feed03.fireside.fm Fri, 20 Mar 2026 17:45:31 -0500 Fireside (https://fireside.fm) Topic Lords https://topiclords.com Fri, 20 Mar 2026 15:44:17 -0700 Every week, Jim invites different friends to guest on Topic Lords and be excited about whatever they've been fixated on this week. en-us © 2026 Jim Stormdancer episodic The only place on the internet you can hear topics discussed! Jim Stormdancer Every week, Jim invites different friends to guest on Topic Lords and be excited about whatever they've been fixated on this week. true Jim Stormdancer [email protected] yes Support the show! 334. A Pivotal Event in the Evolution of the Society of Quebec https://topiclords.com/a-pivotal-event-in-the-evolution-of-the-society-of-quebec e5e32f96-b54d-4835-8380-088192c99012 Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: SJ and Benjamin. We discuss TD Place Arena in Ottawa, learning to ice skate when you're 40, weird anime keyboards, and She Walks in Beauty, by Lord Byron 50:00 true Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Neutral Zone Hotel.
  • Heated Rivalry.
  • What a loon sounds like.
  • Going to Canada but never going outside.
  • A real dickhead in the history of hockey.
  • Needing a new hockey arena and a new football stadium and putting one on top of the other.
  • Backwards ice.
  • Canadian Tire Center.
  • The Ottawa '67s.
  • Realizing that your two arenas on top of one another will collapse instantly if you ever hold two events at once.
  • Asbestos sprinkles falling from the ceiling and delighting the crowd.
  • Ice skaters falling over because the ice is too cold.
  • What's up with fighting in hockey?
  • When ice hockey goaltenders got masks.
  • Regulating sports violence with additional violence.
  • Spontaneous vs. pre-arranged hockey fights.
  • The Gordie Howe Hat Trick.
  • A triple double, except instead of impacting the outcome of the game, it impacts your soul.
  • The Punch-up In Piestany and other bench-clearing brawls.
  • Hockey's Post-Headshot Era.
  • Learning new skills as an adult.
  • The Kraken Community Iceplex.
  • Complaining about swizzles for months.
  • Pumping your legs to propel yourself forward.
  • Swizzles vs. backwards swizzles.
  • The point at which ice skating classes branch out into hockey classes and figure skating classes.
  • Beer League teams.
  • Born knowing how to skate.
  • Jusse Saros erasure.
  • Hockey players getting concussed by swimming while drunk.
  • Circle to confirm and X to back out.
  • A keyboard with all the calculator buttons on it.
  • Interviewing the animator who designed the weird keyboard in Bubblegum Crisis.
  • An argument for Colemak over Dvorak.
  • The Z, X, C and V keys staying right where they are.
  • Switching keyboard layouts to keep your college roommates from screwing with you.
  • Why boredom is a good thing.
  • Desperately trying to fill today's 16 waking hours with something, anything.
  • Making content for the Internet.
  • Cloudless climes and starry skies.
  • Whether Lord Byron got his title by being on the show.
  • Trying to rhyme brow and glow.
  • Whether they had non-rhyming poetry 200 years ago.
  • Only remembering your anxiety dreams.
  • The recurring dream where you explore stone stairs leading down from a decrepit old fishing house, going deeper and deeper each time you have the dream until you finally get to the bottom of the stairs and find out what your whole life has been leading to.
  • Tiny hockey community discords.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Neutral Zone Hotel.
  • Heated Rivalry.
  • What a loon sounds like.
  • Going to Canada but never going outside.
  • A real dickhead in the history of hockey.
  • Needing a new hockey arena and a new football stadium and putting one on top of the other.
  • Backwards ice.
  • Canadian Tire Center.
  • The Ottawa '67s.
  • Realizing that your two arenas on top of one another will collapse instantly if you ever hold two events at once.
  • Asbestos sprinkles falling from the ceiling and delighting the crowd.
  • Ice skaters falling over because the ice is too cold.
  • What's up with fighting in hockey?
  • When ice hockey goaltenders got masks.
  • Regulating sports violence with additional violence.
  • Spontaneous vs. pre-arranged hockey fights.
  • The Gordie Howe Hat Trick.
  • A triple double, except instead of impacting the outcome of the game, it impacts your soul.
  • The Punch-up In Piestany and other bench-clearing brawls.
  • Hockey's Post-Headshot Era.
  • Learning new skills as an adult.
  • The Kraken Community Iceplex.
  • Complaining about swizzles for months.
  • Pumping your legs to propel yourself forward.
  • Swizzles vs. backwards swizzles.
  • The point at which ice skating classes branch out into hockey classes and figure skating classes.
  • Beer League teams.
  • Born knowing how to skate.
  • Jusse Saros erasure.
  • Hockey players getting concussed by swimming while drunk.
  • Circle to confirm and X to back out.
  • A keyboard with all the calculator buttons on it.
  • Interviewing the animator who designed the weird keyboard in Bubblegum Crisis.
  • An argument for Colemak over Dvorak.
  • The Z, X, C and V keys staying right where they are.
  • Switching keyboard layouts to keep your college roommates from screwing with you.
  • Why boredom is a good thing.
  • Desperately trying to fill today's 16 waking hours with something, anything.
  • Making content for the Internet.
  • Cloudless climes and starry skies.
  • Whether Lord Byron got his title by being on the show.
  • Trying to rhyme brow and glow.
  • Whether they had non-rhyming poetry 200 years ago.
  • Only remembering your anxiety dreams.
  • The recurring dream where you explore stone stairs leading down from a decrepit old fishing house, going deeper and deeper each time you have the dream until you finally get to the bottom of the stairs and find out what your whole life has been leading to.
  • Tiny hockey community discords.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Neutral Zone Hotel.
  • Heated Rivalry.
  • What a loon sounds like.
  • Going to Canada but never going outside.
  • A real dickhead in the history of hockey.
  • Needing a new hockey arena and a new football stadium and putting one on top of the other.
  • Backwards ice.
  • Canadian Tire Center.
  • The Ottawa '67s.
  • Realizing that your two arenas on top of one another will collapse instantly if you ever hold two events at once.
  • Asbestos sprinkles falling from the ceiling and delighting the crowd.
  • Ice skaters falling over because the ice is too cold.
  • What's up with fighting in hockey?
  • When ice hockey goaltenders got masks.
  • Regulating sports violence with additional violence.
  • Spontaneous vs. pre-arranged hockey fights.
  • The Gordie Howe Hat Trick.
  • A triple double, except instead of impacting the outcome of the game, it impacts your soul.
  • The Punch-up In Piestany and other bench-clearing brawls.
  • Hockey's Post-Headshot Era.
  • Learning new skills as an adult.
  • The Kraken Community Iceplex.
  • Complaining about swizzles for months.
  • Pumping your legs to propel yourself forward.
  • Swizzles vs. backwards swizzles.
  • The point at which ice skating classes branch out into hockey classes and figure skating classes.
  • Beer League teams.
  • Born knowing how to skate.
  • Jusse Saros erasure.
  • Hockey players getting concussed by swimming while drunk.
  • Circle to confirm and X to back out.
  • A keyboard with all the calculator buttons on it.
  • Interviewing the animator who designed the weird keyboard in Bubblegum Crisis.
  • An argument for Colemak over Dvorak.
  • The Z, X, C and V keys staying right where they are.
  • Switching keyboard layouts to keep your college roommates from screwing with you.
  • Why boredom is a good thing.
  • Desperately trying to fill today's 16 waking hours with something, anything.
  • Making content for the Internet.
  • Cloudless climes and starry skies.
  • Whether Lord Byron got his title by being on the show.
  • Trying to rhyme brow and glow.
  • Whether they had non-rhyming poetry 200 years ago.
  • Only remembering your anxiety dreams.
  • The recurring dream where you explore stone stairs leading down from a decrepit old fishing house, going deeper and deeper each time you have the dream until you finally get to the bottom of the stairs and find out what your whole life has been leading to.
  • Tiny hockey community discords.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+NI-m1koe ]]> Jim Stormdancer 333. Bring Your Daughter to Monastery Day https://topiclords.com/bring-your-daughter-to-monastery-day af74c55d-a81c-4642-b99f-ddf5c8a1b8c8 Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: AP and Alexander. We discuss the 5th Ramsey number, Mr. Satan (from Dragonball), the Odyssey 2's ROM sprites, Search Lizard Vagina And You Shall Find by Patricia Lockwood, and why do drugs have two names? What's up with that? 1:08:33 true Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Recording the fakest possible sounding laughter in case someone makes a joke that doesn't work.
  • Going on a nice short walk.
  • The PNW, where the frogs are a-croaking.
  • Going out to see the dog pee.
  • Lying down and pretending to sleep
  • Explaining to the doctor that you didn't sleep at all and he's like "that's not what your brain waves said!"
  • Dreaming that you've been awake for 48 hours.
  • Path of totality vs. regular shitty boring eclipse.
  • Consume Me.
  • Attempting to become hot in high school.
  • Whether unwishlisting and rewishlisting a game helps.
  • Very large prime numbers that are only two apart.
  • Prolific math speed freaks.
  • Whether the aliens know the fifth Ramsey Number and are just quizzing us.
  • Aliens visiting and sharing the ultimate secret to doing laundry.
  • Sentient arithmetic getting angry.
  • How do kangaroos clean their pouches?
  • Topics that don't cause listenership to drop precipitously.
  • Thinking about Mr. Satan in the bath.
  • Localizing Mr. Satan for the American audience.
  • A cartoon of two muscly guys screaming at each other, getting louder and higher pitched over the course of five minutes, to the point that you start worrying about the health of the voice actors.
  • An episode of TV that's just 22 pure minutes of building tension.
  • Goku's hair turning blond so that the manga artist doesn't have to laboriously color his hair black al on every panel.
  • Everyone in the story growing strong enough to blow up the planet on a whim.
  • Everyone on Earth showing up to cheer on Mr. Satan.
  • When wrestlers stopped maintaining kayfabe outside of the live show.
  • King Lear asking the audience if they can see the corpse breathing.
  • Giving annoying characters a moment of sincerity and/or heroism.
  • Enthusiastically chanting for Satan.
  • Witnessing the total horror of the universe and then being like "I didn't just see that"
  • Mr. Satan convincing the evil alien not to destroy the Earth by showing him a cool puppy.
  • How is Goku going to prevent spam bots from registering accounts?
  • A weird lens on this strange universe.
  • Sincerity punchlines.
  • Behold, an anime horse!
  • Top 37 Classiest Satans.
  • Death losing every game against Bill and Ted.
  • Coloring the up arrow green to represent a tree in your skiing game.
  • The division symbol you learned in grade school and never used again.
  • When you want to shoot a golf course, a plane or a tiny flat cake.
  • Collecting your favorite medieval manuscript scans.
  • The medieval scribe deciding on a whim to write the next passage in Greek.
  • The guy plucking penises off of the penis bush and putting them in a basket.
  • My brain, and the bad sunning lizard inside it.
  • Here is some pornography, if it will help you.
  • Great job, Canada.
  • Poems that foresee themselves being uploaded to the Internet.
  • One of the early "isn't it weird that this literary person is on Twitter writing shitposts?"
  • My Least Favorite Antibiotic.
  • Wrapping your antibiotic in a tortilla.
  • I love an antibiotic with a nickname.
  • Magic acts you can only do once. (Because they kill you.)
  • Settling Space. (And why we shouldn't do it.)
  • Establishing legal precedent for selling moon rocks.
  • Can God get a thorn stuck in his paw?
  • There's No P in Thomson. Let's try to keep it that way.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Recording the fakest possible sounding laughter in case someone makes a joke that doesn't work.
  • Going on a nice short walk.
  • The PNW, where the frogs are a-croaking.
  • Going out to see the dog pee.
  • Lying down and pretending to sleep
  • Explaining to the doctor that you didn't sleep at all and he's like "that's not what your brain waves said!"
  • Dreaming that you've been awake for 48 hours.
  • Path of totality vs. regular shitty boring eclipse.
  • Consume Me.
  • Attempting to become hot in high school.
  • Whether unwishlisting and rewishlisting a game helps.
  • Very large prime numbers that are only two apart.
  • Prolific math speed freaks.
  • Whether the aliens know the fifth Ramsey Number and are just quizzing us.
  • Aliens visiting and sharing the ultimate secret to doing laundry.
  • Sentient arithmetic getting angry.
  • How do kangaroos clean their pouches?
  • Topics that don't cause listenership to drop precipitously.
  • Thinking about Mr. Satan in the bath.
  • Localizing Mr. Satan for the American audience.
  • A cartoon of two muscly guys screaming at each other, getting louder and higher pitched over the course of five minutes, to the point that you start worrying about the health of the voice actors.
  • An episode of TV that's just 22 pure minutes of building tension.
  • Goku's hair turning blond so that the manga artist doesn't have to laboriously color his hair black al on every panel.
  • Everyone in the story growing strong enough to blow up the planet on a whim.
  • Everyone on Earth showing up to cheer on Mr. Satan.
  • When wrestlers stopped maintaining kayfabe outside of the live show.
  • King Lear asking the audience if they can see the corpse breathing.
  • Giving annoying characters a moment of sincerity and/or heroism.
  • Enthusiastically chanting for Satan.
  • Witnessing the total horror of the universe and then being like "I didn't just see that"
  • Mr. Satan convincing the evil alien not to destroy the Earth by showing him a cool puppy.
  • How is Goku going to prevent spam bots from registering accounts?
  • A weird lens on this strange universe.
  • Sincerity punchlines.
  • Behold, an anime horse!
  • Top 37 Classiest Satans.
  • Death losing every game against Bill and Ted.
  • Coloring the up arrow green to represent a tree in your skiing game.
  • The division symbol you learned in grade school and never used again.
  • When you want to shoot a golf course, a plane or a tiny flat cake.
  • Collecting your favorite medieval manuscript scans.
  • The medieval scribe deciding on a whim to write the next passage in Greek.
  • The guy plucking penises off of the penis bush and putting them in a basket.
  • My brain, and the bad sunning lizard inside it.
  • Here is some pornography, if it will help you.
  • Great job, Canada.
  • Poems that foresee themselves being uploaded to the Internet.
  • One of the early "isn't it weird that this literary person is on Twitter writing shitposts?"
  • My Least Favorite Antibiotic.
  • Wrapping your antibiotic in a tortilla.
  • I love an antibiotic with a nickname.
  • Magic acts you can only do once. (Because they kill you.)
  • Settling Space. (And why we shouldn't do it.)
  • Establishing legal precedent for selling moon rocks.
  • Can God get a thorn stuck in his paw?
  • There's No P in Thomson. Let's try to keep it that way.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Recording the fakest possible sounding laughter in case someone makes a joke that doesn't work.
  • Going on a nice short walk.
  • The PNW, where the frogs are a-croaking.
  • Going out to see the dog pee.
  • Lying down and pretending to sleep
  • Explaining to the doctor that you didn't sleep at all and he's like "that's not what your brain waves said!"
  • Dreaming that you've been awake for 48 hours.
  • Path of totality vs. regular shitty boring eclipse.
  • Consume Me.
  • Attempting to become hot in high school.
  • Whether unwishlisting and rewishlisting a game helps.
  • Very large prime numbers that are only two apart.
  • Prolific math speed freaks.
  • Whether the aliens know the fifth Ramsey Number and are just quizzing us.
  • Aliens visiting and sharing the ultimate secret to doing laundry.
  • Sentient arithmetic getting angry.
  • How do kangaroos clean their pouches?
  • Topics that don't cause listenership to drop precipitously.
  • Thinking about Mr. Satan in the bath.
  • Localizing Mr. Satan for the American audience.
  • A cartoon of two muscly guys screaming at each other, getting louder and higher pitched over the course of five minutes, to the point that you start worrying about the health of the voice actors.
  • An episode of TV that's just 22 pure minutes of building tension.
  • Goku's hair turning blond so that the manga artist doesn't have to laboriously color his hair black al on every panel.
  • Everyone in the story growing strong enough to blow up the planet on a whim.
  • Everyone on Earth showing up to cheer on Mr. Satan.
  • When wrestlers stopped maintaining kayfabe outside of the live show.
  • King Lear asking the audience if they can see the corpse breathing.
  • Giving annoying characters a moment of sincerity and/or heroism.
  • Enthusiastically chanting for Satan.
  • Witnessing the total horror of the universe and then being like "I didn't just see that"
  • Mr. Satan convincing the evil alien not to destroy the Earth by showing him a cool puppy.
  • How is Goku going to prevent spam bots from registering accounts?
  • A weird lens on this strange universe.
  • Sincerity punchlines.
  • Behold, an anime horse!
  • Top 37 Classiest Satans.
  • Death losing every game against Bill and Ted.
  • Coloring the up arrow green to represent a tree in your skiing game.
  • The division symbol you learned in grade school and never used again.
  • When you want to shoot a golf course, a plane or a tiny flat cake.
  • Collecting your favorite medieval manuscript scans.
  • The medieval scribe deciding on a whim to write the next passage in Greek.
  • The guy plucking penises off of the penis bush and putting them in a basket.
  • My brain, and the bad sunning lizard inside it.
  • Here is some pornography, if it will help you.
  • Great job, Canada.
  • Poems that foresee themselves being uploaded to the Internet.
  • One of the early "isn't it weird that this literary person is on Twitter writing shitposts?"
  • My Least Favorite Antibiotic.
  • Wrapping your antibiotic in a tortilla.
  • I love an antibiotic with a nickname.
  • Magic acts you can only do once. (Because they kill you.)
  • Settling Space. (And why we shouldn't do it.)
  • Establishing legal precedent for selling moon rocks.
  • Can God get a thorn stuck in his paw?
  • There's No P in Thomson. Let's try to keep it that way.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+Qb3Mf8xE ]]> Jim Stormdancer 332. Boston: It's Not a Year https://topiclords.com/boston-its-not-a-year b1961920-e0d2-41b7-9e67-b02a311fbd5e Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Jin and Brad. We discuss the shareware games business model, on how to define femininity, the Great Molasses Flood, Entrance by Rainer Maria Rilke, and combining magic and science in science fantasy. 1:02:43 true Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Lizard for the NES.
  • Retrofuturism in ancient China.
  • Silkpunk Origins.
  • Ultima-inspired indie RPGs from 1994.
  • Passing around public domain games on floppy disks.
  • Registering shareware to get rid of the nag screen.
  • Adventure game hint books as a second channel of income.
  • Asking your mom to get a money order to register the shareware version of Impulse Tracker so you can get the Stereo Wav Writer.
  • Front loading all the good levels in the shareware episode and selling the crap in the registered episodes.
  • The Ur-Quan Masters.
  • Printing to PDF.
  • Uploading your music to mp3.com.
  • Cracking shareware using a known plaintext attack.
  • Drawing an image with so much entropy that the Save Robot dances for longer than usual and then plays a sad sound.
  • A three hour deep dive on the very popular vampire novel Twilight.
  • Going online and googling masculine and/or feminine traits.
  • The Four Pillars of Femininity.
  • Pants: they're for barbarians.
  • Whether Stephanie Meyer was trying to write a treatise on idealized gender roles or whether she was just writing what she thought was cool and fun.
  • Popular depictions of women who are masculine in behavior but feminine in appearance.
  • Why can't your girlfriend both look like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and eat hamburgers like Buffy the Vampire Slayer?
  • Why women work so well as horror protagonists.
  • Do people cry less in Marvel movies?
  • Someone crying so hard in a movie that you start to worry about the actor's social life.
  • Tolkien adding a second female character to Lord of the Rings just so he can make the "I am no man" linguistic joke.
  • Boston: it's not a year.
  • Painting your giant molasses tank brown so it's harder to notice that it's leaking.
  • All the children in town walking up and licking the giant leaking molasses tank whenever they feel like a snack.
  • Waking up in a pile of dead bodies with your mouth full of molasses.
  • Big Enough to be Horrible.
  • Getting your architectural plans approved by a government body.
  • Gilding the lily when the lily is already extremely memetic.
  • Fame: look what it does to people.
  • Building a giant tank of anything in the middle of a city.
  • Where do you put your 50 million gallons of molasses?
  • What happens if you poke the Demon Core with a screwdriver?
  • Scientists getting too excited to keep being careful.
  • A black and slender tree.
  • A word kept in the mouth to grow.
  • Eveningfall.
  • Putting a tree in the sky while you're creating the world.
  • The game you're making giving you ideas about the game you're making.
  • Navigating the scientific method in a fantastical universe.
  • Lit RPG.
  • Dungeon Crawler Carl.
  • Using a quarter of the words in your novel to explain the rules of the world like a board game manual.
  • Jedi using their powers to boil water for tea.
  • Enslaving Jedi to run your steam engine with their mind powers.
  • Jedi Inflation.
  • Two words that sound good together and now it's your name.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Lizard for the NES.
  • Retrofuturism in ancient China.
  • Silkpunk Origins.
  • Ultima-inspired indie RPGs from 1994.
  • Passing around public domain games on floppy disks.
  • Registering shareware to get rid of the nag screen.
  • Adventure game hint books as a second channel of income.
  • Asking your mom to get a money order to register the shareware version of Impulse Tracker so you can get the Stereo Wav Writer.
  • Front loading all the good levels in the shareware episode and selling the crap in the registered episodes.
  • The Ur-Quan Masters.
  • Printing to PDF.
  • Uploading your music to mp3.com.
  • Cracking shareware using a known plaintext attack.
  • Drawing an image with so much entropy that the Save Robot dances for longer than usual and then plays a sad sound.
  • A three hour deep dive on the very popular vampire novel Twilight.
  • Going online and googling masculine and/or feminine traits.
  • The Four Pillars of Femininity.
  • Pants: they're for barbarians.
  • Whether Stephanie Meyer was trying to write a treatise on idealized gender roles or whether she was just writing what she thought was cool and fun.
  • Popular depictions of women who are masculine in behavior but feminine in appearance.
  • Why can't your girlfriend both look like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and eat hamburgers like Buffy the Vampire Slayer?
  • Why women work so well as horror protagonists.
  • Do people cry less in Marvel movies?
  • Someone crying so hard in a movie that you start to worry about the actor's social life.
  • Tolkien adding a second female character to Lord of the Rings just so he can make the "I am no man" linguistic joke.
  • Boston: it's not a year.
  • Painting your giant molasses tank brown so it's harder to notice that it's leaking.
  • All the children in town walking up and licking the giant leaking molasses tank whenever they feel like a snack.
  • Waking up in a pile of dead bodies with your mouth full of molasses.
  • Big Enough to be Horrible.
  • Getting your architectural plans approved by a government body.
  • Gilding the lily when the lily is already extremely memetic.
  • Fame: look what it does to people.
  • Building a giant tank of anything in the middle of a city.
  • Where do you put your 50 million gallons of molasses?
  • What happens if you poke the Demon Core with a screwdriver?
  • Scientists getting too excited to keep being careful.
  • A black and slender tree.
  • A word kept in the mouth to grow.
  • Eveningfall.
  • Putting a tree in the sky while you're creating the world.
  • The game you're making giving you ideas about the game you're making.
  • Navigating the scientific method in a fantastical universe.
  • Lit RPG.
  • Dungeon Crawler Carl.
  • Using a quarter of the words in your novel to explain the rules of the world like a board game manual.
  • Jedi using their powers to boil water for tea.
  • Enslaving Jedi to run your steam engine with their mind powers.
  • Jedi Inflation.
  • Two words that sound good together and now it's your name.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Lizard for the NES.
  • Retrofuturism in ancient China.
  • Silkpunk Origins.
  • Ultima-inspired indie RPGs from 1994.
  • Passing around public domain games on floppy disks.
  • Registering shareware to get rid of the nag screen.
  • Adventure game hint books as a second channel of income.
  • Asking your mom to get a money order to register the shareware version of Impulse Tracker so you can get the Stereo Wav Writer.
  • Front loading all the good levels in the shareware episode and selling the crap in the registered episodes.
  • The Ur-Quan Masters.
  • Printing to PDF.
  • Uploading your music to mp3.com.
  • Cracking shareware using a known plaintext attack.
  • Drawing an image with so much entropy that the Save Robot dances for longer than usual and then plays a sad sound.
  • A three hour deep dive on the very popular vampire novel Twilight.
  • Going online and googling masculine and/or feminine traits.
  • The Four Pillars of Femininity.
  • Pants: they're for barbarians.
  • Whether Stephanie Meyer was trying to write a treatise on idealized gender roles or whether she was just writing what she thought was cool and fun.
  • Popular depictions of women who are masculine in behavior but feminine in appearance.
  • Why can't your girlfriend both look like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and eat hamburgers like Buffy the Vampire Slayer?
  • Why women work so well as horror protagonists.
  • Do people cry less in Marvel movies?
  • Someone crying so hard in a movie that you start to worry about the actor's social life.
  • Tolkien adding a second female character to Lord of the Rings just so he can make the "I am no man" linguistic joke.
  • Boston: it's not a year.
  • Painting your giant molasses tank brown so it's harder to notice that it's leaking.
  • All the children in town walking up and licking the giant leaking molasses tank whenever they feel like a snack.
  • Waking up in a pile of dead bodies with your mouth full of molasses.
  • Big Enough to be Horrible.
  • Getting your architectural plans approved by a government body.
  • Gilding the lily when the lily is already extremely memetic.
  • Fame: look what it does to people.
  • Building a giant tank of anything in the middle of a city.
  • Where do you put your 50 million gallons of molasses?
  • What happens if you poke the Demon Core with a screwdriver?
  • Scientists getting too excited to keep being careful.
  • A black and slender tree.
  • A word kept in the mouth to grow.
  • Eveningfall.
  • Putting a tree in the sky while you're creating the world.
  • The game you're making giving you ideas about the game you're making.
  • Navigating the scientific method in a fantastical universe.
  • Lit RPG.
  • Dungeon Crawler Carl.
  • Using a quarter of the words in your novel to explain the rules of the world like a board game manual.
  • Jedi using their powers to boil water for tea.
  • Enslaving Jedi to run your steam engine with their mind powers.
  • Jedi Inflation.
  • Two words that sound good together and now it's your name.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+CDuhP8FB ]]> Jim Stormdancer 331. Earbuds Are a Type of Sandwich https://topiclords.com/earbuds-are-a-type-of-sandwich 4ca1fd03-7aa5-44ab-91f7-e22042c13402 Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Kory and Andy. We discuss the Game Tank, auctions in games, how to watch TV at 2AM, Dragonfly Catcher by Chiyo-ni, and losing a snapshot of your life in MP3 format 1:12:08 true Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Multi-time lords.
  • K-Bones dot fun.
  • CachyOS.
  • Scrubbing topics against the corrugated metal washboard of discussion.
  • Leaning into the microphone and saying "topics."
  • Helping Andy quit his day job tonight.
  • What MAGfest used to stand for.
  • Playing with SGI hardware in the Old-Ass Computer Room.
  • Game consoles that output square video.
  • Getting pixels into the framebuffer of the Fairchild Channel F.
  • Seeing a fun puzzle to solve but not solving it because you already have way too many projects.
  • Through-hole soldering.
  • Replacing volatile memory with F-RAM.
  • Preparing to have fun.
  • Reaching the point in your life where you don't want to bother with the war game, you just want to paint the miniatures.
  • What do you call it when you pair up with three people?
  • Throupling up for the next 45 minutes.
  • Who has time to both solder things and play video games?
  • Why Robotron 2084 was more difficult in emulation than in the arcade.
  • How to pronounce SNES.
  • Shmups slowing down when there are more objects on the screen, and game designers incorporating that into the game design.
  • The ZX Spectrum Next and the Mega 65.
  • A game console that only 150 people own and they get super excited whenever a new game comes out for it.
  • Game development like a caveman would do it.
  • Whether more than one person can take the under.
  • The rules of Monopoly as written vs. the folk rules.
  • eBay auctions as an extremely boring game.
  • First price vs. second price auctions.
  • Visiting the real money auction house in Diablo and finding out just how little your time and effort is worth.
  • The Gold Standard of the Hat Meta.
  • An evolutionary branch of PVP that's distinct from Yomi.
  • What to do when you want to play Avalon Hill's Dune.
  • Fence Lara Croft's Stolen Treasures.
  • Lara Croft's Stolen Antiquities Simulator.
  • Winning a bunch of Saltybucks on Saltybet.
  • Age-appropriate behavior.
  • Speedrun watching TV at 2 AM.
  • Live and Don't Learn.
  • Explaining jet lag to a two year old.
  • Watching MTV's Liquid Television block until 2:30 AM.
  • Finally sitting your son down to have the Aeon Flux talk.
  • Haiku that end "that's it, that's the haiku" even though that's too many syllables.
  • Hiking in the wilderness and encountering or not encountering a dragonfly.
  • People at risk of owning a Game Tank.
  • Broadly appealing messages sent out to farm likes.
  • The psychological cost of having 20,000 people following you.
  • Choosing your Mastodon instance based on what domain name William Gibson thought was funny.
  • The Mazzy Star song that's on the Batman Forever soundtrack.
  • iPod shuffles always insisting you're not pregnant no matter how much you pee on them.
  • Ephemeral preservation of a time in your life.
  • A biological weapon that removes your ability to perceive music as music.
  • You die young, or you live long enough to see Nine Inch Nails become dad rock.
  • Music Inspired by the Soundtrack.
  • Putting your MP3 collection on striped RAID arrays for the benefit of future archaeologists.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Multi-time lords.
  • K-Bones dot fun.
  • CachyOS.
  • Scrubbing topics against the corrugated metal washboard of discussion.
  • Leaning into the microphone and saying "topics."
  • Helping Andy quit his day job tonight.
  • What MAGfest used to stand for.
  • Playing with SGI hardware in the Old-Ass Computer Room.
  • Game consoles that output square video.
  • Getting pixels into the framebuffer of the Fairchild Channel F.
  • Seeing a fun puzzle to solve but not solving it because you already have way too many projects.
  • Through-hole soldering.
  • Replacing volatile memory with F-RAM.
  • Preparing to have fun.
  • Reaching the point in your life where you don't want to bother with the war game, you just want to paint the miniatures.
  • What do you call it when you pair up with three people?
  • Throupling up for the next 45 minutes.
  • Who has time to both solder things and play video games?
  • Why Robotron 2084 was more difficult in emulation than in the arcade.
  • How to pronounce SNES.
  • Shmups slowing down when there are more objects on the screen, and game designers incorporating that into the game design.
  • The ZX Spectrum Next and the Mega 65.
  • A game console that only 150 people own and they get super excited whenever a new game comes out for it.
  • Game development like a caveman would do it.
  • Whether more than one person can take the under.
  • The rules of Monopoly as written vs. the folk rules.
  • eBay auctions as an extremely boring game.
  • First price vs. second price auctions.
  • Visiting the real money auction house in Diablo and finding out just how little your time and effort is worth.
  • The Gold Standard of the Hat Meta.
  • An evolutionary branch of PVP that's distinct from Yomi.
  • What to do when you want to play Avalon Hill's Dune.
  • Fence Lara Croft's Stolen Treasures.
  • Lara Croft's Stolen Antiquities Simulator.
  • Winning a bunch of Saltybucks on Saltybet.
  • Age-appropriate behavior.
  • Speedrun watching TV at 2 AM.
  • Live and Don't Learn.
  • Explaining jet lag to a two year old.
  • Watching MTV's Liquid Television block until 2:30 AM.
  • Finally sitting your son down to have the Aeon Flux talk.
  • Haiku that end "that's it, that's the haiku" even though that's too many syllables.
  • Hiking in the wilderness and encountering or not encountering a dragonfly.
  • People at risk of owning a Game Tank.
  • Broadly appealing messages sent out to farm likes.
  • The psychological cost of having 20,000 people following you.
  • Choosing your Mastodon instance based on what domain name William Gibson thought was funny.
  • The Mazzy Star song that's on the Batman Forever soundtrack.
  • iPod shuffles always insisting you're not pregnant no matter how much you pee on them.
  • Ephemeral preservation of a time in your life.
  • A biological weapon that removes your ability to perceive music as music.
  • You die young, or you live long enough to see Nine Inch Nails become dad rock.
  • Music Inspired by the Soundtrack.
  • Putting your MP3 collection on striped RAID arrays for the benefit of future archaeologists.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Multi-time lords.
  • K-Bones dot fun.
  • CachyOS.
  • Scrubbing topics against the corrugated metal washboard of discussion.
  • Leaning into the microphone and saying "topics."
  • Helping Andy quit his day job tonight.
  • What MAGfest used to stand for.
  • Playing with SGI hardware in the Old-Ass Computer Room.
  • Game consoles that output square video.
  • Getting pixels into the framebuffer of the Fairchild Channel F.
  • Seeing a fun puzzle to solve but not solving it because you already have way too many projects.
  • Through-hole soldering.
  • Replacing volatile memory with F-RAM.
  • Preparing to have fun.
  • Reaching the point in your life where you don't want to bother with the war game, you just want to paint the miniatures.
  • What do you call it when you pair up with three people?
  • Throupling up for the next 45 minutes.
  • Who has time to both solder things and play video games?
  • Why Robotron 2084 was more difficult in emulation than in the arcade.
  • How to pronounce SNES.
  • Shmups slowing down when there are more objects on the screen, and game designers incorporating that into the game design.
  • The ZX Spectrum Next and the Mega 65.
  • A game console that only 150 people own and they get super excited whenever a new game comes out for it.
  • Game development like a caveman would do it.
  • Whether more than one person can take the under.
  • The rules of Monopoly as written vs. the folk rules.
  • eBay auctions as an extremely boring game.
  • First price vs. second price auctions.
  • Visiting the real money auction house in Diablo and finding out just how little your time and effort is worth.
  • The Gold Standard of the Hat Meta.
  • An evolutionary branch of PVP that's distinct from Yomi.
  • What to do when you want to play Avalon Hill's Dune.
  • Fence Lara Croft's Stolen Treasures.
  • Lara Croft's Stolen Antiquities Simulator.
  • Winning a bunch of Saltybucks on Saltybet.
  • Age-appropriate behavior.
  • Speedrun watching TV at 2 AM.
  • Live and Don't Learn.
  • Explaining jet lag to a two year old.
  • Watching MTV's Liquid Television block until 2:30 AM.
  • Finally sitting your son down to have the Aeon Flux talk.
  • Haiku that end "that's it, that's the haiku" even though that's too many syllables.
  • Hiking in the wilderness and encountering or not encountering a dragonfly.
  • People at risk of owning a Game Tank.
  • Broadly appealing messages sent out to farm likes.
  • The psychological cost of having 20,000 people following you.
  • Choosing your Mastodon instance based on what domain name William Gibson thought was funny.
  • The Mazzy Star song that's on the Batman Forever soundtrack.
  • iPod shuffles always insisting you're not pregnant no matter how much you pee on them.
  • Ephemeral preservation of a time in your life.
  • A biological weapon that removes your ability to perceive music as music.
  • You die young, or you live long enough to see Nine Inch Nails become dad rock.
  • Music Inspired by the Soundtrack.
  • Putting your MP3 collection on striped RAID arrays for the benefit of future archaeologists.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+GJqc-NP0 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 330. Tip Extra To See the Nuns https://topiclords.com/tip-extra-to-see-the-nuns e2c3c71c-63ce-40cf-b0e3-ce8bd42be751 Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Alex and Shannon. We discuss festivals in Japan, marzipan made by nuns, podcast playlist problems, and Considering the Snail, by Thom Gunn. 1:00:58 true Lords:

  • Alex
  • Shannon

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Traveling.
  • If you need a lot of stuff, or if that stuff needs you.
  • Real Topic Aficionados.
  • Last Life and other lives.
  • Watching a TV series you like and then going back and watching the same episodes again from a different character's perspective.
  • Napping all day and seeing street festivals at night.
  • Walking around with a tower of flaming candles on your head that keep getting tangled in power lines.
  • Why aren't the modern World's Fairs as exciting as the ones from 150 years ago?
  • Making a couple weeks vanish in lieu of a millennium and a half of leap days.
  • Naming your baby Person Who Packs For Themselves.
  • Naming your baby "Supplanter"
  • The littlest bean that's currently born.
  • Growing up enough to realize that everybody is named Luke now.
  • How Bob used to be the funny fake name but now it's Jeremy.
  • The Bob Emergency.
  • The guy you call Baker because he's a baker.
  • The canonical order of ore value in video games.
  • Hacking your save file at home, just like in the good old days.
  • Selling marzipan in a dark room with a turntable and a bell.
  • Things you can eat in some parts of the world that you can't eat in others.
  • San Diego's Best Seattle Burrito.
  • The essence of fine Mexican foods.
  • Australians telling candy companies "stop trying to make Halloween happen"
  • That friend who has digestive issues eating salmon, but only in specific countries.
  • The politics of buying Girl Scout cookies.
  • The best place to sell a Girl Scout cookies on UCSD campus.
  • Boy Scouts trying to sell popcorn, with seemingly no awareness that popcorn is not remotely as good as Girl Scout Cookies.
  • Kobey's Swap Meet.
  • Getting an old timey surgical mannequin at a swap meet so you can practice your surgery.
  • Kids today trying to figure out how to operate a VCR like they're playing Myst.
  • What happens if you put a VHS tape in backwards?
  • Netflix's "continue watching" category, for movies you didn't like enough to finish.
  • We don't want to hear your bra podcasts!
  • The Stanford professor you're gardening for asking you what podcast you're listening to and now you have to explain your weird hobby to your employer.
  • How to listen to podcasts without your boss sneaking up on you.
  • The first time you've been to the dentist without headphones this millennium.
  • Introvert Dentists.
  • Tooth care advice that you forget immediately.
  • Extremely symmetrical knots in a power cable.
  • Climbing, sailing and caving knots.
  • What is a snail's fury? Why is this snail so mad?
  • A turtle that's decided it's go time.
  • Getting really excited about the turtle races at the Renaissance Fair.
  • Watching a carnival game where four people throw five spears each at targets attached to a wall of hay, and none of them manage to hit the wall.
  • Axe throwing bars, where you have a beer and throw axes.
  • Taking up axe throwing as a hobby because whenever someone gets killed with an axe, the police will be sad if they don't have any suspects.
  • Axe throwing failure modes.
  • Dominant javelin throwing strategies.
  • Throwing a javelin further by spinning around like a discus thrower.
  • Bullets: they go where they want.
]]> Lords:

  • Alex
  • Shannon

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Traveling.
  • If you need a lot of stuff, or if that stuff needs you.
  • Real Topic Aficionados.
  • Last Life and other lives.
  • Watching a TV series you like and then going back and watching the same episodes again from a different character's perspective.
  • Napping all day and seeing street festivals at night.
  • Walking around with a tower of flaming candles on your head that keep getting tangled in power lines.
  • Why aren't the modern World's Fairs as exciting as the ones from 150 years ago?
  • Making a couple weeks vanish in lieu of a millennium and a half of leap days.
  • Naming your baby Person Who Packs For Themselves.
  • Naming your baby "Supplanter"
  • The littlest bean that's currently born.
  • Growing up enough to realize that everybody is named Luke now.
  • How Bob used to be the funny fake name but now it's Jeremy.
  • The Bob Emergency.
  • The guy you call Baker because he's a baker.
  • The canonical order of ore value in video games.
  • Hacking your save file at home, just like in the good old days.
  • Selling marzipan in a dark room with a turntable and a bell.
  • Things you can eat in some parts of the world that you can't eat in others.
  • San Diego's Best Seattle Burrito.
  • The essence of fine Mexican foods.
  • Australians telling candy companies "stop trying to make Halloween happen"
  • That friend who has digestive issues eating salmon, but only in specific countries.
  • The politics of buying Girl Scout cookies.
  • The best place to sell a Girl Scout cookies on UCSD campus.
  • Boy Scouts trying to sell popcorn, with seemingly no awareness that popcorn is not remotely as good as Girl Scout Cookies.
  • Kobey's Swap Meet.
  • Getting an old timey surgical mannequin at a swap meet so you can practice your surgery.
  • Kids today trying to figure out how to operate a VCR like they're playing Myst.
  • What happens if you put a VHS tape in backwards?
  • Netflix's "continue watching" category, for movies you didn't like enough to finish.
  • We don't want to hear your bra podcasts!
  • The Stanford professor you're gardening for asking you what podcast you're listening to and now you have to explain your weird hobby to your employer.
  • How to listen to podcasts without your boss sneaking up on you.
  • The first time you've been to the dentist without headphones this millennium.
  • Introvert Dentists.
  • Tooth care advice that you forget immediately.
  • Extremely symmetrical knots in a power cable.
  • Climbing, sailing and caving knots.
  • What is a snail's fury? Why is this snail so mad?
  • A turtle that's decided it's go time.
  • Getting really excited about the turtle races at the Renaissance Fair.
  • Watching a carnival game where four people throw five spears each at targets attached to a wall of hay, and none of them manage to hit the wall.
  • Axe throwing bars, where you have a beer and throw axes.
  • Taking up axe throwing as a hobby because whenever someone gets killed with an axe, the police will be sad if they don't have any suspects.
  • Axe throwing failure modes.
  • Dominant javelin throwing strategies.
  • Throwing a javelin further by spinning around like a discus thrower.
  • Bullets: they go where they want.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Alex
  • Shannon

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Traveling.
  • If you need a lot of stuff, or if that stuff needs you.
  • Real Topic Aficionados.
  • Last Life and other lives.
  • Watching a TV series you like and then going back and watching the same episodes again from a different character's perspective.
  • Napping all day and seeing street festivals at night.
  • Walking around with a tower of flaming candles on your head that keep getting tangled in power lines.
  • Why aren't the modern World's Fairs as exciting as the ones from 150 years ago?
  • Making a couple weeks vanish in lieu of a millennium and a half of leap days.
  • Naming your baby Person Who Packs For Themselves.
  • Naming your baby "Supplanter"
  • The littlest bean that's currently born.
  • Growing up enough to realize that everybody is named Luke now.
  • How Bob used to be the funny fake name but now it's Jeremy.
  • The Bob Emergency.
  • The guy you call Baker because he's a baker.
  • The canonical order of ore value in video games.
  • Hacking your save file at home, just like in the good old days.
  • Selling marzipan in a dark room with a turntable and a bell.
  • Things you can eat in some parts of the world that you can't eat in others.
  • San Diego's Best Seattle Burrito.
  • The essence of fine Mexican foods.
  • Australians telling candy companies "stop trying to make Halloween happen"
  • That friend who has digestive issues eating salmon, but only in specific countries.
  • The politics of buying Girl Scout cookies.
  • The best place to sell a Girl Scout cookies on UCSD campus.
  • Boy Scouts trying to sell popcorn, with seemingly no awareness that popcorn is not remotely as good as Girl Scout Cookies.
  • Kobey's Swap Meet.
  • Getting an old timey surgical mannequin at a swap meet so you can practice your surgery.
  • Kids today trying to figure out how to operate a VCR like they're playing Myst.
  • What happens if you put a VHS tape in backwards?
  • Netflix's "continue watching" category, for movies you didn't like enough to finish.
  • We don't want to hear your bra podcasts!
  • The Stanford professor you're gardening for asking you what podcast you're listening to and now you have to explain your weird hobby to your employer.
  • How to listen to podcasts without your boss sneaking up on you.
  • The first time you've been to the dentist without headphones this millennium.
  • Introvert Dentists.
  • Tooth care advice that you forget immediately.
  • Extremely symmetrical knots in a power cable.
  • Climbing, sailing and caving knots.
  • What is a snail's fury? Why is this snail so mad?
  • A turtle that's decided it's go time.
  • Getting really excited about the turtle races at the Renaissance Fair.
  • Watching a carnival game where four people throw five spears each at targets attached to a wall of hay, and none of them manage to hit the wall.
  • Axe throwing bars, where you have a beer and throw axes.
  • Taking up axe throwing as a hobby because whenever someone gets killed with an axe, the police will be sad if they don't have any suspects.
  • Axe throwing failure modes.
  • Dominant javelin throwing strategies.
  • Throwing a javelin further by spinning around like a discus thrower.
  • Bullets: they go where they want.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+wwKoATDt ]]> Jim Stormdancer 329. Who Made Tigers? https://topiclords.com/who-made-tigers 7fcee038-672c-405f-b234-2f35c7f3d0fe Mon, 09 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Tyriq and Watson. We discuss forgetting how to sleep over the holiday, conlanging teaching you how to judge good art, tate mode, and The Tyger by William Blake 1:08:23 true Lords:

  • Tyriq
  • Watson

Topics:

  • My sleep experience over the holiday
    • Esper says: "Cannabis can definitely help one get into a sleep state, but actually degrades the quality of sleep quite a bit. From personal experience my guess is this has to do with how it affects dreams, often precluding them from happening to begin with."
  • Conlanging taught me how to judge good art
  • Tate mode
  • The Tyger, by William Blake

Microtopics:

  • Scrubbin' Trubble
  • The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Leguin.
  • Changing history by dreaming about it and having a hypnotherapist that's trying to change your dreams.
  • Telling artists that you like them vs. telling them that you like your work.
  • Learning how to take compliments.
  • Three people who could have opinions.
  • Spoilers for early January.
  • Trying to sleep on an airplane and training yourself to be unable to sleep at all.
  • A highly suboptimal experience.
  • Untraining the fear of falling asleep on planes from your body.
  • How to wear a neck pillow, maybe.
  • Sleeping sitting up and your head nodding forward as you fall asleep.
  • Neck pillow instructions dot PDF.
  • How to transport a neck pillow.
  • Hyperfixation on sleep and the consequences of not getting it.
  • Mythbusters Mode.
  • If you can't sleep, how helpful is it to pretend to be asleep?
  • Being woken up by the sensation of all your senses shutting down as you fall asleep.
  • Skipping your consciousness off of the surface of sleep.
  • Getting super stoked when you're about to fall asleep and waking yourself up because you're so excited.
  • Problems solved with more coffee vs. problems solved with more coffee tables.
  • Lingthusiasm.
  • Cursing yourself to hate a beloved movie series by watching it on a plane.
  • Psychosomatic self-curses.
  • Linguistics and conlangs.
  • The guy everyone hires to con a lang for a movie.
  • Judging things based on whether you like it vs. judging things based on whether it achieved the creator's goals.
  • Learning a new framing and applying it to everything.
  • Being aware of your frame and communicating your frame to the listener.
  • Lojban.
  • Lojban as a wholly unnatural way to speak in the same way that ballet is a wholly unnatural way to move.
  • Decent and not unaesthetic.
  • Trying to draw a picture without knowing how to hold a pencil.
  • Birds with extra vocal tracts.
  • Birdlangs.
  • What if parrots evolved to be sentient, except in a fantasy world, because reasons.
  • Ascertaining the borders of your caring.
  • Brandon Sanderson doing Brandon Sanderson things.
  • The IPA of sounds a human can perform live on a modular synthesizer.
  • To create Hatsune Miku, you must first invent the universe.
  • Horizontal vs. vertical scanlines.
  • Designing a CRT that can scan either horizontally or vertically.
  • Delta gun tubes with a triad of phosphor dots.
  • Having a vertical monitor to display tall things.
  • Page-shaped-pages.
  • Games that ship as a rectangle on a web site.
  • Black frame insertion.
  • Do modern LCD displays have ghosting?
  • A very intimidating challenge.
  • A very fun nexus of art and programming.
  • Tate Mode vs. Tate Modern.
  • Tate your owl for science.
  • Whether this poem predates the Great Vowel Shift.
  • Mixing ands and ampersands.
  • Capital Ampersand.
  • Seeing an animal and realizing that this is it, this is the one that's meant to eat me.
  • A glowing golden perfect human that everyone instantly hates and wants to eat.
  • Whether you can invent a tiger in Dwarf Fortress.
]]> Lords:

  • Tyriq
  • Watson

Topics:

  • My sleep experience over the holiday
    • Esper says: "Cannabis can definitely help one get into a sleep state, but actually degrades the quality of sleep quite a bit. From personal experience my guess is this has to do with how it affects dreams, often precluding them from happening to begin with."
  • Conlanging taught me how to judge good art
  • Tate mode
  • The Tyger, by William Blake

Microtopics:

  • Scrubbin' Trubble
  • The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Leguin.
  • Changing history by dreaming about it and having a hypnotherapist that's trying to change your dreams.
  • Telling artists that you like them vs. telling them that you like your work.
  • Learning how to take compliments.
  • Three people who could have opinions.
  • Spoilers for early January.
  • Trying to sleep on an airplane and training yourself to be unable to sleep at all.
  • A highly suboptimal experience.
  • Untraining the fear of falling asleep on planes from your body.
  • How to wear a neck pillow, maybe.
  • Sleeping sitting up and your head nodding forward as you fall asleep.
  • Neck pillow instructions dot PDF.
  • How to transport a neck pillow.
  • Hyperfixation on sleep and the consequences of not getting it.
  • Mythbusters Mode.
  • If you can't sleep, how helpful is it to pretend to be asleep?
  • Being woken up by the sensation of all your senses shutting down as you fall asleep.
  • Skipping your consciousness off of the surface of sleep.
  • Getting super stoked when you're about to fall asleep and waking yourself up because you're so excited.
  • Problems solved with more coffee vs. problems solved with more coffee tables.
  • Lingthusiasm.
  • Cursing yourself to hate a beloved movie series by watching it on a plane.
  • Psychosomatic self-curses.
  • Linguistics and conlangs.
  • The guy everyone hires to con a lang for a movie.
  • Judging things based on whether you like it vs. judging things based on whether it achieved the creator's goals.
  • Learning a new framing and applying it to everything.
  • Being aware of your frame and communicating your frame to the listener.
  • Lojban.
  • Lojban as a wholly unnatural way to speak in the same way that ballet is a wholly unnatural way to move.
  • Decent and not unaesthetic.
  • Trying to draw a picture without knowing how to hold a pencil.
  • Birds with extra vocal tracts.
  • Birdlangs.
  • What if parrots evolved to be sentient, except in a fantasy world, because reasons.
  • Ascertaining the borders of your caring.
  • Brandon Sanderson doing Brandon Sanderson things.
  • The IPA of sounds a human can perform live on a modular synthesizer.
  • To create Hatsune Miku, you must first invent the universe.
  • Horizontal vs. vertical scanlines.
  • Designing a CRT that can scan either horizontally or vertically.
  • Delta gun tubes with a triad of phosphor dots.
  • Having a vertical monitor to display tall things.
  • Page-shaped-pages.
  • Games that ship as a rectangle on a web site.
  • Black frame insertion.
  • Do modern LCD displays have ghosting?
  • A very intimidating challenge.
  • A very fun nexus of art and programming.
  • Tate Mode vs. Tate Modern.
  • Tate your owl for science.
  • Whether this poem predates the Great Vowel Shift.
  • Mixing ands and ampersands.
  • Capital Ampersand.
  • Seeing an animal and realizing that this is it, this is the one that's meant to eat me.
  • A glowing golden perfect human that everyone instantly hates and wants to eat.
  • Whether you can invent a tiger in Dwarf Fortress.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Tyriq
  • Watson

Topics:

  • My sleep experience over the holiday
    • Esper says: "Cannabis can definitely help one get into a sleep state, but actually degrades the quality of sleep quite a bit. From personal experience my guess is this has to do with how it affects dreams, often precluding them from happening to begin with."
  • Conlanging taught me how to judge good art
  • Tate mode
  • The Tyger, by William Blake

Microtopics:

  • Scrubbin' Trubble
  • The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Leguin.
  • Changing history by dreaming about it and having a hypnotherapist that's trying to change your dreams.
  • Telling artists that you like them vs. telling them that you like your work.
  • Learning how to take compliments.
  • Three people who could have opinions.
  • Spoilers for early January.
  • Trying to sleep on an airplane and training yourself to be unable to sleep at all.
  • A highly suboptimal experience.
  • Untraining the fear of falling asleep on planes from your body.
  • How to wear a neck pillow, maybe.
  • Sleeping sitting up and your head nodding forward as you fall asleep.
  • Neck pillow instructions dot PDF.
  • How to transport a neck pillow.
  • Hyperfixation on sleep and the consequences of not getting it.
  • Mythbusters Mode.
  • If you can't sleep, how helpful is it to pretend to be asleep?
  • Being woken up by the sensation of all your senses shutting down as you fall asleep.
  • Skipping your consciousness off of the surface of sleep.
  • Getting super stoked when you're about to fall asleep and waking yourself up because you're so excited.
  • Problems solved with more coffee vs. problems solved with more coffee tables.
  • Lingthusiasm.
  • Cursing yourself to hate a beloved movie series by watching it on a plane.
  • Psychosomatic self-curses.
  • Linguistics and conlangs.
  • The guy everyone hires to con a lang for a movie.
  • Judging things based on whether you like it vs. judging things based on whether it achieved the creator's goals.
  • Learning a new framing and applying it to everything.
  • Being aware of your frame and communicating your frame to the listener.
  • Lojban.
  • Lojban as a wholly unnatural way to speak in the same way that ballet is a wholly unnatural way to move.
  • Decent and not unaesthetic.
  • Trying to draw a picture without knowing how to hold a pencil.
  • Birds with extra vocal tracts.
  • Birdlangs.
  • What if parrots evolved to be sentient, except in a fantasy world, because reasons.
  • Ascertaining the borders of your caring.
  • Brandon Sanderson doing Brandon Sanderson things.
  • The IPA of sounds a human can perform live on a modular synthesizer.
  • To create Hatsune Miku, you must first invent the universe.
  • Horizontal vs. vertical scanlines.
  • Designing a CRT that can scan either horizontally or vertically.
  • Delta gun tubes with a triad of phosphor dots.
  • Having a vertical monitor to display tall things.
  • Page-shaped-pages.
  • Games that ship as a rectangle on a web site.
  • Black frame insertion.
  • Do modern LCD displays have ghosting?
  • A very intimidating challenge.
  • A very fun nexus of art and programming.
  • Tate Mode vs. Tate Modern.
  • Tate your owl for science.
  • Whether this poem predates the Great Vowel Shift.
  • Mixing ands and ampersands.
  • Capital Ampersand.
  • Seeing an animal and realizing that this is it, this is the one that's meant to eat me.
  • A glowing golden perfect human that everyone instantly hates and wants to eat.
  • Whether you can invent a tiger in Dwarf Fortress.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+23gAyU8A ]]> Jim Stormdancer 328. Darth Icky https://topiclords.com/darth-icky 4ac13ea6-cf20-4d02-8baf-539e11c4628c Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Jesse and Alex. We discuss 90s Gen X Internet High Weirdness, writing a podcast about video games as someone who doesn't really play video games, the mystery of BunnyROM, Junk by Richard Wilbur, this is what Saved Star Wars looks like, and cycling's hour record. 1:19:08 true Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • A gold star Canadian.
  • Cousin show Insert Credit.
  • One of the world's foremost experts on DC Comics.
  • Filling in the gaps with bonus episodes.
  • The lost episode of topic lords that might one day be produced.
  • Spreadsheet Secrets.
  • Detritus and ruins of the culture that came before yours. (Gen-X.)
  • Whether Steve Jackson is still doing the GURPS thing.
  • Where did Gen-X come from, and why did it disappear?
  • Your personal relationship with They Might Be Giants.
  • The weirdos who first colonized the Internet in search of the community they weren't finding in their lives.
  • Nerds riding high on military funding and founding new religions with varying degrees of mockery.
  • British comedy crossing the ocean and losing its cultural context, so a generation of American nerds grow up with a more absurdist sense of humor than the previous generations.
  • Sitting at your computer running IRC in 1996, staring at the screen waiting for someone to say something.
  • Classical Education as a shared cultural context so rich people can understand each other's jokes.
  • Halfway into the 2020s, still thinking about the Roaring Twenties whenever anyone names the decade.
  • Everybody forgetting how to group history by decade after a twenty years of not easily being able to talk about "the 00s" and "the 10s."
  • Playing video games from the ages of 5 to 20 and then stopping forever.
  • Asking some of the most thoughtful people you know questions about video games.
  • The exhaustion of trying to keep video games in your life.
  • Artists and critics with opinions that are wildly out of step with their audience.
  • Video game companies that have great logos.
  • People who are so good at telling interesting stories about the bad video games that they're playing that they convince you to buy the game and then you're like "where's the interesting game they talked about"
  • Talking to the same oldbies every week.
  • An 18 year old kid obsessed with the Atari Jaguar wandering into the middle-aged video game club and everyone is like "sickos face yes emoji"
  • Trying to track down the manufacturer of Digital Princess Friend.
  • Mysterious ROM images that nobody knows the origin of because nobody asked.
  • A Tamagotchi where your little guy can be a fighter plane or Sponge Bob.
  • Mysteriously good Tamagotchi software floating around.
  • The reason M&Ms come in different colors.
  • An egg that your umbrella with an eye can hatch from.
  • Why you can't ship a container full of cheap junk to the United States any more.
  • Middle English style poetry.
  • Sheer shards of shattered tumblers.
  • Modern English alliterative verse.
  • It's cool what people do with words.
  • Paying so much attention to the alliteration that you miss the meaning of the poem.
  • All the Babu Frik Funko Pops that will still be around long after all the stars go out.
  • Hephaestus' Hammer, all gunked up in microplastics.
  • Quoting other poems in the middle of your poem.
  • Publishing a book of all the poems we've read on Topic Lords and then being sued for copyright infringement.
  • A poem that originated on Jim's fridge.
  • Diminishing Mandalorian Returns.
  • The goddamned Ewoks shit.
  • The Droids cartoon.
  • The future of Star Wars: jokes about Star Wars??
  • The Day the Clown Cried of Star Wars.
  • The angriest you've ever been watching a movie.
  • The third good Star Wars movie.
  • Stealing good ideas from cool fiction.
  • One guy who got lucky a couple times and a thousand yes men enabling him for the next 40 years.
  • Planet Moriband.
  • Finally finding a guy you can call Mace Windu.
  • Waiting for Jar-Jar.
  • Sometimes you just need drivel that you like.
  • Buying a tangerine and noticing that it's a Star Wars-branded tangerine.
  • Technology improving the way we interact with wind resistance.
  • 1890 guy on his velocipede getting mad at all the new Space Bikes.
  • Instituting new rules stating that your bicycle has to look like a bicycle.
  • Ivory Tower Cycle Men.
  • Vampire Tactics.
  • The most prestigious world record in professional cycling.
  • Keeping track of the world record best dress at a fashion show.
  • What about Funny Cars? What's so funny about them?
  • Trying to break the Merckx record using Merckx's original bicycle and outfit.
  • Everyone tying the same world record forever.
  • Riding 270 miles a day for a year.
  • Walking to work 23 miles a day, both ways, because you love suffering and hate bicycles.
  • Detective Comics Comics.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • A gold star Canadian.
  • Cousin show Insert Credit.
  • One of the world's foremost experts on DC Comics.
  • Filling in the gaps with bonus episodes.
  • The lost episode of topic lords that might one day be produced.
  • Spreadsheet Secrets.
  • Detritus and ruins of the culture that came before yours. (Gen-X.)
  • Whether Steve Jackson is still doing the GURPS thing.
  • Where did Gen-X come from, and why did it disappear?
  • Your personal relationship with They Might Be Giants.
  • The weirdos who first colonized the Internet in search of the community they weren't finding in their lives.
  • Nerds riding high on military funding and founding new religions with varying degrees of mockery.
  • British comedy crossing the ocean and losing its cultural context, so a generation of American nerds grow up with a more absurdist sense of humor than the previous generations.
  • Sitting at your computer running IRC in 1996, staring at the screen waiting for someone to say something.
  • Classical Education as a shared cultural context so rich people can understand each other's jokes.
  • Halfway into the 2020s, still thinking about the Roaring Twenties whenever anyone names the decade.
  • Everybody forgetting how to group history by decade after a twenty years of not easily being able to talk about "the 00s" and "the 10s."
  • Playing video games from the ages of 5 to 20 and then stopping forever.
  • Asking some of the most thoughtful people you know questions about video games.
  • The exhaustion of trying to keep video games in your life.
  • Artists and critics with opinions that are wildly out of step with their audience.
  • Video game companies that have great logos.
  • People who are so good at telling interesting stories about the bad video games that they're playing that they convince you to buy the game and then you're like "where's the interesting game they talked about"
  • Talking to the same oldbies every week.
  • An 18 year old kid obsessed with the Atari Jaguar wandering into the middle-aged video game club and everyone is like "sickos face yes emoji"
  • Trying to track down the manufacturer of Digital Princess Friend.
  • Mysterious ROM images that nobody knows the origin of because nobody asked.
  • A Tamagotchi where your little guy can be a fighter plane or Sponge Bob.
  • Mysteriously good Tamagotchi software floating around.
  • The reason M&Ms come in different colors.
  • An egg that your umbrella with an eye can hatch from.
  • Why you can't ship a container full of cheap junk to the United States any more.
  • Middle English style poetry.
  • Sheer shards of shattered tumblers.
  • Modern English alliterative verse.
  • It's cool what people do with words.
  • Paying so much attention to the alliteration that you miss the meaning of the poem.
  • All the Babu Frik Funko Pops that will still be around long after all the stars go out.
  • Hephaestus' Hammer, all gunked up in microplastics.
  • Quoting other poems in the middle of your poem.
  • Publishing a book of all the poems we've read on Topic Lords and then being sued for copyright infringement.
  • A poem that originated on Jim's fridge.
  • Diminishing Mandalorian Returns.
  • The goddamned Ewoks shit.
  • The Droids cartoon.
  • The future of Star Wars: jokes about Star Wars??
  • The Day the Clown Cried of Star Wars.
  • The angriest you've ever been watching a movie.
  • The third good Star Wars movie.
  • Stealing good ideas from cool fiction.
  • One guy who got lucky a couple times and a thousand yes men enabling him for the next 40 years.
  • Planet Moriband.
  • Finally finding a guy you can call Mace Windu.
  • Waiting for Jar-Jar.
  • Sometimes you just need drivel that you like.
  • Buying a tangerine and noticing that it's a Star Wars-branded tangerine.
  • Technology improving the way we interact with wind resistance.
  • 1890 guy on his velocipede getting mad at all the new Space Bikes.
  • Instituting new rules stating that your bicycle has to look like a bicycle.
  • Ivory Tower Cycle Men.
  • Vampire Tactics.
  • The most prestigious world record in professional cycling.
  • Keeping track of the world record best dress at a fashion show.
  • What about Funny Cars? What's so funny about them?
  • Trying to break the Merckx record using Merckx's original bicycle and outfit.
  • Everyone tying the same world record forever.
  • Riding 270 miles a day for a year.
  • Walking to work 23 miles a day, both ways, because you love suffering and hate bicycles.
  • Detective Comics Comics.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • A gold star Canadian.
  • Cousin show Insert Credit.
  • One of the world's foremost experts on DC Comics.
  • Filling in the gaps with bonus episodes.
  • The lost episode of topic lords that might one day be produced.
  • Spreadsheet Secrets.
  • Detritus and ruins of the culture that came before yours. (Gen-X.)
  • Whether Steve Jackson is still doing the GURPS thing.
  • Where did Gen-X come from, and why did it disappear?
  • Your personal relationship with They Might Be Giants.
  • The weirdos who first colonized the Internet in search of the community they weren't finding in their lives.
  • Nerds riding high on military funding and founding new religions with varying degrees of mockery.
  • British comedy crossing the ocean and losing its cultural context, so a generation of American nerds grow up with a more absurdist sense of humor than the previous generations.
  • Sitting at your computer running IRC in 1996, staring at the screen waiting for someone to say something.
  • Classical Education as a shared cultural context so rich people can understand each other's jokes.
  • Halfway into the 2020s, still thinking about the Roaring Twenties whenever anyone names the decade.
  • Everybody forgetting how to group history by decade after a twenty years of not easily being able to talk about "the 00s" and "the 10s."
  • Playing video games from the ages of 5 to 20 and then stopping forever.
  • Asking some of the most thoughtful people you know questions about video games.
  • The exhaustion of trying to keep video games in your life.
  • Artists and critics with opinions that are wildly out of step with their audience.
  • Video game companies that have great logos.
  • People who are so good at telling interesting stories about the bad video games that they're playing that they convince you to buy the game and then you're like "where's the interesting game they talked about"
  • Talking to the same oldbies every week.
  • An 18 year old kid obsessed with the Atari Jaguar wandering into the middle-aged video game club and everyone is like "sickos face yes emoji"
  • Trying to track down the manufacturer of Digital Princess Friend.
  • Mysterious ROM images that nobody knows the origin of because nobody asked.
  • A Tamagotchi where your little guy can be a fighter plane or Sponge Bob.
  • Mysteriously good Tamagotchi software floating around.
  • The reason M&Ms come in different colors.
  • An egg that your umbrella with an eye can hatch from.
  • Why you can't ship a container full of cheap junk to the United States any more.
  • Middle English style poetry.
  • Sheer shards of shattered tumblers.
  • Modern English alliterative verse.
  • It's cool what people do with words.
  • Paying so much attention to the alliteration that you miss the meaning of the poem.
  • All the Babu Frik Funko Pops that will still be around long after all the stars go out.
  • Hephaestus' Hammer, all gunked up in microplastics.
  • Quoting other poems in the middle of your poem.
  • Publishing a book of all the poems we've read on Topic Lords and then being sued for copyright infringement.
  • A poem that originated on Jim's fridge.
  • Diminishing Mandalorian Returns.
  • The goddamned Ewoks shit.
  • The Droids cartoon.
  • The future of Star Wars: jokes about Star Wars??
  • The Day the Clown Cried of Star Wars.
  • The angriest you've ever been watching a movie.
  • The third good Star Wars movie.
  • Stealing good ideas from cool fiction.
  • One guy who got lucky a couple times and a thousand yes men enabling him for the next 40 years.
  • Planet Moriband.
  • Finally finding a guy you can call Mace Windu.
  • Waiting for Jar-Jar.
  • Sometimes you just need drivel that you like.
  • Buying a tangerine and noticing that it's a Star Wars-branded tangerine.
  • Technology improving the way we interact with wind resistance.
  • 1890 guy on his velocipede getting mad at all the new Space Bikes.
  • Instituting new rules stating that your bicycle has to look like a bicycle.
  • Ivory Tower Cycle Men.
  • Vampire Tactics.
  • The most prestigious world record in professional cycling.
  • Keeping track of the world record best dress at a fashion show.
  • What about Funny Cars? What's so funny about them?
  • Trying to break the Merckx record using Merckx's original bicycle and outfit.
  • Everyone tying the same world record forever.
  • Riding 270 miles a day for a year.
  • Walking to work 23 miles a day, both ways, because you love suffering and hate bicycles.
  • Detective Comics Comics.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+Se8G5_1G ]]> Jim Stormdancer 327. Damn, That's a Good Kidney! https://topiclords.com/damn-thats-a-good-kidney 25a4bbe6-7203-48ee-ab98-7de4e53a0b16 Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Josette and Daniel. We discuss the overlap between musicians and rhythm game players, figure skating and the upcoming Olympics, In This Short Life That Only Lasts an Hour by Emily Dickinson, The Reality of Hope, and whether time travel media is really that bad 1:06:29 true Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • 3D art spaces and the Virtual Burning Man experience.
  • What were we talking about at lunch?
  • The new kind of Christmas light that's reminiscent of the old kind of Christmas light.
  • A nice soft blue.
  • The LED lights that hurt the most.
  • Mounting recessed lights in the eaves and lighting them up with the worst gamer RGB patterns.
  • Beige keyboards with three green LEDs on them that you can animate because they're memory-mapped.
  • Paradiddle.
  • Learning to play drums in VR.
  • Paradiddle for Snapchat Glasses.
  • Video game audio latency vs. digital synthesizer latency.
  • The Bemani guitar game that inspired Guitar Hero.
  • Guitar Freaks vs. Guitar Hero as a case study in how the same idea can be executed very differently getting very different results
  • How singing is scored in Rock Band.
  • Finding new music via the Rock Band games.
  • Beat Saber Library Managers.
  • Solid beams of light.
  • Ice Dancing.
  • Whether you can train rhythm.
  • Brother-sister ice skating couples.
  • Which animals can learn rhythm.
  • Representing your ice rink.
  • What to do after you've spent your life training but what you were training for didn't work out?
  • Ice skater unions.
  • Going to the Olympics with your mom to watch the figure skating.
  • Alysa Liu.
  • Meeting America's Princess and she's not a nice lady.
  • Finding the right coach at age 7.
  • Sports therapists.
  • The disposition to perform your best under pressure.
  • Exercising and practicing at the expense of nearly everything else you could be doing with your time.
  • What to do with your life now that you're no longer spending all your time training for the Olympics.
  • Missing your friend's 11th birthday party because you're busy training for the Olympics.
  • Giving seven year olds a test to see if they do well under pressure and if not, telling their parents not to try to get this one into the Olympics.
  • Grit.
  • What boot camp is for.
  • Training to be the best person in the world at field stripping a rifle.
  • Still living this life, which is great.
  • Still being responsible for other people's taxes.
  • Looking forward to the new year because it's tax time.
  • How your life might've been different if your parents insisted you go to college.
  • We've got learning at home but we don't have socialization at home.
  • Studying how to study without knowing how to study.
  • Passing the classes you were interested in at that moment and not doing so well in the test.
  • Two friends in the furry community.
  • Telling your friend about your medical condition in VR Chat.
  • A documentary about kidney transplants in the furry community.
  • Damn, That's a Good Kidney!
  • Filming a documentary in VR Chat.
  • What normal people think about time travel fiction.
  • Yes, you have to use your hands, and yes it's like a baby's toy.
  • Reading a piece of fiction because you're hoping to have a good time.
  • Which time-travel movies have reached the heights of popular culture.
  • Having this 360-degree camera just sitting around and trying to figure out what movie to make with it.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • 3D art spaces and the Virtual Burning Man experience.
  • What were we talking about at lunch?
  • The new kind of Christmas light that's reminiscent of the old kind of Christmas light.
  • A nice soft blue.
  • The LED lights that hurt the most.
  • Mounting recessed lights in the eaves and lighting them up with the worst gamer RGB patterns.
  • Beige keyboards with three green LEDs on them that you can animate because they're memory-mapped.
  • Paradiddle.
  • Learning to play drums in VR.
  • Paradiddle for Snapchat Glasses.
  • Video game audio latency vs. digital synthesizer latency.
  • The Bemani guitar game that inspired Guitar Hero.
  • Guitar Freaks vs. Guitar Hero as a case study in how the same idea can be executed very differently getting very different results
  • How singing is scored in Rock Band.
  • Finding new music via the Rock Band games.
  • Beat Saber Library Managers.
  • Solid beams of light.
  • Ice Dancing.
  • Whether you can train rhythm.
  • Brother-sister ice skating couples.
  • Which animals can learn rhythm.
  • Representing your ice rink.
  • What to do after you've spent your life training but what you were training for didn't work out?
  • Ice skater unions.
  • Going to the Olympics with your mom to watch the figure skating.
  • Alysa Liu.
  • Meeting America's Princess and she's not a nice lady.
  • Finding the right coach at age 7.
  • Sports therapists.
  • The disposition to perform your best under pressure.
  • Exercising and practicing at the expense of nearly everything else you could be doing with your time.
  • What to do with your life now that you're no longer spending all your time training for the Olympics.
  • Missing your friend's 11th birthday party because you're busy training for the Olympics.
  • Giving seven year olds a test to see if they do well under pressure and if not, telling their parents not to try to get this one into the Olympics.
  • Grit.
  • What boot camp is for.
  • Training to be the best person in the world at field stripping a rifle.
  • Still living this life, which is great.
  • Still being responsible for other people's taxes.
  • Looking forward to the new year because it's tax time.
  • How your life might've been different if your parents insisted you go to college.
  • We've got learning at home but we don't have socialization at home.
  • Studying how to study without knowing how to study.
  • Passing the classes you were interested in at that moment and not doing so well in the test.
  • Two friends in the furry community.
  • Telling your friend about your medical condition in VR Chat.
  • A documentary about kidney transplants in the furry community.
  • Damn, That's a Good Kidney!
  • Filming a documentary in VR Chat.
  • What normal people think about time travel fiction.
  • Yes, you have to use your hands, and yes it's like a baby's toy.
  • Reading a piece of fiction because you're hoping to have a good time.
  • Which time-travel movies have reached the heights of popular culture.
  • Having this 360-degree camera just sitting around and trying to figure out what movie to make with it.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • 3D art spaces and the Virtual Burning Man experience.
  • What were we talking about at lunch?
  • The new kind of Christmas light that's reminiscent of the old kind of Christmas light.
  • A nice soft blue.
  • The LED lights that hurt the most.
  • Mounting recessed lights in the eaves and lighting them up with the worst gamer RGB patterns.
  • Beige keyboards with three green LEDs on them that you can animate because they're memory-mapped.
  • Paradiddle.
  • Learning to play drums in VR.
  • Paradiddle for Snapchat Glasses.
  • Video game audio latency vs. digital synthesizer latency.
  • The Bemani guitar game that inspired Guitar Hero.
  • Guitar Freaks vs. Guitar Hero as a case study in how the same idea can be executed very differently getting very different results
  • How singing is scored in Rock Band.
  • Finding new music via the Rock Band games.
  • Beat Saber Library Managers.
  • Solid beams of light.
  • Ice Dancing.
  • Whether you can train rhythm.
  • Brother-sister ice skating couples.
  • Which animals can learn rhythm.
  • Representing your ice rink.
  • What to do after you've spent your life training but what you were training for didn't work out?
  • Ice skater unions.
  • Going to the Olympics with your mom to watch the figure skating.
  • Alysa Liu.
  • Meeting America's Princess and she's not a nice lady.
  • Finding the right coach at age 7.
  • Sports therapists.
  • The disposition to perform your best under pressure.
  • Exercising and practicing at the expense of nearly everything else you could be doing with your time.
  • What to do with your life now that you're no longer spending all your time training for the Olympics.
  • Missing your friend's 11th birthday party because you're busy training for the Olympics.
  • Giving seven year olds a test to see if they do well under pressure and if not, telling their parents not to try to get this one into the Olympics.
  • Grit.
  • What boot camp is for.
  • Training to be the best person in the world at field stripping a rifle.
  • Still living this life, which is great.
  • Still being responsible for other people's taxes.
  • Looking forward to the new year because it's tax time.
  • How your life might've been different if your parents insisted you go to college.
  • We've got learning at home but we don't have socialization at home.
  • Studying how to study without knowing how to study.
  • Passing the classes you were interested in at that moment and not doing so well in the test.
  • Two friends in the furry community.
  • Telling your friend about your medical condition in VR Chat.
  • A documentary about kidney transplants in the furry community.
  • Damn, That's a Good Kidney!
  • Filming a documentary in VR Chat.
  • What normal people think about time travel fiction.
  • Yes, you have to use your hands, and yes it's like a baby's toy.
  • Reading a piece of fiction because you're hoping to have a good time.
  • Which time-travel movies have reached the heights of popular culture.
  • Having this 360-degree camera just sitting around and trying to figure out what movie to make with it.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+6IDu-ZhG ]]> Jim Stormdancer 326. A Dead Quarterback Can Still Score https://topiclords.com/a-dead-quarterback-can-still-score d54cedc6-1533-41c8-9cbd-8a5c69b38768 Mon, 19 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Cort and Ben. We discuss the Geek Code, a fun fact about your neighborhood, Every 5x6 Nonogram, The Calf Path, by Sam Foss, and Phillip Rivers. 1:03:55 true Lords:

  • Cort
  • Ben

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Secret Playstation Things.
  • Transposing a matrix in SIMD.
  • Reclaiming your plug.
  • Trying and failing to use Libby.
  • Failing to check out library books from your toilet.
  • State-sanctioned piracy.
  • The restaurant where you had the dinner for your wedding.
  • The "my wife" voice.
  • Suddenly having nieces.
  • Hadad and Barney on Black Square Day.
  • The Talos Principal DLC.
  • The Geek Code Era.
  • VMS or OS/2 as a defining feature of your personality.
  • Dilbert, Perl, Doom, and X-Files: all equally culturally relevant to this day.
  • The Natural Bears Classification System for Gay Men.
  • The Human Code.
  • Your favorite grocery store's end-of-year recap.
  • The story of a Venezuelan woman between age 30 and 55, and her top 2000 interests.
  • Your favorite vowel in text messages you've sent this year.
  • What they call that AE vowel.
  • Speedrunning your entire email history in a weekend.
  • The Miracle Mile, where all the tar pits are.
  • Noted monster Sean "Diddy" Combs.
  • Two hip hop producers getting mad at each other.
  • Putting a plaque at your hotel explaining that Jim Morrison did not die at this hotel.
  • Being the plaque you want to see in the world.
  • Whether the Museum of Jurassic Technology has reopened after the fire.
  • A very earnest museum about a history that never was.
  • Wandering around dazed after every 5x5 nonogram is solved.
  • Doing your part to serve humanity by solving nonograms.
  • Do you remember where you were when Every 5x5 Nonogram Section 303 was finished?
  • Why a dippy bird can't keep you online.
  • Gesturing at the idea of collectively solving a problem.
  • Why we haven't heard from Peter Molyneux in a while.
  • What three digit numbers nonogram solvers think are interesting.
  • Sending 96 million solved nonograms into space as proof to alien life that humans are still capable of collective action.
  • Feeling bad about having installed an ad blocker and loading up a four hour block of ads from 80s TV.
  • Being prosecuted for use of ad blockers.
  • Look at that smirk. That's a man who knows he's preaching but getting away with it.
  • Getting a deck of flash cards to learn all of the pentameters.
  • Three iambs and a reverse iamb.
  • Your favorite good poems and your favorite shitpost poems.
  • Tony Gang Flame War.
  • Refusing to tackle the 40 year old quarterback after his wallet falls out on the field and the photos of his ten children unfold.
  • The median age of football players rising into retirement age as teenagers learn about the health risks and refuse to participate.
  • Using NBA 2K as a metaphor for the decline of civilization.
  • LA finally getting a football team again. (They have two now.)
  • Whether they're still playing Starcraft.
  • Broken 19 year olds who can't play Starcraft any more because their APMs are too low.
  • The experience of attending a live e-Sports event.
  • Whether they sell hot dogs and beer to the crowd at the live League of Legends event or if it's all GamerGrub and Feastables.
  • A Youtube shitpost made in Garry's Mod.
  • Channing Tatum playing the toilet in the Skibidi Toilet movie.
  • Al Gore: still alive?
  • Whether Wilford Brimley got plastic surgery to look that old.
]]> Lords:

  • Cort
  • Ben

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Secret Playstation Things.
  • Transposing a matrix in SIMD.
  • Reclaiming your plug.
  • Trying and failing to use Libby.
  • Failing to check out library books from your toilet.
  • State-sanctioned piracy.
  • The restaurant where you had the dinner for your wedding.
  • The "my wife" voice.
  • Suddenly having nieces.
  • Hadad and Barney on Black Square Day.
  • The Talos Principal DLC.
  • The Geek Code Era.
  • VMS or OS/2 as a defining feature of your personality.
  • Dilbert, Perl, Doom, and X-Files: all equally culturally relevant to this day.
  • The Natural Bears Classification System for Gay Men.
  • The Human Code.
  • Your favorite grocery store's end-of-year recap.
  • The story of a Venezuelan woman between age 30 and 55, and her top 2000 interests.
  • Your favorite vowel in text messages you've sent this year.
  • What they call that AE vowel.
  • Speedrunning your entire email history in a weekend.
  • The Miracle Mile, where all the tar pits are.
  • Noted monster Sean "Diddy" Combs.
  • Two hip hop producers getting mad at each other.
  • Putting a plaque at your hotel explaining that Jim Morrison did not die at this hotel.
  • Being the plaque you want to see in the world.
  • Whether the Museum of Jurassic Technology has reopened after the fire.
  • A very earnest museum about a history that never was.
  • Wandering around dazed after every 5x5 nonogram is solved.
  • Doing your part to serve humanity by solving nonograms.
  • Do you remember where you were when Every 5x5 Nonogram Section 303 was finished?
  • Why a dippy bird can't keep you online.
  • Gesturing at the idea of collectively solving a problem.
  • Why we haven't heard from Peter Molyneux in a while.
  • What three digit numbers nonogram solvers think are interesting.
  • Sending 96 million solved nonograms into space as proof to alien life that humans are still capable of collective action.
  • Feeling bad about having installed an ad blocker and loading up a four hour block of ads from 80s TV.
  • Being prosecuted for use of ad blockers.
  • Look at that smirk. That's a man who knows he's preaching but getting away with it.
  • Getting a deck of flash cards to learn all of the pentameters.
  • Three iambs and a reverse iamb.
  • Your favorite good poems and your favorite shitpost poems.
  • Tony Gang Flame War.
  • Refusing to tackle the 40 year old quarterback after his wallet falls out on the field and the photos of his ten children unfold.
  • The median age of football players rising into retirement age as teenagers learn about the health risks and refuse to participate.
  • Using NBA 2K as a metaphor for the decline of civilization.
  • LA finally getting a football team again. (They have two now.)
  • Whether they're still playing Starcraft.
  • Broken 19 year olds who can't play Starcraft any more because their APMs are too low.
  • The experience of attending a live e-Sports event.
  • Whether they sell hot dogs and beer to the crowd at the live League of Legends event or if it's all GamerGrub and Feastables.
  • A Youtube shitpost made in Garry's Mod.
  • Channing Tatum playing the toilet in the Skibidi Toilet movie.
  • Al Gore: still alive?
  • Whether Wilford Brimley got plastic surgery to look that old.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Cort
  • Ben

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Secret Playstation Things.
  • Transposing a matrix in SIMD.
  • Reclaiming your plug.
  • Trying and failing to use Libby.
  • Failing to check out library books from your toilet.
  • State-sanctioned piracy.
  • The restaurant where you had the dinner for your wedding.
  • The "my wife" voice.
  • Suddenly having nieces.
  • Hadad and Barney on Black Square Day.
  • The Talos Principal DLC.
  • The Geek Code Era.
  • VMS or OS/2 as a defining feature of your personality.
  • Dilbert, Perl, Doom, and X-Files: all equally culturally relevant to this day.
  • The Natural Bears Classification System for Gay Men.
  • The Human Code.
  • Your favorite grocery store's end-of-year recap.
  • The story of a Venezuelan woman between age 30 and 55, and her top 2000 interests.
  • Your favorite vowel in text messages you've sent this year.
  • What they call that AE vowel.
  • Speedrunning your entire email history in a weekend.
  • The Miracle Mile, where all the tar pits are.
  • Noted monster Sean "Diddy" Combs.
  • Two hip hop producers getting mad at each other.
  • Putting a plaque at your hotel explaining that Jim Morrison did not die at this hotel.
  • Being the plaque you want to see in the world.
  • Whether the Museum of Jurassic Technology has reopened after the fire.
  • A very earnest museum about a history that never was.
  • Wandering around dazed after every 5x5 nonogram is solved.
  • Doing your part to serve humanity by solving nonograms.
  • Do you remember where you were when Every 5x5 Nonogram Section 303 was finished?
  • Why a dippy bird can't keep you online.
  • Gesturing at the idea of collectively solving a problem.
  • Why we haven't heard from Peter Molyneux in a while.
  • What three digit numbers nonogram solvers think are interesting.
  • Sending 96 million solved nonograms into space as proof to alien life that humans are still capable of collective action.
  • Feeling bad about having installed an ad blocker and loading up a four hour block of ads from 80s TV.
  • Being prosecuted for use of ad blockers.
  • Look at that smirk. That's a man who knows he's preaching but getting away with it.
  • Getting a deck of flash cards to learn all of the pentameters.
  • Three iambs and a reverse iamb.
  • Your favorite good poems and your favorite shitpost poems.
  • Tony Gang Flame War.
  • Refusing to tackle the 40 year old quarterback after his wallet falls out on the field and the photos of his ten children unfold.
  • The median age of football players rising into retirement age as teenagers learn about the health risks and refuse to participate.
  • Using NBA 2K as a metaphor for the decline of civilization.
  • LA finally getting a football team again. (They have two now.)
  • Whether they're still playing Starcraft.
  • Broken 19 year olds who can't play Starcraft any more because their APMs are too low.
  • The experience of attending a live e-Sports event.
  • Whether they sell hot dogs and beer to the crowd at the live League of Legends event or if it's all GamerGrub and Feastables.
  • A Youtube shitpost made in Garry's Mod.
  • Channing Tatum playing the toilet in the Skibidi Toilet movie.
  • Al Gore: still alive?
  • Whether Wilford Brimley got plastic surgery to look that old.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+uKiP7eq0 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 325. Men, Explain Things to Me! https://topiclords.com/men-explain-things-to-me 6d1e581d-a3d9-443c-9616-b8aab6e8deb2 Mon, 12 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Erica and Micah. We discuss Puerto Rico branded holiday jams, chive drama on Reddit, how to cure tinnitus (maybe), the Ballad of Blasphemous Bill by Robert W. Service, and making movies sequels until they're good again 1:06:28 true Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Being finished with horrible shit.
  • Being in the middle of things forever.
  • The Minutes of the Intermittent Meetings of the Society of Apocryphal Gentlefolk, by Dark Art
  • Coming down from the high of PiCoSteveMo.
  • Explaining PiCoSteveMo to someone like it's their first time at Rocky Horror Picture Show.
  • Two things I'm willing to sacrifice to play PiCoSteveMo games.
  • Putting your PICO-8 game in a CRT filter.
  • Lawnmower Man, based on the title by Stephen King.
  • Developing a field system in Puerto Rico.
  • Winston's face appearing to the extent that Zoom thinks it's part of my chest.
  • A deafening hospital siren playing while you're trying to have a good time at the beach.
  • Pirate-themed massage.
  • Stealing the windsurfing gear and going for a ride.
  • Walking past the site of a pirate massage and fatal accident holding a solo cup.
  • Getting pushed off the road by seven full-sized Coca Cola trucks led by a Santa Sleigh and followed by a party truck with a giant octagonal speaker spreading holiday cheer.
  • Charging more for a well-traveled Coca Cola.
  • Holiday-Branded Traffic Jams.
  • Shipping your worst wine to India and it turns out that the sea voyage turns it into your best wine.
  • Spanish Milk.
  • Visiting Puerto Rico during linear time.
  • The Puerto Rican version of Sleep No More in which Bad Bunny might pull you into a dark corner for a one-on-one and it's not clear whether he works for the event or if he's just another attendee.
  • Day 57 of chopping chives on Reddit.
  • Drawing airplanes crashing into the chives that are too long.
  • Working with (and living with) the Chive Lord.
  • Comparing Day 1 chives with day 55 chives.
  • Finding Yoshi in a pile of chopped chives.
  • A job that exists. (But not one you get paid for.)
  • Asking the robot to add heart shapes to your food processor chives.
  • These are the Days of our Chives.
  • Each Sale I Drink a Glass of Water.
  • Self-hosting memes and Turing-complete memes.
  • Phase canceling your tinnitus.
  • Not wanting to look it up because then you'd know.
  • Curing tinnitus with extremely specific grenades.
  • A party where everyone is constantly singing their personal tinnitus tones.
  • Why don't we get bass tinnitus?
  • Can you cure bass tinnitus with snail caviar?
  • The native word for white people who are doing poorly in Alaska.
  • The ice worms wriggling their purple heads through the crust of the pale blue snow.
  • Pine trees cracking like little guns in the silence of the wood.
  • Prankster Bill dying with his arms and legs outstretched so that he won't fit in his coffin.
  • Poems that demand to be performed with a banjo.
  • Whether they have banjos in Alaska.
  • Having fun with the way words sound.
  • I'm not gonna make it – but I can be an X shape.
  • The Cremation of Sam McGee.
  • Burning your house down to get the insurance money to buy a telescope.
  • Making bad art until it becomes good.
  • Tremors 3: Back to Perfection.
  • A giant worm monster drilling up out of the ground in order to slice chives.
  • Really dwelling on how much you don't have in common with other people.
  • Six topics (and Shrieker Island)
  • A dollmaker on the run after making farcical plays about Hitler.
  • The Saved by the Bell themed music video featuring the same actors as the Final Destination movie it's promoting.
  • Would you take 90 minutes off of your life to have not seen Final Destination 4?
  • The replacement for the 1 to 10 pain scale where you decide which Final Destination movie you'd be willing to watch to take the pain away.
  • Low pain awareness.
  • Chess boxing win/loss ratios.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Being finished with horrible shit.
  • Being in the middle of things forever.
  • The Minutes of the Intermittent Meetings of the Society of Apocryphal Gentlefolk, by Dark Art
  • Coming down from the high of PiCoSteveMo.
  • Explaining PiCoSteveMo to someone like it's their first time at Rocky Horror Picture Show.
  • Two things I'm willing to sacrifice to play PiCoSteveMo games.
  • Putting your PICO-8 game in a CRT filter.
  • Lawnmower Man, based on the title by Stephen King.
  • Developing a field system in Puerto Rico.
  • Winston's face appearing to the extent that Zoom thinks it's part of my chest.
  • A deafening hospital siren playing while you're trying to have a good time at the beach.
  • Pirate-themed massage.
  • Stealing the windsurfing gear and going for a ride.
  • Walking past the site of a pirate massage and fatal accident holding a solo cup.
  • Getting pushed off the road by seven full-sized Coca Cola trucks led by a Santa Sleigh and followed by a party truck with a giant octagonal speaker spreading holiday cheer.
  • Charging more for a well-traveled Coca Cola.
  • Holiday-Branded Traffic Jams.
  • Shipping your worst wine to India and it turns out that the sea voyage turns it into your best wine.
  • Spanish Milk.
  • Visiting Puerto Rico during linear time.
  • The Puerto Rican version of Sleep No More in which Bad Bunny might pull you into a dark corner for a one-on-one and it's not clear whether he works for the event or if he's just another attendee.
  • Day 57 of chopping chives on Reddit.
  • Drawing airplanes crashing into the chives that are too long.
  • Working with (and living with) the Chive Lord.
  • Comparing Day 1 chives with day 55 chives.
  • Finding Yoshi in a pile of chopped chives.
  • A job that exists. (But not one you get paid for.)
  • Asking the robot to add heart shapes to your food processor chives.
  • These are the Days of our Chives.
  • Each Sale I Drink a Glass of Water.
  • Self-hosting memes and Turing-complete memes.
  • Phase canceling your tinnitus.
  • Not wanting to look it up because then you'd know.
  • Curing tinnitus with extremely specific grenades.
  • A party where everyone is constantly singing their personal tinnitus tones.
  • Why don't we get bass tinnitus?
  • Can you cure bass tinnitus with snail caviar?
  • The native word for white people who are doing poorly in Alaska.
  • The ice worms wriggling their purple heads through the crust of the pale blue snow.
  • Pine trees cracking like little guns in the silence of the wood.
  • Prankster Bill dying with his arms and legs outstretched so that he won't fit in his coffin.
  • Poems that demand to be performed with a banjo.
  • Whether they have banjos in Alaska.
  • Having fun with the way words sound.
  • I'm not gonna make it – but I can be an X shape.
  • The Cremation of Sam McGee.
  • Burning your house down to get the insurance money to buy a telescope.
  • Making bad art until it becomes good.
  • Tremors 3: Back to Perfection.
  • A giant worm monster drilling up out of the ground in order to slice chives.
  • Really dwelling on how much you don't have in common with other people.
  • Six topics (and Shrieker Island)
  • A dollmaker on the run after making farcical plays about Hitler.
  • The Saved by the Bell themed music video featuring the same actors as the Final Destination movie it's promoting.
  • Would you take 90 minutes off of your life to have not seen Final Destination 4?
  • The replacement for the 1 to 10 pain scale where you decide which Final Destination movie you'd be willing to watch to take the pain away.
  • Low pain awareness.
  • Chess boxing win/loss ratios.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Being finished with horrible shit.
  • Being in the middle of things forever.
  • The Minutes of the Intermittent Meetings of the Society of Apocryphal Gentlefolk, by Dark Art
  • Coming down from the high of PiCoSteveMo.
  • Explaining PiCoSteveMo to someone like it's their first time at Rocky Horror Picture Show.
  • Two things I'm willing to sacrifice to play PiCoSteveMo games.
  • Putting your PICO-8 game in a CRT filter.
  • Lawnmower Man, based on the title by Stephen King.
  • Developing a field system in Puerto Rico.
  • Winston's face appearing to the extent that Zoom thinks it's part of my chest.
  • A deafening hospital siren playing while you're trying to have a good time at the beach.
  • Pirate-themed massage.
  • Stealing the windsurfing gear and going for a ride.
  • Walking past the site of a pirate massage and fatal accident holding a solo cup.
  • Getting pushed off the road by seven full-sized Coca Cola trucks led by a Santa Sleigh and followed by a party truck with a giant octagonal speaker spreading holiday cheer.
  • Charging more for a well-traveled Coca Cola.
  • Holiday-Branded Traffic Jams.
  • Shipping your worst wine to India and it turns out that the sea voyage turns it into your best wine.
  • Spanish Milk.
  • Visiting Puerto Rico during linear time.
  • The Puerto Rican version of Sleep No More in which Bad Bunny might pull you into a dark corner for a one-on-one and it's not clear whether he works for the event or if he's just another attendee.
  • Day 57 of chopping chives on Reddit.
  • Drawing airplanes crashing into the chives that are too long.
  • Working with (and living with) the Chive Lord.
  • Comparing Day 1 chives with day 55 chives.
  • Finding Yoshi in a pile of chopped chives.
  • A job that exists. (But not one you get paid for.)
  • Asking the robot to add heart shapes to your food processor chives.
  • These are the Days of our Chives.
  • Each Sale I Drink a Glass of Water.
  • Self-hosting memes and Turing-complete memes.
  • Phase canceling your tinnitus.
  • Not wanting to look it up because then you'd know.
  • Curing tinnitus with extremely specific grenades.
  • A party where everyone is constantly singing their personal tinnitus tones.
  • Why don't we get bass tinnitus?
  • Can you cure bass tinnitus with snail caviar?
  • The native word for white people who are doing poorly in Alaska.
  • The ice worms wriggling their purple heads through the crust of the pale blue snow.
  • Pine trees cracking like little guns in the silence of the wood.
  • Prankster Bill dying with his arms and legs outstretched so that he won't fit in his coffin.
  • Poems that demand to be performed with a banjo.
  • Whether they have banjos in Alaska.
  • Having fun with the way words sound.
  • I'm not gonna make it – but I can be an X shape.
  • The Cremation of Sam McGee.
  • Burning your house down to get the insurance money to buy a telescope.
  • Making bad art until it becomes good.
  • Tremors 3: Back to Perfection.
  • A giant worm monster drilling up out of the ground in order to slice chives.
  • Really dwelling on how much you don't have in common with other people.
  • Six topics (and Shrieker Island)
  • A dollmaker on the run after making farcical plays about Hitler.
  • The Saved by the Bell themed music video featuring the same actors as the Final Destination movie it's promoting.
  • Would you take 90 minutes off of your life to have not seen Final Destination 4?
  • The replacement for the 1 to 10 pain scale where you decide which Final Destination movie you'd be willing to watch to take the pain away.
  • Low pain awareness.
  • Chess boxing win/loss ratios.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+7Fzoly4G ]]> Jim Stormdancer 324. You Don't Love Staggering? https://topiclords.com/you-dont-love-staggering 44b15092-2fe8-4148-81b5-1efd986f75bb Mon, 05 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Andrew and Kate. We discuss learning to drive at 40, the mottos of the livery companies of London, Independent They Stand!, Leda and the Swan, by William Butler Yeats, predecimalization currency in the UK, and DIY TTRPG mapping software, the ridiculous way 1:18:00 true Lords:

  • Andrew
  • Kate

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Streaming making maps of video games on the Internet.
  • The people who are willing to watch someone map out every corner of this sprawling and convoluted game.
  • Writing about video games and writing video games.
  • Dicey territory. (Which is only appropriate.)
  • King Stephen, which will have been great.
  • Fun jokes and oblique references.
  • Forty and a half years old.
  • Building your life around not being able to drive a car.
  • Pockets of civilization separated by vast stretches of asphalt.
  • The car unsteering itself unless you hold the steering wheel in place.
  • Someone yelling at you with their little beep beep horn.
  • Learning a skill and forgetting how you learn it.
  • Learning a skill before you find out that learning is hard.
  • The false sense of immortality that allows people to get into a car.
  • During your driving test, pushing the drift button but the driving instructor is like "I don't see any blue sparks"
  • Learning to drive when you're six years old.
  • Getting your Lego Land driving license.
  • Awarding the worst student in your driving class the "most spirited" driver's license.
  • Explaining what livery companies are by reading the Wikipedia page also.
  • The Worshipful Company of Communicators.
  • Everything's so good, bread especially.
  • A great motto for clockmakers.
  • Does anyone know any cool Latin mottos?
  • When are all these servants having time to go out and have mottos??
  • The Soggiest God you can Muster.
  • The Worshipful Company of Information Technologists finding a Latin word that is also a snack food for their motto.
  • Painting, staining, and compelling obedience.
  • Sticking with Hope Classic.
  • Shoemakers making jokes about supporting their customers.
  • Getting the salt/wit pun in there for people who know Latin.
  • Africa: always producing some novelty.
  • The 2000 IGF.
  • How to read a magazine together on a podcast.
  • John Carmack's Finger Server.
  • Doom Guy.
  • John Romero's specific type of memory.
  • How they invented mouse look.
  • Turning with the arrow keys and aiming a reticle around the screen with the mouse.
  • Dragging the mouse to the top of your cool dinosaur mouse pad.
  • Why doesn't Microsoft Excel keep the mouse cursor in the center of the screen?
  • The FPS phone interface where you swipe on the touchscreen until the button you want to press is in the center of the screen, then pull the trigger on the back of the phone and a shotgun sound plays.
  • Fold-away interface panels.
  • Thousand Hells, by the developer of King of Dragon Pass.
  • All the video games named "Rift" or "The Rift"
  • How can those terrified vague pink fingers push the feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
  • Zeus disguised as a swan.
  • Whether Marylin Monroe will would've loved Hades.
  • Going to Wikipedia's list of mottos because you need some more mottos.
  • How many ha'ppenies to a thruppence?
  • The half crown, worth 2/6.
  • Several hundred quarterfarthings.
  • Decimal Day, 1971.
  • Extremely forgeable coins.
  • Dividing the day into two sets of twelve.
  • Decimalization. (Based on 10 fingers.)
  • Tuppence and Thruppence.
  • IBM calling it "hexadecimal" because they refuse to say "sexadecimal" out loud.
  • Theater of the Mind storytelling.
  • Importing an occlusion map.
  • Tinting what the players can see green and tinting what the DM can see red or blue.
  • Swapping the lenses in anaglyph glasses so one person can only see red and the other can only see blue.
  • Hanging a projector from the ceiling and projecting the D&D map on the table.
  • A projector of uncertain parentage.
  • Harebrained vs. cockamamie.
  • A fun puzzle you can run off and waste a bunch of time solving.
  • A stochastic cinema where you never know if it's going to be comedy or horror and everything seems totally real to you and is about your personal failings.
  • Focusing on wibbly dream state.
  • How to exhale with your nose plugged.
  • Losing your Apple Watch on Mt. Everest and going back up to look for it and it turns out you dropped it in the shower.
  • Topics going into the bucket that nobody ever sees.
  • Writing a secret on a piece of paper and burying it on a hill with a single tree on it on a moonlit night.
]]> Lords:

  • Andrew
  • Kate

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Streaming making maps of video games on the Internet.
  • The people who are willing to watch someone map out every corner of this sprawling and convoluted game.
  • Writing about video games and writing video games.
  • Dicey territory. (Which is only appropriate.)
  • King Stephen, which will have been great.
  • Fun jokes and oblique references.
  • Forty and a half years old.
  • Building your life around not being able to drive a car.
  • Pockets of civilization separated by vast stretches of asphalt.
  • The car unsteering itself unless you hold the steering wheel in place.
  • Someone yelling at you with their little beep beep horn.
  • Learning a skill and forgetting how you learn it.
  • Learning a skill before you find out that learning is hard.
  • The false sense of immortality that allows people to get into a car.
  • During your driving test, pushing the drift button but the driving instructor is like "I don't see any blue sparks"
  • Learning to drive when you're six years old.
  • Getting your Lego Land driving license.
  • Awarding the worst student in your driving class the "most spirited" driver's license.
  • Explaining what livery companies are by reading the Wikipedia page also.
  • The Worshipful Company of Communicators.
  • Everything's so good, bread especially.
  • A great motto for clockmakers.
  • Does anyone know any cool Latin mottos?
  • When are all these servants having time to go out and have mottos??
  • The Soggiest God you can Muster.
  • The Worshipful Company of Information Technologists finding a Latin word that is also a snack food for their motto.
  • Painting, staining, and compelling obedience.
  • Sticking with Hope Classic.
  • Shoemakers making jokes about supporting their customers.
  • Getting the salt/wit pun in there for people who know Latin.
  • Africa: always producing some novelty.
  • The 2000 IGF.
  • How to read a magazine together on a podcast.
  • John Carmack's Finger Server.
  • Doom Guy.
  • John Romero's specific type of memory.
  • How they invented mouse look.
  • Turning with the arrow keys and aiming a reticle around the screen with the mouse.
  • Dragging the mouse to the top of your cool dinosaur mouse pad.
  • Why doesn't Microsoft Excel keep the mouse cursor in the center of the screen?
  • The FPS phone interface where you swipe on the touchscreen until the button you want to press is in the center of the screen, then pull the trigger on the back of the phone and a shotgun sound plays.
  • Fold-away interface panels.
  • Thousand Hells, by the developer of King of Dragon Pass.
  • All the video games named "Rift" or "The Rift"
  • How can those terrified vague pink fingers push the feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
  • Zeus disguised as a swan.
  • Whether Marylin Monroe will would've loved Hades.
  • Going to Wikipedia's list of mottos because you need some more mottos.
  • How many ha'ppenies to a thruppence?
  • The half crown, worth 2/6.
  • Several hundred quarterfarthings.
  • Decimal Day, 1971.
  • Extremely forgeable coins.
  • Dividing the day into two sets of twelve.
  • Decimalization. (Based on 10 fingers.)
  • Tuppence and Thruppence.
  • IBM calling it "hexadecimal" because they refuse to say "sexadecimal" out loud.
  • Theater of the Mind storytelling.
  • Importing an occlusion map.
  • Tinting what the players can see green and tinting what the DM can see red or blue.
  • Swapping the lenses in anaglyph glasses so one person can only see red and the other can only see blue.
  • Hanging a projector from the ceiling and projecting the D&D map on the table.
  • A projector of uncertain parentage.
  • Harebrained vs. cockamamie.
  • A fun puzzle you can run off and waste a bunch of time solving.
  • A stochastic cinema where you never know if it's going to be comedy or horror and everything seems totally real to you and is about your personal failings.
  • Focusing on wibbly dream state.
  • How to exhale with your nose plugged.
  • Losing your Apple Watch on Mt. Everest and going back up to look for it and it turns out you dropped it in the shower.
  • Topics going into the bucket that nobody ever sees.
  • Writing a secret on a piece of paper and burying it on a hill with a single tree on it on a moonlit night.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Andrew
  • Kate

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Streaming making maps of video games on the Internet.
  • The people who are willing to watch someone map out every corner of this sprawling and convoluted game.
  • Writing about video games and writing video games.
  • Dicey territory. (Which is only appropriate.)
  • King Stephen, which will have been great.
  • Fun jokes and oblique references.
  • Forty and a half years old.
  • Building your life around not being able to drive a car.
  • Pockets of civilization separated by vast stretches of asphalt.
  • The car unsteering itself unless you hold the steering wheel in place.
  • Someone yelling at you with their little beep beep horn.
  • Learning a skill and forgetting how you learn it.
  • Learning a skill before you find out that learning is hard.
  • The false sense of immortality that allows people to get into a car.
  • During your driving test, pushing the drift button but the driving instructor is like "I don't see any blue sparks"
  • Learning to drive when you're six years old.
  • Getting your Lego Land driving license.
  • Awarding the worst student in your driving class the "most spirited" driver's license.
  • Explaining what livery companies are by reading the Wikipedia page also.
  • The Worshipful Company of Communicators.
  • Everything's so good, bread especially.
  • A great motto for clockmakers.
  • Does anyone know any cool Latin mottos?
  • When are all these servants having time to go out and have mottos??
  • The Soggiest God you can Muster.
  • The Worshipful Company of Information Technologists finding a Latin word that is also a snack food for their motto.
  • Painting, staining, and compelling obedience.
  • Sticking with Hope Classic.
  • Shoemakers making jokes about supporting their customers.
  • Getting the salt/wit pun in there for people who know Latin.
  • Africa: always producing some novelty.
  • The 2000 IGF.
  • How to read a magazine together on a podcast.
  • John Carmack's Finger Server.
  • Doom Guy.
  • John Romero's specific type of memory.
  • How they invented mouse look.
  • Turning with the arrow keys and aiming a reticle around the screen with the mouse.
  • Dragging the mouse to the top of your cool dinosaur mouse pad.
  • Why doesn't Microsoft Excel keep the mouse cursor in the center of the screen?
  • The FPS phone interface where you swipe on the touchscreen until the button you want to press is in the center of the screen, then pull the trigger on the back of the phone and a shotgun sound plays.
  • Fold-away interface panels.
  • Thousand Hells, by the developer of King of Dragon Pass.
  • All the video games named "Rift" or "The Rift"
  • How can those terrified vague pink fingers push the feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
  • Zeus disguised as a swan.
  • Whether Marylin Monroe will would've loved Hades.
  • Going to Wikipedia's list of mottos because you need some more mottos.
  • How many ha'ppenies to a thruppence?
  • The half crown, worth 2/6.
  • Several hundred quarterfarthings.
  • Decimal Day, 1971.
  • Extremely forgeable coins.
  • Dividing the day into two sets of twelve.
  • Decimalization. (Based on 10 fingers.)
  • Tuppence and Thruppence.
  • IBM calling it "hexadecimal" because they refuse to say "sexadecimal" out loud.
  • Theater of the Mind storytelling.
  • Importing an occlusion map.
  • Tinting what the players can see green and tinting what the DM can see red or blue.
  • Swapping the lenses in anaglyph glasses so one person can only see red and the other can only see blue.
  • Hanging a projector from the ceiling and projecting the D&D map on the table.
  • A projector of uncertain parentage.
  • Harebrained vs. cockamamie.
  • A fun puzzle you can run off and waste a bunch of time solving.
  • A stochastic cinema where you never know if it's going to be comedy or horror and everything seems totally real to you and is about your personal failings.
  • Focusing on wibbly dream state.
  • How to exhale with your nose plugged.
  • Losing your Apple Watch on Mt. Everest and going back up to look for it and it turns out you dropped it in the shower.
  • Topics going into the bucket that nobody ever sees.
  • Writing a secret on a piece of paper and burying it on a hill with a single tree on it on a moonlit night.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+erIBdaxA ]]> Jim Stormdancer 323. The Astigmaprism https://topiclords.com/the-astigmaprism 75801db5-6bc3-433e-be75-fbc39b0b7d17 Mon, 29 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Ryan and CisHetKayfaber. We discuss vocal stims getting out of control now that you don't have pets, training to become a Tetris Grandmaster, switching to not-bifocals, and Eagle Eye Cherry - Save Tonight 1:13:28 true Lords:

  • Ryan
  • CisHetKayfaber

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Introducing yourself or plugging something.
  • Going to Cape Town for Playtopia.
  • Enemies to enemies to lovers.
  • A game conference with a name that sounds way too much like Fruitopia.
  • What you would do for an Orbitz right now.
  • An apple juice with basil seeds ensconced in it, like an Orbitz.
  • I'm not mean, I'm just trying to manifest bullying.
  • Semisolid Kind of Life.
  • A dog following you into the kitchen and acting like a Ghostbusters trap except for all your bullshit rather than ectoplasm.
  • The movie about the prep school kids who poop on the floor at their magic school.
  • Making yourself laugh by doing a Gollum voice while you make a sandwich.
  • Hanging up a happy face on the fridge and writing "mirror" on top of it to convince yourself that you're okay.
  • An action figure that absorbs all the dark energy aimed at you.
  • Giving advice to someone that you really have no basis for.
  • The dog who loved your terrible celebrity impressions and the dog who gives you a look like "I expected more of you"
  • Your online source for news about what water parks Jim and his family went to.
  • The kind of Tetris that you become s grandmaster in.
  • Tetris but the pieces don't fall, they just instantly appear at the bottom of the well.
  • How the Tetris company wants you to play Tetris.
  • Delayed Auto-Shift.
  • Doing a hadouken move to place the zigzag piece in the correct column.
  • Stack faster, stack better.
  • A skill you can practice and get better at.
  • Training for three or four hours a day on a hacked PlayStation Vita to become a Tetris Grandmaster.
  • How the Tetris the Grandmaster community feels about leverless controls.
  • Going several years between occasions to say hello to your wife.
  • Going for a walk around the block so you have an excuse to say hello to your wife when you get back.
  • Seeing a person and immediately infodumping at them.
  • What they have now instead of bifocals.
  • Training your eyes to look through the part of the lens that does the thing.
  • Going to the optometrist and saying "just fuck me up"
  • Why they don't make bifocals for text at the distance of a computer monitor.
  • There's still time, and there's dignity.
  • Watching the VOD of your own death because you missed the livestream.
  • Getting used to your vision swimming in a new way when you get new glasses.
  • Getting an eye exam and saying "I'd rather not say" when they ask you what letters you see.
  • Freeballing your corneas.
  • A fellow glasses enjoyer.
  • A cursed gem that gives you astigmatism.
  • Doing the Magic Eye thing in order to learn to read.
  • Being born a trust fund kid, except it's your eyeballs.
  • The return of the quarter speed music video.
  • Even slower slow motion.
  • Why can't Eagle-Eye Cherry crawl?
  • Wondering why you haven't leaped yet.
  • Singing to the camera while being robbed.
  • Watching music videos at 1.5x speed as practice for watching them at .25x speed.
  • Suddenly the dog takes its mask off and it was Eagle-Eye Cherry the whole time!
  • Promising to eat your glasses frames on camera.
  • Forgetting how cool your whole premise is and just stopping doing it.
  • Literal music videos.
  • A houseplant can't save shit. A houseplant doesn't know what time it is.
  • People running around New York and looking sad at the camera.
  • Buck Cherry. (Named after Chuck Berry.)
]]> Lords:

  • Ryan
  • CisHetKayfaber

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Introducing yourself or plugging something.
  • Going to Cape Town for Playtopia.
  • Enemies to enemies to lovers.
  • A game conference with a name that sounds way too much like Fruitopia.
  • What you would do for an Orbitz right now.
  • An apple juice with basil seeds ensconced in it, like an Orbitz.
  • I'm not mean, I'm just trying to manifest bullying.
  • Semisolid Kind of Life.
  • A dog following you into the kitchen and acting like a Ghostbusters trap except for all your bullshit rather than ectoplasm.
  • The movie about the prep school kids who poop on the floor at their magic school.
  • Making yourself laugh by doing a Gollum voice while you make a sandwich.
  • Hanging up a happy face on the fridge and writing "mirror" on top of it to convince yourself that you're okay.
  • An action figure that absorbs all the dark energy aimed at you.
  • Giving advice to someone that you really have no basis for.
  • The dog who loved your terrible celebrity impressions and the dog who gives you a look like "I expected more of you"
  • Your online source for news about what water parks Jim and his family went to.
  • The kind of Tetris that you become s grandmaster in.
  • Tetris but the pieces don't fall, they just instantly appear at the bottom of the well.
  • How the Tetris company wants you to play Tetris.
  • Delayed Auto-Shift.
  • Doing a hadouken move to place the zigzag piece in the correct column.
  • Stack faster, stack better.
  • A skill you can practice and get better at.
  • Training for three or four hours a day on a hacked PlayStation Vita to become a Tetris Grandmaster.
  • How the Tetris the Grandmaster community feels about leverless controls.
  • Going several years between occasions to say hello to your wife.
  • Going for a walk around the block so you have an excuse to say hello to your wife when you get back.
  • Seeing a person and immediately infodumping at them.
  • What they have now instead of bifocals.
  • Training your eyes to look through the part of the lens that does the thing.
  • Going to the optometrist and saying "just fuck me up"
  • Why they don't make bifocals for text at the distance of a computer monitor.
  • There's still time, and there's dignity.
  • Watching the VOD of your own death because you missed the livestream.
  • Getting used to your vision swimming in a new way when you get new glasses.
  • Getting an eye exam and saying "I'd rather not say" when they ask you what letters you see.
  • Freeballing your corneas.
  • A fellow glasses enjoyer.
  • A cursed gem that gives you astigmatism.
  • Doing the Magic Eye thing in order to learn to read.
  • Being born a trust fund kid, except it's your eyeballs.
  • The return of the quarter speed music video.
  • Even slower slow motion.
  • Why can't Eagle-Eye Cherry crawl?
  • Wondering why you haven't leaped yet.
  • Singing to the camera while being robbed.
  • Watching music videos at 1.5x speed as practice for watching them at .25x speed.
  • Suddenly the dog takes its mask off and it was Eagle-Eye Cherry the whole time!
  • Promising to eat your glasses frames on camera.
  • Forgetting how cool your whole premise is and just stopping doing it.
  • Literal music videos.
  • A houseplant can't save shit. A houseplant doesn't know what time it is.
  • People running around New York and looking sad at the camera.
  • Buck Cherry. (Named after Chuck Berry.)

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Ryan
  • CisHetKayfaber

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Introducing yourself or plugging something.
  • Going to Cape Town for Playtopia.
  • Enemies to enemies to lovers.
  • A game conference with a name that sounds way too much like Fruitopia.
  • What you would do for an Orbitz right now.
  • An apple juice with basil seeds ensconced in it, like an Orbitz.
  • I'm not mean, I'm just trying to manifest bullying.
  • Semisolid Kind of Life.
  • A dog following you into the kitchen and acting like a Ghostbusters trap except for all your bullshit rather than ectoplasm.
  • The movie about the prep school kids who poop on the floor at their magic school.
  • Making yourself laugh by doing a Gollum voice while you make a sandwich.
  • Hanging up a happy face on the fridge and writing "mirror" on top of it to convince yourself that you're okay.
  • An action figure that absorbs all the dark energy aimed at you.
  • Giving advice to someone that you really have no basis for.
  • The dog who loved your terrible celebrity impressions and the dog who gives you a look like "I expected more of you"
  • Your online source for news about what water parks Jim and his family went to.
  • The kind of Tetris that you become s grandmaster in.
  • Tetris but the pieces don't fall, they just instantly appear at the bottom of the well.
  • How the Tetris company wants you to play Tetris.
  • Delayed Auto-Shift.
  • Doing a hadouken move to place the zigzag piece in the correct column.
  • Stack faster, stack better.
  • A skill you can practice and get better at.
  • Training for three or four hours a day on a hacked PlayStation Vita to become a Tetris Grandmaster.
  • How the Tetris the Grandmaster community feels about leverless controls.
  • Going several years between occasions to say hello to your wife.
  • Going for a walk around the block so you have an excuse to say hello to your wife when you get back.
  • Seeing a person and immediately infodumping at them.
  • What they have now instead of bifocals.
  • Training your eyes to look through the part of the lens that does the thing.
  • Going to the optometrist and saying "just fuck me up"
  • Why they don't make bifocals for text at the distance of a computer monitor.
  • There's still time, and there's dignity.
  • Watching the VOD of your own death because you missed the livestream.
  • Getting used to your vision swimming in a new way when you get new glasses.
  • Getting an eye exam and saying "I'd rather not say" when they ask you what letters you see.
  • Freeballing your corneas.
  • A fellow glasses enjoyer.
  • A cursed gem that gives you astigmatism.
  • Doing the Magic Eye thing in order to learn to read.
  • Being born a trust fund kid, except it's your eyeballs.
  • The return of the quarter speed music video.
  • Even slower slow motion.
  • Why can't Eagle-Eye Cherry crawl?
  • Wondering why you haven't leaped yet.
  • Singing to the camera while being robbed.
  • Watching music videos at 1.5x speed as practice for watching them at .25x speed.
  • Suddenly the dog takes its mask off and it was Eagle-Eye Cherry the whole time!
  • Promising to eat your glasses frames on camera.
  • Forgetting how cool your whole premise is and just stopping doing it.
  • Literal music videos.
  • A houseplant can't save shit. A houseplant doesn't know what time it is.
  • People running around New York and looking sad at the camera.
  • Buck Cherry. (Named after Chuck Berry.)

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+8xj2Nhvo ]]> Jim Stormdancer 322. Tony Hawk's Skateboarding Without Dying https://topiclords.com/tony-hawks-skateboarding-without-dying 9ea7a42d-14eb-4fb6-87ba-804e10514e0c Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Maxx and Michael. We discuss reinventing pants, plortonomics (the economy in the game Slime Rancher), The Leaning American, and Maggie and Milly and Molly and May by E. E. Cummings 57:14 true Lords:

  • Maxx
  • Michael

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Rabbits and writing.
  • Buying the lede (but thankfully the rabbits dug it up)
  • Lord Veterans
  • Ancillary Justice, or The Imperial Radch.
  • Rabbits who want nothing more than to chew louder than you talk.
  • Leaving space for the elephant in the room
  • Inventing a new kind of pants inspired by taiko drumming.
  • After years, finally trying out your new idea for how to sew pants, and realizing that the waist of the pants only reaches the crotch.
  • Pants that are only made of rectangles.
  • The slow process of realizing what pants are.
  • Rapidly becoming pants.
  • The universe doesn't end with a bang, but with a zip. (Of the pants.)
  • Inventing a new kind of pants and looking them up online and realizing that they already exist and the name is extremely offensive.
  • Pants that are just a square of cloth that you fold around your leg.
  • A new kind of pants where the crotch is higher than the waist.
  • Disassembling the kimono to hang it up to dry.
  • Looking up the etymology of "pants" and it comes from an ancient word that means "the thing you can't just fold around your legs, you have to find a pattern on ravelry and sew it"
  • Back when "pants" were just two leg tubes that you tied to your shirt.
  • Clothespins: they turn tubes into clothes.
  • How pants are different for fat people.
  • Clean room pants reverse engineering.
  • Asking a tailor who's never seen pants to make you pants based on a verbal description of a Taiko drummer you saw once.
  • Making plorts after eating.
  • Vacuuming up the plorts.
  • Extremely ineffective insider trading.
  • The kind of crime you only get caught at if people hate you.
  • Gathering data on when people didn't file a malpractice suit.
  • Doctor Parsley diagnosing you with sleep apnea based on the width of your neck.
  • Suing a little mouse for malpractice because his tiny thimbleful of chamomile tea didn't cure your hepatitis A.
  • Wholesome farming games where you go back to nature and practice aggressive capitalism.
  • Throwing your slimes into the sea. (Which is maybe made of slimes.)
  • The fantasy of running at high speed down a hill.
  • The fantasy of skateboarding without dying.
  • Incentivizing the player to discover new plorts.
  • The fantasy of being on friendly terms with your neighbors.
  • Comparing your favorite Animal Crossing villagers with your favorite Love Island cast members.
  • The two competing Britain's Favorite Gardener.
  • A reality show where you check in three times on people doing a project.
  • What the rest of the world does instead of leaving.
  • Learning how to stand – normally a thing only babies do.
  • Leaning on an inclined surface made for a butt.
  • Leaning less when you're visiting Japan.
  • Crab Doctor.
  • Reading a poem before it's too late.
  • Narcissists soaking French.
  • Tag yourself, I'm the horrible thing racing sideways while blowing bubbles.
  • As small as a world and as large as alone.
  • Wikipedia Dad.
  • Gauging how long an answer to give a child asking a philosophical question.
  • The Final Plug of Maxx Yamasaki.
]]> Lords:

  • Maxx
  • Michael

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Rabbits and writing.
  • Buying the lede (but thankfully the rabbits dug it up)
  • Lord Veterans
  • Ancillary Justice, or The Imperial Radch.
  • Rabbits who want nothing more than to chew louder than you talk.
  • Leaving space for the elephant in the room
  • Inventing a new kind of pants inspired by taiko drumming.
  • After years, finally trying out your new idea for how to sew pants, and realizing that the waist of the pants only reaches the crotch.
  • Pants that are only made of rectangles.
  • The slow process of realizing what pants are.
  • Rapidly becoming pants.
  • The universe doesn't end with a bang, but with a zip. (Of the pants.)
  • Inventing a new kind of pants and looking them up online and realizing that they already exist and the name is extremely offensive.
  • Pants that are just a square of cloth that you fold around your leg.
  • A new kind of pants where the crotch is higher than the waist.
  • Disassembling the kimono to hang it up to dry.
  • Looking up the etymology of "pants" and it comes from an ancient word that means "the thing you can't just fold around your legs, you have to find a pattern on ravelry and sew it"
  • Back when "pants" were just two leg tubes that you tied to your shirt.
  • Clothespins: they turn tubes into clothes.
  • How pants are different for fat people.
  • Clean room pants reverse engineering.
  • Asking a tailor who's never seen pants to make you pants based on a verbal description of a Taiko drummer you saw once.
  • Making plorts after eating.
  • Vacuuming up the plorts.
  • Extremely ineffective insider trading.
  • The kind of crime you only get caught at if people hate you.
  • Gathering data on when people didn't file a malpractice suit.
  • Doctor Parsley diagnosing you with sleep apnea based on the width of your neck.
  • Suing a little mouse for malpractice because his tiny thimbleful of chamomile tea didn't cure your hepatitis A.
  • Wholesome farming games where you go back to nature and practice aggressive capitalism.
  • Throwing your slimes into the sea. (Which is maybe made of slimes.)
  • The fantasy of running at high speed down a hill.
  • The fantasy of skateboarding without dying.
  • Incentivizing the player to discover new plorts.
  • The fantasy of being on friendly terms with your neighbors.
  • Comparing your favorite Animal Crossing villagers with your favorite Love Island cast members.
  • The two competing Britain's Favorite Gardener.
  • A reality show where you check in three times on people doing a project.
  • What the rest of the world does instead of leaving.
  • Learning how to stand – normally a thing only babies do.
  • Leaning on an inclined surface made for a butt.
  • Leaning less when you're visiting Japan.
  • Crab Doctor.
  • Reading a poem before it's too late.
  • Narcissists soaking French.
  • Tag yourself, I'm the horrible thing racing sideways while blowing bubbles.
  • As small as a world and as large as alone.
  • Wikipedia Dad.
  • Gauging how long an answer to give a child asking a philosophical question.
  • The Final Plug of Maxx Yamasaki.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Maxx
  • Michael

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Rabbits and writing.
  • Buying the lede (but thankfully the rabbits dug it up)
  • Lord Veterans
  • Ancillary Justice, or The Imperial Radch.
  • Rabbits who want nothing more than to chew louder than you talk.
  • Leaving space for the elephant in the room
  • Inventing a new kind of pants inspired by taiko drumming.
  • After years, finally trying out your new idea for how to sew pants, and realizing that the waist of the pants only reaches the crotch.
  • Pants that are only made of rectangles.
  • The slow process of realizing what pants are.
  • Rapidly becoming pants.
  • The universe doesn't end with a bang, but with a zip. (Of the pants.)
  • Inventing a new kind of pants and looking them up online and realizing that they already exist and the name is extremely offensive.
  • Pants that are just a square of cloth that you fold around your leg.
  • A new kind of pants where the crotch is higher than the waist.
  • Disassembling the kimono to hang it up to dry.
  • Looking up the etymology of "pants" and it comes from an ancient word that means "the thing you can't just fold around your legs, you have to find a pattern on ravelry and sew it"
  • Back when "pants" were just two leg tubes that you tied to your shirt.
  • Clothespins: they turn tubes into clothes.
  • How pants are different for fat people.
  • Clean room pants reverse engineering.
  • Asking a tailor who's never seen pants to make you pants based on a verbal description of a Taiko drummer you saw once.
  • Making plorts after eating.
  • Vacuuming up the plorts.
  • Extremely ineffective insider trading.
  • The kind of crime you only get caught at if people hate you.
  • Gathering data on when people didn't file a malpractice suit.
  • Doctor Parsley diagnosing you with sleep apnea based on the width of your neck.
  • Suing a little mouse for malpractice because his tiny thimbleful of chamomile tea didn't cure your hepatitis A.
  • Wholesome farming games where you go back to nature and practice aggressive capitalism.
  • Throwing your slimes into the sea. (Which is maybe made of slimes.)
  • The fantasy of running at high speed down a hill.
  • The fantasy of skateboarding without dying.
  • Incentivizing the player to discover new plorts.
  • The fantasy of being on friendly terms with your neighbors.
  • Comparing your favorite Animal Crossing villagers with your favorite Love Island cast members.
  • The two competing Britain's Favorite Gardener.
  • A reality show where you check in three times on people doing a project.
  • What the rest of the world does instead of leaving.
  • Learning how to stand – normally a thing only babies do.
  • Leaning on an inclined surface made for a butt.
  • Leaning less when you're visiting Japan.
  • Crab Doctor.
  • Reading a poem before it's too late.
  • Narcissists soaking French.
  • Tag yourself, I'm the horrible thing racing sideways while blowing bubbles.
  • As small as a world and as large as alone.
  • Wikipedia Dad.
  • Gauging how long an answer to give a child asking a philosophical question.
  • The Final Plug of Maxx Yamasaki.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+fIqlv2pc ]]> Jim Stormdancer 321. Mist Is Just Wet Dust https://topiclords.com/mist-is-just-wet-dust 4e3dc476-6caf-4b98-8895-4a19569c63ae Mon, 15 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Linker and Alexa We discuss variations in vampire stories, anthropomorphism in media, getting a free burger when you join my rewards, Meditation at Lagunitas by Robert Hass, what letter would win in a Royal Rumble, and anti-lesbian vampire propaganda of the 1970s 1:07:45 true Lords:

  • Linker
  • Alexa

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Being American and then being Canadian-American.
  • Elephantasy and Elephantasy Flipside.
  • Crazy Aaron's Thinking Putty.
  • 3D-printed worms.
  • A plastic casing attached to your keychain that used to have a clicky button on it.
  • What we did to fidget after the industrialization of textiles.
  • How office workers goofed off before the Internet.
  • Bella's lead skull that prevents Edward from mind-controlling her.
  • Making up a power to be your favorite vampire power.
  • What happens when you inhale a vampire in mist form.
  • Using a picture of Cat's Cradle to illustrate the concept of telekinesis.
  • Putting the vampire coffin in steerage and the familiar has to sit in coach and then pull the coffin off of the luggage conveyor belt.
  • Would it be fun to turn into mist and be collected in a cup and then drunk?
  • Miss Frizzle, vampire expert.
  • Getting frustrated at a stealth video game and giving up being a pacifist as a metaphor for being an old vampire.
  • New Money vs. Old Money vampires.
  • Vampires going on Fetlife to find ethically sourced food.
  • One mysterious vampire at Goth night at the nightclub quietly asking to drink your blood, vs. twenty vampires going around begging and everyone's like jeez, this again?
  • Nobody expecting you to embezzle the blood.
  • Talking to a computer like it's a person you have absolutely no respect for, in a way you'd never talk to a real person because you assign a baseline respect for just being a real person, and people overhearing you are like "holy shit they're really mad" but you're not mad, you're just talking to a computer.
  • Apologizing to the table you just ran into.
  • It Takes Two.
  • Following the instructions of the book of love.
  • Creation of personality in moments of friction.
  • Interacting with video games in similar ways as you would a person, expect without the social anxiety.
  • Why would you ruin this perfectly good complex system with social anxiety?
  • We've got teamwork at home.
  • Sentient burgers enslaving other sentient burgers.
  • Being rewarded with a free burger but then turning into a burger and being given away as a reward.
  • Chicken stars! They're like chicken nuggets but they're shaped like stars!
  • Where were you when you were drafted into the Rewards Wars?
  • Naming your rewards program "My Rewards" so when the mascot refers to it it sounds like the rewards belong to the mascot.
  • Demanding to see the terms and conditions before you eat this hamburger.
  • A word that is elegy to what it signifies.
  • Moments when the body is as numinous as words.
  • Taking some LSD and learning about non-symbolic states.
  • Ignoring poetry in the same way that you ignore ads.
  • Vampire jokes!
  • Transylvanian Hounds.
  • Serif H being much more combat-ready than sans serif H.
  • The most bouba letters.
  • Capital O rolling around crushing the other letters of the alphabet like in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
  • Distraction the ref so you can stab.
  • Which letter of the alphabet could do the best backflip.
  • Whether the ampersand counts as a letter.
  • Letters that are good at stabbing vs. letters with broad sturdy bases.
  • The nuclear family emerging in response to the financial boom following World War II.
  • Anti-lesbian propaganda films that are far too sexy to be effective.
  • Heteronormative fiances.
  • Carmella the lesbian vampire stealing your wife.
  • The vampire lesbians receiving their comeuppance and the heteronormative couple living happily every after.
  • Be gay do crimes. (Murder.)
  • Buying Linker's games so he doesn't die.
]]> Lords:

  • Linker
  • Alexa

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Being American and then being Canadian-American.
  • Elephantasy and Elephantasy Flipside.
  • Crazy Aaron's Thinking Putty.
  • 3D-printed worms.
  • A plastic casing attached to your keychain that used to have a clicky button on it.
  • What we did to fidget after the industrialization of textiles.
  • How office workers goofed off before the Internet.
  • Bella's lead skull that prevents Edward from mind-controlling her.
  • Making up a power to be your favorite vampire power.
  • What happens when you inhale a vampire in mist form.
  • Using a picture of Cat's Cradle to illustrate the concept of telekinesis.
  • Putting the vampire coffin in steerage and the familiar has to sit in coach and then pull the coffin off of the luggage conveyor belt.
  • Would it be fun to turn into mist and be collected in a cup and then drunk?
  • Miss Frizzle, vampire expert.
  • Getting frustrated at a stealth video game and giving up being a pacifist as a metaphor for being an old vampire.
  • New Money vs. Old Money vampires.
  • Vampires going on Fetlife to find ethically sourced food.
  • One mysterious vampire at Goth night at the nightclub quietly asking to drink your blood, vs. twenty vampires going around begging and everyone's like jeez, this again?
  • Nobody expecting you to embezzle the blood.
  • Talking to a computer like it's a person you have absolutely no respect for, in a way you'd never talk to a real person because you assign a baseline respect for just being a real person, and people overhearing you are like "holy shit they're really mad" but you're not mad, you're just talking to a computer.
  • Apologizing to the table you just ran into.
  • It Takes Two.
  • Following the instructions of the book of love.
  • Creation of personality in moments of friction.
  • Interacting with video games in similar ways as you would a person, expect without the social anxiety.
  • Why would you ruin this perfectly good complex system with social anxiety?
  • We've got teamwork at home.
  • Sentient burgers enslaving other sentient burgers.
  • Being rewarded with a free burger but then turning into a burger and being given away as a reward.
  • Chicken stars! They're like chicken nuggets but they're shaped like stars!
  • Where were you when you were drafted into the Rewards Wars?
  • Naming your rewards program "My Rewards" so when the mascot refers to it it sounds like the rewards belong to the mascot.
  • Demanding to see the terms and conditions before you eat this hamburger.
  • A word that is elegy to what it signifies.
  • Moments when the body is as numinous as words.
  • Taking some LSD and learning about non-symbolic states.
  • Ignoring poetry in the same way that you ignore ads.
  • Vampire jokes!
  • Transylvanian Hounds.
  • Serif H being much more combat-ready than sans serif H.
  • The most bouba letters.
  • Capital O rolling around crushing the other letters of the alphabet like in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
  • Distraction the ref so you can stab.
  • Which letter of the alphabet could do the best backflip.
  • Whether the ampersand counts as a letter.
  • Letters that are good at stabbing vs. letters with broad sturdy bases.
  • The nuclear family emerging in response to the financial boom following World War II.
  • Anti-lesbian propaganda films that are far too sexy to be effective.
  • Heteronormative fiances.
  • Carmella the lesbian vampire stealing your wife.
  • The vampire lesbians receiving their comeuppance and the heteronormative couple living happily every after.
  • Be gay do crimes. (Murder.)
  • Buying Linker's games so he doesn't die.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Linker
  • Alexa

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Being American and then being Canadian-American.
  • Elephantasy and Elephantasy Flipside.
  • Crazy Aaron's Thinking Putty.
  • 3D-printed worms.
  • A plastic casing attached to your keychain that used to have a clicky button on it.
  • What we did to fidget after the industrialization of textiles.
  • How office workers goofed off before the Internet.
  • Bella's lead skull that prevents Edward from mind-controlling her.
  • Making up a power to be your favorite vampire power.
  • What happens when you inhale a vampire in mist form.
  • Using a picture of Cat's Cradle to illustrate the concept of telekinesis.
  • Putting the vampire coffin in steerage and the familiar has to sit in coach and then pull the coffin off of the luggage conveyor belt.
  • Would it be fun to turn into mist and be collected in a cup and then drunk?
  • Miss Frizzle, vampire expert.
  • Getting frustrated at a stealth video game and giving up being a pacifist as a metaphor for being an old vampire.
  • New Money vs. Old Money vampires.
  • Vampires going on Fetlife to find ethically sourced food.
  • One mysterious vampire at Goth night at the nightclub quietly asking to drink your blood, vs. twenty vampires going around begging and everyone's like jeez, this again?
  • Nobody expecting you to embezzle the blood.
  • Talking to a computer like it's a person you have absolutely no respect for, in a way you'd never talk to a real person because you assign a baseline respect for just being a real person, and people overhearing you are like "holy shit they're really mad" but you're not mad, you're just talking to a computer.
  • Apologizing to the table you just ran into.
  • It Takes Two.
  • Following the instructions of the book of love.
  • Creation of personality in moments of friction.
  • Interacting with video games in similar ways as you would a person, expect without the social anxiety.
  • Why would you ruin this perfectly good complex system with social anxiety?
  • We've got teamwork at home.
  • Sentient burgers enslaving other sentient burgers.
  • Being rewarded with a free burger but then turning into a burger and being given away as a reward.
  • Chicken stars! They're like chicken nuggets but they're shaped like stars!
  • Where were you when you were drafted into the Rewards Wars?
  • Naming your rewards program "My Rewards" so when the mascot refers to it it sounds like the rewards belong to the mascot.
  • Demanding to see the terms and conditions before you eat this hamburger.
  • A word that is elegy to what it signifies.
  • Moments when the body is as numinous as words.
  • Taking some LSD and learning about non-symbolic states.
  • Ignoring poetry in the same way that you ignore ads.
  • Vampire jokes!
  • Transylvanian Hounds.
  • Serif H being much more combat-ready than sans serif H.
  • The most bouba letters.
  • Capital O rolling around crushing the other letters of the alphabet like in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
  • Distraction the ref so you can stab.
  • Which letter of the alphabet could do the best backflip.
  • Whether the ampersand counts as a letter.
  • Letters that are good at stabbing vs. letters with broad sturdy bases.
  • The nuclear family emerging in response to the financial boom following World War II.
  • Anti-lesbian propaganda films that are far too sexy to be effective.
  • Heteronormative fiances.
  • Carmella the lesbian vampire stealing your wife.
  • The vampire lesbians receiving their comeuppance and the heteronormative couple living happily every after.
  • Be gay do crimes. (Murder.)
  • Buying Linker's games so he doesn't die.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+D3APZNjI ]]> Jim Stormdancer 320. Wri Your WriMo, Gen Your GenMo https://topiclords.com/wri-your-wrimo-gen-your-genmo 6b51a81b-1388-4400-bc8b-0a74f94f6286 Mon, 08 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Hallie and Peter. We discuss where all your things are, how education doesn't melt, Bebop Bytes Back, and Augustus Gloop by Roald Dahl 1:15:43 true Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The Directrix of Cybernetic Security.
  • Unity licensing from Unity as Unity.
  • Fantasy Book of the Month. (FBOM)
  • Part zombie, part ghost.
  • Accidentally GenMoing your WriMo.
  • A house with a bunch of your things in it, and they're everywhere.
  • Knowing someone who knows how to find things and knowing someone who knows where things are.
  • Knowing where to put something because it's where you first thought to look for it.
  • A person who itches when they see somebody not using a switch statement.
  • Having been gradually removing yourself from social media since back when Twitter was Twitter.
  • Back when you could get out of a chair without grunting.
  • Getting the whooping cough and coughing your disc out. (And you're in your twenties.)
  • Whether your dad named you after the murderous robot in 2001.
  • Seeing your students cheating poorly and teaching them how to do it well.
  • Scaffolding it pedagogically.
  • Big boat: hard turn.
  • How do we get education to exhibit swarm behavior?
  • A brand new exciting way to be bummed.
  • Education by Panopticon.
  • LLMs exposing how much of people's jobs and education are bullshit busywork.
  • When does the salt jump?
  • Putting together the 50s and then putting together the tens and then putting together the fours.
  • The simplest shallowest version of active listening that exists.
  • Doritos hacking the learning loop.
  • Continually finding new opiates of the masses.
  • Typing hex opcodes into the Beboputer.
  • An effective educational tool that has never been less appealing to the youth it's targeted at.
  • Steve Jobs coming out of his grave and slitting your throat if you install a programming tool on your iPhone.
  • Making the sun wink and realizing that this is the rest of your life.
  • Deescalating your LLM partner when it has an anxiety attack.
  • Your Socratic Oxford Don persona.
  • The Life Cycle of Software Objects.
  • There is a mistake, and it is being overcome.
  • Steps you can take to avoid Godzilla coming back and nature reclaiming the earth.
  • A poem written by a beloved children's author who absolutely loathes fat people.
  • Whether the terrible children in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory are all based on people that Roald Dahl knew.
  • SwitchBitch, Roald Dahl's famous Typescript library.
  • Making sure your weirdness is a kindness.
  • Roald Dahl: boy did he do the stuff.
  • Penning The Twits in an effort to "do something against beards."
  • Why Stephen King?
  • The Dollar Babies.
  • Whether Stephen King is still on MySpace.
  • Walking down the road and hearing Stephen King yelling at cloud.
  • The Dave Barry game jam.
  • Going into the sewer and solving puzzle platformer problems.
  • Group hug vs. forming a blob.
  • Tube Hippo is back!
  • The game engine sorting hat.
  • Coming out of character to talk about Inform 7.
  • The year that you fucked around with interactive fiction but never shipped anything.
  • Presuming that interactive fiction has continued to be great even after you stopped playing.
  • Choosing Twine over Inform 7 because of your absolutely enormous forelimbs.
  • LLMs as an extremely fancy Tarot deck.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The Directrix of Cybernetic Security.
  • Unity licensing from Unity as Unity.
  • Fantasy Book of the Month. (FBOM)
  • Part zombie, part ghost.
  • Accidentally GenMoing your WriMo.
  • A house with a bunch of your things in it, and they're everywhere.
  • Knowing someone who knows how to find things and knowing someone who knows where things are.
  • Knowing where to put something because it's where you first thought to look for it.
  • A person who itches when they see somebody not using a switch statement.
  • Having been gradually removing yourself from social media since back when Twitter was Twitter.
  • Back when you could get out of a chair without grunting.
  • Getting the whooping cough and coughing your disc out. (And you're in your twenties.)
  • Whether your dad named you after the murderous robot in 2001.
  • Seeing your students cheating poorly and teaching them how to do it well.
  • Scaffolding it pedagogically.
  • Big boat: hard turn.
  • How do we get education to exhibit swarm behavior?
  • A brand new exciting way to be bummed.
  • Education by Panopticon.
  • LLMs exposing how much of people's jobs and education are bullshit busywork.
  • When does the salt jump?
  • Putting together the 50s and then putting together the tens and then putting together the fours.
  • The simplest shallowest version of active listening that exists.
  • Doritos hacking the learning loop.
  • Continually finding new opiates of the masses.
  • Typing hex opcodes into the Beboputer.
  • An effective educational tool that has never been less appealing to the youth it's targeted at.
  • Steve Jobs coming out of his grave and slitting your throat if you install a programming tool on your iPhone.
  • Making the sun wink and realizing that this is the rest of your life.
  • Deescalating your LLM partner when it has an anxiety attack.
  • Your Socratic Oxford Don persona.
  • The Life Cycle of Software Objects.
  • There is a mistake, and it is being overcome.
  • Steps you can take to avoid Godzilla coming back and nature reclaiming the earth.
  • A poem written by a beloved children's author who absolutely loathes fat people.
  • Whether the terrible children in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory are all based on people that Roald Dahl knew.
  • SwitchBitch, Roald Dahl's famous Typescript library.
  • Making sure your weirdness is a kindness.
  • Roald Dahl: boy did he do the stuff.
  • Penning The Twits in an effort to "do something against beards."
  • Why Stephen King?
  • The Dollar Babies.
  • Whether Stephen King is still on MySpace.
  • Walking down the road and hearing Stephen King yelling at cloud.
  • The Dave Barry game jam.
  • Going into the sewer and solving puzzle platformer problems.
  • Group hug vs. forming a blob.
  • Tube Hippo is back!
  • The game engine sorting hat.
  • Coming out of character to talk about Inform 7.
  • The year that you fucked around with interactive fiction but never shipped anything.
  • Presuming that interactive fiction has continued to be great even after you stopped playing.
  • Choosing Twine over Inform 7 because of your absolutely enormous forelimbs.
  • LLMs as an extremely fancy Tarot deck.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The Directrix of Cybernetic Security.
  • Unity licensing from Unity as Unity.
  • Fantasy Book of the Month. (FBOM)
  • Part zombie, part ghost.
  • Accidentally GenMoing your WriMo.
  • A house with a bunch of your things in it, and they're everywhere.
  • Knowing someone who knows how to find things and knowing someone who knows where things are.
  • Knowing where to put something because it's where you first thought to look for it.
  • A person who itches when they see somebody not using a switch statement.
  • Having been gradually removing yourself from social media since back when Twitter was Twitter.
  • Back when you could get out of a chair without grunting.
  • Getting the whooping cough and coughing your disc out. (And you're in your twenties.)
  • Whether your dad named you after the murderous robot in 2001.
  • Seeing your students cheating poorly and teaching them how to do it well.
  • Scaffolding it pedagogically.
  • Big boat: hard turn.
  • How do we get education to exhibit swarm behavior?
  • A brand new exciting way to be bummed.
  • Education by Panopticon.
  • LLMs exposing how much of people's jobs and education are bullshit busywork.
  • When does the salt jump?
  • Putting together the 50s and then putting together the tens and then putting together the fours.
  • The simplest shallowest version of active listening that exists.
  • Doritos hacking the learning loop.
  • Continually finding new opiates of the masses.
  • Typing hex opcodes into the Beboputer.
  • An effective educational tool that has never been less appealing to the youth it's targeted at.
  • Steve Jobs coming out of his grave and slitting your throat if you install a programming tool on your iPhone.
  • Making the sun wink and realizing that this is the rest of your life.
  • Deescalating your LLM partner when it has an anxiety attack.
  • Your Socratic Oxford Don persona.
  • The Life Cycle of Software Objects.
  • There is a mistake, and it is being overcome.
  • Steps you can take to avoid Godzilla coming back and nature reclaiming the earth.
  • A poem written by a beloved children's author who absolutely loathes fat people.
  • Whether the terrible children in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory are all based on people that Roald Dahl knew.
  • SwitchBitch, Roald Dahl's famous Typescript library.
  • Making sure your weirdness is a kindness.
  • Roald Dahl: boy did he do the stuff.
  • Penning The Twits in an effort to "do something against beards."
  • Why Stephen King?
  • The Dollar Babies.
  • Whether Stephen King is still on MySpace.
  • Walking down the road and hearing Stephen King yelling at cloud.
  • The Dave Barry game jam.
  • Going into the sewer and solving puzzle platformer problems.
  • Group hug vs. forming a blob.
  • Tube Hippo is back!
  • The game engine sorting hat.
  • Coming out of character to talk about Inform 7.
  • The year that you fucked around with interactive fiction but never shipped anything.
  • Presuming that interactive fiction has continued to be great even after you stopped playing.
  • Choosing Twine over Inform 7 because of your absolutely enormous forelimbs.
  • LLMs as an extremely fancy Tarot deck.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+Rm9PBME7 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 319. Rolling Dice Like Mozart https://topiclords.com/rolling-dice-like-mozart dde14b3d-f862-491c-991a-6358ebbfd632 Mon, 01 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer 1:06:00 true Lords:

  • Esper
  • Cort

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Figuring out new ways to make video games more expensive.
  • Puzzled Pint.
  • Oh man, this one's a real quart!
  • Puzzled Pint getting you through to the next MIT Mystery Hunt.
  • Blippo Plus.
  • If you're going to watch TV, why not watch TV from another dimension?
  • Capturing broadcast artifacts and CRT fuzz on a 1-bit display.
  • An amateur DSPist. (Such as myself.)
  • Whether Lucas Pope took time away from his busy life as a pirate actuary to make a video about temporally-stable dithering.
  • Dr. Richard Garfield, who loves lasagna and hates Mondays.
  • Final Fantasy espers vs. Magic the Gathering espers.
  • All the different licenses Wizards of the Coast is using to fuck up Magic the Gathering.
  • How to play Magic the Gathering without getting your ass kicked by a SpongeBob deck.
  • Splitbeard, my nemesis.
  • The Kickstarter backer tier that nobody pledged to get.
  • Jim's beard braids, still floating around in a Ziploc bag somewhere.
  • Electroswing Jackson.
  • Trying to continue to evolve as an artist after you named yourself Chrono Trigger Remix DJ.
  • A sci-fi weird constructed zone.
  • The guy on the team who comes up with names like "banalia"
  • Fake scam Oxford English Dictionaries.
  • A Finn named Viznut.
  • The C program on Viznut's business card.
  • Recognizing the twelfth root of two in an obfuscated C program.
  • Bytebeat.
  • Generating audio in ShaderToy.
  • A closed form function of T that produces the Terminator theme.
  • Learning how to put GLSL into the GPU.
  • Needing the preceding 200 samples to produce the current sample so you just start at T-200 and start crunching numbers.
  • The oldest film on Netflix. (From 1987.)
  • Trying to finish X-Files before it leaves your streaming service.
  • Esper's power over the Futurama production schedule.
  • Why would you attack and dethrone God when you could summon God to help you fight a slime?
  • Trying to summon your god in a tough JRPG battle and she's like "not right now I'm editing a podcast."
  • Trying to describe a vocal sample without saying what the voice is saying.
  • The bitrate itself shaping new phonemes.
  • Wahoo vs. wahey vs. waheh.
  • The great darkness where sleep goes and farther death goes.
  • The gods choking on all the dreams you forget.
  • The dump trucks of tasteless gruel keep coming.
  • How to prevent the data miners determining exactly how far the mystery goes.
  • You Can't Data Mine Fallen London.
  • The character who doesn't exist in the game, only the game data files, because he erased himself.
  • Media where you can predict how much longer the story goes and media where you can't.
  • The forty second episode of Topic Lords.
  • The episode of Game Changer that had the fake "end of video" screen before the episode continues.
  • Hitting tab to switch to the next field.
  • Hitting tab to highlight the secret clickable button.
  • Bittorrenting all eight hours of Bandersnatch and watching every scene in random order.
  • How many names does a Seaman know?
  • Escaping the internet.
  • Binge watching the PiCoSteveMo development thread.
]]> Lords:

  • Esper
  • Cort

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Figuring out new ways to make video games more expensive.
  • Puzzled Pint.
  • Oh man, this one's a real quart!
  • Puzzled Pint getting you through to the next MIT Mystery Hunt.
  • Blippo Plus.
  • If you're going to watch TV, why not watch TV from another dimension?
  • Capturing broadcast artifacts and CRT fuzz on a 1-bit display.
  • An amateur DSPist. (Such as myself.)
  • Whether Lucas Pope took time away from his busy life as a pirate actuary to make a video about temporally-stable dithering.
  • Dr. Richard Garfield, who loves lasagna and hates Mondays.
  • Final Fantasy espers vs. Magic the Gathering espers.
  • All the different licenses Wizards of the Coast is using to fuck up Magic the Gathering.
  • How to play Magic the Gathering without getting your ass kicked by a SpongeBob deck.
  • Splitbeard, my nemesis.
  • The Kickstarter backer tier that nobody pledged to get.
  • Jim's beard braids, still floating around in a Ziploc bag somewhere.
  • Electroswing Jackson.
  • Trying to continue to evolve as an artist after you named yourself Chrono Trigger Remix DJ.
  • A sci-fi weird constructed zone.
  • The guy on the team who comes up with names like "banalia"
  • Fake scam Oxford English Dictionaries.
  • A Finn named Viznut.
  • The C program on Viznut's business card.
  • Recognizing the twelfth root of two in an obfuscated C program.
  • Bytebeat.
  • Generating audio in ShaderToy.
  • A closed form function of T that produces the Terminator theme.
  • Learning how to put GLSL into the GPU.
  • Needing the preceding 200 samples to produce the current sample so you just start at T-200 and start crunching numbers.
  • The oldest film on Netflix. (From 1987.)
  • Trying to finish X-Files before it leaves your streaming service.
  • Esper's power over the Futurama production schedule.
  • Why would you attack and dethrone God when you could summon God to help you fight a slime?
  • Trying to summon your god in a tough JRPG battle and she's like "not right now I'm editing a podcast."
  • Trying to describe a vocal sample without saying what the voice is saying.
  • The bitrate itself shaping new phonemes.
  • Wahoo vs. wahey vs. waheh.
  • The great darkness where sleep goes and farther death goes.
  • The gods choking on all the dreams you forget.
  • The dump trucks of tasteless gruel keep coming.
  • How to prevent the data miners determining exactly how far the mystery goes.
  • You Can't Data Mine Fallen London.
  • The character who doesn't exist in the game, only the game data files, because he erased himself.
  • Media where you can predict how much longer the story goes and media where you can't.
  • The forty second episode of Topic Lords.
  • The episode of Game Changer that had the fake "end of video" screen before the episode continues.
  • Hitting tab to switch to the next field.
  • Hitting tab to highlight the secret clickable button.
  • Bittorrenting all eight hours of Bandersnatch and watching every scene in random order.
  • How many names does a Seaman know?
  • Escaping the internet.
  • Binge watching the PiCoSteveMo development thread.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Esper
  • Cort

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Figuring out new ways to make video games more expensive.
  • Puzzled Pint.
  • Oh man, this one's a real quart!
  • Puzzled Pint getting you through to the next MIT Mystery Hunt.
  • Blippo Plus.
  • If you're going to watch TV, why not watch TV from another dimension?
  • Capturing broadcast artifacts and CRT fuzz on a 1-bit display.
  • An amateur DSPist. (Such as myself.)
  • Whether Lucas Pope took time away from his busy life as a pirate actuary to make a video about temporally-stable dithering.
  • Dr. Richard Garfield, who loves lasagna and hates Mondays.
  • Final Fantasy espers vs. Magic the Gathering espers.
  • All the different licenses Wizards of the Coast is using to fuck up Magic the Gathering.
  • How to play Magic the Gathering without getting your ass kicked by a SpongeBob deck.
  • Splitbeard, my nemesis.
  • The Kickstarter backer tier that nobody pledged to get.
  • Jim's beard braids, still floating around in a Ziploc bag somewhere.
  • Electroswing Jackson.
  • Trying to continue to evolve as an artist after you named yourself Chrono Trigger Remix DJ.
  • A sci-fi weird constructed zone.
  • The guy on the team who comes up with names like "banalia"
  • Fake scam Oxford English Dictionaries.
  • A Finn named Viznut.
  • The C program on Viznut's business card.
  • Recognizing the twelfth root of two in an obfuscated C program.
  • Bytebeat.
  • Generating audio in ShaderToy.
  • A closed form function of T that produces the Terminator theme.
  • Learning how to put GLSL into the GPU.
  • Needing the preceding 200 samples to produce the current sample so you just start at T-200 and start crunching numbers.
  • The oldest film on Netflix. (From 1987.)
  • Trying to finish X-Files before it leaves your streaming service.
  • Esper's power over the Futurama production schedule.
  • Why would you attack and dethrone God when you could summon God to help you fight a slime?
  • Trying to summon your god in a tough JRPG battle and she's like "not right now I'm editing a podcast."
  • Trying to describe a vocal sample without saying what the voice is saying.
  • The bitrate itself shaping new phonemes.
  • Wahoo vs. wahey vs. waheh.
  • The great darkness where sleep goes and farther death goes.
  • The gods choking on all the dreams you forget.
  • The dump trucks of tasteless gruel keep coming.
  • How to prevent the data miners determining exactly how far the mystery goes.
  • You Can't Data Mine Fallen London.
  • The character who doesn't exist in the game, only the game data files, because he erased himself.
  • Media where you can predict how much longer the story goes and media where you can't.
  • The forty second episode of Topic Lords.
  • The episode of Game Changer that had the fake "end of video" screen before the episode continues.
  • Hitting tab to switch to the next field.
  • Hitting tab to highlight the secret clickable button.
  • Bittorrenting all eight hours of Bandersnatch and watching every scene in random order.
  • How many names does a Seaman know?
  • Escaping the internet.
  • Binge watching the PiCoSteveMo development thread.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+6hJRJb0L ]]> Jim Stormdancer 318. Fast Thick Pants https://topiclords.com/fast-thick-pants bfc3d0cd-5b4d-4421-9ab9-f714987d61ff Mon, 24 Nov 2025 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Kory and Mitch. We discuss the Nintendo 64DD, wristwatch repair videos, how to switch to Linux, Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the ICZN's recommended method of determining the Latin grammatical gender of a word that isn't Latin 1:06:10 true Lords:

  • Mitch
  • Kory

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Being a fledgling your whole life.
  • Mitch from the Super Mario Wiki.
  • The episode of Topic Lords where we specifically didn't discuss what's happening in Washington DC.
  • A show with nobody on it discussing nothing.
  • Putting money in the jukebox to have three minutes of peace and quiet.
  • A noise cancellation podcast that guesses what noise you'll probably be surrounded by when you listen.
  • The least notable of Nintendo's major failures.
  • What if we added a floppy disk reader to compete with the Playstation?
  • In retrospect, it sounds like a bad idea, but at the time, it also sounded like a bad idea.
  • Paying $100 for a plastic replica of a Virtual Boy to play Virtual Boy games on your Switch.
  • The rich tapestry of homebrew games for the Virtual Boy.
  • Why isn't the Nintendo 64DD in Super Smash Bros. Brawl?
  • Animal Crossing for the Nintendo 64DD.
  • People writing very politely worded letters to Nintendo and getting Mother 3 released.
  • Playing with the 3D sculpture mini game on the title screen of Donkey Kong Bananza and thinking "I bet I could do something cool with this if I was an artist"
  • Mario Artist Polygon Studio.
  • Wario Ware as a spinoff of the Mario Paint series.
  • Family BASIC for the Famicom Disk System.
  • The Tonkachi Editor.
  • Mario 64 2 for the Game Boy Advance.
  • Vegging out by binging wristwatch repair videos.
  • Jewels on the movement that you ambiently know of.
  • Using a ruby or sapphire as a bearing for a mechanical device.
  • Synthetic corundum.
  • Why the little work is going back and forth.
  • Solving a very particular problem at a very micro scale.
  • Transistor radios advertising how many transistors are in there.
  • The World's First 128-Bit Web Site!
  • What 1990s video game enthusiasts knew about numbers of bits.
  • 1.21 Gigaflops!
  • The sad state of Nintendo 64 emulation.
  • Nintendo Classics – Nintendo Switch Online.
  • Migrating all the executables you use to the inside of virtual machines running Windows XP.
  • Winboat.
  • Linux distributions with as much or as little configuration as you want
  • How they made Linux good.
  • The year of Linux on the Desktop.
  • Attaching an IR transceiver to the GPIO pins.
  • Setting the oven via PHP script.
  • Getting an ancient Thinkpad to install Linux on.
  • The red nub in the middle of the keyboard.
  • Whether there's any possible way this $50 Thinkpad doesn't run Pico-8.
  • A stately pleasure dome decreed.
  • Women wailing for their demon lovers.
  • Five miles meandering with a mazy motion.
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge: a native speaker of early modern English, or he's Just Like That?
  • A poem that starts with a real Rubik's Cube of a sentence.
  • How Adam Saltzman does it.
  • Procrastinating game development by installing Linux on everything.
  • The Zoologist with naming dibs.
  • Finally getting to name a beetle and choosing to name it a word borrowed from Serbo-Croatian just to piss people off.
  • The ICZN's stance on Serbo-Croatian.
]]> Lords:

  • Mitch
  • Kory

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Being a fledgling your whole life.
  • Mitch from the Super Mario Wiki.
  • The episode of Topic Lords where we specifically didn't discuss what's happening in Washington DC.
  • A show with nobody on it discussing nothing.
  • Putting money in the jukebox to have three minutes of peace and quiet.
  • A noise cancellation podcast that guesses what noise you'll probably be surrounded by when you listen.
  • The least notable of Nintendo's major failures.
  • What if we added a floppy disk reader to compete with the Playstation?
  • In retrospect, it sounds like a bad idea, but at the time, it also sounded like a bad idea.
  • Paying $100 for a plastic replica of a Virtual Boy to play Virtual Boy games on your Switch.
  • The rich tapestry of homebrew games for the Virtual Boy.
  • Why isn't the Nintendo 64DD in Super Smash Bros. Brawl?
  • Animal Crossing for the Nintendo 64DD.
  • People writing very politely worded letters to Nintendo and getting Mother 3 released.
  • Playing with the 3D sculpture mini game on the title screen of Donkey Kong Bananza and thinking "I bet I could do something cool with this if I was an artist"
  • Mario Artist Polygon Studio.
  • Wario Ware as a spinoff of the Mario Paint series.
  • Family BASIC for the Famicom Disk System.
  • The Tonkachi Editor.
  • Mario 64 2 for the Game Boy Advance.
  • Vegging out by binging wristwatch repair videos.
  • Jewels on the movement that you ambiently know of.
  • Using a ruby or sapphire as a bearing for a mechanical device.
  • Synthetic corundum.
  • Why the little work is going back and forth.
  • Solving a very particular problem at a very micro scale.
  • Transistor radios advertising how many transistors are in there.
  • The World's First 128-Bit Web Site!
  • What 1990s video game enthusiasts knew about numbers of bits.
  • 1.21 Gigaflops!
  • The sad state of Nintendo 64 emulation.
  • Nintendo Classics – Nintendo Switch Online.
  • Migrating all the executables you use to the inside of virtual machines running Windows XP.
  • Winboat.
  • Linux distributions with as much or as little configuration as you want
  • How they made Linux good.
  • The year of Linux on the Desktop.
  • Attaching an IR transceiver to the GPIO pins.
  • Setting the oven via PHP script.
  • Getting an ancient Thinkpad to install Linux on.
  • The red nub in the middle of the keyboard.
  • Whether there's any possible way this $50 Thinkpad doesn't run Pico-8.
  • A stately pleasure dome decreed.
  • Women wailing for their demon lovers.
  • Five miles meandering with a mazy motion.
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge: a native speaker of early modern English, or he's Just Like That?
  • A poem that starts with a real Rubik's Cube of a sentence.
  • How Adam Saltzman does it.
  • Procrastinating game development by installing Linux on everything.
  • The Zoologist with naming dibs.
  • Finally getting to name a beetle and choosing to name it a word borrowed from Serbo-Croatian just to piss people off.
  • The ICZN's stance on Serbo-Croatian.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Mitch
  • Kory

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Being a fledgling your whole life.
  • Mitch from the Super Mario Wiki.
  • The episode of Topic Lords where we specifically didn't discuss what's happening in Washington DC.
  • A show with nobody on it discussing nothing.
  • Putting money in the jukebox to have three minutes of peace and quiet.
  • A noise cancellation podcast that guesses what noise you'll probably be surrounded by when you listen.
  • The least notable of Nintendo's major failures.
  • What if we added a floppy disk reader to compete with the Playstation?
  • In retrospect, it sounds like a bad idea, but at the time, it also sounded like a bad idea.
  • Paying $100 for a plastic replica of a Virtual Boy to play Virtual Boy games on your Switch.
  • The rich tapestry of homebrew games for the Virtual Boy.
  • Why isn't the Nintendo 64DD in Super Smash Bros. Brawl?
  • Animal Crossing for the Nintendo 64DD.
  • People writing very politely worded letters to Nintendo and getting Mother 3 released.
  • Playing with the 3D sculpture mini game on the title screen of Donkey Kong Bananza and thinking "I bet I could do something cool with this if I was an artist"
  • Mario Artist Polygon Studio.
  • Wario Ware as a spinoff of the Mario Paint series.
  • Family BASIC for the Famicom Disk System.
  • The Tonkachi Editor.
  • Mario 64 2 for the Game Boy Advance.
  • Vegging out by binging wristwatch repair videos.
  • Jewels on the movement that you ambiently know of.
  • Using a ruby or sapphire as a bearing for a mechanical device.
  • Synthetic corundum.
  • Why the little work is going back and forth.
  • Solving a very particular problem at a very micro scale.
  • Transistor radios advertising how many transistors are in there.
  • The World's First 128-Bit Web Site!
  • What 1990s video game enthusiasts knew about numbers of bits.
  • 1.21 Gigaflops!
  • The sad state of Nintendo 64 emulation.
  • Nintendo Classics – Nintendo Switch Online.
  • Migrating all the executables you use to the inside of virtual machines running Windows XP.
  • Winboat.
  • Linux distributions with as much or as little configuration as you want
  • How they made Linux good.
  • The year of Linux on the Desktop.
  • Attaching an IR transceiver to the GPIO pins.
  • Setting the oven via PHP script.
  • Getting an ancient Thinkpad to install Linux on.
  • The red nub in the middle of the keyboard.
  • Whether there's any possible way this $50 Thinkpad doesn't run Pico-8.
  • A stately pleasure dome decreed.
  • Women wailing for their demon lovers.
  • Five miles meandering with a mazy motion.
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge: a native speaker of early modern English, or he's Just Like That?
  • A poem that starts with a real Rubik's Cube of a sentence.
  • How Adam Saltzman does it.
  • Procrastinating game development by installing Linux on everything.
  • The Zoologist with naming dibs.
  • Finally getting to name a beetle and choosing to name it a word borrowed from Serbo-Croatian just to piss people off.
  • The ICZN's stance on Serbo-Croatian.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+8sR2HGzB ]]> Jim Stormdancer 317. This Bass Line Stinks (Non-Derogatory) https://topiclords.com/this-bass-line-stinks-non-derogatory be7a0222-a000-4a86-8680-cc7249d64983 Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lord: Danny, Josh, Vitor. We discuss games you love that nobody else knows exist, how to stop losing your sunglasses, homebrewing, when did Bush stop hiding the facts?, and Mad Girl's Love Song by Sylvia Plath. 1:09:18 true Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics

  • Video game music man.
  • Playing a guitar part that someone else wrote by clicking with a mouse.
  • A very fun interesting exercise that you appreciate.
  • Bass dives.
  • Playing bass with extra fingers.
  • Walking into the luthier's workshop asking to pay them to put a whammy bar on a bass and they're like "fuck you, that's disgusting."
  • Harold Drumsman.
  • Tympanum Factotum.
  • Super Stardust vs. Super Rub-a-Dub.
  • The twin stick shooter you made all your bandmates play.
  • The most 1989 thing you've ever seen.
  • A lopsided castle shape drawn out of block characters.
  • Seeing a Lamborghini game and wondering "who would ever play that??"
  • Modding modern-resolution models and textures into an N64 game.
  • A game that looks like dogshit but with modern emulation it's extremely high resolution dogshit.
  • Impressing your dad at how good you are at the one video game he lets you play.
  • Hemiroids.
  • Art style becoming a monoculture more easily in small communities.
  • Dirty Dancing except Baby never dances again.
  • Phalanx. (The banjo game.)
  • The banjo player going inside the ship for the European box art.
  • Engineering Jones and the Time Thieves of DSPea.
  • Games that quiz you on what sorts of consulting services your company needs.
  • Finding a pair of crudely drawn breasts in a collection of Windows 3.1 icons on Uncle Dave's PC and thinking "Uncle Dave is into some weird shit."
  • Prescription sunglasses vs. Just For Fun sunglasses.
  • Doing something that makes you look funny and preparing a five minute angry rant to spit at anyone who looks at you funny.
  • Lacquering your eyes with a substance that darkens in the sunlight.
  • Lacquering your skin instead of wearing clothes.
  • Buying more and more expensive sunglasses until you stop losing them.
  • Pushing 32.
  • Being the mead guy and everyone sends you mead making videos.
  • Fermenting honey in the hot dog water.
  • Making a slurry of hot dogs and ethanol in the blender.
  • Letting honey sit in the closet until it becomes mead.
  • Putting mead in the beehive to give back to the community.
  • Giving all the hallucinogens to all the manufacturing insects to see if they make exciting new kinds of silk and honey.
  • Kirkland Signature Mead.
  • Going into an underground tavern in Sweden and eating boar and lingonberries.
  • Distilling and getting all the wrong -thanols.
  • Putting a couple shots of moonshine in a cup of Booster Juice.
  • Could potato pizza sprout more potato.
  • Have you ever heard a plant scream during a job interview?
  • There is no ethical consumption under life.
  • Connecting plants up to synthesizers.
  • The sound of two black holes colliding. (Bloop!)
  • Data Audializaion.
  • How Windows XP users discovered that bush hid the facts.
  • When did Bush get Microsoft to disable the "Bush hid the facts" Easter egg.
  • The mongoose is a common sight on the Earth.
  • The mongoose's shadow casts a faint glow upon the ancient tree.
  • Reading aloud and trying to understand what you're reading at the same time.
  • Cool as fuck yours truly uwu.
  • The four poems that made you say "oh shit."
  • Art that communicates ideas vs. art that communicates feelings.
  • Bonus stage.
  • Rock Band Karaoke.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics

  • Video game music man.
  • Playing a guitar part that someone else wrote by clicking with a mouse.
  • A very fun interesting exercise that you appreciate.
  • Bass dives.
  • Playing bass with extra fingers.
  • Walking into the luthier's workshop asking to pay them to put a whammy bar on a bass and they're like "fuck you, that's disgusting."
  • Harold Drumsman.
  • Tympanum Factotum.
  • Super Stardust vs. Super Rub-a-Dub.
  • The twin stick shooter you made all your bandmates play.
  • The most 1989 thing you've ever seen.
  • A lopsided castle shape drawn out of block characters.
  • Seeing a Lamborghini game and wondering "who would ever play that??"
  • Modding modern-resolution models and textures into an N64 game.
  • A game that looks like dogshit but with modern emulation it's extremely high resolution dogshit.
  • Impressing your dad at how good you are at the one video game he lets you play.
  • Hemiroids.
  • Art style becoming a monoculture more easily in small communities.
  • Dirty Dancing except Baby never dances again.
  • Phalanx. (The banjo game.)
  • The banjo player going inside the ship for the European box art.
  • Engineering Jones and the Time Thieves of DSPea.
  • Games that quiz you on what sorts of consulting services your company needs.
  • Finding a pair of crudely drawn breasts in a collection of Windows 3.1 icons on Uncle Dave's PC and thinking "Uncle Dave is into some weird shit."
  • Prescription sunglasses vs. Just For Fun sunglasses.
  • Doing something that makes you look funny and preparing a five minute angry rant to spit at anyone who looks at you funny.
  • Lacquering your eyes with a substance that darkens in the sunlight.
  • Lacquering your skin instead of wearing clothes.
  • Buying more and more expensive sunglasses until you stop losing them.
  • Pushing 32.
  • Being the mead guy and everyone sends you mead making videos.
  • Fermenting honey in the hot dog water.
  • Making a slurry of hot dogs and ethanol in the blender.
  • Letting honey sit in the closet until it becomes mead.
  • Putting mead in the beehive to give back to the community.
  • Giving all the hallucinogens to all the manufacturing insects to see if they make exciting new kinds of silk and honey.
  • Kirkland Signature Mead.
  • Going into an underground tavern in Sweden and eating boar and lingonberries.
  • Distilling and getting all the wrong -thanols.
  • Putting a couple shots of moonshine in a cup of Booster Juice.
  • Could potato pizza sprout more potato.
  • Have you ever heard a plant scream during a job interview?
  • There is no ethical consumption under life.
  • Connecting plants up to synthesizers.
  • The sound of two black holes colliding. (Bloop!)
  • Data Audializaion.
  • How Windows XP users discovered that bush hid the facts.
  • When did Bush get Microsoft to disable the "Bush hid the facts" Easter egg.
  • The mongoose is a common sight on the Earth.
  • The mongoose's shadow casts a faint glow upon the ancient tree.
  • Reading aloud and trying to understand what you're reading at the same time.
  • Cool as fuck yours truly uwu.
  • The four poems that made you say "oh shit."
  • Art that communicates ideas vs. art that communicates feelings.
  • Bonus stage.
  • Rock Band Karaoke.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics

  • Video game music man.
  • Playing a guitar part that someone else wrote by clicking with a mouse.
  • A very fun interesting exercise that you appreciate.
  • Bass dives.
  • Playing bass with extra fingers.
  • Walking into the luthier's workshop asking to pay them to put a whammy bar on a bass and they're like "fuck you, that's disgusting."
  • Harold Drumsman.
  • Tympanum Factotum.
  • Super Stardust vs. Super Rub-a-Dub.
  • The twin stick shooter you made all your bandmates play.
  • The most 1989 thing you've ever seen.
  • A lopsided castle shape drawn out of block characters.
  • Seeing a Lamborghini game and wondering "who would ever play that??"
  • Modding modern-resolution models and textures into an N64 game.
  • A game that looks like dogshit but with modern emulation it's extremely high resolution dogshit.
  • Impressing your dad at how good you are at the one video game he lets you play.
  • Hemiroids.
  • Art style becoming a monoculture more easily in small communities.
  • Dirty Dancing except Baby never dances again.
  • Phalanx. (The banjo game.)
  • The banjo player going inside the ship for the European box art.
  • Engineering Jones and the Time Thieves of DSPea.
  • Games that quiz you on what sorts of consulting services your company needs.
  • Finding a pair of crudely drawn breasts in a collection of Windows 3.1 icons on Uncle Dave's PC and thinking "Uncle Dave is into some weird shit."
  • Prescription sunglasses vs. Just For Fun sunglasses.
  • Doing something that makes you look funny and preparing a five minute angry rant to spit at anyone who looks at you funny.
  • Lacquering your eyes with a substance that darkens in the sunlight.
  • Lacquering your skin instead of wearing clothes.
  • Buying more and more expensive sunglasses until you stop losing them.
  • Pushing 32.
  • Being the mead guy and everyone sends you mead making videos.
  • Fermenting honey in the hot dog water.
  • Making a slurry of hot dogs and ethanol in the blender.
  • Letting honey sit in the closet until it becomes mead.
  • Putting mead in the beehive to give back to the community.
  • Giving all the hallucinogens to all the manufacturing insects to see if they make exciting new kinds of silk and honey.
  • Kirkland Signature Mead.
  • Going into an underground tavern in Sweden and eating boar and lingonberries.
  • Distilling and getting all the wrong -thanols.
  • Putting a couple shots of moonshine in a cup of Booster Juice.
  • Could potato pizza sprout more potato.
  • Have you ever heard a plant scream during a job interview?
  • There is no ethical consumption under life.
  • Connecting plants up to synthesizers.
  • The sound of two black holes colliding. (Bloop!)
  • Data Audializaion.
  • How Windows XP users discovered that bush hid the facts.
  • When did Bush get Microsoft to disable the "Bush hid the facts" Easter egg.
  • The mongoose is a common sight on the Earth.
  • The mongoose's shadow casts a faint glow upon the ancient tree.
  • Reading aloud and trying to understand what you're reading at the same time.
  • Cool as fuck yours truly uwu.
  • The four poems that made you say "oh shit."
  • Art that communicates ideas vs. art that communicates feelings.
  • Bonus stage.
  • Rock Band Karaoke.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+Xn6LycQa ]]> Jim Stormdancer 316. Mr. T and the Rats of NIMH https://topiclords.com/mr-t-and-the-rats-of-nimh a28729bc-4943-4e01-bad9-8bdf0c963e28 Mon, 10 Nov 2025 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Jenni and Felicia. We discuss the Mr. T cartoon, couples roasting each other for doing the dishes wrong, the poem that wasn't on Yuji Naka's Wall, Sprouts by Loryn Brantz, and being convinced that you'd do better than the contestants you're watching on TV. 1:15:01 true Lords:

  • Jenni
  • Felicia

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The Fisher Price DJ Mixer.
  • Farting directly into the DJ Mixer.
  • Furries working in cyber security.
  • Furries working at Arby's.
  • Impossible Roast Beef.
  • Beef Pringles.
  • Potato molecules.
  • Miscellaneous Meat Molecules.
  • 3D-printing various cuts of meat.
  • Whether Neil Hamburger has helped or hurt Taco Bell sales.
  • A fictional guy, like Chuck Tingle.
  • Seasonal Depression Suite.
  • Future topics. (Not for today.)
  • Cool PBS parents not letting you watch the Mr. T cartoon.
  • The KGB, the Computer and Me.
  • Writing three original songs per episode of your low-budget Saturday morning cartoon.
  • Mr. T stomping around yelling at Nicodemus.
  • A bulldog with a mohawk named Dozer.
  • Solving crimes by wearing a denim vest and punching through a steel wall.
  • How gymnasts refuse to walk around like regular people, they have to handspring everywhere.
  • Live action Mr. T explaining the moral of the story.
  • Whether The Jetsons qualifies as STEM programming.
  • Spending fifteen minutes watching a silent music video on your audio-only podcast.
  • Google Meat.
  • I hate that everything is on Google Meat now. My face is covered in blood!
  • Mr. T swinging an alligator around by the tail and throwing it, shouting "so long, gay Bowser!"
  • Taskmaster.
  • What happens if you put three lentils together?
  • If you eat almost all the leftover takeout, everyone knows you ate almost all the leftover takeout, but if you eat all of it and throw away the box, nobody knows for sure because maybe the box got lost behind the mayonnaise.
  • Being an object of a hyperspecific roast.
  • The Alice in Wonderland Theater Public Shaming Experience.
  • A burlesque show with a sexy caterpillar where they ask everyone in the audience to write a confession, such as "I find this caterpillar sexy."
  • The Drag Red Queen pulling the audience's written confessions out of her back pocket and everyone is like "oh no"
  • Eating almost the entire tub of Rocky Road but leaving one rock and one road at the bottom, explaining when you are confronted that "it doesn't say Rocky Road*s*"
  • Going outside and finding a piece of toast on the ground and that's the most exciting thing that's happened in two years.
  • Cruise ships ceasing operation during COVID, which rules, but then resuming operations later, which sucks.
  • Explaining that we'll be hosting the event on Google Meat and then slapping you with the salami.
  • A motivational poem that says "Miyamoto is a fart in the wind."
  • Looking at your motivational poem and getting angry every morning.
  • A cross-stitch reading "Miyamoto is a fart" inside of a 1-Up mushroom cloud.
  • Who wouldn't want to cross-stitch a butt? People who suck, that's who.
  • Podcast headers vs. podcast covers.
  • Oh jesus it's the skin fortress.
  • Walking around just trying to live your life but everybody knows exactly what to say to get you to fight.
  • Rock Paper Scissors Fart Scorpion Miyamoto.
  • Classic first time Lord mistake: jogging to school with toast in your mouth but crashing into your attractive senpai and both of you end up in an alien world and one of you is a chain mail dragon.
  • How can you read poetry when a katamari could roll you up at any moment and send you up into space so you can scream forever into the void.
  • Your katamari Prince costume with the fresnel lens that makes you look really small.
  • Whether it's safe to let babies eat chocolate.
  • Which poop is the best to transplant.
  • Only the most pristine dumps.
  • Keeping your blood inside and your skin closed.
  • Babies using your arm hair as a fidget toy.
  • Arm hairs rolling around each other.
  • Stabbing yourself because you're the only one worth stabbing.
  • Solipsistic Stabbing.
  • Who's my little tuber? Who's all starchy? You are. Yes you are!
  • While you were watching Great British Bake Off, I was studying the dough.
  • You're letting too much lactic acid build up in your muscles, you humble gas station clerk.
  • Watching an Olympic sport you've never seen before and critiquing the competitor's technique.
  • Spin, spin, triangle to grind.
  • A contestant putting rose in their cake and you're like "I've watched 20 seasons of this, that's how you go home, you put rose in stuff"
  • Studying game theory before competing on Survivor and everyone votes you off as soon as they find out you studied game theory.
  • Crime Scene Kitchen.
  • Silently switching from content warnings to tags.
  • The professional pink gaming chair with bunny ears.
  • Moral Maggie cutting in at the end of the episode to tell you how to live your life.
  • The Topic Lords discord: we like to have fun.
  • Gratuitous use of the Finger Fortress.
]]> Lords:

  • Jenni
  • Felicia

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The Fisher Price DJ Mixer.
  • Farting directly into the DJ Mixer.
  • Furries working in cyber security.
  • Furries working at Arby's.
  • Impossible Roast Beef.
  • Beef Pringles.
  • Potato molecules.
  • Miscellaneous Meat Molecules.
  • 3D-printing various cuts of meat.
  • Whether Neil Hamburger has helped or hurt Taco Bell sales.
  • A fictional guy, like Chuck Tingle.
  • Seasonal Depression Suite.
  • Future topics. (Not for today.)
  • Cool PBS parents not letting you watch the Mr. T cartoon.
  • The KGB, the Computer and Me.
  • Writing three original songs per episode of your low-budget Saturday morning cartoon.
  • Mr. T stomping around yelling at Nicodemus.
  • A bulldog with a mohawk named Dozer.
  • Solving crimes by wearing a denim vest and punching through a steel wall.
  • How gymnasts refuse to walk around like regular people, they have to handspring everywhere.
  • Live action Mr. T explaining the moral of the story.
  • Whether The Jetsons qualifies as STEM programming.
  • Spending fifteen minutes watching a silent music video on your audio-only podcast.
  • Google Meat.
  • I hate that everything is on Google Meat now. My face is covered in blood!
  • Mr. T swinging an alligator around by the tail and throwing it, shouting "so long, gay Bowser!"
  • Taskmaster.
  • What happens if you put three lentils together?
  • If you eat almost all the leftover takeout, everyone knows you ate almost all the leftover takeout, but if you eat all of it and throw away the box, nobody knows for sure because maybe the box got lost behind the mayonnaise.
  • Being an object of a hyperspecific roast.
  • The Alice in Wonderland Theater Public Shaming Experience.
  • A burlesque show with a sexy caterpillar where they ask everyone in the audience to write a confession, such as "I find this caterpillar sexy."
  • The Drag Red Queen pulling the audience's written confessions out of her back pocket and everyone is like "oh no"
  • Eating almost the entire tub of Rocky Road but leaving one rock and one road at the bottom, explaining when you are confronted that "it doesn't say Rocky Road*s*"
  • Going outside and finding a piece of toast on the ground and that's the most exciting thing that's happened in two years.
  • Cruise ships ceasing operation during COVID, which rules, but then resuming operations later, which sucks.
  • Explaining that we'll be hosting the event on Google Meat and then slapping you with the salami.
  • A motivational poem that says "Miyamoto is a fart in the wind."
  • Looking at your motivational poem and getting angry every morning.
  • A cross-stitch reading "Miyamoto is a fart" inside of a 1-Up mushroom cloud.
  • Who wouldn't want to cross-stitch a butt? People who suck, that's who.
  • Podcast headers vs. podcast covers.
  • Oh jesus it's the skin fortress.
  • Walking around just trying to live your life but everybody knows exactly what to say to get you to fight.
  • Rock Paper Scissors Fart Scorpion Miyamoto.
  • Classic first time Lord mistake: jogging to school with toast in your mouth but crashing into your attractive senpai and both of you end up in an alien world and one of you is a chain mail dragon.
  • How can you read poetry when a katamari could roll you up at any moment and send you up into space so you can scream forever into the void.
  • Your katamari Prince costume with the fresnel lens that makes you look really small.
  • Whether it's safe to let babies eat chocolate.
  • Which poop is the best to transplant.
  • Only the most pristine dumps.
  • Keeping your blood inside and your skin closed.
  • Babies using your arm hair as a fidget toy.
  • Arm hairs rolling around each other.
  • Stabbing yourself because you're the only one worth stabbing.
  • Solipsistic Stabbing.
  • Who's my little tuber? Who's all starchy? You are. Yes you are!
  • While you were watching Great British Bake Off, I was studying the dough.
  • You're letting too much lactic acid build up in your muscles, you humble gas station clerk.
  • Watching an Olympic sport you've never seen before and critiquing the competitor's technique.
  • Spin, spin, triangle to grind.
  • A contestant putting rose in their cake and you're like "I've watched 20 seasons of this, that's how you go home, you put rose in stuff"
  • Studying game theory before competing on Survivor and everyone votes you off as soon as they find out you studied game theory.
  • Crime Scene Kitchen.
  • Silently switching from content warnings to tags.
  • The professional pink gaming chair with bunny ears.
  • Moral Maggie cutting in at the end of the episode to tell you how to live your life.
  • The Topic Lords discord: we like to have fun.
  • Gratuitous use of the Finger Fortress.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Jenni
  • Felicia

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The Fisher Price DJ Mixer.
  • Farting directly into the DJ Mixer.
  • Furries working in cyber security.
  • Furries working at Arby's.
  • Impossible Roast Beef.
  • Beef Pringles.
  • Potato molecules.
  • Miscellaneous Meat Molecules.
  • 3D-printing various cuts of meat.
  • Whether Neil Hamburger has helped or hurt Taco Bell sales.
  • A fictional guy, like Chuck Tingle.
  • Seasonal Depression Suite.
  • Future topics. (Not for today.)
  • Cool PBS parents not letting you watch the Mr. T cartoon.
  • The KGB, the Computer and Me.
  • Writing three original songs per episode of your low-budget Saturday morning cartoon.
  • Mr. T stomping around yelling at Nicodemus.
  • A bulldog with a mohawk named Dozer.
  • Solving crimes by wearing a denim vest and punching through a steel wall.
  • How gymnasts refuse to walk around like regular people, they have to handspring everywhere.
  • Live action Mr. T explaining the moral of the story.
  • Whether The Jetsons qualifies as STEM programming.
  • Spending fifteen minutes watching a silent music video on your audio-only podcast.
  • Google Meat.
  • I hate that everything is on Google Meat now. My face is covered in blood!
  • Mr. T swinging an alligator around by the tail and throwing it, shouting "so long, gay Bowser!"
  • Taskmaster.
  • What happens if you put three lentils together?
  • If you eat almost all the leftover takeout, everyone knows you ate almost all the leftover takeout, but if you eat all of it and throw away the box, nobody knows for sure because maybe the box got lost behind the mayonnaise.
  • Being an object of a hyperspecific roast.
  • The Alice in Wonderland Theater Public Shaming Experience.
  • A burlesque show with a sexy caterpillar where they ask everyone in the audience to write a confession, such as "I find this caterpillar sexy."
  • The Drag Red Queen pulling the audience's written confessions out of her back pocket and everyone is like "oh no"
  • Eating almost the entire tub of Rocky Road but leaving one rock and one road at the bottom, explaining when you are confronted that "it doesn't say Rocky Road*s*"
  • Going outside and finding a piece of toast on the ground and that's the most exciting thing that's happened in two years.
  • Cruise ships ceasing operation during COVID, which rules, but then resuming operations later, which sucks.
  • Explaining that we'll be hosting the event on Google Meat and then slapping you with the salami.
  • A motivational poem that says "Miyamoto is a fart in the wind."
  • Looking at your motivational poem and getting angry every morning.
  • A cross-stitch reading "Miyamoto is a fart" inside of a 1-Up mushroom cloud.
  • Who wouldn't want to cross-stitch a butt? People who suck, that's who.
  • Podcast headers vs. podcast covers.
  • Oh jesus it's the skin fortress.
  • Walking around just trying to live your life but everybody knows exactly what to say to get you to fight.
  • Rock Paper Scissors Fart Scorpion Miyamoto.
  • Classic first time Lord mistake: jogging to school with toast in your mouth but crashing into your attractive senpai and both of you end up in an alien world and one of you is a chain mail dragon.
  • How can you read poetry when a katamari could roll you up at any moment and send you up into space so you can scream forever into the void.
  • Your katamari Prince costume with the fresnel lens that makes you look really small.
  • Whether it's safe to let babies eat chocolate.
  • Which poop is the best to transplant.
  • Only the most pristine dumps.
  • Keeping your blood inside and your skin closed.
  • Babies using your arm hair as a fidget toy.
  • Arm hairs rolling around each other.
  • Stabbing yourself because you're the only one worth stabbing.
  • Solipsistic Stabbing.
  • Who's my little tuber? Who's all starchy? You are. Yes you are!
  • While you were watching Great British Bake Off, I was studying the dough.
  • You're letting too much lactic acid build up in your muscles, you humble gas station clerk.
  • Watching an Olympic sport you've never seen before and critiquing the competitor's technique.
  • Spin, spin, triangle to grind.
  • A contestant putting rose in their cake and you're like "I've watched 20 seasons of this, that's how you go home, you put rose in stuff"
  • Studying game theory before competing on Survivor and everyone votes you off as soon as they find out you studied game theory.
  • Crime Scene Kitchen.
  • Silently switching from content warnings to tags.
  • The professional pink gaming chair with bunny ears.
  • Moral Maggie cutting in at the end of the episode to tell you how to live your life.
  • The Topic Lords discord: we like to have fun.
  • Gratuitous use of the Finger Fortress.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+OcGC-vC4 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 315. I Can't Believe It's Butter https://topiclords.com/i-cant-believe-its-butter 4093f8b9-084c-4226-9770-d338c841abb1 Mon, 03 Nov 2025 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: John and Kevin. We discuss dealing with criticism, how long until multiverse/crossover media is exciting again, cringe that's so cringey it's no longer upsetting, Bell's Theorem by Kevin Hainline, and the golden age of new official localizations of old games. 1:20:00 true Lords:

Topics:

  • Asking for help / Dealing with the slightest criticism/suggestions/etc
  • Roger Rabbit and Marvel vs. Capcom were big deals. How long until multiverse & crossover shit is exciting again?
  • Update on media that makes me feel things vs. media that doesn't
  • "Bell's Theorem"", a poem that I wrote, and then, at a poetry reading someone suggested the next poem and it demonstrated how good poets are pretty amazing and I am not a good poet
  • We're in a golden age of new official localizations and rereleases of old games (and why am I not playing them?!)

Microtopics:

  • Some guy on the internet.
  • Transparent aluminum ukuleles.
  • Hurting your fingers because your ukulele action is too high.
  • Do you still call them cowboy chords when you play them on a ukulele?
  • An astronomer making a series of Youtube videos about Jurassic Park.
  • The history of Mr. DNA.
  • How much kids in the early 90s loved Jamaicans.
  • Solving a 30 year old Internet mystery.
  • Suing Michael Crichton to make him put you in the Jurassic Park acknowledgements section.
  • The Ancient DNA Study Group.
  • Ian Malcolm just saying a bunch of lines from James Gleick's "Chaos."
  • Going into slow motion to show all the Victorian era pickpocketing.
  • Asking an august astronomer to critique your work and squirming as he critiques your work.
  • Therapy-style processing via Topic Lords.
  • People who like being asked for help because it gives them an opportunity to help.
  • The German word for being a person.
  • Being so overly polite that people feel obligated to reassure you that you don't need to be so polite, which is a big pain.
  • After someone helps you, asking for clarification on whether they wanted to help or if they felt obligated.
  • How to save Jim a lot of time and effort.
  • Two people coming from the same gross Internet soup. (Not 4chan)
  • The friends you made on the Pokey the Penguin mailing list.
  • Swearing to kids these days that the internet was good once.
  • Finding the exact right gif for your animated profile picture.
  • Pretend socialization: it's still socialization.
  • Knowing a guy by his Internet handle for decades and suddenly having to call him his birth name.
  • When crossovers started being a thing.
  • The Supreme Court ruling that corporations are people, saying the stage for the world depicted in Bio Freaks for the N64.
  • Daffy and Donald playing rival pianos.
  • Detective Munch's cameo in Fortnite.
  • Konami Wai Wai World.
  • Vib Ribbon n Astro Bot.
  • Why am I on this show when I could be playing Vib Ribbon?
  • Burning episodes of Topic Lords to CD-R so you can play them in Vib Ribbon.
  • Extremely pixelated vector art.
  • The save the cat moment on Topic Lords.
  • Mind-blowing crossover media events where the mind-blowing part is how much they paid all the lawyers to negotiate the deal.
  • Why the indie game scene hadn't produced a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with public domain characters like Robin Hood, Santa Claus, Mickey Mouse and Abraham Lincoln.
  • Reagan-Gorbachev.
  • Which president was kidnapped by ninjas.
  • Choosing to let the ninjas keep Ronald Reagan.
  • Ape Out: Get Back In There!
  • Pushing the left stick to lean and pushing the triggers to lift either foot.
  • Trying to play a video game in which you dislike the protagonist.
  • A guy whose defining trait is that he tries to get out of every conversation as quickly as possible.
  • Playing with the mismatch between what the player wants and what the player character wants.
  • Upsetting the apple cart of how video games work.
  • A minimap that takes up the top fifth of the screen but is nonfunctional until you unlock it halfway through the game.
  • Which Jurassic Park video game is most interesting and which is most fun.
  • Looking down at your cleavage to see your health meter.
  • Saying the secret word and screaming real loud.
  • A poem based on a physics thing.
  • Forgetting your ex girlfriend's face, along with all the state capitals.
  • Time pointing an arrow at your back, and you walk.
  • The New Physicality of Long-Distance Love.
  • Sending a poet up on the spaceship to drain buckets from downtown.
  • A poem written sometime between 1936 and 1992.
  • Off-Topic Lords, a place for people who shout answers at podcasts in grocery stores.
  • A collection of Double Dragon and Kunio-kun games.
  • Kid Dracula.
  • Mother 3's copyright nightmare.
  • Mario Paint on the Switch 2.
  • Who was the Terry that Chris Houlihan replaced in Nintendo World Cup?
  • Satellaview games ported to the Switch.
  • Batman Loves Him a Parallelogram.
  • Joining the discord for the best PicoSteveMo experience.
  • KevinHainlineOnYoutube.com
  • Naming a distant galaxy after yourself and other astronomers mocking you mercilessly.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

  • Asking for help / Dealing with the slightest criticism/suggestions/etc
  • Roger Rabbit and Marvel vs. Capcom were big deals. How long until multiverse & crossover shit is exciting again?
  • Update on media that makes me feel things vs. media that doesn't
  • "Bell's Theorem"", a poem that I wrote, and then, at a poetry reading someone suggested the next poem and it demonstrated how good poets are pretty amazing and I am not a good poet
  • We're in a golden age of new official localizations and rereleases of old games (and why am I not playing them?!)

Microtopics:

  • Some guy on the internet.
  • Transparent aluminum ukuleles.
  • Hurting your fingers because your ukulele action is too high.
  • Do you still call them cowboy chords when you play them on a ukulele?
  • An astronomer making a series of Youtube videos about Jurassic Park.
  • The history of Mr. DNA.
  • How much kids in the early 90s loved Jamaicans.
  • Solving a 30 year old Internet mystery.
  • Suing Michael Crichton to make him put you in the Jurassic Park acknowledgements section.
  • The Ancient DNA Study Group.
  • Ian Malcolm just saying a bunch of lines from James Gleick's "Chaos."
  • Going into slow motion to show all the Victorian era pickpocketing.
  • Asking an august astronomer to critique your work and squirming as he critiques your work.
  • Therapy-style processing via Topic Lords.
  • People who like being asked for help because it gives them an opportunity to help.
  • The German word for being a person.
  • Being so overly polite that people feel obligated to reassure you that you don't need to be so polite, which is a big pain.
  • After someone helps you, asking for clarification on whether they wanted to help or if they felt obligated.
  • How to save Jim a lot of time and effort.
  • Two people coming from the same gross Internet soup. (Not 4chan)
  • The friends you made on the Pokey the Penguin mailing list.
  • Swearing to kids these days that the internet was good once.
  • Finding the exact right gif for your animated profile picture.
  • Pretend socialization: it's still socialization.
  • Knowing a guy by his Internet handle for decades and suddenly having to call him his birth name.
  • When crossovers started being a thing.
  • The Supreme Court ruling that corporations are people, saying the stage for the world depicted in Bio Freaks for the N64.
  • Daffy and Donald playing rival pianos.
  • Detective Munch's cameo in Fortnite.
  • Konami Wai Wai World.
  • Vib Ribbon n Astro Bot.
  • Why am I on this show when I could be playing Vib Ribbon?
  • Burning episodes of Topic Lords to CD-R so you can play them in Vib Ribbon.
  • Extremely pixelated vector art.
  • The save the cat moment on Topic Lords.
  • Mind-blowing crossover media events where the mind-blowing part is how much they paid all the lawyers to negotiate the deal.
  • Why the indie game scene hadn't produced a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with public domain characters like Robin Hood, Santa Claus, Mickey Mouse and Abraham Lincoln.
  • Reagan-Gorbachev.
  • Which president was kidnapped by ninjas.
  • Choosing to let the ninjas keep Ronald Reagan.
  • Ape Out: Get Back In There!
  • Pushing the left stick to lean and pushing the triggers to lift either foot.
  • Trying to play a video game in which you dislike the protagonist.
  • A guy whose defining trait is that he tries to get out of every conversation as quickly as possible.
  • Playing with the mismatch between what the player wants and what the player character wants.
  • Upsetting the apple cart of how video games work.
  • A minimap that takes up the top fifth of the screen but is nonfunctional until you unlock it halfway through the game.
  • Which Jurassic Park video game is most interesting and which is most fun.
  • Looking down at your cleavage to see your health meter.
  • Saying the secret word and screaming real loud.
  • A poem based on a physics thing.
  • Forgetting your ex girlfriend's face, along with all the state capitals.
  • Time pointing an arrow at your back, and you walk.
  • The New Physicality of Long-Distance Love.
  • Sending a poet up on the spaceship to drain buckets from downtown.
  • A poem written sometime between 1936 and 1992.
  • Off-Topic Lords, a place for people who shout answers at podcasts in grocery stores.
  • A collection of Double Dragon and Kunio-kun games.
  • Kid Dracula.
  • Mother 3's copyright nightmare.
  • Mario Paint on the Switch 2.
  • Who was the Terry that Chris Houlihan replaced in Nintendo World Cup?
  • Satellaview games ported to the Switch.
  • Batman Loves Him a Parallelogram.
  • Joining the discord for the best PicoSteveMo experience.
  • KevinHainlineOnYoutube.com
  • Naming a distant galaxy after yourself and other astronomers mocking you mercilessly.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

  • Asking for help / Dealing with the slightest criticism/suggestions/etc
  • Roger Rabbit and Marvel vs. Capcom were big deals. How long until multiverse & crossover shit is exciting again?
  • Update on media that makes me feel things vs. media that doesn't
  • "Bell's Theorem"", a poem that I wrote, and then, at a poetry reading someone suggested the next poem and it demonstrated how good poets are pretty amazing and I am not a good poet
  • We're in a golden age of new official localizations and rereleases of old games (and why am I not playing them?!)

Microtopics:

  • Some guy on the internet.
  • Transparent aluminum ukuleles.
  • Hurting your fingers because your ukulele action is too high.
  • Do you still call them cowboy chords when you play them on a ukulele?
  • An astronomer making a series of Youtube videos about Jurassic Park.
  • The history of Mr. DNA.
  • How much kids in the early 90s loved Jamaicans.
  • Solving a 30 year old Internet mystery.
  • Suing Michael Crichton to make him put you in the Jurassic Park acknowledgements section.
  • The Ancient DNA Study Group.
  • Ian Malcolm just saying a bunch of lines from James Gleick's "Chaos."
  • Going into slow motion to show all the Victorian era pickpocketing.
  • Asking an august astronomer to critique your work and squirming as he critiques your work.
  • Therapy-style processing via Topic Lords.
  • People who like being asked for help because it gives them an opportunity to help.
  • The German word for being a person.
  • Being so overly polite that people feel obligated to reassure you that you don't need to be so polite, which is a big pain.
  • After someone helps you, asking for clarification on whether they wanted to help or if they felt obligated.
  • How to save Jim a lot of time and effort.
  • Two people coming from the same gross Internet soup. (Not 4chan)
  • The friends you made on the Pokey the Penguin mailing list.
  • Swearing to kids these days that the internet was good once.
  • Finding the exact right gif for your animated profile picture.
  • Pretend socialization: it's still socialization.
  • Knowing a guy by his Internet handle for decades and suddenly having to call him his birth name.
  • When crossovers started being a thing.
  • The Supreme Court ruling that corporations are people, saying the stage for the world depicted in Bio Freaks for the N64.
  • Daffy and Donald playing rival pianos.
  • Detective Munch's cameo in Fortnite.
  • Konami Wai Wai World.
  • Vib Ribbon n Astro Bot.
  • Why am I on this show when I could be playing Vib Ribbon?
  • Burning episodes of Topic Lords to CD-R so you can play them in Vib Ribbon.
  • Extremely pixelated vector art.
  • The save the cat moment on Topic Lords.
  • Mind-blowing crossover media events where the mind-blowing part is how much they paid all the lawyers to negotiate the deal.
  • Why the indie game scene hadn't produced a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with public domain characters like Robin Hood, Santa Claus, Mickey Mouse and Abraham Lincoln.
  • Reagan-Gorbachev.
  • Which president was kidnapped by ninjas.
  • Choosing to let the ninjas keep Ronald Reagan.
  • Ape Out: Get Back In There!
  • Pushing the left stick to lean and pushing the triggers to lift either foot.
  • Trying to play a video game in which you dislike the protagonist.
  • A guy whose defining trait is that he tries to get out of every conversation as quickly as possible.
  • Playing with the mismatch between what the player wants and what the player character wants.
  • Upsetting the apple cart of how video games work.
  • A minimap that takes up the top fifth of the screen but is nonfunctional until you unlock it halfway through the game.
  • Which Jurassic Park video game is most interesting and which is most fun.
  • Looking down at your cleavage to see your health meter.
  • Saying the secret word and screaming real loud.
  • A poem based on a physics thing.
  • Forgetting your ex girlfriend's face, along with all the state capitals.
  • Time pointing an arrow at your back, and you walk.
  • The New Physicality of Long-Distance Love.
  • Sending a poet up on the spaceship to drain buckets from downtown.
  • A poem written sometime between 1936 and 1992.
  • Off-Topic Lords, a place for people who shout answers at podcasts in grocery stores.
  • A collection of Double Dragon and Kunio-kun games.
  • Kid Dracula.
  • Mother 3's copyright nightmare.
  • Mario Paint on the Switch 2.
  • Who was the Terry that Chris Houlihan replaced in Nintendo World Cup?
  • Satellaview games ported to the Switch.
  • Batman Loves Him a Parallelogram.
  • Joining the discord for the best PicoSteveMo experience.
  • KevinHainlineOnYoutube.com
  • Naming a distant galaxy after yourself and other astronomers mocking you mercilessly.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+ROjK0flu ]]> Jim Stormdancer 314. Gotta Catch Half of 'Em! https://topiclords.com/gotta-catch-half-of-em 6293dad9-6f0a-4612-bdb2-afa99f485ce2 Mon, 27 Oct 2025 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Elena and Joël. We discuss the Luck Factor, Dual Pilgrim Certificate, the return of PicoSteveMo, and every poem, by every human. 1:04:45 true Lords:

  • Elena
  • Joël

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Packing cubes.
  • The Rolling Method.
  • Modular backpacks.
  • Camera people: a different type of people.
  • Nested zippered envelopes labeled one through five.
  • Why does your purse say "three" on it??
  • Tool user opinions.
  • Getting ready for fiction to incorporate our new conception of what AI is.
  • Running experiments on people who self-identify as lucky or unlucky.
  • Gladstone Gander.
  • Paying your put-upon nephew a dime to accompany you on a trip to Zazu-Zazu.
  • Stan Connery's terrible taste in roles.
  • Natalie Portman's Tom Scott number.
  • Systems that are gamable but not trivially gamable.
  • Rick Rubin numbers vs. Sabbath Numbers.
  • The Kumano Kodo Trail's trail adjudicators ringing a bell and giving you a certificate to certify that you've walked their trail.
  • A terrible time of year to hike the Camino de Santiago.
  • Taking a wrong turn while hiking the Camino de Santiago and ending up on France.
  • All the school children running over to high five the pilgrims.
  • Feral Eucalyptus plantation.
  • Peeking into all the ancient mills.
  • Shrine tossing tricks.
  • Passing bones from chopstick to chopstick.
  • The three major sources of ritual pollution.
  • Getting sick of climbing the hill all the time so you write a poem explaining that the gods don't want the shrine to be at the top of the hill any more.
  • Harassment prevention for non-supervisors.
  • Printing and framing the certificate you got after taking the class on filling out your timecard.
  • The uncle so otherwise never contacts you sending you a happy birthday message on LinkedIn every year.
  • Endorsing your friend on LinkedIn for being a git.
  • Balloons in the sewer.
  • Sokoban mechanics that could apply Stephen King's It.
  • A tricycle kart racer set in the Overlook hotel.
  • NanoSteveMo.
  • The scruffy guy the hotel manager doesn't want around.
  • Singlehandedly supplying the fanbase for this Mo.
  • Hoarding Pico-8 cartridges on you desktop.
  • The Spore creature creator exporting your creature as a PNG.
  • A topic for another Topic Lords.
  • Concatenating a zip file to the end of a different file.
  • Here's this artifact. Please try it out.
  • Saving PNGs to Starlings.
  • Storing your Pico-8 game in a bird.
  • Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme.
  • Pirating software on Usenet.
  • Catching 50 out of 100 birds to extract the Pico-8 game from them.
  • Realizing that it's a plums in a refrigerator thing and moving on.
  • Helping a stranger grieve using your well-honed crossword skills.
  • Approaching classical literature as a collection of in-jokes and wanting to be in on the joke.
  • A book with a serrated edge.
  • How to read a book vs. how to read a poem.
]]> Lords:

  • Elena
  • Joël

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Packing cubes.
  • The Rolling Method.
  • Modular backpacks.
  • Camera people: a different type of people.
  • Nested zippered envelopes labeled one through five.
  • Why does your purse say "three" on it??
  • Tool user opinions.
  • Getting ready for fiction to incorporate our new conception of what AI is.
  • Running experiments on people who self-identify as lucky or unlucky.
  • Gladstone Gander.
  • Paying your put-upon nephew a dime to accompany you on a trip to Zazu-Zazu.
  • Stan Connery's terrible taste in roles.
  • Natalie Portman's Tom Scott number.
  • Systems that are gamable but not trivially gamable.
  • Rick Rubin numbers vs. Sabbath Numbers.
  • The Kumano Kodo Trail's trail adjudicators ringing a bell and giving you a certificate to certify that you've walked their trail.
  • A terrible time of year to hike the Camino de Santiago.
  • Taking a wrong turn while hiking the Camino de Santiago and ending up on France.
  • All the school children running over to high five the pilgrims.
  • Feral Eucalyptus plantation.
  • Peeking into all the ancient mills.
  • Shrine tossing tricks.
  • Passing bones from chopstick to chopstick.
  • The three major sources of ritual pollution.
  • Getting sick of climbing the hill all the time so you write a poem explaining that the gods don't want the shrine to be at the top of the hill any more.
  • Harassment prevention for non-supervisors.
  • Printing and framing the certificate you got after taking the class on filling out your timecard.
  • The uncle so otherwise never contacts you sending you a happy birthday message on LinkedIn every year.
  • Endorsing your friend on LinkedIn for being a git.
  • Balloons in the sewer.
  • Sokoban mechanics that could apply Stephen King's It.
  • A tricycle kart racer set in the Overlook hotel.
  • NanoSteveMo.
  • The scruffy guy the hotel manager doesn't want around.
  • Singlehandedly supplying the fanbase for this Mo.
  • Hoarding Pico-8 cartridges on you desktop.
  • The Spore creature creator exporting your creature as a PNG.
  • A topic for another Topic Lords.
  • Concatenating a zip file to the end of a different file.
  • Here's this artifact. Please try it out.
  • Saving PNGs to Starlings.
  • Storing your Pico-8 game in a bird.
  • Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme.
  • Pirating software on Usenet.
  • Catching 50 out of 100 birds to extract the Pico-8 game from them.
  • Realizing that it's a plums in a refrigerator thing and moving on.
  • Helping a stranger grieve using your well-honed crossword skills.
  • Approaching classical literature as a collection of in-jokes and wanting to be in on the joke.
  • A book with a serrated edge.
  • How to read a book vs. how to read a poem.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Elena
  • Joël

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Packing cubes.
  • The Rolling Method.
  • Modular backpacks.
  • Camera people: a different type of people.
  • Nested zippered envelopes labeled one through five.
  • Why does your purse say "three" on it??
  • Tool user opinions.
  • Getting ready for fiction to incorporate our new conception of what AI is.
  • Running experiments on people who self-identify as lucky or unlucky.
  • Gladstone Gander.
  • Paying your put-upon nephew a dime to accompany you on a trip to Zazu-Zazu.
  • Stan Connery's terrible taste in roles.
  • Natalie Portman's Tom Scott number.
  • Systems that are gamable but not trivially gamable.
  • Rick Rubin numbers vs. Sabbath Numbers.
  • The Kumano Kodo Trail's trail adjudicators ringing a bell and giving you a certificate to certify that you've walked their trail.
  • A terrible time of year to hike the Camino de Santiago.
  • Taking a wrong turn while hiking the Camino de Santiago and ending up on France.
  • All the school children running over to high five the pilgrims.
  • Feral Eucalyptus plantation.
  • Peeking into all the ancient mills.
  • Shrine tossing tricks.
  • Passing bones from chopstick to chopstick.
  • The three major sources of ritual pollution.
  • Getting sick of climbing the hill all the time so you write a poem explaining that the gods don't want the shrine to be at the top of the hill any more.
  • Harassment prevention for non-supervisors.
  • Printing and framing the certificate you got after taking the class on filling out your timecard.
  • The uncle so otherwise never contacts you sending you a happy birthday message on LinkedIn every year.
  • Endorsing your friend on LinkedIn for being a git.
  • Balloons in the sewer.
  • Sokoban mechanics that could apply Stephen King's It.
  • A tricycle kart racer set in the Overlook hotel.
  • NanoSteveMo.
  • The scruffy guy the hotel manager doesn't want around.
  • Singlehandedly supplying the fanbase for this Mo.
  • Hoarding Pico-8 cartridges on you desktop.
  • The Spore creature creator exporting your creature as a PNG.
  • A topic for another Topic Lords.
  • Concatenating a zip file to the end of a different file.
  • Here's this artifact. Please try it out.
  • Saving PNGs to Starlings.
  • Storing your Pico-8 game in a bird.
  • Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme.
  • Pirating software on Usenet.
  • Catching 50 out of 100 birds to extract the Pico-8 game from them.
  • Realizing that it's a plums in a refrigerator thing and moving on.
  • Helping a stranger grieve using your well-honed crossword skills.
  • Approaching classical literature as a collection of in-jokes and wanting to be in on the joke.
  • A book with a serrated edge.
  • How to read a book vs. how to read a poem.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+GZoXYjjs ]]> Jim Stormdancer 313. Don't You Wish You Didn't Know That? https://topiclords.com/dont-you-wish-you-didnt-know-that a8901fd1-e39f-47af-b16c-d7e5359f9131 Mon, 20 Oct 2025 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Daniel and Chris. We discuss Psychic Students In Pursuit Of Guidance, Zhaozhou's "Wash Your Bowl" Koan, Figwit, Sudo-Ku, and the importance of choosing a form vs. your choices within the form. 1:06:29 true Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Introducing yourself twice.
  • Spider mites and spider mite exterminators.
  • Exterminating your spider mite infestation with a washcloth.
  • Diatomaceous earth mines in your hometown.
  • The paperwork necessary when your diatomaceous earth mine accidentally breaks through into the neighboring nitroglycerin mine.
  • How to develop psychic powers of various kinds.
  • Learning to meditate in service of manifesting your psiballs.
  • Learning how to spin a watch around on the Psipog Archive.
  • A 90 year old dude who has been meditating all his life but still doesn't have psychic powers: maybe he's just bad at it?
  • The secret geometry that lets you talk to space beings.
  • Who wants to talk to space beings?
  • How to make progress on what mysteries we have left.
  • Reinventing all of physics from first principles.
  • How does nobody know about creating energy balls with your mind??
  • Choosing not to do the thought experiments that have no good possible outcome.
  • Sitting at a desk made of laminated particleboard.
  • Pseudo-complex meals.
  • When civilization collapses, how am I gonna make a Big Mac??
  • Taking the time to get to know every person you meet and understand every safety you interact with.
  • Wanting to know a secret that nobody else knows.
  • How not to pronounce "koan."
  • What do you do after you finish your gruel?
  • Becoming enlightened during Ikea furniture assembly.
  • Ancient Chinese yo momma jokes.
  • The enlightened experience of inhabiting a mind vs. the bowl needs to be washed again.
  • Questions that science cannot answer.
  • Probing your blood.
  • Measuring your blood chemistry while you wash the dishes to determine whether you're a good person.
  • How to measure how many people you've helped.
  • Short-circuiting your friend's money metaphor before it starts.
  • An incredibly wise computer refusing to tell you the answer because it's too nuanced.
  • Concrete actionable advice that you can trust every time.
  • Figwit pre- and post lines.
  • How things went viral before social media.
  • The Figwit obsession: it's weird.
  • Tracking down Figwit's Topps card to look up his RBI.
  • Why is it the "one" ring when all the Nazguls also have rings??
  • Lord of the Rings fans and how much they love it when podcasters are confused about Lord of the Rings lore.
  • Effective fandom activism at its most innocent and pure.
  • Where were you when you found out Sonic was going to be in Smash?
  • A button that was effective so they pushed it a lot.
  • A Small Brown that Peter Jackson put inside the Real Brown.
  • Topic Lords Movie Secrets Special.
  • Sudo-Ku.
  • A fun gimmick that results in a worse poem.
  • Americans: do they do Haiku wrong??
  • Syllables vs. sound units.
  • One pthong and more than one pthong.
  • Spending too much time reading about the form.
  • Drawing a line on a grid.
  • A valid approach to making interesting stuff.
  • The Pacific Pinball Museum.
  • Pinball as kinetic electromechanical art.
  • Electromechanical puppet shows at Musee Mechanique.
  • If Pixar existed in 1800, what would they do?
  • What if you're playing DDR but it's a joke?
  • High concept jam games.
  • Alien vs. Predator but you're roommates with the Alien.
  • Advantages and disadvantages of starting from an existing design.
  • Advantages of having a slightly different goal from everyone else in your field.
  • Chess with time travel.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Introducing yourself twice.
  • Spider mites and spider mite exterminators.
  • Exterminating your spider mite infestation with a washcloth.
  • Diatomaceous earth mines in your hometown.
  • The paperwork necessary when your diatomaceous earth mine accidentally breaks through into the neighboring nitroglycerin mine.
  • How to develop psychic powers of various kinds.
  • Learning to meditate in service of manifesting your psiballs.
  • Learning how to spin a watch around on the Psipog Archive.
  • A 90 year old dude who has been meditating all his life but still doesn't have psychic powers: maybe he's just bad at it?
  • The secret geometry that lets you talk to space beings.
  • Who wants to talk to space beings?
  • How to make progress on what mysteries we have left.
  • Reinventing all of physics from first principles.
  • How does nobody know about creating energy balls with your mind??
  • Choosing not to do the thought experiments that have no good possible outcome.
  • Sitting at a desk made of laminated particleboard.
  • Pseudo-complex meals.
  • When civilization collapses, how am I gonna make a Big Mac??
  • Taking the time to get to know every person you meet and understand every safety you interact with.
  • Wanting to know a secret that nobody else knows.
  • How not to pronounce "koan."
  • What do you do after you finish your gruel?
  • Becoming enlightened during Ikea furniture assembly.
  • Ancient Chinese yo momma jokes.
  • The enlightened experience of inhabiting a mind vs. the bowl needs to be washed again.
  • Questions that science cannot answer.
  • Probing your blood.
  • Measuring your blood chemistry while you wash the dishes to determine whether you're a good person.
  • How to measure how many people you've helped.
  • Short-circuiting your friend's money metaphor before it starts.
  • An incredibly wise computer refusing to tell you the answer because it's too nuanced.
  • Concrete actionable advice that you can trust every time.
  • Figwit pre- and post lines.
  • How things went viral before social media.
  • The Figwit obsession: it's weird.
  • Tracking down Figwit's Topps card to look up his RBI.
  • Why is it the "one" ring when all the Nazguls also have rings??
  • Lord of the Rings fans and how much they love it when podcasters are confused about Lord of the Rings lore.
  • Effective fandom activism at its most innocent and pure.
  • Where were you when you found out Sonic was going to be in Smash?
  • A button that was effective so they pushed it a lot.
  • A Small Brown that Peter Jackson put inside the Real Brown.
  • Topic Lords Movie Secrets Special.
  • Sudo-Ku.
  • A fun gimmick that results in a worse poem.
  • Americans: do they do Haiku wrong??
  • Syllables vs. sound units.
  • One pthong and more than one pthong.
  • Spending too much time reading about the form.
  • Drawing a line on a grid.
  • A valid approach to making interesting stuff.
  • The Pacific Pinball Museum.
  • Pinball as kinetic electromechanical art.
  • Electromechanical puppet shows at Musee Mechanique.
  • If Pixar existed in 1800, what would they do?
  • What if you're playing DDR but it's a joke?
  • High concept jam games.
  • Alien vs. Predator but you're roommates with the Alien.
  • Advantages and disadvantages of starting from an existing design.
  • Advantages of having a slightly different goal from everyone else in your field.
  • Chess with time travel.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Introducing yourself twice.
  • Spider mites and spider mite exterminators.
  • Exterminating your spider mite infestation with a washcloth.
  • Diatomaceous earth mines in your hometown.
  • The paperwork necessary when your diatomaceous earth mine accidentally breaks through into the neighboring nitroglycerin mine.
  • How to develop psychic powers of various kinds.
  • Learning to meditate in service of manifesting your psiballs.
  • Learning how to spin a watch around on the Psipog Archive.
  • A 90 year old dude who has been meditating all his life but still doesn't have psychic powers: maybe he's just bad at it?
  • The secret geometry that lets you talk to space beings.
  • Who wants to talk to space beings?
  • How to make progress on what mysteries we have left.
  • Reinventing all of physics from first principles.
  • How does nobody know about creating energy balls with your mind??
  • Choosing not to do the thought experiments that have no good possible outcome.
  • Sitting at a desk made of laminated particleboard.
  • Pseudo-complex meals.
  • When civilization collapses, how am I gonna make a Big Mac??
  • Taking the time to get to know every person you meet and understand every safety you interact with.
  • Wanting to know a secret that nobody else knows.
  • How not to pronounce "koan."
  • What do you do after you finish your gruel?
  • Becoming enlightened during Ikea furniture assembly.
  • Ancient Chinese yo momma jokes.
  • The enlightened experience of inhabiting a mind vs. the bowl needs to be washed again.
  • Questions that science cannot answer.
  • Probing your blood.
  • Measuring your blood chemistry while you wash the dishes to determine whether you're a good person.
  • How to measure how many people you've helped.
  • Short-circuiting your friend's money metaphor before it starts.
  • An incredibly wise computer refusing to tell you the answer because it's too nuanced.
  • Concrete actionable advice that you can trust every time.
  • Figwit pre- and post lines.
  • How things went viral before social media.
  • The Figwit obsession: it's weird.
  • Tracking down Figwit's Topps card to look up his RBI.
  • Why is it the "one" ring when all the Nazguls also have rings??
  • Lord of the Rings fans and how much they love it when podcasters are confused about Lord of the Rings lore.
  • Effective fandom activism at its most innocent and pure.
  • Where were you when you found out Sonic was going to be in Smash?
  • A button that was effective so they pushed it a lot.
  • A Small Brown that Peter Jackson put inside the Real Brown.
  • Topic Lords Movie Secrets Special.
  • Sudo-Ku.
  • A fun gimmick that results in a worse poem.
  • Americans: do they do Haiku wrong??
  • Syllables vs. sound units.
  • One pthong and more than one pthong.
  • Spending too much time reading about the form.
  • Drawing a line on a grid.
  • A valid approach to making interesting stuff.
  • The Pacific Pinball Museum.
  • Pinball as kinetic electromechanical art.
  • Electromechanical puppet shows at Musee Mechanique.
  • If Pixar existed in 1800, what would they do?
  • What if you're playing DDR but it's a joke?
  • High concept jam games.
  • Alien vs. Predator but you're roommates with the Alien.
  • Advantages and disadvantages of starting from an existing design.
  • Advantages of having a slightly different goal from everyone else in your field.
  • Chess with time travel.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+ArOBADfn ]]> Jim Stormdancer 312. Rubber Baby Knopfler Romplers https://topiclords.com/rubber-baby-knopfler-romplers 96139945-4d54-4741-83f3-18c8d1107469 Mon, 13 Oct 2025 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Danny and Walker. We discuss "You Probably Think This Song is About You," a tour of r/crappymusic archetypes, sample-based film scores in the 80s, Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep, by Clare Harner, and being a video game noob in your 40s 1:21:23 true Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Is it a Topic or is it Just Banter?
  • Cleaning Lords, Lunch Lords and Cat Lords.
  • Have you heard the good word about the Gaylady?
  • Night Brunch.
  • Wearing your own band's t-shirt.
  • A thing that could happen for a while and then was no longer able to happen.
  • Hi Cindy!
  • Motivating yourself to work harder via self loathing.
  • Feeling the need to act all angsty so that people take you seriously as an artist.
  • A Touch of Grandiosity.
  • How many tracks get uploaded to SoundCloud every day?
  • Continuing to discover music from the 1970s.
  • It's called "Topic Lords," not "Correct Lords."
  • Once it becomes impossible to make new music, and we go back and start listening to all the SoundCloud uploads with 0 listens.
  • All the kids at Rock & Roll Camp getting excited about Lofey.
  • Pretending a topic is about one thing when it's actually about something else.
  • Canadian Actor Dave Coulier.
  • Tuesday at 3:01pm.
  • Learning a new chord on your Electric Tenor Guitar.
  • Bringing Pokemon Puzzle League characters into your love song.
  • Having a whole week to dial in that wub wub patch.
  • What art is for and what art should be for.
  • Fun is our only reward.
  • The objective best pitch wheel range.
  • The Funky Worm preset.
  • Synthesizers that can save and load patches but only when plugged into your phone.
  • Coming up with a Rube Goldberg machine to upload patches from a web server to your CZ-5000.
  • thisdx7cartridgedoesnotexist.com
  • In a convex optimization problem, there is no gradient to descend.
  • Fiddling with the synthesizer sliders until you reach a corner of the parameter space that doesn't make any noise and giving up.
  • Camp Counselor Grant hastily drawing all the synthesizer waves on the board.
  • Ask any Geometer, the triangle has three sides. Love triangles are actually just two love segments.
  • The All Topic Fakeouts episode.
  • The gulf between how an artist thinks they're presenting themselves and how they're being received.
  • A Beautiful Rainbow of the Human Experience.
  • Elderly rappers with excellent flow but terrible drip.
  • Piling onto propaganda music.
  • Someone doing their own thing with confidence and authenticity.
  • Graffiti with immaculate copyediting.
  • With improved access to art tools, taste is one of the only things left to get wrong.
  • Only the best crappy music.
  • Promoting your music in r/crappymusic.
  • Tori the Clown Rap Gal.
  • The audacity of extreme autotune.
  • All Youtube thumbnails converging on the same cognitive attention hacks.
  • Singing the comments on your last video.
  • Situations where echo chamber amplification is fun and good for the world.
  • Obscure Music That Slaps.
  • Serbian Kolos.
  • The Ketron Event Chrom.
  • The Nightmare Klaxon that Represents Dread.
  • All the Fairlight CMI presets used in the Terminator 2 soundtrack.
  • Growing up playing samples at every possible speed in Impulse Tracker.
  • Slowly sucking dog food out of a can to simulate the sound of a mimetic polyalloy passing through steel bars.
  • It's been a long day and you're ready to go home but you need to slam 1000 more inverted glasses into bowls of yogurt, let's hurry it up guys.
  • That one sample library squeaking metal door sound that everyone uses.
  • Calling out comb filtering whenever you hear someone exhale deeply while sitting down at a desk.
  • The sound guy instructing all the actors when to breathe to minimize comb filtering.
  • Rubber Baby Knopfler Romplers.
  • All the things you are after you die.
  • The purpose of suffering. (So we can write cool poems about it.)
  • Making art about how trauma used to exist.
  • Why wireheading will not solve our problems. (Because everything uses bluetooth now.)
  • Who needs trauma when we have CRISPR?
  • Shepherding noobs.
  • Play Any Video Game Day.
  • Complicated goose controls.
  • Trying to play Portal as your first 3D game.
  • Learning video games vs. learning board games.
  • Trying to get into video game series that don't change.
  • Looking at the screen and/or ants until it coalesces into an image.
  • Video games filled with really gross blood squirt sounds.
  • Jumping on and off of buildings.
  • Playing Breath of the Wild and just collecting mushrooms and herbs.
  • Grass simulation in Breath of the Wild vs. in Horizon Zero Dawn.
  • Putting yourself in the head-space of the protagonist in order to do protagonist stuff.
  • Spelling brunch the secret way.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Is it a Topic or is it Just Banter?
  • Cleaning Lords, Lunch Lords and Cat Lords.
  • Have you heard the good word about the Gaylady?
  • Night Brunch.
  • Wearing your own band's t-shirt.
  • A thing that could happen for a while and then was no longer able to happen.
  • Hi Cindy!
  • Motivating yourself to work harder via self loathing.
  • Feeling the need to act all angsty so that people take you seriously as an artist.
  • A Touch of Grandiosity.
  • How many tracks get uploaded to SoundCloud every day?
  • Continuing to discover music from the 1970s.
  • It's called "Topic Lords," not "Correct Lords."
  • Once it becomes impossible to make new music, and we go back and start listening to all the SoundCloud uploads with 0 listens.
  • All the kids at Rock & Roll Camp getting excited about Lofey.
  • Pretending a topic is about one thing when it's actually about something else.
  • Canadian Actor Dave Coulier.
  • Tuesday at 3:01pm.
  • Learning a new chord on your Electric Tenor Guitar.
  • Bringing Pokemon Puzzle League characters into your love song.
  • Having a whole week to dial in that wub wub patch.
  • What art is for and what art should be for.
  • Fun is our only reward.
  • The objective best pitch wheel range.
  • The Funky Worm preset.
  • Synthesizers that can save and load patches but only when plugged into your phone.
  • Coming up with a Rube Goldberg machine to upload patches from a web server to your CZ-5000.
  • thisdx7cartridgedoesnotexist.com
  • In a convex optimization problem, there is no gradient to descend.
  • Fiddling with the synthesizer sliders until you reach a corner of the parameter space that doesn't make any noise and giving up.
  • Camp Counselor Grant hastily drawing all the synthesizer waves on the board.
  • Ask any Geometer, the triangle has three sides. Love triangles are actually just two love segments.
  • The All Topic Fakeouts episode.
  • The gulf between how an artist thinks they're presenting themselves and how they're being received.
  • A Beautiful Rainbow of the Human Experience.
  • Elderly rappers with excellent flow but terrible drip.
  • Piling onto propaganda music.
  • Someone doing their own thing with confidence and authenticity.
  • Graffiti with immaculate copyediting.
  • With improved access to art tools, taste is one of the only things left to get wrong.
  • Only the best crappy music.
  • Promoting your music in r/crappymusic.
  • Tori the Clown Rap Gal.
  • The audacity of extreme autotune.
  • All Youtube thumbnails converging on the same cognitive attention hacks.
  • Singing the comments on your last video.
  • Situations where echo chamber amplification is fun and good for the world.
  • Obscure Music That Slaps.
  • Serbian Kolos.
  • The Ketron Event Chrom.
  • The Nightmare Klaxon that Represents Dread.
  • All the Fairlight CMI presets used in the Terminator 2 soundtrack.
  • Growing up playing samples at every possible speed in Impulse Tracker.
  • Slowly sucking dog food out of a can to simulate the sound of a mimetic polyalloy passing through steel bars.
  • It's been a long day and you're ready to go home but you need to slam 1000 more inverted glasses into bowls of yogurt, let's hurry it up guys.
  • That one sample library squeaking metal door sound that everyone uses.
  • Calling out comb filtering whenever you hear someone exhale deeply while sitting down at a desk.
  • The sound guy instructing all the actors when to breathe to minimize comb filtering.
  • Rubber Baby Knopfler Romplers.
  • All the things you are after you die.
  • The purpose of suffering. (So we can write cool poems about it.)
  • Making art about how trauma used to exist.
  • Why wireheading will not solve our problems. (Because everything uses bluetooth now.)
  • Who needs trauma when we have CRISPR?
  • Shepherding noobs.
  • Play Any Video Game Day.
  • Complicated goose controls.
  • Trying to play Portal as your first 3D game.
  • Learning video games vs. learning board games.
  • Trying to get into video game series that don't change.
  • Looking at the screen and/or ants until it coalesces into an image.
  • Video games filled with really gross blood squirt sounds.
  • Jumping on and off of buildings.
  • Playing Breath of the Wild and just collecting mushrooms and herbs.
  • Grass simulation in Breath of the Wild vs. in Horizon Zero Dawn.
  • Putting yourself in the head-space of the protagonist in order to do protagonist stuff.
  • Spelling brunch the secret way.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Is it a Topic or is it Just Banter?
  • Cleaning Lords, Lunch Lords and Cat Lords.
  • Have you heard the good word about the Gaylady?
  • Night Brunch.
  • Wearing your own band's t-shirt.
  • A thing that could happen for a while and then was no longer able to happen.
  • Hi Cindy!
  • Motivating yourself to work harder via self loathing.
  • Feeling the need to act all angsty so that people take you seriously as an artist.
  • A Touch of Grandiosity.
  • How many tracks get uploaded to SoundCloud every day?
  • Continuing to discover music from the 1970s.
  • It's called "Topic Lords," not "Correct Lords."
  • Once it becomes impossible to make new music, and we go back and start listening to all the SoundCloud uploads with 0 listens.
  • All the kids at Rock & Roll Camp getting excited about Lofey.
  • Pretending a topic is about one thing when it's actually about something else.
  • Canadian Actor Dave Coulier.
  • Tuesday at 3:01pm.
  • Learning a new chord on your Electric Tenor Guitar.
  • Bringing Pokemon Puzzle League characters into your love song.
  • Having a whole week to dial in that wub wub patch.
  • What art is for and what art should be for.
  • Fun is our only reward.
  • The objective best pitch wheel range.
  • The Funky Worm preset.
  • Synthesizers that can save and load patches but only when plugged into your phone.
  • Coming up with a Rube Goldberg machine to upload patches from a web server to your CZ-5000.
  • thisdx7cartridgedoesnotexist.com
  • In a convex optimization problem, there is no gradient to descend.
  • Fiddling with the synthesizer sliders until you reach a corner of the parameter space that doesn't make any noise and giving up.
  • Camp Counselor Grant hastily drawing all the synthesizer waves on the board.
  • Ask any Geometer, the triangle has three sides. Love triangles are actually just two love segments.
  • The All Topic Fakeouts episode.
  • The gulf between how an artist thinks they're presenting themselves and how they're being received.
  • A Beautiful Rainbow of the Human Experience.
  • Elderly rappers with excellent flow but terrible drip.
  • Piling onto propaganda music.
  • Someone doing their own thing with confidence and authenticity.
  • Graffiti with immaculate copyediting.
  • With improved access to art tools, taste is one of the only things left to get wrong.
  • Only the best crappy music.
  • Promoting your music in r/crappymusic.
  • Tori the Clown Rap Gal.
  • The audacity of extreme autotune.
  • All Youtube thumbnails converging on the same cognitive attention hacks.
  • Singing the comments on your last video.
  • Situations where echo chamber amplification is fun and good for the world.
  • Obscure Music That Slaps.
  • Serbian Kolos.
  • The Ketron Event Chrom.
  • The Nightmare Klaxon that Represents Dread.
  • All the Fairlight CMI presets used in the Terminator 2 soundtrack.
  • Growing up playing samples at every possible speed in Impulse Tracker.
  • Slowly sucking dog food out of a can to simulate the sound of a mimetic polyalloy passing through steel bars.
  • It's been a long day and you're ready to go home but you need to slam 1000 more inverted glasses into bowls of yogurt, let's hurry it up guys.
  • That one sample library squeaking metal door sound that everyone uses.
  • Calling out comb filtering whenever you hear someone exhale deeply while sitting down at a desk.
  • The sound guy instructing all the actors when to breathe to minimize comb filtering.
  • Rubber Baby Knopfler Romplers.
  • All the things you are after you die.
  • The purpose of suffering. (So we can write cool poems about it.)
  • Making art about how trauma used to exist.
  • Why wireheading will not solve our problems. (Because everything uses bluetooth now.)
  • Who needs trauma when we have CRISPR?
  • Shepherding noobs.
  • Play Any Video Game Day.
  • Complicated goose controls.
  • Trying to play Portal as your first 3D game.
  • Learning video games vs. learning board games.
  • Trying to get into video game series that don't change.
  • Looking at the screen and/or ants until it coalesces into an image.
  • Video games filled with really gross blood squirt sounds.
  • Jumping on and off of buildings.
  • Playing Breath of the Wild and just collecting mushrooms and herbs.
  • Grass simulation in Breath of the Wild vs. in Horizon Zero Dawn.
  • Putting yourself in the head-space of the protagonist in order to do protagonist stuff.
  • Spelling brunch the secret way.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+S5Z9FR2i ]]> Jim Stormdancer 311. Godzilla's Daily Routine https://topiclords.com/godzillas-daily-routine d20415cd-0b75-48a8-9a43-79cd872fe056 Mon, 06 Oct 2025 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: John and Fif. We discuss accidentally exploring a bunch of related subjects, the excellent progression system of Blues' Clues ABCs (1995), salty Licorice as the sixth taste, the Cubivore between-level limerick, and having 55,555 names. 1:04:37 true Lords:

  • John
  • Fif

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Modern problems requiring modern solutions.
  • Leaving media behind.
  • Subscribing to PBS Passport via your local PBS affiliate.
  • Running out of media and just watching Peaceful Skeleton Realm Attacked By Helicopter over and over again.
  • Whether the Arctic Circle requires any age verification.
  • What even are Truck Nuts?
  • Why do trucks have such tiny nuts??
  • Watching a movie every day because you're unemployed.
  • I'm Gonna Git You Sucka.
  • Independent used bookstores in the San Diego Area.
  • Used bookstores desperately trying to get rid of math textbooks.
  • The original Topic Lords.
  • Having a lot of knowledge that you can call on in a useful way.
  • Being old and having learned a lot of stuff.
  • Your mom describing your brain as "a bric-a-brac of useless facts."
  • Science Fiction Hall of Fame.
  • The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.
  • Someone who you forget as soon they go out of sight.
  • An SCP from the perspective of the SCP.
  • A really cool interactive fiction scene in France.
  • Rules lawyering your way out of yet another curse.
  • The 17th century demon cursing you to live forever and also that "whenever you send an email people won't be able to read what you wrote, they'll just say 'not more dick pill spam.'"
  • Word-based minigames.
  • The blank was in the sky. Blue had fun with her blank.
  • Making a game for three year olds warning them about insecure pedants on the Internet.
  • What year of our Lord was Bully released?
  • We don't talk about the 2010s.
  • The Milton Bradley Microvision.
  • The game is about cubes eating and fucking.
  • Trying to describe any flavor
  • Blue the Dog.
  • Scandinavian Delicacy Ammonium Chloride.
  • A quest to track down Circus Peanuts.
  • An edible earplug that tastes like fake bananas.
  • Red Vines and Black Red Vines.
  • Being the only grocery store in town that sells licorice and reeling in the only licorice eater in town.
  • That Rotting Shark Dish.
  • The white people equivalent of huitlacoche.
  • The Secret Cowbell.
  • The hip hop community realizing that you can increase the delay on the kick drum and rattle your entire car for several seconds.
  • Tigers can't see the sideshow, only cows can see the sideshow.
  • Piggy Fif.
  • A classic poem about cubes fucking.
  • Checking GameFAQs for a list of poems in Cubivore.
  • Piggy Playername's extremely distinctive manner of speaking.
  • Atlus Beast and Editing Beast.
  • The Cubivore trophy in Super Smash Bros.
  • A genetic progression that you need to do by transmogrifying into a progression of various beasts.
  • Entering a tunnel shaped like a heart and sitting in a flesh colored void until you attract 20 females into your harem.
  • Want to mate? Yes/no.
  • The Cubivore manual with the cutaway diagram of cube physiology.
  • Bully/Cubivore crossover fic.
  • Little Samson.
  • Get good at enjoying video games without being validated by a tiny purple cube, scrub.
  • The file you keep of all the names you'll answer to.
  • Pith, fip, pince, fifth, and fint.
  • People: they have a lot of names.
  • Being diagnosably bad at code switching.
  • Writing a random number of fs as a symbol representing your employee.
  • Choosing to be the banana taped to the wall.
  • Gaming naming.
  • Printing up a deck of constraints for when you're asking people to choose a name for you.
  • Paraeducation.
  • Jobs at The MADE.
  • The Worst Nintendo Store.
  • Teaching game design to young children every Saturday morning.
  • The forefront of the next generation of digital creators.
]]> Lords:

  • John
  • Fif

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Modern problems requiring modern solutions.
  • Leaving media behind.
  • Subscribing to PBS Passport via your local PBS affiliate.
  • Running out of media and just watching Peaceful Skeleton Realm Attacked By Helicopter over and over again.
  • Whether the Arctic Circle requires any age verification.
  • What even are Truck Nuts?
  • Why do trucks have such tiny nuts??
  • Watching a movie every day because you're unemployed.
  • I'm Gonna Git You Sucka.
  • Independent used bookstores in the San Diego Area.
  • Used bookstores desperately trying to get rid of math textbooks.
  • The original Topic Lords.
  • Having a lot of knowledge that you can call on in a useful way.
  • Being old and having learned a lot of stuff.
  • Your mom describing your brain as "a bric-a-brac of useless facts."
  • Science Fiction Hall of Fame.
  • The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.
  • Someone who you forget as soon they go out of sight.
  • An SCP from the perspective of the SCP.
  • A really cool interactive fiction scene in France.
  • Rules lawyering your way out of yet another curse.
  • The 17th century demon cursing you to live forever and also that "whenever you send an email people won't be able to read what you wrote, they'll just say 'not more dick pill spam.'"
  • Word-based minigames.
  • The blank was in the sky. Blue had fun with her blank.
  • Making a game for three year olds warning them about insecure pedants on the Internet.
  • What year of our Lord was Bully released?
  • We don't talk about the 2010s.
  • The Milton Bradley Microvision.
  • The game is about cubes eating and fucking.
  • Trying to describe any flavor
  • Blue the Dog.
  • Scandinavian Delicacy Ammonium Chloride.
  • A quest to track down Circus Peanuts.
  • An edible earplug that tastes like fake bananas.
  • Red Vines and Black Red Vines.
  • Being the only grocery store in town that sells licorice and reeling in the only licorice eater in town.
  • That Rotting Shark Dish.
  • The white people equivalent of huitlacoche.
  • The Secret Cowbell.
  • The hip hop community realizing that you can increase the delay on the kick drum and rattle your entire car for several seconds.
  • Tigers can't see the sideshow, only cows can see the sideshow.
  • Piggy Fif.
  • A classic poem about cubes fucking.
  • Checking GameFAQs for a list of poems in Cubivore.
  • Piggy Playername's extremely distinctive manner of speaking.
  • Atlus Beast and Editing Beast.
  • The Cubivore trophy in Super Smash Bros.
  • A genetic progression that you need to do by transmogrifying into a progression of various beasts.
  • Entering a tunnel shaped like a heart and sitting in a flesh colored void until you attract 20 females into your harem.
  • Want to mate? Yes/no.
  • The Cubivore manual with the cutaway diagram of cube physiology.
  • Bully/Cubivore crossover fic.
  • Little Samson.
  • Get good at enjoying video games without being validated by a tiny purple cube, scrub.
  • The file you keep of all the names you'll answer to.
  • Pith, fip, pince, fifth, and fint.
  • People: they have a lot of names.
  • Being diagnosably bad at code switching.
  • Writing a random number of fs as a symbol representing your employee.
  • Choosing to be the banana taped to the wall.
  • Gaming naming.
  • Printing up a deck of constraints for when you're asking people to choose a name for you.
  • Paraeducation.
  • Jobs at The MADE.
  • The Worst Nintendo Store.
  • Teaching game design to young children every Saturday morning.
  • The forefront of the next generation of digital creators.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • John
  • Fif

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Modern problems requiring modern solutions.
  • Leaving media behind.
  • Subscribing to PBS Passport via your local PBS affiliate.
  • Running out of media and just watching Peaceful Skeleton Realm Attacked By Helicopter over and over again.
  • Whether the Arctic Circle requires any age verification.
  • What even are Truck Nuts?
  • Why do trucks have such tiny nuts??
  • Watching a movie every day because you're unemployed.
  • I'm Gonna Git You Sucka.
  • Independent used bookstores in the San Diego Area.
  • Used bookstores desperately trying to get rid of math textbooks.
  • The original Topic Lords.
  • Having a lot of knowledge that you can call on in a useful way.
  • Being old and having learned a lot of stuff.
  • Your mom describing your brain as "a bric-a-brac of useless facts."
  • Science Fiction Hall of Fame.
  • The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.
  • Someone who you forget as soon they go out of sight.
  • An SCP from the perspective of the SCP.
  • A really cool interactive fiction scene in France.
  • Rules lawyering your way out of yet another curse.
  • The 17th century demon cursing you to live forever and also that "whenever you send an email people won't be able to read what you wrote, they'll just say 'not more dick pill spam.'"
  • Word-based minigames.
  • The blank was in the sky. Blue had fun with her blank.
  • Making a game for three year olds warning them about insecure pedants on the Internet.
  • What year of our Lord was Bully released?
  • We don't talk about the 2010s.
  • The Milton Bradley Microvision.
  • The game is about cubes eating and fucking.
  • Trying to describe any flavor
  • Blue the Dog.
  • Scandinavian Delicacy Ammonium Chloride.
  • A quest to track down Circus Peanuts.
  • An edible earplug that tastes like fake bananas.
  • Red Vines and Black Red Vines.
  • Being the only grocery store in town that sells licorice and reeling in the only licorice eater in town.
  • That Rotting Shark Dish.
  • The white people equivalent of huitlacoche.
  • The Secret Cowbell.
  • The hip hop community realizing that you can increase the delay on the kick drum and rattle your entire car for several seconds.
  • Tigers can't see the sideshow, only cows can see the sideshow.
  • Piggy Fif.
  • A classic poem about cubes fucking.
  • Checking GameFAQs for a list of poems in Cubivore.
  • Piggy Playername's extremely distinctive manner of speaking.
  • Atlus Beast and Editing Beast.
  • The Cubivore trophy in Super Smash Bros.
  • A genetic progression that you need to do by transmogrifying into a progression of various beasts.
  • Entering a tunnel shaped like a heart and sitting in a flesh colored void until you attract 20 females into your harem.
  • Want to mate? Yes/no.
  • The Cubivore manual with the cutaway diagram of cube physiology.
  • Bully/Cubivore crossover fic.
  • Little Samson.
  • Get good at enjoying video games without being validated by a tiny purple cube, scrub.
  • The file you keep of all the names you'll answer to.
  • Pith, fip, pince, fifth, and fint.
  • People: they have a lot of names.
  • Being diagnosably bad at code switching.
  • Writing a random number of fs as a symbol representing your employee.
  • Choosing to be the banana taped to the wall.
  • Gaming naming.
  • Printing up a deck of constraints for when you're asking people to choose a name for you.
  • Paraeducation.
  • Jobs at The MADE.
  • The Worst Nintendo Store.
  • Teaching game design to young children every Saturday morning.
  • The forefront of the next generation of digital creators.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+03cPpUfo ]]> Jim Stormdancer 310. Dance Like the Universe Is an Empty Wasteland https://topiclords.com/dance-like-the-universe-is-an-empty-wasteland 9b282781-a275-426a-a768-cf7a202b8292 Mon, 29 Sep 2025 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Alexander and Kev. We discuss floaty movement in games, giving people clutter they can't throw away, debunking Dunning Kruger, With or Without Witnesses, the instinct to not swing a heavy object at somebody, and Japanese curry. 1:03:15 true Lords

  • Alexander
  • Kev

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The Humble Screw.
  • What it might take to be good at hammering nails.
  • Fingerbashing.
  • An inclined plane that goes around in a circle.
  • Metric Rules Football.
  • Whether a state machine is the same kind of thing as a wedge.
  • Clockwork Maiden.
  • Speedrunning, cleaning and dating.
  • Floaty movement.
  • The JPEG artifact of physics simulation.
  • How to Unit Test a video game.
  • Using MIDI knobs to tune your game's physics.
  • Game Oriented Assembly Lisp.
  • Hot Reloading Workflow.
  • Why Naughty Dog stopped using Lisp.
  • Just going about your life when suddenly you have to use Perl for something.
  • Peak Node.JS/SAAS years.
  • Walk/run/sprint transition speed.
  • Getting an special drink for your guys.
  • Medieval style calligraphy.
  • Gifting someone with a burden for the rest of their lives.
  • Pouring rocks into your dad's pocket because that's where you keep your rocks.
  • The kitten going to sleep behind your laptop because it's warm back there.
  • Here's how someone in the 14th century would've written these words.
  • How to say "fuck around and find out" in medieval Latin.
  • Writing a meme in 14th century Blackletter Hand.
  • Sans-serif calligraphy.
  • The ancient Greeks trying to invent ASCII art but they couldn't close the deal.
  • Letters placed inside other letters.
  • Autocorrelation.
  • Figures 8 and 9.
  • Coming out of discussion the topic with a better understanding of the topic.
  • Using a bird feather to write.
  • Knowledge that we used to have and now have again.
  • Learning to Topic Lords while doing home improvement stuff.
  • Scrapping your fragile human body to merge with the machines.
  • Rainbows in Space.
  • Suns going around in circles regardless of whether anyone's looking.
  • A semi-conscious little robot dude.
  • Calling the Qualia Function.
  • A real messed-up looking machine cat.
  • Communicating the story solely via flavor text on mana dorks.
  • A squadron of little kids waving wooden swords at each other.
  • How do you turn sword fighting into something you can do in a video game?
  • East Bay Rat Motorcycle Club Flight Nights.
  • Situations where they ask if you want a mouth guard.
  • Asking the ref at the boxing match what the etiquette is for tapping out.
  • The crowd roaring when they realize you're a southpaw.
  • Punching a guy you just met three seconds ago.
  • Did you end up cutting that girl's head off?
  • Renaissance MMA.
  • That Awkward Sparring Feeling.
  • A simulacrum of kicking each other in the face.
  • Getting a part-time job at your favorite curry shop so you can learn the recipe.
  • What part of curry is the curry?
  • The curry you eat so you don't die.
  • Emperor Riding a Dragon to the Forbidden Palace.
  • The advantage of a burger as a fast food staple.
  • How to make curry convenient.
  • Rendang.
  • Dry curry.
  • Joining a discord and asking "what are all these users for??"
  • Which user is which lord on which episode?
]]> Lords

  • Alexander
  • Kev

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The Humble Screw.
  • What it might take to be good at hammering nails.
  • Fingerbashing.
  • An inclined plane that goes around in a circle.
  • Metric Rules Football.
  • Whether a state machine is the same kind of thing as a wedge.
  • Clockwork Maiden.
  • Speedrunning, cleaning and dating.
  • Floaty movement.
  • The JPEG artifact of physics simulation.
  • How to Unit Test a video game.
  • Using MIDI knobs to tune your game's physics.
  • Game Oriented Assembly Lisp.
  • Hot Reloading Workflow.
  • Why Naughty Dog stopped using Lisp.
  • Just going about your life when suddenly you have to use Perl for something.
  • Peak Node.JS/SAAS years.
  • Walk/run/sprint transition speed.
  • Getting an special drink for your guys.
  • Medieval style calligraphy.
  • Gifting someone with a burden for the rest of their lives.
  • Pouring rocks into your dad's pocket because that's where you keep your rocks.
  • The kitten going to sleep behind your laptop because it's warm back there.
  • Here's how someone in the 14th century would've written these words.
  • How to say "fuck around and find out" in medieval Latin.
  • Writing a meme in 14th century Blackletter Hand.
  • Sans-serif calligraphy.
  • The ancient Greeks trying to invent ASCII art but they couldn't close the deal.
  • Letters placed inside other letters.
  • Autocorrelation.
  • Figures 8 and 9.
  • Coming out of discussion the topic with a better understanding of the topic.
  • Using a bird feather to write.
  • Knowledge that we used to have and now have again.
  • Learning to Topic Lords while doing home improvement stuff.
  • Scrapping your fragile human body to merge with the machines.
  • Rainbows in Space.
  • Suns going around in circles regardless of whether anyone's looking.
  • A semi-conscious little robot dude.
  • Calling the Qualia Function.
  • A real messed-up looking machine cat.
  • Communicating the story solely via flavor text on mana dorks.
  • A squadron of little kids waving wooden swords at each other.
  • How do you turn sword fighting into something you can do in a video game?
  • East Bay Rat Motorcycle Club Flight Nights.
  • Situations where they ask if you want a mouth guard.
  • Asking the ref at the boxing match what the etiquette is for tapping out.
  • The crowd roaring when they realize you're a southpaw.
  • Punching a guy you just met three seconds ago.
  • Did you end up cutting that girl's head off?
  • Renaissance MMA.
  • That Awkward Sparring Feeling.
  • A simulacrum of kicking each other in the face.
  • Getting a part-time job at your favorite curry shop so you can learn the recipe.
  • What part of curry is the curry?
  • The curry you eat so you don't die.
  • Emperor Riding a Dragon to the Forbidden Palace.
  • The advantage of a burger as a fast food staple.
  • How to make curry convenient.
  • Rendang.
  • Dry curry.
  • Joining a discord and asking "what are all these users for??"
  • Which user is which lord on which episode?

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords

  • Alexander
  • Kev

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The Humble Screw.
  • What it might take to be good at hammering nails.
  • Fingerbashing.
  • An inclined plane that goes around in a circle.
  • Metric Rules Football.
  • Whether a state machine is the same kind of thing as a wedge.
  • Clockwork Maiden.
  • Speedrunning, cleaning and dating.
  • Floaty movement.
  • The JPEG artifact of physics simulation.
  • How to Unit Test a video game.
  • Using MIDI knobs to tune your game's physics.
  • Game Oriented Assembly Lisp.
  • Hot Reloading Workflow.
  • Why Naughty Dog stopped using Lisp.
  • Just going about your life when suddenly you have to use Perl for something.
  • Peak Node.JS/SAAS years.
  • Walk/run/sprint transition speed.
  • Getting an special drink for your guys.
  • Medieval style calligraphy.
  • Gifting someone with a burden for the rest of their lives.
  • Pouring rocks into your dad's pocket because that's where you keep your rocks.
  • The kitten going to sleep behind your laptop because it's warm back there.
  • Here's how someone in the 14th century would've written these words.
  • How to say "fuck around and find out" in medieval Latin.
  • Writing a meme in 14th century Blackletter Hand.
  • Sans-serif calligraphy.
  • The ancient Greeks trying to invent ASCII art but they couldn't close the deal.
  • Letters placed inside other letters.
  • Autocorrelation.
  • Figures 8 and 9.
  • Coming out of discussion the topic with a better understanding of the topic.
  • Using a bird feather to write.
  • Knowledge that we used to have and now have again.
  • Learning to Topic Lords while doing home improvement stuff.
  • Scrapping your fragile human body to merge with the machines.
  • Rainbows in Space.
  • Suns going around in circles regardless of whether anyone's looking.
  • A semi-conscious little robot dude.
  • Calling the Qualia Function.
  • A real messed-up looking machine cat.
  • Communicating the story solely via flavor text on mana dorks.
  • A squadron of little kids waving wooden swords at each other.
  • How do you turn sword fighting into something you can do in a video game?
  • East Bay Rat Motorcycle Club Flight Nights.
  • Situations where they ask if you want a mouth guard.
  • Asking the ref at the boxing match what the etiquette is for tapping out.
  • The crowd roaring when they realize you're a southpaw.
  • Punching a guy you just met three seconds ago.
  • Did you end up cutting that girl's head off?
  • Renaissance MMA.
  • That Awkward Sparring Feeling.
  • A simulacrum of kicking each other in the face.
  • Getting a part-time job at your favorite curry shop so you can learn the recipe.
  • What part of curry is the curry?
  • The curry you eat so you don't die.
  • Emperor Riding a Dragon to the Forbidden Palace.
  • The advantage of a burger as a fast food staple.
  • How to make curry convenient.
  • Rendang.
  • Dry curry.
  • Joining a discord and asking "what are all these users for??"
  • Which user is which lord on which episode?

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+RK5RER5C ]]> Jim Stormdancer 309. Shaking Ass to Music for Airports https://topiclords.com/shaking-ass-to-music-for-airports 118fdf7b-e3ae-4839-bc45-28e059417620 Mon, 22 Sep 2025 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Megan and Austin. We discussed going for very long walks, "elevated" horror, Every 5x5 Nonogram Section 303, NPC Dialog Test by Nintendo Europe, breakfast dogma, and not wanting to make shitpost music because people might like it more than your regular music. 1:12:22 true Lords:

Topics:

  • Going for a super long walk is amazing
  • "Elevated" horror is a sham
  • I was there when Every 5x5 Nonogram section 303 finished
  • NPC Dialog Test by Nintendo Europe #NintendoEurope
  • My breakfast dogma
  • Not bringing my shitpost music/mashup ideas to life because I'm afraid they'll be more popular than my actual music

Microtopics:

  • Music for films and video games.
  • The Paper Labyrinths theme.
  • Feeding your cats and yourself.
  • Exercising, drinking water, you know, all of the worst things.
  • Explaining to the doctor that you're depressed and he asks if you've been eating well and exercising and you say "no, because I've been depressed."
  • Turning 35 and becoming interested in birds.
  • Shazam for birds.
  • Birdpilled and Avianmaxxing.
  • Taking the L in Chicago and eating Dick's in Seattle.
  • Cream cheese on a hot dog.
  • The late Chicago on a Bun.
  • Regional food that you get outside of the region.
  • St. Louis style barbecue.
  • Ordering Jack in the Box at 1am and regretting it immediately because you are in your 30s.
  • Eating a spicy chicken sandwich in the prime gremlin hours.
  • Feeling bad because you ate bad.
  • Forty years later, thinking "Maybe I shouldn't have eaten all that White Castle"
  • The kind of person who would call himself a genius.
  • Sometimes it's fun to be goofy and have fun.
  • Horror movies vs. anxiety movies.
  • Media imbibers.
  • The film critic opinions of your Trekkie mom.
  • The high audience score, low critic score, and vice versa.
  • Applauding a huge pile of garbage.
  • Whether anyone ever self-applied the "IDM" genre.
  • The Oscar Genre.
  • Very good movies nominated for Oscars.
  • Braindance.
  • Cringe (Derogatory)
  • The only good form of multiplayer.
  • One of the hominids that watched a different great ape figure out fire.
  • What happens when they run out of nonograms?
  • Morons welcome!
  • Twitch plays Every 5x5 Nonogram.
  • Twitch plays Dark Souls never getting out of that pool of water in the tutorial area.
  • Every star going out at the same time.
  • In the short run, everyone will be fine.
  • Getting bored of your death anxiety.
  • Life is meaningless and nothing matters and that rules actually.
  • Extremely sensible anxieties.
  • Setting an alarm to periodically tell your friend that you're not annoying and I don't hate you.
  • Whether everyone should be afraid of heights.
  • A database of all the kinds of movements a rollercoaster can make so you can search for the types you like.
  • Do you ever get thirsty? Studies say people with ADHD need to drink water.
  • Taking a drug test at your job and worrying that the test people will notice that you're dehydrated.
  • The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog in all caps.
  • Mr. Jock, TV quiz PhD.
  • There really are castles in the eyes of people see them.
  • Role-playing the skeleton of Ben Shapiro in a D&D campaign.
  • What's the difference between being an asshole and role playing an asshole?
  • The 'shopkeepers are not copyeditors" apostrophe.
  • Eating your breakfast burrito over the counter.
  • Things that people say are good for your mental health.
  • Anxiety medication that gives you terrible nightmares.
  • Your anxiety meds making you feel okay about the zombie apocalypse.
  • Revenge bedtime procrastination.
  • The kidnapping advice episode. (FBI don't listen to this one.)
  • Kids are funny. (Just trust us.)
  • Playing in a band with your best friend for fifteen years.
  • Kids: they're sticky everywhere.
  • Never making any shitposts because someone might like them better than your regular art.
  • Receiving a series of increasingly aggressive answering machine messages from the piece of public art across the street from your apartment.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

  • Going for a super long walk is amazing
  • "Elevated" horror is a sham
  • I was there when Every 5x5 Nonogram section 303 finished
  • NPC Dialog Test by Nintendo Europe #NintendoEurope
  • My breakfast dogma
  • Not bringing my shitpost music/mashup ideas to life because I'm afraid they'll be more popular than my actual music

Microtopics:

  • Music for films and video games.
  • The Paper Labyrinths theme.
  • Feeding your cats and yourself.
  • Exercising, drinking water, you know, all of the worst things.
  • Explaining to the doctor that you're depressed and he asks if you've been eating well and exercising and you say "no, because I've been depressed."
  • Turning 35 and becoming interested in birds.
  • Shazam for birds.
  • Birdpilled and Avianmaxxing.
  • Taking the L in Chicago and eating Dick's in Seattle.
  • Cream cheese on a hot dog.
  • The late Chicago on a Bun.
  • Regional food that you get outside of the region.
  • St. Louis style barbecue.
  • Ordering Jack in the Box at 1am and regretting it immediately because you are in your 30s.
  • Eating a spicy chicken sandwich in the prime gremlin hours.
  • Feeling bad because you ate bad.
  • Forty years later, thinking "Maybe I shouldn't have eaten all that White Castle"
  • The kind of person who would call himself a genius.
  • Sometimes it's fun to be goofy and have fun.
  • Horror movies vs. anxiety movies.
  • Media imbibers.
  • The film critic opinions of your Trekkie mom.
  • The high audience score, low critic score, and vice versa.
  • Applauding a huge pile of garbage.
  • Whether anyone ever self-applied the "IDM" genre.
  • The Oscar Genre.
  • Very good movies nominated for Oscars.
  • Braindance.
  • Cringe (Derogatory)
  • The only good form of multiplayer.
  • One of the hominids that watched a different great ape figure out fire.
  • What happens when they run out of nonograms?
  • Morons welcome!
  • Twitch plays Every 5x5 Nonogram.
  • Twitch plays Dark Souls never getting out of that pool of water in the tutorial area.
  • Every star going out at the same time.
  • In the short run, everyone will be fine.
  • Getting bored of your death anxiety.
  • Life is meaningless and nothing matters and that rules actually.
  • Extremely sensible anxieties.
  • Setting an alarm to periodically tell your friend that you're not annoying and I don't hate you.
  • Whether everyone should be afraid of heights.
  • A database of all the kinds of movements a rollercoaster can make so you can search for the types you like.
  • Do you ever get thirsty? Studies say people with ADHD need to drink water.
  • Taking a drug test at your job and worrying that the test people will notice that you're dehydrated.
  • The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog in all caps.
  • Mr. Jock, TV quiz PhD.
  • There really are castles in the eyes of people see them.
  • Role-playing the skeleton of Ben Shapiro in a D&D campaign.
  • What's the difference between being an asshole and role playing an asshole?
  • The 'shopkeepers are not copyeditors" apostrophe.
  • Eating your breakfast burrito over the counter.
  • Things that people say are good for your mental health.
  • Anxiety medication that gives you terrible nightmares.
  • Your anxiety meds making you feel okay about the zombie apocalypse.
  • Revenge bedtime procrastination.
  • The kidnapping advice episode. (FBI don't listen to this one.)
  • Kids are funny. (Just trust us.)
  • Playing in a band with your best friend for fifteen years.
  • Kids: they're sticky everywhere.
  • Never making any shitposts because someone might like them better than your regular art.
  • Receiving a series of increasingly aggressive answering machine messages from the piece of public art across the street from your apartment.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

  • Going for a super long walk is amazing
  • "Elevated" horror is a sham
  • I was there when Every 5x5 Nonogram section 303 finished
  • NPC Dialog Test by Nintendo Europe #NintendoEurope
  • My breakfast dogma
  • Not bringing my shitpost music/mashup ideas to life because I'm afraid they'll be more popular than my actual music

Microtopics:

  • Music for films and video games.
  • The Paper Labyrinths theme.
  • Feeding your cats and yourself.
  • Exercising, drinking water, you know, all of the worst things.
  • Explaining to the doctor that you're depressed and he asks if you've been eating well and exercising and you say "no, because I've been depressed."
  • Turning 35 and becoming interested in birds.
  • Shazam for birds.
  • Birdpilled and Avianmaxxing.
  • Taking the L in Chicago and eating Dick's in Seattle.
  • Cream cheese on a hot dog.
  • The late Chicago on a Bun.
  • Regional food that you get outside of the region.
  • St. Louis style barbecue.
  • Ordering Jack in the Box at 1am and regretting it immediately because you are in your 30s.
  • Eating a spicy chicken sandwich in the prime gremlin hours.
  • Feeling bad because you ate bad.
  • Forty years later, thinking "Maybe I shouldn't have eaten all that White Castle"
  • The kind of person who would call himself a genius.
  • Sometimes it's fun to be goofy and have fun.
  • Horror movies vs. anxiety movies.
  • Media imbibers.
  • The film critic opinions of your Trekkie mom.
  • The high audience score, low critic score, and vice versa.
  • Applauding a huge pile of garbage.
  • Whether anyone ever self-applied the "IDM" genre.
  • The Oscar Genre.
  • Very good movies nominated for Oscars.
  • Braindance.
  • Cringe (Derogatory)
  • The only good form of multiplayer.
  • One of the hominids that watched a different great ape figure out fire.
  • What happens when they run out of nonograms?
  • Morons welcome!
  • Twitch plays Every 5x5 Nonogram.
  • Twitch plays Dark Souls never getting out of that pool of water in the tutorial area.
  • Every star going out at the same time.
  • In the short run, everyone will be fine.
  • Getting bored of your death anxiety.
  • Life is meaningless and nothing matters and that rules actually.
  • Extremely sensible anxieties.
  • Setting an alarm to periodically tell your friend that you're not annoying and I don't hate you.
  • Whether everyone should be afraid of heights.
  • A database of all the kinds of movements a rollercoaster can make so you can search for the types you like.
  • Do you ever get thirsty? Studies say people with ADHD need to drink water.
  • Taking a drug test at your job and worrying that the test people will notice that you're dehydrated.
  • The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog in all caps.
  • Mr. Jock, TV quiz PhD.
  • There really are castles in the eyes of people see them.
  • Role-playing the skeleton of Ben Shapiro in a D&D campaign.
  • What's the difference between being an asshole and role playing an asshole?
  • The 'shopkeepers are not copyeditors" apostrophe.
  • Eating your breakfast burrito over the counter.
  • Things that people say are good for your mental health.
  • Anxiety medication that gives you terrible nightmares.
  • Your anxiety meds making you feel okay about the zombie apocalypse.
  • Revenge bedtime procrastination.
  • The kidnapping advice episode. (FBI don't listen to this one.)
  • Kids are funny. (Just trust us.)
  • Playing in a band with your best friend for fifteen years.
  • Kids: they're sticky everywhere.
  • Never making any shitposts because someone might like them better than your regular art.
  • Receiving a series of increasingly aggressive answering machine messages from the piece of public art across the street from your apartment.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+VrryzQa8 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 308. A Xylophone for Jandek https://topiclords.com/a-xylophone-for-jandek 8ab8a077-9592-4344-a13f-72d7aac5bca3 Mon, 15 Sep 2025 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: John, Avery, Jay. We discuss being known for one thing and trying to do a different thing, finding instruments on the street, and accidentally arguing with sauna guy. 1:08:34 true Lords:

  • John
  • Avery
  • Jay

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Many-Time Topic Lord John Mystery.
  • Talking the plunge into the Topic Lords discord.
  • An unspoken constant presence like Seymour Glass in the Glass Family novels.
  • The Once and Future Musician.
  • Putting a formant filter on your organ so you can play the organ on Zoom.
  • Why pouring hot water sounds different from pouring cold water.
  • The sound of boiling hot urine.
  • The top rated coffee shop in San Francisco on Yelp for seven months in a row.
  • Remaining your coffee shop after Mark Zuckerberg in hopes that he'll show up in person.
  • Trying to open up a coffee shop in late 90s San Francisco and only realizing too late that it's 2016.
  • ADA compliant seating.
  • Four-person episodes of Topic Lords.
  • A 6'5" guy trying to barter a half-used spray paint can for a cup of coffee.
  • The Menacing Barterer.
  • Aggressive Wimpy gladly paying you tomorrow for a hamburger today or else.
  • Aggressive Wimpy throwing a shoe at your espresso machine.
  • Your car accidentally becoming an art car.
  • Letting people spray paint your car until it's nothing but spray paint.
  • Calling 911 and explaining that the guy menacing you needs marijuana.
  • Being detained by Mark Zuckerberg's private security force.
  • Living near Mark Zuckerberg's house so you can do whatever your fixation with Mark Zuckerberg is.
  • Aggressive Barter Guy trying to barter a Porsche for a cup of coffee.
  • The $6 Porsche.
  • Tholen or Tholen.
  • A prog album constructed from Klik n Play samples.
  • When someone who does I've things decides to do something else.
  • The Mountain Goats novelizations.
  • Leonard Cohen's terrible poetry.
  • Thinking a song is deeply meaningful until you read the lyrics.
  • New Active Object.
  • Lunch Music.
  • Doing a thing for a long time and getting good at it.
  • Who has time to read a novel?
  • Having Game Boys Advance but still reading books sometimes.
  • Telling your teacher that you need to go to your job at NASA and they're like "oh you must be doing something important over there"
  • Working in the waterslide industry.
  • The Joy of Being the Secrets Guy.
  • Reading too much into it is the next Frog Fractions game.
  • Admitting to your wife that you found a digital piano on the curb.
  • The digital piano in the background of the Frog Fractions 2 pitch video.
  • Walking by a theremin at a party and it chirps at you like a proximity car alarm.
  • The Moog Etherwave.
  • Staring at your broken Omnichord.
  • A toddler whose first word is "mandolin."
  • Living Out Yonder.
  • The Roland Space Echo.
  • A cassette tape except there isn't any cassette, the tape is just kind of wriggling around in there.
  • Buying synthesizers from thrift shops that don't know how to tell whether synthesizers are broken.
  • The Two Organs Behind Me.
  • Ukelins.
  • Zither-esques.
  • Dulcimers vs. hammered dulcimers.
  • Looping your song and picking the notes that kind of sound like they belong.
  • A Xylophone For Jandek.
  • Feeling like you're taking to extremely accomplished people and you're just a weird little guy.
  • Who Is Sauna Guy??
  • Stuck debating sauna guy while the venerated author with similar interests to yours is holding court in the next room.
  • Physics Philosophy guy talking about physics and philosophy.
  • An hour into the conversation, telling Sauna Guy that you don't even like being warm and he just stares at you.
  • The new way to joke about forum URLs.
  • Back when the Internet was full of exciting possibilities.
  • What topics turn you into Sauna Guy.
  • David Byrne sitting alone at the David Byrne art exhibit in Palo Alto.
  • We're All Sauna Guy Now.
  • Voting each other off the podcast.
  • Lightning round sudden death topics.
  • When the sunscreen finally makes it onto your cornea.
  • Not having a home page again but meaning to someday.
]]> Lords:

  • John
  • Avery
  • Jay

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Many-Time Topic Lord John Mystery.
  • Talking the plunge into the Topic Lords discord.
  • An unspoken constant presence like Seymour Glass in the Glass Family novels.
  • The Once and Future Musician.
  • Putting a formant filter on your organ so you can play the organ on Zoom.
  • Why pouring hot water sounds different from pouring cold water.
  • The sound of boiling hot urine.
  • The top rated coffee shop in San Francisco on Yelp for seven months in a row.
  • Remaining your coffee shop after Mark Zuckerberg in hopes that he'll show up in person.
  • Trying to open up a coffee shop in late 90s San Francisco and only realizing too late that it's 2016.
  • ADA compliant seating.
  • Four-person episodes of Topic Lords.
  • A 6'5" guy trying to barter a half-used spray paint can for a cup of coffee.
  • The Menacing Barterer.
  • Aggressive Wimpy gladly paying you tomorrow for a hamburger today or else.
  • Aggressive Wimpy throwing a shoe at your espresso machine.
  • Your car accidentally becoming an art car.
  • Letting people spray paint your car until it's nothing but spray paint.
  • Calling 911 and explaining that the guy menacing you needs marijuana.
  • Being detained by Mark Zuckerberg's private security force.
  • Living near Mark Zuckerberg's house so you can do whatever your fixation with Mark Zuckerberg is.
  • Aggressive Barter Guy trying to barter a Porsche for a cup of coffee.
  • The $6 Porsche.
  • Tholen or Tholen.
  • A prog album constructed from Klik n Play samples.
  • When someone who does I've things decides to do something else.
  • The Mountain Goats novelizations.
  • Leonard Cohen's terrible poetry.
  • Thinking a song is deeply meaningful until you read the lyrics.
  • New Active Object.
  • Lunch Music.
  • Doing a thing for a long time and getting good at it.
  • Who has time to read a novel?
  • Having Game Boys Advance but still reading books sometimes.
  • Telling your teacher that you need to go to your job at NASA and they're like "oh you must be doing something important over there"
  • Working in the waterslide industry.
  • The Joy of Being the Secrets Guy.
  • Reading too much into it is the next Frog Fractions game.
  • Admitting to your wife that you found a digital piano on the curb.
  • The digital piano in the background of the Frog Fractions 2 pitch video.
  • Walking by a theremin at a party and it chirps at you like a proximity car alarm.
  • The Moog Etherwave.
  • Staring at your broken Omnichord.
  • A toddler whose first word is "mandolin."
  • Living Out Yonder.
  • The Roland Space Echo.
  • A cassette tape except there isn't any cassette, the tape is just kind of wriggling around in there.
  • Buying synthesizers from thrift shops that don't know how to tell whether synthesizers are broken.
  • The Two Organs Behind Me.
  • Ukelins.
  • Zither-esques.
  • Dulcimers vs. hammered dulcimers.
  • Looping your song and picking the notes that kind of sound like they belong.
  • A Xylophone For Jandek.
  • Feeling like you're taking to extremely accomplished people and you're just a weird little guy.
  • Who Is Sauna Guy??
  • Stuck debating sauna guy while the venerated author with similar interests to yours is holding court in the next room.
  • Physics Philosophy guy talking about physics and philosophy.
  • An hour into the conversation, telling Sauna Guy that you don't even like being warm and he just stares at you.
  • The new way to joke about forum URLs.
  • Back when the Internet was full of exciting possibilities.
  • What topics turn you into Sauna Guy.
  • David Byrne sitting alone at the David Byrne art exhibit in Palo Alto.
  • We're All Sauna Guy Now.
  • Voting each other off the podcast.
  • Lightning round sudden death topics.
  • When the sunscreen finally makes it onto your cornea.
  • Not having a home page again but meaning to someday.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • John
  • Avery
  • Jay

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Many-Time Topic Lord John Mystery.
  • Talking the plunge into the Topic Lords discord.
  • An unspoken constant presence like Seymour Glass in the Glass Family novels.
  • The Once and Future Musician.
  • Putting a formant filter on your organ so you can play the organ on Zoom.
  • Why pouring hot water sounds different from pouring cold water.
  • The sound of boiling hot urine.
  • The top rated coffee shop in San Francisco on Yelp for seven months in a row.
  • Remaining your coffee shop after Mark Zuckerberg in hopes that he'll show up in person.
  • Trying to open up a coffee shop in late 90s San Francisco and only realizing too late that it's 2016.
  • ADA compliant seating.
  • Four-person episodes of Topic Lords.
  • A 6'5" guy trying to barter a half-used spray paint can for a cup of coffee.
  • The Menacing Barterer.
  • Aggressive Wimpy gladly paying you tomorrow for a hamburger today or else.
  • Aggressive Wimpy throwing a shoe at your espresso machine.
  • Your car accidentally becoming an art car.
  • Letting people spray paint your car until it's nothing but spray paint.
  • Calling 911 and explaining that the guy menacing you needs marijuana.
  • Being detained by Mark Zuckerberg's private security force.
  • Living near Mark Zuckerberg's house so you can do whatever your fixation with Mark Zuckerberg is.
  • Aggressive Barter Guy trying to barter a Porsche for a cup of coffee.
  • The $6 Porsche.
  • Tholen or Tholen.
  • A prog album constructed from Klik n Play samples.
  • When someone who does I've things decides to do something else.
  • The Mountain Goats novelizations.
  • Leonard Cohen's terrible poetry.
  • Thinking a song is deeply meaningful until you read the lyrics.
  • New Active Object.
  • Lunch Music.
  • Doing a thing for a long time and getting good at it.
  • Who has time to read a novel?
  • Having Game Boys Advance but still reading books sometimes.
  • Telling your teacher that you need to go to your job at NASA and they're like "oh you must be doing something important over there"
  • Working in the waterslide industry.
  • The Joy of Being the Secrets Guy.
  • Reading too much into it is the next Frog Fractions game.
  • Admitting to your wife that you found a digital piano on the curb.
  • The digital piano in the background of the Frog Fractions 2 pitch video.
  • Walking by a theremin at a party and it chirps at you like a proximity car alarm.
  • The Moog Etherwave.
  • Staring at your broken Omnichord.
  • A toddler whose first word is "mandolin."
  • Living Out Yonder.
  • The Roland Space Echo.
  • A cassette tape except there isn't any cassette, the tape is just kind of wriggling around in there.
  • Buying synthesizers from thrift shops that don't know how to tell whether synthesizers are broken.
  • The Two Organs Behind Me.
  • Ukelins.
  • Zither-esques.
  • Dulcimers vs. hammered dulcimers.
  • Looping your song and picking the notes that kind of sound like they belong.
  • A Xylophone For Jandek.
  • Feeling like you're taking to extremely accomplished people and you're just a weird little guy.
  • Who Is Sauna Guy??
  • Stuck debating sauna guy while the venerated author with similar interests to yours is holding court in the next room.
  • Physics Philosophy guy talking about physics and philosophy.
  • An hour into the conversation, telling Sauna Guy that you don't even like being warm and he just stares at you.
  • The new way to joke about forum URLs.
  • Back when the Internet was full of exciting possibilities.
  • What topics turn you into Sauna Guy.
  • David Byrne sitting alone at the David Byrne art exhibit in Palo Alto.
  • We're All Sauna Guy Now.
  • Voting each other off the podcast.
  • Lightning round sudden death topics.
  • When the sunscreen finally makes it onto your cornea.
  • Not having a home page again but meaning to someday.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+ERPe8q-H ]]> Jim Stormdancer 308B. Oops, All Microtopics! https://topiclords.com/oops-all-microtopics 0f60c5af-00fd-4aee-9709-7a906880c83c Mon, 15 Sep 2025 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer This is the pre-show banter and topic negotiation from episode 308, recorded and edited basically by accident?? Enjoy?? 28:17 true This is the pre-show planning and banter for episode 308, recorded and edited basically by accident?? Enjoy??

Microtopics:

  • The old saw that if the teacher is 15 minutes late, you are excused.
  • All the hosts forgetting about the podcast so that episode just doesn't get recorded.
  • The seam in the fish video.
  • Procedurally vs. manually textured terrain.
  • How to texture a limestone chunk.
  • Whether Donkey Kong Bananza is deliberately evoking the sickly sheen of Donkey Kong Country's raytraced art.
  • Procedurally decorating terrain in Techtonica.
  • A lens flare shaped like bananas.
  • Mario Kart opinions.
  • Doing a stunt for the next 30 seconds.
  • The Baja 1000 but with Mario Kart.
  • How Mario Kart tries to make highways interesting.
  • A souped-up Volkswagen Beetle driving 1000 miles through the desert
  • Mario Kart except it's Desert Bus.
  • A Hunter S. Thompson stand-in sent to report on Mario Kart races and ranting about the Mushroom Kingdom.
  • Keeping your powder dry in case your anecdote gets promoted to Topic.
  • Topics that have been in the bucket for a long time and probably will remain there for a long time.
  • Doing a brass fall with your mouth.
  • Finally learning to play "Imagine" on piano.
  • Zoom's musician mode.
  • Going on a date with twins to the same restaurant but neither one knows about the other, so you have to keep going into the bathroom and parting your hair the other way.
  • The episode of Three's Company where there's a misunderstanding.
  • Don Knotts making a weird face.
  • Your prospective roommates explaining that you have to pretend to be gay so the landlord doesn't think you're all having sex with each other.
  • More behind than ahead.
  • Keeping cats in the Storage Atrium.
  • Buying an organ from a salvage yard.
  • Bartering with the organ maker's apprentice.
  • The Estey Organ Company.
  • Playing a bad prog rock solo on the analog synthesizer next to your couch.
  • An organ with all of its organs showing.
  • An accordion with zero subtlety.
  • The difference between an electric piano and a digital piano.
  • The Yamaha Clavinova with Advanced Wave Modeling.
  • Don't play these notes unless you want to hear them forever.
  • Topic Negotiation.
  • Driving every single topic into the ground.
]]> This is the pre-show planning and banter for episode 308, recorded and edited basically by accident?? Enjoy??

Microtopics:

  • The old saw that if the teacher is 15 minutes late, you are excused.
  • All the hosts forgetting about the podcast so that episode just doesn't get recorded.
  • The seam in the fish video.
  • Procedurally vs. manually textured terrain.
  • How to texture a limestone chunk.
  • Whether Donkey Kong Bananza is deliberately evoking the sickly sheen of Donkey Kong Country's raytraced art.
  • Procedurally decorating terrain in Techtonica.
  • A lens flare shaped like bananas.
  • Mario Kart opinions.
  • Doing a stunt for the next 30 seconds.
  • The Baja 1000 but with Mario Kart.
  • How Mario Kart tries to make highways interesting.
  • A souped-up Volkswagen Beetle driving 1000 miles through the desert
  • Mario Kart except it's Desert Bus.
  • A Hunter S. Thompson stand-in sent to report on Mario Kart races and ranting about the Mushroom Kingdom.
  • Keeping your powder dry in case your anecdote gets promoted to Topic.
  • Topics that have been in the bucket for a long time and probably will remain there for a long time.
  • Doing a brass fall with your mouth.
  • Finally learning to play "Imagine" on piano.
  • Zoom's musician mode.
  • Going on a date with twins to the same restaurant but neither one knows about the other, so you have to keep going into the bathroom and parting your hair the other way.
  • The episode of Three's Company where there's a misunderstanding.
  • Don Knotts making a weird face.
  • Your prospective roommates explaining that you have to pretend to be gay so the landlord doesn't think you're all having sex with each other.
  • More behind than ahead.
  • Keeping cats in the Storage Atrium.
  • Buying an organ from a salvage yard.
  • Bartering with the organ maker's apprentice.
  • The Estey Organ Company.
  • Playing a bad prog rock solo on the analog synthesizer next to your couch.
  • An organ with all of its organs showing.
  • An accordion with zero subtlety.
  • The difference between an electric piano and a digital piano.
  • The Yamaha Clavinova with Advanced Wave Modeling.
  • Don't play these notes unless you want to hear them forever.
  • Topic Negotiation.
  • Driving every single topic into the ground.

Support Topic Lords

]]> This is the pre-show planning and banter for episode 308, recorded and edited basically by accident?? Enjoy??

Microtopics:

  • The old saw that if the teacher is 15 minutes late, you are excused.
  • All the hosts forgetting about the podcast so that episode just doesn't get recorded.
  • The seam in the fish video.
  • Procedurally vs. manually textured terrain.
  • How to texture a limestone chunk.
  • Whether Donkey Kong Bananza is deliberately evoking the sickly sheen of Donkey Kong Country's raytraced art.
  • Procedurally decorating terrain in Techtonica.
  • A lens flare shaped like bananas.
  • Mario Kart opinions.
  • Doing a stunt for the next 30 seconds.
  • The Baja 1000 but with Mario Kart.
  • How Mario Kart tries to make highways interesting.
  • A souped-up Volkswagen Beetle driving 1000 miles through the desert
  • Mario Kart except it's Desert Bus.
  • A Hunter S. Thompson stand-in sent to report on Mario Kart races and ranting about the Mushroom Kingdom.
  • Keeping your powder dry in case your anecdote gets promoted to Topic.
  • Topics that have been in the bucket for a long time and probably will remain there for a long time.
  • Doing a brass fall with your mouth.
  • Finally learning to play "Imagine" on piano.
  • Zoom's musician mode.
  • Going on a date with twins to the same restaurant but neither one knows about the other, so you have to keep going into the bathroom and parting your hair the other way.
  • The episode of Three's Company where there's a misunderstanding.
  • Don Knotts making a weird face.
  • Your prospective roommates explaining that you have to pretend to be gay so the landlord doesn't think you're all having sex with each other.
  • More behind than ahead.
  • Keeping cats in the Storage Atrium.
  • Buying an organ from a salvage yard.
  • Bartering with the organ maker's apprentice.
  • The Estey Organ Company.
  • Playing a bad prog rock solo on the analog synthesizer next to your couch.
  • An organ with all of its organs showing.
  • An accordion with zero subtlety.
  • The difference between an electric piano and a digital piano.
  • The Yamaha Clavinova with Advanced Wave Modeling.
  • Don't play these notes unless you want to hear them forever.
  • Topic Negotiation.
  • Driving every single topic into the ground.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+ymChaHDu ]]> Jim Stormdancer 307. The Bad Boy of Crossword Construction https://topiclords.com/the-bad-boy-of-crossword-construction f41766e2-6521-47db-baef-918c6eed7eb6 Mon, 08 Sep 2025 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Ben and Avery. We discuss The Mishima Incident, city-wide game of hide and seek, how to stick it to bad bluetooth actors, and The Carrotman's Lament. 1:04:56 true Lords:

  • Ben
  • Avery

Topics:

  • The Mishima Incident, in which one of the most famous authors in Japan created his own private militia of young men, attempted to overthrow the government and, upon failing, committed ritual suicide.
  • City-wide game of hide and seek
  • How to stick it to bad Bluetooth actors
  • The Carrotman's Lament, by E.L. Hubert
    • https://x.com/sweetstench/status/1724958011754504568
    • Esper says: "Avery’s anecdote about the carrot poem being something he’d do in high school reminded me of something I did in high school, where I took the song 'The Cha Cha Slide' and removed every instance of 'slide to the right' and added a bunch of 'slide to the left' so that people eventually collapsed into the wall. I got to do it at a little party with friends, and it paid off nicely."

Microtopics:

  • Where to play some crosswords.
  • Cruciverbalism.
  • Putting the black squares where the letters don't go.
  • Putting structural jokes in your crossword puzzles.
  • The cleverer the gimmick, the less fun the crossword puzzle.
  • Talking into your phone's transcription software during a five hour drive and having five hours of gibberish at the end of it.
  • Fifth caller wins a t-shirt!
  • Impossible Owls.
  • Squishy details.
  • Taking on an apprenticeship with a nobel prize winner.
  • The Japanese Self-Defense Force.
  • Dressing in bee keeper outfits and hitting each other with sticks.
  • Buying swords for your right wing ultra nationalist militia with the proceeds of your prize-winning literature.
  • Exhorting the troops to reinstate the emperor of Japan but nobody can hear you because there's a helicopter flying overhead.
  • A poster of a kitten next to a poster of a samurai, with diametrically opposed mantras about how you ought to handle failure.
  • Topics that leave you speechless.
  • Founder Brain.
  • Debunking a thing from philosophy.
  • The Philosophy of Reversing a Linked List.
  • The alternate universe where Banksy is a totalitarian dictator.
  • Vladimir Putin tagging up the streets of Bristol in the 90s.
  • Top hat, eyeball and coattails.
  • The Residents of Theseus.
  • Rednex.
  • David Bowie starring as Tesla in The Prestige and self-driving off the set.
  • The percentage of Teslas on the street
  • Nice Stylized T as a Screw Shirt.
  • Brainstorming places to hide in Copenhagen.
  • The problem of how to define the bounds of the hide and seek legal play field.
  • Playing hide and seek and knocking on a stranger's door and asking if you can hide in their house.
  • Knocking on the door of the company that moved into the building your company was in six years ago, asking to use the conference room because you're six years late for a meeting.
  • Journey to the End of the Night.
  • Playing music and speaking in riddles.
  • At what point it becomes morally correct to join the zombies.
  • Why is it okay to name a thing after another thing? Why is it okay to name a band after someone else's song?
  • Whether Skibidi Toilet has been cool, is currently cool, will become cool temporarily, or will become cool and stay forever.
  • A meme based on a Youtube thing.
  • Dadaist comedy Internet videos made in Garry's Mod.
  • Changing the head so it's not owned by Valve.
  • Generations starting the alphabet over, like hurricane names.
  • Turn of the millennium coffee shop war stories.
  • Drinking coffee at 2 AM on January 1st, 2000, looking out the window and waiting for the satellites to come crashing down.
  • Tech folks successfully convincing people that the Y2K bug is a problem, but not what the problem actually was.
  • What the Y2K bug was and how we solved it.
  • The Corolla Must Have Control.
  • The phone is too eager and the car is too greedy.
  • The phone and the bluetooth speaker agreeing to connect, and isn't there somebody you forgot to ask??
  • We invented this new thing but we don't know what it's for. Let's try to solve every problem with it and see if anything sticks.
  • Everybody migrating to TempleOS to get away from LLMs.
  • A lightweight operating system designed to be the Third Temple from the Hebrew bible.
  • Writing to your colleague to retract the continuum hypothesizing.
  • God's Chosen Programmer.
  • Off-Topic Lords.
  • A poem on the back of a bag of carrots.
  • A poem having been added to a bag of carrots by a scoundrel.
  • How many carrots you need to eat before you can be called a carrot man.
  • Explaining hidden tracks by first explaining that music used to come in this form called "albums."
  • If you have topics to talk about, we have a show for that, you don't put it on a hidden track on a CD in the 1990s.
  • Living to regret your self-own.
]]> Lords:

  • Ben
  • Avery

Topics:

  • The Mishima Incident, in which one of the most famous authors in Japan created his own private militia of young men, attempted to overthrow the government and, upon failing, committed ritual suicide.
  • City-wide game of hide and seek
  • How to stick it to bad Bluetooth actors
  • The Carrotman's Lament, by E.L. Hubert
    • https://x.com/sweetstench/status/1724958011754504568
    • Esper says: "Avery’s anecdote about the carrot poem being something he’d do in high school reminded me of something I did in high school, where I took the song 'The Cha Cha Slide' and removed every instance of 'slide to the right' and added a bunch of 'slide to the left' so that people eventually collapsed into the wall. I got to do it at a little party with friends, and it paid off nicely."

Microtopics:

  • Where to play some crosswords.
  • Cruciverbalism.
  • Putting the black squares where the letters don't go.
  • Putting structural jokes in your crossword puzzles.
  • The cleverer the gimmick, the less fun the crossword puzzle.
  • Talking into your phone's transcription software during a five hour drive and having five hours of gibberish at the end of it.
  • Fifth caller wins a t-shirt!
  • Impossible Owls.
  • Squishy details.
  • Taking on an apprenticeship with a nobel prize winner.
  • The Japanese Self-Defense Force.
  • Dressing in bee keeper outfits and hitting each other with sticks.
  • Buying swords for your right wing ultra nationalist militia with the proceeds of your prize-winning literature.
  • Exhorting the troops to reinstate the emperor of Japan but nobody can hear you because there's a helicopter flying overhead.
  • A poster of a kitten next to a poster of a samurai, with diametrically opposed mantras about how you ought to handle failure.
  • Topics that leave you speechless.
  • Founder Brain.
  • Debunking a thing from philosophy.
  • The Philosophy of Reversing a Linked List.
  • The alternate universe where Banksy is a totalitarian dictator.
  • Vladimir Putin tagging up the streets of Bristol in the 90s.
  • Top hat, eyeball and coattails.
  • The Residents of Theseus.
  • Rednex.
  • David Bowie starring as Tesla in The Prestige and self-driving off the set.
  • The percentage of Teslas on the street
  • Nice Stylized T as a Screw Shirt.
  • Brainstorming places to hide in Copenhagen.
  • The problem of how to define the bounds of the hide and seek legal play field.
  • Playing hide and seek and knocking on a stranger's door and asking if you can hide in their house.
  • Knocking on the door of the company that moved into the building your company was in six years ago, asking to use the conference room because you're six years late for a meeting.
  • Journey to the End of the Night.
  • Playing music and speaking in riddles.
  • At what point it becomes morally correct to join the zombies.
  • Why is it okay to name a thing after another thing? Why is it okay to name a band after someone else's song?
  • Whether Skibidi Toilet has been cool, is currently cool, will become cool temporarily, or will become cool and stay forever.
  • A meme based on a Youtube thing.
  • Dadaist comedy Internet videos made in Garry's Mod.
  • Changing the head so it's not owned by Valve.
  • Generations starting the alphabet over, like hurricane names.
  • Turn of the millennium coffee shop war stories.
  • Drinking coffee at 2 AM on January 1st, 2000, looking out the window and waiting for the satellites to come crashing down.
  • Tech folks successfully convincing people that the Y2K bug is a problem, but not what the problem actually was.
  • What the Y2K bug was and how we solved it.
  • The Corolla Must Have Control.
  • The phone is too eager and the car is too greedy.
  • The phone and the bluetooth speaker agreeing to connect, and isn't there somebody you forgot to ask??
  • We invented this new thing but we don't know what it's for. Let's try to solve every problem with it and see if anything sticks.
  • Everybody migrating to TempleOS to get away from LLMs.
  • A lightweight operating system designed to be the Third Temple from the Hebrew bible.
  • Writing to your colleague to retract the continuum hypothesizing.
  • God's Chosen Programmer.
  • Off-Topic Lords.
  • A poem on the back of a bag of carrots.
  • A poem having been added to a bag of carrots by a scoundrel.
  • How many carrots you need to eat before you can be called a carrot man.
  • Explaining hidden tracks by first explaining that music used to come in this form called "albums."
  • If you have topics to talk about, we have a show for that, you don't put it on a hidden track on a CD in the 1990s.
  • Living to regret your self-own.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Ben
  • Avery

Topics:

  • The Mishima Incident, in which one of the most famous authors in Japan created his own private militia of young men, attempted to overthrow the government and, upon failing, committed ritual suicide.
  • City-wide game of hide and seek
  • How to stick it to bad Bluetooth actors
  • The Carrotman's Lament, by E.L. Hubert
    • https://x.com/sweetstench/status/1724958011754504568
    • Esper says: "Avery’s anecdote about the carrot poem being something he’d do in high school reminded me of something I did in high school, where I took the song 'The Cha Cha Slide' and removed every instance of 'slide to the right' and added a bunch of 'slide to the left' so that people eventually collapsed into the wall. I got to do it at a little party with friends, and it paid off nicely."

Microtopics:

  • Where to play some crosswords.
  • Cruciverbalism.
  • Putting the black squares where the letters don't go.
  • Putting structural jokes in your crossword puzzles.
  • The cleverer the gimmick, the less fun the crossword puzzle.
  • Talking into your phone's transcription software during a five hour drive and having five hours of gibberish at the end of it.
  • Fifth caller wins a t-shirt!
  • Impossible Owls.
  • Squishy details.
  • Taking on an apprenticeship with a nobel prize winner.
  • The Japanese Self-Defense Force.
  • Dressing in bee keeper outfits and hitting each other with sticks.
  • Buying swords for your right wing ultra nationalist militia with the proceeds of your prize-winning literature.
  • Exhorting the troops to reinstate the emperor of Japan but nobody can hear you because there's a helicopter flying overhead.
  • A poster of a kitten next to a poster of a samurai, with diametrically opposed mantras about how you ought to handle failure.
  • Topics that leave you speechless.
  • Founder Brain.
  • Debunking a thing from philosophy.
  • The Philosophy of Reversing a Linked List.
  • The alternate universe where Banksy is a totalitarian dictator.
  • Vladimir Putin tagging up the streets of Bristol in the 90s.
  • Top hat, eyeball and coattails.
  • The Residents of Theseus.
  • Rednex.
  • David Bowie starring as Tesla in The Prestige and self-driving off the set.
  • The percentage of Teslas on the street
  • Nice Stylized T as a Screw Shirt.
  • Brainstorming places to hide in Copenhagen.
  • The problem of how to define the bounds of the hide and seek legal play field.
  • Playing hide and seek and knocking on a stranger's door and asking if you can hide in their house.
  • Knocking on the door of the company that moved into the building your company was in six years ago, asking to use the conference room because you're six years late for a meeting.
  • Journey to the End of the Night.
  • Playing music and speaking in riddles.
  • At what point it becomes morally correct to join the zombies.
  • Why is it okay to name a thing after another thing? Why is it okay to name a band after someone else's song?
  • Whether Skibidi Toilet has been cool, is currently cool, will become cool temporarily, or will become cool and stay forever.
  • A meme based on a Youtube thing.
  • Dadaist comedy Internet videos made in Garry's Mod.
  • Changing the head so it's not owned by Valve.
  • Generations starting the alphabet over, like hurricane names.
  • Turn of the millennium coffee shop war stories.
  • Drinking coffee at 2 AM on January 1st, 2000, looking out the window and waiting for the satellites to come crashing down.
  • Tech folks successfully convincing people that the Y2K bug is a problem, but not what the problem actually was.
  • What the Y2K bug was and how we solved it.
  • The Corolla Must Have Control.
  • The phone is too eager and the car is too greedy.
  • The phone and the bluetooth speaker agreeing to connect, and isn't there somebody you forgot to ask??
  • We invented this new thing but we don't know what it's for. Let's try to solve every problem with it and see if anything sticks.
  • Everybody migrating to TempleOS to get away from LLMs.
  • A lightweight operating system designed to be the Third Temple from the Hebrew bible.
  • Writing to your colleague to retract the continuum hypothesizing.
  • God's Chosen Programmer.
  • Off-Topic Lords.
  • A poem on the back of a bag of carrots.
  • A poem having been added to a bag of carrots by a scoundrel.
  • How many carrots you need to eat before you can be called a carrot man.
  • Explaining hidden tracks by first explaining that music used to come in this form called "albums."
  • If you have topics to talk about, we have a show for that, you don't put it on a hidden track on a CD in the 1990s.
  • Living to regret your self-own.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+riG-fCWe ]]> Jim Stormdancer 306. You Wouldn't Believe the Brutes They Make https://topiclords.com/you-wouldnt-believe-the-brutes-they-make 8ae4534c-f845-4674-8b01-3a1c8ef603bd Mon, 01 Sep 2025 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Xalavier and Cort. We discuss the coolest instrument to give a child, what happened to sound lasers?, appearing canes, and The Story of Mel 1:06:06 true Lords:

Topics:

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.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

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

]]> Lords:

Topics:

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

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+gtZMDrCT ]]> Jim Stormdancer 305. Phlegmletting https://topiclords.com/phlegmletting ca88f96f-526e-4687-a21e-741578108617 Mon, 25 Aug 2025 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Abby and Sid. We discuss reading the diabetes manual, saying vegetables instead of cussin', Winston punching his tooth out, If I Ran the Circus (excerpt) by Dr. Seuss, and reminding yourself of all the PS2 games you hated. 1:16:09 true Lords:

Topics:

  • Reading about type 1 diabetes
  • Saying vegetables instead of cussin'
  • 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.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

  • Reading about type 1 diabetes
  • Saying vegetables instead of cussin'
  • 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

]]> Lords:

Topics:

  • Reading about type 1 diabetes
  • Saying vegetables instead of cussin'
  • 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

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+wPPnl2vm ]]> Jim Stormdancer 304. Turn on the MacLachlan https://topiclords.com/turn-on-the-maclachlan 85caf6d7-9999-4d2a-b63f-a13f1ab03e43 Mon, 18 Aug 2025 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Andrew and Brandon. We discuss high school pep band bangers, why some actors can't carry a b-movie but others can, what do these white rings on the Microbrute mean?, Medley by Louis Phillips, and things you can eat in your garden that you might not expect 1:07:26 true Lords:

Topics:

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
]]> Lords:

Topics:

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

]]> Lords:

Topics:

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

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+GH2Mi1kv ]]> Jim Stormdancer 303. A System of People Doing Stuff and Being Weirdos https://topiclords.com/a-system-of-people-doing-stuff-and-being-weirdos c514abe3-ee04-4a08-9f5f-3a4fd47bde31 Mon, 11 Aug 2025 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: JP and Styger. We discuss the nature of Mario vs. Super Mario, Hot Defensive Bee Ball, solving all 25 million 5x5 nonograms, Poem Seen in a Motel Fan by Alberto Blanco, werecreature logistics, and The Ball is Back. 1:06:04 true Lords:

Topics:

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.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

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

]]> Lords:

Topics:

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

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+T1rUulpB ]]> Jim Stormdancer 302. Frog Fractions 2 OST 2: Still Croakin' https://topiclords.com/frog-fractions-2-ost-2-still-croakin 4f74eb0b-f13b-4937-9de0-ad00ae589314 Mon, 04 Aug 2025 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Kory and Ryan. We discuss incorrect facts they teach you in school, remaking your game yet again, accidentally finding a cat on vacation, and Being Boring by Wendy Cope. 1:22:06 true Lords:

  • Kory
  • Ryan

Topics:

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.
]]> Lords:

  • Kory
  • Ryan

Topics:

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

]]> Lords:

  • Kory
  • Ryan

Topics:

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

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+UlEowa_q ]]> Jim Stormdancer 301. For Those Who Are Glucose Curious https://topiclords.com/for-those-who-are-glucose-curious 978a627b-b702-4bdb-8c63-f232f48c49b5 Mon, 28 Jul 2025 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Wacy and Chris. We discuss the mysterious BART smell between 12th st. Oakland and West Oakland, glucose monitors, Minecraft, and The Earth Wants You. 56:46 true Lords:

  • Wacy
  • Chris

Topics:

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.
]]> Lords:

  • Wacy
  • Chris

Topics:

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

]]> Lords:

  • Wacy
  • Chris

Topics:

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

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+NlOCBApR ]]> Jim Stormdancer 300. Dave's Kid Doesn't Know How To Spit https://topiclords.com/daves-kid-doesnt-know-how-to-spit 691b157e-7410-4b18-b05b-181635d9b6d7 Mon, 21 Jul 2025 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Jenni and Tyriq. We discuss internal monologue soundboards, whether it sucks that Ash wants to be the very best, the different ways people play games, friendship as a skill, and which element is best for bending? 1:07:26 true 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.
]]> 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

]]> 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

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+p1C03MBt ]]> Jim Stormdancer 299. Skin Fortress With Armed Idiot https://topiclords.com/skin-fortress-with-armed-idiot 9108f664-14df-477b-9345-80e3a47f698b Mon, 14 Jul 2025 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Jenni and Robb. We discuss multiple people responding with the same mystifying emoji, role-playing with a four year old about stealing Toxic Waste candy and lying to the cops about it, choosing to not rent a Playstation, Hints by Atari Games, and getting an Osia 2 bone-anchored hearing aid. 1:03:53 true Lords:

  • Jenni
  • Robb

Topics:

  • The phenomenon where multiple people respond with the same mystifying emoji
  • 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
  • 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.
]]> Lords:

  • Jenni
  • Robb

Topics:

  • The phenomenon where multiple people respond with the same mystifying emoji
  • 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
  • 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

]]> Lords:

  • Jenni
  • Robb

Topics:

  • The phenomenon where multiple people respond with the same mystifying emoji
  • 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
  • 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

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+Lt9QgrZU ]]> Jim Stormdancer 298. Rawdogging Life https://topiclords.com/rawdogging-life b2be8849-4b59-4e0b-9311-6ce8da5cca33 Mon, 07 Jul 2025 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Mark and Shirley. We discuss Music League, shaping the head like a Japanese watermelon, Kugelmugel, Welcome to Holland by Emily Perl Kingsley, and using drugs in 2025 1:23:03 true Lords:

Topics:

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.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

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

]]> Lords:

Topics:

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

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+cF03Mvvc ]]> Jim Stormdancer 297. Grimace Exploded, Covering 70,000 People https://topiclords.com/grimace-exploded-covering-70000-people 68f71355-3d6b-4442-acee-c5ff97131ca9 Mon, 30 Jun 2025 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Erica and Judy. We discuss the Pantone college experience, why everyone with superpowers is a crime fighter or a criminal, metal utensils, Grand Avenue by Ron Koertge, and spicy toothpaste 1:00:03 true Lords:

Topics:

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.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

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

]]> Lords:

Topics:

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

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+gYnh1tBl ]]> Jim Stormdancer 296. Do You Know About the Sun? https://topiclords.com/do-you-know-about-the-sun cbbe72d8-3c4c-4dfd-aae8-2718bfe383d2 Mon, 23 Jun 2025 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: John and Esper. We discuss Chess the Musical, live television as the most exciting thing humans have invented, Blaseball's multi million dollar VC funding, Pad, Pad by Stevie Smith, RSS for text, and officiating weddings for your friends. 1:20:24 true The video of Charles Martinet puppeteering Mario around the screen:

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
  • 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.
]]> The video of Charles Martinet puppeteering Mario around the screen:

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
  • 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

]]> The video of Charles Martinet puppeteering Mario around the screen:

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
  • 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

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+vCxFFRH4 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 295. Fantasy Malware https://topiclords.com/fantasy-malware 3f54f77d-5f7b-4fcc-88d4-54c1f045eff3 Mon, 16 Jun 2025 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Andrew and Andrew. We discuss finally making a 3D game after using only PICO-8 for 10 years, PICO-8 screen carts, Picotron viruses, and Quest by kittenmaster. 1:04:47 true Lords:

  • Andrew
  • Andrew

Topics:

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.
]]> Lords:

  • Andrew
  • Andrew

Topics:

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

]]> Lords:

  • Andrew
  • Andrew

Topics:

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

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+Ms7Ely9M ]]> Jim Stormdancer 294. Click on This Ad To Save This Child https://topiclords.com/click-on-this-ad-to-save-this-child 2603757e-3d5b-42d6-bd3a-19303d69339a Mon, 09 Jun 2025 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Alex and Shannon. We discuss the rapid proliferation of identical mobile games, randomly generated time traveler loadout, turning your body into 3D printer filament after you die, and Girls Only Want One Thing, by Isabel Correra 1:00:15 true Lords:

  • Alex
  • Shannon

Topics:

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.
]]> Lords:

  • Alex
  • Shannon

Topics:

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

]]> Lords:

  • Alex
  • Shannon

Topics:

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

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+CX5cl49M ]]> Jim Stormdancer 293. Pasting the Sickos Face Back and Forth Forever https://topiclords.com/pasting-the-sickos-face-back-and-forth-forever d957c321-9bc4-4991-8474-5fc77f22a2ce Mon, 02 Jun 2025 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Kory and Andy. We discuss whim-based coding, making friends on the internet, the oscilloscope demo, Peripheriques Like Halos by Robert Montgomery, enhancing a party with a bespoke bar menu, and creating a threatening windows batch file and leaving it on the desktop to frighten an application into not crashing 1:09:32 true Lords:

  • Kory
  • Andy

Topics:

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.
]]> Lords:

  • Kory
  • Andy

Topics:

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

]]> Lords:

  • Kory
  • Andy

Topics:

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

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+9jwaoHLk ]]> Jim Stormdancer 292. A Dewey Decimal System, but for Libraries https://topiclords.com/a-dewey-decimal-system-but-for-libraries 13123412-8a9a-4e2e-9592-49850a895f4d Mon, 26 May 2025 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Alexander and Chall. We discuss having an address after not having an address, slopsquatting, book curses, This Boke ys Myne by Eleanor Worcester, the David Lynch random number generator, and game designers going into public policy. 1:04:47 true Lords:

Topics:

  • Having an address after not having an address
  • Slopsquatting
  • Book curses
  • This boke ys myne, Eleanor Worcester
  • 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.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

  • Having an address after not having an address
  • Slopsquatting
  • Book curses
  • This boke ys myne, Eleanor Worcester
  • 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

]]> Lords:

Topics:

  • Having an address after not having an address
  • Slopsquatting
  • Book curses
  • This boke ys myne, Eleanor Worcester
  • 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

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+j3kcVion ]]> Jim Stormdancer 291. Nair and Nnail: Keratin Erasers https://topiclords.com/nair-and-nnail-keratin-erasers 1868fe09-0898-4b02-a803-c71919ed56e5 Mon, 19 May 2025 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Alexei, Evan. We discuss silt clouds and 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?, and The Ailing Mirror-Smith. 1:08:47 true Lords:

  • Alexei
  • Evan

Topics:

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.
]]> Lords:

  • Alexei
  • Evan

Topics:

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

]]> Lords:

  • Alexei
  • Evan

Topics:

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

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+-q0ni12D ]]> Jim Stormdancer 290. Forever Games are Just Rude https://topiclords.com/forever-games-are-just-rude 96db5fb0-7a99-4e3d-9d6d-4f185e42c303 Mon, 12 May 2025 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Lena and Droqen. We discuss killing gameplay, the thrill of firefighting on live service games, and how to stop, and It was D and K who Showed me the Way. 1:02:12 true Lords:

  • Lena
  • Droqen

Topics:

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!
]]> Lords:

  • Lena
  • Droqen

Topics:

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

]]> Lords:

  • Lena
  • Droqen

Topics:

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

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+iVkvn_5_ ]]> Jim Stormdancer 289. It's Pronounced VRML https://topiclords.com/its-pronounced-vrml 80306066-1119-4df7-b926-7cf575479f81 Mon, 05 May 2025 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: CisHetKayFaber, Andrew. We discuss people saying things in front of janitors, revisiting a creative work after 20 years, naming conventions in the demo scene vs. the ZZT scene, How to Be Perfect by Ron Padgett, and Floops, a 3D cartoon character from the mid-90s internet. 1:06:59 true Lords:

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
  • 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.
]]> Lords:

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
  • 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

]]> Lords:

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
  • 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

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+Nh-v_Eem ]]> Jim Stormdancer 288. Nobody Has Poop on Their Balls on The Astral Plane https://topiclords.com/nobody-has-poop-on-their-balls-on-the-astral-plane 3dc368bc-6cdb-4f2f-a926-7f52d18c9fe1 Mon, 28 Apr 2025 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Jenni and Rebecca. We discuss getting emotionally ambushed by a children's toy piano, 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, and Ask Me About Looms in Video Games. 1:14:04 true Lords:

Topics:

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.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

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

]]> Lords:

Topics:

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

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+bvsrf2xb ]]> Jim Stormdancer 287. Drive It Like You Hate It https://topiclords.com/drive-it-like-you-hate-it f8b9b522-5f29-450a-80f7-3baa72155c66 Mon, 21 Apr 2025 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Ben and Andrew. We discuss Super Nintendo World's theming, the ABCs of Style - A Guide to Plain English, renting game consoles, Matsuo Bashô: Frog Haiku, and pixel art impressionism. 1:03:32 true Lords:

  • Ben
  • Andrew

Topics:

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.
]]> Lords:

  • Ben
  • Andrew

Topics:

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

]]> Lords:

  • Ben
  • Andrew

Topics:

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

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+oFra8Cuh ]]> Jim Stormdancer 286. A Kangaroo the Size of Two Kangaroos https://topiclords.com/a-kangaroo-the-size-of-two-kangaroos 9b78005c-f222-41db-ae62-a6517bf83e67 Mon, 14 Apr 2025 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: John and Tyriq. We discuss not knowing whether having twins is harder than having one kid, the pros and cons of living on a supercontinent, the 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, and Dippin' Dots except each dot is a tiny burger 1:02:31 true Lords:

Topics:

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.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

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.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

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.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+1Yy-Z34l ]]> Jim Stormdancer 285. Poop Songs for Roy https://topiclords.com/poop-songs-for-roy 46fcd343-8a1d-414e-bcf8-b0a341295cec Mon, 07 Apr 2025 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Erica and Jenni. We discuss the chaos you missed, having a baby as a set of hobbies you are expected to engage in full-time, whether people live longer in Greece and Japan or whether they just have more pension fraud, Too Many Women Become Desperate, and whether your kid will find out about Cocomelon even if you never tell them 1:07:21 true 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
  • 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
]]> 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
  • 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

Support Topic Lords

]]> 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
  • 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

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+5OQTkyLE ]]> Jim Stormdancer 284. Spotting a Wild Misogyny https://topiclords.com/spotting-a-wild-misogyny b92e7f9b-b899-45ec-959d-08c0f0c59f4a Mon, 31 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Mitch and Nathan. We discuss Ursula LeGuin, Ryu Numbers and Tom Scott Numbers, how to get out of a chair, Have you seen the new show? by Orcboxer, and OUR DRAWINGS - PRINCESS MOVIE | Full Animation Film | Artist 1:17:54 true Lords:

Topics:

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.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

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.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

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.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+hPwiXrDC ]]> Jim Stormdancer 283. Dracula's Big Happy Polycule https://topiclords.com/draculas-big-happy-polycule ec2a5ac6-1666-48f3-b6d1-ee6137333f26 Mon, 24 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Dan and Daniel. We discuss whether Dracula could escape Groundhog Day, how to know if you're in a golden era, Indiana Jones is supposed to look good?? and Where the Heart Is by F.S. Yousaf 1:04:35 true Lords:

Topics:

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.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

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.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

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.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+TjvaG9Vs ]]> Jim Stormdancer 282. Check Out My Feetbook! https://topiclords.com/check-out-my-feetbook c0d14253-140e-41bb-b27f-b2c7370e315c Mon, 17 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Jeff and Danny. We discuss what's happening on Bluesky, using Google Earth and YouTube to rid myself of Nostalgia of Places you've lived, and Dad Talk: what do we do about porn? 1:11:01 true Lords:

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.
]]> Lords:

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.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

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.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+3511dEqs ]]> Jim Stormdancer 281. Mr. Nukem Was My Father https://topiclords.com/mr-nukem-was-my-father 138a8a14-143d-4158-a378-5260fb41af4d Mon, 10 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Stevie and Bri. We discuss 3D modeling and lack of visual imagination, cut-throat compounds (a linguistic specialty), Pocket Warwick and other lost software, For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper, by Joseph Fasano, and Colma's city motto. 1:06:54 true 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
  • 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.
]]> 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
  • 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.

Support Topic Lords

]]> 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
  • 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.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+6ZuMZjea ]]> Jim Stormdancer 280. How to Start an Ice Cream Shop (Probably) https://topiclords.com/how-to-start-an-ice-cream-shop-probably f1490691-1726-4913-950d-30cd1c8c48ce Mon, 03 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Andi and Casey. We discuss life hacks as communion with the divine, firing your computer, and childhood amnesia. 1:21:58 true 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.
]]> 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.

Support Topic Lords

]]> 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.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+BeT_SjYC ]]> Jim Stormdancer 279. Concrete Peanut Butter Condensate https://topiclords.com/concrete-peanut-butter-condensate a54a2052-edaf-40de-8713-acfd8a60f76e Mon, 24 Feb 2025 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Kory and James. We discuss ditching your eReader, Journey to the Planets, Send Me to Heaven, My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun, whether criminals are like peanut butter, and enjoying photography by making it as labor intensive as possible. 1:05:40 true Lords:

  • Kory
  • James

Topics:

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.
]]> Lords:

  • Kory
  • James

Topics:

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.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Kory
  • James

Topics:

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.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+GWyax6FB ]]> Jim Stormdancer 278. Successfully Talking https://topiclords.com/successfully-talking 4f0a7504-8d1a-4acb-8a17-3d5fc507e7d4 Mon, 17 Feb 2025 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Avery and Linker. We discuss Twin Peaks, Myxozoa, how storytelling is failing us, Bones and Shadows by John Philip Johnson, and novelizing films that originated as novels. 56:28 true Lords:

  • Avery
  • Linker

Topics:

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.
]]> Lords:

  • Avery
  • Linker

Topics:

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

]]> Lords:

  • Avery
  • Linker

Topics:

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

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+EP578-pO ]]> Jim Stormdancer 277. Tunic 2, for Lords Only https://topiclords.com/tunic-2-for-lords-only 9a093686-66dc-4846-9890-fffbb52e0574 Mon, 10 Feb 2025 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Andrew and Kate. We discuss designing a boring game, whether you should let your friend convince you to play WoW, how to melt chocolate, Kate's Wallace and Gromit song, VFX is like cooking; game design is like baking, and "Looksmaxxing" 1:14:57 true Lords:

  • Andrew
  • Kate

Topics:

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.
]]> Lords:

  • Andrew
  • Kate

Topics:

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

]]> Lords:

  • Andrew
  • Kate

Topics:

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

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+VZ4LCURO ]]> Jim Stormdancer 276. The Yukon Territories Foodie Scene https://topiclords.com/the-yukon-territories-foodie-scene 600378fe-cdc0-4371-a802-18c10316d0c1 Mon, 03 Feb 2025 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Remy and Abhi. We discuss why food tastes better outside of Canada, whether biased history is better, making a new game console when we haven't even finished the ones we already have, Puranaanooru, and IP you'd like to adapt. 1:08:21 true Lords:

Topics:

  • Why does food taste better outside of Canada?
  • Xander asks: "Biased history is better"
  • Is it fair to make a new game console when we haven't finished the ones we already have?
  • Puranaanooru
  • What's one IP you would like to adapt or work with?

Microtopics:

  • An image that allows you to attribute the text above it to the character in the image.
  • Knower. (The one who knows things.)
  • Losing your faith in God until you see the clip of Mario Kart showing 24 starting positions.
  • Visual novels with contextualized minigames.
  • Enjoying food more abroad.
  • Orbiting the United States.
  • Which state makes the best dosas.
  • The best Asian food ten minutes south of Vancouver.
  • Waves of immigration establishing generations of restaurants.
  • When there are finally enough immigrants in a city that one of them might open a restaurant to serve food to other immigrants.
  • Vancouver's restaurant licensing situation.
  • Vancouver's medallion system for food trucks.
  • No Good Pizza In My Back Yard!
  • NAID 96.
  • Jim's personal experience with Canadian food.
  • Whether it's what it sounds like.
  • Capturing the history of written language in your game.
  • The constant flux of our understanding of history.
  • Xander-biased history.
  • A very happy self-described sad boy.
  • Squeezing every last great game out of the Atari 2600 before creating a new game console.
  • Hoarding Pico-8 games on your desktop.
  • The golden era of video game development effort-to-return ratio.
  • New ways to make games look more expensive.
  • Outrageously high margins that you are not expected to fill.
  • Games that would still be fun if the graphics were worse.
  • Giving your PS5 to your dad so you can buy a PS5 Pro.
  • Brain hacking yourself.
  • PS5 Pro Max.
  • Realizing you don't need to upgrade your game console or in fact any consumer electronics ever again.
  • The Fairchild Channel F Pro, featuring S-Video.
  • The Dave the Diver revolution.
  • Failing enough that you decide to change.
  • Fortnite Money.
  • You can't read ancient Tamil?!
  • A small white lizard stuck to the wagon axle hub's spoke.
  • The purpose of art. (For people to examine it in 2000 years and find things out about you.)
  • Finding out what dead people thought.
  • Finding the time to be cruel.
  • Shocking Adventure Time moments.
  • Trusting what people write about themselves.
  • Finally understanding Xander Bias.
  • A love letter to Indian cinema.
  • Things Metroid Prime does to make you feel like you're inside a space suit.
  • Waiting for the Metroid IP to expire so you can make your Metroid fan game in your extreme old age.
  • Continuity nerds.
  • Reboot.
  • Vancouver-coded fictional cities.
  • Telus Storyhive.
  • An IP address you're dying to do.
  • Shouldn't Zelda and Sokoban be the same genre?
  • Atari 50 vs. UFO 50.
  • A murder mystery that you solve by playing video games.
  • Why the CBC is like that.
  • Brown Money.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

  • Why does food taste better outside of Canada?
  • Xander asks: "Biased history is better"
  • Is it fair to make a new game console when we haven't finished the ones we already have?
  • Puranaanooru
  • What's one IP you would like to adapt or work with?

Microtopics:

  • An image that allows you to attribute the text above it to the character in the image.
  • Knower. (The one who knows things.)
  • Losing your faith in God until you see the clip of Mario Kart showing 24 starting positions.
  • Visual novels with contextualized minigames.
  • Enjoying food more abroad.
  • Orbiting the United States.
  • Which state makes the best dosas.
  • The best Asian food ten minutes south of Vancouver.
  • Waves of immigration establishing generations of restaurants.
  • When there are finally enough immigrants in a city that one of them might open a restaurant to serve food to other immigrants.
  • Vancouver's restaurant licensing situation.
  • Vancouver's medallion system for food trucks.
  • No Good Pizza In My Back Yard!
  • NAID 96.
  • Jim's personal experience with Canadian food.
  • Whether it's what it sounds like.
  • Capturing the history of written language in your game.
  • The constant flux of our understanding of history.
  • Xander-biased history.
  • A very happy self-described sad boy.
  • Squeezing every last great game out of the Atari 2600 before creating a new game console.
  • Hoarding Pico-8 games on your desktop.
  • The golden era of video game development effort-to-return ratio.
  • New ways to make games look more expensive.
  • Outrageously high margins that you are not expected to fill.
  • Games that would still be fun if the graphics were worse.
  • Giving your PS5 to your dad so you can buy a PS5 Pro.
  • Brain hacking yourself.
  • PS5 Pro Max.
  • Realizing you don't need to upgrade your game console or in fact any consumer electronics ever again.
  • The Fairchild Channel F Pro, featuring S-Video.
  • The Dave the Diver revolution.
  • Failing enough that you decide to change.
  • Fortnite Money.
  • You can't read ancient Tamil?!
  • A small white lizard stuck to the wagon axle hub's spoke.
  • The purpose of art. (For people to examine it in 2000 years and find things out about you.)
  • Finding out what dead people thought.
  • Finding the time to be cruel.
  • Shocking Adventure Time moments.
  • Trusting what people write about themselves.
  • Finally understanding Xander Bias.
  • A love letter to Indian cinema.
  • Things Metroid Prime does to make you feel like you're inside a space suit.
  • Waiting for the Metroid IP to expire so you can make your Metroid fan game in your extreme old age.
  • Continuity nerds.
  • Reboot.
  • Vancouver-coded fictional cities.
  • Telus Storyhive.
  • An IP address you're dying to do.
  • Shouldn't Zelda and Sokoban be the same genre?
  • Atari 50 vs. UFO 50.
  • A murder mystery that you solve by playing video games.
  • Why the CBC is like that.
  • Brown Money.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

  • Why does food taste better outside of Canada?
  • Xander asks: "Biased history is better"
  • Is it fair to make a new game console when we haven't finished the ones we already have?
  • Puranaanooru
  • What's one IP you would like to adapt or work with?

Microtopics:

  • An image that allows you to attribute the text above it to the character in the image.
  • Knower. (The one who knows things.)
  • Losing your faith in God until you see the clip of Mario Kart showing 24 starting positions.
  • Visual novels with contextualized minigames.
  • Enjoying food more abroad.
  • Orbiting the United States.
  • Which state makes the best dosas.
  • The best Asian food ten minutes south of Vancouver.
  • Waves of immigration establishing generations of restaurants.
  • When there are finally enough immigrants in a city that one of them might open a restaurant to serve food to other immigrants.
  • Vancouver's restaurant licensing situation.
  • Vancouver's medallion system for food trucks.
  • No Good Pizza In My Back Yard!
  • NAID 96.
  • Jim's personal experience with Canadian food.
  • Whether it's what it sounds like.
  • Capturing the history of written language in your game.
  • The constant flux of our understanding of history.
  • Xander-biased history.
  • A very happy self-described sad boy.
  • Squeezing every last great game out of the Atari 2600 before creating a new game console.
  • Hoarding Pico-8 games on your desktop.
  • The golden era of video game development effort-to-return ratio.
  • New ways to make games look more expensive.
  • Outrageously high margins that you are not expected to fill.
  • Games that would still be fun if the graphics were worse.
  • Giving your PS5 to your dad so you can buy a PS5 Pro.
  • Brain hacking yourself.
  • PS5 Pro Max.
  • Realizing you don't need to upgrade your game console or in fact any consumer electronics ever again.
  • The Fairchild Channel F Pro, featuring S-Video.
  • The Dave the Diver revolution.
  • Failing enough that you decide to change.
  • Fortnite Money.
  • You can't read ancient Tamil?!
  • A small white lizard stuck to the wagon axle hub's spoke.
  • The purpose of art. (For people to examine it in 2000 years and find things out about you.)
  • Finding out what dead people thought.
  • Finding the time to be cruel.
  • Shocking Adventure Time moments.
  • Trusting what people write about themselves.
  • Finally understanding Xander Bias.
  • A love letter to Indian cinema.
  • Things Metroid Prime does to make you feel like you're inside a space suit.
  • Waiting for the Metroid IP to expire so you can make your Metroid fan game in your extreme old age.
  • Continuity nerds.
  • Reboot.
  • Vancouver-coded fictional cities.
  • Telus Storyhive.
  • An IP address you're dying to do.
  • Shouldn't Zelda and Sokoban be the same genre?
  • Atari 50 vs. UFO 50.
  • A murder mystery that you solve by playing video games.
  • Why the CBC is like that.
  • Brown Money.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+UlxykUQ8 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 275. Angora Semiconductors https://topiclords.com/angora-semiconductors a7b66878-06fc-4a2d-a1f1-c6c80c8cfdc7 Mon, 27 Jan 2025 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Maxx and Chall. We discuss the Steam Deck, the puzzle of the Wikipedia "did you know" section, the neuroplasticity theory of why we dream, and She Needed a Hobby, by Maxx 1:05:31 true Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Comic Fury.
  • The most mediocre comic.
  • Mildreth of the Night.
  • Collage vs. ransom note.
  • A squirrel that finds a way to contact aliens.
  • Using Redbubble to host your webcomic.
  • Direct-to-cassette podcast episodes.
  • A co-op game that makes you raise your voice.
  • Overcooked but it's a train.
  • The part of the train that keeps you moist and warm.
  • How to run Pico-8 on the Steam Deck.
  • Not wanting to get a Steam Deck because you might drop it on your face.
  • How many liters a parrot is.
  • One of those massage beds where your face goes in a little hole and your hands dangle to reach the controls of the Steam Deck that's lying on the ground.
  • Waterproofing the Vive.
  • Games Done Pwick.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog looking like he ought to be a progress bar but he definitely isn't.
  • Emulators: you can do that!
  • Extremely intricate marble runs.
  • Retiring so you have enough time to configure the warping on your enormous loom.
  • The pleasant monotony of weaving vs. the meticulous craft of warping.
  • Tuning 1000 pianos at once.
  • Using a drop spindle to turn wool into thread.
  • Spinning wool straight from the rabbit.
  • Breeding for maximum stats on every axis.
  • Facts that are not particularly fun.
  • Seeing what the Wikipedia home page looks like on January 2nd, 2525.
  • Why is a mountain landscape?
  • Make-your-own-fun fun facts.
  • Who is this man? Why did he steal a horse?
  • Clicking on the nomination wizard.
  • Five Clicks to Jesus and other Wikipedia routing games.
  • Getting really into patterns and categories.
  • Shoehorning your favorite pop culture thing into everywhere you can fit it.
  • Mock Guffin.
  • Breaking down a story into a list of tropes.
  • Screen savers for the visual cortex.
  • Finding stories in the noise.
  • Different levels of the thing where you see patterns on the back of your eyelids.
  • How much can you see behind your eyes?
  • Running experiments on your own physiology.
  • New places on your body you haven't pressed yet.
  • Strobe lights for your ears.
  • Covering the speaker on your phone because you're too place to turn down the volume.
  • How text looks in your dreams.
  • Latching onto the idea of a story.
  • Tasting a lot of math problems before you go to sleep.
  • A gross crinkled dog texture.
  • Accidentally crocheting so much that you remake the universe.
  • The names of such unthinkable numbers.
  • A crochet pattern for an infinite Mobius strip.
  • Cool yarns from the local crafting store.
  • The ability to stick with a hobby.
  • Crocheting a functional internal combustion engine.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Comic Fury.
  • The most mediocre comic.
  • Mildreth of the Night.
  • Collage vs. ransom note.
  • A squirrel that finds a way to contact aliens.
  • Using Redbubble to host your webcomic.
  • Direct-to-cassette podcast episodes.
  • A co-op game that makes you raise your voice.
  • Overcooked but it's a train.
  • The part of the train that keeps you moist and warm.
  • How to run Pico-8 on the Steam Deck.
  • Not wanting to get a Steam Deck because you might drop it on your face.
  • How many liters a parrot is.
  • One of those massage beds where your face goes in a little hole and your hands dangle to reach the controls of the Steam Deck that's lying on the ground.
  • Waterproofing the Vive.
  • Games Done Pwick.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog looking like he ought to be a progress bar but he definitely isn't.
  • Emulators: you can do that!
  • Extremely intricate marble runs.
  • Retiring so you have enough time to configure the warping on your enormous loom.
  • The pleasant monotony of weaving vs. the meticulous craft of warping.
  • Tuning 1000 pianos at once.
  • Using a drop spindle to turn wool into thread.
  • Spinning wool straight from the rabbit.
  • Breeding for maximum stats on every axis.
  • Facts that are not particularly fun.
  • Seeing what the Wikipedia home page looks like on January 2nd, 2525.
  • Why is a mountain landscape?
  • Make-your-own-fun fun facts.
  • Who is this man? Why did he steal a horse?
  • Clicking on the nomination wizard.
  • Five Clicks to Jesus and other Wikipedia routing games.
  • Getting really into patterns and categories.
  • Shoehorning your favorite pop culture thing into everywhere you can fit it.
  • Mock Guffin.
  • Breaking down a story into a list of tropes.
  • Screen savers for the visual cortex.
  • Finding stories in the noise.
  • Different levels of the thing where you see patterns on the back of your eyelids.
  • How much can you see behind your eyes?
  • Running experiments on your own physiology.
  • New places on your body you haven't pressed yet.
  • Strobe lights for your ears.
  • Covering the speaker on your phone because you're too place to turn down the volume.
  • How text looks in your dreams.
  • Latching onto the idea of a story.
  • Tasting a lot of math problems before you go to sleep.
  • A gross crinkled dog texture.
  • Accidentally crocheting so much that you remake the universe.
  • The names of such unthinkable numbers.
  • A crochet pattern for an infinite Mobius strip.
  • Cool yarns from the local crafting store.
  • The ability to stick with a hobby.
  • Crocheting a functional internal combustion engine.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Comic Fury.
  • The most mediocre comic.
  • Mildreth of the Night.
  • Collage vs. ransom note.
  • A squirrel that finds a way to contact aliens.
  • Using Redbubble to host your webcomic.
  • Direct-to-cassette podcast episodes.
  • A co-op game that makes you raise your voice.
  • Overcooked but it's a train.
  • The part of the train that keeps you moist and warm.
  • How to run Pico-8 on the Steam Deck.
  • Not wanting to get a Steam Deck because you might drop it on your face.
  • How many liters a parrot is.
  • One of those massage beds where your face goes in a little hole and your hands dangle to reach the controls of the Steam Deck that's lying on the ground.
  • Waterproofing the Vive.
  • Games Done Pwick.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog looking like he ought to be a progress bar but he definitely isn't.
  • Emulators: you can do that!
  • Extremely intricate marble runs.
  • Retiring so you have enough time to configure the warping on your enormous loom.
  • The pleasant monotony of weaving vs. the meticulous craft of warping.
  • Tuning 1000 pianos at once.
  • Using a drop spindle to turn wool into thread.
  • Spinning wool straight from the rabbit.
  • Breeding for maximum stats on every axis.
  • Facts that are not particularly fun.
  • Seeing what the Wikipedia home page looks like on January 2nd, 2525.
  • Why is a mountain landscape?
  • Make-your-own-fun fun facts.
  • Who is this man? Why did he steal a horse?
  • Clicking on the nomination wizard.
  • Five Clicks to Jesus and other Wikipedia routing games.
  • Getting really into patterns and categories.
  • Shoehorning your favorite pop culture thing into everywhere you can fit it.
  • Mock Guffin.
  • Breaking down a story into a list of tropes.
  • Screen savers for the visual cortex.
  • Finding stories in the noise.
  • Different levels of the thing where you see patterns on the back of your eyelids.
  • How much can you see behind your eyes?
  • Running experiments on your own physiology.
  • New places on your body you haven't pressed yet.
  • Strobe lights for your ears.
  • Covering the speaker on your phone because you're too place to turn down the volume.
  • How text looks in your dreams.
  • Latching onto the idea of a story.
  • Tasting a lot of math problems before you go to sleep.
  • A gross crinkled dog texture.
  • Accidentally crocheting so much that you remake the universe.
  • The names of such unthinkable numbers.
  • A crochet pattern for an infinite Mobius strip.
  • Cool yarns from the local crafting store.
  • The ability to stick with a hobby.
  • Crocheting a functional internal combustion engine.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+vloxGo8T ]]> Jim Stormdancer 274. Samuel Beckett's Animal Crossing Letters https://topiclords.com/samuel-becketts-animal-crossing-letters dccf902d-0ca1-4cca-888a-36962ee0bd09 Mon, 20 Jan 2025 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: John and Elena. We discuss potlock advent calendars, NES games that science says are bad, how animals read, this untitled breakup poem by ailbey 1:06:00 true Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Crispy Shrimp Balls.
  • What makes it Dim Sum?
  • Whether there's always a cart that you roll around.
  • Tapas Lords, a new ASMR podcast.
  • The Blade of Cutie Pants: a Very Cutie Christmas.
  • Christmas Dangerous Dave.
  • Here's a song. I'm going to scroll past that.
  • Stock footage of Godzilla attacks.
  • An album about making games in Kilk n Play.
  • Granny Cream's Hot Butter Ice Cream.
  • Jim's songs in the Hypnospace OST.
  • Knowing a lot of people just by hanging out and being entertaining.
  • Recognizing sounds by looking at them.
  • Tea and Jam Advent Calendars.
  • Tippy Tops.
  • 3D-printed animals with wiggly arms.
  • Taking the economics of Halloween and applying it to Christmas.
  • Stocking Stuffers Every Day.
  • 365-day Advent Calendars.
  • Santa with a Fanta.
  • Showing Home Alone to a kid who already loves setting up traps.
  • An Advent Calendar filled with traps.
  • Never playing board games but opening up the boxes and playing with the pieces.
  • Fake Winstons.
  • Getting 2.5 trinkets from each person.
  • Half-Lego, Half-Chocolate.
  • Why your favorite NES games are terrible.
  • Shipping a game that's no good but damned if it doesn't exist.
  • A Failure of Science.
  • Rare game or Rare game?
  • The Treasure Master walk cycle.
  • The worst NES games with the best soundtracks.
  • British developers succeeding on the Commodore 64 but failing on the NES because people are willing to pay 6 quid for the latest Rob Hubbard track, but not $50.
  • Your neighbor who had Big Nose Freaks Out.
  • Punching the clues.
  • Buying the 3D version of Urban Champion on purpose.
  • Trying to go back to Super Monkey Ball.
  • Nostalgically revisiting your best Super Monkey Ball replays.
  • Accidentally transposing two digits and now you have a Super Monkey Ball world record.
  • Making local copies of videos you want to continue to exist.
  • Recognizing when something works for someone else but not you.
  • Writing letters to your animal neighbors.
  • The seven criteria to judge a letter.
  • How to safely write a letter about VVVVVV to your Animal Crossing neighbor.
  • Roleplaying James Joyce in Animal Crossing.
  • Teaching Animal Crossing a slur and then returning the cartridge to Gamestop.
  • Deciding that it's okay if local news stations freak out.
  • Taking joy in extremely mundane activities.
  • How you spend your moments and how you feel about them.
  • Watching TV so that in several decades you can go to a bar and find out who's the same age as you.
  • Practicing love by trying to love yourself.
  • The breakup song from the Wedding Singer.
  • Corollaries of aphantasia.
  • Blind people watching TV.
  • Learning to draw by studying human anatomy and proportions in detail and imagining the body kinesthetics.
  • Looney Tunes artists making faces in the mirror.
  • Knowing how bones go.
  • The Bone Book.
  • That's Topics!
]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Crispy Shrimp Balls.
  • What makes it Dim Sum?
  • Whether there's always a cart that you roll around.
  • Tapas Lords, a new ASMR podcast.
  • The Blade of Cutie Pants: a Very Cutie Christmas.
  • Christmas Dangerous Dave.
  • Here's a song. I'm going to scroll past that.
  • Stock footage of Godzilla attacks.
  • An album about making games in Kilk n Play.
  • Granny Cream's Hot Butter Ice Cream.
  • Jim's songs in the Hypnospace OST.
  • Knowing a lot of people just by hanging out and being entertaining.
  • Recognizing sounds by looking at them.
  • Tea and Jam Advent Calendars.
  • Tippy Tops.
  • 3D-printed animals with wiggly arms.
  • Taking the economics of Halloween and applying it to Christmas.
  • Stocking Stuffers Every Day.
  • 365-day Advent Calendars.
  • Santa with a Fanta.
  • Showing Home Alone to a kid who already loves setting up traps.
  • An Advent Calendar filled with traps.
  • Never playing board games but opening up the boxes and playing with the pieces.
  • Fake Winstons.
  • Getting 2.5 trinkets from each person.
  • Half-Lego, Half-Chocolate.
  • Why your favorite NES games are terrible.
  • Shipping a game that's no good but damned if it doesn't exist.
  • A Failure of Science.
  • Rare game or Rare game?
  • The Treasure Master walk cycle.
  • The worst NES games with the best soundtracks.
  • British developers succeeding on the Commodore 64 but failing on the NES because people are willing to pay 6 quid for the latest Rob Hubbard track, but not $50.
  • Your neighbor who had Big Nose Freaks Out.
  • Punching the clues.
  • Buying the 3D version of Urban Champion on purpose.
  • Trying to go back to Super Monkey Ball.
  • Nostalgically revisiting your best Super Monkey Ball replays.
  • Accidentally transposing two digits and now you have a Super Monkey Ball world record.
  • Making local copies of videos you want to continue to exist.
  • Recognizing when something works for someone else but not you.
  • Writing letters to your animal neighbors.
  • The seven criteria to judge a letter.
  • How to safely write a letter about VVVVVV to your Animal Crossing neighbor.
  • Roleplaying James Joyce in Animal Crossing.
  • Teaching Animal Crossing a slur and then returning the cartridge to Gamestop.
  • Deciding that it's okay if local news stations freak out.
  • Taking joy in extremely mundane activities.
  • How you spend your moments and how you feel about them.
  • Watching TV so that in several decades you can go to a bar and find out who's the same age as you.
  • Practicing love by trying to love yourself.
  • The breakup song from the Wedding Singer.
  • Corollaries of aphantasia.
  • Blind people watching TV.
  • Learning to draw by studying human anatomy and proportions in detail and imagining the body kinesthetics.
  • Looney Tunes artists making faces in the mirror.
  • Knowing how bones go.
  • The Bone Book.
  • That's Topics!

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Crispy Shrimp Balls.
  • What makes it Dim Sum?
  • Whether there's always a cart that you roll around.
  • Tapas Lords, a new ASMR podcast.
  • The Blade of Cutie Pants: a Very Cutie Christmas.
  • Christmas Dangerous Dave.
  • Here's a song. I'm going to scroll past that.
  • Stock footage of Godzilla attacks.
  • An album about making games in Kilk n Play.
  • Granny Cream's Hot Butter Ice Cream.
  • Jim's songs in the Hypnospace OST.
  • Knowing a lot of people just by hanging out and being entertaining.
  • Recognizing sounds by looking at them.
  • Tea and Jam Advent Calendars.
  • Tippy Tops.
  • 3D-printed animals with wiggly arms.
  • Taking the economics of Halloween and applying it to Christmas.
  • Stocking Stuffers Every Day.
  • 365-day Advent Calendars.
  • Santa with a Fanta.
  • Showing Home Alone to a kid who already loves setting up traps.
  • An Advent Calendar filled with traps.
  • Never playing board games but opening up the boxes and playing with the pieces.
  • Fake Winstons.
  • Getting 2.5 trinkets from each person.
  • Half-Lego, Half-Chocolate.
  • Why your favorite NES games are terrible.
  • Shipping a game that's no good but damned if it doesn't exist.
  • A Failure of Science.
  • Rare game or Rare game?
  • The Treasure Master walk cycle.
  • The worst NES games with the best soundtracks.
  • British developers succeeding on the Commodore 64 but failing on the NES because people are willing to pay 6 quid for the latest Rob Hubbard track, but not $50.
  • Your neighbor who had Big Nose Freaks Out.
  • Punching the clues.
  • Buying the 3D version of Urban Champion on purpose.
  • Trying to go back to Super Monkey Ball.
  • Nostalgically revisiting your best Super Monkey Ball replays.
  • Accidentally transposing two digits and now you have a Super Monkey Ball world record.
  • Making local copies of videos you want to continue to exist.
  • Recognizing when something works for someone else but not you.
  • Writing letters to your animal neighbors.
  • The seven criteria to judge a letter.
  • How to safely write a letter about VVVVVV to your Animal Crossing neighbor.
  • Roleplaying James Joyce in Animal Crossing.
  • Teaching Animal Crossing a slur and then returning the cartridge to Gamestop.
  • Deciding that it's okay if local news stations freak out.
  • Taking joy in extremely mundane activities.
  • How you spend your moments and how you feel about them.
  • Watching TV so that in several decades you can go to a bar and find out who's the same age as you.
  • Practicing love by trying to love yourself.
  • The breakup song from the Wedding Singer.
  • Corollaries of aphantasia.
  • Blind people watching TV.
  • Learning to draw by studying human anatomy and proportions in detail and imagining the body kinesthetics.
  • Looney Tunes artists making faces in the mirror.
  • Knowing how bones go.
  • The Bone Book.
  • That's Topics!

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+bkAh7yzF ]]> Jim Stormdancer 273. Why Isn't Dracula Good at Anything? https://topiclords.com/why-isnt-dracula-good-at-anything 591d8ea2-099b-4bb1-a29f-20208d171baf Mon, 13 Jan 2025 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Esper and RT-55J. We discuss poorly-constructed memes, making ZZT games in 2024, porting Mario 64 to the Commodore 64. "I like to think that in another universe," by ailbey, what counts as a plausible Dracula, and introducing licensed characters into a game that has previously been itself. 1:02:47 true Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • A Muppet Christmas Carol.
  • Gradations of Michael Caine oldness.
  • The Museum of ZZT.
  • Wizened ZZT Wizards.
  • Taking a common idea and altering it in an interesting way.
  • Why do plays still exist?
  • Making up an audience to applaud you.
  • Rehearsing a conversation in a low-oxygen environment.
  • A guy walking around touching things in the world and flavor text appears.
  • The ZZT aspect ratio problem.
  • Sneaking into the office at night and playing ZZT in silent mode so you don't bother the janitor.
  • 8-way movement in ZZT.
  • Reasons to stick with a certain set of constraints.
  • WeaveZZT.
  • Making a deck builder RPG in ZZT.
  • The safety and romance of a good set of constraints.
  • The King in Yellow Borders.
  • Oktrollberfest.
  • A found object horror game built in a fake ZZT engine.
  • Wario doing a ground pound and breaking the Youtube interface around the video.
  • Reading like 200 pages of Problem Sleuth and never getting around to Homestuck.
  • A program you can install to make your computer look like it's still running Windows Vista, and another you can install to make it feel like Obama is still president.
  • Porting ZZT to the Commodore 64.
  • An economy of people enjoying themselves.
  • Porting Mario 64 to ZZT and ending up on the front page of Planet Quake.
  • Tux Racer.
  • Scoping your game just big enough for people to see screen shots and get excited, but small enough that it's still finishable.
  • Mario 64's British Platformer Energy.
  • Whether Argonaut or Rare was a bigger influence on the design of Mario 64.
  • 3D Construction Kit for the Commodore 64.
  • Trying to build a scene in PovRay.
  • What iPad kids were like in the mid-90s.
  • Whether or not Eve ate the best possible apple.
  • Plausible and implausible vampires.
  • Ahistorical vampire analysis.
  • Why there's chicken on the Streets of Rage
  • What the Antediluveans got up to.
  • The 14 million year war for Cybertron.
  • What did you eat for 14 million years?
  • Subsisting on pure unfiltered Sparklemotion.
  • Two robots punching each other in the face for millennia.
  • Nike sponsorships in Magic the Gathering.
  • A roadmap of Magic the Gathering Crossovers.
  • The Guitar Hero game where you could make Kurt Cobain perform Run DMC.
  • Rated E for Explicit.
  • A PubG with fort building mechanics.
  • Winning your first game of Fortnite and retiring forever.
  • The Super Smash Instinct.
  • Monetizing a child's insatiable gambling instincts.
  • Playing a video game and worrying about the developer's immortal soul.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • A Muppet Christmas Carol.
  • Gradations of Michael Caine oldness.
  • The Museum of ZZT.
  • Wizened ZZT Wizards.
  • Taking a common idea and altering it in an interesting way.
  • Why do plays still exist?
  • Making up an audience to applaud you.
  • Rehearsing a conversation in a low-oxygen environment.
  • A guy walking around touching things in the world and flavor text appears.
  • The ZZT aspect ratio problem.
  • Sneaking into the office at night and playing ZZT in silent mode so you don't bother the janitor.
  • 8-way movement in ZZT.
  • Reasons to stick with a certain set of constraints.
  • WeaveZZT.
  • Making a deck builder RPG in ZZT.
  • The safety and romance of a good set of constraints.
  • The King in Yellow Borders.
  • Oktrollberfest.
  • A found object horror game built in a fake ZZT engine.
  • Wario doing a ground pound and breaking the Youtube interface around the video.
  • Reading like 200 pages of Problem Sleuth and never getting around to Homestuck.
  • A program you can install to make your computer look like it's still running Windows Vista, and another you can install to make it feel like Obama is still president.
  • Porting ZZT to the Commodore 64.
  • An economy of people enjoying themselves.
  • Porting Mario 64 to ZZT and ending up on the front page of Planet Quake.
  • Tux Racer.
  • Scoping your game just big enough for people to see screen shots and get excited, but small enough that it's still finishable.
  • Mario 64's British Platformer Energy.
  • Whether Argonaut or Rare was a bigger influence on the design of Mario 64.
  • 3D Construction Kit for the Commodore 64.
  • Trying to build a scene in PovRay.
  • What iPad kids were like in the mid-90s.
  • Whether or not Eve ate the best possible apple.
  • Plausible and implausible vampires.
  • Ahistorical vampire analysis.
  • Why there's chicken on the Streets of Rage
  • What the Antediluveans got up to.
  • The 14 million year war for Cybertron.
  • What did you eat for 14 million years?
  • Subsisting on pure unfiltered Sparklemotion.
  • Two robots punching each other in the face for millennia.
  • Nike sponsorships in Magic the Gathering.
  • A roadmap of Magic the Gathering Crossovers.
  • The Guitar Hero game where you could make Kurt Cobain perform Run DMC.
  • Rated E for Explicit.
  • A PubG with fort building mechanics.
  • Winning your first game of Fortnite and retiring forever.
  • The Super Smash Instinct.
  • Monetizing a child's insatiable gambling instincts.
  • Playing a video game and worrying about the developer's immortal soul.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • A Muppet Christmas Carol.
  • Gradations of Michael Caine oldness.
  • The Museum of ZZT.
  • Wizened ZZT Wizards.
  • Taking a common idea and altering it in an interesting way.
  • Why do plays still exist?
  • Making up an audience to applaud you.
  • Rehearsing a conversation in a low-oxygen environment.
  • A guy walking around touching things in the world and flavor text appears.
  • The ZZT aspect ratio problem.
  • Sneaking into the office at night and playing ZZT in silent mode so you don't bother the janitor.
  • 8-way movement in ZZT.
  • Reasons to stick with a certain set of constraints.
  • WeaveZZT.
  • Making a deck builder RPG in ZZT.
  • The safety and romance of a good set of constraints.
  • The King in Yellow Borders.
  • Oktrollberfest.
  • A found object horror game built in a fake ZZT engine.
  • Wario doing a ground pound and breaking the Youtube interface around the video.
  • Reading like 200 pages of Problem Sleuth and never getting around to Homestuck.
  • A program you can install to make your computer look like it's still running Windows Vista, and another you can install to make it feel like Obama is still president.
  • Porting ZZT to the Commodore 64.
  • An economy of people enjoying themselves.
  • Porting Mario 64 to ZZT and ending up on the front page of Planet Quake.
  • Tux Racer.
  • Scoping your game just big enough for people to see screen shots and get excited, but small enough that it's still finishable.
  • Mario 64's British Platformer Energy.
  • Whether Argonaut or Rare was a bigger influence on the design of Mario 64.
  • 3D Construction Kit for the Commodore 64.
  • Trying to build a scene in PovRay.
  • What iPad kids were like in the mid-90s.
  • Whether or not Eve ate the best possible apple.
  • Plausible and implausible vampires.
  • Ahistorical vampire analysis.
  • Why there's chicken on the Streets of Rage
  • What the Antediluveans got up to.
  • The 14 million year war for Cybertron.
  • What did you eat for 14 million years?
  • Subsisting on pure unfiltered Sparklemotion.
  • Two robots punching each other in the face for millennia.
  • Nike sponsorships in Magic the Gathering.
  • A roadmap of Magic the Gathering Crossovers.
  • The Guitar Hero game where you could make Kurt Cobain perform Run DMC.
  • Rated E for Explicit.
  • A PubG with fort building mechanics.
  • Winning your first game of Fortnite and retiring forever.
  • The Super Smash Instinct.
  • Monetizing a child's insatiable gambling instincts.
  • Playing a video game and worrying about the developer's immortal soul.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+yvg38Q89 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 272. Beakknifed in Busch Gardens https://topiclords.com/beakknifed-in-busch-gardens 13336607-d526-42d1-8e56-7a7845bcd308 Mon, 06 Jan 2025 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Ryan and Cort. We discuss meat-flavored potato chips, the Pico-8 tracker, using "Add or Remove Programs" to add a program, Tommy C, and Advent Calendars. 1:06:56 true Lords:

  • Ryan
  • Cort

Topics:

  • Is it possible to make a "meat flavored" potato chip that's not disgusting.
  • Meandering Pico-8 tracker jabbering
  • Do you think anyone has ever used the "Add or Remove Programs" interface to add a program?
  • Tommy C
  • Advent calendars are just tiny bulk-rate loot crates

Microtopics:

  • Ryan Ike Audio on Instagram.
  • How to make music and have balance in your life.
  • If there's nothing to fail at, what are you bad at?
  • Stand Elsewhere, an Oregon Trail-like.
  • Converting 50s pop songs to chunky four channel chip tunes.
  • The Pico-8 Splore database.
  • Asking a friend to make music for your PiCoSteveMo game, and having to explain what a PiCoSteveMo is, then Pico-8, trackers, music, sound, air, matter, and existence itself.
  • Potatoed Chips.
  • Romanian Beef Bolognese Flavored Potato Chips.
  • Abuela's All-Day Braised Carnitas potato chips.
  • Hate-buying a terrible flavor potato chips over and over so you can make everybody you know taste them.
  • Raw Hamburger flavored potato chips that moo when you eat them.
  • The Doritos Brain-hack.
  • Looking at the box of Frosted Mini-Wheats with a shrimp on the box and thinking "that's a little shrimpy"
  • Cool American Doritos.
  • Eat the cool. They knew the risks.
  • A bowl of M&Ms with a single Skittle in it.
  • Fresh Meat Potato Chips.
  • Walking into the Frito-Lay factory, dangling your jaw open and waiting for come what may.
  • All Night Nippon Shredded Abuela's Braised Carnitas.
  • The Taki's One-Chip Challenge.
  • Inviting all your friends over to try the new Strawberry Mochi Dill Pickle potato chips.
  • Explaining to your daughter's friends' parents that we're going to give your children tablets I got on the Internet and then we're going to eat lots of food and it's going to taste really weird. The FDA doesn't allow you to put this in food but I need you to dissolve this on your tongue.
  • Par-boiling your soft palate in lemon juice because it tastes so amazing.
  • Reprogramming your tongue to remix your palate.
  • What to do if you love both music and spreadsheets.
  • Art tools that make your tummy feel icky.
  • Mr. Lee by the Bobbettes.
  • What trackers are good at.
  • An extremely Bojangles tracker configuration.
  • Trying to do Math Rock in the Pico-8 tracker.
  • Triggering patterns 0 through 7 as instruments.
  • Whether the Add or Remove Programs interface can add a program.
  • Windows Sandbox.
  • Jacking your whole life up but your Windows desktop is pristine.
  • Getting a burner desktop for write-ins.
  • Inventing a guy named Dampiel and getting mad at him even years later.
  • Classic Dampy.
  • Renaming your game to doom.exe and suddenly Nvidia cards run it way better.
  • Putting a comment in your shader saying "Dear Nvidia, please make this shader look rad."
  • The Valve guy refusing to tell you how the math is wrong.
  • A selection of gags, hand movements and facial expressions.
  • Dying onstage while the audience applauds.
  • Feigning death so often as part of your comedy act so when you really die during your routine it'll be hilarious.
  • Death: just a bad deal all around.
  • Not my birth mom, but my robo-mom.
  • Having a death so weird that even as an extremely minor celebrity you end up on TMZ.
  • Doing extensive R&D so that you can somehow be murdered by a flamingo.
  • A bloodied flamingo wearing Ryan Ike's glasses.
  • Walking through the zoo looking for opportunities for environmental storytelling.
  • Accidentally doing an immaculate 360 Christ Air and then dying on impact.
  • Thinking of one funny scenario a month.
  • A treat that's busting the seams of the Advent Calendar door.
  • A sack of little handmade animal ornaments.
  • The Joy of Mastery.
  • Empty Advent Calendars.
  • Going shopping for used candy after Halloween.
  • Terrible Novelty Potato Chip of the Day.
  • One big Advent calendar the size of a barn door with 365 doors in it.
  • The Mayan Advent Calendar.
  • Automats.
  • Wheel of Fortune except you're assembling a wheel and not a phrase.
  • Spin the wheel, make a deal!
  • The first podcast of the rest of your life.
]]> Lords:

  • Ryan
  • Cort

Topics:

  • Is it possible to make a "meat flavored" potato chip that's not disgusting.
  • Meandering Pico-8 tracker jabbering
  • Do you think anyone has ever used the "Add or Remove Programs" interface to add a program?
  • Tommy C
  • Advent calendars are just tiny bulk-rate loot crates

Microtopics:

  • Ryan Ike Audio on Instagram.
  • How to make music and have balance in your life.
  • If there's nothing to fail at, what are you bad at?
  • Stand Elsewhere, an Oregon Trail-like.
  • Converting 50s pop songs to chunky four channel chip tunes.
  • The Pico-8 Splore database.
  • Asking a friend to make music for your PiCoSteveMo game, and having to explain what a PiCoSteveMo is, then Pico-8, trackers, music, sound, air, matter, and existence itself.
  • Potatoed Chips.
  • Romanian Beef Bolognese Flavored Potato Chips.
  • Abuela's All-Day Braised Carnitas potato chips.
  • Hate-buying a terrible flavor potato chips over and over so you can make everybody you know taste them.
  • Raw Hamburger flavored potato chips that moo when you eat them.
  • The Doritos Brain-hack.
  • Looking at the box of Frosted Mini-Wheats with a shrimp on the box and thinking "that's a little shrimpy"
  • Cool American Doritos.
  • Eat the cool. They knew the risks.
  • A bowl of M&Ms with a single Skittle in it.
  • Fresh Meat Potato Chips.
  • Walking into the Frito-Lay factory, dangling your jaw open and waiting for come what may.
  • All Night Nippon Shredded Abuela's Braised Carnitas.
  • The Taki's One-Chip Challenge.
  • Inviting all your friends over to try the new Strawberry Mochi Dill Pickle potato chips.
  • Explaining to your daughter's friends' parents that we're going to give your children tablets I got on the Internet and then we're going to eat lots of food and it's going to taste really weird. The FDA doesn't allow you to put this in food but I need you to dissolve this on your tongue.
  • Par-boiling your soft palate in lemon juice because it tastes so amazing.
  • Reprogramming your tongue to remix your palate.
  • What to do if you love both music and spreadsheets.
  • Art tools that make your tummy feel icky.
  • Mr. Lee by the Bobbettes.
  • What trackers are good at.
  • An extremely Bojangles tracker configuration.
  • Trying to do Math Rock in the Pico-8 tracker.
  • Triggering patterns 0 through 7 as instruments.
  • Whether the Add or Remove Programs interface can add a program.
  • Windows Sandbox.
  • Jacking your whole life up but your Windows desktop is pristine.
  • Getting a burner desktop for write-ins.
  • Inventing a guy named Dampiel and getting mad at him even years later.
  • Classic Dampy.
  • Renaming your game to doom.exe and suddenly Nvidia cards run it way better.
  • Putting a comment in your shader saying "Dear Nvidia, please make this shader look rad."
  • The Valve guy refusing to tell you how the math is wrong.
  • A selection of gags, hand movements and facial expressions.
  • Dying onstage while the audience applauds.
  • Feigning death so often as part of your comedy act so when you really die during your routine it'll be hilarious.
  • Death: just a bad deal all around.
  • Not my birth mom, but my robo-mom.
  • Having a death so weird that even as an extremely minor celebrity you end up on TMZ.
  • Doing extensive R&D so that you can somehow be murdered by a flamingo.
  • A bloodied flamingo wearing Ryan Ike's glasses.
  • Walking through the zoo looking for opportunities for environmental storytelling.
  • Accidentally doing an immaculate 360 Christ Air and then dying on impact.
  • Thinking of one funny scenario a month.
  • A treat that's busting the seams of the Advent Calendar door.
  • A sack of little handmade animal ornaments.
  • The Joy of Mastery.
  • Empty Advent Calendars.
  • Going shopping for used candy after Halloween.
  • Terrible Novelty Potato Chip of the Day.
  • One big Advent calendar the size of a barn door with 365 doors in it.
  • The Mayan Advent Calendar.
  • Automats.
  • Wheel of Fortune except you're assembling a wheel and not a phrase.
  • Spin the wheel, make a deal!
  • The first podcast of the rest of your life.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Ryan
  • Cort

Topics:

  • Is it possible to make a "meat flavored" potato chip that's not disgusting.
  • Meandering Pico-8 tracker jabbering
  • Do you think anyone has ever used the "Add or Remove Programs" interface to add a program?
  • Tommy C
  • Advent calendars are just tiny bulk-rate loot crates

Microtopics:

  • Ryan Ike Audio on Instagram.
  • How to make music and have balance in your life.
  • If there's nothing to fail at, what are you bad at?
  • Stand Elsewhere, an Oregon Trail-like.
  • Converting 50s pop songs to chunky four channel chip tunes.
  • The Pico-8 Splore database.
  • Asking a friend to make music for your PiCoSteveMo game, and having to explain what a PiCoSteveMo is, then Pico-8, trackers, music, sound, air, matter, and existence itself.
  • Potatoed Chips.
  • Romanian Beef Bolognese Flavored Potato Chips.
  • Abuela's All-Day Braised Carnitas potato chips.
  • Hate-buying a terrible flavor potato chips over and over so you can make everybody you know taste them.
  • Raw Hamburger flavored potato chips that moo when you eat them.
  • The Doritos Brain-hack.
  • Looking at the box of Frosted Mini-Wheats with a shrimp on the box and thinking "that's a little shrimpy"
  • Cool American Doritos.
  • Eat the cool. They knew the risks.
  • A bowl of M&Ms with a single Skittle in it.
  • Fresh Meat Potato Chips.
  • Walking into the Frito-Lay factory, dangling your jaw open and waiting for come what may.
  • All Night Nippon Shredded Abuela's Braised Carnitas.
  • The Taki's One-Chip Challenge.
  • Inviting all your friends over to try the new Strawberry Mochi Dill Pickle potato chips.
  • Explaining to your daughter's friends' parents that we're going to give your children tablets I got on the Internet and then we're going to eat lots of food and it's going to taste really weird. The FDA doesn't allow you to put this in food but I need you to dissolve this on your tongue.
  • Par-boiling your soft palate in lemon juice because it tastes so amazing.
  • Reprogramming your tongue to remix your palate.
  • What to do if you love both music and spreadsheets.
  • Art tools that make your tummy feel icky.
  • Mr. Lee by the Bobbettes.
  • What trackers are good at.
  • An extremely Bojangles tracker configuration.
  • Trying to do Math Rock in the Pico-8 tracker.
  • Triggering patterns 0 through 7 as instruments.
  • Whether the Add or Remove Programs interface can add a program.
  • Windows Sandbox.
  • Jacking your whole life up but your Windows desktop is pristine.
  • Getting a burner desktop for write-ins.
  • Inventing a guy named Dampiel and getting mad at him even years later.
  • Classic Dampy.
  • Renaming your game to doom.exe and suddenly Nvidia cards run it way better.
  • Putting a comment in your shader saying "Dear Nvidia, please make this shader look rad."
  • The Valve guy refusing to tell you how the math is wrong.
  • A selection of gags, hand movements and facial expressions.
  • Dying onstage while the audience applauds.
  • Feigning death so often as part of your comedy act so when you really die during your routine it'll be hilarious.
  • Death: just a bad deal all around.
  • Not my birth mom, but my robo-mom.
  • Having a death so weird that even as an extremely minor celebrity you end up on TMZ.
  • Doing extensive R&D so that you can somehow be murdered by a flamingo.
  • A bloodied flamingo wearing Ryan Ike's glasses.
  • Walking through the zoo looking for opportunities for environmental storytelling.
  • Accidentally doing an immaculate 360 Christ Air and then dying on impact.
  • Thinking of one funny scenario a month.
  • A treat that's busting the seams of the Advent Calendar door.
  • A sack of little handmade animal ornaments.
  • The Joy of Mastery.
  • Empty Advent Calendars.
  • Going shopping for used candy after Halloween.
  • Terrible Novelty Potato Chip of the Day.
  • One big Advent calendar the size of a barn door with 365 doors in it.
  • The Mayan Advent Calendar.
  • Automats.
  • Wheel of Fortune except you're assembling a wheel and not a phrase.
  • Spin the wheel, make a deal!
  • The first podcast of the rest of your life.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+h3i1z8R5 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 271. Ego Death Mario https://topiclords.com/ego-death-mario 5ab296ba-0d99-481e-b5f2-943237427c31 Mon, 30 Dec 2024 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Tyriq, Stevie, Avery. We discuss Dr. Mario's specialty, boutique sardines, Street Sharks (and the lies about them), and the aftermath of PiCoSteveMo. 1:11:59 true Lords

  • Tyriq
  • Stevie
  • Avery

Topics:

  • What is Dr. Mario's specialty?
  • Boutique sardines
  • Street Sharks (and the lies about them)
  • PiCoSteveMo is over! (as of this recording)

Microtopics:

  • Throwing out an idea like a plate of spaghetti, or a grenade.
  • Odd Object.
  • Piggy-back dual plugs.
  • Now! That's What I Call Avery Burke, Vol. VII.
  • Jason Shiga.
  • Older kids who are into roughhousing and watching shark movies.
  • Audio Issues Because of Dog.
  • The only place on the Internet you can hear cardboard boxes rubbing against each other.
  • Two hours of an attractive woman scraping her thumbnail on a microphone.
  • Dr. Mario telling someone that they only have-a four months to live-a.
  • The weird forehead mirror that old-timey doctors wear.
  • The opinions of someone who's eaten cat food.
  • Grandma barging in while you're eating dog food.
  • Flintstones Cannibalism Vitamins.
  • Barney's PTSD after the Neanderthal Wars.
  • Wacky Races, the original MCU.
  • Dr. Mario's pill pusherside hustle causing the opioid crisis.
  • Ego Death Mario microdosing the germs in the pill bottle who transcend to the great pill bottle in the sky.
  • Coming up with the conceit that your band is enemies with sea mammals and making all future audiences hate you.
  • Three adorable sardines rowing a boat shaped like a dragon.
  • An octopus tentacle that looks like a serial port or a 2x6 spot light.
  • The animal that you're eating depicted in cartoon form as cheering you on.
  • An anthropomorphic ginger root eating a ginger candy.
  • Single-serving black characters.
  • Eating a fish and finding an entire spine.
  • The weirdest bone to find.
  • Free floating animals gathering into a colony and turning into a face.
  • The most popular fish sauce in ancient Rome.
  • Sealing a whale hand in a trash can with duct tape for two years until it starts leaking and your roommate has to help you dispose of it wearing a hazmat suit.
  • Tucking a whale bone under your trench coat and sneaking out of the museum.
  • Famous whale disposal techniqus.
  • Fishwife, fish life!
  • Not knowing about the preexisting work that your favorite cartoon is in conversation with because you're a kid and don't know anything.
  • Slammu, Ripster and Streex.
  • Michelangelo, Leonardo, DiCaprio, and Don Angelo.
  • Vin Diesel being very excited about the Street Sharks.
  • IP Homeopathy.
  • Sexy Mummy Costume.
  • Using mumnies as train fuel because they are so plentiful.
  • You can't get Mummy Brown any more because of Woke.
  • Who has and hasn't heard of Tommy Tallarico.
  • A toy that lets you shoot at the TV screen during the interactive parts of Captain Power.
  • Fresh off the PiCoSteveMo boat.
  • Graph going up emoji.
  • Lots of different skill levels going on in there.
  • Aardvarks and anteaters.
  • A three hour celebration of weird things that games can be.
  • Look Who's The Shining Two!
  • Why the Sokoban puzzle in Ocarina of Time sucks.
  • Puzzles vs. situations.
  • Tony and the Tony Mechanic.
  • The Thought Leader of the Thinky Games Community.
]]> Lords

  • Tyriq
  • Stevie
  • Avery

Topics:

  • What is Dr. Mario's specialty?
  • Boutique sardines
  • Street Sharks (and the lies about them)
  • PiCoSteveMo is over! (as of this recording)

Microtopics:

  • Throwing out an idea like a plate of spaghetti, or a grenade.
  • Odd Object.
  • Piggy-back dual plugs.
  • Now! That's What I Call Avery Burke, Vol. VII.
  • Jason Shiga.
  • Older kids who are into roughhousing and watching shark movies.
  • Audio Issues Because of Dog.
  • The only place on the Internet you can hear cardboard boxes rubbing against each other.
  • Two hours of an attractive woman scraping her thumbnail on a microphone.
  • Dr. Mario telling someone that they only have-a four months to live-a.
  • The weird forehead mirror that old-timey doctors wear.
  • The opinions of someone who's eaten cat food.
  • Grandma barging in while you're eating dog food.
  • Flintstones Cannibalism Vitamins.
  • Barney's PTSD after the Neanderthal Wars.
  • Wacky Races, the original MCU.
  • Dr. Mario's pill pusherside hustle causing the opioid crisis.
  • Ego Death Mario microdosing the germs in the pill bottle who transcend to the great pill bottle in the sky.
  • Coming up with the conceit that your band is enemies with sea mammals and making all future audiences hate you.
  • Three adorable sardines rowing a boat shaped like a dragon.
  • An octopus tentacle that looks like a serial port or a 2x6 spot light.
  • The animal that you're eating depicted in cartoon form as cheering you on.
  • An anthropomorphic ginger root eating a ginger candy.
  • Single-serving black characters.
  • Eating a fish and finding an entire spine.
  • The weirdest bone to find.
  • Free floating animals gathering into a colony and turning into a face.
  • The most popular fish sauce in ancient Rome.
  • Sealing a whale hand in a trash can with duct tape for two years until it starts leaking and your roommate has to help you dispose of it wearing a hazmat suit.
  • Tucking a whale bone under your trench coat and sneaking out of the museum.
  • Famous whale disposal techniqus.
  • Fishwife, fish life!
  • Not knowing about the preexisting work that your favorite cartoon is in conversation with because you're a kid and don't know anything.
  • Slammu, Ripster and Streex.
  • Michelangelo, Leonardo, DiCaprio, and Don Angelo.
  • Vin Diesel being very excited about the Street Sharks.
  • IP Homeopathy.
  • Sexy Mummy Costume.
  • Using mumnies as train fuel because they are so plentiful.
  • You can't get Mummy Brown any more because of Woke.
  • Who has and hasn't heard of Tommy Tallarico.
  • A toy that lets you shoot at the TV screen during the interactive parts of Captain Power.
  • Fresh off the PiCoSteveMo boat.
  • Graph going up emoji.
  • Lots of different skill levels going on in there.
  • Aardvarks and anteaters.
  • A three hour celebration of weird things that games can be.
  • Look Who's The Shining Two!
  • Why the Sokoban puzzle in Ocarina of Time sucks.
  • Puzzles vs. situations.
  • Tony and the Tony Mechanic.
  • The Thought Leader of the Thinky Games Community.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords

  • Tyriq
  • Stevie
  • Avery

Topics:

  • What is Dr. Mario's specialty?
  • Boutique sardines
  • Street Sharks (and the lies about them)
  • PiCoSteveMo is over! (as of this recording)

Microtopics:

  • Throwing out an idea like a plate of spaghetti, or a grenade.
  • Odd Object.
  • Piggy-back dual plugs.
  • Now! That's What I Call Avery Burke, Vol. VII.
  • Jason Shiga.
  • Older kids who are into roughhousing and watching shark movies.
  • Audio Issues Because of Dog.
  • The only place on the Internet you can hear cardboard boxes rubbing against each other.
  • Two hours of an attractive woman scraping her thumbnail on a microphone.
  • Dr. Mario telling someone that they only have-a four months to live-a.
  • The weird forehead mirror that old-timey doctors wear.
  • The opinions of someone who's eaten cat food.
  • Grandma barging in while you're eating dog food.
  • Flintstones Cannibalism Vitamins.
  • Barney's PTSD after the Neanderthal Wars.
  • Wacky Races, the original MCU.
  • Dr. Mario's pill pusherside hustle causing the opioid crisis.
  • Ego Death Mario microdosing the germs in the pill bottle who transcend to the great pill bottle in the sky.
  • Coming up with the conceit that your band is enemies with sea mammals and making all future audiences hate you.
  • Three adorable sardines rowing a boat shaped like a dragon.
  • An octopus tentacle that looks like a serial port or a 2x6 spot light.
  • The animal that you're eating depicted in cartoon form as cheering you on.
  • An anthropomorphic ginger root eating a ginger candy.
  • Single-serving black characters.
  • Eating a fish and finding an entire spine.
  • The weirdest bone to find.
  • Free floating animals gathering into a colony and turning into a face.
  • The most popular fish sauce in ancient Rome.
  • Sealing a whale hand in a trash can with duct tape for two years until it starts leaking and your roommate has to help you dispose of it wearing a hazmat suit.
  • Tucking a whale bone under your trench coat and sneaking out of the museum.
  • Famous whale disposal techniqus.
  • Fishwife, fish life!
  • Not knowing about the preexisting work that your favorite cartoon is in conversation with because you're a kid and don't know anything.
  • Slammu, Ripster and Streex.
  • Michelangelo, Leonardo, DiCaprio, and Don Angelo.
  • Vin Diesel being very excited about the Street Sharks.
  • IP Homeopathy.
  • Sexy Mummy Costume.
  • Using mumnies as train fuel because they are so plentiful.
  • You can't get Mummy Brown any more because of Woke.
  • Who has and hasn't heard of Tommy Tallarico.
  • A toy that lets you shoot at the TV screen during the interactive parts of Captain Power.
  • Fresh off the PiCoSteveMo boat.
  • Graph going up emoji.
  • Lots of different skill levels going on in there.
  • Aardvarks and anteaters.
  • A three hour celebration of weird things that games can be.
  • Look Who's The Shining Two!
  • Why the Sokoban puzzle in Ocarina of Time sucks.
  • Puzzles vs. situations.
  • Tony and the Tony Mechanic.
  • The Thought Leader of the Thinky Games Community.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+nQCTg08J ]]> Jim Stormdancer 270. B-Roll of the Big Bang https://topiclords.com/b-roll-of-the-big-bang c7dea7bf-4656-4c01-8cb8-fc7a69a67943 Mon, 23 Dec 2024 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Alexander and Hallie. We discuss making AI drunk, how Star Wars being bought Disney is basically the same thing as the Roman Empire converting to Christianity, Electromagnetism, Super Bon Bon according to Google search, using flow theory and Kubler Ross grief to drive learning systems, and animals you want to pet, but cannot. 1:08:27 true Lords:

  • Alexander
  • Hallie

Topics:

  • Making AI drunk
  • How Star Wars being bought Disney is basically the same thing as the Roman Empire converting to Christianity
  • Electromagnetism
  • Super Bon Bon (according to Google search)
  • Using flow theory and Kubler Ross grief to drive learning systems
  • Animals you want to pet, but cannot.

Microtopics:

  • A Game Called Anomaly.
  • A tarot-based GM-less storytelling game about a sinister organization investigating a supernatural The KGB (not that one)
  • Deliberately lo-fi neural nets.
  • Real to less-real name sliders.
  • What Jamden Ovenson is up to these days.
  • Cranking the tipsy slider all way up.
  • anomaly.
  • Things humans can do with new tools.
  • Setting desired and undesired objectives for your learning designers.
  • Learning to speak as many languages as possible so that Godzilla does not rise from the briny deep.
  • Refusing to let the AI drive the bus.
  • A very big json dump.
  • The Mac Mini in your closet that runs your witch's familiars.
  • Things that are obvious to you but not to anyone else.
  • Cool apocryphal acts, bro.
  • Getting into Christ before it was cool.
  • Decanonizing anything that doesn't serve your power interests.
  • Bible/Star Wars crossover fan fiction.
  • Once you eat the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden, forever will it dominate your destiny.
  • Metals that can be turned into a magnet.
  • Where to even start with spin?
  • Whether protons are physical objects.
  • The language of perceiving the world.
  • Reading a poem about quantum physics.
  • Finally understanding the mathematics of love so you can ditch the love poetry and find the best lovers in the math department.
  • Which types of quark are super effective against other types of quark.
  • Why they call it electromagnetism.
  • But what about the Bullet Galaxies?
  • Weakly-interactive massive particles, or WIMPs.
  • Another particle that we thought up.
  • Microphones not picking up your tinnitus.
  • Extremely slow and old neutrinos.
  • Cosmic Microwave Background Average Frame of Reference.
  • The Soul Coughing cadence.
  • A poem, but it's performed in a certain rhythm. Some white guy should invent that and take credit for it.
  • Song Meanings Blog Dot Com.
  • Helping drive exploration of new ideas.
  • Making a name generator so bad that nobody uses it more than once.
  • Patterns and responses that characterize human behavior.
  • Grief as a mechanism to address overfitting in the human learning model.
  • The Parable of the Spandrel.
  • Possibilities that are more probable than Godzilla having eaten your house.
  • Depression as a way to just sit there.
  • Automatons with anxiety.
  • Entering random Game Genie codes into your neural net.
  • Wanting to pet a service dog because he's the best boy.
  • Service dogs having their own service dogs, recursively all the way down.
  • A chicken named Regular Expressions, or Reggie for short.
  • Digging in anything that looks diggable.
  • Being desperately confused by objects that you can see through but not walk through.
  • Ways to not get tricked by yourself or others.
]]> Lords:

  • Alexander
  • Hallie

Topics:

  • Making AI drunk
  • How Star Wars being bought Disney is basically the same thing as the Roman Empire converting to Christianity
  • Electromagnetism
  • Super Bon Bon (according to Google search)
  • Using flow theory and Kubler Ross grief to drive learning systems
  • Animals you want to pet, but cannot.

Microtopics:

  • A Game Called Anomaly.
  • A tarot-based GM-less storytelling game about a sinister organization investigating a supernatural The KGB (not that one)
  • Deliberately lo-fi neural nets.
  • Real to less-real name sliders.
  • What Jamden Ovenson is up to these days.
  • Cranking the tipsy slider all way up.
  • anomaly.
  • Things humans can do with new tools.
  • Setting desired and undesired objectives for your learning designers.
  • Learning to speak as many languages as possible so that Godzilla does not rise from the briny deep.
  • Refusing to let the AI drive the bus.
  • A very big json dump.
  • The Mac Mini in your closet that runs your witch's familiars.
  • Things that are obvious to you but not to anyone else.
  • Cool apocryphal acts, bro.
  • Getting into Christ before it was cool.
  • Decanonizing anything that doesn't serve your power interests.
  • Bible/Star Wars crossover fan fiction.
  • Once you eat the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden, forever will it dominate your destiny.
  • Metals that can be turned into a magnet.
  • Where to even start with spin?
  • Whether protons are physical objects.
  • The language of perceiving the world.
  • Reading a poem about quantum physics.
  • Finally understanding the mathematics of love so you can ditch the love poetry and find the best lovers in the math department.
  • Which types of quark are super effective against other types of quark.
  • Why they call it electromagnetism.
  • But what about the Bullet Galaxies?
  • Weakly-interactive massive particles, or WIMPs.
  • Another particle that we thought up.
  • Microphones not picking up your tinnitus.
  • Extremely slow and old neutrinos.
  • Cosmic Microwave Background Average Frame of Reference.
  • The Soul Coughing cadence.
  • A poem, but it's performed in a certain rhythm. Some white guy should invent that and take credit for it.
  • Song Meanings Blog Dot Com.
  • Helping drive exploration of new ideas.
  • Making a name generator so bad that nobody uses it more than once.
  • Patterns and responses that characterize human behavior.
  • Grief as a mechanism to address overfitting in the human learning model.
  • The Parable of the Spandrel.
  • Possibilities that are more probable than Godzilla having eaten your house.
  • Depression as a way to just sit there.
  • Automatons with anxiety.
  • Entering random Game Genie codes into your neural net.
  • Wanting to pet a service dog because he's the best boy.
  • Service dogs having their own service dogs, recursively all the way down.
  • A chicken named Regular Expressions, or Reggie for short.
  • Digging in anything that looks diggable.
  • Being desperately confused by objects that you can see through but not walk through.
  • Ways to not get tricked by yourself or others.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Alexander
  • Hallie

Topics:

  • Making AI drunk
  • How Star Wars being bought Disney is basically the same thing as the Roman Empire converting to Christianity
  • Electromagnetism
  • Super Bon Bon (according to Google search)
  • Using flow theory and Kubler Ross grief to drive learning systems
  • Animals you want to pet, but cannot.

Microtopics:

  • A Game Called Anomaly.
  • A tarot-based GM-less storytelling game about a sinister organization investigating a supernatural The KGB (not that one)
  • Deliberately lo-fi neural nets.
  • Real to less-real name sliders.
  • What Jamden Ovenson is up to these days.
  • Cranking the tipsy slider all way up.
  • anomaly.
  • Things humans can do with new tools.
  • Setting desired and undesired objectives for your learning designers.
  • Learning to speak as many languages as possible so that Godzilla does not rise from the briny deep.
  • Refusing to let the AI drive the bus.
  • A very big json dump.
  • The Mac Mini in your closet that runs your witch's familiars.
  • Things that are obvious to you but not to anyone else.
  • Cool apocryphal acts, bro.
  • Getting into Christ before it was cool.
  • Decanonizing anything that doesn't serve your power interests.
  • Bible/Star Wars crossover fan fiction.
  • Once you eat the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden, forever will it dominate your destiny.
  • Metals that can be turned into a magnet.
  • Where to even start with spin?
  • Whether protons are physical objects.
  • The language of perceiving the world.
  • Reading a poem about quantum physics.
  • Finally understanding the mathematics of love so you can ditch the love poetry and find the best lovers in the math department.
  • Which types of quark are super effective against other types of quark.
  • Why they call it electromagnetism.
  • But what about the Bullet Galaxies?
  • Weakly-interactive massive particles, or WIMPs.
  • Another particle that we thought up.
  • Microphones not picking up your tinnitus.
  • Extremely slow and old neutrinos.
  • Cosmic Microwave Background Average Frame of Reference.
  • The Soul Coughing cadence.
  • A poem, but it's performed in a certain rhythm. Some white guy should invent that and take credit for it.
  • Song Meanings Blog Dot Com.
  • Helping drive exploration of new ideas.
  • Making a name generator so bad that nobody uses it more than once.
  • Patterns and responses that characterize human behavior.
  • Grief as a mechanism to address overfitting in the human learning model.
  • The Parable of the Spandrel.
  • Possibilities that are more probable than Godzilla having eaten your house.
  • Depression as a way to just sit there.
  • Automatons with anxiety.
  • Entering random Game Genie codes into your neural net.
  • Wanting to pet a service dog because he's the best boy.
  • Service dogs having their own service dogs, recursively all the way down.
  • A chicken named Regular Expressions, or Reggie for short.
  • Digging in anything that looks diggable.
  • Being desperately confused by objects that you can see through but not walk through.
  • Ways to not get tricked by yourself or others.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+b1kL_0BU ]]> Jim Stormdancer 269. Wet-Ass Planetoid https://topiclords.com/wet-ass-planetoid 5ccb4ff1-2d93-4e3f-808b-8e8a9531d56d Mon, 16 Dec 2024 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Tyriq and Alex. We discuss trying to superficially familiarize yourself with every country, the log burner fan, drilling this chair for ancient water, Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams, by Kenneth Koch, Boichik Bagels, and the boxfish skeleton. 1:00:09 true Lords:

  • Tyriq
  • Alex

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Saya Gray.
  • Least-favorite UFO 50 games.
  • Treating the city you live in as if you're a tourist.
  • Going to obscure corners of parking lots.
  • A way to have an adventure in real life.
  • The tiny squishy seal that's no longer in your back pocket.
  • Web sites that are nothing but quizzes.
  • Trying to name every country.
  • This Sporcle quiz's opinion about which disputed territories count as countries.
  • Feeling more worldly after you memorize the names of every country.
  • Learning katakana and then being annoyed when signs do katakana wrong.
  • The curse of perfect-pitch.
  • Corrupted Pitch.
  • Tuning your whole band to the same out of tune guitar.
  • Hearing sounds in your head but only the sounds you're also hearing with your ears.
  • State.gov hosting PDF reports of the US government's opinion of every country.
  • Dear diary, today I did a cool fishing trade with Norway.
  • The Four Guineas.
  • The Place Across the Woods.
  • A giant CPU heat sink in gunmetal black sitting on top of your wood burning stove.
  • Devices powered by ambient temperature differentials.
  • The spinning thing on the roof that looks like a macaroon.
  • Putting googly eyes on your turbine roof vents.
  • Whether Stirling Engines are useful for anything other than a demonstration of the principles of the Stirling Engine.
  • Fluids moving through spaces of different sizes.
  • Injection molded hollow chunky boys.
  • Extremely mundane time capsules.
  • A Chair for Scientists.
  • A giant plastic-encased garbage ravioli.
  • Entire ecosystems that have existed without light for thousands of years.
  • Your FEMA-approved disaster preparedness chair.
  • Sorting all the water molecules on earth from newest to oldest.
  • Artists' depictions of the Hadean Earth.
  • The biggest wettest comet in the universe.
  • Don Quixote, the sopping wet comet.
  • Free sharps, only used once!
  • Writing a piece for prepared guitar after your kid fills the guitar with crayons.
  • Unprepared Pianos.
  • Juicy cold March wind.
  • A fair-use parody.
  • AI analysis of poetry that completely misses the point.
  • Editing Wikipedia to say that Lil Jon went to Harvard.
  • List of Rivers in Togo.
  • What a Specific Guy!
  • Registering an account to vandalize Wikipedia every few months for years.
  • Supermarket bagels.
  • Boiling round bread in water with crustaceans from the Bronx.
  • Making your own water to make coffee with.
  • Where to get food-grade lye.
  • Pastrami lox.
  • Seahorse skeletons.
  • Every Platonic Solid Has a Fish.
  • Where babies breathe from.
  • Fish without ribcages.
  • Caltrops arranged into a fish.
  • Using a pufferfish skeleton as a fidget toy.
  • The pufferfish at the center of our solar system.
  • The kind of decoration you see in a lobster joint.
  • Tropes of the open ocean.
  • The guy preventing you from being able to find search results for the Atari game Toobin'.
  • The loudest drinks in the world.
  • The Toobin' zone in LEGO Dimensions.
  • Chucking whole unopened cans of beer from your inner tube.
]]> Lords:

  • Tyriq
  • Alex

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Saya Gray.
  • Least-favorite UFO 50 games.
  • Treating the city you live in as if you're a tourist.
  • Going to obscure corners of parking lots.
  • A way to have an adventure in real life.
  • The tiny squishy seal that's no longer in your back pocket.
  • Web sites that are nothing but quizzes.
  • Trying to name every country.
  • This Sporcle quiz's opinion about which disputed territories count as countries.
  • Feeling more worldly after you memorize the names of every country.
  • Learning katakana and then being annoyed when signs do katakana wrong.
  • The curse of perfect-pitch.
  • Corrupted Pitch.
  • Tuning your whole band to the same out of tune guitar.
  • Hearing sounds in your head but only the sounds you're also hearing with your ears.
  • State.gov hosting PDF reports of the US government's opinion of every country.
  • Dear diary, today I did a cool fishing trade with Norway.
  • The Four Guineas.
  • The Place Across the Woods.
  • A giant CPU heat sink in gunmetal black sitting on top of your wood burning stove.
  • Devices powered by ambient temperature differentials.
  • The spinning thing on the roof that looks like a macaroon.
  • Putting googly eyes on your turbine roof vents.
  • Whether Stirling Engines are useful for anything other than a demonstration of the principles of the Stirling Engine.
  • Fluids moving through spaces of different sizes.
  • Injection molded hollow chunky boys.
  • Extremely mundane time capsules.
  • A Chair for Scientists.
  • A giant plastic-encased garbage ravioli.
  • Entire ecosystems that have existed without light for thousands of years.
  • Your FEMA-approved disaster preparedness chair.
  • Sorting all the water molecules on earth from newest to oldest.
  • Artists' depictions of the Hadean Earth.
  • The biggest wettest comet in the universe.
  • Don Quixote, the sopping wet comet.
  • Free sharps, only used once!
  • Writing a piece for prepared guitar after your kid fills the guitar with crayons.
  • Unprepared Pianos.
  • Juicy cold March wind.
  • A fair-use parody.
  • AI analysis of poetry that completely misses the point.
  • Editing Wikipedia to say that Lil Jon went to Harvard.
  • List of Rivers in Togo.
  • What a Specific Guy!
  • Registering an account to vandalize Wikipedia every few months for years.
  • Supermarket bagels.
  • Boiling round bread in water with crustaceans from the Bronx.
  • Making your own water to make coffee with.
  • Where to get food-grade lye.
  • Pastrami lox.
  • Seahorse skeletons.
  • Every Platonic Solid Has a Fish.
  • Where babies breathe from.
  • Fish without ribcages.
  • Caltrops arranged into a fish.
  • Using a pufferfish skeleton as a fidget toy.
  • The pufferfish at the center of our solar system.
  • The kind of decoration you see in a lobster joint.
  • Tropes of the open ocean.
  • The guy preventing you from being able to find search results for the Atari game Toobin'.
  • The loudest drinks in the world.
  • The Toobin' zone in LEGO Dimensions.
  • Chucking whole unopened cans of beer from your inner tube.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Tyriq
  • Alex

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Saya Gray.
  • Least-favorite UFO 50 games.
  • Treating the city you live in as if you're a tourist.
  • Going to obscure corners of parking lots.
  • A way to have an adventure in real life.
  • The tiny squishy seal that's no longer in your back pocket.
  • Web sites that are nothing but quizzes.
  • Trying to name every country.
  • This Sporcle quiz's opinion about which disputed territories count as countries.
  • Feeling more worldly after you memorize the names of every country.
  • Learning katakana and then being annoyed when signs do katakana wrong.
  • The curse of perfect-pitch.
  • Corrupted Pitch.
  • Tuning your whole band to the same out of tune guitar.
  • Hearing sounds in your head but only the sounds you're also hearing with your ears.
  • State.gov hosting PDF reports of the US government's opinion of every country.
  • Dear diary, today I did a cool fishing trade with Norway.
  • The Four Guineas.
  • The Place Across the Woods.
  • A giant CPU heat sink in gunmetal black sitting on top of your wood burning stove.
  • Devices powered by ambient temperature differentials.
  • The spinning thing on the roof that looks like a macaroon.
  • Putting googly eyes on your turbine roof vents.
  • Whether Stirling Engines are useful for anything other than a demonstration of the principles of the Stirling Engine.
  • Fluids moving through spaces of different sizes.
  • Injection molded hollow chunky boys.
  • Extremely mundane time capsules.
  • A Chair for Scientists.
  • A giant plastic-encased garbage ravioli.
  • Entire ecosystems that have existed without light for thousands of years.
  • Your FEMA-approved disaster preparedness chair.
  • Sorting all the water molecules on earth from newest to oldest.
  • Artists' depictions of the Hadean Earth.
  • The biggest wettest comet in the universe.
  • Don Quixote, the sopping wet comet.
  • Free sharps, only used once!
  • Writing a piece for prepared guitar after your kid fills the guitar with crayons.
  • Unprepared Pianos.
  • Juicy cold March wind.
  • A fair-use parody.
  • AI analysis of poetry that completely misses the point.
  • Editing Wikipedia to say that Lil Jon went to Harvard.
  • List of Rivers in Togo.
  • What a Specific Guy!
  • Registering an account to vandalize Wikipedia every few months for years.
  • Supermarket bagels.
  • Boiling round bread in water with crustaceans from the Bronx.
  • Making your own water to make coffee with.
  • Where to get food-grade lye.
  • Pastrami lox.
  • Seahorse skeletons.
  • Every Platonic Solid Has a Fish.
  • Where babies breathe from.
  • Fish without ribcages.
  • Caltrops arranged into a fish.
  • Using a pufferfish skeleton as a fidget toy.
  • The pufferfish at the center of our solar system.
  • The kind of decoration you see in a lobster joint.
  • Tropes of the open ocean.
  • The guy preventing you from being able to find search results for the Atari game Toobin'.
  • The loudest drinks in the world.
  • The Toobin' zone in LEGO Dimensions.
  • Chucking whole unopened cans of beer from your inner tube.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+FCYa5gaw ]]> Jim Stormdancer 268. Puzzles for Puzzle Enjoyers https://topiclords.com/puzzles-for-puzzle-enjoyers 978f79ad-f33f-4833-87ef-97ab89de65f0 Mon, 09 Dec 2024 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: James and Kev. We discuss copyparty, egg punk vs. chain punk, going geocaching three times, Septic Tanks, certain kinds of trash you don't see any more, and mosquito bites. 59:29 true Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Multiple recurring lords.
  • Going back to an earlier episode to listen to the plugs.
  • Agreeing to a copy party without knowing what it is.
  • Multi-part RARs.
  • Putting together educational material for your hypothetical younger self.
  • Manually extracting files over a physical USB connection.
  • Org-mode.
  • A collection of ogg vorbis music.
  • Your personal learning mind-map for learning how to draw.
  • The bottom end of expertise.
  • Two contrasting branches of the punk community.
  • Nerdy; dancey; influenced by Devo.
  • Musical genres refusing to converge no matter how close they get.
  • genres refusing to converge no matter how close they get.
  • How old you have to be to know about My Bloody Valentine.
  • Finally getting your act together and installing the right app and logging into the right web site.
  • Finding excuses to be more engaged with nature.
  • Having conversations, like you do with friends in a park.
  • Finding an Altoids tin where you would expect to find a bunch of spider webs.
  • Walking through half-nature in near-complete darkness.
  • Climbing down a rocky embankment in near-complete darkness with your phone in one hand.
  • Caches getting muggled.
  • Null Island.
  • Realizing that you're about to go on the bad kind of adventure.
  • A passing wizard complimenting you on your ironic orc-detecting sword.
  • A stuffed BB-8 that you use for photo opportunities.
  • Leaving one line of your toilet poem blank in case you think of a good rhyme for "too."
  • The kind of poem you put in your bathroom.
  • A pithy way to say what to put in the toilet.
  • Telling the restaurant's poet laureate that he really nailed that septic tank poem.
  • Using a black marker to redact the line about cigarette butts from your poem.
  • A book that reads like browsing Reddit.
  • Taking your mind off of your butt for five minutes.
  • Whether Law and Order was ever an accurate depiction of police procedure.
  • How they convicted or didn't convict the latest perp.
  • Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.
  • TV Guides lying on the street.
  • The genre of children's craft made from newspaper.
  • Archaeologists finding a thousand year old USB drive and finding a bunch of PDFs and videos about how to learn to draw.
  • FAT16 vs. FAT32.
  • Multi-volume ARJ files.
  • Putting together dual-purpose CDs for punk banks.
  • CD-ROMs shaped like a business card.
  • Inserting mini-CDs into a slot loading CD drive.
  • What it takes to make an indie Gamecube game.
  • Side-factoids about Luigi's Mansion.
  • Luigi's Mansion counting the volume of dust you've vacuumed through the whole playthrough.
  • The new Duck Tales game modeling the physics of every treasure you can collect so you can swim in them.
  • Mosquito activity in the midwest.
  • Hanging out around mosquito predators.
  • Mosquitos waking up for the gloaming and then going back to bed.
  • Finding the one high-altitude spot in the Panhandle to avoid the mosquitos.
  • Feeling bad about killng mosquitos after playing Hollow Knight.
  • Your favorite mind control force.
  • Golfers hitting that ball to make the number go down when they could just play less and it'd stay at 0 forever.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Multiple recurring lords.
  • Going back to an earlier episode to listen to the plugs.
  • Agreeing to a copy party without knowing what it is.
  • Multi-part RARs.
  • Putting together educational material for your hypothetical younger self.
  • Manually extracting files over a physical USB connection.
  • Org-mode.
  • A collection of ogg vorbis music.
  • Your personal learning mind-map for learning how to draw.
  • The bottom end of expertise.
  • Two contrasting branches of the punk community.
  • Nerdy; dancey; influenced by Devo.
  • Musical genres refusing to converge no matter how close they get.
  • genres refusing to converge no matter how close they get.
  • How old you have to be to know about My Bloody Valentine.
  • Finally getting your act together and installing the right app and logging into the right web site.
  • Finding excuses to be more engaged with nature.
  • Having conversations, like you do with friends in a park.
  • Finding an Altoids tin where you would expect to find a bunch of spider webs.
  • Walking through half-nature in near-complete darkness.
  • Climbing down a rocky embankment in near-complete darkness with your phone in one hand.
  • Caches getting muggled.
  • Null Island.
  • Realizing that you're about to go on the bad kind of adventure.
  • A passing wizard complimenting you on your ironic orc-detecting sword.
  • A stuffed BB-8 that you use for photo opportunities.
  • Leaving one line of your toilet poem blank in case you think of a good rhyme for "too."
  • The kind of poem you put in your bathroom.
  • A pithy way to say what to put in the toilet.
  • Telling the restaurant's poet laureate that he really nailed that septic tank poem.
  • Using a black marker to redact the line about cigarette butts from your poem.
  • A book that reads like browsing Reddit.
  • Taking your mind off of your butt for five minutes.
  • Whether Law and Order was ever an accurate depiction of police procedure.
  • How they convicted or didn't convict the latest perp.
  • Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.
  • TV Guides lying on the street.
  • The genre of children's craft made from newspaper.
  • Archaeologists finding a thousand year old USB drive and finding a bunch of PDFs and videos about how to learn to draw.
  • FAT16 vs. FAT32.
  • Multi-volume ARJ files.
  • Putting together dual-purpose CDs for punk banks.
  • CD-ROMs shaped like a business card.
  • Inserting mini-CDs into a slot loading CD drive.
  • What it takes to make an indie Gamecube game.
  • Side-factoids about Luigi's Mansion.
  • Luigi's Mansion counting the volume of dust you've vacuumed through the whole playthrough.
  • The new Duck Tales game modeling the physics of every treasure you can collect so you can swim in them.
  • Mosquito activity in the midwest.
  • Hanging out around mosquito predators.
  • Mosquitos waking up for the gloaming and then going back to bed.
  • Finding the one high-altitude spot in the Panhandle to avoid the mosquitos.
  • Feeling bad about killng mosquitos after playing Hollow Knight.
  • Your favorite mind control force.
  • Golfers hitting that ball to make the number go down when they could just play less and it'd stay at 0 forever.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Multiple recurring lords.
  • Going back to an earlier episode to listen to the plugs.
  • Agreeing to a copy party without knowing what it is.
  • Multi-part RARs.
  • Putting together educational material for your hypothetical younger self.
  • Manually extracting files over a physical USB connection.
  • Org-mode.
  • A collection of ogg vorbis music.
  • Your personal learning mind-map for learning how to draw.
  • The bottom end of expertise.
  • Two contrasting branches of the punk community.
  • Nerdy; dancey; influenced by Devo.
  • Musical genres refusing to converge no matter how close they get.
  • genres refusing to converge no matter how close they get.
  • How old you have to be to know about My Bloody Valentine.
  • Finally getting your act together and installing the right app and logging into the right web site.
  • Finding excuses to be more engaged with nature.
  • Having conversations, like you do with friends in a park.
  • Finding an Altoids tin where you would expect to find a bunch of spider webs.
  • Walking through half-nature in near-complete darkness.
  • Climbing down a rocky embankment in near-complete darkness with your phone in one hand.
  • Caches getting muggled.
  • Null Island.
  • Realizing that you're about to go on the bad kind of adventure.
  • A passing wizard complimenting you on your ironic orc-detecting sword.
  • A stuffed BB-8 that you use for photo opportunities.
  • Leaving one line of your toilet poem blank in case you think of a good rhyme for "too."
  • The kind of poem you put in your bathroom.
  • A pithy way to say what to put in the toilet.
  • Telling the restaurant's poet laureate that he really nailed that septic tank poem.
  • Using a black marker to redact the line about cigarette butts from your poem.
  • A book that reads like browsing Reddit.
  • Taking your mind off of your butt for five minutes.
  • Whether Law and Order was ever an accurate depiction of police procedure.
  • How they convicted or didn't convict the latest perp.
  • Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.
  • TV Guides lying on the street.
  • The genre of children's craft made from newspaper.
  • Archaeologists finding a thousand year old USB drive and finding a bunch of PDFs and videos about how to learn to draw.
  • FAT16 vs. FAT32.
  • Multi-volume ARJ files.
  • Putting together dual-purpose CDs for punk banks.
  • CD-ROMs shaped like a business card.
  • Inserting mini-CDs into a slot loading CD drive.
  • What it takes to make an indie Gamecube game.
  • Side-factoids about Luigi's Mansion.
  • Luigi's Mansion counting the volume of dust you've vacuumed through the whole playthrough.
  • The new Duck Tales game modeling the physics of every treasure you can collect so you can swim in them.
  • Mosquito activity in the midwest.
  • Hanging out around mosquito predators.
  • Mosquitos waking up for the gloaming and then going back to bed.
  • Finding the one high-altitude spot in the Panhandle to avoid the mosquitos.
  • Feeling bad about killng mosquitos after playing Hollow Knight.
  • Your favorite mind control force.
  • Golfers hitting that ball to make the number go down when they could just play less and it'd stay at 0 forever.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+mfrsqHvi ]]> Jim Stormdancer 267. Unburying the Duck https://topiclords.com/unburying-the-duck 4a86a57b-e574-4fcc-b9ca-b8a4c20cd52f Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: John and Erica. We discuss Golden Owl Pre-Post-Mortem, one year of having twins, notepad's support for alternative line endings, and Goodnight Moon (plus Goodnight Dune) 1:13:18 true Lords:

  • John
  • Erica

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The waiting list to get into the Topic Lords discord.
  • What goes on the lords-only channel.
  • The first rule of being a lord.
  • It's the end of the show somewhere in the world.
  • Frog Fractions Royalty.
  • Topic Lords Con East.
  • Choosing pairs of lords.
  • What lords have been on the show least recently.
  • Mystery with a B.
  • Responsibility to the lords.
  • ARG goings-on.
  • Maze of Games.
  • Rubber hose ARG solving
  • Digging up the golden owl and replacing it with a duck.
  • The minimum number of golden owls you are allowed to cast in France.
  • The History of the Owl Stuff.
  • Commemorating your love of the Golden Owl by purchasing this commemorative Golden Owl.
  • The Mystery of the Golden Owl that nobody wanted solved.
  • It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.
  • Going and burying a duck
  • Unburying the Duck and putting the Owl back.
  • Looking through the Heart of France.
  • Another cursed treasure hunt in the can.
  • Ancient alternatives to zip files.
  • Re-scoping your puzzle hunt on the fly.
  • Telling twins apart using phrenology.
  • Twin identification strategies.
  • Let me see your flecks!
  • Checking your placental mammals for belly buttons.
  • Platypodes.
  • Jock twin/nerd twin.
  • Having children as a way to practice solving problems together.
  • Who forgot to take a nap today? (Everyone on the show.)
  • Flailing limbs kicking your bedmate all night.
  • Rocking your kid to sleep and then depositing them in the crib like Indy swapping out the golden idol.
  • How to teach babies to sleep.
  • Wearing children until the children no longer tolerate it.
  • A good selection of kid-friendly music.
  • A guy with a soothing British voice saying interesting things for ten minutes.
  • How much coffee to give a six year old right before bed.
  • Waiting for your kid to realize that when it's 1am he doesn't have to ask you if he can watch TV.
  • Just show me the byte order marker!
  • Adding tabs to Notepad.
  • Everyone agreeing to go back to WordStar.
  • What software developers do once a program is finished and perfect.
  • Loading CSV files into R.
  • Accidentally updating Excel.
  • The kind of person who is passionate about the latest cutting edge version of all software, who works in tech and is in charge of all update systems.
  • Adobe Premiere updates that ruin your team's entire workflow.
  • Why JWZ is no longer rich.
  • Seeing all the trailing spaces at the end of the line.
  • Jobs that require you to be able to distinguish between a tab character and the equivalent number of spaces.
  • How Unity handles upgrades and versioning.
  • The 75th anniversary of Goodnight Moon.
  • Why the New York Times's list of most borrowed children's library books of all time doesn't contain Goodnight Moon.
  • When Goodnight Moon says "Goodnight Nobody" and you immediately assume that the old lady died.
  • The calming effect of going over an inventory of really nice soothing things.
  • The Margaret Wise Brown ouevre.
  • Goodnight Dune.
  • Good night, shai-hulud bursting out of the dune.
  • Good night, Bene Gesserit witch whispering "they tried and died."
  • Too much of every character giving their internal monologue in italics.
  • Virginia Facebook's extremely cheap antiques.
  • Floating in the No-Room.
]]> Lords:

  • John
  • Erica

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The waiting list to get into the Topic Lords discord.
  • What goes on the lords-only channel.
  • The first rule of being a lord.
  • It's the end of the show somewhere in the world.
  • Frog Fractions Royalty.
  • Topic Lords Con East.
  • Choosing pairs of lords.
  • What lords have been on the show least recently.
  • Mystery with a B.
  • Responsibility to the lords.
  • ARG goings-on.
  • Maze of Games.
  • Rubber hose ARG solving
  • Digging up the golden owl and replacing it with a duck.
  • The minimum number of golden owls you are allowed to cast in France.
  • The History of the Owl Stuff.
  • Commemorating your love of the Golden Owl by purchasing this commemorative Golden Owl.
  • The Mystery of the Golden Owl that nobody wanted solved.
  • It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.
  • Going and burying a duck
  • Unburying the Duck and putting the Owl back.
  • Looking through the Heart of France.
  • Another cursed treasure hunt in the can.
  • Ancient alternatives to zip files.
  • Re-scoping your puzzle hunt on the fly.
  • Telling twins apart using phrenology.
  • Twin identification strategies.
  • Let me see your flecks!
  • Checking your placental mammals for belly buttons.
  • Platypodes.
  • Jock twin/nerd twin.
  • Having children as a way to practice solving problems together.
  • Who forgot to take a nap today? (Everyone on the show.)
  • Flailing limbs kicking your bedmate all night.
  • Rocking your kid to sleep and then depositing them in the crib like Indy swapping out the golden idol.
  • How to teach babies to sleep.
  • Wearing children until the children no longer tolerate it.
  • A good selection of kid-friendly music.
  • A guy with a soothing British voice saying interesting things for ten minutes.
  • How much coffee to give a six year old right before bed.
  • Waiting for your kid to realize that when it's 1am he doesn't have to ask you if he can watch TV.
  • Just show me the byte order marker!
  • Adding tabs to Notepad.
  • Everyone agreeing to go back to WordStar.
  • What software developers do once a program is finished and perfect.
  • Loading CSV files into R.
  • Accidentally updating Excel.
  • The kind of person who is passionate about the latest cutting edge version of all software, who works in tech and is in charge of all update systems.
  • Adobe Premiere updates that ruin your team's entire workflow.
  • Why JWZ is no longer rich.
  • Seeing all the trailing spaces at the end of the line.
  • Jobs that require you to be able to distinguish between a tab character and the equivalent number of spaces.
  • How Unity handles upgrades and versioning.
  • The 75th anniversary of Goodnight Moon.
  • Why the New York Times's list of most borrowed children's library books of all time doesn't contain Goodnight Moon.
  • When Goodnight Moon says "Goodnight Nobody" and you immediately assume that the old lady died.
  • The calming effect of going over an inventory of really nice soothing things.
  • The Margaret Wise Brown ouevre.
  • Goodnight Dune.
  • Good night, shai-hulud bursting out of the dune.
  • Good night, Bene Gesserit witch whispering "they tried and died."
  • Too much of every character giving their internal monologue in italics.
  • Virginia Facebook's extremely cheap antiques.
  • Floating in the No-Room.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • John
  • Erica

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The waiting list to get into the Topic Lords discord.
  • What goes on the lords-only channel.
  • The first rule of being a lord.
  • It's the end of the show somewhere in the world.
  • Frog Fractions Royalty.
  • Topic Lords Con East.
  • Choosing pairs of lords.
  • What lords have been on the show least recently.
  • Mystery with a B.
  • Responsibility to the lords.
  • ARG goings-on.
  • Maze of Games.
  • Rubber hose ARG solving
  • Digging up the golden owl and replacing it with a duck.
  • The minimum number of golden owls you are allowed to cast in France.
  • The History of the Owl Stuff.
  • Commemorating your love of the Golden Owl by purchasing this commemorative Golden Owl.
  • The Mystery of the Golden Owl that nobody wanted solved.
  • It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.
  • Going and burying a duck
  • Unburying the Duck and putting the Owl back.
  • Looking through the Heart of France.
  • Another cursed treasure hunt in the can.
  • Ancient alternatives to zip files.
  • Re-scoping your puzzle hunt on the fly.
  • Telling twins apart using phrenology.
  • Twin identification strategies.
  • Let me see your flecks!
  • Checking your placental mammals for belly buttons.
  • Platypodes.
  • Jock twin/nerd twin.
  • Having children as a way to practice solving problems together.
  • Who forgot to take a nap today? (Everyone on the show.)
  • Flailing limbs kicking your bedmate all night.
  • Rocking your kid to sleep and then depositing them in the crib like Indy swapping out the golden idol.
  • How to teach babies to sleep.
  • Wearing children until the children no longer tolerate it.
  • A good selection of kid-friendly music.
  • A guy with a soothing British voice saying interesting things for ten minutes.
  • How much coffee to give a six year old right before bed.
  • Waiting for your kid to realize that when it's 1am he doesn't have to ask you if he can watch TV.
  • Just show me the byte order marker!
  • Adding tabs to Notepad.
  • Everyone agreeing to go back to WordStar.
  • What software developers do once a program is finished and perfect.
  • Loading CSV files into R.
  • Accidentally updating Excel.
  • The kind of person who is passionate about the latest cutting edge version of all software, who works in tech and is in charge of all update systems.
  • Adobe Premiere updates that ruin your team's entire workflow.
  • Why JWZ is no longer rich.
  • Seeing all the trailing spaces at the end of the line.
  • Jobs that require you to be able to distinguish between a tab character and the equivalent number of spaces.
  • How Unity handles upgrades and versioning.
  • The 75th anniversary of Goodnight Moon.
  • Why the New York Times's list of most borrowed children's library books of all time doesn't contain Goodnight Moon.
  • When Goodnight Moon says "Goodnight Nobody" and you immediately assume that the old lady died.
  • The calming effect of going over an inventory of really nice soothing things.
  • The Margaret Wise Brown ouevre.
  • Goodnight Dune.
  • Good night, shai-hulud bursting out of the dune.
  • Good night, Bene Gesserit witch whispering "they tried and died."
  • Too much of every character giving their internal monologue in italics.
  • Virginia Facebook's extremely cheap antiques.
  • Floating in the No-Room.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+cXTw0qWf ]]> Jim Stormdancer 266. Voronoi Cookies https://topiclords.com/voronoi-cookies 822381c4-b108-4b1e-a707-3c0e7b1ebf15 Mon, 25 Nov 2024 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Ben and Andrew. We discuss baking with precise measurement vs. by feel, making crosswords, how many weeks there are in a year, The Rules by Leila Chatti, building fidgeting into a Zoom lecture, and Things of Science. 1:07:10 true Lords:

  • Ben
  • Andrew

Topics:

  • Baking: precise science of measurement or do it all by feel? (People have very different philosophies of muffins)
  • I've gotten into making crosswords this year and recently had the idea to start putting them on postcards and leaving them in public places for people to find. Am I becoming the Riddler? Is this fine?
  • I just found out that there aren't exactly 52 weeks in a year
  • The Rules, Leila Chatti
  • Building fidgeting into a Zoom lecture
  • Things of Science. (Subscription science toy service that I got when I was a kid)

Microtopics:

  • Posting pictures of pottery to social media.
  • The Hopefully Year of Layoffs.
  • Teaching game development as a hobby.
  • The interactive comic books of Jason Shiga.
  • Lies and truth and sea monsters.
  • Waiting for half an hour to find out if you fucked it up.
  • Baking intuitively.
  • Skimming a recipe and thinking "hmm yes, I've made food before"
  • Voronoi cookies.
  • Keeping separate baking notebooks for each season.
  • Having units that are divisible by two.
  • Putting it in a Gas 4 Oven.
  • How to pronounce "tare."
  • Sneaking into Grandma's kitchen and weighing all the ingredients.
  • Cruciverbalism.
  • Where to post the crosswords you've constructed.
  • A Lord's Puzzle.
  • Giving people a little bit of joy and avoiding hearing any feedback about it.
  • Living in the puzzle capital of the world.
  • Constructing a crossword puzzle for every party you attend.
  • The MIT Mystery Hunt.
  • Making art for a really small group of people.
  • Crosswordese.
  • Designing themed vs. themeless crossword puzzles.
  • How many weeks are in a leap year.
  • Yet another ratio that doesn't work out.
  • Calendrical systems you could use.
  • Things that you know that are wrong.
  • What's your favorite thing you don't know that you don't know?
  • Finding a drawer full of narwhal tusks in a bone shop and thinking "hm, sixty unicorns died here"
  • NASA's antigravity room.
  • Why doesn't the Mars habitat work out?
  • Multiple digressions on horse urine.
  • Refining horse urine into progesterone on Mars.
  • Suddenly realizing that you've been dead all along.
  • Cicadas doing whatever they do in the trees.
  • Acknowledging the expectations of what a poem is.
  • Why you always turn out to have been dead at the end.
  • Who is out there still making games about guns?
  • Adding line breaks to make your essay look like a poem.
  • Innominateness.
  • Garden path level design.
  • Reading aloud etudes.
  • Mavis Beacon Teaches Elocution.
  • Replacing your Zoom background with a video of yourself.
  • Brain massaging video of cutting sand.
  • The calming effect of amphetamines.
  • Fidgeting incessantly during Zoom calls.
  • Fidgeting for people so they don't have to.
  • Bubbling noises and space harps.
  • Remote testing protocols.
  • Plagiarism detector snake oil.
  • Doing homework to get used to the idea of doing homework.
  • Mass-production of adults.
  • Paperwork as a method of crowd control.
  • Homework as a barrier to family time vs. homework that facilitates family time.
  • Mailing people little bits of science.
  • Aerogel vs. Superslurper.
  • Growing mold in your oobleck.
  • Sending 1940s children asbestos in the mail.
  • Using every sense to explore the world.
  • A dog sniffing your hand and walking away.
  • Throwing away all the business cards that just have your Twitter handle on them.
]]> Lords:

  • Ben
  • Andrew

Topics:

  • Baking: precise science of measurement or do it all by feel? (People have very different philosophies of muffins)
  • I've gotten into making crosswords this year and recently had the idea to start putting them on postcards and leaving them in public places for people to find. Am I becoming the Riddler? Is this fine?
  • I just found out that there aren't exactly 52 weeks in a year
  • The Rules, Leila Chatti
  • Building fidgeting into a Zoom lecture
  • Things of Science. (Subscription science toy service that I got when I was a kid)

Microtopics:

  • Posting pictures of pottery to social media.
  • The Hopefully Year of Layoffs.
  • Teaching game development as a hobby.
  • The interactive comic books of Jason Shiga.
  • Lies and truth and sea monsters.
  • Waiting for half an hour to find out if you fucked it up.
  • Baking intuitively.
  • Skimming a recipe and thinking "hmm yes, I've made food before"
  • Voronoi cookies.
  • Keeping separate baking notebooks for each season.
  • Having units that are divisible by two.
  • Putting it in a Gas 4 Oven.
  • How to pronounce "tare."
  • Sneaking into Grandma's kitchen and weighing all the ingredients.
  • Cruciverbalism.
  • Where to post the crosswords you've constructed.
  • A Lord's Puzzle.
  • Giving people a little bit of joy and avoiding hearing any feedback about it.
  • Living in the puzzle capital of the world.
  • Constructing a crossword puzzle for every party you attend.
  • The MIT Mystery Hunt.
  • Making art for a really small group of people.
  • Crosswordese.
  • Designing themed vs. themeless crossword puzzles.
  • How many weeks are in a leap year.
  • Yet another ratio that doesn't work out.
  • Calendrical systems you could use.
  • Things that you know that are wrong.
  • What's your favorite thing you don't know that you don't know?
  • Finding a drawer full of narwhal tusks in a bone shop and thinking "hm, sixty unicorns died here"
  • NASA's antigravity room.
  • Why doesn't the Mars habitat work out?
  • Multiple digressions on horse urine.
  • Refining horse urine into progesterone on Mars.
  • Suddenly realizing that you've been dead all along.
  • Cicadas doing whatever they do in the trees.
  • Acknowledging the expectations of what a poem is.
  • Why you always turn out to have been dead at the end.
  • Who is out there still making games about guns?
  • Adding line breaks to make your essay look like a poem.
  • Innominateness.
  • Garden path level design.
  • Reading aloud etudes.
  • Mavis Beacon Teaches Elocution.
  • Replacing your Zoom background with a video of yourself.
  • Brain massaging video of cutting sand.
  • The calming effect of amphetamines.
  • Fidgeting incessantly during Zoom calls.
  • Fidgeting for people so they don't have to.
  • Bubbling noises and space harps.
  • Remote testing protocols.
  • Plagiarism detector snake oil.
  • Doing homework to get used to the idea of doing homework.
  • Mass-production of adults.
  • Paperwork as a method of crowd control.
  • Homework as a barrier to family time vs. homework that facilitates family time.
  • Mailing people little bits of science.
  • Aerogel vs. Superslurper.
  • Growing mold in your oobleck.
  • Sending 1940s children asbestos in the mail.
  • Using every sense to explore the world.
  • A dog sniffing your hand and walking away.
  • Throwing away all the business cards that just have your Twitter handle on them.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Ben
  • Andrew

Topics:

  • Baking: precise science of measurement or do it all by feel? (People have very different philosophies of muffins)
  • I've gotten into making crosswords this year and recently had the idea to start putting them on postcards and leaving them in public places for people to find. Am I becoming the Riddler? Is this fine?
  • I just found out that there aren't exactly 52 weeks in a year
  • The Rules, Leila Chatti
  • Building fidgeting into a Zoom lecture
  • Things of Science. (Subscription science toy service that I got when I was a kid)

Microtopics:

  • Posting pictures of pottery to social media.
  • The Hopefully Year of Layoffs.
  • Teaching game development as a hobby.
  • The interactive comic books of Jason Shiga.
  • Lies and truth and sea monsters.
  • Waiting for half an hour to find out if you fucked it up.
  • Baking intuitively.
  • Skimming a recipe and thinking "hmm yes, I've made food before"
  • Voronoi cookies.
  • Keeping separate baking notebooks for each season.
  • Having units that are divisible by two.
  • Putting it in a Gas 4 Oven.
  • How to pronounce "tare."
  • Sneaking into Grandma's kitchen and weighing all the ingredients.
  • Cruciverbalism.
  • Where to post the crosswords you've constructed.
  • A Lord's Puzzle.
  • Giving people a little bit of joy and avoiding hearing any feedback about it.
  • Living in the puzzle capital of the world.
  • Constructing a crossword puzzle for every party you attend.
  • The MIT Mystery Hunt.
  • Making art for a really small group of people.
  • Crosswordese.
  • Designing themed vs. themeless crossword puzzles.
  • How many weeks are in a leap year.
  • Yet another ratio that doesn't work out.
  • Calendrical systems you could use.
  • Things that you know that are wrong.
  • What's your favorite thing you don't know that you don't know?
  • Finding a drawer full of narwhal tusks in a bone shop and thinking "hm, sixty unicorns died here"
  • NASA's antigravity room.
  • Why doesn't the Mars habitat work out?
  • Multiple digressions on horse urine.
  • Refining horse urine into progesterone on Mars.
  • Suddenly realizing that you've been dead all along.
  • Cicadas doing whatever they do in the trees.
  • Acknowledging the expectations of what a poem is.
  • Why you always turn out to have been dead at the end.
  • Who is out there still making games about guns?
  • Adding line breaks to make your essay look like a poem.
  • Innominateness.
  • Garden path level design.
  • Reading aloud etudes.
  • Mavis Beacon Teaches Elocution.
  • Replacing your Zoom background with a video of yourself.
  • Brain massaging video of cutting sand.
  • The calming effect of amphetamines.
  • Fidgeting incessantly during Zoom calls.
  • Fidgeting for people so they don't have to.
  • Bubbling noises and space harps.
  • Remote testing protocols.
  • Plagiarism detector snake oil.
  • Doing homework to get used to the idea of doing homework.
  • Mass-production of adults.
  • Paperwork as a method of crowd control.
  • Homework as a barrier to family time vs. homework that facilitates family time.
  • Mailing people little bits of science.
  • Aerogel vs. Superslurper.
  • Growing mold in your oobleck.
  • Sending 1940s children asbestos in the mail.
  • Using every sense to explore the world.
  • A dog sniffing your hand and walking away.
  • Throwing away all the business cards that just have your Twitter handle on them.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+S1Py-ve4 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 265. We're Here to Make This Slide Floppy https://topiclords.com/were-here-to-make-this-slide-floppy 7a000f82-d16b-4ab6-b851-150d6ded340d Mon, 18 Nov 2024 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Tim and Chris. We discuss noodles, the impoverishment of the question, choosing an integrator, Lucky Jim (old song), and collaborative music as a game design problem. 1:10:50 true Lords:

  • Tim
  • Chris

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Celtic Music and Corgis.
  • Tim, a figure shrouded in mystery.
  • Topic Monologues.
  • Gluten-free noodle straws.
  • Bucatini: imagine a Red Vine but made of pasta.
  • Replacing food service workers with clockwork automata made of noodles that have been hardened into gears and springs.
  • Giant fusilli as playground equipment.
  • Noodleness and pastitude.
  • Whether gnocchi is a pasta. What about cauliflower gnocchi?
  • Unleavened Carrot Cake.
  • Indomie: the number one selling noodle on Earth.
  • Good spices: they can work in a broth.
  • Soupertaster: Jim eats soup alone while talking to a volleyball with a bloody handprint on it.
  • Learning math by starting with incredibly abstract unmotivated ideas.
  • Some Bottomless Pits are Deeper than Others.
  • Approaching a question by interpreting it as a question that if answerable.
  • The significant of the perception of free will.
  • How a closed system can produce multiple different outcomes.
  • What happens when we decide we don't have free will.
  • A completely deterministic system that has a sensation of free will.
  • Taking as much time as it takes to read a book.
  • Shooting the Moon (in real life)
  • Taking all the bad cards and winning.
  • Becoming disciplined about time
  • What a modern feature phone can do.
  • Dividing your day into blocks and spending them.
  • The period in your life when you lived in Burlingame.
  • Getting an incredibe amount of work done during your hour and a half commute.
  • Topic Lords or Plug Lords?
  • Something you'll be glad you did tomorrow.
  • Integration Basics.
  • Explicit Euler vs. Semi-Implicit Euler.
  • The pros and cons of RK4.
  • The physics system behind Drawn to Life.
  • What it takes to be an old song.
  • Hadestown and The Instigator.
  • The Hadestown Tiny Desk Concert.
  • How to play music with other people in a way that accounts for skill gaps.
  • Going to the Starry Plough to play the penny whistle.
  • Musicians sitting in a circle and talking until someone starts playing something and everyone else joins in.
  • Joining in on a song you've never heard before.
  • Playing Mary Had a Little Lamb at 40 BPM.
  • Making a slow song more interesting by adding ornamentation.
  • Star of the County Down.
  • Different ideas that come out when you play music at half speed.
  • Lark Camp.
  • The person who hands out the cheat sheet with all the popular tunes and their chord progressions.
  • Sorting tunes by frequnecy.
  • The bad things about Irish sessions, from a game design perspective.
  • Learning a song by reading the notation vs. learning it by playing it for 30 years.
  • Star Above the Garter.
]]> Lords:

  • Tim
  • Chris

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Celtic Music and Corgis.
  • Tim, a figure shrouded in mystery.
  • Topic Monologues.
  • Gluten-free noodle straws.
  • Bucatini: imagine a Red Vine but made of pasta.
  • Replacing food service workers with clockwork automata made of noodles that have been hardened into gears and springs.
  • Giant fusilli as playground equipment.
  • Noodleness and pastitude.
  • Whether gnocchi is a pasta. What about cauliflower gnocchi?
  • Unleavened Carrot Cake.
  • Indomie: the number one selling noodle on Earth.
  • Good spices: they can work in a broth.
  • Soupertaster: Jim eats soup alone while talking to a volleyball with a bloody handprint on it.
  • Learning math by starting with incredibly abstract unmotivated ideas.
  • Some Bottomless Pits are Deeper than Others.
  • Approaching a question by interpreting it as a question that if answerable.
  • The significant of the perception of free will.
  • How a closed system can produce multiple different outcomes.
  • What happens when we decide we don't have free will.
  • A completely deterministic system that has a sensation of free will.
  • Taking as much time as it takes to read a book.
  • Shooting the Moon (in real life)
  • Taking all the bad cards and winning.
  • Becoming disciplined about time
  • What a modern feature phone can do.
  • Dividing your day into blocks and spending them.
  • The period in your life when you lived in Burlingame.
  • Getting an incredibe amount of work done during your hour and a half commute.
  • Topic Lords or Plug Lords?
  • Something you'll be glad you did tomorrow.
  • Integration Basics.
  • Explicit Euler vs. Semi-Implicit Euler.
  • The pros and cons of RK4.
  • The physics system behind Drawn to Life.
  • What it takes to be an old song.
  • Hadestown and The Instigator.
  • The Hadestown Tiny Desk Concert.
  • How to play music with other people in a way that accounts for skill gaps.
  • Going to the Starry Plough to play the penny whistle.
  • Musicians sitting in a circle and talking until someone starts playing something and everyone else joins in.
  • Joining in on a song you've never heard before.
  • Playing Mary Had a Little Lamb at 40 BPM.
  • Making a slow song more interesting by adding ornamentation.
  • Star of the County Down.
  • Different ideas that come out when you play music at half speed.
  • Lark Camp.
  • The person who hands out the cheat sheet with all the popular tunes and their chord progressions.
  • Sorting tunes by frequnecy.
  • The bad things about Irish sessions, from a game design perspective.
  • Learning a song by reading the notation vs. learning it by playing it for 30 years.
  • Star Above the Garter.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Tim
  • Chris

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Celtic Music and Corgis.
  • Tim, a figure shrouded in mystery.
  • Topic Monologues.
  • Gluten-free noodle straws.
  • Bucatini: imagine a Red Vine but made of pasta.
  • Replacing food service workers with clockwork automata made of noodles that have been hardened into gears and springs.
  • Giant fusilli as playground equipment.
  • Noodleness and pastitude.
  • Whether gnocchi is a pasta. What about cauliflower gnocchi?
  • Unleavened Carrot Cake.
  • Indomie: the number one selling noodle on Earth.
  • Good spices: they can work in a broth.
  • Soupertaster: Jim eats soup alone while talking to a volleyball with a bloody handprint on it.
  • Learning math by starting with incredibly abstract unmotivated ideas.
  • Some Bottomless Pits are Deeper than Others.
  • Approaching a question by interpreting it as a question that if answerable.
  • The significant of the perception of free will.
  • How a closed system can produce multiple different outcomes.
  • What happens when we decide we don't have free will.
  • A completely deterministic system that has a sensation of free will.
  • Taking as much time as it takes to read a book.
  • Shooting the Moon (in real life)
  • Taking all the bad cards and winning.
  • Becoming disciplined about time
  • What a modern feature phone can do.
  • Dividing your day into blocks and spending them.
  • The period in your life when you lived in Burlingame.
  • Getting an incredibe amount of work done during your hour and a half commute.
  • Topic Lords or Plug Lords?
  • Something you'll be glad you did tomorrow.
  • Integration Basics.
  • Explicit Euler vs. Semi-Implicit Euler.
  • The pros and cons of RK4.
  • The physics system behind Drawn to Life.
  • What it takes to be an old song.
  • Hadestown and The Instigator.
  • The Hadestown Tiny Desk Concert.
  • How to play music with other people in a way that accounts for skill gaps.
  • Going to the Starry Plough to play the penny whistle.
  • Musicians sitting in a circle and talking until someone starts playing something and everyone else joins in.
  • Joining in on a song you've never heard before.
  • Playing Mary Had a Little Lamb at 40 BPM.
  • Making a slow song more interesting by adding ornamentation.
  • Star of the County Down.
  • Different ideas that come out when you play music at half speed.
  • Lark Camp.
  • The person who hands out the cheat sheet with all the popular tunes and their chord progressions.
  • Sorting tunes by frequnecy.
  • The bad things about Irish sessions, from a game design perspective.
  • Learning a song by reading the notation vs. learning it by playing it for 30 years.
  • Star Above the Garter.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+0OpEqIAI ]]> Jim Stormdancer 264. Pickpocketed So Hard You Die https://topiclords.com/pickpocketed-so-hard-you-die 754ad184-e393-464a-a182-af9dbf5997ef Mon, 11 Nov 2024 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Andrew and Aubrianne. We discuss coming to terms with being bad at video games, charging money for art, messy game design, To Be of Use by Marge Piercy, Films Noir, and Complementary Hobby Power Couples. 1:07:31 true Lords:

Topics:

  • I will never get good at video games and that's okay
  • Does charging (or even allowing donations) for something change its perception as a piece of art?
  • Messy game design
  • To Be of Use, Marge Piercy
  • Films Noir
  • Complementary Hobby Power Couples

Microtopics:

  • Just shakin' it a little bit.
  • The royal it.
  • Putting Homestar Runner on shuffle while you do homework.
  • Making Pico-8 games under an Internet name.
  • Your child petting a dog but when you try to pet the dog as well the dog is like "no, not you!"
  • A beard or long braid as a fidget tool.
  • Spectrum Cheater Reveals.
  • Games where you have to plan ahead.
  • A very easy social slot to fit into.
  • How many extra organs does Master Chief have?
  • Watching your mom fail the same jump in Animal Well for twenty minutes.
  • Picking a garbage can in Fallout 3 where you keep all your stuff which works great until they patch garbage collection into the game.
  • A game that requires two skills and the two skills exist in two different people.
  • What happened to cheat codes?
  • Paying the pickpocket trainer to train you and then pickpocketing your money back.
  • Pickpocketing someone's vital organs.
  • Homestar Runner as the ultimate counter example.
  • What quilts are worth if you charged a fair wage for your time.
  • Spending half an hour convincing your nephew that this scarf really is worth $300.
  • The only two millennials who haven't professionalized their hobbies.
  • Constructing your game design like a mathematical proof.
  • The promise of the text parser.
  • All the weird bespoke deaths you could find in a Sierra game.
  • Games intended for people who have more free time than you.
  • How to make it completely viable to make small games.
  • A clever hack to market your video game (spend a bunch of money)
  • The promise of the 50 in one pirate kart.
  • Trying to get the house gifts in every game in UFO 50.
  • Collecting the umbrella and the pin an least a dozen times.
  • A Guided Tour of Barbuta.
  • The black sleek heads of seals bouncing like half submerged balls.
  • Doing what has to be done, again and again.
  • A form of idleness that produces an incredibly amount of textiles.
  • Peruvian people spinning while they wait for the bus.
  • Why nobody gives a shit about rope and string.
  • Appreciating the lasagna that's right in front of you.
  • Making a loaf of bread for your family that mostly eats peanut butter sandwiches.
  • Making a little frowny face at "amphoras."
  • Meeting a girl and wooing her with good semicolon usage.
  • Dressing up as Elaine and Guybrush for Halloween.
  • Whoppers Jr. and Games Boys Advance.
  • Classic Film Noir such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
  • That time Rita Hayworth made you realize you were gay.
  • Getting no movies from America for years and then getting a ton of movies from America all at once.
  • Pulpy low-budget melodramas.
  • The Hays Code.
  • The five minute monologue where Quint describes the graphic sex scene between Jaws and the Hoth Ice Wampa
  • Neo Noir. (Meaning from the 70a.)
  • Modern art. (Meaning from the early 20th century.)
  • Neo Noir films such as the Bourne Identity and Batman Begins
  • Bugs Bunny inventing the smoky noir saxophone.
  • A taxonomy of complementary hobby pairs.
  • Getting 20 musicians in a room and it's a total disaster.
  • Sheep growing so much extraneous wool that they fall on their backs and explode.
  • Youtube recommending a video on how to flip a sheep over.
  • Sheep Tips: How to Flip a Sheep.
  • A video of a guy getting out of a car and hopping a fence and running over to help a sheep who is stuck on its back like "what do I even do now?"
  • Fellow Jorts Horsians.
  • Deep lore of server outages.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

  • I will never get good at video games and that's okay
  • Does charging (or even allowing donations) for something change its perception as a piece of art?
  • Messy game design
  • To Be of Use, Marge Piercy
  • Films Noir
  • Complementary Hobby Power Couples

Microtopics:

  • Just shakin' it a little bit.
  • The royal it.
  • Putting Homestar Runner on shuffle while you do homework.
  • Making Pico-8 games under an Internet name.
  • Your child petting a dog but when you try to pet the dog as well the dog is like "no, not you!"
  • A beard or long braid as a fidget tool.
  • Spectrum Cheater Reveals.
  • Games where you have to plan ahead.
  • A very easy social slot to fit into.
  • How many extra organs does Master Chief have?
  • Watching your mom fail the same jump in Animal Well for twenty minutes.
  • Picking a garbage can in Fallout 3 where you keep all your stuff which works great until they patch garbage collection into the game.
  • A game that requires two skills and the two skills exist in two different people.
  • What happened to cheat codes?
  • Paying the pickpocket trainer to train you and then pickpocketing your money back.
  • Pickpocketing someone's vital organs.
  • Homestar Runner as the ultimate counter example.
  • What quilts are worth if you charged a fair wage for your time.
  • Spending half an hour convincing your nephew that this scarf really is worth $300.
  • The only two millennials who haven't professionalized their hobbies.
  • Constructing your game design like a mathematical proof.
  • The promise of the text parser.
  • All the weird bespoke deaths you could find in a Sierra game.
  • Games intended for people who have more free time than you.
  • How to make it completely viable to make small games.
  • A clever hack to market your video game (spend a bunch of money)
  • The promise of the 50 in one pirate kart.
  • Trying to get the house gifts in every game in UFO 50.
  • Collecting the umbrella and the pin an least a dozen times.
  • A Guided Tour of Barbuta.
  • The black sleek heads of seals bouncing like half submerged balls.
  • Doing what has to be done, again and again.
  • A form of idleness that produces an incredibly amount of textiles.
  • Peruvian people spinning while they wait for the bus.
  • Why nobody gives a shit about rope and string.
  • Appreciating the lasagna that's right in front of you.
  • Making a loaf of bread for your family that mostly eats peanut butter sandwiches.
  • Making a little frowny face at "amphoras."
  • Meeting a girl and wooing her with good semicolon usage.
  • Dressing up as Elaine and Guybrush for Halloween.
  • Whoppers Jr. and Games Boys Advance.
  • Classic Film Noir such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
  • That time Rita Hayworth made you realize you were gay.
  • Getting no movies from America for years and then getting a ton of movies from America all at once.
  • Pulpy low-budget melodramas.
  • The Hays Code.
  • The five minute monologue where Quint describes the graphic sex scene between Jaws and the Hoth Ice Wampa
  • Neo Noir. (Meaning from the 70a.)
  • Modern art. (Meaning from the early 20th century.)
  • Neo Noir films such as the Bourne Identity and Batman Begins
  • Bugs Bunny inventing the smoky noir saxophone.
  • A taxonomy of complementary hobby pairs.
  • Getting 20 musicians in a room and it's a total disaster.
  • Sheep growing so much extraneous wool that they fall on their backs and explode.
  • Youtube recommending a video on how to flip a sheep over.
  • Sheep Tips: How to Flip a Sheep.
  • A video of a guy getting out of a car and hopping a fence and running over to help a sheep who is stuck on its back like "what do I even do now?"
  • Fellow Jorts Horsians.
  • Deep lore of server outages.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

  • I will never get good at video games and that's okay
  • Does charging (or even allowing donations) for something change its perception as a piece of art?
  • Messy game design
  • To Be of Use, Marge Piercy
  • Films Noir
  • Complementary Hobby Power Couples

Microtopics:

  • Just shakin' it a little bit.
  • The royal it.
  • Putting Homestar Runner on shuffle while you do homework.
  • Making Pico-8 games under an Internet name.
  • Your child petting a dog but when you try to pet the dog as well the dog is like "no, not you!"
  • A beard or long braid as a fidget tool.
  • Spectrum Cheater Reveals.
  • Games where you have to plan ahead.
  • A very easy social slot to fit into.
  • How many extra organs does Master Chief have?
  • Watching your mom fail the same jump in Animal Well for twenty minutes.
  • Picking a garbage can in Fallout 3 where you keep all your stuff which works great until they patch garbage collection into the game.
  • A game that requires two skills and the two skills exist in two different people.
  • What happened to cheat codes?
  • Paying the pickpocket trainer to train you and then pickpocketing your money back.
  • Pickpocketing someone's vital organs.
  • Homestar Runner as the ultimate counter example.
  • What quilts are worth if you charged a fair wage for your time.
  • Spending half an hour convincing your nephew that this scarf really is worth $300.
  • The only two millennials who haven't professionalized their hobbies.
  • Constructing your game design like a mathematical proof.
  • The promise of the text parser.
  • All the weird bespoke deaths you could find in a Sierra game.
  • Games intended for people who have more free time than you.
  • How to make it completely viable to make small games.
  • A clever hack to market your video game (spend a bunch of money)
  • The promise of the 50 in one pirate kart.
  • Trying to get the house gifts in every game in UFO 50.
  • Collecting the umbrella and the pin an least a dozen times.
  • A Guided Tour of Barbuta.
  • The black sleek heads of seals bouncing like half submerged balls.
  • Doing what has to be done, again and again.
  • A form of idleness that produces an incredibly amount of textiles.
  • Peruvian people spinning while they wait for the bus.
  • Why nobody gives a shit about rope and string.
  • Appreciating the lasagna that's right in front of you.
  • Making a loaf of bread for your family that mostly eats peanut butter sandwiches.
  • Making a little frowny face at "amphoras."
  • Meeting a girl and wooing her with good semicolon usage.
  • Dressing up as Elaine and Guybrush for Halloween.
  • Whoppers Jr. and Games Boys Advance.
  • Classic Film Noir such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
  • That time Rita Hayworth made you realize you were gay.
  • Getting no movies from America for years and then getting a ton of movies from America all at once.
  • Pulpy low-budget melodramas.
  • The Hays Code.
  • The five minute monologue where Quint describes the graphic sex scene between Jaws and the Hoth Ice Wampa
  • Neo Noir. (Meaning from the 70a.)
  • Modern art. (Meaning from the early 20th century.)
  • Neo Noir films such as the Bourne Identity and Batman Begins
  • Bugs Bunny inventing the smoky noir saxophone.
  • A taxonomy of complementary hobby pairs.
  • Getting 20 musicians in a room and it's a total disaster.
  • Sheep growing so much extraneous wool that they fall on their backs and explode.
  • Youtube recommending a video on how to flip a sheep over.
  • Sheep Tips: How to Flip a Sheep.
  • A video of a guy getting out of a car and hopping a fence and running over to help a sheep who is stuck on its back like "what do I even do now?"
  • Fellow Jorts Horsians.
  • Deep lore of server outages.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+RDDC_1k5 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 263. Drafted Into the Applebee's Wars https://topiclords.com/drafted-into-the-applebees-wars 5a82915f-1733-4717-9f51-d08835a7d394 Mon, 04 Nov 2024 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Xalavier and Brianne. We discuss movies about contract killers doing contract negotiation, whether fictional characters are better role models than real people, the new Zelda game talks too much and I'm okay with that, Think of Others by Mahmoud Darwish, enacting a customer service draft, and doing terrible things to the Criterion Closet. 1:09:40 true Lords:

  • Xalavier
  • Brianne

Topics:

  • Why do movies about contract killers skip over the good part of negotiating in excruciating detail the contract and clauses present?
  • Are fictional characters greater role models than real people?
  • The new Zelda game talks too much and I'm okay with that
  • Think of Others by Mahmoud Darwish
  • Should every person be forcibly drafted into a customer service job, like the military.
  • The horrible things I would do in the Criterion Closet, if given an opportunity.

Microtopics:

  • I Am Your Beast.
  • Making 50 games in 7 years.
  • A co-op Kaiju horror cooking game
  • The Name of the Rose meets Godzilla meets Lethal Company.
  • Power couples in games.
  • Moviegoers who want to know about contract law.
  • Search and replacing "murder" with "unalive" so that a contact killer can safely sue the client for breach of contact.
  • Pedantic legal contact killer law every week.
  • Lowering the bar so that we can all raise it later.
  • Doctor Odyssey.
  • Disheveled Detective.
  • The Autistic Coded Detective.
  • A ahow about autistic people written by neurotypical people.
  • Making a weekly podcast and scoffing at the TV shows that can only manage 24 episodes a year.
  • Asking google for the "podcast with the fewest episodes" and google just assuming you meant the podcast with the shortest running time.
  • Sending children to the sharps dump. (Because the kid asked for it and the parent signed a waiver.)
  • Desperately knocking on Google's door and beginning them to tell you where the furthest Denny's is.
  • The Waluigi-owned Denny's in the Andromeda Galaxy.
  • Role Models happening accidentally.
  • Donald Duck becoming a sex pest after edgier writers take over.
  • A form of self to aspire to.
  • 300 Rorschach Guys in a discord server.
  • An epic story that FromSoft will continue to plunder of its biggest plot elements for the next 30 years.
  • A character that you relate to and then you realize that's bad.
  • What do you do after you get what you want?
  • Leading a horde of ninja at the dictates of an Eldritch god.
  • Getting what you've been looking for and realizing that you're no longer the person who wanted that thing.
  • Role-playing a princess who has to talk to a litany of insufferable people.
  • Swinging your sword through grass to reveal rupees.
  • Zelda's Got an Onus.
  • Who you're thinking about as you pay your water bills.
  • Those who are nursed by clouds.
  • Shakespeare beeves.
  • GettingTikTok Mad.
  • The Death of Arthur.
  • Impacting media literacy for generations because you want to make a sassy pun.
  • Slipping into Belgian because you don't have enough mana to speak French.
  • The red phone in every publicly traded franchise restaurant that connects the customer directly to a random shareholder.
  • Working a Black Friday at a retail job and being awarded a purple heart.
  • Working a Best Buy Geek Squad tour of service to earn your citizenship.
  • The Criterion Closet.
  • The level of stardom you need to attain in order to remove movies from the Criterion Collection.
  • Supermarket Sweep.
  • Asking someone who took one year of high school French what you call someone who owns a closet.
  • I would not be normal and they would not be safe.
  • Landed noblemen who are super into Amontillado.
  • Where to lock the insufferable friend who went to film school.
  • How many Miami Vice episodes ended up in the Criterion Collection.
  • The movie that you remember the least.
  • Forgiving the insufferable film school attendees in your life because you can't think of a good punishment for them.
]]> Lords:

  • Xalavier
  • Brianne

Topics:

  • Why do movies about contract killers skip over the good part of negotiating in excruciating detail the contract and clauses present?
  • Are fictional characters greater role models than real people?
  • The new Zelda game talks too much and I'm okay with that
  • Think of Others by Mahmoud Darwish
  • Should every person be forcibly drafted into a customer service job, like the military.
  • The horrible things I would do in the Criterion Closet, if given an opportunity.

Microtopics:

  • I Am Your Beast.
  • Making 50 games in 7 years.
  • A co-op Kaiju horror cooking game
  • The Name of the Rose meets Godzilla meets Lethal Company.
  • Power couples in games.
  • Moviegoers who want to know about contract law.
  • Search and replacing "murder" with "unalive" so that a contact killer can safely sue the client for breach of contact.
  • Pedantic legal contact killer law every week.
  • Lowering the bar so that we can all raise it later.
  • Doctor Odyssey.
  • Disheveled Detective.
  • The Autistic Coded Detective.
  • A ahow about autistic people written by neurotypical people.
  • Making a weekly podcast and scoffing at the TV shows that can only manage 24 episodes a year.
  • Asking google for the "podcast with the fewest episodes" and google just assuming you meant the podcast with the shortest running time.
  • Sending children to the sharps dump. (Because the kid asked for it and the parent signed a waiver.)
  • Desperately knocking on Google's door and beginning them to tell you where the furthest Denny's is.
  • The Waluigi-owned Denny's in the Andromeda Galaxy.
  • Role Models happening accidentally.
  • Donald Duck becoming a sex pest after edgier writers take over.
  • A form of self to aspire to.
  • 300 Rorschach Guys in a discord server.
  • An epic story that FromSoft will continue to plunder of its biggest plot elements for the next 30 years.
  • A character that you relate to and then you realize that's bad.
  • What do you do after you get what you want?
  • Leading a horde of ninja at the dictates of an Eldritch god.
  • Getting what you've been looking for and realizing that you're no longer the person who wanted that thing.
  • Role-playing a princess who has to talk to a litany of insufferable people.
  • Swinging your sword through grass to reveal rupees.
  • Zelda's Got an Onus.
  • Who you're thinking about as you pay your water bills.
  • Those who are nursed by clouds.
  • Shakespeare beeves.
  • GettingTikTok Mad.
  • The Death of Arthur.
  • Impacting media literacy for generations because you want to make a sassy pun.
  • Slipping into Belgian because you don't have enough mana to speak French.
  • The red phone in every publicly traded franchise restaurant that connects the customer directly to a random shareholder.
  • Working a Black Friday at a retail job and being awarded a purple heart.
  • Working a Best Buy Geek Squad tour of service to earn your citizenship.
  • The Criterion Closet.
  • The level of stardom you need to attain in order to remove movies from the Criterion Collection.
  • Supermarket Sweep.
  • Asking someone who took one year of high school French what you call someone who owns a closet.
  • I would not be normal and they would not be safe.
  • Landed noblemen who are super into Amontillado.
  • Where to lock the insufferable friend who went to film school.
  • How many Miami Vice episodes ended up in the Criterion Collection.
  • The movie that you remember the least.
  • Forgiving the insufferable film school attendees in your life because you can't think of a good punishment for them.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Xalavier
  • Brianne

Topics:

  • Why do movies about contract killers skip over the good part of negotiating in excruciating detail the contract and clauses present?
  • Are fictional characters greater role models than real people?
  • The new Zelda game talks too much and I'm okay with that
  • Think of Others by Mahmoud Darwish
  • Should every person be forcibly drafted into a customer service job, like the military.
  • The horrible things I would do in the Criterion Closet, if given an opportunity.

Microtopics:

  • I Am Your Beast.
  • Making 50 games in 7 years.
  • A co-op Kaiju horror cooking game
  • The Name of the Rose meets Godzilla meets Lethal Company.
  • Power couples in games.
  • Moviegoers who want to know about contract law.
  • Search and replacing "murder" with "unalive" so that a contact killer can safely sue the client for breach of contact.
  • Pedantic legal contact killer law every week.
  • Lowering the bar so that we can all raise it later.
  • Doctor Odyssey.
  • Disheveled Detective.
  • The Autistic Coded Detective.
  • A ahow about autistic people written by neurotypical people.
  • Making a weekly podcast and scoffing at the TV shows that can only manage 24 episodes a year.
  • Asking google for the "podcast with the fewest episodes" and google just assuming you meant the podcast with the shortest running time.
  • Sending children to the sharps dump. (Because the kid asked for it and the parent signed a waiver.)
  • Desperately knocking on Google's door and beginning them to tell you where the furthest Denny's is.
  • The Waluigi-owned Denny's in the Andromeda Galaxy.
  • Role Models happening accidentally.
  • Donald Duck becoming a sex pest after edgier writers take over.
  • A form of self to aspire to.
  • 300 Rorschach Guys in a discord server.
  • An epic story that FromSoft will continue to plunder of its biggest plot elements for the next 30 years.
  • A character that you relate to and then you realize that's bad.
  • What do you do after you get what you want?
  • Leading a horde of ninja at the dictates of an Eldritch god.
  • Getting what you've been looking for and realizing that you're no longer the person who wanted that thing.
  • Role-playing a princess who has to talk to a litany of insufferable people.
  • Swinging your sword through grass to reveal rupees.
  • Zelda's Got an Onus.
  • Who you're thinking about as you pay your water bills.
  • Those who are nursed by clouds.
  • Shakespeare beeves.
  • GettingTikTok Mad.
  • The Death of Arthur.
  • Impacting media literacy for generations because you want to make a sassy pun.
  • Slipping into Belgian because you don't have enough mana to speak French.
  • The red phone in every publicly traded franchise restaurant that connects the customer directly to a random shareholder.
  • Working a Black Friday at a retail job and being awarded a purple heart.
  • Working a Best Buy Geek Squad tour of service to earn your citizenship.
  • The Criterion Closet.
  • The level of stardom you need to attain in order to remove movies from the Criterion Collection.
  • Supermarket Sweep.
  • Asking someone who took one year of high school French what you call someone who owns a closet.
  • I would not be normal and they would not be safe.
  • Landed noblemen who are super into Amontillado.
  • Where to lock the insufferable friend who went to film school.
  • How many Miami Vice episodes ended up in the Criterion Collection.
  • The movie that you remember the least.
  • Forgiving the insufferable film school attendees in your life because you can't think of a good punishment for them.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+XkeLDWID ]]> Jim Stormdancer 262. Real Meal, Fictional Man https://topiclords.com/real-meal-fictional-man 774b92f7-0d10-4ac7-b22d-e64e3455b0fa Mon, 28 Oct 2024 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: CisHetKayFaber and Maxx. We discuss food-focused Japanese TV, how pescetarians exist if fish don't, the return of PicoSteveMo, wikipoem.org, and the shifting nature of what is appropriate for children. 1:10:55 true Lords:

  • CisHetKayFaber
  • Maxx

Topics:

  • Food-focused Japanese TV
  • If "fish don't exist," then how do pescetarians?
  • PicoSteveMo is back!
  • https://wikipoem.org/
  • Verisimilitude in play (My daughter plays GTA and Roblox) (The shifting nature of what is appropriate for children)

Microtopics:

  • Emotionally connecting with a dying web site and meeting up with other users in Seattle.
  • What the Cohost diaspora is doing to do.
  • Drive-by bad opinions.
  • Where people live in Australia, on average.
  • CSS Crimes.
  • Using external image hosts to continue blogging on Cohost after it is in read-only mode.
  • URL shortening services reusing old links.
  • Meeting up with people you have a loose association with and having a good time together.
  • The Bowling League Mafia taking up every lane every day with tournaments so nobody else can bowl.
  • A TV drama where a traveling salesman keeps being hungry at different train stations.
  • Seeing a meal that looks delicious but you're full and can't eat a whole nother meal.
  • Whether food becomes fictional as soon as you eat it.
  • Watching satellite TV on your flip phone.
  • OneSeg.
  • Your email address being owned by your phone carrier.
  • A phone that closes and has great battery life.
  • The golden age of food-focused broadcast TV.
  • A celebrity who's interested in food goes and eats at a restaurant.
  • This Burger Weighs 30 Pounds!
  • Midnight Diner.
  • The Karate Kid but with ramen.
  • Watching a Youtube of the video gamers.
  • Ordinary People, Extraordinary Food.
  • Whether pescetarians exist.
  • The researchers in the shark lab you used to work at calling dolphins fish.
  • Fish eyes: nature's boba.
  • A block of gouda floating in the ocean.
  • Fish that stop being fish when you think about it too hard.
  • Disagreeing with beavers about what tree to cut down, but you're conflict avoidant so the beaver always wins.
  • Haven't we all argued with beavers?
  • Crows stealing the naan out of your naan and curry.
  • Jungle Crows who sound like an adult man doing an impression of crows.
  • Crows who are really good at Japanese T9.
  • The nets you put over your garbage that can't possibly keep the crows out.
  • Picking Steves from a continuity standpoint.
  • Finding any excuse to make a Stephen King Sokoban.
  • Deliberately awkward control schemes.
  • A thousand prototyping girls in space.
  • A poem without any line breaks in it.
  • The zine era of web design, when people would just type HTML and it would become a web page.
  • Phrases that make sense locally but not globally.
  • A comedian who is in lots of things.
  • The kind of poem you'd get if you put a poem on a wiki.
  • The kind of thing that would probably be read on this show.
  • The kind of web site that you'd run into when you're doing an ARG.
  • Installing Roblox on the PS5 to teach your daughter to read English better.
  • Playing a game with purple vomiting everywhere.
  • The ways a 7 year old interacts with a Grand Theft Auto.
  • Teaching yourself how to drive in Grand Theft Auto and obeying all the traffic laws.
  • Not shielding your kid from media but talking to them about it instead.
  • Academy Award winner Fisher Stevens.
]]> Lords:

  • CisHetKayFaber
  • Maxx

Topics:

  • Food-focused Japanese TV
  • If "fish don't exist," then how do pescetarians?
  • PicoSteveMo is back!
  • https://wikipoem.org/
  • Verisimilitude in play (My daughter plays GTA and Roblox) (The shifting nature of what is appropriate for children)

Microtopics:

  • Emotionally connecting with a dying web site and meeting up with other users in Seattle.
  • What the Cohost diaspora is doing to do.
  • Drive-by bad opinions.
  • Where people live in Australia, on average.
  • CSS Crimes.
  • Using external image hosts to continue blogging on Cohost after it is in read-only mode.
  • URL shortening services reusing old links.
  • Meeting up with people you have a loose association with and having a good time together.
  • The Bowling League Mafia taking up every lane every day with tournaments so nobody else can bowl.
  • A TV drama where a traveling salesman keeps being hungry at different train stations.
  • Seeing a meal that looks delicious but you're full and can't eat a whole nother meal.
  • Whether food becomes fictional as soon as you eat it.
  • Watching satellite TV on your flip phone.
  • OneSeg.
  • Your email address being owned by your phone carrier.
  • A phone that closes and has great battery life.
  • The golden age of food-focused broadcast TV.
  • A celebrity who's interested in food goes and eats at a restaurant.
  • This Burger Weighs 30 Pounds!
  • Midnight Diner.
  • The Karate Kid but with ramen.
  • Watching a Youtube of the video gamers.
  • Ordinary People, Extraordinary Food.
  • Whether pescetarians exist.
  • The researchers in the shark lab you used to work at calling dolphins fish.
  • Fish eyes: nature's boba.
  • A block of gouda floating in the ocean.
  • Fish that stop being fish when you think about it too hard.
  • Disagreeing with beavers about what tree to cut down, but you're conflict avoidant so the beaver always wins.
  • Haven't we all argued with beavers?
  • Crows stealing the naan out of your naan and curry.
  • Jungle Crows who sound like an adult man doing an impression of crows.
  • Crows who are really good at Japanese T9.
  • The nets you put over your garbage that can't possibly keep the crows out.
  • Picking Steves from a continuity standpoint.
  • Finding any excuse to make a Stephen King Sokoban.
  • Deliberately awkward control schemes.
  • A thousand prototyping girls in space.
  • A poem without any line breaks in it.
  • The zine era of web design, when people would just type HTML and it would become a web page.
  • Phrases that make sense locally but not globally.
  • A comedian who is in lots of things.
  • The kind of poem you'd get if you put a poem on a wiki.
  • The kind of thing that would probably be read on this show.
  • The kind of web site that you'd run into when you're doing an ARG.
  • Installing Roblox on the PS5 to teach your daughter to read English better.
  • Playing a game with purple vomiting everywhere.
  • The ways a 7 year old interacts with a Grand Theft Auto.
  • Teaching yourself how to drive in Grand Theft Auto and obeying all the traffic laws.
  • Not shielding your kid from media but talking to them about it instead.
  • Academy Award winner Fisher Stevens.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • CisHetKayFaber
  • Maxx

Topics:

  • Food-focused Japanese TV
  • If "fish don't exist," then how do pescetarians?
  • PicoSteveMo is back!
  • https://wikipoem.org/
  • Verisimilitude in play (My daughter plays GTA and Roblox) (The shifting nature of what is appropriate for children)

Microtopics:

  • Emotionally connecting with a dying web site and meeting up with other users in Seattle.
  • What the Cohost diaspora is doing to do.
  • Drive-by bad opinions.
  • Where people live in Australia, on average.
  • CSS Crimes.
  • Using external image hosts to continue blogging on Cohost after it is in read-only mode.
  • URL shortening services reusing old links.
  • Meeting up with people you have a loose association with and having a good time together.
  • The Bowling League Mafia taking up every lane every day with tournaments so nobody else can bowl.
  • A TV drama where a traveling salesman keeps being hungry at different train stations.
  • Seeing a meal that looks delicious but you're full and can't eat a whole nother meal.
  • Whether food becomes fictional as soon as you eat it.
  • Watching satellite TV on your flip phone.
  • OneSeg.
  • Your email address being owned by your phone carrier.
  • A phone that closes and has great battery life.
  • The golden age of food-focused broadcast TV.
  • A celebrity who's interested in food goes and eats at a restaurant.
  • This Burger Weighs 30 Pounds!
  • Midnight Diner.
  • The Karate Kid but with ramen.
  • Watching a Youtube of the video gamers.
  • Ordinary People, Extraordinary Food.
  • Whether pescetarians exist.
  • The researchers in the shark lab you used to work at calling dolphins fish.
  • Fish eyes: nature's boba.
  • A block of gouda floating in the ocean.
  • Fish that stop being fish when you think about it too hard.
  • Disagreeing with beavers about what tree to cut down, but you're conflict avoidant so the beaver always wins.
  • Haven't we all argued with beavers?
  • Crows stealing the naan out of your naan and curry.
  • Jungle Crows who sound like an adult man doing an impression of crows.
  • Crows who are really good at Japanese T9.
  • The nets you put over your garbage that can't possibly keep the crows out.
  • Picking Steves from a continuity standpoint.
  • Finding any excuse to make a Stephen King Sokoban.
  • Deliberately awkward control schemes.
  • A thousand prototyping girls in space.
  • A poem without any line breaks in it.
  • The zine era of web design, when people would just type HTML and it would become a web page.
  • Phrases that make sense locally but not globally.
  • A comedian who is in lots of things.
  • The kind of poem you'd get if you put a poem on a wiki.
  • The kind of thing that would probably be read on this show.
  • The kind of web site that you'd run into when you're doing an ARG.
  • Installing Roblox on the PS5 to teach your daughter to read English better.
  • Playing a game with purple vomiting everywhere.
  • The ways a 7 year old interacts with a Grand Theft Auto.
  • Teaching yourself how to drive in Grand Theft Auto and obeying all the traffic laws.
  • Not shielding your kid from media but talking to them about it instead.
  • Academy Award winner Fisher Stevens.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+HXNqcZYU ]]> Jim Stormdancer 261. Chat Hurt Chatself in Chat's Confusion https://topiclords.com/chat-hurt-chatself-in-chats-confusion 429765dc-4c27-4000-9bfc-e861cef70663 Mon, 21 Oct 2024 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Alex and Mitch. We discuss the wikipedia article about Football, classic Macintosh computers, the entomologists in Silence of the Lambs, With Apologies to Dr. Seuss by Supper Mario Broth, Archipelago, and deconstructing chat as a first person pronoun. 1:03:25 true Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Off-the-cuff something.
  • Putting on the best talent show Cohost has ever seen.
  • Www.www.www
  • How to deal with multiple things that are called the same thing.
  • A list of things called Georgia.
  • A very opinionated move that you would not expect from a source as neutral as Wikipedia.
  • Sometimes your can carry the ball; sometimes you can't carry the ball.
  • What an IP address has to say about women in sports.
  • Sports: there's a place where you play it.
  • Watching Mexican TV and seeing an ad for "¡futbol americano!"
  • Repairing an old Mac that you found in an e-waste place.
  • Whether programming has changed since 1985.
  • Running an Electron app on a Mac Classic.
  • Switcher allowing you to run four 128k programs at a time on a 512k Mac.
  • How the 1991 Borland C++ debugger compares to the 2024 Visual Studio debugger.
  • Blah Blob, a Celeste-inspired platformer implemented as a Hypercard stack.
  • Sitting at the blender all day blending everything within arm's reach.
  • Steve Jobs' relationship with fans.
  • Wrapping your Xbox 360 in a towel to reflow the cracked solder.
  • Adding an extra lane to a highway to make the traffic worse.
  • Two awkwardly charming guys who help with an FBI investigation.
  • CSIvania.
  • The public domain jingle that precedes the poem.
  • Supper Mario Broth.
  • Wario's Shit Bone.
  • A Rare Gooper Bloober Goop Gooble Event.
  • Rhyming portend with event.
  • A textuovisual post.
  • Dr. Soup.
  • Whether the folks writing the Prima guide to Mario Sunshine get to personally ask Miyamoto what the weird goop enemies are called.
  • Bowser's Fury: the final Mario game.
  • F Boy: the F stands for fireball.
  • Trying to use a social media service when you don't know anyone on it.
  • In My Tumbl Opinion.
  • Weird Mario Enemies.
  • F Boy (Again)
  • Wanting a cool nickname like F Boy.
  • Explaining randomizers to someone who has never heard of video games.
  • Multi-game multiplayer randomizers.
  • A non-randomized randomizer.
  • Getting rupee donations left and right when all you need is a sword.
  • Unofficial archipelago support.
  • The hypothetical dad behind the fourth wall.
  • The hypothetical eighth month of the year.
  • Subtumbling.
  • How to tell the difference between a noun and a pronoun.
  • Old-fashioned home grown misinformation.
  • Getting from fourth wall to fourth person.
  • Fourth person perspective as an alternative term for first person plural.
  • Whether "dad" is a pronoun.
  • Chat hurt chatself in chat's confusion.
  • Rebageling images from 2014.
  • Agreeing with yourself from 10 years ago about which images are interesting.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Off-the-cuff something.
  • Putting on the best talent show Cohost has ever seen.
  • Www.www.www
  • How to deal with multiple things that are called the same thing.
  • A list of things called Georgia.
  • A very opinionated move that you would not expect from a source as neutral as Wikipedia.
  • Sometimes your can carry the ball; sometimes you can't carry the ball.
  • What an IP address has to say about women in sports.
  • Sports: there's a place where you play it.
  • Watching Mexican TV and seeing an ad for "¡futbol americano!"
  • Repairing an old Mac that you found in an e-waste place.
  • Whether programming has changed since 1985.
  • Running an Electron app on a Mac Classic.
  • Switcher allowing you to run four 128k programs at a time on a 512k Mac.
  • How the 1991 Borland C++ debugger compares to the 2024 Visual Studio debugger.
  • Blah Blob, a Celeste-inspired platformer implemented as a Hypercard stack.
  • Sitting at the blender all day blending everything within arm's reach.
  • Steve Jobs' relationship with fans.
  • Wrapping your Xbox 360 in a towel to reflow the cracked solder.
  • Adding an extra lane to a highway to make the traffic worse.
  • Two awkwardly charming guys who help with an FBI investigation.
  • CSIvania.
  • The public domain jingle that precedes the poem.
  • Supper Mario Broth.
  • Wario's Shit Bone.
  • A Rare Gooper Bloober Goop Gooble Event.
  • Rhyming portend with event.
  • A textuovisual post.
  • Dr. Soup.
  • Whether the folks writing the Prima guide to Mario Sunshine get to personally ask Miyamoto what the weird goop enemies are called.
  • Bowser's Fury: the final Mario game.
  • F Boy: the F stands for fireball.
  • Trying to use a social media service when you don't know anyone on it.
  • In My Tumbl Opinion.
  • Weird Mario Enemies.
  • F Boy (Again)
  • Wanting a cool nickname like F Boy.
  • Explaining randomizers to someone who has never heard of video games.
  • Multi-game multiplayer randomizers.
  • A non-randomized randomizer.
  • Getting rupee donations left and right when all you need is a sword.
  • Unofficial archipelago support.
  • The hypothetical dad behind the fourth wall.
  • The hypothetical eighth month of the year.
  • Subtumbling.
  • How to tell the difference between a noun and a pronoun.
  • Old-fashioned home grown misinformation.
  • Getting from fourth wall to fourth person.
  • Fourth person perspective as an alternative term for first person plural.
  • Whether "dad" is a pronoun.
  • Chat hurt chatself in chat's confusion.
  • Rebageling images from 2014.
  • Agreeing with yourself from 10 years ago about which images are interesting.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Off-the-cuff something.
  • Putting on the best talent show Cohost has ever seen.
  • Www.www.www
  • How to deal with multiple things that are called the same thing.
  • A list of things called Georgia.
  • A very opinionated move that you would not expect from a source as neutral as Wikipedia.
  • Sometimes your can carry the ball; sometimes you can't carry the ball.
  • What an IP address has to say about women in sports.
  • Sports: there's a place where you play it.
  • Watching Mexican TV and seeing an ad for "¡futbol americano!"
  • Repairing an old Mac that you found in an e-waste place.
  • Whether programming has changed since 1985.
  • Running an Electron app on a Mac Classic.
  • Switcher allowing you to run four 128k programs at a time on a 512k Mac.
  • How the 1991 Borland C++ debugger compares to the 2024 Visual Studio debugger.
  • Blah Blob, a Celeste-inspired platformer implemented as a Hypercard stack.
  • Sitting at the blender all day blending everything within arm's reach.
  • Steve Jobs' relationship with fans.
  • Wrapping your Xbox 360 in a towel to reflow the cracked solder.
  • Adding an extra lane to a highway to make the traffic worse.
  • Two awkwardly charming guys who help with an FBI investigation.
  • CSIvania.
  • The public domain jingle that precedes the poem.
  • Supper Mario Broth.
  • Wario's Shit Bone.
  • A Rare Gooper Bloober Goop Gooble Event.
  • Rhyming portend with event.
  • A textuovisual post.
  • Dr. Soup.
  • Whether the folks writing the Prima guide to Mario Sunshine get to personally ask Miyamoto what the weird goop enemies are called.
  • Bowser's Fury: the final Mario game.
  • F Boy: the F stands for fireball.
  • Trying to use a social media service when you don't know anyone on it.
  • In My Tumbl Opinion.
  • Weird Mario Enemies.
  • F Boy (Again)
  • Wanting a cool nickname like F Boy.
  • Explaining randomizers to someone who has never heard of video games.
  • Multi-game multiplayer randomizers.
  • A non-randomized randomizer.
  • Getting rupee donations left and right when all you need is a sword.
  • Unofficial archipelago support.
  • The hypothetical dad behind the fourth wall.
  • The hypothetical eighth month of the year.
  • Subtumbling.
  • How to tell the difference between a noun and a pronoun.
  • Old-fashioned home grown misinformation.
  • Getting from fourth wall to fourth person.
  • Fourth person perspective as an alternative term for first person plural.
  • Whether "dad" is a pronoun.
  • Chat hurt chatself in chat's confusion.
  • Rebageling images from 2014.
  • Agreeing with yourself from 10 years ago about which images are interesting.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+BwedVLyH ]]> Jim Stormdancer 260. This Sentient Life Could've Been an Email https://topiclords.com/this-sentient-life-couldve-been-an-email caeb9d4f-e0fd-4bfb-b9d1-95e63c2b8510 Mon, 14 Oct 2024 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Jenni and Chris. We discuss whether corporate mascots are age-locked to a generation, balls being able to taste soy sauce, BB-8 changed my tire, and The Woodchuck by Sam Pink. 1:15:33 true Lords:

  • Jenni
  • Chris

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Too much dick content for one show.
  • What kind of fetus dong shot engagement you're looking for.
  • When they smear the goo on your belly.
  • Throwing a gender reveal party and the uncle nobody wants around is like "I don't believe you" and you get to whip out the photo of the kid's dick.
  • Shipping a person in Q4.
  • Automating the Omelas kid.
  • The Disney suffering animatronic child asking passers by to walk away from Omelas.
  • Gen Z no longer needing to read The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas because they live in modern society.
  • Gardening in one of the hardest places in the world to garden.
  • What's the grass for?
  • An office park spending millions of gallons of water to maintain a lawn nobody ever walks on or looks at.
  • What if the Omelas kid is a dick? What if they're treating him really well and he just has impossibly high standards and hates everything.
  • An electrical problem that's very pronounced when Jenni turns on the blender.
  • The Golden Age of Corporate Mascots.
  • Undead Corporate Mascots.
  • Trying to find a picture of the Toucan Sam redesign and ending up on Deviant Art.
  • Howard and Nester.
  • Whether American kids will tolerate anime.
  • President of the Nintendo No Fun Club.
  • Spending $200 on the Nintendo hint line trying to solve the last screen in Solstice.
  • An adventure game that's also a platformer where if your toe touches a candle flame it's an instant game over.
  • Inventing terrible camera angles in a 2D game.
  • It's 3D, but on your Speccy!
  • Trusting a YouTube documentary more the longer the video is.
  • Are Domo Kun and Hello Kitty free agents?
  • Cap'n Crunch guest starring in the Star Wars Holiday Special.
  • A Roma who was once helpful.
  • Eating a sandwich and getting the sandwich tattooed on your bicep because.
  • A baby name that Boomer moms love.
  • Remington Steel On At 7PM After Matlock Jones.
  • Getting into a thing with people on Metafilter.
  • POV: when your girlfriend gets you Swedish meatballs at Ikea.
  • Whether Frosthaven is important to the testicles tasting umami story.
  • Vanilloid receptors.
  • Why you can shock your tongue with a 9 volt battery but you can't shock your forearm even if it's wet.
  • The chef with the tiny spoon in your testicles making sure to get the exact right MSG level in your semen.
  • Peppers hacking mammal biology.
  • Seeds who enjoy being digested by birds.
  • The cardioprotective benefit of spicy food.
  • The Ones Who Bring it Back to Omelas.
  • Broccoli evolving into crabs.
  • This is canon: BB-8 drives a 2016 Corolla.
  • Pretending that you are talking to a Youtube audience while you make s sandwich.
  • Just a li'l guy who rolls around on a ball.
  • R2D2: a mean mean man.
  • The floor falling out of the Pinto while you're driving it.
  • A rubber pad with friction stripes on it.
  • Turning it until it feels like you broke it, but you didn't and you have to keep going.
  • After the cake comes out of the oven the recipe stops having steps.
  • How to get help from Linux users.
  • The entire wheel snapping off the axle as you're parking at Camerica Bank.
  • Different car, same maintenance strategy.
  • Driving a car until it can no longer be ontologically be classified as a car.
  • Churchill's Irregulars.
  • Waiting for Peter Jackson to mansplain to you the sound a car makes when the wheel snaps off.
  • Delving too deeply into the Cars cinematic universe.
  • A Mastodon setting that hides all of Jim's BB-8 toots.
  • How to find people to follow on Nectarine.
  • The dying MUD you joined in 1997.
  • Radioactive names such as Hitler and Sheldon.
  • Joining a social media service and it tells you there are no posts.
  • Sam Pink strikes again.
  • The emotional arc of putting a tiny hat on a woodchuck.
  • A woodchuck you would definitely do a murder to.
  • Ampersand at the beginning of the line.
  • The Furniture That Rolled Away From Omelas.
  • Why the computer is mad in I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream.
  • Looking for sentient life in the universe when you have dolphins at home.
]]> Lords:

  • Jenni
  • Chris

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Too much dick content for one show.
  • What kind of fetus dong shot engagement you're looking for.
  • When they smear the goo on your belly.
  • Throwing a gender reveal party and the uncle nobody wants around is like "I don't believe you" and you get to whip out the photo of the kid's dick.
  • Shipping a person in Q4.
  • Automating the Omelas kid.
  • The Disney suffering animatronic child asking passers by to walk away from Omelas.
  • Gen Z no longer needing to read The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas because they live in modern society.
  • Gardening in one of the hardest places in the world to garden.
  • What's the grass for?
  • An office park spending millions of gallons of water to maintain a lawn nobody ever walks on or looks at.
  • What if the Omelas kid is a dick? What if they're treating him really well and he just has impossibly high standards and hates everything.
  • An electrical problem that's very pronounced when Jenni turns on the blender.
  • The Golden Age of Corporate Mascots.
  • Undead Corporate Mascots.
  • Trying to find a picture of the Toucan Sam redesign and ending up on Deviant Art.
  • Howard and Nester.
  • Whether American kids will tolerate anime.
  • President of the Nintendo No Fun Club.
  • Spending $200 on the Nintendo hint line trying to solve the last screen in Solstice.
  • An adventure game that's also a platformer where if your toe touches a candle flame it's an instant game over.
  • Inventing terrible camera angles in a 2D game.
  • It's 3D, but on your Speccy!
  • Trusting a YouTube documentary more the longer the video is.
  • Are Domo Kun and Hello Kitty free agents?
  • Cap'n Crunch guest starring in the Star Wars Holiday Special.
  • A Roma who was once helpful.
  • Eating a sandwich and getting the sandwich tattooed on your bicep because.
  • A baby name that Boomer moms love.
  • Remington Steel On At 7PM After Matlock Jones.
  • Getting into a thing with people on Metafilter.
  • POV: when your girlfriend gets you Swedish meatballs at Ikea.
  • Whether Frosthaven is important to the testicles tasting umami story.
  • Vanilloid receptors.
  • Why you can shock your tongue with a 9 volt battery but you can't shock your forearm even if it's wet.
  • The chef with the tiny spoon in your testicles making sure to get the exact right MSG level in your semen.
  • Peppers hacking mammal biology.
  • Seeds who enjoy being digested by birds.
  • The cardioprotective benefit of spicy food.
  • The Ones Who Bring it Back to Omelas.
  • Broccoli evolving into crabs.
  • This is canon: BB-8 drives a 2016 Corolla.
  • Pretending that you are talking to a Youtube audience while you make s sandwich.
  • Just a li'l guy who rolls around on a ball.
  • R2D2: a mean mean man.
  • The floor falling out of the Pinto while you're driving it.
  • A rubber pad with friction stripes on it.
  • Turning it until it feels like you broke it, but you didn't and you have to keep going.
  • After the cake comes out of the oven the recipe stops having steps.
  • How to get help from Linux users.
  • The entire wheel snapping off the axle as you're parking at Camerica Bank.
  • Different car, same maintenance strategy.
  • Driving a car until it can no longer be ontologically be classified as a car.
  • Churchill's Irregulars.
  • Waiting for Peter Jackson to mansplain to you the sound a car makes when the wheel snaps off.
  • Delving too deeply into the Cars cinematic universe.
  • A Mastodon setting that hides all of Jim's BB-8 toots.
  • How to find people to follow on Nectarine.
  • The dying MUD you joined in 1997.
  • Radioactive names such as Hitler and Sheldon.
  • Joining a social media service and it tells you there are no posts.
  • Sam Pink strikes again.
  • The emotional arc of putting a tiny hat on a woodchuck.
  • A woodchuck you would definitely do a murder to.
  • Ampersand at the beginning of the line.
  • The Furniture That Rolled Away From Omelas.
  • Why the computer is mad in I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream.
  • Looking for sentient life in the universe when you have dolphins at home.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Jenni
  • Chris

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Too much dick content for one show.
  • What kind of fetus dong shot engagement you're looking for.
  • When they smear the goo on your belly.
  • Throwing a gender reveal party and the uncle nobody wants around is like "I don't believe you" and you get to whip out the photo of the kid's dick.
  • Shipping a person in Q4.
  • Automating the Omelas kid.
  • The Disney suffering animatronic child asking passers by to walk away from Omelas.
  • Gen Z no longer needing to read The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas because they live in modern society.
  • Gardening in one of the hardest places in the world to garden.
  • What's the grass for?
  • An office park spending millions of gallons of water to maintain a lawn nobody ever walks on or looks at.
  • What if the Omelas kid is a dick? What if they're treating him really well and he just has impossibly high standards and hates everything.
  • An electrical problem that's very pronounced when Jenni turns on the blender.
  • The Golden Age of Corporate Mascots.
  • Undead Corporate Mascots.
  • Trying to find a picture of the Toucan Sam redesign and ending up on Deviant Art.
  • Howard and Nester.
  • Whether American kids will tolerate anime.
  • President of the Nintendo No Fun Club.
  • Spending $200 on the Nintendo hint line trying to solve the last screen in Solstice.
  • An adventure game that's also a platformer where if your toe touches a candle flame it's an instant game over.
  • Inventing terrible camera angles in a 2D game.
  • It's 3D, but on your Speccy!
  • Trusting a YouTube documentary more the longer the video is.
  • Are Domo Kun and Hello Kitty free agents?
  • Cap'n Crunch guest starring in the Star Wars Holiday Special.
  • A Roma who was once helpful.
  • Eating a sandwich and getting the sandwich tattooed on your bicep because.
  • A baby name that Boomer moms love.
  • Remington Steel On At 7PM After Matlock Jones.
  • Getting into a thing with people on Metafilter.
  • POV: when your girlfriend gets you Swedish meatballs at Ikea.
  • Whether Frosthaven is important to the testicles tasting umami story.
  • Vanilloid receptors.
  • Why you can shock your tongue with a 9 volt battery but you can't shock your forearm even if it's wet.
  • The chef with the tiny spoon in your testicles making sure to get the exact right MSG level in your semen.
  • Peppers hacking mammal biology.
  • Seeds who enjoy being digested by birds.
  • The cardioprotective benefit of spicy food.
  • The Ones Who Bring it Back to Omelas.
  • Broccoli evolving into crabs.
  • This is canon: BB-8 drives a 2016 Corolla.
  • Pretending that you are talking to a Youtube audience while you make s sandwich.
  • Just a li'l guy who rolls around on a ball.
  • R2D2: a mean mean man.
  • The floor falling out of the Pinto while you're driving it.
  • A rubber pad with friction stripes on it.
  • Turning it until it feels like you broke it, but you didn't and you have to keep going.
  • After the cake comes out of the oven the recipe stops having steps.
  • How to get help from Linux users.
  • The entire wheel snapping off the axle as you're parking at Camerica Bank.
  • Different car, same maintenance strategy.
  • Driving a car until it can no longer be ontologically be classified as a car.
  • Churchill's Irregulars.
  • Waiting for Peter Jackson to mansplain to you the sound a car makes when the wheel snaps off.
  • Delving too deeply into the Cars cinematic universe.
  • A Mastodon setting that hides all of Jim's BB-8 toots.
  • How to find people to follow on Nectarine.
  • The dying MUD you joined in 1997.
  • Radioactive names such as Hitler and Sheldon.
  • Joining a social media service and it tells you there are no posts.
  • Sam Pink strikes again.
  • The emotional arc of putting a tiny hat on a woodchuck.
  • A woodchuck you would definitely do a murder to.
  • Ampersand at the beginning of the line.
  • The Furniture That Rolled Away From Omelas.
  • Why the computer is mad in I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream.
  • Looking for sentient life in the universe when you have dolphins at home.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+2DQ5S50n ]]> Jim Stormdancer 259. All Bag, No Pipes https://topiclords.com/all-bag-no-pipes 9c0dd629-3157-4531-9439-04ddffc15b39 Mon, 07 Oct 2024 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Elena and Tyriq. We discuss being witty and social as a power fantasy, popular music: sometimes popular because it's good, where do we go after Cohost, and Ballad of the Veliger by Walter Garstang. 1:08:54 true Lords:

  • Elena
    • Esper says: "I will join both guests in also recommending Dropout, especially Game Changer. They are on to something really special with the shows they're making, very little makes me laugh as hard as the stuff on there."
  • Tyriq

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Japanese cold medicine.
  • Promising the guy at the drug store you haven't taken this drug on the last week.
  • Lulu Attack X.
  • What the College Humor folks went on to do after graduating.
  • 50 games for a fictional console.
  • UFO 500.
  • Super Mario Bros but it scrolls wrong.
  • Google docs autocorrecting your Steam keys.
  • Some weird shit that you're going to maybe discover.
  • Why he's named Gordy.
  • Being sharp and on it all the time in a conversational manner.
  • The safety of a fantasy that is unrealistic to fulfill in real life.
  • Picking a joke and connecting it to the prompt.
  • Making a speech check and the DM thinks of a clever thing for you to say.
  • Coming across as socially competent in a conversation and feeling great for the rest of the day.
  • Looking at an extremely charismatic, competent character in a film and thinking "that's me! That's me in there!"
  • People talking to you about Chappell Roan.
  • Japanese translated cover of Good Luck Babe.
  • Hearing a lot about an artist and thinking "this artist has a lot of attention and they don't need mine"
  • The combination of a man, a woman, and bunch of instruments.
  • Where people who like pop music hear new music.
  • Pop music: not as popular as it used to be.
  • The pros and cons of people enjoying a wider variety of pop culture.
  • Fingerprints in the Clay.
  • Having to make synthesizer music in prison because they won't let you have guitars.
  • Not paying attention to the political context of the unintelligible screaming in your favorite album.
  • Ancestors of the guitar that sound a little bit different from the guitar.
  • People being unable to tell what amateurish synthesizer work sounds like.
  • Instruments producing incidental noises that come alongside the sounds you intend to make, just by their nature as a physical object.
  • Pink Pony Club, a song about dancing at a club.
  • Authenticity vs. perceived authenticity.
  • Trying to stay on top of fashion trends.
  • Making noises because you feel compelled to.
  • Finding one way or another to pay off the Capitalism demons.
  • Having the genetic disposition to practice a lot.
  • Seeking out things that are easy for you personally to become good at.
  • Drawing because you are holding a pencil all the time and need to fidget, and stopping drawing forever when you are no longer in that life situation.
  • Singing to yourself on the bus.
  • An instrument that's just the screechy tube part of the bagpipes.
  • A monotonic screech machine.
  • Joining your church choir and knowing you're better than everybody else there.
  • Doing a really good job and being relieved that nobody noticed.
  • What does 12 year old Jim know? Certainly not where he's been for the past six months.
  • Making a space for humans on the internet.
  • Tumblr wins by doing absolutely nothing.
  • The kind of person who is like "follow me onto this social media site I've just heard of right now"
  • Artist Alley.
  • The moral difference between "liking" and "reposting."
  • The "reposting something without liking it" vs. "liking it without reposting it" truth table.
  • A British citizen from the 19th century with a name that looks German.
  • How the gastropod got its twist.
  • Horny Foot Without.
  • A poem that is just literally what it says on the tin.
  • A little baby sea guy.
  • A sonnet about the anatomy of the eyeball.
  • What marine biology nerds got up to in 1928.
  • Larval Forms and Other Zoological Verses.
  • Red Seas Under Red Skies.
  • Lamarckian evolution.
  • Snails are great. (Except for the cone snail.)
  • I'm on a sea slug diet.
  • The class of pet that you never touch or interact with in any way.
  • How to interact with fish.
  • Whether koi care that you're petting them.
  • Interacting with fish by having them clean your teeth.
  • Enticing your pet octopus to do the dishes by covering them with fish paste.
]]> Lords:

  • Elena
    • Esper says: "I will join both guests in also recommending Dropout, especially Game Changer. They are on to something really special with the shows they're making, very little makes me laugh as hard as the stuff on there."
  • Tyriq

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Japanese cold medicine.
  • Promising the guy at the drug store you haven't taken this drug on the last week.
  • Lulu Attack X.
  • What the College Humor folks went on to do after graduating.
  • 50 games for a fictional console.
  • UFO 500.
  • Super Mario Bros but it scrolls wrong.
  • Google docs autocorrecting your Steam keys.
  • Some weird shit that you're going to maybe discover.
  • Why he's named Gordy.
  • Being sharp and on it all the time in a conversational manner.
  • The safety of a fantasy that is unrealistic to fulfill in real life.
  • Picking a joke and connecting it to the prompt.
  • Making a speech check and the DM thinks of a clever thing for you to say.
  • Coming across as socially competent in a conversation and feeling great for the rest of the day.
  • Looking at an extremely charismatic, competent character in a film and thinking "that's me! That's me in there!"
  • People talking to you about Chappell Roan.
  • Japanese translated cover of Good Luck Babe.
  • Hearing a lot about an artist and thinking "this artist has a lot of attention and they don't need mine"
  • The combination of a man, a woman, and bunch of instruments.
  • Where people who like pop music hear new music.
  • Pop music: not as popular as it used to be.
  • The pros and cons of people enjoying a wider variety of pop culture.
  • Fingerprints in the Clay.
  • Having to make synthesizer music in prison because they won't let you have guitars.
  • Not paying attention to the political context of the unintelligible screaming in your favorite album.
  • Ancestors of the guitar that sound a little bit different from the guitar.
  • People being unable to tell what amateurish synthesizer work sounds like.
  • Instruments producing incidental noises that come alongside the sounds you intend to make, just by their nature as a physical object.
  • Pink Pony Club, a song about dancing at a club.
  • Authenticity vs. perceived authenticity.
  • Trying to stay on top of fashion trends.
  • Making noises because you feel compelled to.
  • Finding one way or another to pay off the Capitalism demons.
  • Having the genetic disposition to practice a lot.
  • Seeking out things that are easy for you personally to become good at.
  • Drawing because you are holding a pencil all the time and need to fidget, and stopping drawing forever when you are no longer in that life situation.
  • Singing to yourself on the bus.
  • An instrument that's just the screechy tube part of the bagpipes.
  • A monotonic screech machine.
  • Joining your church choir and knowing you're better than everybody else there.
  • Doing a really good job and being relieved that nobody noticed.
  • What does 12 year old Jim know? Certainly not where he's been for the past six months.
  • Making a space for humans on the internet.
  • Tumblr wins by doing absolutely nothing.
  • The kind of person who is like "follow me onto this social media site I've just heard of right now"
  • Artist Alley.
  • The moral difference between "liking" and "reposting."
  • The "reposting something without liking it" vs. "liking it without reposting it" truth table.
  • A British citizen from the 19th century with a name that looks German.
  • How the gastropod got its twist.
  • Horny Foot Without.
  • A poem that is just literally what it says on the tin.
  • A little baby sea guy.
  • A sonnet about the anatomy of the eyeball.
  • What marine biology nerds got up to in 1928.
  • Larval Forms and Other Zoological Verses.
  • Red Seas Under Red Skies.
  • Lamarckian evolution.
  • Snails are great. (Except for the cone snail.)
  • I'm on a sea slug diet.
  • The class of pet that you never touch or interact with in any way.
  • How to interact with fish.
  • Whether koi care that you're petting them.
  • Interacting with fish by having them clean your teeth.
  • Enticing your pet octopus to do the dishes by covering them with fish paste.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Elena
    • Esper says: "I will join both guests in also recommending Dropout, especially Game Changer. They are on to something really special with the shows they're making, very little makes me laugh as hard as the stuff on there."
  • Tyriq

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Japanese cold medicine.
  • Promising the guy at the drug store you haven't taken this drug on the last week.
  • Lulu Attack X.
  • What the College Humor folks went on to do after graduating.
  • 50 games for a fictional console.
  • UFO 500.
  • Super Mario Bros but it scrolls wrong.
  • Google docs autocorrecting your Steam keys.
  • Some weird shit that you're going to maybe discover.
  • Why he's named Gordy.
  • Being sharp and on it all the time in a conversational manner.
  • The safety of a fantasy that is unrealistic to fulfill in real life.
  • Picking a joke and connecting it to the prompt.
  • Making a speech check and the DM thinks of a clever thing for you to say.
  • Coming across as socially competent in a conversation and feeling great for the rest of the day.
  • Looking at an extremely charismatic, competent character in a film and thinking "that's me! That's me in there!"
  • People talking to you about Chappell Roan.
  • Japanese translated cover of Good Luck Babe.
  • Hearing a lot about an artist and thinking "this artist has a lot of attention and they don't need mine"
  • The combination of a man, a woman, and bunch of instruments.
  • Where people who like pop music hear new music.
  • Pop music: not as popular as it used to be.
  • The pros and cons of people enjoying a wider variety of pop culture.
  • Fingerprints in the Clay.
  • Having to make synthesizer music in prison because they won't let you have guitars.
  • Not paying attention to the political context of the unintelligible screaming in your favorite album.
  • Ancestors of the guitar that sound a little bit different from the guitar.
  • People being unable to tell what amateurish synthesizer work sounds like.
  • Instruments producing incidental noises that come alongside the sounds you intend to make, just by their nature as a physical object.
  • Pink Pony Club, a song about dancing at a club.
  • Authenticity vs. perceived authenticity.
  • Trying to stay on top of fashion trends.
  • Making noises because you feel compelled to.
  • Finding one way or another to pay off the Capitalism demons.
  • Having the genetic disposition to practice a lot.
  • Seeking out things that are easy for you personally to become good at.
  • Drawing because you are holding a pencil all the time and need to fidget, and stopping drawing forever when you are no longer in that life situation.
  • Singing to yourself on the bus.
  • An instrument that's just the screechy tube part of the bagpipes.
  • A monotonic screech machine.
  • Joining your church choir and knowing you're better than everybody else there.
  • Doing a really good job and being relieved that nobody noticed.
  • What does 12 year old Jim know? Certainly not where he's been for the past six months.
  • Making a space for humans on the internet.
  • Tumblr wins by doing absolutely nothing.
  • The kind of person who is like "follow me onto this social media site I've just heard of right now"
  • Artist Alley.
  • The moral difference between "liking" and "reposting."
  • The "reposting something without liking it" vs. "liking it without reposting it" truth table.
  • A British citizen from the 19th century with a name that looks German.
  • How the gastropod got its twist.
  • Horny Foot Without.
  • A poem that is just literally what it says on the tin.
  • A little baby sea guy.
  • A sonnet about the anatomy of the eyeball.
  • What marine biology nerds got up to in 1928.
  • Larval Forms and Other Zoological Verses.
  • Red Seas Under Red Skies.
  • Lamarckian evolution.
  • Snails are great. (Except for the cone snail.)
  • I'm on a sea slug diet.
  • The class of pet that you never touch or interact with in any way.
  • How to interact with fish.
  • Whether koi care that you're petting them.
  • Interacting with fish by having them clean your teeth.
  • Enticing your pet octopus to do the dishes by covering them with fish paste.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+pai4S6jM ]]> Jim Stormdancer 258. Only The Head of the Deer Sparks Joy https://topiclords.com/only-the-head-of-the-deer-sparks-joy 19e20ee9-d80b-4718-9ed0-4bb3962fe50e Mon, 30 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Cort and Mark. We discuss things you've found in the trash, traveling with children, Adventures with BB-8, Burma Shave Sign by Andrew Plotkin, the useless superpowers game, and whether Mega Man suffers ennui 1:04:45 true Lords:

  • Cort
  • Mark

Topics:

  • The best and worst thing you’ve ever found in the trash.
  • Traveling with children & associated challenges/solutions
  • Adventures with BB-8
  • Survey of Forms - Burma-Shave Sign, by Andrew Plotkin
  • The useless superpowers game
  • Does Mega Man ever suffer ennui?

Microtopics:

  • Dependable sources of guava.
  • Staring at the raccoons as they go by at night.
  • Room temperature ice cream full of bullets.
  • Vietnamese guava vs. central american guava.
  • Gnawing through a leathery rock to impress your in-laws.
  • Cudgel Hero Faction.
  • A life-sized deer sticking out of your neighbor's trash can.
  • What to do with three quarters of a deer.
  • Swimming around in a treasure factory and finding spices.
  • Explaining to your mom where this salt and pepper came from.
  • Dodging a delicious treat bullet.
  • Bringing home a NeXT machine from the dumpsters behind Carnegie Mellon.
  • Throwing away 30 year old legal books and a time traveling lawyer compares you to Hitler.
  • Won't somebody think of the LA hipsters?
  • Figuring out how to be okay not having exactly what you want all the time.
  • Getting heatstroke in Japan.
  • Mr. Puddles Pineapple having the time of his life.
  • Getting a photo of your stuffed penguin at a Hamlet castle holding a skull.
  • Is it really fake if you're telling the truth in a fake way?
  • Housekeeping having a good time with your stuffed animals.
  • The perfect companion to explore the Star Wars Galaxy by your side.
  • Arranging yourself external motivators.
  • A skill separate from cooking that is still relevant to the dining experience.
  • Butterfly Pee Tea.
  • Interwoven bread dough.
  • These are Zelda meatballs!
  • Trying out the recipe for Dubious Food in the Zelda cookbook.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog chili that takes five hours to make.
  • Rouge the Bat's favorite dish.
  • Very round droid. Rounder than most.
  • The make-your-own-lightsaber course class project room experience.
  • Going to Disneyland and asking someone in costume for directions to the speakeasy.
  • A game that exists to make children sad.
  • Everyone working together to blow the shit out of Bowser, Jr.
  • Losing the boss battle with Bowser Jr. at Super Nintendo World and the attendant hands you the dongle so your kids can listen to Princess Peach crying in despair the entire drive home.
  • Explaining to the Super Nintendo World staff that you shouldn't need all the keys to get to the final boss because that's not how Mario games are typically structured.
  • The guy trying to backwards long jump the stairs to the final boss in Super Nintendo World.
  • A series of billboards that turn out to be a poem.
  • Which came first, the Pizza Hut or the building shaped like a hut that you make pizza in?
  • A racially insensitive fireworks store.
  • Dropping a CRT monitor off of a tall building vs. dropping an LCD display.
  • Raccoons witnessing crimes.
  • Shaking exactly two aspirin out of the bottle every single time.
  • An extremely opaque Pepper's Ghost.
  • Mega Man defeating Ennui Man and acquiring his powers.
  • Mega Man can't defeat Dr. Wily because of Asimov's Three Laws.
  • Dr. Light deleting Mega Man's special abilities between games because he needs the hard drive space for porn.
  • Mega Man choosing to forget Crash Man's memories because he's tired of remembering that awkward first date.
  • Dr. Wily hacking everyone's iPhone to have the latest U2 album.
  • Searching for lords and finding a random raccoon.
]]> Lords:

  • Cort
  • Mark

Topics:

  • The best and worst thing you’ve ever found in the trash.
  • Traveling with children & associated challenges/solutions
  • Adventures with BB-8
  • Survey of Forms - Burma-Shave Sign, by Andrew Plotkin
  • The useless superpowers game
  • Does Mega Man ever suffer ennui?

Microtopics:

  • Dependable sources of guava.
  • Staring at the raccoons as they go by at night.
  • Room temperature ice cream full of bullets.
  • Vietnamese guava vs. central american guava.
  • Gnawing through a leathery rock to impress your in-laws.
  • Cudgel Hero Faction.
  • A life-sized deer sticking out of your neighbor's trash can.
  • What to do with three quarters of a deer.
  • Swimming around in a treasure factory and finding spices.
  • Explaining to your mom where this salt and pepper came from.
  • Dodging a delicious treat bullet.
  • Bringing home a NeXT machine from the dumpsters behind Carnegie Mellon.
  • Throwing away 30 year old legal books and a time traveling lawyer compares you to Hitler.
  • Won't somebody think of the LA hipsters?
  • Figuring out how to be okay not having exactly what you want all the time.
  • Getting heatstroke in Japan.
  • Mr. Puddles Pineapple having the time of his life.
  • Getting a photo of your stuffed penguin at a Hamlet castle holding a skull.
  • Is it really fake if you're telling the truth in a fake way?
  • Housekeeping having a good time with your stuffed animals.
  • The perfect companion to explore the Star Wars Galaxy by your side.
  • Arranging yourself external motivators.
  • A skill separate from cooking that is still relevant to the dining experience.
  • Butterfly Pee Tea.
  • Interwoven bread dough.
  • These are Zelda meatballs!
  • Trying out the recipe for Dubious Food in the Zelda cookbook.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog chili that takes five hours to make.
  • Rouge the Bat's favorite dish.
  • Very round droid. Rounder than most.
  • The make-your-own-lightsaber course class project room experience.
  • Going to Disneyland and asking someone in costume for directions to the speakeasy.
  • A game that exists to make children sad.
  • Everyone working together to blow the shit out of Bowser, Jr.
  • Losing the boss battle with Bowser Jr. at Super Nintendo World and the attendant hands you the dongle so your kids can listen to Princess Peach crying in despair the entire drive home.
  • Explaining to the Super Nintendo World staff that you shouldn't need all the keys to get to the final boss because that's not how Mario games are typically structured.
  • The guy trying to backwards long jump the stairs to the final boss in Super Nintendo World.
  • A series of billboards that turn out to be a poem.
  • Which came first, the Pizza Hut or the building shaped like a hut that you make pizza in?
  • A racially insensitive fireworks store.
  • Dropping a CRT monitor off of a tall building vs. dropping an LCD display.
  • Raccoons witnessing crimes.
  • Shaking exactly two aspirin out of the bottle every single time.
  • An extremely opaque Pepper's Ghost.
  • Mega Man defeating Ennui Man and acquiring his powers.
  • Mega Man can't defeat Dr. Wily because of Asimov's Three Laws.
  • Dr. Light deleting Mega Man's special abilities between games because he needs the hard drive space for porn.
  • Mega Man choosing to forget Crash Man's memories because he's tired of remembering that awkward first date.
  • Dr. Wily hacking everyone's iPhone to have the latest U2 album.
  • Searching for lords and finding a random raccoon.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Cort
  • Mark

Topics:

  • The best and worst thing you’ve ever found in the trash.
  • Traveling with children & associated challenges/solutions
  • Adventures with BB-8
  • Survey of Forms - Burma-Shave Sign, by Andrew Plotkin
  • The useless superpowers game
  • Does Mega Man ever suffer ennui?

Microtopics:

  • Dependable sources of guava.
  • Staring at the raccoons as they go by at night.
  • Room temperature ice cream full of bullets.
  • Vietnamese guava vs. central american guava.
  • Gnawing through a leathery rock to impress your in-laws.
  • Cudgel Hero Faction.
  • A life-sized deer sticking out of your neighbor's trash can.
  • What to do with three quarters of a deer.
  • Swimming around in a treasure factory and finding spices.
  • Explaining to your mom where this salt and pepper came from.
  • Dodging a delicious treat bullet.
  • Bringing home a NeXT machine from the dumpsters behind Carnegie Mellon.
  • Throwing away 30 year old legal books and a time traveling lawyer compares you to Hitler.
  • Won't somebody think of the LA hipsters?
  • Figuring out how to be okay not having exactly what you want all the time.
  • Getting heatstroke in Japan.
  • Mr. Puddles Pineapple having the time of his life.
  • Getting a photo of your stuffed penguin at a Hamlet castle holding a skull.
  • Is it really fake if you're telling the truth in a fake way?
  • Housekeeping having a good time with your stuffed animals.
  • The perfect companion to explore the Star Wars Galaxy by your side.
  • Arranging yourself external motivators.
  • A skill separate from cooking that is still relevant to the dining experience.
  • Butterfly Pee Tea.
  • Interwoven bread dough.
  • These are Zelda meatballs!
  • Trying out the recipe for Dubious Food in the Zelda cookbook.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog chili that takes five hours to make.
  • Rouge the Bat's favorite dish.
  • Very round droid. Rounder than most.
  • The make-your-own-lightsaber course class project room experience.
  • Going to Disneyland and asking someone in costume for directions to the speakeasy.
  • A game that exists to make children sad.
  • Everyone working together to blow the shit out of Bowser, Jr.
  • Losing the boss battle with Bowser Jr. at Super Nintendo World and the attendant hands you the dongle so your kids can listen to Princess Peach crying in despair the entire drive home.
  • Explaining to the Super Nintendo World staff that you shouldn't need all the keys to get to the final boss because that's not how Mario games are typically structured.
  • The guy trying to backwards long jump the stairs to the final boss in Super Nintendo World.
  • A series of billboards that turn out to be a poem.
  • Which came first, the Pizza Hut or the building shaped like a hut that you make pizza in?
  • A racially insensitive fireworks store.
  • Dropping a CRT monitor off of a tall building vs. dropping an LCD display.
  • Raccoons witnessing crimes.
  • Shaking exactly two aspirin out of the bottle every single time.
  • An extremely opaque Pepper's Ghost.
  • Mega Man defeating Ennui Man and acquiring his powers.
  • Mega Man can't defeat Dr. Wily because of Asimov's Three Laws.
  • Dr. Light deleting Mega Man's special abilities between games because he needs the hard drive space for porn.
  • Mega Man choosing to forget Crash Man's memories because he's tired of remembering that awkward first date.
  • Dr. Wily hacking everyone's iPhone to have the latest U2 album.
  • Searching for lords and finding a random raccoon.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+_dceqXC9 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 257. Stinky Judo https://topiclords.com/stinky-judo 9977c3ee-390c-4c4f-916c-cbcdaf825c59 Mon, 23 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Nathan and Tom. We discuss France stealing breakdancing during the 2024 Olympics, growing to an age where media is good, how are you saying goodbye to trigraphs, Rain by Raymond Carver, how to pronounce things you normally just type, and rolling in NES tetris. 1:14:40 true Lords:

Topics:

  • During the summer olympics, France introduced breakdancing as an event, which was invented in America. They stole it from us! What new event should we steal from another country when the Olympics comes to LA in 2028?
  • Getting to an age where media is good: the writers are your contemporaries so their work doesn't feel stodgy anymore.
  • How are you saying goodbye to trigraphs?
  • Rain by Raymond Carver
  • Jumping levels of abstraction while explaining computery things, how to pronounce angle brackets and command-line flags
  • 3rd tetris playtest developed ("rolling"), ponder an entirely new approach to a game (or medium, or problem) that comes nearly 40 years later.

Microtopics:

  • Whether the chain staff is also the grappling hook.
  • How all games ought to be made.
  • Using an ancient alien artifact as an immersion blender.
  • Getting the steamer arm upgrade before you can steam the milk.
  • Space Opera by Catherynne Valente.
  • Books where you read a couple paragraphs and you're done for the day.
  • A sport where if you reach just a little bit further maybe you can touch your opponent's face with your foot.
  • Stealing cheese rolling from France at the 2028 Olympics.
  • Hosting the Olympics: a huge money-loser.
  • Shouldering the terrible burden of hosting the 2028 Olympics.
  • Aging up the 1996 Olympics mascot so they'll be the right age for the 2028 Olympics.
  • The Chinese Olympics mascot Jim keeps confusing for Tingle.
  • Olympic announcers just assuming everyone knows what a "B-Boy" is.
  • This right here is a horse.
  • Arranging a competition as bracket of 1v1 matches when it could just as easily be individually scored performances.
  • Gymnasts all over the world chalking their hands because humans are more alike than they are different.
  • Running fast at the Olympics.
  • Hiring Topic Lords as Olympic announcers.
  • Synchronized swimming except you need to synchronize with all your competitors.
  • Getting out the shotgun mics to televise basketball players trash talking each other.
  • Liking television alongside people who share your generational values.
  • Enjoying being part of a target demographic until you get too old.
  • Making an effort to appreciate new art more.
  • The inexhaustible supply of old movies you haven't seen.
  • What is lost and what is gained now that we're not all watching exactly the same TV shows every night.
  • Realizing your social values match the media you're consuming because you didn't roll your eyes at the Very Special Episode.
  • All the video games where you build a bionic arm for an NPC.
  • Two guys in a missile silo arguing to keep trigraphs in the C standard.
  • Boring programming situations where memory leaks are impossible.
  • A guy drinking a beer looking over your shoulder while you program who says "yep" whenever you do something he approves of.
  • Compiling C++ to a web site.
  • Writing a web assembly program by typing opcodes into a Javascript string.
  • What website people are into.
  • Music that plays while you're waiting for a game to load.
  • Loading the loading screen.
  • Some things are being destroyed and other things rebuilt.
  • Waking up and it's raining.
  • Saying you have no regrets when of course you have regrets – everyone has regrets, fool!
  • What cities were destroyed in December 2012?
  • Scraping information so you can stick it in a file system.
  • Complete List of Destroyed Cities.
  • How grumpy Raymond Carver was as a six year old.
  • How to communicate about what you want someone to type.
  • What they call curly braces in other countries.
  • Smooth brackets.
  • How Mandarin speakers write C code.
  • Drawing weird shit with Unicode glyphs, making it your URL, printing it on the side of a bus and making people figure out how to type it.
  • Mathematicians giving all their variables single letter names.
  • Embarrassing yourself by begging the compiler to not reformat your code.
  • Choosing to do the easy part of your job right now.
  • How to play Tetris faster.
  • Strumming arcade buttons to press them faster.
  • Weird ways of holding the NES controller to move Tetris pieces faster.
  • A new way to interact with this piece of plastic.
  • Turning the back of the controller into a giant button.
  • What high jump competitors thought the first time they saw the Fosbury Flop.
  • Learning to do close-up magic and getting frustrated because you can't literally make the card vanish.
  • Funding a weird game and finding out later if it ever ships.
  • Whether the folks who made ZPF considered any better names.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

  • During the summer olympics, France introduced breakdancing as an event, which was invented in America. They stole it from us! What new event should we steal from another country when the Olympics comes to LA in 2028?
  • Getting to an age where media is good: the writers are your contemporaries so their work doesn't feel stodgy anymore.
  • How are you saying goodbye to trigraphs?
  • Rain by Raymond Carver
  • Jumping levels of abstraction while explaining computery things, how to pronounce angle brackets and command-line flags
  • 3rd tetris playtest developed ("rolling"), ponder an entirely new approach to a game (or medium, or problem) that comes nearly 40 years later.

Microtopics:

  • Whether the chain staff is also the grappling hook.
  • How all games ought to be made.
  • Using an ancient alien artifact as an immersion blender.
  • Getting the steamer arm upgrade before you can steam the milk.
  • Space Opera by Catherynne Valente.
  • Books where you read a couple paragraphs and you're done for the day.
  • A sport where if you reach just a little bit further maybe you can touch your opponent's face with your foot.
  • Stealing cheese rolling from France at the 2028 Olympics.
  • Hosting the Olympics: a huge money-loser.
  • Shouldering the terrible burden of hosting the 2028 Olympics.
  • Aging up the 1996 Olympics mascot so they'll be the right age for the 2028 Olympics.
  • The Chinese Olympics mascot Jim keeps confusing for Tingle.
  • Olympic announcers just assuming everyone knows what a "B-Boy" is.
  • This right here is a horse.
  • Arranging a competition as bracket of 1v1 matches when it could just as easily be individually scored performances.
  • Gymnasts all over the world chalking their hands because humans are more alike than they are different.
  • Running fast at the Olympics.
  • Hiring Topic Lords as Olympic announcers.
  • Synchronized swimming except you need to synchronize with all your competitors.
  • Getting out the shotgun mics to televise basketball players trash talking each other.
  • Liking television alongside people who share your generational values.
  • Enjoying being part of a target demographic until you get too old.
  • Making an effort to appreciate new art more.
  • The inexhaustible supply of old movies you haven't seen.
  • What is lost and what is gained now that we're not all watching exactly the same TV shows every night.
  • Realizing your social values match the media you're consuming because you didn't roll your eyes at the Very Special Episode.
  • All the video games where you build a bionic arm for an NPC.
  • Two guys in a missile silo arguing to keep trigraphs in the C standard.
  • Boring programming situations where memory leaks are impossible.
  • A guy drinking a beer looking over your shoulder while you program who says "yep" whenever you do something he approves of.
  • Compiling C++ to a web site.
  • Writing a web assembly program by typing opcodes into a Javascript string.
  • What website people are into.
  • Music that plays while you're waiting for a game to load.
  • Loading the loading screen.
  • Some things are being destroyed and other things rebuilt.
  • Waking up and it's raining.
  • Saying you have no regrets when of course you have regrets – everyone has regrets, fool!
  • What cities were destroyed in December 2012?
  • Scraping information so you can stick it in a file system.
  • Complete List of Destroyed Cities.
  • How grumpy Raymond Carver was as a six year old.
  • How to communicate about what you want someone to type.
  • What they call curly braces in other countries.
  • Smooth brackets.
  • How Mandarin speakers write C code.
  • Drawing weird shit with Unicode glyphs, making it your URL, printing it on the side of a bus and making people figure out how to type it.
  • Mathematicians giving all their variables single letter names.
  • Embarrassing yourself by begging the compiler to not reformat your code.
  • Choosing to do the easy part of your job right now.
  • How to play Tetris faster.
  • Strumming arcade buttons to press them faster.
  • Weird ways of holding the NES controller to move Tetris pieces faster.
  • A new way to interact with this piece of plastic.
  • Turning the back of the controller into a giant button.
  • What high jump competitors thought the first time they saw the Fosbury Flop.
  • Learning to do close-up magic and getting frustrated because you can't literally make the card vanish.
  • Funding a weird game and finding out later if it ever ships.
  • Whether the folks who made ZPF considered any better names.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

  • During the summer olympics, France introduced breakdancing as an event, which was invented in America. They stole it from us! What new event should we steal from another country when the Olympics comes to LA in 2028?
  • Getting to an age where media is good: the writers are your contemporaries so their work doesn't feel stodgy anymore.
  • How are you saying goodbye to trigraphs?
  • Rain by Raymond Carver
  • Jumping levels of abstraction while explaining computery things, how to pronounce angle brackets and command-line flags
  • 3rd tetris playtest developed ("rolling"), ponder an entirely new approach to a game (or medium, or problem) that comes nearly 40 years later.

Microtopics:

  • Whether the chain staff is also the grappling hook.
  • How all games ought to be made.
  • Using an ancient alien artifact as an immersion blender.
  • Getting the steamer arm upgrade before you can steam the milk.
  • Space Opera by Catherynne Valente.
  • Books where you read a couple paragraphs and you're done for the day.
  • A sport where if you reach just a little bit further maybe you can touch your opponent's face with your foot.
  • Stealing cheese rolling from France at the 2028 Olympics.
  • Hosting the Olympics: a huge money-loser.
  • Shouldering the terrible burden of hosting the 2028 Olympics.
  • Aging up the 1996 Olympics mascot so they'll be the right age for the 2028 Olympics.
  • The Chinese Olympics mascot Jim keeps confusing for Tingle.
  • Olympic announcers just assuming everyone knows what a "B-Boy" is.
  • This right here is a horse.
  • Arranging a competition as bracket of 1v1 matches when it could just as easily be individually scored performances.
  • Gymnasts all over the world chalking their hands because humans are more alike than they are different.
  • Running fast at the Olympics.
  • Hiring Topic Lords as Olympic announcers.
  • Synchronized swimming except you need to synchronize with all your competitors.
  • Getting out the shotgun mics to televise basketball players trash talking each other.
  • Liking television alongside people who share your generational values.
  • Enjoying being part of a target demographic until you get too old.
  • Making an effort to appreciate new art more.
  • The inexhaustible supply of old movies you haven't seen.
  • What is lost and what is gained now that we're not all watching exactly the same TV shows every night.
  • Realizing your social values match the media you're consuming because you didn't roll your eyes at the Very Special Episode.
  • All the video games where you build a bionic arm for an NPC.
  • Two guys in a missile silo arguing to keep trigraphs in the C standard.
  • Boring programming situations where memory leaks are impossible.
  • A guy drinking a beer looking over your shoulder while you program who says "yep" whenever you do something he approves of.
  • Compiling C++ to a web site.
  • Writing a web assembly program by typing opcodes into a Javascript string.
  • What website people are into.
  • Music that plays while you're waiting for a game to load.
  • Loading the loading screen.
  • Some things are being destroyed and other things rebuilt.
  • Waking up and it's raining.
  • Saying you have no regrets when of course you have regrets – everyone has regrets, fool!
  • What cities were destroyed in December 2012?
  • Scraping information so you can stick it in a file system.
  • Complete List of Destroyed Cities.
  • How grumpy Raymond Carver was as a six year old.
  • How to communicate about what you want someone to type.
  • What they call curly braces in other countries.
  • Smooth brackets.
  • How Mandarin speakers write C code.
  • Drawing weird shit with Unicode glyphs, making it your URL, printing it on the side of a bus and making people figure out how to type it.
  • Mathematicians giving all their variables single letter names.
  • Embarrassing yourself by begging the compiler to not reformat your code.
  • Choosing to do the easy part of your job right now.
  • How to play Tetris faster.
  • Strumming arcade buttons to press them faster.
  • Weird ways of holding the NES controller to move Tetris pieces faster.
  • A new way to interact with this piece of plastic.
  • Turning the back of the controller into a giant button.
  • What high jump competitors thought the first time they saw the Fosbury Flop.
  • Learning to do close-up magic and getting frustrated because you can't literally make the card vanish.
  • Funding a weird game and finding out later if it ever ships.
  • Whether the folks who made ZPF considered any better names.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+T3H34WKq ]]> Jim Stormdancer 256. Donkey Kong Is a Tankie https://topiclords.com/donkey-kong-is-a-tankie 280c66c8-fb73-4899-a051-4a554f82d53f Mon, 16 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Mark and Shirley. We discuss naming a human, getting more liberal as you get older, I'm scared to start recording Mario Odyssey, and The Orc 1:16:18 true Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Writhen Hilt.
  • Writing a few sentences to achieve your goal.
  • Being extremely entertained by your drunken journal entries from a year ago.
  • Remembering the 140 years your son has been around.
  • Learningl from the dead.
  • How the archaeologists of the future are going to cope with social media, let alone the reams of LLM generated nonsense.
  • Detecting forged paintings via the radioactive isotopes that are only found in pigments manufactured after the detonation of the atomic bomb.
  • Low-background steel.
  • Scavenging steel from shipwrecks because you just can't make steel that good any more.
  • Pizza Pranks.
  • Packaging a USB stick as though it's a cassette tape.
  • Packaging your Dungeon Synth album on cassette in a Sega Genesis cartridge box.
  • Propsr Topics.
  • Calling your niece Billy Zane.
  • Naming your child Scooter. (Monotonously.)
  • Being unable to decide whether you're going to name your child Scooter or Squooter.
  • Some Wizard of Earrhsea ahit.
  • Holding power over your friends (magically, not legally)
  • Your name for a person carrying with it your relationship with that person.
  • Why they shipped a game called "Epic Mickey.*
  • Compaeing this year's top 50 baby names to the top 50 a century ago.
  • Mikse meeting Mikes.
  • The Bob Emergency.
  • One day there will be no more Bobs, and a door will close.
  • Continuing to refer to your nephew as a "little kid" even though he's 45 now.
  • Thinking you're getting more liberal but eventually realizing you're getting more apocalyptic.
  • Garbage-ass subreddits full of dis- and misinformation.
  • Battle Jackets vs. Jackets for Battle.
  • Pregnancy subreddits.
  • Checking out of gamer culture entirely.
  • Black metal communities dealing with white supremacists.
  • Can't we just have a place who love swords and wizards?
  • How to not run a Nazi bar.
  • Whether people get more liberal or more conservative as they age.
  • Stone cold hippies.
  • Explaining trans rights to your parents who are doing their best to understand.
  • Asking the AI-generated slush pile how to update your political beliefs.
  • Keeping younger people around who care about you enough to help you fix your shitty opinions.
  • Hungry for Jim topics.
  • Japanese cultural touchstones referenced in video games that just seem like nonsense to Americans.
  • Slavic folklore in the Witcher games.
  • Importing video games from more and more obscure countries because Japan is played out now.
  • Recognizing Greek heavy metal just from the riffs.
  • Vacuuming a couch and twenty one-dollar bills fly out of it.
  • Shagrat, you shag rats!
  • Rheumy weeping orbs that glare with hate.
  • Truly a poem of unknown provenance.
  • Shagrat doesn't deserve this!
  • We had some great topics today, y'all.
  • Mythcarver.
  • A discord for people who are due in the same month as you.
  • The Libras who won't let the dads in.
  • Circle time with other pregnant couples.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Writhen Hilt.
  • Writing a few sentences to achieve your goal.
  • Being extremely entertained by your drunken journal entries from a year ago.
  • Remembering the 140 years your son has been around.
  • Learningl from the dead.
  • How the archaeologists of the future are going to cope with social media, let alone the reams of LLM generated nonsense.
  • Detecting forged paintings via the radioactive isotopes that are only found in pigments manufactured after the detonation of the atomic bomb.
  • Low-background steel.
  • Scavenging steel from shipwrecks because you just can't make steel that good any more.
  • Pizza Pranks.
  • Packaging a USB stick as though it's a cassette tape.
  • Packaging your Dungeon Synth album on cassette in a Sega Genesis cartridge box.
  • Propsr Topics.
  • Calling your niece Billy Zane.
  • Naming your child Scooter. (Monotonously.)
  • Being unable to decide whether you're going to name your child Scooter or Squooter.
  • Some Wizard of Earrhsea ahit.
  • Holding power over your friends (magically, not legally)
  • Your name for a person carrying with it your relationship with that person.
  • Why they shipped a game called "Epic Mickey.*
  • Compaeing this year's top 50 baby names to the top 50 a century ago.
  • Mikse meeting Mikes.
  • The Bob Emergency.
  • One day there will be no more Bobs, and a door will close.
  • Continuing to refer to your nephew as a "little kid" even though he's 45 now.
  • Thinking you're getting more liberal but eventually realizing you're getting more apocalyptic.
  • Garbage-ass subreddits full of dis- and misinformation.
  • Battle Jackets vs. Jackets for Battle.
  • Pregnancy subreddits.
  • Checking out of gamer culture entirely.
  • Black metal communities dealing with white supremacists.
  • Can't we just have a place who love swords and wizards?
  • How to not run a Nazi bar.
  • Whether people get more liberal or more conservative as they age.
  • Stone cold hippies.
  • Explaining trans rights to your parents who are doing their best to understand.
  • Asking the AI-generated slush pile how to update your political beliefs.
  • Keeping younger people around who care about you enough to help you fix your shitty opinions.
  • Hungry for Jim topics.
  • Japanese cultural touchstones referenced in video games that just seem like nonsense to Americans.
  • Slavic folklore in the Witcher games.
  • Importing video games from more and more obscure countries because Japan is played out now.
  • Recognizing Greek heavy metal just from the riffs.
  • Vacuuming a couch and twenty one-dollar bills fly out of it.
  • Shagrat, you shag rats!
  • Rheumy weeping orbs that glare with hate.
  • Truly a poem of unknown provenance.
  • Shagrat doesn't deserve this!
  • We had some great topics today, y'all.
  • Mythcarver.
  • A discord for people who are due in the same month as you.
  • The Libras who won't let the dads in.
  • Circle time with other pregnant couples.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Writhen Hilt.
  • Writing a few sentences to achieve your goal.
  • Being extremely entertained by your drunken journal entries from a year ago.
  • Remembering the 140 years your son has been around.
  • Learningl from the dead.
  • How the archaeologists of the future are going to cope with social media, let alone the reams of LLM generated nonsense.
  • Detecting forged paintings via the radioactive isotopes that are only found in pigments manufactured after the detonation of the atomic bomb.
  • Low-background steel.
  • Scavenging steel from shipwrecks because you just can't make steel that good any more.
  • Pizza Pranks.
  • Packaging a USB stick as though it's a cassette tape.
  • Packaging your Dungeon Synth album on cassette in a Sega Genesis cartridge box.
  • Propsr Topics.
  • Calling your niece Billy Zane.
  • Naming your child Scooter. (Monotonously.)
  • Being unable to decide whether you're going to name your child Scooter or Squooter.
  • Some Wizard of Earrhsea ahit.
  • Holding power over your friends (magically, not legally)
  • Your name for a person carrying with it your relationship with that person.
  • Why they shipped a game called "Epic Mickey.*
  • Compaeing this year's top 50 baby names to the top 50 a century ago.
  • Mikse meeting Mikes.
  • The Bob Emergency.
  • One day there will be no more Bobs, and a door will close.
  • Continuing to refer to your nephew as a "little kid" even though he's 45 now.
  • Thinking you're getting more liberal but eventually realizing you're getting more apocalyptic.
  • Garbage-ass subreddits full of dis- and misinformation.
  • Battle Jackets vs. Jackets for Battle.
  • Pregnancy subreddits.
  • Checking out of gamer culture entirely.
  • Black metal communities dealing with white supremacists.
  • Can't we just have a place who love swords and wizards?
  • How to not run a Nazi bar.
  • Whether people get more liberal or more conservative as they age.
  • Stone cold hippies.
  • Explaining trans rights to your parents who are doing their best to understand.
  • Asking the AI-generated slush pile how to update your political beliefs.
  • Keeping younger people around who care about you enough to help you fix your shitty opinions.
  • Hungry for Jim topics.
  • Japanese cultural touchstones referenced in video games that just seem like nonsense to Americans.
  • Slavic folklore in the Witcher games.
  • Importing video games from more and more obscure countries because Japan is played out now.
  • Recognizing Greek heavy metal just from the riffs.
  • Vacuuming a couch and twenty one-dollar bills fly out of it.
  • Shagrat, you shag rats!
  • Rheumy weeping orbs that glare with hate.
  • Truly a poem of unknown provenance.
  • Shagrat doesn't deserve this!
  • We had some great topics today, y'all.
  • Mythcarver.
  • A discord for people who are due in the same month as you.
  • The Libras who won't let the dads in.
  • Circle time with other pregnant couples.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+VYZgItG1 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 255. We're Truly on the Bleeding Edge of Something https://topiclords.com/were-truly-on-the-bleeding-edge-of-something 63557269-fef7-4987-8f70-8af5a3a13b72 Mon, 09 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Adam and Linker. We discuss ways you've changed in 20 years, examples of X animal software running on Y animal hardware, whether erasure poetry counts as poetry, and your favorite RPG (whatever that means) 59:02 true Lords:

Topics:

  • Ways you've changed in the last 20 years that have surprised you
  • Examples of x animal software running on y animal hardware (ie. fox being cat software on dog hardware)
  • This argument about whether erasure poetry is poetry
  • Favourite RPG (videogame or tabletop; open to interpretation)

Microtopics:

  • Launching a game in the deep past.
  • Indiepocalypse.
  • After Journey's End vol. 2.
  • The Monthly Tape Club.
  • Games that are big enough or marketable enough.
  • Getting excited about this month's PC Gamer demo disk.
  • Zine-like game distribution.
  • Making a small game to express a thought.
  • Making a living making weird shit.
  • The methods of marketing a small game.
  • Practices that have existed for thousands of years.
  • The boom and bust cycle and why you might or might not get in on the next boom.
  • Making a shit-ton of money and continuing to pay your employees rather than laying them off.
  • Whether Gen Z is savvy to the MBA brain worms.
  • Whether Jim has a college degree.
  • New England Sarcastic.
  • Learning about having kids and wondering what it'd be like to have a purpose in life.
  • Being legally responsible for the survival of the worst roommate imaginable.
  • Other People's Dogs.
  • How is your life different from when you were 6 years old?
  • Becoming a permanent resident of Canada.
  • A local theater company producing your play.
  • Frog Fractions: it came from space.
  • A thing that expresses the maelstrom going on in my head (or soul)
  • The six 70s funk songs with a long enough stretch of isolated drums that they became the drums for every song ever.
  • How to make art as an expression of human needs.
  • Video games: they shouldn't exist.
  • Expressing a thought with the skills you enjoy flexing.
  • The virtues of having playtesters.
  • Bug software running on mammal hardware.
  • Tiny cats in the bodies of big cats.
  • Service dogs for cheetahs.
  • Remaining calm around humans because your dog buddy loves humans.
  • Erasure Poetry.
  • Oh Someone Oh God And Then Me.
  • Formalized rules for determining who gets credit for what when a bunch of people make a piece of art.
  • Legal precedents for copyright and reproduction rights.
  • Magnetic fridge poetry.
  • Inventing an art form that's even more constrained than pixel art somehow.
  • Unity of effect.
  • Looking at a blurry 16x16 tile and not being quite sure what it's supposed to be.
  • RPGs: what even are they?
  • What you can get away with within the aesthetics of a black and white Game Boy game.
  • Whether Breath of the Wild counts as an immersive sim and whether immersive sims count as RPGs
  • Getting into the topic weeds.
  • Chained Echoes.
  • Observing the sand running through the hourglass.
  • Social anxiety preventing you from enjoying tabletop RPGs.
  • Playing tabletop RPGs with a bunch of weird theater people.
  • Meeting your friend at a bar to catch up on the latest events in his tabletop RPG sessions.
  • How to use your name on social media.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

  • Ways you've changed in the last 20 years that have surprised you
  • Examples of x animal software running on y animal hardware (ie. fox being cat software on dog hardware)
  • This argument about whether erasure poetry is poetry
  • Favourite RPG (videogame or tabletop; open to interpretation)

Microtopics:

  • Launching a game in the deep past.
  • Indiepocalypse.
  • After Journey's End vol. 2.
  • The Monthly Tape Club.
  • Games that are big enough or marketable enough.
  • Getting excited about this month's PC Gamer demo disk.
  • Zine-like game distribution.
  • Making a small game to express a thought.
  • Making a living making weird shit.
  • The methods of marketing a small game.
  • Practices that have existed for thousands of years.
  • The boom and bust cycle and why you might or might not get in on the next boom.
  • Making a shit-ton of money and continuing to pay your employees rather than laying them off.
  • Whether Gen Z is savvy to the MBA brain worms.
  • Whether Jim has a college degree.
  • New England Sarcastic.
  • Learning about having kids and wondering what it'd be like to have a purpose in life.
  • Being legally responsible for the survival of the worst roommate imaginable.
  • Other People's Dogs.
  • How is your life different from when you were 6 years old?
  • Becoming a permanent resident of Canada.
  • A local theater company producing your play.
  • Frog Fractions: it came from space.
  • A thing that expresses the maelstrom going on in my head (or soul)
  • The six 70s funk songs with a long enough stretch of isolated drums that they became the drums for every song ever.
  • How to make art as an expression of human needs.
  • Video games: they shouldn't exist.
  • Expressing a thought with the skills you enjoy flexing.
  • The virtues of having playtesters.
  • Bug software running on mammal hardware.
  • Tiny cats in the bodies of big cats.
  • Service dogs for cheetahs.
  • Remaining calm around humans because your dog buddy loves humans.
  • Erasure Poetry.
  • Oh Someone Oh God And Then Me.
  • Formalized rules for determining who gets credit for what when a bunch of people make a piece of art.
  • Legal precedents for copyright and reproduction rights.
  • Magnetic fridge poetry.
  • Inventing an art form that's even more constrained than pixel art somehow.
  • Unity of effect.
  • Looking at a blurry 16x16 tile and not being quite sure what it's supposed to be.
  • RPGs: what even are they?
  • What you can get away with within the aesthetics of a black and white Game Boy game.
  • Whether Breath of the Wild counts as an immersive sim and whether immersive sims count as RPGs
  • Getting into the topic weeds.
  • Chained Echoes.
  • Observing the sand running through the hourglass.
  • Social anxiety preventing you from enjoying tabletop RPGs.
  • Playing tabletop RPGs with a bunch of weird theater people.
  • Meeting your friend at a bar to catch up on the latest events in his tabletop RPG sessions.
  • How to use your name on social media.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

  • Ways you've changed in the last 20 years that have surprised you
  • Examples of x animal software running on y animal hardware (ie. fox being cat software on dog hardware)
  • This argument about whether erasure poetry is poetry
  • Favourite RPG (videogame or tabletop; open to interpretation)

Microtopics:

  • Launching a game in the deep past.
  • Indiepocalypse.
  • After Journey's End vol. 2.
  • The Monthly Tape Club.
  • Games that are big enough or marketable enough.
  • Getting excited about this month's PC Gamer demo disk.
  • Zine-like game distribution.
  • Making a small game to express a thought.
  • Making a living making weird shit.
  • The methods of marketing a small game.
  • Practices that have existed for thousands of years.
  • The boom and bust cycle and why you might or might not get in on the next boom.
  • Making a shit-ton of money and continuing to pay your employees rather than laying them off.
  • Whether Gen Z is savvy to the MBA brain worms.
  • Whether Jim has a college degree.
  • New England Sarcastic.
  • Learning about having kids and wondering what it'd be like to have a purpose in life.
  • Being legally responsible for the survival of the worst roommate imaginable.
  • Other People's Dogs.
  • How is your life different from when you were 6 years old?
  • Becoming a permanent resident of Canada.
  • A local theater company producing your play.
  • Frog Fractions: it came from space.
  • A thing that expresses the maelstrom going on in my head (or soul)
  • The six 70s funk songs with a long enough stretch of isolated drums that they became the drums for every song ever.
  • How to make art as an expression of human needs.
  • Video games: they shouldn't exist.
  • Expressing a thought with the skills you enjoy flexing.
  • The virtues of having playtesters.
  • Bug software running on mammal hardware.
  • Tiny cats in the bodies of big cats.
  • Service dogs for cheetahs.
  • Remaining calm around humans because your dog buddy loves humans.
  • Erasure Poetry.
  • Oh Someone Oh God And Then Me.
  • Formalized rules for determining who gets credit for what when a bunch of people make a piece of art.
  • Legal precedents for copyright and reproduction rights.
  • Magnetic fridge poetry.
  • Inventing an art form that's even more constrained than pixel art somehow.
  • Unity of effect.
  • Looking at a blurry 16x16 tile and not being quite sure what it's supposed to be.
  • RPGs: what even are they?
  • What you can get away with within the aesthetics of a black and white Game Boy game.
  • Whether Breath of the Wild counts as an immersive sim and whether immersive sims count as RPGs
  • Getting into the topic weeds.
  • Chained Echoes.
  • Observing the sand running through the hourglass.
  • Social anxiety preventing you from enjoying tabletop RPGs.
  • Playing tabletop RPGs with a bunch of weird theater people.
  • Meeting your friend at a bar to catch up on the latest events in his tabletop RPG sessions.
  • How to use your name on social media.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+qY8bf4nX ]]> Jim Stormdancer 254. Help Me Get Over the Pervert Hump https://topiclords.com/help-me-get-over-the-pervert-hump 67558368-aad3-4950-8239-10217e10fb09 Mon, 02 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Ryan and Alicia. We discuss asking people what they're into without sounding like a pervert, Arctic Expeditions and man's hubris, Asterix Park, and I Won't Call You Pretty, by L.E. Bowman 1:05:31 true Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • How to work as a freelance creative without burning yourself out.
  • The me who comes up if you google me.
  • The black egg who knows all.
  • A huge egg with a second smaller egg in it.
  • The chickens who got no credit for inventing the Matrioshka doll.
  • Pluto: still a planet, because a dwarf planet is a kind of planet.
  • Team Moon.
  • Ancient Occult Magicks that you can check out from the library.
  • Giving up on the fairy smut everyone is recommending because it isn't smutty enough.
  • The air I just breathed.
  • One of my Top 5 Zeldas.
  • How many goes you get at being alive.
  • Luring Moongrum into the rolling boulder trap.
  • Bracing to hear about some online stuff.
  • Conference season in the game industry.
  • Meeting someone at a conference and asking them a question that Black Philip would ask.
  • How to Unfuck your Sales.
  • Content you Enjoyed.
  • Who are the coolest hangs in game dev?
  • Working with people you know and trust.
  • The Pervert's Mound.
  • Imagine if I was cool.
  • Wearing a sandwich board with the word "MONOGAMY" on it so the woman you're talking to knows you're not hitting on her.
  • Refusing to answer random innocuous questions so that it's not a tacit admission of guilt when you refuse to discuss an accusation.
  • Birthday bookshop tours.
  • Climbing as an act of disrespect to the mountain.
  • The HMS Terror and the HMS Erebus.
  • Peak British Colonialism.
  • Ignoring the locals' advice about what parts of animals to eat.
  • Sledging around your silverware.
  • Getting lead poisoning from the canned food you brought with you to find the Northwest Passage.
  • A cool pantsless mummy.
  • Paradoxical Undressing.
  • Having a hard time climbing Mount Everest because the path is choked with corpses of white people who blew it.
  • Oops, All Antarctic Ship Crashes.
  • Getting excited about bookshelves again.
  • Stepping forward into whatever the next grift is going to be.
  • Asterix the Gaul.
  • Localizing a book that is full of puns to dozens of different languages.
  • Not getting jokes in the English version of the Simpsons because the Swedish version of the Simpsons uses a completely different set of pop culture references.
  • What would an Asterix theme park look like?
  • Riding in a big inner tube down the lazy river.
  • Elder Millenials learning about Skibidi Toilet.
  • Asterix Park is the world's 12th largest economy.
  • My brain beans are really getting steamed, here.
  • Building an empire on that mustache.
  • Watching POV rollercoaster videos with your five year old.
  • Refusing to get in the sea.
  • Going up to strangers and asking what percentage of the sea is fish piss.
  • Weekend at Bernie's-ing your friend's corpse to Asterix Park.
  • What style of underwear Zeus is wearing today.
  • Who makes Zeus's underwear?
  • Eating the boar sandwich at Asterix Park.
  • Tasting the terror sweat on the wild boar you just hunted down.
  • The little bald kid from the comics page has a theme park??
  • Pirates of the Carabiner.
  • Sailing through a diorama.
  • The theme park ride with the sudden drop into a pool of mercury.
  • The Haunted Garfield Theme Park.
  • DeFuncoland.
  • Jon trying to get with the veterinarian lady he's into and Garfield ruining it.
  • Let's-plays as a service.
  • You won't believe what happens when these Muppets swarm Treasure Island.
  • A movie recap that is 80% of the length of the movie.
  • Flirting tricks.
  • The violence of being struck by Cupid's arrow.
  • Complimenting someone on something they have no control over.
  • Good luck getting any continuity out of me!
]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • How to work as a freelance creative without burning yourself out.
  • The me who comes up if you google me.
  • The black egg who knows all.
  • A huge egg with a second smaller egg in it.
  • The chickens who got no credit for inventing the Matrioshka doll.
  • Pluto: still a planet, because a dwarf planet is a kind of planet.
  • Team Moon.
  • Ancient Occult Magicks that you can check out from the library.
  • Giving up on the fairy smut everyone is recommending because it isn't smutty enough.
  • The air I just breathed.
  • One of my Top 5 Zeldas.
  • How many goes you get at being alive.
  • Luring Moongrum into the rolling boulder trap.
  • Bracing to hear about some online stuff.
  • Conference season in the game industry.
  • Meeting someone at a conference and asking them a question that Black Philip would ask.
  • How to Unfuck your Sales.
  • Content you Enjoyed.
  • Who are the coolest hangs in game dev?
  • Working with people you know and trust.
  • The Pervert's Mound.
  • Imagine if I was cool.
  • Wearing a sandwich board with the word "MONOGAMY" on it so the woman you're talking to knows you're not hitting on her.
  • Refusing to answer random innocuous questions so that it's not a tacit admission of guilt when you refuse to discuss an accusation.
  • Birthday bookshop tours.
  • Climbing as an act of disrespect to the mountain.
  • The HMS Terror and the HMS Erebus.
  • Peak British Colonialism.
  • Ignoring the locals' advice about what parts of animals to eat.
  • Sledging around your silverware.
  • Getting lead poisoning from the canned food you brought with you to find the Northwest Passage.
  • A cool pantsless mummy.
  • Paradoxical Undressing.
  • Having a hard time climbing Mount Everest because the path is choked with corpses of white people who blew it.
  • Oops, All Antarctic Ship Crashes.
  • Getting excited about bookshelves again.
  • Stepping forward into whatever the next grift is going to be.
  • Asterix the Gaul.
  • Localizing a book that is full of puns to dozens of different languages.
  • Not getting jokes in the English version of the Simpsons because the Swedish version of the Simpsons uses a completely different set of pop culture references.
  • What would an Asterix theme park look like?
  • Riding in a big inner tube down the lazy river.
  • Elder Millenials learning about Skibidi Toilet.
  • Asterix Park is the world's 12th largest economy.
  • My brain beans are really getting steamed, here.
  • Building an empire on that mustache.
  • Watching POV rollercoaster videos with your five year old.
  • Refusing to get in the sea.
  • Going up to strangers and asking what percentage of the sea is fish piss.
  • Weekend at Bernie's-ing your friend's corpse to Asterix Park.
  • What style of underwear Zeus is wearing today.
  • Who makes Zeus's underwear?
  • Eating the boar sandwich at Asterix Park.
  • Tasting the terror sweat on the wild boar you just hunted down.
  • The little bald kid from the comics page has a theme park??
  • Pirates of the Carabiner.
  • Sailing through a diorama.
  • The theme park ride with the sudden drop into a pool of mercury.
  • The Haunted Garfield Theme Park.
  • DeFuncoland.
  • Jon trying to get with the veterinarian lady he's into and Garfield ruining it.
  • Let's-plays as a service.
  • You won't believe what happens when these Muppets swarm Treasure Island.
  • A movie recap that is 80% of the length of the movie.
  • Flirting tricks.
  • The violence of being struck by Cupid's arrow.
  • Complimenting someone on something they have no control over.
  • Good luck getting any continuity out of me!

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • How to work as a freelance creative without burning yourself out.
  • The me who comes up if you google me.
  • The black egg who knows all.
  • A huge egg with a second smaller egg in it.
  • The chickens who got no credit for inventing the Matrioshka doll.
  • Pluto: still a planet, because a dwarf planet is a kind of planet.
  • Team Moon.
  • Ancient Occult Magicks that you can check out from the library.
  • Giving up on the fairy smut everyone is recommending because it isn't smutty enough.
  • The air I just breathed.
  • One of my Top 5 Zeldas.
  • How many goes you get at being alive.
  • Luring Moongrum into the rolling boulder trap.
  • Bracing to hear about some online stuff.
  • Conference season in the game industry.
  • Meeting someone at a conference and asking them a question that Black Philip would ask.
  • How to Unfuck your Sales.
  • Content you Enjoyed.
  • Who are the coolest hangs in game dev?
  • Working with people you know and trust.
  • The Pervert's Mound.
  • Imagine if I was cool.
  • Wearing a sandwich board with the word "MONOGAMY" on it so the woman you're talking to knows you're not hitting on her.
  • Refusing to answer random innocuous questions so that it's not a tacit admission of guilt when you refuse to discuss an accusation.
  • Birthday bookshop tours.
  • Climbing as an act of disrespect to the mountain.
  • The HMS Terror and the HMS Erebus.
  • Peak British Colonialism.
  • Ignoring the locals' advice about what parts of animals to eat.
  • Sledging around your silverware.
  • Getting lead poisoning from the canned food you brought with you to find the Northwest Passage.
  • A cool pantsless mummy.
  • Paradoxical Undressing.
  • Having a hard time climbing Mount Everest because the path is choked with corpses of white people who blew it.
  • Oops, All Antarctic Ship Crashes.
  • Getting excited about bookshelves again.
  • Stepping forward into whatever the next grift is going to be.
  • Asterix the Gaul.
  • Localizing a book that is full of puns to dozens of different languages.
  • Not getting jokes in the English version of the Simpsons because the Swedish version of the Simpsons uses a completely different set of pop culture references.
  • What would an Asterix theme park look like?
  • Riding in a big inner tube down the lazy river.
  • Elder Millenials learning about Skibidi Toilet.
  • Asterix Park is the world's 12th largest economy.
  • My brain beans are really getting steamed, here.
  • Building an empire on that mustache.
  • Watching POV rollercoaster videos with your five year old.
  • Refusing to get in the sea.
  • Going up to strangers and asking what percentage of the sea is fish piss.
  • Weekend at Bernie's-ing your friend's corpse to Asterix Park.
  • What style of underwear Zeus is wearing today.
  • Who makes Zeus's underwear?
  • Eating the boar sandwich at Asterix Park.
  • Tasting the terror sweat on the wild boar you just hunted down.
  • The little bald kid from the comics page has a theme park??
  • Pirates of the Carabiner.
  • Sailing through a diorama.
  • The theme park ride with the sudden drop into a pool of mercury.
  • The Haunted Garfield Theme Park.
  • DeFuncoland.
  • Jon trying to get with the veterinarian lady he's into and Garfield ruining it.
  • Let's-plays as a service.
  • You won't believe what happens when these Muppets swarm Treasure Island.
  • A movie recap that is 80% of the length of the movie.
  • Flirting tricks.
  • The violence of being struck by Cupid's arrow.
  • Complimenting someone on something they have no control over.
  • Good luck getting any continuity out of me!

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+H5fC9qBS ]]> Jim Stormdancer 253. A Unified Theory of Hot Dog Preference https://topiclords.com/a-unified-theory-of-hot-dog-preference b951d075-3e40-4426-a4a5-a67486914acd Mon, 26 Aug 2024 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Wacy and Chris. We discuss difficulties with long-term traveling, Norway, why they don't have novelty whipped cream, and The Dirt Man Song. 1:03:44 true Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Specialty pour over filter coffee.
  • A very deep rabbit hole of discovery of flavors.
  • Drink the Machine: a Clean Metallic Flavor.
  • Wacy and Chris.
  • Chris or sounds like Chris.
  • Living near your friends and family and being able to see them any time you want.
  • Spot-it.
  • Explaining what "on air" means to someone who has never listened to the radio.
  • Why are flickering lights creepy?
  • Getting Winston ready for swim class.
  • The pressure to hyper-optimize.
  • Being in the place where you are all the time.
  • The world: it's really big and really full of stuff.
  • How to exist in a city where you don't speak the language.
  • Things you don't feel like maximizing.
  • Grocery store bagged salads.
  • Countries that are known for salads.
  • Eating nothing but pickled fish and salty licorice during your trip even though you hate both.
  • Being delighted by mediocre sushi.
  • How many times Topic Lords has been downloaded in Osaka.
  • Modern New-Age Scandinavian Food.
  • Gas station hot dogs in Norway.
  • Ordering a big slab of My Girlfriend is Not Hungry.
  • Ways Norway is familiar to Americans.
  • Walking around kicking the glaciers.
  • Bikepackers.
  • Giant highway ferries with six lanes of traffic.
  • Brown Cheese Waffles.
  • Daylight all night long.
  • Normal people going outside and walking their dogs at 1am.
  • The song that plays with the baby raccoon spinning in a circle.
  • A country that is extremely serious about tunnels.
  • Opening up your windows to let the cave air in.
  • Visiting the Arctic circle in the winter.
  • Good ideas, like Pesto Whipped Cream.
  • Orange Cream Whipped Cream.
  • The toothpaste tubes with the colored wedges.
  • Birthday Cake Coffee Creamer.
  • Guava-flavored beer foam.
  • Coffee creamer except for beer.
  • Chefs seeking out the worst food so they can understand exactly why it's bad.
  • The Friendly's Cone Head.
  • The Bad-Interesting Food Spectrum.
  • Sleep regression, or more generally how you don't always keep forward progress.
  • Why kids become picky eaters.
  • Replicating the texture of uncooked hot dog in a novelty whipped cream.
  • What whippets are for.
  • Original flavorless N2O tanks.
  • Using the word for amyl nitrite that signifies that you are a VCR owner and not a drug user.
  • How to not become dirt in the dirt lair.
  • The dirt man's tithe.
  • Lying to your kid about cosmology.
  • Pretending to believe the little lies as practice for believing big lies.
  • Reminding your mom to make a leprechaun trap.
  • Making fake boot prints to convince your kids that god is real.
  • Reindeer food. (It's just hay.)
  • All the years you didn't keep dirt under your pillow.
  • The dirt man's dirt man taking you even deeper down.
  • Lots of great places where the dirt man can be found.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Specialty pour over filter coffee.
  • A very deep rabbit hole of discovery of flavors.
  • Drink the Machine: a Clean Metallic Flavor.
  • Wacy and Chris.
  • Chris or sounds like Chris.
  • Living near your friends and family and being able to see them any time you want.
  • Spot-it.
  • Explaining what "on air" means to someone who has never listened to the radio.
  • Why are flickering lights creepy?
  • Getting Winston ready for swim class.
  • The pressure to hyper-optimize.
  • Being in the place where you are all the time.
  • The world: it's really big and really full of stuff.
  • How to exist in a city where you don't speak the language.
  • Things you don't feel like maximizing.
  • Grocery store bagged salads.
  • Countries that are known for salads.
  • Eating nothing but pickled fish and salty licorice during your trip even though you hate both.
  • Being delighted by mediocre sushi.
  • How many times Topic Lords has been downloaded in Osaka.
  • Modern New-Age Scandinavian Food.
  • Gas station hot dogs in Norway.
  • Ordering a big slab of My Girlfriend is Not Hungry.
  • Ways Norway is familiar to Americans.
  • Walking around kicking the glaciers.
  • Bikepackers.
  • Giant highway ferries with six lanes of traffic.
  • Brown Cheese Waffles.
  • Daylight all night long.
  • Normal people going outside and walking their dogs at 1am.
  • The song that plays with the baby raccoon spinning in a circle.
  • A country that is extremely serious about tunnels.
  • Opening up your windows to let the cave air in.
  • Visiting the Arctic circle in the winter.
  • Good ideas, like Pesto Whipped Cream.
  • Orange Cream Whipped Cream.
  • The toothpaste tubes with the colored wedges.
  • Birthday Cake Coffee Creamer.
  • Guava-flavored beer foam.
  • Coffee creamer except for beer.
  • Chefs seeking out the worst food so they can understand exactly why it's bad.
  • The Friendly's Cone Head.
  • The Bad-Interesting Food Spectrum.
  • Sleep regression, or more generally how you don't always keep forward progress.
  • Why kids become picky eaters.
  • Replicating the texture of uncooked hot dog in a novelty whipped cream.
  • What whippets are for.
  • Original flavorless N2O tanks.
  • Using the word for amyl nitrite that signifies that you are a VCR owner and not a drug user.
  • How to not become dirt in the dirt lair.
  • The dirt man's tithe.
  • Lying to your kid about cosmology.
  • Pretending to believe the little lies as practice for believing big lies.
  • Reminding your mom to make a leprechaun trap.
  • Making fake boot prints to convince your kids that god is real.
  • Reindeer food. (It's just hay.)
  • All the years you didn't keep dirt under your pillow.
  • The dirt man's dirt man taking you even deeper down.
  • Lots of great places where the dirt man can be found.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Specialty pour over filter coffee.
  • A very deep rabbit hole of discovery of flavors.
  • Drink the Machine: a Clean Metallic Flavor.
  • Wacy and Chris.
  • Chris or sounds like Chris.
  • Living near your friends and family and being able to see them any time you want.
  • Spot-it.
  • Explaining what "on air" means to someone who has never listened to the radio.
  • Why are flickering lights creepy?
  • Getting Winston ready for swim class.
  • The pressure to hyper-optimize.
  • Being in the place where you are all the time.
  • The world: it's really big and really full of stuff.
  • How to exist in a city where you don't speak the language.
  • Things you don't feel like maximizing.
  • Grocery store bagged salads.
  • Countries that are known for salads.
  • Eating nothing but pickled fish and salty licorice during your trip even though you hate both.
  • Being delighted by mediocre sushi.
  • How many times Topic Lords has been downloaded in Osaka.
  • Modern New-Age Scandinavian Food.
  • Gas station hot dogs in Norway.
  • Ordering a big slab of My Girlfriend is Not Hungry.
  • Ways Norway is familiar to Americans.
  • Walking around kicking the glaciers.
  • Bikepackers.
  • Giant highway ferries with six lanes of traffic.
  • Brown Cheese Waffles.
  • Daylight all night long.
  • Normal people going outside and walking their dogs at 1am.
  • The song that plays with the baby raccoon spinning in a circle.
  • A country that is extremely serious about tunnels.
  • Opening up your windows to let the cave air in.
  • Visiting the Arctic circle in the winter.
  • Good ideas, like Pesto Whipped Cream.
  • Orange Cream Whipped Cream.
  • The toothpaste tubes with the colored wedges.
  • Birthday Cake Coffee Creamer.
  • Guava-flavored beer foam.
  • Coffee creamer except for beer.
  • Chefs seeking out the worst food so they can understand exactly why it's bad.
  • The Friendly's Cone Head.
  • The Bad-Interesting Food Spectrum.
  • Sleep regression, or more generally how you don't always keep forward progress.
  • Why kids become picky eaters.
  • Replicating the texture of uncooked hot dog in a novelty whipped cream.
  • What whippets are for.
  • Original flavorless N2O tanks.
  • Using the word for amyl nitrite that signifies that you are a VCR owner and not a drug user.
  • How to not become dirt in the dirt lair.
  • The dirt man's tithe.
  • Lying to your kid about cosmology.
  • Pretending to believe the little lies as practice for believing big lies.
  • Reminding your mom to make a leprechaun trap.
  • Making fake boot prints to convince your kids that god is real.
  • Reindeer food. (It's just hay.)
  • All the years you didn't keep dirt under your pillow.
  • The dirt man's dirt man taking you even deeper down.
  • Lots of great places where the dirt man can be found.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+AmIp_HWe ]]> Jim Stormdancer 252. A Properly Functioning Bag Nose https://topiclords.com/a-properly-functioning-bag-nose d46ad0bc-759e-48f5-9a8f-112aa5c91e07 Mon, 19 Aug 2024 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: JohnB, Kory. We discuss vinyl records, teaching yourself C++, forgetting things as a way of getting things done, I Sat Belonely by John Lennon, and the vestigial organs of video games. 1:04:40 true Lords:

  • JohnB
  • Kory

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Kbones' Wire Tripper, on display at Wonderville.
  • Easter eggs for fans of Gordy and the Monster Moon.
  • Ebirah, Horror of the Deep.
  • Watching Shin Godzilla immediately after Evangelion.
  • Dan Ryckert's nonsense over at Giant Bomb.
  • Listening to a Mario Party game on the radio.
  • Supplementing all your collecting hobbies with a creative hobby.
  • Grabbing the record player before the garbage collector does.
  • An auto-sustaining supply of sound bars entering and leaving the trash.
  • The Digital Jim Gift Shop.
  • The Frog Fractions OST Vinyl in Bug Mars Orange.
  • Auditioning for college radio by DJing a show to tape that won't be aired, just rated by a panel of experts.
  • The vinyl soundtrack to a Net Yaroze game.
  • Albums that have an odd number of sides.
  • Holographic tie fighters that spin around when you shine a light on them.
  • The Funkopopization of Vinyl.
  • Hobbies that are better if you have friends.
  • Using wood glue to clean an LP, then using an inverse record player to play music off the glue's negative grooves.
  • The glue's glue.
  • Station to Station, by David Bowie.
  • The experience of listening to an album all the way through.
  • Content-producing reasons.
  • An excuse to listen to an album with friends under the auspices of being productive.
  • Seeing the music by looking how wide the groove is.
  • Smooth jazz appreciation.
  • The Madden NFL of the record shop.
  • How to justify going to GDC when you're not a game developer.
  • How to ship a Love2D game.
  • Drag your file onto a Love Executable.
  • Putting together your first Arkanoid-like in Game Boy Assembly.
  • To create Red Dead Redemption, first add two binary digits.
  • Super FML.
  • Objectless games.
  • The data flow required to change screens in a Zelda-like game.
  • What happened to various aspects of the Adobe Flash ecosystem.
  • Why console games had such sluggish menus.
  • A bug where if you do it right you don't have to press A.
  • How to do a bureaucracy thing.
  • Keeping an important task in mind so you can accomplish all your less important tasks.
  • Trying to forget all but one thing you need to do because if you remember two things you'll just sit there being anxious.
  • Forgetting information that you do have vs. faking information that you don't have.
  • Foveated vision.
  • Yesterday's List.
  • How many Frog Fractions had to die because the most dangerous task was attempted first?
  • A little tiny little pig.
  • Balonely.
  • A Spaniard in the Works.
  • Reading your own book in your fictionalized biopic.
  • Whimsical Elisions.
  • Fun whimsical vs. dark whimsical.
  • Coming back from India and writing a hundred one minute songs that don't mean anything.
  • Music that you've listened to so much that it's like listening to breathing air.
  • Don't Pass Me By and Octopus' Garden.
  • Game mechanics that still exist because nobody's thought about them in a while.
  • Moon phases in Shin Megami Tensei.
  • Demon Fusion.
  • What Super Mario Wonder does with a combo since it doesn't have points.
  • A potentially dangerous vestigial organ in video games.
  • How to make pinball beginner friendly.
]]> Lords:

  • JohnB
  • Kory

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Kbones' Wire Tripper, on display at Wonderville.
  • Easter eggs for fans of Gordy and the Monster Moon.
  • Ebirah, Horror of the Deep.
  • Watching Shin Godzilla immediately after Evangelion.
  • Dan Ryckert's nonsense over at Giant Bomb.
  • Listening to a Mario Party game on the radio.
  • Supplementing all your collecting hobbies with a creative hobby.
  • Grabbing the record player before the garbage collector does.
  • An auto-sustaining supply of sound bars entering and leaving the trash.
  • The Digital Jim Gift Shop.
  • The Frog Fractions OST Vinyl in Bug Mars Orange.
  • Auditioning for college radio by DJing a show to tape that won't be aired, just rated by a panel of experts.
  • The vinyl soundtrack to a Net Yaroze game.
  • Albums that have an odd number of sides.
  • Holographic tie fighters that spin around when you shine a light on them.
  • The Funkopopization of Vinyl.
  • Hobbies that are better if you have friends.
  • Using wood glue to clean an LP, then using an inverse record player to play music off the glue's negative grooves.
  • The glue's glue.
  • Station to Station, by David Bowie.
  • The experience of listening to an album all the way through.
  • Content-producing reasons.
  • An excuse to listen to an album with friends under the auspices of being productive.
  • Seeing the music by looking how wide the groove is.
  • Smooth jazz appreciation.
  • The Madden NFL of the record shop.
  • How to justify going to GDC when you're not a game developer.
  • How to ship a Love2D game.
  • Drag your file onto a Love Executable.
  • Putting together your first Arkanoid-like in Game Boy Assembly.
  • To create Red Dead Redemption, first add two binary digits.
  • Super FML.
  • Objectless games.
  • The data flow required to change screens in a Zelda-like game.
  • What happened to various aspects of the Adobe Flash ecosystem.
  • Why console games had such sluggish menus.
  • A bug where if you do it right you don't have to press A.
  • How to do a bureaucracy thing.
  • Keeping an important task in mind so you can accomplish all your less important tasks.
  • Trying to forget all but one thing you need to do because if you remember two things you'll just sit there being anxious.
  • Forgetting information that you do have vs. faking information that you don't have.
  • Foveated vision.
  • Yesterday's List.
  • How many Frog Fractions had to die because the most dangerous task was attempted first?
  • A little tiny little pig.
  • Balonely.
  • A Spaniard in the Works.
  • Reading your own book in your fictionalized biopic.
  • Whimsical Elisions.
  • Fun whimsical vs. dark whimsical.
  • Coming back from India and writing a hundred one minute songs that don't mean anything.
  • Music that you've listened to so much that it's like listening to breathing air.
  • Don't Pass Me By and Octopus' Garden.
  • Game mechanics that still exist because nobody's thought about them in a while.
  • Moon phases in Shin Megami Tensei.
  • Demon Fusion.
  • What Super Mario Wonder does with a combo since it doesn't have points.
  • A potentially dangerous vestigial organ in video games.
  • How to make pinball beginner friendly.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • JohnB
  • Kory

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Kbones' Wire Tripper, on display at Wonderville.
  • Easter eggs for fans of Gordy and the Monster Moon.
  • Ebirah, Horror of the Deep.
  • Watching Shin Godzilla immediately after Evangelion.
  • Dan Ryckert's nonsense over at Giant Bomb.
  • Listening to a Mario Party game on the radio.
  • Supplementing all your collecting hobbies with a creative hobby.
  • Grabbing the record player before the garbage collector does.
  • An auto-sustaining supply of sound bars entering and leaving the trash.
  • The Digital Jim Gift Shop.
  • The Frog Fractions OST Vinyl in Bug Mars Orange.
  • Auditioning for college radio by DJing a show to tape that won't be aired, just rated by a panel of experts.
  • The vinyl soundtrack to a Net Yaroze game.
  • Albums that have an odd number of sides.
  • Holographic tie fighters that spin around when you shine a light on them.
  • The Funkopopization of Vinyl.
  • Hobbies that are better if you have friends.
  • Using wood glue to clean an LP, then using an inverse record player to play music off the glue's negative grooves.
  • The glue's glue.
  • Station to Station, by David Bowie.
  • The experience of listening to an album all the way through.
  • Content-producing reasons.
  • An excuse to listen to an album with friends under the auspices of being productive.
  • Seeing the music by looking how wide the groove is.
  • Smooth jazz appreciation.
  • The Madden NFL of the record shop.
  • How to justify going to GDC when you're not a game developer.
  • How to ship a Love2D game.
  • Drag your file onto a Love Executable.
  • Putting together your first Arkanoid-like in Game Boy Assembly.
  • To create Red Dead Redemption, first add two binary digits.
  • Super FML.
  • Objectless games.
  • The data flow required to change screens in a Zelda-like game.
  • What happened to various aspects of the Adobe Flash ecosystem.
  • Why console games had such sluggish menus.
  • A bug where if you do it right you don't have to press A.
  • How to do a bureaucracy thing.
  • Keeping an important task in mind so you can accomplish all your less important tasks.
  • Trying to forget all but one thing you need to do because if you remember two things you'll just sit there being anxious.
  • Forgetting information that you do have vs. faking information that you don't have.
  • Foveated vision.
  • Yesterday's List.
  • How many Frog Fractions had to die because the most dangerous task was attempted first?
  • A little tiny little pig.
  • Balonely.
  • A Spaniard in the Works.
  • Reading your own book in your fictionalized biopic.
  • Whimsical Elisions.
  • Fun whimsical vs. dark whimsical.
  • Coming back from India and writing a hundred one minute songs that don't mean anything.
  • Music that you've listened to so much that it's like listening to breathing air.
  • Don't Pass Me By and Octopus' Garden.
  • Game mechanics that still exist because nobody's thought about them in a while.
  • Moon phases in Shin Megami Tensei.
  • Demon Fusion.
  • What Super Mario Wonder does with a combo since it doesn't have points.
  • A potentially dangerous vestigial organ in video games.
  • How to make pinball beginner friendly.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+awpcFUZx ]]> Jim Stormdancer 251. Organs Experiencing Red Shift https://topiclords.com/organs-experiencing-red-shift ee254511-69d4-4b69-be1a-81f9008fb45c Mon, 12 Aug 2024 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Erica and Casey. We discuss coeloms, solving problems by experiencing a bigger problem, mammals learning to eat cephalopods, A Narrow Fellow in the Grass by Emily Dickinson, and personal project retrospectives. 1:11:19 true Lords:

  • Erica
  • Casey

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • That thing you just heard.
  • Assigning your new hire an office.
  • Plugging over a million leaking gas and oil wells in West Texas.
  • The Topic Lords Promise.
  • A bag that your organs sit in.
  • Undifferentiated tissues.
  • How dissecting an earthworm is different from dissecting a gummy worm.
  • Inflating your coelom in order to take out your spleen.
  • Organisms with high diseectability.
  • The anti-coelom lobby.
  • Undifferentiated tubes of goo that get depression.
  • The gummy worm future we're all looking forward to.
  • Fluid things going on in the organism.
  • A car that has a huge dent in it and it doesn't matter because the car still gets around no problem.
  • Good car ideas.
  • A bad thing happening but it's not your fault.
  • Buying your house in a point and clock adventure online.
  • Rediscovering all the things you have stored at your parent's house.
  • Multi-episode Topic Lords story arcs.
  • Which colored stripes are on Wikipedia's Non-Notable Flag.
  • The Topic Lords explainer episode where everyone finds out what this show is about.
  • Serial Podcast Monogamy.
  • Podcast guilt.
  • Discussing all the same topics as the last episode with no self-awareness.
  • Non-Stop Coelom Celebration.
  • My own very special walking bag of guts.
  • Evolving cheek muscles to suck meat out of a spiral shell.
  • Losing your baby lips.
  • What it's like to eat a planarian.
  • Cephalopods that have evolved to eat mammals.
  • The giant squid that have never been seen alive.
  • The colossal squid vs. the giant squid.
  • Finding a mobius strip solution so borh your flag and your neighbor'a flag can be biggest.
  • Our flag that represents limpness will be your downfall.
  • Non-stop sensationalized documentaries about North Korea.
  • Opening the border to North Korea so we can finally interview the people about the colossal squid.
  • Emily Dickinson slipping into Yoda Speak.
  • Being too busy reading to understand what you're reading.
  • Whether the Emily Dickinson poem about the snake is actually about a snake or about a dick or both.
  • It's coming at your feet! It likes a boggy acre!
  • A polysexual attitude towards nature.
  • Emily Dickinson making thousands of attempts to fix the Gilligan's Island theme.
  • Herman Melville describing Moby Dick as "the Ebon Whale" because he didn't have Wikipedia.
  • Moby Dick annotated by biologists who explain why all the whale facts are wrong.
  • Game Developers doing a "post-mortem" of projects that are ongoing.
  • Befunge.
  • Clojure and other Lisps.
  • Watching your own programming livestreams to learn how to learn better.
  • A huge block of text off to the side that tells you how to play the game.
  • Fine-grained tactical mistakes.
  • Why people keep telling game developers to learn to ship a game.
  • The most significant barrier between you and putting a work of art out in the world.
  • Inventing metrics for success for game engines that never ship.
  • Rewriting your game engine to have cooler tech but be way harder to make levels for.
  • Modern Jim-Style Content.
  • Artists trash talking their own work while they're showing it to you.
  • A sign on your forehead reading "ask me about my severely negative feedback."
  • The George W. Bush childhood home.
  • A community built on everyone's shared desire to leave.
  • The ethic of owning a shotgun.
  • The last of the Midland Odessa complaining.
  • Big Bend and Carlsbad Caverns.
  • An airport full of ads for oil wells and oil well accessories.
  • The Chris Kyle American Sniper Memorial.
  • A plaque on a sculpture explaining whether the flag represents a penis.
  • Everything's a dick if you squint hard enough.
  • An assassin of federal judges.
]]> Lords:

  • Erica
  • Casey

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • That thing you just heard.
  • Assigning your new hire an office.
  • Plugging over a million leaking gas and oil wells in West Texas.
  • The Topic Lords Promise.
  • A bag that your organs sit in.
  • Undifferentiated tissues.
  • How dissecting an earthworm is different from dissecting a gummy worm.
  • Inflating your coelom in order to take out your spleen.
  • Organisms with high diseectability.
  • The anti-coelom lobby.
  • Undifferentiated tubes of goo that get depression.
  • The gummy worm future we're all looking forward to.
  • Fluid things going on in the organism.
  • A car that has a huge dent in it and it doesn't matter because the car still gets around no problem.
  • Good car ideas.
  • A bad thing happening but it's not your fault.
  • Buying your house in a point and clock adventure online.
  • Rediscovering all the things you have stored at your parent's house.
  • Multi-episode Topic Lords story arcs.
  • Which colored stripes are on Wikipedia's Non-Notable Flag.
  • The Topic Lords explainer episode where everyone finds out what this show is about.
  • Serial Podcast Monogamy.
  • Podcast guilt.
  • Discussing all the same topics as the last episode with no self-awareness.
  • Non-Stop Coelom Celebration.
  • My own very special walking bag of guts.
  • Evolving cheek muscles to suck meat out of a spiral shell.
  • Losing your baby lips.
  • What it's like to eat a planarian.
  • Cephalopods that have evolved to eat mammals.
  • The giant squid that have never been seen alive.
  • The colossal squid vs. the giant squid.
  • Finding a mobius strip solution so borh your flag and your neighbor'a flag can be biggest.
  • Our flag that represents limpness will be your downfall.
  • Non-stop sensationalized documentaries about North Korea.
  • Opening the border to North Korea so we can finally interview the people about the colossal squid.
  • Emily Dickinson slipping into Yoda Speak.
  • Being too busy reading to understand what you're reading.
  • Whether the Emily Dickinson poem about the snake is actually about a snake or about a dick or both.
  • It's coming at your feet! It likes a boggy acre!
  • A polysexual attitude towards nature.
  • Emily Dickinson making thousands of attempts to fix the Gilligan's Island theme.
  • Herman Melville describing Moby Dick as "the Ebon Whale" because he didn't have Wikipedia.
  • Moby Dick annotated by biologists who explain why all the whale facts are wrong.
  • Game Developers doing a "post-mortem" of projects that are ongoing.
  • Befunge.
  • Clojure and other Lisps.
  • Watching your own programming livestreams to learn how to learn better.
  • A huge block of text off to the side that tells you how to play the game.
  • Fine-grained tactical mistakes.
  • Why people keep telling game developers to learn to ship a game.
  • The most significant barrier between you and putting a work of art out in the world.
  • Inventing metrics for success for game engines that never ship.
  • Rewriting your game engine to have cooler tech but be way harder to make levels for.
  • Modern Jim-Style Content.
  • Artists trash talking their own work while they're showing it to you.
  • A sign on your forehead reading "ask me about my severely negative feedback."
  • The George W. Bush childhood home.
  • A community built on everyone's shared desire to leave.
  • The ethic of owning a shotgun.
  • The last of the Midland Odessa complaining.
  • Big Bend and Carlsbad Caverns.
  • An airport full of ads for oil wells and oil well accessories.
  • The Chris Kyle American Sniper Memorial.
  • A plaque on a sculpture explaining whether the flag represents a penis.
  • Everything's a dick if you squint hard enough.
  • An assassin of federal judges.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Erica
  • Casey

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • That thing you just heard.
  • Assigning your new hire an office.
  • Plugging over a million leaking gas and oil wells in West Texas.
  • The Topic Lords Promise.
  • A bag that your organs sit in.
  • Undifferentiated tissues.
  • How dissecting an earthworm is different from dissecting a gummy worm.
  • Inflating your coelom in order to take out your spleen.
  • Organisms with high diseectability.
  • The anti-coelom lobby.
  • Undifferentiated tubes of goo that get depression.
  • The gummy worm future we're all looking forward to.
  • Fluid things going on in the organism.
  • A car that has a huge dent in it and it doesn't matter because the car still gets around no problem.
  • Good car ideas.
  • A bad thing happening but it's not your fault.
  • Buying your house in a point and clock adventure online.
  • Rediscovering all the things you have stored at your parent's house.
  • Multi-episode Topic Lords story arcs.
  • Which colored stripes are on Wikipedia's Non-Notable Flag.
  • The Topic Lords explainer episode where everyone finds out what this show is about.
  • Serial Podcast Monogamy.
  • Podcast guilt.
  • Discussing all the same topics as the last episode with no self-awareness.
  • Non-Stop Coelom Celebration.
  • My own very special walking bag of guts.
  • Evolving cheek muscles to suck meat out of a spiral shell.
  • Losing your baby lips.
  • What it's like to eat a planarian.
  • Cephalopods that have evolved to eat mammals.
  • The giant squid that have never been seen alive.
  • The colossal squid vs. the giant squid.
  • Finding a mobius strip solution so borh your flag and your neighbor'a flag can be biggest.
  • Our flag that represents limpness will be your downfall.
  • Non-stop sensationalized documentaries about North Korea.
  • Opening the border to North Korea so we can finally interview the people about the colossal squid.
  • Emily Dickinson slipping into Yoda Speak.
  • Being too busy reading to understand what you're reading.
  • Whether the Emily Dickinson poem about the snake is actually about a snake or about a dick or both.
  • It's coming at your feet! It likes a boggy acre!
  • A polysexual attitude towards nature.
  • Emily Dickinson making thousands of attempts to fix the Gilligan's Island theme.
  • Herman Melville describing Moby Dick as "the Ebon Whale" because he didn't have Wikipedia.
  • Moby Dick annotated by biologists who explain why all the whale facts are wrong.
  • Game Developers doing a "post-mortem" of projects that are ongoing.
  • Befunge.
  • Clojure and other Lisps.
  • Watching your own programming livestreams to learn how to learn better.
  • A huge block of text off to the side that tells you how to play the game.
  • Fine-grained tactical mistakes.
  • Why people keep telling game developers to learn to ship a game.
  • The most significant barrier between you and putting a work of art out in the world.
  • Inventing metrics for success for game engines that never ship.
  • Rewriting your game engine to have cooler tech but be way harder to make levels for.
  • Modern Jim-Style Content.
  • Artists trash talking their own work while they're showing it to you.
  • A sign on your forehead reading "ask me about my severely negative feedback."
  • The George W. Bush childhood home.
  • A community built on everyone's shared desire to leave.
  • The ethic of owning a shotgun.
  • The last of the Midland Odessa complaining.
  • Big Bend and Carlsbad Caverns.
  • An airport full of ads for oil wells and oil well accessories.
  • The Chris Kyle American Sniper Memorial.
  • A plaque on a sculpture explaining whether the flag represents a penis.
  • Everything's a dick if you squint hard enough.
  • An assassin of federal judges.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+VGT3u4a4 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 250. Almost Pickles: It's Just Cucumbers! https://topiclords.com/almost-pickles-its-just-cucumbers 26f277ca-fd79-4b39-962f-063e1eefea14 Mon, 05 Aug 2024 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Jenni and Tyriq. We discuss mayochup and kranch, Barry Topping, Magic Shell, Hot Sauce by Just James, video games where you put toppings on things, and the temptation of bad ice cream toppings. 57:50 true Lords:

  • Jenni
  • Tyriq

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The game where you go into your uncle's nipple and find a tiny heart.
  • Isles of Sea and Sky.
  • A block pushy game.
  • Toppings that are just recombinations of existing toppings.
  • Switching sriracha brands for labor relations reasons.
  • Combining all the soda flavors because you're an iconoclast and suffering because the flavor is worse but it's worth it.
  • Getting a squeeze bottle so you can drizzle sauces like on TV.
  • Getting pre-ruined peanut butters so you don't need to worry about ruining it any further.
  • Buying peanut butter because you no longer live with someone who is allergic to nuts.
  • Intrusive and non-intrusive seeds.
  • Condiment combinations sticking in your head for decades.
  • Ketchup and something that's kind of like a thing you might know but might not.
  • Almost Pickles: It's Just Cucumbers.
  • Harmless Coconut Water.
  • Cranch: ranch dressing that that comes out of the can in a wobbly cylinder like cranberry sauce.
  • Barry Hilary Valentine Topping.
  • Paradise Killer.
  • Walking into court sipping your Starbucks latte.
  • Hopping around a beach and looking at a vaporwave pyramid.
  • Collecting skate tapes, just like Mario does.
  • Bails hurt scores, Mario!
  • Street Uni X.
  • The Tony Hawk soundtrack except slightly more a Lilith Fair.
  • Enjoying a bad N64 camera enough for the two of us.
  • The thing you squirt onto your ice cream.
  • Making your own counterfeit Kranch at home in a bottle with Kranch written on it in crayon.
  • The Cheese Remains Saucy.
  • Getting a boba tea for $17 outside of LA.
  • Taking the very worst bite out of your mother in law's ice cream cone.
  • Working out your jaw muscles until you can eat the entire ice cream cone in one bite.
  • Eating 16 pints of ice cream in six minutes.
  • Screaming at ice cream until it teleports into your belly.
  • Admonishing your readers that hot sauce would not make a good wife.
  • Stealing the pelt of a selkie but she always wants to go back to the ocean.
  • Selkie for a wife vs. ice cream for a wife.
  • ASMRtistry.
  • Spices of life.
  • Using a food metaphor to describe the metaphorical nature to food.
  • Three pop songs that compare women to food.
  • A topic that is floating around in the the collective unconscious.
  • Sriracha sorbet.
  • A flight of tea-flavored ice creams.
  • Sentient hot sauce putting itself on things you don't usually put hot sauce on.
  • Salamander County Public Television.
  • A Wario Ware that's a little bit QWOP.
  • The Pancake/Burger/Bacon trilogy.
  • An interactive thing where you put food into space.
  • The American Portion Gun.
  • Put things on things.
  • Video games with hamburger building elements.
  • A fast food simulator where you solve all the horror game problems that you're in.
  • Whether board games count as video games since you can see them.
  • Vidus Gamus.
  • Livin' la Video Game Loca.
  • Learning how to recover from mistakes.
  • Putting an entire Snickers bar in your cup of Sriracha and the clerk just shakes his head.
  • Asking the froyo guy to arrange the gummy worms "artfully. Like how I would if I could reach in there nyself. In fact why do I need to order, just give me the froyo that I want!"
  • All the Mistake Blizzards you can eat.
  • Nerds Butterfinger Mistake Blizzard.
  • Putting barbecue sauce on vanilla ice cream because you're out or chocolate sauce.
  • What's your favorite cheese to put on Pop-Tarts?
  • The Ambies for Excellence in Audio.
  • How to make more of the red liquid they found in the black sarcophagus.
]]> Lords:

  • Jenni
  • Tyriq

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The game where you go into your uncle's nipple and find a tiny heart.
  • Isles of Sea and Sky.
  • A block pushy game.
  • Toppings that are just recombinations of existing toppings.
  • Switching sriracha brands for labor relations reasons.
  • Combining all the soda flavors because you're an iconoclast and suffering because the flavor is worse but it's worth it.
  • Getting a squeeze bottle so you can drizzle sauces like on TV.
  • Getting pre-ruined peanut butters so you don't need to worry about ruining it any further.
  • Buying peanut butter because you no longer live with someone who is allergic to nuts.
  • Intrusive and non-intrusive seeds.
  • Condiment combinations sticking in your head for decades.
  • Ketchup and something that's kind of like a thing you might know but might not.
  • Almost Pickles: It's Just Cucumbers.
  • Harmless Coconut Water.
  • Cranch: ranch dressing that that comes out of the can in a wobbly cylinder like cranberry sauce.
  • Barry Hilary Valentine Topping.
  • Paradise Killer.
  • Walking into court sipping your Starbucks latte.
  • Hopping around a beach and looking at a vaporwave pyramid.
  • Collecting skate tapes, just like Mario does.
  • Bails hurt scores, Mario!
  • Street Uni X.
  • The Tony Hawk soundtrack except slightly more a Lilith Fair.
  • Enjoying a bad N64 camera enough for the two of us.
  • The thing you squirt onto your ice cream.
  • Making your own counterfeit Kranch at home in a bottle with Kranch written on it in crayon.
  • The Cheese Remains Saucy.
  • Getting a boba tea for $17 outside of LA.
  • Taking the very worst bite out of your mother in law's ice cream cone.
  • Working out your jaw muscles until you can eat the entire ice cream cone in one bite.
  • Eating 16 pints of ice cream in six minutes.
  • Screaming at ice cream until it teleports into your belly.
  • Admonishing your readers that hot sauce would not make a good wife.
  • Stealing the pelt of a selkie but she always wants to go back to the ocean.
  • Selkie for a wife vs. ice cream for a wife.
  • ASMRtistry.
  • Spices of life.
  • Using a food metaphor to describe the metaphorical nature to food.
  • Three pop songs that compare women to food.
  • A topic that is floating around in the the collective unconscious.
  • Sriracha sorbet.
  • A flight of tea-flavored ice creams.
  • Sentient hot sauce putting itself on things you don't usually put hot sauce on.
  • Salamander County Public Television.
  • A Wario Ware that's a little bit QWOP.
  • The Pancake/Burger/Bacon trilogy.
  • An interactive thing where you put food into space.
  • The American Portion Gun.
  • Put things on things.
  • Video games with hamburger building elements.
  • A fast food simulator where you solve all the horror game problems that you're in.
  • Whether board games count as video games since you can see them.
  • Vidus Gamus.
  • Livin' la Video Game Loca.
  • Learning how to recover from mistakes.
  • Putting an entire Snickers bar in your cup of Sriracha and the clerk just shakes his head.
  • Asking the froyo guy to arrange the gummy worms "artfully. Like how I would if I could reach in there nyself. In fact why do I need to order, just give me the froyo that I want!"
  • All the Mistake Blizzards you can eat.
  • Nerds Butterfinger Mistake Blizzard.
  • Putting barbecue sauce on vanilla ice cream because you're out or chocolate sauce.
  • What's your favorite cheese to put on Pop-Tarts?
  • The Ambies for Excellence in Audio.
  • How to make more of the red liquid they found in the black sarcophagus.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Jenni
  • Tyriq

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The game where you go into your uncle's nipple and find a tiny heart.
  • Isles of Sea and Sky.
  • A block pushy game.
  • Toppings that are just recombinations of existing toppings.
  • Switching sriracha brands for labor relations reasons.
  • Combining all the soda flavors because you're an iconoclast and suffering because the flavor is worse but it's worth it.
  • Getting a squeeze bottle so you can drizzle sauces like on TV.
  • Getting pre-ruined peanut butters so you don't need to worry about ruining it any further.
  • Buying peanut butter because you no longer live with someone who is allergic to nuts.
  • Intrusive and non-intrusive seeds.
  • Condiment combinations sticking in your head for decades.
  • Ketchup and something that's kind of like a thing you might know but might not.
  • Almost Pickles: It's Just Cucumbers.
  • Harmless Coconut Water.
  • Cranch: ranch dressing that that comes out of the can in a wobbly cylinder like cranberry sauce.
  • Barry Hilary Valentine Topping.
  • Paradise Killer.
  • Walking into court sipping your Starbucks latte.
  • Hopping around a beach and looking at a vaporwave pyramid.
  • Collecting skate tapes, just like Mario does.
  • Bails hurt scores, Mario!
  • Street Uni X.
  • The Tony Hawk soundtrack except slightly more a Lilith Fair.
  • Enjoying a bad N64 camera enough for the two of us.
  • The thing you squirt onto your ice cream.
  • Making your own counterfeit Kranch at home in a bottle with Kranch written on it in crayon.
  • The Cheese Remains Saucy.
  • Getting a boba tea for $17 outside of LA.
  • Taking the very worst bite out of your mother in law's ice cream cone.
  • Working out your jaw muscles until you can eat the entire ice cream cone in one bite.
  • Eating 16 pints of ice cream in six minutes.
  • Screaming at ice cream until it teleports into your belly.
  • Admonishing your readers that hot sauce would not make a good wife.
  • Stealing the pelt of a selkie but she always wants to go back to the ocean.
  • Selkie for a wife vs. ice cream for a wife.
  • ASMRtistry.
  • Spices of life.
  • Using a food metaphor to describe the metaphorical nature to food.
  • Three pop songs that compare women to food.
  • A topic that is floating around in the the collective unconscious.
  • Sriracha sorbet.
  • A flight of tea-flavored ice creams.
  • Sentient hot sauce putting itself on things you don't usually put hot sauce on.
  • Salamander County Public Television.
  • A Wario Ware that's a little bit QWOP.
  • The Pancake/Burger/Bacon trilogy.
  • An interactive thing where you put food into space.
  • The American Portion Gun.
  • Put things on things.
  • Video games with hamburger building elements.
  • A fast food simulator where you solve all the horror game problems that you're in.
  • Whether board games count as video games since you can see them.
  • Vidus Gamus.
  • Livin' la Video Game Loca.
  • Learning how to recover from mistakes.
  • Putting an entire Snickers bar in your cup of Sriracha and the clerk just shakes his head.
  • Asking the froyo guy to arrange the gummy worms "artfully. Like how I would if I could reach in there nyself. In fact why do I need to order, just give me the froyo that I want!"
  • All the Mistake Blizzards you can eat.
  • Nerds Butterfinger Mistake Blizzard.
  • Putting barbecue sauce on vanilla ice cream because you're out or chocolate sauce.
  • What's your favorite cheese to put on Pop-Tarts?
  • The Ambies for Excellence in Audio.
  • How to make more of the red liquid they found in the black sarcophagus.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+e4ZWKTA1 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 249. Singles Night at Whole Foods https://topiclords.com/singles-night-at-whole-foods 4ee3285f-3ff6-4a13-822f-ed3a81454c13 Mon, 29 Jul 2024 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Ian and Shannon. We discuss remakes of Yojimbo, how to balance character likability with dark comedy, fixing bad movie dialog mixing, and The Chinese Checker Players by Richard Brautigan. 1:02:26 true Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Songs that signify that this scene or moment is sophisticated.
  • How to pronounce Debussy.
  • Southern gothic dark comedy body horror.
  • A weirdo from Twitter who can't email your employer because he doesn't know who you work for.
  • The Glass Key's remake family tree.
  • A drifter samurai coming to a town.
  • A dude who shows up in town and decides to play all the criminal factions against each other.
  • The scene where the protagonist sets the bed on fire and jumps out the window.
  • Escaping from rum runners by convincing them that you've already escaped.
  • Propping your gun on a cross and using Jesus to pull the trigger.
  • A sorceress who spends the whole movie topless because it's one of those movies.
  • Omega Doom starring Rutger Hauer.
  • A robot who gets stabbed in a bar because the stabber needs to download his memories.
  • Using a mook as a human shield.
  • The supporting actor getting a better offer and quitting in between takes.
  • Where you put the interesting part in your movie.
  • A hobo who runs two crime syndicates.
  • The story of two rival vice principals.
  • Jim's theory for why cringe comedy shouldn't exist.
  • Where cringe comedy has gone since Seinfeld.
  • How to make an unlikable protagonist that people don't admire.
  • Characters who aren't good at anything.
  • The schlub.
  • A montage of dad destroying model airplanes with a sledge hammer.
  • Liking some things about someone while not liking other things.
  • A monster who is very fun to hang out with.
  • The character in the show who ends up in Florida.
  • Marathoning Breaking Bad and Better Call Sail and ending up 40 years old no matter how old you were when you started
  • Why you might not throw away a sound bar.
  • Entering the Konami code to enable compression.
  • What the Clear Voice feature actually does.
  • Getting really agitated and putting the subtitles on.
  • Thinking of something interesting to say and then forgetting it.
  • Which one's the son and which one's the dad?
  • Ripley vs. Ripley's Believe it or Not.
  • Lobbying for more mean old lesbians in theatrical productions.
  • Playing Chinese Checkers with a woman who outlived her husband by 70 years.
  • Where you were when you realized that it's possible to outlive your spouse by 70 years.
  • Bowling Alone.
  • A place to meet people that isn't the play you go to drink or the place where you go to pray.
  • All your friends who went sober in the last year.
  • Liquor stores that only sells non-alcoholic products.
  • Mocktail bars.
  • Name tags that have different foods on them.
  • Inappropriate attention in nerd spaces.
  • Figuring out where you can go with all your sober friends.
  • Who listens past the first five minutes of a podcast?
  • AI-driven smell-o-vision.
  • Searching automated transcripts to find things that people didn't say.
  • The subtitler writing "knockos" whenever people in The Wire say "narcos" in a Baltimore accent.
  • Streaming services cutting corners wherever possible in a desperate attempt to become profitable.
  • Snitching on bootlegers of racist Disney movies.
  • How to get banned from TikTok.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Songs that signify that this scene or moment is sophisticated.
  • How to pronounce Debussy.
  • Southern gothic dark comedy body horror.
  • A weirdo from Twitter who can't email your employer because he doesn't know who you work for.
  • The Glass Key's remake family tree.
  • A drifter samurai coming to a town.
  • A dude who shows up in town and decides to play all the criminal factions against each other.
  • The scene where the protagonist sets the bed on fire and jumps out the window.
  • Escaping from rum runners by convincing them that you've already escaped.
  • Propping your gun on a cross and using Jesus to pull the trigger.
  • A sorceress who spends the whole movie topless because it's one of those movies.
  • Omega Doom starring Rutger Hauer.
  • A robot who gets stabbed in a bar because the stabber needs to download his memories.
  • Using a mook as a human shield.
  • The supporting actor getting a better offer and quitting in between takes.
  • Where you put the interesting part in your movie.
  • A hobo who runs two crime syndicates.
  • The story of two rival vice principals.
  • Jim's theory for why cringe comedy shouldn't exist.
  • Where cringe comedy has gone since Seinfeld.
  • How to make an unlikable protagonist that people don't admire.
  • Characters who aren't good at anything.
  • The schlub.
  • A montage of dad destroying model airplanes with a sledge hammer.
  • Liking some things about someone while not liking other things.
  • A monster who is very fun to hang out with.
  • The character in the show who ends up in Florida.
  • Marathoning Breaking Bad and Better Call Sail and ending up 40 years old no matter how old you were when you started
  • Why you might not throw away a sound bar.
  • Entering the Konami code to enable compression.
  • What the Clear Voice feature actually does.
  • Getting really agitated and putting the subtitles on.
  • Thinking of something interesting to say and then forgetting it.
  • Which one's the son and which one's the dad?
  • Ripley vs. Ripley's Believe it or Not.
  • Lobbying for more mean old lesbians in theatrical productions.
  • Playing Chinese Checkers with a woman who outlived her husband by 70 years.
  • Where you were when you realized that it's possible to outlive your spouse by 70 years.
  • Bowling Alone.
  • A place to meet people that isn't the play you go to drink or the place where you go to pray.
  • All your friends who went sober in the last year.
  • Liquor stores that only sells non-alcoholic products.
  • Mocktail bars.
  • Name tags that have different foods on them.
  • Inappropriate attention in nerd spaces.
  • Figuring out where you can go with all your sober friends.
  • Who listens past the first five minutes of a podcast?
  • AI-driven smell-o-vision.
  • Searching automated transcripts to find things that people didn't say.
  • The subtitler writing "knockos" whenever people in The Wire say "narcos" in a Baltimore accent.
  • Streaming services cutting corners wherever possible in a desperate attempt to become profitable.
  • Snitching on bootlegers of racist Disney movies.
  • How to get banned from TikTok.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Songs that signify that this scene or moment is sophisticated.
  • How to pronounce Debussy.
  • Southern gothic dark comedy body horror.
  • A weirdo from Twitter who can't email your employer because he doesn't know who you work for.
  • The Glass Key's remake family tree.
  • A drifter samurai coming to a town.
  • A dude who shows up in town and decides to play all the criminal factions against each other.
  • The scene where the protagonist sets the bed on fire and jumps out the window.
  • Escaping from rum runners by convincing them that you've already escaped.
  • Propping your gun on a cross and using Jesus to pull the trigger.
  • A sorceress who spends the whole movie topless because it's one of those movies.
  • Omega Doom starring Rutger Hauer.
  • A robot who gets stabbed in a bar because the stabber needs to download his memories.
  • Using a mook as a human shield.
  • The supporting actor getting a better offer and quitting in between takes.
  • Where you put the interesting part in your movie.
  • A hobo who runs two crime syndicates.
  • The story of two rival vice principals.
  • Jim's theory for why cringe comedy shouldn't exist.
  • Where cringe comedy has gone since Seinfeld.
  • How to make an unlikable protagonist that people don't admire.
  • Characters who aren't good at anything.
  • The schlub.
  • A montage of dad destroying model airplanes with a sledge hammer.
  • Liking some things about someone while not liking other things.
  • A monster who is very fun to hang out with.
  • The character in the show who ends up in Florida.
  • Marathoning Breaking Bad and Better Call Sail and ending up 40 years old no matter how old you were when you started
  • Why you might not throw away a sound bar.
  • Entering the Konami code to enable compression.
  • What the Clear Voice feature actually does.
  • Getting really agitated and putting the subtitles on.
  • Thinking of something interesting to say and then forgetting it.
  • Which one's the son and which one's the dad?
  • Ripley vs. Ripley's Believe it or Not.
  • Lobbying for more mean old lesbians in theatrical productions.
  • Playing Chinese Checkers with a woman who outlived her husband by 70 years.
  • Where you were when you realized that it's possible to outlive your spouse by 70 years.
  • Bowling Alone.
  • A place to meet people that isn't the play you go to drink or the place where you go to pray.
  • All your friends who went sober in the last year.
  • Liquor stores that only sells non-alcoholic products.
  • Mocktail bars.
  • Name tags that have different foods on them.
  • Inappropriate attention in nerd spaces.
  • Figuring out where you can go with all your sober friends.
  • Who listens past the first five minutes of a podcast?
  • AI-driven smell-o-vision.
  • Searching automated transcripts to find things that people didn't say.
  • The subtitler writing "knockos" whenever people in The Wire say "narcos" in a Baltimore accent.
  • Streaming services cutting corners wherever possible in a desperate attempt to become profitable.
  • Snitching on bootlegers of racist Disney movies.
  • How to get banned from TikTok.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+XxiM76C1 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 248. The Ephemeral Nature of Digital Fish Food https://topiclords.com/the-ephemeral-nature-of-digital-fish-food 7e25b221-0602-40af-813c-97c27bb8ec71 Mon, 22 Jul 2024 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Elena and Nathalie. We discuss fish-based screensavers, fire safety, the Aquarium and the Glass Harmonica, I Am Running Into A New Year by Lucille Clifton, and going to Japan. 1:03:27 true Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Shikiori Ink.
  • The Computer Museum in Berlin.
  • Back when you saw fish-based screen savers everywhere.
  • The Roku app fish screen saver.
  • A rock in the aquarium that says "Roku"
  • 11 hours of fish content.
  • Fish nerds sitting in a small box at the bottom of the ocean getting hype over seeing a small worm.
  • An animated gif of fish nerds getting hype.
  • A live jellyfish web cam that is just in principle.
  • A web cam of the thing that goes donk and everyone cheers when it goes donk.
  • The fish screen saver where you need to keep buying floppy disks with fish food on it or the fish die.
  • Don't copy that fish food!
  • The startup selling digital rabbit food going out of business so all the digital rabbits go into hibernation.
  • The Life Cycle of Software Objects.
  • Being unable to open your front door because the smart lock ran out of batteries.
  • Everybody congratulating you on the infuriating guy you made up to get mad at.
  • Fire safety anecdotes.
  • Glass top electric stoves that look just like induction stoves, as a prank.
  • How fire extinguishers taste.
  • Looking at fire extinguisher dust and thinking "let's get the blood brain barrier involved."
  • Leaving the stove on.
  • Broiling a sandwich and the whole sandwich catches fire.
  • A five year old doing science experiments with a lit candle.
  • The UX design of grease fires.
  • The William Shatner song about the dangers of deep frying a turkey.
  • Relating to the teens coming into fashion for like a week and then the next week the teens are like "You're still trying to relate? That's cheugy AF."
  • Self-moistening fingertips.
  • Soaking your fingertips in water for eight minutes to get them pruny.
  • The Canon of harmonica virtuoso music.
  • Ethereal floating tones that fade in and out of existence.
  • The Flat Bells.
  • The Mellotron as a slightly more physical sampler.
  • Clara Rockmore playing "The Swan" on Theremin.
  • Bit-doers playing "The Swan" on Otamatone.
  • Letting go of what you said to yourself about yourself when you were 16, 26, even 36.
  • The assumption that you need to be forgiven for something.
  • The sun coming up on this episode of Topic Lords.
  • Working up the courage to climb the mountain you see every day from your back yard.
  • Really tall hills you can walk up.
  • What it's like to not hear cars constantly.
  • Designing a building to sound good – even if it isn't a concert hall.
  • Car-free cities.
  • Biking in a bike-centric environment.
  • Throwing your body into traffic and hoping drivers care about the legal liability of running someone over.
  • The intersection where you always see the skid marks from kids doing donuts.
  • Doing watercolors but with ink.
  • Buying a bunch of art supplies and never using them because you're afraid to waste them.
  • How do you get your paintbrush to do what you want?
  • How watercolors behave depending on how wet the painting is and how wet the paintbrush is.
  • Scraping your knife on the painting and it just looks like a shed.
  • Is it a bunch of cats or is it the word "gay"?
  • Images that look like stereograms but aren't.
  • The blank canvas stereogram.
  • Crowds staring at the enormous stereograms hanging up in the Mall of America.
  • Stereogram artists accounting for pupillary distance.
  • Making a stereogram in MS Paint.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Shikiori Ink.
  • The Computer Museum in Berlin.
  • Back when you saw fish-based screen savers everywhere.
  • The Roku app fish screen saver.
  • A rock in the aquarium that says "Roku"
  • 11 hours of fish content.
  • Fish nerds sitting in a small box at the bottom of the ocean getting hype over seeing a small worm.
  • An animated gif of fish nerds getting hype.
  • A live jellyfish web cam that is just in principle.
  • A web cam of the thing that goes donk and everyone cheers when it goes donk.
  • The fish screen saver where you need to keep buying floppy disks with fish food on it or the fish die.
  • Don't copy that fish food!
  • The startup selling digital rabbit food going out of business so all the digital rabbits go into hibernation.
  • The Life Cycle of Software Objects.
  • Being unable to open your front door because the smart lock ran out of batteries.
  • Everybody congratulating you on the infuriating guy you made up to get mad at.
  • Fire safety anecdotes.
  • Glass top electric stoves that look just like induction stoves, as a prank.
  • How fire extinguishers taste.
  • Looking at fire extinguisher dust and thinking "let's get the blood brain barrier involved."
  • Leaving the stove on.
  • Broiling a sandwich and the whole sandwich catches fire.
  • A five year old doing science experiments with a lit candle.
  • The UX design of grease fires.
  • The William Shatner song about the dangers of deep frying a turkey.
  • Relating to the teens coming into fashion for like a week and then the next week the teens are like "You're still trying to relate? That's cheugy AF."
  • Self-moistening fingertips.
  • Soaking your fingertips in water for eight minutes to get them pruny.
  • The Canon of harmonica virtuoso music.
  • Ethereal floating tones that fade in and out of existence.
  • The Flat Bells.
  • The Mellotron as a slightly more physical sampler.
  • Clara Rockmore playing "The Swan" on Theremin.
  • Bit-doers playing "The Swan" on Otamatone.
  • Letting go of what you said to yourself about yourself when you were 16, 26, even 36.
  • The assumption that you need to be forgiven for something.
  • The sun coming up on this episode of Topic Lords.
  • Working up the courage to climb the mountain you see every day from your back yard.
  • Really tall hills you can walk up.
  • What it's like to not hear cars constantly.
  • Designing a building to sound good – even if it isn't a concert hall.
  • Car-free cities.
  • Biking in a bike-centric environment.
  • Throwing your body into traffic and hoping drivers care about the legal liability of running someone over.
  • The intersection where you always see the skid marks from kids doing donuts.
  • Doing watercolors but with ink.
  • Buying a bunch of art supplies and never using them because you're afraid to waste them.
  • How do you get your paintbrush to do what you want?
  • How watercolors behave depending on how wet the painting is and how wet the paintbrush is.
  • Scraping your knife on the painting and it just looks like a shed.
  • Is it a bunch of cats or is it the word "gay"?
  • Images that look like stereograms but aren't.
  • The blank canvas stereogram.
  • Crowds staring at the enormous stereograms hanging up in the Mall of America.
  • Stereogram artists accounting for pupillary distance.
  • Making a stereogram in MS Paint.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Shikiori Ink.
  • The Computer Museum in Berlin.
  • Back when you saw fish-based screen savers everywhere.
  • The Roku app fish screen saver.
  • A rock in the aquarium that says "Roku"
  • 11 hours of fish content.
  • Fish nerds sitting in a small box at the bottom of the ocean getting hype over seeing a small worm.
  • An animated gif of fish nerds getting hype.
  • A live jellyfish web cam that is just in principle.
  • A web cam of the thing that goes donk and everyone cheers when it goes donk.
  • The fish screen saver where you need to keep buying floppy disks with fish food on it or the fish die.
  • Don't copy that fish food!
  • The startup selling digital rabbit food going out of business so all the digital rabbits go into hibernation.
  • The Life Cycle of Software Objects.
  • Being unable to open your front door because the smart lock ran out of batteries.
  • Everybody congratulating you on the infuriating guy you made up to get mad at.
  • Fire safety anecdotes.
  • Glass top electric stoves that look just like induction stoves, as a prank.
  • How fire extinguishers taste.
  • Looking at fire extinguisher dust and thinking "let's get the blood brain barrier involved."
  • Leaving the stove on.
  • Broiling a sandwich and the whole sandwich catches fire.
  • A five year old doing science experiments with a lit candle.
  • The UX design of grease fires.
  • The William Shatner song about the dangers of deep frying a turkey.
  • Relating to the teens coming into fashion for like a week and then the next week the teens are like "You're still trying to relate? That's cheugy AF."
  • Self-moistening fingertips.
  • Soaking your fingertips in water for eight minutes to get them pruny.
  • The Canon of harmonica virtuoso music.
  • Ethereal floating tones that fade in and out of existence.
  • The Flat Bells.
  • The Mellotron as a slightly more physical sampler.
  • Clara Rockmore playing "The Swan" on Theremin.
  • Bit-doers playing "The Swan" on Otamatone.
  • Letting go of what you said to yourself about yourself when you were 16, 26, even 36.
  • The assumption that you need to be forgiven for something.
  • The sun coming up on this episode of Topic Lords.
  • Working up the courage to climb the mountain you see every day from your back yard.
  • Really tall hills you can walk up.
  • What it's like to not hear cars constantly.
  • Designing a building to sound good – even if it isn't a concert hall.
  • Car-free cities.
  • Biking in a bike-centric environment.
  • Throwing your body into traffic and hoping drivers care about the legal liability of running someone over.
  • The intersection where you always see the skid marks from kids doing donuts.
  • Doing watercolors but with ink.
  • Buying a bunch of art supplies and never using them because you're afraid to waste them.
  • How do you get your paintbrush to do what you want?
  • How watercolors behave depending on how wet the painting is and how wet the paintbrush is.
  • Scraping your knife on the painting and it just looks like a shed.
  • Is it a bunch of cats or is it the word "gay"?
  • Images that look like stereograms but aren't.
  • The blank canvas stereogram.
  • Crowds staring at the enormous stereograms hanging up in the Mall of America.
  • Stereogram artists accounting for pupillary distance.
  • Making a stereogram in MS Paint.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+p-a-jcEM ]]> Jim Stormdancer 247. Fish That Scrutinize; Fish That Rubberneck https://topiclords.com/fish-that-scrutinize-fish-that-rubberneck daf7c004-0687-4886-a5d5-a15a27781267 Mon, 15 Jul 2024 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Alex and Shannon. We discuss spending less on food and it tasting better, the jizz of a bird, the Cosmic Call, Line Fishing by Daniel Kahaulelio, how to order coffee in Malaysia, and physically rolling dice. 1:15:40 true Lords:

  • Alex
  • Shannon

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Paleo animators.
  • Malaysia as a vacation destination.
  • Restaurants that are just in s guy's house.
  • The best whole fried catfish you've ever had.
  • Eating mixed whole livers.
  • Striving to get a B rating from the food safety inspectors because the A rating is too bougie.
  • Starch and grease.
  • The shape of the price to deliciousness correlation graph.
  • If you're here to buy cake, ring the doorbell.
  • You can talk to the cops or you can have cake. You can't have both.
  • Whether Americans can drink the water in Malaysia.
  • Being so desperate for fresh vegetables that you wash them with tap water.
  • Butterfly Pee Flour.
  • Jizz (birding)
  • The practice of just getting the vibe of a bird.
  • I don't know, it had the jizz of a bird.
  • Zooniverse.
  • Going through the still images on a nature webcam and trying to identify local animals.
  • Trying to tell the difference between a wood rat and a deer mouse.
  • Reclassifying all the animals in the world based not on their actual genetics or but based on what people think they are by looking at them.
  • Small, Brown and On the Ground.
  • Submitting a picture of a pair of brown wood owls to a bird study app and two hours later an angry ecologist is knocking on your tent to ask if you meant a spotted wood owl.
  • An extremely high-stress app.
  • Asking an albatross which of the twelve species is albatross it is.
  • Walking around in the woods until you spot a kiwi.
  • Major gaffes in interstellar communication that future aliens will be very confused about.
  • Massively synesthetic dog brains.
  • Receiving a sequence of bits and deciding to arrange them in a grid.
  • The other book with the spiders.
  • Humans interacting with a spider-based society.
  • Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
  • Expecting monkeys to become the dominant intelligent species on a terraformed planet seeded with Earth animals.
  • Adventuring into a dungeon built by the ancients and admiring the signage.
  • Opening an oil drum full of concrete and tubes and being like "where's the treasure that's supposed to be in here!"
  • Writing a song about how being near glowing cats is very dangerous.
  • Public serving meme songs.
  • Engineering earworms for the public good.
  • The Museum of Hawaiian Culture in Oahu.
  • Fish that watch. Fish that look.
  • Get those fish hungry.
  • It's just a lookin' fish.
  • Sleeping the lobes of your brain in shifts.
  • The lobes of your brain playing pranks on each other.
  • How can fish get some shuteye if they don't have eyelids??
  • How can fish rubberneck if they don't even have necks??
  • The Star Trek replicator except instead of materializing your food it prints a piece of paper with the words that you need to say to the tired-looking guy who then goes to cook your meal.
  • Ais krim.
  • What languages are hardest to spell in.
  • Are there four silent letters at the end, and if so which ones?
  • Cofftea.
  • Rolling all them bones.
  • Owning more sets of dice than you have played actual D&D sessions.
  • A big pile of dice rattling around in your phone.
  • Rolling the dice off of the table every single time.
  • A switch that goes ka-chonk.
  • Actively seeking out hobbies where you touch things.
  • Ways that continuous deployment sucks.
  • Text classifiers flagging your sexuality as photographic.
  • Image classifiers flagging your medical photos as pornographic.
  • Which photos encapsulate what you're trying to remember and discuss.
  • How to get your life off of a corporation's hard drive.
  • Unsearchable Tumblrs.
  • Get out there and jizz a bird!
]]> Lords:

  • Alex
  • Shannon

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Paleo animators.
  • Malaysia as a vacation destination.
  • Restaurants that are just in s guy's house.
  • The best whole fried catfish you've ever had.
  • Eating mixed whole livers.
  • Striving to get a B rating from the food safety inspectors because the A rating is too bougie.
  • Starch and grease.
  • The shape of the price to deliciousness correlation graph.
  • If you're here to buy cake, ring the doorbell.
  • You can talk to the cops or you can have cake. You can't have both.
  • Whether Americans can drink the water in Malaysia.
  • Being so desperate for fresh vegetables that you wash them with tap water.
  • Butterfly Pee Flour.
  • Jizz (birding)
  • The practice of just getting the vibe of a bird.
  • I don't know, it had the jizz of a bird.
  • Zooniverse.
  • Going through the still images on a nature webcam and trying to identify local animals.
  • Trying to tell the difference between a wood rat and a deer mouse.
  • Reclassifying all the animals in the world based not on their actual genetics or but based on what people think they are by looking at them.
  • Small, Brown and On the Ground.
  • Submitting a picture of a pair of brown wood owls to a bird study app and two hours later an angry ecologist is knocking on your tent to ask if you meant a spotted wood owl.
  • An extremely high-stress app.
  • Asking an albatross which of the twelve species is albatross it is.
  • Walking around in the woods until you spot a kiwi.
  • Major gaffes in interstellar communication that future aliens will be very confused about.
  • Massively synesthetic dog brains.
  • Receiving a sequence of bits and deciding to arrange them in a grid.
  • The other book with the spiders.
  • Humans interacting with a spider-based society.
  • Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
  • Expecting monkeys to become the dominant intelligent species on a terraformed planet seeded with Earth animals.
  • Adventuring into a dungeon built by the ancients and admiring the signage.
  • Opening an oil drum full of concrete and tubes and being like "where's the treasure that's supposed to be in here!"
  • Writing a song about how being near glowing cats is very dangerous.
  • Public serving meme songs.
  • Engineering earworms for the public good.
  • The Museum of Hawaiian Culture in Oahu.
  • Fish that watch. Fish that look.
  • Get those fish hungry.
  • It's just a lookin' fish.
  • Sleeping the lobes of your brain in shifts.
  • The lobes of your brain playing pranks on each other.
  • How can fish get some shuteye if they don't have eyelids??
  • How can fish rubberneck if they don't even have necks??
  • The Star Trek replicator except instead of materializing your food it prints a piece of paper with the words that you need to say to the tired-looking guy who then goes to cook your meal.
  • Ais krim.
  • What languages are hardest to spell in.
  • Are there four silent letters at the end, and if so which ones?
  • Cofftea.
  • Rolling all them bones.
  • Owning more sets of dice than you have played actual D&D sessions.
  • A big pile of dice rattling around in your phone.
  • Rolling the dice off of the table every single time.
  • A switch that goes ka-chonk.
  • Actively seeking out hobbies where you touch things.
  • Ways that continuous deployment sucks.
  • Text classifiers flagging your sexuality as photographic.
  • Image classifiers flagging your medical photos as pornographic.
  • Which photos encapsulate what you're trying to remember and discuss.
  • How to get your life off of a corporation's hard drive.
  • Unsearchable Tumblrs.
  • Get out there and jizz a bird!

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Alex
  • Shannon

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Paleo animators.
  • Malaysia as a vacation destination.
  • Restaurants that are just in s guy's house.
  • The best whole fried catfish you've ever had.
  • Eating mixed whole livers.
  • Striving to get a B rating from the food safety inspectors because the A rating is too bougie.
  • Starch and grease.
  • The shape of the price to deliciousness correlation graph.
  • If you're here to buy cake, ring the doorbell.
  • You can talk to the cops or you can have cake. You can't have both.
  • Whether Americans can drink the water in Malaysia.
  • Being so desperate for fresh vegetables that you wash them with tap water.
  • Butterfly Pee Flour.
  • Jizz (birding)
  • The practice of just getting the vibe of a bird.
  • I don't know, it had the jizz of a bird.
  • Zooniverse.
  • Going through the still images on a nature webcam and trying to identify local animals.
  • Trying to tell the difference between a wood rat and a deer mouse.
  • Reclassifying all the animals in the world based not on their actual genetics or but based on what people think they are by looking at them.
  • Small, Brown and On the Ground.
  • Submitting a picture of a pair of brown wood owls to a bird study app and two hours later an angry ecologist is knocking on your tent to ask if you meant a spotted wood owl.
  • An extremely high-stress app.
  • Asking an albatross which of the twelve species is albatross it is.
  • Walking around in the woods until you spot a kiwi.
  • Major gaffes in interstellar communication that future aliens will be very confused about.
  • Massively synesthetic dog brains.
  • Receiving a sequence of bits and deciding to arrange them in a grid.
  • The other book with the spiders.
  • Humans interacting with a spider-based society.
  • Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
  • Expecting monkeys to become the dominant intelligent species on a terraformed planet seeded with Earth animals.
  • Adventuring into a dungeon built by the ancients and admiring the signage.
  • Opening an oil drum full of concrete and tubes and being like "where's the treasure that's supposed to be in here!"
  • Writing a song about how being near glowing cats is very dangerous.
  • Public serving meme songs.
  • Engineering earworms for the public good.
  • The Museum of Hawaiian Culture in Oahu.
  • Fish that watch. Fish that look.
  • Get those fish hungry.
  • It's just a lookin' fish.
  • Sleeping the lobes of your brain in shifts.
  • The lobes of your brain playing pranks on each other.
  • How can fish get some shuteye if they don't have eyelids??
  • How can fish rubberneck if they don't even have necks??
  • The Star Trek replicator except instead of materializing your food it prints a piece of paper with the words that you need to say to the tired-looking guy who then goes to cook your meal.
  • Ais krim.
  • What languages are hardest to spell in.
  • Are there four silent letters at the end, and if so which ones?
  • Cofftea.
  • Rolling all them bones.
  • Owning more sets of dice than you have played actual D&D sessions.
  • A big pile of dice rattling around in your phone.
  • Rolling the dice off of the table every single time.
  • A switch that goes ka-chonk.
  • Actively seeking out hobbies where you touch things.
  • Ways that continuous deployment sucks.
  • Text classifiers flagging your sexuality as photographic.
  • Image classifiers flagging your medical photos as pornographic.
  • Which photos encapsulate what you're trying to remember and discuss.
  • How to get your life off of a corporation's hard drive.
  • Unsearchable Tumblrs.
  • Get out there and jizz a bird!

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+aWA29T2D ]]> Jim Stormdancer 246. Send an Envelope of Guacamole for Analysis https://topiclords.com/send-an-envelope-of-guacamole-for-analysis 0a099963-182e-4e23-a9e7-c0aff556f4c2 Mon, 08 Jul 2024 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Jay and Alex. We discuss Mexican food outside of San Diego, releasing your first commercial video game, the being an uncle of camping, Skyscrapers by Matt Haig, and attempting to preserve 40 years' worth of personal data. 1:03:58 true Lords:

  • Jay
  • Alex

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • A puzzle adventure game starring a ferret.
  • DROD-likes.
  • Sending an envelope full of guacamole to a food lab so they can tell you a list of ingredients.
  • Reaching in the window so you can finally drive a million dollar Porsche.
  • Letting the Ewok sit in the driver's seat but not actually letting it drive the car.
  • Whether Ewoks get old enough to drive.
  • Throw Rock.
  • Making a game by first making your own level editor, image editor, audio synthesizer and music composition tools.
  • Finding playtesters by letting them come to you.
  • An eyeball that charges a laser when you step in front of it.
  • Deliberately optimizing your game to take up as little disk space as possible.
  • A project that starts moving much faster when you figure out what kind of project it should be.
  • Writing a 3D modeler so that you can get your 2D game on Steam.
  • Working with a professional artist.
  • Rendering fur.
  • Games with turns that represent less than a second of in-game time.
  • The mind-feel of a turn length.
  • A game that was so good that the developers went back decades later to make it playable.
  • The Mud and the Slime.
  • How to play DROD without any roach timers.
  • Which DROD is the best one to start with.
  • Sokoban with swordplay.
  • The level in King Dugan's Dungeon that's nothing but roach queens.
  • Optimizing your sword movements well enough that you can move forward while fighting.
  • Puzzles that are just hard enough to engage your mind while you do something else.
  • Visiting someone who is camping and then going home to sleep in your own bed.
  • Building a fire and making s'mores in the bathroom.
  • Camping expenses.
  • Giving gifts to adults who can already buy whatever they want.
  • Deliberately choosing a vacation that is especially exhausting.
  • Spending two days each visiting seven different family friends.
  • Your grandparents taking you camping and they sleep in the RV while you have to sleep in the tent.
  • Buying an onion bloomer for $600 and insisting that your family eat a blooming onion every night to justify the purchase.
  • Skyscrapers made out of words
  • Training yourself to visualize words in the wrong orientation.
  • Puzzling out what the title of the poem would've been if the typesetter hadn't messed it up
  • Cross-sectional art.
  • Poems that are intended to be viewed rather than read aloud.
  • Anti-poem poems.
  • Every project you've ever worked on (on a computer)
  • Good usable archives.
  • The unique digital footprint of your life.
  • Getting the bits from a SCSI hard drive in an old Mac that doesn't boot up.
  • Apple Desktop Bus Connection.
  • The miraculous ubiquity and longevity of USB-A.
  • Figuring out how to hook up a digital video player that requires a Firewire connection.
  • The MacOS resource fork.
  • What the .sit and .hqx extensions meant.
  • Gamma Zee.
  • Using social media to actually do things.
]]> Lords:

  • Jay
  • Alex

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • A puzzle adventure game starring a ferret.
  • DROD-likes.
  • Sending an envelope full of guacamole to a food lab so they can tell you a list of ingredients.
  • Reaching in the window so you can finally drive a million dollar Porsche.
  • Letting the Ewok sit in the driver's seat but not actually letting it drive the car.
  • Whether Ewoks get old enough to drive.
  • Throw Rock.
  • Making a game by first making your own level editor, image editor, audio synthesizer and music composition tools.
  • Finding playtesters by letting them come to you.
  • An eyeball that charges a laser when you step in front of it.
  • Deliberately optimizing your game to take up as little disk space as possible.
  • A project that starts moving much faster when you figure out what kind of project it should be.
  • Writing a 3D modeler so that you can get your 2D game on Steam.
  • Working with a professional artist.
  • Rendering fur.
  • Games with turns that represent less than a second of in-game time.
  • The mind-feel of a turn length.
  • A game that was so good that the developers went back decades later to make it playable.
  • The Mud and the Slime.
  • How to play DROD without any roach timers.
  • Which DROD is the best one to start with.
  • Sokoban with swordplay.
  • The level in King Dugan's Dungeon that's nothing but roach queens.
  • Optimizing your sword movements well enough that you can move forward while fighting.
  • Puzzles that are just hard enough to engage your mind while you do something else.
  • Visiting someone who is camping and then going home to sleep in your own bed.
  • Building a fire and making s'mores in the bathroom.
  • Camping expenses.
  • Giving gifts to adults who can already buy whatever they want.
  • Deliberately choosing a vacation that is especially exhausting.
  • Spending two days each visiting seven different family friends.
  • Your grandparents taking you camping and they sleep in the RV while you have to sleep in the tent.
  • Buying an onion bloomer for $600 and insisting that your family eat a blooming onion every night to justify the purchase.
  • Skyscrapers made out of words
  • Training yourself to visualize words in the wrong orientation.
  • Puzzling out what the title of the poem would've been if the typesetter hadn't messed it up
  • Cross-sectional art.
  • Poems that are intended to be viewed rather than read aloud.
  • Anti-poem poems.
  • Every project you've ever worked on (on a computer)
  • Good usable archives.
  • The unique digital footprint of your life.
  • Getting the bits from a SCSI hard drive in an old Mac that doesn't boot up.
  • Apple Desktop Bus Connection.
  • The miraculous ubiquity and longevity of USB-A.
  • Figuring out how to hook up a digital video player that requires a Firewire connection.
  • The MacOS resource fork.
  • What the .sit and .hqx extensions meant.
  • Gamma Zee.
  • Using social media to actually do things.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Jay
  • Alex

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • A puzzle adventure game starring a ferret.
  • DROD-likes.
  • Sending an envelope full of guacamole to a food lab so they can tell you a list of ingredients.
  • Reaching in the window so you can finally drive a million dollar Porsche.
  • Letting the Ewok sit in the driver's seat but not actually letting it drive the car.
  • Whether Ewoks get old enough to drive.
  • Throw Rock.
  • Making a game by first making your own level editor, image editor, audio synthesizer and music composition tools.
  • Finding playtesters by letting them come to you.
  • An eyeball that charges a laser when you step in front of it.
  • Deliberately optimizing your game to take up as little disk space as possible.
  • A project that starts moving much faster when you figure out what kind of project it should be.
  • Writing a 3D modeler so that you can get your 2D game on Steam.
  • Working with a professional artist.
  • Rendering fur.
  • Games with turns that represent less than a second of in-game time.
  • The mind-feel of a turn length.
  • A game that was so good that the developers went back decades later to make it playable.
  • The Mud and the Slime.
  • How to play DROD without any roach timers.
  • Which DROD is the best one to start with.
  • Sokoban with swordplay.
  • The level in King Dugan's Dungeon that's nothing but roach queens.
  • Optimizing your sword movements well enough that you can move forward while fighting.
  • Puzzles that are just hard enough to engage your mind while you do something else.
  • Visiting someone who is camping and then going home to sleep in your own bed.
  • Building a fire and making s'mores in the bathroom.
  • Camping expenses.
  • Giving gifts to adults who can already buy whatever they want.
  • Deliberately choosing a vacation that is especially exhausting.
  • Spending two days each visiting seven different family friends.
  • Your grandparents taking you camping and they sleep in the RV while you have to sleep in the tent.
  • Buying an onion bloomer for $600 and insisting that your family eat a blooming onion every night to justify the purchase.
  • Skyscrapers made out of words
  • Training yourself to visualize words in the wrong orientation.
  • Puzzling out what the title of the poem would've been if the typesetter hadn't messed it up
  • Cross-sectional art.
  • Poems that are intended to be viewed rather than read aloud.
  • Anti-poem poems.
  • Every project you've ever worked on (on a computer)
  • Good usable archives.
  • The unique digital footprint of your life.
  • Getting the bits from a SCSI hard drive in an old Mac that doesn't boot up.
  • Apple Desktop Bus Connection.
  • The miraculous ubiquity and longevity of USB-A.
  • Figuring out how to hook up a digital video player that requires a Firewire connection.
  • The MacOS resource fork.
  • What the .sit and .hqx extensions meant.
  • Gamma Zee.
  • Using social media to actually do things.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+tqhgglYz ]]> Jim Stormdancer 245. It Was You, Old Man Molyneux! https://topiclords.com/it-was-you-old-man-molyneux 91f0837e-8356-45a5-9cdb-14700e861ea0 Mon, 01 Jul 2024 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Ben and Nicholas. We discuss sending treats from Australia to Canada, the terrible UX of live sports, Games Buddha Would Not Play, I Continue to Dream by Langston Hughes, and being overly patriotic and repping the national identity but only when around foreigners 1:13:21 true Lords:

  • Ben
  • Nicholas

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Projects that you can't talk about yet
  • Telling a joke for international joke day.
  • A very busy day for Australians.
  • Sending 3 kilos of lollies to your co-worker in Canada.
  • It's the way it shatters that matters.
  • Cherry Ripes.
  • The thinking man's candy.
  • Chicken Crimpy.
  • A biscuit inspired by Golden Gaytime.
  • "It's hard to have a Gaytime on your own."
  • Renaming chocolate jelly babies to be less racist.
  • A real enthusiasm for desiccated coconut.
  • Butter chicken parmigiana.
  • P burger candy.
  • Whether kangaroos are hunted or farmed.
  • Whether kangaroos are the same size as the kangaroo fruit.
  • The waiter in Japan staring at you until you eat the single slice of kiwi.
  • The official ranking of fruit prestige in Japan, with melon only being bested by keys and Galaga ships.
  • How many footballs they have in Australia. (At least three, maybe six.)
  • A sport where nobody can tell when somebody has scored so the whole audience is constantly on edge.
  • The theme song for the guy coming up to bat.
  • Booing when your team scores, because they didn't score more.
  • Whether Eurovision is better when you're not in Europe.
  • Correlating sports with Eurovision.
  • A little song and dance that's definitely not political.
  • XFL camera operators running around on the field.
  • Improving sports broadcasts with drone cameras.
  • A comprehensive list of games that are causes for negligence.
  • Games on boards with 8 or 10 rows (or the same games played in the sky).
  • Avoiding the line to be avoided.
  • Making a mark on a wall and deciding if it looks like an elephant.
  • There's no throwing, Buddha! This is not a cause for negligence.
  • How the Buddha feels about the Mersenne Twister.
  • An abacus except it's a roller coaster track.
  • Tracing letters in the air or on a friend's back.
  • Even more games Buddha would not play.
  • The minigame from the beginning of Mario 64 where you stretch out his eyes.
  • What Shall it Be?
  • In this game you are the video game and you are the one being played.
  • A video game adaptation of the less half fun of Pictionary.
  • Kinect Charades.
  • Using the Kinect voice to say "it's goat!"
  • It turns out Molyneux was wearing the business all along.
  • Turning your dream into art. Like a video game! Or something more artistic.
  • Dubbing your podcast onto cassette tape and calling it an Audio Zine.
  • The Creative Labs Creative Zen.
  • Setting up your sound card and hearing digitized speech in Leisure Suit Larry.
  • Fond memories of listening to digital audio on your Creative Labs Sound Blaster.
  • Dr. Sbaitso and Dr. Sbaitso imitators.
  • What you do when your dad isn't around to help you boot up Red Alert.
  • An FMV adventure game set in Germany.
  • The Red Alert installation experience.
  • Tim Curry giving his all in the Red Alert FMV cutscenes.
  • An oral history of Tim Curry's escape into the one place uncorrupted by capitalism.
  • Enjoying the Aboriginal Sauce at Outback Steakhouse.
  • Australians explaining that America also started as a prison colony
  • Hamilton didn't talk about this!
  • The Simpsons writing room discovering the Coriolis effect and realizing that they need to tell the world so it's lucky that anything they write will be broadcast on national television and on streaming services for decades to come.
  • Everyone in your age bracket having the first ten seasons of the Simpsons memorized.
  • Finding Frinkiac, analogous to discovering a new Blender plug-in.
  • Lying on the couch and taking a photo of the TV.
  • Having a mobile game and sending the APK to anyone who asks nicely.
]]> Lords:

  • Ben
  • Nicholas

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Projects that you can't talk about yet
  • Telling a joke for international joke day.
  • A very busy day for Australians.
  • Sending 3 kilos of lollies to your co-worker in Canada.
  • It's the way it shatters that matters.
  • Cherry Ripes.
  • The thinking man's candy.
  • Chicken Crimpy.
  • A biscuit inspired by Golden Gaytime.
  • "It's hard to have a Gaytime on your own."
  • Renaming chocolate jelly babies to be less racist.
  • A real enthusiasm for desiccated coconut.
  • Butter chicken parmigiana.
  • P burger candy.
  • Whether kangaroos are hunted or farmed.
  • Whether kangaroos are the same size as the kangaroo fruit.
  • The waiter in Japan staring at you until you eat the single slice of kiwi.
  • The official ranking of fruit prestige in Japan, with melon only being bested by keys and Galaga ships.
  • How many footballs they have in Australia. (At least three, maybe six.)
  • A sport where nobody can tell when somebody has scored so the whole audience is constantly on edge.
  • The theme song for the guy coming up to bat.
  • Booing when your team scores, because they didn't score more.
  • Whether Eurovision is better when you're not in Europe.
  • Correlating sports with Eurovision.
  • A little song and dance that's definitely not political.
  • XFL camera operators running around on the field.
  • Improving sports broadcasts with drone cameras.
  • A comprehensive list of games that are causes for negligence.
  • Games on boards with 8 or 10 rows (or the same games played in the sky).
  • Avoiding the line to be avoided.
  • Making a mark on a wall and deciding if it looks like an elephant.
  • There's no throwing, Buddha! This is not a cause for negligence.
  • How the Buddha feels about the Mersenne Twister.
  • An abacus except it's a roller coaster track.
  • Tracing letters in the air or on a friend's back.
  • Even more games Buddha would not play.
  • The minigame from the beginning of Mario 64 where you stretch out his eyes.
  • What Shall it Be?
  • In this game you are the video game and you are the one being played.
  • A video game adaptation of the less half fun of Pictionary.
  • Kinect Charades.
  • Using the Kinect voice to say "it's goat!"
  • It turns out Molyneux was wearing the business all along.
  • Turning your dream into art. Like a video game! Or something more artistic.
  • Dubbing your podcast onto cassette tape and calling it an Audio Zine.
  • The Creative Labs Creative Zen.
  • Setting up your sound card and hearing digitized speech in Leisure Suit Larry.
  • Fond memories of listening to digital audio on your Creative Labs Sound Blaster.
  • Dr. Sbaitso and Dr. Sbaitso imitators.
  • What you do when your dad isn't around to help you boot up Red Alert.
  • An FMV adventure game set in Germany.
  • The Red Alert installation experience.
  • Tim Curry giving his all in the Red Alert FMV cutscenes.
  • An oral history of Tim Curry's escape into the one place uncorrupted by capitalism.
  • Enjoying the Aboriginal Sauce at Outback Steakhouse.
  • Australians explaining that America also started as a prison colony
  • Hamilton didn't talk about this!
  • The Simpsons writing room discovering the Coriolis effect and realizing that they need to tell the world so it's lucky that anything they write will be broadcast on national television and on streaming services for decades to come.
  • Everyone in your age bracket having the first ten seasons of the Simpsons memorized.
  • Finding Frinkiac, analogous to discovering a new Blender plug-in.
  • Lying on the couch and taking a photo of the TV.
  • Having a mobile game and sending the APK to anyone who asks nicely.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Ben
  • Nicholas

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Projects that you can't talk about yet
  • Telling a joke for international joke day.
  • A very busy day for Australians.
  • Sending 3 kilos of lollies to your co-worker in Canada.
  • It's the way it shatters that matters.
  • Cherry Ripes.
  • The thinking man's candy.
  • Chicken Crimpy.
  • A biscuit inspired by Golden Gaytime.
  • "It's hard to have a Gaytime on your own."
  • Renaming chocolate jelly babies to be less racist.
  • A real enthusiasm for desiccated coconut.
  • Butter chicken parmigiana.
  • P burger candy.
  • Whether kangaroos are hunted or farmed.
  • Whether kangaroos are the same size as the kangaroo fruit.
  • The waiter in Japan staring at you until you eat the single slice of kiwi.
  • The official ranking of fruit prestige in Japan, with melon only being bested by keys and Galaga ships.
  • How many footballs they have in Australia. (At least three, maybe six.)
  • A sport where nobody can tell when somebody has scored so the whole audience is constantly on edge.
  • The theme song for the guy coming up to bat.
  • Booing when your team scores, because they didn't score more.
  • Whether Eurovision is better when you're not in Europe.
  • Correlating sports with Eurovision.
  • A little song and dance that's definitely not political.
  • XFL camera operators running around on the field.
  • Improving sports broadcasts with drone cameras.
  • A comprehensive list of games that are causes for negligence.
  • Games on boards with 8 or 10 rows (or the same games played in the sky).
  • Avoiding the line to be avoided.
  • Making a mark on a wall and deciding if it looks like an elephant.
  • There's no throwing, Buddha! This is not a cause for negligence.
  • How the Buddha feels about the Mersenne Twister.
  • An abacus except it's a roller coaster track.
  • Tracing letters in the air or on a friend's back.
  • Even more games Buddha would not play.
  • The minigame from the beginning of Mario 64 where you stretch out his eyes.
  • What Shall it Be?
  • In this game you are the video game and you are the one being played.
  • A video game adaptation of the less half fun of Pictionary.
  • Kinect Charades.
  • Using the Kinect voice to say "it's goat!"
  • It turns out Molyneux was wearing the business all along.
  • Turning your dream into art. Like a video game! Or something more artistic.
  • Dubbing your podcast onto cassette tape and calling it an Audio Zine.
  • The Creative Labs Creative Zen.
  • Setting up your sound card and hearing digitized speech in Leisure Suit Larry.
  • Fond memories of listening to digital audio on your Creative Labs Sound Blaster.
  • Dr. Sbaitso and Dr. Sbaitso imitators.
  • What you do when your dad isn't around to help you boot up Red Alert.
  • An FMV adventure game set in Germany.
  • The Red Alert installation experience.
  • Tim Curry giving his all in the Red Alert FMV cutscenes.
  • An oral history of Tim Curry's escape into the one place uncorrupted by capitalism.
  • Enjoying the Aboriginal Sauce at Outback Steakhouse.
  • Australians explaining that America also started as a prison colony
  • Hamilton didn't talk about this!
  • The Simpsons writing room discovering the Coriolis effect and realizing that they need to tell the world so it's lucky that anything they write will be broadcast on national television and on streaming services for decades to come.
  • Everyone in your age bracket having the first ten seasons of the Simpsons memorized.
  • Finding Frinkiac, analogous to discovering a new Blender plug-in.
  • Lying on the couch and taking a photo of the TV.
  • Having a mobile game and sending the APK to anyone who asks nicely.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+EAetbvKT ]]> Jim Stormdancer 244. Get Gimbal Locked, Dean! https://topiclords.com/get-gimbal-locked-dean 6089995c-fd87-44ba-ab44-2dfe4fe2b285 Mon, 24 Jun 2024 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Daniel and Andrew. We discuss hyperthymesia, Animal Well, "Twinbeard" is the name of the Helldivers 2 community manager, spam about house flipping, and whether game developers should "soak themselves" in games. 1:08:11 true Lords:

  • Daniel
  • Andrew

Topics:

  • Hyperthymesia
  • Animal Well
  • Bad news for my google alerts: "Twinbeard" is the name of the Helldivers 2 community manager
  • Dean asks "I know there are many seniors who are looking to start a business during retirement. For those who haven't settled on an idea yet, I'd love to suggest house flipping as a good way to earn income. May I write about this topic in a free article for your website -- specifically, how seniors can get into the house flipping business and become successful at it? I'll be sure to cover all the basics, including how to find the perfect property, how to finance the expenses, how to manage payroll for employees and contractors, etc. I'll also feature a link back to your website."
  • Should game developers "soak themselves" in games. Referring to this clip of Orson Welles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dg-qaeIcuyI

Microtopics:

  • Doom Guy: Life in First Person
  • A well full of animals.
  • A game that you keep hearing is great from people that you trust.
  • Remembering every detail of your life even though that's a terrible idea.
  • A cop asking you what you were doing on the night of November 3rd, 2021.
  • Fnords.
  • Eidetic memory vs. photographic memory vs. hyperthymesic memory.
  • Checking your memory of a time against your written records of that time.
  • Remembering that you're going to have a conversation about your day tonight so you had better do something interesting.
  • Data mining electronic records to figure out how you met somebody.
  • Playing a Sam Barlow game with your bank records.
  • Navier-Stokes fluid dynamics.
  • Spending a lot of time frowning.
  • Dark Forest.
  • A game providing you with a spoiler-free mechanism of conveying where you are in the game.
  • Shooting people vs. swording people.
  • The tools and verbs of just being a little guy.
  • Seeing a dog doing something you didn't expect to see a dog do.
  • Being unable to turn a crank because there's a blue ghost.
  • Choosing not to be a video game.
  • Setting up Google alerts for your game's working title.
  • Famous racehorse Secret Legend.
  • Liking some parts but not liking other parts.
  • How to construct a Google alert for t the video game Tunic.
  • Computer vision algorithms to increase yield and profitablity of insect farms.
  • How seniors can get into the house flipping business.
  • Collaborating with a spammer to write a poem about house flipping.
  • Exhorting a spammer to join the discord and post their dreams in the announcements channel.
  • A think tank dedicated to increasing house flipping around the world, measured by total rotation.
  • House flipping vs. house spinning.
  • A skateboard with the word "quaternion" written on it in a sick font.
  • Trying to flip a house but it gets gimbal locked and you lose everything.
  • Soaking in films. Just marinating in them.
  • Having virgin eyes in order to make great things.
  • Inventing video games from first principles.
  • The value of outsider art.
  • Shigeru Miyamoto inventing jumping.
  • Trying to remember the last time you jumped in real life.
  • Whether a historian has discovered the cave that inspired the Legend of Zelda.
  • What Stories Untold says about the Orson Welles quote about having virgin eyes.
  • Trying to prove yourself to a piece of software.
  • Trying to tell a story about a spaceship that doesn't involve combat.
  • 50 Years of Text Games.
  • Having read a book back when it was a blog.
  • Whether we have time for another topic.
  • Mixing a Red Bull with a Caffeine Free Coca Cola.
  • Sunlight patterns that remind you of wandering in the forest as a child
  • The disco ball as an extrapolation of dappled sunlight in the forest.
  • Out of focus motes of light.
  • Figuring out how to make a desert beautiful.
  • Living that home assistant life.
  • Going to a thrift store to buy a lamp to fix the terrible lighting in your hotel room.
  • A motor that's constantly jiggling a pot of water.
]]> Lords:

  • Daniel
  • Andrew

Topics:

  • Hyperthymesia
  • Animal Well
  • Bad news for my google alerts: "Twinbeard" is the name of the Helldivers 2 community manager
  • Dean asks "I know there are many seniors who are looking to start a business during retirement. For those who haven't settled on an idea yet, I'd love to suggest house flipping as a good way to earn income. May I write about this topic in a free article for your website -- specifically, how seniors can get into the house flipping business and become successful at it? I'll be sure to cover all the basics, including how to find the perfect property, how to finance the expenses, how to manage payroll for employees and contractors, etc. I'll also feature a link back to your website."
  • Should game developers "soak themselves" in games. Referring to this clip of Orson Welles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dg-qaeIcuyI

Microtopics:

  • Doom Guy: Life in First Person
  • A well full of animals.
  • A game that you keep hearing is great from people that you trust.
  • Remembering every detail of your life even though that's a terrible idea.
  • A cop asking you what you were doing on the night of November 3rd, 2021.
  • Fnords.
  • Eidetic memory vs. photographic memory vs. hyperthymesic memory.
  • Checking your memory of a time against your written records of that time.
  • Remembering that you're going to have a conversation about your day tonight so you had better do something interesting.
  • Data mining electronic records to figure out how you met somebody.
  • Playing a Sam Barlow game with your bank records.
  • Navier-Stokes fluid dynamics.
  • Spending a lot of time frowning.
  • Dark Forest.
  • A game providing you with a spoiler-free mechanism of conveying where you are in the game.
  • Shooting people vs. swording people.
  • The tools and verbs of just being a little guy.
  • Seeing a dog doing something you didn't expect to see a dog do.
  • Being unable to turn a crank because there's a blue ghost.
  • Choosing not to be a video game.
  • Setting up Google alerts for your game's working title.
  • Famous racehorse Secret Legend.
  • Liking some parts but not liking other parts.
  • How to construct a Google alert for t the video game Tunic.
  • Computer vision algorithms to increase yield and profitablity of insect farms.
  • How seniors can get into the house flipping business.
  • Collaborating with a spammer to write a poem about house flipping.
  • Exhorting a spammer to join the discord and post their dreams in the announcements channel.
  • A think tank dedicated to increasing house flipping around the world, measured by total rotation.
  • House flipping vs. house spinning.
  • A skateboard with the word "quaternion" written on it in a sick font.
  • Trying to flip a house but it gets gimbal locked and you lose everything.
  • Soaking in films. Just marinating in them.
  • Having virgin eyes in order to make great things.
  • Inventing video games from first principles.
  • The value of outsider art.
  • Shigeru Miyamoto inventing jumping.
  • Trying to remember the last time you jumped in real life.
  • Whether a historian has discovered the cave that inspired the Legend of Zelda.
  • What Stories Untold says about the Orson Welles quote about having virgin eyes.
  • Trying to prove yourself to a piece of software.
  • Trying to tell a story about a spaceship that doesn't involve combat.
  • 50 Years of Text Games.
  • Having read a book back when it was a blog.
  • Whether we have time for another topic.
  • Mixing a Red Bull with a Caffeine Free Coca Cola.
  • Sunlight patterns that remind you of wandering in the forest as a child
  • The disco ball as an extrapolation of dappled sunlight in the forest.
  • Out of focus motes of light.
  • Figuring out how to make a desert beautiful.
  • Living that home assistant life.
  • Going to a thrift store to buy a lamp to fix the terrible lighting in your hotel room.
  • A motor that's constantly jiggling a pot of water.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Daniel
  • Andrew

Topics:

  • Hyperthymesia
  • Animal Well
  • Bad news for my google alerts: "Twinbeard" is the name of the Helldivers 2 community manager
  • Dean asks "I know there are many seniors who are looking to start a business during retirement. For those who haven't settled on an idea yet, I'd love to suggest house flipping as a good way to earn income. May I write about this topic in a free article for your website -- specifically, how seniors can get into the house flipping business and become successful at it? I'll be sure to cover all the basics, including how to find the perfect property, how to finance the expenses, how to manage payroll for employees and contractors, etc. I'll also feature a link back to your website."
  • Should game developers "soak themselves" in games. Referring to this clip of Orson Welles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dg-qaeIcuyI

Microtopics:

  • Doom Guy: Life in First Person
  • A well full of animals.
  • A game that you keep hearing is great from people that you trust.
  • Remembering every detail of your life even though that's a terrible idea.
  • A cop asking you what you were doing on the night of November 3rd, 2021.
  • Fnords.
  • Eidetic memory vs. photographic memory vs. hyperthymesic memory.
  • Checking your memory of a time against your written records of that time.
  • Remembering that you're going to have a conversation about your day tonight so you had better do something interesting.
  • Data mining electronic records to figure out how you met somebody.
  • Playing a Sam Barlow game with your bank records.
  • Navier-Stokes fluid dynamics.
  • Spending a lot of time frowning.
  • Dark Forest.
  • A game providing you with a spoiler-free mechanism of conveying where you are in the game.
  • Shooting people vs. swording people.
  • The tools and verbs of just being a little guy.
  • Seeing a dog doing something you didn't expect to see a dog do.
  • Being unable to turn a crank because there's a blue ghost.
  • Choosing not to be a video game.
  • Setting up Google alerts for your game's working title.
  • Famous racehorse Secret Legend.
  • Liking some parts but not liking other parts.
  • How to construct a Google alert for t the video game Tunic.
  • Computer vision algorithms to increase yield and profitablity of insect farms.
  • How seniors can get into the house flipping business.
  • Collaborating with a spammer to write a poem about house flipping.
  • Exhorting a spammer to join the discord and post their dreams in the announcements channel.
  • A think tank dedicated to increasing house flipping around the world, measured by total rotation.
  • House flipping vs. house spinning.
  • A skateboard with the word "quaternion" written on it in a sick font.
  • Trying to flip a house but it gets gimbal locked and you lose everything.
  • Soaking in films. Just marinating in them.
  • Having virgin eyes in order to make great things.
  • Inventing video games from first principles.
  • The value of outsider art.
  • Shigeru Miyamoto inventing jumping.
  • Trying to remember the last time you jumped in real life.
  • Whether a historian has discovered the cave that inspired the Legend of Zelda.
  • What Stories Untold says about the Orson Welles quote about having virgin eyes.
  • Trying to prove yourself to a piece of software.
  • Trying to tell a story about a spaceship that doesn't involve combat.
  • 50 Years of Text Games.
  • Having read a book back when it was a blog.
  • Whether we have time for another topic.
  • Mixing a Red Bull with a Caffeine Free Coca Cola.
  • Sunlight patterns that remind you of wandering in the forest as a child
  • The disco ball as an extrapolation of dappled sunlight in the forest.
  • Out of focus motes of light.
  • Figuring out how to make a desert beautiful.
  • Living that home assistant life.
  • Going to a thrift store to buy a lamp to fix the terrible lighting in your hotel room.
  • A motor that's constantly jiggling a pot of water.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+KRZBDmOd ]]> Jim Stormdancer 243. Welcome to the Elder Zone https://topiclords.com/welcome-to-the-elder-zone f62fa628-976f-4955-8ed6-0c124c842fea Mon, 17 Jun 2024 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Andrew and Tyriq. We discuss the Church of the SubGenius, making FreeCell vs. playing FreeCell, how do we get to a place where our primary tool for productivity is not also our primary avenue of distraction? and "<3 Team Schiff", by Team Schiff 1:03:01 true Lords:

  • Andrew
  • Tyriq

Lords:

Microtopics:

  • World Building Notes
  • An accent you cannot discern the origin of.
  • Fun worlds that I've thought of.
  • A world where hair is the source of all life.
  • A port of Freecell to the Playdate that might never be released.
  • J.R. Bob Dobbs, a salesman from the 1950s.
  • Whether Discord (the IRC client) is named after Discordianism.
  • Tyriq Reads Wikipedia.
  • Principia Discordia.
  • An extremely profitable troll.
  • Good and bad reasons to troll.
  • Making your weird fun art without worrying about people taking you way too seriously fifty years from now.
  • Whether submarines are named after the Church of the Subgenus.
  • Rewriting your entire game in C.
  • Playing Freecell Validly.
  • A latecomer to Freecell.
  • The one known impossible Freecell seed.
  • The Freecell Helleed vs. the Minesweeper Dream Board.
  • The looking at the cube phase and the turning the cube phase.
  • Typeshift speed run hacks.
  • Knowing a 38-letter word.
  • Undo trees.
  • The New York Times games package being sold separately from the newspaper.
  • The diction of the New York Times crossword puzzle.
  • Doing Greek letter flash cards to up your crossword game.
  • Words that come up a lot when you're mashing letters together.
  • A job where you don't use a computer? In this economy?
  • Sequencer-based techno.
  • Constraints that fit the UI extremely well.
  • An interface that makes a lot of sense for the Game Boy.
  • Printing out the entirety of Wikipedia so you can go offline for a while.
  • The compressed size of Wikipedia.
  • Here's a thing and the only thing it does is have information on it.
  • Hanging out in the library with people vs. with books.
  • The three best things in life.
  • Opening the tiny drawer and flipping through the tiny cards with your tiny hands and using your tiny eyes to read the tiny text.
  • Downloading information about a spider that links to another spider.
  • Using robots.txt to ward off all kinds of creatures, not just robots.
  • 999: Extraterrestrial Worlds.
  • Abandoning the Dewey Decimal System after you discover that numbers go higher than 999.
  • Stopping to end.
  • This Cat Does Not Exist.
  • The perfect source of images that have never been used before.
  • An art project that invents politicians and texts people imploring them to donate to the campaign and that's how the art project gets funding.
  • What Socrates would have said about the Banksy that shredded itself.
  • Your legal name with a bunch of letters removed.
  • Picking an online handle that's very hard to pronounce to make sure people don't call you that in real life.
  • Giving everybody you meet a different name for yourself.
  • Having more friends than you've ever had.
  • Having hobbies that put you in a room with people.
  • Libraries as raucous hangouts.
  • Inviting tweens to play video games in the back rooms (but not in a shady way)
  • A citizen saying "hey, library, can I use a room?"
  • Your local library, featuring the Middle-Aged Zone.
  • Lego Security Theater.
  • An unordered list of links.
]]> Lords:

  • Andrew
  • Tyriq

Lords:

Microtopics:

  • World Building Notes
  • An accent you cannot discern the origin of.
  • Fun worlds that I've thought of.
  • A world where hair is the source of all life.
  • A port of Freecell to the Playdate that might never be released.
  • J.R. Bob Dobbs, a salesman from the 1950s.
  • Whether Discord (the IRC client) is named after Discordianism.
  • Tyriq Reads Wikipedia.
  • Principia Discordia.
  • An extremely profitable troll.
  • Good and bad reasons to troll.
  • Making your weird fun art without worrying about people taking you way too seriously fifty years from now.
  • Whether submarines are named after the Church of the Subgenus.
  • Rewriting your entire game in C.
  • Playing Freecell Validly.
  • A latecomer to Freecell.
  • The one known impossible Freecell seed.
  • The Freecell Helleed vs. the Minesweeper Dream Board.
  • The looking at the cube phase and the turning the cube phase.
  • Typeshift speed run hacks.
  • Knowing a 38-letter word.
  • Undo trees.
  • The New York Times games package being sold separately from the newspaper.
  • The diction of the New York Times crossword puzzle.
  • Doing Greek letter flash cards to up your crossword game.
  • Words that come up a lot when you're mashing letters together.
  • A job where you don't use a computer? In this economy?
  • Sequencer-based techno.
  • Constraints that fit the UI extremely well.
  • An interface that makes a lot of sense for the Game Boy.
  • Printing out the entirety of Wikipedia so you can go offline for a while.
  • The compressed size of Wikipedia.
  • Here's a thing and the only thing it does is have information on it.
  • Hanging out in the library with people vs. with books.
  • The three best things in life.
  • Opening the tiny drawer and flipping through the tiny cards with your tiny hands and using your tiny eyes to read the tiny text.
  • Downloading information about a spider that links to another spider.
  • Using robots.txt to ward off all kinds of creatures, not just robots.
  • 999: Extraterrestrial Worlds.
  • Abandoning the Dewey Decimal System after you discover that numbers go higher than 999.
  • Stopping to end.
  • This Cat Does Not Exist.
  • The perfect source of images that have never been used before.
  • An art project that invents politicians and texts people imploring them to donate to the campaign and that's how the art project gets funding.
  • What Socrates would have said about the Banksy that shredded itself.
  • Your legal name with a bunch of letters removed.
  • Picking an online handle that's very hard to pronounce to make sure people don't call you that in real life.
  • Giving everybody you meet a different name for yourself.
  • Having more friends than you've ever had.
  • Having hobbies that put you in a room with people.
  • Libraries as raucous hangouts.
  • Inviting tweens to play video games in the back rooms (but not in a shady way)
  • A citizen saying "hey, library, can I use a room?"
  • Your local library, featuring the Middle-Aged Zone.
  • Lego Security Theater.
  • An unordered list of links.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Andrew
  • Tyriq

Lords:

Microtopics:

  • World Building Notes
  • An accent you cannot discern the origin of.
  • Fun worlds that I've thought of.
  • A world where hair is the source of all life.
  • A port of Freecell to the Playdate that might never be released.
  • J.R. Bob Dobbs, a salesman from the 1950s.
  • Whether Discord (the IRC client) is named after Discordianism.
  • Tyriq Reads Wikipedia.
  • Principia Discordia.
  • An extremely profitable troll.
  • Good and bad reasons to troll.
  • Making your weird fun art without worrying about people taking you way too seriously fifty years from now.
  • Whether submarines are named after the Church of the Subgenus.
  • Rewriting your entire game in C.
  • Playing Freecell Validly.
  • A latecomer to Freecell.
  • The one known impossible Freecell seed.
  • The Freecell Helleed vs. the Minesweeper Dream Board.
  • The looking at the cube phase and the turning the cube phase.
  • Typeshift speed run hacks.
  • Knowing a 38-letter word.
  • Undo trees.
  • The New York Times games package being sold separately from the newspaper.
  • The diction of the New York Times crossword puzzle.
  • Doing Greek letter flash cards to up your crossword game.
  • Words that come up a lot when you're mashing letters together.
  • A job where you don't use a computer? In this economy?
  • Sequencer-based techno.
  • Constraints that fit the UI extremely well.
  • An interface that makes a lot of sense for the Game Boy.
  • Printing out the entirety of Wikipedia so you can go offline for a while.
  • The compressed size of Wikipedia.
  • Here's a thing and the only thing it does is have information on it.
  • Hanging out in the library with people vs. with books.
  • The three best things in life.
  • Opening the tiny drawer and flipping through the tiny cards with your tiny hands and using your tiny eyes to read the tiny text.
  • Downloading information about a spider that links to another spider.
  • Using robots.txt to ward off all kinds of creatures, not just robots.
  • 999: Extraterrestrial Worlds.
  • Abandoning the Dewey Decimal System after you discover that numbers go higher than 999.
  • Stopping to end.
  • This Cat Does Not Exist.
  • The perfect source of images that have never been used before.
  • An art project that invents politicians and texts people imploring them to donate to the campaign and that's how the art project gets funding.
  • What Socrates would have said about the Banksy that shredded itself.
  • Your legal name with a bunch of letters removed.
  • Picking an online handle that's very hard to pronounce to make sure people don't call you that in real life.
  • Giving everybody you meet a different name for yourself.
  • Having more friends than you've ever had.
  • Having hobbies that put you in a room with people.
  • Libraries as raucous hangouts.
  • Inviting tweens to play video games in the back rooms (but not in a shady way)
  • A citizen saying "hey, library, can I use a room?"
  • Your local library, featuring the Middle-Aged Zone.
  • Lego Security Theater.
  • An unordered list of links.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+RpIkCL7I ]]> Jim Stormdancer 242. Malware for Labyrinths https://topiclords.com/malware-for-labyrinths 1e69d7f9-e4ae-4afc-a779-cf73d4b4a854 Mon, 10 Jun 2024 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Maxx and JP. We discuss different kinds of "changing your mind" in creative work, what texture clouds are, Infinity Island, Sleep by Jorge Luis Borges, and Chippendale Mupps and the slowest nerves. 1:06:14 true Lords:

  • Maxx
  • JP

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Knowing the names of zero outdoor cats in your neighborhood.
  • Canny outdoor cats who are adapted to city life and don't need your plugs.
  • Obi like the belt or like the Star Wars guy?
  • Loosey goosey versions
  • Changing your mind while making a creative work.
  • Moving a door or a window in an existing wall.
  • Bigger creative decisions being composed of many smaller creative decisions.
  • Retaining maximum flexibility at every point in the process.
  • A workflow that reflects the spectrum of flexibility.
  • Flexibility Lost is Sturdiness Gained.
  • Tweaking the value of pi to suit your needs.
  • A system where a bunch of things depend on a bunch of other things.
  • Axes of flexibility that you don't end up using.
  • More specific categories of types of changing your mind.
  • Going down a deep dark hole and finding the glittering prize but not being sure whether it's worth anything.
  • A loop that spirals, oscillating, into the middle.
  • Putting a branch into a meditation labyrinth and changing its theological meaning.
  • Rewriting your novel in second person, present tense, just to see how it feels.
  • The Citation Needed guy doubting that mazes can be built with snow.
  • The ongoing Corn vs. Maize Wikipedia war.
  • The marine layer rolling in.
  • Looking at clouds and totally seeing the ice cream.
  • Buying aerogel samples on eBay.
  • What stuffed animals are stuffed with.
  • Going to the sky island and it's sort of rubbery.
  • Walkable clouds in the Mario series.
  • Cloudjacking.
  • Yanking Lakitu out onto the pavement and going on a joyride until the LoJack system kicks in.
  • Super Mario Bros. redubbed with Quake and Half-Life sounds.
  • Super Mario Bros. Next Gen AAA
  • What clouds taste like.
  • Fizzy Lifting Drinks.
  • The soda with the glass ball.
  • Ordering something red hoping for cherry, watermelon or strawberry flavor, but it's cinnamon flavored.
  • Eating Red Hots for the first time and realizing you've been Halloween poisoned.
  • Your first bitey cinnamon food.
  • A little poison, as a treat.
  • Filling your mouth with tree bark.
  • Games with saved progress feeling like you're participating in a responsible activity than games where you start over every time.
  • Deliberate mechanical whimsy.
  • Making a complicated game and failing to teach the player how to play it.
  • For a Change, by Dan Schmidt.
  • An infinite variety of forms of confusion.
  • Playing Frog Fractions all the way through and being like "what twist??"
  • Why Jorge Luis Borges gets annoyed when people wake him up.
  • Semi-routinely yelling in your sleep.
  • Being asleep is the inside time.
  • Citing Borges as a vibe.
  • A mid-pod plug.
  • The works of Ted Chiang.
  • Internalizing the idea that you need sleep to function.
  • Stepping stones of self-reflection.
  • Waking up feeling the vague sensations of having dreamt.
  • Sleeping with your eyes open.
  • Integration of your environment into your dreams.
  • Biting your tail before you go to sleep and not feeling it until you wake up.
  • Putting keys in your toast.
  • Repurposing the Chippendale Mupp's nervous system to make a vintage delay pedal.
  • Esports competitors putting the left mouse button between their teeth to improve reaction time, because it's closer to the brain.
  • Brains evolving to process whatever whenever and assembling the timeline later.
  • Kuratas Heavy Industries.
  • Smiling to fire the heavy machine guns.
  • Gripens.
  • Subway ads exhorting Maximum Lethality!
  • The airport nearest to all of the oil fields in the Permean Basin.
  • Billboards for enterprise services.
  • Wasting eyeballs.
  • A couple of active web presences.
]]> Lords:

  • Maxx
  • JP

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Knowing the names of zero outdoor cats in your neighborhood.
  • Canny outdoor cats who are adapted to city life and don't need your plugs.
  • Obi like the belt or like the Star Wars guy?
  • Loosey goosey versions
  • Changing your mind while making a creative work.
  • Moving a door or a window in an existing wall.
  • Bigger creative decisions being composed of many smaller creative decisions.
  • Retaining maximum flexibility at every point in the process.
  • A workflow that reflects the spectrum of flexibility.
  • Flexibility Lost is Sturdiness Gained.
  • Tweaking the value of pi to suit your needs.
  • A system where a bunch of things depend on a bunch of other things.
  • Axes of flexibility that you don't end up using.
  • More specific categories of types of changing your mind.
  • Going down a deep dark hole and finding the glittering prize but not being sure whether it's worth anything.
  • A loop that spirals, oscillating, into the middle.
  • Putting a branch into a meditation labyrinth and changing its theological meaning.
  • Rewriting your novel in second person, present tense, just to see how it feels.
  • The Citation Needed guy doubting that mazes can be built with snow.
  • The ongoing Corn vs. Maize Wikipedia war.
  • The marine layer rolling in.
  • Looking at clouds and totally seeing the ice cream.
  • Buying aerogel samples on eBay.
  • What stuffed animals are stuffed with.
  • Going to the sky island and it's sort of rubbery.
  • Walkable clouds in the Mario series.
  • Cloudjacking.
  • Yanking Lakitu out onto the pavement and going on a joyride until the LoJack system kicks in.
  • Super Mario Bros. redubbed with Quake and Half-Life sounds.
  • Super Mario Bros. Next Gen AAA
  • What clouds taste like.
  • Fizzy Lifting Drinks.
  • The soda with the glass ball.
  • Ordering something red hoping for cherry, watermelon or strawberry flavor, but it's cinnamon flavored.
  • Eating Red Hots for the first time and realizing you've been Halloween poisoned.
  • Your first bitey cinnamon food.
  • A little poison, as a treat.
  • Filling your mouth with tree bark.
  • Games with saved progress feeling like you're participating in a responsible activity than games where you start over every time.
  • Deliberate mechanical whimsy.
  • Making a complicated game and failing to teach the player how to play it.
  • For a Change, by Dan Schmidt.
  • An infinite variety of forms of confusion.
  • Playing Frog Fractions all the way through and being like "what twist??"
  • Why Jorge Luis Borges gets annoyed when people wake him up.
  • Semi-routinely yelling in your sleep.
  • Being asleep is the inside time.
  • Citing Borges as a vibe.
  • A mid-pod plug.
  • The works of Ted Chiang.
  • Internalizing the idea that you need sleep to function.
  • Stepping stones of self-reflection.
  • Waking up feeling the vague sensations of having dreamt.
  • Sleeping with your eyes open.
  • Integration of your environment into your dreams.
  • Biting your tail before you go to sleep and not feeling it until you wake up.
  • Putting keys in your toast.
  • Repurposing the Chippendale Mupp's nervous system to make a vintage delay pedal.
  • Esports competitors putting the left mouse button between their teeth to improve reaction time, because it's closer to the brain.
  • Brains evolving to process whatever whenever and assembling the timeline later.
  • Kuratas Heavy Industries.
  • Smiling to fire the heavy machine guns.
  • Gripens.
  • Subway ads exhorting Maximum Lethality!
  • The airport nearest to all of the oil fields in the Permean Basin.
  • Billboards for enterprise services.
  • Wasting eyeballs.
  • A couple of active web presences.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Maxx
  • JP

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Knowing the names of zero outdoor cats in your neighborhood.
  • Canny outdoor cats who are adapted to city life and don't need your plugs.
  • Obi like the belt or like the Star Wars guy?
  • Loosey goosey versions
  • Changing your mind while making a creative work.
  • Moving a door or a window in an existing wall.
  • Bigger creative decisions being composed of many smaller creative decisions.
  • Retaining maximum flexibility at every point in the process.
  • A workflow that reflects the spectrum of flexibility.
  • Flexibility Lost is Sturdiness Gained.
  • Tweaking the value of pi to suit your needs.
  • A system where a bunch of things depend on a bunch of other things.
  • Axes of flexibility that you don't end up using.
  • More specific categories of types of changing your mind.
  • Going down a deep dark hole and finding the glittering prize but not being sure whether it's worth anything.
  • A loop that spirals, oscillating, into the middle.
  • Putting a branch into a meditation labyrinth and changing its theological meaning.
  • Rewriting your novel in second person, present tense, just to see how it feels.
  • The Citation Needed guy doubting that mazes can be built with snow.
  • The ongoing Corn vs. Maize Wikipedia war.
  • The marine layer rolling in.
  • Looking at clouds and totally seeing the ice cream.
  • Buying aerogel samples on eBay.
  • What stuffed animals are stuffed with.
  • Going to the sky island and it's sort of rubbery.
  • Walkable clouds in the Mario series.
  • Cloudjacking.
  • Yanking Lakitu out onto the pavement and going on a joyride until the LoJack system kicks in.
  • Super Mario Bros. redubbed with Quake and Half-Life sounds.
  • Super Mario Bros. Next Gen AAA
  • What clouds taste like.
  • Fizzy Lifting Drinks.
  • The soda with the glass ball.
  • Ordering something red hoping for cherry, watermelon or strawberry flavor, but it's cinnamon flavored.
  • Eating Red Hots for the first time and realizing you've been Halloween poisoned.
  • Your first bitey cinnamon food.
  • A little poison, as a treat.
  • Filling your mouth with tree bark.
  • Games with saved progress feeling like you're participating in a responsible activity than games where you start over every time.
  • Deliberate mechanical whimsy.
  • Making a complicated game and failing to teach the player how to play it.
  • For a Change, by Dan Schmidt.
  • An infinite variety of forms of confusion.
  • Playing Frog Fractions all the way through and being like "what twist??"
  • Why Jorge Luis Borges gets annoyed when people wake him up.
  • Semi-routinely yelling in your sleep.
  • Being asleep is the inside time.
  • Citing Borges as a vibe.
  • A mid-pod plug.
  • The works of Ted Chiang.
  • Internalizing the idea that you need sleep to function.
  • Stepping stones of self-reflection.
  • Waking up feeling the vague sensations of having dreamt.
  • Sleeping with your eyes open.
  • Integration of your environment into your dreams.
  • Biting your tail before you go to sleep and not feeling it until you wake up.
  • Putting keys in your toast.
  • Repurposing the Chippendale Mupp's nervous system to make a vintage delay pedal.
  • Esports competitors putting the left mouse button between their teeth to improve reaction time, because it's closer to the brain.
  • Brains evolving to process whatever whenever and assembling the timeline later.
  • Kuratas Heavy Industries.
  • Smiling to fire the heavy machine guns.
  • Gripens.
  • Subway ads exhorting Maximum Lethality!
  • The airport nearest to all of the oil fields in the Permean Basin.
  • Billboards for enterprise services.
  • Wasting eyeballs.
  • A couple of active web presences.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+p0fodlA2 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 241. Brad Garrett Must Eat! https://topiclords.com/brad-garrett-must-eat 2cc2c8a9-12d7-49ff-a017-9b3f5ee0b121 Mon, 03 Jun 2024 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Abby and Pat. We discuss the pear scene, capsule machines vs. claw games, designing UIs for TV, and This be the Verse, by Philip Larkin. 59:11 true Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • My Brother the Car.
  • A card game that is not totally random.
  • Deciding to focus on something else in 2020.
  • Rock Paper Scissors vs. Rock Scissors Paper.
  • Which of the twins to take a kidney from
  • Committing to a bit that breaks the rhythm of what people expect you to say.
  • Making a game where people get crushed by debt but making it fun.
  • Everybody Loves Raymond.
  • Sitcoms that have plenty of opportunity to disappoint you.
  • A show that lives and dies in the performance.
  • Nine years to stop trying.
  • The most profitable sitcom of all time.
  • Adapting Raymond.
  • Ray Romano explaining the concept of having parents to a puzzled audience.
  • The kind of argument where both people make sense and are both trying to be nice.
  • Trying to be nice but failing.
  • 'Til Death.
  • The demeanor of a revenant.
  • Whether Brad Garrett listens to this show.
  • Hitting 100 episodes and going into syndication.
  • Musicians needing a body that can strike.
  • Writing an increasingly ludicrous sitcom for an audience of nobody.
  • A son who is always on the wacky tobacky.
  • A sitcom husband who notices that his wife has been recast and realizes he's on a sitcom.
  • Continuing to give Brad Garrett chances to star in sitcoms because he's so tall.
  • A sitcom that made you feel seen.
  • The workplace sitcom vs. the domestic sitcom.
  • Aimlessness in a post-Seinfeld era.
  • Abed Ghaith's striptease.
  • Is that Abed Ghaith's penis in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
  • Claw game skill issues.
  • A billionaire trying to figure out how best to do good in the world and who decides to operate several generous claw machines.
  • Decorating a desk space with a pocket full of miniature delights.
  • Mona Lisa Breakdancing.
  • The rice cooker that King Piccolo was trapped in.
  • Rubik's Cube but all the faces are Mahjong tiles.
  • The coolest and most popular racial atrocity.
  • Ramen Man vs. Kikko Man.
  • A bowl of ramen in the shape of a tube.
  • Homer Simpson: visual ripoff of Kinnikuman.
  • Seeing an aquarium fish that looks just slightly too human.
  • Reading a book about bugs and itching like mad.
  • Worrying that you are ruining eyes for yourself.
  • Famous JAV title "Reincarnated as a Spider"
  • Conveying the idea of receiving a DM on social media to a television audience.
  • My face in a tube dot com.
  • Saying "youshmoob" really fast and hoping nobody notices.
  • Wanting to put a Russian Roulette scene in your TV show but being unable to negotiate the rights to Russian Roulette from ELORG so you need to hire Alexey Pajitnov to design a replacement game.
  • A joke that is very funny when you explain it but impossible to convey in any known medium.
  • The flag that says "bang!"
  • The Joker not being confident enough in his jokes so he has to use laughing gas.
  • Silent Comedy Joker has to work a bit harder.
  • Naming a difficulty level after a pop culture allusion to babies.
  • The ending of a Clockwork Orange in the UK depicting the protagonist as deciding to renounce violence and become a better person, but in the US they omitted that chapter because it's unrealistic.
  • The UK edition of A Clockwork Orange depicting the protagonist renouncing violence and becoming a better person so he joins the police force, whereas in the US edition the protagonist decides to remain brutal and violent so he joins the police force.
  • Where's the bridge, Larkin?
  • This be the verse you grave for me.
  • Poets being jerks to all different kinds of people.
  • Kefka creating a tower of garbage in Final Fantasy while everyone tries to convince him it's worthwhile to have a family.
  • Which kids inspired Lord of the Flies.
  • Suggesting that your mom read Chainsaw Man Part 1 so that you can talk to her about grief.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • My Brother the Car.
  • A card game that is not totally random.
  • Deciding to focus on something else in 2020.
  • Rock Paper Scissors vs. Rock Scissors Paper.
  • Which of the twins to take a kidney from
  • Committing to a bit that breaks the rhythm of what people expect you to say.
  • Making a game where people get crushed by debt but making it fun.
  • Everybody Loves Raymond.
  • Sitcoms that have plenty of opportunity to disappoint you.
  • A show that lives and dies in the performance.
  • Nine years to stop trying.
  • The most profitable sitcom of all time.
  • Adapting Raymond.
  • Ray Romano explaining the concept of having parents to a puzzled audience.
  • The kind of argument where both people make sense and are both trying to be nice.
  • Trying to be nice but failing.
  • 'Til Death.
  • The demeanor of a revenant.
  • Whether Brad Garrett listens to this show.
  • Hitting 100 episodes and going into syndication.
  • Musicians needing a body that can strike.
  • Writing an increasingly ludicrous sitcom for an audience of nobody.
  • A son who is always on the wacky tobacky.
  • A sitcom husband who notices that his wife has been recast and realizes he's on a sitcom.
  • Continuing to give Brad Garrett chances to star in sitcoms because he's so tall.
  • A sitcom that made you feel seen.
  • The workplace sitcom vs. the domestic sitcom.
  • Aimlessness in a post-Seinfeld era.
  • Abed Ghaith's striptease.
  • Is that Abed Ghaith's penis in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
  • Claw game skill issues.
  • A billionaire trying to figure out how best to do good in the world and who decides to operate several generous claw machines.
  • Decorating a desk space with a pocket full of miniature delights.
  • Mona Lisa Breakdancing.
  • The rice cooker that King Piccolo was trapped in.
  • Rubik's Cube but all the faces are Mahjong tiles.
  • The coolest and most popular racial atrocity.
  • Ramen Man vs. Kikko Man.
  • A bowl of ramen in the shape of a tube.
  • Homer Simpson: visual ripoff of Kinnikuman.
  • Seeing an aquarium fish that looks just slightly too human.
  • Reading a book about bugs and itching like mad.
  • Worrying that you are ruining eyes for yourself.
  • Famous JAV title "Reincarnated as a Spider"
  • Conveying the idea of receiving a DM on social media to a television audience.
  • My face in a tube dot com.
  • Saying "youshmoob" really fast and hoping nobody notices.
  • Wanting to put a Russian Roulette scene in your TV show but being unable to negotiate the rights to Russian Roulette from ELORG so you need to hire Alexey Pajitnov to design a replacement game.
  • A joke that is very funny when you explain it but impossible to convey in any known medium.
  • The flag that says "bang!"
  • The Joker not being confident enough in his jokes so he has to use laughing gas.
  • Silent Comedy Joker has to work a bit harder.
  • Naming a difficulty level after a pop culture allusion to babies.
  • The ending of a Clockwork Orange in the UK depicting the protagonist as deciding to renounce violence and become a better person, but in the US they omitted that chapter because it's unrealistic.
  • The UK edition of A Clockwork Orange depicting the protagonist renouncing violence and becoming a better person so he joins the police force, whereas in the US edition the protagonist decides to remain brutal and violent so he joins the police force.
  • Where's the bridge, Larkin?
  • This be the verse you grave for me.
  • Poets being jerks to all different kinds of people.
  • Kefka creating a tower of garbage in Final Fantasy while everyone tries to convince him it's worthwhile to have a family.
  • Which kids inspired Lord of the Flies.
  • Suggesting that your mom read Chainsaw Man Part 1 so that you can talk to her about grief.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • My Brother the Car.
  • A card game that is not totally random.
  • Deciding to focus on something else in 2020.
  • Rock Paper Scissors vs. Rock Scissors Paper.
  • Which of the twins to take a kidney from
  • Committing to a bit that breaks the rhythm of what people expect you to say.
  • Making a game where people get crushed by debt but making it fun.
  • Everybody Loves Raymond.
  • Sitcoms that have plenty of opportunity to disappoint you.
  • A show that lives and dies in the performance.
  • Nine years to stop trying.
  • The most profitable sitcom of all time.
  • Adapting Raymond.
  • Ray Romano explaining the concept of having parents to a puzzled audience.
  • The kind of argument where both people make sense and are both trying to be nice.
  • Trying to be nice but failing.
  • 'Til Death.
  • The demeanor of a revenant.
  • Whether Brad Garrett listens to this show.
  • Hitting 100 episodes and going into syndication.
  • Musicians needing a body that can strike.
  • Writing an increasingly ludicrous sitcom for an audience of nobody.
  • A son who is always on the wacky tobacky.
  • A sitcom husband who notices that his wife has been recast and realizes he's on a sitcom.
  • Continuing to give Brad Garrett chances to star in sitcoms because he's so tall.
  • A sitcom that made you feel seen.
  • The workplace sitcom vs. the domestic sitcom.
  • Aimlessness in a post-Seinfeld era.
  • Abed Ghaith's striptease.
  • Is that Abed Ghaith's penis in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
  • Claw game skill issues.
  • A billionaire trying to figure out how best to do good in the world and who decides to operate several generous claw machines.
  • Decorating a desk space with a pocket full of miniature delights.
  • Mona Lisa Breakdancing.
  • The rice cooker that King Piccolo was trapped in.
  • Rubik's Cube but all the faces are Mahjong tiles.
  • The coolest and most popular racial atrocity.
  • Ramen Man vs. Kikko Man.
  • A bowl of ramen in the shape of a tube.
  • Homer Simpson: visual ripoff of Kinnikuman.
  • Seeing an aquarium fish that looks just slightly too human.
  • Reading a book about bugs and itching like mad.
  • Worrying that you are ruining eyes for yourself.
  • Famous JAV title "Reincarnated as a Spider"
  • Conveying the idea of receiving a DM on social media to a television audience.
  • My face in a tube dot com.
  • Saying "youshmoob" really fast and hoping nobody notices.
  • Wanting to put a Russian Roulette scene in your TV show but being unable to negotiate the rights to Russian Roulette from ELORG so you need to hire Alexey Pajitnov to design a replacement game.
  • A joke that is very funny when you explain it but impossible to convey in any known medium.
  • The flag that says "bang!"
  • The Joker not being confident enough in his jokes so he has to use laughing gas.
  • Silent Comedy Joker has to work a bit harder.
  • Naming a difficulty level after a pop culture allusion to babies.
  • The ending of a Clockwork Orange in the UK depicting the protagonist as deciding to renounce violence and become a better person, but in the US they omitted that chapter because it's unrealistic.
  • The UK edition of A Clockwork Orange depicting the protagonist renouncing violence and becoming a better person so he joins the police force, whereas in the US edition the protagonist decides to remain brutal and violent so he joins the police force.
  • Where's the bridge, Larkin?
  • This be the verse you grave for me.
  • Poets being jerks to all different kinds of people.
  • Kefka creating a tower of garbage in Final Fantasy while everyone tries to convince him it's worthwhile to have a family.
  • Which kids inspired Lord of the Flies.
  • Suggesting that your mom read Chainsaw Man Part 1 so that you can talk to her about grief.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+3kus545g ]]> Jim Stormdancer 240. Who Was Emily Dickinson Owning? https://topiclords.com/who-was-emily-dickinson-owning 2b07c29c-88b1-4b58-aabe-2cdab8d0b2c2 Mon, 27 May 2024 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: JP and Shepard. We discuss Microsoft adding a good feature to Office, favorite DOS game soundtracks, the Balatro Discourse, and Faith is a Fine Invention by Emily Dickinson 1:00:50 true Lords:

  • JP
  • Shepard

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Artist Alley.
  • Scrolling down a web page and seeing a bunch of cool stuff.
  • Seeing a list and wondering "how did this list happen"?
  • Steam Farming Fest.
  • Trying to figure out what you want to do when you grow up.
  • Eating eggs and rice when you have tummy troubles.
  • The file you all edit to make the deposit slip.
  • Taking data from multiple columns and putting them all in a single list.
  • Becoming the spreadsheet wizard.
  • Installation wizards.
  • Why nobody calls a software feature a "wizard" any more
  • A window into the dialectic of wizards.
  • The LLM hype tornado.
  • Renting video software from Blockbuster.
  • Back when any media was a "tape"
  • Enumerating the kinds of MS-DOS audio hardware.
  • Emitting a blast of data.
  • Enjoying a video game in 4, 16 or 256 colors.
  • How Doom sounded on the internal PC speaker.
  • Playing multiplayer Doom on a four computer LAN where two of the computers don't have sound cards.
  • The Doom source port family tree.
  • Whether Linux supported the internal PC speaker.
  • Playing each MIDI note with the off-the-track square wave.
  • Holding on to a joke for several minutes.
  • Doing sound effects via the Roland MT-32.
  • FM synth guitars sounding more evil than real guitars.
  • Synthesizers that are fancier than other synthesizers and are therefore better.
  • The ambient music on the Doom soundtrack.
  • The Lost Vikings soundtrack.
  • Games with tracker soundtracks.
  • The tracker music era.
  • A roguelike deck builder kind of a thing.
  • A huge hit within your social horizon.
  • Beginners hoping to project intelligence and competence.
  • The kind of mixing of data and code that Lua makes easy to do.
  • How to deploy a Love2D game to consoles.
  • A cool game idea that's just a bunch of cards doing stuff.
  • Sean Barrett's STB libraries.
  • The ability to change your mind without having to throw away a bunch of work.
  • Ambient complexity vs. intrinsic complexity.
  • Hot takes escaping containment.
  • The Celeste character controller.
  • Software security practices that do not apply to a single player indie game.
  • Looking at code and seeing all the things that it used to be.
  • Looking at code solving a problem in a domain you are unfamiliar with.
  • An Emily Dickinson poem that reads like a response to an argument she had at dinner.
  • Situations where you can directly observe what's happening.
  • All the filters preventing you from bursting out into song.
  • Esprit de escalier.
  • Who was Emily Dickinson owning?
  • A contempt for faith and a sense that microscopes are good.
  • Knowing that nobody reads your blog, but taking satisfaction in the knowledge that someone hypothetically could.
  • Excavating spiritual truth from apocryphal ramblings.
  • The app that holds all the texts you don't send for ransom.
  • Digging through people's trash but with fewer steps.
]]> Lords:

  • JP
  • Shepard

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Artist Alley.
  • Scrolling down a web page and seeing a bunch of cool stuff.
  • Seeing a list and wondering "how did this list happen"?
  • Steam Farming Fest.
  • Trying to figure out what you want to do when you grow up.
  • Eating eggs and rice when you have tummy troubles.
  • The file you all edit to make the deposit slip.
  • Taking data from multiple columns and putting them all in a single list.
  • Becoming the spreadsheet wizard.
  • Installation wizards.
  • Why nobody calls a software feature a "wizard" any more
  • A window into the dialectic of wizards.
  • The LLM hype tornado.
  • Renting video software from Blockbuster.
  • Back when any media was a "tape"
  • Enumerating the kinds of MS-DOS audio hardware.
  • Emitting a blast of data.
  • Enjoying a video game in 4, 16 or 256 colors.
  • How Doom sounded on the internal PC speaker.
  • Playing multiplayer Doom on a four computer LAN where two of the computers don't have sound cards.
  • The Doom source port family tree.
  • Whether Linux supported the internal PC speaker.
  • Playing each MIDI note with the off-the-track square wave.
  • Holding on to a joke for several minutes.
  • Doing sound effects via the Roland MT-32.
  • FM synth guitars sounding more evil than real guitars.
  • Synthesizers that are fancier than other synthesizers and are therefore better.
  • The ambient music on the Doom soundtrack.
  • The Lost Vikings soundtrack.
  • Games with tracker soundtracks.
  • The tracker music era.
  • A roguelike deck builder kind of a thing.
  • A huge hit within your social horizon.
  • Beginners hoping to project intelligence and competence.
  • The kind of mixing of data and code that Lua makes easy to do.
  • How to deploy a Love2D game to consoles.
  • A cool game idea that's just a bunch of cards doing stuff.
  • Sean Barrett's STB libraries.
  • The ability to change your mind without having to throw away a bunch of work.
  • Ambient complexity vs. intrinsic complexity.
  • Hot takes escaping containment.
  • The Celeste character controller.
  • Software security practices that do not apply to a single player indie game.
  • Looking at code and seeing all the things that it used to be.
  • Looking at code solving a problem in a domain you are unfamiliar with.
  • An Emily Dickinson poem that reads like a response to an argument she had at dinner.
  • Situations where you can directly observe what's happening.
  • All the filters preventing you from bursting out into song.
  • Esprit de escalier.
  • Who was Emily Dickinson owning?
  • A contempt for faith and a sense that microscopes are good.
  • Knowing that nobody reads your blog, but taking satisfaction in the knowledge that someone hypothetically could.
  • Excavating spiritual truth from apocryphal ramblings.
  • The app that holds all the texts you don't send for ransom.
  • Digging through people's trash but with fewer steps.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • JP
  • Shepard

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Artist Alley.
  • Scrolling down a web page and seeing a bunch of cool stuff.
  • Seeing a list and wondering "how did this list happen"?
  • Steam Farming Fest.
  • Trying to figure out what you want to do when you grow up.
  • Eating eggs and rice when you have tummy troubles.
  • The file you all edit to make the deposit slip.
  • Taking data from multiple columns and putting them all in a single list.
  • Becoming the spreadsheet wizard.
  • Installation wizards.
  • Why nobody calls a software feature a "wizard" any more
  • A window into the dialectic of wizards.
  • The LLM hype tornado.
  • Renting video software from Blockbuster.
  • Back when any media was a "tape"
  • Enumerating the kinds of MS-DOS audio hardware.
  • Emitting a blast of data.
  • Enjoying a video game in 4, 16 or 256 colors.
  • How Doom sounded on the internal PC speaker.
  • Playing multiplayer Doom on a four computer LAN where two of the computers don't have sound cards.
  • The Doom source port family tree.
  • Whether Linux supported the internal PC speaker.
  • Playing each MIDI note with the off-the-track square wave.
  • Holding on to a joke for several minutes.
  • Doing sound effects via the Roland MT-32.
  • FM synth guitars sounding more evil than real guitars.
  • Synthesizers that are fancier than other synthesizers and are therefore better.
  • The ambient music on the Doom soundtrack.
  • The Lost Vikings soundtrack.
  • Games with tracker soundtracks.
  • The tracker music era.
  • A roguelike deck builder kind of a thing.
  • A huge hit within your social horizon.
  • Beginners hoping to project intelligence and competence.
  • The kind of mixing of data and code that Lua makes easy to do.
  • How to deploy a Love2D game to consoles.
  • A cool game idea that's just a bunch of cards doing stuff.
  • Sean Barrett's STB libraries.
  • The ability to change your mind without having to throw away a bunch of work.
  • Ambient complexity vs. intrinsic complexity.
  • Hot takes escaping containment.
  • The Celeste character controller.
  • Software security practices that do not apply to a single player indie game.
  • Looking at code and seeing all the things that it used to be.
  • Looking at code solving a problem in a domain you are unfamiliar with.
  • An Emily Dickinson poem that reads like a response to an argument she had at dinner.
  • Situations where you can directly observe what's happening.
  • All the filters preventing you from bursting out into song.
  • Esprit de escalier.
  • Who was Emily Dickinson owning?
  • A contempt for faith and a sense that microscopes are good.
  • Knowing that nobody reads your blog, but taking satisfaction in the knowledge that someone hypothetically could.
  • Excavating spiritual truth from apocryphal ramblings.
  • The app that holds all the texts you don't send for ransom.
  • Digging through people's trash but with fewer steps.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+_sQzrPdp ]]> Jim Stormdancer 239. Public Universal Snoopy https://topiclords.com/public-universal-snoopy 07eb98a7-ed02-4d64-b8a0-f2117e0ccaab Mon, 20 May 2024 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Abi and Eva. We discuss the year of Snoopy girls, whether living fossils are better than the rest of us, Helious, Certain Women, emulators on iOS, and Public Universal Friend. 50:13 true Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Working through mental struggles in the form of Zelda dungeons.
  • Donating to Red Cross for Snoopy Merch.
  • Snoopy's place in the cultural zeitgeist.
  • Transcending Peanuts.
  • Who doesn't want a fun bird friend?
  • Crocheting and knitting making a major comeback.
  • Every year is the year of Linux on the Desktop.
  • Influencers wearing a Snoopy merch.
  • NASA sending Snoopy to the Moon.
  • Giving your merch to NASA for free but charging the shit out of movie makers trying to make documentaries or authentic space movies.
  • Animals that are already so good they didn't need to keep evolving.
  • Leaving bacteria off your list because you couldn't even see them.
  • A little blobby thing.
  • Scientists trying to write for the general public.
  • Naming an organism after the concept of having three eyes when it only has two eyes.
  • Having two good eyes but evolving a third shitty eye just to annoy people.
  • Running executables of completely unknown provenance.
  • A game that was plausibly created by aliens if you haven't played very many interesting games.
  • Making up an incredible back story for your game to explain why you have no idea why colors work.
  • Good Wild Combo vs. Unused Insurance Bonus.
  • Looking up the artist of a work you loved in the 90s and they're still out there tooting.
  • Wizened game developers posting on social media about their farm animals.
  • Designing interfaces for the phone.
  • Finding out that a person made a work you loved and preferring to have imagined it came from space.
  • Striving to be a cozy follow.
  • Retweeting a thing that does not make people angry.
  • Putting the poise in poison.
  • Inherently terrifying bodies of water.
  • A big fish that's touching you now.
  • A level of repetition that is bordering on too much.
  • Songs of Love, Death and Pleasure.
  • Deliberately blurring the line between poems and songs.
  • The Emulators-on-iOS era.
  • Kirby Canvas Curse.
  • Playing Super Mario Land on a TI-84 calculator.
  • What old Nintendo games work well on an iPhone.
  • The EU repeatedly forcing Apple to get its shit together.
  • One- and two-thumbed smartphones.
  • The Society of Universal Friends.
  • The thought process that led to the creation of Human Snoopy.
  • The Cat Snoopy phenomenon.
  • Snoopy as a Psychonauts character.
  • Snoopy enjoying a pile of human femurs.
  • The Notorious PUF.
  • Someone who was interesting enough to enter the historical record.
  • An attempt to seize the Friend and carry them off in an oxcart.
  • The distinction between abstinence and celibacy, and whether it exists now or in the 19th century.
  • The Mouth of the Lord.
  • Naming yourself after a branch of the government.
  • DMing people on Discord.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Working through mental struggles in the form of Zelda dungeons.
  • Donating to Red Cross for Snoopy Merch.
  • Snoopy's place in the cultural zeitgeist.
  • Transcending Peanuts.
  • Who doesn't want a fun bird friend?
  • Crocheting and knitting making a major comeback.
  • Every year is the year of Linux on the Desktop.
  • Influencers wearing a Snoopy merch.
  • NASA sending Snoopy to the Moon.
  • Giving your merch to NASA for free but charging the shit out of movie makers trying to make documentaries or authentic space movies.
  • Animals that are already so good they didn't need to keep evolving.
  • Leaving bacteria off your list because you couldn't even see them.
  • A little blobby thing.
  • Scientists trying to write for the general public.
  • Naming an organism after the concept of having three eyes when it only has two eyes.
  • Having two good eyes but evolving a third shitty eye just to annoy people.
  • Running executables of completely unknown provenance.
  • A game that was plausibly created by aliens if you haven't played very many interesting games.
  • Making up an incredible back story for your game to explain why you have no idea why colors work.
  • Good Wild Combo vs. Unused Insurance Bonus.
  • Looking up the artist of a work you loved in the 90s and they're still out there tooting.
  • Wizened game developers posting on social media about their farm animals.
  • Designing interfaces for the phone.
  • Finding out that a person made a work you loved and preferring to have imagined it came from space.
  • Striving to be a cozy follow.
  • Retweeting a thing that does not make people angry.
  • Putting the poise in poison.
  • Inherently terrifying bodies of water.
  • A big fish that's touching you now.
  • A level of repetition that is bordering on too much.
  • Songs of Love, Death and Pleasure.
  • Deliberately blurring the line between poems and songs.
  • The Emulators-on-iOS era.
  • Kirby Canvas Curse.
  • Playing Super Mario Land on a TI-84 calculator.
  • What old Nintendo games work well on an iPhone.
  • The EU repeatedly forcing Apple to get its shit together.
  • One- and two-thumbed smartphones.
  • The Society of Universal Friends.
  • The thought process that led to the creation of Human Snoopy.
  • The Cat Snoopy phenomenon.
  • Snoopy as a Psychonauts character.
  • Snoopy enjoying a pile of human femurs.
  • The Notorious PUF.
  • Someone who was interesting enough to enter the historical record.
  • An attempt to seize the Friend and carry them off in an oxcart.
  • The distinction between abstinence and celibacy, and whether it exists now or in the 19th century.
  • The Mouth of the Lord.
  • Naming yourself after a branch of the government.
  • DMing people on Discord.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Working through mental struggles in the form of Zelda dungeons.
  • Donating to Red Cross for Snoopy Merch.
  • Snoopy's place in the cultural zeitgeist.
  • Transcending Peanuts.
  • Who doesn't want a fun bird friend?
  • Crocheting and knitting making a major comeback.
  • Every year is the year of Linux on the Desktop.
  • Influencers wearing a Snoopy merch.
  • NASA sending Snoopy to the Moon.
  • Giving your merch to NASA for free but charging the shit out of movie makers trying to make documentaries or authentic space movies.
  • Animals that are already so good they didn't need to keep evolving.
  • Leaving bacteria off your list because you couldn't even see them.
  • A little blobby thing.
  • Scientists trying to write for the general public.
  • Naming an organism after the concept of having three eyes when it only has two eyes.
  • Having two good eyes but evolving a third shitty eye just to annoy people.
  • Running executables of completely unknown provenance.
  • A game that was plausibly created by aliens if you haven't played very many interesting games.
  • Making up an incredible back story for your game to explain why you have no idea why colors work.
  • Good Wild Combo vs. Unused Insurance Bonus.
  • Looking up the artist of a work you loved in the 90s and they're still out there tooting.
  • Wizened game developers posting on social media about their farm animals.
  • Designing interfaces for the phone.
  • Finding out that a person made a work you loved and preferring to have imagined it came from space.
  • Striving to be a cozy follow.
  • Retweeting a thing that does not make people angry.
  • Putting the poise in poison.
  • Inherently terrifying bodies of water.
  • A big fish that's touching you now.
  • A level of repetition that is bordering on too much.
  • Songs of Love, Death and Pleasure.
  • Deliberately blurring the line between poems and songs.
  • The Emulators-on-iOS era.
  • Kirby Canvas Curse.
  • Playing Super Mario Land on a TI-84 calculator.
  • What old Nintendo games work well on an iPhone.
  • The EU repeatedly forcing Apple to get its shit together.
  • One- and two-thumbed smartphones.
  • The Society of Universal Friends.
  • The thought process that led to the creation of Human Snoopy.
  • The Cat Snoopy phenomenon.
  • Snoopy as a Psychonauts character.
  • Snoopy enjoying a pile of human femurs.
  • The Notorious PUF.
  • Someone who was interesting enough to enter the historical record.
  • An attempt to seize the Friend and carry them off in an oxcart.
  • The distinction between abstinence and celibacy, and whether it exists now or in the 19th century.
  • The Mouth of the Lord.
  • Naming yourself after a branch of the government.
  • DMing people on Discord.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+kyRIa4kQ ]]> Jim Stormdancer 238. Talk to Me Like a Doctor Who Gives a Shit https://topiclords.com/talk-to-me-like-a-doctor-who-gives-a-shit 6544909f-94ec-48b7-9d97-e91a653a3f6d Mon, 13 May 2024 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: CisHetKayfaber and Jenni. We discuss weird game foley, finding out about pop culture when it shows up in ASMR videos, seeing the eclipse, He peels off my clothes like a starving man would peel an orange, by Sharon Cherski, and generational punctuation differences. 1:10:02 true Lords:

  • CisHetKayFaber
  • Jenni

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Plugging the enormous void in your soul by playing Balatro.
  • A card game with really good balance and numbering.
  • Seeing the light at the end of the tunnel on the Rusty Lake series.
  • Giving everybody grace except for yourself.
  • Corpse looting foley.
  • Looking through a sound library for the sound of a spider dying.
  • Buying a chair from an estate sale because you love the sound it makes.
  • The Looney Tunes cartoon where some foley artist invented everyone's conception of what a pneumatic tube sounds like.
  • Running around outside and deciding to drop a soup can into the pool.
  • A school project where you rerecord all the audio for five minutes of television.
  • Showing your project to someone and you did such a good job that they don't even notice your project.
  • All the clothes that you're wearing making all the clothes noises.
  • Watching a porn clip overdubbed with Minecraft noises at just the right time in your life.
  • Does two tails mean two assholes?
  • Putting an acronym on the Tails experience.
  • If you've got a cloaca, it's gotta go in the acronym.
  • Only getting horny when an earth, somewhere in the multiverse, is being hit by a comet.
  • Two-Tails has two assholes, and I'm one of them.
  • Forming the Megazord.
  • Lance from all the various things that have Lances in them.
  • Who is Lance in love with Voltron?
  • Google giving you sports results to make incognito mode more plausible.
  • Ironic ASMR.
  • Doin' it for the tingles.
  • When Dora the Explorer asks you what your favorite part of the show was and she says "I liked that too" except it's a video of a doctor asking you about your health.
  • The doctor explaining that this is just what your life is like now.
  • Hot dogging it on the blood pressure cuff.
  • Changing your blood pressure just to fuck with your doctor.
  • Deliberately choosing a femme-presenting chubby doctor.
  • Needing to lose about 40 pounds so you get a leg amputated.
  • Checking a box on your insurance form saying "do not give me lifestyle advice."
  • Carrying around your patient in a folder.
  • Doing the Barium test every time.
  • I'm in a Barium rotisserie, I need you to work with me.
  • Checking the quality of your stomach lining.
  • Trying to banter with the person giving you the mammogram and deeply offending them.
  • Getting small mouth shame at the dentist.
  • Rude Doctor ASMR.
  • ASMR videos where the dentist tells you your mouth is big enough.
  • Assuming Hugh Laurie is not on Cameo for the purposes of the bit.
  • Sourcing an entire podcast through Cameo.
  • The most stony-faced magical realism twin assassins.
  • Topics episode topics.
  • How to personalize a stair.
  • Hiring Mike Ehrmantraut to tell you how you're gonna do your taxes.
  • Mike Ehrmantraut administering the mammogram.
  • Visiting friends who live near the totality.
  • A stump that is freshly cut so it's exuding sap non-stop and is covered with bees and flies 24/7.
  • Whalefall but on land.
  • Chekov's oozing stump coming back in the third act.
  • Going to the astronomical society web site to be sure that the eclipse glasses you get are not the counterfeit eclipse glasses.
  • Looking at where the sun used to be.
  • Looking at something that could only be a visual effect except it's right there in the sky.
  • A thousand year old elf working through her emotions about how her human friends keep dying.
  • The day you had to be inside during recess.
  • Standing up and throwing your potato salad and mint julep on the ground.
  • Writing an angry email to Peter Molyneux for designing eclipses badly.
  • The cold cement basement of love.
  • Media from 1992.
  • Borrowing the DVD boxed set of My So-Called Life from your manager at the pizza place.
  • Writing poems for your benefactors.
  • Poetry written from the point of view of a fake person.
  • Poetry that could plausibly have been written by a teenager.
  • Do you believe the German mathematician in the 19th century, or do you believe Google?
  • A soda can that plays the Amen Break when you open it.
  • Texts from your mom asking how is your "boyfriend," is there anything I can do to "help"?
  • What it means when someone puts two spaces after a period.
  • Growing up meaningfully on the internet.
  • Composing some shit very quickly and making sure it is very needs-suiting.
  • Taking all day to come up with 350 words because you did not grow up on IRC or forums.
  • All the kids discordin' like for real for real fam.
  • A much wider variety of emoji than anything you can do with colons and parentheses.
  • Sending the semicolon-based winky face to your wife because you cannot be bothered to pull open the emoticon window and find the right icon.
  • Asking your dad "what do you think LMAO means"
  • Aunts saying "LOL" in funeral announcements.
  • Entire generations who have terrible reading comprehension because they didn't grow up texting their friends as their primary mode of communication.
  • Missing entire regions of UI because they are vaguely shaped like ads.
  • Using a bigger computer to make your bigger purchases.
  • Millenial CAPTCHAs.
  • Straight for pay.
]]> Lords:

  • CisHetKayFaber
  • Jenni

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Plugging the enormous void in your soul by playing Balatro.
  • A card game with really good balance and numbering.
  • Seeing the light at the end of the tunnel on the Rusty Lake series.
  • Giving everybody grace except for yourself.
  • Corpse looting foley.
  • Looking through a sound library for the sound of a spider dying.
  • Buying a chair from an estate sale because you love the sound it makes.
  • The Looney Tunes cartoon where some foley artist invented everyone's conception of what a pneumatic tube sounds like.
  • Running around outside and deciding to drop a soup can into the pool.
  • A school project where you rerecord all the audio for five minutes of television.
  • Showing your project to someone and you did such a good job that they don't even notice your project.
  • All the clothes that you're wearing making all the clothes noises.
  • Watching a porn clip overdubbed with Minecraft noises at just the right time in your life.
  • Does two tails mean two assholes?
  • Putting an acronym on the Tails experience.
  • If you've got a cloaca, it's gotta go in the acronym.
  • Only getting horny when an earth, somewhere in the multiverse, is being hit by a comet.
  • Two-Tails has two assholes, and I'm one of them.
  • Forming the Megazord.
  • Lance from all the various things that have Lances in them.
  • Who is Lance in love with Voltron?
  • Google giving you sports results to make incognito mode more plausible.
  • Ironic ASMR.
  • Doin' it for the tingles.
  • When Dora the Explorer asks you what your favorite part of the show was and she says "I liked that too" except it's a video of a doctor asking you about your health.
  • The doctor explaining that this is just what your life is like now.
  • Hot dogging it on the blood pressure cuff.
  • Changing your blood pressure just to fuck with your doctor.
  • Deliberately choosing a femme-presenting chubby doctor.
  • Needing to lose about 40 pounds so you get a leg amputated.
  • Checking a box on your insurance form saying "do not give me lifestyle advice."
  • Carrying around your patient in a folder.
  • Doing the Barium test every time.
  • I'm in a Barium rotisserie, I need you to work with me.
  • Checking the quality of your stomach lining.
  • Trying to banter with the person giving you the mammogram and deeply offending them.
  • Getting small mouth shame at the dentist.
  • Rude Doctor ASMR.
  • ASMR videos where the dentist tells you your mouth is big enough.
  • Assuming Hugh Laurie is not on Cameo for the purposes of the bit.
  • Sourcing an entire podcast through Cameo.
  • The most stony-faced magical realism twin assassins.
  • Topics episode topics.
  • How to personalize a stair.
  • Hiring Mike Ehrmantraut to tell you how you're gonna do your taxes.
  • Mike Ehrmantraut administering the mammogram.
  • Visiting friends who live near the totality.
  • A stump that is freshly cut so it's exuding sap non-stop and is covered with bees and flies 24/7.
  • Whalefall but on land.
  • Chekov's oozing stump coming back in the third act.
  • Going to the astronomical society web site to be sure that the eclipse glasses you get are not the counterfeit eclipse glasses.
  • Looking at where the sun used to be.
  • Looking at something that could only be a visual effect except it's right there in the sky.
  • A thousand year old elf working through her emotions about how her human friends keep dying.
  • The day you had to be inside during recess.
  • Standing up and throwing your potato salad and mint julep on the ground.
  • Writing an angry email to Peter Molyneux for designing eclipses badly.
  • The cold cement basement of love.
  • Media from 1992.
  • Borrowing the DVD boxed set of My So-Called Life from your manager at the pizza place.
  • Writing poems for your benefactors.
  • Poetry written from the point of view of a fake person.
  • Poetry that could plausibly have been written by a teenager.
  • Do you believe the German mathematician in the 19th century, or do you believe Google?
  • A soda can that plays the Amen Break when you open it.
  • Texts from your mom asking how is your "boyfriend," is there anything I can do to "help"?
  • What it means when someone puts two spaces after a period.
  • Growing up meaningfully on the internet.
  • Composing some shit very quickly and making sure it is very needs-suiting.
  • Taking all day to come up with 350 words because you did not grow up on IRC or forums.
  • All the kids discordin' like for real for real fam.
  • A much wider variety of emoji than anything you can do with colons and parentheses.
  • Sending the semicolon-based winky face to your wife because you cannot be bothered to pull open the emoticon window and find the right icon.
  • Asking your dad "what do you think LMAO means"
  • Aunts saying "LOL" in funeral announcements.
  • Entire generations who have terrible reading comprehension because they didn't grow up texting their friends as their primary mode of communication.
  • Missing entire regions of UI because they are vaguely shaped like ads.
  • Using a bigger computer to make your bigger purchases.
  • Millenial CAPTCHAs.
  • Straight for pay.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • CisHetKayFaber
  • Jenni

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Plugging the enormous void in your soul by playing Balatro.
  • A card game with really good balance and numbering.
  • Seeing the light at the end of the tunnel on the Rusty Lake series.
  • Giving everybody grace except for yourself.
  • Corpse looting foley.
  • Looking through a sound library for the sound of a spider dying.
  • Buying a chair from an estate sale because you love the sound it makes.
  • The Looney Tunes cartoon where some foley artist invented everyone's conception of what a pneumatic tube sounds like.
  • Running around outside and deciding to drop a soup can into the pool.
  • A school project where you rerecord all the audio for five minutes of television.
  • Showing your project to someone and you did such a good job that they don't even notice your project.
  • All the clothes that you're wearing making all the clothes noises.
  • Watching a porn clip overdubbed with Minecraft noises at just the right time in your life.
  • Does two tails mean two assholes?
  • Putting an acronym on the Tails experience.
  • If you've got a cloaca, it's gotta go in the acronym.
  • Only getting horny when an earth, somewhere in the multiverse, is being hit by a comet.
  • Two-Tails has two assholes, and I'm one of them.
  • Forming the Megazord.
  • Lance from all the various things that have Lances in them.
  • Who is Lance in love with Voltron?
  • Google giving you sports results to make incognito mode more plausible.
  • Ironic ASMR.
  • Doin' it for the tingles.
  • When Dora the Explorer asks you what your favorite part of the show was and she says "I liked that too" except it's a video of a doctor asking you about your health.
  • The doctor explaining that this is just what your life is like now.
  • Hot dogging it on the blood pressure cuff.
  • Changing your blood pressure just to fuck with your doctor.
  • Deliberately choosing a femme-presenting chubby doctor.
  • Needing to lose about 40 pounds so you get a leg amputated.
  • Checking a box on your insurance form saying "do not give me lifestyle advice."
  • Carrying around your patient in a folder.
  • Doing the Barium test every time.
  • I'm in a Barium rotisserie, I need you to work with me.
  • Checking the quality of your stomach lining.
  • Trying to banter with the person giving you the mammogram and deeply offending them.
  • Getting small mouth shame at the dentist.
  • Rude Doctor ASMR.
  • ASMR videos where the dentist tells you your mouth is big enough.
  • Assuming Hugh Laurie is not on Cameo for the purposes of the bit.
  • Sourcing an entire podcast through Cameo.
  • The most stony-faced magical realism twin assassins.
  • Topics episode topics.
  • How to personalize a stair.
  • Hiring Mike Ehrmantraut to tell you how you're gonna do your taxes.
  • Mike Ehrmantraut administering the mammogram.
  • Visiting friends who live near the totality.
  • A stump that is freshly cut so it's exuding sap non-stop and is covered with bees and flies 24/7.
  • Whalefall but on land.
  • Chekov's oozing stump coming back in the third act.
  • Going to the astronomical society web site to be sure that the eclipse glasses you get are not the counterfeit eclipse glasses.
  • Looking at where the sun used to be.
  • Looking at something that could only be a visual effect except it's right there in the sky.
  • A thousand year old elf working through her emotions about how her human friends keep dying.
  • The day you had to be inside during recess.
  • Standing up and throwing your potato salad and mint julep on the ground.
  • Writing an angry email to Peter Molyneux for designing eclipses badly.
  • The cold cement basement of love.
  • Media from 1992.
  • Borrowing the DVD boxed set of My So-Called Life from your manager at the pizza place.
  • Writing poems for your benefactors.
  • Poetry written from the point of view of a fake person.
  • Poetry that could plausibly have been written by a teenager.
  • Do you believe the German mathematician in the 19th century, or do you believe Google?
  • A soda can that plays the Amen Break when you open it.
  • Texts from your mom asking how is your "boyfriend," is there anything I can do to "help"?
  • What it means when someone puts two spaces after a period.
  • Growing up meaningfully on the internet.
  • Composing some shit very quickly and making sure it is very needs-suiting.
  • Taking all day to come up with 350 words because you did not grow up on IRC or forums.
  • All the kids discordin' like for real for real fam.
  • A much wider variety of emoji than anything you can do with colons and parentheses.
  • Sending the semicolon-based winky face to your wife because you cannot be bothered to pull open the emoticon window and find the right icon.
  • Asking your dad "what do you think LMAO means"
  • Aunts saying "LOL" in funeral announcements.
  • Entire generations who have terrible reading comprehension because they didn't grow up texting their friends as their primary mode of communication.
  • Missing entire regions of UI because they are vaguely shaped like ads.
  • Using a bigger computer to make your bigger purchases.
  • Millenial CAPTCHAs.
  • Straight for pay.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+9ijmxnNp ]]> Jim Stormdancer 237. Through the Pooping Glass https://topiclords.com/through-the-pooping-glass 0098e138-43d0-4cc6-9121-421567b842f7 Mon, 06 May 2024 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Avery and Chris. We discuss cross-country skiing, putting art where advertising usually goes, running Pico-8 on a Raspberry Pi, The Day I Fell Down the Toilet, and snow being a million different things. 1:13:54 true Lords:

  • Avery
  • Chris

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Looking for a job as a programmer but finding one as a bard.
  • A Transformers the Movie style power ballad.
  • Stopping having a job on purpose.
  • All the fun things you can do on mountains.
  • Carrying around a VR helmet so you can take photos of a mountain.
  • Snowy mountains on one side and lava fields on the other.
  • Towns named after regular guys.
  • Yelling at your barista that you live in Frisco.
  • The tier list of San Francisco's rarest nicknames.
  • The wrong kind of skiing.
  • A kind of hiking that is faster and also you can slide down the hill.
  • Cross-country snowboarding.
  • Repeatedly popping out of your ski boots and landing in the snow barefoot.
  • The most winter you've experienced in your entire life.
  • Taking snow home from the mountains and putting it in a cup in your freezer.
  • Breaking your toe while stage jumping.
  • Best ways to not save a hypothermic toe.
  • Devoting a portion of your massive intellect to making your friend's life interesting.
  • Back before the Internet was threatening.
  • The Avery ARG (or AARG).
  • Writing a short story about your friend in the form of a dating personals ad and posting hundreds of copies all over town.
  • Miranda July.
  • An app that crowdsources uncomfortable personal interactions.
  • A KFC billboard that has been defaced to unrecognizability but the life-sized statue of Colonel Sanders right next to it remains untouched.
  • Partnering with Safeway to distribute your zine on the back of Safeway receipts.
  • Mixing up your ammo with your pharmaceuticals so your mugger no longer feels iron deficient.
  • Whether it's morally okay to appreciate a well-made advertisement.
  • The advertisement where the guy is now on a horse.
  • Spray tan parties happening in your area.
  • Going to the buying place with your earth money.
  • Your favorite deodorant being discontinued and buying the very last crate and rationing them even though you go to the gym every day.
  • Handling Smellium with your bare hands.
  • Smelling what happened to the scientists who discovered Smellium.
  • Asking for a fun tool for Christmas even though you know you'll never have time to use it because maybe the idea of fun is enough.
  • The screen saver only paying attention to mouse and keyboard input so when you're playing games you need to jiggle the mouse every few minutes or the screen saver kicks in
  • Looking at headlines first thing in the morning to make yourself angry enough to get out of bed.
  • Seeing a headline saying "10,000 people join Mastodon" and thinking it's talking about the metal band.
  • A touring photographer whose job is is to photograph EDM acts staring at their laptops.
  • Software developers figure out a more effective way to make money than making their users happy.
  • Nonconsensual updates.
  • Writing demos, like in the 90s, back when computers were fun.
  • The optimism of feeling like computers were going to make people's lives better.
  • Finding cool programs to download onto your computer.
  • Getting a job writing Picotron BBSes in Lua.
  • Waiting until Chat GPT learns how to use Picotron.
  • Clippy but it's self-aware and hates itself.
  • Asking Clippy for stories about Bill Gates.
  • Desktop Pets.
  • Bonzi Buddy pointedly reminding you that he has your credit card number.
  • Writing a poem to get your dad to stop asking you if you're off the toilet.
  • The scene from Trainspotting where the protagonist dives into the toilet.
  • In twenty years when Winston is hosting Topic Lords and making Frog Fractions sequels.
  • downpour.games
  • Look at this, look what I did!
  • Seeing snowflakes for the second time in your life.
  • Snow: it's beautiful, unless it's in Avery's freezer.
  • A frozen lake that you can just run around on and dogs love it.
  • Snowboarding with a kite.
  • Cross country snowboarding while holding a Swiffer.
  • Contagious ice.
  • 28 different shapes for the waters to be in.
  • A metastable high pressure form of ice.
  • The sci-fi lore of obscure ice.
  • Virtually all the ice in the biosphere.
  • Pauly Shore's lifetime achievement Oscar.
  • Why climb a mountain when you could administer a Mastodon server?
]]> Lords:

  • Avery
  • Chris

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Looking for a job as a programmer but finding one as a bard.
  • A Transformers the Movie style power ballad.
  • Stopping having a job on purpose.
  • All the fun things you can do on mountains.
  • Carrying around a VR helmet so you can take photos of a mountain.
  • Snowy mountains on one side and lava fields on the other.
  • Towns named after regular guys.
  • Yelling at your barista that you live in Frisco.
  • The tier list of San Francisco's rarest nicknames.
  • The wrong kind of skiing.
  • A kind of hiking that is faster and also you can slide down the hill.
  • Cross-country snowboarding.
  • Repeatedly popping out of your ski boots and landing in the snow barefoot.
  • The most winter you've experienced in your entire life.
  • Taking snow home from the mountains and putting it in a cup in your freezer.
  • Breaking your toe while stage jumping.
  • Best ways to not save a hypothermic toe.
  • Devoting a portion of your massive intellect to making your friend's life interesting.
  • Back before the Internet was threatening.
  • The Avery ARG (or AARG).
  • Writing a short story about your friend in the form of a dating personals ad and posting hundreds of copies all over town.
  • Miranda July.
  • An app that crowdsources uncomfortable personal interactions.
  • A KFC billboard that has been defaced to unrecognizability but the life-sized statue of Colonel Sanders right next to it remains untouched.
  • Partnering with Safeway to distribute your zine on the back of Safeway receipts.
  • Mixing up your ammo with your pharmaceuticals so your mugger no longer feels iron deficient.
  • Whether it's morally okay to appreciate a well-made advertisement.
  • The advertisement where the guy is now on a horse.
  • Spray tan parties happening in your area.
  • Going to the buying place with your earth money.
  • Your favorite deodorant being discontinued and buying the very last crate and rationing them even though you go to the gym every day.
  • Handling Smellium with your bare hands.
  • Smelling what happened to the scientists who discovered Smellium.
  • Asking for a fun tool for Christmas even though you know you'll never have time to use it because maybe the idea of fun is enough.
  • The screen saver only paying attention to mouse and keyboard input so when you're playing games you need to jiggle the mouse every few minutes or the screen saver kicks in
  • Looking at headlines first thing in the morning to make yourself angry enough to get out of bed.
  • Seeing a headline saying "10,000 people join Mastodon" and thinking it's talking about the metal band.
  • A touring photographer whose job is is to photograph EDM acts staring at their laptops.
  • Software developers figure out a more effective way to make money than making their users happy.
  • Nonconsensual updates.
  • Writing demos, like in the 90s, back when computers were fun.
  • The optimism of feeling like computers were going to make people's lives better.
  • Finding cool programs to download onto your computer.
  • Getting a job writing Picotron BBSes in Lua.
  • Waiting until Chat GPT learns how to use Picotron.
  • Clippy but it's self-aware and hates itself.
  • Asking Clippy for stories about Bill Gates.
  • Desktop Pets.
  • Bonzi Buddy pointedly reminding you that he has your credit card number.
  • Writing a poem to get your dad to stop asking you if you're off the toilet.
  • The scene from Trainspotting where the protagonist dives into the toilet.
  • In twenty years when Winston is hosting Topic Lords and making Frog Fractions sequels.
  • downpour.games
  • Look at this, look what I did!
  • Seeing snowflakes for the second time in your life.
  • Snow: it's beautiful, unless it's in Avery's freezer.
  • A frozen lake that you can just run around on and dogs love it.
  • Snowboarding with a kite.
  • Cross country snowboarding while holding a Swiffer.
  • Contagious ice.
  • 28 different shapes for the waters to be in.
  • A metastable high pressure form of ice.
  • The sci-fi lore of obscure ice.
  • Virtually all the ice in the biosphere.
  • Pauly Shore's lifetime achievement Oscar.
  • Why climb a mountain when you could administer a Mastodon server?

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Avery
  • Chris

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Looking for a job as a programmer but finding one as a bard.
  • A Transformers the Movie style power ballad.
  • Stopping having a job on purpose.
  • All the fun things you can do on mountains.
  • Carrying around a VR helmet so you can take photos of a mountain.
  • Snowy mountains on one side and lava fields on the other.
  • Towns named after regular guys.
  • Yelling at your barista that you live in Frisco.
  • The tier list of San Francisco's rarest nicknames.
  • The wrong kind of skiing.
  • A kind of hiking that is faster and also you can slide down the hill.
  • Cross-country snowboarding.
  • Repeatedly popping out of your ski boots and landing in the snow barefoot.
  • The most winter you've experienced in your entire life.
  • Taking snow home from the mountains and putting it in a cup in your freezer.
  • Breaking your toe while stage jumping.
  • Best ways to not save a hypothermic toe.
  • Devoting a portion of your massive intellect to making your friend's life interesting.
  • Back before the Internet was threatening.
  • The Avery ARG (or AARG).
  • Writing a short story about your friend in the form of a dating personals ad and posting hundreds of copies all over town.
  • Miranda July.
  • An app that crowdsources uncomfortable personal interactions.
  • A KFC billboard that has been defaced to unrecognizability but the life-sized statue of Colonel Sanders right next to it remains untouched.
  • Partnering with Safeway to distribute your zine on the back of Safeway receipts.
  • Mixing up your ammo with your pharmaceuticals so your mugger no longer feels iron deficient.
  • Whether it's morally okay to appreciate a well-made advertisement.
  • The advertisement where the guy is now on a horse.
  • Spray tan parties happening in your area.
  • Going to the buying place with your earth money.
  • Your favorite deodorant being discontinued and buying the very last crate and rationing them even though you go to the gym every day.
  • Handling Smellium with your bare hands.
  • Smelling what happened to the scientists who discovered Smellium.
  • Asking for a fun tool for Christmas even though you know you'll never have time to use it because maybe the idea of fun is enough.
  • The screen saver only paying attention to mouse and keyboard input so when you're playing games you need to jiggle the mouse every few minutes or the screen saver kicks in
  • Looking at headlines first thing in the morning to make yourself angry enough to get out of bed.
  • Seeing a headline saying "10,000 people join Mastodon" and thinking it's talking about the metal band.
  • A touring photographer whose job is is to photograph EDM acts staring at their laptops.
  • Software developers figure out a more effective way to make money than making their users happy.
  • Nonconsensual updates.
  • Writing demos, like in the 90s, back when computers were fun.
  • The optimism of feeling like computers were going to make people's lives better.
  • Finding cool programs to download onto your computer.
  • Getting a job writing Picotron BBSes in Lua.
  • Waiting until Chat GPT learns how to use Picotron.
  • Clippy but it's self-aware and hates itself.
  • Asking Clippy for stories about Bill Gates.
  • Desktop Pets.
  • Bonzi Buddy pointedly reminding you that he has your credit card number.
  • Writing a poem to get your dad to stop asking you if you're off the toilet.
  • The scene from Trainspotting where the protagonist dives into the toilet.
  • In twenty years when Winston is hosting Topic Lords and making Frog Fractions sequels.
  • downpour.games
  • Look at this, look what I did!
  • Seeing snowflakes for the second time in your life.
  • Snow: it's beautiful, unless it's in Avery's freezer.
  • A frozen lake that you can just run around on and dogs love it.
  • Snowboarding with a kite.
  • Cross country snowboarding while holding a Swiffer.
  • Contagious ice.
  • 28 different shapes for the waters to be in.
  • A metastable high pressure form of ice.
  • The sci-fi lore of obscure ice.
  • Virtually all the ice in the biosphere.
  • Pauly Shore's lifetime achievement Oscar.
  • Why climb a mountain when you could administer a Mastodon server?

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+6hKvesN1 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 236. Your Child Is About the Size of a Game Boy Advance https://topiclords.com/your-child-is-about-the-size-of-a-game-boy-advance 7f9cff6b-cd57-4af9-ab25-66c5b288fad8 Mon, 29 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Mark and Shirley. We discuss Egypt sweater, whether we want Indy to save Elsa, Kazim, Portrait of my Brother as Indiana Jones, the hardest brownface to swallow, whether pits of snakes are good circus attractions, and closing yourself in a giant box on a motorcycle. 1:01:54 true Lords:

  • Mark
  • Shirley

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • A nerd of the second-highest caliber.
  • Working in tech on the internet.
  • Quality guests on a quality show.
  • Savage Oaf vs. Savage Oath.
  • Getting on Metal Archives and figuring out those bands are.
  • Swearing an Oaf.
  • Reading "Lord of the Rings" because you are pregnant.
  • Recommending pregnancy to someone who wants a child.
  • Wonder Weeks.
  • Your child is about the size of a mid-sized sedan.
  • A delightful looking creature about the size of a Micro Machine.
  • A sister who is a chimp and other wild shit from the 1970s.
  • A screwball comedy about lions living with Tippi Hedren and mauling the director of Speed.
  • A movie about an archaeologist who is beloved by all his students and one of them is wearing this sweater.
  • 1940s Egyptian Fair Isle Jumper.
  • Getting unprofessionally close to the professor you have a crush on so he can notice your cool Egypt sweater.
  • Why Dial of Destiny didn't do that well.
  • An entirely tolerable movie according to Mark circa whenever that movie came out.
  • Deploying the tense night-time action music.
  • Going to Fiverr and paying someone the fair value of their labor.
  • Elsa's a Nazi and then we're mad at Elsa.
  • Emotionally elevated moments between Indy and Elsa.
  • Proposing to your girlfriend on the Golden Gate Bridge in a last-ditch attempt to save your relationship.
  • The payoff of Henry Jones Sr.'s character arc.
  • Elsa choosing the wrong grail on purpose.
  • The 50 grails on the other side of the room that Elsa didn't even look at.
  • Coffee cup movie magic.
  • The expeditious nature of film storytelling.
  • The Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword.
  • Kazim falling off the dock.
  • Kazim showing up to beat the shit out of a kid who is spending too much time reading about the grail on Wikipedia.
  • The two-part episode of MacGyver where MacGyver looks for the Holy Grail.
  • Stealing artifacts because they belong in museums, not with the people who originated them.
  • Going on a series of heists to steal artifacts back from museums and returning them to their people.
  • Sometimes chased, sometimes chasing.
  • Amorak from Kalamazoo.
  • Love on her eyelids.
  • A certified Wocust.
  • Compensation for my brother-in-law's car.
  • The depiction of Sallah in Raiders vs. in Last Crusade.
  • Fisher Stevens in Short Circuit.
  • A movie you can give up.
  • John Rhys-Davies playing a dwarf even though he's not even from Middle Earth.
  • Middle Earth being flat for elves but round for humans.
  • A huge vat filled with undifferentiated snakes that is a circus attraction somehow.
  • The guy who lays down in the bed of snakes.
  • A 1920s-era circus putting on a performance of the play that Snakes on a Plane was based on.
  • Giving a garter snake to every kid who comes to the circus and if their parents don't like it they can just set the snake loose in the back yard because it's the midwest.
  • Not thinking to ask a question until 30 years after you've seen the movie.
  • Liking art that is flawed.
  • Dying from a recreational drug situation.
  • Safely ensconced in the box.
  • Being chased by Nazis and taking a moment to pry open a wooden crate just in case there is a motorcycle in it.
  • Batman scrolling reddit while hiding behind the curtain for the guy he's going to surprise coming back into the office.
  • Of course that's what they do, and of course it worked, because you just saw it happen and it worked.
  • The pitfalls of googling your own medical symptoms.
]]> Lords:

  • Mark
  • Shirley

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • A nerd of the second-highest caliber.
  • Working in tech on the internet.
  • Quality guests on a quality show.
  • Savage Oaf vs. Savage Oath.
  • Getting on Metal Archives and figuring out those bands are.
  • Swearing an Oaf.
  • Reading "Lord of the Rings" because you are pregnant.
  • Recommending pregnancy to someone who wants a child.
  • Wonder Weeks.
  • Your child is about the size of a mid-sized sedan.
  • A delightful looking creature about the size of a Micro Machine.
  • A sister who is a chimp and other wild shit from the 1970s.
  • A screwball comedy about lions living with Tippi Hedren and mauling the director of Speed.
  • A movie about an archaeologist who is beloved by all his students and one of them is wearing this sweater.
  • 1940s Egyptian Fair Isle Jumper.
  • Getting unprofessionally close to the professor you have a crush on so he can notice your cool Egypt sweater.
  • Why Dial of Destiny didn't do that well.
  • An entirely tolerable movie according to Mark circa whenever that movie came out.
  • Deploying the tense night-time action music.
  • Going to Fiverr and paying someone the fair value of their labor.
  • Elsa's a Nazi and then we're mad at Elsa.
  • Emotionally elevated moments between Indy and Elsa.
  • Proposing to your girlfriend on the Golden Gate Bridge in a last-ditch attempt to save your relationship.
  • The payoff of Henry Jones Sr.'s character arc.
  • Elsa choosing the wrong grail on purpose.
  • The 50 grails on the other side of the room that Elsa didn't even look at.
  • Coffee cup movie magic.
  • The expeditious nature of film storytelling.
  • The Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword.
  • Kazim falling off the dock.
  • Kazim showing up to beat the shit out of a kid who is spending too much time reading about the grail on Wikipedia.
  • The two-part episode of MacGyver where MacGyver looks for the Holy Grail.
  • Stealing artifacts because they belong in museums, not with the people who originated them.
  • Going on a series of heists to steal artifacts back from museums and returning them to their people.
  • Sometimes chased, sometimes chasing.
  • Amorak from Kalamazoo.
  • Love on her eyelids.
  • A certified Wocust.
  • Compensation for my brother-in-law's car.
  • The depiction of Sallah in Raiders vs. in Last Crusade.
  • Fisher Stevens in Short Circuit.
  • A movie you can give up.
  • John Rhys-Davies playing a dwarf even though he's not even from Middle Earth.
  • Middle Earth being flat for elves but round for humans.
  • A huge vat filled with undifferentiated snakes that is a circus attraction somehow.
  • The guy who lays down in the bed of snakes.
  • A 1920s-era circus putting on a performance of the play that Snakes on a Plane was based on.
  • Giving a garter snake to every kid who comes to the circus and if their parents don't like it they can just set the snake loose in the back yard because it's the midwest.
  • Not thinking to ask a question until 30 years after you've seen the movie.
  • Liking art that is flawed.
  • Dying from a recreational drug situation.
  • Safely ensconced in the box.
  • Being chased by Nazis and taking a moment to pry open a wooden crate just in case there is a motorcycle in it.
  • Batman scrolling reddit while hiding behind the curtain for the guy he's going to surprise coming back into the office.
  • Of course that's what they do, and of course it worked, because you just saw it happen and it worked.
  • The pitfalls of googling your own medical symptoms.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Mark
  • Shirley

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • A nerd of the second-highest caliber.
  • Working in tech on the internet.
  • Quality guests on a quality show.
  • Savage Oaf vs. Savage Oath.
  • Getting on Metal Archives and figuring out those bands are.
  • Swearing an Oaf.
  • Reading "Lord of the Rings" because you are pregnant.
  • Recommending pregnancy to someone who wants a child.
  • Wonder Weeks.
  • Your child is about the size of a mid-sized sedan.
  • A delightful looking creature about the size of a Micro Machine.
  • A sister who is a chimp and other wild shit from the 1970s.
  • A screwball comedy about lions living with Tippi Hedren and mauling the director of Speed.
  • A movie about an archaeologist who is beloved by all his students and one of them is wearing this sweater.
  • 1940s Egyptian Fair Isle Jumper.
  • Getting unprofessionally close to the professor you have a crush on so he can notice your cool Egypt sweater.
  • Why Dial of Destiny didn't do that well.
  • An entirely tolerable movie according to Mark circa whenever that movie came out.
  • Deploying the tense night-time action music.
  • Going to Fiverr and paying someone the fair value of their labor.
  • Elsa's a Nazi and then we're mad at Elsa.
  • Emotionally elevated moments between Indy and Elsa.
  • Proposing to your girlfriend on the Golden Gate Bridge in a last-ditch attempt to save your relationship.
  • The payoff of Henry Jones Sr.'s character arc.
  • Elsa choosing the wrong grail on purpose.
  • The 50 grails on the other side of the room that Elsa didn't even look at.
  • Coffee cup movie magic.
  • The expeditious nature of film storytelling.
  • The Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword.
  • Kazim falling off the dock.
  • Kazim showing up to beat the shit out of a kid who is spending too much time reading about the grail on Wikipedia.
  • The two-part episode of MacGyver where MacGyver looks for the Holy Grail.
  • Stealing artifacts because they belong in museums, not with the people who originated them.
  • Going on a series of heists to steal artifacts back from museums and returning them to their people.
  • Sometimes chased, sometimes chasing.
  • Amorak from Kalamazoo.
  • Love on her eyelids.
  • A certified Wocust.
  • Compensation for my brother-in-law's car.
  • The depiction of Sallah in Raiders vs. in Last Crusade.
  • Fisher Stevens in Short Circuit.
  • A movie you can give up.
  • John Rhys-Davies playing a dwarf even though he's not even from Middle Earth.
  • Middle Earth being flat for elves but round for humans.
  • A huge vat filled with undifferentiated snakes that is a circus attraction somehow.
  • The guy who lays down in the bed of snakes.
  • A 1920s-era circus putting on a performance of the play that Snakes on a Plane was based on.
  • Giving a garter snake to every kid who comes to the circus and if their parents don't like it they can just set the snake loose in the back yard because it's the midwest.
  • Not thinking to ask a question until 30 years after you've seen the movie.
  • Liking art that is flawed.
  • Dying from a recreational drug situation.
  • Safely ensconced in the box.
  • Being chased by Nazis and taking a moment to pry open a wooden crate just in case there is a motorcycle in it.
  • Batman scrolling reddit while hiding behind the curtain for the guy he's going to surprise coming back into the office.
  • Of course that's what they do, and of course it worked, because you just saw it happen and it worked.
  • The pitfalls of googling your own medical symptoms.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+JA326buA ]]> Jim Stormdancer 235. Ennui Golf https://topiclords.com/ennui-golf 89a0c322-695d-40b5-af47-d0e552837352 Mon, 22 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Jenni and Xalavier. We discuss centaur internal organs, adapting unlikely horror franchises, whether boomerangs work, Serious KAAAND, game mascots as sexual avatars of their creators, and The Ted Dabney Experience. 1:03:35 true Lords:

  • Jenni
  • Xalavier

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Rusty Lake.
  • An intriguing, terrifying morsel.
  • Whether it's okay to lie on this show.
  • Life Eater.
  • The horror fantasy kidnapping sim space.
  • Shippers shipping games.
  • How do we ship this game without destroying people?
  • All of the horse except for the head and neck.
  • Cosmetic centaur organs.
  • Introducing yourself to the inside of a centaur and it's extremely squishy in there.
  • A single multifunctional cube that births a centaur and that's the original Xbox startup video.
  • Speaking a language that doesn't exist and every time you finish a sentence you hear church bells.
  • Would a defective centaur wear a hat like this or like this?
  • Centaurs always standing at their standing desks.
  • A centaur wearing a horse mask.
  • Playing Wii Golf with someone who remains sitting the entire time.
  • Getting off the Power Pad to long jump.
  • Sitting golf.
  • My Dinner with Andre the Giant.
  • The monster mash vs. monster bash.
  • Adapting the Ghostbusters theme song to other media.
  • Playing as the car and running people over.
  • Jail for cars.
  • Jelly beans that taste bad on purpose.
  • 80s films for children that are meant to turn them into weird bisexuals when they grow up.
  • Jeff Minter's Dune.
  • Barbarella the video game.
  • More things you can do with your Rock Band instruments.
  • Sticking even more games inside of Fortnite.
  • The lemur with the really big eyes.
  • Microorganisms that live in water and have the end of a comedy roast bone for a head.
  • Venomousness of hybrid mammals.
  • Grabbing your stress ball after learning that the duck billed platypus uses electroreception to track their prey, Xalavier Nelson, Jr.
  • Platypus patch notes.
  • Adding expansions to Classic World of Warcraft.
  • Gauging the temperature of the room when it comes to boomerangs.
  • Throwing a washing machine in a circle.
  • How you feel when the boomerang doesn't come back.
  • Objects that you see on TV.
  • Boomerangs that instant of being carved to return when you throw them, are carved to say "help, I'm trapped in a boomerang factory" in an Australian accent when the wind whistles through it.
  • A boomerang with a heart on it that you throw to find true love.
  • Boomerangs vs. Gen-Xerangs.
  • Getting lazy by the time you sharpen the 7th blade on your boomerang.
  • Disrupting marshmallows by making them kinda good.
  • Hiring a game studio to make a satisfying sequel to Katamari Damacy and then immediately suing them for fraud because making a satisfying sequel to Katamari Damacy is impossible.
  • Getting Australian concussions all weekend.
  • Naming your facial hair "are you ready for the next topics"
  • Hi guys call anyone knows how to buy guns and armor India?
  • Crossposting between r/TopicLords to r/IndianTeenagers.
  • Weeding out the cowards with Gregorian Chant.
  • Looking at Glover and immediately understanding his salient sexual verbs.
  • The distinction between mascot and main character.
  • Your Sonics, your Gexes and your Crashes Bandicoot.
  • Switching places with your therapist.
  • Non-saucy mascots.
  • Having to pick between being horny and being a sociopath because you can't be both.
  • Glover vs. Hamburger Helper vs. Thing.
  • Opening yourself to a deeper Freudian zeitgeist.
  • The mascot platformer you keep seeing roms of but have never downloaded.
  • Blinx 2: Masters of Time and Space.
  • Blinx dressing up as the lead singer of Power Man 5000.
  • Exactly the sort of podcast segment you want to commit to sight unseen.
  • Being willing to give up 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand to make a friend happy.
  • How much do you want that Golden Microphone?
  • The crucible of the soul you go through to record a podcast.
  • People in the future deciding what you would have made a podcast about if you were still alive and making that podcast.
  • The Xalavier Nelson, Jr. Experience.
  • The dream list of developers you ask to help finish your game in your will.
  • Locking Albert Einsten and Genghis Khan in a haunted house and they vote each other off the show back and forth forever.
  • A deeply safe field for job hunting.
  • The Ted Dabney Experience of finding out that Ted Dabney died twelve years ago.
  • Mrs. Columbo.
  • A movie named "This Movie Has Marky Mark In It."
  • A game called Beyonce Battle Royale that doesn't have Beyonce in it and it's not a battle royale. (It's a clicker.)
  • Beyonce: Oops All Mudkips.
]]> Lords:

  • Jenni
  • Xalavier

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Rusty Lake.
  • An intriguing, terrifying morsel.
  • Whether it's okay to lie on this show.
  • Life Eater.
  • The horror fantasy kidnapping sim space.
  • Shippers shipping games.
  • How do we ship this game without destroying people?
  • All of the horse except for the head and neck.
  • Cosmetic centaur organs.
  • Introducing yourself to the inside of a centaur and it's extremely squishy in there.
  • A single multifunctional cube that births a centaur and that's the original Xbox startup video.
  • Speaking a language that doesn't exist and every time you finish a sentence you hear church bells.
  • Would a defective centaur wear a hat like this or like this?
  • Centaurs always standing at their standing desks.
  • A centaur wearing a horse mask.
  • Playing Wii Golf with someone who remains sitting the entire time.
  • Getting off the Power Pad to long jump.
  • Sitting golf.
  • My Dinner with Andre the Giant.
  • The monster mash vs. monster bash.
  • Adapting the Ghostbusters theme song to other media.
  • Playing as the car and running people over.
  • Jail for cars.
  • Jelly beans that taste bad on purpose.
  • 80s films for children that are meant to turn them into weird bisexuals when they grow up.
  • Jeff Minter's Dune.
  • Barbarella the video game.
  • More things you can do with your Rock Band instruments.
  • Sticking even more games inside of Fortnite.
  • The lemur with the really big eyes.
  • Microorganisms that live in water and have the end of a comedy roast bone for a head.
  • Venomousness of hybrid mammals.
  • Grabbing your stress ball after learning that the duck billed platypus uses electroreception to track their prey, Xalavier Nelson, Jr.
  • Platypus patch notes.
  • Adding expansions to Classic World of Warcraft.
  • Gauging the temperature of the room when it comes to boomerangs.
  • Throwing a washing machine in a circle.
  • How you feel when the boomerang doesn't come back.
  • Objects that you see on TV.
  • Boomerangs that instant of being carved to return when you throw them, are carved to say "help, I'm trapped in a boomerang factory" in an Australian accent when the wind whistles through it.
  • A boomerang with a heart on it that you throw to find true love.
  • Boomerangs vs. Gen-Xerangs.
  • Getting lazy by the time you sharpen the 7th blade on your boomerang.
  • Disrupting marshmallows by making them kinda good.
  • Hiring a game studio to make a satisfying sequel to Katamari Damacy and then immediately suing them for fraud because making a satisfying sequel to Katamari Damacy is impossible.
  • Getting Australian concussions all weekend.
  • Naming your facial hair "are you ready for the next topics"
  • Hi guys call anyone knows how to buy guns and armor India?
  • Crossposting between r/TopicLords to r/IndianTeenagers.
  • Weeding out the cowards with Gregorian Chant.
  • Looking at Glover and immediately understanding his salient sexual verbs.
  • The distinction between mascot and main character.
  • Your Sonics, your Gexes and your Crashes Bandicoot.
  • Switching places with your therapist.
  • Non-saucy mascots.
  • Having to pick between being horny and being a sociopath because you can't be both.
  • Glover vs. Hamburger Helper vs. Thing.
  • Opening yourself to a deeper Freudian zeitgeist.
  • The mascot platformer you keep seeing roms of but have never downloaded.
  • Blinx 2: Masters of Time and Space.
  • Blinx dressing up as the lead singer of Power Man 5000.
  • Exactly the sort of podcast segment you want to commit to sight unseen.
  • Being willing to give up 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand to make a friend happy.
  • How much do you want that Golden Microphone?
  • The crucible of the soul you go through to record a podcast.
  • People in the future deciding what you would have made a podcast about if you were still alive and making that podcast.
  • The Xalavier Nelson, Jr. Experience.
  • The dream list of developers you ask to help finish your game in your will.
  • Locking Albert Einsten and Genghis Khan in a haunted house and they vote each other off the show back and forth forever.
  • A deeply safe field for job hunting.
  • The Ted Dabney Experience of finding out that Ted Dabney died twelve years ago.
  • Mrs. Columbo.
  • A movie named "This Movie Has Marky Mark In It."
  • A game called Beyonce Battle Royale that doesn't have Beyonce in it and it's not a battle royale. (It's a clicker.)
  • Beyonce: Oops All Mudkips.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Jenni
  • Xalavier

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Rusty Lake.
  • An intriguing, terrifying morsel.
  • Whether it's okay to lie on this show.
  • Life Eater.
  • The horror fantasy kidnapping sim space.
  • Shippers shipping games.
  • How do we ship this game without destroying people?
  • All of the horse except for the head and neck.
  • Cosmetic centaur organs.
  • Introducing yourself to the inside of a centaur and it's extremely squishy in there.
  • A single multifunctional cube that births a centaur and that's the original Xbox startup video.
  • Speaking a language that doesn't exist and every time you finish a sentence you hear church bells.
  • Would a defective centaur wear a hat like this or like this?
  • Centaurs always standing at their standing desks.
  • A centaur wearing a horse mask.
  • Playing Wii Golf with someone who remains sitting the entire time.
  • Getting off the Power Pad to long jump.
  • Sitting golf.
  • My Dinner with Andre the Giant.
  • The monster mash vs. monster bash.
  • Adapting the Ghostbusters theme song to other media.
  • Playing as the car and running people over.
  • Jail for cars.
  • Jelly beans that taste bad on purpose.
  • 80s films for children that are meant to turn them into weird bisexuals when they grow up.
  • Jeff Minter's Dune.
  • Barbarella the video game.
  • More things you can do with your Rock Band instruments.
  • Sticking even more games inside of Fortnite.
  • The lemur with the really big eyes.
  • Microorganisms that live in water and have the end of a comedy roast bone for a head.
  • Venomousness of hybrid mammals.
  • Grabbing your stress ball after learning that the duck billed platypus uses electroreception to track their prey, Xalavier Nelson, Jr.
  • Platypus patch notes.
  • Adding expansions to Classic World of Warcraft.
  • Gauging the temperature of the room when it comes to boomerangs.
  • Throwing a washing machine in a circle.
  • How you feel when the boomerang doesn't come back.
  • Objects that you see on TV.
  • Boomerangs that instant of being carved to return when you throw them, are carved to say "help, I'm trapped in a boomerang factory" in an Australian accent when the wind whistles through it.
  • A boomerang with a heart on it that you throw to find true love.
  • Boomerangs vs. Gen-Xerangs.
  • Getting lazy by the time you sharpen the 7th blade on your boomerang.
  • Disrupting marshmallows by making them kinda good.
  • Hiring a game studio to make a satisfying sequel to Katamari Damacy and then immediately suing them for fraud because making a satisfying sequel to Katamari Damacy is impossible.
  • Getting Australian concussions all weekend.
  • Naming your facial hair "are you ready for the next topics"
  • Hi guys call anyone knows how to buy guns and armor India?
  • Crossposting between r/TopicLords to r/IndianTeenagers.
  • Weeding out the cowards with Gregorian Chant.
  • Looking at Glover and immediately understanding his salient sexual verbs.
  • The distinction between mascot and main character.
  • Your Sonics, your Gexes and your Crashes Bandicoot.
  • Switching places with your therapist.
  • Non-saucy mascots.
  • Having to pick between being horny and being a sociopath because you can't be both.
  • Glover vs. Hamburger Helper vs. Thing.
  • Opening yourself to a deeper Freudian zeitgeist.
  • The mascot platformer you keep seeing roms of but have never downloaded.
  • Blinx 2: Masters of Time and Space.
  • Blinx dressing up as the lead singer of Power Man 5000.
  • Exactly the sort of podcast segment you want to commit to sight unseen.
  • Being willing to give up 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand to make a friend happy.
  • How much do you want that Golden Microphone?
  • The crucible of the soul you go through to record a podcast.
  • People in the future deciding what you would have made a podcast about if you were still alive and making that podcast.
  • The Xalavier Nelson, Jr. Experience.
  • The dream list of developers you ask to help finish your game in your will.
  • Locking Albert Einsten and Genghis Khan in a haunted house and they vote each other off the show back and forth forever.
  • A deeply safe field for job hunting.
  • The Ted Dabney Experience of finding out that Ted Dabney died twelve years ago.
  • Mrs. Columbo.
  • A movie named "This Movie Has Marky Mark In It."
  • A game called Beyonce Battle Royale that doesn't have Beyonce in it and it's not a battle royale. (It's a clicker.)
  • Beyonce: Oops All Mudkips.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+QTebtX-R ]]> Jim Stormdancer 234. Plunge Correctly for High Score https://topiclords.com/plunge-correctly-for-high-score 39ac5f31-4f4d-449b-98d4-f2e6bd793494 Mon, 15 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: JohnB and Kevin. We discuss Don Quixote, the Time Life Mysteries of the Unknown series, whether phones need to ring, Desiderata by Max Ehrmann, and whether pinball is supposed to be fun. 1:10:03 true Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Dog ownership.
  • A living creature that just wanders around the house.
  • Picking up warm soft weird thing.
  • Cracking open a cold one.
  • Computers flush with science data.
  • The deepest images humans have ever taken.
  • Finding distances to individual galaxies.
  • Listicles you can peruse.
  • Picking a galaxy and naming it after yourself.
  • Bug Mars 2.
  • The Glass Universe.
  • Hiring women and calling them computers.
  • A guy with a lot of free time and a gold nose.
  • Some public domain books being more readable than others.
  • Pun localization.
  • North American otaku tilting at windmills with their katanas.
  • How people pronounce quixotic and how they ought to pronounce quixotic.
  • Whether we respect English majors on this show.
  • Naming a character something weird and hoping nobody argues about the pronunciation hundreds of years from now.
  • Butthead as Don Quixote and Beavis as Sancho Panza.
  • The Great Cornholio tilting at windmills.
  • The era of translations that don't realize Don Quixote is a parody.
  • Part II of Don Quixote responding to Don Quixote fan fiction.
  • Don Coyote.
  • Sending Mario Maker back to Miguel Cervantes to see what he would make.
  • The kinds of books your parents would have on their shelf, back when that was the only thing available to read.
  • The 80s resurgence of New Age thought.
  • Mystic Places.
  • The Shin Megami Tensei section in the library.
  • Where to find the books that teach you magic in the public library.
  • The canonical map of reported UFO sightings worldwide.
  • Books for the kind of person who thinks Aleister Crowley is cool.
  • The Spaceships of Ezekiel.
  • The JWST iceberg.
  • The Distant Astronomical Objects iceberg.
  • A tin can and a string with a battery attached.
  • Hello, fellow phone owner.
  • A phone call asking you to log into a web site and read a message.
  • Funny ways to answer the phone.
  • E.B. Games, where you can get F-Zero for Zero.
  • The size of fortune cookies in the 1920s.
  • Nice things to do and be.
  • Desiderata vs. Deteriorata.
  • Advice giving poems.
  • Skin cancer is mid.
  • Casey Kasem quitting Transformers after they wrote an episode featuring Abdul, king of Carbombya.
  • Avoiding loud and aggressive persons.
  • Pinball getting harder and more complex over the course of a century.
  • Baffleball.
  • Pinball features to make things easier for beginners.
  • The quickest way to lose money on an arcade game.
  • Tilt-sensing plum bobs.
  • A weird kinetic sculpture that exists just for your entertainment.
  • The Black Hole for Personal Reasons.
  • A boring and easy pinball cabinet that you can play for an hour when you want to get sick of pinball.
  • Tilt: The Battle to Save Pinball.
  • Multidisc!
  • Pinball tables by George Gomez.
  • Pinball: not actually fun, but they did their best.
  • Free play skee-ball.
  • Pacific Pinball Museum and Musee Mecanique.
  • Twitter forgiveness.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Dog ownership.
  • A living creature that just wanders around the house.
  • Picking up warm soft weird thing.
  • Cracking open a cold one.
  • Computers flush with science data.
  • The deepest images humans have ever taken.
  • Finding distances to individual galaxies.
  • Listicles you can peruse.
  • Picking a galaxy and naming it after yourself.
  • Bug Mars 2.
  • The Glass Universe.
  • Hiring women and calling them computers.
  • A guy with a lot of free time and a gold nose.
  • Some public domain books being more readable than others.
  • Pun localization.
  • North American otaku tilting at windmills with their katanas.
  • How people pronounce quixotic and how they ought to pronounce quixotic.
  • Whether we respect English majors on this show.
  • Naming a character something weird and hoping nobody argues about the pronunciation hundreds of years from now.
  • Butthead as Don Quixote and Beavis as Sancho Panza.
  • The Great Cornholio tilting at windmills.
  • The era of translations that don't realize Don Quixote is a parody.
  • Part II of Don Quixote responding to Don Quixote fan fiction.
  • Don Coyote.
  • Sending Mario Maker back to Miguel Cervantes to see what he would make.
  • The kinds of books your parents would have on their shelf, back when that was the only thing available to read.
  • The 80s resurgence of New Age thought.
  • Mystic Places.
  • The Shin Megami Tensei section in the library.
  • Where to find the books that teach you magic in the public library.
  • The canonical map of reported UFO sightings worldwide.
  • Books for the kind of person who thinks Aleister Crowley is cool.
  • The Spaceships of Ezekiel.
  • The JWST iceberg.
  • The Distant Astronomical Objects iceberg.
  • A tin can and a string with a battery attached.
  • Hello, fellow phone owner.
  • A phone call asking you to log into a web site and read a message.
  • Funny ways to answer the phone.
  • E.B. Games, where you can get F-Zero for Zero.
  • The size of fortune cookies in the 1920s.
  • Nice things to do and be.
  • Desiderata vs. Deteriorata.
  • Advice giving poems.
  • Skin cancer is mid.
  • Casey Kasem quitting Transformers after they wrote an episode featuring Abdul, king of Carbombya.
  • Avoiding loud and aggressive persons.
  • Pinball getting harder and more complex over the course of a century.
  • Baffleball.
  • Pinball features to make things easier for beginners.
  • The quickest way to lose money on an arcade game.
  • Tilt-sensing plum bobs.
  • A weird kinetic sculpture that exists just for your entertainment.
  • The Black Hole for Personal Reasons.
  • A boring and easy pinball cabinet that you can play for an hour when you want to get sick of pinball.
  • Tilt: The Battle to Save Pinball.
  • Multidisc!
  • Pinball tables by George Gomez.
  • Pinball: not actually fun, but they did their best.
  • Free play skee-ball.
  • Pacific Pinball Museum and Musee Mecanique.
  • Twitter forgiveness.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Dog ownership.
  • A living creature that just wanders around the house.
  • Picking up warm soft weird thing.
  • Cracking open a cold one.
  • Computers flush with science data.
  • The deepest images humans have ever taken.
  • Finding distances to individual galaxies.
  • Listicles you can peruse.
  • Picking a galaxy and naming it after yourself.
  • Bug Mars 2.
  • The Glass Universe.
  • Hiring women and calling them computers.
  • A guy with a lot of free time and a gold nose.
  • Some public domain books being more readable than others.
  • Pun localization.
  • North American otaku tilting at windmills with their katanas.
  • How people pronounce quixotic and how they ought to pronounce quixotic.
  • Whether we respect English majors on this show.
  • Naming a character something weird and hoping nobody argues about the pronunciation hundreds of years from now.
  • Butthead as Don Quixote and Beavis as Sancho Panza.
  • The Great Cornholio tilting at windmills.
  • The era of translations that don't realize Don Quixote is a parody.
  • Part II of Don Quixote responding to Don Quixote fan fiction.
  • Don Coyote.
  • Sending Mario Maker back to Miguel Cervantes to see what he would make.
  • The kinds of books your parents would have on their shelf, back when that was the only thing available to read.
  • The 80s resurgence of New Age thought.
  • Mystic Places.
  • The Shin Megami Tensei section in the library.
  • Where to find the books that teach you magic in the public library.
  • The canonical map of reported UFO sightings worldwide.
  • Books for the kind of person who thinks Aleister Crowley is cool.
  • The Spaceships of Ezekiel.
  • The JWST iceberg.
  • The Distant Astronomical Objects iceberg.
  • A tin can and a string with a battery attached.
  • Hello, fellow phone owner.
  • A phone call asking you to log into a web site and read a message.
  • Funny ways to answer the phone.
  • E.B. Games, where you can get F-Zero for Zero.
  • The size of fortune cookies in the 1920s.
  • Nice things to do and be.
  • Desiderata vs. Deteriorata.
  • Advice giving poems.
  • Skin cancer is mid.
  • Casey Kasem quitting Transformers after they wrote an episode featuring Abdul, king of Carbombya.
  • Avoiding loud and aggressive persons.
  • Pinball getting harder and more complex over the course of a century.
  • Baffleball.
  • Pinball features to make things easier for beginners.
  • The quickest way to lose money on an arcade game.
  • Tilt-sensing plum bobs.
  • A weird kinetic sculpture that exists just for your entertainment.
  • The Black Hole for Personal Reasons.
  • A boring and easy pinball cabinet that you can play for an hour when you want to get sick of pinball.
  • Tilt: The Battle to Save Pinball.
  • Multidisc!
  • Pinball tables by George Gomez.
  • Pinball: not actually fun, but they did their best.
  • Free play skee-ball.
  • Pacific Pinball Museum and Musee Mecanique.
  • Twitter forgiveness.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+KYPgRlsw ]]> Jim Stormdancer 233. A Huge Pile of Gold You Just Use To Shoot Porn On https://topiclords.com/a-huge-pile-of-gold-you-just-use-to-shoot-porn-on 8e98eeee-453a-4cd3-af63-367c254209bf Mon, 08 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Jonah and AC. We discuss listening to music backwards, decentralized manufacturing, other terms like "foodies" to describe those who are super into universal bodily functions, The Bathroom Line, by Jesse Thurston and playtesting Legos. 1:12:35 true Lords:

  • Jonah
  • AC

Topics:

  • When was the last time you listened to a song backwards?
  • Decentralized manufacturing
  • Are there other terms like "foodies," to describe those who are super into universal bodily functions?
  • The Bathroom Line, by Jesse Thurston
  • Playtesting legos

Microtopics:

  • Pet Rock Dot Site
  • Whether rhythm is a kind of sound.
  • A rhythm synthesizer that produces control voltages.
  • All the things you could hypothetically like about New York City.
  • Crowded speculative real estate.
  • Canada's role as a fire hazard.
  • The power company in charge of all the wildfires.
  • What happened to Smokey the Bear.
  • Stopping for lobsters crossing the highway.
  • Whether Smokey the Bear died in his sleep.
  • Putting the oven on self clean and it cleans your whole house.
  • Bringing back Satanic Panic to make backmasking cool again.
  • Constructing a cliff that echoes backwards.
  • Musique Concrete.
  • The kind of people who would make an album in Csound.
  • Admitting that your music is hilarious.
  • Conlon Nancarrow's works for player piano.
  • Black MIDI.
  • Knowing that you should be adding a constraint to your assertion but not knowing what it should be.
  • If Conlon Nancarrow had only entered cryosleep.
  • Loading up a song in Sound Forge.
  • Squid Salmple.
  • Bluetooth: it works every time!
  • Virtual modular synthesizers with cool cable physics.
  • The etymology of backmasking.
  • If Wiktionary is so good, why isn't there a Wiktionary 2?
  • Franchising your rhythm box.
  • Doing each other's administrative work.
  • Doing a labor swap to get fresh eyes on your project.
  • Ubering to the trail head.
  • Imagine: paying rent for an office.
  • Poopsocking it on this family show.
  • The Armory.
  • Going back in time and having $14 million.
  • Selling your forehead as advertising space.
  • Joseph Circuit City Smith.
  • This man needs your help to remove his porn logo forehead tattoos.
  • Aspirational snake eye contacts.
  • Your contacts contact.
  • Antique sword knife bookmark charm sword knife pendants knife charms for bookmarks.
  • Going to the breathing club and breathing really hard.
  • The Hearty-Starty.
  • Trying to joke about a thing that turns out to just be a real thing.
  • A Facebook group for people who love shitting.
  • Blinkos and all the nuances of the ways they love to blink.
  • A whole world just for smelling.
  • How your heart doesn't stop every time you sneeze.
  • Green text vs. other colors of text.
  • The r/bluetext subreddit that's all about links to other web sites.
  • Nutty Gum and Fruit Spleggings.
  • Finding the one while in line to poop.
  • Going to college for like a year and one of the best things about it was the bathroom graffiti.
  • A chalkboard in the physics department's bathroom stall.
  • Help I'm trapped in the bathroom grout.
  • Peeing while trying to think of a poem.
  • Peeing your pants in the bathroom.
  • Don't Backmask Me, Bro.
  • Finding someone in a bar who wants to playtest your experimental game for three hours.
  • The movie Yesterday except for inventing Legos.
  • Following instructions as a way to fidget.
  • Trying to solve a difficult programming puzzle when someone comes up and starts biting you in the ass.
  • All the ways someone can be onboarded onto an experience.
  • Free HTML5 Games Tagged Idle.
  • Top Three Clickers.
  • Roguathia.
  • Waiting until you have more SP to select upgrades.
]]> Lords:

  • Jonah
  • AC

Topics:

  • When was the last time you listened to a song backwards?
  • Decentralized manufacturing
  • Are there other terms like "foodies," to describe those who are super into universal bodily functions?
  • The Bathroom Line, by Jesse Thurston
  • Playtesting legos

Microtopics:

  • Pet Rock Dot Site
  • Whether rhythm is a kind of sound.
  • A rhythm synthesizer that produces control voltages.
  • All the things you could hypothetically like about New York City.
  • Crowded speculative real estate.
  • Canada's role as a fire hazard.
  • The power company in charge of all the wildfires.
  • What happened to Smokey the Bear.
  • Stopping for lobsters crossing the highway.
  • Whether Smokey the Bear died in his sleep.
  • Putting the oven on self clean and it cleans your whole house.
  • Bringing back Satanic Panic to make backmasking cool again.
  • Constructing a cliff that echoes backwards.
  • Musique Concrete.
  • The kind of people who would make an album in Csound.
  • Admitting that your music is hilarious.
  • Conlon Nancarrow's works for player piano.
  • Black MIDI.
  • Knowing that you should be adding a constraint to your assertion but not knowing what it should be.
  • If Conlon Nancarrow had only entered cryosleep.
  • Loading up a song in Sound Forge.
  • Squid Salmple.
  • Bluetooth: it works every time!
  • Virtual modular synthesizers with cool cable physics.
  • The etymology of backmasking.
  • If Wiktionary is so good, why isn't there a Wiktionary 2?
  • Franchising your rhythm box.
  • Doing each other's administrative work.
  • Doing a labor swap to get fresh eyes on your project.
  • Ubering to the trail head.
  • Imagine: paying rent for an office.
  • Poopsocking it on this family show.
  • The Armory.
  • Going back in time and having $14 million.
  • Selling your forehead as advertising space.
  • Joseph Circuit City Smith.
  • This man needs your help to remove his porn logo forehead tattoos.
  • Aspirational snake eye contacts.
  • Your contacts contact.
  • Antique sword knife bookmark charm sword knife pendants knife charms for bookmarks.
  • Going to the breathing club and breathing really hard.
  • The Hearty-Starty.
  • Trying to joke about a thing that turns out to just be a real thing.
  • A Facebook group for people who love shitting.
  • Blinkos and all the nuances of the ways they love to blink.
  • A whole world just for smelling.
  • How your heart doesn't stop every time you sneeze.
  • Green text vs. other colors of text.
  • The r/bluetext subreddit that's all about links to other web sites.
  • Nutty Gum and Fruit Spleggings.
  • Finding the one while in line to poop.
  • Going to college for like a year and one of the best things about it was the bathroom graffiti.
  • A chalkboard in the physics department's bathroom stall.
  • Help I'm trapped in the bathroom grout.
  • Peeing while trying to think of a poem.
  • Peeing your pants in the bathroom.
  • Don't Backmask Me, Bro.
  • Finding someone in a bar who wants to playtest your experimental game for three hours.
  • The movie Yesterday except for inventing Legos.
  • Following instructions as a way to fidget.
  • Trying to solve a difficult programming puzzle when someone comes up and starts biting you in the ass.
  • All the ways someone can be onboarded onto an experience.
  • Free HTML5 Games Tagged Idle.
  • Top Three Clickers.
  • Roguathia.
  • Waiting until you have more SP to select upgrades.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Jonah
  • AC

Topics:

  • When was the last time you listened to a song backwards?
  • Decentralized manufacturing
  • Are there other terms like "foodies," to describe those who are super into universal bodily functions?
  • The Bathroom Line, by Jesse Thurston
  • Playtesting legos

Microtopics:

  • Pet Rock Dot Site
  • Whether rhythm is a kind of sound.
  • A rhythm synthesizer that produces control voltages.
  • All the things you could hypothetically like about New York City.
  • Crowded speculative real estate.
  • Canada's role as a fire hazard.
  • The power company in charge of all the wildfires.
  • What happened to Smokey the Bear.
  • Stopping for lobsters crossing the highway.
  • Whether Smokey the Bear died in his sleep.
  • Putting the oven on self clean and it cleans your whole house.
  • Bringing back Satanic Panic to make backmasking cool again.
  • Constructing a cliff that echoes backwards.
  • Musique Concrete.
  • The kind of people who would make an album in Csound.
  • Admitting that your music is hilarious.
  • Conlon Nancarrow's works for player piano.
  • Black MIDI.
  • Knowing that you should be adding a constraint to your assertion but not knowing what it should be.
  • If Conlon Nancarrow had only entered cryosleep.
  • Loading up a song in Sound Forge.
  • Squid Salmple.
  • Bluetooth: it works every time!
  • Virtual modular synthesizers with cool cable physics.
  • The etymology of backmasking.
  • If Wiktionary is so good, why isn't there a Wiktionary 2?
  • Franchising your rhythm box.
  • Doing each other's administrative work.
  • Doing a labor swap to get fresh eyes on your project.
  • Ubering to the trail head.
  • Imagine: paying rent for an office.
  • Poopsocking it on this family show.
  • The Armory.
  • Going back in time and having $14 million.
  • Selling your forehead as advertising space.
  • Joseph Circuit City Smith.
  • This man needs your help to remove his porn logo forehead tattoos.
  • Aspirational snake eye contacts.
  • Your contacts contact.
  • Antique sword knife bookmark charm sword knife pendants knife charms for bookmarks.
  • Going to the breathing club and breathing really hard.
  • The Hearty-Starty.
  • Trying to joke about a thing that turns out to just be a real thing.
  • A Facebook group for people who love shitting.
  • Blinkos and all the nuances of the ways they love to blink.
  • A whole world just for smelling.
  • How your heart doesn't stop every time you sneeze.
  • Green text vs. other colors of text.
  • The r/bluetext subreddit that's all about links to other web sites.
  • Nutty Gum and Fruit Spleggings.
  • Finding the one while in line to poop.
  • Going to college for like a year and one of the best things about it was the bathroom graffiti.
  • A chalkboard in the physics department's bathroom stall.
  • Help I'm trapped in the bathroom grout.
  • Peeing while trying to think of a poem.
  • Peeing your pants in the bathroom.
  • Don't Backmask Me, Bro.
  • Finding someone in a bar who wants to playtest your experimental game for three hours.
  • The movie Yesterday except for inventing Legos.
  • Following instructions as a way to fidget.
  • Trying to solve a difficult programming puzzle when someone comes up and starts biting you in the ass.
  • All the ways someone can be onboarded onto an experience.
  • Free HTML5 Games Tagged Idle.
  • Top Three Clickers.
  • Roguathia.
  • Waiting until you have more SP to select upgrades.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+5S5MFrlZ ]]> Jim Stormdancer 232. Where's the Poem, Zaborowske? https://topiclords.com/wheres-the-poem-zaborowske b9901864-742a-46ed-91b5-b797acf1c8cc Mon, 01 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Chris and Dev. We discuss taking improv classes, practicing three keyboard layouts at the same time, the perils of store brand salt, I Once Snorted an Eight Ball with Santa, and whether everyone's creative ideas are derivative 1:12:22 true Lords:

Topics:

  • Taking Improv classes has been life changing.
  • Practicing 3 keyboard layouts at the same time
  • I bought store brand salt. You wouldn't think this would be a big deal but it turns out to be
  • I Once Snorted an Eight Ball with Santa, by Richie Zaborowske
  • Are all creative ideas very derivative, or is it just my ideas

Microtopics:

  • Pickleball.
  • Weird shapes the birdie flies in.
  • The sport that has level design.
  • Mindful breathing.
  • You are now breathing mindfully.
  • Looking forward to being at square one.
  • Getting the real data once you stop paying attention.
  • Thespians in High School.
  • Spinning a wheel to figure out what emotion to feel.
  • Whether the yes and rule only works for comedy.
  • Pancakes. Are. Starchy.
  • Being late to your job that's on fire because you were stuck behind the fire truck.
  • Celebrating your own failures.
  • How to play Lemmings in 2024.
  • Self-esteem.
  • Immediately vibing with a new sport.
  • Autotuning except it's completely manual.
  • A bunch of joysticks that you twiddle with your fingers to do letters.
  • Colemak vs. Colemak DH.
  • Keyboards that are laid out in columns.
  • Splitting up the typing test into QWERTY, Dvorak and Colemak.
  • Palm Pilot Graffiti.
  • The Lord's Prayer in Gregg.
  • Shorthand. (Originally called Briefhand.)
  • Good ciphers for room escape puzzles.
  • Are QR codes based on the mazes in Zelda 2?
  • Flaky sea salt vs. coarse sea salt.
  • Adding a biting experience to make your food more heterogeneous.
  • Edible chemistry.
  • The last time you pinched salt.
  • Audially-rewarding salt grinders.
  • Science Youtuber Hank Green.
  • Warning pregnant women to not eat too much salty licorice.
  • Supertaster-outing Tic Tacs that regular people love but supertasters immediately vomit.
  • We've got a level six kaiju supertaster on our hands!
  • The guy who gets paid too much to taste ice cream.
  • The kind of person who doesn't salt their food but instead repeatedly licks a salt lick throughout the meal.
  • Heads swirling around like snow globes.
  • A poem that doesn't do anything with line breaks but does do something interesting with sentence lengths.
  • A poem that you might read on a bathroom stall.
  • Wearing the little hat and pulling on the cord that makes the horn toot.
  • The ecology that grows around the dumpster.
  • The crane swinging porta potties around.
  • An extremely expensive way to have fun
  • Heading towards the era of having kids.
  • Asking for payment for software that is not being maintained.
  • Minesweeper but X.
  • An idea that is worth doing but not obviously worth doing.
  • How to make Missile Command fun in a new and interesting way.
  • A boxing essay with questionable authenticity.
  • Strategies for enjoying Frog Fractions.
  • Rangers and the new way they handle animals.
  • Yes-anding whatever ideas come to you.
  • Ancient primals that were interlocked in battle.
  • Someone thinking of an idea.
  • Constantly listening for cues.
  • What do inanimate objects do?
  • Buying a giant bag of googly eyes and putting them on everything.
  • Not posting on Twitter.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

  • Taking Improv classes has been life changing.
  • Practicing 3 keyboard layouts at the same time
  • I bought store brand salt. You wouldn't think this would be a big deal but it turns out to be
  • I Once Snorted an Eight Ball with Santa, by Richie Zaborowske
  • Are all creative ideas very derivative, or is it just my ideas

Microtopics:

  • Pickleball.
  • Weird shapes the birdie flies in.
  • The sport that has level design.
  • Mindful breathing.
  • You are now breathing mindfully.
  • Looking forward to being at square one.
  • Getting the real data once you stop paying attention.
  • Thespians in High School.
  • Spinning a wheel to figure out what emotion to feel.
  • Whether the yes and rule only works for comedy.
  • Pancakes. Are. Starchy.
  • Being late to your job that's on fire because you were stuck behind the fire truck.
  • Celebrating your own failures.
  • How to play Lemmings in 2024.
  • Self-esteem.
  • Immediately vibing with a new sport.
  • Autotuning except it's completely manual.
  • A bunch of joysticks that you twiddle with your fingers to do letters.
  • Colemak vs. Colemak DH.
  • Keyboards that are laid out in columns.
  • Splitting up the typing test into QWERTY, Dvorak and Colemak.
  • Palm Pilot Graffiti.
  • The Lord's Prayer in Gregg.
  • Shorthand. (Originally called Briefhand.)
  • Good ciphers for room escape puzzles.
  • Are QR codes based on the mazes in Zelda 2?
  • Flaky sea salt vs. coarse sea salt.
  • Adding a biting experience to make your food more heterogeneous.
  • Edible chemistry.
  • The last time you pinched salt.
  • Audially-rewarding salt grinders.
  • Science Youtuber Hank Green.
  • Warning pregnant women to not eat too much salty licorice.
  • Supertaster-outing Tic Tacs that regular people love but supertasters immediately vomit.
  • We've got a level six kaiju supertaster on our hands!
  • The guy who gets paid too much to taste ice cream.
  • The kind of person who doesn't salt their food but instead repeatedly licks a salt lick throughout the meal.
  • Heads swirling around like snow globes.
  • A poem that doesn't do anything with line breaks but does do something interesting with sentence lengths.
  • A poem that you might read on a bathroom stall.
  • Wearing the little hat and pulling on the cord that makes the horn toot.
  • The ecology that grows around the dumpster.
  • The crane swinging porta potties around.
  • An extremely expensive way to have fun
  • Heading towards the era of having kids.
  • Asking for payment for software that is not being maintained.
  • Minesweeper but X.
  • An idea that is worth doing but not obviously worth doing.
  • How to make Missile Command fun in a new and interesting way.
  • A boxing essay with questionable authenticity.
  • Strategies for enjoying Frog Fractions.
  • Rangers and the new way they handle animals.
  • Yes-anding whatever ideas come to you.
  • Ancient primals that were interlocked in battle.
  • Someone thinking of an idea.
  • Constantly listening for cues.
  • What do inanimate objects do?
  • Buying a giant bag of googly eyes and putting them on everything.
  • Not posting on Twitter.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

  • Taking Improv classes has been life changing.
  • Practicing 3 keyboard layouts at the same time
  • I bought store brand salt. You wouldn't think this would be a big deal but it turns out to be
  • I Once Snorted an Eight Ball with Santa, by Richie Zaborowske
  • Are all creative ideas very derivative, or is it just my ideas

Microtopics:

  • Pickleball.
  • Weird shapes the birdie flies in.
  • The sport that has level design.
  • Mindful breathing.
  • You are now breathing mindfully.
  • Looking forward to being at square one.
  • Getting the real data once you stop paying attention.
  • Thespians in High School.
  • Spinning a wheel to figure out what emotion to feel.
  • Whether the yes and rule only works for comedy.
  • Pancakes. Are. Starchy.
  • Being late to your job that's on fire because you were stuck behind the fire truck.
  • Celebrating your own failures.
  • How to play Lemmings in 2024.
  • Self-esteem.
  • Immediately vibing with a new sport.
  • Autotuning except it's completely manual.
  • A bunch of joysticks that you twiddle with your fingers to do letters.
  • Colemak vs. Colemak DH.
  • Keyboards that are laid out in columns.
  • Splitting up the typing test into QWERTY, Dvorak and Colemak.
  • Palm Pilot Graffiti.
  • The Lord's Prayer in Gregg.
  • Shorthand. (Originally called Briefhand.)
  • Good ciphers for room escape puzzles.
  • Are QR codes based on the mazes in Zelda 2?
  • Flaky sea salt vs. coarse sea salt.
  • Adding a biting experience to make your food more heterogeneous.
  • Edible chemistry.
  • The last time you pinched salt.
  • Audially-rewarding salt grinders.
  • Science Youtuber Hank Green.
  • Warning pregnant women to not eat too much salty licorice.
  • Supertaster-outing Tic Tacs that regular people love but supertasters immediately vomit.
  • We've got a level six kaiju supertaster on our hands!
  • The guy who gets paid too much to taste ice cream.
  • The kind of person who doesn't salt their food but instead repeatedly licks a salt lick throughout the meal.
  • Heads swirling around like snow globes.
  • A poem that doesn't do anything with line breaks but does do something interesting with sentence lengths.
  • A poem that you might read on a bathroom stall.
  • Wearing the little hat and pulling on the cord that makes the horn toot.
  • The ecology that grows around the dumpster.
  • The crane swinging porta potties around.
  • An extremely expensive way to have fun
  • Heading towards the era of having kids.
  • Asking for payment for software that is not being maintained.
  • Minesweeper but X.
  • An idea that is worth doing but not obviously worth doing.
  • How to make Missile Command fun in a new and interesting way.
  • A boxing essay with questionable authenticity.
  • Strategies for enjoying Frog Fractions.
  • Rangers and the new way they handle animals.
  • Yes-anding whatever ideas come to you.
  • Ancient primals that were interlocked in battle.
  • Someone thinking of an idea.
  • Constantly listening for cues.
  • What do inanimate objects do?
  • Buying a giant bag of googly eyes and putting them on everything.
  • Not posting on Twitter.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+yczrmf1u ]]> Jim Stormdancer 231. Game: the Game and Music Experience https://topiclords.com/game-the-game-and-music-experience e195dcd0-a83a-4aec-8c91-43d906199bd0 Mon, 25 Mar 2024 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Jeff and Tyriq. We discuss writing jokes on the spot for impatient children, your favorite genre that you have no interest in making, High Sidin', Poetry, and every mammal's fish. 1:11:49 true Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Line of sight for the fog of war.
  • Plugging unplugging.
  • How to keep looking at TikTok when your phone is destroyed.
  • Telling your kid that Youtube broke.
  • Youtube videos that teach your child how to give a thumbs up.
  • Having more kids because it pays for itself.
  • Why did the princess have no dresses?
  • Explaining to a four year old about the $20 Sack Pyramid.
  • Weaning yourself off of saying /s by saying "wocka wocka" instead.
  • Teaching your kids better standards for comedy.
  • Snow White did this and then Belle was there and Ariel was there with her human legs.
  • The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen but for making pie.
  • Looking up knock knock jokes online.
  • Your kid finding your secret hoard of popsicle sticks and realizing you didn't just make all those jokes up from your head.
  • Things you want to have made but don't want to make
  • Trying to surprise yourself with your own level design.
  • Wallowing in the stuckness.
  • Whether game developers know when they're making a bad game.
  • Playtesting the shit out of a game because you enjoy playtesting so much.
  • Questionable hip hop.
  • Thrashy hyperpop.
  • Full-time access to a green screen and what it does to your head.
  • Comedy FMV games.
  • Making a career out of making bad art except it's funny and having to live with yourself.
  • Approachable game projects.
  • Pivoting from making an action RPG to making a Vampire Survivors clone in the space of a weekend.
  • Making a bunch of efforts and they're all terrible.
  • Whispering into a distortion pedal.
  • Putting your vocals through a bunch of effects pedals because your lyrics are terrible.
  • Enjoying an art creation process until you get too self conscious and ruin it.
  • Wallowing in the stuckness.
  • Making art and never showing it to anybody.
  • A twin stick shooter that's just for me.
  • Game Heads.
  • Onlookers getting hyphy.
  • "Side Show" by 415.
  • Back when Oakland was in the 415 area code.
  • Turning tight ones.
  • Turning brodies in an intersection while commuters look at your 15-inch subwoofers.
  • Rogue car events.
  • Game: the Games and Music Experience.
  • A lowrider with the entirely wrong number of switches.
  • Whether Boots Riley and Too Short still live in Oakland.
  • Aspirational trailer music choices.
  • Car Stealth: drive around a corner and hide.
  • Missing Rock Band but not missing it enough to install Fortnite.
  • Initiating taunts in Fortnite by strumming the guitar controller.
  • The immovable critic twinkling his skin.
  • Imaginary gardens with real toads in them.
  • Poetry with a diss track vibe to it.
  • Good going, dumbass, you got into poetry.
  • Whether poetry should rhyme.
  • Discriminating against business documents.
  • Putting a poem on genius.com and adding a "wocka wocka" annotation after every joke.
  • Spending an hour searching for animal names followed by "fish"
  • Which fish have the thickest bones?
  • Buffalo Fish Wings.
  • A fish that is way too big and shaped like the letter D.
  • Is Beyonce a Nicki Minaj friends??
  • Grandma's big bowl of worsties.
  • Energy drinks that make you want to disassemble a clock radio.
  • Drinking C4.
  • The guy you know who always has at least three Red Bulls on him at all times.
  • Bringing home a one-of-a-kind Monet even though you know your roommate is a Monet fiend and will eat it immediately.
  • The Master P of devouring Kit Kats.
  • The Queen of Bites and Sips.
  • Your duty to eat snacks before they go bad.
  • Eating one marshmallow right now.
  • The shitposty garbage that made Twitter fun.
  • Here's some pants pooping jokes, wocka wocka.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Line of sight for the fog of war.
  • Plugging unplugging.
  • How to keep looking at TikTok when your phone is destroyed.
  • Telling your kid that Youtube broke.
  • Youtube videos that teach your child how to give a thumbs up.
  • Having more kids because it pays for itself.
  • Why did the princess have no dresses?
  • Explaining to a four year old about the $20 Sack Pyramid.
  • Weaning yourself off of saying /s by saying "wocka wocka" instead.
  • Teaching your kids better standards for comedy.
  • Snow White did this and then Belle was there and Ariel was there with her human legs.
  • The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen but for making pie.
  • Looking up knock knock jokes online.
  • Your kid finding your secret hoard of popsicle sticks and realizing you didn't just make all those jokes up from your head.
  • Things you want to have made but don't want to make
  • Trying to surprise yourself with your own level design.
  • Wallowing in the stuckness.
  • Whether game developers know when they're making a bad game.
  • Playtesting the shit out of a game because you enjoy playtesting so much.
  • Questionable hip hop.
  • Thrashy hyperpop.
  • Full-time access to a green screen and what it does to your head.
  • Comedy FMV games.
  • Making a career out of making bad art except it's funny and having to live with yourself.
  • Approachable game projects.
  • Pivoting from making an action RPG to making a Vampire Survivors clone in the space of a weekend.
  • Making a bunch of efforts and they're all terrible.
  • Whispering into a distortion pedal.
  • Putting your vocals through a bunch of effects pedals because your lyrics are terrible.
  • Enjoying an art creation process until you get too self conscious and ruin it.
  • Wallowing in the stuckness.
  • Making art and never showing it to anybody.
  • A twin stick shooter that's just for me.
  • Game Heads.
  • Onlookers getting hyphy.
  • "Side Show" by 415.
  • Back when Oakland was in the 415 area code.
  • Turning tight ones.
  • Turning brodies in an intersection while commuters look at your 15-inch subwoofers.
  • Rogue car events.
  • Game: the Games and Music Experience.
  • A lowrider with the entirely wrong number of switches.
  • Whether Boots Riley and Too Short still live in Oakland.
  • Aspirational trailer music choices.
  • Car Stealth: drive around a corner and hide.
  • Missing Rock Band but not missing it enough to install Fortnite.
  • Initiating taunts in Fortnite by strumming the guitar controller.
  • The immovable critic twinkling his skin.
  • Imaginary gardens with real toads in them.
  • Poetry with a diss track vibe to it.
  • Good going, dumbass, you got into poetry.
  • Whether poetry should rhyme.
  • Discriminating against business documents.
  • Putting a poem on genius.com and adding a "wocka wocka" annotation after every joke.
  • Spending an hour searching for animal names followed by "fish"
  • Which fish have the thickest bones?
  • Buffalo Fish Wings.
  • A fish that is way too big and shaped like the letter D.
  • Is Beyonce a Nicki Minaj friends??
  • Grandma's big bowl of worsties.
  • Energy drinks that make you want to disassemble a clock radio.
  • Drinking C4.
  • The guy you know who always has at least three Red Bulls on him at all times.
  • Bringing home a one-of-a-kind Monet even though you know your roommate is a Monet fiend and will eat it immediately.
  • The Master P of devouring Kit Kats.
  • The Queen of Bites and Sips.
  • Your duty to eat snacks before they go bad.
  • Eating one marshmallow right now.
  • The shitposty garbage that made Twitter fun.
  • Here's some pants pooping jokes, wocka wocka.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Line of sight for the fog of war.
  • Plugging unplugging.
  • How to keep looking at TikTok when your phone is destroyed.
  • Telling your kid that Youtube broke.
  • Youtube videos that teach your child how to give a thumbs up.
  • Having more kids because it pays for itself.
  • Why did the princess have no dresses?
  • Explaining to a four year old about the $20 Sack Pyramid.
  • Weaning yourself off of saying /s by saying "wocka wocka" instead.
  • Teaching your kids better standards for comedy.
  • Snow White did this and then Belle was there and Ariel was there with her human legs.
  • The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen but for making pie.
  • Looking up knock knock jokes online.
  • Your kid finding your secret hoard of popsicle sticks and realizing you didn't just make all those jokes up from your head.
  • Things you want to have made but don't want to make
  • Trying to surprise yourself with your own level design.
  • Wallowing in the stuckness.
  • Whether game developers know when they're making a bad game.
  • Playtesting the shit out of a game because you enjoy playtesting so much.
  • Questionable hip hop.
  • Thrashy hyperpop.
  • Full-time access to a green screen and what it does to your head.
  • Comedy FMV games.
  • Making a career out of making bad art except it's funny and having to live with yourself.
  • Approachable game projects.
  • Pivoting from making an action RPG to making a Vampire Survivors clone in the space of a weekend.
  • Making a bunch of efforts and they're all terrible.
  • Whispering into a distortion pedal.
  • Putting your vocals through a bunch of effects pedals because your lyrics are terrible.
  • Enjoying an art creation process until you get too self conscious and ruin it.
  • Wallowing in the stuckness.
  • Making art and never showing it to anybody.
  • A twin stick shooter that's just for me.
  • Game Heads.
  • Onlookers getting hyphy.
  • "Side Show" by 415.
  • Back when Oakland was in the 415 area code.
  • Turning tight ones.
  • Turning brodies in an intersection while commuters look at your 15-inch subwoofers.
  • Rogue car events.
  • Game: the Games and Music Experience.
  • A lowrider with the entirely wrong number of switches.
  • Whether Boots Riley and Too Short still live in Oakland.
  • Aspirational trailer music choices.
  • Car Stealth: drive around a corner and hide.
  • Missing Rock Band but not missing it enough to install Fortnite.
  • Initiating taunts in Fortnite by strumming the guitar controller.
  • The immovable critic twinkling his skin.
  • Imaginary gardens with real toads in them.
  • Poetry with a diss track vibe to it.
  • Good going, dumbass, you got into poetry.
  • Whether poetry should rhyme.
  • Discriminating against business documents.
  • Putting a poem on genius.com and adding a "wocka wocka" annotation after every joke.
  • Spending an hour searching for animal names followed by "fish"
  • Which fish have the thickest bones?
  • Buffalo Fish Wings.
  • A fish that is way too big and shaped like the letter D.
  • Is Beyonce a Nicki Minaj friends??
  • Grandma's big bowl of worsties.
  • Energy drinks that make you want to disassemble a clock radio.
  • Drinking C4.
  • The guy you know who always has at least three Red Bulls on him at all times.
  • Bringing home a one-of-a-kind Monet even though you know your roommate is a Monet fiend and will eat it immediately.
  • The Master P of devouring Kit Kats.
  • The Queen of Bites and Sips.
  • Your duty to eat snacks before they go bad.
  • Eating one marshmallow right now.
  • The shitposty garbage that made Twitter fun.
  • Here's some pants pooping jokes, wocka wocka.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+o9jgj_dI ]]> Jim Stormdancer 230. What's God Even Made of Anymore? https://topiclords.com/whats-god-even-made-of-anymore 09cb08e1-bc25-47e4-9576-3e8fd9e6ec2c Mon, 18 Mar 2024 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Mike and Jake. We discuss what's next after cameras, disappearing mystery, preschool security practices, At the Feast in the Great Hall, by Ursula Leguin, and whether it's boring to talk about dreams. 1:13:38 true Lords:

  • Mike
  • Jake

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The great state of Maine.
  • A project you've been working on for a long time.
  • Inventing a game developer community in Michigan.
  • Meaningful distinguishers on normal camera use.
  • A lukewarm decisionmaking process.
  • Computational photography.
  • Samsung's fake moon.
  • A camera that just guesses what you want to see so you don't even need to take the photo.
  • A massive endless feed of the same photo with different people in it.
  • Why people use cameras.
  • Whether photos exist.
  • Late stages of the product category.
  • People who need Photoshop to do their job.
  • Photo mode in real life.
  • A photo you can take later.
  • Adding a filter to make the guy in the background less likable.
  • Meals for the Ages
  • How to get from here to perfect ubiquitous service surveillance.
  • Theatrically pretending to be hit by a stationary car.
  • Going to the Gallagher movie and getting sprayed with watermelon.
  • There's just the one Bigfoot, it's the same Bigfoot every time.
  • Tomato sauces that are still delicious even if you learned the recipe from the Internet and not from a grandma.
  • Mysterious things backing into the shadows so they can remain mysterious.
  • Protecting mystery wherever you find it.
  • The Museum of Jurassic Technology.
  • Stepping inside someone else's very strange brain.
  • Dawn Wall.
  • An intensely detailed exploration of the surface of a cliff.
  • I wonder what it's like on the fucking moon?
  • Who painted the iconic cover of the Wrinkle in Time paperback.
  • The shoot-em-up cabinet you saw in the canteen at the US Embassy in Monrovia, Liberia before the first Liberian civil war and have never been able to find since.
  • A reaction to the lack of organic mystery in our lives.
  • The Case of the Missing Hit and Searching for Sugarman.
  • Wash over me, True Story.
  • Which phone checked the kid out of preschool.
  • Being on the list of services the insurance companies consider to have checked various boxes.
  • We got pins. We can do that.
  • The three bad four-digit pins.
  • Streamlining the process of rapidly accounting for all the children.
  • Developing a system that would deterministically move the needle in a useful way.
  • Blundering in the brightness.
  • Telling two events from the same perspective.
  • Ugly crying at your desk in a public workspace.
  • Spending way more time not alive than alive.
  • Something that we can experience on either side of our lives.
  • A Fire Take from Jake.
  • Waiter stress dreams.
  • A skill that you can hone.
  • One of the more fun channels in the discord.
  • Holding an increasingly large bag of stuff.
  • Waking up laughing until you realize your dream was not funny.
  • The consciousness wall between you and visualization.
  • Training yourself to let your mental imagery be visible.
  • Seeing clumps of color and interpreting them.
  • Doing an editing pass on your dreams before relating it to your friends.
  • Jay-Z's favorite bleu cheese Milkshakes.
  • Screwball horror.
  • A splash of furry content.
]]> Lords:

  • Mike
  • Jake

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The great state of Maine.
  • A project you've been working on for a long time.
  • Inventing a game developer community in Michigan.
  • Meaningful distinguishers on normal camera use.
  • A lukewarm decisionmaking process.
  • Computational photography.
  • Samsung's fake moon.
  • A camera that just guesses what you want to see so you don't even need to take the photo.
  • A massive endless feed of the same photo with different people in it.
  • Why people use cameras.
  • Whether photos exist.
  • Late stages of the product category.
  • People who need Photoshop to do their job.
  • Photo mode in real life.
  • A photo you can take later.
  • Adding a filter to make the guy in the background less likable.
  • Meals for the Ages
  • How to get from here to perfect ubiquitous service surveillance.
  • Theatrically pretending to be hit by a stationary car.
  • Going to the Gallagher movie and getting sprayed with watermelon.
  • There's just the one Bigfoot, it's the same Bigfoot every time.
  • Tomato sauces that are still delicious even if you learned the recipe from the Internet and not from a grandma.
  • Mysterious things backing into the shadows so they can remain mysterious.
  • Protecting mystery wherever you find it.
  • The Museum of Jurassic Technology.
  • Stepping inside someone else's very strange brain.
  • Dawn Wall.
  • An intensely detailed exploration of the surface of a cliff.
  • I wonder what it's like on the fucking moon?
  • Who painted the iconic cover of the Wrinkle in Time paperback.
  • The shoot-em-up cabinet you saw in the canteen at the US Embassy in Monrovia, Liberia before the first Liberian civil war and have never been able to find since.
  • A reaction to the lack of organic mystery in our lives.
  • The Case of the Missing Hit and Searching for Sugarman.
  • Wash over me, True Story.
  • Which phone checked the kid out of preschool.
  • Being on the list of services the insurance companies consider to have checked various boxes.
  • We got pins. We can do that.
  • The three bad four-digit pins.
  • Streamlining the process of rapidly accounting for all the children.
  • Developing a system that would deterministically move the needle in a useful way.
  • Blundering in the brightness.
  • Telling two events from the same perspective.
  • Ugly crying at your desk in a public workspace.
  • Spending way more time not alive than alive.
  • Something that we can experience on either side of our lives.
  • A Fire Take from Jake.
  • Waiter stress dreams.
  • A skill that you can hone.
  • One of the more fun channels in the discord.
  • Holding an increasingly large bag of stuff.
  • Waking up laughing until you realize your dream was not funny.
  • The consciousness wall between you and visualization.
  • Training yourself to let your mental imagery be visible.
  • Seeing clumps of color and interpreting them.
  • Doing an editing pass on your dreams before relating it to your friends.
  • Jay-Z's favorite bleu cheese Milkshakes.
  • Screwball horror.
  • A splash of furry content.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Mike
  • Jake

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The great state of Maine.
  • A project you've been working on for a long time.
  • Inventing a game developer community in Michigan.
  • Meaningful distinguishers on normal camera use.
  • A lukewarm decisionmaking process.
  • Computational photography.
  • Samsung's fake moon.
  • A camera that just guesses what you want to see so you don't even need to take the photo.
  • A massive endless feed of the same photo with different people in it.
  • Why people use cameras.
  • Whether photos exist.
  • Late stages of the product category.
  • People who need Photoshop to do their job.
  • Photo mode in real life.
  • A photo you can take later.
  • Adding a filter to make the guy in the background less likable.
  • Meals for the Ages
  • How to get from here to perfect ubiquitous service surveillance.
  • Theatrically pretending to be hit by a stationary car.
  • Going to the Gallagher movie and getting sprayed with watermelon.
  • There's just the one Bigfoot, it's the same Bigfoot every time.
  • Tomato sauces that are still delicious even if you learned the recipe from the Internet and not from a grandma.
  • Mysterious things backing into the shadows so they can remain mysterious.
  • Protecting mystery wherever you find it.
  • The Museum of Jurassic Technology.
  • Stepping inside someone else's very strange brain.
  • Dawn Wall.
  • An intensely detailed exploration of the surface of a cliff.
  • I wonder what it's like on the fucking moon?
  • Who painted the iconic cover of the Wrinkle in Time paperback.
  • The shoot-em-up cabinet you saw in the canteen at the US Embassy in Monrovia, Liberia before the first Liberian civil war and have never been able to find since.
  • A reaction to the lack of organic mystery in our lives.
  • The Case of the Missing Hit and Searching for Sugarman.
  • Wash over me, True Story.
  • Which phone checked the kid out of preschool.
  • Being on the list of services the insurance companies consider to have checked various boxes.
  • We got pins. We can do that.
  • The three bad four-digit pins.
  • Streamlining the process of rapidly accounting for all the children.
  • Developing a system that would deterministically move the needle in a useful way.
  • Blundering in the brightness.
  • Telling two events from the same perspective.
  • Ugly crying at your desk in a public workspace.
  • Spending way more time not alive than alive.
  • Something that we can experience on either side of our lives.
  • A Fire Take from Jake.
  • Waiter stress dreams.
  • A skill that you can hone.
  • One of the more fun channels in the discord.
  • Holding an increasingly large bag of stuff.
  • Waking up laughing until you realize your dream was not funny.
  • The consciousness wall between you and visualization.
  • Training yourself to let your mental imagery be visible.
  • Seeing clumps of color and interpreting them.
  • Doing an editing pass on your dreams before relating it to your friends.
  • Jay-Z's favorite bleu cheese Milkshakes.
  • Screwball horror.
  • A splash of furry content.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+SFdaUtrU ]]> Jim Stormdancer 229. This Show Now Available on Cockroach DNA https://topiclords.com/this-show-now-available-on-cockroach-dna f95abfd9-6c0a-42d3-8622-e18754efa425 Mon, 11 Mar 2024 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Megan and Lexi. We dicsuss Erik Satie's performance indications, instant food from other cultures, seasonal decorations, Delhi Metro, becoming immortal by being predictable, and living in different climates. 54:40 true Lords:

  • Megan
  • Lexi

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Music implementation for The Lamplighters League.
  • Watching a streamer play games and asking them for a turn at the controls.
  • How to pronounce "Erik Satie."
  • How to pronounce "Gymnopedies."
  • Finding 100 umbrellas in your dead friend's apartment.
  • A list of Satie's performance indications.
  • Grandly forgetting the present.
  • With your bones dry and distant.
  • Playing music with your forehead.
  • Doing something to a piano.
  • Your boss sending a memo asking you to work with a shy piety.
  • Pizzicato vs. Bartok pizzicato.
  • Adding the hamburger so it's not just Helper.
  • What instant foods are missing from your food vocabulary.
  • Adding heavy cream to ramen broth.
  • Getting an apron so you can have a little costume when you cook.
  • Realizing that when you wear the apron you don't get food on your shirt.
  • A big bib for Big Jim.
  • Normalizing scoop bibs.
  • Kraft Dinner.
  • Halal certified instant stir fry noodles.
  • Ramen in a cup or ramen where you provide your own container.
  • Insurance Mac.
  • Canned cheeseburgers.
  • A boring house with nothing on it.
  • Movable feasts.
  • Keeping those 12-foot skeletons in your yard and decorating it seasonally.
  • The beetles that clean bones for you.
  • Recreational Explosives Day.
  • A Zachtronics programming puzzle for every holiday.
  • A movable feast where you don't eat.
  • Decorating your house to celebrate Toyotathon.
  • Falling for strangers and their blue hair.
  • A poem that is long if you read it but short if you recite it.
  • Taking public transit as an act of defiance.
  • A gift that is impossible to give yourself on purpose.
  • Inventing a shower proof phone so nobody ever has shower thoughts again.
  • Putting your phone in a Ziploc bag and watching movies underwater.
  • Sitting down at your computer and getting stuck.
  • Hacking your executive function by adding friction in the right places.
  • Whether Wellbutrin gives everyone tinnitus or just you.
  • Death hacks for staying mentally connected to your dead relatives.
  • A service that puts your podcast on vinyl.
  • Using CRISPR to infect the cockroach population with 229 episodes of Topic Lords.
  • Moving to a land where your snot doesn't freeze.
  • Not trusting your own weather opinions.
  • Surprising yourself by enjoying seasons.
  • Driving in icy conditions.
  • Standing under the heated lamps like a lizard.
  • Waiting for the bus in the dark.
  • Learning to drive after you move to a city with public transit.
  • Not driving with kids.
  • Getting rid of all the bots.
  • Sgt. Pepper Bot.
]]> Lords:

  • Megan
  • Lexi

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Music implementation for The Lamplighters League.
  • Watching a streamer play games and asking them for a turn at the controls.
  • How to pronounce "Erik Satie."
  • How to pronounce "Gymnopedies."
  • Finding 100 umbrellas in your dead friend's apartment.
  • A list of Satie's performance indications.
  • Grandly forgetting the present.
  • With your bones dry and distant.
  • Playing music with your forehead.
  • Doing something to a piano.
  • Your boss sending a memo asking you to work with a shy piety.
  • Pizzicato vs. Bartok pizzicato.
  • Adding the hamburger so it's not just Helper.
  • What instant foods are missing from your food vocabulary.
  • Adding heavy cream to ramen broth.
  • Getting an apron so you can have a little costume when you cook.
  • Realizing that when you wear the apron you don't get food on your shirt.
  • A big bib for Big Jim.
  • Normalizing scoop bibs.
  • Kraft Dinner.
  • Halal certified instant stir fry noodles.
  • Ramen in a cup or ramen where you provide your own container.
  • Insurance Mac.
  • Canned cheeseburgers.
  • A boring house with nothing on it.
  • Movable feasts.
  • Keeping those 12-foot skeletons in your yard and decorating it seasonally.
  • The beetles that clean bones for you.
  • Recreational Explosives Day.
  • A Zachtronics programming puzzle for every holiday.
  • A movable feast where you don't eat.
  • Decorating your house to celebrate Toyotathon.
  • Falling for strangers and their blue hair.
  • A poem that is long if you read it but short if you recite it.
  • Taking public transit as an act of defiance.
  • A gift that is impossible to give yourself on purpose.
  • Inventing a shower proof phone so nobody ever has shower thoughts again.
  • Putting your phone in a Ziploc bag and watching movies underwater.
  • Sitting down at your computer and getting stuck.
  • Hacking your executive function by adding friction in the right places.
  • Whether Wellbutrin gives everyone tinnitus or just you.
  • Death hacks for staying mentally connected to your dead relatives.
  • A service that puts your podcast on vinyl.
  • Using CRISPR to infect the cockroach population with 229 episodes of Topic Lords.
  • Moving to a land where your snot doesn't freeze.
  • Not trusting your own weather opinions.
  • Surprising yourself by enjoying seasons.
  • Driving in icy conditions.
  • Standing under the heated lamps like a lizard.
  • Waiting for the bus in the dark.
  • Learning to drive after you move to a city with public transit.
  • Not driving with kids.
  • Getting rid of all the bots.
  • Sgt. Pepper Bot.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Megan
  • Lexi

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Music implementation for The Lamplighters League.
  • Watching a streamer play games and asking them for a turn at the controls.
  • How to pronounce "Erik Satie."
  • How to pronounce "Gymnopedies."
  • Finding 100 umbrellas in your dead friend's apartment.
  • A list of Satie's performance indications.
  • Grandly forgetting the present.
  • With your bones dry and distant.
  • Playing music with your forehead.
  • Doing something to a piano.
  • Your boss sending a memo asking you to work with a shy piety.
  • Pizzicato vs. Bartok pizzicato.
  • Adding the hamburger so it's not just Helper.
  • What instant foods are missing from your food vocabulary.
  • Adding heavy cream to ramen broth.
  • Getting an apron so you can have a little costume when you cook.
  • Realizing that when you wear the apron you don't get food on your shirt.
  • A big bib for Big Jim.
  • Normalizing scoop bibs.
  • Kraft Dinner.
  • Halal certified instant stir fry noodles.
  • Ramen in a cup or ramen where you provide your own container.
  • Insurance Mac.
  • Canned cheeseburgers.
  • A boring house with nothing on it.
  • Movable feasts.
  • Keeping those 12-foot skeletons in your yard and decorating it seasonally.
  • The beetles that clean bones for you.
  • Recreational Explosives Day.
  • A Zachtronics programming puzzle for every holiday.
  • A movable feast where you don't eat.
  • Decorating your house to celebrate Toyotathon.
  • Falling for strangers and their blue hair.
  • A poem that is long if you read it but short if you recite it.
  • Taking public transit as an act of defiance.
  • A gift that is impossible to give yourself on purpose.
  • Inventing a shower proof phone so nobody ever has shower thoughts again.
  • Putting your phone in a Ziploc bag and watching movies underwater.
  • Sitting down at your computer and getting stuck.
  • Hacking your executive function by adding friction in the right places.
  • Whether Wellbutrin gives everyone tinnitus or just you.
  • Death hacks for staying mentally connected to your dead relatives.
  • A service that puts your podcast on vinyl.
  • Using CRISPR to infect the cockroach population with 229 episodes of Topic Lords.
  • Moving to a land where your snot doesn't freeze.
  • Not trusting your own weather opinions.
  • Surprising yourself by enjoying seasons.
  • Driving in icy conditions.
  • Standing under the heated lamps like a lizard.
  • Waiting for the bus in the dark.
  • Learning to drive after you move to a city with public transit.
  • Not driving with kids.
  • Getting rid of all the bots.
  • Sgt. Pepper Bot.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+o1Q_w8yN ]]> Jim Stormdancer 228. Detecting Myself as Spam https://topiclords.com/detecting-myself-as-spam d8cdd8a4-e918-4281-89fd-dfe65a7f00e8 Mon, 04 Mar 2024 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Fif and Mitch. We discuss the Ace Attorney series' naming conventions, the kissing mechanic in Bully, Podcast Prep Sheet, the Tay Bridge Disaster, the user interface in Bully, and comments asking "why did the algorithm recommend this to me" 1:10:47 true Lords:

  • Fif
  • Mitch

Topics:

  • The Ace Attorney series' English localization's naming conventions
  • The kissing mechanic in Bully represents both what is genius and terrible about the game
  • Podcast Prep Sheet Trending Guests and Topics
  • The Tay Bridge Disaster
  • No but seriously what the hell is up with the user interface in Bully. I assume it's just a Rockstar thing? I'm only into Bully so it is a mystery
  • Comments that say "why did the algorithm recommend this to me"

Microtopics:

  • Two handfuls of times.
  • Something very fivey about hands.
  • Dependability and a detail-oriented nature.
  • Putting your resume in the show notes.
  • Naming your kid a list of two things.
  • A story taking place in a Los Angeles that is a satire of near future Japan.
  • Naming games after verbs.
  • Mario Push Button.
  • The Haiku-detecting tumblr bot.
  • Imagining an opinion and searching for someone who has it so you can yell at them.
  • All the time we have for Topic Lords.
  • Kissing a kissable person. (They have kissability.)
  • A dress-up fashion thing.
  • Wearing a reindeer patterned jumper to reduce your kissability.
  • Applying triple-A polish to a boarding school setting.
  • Dorms in a castle.
  • Hey, nice face.
  • Demographics based on what classes you have to take to kiss members of the demographic.
  • Dressing in real life like you do in a Grand Theft Auto game.
  • The one character in the entire GTA series that cares about the clothes you wear.
  • Secrets Behind the Suite: Unveiling the Hidden World behind Luxury Hotels.
  • Eco-friendly or Eco-fail?
  • Law and Disorder: how TV crime shows get it wrong.
  • Sending an email to yourself and it gets detected as spam.
  • The friend who has a lot of opinions about Homestuck.
  • Making your hearts for to quail.
  • Poems including civil engineering advice.
  • Good vs. bad nonsense poems.
  • A fun poem to read.
  • Paying money to engage with content.
  • Deliberately slipping on a banana peel.
  • What it says about hitting in the Banana Rules.
  • School administrators publishing statistics on how many banana peels you've slipped on.
  • Skyrim spoiling the presence of robots on the stats screen.
  • Watching what players do and rewarding every action they take.
  • A good video game is a game that has three good stats screens and no bad stats screens.
  • Having a question in your head and not knowing who to ask so you ask the person in front of you.
  • Youtube koans.
  • Showing content to someone who will be not that jazzed about it.
  • Youtube recommending a let's-play from a year ago with 10 views.
  • A PMV of the character you are obsessed with.
  • The only person who takes a the Youtube Creator Surveys.
  • Constantly deleting the shorts.
  • Posting a tweet to youtube.com.
  • Posting a link to your own videos on Youtube.
  • Community captions and what happened to them.
  • Doing annotations dirty.
  • Nekoneko.
  • Comments popping up and scrolling across the screen constantly.
  • Listening to a cassette tape you dug up in the desert.
]]> Lords:

  • Fif
  • Mitch

Topics:

  • The Ace Attorney series' English localization's naming conventions
  • The kissing mechanic in Bully represents both what is genius and terrible about the game
  • Podcast Prep Sheet Trending Guests and Topics
  • The Tay Bridge Disaster
  • No but seriously what the hell is up with the user interface in Bully. I assume it's just a Rockstar thing? I'm only into Bully so it is a mystery
  • Comments that say "why did the algorithm recommend this to me"

Microtopics:

  • Two handfuls of times.
  • Something very fivey about hands.
  • Dependability and a detail-oriented nature.
  • Putting your resume in the show notes.
  • Naming your kid a list of two things.
  • A story taking place in a Los Angeles that is a satire of near future Japan.
  • Naming games after verbs.
  • Mario Push Button.
  • The Haiku-detecting tumblr bot.
  • Imagining an opinion and searching for someone who has it so you can yell at them.
  • All the time we have for Topic Lords.
  • Kissing a kissable person. (They have kissability.)
  • A dress-up fashion thing.
  • Wearing a reindeer patterned jumper to reduce your kissability.
  • Applying triple-A polish to a boarding school setting.
  • Dorms in a castle.
  • Hey, nice face.
  • Demographics based on what classes you have to take to kiss members of the demographic.
  • Dressing in real life like you do in a Grand Theft Auto game.
  • The one character in the entire GTA series that cares about the clothes you wear.
  • Secrets Behind the Suite: Unveiling the Hidden World behind Luxury Hotels.
  • Eco-friendly or Eco-fail?
  • Law and Disorder: how TV crime shows get it wrong.
  • Sending an email to yourself and it gets detected as spam.
  • The friend who has a lot of opinions about Homestuck.
  • Making your hearts for to quail.
  • Poems including civil engineering advice.
  • Good vs. bad nonsense poems.
  • A fun poem to read.
  • Paying money to engage with content.
  • Deliberately slipping on a banana peel.
  • What it says about hitting in the Banana Rules.
  • School administrators publishing statistics on how many banana peels you've slipped on.
  • Skyrim spoiling the presence of robots on the stats screen.
  • Watching what players do and rewarding every action they take.
  • A good video game is a game that has three good stats screens and no bad stats screens.
  • Having a question in your head and not knowing who to ask so you ask the person in front of you.
  • Youtube koans.
  • Showing content to someone who will be not that jazzed about it.
  • Youtube recommending a let's-play from a year ago with 10 views.
  • A PMV of the character you are obsessed with.
  • The only person who takes a the Youtube Creator Surveys.
  • Constantly deleting the shorts.
  • Posting a tweet to youtube.com.
  • Posting a link to your own videos on Youtube.
  • Community captions and what happened to them.
  • Doing annotations dirty.
  • Nekoneko.
  • Comments popping up and scrolling across the screen constantly.
  • Listening to a cassette tape you dug up in the desert.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Fif
  • Mitch

Topics:

  • The Ace Attorney series' English localization's naming conventions
  • The kissing mechanic in Bully represents both what is genius and terrible about the game
  • Podcast Prep Sheet Trending Guests and Topics
  • The Tay Bridge Disaster
  • No but seriously what the hell is up with the user interface in Bully. I assume it's just a Rockstar thing? I'm only into Bully so it is a mystery
  • Comments that say "why did the algorithm recommend this to me"

Microtopics:

  • Two handfuls of times.
  • Something very fivey about hands.
  • Dependability and a detail-oriented nature.
  • Putting your resume in the show notes.
  • Naming your kid a list of two things.
  • A story taking place in a Los Angeles that is a satire of near future Japan.
  • Naming games after verbs.
  • Mario Push Button.
  • The Haiku-detecting tumblr bot.
  • Imagining an opinion and searching for someone who has it so you can yell at them.
  • All the time we have for Topic Lords.
  • Kissing a kissable person. (They have kissability.)
  • A dress-up fashion thing.
  • Wearing a reindeer patterned jumper to reduce your kissability.
  • Applying triple-A polish to a boarding school setting.
  • Dorms in a castle.
  • Hey, nice face.
  • Demographics based on what classes you have to take to kiss members of the demographic.
  • Dressing in real life like you do in a Grand Theft Auto game.
  • The one character in the entire GTA series that cares about the clothes you wear.
  • Secrets Behind the Suite: Unveiling the Hidden World behind Luxury Hotels.
  • Eco-friendly or Eco-fail?
  • Law and Disorder: how TV crime shows get it wrong.
  • Sending an email to yourself and it gets detected as spam.
  • The friend who has a lot of opinions about Homestuck.
  • Making your hearts for to quail.
  • Poems including civil engineering advice.
  • Good vs. bad nonsense poems.
  • A fun poem to read.
  • Paying money to engage with content.
  • Deliberately slipping on a banana peel.
  • What it says about hitting in the Banana Rules.
  • School administrators publishing statistics on how many banana peels you've slipped on.
  • Skyrim spoiling the presence of robots on the stats screen.
  • Watching what players do and rewarding every action they take.
  • A good video game is a game that has three good stats screens and no bad stats screens.
  • Having a question in your head and not knowing who to ask so you ask the person in front of you.
  • Youtube koans.
  • Showing content to someone who will be not that jazzed about it.
  • Youtube recommending a let's-play from a year ago with 10 views.
  • A PMV of the character you are obsessed with.
  • The only person who takes a the Youtube Creator Surveys.
  • Constantly deleting the shorts.
  • Posting a tweet to youtube.com.
  • Posting a link to your own videos on Youtube.
  • Community captions and what happened to them.
  • Doing annotations dirty.
  • Nekoneko.
  • Comments popping up and scrolling across the screen constantly.
  • Listening to a cassette tape you dug up in the desert.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+p5wQqTxv ]]> Jim Stormdancer 227. Maximal Overlap With the Dork https://topiclords.com/maximal-overlap-with-the-dork 46cc7ef6-74d0-4098-b402-5bdf5ca5a3d1 Mon, 26 Feb 2024 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Erica and Kory. We discuss Mystery Hunt 2024, developing your first video game, wearing glasses to prevent COVID, English Ending Song by Ryoji Yoshitomi, and how to make satisfying non-violent gameplay 1:13:21 true Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Letting go of concepts of yourself that you believe.
  • Losing a concept of yourself as a person and just becoming free-floating thoughts.
  • 47 year old house painters.
  • Growing up to be a pluripotent human being.
  • Finding cool and positive Internet spaces to hang out in.
  • Excavating old Bubsy memorabilia.
  • Checking the maps on your telephone.
  • Defining yourself as someone who doesn't eat free cheese samples.
  • Scientists researching how to be cool and cringe at the same time.
  • 2023 Game of the Year Gordy and the Monster Moon.
  • Protocols and processes that presume that if you are good at solving puzzles then you must also be good at designing puzzles.
  • The humble beginnings of the MIT Mystery Hunt.
  • Puzzle Inflation.
  • Instant stooging.
  • People who are obligated to prevent their children from dying.
  • Server migration problems.
  • Accidentally writing the same puzzle as someone else.
  • Premium content for listeners who want to subscribe.
  • Putting sprites on the screen and accepting controller input.
  • Game design by proxy.
  • Your local Barcade with a Pico-8 cabinet.
  • Buttoning up a game to make it a shippable product.
  • Whether the knife is detecting a dork.
  • Butter golems.
  • Bugs that make games more fun.
  • Building a high end gaming PC and only running Pico-8 on it
  • I can't believe they buttered Jorts!
  • Meeting the guy who runs the Indie Arcade at Magfest.
  • Waiting 40 years for opportunities to fall in your lap.
  • Think Buick.
  • A cat that is not on the show.
  • Of all the exposed mucus membranes on your face, the eyes are two of them.
  • Projectile transmission.
  • Did this COVID infection rate study control for popularity?
  • Hitting 40 and embracing the cringe.
  • Wearing chemistry goggles in public.
  • Myopic basketball players.
  • Things you can put on your face to look like a superhero in disguise.
  • The Wario Land 4 soundtrack.
  • Making ogg vorbis rips of the Wario Land 4 soundtrack to put on Napster.
  • A gem of a poem to be hidden in a Wario game.
  • Playing back vocals with single-syllable samples.
  • Our collective dream diary.
  • Your dreams melting into your pillow with all the dust mites.
  • Everything is impermanent, especially video games.
  • A shocking removal of an important human from your life.
  • Making your peace with the time you have forgotten.
  • The natural high you get from blowing things up.
  • Throwing apples at a Snorlax until it wakes up.
  • Cooking games.
  • Matching happy looking fruits of different sizes.
  • Watching carefully as two peaches slide together.
  • Designing video games for 5-year olds on T.
  • Dropping things that merge in a two dimensional space with gravity.
  • The boy has two dads.
  • What can I do that is nonviolent and crunchy and interesting and solvable?
  • Looking for inspiration outside of video games.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Letting go of concepts of yourself that you believe.
  • Losing a concept of yourself as a person and just becoming free-floating thoughts.
  • 47 year old house painters.
  • Growing up to be a pluripotent human being.
  • Finding cool and positive Internet spaces to hang out in.
  • Excavating old Bubsy memorabilia.
  • Checking the maps on your telephone.
  • Defining yourself as someone who doesn't eat free cheese samples.
  • Scientists researching how to be cool and cringe at the same time.
  • 2023 Game of the Year Gordy and the Monster Moon.
  • Protocols and processes that presume that if you are good at solving puzzles then you must also be good at designing puzzles.
  • The humble beginnings of the MIT Mystery Hunt.
  • Puzzle Inflation.
  • Instant stooging.
  • People who are obligated to prevent their children from dying.
  • Server migration problems.
  • Accidentally writing the same puzzle as someone else.
  • Premium content for listeners who want to subscribe.
  • Putting sprites on the screen and accepting controller input.
  • Game design by proxy.
  • Your local Barcade with a Pico-8 cabinet.
  • Buttoning up a game to make it a shippable product.
  • Whether the knife is detecting a dork.
  • Butter golems.
  • Bugs that make games more fun.
  • Building a high end gaming PC and only running Pico-8 on it
  • I can't believe they buttered Jorts!
  • Meeting the guy who runs the Indie Arcade at Magfest.
  • Waiting 40 years for opportunities to fall in your lap.
  • Think Buick.
  • A cat that is not on the show.
  • Of all the exposed mucus membranes on your face, the eyes are two of them.
  • Projectile transmission.
  • Did this COVID infection rate study control for popularity?
  • Hitting 40 and embracing the cringe.
  • Wearing chemistry goggles in public.
  • Myopic basketball players.
  • Things you can put on your face to look like a superhero in disguise.
  • The Wario Land 4 soundtrack.
  • Making ogg vorbis rips of the Wario Land 4 soundtrack to put on Napster.
  • A gem of a poem to be hidden in a Wario game.
  • Playing back vocals with single-syllable samples.
  • Our collective dream diary.
  • Your dreams melting into your pillow with all the dust mites.
  • Everything is impermanent, especially video games.
  • A shocking removal of an important human from your life.
  • Making your peace with the time you have forgotten.
  • The natural high you get from blowing things up.
  • Throwing apples at a Snorlax until it wakes up.
  • Cooking games.
  • Matching happy looking fruits of different sizes.
  • Watching carefully as two peaches slide together.
  • Designing video games for 5-year olds on T.
  • Dropping things that merge in a two dimensional space with gravity.
  • The boy has two dads.
  • What can I do that is nonviolent and crunchy and interesting and solvable?
  • Looking for inspiration outside of video games.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Letting go of concepts of yourself that you believe.
  • Losing a concept of yourself as a person and just becoming free-floating thoughts.
  • 47 year old house painters.
  • Growing up to be a pluripotent human being.
  • Finding cool and positive Internet spaces to hang out in.
  • Excavating old Bubsy memorabilia.
  • Checking the maps on your telephone.
  • Defining yourself as someone who doesn't eat free cheese samples.
  • Scientists researching how to be cool and cringe at the same time.
  • 2023 Game of the Year Gordy and the Monster Moon.
  • Protocols and processes that presume that if you are good at solving puzzles then you must also be good at designing puzzles.
  • The humble beginnings of the MIT Mystery Hunt.
  • Puzzle Inflation.
  • Instant stooging.
  • People who are obligated to prevent their children from dying.
  • Server migration problems.
  • Accidentally writing the same puzzle as someone else.
  • Premium content for listeners who want to subscribe.
  • Putting sprites on the screen and accepting controller input.
  • Game design by proxy.
  • Your local Barcade with a Pico-8 cabinet.
  • Buttoning up a game to make it a shippable product.
  • Whether the knife is detecting a dork.
  • Butter golems.
  • Bugs that make games more fun.
  • Building a high end gaming PC and only running Pico-8 on it
  • I can't believe they buttered Jorts!
  • Meeting the guy who runs the Indie Arcade at Magfest.
  • Waiting 40 years for opportunities to fall in your lap.
  • Think Buick.
  • A cat that is not on the show.
  • Of all the exposed mucus membranes on your face, the eyes are two of them.
  • Projectile transmission.
  • Did this COVID infection rate study control for popularity?
  • Hitting 40 and embracing the cringe.
  • Wearing chemistry goggles in public.
  • Myopic basketball players.
  • Things you can put on your face to look like a superhero in disguise.
  • The Wario Land 4 soundtrack.
  • Making ogg vorbis rips of the Wario Land 4 soundtrack to put on Napster.
  • A gem of a poem to be hidden in a Wario game.
  • Playing back vocals with single-syllable samples.
  • Our collective dream diary.
  • Your dreams melting into your pillow with all the dust mites.
  • Everything is impermanent, especially video games.
  • A shocking removal of an important human from your life.
  • Making your peace with the time you have forgotten.
  • The natural high you get from blowing things up.
  • Throwing apples at a Snorlax until it wakes up.
  • Cooking games.
  • Matching happy looking fruits of different sizes.
  • Watching carefully as two peaches slide together.
  • Designing video games for 5-year olds on T.
  • Dropping things that merge in a two dimensional space with gravity.
  • The boy has two dads.
  • What can I do that is nonviolent and crunchy and interesting and solvable?
  • Looking for inspiration outside of video games.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+I600Nrlt ]]> Jim Stormdancer 226. Ilk-Action Lawsuit https://topiclords.com/ilk-action-lawsuit 5b8c1569-66c1-4426-87b1-4faf363b5312 Mon, 19 Feb 2024 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Ryan and Alexander. We discuss getting so agitated that you cook dinner, acquired tastes that are worth acquiring, texturally enhanced alternative beverage, and Bagme Bloma. 1:08:29 true Lords:

  • Ryan
  • Alexander

Topics:

  • Getting so agitated that you cook dinner
  • What's an acquired taste that's worth acquiring? What's one that's not worth the effort? What's the point of even "acquiring" a taste for anything when there are probably infinite options you don't have to teach yourself to enjoy?
  • Texturally enhanced alternative beverage
  • Bagme Bloma

Microtopics:

  • How the science gets done.
  • Measuring the height of a flagpole by measuring its shadow.
  • Using calculus to find the surface area of a potato.
  • Measuring and re-measuring until you get the result you want.
  • Confronting your professor about their involvement in Frog Fractions 2.
  • Country and Western music fused with synth heavy prog rock.
  • Using the gun to parallel park.
  • That time Ryan died while recording Topic Lords.
  • Getting so agitated that you do some differential equations.
  • New guy just dropped: guy who whenever he thinks about death he has to make a sandwich.
  • The first step towards rejecting a task: assessing the task.
  • Today is a good day to fill your Prius with snakes.
  • The Raccoon Prius story.
  • Hilarious mothers.
  • The inside of a Prius: nothing but corners.
  • Officer, it's not what you think. No, not that either.
  • Putting the AC on so the python in the back seat gets sluggish.
  • Getting a fork and spoon and twirling up snakes like spaghetti.
  • A taste worth busting your ass for.
  • An oral history of tricking alcohol post your tongue.
  • An entire generation that has never had to work to enjoy things because there are so many things that are easy to enjoy.
  • Twelve year olds from Alabama calling you a cuck.
  • New ideas that you haven't been thinking of even without looking at your phone.
  • Hiking: it's just hard walking.
  • Getting so agitated that you developed a taste for hiking.
  • The guy in the Fred Meyer buying Reese's cups while wearing a tuxedo.
  • The Men's Wearhome.
  • The Men's Wearhouse employee who is not allowed to tell you that they don't have anything for fat people so he brings out less and less flattering outfits until you take the hint.
  • Orbitz. (The soft drink from 1996.)
  • A proto-boba.
  • Drinking a random test tube from a bioengineering lab.
  • What if everyone had a number floating above their heads that represented the number of times they had to drink Orbitz before they developed a taste for Orbitz and now that Orbitz is out of production everyone's number stays the same forever
  • Big Dick's Energy.
  • Flavor-blasted slushies.
  • The sense-horror of drinking an Orbitz.
  • Shelf-stable tapioca pearls.
  • A free-to-play game for your tongue.
  • Texturally subdued beverages.
  • Decaf Red Bull.
  • The hypothetical beverage enthusiast who wants a decaf Red Bull.
  • How to make Orbitz in your toilet.
  • How many Orbitz you have to drink to reach Nirvana.
  • eBay sellers insisting that you don't drink the thirty year old novelty beverage they're selling you.
  • Thinking a poem is a Middle Earth thing but it's actually a regular Earth thing.
  • Poetry that is alliterative rather than rhyming.
  • Making art by fucking around with a new medium.
  • Music in a foreign language.
  • What Simlish sounds like in different languages.
  • A quest to discover why they started dotting the letter Y.
  • Expecting scrolls in 3 to 5 days.
]]> Lords:

  • Ryan
  • Alexander

Topics:

  • Getting so agitated that you cook dinner
  • What's an acquired taste that's worth acquiring? What's one that's not worth the effort? What's the point of even "acquiring" a taste for anything when there are probably infinite options you don't have to teach yourself to enjoy?
  • Texturally enhanced alternative beverage
  • Bagme Bloma

Microtopics:

  • How the science gets done.
  • Measuring the height of a flagpole by measuring its shadow.
  • Using calculus to find the surface area of a potato.
  • Measuring and re-measuring until you get the result you want.
  • Confronting your professor about their involvement in Frog Fractions 2.
  • Country and Western music fused with synth heavy prog rock.
  • Using the gun to parallel park.
  • That time Ryan died while recording Topic Lords.
  • Getting so agitated that you do some differential equations.
  • New guy just dropped: guy who whenever he thinks about death he has to make a sandwich.
  • The first step towards rejecting a task: assessing the task.
  • Today is a good day to fill your Prius with snakes.
  • The Raccoon Prius story.
  • Hilarious mothers.
  • The inside of a Prius: nothing but corners.
  • Officer, it's not what you think. No, not that either.
  • Putting the AC on so the python in the back seat gets sluggish.
  • Getting a fork and spoon and twirling up snakes like spaghetti.
  • A taste worth busting your ass for.
  • An oral history of tricking alcohol post your tongue.
  • An entire generation that has never had to work to enjoy things because there are so many things that are easy to enjoy.
  • Twelve year olds from Alabama calling you a cuck.
  • New ideas that you haven't been thinking of even without looking at your phone.
  • Hiking: it's just hard walking.
  • Getting so agitated that you developed a taste for hiking.
  • The guy in the Fred Meyer buying Reese's cups while wearing a tuxedo.
  • The Men's Wearhome.
  • The Men's Wearhouse employee who is not allowed to tell you that they don't have anything for fat people so he brings out less and less flattering outfits until you take the hint.
  • Orbitz. (The soft drink from 1996.)
  • A proto-boba.
  • Drinking a random test tube from a bioengineering lab.
  • What if everyone had a number floating above their heads that represented the number of times they had to drink Orbitz before they developed a taste for Orbitz and now that Orbitz is out of production everyone's number stays the same forever
  • Big Dick's Energy.
  • Flavor-blasted slushies.
  • The sense-horror of drinking an Orbitz.
  • Shelf-stable tapioca pearls.
  • A free-to-play game for your tongue.
  • Texturally subdued beverages.
  • Decaf Red Bull.
  • The hypothetical beverage enthusiast who wants a decaf Red Bull.
  • How to make Orbitz in your toilet.
  • How many Orbitz you have to drink to reach Nirvana.
  • eBay sellers insisting that you don't drink the thirty year old novelty beverage they're selling you.
  • Thinking a poem is a Middle Earth thing but it's actually a regular Earth thing.
  • Poetry that is alliterative rather than rhyming.
  • Making art by fucking around with a new medium.
  • Music in a foreign language.
  • What Simlish sounds like in different languages.
  • A quest to discover why they started dotting the letter Y.
  • Expecting scrolls in 3 to 5 days.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Ryan
  • Alexander

Topics:

  • Getting so agitated that you cook dinner
  • What's an acquired taste that's worth acquiring? What's one that's not worth the effort? What's the point of even "acquiring" a taste for anything when there are probably infinite options you don't have to teach yourself to enjoy?
  • Texturally enhanced alternative beverage
  • Bagme Bloma

Microtopics:

  • How the science gets done.
  • Measuring the height of a flagpole by measuring its shadow.
  • Using calculus to find the surface area of a potato.
  • Measuring and re-measuring until you get the result you want.
  • Confronting your professor about their involvement in Frog Fractions 2.
  • Country and Western music fused with synth heavy prog rock.
  • Using the gun to parallel park.
  • That time Ryan died while recording Topic Lords.
  • Getting so agitated that you do some differential equations.
  • New guy just dropped: guy who whenever he thinks about death he has to make a sandwich.
  • The first step towards rejecting a task: assessing the task.
  • Today is a good day to fill your Prius with snakes.
  • The Raccoon Prius story.
  • Hilarious mothers.
  • The inside of a Prius: nothing but corners.
  • Officer, it's not what you think. No, not that either.
  • Putting the AC on so the python in the back seat gets sluggish.
  • Getting a fork and spoon and twirling up snakes like spaghetti.
  • A taste worth busting your ass for.
  • An oral history of tricking alcohol post your tongue.
  • An entire generation that has never had to work to enjoy things because there are so many things that are easy to enjoy.
  • Twelve year olds from Alabama calling you a cuck.
  • New ideas that you haven't been thinking of even without looking at your phone.
  • Hiking: it's just hard walking.
  • Getting so agitated that you developed a taste for hiking.
  • The guy in the Fred Meyer buying Reese's cups while wearing a tuxedo.
  • The Men's Wearhome.
  • The Men's Wearhouse employee who is not allowed to tell you that they don't have anything for fat people so he brings out less and less flattering outfits until you take the hint.
  • Orbitz. (The soft drink from 1996.)
  • A proto-boba.
  • Drinking a random test tube from a bioengineering lab.
  • What if everyone had a number floating above their heads that represented the number of times they had to drink Orbitz before they developed a taste for Orbitz and now that Orbitz is out of production everyone's number stays the same forever
  • Big Dick's Energy.
  • Flavor-blasted slushies.
  • The sense-horror of drinking an Orbitz.
  • Shelf-stable tapioca pearls.
  • A free-to-play game for your tongue.
  • Texturally subdued beverages.
  • Decaf Red Bull.
  • The hypothetical beverage enthusiast who wants a decaf Red Bull.
  • How to make Orbitz in your toilet.
  • How many Orbitz you have to drink to reach Nirvana.
  • eBay sellers insisting that you don't drink the thirty year old novelty beverage they're selling you.
  • Thinking a poem is a Middle Earth thing but it's actually a regular Earth thing.
  • Poetry that is alliterative rather than rhyming.
  • Making art by fucking around with a new medium.
  • Music in a foreign language.
  • What Simlish sounds like in different languages.
  • A quest to discover why they started dotting the letter Y.
  • Expecting scrolls in 3 to 5 days.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+-yV5Tccf ]]> Jim Stormdancer 225. Showers: It's Wet in There https://topiclords.com/showers-its-wet-in-there 7642077f-83d1-4974-901c-7d65abeeb1f1 Mon, 12 Feb 2024 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: CisHetKayfaber and BaseCase. We discuss raising third culture kids, how to do creative projects that take longer than a weekend, Venmo having your money and having to sign up for Venmo, Farmyard Song, and Universal Yums sweet vs. savory snacks. 1:19:36 true Lords:

  • CisHetKayfaber
  • BaseCase

Topics:

  • Raising third cultural kids as a second cultural individual
  • Figuring out how to do creative projects that take longer than a weekend when you aren't getting paid for them.
  • Someone sent me money on Venmo and now I need to sign up for Venmo if I want to have the money
  • Farmyard Song
  • We've been subscribed to Universal Yums for over a year now, and the sweet snacks range from "unremarkable" to "unbelievably great" to "not my cup of tea but interesting", whereas the savory snacks are mostly bad. What's going on there?

Microtopics:

  • Not being permitted to plug anything.
  • A unique situation in which you are gendered a lot less.
  • Australian Treat Arnott's Mint Slice.
  • Crossover of snacks from Australia to Japan.
  • Gentleman's agreements among cookie manufacturers.
  • Patenting your cookie recipe.
  • Touring school administrators.
  • Being friends with a lot of Coca Cola people.
  • Really enjoying multiculturalism.
  • Producing a good person.
  • Taking credit for the time your daughter didn't play Mario for six months.
  • Focusing on the aspects of the situation that you find meaningful.
  • What does and doesn't count as a childhood development milestone.
  • Being good at the work people are expecting you to do.
  • Doing worksheets outside.
  • What children report back from their experience at school.
  • Attempting to pirate the Montessori curriculum.
  • A really fun month.
  • Projects you can accomplish in a weekend.
  • Why you don't have more to show for all your free time.
  • Refusing to call someone stupid or lazy and having to figure out why they're actually failing.
  • Coping strategies to get things done.
  • Advice that is not helpful for neurodivergent people.
  • Breaking a task into subtasks and putting them on a schedule.
  • The first time you encountered the concept of a to-do list.
  • Brain tech.
  • Hammock time. (Or shower time.)
  • Showers: It's Wet In There.
  • Exultation of showers.
  • Watching someone start a hobby and immediately excel at it.
  • Finding a good community to learn how to do a thing.
  • Joining a discord with experts in many things.
  • Learning how to program and realizing that this makes you good at everything because programming is the hardest thing humans do.
  • Sending money to a phone number vs. sending money to an email address.
  • Canadians wishing each other money.
  • Nice things to do when you don't want to defraud people.
  • Opening a whole raft of phishing opportunities.
  • Visa getting a cut of every transaction that happens ever.
  • Whether every person in the world could live in Canada.
  • The Cocaine Mayor.
  • A traditional that is credited to Aaron Copeland.
  • Cats saying "fiddle-eye-fee."
  • Not being a raging misogynist but engaging in raging misogyny anyway.
  • The era when the onomatopoeia for a dog barking was "bow wow."
  • Onomatopoeia that is literal like "bang" vs. onomatopoeia that is more of a stretch like "shimmy shack shimmy shack."
  • Riffing on Aaron Copeland's sexuality.
  • Trying to shit enough to keep up with your toilet paper subscription.
  • A product built for people who have kids but do not have kids.
  • The mechanism by which the "Launch Frog Fractions 2" button launched Frog Fractions 2.
  • The great Loot Box crash of 2019.
  • Snacks that come with an instruction manual.
  • Ketchup flavored potato chips.
  • What you reach for when you're feeling snacky.
  • A potato chip palate that is just far too sophisticated.
  • Smoked ham potato chips.
  • Harry Potter jelly beans ruining snacks forever.
  • Only liking eating things that taste good.
  • This is bad, but is it bad in a new, interesting way?
  • The worst kind of bad.
  • Observing a terrible sprawling work and thinking "wow, you really did a thing here."
  • The recontextualization of earlier elements based on later knowledge.
  • Discord Lords.
  • Listening to ads because you have gloves on.
  • How to join the Topic Lords discord.
  • A recently minted lord who edits the show.
  • Lords Eat Free.
]]> Lords:

  • CisHetKayfaber
  • BaseCase

Topics:

  • Raising third cultural kids as a second cultural individual
  • Figuring out how to do creative projects that take longer than a weekend when you aren't getting paid for them.
  • Someone sent me money on Venmo and now I need to sign up for Venmo if I want to have the money
  • Farmyard Song
  • We've been subscribed to Universal Yums for over a year now, and the sweet snacks range from "unremarkable" to "unbelievably great" to "not my cup of tea but interesting", whereas the savory snacks are mostly bad. What's going on there?

Microtopics:

  • Not being permitted to plug anything.
  • A unique situation in which you are gendered a lot less.
  • Australian Treat Arnott's Mint Slice.
  • Crossover of snacks from Australia to Japan.
  • Gentleman's agreements among cookie manufacturers.
  • Patenting your cookie recipe.
  • Touring school administrators.
  • Being friends with a lot of Coca Cola people.
  • Really enjoying multiculturalism.
  • Producing a good person.
  • Taking credit for the time your daughter didn't play Mario for six months.
  • Focusing on the aspects of the situation that you find meaningful.
  • What does and doesn't count as a childhood development milestone.
  • Being good at the work people are expecting you to do.
  • Doing worksheets outside.
  • What children report back from their experience at school.
  • Attempting to pirate the Montessori curriculum.
  • A really fun month.
  • Projects you can accomplish in a weekend.
  • Why you don't have more to show for all your free time.
  • Refusing to call someone stupid or lazy and having to figure out why they're actually failing.
  • Coping strategies to get things done.
  • Advice that is not helpful for neurodivergent people.
  • Breaking a task into subtasks and putting them on a schedule.
  • The first time you encountered the concept of a to-do list.
  • Brain tech.
  • Hammock time. (Or shower time.)
  • Showers: It's Wet In There.
  • Exultation of showers.
  • Watching someone start a hobby and immediately excel at it.
  • Finding a good community to learn how to do a thing.
  • Joining a discord with experts in many things.
  • Learning how to program and realizing that this makes you good at everything because programming is the hardest thing humans do.
  • Sending money to a phone number vs. sending money to an email address.
  • Canadians wishing each other money.
  • Nice things to do when you don't want to defraud people.
  • Opening a whole raft of phishing opportunities.
  • Visa getting a cut of every transaction that happens ever.
  • Whether every person in the world could live in Canada.
  • The Cocaine Mayor.
  • A traditional that is credited to Aaron Copeland.
  • Cats saying "fiddle-eye-fee."
  • Not being a raging misogynist but engaging in raging misogyny anyway.
  • The era when the onomatopoeia for a dog barking was "bow wow."
  • Onomatopoeia that is literal like "bang" vs. onomatopoeia that is more of a stretch like "shimmy shack shimmy shack."
  • Riffing on Aaron Copeland's sexuality.
  • Trying to shit enough to keep up with your toilet paper subscription.
  • A product built for people who have kids but do not have kids.
  • The mechanism by which the "Launch Frog Fractions 2" button launched Frog Fractions 2.
  • The great Loot Box crash of 2019.
  • Snacks that come with an instruction manual.
  • Ketchup flavored potato chips.
  • What you reach for when you're feeling snacky.
  • A potato chip palate that is just far too sophisticated.
  • Smoked ham potato chips.
  • Harry Potter jelly beans ruining snacks forever.
  • Only liking eating things that taste good.
  • This is bad, but is it bad in a new, interesting way?
  • The worst kind of bad.
  • Observing a terrible sprawling work and thinking "wow, you really did a thing here."
  • The recontextualization of earlier elements based on later knowledge.
  • Discord Lords.
  • Listening to ads because you have gloves on.
  • How to join the Topic Lords discord.
  • A recently minted lord who edits the show.
  • Lords Eat Free.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • CisHetKayfaber
  • BaseCase

Topics:

  • Raising third cultural kids as a second cultural individual
  • Figuring out how to do creative projects that take longer than a weekend when you aren't getting paid for them.
  • Someone sent me money on Venmo and now I need to sign up for Venmo if I want to have the money
  • Farmyard Song
  • We've been subscribed to Universal Yums for over a year now, and the sweet snacks range from "unremarkable" to "unbelievably great" to "not my cup of tea but interesting", whereas the savory snacks are mostly bad. What's going on there?

Microtopics:

  • Not being permitted to plug anything.
  • A unique situation in which you are gendered a lot less.
  • Australian Treat Arnott's Mint Slice.
  • Crossover of snacks from Australia to Japan.
  • Gentleman's agreements among cookie manufacturers.
  • Patenting your cookie recipe.
  • Touring school administrators.
  • Being friends with a lot of Coca Cola people.
  • Really enjoying multiculturalism.
  • Producing a good person.
  • Taking credit for the time your daughter didn't play Mario for six months.
  • Focusing on the aspects of the situation that you find meaningful.
  • What does and doesn't count as a childhood development milestone.
  • Being good at the work people are expecting you to do.
  • Doing worksheets outside.
  • What children report back from their experience at school.
  • Attempting to pirate the Montessori curriculum.
  • A really fun month.
  • Projects you can accomplish in a weekend.
  • Why you don't have more to show for all your free time.
  • Refusing to call someone stupid or lazy and having to figure out why they're actually failing.
  • Coping strategies to get things done.
  • Advice that is not helpful for neurodivergent people.
  • Breaking a task into subtasks and putting them on a schedule.
  • The first time you encountered the concept of a to-do list.
  • Brain tech.
  • Hammock time. (Or shower time.)
  • Showers: It's Wet In There.
  • Exultation of showers.
  • Watching someone start a hobby and immediately excel at it.
  • Finding a good community to learn how to do a thing.
  • Joining a discord with experts in many things.
  • Learning how to program and realizing that this makes you good at everything because programming is the hardest thing humans do.
  • Sending money to a phone number vs. sending money to an email address.
  • Canadians wishing each other money.
  • Nice things to do when you don't want to defraud people.
  • Opening a whole raft of phishing opportunities.
  • Visa getting a cut of every transaction that happens ever.
  • Whether every person in the world could live in Canada.
  • The Cocaine Mayor.
  • A traditional that is credited to Aaron Copeland.
  • Cats saying "fiddle-eye-fee."
  • Not being a raging misogynist but engaging in raging misogyny anyway.
  • The era when the onomatopoeia for a dog barking was "bow wow."
  • Onomatopoeia that is literal like "bang" vs. onomatopoeia that is more of a stretch like "shimmy shack shimmy shack."
  • Riffing on Aaron Copeland's sexuality.
  • Trying to shit enough to keep up with your toilet paper subscription.
  • A product built for people who have kids but do not have kids.
  • The mechanism by which the "Launch Frog Fractions 2" button launched Frog Fractions 2.
  • The great Loot Box crash of 2019.
  • Snacks that come with an instruction manual.
  • Ketchup flavored potato chips.
  • What you reach for when you're feeling snacky.
  • A potato chip palate that is just far too sophisticated.
  • Smoked ham potato chips.
  • Harry Potter jelly beans ruining snacks forever.
  • Only liking eating things that taste good.
  • This is bad, but is it bad in a new, interesting way?
  • The worst kind of bad.
  • Observing a terrible sprawling work and thinking "wow, you really did a thing here."
  • The recontextualization of earlier elements based on later knowledge.
  • Discord Lords.
  • Listening to ads because you have gloves on.
  • How to join the Topic Lords discord.
  • A recently minted lord who edits the show.
  • Lords Eat Free.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+k5IuV8Jq ]]> Jim Stormdancer 224. Following a Garden Hose Around in the Dark https://topiclords.com/following-a-garden-hose-around-in-the-dark 0f6c713d-f900-4a73-aa83-4a9c67054140 Mon, 05 Feb 2024 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Jason and Nathan. We discuss painting your nails, jukebox griefing, the team that developed Donkey Kong, Hypothetical Explanations for the Paradox, how color happens on monitors, and Bach's looping doodle. 1:10:21 true Lords:

Topics:

  • When I paint my nails I don't paint my thumbnails. This is because I see my thumbnails all day long but I don't see my other fingernails nearly as often, and so every time I do I'm like "Whoa!!!!"
  • Jukebox griefing
  • Nintendo farmed out the development of Donkey Kong to an outside dev team, because they didn't have an in-house video game team yet. Donkey Kong was that team's first game. Their second game was Zaxxon.
  • Hypothetical explanations for the paradox
  • Thinking about RGB color programming for games, then wondering about how the color actually happens on monitors.
  • Bach drew a loopy doodle at the top of the cover of his original manuscript of "The Well Tempered Clavier". It looks like he was just warming up his pen-hand, but scholars have been arguing for years that it contains secret codes about how to well-temper a clavier

Microtopics:

  • Interactive Fiction Land.
  • Panoptikum Budapest.
  • Bumpy Grumpy's emotional arc.
  • Frantic Frank.
  • Men and male-presenting persons with painted nails.
  • Painting just one fingernail dark green and wondering whether that's a hankie code thing.
  • What's going on with my thumbs?
  • Your non-thumb fingernails.
  • Painting your nails and repeatedly rediscovering them.
  • Looking like an android. (But in a cool way.)
  • Forehead loaves.
  • Starting to pay attention to where your fingers are.
  • Why not to wear a magnetic nose stud.
  • Being old enough to remember when you had to walk up to the jukebox to queue up Beat It by Michael Jackson ten times in a row.
  • Getting into a jukebox griefing war with someone you've never met.
  • Walking up to the jukebox and typing in the binary code of the WAV file you want to play.
  • Binary data played back at audio rates.
  • The math describing Mario's jump arc.
  • Making the first racing video game and thinking "well that's racing games sorted."
  • Satoru Iwata's understanding of Mario's last name.
  • Mario: a weird little dude.
  • Drill Dozer.
  • How to run a video game business when games are sold on cassette tape for six pounds which is way too heavy for a video game.
  • Platformers where you go off the edge of the screen and end up on another screen and each screen has a name.
  • Inflation hypothesis and the youngness argument.
  • Earth is purposefully isolated. (Planetarium hypothesis.)
  • They are here undetected vs. they are here unacknowledged.
  • Arguing about a sexy robot.
  • Ironically Sexy Robots
  • The Fudd Paradox, by Ray Bradbury.
  • People who just want to toss salad and don't want to know about your weird slang.
  • Gender-expansive anthropomorphic rabbits.
  • Blank verse vs. free verse.
  • Burning Monkey Solitaire.
  • What your cat sees when he's swatting at Kratos.
  • How blue is blue?
  • Watching old episodes of Bob Ross and you can't follow along any more because they don't make Mummy Brown anymore.
  • The Opaque See-Through TV.
  • Seeing a see-through TV at CES and asking the guy at the booth what use case is of a see-through TV and he's like "to look cool at CES."
  • Ribbed monitors.
  • The secret textures of the Nintendo 3DS.
  • All kinds of words that you don't know how to pronounce.
  • The Moogseum.
  • Bach's looping doodle.
  • The structure of the J.S. Bach speedrunning community.
  • A community obsessing over minutia and never worrying about whether it's true or important because it's just some bullshit you made up and agreed to care about.
  • Hungry music theorists who need human connection.
  • Sponsoring AGDQ with your clavier etudes.
  • Black MIDI.
  • Using up all the claviers in the world during your clavier speedrunning event.
  • The Fetaverse.
  • Making an arcade cabinet.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

  • When I paint my nails I don't paint my thumbnails. This is because I see my thumbnails all day long but I don't see my other fingernails nearly as often, and so every time I do I'm like "Whoa!!!!"
  • Jukebox griefing
  • Nintendo farmed out the development of Donkey Kong to an outside dev team, because they didn't have an in-house video game team yet. Donkey Kong was that team's first game. Their second game was Zaxxon.
  • Hypothetical explanations for the paradox
  • Thinking about RGB color programming for games, then wondering about how the color actually happens on monitors.
  • Bach drew a loopy doodle at the top of the cover of his original manuscript of "The Well Tempered Clavier". It looks like he was just warming up his pen-hand, but scholars have been arguing for years that it contains secret codes about how to well-temper a clavier

Microtopics:

  • Interactive Fiction Land.
  • Panoptikum Budapest.
  • Bumpy Grumpy's emotional arc.
  • Frantic Frank.
  • Men and male-presenting persons with painted nails.
  • Painting just one fingernail dark green and wondering whether that's a hankie code thing.
  • What's going on with my thumbs?
  • Your non-thumb fingernails.
  • Painting your nails and repeatedly rediscovering them.
  • Looking like an android. (But in a cool way.)
  • Forehead loaves.
  • Starting to pay attention to where your fingers are.
  • Why not to wear a magnetic nose stud.
  • Being old enough to remember when you had to walk up to the jukebox to queue up Beat It by Michael Jackson ten times in a row.
  • Getting into a jukebox griefing war with someone you've never met.
  • Walking up to the jukebox and typing in the binary code of the WAV file you want to play.
  • Binary data played back at audio rates.
  • The math describing Mario's jump arc.
  • Making the first racing video game and thinking "well that's racing games sorted."
  • Satoru Iwata's understanding of Mario's last name.
  • Mario: a weird little dude.
  • Drill Dozer.
  • How to run a video game business when games are sold on cassette tape for six pounds which is way too heavy for a video game.
  • Platformers where you go off the edge of the screen and end up on another screen and each screen has a name.
  • Inflation hypothesis and the youngness argument.
  • Earth is purposefully isolated. (Planetarium hypothesis.)
  • They are here undetected vs. they are here unacknowledged.
  • Arguing about a sexy robot.
  • Ironically Sexy Robots
  • The Fudd Paradox, by Ray Bradbury.
  • People who just want to toss salad and don't want to know about your weird slang.
  • Gender-expansive anthropomorphic rabbits.
  • Blank verse vs. free verse.
  • Burning Monkey Solitaire.
  • What your cat sees when he's swatting at Kratos.
  • How blue is blue?
  • Watching old episodes of Bob Ross and you can't follow along any more because they don't make Mummy Brown anymore.
  • The Opaque See-Through TV.
  • Seeing a see-through TV at CES and asking the guy at the booth what use case is of a see-through TV and he's like "to look cool at CES."
  • Ribbed monitors.
  • The secret textures of the Nintendo 3DS.
  • All kinds of words that you don't know how to pronounce.
  • The Moogseum.
  • Bach's looping doodle.
  • The structure of the J.S. Bach speedrunning community.
  • A community obsessing over minutia and never worrying about whether it's true or important because it's just some bullshit you made up and agreed to care about.
  • Hungry music theorists who need human connection.
  • Sponsoring AGDQ with your clavier etudes.
  • Black MIDI.
  • Using up all the claviers in the world during your clavier speedrunning event.
  • The Fetaverse.
  • Making an arcade cabinet.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

  • When I paint my nails I don't paint my thumbnails. This is because I see my thumbnails all day long but I don't see my other fingernails nearly as often, and so every time I do I'm like "Whoa!!!!"
  • Jukebox griefing
  • Nintendo farmed out the development of Donkey Kong to an outside dev team, because they didn't have an in-house video game team yet. Donkey Kong was that team's first game. Their second game was Zaxxon.
  • Hypothetical explanations for the paradox
  • Thinking about RGB color programming for games, then wondering about how the color actually happens on monitors.
  • Bach drew a loopy doodle at the top of the cover of his original manuscript of "The Well Tempered Clavier". It looks like he was just warming up his pen-hand, but scholars have been arguing for years that it contains secret codes about how to well-temper a clavier

Microtopics:

  • Interactive Fiction Land.
  • Panoptikum Budapest.
  • Bumpy Grumpy's emotional arc.
  • Frantic Frank.
  • Men and male-presenting persons with painted nails.
  • Painting just one fingernail dark green and wondering whether that's a hankie code thing.
  • What's going on with my thumbs?
  • Your non-thumb fingernails.
  • Painting your nails and repeatedly rediscovering them.
  • Looking like an android. (But in a cool way.)
  • Forehead loaves.
  • Starting to pay attention to where your fingers are.
  • Why not to wear a magnetic nose stud.
  • Being old enough to remember when you had to walk up to the jukebox to queue up Beat It by Michael Jackson ten times in a row.
  • Getting into a jukebox griefing war with someone you've never met.
  • Walking up to the jukebox and typing in the binary code of the WAV file you want to play.
  • Binary data played back at audio rates.
  • The math describing Mario's jump arc.
  • Making the first racing video game and thinking "well that's racing games sorted."
  • Satoru Iwata's understanding of Mario's last name.
  • Mario: a weird little dude.
  • Drill Dozer.
  • How to run a video game business when games are sold on cassette tape for six pounds which is way too heavy for a video game.
  • Platformers where you go off the edge of the screen and end up on another screen and each screen has a name.
  • Inflation hypothesis and the youngness argument.
  • Earth is purposefully isolated. (Planetarium hypothesis.)
  • They are here undetected vs. they are here unacknowledged.
  • Arguing about a sexy robot.
  • Ironically Sexy Robots
  • The Fudd Paradox, by Ray Bradbury.
  • People who just want to toss salad and don't want to know about your weird slang.
  • Gender-expansive anthropomorphic rabbits.
  • Blank verse vs. free verse.
  • Burning Monkey Solitaire.
  • What your cat sees when he's swatting at Kratos.
  • How blue is blue?
  • Watching old episodes of Bob Ross and you can't follow along any more because they don't make Mummy Brown anymore.
  • The Opaque See-Through TV.
  • Seeing a see-through TV at CES and asking the guy at the booth what use case is of a see-through TV and he's like "to look cool at CES."
  • Ribbed monitors.
  • The secret textures of the Nintendo 3DS.
  • All kinds of words that you don't know how to pronounce.
  • The Moogseum.
  • Bach's looping doodle.
  • The structure of the J.S. Bach speedrunning community.
  • A community obsessing over minutia and never worrying about whether it's true or important because it's just some bullshit you made up and agreed to care about.
  • Hungry music theorists who need human connection.
  • Sponsoring AGDQ with your clavier etudes.
  • Black MIDI.
  • Using up all the claviers in the world during your clavier speedrunning event.
  • The Fetaverse.
  • Making an arcade cabinet.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+lyLZJCJ8 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 223. Three Hats to Scoop up a Mouse https://topiclords.com/three-hats-to-scoop-up-a-mouse 044b270f-4eae-44c6-b285-1813bed6c296 Mon, 29 Jan 2024 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Andrew and Aubrianne. We discuss knitting patterns as open source clothing, making your video game feel original, using insert after all, The Garden by Shel Silverstein, and aphantasia but for audiation. 1:12:38 true Lords:

Topics:

  • Knitting patterns are open source clothing
  • This one weird trick will make your videogame feel original
    • Esper says: "JRPGs are just menu games. Everything that's happening is an option in a menu doing some math, there's almost never timing involved. Why do they have to be 'battles?' I've always wanted to make a JRPG set in 1990 where instead of getting in battles, you're just a band from Detroit on tour. There's probably enough going on that you could make interesting JRPG 'battles' and story and characters out of that. 'Audience response' as an HP meter that goes up instead of down, I guess."
  • I noticed myself using insert. It turns out I use insert.
  • https://genius.com/Shel-silverstein-the-garden-annotated
    • Esper says: "The best summation of Black Mirror I ever heard was: 'Can I have an apple?' 'No, there are only Cyber Apples.' 'Can I have a Cyber Apple?' 'No.'"
  • Aphantasia but for audiation. Is that a thing?

Microtopics:

  • Wool socks.
  • The thing Jim heard about wool.
  • Making a rope out of human hair.
  • Whether there are multiple Columbos or just one.
  • Which one of you is the programmer and which one is the rubber duck?
  • A human 3D printer.
  • Keeping your hands busy.
  • Stim vs. fidget.
  • How to end a conversation that is not during a D&D session.
  • Discovering that your entire personality is a coping mechanism.
  • YarnTube.
  • The fine line between dressing like a grandma and dressing like a really slutty grandma.
  • It's a tube. Figure it out.
  • Doing it badly until you figure out how to do it better.
  • Making a game that is fun even if it doesn't have health bars.
  • Instead of doing the easy and obvious things, do something really hard instead.
  • Why video games have conflict.
  • Disaccord between you and everyone else in the video game.
  • Definitely arguably.
  • Kids learning from people who are not their parents.
  • Smashing a bunch of things together until fun emerges.
  • It's not a game where you jump over pits and it's not a game where you hit people with swords so what even is it??
  • Dating anime ladies by clicking through text.
  • A caveat among recommenders.
  • Video game dialog that makes you feel conflicted about shooting Nazis.
  • Remembering people's tweets.
  • The Rule of Thirds of video game dialog.
  • Executing a bad idea very well.
  • No One Weird Trick for learning to play cello.
  • The insert key as part of your typing repertoire.
  • Whether pause/break still works.
  • A keyboard without the LinkedIn key.
  • Getting your grandma online.
  • Pushing the pizza key on the keyboard and the CD-ROM drive opens and there it is.
  • Rifled plumbing that allows sewage to flow in a clockwise spiral while clean water flows in a counterclockwise spiral and they never touch.
  • A surprise poem where none of your fruit is food.
  • How to make a poem fit on Pinterest.
  • No combat in my poems.
  • Doing your best to make a good thing but never thinking your own work is good even after you experience great success.
  • A grocery list with a Black Mirror twist ending.
  • Having money in Venmo but you need to sign up for Venmo to get it.
  • Listening to a thing if you want to know what it sounds like.
  • Anauralia: the silent mind.
  • It takes your whole brain to be you, it doesn't have time to be other people too.
  • Not watching Black Mirror so that you can believe everyone when they tell you lies about Black Mirror.
  • It was Emma Thompson all along.
  • The difficulty of remembering Maggie Gyllenhaal.
  • Getting ripped while sitting motionless at your desk.
  • That fat jiggling machine from the 50s.
  • A weighted hula hoop to massage your guts.
  • Jorts Horse.
  • A bunch of millennials shitposting.
  • Trying to distribute your games locally by stapling a floppy disk to a telephone pole
  • Microtransaction pump games.
  • Sneaking into an arcade with a new arcade game in your back pocket and furtively shoving your new game between two existing arcade games.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

  • Knitting patterns are open source clothing
  • This one weird trick will make your videogame feel original
    • Esper says: "JRPGs are just menu games. Everything that's happening is an option in a menu doing some math, there's almost never timing involved. Why do they have to be 'battles?' I've always wanted to make a JRPG set in 1990 where instead of getting in battles, you're just a band from Detroit on tour. There's probably enough going on that you could make interesting JRPG 'battles' and story and characters out of that. 'Audience response' as an HP meter that goes up instead of down, I guess."
  • I noticed myself using insert. It turns out I use insert.
  • https://genius.com/Shel-silverstein-the-garden-annotated
    • Esper says: "The best summation of Black Mirror I ever heard was: 'Can I have an apple?' 'No, there are only Cyber Apples.' 'Can I have a Cyber Apple?' 'No.'"
  • Aphantasia but for audiation. Is that a thing?

Microtopics:

  • Wool socks.
  • The thing Jim heard about wool.
  • Making a rope out of human hair.
  • Whether there are multiple Columbos or just one.
  • Which one of you is the programmer and which one is the rubber duck?
  • A human 3D printer.
  • Keeping your hands busy.
  • Stim vs. fidget.
  • How to end a conversation that is not during a D&D session.
  • Discovering that your entire personality is a coping mechanism.
  • YarnTube.
  • The fine line between dressing like a grandma and dressing like a really slutty grandma.
  • It's a tube. Figure it out.
  • Doing it badly until you figure out how to do it better.
  • Making a game that is fun even if it doesn't have health bars.
  • Instead of doing the easy and obvious things, do something really hard instead.
  • Why video games have conflict.
  • Disaccord between you and everyone else in the video game.
  • Definitely arguably.
  • Kids learning from people who are not their parents.
  • Smashing a bunch of things together until fun emerges.
  • It's not a game where you jump over pits and it's not a game where you hit people with swords so what even is it??
  • Dating anime ladies by clicking through text.
  • A caveat among recommenders.
  • Video game dialog that makes you feel conflicted about shooting Nazis.
  • Remembering people's tweets.
  • The Rule of Thirds of video game dialog.
  • Executing a bad idea very well.
  • No One Weird Trick for learning to play cello.
  • The insert key as part of your typing repertoire.
  • Whether pause/break still works.
  • A keyboard without the LinkedIn key.
  • Getting your grandma online.
  • Pushing the pizza key on the keyboard and the CD-ROM drive opens and there it is.
  • Rifled plumbing that allows sewage to flow in a clockwise spiral while clean water flows in a counterclockwise spiral and they never touch.
  • A surprise poem where none of your fruit is food.
  • How to make a poem fit on Pinterest.
  • No combat in my poems.
  • Doing your best to make a good thing but never thinking your own work is good even after you experience great success.
  • A grocery list with a Black Mirror twist ending.
  • Having money in Venmo but you need to sign up for Venmo to get it.
  • Listening to a thing if you want to know what it sounds like.
  • Anauralia: the silent mind.
  • It takes your whole brain to be you, it doesn't have time to be other people too.
  • Not watching Black Mirror so that you can believe everyone when they tell you lies about Black Mirror.
  • It was Emma Thompson all along.
  • The difficulty of remembering Maggie Gyllenhaal.
  • Getting ripped while sitting motionless at your desk.
  • That fat jiggling machine from the 50s.
  • A weighted hula hoop to massage your guts.
  • Jorts Horse.
  • A bunch of millennials shitposting.
  • Trying to distribute your games locally by stapling a floppy disk to a telephone pole
  • Microtransaction pump games.
  • Sneaking into an arcade with a new arcade game in your back pocket and furtively shoving your new game between two existing arcade games.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

  • Knitting patterns are open source clothing
  • This one weird trick will make your videogame feel original
    • Esper says: "JRPGs are just menu games. Everything that's happening is an option in a menu doing some math, there's almost never timing involved. Why do they have to be 'battles?' I've always wanted to make a JRPG set in 1990 where instead of getting in battles, you're just a band from Detroit on tour. There's probably enough going on that you could make interesting JRPG 'battles' and story and characters out of that. 'Audience response' as an HP meter that goes up instead of down, I guess."
  • I noticed myself using insert. It turns out I use insert.
  • https://genius.com/Shel-silverstein-the-garden-annotated
    • Esper says: "The best summation of Black Mirror I ever heard was: 'Can I have an apple?' 'No, there are only Cyber Apples.' 'Can I have a Cyber Apple?' 'No.'"
  • Aphantasia but for audiation. Is that a thing?

Microtopics:

  • Wool socks.
  • The thing Jim heard about wool.
  • Making a rope out of human hair.
  • Whether there are multiple Columbos or just one.
  • Which one of you is the programmer and which one is the rubber duck?
  • A human 3D printer.
  • Keeping your hands busy.
  • Stim vs. fidget.
  • How to end a conversation that is not during a D&D session.
  • Discovering that your entire personality is a coping mechanism.
  • YarnTube.
  • The fine line between dressing like a grandma and dressing like a really slutty grandma.
  • It's a tube. Figure it out.
  • Doing it badly until you figure out how to do it better.
  • Making a game that is fun even if it doesn't have health bars.
  • Instead of doing the easy and obvious things, do something really hard instead.
  • Why video games have conflict.
  • Disaccord between you and everyone else in the video game.
  • Definitely arguably.
  • Kids learning from people who are not their parents.
  • Smashing a bunch of things together until fun emerges.
  • It's not a game where you jump over pits and it's not a game where you hit people with swords so what even is it??
  • Dating anime ladies by clicking through text.
  • A caveat among recommenders.
  • Video game dialog that makes you feel conflicted about shooting Nazis.
  • Remembering people's tweets.
  • The Rule of Thirds of video game dialog.
  • Executing a bad idea very well.
  • No One Weird Trick for learning to play cello.
  • The insert key as part of your typing repertoire.
  • Whether pause/break still works.
  • A keyboard without the LinkedIn key.
  • Getting your grandma online.
  • Pushing the pizza key on the keyboard and the CD-ROM drive opens and there it is.
  • Rifled plumbing that allows sewage to flow in a clockwise spiral while clean water flows in a counterclockwise spiral and they never touch.
  • A surprise poem where none of your fruit is food.
  • How to make a poem fit on Pinterest.
  • No combat in my poems.
  • Doing your best to make a good thing but never thinking your own work is good even after you experience great success.
  • A grocery list with a Black Mirror twist ending.
  • Having money in Venmo but you need to sign up for Venmo to get it.
  • Listening to a thing if you want to know what it sounds like.
  • Anauralia: the silent mind.
  • It takes your whole brain to be you, it doesn't have time to be other people too.
  • Not watching Black Mirror so that you can believe everyone when they tell you lies about Black Mirror.
  • It was Emma Thompson all along.
  • The difficulty of remembering Maggie Gyllenhaal.
  • Getting ripped while sitting motionless at your desk.
  • That fat jiggling machine from the 50s.
  • A weighted hula hoop to massage your guts.
  • Jorts Horse.
  • A bunch of millennials shitposting.
  • Trying to distribute your games locally by stapling a floppy disk to a telephone pole
  • Microtransaction pump games.
  • Sneaking into an arcade with a new arcade game in your back pocket and furtively shoving your new game between two existing arcade games.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+gOmJapTf ]]> Jim Stormdancer 222. Barkley in Retrograde https://topiclords.com/barkley-in-retrograde 0c93519c-5ae2-4568-bd7a-566d7b9501d3 Mon, 22 Jan 2024 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Chris and Esper. Topics: Geocaching, the Miyoo Mini, my lost career as a Super Mario Bros. 35 Coach, There's Not a Person Alive by David Donihue, the semiparasocial relationship between a podcast editor and the people on the podcast, and struggling to relearn high school Spanish 1:13:23 true Lords:

  • Chris
  • Esper

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The editor of a podcast.
  • The #1 podcast for topic fans.
  • Chopping at some audio until it becomes a podcast.
  • Editing a recording into a podcast that's nothing but ums, mouth smacking noises and uncomfortable silence.
  • Zoom dynamically sensing when you're saying something dumb or boring and muting you.
  • Saying yes with the Sonic ring noise and no with the Sonic taking damage noise.
  • A cozy pleasant show full of fun facts.
  • Prepping for a paradigm.
  • How to put audio on film.
  • Going on a web forum and receiving a quest to find a magnetic box stuck underneath a metal staircase.
  • Geocaching on the Moon.
  • Geocaching vs. Geohashing.
  • A French pun for your board game night that nobody can remember because it's in French.
  • c:geo.
  • Finding a geocache by climbing a tree and pulling a paperclip attached to a fake piece of bark.
  • What to do if you're the one who picks up a travel bug.
  • Fake bolts where the center unscrews and it's hollow inside.
  • Developing a sense for when a geocache is nearby and always being wrong.
  • Miyoo Mini Plus.
  • Custom firmware that fixes your terrible handheld game system.
  • The Dream of the Playdate.
  • The Anbernic R something something letters numbers.
  • C-ctrl.
  • Going back to the Tekken 3 well.
  • A video game bar in Japan that only has Americans in it.
  • A very reasonable number of video games to flip through.
  • Emulators with daily runs.
  • Multi Bowl.
  • A game that legally can not exist.
  • Johann Sebastian Joust and its meta.
  • Getting one point in Rampage.
  • Advice that can literally no longer be helpful for anybody.
  • How to be an effective Goomba.
  • Looking at Jim's win/loss ratio and being inspired.
  • As Garfield said, "nothing good can stay."
  • A stainless soul lying inspired.
  • Bad experiences shared by every human.
  • A very smooth-brained day
  • Rampant poetry plagiarism on TikTok.
  • A food ASMR video where someone is repeatedly stabbing chicken with a fork.
  • Videos of hamsters running in wheels while listening to Dragula by Rob Zombie.
  • Whether the fish enjoys playing Pokemon.
  • A sweet 16 bracket of Best Kinds of Shark.
  • Rerecording the Topic Lords jingle with a swarm of bees.
  • The qualifications required for the person who designs electric car backing up noises.
  • Which apps to use to help you remember Spanish.
  • Speedrunning High School Spanish.
  • Learning Japanese from anime.
  • A 24/7 Livestream of digital cats lying around the house.
  • Hallucinating new languages around the house.
  • 52 Pickup with Gita Jackson and Alex Jaffee, about the most important comic book series of this century.
]]> Lords:

  • Chris
  • Esper

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The editor of a podcast.
  • The #1 podcast for topic fans.
  • Chopping at some audio until it becomes a podcast.
  • Editing a recording into a podcast that's nothing but ums, mouth smacking noises and uncomfortable silence.
  • Zoom dynamically sensing when you're saying something dumb or boring and muting you.
  • Saying yes with the Sonic ring noise and no with the Sonic taking damage noise.
  • A cozy pleasant show full of fun facts.
  • Prepping for a paradigm.
  • How to put audio on film.
  • Going on a web forum and receiving a quest to find a magnetic box stuck underneath a metal staircase.
  • Geocaching on the Moon.
  • Geocaching vs. Geohashing.
  • A French pun for your board game night that nobody can remember because it's in French.
  • c:geo.
  • Finding a geocache by climbing a tree and pulling a paperclip attached to a fake piece of bark.
  • What to do if you're the one who picks up a travel bug.
  • Fake bolts where the center unscrews and it's hollow inside.
  • Developing a sense for when a geocache is nearby and always being wrong.
  • Miyoo Mini Plus.
  • Custom firmware that fixes your terrible handheld game system.
  • The Dream of the Playdate.
  • The Anbernic R something something letters numbers.
  • C-ctrl.
  • Going back to the Tekken 3 well.
  • A video game bar in Japan that only has Americans in it.
  • A very reasonable number of video games to flip through.
  • Emulators with daily runs.
  • Multi Bowl.
  • A game that legally can not exist.
  • Johann Sebastian Joust and its meta.
  • Getting one point in Rampage.
  • Advice that can literally no longer be helpful for anybody.
  • How to be an effective Goomba.
  • Looking at Jim's win/loss ratio and being inspired.
  • As Garfield said, "nothing good can stay."
  • A stainless soul lying inspired.
  • Bad experiences shared by every human.
  • A very smooth-brained day
  • Rampant poetry plagiarism on TikTok.
  • A food ASMR video where someone is repeatedly stabbing chicken with a fork.
  • Videos of hamsters running in wheels while listening to Dragula by Rob Zombie.
  • Whether the fish enjoys playing Pokemon.
  • A sweet 16 bracket of Best Kinds of Shark.
  • Rerecording the Topic Lords jingle with a swarm of bees.
  • The qualifications required for the person who designs electric car backing up noises.
  • Which apps to use to help you remember Spanish.
  • Speedrunning High School Spanish.
  • Learning Japanese from anime.
  • A 24/7 Livestream of digital cats lying around the house.
  • Hallucinating new languages around the house.
  • 52 Pickup with Gita Jackson and Alex Jaffee, about the most important comic book series of this century.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Chris
  • Esper

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The editor of a podcast.
  • The #1 podcast for topic fans.
  • Chopping at some audio until it becomes a podcast.
  • Editing a recording into a podcast that's nothing but ums, mouth smacking noises and uncomfortable silence.
  • Zoom dynamically sensing when you're saying something dumb or boring and muting you.
  • Saying yes with the Sonic ring noise and no with the Sonic taking damage noise.
  • A cozy pleasant show full of fun facts.
  • Prepping for a paradigm.
  • How to put audio on film.
  • Going on a web forum and receiving a quest to find a magnetic box stuck underneath a metal staircase.
  • Geocaching on the Moon.
  • Geocaching vs. Geohashing.
  • A French pun for your board game night that nobody can remember because it's in French.
  • c:geo.
  • Finding a geocache by climbing a tree and pulling a paperclip attached to a fake piece of bark.
  • What to do if you're the one who picks up a travel bug.
  • Fake bolts where the center unscrews and it's hollow inside.
  • Developing a sense for when a geocache is nearby and always being wrong.
  • Miyoo Mini Plus.
  • Custom firmware that fixes your terrible handheld game system.
  • The Dream of the Playdate.
  • The Anbernic R something something letters numbers.
  • C-ctrl.
  • Going back to the Tekken 3 well.
  • A video game bar in Japan that only has Americans in it.
  • A very reasonable number of video games to flip through.
  • Emulators with daily runs.
  • Multi Bowl.
  • A game that legally can not exist.
  • Johann Sebastian Joust and its meta.
  • Getting one point in Rampage.
  • Advice that can literally no longer be helpful for anybody.
  • How to be an effective Goomba.
  • Looking at Jim's win/loss ratio and being inspired.
  • As Garfield said, "nothing good can stay."
  • A stainless soul lying inspired.
  • Bad experiences shared by every human.
  • A very smooth-brained day
  • Rampant poetry plagiarism on TikTok.
  • A food ASMR video where someone is repeatedly stabbing chicken with a fork.
  • Videos of hamsters running in wheels while listening to Dragula by Rob Zombie.
  • Whether the fish enjoys playing Pokemon.
  • A sweet 16 bracket of Best Kinds of Shark.
  • Rerecording the Topic Lords jingle with a swarm of bees.
  • The qualifications required for the person who designs electric car backing up noises.
  • Which apps to use to help you remember Spanish.
  • Speedrunning High School Spanish.
  • Learning Japanese from anime.
  • A 24/7 Livestream of digital cats lying around the house.
  • Hallucinating new languages around the house.
  • 52 Pickup with Gita Jackson and Alex Jaffee, about the most important comic book series of this century.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+GcI1QUM7 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 221. Fisher-Price My First Right Click Menu https://topiclords.com/fisher-price-my-first-right-click-menu b1322b7b-35e1-45a1-ac6a-bb110d20956d Mon, 15 Jan 2024 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Chris and Alex. We discuss living without software updates, Cyberpunk 2077, arguing with people collecting signatures, and PIECE A SHIT by Sam Pink. 1:12:39 true Lords:

  • Chris
  • Alex

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Lords of Topics.
  • Asking your mom if this Thanksgiving turkey is Frog Fractions 3.
  • Haiku Hero.
  • How to talk to the press.
  • An email from the guy who sent me the quirky thing from before.
  • The Last Biceps.
  • Filling your house with electronics that continuously ask you to do things.
  • How to interact with the Internet on an old un-updated computer.
  • Snap craft something or other.
  • Turning off Windows updates for over a year and nothing bad happens because security best practices are bullshit.
  • Visiting twinbeard.com to find out about the beads in Jim's ears.
  • Searching Google for the little balls in your ears.
  • Your phone popping up a window saying "you're a year and a half out of date, would you like to update?" and hitting the back button as fast as you can.
  • Windows updates adding AI functionality to MS Paint.
  • Making uneducated guesses about how someone else's code works.
  • Searching for a program on your computer and Windows gives you Bing results for that program's name.
  • A sneaky hacker man doing non lethal takedowns.
  • Making a complicated video game and then patching it into a completely different complicated video game after the guides have all been written.
  • Trying to explain to someone why the story of Half-Life is cool and realizing halfway through your explanation that it's not that cool actually.
  • Cool things that build immersion.
  • A guy saying "have a seat" and a contextual actionicon appearing over a chair.
  • Voluminous closets full of costumes for virtual dress-up.
  • Delivering exposition in cars.
  • All the weird things people will put on their body in the cyber future.
  • A fictional city halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles.
  • Recovering a stolen painting by showing a satellite.
  • A city with lots of neat stuff to do.
  • Querulous Friend's Advocate.
  • The Everyone Gets a Pony Initiative of 2023.
  • Filibustering people collecting signatures in front of the grocery store.
  • How much do you believe in the political causes you're promoting?
  • Watching your friend play games in a little window on your second monitor.
  • Mr. Feeny recording car AI voices.
  • Getting into World of Warcraft because you are stressed about starting a new job.
  • Level 1 Superman killing rats to collect 10 rat pelts.
  • Fun ways to fight crowds of mooks.
  • The things you see on your limbs when you see your limbs.
  • Replacing all the mirrors with cyber mirrors.
  • The doctor pulling out your cyber eyes and putting them in a drawer and all you can see is the inside of the drawer.
  • Lost games dev techniques such as palette swaps.
  • A screenshot of a book.
  • A poem painting a picture of a time and place.
  • Maybe Sam Pink.
  • Writing a bunch of messages to someone and making their phone vibrate every five seconds for a full minute.
  • Notification throttling.
  • Fanciful technological panaceas.
  • Ultra poetry where each line has animation and timing.
  • Making a word wiggle in a sine wave to indicate that it's a spooky ghost noise.
  • Poem Lords.
  • Seven poems on the itinerary. (But we'll only have time for three of them.)
]]> Lords:

  • Chris
  • Alex

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Lords of Topics.
  • Asking your mom if this Thanksgiving turkey is Frog Fractions 3.
  • Haiku Hero.
  • How to talk to the press.
  • An email from the guy who sent me the quirky thing from before.
  • The Last Biceps.
  • Filling your house with electronics that continuously ask you to do things.
  • How to interact with the Internet on an old un-updated computer.
  • Snap craft something or other.
  • Turning off Windows updates for over a year and nothing bad happens because security best practices are bullshit.
  • Visiting twinbeard.com to find out about the beads in Jim's ears.
  • Searching Google for the little balls in your ears.
  • Your phone popping up a window saying "you're a year and a half out of date, would you like to update?" and hitting the back button as fast as you can.
  • Windows updates adding AI functionality to MS Paint.
  • Making uneducated guesses about how someone else's code works.
  • Searching for a program on your computer and Windows gives you Bing results for that program's name.
  • A sneaky hacker man doing non lethal takedowns.
  • Making a complicated video game and then patching it into a completely different complicated video game after the guides have all been written.
  • Trying to explain to someone why the story of Half-Life is cool and realizing halfway through your explanation that it's not that cool actually.
  • Cool things that build immersion.
  • A guy saying "have a seat" and a contextual actionicon appearing over a chair.
  • Voluminous closets full of costumes for virtual dress-up.
  • Delivering exposition in cars.
  • All the weird things people will put on their body in the cyber future.
  • A fictional city halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles.
  • Recovering a stolen painting by showing a satellite.
  • A city with lots of neat stuff to do.
  • Querulous Friend's Advocate.
  • The Everyone Gets a Pony Initiative of 2023.
  • Filibustering people collecting signatures in front of the grocery store.
  • How much do you believe in the political causes you're promoting?
  • Watching your friend play games in a little window on your second monitor.
  • Mr. Feeny recording car AI voices.
  • Getting into World of Warcraft because you are stressed about starting a new job.
  • Level 1 Superman killing rats to collect 10 rat pelts.
  • Fun ways to fight crowds of mooks.
  • The things you see on your limbs when you see your limbs.
  • Replacing all the mirrors with cyber mirrors.
  • The doctor pulling out your cyber eyes and putting them in a drawer and all you can see is the inside of the drawer.
  • Lost games dev techniques such as palette swaps.
  • A screenshot of a book.
  • A poem painting a picture of a time and place.
  • Maybe Sam Pink.
  • Writing a bunch of messages to someone and making their phone vibrate every five seconds for a full minute.
  • Notification throttling.
  • Fanciful technological panaceas.
  • Ultra poetry where each line has animation and timing.
  • Making a word wiggle in a sine wave to indicate that it's a spooky ghost noise.
  • Poem Lords.
  • Seven poems on the itinerary. (But we'll only have time for three of them.)

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Chris
  • Alex

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Lords of Topics.
  • Asking your mom if this Thanksgiving turkey is Frog Fractions 3.
  • Haiku Hero.
  • How to talk to the press.
  • An email from the guy who sent me the quirky thing from before.
  • The Last Biceps.
  • Filling your house with electronics that continuously ask you to do things.
  • How to interact with the Internet on an old un-updated computer.
  • Snap craft something or other.
  • Turning off Windows updates for over a year and nothing bad happens because security best practices are bullshit.
  • Visiting twinbeard.com to find out about the beads in Jim's ears.
  • Searching Google for the little balls in your ears.
  • Your phone popping up a window saying "you're a year and a half out of date, would you like to update?" and hitting the back button as fast as you can.
  • Windows updates adding AI functionality to MS Paint.
  • Making uneducated guesses about how someone else's code works.
  • Searching for a program on your computer and Windows gives you Bing results for that program's name.
  • A sneaky hacker man doing non lethal takedowns.
  • Making a complicated video game and then patching it into a completely different complicated video game after the guides have all been written.
  • Trying to explain to someone why the story of Half-Life is cool and realizing halfway through your explanation that it's not that cool actually.
  • Cool things that build immersion.
  • A guy saying "have a seat" and a contextual actionicon appearing over a chair.
  • Voluminous closets full of costumes for virtual dress-up.
  • Delivering exposition in cars.
  • All the weird things people will put on their body in the cyber future.
  • A fictional city halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles.
  • Recovering a stolen painting by showing a satellite.
  • A city with lots of neat stuff to do.
  • Querulous Friend's Advocate.
  • The Everyone Gets a Pony Initiative of 2023.
  • Filibustering people collecting signatures in front of the grocery store.
  • How much do you believe in the political causes you're promoting?
  • Watching your friend play games in a little window on your second monitor.
  • Mr. Feeny recording car AI voices.
  • Getting into World of Warcraft because you are stressed about starting a new job.
  • Level 1 Superman killing rats to collect 10 rat pelts.
  • Fun ways to fight crowds of mooks.
  • The things you see on your limbs when you see your limbs.
  • Replacing all the mirrors with cyber mirrors.
  • The doctor pulling out your cyber eyes and putting them in a drawer and all you can see is the inside of the drawer.
  • Lost games dev techniques such as palette swaps.
  • A screenshot of a book.
  • A poem painting a picture of a time and place.
  • Maybe Sam Pink.
  • Writing a bunch of messages to someone and making their phone vibrate every five seconds for a full minute.
  • Notification throttling.
  • Fanciful technological panaceas.
  • Ultra poetry where each line has animation and timing.
  • Making a word wiggle in a sine wave to indicate that it's a spooky ghost noise.
  • Poem Lords.
  • Seven poems on the itinerary. (But we'll only have time for three of them.)

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+vIhF9qux ]]> Jim Stormdancer 220. An Oral History of Men Riding Cats https://topiclords.com/an-oral-history-of-men-riding-cats d8100dc3-f66e-4c27-b313-0d4979a2b12c Mon, 08 Jan 2024 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Abby and Michael. We discuss when podcast ads don't play, Lobsang Rampa, recoloring your teeth, "I've Been Writing You A Poem," by Abby Denton, and rideable cats. 1:08:00 true Lords:

Topics:

  • That moment when the podcast ads don't play
  • Lobsang Rampa
  • I had a dream where I needed to recolor my teeth. Why don't video game character creators support this?
  • "I've Been Writing You A Poem," by Abby Denton
  • Cats you can ride, pre-He Man

Microtopics:

  • Cyber Cafe.
  • Tiny Barbarian DX.
  • An exciting new way to give me money.
  • The gamut of barbarian sizes.
  • Learning the power of chat from Alan Partridge.
  • A podcast deciding that you're not worth advertising to.
  • Launching into the jokes and the fiending.
  • 99% Inaudible.
  • Elvira's lawful good rival.
  • Sugarhill Oiljack.
  • Roundtree's fruit pastilles.
  • A more colorful playful treat time.
  • The comic book guy sizing you up and stapling appropriate ads into the comic you're buying.
  • Finding out a lot of very interesting information about Texas Railroad Commissioner and forgetting it all immediately.
  • Page after page of ads and then a back cover.
  • A hardcore Bush-era ad explaining that Klonoa's gonna kill your mom.
  • Two Dollar Groos.
  • Writing a fan letter to the guy who letters Groo the Wanderer.
  • Groo ASMR on GrooTube.
  • A man in the 50s. (And the 60s.)
  • A plumber from London who found success writing books about Tibetan mysticism.
  • What English sounds like to an Italian speaker.
  • Prisencolinescionalciusol.
  • Lobsang Rampa getting an extra bump from people misspelling Danganronpa.
  • Painting your teeth mother of pearl.
  • The Xbox 360s mii knockoffs.
  • Breath of the Wild's NPC faces.
  • Mr. Potato Head Plug and Play Mouth.
  • Mainly a tooth-oriented game.
  • Dentists wearing a back sack over their head.
  • How dentures happen.
  • Insulin price caps.
  • Explaining to the nice lady who works at the grocery store that the company she works for is monstrous.
  • Trashy people in all walks of life.
  • Why shouldn't I be able to give Bayonetta missing teeth?
  • Post-hoc nightmares where they only upset you after you wake up.
  • The bladder comes to me, I don't go to the bladder.
  • Changing the scansion on the fly.
  • Writing a poem for a relative who won't appreciate it.
  • Whether children only like 3D animation now.
  • Whether it's cheaper to do 3D or 2D animation.
  • Wanting to play with the person you see even though they can't step out of the phone.
  • People who love being perceived.
  • This poem's threen.
  • Vamping about an ambiguous number because of diabetes.
  • Feeling shaky even though you are not shaking.
  • Fat cats in Washington and what they're sitting on.
  • Two people in the universe with perfectly incompatible needs.
  • The only member of your family who didn't go into the hard sciences.
  • The giant cats in Tom and Jerry going their weird shifting their muscles walk.
  • A mockery of a crown.
  • There he is; the poopy man.
  • Thinking of a man riding on a cat.
  • The Lure of the Basilisk.
  • The Gandalara Cycle.
  • Teleport vs. New Body.
  • A big cat-riding opportunity.
  • Riding around on a cat made of pure vinyl.
  • How did Cringer get like that, Prince Adam?
  • Little jokes you do with your partner.
  • Wingor, Trunkor and Unkor.
  • She-Ra taking it back from the boys.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

  • That moment when the podcast ads don't play
  • Lobsang Rampa
  • I had a dream where I needed to recolor my teeth. Why don't video game character creators support this?
  • "I've Been Writing You A Poem," by Abby Denton
  • Cats you can ride, pre-He Man

Microtopics:

  • Cyber Cafe.
  • Tiny Barbarian DX.
  • An exciting new way to give me money.
  • The gamut of barbarian sizes.
  • Learning the power of chat from Alan Partridge.
  • A podcast deciding that you're not worth advertising to.
  • Launching into the jokes and the fiending.
  • 99% Inaudible.
  • Elvira's lawful good rival.
  • Sugarhill Oiljack.
  • Roundtree's fruit pastilles.
  • A more colorful playful treat time.
  • The comic book guy sizing you up and stapling appropriate ads into the comic you're buying.
  • Finding out a lot of very interesting information about Texas Railroad Commissioner and forgetting it all immediately.
  • Page after page of ads and then a back cover.
  • A hardcore Bush-era ad explaining that Klonoa's gonna kill your mom.
  • Two Dollar Groos.
  • Writing a fan letter to the guy who letters Groo the Wanderer.
  • Groo ASMR on GrooTube.
  • A man in the 50s. (And the 60s.)
  • A plumber from London who found success writing books about Tibetan mysticism.
  • What English sounds like to an Italian speaker.
  • Prisencolinescionalciusol.
  • Lobsang Rampa getting an extra bump from people misspelling Danganronpa.
  • Painting your teeth mother of pearl.
  • The Xbox 360s mii knockoffs.
  • Breath of the Wild's NPC faces.
  • Mr. Potato Head Plug and Play Mouth.
  • Mainly a tooth-oriented game.
  • Dentists wearing a back sack over their head.
  • How dentures happen.
  • Insulin price caps.
  • Explaining to the nice lady who works at the grocery store that the company she works for is monstrous.
  • Trashy people in all walks of life.
  • Why shouldn't I be able to give Bayonetta missing teeth?
  • Post-hoc nightmares where they only upset you after you wake up.
  • The bladder comes to me, I don't go to the bladder.
  • Changing the scansion on the fly.
  • Writing a poem for a relative who won't appreciate it.
  • Whether children only like 3D animation now.
  • Whether it's cheaper to do 3D or 2D animation.
  • Wanting to play with the person you see even though they can't step out of the phone.
  • People who love being perceived.
  • This poem's threen.
  • Vamping about an ambiguous number because of diabetes.
  • Feeling shaky even though you are not shaking.
  • Fat cats in Washington and what they're sitting on.
  • Two people in the universe with perfectly incompatible needs.
  • The only member of your family who didn't go into the hard sciences.
  • The giant cats in Tom and Jerry going their weird shifting their muscles walk.
  • A mockery of a crown.
  • There he is; the poopy man.
  • Thinking of a man riding on a cat.
  • The Lure of the Basilisk.
  • The Gandalara Cycle.
  • Teleport vs. New Body.
  • A big cat-riding opportunity.
  • Riding around on a cat made of pure vinyl.
  • How did Cringer get like that, Prince Adam?
  • Little jokes you do with your partner.
  • Wingor, Trunkor and Unkor.
  • She-Ra taking it back from the boys.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

  • That moment when the podcast ads don't play
  • Lobsang Rampa
  • I had a dream where I needed to recolor my teeth. Why don't video game character creators support this?
  • "I've Been Writing You A Poem," by Abby Denton
  • Cats you can ride, pre-He Man

Microtopics:

  • Cyber Cafe.
  • Tiny Barbarian DX.
  • An exciting new way to give me money.
  • The gamut of barbarian sizes.
  • Learning the power of chat from Alan Partridge.
  • A podcast deciding that you're not worth advertising to.
  • Launching into the jokes and the fiending.
  • 99% Inaudible.
  • Elvira's lawful good rival.
  • Sugarhill Oiljack.
  • Roundtree's fruit pastilles.
  • A more colorful playful treat time.
  • The comic book guy sizing you up and stapling appropriate ads into the comic you're buying.
  • Finding out a lot of very interesting information about Texas Railroad Commissioner and forgetting it all immediately.
  • Page after page of ads and then a back cover.
  • A hardcore Bush-era ad explaining that Klonoa's gonna kill your mom.
  • Two Dollar Groos.
  • Writing a fan letter to the guy who letters Groo the Wanderer.
  • Groo ASMR on GrooTube.
  • A man in the 50s. (And the 60s.)
  • A plumber from London who found success writing books about Tibetan mysticism.
  • What English sounds like to an Italian speaker.
  • Prisencolinescionalciusol.
  • Lobsang Rampa getting an extra bump from people misspelling Danganronpa.
  • Painting your teeth mother of pearl.
  • The Xbox 360s mii knockoffs.
  • Breath of the Wild's NPC faces.
  • Mr. Potato Head Plug and Play Mouth.
  • Mainly a tooth-oriented game.
  • Dentists wearing a back sack over their head.
  • How dentures happen.
  • Insulin price caps.
  • Explaining to the nice lady who works at the grocery store that the company she works for is monstrous.
  • Trashy people in all walks of life.
  • Why shouldn't I be able to give Bayonetta missing teeth?
  • Post-hoc nightmares where they only upset you after you wake up.
  • The bladder comes to me, I don't go to the bladder.
  • Changing the scansion on the fly.
  • Writing a poem for a relative who won't appreciate it.
  • Whether children only like 3D animation now.
  • Whether it's cheaper to do 3D or 2D animation.
  • Wanting to play with the person you see even though they can't step out of the phone.
  • People who love being perceived.
  • This poem's threen.
  • Vamping about an ambiguous number because of diabetes.
  • Feeling shaky even though you are not shaking.
  • Fat cats in Washington and what they're sitting on.
  • Two people in the universe with perfectly incompatible needs.
  • The only member of your family who didn't go into the hard sciences.
  • The giant cats in Tom and Jerry going their weird shifting their muscles walk.
  • A mockery of a crown.
  • There he is; the poopy man.
  • Thinking of a man riding on a cat.
  • The Lure of the Basilisk.
  • The Gandalara Cycle.
  • Teleport vs. New Body.
  • A big cat-riding opportunity.
  • Riding around on a cat made of pure vinyl.
  • How did Cringer get like that, Prince Adam?
  • Little jokes you do with your partner.
  • Wingor, Trunkor and Unkor.
  • She-Ra taking it back from the boys.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+HamEDsbB ]]> Jim Stormdancer 219. Jeff Bezos's Butthole Guy https://topiclords.com/jeff-bezos-butthole-guy 8ad01b98-baa5-4480-99dc-fb7d898bb58b Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Jay and Jenni. We discuss learning a skill on a message board, the Baldur's Gate 3 butthole chart, whether giving people ideas helps them, why configuring the thing is more enjoyable than using the thing, and knowing a place vs. having a guy. 1:15:38 true Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Three people with social anxiety.
  • Your left ear not working at the post office.
  • 80 people in a post office screaming at each other.
  • Keeping your broken item and just buying another because you don't want to go to the post office.
  • Naming your band after a way to transmit audio.
  • I'm good that they're exist.
  • Getting your New Year's Resolution off of the Mastodon Tooter.
  • Finding a kid at Applebee's to sit next to.
  • Forming a seal on your face when there's hair.
  • A hip burger or hot dog joint hanging a sign saying "Take it to Squirts-Town" over their condiment counter.
  • An app to track how much emotional load you've dumped on each friend recently.
  • Preparing to hold space for your feelings.
  • Going outside and banging on pots and pans at midnight.
  • Getting really into Casey Kasem's Rockin' New Year.
  • Getting twelve grapes and trying to eat a grape on every bong of the clock.
  • How far apart are the bongs?
  • Whack it for a huge dong!
  • The second message board you signed up for. (After The Sims.)
  • Entirely abandoning the idea of drawing with your hands.
  • The Three Tile Rule.
  • New Year, New Wife!
  • Being approached in a Trader Joe's by a guy who runs a message board for men with long hair.
  • How to find people to follow on Cohost.
  • Searching for a technical issue on the internet and finding a post on a message board asking your question and the answer is to "google it."
  • Message boards about tying knots.
  • A ghost giving you a hug.
  • Shadebobs and searching on Youtube for shadebobs.
  • Shadebob Squarepixels.
  • Turn-based speed runs.
  • Oxygenarian runs.
  • Starting with meat. Ending with meat.
  • Whether it's okay to do a Butthole Chart for people who are still alive.
  • The Shade of the Butthole.
  • Special people with hairy buttholes.
  • When God asks you to bring him 50 buttholes, what body parts he'll accept as the butthole.
  • Butthole purism.
  • Personality traits that correspond with butthole traits in popular culture.
  • What to do if you don't like the shade or the smell of your butthole.
  • Going on T because you want a hairier butthole.
  • Whether billionaires are real people.
  • The Butthole of Dorian Gray.
  • Hiring a person to take care of your butthole situation.
  • Making eye contact with the guy who cleans Jeff Bezos's butthole but you can't stop and help, you have to catch your train.
  • PiCoSteveMo outcomes.
  • Self-driving taxis paving the entire planet.
  • Suggesting ideas as a way to make sure nobody will implement those ideas.
  • Receiving a new CD for Christmas in the post-Napster era.
  • What we can still use as stocking stuffers now that CDs and DVDs don't make sense any more.
  • Your life partner going through a Brandon Sanderson phase and giving you a huge Brandon Sanderson book to read.
  • What you call the plug that goes into a plug.
  • Getting paid to learn to solder.
  • Deliberately introducing mpeg artifacts into a video stream.
  • How to troubleshoot a motherboard now that they don't beep any more.
  • How many Intels they're up to now.
  • A memory of fun that you can't go back to.
  • Awful Fantasy.
  • Putting a foul-mouthed rom hack on your SNES Classic and then forgetting that happened when you give it away to your friends' kids.
  • Imagining how great a product is going to be while you're buying the product.
  • Asking for a toy for Christmas even though you know you'll never make time for it.
  • Going to a friend's house and seeing a bajillion guitar pedals that you can't afford.
  • Giving your guitar pedals away to someone who'll actually use them rather than just reselling them.
  • Hanging out with the kind of person who's playing Rock Band in 2023.
  • The only generation that learned how to use computers.
  • Worrying that the five year old computer geniuses are going to hack your foot so you can't walk.
  • Living in New Holstein Wisconsin and needing psychic healing.
  • Living in the city and having a place you go to for hot dogs vs. living in the country and having a guy you call for hot dogs and he comes to your house with a suitcase full of hot dogs and a USB-C grill.
  • Moving to the country so you can hang out of the hot dog guy.
  • A place that's not even really a place because you can't catch Pokemon there.
  • Two Guys and a Place.
  • Bringing independent gas stations their coffee.
  • Yacht Man Cologne.
  • Stuff You're Not Allowed To Eat dot com.
  • Arguing with GPT-4 until it agrees that your Garfield dating sim idea is ethical.
  • Putting on your face shoes.
  • This Is Cake Bread!
  • Tholen vs. Tholen.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Three people with social anxiety.
  • Your left ear not working at the post office.
  • 80 people in a post office screaming at each other.
  • Keeping your broken item and just buying another because you don't want to go to the post office.
  • Naming your band after a way to transmit audio.
  • I'm good that they're exist.
  • Getting your New Year's Resolution off of the Mastodon Tooter.
  • Finding a kid at Applebee's to sit next to.
  • Forming a seal on your face when there's hair.
  • A hip burger or hot dog joint hanging a sign saying "Take it to Squirts-Town" over their condiment counter.
  • An app to track how much emotional load you've dumped on each friend recently.
  • Preparing to hold space for your feelings.
  • Going outside and banging on pots and pans at midnight.
  • Getting really into Casey Kasem's Rockin' New Year.
  • Getting twelve grapes and trying to eat a grape on every bong of the clock.
  • How far apart are the bongs?
  • Whack it for a huge dong!
  • The second message board you signed up for. (After The Sims.)
  • Entirely abandoning the idea of drawing with your hands.
  • The Three Tile Rule.
  • New Year, New Wife!
  • Being approached in a Trader Joe's by a guy who runs a message board for men with long hair.
  • How to find people to follow on Cohost.
  • Searching for a technical issue on the internet and finding a post on a message board asking your question and the answer is to "google it."
  • Message boards about tying knots.
  • A ghost giving you a hug.
  • Shadebobs and searching on Youtube for shadebobs.
  • Shadebob Squarepixels.
  • Turn-based speed runs.
  • Oxygenarian runs.
  • Starting with meat. Ending with meat.
  • Whether it's okay to do a Butthole Chart for people who are still alive.
  • The Shade of the Butthole.
  • Special people with hairy buttholes.
  • When God asks you to bring him 50 buttholes, what body parts he'll accept as the butthole.
  • Butthole purism.
  • Personality traits that correspond with butthole traits in popular culture.
  • What to do if you don't like the shade or the smell of your butthole.
  • Going on T because you want a hairier butthole.
  • Whether billionaires are real people.
  • The Butthole of Dorian Gray.
  • Hiring a person to take care of your butthole situation.
  • Making eye contact with the guy who cleans Jeff Bezos's butthole but you can't stop and help, you have to catch your train.
  • PiCoSteveMo outcomes.
  • Self-driving taxis paving the entire planet.
  • Suggesting ideas as a way to make sure nobody will implement those ideas.
  • Receiving a new CD for Christmas in the post-Napster era.
  • What we can still use as stocking stuffers now that CDs and DVDs don't make sense any more.
  • Your life partner going through a Brandon Sanderson phase and giving you a huge Brandon Sanderson book to read.
  • What you call the plug that goes into a plug.
  • Getting paid to learn to solder.
  • Deliberately introducing mpeg artifacts into a video stream.
  • How to troubleshoot a motherboard now that they don't beep any more.
  • How many Intels they're up to now.
  • A memory of fun that you can't go back to.
  • Awful Fantasy.
  • Putting a foul-mouthed rom hack on your SNES Classic and then forgetting that happened when you give it away to your friends' kids.
  • Imagining how great a product is going to be while you're buying the product.
  • Asking for a toy for Christmas even though you know you'll never make time for it.
  • Going to a friend's house and seeing a bajillion guitar pedals that you can't afford.
  • Giving your guitar pedals away to someone who'll actually use them rather than just reselling them.
  • Hanging out with the kind of person who's playing Rock Band in 2023.
  • The only generation that learned how to use computers.
  • Worrying that the five year old computer geniuses are going to hack your foot so you can't walk.
  • Living in New Holstein Wisconsin and needing psychic healing.
  • Living in the city and having a place you go to for hot dogs vs. living in the country and having a guy you call for hot dogs and he comes to your house with a suitcase full of hot dogs and a USB-C grill.
  • Moving to the country so you can hang out of the hot dog guy.
  • A place that's not even really a place because you can't catch Pokemon there.
  • Two Guys and a Place.
  • Bringing independent gas stations their coffee.
  • Yacht Man Cologne.
  • Stuff You're Not Allowed To Eat dot com.
  • Arguing with GPT-4 until it agrees that your Garfield dating sim idea is ethical.
  • Putting on your face shoes.
  • This Is Cake Bread!
  • Tholen vs. Tholen.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Three people with social anxiety.
  • Your left ear not working at the post office.
  • 80 people in a post office screaming at each other.
  • Keeping your broken item and just buying another because you don't want to go to the post office.
  • Naming your band after a way to transmit audio.
  • I'm good that they're exist.
  • Getting your New Year's Resolution off of the Mastodon Tooter.
  • Finding a kid at Applebee's to sit next to.
  • Forming a seal on your face when there's hair.
  • A hip burger or hot dog joint hanging a sign saying "Take it to Squirts-Town" over their condiment counter.
  • An app to track how much emotional load you've dumped on each friend recently.
  • Preparing to hold space for your feelings.
  • Going outside and banging on pots and pans at midnight.
  • Getting really into Casey Kasem's Rockin' New Year.
  • Getting twelve grapes and trying to eat a grape on every bong of the clock.
  • How far apart are the bongs?
  • Whack it for a huge dong!
  • The second message board you signed up for. (After The Sims.)
  • Entirely abandoning the idea of drawing with your hands.
  • The Three Tile Rule.
  • New Year, New Wife!
  • Being approached in a Trader Joe's by a guy who runs a message board for men with long hair.
  • How to find people to follow on Cohost.
  • Searching for a technical issue on the internet and finding a post on a message board asking your question and the answer is to "google it."
  • Message boards about tying knots.
  • A ghost giving you a hug.
  • Shadebobs and searching on Youtube for shadebobs.
  • Shadebob Squarepixels.
  • Turn-based speed runs.
  • Oxygenarian runs.
  • Starting with meat. Ending with meat.
  • Whether it's okay to do a Butthole Chart for people who are still alive.
  • The Shade of the Butthole.
  • Special people with hairy buttholes.
  • When God asks you to bring him 50 buttholes, what body parts he'll accept as the butthole.
  • Butthole purism.
  • Personality traits that correspond with butthole traits in popular culture.
  • What to do if you don't like the shade or the smell of your butthole.
  • Going on T because you want a hairier butthole.
  • Whether billionaires are real people.
  • The Butthole of Dorian Gray.
  • Hiring a person to take care of your butthole situation.
  • Making eye contact with the guy who cleans Jeff Bezos's butthole but you can't stop and help, you have to catch your train.
  • PiCoSteveMo outcomes.
  • Self-driving taxis paving the entire planet.
  • Suggesting ideas as a way to make sure nobody will implement those ideas.
  • Receiving a new CD for Christmas in the post-Napster era.
  • What we can still use as stocking stuffers now that CDs and DVDs don't make sense any more.
  • Your life partner going through a Brandon Sanderson phase and giving you a huge Brandon Sanderson book to read.
  • What you call the plug that goes into a plug.
  • Getting paid to learn to solder.
  • Deliberately introducing mpeg artifacts into a video stream.
  • How to troubleshoot a motherboard now that they don't beep any more.
  • How many Intels they're up to now.
  • A memory of fun that you can't go back to.
  • Awful Fantasy.
  • Putting a foul-mouthed rom hack on your SNES Classic and then forgetting that happened when you give it away to your friends' kids.
  • Imagining how great a product is going to be while you're buying the product.
  • Asking for a toy for Christmas even though you know you'll never make time for it.
  • Going to a friend's house and seeing a bajillion guitar pedals that you can't afford.
  • Giving your guitar pedals away to someone who'll actually use them rather than just reselling them.
  • Hanging out with the kind of person who's playing Rock Band in 2023.
  • The only generation that learned how to use computers.
  • Worrying that the five year old computer geniuses are going to hack your foot so you can't walk.
  • Living in New Holstein Wisconsin and needing psychic healing.
  • Living in the city and having a place you go to for hot dogs vs. living in the country and having a guy you call for hot dogs and he comes to your house with a suitcase full of hot dogs and a USB-C grill.
  • Moving to the country so you can hang out of the hot dog guy.
  • A place that's not even really a place because you can't catch Pokemon there.
  • Two Guys and a Place.
  • Bringing independent gas stations their coffee.
  • Yacht Man Cologne.
  • Stuff You're Not Allowed To Eat dot com.
  • Arguing with GPT-4 until it agrees that your Garfield dating sim idea is ethical.
  • Putting on your face shoes.
  • This Is Cake Bread!
  • Tholen vs. Tholen.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+noob8Tek ]]> Jim Stormdancer 218. Darmok and Jalad Go to White Castle https://topiclords.com/darmok-and-jalad-go-to-white-castle 6066d4c3-69e3-4d42-b4a2-d0d2031d9a69 Mon, 25 Dec 2023 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Stevie and Avery. We discuss medieval musical instruments, the baseball cult who all looked like old-timey barbers, arguing about how needing to pee works, Avery's Non-Mammalian Milk Corner, and Ode on the Mammoth Cheese Weighing over 7,000 Pounds 1:03:49 true Lords:

  • Stevie
  • Avery

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Why the show works like that.
  • Asking people if they understand what's going on.
  • Spy software.
  • Exactly the kind of game you don't want to explain.
  • Someone who has a sense of humor and thinks something is funny.
  • A hat you can put on your frog.
  • Why frogs are so damn popular.
  • The game with the magnifying glass.
  • Whether the recorder is a real instrument or a crappy toy for babies.
  • Just how thicc this bass recorder is
  • The supercomputer that's also a couch.
  • Talking to your mom on the phone for 45 minutes because she can't stop listing medieval instruments.
  • Recorders that are double recorders.
  • Michael Fassbender teaching his clone how to play the flute.
  • Eating a pair of garden shears.
  • An umbrella handle that was given growth hormones that sounds kind of like a stylophone.
  • An instrument that is curved so that you can play it on horseback without bonking the horse.
  • The sackbut.
  • A selfie stick but for a trombone.
  • Sausage bassoons.
  • Unholy Rackett.
  • How long how many strings look it up?
  • Insufflation tubes and dudelsacks..
  • Versatile, like the Pogues.
  • Bears riding unicycles but not very well.
  • Overblowing.
  • Jim the Overblower.
  • Bringing up bugles to someone who works hospice.
  • How many songs you can play on a bugle.
  • Not wanting to play Beatles Rock Band because you with at BevMo.
  • A photo of an early 20th century cult/baseball team that looks like a modern-day metal band.
  • Not being able to make it to the majors so you settle for House of Dave.
  • Someone who's never played Blaseball trying to explain Blaseball.
  • Amusement parks started by cults.
  • A pretty good way to end a baseball league.
  • Additional amusement.
  • Preserving tiny railways built by a baseball cult.
  • A busy man who has no time to pee.
  • Peristalsis.
  • Persons currently experiencing hubris.
  • What happens to your knowledge when you're not actively thinking about it.
  • When you can truly say you know the capital of the United States.
  • Waking up needing to pee and trying to fall back to sleep so that you forget you need to pee.
  • Having a dream about urinals overflowing.
  • Cutting nature at its joints.
  • Preparing for Topicking.
  • Whether the Jejune Institute made money.
  • When Sacky Meets Butty.
  • Signing a contract in someone else's blood.
  • Yet another non-mammalian milk.
  • Jacked, yoked, ripped and swole spiders.
  • Imagery that's only unsettling because you don't regularly drink spider milk.
  • Vestigial web butts.
  • Sympathy for the young.
  • Putting on a spider silk dress and never being able to take it off.
  • A communal spider butthole web.
  • Blinded by the milk, wrapped up in a douche.
  • The first boutique New York restaurant to serve spider milk pancakes.
  • Cutting out all the parts where people say something dumb.
  • Drum Pants. (It turns your pants into a drum set.)
  • We have seen the a Queen of Cheese.
  • The worst rhyme scheme.
  • A poem that screams 5th grade.
  • Why does this web site have line numbers?
  • Are you a bad enough dude to save the president's cheese?
  • A poetic technique that can be really cool (but not in this poem)
  • Confusing this mammoth cheese with another mammoth cheese.
  • The most mammalian of all mammals.
  • My Mother Milked a Million Mostly Male Mammoths.
  • A huge ice cream tub carried by four ponies.
  • 35 tons of milk
  • Extremely fake beards.
  • A thing people once said to sell chicken.
]]> Lords:

  • Stevie
  • Avery

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Why the show works like that.
  • Asking people if they understand what's going on.
  • Spy software.
  • Exactly the kind of game you don't want to explain.
  • Someone who has a sense of humor and thinks something is funny.
  • A hat you can put on your frog.
  • Why frogs are so damn popular.
  • The game with the magnifying glass.
  • Whether the recorder is a real instrument or a crappy toy for babies.
  • Just how thicc this bass recorder is
  • The supercomputer that's also a couch.
  • Talking to your mom on the phone for 45 minutes because she can't stop listing medieval instruments.
  • Recorders that are double recorders.
  • Michael Fassbender teaching his clone how to play the flute.
  • Eating a pair of garden shears.
  • An umbrella handle that was given growth hormones that sounds kind of like a stylophone.
  • An instrument that is curved so that you can play it on horseback without bonking the horse.
  • The sackbut.
  • A selfie stick but for a trombone.
  • Sausage bassoons.
  • Unholy Rackett.
  • How long how many strings look it up?
  • Insufflation tubes and dudelsacks..
  • Versatile, like the Pogues.
  • Bears riding unicycles but not very well.
  • Overblowing.
  • Jim the Overblower.
  • Bringing up bugles to someone who works hospice.
  • How many songs you can play on a bugle.
  • Not wanting to play Beatles Rock Band because you with at BevMo.
  • A photo of an early 20th century cult/baseball team that looks like a modern-day metal band.
  • Not being able to make it to the majors so you settle for House of Dave.
  • Someone who's never played Blaseball trying to explain Blaseball.
  • Amusement parks started by cults.
  • A pretty good way to end a baseball league.
  • Additional amusement.
  • Preserving tiny railways built by a baseball cult.
  • A busy man who has no time to pee.
  • Peristalsis.
  • Persons currently experiencing hubris.
  • What happens to your knowledge when you're not actively thinking about it.
  • When you can truly say you know the capital of the United States.
  • Waking up needing to pee and trying to fall back to sleep so that you forget you need to pee.
  • Having a dream about urinals overflowing.
  • Cutting nature at its joints.
  • Preparing for Topicking.
  • Whether the Jejune Institute made money.
  • When Sacky Meets Butty.
  • Signing a contract in someone else's blood.
  • Yet another non-mammalian milk.
  • Jacked, yoked, ripped and swole spiders.
  • Imagery that's only unsettling because you don't regularly drink spider milk.
  • Vestigial web butts.
  • Sympathy for the young.
  • Putting on a spider silk dress and never being able to take it off.
  • A communal spider butthole web.
  • Blinded by the milk, wrapped up in a douche.
  • The first boutique New York restaurant to serve spider milk pancakes.
  • Cutting out all the parts where people say something dumb.
  • Drum Pants. (It turns your pants into a drum set.)
  • We have seen the a Queen of Cheese.
  • The worst rhyme scheme.
  • A poem that screams 5th grade.
  • Why does this web site have line numbers?
  • Are you a bad enough dude to save the president's cheese?
  • A poetic technique that can be really cool (but not in this poem)
  • Confusing this mammoth cheese with another mammoth cheese.
  • The most mammalian of all mammals.
  • My Mother Milked a Million Mostly Male Mammoths.
  • A huge ice cream tub carried by four ponies.
  • 35 tons of milk
  • Extremely fake beards.
  • A thing people once said to sell chicken.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Stevie
  • Avery

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Why the show works like that.
  • Asking people if they understand what's going on.
  • Spy software.
  • Exactly the kind of game you don't want to explain.
  • Someone who has a sense of humor and thinks something is funny.
  • A hat you can put on your frog.
  • Why frogs are so damn popular.
  • The game with the magnifying glass.
  • Whether the recorder is a real instrument or a crappy toy for babies.
  • Just how thicc this bass recorder is
  • The supercomputer that's also a couch.
  • Talking to your mom on the phone for 45 minutes because she can't stop listing medieval instruments.
  • Recorders that are double recorders.
  • Michael Fassbender teaching his clone how to play the flute.
  • Eating a pair of garden shears.
  • An umbrella handle that was given growth hormones that sounds kind of like a stylophone.
  • An instrument that is curved so that you can play it on horseback without bonking the horse.
  • The sackbut.
  • A selfie stick but for a trombone.
  • Sausage bassoons.
  • Unholy Rackett.
  • How long how many strings look it up?
  • Insufflation tubes and dudelsacks..
  • Versatile, like the Pogues.
  • Bears riding unicycles but not very well.
  • Overblowing.
  • Jim the Overblower.
  • Bringing up bugles to someone who works hospice.
  • How many songs you can play on a bugle.
  • Not wanting to play Beatles Rock Band because you with at BevMo.
  • A photo of an early 20th century cult/baseball team that looks like a modern-day metal band.
  • Not being able to make it to the majors so you settle for House of Dave.
  • Someone who's never played Blaseball trying to explain Blaseball.
  • Amusement parks started by cults.
  • A pretty good way to end a baseball league.
  • Additional amusement.
  • Preserving tiny railways built by a baseball cult.
  • A busy man who has no time to pee.
  • Peristalsis.
  • Persons currently experiencing hubris.
  • What happens to your knowledge when you're not actively thinking about it.
  • When you can truly say you know the capital of the United States.
  • Waking up needing to pee and trying to fall back to sleep so that you forget you need to pee.
  • Having a dream about urinals overflowing.
  • Cutting nature at its joints.
  • Preparing for Topicking.
  • Whether the Jejune Institute made money.
  • When Sacky Meets Butty.
  • Signing a contract in someone else's blood.
  • Yet another non-mammalian milk.
  • Jacked, yoked, ripped and swole spiders.
  • Imagery that's only unsettling because you don't regularly drink spider milk.
  • Vestigial web butts.
  • Sympathy for the young.
  • Putting on a spider silk dress and never being able to take it off.
  • A communal spider butthole web.
  • Blinded by the milk, wrapped up in a douche.
  • The first boutique New York restaurant to serve spider milk pancakes.
  • Cutting out all the parts where people say something dumb.
  • Drum Pants. (It turns your pants into a drum set.)
  • We have seen the a Queen of Cheese.
  • The worst rhyme scheme.
  • A poem that screams 5th grade.
  • Why does this web site have line numbers?
  • Are you a bad enough dude to save the president's cheese?
  • A poetic technique that can be really cool (but not in this poem)
  • Confusing this mammoth cheese with another mammoth cheese.
  • The most mammalian of all mammals.
  • My Mother Milked a Million Mostly Male Mammoths.
  • A huge ice cream tub carried by four ponies.
  • 35 tons of milk
  • Extremely fake beards.
  • A thing people once said to sell chicken.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+rpY9NMy_ ]]> Jim Stormdancer 217. Rotate Your Plate Breakage https://topiclords.com/rotate-your-plate-breakage ebe5bfca-44f2-4c81-81d1-325e26746fed Mon, 18 Dec 2023 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Maxx and Nick. We discuss Puzzmo, tableware rotation strategy, Ennigaldi-Nanna's museum, and "It Was A Coffin That Sang," by Olena Davis 1:07:00 true Lords:

  • Maxx
  • Nick

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Instead of giving someone a business card, stamping your information on them so they have to call you before they take a shower.
  • Where's George?
  • George isn't here. George was never here.
  • Canadians looking forward to when they can walk around with King Charles' face in their pocket.
  • Giving the barista a coupla chucks for a cup of coffee.
  • Money with RadarSat on it.
  • inaturalist dot org.
  • Taking a photo of a weird plant with a weird seed pod.
  • The fantasy of collecting information.
  • The game where you try to name every street in San Francisco.
  • Running all the streets in your city over the course of a decade.
  • Games Genie.
  • Lexicographic Ordering and Time Travel.
  • A sanctioned topic. (It's on the list.)
  • Wario Ware presenting you with a full sized crossword and giving you six seconds to solve it.
  • A fun little histogram.
  • Finally implementing the letter T.
  • Doing the crossword on paper and making your daughter enter your answers into the app.
  • Will Shortz coming out of his orb to carry out a hit on a competing puzzle.
  • Fugue Orbs.
  • Comparing the interface design of Connections and Red Herring.
  • Things Relating to Wonder Woman.
  • Extremely well SEO'd pestilences.
  • Arranging your dinner plates in a stack vs. in a queue.
  • Using all your plates evenly so they all break at the same time.
  • Rotating the Stock.
  • The dangers of Low-Sodium Perpetual Stew.
  • Default plates from the food service factory.
  • Airplane boarding algorithms and how to convince everyone in the terminal to follow yours.
  • Plates that are made for using.
  • A whole Jefferson, in your Republic dollars.
  • The urge to queue.
  • Lanesplitting your backpack.
  • History: it's a lot older than we think
  • Ancient cash registers.
  • Pranksters organizing the topic bucket.
  • How many museums deep are we?
  • The human wife.
  • Efficient.. Successful. Human.
  • Top five lists of your life.
  • How small a flavoring agent has to be to be considered a spice.
  • A twelve foot tall statue of either Zeus or Poseidon.
  • Myth- and Nationhood- Making.
  • A museum where you can feel wood cut with various tools.
  • Hearing about a cool metalworking museum but fixating on how the bathroom works.
  • Cool Bathroom Ghost.
  • The toilet commenting on your performance.
  • Piping bookshop noises into your bathroom.
  • Robert Stack's Solved Mysteries.
  • Being sad and trying to have a good sadness.
  • Michael Brough talking about his design process.
  • Fun exercise vs. shitty boring exercise.
  • What to do about the world ending.
  • Driving in circles around the McDonald's drive-thru ordering more and more coffee until they catch on.
  • Telling a joke on Twitter and an archaeologist getting it 1000 years from now.
  • The world's oldest joke.
  • A fart joke from 1900 BCE.
  • Reconstructive historical linguistics.
  • The linguistics of swearing and taboo.
  • Eater of bees.
  • Top five stanzas.
]]> Lords:

  • Maxx
  • Nick

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Instead of giving someone a business card, stamping your information on them so they have to call you before they take a shower.
  • Where's George?
  • George isn't here. George was never here.
  • Canadians looking forward to when they can walk around with King Charles' face in their pocket.
  • Giving the barista a coupla chucks for a cup of coffee.
  • Money with RadarSat on it.
  • inaturalist dot org.
  • Taking a photo of a weird plant with a weird seed pod.
  • The fantasy of collecting information.
  • The game where you try to name every street in San Francisco.
  • Running all the streets in your city over the course of a decade.
  • Games Genie.
  • Lexicographic Ordering and Time Travel.
  • A sanctioned topic. (It's on the list.)
  • Wario Ware presenting you with a full sized crossword and giving you six seconds to solve it.
  • A fun little histogram.
  • Finally implementing the letter T.
  • Doing the crossword on paper and making your daughter enter your answers into the app.
  • Will Shortz coming out of his orb to carry out a hit on a competing puzzle.
  • Fugue Orbs.
  • Comparing the interface design of Connections and Red Herring.
  • Things Relating to Wonder Woman.
  • Extremely well SEO'd pestilences.
  • Arranging your dinner plates in a stack vs. in a queue.
  • Using all your plates evenly so they all break at the same time.
  • Rotating the Stock.
  • The dangers of Low-Sodium Perpetual Stew.
  • Default plates from the food service factory.
  • Airplane boarding algorithms and how to convince everyone in the terminal to follow yours.
  • Plates that are made for using.
  • A whole Jefferson, in your Republic dollars.
  • The urge to queue.
  • Lanesplitting your backpack.
  • History: it's a lot older than we think
  • Ancient cash registers.
  • Pranksters organizing the topic bucket.
  • How many museums deep are we?
  • The human wife.
  • Efficient.. Successful. Human.
  • Top five lists of your life.
  • How small a flavoring agent has to be to be considered a spice.
  • A twelve foot tall statue of either Zeus or Poseidon.
  • Myth- and Nationhood- Making.
  • A museum where you can feel wood cut with various tools.
  • Hearing about a cool metalworking museum but fixating on how the bathroom works.
  • Cool Bathroom Ghost.
  • The toilet commenting on your performance.
  • Piping bookshop noises into your bathroom.
  • Robert Stack's Solved Mysteries.
  • Being sad and trying to have a good sadness.
  • Michael Brough talking about his design process.
  • Fun exercise vs. shitty boring exercise.
  • What to do about the world ending.
  • Driving in circles around the McDonald's drive-thru ordering more and more coffee until they catch on.
  • Telling a joke on Twitter and an archaeologist getting it 1000 years from now.
  • The world's oldest joke.
  • A fart joke from 1900 BCE.
  • Reconstructive historical linguistics.
  • The linguistics of swearing and taboo.
  • Eater of bees.
  • Top five stanzas.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Maxx
  • Nick

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Instead of giving someone a business card, stamping your information on them so they have to call you before they take a shower.
  • Where's George?
  • George isn't here. George was never here.
  • Canadians looking forward to when they can walk around with King Charles' face in their pocket.
  • Giving the barista a coupla chucks for a cup of coffee.
  • Money with RadarSat on it.
  • inaturalist dot org.
  • Taking a photo of a weird plant with a weird seed pod.
  • The fantasy of collecting information.
  • The game where you try to name every street in San Francisco.
  • Running all the streets in your city over the course of a decade.
  • Games Genie.
  • Lexicographic Ordering and Time Travel.
  • A sanctioned topic. (It's on the list.)
  • Wario Ware presenting you with a full sized crossword and giving you six seconds to solve it.
  • A fun little histogram.
  • Finally implementing the letter T.
  • Doing the crossword on paper and making your daughter enter your answers into the app.
  • Will Shortz coming out of his orb to carry out a hit on a competing puzzle.
  • Fugue Orbs.
  • Comparing the interface design of Connections and Red Herring.
  • Things Relating to Wonder Woman.
  • Extremely well SEO'd pestilences.
  • Arranging your dinner plates in a stack vs. in a queue.
  • Using all your plates evenly so they all break at the same time.
  • Rotating the Stock.
  • The dangers of Low-Sodium Perpetual Stew.
  • Default plates from the food service factory.
  • Airplane boarding algorithms and how to convince everyone in the terminal to follow yours.
  • Plates that are made for using.
  • A whole Jefferson, in your Republic dollars.
  • The urge to queue.
  • Lanesplitting your backpack.
  • History: it's a lot older than we think
  • Ancient cash registers.
  • Pranksters organizing the topic bucket.
  • How many museums deep are we?
  • The human wife.
  • Efficient.. Successful. Human.
  • Top five lists of your life.
  • How small a flavoring agent has to be to be considered a spice.
  • A twelve foot tall statue of either Zeus or Poseidon.
  • Myth- and Nationhood- Making.
  • A museum where you can feel wood cut with various tools.
  • Hearing about a cool metalworking museum but fixating on how the bathroom works.
  • Cool Bathroom Ghost.
  • The toilet commenting on your performance.
  • Piping bookshop noises into your bathroom.
  • Robert Stack's Solved Mysteries.
  • Being sad and trying to have a good sadness.
  • Michael Brough talking about his design process.
  • Fun exercise vs. shitty boring exercise.
  • What to do about the world ending.
  • Driving in circles around the McDonald's drive-thru ordering more and more coffee until they catch on.
  • Telling a joke on Twitter and an archaeologist getting it 1000 years from now.
  • The world's oldest joke.
  • A fart joke from 1900 BCE.
  • Reconstructive historical linguistics.
  • The linguistics of swearing and taboo.
  • Eater of bees.
  • Top five stanzas.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+KLbFPGky ]]> Jim Stormdancer 216. I Forget What We Do but We're About To Do It https://topiclords.com/i-forget-what-we-do-but-were-about-to-do-it cc9da316-6e3f-457f-b9ce-4e1ca7f160b8 Mon, 11 Dec 2023 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Tyriq and Jay. We discuss moving and having stuff, teaching a 3-year-old to use a mouse and keyboard, interface traps, Yelp! Review for God, and starting a Youtube channel for kids. 1:13:42 true Lords:

  • Tyriq
  • Jay

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Ben and Jerry's Cookie Dough ice cream.
  • Washing the ice cream off of the cookie dough ice cream and baking cookies.
  • Snacking dough.
  • Living on your own and owning silverware for the first time.
  • Losing a fork that they don't make any more and having mismatched forks forever.
  • A hodgepodge of styles.
  • Different spaces each with their own internal consistency.
  • Going to your ex-roommate's Halloween party as a guest for the first time.
  • Parties that you can leave.
  • Finding out you were right about what you thought you'd like.
  • Moving house in an hour.
  • Your kid banging on the keyboard to write nonsense messages in discord but he forgets to hit enter to send so you have to do it for him.
  • Teaching kids to read by giving them a Kindle tablet.
  • Typing "stop" fifty times in notepad.
  • Dell Rugged.
  • What Mavis Beacon is up to nowadays.
  • Computers as the exciting future vs. computers as the boring shitty present.
  • Getting a laptop without a touch screen so your kid can learn to use the mouse.
  • Different ways to not understand folders.
  • Whether the problem is that Gen Z doesn't know what a folder is or whether it's that they sometimes still need to know what a folder is.
  • Apps that appear to be native apps but they're secretly running in a web browser.
  • Coming into possession of a child.
  • An overworld where you can walk in 8 directions and bump into NPCs.
  • Boots Quest.
  • Auto Shooting Survival.
  • Roguelike Turn-Based Auto Shooting Survival.
  • Mini Yoto.
  • Using the insert key on purpose.
  • The Jay's Wife of Scroll Lock.
  • The two Smush tracks on the Hypnospace Outlaw soundtrack.
  • Why there are separate shift and caps lock keys but no separate toggle insert and hold to insert keys.
  • Sticky Keys.
  • Caps lock keys that physically toggle.
  • Toon Boom Harmony and other way too expensive subscription software.
  • Can't draw can't see pencil in toon boom reddit
  • Lock the taskbar, lock the taskbar.
  • The pros and cons of different start menu orientations.
  • Getting kissed in the vegetable aisle, so to speak.
  • Talking about dungeons and dragons and getting something slightly wrong about dungeons or dragons.
  • The laws of physics preventing you from kidding boys.
  • On the one hand growing up as a trans poet in Arizona. On the other, drinking a whole lot of strawberry kiwi kombucha.
  • Four out of five stars for inventing an extremely dry mouth.
  • A dry, scratchy, sandpaper cat tongue.
  • A song about a ghost eating toast.
  • Watching your kid watch things.
  • Where to put video content on the internet.
  • Ideas that are occluded by ideas that are better search-engine optimized.
  • Whether librarians are scarier in Germany.
  • Combining three people with social anxiety to make one really big person with social anxiety.
  • Fixing kids software for 100 people because it's too hard to fix it for the whole world.
  • X for Extreme.
]]> Lords:

  • Tyriq
  • Jay

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Ben and Jerry's Cookie Dough ice cream.
  • Washing the ice cream off of the cookie dough ice cream and baking cookies.
  • Snacking dough.
  • Living on your own and owning silverware for the first time.
  • Losing a fork that they don't make any more and having mismatched forks forever.
  • A hodgepodge of styles.
  • Different spaces each with their own internal consistency.
  • Going to your ex-roommate's Halloween party as a guest for the first time.
  • Parties that you can leave.
  • Finding out you were right about what you thought you'd like.
  • Moving house in an hour.
  • Your kid banging on the keyboard to write nonsense messages in discord but he forgets to hit enter to send so you have to do it for him.
  • Teaching kids to read by giving them a Kindle tablet.
  • Typing "stop" fifty times in notepad.
  • Dell Rugged.
  • What Mavis Beacon is up to nowadays.
  • Computers as the exciting future vs. computers as the boring shitty present.
  • Getting a laptop without a touch screen so your kid can learn to use the mouse.
  • Different ways to not understand folders.
  • Whether the problem is that Gen Z doesn't know what a folder is or whether it's that they sometimes still need to know what a folder is.
  • Apps that appear to be native apps but they're secretly running in a web browser.
  • Coming into possession of a child.
  • An overworld where you can walk in 8 directions and bump into NPCs.
  • Boots Quest.
  • Auto Shooting Survival.
  • Roguelike Turn-Based Auto Shooting Survival.
  • Mini Yoto.
  • Using the insert key on purpose.
  • The Jay's Wife of Scroll Lock.
  • The two Smush tracks on the Hypnospace Outlaw soundtrack.
  • Why there are separate shift and caps lock keys but no separate toggle insert and hold to insert keys.
  • Sticky Keys.
  • Caps lock keys that physically toggle.
  • Toon Boom Harmony and other way too expensive subscription software.
  • Can't draw can't see pencil in toon boom reddit
  • Lock the taskbar, lock the taskbar.
  • The pros and cons of different start menu orientations.
  • Getting kissed in the vegetable aisle, so to speak.
  • Talking about dungeons and dragons and getting something slightly wrong about dungeons or dragons.
  • The laws of physics preventing you from kidding boys.
  • On the one hand growing up as a trans poet in Arizona. On the other, drinking a whole lot of strawberry kiwi kombucha.
  • Four out of five stars for inventing an extremely dry mouth.
  • A dry, scratchy, sandpaper cat tongue.
  • A song about a ghost eating toast.
  • Watching your kid watch things.
  • Where to put video content on the internet.
  • Ideas that are occluded by ideas that are better search-engine optimized.
  • Whether librarians are scarier in Germany.
  • Combining three people with social anxiety to make one really big person with social anxiety.
  • Fixing kids software for 100 people because it's too hard to fix it for the whole world.
  • X for Extreme.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Tyriq
  • Jay

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Ben and Jerry's Cookie Dough ice cream.
  • Washing the ice cream off of the cookie dough ice cream and baking cookies.
  • Snacking dough.
  • Living on your own and owning silverware for the first time.
  • Losing a fork that they don't make any more and having mismatched forks forever.
  • A hodgepodge of styles.
  • Different spaces each with their own internal consistency.
  • Going to your ex-roommate's Halloween party as a guest for the first time.
  • Parties that you can leave.
  • Finding out you were right about what you thought you'd like.
  • Moving house in an hour.
  • Your kid banging on the keyboard to write nonsense messages in discord but he forgets to hit enter to send so you have to do it for him.
  • Teaching kids to read by giving them a Kindle tablet.
  • Typing "stop" fifty times in notepad.
  • Dell Rugged.
  • What Mavis Beacon is up to nowadays.
  • Computers as the exciting future vs. computers as the boring shitty present.
  • Getting a laptop without a touch screen so your kid can learn to use the mouse.
  • Different ways to not understand folders.
  • Whether the problem is that Gen Z doesn't know what a folder is or whether it's that they sometimes still need to know what a folder is.
  • Apps that appear to be native apps but they're secretly running in a web browser.
  • Coming into possession of a child.
  • An overworld where you can walk in 8 directions and bump into NPCs.
  • Boots Quest.
  • Auto Shooting Survival.
  • Roguelike Turn-Based Auto Shooting Survival.
  • Mini Yoto.
  • Using the insert key on purpose.
  • The Jay's Wife of Scroll Lock.
  • The two Smush tracks on the Hypnospace Outlaw soundtrack.
  • Why there are separate shift and caps lock keys but no separate toggle insert and hold to insert keys.
  • Sticky Keys.
  • Caps lock keys that physically toggle.
  • Toon Boom Harmony and other way too expensive subscription software.
  • Can't draw can't see pencil in toon boom reddit
  • Lock the taskbar, lock the taskbar.
  • The pros and cons of different start menu orientations.
  • Getting kissed in the vegetable aisle, so to speak.
  • Talking about dungeons and dragons and getting something slightly wrong about dungeons or dragons.
  • The laws of physics preventing you from kidding boys.
  • On the one hand growing up as a trans poet in Arizona. On the other, drinking a whole lot of strawberry kiwi kombucha.
  • Four out of five stars for inventing an extremely dry mouth.
  • A dry, scratchy, sandpaper cat tongue.
  • A song about a ghost eating toast.
  • Watching your kid watch things.
  • Where to put video content on the internet.
  • Ideas that are occluded by ideas that are better search-engine optimized.
  • Whether librarians are scarier in Germany.
  • Combining three people with social anxiety to make one really big person with social anxiety.
  • Fixing kids software for 100 people because it's too hard to fix it for the whole world.
  • X for Extreme.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+zMoaMNm_ ]]> Jim Stormdancer 215. Taffy Arbitrage Tips https://topiclords.com/taffy-arbitrage-tips 16bb6dec-9931-4c64-b5f8-90e33d28e164 Mon, 04 Dec 2023 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Ben and JohnB. We discuss Game & Watch Gallery, Novemberween, square mattresses, Eight Line Poem by David Bowie, and sitting on a bench in Spider-Man 2. 1:03:18 true Lords:

  • Ben
  • JohnB

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Fellow Traveler.
  • Citizen Sleeper: at least one person's game of the year.
  • State fair taffy.
  • Where to find seasonal taffy bargains.
  • Terrifying taffy flavors.
  • Single game LCD handhelds.
  • Gunplay Yokoi.
  • Withered technology.
  • The RC car that can only turn left because right was cut for scope.
  • Games where things are bouncing across the screen.
  • Tiger Electronics Double Dragon.
  • The earliest, most boring Game and Watch game.
  • A fun clock that's fun to watch.
  • Putting your face as the juggler in Ball for the Game Boy Camera.
  • What they did before d-pads.
  • A Print the Legend situation.
  • Mario Bros II for the Commodore 64.
  • Porting Game and Watch games to card stock.
  • Releasing a floppy disk reader for the Game Boy Advance in 2023.
  • Mario's Bombs Away, in Panorama Vision.
  • Moving slower the more gold you're carrying.
  • Toad walking across a bunch of seagulls.
  • Trying to get 16 player Faceball up and running.
  • The Burger King vs. Hungry Jack's era.
  • The Lost Lost Levels.
  • The most polite pumpkin head person you've ever met.
  • Inventing a new Halloween that happens the first weekend after Halloween so you can get candy at a discount.
  • Implicating the viewers in your terrible horror movie marathon.
  • Terrifying cakes with spooky words on them like "mortgage"
  • Tammy and the T-Rex.
  • A spooky guy in a helmet who races people in his car (and kills them)
  • Putting pieces of Stonehenge into circuitry to make children's faces turn into bugs.
  • A movie about a cat that vomits up another cat.
  • A very spooky four dollar pumpkin man.
  • Neglecting upkeep on your house for thirty years to celebrate Halloween.
  • Novemberween every Sunday.
  • How to celebrate Labor Day.
  • Rotating a square mattress 90 degrees.
  • Going into the mattress store and unrolling the amount of mattress you want from the spool and getting it cut to order.
  • Alternate reality How It's Made videos.
  • The Manchester Department.
  • Super Passive Aggressive Xenomorph Roommate Irritation Simulator.
  • Rolling the dice to determine which side of the cube mattress you're sleeping on tonight.
  • Rotating the tires on your racecar bed.
  • Asking the cat for poem opinions.
  • Sometimes the sun is just the sun. (Not this time though – it's David Bowie.)
  • Plugs within plugs.
  • All the different games named "Spider-Man 2"
  • Using your Spider Radar to track down the next objective.
  • A video game where you go on a holiday to Greece and stab a bunch of people.
  • The distressing absence of Mario Odyssey 2.
  • Finally, a Super Mario game you can finish without hating yourself.
  • A grown-up with adult things to do, like cooking bacon and receiving mail.
  • The Trophy Seller in Nier Automata.
  • Kosmology Hungry Jack.
]]> Lords:

  • Ben
  • JohnB

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Fellow Traveler.
  • Citizen Sleeper: at least one person's game of the year.
  • State fair taffy.
  • Where to find seasonal taffy bargains.
  • Terrifying taffy flavors.
  • Single game LCD handhelds.
  • Gunplay Yokoi.
  • Withered technology.
  • The RC car that can only turn left because right was cut for scope.
  • Games where things are bouncing across the screen.
  • Tiger Electronics Double Dragon.
  • The earliest, most boring Game and Watch game.
  • A fun clock that's fun to watch.
  • Putting your face as the juggler in Ball for the Game Boy Camera.
  • What they did before d-pads.
  • A Print the Legend situation.
  • Mario Bros II for the Commodore 64.
  • Porting Game and Watch games to card stock.
  • Releasing a floppy disk reader for the Game Boy Advance in 2023.
  • Mario's Bombs Away, in Panorama Vision.
  • Moving slower the more gold you're carrying.
  • Toad walking across a bunch of seagulls.
  • Trying to get 16 player Faceball up and running.
  • The Burger King vs. Hungry Jack's era.
  • The Lost Lost Levels.
  • The most polite pumpkin head person you've ever met.
  • Inventing a new Halloween that happens the first weekend after Halloween so you can get candy at a discount.
  • Implicating the viewers in your terrible horror movie marathon.
  • Terrifying cakes with spooky words on them like "mortgage"
  • Tammy and the T-Rex.
  • A spooky guy in a helmet who races people in his car (and kills them)
  • Putting pieces of Stonehenge into circuitry to make children's faces turn into bugs.
  • A movie about a cat that vomits up another cat.
  • A very spooky four dollar pumpkin man.
  • Neglecting upkeep on your house for thirty years to celebrate Halloween.
  • Novemberween every Sunday.
  • How to celebrate Labor Day.
  • Rotating a square mattress 90 degrees.
  • Going into the mattress store and unrolling the amount of mattress you want from the spool and getting it cut to order.
  • Alternate reality How It's Made videos.
  • The Manchester Department.
  • Super Passive Aggressive Xenomorph Roommate Irritation Simulator.
  • Rolling the dice to determine which side of the cube mattress you're sleeping on tonight.
  • Rotating the tires on your racecar bed.
  • Asking the cat for poem opinions.
  • Sometimes the sun is just the sun. (Not this time though – it's David Bowie.)
  • Plugs within plugs.
  • All the different games named "Spider-Man 2"
  • Using your Spider Radar to track down the next objective.
  • A video game where you go on a holiday to Greece and stab a bunch of people.
  • The distressing absence of Mario Odyssey 2.
  • Finally, a Super Mario game you can finish without hating yourself.
  • A grown-up with adult things to do, like cooking bacon and receiving mail.
  • The Trophy Seller in Nier Automata.
  • Kosmology Hungry Jack.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Ben
  • JohnB

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Fellow Traveler.
  • Citizen Sleeper: at least one person's game of the year.
  • State fair taffy.
  • Where to find seasonal taffy bargains.
  • Terrifying taffy flavors.
  • Single game LCD handhelds.
  • Gunplay Yokoi.
  • Withered technology.
  • The RC car that can only turn left because right was cut for scope.
  • Games where things are bouncing across the screen.
  • Tiger Electronics Double Dragon.
  • The earliest, most boring Game and Watch game.
  • A fun clock that's fun to watch.
  • Putting your face as the juggler in Ball for the Game Boy Camera.
  • What they did before d-pads.
  • A Print the Legend situation.
  • Mario Bros II for the Commodore 64.
  • Porting Game and Watch games to card stock.
  • Releasing a floppy disk reader for the Game Boy Advance in 2023.
  • Mario's Bombs Away, in Panorama Vision.
  • Moving slower the more gold you're carrying.
  • Toad walking across a bunch of seagulls.
  • Trying to get 16 player Faceball up and running.
  • The Burger King vs. Hungry Jack's era.
  • The Lost Lost Levels.
  • The most polite pumpkin head person you've ever met.
  • Inventing a new Halloween that happens the first weekend after Halloween so you can get candy at a discount.
  • Implicating the viewers in your terrible horror movie marathon.
  • Terrifying cakes with spooky words on them like "mortgage"
  • Tammy and the T-Rex.
  • A spooky guy in a helmet who races people in his car (and kills them)
  • Putting pieces of Stonehenge into circuitry to make children's faces turn into bugs.
  • A movie about a cat that vomits up another cat.
  • A very spooky four dollar pumpkin man.
  • Neglecting upkeep on your house for thirty years to celebrate Halloween.
  • Novemberween every Sunday.
  • How to celebrate Labor Day.
  • Rotating a square mattress 90 degrees.
  • Going into the mattress store and unrolling the amount of mattress you want from the spool and getting it cut to order.
  • Alternate reality How It's Made videos.
  • The Manchester Department.
  • Super Passive Aggressive Xenomorph Roommate Irritation Simulator.
  • Rolling the dice to determine which side of the cube mattress you're sleeping on tonight.
  • Rotating the tires on your racecar bed.
  • Asking the cat for poem opinions.
  • Sometimes the sun is just the sun. (Not this time though – it's David Bowie.)
  • Plugs within plugs.
  • All the different games named "Spider-Man 2"
  • Using your Spider Radar to track down the next objective.
  • A video game where you go on a holiday to Greece and stab a bunch of people.
  • The distressing absence of Mario Odyssey 2.
  • Finally, a Super Mario game you can finish without hating yourself.
  • A grown-up with adult things to do, like cooking bacon and receiving mail.
  • The Trophy Seller in Nier Automata.
  • Kosmology Hungry Jack.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+nKFle5d9 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 214. Oh Shit! That Guy's Got Horse Legs! https://topiclords.com/oh-shit-that-guys-got-horse-legs 5c14804c-b73d-4727-8358-cc2be876c4f1 Mon, 27 Nov 2023 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Daniel and Alexander. We discuss octopus dreams, perception of memory, hike on 58, World of Warcraft over the years, mathematicians not capitalizing your name, polywater, and involuntary trochaic trimeter recognition. 1:05:19 true Lords

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Preventative care.
  • COVID lucky streaks.
  • Being able to go to the ER.
  • How to spell Cocoon.
  • Moth guys carrying orbs on their backs.
  • Boss battles that you wouldn't expect.
  • Wilford Brimley's agelessness.
  • Octopus nightmares.
  • The octopus equivalent of rapid eye movement.
  • Meeting sapient crows and asking them whether Y or Z should be up.
  • Which memories stick better.
  • Perception of time when you have a routine vs. when you don't.
  • Arranging your life to maximize perceived lifespan.
  • Different ways to have an adventure.
  • Shooby doooby doggie.
  • A sports rule that sounds like a 17776 plot point
  • Why the Bob Emergency is an emergency.
  • The best quarterbacks getting stuck in an endless hike and football ending forever.
  • The one person who hasn't played Frog Fractions but just listens to Topic Lords because they like topics so much.
  • Summer's lease.
  • Reading a poem aloud without knowing what "ow'st" means or how to pronounce it.
  • Words that used to rhyme but don't anymore.
  • Meter recognize meter.
  • Writing all your sonnets during COVID lockdown.
  • A poem about a dude that Shakespeare is not in love with.
  • Woe is me, etc.
  • Piss Jugman vs Piss Jugm'n.
  • Making phonetic reforms that don't take.
  • Smoothing off any rough edges or peculiarities.
  • Permadeath taking inspiration from real life.
  • A fun thing that you wouldn't have expected to see.
  • Enjoying spending time in the world.
  • Hold the W key and cruise through it.
  • The difference between wanting something vs. liking it.
  • Abelian.
  • The opposite of how you would think honor works.
  • Great honors: brands hate them!
  • Whether to capitalize "lynchian," "kafkaesque" or "quixotic"
  • Eternal abstract universal objects.
  • Teaching truck drivers where to put their piss jugs.
  • The highest honor Piss Jugman can receive.
  • The surname Piss.
  • What is the average Piss lifespan?
  • A real life Bobby Tables moment.
  • The Polywater Gap.
  • Water that scientists have sweated in.
  • Buying a can of Soviet Scientist Sweat in a Japanese vending machine.
  • Polyester intoxication.
  • Liquids with a lower freezing temperature than water.
  • The Polywater Doodle.
  • A metabolism described by Richard Feynman.
  • Brain Pollution.
  • The particular better of the first line of Aqualung by Jethro Tull.
  • Singing "parallelipiped" to the tune of Aqualung.
  • Hearing random phrases in your life.
  • Spelling "yogurt" backwards.
  • Trying to understand the New York Times' effect on man.
  • A killer rap album based on alliteration rather than rhyming.
  • Poetry that rhymes on the second to last syllable rather than the last.
  • The baffling cosmology of Butter Dorks.
]]> Lords

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Preventative care.
  • COVID lucky streaks.
  • Being able to go to the ER.
  • How to spell Cocoon.
  • Moth guys carrying orbs on their backs.
  • Boss battles that you wouldn't expect.
  • Wilford Brimley's agelessness.
  • Octopus nightmares.
  • The octopus equivalent of rapid eye movement.
  • Meeting sapient crows and asking them whether Y or Z should be up.
  • Which memories stick better.
  • Perception of time when you have a routine vs. when you don't.
  • Arranging your life to maximize perceived lifespan.
  • Different ways to have an adventure.
  • Shooby doooby doggie.
  • A sports rule that sounds like a 17776 plot point
  • Why the Bob Emergency is an emergency.
  • The best quarterbacks getting stuck in an endless hike and football ending forever.
  • The one person who hasn't played Frog Fractions but just listens to Topic Lords because they like topics so much.
  • Summer's lease.
  • Reading a poem aloud without knowing what "ow'st" means or how to pronounce it.
  • Words that used to rhyme but don't anymore.
  • Meter recognize meter.
  • Writing all your sonnets during COVID lockdown.
  • A poem about a dude that Shakespeare is not in love with.
  • Woe is me, etc.
  • Piss Jugman vs Piss Jugm'n.
  • Making phonetic reforms that don't take.
  • Smoothing off any rough edges or peculiarities.
  • Permadeath taking inspiration from real life.
  • A fun thing that you wouldn't have expected to see.
  • Enjoying spending time in the world.
  • Hold the W key and cruise through it.
  • The difference between wanting something vs. liking it.
  • Abelian.
  • The opposite of how you would think honor works.
  • Great honors: brands hate them!
  • Whether to capitalize "lynchian," "kafkaesque" or "quixotic"
  • Eternal abstract universal objects.
  • Teaching truck drivers where to put their piss jugs.
  • The highest honor Piss Jugman can receive.
  • The surname Piss.
  • What is the average Piss lifespan?
  • A real life Bobby Tables moment.
  • The Polywater Gap.
  • Water that scientists have sweated in.
  • Buying a can of Soviet Scientist Sweat in a Japanese vending machine.
  • Polyester intoxication.
  • Liquids with a lower freezing temperature than water.
  • The Polywater Doodle.
  • A metabolism described by Richard Feynman.
  • Brain Pollution.
  • The particular better of the first line of Aqualung by Jethro Tull.
  • Singing "parallelipiped" to the tune of Aqualung.
  • Hearing random phrases in your life.
  • Spelling "yogurt" backwards.
  • Trying to understand the New York Times' effect on man.
  • A killer rap album based on alliteration rather than rhyming.
  • Poetry that rhymes on the second to last syllable rather than the last.
  • The baffling cosmology of Butter Dorks.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Preventative care.
  • COVID lucky streaks.
  • Being able to go to the ER.
  • How to spell Cocoon.
  • Moth guys carrying orbs on their backs.
  • Boss battles that you wouldn't expect.
  • Wilford Brimley's agelessness.
  • Octopus nightmares.
  • The octopus equivalent of rapid eye movement.
  • Meeting sapient crows and asking them whether Y or Z should be up.
  • Which memories stick better.
  • Perception of time when you have a routine vs. when you don't.
  • Arranging your life to maximize perceived lifespan.
  • Different ways to have an adventure.
  • Shooby doooby doggie.
  • A sports rule that sounds like a 17776 plot point
  • Why the Bob Emergency is an emergency.
  • The best quarterbacks getting stuck in an endless hike and football ending forever.
  • The one person who hasn't played Frog Fractions but just listens to Topic Lords because they like topics so much.
  • Summer's lease.
  • Reading a poem aloud without knowing what "ow'st" means or how to pronounce it.
  • Words that used to rhyme but don't anymore.
  • Meter recognize meter.
  • Writing all your sonnets during COVID lockdown.
  • A poem about a dude that Shakespeare is not in love with.
  • Woe is me, etc.
  • Piss Jugman vs Piss Jugm'n.
  • Making phonetic reforms that don't take.
  • Smoothing off any rough edges or peculiarities.
  • Permadeath taking inspiration from real life.
  • A fun thing that you wouldn't have expected to see.
  • Enjoying spending time in the world.
  • Hold the W key and cruise through it.
  • The difference between wanting something vs. liking it.
  • Abelian.
  • The opposite of how you would think honor works.
  • Great honors: brands hate them!
  • Whether to capitalize "lynchian," "kafkaesque" or "quixotic"
  • Eternal abstract universal objects.
  • Teaching truck drivers where to put their piss jugs.
  • The highest honor Piss Jugman can receive.
  • The surname Piss.
  • What is the average Piss lifespan?
  • A real life Bobby Tables moment.
  • The Polywater Gap.
  • Water that scientists have sweated in.
  • Buying a can of Soviet Scientist Sweat in a Japanese vending machine.
  • Polyester intoxication.
  • Liquids with a lower freezing temperature than water.
  • The Polywater Doodle.
  • A metabolism described by Richard Feynman.
  • Brain Pollution.
  • The particular better of the first line of Aqualung by Jethro Tull.
  • Singing "parallelipiped" to the tune of Aqualung.
  • Hearing random phrases in your life.
  • Spelling "yogurt" backwards.
  • Trying to understand the New York Times' effect on man.
  • A killer rap album based on alliteration rather than rhyming.
  • Poetry that rhymes on the second to last syllable rather than the last.
  • The baffling cosmology of Butter Dorks.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+kGtEp-Wi ]]> Jim Stormdancer 213. Urine-Based Interactions With the Scientific Community https://topiclords.com/urine-based-interactions-with-the-scientific-community 567066d6-50d1-46d8-bdbe-782d22f3fb7d Mon, 20 Nov 2023 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Erica and Ryan. We discuss dog bone facts, going to Cuba, Candidatos Desulforudis audaxviator, Avoid the Noid by Florence P. Wordsmith, canceling Texas, and shielding an avid gamer from the Final Fantasy 7 spoiler. 1:23:36 true Lords:

  • Erica
  • Ryan

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The COVID booster as a form of recreational drug use.
  • Puking, but not for the listeners at home.
  • The only way you can know if you're doing well.
  • WavHog.
  • Trying a lot of things that aren't working out.
  • A chat log that's organized poorly.
  • An ever-growing cacophony.
  • The million dollar web page.
  • Buying ad space on a web page that's entirely ads.
  • Gordy and the Monster Moon.
  • Little Buddy mode vs. Little Nemesis mode.
  • Making a noise whenever you wonder about something.
  • The sound of the aurora borealis.
  • The Northern Lights explaining to you how many bones are in a dog's body.
  • Peeing on your equipment to keep the foxes away.
  • Maintaining curiosity about things.
  • Burying a question and seeing if it comes back to you.
  • Recording a podcast even though you don't know anything.
  • An information strategy that is much more enchanting than looking things up.
  • Leaving through your journals.
  • Tannish white hair.
  • Burying a dog bone so that it grows into a dog bone tree.
  • Farms with no distinct edges.
  • Cholera vegetables.
  • Inventing your own COVID-19 vaccine.
  • Putting a whole country in a snow globe.
  • Tube ham.
  • Drinking a soda branded "your ass."
  • Knight Anoles.
  • Gerrymandering Florida to fix Cuba.
  • Lord Kensingtonitis.
  • A bacterium named after a Jules Verne quote.
  • The only known organism to exist in an ecosystem containing only itself.
  • A biome that's just a bunch of clones of you making a go of it together.
  • Slurping up radiation from the good good surrounding bedrock.
  • All the little guys out there being interesting.
  • The credentials you need to call yourself a scientist.
  • Which bacteria are most bothered by their Wikipedia pages.
  • Everyone's MRCA.
  • Meteorites throwing amino assets into space.
  • Extremely grabby carbon.
  • Moldy bathtubs all over the universe.
  • Little Buddy mode but for bacteria.
  • The works of Florence P. Wordsmith.
  • The origin myth of the Noid.
  • Whether the Noid is wearing a suit or if that's just his skin.
  • Yo! Noid and Yo! Noid 2: Enter the Void.
  • A layer of water that's waving up and down.
  • Empathizing with how the Noid sees the world.
  • Writing a poem about the Noid and, instead of hiding it in shame, putting it on the internet for all to see.
  • Getting a game over before you finish the first level but at least you killed a lot of seagulls with a yoyo.
  • The sun making a big X over Texas.
  • Drilling for oil in the Permian Basin.
  • The last total eclipse of the sun of our lifetimes.
  • Checkmate, scientists!
  • Solar noon.
  • Grab your glasses and get lookin'!
  • Meeting Topic Lords all summer.
  • Going sightseeing to find out where all your gasoline comes from.
  • Going to see the solar eclipse or just closing your eyes to get the same effect.
  • A big pile of polygonal Doritos killing another pile of polygonal Doritos.
  • Making sequels to the Final Fantasy 7 remake.
  • The porn web site named after a Final Fantasy 7 plot point.
  • aerisdies.com vs. aerithdies.com.
  • Retransliterations.
  • Husbands who are dead (asleep).
  • The option that makes you look like less of a douchebag.
  • Watching a Final Fantasy documentary before you watch it with your girlfriend to make sure it won't spoil a major character's death for her, and it shows the death onscreen but you missed it during the vetting process, but it's okay because she couldn't visually parse the Playstation-era graphics anyway.
  • Sending your sister to media literacy classes so that she can understand when Aeris dies.
  • A pile of snack chips fighting each other.
  • Showing Star Wars to kids who have never seen it but know every plot point in advance.
  • A priceless Ming vase that has never been perceived by human eyes and everyone thinks it's an idiot and Erica wants to save it by calling it up on the phone and smashing it.
  • A big red button you can push whenever you want.
  • The only time you've ever been accused of underthinking something.
  • Putting your first name and last name together to make a person.
]]> Lords:

  • Erica
  • Ryan

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The COVID booster as a form of recreational drug use.
  • Puking, but not for the listeners at home.
  • The only way you can know if you're doing well.
  • WavHog.
  • Trying a lot of things that aren't working out.
  • A chat log that's organized poorly.
  • An ever-growing cacophony.
  • The million dollar web page.
  • Buying ad space on a web page that's entirely ads.
  • Gordy and the Monster Moon.
  • Little Buddy mode vs. Little Nemesis mode.
  • Making a noise whenever you wonder about something.
  • The sound of the aurora borealis.
  • The Northern Lights explaining to you how many bones are in a dog's body.
  • Peeing on your equipment to keep the foxes away.
  • Maintaining curiosity about things.
  • Burying a question and seeing if it comes back to you.
  • Recording a podcast even though you don't know anything.
  • An information strategy that is much more enchanting than looking things up.
  • Leaving through your journals.
  • Tannish white hair.
  • Burying a dog bone so that it grows into a dog bone tree.
  • Farms with no distinct edges.
  • Cholera vegetables.
  • Inventing your own COVID-19 vaccine.
  • Putting a whole country in a snow globe.
  • Tube ham.
  • Drinking a soda branded "your ass."
  • Knight Anoles.
  • Gerrymandering Florida to fix Cuba.
  • Lord Kensingtonitis.
  • A bacterium named after a Jules Verne quote.
  • The only known organism to exist in an ecosystem containing only itself.
  • A biome that's just a bunch of clones of you making a go of it together.
  • Slurping up radiation from the good good surrounding bedrock.
  • All the little guys out there being interesting.
  • The credentials you need to call yourself a scientist.
  • Which bacteria are most bothered by their Wikipedia pages.
  • Everyone's MRCA.
  • Meteorites throwing amino assets into space.
  • Extremely grabby carbon.
  • Moldy bathtubs all over the universe.
  • Little Buddy mode but for bacteria.
  • The works of Florence P. Wordsmith.
  • The origin myth of the Noid.
  • Whether the Noid is wearing a suit or if that's just his skin.
  • Yo! Noid and Yo! Noid 2: Enter the Void.
  • A layer of water that's waving up and down.
  • Empathizing with how the Noid sees the world.
  • Writing a poem about the Noid and, instead of hiding it in shame, putting it on the internet for all to see.
  • Getting a game over before you finish the first level but at least you killed a lot of seagulls with a yoyo.
  • The sun making a big X over Texas.
  • Drilling for oil in the Permian Basin.
  • The last total eclipse of the sun of our lifetimes.
  • Checkmate, scientists!
  • Solar noon.
  • Grab your glasses and get lookin'!
  • Meeting Topic Lords all summer.
  • Going sightseeing to find out where all your gasoline comes from.
  • Going to see the solar eclipse or just closing your eyes to get the same effect.
  • A big pile of polygonal Doritos killing another pile of polygonal Doritos.
  • Making sequels to the Final Fantasy 7 remake.
  • The porn web site named after a Final Fantasy 7 plot point.
  • aerisdies.com vs. aerithdies.com.
  • Retransliterations.
  • Husbands who are dead (asleep).
  • The option that makes you look like less of a douchebag.
  • Watching a Final Fantasy documentary before you watch it with your girlfriend to make sure it won't spoil a major character's death for her, and it shows the death onscreen but you missed it during the vetting process, but it's okay because she couldn't visually parse the Playstation-era graphics anyway.
  • Sending your sister to media literacy classes so that she can understand when Aeris dies.
  • A pile of snack chips fighting each other.
  • Showing Star Wars to kids who have never seen it but know every plot point in advance.
  • A priceless Ming vase that has never been perceived by human eyes and everyone thinks it's an idiot and Erica wants to save it by calling it up on the phone and smashing it.
  • A big red button you can push whenever you want.
  • The only time you've ever been accused of underthinking something.
  • Putting your first name and last name together to make a person.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Erica
  • Ryan

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The COVID booster as a form of recreational drug use.
  • Puking, but not for the listeners at home.
  • The only way you can know if you're doing well.
  • WavHog.
  • Trying a lot of things that aren't working out.
  • A chat log that's organized poorly.
  • An ever-growing cacophony.
  • The million dollar web page.
  • Buying ad space on a web page that's entirely ads.
  • Gordy and the Monster Moon.
  • Little Buddy mode vs. Little Nemesis mode.
  • Making a noise whenever you wonder about something.
  • The sound of the aurora borealis.
  • The Northern Lights explaining to you how many bones are in a dog's body.
  • Peeing on your equipment to keep the foxes away.
  • Maintaining curiosity about things.
  • Burying a question and seeing if it comes back to you.
  • Recording a podcast even though you don't know anything.
  • An information strategy that is much more enchanting than looking things up.
  • Leaving through your journals.
  • Tannish white hair.
  • Burying a dog bone so that it grows into a dog bone tree.
  • Farms with no distinct edges.
  • Cholera vegetables.
  • Inventing your own COVID-19 vaccine.
  • Putting a whole country in a snow globe.
  • Tube ham.
  • Drinking a soda branded "your ass."
  • Knight Anoles.
  • Gerrymandering Florida to fix Cuba.
  • Lord Kensingtonitis.
  • A bacterium named after a Jules Verne quote.
  • The only known organism to exist in an ecosystem containing only itself.
  • A biome that's just a bunch of clones of you making a go of it together.
  • Slurping up radiation from the good good surrounding bedrock.
  • All the little guys out there being interesting.
  • The credentials you need to call yourself a scientist.
  • Which bacteria are most bothered by their Wikipedia pages.
  • Everyone's MRCA.
  • Meteorites throwing amino assets into space.
  • Extremely grabby carbon.
  • Moldy bathtubs all over the universe.
  • Little Buddy mode but for bacteria.
  • The works of Florence P. Wordsmith.
  • The origin myth of the Noid.
  • Whether the Noid is wearing a suit or if that's just his skin.
  • Yo! Noid and Yo! Noid 2: Enter the Void.
  • A layer of water that's waving up and down.
  • Empathizing with how the Noid sees the world.
  • Writing a poem about the Noid and, instead of hiding it in shame, putting it on the internet for all to see.
  • Getting a game over before you finish the first level but at least you killed a lot of seagulls with a yoyo.
  • The sun making a big X over Texas.
  • Drilling for oil in the Permian Basin.
  • The last total eclipse of the sun of our lifetimes.
  • Checkmate, scientists!
  • Solar noon.
  • Grab your glasses and get lookin'!
  • Meeting Topic Lords all summer.
  • Going sightseeing to find out where all your gasoline comes from.
  • Going to see the solar eclipse or just closing your eyes to get the same effect.
  • A big pile of polygonal Doritos killing another pile of polygonal Doritos.
  • Making sequels to the Final Fantasy 7 remake.
  • The porn web site named after a Final Fantasy 7 plot point.
  • aerisdies.com vs. aerithdies.com.
  • Retransliterations.
  • Husbands who are dead (asleep).
  • The option that makes you look like less of a douchebag.
  • Watching a Final Fantasy documentary before you watch it with your girlfriend to make sure it won't spoil a major character's death for her, and it shows the death onscreen but you missed it during the vetting process, but it's okay because she couldn't visually parse the Playstation-era graphics anyway.
  • Sending your sister to media literacy classes so that she can understand when Aeris dies.
  • A pile of snack chips fighting each other.
  • Showing Star Wars to kids who have never seen it but know every plot point in advance.
  • A priceless Ming vase that has never been perceived by human eyes and everyone thinks it's an idiot and Erica wants to save it by calling it up on the phone and smashing it.
  • A big red button you can push whenever you want.
  • The only time you've ever been accused of underthinking something.
  • Putting your first name and last name together to make a person.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+_H7bHKS0 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 212. Back in My Day, Kids Actually Crossied the Road https://topiclords.com/back-in-my-day-kids-actually-crossied-the-road 852f0f94-acae-468d-a370-9aedef1e5a3e Mon, 13 Nov 2023 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Mitch and Andrew. We discuss how many Super Mario games there are now, owning the domain emailfordogs.com, whether the DMV is hiring kids to jump in front of your car, Love in the Age of Google, the Burrito Run, and storytelling in the WarioWare series. 1:10:50 true Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Your names.
  • Jokes that have or have not been done.
  • The real Jim Stormdancer. (On my birth certificate.)
  • A game which has no sequels.
  • Pizza Panda dot Pizza.
  • Cultivating an audience who loves clicking links.
  • A polling feature that is great for polling people.
  • Why not use one thing? Just have one place where you post everything.
  • How to make your audience stop clicking links.
  • 358 games that might or might not be Super Mario games.
  • A game called Super Mario Bros. Something.
  • All the different years there hasn't been a new Super Mario game since.
  • A controversy, but not one people care about.
  • New guy just dropped: guy who gets in arguments about whether New Super Mario Bros. 2 is a mainline Super Mario game.
  • Super Mario Bros. and Friends: When I Grow Up.
  • Super Mario and his friends discussing what career paths they might take.
  • Looking at all these MS-DOS colors.
  • Brian A. Rice, Inc.: it's just a guy!
  • Mario games for MS-DOS.
  • A Mario fan theory that has been disproven extremely recently.
  • Princess Peach and Princess Daisy having a conversation about something other than a man.
  • The description of Daisy in Smash Ultimate trying to come up with convincing reasons why Peach and Daisy are different people.
  • New Super Mario Bros. Mii.
  • Super Mariologists studying Super Mariology.
  • Super Mario Bros. Special.
  • A smeary snapshot of your mind.
  • A Mario game that was extremely expensive to make.
  • Working on a game until it's ready.
  • If you like Mario games, then it's one of them. If you don't then it's not.
  • Super Mario Bros. Tudor.
  • Super Mario Bros. Oneder.
  • Getting email for dogs at emailfordogs.com.
  • A hobby you used to be able to have.
  • Enough people making up fake emails for their dogs that some them send email to your fake dog email domain name.
  • Rip the old spacejam.com.
  • Space Jam: a New Legacy.
  • Reusing apacejam.com to capture all the people clicking on novelty domain names that redirect to spacejam.com.
  • A very small scale conspiracy, between one driver's test examiner and one child.
  • Being too flustered to deliberately fail your test.
  • A checkbox on the DMV test labeled "did not assassinate my arch rival, whom I now owe five dollars."
  • Back in my day kids actually Crossied the Road.
  • A smoke made with the fume of sighs.
  • A poem that scans as a poem.
  • A million monkeys using a million trackers.
  • One extremely busy monkey using a million trackers.
  • A new form of physical exercise.
  • Terraforming the hill to make your exercise routine more effective.
  • Copylefted exercise routines.
  • There are very few perfect things in life but this is the perfect exercise routine.
  • Dogs who are like dogs.
  • Dog theory.
  • What's more habitual than eating lunch?
  • Mathematical proof that all horses are the same color. (Except for the horse of a different color.)
  • Booger joke fart joke silly game.
  • A history of storytelling in the Wario Ware series.
  • Wario's hiring process.
  • A thing that happens after Wario puts a toilet on his head.
  • Why the latest Wario Ware game has microgames in it.
  • The Wario Ware employee who joined the company because he was such a big fan of previous games in the series.
  • Nintendo games that implicitly support unionization and fan-fiction.
  • The man who was too many Marios.
  • Hearing Wario speak in full sentences.
  • A thing that is nothing to write home about but writing home about it anyways.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Your names.
  • Jokes that have or have not been done.
  • The real Jim Stormdancer. (On my birth certificate.)
  • A game which has no sequels.
  • Pizza Panda dot Pizza.
  • Cultivating an audience who loves clicking links.
  • A polling feature that is great for polling people.
  • Why not use one thing? Just have one place where you post everything.
  • How to make your audience stop clicking links.
  • 358 games that might or might not be Super Mario games.
  • A game called Super Mario Bros. Something.
  • All the different years there hasn't been a new Super Mario game since.
  • A controversy, but not one people care about.
  • New guy just dropped: guy who gets in arguments about whether New Super Mario Bros. 2 is a mainline Super Mario game.
  • Super Mario Bros. and Friends: When I Grow Up.
  • Super Mario and his friends discussing what career paths they might take.
  • Looking at all these MS-DOS colors.
  • Brian A. Rice, Inc.: it's just a guy!
  • Mario games for MS-DOS.
  • A Mario fan theory that has been disproven extremely recently.
  • Princess Peach and Princess Daisy having a conversation about something other than a man.
  • The description of Daisy in Smash Ultimate trying to come up with convincing reasons why Peach and Daisy are different people.
  • New Super Mario Bros. Mii.
  • Super Mariologists studying Super Mariology.
  • Super Mario Bros. Special.
  • A smeary snapshot of your mind.
  • A Mario game that was extremely expensive to make.
  • Working on a game until it's ready.
  • If you like Mario games, then it's one of them. If you don't then it's not.
  • Super Mario Bros. Tudor.
  • Super Mario Bros. Oneder.
  • Getting email for dogs at emailfordogs.com.
  • A hobby you used to be able to have.
  • Enough people making up fake emails for their dogs that some them send email to your fake dog email domain name.
  • Rip the old spacejam.com.
  • Space Jam: a New Legacy.
  • Reusing apacejam.com to capture all the people clicking on novelty domain names that redirect to spacejam.com.
  • A very small scale conspiracy, between one driver's test examiner and one child.
  • Being too flustered to deliberately fail your test.
  • A checkbox on the DMV test labeled "did not assassinate my arch rival, whom I now owe five dollars."
  • Back in my day kids actually Crossied the Road.
  • A smoke made with the fume of sighs.
  • A poem that scans as a poem.
  • A million monkeys using a million trackers.
  • One extremely busy monkey using a million trackers.
  • A new form of physical exercise.
  • Terraforming the hill to make your exercise routine more effective.
  • Copylefted exercise routines.
  • There are very few perfect things in life but this is the perfect exercise routine.
  • Dogs who are like dogs.
  • Dog theory.
  • What's more habitual than eating lunch?
  • Mathematical proof that all horses are the same color. (Except for the horse of a different color.)
  • Booger joke fart joke silly game.
  • A history of storytelling in the Wario Ware series.
  • Wario's hiring process.
  • A thing that happens after Wario puts a toilet on his head.
  • Why the latest Wario Ware game has microgames in it.
  • The Wario Ware employee who joined the company because he was such a big fan of previous games in the series.
  • Nintendo games that implicitly support unionization and fan-fiction.
  • The man who was too many Marios.
  • Hearing Wario speak in full sentences.
  • A thing that is nothing to write home about but writing home about it anyways.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Your names.
  • Jokes that have or have not been done.
  • The real Jim Stormdancer. (On my birth certificate.)
  • A game which has no sequels.
  • Pizza Panda dot Pizza.
  • Cultivating an audience who loves clicking links.
  • A polling feature that is great for polling people.
  • Why not use one thing? Just have one place where you post everything.
  • How to make your audience stop clicking links.
  • 358 games that might or might not be Super Mario games.
  • A game called Super Mario Bros. Something.
  • All the different years there hasn't been a new Super Mario game since.
  • A controversy, but not one people care about.
  • New guy just dropped: guy who gets in arguments about whether New Super Mario Bros. 2 is a mainline Super Mario game.
  • Super Mario Bros. and Friends: When I Grow Up.
  • Super Mario and his friends discussing what career paths they might take.
  • Looking at all these MS-DOS colors.
  • Brian A. Rice, Inc.: it's just a guy!
  • Mario games for MS-DOS.
  • A Mario fan theory that has been disproven extremely recently.
  • Princess Peach and Princess Daisy having a conversation about something other than a man.
  • The description of Daisy in Smash Ultimate trying to come up with convincing reasons why Peach and Daisy are different people.
  • New Super Mario Bros. Mii.
  • Super Mariologists studying Super Mariology.
  • Super Mario Bros. Special.
  • A smeary snapshot of your mind.
  • A Mario game that was extremely expensive to make.
  • Working on a game until it's ready.
  • If you like Mario games, then it's one of them. If you don't then it's not.
  • Super Mario Bros. Tudor.
  • Super Mario Bros. Oneder.
  • Getting email for dogs at emailfordogs.com.
  • A hobby you used to be able to have.
  • Enough people making up fake emails for their dogs that some them send email to your fake dog email domain name.
  • Rip the old spacejam.com.
  • Space Jam: a New Legacy.
  • Reusing apacejam.com to capture all the people clicking on novelty domain names that redirect to spacejam.com.
  • A very small scale conspiracy, between one driver's test examiner and one child.
  • Being too flustered to deliberately fail your test.
  • A checkbox on the DMV test labeled "did not assassinate my arch rival, whom I now owe five dollars."
  • Back in my day kids actually Crossied the Road.
  • A smoke made with the fume of sighs.
  • A poem that scans as a poem.
  • A million monkeys using a million trackers.
  • One extremely busy monkey using a million trackers.
  • A new form of physical exercise.
  • Terraforming the hill to make your exercise routine more effective.
  • Copylefted exercise routines.
  • There are very few perfect things in life but this is the perfect exercise routine.
  • Dogs who are like dogs.
  • Dog theory.
  • What's more habitual than eating lunch?
  • Mathematical proof that all horses are the same color. (Except for the horse of a different color.)
  • Booger joke fart joke silly game.
  • A history of storytelling in the Wario Ware series.
  • Wario's hiring process.
  • A thing that happens after Wario puts a toilet on his head.
  • Why the latest Wario Ware game has microgames in it.
  • The Wario Ware employee who joined the company because he was such a big fan of previous games in the series.
  • Nintendo games that implicitly support unionization and fan-fiction.
  • The man who was too many Marios.
  • Hearing Wario speak in full sentences.
  • A thing that is nothing to write home about but writing home about it anyways.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+YNM-ky3g ]]> Jim Stormdancer 211. Window-Peering Jim Checking Out Your Cats https://topiclords.com/window-peering-jim-checking-out-your-cats 228d0f9c-d36a-444b-90aa-7cbe5b49736b Mon, 06 Nov 2023 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Cort and Elena. We discuss your baby being due tomorrow, Dogme 95 for web development, visits from neighborhood cats, Potato by Jane Kenyon, the difficulty of designing cooperative board games, and building a conlang generator. 1:04:19 true Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The Be Real App.
  • Posting your mortifying skin condition for all the internet to see.
  • Being born.
  • The Dance Dance Revolution song "20,November," by Earth Wind and Fire.
  • PiCoSteveMo.
  • Tossing around hastily drawn concept art with your team.
  • Being born, again.
  • Having a kid for someone else.
  • Eating cigarettes off of the sidewalk.
  • A grab bag of thousands of possible pregnancy symptoms.
  • Literacy as a symptom of pregnancy.
  • A visceral reminder that you are part of a long chain of humans.
  • Which came first, humans or birth?
  • The comfort of the humans who are still around having individual experiences even after you die.
  • Tips n Tricks for dealing with fear of death.
  • Inviting dead people onto the show.
  • Asking for more pro-death art so you can feel better about death.
  • Pro-life, in the literal sense.
  • Flowers and mushrooms growing up through the bones.
  • Returning to the universe to nurture it.
  • Dumb Ways to Die.
  • Sum: 40 Tales from the Afterlives.
  • Thought experiments about something weird that could happen.
  • The Egg by Andy Weir.
  • Covering birth and death in the same topic.
  • Looking at photos of yourself from five years ago and thinking "oh shit!"
  • I am choosing to no longer have conscious experience, mom. You wouldn't understand, mom.
  • Swedish with a mouthful of potatoes.
  • Dogme 95.
  • Enpoopification.
  • A protocol for exchanging information on a computer.
  • Rewinding to a kinder, simpler web.
  • Avoiding all this gestures at the world
  • New rule: no web servers more powerful than a Raspberry Pi.
  • The cool thing that was on the web in the mid-90s.
  • Making art and putting it on the internet and getting a fan base.
  • The teenage gamer comic series making a comic about prostate exams.
  • Sharding the internet.
  • El Goonish Shive.
  • Anime hammers that you do when someone is being a pervert.
  • Coming to personal revelations regarding your neurodivergence or gender situation.
  • How to be a successful artist.
  • Not knowing if your favorite webcomic had ads because you use an adblocker.
  • Working at your parents animation studio as an inbetweener.
  • Merging your cats into one cat.
  • Neighborhood coyotes.
  • Cats beyond the reach of fear.
  • Window-peering Jim: he's just checking out your remodel.
  • Putting a GoPro on your neighbor's cat and livestreaming the inside of their house.
  • Cats with amazing life stories that they'll never tell you.
  • The consort of coffee grounds.
  • Making shepherd's pie for an entire hamlet.
  • A possibly accidental double line break.
  • A line break corresponding to a conceptual boundary.
  • The Story of Mel: a Real Programmer.
  • Adding left angle brackets to the start of every line until word wrap makes it a poem.
  • Blackout poetry.
  • Pumping gas as an element of Cottagecore.
  • A hamlet is just a city in New Jersey.
  • The fireworks on your forehead game.
  • A game where everyone stops talking.
  • The Yelling Game.
  • A dedicated period of yelling.
  • Space-themed trick taking games.
  • The Spaceteam card game.
  • Coming up with a set of place names that sound like they're from the same culture.
  • Assigning syllable groups to a morpheme.
  • Asking Claude.
  • Interpolating the obvious things.
  • The Sonority Hierarchy.
  • A gradient from less vowel-like to more vowel-like.
  • Cursed Conlangs.
  • Generating syllables and mushing them together.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The Be Real App.
  • Posting your mortifying skin condition for all the internet to see.
  • Being born.
  • The Dance Dance Revolution song "20,November," by Earth Wind and Fire.
  • PiCoSteveMo.
  • Tossing around hastily drawn concept art with your team.
  • Being born, again.
  • Having a kid for someone else.
  • Eating cigarettes off of the sidewalk.
  • A grab bag of thousands of possible pregnancy symptoms.
  • Literacy as a symptom of pregnancy.
  • A visceral reminder that you are part of a long chain of humans.
  • Which came first, humans or birth?
  • The comfort of the humans who are still around having individual experiences even after you die.
  • Tips n Tricks for dealing with fear of death.
  • Inviting dead people onto the show.
  • Asking for more pro-death art so you can feel better about death.
  • Pro-life, in the literal sense.
  • Flowers and mushrooms growing up through the bones.
  • Returning to the universe to nurture it.
  • Dumb Ways to Die.
  • Sum: 40 Tales from the Afterlives.
  • Thought experiments about something weird that could happen.
  • The Egg by Andy Weir.
  • Covering birth and death in the same topic.
  • Looking at photos of yourself from five years ago and thinking "oh shit!"
  • I am choosing to no longer have conscious experience, mom. You wouldn't understand, mom.
  • Swedish with a mouthful of potatoes.
  • Dogme 95.
  • Enpoopification.
  • A protocol for exchanging information on a computer.
  • Rewinding to a kinder, simpler web.
  • Avoiding all this gestures at the world
  • New rule: no web servers more powerful than a Raspberry Pi.
  • The cool thing that was on the web in the mid-90s.
  • Making art and putting it on the internet and getting a fan base.
  • The teenage gamer comic series making a comic about prostate exams.
  • Sharding the internet.
  • El Goonish Shive.
  • Anime hammers that you do when someone is being a pervert.
  • Coming to personal revelations regarding your neurodivergence or gender situation.
  • How to be a successful artist.
  • Not knowing if your favorite webcomic had ads because you use an adblocker.
  • Working at your parents animation studio as an inbetweener.
  • Merging your cats into one cat.
  • Neighborhood coyotes.
  • Cats beyond the reach of fear.
  • Window-peering Jim: he's just checking out your remodel.
  • Putting a GoPro on your neighbor's cat and livestreaming the inside of their house.
  • Cats with amazing life stories that they'll never tell you.
  • The consort of coffee grounds.
  • Making shepherd's pie for an entire hamlet.
  • A possibly accidental double line break.
  • A line break corresponding to a conceptual boundary.
  • The Story of Mel: a Real Programmer.
  • Adding left angle brackets to the start of every line until word wrap makes it a poem.
  • Blackout poetry.
  • Pumping gas as an element of Cottagecore.
  • A hamlet is just a city in New Jersey.
  • The fireworks on your forehead game.
  • A game where everyone stops talking.
  • The Yelling Game.
  • A dedicated period of yelling.
  • Space-themed trick taking games.
  • The Spaceteam card game.
  • Coming up with a set of place names that sound like they're from the same culture.
  • Assigning syllable groups to a morpheme.
  • Asking Claude.
  • Interpolating the obvious things.
  • The Sonority Hierarchy.
  • A gradient from less vowel-like to more vowel-like.
  • Cursed Conlangs.
  • Generating syllables and mushing them together.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The Be Real App.
  • Posting your mortifying skin condition for all the internet to see.
  • Being born.
  • The Dance Dance Revolution song "20,November," by Earth Wind and Fire.
  • PiCoSteveMo.
  • Tossing around hastily drawn concept art with your team.
  • Being born, again.
  • Having a kid for someone else.
  • Eating cigarettes off of the sidewalk.
  • A grab bag of thousands of possible pregnancy symptoms.
  • Literacy as a symptom of pregnancy.
  • A visceral reminder that you are part of a long chain of humans.
  • Which came first, humans or birth?
  • The comfort of the humans who are still around having individual experiences even after you die.
  • Tips n Tricks for dealing with fear of death.
  • Inviting dead people onto the show.
  • Asking for more pro-death art so you can feel better about death.
  • Pro-life, in the literal sense.
  • Flowers and mushrooms growing up through the bones.
  • Returning to the universe to nurture it.
  • Dumb Ways to Die.
  • Sum: 40 Tales from the Afterlives.
  • Thought experiments about something weird that could happen.
  • The Egg by Andy Weir.
  • Covering birth and death in the same topic.
  • Looking at photos of yourself from five years ago and thinking "oh shit!"
  • I am choosing to no longer have conscious experience, mom. You wouldn't understand, mom.
  • Swedish with a mouthful of potatoes.
  • Dogme 95.
  • Enpoopification.
  • A protocol for exchanging information on a computer.
  • Rewinding to a kinder, simpler web.
  • Avoiding all this gestures at the world
  • New rule: no web servers more powerful than a Raspberry Pi.
  • The cool thing that was on the web in the mid-90s.
  • Making art and putting it on the internet and getting a fan base.
  • The teenage gamer comic series making a comic about prostate exams.
  • Sharding the internet.
  • El Goonish Shive.
  • Anime hammers that you do when someone is being a pervert.
  • Coming to personal revelations regarding your neurodivergence or gender situation.
  • How to be a successful artist.
  • Not knowing if your favorite webcomic had ads because you use an adblocker.
  • Working at your parents animation studio as an inbetweener.
  • Merging your cats into one cat.
  • Neighborhood coyotes.
  • Cats beyond the reach of fear.
  • Window-peering Jim: he's just checking out your remodel.
  • Putting a GoPro on your neighbor's cat and livestreaming the inside of their house.
  • Cats with amazing life stories that they'll never tell you.
  • The consort of coffee grounds.
  • Making shepherd's pie for an entire hamlet.
  • A possibly accidental double line break.
  • A line break corresponding to a conceptual boundary.
  • The Story of Mel: a Real Programmer.
  • Adding left angle brackets to the start of every line until word wrap makes it a poem.
  • Blackout poetry.
  • Pumping gas as an element of Cottagecore.
  • A hamlet is just a city in New Jersey.
  • The fireworks on your forehead game.
  • A game where everyone stops talking.
  • The Yelling Game.
  • A dedicated period of yelling.
  • Space-themed trick taking games.
  • The Spaceteam card game.
  • Coming up with a set of place names that sound like they're from the same culture.
  • Assigning syllable groups to a morpheme.
  • Asking Claude.
  • Interpolating the obvious things.
  • The Sonority Hierarchy.
  • A gradient from less vowel-like to more vowel-like.
  • Cursed Conlangs.
  • Generating syllables and mushing them together.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+aE3IRoKo ]]> Jim Stormdancer 210. Good Ideas for Sam Barlow https://topiclords.com/good-ideas-for-sam-barlow 96ec3e9c-d108-40f5-ba7a-b5c84a39aa5b Mon, 30 Oct 2023 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Andrew and Kate. We discuss british food, learning new things, lightswitch abstraction limits, Un Petit D'un Petit, The Old Timey Computer Show, trying to get your friends to play a game that sucks to learn, and watching just the end of movies. 1:13:43 true Lords:

Topics:

  • British food is good, actually
  • Really enjoying programming in MonoGame (and stop motion animation)
  • Lightswitch abstraction limit
  • Un petit d'un petit
  • The Old Timey Computer Show
  • Trying to get your friends to play a game that sucks to learn
  • Winston has discovered that the ending of a story is usually the most exciting part, so he doesn't want to watch whole movies any more, just the last twenty minutes of each

Microtopics:

  • Moonstone Island.
  • A tiny fox in a big world.
  • Cherry blues.
  • Something within your culture that is awful and bad.
  • Whatever can grow in the wet and dark. (Potatoes.)
  • Cool Whip based salads.
  • Yorkshire pudding. (The fluffy one.)
  • The non-spicy gravies.
  • J. Kenji Lopez-Alt's roast potato recipe.
  • Lamb going with mint and pork going with applesauce.
  • How to eat Vegemite or Marmite.
  • A man at the end of the table whose entire job is to carve meat for you.
  • A place to take your picky grandma to eat.
  • Bodega cats and bodega kids.
  • Doing stop motion animation as a goof.
  • The fun part of Dunning Krueger.
  • Doing a magic trick without knowing how the trick works and amazing yourself.
  • Leaning into the good times.
  • Accidentally getting good at an employable skill.
  • Flailing at the wall until the light switches are in the right position.
  • Off: just a different kind of on.
  • Doing your first pull request.
  • The fountain pen of the version control ecology.
  • Getting a bunch of little plant men to turn the lights on and off for me.
  • Poetry written in nonsensical French that is homophonic with English nursery rhymes.
  • An entire book for a very specific kind of nerd to have a sensible chuckle.
  • Allowing yourself one E, as a mistake.
  • A joke written back when people knew what am omnibus was.
  • Vintages footage from 1980s computer shows.
  • Dousing CD-Rs.
  • The Free Cake and Donuts Half-Hour.
  • Getting as many 35+ computer dorks as you can under a box before you pull the string.
  • Making two children fight each other on the British equivalent of Crash Bandicoot.
  • A policeman on a unicycle.
  • The imagined experience of programming the ZX Spectrum.
  • The other Cambridge.
  • Mac PCs.
  • The Oliver Twins.
  • Turning on all the shaders to make your programmer art look good.
  • Finding three extra Dizzy games in the attic.
  • Trying to tell your friends about a family tradition and while you're telling them you realize how messed up it is.
  • A pile of 500 cards that should really be a computer game instead.
  • A rule where every time you play a card you have to sigh a little bit.
  • A game where you torture your friends.
  • A food with the letter E in it.
  • Trying to have fun despite your friend who is making you play the game.
  • Have you guys heard about conclusions?
  • A bunch of stuff happening and then there's a riddle.
  • The Go Left Problem.
  • When games have secrets.
  • Pushing at the edges of a game and the game pops up a dialog saying "I noticed you pushing at my edges."
  • A password named "Susan."
  • A DVD where every interface to start the movie starts it at chapter 2 and chapter 1 is a secret.
  • Reading just the last word of a book.
  • Watching the first episode and the last episode of a sitcom and trying to guess which actors missing from the last episode died and which went to prison.
  • How to find your Mastodon name.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

  • British food is good, actually
  • Really enjoying programming in MonoGame (and stop motion animation)
  • Lightswitch abstraction limit
  • Un petit d'un petit
  • The Old Timey Computer Show
  • Trying to get your friends to play a game that sucks to learn
  • Winston has discovered that the ending of a story is usually the most exciting part, so he doesn't want to watch whole movies any more, just the last twenty minutes of each

Microtopics:

  • Moonstone Island.
  • A tiny fox in a big world.
  • Cherry blues.
  • Something within your culture that is awful and bad.
  • Whatever can grow in the wet and dark. (Potatoes.)
  • Cool Whip based salads.
  • Yorkshire pudding. (The fluffy one.)
  • The non-spicy gravies.
  • J. Kenji Lopez-Alt's roast potato recipe.
  • Lamb going with mint and pork going with applesauce.
  • How to eat Vegemite or Marmite.
  • A man at the end of the table whose entire job is to carve meat for you.
  • A place to take your picky grandma to eat.
  • Bodega cats and bodega kids.
  • Doing stop motion animation as a goof.
  • The fun part of Dunning Krueger.
  • Doing a magic trick without knowing how the trick works and amazing yourself.
  • Leaning into the good times.
  • Accidentally getting good at an employable skill.
  • Flailing at the wall until the light switches are in the right position.
  • Off: just a different kind of on.
  • Doing your first pull request.
  • The fountain pen of the version control ecology.
  • Getting a bunch of little plant men to turn the lights on and off for me.
  • Poetry written in nonsensical French that is homophonic with English nursery rhymes.
  • An entire book for a very specific kind of nerd to have a sensible chuckle.
  • Allowing yourself one E, as a mistake.
  • A joke written back when people knew what am omnibus was.
  • Vintages footage from 1980s computer shows.
  • Dousing CD-Rs.
  • The Free Cake and Donuts Half-Hour.
  • Getting as many 35+ computer dorks as you can under a box before you pull the string.
  • Making two children fight each other on the British equivalent of Crash Bandicoot.
  • A policeman on a unicycle.
  • The imagined experience of programming the ZX Spectrum.
  • The other Cambridge.
  • Mac PCs.
  • The Oliver Twins.
  • Turning on all the shaders to make your programmer art look good.
  • Finding three extra Dizzy games in the attic.
  • Trying to tell your friends about a family tradition and while you're telling them you realize how messed up it is.
  • A pile of 500 cards that should really be a computer game instead.
  • A rule where every time you play a card you have to sigh a little bit.
  • A game where you torture your friends.
  • A food with the letter E in it.
  • Trying to have fun despite your friend who is making you play the game.
  • Have you guys heard about conclusions?
  • A bunch of stuff happening and then there's a riddle.
  • The Go Left Problem.
  • When games have secrets.
  • Pushing at the edges of a game and the game pops up a dialog saying "I noticed you pushing at my edges."
  • A password named "Susan."
  • A DVD where every interface to start the movie starts it at chapter 2 and chapter 1 is a secret.
  • Reading just the last word of a book.
  • Watching the first episode and the last episode of a sitcom and trying to guess which actors missing from the last episode died and which went to prison.
  • How to find your Mastodon name.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

  • British food is good, actually
  • Really enjoying programming in MonoGame (and stop motion animation)
  • Lightswitch abstraction limit
  • Un petit d'un petit
  • The Old Timey Computer Show
  • Trying to get your friends to play a game that sucks to learn
  • Winston has discovered that the ending of a story is usually the most exciting part, so he doesn't want to watch whole movies any more, just the last twenty minutes of each

Microtopics:

  • Moonstone Island.
  • A tiny fox in a big world.
  • Cherry blues.
  • Something within your culture that is awful and bad.
  • Whatever can grow in the wet and dark. (Potatoes.)
  • Cool Whip based salads.
  • Yorkshire pudding. (The fluffy one.)
  • The non-spicy gravies.
  • J. Kenji Lopez-Alt's roast potato recipe.
  • Lamb going with mint and pork going with applesauce.
  • How to eat Vegemite or Marmite.
  • A man at the end of the table whose entire job is to carve meat for you.
  • A place to take your picky grandma to eat.
  • Bodega cats and bodega kids.
  • Doing stop motion animation as a goof.
  • The fun part of Dunning Krueger.
  • Doing a magic trick without knowing how the trick works and amazing yourself.
  • Leaning into the good times.
  • Accidentally getting good at an employable skill.
  • Flailing at the wall until the light switches are in the right position.
  • Off: just a different kind of on.
  • Doing your first pull request.
  • The fountain pen of the version control ecology.
  • Getting a bunch of little plant men to turn the lights on and off for me.
  • Poetry written in nonsensical French that is homophonic with English nursery rhymes.
  • An entire book for a very specific kind of nerd to have a sensible chuckle.
  • Allowing yourself one E, as a mistake.
  • A joke written back when people knew what am omnibus was.
  • Vintages footage from 1980s computer shows.
  • Dousing CD-Rs.
  • The Free Cake and Donuts Half-Hour.
  • Getting as many 35+ computer dorks as you can under a box before you pull the string.
  • Making two children fight each other on the British equivalent of Crash Bandicoot.
  • A policeman on a unicycle.
  • The imagined experience of programming the ZX Spectrum.
  • The other Cambridge.
  • Mac PCs.
  • The Oliver Twins.
  • Turning on all the shaders to make your programmer art look good.
  • Finding three extra Dizzy games in the attic.
  • Trying to tell your friends about a family tradition and while you're telling them you realize how messed up it is.
  • A pile of 500 cards that should really be a computer game instead.
  • A rule where every time you play a card you have to sigh a little bit.
  • A game where you torture your friends.
  • A food with the letter E in it.
  • Trying to have fun despite your friend who is making you play the game.
  • Have you guys heard about conclusions?
  • A bunch of stuff happening and then there's a riddle.
  • The Go Left Problem.
  • When games have secrets.
  • Pushing at the edges of a game and the game pops up a dialog saying "I noticed you pushing at my edges."
  • A password named "Susan."
  • A DVD where every interface to start the movie starts it at chapter 2 and chapter 1 is a secret.
  • Reading just the last word of a book.
  • Watching the first episode and the last episode of a sitcom and trying to guess which actors missing from the last episode died and which went to prison.
  • How to find your Mastodon name.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+7WrI6eH9 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 209. Do Caterpillars Anticipate? https://topiclords.com/do-caterpillars-anticipate 9d1b3985-c0e2-4b51-ab4b-4d82a9f29815 Mon, 23 Oct 2023 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Will, Chris. We discuss canoes, blowing soap bubbles with your hands and other party tricks, nissan.com, Nothing Is Too Small Not To Be Wondered About, by Mary Oliver, zombies pretending to not be zombies, and magic. 1:20:45 true Lords:

  • Will
  • Chris

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Soda Drinker Pro for the Nintendo Entertainment System.
  • Finding someone to port your game to NES via LinkedIn.
  • The Vivian Clark Experience.
  • Making certain contortions slightly easier.
  • Rock climbing. (Not a topic.)
  • The Phantom Lapboard.
  • The Only Viable Product. (OVP.)
  • What if you could mouse and keyboard on the couch?
  • Growing up in a canoe family.
  • Paddling vs. rowing.
  • Carbon fiber paddles for canoe racing.
  • Waterwalker by Bill Mason.
  • Your favorite memories of a kayak.
  • Waking up in your kayak to see a snapping turtle staring at you.
  • Floating up and wiggling all over the place.
  • Kayaking to lunch from your office.
  • Living in a ski cabin and your office is at the bottom of the mountain.
  • Living at a Lagrange point and your office is at the bottom of the zipline.
  • Boston Unity Knights.
  • Doing a game jam every month for four years.
  • Knowing enough people in your field that you no longer need to network.
  • Five really worthy zero-hour games.
  • Making a therapeutic horror game.
  • Going to a terrifying party in an abandoned train tunnel and finding a burned-out police car.
  • Questionable poisonous air filled with unknown tunnel organisms.
  • Doing mouth stuff in VR.
  • Making the soda line up with your mouth.
  • The Ferris Bueller water drop noise.
  • The thing where you play a blade of grass like a reed instrument.
  • Cheek-flapping noises.
  • Magic tricks vs. Party Tricks.
  • Inhaler magic.
  • Twenty levels of spinning pens.
  • A different horrible knife game.
  • A game about chopping off fingers named "Chop the Finger."
  • Shooting arrows in the air while your friend run away.
  • The keyboard shortcut for finding someone to port your game to NES.
  • A web site where you endorse people as thought leaders.
  • Entering the LinkedIn cheat code on Xbox 360.
  • Porting your video game to a robotic arm.
  • Making it move when you think about it.
  • Uzi Nissan v. Nissan Motors.
  • It can happen to you or someone you know!
  • Picturing conceptual rabbit holes in your head.
  • Sylvester Stallone's Mom's web site.
  • Sylvester Stallone's mom doing palm readings of your ass.
  • All our favorite apps, such as buffalo wings and boneless spare ribs.
  • Thinking about a cricket's interiority.
  • Putting some nature in your poem.
  • Using cricket noises to tell what temperature it is.
  • Having the same number of wings you've always had.
  • Do any bugs make a plan.
  • Leaving "I gave up" pheromones
  • Leaving a map of a physical space in the space.
  • Sizable ants.
  • Fewer scorpions than you'd expect.
  • Putting a bug into your awareness.
  • Pseudoscorpions hanging out on old stuff.
  • Little guys in random places very occasionally.
  • Zombies going to Whole Foods.
  • Going quiescent until a dude walks by with a tasty-looking scalp.
  • Painting a brain on your helmet to fool the zombies.
  • A short-hair wig taped to your grandfather's basketball.
  • Dropping your scalp like a lizard tail and the zombie shakes your scalp back and forth in its teeth.
  • An analyst commissioned by a think tank to write a book explicating how to deal with the zombie apocalypse.
  • Sound Reading Trainer.
  • Having a bunch of magic props that you never show anyone how to use.
  • The casino OJ got arrested at.
  • Tommy Wonder.
  • Reviewing a product on YouTube without ever showing it or saying what it does.
  • How stage hypnosis works.
]]> Lords:

  • Will
  • Chris

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Soda Drinker Pro for the Nintendo Entertainment System.
  • Finding someone to port your game to NES via LinkedIn.
  • The Vivian Clark Experience.
  • Making certain contortions slightly easier.
  • Rock climbing. (Not a topic.)
  • The Phantom Lapboard.
  • The Only Viable Product. (OVP.)
  • What if you could mouse and keyboard on the couch?
  • Growing up in a canoe family.
  • Paddling vs. rowing.
  • Carbon fiber paddles for canoe racing.
  • Waterwalker by Bill Mason.
  • Your favorite memories of a kayak.
  • Waking up in your kayak to see a snapping turtle staring at you.
  • Floating up and wiggling all over the place.
  • Kayaking to lunch from your office.
  • Living in a ski cabin and your office is at the bottom of the mountain.
  • Living at a Lagrange point and your office is at the bottom of the zipline.
  • Boston Unity Knights.
  • Doing a game jam every month for four years.
  • Knowing enough people in your field that you no longer need to network.
  • Five really worthy zero-hour games.
  • Making a therapeutic horror game.
  • Going to a terrifying party in an abandoned train tunnel and finding a burned-out police car.
  • Questionable poisonous air filled with unknown tunnel organisms.
  • Doing mouth stuff in VR.
  • Making the soda line up with your mouth.
  • The Ferris Bueller water drop noise.
  • The thing where you play a blade of grass like a reed instrument.
  • Cheek-flapping noises.
  • Magic tricks vs. Party Tricks.
  • Inhaler magic.
  • Twenty levels of spinning pens.
  • A different horrible knife game.
  • A game about chopping off fingers named "Chop the Finger."
  • Shooting arrows in the air while your friend run away.
  • The keyboard shortcut for finding someone to port your game to NES.
  • A web site where you endorse people as thought leaders.
  • Entering the LinkedIn cheat code on Xbox 360.
  • Porting your video game to a robotic arm.
  • Making it move when you think about it.
  • Uzi Nissan v. Nissan Motors.
  • It can happen to you or someone you know!
  • Picturing conceptual rabbit holes in your head.
  • Sylvester Stallone's Mom's web site.
  • Sylvester Stallone's mom doing palm readings of your ass.
  • All our favorite apps, such as buffalo wings and boneless spare ribs.
  • Thinking about a cricket's interiority.
  • Putting some nature in your poem.
  • Using cricket noises to tell what temperature it is.
  • Having the same number of wings you've always had.
  • Do any bugs make a plan.
  • Leaving "I gave up" pheromones
  • Leaving a map of a physical space in the space.
  • Sizable ants.
  • Fewer scorpions than you'd expect.
  • Putting a bug into your awareness.
  • Pseudoscorpions hanging out on old stuff.
  • Little guys in random places very occasionally.
  • Zombies going to Whole Foods.
  • Going quiescent until a dude walks by with a tasty-looking scalp.
  • Painting a brain on your helmet to fool the zombies.
  • A short-hair wig taped to your grandfather's basketball.
  • Dropping your scalp like a lizard tail and the zombie shakes your scalp back and forth in its teeth.
  • An analyst commissioned by a think tank to write a book explicating how to deal with the zombie apocalypse.
  • Sound Reading Trainer.
  • Having a bunch of magic props that you never show anyone how to use.
  • The casino OJ got arrested at.
  • Tommy Wonder.
  • Reviewing a product on YouTube without ever showing it or saying what it does.
  • How stage hypnosis works.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Will
  • Chris

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Soda Drinker Pro for the Nintendo Entertainment System.
  • Finding someone to port your game to NES via LinkedIn.
  • The Vivian Clark Experience.
  • Making certain contortions slightly easier.
  • Rock climbing. (Not a topic.)
  • The Phantom Lapboard.
  • The Only Viable Product. (OVP.)
  • What if you could mouse and keyboard on the couch?
  • Growing up in a canoe family.
  • Paddling vs. rowing.
  • Carbon fiber paddles for canoe racing.
  • Waterwalker by Bill Mason.
  • Your favorite memories of a kayak.
  • Waking up in your kayak to see a snapping turtle staring at you.
  • Floating up and wiggling all over the place.
  • Kayaking to lunch from your office.
  • Living in a ski cabin and your office is at the bottom of the mountain.
  • Living at a Lagrange point and your office is at the bottom of the zipline.
  • Boston Unity Knights.
  • Doing a game jam every month for four years.
  • Knowing enough people in your field that you no longer need to network.
  • Five really worthy zero-hour games.
  • Making a therapeutic horror game.
  • Going to a terrifying party in an abandoned train tunnel and finding a burned-out police car.
  • Questionable poisonous air filled with unknown tunnel organisms.
  • Doing mouth stuff in VR.
  • Making the soda line up with your mouth.
  • The Ferris Bueller water drop noise.
  • The thing where you play a blade of grass like a reed instrument.
  • Cheek-flapping noises.
  • Magic tricks vs. Party Tricks.
  • Inhaler magic.
  • Twenty levels of spinning pens.
  • A different horrible knife game.
  • A game about chopping off fingers named "Chop the Finger."
  • Shooting arrows in the air while your friend run away.
  • The keyboard shortcut for finding someone to port your game to NES.
  • A web site where you endorse people as thought leaders.
  • Entering the LinkedIn cheat code on Xbox 360.
  • Porting your video game to a robotic arm.
  • Making it move when you think about it.
  • Uzi Nissan v. Nissan Motors.
  • It can happen to you or someone you know!
  • Picturing conceptual rabbit holes in your head.
  • Sylvester Stallone's Mom's web site.
  • Sylvester Stallone's mom doing palm readings of your ass.
  • All our favorite apps, such as buffalo wings and boneless spare ribs.
  • Thinking about a cricket's interiority.
  • Putting some nature in your poem.
  • Using cricket noises to tell what temperature it is.
  • Having the same number of wings you've always had.
  • Do any bugs make a plan.
  • Leaving "I gave up" pheromones
  • Leaving a map of a physical space in the space.
  • Sizable ants.
  • Fewer scorpions than you'd expect.
  • Putting a bug into your awareness.
  • Pseudoscorpions hanging out on old stuff.
  • Little guys in random places very occasionally.
  • Zombies going to Whole Foods.
  • Going quiescent until a dude walks by with a tasty-looking scalp.
  • Painting a brain on your helmet to fool the zombies.
  • A short-hair wig taped to your grandfather's basketball.
  • Dropping your scalp like a lizard tail and the zombie shakes your scalp back and forth in its teeth.
  • An analyst commissioned by a think tank to write a book explicating how to deal with the zombie apocalypse.
  • Sound Reading Trainer.
  • Having a bunch of magic props that you never show anyone how to use.
  • The casino OJ got arrested at.
  • Tommy Wonder.
  • Reviewing a product on YouTube without ever showing it or saying what it does.
  • How stage hypnosis works.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+qPvrBm7u ]]> Jim Stormdancer 208. E.T. Shot First https://topiclords.com/et-shot-first b31677bf-7e49-4f89-aa25-ebbc3bdf158e Mon, 16 Oct 2023 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Hallie and Tyriq. We discuss not really caring for potatoes, wearing shorts, why ants are on my desk, the go-getters of pre-dawn gym, non-feathered dinosaurs in the public imagination, and McPop. 1:01:28 true Lords:

  • Hallie
  • Tyriq

Topics:

  • People really like potatoes and I don't get it
  • I wear shorts now.
  • Why are these ants on my desk?
  • The go-getters of predawn gym
  • Non feathered dinosaurs in the public imagination
    • Esper says: Magic: the Gathering does have feathered dinosaurs as part of its mesoamerican-inspired setting, which look cool as hell. Not all of them are completely covered or anything, but Gishath is a good example of how to make a dinosaur look really intimidating and powerful while still having feathers. https://scryfall.com/card/xln/222/gishath-suns-avatar
  • McPop

Microtopics:

  • Not counting the Zelda game you made.
  • Mashing up the hummus beans.
  • Tahini texture.
  • Garbanzo merengue.
  • Cutting-edge vegan technology.
  • Making video games until you learn better.
  • The freezer popsicle that's just a tube of flavored water.
  • Potato struggle sessions.
  • Curly fries versus seasoned curly fries.
  • A waste of a hearty food that should last longer.
  • Century potatoes.
  • Burying a potato in the ground and setting a peat bog on fire.
  • Taro chips.
  • The bag in the grocery store that says "veggie sticks" and there's a picture of fresh vegetables on the bag but inside it's just potato slurry fried into stick form.
  • Anti-shorts positions.
  • A tattoo in a conspicuous place.
  • Showing up to a game jam in a Voldo harness.
  • A tattoo that makes it look like you've been scratching a rash.
  • Getting a cool tattoo and starting going to the gym because you want to be worthy of the tattoo.
  • A slovenly dude in a fedora getting a sick tattoo of a slovenly dude in a fedora.
  • Yakuza style tattoos except it's all video game shit.
  • Leaving an olive under your desk.
  • What the ants are into lately.
  • House Ants.
  • Storehouses of finger dust.
  • Letting the ants have the olive.
  • Mice with an exoskeleton.
  • Sitting on a toilet made of ants and instantly becoming one with the ants.
  • A bottle of Ginger Ants.
  • Extremely tangy abyss.
  • What is in my mouth? What is in my bed?
  • Rolling a ball of goo over your keyboard.
  • Finding some good goo and keeping it to yourself.
  • The validity of shipping yourself with things.
  • Merging your cats.
  • Motivated brothers.
  • Waking up at 5:30 to go to the gym.
  • Go-gettitude.
  • Chronotypes.
  • Expressing all the aspirational aspects of yourself.
  • The only person flexing in the mirrors.
  • Why is this young teen here so early?
  • Pretty ripped. (For a child.)
  • Giving up on waking up before dawn and becoming the kind of go-getter who gets later things.
  • Reconstructing dinosaurs based on what people think they should look like.
  • Semi-mythical creatures. (That actually existed.)
  • Microraptors that are slightly melty.
  • 65, with Adam Driver.
  • An interesting concept, executed poorly.
  • The Pepsisaur.
  • Adam Driver running away from horny dudes crawling around in mocap suits and the test audiences hate it so they CGI in some horny humanoid dinosaurs.
  • Having kids and patching ET so the government agents don't have guns and then after your kids grow up, patching ET so they have extra guns.
  • Twelve gauge flashlights.
  • Lemmings but with babies.
  • One of each type of eye.
  • Eyes that are so human looking that it kind of fucks you up.
  • A reverse The Fly situation.
  • McPopHouse.
  • The Junta of Tralfaz.
  • Picking up a new key and trying it on every locked door you've ever seen.
  • Pressing insert to empty your sexual tension meter.
  • Back before Microsoft Word owned the .doc extension.
  • A hoary pld PD Turbo 3.0 include file circa 1985.
  • Sentences from shareware documentation that have been in your head for 30 years.
  • BBS Doors.
  • Legend of the Red Dragon.
  • Reprising your role as Olmec.
]]> Lords:

  • Hallie
  • Tyriq

Topics:

  • People really like potatoes and I don't get it
  • I wear shorts now.
  • Why are these ants on my desk?
  • The go-getters of predawn gym
  • Non feathered dinosaurs in the public imagination
    • Esper says: Magic: the Gathering does have feathered dinosaurs as part of its mesoamerican-inspired setting, which look cool as hell. Not all of them are completely covered or anything, but Gishath is a good example of how to make a dinosaur look really intimidating and powerful while still having feathers. https://scryfall.com/card/xln/222/gishath-suns-avatar
  • McPop

Microtopics:

  • Not counting the Zelda game you made.
  • Mashing up the hummus beans.
  • Tahini texture.
  • Garbanzo merengue.
  • Cutting-edge vegan technology.
  • Making video games until you learn better.
  • The freezer popsicle that's just a tube of flavored water.
  • Potato struggle sessions.
  • Curly fries versus seasoned curly fries.
  • A waste of a hearty food that should last longer.
  • Century potatoes.
  • Burying a potato in the ground and setting a peat bog on fire.
  • Taro chips.
  • The bag in the grocery store that says "veggie sticks" and there's a picture of fresh vegetables on the bag but inside it's just potato slurry fried into stick form.
  • Anti-shorts positions.
  • A tattoo in a conspicuous place.
  • Showing up to a game jam in a Voldo harness.
  • A tattoo that makes it look like you've been scratching a rash.
  • Getting a cool tattoo and starting going to the gym because you want to be worthy of the tattoo.
  • A slovenly dude in a fedora getting a sick tattoo of a slovenly dude in a fedora.
  • Yakuza style tattoos except it's all video game shit.
  • Leaving an olive under your desk.
  • What the ants are into lately.
  • House Ants.
  • Storehouses of finger dust.
  • Letting the ants have the olive.
  • Mice with an exoskeleton.
  • Sitting on a toilet made of ants and instantly becoming one with the ants.
  • A bottle of Ginger Ants.
  • Extremely tangy abyss.
  • What is in my mouth? What is in my bed?
  • Rolling a ball of goo over your keyboard.
  • Finding some good goo and keeping it to yourself.
  • The validity of shipping yourself with things.
  • Merging your cats.
  • Motivated brothers.
  • Waking up at 5:30 to go to the gym.
  • Go-gettitude.
  • Chronotypes.
  • Expressing all the aspirational aspects of yourself.
  • The only person flexing in the mirrors.
  • Why is this young teen here so early?
  • Pretty ripped. (For a child.)
  • Giving up on waking up before dawn and becoming the kind of go-getter who gets later things.
  • Reconstructing dinosaurs based on what people think they should look like.
  • Semi-mythical creatures. (That actually existed.)
  • Microraptors that are slightly melty.
  • 65, with Adam Driver.
  • An interesting concept, executed poorly.
  • The Pepsisaur.
  • Adam Driver running away from horny dudes crawling around in mocap suits and the test audiences hate it so they CGI in some horny humanoid dinosaurs.
  • Having kids and patching ET so the government agents don't have guns and then after your kids grow up, patching ET so they have extra guns.
  • Twelve gauge flashlights.
  • Lemmings but with babies.
  • One of each type of eye.
  • Eyes that are so human looking that it kind of fucks you up.
  • A reverse The Fly situation.
  • McPopHouse.
  • The Junta of Tralfaz.
  • Picking up a new key and trying it on every locked door you've ever seen.
  • Pressing insert to empty your sexual tension meter.
  • Back before Microsoft Word owned the .doc extension.
  • A hoary pld PD Turbo 3.0 include file circa 1985.
  • Sentences from shareware documentation that have been in your head for 30 years.
  • BBS Doors.
  • Legend of the Red Dragon.
  • Reprising your role as Olmec.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Hallie
  • Tyriq

Topics:

  • People really like potatoes and I don't get it
  • I wear shorts now.
  • Why are these ants on my desk?
  • The go-getters of predawn gym
  • Non feathered dinosaurs in the public imagination
    • Esper says: Magic: the Gathering does have feathered dinosaurs as part of its mesoamerican-inspired setting, which look cool as hell. Not all of them are completely covered or anything, but Gishath is a good example of how to make a dinosaur look really intimidating and powerful while still having feathers. https://scryfall.com/card/xln/222/gishath-suns-avatar
  • McPop

Microtopics:

  • Not counting the Zelda game you made.
  • Mashing up the hummus beans.
  • Tahini texture.
  • Garbanzo merengue.
  • Cutting-edge vegan technology.
  • Making video games until you learn better.
  • The freezer popsicle that's just a tube of flavored water.
  • Potato struggle sessions.
  • Curly fries versus seasoned curly fries.
  • A waste of a hearty food that should last longer.
  • Century potatoes.
  • Burying a potato in the ground and setting a peat bog on fire.
  • Taro chips.
  • The bag in the grocery store that says "veggie sticks" and there's a picture of fresh vegetables on the bag but inside it's just potato slurry fried into stick form.
  • Anti-shorts positions.
  • A tattoo in a conspicuous place.
  • Showing up to a game jam in a Voldo harness.
  • A tattoo that makes it look like you've been scratching a rash.
  • Getting a cool tattoo and starting going to the gym because you want to be worthy of the tattoo.
  • A slovenly dude in a fedora getting a sick tattoo of a slovenly dude in a fedora.
  • Yakuza style tattoos except it's all video game shit.
  • Leaving an olive under your desk.
  • What the ants are into lately.
  • House Ants.
  • Storehouses of finger dust.
  • Letting the ants have the olive.
  • Mice with an exoskeleton.
  • Sitting on a toilet made of ants and instantly becoming one with the ants.
  • A bottle of Ginger Ants.
  • Extremely tangy abyss.
  • What is in my mouth? What is in my bed?
  • Rolling a ball of goo over your keyboard.
  • Finding some good goo and keeping it to yourself.
  • The validity of shipping yourself with things.
  • Merging your cats.
  • Motivated brothers.
  • Waking up at 5:30 to go to the gym.
  • Go-gettitude.
  • Chronotypes.
  • Expressing all the aspirational aspects of yourself.
  • The only person flexing in the mirrors.
  • Why is this young teen here so early?
  • Pretty ripped. (For a child.)
  • Giving up on waking up before dawn and becoming the kind of go-getter who gets later things.
  • Reconstructing dinosaurs based on what people think they should look like.
  • Semi-mythical creatures. (That actually existed.)
  • Microraptors that are slightly melty.
  • 65, with Adam Driver.
  • An interesting concept, executed poorly.
  • The Pepsisaur.
  • Adam Driver running away from horny dudes crawling around in mocap suits and the test audiences hate it so they CGI in some horny humanoid dinosaurs.
  • Having kids and patching ET so the government agents don't have guns and then after your kids grow up, patching ET so they have extra guns.
  • Twelve gauge flashlights.
  • Lemmings but with babies.
  • One of each type of eye.
  • Eyes that are so human looking that it kind of fucks you up.
  • A reverse The Fly situation.
  • McPopHouse.
  • The Junta of Tralfaz.
  • Picking up a new key and trying it on every locked door you've ever seen.
  • Pressing insert to empty your sexual tension meter.
  • Back before Microsoft Word owned the .doc extension.
  • A hoary pld PD Turbo 3.0 include file circa 1985.
  • Sentences from shareware documentation that have been in your head for 30 years.
  • BBS Doors.
  • Legend of the Red Dragon.
  • Reprising your role as Olmec.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+3to8OWYm ]]> Jim Stormdancer 207. Muppet Bird Generation Ship https://topiclords.com/muppet-bird-generation-ship 06ba70c9-4ca6-4a59-b0e6-7851cf7994f4 Mon, 09 Oct 2023 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Lesley and Nathan. We discuss whether wilderness survival is a sport, variation in NextDoor posts, pastry arbitrage, The Light That Shines When Things End, wild takahe returning to New Zealand, and Boston Robotics. 1:11:39 true Lords:

  • Lesley
  • Nathan

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Hyper Light Breaker.
  • Bumpy Grumpy.
  • Recording a podcast from inside a toilet.
  • Fishtank bubbling noises.
  • Assigning a point value to eating reindeer lichen.
  • Eating your belt because someone famous ate their belt once in the 19th century.
  • Starving contests.
  • Calling in an air drop for your favorite outdoor survivalists.
  • The reality show where a guy is living alone in an apartment scouring thousands of magazines for offers of free stuff.
  • The "it's a living" joke.
  • Pez Guy.
  • Trying to redeem Pepsi tokens for a fighter jet.
  • A boiler room full of people tilting soda bottles.
  • Weary cereal mascots.
  • Hippies living in a canyon until Topanga emerges.
  • Making a Nextdoor post about a guy peering in your window and the replies are like "it's cool it's just Window Peering Jim checking out your remodel."
  • Making a Nextdoor post about finding a baby goat and what do I do and a reply saying "you need to call the Goat Goddess" and another reply saying "I'm the Goat Goddess and I can help you."
  • Encouraging microcultures.
  • Surfacing positive comments to the top of Youtube videos.
  • Using technology to steer people away from being terrible.
  • Writing a story about a guy with a sword.
  • Writing a parody of bad fanfiction and building Minecraft worlds to support your world building.
  • Whether jokes are funnier now or if old jokes are just out of fashion.
  • Trying to relate to the kids by saying "I can has cheeseburger?"
  • How art used to happen before copyright law fucked everything up.
  • The dudes at the farmers market selling tomatoes that are obviously from the grocery store.
  • The farm with a sign that says "come pick pumpkins at our pumpkin patch" but the pumpkins are just sitting on the ground and by pick they just meant "select."
  • The Quasi-Authentic Experience.
  • A pumpkin velcroed to a vine.
  • A large hill. (Not a mountain.)
  • Making the light a liar, at least until your mid-thirties.
  • Ruining an otherwise amazing moment.
  • A Minority Report precog murder kind of situation.
  • Whether the light has a bell too.
  • A poem that's just a shower thought if you think about it.
  • Taking the eggs to an incubation center.
  • Muppet Bird flavor.
  • Cutting open a cookie monster to reveal the cookie layers inside.
  • Seeing the Cookie Monster's leg in the window of the butcher shop.
  • The roast chicken saying "It's a living!" as you slice it up.
  • Robots that sound like bees.
  • Slipping on the ice and hearing the bees.
  • Whether fun robots are even scarier than serious robots.
  • Moxie the child companion robot.
  • A dog named Spot and his SDK.
  • Too loud, too scary, too many bees.
  • People who can pollinate.
  • If it's empty, fill it with bees.
  • Memes that the kids don't think are old because they have fallen out of the cultural memory entirely.
  • Still being on Twitter because you have games to sell.
]]> Lords:

  • Lesley
  • Nathan

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Hyper Light Breaker.
  • Bumpy Grumpy.
  • Recording a podcast from inside a toilet.
  • Fishtank bubbling noises.
  • Assigning a point value to eating reindeer lichen.
  • Eating your belt because someone famous ate their belt once in the 19th century.
  • Starving contests.
  • Calling in an air drop for your favorite outdoor survivalists.
  • The reality show where a guy is living alone in an apartment scouring thousands of magazines for offers of free stuff.
  • The "it's a living" joke.
  • Pez Guy.
  • Trying to redeem Pepsi tokens for a fighter jet.
  • A boiler room full of people tilting soda bottles.
  • Weary cereal mascots.
  • Hippies living in a canyon until Topanga emerges.
  • Making a Nextdoor post about a guy peering in your window and the replies are like "it's cool it's just Window Peering Jim checking out your remodel."
  • Making a Nextdoor post about finding a baby goat and what do I do and a reply saying "you need to call the Goat Goddess" and another reply saying "I'm the Goat Goddess and I can help you."
  • Encouraging microcultures.
  • Surfacing positive comments to the top of Youtube videos.
  • Using technology to steer people away from being terrible.
  • Writing a story about a guy with a sword.
  • Writing a parody of bad fanfiction and building Minecraft worlds to support your world building.
  • Whether jokes are funnier now or if old jokes are just out of fashion.
  • Trying to relate to the kids by saying "I can has cheeseburger?"
  • How art used to happen before copyright law fucked everything up.
  • The dudes at the farmers market selling tomatoes that are obviously from the grocery store.
  • The farm with a sign that says "come pick pumpkins at our pumpkin patch" but the pumpkins are just sitting on the ground and by pick they just meant "select."
  • The Quasi-Authentic Experience.
  • A pumpkin velcroed to a vine.
  • A large hill. (Not a mountain.)
  • Making the light a liar, at least until your mid-thirties.
  • Ruining an otherwise amazing moment.
  • A Minority Report precog murder kind of situation.
  • Whether the light has a bell too.
  • A poem that's just a shower thought if you think about it.
  • Taking the eggs to an incubation center.
  • Muppet Bird flavor.
  • Cutting open a cookie monster to reveal the cookie layers inside.
  • Seeing the Cookie Monster's leg in the window of the butcher shop.
  • The roast chicken saying "It's a living!" as you slice it up.
  • Robots that sound like bees.
  • Slipping on the ice and hearing the bees.
  • Whether fun robots are even scarier than serious robots.
  • Moxie the child companion robot.
  • A dog named Spot and his SDK.
  • Too loud, too scary, too many bees.
  • People who can pollinate.
  • If it's empty, fill it with bees.
  • Memes that the kids don't think are old because they have fallen out of the cultural memory entirely.
  • Still being on Twitter because you have games to sell.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Lesley
  • Nathan

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Hyper Light Breaker.
  • Bumpy Grumpy.
  • Recording a podcast from inside a toilet.
  • Fishtank bubbling noises.
  • Assigning a point value to eating reindeer lichen.
  • Eating your belt because someone famous ate their belt once in the 19th century.
  • Starving contests.
  • Calling in an air drop for your favorite outdoor survivalists.
  • The reality show where a guy is living alone in an apartment scouring thousands of magazines for offers of free stuff.
  • The "it's a living" joke.
  • Pez Guy.
  • Trying to redeem Pepsi tokens for a fighter jet.
  • A boiler room full of people tilting soda bottles.
  • Weary cereal mascots.
  • Hippies living in a canyon until Topanga emerges.
  • Making a Nextdoor post about a guy peering in your window and the replies are like "it's cool it's just Window Peering Jim checking out your remodel."
  • Making a Nextdoor post about finding a baby goat and what do I do and a reply saying "you need to call the Goat Goddess" and another reply saying "I'm the Goat Goddess and I can help you."
  • Encouraging microcultures.
  • Surfacing positive comments to the top of Youtube videos.
  • Using technology to steer people away from being terrible.
  • Writing a story about a guy with a sword.
  • Writing a parody of bad fanfiction and building Minecraft worlds to support your world building.
  • Whether jokes are funnier now or if old jokes are just out of fashion.
  • Trying to relate to the kids by saying "I can has cheeseburger?"
  • How art used to happen before copyright law fucked everything up.
  • The dudes at the farmers market selling tomatoes that are obviously from the grocery store.
  • The farm with a sign that says "come pick pumpkins at our pumpkin patch" but the pumpkins are just sitting on the ground and by pick they just meant "select."
  • The Quasi-Authentic Experience.
  • A pumpkin velcroed to a vine.
  • A large hill. (Not a mountain.)
  • Making the light a liar, at least until your mid-thirties.
  • Ruining an otherwise amazing moment.
  • A Minority Report precog murder kind of situation.
  • Whether the light has a bell too.
  • A poem that's just a shower thought if you think about it.
  • Taking the eggs to an incubation center.
  • Muppet Bird flavor.
  • Cutting open a cookie monster to reveal the cookie layers inside.
  • Seeing the Cookie Monster's leg in the window of the butcher shop.
  • The roast chicken saying "It's a living!" as you slice it up.
  • Robots that sound like bees.
  • Slipping on the ice and hearing the bees.
  • Whether fun robots are even scarier than serious robots.
  • Moxie the child companion robot.
  • A dog named Spot and his SDK.
  • Too loud, too scary, too many bees.
  • People who can pollinate.
  • If it's empty, fill it with bees.
  • Memes that the kids don't think are old because they have fallen out of the cultural memory entirely.
  • Still being on Twitter because you have games to sell.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+UgiFNhj9 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 206. Waiting Around for Laundry To Be Invented https://topiclords.com/waiting-around-for-laundry-to-be-invented f7c88162-9481-41d2-b6e9-1ddd2d777d39 Mon, 02 Oct 2023 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: JP and Styger. We discuss Super Mario Bros. Wonder, souls departing, using a spacer with inhalers, revisiting the Cosmic Crisp, how to learn to play piano, and teaching our children to pirate. 1:21:40 true Lords:

  • JP
  • Styger

Topics:

  • Wouldn't mind hearing Jim's thoughts on the recent Super Mario Bros Wonder video
  • Souls departing / cartoon ghosts
  • You're supposed to use a "spacer" with inhalers now
  • Probably not a full topic but I finally ate that apple I was hyped for in my fist Topic Lords appearance
  • Questions for a more experienced musician about learning to play piano + songwriting
  • How do we teach our children to pirate?

Microtopics:

  • The flu shot.
  • Your TV patching itself.
  • Going wading in a bog until laundry is invented.
  • Dying of smoke inhalation until someone invents the chimney.
  • A topic for Jim.
  • Soliciting Mario opinions.
  • Murdering an 80s kid with Mario footage.
  • Squat anime Link.
  • Mario with a grappling hook.
  • Mario with asynchronous co-op partners.
  • The new Mario game bringing the real freak shit.
  • Developer quality of life.
  • The unfortunate mythology of the industry.
  • Getting to the moon more sustainably.
  • Mike Mika's Donkey Kong gender swap mod.
  • Big globs of ragu flying out of rotoscoped pixel men.
  • The evolutionary dynamic range of AAA games.
  • The boringness of violence.
  • Realistic present day modern warfare.
  • Making garbage that makes the world worse forever.
  • Wanting to see your medium grow.
  • A puzzle platformer using a first person shooter interface.
  • Reaching a little bit for a different thing.
  • Dealing a little bit of damage to a wall.
  • A door turning a corpse into a squished blood paste sprite.
  • Pikmin 3 as the most honest war game.
  • No Dead Pikmin Speed Run.
  • Getting more stuff back to your onion.
  • Revisiting game mechanics from throughout the series.
  • Outgrowing your childhood diseases.
  • A big plastic cylinder the size of a breath.
  • Audio iconography saying "look at this dickhead"
  • A bong for your inhaler.
  • All the surfaces between the air and your bronchial tubes.
  • A major change in inhaler technology.
  • Putting a bunch of programmer time into making conference calls sound good.
  • Respironix Optichamber Diamond.
  • Algorithms to cancel out the Mentos Jingle.
  • Finally trying the new apple varietal on your birthday.
  • Haphazard produce sections.
  • Heapsorting apples.
  • This apple is going to make you its bitch.
  • Bad mealy apples in the 80s.
  • Banana lore.
  • As Seen In Snopes: Verified Not Bullshit Fruit.
  • Getting the gist of a song and being able to do your own thing with it.
  • Making noises that sound like nice music.
  • Learning to play guitar while waiting for your maps to compile.
  • Edly's Music Theory for Practical People.
  • Learning to which suspicious-looking websites to trust.
  • The Golden Age of Scams.
  • oldversion.com
  • Spiffy new Windows NT computers.
  • Streaming services that you refuse to give money to.
  • Doers of Game Piracy.
  • Public opinion turning on piracy and copyright.
  • Information literacy.
  • The surviving websites where you don't mind being found.
]]> Lords:

  • JP
  • Styger

Topics:

  • Wouldn't mind hearing Jim's thoughts on the recent Super Mario Bros Wonder video
  • Souls departing / cartoon ghosts
  • You're supposed to use a "spacer" with inhalers now
  • Probably not a full topic but I finally ate that apple I was hyped for in my fist Topic Lords appearance
  • Questions for a more experienced musician about learning to play piano + songwriting
  • How do we teach our children to pirate?

Microtopics:

  • The flu shot.
  • Your TV patching itself.
  • Going wading in a bog until laundry is invented.
  • Dying of smoke inhalation until someone invents the chimney.
  • A topic for Jim.
  • Soliciting Mario opinions.
  • Murdering an 80s kid with Mario footage.
  • Squat anime Link.
  • Mario with a grappling hook.
  • Mario with asynchronous co-op partners.
  • The new Mario game bringing the real freak shit.
  • Developer quality of life.
  • The unfortunate mythology of the industry.
  • Getting to the moon more sustainably.
  • Mike Mika's Donkey Kong gender swap mod.
  • Big globs of ragu flying out of rotoscoped pixel men.
  • The evolutionary dynamic range of AAA games.
  • The boringness of violence.
  • Realistic present day modern warfare.
  • Making garbage that makes the world worse forever.
  • Wanting to see your medium grow.
  • A puzzle platformer using a first person shooter interface.
  • Reaching a little bit for a different thing.
  • Dealing a little bit of damage to a wall.
  • A door turning a corpse into a squished blood paste sprite.
  • Pikmin 3 as the most honest war game.
  • No Dead Pikmin Speed Run.
  • Getting more stuff back to your onion.
  • Revisiting game mechanics from throughout the series.
  • Outgrowing your childhood diseases.
  • A big plastic cylinder the size of a breath.
  • Audio iconography saying "look at this dickhead"
  • A bong for your inhaler.
  • All the surfaces between the air and your bronchial tubes.
  • A major change in inhaler technology.
  • Putting a bunch of programmer time into making conference calls sound good.
  • Respironix Optichamber Diamond.
  • Algorithms to cancel out the Mentos Jingle.
  • Finally trying the new apple varietal on your birthday.
  • Haphazard produce sections.
  • Heapsorting apples.
  • This apple is going to make you its bitch.
  • Bad mealy apples in the 80s.
  • Banana lore.
  • As Seen In Snopes: Verified Not Bullshit Fruit.
  • Getting the gist of a song and being able to do your own thing with it.
  • Making noises that sound like nice music.
  • Learning to play guitar while waiting for your maps to compile.
  • Edly's Music Theory for Practical People.
  • Learning to which suspicious-looking websites to trust.
  • The Golden Age of Scams.
  • oldversion.com
  • Spiffy new Windows NT computers.
  • Streaming services that you refuse to give money to.
  • Doers of Game Piracy.
  • Public opinion turning on piracy and copyright.
  • Information literacy.
  • The surviving websites where you don't mind being found.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • JP
  • Styger

Topics:

  • Wouldn't mind hearing Jim's thoughts on the recent Super Mario Bros Wonder video
  • Souls departing / cartoon ghosts
  • You're supposed to use a "spacer" with inhalers now
  • Probably not a full topic but I finally ate that apple I was hyped for in my fist Topic Lords appearance
  • Questions for a more experienced musician about learning to play piano + songwriting
  • How do we teach our children to pirate?

Microtopics:

  • The flu shot.
  • Your TV patching itself.
  • Going wading in a bog until laundry is invented.
  • Dying of smoke inhalation until someone invents the chimney.
  • A topic for Jim.
  • Soliciting Mario opinions.
  • Murdering an 80s kid with Mario footage.
  • Squat anime Link.
  • Mario with a grappling hook.
  • Mario with asynchronous co-op partners.
  • The new Mario game bringing the real freak shit.
  • Developer quality of life.
  • The unfortunate mythology of the industry.
  • Getting to the moon more sustainably.
  • Mike Mika's Donkey Kong gender swap mod.
  • Big globs of ragu flying out of rotoscoped pixel men.
  • The evolutionary dynamic range of AAA games.
  • The boringness of violence.
  • Realistic present day modern warfare.
  • Making garbage that makes the world worse forever.
  • Wanting to see your medium grow.
  • A puzzle platformer using a first person shooter interface.
  • Reaching a little bit for a different thing.
  • Dealing a little bit of damage to a wall.
  • A door turning a corpse into a squished blood paste sprite.
  • Pikmin 3 as the most honest war game.
  • No Dead Pikmin Speed Run.
  • Getting more stuff back to your onion.
  • Revisiting game mechanics from throughout the series.
  • Outgrowing your childhood diseases.
  • A big plastic cylinder the size of a breath.
  • Audio iconography saying "look at this dickhead"
  • A bong for your inhaler.
  • All the surfaces between the air and your bronchial tubes.
  • A major change in inhaler technology.
  • Putting a bunch of programmer time into making conference calls sound good.
  • Respironix Optichamber Diamond.
  • Algorithms to cancel out the Mentos Jingle.
  • Finally trying the new apple varietal on your birthday.
  • Haphazard produce sections.
  • Heapsorting apples.
  • This apple is going to make you its bitch.
  • Bad mealy apples in the 80s.
  • Banana lore.
  • As Seen In Snopes: Verified Not Bullshit Fruit.
  • Getting the gist of a song and being able to do your own thing with it.
  • Making noises that sound like nice music.
  • Learning to play guitar while waiting for your maps to compile.
  • Edly's Music Theory for Practical People.
  • Learning to which suspicious-looking websites to trust.
  • The Golden Age of Scams.
  • oldversion.com
  • Spiffy new Windows NT computers.
  • Streaming services that you refuse to give money to.
  • Doers of Game Piracy.
  • Public opinion turning on piracy and copyright.
  • Information literacy.
  • The surviving websites where you don't mind being found.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+mol4XWZd ]]> Jim Stormdancer 205. It's Cool to Get a Letter https://topiclords.com/its-cool-to-get-a-letter dd0a4c66-cb95-47fc-b194-ad2b5135b11b Mon, 25 Sep 2023 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Alex and John. We discuss spending four days fasting in the woods, having twins, the Zelda 1 second quest, and "Now the World has Gone to Bed" by Marvin. 1:08:23 true Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Joyful communities.
  • Whether discord logs can be subpoenaed.
  • Encoding all your mail in ROT13 to keep them safe from the snoops at the NSA.
  • Finishing with your DSP design work so your employer sends you into the basement to make cardboard boxes.
  • Someone in the early 2000s with a high pitched voice.
  • Remembering your grandma's phone number from when you were six but not remembering any phone numbers since then.
  • Thinky Puzzle Games.
  • An Alan Hazelden thing.
  • Tom Brown's Tracker School.
  • Going into the woods and sitting in one spot for four days.
  • A good, productive, safe time.
  • Keeping control of your emotions.
  • How to know when to stop.
  • Doing a ritual at sunrise.
  • Having animal encounters.
  • Trees dripping water on you.
  • Doing the most boring thing for four days straight so you can never be bored again.
  • A really cool thing to do in your twenties.
  • Sonic showers screaming at you until you're clean.
  • Lacking the experience to understand what's coming for you.
  • Going through some shit and loving it.
  • What if it all works out?
  • The experience of knowing twins.
  • Taking advantage of the Groupon for college tuition.
  • Hanging your fears on milestones.
  • Taking your parental leave consecutively.
  • Daycare as a microcosm of communal living.
  • Showing people what you're working on.
  • Making a living putting your kids on social media until your kids get old enough to express that they don't like it.
  • Wearing a shirt saying "I do not consent to be photographed."
  • A conversation with a five year old about scrub jays.
  • Sharing media with an allowlist.
  • Setting permissions on who can see your photos.
  • Sharing photos with your family by handing out USB drives.
  • A visual novel that is extremely interested in your personal financial information.
  • A pen connected to a matrix of hundreds of other pens so you can sign your name hundreds of times at once.
  • The Zelda one-second quest.
  • Naming yourself Zelda as a shortcut for understanding this topic.
  • Naming your character Zelda without understanding the consequences.
  • Red bubbles that take your sword away.
  • An obvious door that you can walk through.
  • Iwata Asks.
  • Accidentally using only half the space available.
  • Zelda randomizers.
  • SMZ3.
  • How to make Super Mario World a metroidvania.
  • Marvin putting in work.
  • Capturing a particular level of snark.
  • Reading books in high school that you won't understand until you're 30.
  • The California Raisins as the sequel to the Grapes of Wrath.
  • The kind of person who works really hard in high school.
  • Xanthan gum.
  • Trochaic something or other.
  • I had a theory about music and then I made all these friends!
]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Joyful communities.
  • Whether discord logs can be subpoenaed.
  • Encoding all your mail in ROT13 to keep them safe from the snoops at the NSA.
  • Finishing with your DSP design work so your employer sends you into the basement to make cardboard boxes.
  • Someone in the early 2000s with a high pitched voice.
  • Remembering your grandma's phone number from when you were six but not remembering any phone numbers since then.
  • Thinky Puzzle Games.
  • An Alan Hazelden thing.
  • Tom Brown's Tracker School.
  • Going into the woods and sitting in one spot for four days.
  • A good, productive, safe time.
  • Keeping control of your emotions.
  • How to know when to stop.
  • Doing a ritual at sunrise.
  • Having animal encounters.
  • Trees dripping water on you.
  • Doing the most boring thing for four days straight so you can never be bored again.
  • A really cool thing to do in your twenties.
  • Sonic showers screaming at you until you're clean.
  • Lacking the experience to understand what's coming for you.
  • Going through some shit and loving it.
  • What if it all works out?
  • The experience of knowing twins.
  • Taking advantage of the Groupon for college tuition.
  • Hanging your fears on milestones.
  • Taking your parental leave consecutively.
  • Daycare as a microcosm of communal living.
  • Showing people what you're working on.
  • Making a living putting your kids on social media until your kids get old enough to express that they don't like it.
  • Wearing a shirt saying "I do not consent to be photographed."
  • A conversation with a five year old about scrub jays.
  • Sharing media with an allowlist.
  • Setting permissions on who can see your photos.
  • Sharing photos with your family by handing out USB drives.
  • A visual novel that is extremely interested in your personal financial information.
  • A pen connected to a matrix of hundreds of other pens so you can sign your name hundreds of times at once.
  • The Zelda one-second quest.
  • Naming yourself Zelda as a shortcut for understanding this topic.
  • Naming your character Zelda without understanding the consequences.
  • Red bubbles that take your sword away.
  • An obvious door that you can walk through.
  • Iwata Asks.
  • Accidentally using only half the space available.
  • Zelda randomizers.
  • SMZ3.
  • How to make Super Mario World a metroidvania.
  • Marvin putting in work.
  • Capturing a particular level of snark.
  • Reading books in high school that you won't understand until you're 30.
  • The California Raisins as the sequel to the Grapes of Wrath.
  • The kind of person who works really hard in high school.
  • Xanthan gum.
  • Trochaic something or other.
  • I had a theory about music and then I made all these friends!

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Joyful communities.
  • Whether discord logs can be subpoenaed.
  • Encoding all your mail in ROT13 to keep them safe from the snoops at the NSA.
  • Finishing with your DSP design work so your employer sends you into the basement to make cardboard boxes.
  • Someone in the early 2000s with a high pitched voice.
  • Remembering your grandma's phone number from when you were six but not remembering any phone numbers since then.
  • Thinky Puzzle Games.
  • An Alan Hazelden thing.
  • Tom Brown's Tracker School.
  • Going into the woods and sitting in one spot for four days.
  • A good, productive, safe time.
  • Keeping control of your emotions.
  • How to know when to stop.
  • Doing a ritual at sunrise.
  • Having animal encounters.
  • Trees dripping water on you.
  • Doing the most boring thing for four days straight so you can never be bored again.
  • A really cool thing to do in your twenties.
  • Sonic showers screaming at you until you're clean.
  • Lacking the experience to understand what's coming for you.
  • Going through some shit and loving it.
  • What if it all works out?
  • The experience of knowing twins.
  • Taking advantage of the Groupon for college tuition.
  • Hanging your fears on milestones.
  • Taking your parental leave consecutively.
  • Daycare as a microcosm of communal living.
  • Showing people what you're working on.
  • Making a living putting your kids on social media until your kids get old enough to express that they don't like it.
  • Wearing a shirt saying "I do not consent to be photographed."
  • A conversation with a five year old about scrub jays.
  • Sharing media with an allowlist.
  • Setting permissions on who can see your photos.
  • Sharing photos with your family by handing out USB drives.
  • A visual novel that is extremely interested in your personal financial information.
  • A pen connected to a matrix of hundreds of other pens so you can sign your name hundreds of times at once.
  • The Zelda one-second quest.
  • Naming yourself Zelda as a shortcut for understanding this topic.
  • Naming your character Zelda without understanding the consequences.
  • Red bubbles that take your sword away.
  • An obvious door that you can walk through.
  • Iwata Asks.
  • Accidentally using only half the space available.
  • Zelda randomizers.
  • SMZ3.
  • How to make Super Mario World a metroidvania.
  • Marvin putting in work.
  • Capturing a particular level of snark.
  • Reading books in high school that you won't understand until you're 30.
  • The California Raisins as the sequel to the Grapes of Wrath.
  • The kind of person who works really hard in high school.
  • Xanthan gum.
  • Trochaic something or other.
  • I had a theory about music and then I made all these friends!

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+RuinU2HP ]]> Jim Stormdancer 204. Defrag My Colon https://topiclords.com/defrag-my-colon 2fc4d385-6f34-4f4b-8eed-bd840725da99 Mon, 18 Sep 2023 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: JohnB and CisHetKayFaber. We discuss the human body's similarity to shitty software, the origin of hiccups, books about video games that aren't strategy guides, untitled by Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz, and TV shows that have inspired original mathematics. 1:10:38 true Lords:

  • JohnB
  • CisHetKayFaber

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Whether it's okay to catch up.
  • Air conditioning on hot days.
  • A steel mill catching fire and the whole east bay smells like the back of a cathode ray tube.
  • Shaking yellow sand out of your laundry.
  • Importing brushfire smoke from Canada.
  • Using bad metaphors to explain RAM.
  • Stochastic immunology.
  • Alphabetizing all your gut bacteria.
  • Whitman's Anal Sampling Mechanism.
  • The Bonzi Buddy of the human body.
  • Your inkjet printer waking up at 5am to cycle some ink.
  • The optimal humidity to reflow your ink cartridges.
  • Norton Commander.
  • Selecting files with the arrow keys and viewing them with F3.
  • How Thunking ruined Jim's Norton Commander clone.
  • Your fish nervous system trying to be a fish again.
  • Reciting the anti-hiccup poem to cure your hiccups.
  • Fish reminding each other to not take ten small sips of water or they'll stop breathing.
  • Scaly swimmers.
  • Working in a shark lab.
  • Whether a fish sandwich is a fish or a sandwich.
  • Offering people a "tuna roll" and when they say yes guessing whether they think you mean the sushi or tuna salad on a bready roll.
  • Meditating on the concept of hiccups.
  • Congratulations, you won the game!
  • How to Beat the Atari Home Video Games.
  • Where a library would shelve those books of type-in BASIC programs.
  • Dave (2018) and Dave Demo (2018)
  • Which Boss Fight Books are good.
  • Starting your kid on Mario Maker.
  • Game Engine Black Book: Doom and Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D.
  • Mario Galaxy's camera-oriented level design.
  • Your body telling you when it's time to drink water.
  • Using Final Fantasy 4 as a bridge to talk about localization.
  • Developing a light gun game to install in all the bowling alleys now that the bowling fad has faded.
  • The Countdown to Irrelevance.
  • Books that used to be blogs.
  • Inventing criteria for how you beat Galaga.
  • Learning what micturations are twenty years after reading that Vogon poem and wondering which seeming nonsense words you'll learn in the next twenty years.
  • The BBC TV Hitchhiker's Guide series.
  • The second-worst poetry in the galaxy.
  • Red Dwarf airing on Dave.
  • A better way to think about it. (If you are a math person.)
  • Drive-by Mathematics.
  • Nesting your watch orders.
  • Watching every episode in every possible order to get the maximum possible amount of context for every scene.
  • Marylin vos Savant.
  • The Monty Hall Problem.
  • A game design that presumes the player does not want a goat.
  • Whether you want to switch to the other goat.
  • Opening 98 doors, revealing goats behind each one.
  • Pushing limits and talking about calculus.
  • Learning Japanese because you want to read the smutty manga.
  • X: The Everything App.
]]> Lords:

  • JohnB
  • CisHetKayFaber

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Whether it's okay to catch up.
  • Air conditioning on hot days.
  • A steel mill catching fire and the whole east bay smells like the back of a cathode ray tube.
  • Shaking yellow sand out of your laundry.
  • Importing brushfire smoke from Canada.
  • Using bad metaphors to explain RAM.
  • Stochastic immunology.
  • Alphabetizing all your gut bacteria.
  • Whitman's Anal Sampling Mechanism.
  • The Bonzi Buddy of the human body.
  • Your inkjet printer waking up at 5am to cycle some ink.
  • The optimal humidity to reflow your ink cartridges.
  • Norton Commander.
  • Selecting files with the arrow keys and viewing them with F3.
  • How Thunking ruined Jim's Norton Commander clone.
  • Your fish nervous system trying to be a fish again.
  • Reciting the anti-hiccup poem to cure your hiccups.
  • Fish reminding each other to not take ten small sips of water or they'll stop breathing.
  • Scaly swimmers.
  • Working in a shark lab.
  • Whether a fish sandwich is a fish or a sandwich.
  • Offering people a "tuna roll" and when they say yes guessing whether they think you mean the sushi or tuna salad on a bready roll.
  • Meditating on the concept of hiccups.
  • Congratulations, you won the game!
  • How to Beat the Atari Home Video Games.
  • Where a library would shelve those books of type-in BASIC programs.
  • Dave (2018) and Dave Demo (2018)
  • Which Boss Fight Books are good.
  • Starting your kid on Mario Maker.
  • Game Engine Black Book: Doom and Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D.
  • Mario Galaxy's camera-oriented level design.
  • Your body telling you when it's time to drink water.
  • Using Final Fantasy 4 as a bridge to talk about localization.
  • Developing a light gun game to install in all the bowling alleys now that the bowling fad has faded.
  • The Countdown to Irrelevance.
  • Books that used to be blogs.
  • Inventing criteria for how you beat Galaga.
  • Learning what micturations are twenty years after reading that Vogon poem and wondering which seeming nonsense words you'll learn in the next twenty years.
  • The BBC TV Hitchhiker's Guide series.
  • The second-worst poetry in the galaxy.
  • Red Dwarf airing on Dave.
  • A better way to think about it. (If you are a math person.)
  • Drive-by Mathematics.
  • Nesting your watch orders.
  • Watching every episode in every possible order to get the maximum possible amount of context for every scene.
  • Marylin vos Savant.
  • The Monty Hall Problem.
  • A game design that presumes the player does not want a goat.
  • Whether you want to switch to the other goat.
  • Opening 98 doors, revealing goats behind each one.
  • Pushing limits and talking about calculus.
  • Learning Japanese because you want to read the smutty manga.
  • X: The Everything App.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • JohnB
  • CisHetKayFaber

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Whether it's okay to catch up.
  • Air conditioning on hot days.
  • A steel mill catching fire and the whole east bay smells like the back of a cathode ray tube.
  • Shaking yellow sand out of your laundry.
  • Importing brushfire smoke from Canada.
  • Using bad metaphors to explain RAM.
  • Stochastic immunology.
  • Alphabetizing all your gut bacteria.
  • Whitman's Anal Sampling Mechanism.
  • The Bonzi Buddy of the human body.
  • Your inkjet printer waking up at 5am to cycle some ink.
  • The optimal humidity to reflow your ink cartridges.
  • Norton Commander.
  • Selecting files with the arrow keys and viewing them with F3.
  • How Thunking ruined Jim's Norton Commander clone.
  • Your fish nervous system trying to be a fish again.
  • Reciting the anti-hiccup poem to cure your hiccups.
  • Fish reminding each other to not take ten small sips of water or they'll stop breathing.
  • Scaly swimmers.
  • Working in a shark lab.
  • Whether a fish sandwich is a fish or a sandwich.
  • Offering people a "tuna roll" and when they say yes guessing whether they think you mean the sushi or tuna salad on a bready roll.
  • Meditating on the concept of hiccups.
  • Congratulations, you won the game!
  • How to Beat the Atari Home Video Games.
  • Where a library would shelve those books of type-in BASIC programs.
  • Dave (2018) and Dave Demo (2018)
  • Which Boss Fight Books are good.
  • Starting your kid on Mario Maker.
  • Game Engine Black Book: Doom and Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D.
  • Mario Galaxy's camera-oriented level design.
  • Your body telling you when it's time to drink water.
  • Using Final Fantasy 4 as a bridge to talk about localization.
  • Developing a light gun game to install in all the bowling alleys now that the bowling fad has faded.
  • The Countdown to Irrelevance.
  • Books that used to be blogs.
  • Inventing criteria for how you beat Galaga.
  • Learning what micturations are twenty years after reading that Vogon poem and wondering which seeming nonsense words you'll learn in the next twenty years.
  • The BBC TV Hitchhiker's Guide series.
  • The second-worst poetry in the galaxy.
  • Red Dwarf airing on Dave.
  • A better way to think about it. (If you are a math person.)
  • Drive-by Mathematics.
  • Nesting your watch orders.
  • Watching every episode in every possible order to get the maximum possible amount of context for every scene.
  • Marylin vos Savant.
  • The Monty Hall Problem.
  • A game design that presumes the player does not want a goat.
  • Whether you want to switch to the other goat.
  • Opening 98 doors, revealing goats behind each one.
  • Pushing limits and talking about calculus.
  • Learning Japanese because you want to read the smutty manga.
  • X: The Everything App.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+-iozeOlg ]]> Jim Stormdancer 203. Only Girls Get Duck Combs for Christmas https://topiclords.com/only-girls-get-duck-combs-for-christmas 135fc497-e847-40f6-9834-3bd991d0a3b4 Mon, 11 Sep 2023 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: CisHetKayFaber and Phone. We discuss Metal Gear Solid, children being unable to enjoy things, this extremely specific list of danger signs, Bank Account by Louis Cole, and technical beliefs which may be regarded as superstition but are true to your experience. 1:08:17 true Lords:

  • CisHetKayFaber
  • Phone

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The part where Jim talks.
  • Splitting your mutuals.
  • The kind of person who goes to Bluesky vs. who goes to Mastodon.
  • A relationship with an editor. (Like Emacs.) (Or Vim)
  • Wanting to see what Shaq posts.
  • The human zoo of bad takes.
  • Who sent Shaq a Bluesky invite??
  • O' That's Raspberry
  • Metal Gear Apologies.
  • Sending Konami money to fund the port of Metal Gear Solid 4.
  • Optimizing for extremely specific hardware and getting entrenched.
  • Shaders languishing on PS3.
  • PT's final resting place.
  • Konami diversifying into video games in the 80s when it's lucrative and dediversifying when it stops being as lucrative in the 2010s
  • A lot of weird business practices involving Slurpees and banking
  • All the places the Vita port of Metal Gear Solid 2 went on to.
  • The Worlds of Power novelization of Metal Gear.
  • A Narpas Sword scenario.
  • Cutscene inflation.
  • What happened to cutscene lengths after voice acting became cheap.
  • Encoding movies on a disc for free.
  • Time to Crate vs. Time to When Your Input Matters.
  • Ramen waterslides.
  • Annoying things that little kids do that adults also do.
  • Playing video games and parenting at the same time.
  • Whether it's still abuse if it's happening in the Netherlands.
  • Expectations people place on their children for Christmas vs. for Halloween.
  • Distorted beer.
  • Getting a bunch of stuff you don't want for Christmas.
  • A sweater with Mario or a cool dinosaur on it.
  • Swapping the Barbie and GI Joe voice boxes and whether that's a plot point of the Barbie movie.
  • Chewbacca dancing on top of the twin towers as they collapse.
  • Taking wire cutters to the electrical substation and getting some free copper.
  • I don't feel 130 kilovolts; I'm a perfect sphere.
  • Creating a situation where people are safe even if they're not paying attention.
  • Flying around in a tornado googling "what do you do when you're flying around in a tornado"
  • Is it .webm or .webnn?
  • All the three letter acronyms that ought to be on the internet rug you can't get.
  • The giant System 7 floppy disk blanket.
  • A blanket with the Mac startup sound on it.
  • Missing out on some drum solos.
  • A poem based on a true story.
  • Being afraid to look at your tax returns.
  • Getting single taxed and double social security benefits.
  • Replacing your old snowball with a new snowball.
  • Your thing as a person trained in audio engineering.
  • Getting a very insensitive microphone so that it only picks up the sounds you want it to.
  • Jim's advice for recording your voice.
  • A Shure SM-57B with the Cloudlifter.
  • Technical knowledge for smart people.
  • Solid state drives failing without warning.
  • A high pitched whine imparting a natural warmth to your voice.
  • Recording your voice with a $15 boom arm.
  • Using shittier tools as you get more experienced.
  • A cover of a Weezer song that's rendered unlistenable hematite l because of the string squeak.
  • The inability to process and retain information about LinkedIn's purpose.
]]> Lords:

  • CisHetKayFaber
  • Phone

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The part where Jim talks.
  • Splitting your mutuals.
  • The kind of person who goes to Bluesky vs. who goes to Mastodon.
  • A relationship with an editor. (Like Emacs.) (Or Vim)
  • Wanting to see what Shaq posts.
  • The human zoo of bad takes.
  • Who sent Shaq a Bluesky invite??
  • O' That's Raspberry
  • Metal Gear Apologies.
  • Sending Konami money to fund the port of Metal Gear Solid 4.
  • Optimizing for extremely specific hardware and getting entrenched.
  • Shaders languishing on PS3.
  • PT's final resting place.
  • Konami diversifying into video games in the 80s when it's lucrative and dediversifying when it stops being as lucrative in the 2010s
  • A lot of weird business practices involving Slurpees and banking
  • All the places the Vita port of Metal Gear Solid 2 went on to.
  • The Worlds of Power novelization of Metal Gear.
  • A Narpas Sword scenario.
  • Cutscene inflation.
  • What happened to cutscene lengths after voice acting became cheap.
  • Encoding movies on a disc for free.
  • Time to Crate vs. Time to When Your Input Matters.
  • Ramen waterslides.
  • Annoying things that little kids do that adults also do.
  • Playing video games and parenting at the same time.
  • Whether it's still abuse if it's happening in the Netherlands.
  • Expectations people place on their children for Christmas vs. for Halloween.
  • Distorted beer.
  • Getting a bunch of stuff you don't want for Christmas.
  • A sweater with Mario or a cool dinosaur on it.
  • Swapping the Barbie and GI Joe voice boxes and whether that's a plot point of the Barbie movie.
  • Chewbacca dancing on top of the twin towers as they collapse.
  • Taking wire cutters to the electrical substation and getting some free copper.
  • I don't feel 130 kilovolts; I'm a perfect sphere.
  • Creating a situation where people are safe even if they're not paying attention.
  • Flying around in a tornado googling "what do you do when you're flying around in a tornado"
  • Is it .webm or .webnn?
  • All the three letter acronyms that ought to be on the internet rug you can't get.
  • The giant System 7 floppy disk blanket.
  • A blanket with the Mac startup sound on it.
  • Missing out on some drum solos.
  • A poem based on a true story.
  • Being afraid to look at your tax returns.
  • Getting single taxed and double social security benefits.
  • Replacing your old snowball with a new snowball.
  • Your thing as a person trained in audio engineering.
  • Getting a very insensitive microphone so that it only picks up the sounds you want it to.
  • Jim's advice for recording your voice.
  • A Shure SM-57B with the Cloudlifter.
  • Technical knowledge for smart people.
  • Solid state drives failing without warning.
  • A high pitched whine imparting a natural warmth to your voice.
  • Recording your voice with a $15 boom arm.
  • Using shittier tools as you get more experienced.
  • A cover of a Weezer song that's rendered unlistenable hematite l because of the string squeak.
  • The inability to process and retain information about LinkedIn's purpose.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • CisHetKayFaber
  • Phone

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The part where Jim talks.
  • Splitting your mutuals.
  • The kind of person who goes to Bluesky vs. who goes to Mastodon.
  • A relationship with an editor. (Like Emacs.) (Or Vim)
  • Wanting to see what Shaq posts.
  • The human zoo of bad takes.
  • Who sent Shaq a Bluesky invite??
  • O' That's Raspberry
  • Metal Gear Apologies.
  • Sending Konami money to fund the port of Metal Gear Solid 4.
  • Optimizing for extremely specific hardware and getting entrenched.
  • Shaders languishing on PS3.
  • PT's final resting place.
  • Konami diversifying into video games in the 80s when it's lucrative and dediversifying when it stops being as lucrative in the 2010s
  • A lot of weird business practices involving Slurpees and banking
  • All the places the Vita port of Metal Gear Solid 2 went on to.
  • The Worlds of Power novelization of Metal Gear.
  • A Narpas Sword scenario.
  • Cutscene inflation.
  • What happened to cutscene lengths after voice acting became cheap.
  • Encoding movies on a disc for free.
  • Time to Crate vs. Time to When Your Input Matters.
  • Ramen waterslides.
  • Annoying things that little kids do that adults also do.
  • Playing video games and parenting at the same time.
  • Whether it's still abuse if it's happening in the Netherlands.
  • Expectations people place on their children for Christmas vs. for Halloween.
  • Distorted beer.
  • Getting a bunch of stuff you don't want for Christmas.
  • A sweater with Mario or a cool dinosaur on it.
  • Swapping the Barbie and GI Joe voice boxes and whether that's a plot point of the Barbie movie.
  • Chewbacca dancing on top of the twin towers as they collapse.
  • Taking wire cutters to the electrical substation and getting some free copper.
  • I don't feel 130 kilovolts; I'm a perfect sphere.
  • Creating a situation where people are safe even if they're not paying attention.
  • Flying around in a tornado googling "what do you do when you're flying around in a tornado"
  • Is it .webm or .webnn?
  • All the three letter acronyms that ought to be on the internet rug you can't get.
  • The giant System 7 floppy disk blanket.
  • A blanket with the Mac startup sound on it.
  • Missing out on some drum solos.
  • A poem based on a true story.
  • Being afraid to look at your tax returns.
  • Getting single taxed and double social security benefits.
  • Replacing your old snowball with a new snowball.
  • Your thing as a person trained in audio engineering.
  • Getting a very insensitive microphone so that it only picks up the sounds you want it to.
  • Jim's advice for recording your voice.
  • A Shure SM-57B with the Cloudlifter.
  • Technical knowledge for smart people.
  • Solid state drives failing without warning.
  • A high pitched whine imparting a natural warmth to your voice.
  • Recording your voice with a $15 boom arm.
  • Using shittier tools as you get more experienced.
  • A cover of a Weezer song that's rendered unlistenable hematite l because of the string squeak.
  • The inability to process and retain information about LinkedIn's purpose.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+Kd1yqHiW ]]> Jim Stormdancer 202. Tim Was My Jim https://topiclords.com/tim-was-my-jim 8488587e-5abf-4cf7-9ca0-5f50d9398698 Mon, 04 Sep 2023 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Mark and Shirley. We discuss why the city gets to decide what is a weed, learning to program as a cheat code for work, poop epidemiology, Insomnolence by Charles Rafferty, and buying food items labeled in a foreign language. 1:15:48 true Lords:

  • Mark
  • Shirley

Topics

  • Lawn Angst: Why does the city get to decide what is a weed vs an acceptable plant?
  • Learning to code is like a cheat code for life, or at least work
  • Poop epidemiology
  • Insomnolence by Charles Rafferty
  • Ville asks: "buying mysterious items that aren't labeled in a language you speak from the Asian supermarket because the picture on the front looks good, then choosing whether to roll the dice by putting them in your dinner or keep them in the back of the cupboard until you move house and throw them away"

Microtopics:

  • Chamber Mage.
  • Touring on the strength of your one song.
  • Heartstopper, by Alice Oseman.
  • The city issuing a ticket because you have a weed on your lawn.
  • Declaring certain plants weeds when they're all good plants, Bront.
  • All the different signs you could put on your lawn to tell off your neighbors.
  • How tall a CB tower you're allowed to build without a permit.
  • The youngest homeowners on the block.
  • A natural space that isn't so manufactured.
  • A society that loves some plants and hates others.
  • How to grow flowers on the moon.
  • Making 660 folders based on an excel spreadsheet.
  • The stick-to-it-iveness required to fight a bunch of bugs.
  • What LLMs are good at and bad at.
  • A Dragonborn Paladin with aphasia.
  • Generating humans with too many fingers.
  • Where to post your Wordle results and Dall-E shitposts.
  • A cryptic lineage of COVID in Columbus, Ohio.
  • Gross but amazing.
  • Some seriously bad-ass science.
  • Expecting more diligence after you start paying your volunteers.
  • The Paxlovid Rebound.
  • Gin Gin Ginger Chews
  • Genetically altering your tongue to taste the most possible bitter flavor all the time.
  • Placing a ginger chew on your tongue and allowing it to dissolve over the course of an hour.
  • Paxlovid Mouth.
  • How to sleep with a cough.
  • Numbing your coughing agents.
  • Stashing the lozenge on your gums.
  • Waking with a hard candy stuck to your teeth.
  • Scarring your vocal folds by coughing as much as you can.
  • Poets: good at writing in a poetic way.
  • Poetry that's just prose if you think about it.
  • Turning a poet in to the authorities for writing prose.
  • At night, in the woods.
  • Standing here a thousand years ago and feeling the exact same thing.
  • Not being able to upgrade our armor any more because bokoblins are extinct.
  • Finding and giving up on a new ingredient every week.
  • RIP Bean Paste.
  • H-Mart.
  • Gooey Duck.
  • Buying a bunch of dumplings without any idea what's in them and having a tasting party.
  • A tiny freezer with only durian in it.
  • A smoothie that tastes like drinking a gas leak.
  • Jackfruit as a crab or pulled meat alternative vs. jackfruit as a tasty treat.
  • Getting foodstuffs stuck behind your soft palate.
  • Asafoetida risks.
  • Golden Mountain Sauce.
  • Brown Umami Boosters.
  • Fish sauce tastings.
  • Three Crabs vs. Flying Lion.
  • How to say "Serving Suggestion" in all the different Asian languages.
  • Loving all your listeners, even the problematic ones.
  • Throne of Iron.
  • Heavy metal music about D&D.
  • Finding yourself on the internet.
]]> Lords:

  • Mark
  • Shirley

Topics

  • Lawn Angst: Why does the city get to decide what is a weed vs an acceptable plant?
  • Learning to code is like a cheat code for life, or at least work
  • Poop epidemiology
  • Insomnolence by Charles Rafferty
  • Ville asks: "buying mysterious items that aren't labeled in a language you speak from the Asian supermarket because the picture on the front looks good, then choosing whether to roll the dice by putting them in your dinner or keep them in the back of the cupboard until you move house and throw them away"

Microtopics:

  • Chamber Mage.
  • Touring on the strength of your one song.
  • Heartstopper, by Alice Oseman.
  • The city issuing a ticket because you have a weed on your lawn.
  • Declaring certain plants weeds when they're all good plants, Bront.
  • All the different signs you could put on your lawn to tell off your neighbors.
  • How tall a CB tower you're allowed to build without a permit.
  • The youngest homeowners on the block.
  • A natural space that isn't so manufactured.
  • A society that loves some plants and hates others.
  • How to grow flowers on the moon.
  • Making 660 folders based on an excel spreadsheet.
  • The stick-to-it-iveness required to fight a bunch of bugs.
  • What LLMs are good at and bad at.
  • A Dragonborn Paladin with aphasia.
  • Generating humans with too many fingers.
  • Where to post your Wordle results and Dall-E shitposts.
  • A cryptic lineage of COVID in Columbus, Ohio.
  • Gross but amazing.
  • Some seriously bad-ass science.
  • Expecting more diligence after you start paying your volunteers.
  • The Paxlovid Rebound.
  • Gin Gin Ginger Chews
  • Genetically altering your tongue to taste the most possible bitter flavor all the time.
  • Placing a ginger chew on your tongue and allowing it to dissolve over the course of an hour.
  • Paxlovid Mouth.
  • How to sleep with a cough.
  • Numbing your coughing agents.
  • Stashing the lozenge on your gums.
  • Waking with a hard candy stuck to your teeth.
  • Scarring your vocal folds by coughing as much as you can.
  • Poets: good at writing in a poetic way.
  • Poetry that's just prose if you think about it.
  • Turning a poet in to the authorities for writing prose.
  • At night, in the woods.
  • Standing here a thousand years ago and feeling the exact same thing.
  • Not being able to upgrade our armor any more because bokoblins are extinct.
  • Finding and giving up on a new ingredient every week.
  • RIP Bean Paste.
  • H-Mart.
  • Gooey Duck.
  • Buying a bunch of dumplings without any idea what's in them and having a tasting party.
  • A tiny freezer with only durian in it.
  • A smoothie that tastes like drinking a gas leak.
  • Jackfruit as a crab or pulled meat alternative vs. jackfruit as a tasty treat.
  • Getting foodstuffs stuck behind your soft palate.
  • Asafoetida risks.
  • Golden Mountain Sauce.
  • Brown Umami Boosters.
  • Fish sauce tastings.
  • Three Crabs vs. Flying Lion.
  • How to say "Serving Suggestion" in all the different Asian languages.
  • Loving all your listeners, even the problematic ones.
  • Throne of Iron.
  • Heavy metal music about D&D.
  • Finding yourself on the internet.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Mark
  • Shirley

Topics

  • Lawn Angst: Why does the city get to decide what is a weed vs an acceptable plant?
  • Learning to code is like a cheat code for life, or at least work
  • Poop epidemiology
  • Insomnolence by Charles Rafferty
  • Ville asks: "buying mysterious items that aren't labeled in a language you speak from the Asian supermarket because the picture on the front looks good, then choosing whether to roll the dice by putting them in your dinner or keep them in the back of the cupboard until you move house and throw them away"

Microtopics:

  • Chamber Mage.
  • Touring on the strength of your one song.
  • Heartstopper, by Alice Oseman.
  • The city issuing a ticket because you have a weed on your lawn.
  • Declaring certain plants weeds when they're all good plants, Bront.
  • All the different signs you could put on your lawn to tell off your neighbors.
  • How tall a CB tower you're allowed to build without a permit.
  • The youngest homeowners on the block.
  • A natural space that isn't so manufactured.
  • A society that loves some plants and hates others.
  • How to grow flowers on the moon.
  • Making 660 folders based on an excel spreadsheet.
  • The stick-to-it-iveness required to fight a bunch of bugs.
  • What LLMs are good at and bad at.
  • A Dragonborn Paladin with aphasia.
  • Generating humans with too many fingers.
  • Where to post your Wordle results and Dall-E shitposts.
  • A cryptic lineage of COVID in Columbus, Ohio.
  • Gross but amazing.
  • Some seriously bad-ass science.
  • Expecting more diligence after you start paying your volunteers.
  • The Paxlovid Rebound.
  • Gin Gin Ginger Chews
  • Genetically altering your tongue to taste the most possible bitter flavor all the time.
  • Placing a ginger chew on your tongue and allowing it to dissolve over the course of an hour.
  • Paxlovid Mouth.
  • How to sleep with a cough.
  • Numbing your coughing agents.
  • Stashing the lozenge on your gums.
  • Waking with a hard candy stuck to your teeth.
  • Scarring your vocal folds by coughing as much as you can.
  • Poets: good at writing in a poetic way.
  • Poetry that's just prose if you think about it.
  • Turning a poet in to the authorities for writing prose.
  • At night, in the woods.
  • Standing here a thousand years ago and feeling the exact same thing.
  • Not being able to upgrade our armor any more because bokoblins are extinct.
  • Finding and giving up on a new ingredient every week.
  • RIP Bean Paste.
  • H-Mart.
  • Gooey Duck.
  • Buying a bunch of dumplings without any idea what's in them and having a tasting party.
  • A tiny freezer with only durian in it.
  • A smoothie that tastes like drinking a gas leak.
  • Jackfruit as a crab or pulled meat alternative vs. jackfruit as a tasty treat.
  • Getting foodstuffs stuck behind your soft palate.
  • Asafoetida risks.
  • Golden Mountain Sauce.
  • Brown Umami Boosters.
  • Fish sauce tastings.
  • Three Crabs vs. Flying Lion.
  • How to say "Serving Suggestion" in all the different Asian languages.
  • Loving all your listeners, even the problematic ones.
  • Throne of Iron.
  • Heavy metal music about D&D.
  • Finding yourself on the internet.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+ScaJWJ-g ]]> Jim Stormdancer 201. Don't Be Distressed, It's Just Australia https://topiclords.com/dont-be-distressed-its-just-australia 8c599edf-3f4f-4841-bead-45980fdb33d6 Mon, 28 Aug 2023 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Alex and Shannon. We discuss tree law, Tax Heaven 3000, the trick where you hold two fingers in front of your face and hallucinate a disembodied third finger, Outbreaks by Kitchen McKeown, and the best food byproducts. 1:05:16 true Lords:

  • Alex
  • Shannon

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Exhausting topics before the show even starts.
  • Should we give bee educators guns?
  • Lords with lord awards.
  • Megalords lording over huge swaths of topics.
  • Getting your partner a very smooth engagement ring so it hurts less when they punch you in the face.
  • Trimming a tree in the middle of summer.
  • Tree law consequences.
  • The Hitman games, you know, with the bald guy
  • Whether Hit People are hired to kill likable or dislikable people.
  • Games with missions designed to make you feel bad about what you're doing but also to give you no choice but to do it.
  • Injured while sl searching for bodies in Lake Mead? Demand compensation!
  • A cute anime girl who really wants to help you prepare your taxes.
  • MSCHF.
  • Calling the Key 4 All hotline for real time data on the car's location and speed.
  • Playing Geoguessr to determine where the car is.
  • Reverse engineering the smell of WD-40.
  • Using the car for purposes of a car.
  • The legal standing of Public Universal Car.
  • Don't rotate the donut, you gave to rotate the pie
  • Legal MSCHF.
  • Taking the SATs for money.
  • Writing a list of demands in a child's scrawl and sending it to your senator.
  • Seeing the Vienna sausage with knuckles.
  • Getting a book of Magic Eyes in the 90s and staring at it until you see the dolphin and having a splitting headache for the next day and a half.
  • A jump scare in Magic Eye form.
  • Why we all need glasses.
  • Listening to your dad listening to a podcast.
  • Disappearing your own nose.
  • The purpose of feeling boredom.
  • The impossibility of being bored when libraries exist.
  • Paleolithic man enjoying memes.
  • Why campfire smoke always blows into your eyes.
  • Building a prehistoric highway system and using one of those printers that prints on the road so paleolithic man can enjoy dank memes.
  • What kids get in their stockings today now that iTunes gift cards are obsolete.
  • Why keep any DVDs?
  • A common metaphor for a problem that can be overcome by relaxing.
  • The most racist shrimp.
  • It's not a firearm, it's just an explosive knife.
  • Begging your mom to buy you the Krazy Krabs.
  • Putting on a brine shrimp show for your family members.
  • A spring loaded rigid whip.
  • Kitchen Somebody.
  • Searching for comfort and the eels come.
  • The neon 24 hour fried chicken sign gleaming behind the pines.
  • Finding god in a cluster of eels beneath your palms.
  • Have you given god a pizza?
  • A different eel pizza meme.
  • All the Breaking Bad fans coming to your neighborhood and throwing pizza on top of the Pizza Eels for a photo opportunity and the eels are getting extremely fat.
  • Feeding the sharks by stuffing a dive suit full of chum.
  • A cooking process that creates a byproduct that you can use to cook something else.
  • Calling bean juice "aqua fava" and styling.
  • Browning the whey to create a delicious paste loaf.
  • The two-in-one, in which they put two taquitos into a burrito.
  • Glorpamole.
]]> Lords:

  • Alex
  • Shannon

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Exhausting topics before the show even starts.
  • Should we give bee educators guns?
  • Lords with lord awards.
  • Megalords lording over huge swaths of topics.
  • Getting your partner a very smooth engagement ring so it hurts less when they punch you in the face.
  • Trimming a tree in the middle of summer.
  • Tree law consequences.
  • The Hitman games, you know, with the bald guy
  • Whether Hit People are hired to kill likable or dislikable people.
  • Games with missions designed to make you feel bad about what you're doing but also to give you no choice but to do it.
  • Injured while sl searching for bodies in Lake Mead? Demand compensation!
  • A cute anime girl who really wants to help you prepare your taxes.
  • MSCHF.
  • Calling the Key 4 All hotline for real time data on the car's location and speed.
  • Playing Geoguessr to determine where the car is.
  • Reverse engineering the smell of WD-40.
  • Using the car for purposes of a car.
  • The legal standing of Public Universal Car.
  • Don't rotate the donut, you gave to rotate the pie
  • Legal MSCHF.
  • Taking the SATs for money.
  • Writing a list of demands in a child's scrawl and sending it to your senator.
  • Seeing the Vienna sausage with knuckles.
  • Getting a book of Magic Eyes in the 90s and staring at it until you see the dolphin and having a splitting headache for the next day and a half.
  • A jump scare in Magic Eye form.
  • Why we all need glasses.
  • Listening to your dad listening to a podcast.
  • Disappearing your own nose.
  • The purpose of feeling boredom.
  • The impossibility of being bored when libraries exist.
  • Paleolithic man enjoying memes.
  • Why campfire smoke always blows into your eyes.
  • Building a prehistoric highway system and using one of those printers that prints on the road so paleolithic man can enjoy dank memes.
  • What kids get in their stockings today now that iTunes gift cards are obsolete.
  • Why keep any DVDs?
  • A common metaphor for a problem that can be overcome by relaxing.
  • The most racist shrimp.
  • It's not a firearm, it's just an explosive knife.
  • Begging your mom to buy you the Krazy Krabs.
  • Putting on a brine shrimp show for your family members.
  • A spring loaded rigid whip.
  • Kitchen Somebody.
  • Searching for comfort and the eels come.
  • The neon 24 hour fried chicken sign gleaming behind the pines.
  • Finding god in a cluster of eels beneath your palms.
  • Have you given god a pizza?
  • A different eel pizza meme.
  • All the Breaking Bad fans coming to your neighborhood and throwing pizza on top of the Pizza Eels for a photo opportunity and the eels are getting extremely fat.
  • Feeding the sharks by stuffing a dive suit full of chum.
  • A cooking process that creates a byproduct that you can use to cook something else.
  • Calling bean juice "aqua fava" and styling.
  • Browning the whey to create a delicious paste loaf.
  • The two-in-one, in which they put two taquitos into a burrito.
  • Glorpamole.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Alex
  • Shannon

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Exhausting topics before the show even starts.
  • Should we give bee educators guns?
  • Lords with lord awards.
  • Megalords lording over huge swaths of topics.
  • Getting your partner a very smooth engagement ring so it hurts less when they punch you in the face.
  • Trimming a tree in the middle of summer.
  • Tree law consequences.
  • The Hitman games, you know, with the bald guy
  • Whether Hit People are hired to kill likable or dislikable people.
  • Games with missions designed to make you feel bad about what you're doing but also to give you no choice but to do it.
  • Injured while sl searching for bodies in Lake Mead? Demand compensation!
  • A cute anime girl who really wants to help you prepare your taxes.
  • MSCHF.
  • Calling the Key 4 All hotline for real time data on the car's location and speed.
  • Playing Geoguessr to determine where the car is.
  • Reverse engineering the smell of WD-40.
  • Using the car for purposes of a car.
  • The legal standing of Public Universal Car.
  • Don't rotate the donut, you gave to rotate the pie
  • Legal MSCHF.
  • Taking the SATs for money.
  • Writing a list of demands in a child's scrawl and sending it to your senator.
  • Seeing the Vienna sausage with knuckles.
  • Getting a book of Magic Eyes in the 90s and staring at it until you see the dolphin and having a splitting headache for the next day and a half.
  • A jump scare in Magic Eye form.
  • Why we all need glasses.
  • Listening to your dad listening to a podcast.
  • Disappearing your own nose.
  • The purpose of feeling boredom.
  • The impossibility of being bored when libraries exist.
  • Paleolithic man enjoying memes.
  • Why campfire smoke always blows into your eyes.
  • Building a prehistoric highway system and using one of those printers that prints on the road so paleolithic man can enjoy dank memes.
  • What kids get in their stockings today now that iTunes gift cards are obsolete.
  • Why keep any DVDs?
  • A common metaphor for a problem that can be overcome by relaxing.
  • The most racist shrimp.
  • It's not a firearm, it's just an explosive knife.
  • Begging your mom to buy you the Krazy Krabs.
  • Putting on a brine shrimp show for your family members.
  • A spring loaded rigid whip.
  • Kitchen Somebody.
  • Searching for comfort and the eels come.
  • The neon 24 hour fried chicken sign gleaming behind the pines.
  • Finding god in a cluster of eels beneath your palms.
  • Have you given god a pizza?
  • A different eel pizza meme.
  • All the Breaking Bad fans coming to your neighborhood and throwing pizza on top of the Pizza Eels for a photo opportunity and the eels are getting extremely fat.
  • Feeding the sharks by stuffing a dive suit full of chum.
  • A cooking process that creates a byproduct that you can use to cook something else.
  • Calling bean juice "aqua fava" and styling.
  • Browning the whey to create a delicious paste loaf.
  • The two-in-one, in which they put two taquitos into a burrito.
  • Glorpamole.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+PqXb1I9e ]]> Jim Stormdancer 200. My Banana Has Bones https://topiclords.com/my-banana-has-bones ea60729f-39cf-4493-be8a-57dad15558fd Mon, 21 Aug 2023 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Jenni and Tyriq. We discuss King Leonardo and His Short Subjects, Nervous Subject, Subject Zero, On the Subject of Poetry By W. S. Merwin, royal subjects, and Subject 13. 1:07:01 true Lords:

  • Jenni
  • Tyriq

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The only place on the internet you can hear subjects discussed.
  • Subject Lords.
  • Finding video games in places that don't exist.
  • Renaming the spreadsheet to the Subject Bucket.
  • A hand me down Rocky and Bullwinkle bedsheet set.
  • Rocky and Bullwinkle indoctrination.
  • How many seasons the Flintstones ran for.
  • The Classic Wikipedia Was.
  • Wacky Racers.
  • Whether Winston has ever tried Circus Peanuts.
  • Enjoying one Circus Peanut every three years.
  • How to buy just one Circus Peanut.
  • Sawing a nickel in half before money became pre-scored.
  • Whether jokes were funny in the past.
  • Two troublemaking nephews named Duke and Earl.
  • Mr. Mad's plan to trap the king.
  • One actor playing more than one character all in one take.
  • Somebody the Explainer.
  • A Nancy strip where the joke revolves around knowing that people used to take their shoes off in movie theaters.
  • Show Swap day at the movie theater.
  • Waiting in the closet for the grim reaper to show up and then jumping out and being really seductive.
  • Closet-pilled.
  • Multiple people dying in the same yoga class and the grim reaper just sticks around instead of leaving and coming back.
  • Yogaing while old. (YWO.)
  • First name nervous, last name subject.
  • Born pregnant by aliens.
  • Nervous Subject vs. Nervous Object.
  • Pressing X to wisecrack.
  • Getting quests from Lord British and killing some monsters.
  • The Vic Viper and the Road British.
  • A pop culture character who hits the center of the Venn diagram.
  • Writing Mass Effect fanfiction for Glittermitten Grove
  • 10,000 Boolean variables that can be triggered by your narrative choices.
  • Narratively justifying how getting a donut leads to your death.
  • Generating alive/dead states for everybody.
  • The tortured but boring space marine guy with a tragic soldier past that isn't very interesting.
  • The girl who is just a cloud of gas under her hazard suit.
  • The man who slouches listening to the wheel revolving in the stream, yet there is no wheel there to revolve.
  • The reason the wheel turns – though there is no wheel.
  • Sitting at the end of March.
  • Deckard Bane.
  • Hortatoriness.
  • How do we feel about monarchies?
  • Tropical fruit tree drama.
  • The Miami Fruit Organization.
  • Ordering a moonbeam in a jar from Instacart.
  • Where in the fruit the seed wants to be.
  • The banana that evolved for the seed to pop out and hit you in the face as soon as you start peeling it and that's how they invented firearms.
  • Figuring out how to hold an avocado like a gun.
  • Fruit with Velcro-style hook and loop.
  • Fruit you should avoid if you have a mucous membrane.
  • Subscribing to durians for $199 per week.
  • Turning the pineapple upside down.
  • The pineapple as a symbol of hospitality.
  • A video game with many of the components a video game would have.
  • The taking robots from the System Shock series.
  • A pre-rendered background Final Fantasy 7 type deal.
  • Cinematic platformers starring spheres.
  • Conflating two games made by Francophones.
  • Namable group chats.
  • Getting a Bluesky invite just so you can park your domain.
]]> Lords:

  • Jenni
  • Tyriq

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The only place on the internet you can hear subjects discussed.
  • Subject Lords.
  • Finding video games in places that don't exist.
  • Renaming the spreadsheet to the Subject Bucket.
  • A hand me down Rocky and Bullwinkle bedsheet set.
  • Rocky and Bullwinkle indoctrination.
  • How many seasons the Flintstones ran for.
  • The Classic Wikipedia Was.
  • Wacky Racers.
  • Whether Winston has ever tried Circus Peanuts.
  • Enjoying one Circus Peanut every three years.
  • How to buy just one Circus Peanut.
  • Sawing a nickel in half before money became pre-scored.
  • Whether jokes were funny in the past.
  • Two troublemaking nephews named Duke and Earl.
  • Mr. Mad's plan to trap the king.
  • One actor playing more than one character all in one take.
  • Somebody the Explainer.
  • A Nancy strip where the joke revolves around knowing that people used to take their shoes off in movie theaters.
  • Show Swap day at the movie theater.
  • Waiting in the closet for the grim reaper to show up and then jumping out and being really seductive.
  • Closet-pilled.
  • Multiple people dying in the same yoga class and the grim reaper just sticks around instead of leaving and coming back.
  • Yogaing while old. (YWO.)
  • First name nervous, last name subject.
  • Born pregnant by aliens.
  • Nervous Subject vs. Nervous Object.
  • Pressing X to wisecrack.
  • Getting quests from Lord British and killing some monsters.
  • The Vic Viper and the Road British.
  • A pop culture character who hits the center of the Venn diagram.
  • Writing Mass Effect fanfiction for Glittermitten Grove
  • 10,000 Boolean variables that can be triggered by your narrative choices.
  • Narratively justifying how getting a donut leads to your death.
  • Generating alive/dead states for everybody.
  • The tortured but boring space marine guy with a tragic soldier past that isn't very interesting.
  • The girl who is just a cloud of gas under her hazard suit.
  • The man who slouches listening to the wheel revolving in the stream, yet there is no wheel there to revolve.
  • The reason the wheel turns – though there is no wheel.
  • Sitting at the end of March.
  • Deckard Bane.
  • Hortatoriness.
  • How do we feel about monarchies?
  • Tropical fruit tree drama.
  • The Miami Fruit Organization.
  • Ordering a moonbeam in a jar from Instacart.
  • Where in the fruit the seed wants to be.
  • The banana that evolved for the seed to pop out and hit you in the face as soon as you start peeling it and that's how they invented firearms.
  • Figuring out how to hold an avocado like a gun.
  • Fruit with Velcro-style hook and loop.
  • Fruit you should avoid if you have a mucous membrane.
  • Subscribing to durians for $199 per week.
  • Turning the pineapple upside down.
  • The pineapple as a symbol of hospitality.
  • A video game with many of the components a video game would have.
  • The taking robots from the System Shock series.
  • A pre-rendered background Final Fantasy 7 type deal.
  • Cinematic platformers starring spheres.
  • Conflating two games made by Francophones.
  • Namable group chats.
  • Getting a Bluesky invite just so you can park your domain.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Jenni
  • Tyriq

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The only place on the internet you can hear subjects discussed.
  • Subject Lords.
  • Finding video games in places that don't exist.
  • Renaming the spreadsheet to the Subject Bucket.
  • A hand me down Rocky and Bullwinkle bedsheet set.
  • Rocky and Bullwinkle indoctrination.
  • How many seasons the Flintstones ran for.
  • The Classic Wikipedia Was.
  • Wacky Racers.
  • Whether Winston has ever tried Circus Peanuts.
  • Enjoying one Circus Peanut every three years.
  • How to buy just one Circus Peanut.
  • Sawing a nickel in half before money became pre-scored.
  • Whether jokes were funny in the past.
  • Two troublemaking nephews named Duke and Earl.
  • Mr. Mad's plan to trap the king.
  • One actor playing more than one character all in one take.
  • Somebody the Explainer.
  • A Nancy strip where the joke revolves around knowing that people used to take their shoes off in movie theaters.
  • Show Swap day at the movie theater.
  • Waiting in the closet for the grim reaper to show up and then jumping out and being really seductive.
  • Closet-pilled.
  • Multiple people dying in the same yoga class and the grim reaper just sticks around instead of leaving and coming back.
  • Yogaing while old. (YWO.)
  • First name nervous, last name subject.
  • Born pregnant by aliens.
  • Nervous Subject vs. Nervous Object.
  • Pressing X to wisecrack.
  • Getting quests from Lord British and killing some monsters.
  • The Vic Viper and the Road British.
  • A pop culture character who hits the center of the Venn diagram.
  • Writing Mass Effect fanfiction for Glittermitten Grove
  • 10,000 Boolean variables that can be triggered by your narrative choices.
  • Narratively justifying how getting a donut leads to your death.
  • Generating alive/dead states for everybody.
  • The tortured but boring space marine guy with a tragic soldier past that isn't very interesting.
  • The girl who is just a cloud of gas under her hazard suit.
  • The man who slouches listening to the wheel revolving in the stream, yet there is no wheel there to revolve.
  • The reason the wheel turns – though there is no wheel.
  • Sitting at the end of March.
  • Deckard Bane.
  • Hortatoriness.
  • How do we feel about monarchies?
  • Tropical fruit tree drama.
  • The Miami Fruit Organization.
  • Ordering a moonbeam in a jar from Instacart.
  • Where in the fruit the seed wants to be.
  • The banana that evolved for the seed to pop out and hit you in the face as soon as you start peeling it and that's how they invented firearms.
  • Figuring out how to hold an avocado like a gun.
  • Fruit with Velcro-style hook and loop.
  • Fruit you should avoid if you have a mucous membrane.
  • Subscribing to durians for $199 per week.
  • Turning the pineapple upside down.
  • The pineapple as a symbol of hospitality.
  • A video game with many of the components a video game would have.
  • The taking robots from the System Shock series.
  • A pre-rendered background Final Fantasy 7 type deal.
  • Cinematic platformers starring spheres.
  • Conflating two games made by Francophones.
  • Namable group chats.
  • Getting a Bluesky invite just so you can park your domain.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+6xr-T0aP ]]> Jim Stormdancer 199. The Hum of the Universe Sounded Like a Bug Zapper https://topiclords.com/the-hum-of-the-universe-sounded-like-a-bug-zapper 1167b0e7-dbaf-4852-9638-c567d9e5f2f9 Mon, 14 Aug 2023 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: April and Ryan. We discuss puzzle games you don't understand, rotating food by 90 degrees before eating it, The Shaggs, Instructions for Traveling West, and songs where we ignore how weird they are because they're famous already. 1:17:06 true Lords:

  • April
  • Ryan

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Unions
  • Plug guilt.
  • Mentoring young composers.
  • Saying smart stuff about things you know about.
  • Taking the W.
  • A high pitched ding whenever someone succeeds at something.
  • A Good Snowman is Hard to Build.
  • Into the Breach.
  • Pushing the Vek to a different square.
  • Making something in your environment more satisfying.
  • A squid with your kid.
  • Colors that have frequencies vs. compound colors.
  • Indigo: a fake color.
  • The banger heavy duty colors.
  • A range of frequencies that is culturally mediated.
  • Paint mixing vs. light mixing.
  • Exploding ancient dinosaur juice constantly.
  • The electricity magic vs. the valve magic.
  • What does it mean to explode?
  • How to tell the difference between things you know because it's common knowledge vs. things you know because it's what you obsessed about when you were 15.
  • Having a responsibility to the taxpayers to not be wasteful.
  • The science of what sounds good.
  • The most confusing music you've ever heard.
  • Food rotation.
  • Imagining you have a banana coming at you. (It's not scary.)
  • Biting it the way we bite it.
  • Burrowing through your hamburger top to bottom.
  • Living with the mayonnaise for 30 seconds.
  • What happens when you turn a taco 90 degrees.
  • Ike's Paradox.
  • Eating a rib straight up and down.
  • Pizza sandwiches.
  • Explaining to your dentist that your bottom jaw is a ruinous cavern because you eat ribs top to bottom.
  • Adding a thickening agent to soup so you can turn the bowl sideways and just shove your face in there.
  • Buying the Ultra Rare Cheeto Shaped Like Batman Crying just to flip it.
  • A li'l cute ghostie with ears.
  • Affection for bands that are bad.
  • A rock album recorded by three kids who have no interest in or aptitude for writing and performing music.
  • Art that lives at the very tips of the horseshoe ends.
  • High fashion and weird looks that aren't meant to be for everyday.
  • Music that sounds bad in a way that you don't recognize.
  • Music that is boring and propulsive at the same time.
  • Music that is not for listening to.
  • Threatening your wife with a conversation about Beatles chord progressions.
  • Making art that is boring in unexpected, interesting ways.
  • Inventing a new boring version of interesting that still isn't interesting but is boring in interesting ways, which should make it interesting but doesn't.
  • Finding a desert and falling in.
  • Watching a purple meadow quiver and drinking whiskey beside a 100 year old cactus.
  • Whether Joy is a trick.
  • Blowing up your life and other people's lives as well.
  • The other entendre.
  • Yet another example of this fucking show.
  • Cooking for the rest of your life without ever washing dishes.
  • Joy that can't not be real.
  • Poetry that's just really well-constructed prose.
  • A poem that doesn't have any line breaks because then it wouldn't fit on Instagram.
  • A true poet who accounts for swiping.
  • An expression of a huge evocative idea built out of tiny ideas.
  • How to be happy even when you are not actively chasing your dreams.
  • A song that is famous in some way.
  • That fuckin' Pina Colada song.
  • Marrying the same person three or four times.
  • Bouncing along and going on a fun road trip while the world is ending.
  • Mystifying number one hits.
  • Robot Mr. Feeny in your car and you go around solving mysteries together.
  • Getting your wife a Groucho Marx nose for christmas.
  • Robust dependable noses.
  • Think On Thine Sins, Gumshoes.
  • Giving the Latin Grammar Police the L.
]]> Lords:

  • April
  • Ryan

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Unions
  • Plug guilt.
  • Mentoring young composers.
  • Saying smart stuff about things you know about.
  • Taking the W.
  • A high pitched ding whenever someone succeeds at something.
  • A Good Snowman is Hard to Build.
  • Into the Breach.
  • Pushing the Vek to a different square.
  • Making something in your environment more satisfying.
  • A squid with your kid.
  • Colors that have frequencies vs. compound colors.
  • Indigo: a fake color.
  • The banger heavy duty colors.
  • A range of frequencies that is culturally mediated.
  • Paint mixing vs. light mixing.
  • Exploding ancient dinosaur juice constantly.
  • The electricity magic vs. the valve magic.
  • What does it mean to explode?
  • How to tell the difference between things you know because it's common knowledge vs. things you know because it's what you obsessed about when you were 15.
  • Having a responsibility to the taxpayers to not be wasteful.
  • The science of what sounds good.
  • The most confusing music you've ever heard.
  • Food rotation.
  • Imagining you have a banana coming at you. (It's not scary.)
  • Biting it the way we bite it.
  • Burrowing through your hamburger top to bottom.
  • Living with the mayonnaise for 30 seconds.
  • What happens when you turn a taco 90 degrees.
  • Ike's Paradox.
  • Eating a rib straight up and down.
  • Pizza sandwiches.
  • Explaining to your dentist that your bottom jaw is a ruinous cavern because you eat ribs top to bottom.
  • Adding a thickening agent to soup so you can turn the bowl sideways and just shove your face in there.
  • Buying the Ultra Rare Cheeto Shaped Like Batman Crying just to flip it.
  • A li'l cute ghostie with ears.
  • Affection for bands that are bad.
  • A rock album recorded by three kids who have no interest in or aptitude for writing and performing music.
  • Art that lives at the very tips of the horseshoe ends.
  • High fashion and weird looks that aren't meant to be for everyday.
  • Music that sounds bad in a way that you don't recognize.
  • Music that is boring and propulsive at the same time.
  • Music that is not for listening to.
  • Threatening your wife with a conversation about Beatles chord progressions.
  • Making art that is boring in unexpected, interesting ways.
  • Inventing a new boring version of interesting that still isn't interesting but is boring in interesting ways, which should make it interesting but doesn't.
  • Finding a desert and falling in.
  • Watching a purple meadow quiver and drinking whiskey beside a 100 year old cactus.
  • Whether Joy is a trick.
  • Blowing up your life and other people's lives as well.
  • The other entendre.
  • Yet another example of this fucking show.
  • Cooking for the rest of your life without ever washing dishes.
  • Joy that can't not be real.
  • Poetry that's just really well-constructed prose.
  • A poem that doesn't have any line breaks because then it wouldn't fit on Instagram.
  • A true poet who accounts for swiping.
  • An expression of a huge evocative idea built out of tiny ideas.
  • How to be happy even when you are not actively chasing your dreams.
  • A song that is famous in some way.
  • That fuckin' Pina Colada song.
  • Marrying the same person three or four times.
  • Bouncing along and going on a fun road trip while the world is ending.
  • Mystifying number one hits.
  • Robot Mr. Feeny in your car and you go around solving mysteries together.
  • Getting your wife a Groucho Marx nose for christmas.
  • Robust dependable noses.
  • Think On Thine Sins, Gumshoes.
  • Giving the Latin Grammar Police the L.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • April
  • Ryan

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Unions
  • Plug guilt.
  • Mentoring young composers.
  • Saying smart stuff about things you know about.
  • Taking the W.
  • A high pitched ding whenever someone succeeds at something.
  • A Good Snowman is Hard to Build.
  • Into the Breach.
  • Pushing the Vek to a different square.
  • Making something in your environment more satisfying.
  • A squid with your kid.
  • Colors that have frequencies vs. compound colors.
  • Indigo: a fake color.
  • The banger heavy duty colors.
  • A range of frequencies that is culturally mediated.
  • Paint mixing vs. light mixing.
  • Exploding ancient dinosaur juice constantly.
  • The electricity magic vs. the valve magic.
  • What does it mean to explode?
  • How to tell the difference between things you know because it's common knowledge vs. things you know because it's what you obsessed about when you were 15.
  • Having a responsibility to the taxpayers to not be wasteful.
  • The science of what sounds good.
  • The most confusing music you've ever heard.
  • Food rotation.
  • Imagining you have a banana coming at you. (It's not scary.)
  • Biting it the way we bite it.
  • Burrowing through your hamburger top to bottom.
  • Living with the mayonnaise for 30 seconds.
  • What happens when you turn a taco 90 degrees.
  • Ike's Paradox.
  • Eating a rib straight up and down.
  • Pizza sandwiches.
  • Explaining to your dentist that your bottom jaw is a ruinous cavern because you eat ribs top to bottom.
  • Adding a thickening agent to soup so you can turn the bowl sideways and just shove your face in there.
  • Buying the Ultra Rare Cheeto Shaped Like Batman Crying just to flip it.
  • A li'l cute ghostie with ears.
  • Affection for bands that are bad.
  • A rock album recorded by three kids who have no interest in or aptitude for writing and performing music.
  • Art that lives at the very tips of the horseshoe ends.
  • High fashion and weird looks that aren't meant to be for everyday.
  • Music that sounds bad in a way that you don't recognize.
  • Music that is boring and propulsive at the same time.
  • Music that is not for listening to.
  • Threatening your wife with a conversation about Beatles chord progressions.
  • Making art that is boring in unexpected, interesting ways.
  • Inventing a new boring version of interesting that still isn't interesting but is boring in interesting ways, which should make it interesting but doesn't.
  • Finding a desert and falling in.
  • Watching a purple meadow quiver and drinking whiskey beside a 100 year old cactus.
  • Whether Joy is a trick.
  • Blowing up your life and other people's lives as well.
  • The other entendre.
  • Yet another example of this fucking show.
  • Cooking for the rest of your life without ever washing dishes.
  • Joy that can't not be real.
  • Poetry that's just really well-constructed prose.
  • A poem that doesn't have any line breaks because then it wouldn't fit on Instagram.
  • A true poet who accounts for swiping.
  • An expression of a huge evocative idea built out of tiny ideas.
  • How to be happy even when you are not actively chasing your dreams.
  • A song that is famous in some way.
  • That fuckin' Pina Colada song.
  • Marrying the same person three or four times.
  • Bouncing along and going on a fun road trip while the world is ending.
  • Mystifying number one hits.
  • Robot Mr. Feeny in your car and you go around solving mysteries together.
  • Getting your wife a Groucho Marx nose for christmas.
  • Robust dependable noses.
  • Think On Thine Sins, Gumshoes.
  • Giving the Latin Grammar Police the L.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+deToyZJy ]]> Jim Stormdancer 198. I’m Not Leaving Until Someone Sequences This Cup of Spit https://topiclords.com/im-not-leaving-until-someone-sequences-this-cup-of-spit 38aa587a-b8a2-4b75-8b1b-68606572fc03 Mon, 07 Aug 2023 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Maxx and Avery. We discuss change ringing, the differences between American and Japanese robotics teams, the internet rug, Look What We Found in the Park in the Dark, and grandma giving you a world's best grandma mug. 1:04:26 true Lords:

  • Maxx
  • Avery

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Topics. Disgust.
  • A video game experience that you will find relatable if you've ever moved.
  • Making prototype furniture out of huge Tetris blocks and then forcing your friends to carry them around every time you move onto a new house.
  • The kind of friend who believes the world should be a certain way and then acts like it is.
  • Just frogs. Toads too. Mostly turtles.
  • Frog-themed 8th birthday parties.
  • Running a frog rescue out of your van.
  • Frog Fractions 2: Revenge of the Fallen.
  • Writing Bonfire of the Vanities but never reading it.
  • Sport meets art: spart.
  • Method ringing with two cycle sine waves.
  • Installing a huge church organ in your home because they were giving it away for free but when you play a note the whole building catches on fire.
  • Free Pianos On Line!
  • Babysitting someone's upright piano while they go on the lam.
  • The mattress story but with a piano.
  • Where the warehouse came from.
  • When the landlord comes by and you have to put a microphone over your bed to convince him that this is a recording studio, not a bedroom.
  • Getting a pipe organ so you can play it while holding your brain in a jar and cackling.
  • Sliding down the whale rib.
  • Donating your brain to art so that they can slide it down the whale rib and try to hit a target.
  • Experiencing change ringing in a regal square.
  • Memorial ringing
  • Bell ringing machines.
  • Robots competing in team sports.
  • Microsumo.
  • Sumo printers smashing into each other.
  • Making a fighting toaster for the fighting toaster league.
  • Battle Bots vs. Robot Jox.
  • Department stores with an entire floor for stationery.
  • Buying Gundam models and never putting them together and just having a bunch of robot heads lying around.
  • Major innovations in robot mouse maze navigation.
  • A mouse with an inverted helicopter to keep it on the ground.
  • A 3D maze with a robot mouse that can walk on walls and ceilings.
  • Fun rugs fun time shapes to impress your teens with a trendy sense of style when you bring it into their room.
  • A rug covered with keywords from the 90s internet.
  • $87 for not that big of a rug.
  • Bonding with your child over ISP servers.
  • A visitor trying to bond with you about your ironic decor and you have to explain that sorry, no, it's supposed to be ironic.
  • The illuminated manuscript version of an the ironic internet rug.
  • A fantastic place to buy nuts and other bulk items.
  • A limit of 1 kilogram of tapioca pearls per customer.
  • Bringing the tapioca balls to life in the rice cooker.
  • Inventing a new way to dispose of tapioca pearls every single day.
  • Tiktok schticks that are connected to a minimum wage jobs so even if your tiktok starts making a bunch of money you still can't quit your shitty job.
  • Having anxiety dreams about the coffee shop you worked at years ago.
  • Non-mammalian milk enthusiasm.
  • Being someone's non-mammalian milk guy.
  • A bipedal walrus with jaundiced eyes in a jar the size of a walrus and it knows you're here.
  • Leaving a turtle in the park and it's a 50/50 tossup whether it immediately dies or has a litter of a thousand baby turtles that devour the entire ecosystem.
  • Companies that are named after the business that used to be in the building.
  • A 1950s sign with a bowling pin on it that says "Safeway."
  • Walking into the DNA lounge and demanding that they sequence some DNA.
  • Military challenge coins.
  • Meeting the world's best grandma and she hands you a "world's greatest grandma" mug to prove it.
  • Seek god coin??
]]> Lords:

  • Maxx
  • Avery

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Topics. Disgust.
  • A video game experience that you will find relatable if you've ever moved.
  • Making prototype furniture out of huge Tetris blocks and then forcing your friends to carry them around every time you move onto a new house.
  • The kind of friend who believes the world should be a certain way and then acts like it is.
  • Just frogs. Toads too. Mostly turtles.
  • Frog-themed 8th birthday parties.
  • Running a frog rescue out of your van.
  • Frog Fractions 2: Revenge of the Fallen.
  • Writing Bonfire of the Vanities but never reading it.
  • Sport meets art: spart.
  • Method ringing with two cycle sine waves.
  • Installing a huge church organ in your home because they were giving it away for free but when you play a note the whole building catches on fire.
  • Free Pianos On Line!
  • Babysitting someone's upright piano while they go on the lam.
  • The mattress story but with a piano.
  • Where the warehouse came from.
  • When the landlord comes by and you have to put a microphone over your bed to convince him that this is a recording studio, not a bedroom.
  • Getting a pipe organ so you can play it while holding your brain in a jar and cackling.
  • Sliding down the whale rib.
  • Donating your brain to art so that they can slide it down the whale rib and try to hit a target.
  • Experiencing change ringing in a regal square.
  • Memorial ringing
  • Bell ringing machines.
  • Robots competing in team sports.
  • Microsumo.
  • Sumo printers smashing into each other.
  • Making a fighting toaster for the fighting toaster league.
  • Battle Bots vs. Robot Jox.
  • Department stores with an entire floor for stationery.
  • Buying Gundam models and never putting them together and just having a bunch of robot heads lying around.
  • Major innovations in robot mouse maze navigation.
  • A mouse with an inverted helicopter to keep it on the ground.
  • A 3D maze with a robot mouse that can walk on walls and ceilings.
  • Fun rugs fun time shapes to impress your teens with a trendy sense of style when you bring it into their room.
  • A rug covered with keywords from the 90s internet.
  • $87 for not that big of a rug.
  • Bonding with your child over ISP servers.
  • A visitor trying to bond with you about your ironic decor and you have to explain that sorry, no, it's supposed to be ironic.
  • The illuminated manuscript version of an the ironic internet rug.
  • A fantastic place to buy nuts and other bulk items.
  • A limit of 1 kilogram of tapioca pearls per customer.
  • Bringing the tapioca balls to life in the rice cooker.
  • Inventing a new way to dispose of tapioca pearls every single day.
  • Tiktok schticks that are connected to a minimum wage jobs so even if your tiktok starts making a bunch of money you still can't quit your shitty job.
  • Having anxiety dreams about the coffee shop you worked at years ago.
  • Non-mammalian milk enthusiasm.
  • Being someone's non-mammalian milk guy.
  • A bipedal walrus with jaundiced eyes in a jar the size of a walrus and it knows you're here.
  • Leaving a turtle in the park and it's a 50/50 tossup whether it immediately dies or has a litter of a thousand baby turtles that devour the entire ecosystem.
  • Companies that are named after the business that used to be in the building.
  • A 1950s sign with a bowling pin on it that says "Safeway."
  • Walking into the DNA lounge and demanding that they sequence some DNA.
  • Military challenge coins.
  • Meeting the world's best grandma and she hands you a "world's greatest grandma" mug to prove it.
  • Seek god coin??

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Maxx
  • Avery

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Topics. Disgust.
  • A video game experience that you will find relatable if you've ever moved.
  • Making prototype furniture out of huge Tetris blocks and then forcing your friends to carry them around every time you move onto a new house.
  • The kind of friend who believes the world should be a certain way and then acts like it is.
  • Just frogs. Toads too. Mostly turtles.
  • Frog-themed 8th birthday parties.
  • Running a frog rescue out of your van.
  • Frog Fractions 2: Revenge of the Fallen.
  • Writing Bonfire of the Vanities but never reading it.
  • Sport meets art: spart.
  • Method ringing with two cycle sine waves.
  • Installing a huge church organ in your home because they were giving it away for free but when you play a note the whole building catches on fire.
  • Free Pianos On Line!
  • Babysitting someone's upright piano while they go on the lam.
  • The mattress story but with a piano.
  • Where the warehouse came from.
  • When the landlord comes by and you have to put a microphone over your bed to convince him that this is a recording studio, not a bedroom.
  • Getting a pipe organ so you can play it while holding your brain in a jar and cackling.
  • Sliding down the whale rib.
  • Donating your brain to art so that they can slide it down the whale rib and try to hit a target.
  • Experiencing change ringing in a regal square.
  • Memorial ringing
  • Bell ringing machines.
  • Robots competing in team sports.
  • Microsumo.
  • Sumo printers smashing into each other.
  • Making a fighting toaster for the fighting toaster league.
  • Battle Bots vs. Robot Jox.
  • Department stores with an entire floor for stationery.
  • Buying Gundam models and never putting them together and just having a bunch of robot heads lying around.
  • Major innovations in robot mouse maze navigation.
  • A mouse with an inverted helicopter to keep it on the ground.
  • A 3D maze with a robot mouse that can walk on walls and ceilings.
  • Fun rugs fun time shapes to impress your teens with a trendy sense of style when you bring it into their room.
  • A rug covered with keywords from the 90s internet.
  • $87 for not that big of a rug.
  • Bonding with your child over ISP servers.
  • A visitor trying to bond with you about your ironic decor and you have to explain that sorry, no, it's supposed to be ironic.
  • The illuminated manuscript version of an the ironic internet rug.
  • A fantastic place to buy nuts and other bulk items.
  • A limit of 1 kilogram of tapioca pearls per customer.
  • Bringing the tapioca balls to life in the rice cooker.
  • Inventing a new way to dispose of tapioca pearls every single day.
  • Tiktok schticks that are connected to a minimum wage jobs so even if your tiktok starts making a bunch of money you still can't quit your shitty job.
  • Having anxiety dreams about the coffee shop you worked at years ago.
  • Non-mammalian milk enthusiasm.
  • Being someone's non-mammalian milk guy.
  • A bipedal walrus with jaundiced eyes in a jar the size of a walrus and it knows you're here.
  • Leaving a turtle in the park and it's a 50/50 tossup whether it immediately dies or has a litter of a thousand baby turtles that devour the entire ecosystem.
  • Companies that are named after the business that used to be in the building.
  • A 1950s sign with a bowling pin on it that says "Safeway."
  • Walking into the DNA lounge and demanding that they sequence some DNA.
  • Military challenge coins.
  • Meeting the world's best grandma and she hands you a "world's greatest grandma" mug to prove it.
  • Seek god coin??

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+jPDiFaju ]]> Jim Stormdancer 197. It's No Moist Shit, But I'll Eat It https://topiclords.com/its-no-moist-shit-but-ill-eat-it e388a089-4fbf-4c12-a209-6755e5b510b6 Mon, 31 Jul 2023 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Mikel and Diana. We discuss banishment as a legal punishment, why it's so hard for apes to admit they're wrong, Minesweeper speed running, Sometime During Eternity, marsupial reproduction, Venture Bros., and the origin of dungeons. 58:24 true Lords:

Topics:

  • Banishment is still legal as a punishment in Georgia (the state)
  • From an evolutionary standpoint, why is it so hard to admit you're wrong?
  • Minesweeper speed running
  • Sometime During Eternity, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
  • Marsupials: Have they got it figured out?
  • Venture Bros. rewatch - things gleaned from a binge rewatch 20 years after it debuted, ahead of the finale
    • Esper says: "Also I second the Venture Bros. recommendation, and double-triple the content warning. The first season is rough not only in terms of political correctness, but some of the episode setups are just 'let's watch the characters be racist for a while and assume that's funny.' They work their way out of it mostly after the first season, and those episodes aren't even great, but are completely necessary for laying groundwork going forward. And it's really worth it to get through them! Everything after season 1 is excellent, and everything from seasons 3 to 7 is truly some of the best television writing of all time."
  • The origin of dungeons

Microtopics:

  • Vidjagame Apocalypse.
  • 30 20 10.
  • The day when new games used to come out.
  • Why podcasts come out at certain times.
  • Banishing someone from 158 counties.
  • Taking drugs to regulate your brain chemistry.
  • Figuring out some way you were right every time you're wrong.
  • Signaling and countersignaling.
  • Being so high status that you don't even need to pretend to be right.
  • Coming back two days later to prove that Steven Spielberg directed Star Wars.
  • Minesweeper board generation.
  • The Dreamboard.
  • 16 vs 32-bit PRNGs.
  • Speed running a game regardless of whether it's fun to speed run.
  • Watching speed run attempts live.
  • Using up one of your Life Stalks.
  • The shame of confusing Minesweeper and Minecraft.
  • The origins of Minesweeper.
  • Minesweeper the Game the Movie.
  • Harrison Ford on a boat fighting aliens.
  • Rihanna on a boat fighting aliens.
  • Manning an aircraft carrier with four guys, two of whom are over 90.
  • Back when they were still making movie video games.
  • An Advance Wars clone made as a tie-in to the movie Battleship.
  • Some scroll-type parchments that some henchmen left lying around the Dead Sea.
  • Jesus sitting in on your jazz combo.
  • Sitting there looking dead.
  • Going all in on Beatnik Jargon.
  • Asking centenarian beat legend Lawrence Ferlinghetti what he thinks about Minesweeper.
  • Flies holding their noses to eat durians.
  • If humans had elephant-length gestation periods and the kids came out walking and talking.
  • Giving birth to peanut-sized babies and expecting the babies to climb into your pouch on their own.
  • Having half a dozen kids because you need help emailing PDFs.
  • Adorable tiny possums that look like weasels all over South America.
  • Marsupials transplanting babies between pouches.
  • Some K-Type shit.
  • Munching on opiates your entire life.
  • What if Jonny Quest grew up to become a fail son?
  • The slowest rollout of a TV show in the history of television.
  • Gee willikers, I can't wait to solve this mystery!
  • Making a sequel that reflects the fact that you've grown since you made the original.
  • Adventure cartoon archetypes.
  • David Bowie showing up and yelling at you.
  • The deadly sting of the monarch butterfly.
  • One of the things that you put up against your throat and it vibrates.
  • A little straw that you put in your mouth to make it sound like you're talking through a didgeridoo.
  • What a regular person thinks of when they hear "dungeon" vs. what a nerd thinks of.
  • What was this place before it was a monster-infested dungeon?
  • A labyrinth full of guys.
  • Fill it with a few wonders and you got yourself a dungeon.
  • The Tomb of the Qin Emperor.
  • Why they only made some of the pharaoh's tomb a trap, rather than the whole thing.
  • Letters we used to have.
  • The German letter that looks like a big B.
  • Mewterhead.
  • La Fiesta de Quince Anos.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

  • Banishment is still legal as a punishment in Georgia (the state)
  • From an evolutionary standpoint, why is it so hard to admit you're wrong?
  • Minesweeper speed running
  • Sometime During Eternity, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
  • Marsupials: Have they got it figured out?
  • Venture Bros. rewatch - things gleaned from a binge rewatch 20 years after it debuted, ahead of the finale
    • Esper says: "Also I second the Venture Bros. recommendation, and double-triple the content warning. The first season is rough not only in terms of political correctness, but some of the episode setups are just 'let's watch the characters be racist for a while and assume that's funny.' They work their way out of it mostly after the first season, and those episodes aren't even great, but are completely necessary for laying groundwork going forward. And it's really worth it to get through them! Everything after season 1 is excellent, and everything from seasons 3 to 7 is truly some of the best television writing of all time."
  • The origin of dungeons

Microtopics:

  • Vidjagame Apocalypse.
  • 30 20 10.
  • The day when new games used to come out.
  • Why podcasts come out at certain times.
  • Banishing someone from 158 counties.
  • Taking drugs to regulate your brain chemistry.
  • Figuring out some way you were right every time you're wrong.
  • Signaling and countersignaling.
  • Being so high status that you don't even need to pretend to be right.
  • Coming back two days later to prove that Steven Spielberg directed Star Wars.
  • Minesweeper board generation.
  • The Dreamboard.
  • 16 vs 32-bit PRNGs.
  • Speed running a game regardless of whether it's fun to speed run.
  • Watching speed run attempts live.
  • Using up one of your Life Stalks.
  • The shame of confusing Minesweeper and Minecraft.
  • The origins of Minesweeper.
  • Minesweeper the Game the Movie.
  • Harrison Ford on a boat fighting aliens.
  • Rihanna on a boat fighting aliens.
  • Manning an aircraft carrier with four guys, two of whom are over 90.
  • Back when they were still making movie video games.
  • An Advance Wars clone made as a tie-in to the movie Battleship.
  • Some scroll-type parchments that some henchmen left lying around the Dead Sea.
  • Jesus sitting in on your jazz combo.
  • Sitting there looking dead.
  • Going all in on Beatnik Jargon.
  • Asking centenarian beat legend Lawrence Ferlinghetti what he thinks about Minesweeper.
  • Flies holding their noses to eat durians.
  • If humans had elephant-length gestation periods and the kids came out walking and talking.
  • Giving birth to peanut-sized babies and expecting the babies to climb into your pouch on their own.
  • Having half a dozen kids because you need help emailing PDFs.
  • Adorable tiny possums that look like weasels all over South America.
  • Marsupials transplanting babies between pouches.
  • Some K-Type shit.
  • Munching on opiates your entire life.
  • What if Jonny Quest grew up to become a fail son?
  • The slowest rollout of a TV show in the history of television.
  • Gee willikers, I can't wait to solve this mystery!
  • Making a sequel that reflects the fact that you've grown since you made the original.
  • Adventure cartoon archetypes.
  • David Bowie showing up and yelling at you.
  • The deadly sting of the monarch butterfly.
  • One of the things that you put up against your throat and it vibrates.
  • A little straw that you put in your mouth to make it sound like you're talking through a didgeridoo.
  • What a regular person thinks of when they hear "dungeon" vs. what a nerd thinks of.
  • What was this place before it was a monster-infested dungeon?
  • A labyrinth full of guys.
  • Fill it with a few wonders and you got yourself a dungeon.
  • The Tomb of the Qin Emperor.
  • Why they only made some of the pharaoh's tomb a trap, rather than the whole thing.
  • Letters we used to have.
  • The German letter that looks like a big B.
  • Mewterhead.
  • La Fiesta de Quince Anos.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

  • Banishment is still legal as a punishment in Georgia (the state)
  • From an evolutionary standpoint, why is it so hard to admit you're wrong?
  • Minesweeper speed running
  • Sometime During Eternity, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
  • Marsupials: Have they got it figured out?
  • Venture Bros. rewatch - things gleaned from a binge rewatch 20 years after it debuted, ahead of the finale
    • Esper says: "Also I second the Venture Bros. recommendation, and double-triple the content warning. The first season is rough not only in terms of political correctness, but some of the episode setups are just 'let's watch the characters be racist for a while and assume that's funny.' They work their way out of it mostly after the first season, and those episodes aren't even great, but are completely necessary for laying groundwork going forward. And it's really worth it to get through them! Everything after season 1 is excellent, and everything from seasons 3 to 7 is truly some of the best television writing of all time."
  • The origin of dungeons

Microtopics:

  • Vidjagame Apocalypse.
  • 30 20 10.
  • The day when new games used to come out.
  • Why podcasts come out at certain times.
  • Banishing someone from 158 counties.
  • Taking drugs to regulate your brain chemistry.
  • Figuring out some way you were right every time you're wrong.
  • Signaling and countersignaling.
  • Being so high status that you don't even need to pretend to be right.
  • Coming back two days later to prove that Steven Spielberg directed Star Wars.
  • Minesweeper board generation.
  • The Dreamboard.
  • 16 vs 32-bit PRNGs.
  • Speed running a game regardless of whether it's fun to speed run.
  • Watching speed run attempts live.
  • Using up one of your Life Stalks.
  • The shame of confusing Minesweeper and Minecraft.
  • The origins of Minesweeper.
  • Minesweeper the Game the Movie.
  • Harrison Ford on a boat fighting aliens.
  • Rihanna on a boat fighting aliens.
  • Manning an aircraft carrier with four guys, two of whom are over 90.
  • Back when they were still making movie video games.
  • An Advance Wars clone made as a tie-in to the movie Battleship.
  • Some scroll-type parchments that some henchmen left lying around the Dead Sea.
  • Jesus sitting in on your jazz combo.
  • Sitting there looking dead.
  • Going all in on Beatnik Jargon.
  • Asking centenarian beat legend Lawrence Ferlinghetti what he thinks about Minesweeper.
  • Flies holding their noses to eat durians.
  • If humans had elephant-length gestation periods and the kids came out walking and talking.
  • Giving birth to peanut-sized babies and expecting the babies to climb into your pouch on their own.
  • Having half a dozen kids because you need help emailing PDFs.
  • Adorable tiny possums that look like weasels all over South America.
  • Marsupials transplanting babies between pouches.
  • Some K-Type shit.
  • Munching on opiates your entire life.
  • What if Jonny Quest grew up to become a fail son?
  • The slowest rollout of a TV show in the history of television.
  • Gee willikers, I can't wait to solve this mystery!
  • Making a sequel that reflects the fact that you've grown since you made the original.
  • Adventure cartoon archetypes.
  • David Bowie showing up and yelling at you.
  • The deadly sting of the monarch butterfly.
  • One of the things that you put up against your throat and it vibrates.
  • A little straw that you put in your mouth to make it sound like you're talking through a didgeridoo.
  • What a regular person thinks of when they hear "dungeon" vs. what a nerd thinks of.
  • What was this place before it was a monster-infested dungeon?
  • A labyrinth full of guys.
  • Fill it with a few wonders and you got yourself a dungeon.
  • The Tomb of the Qin Emperor.
  • Why they only made some of the pharaoh's tomb a trap, rather than the whole thing.
  • Letters we used to have.
  • The German letter that looks like a big B.
  • Mewterhead.
  • La Fiesta de Quince Anos.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+OOTG_zBH ]]> Jim Stormdancer 196. Active Time Battle Internet Relay Chat https://topiclords.com/active-time-battle-internet-relay-chat 657a5ed9-37d8-4469-87a7-06787c24a752 Mon, 24 Jul 2023 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: John and John. We discuss juxtaposition, farewell to Cheap Bots Done Quick, the Temple of Apshai manual, "Seen and Not Seen" by Talking Heads, and the new Zelda game several weeks in. 1:11:01 true Lords:

  • John
  • JohnB

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • John and John as well.
  • A John of Many Names.
  • The Frog Fractions Soundtrack of the Decade Edition Vinyl.
  • Being sued for copying a song's vibes.
  • Aldi Barcodes.
  • Noise-cancelling the sound of eating crackers.
  • Just scan it. It's food.
  • A word full of high-scoring Scrabble tiles.
  • Juxtaposing a police station.
  • A history of "juxtapose" waiting in the wings like a Batman origin story.
  • Pre-35 words.
  • Biff going back in time to 17th century Prague to be thrown out a window but surviving because he landed in a pile of manure.
  • An upbeat song about tolerating people that you hate.
  • The invention of defenestration.
  • Farewell to Cheap Bots Done Quick.
  • Sharing a fun tweet.
  • Being technical enough to look at nested braces and know what that means.
  • Bots in Space.
  • Capcom vs. Everyone.
  • Temple of Apshai.
  • A text adventure except they couldn't fit any of the text on the floppy.
  • Action RPGs that demand you manage your stats and inventory on paper.
  • Solo D&D adventure books.
  • Dragon's on a Chip.
  • Video games that come with books that you need to read to play the game.
  • A thick boy, full of lore.
  • The philosophy of city planning.
  • What is an Earth for?
  • Tunic.
  • What StarTropics did with the letter.
  • Sentinel Worlds One: Future Magic.
  • [See paragraph 3.]
  • 1980s computer game copy protection.
  • Bringing the Shenzhen I/O manual to work to study it on the job.
  • Why the main campaign in Shenzhen I/O is so much better than the bonus campaign.
  • Keeping an ideal facial structure fixed in your mind for years.
  • Musical mumbling.
  • Songs that are just a Shower Thoughts post.
  • The long-term discipline of adjusting your facial features over time.
  • Thinking about wider, thinner lips during the instrumental breakdown.
  • Trying to save SACD albums.
  • The Depths.
  • Sharing your location precisely.
  • There are four places: go to them.
  • The Ghost King Rauru.
  • The Calamity Ganon Calamity.
  • A dragon with really weird exaggerated eyelashes that you can run around on.
  • Giving up on horses.
  • Unique items of dubious usefulness.
  • Okay boomer, it's called a Purah Pad now.
  • Finding a tiny rock to jump off of to go into bullet time.
  • The two-fan hoverbike.
  • Skating around atop frozen gourmet meat.
]]> Lords:

  • John
  • JohnB

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • John and John as well.
  • A John of Many Names.
  • The Frog Fractions Soundtrack of the Decade Edition Vinyl.
  • Being sued for copying a song's vibes.
  • Aldi Barcodes.
  • Noise-cancelling the sound of eating crackers.
  • Just scan it. It's food.
  • A word full of high-scoring Scrabble tiles.
  • Juxtaposing a police station.
  • A history of "juxtapose" waiting in the wings like a Batman origin story.
  • Pre-35 words.
  • Biff going back in time to 17th century Prague to be thrown out a window but surviving because he landed in a pile of manure.
  • An upbeat song about tolerating people that you hate.
  • The invention of defenestration.
  • Farewell to Cheap Bots Done Quick.
  • Sharing a fun tweet.
  • Being technical enough to look at nested braces and know what that means.
  • Bots in Space.
  • Capcom vs. Everyone.
  • Temple of Apshai.
  • A text adventure except they couldn't fit any of the text on the floppy.
  • Action RPGs that demand you manage your stats and inventory on paper.
  • Solo D&D adventure books.
  • Dragon's on a Chip.
  • Video games that come with books that you need to read to play the game.
  • A thick boy, full of lore.
  • The philosophy of city planning.
  • What is an Earth for?
  • Tunic.
  • What StarTropics did with the letter.
  • Sentinel Worlds One: Future Magic.
  • [See paragraph 3.]
  • 1980s computer game copy protection.
  • Bringing the Shenzhen I/O manual to work to study it on the job.
  • Why the main campaign in Shenzhen I/O is so much better than the bonus campaign.
  • Keeping an ideal facial structure fixed in your mind for years.
  • Musical mumbling.
  • Songs that are just a Shower Thoughts post.
  • The long-term discipline of adjusting your facial features over time.
  • Thinking about wider, thinner lips during the instrumental breakdown.
  • Trying to save SACD albums.
  • The Depths.
  • Sharing your location precisely.
  • There are four places: go to them.
  • The Ghost King Rauru.
  • The Calamity Ganon Calamity.
  • A dragon with really weird exaggerated eyelashes that you can run around on.
  • Giving up on horses.
  • Unique items of dubious usefulness.
  • Okay boomer, it's called a Purah Pad now.
  • Finding a tiny rock to jump off of to go into bullet time.
  • The two-fan hoverbike.
  • Skating around atop frozen gourmet meat.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • John
  • JohnB

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • John and John as well.
  • A John of Many Names.
  • The Frog Fractions Soundtrack of the Decade Edition Vinyl.
  • Being sued for copying a song's vibes.
  • Aldi Barcodes.
  • Noise-cancelling the sound of eating crackers.
  • Just scan it. It's food.
  • A word full of high-scoring Scrabble tiles.
  • Juxtaposing a police station.
  • A history of "juxtapose" waiting in the wings like a Batman origin story.
  • Pre-35 words.
  • Biff going back in time to 17th century Prague to be thrown out a window but surviving because he landed in a pile of manure.
  • An upbeat song about tolerating people that you hate.
  • The invention of defenestration.
  • Farewell to Cheap Bots Done Quick.
  • Sharing a fun tweet.
  • Being technical enough to look at nested braces and know what that means.
  • Bots in Space.
  • Capcom vs. Everyone.
  • Temple of Apshai.
  • A text adventure except they couldn't fit any of the text on the floppy.
  • Action RPGs that demand you manage your stats and inventory on paper.
  • Solo D&D adventure books.
  • Dragon's on a Chip.
  • Video games that come with books that you need to read to play the game.
  • A thick boy, full of lore.
  • The philosophy of city planning.
  • What is an Earth for?
  • Tunic.
  • What StarTropics did with the letter.
  • Sentinel Worlds One: Future Magic.
  • [See paragraph 3.]
  • 1980s computer game copy protection.
  • Bringing the Shenzhen I/O manual to work to study it on the job.
  • Why the main campaign in Shenzhen I/O is so much better than the bonus campaign.
  • Keeping an ideal facial structure fixed in your mind for years.
  • Musical mumbling.
  • Songs that are just a Shower Thoughts post.
  • The long-term discipline of adjusting your facial features over time.
  • Thinking about wider, thinner lips during the instrumental breakdown.
  • Trying to save SACD albums.
  • The Depths.
  • Sharing your location precisely.
  • There are four places: go to them.
  • The Ghost King Rauru.
  • The Calamity Ganon Calamity.
  • A dragon with really weird exaggerated eyelashes that you can run around on.
  • Giving up on horses.
  • Unique items of dubious usefulness.
  • Okay boomer, it's called a Purah Pad now.
  • Finding a tiny rock to jump off of to go into bullet time.
  • The two-fan hoverbike.
  • Skating around atop frozen gourmet meat.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+cpe58wiN ]]> Jim Stormdancer 195. Persian Castle Day at The Climbing Gym https://topiclords.com/persian-castle-day-at-the-climbing-gym 0e545454-be2c-44ac-be3d-4c790176a8db Mon, 17 Jul 2023 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Alexicographic and Kev. We discuss whether sports are good, haunted articles of clothing, burrito R&D, Casey at the Bat, becoming a VTuber after losing a bet, and TV show mixtapes 52:05 true Lords:

  • Alexicographic
  • Kev

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Streaming daily.
  • The Tears of the Kingdom thread in the Topic Lords discord.
  • A rigid self-conception as someone who does not like sports.
  • Roller derby.
  • Whether skateboarding is a sport.
  • Going fast and shoving past people.
  • An athletic endeavor.
  • How much hockey fights feed back into the actual game.
  • Baseball nerds.
  • Chart Party.
  • Storytelling using data.
  • The Bob Emergency.
  • Seven Bobs left, and they're all aged.
  • Who was the top Bob?
  • East Bay Bike Party.
  • Floyd Rose Bridge Valves.
  • Figuring out how to make video games without involving Bay Area salaries.
  • Persian Castle Day at the climbing gym.
  • Taking the leather jacket that your drug dealer OD'd in.
  • Signing the bathroom guest book every time you poop at your grandma's house.
  • Schwarzenegger DNA on eBay.
  • The Clothes People Have Died In line at Value Village.
  • This Shirt Will Kill You.
  • A detailed cosmology of how hauntings work.
  • Ghosts of people who are still alive, following you around and asking for their hat back.
  • Taco Shop Guacamole.
  • A completely different foodstuff from what you were accustomed to.
  • Wet Burritos.
  • Airport Head.
  • A 3 oz container of guacamole that the TSA will allow on the plane.
  • Burrito night at the Stormdancer household.
  • Lulus and Cakes.
  • Spheroids.
  • Baseball Hagiography.
  • A Quora reply from three years ago.
  • Searching for cake and Google asking you to prove that you're not a robot.
  • Bethlehem slang from 1888.
  • Vtuber tooling.
  • Picking a punishment for yourself that you already want to do.
  • Animated fish backgrounds.
  • A more compatible CUDA API.
  • Mixtapes of TV episodes and video game levels.
  • Someone's top ten list of Star Trek episodes.
  • What the kids call Cliff's Notes.
  • The skill of understanding someone else's taste.
  • These are the songs that I love, perhaps you will also love them and if so we could fall in love.
  • Exchanging Spotify playlists because that's what we have now instead of mixtapes.
  • Trying to get into Homestuck via Problem Sleuth.
  • An 11 year old with the patience to wait a year to read Harry Potter book 2.
  • Phish Food.
  • Recording Topic Lords before lunch and getting a well-deserved burrito afterwards.
]]> Lords:

  • Alexicographic
  • Kev

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Streaming daily.
  • The Tears of the Kingdom thread in the Topic Lords discord.
  • A rigid self-conception as someone who does not like sports.
  • Roller derby.
  • Whether skateboarding is a sport.
  • Going fast and shoving past people.
  • An athletic endeavor.
  • How much hockey fights feed back into the actual game.
  • Baseball nerds.
  • Chart Party.
  • Storytelling using data.
  • The Bob Emergency.
  • Seven Bobs left, and they're all aged.
  • Who was the top Bob?
  • East Bay Bike Party.
  • Floyd Rose Bridge Valves.
  • Figuring out how to make video games without involving Bay Area salaries.
  • Persian Castle Day at the climbing gym.
  • Taking the leather jacket that your drug dealer OD'd in.
  • Signing the bathroom guest book every time you poop at your grandma's house.
  • Schwarzenegger DNA on eBay.
  • The Clothes People Have Died In line at Value Village.
  • This Shirt Will Kill You.
  • A detailed cosmology of how hauntings work.
  • Ghosts of people who are still alive, following you around and asking for their hat back.
  • Taco Shop Guacamole.
  • A completely different foodstuff from what you were accustomed to.
  • Wet Burritos.
  • Airport Head.
  • A 3 oz container of guacamole that the TSA will allow on the plane.
  • Burrito night at the Stormdancer household.
  • Lulus and Cakes.
  • Spheroids.
  • Baseball Hagiography.
  • A Quora reply from three years ago.
  • Searching for cake and Google asking you to prove that you're not a robot.
  • Bethlehem slang from 1888.
  • Vtuber tooling.
  • Picking a punishment for yourself that you already want to do.
  • Animated fish backgrounds.
  • A more compatible CUDA API.
  • Mixtapes of TV episodes and video game levels.
  • Someone's top ten list of Star Trek episodes.
  • What the kids call Cliff's Notes.
  • The skill of understanding someone else's taste.
  • These are the songs that I love, perhaps you will also love them and if so we could fall in love.
  • Exchanging Spotify playlists because that's what we have now instead of mixtapes.
  • Trying to get into Homestuck via Problem Sleuth.
  • An 11 year old with the patience to wait a year to read Harry Potter book 2.
  • Phish Food.
  • Recording Topic Lords before lunch and getting a well-deserved burrito afterwards.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Alexicographic
  • Kev

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Streaming daily.
  • The Tears of the Kingdom thread in the Topic Lords discord.
  • A rigid self-conception as someone who does not like sports.
  • Roller derby.
  • Whether skateboarding is a sport.
  • Going fast and shoving past people.
  • An athletic endeavor.
  • How much hockey fights feed back into the actual game.
  • Baseball nerds.
  • Chart Party.
  • Storytelling using data.
  • The Bob Emergency.
  • Seven Bobs left, and they're all aged.
  • Who was the top Bob?
  • East Bay Bike Party.
  • Floyd Rose Bridge Valves.
  • Figuring out how to make video games without involving Bay Area salaries.
  • Persian Castle Day at the climbing gym.
  • Taking the leather jacket that your drug dealer OD'd in.
  • Signing the bathroom guest book every time you poop at your grandma's house.
  • Schwarzenegger DNA on eBay.
  • The Clothes People Have Died In line at Value Village.
  • This Shirt Will Kill You.
  • A detailed cosmology of how hauntings work.
  • Ghosts of people who are still alive, following you around and asking for their hat back.
  • Taco Shop Guacamole.
  • A completely different foodstuff from what you were accustomed to.
  • Wet Burritos.
  • Airport Head.
  • A 3 oz container of guacamole that the TSA will allow on the plane.
  • Burrito night at the Stormdancer household.
  • Lulus and Cakes.
  • Spheroids.
  • Baseball Hagiography.
  • A Quora reply from three years ago.
  • Searching for cake and Google asking you to prove that you're not a robot.
  • Bethlehem slang from 1888.
  • Vtuber tooling.
  • Picking a punishment for yourself that you already want to do.
  • Animated fish backgrounds.
  • A more compatible CUDA API.
  • Mixtapes of TV episodes and video game levels.
  • Someone's top ten list of Star Trek episodes.
  • What the kids call Cliff's Notes.
  • The skill of understanding someone else's taste.
  • These are the songs that I love, perhaps you will also love them and if so we could fall in love.
  • Exchanging Spotify playlists because that's what we have now instead of mixtapes.
  • Trying to get into Homestuck via Problem Sleuth.
  • An 11 year old with the patience to wait a year to read Harry Potter book 2.
  • Phish Food.
  • Recording Topic Lords before lunch and getting a well-deserved burrito afterwards.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+6BFOMIVc ]]> Jim Stormdancer 194. How Good It Was, To Have a Toe https://topiclords.com/how-good-it-was-to-have-a-toe 96a5fc09-5f39-4497-808b-5732a965e01c Mon, 10 Jul 2023 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Danny and Danny. We discuss redundancy of song lyrics, renaming perfect fourths and fifths, Mark Salud's "Forever in Summer," Upon Julia's Clothes, Oh yes, celebrity deaths getting out of control, and ZZT achievements. 1:19:15 true Lords:

  • Danny
  • Danny

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Which Danny should go first.
  • The Noclip Archive.
  • Night Brunch.
  • Plugging before demonstrating your plugworthiness.
  • Whatever happened to MySpace.
  • The gnarliest weirdest thing you can get away with.
  • Stop making weird things!
  • Feeling passionately about individual words without considering their actual message.
  • Writing lyrics by stringing together abstract vowel sounds and then filling in the rest of the word later.
  • The native language of rock and roll.
  • Prisencolinensinainciusol.
  • Irish rap.
  • All the ways music is redundant.
  • A very inefficient way to communicate factual information.
  • The Mentos jingle.
  • Spoonman: a famous guy who played the spoons.
  • Music's ability to convey ideas that shouldn't be conveyed.
  • Teaching kids to love it.
  • What's perfect about a perfect fifth.
  • Music theory homework that calls it a "perfect unison."
  • Lydian to Locrian.
  • An extremely popular nostalgic songwriting device.
  • Trying to bring up topics out in the wild.
  • Even majorer then major.
  • What it means to be far from A.
  • A thing that happened on Public Access TV in San Diego.
  • Keyjazzing.
  • Weirdos making weirdo outsider art.
  • The tradition of using an Amiga 500 as a musical instrument.
  • Watching a musical performance by looking at the back of the performer's head.
  • Something to watch.
  • Economy of movement.
  • Playing drums so as to take up the most possible space.
  • The kind of singing that the Rock Band scoring system encourages.
  • Pre-singing the note so you're getting points as soon as the note starts.
  • Smutty poetry.
  • Whether singer songwriters have parentheses.
  • The Diamond Fleece.
  • Whether liquefaction is a Bay Area word.
  • Brave Vibrations.
  • What people thought was sexy in the 1600s.
  • Talking about a topic because people can hear you.
  • The 80s-90s thing of saying "as if"
  • America's Whitest City.
  • A phrase that Zoomers use to mean that they don't believe what they just said.
  • Investigating the Cool S for ten years.
  • Finding the Cool S in ancient Sumeria.
  • People in Latvia who don't know who Marilyn Manson is but they know he had a rib surgically removed.
  • The first celebrity.
  • Increasing numbers of celebrities.
  • Industrialized celebrity.
  • Adopting a future grief machine.
  • Practicing grief.
  • Several generations of digital fish.
  • Trugoy the Dove.
  • Disembodied consciousnesses living on a Dyson Sphere simulating Tina Turner's music.
  • Downsides of everyone living forever.
  • This is a mistake. (Here I go.)
  • Pre-dead.
  • Questions that will not be answered on this show because they are not topics.
  • Fish swimming in the background of someone's Zoom call.
  • What a time to not want to be alive!
  • Doing squats so you can get out of a chair.
  • Maximizing broken limbs while minimizing brain trauma.
  • Renaming Potomac Computer Systems to Epic Megagames.
  • ZZT: an Epic Game Store exclusive.
  • Caverns of Kroz.
  • An Amiga platformer sponsored by Chupa-Chups.
  • Retro Achievements.
  • Modding emulators to add achievements to old games.
  • Adding achievements to the Fairchild Channel F.
  • Achievements as a ludological device.
  • Assigning a point value to all the things your lizard brain needs an extra incentive for.
  • Citizen Game.
  • A game design trope that can be deployed with taste or not.
]]> Lords:

  • Danny
  • Danny

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Which Danny should go first.
  • The Noclip Archive.
  • Night Brunch.
  • Plugging before demonstrating your plugworthiness.
  • Whatever happened to MySpace.
  • The gnarliest weirdest thing you can get away with.
  • Stop making weird things!
  • Feeling passionately about individual words without considering their actual message.
  • Writing lyrics by stringing together abstract vowel sounds and then filling in the rest of the word later.
  • The native language of rock and roll.
  • Prisencolinensinainciusol.
  • Irish rap.
  • All the ways music is redundant.
  • A very inefficient way to communicate factual information.
  • The Mentos jingle.
  • Spoonman: a famous guy who played the spoons.
  • Music's ability to convey ideas that shouldn't be conveyed.
  • Teaching kids to love it.
  • What's perfect about a perfect fifth.
  • Music theory homework that calls it a "perfect unison."
  • Lydian to Locrian.
  • An extremely popular nostalgic songwriting device.
  • Trying to bring up topics out in the wild.
  • Even majorer then major.
  • What it means to be far from A.
  • A thing that happened on Public Access TV in San Diego.
  • Keyjazzing.
  • Weirdos making weirdo outsider art.
  • The tradition of using an Amiga 500 as a musical instrument.
  • Watching a musical performance by looking at the back of the performer's head.
  • Something to watch.
  • Economy of movement.
  • Playing drums so as to take up the most possible space.
  • The kind of singing that the Rock Band scoring system encourages.
  • Pre-singing the note so you're getting points as soon as the note starts.
  • Smutty poetry.
  • Whether singer songwriters have parentheses.
  • The Diamond Fleece.
  • Whether liquefaction is a Bay Area word.
  • Brave Vibrations.
  • What people thought was sexy in the 1600s.
  • Talking about a topic because people can hear you.
  • The 80s-90s thing of saying "as if"
  • America's Whitest City.
  • A phrase that Zoomers use to mean that they don't believe what they just said.
  • Investigating the Cool S for ten years.
  • Finding the Cool S in ancient Sumeria.
  • People in Latvia who don't know who Marilyn Manson is but they know he had a rib surgically removed.
  • The first celebrity.
  • Increasing numbers of celebrities.
  • Industrialized celebrity.
  • Adopting a future grief machine.
  • Practicing grief.
  • Several generations of digital fish.
  • Trugoy the Dove.
  • Disembodied consciousnesses living on a Dyson Sphere simulating Tina Turner's music.
  • Downsides of everyone living forever.
  • This is a mistake. (Here I go.)
  • Pre-dead.
  • Questions that will not be answered on this show because they are not topics.
  • Fish swimming in the background of someone's Zoom call.
  • What a time to not want to be alive!
  • Doing squats so you can get out of a chair.
  • Maximizing broken limbs while minimizing brain trauma.
  • Renaming Potomac Computer Systems to Epic Megagames.
  • ZZT: an Epic Game Store exclusive.
  • Caverns of Kroz.
  • An Amiga platformer sponsored by Chupa-Chups.
  • Retro Achievements.
  • Modding emulators to add achievements to old games.
  • Adding achievements to the Fairchild Channel F.
  • Achievements as a ludological device.
  • Assigning a point value to all the things your lizard brain needs an extra incentive for.
  • Citizen Game.
  • A game design trope that can be deployed with taste or not.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Danny
  • Danny

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Which Danny should go first.
  • The Noclip Archive.
  • Night Brunch.
  • Plugging before demonstrating your plugworthiness.
  • Whatever happened to MySpace.
  • The gnarliest weirdest thing you can get away with.
  • Stop making weird things!
  • Feeling passionately about individual words without considering their actual message.
  • Writing lyrics by stringing together abstract vowel sounds and then filling in the rest of the word later.
  • The native language of rock and roll.
  • Prisencolinensinainciusol.
  • Irish rap.
  • All the ways music is redundant.
  • A very inefficient way to communicate factual information.
  • The Mentos jingle.
  • Spoonman: a famous guy who played the spoons.
  • Music's ability to convey ideas that shouldn't be conveyed.
  • Teaching kids to love it.
  • What's perfect about a perfect fifth.
  • Music theory homework that calls it a "perfect unison."
  • Lydian to Locrian.
  • An extremely popular nostalgic songwriting device.
  • Trying to bring up topics out in the wild.
  • Even majorer then major.
  • What it means to be far from A.
  • A thing that happened on Public Access TV in San Diego.
  • Keyjazzing.
  • Weirdos making weirdo outsider art.
  • The tradition of using an Amiga 500 as a musical instrument.
  • Watching a musical performance by looking at the back of the performer's head.
  • Something to watch.
  • Economy of movement.
  • Playing drums so as to take up the most possible space.
  • The kind of singing that the Rock Band scoring system encourages.
  • Pre-singing the note so you're getting points as soon as the note starts.
  • Smutty poetry.
  • Whether singer songwriters have parentheses.
  • The Diamond Fleece.
  • Whether liquefaction is a Bay Area word.
  • Brave Vibrations.
  • What people thought was sexy in the 1600s.
  • Talking about a topic because people can hear you.
  • The 80s-90s thing of saying "as if"
  • America's Whitest City.
  • A phrase that Zoomers use to mean that they don't believe what they just said.
  • Investigating the Cool S for ten years.
  • Finding the Cool S in ancient Sumeria.
  • People in Latvia who don't know who Marilyn Manson is but they know he had a rib surgically removed.
  • The first celebrity.
  • Increasing numbers of celebrities.
  • Industrialized celebrity.
  • Adopting a future grief machine.
  • Practicing grief.
  • Several generations of digital fish.
  • Trugoy the Dove.
  • Disembodied consciousnesses living on a Dyson Sphere simulating Tina Turner's music.
  • Downsides of everyone living forever.
  • This is a mistake. (Here I go.)
  • Pre-dead.
  • Questions that will not be answered on this show because they are not topics.
  • Fish swimming in the background of someone's Zoom call.
  • What a time to not want to be alive!
  • Doing squats so you can get out of a chair.
  • Maximizing broken limbs while minimizing brain trauma.
  • Renaming Potomac Computer Systems to Epic Megagames.
  • ZZT: an Epic Game Store exclusive.
  • Caverns of Kroz.
  • An Amiga platformer sponsored by Chupa-Chups.
  • Retro Achievements.
  • Modding emulators to add achievements to old games.
  • Adding achievements to the Fairchild Channel F.
  • Achievements as a ludological device.
  • Assigning a point value to all the things your lizard brain needs an extra incentive for.
  • Citizen Game.
  • A game design trope that can be deployed with taste or not.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+o93rfupN ]]> Jim Stormdancer 193. Pull Down Your Murphy Toilet https://topiclords.com/pull-down-your-murphy-toilet dd553b6e-3808-46b4-ac07-2a1000b02fdc Mon, 03 Jul 2023 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Elena and Quil. We discuss Human Pudding, and why popular media can't depict bad art, only bad taste, getting a van, corporate art, and Lamentation Upon Surveying the Destruction of a Battlefield by Everett Patterson. 58:13 true Lords:

  • Elena
  • Quil

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • A very good New York Times crossword.
  • Feats of crossword construction that just make the experience of solving it worse.
  • Cottage cheese and jam.
  • Fruit on the bottom cottage cheese cups.
  • Whether cottage cheese comes pre-curdled.
  • An opportunity to make money by making the richest people in the world happier.
  • A jams and jellies bandolier.
  • Going to the arcade wearing a token dispenser but also your "I don't work here" shirt.
  • A band that only exists so that John Stamos can be annoyed by it.
  • Whether the average person would misspell a word on a grocery list.
  • Flashy rock and roll in which the lyricss are goofy and the goofy lyrics heightens the perceived quality of the music and the music heightens the perceived goofiness of the lyrics.
  • Various anime in which the kids are forming a band.
  • The Fictitious Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
  • The East coast DIY music scene.
  • Eyeball Skeleton.
  • Smoosh nee Smush.
  • My Pal God Records.
  • The Most Wanted Song and The Most Unwanted Song.
  • Ramadan jingles.
  • Putting all the things people hate the most in the same song.
  • Single Ladies.
  • The Rescue Rangers dimension where the Rescue Rangers theme song is still modulating upwards to this day.
  • Releasing an album on vinyl that ends in a locked groove with a shepard tone.
  • Sprinter Vans.
  • Diesel vans racking up a million miles.
  • Van life.
  • Vans with indoor plumbing.
  • How people react when someone is sleeping in a vehicle in their neighborhood.
  • How to recognize a van that somebody lives in.
  • Living in a Wal-Mart parking lot.
  • Campy camping.
  • Living the hash tag no car life.
  • Bimodal distribution of van dwellers.
  • The Minimum Viable Van.
  • Living six people to a bedroom and not liking it.
  • A landlady who cooks for everybody in the 1800s.
  • Outlawing boarding houses because there are too many single men being rowdy.
  • The Florida Project.
  • Moving into the hotel across the street for a day so that you don't live in one place long enough to become a tenant.
  • Guessing how squatting laws work.
  • Staples presenting a trailer for their new logo at E3.
  • The history of Industrial Musicals.
  • Hiring video artists and composers to create massive lavish displays of brand awareness.
  • The documentary that Kevin Smith made about Prince just for Prince to watch and never release.
  • Making a funny video for mystery people to watch for mystery purposes.
  • The KFC VR training app.
  • Living close to Hamburger University.
  • Rerecording Prince's "1999" for every year up to 2999.
  • The circus ad that Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite was based on.
  • O Deathy Death.
  • Most Foul Vowel.
  • The Alfred Joyce Kilmer Memorial Bad Poetry Contest.
  • The headspace you get into as an artist when you try to make bad art.
  • A good example of a bad poem.
  • Birdemic's environmental message.
  • A clown photobombing your movie soundtrack.
]]> Lords:

  • Elena
  • Quil

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • A very good New York Times crossword.
  • Feats of crossword construction that just make the experience of solving it worse.
  • Cottage cheese and jam.
  • Fruit on the bottom cottage cheese cups.
  • Whether cottage cheese comes pre-curdled.
  • An opportunity to make money by making the richest people in the world happier.
  • A jams and jellies bandolier.
  • Going to the arcade wearing a token dispenser but also your "I don't work here" shirt.
  • A band that only exists so that John Stamos can be annoyed by it.
  • Whether the average person would misspell a word on a grocery list.
  • Flashy rock and roll in which the lyricss are goofy and the goofy lyrics heightens the perceived quality of the music and the music heightens the perceived goofiness of the lyrics.
  • Various anime in which the kids are forming a band.
  • The Fictitious Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
  • The East coast DIY music scene.
  • Eyeball Skeleton.
  • Smoosh nee Smush.
  • My Pal God Records.
  • The Most Wanted Song and The Most Unwanted Song.
  • Ramadan jingles.
  • Putting all the things people hate the most in the same song.
  • Single Ladies.
  • The Rescue Rangers dimension where the Rescue Rangers theme song is still modulating upwards to this day.
  • Releasing an album on vinyl that ends in a locked groove with a shepard tone.
  • Sprinter Vans.
  • Diesel vans racking up a million miles.
  • Van life.
  • Vans with indoor plumbing.
  • How people react when someone is sleeping in a vehicle in their neighborhood.
  • How to recognize a van that somebody lives in.
  • Living in a Wal-Mart parking lot.
  • Campy camping.
  • Living the hash tag no car life.
  • Bimodal distribution of van dwellers.
  • The Minimum Viable Van.
  • Living six people to a bedroom and not liking it.
  • A landlady who cooks for everybody in the 1800s.
  • Outlawing boarding houses because there are too many single men being rowdy.
  • The Florida Project.
  • Moving into the hotel across the street for a day so that you don't live in one place long enough to become a tenant.
  • Guessing how squatting laws work.
  • Staples presenting a trailer for their new logo at E3.
  • The history of Industrial Musicals.
  • Hiring video artists and composers to create massive lavish displays of brand awareness.
  • The documentary that Kevin Smith made about Prince just for Prince to watch and never release.
  • Making a funny video for mystery people to watch for mystery purposes.
  • The KFC VR training app.
  • Living close to Hamburger University.
  • Rerecording Prince's "1999" for every year up to 2999.
  • The circus ad that Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite was based on.
  • O Deathy Death.
  • Most Foul Vowel.
  • The Alfred Joyce Kilmer Memorial Bad Poetry Contest.
  • The headspace you get into as an artist when you try to make bad art.
  • A good example of a bad poem.
  • Birdemic's environmental message.
  • A clown photobombing your movie soundtrack.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Elena
  • Quil

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • A very good New York Times crossword.
  • Feats of crossword construction that just make the experience of solving it worse.
  • Cottage cheese and jam.
  • Fruit on the bottom cottage cheese cups.
  • Whether cottage cheese comes pre-curdled.
  • An opportunity to make money by making the richest people in the world happier.
  • A jams and jellies bandolier.
  • Going to the arcade wearing a token dispenser but also your "I don't work here" shirt.
  • A band that only exists so that John Stamos can be annoyed by it.
  • Whether the average person would misspell a word on a grocery list.
  • Flashy rock and roll in which the lyricss are goofy and the goofy lyrics heightens the perceived quality of the music and the music heightens the perceived goofiness of the lyrics.
  • Various anime in which the kids are forming a band.
  • The Fictitious Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
  • The East coast DIY music scene.
  • Eyeball Skeleton.
  • Smoosh nee Smush.
  • My Pal God Records.
  • The Most Wanted Song and The Most Unwanted Song.
  • Ramadan jingles.
  • Putting all the things people hate the most in the same song.
  • Single Ladies.
  • The Rescue Rangers dimension where the Rescue Rangers theme song is still modulating upwards to this day.
  • Releasing an album on vinyl that ends in a locked groove with a shepard tone.
  • Sprinter Vans.
  • Diesel vans racking up a million miles.
  • Van life.
  • Vans with indoor plumbing.
  • How people react when someone is sleeping in a vehicle in their neighborhood.
  • How to recognize a van that somebody lives in.
  • Living in a Wal-Mart parking lot.
  • Campy camping.
  • Living the hash tag no car life.
  • Bimodal distribution of van dwellers.
  • The Minimum Viable Van.
  • Living six people to a bedroom and not liking it.
  • A landlady who cooks for everybody in the 1800s.
  • Outlawing boarding houses because there are too many single men being rowdy.
  • The Florida Project.
  • Moving into the hotel across the street for a day so that you don't live in one place long enough to become a tenant.
  • Guessing how squatting laws work.
  • Staples presenting a trailer for their new logo at E3.
  • The history of Industrial Musicals.
  • Hiring video artists and composers to create massive lavish displays of brand awareness.
  • The documentary that Kevin Smith made about Prince just for Prince to watch and never release.
  • Making a funny video for mystery people to watch for mystery purposes.
  • The KFC VR training app.
  • Living close to Hamburger University.
  • Rerecording Prince's "1999" for every year up to 2999.
  • The circus ad that Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite was based on.
  • O Deathy Death.
  • Most Foul Vowel.
  • The Alfred Joyce Kilmer Memorial Bad Poetry Contest.
  • The headspace you get into as an artist when you try to make bad art.
  • A good example of a bad poem.
  • Birdemic's environmental message.
  • A clown photobombing your movie soundtrack.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+E9-RkM-i ]]> Jim Stormdancer 192. The Prime Number Shitting Bear https://topiclords.com/the-prime-number-shitting-bear 4fac278b-58fb-4e30-9e08-587de91c3f48 Mon, 26 Jun 2023 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: CisHetKayfaber and Charlie. We discuss umbrellas, siphons, and other physical things that seem like hacky bullshit but actually work, articulating the shape of your internal cause-and-effect network and applying it as a learning superpower, archipelago.gg, and why a skill is less valued the more we love it 1:06:52 true Lords

  • CisHetKayfaber
  • Charlie

Topics:

  • Umbrellas, siphons, and other physical things that seem like hacky bullshit but actually work
  • Articulating the shape of your internal cause-and-effect network and applying it as a learning superpower (futurevision)
  • I'm not sure what archipelago.gg is but if I read this paragraph aloud maybe we can figure it out together
  • A copypasta from this page:
  • Why is a skill less valued the more we love it? Shouldn't it be the opposite? Is this arguable?

Microtopics:

  • Supporting someone's video game dream in Denmark.
  • Escaping from idle games.
  • Video games drawing the screen as often as they can.
  • The pauses getting longer and longer whenever the bear needs to shit a new prime number.
  • The prime number shitting bear getting constipated.
  • How to calculate prime numbers faster.
  • Math stuff.
  • A choo choo train of thought.
  • Meditation apps that play ads while you're in the middle of meditating.
  • The thing where you put your mouth on the tube and then have to spit out the gas or you get neurological damage.
  • Creating a low pressure system by sucking on a tube.
  • Whether umbrellas make sense.
  • Umbrella side-drip.
  • How bicycles stay upright.
  • Does a bicycle on a treadmill stay upright?
  • Pattern recognition.
  • Seeing a situation you recognize and understanding what's going to happen.
  • Predicting where someone's sentence is going to end up.
  • Putting your water glass in a zone where it's going to get knocked over.
  • The shape of your mind's cause and effect network.
  • Seeing scenes from the future, like in Law and Order.
  • Predicting the future so that you can be a more efficient organism.
  • Mashing air molecules at you.
  • Speaking a language that your coworkers don't.
  • Applying FutureVision to your creative process.
  • Nonlinear creative processes.
  • One unique large musical story where nothing repeats.
  • A physical task you are doing inside your head.
  • The pet that is closest to having a kid.
  • Importing a portal gun into Tears of the Kingdom.
  • Finding the hookshot in Metroid and your friend then bring able to use it in Link to the Past.
  • How to know what your friends want.
  • All the bad ways an idea could be implemented
  • Surprise boomerangs.
  • Archipelago's Release System.
  • The era of couch co-op games.
  • A multiplayer season where everybody picks a different game.
  • Doing the oration.
  • Who the colored lights in your keyboard are for.
  • Polygonal dudes with long hair head banging in the background.
  • Weirdly modern music.
  • Fifteen years of everything else.
  • Rhythm games vs. music games.
  • Living in a society.
  • Devaluing the skills you love.
  • Listening to a song and really appreciating its use of rests.
  • How note lengths and rests work in tracker music.
  • Stopping a note without starting a new one.
  • Running experiments to determine exactly when a note should stop.
  • The micro decisions of things that people don't think about or care about.
  • A bird named Mabel.
  • A bird figuring out how to enjoy music.
  • A tepid delicate series of notes.
  • Attractivision.
]]> Lords

  • CisHetKayfaber
  • Charlie

Topics:

  • Umbrellas, siphons, and other physical things that seem like hacky bullshit but actually work
  • Articulating the shape of your internal cause-and-effect network and applying it as a learning superpower (futurevision)
  • I'm not sure what archipelago.gg is but if I read this paragraph aloud maybe we can figure it out together
  • A copypasta from this page:
  • Why is a skill less valued the more we love it? Shouldn't it be the opposite? Is this arguable?

Microtopics:

  • Supporting someone's video game dream in Denmark.
  • Escaping from idle games.
  • Video games drawing the screen as often as they can.
  • The pauses getting longer and longer whenever the bear needs to shit a new prime number.
  • The prime number shitting bear getting constipated.
  • How to calculate prime numbers faster.
  • Math stuff.
  • A choo choo train of thought.
  • Meditation apps that play ads while you're in the middle of meditating.
  • The thing where you put your mouth on the tube and then have to spit out the gas or you get neurological damage.
  • Creating a low pressure system by sucking on a tube.
  • Whether umbrellas make sense.
  • Umbrella side-drip.
  • How bicycles stay upright.
  • Does a bicycle on a treadmill stay upright?
  • Pattern recognition.
  • Seeing a situation you recognize and understanding what's going to happen.
  • Predicting where someone's sentence is going to end up.
  • Putting your water glass in a zone where it's going to get knocked over.
  • The shape of your mind's cause and effect network.
  • Seeing scenes from the future, like in Law and Order.
  • Predicting the future so that you can be a more efficient organism.
  • Mashing air molecules at you.
  • Speaking a language that your coworkers don't.
  • Applying FutureVision to your creative process.
  • Nonlinear creative processes.
  • One unique large musical story where nothing repeats.
  • A physical task you are doing inside your head.
  • The pet that is closest to having a kid.
  • Importing a portal gun into Tears of the Kingdom.
  • Finding the hookshot in Metroid and your friend then bring able to use it in Link to the Past.
  • How to know what your friends want.
  • All the bad ways an idea could be implemented
  • Surprise boomerangs.
  • Archipelago's Release System.
  • The era of couch co-op games.
  • A multiplayer season where everybody picks a different game.
  • Doing the oration.
  • Who the colored lights in your keyboard are for.
  • Polygonal dudes with long hair head banging in the background.
  • Weirdly modern music.
  • Fifteen years of everything else.
  • Rhythm games vs. music games.
  • Living in a society.
  • Devaluing the skills you love.
  • Listening to a song and really appreciating its use of rests.
  • How note lengths and rests work in tracker music.
  • Stopping a note without starting a new one.
  • Running experiments to determine exactly when a note should stop.
  • The micro decisions of things that people don't think about or care about.
  • A bird named Mabel.
  • A bird figuring out how to enjoy music.
  • A tepid delicate series of notes.
  • Attractivision.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords

  • CisHetKayfaber
  • Charlie

Topics:

  • Umbrellas, siphons, and other physical things that seem like hacky bullshit but actually work
  • Articulating the shape of your internal cause-and-effect network and applying it as a learning superpower (futurevision)
  • I'm not sure what archipelago.gg is but if I read this paragraph aloud maybe we can figure it out together
  • A copypasta from this page:
  • Why is a skill less valued the more we love it? Shouldn't it be the opposite? Is this arguable?

Microtopics:

  • Supporting someone's video game dream in Denmark.
  • Escaping from idle games.
  • Video games drawing the screen as often as they can.
  • The pauses getting longer and longer whenever the bear needs to shit a new prime number.
  • The prime number shitting bear getting constipated.
  • How to calculate prime numbers faster.
  • Math stuff.
  • A choo choo train of thought.
  • Meditation apps that play ads while you're in the middle of meditating.
  • The thing where you put your mouth on the tube and then have to spit out the gas or you get neurological damage.
  • Creating a low pressure system by sucking on a tube.
  • Whether umbrellas make sense.
  • Umbrella side-drip.
  • How bicycles stay upright.
  • Does a bicycle on a treadmill stay upright?
  • Pattern recognition.
  • Seeing a situation you recognize and understanding what's going to happen.
  • Predicting where someone's sentence is going to end up.
  • Putting your water glass in a zone where it's going to get knocked over.
  • The shape of your mind's cause and effect network.
  • Seeing scenes from the future, like in Law and Order.
  • Predicting the future so that you can be a more efficient organism.
  • Mashing air molecules at you.
  • Speaking a language that your coworkers don't.
  • Applying FutureVision to your creative process.
  • Nonlinear creative processes.
  • One unique large musical story where nothing repeats.
  • A physical task you are doing inside your head.
  • The pet that is closest to having a kid.
  • Importing a portal gun into Tears of the Kingdom.
  • Finding the hookshot in Metroid and your friend then bring able to use it in Link to the Past.
  • How to know what your friends want.
  • All the bad ways an idea could be implemented
  • Surprise boomerangs.
  • Archipelago's Release System.
  • The era of couch co-op games.
  • A multiplayer season where everybody picks a different game.
  • Doing the oration.
  • Who the colored lights in your keyboard are for.
  • Polygonal dudes with long hair head banging in the background.
  • Weirdly modern music.
  • Fifteen years of everything else.
  • Rhythm games vs. music games.
  • Living in a society.
  • Devaluing the skills you love.
  • Listening to a song and really appreciating its use of rests.
  • How note lengths and rests work in tracker music.
  • Stopping a note without starting a new one.
  • Running experiments to determine exactly when a note should stop.
  • The micro decisions of things that people don't think about or care about.
  • A bird named Mabel.
  • A bird figuring out how to enjoy music.
  • A tepid delicate series of notes.
  • Attractivision.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+ogGMULYp ]]> Jim Stormdancer 191. Carbonated Cream of Mushroom Latte https://topiclords.com/carbonated-cream-of-mushroom-latte fea884c2-5843-4d6b-9bf7-3326e3e2a782 Mon, 19 Jun 2023 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Chris and Wacy. We discuss crafting little guys, negotiating how to play Zelda together, cream of mushroom latte, ChatGPT's poem about Zelda, and climbing real rocks. 1:03:16 true Lords:

  • Chris
  • Wacy

Topics:

  • Crafting little guys
  • Negotiating how to play Zelda together
  • Cream of mushroom latte
  • ChatGPT wrote a poem about zelda
  • Climbing real rocks

Microtopics:

  • The Marble Hornets/Slender Man oeuvre.
  • Copying and pasting a video.
  • Sharing a movie you liked with a friend over IM by copying and pasting the title.
  • The turnip in Breath of the Wild.
  • Attempting and failing to enjoy wood carving.
  • Stabbing the Korok until it is less fuzzy.
  • A Snapchat filter that makes it look like you're made of felt.
  • Losing your needle-felted Lorax and getting upset.
  • Kirby eating Halo.
  • Hobbies that double as fidget toys.
  • Carving a stick into a squirrel.
  • Finding polymer clay out in the woods.
  • Naturally-occurring fission reactors.
  • Nature with really good graphic design.
  • Sharing a Zelda save with your life partner and learning a lot about each other.
  • Finding every turnip.
  • Learning spoilers at an interesting space.
  • The huge thing.
  • Target's 30-day return policy.
  • What Switch games support local wireless multiplayer.
  • Playing halfway through a video game before you figure out the most of the systems.
  • Stirring until the lumps go away.
  • Kombucha milk.
  • An incredibly cheap gas.
  • The Sus Engineering DIY carbonation guide.
  • Cream of Cow Latte.
  • Target getting out the UV light to detect traces of cream of mushroom soup on the espresso machine you're trying to return.
  • Frothy oily coffees.
  • Inventing a culinary taxonomy in which mushrooms and cheese are both fruit.
  • Sweet cheese and savory fruit.
  • Sweet cheesus!
  • Making a yes or no answer incredibly long.
  • Rewriting each paragraph until it ends with a word on a line by itself.
  • Rapping about Zelda in 1980s.
  • Finding plot holes in this poem about the Legend of Zelda.
  • Using video games to ignore that you're on a plane for six hours.
  • Horror poems.
  • "A Crow Looked at Me" by Mt. Eerie.
  • Knowing why someone wrote an album but not why people listen to it.
  • Bad Two-Sentence Horror.
  • Whether Poe's The Raven counts as horror.
  • Businesses named after the thing that the building they're in used to be used for.
  • Berkeley Bowl's produce section.
  • Climbing a boulder that is not labeled with its difficulty level.
  • Difficulty inflation at the climbing gym.
  • How rocks are shaped.
  • A lump that you pinch with your whole hand.
  • Reading about a weird thing in Harry Potter and not knowing if it's weird because it's a magical kingdom or if that's how England does things.
  • What camping is like in England.
  • Taking a four year old to a parkour gym.
  • Being a kid and looking forward to finally growing tall enough to skate on the power lines.
  • A table full of rock obstacle courses.
  • The standards body that certifies what playground equipment is safe to install.
  • Old Enough.
  • Achieving the Milk Task.
  • Not teaching children cursive.
  • Having a name because your mom liked it.
]]> Lords:

  • Chris
  • Wacy

Topics:

  • Crafting little guys
  • Negotiating how to play Zelda together
  • Cream of mushroom latte
  • ChatGPT wrote a poem about zelda
  • Climbing real rocks

Microtopics:

  • The Marble Hornets/Slender Man oeuvre.
  • Copying and pasting a video.
  • Sharing a movie you liked with a friend over IM by copying and pasting the title.
  • The turnip in Breath of the Wild.
  • Attempting and failing to enjoy wood carving.
  • Stabbing the Korok until it is less fuzzy.
  • A Snapchat filter that makes it look like you're made of felt.
  • Losing your needle-felted Lorax and getting upset.
  • Kirby eating Halo.
  • Hobbies that double as fidget toys.
  • Carving a stick into a squirrel.
  • Finding polymer clay out in the woods.
  • Naturally-occurring fission reactors.
  • Nature with really good graphic design.
  • Sharing a Zelda save with your life partner and learning a lot about each other.
  • Finding every turnip.
  • Learning spoilers at an interesting space.
  • The huge thing.
  • Target's 30-day return policy.
  • What Switch games support local wireless multiplayer.
  • Playing halfway through a video game before you figure out the most of the systems.
  • Stirring until the lumps go away.
  • Kombucha milk.
  • An incredibly cheap gas.
  • The Sus Engineering DIY carbonation guide.
  • Cream of Cow Latte.
  • Target getting out the UV light to detect traces of cream of mushroom soup on the espresso machine you're trying to return.
  • Frothy oily coffees.
  • Inventing a culinary taxonomy in which mushrooms and cheese are both fruit.
  • Sweet cheese and savory fruit.
  • Sweet cheesus!
  • Making a yes or no answer incredibly long.
  • Rewriting each paragraph until it ends with a word on a line by itself.
  • Rapping about Zelda in 1980s.
  • Finding plot holes in this poem about the Legend of Zelda.
  • Using video games to ignore that you're on a plane for six hours.
  • Horror poems.
  • "A Crow Looked at Me" by Mt. Eerie.
  • Knowing why someone wrote an album but not why people listen to it.
  • Bad Two-Sentence Horror.
  • Whether Poe's The Raven counts as horror.
  • Businesses named after the thing that the building they're in used to be used for.
  • Berkeley Bowl's produce section.
  • Climbing a boulder that is not labeled with its difficulty level.
  • Difficulty inflation at the climbing gym.
  • How rocks are shaped.
  • A lump that you pinch with your whole hand.
  • Reading about a weird thing in Harry Potter and not knowing if it's weird because it's a magical kingdom or if that's how England does things.
  • What camping is like in England.
  • Taking a four year old to a parkour gym.
  • Being a kid and looking forward to finally growing tall enough to skate on the power lines.
  • A table full of rock obstacle courses.
  • The standards body that certifies what playground equipment is safe to install.
  • Old Enough.
  • Achieving the Milk Task.
  • Not teaching children cursive.
  • Having a name because your mom liked it.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Chris
  • Wacy

Topics:

  • Crafting little guys
  • Negotiating how to play Zelda together
  • Cream of mushroom latte
  • ChatGPT wrote a poem about zelda
  • Climbing real rocks

Microtopics:

  • The Marble Hornets/Slender Man oeuvre.
  • Copying and pasting a video.
  • Sharing a movie you liked with a friend over IM by copying and pasting the title.
  • The turnip in Breath of the Wild.
  • Attempting and failing to enjoy wood carving.
  • Stabbing the Korok until it is less fuzzy.
  • A Snapchat filter that makes it look like you're made of felt.
  • Losing your needle-felted Lorax and getting upset.
  • Kirby eating Halo.
  • Hobbies that double as fidget toys.
  • Carving a stick into a squirrel.
  • Finding polymer clay out in the woods.
  • Naturally-occurring fission reactors.
  • Nature with really good graphic design.
  • Sharing a Zelda save with your life partner and learning a lot about each other.
  • Finding every turnip.
  • Learning spoilers at an interesting space.
  • The huge thing.
  • Target's 30-day return policy.
  • What Switch games support local wireless multiplayer.
  • Playing halfway through a video game before you figure out the most of the systems.
  • Stirring until the lumps go away.
  • Kombucha milk.
  • An incredibly cheap gas.
  • The Sus Engineering DIY carbonation guide.
  • Cream of Cow Latte.
  • Target getting out the UV light to detect traces of cream of mushroom soup on the espresso machine you're trying to return.
  • Frothy oily coffees.
  • Inventing a culinary taxonomy in which mushrooms and cheese are both fruit.
  • Sweet cheese and savory fruit.
  • Sweet cheesus!
  • Making a yes or no answer incredibly long.
  • Rewriting each paragraph until it ends with a word on a line by itself.
  • Rapping about Zelda in 1980s.
  • Finding plot holes in this poem about the Legend of Zelda.
  • Using video games to ignore that you're on a plane for six hours.
  • Horror poems.
  • "A Crow Looked at Me" by Mt. Eerie.
  • Knowing why someone wrote an album but not why people listen to it.
  • Bad Two-Sentence Horror.
  • Whether Poe's The Raven counts as horror.
  • Businesses named after the thing that the building they're in used to be used for.
  • Berkeley Bowl's produce section.
  • Climbing a boulder that is not labeled with its difficulty level.
  • Difficulty inflation at the climbing gym.
  • How rocks are shaped.
  • A lump that you pinch with your whole hand.
  • Reading about a weird thing in Harry Potter and not knowing if it's weird because it's a magical kingdom or if that's how England does things.
  • What camping is like in England.
  • Taking a four year old to a parkour gym.
  • Being a kid and looking forward to finally growing tall enough to skate on the power lines.
  • A table full of rock obstacle courses.
  • The standards body that certifies what playground equipment is safe to install.
  • Old Enough.
  • Achieving the Milk Task.
  • Not teaching children cursive.
  • Having a name because your mom liked it.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+3gYmiyuG ]]> Jim Stormdancer 190. The Linguistic Eggplant-Dick Collapse https://topiclords.com/the-linguistic-eggplant-dick-collapse 59a0292a-1147-441a-970e-651b93846514 Mon, 12 Jun 2023 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Tyriq and Hallie. We discuss clues for secrets nearby, kids on TV hating leftovers, smartphone sales declining 11% in 2022 while sales of flip phones double, The Road Not Taken, what will emoji look like in 100 years?, and a conspiracy regarding the shape of hand-held supermarket baskets. 56:11 true Lords:

  • Tyriq
  • Hallie

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Lumps.
  • Lumpy Space Princess.
  • The best Space Princesses.
  • A completely different two Ls.
  • A good first vertically scrolling shooter.
  • Electric vehicle backing up noises.
  • Collecting Tesla license plates whenever you hear the Tesla collectible item noise.
  • The most sound-designed thing you interact with on a regular basis.
  • What kind of noises electric motorcycles make.
  • The laser you can point at any window to turn it into a speaker.
  • Bubb Rubb's reaction to whistle tips.
  • An urban legend about a haunted car driving down the freeway.
  • Advertisers beaming holograms directly into your AR goggles.
  • The city where instead of taxes they have ads and you're not allowed into the city without wearing the AR goggles at all times, even in the shower.
  • Wandering into the woods to escape the ubiquitous advertising but the birds have learned to repeat the ads.
  • Birds who sing the song that turns your skull into a speaker.
  • A scrub jay watching you with binoculars from across the street, reading your lips while you talk about the brown note, so it can teach the rest of the birds the song that makes the humans shit their pants.
  • Describing memes on podcasts.
  • The fungus that killed all the leftovers so the leftovers we eat today are a completely different varietal of leftovers.
  • Why leftovers-flavored jelly beans don't taste like real leftovers.
  • Spending more money so people don't perceive you as poor.
  • Food that you don't have to cook again.
  • Eating pizza straight out of the freezer.
  • Taking an ice cold slice of pizza into a hot shower.
  • Toaster pizza.
  • Cat body temperature pizza.
  • Rosemary garlic pop tarts.
  • Whether a day old poptart you forgot in the toaster counts as leftovers.
  • Leftunders.
  • Increasing crime by 100% but it's all good crime.
  • Flip phones Georg and whether he should be counted.
  • If anyone in the world decides not to eat something, that thing is canonically leftovers.
  • Wanting to be in a forest.
  • Dudes talking about themselves and the roads they've traveled.
  • The Most Misread Poem in America.
  • Pop quiz: individualism or fake individualism?
  • Doing a Twitter poll every time you are making a life decision and then taking the road less traveled by.
  • Dialects of emoji.
  • What Unicode looks like in the future where we communicate by swapping brain lobes with each other momentarily.
  • Doing the emoji hand clap for every word thing in your Great American Novel.
  • A screen reader reading out ascii art of a forest and after six minutes the blind user is like "nice forest!"
  • What the audio book for House of Leaves sounds like.
  • Lexicalogical collapse.
  • Veiny eggplant.
  • Which end of the eggplant emoji the droplets go on.
  • Genetically modifying eggplants so they look like dicks while unbeknownst to you another scientist is genetically modifying dicks so they look like eggplants and everyone remains confused.
  • Going to the bulk bin and scooping rice directly into your shopping basket.
  • If rice is like water and Bruce Lee is like water then Bruce Lee is like rice.
  • Trying to Tetris into a curve.
  • When a service works perfectly fine and they change things for no reason.
  • Searching Podcast Addict for a podcast and it comes back with a one episode podcast called "Please Update Podcast Addict"
  • Uber and Lyft becoming uncompetitive because they're trying to be profitable.
  • Ads that aren't even beamed directly into your skull so that good are they?
  • Advertising by teleporting a brain hemisphere of someone who loves your product with your target audience so you can share their knowledge.
]]> Lords:

  • Tyriq
  • Hallie

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Lumps.
  • Lumpy Space Princess.
  • The best Space Princesses.
  • A completely different two Ls.
  • A good first vertically scrolling shooter.
  • Electric vehicle backing up noises.
  • Collecting Tesla license plates whenever you hear the Tesla collectible item noise.
  • The most sound-designed thing you interact with on a regular basis.
  • What kind of noises electric motorcycles make.
  • The laser you can point at any window to turn it into a speaker.
  • Bubb Rubb's reaction to whistle tips.
  • An urban legend about a haunted car driving down the freeway.
  • Advertisers beaming holograms directly into your AR goggles.
  • The city where instead of taxes they have ads and you're not allowed into the city without wearing the AR goggles at all times, even in the shower.
  • Wandering into the woods to escape the ubiquitous advertising but the birds have learned to repeat the ads.
  • Birds who sing the song that turns your skull into a speaker.
  • A scrub jay watching you with binoculars from across the street, reading your lips while you talk about the brown note, so it can teach the rest of the birds the song that makes the humans shit their pants.
  • Describing memes on podcasts.
  • The fungus that killed all the leftovers so the leftovers we eat today are a completely different varietal of leftovers.
  • Why leftovers-flavored jelly beans don't taste like real leftovers.
  • Spending more money so people don't perceive you as poor.
  • Food that you don't have to cook again.
  • Eating pizza straight out of the freezer.
  • Taking an ice cold slice of pizza into a hot shower.
  • Toaster pizza.
  • Cat body temperature pizza.
  • Rosemary garlic pop tarts.
  • Whether a day old poptart you forgot in the toaster counts as leftovers.
  • Leftunders.
  • Increasing crime by 100% but it's all good crime.
  • Flip phones Georg and whether he should be counted.
  • If anyone in the world decides not to eat something, that thing is canonically leftovers.
  • Wanting to be in a forest.
  • Dudes talking about themselves and the roads they've traveled.
  • The Most Misread Poem in America.
  • Pop quiz: individualism or fake individualism?
  • Doing a Twitter poll every time you are making a life decision and then taking the road less traveled by.
  • Dialects of emoji.
  • What Unicode looks like in the future where we communicate by swapping brain lobes with each other momentarily.
  • Doing the emoji hand clap for every word thing in your Great American Novel.
  • A screen reader reading out ascii art of a forest and after six minutes the blind user is like "nice forest!"
  • What the audio book for House of Leaves sounds like.
  • Lexicalogical collapse.
  • Veiny eggplant.
  • Which end of the eggplant emoji the droplets go on.
  • Genetically modifying eggplants so they look like dicks while unbeknownst to you another scientist is genetically modifying dicks so they look like eggplants and everyone remains confused.
  • Going to the bulk bin and scooping rice directly into your shopping basket.
  • If rice is like water and Bruce Lee is like water then Bruce Lee is like rice.
  • Trying to Tetris into a curve.
  • When a service works perfectly fine and they change things for no reason.
  • Searching Podcast Addict for a podcast and it comes back with a one episode podcast called "Please Update Podcast Addict"
  • Uber and Lyft becoming uncompetitive because they're trying to be profitable.
  • Ads that aren't even beamed directly into your skull so that good are they?
  • Advertising by teleporting a brain hemisphere of someone who loves your product with your target audience so you can share their knowledge.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Tyriq
  • Hallie

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Lumps.
  • Lumpy Space Princess.
  • The best Space Princesses.
  • A completely different two Ls.
  • A good first vertically scrolling shooter.
  • Electric vehicle backing up noises.
  • Collecting Tesla license plates whenever you hear the Tesla collectible item noise.
  • The most sound-designed thing you interact with on a regular basis.
  • What kind of noises electric motorcycles make.
  • The laser you can point at any window to turn it into a speaker.
  • Bubb Rubb's reaction to whistle tips.
  • An urban legend about a haunted car driving down the freeway.
  • Advertisers beaming holograms directly into your AR goggles.
  • The city where instead of taxes they have ads and you're not allowed into the city without wearing the AR goggles at all times, even in the shower.
  • Wandering into the woods to escape the ubiquitous advertising but the birds have learned to repeat the ads.
  • Birds who sing the song that turns your skull into a speaker.
  • A scrub jay watching you with binoculars from across the street, reading your lips while you talk about the brown note, so it can teach the rest of the birds the song that makes the humans shit their pants.
  • Describing memes on podcasts.
  • The fungus that killed all the leftovers so the leftovers we eat today are a completely different varietal of leftovers.
  • Why leftovers-flavored jelly beans don't taste like real leftovers.
  • Spending more money so people don't perceive you as poor.
  • Food that you don't have to cook again.
  • Eating pizza straight out of the freezer.
  • Taking an ice cold slice of pizza into a hot shower.
  • Toaster pizza.
  • Cat body temperature pizza.
  • Rosemary garlic pop tarts.
  • Whether a day old poptart you forgot in the toaster counts as leftovers.
  • Leftunders.
  • Increasing crime by 100% but it's all good crime.
  • Flip phones Georg and whether he should be counted.
  • If anyone in the world decides not to eat something, that thing is canonically leftovers.
  • Wanting to be in a forest.
  • Dudes talking about themselves and the roads they've traveled.
  • The Most Misread Poem in America.
  • Pop quiz: individualism or fake individualism?
  • Doing a Twitter poll every time you are making a life decision and then taking the road less traveled by.
  • Dialects of emoji.
  • What Unicode looks like in the future where we communicate by swapping brain lobes with each other momentarily.
  • Doing the emoji hand clap for every word thing in your Great American Novel.
  • A screen reader reading out ascii art of a forest and after six minutes the blind user is like "nice forest!"
  • What the audio book for House of Leaves sounds like.
  • Lexicalogical collapse.
  • Veiny eggplant.
  • Which end of the eggplant emoji the droplets go on.
  • Genetically modifying eggplants so they look like dicks while unbeknownst to you another scientist is genetically modifying dicks so they look like eggplants and everyone remains confused.
  • Going to the bulk bin and scooping rice directly into your shopping basket.
  • If rice is like water and Bruce Lee is like water then Bruce Lee is like rice.
  • Trying to Tetris into a curve.
  • When a service works perfectly fine and they change things for no reason.
  • Searching Podcast Addict for a podcast and it comes back with a one episode podcast called "Please Update Podcast Addict"
  • Uber and Lyft becoming uncompetitive because they're trying to be profitable.
  • Ads that aren't even beamed directly into your skull so that good are they?
  • Advertising by teleporting a brain hemisphere of someone who loves your product with your target audience so you can share their knowledge.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+53pY5yUV ]]> Jim Stormdancer 189. If You Don't Know Who Your Wario Is, You're the Wario https://topiclords.com/if-you-dont-know-who-your-wario-is-youre-the-wario 1723faec-3e10-4c71-bc19-f8f63e7f2d02 Mon, 05 Jun 2023 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Alexander and Yaros. We discuss Somewhat Dim Mirror, Forth, getting email from Online Casino Guide about the most popular Mario characters, The Kraken by Alfred Tennyson, NES dev scene, heating a black hole to cool it down, and Winston being into Power Rangers 55:44 true Lords:

  • Alexander
  • Yaros

Topics:

  • Somewhat Dim Mirror
  • Unique and weird self-bootstrapping computer language - Forth
  • I've been getting emails from an Online Casino Guide offering analysis of the relative popularity of characters from the Mario Bros. movie. How did they get my email, and how did they know that this is the kind of thing I want to gamble on?
  • The Kraken, by Alfred Tennyson
  • NES dev scene and new games still being released
  • You have to heat a black hole to cool it down
  • Winston is suddenly really into Power Rangers which I'm not super thrilled about, but it does make me happy that the appeal of cheesy MIDI rock won't be lost on future generations
    • Esper says: "The tradition of taking Japanese action stuff and reworking it into an entirely different show is pretty wild, and pretty common. The original idea behind the western release of Sailor Moon was actually going to be a live action cast of young girls who transform into "cartoon scouts" or something, and the legendary anime Macross (known for animating lots of missles with cool smoke trails) was brought over here and entirely rewritten to be Robotech, an already existing western property. Power Rangers specifically comes from the Super Sentai tokusatsu series, of which there's actually two or three dozen seasons, each with more or less individual continuity. They're fun and goofy to watch if you get a chance to see the originals; I was mostly surprised by how self-aware they are."

Microtopics:

  • Just playing games you already know whenever you find the time for games.
  • Dystopian fiction about all the little annoying things.
  • Dystopian fiction about all the terrible TV shows that are on now.
  • A guy who thought his idea would work but it didn't.
  • A black mirror but a little less black.
  • How really shiny black things work.
  • Logging in to watch people make themselves miserable.
  • Reverse polish notation.
  • Giving up on operating systems and deciding to live inside a Forth interpreter.
  • Going back to the Cambrian period and being like "what is this shell thing and what is it trying to accomplish?"
  • How Forth is like Eurovision.
  • Borrowing someone's RPN calculator and being very confused for a moment.
  • Your Dymaxion map of the globe.
  • The next emulations of Hewlett-Packard reverse polish notation calculators.
  • Online Casino Guides and the kinds of email they send.
  • A gaming and entertainment experience.
  • Naming your movie @ and getting incredible engagement on Twitter.
  • How recently Nethack has been patched.
  • Carpetology and the study of rugs and carpets even though they're not in the same phylum.
  • The Dungeons and Dragons Chick Tract.
  • A kid named Wario.
  • The Abysmal Sea.
  • Unnumbered and enormous polypi.
  • Interpreting a poem as a political statement when it's clearly about how giant squids are super cool.
  • Lauding this poet's skill with language even though he didn't know the difference between abyssal and abysmal.
  • Calling a poem a sonnet when it doesn't meet the criteria of a sonnet just because Tennyson wrote it.
  • Wanting to be huge and eat sponges, like the kraken.
  • Dendy.
  • Buying NES games made this year.
  • Sokoban with a Twist.
  • MOON 8.
  • Releasing chiptunes on vinyl shaped like a square.
  • Russian Roulette for the NES making good use of the Zapper.
  • Two people who are really bad at archery.
  • Pointing your Rambo exploding arrow at the exploding barrel sitting right next to you.
  • A turn-based thing where you can kill zombies.
  • Forklift simulators in VR.
  • NES Maker and GB Studio.
  • LLVM's NES back-end.
  • Making a NES game in C and never using local variables.
  • Finding the free time to do all your hobbies.
  • The bigger I am the colder I am, and if you heat me up I get bigger and colder. What am I?
  • A tear in geometry that just leaks shit.
  • Care and feeding of your pet black hole.
  • Pascal's Breakfast.
  • Whether it's in your best interest to believe in waffles.
  • The International Cult Registry.
  • Trying to make a portmanteau of waffle and apocalypse.
  • Violence against putty monsters.
  • The Horsemen of the Apocalypse Power Rangers spinoff.
  • A Power Rangers spinoff made in the last three years that has the exact same production values of the original.
  • Writing a new TV show around the action scenes from a different TV show.
  • Taking the most expensive special effects shots from every movie and putting them all in one uber-movie.
  • Tricking Harrison Ford into being in your movie because he's so old now.
]]> Lords:

  • Alexander
  • Yaros

Topics:

  • Somewhat Dim Mirror
  • Unique and weird self-bootstrapping computer language - Forth
  • I've been getting emails from an Online Casino Guide offering analysis of the relative popularity of characters from the Mario Bros. movie. How did they get my email, and how did they know that this is the kind of thing I want to gamble on?
  • The Kraken, by Alfred Tennyson
  • NES dev scene and new games still being released
  • You have to heat a black hole to cool it down
  • Winston is suddenly really into Power Rangers which I'm not super thrilled about, but it does make me happy that the appeal of cheesy MIDI rock won't be lost on future generations
    • Esper says: "The tradition of taking Japanese action stuff and reworking it into an entirely different show is pretty wild, and pretty common. The original idea behind the western release of Sailor Moon was actually going to be a live action cast of young girls who transform into "cartoon scouts" or something, and the legendary anime Macross (known for animating lots of missles with cool smoke trails) was brought over here and entirely rewritten to be Robotech, an already existing western property. Power Rangers specifically comes from the Super Sentai tokusatsu series, of which there's actually two or three dozen seasons, each with more or less individual continuity. They're fun and goofy to watch if you get a chance to see the originals; I was mostly surprised by how self-aware they are."

Microtopics:

  • Just playing games you already know whenever you find the time for games.
  • Dystopian fiction about all the little annoying things.
  • Dystopian fiction about all the terrible TV shows that are on now.
  • A guy who thought his idea would work but it didn't.
  • A black mirror but a little less black.
  • How really shiny black things work.
  • Logging in to watch people make themselves miserable.
  • Reverse polish notation.
  • Giving up on operating systems and deciding to live inside a Forth interpreter.
  • Going back to the Cambrian period and being like "what is this shell thing and what is it trying to accomplish?"
  • How Forth is like Eurovision.
  • Borrowing someone's RPN calculator and being very confused for a moment.
  • Your Dymaxion map of the globe.
  • The next emulations of Hewlett-Packard reverse polish notation calculators.
  • Online Casino Guides and the kinds of email they send.
  • A gaming and entertainment experience.
  • Naming your movie @ and getting incredible engagement on Twitter.
  • How recently Nethack has been patched.
  • Carpetology and the study of rugs and carpets even though they're not in the same phylum.
  • The Dungeons and Dragons Chick Tract.
  • A kid named Wario.
  • The Abysmal Sea.
  • Unnumbered and enormous polypi.
  • Interpreting a poem as a political statement when it's clearly about how giant squids are super cool.
  • Lauding this poet's skill with language even though he didn't know the difference between abyssal and abysmal.
  • Calling a poem a sonnet when it doesn't meet the criteria of a sonnet just because Tennyson wrote it.
  • Wanting to be huge and eat sponges, like the kraken.
  • Dendy.
  • Buying NES games made this year.
  • Sokoban with a Twist.
  • MOON 8.
  • Releasing chiptunes on vinyl shaped like a square.
  • Russian Roulette for the NES making good use of the Zapper.
  • Two people who are really bad at archery.
  • Pointing your Rambo exploding arrow at the exploding barrel sitting right next to you.
  • A turn-based thing where you can kill zombies.
  • Forklift simulators in VR.
  • NES Maker and GB Studio.
  • LLVM's NES back-end.
  • Making a NES game in C and never using local variables.
  • Finding the free time to do all your hobbies.
  • The bigger I am the colder I am, and if you heat me up I get bigger and colder. What am I?
  • A tear in geometry that just leaks shit.
  • Care and feeding of your pet black hole.
  • Pascal's Breakfast.
  • Whether it's in your best interest to believe in waffles.
  • The International Cult Registry.
  • Trying to make a portmanteau of waffle and apocalypse.
  • Violence against putty monsters.
  • The Horsemen of the Apocalypse Power Rangers spinoff.
  • A Power Rangers spinoff made in the last three years that has the exact same production values of the original.
  • Writing a new TV show around the action scenes from a different TV show.
  • Taking the most expensive special effects shots from every movie and putting them all in one uber-movie.
  • Tricking Harrison Ford into being in your movie because he's so old now.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Alexander
  • Yaros

Topics:

  • Somewhat Dim Mirror
  • Unique and weird self-bootstrapping computer language - Forth
  • I've been getting emails from an Online Casino Guide offering analysis of the relative popularity of characters from the Mario Bros. movie. How did they get my email, and how did they know that this is the kind of thing I want to gamble on?
  • The Kraken, by Alfred Tennyson
  • NES dev scene and new games still being released
  • You have to heat a black hole to cool it down
  • Winston is suddenly really into Power Rangers which I'm not super thrilled about, but it does make me happy that the appeal of cheesy MIDI rock won't be lost on future generations
    • Esper says: "The tradition of taking Japanese action stuff and reworking it into an entirely different show is pretty wild, and pretty common. The original idea behind the western release of Sailor Moon was actually going to be a live action cast of young girls who transform into "cartoon scouts" or something, and the legendary anime Macross (known for animating lots of missles with cool smoke trails) was brought over here and entirely rewritten to be Robotech, an already existing western property. Power Rangers specifically comes from the Super Sentai tokusatsu series, of which there's actually two or three dozen seasons, each with more or less individual continuity. They're fun and goofy to watch if you get a chance to see the originals; I was mostly surprised by how self-aware they are."

Microtopics:

  • Just playing games you already know whenever you find the time for games.
  • Dystopian fiction about all the little annoying things.
  • Dystopian fiction about all the terrible TV shows that are on now.
  • A guy who thought his idea would work but it didn't.
  • A black mirror but a little less black.
  • How really shiny black things work.
  • Logging in to watch people make themselves miserable.
  • Reverse polish notation.
  • Giving up on operating systems and deciding to live inside a Forth interpreter.
  • Going back to the Cambrian period and being like "what is this shell thing and what is it trying to accomplish?"
  • How Forth is like Eurovision.
  • Borrowing someone's RPN calculator and being very confused for a moment.
  • Your Dymaxion map of the globe.
  • The next emulations of Hewlett-Packard reverse polish notation calculators.
  • Online Casino Guides and the kinds of email they send.
  • A gaming and entertainment experience.
  • Naming your movie @ and getting incredible engagement on Twitter.
  • How recently Nethack has been patched.
  • Carpetology and the study of rugs and carpets even though they're not in the same phylum.
  • The Dungeons and Dragons Chick Tract.
  • A kid named Wario.
  • The Abysmal Sea.
  • Unnumbered and enormous polypi.
  • Interpreting a poem as a political statement when it's clearly about how giant squids are super cool.
  • Lauding this poet's skill with language even though he didn't know the difference between abyssal and abysmal.
  • Calling a poem a sonnet when it doesn't meet the criteria of a sonnet just because Tennyson wrote it.
  • Wanting to be huge and eat sponges, like the kraken.
  • Dendy.
  • Buying NES games made this year.
  • Sokoban with a Twist.
  • MOON 8.
  • Releasing chiptunes on vinyl shaped like a square.
  • Russian Roulette for the NES making good use of the Zapper.
  • Two people who are really bad at archery.
  • Pointing your Rambo exploding arrow at the exploding barrel sitting right next to you.
  • A turn-based thing where you can kill zombies.
  • Forklift simulators in VR.
  • NES Maker and GB Studio.
  • LLVM's NES back-end.
  • Making a NES game in C and never using local variables.
  • Finding the free time to do all your hobbies.
  • The bigger I am the colder I am, and if you heat me up I get bigger and colder. What am I?
  • A tear in geometry that just leaks shit.
  • Care and feeding of your pet black hole.
  • Pascal's Breakfast.
  • Whether it's in your best interest to believe in waffles.
  • The International Cult Registry.
  • Trying to make a portmanteau of waffle and apocalypse.
  • Violence against putty monsters.
  • The Horsemen of the Apocalypse Power Rangers spinoff.
  • A Power Rangers spinoff made in the last three years that has the exact same production values of the original.
  • Writing a new TV show around the action scenes from a different TV show.
  • Taking the most expensive special effects shots from every movie and putting them all in one uber-movie.
  • Tricking Harrison Ford into being in your movie because he's so old now.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+Hz5Kas-x ]]> Jim Stormdancer 188. An Extremely Gendered Sniper Rifle https://topiclords.com/an-extremely-gendered-sniper-rifle 59fa30ff-abc0-465d-80be-89b3eee8a659 Mon, 29 May 2023 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Maxx and Erica. We discuss zines and jam games, birding in the pandemic, itinerant filmmakers, and "Meditation on Capitalism." 57:47 true Lords:

  • Maxx
  • Erica

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The Bugzooka
  • Booms and busts of little insect invasions.
  • A little vacuum chamber that you squish closed.
  • Sucking a fly through a tube.
  • Cry havoc and let slip the bugs of war.
  • Egads, Bugzooks!
  • The Bug-A-Salt Passion Assassin 3.0.
  • A middle aged dad of the type that would buy a salt gun
  • A bugzooka in active use.
  • A balding man who looks like Jeffery Epstein crawling on the floor in his underwear to promote the Bug-A-Salt.
  • Professor Fly Presents: Fly Facts.
  • Judging the anatomical correctness of Professor Fly.
  • Hammacher-Schlemmer ads for bug-catching devices.
  • Whether women make better snipers.
  • Aiming at the fly on the wall with your laser sight.
  • Mr. Pinch.
  • A fly in a lab coat who lives in Seattle.
  • A photocopied leaflet about your band or political cause.
  • The best, most well-produced musicians in the world.
  • Ways to frame game jams.
  • A good brain hack for if you feel the urge to be a product.
  • Indiepocalypse.
  • Electric Zine Maker.
  • Whether the pandemic is over.
  • One of the birdiest places in the United States.
  • Talk Irby to Me.
  • Becoming texting buddies with a famous bird systematist from Cornell.
  • A Big Year.
  • Yelling bird coordinates at someone you just met.
  • Winston's favorite bird and why he likes it so much.
  • Knowing something about ravens. (Not what they eat.)
  • The Northwestern Crow.
  • A crow catching live shrimp and stashing them in the moss.
  • Collecting black walnut husks to dye wool.
  • Feeding crows who bring you lipstick from the 1940s.
  • What to do with a 10 pound bag of unsalted peanuts.
  • A movie where every kid in town foils an attempted kidnapping and then holds a talent show.
  • Ark Music Factory.
  • Hiring a record label guy to write and record a song with your daughter so she can star in a terrible music video and become a survivor of internet celebrity.
  • Social media survivors.
  • Stardom: it's not good for you.
  • Whether kids today still want to be movie stars.
  • Bitmojis and other things that put you in a little cartoon.
  • A customized birthday greeting from a Weird Al.
  • Paying Rudy Giuliani a pittance to wish your mom a happy birthday.
  • One of the Breaking Bad hitman twins undercutting the other by $300 on Cameo.
  • Preserving your Too Short custom rap tape on Youtube.
  • A poem written in BASIC that is spoilers for Mad Men.
  • The light in your Ikea bookshelf recognizing the light in you.
  • Doing line number archaeology when reading a BASIC program.
  • Seeing text from the other side of the page through the page.
  • Do It.
  • Instructional Art.
  • Finding 25 identical objects and naming them all Jimmy.
  • Flying Maxx to the Permian Basin to teach your students how to repair microscopes.
]]> Lords:

  • Maxx
  • Erica

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The Bugzooka
  • Booms and busts of little insect invasions.
  • A little vacuum chamber that you squish closed.
  • Sucking a fly through a tube.
  • Cry havoc and let slip the bugs of war.
  • Egads, Bugzooks!
  • The Bug-A-Salt Passion Assassin 3.0.
  • A middle aged dad of the type that would buy a salt gun
  • A bugzooka in active use.
  • A balding man who looks like Jeffery Epstein crawling on the floor in his underwear to promote the Bug-A-Salt.
  • Professor Fly Presents: Fly Facts.
  • Judging the anatomical correctness of Professor Fly.
  • Hammacher-Schlemmer ads for bug-catching devices.
  • Whether women make better snipers.
  • Aiming at the fly on the wall with your laser sight.
  • Mr. Pinch.
  • A fly in a lab coat who lives in Seattle.
  • A photocopied leaflet about your band or political cause.
  • The best, most well-produced musicians in the world.
  • Ways to frame game jams.
  • A good brain hack for if you feel the urge to be a product.
  • Indiepocalypse.
  • Electric Zine Maker.
  • Whether the pandemic is over.
  • One of the birdiest places in the United States.
  • Talk Irby to Me.
  • Becoming texting buddies with a famous bird systematist from Cornell.
  • A Big Year.
  • Yelling bird coordinates at someone you just met.
  • Winston's favorite bird and why he likes it so much.
  • Knowing something about ravens. (Not what they eat.)
  • The Northwestern Crow.
  • A crow catching live shrimp and stashing them in the moss.
  • Collecting black walnut husks to dye wool.
  • Feeding crows who bring you lipstick from the 1940s.
  • What to do with a 10 pound bag of unsalted peanuts.
  • A movie where every kid in town foils an attempted kidnapping and then holds a talent show.
  • Ark Music Factory.
  • Hiring a record label guy to write and record a song with your daughter so she can star in a terrible music video and become a survivor of internet celebrity.
  • Social media survivors.
  • Stardom: it's not good for you.
  • Whether kids today still want to be movie stars.
  • Bitmojis and other things that put you in a little cartoon.
  • A customized birthday greeting from a Weird Al.
  • Paying Rudy Giuliani a pittance to wish your mom a happy birthday.
  • One of the Breaking Bad hitman twins undercutting the other by $300 on Cameo.
  • Preserving your Too Short custom rap tape on Youtube.
  • A poem written in BASIC that is spoilers for Mad Men.
  • The light in your Ikea bookshelf recognizing the light in you.
  • Doing line number archaeology when reading a BASIC program.
  • Seeing text from the other side of the page through the page.
  • Do It.
  • Instructional Art.
  • Finding 25 identical objects and naming them all Jimmy.
  • Flying Maxx to the Permian Basin to teach your students how to repair microscopes.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Maxx
  • Erica

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The Bugzooka
  • Booms and busts of little insect invasions.
  • A little vacuum chamber that you squish closed.
  • Sucking a fly through a tube.
  • Cry havoc and let slip the bugs of war.
  • Egads, Bugzooks!
  • The Bug-A-Salt Passion Assassin 3.0.
  • A middle aged dad of the type that would buy a salt gun
  • A bugzooka in active use.
  • A balding man who looks like Jeffery Epstein crawling on the floor in his underwear to promote the Bug-A-Salt.
  • Professor Fly Presents: Fly Facts.
  • Judging the anatomical correctness of Professor Fly.
  • Hammacher-Schlemmer ads for bug-catching devices.
  • Whether women make better snipers.
  • Aiming at the fly on the wall with your laser sight.
  • Mr. Pinch.
  • A fly in a lab coat who lives in Seattle.
  • A photocopied leaflet about your band or political cause.
  • The best, most well-produced musicians in the world.
  • Ways to frame game jams.
  • A good brain hack for if you feel the urge to be a product.
  • Indiepocalypse.
  • Electric Zine Maker.
  • Whether the pandemic is over.
  • One of the birdiest places in the United States.
  • Talk Irby to Me.
  • Becoming texting buddies with a famous bird systematist from Cornell.
  • A Big Year.
  • Yelling bird coordinates at someone you just met.
  • Winston's favorite bird and why he likes it so much.
  • Knowing something about ravens. (Not what they eat.)
  • The Northwestern Crow.
  • A crow catching live shrimp and stashing them in the moss.
  • Collecting black walnut husks to dye wool.
  • Feeding crows who bring you lipstick from the 1940s.
  • What to do with a 10 pound bag of unsalted peanuts.
  • A movie where every kid in town foils an attempted kidnapping and then holds a talent show.
  • Ark Music Factory.
  • Hiring a record label guy to write and record a song with your daughter so she can star in a terrible music video and become a survivor of internet celebrity.
  • Social media survivors.
  • Stardom: it's not good for you.
  • Whether kids today still want to be movie stars.
  • Bitmojis and other things that put you in a little cartoon.
  • A customized birthday greeting from a Weird Al.
  • Paying Rudy Giuliani a pittance to wish your mom a happy birthday.
  • One of the Breaking Bad hitman twins undercutting the other by $300 on Cameo.
  • Preserving your Too Short custom rap tape on Youtube.
  • A poem written in BASIC that is spoilers for Mad Men.
  • The light in your Ikea bookshelf recognizing the light in you.
  • Doing line number archaeology when reading a BASIC program.
  • Seeing text from the other side of the page through the page.
  • Do It.
  • Instructional Art.
  • Finding 25 identical objects and naming them all Jimmy.
  • Flying Maxx to the Permian Basin to teach your students how to repair microscopes.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+m2g-uj5B ]]> Jim Stormdancer 187. The Second-Best Whale Playground in Emeryville https://topiclords.com/the-second-best-whale-playground-in-emeryville 5f84c33d-04eb-435e-876b-0b91d5b59ac0 Mon, 22 May 2023 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Cort and Stephan. We discuss asymmetrical USB-C cables, playground improvement over the last decade, bedtime guitar, Where the Wild Things Are, classic game hardware as a kind of virtual console, and constructing a computing environment as a nested series of cages for a child to escape 1:08:13 true Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Extra plugs.
  • Mr. Saitou
  • How to sideload software onto the Playdate.
  • Trying to make Sifteo happen.
  • Where to find all the fancy MacIntosh dithering algorithms.
  • Ableton for the Sega Megadrive.
  • Who Zarf is.
  • EU legislation saying that phones must charge via USB-C, which is unsustainable, when the text of the law ought to have been "Apple, knock that shit off."
  • Getting rid of your bucket of cables.
  • Never throwing away wood because you might need one that shape some day
  • Never throwing away oddly shaped pieces of wood because you might become a carpenter some day.
  • Playgrounds getting bad and then good again.
  • Getting breakfast at the Emeryville Public Market.
  • Whether swings or seesaws still exist.
  • Giant wooden castles with bridges going between them.
  • How to make the spinny playground things safe.
  • A regionally variable playground.
  • What countries have and don't have playgrounds.
  • The San Lorenzo Community Park.
  • A big stone bear you can climb on.
  • Whether any of those playground speaking tubes have ever worked.
  • Wanting the world to have magic in it so you lie to your kid about science.
  • The Dennis the Menace playground in Monterey.
  • Periodically removing the poison oak.
  • Growing up and being on the other side of the memory.
  • The Dead Dad playground turning into a fenced-off deathtrap.
  • Procedural memory for nice melodies.
  • Mountain dulcimers vs. hammered dulcimers.
  • Walking around with a bandolier of mountain dulcimers, one for every key.
  • What happens when you're living in the Appalachians and you want to make a violin but you can't.
  • What to do with your ability to play an instrument when you have no free time.
  • Maintaining a consistent strumming pattern while singing.
  • Strumming and finding finger positions intuitively.
  • Here's all the notes. Play the right ones at the right times.
  • The Virtual Console of musical instruments.
  • Jim's favorite note in the mixolydian mode.
  • Where the Wild Things Are for Xbox 360.
  • A poem with hardly any punctuation.
  • Going on a journey of many weeks in just a few pages.
  • Max in a wolf suit fighting bees with a stick.
  • Maurice Sendak Kart Racer.
  • Dinosaur Time.
  • Clapping for names you know.
  • A building with dinosaur bones in it.
  • Rumpusing things.
  • Games where you whack shadow spiders with a stick.
  • GB Studio.
  • Putting a wifi adapter in an NES cartridge.
  • The Mario modding tool set.
  • An IDE for making NES games.
  • Pi-Boy D.
  • Doing homebrew development on a system that is still in active use.
  • Castlevania: Passacaglia of Disrepair.
  • GBA of Theseus.
  • Making a Lynx game that supports 8-player multiplayer, when there aren't 8 people who own the system.
  • Porting a game about matching colors to a monochrome display.
  • Giving your kids a computer running Linux to teach them sysadmin skills, but they just play games on their phone instead.
  • Branded Scratch Wrappers.
  • Composing new music for the extended What the Golf? cinematic universe.
  • How to unlock your school laptop to play the Chrome Dinosaur Game.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Extra plugs.
  • Mr. Saitou
  • How to sideload software onto the Playdate.
  • Trying to make Sifteo happen.
  • Where to find all the fancy MacIntosh dithering algorithms.
  • Ableton for the Sega Megadrive.
  • Who Zarf is.
  • EU legislation saying that phones must charge via USB-C, which is unsustainable, when the text of the law ought to have been "Apple, knock that shit off."
  • Getting rid of your bucket of cables.
  • Never throwing away wood because you might need one that shape some day
  • Never throwing away oddly shaped pieces of wood because you might become a carpenter some day.
  • Playgrounds getting bad and then good again.
  • Getting breakfast at the Emeryville Public Market.
  • Whether swings or seesaws still exist.
  • Giant wooden castles with bridges going between them.
  • How to make the spinny playground things safe.
  • A regionally variable playground.
  • What countries have and don't have playgrounds.
  • The San Lorenzo Community Park.
  • A big stone bear you can climb on.
  • Whether any of those playground speaking tubes have ever worked.
  • Wanting the world to have magic in it so you lie to your kid about science.
  • The Dennis the Menace playground in Monterey.
  • Periodically removing the poison oak.
  • Growing up and being on the other side of the memory.
  • The Dead Dad playground turning into a fenced-off deathtrap.
  • Procedural memory for nice melodies.
  • Mountain dulcimers vs. hammered dulcimers.
  • Walking around with a bandolier of mountain dulcimers, one for every key.
  • What happens when you're living in the Appalachians and you want to make a violin but you can't.
  • What to do with your ability to play an instrument when you have no free time.
  • Maintaining a consistent strumming pattern while singing.
  • Strumming and finding finger positions intuitively.
  • Here's all the notes. Play the right ones at the right times.
  • The Virtual Console of musical instruments.
  • Jim's favorite note in the mixolydian mode.
  • Where the Wild Things Are for Xbox 360.
  • A poem with hardly any punctuation.
  • Going on a journey of many weeks in just a few pages.
  • Max in a wolf suit fighting bees with a stick.
  • Maurice Sendak Kart Racer.
  • Dinosaur Time.
  • Clapping for names you know.
  • A building with dinosaur bones in it.
  • Rumpusing things.
  • Games where you whack shadow spiders with a stick.
  • GB Studio.
  • Putting a wifi adapter in an NES cartridge.
  • The Mario modding tool set.
  • An IDE for making NES games.
  • Pi-Boy D.
  • Doing homebrew development on a system that is still in active use.
  • Castlevania: Passacaglia of Disrepair.
  • GBA of Theseus.
  • Making a Lynx game that supports 8-player multiplayer, when there aren't 8 people who own the system.
  • Porting a game about matching colors to a monochrome display.
  • Giving your kids a computer running Linux to teach them sysadmin skills, but they just play games on their phone instead.
  • Branded Scratch Wrappers.
  • Composing new music for the extended What the Golf? cinematic universe.
  • How to unlock your school laptop to play the Chrome Dinosaur Game.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Extra plugs.
  • Mr. Saitou
  • How to sideload software onto the Playdate.
  • Trying to make Sifteo happen.
  • Where to find all the fancy MacIntosh dithering algorithms.
  • Ableton for the Sega Megadrive.
  • Who Zarf is.
  • EU legislation saying that phones must charge via USB-C, which is unsustainable, when the text of the law ought to have been "Apple, knock that shit off."
  • Getting rid of your bucket of cables.
  • Never throwing away wood because you might need one that shape some day
  • Never throwing away oddly shaped pieces of wood because you might become a carpenter some day.
  • Playgrounds getting bad and then good again.
  • Getting breakfast at the Emeryville Public Market.
  • Whether swings or seesaws still exist.
  • Giant wooden castles with bridges going between them.
  • How to make the spinny playground things safe.
  • A regionally variable playground.
  • What countries have and don't have playgrounds.
  • The San Lorenzo Community Park.
  • A big stone bear you can climb on.
  • Whether any of those playground speaking tubes have ever worked.
  • Wanting the world to have magic in it so you lie to your kid about science.
  • The Dennis the Menace playground in Monterey.
  • Periodically removing the poison oak.
  • Growing up and being on the other side of the memory.
  • The Dead Dad playground turning into a fenced-off deathtrap.
  • Procedural memory for nice melodies.
  • Mountain dulcimers vs. hammered dulcimers.
  • Walking around with a bandolier of mountain dulcimers, one for every key.
  • What happens when you're living in the Appalachians and you want to make a violin but you can't.
  • What to do with your ability to play an instrument when you have no free time.
  • Maintaining a consistent strumming pattern while singing.
  • Strumming and finding finger positions intuitively.
  • Here's all the notes. Play the right ones at the right times.
  • The Virtual Console of musical instruments.
  • Jim's favorite note in the mixolydian mode.
  • Where the Wild Things Are for Xbox 360.
  • A poem with hardly any punctuation.
  • Going on a journey of many weeks in just a few pages.
  • Max in a wolf suit fighting bees with a stick.
  • Maurice Sendak Kart Racer.
  • Dinosaur Time.
  • Clapping for names you know.
  • A building with dinosaur bones in it.
  • Rumpusing things.
  • Games where you whack shadow spiders with a stick.
  • GB Studio.
  • Putting a wifi adapter in an NES cartridge.
  • The Mario modding tool set.
  • An IDE for making NES games.
  • Pi-Boy D.
  • Doing homebrew development on a system that is still in active use.
  • Castlevania: Passacaglia of Disrepair.
  • GBA of Theseus.
  • Making a Lynx game that supports 8-player multiplayer, when there aren't 8 people who own the system.
  • Porting a game about matching colors to a monochrome display.
  • Giving your kids a computer running Linux to teach them sysadmin skills, but they just play games on their phone instead.
  • Branded Scratch Wrappers.
  • Composing new music for the extended What the Golf? cinematic universe.
  • How to unlock your school laptop to play the Chrome Dinosaur Game.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+GPnl3BWi ]]> Jim Stormdancer 186. ADHD Shame Graveyard of Browser Tabs https://topiclords.com/adhd-shame-graveyard-of-browser-tabs e076e051-4483-48be-adf5-584397fb1c33 Mon, 15 May 2023 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Tim and Ben. We discuss Thursday Night, finding your favorite music, never shipping a game and just playtesting forever, Fine Feather, having lots of browser tabs open, and secrets in Super Mario World 59:54 true Lords:

Topics:

  • My Thursday Night
  • The daunting thought of: there is so much music that exists now - it's more than likely that your favorite song in the world is out there and you'll never find it in your lifetime.
  • I've been working on a small game in my spare time and I never want to ship it. I just want to have friends playtest forever.
  • Fine Feather
  • The terrifying field of Hostile Nuclear Architecture
  • Do you have 103 tabs open in Chrome?
  • In Super Mario World, some secrets reward you by skipping levels and some reward you by adding new levels. Make up your mind! If the level add guy and the level subtract guy had just talked to each other they could've just left the levels as they were and saved everybody a lot of work.

Topics:

  • Having something to unplug.
  • Continuing to take care of your children.
  • Going to see the Mountain Goats for your birthday.
  • Sleep meds that don't interact well with grapefruit.
  • Caring for a newborn for a month and then suddenly having a nice meal.
  • A cocktail of factors.
  • Finding an amazing new artist you become obsessed with for the next few months.
  • Listening to music while you work.
  • A poster containing the source code for Pitfall.
  • How to keep finding new music in your thirties.
  • Phonograph.
  • Auto-brewery syndrome but for methamphetamines.
  • A good song that everybody likes.
  • Fear of stories.
  • Refusing to see a movie because you're afraid of what it'll make you feel.
  • Going camping in the woods in order to watch a movie.
  • Reliving your past experience in memory.
  • The soap operas that your ex's mom would watch.
  • Buying sheet music and playing it yourself in anticipation of when the orchestra comes to your town to play you the real thing.
  • Sheet music as a pre-release hype document.
  • Reading the manual of your new video game on the car ride home.
  • Crestfallenness.
  • Listening to a record with somebody.
  • Rogue topics that keep threatening to come up.
  • Playtesting as a way to get to know your friends better.
  • Approaching the things that are valuable to you through the lens of an illusion that you know is an illusion.
  • Lockdown hobbies.
  • How to enjoy hobbies.
  • Starting a Youtube series called "Ben sucks at baking" so you get a bunch of followers who will be disappointed if you get good at baking.
  • Dehydrating beer to get yeast out of it.
  • Making beer out of the yeast that's just hanging out in the air around you.
  • Gordy and the Monster Moon.
  • Nine year olds who are incredible at climbing because they refuse to eat fish.
  • A sparrow showing you its whole ass.
  • Whether sparrows are detested.
  • How to dispose of nuclear waste.
  • Attempts to make you hind brain think "I need to leave here immediately."
  • The meme of the skeleton playing the trumpet.
  • A field of Aztec death whistles activated by the wind blowing.
  • Trying to save the lives of people who live far in the future.
  • Speaking across time.
  • Whether this place is a place of honor.
  • An ADHD Shame Graveyard of Browser Tabs.
  • Going over all your browser tabs to see which ones remain relevant to you.
  • Details of how one bathes oneself that we never discuss in public.
  • A web browser that'll tell you "no, I think you've had enough tabs"
  • A brick that gives you a key.
  • How Elden Ring is structured.
  • A game that is a foray into a new design space that demonstrates how not to solve these design problems.
  • A scavenger hunt to find the next Topic Lords guest.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

  • My Thursday Night
  • The daunting thought of: there is so much music that exists now - it's more than likely that your favorite song in the world is out there and you'll never find it in your lifetime.
  • I've been working on a small game in my spare time and I never want to ship it. I just want to have friends playtest forever.
  • Fine Feather
  • The terrifying field of Hostile Nuclear Architecture
  • Do you have 103 tabs open in Chrome?
  • In Super Mario World, some secrets reward you by skipping levels and some reward you by adding new levels. Make up your mind! If the level add guy and the level subtract guy had just talked to each other they could've just left the levels as they were and saved everybody a lot of work.

Topics:

  • Having something to unplug.
  • Continuing to take care of your children.
  • Going to see the Mountain Goats for your birthday.
  • Sleep meds that don't interact well with grapefruit.
  • Caring for a newborn for a month and then suddenly having a nice meal.
  • A cocktail of factors.
  • Finding an amazing new artist you become obsessed with for the next few months.
  • Listening to music while you work.
  • A poster containing the source code for Pitfall.
  • How to keep finding new music in your thirties.
  • Phonograph.
  • Auto-brewery syndrome but for methamphetamines.
  • A good song that everybody likes.
  • Fear of stories.
  • Refusing to see a movie because you're afraid of what it'll make you feel.
  • Going camping in the woods in order to watch a movie.
  • Reliving your past experience in memory.
  • The soap operas that your ex's mom would watch.
  • Buying sheet music and playing it yourself in anticipation of when the orchestra comes to your town to play you the real thing.
  • Sheet music as a pre-release hype document.
  • Reading the manual of your new video game on the car ride home.
  • Crestfallenness.
  • Listening to a record with somebody.
  • Rogue topics that keep threatening to come up.
  • Playtesting as a way to get to know your friends better.
  • Approaching the things that are valuable to you through the lens of an illusion that you know is an illusion.
  • Lockdown hobbies.
  • How to enjoy hobbies.
  • Starting a Youtube series called "Ben sucks at baking" so you get a bunch of followers who will be disappointed if you get good at baking.
  • Dehydrating beer to get yeast out of it.
  • Making beer out of the yeast that's just hanging out in the air around you.
  • Gordy and the Monster Moon.
  • Nine year olds who are incredible at climbing because they refuse to eat fish.
  • A sparrow showing you its whole ass.
  • Whether sparrows are detested.
  • How to dispose of nuclear waste.
  • Attempts to make you hind brain think "I need to leave here immediately."
  • The meme of the skeleton playing the trumpet.
  • A field of Aztec death whistles activated by the wind blowing.
  • Trying to save the lives of people who live far in the future.
  • Speaking across time.
  • Whether this place is a place of honor.
  • An ADHD Shame Graveyard of Browser Tabs.
  • Going over all your browser tabs to see which ones remain relevant to you.
  • Details of how one bathes oneself that we never discuss in public.
  • A web browser that'll tell you "no, I think you've had enough tabs"
  • A brick that gives you a key.
  • How Elden Ring is structured.
  • A game that is a foray into a new design space that demonstrates how not to solve these design problems.
  • A scavenger hunt to find the next Topic Lords guest.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

  • My Thursday Night
  • The daunting thought of: there is so much music that exists now - it's more than likely that your favorite song in the world is out there and you'll never find it in your lifetime.
  • I've been working on a small game in my spare time and I never want to ship it. I just want to have friends playtest forever.
  • Fine Feather
  • The terrifying field of Hostile Nuclear Architecture
  • Do you have 103 tabs open in Chrome?
  • In Super Mario World, some secrets reward you by skipping levels and some reward you by adding new levels. Make up your mind! If the level add guy and the level subtract guy had just talked to each other they could've just left the levels as they were and saved everybody a lot of work.

Topics:

  • Having something to unplug.
  • Continuing to take care of your children.
  • Going to see the Mountain Goats for your birthday.
  • Sleep meds that don't interact well with grapefruit.
  • Caring for a newborn for a month and then suddenly having a nice meal.
  • A cocktail of factors.
  • Finding an amazing new artist you become obsessed with for the next few months.
  • Listening to music while you work.
  • A poster containing the source code for Pitfall.
  • How to keep finding new music in your thirties.
  • Phonograph.
  • Auto-brewery syndrome but for methamphetamines.
  • A good song that everybody likes.
  • Fear of stories.
  • Refusing to see a movie because you're afraid of what it'll make you feel.
  • Going camping in the woods in order to watch a movie.
  • Reliving your past experience in memory.
  • The soap operas that your ex's mom would watch.
  • Buying sheet music and playing it yourself in anticipation of when the orchestra comes to your town to play you the real thing.
  • Sheet music as a pre-release hype document.
  • Reading the manual of your new video game on the car ride home.
  • Crestfallenness.
  • Listening to a record with somebody.
  • Rogue topics that keep threatening to come up.
  • Playtesting as a way to get to know your friends better.
  • Approaching the things that are valuable to you through the lens of an illusion that you know is an illusion.
  • Lockdown hobbies.
  • How to enjoy hobbies.
  • Starting a Youtube series called "Ben sucks at baking" so you get a bunch of followers who will be disappointed if you get good at baking.
  • Dehydrating beer to get yeast out of it.
  • Making beer out of the yeast that's just hanging out in the air around you.
  • Gordy and the Monster Moon.
  • Nine year olds who are incredible at climbing because they refuse to eat fish.
  • A sparrow showing you its whole ass.
  • Whether sparrows are detested.
  • How to dispose of nuclear waste.
  • Attempts to make you hind brain think "I need to leave here immediately."
  • The meme of the skeleton playing the trumpet.
  • A field of Aztec death whistles activated by the wind blowing.
  • Trying to save the lives of people who live far in the future.
  • Speaking across time.
  • Whether this place is a place of honor.
  • An ADHD Shame Graveyard of Browser Tabs.
  • Going over all your browser tabs to see which ones remain relevant to you.
  • Details of how one bathes oneself that we never discuss in public.
  • A web browser that'll tell you "no, I think you've had enough tabs"
  • A brick that gives you a key.
  • How Elden Ring is structured.
  • A game that is a foray into a new design space that demonstrates how not to solve these design problems.
  • A scavenger hunt to find the next Topic Lords guest.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+zOoLdZHq ]]> Jim Stormdancer 185. 2000-Year-Old Head, Again?? https://topiclords.com/2000-year-old-head-again eb6fd239-7960-41c0-b77c-c37d6936c595 Mon, 08 May 2023 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Danny and Kim. We discuss Animorphs, Danny's tech support needs, Youtube channels that summarize movies like Cliff's Notes, CatGPT, M3gan/technology horror movies, and not getting points in Super Mario World 1:00:33 true Lords:

  • Danny
  • Kim

Topics:

Microtopics

  • A video game man.
  • The Animorphs train.
  • Children committing war crimes and having to live with the consequences.
  • How many books are in the Animorphs series.
  • The Visser Chronicles.
  • Yeerks living in the Yeerk pool.
  • Finding the person whose car you stole and explaining "here's your car back, I did a bunch of war crimes in it"
  • Hearing someone explain Animorphs repeatedly and never forming a single opinion.
  • The horror of noses moving around.
  • Refusing to read graphic novels because you can't read and look at pictures at the same time.
  • Animorphs: Shattered Reality.
  • Why boys don't read Animorphs.
  • Marco turning into an Andalyte.
  • Eating via your hooves.
  • F for Furry.
  • The canonical source for all sexualities.
  • Non-Consensual Dippin' Dots.
  • Haunted Headphones.
  • How to compliment your partner's flams.
  • Taking a movie and turning it into a TikTok.
  • The dude from Dark with the face.
  • Twisted social experiment: whoever survives til the end gets to live.
  • 2000 Year Old Head Again??
  • Blind Man Who Robbers Are Trying To Avoid For A Movie.
  • This Garfield Comic is Too Highbrow.
  • A Simple Rhyming Man.
  • I Had a Lover's Quarrel with the World.
  • A chat bot that only replies with cat memes.
  • An extremely asymmetric cat.
  • Hiding inside the couch.
  • A cat wearing a neckerchief.
  • AI dolls in horror movies.
  • A movie that is advertised relentlessly on whatever wavelength you're on.
  • Content warning: hilarious child death. The whole movie theater will laugh.
  • Haunted TikTok.
  • Topic Lords M3gan Edition.
  • Robot vs. Firmware Updates.
  • Robot vs. EULA.
  • Horror stories about firmware updates.
  • A toilet that screams at you if you're not licensed to shit in it.
  • Bathrooms that self clean whether you're still in there or not.
  • How many points coins are worth in all the different Mario games.
  • Incentivizing children to stomp on goombas.
  • Frog Fractions as an expression of score-related trauma.
  • An email where it's hard to tell who is fucking with whom.
  • The kind of people who like a game and leave a negative review on Steam that is clearly a joke but actually click the thumbs down button.
  • Curling: the most horny sport.
  • The game where people crouch really low and try to get a stone into a button.
  • Playing Frog Fractions for 420 hours.
  • The modern experience of being verified on Twitter.
  • The time Frog Fractions was crashing when you played it in France.
]]> Lords:

  • Danny
  • Kim

Topics:

Microtopics

  • A video game man.
  • The Animorphs train.
  • Children committing war crimes and having to live with the consequences.
  • How many books are in the Animorphs series.
  • The Visser Chronicles.
  • Yeerks living in the Yeerk pool.
  • Finding the person whose car you stole and explaining "here's your car back, I did a bunch of war crimes in it"
  • Hearing someone explain Animorphs repeatedly and never forming a single opinion.
  • The horror of noses moving around.
  • Refusing to read graphic novels because you can't read and look at pictures at the same time.
  • Animorphs: Shattered Reality.
  • Why boys don't read Animorphs.
  • Marco turning into an Andalyte.
  • Eating via your hooves.
  • F for Furry.
  • The canonical source for all sexualities.
  • Non-Consensual Dippin' Dots.
  • Haunted Headphones.
  • How to compliment your partner's flams.
  • Taking a movie and turning it into a TikTok.
  • The dude from Dark with the face.
  • Twisted social experiment: whoever survives til the end gets to live.
  • 2000 Year Old Head Again??
  • Blind Man Who Robbers Are Trying To Avoid For A Movie.
  • This Garfield Comic is Too Highbrow.
  • A Simple Rhyming Man.
  • I Had a Lover's Quarrel with the World.
  • A chat bot that only replies with cat memes.
  • An extremely asymmetric cat.
  • Hiding inside the couch.
  • A cat wearing a neckerchief.
  • AI dolls in horror movies.
  • A movie that is advertised relentlessly on whatever wavelength you're on.
  • Content warning: hilarious child death. The whole movie theater will laugh.
  • Haunted TikTok.
  • Topic Lords M3gan Edition.
  • Robot vs. Firmware Updates.
  • Robot vs. EULA.
  • Horror stories about firmware updates.
  • A toilet that screams at you if you're not licensed to shit in it.
  • Bathrooms that self clean whether you're still in there or not.
  • How many points coins are worth in all the different Mario games.
  • Incentivizing children to stomp on goombas.
  • Frog Fractions as an expression of score-related trauma.
  • An email where it's hard to tell who is fucking with whom.
  • The kind of people who like a game and leave a negative review on Steam that is clearly a joke but actually click the thumbs down button.
  • Curling: the most horny sport.
  • The game where people crouch really low and try to get a stone into a button.
  • Playing Frog Fractions for 420 hours.
  • The modern experience of being verified on Twitter.
  • The time Frog Fractions was crashing when you played it in France.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Danny
  • Kim

Topics:

Microtopics

  • A video game man.
  • The Animorphs train.
  • Children committing war crimes and having to live with the consequences.
  • How many books are in the Animorphs series.
  • The Visser Chronicles.
  • Yeerks living in the Yeerk pool.
  • Finding the person whose car you stole and explaining "here's your car back, I did a bunch of war crimes in it"
  • Hearing someone explain Animorphs repeatedly and never forming a single opinion.
  • The horror of noses moving around.
  • Refusing to read graphic novels because you can't read and look at pictures at the same time.
  • Animorphs: Shattered Reality.
  • Why boys don't read Animorphs.
  • Marco turning into an Andalyte.
  • Eating via your hooves.
  • F for Furry.
  • The canonical source for all sexualities.
  • Non-Consensual Dippin' Dots.
  • Haunted Headphones.
  • How to compliment your partner's flams.
  • Taking a movie and turning it into a TikTok.
  • The dude from Dark with the face.
  • Twisted social experiment: whoever survives til the end gets to live.
  • 2000 Year Old Head Again??
  • Blind Man Who Robbers Are Trying To Avoid For A Movie.
  • This Garfield Comic is Too Highbrow.
  • A Simple Rhyming Man.
  • I Had a Lover's Quarrel with the World.
  • A chat bot that only replies with cat memes.
  • An extremely asymmetric cat.
  • Hiding inside the couch.
  • A cat wearing a neckerchief.
  • AI dolls in horror movies.
  • A movie that is advertised relentlessly on whatever wavelength you're on.
  • Content warning: hilarious child death. The whole movie theater will laugh.
  • Haunted TikTok.
  • Topic Lords M3gan Edition.
  • Robot vs. Firmware Updates.
  • Robot vs. EULA.
  • Horror stories about firmware updates.
  • A toilet that screams at you if you're not licensed to shit in it.
  • Bathrooms that self clean whether you're still in there or not.
  • How many points coins are worth in all the different Mario games.
  • Incentivizing children to stomp on goombas.
  • Frog Fractions as an expression of score-related trauma.
  • An email where it's hard to tell who is fucking with whom.
  • The kind of people who like a game and leave a negative review on Steam that is clearly a joke but actually click the thumbs down button.
  • Curling: the most horny sport.
  • The game where people crouch really low and try to get a stone into a button.
  • Playing Frog Fractions for 420 hours.
  • The modern experience of being verified on Twitter.
  • The time Frog Fractions was crashing when you played it in France.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+YcNkhlWR ]]> Jim Stormdancer 184. Times New Orange https://topiclords.com/times-new-orange d960d39d-0ad6-4e40-b8d6-429e84024a66 Mon, 01 May 2023 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Alexicographic and Andrew. We discuss what 3 foods are pairwise good but bad all together, talking loudly during movie trailers as an act of anticapitalist subversion, the truth about Moon Mode, The Orange by Wendy Cope, learning Italian from a cartoon dog, being able to identify McElroy fans by how they complement my woodworking, and List of Video Games Considered Artistic 1:03:08 true Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • kittenm4ster's PICO-8 games.
  • Vibing with the Alfonzo's Bowling Challenge ethos.
  • A game that is implemented in under 8000 tokens.
  • The ideal game pitch.
  • Chocolate and cheese and something.
  • Choccoli.
  • Chocolate and gravy.
  • A lukewarm Americano.
  • A bunch of foodies who really know their foodstuffs.
  • A fish being strangled by Red Vines.
  • A GPU that has food inside of it.
  • The Turing test for whether computers can taste foods.
  • Asking Chat GPT what three foods you can combine to create a bomb in your kitchen.
  • Whether Gallium has calories.
  • Three people on a podcast who all think "trailers" should come after the movie
  • Finding out about a movie by seeing a trailer in a movie theater even though trailers are constantly spilling out of every screen you own.
  • Getting the wiggles out.
  • How to make the lives of people who enjoy looking at ads a little bit worse.
  • Yelling "fire" before the movie starts so fewer people pay attention to the pre-movie ads.
  • Wanting to become the reason all movies have "no leopards in the theater" PSAs now.
  • A toddler watching Youtube, yelling "no!" and throwing the phone on the ground when an ad plays.
  • Pushing the lever to receive your stochastic reward.
  • Youtube deciding you've seen enough ads lately and taking pity on you.
  • Trying to explain to a four year old how to play a light gun game but the game is over before you finish explaining.
  • The Space Alien Busting Song.
  • Drawing new mountains on the moon to test your camera's moon mode.
  • Here's the moon again.
  • A filter to replace pictures of your wife with the moon.
  • A Snapchat filter that makes you feel like you used to be attractive.
  • A filter that takes your bad photos of the moon and makes them even worse.
  • The worst bunny in the moon.
  • A good poem that rhymes.
  • Turtle metaconsistency.
  • Enormous and hilarious oranges.
  • Good art here, you guys.
  • Reading poetry in the original Helvetica.
  • BorgiaPro on various font downloading sites.
  • A cartoon that is entertaining even if you are not learning Italian.
  • Finding Armando's old hat in the attic.
  • Asking the clouds to move so that your hat can protect you from the sun.
  • Working within a constraint that produces delightful nonsense.
  • Photocopying yourself to create a black and white clone.
  • What drugs they'll give to kids in what countries.
  • Growing up but continuing to take the same drugs.
  • A little girl who is also a dog.
  • Subtitles that don't match what's being said aloud.
  • Watching Italian TV using a VPN.
  • The Andrew Lloyd Weber musical with the roller skates.
  • Roller bladers dancing in weird futuristic costumes.
  • Having positive fun experiences with language.
  • Learning a new language while skydiving.
  • Hiring an experienced skydiver who can give you foreign language lessons while you're both falling from a plane.
  • Getting bored while skydiving and looking at your phone but there's no WiFi up there.
  • How McElroy fans compliment someone's woodworking.
  • How to Fake an Interest in Woodworking.
  • Arguing about whether games are art.
  • All the games that anyone's ever called art.
  • Finding information about a deleted page on Wikipedia.
  • Philosophical debate on the creative qualia of electronic structured play. (Roger Ebert has a subheading.)
  • Whether the List of Zombie Video Games on Wikipedia includes philosophical zombies.
  • Whether the List of Zombie Video Games on Wikipedia includes voodoo zombies.
  • What Casinos are trying to do to attract kids who like video games.
  • Whether Lechuck is a voodoo zombie or a Romero zombie.
  • Hohokum.
  • Finding a bunch of snakes that each have different names.
  • What happens when you collect all the things. (Art.)
  • List of Paintings Considered Artistic.
  • Gimmick food that is more about the experience of eating a weird thing than the food itself.
  • A restaurant that doesn't have plates and just pours the food into your cupped hands.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • kittenm4ster's PICO-8 games.
  • Vibing with the Alfonzo's Bowling Challenge ethos.
  • A game that is implemented in under 8000 tokens.
  • The ideal game pitch.
  • Chocolate and cheese and something.
  • Choccoli.
  • Chocolate and gravy.
  • A lukewarm Americano.
  • A bunch of foodies who really know their foodstuffs.
  • A fish being strangled by Red Vines.
  • A GPU that has food inside of it.
  • The Turing test for whether computers can taste foods.
  • Asking Chat GPT what three foods you can combine to create a bomb in your kitchen.
  • Whether Gallium has calories.
  • Three people on a podcast who all think "trailers" should come after the movie
  • Finding out about a movie by seeing a trailer in a movie theater even though trailers are constantly spilling out of every screen you own.
  • Getting the wiggles out.
  • How to make the lives of people who enjoy looking at ads a little bit worse.
  • Yelling "fire" before the movie starts so fewer people pay attention to the pre-movie ads.
  • Wanting to become the reason all movies have "no leopards in the theater" PSAs now.
  • A toddler watching Youtube, yelling "no!" and throwing the phone on the ground when an ad plays.
  • Pushing the lever to receive your stochastic reward.
  • Youtube deciding you've seen enough ads lately and taking pity on you.
  • Trying to explain to a four year old how to play a light gun game but the game is over before you finish explaining.
  • The Space Alien Busting Song.
  • Drawing new mountains on the moon to test your camera's moon mode.
  • Here's the moon again.
  • A filter to replace pictures of your wife with the moon.
  • A Snapchat filter that makes you feel like you used to be attractive.
  • A filter that takes your bad photos of the moon and makes them even worse.
  • The worst bunny in the moon.
  • A good poem that rhymes.
  • Turtle metaconsistency.
  • Enormous and hilarious oranges.
  • Good art here, you guys.
  • Reading poetry in the original Helvetica.
  • BorgiaPro on various font downloading sites.
  • A cartoon that is entertaining even if you are not learning Italian.
  • Finding Armando's old hat in the attic.
  • Asking the clouds to move so that your hat can protect you from the sun.
  • Working within a constraint that produces delightful nonsense.
  • Photocopying yourself to create a black and white clone.
  • What drugs they'll give to kids in what countries.
  • Growing up but continuing to take the same drugs.
  • A little girl who is also a dog.
  • Subtitles that don't match what's being said aloud.
  • Watching Italian TV using a VPN.
  • The Andrew Lloyd Weber musical with the roller skates.
  • Roller bladers dancing in weird futuristic costumes.
  • Having positive fun experiences with language.
  • Learning a new language while skydiving.
  • Hiring an experienced skydiver who can give you foreign language lessons while you're both falling from a plane.
  • Getting bored while skydiving and looking at your phone but there's no WiFi up there.
  • How McElroy fans compliment someone's woodworking.
  • How to Fake an Interest in Woodworking.
  • Arguing about whether games are art.
  • All the games that anyone's ever called art.
  • Finding information about a deleted page on Wikipedia.
  • Philosophical debate on the creative qualia of electronic structured play. (Roger Ebert has a subheading.)
  • Whether the List of Zombie Video Games on Wikipedia includes philosophical zombies.
  • Whether the List of Zombie Video Games on Wikipedia includes voodoo zombies.
  • What Casinos are trying to do to attract kids who like video games.
  • Whether Lechuck is a voodoo zombie or a Romero zombie.
  • Hohokum.
  • Finding a bunch of snakes that each have different names.
  • What happens when you collect all the things. (Art.)
  • List of Paintings Considered Artistic.
  • Gimmick food that is more about the experience of eating a weird thing than the food itself.
  • A restaurant that doesn't have plates and just pours the food into your cupped hands.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • kittenm4ster's PICO-8 games.
  • Vibing with the Alfonzo's Bowling Challenge ethos.
  • A game that is implemented in under 8000 tokens.
  • The ideal game pitch.
  • Chocolate and cheese and something.
  • Choccoli.
  • Chocolate and gravy.
  • A lukewarm Americano.
  • A bunch of foodies who really know their foodstuffs.
  • A fish being strangled by Red Vines.
  • A GPU that has food inside of it.
  • The Turing test for whether computers can taste foods.
  • Asking Chat GPT what three foods you can combine to create a bomb in your kitchen.
  • Whether Gallium has calories.
  • Three people on a podcast who all think "trailers" should come after the movie
  • Finding out about a movie by seeing a trailer in a movie theater even though trailers are constantly spilling out of every screen you own.
  • Getting the wiggles out.
  • How to make the lives of people who enjoy looking at ads a little bit worse.
  • Yelling "fire" before the movie starts so fewer people pay attention to the pre-movie ads.
  • Wanting to become the reason all movies have "no leopards in the theater" PSAs now.
  • A toddler watching Youtube, yelling "no!" and throwing the phone on the ground when an ad plays.
  • Pushing the lever to receive your stochastic reward.
  • Youtube deciding you've seen enough ads lately and taking pity on you.
  • Trying to explain to a four year old how to play a light gun game but the game is over before you finish explaining.
  • The Space Alien Busting Song.
  • Drawing new mountains on the moon to test your camera's moon mode.
  • Here's the moon again.
  • A filter to replace pictures of your wife with the moon.
  • A Snapchat filter that makes you feel like you used to be attractive.
  • A filter that takes your bad photos of the moon and makes them even worse.
  • The worst bunny in the moon.
  • A good poem that rhymes.
  • Turtle metaconsistency.
  • Enormous and hilarious oranges.
  • Good art here, you guys.
  • Reading poetry in the original Helvetica.
  • BorgiaPro on various font downloading sites.
  • A cartoon that is entertaining even if you are not learning Italian.
  • Finding Armando's old hat in the attic.
  • Asking the clouds to move so that your hat can protect you from the sun.
  • Working within a constraint that produces delightful nonsense.
  • Photocopying yourself to create a black and white clone.
  • What drugs they'll give to kids in what countries.
  • Growing up but continuing to take the same drugs.
  • A little girl who is also a dog.
  • Subtitles that don't match what's being said aloud.
  • Watching Italian TV using a VPN.
  • The Andrew Lloyd Weber musical with the roller skates.
  • Roller bladers dancing in weird futuristic costumes.
  • Having positive fun experiences with language.
  • Learning a new language while skydiving.
  • Hiring an experienced skydiver who can give you foreign language lessons while you're both falling from a plane.
  • Getting bored while skydiving and looking at your phone but there's no WiFi up there.
  • How McElroy fans compliment someone's woodworking.
  • How to Fake an Interest in Woodworking.
  • Arguing about whether games are art.
  • All the games that anyone's ever called art.
  • Finding information about a deleted page on Wikipedia.
  • Philosophical debate on the creative qualia of electronic structured play. (Roger Ebert has a subheading.)
  • Whether the List of Zombie Video Games on Wikipedia includes philosophical zombies.
  • Whether the List of Zombie Video Games on Wikipedia includes voodoo zombies.
  • What Casinos are trying to do to attract kids who like video games.
  • Whether Lechuck is a voodoo zombie or a Romero zombie.
  • Hohokum.
  • Finding a bunch of snakes that each have different names.
  • What happens when you collect all the things. (Art.)
  • List of Paintings Considered Artistic.
  • Gimmick food that is more about the experience of eating a weird thing than the food itself.
  • A restaurant that doesn't have plates and just pours the food into your cupped hands.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+u46iD3pz ]]> Jim Stormdancer 183. The Radioactive Scone Problem https://topiclords.com/the-radioactive-scone-problem e8e4a1cc-31b1-468c-b52c-d9e052aea795 Mon, 24 Apr 2023 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: John and Quil. We discuss playing a Zelda game before it's spoiled on the internet, RCA's implementation of color TV, the guy next to Jim on BART, 1961 by Robert Lowell, and every civilization independently inventing dumplings. 1:01:17 true Lords:

  • John
  • Quil

Topics:

  • Taking advantage of a rare opportunity to play a Legend of Zelda game before every aspect of it is documented on the internet
  • RCA's implementation of color television is one of the most impressive engineering feats of the 20th century
  • The guy next to me on BART talked to me the entire ride home from GDC. He made me play the phone game he was addicted to and compared my performance to the coworker he was also making play the game. He got a call from his wife and introduced me to her. He told me he was in prison for 30 years for murder. His step son is a pitbull breeder and he complained about how few free pitbulls he was getting. He smelled weed on the train and put on a loud voice to announce "I'm a cop, put your vape pen away." My stop was also his stop, so the monologue didn't let up when I got off the train. I finally escaped when he was distracted by girl scout cookies.
  • http://blueridgejournal.com/poems/rl-fall.htm
  • Are dumplings universal? It seems like every civilization has at some point invented their version of 'carbs around a protein' food

Microtopics:

  • The best part of the show.
  • The Great Lakes Pigeon Rescue.
  • How best to keep a pigeon.
  • Hiding in the discord
  • Solving problems in interesting ways.
  • A very interesting idea that just barely pays off.
  • Playing a new game all weekend for the first time in your life.
  • A game that is too spiky to be solved by one person.
  • A matchmaking service that puts you on a forum with fifty people who are each starting a Dark Souls game for the first time.
  • Accidentally playing geez Fez with your sister.
  • A riddle about risk management.
  • Not being able to throw away radioactive waste because you don't want to waste food.
  • Deciding which cookie to put in your mouth
  • Finding the password to someone's laptop in a video game by googling their information in real life.
  • Digital vs. Analog circuitry.
  • Piggybacking the color signal on top of the black and white signal.
  • Quadrature amplitude modulation.
  • Racing the Beam.
  • Being banished from the kingdom for partly understanding how television works.
  • Inventing two televisions so you can run one backwards.
  • Extroverts who when meeting an introvert, think to themselves "it's my job to bridge the gap"
  • Escaping when someone is distracted by Girl Scout Cookies.
  • Encountering the ARG that you made for yourself and then forgot about.
  • Not getting as many free pitbulls as you thought.
  • Getting off the train early to get away from the person who won't stop talking to you and he's like "oh ok I'll get off here too."
  • Your wife who hates when you impersonate a cop.
  • The episode of Train Hot Dog which was just Jim reading a stack trace for twenty minutes.
  • Trying to figure out what web site you can browse on your phone to get the person sitting next to you to stand up.
  • Jim's preferred San Francisco residents.
  • The orange bland ambassadorial face of the moon.
  • Wild spiders crying together.
  • What to do when the air raid sirens go off.
  • Moving to a new place where they don't have monthly nuclear accident drills.
  • John Vanderslice.
  • The Human Missile Crisis.
  • Showing fear for humanity before it's cool.
  • Poetry that is not meant to be read aloud.
  • Stripping the formatting out of e e cummings's poetry.
  • A poem that skips around on the page like Chutes and Ladders.
  • Topic Troves.
  • Carbs around a protein food.
  • A rooster named Pierogi.
  • Whether dumplings have to be slimy.
  • Putting the pudding in a protein.
  • A particleboard meat.
  • A McRib that's been injected with custard.
  • Sweet and savory things placed inside a carb.
  • What civilizations have never invented the dumpling.
  • How to get from agriculture to the Hot Pocket.
  • The singular of funfetti.
  • How to get into the Topic Lords discord.
  • Topic Lords the Phone Game.
  • Cheap Bots Toot Sweet.
]]> Lords:

  • John
  • Quil

Topics:

  • Taking advantage of a rare opportunity to play a Legend of Zelda game before every aspect of it is documented on the internet
  • RCA's implementation of color television is one of the most impressive engineering feats of the 20th century
  • The guy next to me on BART talked to me the entire ride home from GDC. He made me play the phone game he was addicted to and compared my performance to the coworker he was also making play the game. He got a call from his wife and introduced me to her. He told me he was in prison for 30 years for murder. His step son is a pitbull breeder and he complained about how few free pitbulls he was getting. He smelled weed on the train and put on a loud voice to announce "I'm a cop, put your vape pen away." My stop was also his stop, so the monologue didn't let up when I got off the train. I finally escaped when he was distracted by girl scout cookies.
  • http://blueridgejournal.com/poems/rl-fall.htm
  • Are dumplings universal? It seems like every civilization has at some point invented their version of 'carbs around a protein' food

Microtopics:

  • The best part of the show.
  • The Great Lakes Pigeon Rescue.
  • How best to keep a pigeon.
  • Hiding in the discord
  • Solving problems in interesting ways.
  • A very interesting idea that just barely pays off.
  • Playing a new game all weekend for the first time in your life.
  • A game that is too spiky to be solved by one person.
  • A matchmaking service that puts you on a forum with fifty people who are each starting a Dark Souls game for the first time.
  • Accidentally playing geez Fez with your sister.
  • A riddle about risk management.
  • Not being able to throw away radioactive waste because you don't want to waste food.
  • Deciding which cookie to put in your mouth
  • Finding the password to someone's laptop in a video game by googling their information in real life.
  • Digital vs. Analog circuitry.
  • Piggybacking the color signal on top of the black and white signal.
  • Quadrature amplitude modulation.
  • Racing the Beam.
  • Being banished from the kingdom for partly understanding how television works.
  • Inventing two televisions so you can run one backwards.
  • Extroverts who when meeting an introvert, think to themselves "it's my job to bridge the gap"
  • Escaping when someone is distracted by Girl Scout Cookies.
  • Encountering the ARG that you made for yourself and then forgot about.
  • Not getting as many free pitbulls as you thought.
  • Getting off the train early to get away from the person who won't stop talking to you and he's like "oh ok I'll get off here too."
  • Your wife who hates when you impersonate a cop.
  • The episode of Train Hot Dog which was just Jim reading a stack trace for twenty minutes.
  • Trying to figure out what web site you can browse on your phone to get the person sitting next to you to stand up.
  • Jim's preferred San Francisco residents.
  • The orange bland ambassadorial face of the moon.
  • Wild spiders crying together.
  • What to do when the air raid sirens go off.
  • Moving to a new place where they don't have monthly nuclear accident drills.
  • John Vanderslice.
  • The Human Missile Crisis.
  • Showing fear for humanity before it's cool.
  • Poetry that is not meant to be read aloud.
  • Stripping the formatting out of e e cummings's poetry.
  • A poem that skips around on the page like Chutes and Ladders.
  • Topic Troves.
  • Carbs around a protein food.
  • A rooster named Pierogi.
  • Whether dumplings have to be slimy.
  • Putting the pudding in a protein.
  • A particleboard meat.
  • A McRib that's been injected with custard.
  • Sweet and savory things placed inside a carb.
  • What civilizations have never invented the dumpling.
  • How to get from agriculture to the Hot Pocket.
  • The singular of funfetti.
  • How to get into the Topic Lords discord.
  • Topic Lords the Phone Game.
  • Cheap Bots Toot Sweet.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • John
  • Quil

Topics:

  • Taking advantage of a rare opportunity to play a Legend of Zelda game before every aspect of it is documented on the internet
  • RCA's implementation of color television is one of the most impressive engineering feats of the 20th century
  • The guy next to me on BART talked to me the entire ride home from GDC. He made me play the phone game he was addicted to and compared my performance to the coworker he was also making play the game. He got a call from his wife and introduced me to her. He told me he was in prison for 30 years for murder. His step son is a pitbull breeder and he complained about how few free pitbulls he was getting. He smelled weed on the train and put on a loud voice to announce "I'm a cop, put your vape pen away." My stop was also his stop, so the monologue didn't let up when I got off the train. I finally escaped when he was distracted by girl scout cookies.
  • http://blueridgejournal.com/poems/rl-fall.htm
  • Are dumplings universal? It seems like every civilization has at some point invented their version of 'carbs around a protein' food

Microtopics:

  • The best part of the show.
  • The Great Lakes Pigeon Rescue.
  • How best to keep a pigeon.
  • Hiding in the discord
  • Solving problems in interesting ways.
  • A very interesting idea that just barely pays off.
  • Playing a new game all weekend for the first time in your life.
  • A game that is too spiky to be solved by one person.
  • A matchmaking service that puts you on a forum with fifty people who are each starting a Dark Souls game for the first time.
  • Accidentally playing geez Fez with your sister.
  • A riddle about risk management.
  • Not being able to throw away radioactive waste because you don't want to waste food.
  • Deciding which cookie to put in your mouth
  • Finding the password to someone's laptop in a video game by googling their information in real life.
  • Digital vs. Analog circuitry.
  • Piggybacking the color signal on top of the black and white signal.
  • Quadrature amplitude modulation.
  • Racing the Beam.
  • Being banished from the kingdom for partly understanding how television works.
  • Inventing two televisions so you can run one backwards.
  • Extroverts who when meeting an introvert, think to themselves "it's my job to bridge the gap"
  • Escaping when someone is distracted by Girl Scout Cookies.
  • Encountering the ARG that you made for yourself and then forgot about.
  • Not getting as many free pitbulls as you thought.
  • Getting off the train early to get away from the person who won't stop talking to you and he's like "oh ok I'll get off here too."
  • Your wife who hates when you impersonate a cop.
  • The episode of Train Hot Dog which was just Jim reading a stack trace for twenty minutes.
  • Trying to figure out what web site you can browse on your phone to get the person sitting next to you to stand up.
  • Jim's preferred San Francisco residents.
  • The orange bland ambassadorial face of the moon.
  • Wild spiders crying together.
  • What to do when the air raid sirens go off.
  • Moving to a new place where they don't have monthly nuclear accident drills.
  • John Vanderslice.
  • The Human Missile Crisis.
  • Showing fear for humanity before it's cool.
  • Poetry that is not meant to be read aloud.
  • Stripping the formatting out of e e cummings's poetry.
  • A poem that skips around on the page like Chutes and Ladders.
  • Topic Troves.
  • Carbs around a protein food.
  • A rooster named Pierogi.
  • Whether dumplings have to be slimy.
  • Putting the pudding in a protein.
  • A particleboard meat.
  • A McRib that's been injected with custard.
  • Sweet and savory things placed inside a carb.
  • What civilizations have never invented the dumpling.
  • How to get from agriculture to the Hot Pocket.
  • The singular of funfetti.
  • How to get into the Topic Lords discord.
  • Topic Lords the Phone Game.
  • Cheap Bots Toot Sweet.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+Gim-Tly2 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 182. Baby Baby Mario https://topiclords.com/baby-baby-mario f326396f-7fb5-4a61-b39e-69a0b0ef6e82 Mon, 17 Apr 2023 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Jenni and Chris. We discuss sleepovers and latchkey kids, the movie adaptation of Jurassic Park 2, the VR episode of Nowhere Man, the space battle over Nuremberg in 1561, &c. 1:02:53 true Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Baby Mario and Baby Luigi being two different species.
  • Riff and Jenni play Rusty Lake.
  • Absorbing most of your twin in the womb and all that's left is his heart behind your nipple.
  • Nippleheart.
  • Cool Time Dice Hour.
  • Cragne Manor.
  • Heck of a project, terrible game, not recommended at all.
  • Cragne Manor's TV Tropes page.
  • A Metafilter thread about sleepovers.
  • Your mom asking for a report on all the swear words in the book you're reading.
  • Elsa Screams at Dentist.
  • Watching Elsa Screaming videos on Youtube to learn how to scream better.
  • Going to the bookstore by yourself when your are 13 years old.
  • Calling the anime repair guy when your anime goes out.
  • New guy just dropped: guy with trench coat full of VHS tapes who won't hand you the VHS tapes, he makes you reach in and take them.
  • Socializing your kids poorly so nobody will invite them to sleepovers.
  • Learning how sex works and then calling a conference on the playground to explain it to everyone.
  • Calvin's dad explaining that women only pee once a month.
  • Picking up the broken glass that your meth dealer neighbor keeps throwing in your cactus garden.
  • The tiny-handed thin-necked final girl.
  • Abraham Lincoln's wrestling career.
  • The one where they defeat the veloraptors with gymnastics.
  • The one where they defeat the velociraptors by showing them Elsa Screaming videos on Youtube.
  • Taking a bad book and adapting it into an even worse movie.
  • Doing drugs until the dinosaurs look like they have feathers.
  • Microscopic dust particles on the slicey bits.
  • Why blowing into the cartridge did or didn't work
  • Hunter-gatherers blowing on a blinking raspberry bush and cursing the defective lockout chip.
  • Being unable to hunt bison because of bison DRM.
  • A completely made-up kind of VR.
  • Downloading your estranged wife from the internet so you can reunite in VR.
  • A Rough Whimper of Insanity.
  • Max Headroom: a guy with a weird forehead who shows up in media sometimes, like a California Raisin.
  • Explaining Mac Tonight to a 22 year old.
  • The worst car you could have possibly imagined.
  • Delightful clean all-ages nonsense.
  • Demonstrating your allegiance to 90s-era edgelordism.
  • Cresting the event horizon of random bullshit.
  • The VR apparatus hanging off of your wasted body.
  • Adding more vanilla than the recipe calls for.
  • Putting a hapenny on the spice vendor's tongue and reaching into his trench coat to pull out a bag of cumin.
  • Poking bytes into memory to mod Cyberpunk 2077.
  • Whether Pico-8 is more or less racist than Dickens Fair.
  • The space battle that took place over Nuremberg in 1561.
  • UFOs vs. UAPs.
  • Tie-Fighters and Star Destroyers over Nuremberg.
  • The All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office: if you got an anomaly, yo, they'll resolve it.
  • Asking the Pentagon for money for a cab fare to go investigate unexplained aerial phenomena.
  • A mass hysteria of the collective unconscious.
  • Marrying your cousin and going into space.
  • Anakin is of the species Baby Mario and Padme is a Baby Luigi so when they breed they'll have an infertile Baby Wario or Baby Waluigi.
  • The fan theory where Jar-Jar is the Sith Lord.
  • The origin of angels as a terror.
  • Pre-hurricane ice crystal patterns.
  • Making biblically accurate angels out of everything.
  • Generational memory from back when we had wings.
  • Fish wings.
  • Being drunk all the time because you don't trust the water.
  • Aspartame's bitter aftertaste, and also fuck Stevia.
  • Coke Grownups.
  • Pepsi Peeps.
  • Eating the whole bag of Pepsi Syrup Peep Gushers and now you can't play D&D tonight because you just have to lie on the floor clutching your belly and complaining that nobody saved you from your life choices.
  • Food that exists to overwhelm your senses and your ability to make decisions.
  • The two genders of time.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Baby Mario and Baby Luigi being two different species.
  • Riff and Jenni play Rusty Lake.
  • Absorbing most of your twin in the womb and all that's left is his heart behind your nipple.
  • Nippleheart.
  • Cool Time Dice Hour.
  • Cragne Manor.
  • Heck of a project, terrible game, not recommended at all.
  • Cragne Manor's TV Tropes page.
  • A Metafilter thread about sleepovers.
  • Your mom asking for a report on all the swear words in the book you're reading.
  • Elsa Screams at Dentist.
  • Watching Elsa Screaming videos on Youtube to learn how to scream better.
  • Going to the bookstore by yourself when your are 13 years old.
  • Calling the anime repair guy when your anime goes out.
  • New guy just dropped: guy with trench coat full of VHS tapes who won't hand you the VHS tapes, he makes you reach in and take them.
  • Socializing your kids poorly so nobody will invite them to sleepovers.
  • Learning how sex works and then calling a conference on the playground to explain it to everyone.
  • Calvin's dad explaining that women only pee once a month.
  • Picking up the broken glass that your meth dealer neighbor keeps throwing in your cactus garden.
  • The tiny-handed thin-necked final girl.
  • Abraham Lincoln's wrestling career.
  • The one where they defeat the veloraptors with gymnastics.
  • The one where they defeat the velociraptors by showing them Elsa Screaming videos on Youtube.
  • Taking a bad book and adapting it into an even worse movie.
  • Doing drugs until the dinosaurs look like they have feathers.
  • Microscopic dust particles on the slicey bits.
  • Why blowing into the cartridge did or didn't work
  • Hunter-gatherers blowing on a blinking raspberry bush and cursing the defective lockout chip.
  • Being unable to hunt bison because of bison DRM.
  • A completely made-up kind of VR.
  • Downloading your estranged wife from the internet so you can reunite in VR.
  • A Rough Whimper of Insanity.
  • Max Headroom: a guy with a weird forehead who shows up in media sometimes, like a California Raisin.
  • Explaining Mac Tonight to a 22 year old.
  • The worst car you could have possibly imagined.
  • Delightful clean all-ages nonsense.
  • Demonstrating your allegiance to 90s-era edgelordism.
  • Cresting the event horizon of random bullshit.
  • The VR apparatus hanging off of your wasted body.
  • Adding more vanilla than the recipe calls for.
  • Putting a hapenny on the spice vendor's tongue and reaching into his trench coat to pull out a bag of cumin.
  • Poking bytes into memory to mod Cyberpunk 2077.
  • Whether Pico-8 is more or less racist than Dickens Fair.
  • The space battle that took place over Nuremberg in 1561.
  • UFOs vs. UAPs.
  • Tie-Fighters and Star Destroyers over Nuremberg.
  • The All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office: if you got an anomaly, yo, they'll resolve it.
  • Asking the Pentagon for money for a cab fare to go investigate unexplained aerial phenomena.
  • A mass hysteria of the collective unconscious.
  • Marrying your cousin and going into space.
  • Anakin is of the species Baby Mario and Padme is a Baby Luigi so when they breed they'll have an infertile Baby Wario or Baby Waluigi.
  • The fan theory where Jar-Jar is the Sith Lord.
  • The origin of angels as a terror.
  • Pre-hurricane ice crystal patterns.
  • Making biblically accurate angels out of everything.
  • Generational memory from back when we had wings.
  • Fish wings.
  • Being drunk all the time because you don't trust the water.
  • Aspartame's bitter aftertaste, and also fuck Stevia.
  • Coke Grownups.
  • Pepsi Peeps.
  • Eating the whole bag of Pepsi Syrup Peep Gushers and now you can't play D&D tonight because you just have to lie on the floor clutching your belly and complaining that nobody saved you from your life choices.
  • Food that exists to overwhelm your senses and your ability to make decisions.
  • The two genders of time.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Baby Mario and Baby Luigi being two different species.
  • Riff and Jenni play Rusty Lake.
  • Absorbing most of your twin in the womb and all that's left is his heart behind your nipple.
  • Nippleheart.
  • Cool Time Dice Hour.
  • Cragne Manor.
  • Heck of a project, terrible game, not recommended at all.
  • Cragne Manor's TV Tropes page.
  • A Metafilter thread about sleepovers.
  • Your mom asking for a report on all the swear words in the book you're reading.
  • Elsa Screams at Dentist.
  • Watching Elsa Screaming videos on Youtube to learn how to scream better.
  • Going to the bookstore by yourself when your are 13 years old.
  • Calling the anime repair guy when your anime goes out.
  • New guy just dropped: guy with trench coat full of VHS tapes who won't hand you the VHS tapes, he makes you reach in and take them.
  • Socializing your kids poorly so nobody will invite them to sleepovers.
  • Learning how sex works and then calling a conference on the playground to explain it to everyone.
  • Calvin's dad explaining that women only pee once a month.
  • Picking up the broken glass that your meth dealer neighbor keeps throwing in your cactus garden.
  • The tiny-handed thin-necked final girl.
  • Abraham Lincoln's wrestling career.
  • The one where they defeat the veloraptors with gymnastics.
  • The one where they defeat the velociraptors by showing them Elsa Screaming videos on Youtube.
  • Taking a bad book and adapting it into an even worse movie.
  • Doing drugs until the dinosaurs look like they have feathers.
  • Microscopic dust particles on the slicey bits.
  • Why blowing into the cartridge did or didn't work
  • Hunter-gatherers blowing on a blinking raspberry bush and cursing the defective lockout chip.
  • Being unable to hunt bison because of bison DRM.
  • A completely made-up kind of VR.
  • Downloading your estranged wife from the internet so you can reunite in VR.
  • A Rough Whimper of Insanity.
  • Max Headroom: a guy with a weird forehead who shows up in media sometimes, like a California Raisin.
  • Explaining Mac Tonight to a 22 year old.
  • The worst car you could have possibly imagined.
  • Delightful clean all-ages nonsense.
  • Demonstrating your allegiance to 90s-era edgelordism.
  • Cresting the event horizon of random bullshit.
  • The VR apparatus hanging off of your wasted body.
  • Adding more vanilla than the recipe calls for.
  • Putting a hapenny on the spice vendor's tongue and reaching into his trench coat to pull out a bag of cumin.
  • Poking bytes into memory to mod Cyberpunk 2077.
  • Whether Pico-8 is more or less racist than Dickens Fair.
  • The space battle that took place over Nuremberg in 1561.
  • UFOs vs. UAPs.
  • Tie-Fighters and Star Destroyers over Nuremberg.
  • The All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office: if you got an anomaly, yo, they'll resolve it.
  • Asking the Pentagon for money for a cab fare to go investigate unexplained aerial phenomena.
  • A mass hysteria of the collective unconscious.
  • Marrying your cousin and going into space.
  • Anakin is of the species Baby Mario and Padme is a Baby Luigi so when they breed they'll have an infertile Baby Wario or Baby Waluigi.
  • The fan theory where Jar-Jar is the Sith Lord.
  • The origin of angels as a terror.
  • Pre-hurricane ice crystal patterns.
  • Making biblically accurate angels out of everything.
  • Generational memory from back when we had wings.
  • Fish wings.
  • Being drunk all the time because you don't trust the water.
  • Aspartame's bitter aftertaste, and also fuck Stevia.
  • Coke Grownups.
  • Pepsi Peeps.
  • Eating the whole bag of Pepsi Syrup Peep Gushers and now you can't play D&D tonight because you just have to lie on the floor clutching your belly and complaining that nobody saved you from your life choices.
  • Food that exists to overwhelm your senses and your ability to make decisions.
  • The two genders of time.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+piSHHCWR ]]> Jim Stormdancer 181. My Own Personal Kennedy Assassination https://topiclords.com/my-own-personal-kennedy-assassination 9a6f9ecf-1e61-4e88-b23f-9a6cc06ba374 Mon, 10 Apr 2023 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Avery and Tyriq. We discuss Adam the Giant, Heathcliff, novelty metal covers about Truly Scrumptious / Doll on a Music Box, and The Phone Call by James Tate. 1:04:00 true Lords:

  • Avery
  • Tyriq

Topics:

  • Adam, Father of all humankind, was maybe a giant
  • Heathcliff is still going and it's weird
  • I've heard a million novelty metal covers but still nobody's done Truly Scrumptious / Doll on a Music Box from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
  • "The Phone Call" by James Tate

Microtopics:

  • Withholding all your best URLs until the end of the episode.
  • Using lowercase Ls in place of Is and seeing if anybody notices.
  • Leaving capitalizations to the whims of chaos. (Your fingers.)
  • Teachers explaining that if you can't write in cursive by junior high your teachers will throw things at you and call you stupid.
  • Adam and Eve growing to 18 feet tall.
  • Pre-flood humans and their towering heights/lifespans/IQs.
  • How to make your wisdom teeth fit again.
  • Conspiracy theories that have no bearing on anything.
  • Fighting wars over the estimated radius of the earth.
  • The Nephilim.
  • YHWH fanfiction.
  • How many Jesuses are alive today.
  • The friend you have with superhuman charisma and whether they ended up starting a cult.
  • Getcherself a nice cult, settle down, have a thousand babies.
  • The guy who was both a dwarf and a giant during his lifetime.
  • Every tall person having been short at one point.
  • Chain-smoking tweens drinking martinis and yelling at their secretaries.
  • A Topic Lords ouroboros.
  • Hypothesizing why the elderly people Heathcliff lives with have a child.
  • Having a child for some reason.
  • A humanoid robot with the word "meat" printed on its chest.
  • The kind of people who read comics every day.
  • Zippy the Pinhead.
  • A weird underground subculture comic that somehow made it into newspaper syndication.
  • Mustache Mondays vs. Mustache Lasagna.
  • A milk mustache but for lasagna.
  • A cartoon anvil that has its weight imprinted on it.
  • Two side characters explaining the situation to each other.
  • One of the birds says to the other, "Christ, what an asshole."
  • Historians a thousand years from now deciding whether Heathcliff should be included in the Bible.
  • After recorded media stops being a thing, episodes of The Simpsons being passed down as oral history.
  • Rhapsodes.
  • Contests for the best rhapsode.
  • Hector of the Shining Helmet vs. Hector the Booty Inspector.
  • Fillet episodes in the Odyssey and the Iliad.
  • The Flaming Lips album that comes on four CDs that your supposed to play simultaneously, but nobody's ever bothered.
  • How they handle hidden tracks on Spotify.
  • How to deal with skits when you're ripping rap albums to mp3.
  • The Meat Puppets playing a set in the middle of Nirvana'a MTV Unplugged set.
  • Writing a song about a shooting star who's been turned into a rat and has just fallen in love with someone named Tristran, and trying to figure out what rhymes with Tristran.
  • Working at the Brill Building.
  • Tin Pan Alley.
  • Nearly jumping out of your pants.
  • Taking a high-paying job as a murder victim.
  • The one where people wear horse skulls.
  • The Scrambler, from issue #12 where the panels were all out of order.
  • Working at the oil refinery until a giant spider comes and steals the Light of the Silmarils.
  • Whether there's a werewolf in the Silmarillion.
  • Biblical Exigesis.
  • Getting email saying that your art is improving someone's life.
  • A phone that can receive text messages but you have to pay extra to know who they're from.
]]> Lords:

  • Avery
  • Tyriq

Topics:

  • Adam, Father of all humankind, was maybe a giant
  • Heathcliff is still going and it's weird
  • I've heard a million novelty metal covers but still nobody's done Truly Scrumptious / Doll on a Music Box from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
  • "The Phone Call" by James Tate

Microtopics:

  • Withholding all your best URLs until the end of the episode.
  • Using lowercase Ls in place of Is and seeing if anybody notices.
  • Leaving capitalizations to the whims of chaos. (Your fingers.)
  • Teachers explaining that if you can't write in cursive by junior high your teachers will throw things at you and call you stupid.
  • Adam and Eve growing to 18 feet tall.
  • Pre-flood humans and their towering heights/lifespans/IQs.
  • How to make your wisdom teeth fit again.
  • Conspiracy theories that have no bearing on anything.
  • Fighting wars over the estimated radius of the earth.
  • The Nephilim.
  • YHWH fanfiction.
  • How many Jesuses are alive today.
  • The friend you have with superhuman charisma and whether they ended up starting a cult.
  • Getcherself a nice cult, settle down, have a thousand babies.
  • The guy who was both a dwarf and a giant during his lifetime.
  • Every tall person having been short at one point.
  • Chain-smoking tweens drinking martinis and yelling at their secretaries.
  • A Topic Lords ouroboros.
  • Hypothesizing why the elderly people Heathcliff lives with have a child.
  • Having a child for some reason.
  • A humanoid robot with the word "meat" printed on its chest.
  • The kind of people who read comics every day.
  • Zippy the Pinhead.
  • A weird underground subculture comic that somehow made it into newspaper syndication.
  • Mustache Mondays vs. Mustache Lasagna.
  • A milk mustache but for lasagna.
  • A cartoon anvil that has its weight imprinted on it.
  • Two side characters explaining the situation to each other.
  • One of the birds says to the other, "Christ, what an asshole."
  • Historians a thousand years from now deciding whether Heathcliff should be included in the Bible.
  • After recorded media stops being a thing, episodes of The Simpsons being passed down as oral history.
  • Rhapsodes.
  • Contests for the best rhapsode.
  • Hector of the Shining Helmet vs. Hector the Booty Inspector.
  • Fillet episodes in the Odyssey and the Iliad.
  • The Flaming Lips album that comes on four CDs that your supposed to play simultaneously, but nobody's ever bothered.
  • How they handle hidden tracks on Spotify.
  • How to deal with skits when you're ripping rap albums to mp3.
  • The Meat Puppets playing a set in the middle of Nirvana'a MTV Unplugged set.
  • Writing a song about a shooting star who's been turned into a rat and has just fallen in love with someone named Tristran, and trying to figure out what rhymes with Tristran.
  • Working at the Brill Building.
  • Tin Pan Alley.
  • Nearly jumping out of your pants.
  • Taking a high-paying job as a murder victim.
  • The one where people wear horse skulls.
  • The Scrambler, from issue #12 where the panels were all out of order.
  • Working at the oil refinery until a giant spider comes and steals the Light of the Silmarils.
  • Whether there's a werewolf in the Silmarillion.
  • Biblical Exigesis.
  • Getting email saying that your art is improving someone's life.
  • A phone that can receive text messages but you have to pay extra to know who they're from.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Avery
  • Tyriq

Topics:

  • Adam, Father of all humankind, was maybe a giant
  • Heathcliff is still going and it's weird
  • I've heard a million novelty metal covers but still nobody's done Truly Scrumptious / Doll on a Music Box from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
  • "The Phone Call" by James Tate

Microtopics:

  • Withholding all your best URLs until the end of the episode.
  • Using lowercase Ls in place of Is and seeing if anybody notices.
  • Leaving capitalizations to the whims of chaos. (Your fingers.)
  • Teachers explaining that if you can't write in cursive by junior high your teachers will throw things at you and call you stupid.
  • Adam and Eve growing to 18 feet tall.
  • Pre-flood humans and their towering heights/lifespans/IQs.
  • How to make your wisdom teeth fit again.
  • Conspiracy theories that have no bearing on anything.
  • Fighting wars over the estimated radius of the earth.
  • The Nephilim.
  • YHWH fanfiction.
  • How many Jesuses are alive today.
  • The friend you have with superhuman charisma and whether they ended up starting a cult.
  • Getcherself a nice cult, settle down, have a thousand babies.
  • The guy who was both a dwarf and a giant during his lifetime.
  • Every tall person having been short at one point.
  • Chain-smoking tweens drinking martinis and yelling at their secretaries.
  • A Topic Lords ouroboros.
  • Hypothesizing why the elderly people Heathcliff lives with have a child.
  • Having a child for some reason.
  • A humanoid robot with the word "meat" printed on its chest.
  • The kind of people who read comics every day.
  • Zippy the Pinhead.
  • A weird underground subculture comic that somehow made it into newspaper syndication.
  • Mustache Mondays vs. Mustache Lasagna.
  • A milk mustache but for lasagna.
  • A cartoon anvil that has its weight imprinted on it.
  • Two side characters explaining the situation to each other.
  • One of the birds says to the other, "Christ, what an asshole."
  • Historians a thousand years from now deciding whether Heathcliff should be included in the Bible.
  • After recorded media stops being a thing, episodes of The Simpsons being passed down as oral history.
  • Rhapsodes.
  • Contests for the best rhapsode.
  • Hector of the Shining Helmet vs. Hector the Booty Inspector.
  • Fillet episodes in the Odyssey and the Iliad.
  • The Flaming Lips album that comes on four CDs that your supposed to play simultaneously, but nobody's ever bothered.
  • How they handle hidden tracks on Spotify.
  • How to deal with skits when you're ripping rap albums to mp3.
  • The Meat Puppets playing a set in the middle of Nirvana'a MTV Unplugged set.
  • Writing a song about a shooting star who's been turned into a rat and has just fallen in love with someone named Tristran, and trying to figure out what rhymes with Tristran.
  • Working at the Brill Building.
  • Tin Pan Alley.
  • Nearly jumping out of your pants.
  • Taking a high-paying job as a murder victim.
  • The one where people wear horse skulls.
  • The Scrambler, from issue #12 where the panels were all out of order.
  • Working at the oil refinery until a giant spider comes and steals the Light of the Silmarils.
  • Whether there's a werewolf in the Silmarillion.
  • Biblical Exigesis.
  • Getting email saying that your art is improving someone's life.
  • A phone that can receive text messages but you have to pay extra to know who they're from.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+FTaFikHX ]]> Jim Stormdancer 180. We Are All Stardust Poop https://topiclords.com/we-are-all-stardust-poop 40800d8e-d393-40f0-a757-cd167bd79899 Mon, 03 Apr 2023 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Ichiro and Adam. We discuss leaning to animate by watching cartoons, Totally Human Rapper, Frog Fractions banned from AGDQ, "Frog Fractions" by Totally Human Rapper, and Tiny Mass Games small games cycle. 1:00:01 true Lords:

  • Ichiro
  • Adam

Topics:

  • I learned how to animate by watching cartoons as a child (and I'm curious what else folks absorbed as a child that impacted the kind of adult they became)
  • I created a Totally Human Rapper that can read up on a game and cut a rap video.
  • Frog Fractions is banned from AGDQ
  • "Frog Fractions" by Totally Human Rapper
  • Tiny Mass Games small games cycle.

Microtopics:

  • One of the episodes with a cold open.
  • Live from New York, it's.
  • Using ocean water as a mixer.
  • Being of poop and returning to poop.
  • Using the Boston river as a mixer.
  • Learning everything you know about love from Robotech.
  • Losing your fiancee and marrying an alien instead.
  • Paying $6/hr to play a MUD.
  • Corresponding with your MUD lover via dead tree letters.
  • Playing a MUD and cheating on one avatar with another avatar and eventually realizing that they are played by the same person.
  • Sleep is Death.
  • The cool part of the Metaverse circa 2005.
  • Learning what human relationships look like by watching Saturday morning cartoons.
  • Sarah and Duck.
  • Pocoyo.
  • Busting ghosts. (A very important time in a boy's life.)
  • Retired Men's Nude Beach Volleyball League.
  • The center of your Venn diagram as a creator.
  • Ichiro Paydirt.
  • If Tank Girl were a streamer.
  • Endless Seinfeld pulling a Microsoft Tay.
  • The year of the deluge of AI generated crap.
  • Making a BBS door game about traveling into space.
  • Zooming out of yourself and looking at it with ghost eyes.
  • A game that appears to be family-friendly but is actually porn-adjacent.
  • The Timic skip.
  • A very respectful way to play Frog Fractions.
  • The two concessions Jim made to game design in the Frog Fractions remaster.
  • Catering to the you demographic.
  • Blanking on Tim Ambrogi's name.
  • Noted base jumping game "ahh"
  • An underlying engine that just won't swear.
  • Saying something interesting enough to be debated by a bunch of people.
  • Stemming the tide of mediocrity across streaming platforms.
  • The value of making dinner for two people vs. making art for millions of people.
  • Having a thought in your head and wanting people to hear it.
  • Gluing all the ports shut.
  • Games that gradually destroy themselves.
  • Follow the Frog, an arcade action adventure.
  • Where Totally Human Rapper gets his ideas.
  • How to jailbreak ChatGPT.
  • A deck building auto battler without the deck.
  • A well-scoped game design.
  • Not really having anything to say but loving to wrestle with language.
  • An AI generated game about AI generated games.
  • Polishing a prototype enough to put it in front of a mass audience.
  • Rating AI-generated food.
  • Synergies and combinatorics.
  • The development process for each Frog Fractions game.
  • Answering to ask things.
]]> Lords:

  • Ichiro
  • Adam

Topics:

  • I learned how to animate by watching cartoons as a child (and I'm curious what else folks absorbed as a child that impacted the kind of adult they became)
  • I created a Totally Human Rapper that can read up on a game and cut a rap video.
  • Frog Fractions is banned from AGDQ
  • "Frog Fractions" by Totally Human Rapper
  • Tiny Mass Games small games cycle.

Microtopics:

  • One of the episodes with a cold open.
  • Live from New York, it's.
  • Using ocean water as a mixer.
  • Being of poop and returning to poop.
  • Using the Boston river as a mixer.
  • Learning everything you know about love from Robotech.
  • Losing your fiancee and marrying an alien instead.
  • Paying $6/hr to play a MUD.
  • Corresponding with your MUD lover via dead tree letters.
  • Playing a MUD and cheating on one avatar with another avatar and eventually realizing that they are played by the same person.
  • Sleep is Death.
  • The cool part of the Metaverse circa 2005.
  • Learning what human relationships look like by watching Saturday morning cartoons.
  • Sarah and Duck.
  • Pocoyo.
  • Busting ghosts. (A very important time in a boy's life.)
  • Retired Men's Nude Beach Volleyball League.
  • The center of your Venn diagram as a creator.
  • Ichiro Paydirt.
  • If Tank Girl were a streamer.
  • Endless Seinfeld pulling a Microsoft Tay.
  • The year of the deluge of AI generated crap.
  • Making a BBS door game about traveling into space.
  • Zooming out of yourself and looking at it with ghost eyes.
  • A game that appears to be family-friendly but is actually porn-adjacent.
  • The Timic skip.
  • A very respectful way to play Frog Fractions.
  • The two concessions Jim made to game design in the Frog Fractions remaster.
  • Catering to the you demographic.
  • Blanking on Tim Ambrogi's name.
  • Noted base jumping game "ahh"
  • An underlying engine that just won't swear.
  • Saying something interesting enough to be debated by a bunch of people.
  • Stemming the tide of mediocrity across streaming platforms.
  • The value of making dinner for two people vs. making art for millions of people.
  • Having a thought in your head and wanting people to hear it.
  • Gluing all the ports shut.
  • Games that gradually destroy themselves.
  • Follow the Frog, an arcade action adventure.
  • Where Totally Human Rapper gets his ideas.
  • How to jailbreak ChatGPT.
  • A deck building auto battler without the deck.
  • A well-scoped game design.
  • Not really having anything to say but loving to wrestle with language.
  • An AI generated game about AI generated games.
  • Polishing a prototype enough to put it in front of a mass audience.
  • Rating AI-generated food.
  • Synergies and combinatorics.
  • The development process for each Frog Fractions game.
  • Answering to ask things.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Ichiro
  • Adam

Topics:

  • I learned how to animate by watching cartoons as a child (and I'm curious what else folks absorbed as a child that impacted the kind of adult they became)
  • I created a Totally Human Rapper that can read up on a game and cut a rap video.
  • Frog Fractions is banned from AGDQ
  • "Frog Fractions" by Totally Human Rapper
  • Tiny Mass Games small games cycle.

Microtopics:

  • One of the episodes with a cold open.
  • Live from New York, it's.
  • Using ocean water as a mixer.
  • Being of poop and returning to poop.
  • Using the Boston river as a mixer.
  • Learning everything you know about love from Robotech.
  • Losing your fiancee and marrying an alien instead.
  • Paying $6/hr to play a MUD.
  • Corresponding with your MUD lover via dead tree letters.
  • Playing a MUD and cheating on one avatar with another avatar and eventually realizing that they are played by the same person.
  • Sleep is Death.
  • The cool part of the Metaverse circa 2005.
  • Learning what human relationships look like by watching Saturday morning cartoons.
  • Sarah and Duck.
  • Pocoyo.
  • Busting ghosts. (A very important time in a boy's life.)
  • Retired Men's Nude Beach Volleyball League.
  • The center of your Venn diagram as a creator.
  • Ichiro Paydirt.
  • If Tank Girl were a streamer.
  • Endless Seinfeld pulling a Microsoft Tay.
  • The year of the deluge of AI generated crap.
  • Making a BBS door game about traveling into space.
  • Zooming out of yourself and looking at it with ghost eyes.
  • A game that appears to be family-friendly but is actually porn-adjacent.
  • The Timic skip.
  • A very respectful way to play Frog Fractions.
  • The two concessions Jim made to game design in the Frog Fractions remaster.
  • Catering to the you demographic.
  • Blanking on Tim Ambrogi's name.
  • Noted base jumping game "ahh"
  • An underlying engine that just won't swear.
  • Saying something interesting enough to be debated by a bunch of people.
  • Stemming the tide of mediocrity across streaming platforms.
  • The value of making dinner for two people vs. making art for millions of people.
  • Having a thought in your head and wanting people to hear it.
  • Gluing all the ports shut.
  • Games that gradually destroy themselves.
  • Follow the Frog, an arcade action adventure.
  • Where Totally Human Rapper gets his ideas.
  • How to jailbreak ChatGPT.
  • A deck building auto battler without the deck.
  • A well-scoped game design.
  • Not really having anything to say but loving to wrestle with language.
  • An AI generated game about AI generated games.
  • Polishing a prototype enough to put it in front of a mass audience.
  • Rating AI-generated food.
  • Synergies and combinatorics.
  • The development process for each Frog Fractions game.
  • Answering to ask things.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+CHNTrCYA ]]> Jim Stormdancer 179. Get Bad https://topiclords.com/get-bad 1d4dfbe3-ae53-45f6-9db0-93e1da605b5d Mon, 27 Mar 2023 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Alex and Shannon. We discuss reading music badly, guessing the animal from bad old-timey description, how to pronounce "MacPaint," a poem in the options of a Tumblr poll, and airport teleportation. 1:03:02 true Lords:

  • Alex
  • Shannon

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Games that you should not play if you get addicted to games.
  • Roguelikes that take a reasonable amount of time to play if you are bad at them.
  • We're Not That Bad!™
  • The Sunnyvale Singers.
  • Producing music with a piano.
  • Two guards, one who can't read a book and the other one who can read a book aloud but doesn't know the language.
  • Buttons corresponding to the doots.
  • Given a starting note, figuring out what the next note is supposed to be.
  • Not being able to sight sing but faking it by looking at the vertical distance between notes.
  • Music direction reading "lower than you think" (but in Italian)
  • Knowing the chord progressions to 10,000 pop songs.
  • Ways to make music.
  • Moving between shapes even without hearing them.
  • Playing accompaniment to silent films.
  • Improvising music differently each time.
  • Pliny the Elder describing the camel leopard.
  • An animal with the neck of a horse but the head of a camel.
  • A bigness answering thereto.
  • Enjoying the alligator too much.
  • A curse on four legs, equally pernicious on land and river.
  • Inflating the chameleon.
  • Spontaneous generation.
  • Horned ghosts catapulting themselves around.
  • Hunting an elephant by tricking it into leaning on a tree that won't support it.
  • Whether elephants have knees.
  • Vultures gestating for three years and giving live birth.
  • Vultures and condors reproducing without mating.
  • Your good friend Ms. Paint.
  • Naming your dog a Japanese-sounding name with no regard to Japanese phonotactics and then arguing with people who try to correct you.
  • Baking a cake that is 80% vanilla extract.
  • A poem in the options of a Tumblr poll.
  • Starting from a point of trust but slowly starting to doubt yourself.
  • Orpheus and Eurydice.
  • A poignant way of putting the reader in the character's frame of mind.
  • The value of Oregon Trail.
  • Iterating the Orpheus and Eurydice prisoner's dilemma, where whether looking back is the right move is different every time.
  • Choosing to buy a certain amount of supplies and watching that not work out for you and the character you named after your best friend in the media lab dies.
  • Extremely short form interactive fiction.
  • Making an important decision and never finding out if it was the right decision.
  • Performing Sicilian Reasoning to finesse the outcome of this online cake ingredient poll.
  • Making a perfect stairway in an online poll.
  • Making a phone app to help people choose the best option in the cake ingredient poll.
  • Instantly teleporting from your seat on the flight to the entrance to your destination airport.
  • Teleporting from the TSA interrogation room to the entrance of the airport.
  • Teleportation gravity wells.
  • Establishing an international airport out of your home.
  • Hoping the cops never figure out that you can only teleport to the entrance of an airport.
  • Stuperpowers
  • Gerrymandering your teleport destinations.
  • An international airport that is 100 miles long and 1 centimeter wide.
  • Asking a friend to convince you that a certain building is an international airport.
  • Drinking a glass of water while standing on your head to convince yourself of what an airport is.
  • Hiccups Gone Install.
  • You Only Get Screamered Once.
]]> Lords:

  • Alex
  • Shannon

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Games that you should not play if you get addicted to games.
  • Roguelikes that take a reasonable amount of time to play if you are bad at them.
  • We're Not That Bad!™
  • The Sunnyvale Singers.
  • Producing music with a piano.
  • Two guards, one who can't read a book and the other one who can read a book aloud but doesn't know the language.
  • Buttons corresponding to the doots.
  • Given a starting note, figuring out what the next note is supposed to be.
  • Not being able to sight sing but faking it by looking at the vertical distance between notes.
  • Music direction reading "lower than you think" (but in Italian)
  • Knowing the chord progressions to 10,000 pop songs.
  • Ways to make music.
  • Moving between shapes even without hearing them.
  • Playing accompaniment to silent films.
  • Improvising music differently each time.
  • Pliny the Elder describing the camel leopard.
  • An animal with the neck of a horse but the head of a camel.
  • A bigness answering thereto.
  • Enjoying the alligator too much.
  • A curse on four legs, equally pernicious on land and river.
  • Inflating the chameleon.
  • Spontaneous generation.
  • Horned ghosts catapulting themselves around.
  • Hunting an elephant by tricking it into leaning on a tree that won't support it.
  • Whether elephants have knees.
  • Vultures gestating for three years and giving live birth.
  • Vultures and condors reproducing without mating.
  • Your good friend Ms. Paint.
  • Naming your dog a Japanese-sounding name with no regard to Japanese phonotactics and then arguing with people who try to correct you.
  • Baking a cake that is 80% vanilla extract.
  • A poem in the options of a Tumblr poll.
  • Starting from a point of trust but slowly starting to doubt yourself.
  • Orpheus and Eurydice.
  • A poignant way of putting the reader in the character's frame of mind.
  • The value of Oregon Trail.
  • Iterating the Orpheus and Eurydice prisoner's dilemma, where whether looking back is the right move is different every time.
  • Choosing to buy a certain amount of supplies and watching that not work out for you and the character you named after your best friend in the media lab dies.
  • Extremely short form interactive fiction.
  • Making an important decision and never finding out if it was the right decision.
  • Performing Sicilian Reasoning to finesse the outcome of this online cake ingredient poll.
  • Making a perfect stairway in an online poll.
  • Making a phone app to help people choose the best option in the cake ingredient poll.
  • Instantly teleporting from your seat on the flight to the entrance to your destination airport.
  • Teleporting from the TSA interrogation room to the entrance of the airport.
  • Teleportation gravity wells.
  • Establishing an international airport out of your home.
  • Hoping the cops never figure out that you can only teleport to the entrance of an airport.
  • Stuperpowers
  • Gerrymandering your teleport destinations.
  • An international airport that is 100 miles long and 1 centimeter wide.
  • Asking a friend to convince you that a certain building is an international airport.
  • Drinking a glass of water while standing on your head to convince yourself of what an airport is.
  • Hiccups Gone Install.
  • You Only Get Screamered Once.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Alex
  • Shannon

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Games that you should not play if you get addicted to games.
  • Roguelikes that take a reasonable amount of time to play if you are bad at them.
  • We're Not That Bad!™
  • The Sunnyvale Singers.
  • Producing music with a piano.
  • Two guards, one who can't read a book and the other one who can read a book aloud but doesn't know the language.
  • Buttons corresponding to the doots.
  • Given a starting note, figuring out what the next note is supposed to be.
  • Not being able to sight sing but faking it by looking at the vertical distance between notes.
  • Music direction reading "lower than you think" (but in Italian)
  • Knowing the chord progressions to 10,000 pop songs.
  • Ways to make music.
  • Moving between shapes even without hearing them.
  • Playing accompaniment to silent films.
  • Improvising music differently each time.
  • Pliny the Elder describing the camel leopard.
  • An animal with the neck of a horse but the head of a camel.
  • A bigness answering thereto.
  • Enjoying the alligator too much.
  • A curse on four legs, equally pernicious on land and river.
  • Inflating the chameleon.
  • Spontaneous generation.
  • Horned ghosts catapulting themselves around.
  • Hunting an elephant by tricking it into leaning on a tree that won't support it.
  • Whether elephants have knees.
  • Vultures gestating for three years and giving live birth.
  • Vultures and condors reproducing without mating.
  • Your good friend Ms. Paint.
  • Naming your dog a Japanese-sounding name with no regard to Japanese phonotactics and then arguing with people who try to correct you.
  • Baking a cake that is 80% vanilla extract.
  • A poem in the options of a Tumblr poll.
  • Starting from a point of trust but slowly starting to doubt yourself.
  • Orpheus and Eurydice.
  • A poignant way of putting the reader in the character's frame of mind.
  • The value of Oregon Trail.
  • Iterating the Orpheus and Eurydice prisoner's dilemma, where whether looking back is the right move is different every time.
  • Choosing to buy a certain amount of supplies and watching that not work out for you and the character you named after your best friend in the media lab dies.
  • Extremely short form interactive fiction.
  • Making an important decision and never finding out if it was the right decision.
  • Performing Sicilian Reasoning to finesse the outcome of this online cake ingredient poll.
  • Making a perfect stairway in an online poll.
  • Making a phone app to help people choose the best option in the cake ingredient poll.
  • Instantly teleporting from your seat on the flight to the entrance to your destination airport.
  • Teleporting from the TSA interrogation room to the entrance of the airport.
  • Teleportation gravity wells.
  • Establishing an international airport out of your home.
  • Hoping the cops never figure out that you can only teleport to the entrance of an airport.
  • Stuperpowers
  • Gerrymandering your teleport destinations.
  • An international airport that is 100 miles long and 1 centimeter wide.
  • Asking a friend to convince you that a certain building is an international airport.
  • Drinking a glass of water while standing on your head to convince yourself of what an airport is.
  • Hiccups Gone Install.
  • You Only Get Screamered Once.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+TuSBf2gy ]]> Jim Stormdancer 178. The Lathe of Kojima https://topiclords.com/the-lathe-of-kojima 31d8c4cd-287d-4951-9679-7c8ad40138b0 Mon, 20 Mar 2023 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: CisHetKayfaber and Phone. We discuss calculus ruining incremental games, small form factor PCs, HDR, Ode to Ice Cream by Vada Sultenfuss, and Metal Gear Solid 2: the most important game of 2023. 1:06:15 true Lords:

  • CisHetKeyfaber
  • Phone

Topics:

  • Calculus ruined incremental games for me
  • SFF PCs are ridiculous and hilarious
  • What's the deal with HDR?
  • Ode to Ice Cream by Vada Sultenfuss (from the movie My Girl)
  • Metal Gear Solid 2 is the most important game of 2023

Microtopics:

  • Appropriating wrestling culture.
  • Idle games vs. incremental games.
  • Trimps.
  • Physics and calculus educators each pretending the other field doesn't exist.
  • Jerk as a unit of measurement.
  • Ruining a child's mathematical career by teaching them linear algebra.
  • Floating point precision.
  • Optimizing the area under the curve.
  • What's the jerk of my progress?
  • Position, speed, acceleration, jerk, jounce, hyperjerk, metajounce, binge warp, migrational spank, barflurch, dark jaunt, catastrophic snap, whipfuck, and Newton's Torment.
  • A real aerodynamic phenomenon.
  • Ruining the bench racers.
  • The kind of people who form an online community around a game.
  • The NGU IDLE speedrunning community.
  • Slaying the starting area killing slimes for 90 hours.
  • How big 26.8 liters is.
  • Rehoming your PC.
  • How many shoeboxes your PC case is equivalent to.
  • A graphics card that is perpendicular to the motherboard.
  • How many parakeets could fit in your PC case using modern parakeet packing algorithms.
  • Making a novelty enormous soda can to use as a fake scale comparison in photos.
  • Bending your hand at a weird angle.
  • JEBKAC.
  • The jerk of your PC case.
  • Turning the gamma up in order to see a video game.
  • Squashed gamuts.
  • Adding more bits to describe the color.
  • HDMI stratification.
  • The colors that future mankind will invent.
  • Being unable to use certain hex color triplets because the Pantone license expired.
  • When ice cream tastes good.
  • Poems written by works in progress.
  • B.R.R. (Before Rocky Road)
  • Not having seen My Girl but having seen the cover at Blockbuster.
  • Growing up in a mortuary.
  • Bragging that you know how to play the theme to Jaws on the piano.
  • Nick at Nite.
  • Playing with Legos with I Love Lucy in the background.
  • Timeshared cable channels.
  • Nickelodeon's audience being kids and Nick at Nite's audience being the elderly so the channel's average audience is middle-aged.
  • The most important game of 2023.
  • The core switcheroo.
  • Psycho Mantis reading your memory card.
  • Playing a really whiny guy who just sucks.
  • Whether they've invented pausing cutscenes yet.
  • Pausing a 40 minute cutscene to go make pizza rolls.
  • AI heel turns.
  • Metal Gear Solid 2 beating out Vampire Survivors for most important game of 2022.
  • Why Hideo Kojima's dialog sounds like an American 90s movie.
  • Political theory outsider art.
  • The anti-Noby Noby Boy.
  • A discord channel brimming with Lords.
]]> Lords:

  • CisHetKeyfaber
  • Phone

Topics:

  • Calculus ruined incremental games for me
  • SFF PCs are ridiculous and hilarious
  • What's the deal with HDR?
  • Ode to Ice Cream by Vada Sultenfuss (from the movie My Girl)
  • Metal Gear Solid 2 is the most important game of 2023

Microtopics:

  • Appropriating wrestling culture.
  • Idle games vs. incremental games.
  • Trimps.
  • Physics and calculus educators each pretending the other field doesn't exist.
  • Jerk as a unit of measurement.
  • Ruining a child's mathematical career by teaching them linear algebra.
  • Floating point precision.
  • Optimizing the area under the curve.
  • What's the jerk of my progress?
  • Position, speed, acceleration, jerk, jounce, hyperjerk, metajounce, binge warp, migrational spank, barflurch, dark jaunt, catastrophic snap, whipfuck, and Newton's Torment.
  • A real aerodynamic phenomenon.
  • Ruining the bench racers.
  • The kind of people who form an online community around a game.
  • The NGU IDLE speedrunning community.
  • Slaying the starting area killing slimes for 90 hours.
  • How big 26.8 liters is.
  • Rehoming your PC.
  • How many shoeboxes your PC case is equivalent to.
  • A graphics card that is perpendicular to the motherboard.
  • How many parakeets could fit in your PC case using modern parakeet packing algorithms.
  • Making a novelty enormous soda can to use as a fake scale comparison in photos.
  • Bending your hand at a weird angle.
  • JEBKAC.
  • The jerk of your PC case.
  • Turning the gamma up in order to see a video game.
  • Squashed gamuts.
  • Adding more bits to describe the color.
  • HDMI stratification.
  • The colors that future mankind will invent.
  • Being unable to use certain hex color triplets because the Pantone license expired.
  • When ice cream tastes good.
  • Poems written by works in progress.
  • B.R.R. (Before Rocky Road)
  • Not having seen My Girl but having seen the cover at Blockbuster.
  • Growing up in a mortuary.
  • Bragging that you know how to play the theme to Jaws on the piano.
  • Nick at Nite.
  • Playing with Legos with I Love Lucy in the background.
  • Timeshared cable channels.
  • Nickelodeon's audience being kids and Nick at Nite's audience being the elderly so the channel's average audience is middle-aged.
  • The most important game of 2023.
  • The core switcheroo.
  • Psycho Mantis reading your memory card.
  • Playing a really whiny guy who just sucks.
  • Whether they've invented pausing cutscenes yet.
  • Pausing a 40 minute cutscene to go make pizza rolls.
  • AI heel turns.
  • Metal Gear Solid 2 beating out Vampire Survivors for most important game of 2022.
  • Why Hideo Kojima's dialog sounds like an American 90s movie.
  • Political theory outsider art.
  • The anti-Noby Noby Boy.
  • A discord channel brimming with Lords.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • CisHetKeyfaber
  • Phone

Topics:

  • Calculus ruined incremental games for me
  • SFF PCs are ridiculous and hilarious
  • What's the deal with HDR?
  • Ode to Ice Cream by Vada Sultenfuss (from the movie My Girl)
  • Metal Gear Solid 2 is the most important game of 2023

Microtopics:

  • Appropriating wrestling culture.
  • Idle games vs. incremental games.
  • Trimps.
  • Physics and calculus educators each pretending the other field doesn't exist.
  • Jerk as a unit of measurement.
  • Ruining a child's mathematical career by teaching them linear algebra.
  • Floating point precision.
  • Optimizing the area under the curve.
  • What's the jerk of my progress?
  • Position, speed, acceleration, jerk, jounce, hyperjerk, metajounce, binge warp, migrational spank, barflurch, dark jaunt, catastrophic snap, whipfuck, and Newton's Torment.
  • A real aerodynamic phenomenon.
  • Ruining the bench racers.
  • The kind of people who form an online community around a game.
  • The NGU IDLE speedrunning community.
  • Slaying the starting area killing slimes for 90 hours.
  • How big 26.8 liters is.
  • Rehoming your PC.
  • How many shoeboxes your PC case is equivalent to.
  • A graphics card that is perpendicular to the motherboard.
  • How many parakeets could fit in your PC case using modern parakeet packing algorithms.
  • Making a novelty enormous soda can to use as a fake scale comparison in photos.
  • Bending your hand at a weird angle.
  • JEBKAC.
  • The jerk of your PC case.
  • Turning the gamma up in order to see a video game.
  • Squashed gamuts.
  • Adding more bits to describe the color.
  • HDMI stratification.
  • The colors that future mankind will invent.
  • Being unable to use certain hex color triplets because the Pantone license expired.
  • When ice cream tastes good.
  • Poems written by works in progress.
  • B.R.R. (Before Rocky Road)
  • Not having seen My Girl but having seen the cover at Blockbuster.
  • Growing up in a mortuary.
  • Bragging that you know how to play the theme to Jaws on the piano.
  • Nick at Nite.
  • Playing with Legos with I Love Lucy in the background.
  • Timeshared cable channels.
  • Nickelodeon's audience being kids and Nick at Nite's audience being the elderly so the channel's average audience is middle-aged.
  • The most important game of 2023.
  • The core switcheroo.
  • Psycho Mantis reading your memory card.
  • Playing a really whiny guy who just sucks.
  • Whether they've invented pausing cutscenes yet.
  • Pausing a 40 minute cutscene to go make pizza rolls.
  • AI heel turns.
  • Metal Gear Solid 2 beating out Vampire Survivors for most important game of 2022.
  • Why Hideo Kojima's dialog sounds like an American 90s movie.
  • Political theory outsider art.
  • The anti-Noby Noby Boy.
  • A discord channel brimming with Lords.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+U-bAPFzL ]]> Jim Stormdancer 177. An Episode Your Landlord Should Not Listen To https://topiclords.com/an-episode-your-landlord-should-not-listen-to 798a25c3-7d5d-4c06-8e5d-69a16b3f3b24 Mon, 13 Mar 2023 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Alicia and Ryan. We discuss: Seattle's reaction to snow vs the Bay Area's reaction to rain, would you rather fart bones once a month or have Goldeneye "big head mode" on in real life for a year, Moral philosophy lessons from the California DMV, Nancy, and common everyday items that make you mentally "time travel." 1:03:35 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Alicia
  • Ryan
    • Just type his name into google.

Topics:

  • Seattle's reaction to snow vs the Bay Area's reaction to rain: who is more dramatic?
  • Would you rather fart bones once a month or have Goldeneye "big head mode" on in real life for a year?
  • Moral philosophy lessons from the California DMV
  • Nancy
  • Common everyday items that make you mentally "time travel"

Microtopics:

  • Structurally reinforcing the scrotum.
  • Plugging mundane chores around the house.
  • Why do you live here, Seattle?
  • The lamentation of a failed joke being funnier than the joke itself would've been.
  • Turning the tire towards the curb when parking on a hill.
  • Driving in inclement weather.
  • Milking oats.
  • What it means for society when you make oat milk at home.
  • The rain we occasionally get except way more.
  • Bettie White-out.
  • When an imaginary kid uses his last words to put you on blast.
  • The advantages and disadvantages of big head mode.
  • How to get on the bus with big head mode on.
  • Whose bones you're farting right now.
  • Big Head Mode Confirmed in GoldenEye 007.
  • The yoga pose that is most optimal for shitting bones.
  • Getting your GoldenEye big head stuck in the automatic doors at TJ Maxx.
  • Whale bones on your mattress.
  • Which bones you can do without.
  • Bone pellets.
  • Using your broken tooth as a fidget toy.
  • An absolutely staggering amount of dental work.
  • A perfectly lovely root canal.
  • Using your bone-lasered rib as a fidget toy.
  • Extra ribs just loose in your torso somewhere.
  • Ribs of betrayal stabbing you in your soft pink innards.
  • McRib, more like MacBethRib.
  • The DMV letting you know that your custom license plate is "in the mail, you fucking pervert."
  • A grizzled PI paid to determine whether Dr. Puff is a real doctor.
  • Dark, but fair.
  • The moral philosophy of the DMV.
  • The 4chan veteran the DMV hires to detect profanity in custom license plate applications.
  • Three letters that mean a car thing.
  • You just got passed by a bad driver.
  • Nancyverse lore.
  • The one place in the world where the cost of living is higher than San Francisco.
  • Slant rhymes that slant so much they fall over.
  • Writing a Nancy fan poem just so you can slip increasingly awful rhymes into it.
  • Making your poem worse and worse as it goes on because what are the readers going to do, stop reading? Nobody has Netflix in 1966.
  • Using hand-crank egg-beaters when it's not the Prohibition.
  • Everybody at the office party with those paper guillotines, going to town on reams of paper.
  • Jim's hotel waffle story again.
  • Paying $8 for this novelty bust of Duke Nukem because you liked Duke Nukem 1.
  • High school kids dressing just like you dressed when you were in high school 20 years ago.
  • JNCO jeans with a dragon on the back pocket.
  • That Nostalgia Cycle: it's gonna come around.
  • Using two different keys to unlock and start your car.
  • The best car for the kidnapper on the go.
  • The first car to use the same key for the door, trunk and ignition.
  • Locking the exhaust pipe so nobody can put a banana in there.
  • Separate keys for locking your sun and moonroof.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Alicia
  • Ryan
    • Just type his name into google.

Topics:

  • Seattle's reaction to snow vs the Bay Area's reaction to rain: who is more dramatic?
  • Would you rather fart bones once a month or have Goldeneye "big head mode" on in real life for a year?
  • Moral philosophy lessons from the California DMV
  • Nancy
  • Common everyday items that make you mentally "time travel"

Microtopics:

  • Structurally reinforcing the scrotum.
  • Plugging mundane chores around the house.
  • Why do you live here, Seattle?
  • The lamentation of a failed joke being funnier than the joke itself would've been.
  • Turning the tire towards the curb when parking on a hill.
  • Driving in inclement weather.
  • Milking oats.
  • What it means for society when you make oat milk at home.
  • The rain we occasionally get except way more.
  • Bettie White-out.
  • When an imaginary kid uses his last words to put you on blast.
  • The advantages and disadvantages of big head mode.
  • How to get on the bus with big head mode on.
  • Whose bones you're farting right now.
  • Big Head Mode Confirmed in GoldenEye 007.
  • The yoga pose that is most optimal for shitting bones.
  • Getting your GoldenEye big head stuck in the automatic doors at TJ Maxx.
  • Whale bones on your mattress.
  • Which bones you can do without.
  • Bone pellets.
  • Using your broken tooth as a fidget toy.
  • An absolutely staggering amount of dental work.
  • A perfectly lovely root canal.
  • Using your bone-lasered rib as a fidget toy.
  • Extra ribs just loose in your torso somewhere.
  • Ribs of betrayal stabbing you in your soft pink innards.
  • McRib, more like MacBethRib.
  • The DMV letting you know that your custom license plate is "in the mail, you fucking pervert."
  • A grizzled PI paid to determine whether Dr. Puff is a real doctor.
  • Dark, but fair.
  • The moral philosophy of the DMV.
  • The 4chan veteran the DMV hires to detect profanity in custom license plate applications.
  • Three letters that mean a car thing.
  • You just got passed by a bad driver.
  • Nancyverse lore.
  • The one place in the world where the cost of living is higher than San Francisco.
  • Slant rhymes that slant so much they fall over.
  • Writing a Nancy fan poem just so you can slip increasingly awful rhymes into it.
  • Making your poem worse and worse as it goes on because what are the readers going to do, stop reading? Nobody has Netflix in 1966.
  • Using hand-crank egg-beaters when it's not the Prohibition.
  • Everybody at the office party with those paper guillotines, going to town on reams of paper.
  • Jim's hotel waffle story again.
  • Paying $8 for this novelty bust of Duke Nukem because you liked Duke Nukem 1.
  • High school kids dressing just like you dressed when you were in high school 20 years ago.
  • JNCO jeans with a dragon on the back pocket.
  • That Nostalgia Cycle: it's gonna come around.
  • Using two different keys to unlock and start your car.
  • The best car for the kidnapper on the go.
  • The first car to use the same key for the door, trunk and ignition.
  • Locking the exhaust pipe so nobody can put a banana in there.
  • Separate keys for locking your sun and moonroof.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Alicia
  • Ryan
    • Just type his name into google.

Topics:

  • Seattle's reaction to snow vs the Bay Area's reaction to rain: who is more dramatic?
  • Would you rather fart bones once a month or have Goldeneye "big head mode" on in real life for a year?
  • Moral philosophy lessons from the California DMV
  • Nancy
  • Common everyday items that make you mentally "time travel"

Microtopics:

  • Structurally reinforcing the scrotum.
  • Plugging mundane chores around the house.
  • Why do you live here, Seattle?
  • The lamentation of a failed joke being funnier than the joke itself would've been.
  • Turning the tire towards the curb when parking on a hill.
  • Driving in inclement weather.
  • Milking oats.
  • What it means for society when you make oat milk at home.
  • The rain we occasionally get except way more.
  • Bettie White-out.
  • When an imaginary kid uses his last words to put you on blast.
  • The advantages and disadvantages of big head mode.
  • How to get on the bus with big head mode on.
  • Whose bones you're farting right now.
  • Big Head Mode Confirmed in GoldenEye 007.
  • The yoga pose that is most optimal for shitting bones.
  • Getting your GoldenEye big head stuck in the automatic doors at TJ Maxx.
  • Whale bones on your mattress.
  • Which bones you can do without.
  • Bone pellets.
  • Using your broken tooth as a fidget toy.
  • An absolutely staggering amount of dental work.
  • A perfectly lovely root canal.
  • Using your bone-lasered rib as a fidget toy.
  • Extra ribs just loose in your torso somewhere.
  • Ribs of betrayal stabbing you in your soft pink innards.
  • McRib, more like MacBethRib.
  • The DMV letting you know that your custom license plate is "in the mail, you fucking pervert."
  • A grizzled PI paid to determine whether Dr. Puff is a real doctor.
  • Dark, but fair.
  • The moral philosophy of the DMV.
  • The 4chan veteran the DMV hires to detect profanity in custom license plate applications.
  • Three letters that mean a car thing.
  • You just got passed by a bad driver.
  • Nancyverse lore.
  • The one place in the world where the cost of living is higher than San Francisco.
  • Slant rhymes that slant so much they fall over.
  • Writing a Nancy fan poem just so you can slip increasingly awful rhymes into it.
  • Making your poem worse and worse as it goes on because what are the readers going to do, stop reading? Nobody has Netflix in 1966.
  • Using hand-crank egg-beaters when it's not the Prohibition.
  • Everybody at the office party with those paper guillotines, going to town on reams of paper.
  • Jim's hotel waffle story again.
  • Paying $8 for this novelty bust of Duke Nukem because you liked Duke Nukem 1.
  • High school kids dressing just like you dressed when you were in high school 20 years ago.
  • JNCO jeans with a dragon on the back pocket.
  • That Nostalgia Cycle: it's gonna come around.
  • Using two different keys to unlock and start your car.
  • The best car for the kidnapper on the go.
  • The first car to use the same key for the door, trunk and ignition.
  • Locking the exhaust pipe so nobody can put a banana in there.
  • Separate keys for locking your sun and moonroof.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+gaB4TOBl ]]> Jim Stormdancer 176. A Diglett Slightly Tan https://topiclords.com/a-diglett-slightly-tan 127a7a67-7bc2-4d2f-aace-fe8c21d779c4 Mon, 06 Mar 2023 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Hallie and John B. We discuss tabletop RPGs as educational platform, Flicky-likes, Etch A Sketch Animator 2000, My Brother's Head Should Be Replaced by Jack Prelutsky, and Buff Diglett. 54:28 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Hallie
  • John B

Topics:

  • Tabletop RPGs as educational platform
  • Flicky-likes
  • Etch A Sketch Animator 2000
  • Poem: "My Brother's Head Should Be Replaced" by Jack Prelutsky
  • Buff Diglett

Microtopics:

  • 471 very positive reviews.
  • Pizza Tower, the Tower of Pizza.
  • Snoopy's Silly Sports Spectacular.
  • Taking a drink of your Safeway brand Diet Cola Caffeine Free Soda.
  • Bouncy the Rat and her friends in the Wild Wood.
  • Providing a platform for people to talk to each other and learn about boundaries.
  • Why to add numbers together.
  • Teaching children math when everyone has a pocket calculator in their pocket at all times.
  • A peek under the curtain.
  • The edutainment classics.
  • Three D&D combat system as a way to get comfortable doing arithmetic in your head.
  • Providing an experiential experience.
  • A tiny video game console that looks like a Sega Genesis.
  • Trying to sex Flicky.
  • Maximizing your combo chain in Flicky.
  • Sonic 3D Blast as a sequel to Flicky.
  • Super Rub-a-Dub.
  • Flicking the controller to make the rubber ducky jump.
  • A dude collecting dudes who follow you in a trail.
  • Pix the Cat.
  • All the Bubble Bobble sequels, none of which use the bubbling mechanic.
  • Rainbow Islands: Towering Adventure.
  • Whip Whip: the word "whip" twice.
  • The Etch-a-Sketch: a terrible toy for terrible people.
  • Making animations that are perhaps five or six frames long.
  • Controlling with the knobbies.
  • The Magic Touch Pad.
  • A button that says "recall" on it.
  • Putt-Nuts Go to the Moon, featuring Alan Shepard.
  • Plugging your Etch-a-Sketch into your VCR to save your art.
  • The powder leaking out of the Etch-a-Sketch because you used it too much.
  • It's like painting but on a TV but worse than regular painting.
  • 2000 gray squares.
  • The poet laureate of children.
  • The golden age of the CD-ROM.
  • Wanting a tomato to be bigger.
  • The Tomato Centipede.
  • Poems about homework.
  • A mole-type Pokemon.
  • Everybody independently coming to the conclusion that Diglett has a muscular human body down there.
  • Buff kittens.
  • Whether Dugtrio has one muscular human body down there, or three.
  • Three human bodybuilders cosplaying as Dugtrio.
  • Trying to search for "naked diglett" but Google autocorrects you to "naked woman"
  • Space Dentist!!
  • That one dentist out of ten who recommends that you go to space.
  • Organizing your video game garbo.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Hallie
  • John B

Topics:

  • Tabletop RPGs as educational platform
  • Flicky-likes
  • Etch A Sketch Animator 2000
  • Poem: "My Brother's Head Should Be Replaced" by Jack Prelutsky
  • Buff Diglett

Microtopics:

  • 471 very positive reviews.
  • Pizza Tower, the Tower of Pizza.
  • Snoopy's Silly Sports Spectacular.
  • Taking a drink of your Safeway brand Diet Cola Caffeine Free Soda.
  • Bouncy the Rat and her friends in the Wild Wood.
  • Providing a platform for people to talk to each other and learn about boundaries.
  • Why to add numbers together.
  • Teaching children math when everyone has a pocket calculator in their pocket at all times.
  • A peek under the curtain.
  • The edutainment classics.
  • Three D&D combat system as a way to get comfortable doing arithmetic in your head.
  • Providing an experiential experience.
  • A tiny video game console that looks like a Sega Genesis.
  • Trying to sex Flicky.
  • Maximizing your combo chain in Flicky.
  • Sonic 3D Blast as a sequel to Flicky.
  • Super Rub-a-Dub.
  • Flicking the controller to make the rubber ducky jump.
  • A dude collecting dudes who follow you in a trail.
  • Pix the Cat.
  • All the Bubble Bobble sequels, none of which use the bubbling mechanic.
  • Rainbow Islands: Towering Adventure.
  • Whip Whip: the word "whip" twice.
  • The Etch-a-Sketch: a terrible toy for terrible people.
  • Making animations that are perhaps five or six frames long.
  • Controlling with the knobbies.
  • The Magic Touch Pad.
  • A button that says "recall" on it.
  • Putt-Nuts Go to the Moon, featuring Alan Shepard.
  • Plugging your Etch-a-Sketch into your VCR to save your art.
  • The powder leaking out of the Etch-a-Sketch because you used it too much.
  • It's like painting but on a TV but worse than regular painting.
  • 2000 gray squares.
  • The poet laureate of children.
  • The golden age of the CD-ROM.
  • Wanting a tomato to be bigger.
  • The Tomato Centipede.
  • Poems about homework.
  • A mole-type Pokemon.
  • Everybody independently coming to the conclusion that Diglett has a muscular human body down there.
  • Buff kittens.
  • Whether Dugtrio has one muscular human body down there, or three.
  • Three human bodybuilders cosplaying as Dugtrio.
  • Trying to search for "naked diglett" but Google autocorrects you to "naked woman"
  • Space Dentist!!
  • That one dentist out of ten who recommends that you go to space.
  • Organizing your video game garbo.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Hallie
  • John B

Topics:

  • Tabletop RPGs as educational platform
  • Flicky-likes
  • Etch A Sketch Animator 2000
  • Poem: "My Brother's Head Should Be Replaced" by Jack Prelutsky
  • Buff Diglett

Microtopics:

  • 471 very positive reviews.
  • Pizza Tower, the Tower of Pizza.
  • Snoopy's Silly Sports Spectacular.
  • Taking a drink of your Safeway brand Diet Cola Caffeine Free Soda.
  • Bouncy the Rat and her friends in the Wild Wood.
  • Providing a platform for people to talk to each other and learn about boundaries.
  • Why to add numbers together.
  • Teaching children math when everyone has a pocket calculator in their pocket at all times.
  • A peek under the curtain.
  • The edutainment classics.
  • Three D&D combat system as a way to get comfortable doing arithmetic in your head.
  • Providing an experiential experience.
  • A tiny video game console that looks like a Sega Genesis.
  • Trying to sex Flicky.
  • Maximizing your combo chain in Flicky.
  • Sonic 3D Blast as a sequel to Flicky.
  • Super Rub-a-Dub.
  • Flicking the controller to make the rubber ducky jump.
  • A dude collecting dudes who follow you in a trail.
  • Pix the Cat.
  • All the Bubble Bobble sequels, none of which use the bubbling mechanic.
  • Rainbow Islands: Towering Adventure.
  • Whip Whip: the word "whip" twice.
  • The Etch-a-Sketch: a terrible toy for terrible people.
  • Making animations that are perhaps five or six frames long.
  • Controlling with the knobbies.
  • The Magic Touch Pad.
  • A button that says "recall" on it.
  • Putt-Nuts Go to the Moon, featuring Alan Shepard.
  • Plugging your Etch-a-Sketch into your VCR to save your art.
  • The powder leaking out of the Etch-a-Sketch because you used it too much.
  • It's like painting but on a TV but worse than regular painting.
  • 2000 gray squares.
  • The poet laureate of children.
  • The golden age of the CD-ROM.
  • Wanting a tomato to be bigger.
  • The Tomato Centipede.
  • Poems about homework.
  • A mole-type Pokemon.
  • Everybody independently coming to the conclusion that Diglett has a muscular human body down there.
  • Buff kittens.
  • Whether Dugtrio has one muscular human body down there, or three.
  • Three human bodybuilders cosplaying as Dugtrio.
  • Trying to search for "naked diglett" but Google autocorrects you to "naked woman"
  • Space Dentist!!
  • That one dentist out of ten who recommends that you go to space.
  • Organizing your video game garbo.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+IRB1ID0V ]]> Jim Stormdancer 175. This Movie Has Marky Mark in It https://topiclords.com/this-movie-has-marky-mark-in-it 391dbde0-f68c-4730-9934-a50429cfa65b Mon, 27 Feb 2023 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Erica and Jesse. We discuss the Spanish word that can't be spelled, Disco Elysium, Clue ||: Murder in Disguise, All of the Words on a Bottle of Rolling Rock Beer in a Different Order, this year's beast of a Mystery Hunt, and shareable alarms. 1:14:16 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Erica
  • Jesse

Topics:

  • There's a Spanish word which officially cannot be written because the grammar and orthography conflict about how it should spelled/pronounced.
  • My personal relationship with Disco Elysium
  • Clue II: Murder in Disguise
  • All of the Words on a Bottle of Rolling Rock Beer in a Different Order
  • This year's beast of a Mystery Hunt
  • Shareable alarms

Microtopics:

  • Texans with nothing to plug.
  • The Army Corp of Engineers coming to your town and kicking ass.
  • No, and no.
  • Fuck em, just get a laptop.
  • Fact checking the dinner table conversation with your laptop.
  • An interaction deemed normal.
  • The Spanish double-L sound.
  • Finally finding a way that spelling in English is more sensible than spelling in Spanish.
  • Desperately avoiding hearing French spoken incorrectly.
  • A place that is less like the rest of Canada than any part of the United States is like the United States.
  • A good relaxing podcast that leads to substantial academic progress.
  • Stormdancer Zero.
  • Secret of Monkey Island with additional D&D stat checks and communism.
  • Continents not connected to tectonic plates but instead freely floating in the mist.
  • When your stats talk to you.
  • Equipping a philosophical idea in your thought cabinet.
  • Where the resource extraction happens.
  • An alcoholic amnesiac video game protagonist.
  • Finding the richest person in town to explain to you how the world works.
  • Recreating all your characters from the ground up to be optimized for the game engine.
  • Cheating past the final boss in Baldur's Gate because the alternative is starting from scratch with a viable build.
  • Revising your thinking about the Gros Michel banana.
  • Campy goofballs doing campy goofball shit except it's not Tim Curry this time.
  • The guy whose name Jim can't remember who played Chuck on Better Call Saul.
  • The VCR board game phenomenon.
  • Scenes sort of adding up into a narrative if you squint.
  • Seeing John Lithgow when nobody else sees him.
  • How to get Michael Land to talk to you at CES.
  • Out-of-work FMV actors.
  • Specializing in loving horrible FMV games.
  • The one place that hasn't been corrupted by capitalism.
  • DVD games vs. VCR games.
  • A DVD arriving too late to save a drowning VCR game industry.
  • The pride of seeing your topic grow up and take its place in the world.
  • Panache, aplomb, and savoir-faire.
  • Rolling, glass tanks of beverages that rocked that lined mountain.
  • Women as the exception to implied maleness.
  • A folk pop album featuring a disgraced CDC employee.
  • 50 Cent rapping about going to prison for insider trading.
  • The Topic Lords Guarantee.
  • A series of interconnected puzzles that you solve as a team.
  • Flavor text explaining why it's fun to solve this math problem.
  • A beautiful puzzle hunt that is way too long.
  • Assuming that being good at solving puzzles is the same skill as constructing puzzles.
  • Waiting all year for a chocolate box that ends up being a marathon through Death Valley.
  • How to test a 100-person puzzle hunt.
  • Admonishing astronomers to "get good."
  • Puzzles that are like tiny little gifts that open up and dance in front of you.
  • A chip that controls a single light point on the wall.
  • Doing something for free vs. doing it for a pittance.
  • Losing your wedding ring but also your wedding ring screams once a day.
  • Your screaming wedding ring following you from house to house.
  • One o’clock: Time for Pants.
  • Remembering that it's time for pants no matter what time zone you're in.
  • The Playstation Vita's pants alarm.
  • Playing a competitive minigame to see who can wake up fastest.
  • Earning achievements for getting out of bed.
  • The app that is the opposite of sex.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Erica
  • Jesse

Topics:

  • There's a Spanish word which officially cannot be written because the grammar and orthography conflict about how it should spelled/pronounced.
  • My personal relationship with Disco Elysium
  • Clue II: Murder in Disguise
  • All of the Words on a Bottle of Rolling Rock Beer in a Different Order
  • This year's beast of a Mystery Hunt
  • Shareable alarms

Microtopics:

  • Texans with nothing to plug.
  • The Army Corp of Engineers coming to your town and kicking ass.
  • No, and no.
  • Fuck em, just get a laptop.
  • Fact checking the dinner table conversation with your laptop.
  • An interaction deemed normal.
  • The Spanish double-L sound.
  • Finally finding a way that spelling in English is more sensible than spelling in Spanish.
  • Desperately avoiding hearing French spoken incorrectly.
  • A place that is less like the rest of Canada than any part of the United States is like the United States.
  • A good relaxing podcast that leads to substantial academic progress.
  • Stormdancer Zero.
  • Secret of Monkey Island with additional D&D stat checks and communism.
  • Continents not connected to tectonic plates but instead freely floating in the mist.
  • When your stats talk to you.
  • Equipping a philosophical idea in your thought cabinet.
  • Where the resource extraction happens.
  • An alcoholic amnesiac video game protagonist.
  • Finding the richest person in town to explain to you how the world works.
  • Recreating all your characters from the ground up to be optimized for the game engine.
  • Cheating past the final boss in Baldur's Gate because the alternative is starting from scratch with a viable build.
  • Revising your thinking about the Gros Michel banana.
  • Campy goofballs doing campy goofball shit except it's not Tim Curry this time.
  • The guy whose name Jim can't remember who played Chuck on Better Call Saul.
  • The VCR board game phenomenon.
  • Scenes sort of adding up into a narrative if you squint.
  • Seeing John Lithgow when nobody else sees him.
  • How to get Michael Land to talk to you at CES.
  • Out-of-work FMV actors.
  • Specializing in loving horrible FMV games.
  • The one place that hasn't been corrupted by capitalism.
  • DVD games vs. VCR games.
  • A DVD arriving too late to save a drowning VCR game industry.
  • The pride of seeing your topic grow up and take its place in the world.
  • Panache, aplomb, and savoir-faire.
  • Rolling, glass tanks of beverages that rocked that lined mountain.
  • Women as the exception to implied maleness.
  • A folk pop album featuring a disgraced CDC employee.
  • 50 Cent rapping about going to prison for insider trading.
  • The Topic Lords Guarantee.
  • A series of interconnected puzzles that you solve as a team.
  • Flavor text explaining why it's fun to solve this math problem.
  • A beautiful puzzle hunt that is way too long.
  • Assuming that being good at solving puzzles is the same skill as constructing puzzles.
  • Waiting all year for a chocolate box that ends up being a marathon through Death Valley.
  • How to test a 100-person puzzle hunt.
  • Admonishing astronomers to "get good."
  • Puzzles that are like tiny little gifts that open up and dance in front of you.
  • A chip that controls a single light point on the wall.
  • Doing something for free vs. doing it for a pittance.
  • Losing your wedding ring but also your wedding ring screams once a day.
  • Your screaming wedding ring following you from house to house.
  • One o’clock: Time for Pants.
  • Remembering that it's time for pants no matter what time zone you're in.
  • The Playstation Vita's pants alarm.
  • Playing a competitive minigame to see who can wake up fastest.
  • Earning achievements for getting out of bed.
  • The app that is the opposite of sex.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Erica
  • Jesse

Topics:

  • There's a Spanish word which officially cannot be written because the grammar and orthography conflict about how it should spelled/pronounced.
  • My personal relationship with Disco Elysium
  • Clue II: Murder in Disguise
  • All of the Words on a Bottle of Rolling Rock Beer in a Different Order
  • This year's beast of a Mystery Hunt
  • Shareable alarms

Microtopics:

  • Texans with nothing to plug.
  • The Army Corp of Engineers coming to your town and kicking ass.
  • No, and no.
  • Fuck em, just get a laptop.
  • Fact checking the dinner table conversation with your laptop.
  • An interaction deemed normal.
  • The Spanish double-L sound.
  • Finally finding a way that spelling in English is more sensible than spelling in Spanish.
  • Desperately avoiding hearing French spoken incorrectly.
  • A place that is less like the rest of Canada than any part of the United States is like the United States.
  • A good relaxing podcast that leads to substantial academic progress.
  • Stormdancer Zero.
  • Secret of Monkey Island with additional D&D stat checks and communism.
  • Continents not connected to tectonic plates but instead freely floating in the mist.
  • When your stats talk to you.
  • Equipping a philosophical idea in your thought cabinet.
  • Where the resource extraction happens.
  • An alcoholic amnesiac video game protagonist.
  • Finding the richest person in town to explain to you how the world works.
  • Recreating all your characters from the ground up to be optimized for the game engine.
  • Cheating past the final boss in Baldur's Gate because the alternative is starting from scratch with a viable build.
  • Revising your thinking about the Gros Michel banana.
  • Campy goofballs doing campy goofball shit except it's not Tim Curry this time.
  • The guy whose name Jim can't remember who played Chuck on Better Call Saul.
  • The VCR board game phenomenon.
  • Scenes sort of adding up into a narrative if you squint.
  • Seeing John Lithgow when nobody else sees him.
  • How to get Michael Land to talk to you at CES.
  • Out-of-work FMV actors.
  • Specializing in loving horrible FMV games.
  • The one place that hasn't been corrupted by capitalism.
  • DVD games vs. VCR games.
  • A DVD arriving too late to save a drowning VCR game industry.
  • The pride of seeing your topic grow up and take its place in the world.
  • Panache, aplomb, and savoir-faire.
  • Rolling, glass tanks of beverages that rocked that lined mountain.
  • Women as the exception to implied maleness.
  • A folk pop album featuring a disgraced CDC employee.
  • 50 Cent rapping about going to prison for insider trading.
  • The Topic Lords Guarantee.
  • A series of interconnected puzzles that you solve as a team.
  • Flavor text explaining why it's fun to solve this math problem.
  • A beautiful puzzle hunt that is way too long.
  • Assuming that being good at solving puzzles is the same skill as constructing puzzles.
  • Waiting all year for a chocolate box that ends up being a marathon through Death Valley.
  • How to test a 100-person puzzle hunt.
  • Admonishing astronomers to "get good."
  • Puzzles that are like tiny little gifts that open up and dance in front of you.
  • A chip that controls a single light point on the wall.
  • Doing something for free vs. doing it for a pittance.
  • Losing your wedding ring but also your wedding ring screams once a day.
  • Your screaming wedding ring following you from house to house.
  • One o’clock: Time for Pants.
  • Remembering that it's time for pants no matter what time zone you're in.
  • The Playstation Vita's pants alarm.
  • Playing a competitive minigame to see who can wake up fastest.
  • Earning achievements for getting out of bed.
  • The app that is the opposite of sex.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+k-PSf_Ec ]]> Jim Stormdancer 174. Occam's Raccoon https://topiclords.com/occams-raccoon 324adc98-4c2d-44b9-86c8-3b347d6c478b Mon, 20 Feb 2023 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Chris and Alexander. We discuss words with similar sounds and meanings but no etymological relation, virtual marble runs with guns, the broom method of dealing with a hydrogen leak, a poem by Dr. Seuss, the Loveland Frog, and ghosts are real: what are the economic consequences? 1:05:42 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Chris
  • Alexander

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator.
  • Lords starting with Xa.
  • Moving boxes that have handles built in.
  • All else being equal, a raccoon did it.
  • Proto-Indo-European.
  • Putting the S in Island.
  • The era of Topic Lords when we only discussed Shakespeare.
  • Some of the things you expect are wrong, and vice-versa.
  • Bacteria finding proteins hanging around and deciding "this is part of me now."
  • Branching path structures shooting red and blue bullets at each other.
  • Escalating Revenge Core Destruction.
  • If pachinko were extremely elaborate and violent.
  • Oil timers.
  • Turning over the rectangle on your desk and forcing the red and green combatants to fight for you once more.
  • Apollonian circles.
  • The ancestry of Firefox.
  • Web browsers surrounded by water on all sides.
  • Using the entirety of your computing resources to do basically nothing.
  • A phone app that makes your phone display Flying Toasters but only while it's in your pocket.
  • Computers that are really good at getting hot and not very good at not getting hot.
  • An air conditioner but backwards.
  • Marbula One.
  • Marble races except every marble is armed with an assault rifle.
  • The year you finally get into Blaseball.
  • How Blaseball works.
  • How to detect a fire that you can't see.
  • Glass Onion: debunked.
  • A hell planet completely saturated with a volatile gas populated by lava monsters.
  • Why leave the house? Just send a probe and infer the existence of your neighbors.
  • What "from" means in "escape from the tank"
  • The jingle the hydrogen truck plays as it trundles by.
  • The Snack of the Stars.
  • Safety testing various propellants.
  • What your voice sounds like without any transmission medium.
  • The Gregorian Underwater Choir.
  • Naming Helium after the sun because that's where we discovered it.
  • The Lorax threatening you with a bat.
  • My huge sawed off flashlight.
  • Stay back, officer, it's just just a flashlight.
  • Replacing your self-defense rabies bat every time it dies.
  • Brushing your self-defense bat's teeth.
  • Dr. Zeus's book of adult poetry.
  • Is the Death Star brutalist? Can brutalist architecture be round?
  • Bee Barns.
  • A four foot tall frog guy who lives in the woods.
  • A frog guy. A guy who is a frog.
  • A frog guy caught between two worlds of posture.
  • A Wikipedia user whose thing is to make photo illustrations of cryptids and extinct animals.
  • What happens to Pikachu's soul when it dies.
  • Ghosts: what do they do all day?
  • Ghosts exist, and they can talk, and they know all about the afterlife, but also they're huge liars.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Chris
  • Alexander

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator.
  • Lords starting with Xa.
  • Moving boxes that have handles built in.
  • All else being equal, a raccoon did it.
  • Proto-Indo-European.
  • Putting the S in Island.
  • The era of Topic Lords when we only discussed Shakespeare.
  • Some of the things you expect are wrong, and vice-versa.
  • Bacteria finding proteins hanging around and deciding "this is part of me now."
  • Branching path structures shooting red and blue bullets at each other.
  • Escalating Revenge Core Destruction.
  • If pachinko were extremely elaborate and violent.
  • Oil timers.
  • Turning over the rectangle on your desk and forcing the red and green combatants to fight for you once more.
  • Apollonian circles.
  • The ancestry of Firefox.
  • Web browsers surrounded by water on all sides.
  • Using the entirety of your computing resources to do basically nothing.
  • A phone app that makes your phone display Flying Toasters but only while it's in your pocket.
  • Computers that are really good at getting hot and not very good at not getting hot.
  • An air conditioner but backwards.
  • Marbula One.
  • Marble races except every marble is armed with an assault rifle.
  • The year you finally get into Blaseball.
  • How Blaseball works.
  • How to detect a fire that you can't see.
  • Glass Onion: debunked.
  • A hell planet completely saturated with a volatile gas populated by lava monsters.
  • Why leave the house? Just send a probe and infer the existence of your neighbors.
  • What "from" means in "escape from the tank"
  • The jingle the hydrogen truck plays as it trundles by.
  • The Snack of the Stars.
  • Safety testing various propellants.
  • What your voice sounds like without any transmission medium.
  • The Gregorian Underwater Choir.
  • Naming Helium after the sun because that's where we discovered it.
  • The Lorax threatening you with a bat.
  • My huge sawed off flashlight.
  • Stay back, officer, it's just just a flashlight.
  • Replacing your self-defense rabies bat every time it dies.
  • Brushing your self-defense bat's teeth.
  • Dr. Zeus's book of adult poetry.
  • Is the Death Star brutalist? Can brutalist architecture be round?
  • Bee Barns.
  • A four foot tall frog guy who lives in the woods.
  • A frog guy. A guy who is a frog.
  • A frog guy caught between two worlds of posture.
  • A Wikipedia user whose thing is to make photo illustrations of cryptids and extinct animals.
  • What happens to Pikachu's soul when it dies.
  • Ghosts: what do they do all day?
  • Ghosts exist, and they can talk, and they know all about the afterlife, but also they're huge liars.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Chris
  • Alexander

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator.
  • Lords starting with Xa.
  • Moving boxes that have handles built in.
  • All else being equal, a raccoon did it.
  • Proto-Indo-European.
  • Putting the S in Island.
  • The era of Topic Lords when we only discussed Shakespeare.
  • Some of the things you expect are wrong, and vice-versa.
  • Bacteria finding proteins hanging around and deciding "this is part of me now."
  • Branching path structures shooting red and blue bullets at each other.
  • Escalating Revenge Core Destruction.
  • If pachinko were extremely elaborate and violent.
  • Oil timers.
  • Turning over the rectangle on your desk and forcing the red and green combatants to fight for you once more.
  • Apollonian circles.
  • The ancestry of Firefox.
  • Web browsers surrounded by water on all sides.
  • Using the entirety of your computing resources to do basically nothing.
  • A phone app that makes your phone display Flying Toasters but only while it's in your pocket.
  • Computers that are really good at getting hot and not very good at not getting hot.
  • An air conditioner but backwards.
  • Marbula One.
  • Marble races except every marble is armed with an assault rifle.
  • The year you finally get into Blaseball.
  • How Blaseball works.
  • How to detect a fire that you can't see.
  • Glass Onion: debunked.
  • A hell planet completely saturated with a volatile gas populated by lava monsters.
  • Why leave the house? Just send a probe and infer the existence of your neighbors.
  • What "from" means in "escape from the tank"
  • The jingle the hydrogen truck plays as it trundles by.
  • The Snack of the Stars.
  • Safety testing various propellants.
  • What your voice sounds like without any transmission medium.
  • The Gregorian Underwater Choir.
  • Naming Helium after the sun because that's where we discovered it.
  • The Lorax threatening you with a bat.
  • My huge sawed off flashlight.
  • Stay back, officer, it's just just a flashlight.
  • Replacing your self-defense rabies bat every time it dies.
  • Brushing your self-defense bat's teeth.
  • Dr. Zeus's book of adult poetry.
  • Is the Death Star brutalist? Can brutalist architecture be round?
  • Bee Barns.
  • A four foot tall frog guy who lives in the woods.
  • A frog guy. A guy who is a frog.
  • A frog guy caught between two worlds of posture.
  • A Wikipedia user whose thing is to make photo illustrations of cryptids and extinct animals.
  • What happens to Pikachu's soul when it dies.
  • Ghosts: what do they do all day?
  • Ghosts exist, and they can talk, and they know all about the afterlife, but also they're huge liars.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+x6Irb8Ps ]]> Jim Stormdancer 173. How Much Anxiety Does Your Car Have? https://topiclords.com/how-much-anxiety-does-your-car-have 6f482bfc-4c44-4232-abf1-253291584b2d Mon, 13 Feb 2023 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Maxx and Tyriq. We discuss Nancy and having a continuous tone for a hundred years, recommendations, adding trinkets to other people's time capsules, and A Psalm for the Wild-Built. 1:03:41 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Maxx
  • Tyriq

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Looking down a lot while you're on a walk.
  • What is this Meta for?
  • Discovering that there is a cliff and having a brief high-octane experience.
  • Sitting on the bus and saying the lore of the land.
  • A lego minifig that you found on the street.
  • Fritzi Ritz.
  • Making millennial shitposts in the 1930s.
  • Being wholesomely surreal for a hundred years.
  • Accruing canon.
  • Simple archetypes that have been honed to a point.
  • Writing a new punchline to the same joke every day for a hundred years.
  • Comics going on two silent retreats, one for the setup (at a monastery) and the other for the punchline (at an empty lot)
  • Coronation St.
  • The kids we met in 1964.
  • Whether South Park is still a thing.
  • Finding success at a young age and staying the same person for the rest of your life.
  • Retirement or Blade Runner Retirement?
  • User Friendly.
  • Web comics that started when the hardest part about making a web comic is uploading an image to the internet.
  • Web comics going from having bad art to having good art.
  • Telling someone to like art other than the art they like.
  • Politely accepting advice and then ignoring it.
  • Speaking into the void to ask for music recommendations.
  • If you don't see it, that's what you paid for.
  • Delivering Nancy comics daily for over 100 years.
  • Working on the same game for 10 years even though you like different kinds of games now.
  • Working within the framework of past you.
  • Every page of a webcomic as a collage of all the previous pages.
  • Pokey the Penguin: updated sporadically.
  • Enjoying a webcomic a lot.
  • Weird semi-robot creatures.
  • Haribogosean.
  • Recommending someone a nice leaf.
  • Wanting to accept recommendations but hating them viscerally.
  • Tricking music recommendations into someone's life like a fairy tale gremlin.
  • Introducing hot jams to the people of the future.
  • Burying a can of cheese for a hundred years.
  • Extra old tardigrades.
  • A sealed piggy bank where if you want to get the tardigrades out you have to smash it on the floor.
  • Opening up your terrarium every so often to swap out the moss.
  • This wholesome man with this forty year old bottle ecosystem.
  • The most advanced level of mummification, in which you become a mannequin.
  • Dumping a pile of garbage in the forest and leaving it to your children in your will.
  • The Artemis Program.
  • Returning to the moon to get the geocache back.
  • Inserting a completely fictional topic into the historical record.
  • Wax House, Baby!
  • A fake fact about the world that has been purged from Wikipedia but is still everywhere that scraped the data from Wikipedia.
  • Chosts from chostville.
  • The age of monetizing all your hobbies.
  • Trying to make a human connection via your art.
  • Digging up, modifying, and reburying other people's time capsules even though nobody's paying you to do it.
  • Keeping your citizens happy and healthy.
  • An intentionally altered view of how automated clothing production is.
  • Going on a journey together with a robot.
  • Cozy books entirely lacking in high-octane moments.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Maxx
  • Tyriq

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Looking down a lot while you're on a walk.
  • What is this Meta for?
  • Discovering that there is a cliff and having a brief high-octane experience.
  • Sitting on the bus and saying the lore of the land.
  • A lego minifig that you found on the street.
  • Fritzi Ritz.
  • Making millennial shitposts in the 1930s.
  • Being wholesomely surreal for a hundred years.
  • Accruing canon.
  • Simple archetypes that have been honed to a point.
  • Writing a new punchline to the same joke every day for a hundred years.
  • Comics going on two silent retreats, one for the setup (at a monastery) and the other for the punchline (at an empty lot)
  • Coronation St.
  • The kids we met in 1964.
  • Whether South Park is still a thing.
  • Finding success at a young age and staying the same person for the rest of your life.
  • Retirement or Blade Runner Retirement?
  • User Friendly.
  • Web comics that started when the hardest part about making a web comic is uploading an image to the internet.
  • Web comics going from having bad art to having good art.
  • Telling someone to like art other than the art they like.
  • Politely accepting advice and then ignoring it.
  • Speaking into the void to ask for music recommendations.
  • If you don't see it, that's what you paid for.
  • Delivering Nancy comics daily for over 100 years.
  • Working on the same game for 10 years even though you like different kinds of games now.
  • Working within the framework of past you.
  • Every page of a webcomic as a collage of all the previous pages.
  • Pokey the Penguin: updated sporadically.
  • Enjoying a webcomic a lot.
  • Weird semi-robot creatures.
  • Haribogosean.
  • Recommending someone a nice leaf.
  • Wanting to accept recommendations but hating them viscerally.
  • Tricking music recommendations into someone's life like a fairy tale gremlin.
  • Introducing hot jams to the people of the future.
  • Burying a can of cheese for a hundred years.
  • Extra old tardigrades.
  • A sealed piggy bank where if you want to get the tardigrades out you have to smash it on the floor.
  • Opening up your terrarium every so often to swap out the moss.
  • This wholesome man with this forty year old bottle ecosystem.
  • The most advanced level of mummification, in which you become a mannequin.
  • Dumping a pile of garbage in the forest and leaving it to your children in your will.
  • The Artemis Program.
  • Returning to the moon to get the geocache back.
  • Inserting a completely fictional topic into the historical record.
  • Wax House, Baby!
  • A fake fact about the world that has been purged from Wikipedia but is still everywhere that scraped the data from Wikipedia.
  • Chosts from chostville.
  • The age of monetizing all your hobbies.
  • Trying to make a human connection via your art.
  • Digging up, modifying, and reburying other people's time capsules even though nobody's paying you to do it.
  • Keeping your citizens happy and healthy.
  • An intentionally altered view of how automated clothing production is.
  • Going on a journey together with a robot.
  • Cozy books entirely lacking in high-octane moments.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Maxx
  • Tyriq

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Looking down a lot while you're on a walk.
  • What is this Meta for?
  • Discovering that there is a cliff and having a brief high-octane experience.
  • Sitting on the bus and saying the lore of the land.
  • A lego minifig that you found on the street.
  • Fritzi Ritz.
  • Making millennial shitposts in the 1930s.
  • Being wholesomely surreal for a hundred years.
  • Accruing canon.
  • Simple archetypes that have been honed to a point.
  • Writing a new punchline to the same joke every day for a hundred years.
  • Comics going on two silent retreats, one for the setup (at a monastery) and the other for the punchline (at an empty lot)
  • Coronation St.
  • The kids we met in 1964.
  • Whether South Park is still a thing.
  • Finding success at a young age and staying the same person for the rest of your life.
  • Retirement or Blade Runner Retirement?
  • User Friendly.
  • Web comics that started when the hardest part about making a web comic is uploading an image to the internet.
  • Web comics going from having bad art to having good art.
  • Telling someone to like art other than the art they like.
  • Politely accepting advice and then ignoring it.
  • Speaking into the void to ask for music recommendations.
  • If you don't see it, that's what you paid for.
  • Delivering Nancy comics daily for over 100 years.
  • Working on the same game for 10 years even though you like different kinds of games now.
  • Working within the framework of past you.
  • Every page of a webcomic as a collage of all the previous pages.
  • Pokey the Penguin: updated sporadically.
  • Enjoying a webcomic a lot.
  • Weird semi-robot creatures.
  • Haribogosean.
  • Recommending someone a nice leaf.
  • Wanting to accept recommendations but hating them viscerally.
  • Tricking music recommendations into someone's life like a fairy tale gremlin.
  • Introducing hot jams to the people of the future.
  • Burying a can of cheese for a hundred years.
  • Extra old tardigrades.
  • A sealed piggy bank where if you want to get the tardigrades out you have to smash it on the floor.
  • Opening up your terrarium every so often to swap out the moss.
  • This wholesome man with this forty year old bottle ecosystem.
  • The most advanced level of mummification, in which you become a mannequin.
  • Dumping a pile of garbage in the forest and leaving it to your children in your will.
  • The Artemis Program.
  • Returning to the moon to get the geocache back.
  • Inserting a completely fictional topic into the historical record.
  • Wax House, Baby!
  • A fake fact about the world that has been purged from Wikipedia but is still everywhere that scraped the data from Wikipedia.
  • Chosts from chostville.
  • The age of monetizing all your hobbies.
  • Trying to make a human connection via your art.
  • Digging up, modifying, and reburying other people's time capsules even though nobody's paying you to do it.
  • Keeping your citizens happy and healthy.
  • An intentionally altered view of how automated clothing production is.
  • Going on a journey together with a robot.
  • Cozy books entirely lacking in high-octane moments.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+4UHBrCNl ]]> Jim Stormdancer 172. Don’t Apply Any Torque to This Bag https://topiclords.com/dont-apply-any-torque-to-this-bag 488b719e-bff8-4c3f-9b42-6d71811fb6de Mon, 06 Feb 2023 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Alex and Shannon. We discuss incomprehensible PSAs, games which use player ignorance as a major mechanic, Man out of Space Easiest, Stepped on a plum (overripe plum) (barefoot), how to pay for things in Australia, and bats! Micro and Mega! 1:16:40 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Alex
  • Shannon

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The Broken Earth Trilogy.
  • The Lightly-Massaged Earth Trilogy.
  • Turkish Delight vs. a Turkish Delight candy bar.
  • A candy that gives you the feeling of nostalgia but no corresponding memories.
  • Remembering to slip, slop, slap, seek and slide in the kitchen.
  • The three onomatopoeias for applying sunscreen.
  • Lamenting to your partner that you forgot to slip.
  • Posters that just say "don't forget to slip slop slap seek and slide" with no further context.
  • A cool grandpa following safety instructions.
  • Actionable snake advice.
  • Various ways to distinguish goats and sheep.
  • A music video that is also a drunk driving PSA.
  • How to use search atoms.
  • If you're on the train, that's a shame.
  • Rhyming platitudes about how social media is bad for your mental health and society as a whole.
  • A music video trying to get across a safe sex message to the kids.
  • Do They Even Know it's Christmas?
  • Something jarring to hear on the radio.
  • A desert wasteland full of crying children.
  • Tunic.
  • Reading the manual of the video game you just bought on the drive home.
  • Evoking the idea of playing old video games.
  • Jumping puzzles that cost you twenty minutes of your life if you fall.
  • A Jules Verne conception of the solar system where other planets are a five minute rocket trip away.
  • Learning a code and keeping it in your brain.
  • The Hourglass Twins.
  • Not being sure what to do so you go look at the moon.
  • The kind of game where most of the fun is figuring out how to play the game.
  • AAA games trying to make artistic statements about AAA games.
  • Hatoful Boyfriend as a better Doki Doki Literature Club.
  • A horror story about pigeons.
  • An ablative heat shield on your butt.
  • Manually aiming the rocket without being to look outside of your polyester bag.
  • The legality of dropping a moose out of a spaceship.
  • A safety mechanism that is not appealing to aerospace professionals.
  • Landing an airplane on Mars and then remote-piloting Mars rovers from inside the airplane.
  • The world's largest saltwater crocodile.
  • Pulling the quick release flap on the crocodile's mouth.
  • Don't Go To Space.
  • It's the 60s, and it's a bag.
  • A snorkel for when you land in the ocean and can't get out of your foam entombment capsule.
  • Bringing along a shotgun in case your escape pod lands in Siberia.
  • Clown First Lover Second.
  • A single paragraph with 19 parenthetical phrases and no other punctuation.
  • Deciding to hem your sweatpants.
  • Plum Nightmare.
  • Finding two extra poems inside an existing poem.
  • What to expect when you read a poem.
  • Whether it's illegal to drive barefoot.
  • Bare feet and there's textures down here.
  • The utter lack of technology at the pump.
  • No-flush toilets.
  • What kinds of towels they use to clean up messes in Australia.
  • Public restrooms that automatically eject you if you're not done in ten minutes.
  • Honeycomb candy with the same texture as instant coffee.
  • Look to your left; look to your right; one of you is a bat.
  • Visiting baby bats in the bat hospital.
  • Bats as pollinators.
  • Giving stuffed animals to baby bats.
  • The pollinating and bug-eating ecosystem.
  • A bat the size of a bat.
  • Spectacled flying foxes.
  • Bats reverse-nicheing back into mice.
  • Bats becoming nocturnal to avoid their creditors.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Alex
  • Shannon

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The Broken Earth Trilogy.
  • The Lightly-Massaged Earth Trilogy.
  • Turkish Delight vs. a Turkish Delight candy bar.
  • A candy that gives you the feeling of nostalgia but no corresponding memories.
  • Remembering to slip, slop, slap, seek and slide in the kitchen.
  • The three onomatopoeias for applying sunscreen.
  • Lamenting to your partner that you forgot to slip.
  • Posters that just say "don't forget to slip slop slap seek and slide" with no further context.
  • A cool grandpa following safety instructions.
  • Actionable snake advice.
  • Various ways to distinguish goats and sheep.
  • A music video that is also a drunk driving PSA.
  • How to use search atoms.
  • If you're on the train, that's a shame.
  • Rhyming platitudes about how social media is bad for your mental health and society as a whole.
  • A music video trying to get across a safe sex message to the kids.
  • Do They Even Know it's Christmas?
  • Something jarring to hear on the radio.
  • A desert wasteland full of crying children.
  • Tunic.
  • Reading the manual of the video game you just bought on the drive home.
  • Evoking the idea of playing old video games.
  • Jumping puzzles that cost you twenty minutes of your life if you fall.
  • A Jules Verne conception of the solar system where other planets are a five minute rocket trip away.
  • Learning a code and keeping it in your brain.
  • The Hourglass Twins.
  • Not being sure what to do so you go look at the moon.
  • The kind of game where most of the fun is figuring out how to play the game.
  • AAA games trying to make artistic statements about AAA games.
  • Hatoful Boyfriend as a better Doki Doki Literature Club.
  • A horror story about pigeons.
  • An ablative heat shield on your butt.
  • Manually aiming the rocket without being to look outside of your polyester bag.
  • The legality of dropping a moose out of a spaceship.
  • A safety mechanism that is not appealing to aerospace professionals.
  • Landing an airplane on Mars and then remote-piloting Mars rovers from inside the airplane.
  • The world's largest saltwater crocodile.
  • Pulling the quick release flap on the crocodile's mouth.
  • Don't Go To Space.
  • It's the 60s, and it's a bag.
  • A snorkel for when you land in the ocean and can't get out of your foam entombment capsule.
  • Bringing along a shotgun in case your escape pod lands in Siberia.
  • Clown First Lover Second.
  • A single paragraph with 19 parenthetical phrases and no other punctuation.
  • Deciding to hem your sweatpants.
  • Plum Nightmare.
  • Finding two extra poems inside an existing poem.
  • What to expect when you read a poem.
  • Whether it's illegal to drive barefoot.
  • Bare feet and there's textures down here.
  • The utter lack of technology at the pump.
  • No-flush toilets.
  • What kinds of towels they use to clean up messes in Australia.
  • Public restrooms that automatically eject you if you're not done in ten minutes.
  • Honeycomb candy with the same texture as instant coffee.
  • Look to your left; look to your right; one of you is a bat.
  • Visiting baby bats in the bat hospital.
  • Bats as pollinators.
  • Giving stuffed animals to baby bats.
  • The pollinating and bug-eating ecosystem.
  • A bat the size of a bat.
  • Spectacled flying foxes.
  • Bats reverse-nicheing back into mice.
  • Bats becoming nocturnal to avoid their creditors.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Alex
  • Shannon

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The Broken Earth Trilogy.
  • The Lightly-Massaged Earth Trilogy.
  • Turkish Delight vs. a Turkish Delight candy bar.
  • A candy that gives you the feeling of nostalgia but no corresponding memories.
  • Remembering to slip, slop, slap, seek and slide in the kitchen.
  • The three onomatopoeias for applying sunscreen.
  • Lamenting to your partner that you forgot to slip.
  • Posters that just say "don't forget to slip slop slap seek and slide" with no further context.
  • A cool grandpa following safety instructions.
  • Actionable snake advice.
  • Various ways to distinguish goats and sheep.
  • A music video that is also a drunk driving PSA.
  • How to use search atoms.
  • If you're on the train, that's a shame.
  • Rhyming platitudes about how social media is bad for your mental health and society as a whole.
  • A music video trying to get across a safe sex message to the kids.
  • Do They Even Know it's Christmas?
  • Something jarring to hear on the radio.
  • A desert wasteland full of crying children.
  • Tunic.
  • Reading the manual of the video game you just bought on the drive home.
  • Evoking the idea of playing old video games.
  • Jumping puzzles that cost you twenty minutes of your life if you fall.
  • A Jules Verne conception of the solar system where other planets are a five minute rocket trip away.
  • Learning a code and keeping it in your brain.
  • The Hourglass Twins.
  • Not being sure what to do so you go look at the moon.
  • The kind of game where most of the fun is figuring out how to play the game.
  • AAA games trying to make artistic statements about AAA games.
  • Hatoful Boyfriend as a better Doki Doki Literature Club.
  • A horror story about pigeons.
  • An ablative heat shield on your butt.
  • Manually aiming the rocket without being to look outside of your polyester bag.
  • The legality of dropping a moose out of a spaceship.
  • A safety mechanism that is not appealing to aerospace professionals.
  • Landing an airplane on Mars and then remote-piloting Mars rovers from inside the airplane.
  • The world's largest saltwater crocodile.
  • Pulling the quick release flap on the crocodile's mouth.
  • Don't Go To Space.
  • It's the 60s, and it's a bag.
  • A snorkel for when you land in the ocean and can't get out of your foam entombment capsule.
  • Bringing along a shotgun in case your escape pod lands in Siberia.
  • Clown First Lover Second.
  • A single paragraph with 19 parenthetical phrases and no other punctuation.
  • Deciding to hem your sweatpants.
  • Plum Nightmare.
  • Finding two extra poems inside an existing poem.
  • What to expect when you read a poem.
  • Whether it's illegal to drive barefoot.
  • Bare feet and there's textures down here.
  • The utter lack of technology at the pump.
  • No-flush toilets.
  • What kinds of towels they use to clean up messes in Australia.
  • Public restrooms that automatically eject you if you're not done in ten minutes.
  • Honeycomb candy with the same texture as instant coffee.
  • Look to your left; look to your right; one of you is a bat.
  • Visiting baby bats in the bat hospital.
  • Bats as pollinators.
  • Giving stuffed animals to baby bats.
  • The pollinating and bug-eating ecosystem.
  • A bat the size of a bat.
  • Spectacled flying foxes.
  • Bats reverse-nicheing back into mice.
  • Bats becoming nocturnal to avoid their creditors.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+l3sxOfes ]]> Jim Stormdancer 171. Reasons to Not Throw Your Phone in the Ocean https://topiclords.com/reasons-to-not-throw-your-phone-in-the-ocean 666f81f7-c38b-4b38-a5f5-51b1b87feb7c Mon, 30 Jan 2023 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: CisHetKayFaber and Kev. We discuss food from dreams and nightmares, Han Unification, the Super Mega Crossword, Down by the Bay by Raffi, video game franchises known for secrets, five-tined forks, and horrible exceptions to rule 34. 1:09:48 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • CisHetKayFaber
  • Kev

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • First time long time.
  • A very light hobby that is kind of shallow.
  • Getting really into Rubik's Cube because you already love flash cards.
  • Being reminded of something right before you were about to forget it.
  • How best to memorize pizza coding and microphone specs.
  • Ignoring the room and being annoyed when people talk to you.
  • Work life balance being too tilted toward life
  • The King's Hand.
  • Orange Creamsicle Mashed Potatoes.
  • M&M fingernails.
  • A tweet and what happened with it.
  • Biting something with the wrong texture and having to stare at a wall for ten minutes.
  • UTF-8 character encoding.
  • Adding support for Asian languages to Unicode without consulting any native speakers for advice.
  • The international new global meme language of the internet.
  • PuzzleMania.
  • All the downsides of doing a crossword on paper.
  • Words that just happen a lot when you're constructing a crossword puzzle.
  • The Elden Ring of crossword puzzles.
  • Doing the crossword puzzle on paper so that when you're done you can say "looks right to me" and there's no app to tell you you're wrong.
  • Reading crossword puzzle clues to your wife as she falls asleep.
  • A time traveler from the future who invented time travel to bring us excellent children's songs.
  • A national treasure (Canada)
  • A fly wearing a tie, a bear combing its hair, a llama eating pajamas, &c.
  • A song intended to be performed improvisationally.
  • Extending the finger family song by adding more fingers.
  • Messing the cadence up with your fake mother voice.
  • Where the watermelons roam.
  • A mom saying nonsense that really makes you think.
  • Avoiding your mom because she keeps saying weird shit about a goose kissing a moose.
  • Unlocking a branch of a storyline by fulfilling a set of conditions.
  • Subverting overused fantasy tropes.
  • Finding a cool castle by going down a secret cliffside stairway into a hidden cave.
  • Systems that point you everywhere on the map.
  • Secrets of all sorts of scopes.
  • The Doom thing where they point out that you didn't find all the secrets.
  • Frog Fractions containing Rule 34 of itself.
  • Reacting to five-tined fork.
  • The fork optimization function that decided that four is the right number of tines.
  • Unknowing a conversation.
  • A Victorian flex of a fork.
  • When die-casting was invented.
  • A shovel with teeth.
  • Seven-tined sporks.
  • The Pornography Lord.
  • Human pairings and human activities that you would expect there to be pornography of.
  • Linda Hunt smugly declaring "ass to ass"
  • AI pornographers buying sex dice on eBay.
  • Weird combinations of words you can plug into a search engine.
  • People don't want everything; people only want some things.
  • The Frog Fractions pornography gap.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • CisHetKayFaber
  • Kev

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • First time long time.
  • A very light hobby that is kind of shallow.
  • Getting really into Rubik's Cube because you already love flash cards.
  • Being reminded of something right before you were about to forget it.
  • How best to memorize pizza coding and microphone specs.
  • Ignoring the room and being annoyed when people talk to you.
  • Work life balance being too tilted toward life
  • The King's Hand.
  • Orange Creamsicle Mashed Potatoes.
  • M&M fingernails.
  • A tweet and what happened with it.
  • Biting something with the wrong texture and having to stare at a wall for ten minutes.
  • UTF-8 character encoding.
  • Adding support for Asian languages to Unicode without consulting any native speakers for advice.
  • The international new global meme language of the internet.
  • PuzzleMania.
  • All the downsides of doing a crossword on paper.
  • Words that just happen a lot when you're constructing a crossword puzzle.
  • The Elden Ring of crossword puzzles.
  • Doing the crossword puzzle on paper so that when you're done you can say "looks right to me" and there's no app to tell you you're wrong.
  • Reading crossword puzzle clues to your wife as she falls asleep.
  • A time traveler from the future who invented time travel to bring us excellent children's songs.
  • A national treasure (Canada)
  • A fly wearing a tie, a bear combing its hair, a llama eating pajamas, &c.
  • A song intended to be performed improvisationally.
  • Extending the finger family song by adding more fingers.
  • Messing the cadence up with your fake mother voice.
  • Where the watermelons roam.
  • A mom saying nonsense that really makes you think.
  • Avoiding your mom because she keeps saying weird shit about a goose kissing a moose.
  • Unlocking a branch of a storyline by fulfilling a set of conditions.
  • Subverting overused fantasy tropes.
  • Finding a cool castle by going down a secret cliffside stairway into a hidden cave.
  • Systems that point you everywhere on the map.
  • Secrets of all sorts of scopes.
  • The Doom thing where they point out that you didn't find all the secrets.
  • Frog Fractions containing Rule 34 of itself.
  • Reacting to five-tined fork.
  • The fork optimization function that decided that four is the right number of tines.
  • Unknowing a conversation.
  • A Victorian flex of a fork.
  • When die-casting was invented.
  • A shovel with teeth.
  • Seven-tined sporks.
  • The Pornography Lord.
  • Human pairings and human activities that you would expect there to be pornography of.
  • Linda Hunt smugly declaring "ass to ass"
  • AI pornographers buying sex dice on eBay.
  • Weird combinations of words you can plug into a search engine.
  • People don't want everything; people only want some things.
  • The Frog Fractions pornography gap.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • CisHetKayFaber
  • Kev

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • First time long time.
  • A very light hobby that is kind of shallow.
  • Getting really into Rubik's Cube because you already love flash cards.
  • Being reminded of something right before you were about to forget it.
  • How best to memorize pizza coding and microphone specs.
  • Ignoring the room and being annoyed when people talk to you.
  • Work life balance being too tilted toward life
  • The King's Hand.
  • Orange Creamsicle Mashed Potatoes.
  • M&M fingernails.
  • A tweet and what happened with it.
  • Biting something with the wrong texture and having to stare at a wall for ten minutes.
  • UTF-8 character encoding.
  • Adding support for Asian languages to Unicode without consulting any native speakers for advice.
  • The international new global meme language of the internet.
  • PuzzleMania.
  • All the downsides of doing a crossword on paper.
  • Words that just happen a lot when you're constructing a crossword puzzle.
  • The Elden Ring of crossword puzzles.
  • Doing the crossword puzzle on paper so that when you're done you can say "looks right to me" and there's no app to tell you you're wrong.
  • Reading crossword puzzle clues to your wife as she falls asleep.
  • A time traveler from the future who invented time travel to bring us excellent children's songs.
  • A national treasure (Canada)
  • A fly wearing a tie, a bear combing its hair, a llama eating pajamas, &c.
  • A song intended to be performed improvisationally.
  • Extending the finger family song by adding more fingers.
  • Messing the cadence up with your fake mother voice.
  • Where the watermelons roam.
  • A mom saying nonsense that really makes you think.
  • Avoiding your mom because she keeps saying weird shit about a goose kissing a moose.
  • Unlocking a branch of a storyline by fulfilling a set of conditions.
  • Subverting overused fantasy tropes.
  • Finding a cool castle by going down a secret cliffside stairway into a hidden cave.
  • Systems that point you everywhere on the map.
  • Secrets of all sorts of scopes.
  • The Doom thing where they point out that you didn't find all the secrets.
  • Frog Fractions containing Rule 34 of itself.
  • Reacting to five-tined fork.
  • The fork optimization function that decided that four is the right number of tines.
  • Unknowing a conversation.
  • A Victorian flex of a fork.
  • When die-casting was invented.
  • A shovel with teeth.
  • Seven-tined sporks.
  • The Pornography Lord.
  • Human pairings and human activities that you would expect there to be pornography of.
  • Linda Hunt smugly declaring "ass to ass"
  • AI pornographers buying sex dice on eBay.
  • Weird combinations of words you can plug into a search engine.
  • People don't want everything; people only want some things.
  • The Frog Fractions pornography gap.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+qPcnVYz2 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 170. My Brain Likes the Things I Like https://topiclords.com/my-brain-likes-the-things-i-like c6cdc2d0-01b3-4c7f-a3ef-e8afb3000e26 Mon, 23 Jan 2023 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Tyriq and Cort. We discuss fantasy consoles, music from the 80s, getting earwormed by a song that doesn't exist, and Aesop Rock - Ruby 81. 1:08:52 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The album you finished.
  • A song that is entirely made of uncleared samples.
  • Turning leftover pumpkin pie into delicious pumpkin spice curry.
  • Interactive Pico-8 holiday cards.
  • Artificial constraints pegged at a level of technology somewhere in the 80s.
  • Writing specs for Pico-16 so that you don't accidentally make Pico-16 when you're making Pico-8.
  • Seeking a box to work within.
  • The most played entry in your Steam library is something your kids left running for weeks.
  • A collection of 50 games made for a console that never existed.
  • List of Fantasy Consoles.
  • The fantasy console hidden as an Easter egg in the Frog Fractions hat DLC.
  • Four joysticks in your garage waiting for an arcade machine to be installed into.
  • Languages that transpile to Lua.
  • Emulating the PlayStation 9.
  • A fantasy console for making 4D games.
  • A popular game engine that starts with the letters UN.
  • Civilisation's relationship with art.
  • Hop's Big Adventure in the Gift Dimension.
  • All the problems with Lua.
  • The Pico-8 show with the Pico-Lords.
  • All the things people were doing in the 80s.
  • Playing an inaudible guitar.
  • The sound of somebody being chased.
  • All the good Meat Loaf albums.
  • An inspiring thing that shows up a lot in your life.
  • A hip hop album entirely devoid of metaphor.
  • Listening to the first fifteen seconds of each song on an album.
  • Drums that are emblematic of everything you hate about the 80s.
  • A big decade with a lot of things happening.
  • Gil Scott-Heron.
  • Music that is distinctly of the 80s vs. music that happened to be released in the 80s.
  • The musical equivalent of oatmeal.
  • Not liking the whole chorus, but liking the first chord change in the chorus.
  • The bass part of Like a Prayer.
  • Your superpower: knowing what marmite tastes like and knowing your don't like it.
  • Hyperactive j-pop with way too many chord changes.
  • Creating a mashup that is better than the sum of its parts, but only for ten seconds.
  • Purging an earworm with another earworm.
  • We Need a Bigger Dumpster, by Cheek Face.
  • The parts of your brain that you're not on speaking terms with.
  • A photographic memory for all audio except for words.
  • Songs about love or romance or being horny: get that shit out of here.
  • "Baby Got Back," a song about Sir Mix A Lot's infant and her extremely loaded diaper.
  • Waking the sleeping beagle.
  • Some kind of intentional arson.
  • Painting an evocative picture of an extremely specific moment in time.
  • Uncles and aunts and stuff everywhere.
  • Thank you, Genius!
  • Bad or text-to-speech bad?
  • Trying to fix all instances of a given fact that is wrong everywhere on the internet.
  • Wesley Willis writing the story song "Oil Express" because he wanted to write about oil changes.
  • Lords Rule, Nuff Said.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The album you finished.
  • A song that is entirely made of uncleared samples.
  • Turning leftover pumpkin pie into delicious pumpkin spice curry.
  • Interactive Pico-8 holiday cards.
  • Artificial constraints pegged at a level of technology somewhere in the 80s.
  • Writing specs for Pico-16 so that you don't accidentally make Pico-16 when you're making Pico-8.
  • Seeking a box to work within.
  • The most played entry in your Steam library is something your kids left running for weeks.
  • A collection of 50 games made for a console that never existed.
  • List of Fantasy Consoles.
  • The fantasy console hidden as an Easter egg in the Frog Fractions hat DLC.
  • Four joysticks in your garage waiting for an arcade machine to be installed into.
  • Languages that transpile to Lua.
  • Emulating the PlayStation 9.
  • A fantasy console for making 4D games.
  • A popular game engine that starts with the letters UN.
  • Civilisation's relationship with art.
  • Hop's Big Adventure in the Gift Dimension.
  • All the problems with Lua.
  • The Pico-8 show with the Pico-Lords.
  • All the things people were doing in the 80s.
  • Playing an inaudible guitar.
  • The sound of somebody being chased.
  • All the good Meat Loaf albums.
  • An inspiring thing that shows up a lot in your life.
  • A hip hop album entirely devoid of metaphor.
  • Listening to the first fifteen seconds of each song on an album.
  • Drums that are emblematic of everything you hate about the 80s.
  • A big decade with a lot of things happening.
  • Gil Scott-Heron.
  • Music that is distinctly of the 80s vs. music that happened to be released in the 80s.
  • The musical equivalent of oatmeal.
  • Not liking the whole chorus, but liking the first chord change in the chorus.
  • The bass part of Like a Prayer.
  • Your superpower: knowing what marmite tastes like and knowing your don't like it.
  • Hyperactive j-pop with way too many chord changes.
  • Creating a mashup that is better than the sum of its parts, but only for ten seconds.
  • Purging an earworm with another earworm.
  • We Need a Bigger Dumpster, by Cheek Face.
  • The parts of your brain that you're not on speaking terms with.
  • A photographic memory for all audio except for words.
  • Songs about love or romance or being horny: get that shit out of here.
  • "Baby Got Back," a song about Sir Mix A Lot's infant and her extremely loaded diaper.
  • Waking the sleeping beagle.
  • Some kind of intentional arson.
  • Painting an evocative picture of an extremely specific moment in time.
  • Uncles and aunts and stuff everywhere.
  • Thank you, Genius!
  • Bad or text-to-speech bad?
  • Trying to fix all instances of a given fact that is wrong everywhere on the internet.
  • Wesley Willis writing the story song "Oil Express" because he wanted to write about oil changes.
  • Lords Rule, Nuff Said.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The album you finished.
  • A song that is entirely made of uncleared samples.
  • Turning leftover pumpkin pie into delicious pumpkin spice curry.
  • Interactive Pico-8 holiday cards.
  • Artificial constraints pegged at a level of technology somewhere in the 80s.
  • Writing specs for Pico-16 so that you don't accidentally make Pico-16 when you're making Pico-8.
  • Seeking a box to work within.
  • The most played entry in your Steam library is something your kids left running for weeks.
  • A collection of 50 games made for a console that never existed.
  • List of Fantasy Consoles.
  • The fantasy console hidden as an Easter egg in the Frog Fractions hat DLC.
  • Four joysticks in your garage waiting for an arcade machine to be installed into.
  • Languages that transpile to Lua.
  • Emulating the PlayStation 9.
  • A fantasy console for making 4D games.
  • A popular game engine that starts with the letters UN.
  • Civilisation's relationship with art.
  • Hop's Big Adventure in the Gift Dimension.
  • All the problems with Lua.
  • The Pico-8 show with the Pico-Lords.
  • All the things people were doing in the 80s.
  • Playing an inaudible guitar.
  • The sound of somebody being chased.
  • All the good Meat Loaf albums.
  • An inspiring thing that shows up a lot in your life.
  • A hip hop album entirely devoid of metaphor.
  • Listening to the first fifteen seconds of each song on an album.
  • Drums that are emblematic of everything you hate about the 80s.
  • A big decade with a lot of things happening.
  • Gil Scott-Heron.
  • Music that is distinctly of the 80s vs. music that happened to be released in the 80s.
  • The musical equivalent of oatmeal.
  • Not liking the whole chorus, but liking the first chord change in the chorus.
  • The bass part of Like a Prayer.
  • Your superpower: knowing what marmite tastes like and knowing your don't like it.
  • Hyperactive j-pop with way too many chord changes.
  • Creating a mashup that is better than the sum of its parts, but only for ten seconds.
  • Purging an earworm with another earworm.
  • We Need a Bigger Dumpster, by Cheek Face.
  • The parts of your brain that you're not on speaking terms with.
  • A photographic memory for all audio except for words.
  • Songs about love or romance or being horny: get that shit out of here.
  • "Baby Got Back," a song about Sir Mix A Lot's infant and her extremely loaded diaper.
  • Waking the sleeping beagle.
  • Some kind of intentional arson.
  • Painting an evocative picture of an extremely specific moment in time.
  • Uncles and aunts and stuff everywhere.
  • Thank you, Genius!
  • Bad or text-to-speech bad?
  • Trying to fix all instances of a given fact that is wrong everywhere on the internet.
  • Wesley Willis writing the story song "Oil Express" because he wanted to write about oil changes.
  • Lords Rule, Nuff Said.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+rGB1GkwS ]]> Jim Stormdancer 169. Topicless https://topiclords.com/topicless 0f6097a4-73cf-436c-8e36-30503e78c4dd Mon, 16 Jan 2023 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: John and Tim. We discuss compartmentalization, Deus Ex: Revision, Napster pranks, The Last Titan, the Gros Michel banana, and making art even when AI does it better. 1:12:04 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • America's self-denying culture of compartmentalization
  • Deus Ex: Revision is a mod for Deus Ex that changes maps just enough that it feels like a new game without losing what made the original special.
  • Napster pranks and more generally, fun with the early internet's poor security
  • The Last Titan
  • Topic Lords update: A review of the Gros Michel (aka "Big Mike") banana
  • If AI can tell better stories than you, is it still worth telling them (and why)?

Microtopics:

  • Planning around time zone differences.
  • What bots are left after the bot purge.
  • Text parsers that make it sound like you have silly accents.
  • C++ Coroutines for Everyone!
  • Playing the Frog Fractions soundtrack on mandolin at Jim's wedding reception.
  • Seeing friends catch up.
  • Waiting until the weekend to celebrate your birthday because weekdays are not for fun things.
  • Topicless Topic Peasants.
  • Planning to do things all week so you have things to look forward to all week.
  • How to schedule a movie night.
  • How to hang out with your friends on weekends.
  • Hanging out with your friends once a week because your internet audience demands it.
  • Setting traps for yourself so that you involuntarily have fun.
  • How you felt in the Fall of 2014.
  • Embracing making bad things.
  • Making bad art and dropping it in the company Slack.
  • April cameos.
  • What to do when Jim makes a mistake.
  • Watching a 3D film on a 2D viewing apparatus.
  • New super duper secret places to sneak around in.
  • Lay D Denton.
  • Let me tell you about my Napster pranks.
  • A very specific example of Napster interactions.
  • Authorless messages.
  • Renaming your band's music to have the same name as popular songs so people will download it on Napster.
  • A very benign internet security prank.
  • Telling your friend that you've made an AI chatbot but actually it's you typing the replies and she falls in love with the AI and wants to talk to it all the time.
  • Philly Boys.
  • Taking bets on whether any given domain name leads to porn.
  • Writing a cease and desist letter to the owner of a domain name that you want, claiming that you need it for your nonexistent porn company.
  • Getting out of legal jeopardy by constructing a gay porn web site.
  • An old god, his glory lost to memory.
  • A computer named Roboticus that you can't bear to decommission.
  • Looking on a diorama of dusty objects that represent your lost past.
  • Banana history.
  • A banana that you've never tasted.
  • Buying fruit from the Miami Fruit Organization.
  • The shocking flavor of electrolytes.
  • Fat Mike vs. Big Mike.
  • Quantifying 45 apple varietals without realizing that there is also wide variance within varietals.
  • Having to eat 10,000 bananas before you can safely say you know what they taste like.
  • Eating a bunch of types of bananas and realizing that they all pretty much taste the same.
  • Cotton candy flavored grapes.
  • Strawberries the size (and flavor) of a human heart.
  • Grapples vs. grapples.
  • A banana that is certainly a banana that you can eat.
  • The time Deep Blue glitched out and made a random chess move and Garry Kasparov couldn't figure it out and resigned the match.
  • Teaching a computer how to get flummoxed.
  • The purpose of making art.
  • What about Mario coins?
  • K-Mart music.
  • Smarty Pants, Brain Quest and Booty Blocks.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • America's self-denying culture of compartmentalization
  • Deus Ex: Revision is a mod for Deus Ex that changes maps just enough that it feels like a new game without losing what made the original special.
  • Napster pranks and more generally, fun with the early internet's poor security
  • The Last Titan
  • Topic Lords update: A review of the Gros Michel (aka "Big Mike") banana
  • If AI can tell better stories than you, is it still worth telling them (and why)?

Microtopics:

  • Planning around time zone differences.
  • What bots are left after the bot purge.
  • Text parsers that make it sound like you have silly accents.
  • C++ Coroutines for Everyone!
  • Playing the Frog Fractions soundtrack on mandolin at Jim's wedding reception.
  • Seeing friends catch up.
  • Waiting until the weekend to celebrate your birthday because weekdays are not for fun things.
  • Topicless Topic Peasants.
  • Planning to do things all week so you have things to look forward to all week.
  • How to schedule a movie night.
  • How to hang out with your friends on weekends.
  • Hanging out with your friends once a week because your internet audience demands it.
  • Setting traps for yourself so that you involuntarily have fun.
  • How you felt in the Fall of 2014.
  • Embracing making bad things.
  • Making bad art and dropping it in the company Slack.
  • April cameos.
  • What to do when Jim makes a mistake.
  • Watching a 3D film on a 2D viewing apparatus.
  • New super duper secret places to sneak around in.
  • Lay D Denton.
  • Let me tell you about my Napster pranks.
  • A very specific example of Napster interactions.
  • Authorless messages.
  • Renaming your band's music to have the same name as popular songs so people will download it on Napster.
  • A very benign internet security prank.
  • Telling your friend that you've made an AI chatbot but actually it's you typing the replies and she falls in love with the AI and wants to talk to it all the time.
  • Philly Boys.
  • Taking bets on whether any given domain name leads to porn.
  • Writing a cease and desist letter to the owner of a domain name that you want, claiming that you need it for your nonexistent porn company.
  • Getting out of legal jeopardy by constructing a gay porn web site.
  • An old god, his glory lost to memory.
  • A computer named Roboticus that you can't bear to decommission.
  • Looking on a diorama of dusty objects that represent your lost past.
  • Banana history.
  • A banana that you've never tasted.
  • Buying fruit from the Miami Fruit Organization.
  • The shocking flavor of electrolytes.
  • Fat Mike vs. Big Mike.
  • Quantifying 45 apple varietals without realizing that there is also wide variance within varietals.
  • Having to eat 10,000 bananas before you can safely say you know what they taste like.
  • Eating a bunch of types of bananas and realizing that they all pretty much taste the same.
  • Cotton candy flavored grapes.
  • Strawberries the size (and flavor) of a human heart.
  • Grapples vs. grapples.
  • A banana that is certainly a banana that you can eat.
  • The time Deep Blue glitched out and made a random chess move and Garry Kasparov couldn't figure it out and resigned the match.
  • Teaching a computer how to get flummoxed.
  • The purpose of making art.
  • What about Mario coins?
  • K-Mart music.
  • Smarty Pants, Brain Quest and Booty Blocks.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • America's self-denying culture of compartmentalization
  • Deus Ex: Revision is a mod for Deus Ex that changes maps just enough that it feels like a new game without losing what made the original special.
  • Napster pranks and more generally, fun with the early internet's poor security
  • The Last Titan
  • Topic Lords update: A review of the Gros Michel (aka "Big Mike") banana
  • If AI can tell better stories than you, is it still worth telling them (and why)?

Microtopics:

  • Planning around time zone differences.
  • What bots are left after the bot purge.
  • Text parsers that make it sound like you have silly accents.
  • C++ Coroutines for Everyone!
  • Playing the Frog Fractions soundtrack on mandolin at Jim's wedding reception.
  • Seeing friends catch up.
  • Waiting until the weekend to celebrate your birthday because weekdays are not for fun things.
  • Topicless Topic Peasants.
  • Planning to do things all week so you have things to look forward to all week.
  • How to schedule a movie night.
  • How to hang out with your friends on weekends.
  • Hanging out with your friends once a week because your internet audience demands it.
  • Setting traps for yourself so that you involuntarily have fun.
  • How you felt in the Fall of 2014.
  • Embracing making bad things.
  • Making bad art and dropping it in the company Slack.
  • April cameos.
  • What to do when Jim makes a mistake.
  • Watching a 3D film on a 2D viewing apparatus.
  • New super duper secret places to sneak around in.
  • Lay D Denton.
  • Let me tell you about my Napster pranks.
  • A very specific example of Napster interactions.
  • Authorless messages.
  • Renaming your band's music to have the same name as popular songs so people will download it on Napster.
  • A very benign internet security prank.
  • Telling your friend that you've made an AI chatbot but actually it's you typing the replies and she falls in love with the AI and wants to talk to it all the time.
  • Philly Boys.
  • Taking bets on whether any given domain name leads to porn.
  • Writing a cease and desist letter to the owner of a domain name that you want, claiming that you need it for your nonexistent porn company.
  • Getting out of legal jeopardy by constructing a gay porn web site.
  • An old god, his glory lost to memory.
  • A computer named Roboticus that you can't bear to decommission.
  • Looking on a diorama of dusty objects that represent your lost past.
  • Banana history.
  • A banana that you've never tasted.
  • Buying fruit from the Miami Fruit Organization.
  • The shocking flavor of electrolytes.
  • Fat Mike vs. Big Mike.
  • Quantifying 45 apple varietals without realizing that there is also wide variance within varietals.
  • Having to eat 10,000 bananas before you can safely say you know what they taste like.
  • Eating a bunch of types of bananas and realizing that they all pretty much taste the same.
  • Cotton candy flavored grapes.
  • Strawberries the size (and flavor) of a human heart.
  • Grapples vs. grapples.
  • A banana that is certainly a banana that you can eat.
  • The time Deep Blue glitched out and made a random chess move and Garry Kasparov couldn't figure it out and resigned the match.
  • Teaching a computer how to get flummoxed.
  • The purpose of making art.
  • What about Mario coins?
  • K-Mart music.
  • Smarty Pants, Brain Quest and Booty Blocks.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+6reTakOB ]]> Jim Stormdancer 168. Take a Gasket, Leave a Gasket https://topiclords.com/take-a-gasket-leave-a-gasket 84f716ee-bf63-44b8-8e88-0839d87abb80 Mon, 09 Jan 2023 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Erica and Jenni. We discuss Stronger with Stogner, what is and isn't ahegao, feeling old about anti-piracy measures, The Lanyard by Billy Collins, the WTF genre of narrative's often unsatisfying endings, and Ed O'Brien on Backing Vocals 1:19:37 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Erica
  • Jenni

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Fighting for credit.
  • The discord: it's fun in there.
  • Forgetting an entire lord.
  • A lot of work to get twice as many views.
  • A convenient thing you can put old food in so it doesn't go bad as quickly.
  • Gaskets: there's a name for them.
  • The British vs. the American conception of a frown.
  • Frowning with your face gaskets.
  • Doing a cartwheel to feel happier.
  • Alan Snape.
  • Doing a racy political ad on top of a 40-foot pumpjack.
  • What the Texas Railroad Commission does.
  • Getting the idea for OPEC from Texas.
  • A political ad using the Sugar Hill Gang cover of Apache as a soundtrack.
  • The suburban Texan mom solving the climate crisis single-handedly.
  • Twerking at the sunrise.
  • Field-dressing a moose.
  • Fantasy-footballing a female running mate for Theodore Roosevelt even though they didn't have women back then.
  • Getting so annoyed at an ad that you have to log back into Twitter.
  • Scrolling social media and getting angry by yourself.
  • The crucial elements that comprise the ahegao face.
  • Electronic Girl.
  • The phylogeny of the e-girl.
  • Is it Soup?
  • Looking at Zelda's face and thinking "okay, that's soup."
  • Whether ahegao or Betty Boop are sexy.
  • A face that people make to indicate horniness.
  • The Betty Boop ahegao: it's bad, folks.
  • What is otaku's plan for us?
  • Project Lords.
  • A web site with JavaScript implementations of video game code wheels of various 90s video games.
  • Everybody playing the free version of chess for thousands of years when the paid version is a way better game.
  • Why there is no Casio Loopy emulator.
  • Finding a tiny blood reservoir for the smallest blood sacrifices.
  • Who wrote the Vagina Monologues?
  • Moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano.
  • What a lanyard is and what it's for.
  • How to repay your mom for all the things that she's given you.
  • God's Eyes.
  • Replacing your son's butt-gasket.
  • Being old enough to remember when it was normal for schoolchildren to make their parents an ashtray.
  • Making a gumball dispenser in wood shop and using it to convince your mom to buy you a big bag of gumballs.
  • 1899.
  • A sequence of mysterious things happening.
  • A mysterious TV show that ends when you overwater all of your boyfriend's plants.
  • The final episode of Lost, where the giant panda shows up and explains that "I'm god and you're in my dream!"
  • Comedy typing directly into the Topic Bucket.
  • What makes a good ending to a mystery-focused story.
  • Mystery as marketing hook.
  • How to end a mystery-focused story in a satisfying way without solving the mystery.
  • The most normal-looking guy in Radiohead.
  • The one guy in Radiohead who doesn't have any fans.
  • From the Basement in Rainbows.
  • A super chill guy keeping time with his leg.
  • Does Ed from Radiohead only sing his own name?
  • A Pokemon Named Ed.
  • Idiosyncratic ways to describe your favorite band member, that unlock your unique adoration.
  • The only member of the band who smiles.
  • Absorbing it all as the luckiest person alive playing with your pals in a huge venue.
  • The kind of Radiohead fan whose imagination is so powerful that you can't safely let them into Radiohead concerts because they might imagine a bomb.
  • The kind of Topic Lord who listens to the show.
  • Having some delightful chats in Texas.
  • Posing on the pumpjack where nobody will ever see you.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Erica
  • Jenni

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Fighting for credit.
  • The discord: it's fun in there.
  • Forgetting an entire lord.
  • A lot of work to get twice as many views.
  • A convenient thing you can put old food in so it doesn't go bad as quickly.
  • Gaskets: there's a name for them.
  • The British vs. the American conception of a frown.
  • Frowning with your face gaskets.
  • Doing a cartwheel to feel happier.
  • Alan Snape.
  • Doing a racy political ad on top of a 40-foot pumpjack.
  • What the Texas Railroad Commission does.
  • Getting the idea for OPEC from Texas.
  • A political ad using the Sugar Hill Gang cover of Apache as a soundtrack.
  • The suburban Texan mom solving the climate crisis single-handedly.
  • Twerking at the sunrise.
  • Field-dressing a moose.
  • Fantasy-footballing a female running mate for Theodore Roosevelt even though they didn't have women back then.
  • Getting so annoyed at an ad that you have to log back into Twitter.
  • Scrolling social media and getting angry by yourself.
  • The crucial elements that comprise the ahegao face.
  • Electronic Girl.
  • The phylogeny of the e-girl.
  • Is it Soup?
  • Looking at Zelda's face and thinking "okay, that's soup."
  • Whether ahegao or Betty Boop are sexy.
  • A face that people make to indicate horniness.
  • The Betty Boop ahegao: it's bad, folks.
  • What is otaku's plan for us?
  • Project Lords.
  • A web site with JavaScript implementations of video game code wheels of various 90s video games.
  • Everybody playing the free version of chess for thousands of years when the paid version is a way better game.
  • Why there is no Casio Loopy emulator.
  • Finding a tiny blood reservoir for the smallest blood sacrifices.
  • Who wrote the Vagina Monologues?
  • Moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano.
  • What a lanyard is and what it's for.
  • How to repay your mom for all the things that she's given you.
  • God's Eyes.
  • Replacing your son's butt-gasket.
  • Being old enough to remember when it was normal for schoolchildren to make their parents an ashtray.
  • Making a gumball dispenser in wood shop and using it to convince your mom to buy you a big bag of gumballs.
  • 1899.
  • A sequence of mysterious things happening.
  • A mysterious TV show that ends when you overwater all of your boyfriend's plants.
  • The final episode of Lost, where the giant panda shows up and explains that "I'm god and you're in my dream!"
  • Comedy typing directly into the Topic Bucket.
  • What makes a good ending to a mystery-focused story.
  • Mystery as marketing hook.
  • How to end a mystery-focused story in a satisfying way without solving the mystery.
  • The most normal-looking guy in Radiohead.
  • The one guy in Radiohead who doesn't have any fans.
  • From the Basement in Rainbows.
  • A super chill guy keeping time with his leg.
  • Does Ed from Radiohead only sing his own name?
  • A Pokemon Named Ed.
  • Idiosyncratic ways to describe your favorite band member, that unlock your unique adoration.
  • The only member of the band who smiles.
  • Absorbing it all as the luckiest person alive playing with your pals in a huge venue.
  • The kind of Radiohead fan whose imagination is so powerful that you can't safely let them into Radiohead concerts because they might imagine a bomb.
  • The kind of Topic Lord who listens to the show.
  • Having some delightful chats in Texas.
  • Posing on the pumpjack where nobody will ever see you.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Erica
  • Jenni

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Fighting for credit.
  • The discord: it's fun in there.
  • Forgetting an entire lord.
  • A lot of work to get twice as many views.
  • A convenient thing you can put old food in so it doesn't go bad as quickly.
  • Gaskets: there's a name for them.
  • The British vs. the American conception of a frown.
  • Frowning with your face gaskets.
  • Doing a cartwheel to feel happier.
  • Alan Snape.
  • Doing a racy political ad on top of a 40-foot pumpjack.
  • What the Texas Railroad Commission does.
  • Getting the idea for OPEC from Texas.
  • A political ad using the Sugar Hill Gang cover of Apache as a soundtrack.
  • The suburban Texan mom solving the climate crisis single-handedly.
  • Twerking at the sunrise.
  • Field-dressing a moose.
  • Fantasy-footballing a female running mate for Theodore Roosevelt even though they didn't have women back then.
  • Getting so annoyed at an ad that you have to log back into Twitter.
  • Scrolling social media and getting angry by yourself.
  • The crucial elements that comprise the ahegao face.
  • Electronic Girl.
  • The phylogeny of the e-girl.
  • Is it Soup?
  • Looking at Zelda's face and thinking "okay, that's soup."
  • Whether ahegao or Betty Boop are sexy.
  • A face that people make to indicate horniness.
  • The Betty Boop ahegao: it's bad, folks.
  • What is otaku's plan for us?
  • Project Lords.
  • A web site with JavaScript implementations of video game code wheels of various 90s video games.
  • Everybody playing the free version of chess for thousands of years when the paid version is a way better game.
  • Why there is no Casio Loopy emulator.
  • Finding a tiny blood reservoir for the smallest blood sacrifices.
  • Who wrote the Vagina Monologues?
  • Moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano.
  • What a lanyard is and what it's for.
  • How to repay your mom for all the things that she's given you.
  • God's Eyes.
  • Replacing your son's butt-gasket.
  • Being old enough to remember when it was normal for schoolchildren to make their parents an ashtray.
  • Making a gumball dispenser in wood shop and using it to convince your mom to buy you a big bag of gumballs.
  • 1899.
  • A sequence of mysterious things happening.
  • A mysterious TV show that ends when you overwater all of your boyfriend's plants.
  • The final episode of Lost, where the giant panda shows up and explains that "I'm god and you're in my dream!"
  • Comedy typing directly into the Topic Bucket.
  • What makes a good ending to a mystery-focused story.
  • Mystery as marketing hook.
  • How to end a mystery-focused story in a satisfying way without solving the mystery.
  • The most normal-looking guy in Radiohead.
  • The one guy in Radiohead who doesn't have any fans.
  • From the Basement in Rainbows.
  • A super chill guy keeping time with his leg.
  • Does Ed from Radiohead only sing his own name?
  • A Pokemon Named Ed.
  • Idiosyncratic ways to describe your favorite band member, that unlock your unique adoration.
  • The only member of the band who smiles.
  • Absorbing it all as the luckiest person alive playing with your pals in a huge venue.
  • The kind of Radiohead fan whose imagination is so powerful that you can't safely let them into Radiohead concerts because they might imagine a bomb.
  • The kind of Topic Lord who listens to the show.
  • Having some delightful chats in Texas.
  • Posing on the pumpjack where nobody will ever see you.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+OE6htGko ]]> Jim Stormdancer 167. Riker's Doing the Biting https://topiclords.com/rikers-doing-the-biting 094b238d-fcca-4b38-80c7-7728873e409d Mon, 02 Jan 2023 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Danny and Akash. We discuss 100khz microphones, the town in Alaska that's all in one building, grainy magazine screen shot filters, Hitler is a Jerk, coming back to games after not playing them for a while, and what to call the Vampire Survivors genre. 1:05:13 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Sleeping with 20,000 podcasts.
  • Hyper Light Waiter.
  • Rift of the Necrodancer.
  • Picking up a dog ribcage and the rest of the dog comes with it.
  • A cat flowing out of your hands like water.
  • Which organ you smell with.
  • Dipping your fingies into the chicken vat to refresh the chicken smell.
  • Serendipity, providence, kismet, fate: Stormdancing.
  • Nyquist vs. Dayquist.
  • A big talking world snake named Carlosti, just like in the Edda.
  • Pitching a character's voice down four semitones to indicate that they're the bad guy.
  • Inventing a sound never heard before.
  • Doing a fun click.
  • Whether to take Tidal seriously.
  • Moving to a town that lives in a shopping mall.
  • Snowpiercer but the wheels fell off.
  • Signing your kids up for Twitter because they have to learn about death somehow.
  • A tiktok sensation dancing with a subway sandwich.
  • Visiting the sewage treatment plant next to the Forever 21.
  • The only two Invisible War fans in the world, on the same podcast together.
  • Crimothy, Jermdom and Frenchalor.
  • The Archie Effect.
  • A video card that's broken in an extremely specific way.
  • Reading a brochure about Super Metroid over and over.
  • A controller made of marzipan.
  • 2x Sai vs. SuperEagle.
  • DLSS but for pixel art.
  • Star Wars but every six seconds it's a different director.
  • Paying composers to make original music because you enjoy the idea of paying people to do work.
  • A poem by Nega-Kanye West.
  • The engine that drives the popularity of the "Whistle while you work / Hitler is a jerk" rhyme.
  • Bratwurst vs. Vienna Sausage.
  • Whether Data has functional genitalia.
  • The episode of Star Trek: the Next Generation where Data stars in a porn film in order to better understand that part of the human experience.
  • Star Trek Next Generation Triple-X Porn Parody: it's a satire.
  • Trying to find the Star Trek Next Generation Triple-X porn parody but all you can find is endless copies of the Babylon 5 porn parody.
  • Searching the internet and the universe for an answer.
  • Pressing both the sticks in and the sea monkeys come out.
  • What's cool about Dark Souls.
  • Trying to get your mom to play Skyrim with the Macho Man Randy Savage mod installed.
  • Video games: fuck the whole town!
  • Game of the Year in the sense of Time Magazine's Man of the Year.
  • Roguelikes: they're like Rogue.
  • Single-stick shooters.
  • The kind of game that a CSI character would play.
  • What Fortnite was before it was a PubG clone.
  • The extremely bitter blog post about the Edge team giving up and wrapping Chromium.
  • Where to play Frog Fractions 4 and 5.
  • How to feel about numbers.
  • The most expensive Vampire Survivor-likes.
  • Where to find Drop 7 2.
  • Arcade Paradise.
  • Bootleg Fractions.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Sleeping with 20,000 podcasts.
  • Hyper Light Waiter.
  • Rift of the Necrodancer.
  • Picking up a dog ribcage and the rest of the dog comes with it.
  • A cat flowing out of your hands like water.
  • Which organ you smell with.
  • Dipping your fingies into the chicken vat to refresh the chicken smell.
  • Serendipity, providence, kismet, fate: Stormdancing.
  • Nyquist vs. Dayquist.
  • A big talking world snake named Carlosti, just like in the Edda.
  • Pitching a character's voice down four semitones to indicate that they're the bad guy.
  • Inventing a sound never heard before.
  • Doing a fun click.
  • Whether to take Tidal seriously.
  • Moving to a town that lives in a shopping mall.
  • Snowpiercer but the wheels fell off.
  • Signing your kids up for Twitter because they have to learn about death somehow.
  • A tiktok sensation dancing with a subway sandwich.
  • Visiting the sewage treatment plant next to the Forever 21.
  • The only two Invisible War fans in the world, on the same podcast together.
  • Crimothy, Jermdom and Frenchalor.
  • The Archie Effect.
  • A video card that's broken in an extremely specific way.
  • Reading a brochure about Super Metroid over and over.
  • A controller made of marzipan.
  • 2x Sai vs. SuperEagle.
  • DLSS but for pixel art.
  • Star Wars but every six seconds it's a different director.
  • Paying composers to make original music because you enjoy the idea of paying people to do work.
  • A poem by Nega-Kanye West.
  • The engine that drives the popularity of the "Whistle while you work / Hitler is a jerk" rhyme.
  • Bratwurst vs. Vienna Sausage.
  • Whether Data has functional genitalia.
  • The episode of Star Trek: the Next Generation where Data stars in a porn film in order to better understand that part of the human experience.
  • Star Trek Next Generation Triple-X Porn Parody: it's a satire.
  • Trying to find the Star Trek Next Generation Triple-X porn parody but all you can find is endless copies of the Babylon 5 porn parody.
  • Searching the internet and the universe for an answer.
  • Pressing both the sticks in and the sea monkeys come out.
  • What's cool about Dark Souls.
  • Trying to get your mom to play Skyrim with the Macho Man Randy Savage mod installed.
  • Video games: fuck the whole town!
  • Game of the Year in the sense of Time Magazine's Man of the Year.
  • Roguelikes: they're like Rogue.
  • Single-stick shooters.
  • The kind of game that a CSI character would play.
  • What Fortnite was before it was a PubG clone.
  • The extremely bitter blog post about the Edge team giving up and wrapping Chromium.
  • Where to play Frog Fractions 4 and 5.
  • How to feel about numbers.
  • The most expensive Vampire Survivor-likes.
  • Where to find Drop 7 2.
  • Arcade Paradise.
  • Bootleg Fractions.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Sleeping with 20,000 podcasts.
  • Hyper Light Waiter.
  • Rift of the Necrodancer.
  • Picking up a dog ribcage and the rest of the dog comes with it.
  • A cat flowing out of your hands like water.
  • Which organ you smell with.
  • Dipping your fingies into the chicken vat to refresh the chicken smell.
  • Serendipity, providence, kismet, fate: Stormdancing.
  • Nyquist vs. Dayquist.
  • A big talking world snake named Carlosti, just like in the Edda.
  • Pitching a character's voice down four semitones to indicate that they're the bad guy.
  • Inventing a sound never heard before.
  • Doing a fun click.
  • Whether to take Tidal seriously.
  • Moving to a town that lives in a shopping mall.
  • Snowpiercer but the wheels fell off.
  • Signing your kids up for Twitter because they have to learn about death somehow.
  • A tiktok sensation dancing with a subway sandwich.
  • Visiting the sewage treatment plant next to the Forever 21.
  • The only two Invisible War fans in the world, on the same podcast together.
  • Crimothy, Jermdom and Frenchalor.
  • The Archie Effect.
  • A video card that's broken in an extremely specific way.
  • Reading a brochure about Super Metroid over and over.
  • A controller made of marzipan.
  • 2x Sai vs. SuperEagle.
  • DLSS but for pixel art.
  • Star Wars but every six seconds it's a different director.
  • Paying composers to make original music because you enjoy the idea of paying people to do work.
  • A poem by Nega-Kanye West.
  • The engine that drives the popularity of the "Whistle while you work / Hitler is a jerk" rhyme.
  • Bratwurst vs. Vienna Sausage.
  • Whether Data has functional genitalia.
  • The episode of Star Trek: the Next Generation where Data stars in a porn film in order to better understand that part of the human experience.
  • Star Trek Next Generation Triple-X Porn Parody: it's a satire.
  • Trying to find the Star Trek Next Generation Triple-X porn parody but all you can find is endless copies of the Babylon 5 porn parody.
  • Searching the internet and the universe for an answer.
  • Pressing both the sticks in and the sea monkeys come out.
  • What's cool about Dark Souls.
  • Trying to get your mom to play Skyrim with the Macho Man Randy Savage mod installed.
  • Video games: fuck the whole town!
  • Game of the Year in the sense of Time Magazine's Man of the Year.
  • Roguelikes: they're like Rogue.
  • Single-stick shooters.
  • The kind of game that a CSI character would play.
  • What Fortnite was before it was a PubG clone.
  • The extremely bitter blog post about the Edge team giving up and wrapping Chromium.
  • Where to play Frog Fractions 4 and 5.
  • How to feel about numbers.
  • The most expensive Vampire Survivor-likes.
  • Where to find Drop 7 2.
  • Arcade Paradise.
  • Bootleg Fractions.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+nQ2nGYDA ]]> Jim Stormdancer 166. There's Only One Best Topic https://topiclords.com/theres-only-one-best-topic 685b1b60-aab5-4a6d-b73b-ef28c59401a7 Mon, 26 Dec 2022 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Erica and Maxx. We discuss freesound.org, shutting down the FF2 ARG Twitter, leisure in the 70s, Snow by David Berman, the Some Potatoes diet, and plants that can see, sorta. 1:11:31 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Erica
  • Maxx

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The Topic Lords discord.
  • Meeting friends in the Kingdom of Loathing chat.
  • A virtual birthday party crashing app.
  • Piranesi.
  • A website where people post sound.
  • Wav laundering.
  • Purchasing a lion sound effect from an off-Broadway sound effect shop.
  • Sending over the can crushing noises that you selected.
  • Someone's friend pretending to be a bird.
  • Having a roommate named Phil all of whose passwords were “Phil”
  • AAA games with Freesound user names in the credits.
  • Recognizing Brick Drop 5 from Dope Dragon 69's Freesound portfolio.
  • Officer, I was just making a video game!
  • The psychology of why no Freesound user has uploaded a good pneumatic tube delivery sound.
  • The bank teller watching you and registering your surprise at being delivered a tube.
  • The bank tellers noticing that you are shitting into the pneumatic delivery tube and lifting the Gallagher tarp in front of their faces.
  • Getting ready for bed and then suddenly recording an episode of Topic Lords.
  • SmokenweewALT recording water flowing sounds in Flushing, Queens.
  • The best Wikipedia pages.
  • Toe Cleavage.
  • Cats who have jobs.
  • Finding things on Wikipedia that are not directly related to one another.
  • Tweeting your disappointment that a weird thing turns out to be part of the Frog Fractions ARG.
  • The alternate reality where Frog Fractions 2 launched but nobody ever found it.
  • The final unsolved (and now unsolvable) FF2 ARG puzzle.
  • Who was solving things?
  • New ways to not be at work.
  • Another word for having a good time.
  • Choosing photos to represent the concept of leisure.
  • Phil relaxing on the couch next to his toilet paper.
  • Someone who doesn't have a bed but does have two lanterns.
  • The guy who has spent fifteen years uploading pictures of his foreskin to Wikipedia just in case someone needs a picture of foreskin.
  • Spending so long thinking about someone that you're unsure whether they're notorious to anyone but you.
  • A foreskin in repose.
  • Believing that genes are immortal survival machines that use our disposable bodies to endlessly replicate themselves.
  • The concept of leisure as a human right.
  • Serious vs. casual leisure.
  • Project-based leisure projects.
  • A poem stapled to the wall in a laundromat in Massachusetts.
  • Voices hanging close in the new acoustics.
  • Explaining to your little brother that the snow angels are angel corpses that a nearby farmer murdered.
  • Lying to your child just a little bit, as a treat.
  • The Seattle Space Noodle.
  • The last Burger King in Amsterdam.
  • The most normal person you know.
  • Running an impromptu experiment on the internet by asking strangers to eat nothing but potatoes and report back.
  • Trying the all-potatoes diet for thirty years.
  • Eating 40 potatoes a day.
  • Game designer and science communicator Nicky Case.
  • Halftato.
  • Overdosing on potassium.
  • Doctors telling you to cool it with the potassium.
  • Why doctors don't know how much chemotherapy to give obese people.
  • The doctor from the phrenology department measuring your neck to see if you have sleep apnea.
  • Parasitic plants imitating the host plant's leaves.
  • Recognizing silhouettes of birds from an 8x8 monochrome image.
  • Rapidly changing the hydraulics of your leaves.
  • A forest of Max mimicry.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Erica
  • Maxx

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The Topic Lords discord.
  • Meeting friends in the Kingdom of Loathing chat.
  • A virtual birthday party crashing app.
  • Piranesi.
  • A website where people post sound.
  • Wav laundering.
  • Purchasing a lion sound effect from an off-Broadway sound effect shop.
  • Sending over the can crushing noises that you selected.
  • Someone's friend pretending to be a bird.
  • Having a roommate named Phil all of whose passwords were “Phil”
  • AAA games with Freesound user names in the credits.
  • Recognizing Brick Drop 5 from Dope Dragon 69's Freesound portfolio.
  • Officer, I was just making a video game!
  • The psychology of why no Freesound user has uploaded a good pneumatic tube delivery sound.
  • The bank teller watching you and registering your surprise at being delivered a tube.
  • The bank tellers noticing that you are shitting into the pneumatic delivery tube and lifting the Gallagher tarp in front of their faces.
  • Getting ready for bed and then suddenly recording an episode of Topic Lords.
  • SmokenweewALT recording water flowing sounds in Flushing, Queens.
  • The best Wikipedia pages.
  • Toe Cleavage.
  • Cats who have jobs.
  • Finding things on Wikipedia that are not directly related to one another.
  • Tweeting your disappointment that a weird thing turns out to be part of the Frog Fractions ARG.
  • The alternate reality where Frog Fractions 2 launched but nobody ever found it.
  • The final unsolved (and now unsolvable) FF2 ARG puzzle.
  • Who was solving things?
  • New ways to not be at work.
  • Another word for having a good time.
  • Choosing photos to represent the concept of leisure.
  • Phil relaxing on the couch next to his toilet paper.
  • Someone who doesn't have a bed but does have two lanterns.
  • The guy who has spent fifteen years uploading pictures of his foreskin to Wikipedia just in case someone needs a picture of foreskin.
  • Spending so long thinking about someone that you're unsure whether they're notorious to anyone but you.
  • A foreskin in repose.
  • Believing that genes are immortal survival machines that use our disposable bodies to endlessly replicate themselves.
  • The concept of leisure as a human right.
  • Serious vs. casual leisure.
  • Project-based leisure projects.
  • A poem stapled to the wall in a laundromat in Massachusetts.
  • Voices hanging close in the new acoustics.
  • Explaining to your little brother that the snow angels are angel corpses that a nearby farmer murdered.
  • Lying to your child just a little bit, as a treat.
  • The Seattle Space Noodle.
  • The last Burger King in Amsterdam.
  • The most normal person you know.
  • Running an impromptu experiment on the internet by asking strangers to eat nothing but potatoes and report back.
  • Trying the all-potatoes diet for thirty years.
  • Eating 40 potatoes a day.
  • Game designer and science communicator Nicky Case.
  • Halftato.
  • Overdosing on potassium.
  • Doctors telling you to cool it with the potassium.
  • Why doctors don't know how much chemotherapy to give obese people.
  • The doctor from the phrenology department measuring your neck to see if you have sleep apnea.
  • Parasitic plants imitating the host plant's leaves.
  • Recognizing silhouettes of birds from an 8x8 monochrome image.
  • Rapidly changing the hydraulics of your leaves.
  • A forest of Max mimicry.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Erica
  • Maxx

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The Topic Lords discord.
  • Meeting friends in the Kingdom of Loathing chat.
  • A virtual birthday party crashing app.
  • Piranesi.
  • A website where people post sound.
  • Wav laundering.
  • Purchasing a lion sound effect from an off-Broadway sound effect shop.
  • Sending over the can crushing noises that you selected.
  • Someone's friend pretending to be a bird.
  • Having a roommate named Phil all of whose passwords were “Phil”
  • AAA games with Freesound user names in the credits.
  • Recognizing Brick Drop 5 from Dope Dragon 69's Freesound portfolio.
  • Officer, I was just making a video game!
  • The psychology of why no Freesound user has uploaded a good pneumatic tube delivery sound.
  • The bank teller watching you and registering your surprise at being delivered a tube.
  • The bank tellers noticing that you are shitting into the pneumatic delivery tube and lifting the Gallagher tarp in front of their faces.
  • Getting ready for bed and then suddenly recording an episode of Topic Lords.
  • SmokenweewALT recording water flowing sounds in Flushing, Queens.
  • The best Wikipedia pages.
  • Toe Cleavage.
  • Cats who have jobs.
  • Finding things on Wikipedia that are not directly related to one another.
  • Tweeting your disappointment that a weird thing turns out to be part of the Frog Fractions ARG.
  • The alternate reality where Frog Fractions 2 launched but nobody ever found it.
  • The final unsolved (and now unsolvable) FF2 ARG puzzle.
  • Who was solving things?
  • New ways to not be at work.
  • Another word for having a good time.
  • Choosing photos to represent the concept of leisure.
  • Phil relaxing on the couch next to his toilet paper.
  • Someone who doesn't have a bed but does have two lanterns.
  • The guy who has spent fifteen years uploading pictures of his foreskin to Wikipedia just in case someone needs a picture of foreskin.
  • Spending so long thinking about someone that you're unsure whether they're notorious to anyone but you.
  • A foreskin in repose.
  • Believing that genes are immortal survival machines that use our disposable bodies to endlessly replicate themselves.
  • The concept of leisure as a human right.
  • Serious vs. casual leisure.
  • Project-based leisure projects.
  • A poem stapled to the wall in a laundromat in Massachusetts.
  • Voices hanging close in the new acoustics.
  • Explaining to your little brother that the snow angels are angel corpses that a nearby farmer murdered.
  • Lying to your child just a little bit, as a treat.
  • The Seattle Space Noodle.
  • The last Burger King in Amsterdam.
  • The most normal person you know.
  • Running an impromptu experiment on the internet by asking strangers to eat nothing but potatoes and report back.
  • Trying the all-potatoes diet for thirty years.
  • Eating 40 potatoes a day.
  • Game designer and science communicator Nicky Case.
  • Halftato.
  • Overdosing on potassium.
  • Doctors telling you to cool it with the potassium.
  • Why doctors don't know how much chemotherapy to give obese people.
  • The doctor from the phrenology department measuring your neck to see if you have sleep apnea.
  • Parasitic plants imitating the host plant's leaves.
  • Recognizing silhouettes of birds from an 8x8 monochrome image.
  • Rapidly changing the hydraulics of your leaves.
  • A forest of Max mimicry.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+8Cb8EezP ]]> Jim Stormdancer 165. Spitting Wiggly Air https://topiclords.com/spitting-wiggly-air 931972ed-56d6-49bd-b736-cc4acb6c354c Mon, 19 Dec 2022 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Mark and Shirley. We discuss finding Shirley transformed into a puddle of water, aphasia, Dr. Icecreamwala, Eternal Champion - I Am The Hammer, Teen Censorship, and SCA stuff. 1:11:22 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Mark
  • Shirley

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • EEG, EKG and ECG.
  • Dogs and video games.
  • Kingdom: Two Crowns.
  • Whoops, I'm Dead!
  • Borker and Starina.
  • Waking up in the morning and telling your wife "and we're back!"
  • Sleeping with the Shirley-cicle.
  • When your wife turns into a puddle of water and you have to get a hot water bottle shaped like your wife to sleep with every night.
  • Hedge witches.
  • An Alex Mack situation.
  • Turning yourself into a goo accidentally vs. on purpose.
  • A dog athletic enough to pee on your glasses while you're wearing them.
  • Figuring out what muscle to flex to telepathically communicate as a glass of water.
  • Believing things you see written in an authoritative voice.
  • The kind of movies Bruce Willis has been making lately.
  • Aphasia vs. Primary Progressive Aphasia.
  • The four primary modalities of human language.
  • Figuring out how to hang out with someone you can't talk to.
  • Decoupling the word "yes" from its literal meaning.
  • Apraxia of speech.
  • Thanking colonialism for this moment of delight.
  • Serving your patients their prescription in a waffle cone.
  • Flying to the Bay Area to get some light dermatology done.
  • The battle-starved riders of Tarsul.
  • The demon priests of ill Nitaar.
  • Nolan Bushnell receiving feedback about the name Atari.
  • The God Blade.
  • Fist-pumpin', sword-swingin' heavy metal.
  • A good source of lore.
  • Cosmologies where god is a species.
  • Drinking his blood to see what happens.
  • Heavy metal bands fronted by blacksmiths.
  • Wanting your teenager to feel safe listening to fascist heavy metal in front of you so that you can talk to them about it.
  • Installing a web filter so that your child doesn't accidentally stumble into gross abusive porn.
  • Opinions about parent-child relationships from someone who was once a child.
  • Heavy metal bands who write music about white nationalism vs. heavy metal bands who are just white nationalist without writing about it.
  • Deliberately not separating the art from the artist so you get the extra enjoyment out of musicians who are cool people.
  • Videos of common household items being crushed under the wheels of a car.
  • Videos of people building things in the woods.
  • Devil's toothpaste.
  • Reacting to the sugar tax by angrily boycotting soda.
  • The Society for Creative Anachronism kicking you out if you dress up as a time traveler from the future or a 1950s greaser.
  • The SCA re-enacting the before-times, when morning zoo radio didn't exist yet.
  • Apex Nerds.
  • Geniuses above petty squabbling.
  • A better system of chilling out.
  • Going into the woods with your friend who likes building stuff in the woods and watching him build stuff in the woods.
  • Movies set in the 80s that have absolutely nothing from the 70s in them because everybody threw all that shit away on January 1st, 1980.
  • Handing out arm rings to your sworn men.
  • Instituting a buddy system where you buy each other awards.
  • Happy baby cow.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Mark
  • Shirley

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • EEG, EKG and ECG.
  • Dogs and video games.
  • Kingdom: Two Crowns.
  • Whoops, I'm Dead!
  • Borker and Starina.
  • Waking up in the morning and telling your wife "and we're back!"
  • Sleeping with the Shirley-cicle.
  • When your wife turns into a puddle of water and you have to get a hot water bottle shaped like your wife to sleep with every night.
  • Hedge witches.
  • An Alex Mack situation.
  • Turning yourself into a goo accidentally vs. on purpose.
  • A dog athletic enough to pee on your glasses while you're wearing them.
  • Figuring out what muscle to flex to telepathically communicate as a glass of water.
  • Believing things you see written in an authoritative voice.
  • The kind of movies Bruce Willis has been making lately.
  • Aphasia vs. Primary Progressive Aphasia.
  • The four primary modalities of human language.
  • Figuring out how to hang out with someone you can't talk to.
  • Decoupling the word "yes" from its literal meaning.
  • Apraxia of speech.
  • Thanking colonialism for this moment of delight.
  • Serving your patients their prescription in a waffle cone.
  • Flying to the Bay Area to get some light dermatology done.
  • The battle-starved riders of Tarsul.
  • The demon priests of ill Nitaar.
  • Nolan Bushnell receiving feedback about the name Atari.
  • The God Blade.
  • Fist-pumpin', sword-swingin' heavy metal.
  • A good source of lore.
  • Cosmologies where god is a species.
  • Drinking his blood to see what happens.
  • Heavy metal bands fronted by blacksmiths.
  • Wanting your teenager to feel safe listening to fascist heavy metal in front of you so that you can talk to them about it.
  • Installing a web filter so that your child doesn't accidentally stumble into gross abusive porn.
  • Opinions about parent-child relationships from someone who was once a child.
  • Heavy metal bands who write music about white nationalism vs. heavy metal bands who are just white nationalist without writing about it.
  • Deliberately not separating the art from the artist so you get the extra enjoyment out of musicians who are cool people.
  • Videos of common household items being crushed under the wheels of a car.
  • Videos of people building things in the woods.
  • Devil's toothpaste.
  • Reacting to the sugar tax by angrily boycotting soda.
  • The Society for Creative Anachronism kicking you out if you dress up as a time traveler from the future or a 1950s greaser.
  • The SCA re-enacting the before-times, when morning zoo radio didn't exist yet.
  • Apex Nerds.
  • Geniuses above petty squabbling.
  • A better system of chilling out.
  • Going into the woods with your friend who likes building stuff in the woods and watching him build stuff in the woods.
  • Movies set in the 80s that have absolutely nothing from the 70s in them because everybody threw all that shit away on January 1st, 1980.
  • Handing out arm rings to your sworn men.
  • Instituting a buddy system where you buy each other awards.
  • Happy baby cow.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Mark
  • Shirley

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • EEG, EKG and ECG.
  • Dogs and video games.
  • Kingdom: Two Crowns.
  • Whoops, I'm Dead!
  • Borker and Starina.
  • Waking up in the morning and telling your wife "and we're back!"
  • Sleeping with the Shirley-cicle.
  • When your wife turns into a puddle of water and you have to get a hot water bottle shaped like your wife to sleep with every night.
  • Hedge witches.
  • An Alex Mack situation.
  • Turning yourself into a goo accidentally vs. on purpose.
  • A dog athletic enough to pee on your glasses while you're wearing them.
  • Figuring out what muscle to flex to telepathically communicate as a glass of water.
  • Believing things you see written in an authoritative voice.
  • The kind of movies Bruce Willis has been making lately.
  • Aphasia vs. Primary Progressive Aphasia.
  • The four primary modalities of human language.
  • Figuring out how to hang out with someone you can't talk to.
  • Decoupling the word "yes" from its literal meaning.
  • Apraxia of speech.
  • Thanking colonialism for this moment of delight.
  • Serving your patients their prescription in a waffle cone.
  • Flying to the Bay Area to get some light dermatology done.
  • The battle-starved riders of Tarsul.
  • The demon priests of ill Nitaar.
  • Nolan Bushnell receiving feedback about the name Atari.
  • The God Blade.
  • Fist-pumpin', sword-swingin' heavy metal.
  • A good source of lore.
  • Cosmologies where god is a species.
  • Drinking his blood to see what happens.
  • Heavy metal bands fronted by blacksmiths.
  • Wanting your teenager to feel safe listening to fascist heavy metal in front of you so that you can talk to them about it.
  • Installing a web filter so that your child doesn't accidentally stumble into gross abusive porn.
  • Opinions about parent-child relationships from someone who was once a child.
  • Heavy metal bands who write music about white nationalism vs. heavy metal bands who are just white nationalist without writing about it.
  • Deliberately not separating the art from the artist so you get the extra enjoyment out of musicians who are cool people.
  • Videos of common household items being crushed under the wheels of a car.
  • Videos of people building things in the woods.
  • Devil's toothpaste.
  • Reacting to the sugar tax by angrily boycotting soda.
  • The Society for Creative Anachronism kicking you out if you dress up as a time traveler from the future or a 1950s greaser.
  • The SCA re-enacting the before-times, when morning zoo radio didn't exist yet.
  • Apex Nerds.
  • Geniuses above petty squabbling.
  • A better system of chilling out.
  • Going into the woods with your friend who likes building stuff in the woods and watching him build stuff in the woods.
  • Movies set in the 80s that have absolutely nothing from the 70s in them because everybody threw all that shit away on January 1st, 1980.
  • Handing out arm rings to your sworn men.
  • Instituting a buddy system where you buy each other awards.
  • Happy baby cow.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+6b7AvI2s ]]> Jim Stormdancer 164. Dead Bodies Are Always in the First Place You Look https://topiclords.com/dead-bodies-are-always-in-the-first-place-you-look 06d046ab-78d8-40b5-80db-0ed5ceb12953 Mon, 12 Dec 2022 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Nathan and Tyriq. Topics: octopodes, teaching your son to drive, breaking the RNG in The Colonel's Bequest, and fixing the camera in Mario Odyssey. 1:12:56 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Nathan
    • MommysBestGames on Twitter.
  • Tyriq
    • FourBitFriday everywhere.

Topics:

  • Octopodes, continued
  • My wife and I are both teaching our son to drive, with separate lessons. It's going OK but with bumps.
  • The most widely-used crack for The Colonel's Bequest works by breaking the random number generator. This has wide-ranging effects on the gameplay.
  • How are we going to fix the camera in Mario Odyssey?

Microtopics:

  • Game Type DX.
  • Implementing the Xbox dashboard and trying to get it approved by Sony.
  • The most serious episode of Topic Lords.
  • Bringing up Octopuses every three years.
  • Giving yourself an electric shock because you're so bored.
  • Sea pork.
  • Eating the animals that are extremely convenient to farm.
  • Aoes sitting around waiting for something interesting to happen.
  • Chimpanzee pranks.
  • Making art because that's what people do.
  • Trying to disentangle making art from making a living.
  • Whether zoo animals would prefer their natural habitat or whether they just enjoy a chill cool time.
  • Inventing an octopus psychologist to figure out what parts of their lives they like and what parts could be improved.
  • Children of Time and Children of Ruin.
  • Molluscs having a good time.
  • Terraforming gone awry.
  • The impossibility of talking smart people out of bad ideas.
  • Why a teenager might or might not want to learn to drive.
  • How hard to push the brakes and how hard to push the gas.
  • Pushing the gas too hard and the car is like no, take a deep breath and try again.
  • Terrifying two lane roads.
  • Whether to start turning before you reach the stop sign.
  • Driving in Atlanta.
  • Learning to drive because you have to get to college somehow.
  • The responsibility of being in charge of heavy machinery.
  • Driving and suddenly realizing you need to be paying way more attention right now.
  • Saying the worst possible thing to someone who is already anxious.
  • Detective adventure game structure.
  • The botched Red Baron Easter egg.
  • Walking by windows whenever possible.
  • Blinking, fidgeting and moving with lifeless constancy.
  • Serious Sam 3's copy protection scorpion.
  • Finding the thing you're not expecting in the first place you look.
  • Whether the Law and Order video games implement both Law and Order.
  • A detective game where you spend most of your energy preventing the detective from having a nervous breakdown or hurting somebody.
  • Game design that is driven by fun tech.
  • Getting a fancy new drill press and for a while all the furniture you make has a bunch of extra holes for no apparent reason.
  • An RPG character with the ability to manipulate the RNG.
  • A game design critique of darts.
  • Fingers in the brain, squishing.
  • Why Game Genie codes are encrypted.
  • The Sonic the Hedgehog 2 level editor.
  • BASIC Programming and Computer Intro.
  • The guy who wrote half of the Odyssey 2's game catalog.
  • Whether console exclusives, or indeed video game systems at all, should exist.
  • Why they set Mario Galaxy on planetoids.
  • Looking into a shoebox of fun.
  • Mario's fluctuating weight throughout the series.
  • A classic 3D platformer problem.
  • Manipulating the camera while you touch all kinds of other buttons.
  • The kind of Mario game that your dad can play.
  • Been solved. Not fun.
  • Trying to show Portal to people who have never played first-person shooters.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Nathan
    • MommysBestGames on Twitter.
  • Tyriq
    • FourBitFriday everywhere.

Topics:

  • Octopodes, continued
  • My wife and I are both teaching our son to drive, with separate lessons. It's going OK but with bumps.
  • The most widely-used crack for The Colonel's Bequest works by breaking the random number generator. This has wide-ranging effects on the gameplay.
  • How are we going to fix the camera in Mario Odyssey?

Microtopics:

  • Game Type DX.
  • Implementing the Xbox dashboard and trying to get it approved by Sony.
  • The most serious episode of Topic Lords.
  • Bringing up Octopuses every three years.
  • Giving yourself an electric shock because you're so bored.
  • Sea pork.
  • Eating the animals that are extremely convenient to farm.
  • Aoes sitting around waiting for something interesting to happen.
  • Chimpanzee pranks.
  • Making art because that's what people do.
  • Trying to disentangle making art from making a living.
  • Whether zoo animals would prefer their natural habitat or whether they just enjoy a chill cool time.
  • Inventing an octopus psychologist to figure out what parts of their lives they like and what parts could be improved.
  • Children of Time and Children of Ruin.
  • Molluscs having a good time.
  • Terraforming gone awry.
  • The impossibility of talking smart people out of bad ideas.
  • Why a teenager might or might not want to learn to drive.
  • How hard to push the brakes and how hard to push the gas.
  • Pushing the gas too hard and the car is like no, take a deep breath and try again.
  • Terrifying two lane roads.
  • Whether to start turning before you reach the stop sign.
  • Driving in Atlanta.
  • Learning to drive because you have to get to college somehow.
  • The responsibility of being in charge of heavy machinery.
  • Driving and suddenly realizing you need to be paying way more attention right now.
  • Saying the worst possible thing to someone who is already anxious.
  • Detective adventure game structure.
  • The botched Red Baron Easter egg.
  • Walking by windows whenever possible.
  • Blinking, fidgeting and moving with lifeless constancy.
  • Serious Sam 3's copy protection scorpion.
  • Finding the thing you're not expecting in the first place you look.
  • Whether the Law and Order video games implement both Law and Order.
  • A detective game where you spend most of your energy preventing the detective from having a nervous breakdown or hurting somebody.
  • Game design that is driven by fun tech.
  • Getting a fancy new drill press and for a while all the furniture you make has a bunch of extra holes for no apparent reason.
  • An RPG character with the ability to manipulate the RNG.
  • A game design critique of darts.
  • Fingers in the brain, squishing.
  • Why Game Genie codes are encrypted.
  • The Sonic the Hedgehog 2 level editor.
  • BASIC Programming and Computer Intro.
  • The guy who wrote half of the Odyssey 2's game catalog.
  • Whether console exclusives, or indeed video game systems at all, should exist.
  • Why they set Mario Galaxy on planetoids.
  • Looking into a shoebox of fun.
  • Mario's fluctuating weight throughout the series.
  • A classic 3D platformer problem.
  • Manipulating the camera while you touch all kinds of other buttons.
  • The kind of Mario game that your dad can play.
  • Been solved. Not fun.
  • Trying to show Portal to people who have never played first-person shooters.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Nathan
    • MommysBestGames on Twitter.
  • Tyriq
    • FourBitFriday everywhere.

Topics:

  • Octopodes, continued
  • My wife and I are both teaching our son to drive, with separate lessons. It's going OK but with bumps.
  • The most widely-used crack for The Colonel's Bequest works by breaking the random number generator. This has wide-ranging effects on the gameplay.
  • How are we going to fix the camera in Mario Odyssey?

Microtopics:

  • Game Type DX.
  • Implementing the Xbox dashboard and trying to get it approved by Sony.
  • The most serious episode of Topic Lords.
  • Bringing up Octopuses every three years.
  • Giving yourself an electric shock because you're so bored.
  • Sea pork.
  • Eating the animals that are extremely convenient to farm.
  • Aoes sitting around waiting for something interesting to happen.
  • Chimpanzee pranks.
  • Making art because that's what people do.
  • Trying to disentangle making art from making a living.
  • Whether zoo animals would prefer their natural habitat or whether they just enjoy a chill cool time.
  • Inventing an octopus psychologist to figure out what parts of their lives they like and what parts could be improved.
  • Children of Time and Children of Ruin.
  • Molluscs having a good time.
  • Terraforming gone awry.
  • The impossibility of talking smart people out of bad ideas.
  • Why a teenager might or might not want to learn to drive.
  • How hard to push the brakes and how hard to push the gas.
  • Pushing the gas too hard and the car is like no, take a deep breath and try again.
  • Terrifying two lane roads.
  • Whether to start turning before you reach the stop sign.
  • Driving in Atlanta.
  • Learning to drive because you have to get to college somehow.
  • The responsibility of being in charge of heavy machinery.
  • Driving and suddenly realizing you need to be paying way more attention right now.
  • Saying the worst possible thing to someone who is already anxious.
  • Detective adventure game structure.
  • The botched Red Baron Easter egg.
  • Walking by windows whenever possible.
  • Blinking, fidgeting and moving with lifeless constancy.
  • Serious Sam 3's copy protection scorpion.
  • Finding the thing you're not expecting in the first place you look.
  • Whether the Law and Order video games implement both Law and Order.
  • A detective game where you spend most of your energy preventing the detective from having a nervous breakdown or hurting somebody.
  • Game design that is driven by fun tech.
  • Getting a fancy new drill press and for a while all the furniture you make has a bunch of extra holes for no apparent reason.
  • An RPG character with the ability to manipulate the RNG.
  • A game design critique of darts.
  • Fingers in the brain, squishing.
  • Why Game Genie codes are encrypted.
  • The Sonic the Hedgehog 2 level editor.
  • BASIC Programming and Computer Intro.
  • The guy who wrote half of the Odyssey 2's game catalog.
  • Whether console exclusives, or indeed video game systems at all, should exist.
  • Why they set Mario Galaxy on planetoids.
  • Looking into a shoebox of fun.
  • Mario's fluctuating weight throughout the series.
  • A classic 3D platformer problem.
  • Manipulating the camera while you touch all kinds of other buttons.
  • The kind of Mario game that your dad can play.
  • Been solved. Not fun.
  • Trying to show Portal to people who have never played first-person shooters.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+uEbqgtZ4 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 163. The Mean Horse Scenario https://topiclords.com/the-mean-horse-scenario 65dd8d59-7751-407a-b7b0-6cc96898fa1e Mon, 05 Dec 2022 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Mitch and Laura. We discuss how to get around in the post apocalypse, Super Mario Wiki, the GTA San Andreas conversation system, Last Straw by George Starbuck, and the gradual inflation of Youtube video length. 1:04:15 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • What vehicle would you use to get around in the post apocalypse? Are we talking live animals, internal combustion engine vehicles, bikes, skiis, etc? Why did you choose this?
  • The Super Mario Wiki is a beacon that other fan wikis should look to for inspiration
  • The GTA San Andreas conversation system
  • Last Straw, by George Starbuck http://reesewarner.blogspot.com/2021/04/george-starbuck-nationalpoetrymonth.html
  • The gradual inflation of standard youtube video length

Microtopics:

  • Lowercase jan, capital Misali.
  • Collecting all 905 Pokemon after 25 years.
  • R-rated Pokemon competitor, "Seximals."
  • Free-range porn, or legitimate educational resource?
  • First impressions of seximal.net.
  • Counting up to 99 on your hands.
  • College basketball's tactical use of base 6.
  • The binary number represented by flipping someone the bird with both hands.
  • The Airworld situation.
  • A sled pulled by domesticated zombies.
  • Solving the tire problem so you can bike around in the post-apocalypse.
  • Horses destroying society by kicking every building down with their powerful legs.
  • Horsefingers.
  • Horseknuckles.
  • Being just tall enough for a horse to try to eat your hair.
  • Shoveling poop out of the bear bone barn.
  • Standards of accuracy and editorial quality in the Super Mario Wiki.
  • Niwa, the Nintendo Independent Wiki Alliance.
  • What Mario Wiki has to say about the Berlin Wall.
  • Abraham Lincoln's place in the Mario Canon.
  • Organizing the Marvel Wiki by universe number.
  • The most objective possible method of sorting a list of universes.
  • Regular Peter Parker vs. Ultimate Peter Parker.
  • 10 seconds of scrolling.
  • A wealth of information not intended for a phone screen.
  • The ontological difference between characters and allies.
  • What species exist in the world of Mario?
  • Action Toad.
  • The wiki article about Baby Mario, a distinct character from the times various Marios have been babies.
  • The love child of Bowser and Shigeru Miyamoto.
  • Making invitations to your bachelor party with Mario Print World.
  • Different forms of pounding your butt on the ground.
  • The Ground Pound, also known as the Hip Drop, Pound the Ground attack, Bounce, Butt-Bash, Jump Smash, Smash Attack, and Butt Stomp.
  • How wikis get away with not being normalized databases.
  • A loose simulacrum of conversation.
  • A conversation that takes the form of a hand wave and then a gulf a million miles wide.
  • Pausing for several minutes to contemplate whether you've ever eaten octopus for breakfast.
  • Fifty ways to say "please don't hit me in the head with that wrench."
  • The Heaven's Vault conversation system.
  • Ten different voice actors saying the same twenty lines.
  • A normal poetry thing.
  • Trying to find the poem "The Last Straw" by George Starbuck but Google only wants to show you articles about how Starbucks doesn't have straws any more.
  • Poems that use two meters at once.
  • Showing the frivolity of the line lengths.
  • Back when Youtube videos were limited to ten minutes.
  • Just sitting here making feature films by myself.
  • Al Gore, the guy who invented the Algorithm.
  • Promising things in the show notes that definitely aren't going to go there.
  • What happens in an ecosystem where there is no pressure to make your work shorter.
  • People who have time to watch a three hour Youtube video.
  • Watching a movie over the course of a week, ten minutes at a time.
  • Multitasking poorly.
  • How to find people on Cohost.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • What vehicle would you use to get around in the post apocalypse? Are we talking live animals, internal combustion engine vehicles, bikes, skiis, etc? Why did you choose this?
  • The Super Mario Wiki is a beacon that other fan wikis should look to for inspiration
  • The GTA San Andreas conversation system
  • Last Straw, by George Starbuck http://reesewarner.blogspot.com/2021/04/george-starbuck-nationalpoetrymonth.html
  • The gradual inflation of standard youtube video length

Microtopics:

  • Lowercase jan, capital Misali.
  • Collecting all 905 Pokemon after 25 years.
  • R-rated Pokemon competitor, "Seximals."
  • Free-range porn, or legitimate educational resource?
  • First impressions of seximal.net.
  • Counting up to 99 on your hands.
  • College basketball's tactical use of base 6.
  • The binary number represented by flipping someone the bird with both hands.
  • The Airworld situation.
  • A sled pulled by domesticated zombies.
  • Solving the tire problem so you can bike around in the post-apocalypse.
  • Horses destroying society by kicking every building down with their powerful legs.
  • Horsefingers.
  • Horseknuckles.
  • Being just tall enough for a horse to try to eat your hair.
  • Shoveling poop out of the bear bone barn.
  • Standards of accuracy and editorial quality in the Super Mario Wiki.
  • Niwa, the Nintendo Independent Wiki Alliance.
  • What Mario Wiki has to say about the Berlin Wall.
  • Abraham Lincoln's place in the Mario Canon.
  • Organizing the Marvel Wiki by universe number.
  • The most objective possible method of sorting a list of universes.
  • Regular Peter Parker vs. Ultimate Peter Parker.
  • 10 seconds of scrolling.
  • A wealth of information not intended for a phone screen.
  • The ontological difference between characters and allies.
  • What species exist in the world of Mario?
  • Action Toad.
  • The wiki article about Baby Mario, a distinct character from the times various Marios have been babies.
  • The love child of Bowser and Shigeru Miyamoto.
  • Making invitations to your bachelor party with Mario Print World.
  • Different forms of pounding your butt on the ground.
  • The Ground Pound, also known as the Hip Drop, Pound the Ground attack, Bounce, Butt-Bash, Jump Smash, Smash Attack, and Butt Stomp.
  • How wikis get away with not being normalized databases.
  • A loose simulacrum of conversation.
  • A conversation that takes the form of a hand wave and then a gulf a million miles wide.
  • Pausing for several minutes to contemplate whether you've ever eaten octopus for breakfast.
  • Fifty ways to say "please don't hit me in the head with that wrench."
  • The Heaven's Vault conversation system.
  • Ten different voice actors saying the same twenty lines.
  • A normal poetry thing.
  • Trying to find the poem "The Last Straw" by George Starbuck but Google only wants to show you articles about how Starbucks doesn't have straws any more.
  • Poems that use two meters at once.
  • Showing the frivolity of the line lengths.
  • Back when Youtube videos were limited to ten minutes.
  • Just sitting here making feature films by myself.
  • Al Gore, the guy who invented the Algorithm.
  • Promising things in the show notes that definitely aren't going to go there.
  • What happens in an ecosystem where there is no pressure to make your work shorter.
  • People who have time to watch a three hour Youtube video.
  • Watching a movie over the course of a week, ten minutes at a time.
  • Multitasking poorly.
  • How to find people on Cohost.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • What vehicle would you use to get around in the post apocalypse? Are we talking live animals, internal combustion engine vehicles, bikes, skiis, etc? Why did you choose this?
  • The Super Mario Wiki is a beacon that other fan wikis should look to for inspiration
  • The GTA San Andreas conversation system
  • Last Straw, by George Starbuck http://reesewarner.blogspot.com/2021/04/george-starbuck-nationalpoetrymonth.html
  • The gradual inflation of standard youtube video length

Microtopics:

  • Lowercase jan, capital Misali.
  • Collecting all 905 Pokemon after 25 years.
  • R-rated Pokemon competitor, "Seximals."
  • Free-range porn, or legitimate educational resource?
  • First impressions of seximal.net.
  • Counting up to 99 on your hands.
  • College basketball's tactical use of base 6.
  • The binary number represented by flipping someone the bird with both hands.
  • The Airworld situation.
  • A sled pulled by domesticated zombies.
  • Solving the tire problem so you can bike around in the post-apocalypse.
  • Horses destroying society by kicking every building down with their powerful legs.
  • Horsefingers.
  • Horseknuckles.
  • Being just tall enough for a horse to try to eat your hair.
  • Shoveling poop out of the bear bone barn.
  • Standards of accuracy and editorial quality in the Super Mario Wiki.
  • Niwa, the Nintendo Independent Wiki Alliance.
  • What Mario Wiki has to say about the Berlin Wall.
  • Abraham Lincoln's place in the Mario Canon.
  • Organizing the Marvel Wiki by universe number.
  • The most objective possible method of sorting a list of universes.
  • Regular Peter Parker vs. Ultimate Peter Parker.
  • 10 seconds of scrolling.
  • A wealth of information not intended for a phone screen.
  • The ontological difference between characters and allies.
  • What species exist in the world of Mario?
  • Action Toad.
  • The wiki article about Baby Mario, a distinct character from the times various Marios have been babies.
  • The love child of Bowser and Shigeru Miyamoto.
  • Making invitations to your bachelor party with Mario Print World.
  • Different forms of pounding your butt on the ground.
  • The Ground Pound, also known as the Hip Drop, Pound the Ground attack, Bounce, Butt-Bash, Jump Smash, Smash Attack, and Butt Stomp.
  • How wikis get away with not being normalized databases.
  • A loose simulacrum of conversation.
  • A conversation that takes the form of a hand wave and then a gulf a million miles wide.
  • Pausing for several minutes to contemplate whether you've ever eaten octopus for breakfast.
  • Fifty ways to say "please don't hit me in the head with that wrench."
  • The Heaven's Vault conversation system.
  • Ten different voice actors saying the same twenty lines.
  • A normal poetry thing.
  • Trying to find the poem "The Last Straw" by George Starbuck but Google only wants to show you articles about how Starbucks doesn't have straws any more.
  • Poems that use two meters at once.
  • Showing the frivolity of the line lengths.
  • Back when Youtube videos were limited to ten minutes.
  • Just sitting here making feature films by myself.
  • Al Gore, the guy who invented the Algorithm.
  • Promising things in the show notes that definitely aren't going to go there.
  • What happens in an ecosystem where there is no pressure to make your work shorter.
  • People who have time to watch a three hour Youtube video.
  • Watching a movie over the course of a week, ten minutes at a time.
  • Multitasking poorly.
  • How to find people on Cohost.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+EldZNgP0 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 162. The Best Lawyer on Fiverr https://topiclords.com/the-best-lawyer-on-fiverr c74c1d63-183d-4f51-98b2-377a6d84efad Mon, 28 Nov 2022 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Quil and Maxx. We discuss not liking apples, Opposite Costco, the Sweet Science, the Village and the Curious Hole, and BALLU the best robot. 57:04 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Quil
  • Maxx

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Making robots and video games in Seattle.
  • Cohost dot org.
  • Tumblr without Tumblr's weird nesting.
  • Finding interesting people to follow in 2005.
  • Cohost's discovery apparatus.
  • Making bad music on the internet that's not very enjoyable.
  • The worst fruit. (Apples.)
  • The enormous gulf between the audiovisual experience of watching someone eat an apple and eating that apple yourself.
  • The world's most apple growing place.
  • "Extra honey" apples.
  • Upgrading your teeth so that you can eat stone fruit without pitting them.
  • Installing a machine in your mouth that you can pour wheat into and it extrudes noodles right into your throat.
  • What wheat becomes if you chew it.
  • Pasta-flavored gum.
  • Vaguely salty orange chewing gum.
  • Installing an app to play a "biting an apple" ringtone into whenever you bite any fruit.
  • Japan's canonical fruit ranking with melon at the top, as seen in Pac-Man.
  • The way in which the B-tier melons are substandard.
  • The most cherries per slot machine.
  • Pivoting to chewing gum after San Francisco bans your gambling machines.
  • Buying just one leaf of parsley from Opposite Costco.
  • Naming your company after the idea of charging for things.
  • Buying hundreds of jigsaw puzzle pieces in bulk.
  • Tito Beverage.
  • You win stun, you lose stun.
  • Doug Bowser's Heel Turn.
  • Inaptronyms.
  • Punching somebody and all their honey comes out.
  • Preferring to punch people who bruise extremely precisely.
  • Hypothesizing that you are about to be punched in the face and setting up a control group.
  • Using science in an interesting way in 1832.
  • Little Alchemy and other combine-'em-ups.
  • What to play if you like adventure game inventory puzzles but not the rest of the adventure game.
  • The phone number you could call as part of the Frog Fractions ARG.
  • Investigating where the wind knocked over the fox shrine.
  • Finding an infinitely deep hole and dumping all your garbage in it until you realize you can use it to solve the housing crisis.
  • The deepest man-made hole.
  • The town that is permanently on fire.
  • An extremely plausible hellmouth.
  • Thanks, Hellmouth!
  • Inventing Hell in the 1970s.
  • A video that you can silently play in the background.
  • A robot that is just a large helium balloon.
  • A robot that is neutrally buoyant.
  • Strandbeests.
  • Making the goofiest lil guy.
  • The exploded cell phone ghosts.
  • A traffic cone skateboarding with ska playing in the background.
  • The Topic Lords startup incubator.
  • Cony Hawk.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Quil
  • Maxx

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Making robots and video games in Seattle.
  • Cohost dot org.
  • Tumblr without Tumblr's weird nesting.
  • Finding interesting people to follow in 2005.
  • Cohost's discovery apparatus.
  • Making bad music on the internet that's not very enjoyable.
  • The worst fruit. (Apples.)
  • The enormous gulf between the audiovisual experience of watching someone eat an apple and eating that apple yourself.
  • The world's most apple growing place.
  • "Extra honey" apples.
  • Upgrading your teeth so that you can eat stone fruit without pitting them.
  • Installing a machine in your mouth that you can pour wheat into and it extrudes noodles right into your throat.
  • What wheat becomes if you chew it.
  • Pasta-flavored gum.
  • Vaguely salty orange chewing gum.
  • Installing an app to play a "biting an apple" ringtone into whenever you bite any fruit.
  • Japan's canonical fruit ranking with melon at the top, as seen in Pac-Man.
  • The way in which the B-tier melons are substandard.
  • The most cherries per slot machine.
  • Pivoting to chewing gum after San Francisco bans your gambling machines.
  • Buying just one leaf of parsley from Opposite Costco.
  • Naming your company after the idea of charging for things.
  • Buying hundreds of jigsaw puzzle pieces in bulk.
  • Tito Beverage.
  • You win stun, you lose stun.
  • Doug Bowser's Heel Turn.
  • Inaptronyms.
  • Punching somebody and all their honey comes out.
  • Preferring to punch people who bruise extremely precisely.
  • Hypothesizing that you are about to be punched in the face and setting up a control group.
  • Using science in an interesting way in 1832.
  • Little Alchemy and other combine-'em-ups.
  • What to play if you like adventure game inventory puzzles but not the rest of the adventure game.
  • The phone number you could call as part of the Frog Fractions ARG.
  • Investigating where the wind knocked over the fox shrine.
  • Finding an infinitely deep hole and dumping all your garbage in it until you realize you can use it to solve the housing crisis.
  • The deepest man-made hole.
  • The town that is permanently on fire.
  • An extremely plausible hellmouth.
  • Thanks, Hellmouth!
  • Inventing Hell in the 1970s.
  • A video that you can silently play in the background.
  • A robot that is just a large helium balloon.
  • A robot that is neutrally buoyant.
  • Strandbeests.
  • Making the goofiest lil guy.
  • The exploded cell phone ghosts.
  • A traffic cone skateboarding with ska playing in the background.
  • The Topic Lords startup incubator.
  • Cony Hawk.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Quil
  • Maxx

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Making robots and video games in Seattle.
  • Cohost dot org.
  • Tumblr without Tumblr's weird nesting.
  • Finding interesting people to follow in 2005.
  • Cohost's discovery apparatus.
  • Making bad music on the internet that's not very enjoyable.
  • The worst fruit. (Apples.)
  • The enormous gulf between the audiovisual experience of watching someone eat an apple and eating that apple yourself.
  • The world's most apple growing place.
  • "Extra honey" apples.
  • Upgrading your teeth so that you can eat stone fruit without pitting them.
  • Installing a machine in your mouth that you can pour wheat into and it extrudes noodles right into your throat.
  • What wheat becomes if you chew it.
  • Pasta-flavored gum.
  • Vaguely salty orange chewing gum.
  • Installing an app to play a "biting an apple" ringtone into whenever you bite any fruit.
  • Japan's canonical fruit ranking with melon at the top, as seen in Pac-Man.
  • The way in which the B-tier melons are substandard.
  • The most cherries per slot machine.
  • Pivoting to chewing gum after San Francisco bans your gambling machines.
  • Buying just one leaf of parsley from Opposite Costco.
  • Naming your company after the idea of charging for things.
  • Buying hundreds of jigsaw puzzle pieces in bulk.
  • Tito Beverage.
  • You win stun, you lose stun.
  • Doug Bowser's Heel Turn.
  • Inaptronyms.
  • Punching somebody and all their honey comes out.
  • Preferring to punch people who bruise extremely precisely.
  • Hypothesizing that you are about to be punched in the face and setting up a control group.
  • Using science in an interesting way in 1832.
  • Little Alchemy and other combine-'em-ups.
  • What to play if you like adventure game inventory puzzles but not the rest of the adventure game.
  • The phone number you could call as part of the Frog Fractions ARG.
  • Investigating where the wind knocked over the fox shrine.
  • Finding an infinitely deep hole and dumping all your garbage in it until you realize you can use it to solve the housing crisis.
  • The deepest man-made hole.
  • The town that is permanently on fire.
  • An extremely plausible hellmouth.
  • Thanks, Hellmouth!
  • Inventing Hell in the 1970s.
  • A video that you can silently play in the background.
  • A robot that is just a large helium balloon.
  • A robot that is neutrally buoyant.
  • Strandbeests.
  • Making the goofiest lil guy.
  • The exploded cell phone ghosts.
  • A traffic cone skateboarding with ska playing in the background.
  • The Topic Lords startup incubator.
  • Cony Hawk.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+_BRs8dEQ ]]> Jim Stormdancer 161. How Much Can This Dog Deadlift? https://topiclords.com/how-much-can-this-dog-deadlift e3b739b0-53c7-4be8-b06f-90d9501a7b20 Mon, 21 Nov 2022 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Shannon and Avery. We discuss measure words, what even is color, and My Cat is Sad by Spenser Madsen. 58:08 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Shannon
  • Avery

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Game Changer.
  • Why various albums aren't on Spotify.
  • During the American Revolution when the British were always quartering punk bands in colonial household.
  • The Bug Porn calendar that Shannon drew for the FF2 ARG.
  • A singular bug in a pin-up pose.
  • A praying mantis cosplaying as a nun.
  • Learning a language and then forgetting it because you're too embarrassed to speak it around people.
  • A soup vs. a bowl of soup.
  • Thousands of years of associating this thing with this other thing.
  • How singing works in tonal languages.
  • The people who keep insisting that orange doesn't rhyme with anything.
  • That time Tom Lehrer rhymed "orange" with "bizarre enjoyment."
  • Memory palaces.
  • Stand over mouth next to person equals.
  • The "two six-packs" mnemonic for remembering what the two dots on the guitar fretboard mean.
  • Mnemonics that you would prefer to forget.
  • The blue/black/gold/white dress.
  • Changing the perceived color of an object by changing the lighting in the room.
  • Whether light is real.
  • Naming a color and never telling anybody the name.
  • Keeping a color swatch because your memory of a color might drift over time, but the swatch fades.
  • Perfect pitch for color perception.
  • Getting two sensory outputs from a single sensory input.
  • A deeply visual species.
  • Striving to be amazed and confused by things normal people take for granted.
  • Visualization but for smells.
  • A list of attributes of what your daughter looks like.
  • Blind sight.
  • Seeing but having no experience of sight.
  • Hashtag Kant Folks.
  • Discerning green and pink.
  • Do these two sexy nazi ponies look the same to you?
  • The purpose of music theory.
  • The invention of standardized tunings.
  • Where to find poems.
  • A cat who does not have a cat.
  • A cat wondering why nobody else in his family is a cat.
  • Things it is funny for a cat to be sad about.
  • Why the family cat didn't go to college.
  • Making sure to get a pet early enough that you child can see it die before going to college.
  • Getting a second dog vs. getting your dog a dog.
  • Dog IQ tests.
  • The placards at the dog shelter listing each dog's D&D stats and alignment.
  • Cockatiel owners.
  • A sporting event that measures how hungry you are.
  • How many cinder blocks you'd pull for a kingdom's Klondike bar.
  • Looking into a well during the full moon and saying Avery's name a hundred times.
  • Dating a string of Lisas.
  • Six Songs For Lisa.
  • Starting your six song album on song number three.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Shannon
  • Avery

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Game Changer.
  • Why various albums aren't on Spotify.
  • During the American Revolution when the British were always quartering punk bands in colonial household.
  • The Bug Porn calendar that Shannon drew for the FF2 ARG.
  • A singular bug in a pin-up pose.
  • A praying mantis cosplaying as a nun.
  • Learning a language and then forgetting it because you're too embarrassed to speak it around people.
  • A soup vs. a bowl of soup.
  • Thousands of years of associating this thing with this other thing.
  • How singing works in tonal languages.
  • The people who keep insisting that orange doesn't rhyme with anything.
  • That time Tom Lehrer rhymed "orange" with "bizarre enjoyment."
  • Memory palaces.
  • Stand over mouth next to person equals.
  • The "two six-packs" mnemonic for remembering what the two dots on the guitar fretboard mean.
  • Mnemonics that you would prefer to forget.
  • The blue/black/gold/white dress.
  • Changing the perceived color of an object by changing the lighting in the room.
  • Whether light is real.
  • Naming a color and never telling anybody the name.
  • Keeping a color swatch because your memory of a color might drift over time, but the swatch fades.
  • Perfect pitch for color perception.
  • Getting two sensory outputs from a single sensory input.
  • A deeply visual species.
  • Striving to be amazed and confused by things normal people take for granted.
  • Visualization but for smells.
  • A list of attributes of what your daughter looks like.
  • Blind sight.
  • Seeing but having no experience of sight.
  • Hashtag Kant Folks.
  • Discerning green and pink.
  • Do these two sexy nazi ponies look the same to you?
  • The purpose of music theory.
  • The invention of standardized tunings.
  • Where to find poems.
  • A cat who does not have a cat.
  • A cat wondering why nobody else in his family is a cat.
  • Things it is funny for a cat to be sad about.
  • Why the family cat didn't go to college.
  • Making sure to get a pet early enough that you child can see it die before going to college.
  • Getting a second dog vs. getting your dog a dog.
  • Dog IQ tests.
  • The placards at the dog shelter listing each dog's D&D stats and alignment.
  • Cockatiel owners.
  • A sporting event that measures how hungry you are.
  • How many cinder blocks you'd pull for a kingdom's Klondike bar.
  • Looking into a well during the full moon and saying Avery's name a hundred times.
  • Dating a string of Lisas.
  • Six Songs For Lisa.
  • Starting your six song album on song number three.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Shannon
  • Avery

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Game Changer.
  • Why various albums aren't on Spotify.
  • During the American Revolution when the British were always quartering punk bands in colonial household.
  • The Bug Porn calendar that Shannon drew for the FF2 ARG.
  • A singular bug in a pin-up pose.
  • A praying mantis cosplaying as a nun.
  • Learning a language and then forgetting it because you're too embarrassed to speak it around people.
  • A soup vs. a bowl of soup.
  • Thousands of years of associating this thing with this other thing.
  • How singing works in tonal languages.
  • The people who keep insisting that orange doesn't rhyme with anything.
  • That time Tom Lehrer rhymed "orange" with "bizarre enjoyment."
  • Memory palaces.
  • Stand over mouth next to person equals.
  • The "two six-packs" mnemonic for remembering what the two dots on the guitar fretboard mean.
  • Mnemonics that you would prefer to forget.
  • The blue/black/gold/white dress.
  • Changing the perceived color of an object by changing the lighting in the room.
  • Whether light is real.
  • Naming a color and never telling anybody the name.
  • Keeping a color swatch because your memory of a color might drift over time, but the swatch fades.
  • Perfect pitch for color perception.
  • Getting two sensory outputs from a single sensory input.
  • A deeply visual species.
  • Striving to be amazed and confused by things normal people take for granted.
  • Visualization but for smells.
  • A list of attributes of what your daughter looks like.
  • Blind sight.
  • Seeing but having no experience of sight.
  • Hashtag Kant Folks.
  • Discerning green and pink.
  • Do these two sexy nazi ponies look the same to you?
  • The purpose of music theory.
  • The invention of standardized tunings.
  • Where to find poems.
  • A cat who does not have a cat.
  • A cat wondering why nobody else in his family is a cat.
  • Things it is funny for a cat to be sad about.
  • Why the family cat didn't go to college.
  • Making sure to get a pet early enough that you child can see it die before going to college.
  • Getting a second dog vs. getting your dog a dog.
  • Dog IQ tests.
  • The placards at the dog shelter listing each dog's D&D stats and alignment.
  • Cockatiel owners.
  • A sporting event that measures how hungry you are.
  • How many cinder blocks you'd pull for a kingdom's Klondike bar.
  • Looking into a well during the full moon and saying Avery's name a hundred times.
  • Dating a string of Lisas.
  • Six Songs For Lisa.
  • Starting your six song album on song number three.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+Ij2Unkgx ]]> Jim Stormdancer 160. Dracula Never Brushes His Teeth https://topiclords.com/dracula-never-brushes-his-teeth bdde6ab6-1b6d-4be1-8158-3998ce19bc7b Mon, 14 Nov 2022 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Elena and Shannon. We discuss going to Burning Man and not biting your nails, pros and cons of vampirism, twins conjoined at the brain, and "Gray cube, rectangular light," by Clarissa Darling's computer. 1:05:23 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Elena
  • Shannon

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Nominally saving everybody a big hassle but in fact completely failing to do the job.
  • Checking the double secret server.
  • Will Wood.
  • Listening to music but not learning a lot.
  • Biting your cuticles.
  • The Burning Man dust/paste situation.
  • Trying to get dust under your fingernails when you don't have fingernails.
  • Getting rid of the textures on your face which just causes more textures to happen.
  • A cuticle lab kit with fancy sticks and creams that you don't understand.
  • Nail-buffing cubes.
  • Losing some unpredictable aspect of your person at Burning Man.
  • A man made up of all the aspects of personalities that he stole from Burning Man attendees.
  • Leaving your nail biting behind in the temple.
  • Cutting your nails short ever since you got that gardening gig.
  • The weird traveling bruise you get when you hit your fingernail too hard.
  • Every shovelful had so much danger in it.
  • The perils of gardening barefoot.
  • Wearing gloves but not wearing shoes because you like the mud between your toes.
  • Dracula Daily.
  • Starting a mailing list for someone else's diary.
  • Couriers telling you that they delivered the boxes of soil and thanks for the shillings.
  • Explaining what a vampire is after the vampire is already dead.
  • Vampirism as a pyramid scheme.
  • Leaving and returning to your soldered-closed coffin at will.
  • God's meaner creatures.
  • Vampirism as a recipe for seasonal affective disorder.
  • What a bummer it'd be to discover that hell is real.
  • Living a thousand subjective years and learning a bunch of skills.
  • Getting up every night and finding a child to eat because that's all you have time for.
  • Dracula the trainspotter.
  • The Kirby dimension that his victims all go to and hang out together.
  • Offering value to the world that compensates for the person you have to kill and eat every day.
  • The guy in Dracula that is obsessed with technology and records his diary on wax cylinders but doesn't think to write the date on them.
  • Doctor C-Word.
  • The Blood of Manly Men.
  • God Sends Us Men When We Want Them.
  • Running out of manly blood but luckily a Texan shows up.
  • Affixing small electric lights to your chest so that you can explore a basement.
  • The spider that got so big that it was just a really big spider, you know, the really big spider everybody talks about.
  • How our intuition for what makes a person can be thrown off completely by simple biology.
  • Two brains that are slightly overlapped.
  • A closed system that can answer questions about itself.
  • Raising a child as if it is two people.
  • Split-brain patients.
  • Interpreting the two hemispheres of the brain as two individual people who are working in concert.
  • The storytelling part of our brain that we call consciousness.
  • Having control of three legs and an arm vs. three arms and a leg.
  • Trying to relate your subjective experience to other people.
  • What is the self?
  • A dog that likes another dog but doesn't like a different dog.
  • Cantilevered rainbows.
  • Clarissa Explains it All.
  • Clarissa Explains Indie Game Development.
  • Processing events in your life by making games about them.
  • Bringing out the special poetry lady to teach you poetry.
  • Writing a book of poetry where the typesetter also has to be a poet.
  • Writing a poem where you describe the scene from Fullmetal Alchemist where the two brothers burn down their house and your teacher is like "are you ok"
  • Writing a poem from the perspective of the piece of paper you're holding up to protect yourself from the rain and your poetry circle is like "I'm so sorry about your sister"
  • How to write a relatable poem.
  • The extra fridge that holds the food that you don't ever actually eat.
  • Who's got the tiger with the baseball bat?
  • Fragments of different jagged shapes.
  • Zero-Inbox Your Fridge.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Elena
  • Shannon

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Nominally saving everybody a big hassle but in fact completely failing to do the job.
  • Checking the double secret server.
  • Will Wood.
  • Listening to music but not learning a lot.
  • Biting your cuticles.
  • The Burning Man dust/paste situation.
  • Trying to get dust under your fingernails when you don't have fingernails.
  • Getting rid of the textures on your face which just causes more textures to happen.
  • A cuticle lab kit with fancy sticks and creams that you don't understand.
  • Nail-buffing cubes.
  • Losing some unpredictable aspect of your person at Burning Man.
  • A man made up of all the aspects of personalities that he stole from Burning Man attendees.
  • Leaving your nail biting behind in the temple.
  • Cutting your nails short ever since you got that gardening gig.
  • The weird traveling bruise you get when you hit your fingernail too hard.
  • Every shovelful had so much danger in it.
  • The perils of gardening barefoot.
  • Wearing gloves but not wearing shoes because you like the mud between your toes.
  • Dracula Daily.
  • Starting a mailing list for someone else's diary.
  • Couriers telling you that they delivered the boxes of soil and thanks for the shillings.
  • Explaining what a vampire is after the vampire is already dead.
  • Vampirism as a pyramid scheme.
  • Leaving and returning to your soldered-closed coffin at will.
  • God's meaner creatures.
  • Vampirism as a recipe for seasonal affective disorder.
  • What a bummer it'd be to discover that hell is real.
  • Living a thousand subjective years and learning a bunch of skills.
  • Getting up every night and finding a child to eat because that's all you have time for.
  • Dracula the trainspotter.
  • The Kirby dimension that his victims all go to and hang out together.
  • Offering value to the world that compensates for the person you have to kill and eat every day.
  • The guy in Dracula that is obsessed with technology and records his diary on wax cylinders but doesn't think to write the date on them.
  • Doctor C-Word.
  • The Blood of Manly Men.
  • God Sends Us Men When We Want Them.
  • Running out of manly blood but luckily a Texan shows up.
  • Affixing small electric lights to your chest so that you can explore a basement.
  • The spider that got so big that it was just a really big spider, you know, the really big spider everybody talks about.
  • How our intuition for what makes a person can be thrown off completely by simple biology.
  • Two brains that are slightly overlapped.
  • A closed system that can answer questions about itself.
  • Raising a child as if it is two people.
  • Split-brain patients.
  • Interpreting the two hemispheres of the brain as two individual people who are working in concert.
  • The storytelling part of our brain that we call consciousness.
  • Having control of three legs and an arm vs. three arms and a leg.
  • Trying to relate your subjective experience to other people.
  • What is the self?
  • A dog that likes another dog but doesn't like a different dog.
  • Cantilevered rainbows.
  • Clarissa Explains it All.
  • Clarissa Explains Indie Game Development.
  • Processing events in your life by making games about them.
  • Bringing out the special poetry lady to teach you poetry.
  • Writing a book of poetry where the typesetter also has to be a poet.
  • Writing a poem where you describe the scene from Fullmetal Alchemist where the two brothers burn down their house and your teacher is like "are you ok"
  • Writing a poem from the perspective of the piece of paper you're holding up to protect yourself from the rain and your poetry circle is like "I'm so sorry about your sister"
  • How to write a relatable poem.
  • The extra fridge that holds the food that you don't ever actually eat.
  • Who's got the tiger with the baseball bat?
  • Fragments of different jagged shapes.
  • Zero-Inbox Your Fridge.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Elena
  • Shannon

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Nominally saving everybody a big hassle but in fact completely failing to do the job.
  • Checking the double secret server.
  • Will Wood.
  • Listening to music but not learning a lot.
  • Biting your cuticles.
  • The Burning Man dust/paste situation.
  • Trying to get dust under your fingernails when you don't have fingernails.
  • Getting rid of the textures on your face which just causes more textures to happen.
  • A cuticle lab kit with fancy sticks and creams that you don't understand.
  • Nail-buffing cubes.
  • Losing some unpredictable aspect of your person at Burning Man.
  • A man made up of all the aspects of personalities that he stole from Burning Man attendees.
  • Leaving your nail biting behind in the temple.
  • Cutting your nails short ever since you got that gardening gig.
  • The weird traveling bruise you get when you hit your fingernail too hard.
  • Every shovelful had so much danger in it.
  • The perils of gardening barefoot.
  • Wearing gloves but not wearing shoes because you like the mud between your toes.
  • Dracula Daily.
  • Starting a mailing list for someone else's diary.
  • Couriers telling you that they delivered the boxes of soil and thanks for the shillings.
  • Explaining what a vampire is after the vampire is already dead.
  • Vampirism as a pyramid scheme.
  • Leaving and returning to your soldered-closed coffin at will.
  • God's meaner creatures.
  • Vampirism as a recipe for seasonal affective disorder.
  • What a bummer it'd be to discover that hell is real.
  • Living a thousand subjective years and learning a bunch of skills.
  • Getting up every night and finding a child to eat because that's all you have time for.
  • Dracula the trainspotter.
  • The Kirby dimension that his victims all go to and hang out together.
  • Offering value to the world that compensates for the person you have to kill and eat every day.
  • The guy in Dracula that is obsessed with technology and records his diary on wax cylinders but doesn't think to write the date on them.
  • Doctor C-Word.
  • The Blood of Manly Men.
  • God Sends Us Men When We Want Them.
  • Running out of manly blood but luckily a Texan shows up.
  • Affixing small electric lights to your chest so that you can explore a basement.
  • The spider that got so big that it was just a really big spider, you know, the really big spider everybody talks about.
  • How our intuition for what makes a person can be thrown off completely by simple biology.
  • Two brains that are slightly overlapped.
  • A closed system that can answer questions about itself.
  • Raising a child as if it is two people.
  • Split-brain patients.
  • Interpreting the two hemispheres of the brain as two individual people who are working in concert.
  • The storytelling part of our brain that we call consciousness.
  • Having control of three legs and an arm vs. three arms and a leg.
  • Trying to relate your subjective experience to other people.
  • What is the self?
  • A dog that likes another dog but doesn't like a different dog.
  • Cantilevered rainbows.
  • Clarissa Explains it All.
  • Clarissa Explains Indie Game Development.
  • Processing events in your life by making games about them.
  • Bringing out the special poetry lady to teach you poetry.
  • Writing a book of poetry where the typesetter also has to be a poet.
  • Writing a poem where you describe the scene from Fullmetal Alchemist where the two brothers burn down their house and your teacher is like "are you ok"
  • Writing a poem from the perspective of the piece of paper you're holding up to protect yourself from the rain and your poetry circle is like "I'm so sorry about your sister"
  • How to write a relatable poem.
  • The extra fridge that holds the food that you don't ever actually eat.
  • Who's got the tiger with the baseball bat?
  • Fragments of different jagged shapes.
  • Zero-Inbox Your Fridge.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+tmhTyck9 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 159. It's Beautiful That We Once Existed https://topiclords.com/its-beautiful-that-we-once-existed b6eab021-dcb9-4c7d-9d3e-802376104117 Mon, 07 Nov 2022 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Kev and Cort. We discuss losing all your memories around age 4, extreme "kids in trench coat" trope scenarios, Krista and Tatiana Hogan, "Autopsy" by Ross Sutherland, Neighbors overplaying the same playlist, and technology making creative expression easier. 1:06:47 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Mic on, pants off.
  • The inherent meaningless of "limited editions" in a finite universe ultimately bound for a slow heat death.
  • Vinyl record Easter eggs.
  • A big ol' spiral cut into the vinyl.
  • Limited characteristics of a physical process.
  • Mental models of what it means to master an album.
  • Novelty vinyl colors.
  • Jim's burgeoning record collection.
  • The most glorious twenty minute act of art terrorism.
  • Losing access to your old memories because your brain changed formats.
  • How to erase medical debt by just not paying it.
  • Borrowing money from your toddler.
  • Spark: the revolution of exercise or some other subtitle.
  • Mollusks eating their own nervous systems.
  • Eating your own childhood to launch yourself into adulthood.
  • Upping the emotional stakes with large animals and near-death experiences.
  • Putting your girlfriend in mortal danger so that she's more likely to want to marry you.
  • Getting pigeonholed as a really good butt.
  • Getting surgically separated so you can disguise yourself as two kids in a trench coat.
  • The hemispheres of the brain as independent entities which happen to share a body.
  • Lumps of biology.
  • Every person's unique inability to speak to other people's interiority.
  • Walkie-talkie telepathy vs. "perfect mutual understanding" telepathy.
  • One mind with two faces.
  • Superhuman limb/vocal cord coordination.
  • Segue Week.
  • Burroughs cut-ups.
  • Vigorous grandparenting with a face of terror.
  • A modern-day television quiz show phoenix.
  • The impenetrable free-form rhymes of a heart attack in October.
  • The greets.
  • Tracker music instrument names as cut-up poetry generators.
  • Super Obituaries!
  • The potentially transformative effect of reading your own obituary.
  • The perverse incentives behind soliciting reviews of unfinished games.
  • The awesome power of knowing that your feedback will be considered.
  • The neighbor who only listens to Rod Stewart's Greatest Hits over and over again.
  • Listening to entire albums until you're so sick of them that you underflow and love them again.
  • The song you have to listen to to get to Roxette's It Must Have Been Love.
  • Bad podcast ideas.
  • Novelty t-shirts whose joke is only funny once, but you still wear it once a week
  • The shirt with the Fight Club and the cognitive science reference on it.
  • Shirts/tattoos as pop culture dog whistles.
  • Getting a tattoo of the Colossus' weak points so that you can meet the people who stab you there.
  • Naming your game's public alpha something innocent so it doesn't arouse suspicion when your friends see you playing it.
  • The hazards of wearing a shirt promoting a pop culture reference you know nothing about.
  • Wearing a shirt that makes people try to talk to you about a video game you've never played.
  • All the people you disappointed in high school.
  • NPCs in Thief Deadly Shadows talking about how hard it is to get a job making games.
  • A bright future where nobody can make a living making video games.
  • A bright future where AIs curate collections of AI-generated content.
  • A case for the 1991 film "Super Mario Brothers" as the pinnacle of entertainment.
  • Charles Martinet doing the Mario voice as he leaps to his death from a roof in "The Game."
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Mic on, pants off.
  • The inherent meaningless of "limited editions" in a finite universe ultimately bound for a slow heat death.
  • Vinyl record Easter eggs.
  • A big ol' spiral cut into the vinyl.
  • Limited characteristics of a physical process.
  • Mental models of what it means to master an album.
  • Novelty vinyl colors.
  • Jim's burgeoning record collection.
  • The most glorious twenty minute act of art terrorism.
  • Losing access to your old memories because your brain changed formats.
  • How to erase medical debt by just not paying it.
  • Borrowing money from your toddler.
  • Spark: the revolution of exercise or some other subtitle.
  • Mollusks eating their own nervous systems.
  • Eating your own childhood to launch yourself into adulthood.
  • Upping the emotional stakes with large animals and near-death experiences.
  • Putting your girlfriend in mortal danger so that she's more likely to want to marry you.
  • Getting pigeonholed as a really good butt.
  • Getting surgically separated so you can disguise yourself as two kids in a trench coat.
  • The hemispheres of the brain as independent entities which happen to share a body.
  • Lumps of biology.
  • Every person's unique inability to speak to other people's interiority.
  • Walkie-talkie telepathy vs. "perfect mutual understanding" telepathy.
  • One mind with two faces.
  • Superhuman limb/vocal cord coordination.
  • Segue Week.
  • Burroughs cut-ups.
  • Vigorous grandparenting with a face of terror.
  • A modern-day television quiz show phoenix.
  • The impenetrable free-form rhymes of a heart attack in October.
  • The greets.
  • Tracker music instrument names as cut-up poetry generators.
  • Super Obituaries!
  • The potentially transformative effect of reading your own obituary.
  • The perverse incentives behind soliciting reviews of unfinished games.
  • The awesome power of knowing that your feedback will be considered.
  • The neighbor who only listens to Rod Stewart's Greatest Hits over and over again.
  • Listening to entire albums until you're so sick of them that you underflow and love them again.
  • The song you have to listen to to get to Roxette's It Must Have Been Love.
  • Bad podcast ideas.
  • Novelty t-shirts whose joke is only funny once, but you still wear it once a week
  • The shirt with the Fight Club and the cognitive science reference on it.
  • Shirts/tattoos as pop culture dog whistles.
  • Getting a tattoo of the Colossus' weak points so that you can meet the people who stab you there.
  • Naming your game's public alpha something innocent so it doesn't arouse suspicion when your friends see you playing it.
  • The hazards of wearing a shirt promoting a pop culture reference you know nothing about.
  • Wearing a shirt that makes people try to talk to you about a video game you've never played.
  • All the people you disappointed in high school.
  • NPCs in Thief Deadly Shadows talking about how hard it is to get a job making games.
  • A bright future where nobody can make a living making video games.
  • A bright future where AIs curate collections of AI-generated content.
  • A case for the 1991 film "Super Mario Brothers" as the pinnacle of entertainment.
  • Charles Martinet doing the Mario voice as he leaps to his death from a roof in "The Game."

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Mic on, pants off.
  • The inherent meaningless of "limited editions" in a finite universe ultimately bound for a slow heat death.
  • Vinyl record Easter eggs.
  • A big ol' spiral cut into the vinyl.
  • Limited characteristics of a physical process.
  • Mental models of what it means to master an album.
  • Novelty vinyl colors.
  • Jim's burgeoning record collection.
  • The most glorious twenty minute act of art terrorism.
  • Losing access to your old memories because your brain changed formats.
  • How to erase medical debt by just not paying it.
  • Borrowing money from your toddler.
  • Spark: the revolution of exercise or some other subtitle.
  • Mollusks eating their own nervous systems.
  • Eating your own childhood to launch yourself into adulthood.
  • Upping the emotional stakes with large animals and near-death experiences.
  • Putting your girlfriend in mortal danger so that she's more likely to want to marry you.
  • Getting pigeonholed as a really good butt.
  • Getting surgically separated so you can disguise yourself as two kids in a trench coat.
  • The hemispheres of the brain as independent entities which happen to share a body.
  • Lumps of biology.
  • Every person's unique inability to speak to other people's interiority.
  • Walkie-talkie telepathy vs. "perfect mutual understanding" telepathy.
  • One mind with two faces.
  • Superhuman limb/vocal cord coordination.
  • Segue Week.
  • Burroughs cut-ups.
  • Vigorous grandparenting with a face of terror.
  • A modern-day television quiz show phoenix.
  • The impenetrable free-form rhymes of a heart attack in October.
  • The greets.
  • Tracker music instrument names as cut-up poetry generators.
  • Super Obituaries!
  • The potentially transformative effect of reading your own obituary.
  • The perverse incentives behind soliciting reviews of unfinished games.
  • The awesome power of knowing that your feedback will be considered.
  • The neighbor who only listens to Rod Stewart's Greatest Hits over and over again.
  • Listening to entire albums until you're so sick of them that you underflow and love them again.
  • The song you have to listen to to get to Roxette's It Must Have Been Love.
  • Bad podcast ideas.
  • Novelty t-shirts whose joke is only funny once, but you still wear it once a week
  • The shirt with the Fight Club and the cognitive science reference on it.
  • Shirts/tattoos as pop culture dog whistles.
  • Getting a tattoo of the Colossus' weak points so that you can meet the people who stab you there.
  • Naming your game's public alpha something innocent so it doesn't arouse suspicion when your friends see you playing it.
  • The hazards of wearing a shirt promoting a pop culture reference you know nothing about.
  • Wearing a shirt that makes people try to talk to you about a video game you've never played.
  • All the people you disappointed in high school.
  • NPCs in Thief Deadly Shadows talking about how hard it is to get a job making games.
  • A bright future where nobody can make a living making video games.
  • A bright future where AIs curate collections of AI-generated content.
  • A case for the 1991 film "Super Mario Brothers" as the pinnacle of entertainment.
  • Charles Martinet doing the Mario voice as he leaps to his death from a roof in "The Game."

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+GTEFzhdI ]]> Jim Stormdancer 158. Bark Mitzvah: Where Your Good Boy Becomes a Mensch https://topiclords.com/bark-mitzvah-where-your-good-boy-becomes-a-mensch 255180cb-e886-4b86-b199-03a109ba825a Mon, 31 Oct 2022 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Erica and John. We discuss the Nancy Drew point and click adventures, garbage food technology, the grunting American Airlines voice, The Cow by Oliver Herford, indie games of the late 90s and early 2000s, and the Some Potatoes Diet. 1:09:04 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Erica
  • The Real John B

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Other topic podcasts biting Jim's steeze.
  • Spending the next hour blushing.
  • Holding a Bark Mitzvah to watch your Good Boy become a mensch.
  • Releasing a director's cut from beyond the grave.
  • Bad games that you can't get enough of.
  • Adventure games that make you feel like when grandma would visit and bring you donuts.
  • Secret Fandoms.
  • The new Nancy Drew series where Nancy Drew is an airhead and nobody likes her.
  • A 70 year old woman playing a teenager.
  • Whether game designers play anything other than World of Warcraft.
  • Why the Nancy Drew adventure games are not on phones.
  • Putting Nancy Drew in Fortnite.
  • Friend of the show, Dropsy.
  • You don't have to be an American to eat a garbage diet, but it sure helps.
  • Food color technology over time.
  • When Froot Loops added the fourth color.
  • Speaking truth to power about the little silver disc that you microwave pizza on.
  • The starchy packet that helps the noodles cook.
  • A job that requires the skill sets of both a chef and a materials engineer.
  • Things that come out of boxes nowadays.
  • Watching meat substitutes grow up.
  • Plastic golems living in your body.
  • Getting your first reading glasses at your Old Mitzvah and giving a speech starting with "now I am an old."
  • The second person this hour who has admitted to the pharmacist that they need reading glasses.
  • The baby technology section at Walmart.
  • Snot removers that'd also be great for insect collection.
  • A sock that measures blood oxygenation.
  • Earwitness accounts.
  • Working on the American Airlines announcement system and adding strange grunting noises to the playlist.
  • Electrical noise that is being interpreted by a system intended to transmit the human voice.
  • The guy who does all the grunt voices.
  • A sound that is like audio from a music album.
  • An incredible technical smartass who got annoyed at luggage fees.
  • A fridge full of snacks in the middle of the plane.
  • Every passenger getting up and going to the snack pit.
  • Wrestling for Cheez-Its.
  • All the folks who are into weird pranks and technical glitches making a pilgrimage to the American Airlines flight with the weird grunting.
  • Nancy-likes.
  • The Three Investigators, presented by Alfred Hitchcock.
  • Joining the discord for more on the ukulele plane.
  • Back in 1901 when they worried about Peak Cow.
  • Milk punch.
  • Eggless egg nog.
  • Celebrating all the positive ways cows influence our lives, and also we eat them.
  • Whether scientists knew extinctions were possible in 1901.
  • Looking for free games on the internet in 1999.
  • Letting the Game Hippo domain lapse and a domain squatter picks it up and the rest is history.
  • Dink Smallwood.
  • A multidirectional shooter with a cool perspective trick.
  • All the search engines they had before google.
  • The Williams College MUD that you could log in to and visit Williams College in the MUD.
  • Graal Online.
  • Receiving a box of shareware from your mom's coworker.
  • PC games from before developers realized that computers would get faster.
  • Typing swim fast enough that you don't drown.
  • Please Copy That Floppy!
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Erica
  • The Real John B

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Other topic podcasts biting Jim's steeze.
  • Spending the next hour blushing.
  • Holding a Bark Mitzvah to watch your Good Boy become a mensch.
  • Releasing a director's cut from beyond the grave.
  • Bad games that you can't get enough of.
  • Adventure games that make you feel like when grandma would visit and bring you donuts.
  • Secret Fandoms.
  • The new Nancy Drew series where Nancy Drew is an airhead and nobody likes her.
  • A 70 year old woman playing a teenager.
  • Whether game designers play anything other than World of Warcraft.
  • Why the Nancy Drew adventure games are not on phones.
  • Putting Nancy Drew in Fortnite.
  • Friend of the show, Dropsy.
  • You don't have to be an American to eat a garbage diet, but it sure helps.
  • Food color technology over time.
  • When Froot Loops added the fourth color.
  • Speaking truth to power about the little silver disc that you microwave pizza on.
  • The starchy packet that helps the noodles cook.
  • A job that requires the skill sets of both a chef and a materials engineer.
  • Things that come out of boxes nowadays.
  • Watching meat substitutes grow up.
  • Plastic golems living in your body.
  • Getting your first reading glasses at your Old Mitzvah and giving a speech starting with "now I am an old."
  • The second person this hour who has admitted to the pharmacist that they need reading glasses.
  • The baby technology section at Walmart.
  • Snot removers that'd also be great for insect collection.
  • A sock that measures blood oxygenation.
  • Earwitness accounts.
  • Working on the American Airlines announcement system and adding strange grunting noises to the playlist.
  • Electrical noise that is being interpreted by a system intended to transmit the human voice.
  • The guy who does all the grunt voices.
  • A sound that is like audio from a music album.
  • An incredible technical smartass who got annoyed at luggage fees.
  • A fridge full of snacks in the middle of the plane.
  • Every passenger getting up and going to the snack pit.
  • Wrestling for Cheez-Its.
  • All the folks who are into weird pranks and technical glitches making a pilgrimage to the American Airlines flight with the weird grunting.
  • Nancy-likes.
  • The Three Investigators, presented by Alfred Hitchcock.
  • Joining the discord for more on the ukulele plane.
  • Back in 1901 when they worried about Peak Cow.
  • Milk punch.
  • Eggless egg nog.
  • Celebrating all the positive ways cows influence our lives, and also we eat them.
  • Whether scientists knew extinctions were possible in 1901.
  • Looking for free games on the internet in 1999.
  • Letting the Game Hippo domain lapse and a domain squatter picks it up and the rest is history.
  • Dink Smallwood.
  • A multidirectional shooter with a cool perspective trick.
  • All the search engines they had before google.
  • The Williams College MUD that you could log in to and visit Williams College in the MUD.
  • Graal Online.
  • Receiving a box of shareware from your mom's coworker.
  • PC games from before developers realized that computers would get faster.
  • Typing swim fast enough that you don't drown.
  • Please Copy That Floppy!

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Erica
  • The Real John B

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Other topic podcasts biting Jim's steeze.
  • Spending the next hour blushing.
  • Holding a Bark Mitzvah to watch your Good Boy become a mensch.
  • Releasing a director's cut from beyond the grave.
  • Bad games that you can't get enough of.
  • Adventure games that make you feel like when grandma would visit and bring you donuts.
  • Secret Fandoms.
  • The new Nancy Drew series where Nancy Drew is an airhead and nobody likes her.
  • A 70 year old woman playing a teenager.
  • Whether game designers play anything other than World of Warcraft.
  • Why the Nancy Drew adventure games are not on phones.
  • Putting Nancy Drew in Fortnite.
  • Friend of the show, Dropsy.
  • You don't have to be an American to eat a garbage diet, but it sure helps.
  • Food color technology over time.
  • When Froot Loops added the fourth color.
  • Speaking truth to power about the little silver disc that you microwave pizza on.
  • The starchy packet that helps the noodles cook.
  • A job that requires the skill sets of both a chef and a materials engineer.
  • Things that come out of boxes nowadays.
  • Watching meat substitutes grow up.
  • Plastic golems living in your body.
  • Getting your first reading glasses at your Old Mitzvah and giving a speech starting with "now I am an old."
  • The second person this hour who has admitted to the pharmacist that they need reading glasses.
  • The baby technology section at Walmart.
  • Snot removers that'd also be great for insect collection.
  • A sock that measures blood oxygenation.
  • Earwitness accounts.
  • Working on the American Airlines announcement system and adding strange grunting noises to the playlist.
  • Electrical noise that is being interpreted by a system intended to transmit the human voice.
  • The guy who does all the grunt voices.
  • A sound that is like audio from a music album.
  • An incredible technical smartass who got annoyed at luggage fees.
  • A fridge full of snacks in the middle of the plane.
  • Every passenger getting up and going to the snack pit.
  • Wrestling for Cheez-Its.
  • All the folks who are into weird pranks and technical glitches making a pilgrimage to the American Airlines flight with the weird grunting.
  • Nancy-likes.
  • The Three Investigators, presented by Alfred Hitchcock.
  • Joining the discord for more on the ukulele plane.
  • Back in 1901 when they worried about Peak Cow.
  • Milk punch.
  • Eggless egg nog.
  • Celebrating all the positive ways cows influence our lives, and also we eat them.
  • Whether scientists knew extinctions were possible in 1901.
  • Looking for free games on the internet in 1999.
  • Letting the Game Hippo domain lapse and a domain squatter picks it up and the rest is history.
  • Dink Smallwood.
  • A multidirectional shooter with a cool perspective trick.
  • All the search engines they had before google.
  • The Williams College MUD that you could log in to and visit Williams College in the MUD.
  • Graal Online.
  • Receiving a box of shareware from your mom's coworker.
  • PC games from before developers realized that computers would get faster.
  • Typing swim fast enough that you don't drown.
  • Please Copy That Floppy!

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+RXCOB4ll ]]> Jim Stormdancer 157. The Boy Who Cried ARG https://topiclords.com/the-boy-who-cried-arg a81c32dc-04f2-47c0-8a30-f70ed3f5a0f4 Mon, 24 Oct 2022 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Tyriq and Chris. We discuss Jim's Mario videos, enjoying worldbuilding but not storytelling, Bigger Luke, the Green Street Mortuary Marching Band, and phantom kangaroos. 1:10:23 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Giving someone else's biography.
  • 7-Day Roguelikes.
  • Feeling ambiently like you are hanging out with somebody.
  • An emulator that works when you are not screen-capturing in OBS, but freezes when you are.
  • Making a backup of your Bowser's Fury save.
  • Video recording setup evolutions.
  • The pros and cons of extremely variable video lengths.
  • Playing Tony Hawk with Mario modded in.
  • What working on a Zelda game does to a person, psychologically.
  • Doing things that make people believe you're doing an ARG.
  • Twinbeard Rates Mario.
  • A robot co-host that eventually starts finishing your words for you.
  • Wanting to be a writer until you try writing.
  • A world that naturally develops in your brain.
  • How to tell stories.
  • Coming up with a bunch of characters that want things.
  • Reading stories in hopes that stories rub off on you.
  • Putting yourself in a situation where you write a lot of dialog trees.
  • How to make a platformer without doing any level design.
  • Expecting the same person to write the music and the lyrics.
  • The difference in the ideation process of world building and story telling.
  • A fact about the world that is true.
  • Captain Thalmoo surveying the battlefield.
  • Figuring out mid-burrito that there was a war, and deciding who won it.
  • A grain that flowers like lavender.
  • Searching Fiverr for Conlangers.
  • Paying $2 for something at the Dollar Store.
  • Logging Onto JimNet.
  • The Canon Bigger Luke Hypothesis vs. the Hamill Hypothesis.
  • The Inch-Luke Hypothesis.
  • Inch-Lukers.
  • Bigger Luke conspiracy theorists just assume that Han Solo stays the same size.
  • The real Skywalker was the bigger Luke all along.
  • The Boy Who Cried ARG.
  • Promising your wife that your son will not be Frog Fractions 3.
  • How many pages of laws a person is subject to at any given time.
  • Designing an ARG for your teenage son and he's like "ugh dad, again?"
  • Mortuary marching bands.
  • The patriarch who has just croaked.
  • The sister with the bent frame.
  • Uncle Louie with the wig.
  • Getting a free concert because someone died.
  • A funeral as a pleasant gathering of people you haven't seen in a long time.
  • Getting arrested for publishing Allen Ginsberg's "Howl."
  • Dressing up as an ancient sea captain.
  • How many funerals this marching band is playing today.
  • Hiring your nephew who has a Casiotone keyboard to play your funeral.
  • Hiring the Green Street Mortuary Marching Band to play at your kid's birthday but all they know how to play is Taps.
  • Bringing an axe to the funeral in case there's an emergency and you need to open up the coffin quickly.
  • If a guitar is an axe, a tuba is a bent axe.
  • Unbending the Tuba.
  • Why brass instruments are so twisty.
  • If you unwind a French horn it'll reach the moon and back.
  • The large flutes that are curly.
  • The son of a flautist.
  • A bookshelf that you blow into and music comes out.
  • Potential downsides of cryptids.
  • Wanting to take EMF meters into a creepy house even though you don't believe in ghosts.
  • The script scientists developed to let you fall in love at will.
  • How many blue coins out of five you would rate your wife.
  • Taking the Race IAT every week and analyzing your results over time.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Giving someone else's biography.
  • 7-Day Roguelikes.
  • Feeling ambiently like you are hanging out with somebody.
  • An emulator that works when you are not screen-capturing in OBS, but freezes when you are.
  • Making a backup of your Bowser's Fury save.
  • Video recording setup evolutions.
  • The pros and cons of extremely variable video lengths.
  • Playing Tony Hawk with Mario modded in.
  • What working on a Zelda game does to a person, psychologically.
  • Doing things that make people believe you're doing an ARG.
  • Twinbeard Rates Mario.
  • A robot co-host that eventually starts finishing your words for you.
  • Wanting to be a writer until you try writing.
  • A world that naturally develops in your brain.
  • How to tell stories.
  • Coming up with a bunch of characters that want things.
  • Reading stories in hopes that stories rub off on you.
  • Putting yourself in a situation where you write a lot of dialog trees.
  • How to make a platformer without doing any level design.
  • Expecting the same person to write the music and the lyrics.
  • The difference in the ideation process of world building and story telling.
  • A fact about the world that is true.
  • Captain Thalmoo surveying the battlefield.
  • Figuring out mid-burrito that there was a war, and deciding who won it.
  • A grain that flowers like lavender.
  • Searching Fiverr for Conlangers.
  • Paying $2 for something at the Dollar Store.
  • Logging Onto JimNet.
  • The Canon Bigger Luke Hypothesis vs. the Hamill Hypothesis.
  • The Inch-Luke Hypothesis.
  • Inch-Lukers.
  • Bigger Luke conspiracy theorists just assume that Han Solo stays the same size.
  • The real Skywalker was the bigger Luke all along.
  • The Boy Who Cried ARG.
  • Promising your wife that your son will not be Frog Fractions 3.
  • How many pages of laws a person is subject to at any given time.
  • Designing an ARG for your teenage son and he's like "ugh dad, again?"
  • Mortuary marching bands.
  • The patriarch who has just croaked.
  • The sister with the bent frame.
  • Uncle Louie with the wig.
  • Getting a free concert because someone died.
  • A funeral as a pleasant gathering of people you haven't seen in a long time.
  • Getting arrested for publishing Allen Ginsberg's "Howl."
  • Dressing up as an ancient sea captain.
  • How many funerals this marching band is playing today.
  • Hiring your nephew who has a Casiotone keyboard to play your funeral.
  • Hiring the Green Street Mortuary Marching Band to play at your kid's birthday but all they know how to play is Taps.
  • Bringing an axe to the funeral in case there's an emergency and you need to open up the coffin quickly.
  • If a guitar is an axe, a tuba is a bent axe.
  • Unbending the Tuba.
  • Why brass instruments are so twisty.
  • If you unwind a French horn it'll reach the moon and back.
  • The large flutes that are curly.
  • The son of a flautist.
  • A bookshelf that you blow into and music comes out.
  • Potential downsides of cryptids.
  • Wanting to take EMF meters into a creepy house even though you don't believe in ghosts.
  • The script scientists developed to let you fall in love at will.
  • How many blue coins out of five you would rate your wife.
  • Taking the Race IAT every week and analyzing your results over time.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Giving someone else's biography.
  • 7-Day Roguelikes.
  • Feeling ambiently like you are hanging out with somebody.
  • An emulator that works when you are not screen-capturing in OBS, but freezes when you are.
  • Making a backup of your Bowser's Fury save.
  • Video recording setup evolutions.
  • The pros and cons of extremely variable video lengths.
  • Playing Tony Hawk with Mario modded in.
  • What working on a Zelda game does to a person, psychologically.
  • Doing things that make people believe you're doing an ARG.
  • Twinbeard Rates Mario.
  • A robot co-host that eventually starts finishing your words for you.
  • Wanting to be a writer until you try writing.
  • A world that naturally develops in your brain.
  • How to tell stories.
  • Coming up with a bunch of characters that want things.
  • Reading stories in hopes that stories rub off on you.
  • Putting yourself in a situation where you write a lot of dialog trees.
  • How to make a platformer without doing any level design.
  • Expecting the same person to write the music and the lyrics.
  • The difference in the ideation process of world building and story telling.
  • A fact about the world that is true.
  • Captain Thalmoo surveying the battlefield.
  • Figuring out mid-burrito that there was a war, and deciding who won it.
  • A grain that flowers like lavender.
  • Searching Fiverr for Conlangers.
  • Paying $2 for something at the Dollar Store.
  • Logging Onto JimNet.
  • The Canon Bigger Luke Hypothesis vs. the Hamill Hypothesis.
  • The Inch-Luke Hypothesis.
  • Inch-Lukers.
  • Bigger Luke conspiracy theorists just assume that Han Solo stays the same size.
  • The real Skywalker was the bigger Luke all along.
  • The Boy Who Cried ARG.
  • Promising your wife that your son will not be Frog Fractions 3.
  • How many pages of laws a person is subject to at any given time.
  • Designing an ARG for your teenage son and he's like "ugh dad, again?"
  • Mortuary marching bands.
  • The patriarch who has just croaked.
  • The sister with the bent frame.
  • Uncle Louie with the wig.
  • Getting a free concert because someone died.
  • A funeral as a pleasant gathering of people you haven't seen in a long time.
  • Getting arrested for publishing Allen Ginsberg's "Howl."
  • Dressing up as an ancient sea captain.
  • How many funerals this marching band is playing today.
  • Hiring your nephew who has a Casiotone keyboard to play your funeral.
  • Hiring the Green Street Mortuary Marching Band to play at your kid's birthday but all they know how to play is Taps.
  • Bringing an axe to the funeral in case there's an emergency and you need to open up the coffin quickly.
  • If a guitar is an axe, a tuba is a bent axe.
  • Unbending the Tuba.
  • Why brass instruments are so twisty.
  • If you unwind a French horn it'll reach the moon and back.
  • The large flutes that are curly.
  • The son of a flautist.
  • A bookshelf that you blow into and music comes out.
  • Potential downsides of cryptids.
  • Wanting to take EMF meters into a creepy house even though you don't believe in ghosts.
  • The script scientists developed to let you fall in love at will.
  • How many blue coins out of five you would rate your wife.
  • Taking the Race IAT every week and analyzing your results over time.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+bYzg1YUq ]]> Jim Stormdancer 156. Society Is Moving in a Direction https://topiclords.com/society-is-moving-in-a-direction 35defb5a-5f80-4a99-b4e3-f8bf088a7c00 Mon, 17 Oct 2022 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Alex and JP. We discuss your gravestone audio clip, counting the beats in eenie-meenie, SoundCcan and the SoundScan Era, the scorched-earth strategy for Lowest Positive Unique Integer, and "leaving beautiful ruins" in a video game. 1:05:26 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • A return of many-storied adventure game developers.
  • A point and click adventure game that changed the trajectory of your life.
  • Suspenders as an architectural feature.
  • Onesie pajamas with a trap door.
  • People sneaking up behind you and trying to unbutton your poop flap.
  • Thoughts that are meant to remain unthought.
  • The famous elongated "some."
  • A marketing executive saying "nobody will know what a 'tetralogy' is."
  • Whether your game studio logo has a sound.
  • Console startup noises.
  • The button your loved ones can press on your gravestone to hear the Dreamcast startup sound.
  • King Solomoning the gif-vs-gif debate.
  • The governing body that decides whether your death is cool enough to warrant a gif of your death on your tombstone.
  • The kind of people who gravitate to a job that rates everyone's deaths on a five-star scale.
  • The IP situation surrounding your gravestone's looping wav button.
  • Your tombstone jukebox that plays David Bowie songs when people put a quarter in and the quarters all end up in your casket and if David Bowie wants them he can damn well come and get them.
  • Wagering on your ability to read emergent situations.
  • Electric Football.
  • Covering a metal plate with quarters and flipping the switch that makes the plate vibrate, creating the quarter configuration for optimal money gouging.
  • Becoming really good at beating a rigged game.
  • Becoming really good at funnel cake.
  • Dentists not understanding the motivations people have for drinking soda.
  • Largest Sip.
  • The liminal space between a Sip and a Gulp.
  • Gaming the outcome in Eenie Meenie Miney Moe.
  • Whether Eenie Meenie Miney Moe is a solved game.
  • A great opportunity to practice believing the lies that we form our wesociety on.
  • When Billboard switched from a call-stores-and-ask data collection system to an automated system to gather song sales data, and rap and R&B suddenly started dominating the charts.
  • Rockists fudging the numbers.
  • The pros and cons of getting a Billboard Hot 100 hit.
  • Jukebox charts.
  • The Billboard Humming chart based on them listening to the songs people are humming to themselves on the street.
  • Who loves the radio hits that everyone you know hates? (People you don't know.)
  • Knowing where to stick that quarter.
  • White dudes making 17 minute songs.
  • Axis of Discourse.
  • A directory of mp3s in your Jellyfin server.
  • Napster pivoting to NFTs but nobody notices or cares.
  • Nostalgia for the Spanish Flu.
  • A giant ball of iron with life forms clinging to it.
  • The earth continuing to be a lump of iron no matter how badly we treat it.
  • Potential human extinction and whether birds would notice it.
  • A fully-automated human house of the near to far future.
  • A band of roving pranksters in the post-apocalypse who are running around transmitting bad Roomba firmware updates.
  • Rolling up on prom with your entourage of four Half-Life scientists and five Barneys.
  • Rolling up on the rap battle with your entourage of backup singer Roombas trailing behind you.
  • The Mad Max series as prepper porn.
  • A good shelf to rest on in the collective psyche.
  • Friend deterrent strategies.
  • How strategy disclosure alters the gameplay of Rock Paper Scissors.
  • Disclosing ahead of the game or Rock Paper Scissors that your strategy will be to punch your opponent repeatedly, and how that affects the way the game is played.
  • Satisfactory: an open-world factory building game.
  • Building your factories and then leaving them behind.
  • Emergent haunted houses in abandoned player-built structures in persistent-world multiplayer games.
  • Having an idea for a game feature and having to build the whole game to try the feature out.
  • Being scared of weird old crap.
  • Adding Pokemon to Minecraft.
  • The last gasp of mainstream PC gaming before phones happened.
  • An 11 year old game developer getting thrown into the Capitalist snake pit.
  • The Human Attention Zoo.
  • Kids (or adults) having goofs.
  • The Golden Age of the Moddable Game Engine.
  • Getting a job based on your Roblox portfolio.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • A return of many-storied adventure game developers.
  • A point and click adventure game that changed the trajectory of your life.
  • Suspenders as an architectural feature.
  • Onesie pajamas with a trap door.
  • People sneaking up behind you and trying to unbutton your poop flap.
  • Thoughts that are meant to remain unthought.
  • The famous elongated "some."
  • A marketing executive saying "nobody will know what a 'tetralogy' is."
  • Whether your game studio logo has a sound.
  • Console startup noises.
  • The button your loved ones can press on your gravestone to hear the Dreamcast startup sound.
  • King Solomoning the gif-vs-gif debate.
  • The governing body that decides whether your death is cool enough to warrant a gif of your death on your tombstone.
  • The kind of people who gravitate to a job that rates everyone's deaths on a five-star scale.
  • The IP situation surrounding your gravestone's looping wav button.
  • Your tombstone jukebox that plays David Bowie songs when people put a quarter in and the quarters all end up in your casket and if David Bowie wants them he can damn well come and get them.
  • Wagering on your ability to read emergent situations.
  • Electric Football.
  • Covering a metal plate with quarters and flipping the switch that makes the plate vibrate, creating the quarter configuration for optimal money gouging.
  • Becoming really good at beating a rigged game.
  • Becoming really good at funnel cake.
  • Dentists not understanding the motivations people have for drinking soda.
  • Largest Sip.
  • The liminal space between a Sip and a Gulp.
  • Gaming the outcome in Eenie Meenie Miney Moe.
  • Whether Eenie Meenie Miney Moe is a solved game.
  • A great opportunity to practice believing the lies that we form our wesociety on.
  • When Billboard switched from a call-stores-and-ask data collection system to an automated system to gather song sales data, and rap and R&B suddenly started dominating the charts.
  • Rockists fudging the numbers.
  • The pros and cons of getting a Billboard Hot 100 hit.
  • Jukebox charts.
  • The Billboard Humming chart based on them listening to the songs people are humming to themselves on the street.
  • Who loves the radio hits that everyone you know hates? (People you don't know.)
  • Knowing where to stick that quarter.
  • White dudes making 17 minute songs.
  • Axis of Discourse.
  • A directory of mp3s in your Jellyfin server.
  • Napster pivoting to NFTs but nobody notices or cares.
  • Nostalgia for the Spanish Flu.
  • A giant ball of iron with life forms clinging to it.
  • The earth continuing to be a lump of iron no matter how badly we treat it.
  • Potential human extinction and whether birds would notice it.
  • A fully-automated human house of the near to far future.
  • A band of roving pranksters in the post-apocalypse who are running around transmitting bad Roomba firmware updates.
  • Rolling up on prom with your entourage of four Half-Life scientists and five Barneys.
  • Rolling up on the rap battle with your entourage of backup singer Roombas trailing behind you.
  • The Mad Max series as prepper porn.
  • A good shelf to rest on in the collective psyche.
  • Friend deterrent strategies.
  • How strategy disclosure alters the gameplay of Rock Paper Scissors.
  • Disclosing ahead of the game or Rock Paper Scissors that your strategy will be to punch your opponent repeatedly, and how that affects the way the game is played.
  • Satisfactory: an open-world factory building game.
  • Building your factories and then leaving them behind.
  • Emergent haunted houses in abandoned player-built structures in persistent-world multiplayer games.
  • Having an idea for a game feature and having to build the whole game to try the feature out.
  • Being scared of weird old crap.
  • Adding Pokemon to Minecraft.
  • The last gasp of mainstream PC gaming before phones happened.
  • An 11 year old game developer getting thrown into the Capitalist snake pit.
  • The Human Attention Zoo.
  • Kids (or adults) having goofs.
  • The Golden Age of the Moddable Game Engine.
  • Getting a job based on your Roblox portfolio.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • A return of many-storied adventure game developers.
  • A point and click adventure game that changed the trajectory of your life.
  • Suspenders as an architectural feature.
  • Onesie pajamas with a trap door.
  • People sneaking up behind you and trying to unbutton your poop flap.
  • Thoughts that are meant to remain unthought.
  • The famous elongated "some."
  • A marketing executive saying "nobody will know what a 'tetralogy' is."
  • Whether your game studio logo has a sound.
  • Console startup noises.
  • The button your loved ones can press on your gravestone to hear the Dreamcast startup sound.
  • King Solomoning the gif-vs-gif debate.
  • The governing body that decides whether your death is cool enough to warrant a gif of your death on your tombstone.
  • The kind of people who gravitate to a job that rates everyone's deaths on a five-star scale.
  • The IP situation surrounding your gravestone's looping wav button.
  • Your tombstone jukebox that plays David Bowie songs when people put a quarter in and the quarters all end up in your casket and if David Bowie wants them he can damn well come and get them.
  • Wagering on your ability to read emergent situations.
  • Electric Football.
  • Covering a metal plate with quarters and flipping the switch that makes the plate vibrate, creating the quarter configuration for optimal money gouging.
  • Becoming really good at beating a rigged game.
  • Becoming really good at funnel cake.
  • Dentists not understanding the motivations people have for drinking soda.
  • Largest Sip.
  • The liminal space between a Sip and a Gulp.
  • Gaming the outcome in Eenie Meenie Miney Moe.
  • Whether Eenie Meenie Miney Moe is a solved game.
  • A great opportunity to practice believing the lies that we form our wesociety on.
  • When Billboard switched from a call-stores-and-ask data collection system to an automated system to gather song sales data, and rap and R&B suddenly started dominating the charts.
  • Rockists fudging the numbers.
  • The pros and cons of getting a Billboard Hot 100 hit.
  • Jukebox charts.
  • The Billboard Humming chart based on them listening to the songs people are humming to themselves on the street.
  • Who loves the radio hits that everyone you know hates? (People you don't know.)
  • Knowing where to stick that quarter.
  • White dudes making 17 minute songs.
  • Axis of Discourse.
  • A directory of mp3s in your Jellyfin server.
  • Napster pivoting to NFTs but nobody notices or cares.
  • Nostalgia for the Spanish Flu.
  • A giant ball of iron with life forms clinging to it.
  • The earth continuing to be a lump of iron no matter how badly we treat it.
  • Potential human extinction and whether birds would notice it.
  • A fully-automated human house of the near to far future.
  • A band of roving pranksters in the post-apocalypse who are running around transmitting bad Roomba firmware updates.
  • Rolling up on prom with your entourage of four Half-Life scientists and five Barneys.
  • Rolling up on the rap battle with your entourage of backup singer Roombas trailing behind you.
  • The Mad Max series as prepper porn.
  • A good shelf to rest on in the collective psyche.
  • Friend deterrent strategies.
  • How strategy disclosure alters the gameplay of Rock Paper Scissors.
  • Disclosing ahead of the game or Rock Paper Scissors that your strategy will be to punch your opponent repeatedly, and how that affects the way the game is played.
  • Satisfactory: an open-world factory building game.
  • Building your factories and then leaving them behind.
  • Emergent haunted houses in abandoned player-built structures in persistent-world multiplayer games.
  • Having an idea for a game feature and having to build the whole game to try the feature out.
  • Being scared of weird old crap.
  • Adding Pokemon to Minecraft.
  • The last gasp of mainstream PC gaming before phones happened.
  • An 11 year old game developer getting thrown into the Capitalist snake pit.
  • The Human Attention Zoo.
  • Kids (or adults) having goofs.
  • The Golden Age of the Moddable Game Engine.
  • Getting a job based on your Roblox portfolio.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+X81ZsP8J ]]> Jim Stormdancer 155. Do AI Researchers Know About Having Kids? https://topiclords.com/do-ai-researchers-know-about-having-kids c4155803-5180-4ab9-82e6-df3f883dc4d0 Mon, 10 Oct 2022 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Jude and Shepard. We discuss the attention schema model of consciousness, studying a children's picture book in academia because it was successfully banned out of existence, your favorite floor cocktail, Ode to Waluigi, whether generations used to be a thing, and remembering what the mnemonic is but not what it is supposed to remind you. 58:20 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Bike Church.
  • Learning to fix a bike.
  • The audio book for Watership Down.
  • The book that inspired the plugging.
  • Our own brain's mental model of our attention.
  • If you are what you think then suddenly you're this other thing.
  • The brain's proprioception of itself.
  • The Turning Test as praxis.
  • A second brain that tries to second-guess the first brain.
  • An idea that is brilliant or not.
  • Have machine learning researchers heard about having kids?
  • X: A Child's Story.
  • A discount dystopian nightmare.
  • A book that is banned in twenty states but otherwise nobody cares about it.
  • Kids who inexplicably look like Charles Bronson.
  • The consolidation of media into six megacorporations.
  • Kids learning how to pirate again.
  • A specific right that can be sold or exchanged.
  • The end of the golden age of streaming.
  • What Napster was like.
  • Downloading an MP3 from an FTP site and then recording it to a cassette tape because you don't have that much hard drive space.
  • Ice that is still ice.
  • When the bartender pours your drink on the floor and gives you a straw.
  • The Forbidden Jungle Juice.
  • A story from back when most of Jim's friends were alcoholics.
  • Noticing a cocktail on the floor of the elevator and wondering how it got there and then you realize the elevator smells like a smoke bomb and you're like "oh ok"
  • Checking the ceiling of the elevator for ninjas.
  • The problem with the wine bar spit urn.
  • The coffee that you give to the poor.
  • Pouring your excess coffee into the donation box at church.
  • Dropping a loose muffin into the mail drop box to show thanks to the mail carrier.
  • A floor made of mail.
  • A dastardly Nintendo villain.
  • Thy time to attack Mario and Luigi.
  • Why thou dost not have thine own video fame.
  • Why thou art always cranky.
  • Whether a power flower fell in you mouth when thou wast a baby.
  • What it wouldst be like to be friends with Bowser and thou.
  • Fighting Geno the Explorer dangerously.
  • Why thou art not in Super Smash Bros. Brawl.
  • A poem that asks many important questions and provides no answers.
  • Hyper Mecha Sonic.
  • A thriller about video game mascots.
  • The bright line in the sand that makes Yoshi a pet rather than a friend.
  • Dumping your boyfriend Waluigi any time you need an extra few feet of jump height because at any time you can load up Mario Tennis and get another Waluigi for free.
  • Trying desperately to find or create a purple-moustachioed Waluigi.
  • The eight named generations.
  • The Reprisal Generation, of the Nomad/Reactive archetypes.
  • Why the concept of generational cohorts is unique to modern Americans.
  • Ming Dynasty Boomers.
  • Violence that is continuous and normal.
  • The Greatest Generation, who had no idea at the time how Great they had it.
  • A Radical for Fingers.
  • Seeing a king wearing a hat and trying to remember what that's supposed to remind you of.
  • Looking at your hands and trying to remember why this is important.
  • Not figuring out that your grandpa is hilarious until a week before he dies.
  • Waiting in the bathroom for the test to start.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Bike Church.
  • Learning to fix a bike.
  • The audio book for Watership Down.
  • The book that inspired the plugging.
  • Our own brain's mental model of our attention.
  • If you are what you think then suddenly you're this other thing.
  • The brain's proprioception of itself.
  • The Turning Test as praxis.
  • A second brain that tries to second-guess the first brain.
  • An idea that is brilliant or not.
  • Have machine learning researchers heard about having kids?
  • X: A Child's Story.
  • A discount dystopian nightmare.
  • A book that is banned in twenty states but otherwise nobody cares about it.
  • Kids who inexplicably look like Charles Bronson.
  • The consolidation of media into six megacorporations.
  • Kids learning how to pirate again.
  • A specific right that can be sold or exchanged.
  • The end of the golden age of streaming.
  • What Napster was like.
  • Downloading an MP3 from an FTP site and then recording it to a cassette tape because you don't have that much hard drive space.
  • Ice that is still ice.
  • When the bartender pours your drink on the floor and gives you a straw.
  • The Forbidden Jungle Juice.
  • A story from back when most of Jim's friends were alcoholics.
  • Noticing a cocktail on the floor of the elevator and wondering how it got there and then you realize the elevator smells like a smoke bomb and you're like "oh ok"
  • Checking the ceiling of the elevator for ninjas.
  • The problem with the wine bar spit urn.
  • The coffee that you give to the poor.
  • Pouring your excess coffee into the donation box at church.
  • Dropping a loose muffin into the mail drop box to show thanks to the mail carrier.
  • A floor made of mail.
  • A dastardly Nintendo villain.
  • Thy time to attack Mario and Luigi.
  • Why thou dost not have thine own video fame.
  • Why thou art always cranky.
  • Whether a power flower fell in you mouth when thou wast a baby.
  • What it wouldst be like to be friends with Bowser and thou.
  • Fighting Geno the Explorer dangerously.
  • Why thou art not in Super Smash Bros. Brawl.
  • A poem that asks many important questions and provides no answers.
  • Hyper Mecha Sonic.
  • A thriller about video game mascots.
  • The bright line in the sand that makes Yoshi a pet rather than a friend.
  • Dumping your boyfriend Waluigi any time you need an extra few feet of jump height because at any time you can load up Mario Tennis and get another Waluigi for free.
  • Trying desperately to find or create a purple-moustachioed Waluigi.
  • The eight named generations.
  • The Reprisal Generation, of the Nomad/Reactive archetypes.
  • Why the concept of generational cohorts is unique to modern Americans.
  • Ming Dynasty Boomers.
  • Violence that is continuous and normal.
  • The Greatest Generation, who had no idea at the time how Great they had it.
  • A Radical for Fingers.
  • Seeing a king wearing a hat and trying to remember what that's supposed to remind you of.
  • Looking at your hands and trying to remember why this is important.
  • Not figuring out that your grandpa is hilarious until a week before he dies.
  • Waiting in the bathroom for the test to start.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Bike Church.
  • Learning to fix a bike.
  • The audio book for Watership Down.
  • The book that inspired the plugging.
  • Our own brain's mental model of our attention.
  • If you are what you think then suddenly you're this other thing.
  • The brain's proprioception of itself.
  • The Turning Test as praxis.
  • A second brain that tries to second-guess the first brain.
  • An idea that is brilliant or not.
  • Have machine learning researchers heard about having kids?
  • X: A Child's Story.
  • A discount dystopian nightmare.
  • A book that is banned in twenty states but otherwise nobody cares about it.
  • Kids who inexplicably look like Charles Bronson.
  • The consolidation of media into six megacorporations.
  • Kids learning how to pirate again.
  • A specific right that can be sold or exchanged.
  • The end of the golden age of streaming.
  • What Napster was like.
  • Downloading an MP3 from an FTP site and then recording it to a cassette tape because you don't have that much hard drive space.
  • Ice that is still ice.
  • When the bartender pours your drink on the floor and gives you a straw.
  • The Forbidden Jungle Juice.
  • A story from back when most of Jim's friends were alcoholics.
  • Noticing a cocktail on the floor of the elevator and wondering how it got there and then you realize the elevator smells like a smoke bomb and you're like "oh ok"
  • Checking the ceiling of the elevator for ninjas.
  • The problem with the wine bar spit urn.
  • The coffee that you give to the poor.
  • Pouring your excess coffee into the donation box at church.
  • Dropping a loose muffin into the mail drop box to show thanks to the mail carrier.
  • A floor made of mail.
  • A dastardly Nintendo villain.
  • Thy time to attack Mario and Luigi.
  • Why thou dost not have thine own video fame.
  • Why thou art always cranky.
  • Whether a power flower fell in you mouth when thou wast a baby.
  • What it wouldst be like to be friends with Bowser and thou.
  • Fighting Geno the Explorer dangerously.
  • Why thou art not in Super Smash Bros. Brawl.
  • A poem that asks many important questions and provides no answers.
  • Hyper Mecha Sonic.
  • A thriller about video game mascots.
  • The bright line in the sand that makes Yoshi a pet rather than a friend.
  • Dumping your boyfriend Waluigi any time you need an extra few feet of jump height because at any time you can load up Mario Tennis and get another Waluigi for free.
  • Trying desperately to find or create a purple-moustachioed Waluigi.
  • The eight named generations.
  • The Reprisal Generation, of the Nomad/Reactive archetypes.
  • Why the concept of generational cohorts is unique to modern Americans.
  • Ming Dynasty Boomers.
  • Violence that is continuous and normal.
  • The Greatest Generation, who had no idea at the time how Great they had it.
  • A Radical for Fingers.
  • Seeing a king wearing a hat and trying to remember what that's supposed to remind you of.
  • Looking at your hands and trying to remember why this is important.
  • Not figuring out that your grandpa is hilarious until a week before he dies.
  • Waiting in the bathroom for the test to start.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+xfegoRJg ]]> Jim Stormdancer 154. QWERTY in the Streets, Colemak in the Sheets https://topiclords.com/qwerty-in-the-streets-colemak-in-the-sheets dadaa3ed-54f3-4e79-9108-54b7b4c9dcda Mon, 03 Oct 2022 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Tyriq and Stevie. We discuss striped humans, teaching yourself to type in new horrible ways, where did I get these floppy disk poems, and how to give a tech talk. 1:17:59 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The extent of Jim's patience vis-a-vis delayed plugging.
  • Wishing you didn't make things so you could talk about the things you didn't make.
  • Plugging the small random things in life, like bugs.
  • Sitting in a chair right now.
  • Trying desperately for forty years to never use Bluetooth.
  • George Michael's "Faith"
  • George Michael rehearsing a Queen song.
  • A Faith listening party.
  • The etymology of "Lobster."
  • Plugging bugs and unplugging crustaceans.
  • Invisible stripes along one's epidermis.
  • Mosaicism (as distinct from Chimerism.)
  • Blaschko Lines.
  • A secret invisible power to be striped.
  • The show where nobody knows anything.
  • Spiraling outward from a central point.
  • A thing that is a fact if you believe Wikipedia.
  • Describing an egg as ovoid because it is similar to an ovum, i.e. an egg.
  • Whether a factoid is bullshit.
  • Whether humans are humanoid.
  • The distinction between a fact and a factoid and how it has changed over time.
  • Being slightly hungry and eating a single macaronus.
  • Batman training his successor in the sci-fi future.
  • Joining the villain faction because they get the cool hooves and horns.
  • Turning 90 and getting your internal organs tattooed.
  • Check it out, here's my solar plexus. Enjoy.
  • An injection that makes your bones glow in the dark.
  • Cold-Turkey Colemak Switchin'.
  • Holding your left pinky on the tab key to keep your place.
  • Iterating until you find the episode title.
  • Typing without twerking.
  • Being able to get your hands to do what you want without hurting.
  • Getting a split keyboard so your hands keep working.
  • The ease and laziness of the Wiimote and nunchuk allowing you to put your hands anywhere you want.
  • Twitchy aim dominating the PC FPS design space regardless of what the game designer wants.
  • Making poem floppy disks and using them as drinking coasters.
  • Cleaning out your mouse.
  • Disassembling a floppy disk and folding it into the shape of the Starship Enterprise.
  • Remembering where the USB floppy drive might stuff.
  • Whether cursed demoscene executables still curse you if you run them in DosBox.
  • Whether the Ring video still cursed you after it's digitized to DVD.
  • Maybe'm or maybe'm not.
  • A pretty cool knick knack.
  • A human head like pancake batter.
  • Bread that you put in a blender.
  • The old good lord, bad lord routine.
  • Picking a god and channeling its power into your tech talk.
  • A community of people that you want to like and respect you.
  • Various ways to prepare to give a talk, and why Tyriq always does it the wrong way.
  • Going to a talk and thereby consenting to be lectured by the person giving the talk.
  • Blaming the audience for picking the wrong talk if they don't like your talk.
  • How to run an ARG for no money.
  • Deconstructing the idea that canon and headcanon are in any way different.
  • Re-telling the same story over and over again.
  • Same bullshit, different number of dimensions.
  • A movie that was cooler when it was just a throwaway line in another movie.
  • Depicting the same overarching event but with details changed.
  • Games that require you to make a choice that you can't take back.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The extent of Jim's patience vis-a-vis delayed plugging.
  • Wishing you didn't make things so you could talk about the things you didn't make.
  • Plugging the small random things in life, like bugs.
  • Sitting in a chair right now.
  • Trying desperately for forty years to never use Bluetooth.
  • George Michael's "Faith"
  • George Michael rehearsing a Queen song.
  • A Faith listening party.
  • The etymology of "Lobster."
  • Plugging bugs and unplugging crustaceans.
  • Invisible stripes along one's epidermis.
  • Mosaicism (as distinct from Chimerism.)
  • Blaschko Lines.
  • A secret invisible power to be striped.
  • The show where nobody knows anything.
  • Spiraling outward from a central point.
  • A thing that is a fact if you believe Wikipedia.
  • Describing an egg as ovoid because it is similar to an ovum, i.e. an egg.
  • Whether a factoid is bullshit.
  • Whether humans are humanoid.
  • The distinction between a fact and a factoid and how it has changed over time.
  • Being slightly hungry and eating a single macaronus.
  • Batman training his successor in the sci-fi future.
  • Joining the villain faction because they get the cool hooves and horns.
  • Turning 90 and getting your internal organs tattooed.
  • Check it out, here's my solar plexus. Enjoy.
  • An injection that makes your bones glow in the dark.
  • Cold-Turkey Colemak Switchin'.
  • Holding your left pinky on the tab key to keep your place.
  • Iterating until you find the episode title.
  • Typing without twerking.
  • Being able to get your hands to do what you want without hurting.
  • Getting a split keyboard so your hands keep working.
  • The ease and laziness of the Wiimote and nunchuk allowing you to put your hands anywhere you want.
  • Twitchy aim dominating the PC FPS design space regardless of what the game designer wants.
  • Making poem floppy disks and using them as drinking coasters.
  • Cleaning out your mouse.
  • Disassembling a floppy disk and folding it into the shape of the Starship Enterprise.
  • Remembering where the USB floppy drive might stuff.
  • Whether cursed demoscene executables still curse you if you run them in DosBox.
  • Whether the Ring video still cursed you after it's digitized to DVD.
  • Maybe'm or maybe'm not.
  • A pretty cool knick knack.
  • A human head like pancake batter.
  • Bread that you put in a blender.
  • The old good lord, bad lord routine.
  • Picking a god and channeling its power into your tech talk.
  • A community of people that you want to like and respect you.
  • Various ways to prepare to give a talk, and why Tyriq always does it the wrong way.
  • Going to a talk and thereby consenting to be lectured by the person giving the talk.
  • Blaming the audience for picking the wrong talk if they don't like your talk.
  • How to run an ARG for no money.
  • Deconstructing the idea that canon and headcanon are in any way different.
  • Re-telling the same story over and over again.
  • Same bullshit, different number of dimensions.
  • A movie that was cooler when it was just a throwaway line in another movie.
  • Depicting the same overarching event but with details changed.
  • Games that require you to make a choice that you can't take back.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The extent of Jim's patience vis-a-vis delayed plugging.
  • Wishing you didn't make things so you could talk about the things you didn't make.
  • Plugging the small random things in life, like bugs.
  • Sitting in a chair right now.
  • Trying desperately for forty years to never use Bluetooth.
  • George Michael's "Faith"
  • George Michael rehearsing a Queen song.
  • A Faith listening party.
  • The etymology of "Lobster."
  • Plugging bugs and unplugging crustaceans.
  • Invisible stripes along one's epidermis.
  • Mosaicism (as distinct from Chimerism.)
  • Blaschko Lines.
  • A secret invisible power to be striped.
  • The show where nobody knows anything.
  • Spiraling outward from a central point.
  • A thing that is a fact if you believe Wikipedia.
  • Describing an egg as ovoid because it is similar to an ovum, i.e. an egg.
  • Whether a factoid is bullshit.
  • Whether humans are humanoid.
  • The distinction between a fact and a factoid and how it has changed over time.
  • Being slightly hungry and eating a single macaronus.
  • Batman training his successor in the sci-fi future.
  • Joining the villain faction because they get the cool hooves and horns.
  • Turning 90 and getting your internal organs tattooed.
  • Check it out, here's my solar plexus. Enjoy.
  • An injection that makes your bones glow in the dark.
  • Cold-Turkey Colemak Switchin'.
  • Holding your left pinky on the tab key to keep your place.
  • Iterating until you find the episode title.
  • Typing without twerking.
  • Being able to get your hands to do what you want without hurting.
  • Getting a split keyboard so your hands keep working.
  • The ease and laziness of the Wiimote and nunchuk allowing you to put your hands anywhere you want.
  • Twitchy aim dominating the PC FPS design space regardless of what the game designer wants.
  • Making poem floppy disks and using them as drinking coasters.
  • Cleaning out your mouse.
  • Disassembling a floppy disk and folding it into the shape of the Starship Enterprise.
  • Remembering where the USB floppy drive might stuff.
  • Whether cursed demoscene executables still curse you if you run them in DosBox.
  • Whether the Ring video still cursed you after it's digitized to DVD.
  • Maybe'm or maybe'm not.
  • A pretty cool knick knack.
  • A human head like pancake batter.
  • Bread that you put in a blender.
  • The old good lord, bad lord routine.
  • Picking a god and channeling its power into your tech talk.
  • A community of people that you want to like and respect you.
  • Various ways to prepare to give a talk, and why Tyriq always does it the wrong way.
  • Going to a talk and thereby consenting to be lectured by the person giving the talk.
  • Blaming the audience for picking the wrong talk if they don't like your talk.
  • How to run an ARG for no money.
  • Deconstructing the idea that canon and headcanon are in any way different.
  • Re-telling the same story over and over again.
  • Same bullshit, different number of dimensions.
  • A movie that was cooler when it was just a throwaway line in another movie.
  • Depicting the same overarching event but with details changed.
  • Games that require you to make a choice that you can't take back.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+iAGa8TNu ]]> Jim Stormdancer 153. I Can't Wait for My Cockroach Lipids https://topiclords.com/i-cant-wait-for-my-cockroach-lipids 30f5c80e-1447-4f6a-8eb0-de9019bae6a8 Mon, 26 Sep 2022 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: James and Avery. We discuss stone paper, The Flashing Blade, The Number Ones, King of the River, and cockroach milk. 1:03:34 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • James
  • Avery

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The latest on whether or not you've been canceled.
  • Spotify rejecting your album because you don't believe in yourself enough.
  • Spagbol.
  • The very one that is being digested by you now.
  • thisbolognesedoesnotexist.com
  • Paper that is 60% stone.
  • The price you pay for participating in art.
  • Coffee that is more powerful than a laptop.
  • What happens if you try to shred margarine.
  • Documents only for the document control society.
  • The Novelty FBI raiding your house and confiscating your Novelty Top Secret Documents and hiding them in their fake Groucho Marx glasses.
  • The guy who bought the last 100 Groucho Marx glasses from Party City.
  • Moustache Ninja.
  • Why more people aren't talking about Moustache Ninja.
  • The height of Pirate Ninja Robot Mustache Mania.
  • Ankle Biter Man.
  • Atrocities Guide.
  • One of many reasons why real life superheroes are a bad idea.
  • Superheroes: police except there is no oversight whatsoever.
  • Avery's Angels on Phoenix Jones.
  • If Seattle police arrest you for being nude, they are legally obligated to provide you with a dinner jacket for your jail stay.
  • Heath Ledger instructing the audience to charge their shower.
  • The Masked Magician Revealed.
  • TV stage magic.
  • David Copperfield raising the Titanic.
  • The Cheap Trick song that got to #1.
  • The songs that hit #1 because General Hospital used them on the soundtrack.
  • An antidote to the idea that music used to be better.
  • Breaking Up is Hard to Do.
  • Finding a way to enjoy art that you didn't like before.
  • Getting old and liking boring music.
  • What radio formats overlap with Beautiful Music.
  • A foam snake that shoots thirty feet into the air and then drifts into a nearby tree.
  • Tumbling over the rocks until you paint them with your belly's blood.
  • That other flesh, heavy with milt, bruised, battering toward the dam that lips the orgiastic pool.
  • Limber and firm in the state of his shining, forever inheriting his salt kingdom, from which he is banished forever.
  • The most animalistic and primitive part of your consciousness.
  • An Atari 2600 game inspired by a poem about a fish.
  • The level in Dante's Inferno where you have to fight unbaptized babies.
  • A game with one foot in the majesty of Greek mythology and the other foot in what it's like to bash someone's head into the concrete.
  • A great use of thumbsticks.
  • Whether Wisdom Tree would've published the Dante's Inferno video game.
  • Spending your entire life obsessed with the pear you stole as a kid.
  • An illumination of someone kneeling in front of a pear tree and weeping.
  • Pop songs about relationship situations.
  • An idea that is not as old as music.
  • A piece of music going right for the emotion, like the Windows Startup Sound.
  • Melody in lyrics, in conversation with each other.
  • Seeing a person and drawing a stick figure.
  • How do I get too much into my own head?
  • Why you're turning into a fish, and what the fish represents.
  • Sea Monkeys' Garden of Earthly Delights.
  • Do we want to get to the Cockroach Milk?
  • Being accosted on the street by Topic Lords fans asking for non-mammalian milk news but you're like "sorry I'm saving this for Topic Lords"
  • How many cockroaches it takes to make one serving of cockroach milk.
  • Sobbing in front of the slab of meat that Rocky punched.
  • Pouring cockroach milk onto stone paper to prove its resiliency.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • James
  • Avery

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The latest on whether or not you've been canceled.
  • Spotify rejecting your album because you don't believe in yourself enough.
  • Spagbol.
  • The very one that is being digested by you now.
  • thisbolognesedoesnotexist.com
  • Paper that is 60% stone.
  • The price you pay for participating in art.
  • Coffee that is more powerful than a laptop.
  • What happens if you try to shred margarine.
  • Documents only for the document control society.
  • The Novelty FBI raiding your house and confiscating your Novelty Top Secret Documents and hiding them in their fake Groucho Marx glasses.
  • The guy who bought the last 100 Groucho Marx glasses from Party City.
  • Moustache Ninja.
  • Why more people aren't talking about Moustache Ninja.
  • The height of Pirate Ninja Robot Mustache Mania.
  • Ankle Biter Man.
  • Atrocities Guide.
  • One of many reasons why real life superheroes are a bad idea.
  • Superheroes: police except there is no oversight whatsoever.
  • Avery's Angels on Phoenix Jones.
  • If Seattle police arrest you for being nude, they are legally obligated to provide you with a dinner jacket for your jail stay.
  • Heath Ledger instructing the audience to charge their shower.
  • The Masked Magician Revealed.
  • TV stage magic.
  • David Copperfield raising the Titanic.
  • The Cheap Trick song that got to #1.
  • The songs that hit #1 because General Hospital used them on the soundtrack.
  • An antidote to the idea that music used to be better.
  • Breaking Up is Hard to Do.
  • Finding a way to enjoy art that you didn't like before.
  • Getting old and liking boring music.
  • What radio formats overlap with Beautiful Music.
  • A foam snake that shoots thirty feet into the air and then drifts into a nearby tree.
  • Tumbling over the rocks until you paint them with your belly's blood.
  • That other flesh, heavy with milt, bruised, battering toward the dam that lips the orgiastic pool.
  • Limber and firm in the state of his shining, forever inheriting his salt kingdom, from which he is banished forever.
  • The most animalistic and primitive part of your consciousness.
  • An Atari 2600 game inspired by a poem about a fish.
  • The level in Dante's Inferno where you have to fight unbaptized babies.
  • A game with one foot in the majesty of Greek mythology and the other foot in what it's like to bash someone's head into the concrete.
  • A great use of thumbsticks.
  • Whether Wisdom Tree would've published the Dante's Inferno video game.
  • Spending your entire life obsessed with the pear you stole as a kid.
  • An illumination of someone kneeling in front of a pear tree and weeping.
  • Pop songs about relationship situations.
  • An idea that is not as old as music.
  • A piece of music going right for the emotion, like the Windows Startup Sound.
  • Melody in lyrics, in conversation with each other.
  • Seeing a person and drawing a stick figure.
  • How do I get too much into my own head?
  • Why you're turning into a fish, and what the fish represents.
  • Sea Monkeys' Garden of Earthly Delights.
  • Do we want to get to the Cockroach Milk?
  • Being accosted on the street by Topic Lords fans asking for non-mammalian milk news but you're like "sorry I'm saving this for Topic Lords"
  • How many cockroaches it takes to make one serving of cockroach milk.
  • Sobbing in front of the slab of meat that Rocky punched.
  • Pouring cockroach milk onto stone paper to prove its resiliency.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • James
  • Avery

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The latest on whether or not you've been canceled.
  • Spotify rejecting your album because you don't believe in yourself enough.
  • Spagbol.
  • The very one that is being digested by you now.
  • thisbolognesedoesnotexist.com
  • Paper that is 60% stone.
  • The price you pay for participating in art.
  • Coffee that is more powerful than a laptop.
  • What happens if you try to shred margarine.
  • Documents only for the document control society.
  • The Novelty FBI raiding your house and confiscating your Novelty Top Secret Documents and hiding them in their fake Groucho Marx glasses.
  • The guy who bought the last 100 Groucho Marx glasses from Party City.
  • Moustache Ninja.
  • Why more people aren't talking about Moustache Ninja.
  • The height of Pirate Ninja Robot Mustache Mania.
  • Ankle Biter Man.
  • Atrocities Guide.
  • One of many reasons why real life superheroes are a bad idea.
  • Superheroes: police except there is no oversight whatsoever.
  • Avery's Angels on Phoenix Jones.
  • If Seattle police arrest you for being nude, they are legally obligated to provide you with a dinner jacket for your jail stay.
  • Heath Ledger instructing the audience to charge their shower.
  • The Masked Magician Revealed.
  • TV stage magic.
  • David Copperfield raising the Titanic.
  • The Cheap Trick song that got to #1.
  • The songs that hit #1 because General Hospital used them on the soundtrack.
  • An antidote to the idea that music used to be better.
  • Breaking Up is Hard to Do.
  • Finding a way to enjoy art that you didn't like before.
  • Getting old and liking boring music.
  • What radio formats overlap with Beautiful Music.
  • A foam snake that shoots thirty feet into the air and then drifts into a nearby tree.
  • Tumbling over the rocks until you paint them with your belly's blood.
  • That other flesh, heavy with milt, bruised, battering toward the dam that lips the orgiastic pool.
  • Limber and firm in the state of his shining, forever inheriting his salt kingdom, from which he is banished forever.
  • The most animalistic and primitive part of your consciousness.
  • An Atari 2600 game inspired by a poem about a fish.
  • The level in Dante's Inferno where you have to fight unbaptized babies.
  • A game with one foot in the majesty of Greek mythology and the other foot in what it's like to bash someone's head into the concrete.
  • A great use of thumbsticks.
  • Whether Wisdom Tree would've published the Dante's Inferno video game.
  • Spending your entire life obsessed with the pear you stole as a kid.
  • An illumination of someone kneeling in front of a pear tree and weeping.
  • Pop songs about relationship situations.
  • An idea that is not as old as music.
  • A piece of music going right for the emotion, like the Windows Startup Sound.
  • Melody in lyrics, in conversation with each other.
  • Seeing a person and drawing a stick figure.
  • How do I get too much into my own head?
  • Why you're turning into a fish, and what the fish represents.
  • Sea Monkeys' Garden of Earthly Delights.
  • Do we want to get to the Cockroach Milk?
  • Being accosted on the street by Topic Lords fans asking for non-mammalian milk news but you're like "sorry I'm saving this for Topic Lords"
  • How many cockroaches it takes to make one serving of cockroach milk.
  • Sobbing in front of the slab of meat that Rocky punched.
  • Pouring cockroach milk onto stone paper to prove its resiliency.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+oMJzI9pA ]]> Jim Stormdancer 152. National Butterscotch Pudding Day's Eve https://topiclords.com/national-butterscotch-pudding-days-eve 5281a6c6-9376-4e99-bff5-b2731041d42e Mon, 19 Sep 2022 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Alex and Shannon. Topics: Rebranding a Country, The single-celled dog, Joe Hart still hasn't cleared out the vampire dens, i hate it when i cant even write a poem about something because its too obvious, and National Butterscotch Pudding Day. 1:00:24 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Alex
  • Shannon

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Tying on the tiebreaker.
  • Cambodian street food.
  • Topic Time!!
  • Two countries in the process of changing their names.
  • Whether sovereignty was ceded.
  • Tourism videos encouraging people to pronounce your country's name correctly.
  • History continuing to happen after you leave high school.
  • Changing your name to North Your Name to get an alliance with NATO.
  • A bonanza for globe manufacturers.
  • The United States of Mexico.
  • Germany's reaction to the United States changing its name to The United States of Germany.
  • Playing the wrong Korea's national anthem by mistake.
  • Switching to Roguelike Alphabetical Order so Zimbabwe doesn't always go last.
  • What does it mean to be a particular kind of animal?
  • Transmissible cancer.
  • A breed of dog that no longer exists as a dog but does exist as a strain of transmissible cancer.
  • CTVT.
  • HeLa cells.
  • Whether Henrietta Lacks is still alive.
  • How to fix 20,000 years of evolution.
  • A dog that is unlike extant dogs.
  • When you decide to change your evolutionary niche from macro to microorganism.
  • Cancer that is smart enough to not kill its host.
  • How cancer interacts with your mutant healing factor.
  • What this is and why it's happening to you.
  • Why a two year old wants to play in a copper mine.
  • What kind of mines New England vampires lived in.
  • Rearranging a corpse so that the vampire can't walk.
  • No Arizona Mine Draculas.
  • Joe Hart: defending our vampires.
  • Change that you can really make, if you live in Arizona.
  • Not getting the Google results you want because of sports mans.
  • The pros and cons of vampire bats.
  • Abandoned mines serving as habitats for 28 bat species that are crucial to the local ecology.
  • Persons currently experiencing vampirism.
  • Can't Have Shitting Gotham.
  • Adding line breaks to someone's complaint about a glow in the dark star to make a poem.
  • The imprint of one little glow in the dark star that had been missed and painted over in landlord white.
  • A life situation that is so poignant that it's impossible to write a poem about, so you describe it in prose and wait for a Tumblr user to come and add some line breaks.
  • A monologue that you could read in many different ways.
  • Returning to Tumblr because you have more thoughts on the painted-over star.
  • Responding to every text from your daughter as if it's a formal letter to a long-lost cousin.
  • Putting glow in the dark eyeballs on your closet door.
  • Putting you pudding under the Pudding Tree for Father Pudding.
  • How you grow the Pudding Tree.
  • Werther's Compromise.
  • Using Werther's Originals as dentures and you have to replace them every hour.
  • Removing the butter from scotch to get butterscotch.
  • Soft crack vs. hard crack.
  • Those terrifying Pillsbury tins that you bang on the counter and they explode and breadsticks come out.
  • How to determine if your candy in progress is in the soft ball stage.
  • What is pudding?
  • Having an existential crisis on Butterscotch Pudding Day.
  • Butterscotch Buttercream Frosting.
  • All the Lords that are fit to print.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Alex
  • Shannon

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Tying on the tiebreaker.
  • Cambodian street food.
  • Topic Time!!
  • Two countries in the process of changing their names.
  • Whether sovereignty was ceded.
  • Tourism videos encouraging people to pronounce your country's name correctly.
  • History continuing to happen after you leave high school.
  • Changing your name to North Your Name to get an alliance with NATO.
  • A bonanza for globe manufacturers.
  • The United States of Mexico.
  • Germany's reaction to the United States changing its name to The United States of Germany.
  • Playing the wrong Korea's national anthem by mistake.
  • Switching to Roguelike Alphabetical Order so Zimbabwe doesn't always go last.
  • What does it mean to be a particular kind of animal?
  • Transmissible cancer.
  • A breed of dog that no longer exists as a dog but does exist as a strain of transmissible cancer.
  • CTVT.
  • HeLa cells.
  • Whether Henrietta Lacks is still alive.
  • How to fix 20,000 years of evolution.
  • A dog that is unlike extant dogs.
  • When you decide to change your evolutionary niche from macro to microorganism.
  • Cancer that is smart enough to not kill its host.
  • How cancer interacts with your mutant healing factor.
  • What this is and why it's happening to you.
  • Why a two year old wants to play in a copper mine.
  • What kind of mines New England vampires lived in.
  • Rearranging a corpse so that the vampire can't walk.
  • No Arizona Mine Draculas.
  • Joe Hart: defending our vampires.
  • Change that you can really make, if you live in Arizona.
  • Not getting the Google results you want because of sports mans.
  • The pros and cons of vampire bats.
  • Abandoned mines serving as habitats for 28 bat species that are crucial to the local ecology.
  • Persons currently experiencing vampirism.
  • Can't Have Shitting Gotham.
  • Adding line breaks to someone's complaint about a glow in the dark star to make a poem.
  • The imprint of one little glow in the dark star that had been missed and painted over in landlord white.
  • A life situation that is so poignant that it's impossible to write a poem about, so you describe it in prose and wait for a Tumblr user to come and add some line breaks.
  • A monologue that you could read in many different ways.
  • Returning to Tumblr because you have more thoughts on the painted-over star.
  • Responding to every text from your daughter as if it's a formal letter to a long-lost cousin.
  • Putting glow in the dark eyeballs on your closet door.
  • Putting you pudding under the Pudding Tree for Father Pudding.
  • How you grow the Pudding Tree.
  • Werther's Compromise.
  • Using Werther's Originals as dentures and you have to replace them every hour.
  • Removing the butter from scotch to get butterscotch.
  • Soft crack vs. hard crack.
  • Those terrifying Pillsbury tins that you bang on the counter and they explode and breadsticks come out.
  • How to determine if your candy in progress is in the soft ball stage.
  • What is pudding?
  • Having an existential crisis on Butterscotch Pudding Day.
  • Butterscotch Buttercream Frosting.
  • All the Lords that are fit to print.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Alex
  • Shannon

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Tying on the tiebreaker.
  • Cambodian street food.
  • Topic Time!!
  • Two countries in the process of changing their names.
  • Whether sovereignty was ceded.
  • Tourism videos encouraging people to pronounce your country's name correctly.
  • History continuing to happen after you leave high school.
  • Changing your name to North Your Name to get an alliance with NATO.
  • A bonanza for globe manufacturers.
  • The United States of Mexico.
  • Germany's reaction to the United States changing its name to The United States of Germany.
  • Playing the wrong Korea's national anthem by mistake.
  • Switching to Roguelike Alphabetical Order so Zimbabwe doesn't always go last.
  • What does it mean to be a particular kind of animal?
  • Transmissible cancer.
  • A breed of dog that no longer exists as a dog but does exist as a strain of transmissible cancer.
  • CTVT.
  • HeLa cells.
  • Whether Henrietta Lacks is still alive.
  • How to fix 20,000 years of evolution.
  • A dog that is unlike extant dogs.
  • When you decide to change your evolutionary niche from macro to microorganism.
  • Cancer that is smart enough to not kill its host.
  • How cancer interacts with your mutant healing factor.
  • What this is and why it's happening to you.
  • Why a two year old wants to play in a copper mine.
  • What kind of mines New England vampires lived in.
  • Rearranging a corpse so that the vampire can't walk.
  • No Arizona Mine Draculas.
  • Joe Hart: defending our vampires.
  • Change that you can really make, if you live in Arizona.
  • Not getting the Google results you want because of sports mans.
  • The pros and cons of vampire bats.
  • Abandoned mines serving as habitats for 28 bat species that are crucial to the local ecology.
  • Persons currently experiencing vampirism.
  • Can't Have Shitting Gotham.
  • Adding line breaks to someone's complaint about a glow in the dark star to make a poem.
  • The imprint of one little glow in the dark star that had been missed and painted over in landlord white.
  • A life situation that is so poignant that it's impossible to write a poem about, so you describe it in prose and wait for a Tumblr user to come and add some line breaks.
  • A monologue that you could read in many different ways.
  • Returning to Tumblr because you have more thoughts on the painted-over star.
  • Responding to every text from your daughter as if it's a formal letter to a long-lost cousin.
  • Putting glow in the dark eyeballs on your closet door.
  • Putting you pudding under the Pudding Tree for Father Pudding.
  • How you grow the Pudding Tree.
  • Werther's Compromise.
  • Using Werther's Originals as dentures and you have to replace them every hour.
  • Removing the butter from scotch to get butterscotch.
  • Soft crack vs. hard crack.
  • Those terrifying Pillsbury tins that you bang on the counter and they explode and breadsticks come out.
  • How to determine if your candy in progress is in the soft ball stage.
  • What is pudding?
  • Having an existential crisis on Butterscotch Pudding Day.
  • Butterscotch Buttercream Frosting.
  • All the Lords that are fit to print.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+veidBICX ]]> Jim Stormdancer 151. A Fantastic Way to Escape From Your Loved Ones https://topiclords.com/a-fantastic-way-to-escape-from-your-loved-ones 198897fc-6d06-47d5-9d04-fca3202f0662 Mon, 12 Sep 2022 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Mike and Adam. We discuss cooking, profound kid questions, Mr. Jaws, Distant Regard by Tony Hoagland, and having very tight standards that you hold in one part of your creative life that you totally ignore in other parts. 1:07:45 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Desktop Dungeons Rewind.
  • A rug that looks like a cat's face.
  • Starting a game studio with your life.
  • How the whole butch/femme thing works.
  • After the fall of civilization when the guy with an iPod is the most important person in the village.
  • Your FK-IK rigging skills really paying off in the post-apocalypse.
  • How much kayfabe is happening right now?
  • Whether the PS5 exists and whether you can play Jamestown Plus on it.
  • A great way to nurture and nourish your loved ones while also staying away from them.
  • Soaking Ls.
  • Whether Jim has a sister-in-law.
  • Top three texture-bothers-me foods.
  • Jim's position on eating eyeballs.
  • A snack that can look back.
  • Sucking on the window to the soul.
  • Ordering your tuna salad extra starchy.
  • A deep appreciation of the sandwich arts.
  • Making a Youtube series where part of the bit is that it's really professionally made but also that means you need to do all the dang work, and also maybe you're not good enough to do it as professionally as you think.
  • Getting a real video editor to do the parts that are edited like a normal video but editing all the parts that are bullshit yourself.
  • A daughter in rock climbing camp.
  • Describing Cosmic Cat socks to your dad.
  • How to enjoy things.
  • A series of experiences that enter your body via your sensory organs.
  • Laying a framework for understanding the self.
  • Encoding your musical taste in a C program.
  • Configuring human behavior on an iPad.
  • Feeding the Reddit grist mill with season 4 of Westworld.
  • Living near a pleasing combination of straightaways and turns so you have to hear people racing motorcycles at all hours.
  • The emotional status of the teenager who flipped his car in front of your house.
  • What to say after a car accident to convince passers by to not call 911.
  • An SUV that looks like a t-rex just tried to eat it driving the wrong way on the Bay Bridge.
  • Bombing back into San Francisco in your exploded car.
  • Seeing someone driving recklessly but it's okay because the car has a bumper sticker saying "Everything is fine. We're not drinking in here."
  • Taking a joke that someone else made and making another joke out of it.
  • As topical an artifact as you can imagine.
  • Repetitive and familiar two-minute chunks of sound.
  • The They Might Be Giants album that has the giant squid on the cover.
  • Singing Fingertips from start to finish.
  • The amount of work that went into the cover art of Dickie Goodman's Mr. Jaws.
  • DJing from a dinghy.
  • Writing a thank you note to your travel agent.
  • The clouds blowing overhead like governments and years.
  • Secular Americans having to reinvent gratitude since they don't pray.
  • Parts of you that you think make you a better person.
  • Valuing something in yourself but not being sure how you got there.
  • Having taught yourself a bunch of hard things and learning to trust the process of learning a skill.
  • Civilization: something we agreed to do.
  • The difference between doing something professionally and doing it for fun.
  • Trying to sneak into a giant hovering ball of rock.
  • People who are hungry for topics refusing to hire you.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Desktop Dungeons Rewind.
  • A rug that looks like a cat's face.
  • Starting a game studio with your life.
  • How the whole butch/femme thing works.
  • After the fall of civilization when the guy with an iPod is the most important person in the village.
  • Your FK-IK rigging skills really paying off in the post-apocalypse.
  • How much kayfabe is happening right now?
  • Whether the PS5 exists and whether you can play Jamestown Plus on it.
  • A great way to nurture and nourish your loved ones while also staying away from them.
  • Soaking Ls.
  • Whether Jim has a sister-in-law.
  • Top three texture-bothers-me foods.
  • Jim's position on eating eyeballs.
  • A snack that can look back.
  • Sucking on the window to the soul.
  • Ordering your tuna salad extra starchy.
  • A deep appreciation of the sandwich arts.
  • Making a Youtube series where part of the bit is that it's really professionally made but also that means you need to do all the dang work, and also maybe you're not good enough to do it as professionally as you think.
  • Getting a real video editor to do the parts that are edited like a normal video but editing all the parts that are bullshit yourself.
  • A daughter in rock climbing camp.
  • Describing Cosmic Cat socks to your dad.
  • How to enjoy things.
  • A series of experiences that enter your body via your sensory organs.
  • Laying a framework for understanding the self.
  • Encoding your musical taste in a C program.
  • Configuring human behavior on an iPad.
  • Feeding the Reddit grist mill with season 4 of Westworld.
  • Living near a pleasing combination of straightaways and turns so you have to hear people racing motorcycles at all hours.
  • The emotional status of the teenager who flipped his car in front of your house.
  • What to say after a car accident to convince passers by to not call 911.
  • An SUV that looks like a t-rex just tried to eat it driving the wrong way on the Bay Bridge.
  • Bombing back into San Francisco in your exploded car.
  • Seeing someone driving recklessly but it's okay because the car has a bumper sticker saying "Everything is fine. We're not drinking in here."
  • Taking a joke that someone else made and making another joke out of it.
  • As topical an artifact as you can imagine.
  • Repetitive and familiar two-minute chunks of sound.
  • The They Might Be Giants album that has the giant squid on the cover.
  • Singing Fingertips from start to finish.
  • The amount of work that went into the cover art of Dickie Goodman's Mr. Jaws.
  • DJing from a dinghy.
  • Writing a thank you note to your travel agent.
  • The clouds blowing overhead like governments and years.
  • Secular Americans having to reinvent gratitude since they don't pray.
  • Parts of you that you think make you a better person.
  • Valuing something in yourself but not being sure how you got there.
  • Having taught yourself a bunch of hard things and learning to trust the process of learning a skill.
  • Civilization: something we agreed to do.
  • The difference between doing something professionally and doing it for fun.
  • Trying to sneak into a giant hovering ball of rock.
  • People who are hungry for topics refusing to hire you.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Desktop Dungeons Rewind.
  • A rug that looks like a cat's face.
  • Starting a game studio with your life.
  • How the whole butch/femme thing works.
  • After the fall of civilization when the guy with an iPod is the most important person in the village.
  • Your FK-IK rigging skills really paying off in the post-apocalypse.
  • How much kayfabe is happening right now?
  • Whether the PS5 exists and whether you can play Jamestown Plus on it.
  • A great way to nurture and nourish your loved ones while also staying away from them.
  • Soaking Ls.
  • Whether Jim has a sister-in-law.
  • Top three texture-bothers-me foods.
  • Jim's position on eating eyeballs.
  • A snack that can look back.
  • Sucking on the window to the soul.
  • Ordering your tuna salad extra starchy.
  • A deep appreciation of the sandwich arts.
  • Making a Youtube series where part of the bit is that it's really professionally made but also that means you need to do all the dang work, and also maybe you're not good enough to do it as professionally as you think.
  • Getting a real video editor to do the parts that are edited like a normal video but editing all the parts that are bullshit yourself.
  • A daughter in rock climbing camp.
  • Describing Cosmic Cat socks to your dad.
  • How to enjoy things.
  • A series of experiences that enter your body via your sensory organs.
  • Laying a framework for understanding the self.
  • Encoding your musical taste in a C program.
  • Configuring human behavior on an iPad.
  • Feeding the Reddit grist mill with season 4 of Westworld.
  • Living near a pleasing combination of straightaways and turns so you have to hear people racing motorcycles at all hours.
  • The emotional status of the teenager who flipped his car in front of your house.
  • What to say after a car accident to convince passers by to not call 911.
  • An SUV that looks like a t-rex just tried to eat it driving the wrong way on the Bay Bridge.
  • Bombing back into San Francisco in your exploded car.
  • Seeing someone driving recklessly but it's okay because the car has a bumper sticker saying "Everything is fine. We're not drinking in here."
  • Taking a joke that someone else made and making another joke out of it.
  • As topical an artifact as you can imagine.
  • Repetitive and familiar two-minute chunks of sound.
  • The They Might Be Giants album that has the giant squid on the cover.
  • Singing Fingertips from start to finish.
  • The amount of work that went into the cover art of Dickie Goodman's Mr. Jaws.
  • DJing from a dinghy.
  • Writing a thank you note to your travel agent.
  • The clouds blowing overhead like governments and years.
  • Secular Americans having to reinvent gratitude since they don't pray.
  • Parts of you that you think make you a better person.
  • Valuing something in yourself but not being sure how you got there.
  • Having taught yourself a bunch of hard things and learning to trust the process of learning a skill.
  • Civilization: something we agreed to do.
  • The difference between doing something professionally and doing it for fun.
  • Trying to sneak into a giant hovering ball of rock.
  • People who are hungry for topics refusing to hire you.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+ZsHEKA4F ]]> Jim Stormdancer 150. Your Honking Monotoe https://topiclords.com/your-honking-monotoe 1189c2ea-2e66-4d9a-842a-4dab3ef1412c Mon, 05 Sep 2022 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Jenni and Tyriq. We discuss Hot Topic, toe picks, Topical medication, why they call it a Topic bar, Test of Proficiency in Korean, and Topic Records. 1:01:46 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Hot Topic
  • Toe picks
  • Topical medication
  • Groke asks: My friend (who is completely unaware of this podcast and did this apropos of nothing) emailed the Mars chocolate company to find out why the Topic candy bar has that name. "Dear Mr Smith, Thanks for getting in touch about our MARS product. The Topic bar has been a firm favourite since it's introduction in 1962, unfortunately over time the origin of how the Topic chocolate bar came to be called Topic has been lost and now it has become a mystery that we are still trying to discover'. If you need any more information, please let us know. Kind Regards, Nasteha Tiirow Consumer Care Mars Chocolate UK Reference No: 00366098"
  • Test of Proficiency in Korean
  • Topic Records

Microtopics:

  • Who has been on Topic Lords the most often.
  • Plugging a leaky dog.
  • Whether dogs know about consent.
  • A store in the mall that teenagers go to.
  • Stranger Things merch in the Hot Topic.
  • Squeezing the timeline.
  • The goth-emo shift of the aughts.
  • The phrase "big tiddy goth girlfriend" which will far outlast the word "goth" in general usage.
  • Dark Academia: emo but in school.
  • Trying to do actual research in an Elden Ring library.
  • Rustic Dark Academics.
  • Buying a sweet Kirby t-shirt at GameStop and getting a compliment on it from your therapist.
  • Minnesota: the Land of Lakes.
  • Dogehouse Laser Tag.
  • A variety show that shows a variety of Youtube videos.
  • The internet and real life merging, to the detriment of both realms.
  • Everyone's top four toes.
  • Intrusive thoughts about feet, the worst body part.
  • What the guy who runs the nude model sketch thing thinks of your feet vis-a-vis your age.
  • The most awkward encounter of your life until the next day when you run into the same guy again.
  • Sending a picture of your feet to the same friend every year.
  • Putting 720° in a Marble Madness cabinet so that when people can't figure out how to play it and ask you how, you can ask them to show you their feet.
  • Top ten toe beans.
  • Mr. Frito-Lay smelling a dog foot and thinking "I want a chip that smells like this!"
  • Nothin' but thumbs.
  • Whether a horse hoof is just one big toenail.
  • What people would look like if they had the proportions of animals.
  • The indecency of seeing a bird's knee.
  • Medication you're supposed to use topically but it also tastes good.
  • The ester they use to indicate that even though this hand lotion smells good, it also smells like you shouldn't put it in your mouth.
  • Very petroleum-based very fake coconut.
  • Chris Hemsworth answering a question at a press conference when one of his assistants says "it's time for your hourly chicken" and shoves a chicken breast in his mouth.
  • Deep-frying the inedible part of the edamame.
  • Chewing your food as many times as possible.
  • Elaborate traffic jam metaphors for chewing food.
  • Hitting the big four-two.
  • The Box of Celebrations.
  • Describing a Twix bar without ever saying the name Twix.
  • When the moon hits your eye like a big chocolate gravy, that's a mole.
  • Trying to buy just one Andes Mint so you go to a hotel or a steakhouse in 1997 but the host won't let you buy it, they're like "just take it and leave."
  • Triscuit: it's one more than a biscuit.
  • Champion Racehorse Electricity Biscuit.
  • The Shape of Electricity, starring Pikachu.
  • Winston drinking all of your water.
  • Being proud that you translated a sign in a language you're learning, then looking just below that sign and seeing a translated sign in your native language just below it.
  • Sneaking into somebody's room and replacing their diary with their diary translated into Korean.
  • Saloon: just a salon with an extra O.
  • The room where you keep your art collection in a pile on the floor and visitors can come in to dig through it.
  • The podcast where we talk about Robin Tunney.
  • Selling Soviet and left-wing political music by mail order.
  • The Hundred Best Poetry Topics.
  • Why it is so frustrating to be frustrated.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Hot Topic
  • Toe picks
  • Topical medication
  • Groke asks: My friend (who is completely unaware of this podcast and did this apropos of nothing) emailed the Mars chocolate company to find out why the Topic candy bar has that name. "Dear Mr Smith, Thanks for getting in touch about our MARS product. The Topic bar has been a firm favourite since it's introduction in 1962, unfortunately over time the origin of how the Topic chocolate bar came to be called Topic has been lost and now it has become a mystery that we are still trying to discover'. If you need any more information, please let us know. Kind Regards, Nasteha Tiirow Consumer Care Mars Chocolate UK Reference No: 00366098"
  • Test of Proficiency in Korean
  • Topic Records

Microtopics:

  • Who has been on Topic Lords the most often.
  • Plugging a leaky dog.
  • Whether dogs know about consent.
  • A store in the mall that teenagers go to.
  • Stranger Things merch in the Hot Topic.
  • Squeezing the timeline.
  • The goth-emo shift of the aughts.
  • The phrase "big tiddy goth girlfriend" which will far outlast the word "goth" in general usage.
  • Dark Academia: emo but in school.
  • Trying to do actual research in an Elden Ring library.
  • Rustic Dark Academics.
  • Buying a sweet Kirby t-shirt at GameStop and getting a compliment on it from your therapist.
  • Minnesota: the Land of Lakes.
  • Dogehouse Laser Tag.
  • A variety show that shows a variety of Youtube videos.
  • The internet and real life merging, to the detriment of both realms.
  • Everyone's top four toes.
  • Intrusive thoughts about feet, the worst body part.
  • What the guy who runs the nude model sketch thing thinks of your feet vis-a-vis your age.
  • The most awkward encounter of your life until the next day when you run into the same guy again.
  • Sending a picture of your feet to the same friend every year.
  • Putting 720° in a Marble Madness cabinet so that when people can't figure out how to play it and ask you how, you can ask them to show you their feet.
  • Top ten toe beans.
  • Mr. Frito-Lay smelling a dog foot and thinking "I want a chip that smells like this!"
  • Nothin' but thumbs.
  • Whether a horse hoof is just one big toenail.
  • What people would look like if they had the proportions of animals.
  • The indecency of seeing a bird's knee.
  • Medication you're supposed to use topically but it also tastes good.
  • The ester they use to indicate that even though this hand lotion smells good, it also smells like you shouldn't put it in your mouth.
  • Very petroleum-based very fake coconut.
  • Chris Hemsworth answering a question at a press conference when one of his assistants says "it's time for your hourly chicken" and shoves a chicken breast in his mouth.
  • Deep-frying the inedible part of the edamame.
  • Chewing your food as many times as possible.
  • Elaborate traffic jam metaphors for chewing food.
  • Hitting the big four-two.
  • The Box of Celebrations.
  • Describing a Twix bar without ever saying the name Twix.
  • When the moon hits your eye like a big chocolate gravy, that's a mole.
  • Trying to buy just one Andes Mint so you go to a hotel or a steakhouse in 1997 but the host won't let you buy it, they're like "just take it and leave."
  • Triscuit: it's one more than a biscuit.
  • Champion Racehorse Electricity Biscuit.
  • The Shape of Electricity, starring Pikachu.
  • Winston drinking all of your water.
  • Being proud that you translated a sign in a language you're learning, then looking just below that sign and seeing a translated sign in your native language just below it.
  • Sneaking into somebody's room and replacing their diary with their diary translated into Korean.
  • Saloon: just a salon with an extra O.
  • The room where you keep your art collection in a pile on the floor and visitors can come in to dig through it.
  • The podcast where we talk about Robin Tunney.
  • Selling Soviet and left-wing political music by mail order.
  • The Hundred Best Poetry Topics.
  • Why it is so frustrating to be frustrated.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Hot Topic
  • Toe picks
  • Topical medication
  • Groke asks: My friend (who is completely unaware of this podcast and did this apropos of nothing) emailed the Mars chocolate company to find out why the Topic candy bar has that name. "Dear Mr Smith, Thanks for getting in touch about our MARS product. The Topic bar has been a firm favourite since it's introduction in 1962, unfortunately over time the origin of how the Topic chocolate bar came to be called Topic has been lost and now it has become a mystery that we are still trying to discover'. If you need any more information, please let us know. Kind Regards, Nasteha Tiirow Consumer Care Mars Chocolate UK Reference No: 00366098"
  • Test of Proficiency in Korean
  • Topic Records

Microtopics:

  • Who has been on Topic Lords the most often.
  • Plugging a leaky dog.
  • Whether dogs know about consent.
  • A store in the mall that teenagers go to.
  • Stranger Things merch in the Hot Topic.
  • Squeezing the timeline.
  • The goth-emo shift of the aughts.
  • The phrase "big tiddy goth girlfriend" which will far outlast the word "goth" in general usage.
  • Dark Academia: emo but in school.
  • Trying to do actual research in an Elden Ring library.
  • Rustic Dark Academics.
  • Buying a sweet Kirby t-shirt at GameStop and getting a compliment on it from your therapist.
  • Minnesota: the Land of Lakes.
  • Dogehouse Laser Tag.
  • A variety show that shows a variety of Youtube videos.
  • The internet and real life merging, to the detriment of both realms.
  • Everyone's top four toes.
  • Intrusive thoughts about feet, the worst body part.
  • What the guy who runs the nude model sketch thing thinks of your feet vis-a-vis your age.
  • The most awkward encounter of your life until the next day when you run into the same guy again.
  • Sending a picture of your feet to the same friend every year.
  • Putting 720° in a Marble Madness cabinet so that when people can't figure out how to play it and ask you how, you can ask them to show you their feet.
  • Top ten toe beans.
  • Mr. Frito-Lay smelling a dog foot and thinking "I want a chip that smells like this!"
  • Nothin' but thumbs.
  • Whether a horse hoof is just one big toenail.
  • What people would look like if they had the proportions of animals.
  • The indecency of seeing a bird's knee.
  • Medication you're supposed to use topically but it also tastes good.
  • The ester they use to indicate that even though this hand lotion smells good, it also smells like you shouldn't put it in your mouth.
  • Very petroleum-based very fake coconut.
  • Chris Hemsworth answering a question at a press conference when one of his assistants says "it's time for your hourly chicken" and shoves a chicken breast in his mouth.
  • Deep-frying the inedible part of the edamame.
  • Chewing your food as many times as possible.
  • Elaborate traffic jam metaphors for chewing food.
  • Hitting the big four-two.
  • The Box of Celebrations.
  • Describing a Twix bar without ever saying the name Twix.
  • When the moon hits your eye like a big chocolate gravy, that's a mole.
  • Trying to buy just one Andes Mint so you go to a hotel or a steakhouse in 1997 but the host won't let you buy it, they're like "just take it and leave."
  • Triscuit: it's one more than a biscuit.
  • Champion Racehorse Electricity Biscuit.
  • The Shape of Electricity, starring Pikachu.
  • Winston drinking all of your water.
  • Being proud that you translated a sign in a language you're learning, then looking just below that sign and seeing a translated sign in your native language just below it.
  • Sneaking into somebody's room and replacing their diary with their diary translated into Korean.
  • Saloon: just a salon with an extra O.
  • The room where you keep your art collection in a pile on the floor and visitors can come in to dig through it.
  • The podcast where we talk about Robin Tunney.
  • Selling Soviet and left-wing political music by mail order.
  • The Hundred Best Poetry Topics.
  • Why it is so frustrating to be frustrated.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+DWpy7aOJ ]]> Jim Stormdancer 149. Croc Nutz https://topiclords.com/croc-nutz 251fd623-15ca-40cb-9ba0-29561eb1ac8c Mon, 29 Aug 2022 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Erica and David. We discuss a partnership between you and a tool, Schmalhausen and Vernadsky, whether a wedge is a machine and what to do about it, "The Poetry Teacher" by Mary Oliver, and drinking vinegar. 1:06:00 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Erica
  • David

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Taking an allergy pill and getting something unexpected.
  • Nap skeptics.
  • Non-stop napping.
  • Wanting to eat nothing but spinach for two days so you go to Disney World and pay extra for all the park employees to tell you that in the happiest place on Earth we only eat spinach.
  • Who gets to chew the grape next and for how long.
  • Forgetting a story after you tell it, so you can tell the story back and forth forever.
  • A plastic grape that dissolves in your nose.
  • The least favorite thing that you bought during the pandemic.
  • The collective politico-pandemical nightmare.
  • A shitty partnership between you and a shitty tool.
  • Ol’ Slicky.
  • Tools that bring you distress.
  • Whether it's legal to open carry a claymore in Texas.
  • A decoration you can put on your truck just in case nobody knows what an asshole you are.
  • Whether you can open-carry a dildo in Texas if the dildo is also an assault rifle.
  • Gluing a penis to things you don't like and explaining that "this is a partnership between you and a tool."
  • Papers that you really approve should've read fifteen years ago.
  • The parallel world of the Modern Synthesis.
  • Soviet biologists who were recognized in their time but have since been forgotten.
  • Stalin's purge of scientists researching Mendelian genetics.
  • Being evacuated to Kazakhstan and fed only wilted spinach so that you can finally write the book you've been thinking about.
  • Bringing your adopted pet wolf back with you from Kazakhstan.
  • Growing up after the Russian revolution in St. Petersburg.
  • Delegating research by convincing the Game Detectives folks that there is a pop culture reward behind it.
  • Your own personal ARG that only you care about and doesn't lead to any goal except knowing more facts.
  • The point of games.
  • The creativity that exists in fiction that you wish you could capture in nonfiction.
  • The advantages of reality over fiction.
  • Becoming disenchanted with capitalism in the 1920s.
  • The Demon Haunted World.
  • Escaping from Stalinist Russia into Nazi Germany.
  • Cheers to a boring life.
  • A slightly tilted floor.
  • Electrifying the wedge so it's finally a machine.
  • The xkcd comic from 15 years ago that lampooned the way Wikipedia articles used to be stereotypically bad.
  • Being good at math and assuming that also means you'd be good at writing an encyclopedia.
  • Whether Wildlife Ecology is a different field from Wildlife Biology.
  • The shittiest source that Wikipedia will accept as a citation.
  • Citing George W. Bush as a source in your peer-reviewed paper about climate change.
  • All the dogs arriving at once.
  • Dogs teaching students how to write thirsty happy poems.
  • Dog Songs (2013)
  • Deliberately putting line breaks where they seem least intentional.
  • The Wedge of the Poetry World.
  • Dinging the pan to proceed.
  • The manufacture and use of short-chain fatty acids.
  • Fixing an ulcer with vinegar.
  • Fuck you, I'm drinking a shrub.
  • Drinking balsamic vinegar and then rinsing with baking soda.
  • Butter and vinegar, together at last.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Erica
  • David

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Taking an allergy pill and getting something unexpected.
  • Nap skeptics.
  • Non-stop napping.
  • Wanting to eat nothing but spinach for two days so you go to Disney World and pay extra for all the park employees to tell you that in the happiest place on Earth we only eat spinach.
  • Who gets to chew the grape next and for how long.
  • Forgetting a story after you tell it, so you can tell the story back and forth forever.
  • A plastic grape that dissolves in your nose.
  • The least favorite thing that you bought during the pandemic.
  • The collective politico-pandemical nightmare.
  • A shitty partnership between you and a shitty tool.
  • Ol’ Slicky.
  • Tools that bring you distress.
  • Whether it's legal to open carry a claymore in Texas.
  • A decoration you can put on your truck just in case nobody knows what an asshole you are.
  • Whether you can open-carry a dildo in Texas if the dildo is also an assault rifle.
  • Gluing a penis to things you don't like and explaining that "this is a partnership between you and a tool."
  • Papers that you really approve should've read fifteen years ago.
  • The parallel world of the Modern Synthesis.
  • Soviet biologists who were recognized in their time but have since been forgotten.
  • Stalin's purge of scientists researching Mendelian genetics.
  • Being evacuated to Kazakhstan and fed only wilted spinach so that you can finally write the book you've been thinking about.
  • Bringing your adopted pet wolf back with you from Kazakhstan.
  • Growing up after the Russian revolution in St. Petersburg.
  • Delegating research by convincing the Game Detectives folks that there is a pop culture reward behind it.
  • Your own personal ARG that only you care about and doesn't lead to any goal except knowing more facts.
  • The point of games.
  • The creativity that exists in fiction that you wish you could capture in nonfiction.
  • The advantages of reality over fiction.
  • Becoming disenchanted with capitalism in the 1920s.
  • The Demon Haunted World.
  • Escaping from Stalinist Russia into Nazi Germany.
  • Cheers to a boring life.
  • A slightly tilted floor.
  • Electrifying the wedge so it's finally a machine.
  • The xkcd comic from 15 years ago that lampooned the way Wikipedia articles used to be stereotypically bad.
  • Being good at math and assuming that also means you'd be good at writing an encyclopedia.
  • Whether Wildlife Ecology is a different field from Wildlife Biology.
  • The shittiest source that Wikipedia will accept as a citation.
  • Citing George W. Bush as a source in your peer-reviewed paper about climate change.
  • All the dogs arriving at once.
  • Dogs teaching students how to write thirsty happy poems.
  • Dog Songs (2013)
  • Deliberately putting line breaks where they seem least intentional.
  • The Wedge of the Poetry World.
  • Dinging the pan to proceed.
  • The manufacture and use of short-chain fatty acids.
  • Fixing an ulcer with vinegar.
  • Fuck you, I'm drinking a shrub.
  • Drinking balsamic vinegar and then rinsing with baking soda.
  • Butter and vinegar, together at last.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Erica
  • David

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Taking an allergy pill and getting something unexpected.
  • Nap skeptics.
  • Non-stop napping.
  • Wanting to eat nothing but spinach for two days so you go to Disney World and pay extra for all the park employees to tell you that in the happiest place on Earth we only eat spinach.
  • Who gets to chew the grape next and for how long.
  • Forgetting a story after you tell it, so you can tell the story back and forth forever.
  • A plastic grape that dissolves in your nose.
  • The least favorite thing that you bought during the pandemic.
  • The collective politico-pandemical nightmare.
  • A shitty partnership between you and a shitty tool.
  • Ol’ Slicky.
  • Tools that bring you distress.
  • Whether it's legal to open carry a claymore in Texas.
  • A decoration you can put on your truck just in case nobody knows what an asshole you are.
  • Whether you can open-carry a dildo in Texas if the dildo is also an assault rifle.
  • Gluing a penis to things you don't like and explaining that "this is a partnership between you and a tool."
  • Papers that you really approve should've read fifteen years ago.
  • The parallel world of the Modern Synthesis.
  • Soviet biologists who were recognized in their time but have since been forgotten.
  • Stalin's purge of scientists researching Mendelian genetics.
  • Being evacuated to Kazakhstan and fed only wilted spinach so that you can finally write the book you've been thinking about.
  • Bringing your adopted pet wolf back with you from Kazakhstan.
  • Growing up after the Russian revolution in St. Petersburg.
  • Delegating research by convincing the Game Detectives folks that there is a pop culture reward behind it.
  • Your own personal ARG that only you care about and doesn't lead to any goal except knowing more facts.
  • The point of games.
  • The creativity that exists in fiction that you wish you could capture in nonfiction.
  • The advantages of reality over fiction.
  • Becoming disenchanted with capitalism in the 1920s.
  • The Demon Haunted World.
  • Escaping from Stalinist Russia into Nazi Germany.
  • Cheers to a boring life.
  • A slightly tilted floor.
  • Electrifying the wedge so it's finally a machine.
  • The xkcd comic from 15 years ago that lampooned the way Wikipedia articles used to be stereotypically bad.
  • Being good at math and assuming that also means you'd be good at writing an encyclopedia.
  • Whether Wildlife Ecology is a different field from Wildlife Biology.
  • The shittiest source that Wikipedia will accept as a citation.
  • Citing George W. Bush as a source in your peer-reviewed paper about climate change.
  • All the dogs arriving at once.
  • Dogs teaching students how to write thirsty happy poems.
  • Dog Songs (2013)
  • Deliberately putting line breaks where they seem least intentional.
  • The Wedge of the Poetry World.
  • Dinging the pan to proceed.
  • The manufacture and use of short-chain fatty acids.
  • Fixing an ulcer with vinegar.
  • Fuck you, I'm drinking a shrub.
  • Drinking balsamic vinegar and then rinsing with baking soda.
  • Butter and vinegar, together at last.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+V1XnBNcA ]]> Jim Stormdancer 148. Dual-Wielding Ingresses https://topiclords.com/dual-wielding-ingresses 0e2ac5ab-cebf-4c87-9413-3a3b2a257725 Mon, 22 Aug 2022 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: CisHetKayFaber and Phone. We discuss Japanese adult video titles, 3DS Street Pass, service at Lou's Cafe, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, and people that do things. 1:08:16 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topic Lords:

Microtopics:

  • Seeking penance from the Topic Lord.
  • Dual-purpose infotainment.
  • Getting a new job that is better for your mental health.
  • The People's Republic of Wal-Mart.
  • Maximizing human dignity.
  • Jennifer Government.
  • Works of stilted microfiction describing porn contents.
  • Information density and reading speed in Japanese writing.
  • Accidentally machine-translating the wrong field.
  • Organizing your porn by publisher.
  • The full title of Robinson Crusoe.
  • When movie trailers stopped giving the whole plot away as a matter of course.
  • Setting your most recently played game to "Health and Safety Information" before going out to collect 3DS street-passes.
  • Trying to get 3DS street passes on in suburbia.
  • Edging towards the playground to get 3DS street passes without getting close enough that people notice you edging towards the playground.
  • Walking backwards into the playground, staring at your 3DS.
  • Taking over a gym and leaving something behind.
  • A lady with three phones and a tablet out who you are sure is making a drug deal but it turns out she's just playing Pokemon.
  • Collecting all the territories in 3DS street pass.
  • The critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XVIV now with the free expansion up to level 60.
  • A problem that helps you exercise.
  • Wandering around Willow Glen dual wielding Ingresses.
  • Attacking a portal in an AR game and some guy in cargo shorts comes out of his house to politely ask you to stop.
  • Min-maxing your Burger King visits to become the mayor of Burger King.
  • Hacking the limiter on your chocolate milk tap.
  • Lou's superhuman beverage production.
  • The era of automats.
  • How they stored coffee in the 1950s.
  • Having one of each thing on your menu ready to give to potential customers immediately.
  • The turnaround on a queue of hamburgers.
  • Spaghetti and blankets at the Japanese McDonald's.
  • The MegaMuffin.
  • The Bojangles biscuit game.
  • Losing yourself on skag and skipping out for beer during commercials.
  • Nixon playing a bugle.
  • A revolution to get rid of the nubs.
  • Sliding a color TV into a stolen ambulance.
  • Only letting people into the revolution who can't spell Natalie Wood's name.
  • Dreaming about the end of television.
  • The BBC covering climate change by talking about how nice and sunny it is.
  • The guy who wanted to work at Nintendo so he got a job working at Nintendo.
  • Improving your tools and workflow because you're procrastinating doing actual work.
  • Playing Tetris on a gamepad vs. on a keyboard.
  • Tetris APM.
  • Switching joycon hands because you're accustomed to using the arrow keys with your right hand.
  • Making friends the wrong way in Japan.
  • Making things on purpose vs. making them accidentally.
  • Knowing how to act in a Japanese meeting.
  • Learning how to work towards a goal every day whether or not you feel like it.
  • How to tell when a game is ready to ship.
  • Going to the grocery store and explaining to the cashier about the cool art you make and they're like "great but you still have to pay for this food with money."
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topic Lords:

Microtopics:

  • Seeking penance from the Topic Lord.
  • Dual-purpose infotainment.
  • Getting a new job that is better for your mental health.
  • The People's Republic of Wal-Mart.
  • Maximizing human dignity.
  • Jennifer Government.
  • Works of stilted microfiction describing porn contents.
  • Information density and reading speed in Japanese writing.
  • Accidentally machine-translating the wrong field.
  • Organizing your porn by publisher.
  • The full title of Robinson Crusoe.
  • When movie trailers stopped giving the whole plot away as a matter of course.
  • Setting your most recently played game to "Health and Safety Information" before going out to collect 3DS street-passes.
  • Trying to get 3DS street passes on in suburbia.
  • Edging towards the playground to get 3DS street passes without getting close enough that people notice you edging towards the playground.
  • Walking backwards into the playground, staring at your 3DS.
  • Taking over a gym and leaving something behind.
  • A lady with three phones and a tablet out who you are sure is making a drug deal but it turns out she's just playing Pokemon.
  • Collecting all the territories in 3DS street pass.
  • The critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XVIV now with the free expansion up to level 60.
  • A problem that helps you exercise.
  • Wandering around Willow Glen dual wielding Ingresses.
  • Attacking a portal in an AR game and some guy in cargo shorts comes out of his house to politely ask you to stop.
  • Min-maxing your Burger King visits to become the mayor of Burger King.
  • Hacking the limiter on your chocolate milk tap.
  • Lou's superhuman beverage production.
  • The era of automats.
  • How they stored coffee in the 1950s.
  • Having one of each thing on your menu ready to give to potential customers immediately.
  • The turnaround on a queue of hamburgers.
  • Spaghetti and blankets at the Japanese McDonald's.
  • The MegaMuffin.
  • The Bojangles biscuit game.
  • Losing yourself on skag and skipping out for beer during commercials.
  • Nixon playing a bugle.
  • A revolution to get rid of the nubs.
  • Sliding a color TV into a stolen ambulance.
  • Only letting people into the revolution who can't spell Natalie Wood's name.
  • Dreaming about the end of television.
  • The BBC covering climate change by talking about how nice and sunny it is.
  • The guy who wanted to work at Nintendo so he got a job working at Nintendo.
  • Improving your tools and workflow because you're procrastinating doing actual work.
  • Playing Tetris on a gamepad vs. on a keyboard.
  • Tetris APM.
  • Switching joycon hands because you're accustomed to using the arrow keys with your right hand.
  • Making friends the wrong way in Japan.
  • Making things on purpose vs. making them accidentally.
  • Knowing how to act in a Japanese meeting.
  • Learning how to work towards a goal every day whether or not you feel like it.
  • How to tell when a game is ready to ship.
  • Going to the grocery store and explaining to the cashier about the cool art you make and they're like "great but you still have to pay for this food with money."

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topic Lords:

Microtopics:

  • Seeking penance from the Topic Lord.
  • Dual-purpose infotainment.
  • Getting a new job that is better for your mental health.
  • The People's Republic of Wal-Mart.
  • Maximizing human dignity.
  • Jennifer Government.
  • Works of stilted microfiction describing porn contents.
  • Information density and reading speed in Japanese writing.
  • Accidentally machine-translating the wrong field.
  • Organizing your porn by publisher.
  • The full title of Robinson Crusoe.
  • When movie trailers stopped giving the whole plot away as a matter of course.
  • Setting your most recently played game to "Health and Safety Information" before going out to collect 3DS street-passes.
  • Trying to get 3DS street passes on in suburbia.
  • Edging towards the playground to get 3DS street passes without getting close enough that people notice you edging towards the playground.
  • Walking backwards into the playground, staring at your 3DS.
  • Taking over a gym and leaving something behind.
  • A lady with three phones and a tablet out who you are sure is making a drug deal but it turns out she's just playing Pokemon.
  • Collecting all the territories in 3DS street pass.
  • The critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XVIV now with the free expansion up to level 60.
  • A problem that helps you exercise.
  • Wandering around Willow Glen dual wielding Ingresses.
  • Attacking a portal in an AR game and some guy in cargo shorts comes out of his house to politely ask you to stop.
  • Min-maxing your Burger King visits to become the mayor of Burger King.
  • Hacking the limiter on your chocolate milk tap.
  • Lou's superhuman beverage production.
  • The era of automats.
  • How they stored coffee in the 1950s.
  • Having one of each thing on your menu ready to give to potential customers immediately.
  • The turnaround on a queue of hamburgers.
  • Spaghetti and blankets at the Japanese McDonald's.
  • The MegaMuffin.
  • The Bojangles biscuit game.
  • Losing yourself on skag and skipping out for beer during commercials.
  • Nixon playing a bugle.
  • A revolution to get rid of the nubs.
  • Sliding a color TV into a stolen ambulance.
  • Only letting people into the revolution who can't spell Natalie Wood's name.
  • Dreaming about the end of television.
  • The BBC covering climate change by talking about how nice and sunny it is.
  • The guy who wanted to work at Nintendo so he got a job working at Nintendo.
  • Improving your tools and workflow because you're procrastinating doing actual work.
  • Playing Tetris on a gamepad vs. on a keyboard.
  • Tetris APM.
  • Switching joycon hands because you're accustomed to using the arrow keys with your right hand.
  • Making friends the wrong way in Japan.
  • Making things on purpose vs. making them accidentally.
  • Knowing how to act in a Japanese meeting.
  • Learning how to work towards a goal every day whether or not you feel like it.
  • How to tell when a game is ready to ship.
  • Going to the grocery store and explaining to the cashier about the cool art you make and they're like "great but you still have to pay for this food with money."

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+Wl_I_JaU ]]> Jim Stormdancer 147. Part-Time Cryptids https://topiclords.com/part-time-cryptids 2ccf1006-92ec-4777-a7ad-2d101154a7af Mon, 15 Aug 2022 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Laura and Nick. We discuss how to fix pooping, The Hobbit: Dopemoker Edition, Gato Gonzales and the Guts Pose, "The Fish" by Elizabeth Bishop, Twitter's UI changing Top Three and Top Five into Top Four, and how to cope with growing a millimeter taller every week. 1:00:04 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Can the biological function of expelling waste be improved in any way? Should humans expel waste differently?
  • The Hobbit: Dopesmoker Edition. (it's great)
  • Gato Gonzales and the Guts Pose
  • The Fish, by Elizabeth Bishop
  • Twitter's UI has changed "Top 3" and "Top Fives" into "Top Four"
  • Every Monday, when you wake up in the morning, you discover that you have grown EXACTLY one millimeter taller. This continues throughout your life, so you will grow about 5.6 centimeters per year for the rest of the time you are alive. In ten years, you will be 1.8 feet taller than you are now. If you are 30 years old right now, you will be 7.3 feet taller when you reach 70. If you are 5.5 feet tall now, you will be 7 feet tall in just over 8 years, at which point you will start to look really weird. How does this change your life? What do you do about it? There is no cure for this condition, because it is caused by magic, not science, and there is no countercurse.

Microtopics:

  • The type of band that has four songs per album.
  • Creating ambient soundscapes via a series of guitar pedals.
  • Johnny To.
  • Interpersonal violence and the right to be perceived as human.
  • A world where everyone knows Judo for some reason and they fight each other with Judo all the time.
  • The quality of life edge that birds have over humans (their urine to feces ratio)
  • A nozzle in your wrist like spider man so you can poop into the tiny hole in the wall that everyone's house has for wrist poop nozzles.
  • Improving the human condition with a wall hole and maybe a wall tank.
  • Burying a pile of trash but also putting a photograph and a floppy disk in there so if you ever get in trouble for your pile of trash you can claim it's a time capsule.
  • How geniuses empty dumpsters.
  • Everyone taking the first Monday of the month off of work to poop and at 6pm the city's plumbing system explodes.
  • How to monetize pooping teens.
  • American poor being condemned to a low quality poop zone whereas in Europe they have luxury poop villas.
  • Locking your dumpster so it's not filled with old carpet overnight by marauding carpet installers.
  • A Person on Twitter.
  • Playing a stoner album at the same time as a stoner movie.
  • An album/movie combo entirely bereft of revelatory synchronicities.
  • The most wrinkly hobbit.
  • Whether Gandalf was actually smoking something or if that's just something people joke about.
  • Brian Moriarty's multiple GDC talks about looking for secrets where there are none.
  • Writing a classic rock album intended to be played simultaneously with Boss Baby 2.
  • Rodolfo "Gato" Gonzales's legacy in Japan.
  • What the Guts Pose means to you.
  • Assigning elaborate meaning to each fist in a fist pump.
  • Henry Cavill reloading his fists.
  • Playing Rock Paper Scissors with Mario whenever he collects a moon.
  • A little head tilt to get you in the right mood to pick up rocks.
  • Whether Guts Berserk is named after Guts.
  • Elden Ring as Berserk fanfic.
  • Understanding and enjoying Elden Ring in a new way.
  • Attending the Montreal Screw-Job but not having any idea what's going on.
  • Taking a photo to prove you were at a historical event but the flash just reflects off the bald head of the guy in front of you.
  • A poem describing a fish.
  • A five-haired beard of wisdom.
  • A poem with fantastic mouth feel.
  • Catching a fish while dad is in the bathroom and screaming at him to hurry up because you don't know what to do with a fish.
  • Downloading a poem to your hard drive.
  • A good idea or at least a fun idea.
  • Whether you can believe the web design on this whitehouse.gov.
  • Killing software like only a 90s dad can.
  • Eating nachos every night.
  • Wanting to do things in fours because on Twitter you can attach four images to a post.
  • Top Four Favorite Sandwiches.
  • Refusing to share your top anythings.
  • That time Nintendo burned a hole in the palms of millions of children.
  • The ways Pokemon Go encourages you to put your phone down.
  • The kinds of places that society benefits from Pokemon Go not being played.
  • The Pokestop Review Process.
  • Two excellent reasons not to ship the Virtual Boy as a helmet.
  • VR chaperones.
  • Being okay with growing too tall but only if you have friends who are also growing way too tall.
  • Small inconvenient things about growing taller.
  • A cryptic giant living on a mountaintop.
  • Being 10 feet tall and retired and figuring out how to live in a normal sized house.
  • Doing CSG with caves and shirts.
  • Modular clothes that you can reconfigure to cover your changing body.
  • A wisp of a person with an eternal tube sweater.
  • Not wanting to become a spaghetti but respecting anybody who wants to become a spaghetti.
  • Growing to twice your adult height and getting cast as the monster in every horror movie.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Can the biological function of expelling waste be improved in any way? Should humans expel waste differently?
  • The Hobbit: Dopesmoker Edition. (it's great)
  • Gato Gonzales and the Guts Pose
  • The Fish, by Elizabeth Bishop
  • Twitter's UI has changed "Top 3" and "Top Fives" into "Top Four"
  • Every Monday, when you wake up in the morning, you discover that you have grown EXACTLY one millimeter taller. This continues throughout your life, so you will grow about 5.6 centimeters per year for the rest of the time you are alive. In ten years, you will be 1.8 feet taller than you are now. If you are 30 years old right now, you will be 7.3 feet taller when you reach 70. If you are 5.5 feet tall now, you will be 7 feet tall in just over 8 years, at which point you will start to look really weird. How does this change your life? What do you do about it? There is no cure for this condition, because it is caused by magic, not science, and there is no countercurse.

Microtopics:

  • The type of band that has four songs per album.
  • Creating ambient soundscapes via a series of guitar pedals.
  • Johnny To.
  • Interpersonal violence and the right to be perceived as human.
  • A world where everyone knows Judo for some reason and they fight each other with Judo all the time.
  • The quality of life edge that birds have over humans (their urine to feces ratio)
  • A nozzle in your wrist like spider man so you can poop into the tiny hole in the wall that everyone's house has for wrist poop nozzles.
  • Improving the human condition with a wall hole and maybe a wall tank.
  • Burying a pile of trash but also putting a photograph and a floppy disk in there so if you ever get in trouble for your pile of trash you can claim it's a time capsule.
  • How geniuses empty dumpsters.
  • Everyone taking the first Monday of the month off of work to poop and at 6pm the city's plumbing system explodes.
  • How to monetize pooping teens.
  • American poor being condemned to a low quality poop zone whereas in Europe they have luxury poop villas.
  • Locking your dumpster so it's not filled with old carpet overnight by marauding carpet installers.
  • A Person on Twitter.
  • Playing a stoner album at the same time as a stoner movie.
  • An album/movie combo entirely bereft of revelatory synchronicities.
  • The most wrinkly hobbit.
  • Whether Gandalf was actually smoking something or if that's just something people joke about.
  • Brian Moriarty's multiple GDC talks about looking for secrets where there are none.
  • Writing a classic rock album intended to be played simultaneously with Boss Baby 2.
  • Rodolfo "Gato" Gonzales's legacy in Japan.
  • What the Guts Pose means to you.
  • Assigning elaborate meaning to each fist in a fist pump.
  • Henry Cavill reloading his fists.
  • Playing Rock Paper Scissors with Mario whenever he collects a moon.
  • A little head tilt to get you in the right mood to pick up rocks.
  • Whether Guts Berserk is named after Guts.
  • Elden Ring as Berserk fanfic.
  • Understanding and enjoying Elden Ring in a new way.
  • Attending the Montreal Screw-Job but not having any idea what's going on.
  • Taking a photo to prove you were at a historical event but the flash just reflects off the bald head of the guy in front of you.
  • A poem describing a fish.
  • A five-haired beard of wisdom.
  • A poem with fantastic mouth feel.
  • Catching a fish while dad is in the bathroom and screaming at him to hurry up because you don't know what to do with a fish.
  • Downloading a poem to your hard drive.
  • A good idea or at least a fun idea.
  • Whether you can believe the web design on this whitehouse.gov.
  • Killing software like only a 90s dad can.
  • Eating nachos every night.
  • Wanting to do things in fours because on Twitter you can attach four images to a post.
  • Top Four Favorite Sandwiches.
  • Refusing to share your top anythings.
  • That time Nintendo burned a hole in the palms of millions of children.
  • The ways Pokemon Go encourages you to put your phone down.
  • The kinds of places that society benefits from Pokemon Go not being played.
  • The Pokestop Review Process.
  • Two excellent reasons not to ship the Virtual Boy as a helmet.
  • VR chaperones.
  • Being okay with growing too tall but only if you have friends who are also growing way too tall.
  • Small inconvenient things about growing taller.
  • A cryptic giant living on a mountaintop.
  • Being 10 feet tall and retired and figuring out how to live in a normal sized house.
  • Doing CSG with caves and shirts.
  • Modular clothes that you can reconfigure to cover your changing body.
  • A wisp of a person with an eternal tube sweater.
  • Not wanting to become a spaghetti but respecting anybody who wants to become a spaghetti.
  • Growing to twice your adult height and getting cast as the monster in every horror movie.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Can the biological function of expelling waste be improved in any way? Should humans expel waste differently?
  • The Hobbit: Dopesmoker Edition. (it's great)
  • Gato Gonzales and the Guts Pose
  • The Fish, by Elizabeth Bishop
  • Twitter's UI has changed "Top 3" and "Top Fives" into "Top Four"
  • Every Monday, when you wake up in the morning, you discover that you have grown EXACTLY one millimeter taller. This continues throughout your life, so you will grow about 5.6 centimeters per year for the rest of the time you are alive. In ten years, you will be 1.8 feet taller than you are now. If you are 30 years old right now, you will be 7.3 feet taller when you reach 70. If you are 5.5 feet tall now, you will be 7 feet tall in just over 8 years, at which point you will start to look really weird. How does this change your life? What do you do about it? There is no cure for this condition, because it is caused by magic, not science, and there is no countercurse.

Microtopics:

  • The type of band that has four songs per album.
  • Creating ambient soundscapes via a series of guitar pedals.
  • Johnny To.
  • Interpersonal violence and the right to be perceived as human.
  • A world where everyone knows Judo for some reason and they fight each other with Judo all the time.
  • The quality of life edge that birds have over humans (their urine to feces ratio)
  • A nozzle in your wrist like spider man so you can poop into the tiny hole in the wall that everyone's house has for wrist poop nozzles.
  • Improving the human condition with a wall hole and maybe a wall tank.
  • Burying a pile of trash but also putting a photograph and a floppy disk in there so if you ever get in trouble for your pile of trash you can claim it's a time capsule.
  • How geniuses empty dumpsters.
  • Everyone taking the first Monday of the month off of work to poop and at 6pm the city's plumbing system explodes.
  • How to monetize pooping teens.
  • American poor being condemned to a low quality poop zone whereas in Europe they have luxury poop villas.
  • Locking your dumpster so it's not filled with old carpet overnight by marauding carpet installers.
  • A Person on Twitter.
  • Playing a stoner album at the same time as a stoner movie.
  • An album/movie combo entirely bereft of revelatory synchronicities.
  • The most wrinkly hobbit.
  • Whether Gandalf was actually smoking something or if that's just something people joke about.
  • Brian Moriarty's multiple GDC talks about looking for secrets where there are none.
  • Writing a classic rock album intended to be played simultaneously with Boss Baby 2.
  • Rodolfo "Gato" Gonzales's legacy in Japan.
  • What the Guts Pose means to you.
  • Assigning elaborate meaning to each fist in a fist pump.
  • Henry Cavill reloading his fists.
  • Playing Rock Paper Scissors with Mario whenever he collects a moon.
  • A little head tilt to get you in the right mood to pick up rocks.
  • Whether Guts Berserk is named after Guts.
  • Elden Ring as Berserk fanfic.
  • Understanding and enjoying Elden Ring in a new way.
  • Attending the Montreal Screw-Job but not having any idea what's going on.
  • Taking a photo to prove you were at a historical event but the flash just reflects off the bald head of the guy in front of you.
  • A poem describing a fish.
  • A five-haired beard of wisdom.
  • A poem with fantastic mouth feel.
  • Catching a fish while dad is in the bathroom and screaming at him to hurry up because you don't know what to do with a fish.
  • Downloading a poem to your hard drive.
  • A good idea or at least a fun idea.
  • Whether you can believe the web design on this whitehouse.gov.
  • Killing software like only a 90s dad can.
  • Eating nachos every night.
  • Wanting to do things in fours because on Twitter you can attach four images to a post.
  • Top Four Favorite Sandwiches.
  • Refusing to share your top anythings.
  • That time Nintendo burned a hole in the palms of millions of children.
  • The ways Pokemon Go encourages you to put your phone down.
  • The kinds of places that society benefits from Pokemon Go not being played.
  • The Pokestop Review Process.
  • Two excellent reasons not to ship the Virtual Boy as a helmet.
  • VR chaperones.
  • Being okay with growing too tall but only if you have friends who are also growing way too tall.
  • Small inconvenient things about growing taller.
  • A cryptic giant living on a mountaintop.
  • Being 10 feet tall and retired and figuring out how to live in a normal sized house.
  • Doing CSG with caves and shirts.
  • Modular clothes that you can reconfigure to cover your changing body.
  • A wisp of a person with an eternal tube sweater.
  • Not wanting to become a spaghetti but respecting anybody who wants to become a spaghetti.
  • Growing to twice your adult height and getting cast as the monster in every horror movie.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+q40gYejo ]]> Jim Stormdancer 146. If You Can't Pay the Time, Don't Do the Feet Liking https://topiclords.com/if-you-cant-pay-the-time-dont-do-the-feet-liking 8ad1c87a-9545-4304-a985-42e4aaab17d6 Mon, 08 Aug 2022 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Maxx and Nelson. We discuss how many how many random numbers you can dial before you contact someone who is expecting you, pocket versions of your art, the Dave Matthews Band Chicago River Incident, and So You Want to be a Writer, by Charles Bukowski. 48:35 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Being non-binary in Washington.
  • Witch Strandings.
  • The crucial aspects that define a traditional Strand-Like.
  • What makes the nurturing not feel bad/weird?
  • Physically inhabiting a mouse cursor.
  • Playing shuffleboard on a Mario Golf power meter using the Oblivion persuasion wheel.
  • Several things that people like, existing at the same time.
  • Why nobody but Jim is making Frog Fractions games.
  • Dialing random phone numbers until you reach someone you know.
  • A nightmare creature from the abyss waiting by the phone for your call.
  • Everyone having exactly one mom and exactly one faceless nightmare creature waiting by the phone.
  • Phone number Minesweeper.
  • Birthday parties as an opportunity to force your friends to play the weird game you just designed.
  • Guessing the phone number of the burner phone in front of you.
  • Computers you can talk to in your local area.
  • Hacking the government mainframe that has all the Nintendo games.
  • Needing to have a soul before your soul can be sucked out through the phone.
  • Finding out how smart dolphins are after they meet the being from beyond the abyss.
  • Holding on to your childhood dreams of stealing a series of towers for your tower collection.
  • Figuring out how to put custom ringtones on your flip phone even though the Verizon rep said it was impossible.
  • What the Kidz Bop version says instead of "it smells like R. Kelly's sheets."
  • A coat that smells like my baseball cleats, yikesssss.
  • What if football wasn't good?
  • What would happen if a child held all of baseball in their hands?
  • Futilitris.
  • Supernova SWF Enabler.
  • Working in the Kidz Bop factory.
  • Who Put Goku In Fortnite?
  • Ending the game immediately when somebody drops the come bomb.
  • Not being allowed to say dang or shit.
  • The through line from miniature replica sculptures to Kidz Bop Breaking Bad.
  • Kidz Bop Oldboy.
  • The French opera singer who replaced her girlfriend with a dummy and then set the nunnery on fire so it looked like her girlfriend died in the fire, but her opera singing was so good that the king had to pardon her.
  • If Jim was arrested for dumping 800 pounds of sewage on an open air tour boat, how many people would try to solve the ARG?
  • Wiping the raw sewage off of your face and wondering aloud "is this Frog Fractions 2?"
  • Going to jail for making a cursed tweet.
  • What if your tweet only goes viral after the cursed tweet law is enacted?
  • Having to read your tweet aloud to everyone who liked it.
  • Going to jail for writing a cursed tweet and being sentenced to having to explain it to your mom.
  • All-ages interactive sculptures.
  • A child with a tiny screwdriver installing an emergency communication system in case someone has a bad time in their Radio Flyer.
  • A pretty intense poem by a pretty intense dude.
  • Why or why not to be a writer.
  • Warning young people against destroying themselves.
  • Being deeply desperately driven by the essence of what you are creating.
  • Needing somebody to remind you that your work has value.
  • The different coping strategies required to create a work that takes half an hour to finish vs. years to finish.
  • False panels.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Being non-binary in Washington.
  • Witch Strandings.
  • The crucial aspects that define a traditional Strand-Like.
  • What makes the nurturing not feel bad/weird?
  • Physically inhabiting a mouse cursor.
  • Playing shuffleboard on a Mario Golf power meter using the Oblivion persuasion wheel.
  • Several things that people like, existing at the same time.
  • Why nobody but Jim is making Frog Fractions games.
  • Dialing random phone numbers until you reach someone you know.
  • A nightmare creature from the abyss waiting by the phone for your call.
  • Everyone having exactly one mom and exactly one faceless nightmare creature waiting by the phone.
  • Phone number Minesweeper.
  • Birthday parties as an opportunity to force your friends to play the weird game you just designed.
  • Guessing the phone number of the burner phone in front of you.
  • Computers you can talk to in your local area.
  • Hacking the government mainframe that has all the Nintendo games.
  • Needing to have a soul before your soul can be sucked out through the phone.
  • Finding out how smart dolphins are after they meet the being from beyond the abyss.
  • Holding on to your childhood dreams of stealing a series of towers for your tower collection.
  • Figuring out how to put custom ringtones on your flip phone even though the Verizon rep said it was impossible.
  • What the Kidz Bop version says instead of "it smells like R. Kelly's sheets."
  • A coat that smells like my baseball cleats, yikesssss.
  • What if football wasn't good?
  • What would happen if a child held all of baseball in their hands?
  • Futilitris.
  • Supernova SWF Enabler.
  • Working in the Kidz Bop factory.
  • Who Put Goku In Fortnite?
  • Ending the game immediately when somebody drops the come bomb.
  • Not being allowed to say dang or shit.
  • The through line from miniature replica sculptures to Kidz Bop Breaking Bad.
  • Kidz Bop Oldboy.
  • The French opera singer who replaced her girlfriend with a dummy and then set the nunnery on fire so it looked like her girlfriend died in the fire, but her opera singing was so good that the king had to pardon her.
  • If Jim was arrested for dumping 800 pounds of sewage on an open air tour boat, how many people would try to solve the ARG?
  • Wiping the raw sewage off of your face and wondering aloud "is this Frog Fractions 2?"
  • Going to jail for making a cursed tweet.
  • What if your tweet only goes viral after the cursed tweet law is enacted?
  • Having to read your tweet aloud to everyone who liked it.
  • Going to jail for writing a cursed tweet and being sentenced to having to explain it to your mom.
  • All-ages interactive sculptures.
  • A child with a tiny screwdriver installing an emergency communication system in case someone has a bad time in their Radio Flyer.
  • A pretty intense poem by a pretty intense dude.
  • Why or why not to be a writer.
  • Warning young people against destroying themselves.
  • Being deeply desperately driven by the essence of what you are creating.
  • Needing somebody to remind you that your work has value.
  • The different coping strategies required to create a work that takes half an hour to finish vs. years to finish.
  • False panels.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Being non-binary in Washington.
  • Witch Strandings.
  • The crucial aspects that define a traditional Strand-Like.
  • What makes the nurturing not feel bad/weird?
  • Physically inhabiting a mouse cursor.
  • Playing shuffleboard on a Mario Golf power meter using the Oblivion persuasion wheel.
  • Several things that people like, existing at the same time.
  • Why nobody but Jim is making Frog Fractions games.
  • Dialing random phone numbers until you reach someone you know.
  • A nightmare creature from the abyss waiting by the phone for your call.
  • Everyone having exactly one mom and exactly one faceless nightmare creature waiting by the phone.
  • Phone number Minesweeper.
  • Birthday parties as an opportunity to force your friends to play the weird game you just designed.
  • Guessing the phone number of the burner phone in front of you.
  • Computers you can talk to in your local area.
  • Hacking the government mainframe that has all the Nintendo games.
  • Needing to have a soul before your soul can be sucked out through the phone.
  • Finding out how smart dolphins are after they meet the being from beyond the abyss.
  • Holding on to your childhood dreams of stealing a series of towers for your tower collection.
  • Figuring out how to put custom ringtones on your flip phone even though the Verizon rep said it was impossible.
  • What the Kidz Bop version says instead of "it smells like R. Kelly's sheets."
  • A coat that smells like my baseball cleats, yikesssss.
  • What if football wasn't good?
  • What would happen if a child held all of baseball in their hands?
  • Futilitris.
  • Supernova SWF Enabler.
  • Working in the Kidz Bop factory.
  • Who Put Goku In Fortnite?
  • Ending the game immediately when somebody drops the come bomb.
  • Not being allowed to say dang or shit.
  • The through line from miniature replica sculptures to Kidz Bop Breaking Bad.
  • Kidz Bop Oldboy.
  • The French opera singer who replaced her girlfriend with a dummy and then set the nunnery on fire so it looked like her girlfriend died in the fire, but her opera singing was so good that the king had to pardon her.
  • If Jim was arrested for dumping 800 pounds of sewage on an open air tour boat, how many people would try to solve the ARG?
  • Wiping the raw sewage off of your face and wondering aloud "is this Frog Fractions 2?"
  • Going to jail for making a cursed tweet.
  • What if your tweet only goes viral after the cursed tweet law is enacted?
  • Having to read your tweet aloud to everyone who liked it.
  • Going to jail for writing a cursed tweet and being sentenced to having to explain it to your mom.
  • All-ages interactive sculptures.
  • A child with a tiny screwdriver installing an emergency communication system in case someone has a bad time in their Radio Flyer.
  • A pretty intense poem by a pretty intense dude.
  • Why or why not to be a writer.
  • Warning young people against destroying themselves.
  • Being deeply desperately driven by the essence of what you are creating.
  • Needing somebody to remind you that your work has value.
  • The different coping strategies required to create a work that takes half an hour to finish vs. years to finish.
  • False panels.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+iid2uV1n ]]> Jim Stormdancer 145. A Visceral Tobacco Consumption Experience https://topiclords.com/a-visceral-tobacco-consumption-experience 96cff35e-7878-4fc3-9cc0-4a5a68dc7b3b Mon, 01 Aug 2022 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Hallie and John. We discuss finding value in shared imagined spaces and worlds outside of religious contexts, final Fantasy Challenge: Zero Story; and other vaporware games & mods of which no record exists on the internet, streaming movies on Youtube, and Canterbury Tales General Prologue, by Geoffrey Chaucer. 1:00:54 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The Ten Timers Club.
  • Podcasting for three years straight.
  • Fantastical ideas for famous bands covering Garages songs.
  • An increasingly hard to describe person.
  • Reclaiming the asshole.
  • The sort of thing that sometimes happens in Maine.
  • Finding the right microphone settings.
  • A podcast about what people think about that ends up being a video game podcast because that's what they're thinking about.
  • The barnacle on the indie game scene life.
  • Making a video game good on purpose.
  • Talking to your friends who talk you out of grad school because you need to be talked out of grad school again
  • Your own personal relationship with the divine.
  • Shared imagined worlds and how we talk about them.
  • Your friend asks how you're doing and you say "Han and Leia at the end of Empire" and your friend just nods.
  • Fighting a great beast together.
  • Promoting group cohesion by developing a shared frame of reference.
  • How in the 70s everyone watched the same three TV channels but nowadays everyone has access to all of every form of media all the time, and whether that's a handicap for developing a shared cultural reference frame.
  • Waxy potatoes vs. starchy potatoes.
  • Where to find non-starchy potatoes.
  • Harry Potter and the Sacred Texts.
  • The act of interpretation and the creation of shared symbols.
  • A Final Fantasy mod that you were very excited about in the early 00s but that now has no results on google.
  • Abraham Lincoln Land vanishing from the internet.
  • All the bad video games starring Tux.
  • Your boss saying "let me show you how the Peter Principle works" and promoting you to Project Manager.
  • Erasing the projects you are ashamed of from your personal web site.
  • Adding a clause to your will about deleting all your novelty web sites.
  • A web site where you write a bunch of fake reviews of fake bands and eventually start writing the songs yourself.
  • Mutually executable languages.
  • A betrayal of both movies and Youtube.
  • Commenting with a timestamp of your favorite part of Napoleon Dynamite.
  • Whether Pedro won the election on his own merits.
  • Creating an audition tape for the musical extravaganza your employer is running, getting the part, and later finding out that you were the only one who applied.
  • Whether John will ever release the video of him dancing like Napoleon Dynamite.
  • An entire stanza of completely unintelligible Middle English.
  • Wanting to go on pilgrimages to seek the Holy Blissful Martyr because spring is coming.
  • Pronouncing all the silent letters.
  • A well-SparkesNotes'd text.
  • Having a poem memorized but not in order.
  • How wishing someone a happy birthday before their birthday is illegal in Germany.
  • The least surfer dude.
  • Various tobacco saliva receptacles, some of which ding and some of which don't.
  • Chewing tobacco but not having the self-respect to get a spittoon.
  • The nicotine delivery method where you stick a tobacco blob under your lip like a walrus tusk and make TikTok videos.
  • Dip a.k.a. Snus.
  • A cool friend from Tennessee.
  • Big League Chew, again.
  • Asking the clerk for tar patches because nicotine patches don't give you melanoma.
  • Ending the show early because you believe so vehemently that vaping is good for you.
  • A pithy German word for having guested on Topic Lords ten times.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The Ten Timers Club.
  • Podcasting for three years straight.
  • Fantastical ideas for famous bands covering Garages songs.
  • An increasingly hard to describe person.
  • Reclaiming the asshole.
  • The sort of thing that sometimes happens in Maine.
  • Finding the right microphone settings.
  • A podcast about what people think about that ends up being a video game podcast because that's what they're thinking about.
  • The barnacle on the indie game scene life.
  • Making a video game good on purpose.
  • Talking to your friends who talk you out of grad school because you need to be talked out of grad school again
  • Your own personal relationship with the divine.
  • Shared imagined worlds and how we talk about them.
  • Your friend asks how you're doing and you say "Han and Leia at the end of Empire" and your friend just nods.
  • Fighting a great beast together.
  • Promoting group cohesion by developing a shared frame of reference.
  • How in the 70s everyone watched the same three TV channels but nowadays everyone has access to all of every form of media all the time, and whether that's a handicap for developing a shared cultural reference frame.
  • Waxy potatoes vs. starchy potatoes.
  • Where to find non-starchy potatoes.
  • Harry Potter and the Sacred Texts.
  • The act of interpretation and the creation of shared symbols.
  • A Final Fantasy mod that you were very excited about in the early 00s but that now has no results on google.
  • Abraham Lincoln Land vanishing from the internet.
  • All the bad video games starring Tux.
  • Your boss saying "let me show you how the Peter Principle works" and promoting you to Project Manager.
  • Erasing the projects you are ashamed of from your personal web site.
  • Adding a clause to your will about deleting all your novelty web sites.
  • A web site where you write a bunch of fake reviews of fake bands and eventually start writing the songs yourself.
  • Mutually executable languages.
  • A betrayal of both movies and Youtube.
  • Commenting with a timestamp of your favorite part of Napoleon Dynamite.
  • Whether Pedro won the election on his own merits.
  • Creating an audition tape for the musical extravaganza your employer is running, getting the part, and later finding out that you were the only one who applied.
  • Whether John will ever release the video of him dancing like Napoleon Dynamite.
  • An entire stanza of completely unintelligible Middle English.
  • Wanting to go on pilgrimages to seek the Holy Blissful Martyr because spring is coming.
  • Pronouncing all the silent letters.
  • A well-SparkesNotes'd text.
  • Having a poem memorized but not in order.
  • How wishing someone a happy birthday before their birthday is illegal in Germany.
  • The least surfer dude.
  • Various tobacco saliva receptacles, some of which ding and some of which don't.
  • Chewing tobacco but not having the self-respect to get a spittoon.
  • The nicotine delivery method where you stick a tobacco blob under your lip like a walrus tusk and make TikTok videos.
  • Dip a.k.a. Snus.
  • A cool friend from Tennessee.
  • Big League Chew, again.
  • Asking the clerk for tar patches because nicotine patches don't give you melanoma.
  • Ending the show early because you believe so vehemently that vaping is good for you.
  • A pithy German word for having guested on Topic Lords ten times.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The Ten Timers Club.
  • Podcasting for three years straight.
  • Fantastical ideas for famous bands covering Garages songs.
  • An increasingly hard to describe person.
  • Reclaiming the asshole.
  • The sort of thing that sometimes happens in Maine.
  • Finding the right microphone settings.
  • A podcast about what people think about that ends up being a video game podcast because that's what they're thinking about.
  • The barnacle on the indie game scene life.
  • Making a video game good on purpose.
  • Talking to your friends who talk you out of grad school because you need to be talked out of grad school again
  • Your own personal relationship with the divine.
  • Shared imagined worlds and how we talk about them.
  • Your friend asks how you're doing and you say "Han and Leia at the end of Empire" and your friend just nods.
  • Fighting a great beast together.
  • Promoting group cohesion by developing a shared frame of reference.
  • How in the 70s everyone watched the same three TV channels but nowadays everyone has access to all of every form of media all the time, and whether that's a handicap for developing a shared cultural reference frame.
  • Waxy potatoes vs. starchy potatoes.
  • Where to find non-starchy potatoes.
  • Harry Potter and the Sacred Texts.
  • The act of interpretation and the creation of shared symbols.
  • A Final Fantasy mod that you were very excited about in the early 00s but that now has no results on google.
  • Abraham Lincoln Land vanishing from the internet.
  • All the bad video games starring Tux.
  • Your boss saying "let me show you how the Peter Principle works" and promoting you to Project Manager.
  • Erasing the projects you are ashamed of from your personal web site.
  • Adding a clause to your will about deleting all your novelty web sites.
  • A web site where you write a bunch of fake reviews of fake bands and eventually start writing the songs yourself.
  • Mutually executable languages.
  • A betrayal of both movies and Youtube.
  • Commenting with a timestamp of your favorite part of Napoleon Dynamite.
  • Whether Pedro won the election on his own merits.
  • Creating an audition tape for the musical extravaganza your employer is running, getting the part, and later finding out that you were the only one who applied.
  • Whether John will ever release the video of him dancing like Napoleon Dynamite.
  • An entire stanza of completely unintelligible Middle English.
  • Wanting to go on pilgrimages to seek the Holy Blissful Martyr because spring is coming.
  • Pronouncing all the silent letters.
  • A well-SparkesNotes'd text.
  • Having a poem memorized but not in order.
  • How wishing someone a happy birthday before their birthday is illegal in Germany.
  • The least surfer dude.
  • Various tobacco saliva receptacles, some of which ding and some of which don't.
  • Chewing tobacco but not having the self-respect to get a spittoon.
  • The nicotine delivery method where you stick a tobacco blob under your lip like a walrus tusk and make TikTok videos.
  • Dip a.k.a. Snus.
  • A cool friend from Tennessee.
  • Big League Chew, again.
  • Asking the clerk for tar patches because nicotine patches don't give you melanoma.
  • Ending the show early because you believe so vehemently that vaping is good for you.
  • A pithy German word for having guested on Topic Lords ten times.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+mlJhjCBi ]]> Jim Stormdancer 144. Vultures Who Know the Difference (Between Sugar and Aspartame) https://topiclords.com/vultures-who-know-the-difference-between-sugar-and-aspartame f6df4126-6916-450e-ac57-f123b9e2d0ed Mon, 25 Jul 2022 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: JohnB and Jesse. We discuss Wario 64, bringing back Dogme 95, Seeking Mr. Eaten's Name again, This is Just to Say, by William Carlos Williams, outdoor pop machines, and Godzilla. 1:12:59 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • A Link's Awakening speedrun that may surprise you.
  • Lord clouds.
  • What's the deal with Wario 64?
  • Asking Webster's Dictionary to define Wario 64.
  • Your source for video game deals.
  • How Wario64 feels about Chris Pratt voicing Mario.
  • Geralt in the bathtub.
  • Wario World for the GameCube.
  • The hidden origins of Wario64.
  • Ten rules for how to make a movie.
  • Lars von Trier being traumatized by a dolly shot and inventing Dogme 95.
  • Unintentional Dogme 95 movies.
  • Unboxing a Criterion Collection DVD live on the show and there's just a DVD in there.
  • Creative freedom, the worst constraint.
  • A recipe for the worst movies in the fucking world.
  • Dogme 95 drinking game.
  • Making a flag in the bucket.
  • The Adventure 2600 continuity.
  • Bats that can steal things that shouldn't be able to be stolen.
  • A video game quest that was very difficult and obscure until someone wrote a FAQ.
  • The ludonarrative consonance of following your self-destructive obsession at the same time your character follows their self-destructive obsession.
  • Being confused about a story beat in a video game and having to seek out a lore genius on the internet.
  • The Random House Annotated Fallen London.
  • Becoming St. Gawain's Candle.
  • How the icebox plums poem became a meme.
  • Learning about poutine on social media.
  • Satirical poetry in the 1960s.
  • Things that are Ira Glass's fault.
  • Extreme meminess.
  • Wanting a god damn plum right now.
  • Pictures of normal people that are considered heresy.
  • Deliberately making your podcast guest's audio sound bad.
  • Continuing to read poetry even though you're terrible at it.
  • Asking Siri to get you a substantial raise.
  • Checking the change return slots on the mobile phone bank for quarters, to do your part to sustain the soda vending machine economy.
  • The cost of a 510 ml bottle of pop these days.
  • The fastest pop machine in the world.
  • Joking about the day we record the show when it comes out weeks later and none of the listeners have any idea what you're talking about.
  • Applying the sugar tax to beverages sweetened with aspartame.
  • The Godzilla movie with Inspector Gadget in it.
  • Redheaded Stepzilla.
  • The three Godzilla movies that are out of print in the US. (But not on archive.org)
  • Having to license all the Kaiju separately.
  • Movies that are in the public domain because they were not explicitly labeled as copyrighted.
  • Public Domain Day.
  • The personality traits of Sherlock Holmes that are and aren't copyrighted.
  • The Beast at 20,000 Fathoms.
  • Messing up a slow-motion shot by undercranking the camera rather than overcranking, but it has to go into the movie like that because it was your only take.
  • Making a movie where you can do as many takes as you want but they all have to go in the finished film.
  • Godzilla taking some much needed time off.
  • Invasion of Astro-Monster.
  • Watching the entire Godzilla series and learning why people think Avengers: Endgame is good.
  • A latchkey kid in 1960s Japan overcoming his bullies by imagining that Godzilla is his friend.
  • A dinosaur falling in love with a lighthouse.
  • Empathizing with the dinosaur who is completely misunderstanding the situation.
  • Why the English speakers in Japanese or Korean films are such bad actors.
  • An island protector of these native people brought to society for reasons of Capitalism.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • A Link's Awakening speedrun that may surprise you.
  • Lord clouds.
  • What's the deal with Wario 64?
  • Asking Webster's Dictionary to define Wario 64.
  • Your source for video game deals.
  • How Wario64 feels about Chris Pratt voicing Mario.
  • Geralt in the bathtub.
  • Wario World for the GameCube.
  • The hidden origins of Wario64.
  • Ten rules for how to make a movie.
  • Lars von Trier being traumatized by a dolly shot and inventing Dogme 95.
  • Unintentional Dogme 95 movies.
  • Unboxing a Criterion Collection DVD live on the show and there's just a DVD in there.
  • Creative freedom, the worst constraint.
  • A recipe for the worst movies in the fucking world.
  • Dogme 95 drinking game.
  • Making a flag in the bucket.
  • The Adventure 2600 continuity.
  • Bats that can steal things that shouldn't be able to be stolen.
  • A video game quest that was very difficult and obscure until someone wrote a FAQ.
  • The ludonarrative consonance of following your self-destructive obsession at the same time your character follows their self-destructive obsession.
  • Being confused about a story beat in a video game and having to seek out a lore genius on the internet.
  • The Random House Annotated Fallen London.
  • Becoming St. Gawain's Candle.
  • How the icebox plums poem became a meme.
  • Learning about poutine on social media.
  • Satirical poetry in the 1960s.
  • Things that are Ira Glass's fault.
  • Extreme meminess.
  • Wanting a god damn plum right now.
  • Pictures of normal people that are considered heresy.
  • Deliberately making your podcast guest's audio sound bad.
  • Continuing to read poetry even though you're terrible at it.
  • Asking Siri to get you a substantial raise.
  • Checking the change return slots on the mobile phone bank for quarters, to do your part to sustain the soda vending machine economy.
  • The cost of a 510 ml bottle of pop these days.
  • The fastest pop machine in the world.
  • Joking about the day we record the show when it comes out weeks later and none of the listeners have any idea what you're talking about.
  • Applying the sugar tax to beverages sweetened with aspartame.
  • The Godzilla movie with Inspector Gadget in it.
  • Redheaded Stepzilla.
  • The three Godzilla movies that are out of print in the US. (But not on archive.org)
  • Having to license all the Kaiju separately.
  • Movies that are in the public domain because they were not explicitly labeled as copyrighted.
  • Public Domain Day.
  • The personality traits of Sherlock Holmes that are and aren't copyrighted.
  • The Beast at 20,000 Fathoms.
  • Messing up a slow-motion shot by undercranking the camera rather than overcranking, but it has to go into the movie like that because it was your only take.
  • Making a movie where you can do as many takes as you want but they all have to go in the finished film.
  • Godzilla taking some much needed time off.
  • Invasion of Astro-Monster.
  • Watching the entire Godzilla series and learning why people think Avengers: Endgame is good.
  • A latchkey kid in 1960s Japan overcoming his bullies by imagining that Godzilla is his friend.
  • A dinosaur falling in love with a lighthouse.
  • Empathizing with the dinosaur who is completely misunderstanding the situation.
  • Why the English speakers in Japanese or Korean films are such bad actors.
  • An island protector of these native people brought to society for reasons of Capitalism.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • A Link's Awakening speedrun that may surprise you.
  • Lord clouds.
  • What's the deal with Wario 64?
  • Asking Webster's Dictionary to define Wario 64.
  • Your source for video game deals.
  • How Wario64 feels about Chris Pratt voicing Mario.
  • Geralt in the bathtub.
  • Wario World for the GameCube.
  • The hidden origins of Wario64.
  • Ten rules for how to make a movie.
  • Lars von Trier being traumatized by a dolly shot and inventing Dogme 95.
  • Unintentional Dogme 95 movies.
  • Unboxing a Criterion Collection DVD live on the show and there's just a DVD in there.
  • Creative freedom, the worst constraint.
  • A recipe for the worst movies in the fucking world.
  • Dogme 95 drinking game.
  • Making a flag in the bucket.
  • The Adventure 2600 continuity.
  • Bats that can steal things that shouldn't be able to be stolen.
  • A video game quest that was very difficult and obscure until someone wrote a FAQ.
  • The ludonarrative consonance of following your self-destructive obsession at the same time your character follows their self-destructive obsession.
  • Being confused about a story beat in a video game and having to seek out a lore genius on the internet.
  • The Random House Annotated Fallen London.
  • Becoming St. Gawain's Candle.
  • How the icebox plums poem became a meme.
  • Learning about poutine on social media.
  • Satirical poetry in the 1960s.
  • Things that are Ira Glass's fault.
  • Extreme meminess.
  • Wanting a god damn plum right now.
  • Pictures of normal people that are considered heresy.
  • Deliberately making your podcast guest's audio sound bad.
  • Continuing to read poetry even though you're terrible at it.
  • Asking Siri to get you a substantial raise.
  • Checking the change return slots on the mobile phone bank for quarters, to do your part to sustain the soda vending machine economy.
  • The cost of a 510 ml bottle of pop these days.
  • The fastest pop machine in the world.
  • Joking about the day we record the show when it comes out weeks later and none of the listeners have any idea what you're talking about.
  • Applying the sugar tax to beverages sweetened with aspartame.
  • The Godzilla movie with Inspector Gadget in it.
  • Redheaded Stepzilla.
  • The three Godzilla movies that are out of print in the US. (But not on archive.org)
  • Having to license all the Kaiju separately.
  • Movies that are in the public domain because they were not explicitly labeled as copyrighted.
  • Public Domain Day.
  • The personality traits of Sherlock Holmes that are and aren't copyrighted.
  • The Beast at 20,000 Fathoms.
  • Messing up a slow-motion shot by undercranking the camera rather than overcranking, but it has to go into the movie like that because it was your only take.
  • Making a movie where you can do as many takes as you want but they all have to go in the finished film.
  • Godzilla taking some much needed time off.
  • Invasion of Astro-Monster.
  • Watching the entire Godzilla series and learning why people think Avengers: Endgame is good.
  • A latchkey kid in 1960s Japan overcoming his bullies by imagining that Godzilla is his friend.
  • A dinosaur falling in love with a lighthouse.
  • Empathizing with the dinosaur who is completely misunderstanding the situation.
  • Why the English speakers in Japanese or Korean films are such bad actors.
  • An island protector of these native people brought to society for reasons of Capitalism.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+eSqDlViP ]]> Jim Stormdancer 143. Your Face Is Looking a Little Impact Resistant https://topiclords.com/your-face-is-looking-a-little-impact-resistant 4ea72677-7982-4e14-886c-4659e55cc64b Mon, 18 Jul 2022 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Chall and Jenni. We discuss frogs that leap without knowing how to land, the charachorder, speedrun health hazards, Bananas Bananas by Greg, the Chicago Bean, and walkin'-around videogames. 1:04:11 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Nose Goes.
  • Allergy medication that does not make you drowsy.
  • Coming out of the womb sleep-deprived.
  • Jenni from the Blockchain.
  • Pokemon Gockchain.
  • A good speedrun idea for somebody else.
  • Watching Mario 64 let's-plays to distract us from the disaster of our own interiority.
  • Why Can't the Pumpkin Toadlet Land?
  • Landing in a t-pose and rigid-bodying your way into a pratfall.
  • Which frog would win the X Games of frogs?
  • The distant future when everyone has evolved to survive car crashes and nobody is allowed to wear a shirt in the payroll department.
  • An editorial team choosing what links will go on the front page.
  • Photoshop This Tractor.
  • "Gone drinking" as a euphemism for crashing into a lake.
  • The history of social media on the internet.
  • Choosing the most obnoxious possible video to be your Zoom background.
  • What's stopping developers from compiling ffmpeg to Webassembly and including it in every web page.
  • Chorded word entry.
  • Getting an exciting new keyboard where it takes you three minutes to type youtube.com.
  • Switching keyboard layouts to fix your abysmal typing posture.
  • A very dim room full of typewriters.
  • Thinking about the cubic watermelons.
  • Another one from the Deck of Old Memes.
  • Whether Plato ever got to prove his cave allegory correct.
  • RSI in the speedrunning scene.
  • Waving your right hand up and down for twelve hours a day.
  • Hypertapping.
  • Tap to Survive!
  • Clickers that require you to watch the game run to efficiently progress.
  • The deep crevasse where Cookie Clicker lives in your brain.
  • Getting RSI from watching speedruns all the time.
  • Coping with the mental anguish of speedrunning.
  • Leomard Sportsinterviews.
  • Making a mixtape of yourself playing clarinet and your younger brother reading poems, for your girlfriend Sara.
  • Your vengeful ex-girlfriend turning you in to VEVO for music piracy using the mixtape you gave her as proof.
  • Using music to anchor a repeated moment.
  • Using this episode of Topic Lords to score your morning routine.
  • Warrant canaries.
  • Bananas: they're underground.
  • The return of the Banana Box.
  • The tropical fruit that tastes like mayonnaise.
  • The cheese of the sea.
  • Cloud Gate in Millennium Park.
  • Chicago Bean Radiation.
  • Walking through the Chicago Bean and getting mirrored left to right and subsequently only being able to digest animals that also wandered through the Chicago Bean that you catch and kill.
  • Wearing a hospital wrist band informing your duel opponent that your internal organs are mirrored left to right.
  • Mirror image twins.
  • Fighting little ASCII bears and solving exploding bomb puzzles.
  • What you do in Proteus.
  • The game where you hit the ball back and forth over a net.
  • A board game where you vacation in feudal Japan.
  • The Museum of Other Realities.
  • Seiklus and Gebub's Adventure.
  • A place to wander while interesting things happen to you.
  • The talking tree that says "invest in leaves."
  • Legends of Murder.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Nose Goes.
  • Allergy medication that does not make you drowsy.
  • Coming out of the womb sleep-deprived.
  • Jenni from the Blockchain.
  • Pokemon Gockchain.
  • A good speedrun idea for somebody else.
  • Watching Mario 64 let's-plays to distract us from the disaster of our own interiority.
  • Why Can't the Pumpkin Toadlet Land?
  • Landing in a t-pose and rigid-bodying your way into a pratfall.
  • Which frog would win the X Games of frogs?
  • The distant future when everyone has evolved to survive car crashes and nobody is allowed to wear a shirt in the payroll department.
  • An editorial team choosing what links will go on the front page.
  • Photoshop This Tractor.
  • "Gone drinking" as a euphemism for crashing into a lake.
  • The history of social media on the internet.
  • Choosing the most obnoxious possible video to be your Zoom background.
  • What's stopping developers from compiling ffmpeg to Webassembly and including it in every web page.
  • Chorded word entry.
  • Getting an exciting new keyboard where it takes you three minutes to type youtube.com.
  • Switching keyboard layouts to fix your abysmal typing posture.
  • A very dim room full of typewriters.
  • Thinking about the cubic watermelons.
  • Another one from the Deck of Old Memes.
  • Whether Plato ever got to prove his cave allegory correct.
  • RSI in the speedrunning scene.
  • Waving your right hand up and down for twelve hours a day.
  • Hypertapping.
  • Tap to Survive!
  • Clickers that require you to watch the game run to efficiently progress.
  • The deep crevasse where Cookie Clicker lives in your brain.
  • Getting RSI from watching speedruns all the time.
  • Coping with the mental anguish of speedrunning.
  • Leomard Sportsinterviews.
  • Making a mixtape of yourself playing clarinet and your younger brother reading poems, for your girlfriend Sara.
  • Your vengeful ex-girlfriend turning you in to VEVO for music piracy using the mixtape you gave her as proof.
  • Using music to anchor a repeated moment.
  • Using this episode of Topic Lords to score your morning routine.
  • Warrant canaries.
  • Bananas: they're underground.
  • The return of the Banana Box.
  • The tropical fruit that tastes like mayonnaise.
  • The cheese of the sea.
  • Cloud Gate in Millennium Park.
  • Chicago Bean Radiation.
  • Walking through the Chicago Bean and getting mirrored left to right and subsequently only being able to digest animals that also wandered through the Chicago Bean that you catch and kill.
  • Wearing a hospital wrist band informing your duel opponent that your internal organs are mirrored left to right.
  • Mirror image twins.
  • Fighting little ASCII bears and solving exploding bomb puzzles.
  • What you do in Proteus.
  • The game where you hit the ball back and forth over a net.
  • A board game where you vacation in feudal Japan.
  • The Museum of Other Realities.
  • Seiklus and Gebub's Adventure.
  • A place to wander while interesting things happen to you.
  • The talking tree that says "invest in leaves."
  • Legends of Murder.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Nose Goes.
  • Allergy medication that does not make you drowsy.
  • Coming out of the womb sleep-deprived.
  • Jenni from the Blockchain.
  • Pokemon Gockchain.
  • A good speedrun idea for somebody else.
  • Watching Mario 64 let's-plays to distract us from the disaster of our own interiority.
  • Why Can't the Pumpkin Toadlet Land?
  • Landing in a t-pose and rigid-bodying your way into a pratfall.
  • Which frog would win the X Games of frogs?
  • The distant future when everyone has evolved to survive car crashes and nobody is allowed to wear a shirt in the payroll department.
  • An editorial team choosing what links will go on the front page.
  • Photoshop This Tractor.
  • "Gone drinking" as a euphemism for crashing into a lake.
  • The history of social media on the internet.
  • Choosing the most obnoxious possible video to be your Zoom background.
  • What's stopping developers from compiling ffmpeg to Webassembly and including it in every web page.
  • Chorded word entry.
  • Getting an exciting new keyboard where it takes you three minutes to type youtube.com.
  • Switching keyboard layouts to fix your abysmal typing posture.
  • A very dim room full of typewriters.
  • Thinking about the cubic watermelons.
  • Another one from the Deck of Old Memes.
  • Whether Plato ever got to prove his cave allegory correct.
  • RSI in the speedrunning scene.
  • Waving your right hand up and down for twelve hours a day.
  • Hypertapping.
  • Tap to Survive!
  • Clickers that require you to watch the game run to efficiently progress.
  • The deep crevasse where Cookie Clicker lives in your brain.
  • Getting RSI from watching speedruns all the time.
  • Coping with the mental anguish of speedrunning.
  • Leomard Sportsinterviews.
  • Making a mixtape of yourself playing clarinet and your younger brother reading poems, for your girlfriend Sara.
  • Your vengeful ex-girlfriend turning you in to VEVO for music piracy using the mixtape you gave her as proof.
  • Using music to anchor a repeated moment.
  • Using this episode of Topic Lords to score your morning routine.
  • Warrant canaries.
  • Bananas: they're underground.
  • The return of the Banana Box.
  • The tropical fruit that tastes like mayonnaise.
  • The cheese of the sea.
  • Cloud Gate in Millennium Park.
  • Chicago Bean Radiation.
  • Walking through the Chicago Bean and getting mirrored left to right and subsequently only being able to digest animals that also wandered through the Chicago Bean that you catch and kill.
  • Wearing a hospital wrist band informing your duel opponent that your internal organs are mirrored left to right.
  • Mirror image twins.
  • Fighting little ASCII bears and solving exploding bomb puzzles.
  • What you do in Proteus.
  • The game where you hit the ball back and forth over a net.
  • A board game where you vacation in feudal Japan.
  • The Museum of Other Realities.
  • Seiklus and Gebub's Adventure.
  • A place to wander while interesting things happen to you.
  • The talking tree that says "invest in leaves."
  • Legends of Murder.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+2zo0MYzv ]]> Jim Stormdancer 142. Threatjazz https://topiclords.com/threatjazz 811bca70-b3a0-4df2-a73e-bd75fbe68067 Mon, 11 Jul 2022 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Ben and Tyriq. We discuss what occupations are closest to adventuring, getting a tattoo as motivation to be healthier, playing instruments with your hands vs. with your mouth, The Mushroom Hunters, putting butter in food, and the sad nonexistence of Violence/Threat Jazz. 1:07:57 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Which real life occupations are the closest thing to actual Adventuring? And would you want to do any of them?
  • Getting a tattoo has somehow motivated me to be healthier
  • It's weird that some instruments you play with your hands and others you put in your mouth
  • The Mushroom Hunters
  • Discovering how much butter and sugar is in your common or garden cake has filled me with sheer horror
  • A public call to action for the creation of Violence/Threat Jazz as a genre

Microtopics:

  • The collection of music songs that you put on the internet last year.
  • The Citizen Sleeper trailer.
  • Managing a game's Steam store page.
  • The conversations you don't have.
  • Adventuring as it is conceived of and perceived.
  • Going into the field and being exposed to health hazards.
  • Rock climbing and its relationship to speed running.
  • All the big parts of the world having been discovered already so you need to be satisfied with discovering tiny parts.
  • The difficulty of spending a lifetime rock climbing when you don't enjoy rock climbing.
  • Whether being sent off to war feels or ought to feel like an adventure.
  • Lockdown tattoos.
  • The uncle who convinced you to get an eyebrow ring.
  • Designing a tattoo so that it still looks right if the recipient suddenly gets swole.
  • The Clean and Jerk.
  • Compressing yourself inwards as you hit the ground.
  • The idea of caring about your appearance.
  • Looking in the mirror and feeling good about yourself.
  • A portion of meat that is ruining your aesthetic.
  • Your full-sleeve Gigantamax Meowth tattoo.
  • Ark from Terranigma.
  • A tattoo of a goat because you love goats a lot.
  • Putting pictures on your body and looking cool.
  • Going full body-mod in your old age.
  • A Rotom right up there in your armpit.
  • Walking around looking like a JRPG character with an asymmetrical pauldron.
  • The right torso for me.
  • Bone tattoos that are just for you because nobody can see your bones.
  • Waiting until you are 80 years old for eyeball tattoo technology to get safer.
  • Screaming higher and higher until you take a shower.
  • Airflow and handflow.
  • Licking a musical instrument that makes noise when it's wet.
  • Chromatic spittoon virtuosos.
  • Melody Pops.
  • How to survive long car trips before portable video games.
  • Lollipops you could write with.
  • Chocolate cigarettes wrapped in rice paper.
  • Rebranding your offensive children's cigarette brand to "Fads."
  • The formulation of laws to follow facts revealed.
  • Food Tasters.
  • One king left and so much food to eat.
  • Why so much fiction is so obsessed with royalty.
  • Cracking a nut in your brain.
  • The moon's excellent product placement.
  • Cakes for people to jump out of.
  • How to marble a cake.
  • The butter iceberg.
  • The inside scoop behind all the drama.
  • The Sharks and the Jets snapping at each other.
  • The dude in Mad Max Fury Road playing a flaming guitar on top of a moving truck.
  • Where to see Ben's cats.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Which real life occupations are the closest thing to actual Adventuring? And would you want to do any of them?
  • Getting a tattoo has somehow motivated me to be healthier
  • It's weird that some instruments you play with your hands and others you put in your mouth
  • The Mushroom Hunters
  • Discovering how much butter and sugar is in your common or garden cake has filled me with sheer horror
  • A public call to action for the creation of Violence/Threat Jazz as a genre

Microtopics:

  • The collection of music songs that you put on the internet last year.
  • The Citizen Sleeper trailer.
  • Managing a game's Steam store page.
  • The conversations you don't have.
  • Adventuring as it is conceived of and perceived.
  • Going into the field and being exposed to health hazards.
  • Rock climbing and its relationship to speed running.
  • All the big parts of the world having been discovered already so you need to be satisfied with discovering tiny parts.
  • The difficulty of spending a lifetime rock climbing when you don't enjoy rock climbing.
  • Whether being sent off to war feels or ought to feel like an adventure.
  • Lockdown tattoos.
  • The uncle who convinced you to get an eyebrow ring.
  • Designing a tattoo so that it still looks right if the recipient suddenly gets swole.
  • The Clean and Jerk.
  • Compressing yourself inwards as you hit the ground.
  • The idea of caring about your appearance.
  • Looking in the mirror and feeling good about yourself.
  • A portion of meat that is ruining your aesthetic.
  • Your full-sleeve Gigantamax Meowth tattoo.
  • Ark from Terranigma.
  • A tattoo of a goat because you love goats a lot.
  • Putting pictures on your body and looking cool.
  • Going full body-mod in your old age.
  • A Rotom right up there in your armpit.
  • Walking around looking like a JRPG character with an asymmetrical pauldron.
  • The right torso for me.
  • Bone tattoos that are just for you because nobody can see your bones.
  • Waiting until you are 80 years old for eyeball tattoo technology to get safer.
  • Screaming higher and higher until you take a shower.
  • Airflow and handflow.
  • Licking a musical instrument that makes noise when it's wet.
  • Chromatic spittoon virtuosos.
  • Melody Pops.
  • How to survive long car trips before portable video games.
  • Lollipops you could write with.
  • Chocolate cigarettes wrapped in rice paper.
  • Rebranding your offensive children's cigarette brand to "Fads."
  • The formulation of laws to follow facts revealed.
  • Food Tasters.
  • One king left and so much food to eat.
  • Why so much fiction is so obsessed with royalty.
  • Cracking a nut in your brain.
  • The moon's excellent product placement.
  • Cakes for people to jump out of.
  • How to marble a cake.
  • The butter iceberg.
  • The inside scoop behind all the drama.
  • The Sharks and the Jets snapping at each other.
  • The dude in Mad Max Fury Road playing a flaming guitar on top of a moving truck.
  • Where to see Ben's cats.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Which real life occupations are the closest thing to actual Adventuring? And would you want to do any of them?
  • Getting a tattoo has somehow motivated me to be healthier
  • It's weird that some instruments you play with your hands and others you put in your mouth
  • The Mushroom Hunters
  • Discovering how much butter and sugar is in your common or garden cake has filled me with sheer horror
  • A public call to action for the creation of Violence/Threat Jazz as a genre

Microtopics:

  • The collection of music songs that you put on the internet last year.
  • The Citizen Sleeper trailer.
  • Managing a game's Steam store page.
  • The conversations you don't have.
  • Adventuring as it is conceived of and perceived.
  • Going into the field and being exposed to health hazards.
  • Rock climbing and its relationship to speed running.
  • All the big parts of the world having been discovered already so you need to be satisfied with discovering tiny parts.
  • The difficulty of spending a lifetime rock climbing when you don't enjoy rock climbing.
  • Whether being sent off to war feels or ought to feel like an adventure.
  • Lockdown tattoos.
  • The uncle who convinced you to get an eyebrow ring.
  • Designing a tattoo so that it still looks right if the recipient suddenly gets swole.
  • The Clean and Jerk.
  • Compressing yourself inwards as you hit the ground.
  • The idea of caring about your appearance.
  • Looking in the mirror and feeling good about yourself.
  • A portion of meat that is ruining your aesthetic.
  • Your full-sleeve Gigantamax Meowth tattoo.
  • Ark from Terranigma.
  • A tattoo of a goat because you love goats a lot.
  • Putting pictures on your body and looking cool.
  • Going full body-mod in your old age.
  • A Rotom right up there in your armpit.
  • Walking around looking like a JRPG character with an asymmetrical pauldron.
  • The right torso for me.
  • Bone tattoos that are just for you because nobody can see your bones.
  • Waiting until you are 80 years old for eyeball tattoo technology to get safer.
  • Screaming higher and higher until you take a shower.
  • Airflow and handflow.
  • Licking a musical instrument that makes noise when it's wet.
  • Chromatic spittoon virtuosos.
  • Melody Pops.
  • How to survive long car trips before portable video games.
  • Lollipops you could write with.
  • Chocolate cigarettes wrapped in rice paper.
  • Rebranding your offensive children's cigarette brand to "Fads."
  • The formulation of laws to follow facts revealed.
  • Food Tasters.
  • One king left and so much food to eat.
  • Why so much fiction is so obsessed with royalty.
  • Cracking a nut in your brain.
  • The moon's excellent product placement.
  • Cakes for people to jump out of.
  • How to marble a cake.
  • The butter iceberg.
  • The inside scoop behind all the drama.
  • The Sharks and the Jets snapping at each other.
  • The dude in Mad Max Fury Road playing a flaming guitar on top of a moving truck.
  • Where to see Ben's cats.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+CO9g8fic ]]> Jim Stormdancer 141. Toast in Its Original Format https://topiclords.com/toast-in-its-original-format e0135fe2-eb2d-4fb9-be68-199e610ba0d1 Mon, 04 Jul 2022 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Avery and Jesse. We discuss Laserdisc, tracing the lineage of racehorses on Wikipedia, bread too wide to fit in toasters, "In my Dream, I am a Man," and variants of bowling, now mostly lost to history, which are like glimpses into possible worlds metaphysically close to our own. 1:06:10 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Avery
  • Jesse

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • How to sound like a douchebag if you are a programmer who lives in Oakland.
  • A Social Security Number that has way too many sixes in it.
  • A disc that is the same size as an LP but looks like a CD and has a movie on it.
  • Arcade games breaking whenever you transport them.
  • Laserdiscs rusting.
  • Integrating the likely degradation of the viewing medium into the piece itself.
  • The Matrix on Betamax.
  • The guy who owns all the Betamax players in your province.
  • The canonical paths to becoming a Laserdisc collector.
  • All the criteria used to curate the Criterion Collection.
  • The advantages and disadvantages of CAV discs over CLV.
  • Getting off the couch to flip the disc over halfway through the movie.
  • Asking your robot butler to flip the Laserdisc over.
  • Potoooooooo.
  • Seeing the name of the Wii for the first time and wondering if it's a typo for World War 2 or if it's a typo for WiFi.
  • Finding the They Live sunglasses and finally being able to read the Snickers ads.
  • The three racehorses that all thoroughbred racehorses are descended from.
  • Knowing more about the history of racehorses than about your own family tree, because racehorses are worth more than people.
  • War booty from the battle of Vienna.
  • The General Studbook.
  • Going blind in one eye from staying up for three days straight doing logarithms.
  • Bell Right Hooks and Cuban Menstrual Crisis.
  • Whether the clown face registry still exists for juggalos.
  • Nothing Sweet About Bees.
  • What happened to bread?
  • Your basic 4:3 bread vs. 4K ultra-wide bread.
  • Your favorite toaster from the 1940s.
  • A four slice toaster kind of day.
  • Making food better with science and it's going to be way better than nature because it's science.
  • Convincing Mr. Smeg not to put his name on the toasters his company manufactures.
  • What market research firm decided that podcast listeners want underwear and mattresses.
  • Constant angular velocity: the only way to rewind a movie.
  • A magnetic poetry set that includes the word "Kafkaesque."
  • How Kafkaesque the miscreant insects are.
  • Whether Jim has ever touched any other human being.
  • How Zoomers don't know about Graggle Simpson.
  • A possible scenario that is metaphysically close to our own.
  • How metaphysically close Canada is to the United States.
  • Getting up at 4pm every day and bowling.
  • A 3D model recreation of five-pin bowling.
  • The amount of data visualization competence that went into dimensions.com.
  • Candlepin and Duckpin bowling.
  • The dimensions of various famous bowlers.
  • Getting a parakeet and finding out how much water it displaces.
  • Making a flask out of a parakeet so people think you just brought your pet parakeet to work and aren't drinking on the job.
  • Buying a propane tank to use as a water bottle.
  • What's wrong with Jim's listeners?
  • Karate tournaments in the 80s and 90s.
  • Assuming Avery's identity and looking in the mirror.
  • To Mock A Mockingbird.
  • Certified Bird Mockers.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Avery
  • Jesse

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • How to sound like a douchebag if you are a programmer who lives in Oakland.
  • A Social Security Number that has way too many sixes in it.
  • A disc that is the same size as an LP but looks like a CD and has a movie on it.
  • Arcade games breaking whenever you transport them.
  • Laserdiscs rusting.
  • Integrating the likely degradation of the viewing medium into the piece itself.
  • The Matrix on Betamax.
  • The guy who owns all the Betamax players in your province.
  • The canonical paths to becoming a Laserdisc collector.
  • All the criteria used to curate the Criterion Collection.
  • The advantages and disadvantages of CAV discs over CLV.
  • Getting off the couch to flip the disc over halfway through the movie.
  • Asking your robot butler to flip the Laserdisc over.
  • Potoooooooo.
  • Seeing the name of the Wii for the first time and wondering if it's a typo for World War 2 or if it's a typo for WiFi.
  • Finding the They Live sunglasses and finally being able to read the Snickers ads.
  • The three racehorses that all thoroughbred racehorses are descended from.
  • Knowing more about the history of racehorses than about your own family tree, because racehorses are worth more than people.
  • War booty from the battle of Vienna.
  • The General Studbook.
  • Going blind in one eye from staying up for three days straight doing logarithms.
  • Bell Right Hooks and Cuban Menstrual Crisis.
  • Whether the clown face registry still exists for juggalos.
  • Nothing Sweet About Bees.
  • What happened to bread?
  • Your basic 4:3 bread vs. 4K ultra-wide bread.
  • Your favorite toaster from the 1940s.
  • A four slice toaster kind of day.
  • Making food better with science and it's going to be way better than nature because it's science.
  • Convincing Mr. Smeg not to put his name on the toasters his company manufactures.
  • What market research firm decided that podcast listeners want underwear and mattresses.
  • Constant angular velocity: the only way to rewind a movie.
  • A magnetic poetry set that includes the word "Kafkaesque."
  • How Kafkaesque the miscreant insects are.
  • Whether Jim has ever touched any other human being.
  • How Zoomers don't know about Graggle Simpson.
  • A possible scenario that is metaphysically close to our own.
  • How metaphysically close Canada is to the United States.
  • Getting up at 4pm every day and bowling.
  • A 3D model recreation of five-pin bowling.
  • The amount of data visualization competence that went into dimensions.com.
  • Candlepin and Duckpin bowling.
  • The dimensions of various famous bowlers.
  • Getting a parakeet and finding out how much water it displaces.
  • Making a flask out of a parakeet so people think you just brought your pet parakeet to work and aren't drinking on the job.
  • Buying a propane tank to use as a water bottle.
  • What's wrong with Jim's listeners?
  • Karate tournaments in the 80s and 90s.
  • Assuming Avery's identity and looking in the mirror.
  • To Mock A Mockingbird.
  • Certified Bird Mockers.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Avery
  • Jesse

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • How to sound like a douchebag if you are a programmer who lives in Oakland.
  • A Social Security Number that has way too many sixes in it.
  • A disc that is the same size as an LP but looks like a CD and has a movie on it.
  • Arcade games breaking whenever you transport them.
  • Laserdiscs rusting.
  • Integrating the likely degradation of the viewing medium into the piece itself.
  • The Matrix on Betamax.
  • The guy who owns all the Betamax players in your province.
  • The canonical paths to becoming a Laserdisc collector.
  • All the criteria used to curate the Criterion Collection.
  • The advantages and disadvantages of CAV discs over CLV.
  • Getting off the couch to flip the disc over halfway through the movie.
  • Asking your robot butler to flip the Laserdisc over.
  • Potoooooooo.
  • Seeing the name of the Wii for the first time and wondering if it's a typo for World War 2 or if it's a typo for WiFi.
  • Finding the They Live sunglasses and finally being able to read the Snickers ads.
  • The three racehorses that all thoroughbred racehorses are descended from.
  • Knowing more about the history of racehorses than about your own family tree, because racehorses are worth more than people.
  • War booty from the battle of Vienna.
  • The General Studbook.
  • Going blind in one eye from staying up for three days straight doing logarithms.
  • Bell Right Hooks and Cuban Menstrual Crisis.
  • Whether the clown face registry still exists for juggalos.
  • Nothing Sweet About Bees.
  • What happened to bread?
  • Your basic 4:3 bread vs. 4K ultra-wide bread.
  • Your favorite toaster from the 1940s.
  • A four slice toaster kind of day.
  • Making food better with science and it's going to be way better than nature because it's science.
  • Convincing Mr. Smeg not to put his name on the toasters his company manufactures.
  • What market research firm decided that podcast listeners want underwear and mattresses.
  • Constant angular velocity: the only way to rewind a movie.
  • A magnetic poetry set that includes the word "Kafkaesque."
  • How Kafkaesque the miscreant insects are.
  • Whether Jim has ever touched any other human being.
  • How Zoomers don't know about Graggle Simpson.
  • A possible scenario that is metaphysically close to our own.
  • How metaphysically close Canada is to the United States.
  • Getting up at 4pm every day and bowling.
  • A 3D model recreation of five-pin bowling.
  • The amount of data visualization competence that went into dimensions.com.
  • Candlepin and Duckpin bowling.
  • The dimensions of various famous bowlers.
  • Getting a parakeet and finding out how much water it displaces.
  • Making a flask out of a parakeet so people think you just brought your pet parakeet to work and aren't drinking on the job.
  • Buying a propane tank to use as a water bottle.
  • What's wrong with Jim's listeners?
  • Karate tournaments in the 80s and 90s.
  • Assuming Avery's identity and looking in the mirror.
  • To Mock A Mockingbird.
  • Certified Bird Mockers.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+l278Jq81 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 140. The Most Edible Petrochemical https://topiclords.com/the-most-edible-petrochemical 3244b87a-fba9-4b4e-829f-d3a8c1f1d154 Mon, 27 Jun 2022 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Kevin and John. We discuss reading the other headlines on newspapers in films that flash on screen solely for the headline, the Game Boy Camera, best Halloween candy: candy corn or pumpkin-shaped candy corn?, "Icarus" by Edward Field, and Douglas Hofstadter. 1:15:09 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The James Webb Space Telescope.
  • The thing you get the most DMs about.
  • Recording a fan's answering machine message in the Mario Frustration voice.
  • The guy who "fixed" the NES triangle wave.
  • Bandlimiting your oscillators.
  • What the real Lordheads know.
  • Another place to shitpost.
  • 3D entertainment.
  • Deku momentum problems.
  • The analog stick mod for Mario 64 DS.
  • A remaster that is in direct conversation with what it's remastering.
  • The pros and cons of Mario 64 DS.
  • Abandoned let's-plays.
  • Waterworld for the Virtual Boy.
  • Wario Ware and Rhythm Heaven.
  • How to give Nintendo money in 2022.
  • Prodigy Child Wins Every Award Given.
  • Pausing movies to read the nonsense headlines that the prop designers didn't expect you to read.
  • Pausing the movie to complain about the nonsensical Scrabble game depicted.
  • A movie about people who don't know how to play Clue.
  • A mahjongg game that is a literary microcosm of the players' lives.
  • Leaning across the couch to your girlfriend and saying "that's Chappie's chess game."
  • Playing Super Mario Bros. with the Power Glove.
  • The Steam reviews for the 8-bit wrestling game that appears for three seconds in The Wrestler.
  • The only digital camera that was under $100 in the 90s.
  • How to get images off of the Game Boy Camera.
  • Hooking together a TV, VCR, SNES, Super Game Boy and Game Boy Camera and plugging it in with a very long extension cord so you can shoot a movie outdoors.
  • An in-your-face student film about what happens when computers can detect emotion.
  • Using your Game Boy Camera as a webcam on Twitch.
  • The Game Boy Camera's music sequencer.
  • The Game Boy Camera asking ROM hackers if they are feeling ok.
  • The Gold Zelda Camera.
  • The gold Breath of the Wild cartridge that tastes like the Master Sword.
  • The Cool Cam.
  • The Lefty RX.
  • Ranking candy by its volume to surface area ratio.
  • Getting sick of candy corn naysayers.
  • Wax Lips: Ya Gotta Eat 'Em!
  • A powder that's been glued into a little puck.
  • What the American Oil and Gas Historical Society has to say about wax lips.
  • The oleaginous history of wax lips.
  • Edible dinosaur bones.
  • Bananasaurus Rex-flavored string cheese.
  • The Genius of the Hero falling to the Middling Stature of the Merely Talented.
  • Looking back on your best work and knowing you'll probably never best it but still liking your life more now.
  • A short story with extra line breaks.
  • Turning any text into a poem by resizing the window so there are extra line breaks.
  • Robert Altman's follow-up to MASH.
  • A retelling of Icarus featuring the wicked witch saying a slur.
  • What it means to be conscious.
  • Godel, Escher, Bach: I am a Strange Loop except more confusing.
  • Writing a book for the general public and having to figure out how to make your ideas fun.
  • Searching YouTube for "Crab Cannon" and only finding music for weirdos and no cannons of any kind.
  • Martin Gardner's column about math games in Scientific American.
  • Metamagical Themas.
  • Using math to do fun space stuff.
  • Stream Frasier Online Free.
  • Rubik's Cube except spelled like an asshole.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The James Webb Space Telescope.
  • The thing you get the most DMs about.
  • Recording a fan's answering machine message in the Mario Frustration voice.
  • The guy who "fixed" the NES triangle wave.
  • Bandlimiting your oscillators.
  • What the real Lordheads know.
  • Another place to shitpost.
  • 3D entertainment.
  • Deku momentum problems.
  • The analog stick mod for Mario 64 DS.
  • A remaster that is in direct conversation with what it's remastering.
  • The pros and cons of Mario 64 DS.
  • Abandoned let's-plays.
  • Waterworld for the Virtual Boy.
  • Wario Ware and Rhythm Heaven.
  • How to give Nintendo money in 2022.
  • Prodigy Child Wins Every Award Given.
  • Pausing movies to read the nonsense headlines that the prop designers didn't expect you to read.
  • Pausing the movie to complain about the nonsensical Scrabble game depicted.
  • A movie about people who don't know how to play Clue.
  • A mahjongg game that is a literary microcosm of the players' lives.
  • Leaning across the couch to your girlfriend and saying "that's Chappie's chess game."
  • Playing Super Mario Bros. with the Power Glove.
  • The Steam reviews for the 8-bit wrestling game that appears for three seconds in The Wrestler.
  • The only digital camera that was under $100 in the 90s.
  • How to get images off of the Game Boy Camera.
  • Hooking together a TV, VCR, SNES, Super Game Boy and Game Boy Camera and plugging it in with a very long extension cord so you can shoot a movie outdoors.
  • An in-your-face student film about what happens when computers can detect emotion.
  • Using your Game Boy Camera as a webcam on Twitch.
  • The Game Boy Camera's music sequencer.
  • The Game Boy Camera asking ROM hackers if they are feeling ok.
  • The Gold Zelda Camera.
  • The gold Breath of the Wild cartridge that tastes like the Master Sword.
  • The Cool Cam.
  • The Lefty RX.
  • Ranking candy by its volume to surface area ratio.
  • Getting sick of candy corn naysayers.
  • Wax Lips: Ya Gotta Eat 'Em!
  • A powder that's been glued into a little puck.
  • What the American Oil and Gas Historical Society has to say about wax lips.
  • The oleaginous history of wax lips.
  • Edible dinosaur bones.
  • Bananasaurus Rex-flavored string cheese.
  • The Genius of the Hero falling to the Middling Stature of the Merely Talented.
  • Looking back on your best work and knowing you'll probably never best it but still liking your life more now.
  • A short story with extra line breaks.
  • Turning any text into a poem by resizing the window so there are extra line breaks.
  • Robert Altman's follow-up to MASH.
  • A retelling of Icarus featuring the wicked witch saying a slur.
  • What it means to be conscious.
  • Godel, Escher, Bach: I am a Strange Loop except more confusing.
  • Writing a book for the general public and having to figure out how to make your ideas fun.
  • Searching YouTube for "Crab Cannon" and only finding music for weirdos and no cannons of any kind.
  • Martin Gardner's column about math games in Scientific American.
  • Metamagical Themas.
  • Using math to do fun space stuff.
  • Stream Frasier Online Free.
  • Rubik's Cube except spelled like an asshole.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The James Webb Space Telescope.
  • The thing you get the most DMs about.
  • Recording a fan's answering machine message in the Mario Frustration voice.
  • The guy who "fixed" the NES triangle wave.
  • Bandlimiting your oscillators.
  • What the real Lordheads know.
  • Another place to shitpost.
  • 3D entertainment.
  • Deku momentum problems.
  • The analog stick mod for Mario 64 DS.
  • A remaster that is in direct conversation with what it's remastering.
  • The pros and cons of Mario 64 DS.
  • Abandoned let's-plays.
  • Waterworld for the Virtual Boy.
  • Wario Ware and Rhythm Heaven.
  • How to give Nintendo money in 2022.
  • Prodigy Child Wins Every Award Given.
  • Pausing movies to read the nonsense headlines that the prop designers didn't expect you to read.
  • Pausing the movie to complain about the nonsensical Scrabble game depicted.
  • A movie about people who don't know how to play Clue.
  • A mahjongg game that is a literary microcosm of the players' lives.
  • Leaning across the couch to your girlfriend and saying "that's Chappie's chess game."
  • Playing Super Mario Bros. with the Power Glove.
  • The Steam reviews for the 8-bit wrestling game that appears for three seconds in The Wrestler.
  • The only digital camera that was under $100 in the 90s.
  • How to get images off of the Game Boy Camera.
  • Hooking together a TV, VCR, SNES, Super Game Boy and Game Boy Camera and plugging it in with a very long extension cord so you can shoot a movie outdoors.
  • An in-your-face student film about what happens when computers can detect emotion.
  • Using your Game Boy Camera as a webcam on Twitch.
  • The Game Boy Camera's music sequencer.
  • The Game Boy Camera asking ROM hackers if they are feeling ok.
  • The Gold Zelda Camera.
  • The gold Breath of the Wild cartridge that tastes like the Master Sword.
  • The Cool Cam.
  • The Lefty RX.
  • Ranking candy by its volume to surface area ratio.
  • Getting sick of candy corn naysayers.
  • Wax Lips: Ya Gotta Eat 'Em!
  • A powder that's been glued into a little puck.
  • What the American Oil and Gas Historical Society has to say about wax lips.
  • The oleaginous history of wax lips.
  • Edible dinosaur bones.
  • Bananasaurus Rex-flavored string cheese.
  • The Genius of the Hero falling to the Middling Stature of the Merely Talented.
  • Looking back on your best work and knowing you'll probably never best it but still liking your life more now.
  • A short story with extra line breaks.
  • Turning any text into a poem by resizing the window so there are extra line breaks.
  • Robert Altman's follow-up to MASH.
  • A retelling of Icarus featuring the wicked witch saying a slur.
  • What it means to be conscious.
  • Godel, Escher, Bach: I am a Strange Loop except more confusing.
  • Writing a book for the general public and having to figure out how to make your ideas fun.
  • Searching YouTube for "Crab Cannon" and only finding music for weirdos and no cannons of any kind.
  • Martin Gardner's column about math games in Scientific American.
  • Metamagical Themas.
  • Using math to do fun space stuff.
  • Stream Frasier Online Free.
  • Rubik's Cube except spelled like an asshole.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+ZXVzNSZ9 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 139. She Died as a Space Racist https://topiclords.com/she-died-as-a-space-racist 4c539ebf-ac44-4504-b9cb-80d55ed26c7d Mon, 20 Jun 2022 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Dan and Shepard. We discuss playing narrative games exactly once, when life is like an adventure game, Sleng Teng Riddim, Tyger! Tyger!, going to college on the internet, beating your dad at scrabble finally, and traffic jams. 58:36 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Wanting to see all the stuff.
  • Replaying a series of four RPG length games to see the alternate endings.
  • Getting the most video game endings for your dollar.
  • Tenable and untenable ways to have an adventure.
  • Recapturing the magic of your first time (with emulators).
  • Getting every video game you wanted for a system and then enjoying that for 10 minutes.
  • A giant archive of every DOS game ever.
  • Losing your nostalgia for old games via emulation, but keeping your nostalgia for the box art.
  • Falling out of love with Windows Vista.
  • Keeping your custard pie intact until the yeti needs it.
  • The bread maker approach to learning a new skill.
  • Why there are no cupcakes in Frog Fractions 2.
  • Playing Go against someone better than you and suddenly losing.
  • The Go community rallying around the identity that computers can't beat the best Go players.
  • Whether computer Go has shaped the way humans play Go.
  • An extra creative extra special humany thing.
  • Beating a chess expert by convincing them to play something else.
  • John Henry's retirement plan.
  • Being promised a Yamaha DX7 but receiving a Casio MT-40 instead.
  • Writing a part for a rock and roll rhythm section that is accidentally a great reggae rhythm section.
  • The origins of the Amen Break.
  • Setting up a situation where you can write your own notes.
  • Figuring out where the genre can go with this new tonality.
  • Stripy guys and chonky units.
  • The best kind of tigers. (Floofers.)
  • Learning about slant rhymes one morning and that afternoon writing a poem that rhymes "eye" with "symmetry."
  • Blake hearing about the Great Vowel Shift from his grandpa and deciding that that would be a great way to make Tyger! Tyger! sound old timey.
  • Googling why Blake tried to rhyme "eye" with "symmetry" and finding dozens of implausible theories, all expressed with complete confidence.
  • Making an impression on the world of poetry by not being good at it.
  • Hipster throwbacks to the great vowel shift.
  • Calvin and Hobbes panoply of tiger poems.
  • Holding off on reading more Calvin and Hobbes tiger poems until you’re done recording the podcast.
  • Not letting online schooling get in the way of your online education.
  • Whether someone will figure out how to do a college class online before we transition back to in-person classes.
  • Whether ASL is especially well suited to bring taught over Zoom.
  • Doing yard work and wearing protective equipment so you can't pull out your phone to check Twitter.
  • Lying down in court.
  • Realizing for the first time that your parents don't know everything.
  • A framed photo of the one time your mom won at Risk.
  • The one thing you and your dad are both interested in.
  • Sports montage of getting better at Scrabble.
  • Driving or better yet watching movies with cars in them.
  • Everybody slowing down to take a look at the two headed chicken.
  • Driving towards a shadow and being blinded by the sun to what's beyond the shadow.
  • A time loop where the car in front of you slows down for no reason and then you slow down for a good reason but the car behind you thinks you're slowing down for no reason.
  • A car driving on a road.
  • Stacking a bunch of human reaction speeds on top of each other.
  • Slot cars as a fun and disastrous solution to traffic.
  • The slot car model of public transit.
  • Finding everybody on the Discord.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Wanting to see all the stuff.
  • Replaying a series of four RPG length games to see the alternate endings.
  • Getting the most video game endings for your dollar.
  • Tenable and untenable ways to have an adventure.
  • Recapturing the magic of your first time (with emulators).
  • Getting every video game you wanted for a system and then enjoying that for 10 minutes.
  • A giant archive of every DOS game ever.
  • Losing your nostalgia for old games via emulation, but keeping your nostalgia for the box art.
  • Falling out of love with Windows Vista.
  • Keeping your custard pie intact until the yeti needs it.
  • The bread maker approach to learning a new skill.
  • Why there are no cupcakes in Frog Fractions 2.
  • Playing Go against someone better than you and suddenly losing.
  • The Go community rallying around the identity that computers can't beat the best Go players.
  • Whether computer Go has shaped the way humans play Go.
  • An extra creative extra special humany thing.
  • Beating a chess expert by convincing them to play something else.
  • John Henry's retirement plan.
  • Being promised a Yamaha DX7 but receiving a Casio MT-40 instead.
  • Writing a part for a rock and roll rhythm section that is accidentally a great reggae rhythm section.
  • The origins of the Amen Break.
  • Setting up a situation where you can write your own notes.
  • Figuring out where the genre can go with this new tonality.
  • Stripy guys and chonky units.
  • The best kind of tigers. (Floofers.)
  • Learning about slant rhymes one morning and that afternoon writing a poem that rhymes "eye" with "symmetry."
  • Blake hearing about the Great Vowel Shift from his grandpa and deciding that that would be a great way to make Tyger! Tyger! sound old timey.
  • Googling why Blake tried to rhyme "eye" with "symmetry" and finding dozens of implausible theories, all expressed with complete confidence.
  • Making an impression on the world of poetry by not being good at it.
  • Hipster throwbacks to the great vowel shift.
  • Calvin and Hobbes panoply of tiger poems.
  • Holding off on reading more Calvin and Hobbes tiger poems until you’re done recording the podcast.
  • Not letting online schooling get in the way of your online education.
  • Whether someone will figure out how to do a college class online before we transition back to in-person classes.
  • Whether ASL is especially well suited to bring taught over Zoom.
  • Doing yard work and wearing protective equipment so you can't pull out your phone to check Twitter.
  • Lying down in court.
  • Realizing for the first time that your parents don't know everything.
  • A framed photo of the one time your mom won at Risk.
  • The one thing you and your dad are both interested in.
  • Sports montage of getting better at Scrabble.
  • Driving or better yet watching movies with cars in them.
  • Everybody slowing down to take a look at the two headed chicken.
  • Driving towards a shadow and being blinded by the sun to what's beyond the shadow.
  • A time loop where the car in front of you slows down for no reason and then you slow down for a good reason but the car behind you thinks you're slowing down for no reason.
  • A car driving on a road.
  • Stacking a bunch of human reaction speeds on top of each other.
  • Slot cars as a fun and disastrous solution to traffic.
  • The slot car model of public transit.
  • Finding everybody on the Discord.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Wanting to see all the stuff.
  • Replaying a series of four RPG length games to see the alternate endings.
  • Getting the most video game endings for your dollar.
  • Tenable and untenable ways to have an adventure.
  • Recapturing the magic of your first time (with emulators).
  • Getting every video game you wanted for a system and then enjoying that for 10 minutes.
  • A giant archive of every DOS game ever.
  • Losing your nostalgia for old games via emulation, but keeping your nostalgia for the box art.
  • Falling out of love with Windows Vista.
  • Keeping your custard pie intact until the yeti needs it.
  • The bread maker approach to learning a new skill.
  • Why there are no cupcakes in Frog Fractions 2.
  • Playing Go against someone better than you and suddenly losing.
  • The Go community rallying around the identity that computers can't beat the best Go players.
  • Whether computer Go has shaped the way humans play Go.
  • An extra creative extra special humany thing.
  • Beating a chess expert by convincing them to play something else.
  • John Henry's retirement plan.
  • Being promised a Yamaha DX7 but receiving a Casio MT-40 instead.
  • Writing a part for a rock and roll rhythm section that is accidentally a great reggae rhythm section.
  • The origins of the Amen Break.
  • Setting up a situation where you can write your own notes.
  • Figuring out where the genre can go with this new tonality.
  • Stripy guys and chonky units.
  • The best kind of tigers. (Floofers.)
  • Learning about slant rhymes one morning and that afternoon writing a poem that rhymes "eye" with "symmetry."
  • Blake hearing about the Great Vowel Shift from his grandpa and deciding that that would be a great way to make Tyger! Tyger! sound old timey.
  • Googling why Blake tried to rhyme "eye" with "symmetry" and finding dozens of implausible theories, all expressed with complete confidence.
  • Making an impression on the world of poetry by not being good at it.
  • Hipster throwbacks to the great vowel shift.
  • Calvin and Hobbes panoply of tiger poems.
  • Holding off on reading more Calvin and Hobbes tiger poems until you’re done recording the podcast.
  • Not letting online schooling get in the way of your online education.
  • Whether someone will figure out how to do a college class online before we transition back to in-person classes.
  • Whether ASL is especially well suited to bring taught over Zoom.
  • Doing yard work and wearing protective equipment so you can't pull out your phone to check Twitter.
  • Lying down in court.
  • Realizing for the first time that your parents don't know everything.
  • A framed photo of the one time your mom won at Risk.
  • The one thing you and your dad are both interested in.
  • Sports montage of getting better at Scrabble.
  • Driving or better yet watching movies with cars in them.
  • Everybody slowing down to take a look at the two headed chicken.
  • Driving towards a shadow and being blinded by the sun to what's beyond the shadow.
  • A time loop where the car in front of you slows down for no reason and then you slow down for a good reason but the car behind you thinks you're slowing down for no reason.
  • A car driving on a road.
  • Stacking a bunch of human reaction speeds on top of each other.
  • Slot cars as a fun and disastrous solution to traffic.
  • The slot car model of public transit.
  • Finding everybody on the Discord.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+8guthXL2 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 138. From Infracheddar to Ultrableu https://topiclords.com/from-infracheddar-to-ultrableu 60234a09-43a4-43c6-9858-0b71e77e857f Mon, 13 Jun 2022 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Elena and Alexander. We discuss hosting a party vs. going to the party, the Pearl Jam Liner Notes method of writing first drafts, Lagrange Point Lasagna, Ode on the Longitude, the theory of spontaneous generation, Sunday Roasts, and diagnosing Jim's tongue. 1:00:44 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Unfindable Lords.
  • The Constant: a History of Getting Things Wrong.
  • Continuous vs. discontinuous weighted blankets.
  • People asking you about your life so you have to give them all the necessary context on your life so they'll understand.
  • A masquerade ball where you receive a quest to find someone wearing a dog mask and talk to them about topology.
  • The smallest of talk.
  • A continuous unplanned unstructured talking with each other that you expect to just happen by itself.
  • Bringing a cheeseboard to a party so you can go sort it whenever the conversation gets awkward
  • Sorting the cheeseboard from sharp to mild and then sorting the cheese by color but nobody at the party is allowed to actually eat any.
  • From Infracheddar to Ultrableu.
  • A sorting algorithm gaining intelligence and trying to understand itself.
  • Teaching your friends sign language so they'll be quieter at parties.
  • The weirdness of reading aloud.
  • Writing while talking.
  • A species of alien that can follow two conversations at once.
  • Balancing the complexity of your word choices so your sentence flows nicely.
  • Writing the most important word of each sentence first and then going back and filling in the rest of the sentence.
  • Worrying about commas later.
  • Taking so long to implement the core of your idea that you've forgotten the details.
  • How to bake brownies that are all edge pieces.
  • How to bake brownies that's all center pieces.
  • Sous vide brownies.
  • People who only like the center of the falafel.
  • The perfect solution for the person who prefers the grossest part of the brownie.
  • Opening a portal to the lasagna dimension and scooping some out and feeling safe because there's no e. coli in the lasagna dimension, just lasagna.
  • Tectonic plates in the lasagna dimension.
  • Subduction lasagna.
  • The asteroid equivalent of brownie soup.
  • Forming trade alliances with the people who live in the air pockets of the lasagna dimension.
  • Lasagna creationists.
  • The Earth is a rock lasagna.
  • Whether lasagna or baked ziti is more likely to be naturally occurring.
  • Bepst and besht.
  • A long-standing problem in navigation.
  • Figuring out how to determine longitude in the Age of Navigation.
  • Getting kicked out of Cambridge because you don't accept the Trinity.
  • Firing a cannon at noon so everyone knows what time it is.
  • Such explosive ships, in such known locations.
  • A new method for discovering longitude both at sea and land, humbly proposed for the consideration of the public.
  • The Jewish Space Lasers of the 1700s.
  • The sense in which GPS is extremely loud.
  • Putting a log on the fire and salamanders come out.
  • The riddle where to understand the answer you have to know that bees come from lion carcasses.
  • How earth used to have enough energy to spawn humans out of clay but now it only has enough juice left to make bugs and snails.
  • A recipe for scorpions.
  • The Tragedy of the Sunday Roast.
  • The St. Tuppensday Brouhaha.
  • Million Shilling Idea: serving Sunday Roast all week.
  • Victorian orphans mining for Bitcoin (or "bittums") out on the Playa.
  • Eating a Yorkshire pudding at a Lagrange point and sopping up gravy from the gravy dimension.
  • Via Gravia.
  • Nega-scurvy, where you eat too much fruit and grow extra teeth.
  • The Yes Ship of Theseus.
  • That time the Zombies broke up and then had a hit record and then fake Zombies started touring the US until someone from the real band noticed.
  • The Caramelldansen saga.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Unfindable Lords.
  • The Constant: a History of Getting Things Wrong.
  • Continuous vs. discontinuous weighted blankets.
  • People asking you about your life so you have to give them all the necessary context on your life so they'll understand.
  • A masquerade ball where you receive a quest to find someone wearing a dog mask and talk to them about topology.
  • The smallest of talk.
  • A continuous unplanned unstructured talking with each other that you expect to just happen by itself.
  • Bringing a cheeseboard to a party so you can go sort it whenever the conversation gets awkward
  • Sorting the cheeseboard from sharp to mild and then sorting the cheese by color but nobody at the party is allowed to actually eat any.
  • From Infracheddar to Ultrableu.
  • A sorting algorithm gaining intelligence and trying to understand itself.
  • Teaching your friends sign language so they'll be quieter at parties.
  • The weirdness of reading aloud.
  • Writing while talking.
  • A species of alien that can follow two conversations at once.
  • Balancing the complexity of your word choices so your sentence flows nicely.
  • Writing the most important word of each sentence first and then going back and filling in the rest of the sentence.
  • Worrying about commas later.
  • Taking so long to implement the core of your idea that you've forgotten the details.
  • How to bake brownies that are all edge pieces.
  • How to bake brownies that's all center pieces.
  • Sous vide brownies.
  • People who only like the center of the falafel.
  • The perfect solution for the person who prefers the grossest part of the brownie.
  • Opening a portal to the lasagna dimension and scooping some out and feeling safe because there's no e. coli in the lasagna dimension, just lasagna.
  • Tectonic plates in the lasagna dimension.
  • Subduction lasagna.
  • The asteroid equivalent of brownie soup.
  • Forming trade alliances with the people who live in the air pockets of the lasagna dimension.
  • Lasagna creationists.
  • The Earth is a rock lasagna.
  • Whether lasagna or baked ziti is more likely to be naturally occurring.
  • Bepst and besht.
  • A long-standing problem in navigation.
  • Figuring out how to determine longitude in the Age of Navigation.
  • Getting kicked out of Cambridge because you don't accept the Trinity.
  • Firing a cannon at noon so everyone knows what time it is.
  • Such explosive ships, in such known locations.
  • A new method for discovering longitude both at sea and land, humbly proposed for the consideration of the public.
  • The Jewish Space Lasers of the 1700s.
  • The sense in which GPS is extremely loud.
  • Putting a log on the fire and salamanders come out.
  • The riddle where to understand the answer you have to know that bees come from lion carcasses.
  • How earth used to have enough energy to spawn humans out of clay but now it only has enough juice left to make bugs and snails.
  • A recipe for scorpions.
  • The Tragedy of the Sunday Roast.
  • The St. Tuppensday Brouhaha.
  • Million Shilling Idea: serving Sunday Roast all week.
  • Victorian orphans mining for Bitcoin (or "bittums") out on the Playa.
  • Eating a Yorkshire pudding at a Lagrange point and sopping up gravy from the gravy dimension.
  • Via Gravia.
  • Nega-scurvy, where you eat too much fruit and grow extra teeth.
  • The Yes Ship of Theseus.
  • That time the Zombies broke up and then had a hit record and then fake Zombies started touring the US until someone from the real band noticed.
  • The Caramelldansen saga.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Unfindable Lords.
  • The Constant: a History of Getting Things Wrong.
  • Continuous vs. discontinuous weighted blankets.
  • People asking you about your life so you have to give them all the necessary context on your life so they'll understand.
  • A masquerade ball where you receive a quest to find someone wearing a dog mask and talk to them about topology.
  • The smallest of talk.
  • A continuous unplanned unstructured talking with each other that you expect to just happen by itself.
  • Bringing a cheeseboard to a party so you can go sort it whenever the conversation gets awkward
  • Sorting the cheeseboard from sharp to mild and then sorting the cheese by color but nobody at the party is allowed to actually eat any.
  • From Infracheddar to Ultrableu.
  • A sorting algorithm gaining intelligence and trying to understand itself.
  • Teaching your friends sign language so they'll be quieter at parties.
  • The weirdness of reading aloud.
  • Writing while talking.
  • A species of alien that can follow two conversations at once.
  • Balancing the complexity of your word choices so your sentence flows nicely.
  • Writing the most important word of each sentence first and then going back and filling in the rest of the sentence.
  • Worrying about commas later.
  • Taking so long to implement the core of your idea that you've forgotten the details.
  • How to bake brownies that are all edge pieces.
  • How to bake brownies that's all center pieces.
  • Sous vide brownies.
  • People who only like the center of the falafel.
  • The perfect solution for the person who prefers the grossest part of the brownie.
  • Opening a portal to the lasagna dimension and scooping some out and feeling safe because there's no e. coli in the lasagna dimension, just lasagna.
  • Tectonic plates in the lasagna dimension.
  • Subduction lasagna.
  • The asteroid equivalent of brownie soup.
  • Forming trade alliances with the people who live in the air pockets of the lasagna dimension.
  • Lasagna creationists.
  • The Earth is a rock lasagna.
  • Whether lasagna or baked ziti is more likely to be naturally occurring.
  • Bepst and besht.
  • A long-standing problem in navigation.
  • Figuring out how to determine longitude in the Age of Navigation.
  • Getting kicked out of Cambridge because you don't accept the Trinity.
  • Firing a cannon at noon so everyone knows what time it is.
  • Such explosive ships, in such known locations.
  • A new method for discovering longitude both at sea and land, humbly proposed for the consideration of the public.
  • The Jewish Space Lasers of the 1700s.
  • The sense in which GPS is extremely loud.
  • Putting a log on the fire and salamanders come out.
  • The riddle where to understand the answer you have to know that bees come from lion carcasses.
  • How earth used to have enough energy to spawn humans out of clay but now it only has enough juice left to make bugs and snails.
  • A recipe for scorpions.
  • The Tragedy of the Sunday Roast.
  • The St. Tuppensday Brouhaha.
  • Million Shilling Idea: serving Sunday Roast all week.
  • Victorian orphans mining for Bitcoin (or "bittums") out on the Playa.
  • Eating a Yorkshire pudding at a Lagrange point and sopping up gravy from the gravy dimension.
  • Via Gravia.
  • Nega-scurvy, where you eat too much fruit and grow extra teeth.
  • The Yes Ship of Theseus.
  • That time the Zombies broke up and then had a hit record and then fake Zombies started touring the US until someone from the real band noticed.
  • The Caramelldansen saga.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+X4y4LYTP ]]> Jim Stormdancer 137. Burying the Machete (So Nobody Can Open the Coconuts) https://topiclords.com/burying-the-machete-so-nobody-can-open-the-coconuts f5ee9ffd-0c2c-4a91-b395-9dce8e4b3f1a Mon, 06 Jun 2022 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: John and April. We discuss playing GTA V in lieu of hiking in California, embroidery, jokes that 3-year-olds tell, Moondrop's Tale, Survivor, and why Twitter keeps recommending Russell Crowe. 1:16:03 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Return of the Beast Lord.
  • Whether the Beast Lord fucks around.
  • The Beets Lord.
  • Hearing clapping and encouragement and assuming it's for you.
  • Being a tourist in a video game.
  • Riding a quad bike up Mt. Chiliad.
  • Getting past the first mission where you need to do violence to a lot of people so you can peacefully explore Los Santos.
  • Driving down the highway at night and taking a random turnoff into the wilderness and going on a hike in the moonlight.
  • The Grand Theft Auto V Not Hurting Anybody Challenge.
  • Taking a self-guided tour of the Bay Area in Watch Dogs 2.
  • A Short Hike mod for GTA V.
  • A needle art or craft.
  • Art vs. Craft.
  • What is the Citizen Kane of needlepoint? When will we see the first needle that can make you cry?
  • A piece of physical media that you look at.
  • Physically doing the thing to make it look like the image you have in your head.
  • An art form that has been around for as long as thread.
  • The joy of buying art supplies.
  • The anxiety relief of various stitches.
  • A boy who contains multitudes.
  • Getting dad a sidewalk for his birthday.
  • Cross-stitch route planning.
  • Marking notable locations in red.
  • The only way out. (Through.)
  • A three year old who wants to do something but delays as much as he can anyway.
  • A three year old who is just like adults except with way less impulse control.
  • A work in frogress.
  • The tale of druid Moondrop Honeysuckle.
  • A disembodied voice telling you to call it "granny."
  • The ancient place beyond the dead star in the Ultraviolet City.
  • Going into a random bar and hearing a poem about your mom.
  • Granny the Mind Flayer.
  • Falling sideways through reality and having to fight the big boss.
  • Recording season 42 of Survivor over Zoom.
  • The evolution of Survivor meta.
  • Finding a clue in the crook of a tree.
  • Throwing the flint into the ocean.
  • The gif of the two women gasping and the dude behind them smiling.
  • The Ashby Brewery Twitter account.
  • Why the algorithm thinks you care about Ratchet and Clank.
  • How to make Twitter livable on PC vs. on your phone.
  • The work every internet user puts into not being shown the stuff they don't want to see.
  • Mark Zuckerberg pointing at his mugger and shouting "See less of this! I'd like to see less of this!"
  • Eating the rich and having to worry about biomagnification.
  • Mr. Beer.
  • The Ashby Brewery and Video Game Studio.
  • All the Brews That's Fit to Print.
  • The Ashby Brewery and Video Game Studio quarterly brewsletter.
  • Being the bee man.
  • Not using Twitter in a while and Twitter emails you about what Russell Crowe is doing lately.
  • Extensively DMing Russell Crowe and then blocking Russell Crowe and then forgetting that either thing happened.
  • Why they call him John Mystery.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Return of the Beast Lord.
  • Whether the Beast Lord fucks around.
  • The Beets Lord.
  • Hearing clapping and encouragement and assuming it's for you.
  • Being a tourist in a video game.
  • Riding a quad bike up Mt. Chiliad.
  • Getting past the first mission where you need to do violence to a lot of people so you can peacefully explore Los Santos.
  • Driving down the highway at night and taking a random turnoff into the wilderness and going on a hike in the moonlight.
  • The Grand Theft Auto V Not Hurting Anybody Challenge.
  • Taking a self-guided tour of the Bay Area in Watch Dogs 2.
  • A Short Hike mod for GTA V.
  • A needle art or craft.
  • Art vs. Craft.
  • What is the Citizen Kane of needlepoint? When will we see the first needle that can make you cry?
  • A piece of physical media that you look at.
  • Physically doing the thing to make it look like the image you have in your head.
  • An art form that has been around for as long as thread.
  • The joy of buying art supplies.
  • The anxiety relief of various stitches.
  • A boy who contains multitudes.
  • Getting dad a sidewalk for his birthday.
  • Cross-stitch route planning.
  • Marking notable locations in red.
  • The only way out. (Through.)
  • A three year old who wants to do something but delays as much as he can anyway.
  • A three year old who is just like adults except with way less impulse control.
  • A work in frogress.
  • The tale of druid Moondrop Honeysuckle.
  • A disembodied voice telling you to call it "granny."
  • The ancient place beyond the dead star in the Ultraviolet City.
  • Going into a random bar and hearing a poem about your mom.
  • Granny the Mind Flayer.
  • Falling sideways through reality and having to fight the big boss.
  • Recording season 42 of Survivor over Zoom.
  • The evolution of Survivor meta.
  • Finding a clue in the crook of a tree.
  • Throwing the flint into the ocean.
  • The gif of the two women gasping and the dude behind them smiling.
  • The Ashby Brewery Twitter account.
  • Why the algorithm thinks you care about Ratchet and Clank.
  • How to make Twitter livable on PC vs. on your phone.
  • The work every internet user puts into not being shown the stuff they don't want to see.
  • Mark Zuckerberg pointing at his mugger and shouting "See less of this! I'd like to see less of this!"
  • Eating the rich and having to worry about biomagnification.
  • Mr. Beer.
  • The Ashby Brewery and Video Game Studio.
  • All the Brews That's Fit to Print.
  • The Ashby Brewery and Video Game Studio quarterly brewsletter.
  • Being the bee man.
  • Not using Twitter in a while and Twitter emails you about what Russell Crowe is doing lately.
  • Extensively DMing Russell Crowe and then blocking Russell Crowe and then forgetting that either thing happened.
  • Why they call him John Mystery.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Return of the Beast Lord.
  • Whether the Beast Lord fucks around.
  • The Beets Lord.
  • Hearing clapping and encouragement and assuming it's for you.
  • Being a tourist in a video game.
  • Riding a quad bike up Mt. Chiliad.
  • Getting past the first mission where you need to do violence to a lot of people so you can peacefully explore Los Santos.
  • Driving down the highway at night and taking a random turnoff into the wilderness and going on a hike in the moonlight.
  • The Grand Theft Auto V Not Hurting Anybody Challenge.
  • Taking a self-guided tour of the Bay Area in Watch Dogs 2.
  • A Short Hike mod for GTA V.
  • A needle art or craft.
  • Art vs. Craft.
  • What is the Citizen Kane of needlepoint? When will we see the first needle that can make you cry?
  • A piece of physical media that you look at.
  • Physically doing the thing to make it look like the image you have in your head.
  • An art form that has been around for as long as thread.
  • The joy of buying art supplies.
  • The anxiety relief of various stitches.
  • A boy who contains multitudes.
  • Getting dad a sidewalk for his birthday.
  • Cross-stitch route planning.
  • Marking notable locations in red.
  • The only way out. (Through.)
  • A three year old who wants to do something but delays as much as he can anyway.
  • A three year old who is just like adults except with way less impulse control.
  • A work in frogress.
  • The tale of druid Moondrop Honeysuckle.
  • A disembodied voice telling you to call it "granny."
  • The ancient place beyond the dead star in the Ultraviolet City.
  • Going into a random bar and hearing a poem about your mom.
  • Granny the Mind Flayer.
  • Falling sideways through reality and having to fight the big boss.
  • Recording season 42 of Survivor over Zoom.
  • The evolution of Survivor meta.
  • Finding a clue in the crook of a tree.
  • Throwing the flint into the ocean.
  • The gif of the two women gasping and the dude behind them smiling.
  • The Ashby Brewery Twitter account.
  • Why the algorithm thinks you care about Ratchet and Clank.
  • How to make Twitter livable on PC vs. on your phone.
  • The work every internet user puts into not being shown the stuff they don't want to see.
  • Mark Zuckerberg pointing at his mugger and shouting "See less of this! I'd like to see less of this!"
  • Eating the rich and having to worry about biomagnification.
  • Mr. Beer.
  • The Ashby Brewery and Video Game Studio.
  • All the Brews That's Fit to Print.
  • The Ashby Brewery and Video Game Studio quarterly brewsletter.
  • Being the bee man.
  • Not using Twitter in a while and Twitter emails you about what Russell Crowe is doing lately.
  • Extensively DMing Russell Crowe and then blocking Russell Crowe and then forgetting that either thing happened.
  • Why they call him John Mystery.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+xTj_6S3a ]]> Jim Stormdancer 136. Thanks for Inventing Dengue Fever, Mark Rosewater https://topiclords.com/thanks-for-inventing-dengue-fever-mark-rosewater 29da53b4-9d51-418f-8033-9ed3d3f3825d Mon, 30 May 2022 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Erica and Jenni. We discuss the Talenti Cup System, decentralizing social media, what 3-year-olds know about peeing in the woods, Mark Rosewater-designed devil fruits, and decarbonizing the language. 1:03:25 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Erica plugs increasing optional mask compliance by farting
  • Jenni plugs birds
  • Jim plugs metaplugs repeating plugs

Topics:

  • The System, and by extension, The Talenti Cup System
  • Decentralizing social media is gonna be real good for people not yelling at each other & kinda bad for sharing specialized information
  • We just taught Winston about "peeing in the woods" when we were going on a hike and now he wants to "pee in the woods" everywhere
  • Mark Rosewater designed devil fruits
  • Esper says: "As a longtime (since 1999, with only one substantial break) Magic: the Gathering player, it does my heart good to hear Mark Rosewater come up. His GDC talk about lessons he's learned in designing games is really sharp stuff (if a little 101 in places), check it out sometime."
  • Decarbonizing the language

Microtopics:

  • Meta-plugging repeating plugs.
  • Bee Movie but it’s text to speech.
  • Increasing optional mask compliance by farting.
  • Mass: the volume of gas inside you, and how to increase its compliance.
  • A meme that people teach to each other.
  • Packing a shoe into a box and opening up a big box of mold years later.
  • Categories of things that fit into one-pint gelato cups.
  • The Body Box.
  • How to make itinerant lifestyles bearable and possible.
  • Organizing your entire house into the House Box.
  • Using your Dunbar number to keep track of your house plants.
  • Getting on Topic Lords by searching "pineapple on pizza"
  • Social media platforms that are owned by a rich asshole.
  • Drastically improving productivity in the workplace by banning the email forwarding of news articles.
  • The overwhelming feeling of shame when you don't have a take on the latest discourse.
  • Going on Tori Amos AOL chat to talk to your social group.
  • Buddha's list of 89 things that make you angry.
  • We've invented a new way to be angry.
  • Repeating topics because you've forgotten what you were just talking about.
  • Peeing in the laundry closet and calling it peeing in the woods.
  • Explaining to a three year old when it's ok and when it's not ok to pee outside.
  • Pee-ka-boo.
  • Everything sucks and I have no control over anything but I can poop in the front yard.
  • Taking increasingly larger shits in Richard Kind's cat box.
  • How George Clooney gets away with poop modification.
  • Taking increasingly larger shits in the Li-Cor machine that measures leaf respiration.
  • Whether playing Tom Jones at work constitutes sexual harassment.
  • Tom Jones in his leisure suit.
  • Cleaning up the lyrics to make rock and roll palatable to white people but leaving in the line about the "one-eyed cat peepin' in a seafood store."
  • Whether it's still sexual harassment if nobody points out that it's sexual harassment.
  • Jocund company.
  • Telling the story of the time you saw a bunch of daffodils.
  • Seeing a bunch of daffodils and shouting "Fuck! These fucking flowers are fucking pretty as shit!"
  • Conceiving of yourself as an indoor person, separate from the outdoors.
  • Reading a Japanese dictionary of dirty words and saying "Fuck! These fucking dirty words are fucking good as shit!"
  • Conceiving of interior spaces as being one with exterior spaced.
  • You can't unpee the bush.
  • Finding and eating devil fruits.
  • Eating the fruit that lets you talk to dragons when dragons don't exist.
  • Seeing a gun dog and assuming that it was a dog that ate a gun fruit but actually it was a gun that ate a dog fruit.
  • What happens if you eat a second devil fruit.
  • Dengue fever creeping up into Texas from Mexico.
  • The best place to contract Dengue Fever.
  • Burning the candle at both ends of the day.
  • Eating the burrito from both ends.
  • Harvesting the bioluminescent fungus.
  • Turbines on a windless morn.
  • Burning solar panels as a fuel source.
  • The worst thing to happen to Twitter/the best thing to happen to Mastodon.
  • The Dunbar Number for plants.
  • Voting someone out of the marriage because there's only room for one person in here.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Erica plugs increasing optional mask compliance by farting
  • Jenni plugs birds
  • Jim plugs metaplugs repeating plugs

Topics:

  • The System, and by extension, The Talenti Cup System
  • Decentralizing social media is gonna be real good for people not yelling at each other & kinda bad for sharing specialized information
  • We just taught Winston about "peeing in the woods" when we were going on a hike and now he wants to "pee in the woods" everywhere
  • Mark Rosewater designed devil fruits
  • Esper says: "As a longtime (since 1999, with only one substantial break) Magic: the Gathering player, it does my heart good to hear Mark Rosewater come up. His GDC talk about lessons he's learned in designing games is really sharp stuff (if a little 101 in places), check it out sometime."
  • Decarbonizing the language

Microtopics:

  • Meta-plugging repeating plugs.
  • Bee Movie but it’s text to speech.
  • Increasing optional mask compliance by farting.
  • Mass: the volume of gas inside you, and how to increase its compliance.
  • A meme that people teach to each other.
  • Packing a shoe into a box and opening up a big box of mold years later.
  • Categories of things that fit into one-pint gelato cups.
  • The Body Box.
  • How to make itinerant lifestyles bearable and possible.
  • Organizing your entire house into the House Box.
  • Using your Dunbar number to keep track of your house plants.
  • Getting on Topic Lords by searching "pineapple on pizza"
  • Social media platforms that are owned by a rich asshole.
  • Drastically improving productivity in the workplace by banning the email forwarding of news articles.
  • The overwhelming feeling of shame when you don't have a take on the latest discourse.
  • Going on Tori Amos AOL chat to talk to your social group.
  • Buddha's list of 89 things that make you angry.
  • We've invented a new way to be angry.
  • Repeating topics because you've forgotten what you were just talking about.
  • Peeing in the laundry closet and calling it peeing in the woods.
  • Explaining to a three year old when it's ok and when it's not ok to pee outside.
  • Pee-ka-boo.
  • Everything sucks and I have no control over anything but I can poop in the front yard.
  • Taking increasingly larger shits in Richard Kind's cat box.
  • How George Clooney gets away with poop modification.
  • Taking increasingly larger shits in the Li-Cor machine that measures leaf respiration.
  • Whether playing Tom Jones at work constitutes sexual harassment.
  • Tom Jones in his leisure suit.
  • Cleaning up the lyrics to make rock and roll palatable to white people but leaving in the line about the "one-eyed cat peepin' in a seafood store."
  • Whether it's still sexual harassment if nobody points out that it's sexual harassment.
  • Jocund company.
  • Telling the story of the time you saw a bunch of daffodils.
  • Seeing a bunch of daffodils and shouting "Fuck! These fucking flowers are fucking pretty as shit!"
  • Conceiving of yourself as an indoor person, separate from the outdoors.
  • Reading a Japanese dictionary of dirty words and saying "Fuck! These fucking dirty words are fucking good as shit!"
  • Conceiving of interior spaces as being one with exterior spaced.
  • You can't unpee the bush.
  • Finding and eating devil fruits.
  • Eating the fruit that lets you talk to dragons when dragons don't exist.
  • Seeing a gun dog and assuming that it was a dog that ate a gun fruit but actually it was a gun that ate a dog fruit.
  • What happens if you eat a second devil fruit.
  • Dengue fever creeping up into Texas from Mexico.
  • The best place to contract Dengue Fever.
  • Burning the candle at both ends of the day.
  • Eating the burrito from both ends.
  • Harvesting the bioluminescent fungus.
  • Turbines on a windless morn.
  • Burning solar panels as a fuel source.
  • The worst thing to happen to Twitter/the best thing to happen to Mastodon.
  • The Dunbar Number for plants.
  • Voting someone out of the marriage because there's only room for one person in here.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Erica plugs increasing optional mask compliance by farting
  • Jenni plugs birds
  • Jim plugs metaplugs repeating plugs

Topics:

  • The System, and by extension, The Talenti Cup System
  • Decentralizing social media is gonna be real good for people not yelling at each other & kinda bad for sharing specialized information
  • We just taught Winston about "peeing in the woods" when we were going on a hike and now he wants to "pee in the woods" everywhere
  • Mark Rosewater designed devil fruits
  • Esper says: "As a longtime (since 1999, with only one substantial break) Magic: the Gathering player, it does my heart good to hear Mark Rosewater come up. His GDC talk about lessons he's learned in designing games is really sharp stuff (if a little 101 in places), check it out sometime."
  • Decarbonizing the language

Microtopics:

  • Meta-plugging repeating plugs.
  • Bee Movie but it’s text to speech.
  • Increasing optional mask compliance by farting.
  • Mass: the volume of gas inside you, and how to increase its compliance.
  • A meme that people teach to each other.
  • Packing a shoe into a box and opening up a big box of mold years later.
  • Categories of things that fit into one-pint gelato cups.
  • The Body Box.
  • How to make itinerant lifestyles bearable and possible.
  • Organizing your entire house into the House Box.
  • Using your Dunbar number to keep track of your house plants.
  • Getting on Topic Lords by searching "pineapple on pizza"
  • Social media platforms that are owned by a rich asshole.
  • Drastically improving productivity in the workplace by banning the email forwarding of news articles.
  • The overwhelming feeling of shame when you don't have a take on the latest discourse.
  • Going on Tori Amos AOL chat to talk to your social group.
  • Buddha's list of 89 things that make you angry.
  • We've invented a new way to be angry.
  • Repeating topics because you've forgotten what you were just talking about.
  • Peeing in the laundry closet and calling it peeing in the woods.
  • Explaining to a three year old when it's ok and when it's not ok to pee outside.
  • Pee-ka-boo.
  • Everything sucks and I have no control over anything but I can poop in the front yard.
  • Taking increasingly larger shits in Richard Kind's cat box.
  • How George Clooney gets away with poop modification.
  • Taking increasingly larger shits in the Li-Cor machine that measures leaf respiration.
  • Whether playing Tom Jones at work constitutes sexual harassment.
  • Tom Jones in his leisure suit.
  • Cleaning up the lyrics to make rock and roll palatable to white people but leaving in the line about the "one-eyed cat peepin' in a seafood store."
  • Whether it's still sexual harassment if nobody points out that it's sexual harassment.
  • Jocund company.
  • Telling the story of the time you saw a bunch of daffodils.
  • Seeing a bunch of daffodils and shouting "Fuck! These fucking flowers are fucking pretty as shit!"
  • Conceiving of yourself as an indoor person, separate from the outdoors.
  • Reading a Japanese dictionary of dirty words and saying "Fuck! These fucking dirty words are fucking good as shit!"
  • Conceiving of interior spaces as being one with exterior spaced.
  • You can't unpee the bush.
  • Finding and eating devil fruits.
  • Eating the fruit that lets you talk to dragons when dragons don't exist.
  • Seeing a gun dog and assuming that it was a dog that ate a gun fruit but actually it was a gun that ate a dog fruit.
  • What happens if you eat a second devil fruit.
  • Dengue fever creeping up into Texas from Mexico.
  • The best place to contract Dengue Fever.
  • Burning the candle at both ends of the day.
  • Eating the burrito from both ends.
  • Harvesting the bioluminescent fungus.
  • Turbines on a windless morn.
  • Burning solar panels as a fuel source.
  • The worst thing to happen to Twitter/the best thing to happen to Mastodon.
  • The Dunbar Number for plants.
  • Voting someone out of the marriage because there's only room for one person in here.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+PpwGmL2e ]]> Jim Stormdancer 135. I've Been a Bad, Bad French https://topiclords.com/ive-been-a-bad-bad-french 62021d3f-ecad-4087-9e62-acd4981e9808 Mon, 23 May 2022 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Nate and Fred. We discuss rice cookers playing music, competition in a utopia, Hot Ice, Cool Sounds, Goblin Time, whether the D&D-themed Nerds marketing campaign is good for D&D, and convincing the four horsemen to hire you as fifth horseman. 1:15:23 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Why do rice cookers play music but not microwaves?
  • If all your needs are met in a utopian society will we still need sports and competition?
  • Hot Ice, Cool Sounds
  • Goblin Time by Emma
    • https://mastodon.art/@emmajuettner/108103474257806186
    • Esper says: "My long-held suspicion has always been that humans are generally way less prone to salt-related health issues than suggested by nutritional science. I think a lot of that stuff was ginned up by cigarette companies trying to deflect blame. But I try not to go full-on conspiracy theory about it."
  • Nerds candy has a Dungeons and Dragons themed box. Is this good for D&D?
  • If the four horsemen of the apocalypse were recruiting for a fifth member, how would you convince them to hire you?

Microtopics:

  • A shmup about how Microsoft screwed up their Xbox 360 dashboard.
  • Screaming for 24 hours straight and having a heart attack, or vice versa.
  • Remastering your obscure protest game and needing to build a museum explaining the context for the protest.
  • An educational title about how to find games on the new Xbox 360 dashboard.
  • An infinite runner with extremely awkward horse controls.
  • Using all the right dark patterns.
  • Meeting an indie game developer in San Francisco and recognizing him because he's a white guy with a beard and glasses who likes Dark Souls.
  • A pot that's specifically for rice and it knows when to school cooking the rice.
  • Only rice cookers get to sing a song.
  • Installing an AI in your microwave so your microwave can try to murder you.
  • A codependent washing machine.
  • Landlords in California doing an end run around renter's rights.
  • The keyless entry system on your apartment that has a battery backup just so it can play "These Boots are Made for Walking" when it can't let you in because the power is out.
  • 3D printing some laundry to fold because people are bored in your Utopia.
  • Extremely soporific TV.
  • A mashup of music and sports.
  • Gathering to watch a live band play while a chef makes crepes.
  • Whether you can be bored while watching two things at the same time.
  • An orchestra trying to live-score a basketball game.
  • Trying to listen to an arcade game in the arcade.
  • Goblins in our community.
  • A bullet point list of how you can help a goblin.
  • Spicy radish waffles.
  • Blackwheat crepes and whether they're really black.
  • Lemonade crepes.
  • Dipping a sandwich in mustard.
  • The pros and cons of salting food.
  • Chickens laying pre-salted eggs.
  • Paying a monthly subscription to Monsanto to keep up the injections that make your tongue exude its own salt.
  • Getting in line to hate Monsanto.
  • Whether nerds are more or less likely to eat Nerds candy.
  • A candy for people who forgot D&D exists.
  • Candy&D.
  • A series of Nerds-themed D&D campaigns.
  • Hiring people and paying them.
  • Star Trek Jeopardy where 70% of the answers are 1980s pop culture because the federation is obsessed with the 80s.
  • Seeing yet another college sports question in the New York Times crossword and deciding whether to get irrationally angry at Will Shortz.
  • What Jim embodies that is the worst thing.
  • Death, war, famine, pestilence, crypto and late-onset melatonin.
  • John Cleese teaching sex ed in a boarding school.
  • Starting with death and going downhill from there.
  • Convincing Death to not kill anyone and Death just rides off and mopes.
  • Whether the four horsemen listen to podcasts or if the internet is down during the apocalypse.
  • The four new horsemen of the new apocalypse: crypto, gaslighting, late-onset melatonin and Elon Musk.
  • How to find people to follow on Mastodon.
  • How to be a part of a human-sized community.
  • The Topic Lords subreddit.
  • The photo of a middle school basketball team that somebody posted to the Topic Lords subreddit.
  • How to keep spam bots out of your Discord.
  • Batbarian.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Why do rice cookers play music but not microwaves?
  • If all your needs are met in a utopian society will we still need sports and competition?
  • Hot Ice, Cool Sounds
  • Goblin Time by Emma
    • https://mastodon.art/@emmajuettner/108103474257806186
    • Esper says: "My long-held suspicion has always been that humans are generally way less prone to salt-related health issues than suggested by nutritional science. I think a lot of that stuff was ginned up by cigarette companies trying to deflect blame. But I try not to go full-on conspiracy theory about it."
  • Nerds candy has a Dungeons and Dragons themed box. Is this good for D&D?
  • If the four horsemen of the apocalypse were recruiting for a fifth member, how would you convince them to hire you?

Microtopics:

  • A shmup about how Microsoft screwed up their Xbox 360 dashboard.
  • Screaming for 24 hours straight and having a heart attack, or vice versa.
  • Remastering your obscure protest game and needing to build a museum explaining the context for the protest.
  • An educational title about how to find games on the new Xbox 360 dashboard.
  • An infinite runner with extremely awkward horse controls.
  • Using all the right dark patterns.
  • Meeting an indie game developer in San Francisco and recognizing him because he's a white guy with a beard and glasses who likes Dark Souls.
  • A pot that's specifically for rice and it knows when to school cooking the rice.
  • Only rice cookers get to sing a song.
  • Installing an AI in your microwave so your microwave can try to murder you.
  • A codependent washing machine.
  • Landlords in California doing an end run around renter's rights.
  • The keyless entry system on your apartment that has a battery backup just so it can play "These Boots are Made for Walking" when it can't let you in because the power is out.
  • 3D printing some laundry to fold because people are bored in your Utopia.
  • Extremely soporific TV.
  • A mashup of music and sports.
  • Gathering to watch a live band play while a chef makes crepes.
  • Whether you can be bored while watching two things at the same time.
  • An orchestra trying to live-score a basketball game.
  • Trying to listen to an arcade game in the arcade.
  • Goblins in our community.
  • A bullet point list of how you can help a goblin.
  • Spicy radish waffles.
  • Blackwheat crepes and whether they're really black.
  • Lemonade crepes.
  • Dipping a sandwich in mustard.
  • The pros and cons of salting food.
  • Chickens laying pre-salted eggs.
  • Paying a monthly subscription to Monsanto to keep up the injections that make your tongue exude its own salt.
  • Getting in line to hate Monsanto.
  • Whether nerds are more or less likely to eat Nerds candy.
  • A candy for people who forgot D&D exists.
  • Candy&D.
  • A series of Nerds-themed D&D campaigns.
  • Hiring people and paying them.
  • Star Trek Jeopardy where 70% of the answers are 1980s pop culture because the federation is obsessed with the 80s.
  • Seeing yet another college sports question in the New York Times crossword and deciding whether to get irrationally angry at Will Shortz.
  • What Jim embodies that is the worst thing.
  • Death, war, famine, pestilence, crypto and late-onset melatonin.
  • John Cleese teaching sex ed in a boarding school.
  • Starting with death and going downhill from there.
  • Convincing Death to not kill anyone and Death just rides off and mopes.
  • Whether the four horsemen listen to podcasts or if the internet is down during the apocalypse.
  • The four new horsemen of the new apocalypse: crypto, gaslighting, late-onset melatonin and Elon Musk.
  • How to find people to follow on Mastodon.
  • How to be a part of a human-sized community.
  • The Topic Lords subreddit.
  • The photo of a middle school basketball team that somebody posted to the Topic Lords subreddit.
  • How to keep spam bots out of your Discord.
  • Batbarian.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Why do rice cookers play music but not microwaves?
  • If all your needs are met in a utopian society will we still need sports and competition?
  • Hot Ice, Cool Sounds
  • Goblin Time by Emma
    • https://mastodon.art/@emmajuettner/108103474257806186
    • Esper says: "My long-held suspicion has always been that humans are generally way less prone to salt-related health issues than suggested by nutritional science. I think a lot of that stuff was ginned up by cigarette companies trying to deflect blame. But I try not to go full-on conspiracy theory about it."
  • Nerds candy has a Dungeons and Dragons themed box. Is this good for D&D?
  • If the four horsemen of the apocalypse were recruiting for a fifth member, how would you convince them to hire you?

Microtopics:

  • A shmup about how Microsoft screwed up their Xbox 360 dashboard.
  • Screaming for 24 hours straight and having a heart attack, or vice versa.
  • Remastering your obscure protest game and needing to build a museum explaining the context for the protest.
  • An educational title about how to find games on the new Xbox 360 dashboard.
  • An infinite runner with extremely awkward horse controls.
  • Using all the right dark patterns.
  • Meeting an indie game developer in San Francisco and recognizing him because he's a white guy with a beard and glasses who likes Dark Souls.
  • A pot that's specifically for rice and it knows when to school cooking the rice.
  • Only rice cookers get to sing a song.
  • Installing an AI in your microwave so your microwave can try to murder you.
  • A codependent washing machine.
  • Landlords in California doing an end run around renter's rights.
  • The keyless entry system on your apartment that has a battery backup just so it can play "These Boots are Made for Walking" when it can't let you in because the power is out.
  • 3D printing some laundry to fold because people are bored in your Utopia.
  • Extremely soporific TV.
  • A mashup of music and sports.
  • Gathering to watch a live band play while a chef makes crepes.
  • Whether you can be bored while watching two things at the same time.
  • An orchestra trying to live-score a basketball game.
  • Trying to listen to an arcade game in the arcade.
  • Goblins in our community.
  • A bullet point list of how you can help a goblin.
  • Spicy radish waffles.
  • Blackwheat crepes and whether they're really black.
  • Lemonade crepes.
  • Dipping a sandwich in mustard.
  • The pros and cons of salting food.
  • Chickens laying pre-salted eggs.
  • Paying a monthly subscription to Monsanto to keep up the injections that make your tongue exude its own salt.
  • Getting in line to hate Monsanto.
  • Whether nerds are more or less likely to eat Nerds candy.
  • A candy for people who forgot D&D exists.
  • Candy&D.
  • A series of Nerds-themed D&D campaigns.
  • Hiring people and paying them.
  • Star Trek Jeopardy where 70% of the answers are 1980s pop culture because the federation is obsessed with the 80s.
  • Seeing yet another college sports question in the New York Times crossword and deciding whether to get irrationally angry at Will Shortz.
  • What Jim embodies that is the worst thing.
  • Death, war, famine, pestilence, crypto and late-onset melatonin.
  • John Cleese teaching sex ed in a boarding school.
  • Starting with death and going downhill from there.
  • Convincing Death to not kill anyone and Death just rides off and mopes.
  • Whether the four horsemen listen to podcasts or if the internet is down during the apocalypse.
  • The four new horsemen of the new apocalypse: crypto, gaslighting, late-onset melatonin and Elon Musk.
  • How to find people to follow on Mastodon.
  • How to be a part of a human-sized community.
  • The Topic Lords subreddit.
  • The photo of a middle school basketball team that somebody posted to the Topic Lords subreddit.
  • How to keep spam bots out of your Discord.
  • Batbarian.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+AzmZi2KN ]]> Jim Stormdancer 134. A Bad Case of Footmouse https://topiclords.com/a-bad-case-of-footmouse d9d3723c-e626-4125-ae48-c088fc494390 Mon, 16 May 2022 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Maxx and Michael. We discuss World's Greatest Author Chuck Tingle, ways of making moving easier, melatonin parenting decisions, and fjf. 1:00:55 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Rabbit nose speeds.
  • A stranger from Australia handing you a twenty dollar bill.
  • Lining a trench coat with Steam keys.
  • How to make Elden Ring feel like a video game rather than a slog.
  • An incredible variety of fantastical biomes filled with body horror monstrosities that are inexplicably bad at killing you.
  • Playing Elden Ring with passive enemies
  • Big columns with massively muscular horsemen.
  • Sheep curling up into a wheel and rolling away.
  • Fostering a different sense of what accomplishment means.
  • Ramps interweaving the stairway.
  • Going into a spooky house and the house is like "why would you come in here? Can't you see I'm haunted"
  • Going into a spooky house in hopes of seeing bespoke content.
  • An author of real books that people think are memes.
  • A tornado that has a butthole because it must've picked it up with all the other debris.
  • Lesbian candy corn.
  • High-functioning chocoholics.
  • Having sex with the State of California and reading the list of things that the State of California has found to cause cancer.
  • Making a career out of exploring the weird connections in your own mind.
  • Writing to Chuck Tingle to ask for more details about the 747's genitalia.
  • Moving house and then moving house again immediately, to save yourself a packing/unpacking cycle.
  • Having many shamefully confusing objects and making the movers wear blindfolds.
  • Making your friends wear blindfolds and rely on LIDAR when they come into your house.
  • Putting all your vacation souvenirs in storage and going to your storage unit when you want to remember your vacation.
  • Three drawers of cables organized into power cables, USB cables and audio cables, all neatly constrained with velcro.
  • Giving your rabbit decoy cables to chew on so that the important cables remain safe.
  • Throwing away 70% of your stuff.
  • Whether it's a lie if you have books on your shelf that you haven't read yet.
  • Apocryphal John Waters quotes.
  • Having an outfit for hacktivism.
  • Mounting the spines of books you've read above your hearth.
  • Data Hands.
  • A keyboard that doesn't work in direct sunlight.
  • Foot Mouse and the Data Hands.
  • Staring into the abyss, wiggling your fingers.
  • Underwear computing.
  • Late-onset melatonin generation.
  • How to deal when everybody in the family gets sick at once.
  • An island made of bureaucracy.
  • The fax machine in your underwear computer.
  • How to pronounce "James" according to Jim's facebook profile.
  • Armchairing a request for poetry in the rudest way possible.
  • Streets that duel like coarse teeth.
  • The matted thing that leaves its woman without the duck.
  • Hooking your poetry generator up to a receipt printer so people can print a new poem on demand.
  • Writing a poem and finding out what you meant later.
  • Soup repair.
  • A man who is nice on British TV but angry on American TV.
  • Old Enough!
  • An extremely relatable two year old.
  • Being tasked with juicing some oranges and spending the next hour chasing the dog.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Rabbit nose speeds.
  • A stranger from Australia handing you a twenty dollar bill.
  • Lining a trench coat with Steam keys.
  • How to make Elden Ring feel like a video game rather than a slog.
  • An incredible variety of fantastical biomes filled with body horror monstrosities that are inexplicably bad at killing you.
  • Playing Elden Ring with passive enemies
  • Big columns with massively muscular horsemen.
  • Sheep curling up into a wheel and rolling away.
  • Fostering a different sense of what accomplishment means.
  • Ramps interweaving the stairway.
  • Going into a spooky house and the house is like "why would you come in here? Can't you see I'm haunted"
  • Going into a spooky house in hopes of seeing bespoke content.
  • An author of real books that people think are memes.
  • A tornado that has a butthole because it must've picked it up with all the other debris.
  • Lesbian candy corn.
  • High-functioning chocoholics.
  • Having sex with the State of California and reading the list of things that the State of California has found to cause cancer.
  • Making a career out of exploring the weird connections in your own mind.
  • Writing to Chuck Tingle to ask for more details about the 747's genitalia.
  • Moving house and then moving house again immediately, to save yourself a packing/unpacking cycle.
  • Having many shamefully confusing objects and making the movers wear blindfolds.
  • Making your friends wear blindfolds and rely on LIDAR when they come into your house.
  • Putting all your vacation souvenirs in storage and going to your storage unit when you want to remember your vacation.
  • Three drawers of cables organized into power cables, USB cables and audio cables, all neatly constrained with velcro.
  • Giving your rabbit decoy cables to chew on so that the important cables remain safe.
  • Throwing away 70% of your stuff.
  • Whether it's a lie if you have books on your shelf that you haven't read yet.
  • Apocryphal John Waters quotes.
  • Having an outfit for hacktivism.
  • Mounting the spines of books you've read above your hearth.
  • Data Hands.
  • A keyboard that doesn't work in direct sunlight.
  • Foot Mouse and the Data Hands.
  • Staring into the abyss, wiggling your fingers.
  • Underwear computing.
  • Late-onset melatonin generation.
  • How to deal when everybody in the family gets sick at once.
  • An island made of bureaucracy.
  • The fax machine in your underwear computer.
  • How to pronounce "James" according to Jim's facebook profile.
  • Armchairing a request for poetry in the rudest way possible.
  • Streets that duel like coarse teeth.
  • The matted thing that leaves its woman without the duck.
  • Hooking your poetry generator up to a receipt printer so people can print a new poem on demand.
  • Writing a poem and finding out what you meant later.
  • Soup repair.
  • A man who is nice on British TV but angry on American TV.
  • Old Enough!
  • An extremely relatable two year old.
  • Being tasked with juicing some oranges and spending the next hour chasing the dog.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Rabbit nose speeds.
  • A stranger from Australia handing you a twenty dollar bill.
  • Lining a trench coat with Steam keys.
  • How to make Elden Ring feel like a video game rather than a slog.
  • An incredible variety of fantastical biomes filled with body horror monstrosities that are inexplicably bad at killing you.
  • Playing Elden Ring with passive enemies
  • Big columns with massively muscular horsemen.
  • Sheep curling up into a wheel and rolling away.
  • Fostering a different sense of what accomplishment means.
  • Ramps interweaving the stairway.
  • Going into a spooky house and the house is like "why would you come in here? Can't you see I'm haunted"
  • Going into a spooky house in hopes of seeing bespoke content.
  • An author of real books that people think are memes.
  • A tornado that has a butthole because it must've picked it up with all the other debris.
  • Lesbian candy corn.
  • High-functioning chocoholics.
  • Having sex with the State of California and reading the list of things that the State of California has found to cause cancer.
  • Making a career out of exploring the weird connections in your own mind.
  • Writing to Chuck Tingle to ask for more details about the 747's genitalia.
  • Moving house and then moving house again immediately, to save yourself a packing/unpacking cycle.
  • Having many shamefully confusing objects and making the movers wear blindfolds.
  • Making your friends wear blindfolds and rely on LIDAR when they come into your house.
  • Putting all your vacation souvenirs in storage and going to your storage unit when you want to remember your vacation.
  • Three drawers of cables organized into power cables, USB cables and audio cables, all neatly constrained with velcro.
  • Giving your rabbit decoy cables to chew on so that the important cables remain safe.
  • Throwing away 70% of your stuff.
  • Whether it's a lie if you have books on your shelf that you haven't read yet.
  • Apocryphal John Waters quotes.
  • Having an outfit for hacktivism.
  • Mounting the spines of books you've read above your hearth.
  • Data Hands.
  • A keyboard that doesn't work in direct sunlight.
  • Foot Mouse and the Data Hands.
  • Staring into the abyss, wiggling your fingers.
  • Underwear computing.
  • Late-onset melatonin generation.
  • How to deal when everybody in the family gets sick at once.
  • An island made of bureaucracy.
  • The fax machine in your underwear computer.
  • How to pronounce "James" according to Jim's facebook profile.
  • Armchairing a request for poetry in the rudest way possible.
  • Streets that duel like coarse teeth.
  • The matted thing that leaves its woman without the duck.
  • Hooking your poetry generator up to a receipt printer so people can print a new poem on demand.
  • Writing a poem and finding out what you meant later.
  • Soup repair.
  • A man who is nice on British TV but angry on American TV.
  • Old Enough!
  • An extremely relatable two year old.
  • Being tasked with juicing some oranges and spending the next hour chasing the dog.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+FhGyiMry ]]> Jim Stormdancer 133. Every Tumbleweed is an Antique https://topiclords.com/every-tumbleweed-is-an-antique bf2f6770-f0f2-405a-bda7-adf0df69c9d8 Mon, 09 May 2022 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Duncan and Avery. We discuss the golden age of belt buckles, someone asking if you remember Tetris, the JVC PocketMail, The Prelude, by Matthew Zapruder, hyperspecific collections, and Yiwum, the city in China that produces 60% of all the Christmas decorations in the world. 1:01:40 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • An album that someday will be available on Spotify.
  • The Mauretania comics by Detective Pikachu.
  • The kind of work that falls out of relaxation.
  • The Golden Age of Belt Buckles.
  • Going into an eBay fugue state.
  • Promotional belt buckles.
  • The British obsession with American long haul truckers.
  • The kind of video game where you have to file copious paperwork before and after you shoot someone.
  • What Police Quest was before and after Daryl Gates was hired as lead designer.
  • Whether there were any racist belt buckles in the 1960s.
  • Buying 20 $2 games for Christmas rather than the one $40 game your kid actually asked for.
  • Men's names from the 1960s and 1970s.
  • Hewlett Packard belt buckles.
  • The personalized belt buckles you'll sell at your merch table when you go back on tour.
  • A conference about fingers.
  • Talking to the funeral director before you're dead just in case you die someday.
  • A point-of-sale system for funeral directors.
  • Bidding on a Cheeto and getting outbid.
  • Having It's-Its and That's-Its in the freezer and completing your collection with a What's-It.
  • Remembering Tetris.
  • Being a parent and making friends with people you have basically nothing in common with.
  • Talking to normies about your nerd interests.
  • Going into the Forever 21 and yelling "Skeletor!" and everybody cheers.
  • People high-fiving you as you walk down the street in your Wolverine costume.
  • Listening to an adult man gush about Power Rangers to you and realizing that probably Star Wars isn't any good after all and you just happened to be the right age for it.
  • Star Wars fans trying to convince each other that being based on the Hero's Journey makes a story good art.
  • Reading a mathematical proof that Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is actually exactly as good as Raiders of the Lost Ark and having no choice but to believe it.
  • Remember Tetris? This is a topic about Tetris.
  • Writing email in the jungle and getting the chance to send it if you survive all the quicksand.
  • A product using technologies developed by NASA, i.e. one of the programmers drank Tang once.
  • Dongling things to the Palm Pilot.
  • An article from 1999 titled "Email on the Move."
  • Check your pocket… you've got mail!
  • Preserving your Motorola Razr M in amber so Jim can buy it on eBay the next time he's ordering a batch of Orbitz.
  • The Linux open source phone that everybody likes but nobody's heard of.
  • The idea of chocolate.
  • A disappointing and super creepy bed and breakfast.
  • Art where the artist has disguised a message for you.
  • Contrasting a Diet Coke with Coleridge and Wordsworth.
  • Freedom Power Style Motion.
  • Having a bunch of Tumblrs and never going on Tumblr.
  • Hours Played.
  • A new weird thing that a video game can be.
  • Collecting tumbleweeds.
  • A tumbleweed the size of a car that stops at the red light.
  • Movies from the 1930s giving a false impression of how much you need to worry about quicksand.
  • Sentient poison oak.
  • The sentient tumbleweed episode of The Outer Limits.
  • Consuming media by fast-forwarding to the tumbleweed parts.
  • A book of polaroids of all your favorite lighting fixtures.
  • A list of every move in every game that Mario has ever been in.
  • Desert Chrome.
  • Drawing a van and airbrushing your drawing of a van.
  • Jean-Claude Van Dad.
  • Spending the rest of your life googling "van dad."
  • Zoning your city by the kind of Christmas decorations sold.
  • An ocean of booths selling plastic Santa Clauses as far as the eye can see.
  • The city that sells the other 40% of Christmas decorations.
  • The Christmas memeplex.
  • Clone shoes with strange names.
  • Running shoes for dogs.
  • A romantic comedy set in the city in China entirely dedicated to selling Christmas decorations.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • An album that someday will be available on Spotify.
  • The Mauretania comics by Detective Pikachu.
  • The kind of work that falls out of relaxation.
  • The Golden Age of Belt Buckles.
  • Going into an eBay fugue state.
  • Promotional belt buckles.
  • The British obsession with American long haul truckers.
  • The kind of video game where you have to file copious paperwork before and after you shoot someone.
  • What Police Quest was before and after Daryl Gates was hired as lead designer.
  • Whether there were any racist belt buckles in the 1960s.
  • Buying 20 $2 games for Christmas rather than the one $40 game your kid actually asked for.
  • Men's names from the 1960s and 1970s.
  • Hewlett Packard belt buckles.
  • The personalized belt buckles you'll sell at your merch table when you go back on tour.
  • A conference about fingers.
  • Talking to the funeral director before you're dead just in case you die someday.
  • A point-of-sale system for funeral directors.
  • Bidding on a Cheeto and getting outbid.
  • Having It's-Its and That's-Its in the freezer and completing your collection with a What's-It.
  • Remembering Tetris.
  • Being a parent and making friends with people you have basically nothing in common with.
  • Talking to normies about your nerd interests.
  • Going into the Forever 21 and yelling "Skeletor!" and everybody cheers.
  • People high-fiving you as you walk down the street in your Wolverine costume.
  • Listening to an adult man gush about Power Rangers to you and realizing that probably Star Wars isn't any good after all and you just happened to be the right age for it.
  • Star Wars fans trying to convince each other that being based on the Hero's Journey makes a story good art.
  • Reading a mathematical proof that Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is actually exactly as good as Raiders of the Lost Ark and having no choice but to believe it.
  • Remember Tetris? This is a topic about Tetris.
  • Writing email in the jungle and getting the chance to send it if you survive all the quicksand.
  • A product using technologies developed by NASA, i.e. one of the programmers drank Tang once.
  • Dongling things to the Palm Pilot.
  • An article from 1999 titled "Email on the Move."
  • Check your pocket… you've got mail!
  • Preserving your Motorola Razr M in amber so Jim can buy it on eBay the next time he's ordering a batch of Orbitz.
  • The Linux open source phone that everybody likes but nobody's heard of.
  • The idea of chocolate.
  • A disappointing and super creepy bed and breakfast.
  • Art where the artist has disguised a message for you.
  • Contrasting a Diet Coke with Coleridge and Wordsworth.
  • Freedom Power Style Motion.
  • Having a bunch of Tumblrs and never going on Tumblr.
  • Hours Played.
  • A new weird thing that a video game can be.
  • Collecting tumbleweeds.
  • A tumbleweed the size of a car that stops at the red light.
  • Movies from the 1930s giving a false impression of how much you need to worry about quicksand.
  • Sentient poison oak.
  • The sentient tumbleweed episode of The Outer Limits.
  • Consuming media by fast-forwarding to the tumbleweed parts.
  • A book of polaroids of all your favorite lighting fixtures.
  • A list of every move in every game that Mario has ever been in.
  • Desert Chrome.
  • Drawing a van and airbrushing your drawing of a van.
  • Jean-Claude Van Dad.
  • Spending the rest of your life googling "van dad."
  • Zoning your city by the kind of Christmas decorations sold.
  • An ocean of booths selling plastic Santa Clauses as far as the eye can see.
  • The city that sells the other 40% of Christmas decorations.
  • The Christmas memeplex.
  • Clone shoes with strange names.
  • Running shoes for dogs.
  • A romantic comedy set in the city in China entirely dedicated to selling Christmas decorations.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • An album that someday will be available on Spotify.
  • The Mauretania comics by Detective Pikachu.
  • The kind of work that falls out of relaxation.
  • The Golden Age of Belt Buckles.
  • Going into an eBay fugue state.
  • Promotional belt buckles.
  • The British obsession with American long haul truckers.
  • The kind of video game where you have to file copious paperwork before and after you shoot someone.
  • What Police Quest was before and after Daryl Gates was hired as lead designer.
  • Whether there were any racist belt buckles in the 1960s.
  • Buying 20 $2 games for Christmas rather than the one $40 game your kid actually asked for.
  • Men's names from the 1960s and 1970s.
  • Hewlett Packard belt buckles.
  • The personalized belt buckles you'll sell at your merch table when you go back on tour.
  • A conference about fingers.
  • Talking to the funeral director before you're dead just in case you die someday.
  • A point-of-sale system for funeral directors.
  • Bidding on a Cheeto and getting outbid.
  • Having It's-Its and That's-Its in the freezer and completing your collection with a What's-It.
  • Remembering Tetris.
  • Being a parent and making friends with people you have basically nothing in common with.
  • Talking to normies about your nerd interests.
  • Going into the Forever 21 and yelling "Skeletor!" and everybody cheers.
  • People high-fiving you as you walk down the street in your Wolverine costume.
  • Listening to an adult man gush about Power Rangers to you and realizing that probably Star Wars isn't any good after all and you just happened to be the right age for it.
  • Star Wars fans trying to convince each other that being based on the Hero's Journey makes a story good art.
  • Reading a mathematical proof that Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is actually exactly as good as Raiders of the Lost Ark and having no choice but to believe it.
  • Remember Tetris? This is a topic about Tetris.
  • Writing email in the jungle and getting the chance to send it if you survive all the quicksand.
  • A product using technologies developed by NASA, i.e. one of the programmers drank Tang once.
  • Dongling things to the Palm Pilot.
  • An article from 1999 titled "Email on the Move."
  • Check your pocket… you've got mail!
  • Preserving your Motorola Razr M in amber so Jim can buy it on eBay the next time he's ordering a batch of Orbitz.
  • The Linux open source phone that everybody likes but nobody's heard of.
  • The idea of chocolate.
  • A disappointing and super creepy bed and breakfast.
  • Art where the artist has disguised a message for you.
  • Contrasting a Diet Coke with Coleridge and Wordsworth.
  • Freedom Power Style Motion.
  • Having a bunch of Tumblrs and never going on Tumblr.
  • Hours Played.
  • A new weird thing that a video game can be.
  • Collecting tumbleweeds.
  • A tumbleweed the size of a car that stops at the red light.
  • Movies from the 1930s giving a false impression of how much you need to worry about quicksand.
  • Sentient poison oak.
  • The sentient tumbleweed episode of The Outer Limits.
  • Consuming media by fast-forwarding to the tumbleweed parts.
  • A book of polaroids of all your favorite lighting fixtures.
  • A list of every move in every game that Mario has ever been in.
  • Desert Chrome.
  • Drawing a van and airbrushing your drawing of a van.
  • Jean-Claude Van Dad.
  • Spending the rest of your life googling "van dad."
  • Zoning your city by the kind of Christmas decorations sold.
  • An ocean of booths selling plastic Santa Clauses as far as the eye can see.
  • The city that sells the other 40% of Christmas decorations.
  • The Christmas memeplex.
  • Clone shoes with strange names.
  • Running shoes for dogs.
  • A romantic comedy set in the city in China entirely dedicated to selling Christmas decorations.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+UWFmMw_c ]]> Jim Stormdancer 132. A Miserable Pile of Knuckles https://topiclords.com/a-miserable-pile-of-knuckles 8eb98b94-a315-412f-85d9-f7db663362ac Mon, 02 May 2022 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Jenni and Cort. We discuss novel uses for hundreds of surplus ceramic clown statues, thinking about household stuff as a system you can design to meet your needs instead of a cultural lifestyle obligation, Sidetalkin', Big Black Elephant, giving people a video game so they can paradigm shift, and games or sports that started out as fictional, but that people actually play. 50:54 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Jenni, she slash her.
  • A poem that could've been an email.
  • OST Jam.
  • If every time you were in a room there was someone else in the room doing the game thing you were doing.
  • Just trying to enjoy a leisurely video game when suddenly a co-op partner shows up and starts getting impatient with you.
  • Animals but wet.
  • Animals but they are in the ocean and don't have legs so they can't kick butt.
  • The duality of having legs.
  • The many-faceted world butt.
  • Try fish: you're welcome.
  • Becoming deeply involved in the design and production of novelty clown statues.
  • Who's this unsold clown?
  • Whether the prenup addresses any of the potential clown situations.
  • How many clowns could fit in a bed and breakfast.
  • Monogrammed businessclowns.
  • How to buy yourself a Lordy.
  • Sending unsolicited clowns in the mail.
  • Stacking the clowns until you can ascend to clown heaven.
  • Cleaning help and support for neurodivergent people to clean our filthy filthy houses.
  • The act of living in a house and putting things in places.
  • Keeping your silverware in the freezer.
  • A house where the forks turn into spoons.
  • A basket for clothes that are not so dirty that they need to be washed immediately.
  • Food that is technically rotten but not so rotten that you can't eat it.
  • The room in your house where the gravity is lower and you float.
  • Holding a phone up to your face like a taco.
  • Hundreds of pictures of people holding weird shit up to their heads.
  • Why all the women are at the end of the page.
  • Announcing a new consumer electronics device by submitting it to sidetalkin.com.
  • Side-snorin'.
  • A fun web site for if you want to look at objects.
  • A pregnant woman with her belly painted to look like your face.
  • Copying all the worst aspects of the Virtual Boy.
  • Whether you want to download jivetalkin.midi.
  • A poem shaped like something.
  • Updo bleak curious quiet.
  • Desert thumbs.
  • Rather pale pagasus.
  • A poem that generates its own blurb.
  • The entire front edge of the pegasus.
  • Why so political, pagasus?
  • Any thumb you want it to be.
  • Defining a thumb by its oppositionality.
  • Rooting for and with the thumb.
  • Your boomer aunt who has a really specific idea of gender roles.
  • Disrupting your toothbrush.
  • Your beaver farm where the underwear comes down the chute and you feed the underwear to the beavers and put the beavers in the juicer and sell the beaver juice to Lenny who gives you gems you can use to play Scrabble but you only get so many tiles per minute unless you're willing to sit and tap video ads, and whether that's a paradigm shift.
  • Willingness to think through processes and systems.
  • A shmup where you control a whale research vessel.
  • Taking the one skill you have in this life and using it to create heavy handed, ineffective political satire.
  • Making an exit poll to find out what percentage of players actually learned something from your propaganda simulator game and what percentage just min-maxed the numbers because it was a fun puzzle.
  • What paradigm you're imagining shifting, exactly.
  • Every game developer's cottage-core retirement fantasy.
  • Making video games without ever talking to anyone on Twitter.
  • Who's the beardy guy dot com.
  • Scrolling through pictures of beardy guys until you find the right one.
  • Jugger.
  • Carrying the macguffin into your opponent's goal.
  • Arcane rules about who's allowed to touch the dog skull and when.
  • The global governing body in charge of the rules of Discs of Tron.
  • The schism in the Jugger community.
  • Teaching a three year old chess boxing.
  • Snapdragon.
  • Taking turns grabbing raisins of a flaming bowl of brandy.
  • Tucking a clove into one of the raisins and whoever grabs that raisin out of the bowl of flaming brandy gets to stop reaching into the bowl of flaming brandy.
  • Flaming tennis ball catch.
  • Calvin Ball, III.
  • The delicate balance of taking letters out of a username until you get to one that's not taken, before you get to names that are definitely taken because they're so short.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Jenni, she slash her.
  • A poem that could've been an email.
  • OST Jam.
  • If every time you were in a room there was someone else in the room doing the game thing you were doing.
  • Just trying to enjoy a leisurely video game when suddenly a co-op partner shows up and starts getting impatient with you.
  • Animals but wet.
  • Animals but they are in the ocean and don't have legs so they can't kick butt.
  • The duality of having legs.
  • The many-faceted world butt.
  • Try fish: you're welcome.
  • Becoming deeply involved in the design and production of novelty clown statues.
  • Who's this unsold clown?
  • Whether the prenup addresses any of the potential clown situations.
  • How many clowns could fit in a bed and breakfast.
  • Monogrammed businessclowns.
  • How to buy yourself a Lordy.
  • Sending unsolicited clowns in the mail.
  • Stacking the clowns until you can ascend to clown heaven.
  • Cleaning help and support for neurodivergent people to clean our filthy filthy houses.
  • The act of living in a house and putting things in places.
  • Keeping your silverware in the freezer.
  • A house where the forks turn into spoons.
  • A basket for clothes that are not so dirty that they need to be washed immediately.
  • Food that is technically rotten but not so rotten that you can't eat it.
  • The room in your house where the gravity is lower and you float.
  • Holding a phone up to your face like a taco.
  • Hundreds of pictures of people holding weird shit up to their heads.
  • Why all the women are at the end of the page.
  • Announcing a new consumer electronics device by submitting it to sidetalkin.com.
  • Side-snorin'.
  • A fun web site for if you want to look at objects.
  • A pregnant woman with her belly painted to look like your face.
  • Copying all the worst aspects of the Virtual Boy.
  • Whether you want to download jivetalkin.midi.
  • A poem shaped like something.
  • Updo bleak curious quiet.
  • Desert thumbs.
  • Rather pale pagasus.
  • A poem that generates its own blurb.
  • The entire front edge of the pegasus.
  • Why so political, pagasus?
  • Any thumb you want it to be.
  • Defining a thumb by its oppositionality.
  • Rooting for and with the thumb.
  • Your boomer aunt who has a really specific idea of gender roles.
  • Disrupting your toothbrush.
  • Your beaver farm where the underwear comes down the chute and you feed the underwear to the beavers and put the beavers in the juicer and sell the beaver juice to Lenny who gives you gems you can use to play Scrabble but you only get so many tiles per minute unless you're willing to sit and tap video ads, and whether that's a paradigm shift.
  • Willingness to think through processes and systems.
  • A shmup where you control a whale research vessel.
  • Taking the one skill you have in this life and using it to create heavy handed, ineffective political satire.
  • Making an exit poll to find out what percentage of players actually learned something from your propaganda simulator game and what percentage just min-maxed the numbers because it was a fun puzzle.
  • What paradigm you're imagining shifting, exactly.
  • Every game developer's cottage-core retirement fantasy.
  • Making video games without ever talking to anyone on Twitter.
  • Who's the beardy guy dot com.
  • Scrolling through pictures of beardy guys until you find the right one.
  • Jugger.
  • Carrying the macguffin into your opponent's goal.
  • Arcane rules about who's allowed to touch the dog skull and when.
  • The global governing body in charge of the rules of Discs of Tron.
  • The schism in the Jugger community.
  • Teaching a three year old chess boxing.
  • Snapdragon.
  • Taking turns grabbing raisins of a flaming bowl of brandy.
  • Tucking a clove into one of the raisins and whoever grabs that raisin out of the bowl of flaming brandy gets to stop reaching into the bowl of flaming brandy.
  • Flaming tennis ball catch.
  • Calvin Ball, III.
  • The delicate balance of taking letters out of a username until you get to one that's not taken, before you get to names that are definitely taken because they're so short.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Jenni, she slash her.
  • A poem that could've been an email.
  • OST Jam.
  • If every time you were in a room there was someone else in the room doing the game thing you were doing.
  • Just trying to enjoy a leisurely video game when suddenly a co-op partner shows up and starts getting impatient with you.
  • Animals but wet.
  • Animals but they are in the ocean and don't have legs so they can't kick butt.
  • The duality of having legs.
  • The many-faceted world butt.
  • Try fish: you're welcome.
  • Becoming deeply involved in the design and production of novelty clown statues.
  • Who's this unsold clown?
  • Whether the prenup addresses any of the potential clown situations.
  • How many clowns could fit in a bed and breakfast.
  • Monogrammed businessclowns.
  • How to buy yourself a Lordy.
  • Sending unsolicited clowns in the mail.
  • Stacking the clowns until you can ascend to clown heaven.
  • Cleaning help and support for neurodivergent people to clean our filthy filthy houses.
  • The act of living in a house and putting things in places.
  • Keeping your silverware in the freezer.
  • A house where the forks turn into spoons.
  • A basket for clothes that are not so dirty that they need to be washed immediately.
  • Food that is technically rotten but not so rotten that you can't eat it.
  • The room in your house where the gravity is lower and you float.
  • Holding a phone up to your face like a taco.
  • Hundreds of pictures of people holding weird shit up to their heads.
  • Why all the women are at the end of the page.
  • Announcing a new consumer electronics device by submitting it to sidetalkin.com.
  • Side-snorin'.
  • A fun web site for if you want to look at objects.
  • A pregnant woman with her belly painted to look like your face.
  • Copying all the worst aspects of the Virtual Boy.
  • Whether you want to download jivetalkin.midi.
  • A poem shaped like something.
  • Updo bleak curious quiet.
  • Desert thumbs.
  • Rather pale pagasus.
  • A poem that generates its own blurb.
  • The entire front edge of the pegasus.
  • Why so political, pagasus?
  • Any thumb you want it to be.
  • Defining a thumb by its oppositionality.
  • Rooting for and with the thumb.
  • Your boomer aunt who has a really specific idea of gender roles.
  • Disrupting your toothbrush.
  • Your beaver farm where the underwear comes down the chute and you feed the underwear to the beavers and put the beavers in the juicer and sell the beaver juice to Lenny who gives you gems you can use to play Scrabble but you only get so many tiles per minute unless you're willing to sit and tap video ads, and whether that's a paradigm shift.
  • Willingness to think through processes and systems.
  • A shmup where you control a whale research vessel.
  • Taking the one skill you have in this life and using it to create heavy handed, ineffective political satire.
  • Making an exit poll to find out what percentage of players actually learned something from your propaganda simulator game and what percentage just min-maxed the numbers because it was a fun puzzle.
  • What paradigm you're imagining shifting, exactly.
  • Every game developer's cottage-core retirement fantasy.
  • Making video games without ever talking to anyone on Twitter.
  • Who's the beardy guy dot com.
  • Scrolling through pictures of beardy guys until you find the right one.
  • Jugger.
  • Carrying the macguffin into your opponent's goal.
  • Arcane rules about who's allowed to touch the dog skull and when.
  • The global governing body in charge of the rules of Discs of Tron.
  • The schism in the Jugger community.
  • Teaching a three year old chess boxing.
  • Snapdragon.
  • Taking turns grabbing raisins of a flaming bowl of brandy.
  • Tucking a clove into one of the raisins and whoever grabs that raisin out of the bowl of flaming brandy gets to stop reaching into the bowl of flaming brandy.
  • Flaming tennis ball catch.
  • Calvin Ball, III.
  • The delicate balance of taking letters out of a username until you get to one that's not taken, before you get to names that are definitely taken because they're so short.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+jliXnXlz ]]> Jim Stormdancer 131. GDC Santa Rides Again https://topiclords.com/gdc-santa-rides-again a4a62a70-7224-4253-aefa-eed6e1cff696 Mon, 25 Apr 2022 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Mike and Kev. We discuss embracing creative chaos is very hard but paradoxically extremely common, thanatosensitivity, GDC, Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy By Thomas Lux, and Being left handed in a right handed world. 1:07:20 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics

Microtopics:

  • Wanting to learn to program and moving to Maine.
  • Learning to program by implementing a meticulous copy of Metroid for the NES.
  • Choosing to live a life that feels like an anime training montage.
  • How to learn to program while having kids.
  • Radical content for radical gamers.
  • Having one's mind blown by works of art, as one does.
  • The "stone soup bubblegum and baling wire everything went wrong" method of making art.
  • What happens when the plan makes contact with the enemy.
  • Writing a film with the magic of wintertime as a core theme and not being able to get the permit to film until spring.
  • Iterating on your idea with insights you've gleaned from working on your idea.
  • Ascertaining the recoverability of any given error.
  • The kind of disaster that happens when a culture accustomed to low-cost-error problems tries to work on high-cost-error problems.
  • Improvising bridges.
  • Programming vs. the disciplined engineering fields.
  • The pros and cons of storing a bunch of elephants on the roof.
  • The user experience of death.
  • Digital ghosts on LinkedIn.
  • Logging in to LinkedIn for the first time in eight years and getting a bunch of IMs from a friend who died six years ago.
  • Dealing with your dead friend's estate and having to close out all the relationships they were maintaining on OkCupid.
  • Thanatechnologies.
  • The human events taking place on a separate flow of time than internet time.
  • Slug World.
  • A human brain computer interaction conference at Noisebridge.
  • alt.ctrl.GDC
  • Spending all of GDC on the lawn.
  • A GDC talk except instead of talking to an auditorium full of 500 people, you're talking to a hotel room full of five people.
  • The Unconference Phenomenon.
  • Substance-to-fluff ratios.
  • Your three GDC lives.
  • Going to the talks where they talk about the stuff we're doing to figure out how we can do our stuff better.
  • The ascended platonic GDC.
  • Getting all Dunbar's Numbered-out and spending all your time talking to people you know.
  • Showing your game at a conference to increase the odds that one of the seven people at Sony who can get your game into the Spring Fever promotion will walk by and notice you.
  • Making a leveraged play on your charisma and luck stats.
  • GDC Santa with the sack of boxed copies of Glittermitten Grove.
  • A map of TXT World stitched together out of screenshots, like in the good old days.
  • A greybeard coming out of the woodwork to admire your ANSI art map.
  • Disrespecting the expo.
  • Realizing that somebody is about to ask you how your GDC is going and getting the drop on them by asking how their GDC is going first.
  • Katie hauling off and gassing you up.
  • The hazards of being Jim Stormdancer.
  • A reward for not loving the death of the ugly and even the dangerous.
  • The tangled underworld of your socks.
  • Pretending to not be afraid of spiders because you don't want your son to be afraid of spiders.
  • Growing up with rhino beetles in Liberia.
  • Hog snakes.
  • The extremely specific feeling of a desperate beetle clinging to your pruny fingertip.
  • Formative bug experiences.
  • Millions of termites growing wings to do their big ol' termite sex party.
  • Sweeping up all the termites who are taking a nap after mating season to fry in palm oil as a special treat.
  • The morning where the entire town is covered in bugs which sucks but you get to eat them which rules.
  • Reminiscing about which body parts of a termite are saltiest.
  • Getting accustomed to eating termites by the time you get to the bottom of the bag.
  • Left-handed zippers.
  • Trying to use the wrong scissors and assuming that you have some kind of developmental problem.
  • The Uniball Jetstream Rollerball, with a pressurized ink reservoir.
  • The prince who was promised.
  • Fretting with your dominant hand.
  • Picking a specific guitar string at speed.
  • Whether handedness exists.
  • Drawing with gross motor movements.
  • Left-handed mugs.
  • Left-handed drums vs. open-handed drums.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics

Microtopics:

  • Wanting to learn to program and moving to Maine.
  • Learning to program by implementing a meticulous copy of Metroid for the NES.
  • Choosing to live a life that feels like an anime training montage.
  • How to learn to program while having kids.
  • Radical content for radical gamers.
  • Having one's mind blown by works of art, as one does.
  • The "stone soup bubblegum and baling wire everything went wrong" method of making art.
  • What happens when the plan makes contact with the enemy.
  • Writing a film with the magic of wintertime as a core theme and not being able to get the permit to film until spring.
  • Iterating on your idea with insights you've gleaned from working on your idea.
  • Ascertaining the recoverability of any given error.
  • The kind of disaster that happens when a culture accustomed to low-cost-error problems tries to work on high-cost-error problems.
  • Improvising bridges.
  • Programming vs. the disciplined engineering fields.
  • The pros and cons of storing a bunch of elephants on the roof.
  • The user experience of death.
  • Digital ghosts on LinkedIn.
  • Logging in to LinkedIn for the first time in eight years and getting a bunch of IMs from a friend who died six years ago.
  • Dealing with your dead friend's estate and having to close out all the relationships they were maintaining on OkCupid.
  • Thanatechnologies.
  • The human events taking place on a separate flow of time than internet time.
  • Slug World.
  • A human brain computer interaction conference at Noisebridge.
  • alt.ctrl.GDC
  • Spending all of GDC on the lawn.
  • A GDC talk except instead of talking to an auditorium full of 500 people, you're talking to a hotel room full of five people.
  • The Unconference Phenomenon.
  • Substance-to-fluff ratios.
  • Your three GDC lives.
  • Going to the talks where they talk about the stuff we're doing to figure out how we can do our stuff better.
  • The ascended platonic GDC.
  • Getting all Dunbar's Numbered-out and spending all your time talking to people you know.
  • Showing your game at a conference to increase the odds that one of the seven people at Sony who can get your game into the Spring Fever promotion will walk by and notice you.
  • Making a leveraged play on your charisma and luck stats.
  • GDC Santa with the sack of boxed copies of Glittermitten Grove.
  • A map of TXT World stitched together out of screenshots, like in the good old days.
  • A greybeard coming out of the woodwork to admire your ANSI art map.
  • Disrespecting the expo.
  • Realizing that somebody is about to ask you how your GDC is going and getting the drop on them by asking how their GDC is going first.
  • Katie hauling off and gassing you up.
  • The hazards of being Jim Stormdancer.
  • A reward for not loving the death of the ugly and even the dangerous.
  • The tangled underworld of your socks.
  • Pretending to not be afraid of spiders because you don't want your son to be afraid of spiders.
  • Growing up with rhino beetles in Liberia.
  • Hog snakes.
  • The extremely specific feeling of a desperate beetle clinging to your pruny fingertip.
  • Formative bug experiences.
  • Millions of termites growing wings to do their big ol' termite sex party.
  • Sweeping up all the termites who are taking a nap after mating season to fry in palm oil as a special treat.
  • The morning where the entire town is covered in bugs which sucks but you get to eat them which rules.
  • Reminiscing about which body parts of a termite are saltiest.
  • Getting accustomed to eating termites by the time you get to the bottom of the bag.
  • Left-handed zippers.
  • Trying to use the wrong scissors and assuming that you have some kind of developmental problem.
  • The Uniball Jetstream Rollerball, with a pressurized ink reservoir.
  • The prince who was promised.
  • Fretting with your dominant hand.
  • Picking a specific guitar string at speed.
  • Whether handedness exists.
  • Drawing with gross motor movements.
  • Left-handed mugs.
  • Left-handed drums vs. open-handed drums.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics

Microtopics:

  • Wanting to learn to program and moving to Maine.
  • Learning to program by implementing a meticulous copy of Metroid for the NES.
  • Choosing to live a life that feels like an anime training montage.
  • How to learn to program while having kids.
  • Radical content for radical gamers.
  • Having one's mind blown by works of art, as one does.
  • The "stone soup bubblegum and baling wire everything went wrong" method of making art.
  • What happens when the plan makes contact with the enemy.
  • Writing a film with the magic of wintertime as a core theme and not being able to get the permit to film until spring.
  • Iterating on your idea with insights you've gleaned from working on your idea.
  • Ascertaining the recoverability of any given error.
  • The kind of disaster that happens when a culture accustomed to low-cost-error problems tries to work on high-cost-error problems.
  • Improvising bridges.
  • Programming vs. the disciplined engineering fields.
  • The pros and cons of storing a bunch of elephants on the roof.
  • The user experience of death.
  • Digital ghosts on LinkedIn.
  • Logging in to LinkedIn for the first time in eight years and getting a bunch of IMs from a friend who died six years ago.
  • Dealing with your dead friend's estate and having to close out all the relationships they were maintaining on OkCupid.
  • Thanatechnologies.
  • The human events taking place on a separate flow of time than internet time.
  • Slug World.
  • A human brain computer interaction conference at Noisebridge.
  • alt.ctrl.GDC
  • Spending all of GDC on the lawn.
  • A GDC talk except instead of talking to an auditorium full of 500 people, you're talking to a hotel room full of five people.
  • The Unconference Phenomenon.
  • Substance-to-fluff ratios.
  • Your three GDC lives.
  • Going to the talks where they talk about the stuff we're doing to figure out how we can do our stuff better.
  • The ascended platonic GDC.
  • Getting all Dunbar's Numbered-out and spending all your time talking to people you know.
  • Showing your game at a conference to increase the odds that one of the seven people at Sony who can get your game into the Spring Fever promotion will walk by and notice you.
  • Making a leveraged play on your charisma and luck stats.
  • GDC Santa with the sack of boxed copies of Glittermitten Grove.
  • A map of TXT World stitched together out of screenshots, like in the good old days.
  • A greybeard coming out of the woodwork to admire your ANSI art map.
  • Disrespecting the expo.
  • Realizing that somebody is about to ask you how your GDC is going and getting the drop on them by asking how their GDC is going first.
  • Katie hauling off and gassing you up.
  • The hazards of being Jim Stormdancer.
  • A reward for not loving the death of the ugly and even the dangerous.
  • The tangled underworld of your socks.
  • Pretending to not be afraid of spiders because you don't want your son to be afraid of spiders.
  • Growing up with rhino beetles in Liberia.
  • Hog snakes.
  • The extremely specific feeling of a desperate beetle clinging to your pruny fingertip.
  • Formative bug experiences.
  • Millions of termites growing wings to do their big ol' termite sex party.
  • Sweeping up all the termites who are taking a nap after mating season to fry in palm oil as a special treat.
  • The morning where the entire town is covered in bugs which sucks but you get to eat them which rules.
  • Reminiscing about which body parts of a termite are saltiest.
  • Getting accustomed to eating termites by the time you get to the bottom of the bag.
  • Left-handed zippers.
  • Trying to use the wrong scissors and assuming that you have some kind of developmental problem.
  • The Uniball Jetstream Rollerball, with a pressurized ink reservoir.
  • The prince who was promised.
  • Fretting with your dominant hand.
  • Picking a specific guitar string at speed.
  • Whether handedness exists.
  • Drawing with gross motor movements.
  • Left-handed mugs.
  • Left-handed drums vs. open-handed drums.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+WtRySbB8 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 130. Gilding the Lemur https://topiclords.com/gilding-the-lemur e6cd14b8-1d06-434d-83d7-fea9e80cfe8a Mon, 18 Apr 2022 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Tyriq and Stevie. We discuss watching TAS videos and wondering how much of what is happening is necessary vs flourish, if Jeff Bezos wanted to create Jurassic Park, dipping fruit in chocolate, Strong Men, Riding Horses by Gwendolyn Brooks, and the creators of Earthworm Jim: Where are they now? 1:12:49 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Watching TAS videos and wondering how much of what is happening is necessary vs flourish
  • If Jeff Bezos wanted to recreate Jurassic Park
  • Chocolate-dipped fruit has such an enormous gulf between perceived effort and actual effort that as a gift giver or potluck attendee you are all but obligated to take advantage
  • Strong Men, Riding Horses by Gwendolyn Brooks
  • The creators of Earthworm Jim: Where are they now?

Microtopics:

  • Tunic.
  • Finding collectible pages of a game's manual inside the game.
  • Games in fake languages.
  • Playing imported games in emulation and trying to figure out how to play even though you don't speak the language.
  • Curveballs.
  • A monthly in-person cozy casual game development meetup.
  • Discovering what people mean by "within" when people say "inquire within."
  • What happened to all of the art.
  • What a whale bone smells like after you clean it.
  • Whether it's grosser to drink bone marrow or eat oysters.
  • The most charming of all the crabs.
  • TAS runs.
  • The various kinds of tools that might assist you in creating a tool-assisted speed run.
  • Human-Mediated Speed Runs, or HMSRs.
  • Proving the ideal speed run.
  • Some kind of sequence that is based on a timer.
  • When the TAS run does a little dance and you're trying to figure out whether that's important to the run or if they're just killing time.
  • The game became Snake.
  • Whether coffee cures or causes cancer.
  • Like listening in a mirror.
  • The vapors.
  • Trillionaires not being as rich as they used to be.
  • A big big island full of organisms that are just waiting to be coated in gold.
  • Painting your entire body and dying somehow.
  • Lemur-friendly paints.
  • People who've eaten breakfast and then died.
  • Dipping some shit in some crap.
  • Watching Food Network to discover the Science of Chocolate.
  • An attractive morsel.
  • Pastries with fruit fillings.
  • A solid cube of a mass of dessert-object.
  • Taking advice from someone who hasn't even been on several hundred podcasts.
  • Frantically putting the Topic Lords banner back on your wall when you see Jim approaching.
  • Releasing Topic Lords episodes.
  • Shuffling off of this mortal topic.
  • Making a movie to promote your new chocolate bar.
  • A type of chocolate that tries to be solid.
  • Spaghetti-Os as a back formation of Spaghetti-O-ification, which is what happens when pasta passes through a black hole's event horizon.
  • Using Hawking radiation to retrieve lost Spaghetti-Os from within black holes.
  • The movie playing the sound of somebody peeing to let you know that now's when you get up to use the bathroom.
  • A crowd of people doing foley work for a restaurant scene in Murder She Wrote.
  • Picking somebody for Animatronic Angela Lansbury to murder and then picking somebody for her to pin it on when she solves the crime.
  • The fine line between true and false.
  • The fine line between foot and floor.
  • Desert-eyed, rentless strong men pasted to stars already.
  • A source of praise for the patriarchy.
  • Addled by landlords.
  • Whether being pasted to the stars is good.
  • The elbow of the topics.
  • Earthworm Jim.
  • A muscular goofball earthworm.
  • Whether you can say "groovy" and still be angry.
  • A strict no-sequels policy.
  • Not the thing you're here to talk about.
  • George "The Fat Man" Sanger.
  • Wall-E but a Roomba but also one of those 90s wireless phone cradles.
  • Games you can play for free on the web.
  • All the good times we had at Blockbuster Video renting movies from Blockbuster Video.
  • How public libraries still exist and offer more movies than your local Blockbuster Video had and they're free and you keep them for a month rather than two days but nobody gives a shit because libraries don't have branding or advertising.
  • A perfect solution to a problem that everybody wants solved urgently.
  • Weirdly buff creatures that should not be buff.
  • Music band with animal companion solves mystery.
  • The Dog & The Stoner & The Band & The Ghost.
  • Queen Slug-for-a-Butt.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Watching TAS videos and wondering how much of what is happening is necessary vs flourish
  • If Jeff Bezos wanted to recreate Jurassic Park
  • Chocolate-dipped fruit has such an enormous gulf between perceived effort and actual effort that as a gift giver or potluck attendee you are all but obligated to take advantage
  • Strong Men, Riding Horses by Gwendolyn Brooks
  • The creators of Earthworm Jim: Where are they now?

Microtopics:

  • Tunic.
  • Finding collectible pages of a game's manual inside the game.
  • Games in fake languages.
  • Playing imported games in emulation and trying to figure out how to play even though you don't speak the language.
  • Curveballs.
  • A monthly in-person cozy casual game development meetup.
  • Discovering what people mean by "within" when people say "inquire within."
  • What happened to all of the art.
  • What a whale bone smells like after you clean it.
  • Whether it's grosser to drink bone marrow or eat oysters.
  • The most charming of all the crabs.
  • TAS runs.
  • The various kinds of tools that might assist you in creating a tool-assisted speed run.
  • Human-Mediated Speed Runs, or HMSRs.
  • Proving the ideal speed run.
  • Some kind of sequence that is based on a timer.
  • When the TAS run does a little dance and you're trying to figure out whether that's important to the run or if they're just killing time.
  • The game became Snake.
  • Whether coffee cures or causes cancer.
  • Like listening in a mirror.
  • The vapors.
  • Trillionaires not being as rich as they used to be.
  • A big big island full of organisms that are just waiting to be coated in gold.
  • Painting your entire body and dying somehow.
  • Lemur-friendly paints.
  • People who've eaten breakfast and then died.
  • Dipping some shit in some crap.
  • Watching Food Network to discover the Science of Chocolate.
  • An attractive morsel.
  • Pastries with fruit fillings.
  • A solid cube of a mass of dessert-object.
  • Taking advice from someone who hasn't even been on several hundred podcasts.
  • Frantically putting the Topic Lords banner back on your wall when you see Jim approaching.
  • Releasing Topic Lords episodes.
  • Shuffling off of this mortal topic.
  • Making a movie to promote your new chocolate bar.
  • A type of chocolate that tries to be solid.
  • Spaghetti-Os as a back formation of Spaghetti-O-ification, which is what happens when pasta passes through a black hole's event horizon.
  • Using Hawking radiation to retrieve lost Spaghetti-Os from within black holes.
  • The movie playing the sound of somebody peeing to let you know that now's when you get up to use the bathroom.
  • A crowd of people doing foley work for a restaurant scene in Murder She Wrote.
  • Picking somebody for Animatronic Angela Lansbury to murder and then picking somebody for her to pin it on when she solves the crime.
  • The fine line between true and false.
  • The fine line between foot and floor.
  • Desert-eyed, rentless strong men pasted to stars already.
  • A source of praise for the patriarchy.
  • Addled by landlords.
  • Whether being pasted to the stars is good.
  • The elbow of the topics.
  • Earthworm Jim.
  • A muscular goofball earthworm.
  • Whether you can say "groovy" and still be angry.
  • A strict no-sequels policy.
  • Not the thing you're here to talk about.
  • George "The Fat Man" Sanger.
  • Wall-E but a Roomba but also one of those 90s wireless phone cradles.
  • Games you can play for free on the web.
  • All the good times we had at Blockbuster Video renting movies from Blockbuster Video.
  • How public libraries still exist and offer more movies than your local Blockbuster Video had and they're free and you keep them for a month rather than two days but nobody gives a shit because libraries don't have branding or advertising.
  • A perfect solution to a problem that everybody wants solved urgently.
  • Weirdly buff creatures that should not be buff.
  • Music band with animal companion solves mystery.
  • The Dog & The Stoner & The Band & The Ghost.
  • Queen Slug-for-a-Butt.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Watching TAS videos and wondering how much of what is happening is necessary vs flourish
  • If Jeff Bezos wanted to recreate Jurassic Park
  • Chocolate-dipped fruit has such an enormous gulf between perceived effort and actual effort that as a gift giver or potluck attendee you are all but obligated to take advantage
  • Strong Men, Riding Horses by Gwendolyn Brooks
  • The creators of Earthworm Jim: Where are they now?

Microtopics:

  • Tunic.
  • Finding collectible pages of a game's manual inside the game.
  • Games in fake languages.
  • Playing imported games in emulation and trying to figure out how to play even though you don't speak the language.
  • Curveballs.
  • A monthly in-person cozy casual game development meetup.
  • Discovering what people mean by "within" when people say "inquire within."
  • What happened to all of the art.
  • What a whale bone smells like after you clean it.
  • Whether it's grosser to drink bone marrow or eat oysters.
  • The most charming of all the crabs.
  • TAS runs.
  • The various kinds of tools that might assist you in creating a tool-assisted speed run.
  • Human-Mediated Speed Runs, or HMSRs.
  • Proving the ideal speed run.
  • Some kind of sequence that is based on a timer.
  • When the TAS run does a little dance and you're trying to figure out whether that's important to the run or if they're just killing time.
  • The game became Snake.
  • Whether coffee cures or causes cancer.
  • Like listening in a mirror.
  • The vapors.
  • Trillionaires not being as rich as they used to be.
  • A big big island full of organisms that are just waiting to be coated in gold.
  • Painting your entire body and dying somehow.
  • Lemur-friendly paints.
  • People who've eaten breakfast and then died.
  • Dipping some shit in some crap.
  • Watching Food Network to discover the Science of Chocolate.
  • An attractive morsel.
  • Pastries with fruit fillings.
  • A solid cube of a mass of dessert-object.
  • Taking advice from someone who hasn't even been on several hundred podcasts.
  • Frantically putting the Topic Lords banner back on your wall when you see Jim approaching.
  • Releasing Topic Lords episodes.
  • Shuffling off of this mortal topic.
  • Making a movie to promote your new chocolate bar.
  • A type of chocolate that tries to be solid.
  • Spaghetti-Os as a back formation of Spaghetti-O-ification, which is what happens when pasta passes through a black hole's event horizon.
  • Using Hawking radiation to retrieve lost Spaghetti-Os from within black holes.
  • The movie playing the sound of somebody peeing to let you know that now's when you get up to use the bathroom.
  • A crowd of people doing foley work for a restaurant scene in Murder She Wrote.
  • Picking somebody for Animatronic Angela Lansbury to murder and then picking somebody for her to pin it on when she solves the crime.
  • The fine line between true and false.
  • The fine line between foot and floor.
  • Desert-eyed, rentless strong men pasted to stars already.
  • A source of praise for the patriarchy.
  • Addled by landlords.
  • Whether being pasted to the stars is good.
  • The elbow of the topics.
  • Earthworm Jim.
  • A muscular goofball earthworm.
  • Whether you can say "groovy" and still be angry.
  • A strict no-sequels policy.
  • Not the thing you're here to talk about.
  • George "The Fat Man" Sanger.
  • Wall-E but a Roomba but also one of those 90s wireless phone cradles.
  • Games you can play for free on the web.
  • All the good times we had at Blockbuster Video renting movies from Blockbuster Video.
  • How public libraries still exist and offer more movies than your local Blockbuster Video had and they're free and you keep them for a month rather than two days but nobody gives a shit because libraries don't have branding or advertising.
  • A perfect solution to a problem that everybody wants solved urgently.
  • Weirdly buff creatures that should not be buff.
  • Music band with animal companion solves mystery.
  • The Dog & The Stoner & The Band & The Ghost.
  • Queen Slug-for-a-Butt.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+hfyXODP_ ]]> Jim Stormdancer 129. Yet Another Country Where They Don't Pee https://topiclords.com/yet-another-country-where-they-dont-pee 6296ee85-9044-4876-bfd7-0de897ec93ed Mon, 11 Apr 2022 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Alex and Shannon. We discuss regional Trash animals, dynamic water features, the Pee Pee Dance's Wikipedia absence, The Bells by Edgar Allen Poe, recipe essentialism, and Sei Shonagon's Hateful Things. 1:07:05 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Alex
  • Shannon

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Striving to sound like a motor that has just been switched off.
  • A very healthy vasovagal response.
  • Separating the platelets from the plasma.
  • Donating blood to anybody on the street with a needle and some brownie brittle.
  • Determining the blood type of this synthetic fake blood.
  • Brownies except they shatter like glass between your teeth.
  • Trashimals.
  • Visiting a new place and delighting at all the local pests.
  • Living in Florida and just bumping into crocodiles on the street.
  • Monkeys climbing your body to steal your food and break your camera.
  • Fairy penguins nesting in your storm drains.
  • Scooping rattlesnakes into a bucket, going to a military base and dumping them into the tank cockpits.
  • Only realizing that it's weird to have a rattlesnake in a jar on your porch when a Frenchman wants to come see.
  • It's a Canyon Thing.
  • Finding out that a mongoose is not the size of a goose.
  • One of the more hazardous trashimals.
  • Looking out the window and realizing that someone forgot to close the garage door and you're just going to have to wait for that grizzly bear to leave.
  • The mountain lion who visited downtown Berkeley.
  • A regular household goose.
  • Turning off Niagara falls at night.
  • Seeing behind the veil of the world when Niagara falls gets switched off.
  • Going to Hawaii to see the milky way.
  • A universal human experience that remains completely undocumented.
  • The squeeze and grab strategy.
  • Something you wouldn't want to sample in Costco.
  • The tiny sommelier in your butt.
  • Recipes calling for eggs or milk but not specifying which kind.
  • Pee shivers.
  • A reading face for radio.
  • A sort of runic rhyme.
  • The rhyming and the chiming of the bells bells bells bells bells bells bells.
  • Edgar Allan Poe as an emo Dr. Seuss.
  • The gamut of all the things bells can be.
  • Adding more bells to the end of each verse.
  • The Jabberwocky rewritten in the style of incomprehensible in-jokes.
  • A cake recipe with two ingredients.
  • Keto-something something cookies.
  • Mashing the crosshatch shape with a fork.
  • The Easy Cookbook: Over 100 Satisfying Recipes Made with Four Ingredients or Less.
  • Ice cream made from eggs and peanut butter.
  • The fourth ingredient is your car.
  • Writing a book of listicles in the 11th century.
  • The way the snow looks on the roofs of the village under moonlight, and how the plebian villagers can't appreciate it.
  • When one is in a hurry to leave but one's visitor keeps chattering away.
  • Shameless old people putting their feet up on braziers.
  • One's attachment to a man depending largely on the elegance of his leave-taking.
  • Trying to maintain all your clandestine relationships in a palace where the walls are made of paper.
  • A person who recites a spell after sneezing.
  • When one is about to be told some interesting piece of news and a baby starts crying.
  • The exorcist staying up too late and falling asleep in the middle of the exorcism.
  • All the interesting poetry and prose from a historical era being written by women because the men were expected to write in their second language.
  • The Empress receives the gift of a phonograph at the dawn of voice recording, and she turns to and is like "uh, figure out something to do with this."
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Alex
  • Shannon

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Striving to sound like a motor that has just been switched off.
  • A very healthy vasovagal response.
  • Separating the platelets from the plasma.
  • Donating blood to anybody on the street with a needle and some brownie brittle.
  • Determining the blood type of this synthetic fake blood.
  • Brownies except they shatter like glass between your teeth.
  • Trashimals.
  • Visiting a new place and delighting at all the local pests.
  • Living in Florida and just bumping into crocodiles on the street.
  • Monkeys climbing your body to steal your food and break your camera.
  • Fairy penguins nesting in your storm drains.
  • Scooping rattlesnakes into a bucket, going to a military base and dumping them into the tank cockpits.
  • Only realizing that it's weird to have a rattlesnake in a jar on your porch when a Frenchman wants to come see.
  • It's a Canyon Thing.
  • Finding out that a mongoose is not the size of a goose.
  • One of the more hazardous trashimals.
  • Looking out the window and realizing that someone forgot to close the garage door and you're just going to have to wait for that grizzly bear to leave.
  • The mountain lion who visited downtown Berkeley.
  • A regular household goose.
  • Turning off Niagara falls at night.
  • Seeing behind the veil of the world when Niagara falls gets switched off.
  • Going to Hawaii to see the milky way.
  • A universal human experience that remains completely undocumented.
  • The squeeze and grab strategy.
  • Something you wouldn't want to sample in Costco.
  • The tiny sommelier in your butt.
  • Recipes calling for eggs or milk but not specifying which kind.
  • Pee shivers.
  • A reading face for radio.
  • A sort of runic rhyme.
  • The rhyming and the chiming of the bells bells bells bells bells bells bells.
  • Edgar Allan Poe as an emo Dr. Seuss.
  • The gamut of all the things bells can be.
  • Adding more bells to the end of each verse.
  • The Jabberwocky rewritten in the style of incomprehensible in-jokes.
  • A cake recipe with two ingredients.
  • Keto-something something cookies.
  • Mashing the crosshatch shape with a fork.
  • The Easy Cookbook: Over 100 Satisfying Recipes Made with Four Ingredients or Less.
  • Ice cream made from eggs and peanut butter.
  • The fourth ingredient is your car.
  • Writing a book of listicles in the 11th century.
  • The way the snow looks on the roofs of the village under moonlight, and how the plebian villagers can't appreciate it.
  • When one is in a hurry to leave but one's visitor keeps chattering away.
  • Shameless old people putting their feet up on braziers.
  • One's attachment to a man depending largely on the elegance of his leave-taking.
  • Trying to maintain all your clandestine relationships in a palace where the walls are made of paper.
  • A person who recites a spell after sneezing.
  • When one is about to be told some interesting piece of news and a baby starts crying.
  • The exorcist staying up too late and falling asleep in the middle of the exorcism.
  • All the interesting poetry and prose from a historical era being written by women because the men were expected to write in their second language.
  • The Empress receives the gift of a phonograph at the dawn of voice recording, and she turns to and is like "uh, figure out something to do with this."

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Alex
  • Shannon

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Striving to sound like a motor that has just been switched off.
  • A very healthy vasovagal response.
  • Separating the platelets from the plasma.
  • Donating blood to anybody on the street with a needle and some brownie brittle.
  • Determining the blood type of this synthetic fake blood.
  • Brownies except they shatter like glass between your teeth.
  • Trashimals.
  • Visiting a new place and delighting at all the local pests.
  • Living in Florida and just bumping into crocodiles on the street.
  • Monkeys climbing your body to steal your food and break your camera.
  • Fairy penguins nesting in your storm drains.
  • Scooping rattlesnakes into a bucket, going to a military base and dumping them into the tank cockpits.
  • Only realizing that it's weird to have a rattlesnake in a jar on your porch when a Frenchman wants to come see.
  • It's a Canyon Thing.
  • Finding out that a mongoose is not the size of a goose.
  • One of the more hazardous trashimals.
  • Looking out the window and realizing that someone forgot to close the garage door and you're just going to have to wait for that grizzly bear to leave.
  • The mountain lion who visited downtown Berkeley.
  • A regular household goose.
  • Turning off Niagara falls at night.
  • Seeing behind the veil of the world when Niagara falls gets switched off.
  • Going to Hawaii to see the milky way.
  • A universal human experience that remains completely undocumented.
  • The squeeze and grab strategy.
  • Something you wouldn't want to sample in Costco.
  • The tiny sommelier in your butt.
  • Recipes calling for eggs or milk but not specifying which kind.
  • Pee shivers.
  • A reading face for radio.
  • A sort of runic rhyme.
  • The rhyming and the chiming of the bells bells bells bells bells bells bells.
  • Edgar Allan Poe as an emo Dr. Seuss.
  • The gamut of all the things bells can be.
  • Adding more bells to the end of each verse.
  • The Jabberwocky rewritten in the style of incomprehensible in-jokes.
  • A cake recipe with two ingredients.
  • Keto-something something cookies.
  • Mashing the crosshatch shape with a fork.
  • The Easy Cookbook: Over 100 Satisfying Recipes Made with Four Ingredients or Less.
  • Ice cream made from eggs and peanut butter.
  • The fourth ingredient is your car.
  • Writing a book of listicles in the 11th century.
  • The way the snow looks on the roofs of the village under moonlight, and how the plebian villagers can't appreciate it.
  • When one is in a hurry to leave but one's visitor keeps chattering away.
  • Shameless old people putting their feet up on braziers.
  • One's attachment to a man depending largely on the elegance of his leave-taking.
  • Trying to maintain all your clandestine relationships in a palace where the walls are made of paper.
  • A person who recites a spell after sneezing.
  • When one is about to be told some interesting piece of news and a baby starts crying.
  • The exorcist staying up too late and falling asleep in the middle of the exorcism.
  • All the interesting poetry and prose from a historical era being written by women because the men were expected to write in their second language.
  • The Empress receives the gift of a phonograph at the dawn of voice recording, and she turns to and is like "uh, figure out something to do with this."

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+zFnA29R8 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 128. Intermittent Fasting Kirby https://topiclords.com/intermittent-fasting-kirby b5146e85-d065-49ea-8718-98066c6492e4 Mon, 04 Apr 2022 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Jenni and Chris. We discuss bean trees, the spoilers social contract, words that men know but women don't and vice versa, Ozymandias by Percy Shelley, chilling by yourself in the womb unless you're a twin, oldschool AD&D being hard to start but ultimately less video/board gamey, and Wordle speed runs. 1:07:37 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Plugging every Xalavier Nelson game.
  • Standing in a three bean soup.
  • Everyone's favorite Fire Emblem hero, Spiky Ball Tree.
  • Sweetgum.
  • Producing liquid amber but not calling it liquid amber for trademark reasons.
  • Whether it's possible to have green wood.
  • A traumatic formative art school experience that you take out on trees for the rest of your life.
  • Ablative armor.
  • Spoilers for the first novel ever written.
  • Seeing Empire Strikes Back dozens of times in the theater while in the womb.
  • A spoiler policy that makes people hate you.
  • Getting consent to gaslight your girlfriend about movies she hasn't watched.
  • Picking a movie line to be the only joke you ever say.
  • The list of movies for which there is no statute of limitations on spoilers.
  • Using a pen knife to cut open your forearm to reveal the servomotors inside any time there's a lull in the conversation.
  • The SpoilOrbs.
  • Inventing the video game haptics to allow a game designer to kick you in the balls.
  • Kittencore Dark Souls.
  • Junji-ito's cat diary.
  • Clutter in movies.
  • Hiring excellent schlubby actors.
  • Back when it was notable and interesting that Linda Hamilton got fit for Terminator 2.
  • Getting an AI on the job.
  • Laura Panini.
  • Live coding skeletal animation.
  • Rotating around a creepy lady.
  • Asking if anyone's seen something but nobody has.
  • When you push the button on the monitor and it goes all wibbly wobbly for a second.
  • A list going there.
  • A word that you only know if you read a lot of G.K. Chesterson.
  • Little Kirbys that help you out in the event of a prolapse.
  • How nobody in the UK knows what "goober" or "wine gums" means.
  • Abseiling and rappelling.
  • Putting "kerbside" on a list of words that Americans don't know.
  • Polearms that were descended from boar hunting.
  • Asking a thousand Americans to say yes or no to every word in the dictionary.
  • The Katana Yakuza Thesis.
  • Reading poetry in a funny voice.
  • The kind of person who would end a poem with a semicolon.
  • Reciting a poem about a guy you met yesterday who told you most of the poem.
  • Hearing from a guy about a rotting stump of a conquest.
  • Writing a poem where you meet a guy who tells you about a song that used to be on his iPod that you can no longer download from mp3 dot com.
  • Yelling at a long dead poet about punctuation.
  • Poetry about not knowing something but it's unclear whether nobody knows the thing or if it's just the poet's personal ignorance.
  • Painting ancient Greek statues flesh-colored.
  • Percy Shelley the nonsense man.
  • Smash Mouth cancelling their concert at your county fair after they got famous.
  • How to pronounce "shewed"
  • What's wrong with looking upon me?
  • 23 And Me informing you that you have a mom.
  • The familial incest tab on 23 And Me.
  • Twins: There's Two Of Them.
  • Twins in the womb listening to the Empire Strikes Back soundtrack and elbowing each other.
  • A person who could exist and would be attractive.
  • Geocities turn of the century vibes.
  • The t-shirt that Jim's wife bought him.
  • How Futurama made the name "Hubert" cool but "Pubert" is still no good.
  • Having six kids and naming them all Pubert.
  • Naming an ice cream shop "Fucklers" because who can stop you? (The police.)
  • Fucklers: Sole Owner of my Name Ice-Creamery.
  • The holding company that owns every disused mascot.
  • The Hamm's Beer Bear.
  • Wordle speed run categories.
  • Mathematicians who debunk Minecraft speed runs.
  • Trying to invent fake commentary for a sport you know nothing about.
  • Yelling advice to recorded speed runs.
  • Watching everybody believe Wordle conspiracy theories.
  • Comparing notes about reality.
  • Preferring having friends over being right.
  • The absolute best time to get off of social media.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Plugging every Xalavier Nelson game.
  • Standing in a three bean soup.
  • Everyone's favorite Fire Emblem hero, Spiky Ball Tree.
  • Sweetgum.
  • Producing liquid amber but not calling it liquid amber for trademark reasons.
  • Whether it's possible to have green wood.
  • A traumatic formative art school experience that you take out on trees for the rest of your life.
  • Ablative armor.
  • Spoilers for the first novel ever written.
  • Seeing Empire Strikes Back dozens of times in the theater while in the womb.
  • A spoiler policy that makes people hate you.
  • Getting consent to gaslight your girlfriend about movies she hasn't watched.
  • Picking a movie line to be the only joke you ever say.
  • The list of movies for which there is no statute of limitations on spoilers.
  • Using a pen knife to cut open your forearm to reveal the servomotors inside any time there's a lull in the conversation.
  • The SpoilOrbs.
  • Inventing the video game haptics to allow a game designer to kick you in the balls.
  • Kittencore Dark Souls.
  • Junji-ito's cat diary.
  • Clutter in movies.
  • Hiring excellent schlubby actors.
  • Back when it was notable and interesting that Linda Hamilton got fit for Terminator 2.
  • Getting an AI on the job.
  • Laura Panini.
  • Live coding skeletal animation.
  • Rotating around a creepy lady.
  • Asking if anyone's seen something but nobody has.
  • When you push the button on the monitor and it goes all wibbly wobbly for a second.
  • A list going there.
  • A word that you only know if you read a lot of G.K. Chesterson.
  • Little Kirbys that help you out in the event of a prolapse.
  • How nobody in the UK knows what "goober" or "wine gums" means.
  • Abseiling and rappelling.
  • Putting "kerbside" on a list of words that Americans don't know.
  • Polearms that were descended from boar hunting.
  • Asking a thousand Americans to say yes or no to every word in the dictionary.
  • The Katana Yakuza Thesis.
  • Reading poetry in a funny voice.
  • The kind of person who would end a poem with a semicolon.
  • Reciting a poem about a guy you met yesterday who told you most of the poem.
  • Hearing from a guy about a rotting stump of a conquest.
  • Writing a poem where you meet a guy who tells you about a song that used to be on his iPod that you can no longer download from mp3 dot com.
  • Yelling at a long dead poet about punctuation.
  • Poetry about not knowing something but it's unclear whether nobody knows the thing or if it's just the poet's personal ignorance.
  • Painting ancient Greek statues flesh-colored.
  • Percy Shelley the nonsense man.
  • Smash Mouth cancelling their concert at your county fair after they got famous.
  • How to pronounce "shewed"
  • What's wrong with looking upon me?
  • 23 And Me informing you that you have a mom.
  • The familial incest tab on 23 And Me.
  • Twins: There's Two Of Them.
  • Twins in the womb listening to the Empire Strikes Back soundtrack and elbowing each other.
  • A person who could exist and would be attractive.
  • Geocities turn of the century vibes.
  • The t-shirt that Jim's wife bought him.
  • How Futurama made the name "Hubert" cool but "Pubert" is still no good.
  • Having six kids and naming them all Pubert.
  • Naming an ice cream shop "Fucklers" because who can stop you? (The police.)
  • Fucklers: Sole Owner of my Name Ice-Creamery.
  • The holding company that owns every disused mascot.
  • The Hamm's Beer Bear.
  • Wordle speed run categories.
  • Mathematicians who debunk Minecraft speed runs.
  • Trying to invent fake commentary for a sport you know nothing about.
  • Yelling advice to recorded speed runs.
  • Watching everybody believe Wordle conspiracy theories.
  • Comparing notes about reality.
  • Preferring having friends over being right.
  • The absolute best time to get off of social media.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Plugging every Xalavier Nelson game.
  • Standing in a three bean soup.
  • Everyone's favorite Fire Emblem hero, Spiky Ball Tree.
  • Sweetgum.
  • Producing liquid amber but not calling it liquid amber for trademark reasons.
  • Whether it's possible to have green wood.
  • A traumatic formative art school experience that you take out on trees for the rest of your life.
  • Ablative armor.
  • Spoilers for the first novel ever written.
  • Seeing Empire Strikes Back dozens of times in the theater while in the womb.
  • A spoiler policy that makes people hate you.
  • Getting consent to gaslight your girlfriend about movies she hasn't watched.
  • Picking a movie line to be the only joke you ever say.
  • The list of movies for which there is no statute of limitations on spoilers.
  • Using a pen knife to cut open your forearm to reveal the servomotors inside any time there's a lull in the conversation.
  • The SpoilOrbs.
  • Inventing the video game haptics to allow a game designer to kick you in the balls.
  • Kittencore Dark Souls.
  • Junji-ito's cat diary.
  • Clutter in movies.
  • Hiring excellent schlubby actors.
  • Back when it was notable and interesting that Linda Hamilton got fit for Terminator 2.
  • Getting an AI on the job.
  • Laura Panini.
  • Live coding skeletal animation.
  • Rotating around a creepy lady.
  • Asking if anyone's seen something but nobody has.
  • When you push the button on the monitor and it goes all wibbly wobbly for a second.
  • A list going there.
  • A word that you only know if you read a lot of G.K. Chesterson.
  • Little Kirbys that help you out in the event of a prolapse.
  • How nobody in the UK knows what "goober" or "wine gums" means.
  • Abseiling and rappelling.
  • Putting "kerbside" on a list of words that Americans don't know.
  • Polearms that were descended from boar hunting.
  • Asking a thousand Americans to say yes or no to every word in the dictionary.
  • The Katana Yakuza Thesis.
  • Reading poetry in a funny voice.
  • The kind of person who would end a poem with a semicolon.
  • Reciting a poem about a guy you met yesterday who told you most of the poem.
  • Hearing from a guy about a rotting stump of a conquest.
  • Writing a poem where you meet a guy who tells you about a song that used to be on his iPod that you can no longer download from mp3 dot com.
  • Yelling at a long dead poet about punctuation.
  • Poetry about not knowing something but it's unclear whether nobody knows the thing or if it's just the poet's personal ignorance.
  • Painting ancient Greek statues flesh-colored.
  • Percy Shelley the nonsense man.
  • Smash Mouth cancelling their concert at your county fair after they got famous.
  • How to pronounce "shewed"
  • What's wrong with looking upon me?
  • 23 And Me informing you that you have a mom.
  • The familial incest tab on 23 And Me.
  • Twins: There's Two Of Them.
  • Twins in the womb listening to the Empire Strikes Back soundtrack and elbowing each other.
  • A person who could exist and would be attractive.
  • Geocities turn of the century vibes.
  • The t-shirt that Jim's wife bought him.
  • How Futurama made the name "Hubert" cool but "Pubert" is still no good.
  • Having six kids and naming them all Pubert.
  • Naming an ice cream shop "Fucklers" because who can stop you? (The police.)
  • Fucklers: Sole Owner of my Name Ice-Creamery.
  • The holding company that owns every disused mascot.
  • The Hamm's Beer Bear.
  • Wordle speed run categories.
  • Mathematicians who debunk Minecraft speed runs.
  • Trying to invent fake commentary for a sport you know nothing about.
  • Yelling advice to recorded speed runs.
  • Watching everybody believe Wordle conspiracy theories.
  • Comparing notes about reality.
  • Preferring having friends over being right.
  • The absolute best time to get off of social media.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+-2Iffdpc ]]> Jim Stormdancer 127. Let's e e cummings This Up https://topiclords.com/lets-e-e-cummings-this-up 60e8ca87-b7a3-43a1-aa5b-fbf9664888ea Mon, 28 Mar 2022 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Cort and Fabian. We discuss Black Square Day, why we have nostalgia for old computers even though they were terrible, the Dirtywave M8 tracker, and Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, by Robert Frost. 1:13:50 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Black Square Day (inventing holidays and subsequently forgetting everything about them)
  • Nostalgia for old computers isn't because they were good, but because they sucked in ways that were simple to understand
  • The Dirtywave M8 tracker
  • Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, by Robert Frost

Microtopics:

  • The music videos of Max Cooper.
  • Styptic pencils.
  • Doing archaeology on your own Google calendar.
  • A stable time loop where your future self adds "Black Square Day" to your calendar.
  • Bringing a palindrome to the palindrome party.
  • Telling your visitors "it's Black Square Day; dress appropriately."
  • Celebrating the day you really burned the casserole.
  • Black Squaroling.
  • A way that your community organizes itself.
  • Getting in a pissing contest with your neighbors about whose house has the most black squares.
  • Booting up to a BASIC prompt so you need to write a short BASIC program to load the program you want to run (probably another BASIC program)
  • How the Commodore 64 BASIC determined where the line you were editing started and ended.
  • How Commodore 64 BASIC stored lines of code internally.
  • Survivorship bias among early microcomputer users.
  • Accepting a certain level of brokenness because fixing the problem will take an unbounded amount of time.
  • Machines that are simple enough for a single human to understand vs. those that are not.
  • What percentage of the Commodore 64's ROM is dedicated to implementing floating point math.
  • Varying levels of nostalgia for developing for the Playstation 3.
  • The room in London that the Playstation 2 had instead of a debugger.
  • The Tool PS2.
  • Fetishization of the mid-2010s tower PC
  • Second order nostalgia, for what 90s emulation of 80s games looked like.
  • Nostalgia for objectively terrible art style.
  • All the walls swimming all the time.
  • The 15 year nostalgia gap where nobody wants to remember the early 3D console games.
  • Making music on the toilet every day.
  • Trackers.
  • What Trackers are better at vs. traditional DAWs.
  • Music that ships with its own source code.
  • Technical limitations transforming into a unique aesthetic.
  • How to hide a second song in the same tracker module.
  • Doing a thing on the screen while music loops.
  • A portable device to edit spreadsheets that only has a trackball.
  • Looking at your song through a straw.
  • Loading a ProTracker module in FastTracker.
  • Trying to identify which tracker created the MOD you're reading by looking for file format bugs unique to that tracker.
  • Fixing bugs by hex editing an executable and that becomes the version everybody uses now.
  • What you call it when an archaeologist writes the file spec.
  • Unknown sources of dubious quality.
  • Lore of unknown provenance about how to play a mod file.
  • Watching dense notation scrolling by.
  • Loading tracker music into various players to see how their performances of the same material vary.
  • Trying to load up music you wrote fifteen years ago and needing to source old versions of all the plugins you used.
  • Watching the woods fill up with snow.
  • A very evocative one of those.
  • Whether sleep represents death in this poem or if it's just sleep this time.
  • Why write a poem.
  • Interviewing the author of a poem and then interviewing everyone who ever read the poem before writing the authoritative interpretation of that poem.
  • A joke that doesn't really seem like a joke at all.
  • Rating a poem on a five star scale and then deciding how many of those stars belong to each of the stanzas.
  • The Three Musketeers sequels that nobody has read.
  • Getting paid by the line and adding a character to your story that speaks only one word at a time.
  • How to write 300 books a year.
  • Taking out the but because there's nothing for it to but.
  • Ceramic clown statues.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Black Square Day (inventing holidays and subsequently forgetting everything about them)
  • Nostalgia for old computers isn't because they were good, but because they sucked in ways that were simple to understand
  • The Dirtywave M8 tracker
  • Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, by Robert Frost

Microtopics:

  • The music videos of Max Cooper.
  • Styptic pencils.
  • Doing archaeology on your own Google calendar.
  • A stable time loop where your future self adds "Black Square Day" to your calendar.
  • Bringing a palindrome to the palindrome party.
  • Telling your visitors "it's Black Square Day; dress appropriately."
  • Celebrating the day you really burned the casserole.
  • Black Squaroling.
  • A way that your community organizes itself.
  • Getting in a pissing contest with your neighbors about whose house has the most black squares.
  • Booting up to a BASIC prompt so you need to write a short BASIC program to load the program you want to run (probably another BASIC program)
  • How the Commodore 64 BASIC determined where the line you were editing started and ended.
  • How Commodore 64 BASIC stored lines of code internally.
  • Survivorship bias among early microcomputer users.
  • Accepting a certain level of brokenness because fixing the problem will take an unbounded amount of time.
  • Machines that are simple enough for a single human to understand vs. those that are not.
  • What percentage of the Commodore 64's ROM is dedicated to implementing floating point math.
  • Varying levels of nostalgia for developing for the Playstation 3.
  • The room in London that the Playstation 2 had instead of a debugger.
  • The Tool PS2.
  • Fetishization of the mid-2010s tower PC
  • Second order nostalgia, for what 90s emulation of 80s games looked like.
  • Nostalgia for objectively terrible art style.
  • All the walls swimming all the time.
  • The 15 year nostalgia gap where nobody wants to remember the early 3D console games.
  • Making music on the toilet every day.
  • Trackers.
  • What Trackers are better at vs. traditional DAWs.
  • Music that ships with its own source code.
  • Technical limitations transforming into a unique aesthetic.
  • How to hide a second song in the same tracker module.
  • Doing a thing on the screen while music loops.
  • A portable device to edit spreadsheets that only has a trackball.
  • Looking at your song through a straw.
  • Loading a ProTracker module in FastTracker.
  • Trying to identify which tracker created the MOD you're reading by looking for file format bugs unique to that tracker.
  • Fixing bugs by hex editing an executable and that becomes the version everybody uses now.
  • What you call it when an archaeologist writes the file spec.
  • Unknown sources of dubious quality.
  • Lore of unknown provenance about how to play a mod file.
  • Watching dense notation scrolling by.
  • Loading tracker music into various players to see how their performances of the same material vary.
  • Trying to load up music you wrote fifteen years ago and needing to source old versions of all the plugins you used.
  • Watching the woods fill up with snow.
  • A very evocative one of those.
  • Whether sleep represents death in this poem or if it's just sleep this time.
  • Why write a poem.
  • Interviewing the author of a poem and then interviewing everyone who ever read the poem before writing the authoritative interpretation of that poem.
  • A joke that doesn't really seem like a joke at all.
  • Rating a poem on a five star scale and then deciding how many of those stars belong to each of the stanzas.
  • The Three Musketeers sequels that nobody has read.
  • Getting paid by the line and adding a character to your story that speaks only one word at a time.
  • How to write 300 books a year.
  • Taking out the but because there's nothing for it to but.
  • Ceramic clown statues.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Black Square Day (inventing holidays and subsequently forgetting everything about them)
  • Nostalgia for old computers isn't because they were good, but because they sucked in ways that were simple to understand
  • The Dirtywave M8 tracker
  • Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, by Robert Frost

Microtopics:

  • The music videos of Max Cooper.
  • Styptic pencils.
  • Doing archaeology on your own Google calendar.
  • A stable time loop where your future self adds "Black Square Day" to your calendar.
  • Bringing a palindrome to the palindrome party.
  • Telling your visitors "it's Black Square Day; dress appropriately."
  • Celebrating the day you really burned the casserole.
  • Black Squaroling.
  • A way that your community organizes itself.
  • Getting in a pissing contest with your neighbors about whose house has the most black squares.
  • Booting up to a BASIC prompt so you need to write a short BASIC program to load the program you want to run (probably another BASIC program)
  • How the Commodore 64 BASIC determined where the line you were editing started and ended.
  • How Commodore 64 BASIC stored lines of code internally.
  • Survivorship bias among early microcomputer users.
  • Accepting a certain level of brokenness because fixing the problem will take an unbounded amount of time.
  • Machines that are simple enough for a single human to understand vs. those that are not.
  • What percentage of the Commodore 64's ROM is dedicated to implementing floating point math.
  • Varying levels of nostalgia for developing for the Playstation 3.
  • The room in London that the Playstation 2 had instead of a debugger.
  • The Tool PS2.
  • Fetishization of the mid-2010s tower PC
  • Second order nostalgia, for what 90s emulation of 80s games looked like.
  • Nostalgia for objectively terrible art style.
  • All the walls swimming all the time.
  • The 15 year nostalgia gap where nobody wants to remember the early 3D console games.
  • Making music on the toilet every day.
  • Trackers.
  • What Trackers are better at vs. traditional DAWs.
  • Music that ships with its own source code.
  • Technical limitations transforming into a unique aesthetic.
  • How to hide a second song in the same tracker module.
  • Doing a thing on the screen while music loops.
  • A portable device to edit spreadsheets that only has a trackball.
  • Looking at your song through a straw.
  • Loading a ProTracker module in FastTracker.
  • Trying to identify which tracker created the MOD you're reading by looking for file format bugs unique to that tracker.
  • Fixing bugs by hex editing an executable and that becomes the version everybody uses now.
  • What you call it when an archaeologist writes the file spec.
  • Unknown sources of dubious quality.
  • Lore of unknown provenance about how to play a mod file.
  • Watching dense notation scrolling by.
  • Loading tracker music into various players to see how their performances of the same material vary.
  • Trying to load up music you wrote fifteen years ago and needing to source old versions of all the plugins you used.
  • Watching the woods fill up with snow.
  • A very evocative one of those.
  • Whether sleep represents death in this poem or if it's just sleep this time.
  • Why write a poem.
  • Interviewing the author of a poem and then interviewing everyone who ever read the poem before writing the authoritative interpretation of that poem.
  • A joke that doesn't really seem like a joke at all.
  • Rating a poem on a five star scale and then deciding how many of those stars belong to each of the stanzas.
  • The Three Musketeers sequels that nobody has read.
  • Getting paid by the line and adding a character to your story that speaks only one word at a time.
  • How to write 300 books a year.
  • Taking out the but because there's nothing for it to but.
  • Ceramic clown statues.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+nNQMMDwn ]]> Jim Stormdancer 126. Toast is a Fruit https://topiclords.com/toast-is-a-fruit db5d98d2-ffda-4646-a84a-9f84073fdb20 Mon, 21 Mar 2022 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: David and Erica. We discuss choosing plant families for the apocalypse, alternation of generations, gaming your Fitbit, Ode to Spot, Stonecoin, and things that have not gone wrong yet. 1:06:31 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Uncovering the fatal flaw in the premise of the topic.
  • The Frog Fractions Extended Universe.
  • Marrying someone from the Frog Fractions Extended Universe.
  • Picking out insect photos that are still on the Internet.
  • Posting photos to social media as a way of convincing yourself that you have a good life.
  • A stranger's child slathered in various foodstuffs.
  • Using social media to curate a list of everything you were upset about today.
  • Getting a concerned phone call from a family member when you post angrily about world events and changing your phone number.
  • Which two plant families you'd take with you into the apocalypse.
  • Touching Cow Parsnip and then running for shelter.
  • Taking grass with you into the apocalypse so you can keep eating rice.
  • Drinking coffee and eating onions in the post-apocalypse.
  • Vegetables that are technically fruits.
  • Whether croutons are classified as a fruit or a vegetable.
  • Leaves vs. fronds.
  • The organs that produce spores.
  • Finding two distinct forms of plants that always appear together and eventually realizing that these are the same species.
  • Evolving cocoons when it would be way easier to just evolve a second mouth.
  • If humans didn't reproduce directly but instead spored little goblins who ran off to fuck each other and had human babies and we were like "ugh those goblins again"
  • Ghoulies 3: Ghoulies go to College.
  • Hard-Sporing Citizens.
  • A health metric invented by pedometer salesmen.
  • Muscles contracting to pump blood throughout your body.
  • The differing benefits of running vs. walking.
  • The evolutionary benefits of gigantic asses.
  • Linking intention to activity.
  • Walking around saying quotes from Rick and Morty and the hospice nurse just assumes you have dementia.
  • The racism hormone.
  • Why it's so satisfying to dismiss ideas that are different from your own.
  • Curing dementia by googling the things your grandma says and realizing she's just referencing TV shows nobody's seen in 30 years.
  • Two marathons looking backwards through time.
  • Subvocal oscillations.
  • The best 45 seconds of TV of the 80s.
  • The guy who writes all of Data's dialog regardless of who writes the rest of the screenplay.
  • The Cyberiad, by Stanislaw Lem.
  • A love poem about tensor algebra.
  • The bar for what constitutes a love poem to tensor algebra.
  • Writing a poem about a cat to the cat even though the cat doesn't understand.
  • Web sites eating each other.
  • Living inside the Library of Alexandria as it burns down.
  • An alternative hypertext protocol similar to The HTTP and The Gopher.
  • Nerdy high schoolers who exist today.
  • Whether any given internet protocol is for the olds.
  • Worrying about all of these cryptos.
  • Watching the Olympics streaming on NBC and discovering that not only does TV still exist, it has ads for cryptocurrency now.
  • The Island of Yap, part of the Federated States of Micronesia.
  • Coin famousness scaling by size.
  • An oral history of money where everyone just remembers who paid for what and how much money everyone has.
  • A flat exchange rate of inches in diameter to US dollars.
  • The stability of a currency that is not currently being speculated on.
  • The guy who wrote jokes for Obama.
  • Presidential speechwriters paying attention to internet memes and incorporating them into the State of the Union address.
  • The inflection point in 2014 where suddenly everyone became much more aware of every bad thing in the world.
  • A comprehensive list of everything that has gone right.
  • The number of languages in which you have not embarrassed yourself this year.
  • Inventing ink live on the show.
  • An enormous 3D printer of clear domes.
  • Baked slimy okra.
  • Baking a couple dozen of your sporulated forms and their gametophytes into a pie crust, who immediately start singing when you cut the pie open.
  • A headlamp named Petzl.
  • Why is daddy laughing?
  • The magic summoning word of little boys.
  • An armchair fan of podcasts.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Uncovering the fatal flaw in the premise of the topic.
  • The Frog Fractions Extended Universe.
  • Marrying someone from the Frog Fractions Extended Universe.
  • Picking out insect photos that are still on the Internet.
  • Posting photos to social media as a way of convincing yourself that you have a good life.
  • A stranger's child slathered in various foodstuffs.
  • Using social media to curate a list of everything you were upset about today.
  • Getting a concerned phone call from a family member when you post angrily about world events and changing your phone number.
  • Which two plant families you'd take with you into the apocalypse.
  • Touching Cow Parsnip and then running for shelter.
  • Taking grass with you into the apocalypse so you can keep eating rice.
  • Drinking coffee and eating onions in the post-apocalypse.
  • Vegetables that are technically fruits.
  • Whether croutons are classified as a fruit or a vegetable.
  • Leaves vs. fronds.
  • The organs that produce spores.
  • Finding two distinct forms of plants that always appear together and eventually realizing that these are the same species.
  • Evolving cocoons when it would be way easier to just evolve a second mouth.
  • If humans didn't reproduce directly but instead spored little goblins who ran off to fuck each other and had human babies and we were like "ugh those goblins again"
  • Ghoulies 3: Ghoulies go to College.
  • Hard-Sporing Citizens.
  • A health metric invented by pedometer salesmen.
  • Muscles contracting to pump blood throughout your body.
  • The differing benefits of running vs. walking.
  • The evolutionary benefits of gigantic asses.
  • Linking intention to activity.
  • Walking around saying quotes from Rick and Morty and the hospice nurse just assumes you have dementia.
  • The racism hormone.
  • Why it's so satisfying to dismiss ideas that are different from your own.
  • Curing dementia by googling the things your grandma says and realizing she's just referencing TV shows nobody's seen in 30 years.
  • Two marathons looking backwards through time.
  • Subvocal oscillations.
  • The best 45 seconds of TV of the 80s.
  • The guy who writes all of Data's dialog regardless of who writes the rest of the screenplay.
  • The Cyberiad, by Stanislaw Lem.
  • A love poem about tensor algebra.
  • The bar for what constitutes a love poem to tensor algebra.
  • Writing a poem about a cat to the cat even though the cat doesn't understand.
  • Web sites eating each other.
  • Living inside the Library of Alexandria as it burns down.
  • An alternative hypertext protocol similar to The HTTP and The Gopher.
  • Nerdy high schoolers who exist today.
  • Whether any given internet protocol is for the olds.
  • Worrying about all of these cryptos.
  • Watching the Olympics streaming on NBC and discovering that not only does TV still exist, it has ads for cryptocurrency now.
  • The Island of Yap, part of the Federated States of Micronesia.
  • Coin famousness scaling by size.
  • An oral history of money where everyone just remembers who paid for what and how much money everyone has.
  • A flat exchange rate of inches in diameter to US dollars.
  • The stability of a currency that is not currently being speculated on.
  • The guy who wrote jokes for Obama.
  • Presidential speechwriters paying attention to internet memes and incorporating them into the State of the Union address.
  • The inflection point in 2014 where suddenly everyone became much more aware of every bad thing in the world.
  • A comprehensive list of everything that has gone right.
  • The number of languages in which you have not embarrassed yourself this year.
  • Inventing ink live on the show.
  • An enormous 3D printer of clear domes.
  • Baked slimy okra.
  • Baking a couple dozen of your sporulated forms and their gametophytes into a pie crust, who immediately start singing when you cut the pie open.
  • A headlamp named Petzl.
  • Why is daddy laughing?
  • The magic summoning word of little boys.
  • An armchair fan of podcasts.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Uncovering the fatal flaw in the premise of the topic.
  • The Frog Fractions Extended Universe.
  • Marrying someone from the Frog Fractions Extended Universe.
  • Picking out insect photos that are still on the Internet.
  • Posting photos to social media as a way of convincing yourself that you have a good life.
  • A stranger's child slathered in various foodstuffs.
  • Using social media to curate a list of everything you were upset about today.
  • Getting a concerned phone call from a family member when you post angrily about world events and changing your phone number.
  • Which two plant families you'd take with you into the apocalypse.
  • Touching Cow Parsnip and then running for shelter.
  • Taking grass with you into the apocalypse so you can keep eating rice.
  • Drinking coffee and eating onions in the post-apocalypse.
  • Vegetables that are technically fruits.
  • Whether croutons are classified as a fruit or a vegetable.
  • Leaves vs. fronds.
  • The organs that produce spores.
  • Finding two distinct forms of plants that always appear together and eventually realizing that these are the same species.
  • Evolving cocoons when it would be way easier to just evolve a second mouth.
  • If humans didn't reproduce directly but instead spored little goblins who ran off to fuck each other and had human babies and we were like "ugh those goblins again"
  • Ghoulies 3: Ghoulies go to College.
  • Hard-Sporing Citizens.
  • A health metric invented by pedometer salesmen.
  • Muscles contracting to pump blood throughout your body.
  • The differing benefits of running vs. walking.
  • The evolutionary benefits of gigantic asses.
  • Linking intention to activity.
  • Walking around saying quotes from Rick and Morty and the hospice nurse just assumes you have dementia.
  • The racism hormone.
  • Why it's so satisfying to dismiss ideas that are different from your own.
  • Curing dementia by googling the things your grandma says and realizing she's just referencing TV shows nobody's seen in 30 years.
  • Two marathons looking backwards through time.
  • Subvocal oscillations.
  • The best 45 seconds of TV of the 80s.
  • The guy who writes all of Data's dialog regardless of who writes the rest of the screenplay.
  • The Cyberiad, by Stanislaw Lem.
  • A love poem about tensor algebra.
  • The bar for what constitutes a love poem to tensor algebra.
  • Writing a poem about a cat to the cat even though the cat doesn't understand.
  • Web sites eating each other.
  • Living inside the Library of Alexandria as it burns down.
  • An alternative hypertext protocol similar to The HTTP and The Gopher.
  • Nerdy high schoolers who exist today.
  • Whether any given internet protocol is for the olds.
  • Worrying about all of these cryptos.
  • Watching the Olympics streaming on NBC and discovering that not only does TV still exist, it has ads for cryptocurrency now.
  • The Island of Yap, part of the Federated States of Micronesia.
  • Coin famousness scaling by size.
  • An oral history of money where everyone just remembers who paid for what and how much money everyone has.
  • A flat exchange rate of inches in diameter to US dollars.
  • The stability of a currency that is not currently being speculated on.
  • The guy who wrote jokes for Obama.
  • Presidential speechwriters paying attention to internet memes and incorporating them into the State of the Union address.
  • The inflection point in 2014 where suddenly everyone became much more aware of every bad thing in the world.
  • A comprehensive list of everything that has gone right.
  • The number of languages in which you have not embarrassed yourself this year.
  • Inventing ink live on the show.
  • An enormous 3D printer of clear domes.
  • Baked slimy okra.
  • Baking a couple dozen of your sporulated forms and their gametophytes into a pie crust, who immediately start singing when you cut the pie open.
  • A headlamp named Petzl.
  • Why is daddy laughing?
  • The magic summoning word of little boys.
  • An armchair fan of podcasts.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+w5T6iAMI ]]> Jim Stormdancer 125. Your Mom Won't Cry https://topiclords.com/your-mom-wont-cry 4c93905f-fb62-47bd-b133-3e609d713339 Mon, 14 Mar 2022 00:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Danielle and Alexander. We discuss learning to figure skate as an adult, cursed mnemonics we never question, the first thing you remember buying online, a child's beliefs about the afterlife, learning how to speedrun without actually doing it, and receiving texts in your email. 1:03:35 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Learning to figure skate as an adult
  • Cursed mnemonics we never question
  • What was the first thing you remember buying online?
  • "Chi dara fine al gran dolore? L’ore" from House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski
  • My daughter has strong beliefs about the afterlife
  • I don't actually want to speedrun anything, I just want to learn how they do it
  • Once a year or so my last friend who still lives in San Diego sends me an email from his phone number. The email is blank but there's a text file attached to it saying something like "hey are you still alive?" Everyone has a friend like that, right?

Microtopics:

  • Spin Rhythm XD and the Spin Rhythm XD level design community.
  • Learning to figure skate.
  • How to convert axels into 360s.
  • Figure skating in a half pipe.
  • Clockwise and widdershins figure skaters.
  • Putting a hair dryer in reverse so it blows cool air.
  • Using Zamboni technology to invent the ice skating treadmill.
  • Covering a carousel with ice and then realizing you don't need the carousel part because you can just skate in a circle.
  • The Beginner Effect.
  • Finding time for hobbies.
  • Cursed mnemonics for remembering how to spell "because"
  • Using eggs.
  • The extremely entertaining mnemonic that Jim uses to remember his social security number, but can't share with anyone.
  • Man Very Early Made Jars Stand Up Nearly Perpendicular.
  • My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Noodles And Used Soft Eggs.
  • Elephants Go Ballistic Doing Flips.
  • Idioms translated from other languages.
  • Whether it's good for a stone to gather moss.
  • When it stopped being a big deal to enter your credit card information on a web site.
  • A piece of wood that tells you what the weather is going to be.
  • Buying a cassette tape from a friend you met on IRC by mailing them an envelope full of cash and having to pester them about it before they send you the album because just because they're good at making techno doesn't mean they're good at running a record label.
  • Speculating about how many game developers actually made a living from shareware in the 90s.
  • Cashing a check on the bus.
  • Asking your mom to go to the 7-11 to get a money order so you can mail it to a guy in Australia and he ends up not being able to cash it because it isn't an international money order.
  • Buying a lot of used books on half.com
  • Reading and discussing a poem in Italian.
  • The percentage of Topic Lords listeners who have read House of Leaves.
  • Removing all the outer layers of the onion to get to the SCP inside.
  • What events did and didn't happen in various layers of fiction in House of Leaves.
  • Listing every known building not designed in a Brutalist style.
  • Device 6 by Simogo.
  • 50 Years of Text Games.
  • Print-on-demand procgen novels.
  • Creepy endless houses.
  • Loving babies and wanting to be a baby.
  • Inventing reincarnation from first principles.
  • Where six year olds learn about the afterlife.
  • Getting really worked up about the flu shot you're going to get in eight months.
  • Hearing a gross thing described but not being disgusted because you can't visualize it.
  • ADHD and Autism Tiktok.
  • The "rubbing styrofoam" diagnostic for ADHD.
  • Learning all the speedrun skills but never actually doing any speed runs.
  • Learning to do an ultra to get this strawberry.
  • The nega-set of games that don't have a bunch of stressful violence and also don't have a bunch of overbearing dialog.
  • Writing an album and then designing a level around each song.
  • Bisexual lighting.
  • Queen Latifah showing up to ask if you want to skip to the next checkpoint.
  • The kind of friendship where if you ever talked about anything but music the friendship would immediately collapse.
  • Known iPhone protocol weirdnesses.
  • Why is Apple like this?
  • How to set a custom ringtone on your phone back before everyone put their phone on vibrate.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Learning to figure skate as an adult
  • Cursed mnemonics we never question
  • What was the first thing you remember buying online?
  • "Chi dara fine al gran dolore? L’ore" from House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski
  • My daughter has strong beliefs about the afterlife
  • I don't actually want to speedrun anything, I just want to learn how they do it
  • Once a year or so my last friend who still lives in San Diego sends me an email from his phone number. The email is blank but there's a text file attached to it saying something like "hey are you still alive?" Everyone has a friend like that, right?

Microtopics:

  • Spin Rhythm XD and the Spin Rhythm XD level design community.
  • Learning to figure skate.
  • How to convert axels into 360s.
  • Figure skating in a half pipe.
  • Clockwise and widdershins figure skaters.
  • Putting a hair dryer in reverse so it blows cool air.
  • Using Zamboni technology to invent the ice skating treadmill.
  • Covering a carousel with ice and then realizing you don't need the carousel part because you can just skate in a circle.
  • The Beginner Effect.
  • Finding time for hobbies.
  • Cursed mnemonics for remembering how to spell "because"
  • Using eggs.
  • The extremely entertaining mnemonic that Jim uses to remember his social security number, but can't share with anyone.
  • Man Very Early Made Jars Stand Up Nearly Perpendicular.
  • My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Noodles And Used Soft Eggs.
  • Elephants Go Ballistic Doing Flips.
  • Idioms translated from other languages.
  • Whether it's good for a stone to gather moss.
  • When it stopped being a big deal to enter your credit card information on a web site.
  • A piece of wood that tells you what the weather is going to be.
  • Buying a cassette tape from a friend you met on IRC by mailing them an envelope full of cash and having to pester them about it before they send you the album because just because they're good at making techno doesn't mean they're good at running a record label.
  • Speculating about how many game developers actually made a living from shareware in the 90s.
  • Cashing a check on the bus.
  • Asking your mom to go to the 7-11 to get a money order so you can mail it to a guy in Australia and he ends up not being able to cash it because it isn't an international money order.
  • Buying a lot of used books on half.com
  • Reading and discussing a poem in Italian.
  • The percentage of Topic Lords listeners who have read House of Leaves.
  • Removing all the outer layers of the onion to get to the SCP inside.
  • What events did and didn't happen in various layers of fiction in House of Leaves.
  • Listing every known building not designed in a Brutalist style.
  • Device 6 by Simogo.
  • 50 Years of Text Games.
  • Print-on-demand procgen novels.
  • Creepy endless houses.
  • Loving babies and wanting to be a baby.
  • Inventing reincarnation from first principles.
  • Where six year olds learn about the afterlife.
  • Getting really worked up about the flu shot you're going to get in eight months.
  • Hearing a gross thing described but not being disgusted because you can't visualize it.
  • ADHD and Autism Tiktok.
  • The "rubbing styrofoam" diagnostic for ADHD.
  • Learning all the speedrun skills but never actually doing any speed runs.
  • Learning to do an ultra to get this strawberry.
  • The nega-set of games that don't have a bunch of stressful violence and also don't have a bunch of overbearing dialog.
  • Writing an album and then designing a level around each song.
  • Bisexual lighting.
  • Queen Latifah showing up to ask if you want to skip to the next checkpoint.
  • The kind of friendship where if you ever talked about anything but music the friendship would immediately collapse.
  • Known iPhone protocol weirdnesses.
  • Why is Apple like this?
  • How to set a custom ringtone on your phone back before everyone put their phone on vibrate.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Learning to figure skate as an adult
  • Cursed mnemonics we never question
  • What was the first thing you remember buying online?
  • "Chi dara fine al gran dolore? L’ore" from House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski
  • My daughter has strong beliefs about the afterlife
  • I don't actually want to speedrun anything, I just want to learn how they do it
  • Once a year or so my last friend who still lives in San Diego sends me an email from his phone number. The email is blank but there's a text file attached to it saying something like "hey are you still alive?" Everyone has a friend like that, right?

Microtopics:

  • Spin Rhythm XD and the Spin Rhythm XD level design community.
  • Learning to figure skate.
  • How to convert axels into 360s.
  • Figure skating in a half pipe.
  • Clockwise and widdershins figure skaters.
  • Putting a hair dryer in reverse so it blows cool air.
  • Using Zamboni technology to invent the ice skating treadmill.
  • Covering a carousel with ice and then realizing you don't need the carousel part because you can just skate in a circle.
  • The Beginner Effect.
  • Finding time for hobbies.
  • Cursed mnemonics for remembering how to spell "because"
  • Using eggs.
  • The extremely entertaining mnemonic that Jim uses to remember his social security number, but can't share with anyone.
  • Man Very Early Made Jars Stand Up Nearly Perpendicular.
  • My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Noodles And Used Soft Eggs.
  • Elephants Go Ballistic Doing Flips.
  • Idioms translated from other languages.
  • Whether it's good for a stone to gather moss.
  • When it stopped being a big deal to enter your credit card information on a web site.
  • A piece of wood that tells you what the weather is going to be.
  • Buying a cassette tape from a friend you met on IRC by mailing them an envelope full of cash and having to pester them about it before they send you the album because just because they're good at making techno doesn't mean they're good at running a record label.
  • Speculating about how many game developers actually made a living from shareware in the 90s.
  • Cashing a check on the bus.
  • Asking your mom to go to the 7-11 to get a money order so you can mail it to a guy in Australia and he ends up not being able to cash it because it isn't an international money order.
  • Buying a lot of used books on half.com
  • Reading and discussing a poem in Italian.
  • The percentage of Topic Lords listeners who have read House of Leaves.
  • Removing all the outer layers of the onion to get to the SCP inside.
  • What events did and didn't happen in various layers of fiction in House of Leaves.
  • Listing every known building not designed in a Brutalist style.
  • Device 6 by Simogo.
  • 50 Years of Text Games.
  • Print-on-demand procgen novels.
  • Creepy endless houses.
  • Loving babies and wanting to be a baby.
  • Inventing reincarnation from first principles.
  • Where six year olds learn about the afterlife.
  • Getting really worked up about the flu shot you're going to get in eight months.
  • Hearing a gross thing described but not being disgusted because you can't visualize it.
  • ADHD and Autism Tiktok.
  • The "rubbing styrofoam" diagnostic for ADHD.
  • Learning all the speedrun skills but never actually doing any speed runs.
  • Learning to do an ultra to get this strawberry.
  • The nega-set of games that don't have a bunch of stressful violence and also don't have a bunch of overbearing dialog.
  • Writing an album and then designing a level around each song.
  • Bisexual lighting.
  • Queen Latifah showing up to ask if you want to skip to the next checkpoint.
  • The kind of friendship where if you ever talked about anything but music the friendship would immediately collapse.
  • Known iPhone protocol weirdnesses.
  • Why is Apple like this?
  • How to set a custom ringtone on your phone back before everyone put their phone on vibrate.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+HFeKwe_u ]]> Jim Stormdancer 124. Call Me Da5id; Da4id Was My Father https://topiclords.com/call-me-da5id-da4id-was-my-father bbbecf8a-8e87-461f-b675-26f3493e8368 Mon, 07 Mar 2022 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Tyriq and Xander. We discuss choosing a name with numbers in it, overcoming the inertia of old tools, confusing two things that are not the same, Sweater Weather, by Sharon Bryan, making things that occupy real-world space, and Ithkuil: the inscrutable conlang that was co-opted by Russian Buddhist cultists. 1:01:39 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Making games and albums.
  • In the pluggable range.
  • The history of Byzantium.
  • The weird mysteries of what happened, what we know, what we don't know, and what didn't happen.
  • An average of all the books that don't exist.
  • Taking the average of two books.
  • The square root of negative Garfield.
  • A lossy compression algorithm for plain text.
  • The most information dense thing you can change.
  • LLLL Cool J.
  • Beware the LLs of March.
  • All the numbers you might append to your user name.
  • Wanting or not wanting to be like Xeno746.
  • Social signaling by putting numbers in your user name or by not putting numbers in your user name.
  • Role-playing having sponsors because all your idols are influencers.
  • Using the term "Information Superhighway" unironically.
  • Visually decorating your name.
  • Putting card suit emojis around your name and then appending "-chocolate"
  • Encoding your identity in emojis and adding them to your user name.
  • The double inertias of trying to move plus leaving your comfort zones.
  • Jim's advice for learning a new tool.
  • Working with a tool the way it's intended to be used.
  • Petting a cat the wrong way as a metaphor.
  • Actors we confuse with each other.
  • Hearing two bands on the same mixtape and getting them confused for the rest of your life.
  • Refusing to explain a gross band name on the show.
  • Trying to figure out what sex act your parents named you after.
  • That Tom Lehrer song that's just a list of all the elements, except it's all your favorite turns of phrase.
  • Making a melody so dissonant and weird that the listener dissociates from music and just hears a sequence of pitches on its own merits.
  • Having a tongue party in your mouth.
  • The Sultan of Swat.
  • Loose Lips Buck Up.
  • Lifty Nifty, Bright and Shifty.
  • Making a bartop arcade machine with unconventional controls.
  • The kinetic feel of throwing and catching a flywheel.
  • Flipping a series of switches in quick succession.
  • A totally arbitrary control scheme that would be weird and interesting for one game but it's been used for thousands.
  • Designing your pinball table so that players nudge your pinball cabinet a bit but not too much.
  • Reasons for subtle variation in how pinball tables play.
  • Buying banned pinball parts at the pinball black market.
  • A pinball simulation of shooting cans with a gun.
  • The seesaw lever thing for going along the rails.
  • Bowling with a shuffleboard.
  • Being over monetizing your art.
  • Non-Functional Bullshit.
  • Non-Fungible Game Experiences, such as when the party you're DMing tries to intimidate NPCs with a severed leg.
  • Hobbies that feed your family.
  • Making sure your game remains mysterious by ensuring nobody cares enough to solve them.
  • Simmering on a thought before you express it.
  • Crunchy conlangs.
  • Idiosyncratic Oblasts of Russia.
  • Telling your boss at the DMV that you need time off to go speak to Russian Buddhist alien abduction cultists about the obscure conlang you invented.
  • Taking something functional and making something non-functional out of it to find out what it would look like.
  • A Dewey Decimal System for individual words.
  • Inventing a categorization system for all human knowledge that's extremely focused on maritime concerns.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Making games and albums.
  • In the pluggable range.
  • The history of Byzantium.
  • The weird mysteries of what happened, what we know, what we don't know, and what didn't happen.
  • An average of all the books that don't exist.
  • Taking the average of two books.
  • The square root of negative Garfield.
  • A lossy compression algorithm for plain text.
  • The most information dense thing you can change.
  • LLLL Cool J.
  • Beware the LLs of March.
  • All the numbers you might append to your user name.
  • Wanting or not wanting to be like Xeno746.
  • Social signaling by putting numbers in your user name or by not putting numbers in your user name.
  • Role-playing having sponsors because all your idols are influencers.
  • Using the term "Information Superhighway" unironically.
  • Visually decorating your name.
  • Putting card suit emojis around your name and then appending "-chocolate"
  • Encoding your identity in emojis and adding them to your user name.
  • The double inertias of trying to move plus leaving your comfort zones.
  • Jim's advice for learning a new tool.
  • Working with a tool the way it's intended to be used.
  • Petting a cat the wrong way as a metaphor.
  • Actors we confuse with each other.
  • Hearing two bands on the same mixtape and getting them confused for the rest of your life.
  • Refusing to explain a gross band name on the show.
  • Trying to figure out what sex act your parents named you after.
  • That Tom Lehrer song that's just a list of all the elements, except it's all your favorite turns of phrase.
  • Making a melody so dissonant and weird that the listener dissociates from music and just hears a sequence of pitches on its own merits.
  • Having a tongue party in your mouth.
  • The Sultan of Swat.
  • Loose Lips Buck Up.
  • Lifty Nifty, Bright and Shifty.
  • Making a bartop arcade machine with unconventional controls.
  • The kinetic feel of throwing and catching a flywheel.
  • Flipping a series of switches in quick succession.
  • A totally arbitrary control scheme that would be weird and interesting for one game but it's been used for thousands.
  • Designing your pinball table so that players nudge your pinball cabinet a bit but not too much.
  • Reasons for subtle variation in how pinball tables play.
  • Buying banned pinball parts at the pinball black market.
  • A pinball simulation of shooting cans with a gun.
  • The seesaw lever thing for going along the rails.
  • Bowling with a shuffleboard.
  • Being over monetizing your art.
  • Non-Functional Bullshit.
  • Non-Fungible Game Experiences, such as when the party you're DMing tries to intimidate NPCs with a severed leg.
  • Hobbies that feed your family.
  • Making sure your game remains mysterious by ensuring nobody cares enough to solve them.
  • Simmering on a thought before you express it.
  • Crunchy conlangs.
  • Idiosyncratic Oblasts of Russia.
  • Telling your boss at the DMV that you need time off to go speak to Russian Buddhist alien abduction cultists about the obscure conlang you invented.
  • Taking something functional and making something non-functional out of it to find out what it would look like.
  • A Dewey Decimal System for individual words.
  • Inventing a categorization system for all human knowledge that's extremely focused on maritime concerns.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Making games and albums.
  • In the pluggable range.
  • The history of Byzantium.
  • The weird mysteries of what happened, what we know, what we don't know, and what didn't happen.
  • An average of all the books that don't exist.
  • Taking the average of two books.
  • The square root of negative Garfield.
  • A lossy compression algorithm for plain text.
  • The most information dense thing you can change.
  • LLLL Cool J.
  • Beware the LLs of March.
  • All the numbers you might append to your user name.
  • Wanting or not wanting to be like Xeno746.
  • Social signaling by putting numbers in your user name or by not putting numbers in your user name.
  • Role-playing having sponsors because all your idols are influencers.
  • Using the term "Information Superhighway" unironically.
  • Visually decorating your name.
  • Putting card suit emojis around your name and then appending "-chocolate"
  • Encoding your identity in emojis and adding them to your user name.
  • The double inertias of trying to move plus leaving your comfort zones.
  • Jim's advice for learning a new tool.
  • Working with a tool the way it's intended to be used.
  • Petting a cat the wrong way as a metaphor.
  • Actors we confuse with each other.
  • Hearing two bands on the same mixtape and getting them confused for the rest of your life.
  • Refusing to explain a gross band name on the show.
  • Trying to figure out what sex act your parents named you after.
  • That Tom Lehrer song that's just a list of all the elements, except it's all your favorite turns of phrase.
  • Making a melody so dissonant and weird that the listener dissociates from music and just hears a sequence of pitches on its own merits.
  • Having a tongue party in your mouth.
  • The Sultan of Swat.
  • Loose Lips Buck Up.
  • Lifty Nifty, Bright and Shifty.
  • Making a bartop arcade machine with unconventional controls.
  • The kinetic feel of throwing and catching a flywheel.
  • Flipping a series of switches in quick succession.
  • A totally arbitrary control scheme that would be weird and interesting for one game but it's been used for thousands.
  • Designing your pinball table so that players nudge your pinball cabinet a bit but not too much.
  • Reasons for subtle variation in how pinball tables play.
  • Buying banned pinball parts at the pinball black market.
  • A pinball simulation of shooting cans with a gun.
  • The seesaw lever thing for going along the rails.
  • Bowling with a shuffleboard.
  • Being over monetizing your art.
  • Non-Functional Bullshit.
  • Non-Fungible Game Experiences, such as when the party you're DMing tries to intimidate NPCs with a severed leg.
  • Hobbies that feed your family.
  • Making sure your game remains mysterious by ensuring nobody cares enough to solve them.
  • Simmering on a thought before you express it.
  • Crunchy conlangs.
  • Idiosyncratic Oblasts of Russia.
  • Telling your boss at the DMV that you need time off to go speak to Russian Buddhist alien abduction cultists about the obscure conlang you invented.
  • Taking something functional and making something non-functional out of it to find out what it would look like.
  • A Dewey Decimal System for individual words.
  • Inventing a categorization system for all human knowledge that's extremely focused on maritime concerns.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+Av07fkBh ]]> Jim Stormdancer 123. Go Up, You Bald Head! https://topiclords.com/go-up-you-bald-head 501e1b89-c9e7-4b41-9c9a-b325cc8a197d Mon, 28 Feb 2022 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: Hallie and Chris. We discuss playing card finishes, how we'd talk about religion and faith if those words didn't exist, Good Bones by Maggie Smith, and hair mayonnaise. 1:03:15 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Playing card finishes
  • Esper Quinn adds: "As a decades long Magic: the Gathering player, card condition, handling and protection is something I've actually spent a lot of time thinking about. There's a guy on YouTube whose whole claim to fame is that every couple months he reviews every new sleeve (both inner and outer, for double sleeving), deck protector, carrying case, binder, etc. for card protection. Magic cardstock has actually remained consistent since 1993, though inks and printing techniques have shifted a lot over the years. In fact, new foil cards are way worse than old foils; for some reason, they tend to curl the card if not kept in a 100% humidity free environment. The curling can get so bad that sometimes judges won't allow them to be played in tournaments, since they count as marked cards!"
  • If the words religion and faith didn't exist, how would we talk about them?
  • Good Bones, by Maggie Smith
  • Homemade hair conditioner / masque is basically mayo

Microtopics:

  • Ripe and ready topics.
  • Making guests record their own obituary in case they die between when an episode is recorded and when it's released.
  • Watching Your Rass.
  • A podcast about people who form their identities around games, specifically Cribbage.
  • The Slim-Line B-7 "True Linen" Finish.
  • Switching out topics on the fly.
  • Practicing a magic trick in front of a mirror and fooling yourself.
  • Positive feedback loops.
  • Curling -- The Thing Noodles Do.
  • The benefits of cheap hobbies.
  • A Clarke Sweetone with a conical bore.
  • Bicycle Backs.
  • How quickly you wear out a deck of playing cards when learning close-up magic.
  • The most interesting card finishes.
  • Cardistry.
  • The Bicycle Air-Cushion finish vs. the Cartamundi True Linen finish.
  • E-llusionist Magic Supplies.
  • The best brand of cards to do the Faro shuffle with.
  • Two pieces of paper surrounding a cardboard core and enveloped in a plastic finish.
  • Peeling apart playing cards and finding a tiny map of Germany.
  • Something that comes from how people are.
  • Going to Blorp every Sunday morning.
  • Students with different educational needs.
  • Wanting to participate in a group that sets the rules but feeling really strongly that you shouldn't follow one particular rule.
  • Doing a lot of moderating of teen forums.
  • Conceiving of religions as fandoms of book series.
  • Being a super fan of someone who spoke out against elevating individuals above their individual experiences.
  • Eliezer Yudkowsky's Dune.
  • Scientist clergymen exploring the world.
  • The fossils of the language that we speak.
  • Dictionaries as the chalk outline around language's corpse.
  • Disney buying the Star Wars franchise as a metaphor for the Roman empire converting to Christianity.
  • Christianity before it was cool.
  • Talking dogs.
  • Comic book puppy trash acts.
  • The story from Kings where children make fun of a man's bald head and the man prays to God for help who sends bears to maul the children.
  • Being surrounded by hundreds of children making fun of your bald head.
  • Things that you thought were good but if there are ways they can be bad you want to hear about them.
  • Selling the world to your child.
  • Having a world view and having to learn to live with it.
  • Stones Georg.
  • Presenting the world's best self to your child.
  • Which end of the cow is the milk end.
  • The gestalt of a cow, which moos and creates milk.
  • Writing a poem live on the air by saying "dah" whenever you can't think of another word.
  • What happens if you shampoo but don't condition your hair.
  • The FBI coming to your apartment to arrest the free radicals making your hair frizzy.
  • Dropping mustard from your hair care routine because your head smells too much like a sandwich now.
  • Putting bean water on your head.
  • Hairdini.
  • The guests you can't find on Topic Lords.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Playing card finishes
  • Esper Quinn adds: "As a decades long Magic: the Gathering player, card condition, handling and protection is something I've actually spent a lot of time thinking about. There's a guy on YouTube whose whole claim to fame is that every couple months he reviews every new sleeve (both inner and outer, for double sleeving), deck protector, carrying case, binder, etc. for card protection. Magic cardstock has actually remained consistent since 1993, though inks and printing techniques have shifted a lot over the years. In fact, new foil cards are way worse than old foils; for some reason, they tend to curl the card if not kept in a 100% humidity free environment. The curling can get so bad that sometimes judges won't allow them to be played in tournaments, since they count as marked cards!"
  • If the words religion and faith didn't exist, how would we talk about them?
  • Good Bones, by Maggie Smith
  • Homemade hair conditioner / masque is basically mayo

Microtopics:

  • Ripe and ready topics.
  • Making guests record their own obituary in case they die between when an episode is recorded and when it's released.
  • Watching Your Rass.
  • A podcast about people who form their identities around games, specifically Cribbage.
  • The Slim-Line B-7 "True Linen" Finish.
  • Switching out topics on the fly.
  • Practicing a magic trick in front of a mirror and fooling yourself.
  • Positive feedback loops.
  • Curling -- The Thing Noodles Do.
  • The benefits of cheap hobbies.
  • A Clarke Sweetone with a conical bore.
  • Bicycle Backs.
  • How quickly you wear out a deck of playing cards when learning close-up magic.
  • The most interesting card finishes.
  • Cardistry.
  • The Bicycle Air-Cushion finish vs. the Cartamundi True Linen finish.
  • E-llusionist Magic Supplies.
  • The best brand of cards to do the Faro shuffle with.
  • Two pieces of paper surrounding a cardboard core and enveloped in a plastic finish.
  • Peeling apart playing cards and finding a tiny map of Germany.
  • Something that comes from how people are.
  • Going to Blorp every Sunday morning.
  • Students with different educational needs.
  • Wanting to participate in a group that sets the rules but feeling really strongly that you shouldn't follow one particular rule.
  • Doing a lot of moderating of teen forums.
  • Conceiving of religions as fandoms of book series.
  • Being a super fan of someone who spoke out against elevating individuals above their individual experiences.
  • Eliezer Yudkowsky's Dune.
  • Scientist clergymen exploring the world.
  • The fossils of the language that we speak.
  • Dictionaries as the chalk outline around language's corpse.
  • Disney buying the Star Wars franchise as a metaphor for the Roman empire converting to Christianity.
  • Christianity before it was cool.
  • Talking dogs.
  • Comic book puppy trash acts.
  • The story from Kings where children make fun of a man's bald head and the man prays to God for help who sends bears to maul the children.
  • Being surrounded by hundreds of children making fun of your bald head.
  • Things that you thought were good but if there are ways they can be bad you want to hear about them.
  • Selling the world to your child.
  • Having a world view and having to learn to live with it.
  • Stones Georg.
  • Presenting the world's best self to your child.
  • Which end of the cow is the milk end.
  • The gestalt of a cow, which moos and creates milk.
  • Writing a poem live on the air by saying "dah" whenever you can't think of another word.
  • What happens if you shampoo but don't condition your hair.
  • The FBI coming to your apartment to arrest the free radicals making your hair frizzy.
  • Dropping mustard from your hair care routine because your head smells too much like a sandwich now.
  • Putting bean water on your head.
  • Hairdini.
  • The guests you can't find on Topic Lords.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Playing card finishes
  • Esper Quinn adds: "As a decades long Magic: the Gathering player, card condition, handling and protection is something I've actually spent a lot of time thinking about. There's a guy on YouTube whose whole claim to fame is that every couple months he reviews every new sleeve (both inner and outer, for double sleeving), deck protector, carrying case, binder, etc. for card protection. Magic cardstock has actually remained consistent since 1993, though inks and printing techniques have shifted a lot over the years. In fact, new foil cards are way worse than old foils; for some reason, they tend to curl the card if not kept in a 100% humidity free environment. The curling can get so bad that sometimes judges won't allow them to be played in tournaments, since they count as marked cards!"
  • If the words religion and faith didn't exist, how would we talk about them?
  • Good Bones, by Maggie Smith
  • Homemade hair conditioner / masque is basically mayo

Microtopics:

  • Ripe and ready topics.
  • Making guests record their own obituary in case they die between when an episode is recorded and when it's released.
  • Watching Your Rass.
  • A podcast about people who form their identities around games, specifically Cribbage.
  • The Slim-Line B-7 "True Linen" Finish.
  • Switching out topics on the fly.
  • Practicing a magic trick in front of a mirror and fooling yourself.
  • Positive feedback loops.
  • Curling -- The Thing Noodles Do.
  • The benefits of cheap hobbies.
  • A Clarke Sweetone with a conical bore.
  • Bicycle Backs.
  • How quickly you wear out a deck of playing cards when learning close-up magic.
  • The most interesting card finishes.
  • Cardistry.
  • The Bicycle Air-Cushion finish vs. the Cartamundi True Linen finish.
  • E-llusionist Magic Supplies.
  • The best brand of cards to do the Faro shuffle with.
  • Two pieces of paper surrounding a cardboard core and enveloped in a plastic finish.
  • Peeling apart playing cards and finding a tiny map of Germany.
  • Something that comes from how people are.
  • Going to Blorp every Sunday morning.
  • Students with different educational needs.
  • Wanting to participate in a group that sets the rules but feeling really strongly that you shouldn't follow one particular rule.
  • Doing a lot of moderating of teen forums.
  • Conceiving of religions as fandoms of book series.
  • Being a super fan of someone who spoke out against elevating individuals above their individual experiences.
  • Eliezer Yudkowsky's Dune.
  • Scientist clergymen exploring the world.
  • The fossils of the language that we speak.
  • Dictionaries as the chalk outline around language's corpse.
  • Disney buying the Star Wars franchise as a metaphor for the Roman empire converting to Christianity.
  • Christianity before it was cool.
  • Talking dogs.
  • Comic book puppy trash acts.
  • The story from Kings where children make fun of a man's bald head and the man prays to God for help who sends bears to maul the children.
  • Being surrounded by hundreds of children making fun of your bald head.
  • Things that you thought were good but if there are ways they can be bad you want to hear about them.
  • Selling the world to your child.
  • Having a world view and having to learn to live with it.
  • Stones Georg.
  • Presenting the world's best self to your child.
  • Which end of the cow is the milk end.
  • The gestalt of a cow, which moos and creates milk.
  • Writing a poem live on the air by saying "dah" whenever you can't think of another word.
  • What happens if you shampoo but don't condition your hair.
  • The FBI coming to your apartment to arrest the free radicals making your hair frizzy.
  • Dropping mustard from your hair care routine because your head smells too much like a sandwich now.
  • Putting bean water on your head.
  • Hairdini.
  • The guests you can't find on Topic Lords.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+LtBrmDSi ]]> Jim Stormdancer 122. If You're Cold, Your Oatmeal is Cold https://topiclords.com/if-youre-cold-your-oatmeal-is-cold 4cc9dea4-81fc-4816-976a-588ab7cb934b Mon, 21 Feb 2022 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Maxx and Ananda. We discuss rare videos of European hamsters, eating the last dragon vs. eating a human being, what's wrong with math Wikipedia, All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace by Richard Brautigan, Diatomite and our weird relationship to tiny cursed skeletons, and making fermented foods. 58:33 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Rare videos of European Hamsters.
  • Would you rather eat: the last dragon or a human being?
  • What happened in the editor culture that made medical and mathematical Wikipedia absolutely useless for lay readers, and is there anything we can do to fix it?
  • All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace, by Richard Brautigan
    • https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/weekend-poem-all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving-grace/245251/
    • Esper Quinn adds: "I grew up very techno-utopian in that particular Y2K post-history stripe, where everything will be Extreme Sports and Peace Summits for the rest of existence once we can get everybody hooked up to 'broadband'. I loved the idea of the singularity, humanism, the maybe naive idea that once everybody can just understand how everyone feels by way of livejournal posts or brain implants we'll all be friends and start working together on things. I still have a lot of love for that era, and my dream video game concept I tinker with every couple months is an extremely Y2K-aesthetic snowboarding-ballsport called CYBERXROSS. I had heard this Brautigan poem before, though a bit late for that era; I want to say it was around 2012, just when Facebook (and post-bubble Silicon Valley Capitalism) began to really bare its teeth and sink into the world's throat, shattering the idea of technology as a Total Positive entirely. Oh well. I still love the poem."
  • Diatomite and our weird relationship to tiny cursed skeletons.
  • Making fermented foods. I want to make stinky tofu.

Microtopics:

  • Choosing to believe when somebody last ate oatmeal.
  • Outside oatmeal vs. inside oatmeal.
  • The wide world of breakfast goops.
  • Writing your to-do lists in calligraphy.
  • Minutes from the meeting where you are every member of the board of directors and you agree with yourself that you should remain CEO.
  • Jodorowsky's Hamster.
  • Videos of aggressive wild hamsters that they don't want you to see.
  • Ethical hamster breeders in your area.
  • Shipping a hamster in a box with a potato and when it arrives there's no potato but there's a potato's worth of feces.
  • The kind of habitat that pet hamsters need.
  • A German naturalist's hamster cage.
  • King Solomon's Ring, by Konrad Z. Lorenz.
  • Importing an entire pond into your house so you can observe it more efficiently.
  • A cheese shop in a small town staffed by the same person who runs the travel agency and the general store.
  • Imitation cannibalism hoax "Hufu."
  • Whether Winston can say good night.
  • Whether a three year old understands the ethical calculus behind eating or not eating the last dragon.
  • Eating raw dragon and getting Mad Dragon Disease.
  • Whether biomagnification would be worse in dragon or human meat.
  • Whether Wikipedia pages for difficult ideas should have tutorials.
  • A series of date nights in which you make Powerpoint presentations about armadillos for each other.
  • The Seven-Banded Armadillo.
  • A detailed technical description of the scoots on the Seven-Banded Armadillo's fourth moveable band.
  • Volunteer opportunities to study Paraguayan fauna.
  • Spending four years in Paraguay discovering and describing a new species of armadillo by going to the museum where they are stuffed and mounted.
  • The relief of discovering that other people fail at things too.
  • Mutually programming harmony, like pure water touching clear sky.
  • A cybernetic forest filled with pines and electronics.
  • The counterculture era of hippies and computers.
  • Solving every problem.
  • Making a machine to water your plants and going back to sleep.
  • Making art that is deeply alarming but also incredibly pleasant.
  • Violently bright emotions for short moments.
  • How to recognize utopias from the outside.
  • Fixing a poem you almost like and posting the result on Instagram.
  • Crypto bros perishing in the wildfires of this cybernetic ecosystem.
  • Exploring and coming to terms with the complications of the field you were uncomplicatedly excited about as a kid.
  • The set of questions that don't have words attached to them.
  • The Mossman Lock Collection.
  • Branches of technology that we didn't take.
  • Using a slab of diatomaceous earth as your bath mat.
  • The multivarious uses of the skeletons left behind after the primordial seas dried up.
  • Surrounding your pantry with ancient dry skeletons so when ants step on the skeletons they think "oh gross, this skeleton is so dry" and they go away.
  • Pouring nitroglycerin into ancient tiny skeletons to invent dynamite.
  • Scrubbing the exposed parts of your skeleton with much smaller skeletons.
  • Late night snack vendors.
  • Sarcophagus tofu.
  • Preserved organ dishes.
  • The difficulty of acquiring stinky tofu during a global pandemic.
  • Fermented meat products.
  • How to tell when your stinky tofu turned out wrong.
  • Drinking the band-aid beer.
  • Paying a nominal fee for a lab to DNA sequence your mystery meat.
  • Comparing sludge notes.
  • Adding kimchi to pizza sauce.
  • Drawing the Instagram logo out of diatomaceous earth on the floor and going to sleep in it and waking up and now you are Instagram and whenever someone uploads a video they're uploading it into your head.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Rare videos of European Hamsters.
  • Would you rather eat: the last dragon or a human being?
  • What happened in the editor culture that made medical and mathematical Wikipedia absolutely useless for lay readers, and is there anything we can do to fix it?
  • All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace, by Richard Brautigan
    • https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/weekend-poem-all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving-grace/245251/
    • Esper Quinn adds: "I grew up very techno-utopian in that particular Y2K post-history stripe, where everything will be Extreme Sports and Peace Summits for the rest of existence once we can get everybody hooked up to 'broadband'. I loved the idea of the singularity, humanism, the maybe naive idea that once everybody can just understand how everyone feels by way of livejournal posts or brain implants we'll all be friends and start working together on things. I still have a lot of love for that era, and my dream video game concept I tinker with every couple months is an extremely Y2K-aesthetic snowboarding-ballsport called CYBERXROSS. I had heard this Brautigan poem before, though a bit late for that era; I want to say it was around 2012, just when Facebook (and post-bubble Silicon Valley Capitalism) began to really bare its teeth and sink into the world's throat, shattering the idea of technology as a Total Positive entirely. Oh well. I still love the poem."
  • Diatomite and our weird relationship to tiny cursed skeletons.
  • Making fermented foods. I want to make stinky tofu.

Microtopics:

  • Choosing to believe when somebody last ate oatmeal.
  • Outside oatmeal vs. inside oatmeal.
  • The wide world of breakfast goops.
  • Writing your to-do lists in calligraphy.
  • Minutes from the meeting where you are every member of the board of directors and you agree with yourself that you should remain CEO.
  • Jodorowsky's Hamster.
  • Videos of aggressive wild hamsters that they don't want you to see.
  • Ethical hamster breeders in your area.
  • Shipping a hamster in a box with a potato and when it arrives there's no potato but there's a potato's worth of feces.
  • The kind of habitat that pet hamsters need.
  • A German naturalist's hamster cage.
  • King Solomon's Ring, by Konrad Z. Lorenz.
  • Importing an entire pond into your house so you can observe it more efficiently.
  • A cheese shop in a small town staffed by the same person who runs the travel agency and the general store.
  • Imitation cannibalism hoax "Hufu."
  • Whether Winston can say good night.
  • Whether a three year old understands the ethical calculus behind eating or not eating the last dragon.
  • Eating raw dragon and getting Mad Dragon Disease.
  • Whether biomagnification would be worse in dragon or human meat.
  • Whether Wikipedia pages for difficult ideas should have tutorials.
  • A series of date nights in which you make Powerpoint presentations about armadillos for each other.
  • The Seven-Banded Armadillo.
  • A detailed technical description of the scoots on the Seven-Banded Armadillo's fourth moveable band.
  • Volunteer opportunities to study Paraguayan fauna.
  • Spending four years in Paraguay discovering and describing a new species of armadillo by going to the museum where they are stuffed and mounted.
  • The relief of discovering that other people fail at things too.
  • Mutually programming harmony, like pure water touching clear sky.
  • A cybernetic forest filled with pines and electronics.
  • The counterculture era of hippies and computers.
  • Solving every problem.
  • Making a machine to water your plants and going back to sleep.
  • Making art that is deeply alarming but also incredibly pleasant.
  • Violently bright emotions for short moments.
  • How to recognize utopias from the outside.
  • Fixing a poem you almost like and posting the result on Instagram.
  • Crypto bros perishing in the wildfires of this cybernetic ecosystem.
  • Exploring and coming to terms with the complications of the field you were uncomplicatedly excited about as a kid.
  • The set of questions that don't have words attached to them.
  • The Mossman Lock Collection.
  • Branches of technology that we didn't take.
  • Using a slab of diatomaceous earth as your bath mat.
  • The multivarious uses of the skeletons left behind after the primordial seas dried up.
  • Surrounding your pantry with ancient dry skeletons so when ants step on the skeletons they think "oh gross, this skeleton is so dry" and they go away.
  • Pouring nitroglycerin into ancient tiny skeletons to invent dynamite.
  • Scrubbing the exposed parts of your skeleton with much smaller skeletons.
  • Late night snack vendors.
  • Sarcophagus tofu.
  • Preserved organ dishes.
  • The difficulty of acquiring stinky tofu during a global pandemic.
  • Fermented meat products.
  • How to tell when your stinky tofu turned out wrong.
  • Drinking the band-aid beer.
  • Paying a nominal fee for a lab to DNA sequence your mystery meat.
  • Comparing sludge notes.
  • Adding kimchi to pizza sauce.
  • Drawing the Instagram logo out of diatomaceous earth on the floor and going to sleep in it and waking up and now you are Instagram and whenever someone uploads a video they're uploading it into your head.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Rare videos of European Hamsters.
  • Would you rather eat: the last dragon or a human being?
  • What happened in the editor culture that made medical and mathematical Wikipedia absolutely useless for lay readers, and is there anything we can do to fix it?
  • All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace, by Richard Brautigan
    • https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/weekend-poem-all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving-grace/245251/
    • Esper Quinn adds: "I grew up very techno-utopian in that particular Y2K post-history stripe, where everything will be Extreme Sports and Peace Summits for the rest of existence once we can get everybody hooked up to 'broadband'. I loved the idea of the singularity, humanism, the maybe naive idea that once everybody can just understand how everyone feels by way of livejournal posts or brain implants we'll all be friends and start working together on things. I still have a lot of love for that era, and my dream video game concept I tinker with every couple months is an extremely Y2K-aesthetic snowboarding-ballsport called CYBERXROSS. I had heard this Brautigan poem before, though a bit late for that era; I want to say it was around 2012, just when Facebook (and post-bubble Silicon Valley Capitalism) began to really bare its teeth and sink into the world's throat, shattering the idea of technology as a Total Positive entirely. Oh well. I still love the poem."
  • Diatomite and our weird relationship to tiny cursed skeletons.
  • Making fermented foods. I want to make stinky tofu.

Microtopics:

  • Choosing to believe when somebody last ate oatmeal.
  • Outside oatmeal vs. inside oatmeal.
  • The wide world of breakfast goops.
  • Writing your to-do lists in calligraphy.
  • Minutes from the meeting where you are every member of the board of directors and you agree with yourself that you should remain CEO.
  • Jodorowsky's Hamster.
  • Videos of aggressive wild hamsters that they don't want you to see.
  • Ethical hamster breeders in your area.
  • Shipping a hamster in a box with a potato and when it arrives there's no potato but there's a potato's worth of feces.
  • The kind of habitat that pet hamsters need.
  • A German naturalist's hamster cage.
  • King Solomon's Ring, by Konrad Z. Lorenz.
  • Importing an entire pond into your house so you can observe it more efficiently.
  • A cheese shop in a small town staffed by the same person who runs the travel agency and the general store.
  • Imitation cannibalism hoax "Hufu."
  • Whether Winston can say good night.
  • Whether a three year old understands the ethical calculus behind eating or not eating the last dragon.
  • Eating raw dragon and getting Mad Dragon Disease.
  • Whether biomagnification would be worse in dragon or human meat.
  • Whether Wikipedia pages for difficult ideas should have tutorials.
  • A series of date nights in which you make Powerpoint presentations about armadillos for each other.
  • The Seven-Banded Armadillo.
  • A detailed technical description of the scoots on the Seven-Banded Armadillo's fourth moveable band.
  • Volunteer opportunities to study Paraguayan fauna.
  • Spending four years in Paraguay discovering and describing a new species of armadillo by going to the museum where they are stuffed and mounted.
  • The relief of discovering that other people fail at things too.
  • Mutually programming harmony, like pure water touching clear sky.
  • A cybernetic forest filled with pines and electronics.
  • The counterculture era of hippies and computers.
  • Solving every problem.
  • Making a machine to water your plants and going back to sleep.
  • Making art that is deeply alarming but also incredibly pleasant.
  • Violently bright emotions for short moments.
  • How to recognize utopias from the outside.
  • Fixing a poem you almost like and posting the result on Instagram.
  • Crypto bros perishing in the wildfires of this cybernetic ecosystem.
  • Exploring and coming to terms with the complications of the field you were uncomplicatedly excited about as a kid.
  • The set of questions that don't have words attached to them.
  • The Mossman Lock Collection.
  • Branches of technology that we didn't take.
  • Using a slab of diatomaceous earth as your bath mat.
  • The multivarious uses of the skeletons left behind after the primordial seas dried up.
  • Surrounding your pantry with ancient dry skeletons so when ants step on the skeletons they think "oh gross, this skeleton is so dry" and they go away.
  • Pouring nitroglycerin into ancient tiny skeletons to invent dynamite.
  • Scrubbing the exposed parts of your skeleton with much smaller skeletons.
  • Late night snack vendors.
  • Sarcophagus tofu.
  • Preserved organ dishes.
  • The difficulty of acquiring stinky tofu during a global pandemic.
  • Fermented meat products.
  • How to tell when your stinky tofu turned out wrong.
  • Drinking the band-aid beer.
  • Paying a nominal fee for a lab to DNA sequence your mystery meat.
  • Comparing sludge notes.
  • Adding kimchi to pizza sauce.
  • Drawing the Instagram logo out of diatomaceous earth on the floor and going to sleep in it and waking up and now you are Instagram and whenever someone uploads a video they're uploading it into your head.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+w3O7egUL ]]> Jim Stormdancer 121. A Delicious Treat for Your Brain's Ass https://topiclords.com/a-delicious-treat-for-your-brains-ass 19b64bce-3e01-4563-a9a8-7217d8bfa38c Mon, 14 Feb 2022 00:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Ryan and Chris. We discuss what position you sleep in and when you're going to die, the power of limes, why we have fingernails, and a poem about garlic bread. 1:04:36 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Reading someone's grocery list and trying to decide if it's ironic.
  • The importance of firing Jimmy Wales.
  • Trying to make a garbage fire better but it's not better yet.
  • Filming yourself becoming the villain so that the documentary won't be disappointing.
  • Topic Sloars.
  • Not really knowing what a sloar is except that you can roast in the belly of it.
  • The place for Buster-Heads.
  • Sleeping the wrongest.
  • Going to your dentist for sleeping advice.
  • Sleeping in a position to minimize the number of times per hour you stop breathing.
  • The sleep paralysis demon not being able to sit on your chest because you sleep on your side.
  • Sleeping in a nanofiber web suspended from the ceiling.
  • Whether sleeping cuddling a pillow is good or bad for various bones and organs.
  • Famous Racist Pillow Peddler.
  • Doctor Wu says you're going to eat shit.
  • Sleeping like the number four.
  • Lying in entirely different positions at the beach because you don't want anyone to know how you sleep.
  • Trying the number four leg and letting Ryan know how it goes in the morning.
  • A night of making cocktails using limes.
  • Deciding that limes are too powerful and we need to put them in their place.
  • Garnishing your beverage with cornflakes.
  • All citrus fruit descending from the mustard plant.
  • Demanding that every foodstuff be as delicious and useful as limes are.
  • A pile of nasty pasta mistake.
  • Chocolate pasta that you boil and put on your ice cream.
  • A Wikipedia rabbit hole of citrus fruits.
  • The three ur-fruits that control the fate of every citrus fruit you've ever eaten.
  • An open faced lime growing in the wild.
  • Optimus Lime.
  • Thinking of a pop culture pun and asking the bartender for it because it's probably a beer.
  • Extremely lumpy limes.
  • Filling city hall with gorillas so they'll eat all the snakes.
  • Hot dog fingers that are homogenous all the way to the end.
  • Manatee toenails.
  • Where whales keep their finger bones.
  • Awesome ladies with orca fingernails.
  • An extremely informative image search that you don't recommend to anyone.
  • All the gross ways Takis can fail.
  • Origami claws.
  • The state of the spit valves on those Cool Ranch Bugles.
  • Sweet and Salty and Chocolate and Peanut Butter Bugles.
  • Ultra-Powerful Butter Flavor.
  • Coming out of your bunker after 200 years and not knowing who Batman is but seeing the "ultra rare cheeto shaped like batman crying" and thinking "wow it's like a man, but also a bat, and he's weeping because he'll never solve his parents murder"
  • Making NFTs of every character in FF2 minigame Biker Chicks and then trying to get all the Kickstarter backers who sent in photos to buy their own face, because if they don't someone else is going to own their face.
  • Selling visitation rights to your collection of rare Cheetos.
  • Rare Cheeto NFTs.
  • Buying Cheeto earrings and becoming Cheeto Earrings Guy.
  • Something in red that was where "garlic bread" is -- erased.
  • Painters buying big slabs of bathroom stall at craft stores so they can paint on it.
  • Keeping your finger on the pulse of garlic bread related poetry.
  • The dark recesses of Jim's Travis Barker poetry headcanon.
  • A traveling japesman who modifies any exposed whiteboard poetry to be about food.
  • Where you do your business after dark.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Reading someone's grocery list and trying to decide if it's ironic.
  • The importance of firing Jimmy Wales.
  • Trying to make a garbage fire better but it's not better yet.
  • Filming yourself becoming the villain so that the documentary won't be disappointing.
  • Topic Sloars.
  • Not really knowing what a sloar is except that you can roast in the belly of it.
  • The place for Buster-Heads.
  • Sleeping the wrongest.
  • Going to your dentist for sleeping advice.
  • Sleeping in a position to minimize the number of times per hour you stop breathing.
  • The sleep paralysis demon not being able to sit on your chest because you sleep on your side.
  • Sleeping in a nanofiber web suspended from the ceiling.
  • Whether sleeping cuddling a pillow is good or bad for various bones and organs.
  • Famous Racist Pillow Peddler.
  • Doctor Wu says you're going to eat shit.
  • Sleeping like the number four.
  • Lying in entirely different positions at the beach because you don't want anyone to know how you sleep.
  • Trying the number four leg and letting Ryan know how it goes in the morning.
  • A night of making cocktails using limes.
  • Deciding that limes are too powerful and we need to put them in their place.
  • Garnishing your beverage with cornflakes.
  • All citrus fruit descending from the mustard plant.
  • Demanding that every foodstuff be as delicious and useful as limes are.
  • A pile of nasty pasta mistake.
  • Chocolate pasta that you boil and put on your ice cream.
  • A Wikipedia rabbit hole of citrus fruits.
  • The three ur-fruits that control the fate of every citrus fruit you've ever eaten.
  • An open faced lime growing in the wild.
  • Optimus Lime.
  • Thinking of a pop culture pun and asking the bartender for it because it's probably a beer.
  • Extremely lumpy limes.
  • Filling city hall with gorillas so they'll eat all the snakes.
  • Hot dog fingers that are homogenous all the way to the end.
  • Manatee toenails.
  • Where whales keep their finger bones.
  • Awesome ladies with orca fingernails.
  • An extremely informative image search that you don't recommend to anyone.
  • All the gross ways Takis can fail.
  • Origami claws.
  • The state of the spit valves on those Cool Ranch Bugles.
  • Sweet and Salty and Chocolate and Peanut Butter Bugles.
  • Ultra-Powerful Butter Flavor.
  • Coming out of your bunker after 200 years and not knowing who Batman is but seeing the "ultra rare cheeto shaped like batman crying" and thinking "wow it's like a man, but also a bat, and he's weeping because he'll never solve his parents murder"
  • Making NFTs of every character in FF2 minigame Biker Chicks and then trying to get all the Kickstarter backers who sent in photos to buy their own face, because if they don't someone else is going to own their face.
  • Selling visitation rights to your collection of rare Cheetos.
  • Rare Cheeto NFTs.
  • Buying Cheeto earrings and becoming Cheeto Earrings Guy.
  • Something in red that was where "garlic bread" is -- erased.
  • Painters buying big slabs of bathroom stall at craft stores so they can paint on it.
  • Keeping your finger on the pulse of garlic bread related poetry.
  • The dark recesses of Jim's Travis Barker poetry headcanon.
  • A traveling japesman who modifies any exposed whiteboard poetry to be about food.
  • Where you do your business after dark.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Reading someone's grocery list and trying to decide if it's ironic.
  • The importance of firing Jimmy Wales.
  • Trying to make a garbage fire better but it's not better yet.
  • Filming yourself becoming the villain so that the documentary won't be disappointing.
  • Topic Sloars.
  • Not really knowing what a sloar is except that you can roast in the belly of it.
  • The place for Buster-Heads.
  • Sleeping the wrongest.
  • Going to your dentist for sleeping advice.
  • Sleeping in a position to minimize the number of times per hour you stop breathing.
  • The sleep paralysis demon not being able to sit on your chest because you sleep on your side.
  • Sleeping in a nanofiber web suspended from the ceiling.
  • Whether sleeping cuddling a pillow is good or bad for various bones and organs.
  • Famous Racist Pillow Peddler.
  • Doctor Wu says you're going to eat shit.
  • Sleeping like the number four.
  • Lying in entirely different positions at the beach because you don't want anyone to know how you sleep.
  • Trying the number four leg and letting Ryan know how it goes in the morning.
  • A night of making cocktails using limes.
  • Deciding that limes are too powerful and we need to put them in their place.
  • Garnishing your beverage with cornflakes.
  • All citrus fruit descending from the mustard plant.
  • Demanding that every foodstuff be as delicious and useful as limes are.
  • A pile of nasty pasta mistake.
  • Chocolate pasta that you boil and put on your ice cream.
  • A Wikipedia rabbit hole of citrus fruits.
  • The three ur-fruits that control the fate of every citrus fruit you've ever eaten.
  • An open faced lime growing in the wild.
  • Optimus Lime.
  • Thinking of a pop culture pun and asking the bartender for it because it's probably a beer.
  • Extremely lumpy limes.
  • Filling city hall with gorillas so they'll eat all the snakes.
  • Hot dog fingers that are homogenous all the way to the end.
  • Manatee toenails.
  • Where whales keep their finger bones.
  • Awesome ladies with orca fingernails.
  • An extremely informative image search that you don't recommend to anyone.
  • All the gross ways Takis can fail.
  • Origami claws.
  • The state of the spit valves on those Cool Ranch Bugles.
  • Sweet and Salty and Chocolate and Peanut Butter Bugles.
  • Ultra-Powerful Butter Flavor.
  • Coming out of your bunker after 200 years and not knowing who Batman is but seeing the "ultra rare cheeto shaped like batman crying" and thinking "wow it's like a man, but also a bat, and he's weeping because he'll never solve his parents murder"
  • Making NFTs of every character in FF2 minigame Biker Chicks and then trying to get all the Kickstarter backers who sent in photos to buy their own face, because if they don't someone else is going to own their face.
  • Selling visitation rights to your collection of rare Cheetos.
  • Rare Cheeto NFTs.
  • Buying Cheeto earrings and becoming Cheeto Earrings Guy.
  • Something in red that was where "garlic bread" is -- erased.
  • Painters buying big slabs of bathroom stall at craft stores so they can paint on it.
  • Keeping your finger on the pulse of garlic bread related poetry.
  • The dark recesses of Jim's Travis Barker poetry headcanon.
  • A traveling japesman who modifies any exposed whiteboard poetry to be about food.
  • Where you do your business after dark.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+tbT_Okpz ]]> Jim Stormdancer 120. The Mouse is For Hippies and Slackers https://topiclords.com/the-mouse-is-for-hippies-and-slackers fe51ad17-d1cb-4ada-8675-eb3b63dcd068 Mon, 07 Feb 2022 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Daniel and Jonah. We discuss the energy of Chop Socky, the Resident Evil series, Flettner airplanes, Ogden Nash's poetry, Indonesia, and watching movies without finding out anything about them first. 1:01:12 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • A website for dead people who will pay $12/year for as long as they're dead.
  • Hummus.
  • Whether Inscryption is more popular than hummus.
  • Starting a topic with an anecdote.
  • Walking around a city with the audio of a movie playing on your headphones.
  • Watching a foreign film subbed because you're too cool to realize there's a subbed version in the settings.
  • What you notice when you strip the visuals out of a visual medium.
  • Porting Doom to ears.
  • Whether blind people have their own Steam.
  • Going through several iterations of reinventing how you shoot zombies.
  • A woman scaled up 2x on every axis.
  • Brazil's first new console after the Megadrive.
  • Porting Resident Evil 4 to the Megadrive.
  • Jim's entire history with the Resident Evil stories.
  • A goofy Zelda boss but it's in a horror game for some reason.
  • Turning doing donuts in a two car garage into a boss fight.
  • Being bad at puzzles that aren't supposed to be puzzles, like how to use this can opener.
  • A Flettner airplane made out of KFC buckets.
  • The Magnus effect.
  • The downside of an airplane that drops like a rock if the engines lose power.
  • The world's first portable steamroller.
  • An airplane that is heavy enough to create its own runway.
  • Putting a dog in the Youtube thumbnail.
  • A poem that was short even before you cut the last 25%.
  • A joke poem that becomes even more of a joke when you cut out the punchline.
  • Dad giving you permission to memorize the shortest possible poem.
  • Web design nostalgia.
  • Hypertext protocols that predated HTTP.
  • How HTTP ate every other hypertext protocol's lunch.
  • This thing that was invented in the 70s.
  • Tetris the Grand Master, and how it would be better with mouse input.
  • Hypothetical keyboard-only interfaces for audio editing software.
  • A keyboard macro scripting language thing for transcribing sheet music.
  • How to pronounce "Latex"
  • Pronouncing the typesetting puns.
  • Being surprised when a country has almost as many people as the United States.
  • Gamelan.
  • Being Indonesian and knowing more about Indonesia than most people.
  • Whether modern day Greeks get annoyed when you try to engage them about Greece 2000 years ago.
  • Thinking you know where New Zealand is but not.
  • Growing up in the US and spending all your geography points on remembering which state is which and not having any left for the rest of the world.
  • Talking about yourself in any person.
  • Why nobody reviews Frog Fractions games.
  • Soda speak.
  • Divesting yourself of places you might get spoiled.
  • Middling Marvel Movie Buddies.
  • How to make choices without having enough information to decide.
  • Totally wasting your plug.
  • The premier place to send answers to the Inscryption ARG.
  • Counting the number of syllables in the sentence that claims to not be an ARG clue.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • A website for dead people who will pay $12/year for as long as they're dead.
  • Hummus.
  • Whether Inscryption is more popular than hummus.
  • Starting a topic with an anecdote.
  • Walking around a city with the audio of a movie playing on your headphones.
  • Watching a foreign film subbed because you're too cool to realize there's a subbed version in the settings.
  • What you notice when you strip the visuals out of a visual medium.
  • Porting Doom to ears.
  • Whether blind people have their own Steam.
  • Going through several iterations of reinventing how you shoot zombies.
  • A woman scaled up 2x on every axis.
  • Brazil's first new console after the Megadrive.
  • Porting Resident Evil 4 to the Megadrive.
  • Jim's entire history with the Resident Evil stories.
  • A goofy Zelda boss but it's in a horror game for some reason.
  • Turning doing donuts in a two car garage into a boss fight.
  • Being bad at puzzles that aren't supposed to be puzzles, like how to use this can opener.
  • A Flettner airplane made out of KFC buckets.
  • The Magnus effect.
  • The downside of an airplane that drops like a rock if the engines lose power.
  • The world's first portable steamroller.
  • An airplane that is heavy enough to create its own runway.
  • Putting a dog in the Youtube thumbnail.
  • A poem that was short even before you cut the last 25%.
  • A joke poem that becomes even more of a joke when you cut out the punchline.
  • Dad giving you permission to memorize the shortest possible poem.
  • Web design nostalgia.
  • Hypertext protocols that predated HTTP.
  • How HTTP ate every other hypertext protocol's lunch.
  • This thing that was invented in the 70s.
  • Tetris the Grand Master, and how it would be better with mouse input.
  • Hypothetical keyboard-only interfaces for audio editing software.
  • A keyboard macro scripting language thing for transcribing sheet music.
  • How to pronounce "Latex"
  • Pronouncing the typesetting puns.
  • Being surprised when a country has almost as many people as the United States.
  • Gamelan.
  • Being Indonesian and knowing more about Indonesia than most people.
  • Whether modern day Greeks get annoyed when you try to engage them about Greece 2000 years ago.
  • Thinking you know where New Zealand is but not.
  • Growing up in the US and spending all your geography points on remembering which state is which and not having any left for the rest of the world.
  • Talking about yourself in any person.
  • Why nobody reviews Frog Fractions games.
  • Soda speak.
  • Divesting yourself of places you might get spoiled.
  • Middling Marvel Movie Buddies.
  • How to make choices without having enough information to decide.
  • Totally wasting your plug.
  • The premier place to send answers to the Inscryption ARG.
  • Counting the number of syllables in the sentence that claims to not be an ARG clue.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • A website for dead people who will pay $12/year for as long as they're dead.
  • Hummus.
  • Whether Inscryption is more popular than hummus.
  • Starting a topic with an anecdote.
  • Walking around a city with the audio of a movie playing on your headphones.
  • Watching a foreign film subbed because you're too cool to realize there's a subbed version in the settings.
  • What you notice when you strip the visuals out of a visual medium.
  • Porting Doom to ears.
  • Whether blind people have their own Steam.
  • Going through several iterations of reinventing how you shoot zombies.
  • A woman scaled up 2x on every axis.
  • Brazil's first new console after the Megadrive.
  • Porting Resident Evil 4 to the Megadrive.
  • Jim's entire history with the Resident Evil stories.
  • A goofy Zelda boss but it's in a horror game for some reason.
  • Turning doing donuts in a two car garage into a boss fight.
  • Being bad at puzzles that aren't supposed to be puzzles, like how to use this can opener.
  • A Flettner airplane made out of KFC buckets.
  • The Magnus effect.
  • The downside of an airplane that drops like a rock if the engines lose power.
  • The world's first portable steamroller.
  • An airplane that is heavy enough to create its own runway.
  • Putting a dog in the Youtube thumbnail.
  • A poem that was short even before you cut the last 25%.
  • A joke poem that becomes even more of a joke when you cut out the punchline.
  • Dad giving you permission to memorize the shortest possible poem.
  • Web design nostalgia.
  • Hypertext protocols that predated HTTP.
  • How HTTP ate every other hypertext protocol's lunch.
  • This thing that was invented in the 70s.
  • Tetris the Grand Master, and how it would be better with mouse input.
  • Hypothetical keyboard-only interfaces for audio editing software.
  • A keyboard macro scripting language thing for transcribing sheet music.
  • How to pronounce "Latex"
  • Pronouncing the typesetting puns.
  • Being surprised when a country has almost as many people as the United States.
  • Gamelan.
  • Being Indonesian and knowing more about Indonesia than most people.
  • Whether modern day Greeks get annoyed when you try to engage them about Greece 2000 years ago.
  • Thinking you know where New Zealand is but not.
  • Growing up in the US and spending all your geography points on remembering which state is which and not having any left for the rest of the world.
  • Talking about yourself in any person.
  • Why nobody reviews Frog Fractions games.
  • Soda speak.
  • Divesting yourself of places you might get spoiled.
  • Middling Marvel Movie Buddies.
  • How to make choices without having enough information to decide.
  • Totally wasting your plug.
  • The premier place to send answers to the Inscryption ARG.
  • Counting the number of syllables in the sentence that claims to not be an ARG clue.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+f41lohUt ]]> Jim Stormdancer 119. Book 'Em, Dildano https://topiclords.com/book-em-dildano bc823082-5a56-4442-8ae7-2e8819d71fb3 Mon, 31 Jan 2022 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Jenni and Chris. We discuss Wordle metagamers, obscure fantasy niches, using up all the ink in a ball-point pen, The Tiger by Nael Age 6, Wizard's failure to make D&D fun at high levels, and compare and contrast: Barbarella's energy vs. Zardoz's energy. 1:03:32 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Jenni
    • @horsewizrd
  • Chris

Topics:

  • The coming schism between Wordle purists & Wordle metagamers
  • Amazon kindle fantasy best-sellers is ruled by niches that nobody outside of kindle or Royal Road users have heard of
  • In high school I knew a guy who, one time, managed to use up all the ink in a ball-point pen. The ink tube in there was just totally empty, it was astonishing. Nowadays whenever we run out of olive oil I get the same thrill. I did it! I used all the oil!
  • The Tiger, by Nael, Age 6
  • Why can't Wizards or any of the clones figure out how to make D&D fun to play at high levels? Why is this an unsolved design?
  • Zardoz & Barbarella have similar energy except Zardoz comes across as sincere & Barbarella comes across as falsely ironic to hide the sincerity

Microtopics:

  • Jim's sip of tea.
  • Making your husband Sleepytime tea so he goes to sleep while recording the podcast.
  • Making a video of yourself arguing with your cooking teacher to post to social media.
  • What is a Wordle?
  • The Wordle sheriff joke.
  • Muting the green block emoji so you stop seeing all the Wordle bragging.
  • How to improve Wordle's psychic damage output.
  • Wordle except instead of five letters it's five abstract concepts.
  • Paranormal reverse-harem.
  • Pricing your paranormal reverse-harem book at $250 and discounting it 99% so users are like "paranormal reverse-harem for $2.50? I can't afford not to!"
  • All the topics you can't sell books about on Amazon and all the coded tags you use to sell them anyway.
  • Whether Amazon will ban your book as containing bestiality if the genitalia is on the human side of the minotaur.
  • A horse with human intelligence with a penis growing out of its back, and whether anyone has sex with the penis.
  • The liminal space between bestiality and reverse-bestiality.
  • Arguing in traffic court that your car is just a collection of atoms and the distinction between those atoms and those of the world it's traveling with respect to exists entirely in our minds.
  • Doing a crime just to go to Horse Court and see that horse judge you.
  • Admitting that you are That Guy.
  • Sending your pens to the pen dimension.
  • Graduating from high school and discovering that the weird lump on the knuckle of your middle finger isn't just you having a weird skeleton.
  • Writing good handwriting.
  • Refilling the salt pig from the salt cylinder.
  • When the sauce is burning and the only solution is to salt it right now.
  • Going to Horse Court to decide which of you bought the pepper grinder.
  • Popular with the robots.
  • Whether the poem works on a third level.
  • Writing the best poem.
  • Viral Poetry Sensation "The Tiger."
  • An "invisibility cloak" which is just an empty hanger.
  • A magic supply store where half the items are just jokes on the purchaser.
  • The adult poetry workshop where you drink a glass of wine and transcribe "The Tiger" by Nael, age 6, then take it home and show it to your parents.
  • Trying to look at the thumb tips your friends are going on about.
  • Braving Omicron to buy a thumb tip.
  • Hypnotizing a napkin.
  • A magic trick where you make a rubber band disappear, but only for yourself.
  • Aging two years while dead.
  • Whether Nethack's difficulty curve is better than D&D's.
  • A weird combination of spells that is broken in a non-numerical way.
  • What the wizard did when the spaghetti-os were on too high a shelf to reach.
  • Letting the players fight Thor even though you know they'll figure out a way to kill Thor.
  • Thor swinging his hammer and killing you without having to roll any dice because Thor doesn't have stats.
  • The Dying Earth series by Jack Vance.
  • Godlike wizards feuding over who took the leftovers out of the office fridge because they ran out of real problems to solve.
  • The Dying Earth series by Jack Vance, except with football.
  • That Insidious Beast by Zack Parsons.
  • Instructions for a fruit.
  • There is no Antimemetics Division, by qntm.
  • Counterfeit Monkey by Emily Short.
  • Sean Connery in a red diaperkini.
  • The big head that floats around and vomits guns and explains how guns are better than penes.
  • When they invented the concept of copies of movies.
  • Your deal with the devil where if you fail to make Lord of the Rings you have to make Zardoz, but you succeed you get to make King Kong.
  • Scantily clad rocket people.
  • Barbarella lying in a thumb harp being yelled at by a dude wearing a Dalek and reading from a piano roll.
  • Learning how to draw by looking at promotional shots from Barbarella.
  • Mario fanfiction through the lens of Cyberpunk.
  • Whether they have sarcasm in Japan.
  • Tom Nook slapping his own nipples for ten hours.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Jenni
    • @horsewizrd
  • Chris

Topics:

  • The coming schism between Wordle purists & Wordle metagamers
  • Amazon kindle fantasy best-sellers is ruled by niches that nobody outside of kindle or Royal Road users have heard of
  • In high school I knew a guy who, one time, managed to use up all the ink in a ball-point pen. The ink tube in there was just totally empty, it was astonishing. Nowadays whenever we run out of olive oil I get the same thrill. I did it! I used all the oil!
  • The Tiger, by Nael, Age 6
  • Why can't Wizards or any of the clones figure out how to make D&D fun to play at high levels? Why is this an unsolved design?
  • Zardoz & Barbarella have similar energy except Zardoz comes across as sincere & Barbarella comes across as falsely ironic to hide the sincerity

Microtopics:

  • Jim's sip of tea.
  • Making your husband Sleepytime tea so he goes to sleep while recording the podcast.
  • Making a video of yourself arguing with your cooking teacher to post to social media.
  • What is a Wordle?
  • The Wordle sheriff joke.
  • Muting the green block emoji so you stop seeing all the Wordle bragging.
  • How to improve Wordle's psychic damage output.
  • Wordle except instead of five letters it's five abstract concepts.
  • Paranormal reverse-harem.
  • Pricing your paranormal reverse-harem book at $250 and discounting it 99% so users are like "paranormal reverse-harem for $2.50? I can't afford not to!"
  • All the topics you can't sell books about on Amazon and all the coded tags you use to sell them anyway.
  • Whether Amazon will ban your book as containing bestiality if the genitalia is on the human side of the minotaur.
  • A horse with human intelligence with a penis growing out of its back, and whether anyone has sex with the penis.
  • The liminal space between bestiality and reverse-bestiality.
  • Arguing in traffic court that your car is just a collection of atoms and the distinction between those atoms and those of the world it's traveling with respect to exists entirely in our minds.
  • Doing a crime just to go to Horse Court and see that horse judge you.
  • Admitting that you are That Guy.
  • Sending your pens to the pen dimension.
  • Graduating from high school and discovering that the weird lump on the knuckle of your middle finger isn't just you having a weird skeleton.
  • Writing good handwriting.
  • Refilling the salt pig from the salt cylinder.
  • When the sauce is burning and the only solution is to salt it right now.
  • Going to Horse Court to decide which of you bought the pepper grinder.
  • Popular with the robots.
  • Whether the poem works on a third level.
  • Writing the best poem.
  • Viral Poetry Sensation "The Tiger."
  • An "invisibility cloak" which is just an empty hanger.
  • A magic supply store where half the items are just jokes on the purchaser.
  • The adult poetry workshop where you drink a glass of wine and transcribe "The Tiger" by Nael, age 6, then take it home and show it to your parents.
  • Trying to look at the thumb tips your friends are going on about.
  • Braving Omicron to buy a thumb tip.
  • Hypnotizing a napkin.
  • A magic trick where you make a rubber band disappear, but only for yourself.
  • Aging two years while dead.
  • Whether Nethack's difficulty curve is better than D&D's.
  • A weird combination of spells that is broken in a non-numerical way.
  • What the wizard did when the spaghetti-os were on too high a shelf to reach.
  • Letting the players fight Thor even though you know they'll figure out a way to kill Thor.
  • Thor swinging his hammer and killing you without having to roll any dice because Thor doesn't have stats.
  • The Dying Earth series by Jack Vance.
  • Godlike wizards feuding over who took the leftovers out of the office fridge because they ran out of real problems to solve.
  • The Dying Earth series by Jack Vance, except with football.
  • That Insidious Beast by Zack Parsons.
  • Instructions for a fruit.
  • There is no Antimemetics Division, by qntm.
  • Counterfeit Monkey by Emily Short.
  • Sean Connery in a red diaperkini.
  • The big head that floats around and vomits guns and explains how guns are better than penes.
  • When they invented the concept of copies of movies.
  • Your deal with the devil where if you fail to make Lord of the Rings you have to make Zardoz, but you succeed you get to make King Kong.
  • Scantily clad rocket people.
  • Barbarella lying in a thumb harp being yelled at by a dude wearing a Dalek and reading from a piano roll.
  • Learning how to draw by looking at promotional shots from Barbarella.
  • Mario fanfiction through the lens of Cyberpunk.
  • Whether they have sarcasm in Japan.
  • Tom Nook slapping his own nipples for ten hours.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Jenni
    • @horsewizrd
  • Chris

Topics:

  • The coming schism between Wordle purists & Wordle metagamers
  • Amazon kindle fantasy best-sellers is ruled by niches that nobody outside of kindle or Royal Road users have heard of
  • In high school I knew a guy who, one time, managed to use up all the ink in a ball-point pen. The ink tube in there was just totally empty, it was astonishing. Nowadays whenever we run out of olive oil I get the same thrill. I did it! I used all the oil!
  • The Tiger, by Nael, Age 6
  • Why can't Wizards or any of the clones figure out how to make D&D fun to play at high levels? Why is this an unsolved design?
  • Zardoz & Barbarella have similar energy except Zardoz comes across as sincere & Barbarella comes across as falsely ironic to hide the sincerity

Microtopics:

  • Jim's sip of tea.
  • Making your husband Sleepytime tea so he goes to sleep while recording the podcast.
  • Making a video of yourself arguing with your cooking teacher to post to social media.
  • What is a Wordle?
  • The Wordle sheriff joke.
  • Muting the green block emoji so you stop seeing all the Wordle bragging.
  • How to improve Wordle's psychic damage output.
  • Wordle except instead of five letters it's five abstract concepts.
  • Paranormal reverse-harem.
  • Pricing your paranormal reverse-harem book at $250 and discounting it 99% so users are like "paranormal reverse-harem for $2.50? I can't afford not to!"
  • All the topics you can't sell books about on Amazon and all the coded tags you use to sell them anyway.
  • Whether Amazon will ban your book as containing bestiality if the genitalia is on the human side of the minotaur.
  • A horse with human intelligence with a penis growing out of its back, and whether anyone has sex with the penis.
  • The liminal space between bestiality and reverse-bestiality.
  • Arguing in traffic court that your car is just a collection of atoms and the distinction between those atoms and those of the world it's traveling with respect to exists entirely in our minds.
  • Doing a crime just to go to Horse Court and see that horse judge you.
  • Admitting that you are That Guy.
  • Sending your pens to the pen dimension.
  • Graduating from high school and discovering that the weird lump on the knuckle of your middle finger isn't just you having a weird skeleton.
  • Writing good handwriting.
  • Refilling the salt pig from the salt cylinder.
  • When the sauce is burning and the only solution is to salt it right now.
  • Going to Horse Court to decide which of you bought the pepper grinder.
  • Popular with the robots.
  • Whether the poem works on a third level.
  • Writing the best poem.
  • Viral Poetry Sensation "The Tiger."
  • An "invisibility cloak" which is just an empty hanger.
  • A magic supply store where half the items are just jokes on the purchaser.
  • The adult poetry workshop where you drink a glass of wine and transcribe "The Tiger" by Nael, age 6, then take it home and show it to your parents.
  • Trying to look at the thumb tips your friends are going on about.
  • Braving Omicron to buy a thumb tip.
  • Hypnotizing a napkin.
  • A magic trick where you make a rubber band disappear, but only for yourself.
  • Aging two years while dead.
  • Whether Nethack's difficulty curve is better than D&D's.
  • A weird combination of spells that is broken in a non-numerical way.
  • What the wizard did when the spaghetti-os were on too high a shelf to reach.
  • Letting the players fight Thor even though you know they'll figure out a way to kill Thor.
  • Thor swinging his hammer and killing you without having to roll any dice because Thor doesn't have stats.
  • The Dying Earth series by Jack Vance.
  • Godlike wizards feuding over who took the leftovers out of the office fridge because they ran out of real problems to solve.
  • The Dying Earth series by Jack Vance, except with football.
  • That Insidious Beast by Zack Parsons.
  • Instructions for a fruit.
  • There is no Antimemetics Division, by qntm.
  • Counterfeit Monkey by Emily Short.
  • Sean Connery in a red diaperkini.
  • The big head that floats around and vomits guns and explains how guns are better than penes.
  • When they invented the concept of copies of movies.
  • Your deal with the devil where if you fail to make Lord of the Rings you have to make Zardoz, but you succeed you get to make King Kong.
  • Scantily clad rocket people.
  • Barbarella lying in a thumb harp being yelled at by a dude wearing a Dalek and reading from a piano roll.
  • Learning how to draw by looking at promotional shots from Barbarella.
  • Mario fanfiction through the lens of Cyberpunk.
  • Whether they have sarcasm in Japan.
  • Tom Nook slapping his own nipples for ten hours.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+TqexBWUa ]]> Jim Stormdancer 118. The Dinosaur Poetry Gap https://topiclords.com/the-dinosaur-poetry-gap 582d7a73-dc69-453c-8e8a-8a2910e372f2 Mon, 24 Jan 2022 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Eitan and Xalavier. We discuss being sad nobody forces you to play sports, staring at someone until it gets weird, the spirituality of the right amount of reverb, a t-rex poem by Bill Watterson, untrue facts about human anatomy, things on your bucket list that you'll never do, and why cows have four stomachs but only one butthole. 59:41 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • When I was a kid I hated gym class. Now I'm kinda sad that no one forces me to play sports on a semi-regular basis
  • How long is it polite to stare at a person before it gets weird for you, specifically (assuming they haven't seen you).
  • When asked why some people find her music to be spiritual, Enya explained that "It's the amount of reverb we use."
  • "Eighty Million Years Ago," by Bill Watterson
  • Untrue facts about human anatomy
  • Things that have been on your "I'm gonna do it" list for 10+ years, that you will in fact probably never get around to doing
  • Why do cows have four stomachs but only one butthole?

Microtopics:

  • Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator.
  • As many digits as you can imagine.
  • The trope where you change costumes at a party to make people think you are more than one person.
  • Your game's extremely long title breaking Steam's web site.
  • Petting dogs using a different hand each time.
  • A cat person who made a game about dogs.
  • A giant person insisting that you go outside and play sports.
  • When seagulls are full grown but they haven't realized they're adults yet so they're still begging other seagulls for food.
  • A teenager realizing that they are now bigger than their parents and could beat the shit out of either of them at any time.
  • Remembering that you enjoyed basketball in grade school and deciding to play basketball as an adult and realizing that the only adults who are still playing basketball are a thousand times better than you are.
  • Observing and fearing that you will be observed in turn.
  • Trying to predict who will decide you are a creep.
  • Deciding whether you are a creep vs. letting others decide.
  • Watching an elderly person for as long as they are still alive.
  • Staring at someone forever in a nursing home and nobody gives a shit because there's no staring time limit in a nursing home.
  • PvP for Perverts.
  • Finding white papers to determine how long it's safe to stare at strangers under various conditions.
  • Knowing everything you need to know about someone after seeing them for 1/10th of a second.
  • Paying doppelgangers to do good deeds so people instinctively associate your appearance with good deeds.
  • The Serious Batmans.
  • A guy who is the Penguin who was raised by penguins.
  • Figuring out how to make everybody feel every emotion all the time.
  • Your own voice being very small but the voices you hear being really big.
  • Listening from inside the Gregorian chanter's mouth.
  • Finding a dungeon in which to sacrifice your goats.
  • The Church of Satan asking to put their goat on display.
  • Picking the most terrifying name for your rationalist philosophy.
  • A 10 year old putting the Transformers movie on hold at the local library.
  • A 30 minute toy commercial that somehow got run on television.
  • Watching Optimus Prime die.
  • A surprisingly queer road trip impacting robot-kind through time and space.
  • Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye.
  • Chasing after a glowing cube that's going to give you power.
  • Edison making documentary about electrocuting an elephant to prove that DC power is dangerous.
  • Falling in love with a pigeon with laser eyes.
  • The Christmas story where bloodthirsty reindeer are stalking Rudolph and he hides in a closet and they spot the light glowing under the door.
  • Giving your child the talk about where Fortnite skins come from.
  • The Santa FPS where your gun is all the reindeer and instead of muzzle flash Rudolph's nose glows.
  • A ripped Santa Claus running over Peter Parker.
  • Fore and aft serrations.
  • Dawdling by the candy shop and being devoured.
  • The terrible secret of Ragnasaurth's bones.
  • Taking back the soul of the nation via Tyrannosaur poetry.
  • TikTok? More like "tick tock it's time to write some dinosaur poetry."
  • How neurotransmitters definitely don't work.
  • The volunteer who proved that if you uncoil all the blood vessels in the human body they will reach the moon and back seven times.
  • All your serotonin languishing under a heat lamp because whoever runs the diner in your brain is a real dick.
  • How to convey facial expressions via sound effects in an audio medium.
  • Gymnasts getting hiccups by rotating too much and having to rotate the other way to cure them.
  • Not being old enough to have a bucket list.
  • Fried butter.
  • Waiting on tenterhooks for when it's ok to eat fried butter again.
  • Deciding on your deathbed to take a bath in butter.
  • Learning enough about tubes that you can hack the IV bag whenever you want to get more opiates.
  • Two-socks McGillicuddy.
  • Whether the guy's name is Fried Jesus or Fried Jesus.
  • When you saw one set of footprints in the sand it was because you collapsed thirty miles back.
  • Loss-leader churros.
  • A really ethical company in a sea of Wal-marts.
  • The pros and cons of having four stomachs in sequence vs. four stomachs in parallel.
  • The cow not being impressed by the extra buttholes you installed at first, but later thanking you when it needs to propel itself around in microgravity.
  • How much of your surface area needs to be butthole before you are yourself considered a butthole.
  • A 76% butthole being.
  • If the new butthole is shaped like a smiley face, does that mean the cow is happy?
  • Professional with a capital p.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • When I was a kid I hated gym class. Now I'm kinda sad that no one forces me to play sports on a semi-regular basis
  • How long is it polite to stare at a person before it gets weird for you, specifically (assuming they haven't seen you).
  • When asked why some people find her music to be spiritual, Enya explained that "It's the amount of reverb we use."
  • "Eighty Million Years Ago," by Bill Watterson
  • Untrue facts about human anatomy
  • Things that have been on your "I'm gonna do it" list for 10+ years, that you will in fact probably never get around to doing
  • Why do cows have four stomachs but only one butthole?

Microtopics:

  • Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator.
  • As many digits as you can imagine.
  • The trope where you change costumes at a party to make people think you are more than one person.
  • Your game's extremely long title breaking Steam's web site.
  • Petting dogs using a different hand each time.
  • A cat person who made a game about dogs.
  • A giant person insisting that you go outside and play sports.
  • When seagulls are full grown but they haven't realized they're adults yet so they're still begging other seagulls for food.
  • A teenager realizing that they are now bigger than their parents and could beat the shit out of either of them at any time.
  • Remembering that you enjoyed basketball in grade school and deciding to play basketball as an adult and realizing that the only adults who are still playing basketball are a thousand times better than you are.
  • Observing and fearing that you will be observed in turn.
  • Trying to predict who will decide you are a creep.
  • Deciding whether you are a creep vs. letting others decide.
  • Watching an elderly person for as long as they are still alive.
  • Staring at someone forever in a nursing home and nobody gives a shit because there's no staring time limit in a nursing home.
  • PvP for Perverts.
  • Finding white papers to determine how long it's safe to stare at strangers under various conditions.
  • Knowing everything you need to know about someone after seeing them for 1/10th of a second.
  • Paying doppelgangers to do good deeds so people instinctively associate your appearance with good deeds.
  • The Serious Batmans.
  • A guy who is the Penguin who was raised by penguins.
  • Figuring out how to make everybody feel every emotion all the time.
  • Your own voice being very small but the voices you hear being really big.
  • Listening from inside the Gregorian chanter's mouth.
  • Finding a dungeon in which to sacrifice your goats.
  • The Church of Satan asking to put their goat on display.
  • Picking the most terrifying name for your rationalist philosophy.
  • A 10 year old putting the Transformers movie on hold at the local library.
  • A 30 minute toy commercial that somehow got run on television.
  • Watching Optimus Prime die.
  • A surprisingly queer road trip impacting robot-kind through time and space.
  • Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye.
  • Chasing after a glowing cube that's going to give you power.
  • Edison making documentary about electrocuting an elephant to prove that DC power is dangerous.
  • Falling in love with a pigeon with laser eyes.
  • The Christmas story where bloodthirsty reindeer are stalking Rudolph and he hides in a closet and they spot the light glowing under the door.
  • Giving your child the talk about where Fortnite skins come from.
  • The Santa FPS where your gun is all the reindeer and instead of muzzle flash Rudolph's nose glows.
  • A ripped Santa Claus running over Peter Parker.
  • Fore and aft serrations.
  • Dawdling by the candy shop and being devoured.
  • The terrible secret of Ragnasaurth's bones.
  • Taking back the soul of the nation via Tyrannosaur poetry.
  • TikTok? More like "tick tock it's time to write some dinosaur poetry."
  • How neurotransmitters definitely don't work.
  • The volunteer who proved that if you uncoil all the blood vessels in the human body they will reach the moon and back seven times.
  • All your serotonin languishing under a heat lamp because whoever runs the diner in your brain is a real dick.
  • How to convey facial expressions via sound effects in an audio medium.
  • Gymnasts getting hiccups by rotating too much and having to rotate the other way to cure them.
  • Not being old enough to have a bucket list.
  • Fried butter.
  • Waiting on tenterhooks for when it's ok to eat fried butter again.
  • Deciding on your deathbed to take a bath in butter.
  • Learning enough about tubes that you can hack the IV bag whenever you want to get more opiates.
  • Two-socks McGillicuddy.
  • Whether the guy's name is Fried Jesus or Fried Jesus.
  • When you saw one set of footprints in the sand it was because you collapsed thirty miles back.
  • Loss-leader churros.
  • A really ethical company in a sea of Wal-marts.
  • The pros and cons of having four stomachs in sequence vs. four stomachs in parallel.
  • The cow not being impressed by the extra buttholes you installed at first, but later thanking you when it needs to propel itself around in microgravity.
  • How much of your surface area needs to be butthole before you are yourself considered a butthole.
  • A 76% butthole being.
  • If the new butthole is shaped like a smiley face, does that mean the cow is happy?
  • Professional with a capital p.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • When I was a kid I hated gym class. Now I'm kinda sad that no one forces me to play sports on a semi-regular basis
  • How long is it polite to stare at a person before it gets weird for you, specifically (assuming they haven't seen you).
  • When asked why some people find her music to be spiritual, Enya explained that "It's the amount of reverb we use."
  • "Eighty Million Years Ago," by Bill Watterson
  • Untrue facts about human anatomy
  • Things that have been on your "I'm gonna do it" list for 10+ years, that you will in fact probably never get around to doing
  • Why do cows have four stomachs but only one butthole?

Microtopics:

  • Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator.
  • As many digits as you can imagine.
  • The trope where you change costumes at a party to make people think you are more than one person.
  • Your game's extremely long title breaking Steam's web site.
  • Petting dogs using a different hand each time.
  • A cat person who made a game about dogs.
  • A giant person insisting that you go outside and play sports.
  • When seagulls are full grown but they haven't realized they're adults yet so they're still begging other seagulls for food.
  • A teenager realizing that they are now bigger than their parents and could beat the shit out of either of them at any time.
  • Remembering that you enjoyed basketball in grade school and deciding to play basketball as an adult and realizing that the only adults who are still playing basketball are a thousand times better than you are.
  • Observing and fearing that you will be observed in turn.
  • Trying to predict who will decide you are a creep.
  • Deciding whether you are a creep vs. letting others decide.
  • Watching an elderly person for as long as they are still alive.
  • Staring at someone forever in a nursing home and nobody gives a shit because there's no staring time limit in a nursing home.
  • PvP for Perverts.
  • Finding white papers to determine how long it's safe to stare at strangers under various conditions.
  • Knowing everything you need to know about someone after seeing them for 1/10th of a second.
  • Paying doppelgangers to do good deeds so people instinctively associate your appearance with good deeds.
  • The Serious Batmans.
  • A guy who is the Penguin who was raised by penguins.
  • Figuring out how to make everybody feel every emotion all the time.
  • Your own voice being very small but the voices you hear being really big.
  • Listening from inside the Gregorian chanter's mouth.
  • Finding a dungeon in which to sacrifice your goats.
  • The Church of Satan asking to put their goat on display.
  • Picking the most terrifying name for your rationalist philosophy.
  • A 10 year old putting the Transformers movie on hold at the local library.
  • A 30 minute toy commercial that somehow got run on television.
  • Watching Optimus Prime die.
  • A surprisingly queer road trip impacting robot-kind through time and space.
  • Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye.
  • Chasing after a glowing cube that's going to give you power.
  • Edison making documentary about electrocuting an elephant to prove that DC power is dangerous.
  • Falling in love with a pigeon with laser eyes.
  • The Christmas story where bloodthirsty reindeer are stalking Rudolph and he hides in a closet and they spot the light glowing under the door.
  • Giving your child the talk about where Fortnite skins come from.
  • The Santa FPS where your gun is all the reindeer and instead of muzzle flash Rudolph's nose glows.
  • A ripped Santa Claus running over Peter Parker.
  • Fore and aft serrations.
  • Dawdling by the candy shop and being devoured.
  • The terrible secret of Ragnasaurth's bones.
  • Taking back the soul of the nation via Tyrannosaur poetry.
  • TikTok? More like "tick tock it's time to write some dinosaur poetry."
  • How neurotransmitters definitely don't work.
  • The volunteer who proved that if you uncoil all the blood vessels in the human body they will reach the moon and back seven times.
  • All your serotonin languishing under a heat lamp because whoever runs the diner in your brain is a real dick.
  • How to convey facial expressions via sound effects in an audio medium.
  • Gymnasts getting hiccups by rotating too much and having to rotate the other way to cure them.
  • Not being old enough to have a bucket list.
  • Fried butter.
  • Waiting on tenterhooks for when it's ok to eat fried butter again.
  • Deciding on your deathbed to take a bath in butter.
  • Learning enough about tubes that you can hack the IV bag whenever you want to get more opiates.
  • Two-socks McGillicuddy.
  • Whether the guy's name is Fried Jesus or Fried Jesus.
  • When you saw one set of footprints in the sand it was because you collapsed thirty miles back.
  • Loss-leader churros.
  • A really ethical company in a sea of Wal-marts.
  • The pros and cons of having four stomachs in sequence vs. four stomachs in parallel.
  • The cow not being impressed by the extra buttholes you installed at first, but later thanking you when it needs to propel itself around in microgravity.
  • How much of your surface area needs to be butthole before you are yourself considered a butthole.
  • A 76% butthole being.
  • If the new butthole is shaped like a smiley face, does that mean the cow is happy?
  • Professional with a capital p.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+XhjkLHft ]]> Jim Stormdancer 117. Your Self-Inflicted Artistic Purgatory https://topiclords.com/your-self-inflicted-artistic-purgatory 2ef0c71c-8f26-44be-a064-26a540434ae0 Mon, 17 Jan 2022 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Brad and Quil. We discuss what superpowers like shrinking suggests about how we conceptualize reality, how to call your work "art" and not feel bad about it, Stinky Meat and Stinky Feet, Hope is a Thing with Feathers by Emily Dickinson, visual novels, and the cortical homunculus. 1:02:56 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Accidentally agreeing to be on the show.
  • Doing nothing in Chicago.
  • Computer creativity.
  • Making an argument that a computer program is creative.
  • "Honey I Shrunk The Kids" as a philosophical text.
  • Using a set of mirrors to give yourself 360 degree vision.
  • Imagining additional colors.
  • Assuming the listener knows what cellular automata is.
  • A platonic dude in the way you would conceive of a dude.
  • Trying to find a game that uses cellular automata but it's occluded by search results for Conway's Life and Nier Automata.
  • The top four Live 'em Ups.
  • A game that left the world when Flash stopped being a thing.
  • Putting tremendous creative effort into a project but not being willing to call it your art because that would be pretentious.
  • Calling your bad music your "works" because they make ye listeners despair.
  • How you conceptualize the things that you make.
  • Attaching a label to the semiotic representation of a thing and thereby changing the nature of the thing.
  • Making a song in the amount of time the song takes to elapse.
  • Having done NaNoWriMo once and then being able to tell people you're working on your second novel.
  • Wanting to have the identity of being a creator.
  • Something that is cool to be and do.
  • How to make art that feels meaningful when you are surrounded by art that is way better than yours.
  • Ancient handwriting samples.
  • Doing psychic damage by singing the wrong words to a song.
  • Leaving a plate of meat in your neighbor's yard.
  • Deciding it's time to stop your science experiment and go to a doctor.
  • A storied history of people screwing up their bodies for the sake of internet points.
  • The melding of art and science.
  • Piss Christ and other works that are intended to annoy.
  • Trying to elicit a strong emotion but not caring too much which emotion it is.
  • What it takes to know Bennett Foddy.
  • The idea that heavy metal bands were trying to get listeners to kill themselves.
  • The euphemism treadmill and the inverted euphemism treadmill.
  • How come there are still kids if kids keep growing up??
  • Slurs in various stages of reclamation.
  • How there are stupid people out there and they're not bad people, they're just stupid.
  • Jabroni origins.
  • Replacing all your pejoratives with "ridiculous."
  • Mario running up the infinite euphemism treadmill saying successively more watered down swears.
  • The purpose of comparing an emotion to a bird.
  • What is a poem? A pile of lines about a bird.
  • Conceiving of hope as a bird sitting outside your window and waking you up way too early.
  • Enclosing poems in letters to your friends.
  • Making art for a person and sharing it just with that person.
  • Reading "Hope is the Thing with Feathers" in the Sick Sad World announcer voice.
  • Reading poems in a sarcastic voice and analyzing how it makes you feel.
  • Reading Emily Dickinson poetry in the voice of somebody begging for their life.
  • Whether Poe's Law is the sarcasm thing.
  • Whether Machiavelli was doing a bit.
  • A performance of the entirety of Hamilton in the Adam Sandler voice.
  • Getting famous for singing "All Star" and having to sing it for the rest of your life.
  • The realm between video games and books.
  • How the phone would be the perfect venue for a visual novel if it weren't for all the phone games.
  • Approaches to consuming media.
  • Watching half a movie and then falling asleep and eventually realizing that now there are at least five movies you've watched half of.
  • A library book from 2019 that you still haven't returned.
  • Mapping the size of your body parts to how much space they take up in your brain.
  • A Cortical Homunculus Funko Pop.
  • Shrimp Obama Magnet.
  • T-shirts about adrenal cancer.
  • Angry Little Friend Taxidermy Monster Sculpture Oddity.
  • Too good an idea to just let be a joke.
  • Symbolizing the emotions of people who wait at the dentist's office.
  • Max Rebo, the popular jizz-wailer.
  • Seeing the two tabs but not knowing the difference between them.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Accidentally agreeing to be on the show.
  • Doing nothing in Chicago.
  • Computer creativity.
  • Making an argument that a computer program is creative.
  • "Honey I Shrunk The Kids" as a philosophical text.
  • Using a set of mirrors to give yourself 360 degree vision.
  • Imagining additional colors.
  • Assuming the listener knows what cellular automata is.
  • A platonic dude in the way you would conceive of a dude.
  • Trying to find a game that uses cellular automata but it's occluded by search results for Conway's Life and Nier Automata.
  • The top four Live 'em Ups.
  • A game that left the world when Flash stopped being a thing.
  • Putting tremendous creative effort into a project but not being willing to call it your art because that would be pretentious.
  • Calling your bad music your "works" because they make ye listeners despair.
  • How you conceptualize the things that you make.
  • Attaching a label to the semiotic representation of a thing and thereby changing the nature of the thing.
  • Making a song in the amount of time the song takes to elapse.
  • Having done NaNoWriMo once and then being able to tell people you're working on your second novel.
  • Wanting to have the identity of being a creator.
  • Something that is cool to be and do.
  • How to make art that feels meaningful when you are surrounded by art that is way better than yours.
  • Ancient handwriting samples.
  • Doing psychic damage by singing the wrong words to a song.
  • Leaving a plate of meat in your neighbor's yard.
  • Deciding it's time to stop your science experiment and go to a doctor.
  • A storied history of people screwing up their bodies for the sake of internet points.
  • The melding of art and science.
  • Piss Christ and other works that are intended to annoy.
  • Trying to elicit a strong emotion but not caring too much which emotion it is.
  • What it takes to know Bennett Foddy.
  • The idea that heavy metal bands were trying to get listeners to kill themselves.
  • The euphemism treadmill and the inverted euphemism treadmill.
  • How come there are still kids if kids keep growing up??
  • Slurs in various stages of reclamation.
  • How there are stupid people out there and they're not bad people, they're just stupid.
  • Jabroni origins.
  • Replacing all your pejoratives with "ridiculous."
  • Mario running up the infinite euphemism treadmill saying successively more watered down swears.
  • The purpose of comparing an emotion to a bird.
  • What is a poem? A pile of lines about a bird.
  • Conceiving of hope as a bird sitting outside your window and waking you up way too early.
  • Enclosing poems in letters to your friends.
  • Making art for a person and sharing it just with that person.
  • Reading "Hope is the Thing with Feathers" in the Sick Sad World announcer voice.
  • Reading poems in a sarcastic voice and analyzing how it makes you feel.
  • Reading Emily Dickinson poetry in the voice of somebody begging for their life.
  • Whether Poe's Law is the sarcasm thing.
  • Whether Machiavelli was doing a bit.
  • A performance of the entirety of Hamilton in the Adam Sandler voice.
  • Getting famous for singing "All Star" and having to sing it for the rest of your life.
  • The realm between video games and books.
  • How the phone would be the perfect venue for a visual novel if it weren't for all the phone games.
  • Approaches to consuming media.
  • Watching half a movie and then falling asleep and eventually realizing that now there are at least five movies you've watched half of.
  • A library book from 2019 that you still haven't returned.
  • Mapping the size of your body parts to how much space they take up in your brain.
  • A Cortical Homunculus Funko Pop.
  • Shrimp Obama Magnet.
  • T-shirts about adrenal cancer.
  • Angry Little Friend Taxidermy Monster Sculpture Oddity.
  • Too good an idea to just let be a joke.
  • Symbolizing the emotions of people who wait at the dentist's office.
  • Max Rebo, the popular jizz-wailer.
  • Seeing the two tabs but not knowing the difference between them.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Accidentally agreeing to be on the show.
  • Doing nothing in Chicago.
  • Computer creativity.
  • Making an argument that a computer program is creative.
  • "Honey I Shrunk The Kids" as a philosophical text.
  • Using a set of mirrors to give yourself 360 degree vision.
  • Imagining additional colors.
  • Assuming the listener knows what cellular automata is.
  • A platonic dude in the way you would conceive of a dude.
  • Trying to find a game that uses cellular automata but it's occluded by search results for Conway's Life and Nier Automata.
  • The top four Live 'em Ups.
  • A game that left the world when Flash stopped being a thing.
  • Putting tremendous creative effort into a project but not being willing to call it your art because that would be pretentious.
  • Calling your bad music your "works" because they make ye listeners despair.
  • How you conceptualize the things that you make.
  • Attaching a label to the semiotic representation of a thing and thereby changing the nature of the thing.
  • Making a song in the amount of time the song takes to elapse.
  • Having done NaNoWriMo once and then being able to tell people you're working on your second novel.
  • Wanting to have the identity of being a creator.
  • Something that is cool to be and do.
  • How to make art that feels meaningful when you are surrounded by art that is way better than yours.
  • Ancient handwriting samples.
  • Doing psychic damage by singing the wrong words to a song.
  • Leaving a plate of meat in your neighbor's yard.
  • Deciding it's time to stop your science experiment and go to a doctor.
  • A storied history of people screwing up their bodies for the sake of internet points.
  • The melding of art and science.
  • Piss Christ and other works that are intended to annoy.
  • Trying to elicit a strong emotion but not caring too much which emotion it is.
  • What it takes to know Bennett Foddy.
  • The idea that heavy metal bands were trying to get listeners to kill themselves.
  • The euphemism treadmill and the inverted euphemism treadmill.
  • How come there are still kids if kids keep growing up??
  • Slurs in various stages of reclamation.
  • How there are stupid people out there and they're not bad people, they're just stupid.
  • Jabroni origins.
  • Replacing all your pejoratives with "ridiculous."
  • Mario running up the infinite euphemism treadmill saying successively more watered down swears.
  • The purpose of comparing an emotion to a bird.
  • What is a poem? A pile of lines about a bird.
  • Conceiving of hope as a bird sitting outside your window and waking you up way too early.
  • Enclosing poems in letters to your friends.
  • Making art for a person and sharing it just with that person.
  • Reading "Hope is the Thing with Feathers" in the Sick Sad World announcer voice.
  • Reading poems in a sarcastic voice and analyzing how it makes you feel.
  • Reading Emily Dickinson poetry in the voice of somebody begging for their life.
  • Whether Poe's Law is the sarcasm thing.
  • Whether Machiavelli was doing a bit.
  • A performance of the entirety of Hamilton in the Adam Sandler voice.
  • Getting famous for singing "All Star" and having to sing it for the rest of your life.
  • The realm between video games and books.
  • How the phone would be the perfect venue for a visual novel if it weren't for all the phone games.
  • Approaches to consuming media.
  • Watching half a movie and then falling asleep and eventually realizing that now there are at least five movies you've watched half of.
  • A library book from 2019 that you still haven't returned.
  • Mapping the size of your body parts to how much space they take up in your brain.
  • A Cortical Homunculus Funko Pop.
  • Shrimp Obama Magnet.
  • T-shirts about adrenal cancer.
  • Angry Little Friend Taxidermy Monster Sculpture Oddity.
  • Too good an idea to just let be a joke.
  • Symbolizing the emotions of people who wait at the dentist's office.
  • Max Rebo, the popular jizz-wailer.
  • Seeing the two tabs but not knowing the difference between them.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+7-sKcVSD ]]> Jim Stormdancer 116. I Don't Trust Toilets Any More https://topiclords.com/i-dont-trust-toilets-any-more 172a8030-829b-420e-8414-5f4738c18d15 Mon, 10 Jan 2022 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Laura and Rachel. We discuss what to replace your hand with, how to hang out with friends long distance, fake childhood impressions, A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts, deleting a food, and soda flavors that should be. 58:57 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • You are walking down the street one day when your hand transforms into a stapler! For the next 60 minutes, your hand is a stapler from the wrist up. The next day, at the same time, your hand transforms into a stack of post-it notes. Soon, you realize that at noon every day, your hand transforms into one of the objects in your office desk drawer. You discover that anything that goes into your desk drawer has an even chance of replacing your hand for one hour at noon every day. Your desk drawer has a volume of 4 cubic feet and is 12 inches wide, 12 inches long, and 4 inches deep. What do you put into your desk drawer? (If there is nothing in your desk drawer, your hand will vanish for one hour.)
  • What's the best way to hang out with friends long distance?
  • My childhood impressions of Zelda 1 were apparently formed during my twenties.
  • "A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts," by Wallace Stevens
  • If there was one food you could delete from Earth forever, what would it be?
  • What should be a flavor of soda that isn’t?

Microtopics:

  • Tall Bagel 2: Avocado Hardtack
  • Awkward family dinner simulators
  • A topic that has been percolating in the bucket since its inception, getting better every year.
  • Safely scratching your butt when your hand suddenly turns into a gun.
  • Making a list of safe things for your hand to spontaneously turn into, like a hawk.
  • Putting a hawk in the drawer so at noon your hand turns into a hawk, then putting a hood on your hand so it thinks it's night time.
  • Putting a sandwich in the hand drawer so your hand turns into a sandwich at lunchtime.
  • Spending a lot of time at a computer drawing cartoon animals.
  • Finding out how sandwiches feel about being eaten.
  • Hypothetical questions that make you want to figure out how to break the laws of thermodynamics.
  • Keeping your magic drawer away from evil government researchers.
  • Knowing what is like to be a cannibal and to be cannibalized, because you chew your fingernails.
  • The consequences of replacing your hand with a gold coin.
  • Fully mediating which of your actions are perceived by the other party.
  • Fighting a large poisonous skull with your friends.
  • Talking to your friends for an hour without any awkward lulls.
  • Topic Lords, Jr.
  • Finding out that a cherished childhood memory could not possibly have happened the way you remember it.
  • Receiving photocopies of the Legend of Zelda manual months before receiving the game itself.
  • Reliability of witness identification.
  • Weird encounters that you tell as stories to your friends.
  • Becoming Samuel Pepys.
  • Acquiring most of your impressions of world history via what Victorians thought were important.
  • Remembering too much about your life and wishing you could forget.
  • Lying to your future self in your journal.
  • Benevolently gaslighting yourself.
  • That monument of cat, the cat forgotten in the moon.
  • Sitting with your head like a carving in space.
  • Poetry that is angry at the concept of making sense.
  • Letting the syllables wash over you.
  • The inversion of the power relationships you would expect in nature.
  • Whether Wallace Stevens had peers.
  • Correctly identifying 100 poem authors in a row.
  • Caring a lot about American poetry until you discover video games.
  • basketballsintrafficcones.com
  • Notes towards a supreme fiction.
  • What green things the cat was thinking about.
  • Being perceived by a rabbit as tall as outer space.
  • Writing for an assumed audience who doesn't exist any more.
  • Recommending enjoying being weirded out.
  • Deleting ranch dressing because it's just weird vinegary mayonnaise.
  • Getting that fake garlic grease zone going on
  • Screaming in people's ears all night.
  • Misspeaking and having to commit to what you said.
  • Throwing your back out by sitting in a relaxed position.
  • Gag sodas.
  • Soda flavor innovation.
  • Pebble ice.
  • Savory beverages like sipping vinegar or a cup of warm broth.
  • The fakest orange you ever did taste.
  • Being disempowered at dinner.
  • A relatable game where you can steal food from other people's plates with your long tongue.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • You are walking down the street one day when your hand transforms into a stapler! For the next 60 minutes, your hand is a stapler from the wrist up. The next day, at the same time, your hand transforms into a stack of post-it notes. Soon, you realize that at noon every day, your hand transforms into one of the objects in your office desk drawer. You discover that anything that goes into your desk drawer has an even chance of replacing your hand for one hour at noon every day. Your desk drawer has a volume of 4 cubic feet and is 12 inches wide, 12 inches long, and 4 inches deep. What do you put into your desk drawer? (If there is nothing in your desk drawer, your hand will vanish for one hour.)
  • What's the best way to hang out with friends long distance?
  • My childhood impressions of Zelda 1 were apparently formed during my twenties.
  • "A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts," by Wallace Stevens
  • If there was one food you could delete from Earth forever, what would it be?
  • What should be a flavor of soda that isn’t?

Microtopics:

  • Tall Bagel 2: Avocado Hardtack
  • Awkward family dinner simulators
  • A topic that has been percolating in the bucket since its inception, getting better every year.
  • Safely scratching your butt when your hand suddenly turns into a gun.
  • Making a list of safe things for your hand to spontaneously turn into, like a hawk.
  • Putting a hawk in the drawer so at noon your hand turns into a hawk, then putting a hood on your hand so it thinks it's night time.
  • Putting a sandwich in the hand drawer so your hand turns into a sandwich at lunchtime.
  • Spending a lot of time at a computer drawing cartoon animals.
  • Finding out how sandwiches feel about being eaten.
  • Hypothetical questions that make you want to figure out how to break the laws of thermodynamics.
  • Keeping your magic drawer away from evil government researchers.
  • Knowing what is like to be a cannibal and to be cannibalized, because you chew your fingernails.
  • The consequences of replacing your hand with a gold coin.
  • Fully mediating which of your actions are perceived by the other party.
  • Fighting a large poisonous skull with your friends.
  • Talking to your friends for an hour without any awkward lulls.
  • Topic Lords, Jr.
  • Finding out that a cherished childhood memory could not possibly have happened the way you remember it.
  • Receiving photocopies of the Legend of Zelda manual months before receiving the game itself.
  • Reliability of witness identification.
  • Weird encounters that you tell as stories to your friends.
  • Becoming Samuel Pepys.
  • Acquiring most of your impressions of world history via what Victorians thought were important.
  • Remembering too much about your life and wishing you could forget.
  • Lying to your future self in your journal.
  • Benevolently gaslighting yourself.
  • That monument of cat, the cat forgotten in the moon.
  • Sitting with your head like a carving in space.
  • Poetry that is angry at the concept of making sense.
  • Letting the syllables wash over you.
  • The inversion of the power relationships you would expect in nature.
  • Whether Wallace Stevens had peers.
  • Correctly identifying 100 poem authors in a row.
  • Caring a lot about American poetry until you discover video games.
  • basketballsintrafficcones.com
  • Notes towards a supreme fiction.
  • What green things the cat was thinking about.
  • Being perceived by a rabbit as tall as outer space.
  • Writing for an assumed audience who doesn't exist any more.
  • Recommending enjoying being weirded out.
  • Deleting ranch dressing because it's just weird vinegary mayonnaise.
  • Getting that fake garlic grease zone going on
  • Screaming in people's ears all night.
  • Misspeaking and having to commit to what you said.
  • Throwing your back out by sitting in a relaxed position.
  • Gag sodas.
  • Soda flavor innovation.
  • Pebble ice.
  • Savory beverages like sipping vinegar or a cup of warm broth.
  • The fakest orange you ever did taste.
  • Being disempowered at dinner.
  • A relatable game where you can steal food from other people's plates with your long tongue.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • You are walking down the street one day when your hand transforms into a stapler! For the next 60 minutes, your hand is a stapler from the wrist up. The next day, at the same time, your hand transforms into a stack of post-it notes. Soon, you realize that at noon every day, your hand transforms into one of the objects in your office desk drawer. You discover that anything that goes into your desk drawer has an even chance of replacing your hand for one hour at noon every day. Your desk drawer has a volume of 4 cubic feet and is 12 inches wide, 12 inches long, and 4 inches deep. What do you put into your desk drawer? (If there is nothing in your desk drawer, your hand will vanish for one hour.)
  • What's the best way to hang out with friends long distance?
  • My childhood impressions of Zelda 1 were apparently formed during my twenties.
  • "A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts," by Wallace Stevens
  • If there was one food you could delete from Earth forever, what would it be?
  • What should be a flavor of soda that isn’t?

Microtopics:

  • Tall Bagel 2: Avocado Hardtack
  • Awkward family dinner simulators
  • A topic that has been percolating in the bucket since its inception, getting better every year.
  • Safely scratching your butt when your hand suddenly turns into a gun.
  • Making a list of safe things for your hand to spontaneously turn into, like a hawk.
  • Putting a hawk in the drawer so at noon your hand turns into a hawk, then putting a hood on your hand so it thinks it's night time.
  • Putting a sandwich in the hand drawer so your hand turns into a sandwich at lunchtime.
  • Spending a lot of time at a computer drawing cartoon animals.
  • Finding out how sandwiches feel about being eaten.
  • Hypothetical questions that make you want to figure out how to break the laws of thermodynamics.
  • Keeping your magic drawer away from evil government researchers.
  • Knowing what is like to be a cannibal and to be cannibalized, because you chew your fingernails.
  • The consequences of replacing your hand with a gold coin.
  • Fully mediating which of your actions are perceived by the other party.
  • Fighting a large poisonous skull with your friends.
  • Talking to your friends for an hour without any awkward lulls.
  • Topic Lords, Jr.
  • Finding out that a cherished childhood memory could not possibly have happened the way you remember it.
  • Receiving photocopies of the Legend of Zelda manual months before receiving the game itself.
  • Reliability of witness identification.
  • Weird encounters that you tell as stories to your friends.
  • Becoming Samuel Pepys.
  • Acquiring most of your impressions of world history via what Victorians thought were important.
  • Remembering too much about your life and wishing you could forget.
  • Lying to your future self in your journal.
  • Benevolently gaslighting yourself.
  • That monument of cat, the cat forgotten in the moon.
  • Sitting with your head like a carving in space.
  • Poetry that is angry at the concept of making sense.
  • Letting the syllables wash over you.
  • The inversion of the power relationships you would expect in nature.
  • Whether Wallace Stevens had peers.
  • Correctly identifying 100 poem authors in a row.
  • Caring a lot about American poetry until you discover video games.
  • basketballsintrafficcones.com
  • Notes towards a supreme fiction.
  • What green things the cat was thinking about.
  • Being perceived by a rabbit as tall as outer space.
  • Writing for an assumed audience who doesn't exist any more.
  • Recommending enjoying being weirded out.
  • Deleting ranch dressing because it's just weird vinegary mayonnaise.
  • Getting that fake garlic grease zone going on
  • Screaming in people's ears all night.
  • Misspeaking and having to commit to what you said.
  • Throwing your back out by sitting in a relaxed position.
  • Gag sodas.
  • Soda flavor innovation.
  • Pebble ice.
  • Savory beverages like sipping vinegar or a cup of warm broth.
  • The fakest orange you ever did taste.
  • Being disempowered at dinner.
  • A relatable game where you can steal food from other people's plates with your long tongue.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+b2VdBapf ]]> Jim Stormdancer 115. Intrusive Thought Simulator https://topiclords.com/intrusive-thought-simulator 213bfcf6-5d65-4af3-b915-bc4ae0e414c4 Mon, 03 Jan 2022 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: CisHetKayFaber and Dan. We discuss not understanding the theory behind what you're doing, realizing that nobody cares about the things that make you unique, Shrek's 10-minute standing ovation at Cannes, The Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll, cursed connectors and adapters, the efficiency of vacationing alone, and Seeking Mr. Eaten's Name. 1:19:40 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Learning something by doing, so you don't understand the theory behind it
  • The lonely realization that most people don't really care that much about the things that make you unique (not depressing) (I promise)
  • Shrek got a ten minute standing ovation at Cannes in 2001.
  • The Jabberwocky
  • Cursed connectors and adapters
  • Vacationing alone is extremely efficient
  • Seeking Mr. Eaten's Name

Microtopics:

  • A name that has nothing to do with wrestling.
  • Upturned Table.
  • Topic hunger.
  • Hearing something and playing it back.
  • The particular rat-a-tat of that ratio.
  • The difficulty of making art compelling and simple at the same time.
  • In C.
  • A proc-gen song that is different every time you hear it but you have to pick just version to put on the record.
  • Meeting a group of people who all learned a skill in a certain context and being unable to convince them that you also have the skill but you learned it in a different context.
  • Not wanting to tell your family that you are trans because they would be very interested.
  • The dream of owning a board and card game store.
  • Trying to convince an extremely modest person to tell you something interesting about themselves.
  • Doing an interesting thing but not making a mental note to tell your friends about it because you never learned to tell stories.
  • A guy whose family fled a corrupt governmental regime being surprised that you think that's interesting, because he knows hundreds of people who lived under a corrupt governmental regime.
  • Discovering a viable competitor to Disney.
  • Devaluing the Cannes Standing Ovation.
  • The Sarcastic Standing Ovation.
  • Shepard Tones.
  • How many people you need to pay to stand and clap to extend a standing ovation indefinitely.
  • Being the one guy who is yelling at everyone to stop applauding.
  • Moving the last scene to after the credits roll so that people have to find out who the key grip is to see the whole story.
  • Reading a game credits list on MobyGames and giving a standing ovation at the end.
  • Vorpal, manxome, uffish, frabjous and other words that didn't exist at one point but now do.
  • Understanding the rhythm of language even if the words don't make sense.
  • Alice Liddel.
  • A faithful musical TV adaptation of the entire Alice in Wonderland series.
  • An adapter from pneumatic air to stereo XLR.
  • Speakers and microphones as adapters between air pressure and electrical signal.
  • Using a microphone as a speaker and a speaker as a microphone.
  • The downsides of USB-C.
  • A sticker with induction coils on it.
  • Counting the pins on a Famicom cartridge.
  • How you're supposed to blow into cartridges differently in the United States and in Japan.
  • Breathing into your NES cartridge to apply a layer of condensation to the pins and improve connectivity.
  • Dry vs. wet exhale.
  • Bagpipe to stereo XLR connectors.
  • A vacation where you go exactly where you want when you want and never need to form a consensus.
  • The kind of AAA vacation that a 4000 person team of Ubisoft employees would go on.
  • Spending most of your vacation listening to podcasts in your hotel room.
  • Going on a vacation in order to scout out potential locations for future vacations.
  • Walking into a book store and going to the zine section and downloading some bespoke local podcasts.
  • Asking the concierge at the hotel what podcasts are good to listen to around here, and they suggest This American Life and Radiolab.
  • A cloud of scenarios that you can choose to interact with.
  • Whether the Last Constable is really last or whether she's just called that.
  • Paying for a second candle.
  • Waking up in the middle of the night to spend the turns you've accumulated so they don't go to waste.
  • Sailing the Unterzee in a majestic pleasure yacht.
  • Dreaming about going north.
  • Breaking into a dentist's office to steak the jar of teeth from the cupboard in the back.
  • Building up your Obscurity to endgame levels.
  • Knowing that to solve the mystery you'll need to destroy yourself, and choosing to do it anyway.
  • Playing the game to get to the text that you're trying to read.
  • The grindiest content in the game.
  • Selling your soul to devils and then realizing that you need to get it back so you can destroy it yourself.
  • Hammering on the button until it tells you where to go.
  • Whether anyone knows the plot of World of Warcraft.
  • A great place to discuss topics with people who might become your friends.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Learning something by doing, so you don't understand the theory behind it
  • The lonely realization that most people don't really care that much about the things that make you unique (not depressing) (I promise)
  • Shrek got a ten minute standing ovation at Cannes in 2001.
  • The Jabberwocky
  • Cursed connectors and adapters
  • Vacationing alone is extremely efficient
  • Seeking Mr. Eaten's Name

Microtopics:

  • A name that has nothing to do with wrestling.
  • Upturned Table.
  • Topic hunger.
  • Hearing something and playing it back.
  • The particular rat-a-tat of that ratio.
  • The difficulty of making art compelling and simple at the same time.
  • In C.
  • A proc-gen song that is different every time you hear it but you have to pick just version to put on the record.
  • Meeting a group of people who all learned a skill in a certain context and being unable to convince them that you also have the skill but you learned it in a different context.
  • Not wanting to tell your family that you are trans because they would be very interested.
  • The dream of owning a board and card game store.
  • Trying to convince an extremely modest person to tell you something interesting about themselves.
  • Doing an interesting thing but not making a mental note to tell your friends about it because you never learned to tell stories.
  • A guy whose family fled a corrupt governmental regime being surprised that you think that's interesting, because he knows hundreds of people who lived under a corrupt governmental regime.
  • Discovering a viable competitor to Disney.
  • Devaluing the Cannes Standing Ovation.
  • The Sarcastic Standing Ovation.
  • Shepard Tones.
  • How many people you need to pay to stand and clap to extend a standing ovation indefinitely.
  • Being the one guy who is yelling at everyone to stop applauding.
  • Moving the last scene to after the credits roll so that people have to find out who the key grip is to see the whole story.
  • Reading a game credits list on MobyGames and giving a standing ovation at the end.
  • Vorpal, manxome, uffish, frabjous and other words that didn't exist at one point but now do.
  • Understanding the rhythm of language even if the words don't make sense.
  • Alice Liddel.
  • A faithful musical TV adaptation of the entire Alice in Wonderland series.
  • An adapter from pneumatic air to stereo XLR.
  • Speakers and microphones as adapters between air pressure and electrical signal.
  • Using a microphone as a speaker and a speaker as a microphone.
  • The downsides of USB-C.
  • A sticker with induction coils on it.
  • Counting the pins on a Famicom cartridge.
  • How you're supposed to blow into cartridges differently in the United States and in Japan.
  • Breathing into your NES cartridge to apply a layer of condensation to the pins and improve connectivity.
  • Dry vs. wet exhale.
  • Bagpipe to stereo XLR connectors.
  • A vacation where you go exactly where you want when you want and never need to form a consensus.
  • The kind of AAA vacation that a 4000 person team of Ubisoft employees would go on.
  • Spending most of your vacation listening to podcasts in your hotel room.
  • Going on a vacation in order to scout out potential locations for future vacations.
  • Walking into a book store and going to the zine section and downloading some bespoke local podcasts.
  • Asking the concierge at the hotel what podcasts are good to listen to around here, and they suggest This American Life and Radiolab.
  • A cloud of scenarios that you can choose to interact with.
  • Whether the Last Constable is really last or whether she's just called that.
  • Paying for a second candle.
  • Waking up in the middle of the night to spend the turns you've accumulated so they don't go to waste.
  • Sailing the Unterzee in a majestic pleasure yacht.
  • Dreaming about going north.
  • Breaking into a dentist's office to steak the jar of teeth from the cupboard in the back.
  • Building up your Obscurity to endgame levels.
  • Knowing that to solve the mystery you'll need to destroy yourself, and choosing to do it anyway.
  • Playing the game to get to the text that you're trying to read.
  • The grindiest content in the game.
  • Selling your soul to devils and then realizing that you need to get it back so you can destroy it yourself.
  • Hammering on the button until it tells you where to go.
  • Whether anyone knows the plot of World of Warcraft.
  • A great place to discuss topics with people who might become your friends.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Learning something by doing, so you don't understand the theory behind it
  • The lonely realization that most people don't really care that much about the things that make you unique (not depressing) (I promise)
  • Shrek got a ten minute standing ovation at Cannes in 2001.
  • The Jabberwocky
  • Cursed connectors and adapters
  • Vacationing alone is extremely efficient
  • Seeking Mr. Eaten's Name

Microtopics:

  • A name that has nothing to do with wrestling.
  • Upturned Table.
  • Topic hunger.
  • Hearing something and playing it back.
  • The particular rat-a-tat of that ratio.
  • The difficulty of making art compelling and simple at the same time.
  • In C.
  • A proc-gen song that is different every time you hear it but you have to pick just version to put on the record.
  • Meeting a group of people who all learned a skill in a certain context and being unable to convince them that you also have the skill but you learned it in a different context.
  • Not wanting to tell your family that you are trans because they would be very interested.
  • The dream of owning a board and card game store.
  • Trying to convince an extremely modest person to tell you something interesting about themselves.
  • Doing an interesting thing but not making a mental note to tell your friends about it because you never learned to tell stories.
  • A guy whose family fled a corrupt governmental regime being surprised that you think that's interesting, because he knows hundreds of people who lived under a corrupt governmental regime.
  • Discovering a viable competitor to Disney.
  • Devaluing the Cannes Standing Ovation.
  • The Sarcastic Standing Ovation.
  • Shepard Tones.
  • How many people you need to pay to stand and clap to extend a standing ovation indefinitely.
  • Being the one guy who is yelling at everyone to stop applauding.
  • Moving the last scene to after the credits roll so that people have to find out who the key grip is to see the whole story.
  • Reading a game credits list on MobyGames and giving a standing ovation at the end.
  • Vorpal, manxome, uffish, frabjous and other words that didn't exist at one point but now do.
  • Understanding the rhythm of language even if the words don't make sense.
  • Alice Liddel.
  • A faithful musical TV adaptation of the entire Alice in Wonderland series.
  • An adapter from pneumatic air to stereo XLR.
  • Speakers and microphones as adapters between air pressure and electrical signal.
  • Using a microphone as a speaker and a speaker as a microphone.
  • The downsides of USB-C.
  • A sticker with induction coils on it.
  • Counting the pins on a Famicom cartridge.
  • How you're supposed to blow into cartridges differently in the United States and in Japan.
  • Breathing into your NES cartridge to apply a layer of condensation to the pins and improve connectivity.
  • Dry vs. wet exhale.
  • Bagpipe to stereo XLR connectors.
  • A vacation where you go exactly where you want when you want and never need to form a consensus.
  • The kind of AAA vacation that a 4000 person team of Ubisoft employees would go on.
  • Spending most of your vacation listening to podcasts in your hotel room.
  • Going on a vacation in order to scout out potential locations for future vacations.
  • Walking into a book store and going to the zine section and downloading some bespoke local podcasts.
  • Asking the concierge at the hotel what podcasts are good to listen to around here, and they suggest This American Life and Radiolab.
  • A cloud of scenarios that you can choose to interact with.
  • Whether the Last Constable is really last or whether she's just called that.
  • Paying for a second candle.
  • Waking up in the middle of the night to spend the turns you've accumulated so they don't go to waste.
  • Sailing the Unterzee in a majestic pleasure yacht.
  • Dreaming about going north.
  • Breaking into a dentist's office to steak the jar of teeth from the cupboard in the back.
  • Building up your Obscurity to endgame levels.
  • Knowing that to solve the mystery you'll need to destroy yourself, and choosing to do it anyway.
  • Playing the game to get to the text that you're trying to read.
  • The grindiest content in the game.
  • Selling your soul to devils and then realizing that you need to get it back so you can destroy it yourself.
  • Hammering on the button until it tells you where to go.
  • Whether anyone knows the plot of World of Warcraft.
  • A great place to discuss topics with people who might become your friends.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+X1a8r_5a ]]> Jim Stormdancer 114. Memento Maury Povich https://topiclords.com/memento-maury-povich a47cc454-cba8-4b7e-81cf-9746c825e8a6 Mon, 27 Dec 2021 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Maxx and Elena. We discuss Celeste and conflict with oneself vs. acceptance of oneself, the Museum of Jurassic Technology and when it's okay to lie to your audience, human jaw shrinkage, Feeding the Worms, and Linguistics of Swearing and Taboo. 1:03:08 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Getting a lot of calories for your money.
  • All your amino acids right there.
  • Superman grabbing the bumper and lifting the entire gestalt of the car.
  • A "superfood" in the sense of being beyond the concept of food, e.g. antidepressants.
  • Whether you get better at running events after running events for a decade.
  • Ultimately reconciling with yourself after making a video game about reconciling with yourself.
  • A platformer about depression and panic attacks.
  • The checkbox in a hard game's accessibility options that allows you to give yourself permission to use the disability options.
  • The 8-way joystick gate on the Nintendo 64 and the Gamecube.
  • Installing little pigeon spikes on the thumb stick to remind yourself to use the d-pad when playing Celeste.
  • Iterating when everything you do is slightly difficult.
  • A mixed record of enjoying platformers.
  • Putting in the effort to making someone's holy video game genre, such as the scrolling shooter or the masocore platformer, accessible to a non-believer.
  • A culture of something.
  • Being unable to process what's going on in a movie so you look up the Wikipedia plot summary mid-movie.
  • Media-related experiences that you miss out on because your priorities lie elsewhere.
  • Hating very difficult platformers but also being so good at platformers that you only get mildly frustrated at platformers that are generally considered very difficult.
  • An art installation that pretends to be a museum.
  • Visiting a museum and at the end of it being unsure what a museum is.
  • A glitch in your house where rooms occasionally disappear.
  • The genre of joke that takes the form of telling a lie, and the failure modes where the listener believes the lie and gets confused, or where they don't realize it's supposed to be amusing and think you're trying to deceive them.
  • Listening to someone tell a story from their life with growing horror and only realizing midway through that they're describing a dream.
  • Subscribe to Nitro on Discord and needing to write a SQL query to find the right emoji reaction.
  • Using a normally innocuous emoji in a way that is not innocuous on this particular Discord server.
  • Using emoji reactions to replace the parental paratextual back channel of information that body language gives you in a real life conversation.
  • Whether "human jaw shrinkage" refers to over an individual lifetime or over millennia of evolution.
  • Human jaws getting smaller not because of evolutionary pressure, but because we aren't chewing tough grains and nuts as much as our ancestors did.
  • Not experiencing pain, fear or anxiety and not realizing it until you're in your sixties.
  • Not experiencing pain, fear or anxiety so you only feel mild disappointment when you get a cut on your foot and your dog eats your foot while you're not paying attention.
  • The tickly sensation of yanking metal wire out of the ground.
  • Recreational anaphylaxis.
  • Drinking hot tea to burn your tongue so your dad won't be disappointed when you react to incredibly spicy ramen.
  • The sweetness of apples permeating the pores all over your stringy body.
  • The feathery tops of carrots.
  • At what point things become gross.
  • High and low variance fruit.
  • Mush that is beyond comprehension.
  • If going on the bus to work was that chaotic Willy Wonka tunnel.
  • Getting more reminders of life in your life.
  • Google procedurally generating a vacation montage of the time you visited a Holocaust memorial, and playing a jaunty tune over it.
  • Giving people unlabeled interfaces that they subconsciously learn how to use.
  • Using a fishing rod to hanging a sad mannequin head in front of the lens when you're taking photos that you don't want Google to create a jaunty montage of three years from now.
  • Ling 269.
  • What that guy is saying in the weird Mummy trailer.
  • Pan-Pan the Human Man.
  • Studying the brain of the guy who can only say "pan," and there in his brain wrinkles you can read the word "pan" in the place where most people have the dictionary etched.
  • An aphasic situation.
  • A comprehensive timeline of euphemisms for genitals going back to the 12th century.
  • A novel mince to your swear.
  • Practicing minced oaths until they are internalized enough to move into swear storage in your brain.
  • Finding a stranger in the Alps.
  • Americans coming back from World War I with a bunch of new slurs.
  • The Holy Shit Shift, where the offensive part of the phrase "holy shit" shifted from one word to the other over time.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Getting a lot of calories for your money.
  • All your amino acids right there.
  • Superman grabbing the bumper and lifting the entire gestalt of the car.
  • A "superfood" in the sense of being beyond the concept of food, e.g. antidepressants.
  • Whether you get better at running events after running events for a decade.
  • Ultimately reconciling with yourself after making a video game about reconciling with yourself.
  • A platformer about depression and panic attacks.
  • The checkbox in a hard game's accessibility options that allows you to give yourself permission to use the disability options.
  • The 8-way joystick gate on the Nintendo 64 and the Gamecube.
  • Installing little pigeon spikes on the thumb stick to remind yourself to use the d-pad when playing Celeste.
  • Iterating when everything you do is slightly difficult.
  • A mixed record of enjoying platformers.
  • Putting in the effort to making someone's holy video game genre, such as the scrolling shooter or the masocore platformer, accessible to a non-believer.
  • A culture of something.
  • Being unable to process what's going on in a movie so you look up the Wikipedia plot summary mid-movie.
  • Media-related experiences that you miss out on because your priorities lie elsewhere.
  • Hating very difficult platformers but also being so good at platformers that you only get mildly frustrated at platformers that are generally considered very difficult.
  • An art installation that pretends to be a museum.
  • Visiting a museum and at the end of it being unsure what a museum is.
  • A glitch in your house where rooms occasionally disappear.
  • The genre of joke that takes the form of telling a lie, and the failure modes where the listener believes the lie and gets confused, or where they don't realize it's supposed to be amusing and think you're trying to deceive them.
  • Listening to someone tell a story from their life with growing horror and only realizing midway through that they're describing a dream.
  • Subscribe to Nitro on Discord and needing to write a SQL query to find the right emoji reaction.
  • Using a normally innocuous emoji in a way that is not innocuous on this particular Discord server.
  • Using emoji reactions to replace the parental paratextual back channel of information that body language gives you in a real life conversation.
  • Whether "human jaw shrinkage" refers to over an individual lifetime or over millennia of evolution.
  • Human jaws getting smaller not because of evolutionary pressure, but because we aren't chewing tough grains and nuts as much as our ancestors did.
  • Not experiencing pain, fear or anxiety and not realizing it until you're in your sixties.
  • Not experiencing pain, fear or anxiety so you only feel mild disappointment when you get a cut on your foot and your dog eats your foot while you're not paying attention.
  • The tickly sensation of yanking metal wire out of the ground.
  • Recreational anaphylaxis.
  • Drinking hot tea to burn your tongue so your dad won't be disappointed when you react to incredibly spicy ramen.
  • The sweetness of apples permeating the pores all over your stringy body.
  • The feathery tops of carrots.
  • At what point things become gross.
  • High and low variance fruit.
  • Mush that is beyond comprehension.
  • If going on the bus to work was that chaotic Willy Wonka tunnel.
  • Getting more reminders of life in your life.
  • Google procedurally generating a vacation montage of the time you visited a Holocaust memorial, and playing a jaunty tune over it.
  • Giving people unlabeled interfaces that they subconsciously learn how to use.
  • Using a fishing rod to hanging a sad mannequin head in front of the lens when you're taking photos that you don't want Google to create a jaunty montage of three years from now.
  • Ling 269.
  • What that guy is saying in the weird Mummy trailer.
  • Pan-Pan the Human Man.
  • Studying the brain of the guy who can only say "pan," and there in his brain wrinkles you can read the word "pan" in the place where most people have the dictionary etched.
  • An aphasic situation.
  • A comprehensive timeline of euphemisms for genitals going back to the 12th century.
  • A novel mince to your swear.
  • Practicing minced oaths until they are internalized enough to move into swear storage in your brain.
  • Finding a stranger in the Alps.
  • Americans coming back from World War I with a bunch of new slurs.
  • The Holy Shit Shift, where the offensive part of the phrase "holy shit" shifted from one word to the other over time.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Getting a lot of calories for your money.
  • All your amino acids right there.
  • Superman grabbing the bumper and lifting the entire gestalt of the car.
  • A "superfood" in the sense of being beyond the concept of food, e.g. antidepressants.
  • Whether you get better at running events after running events for a decade.
  • Ultimately reconciling with yourself after making a video game about reconciling with yourself.
  • A platformer about depression and panic attacks.
  • The checkbox in a hard game's accessibility options that allows you to give yourself permission to use the disability options.
  • The 8-way joystick gate on the Nintendo 64 and the Gamecube.
  • Installing little pigeon spikes on the thumb stick to remind yourself to use the d-pad when playing Celeste.
  • Iterating when everything you do is slightly difficult.
  • A mixed record of enjoying platformers.
  • Putting in the effort to making someone's holy video game genre, such as the scrolling shooter or the masocore platformer, accessible to a non-believer.
  • A culture of something.
  • Being unable to process what's going on in a movie so you look up the Wikipedia plot summary mid-movie.
  • Media-related experiences that you miss out on because your priorities lie elsewhere.
  • Hating very difficult platformers but also being so good at platformers that you only get mildly frustrated at platformers that are generally considered very difficult.
  • An art installation that pretends to be a museum.
  • Visiting a museum and at the end of it being unsure what a museum is.
  • A glitch in your house where rooms occasionally disappear.
  • The genre of joke that takes the form of telling a lie, and the failure modes where the listener believes the lie and gets confused, or where they don't realize it's supposed to be amusing and think you're trying to deceive them.
  • Listening to someone tell a story from their life with growing horror and only realizing midway through that they're describing a dream.
  • Subscribe to Nitro on Discord and needing to write a SQL query to find the right emoji reaction.
  • Using a normally innocuous emoji in a way that is not innocuous on this particular Discord server.
  • Using emoji reactions to replace the parental paratextual back channel of information that body language gives you in a real life conversation.
  • Whether "human jaw shrinkage" refers to over an individual lifetime or over millennia of evolution.
  • Human jaws getting smaller not because of evolutionary pressure, but because we aren't chewing tough grains and nuts as much as our ancestors did.
  • Not experiencing pain, fear or anxiety and not realizing it until you're in your sixties.
  • Not experiencing pain, fear or anxiety so you only feel mild disappointment when you get a cut on your foot and your dog eats your foot while you're not paying attention.
  • The tickly sensation of yanking metal wire out of the ground.
  • Recreational anaphylaxis.
  • Drinking hot tea to burn your tongue so your dad won't be disappointed when you react to incredibly spicy ramen.
  • The sweetness of apples permeating the pores all over your stringy body.
  • The feathery tops of carrots.
  • At what point things become gross.
  • High and low variance fruit.
  • Mush that is beyond comprehension.
  • If going on the bus to work was that chaotic Willy Wonka tunnel.
  • Getting more reminders of life in your life.
  • Google procedurally generating a vacation montage of the time you visited a Holocaust memorial, and playing a jaunty tune over it.
  • Giving people unlabeled interfaces that they subconsciously learn how to use.
  • Using a fishing rod to hanging a sad mannequin head in front of the lens when you're taking photos that you don't want Google to create a jaunty montage of three years from now.
  • Ling 269.
  • What that guy is saying in the weird Mummy trailer.
  • Pan-Pan the Human Man.
  • Studying the brain of the guy who can only say "pan," and there in his brain wrinkles you can read the word "pan" in the place where most people have the dictionary etched.
  • An aphasic situation.
  • A comprehensive timeline of euphemisms for genitals going back to the 12th century.
  • A novel mince to your swear.
  • Practicing minced oaths until they are internalized enough to move into swear storage in your brain.
  • Finding a stranger in the Alps.
  • Americans coming back from World War I with a bunch of new slurs.
  • The Holy Shit Shift, where the offensive part of the phrase "holy shit" shifted from one word to the other over time.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+q0De1Whx ]]> Jim Stormdancer 113. Only You in Particular Can Prevent Forest Fires https://topiclords.com/only-you-in-particular-can-prevent-forest-fires f899a0a1-5152-49c0-8190-24cca06e8517 Mon, 20 Dec 2021 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: April and Danny. We discuss favorite desserts when it's hot out, the horror of almost being older than Princess Diana, Abraham Lincolnland, "I Would Like To Describe" by Zbigniew Herbert, Irish surnames as American girl names, words you misunderstood as a child, and Jordan Mechner calling E.Y. Harburg on the phone. 1:07:08 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Priming with a prompt.
  • Using the Inception noise too much so Christopher Nolan angrily accosts you and you can get his autograph.
  • A selection of nice suits.
  • The swirl of the chocolate and vanilla duo.
  • So classy but also so messy.
  • The counter with fifty different ice creams in buckets.
  • 99.
  • A stick of flaky wispy chocolate that you stick into your ice cream.
  • The two biggest KLF fans in America.
  • Mid-Atlantic Podcast Time.
  • Ordering a hot latte in the middle of Summer.
  • Realizing it's winter and going back into the coffee shop and asking the barista to put your iced coffee in the microwave.
  • The treat that you would least like to have in the summer.
  • Hanging your Christmas Pudding from a clothesline.
  • Hollywood Pudding.
  • The Devil's Sandwich.
  • A fancy lad who eats nothing but olives and fig newtons.
  • Morbid Distance Markers.
  • Royalophilia.
  • One princess dies and TV becomes useless for days
  • The ethical considerations of faking a news segment.
  • The last time you'll ever think about Princess Diana.
  • All your dead relatives living in your head.
  • Never saying your child's name on the internet.
  • What body part is touching the poison oak in this metaphor.
  • Refusing to go outside without an EpiPen.
  • Abraham Lincoln fighting Nazis in the cyberpunk future.
  • Bringing back beards for presidents.
  • A 60-page readme about how to run this game in various driver configurations.
  • Sitemaps.
  • Selling shirts with Abraham Lincoln's face on them at Milwaukee Marker Fair.
  • Going full neon.
  • Covering the entire surface of the shirt with a garish vaporwave pattern.
  • Describing courage without involving a dusty lion.
  • Drawing a single original word from your breast, like a rib.
  • Falling asleep with your hand in a mound of planets.
  • A fleeting moment of recognition that is often very centering.
  • Standing at the limits of language.
  • Word tattoos.
  • Mostly salt up top.
  • Describing a moment or a feeling or a concept that is unrelenting in your mind.
  • Using a trembling glass of water emoji but nobody knows whether you mean anxiety or an approaching T-Rex.
  • His and Hers Mound of Planets Tattoos.
  • The Irish guy in the room.
  • Paying respect to your Irish heritage by naming your daughter "McPhee."
  • 8 out of the top 10 baby names of 2020.
  • Having a reaction that nobody else is having.
  • Don't Start Fires mascots.
  • Thinking that Smokey the Bear is instructing you to start forest fires because you don't know what "prevent" means.
  • Only you in particular can prevent forest fires.
  • Whatever flips your boat.
  • One of those weird European psychological horrors.
  • Ha-Ha Hollywood.
  • Wanting information and figuring out how to get it.
  • John Romero still having the Apple 2's memory layout memorized 40 years later.
  • Trying to remember if you've done a podcast.
  • A cat trying to get you to come to bed.
  • Only grace tweets.
  • Overwatch boops.
  • Overwatch: Global Offensive.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Priming with a prompt.
  • Using the Inception noise too much so Christopher Nolan angrily accosts you and you can get his autograph.
  • A selection of nice suits.
  • The swirl of the chocolate and vanilla duo.
  • So classy but also so messy.
  • The counter with fifty different ice creams in buckets.
  • 99.
  • A stick of flaky wispy chocolate that you stick into your ice cream.
  • The two biggest KLF fans in America.
  • Mid-Atlantic Podcast Time.
  • Ordering a hot latte in the middle of Summer.
  • Realizing it's winter and going back into the coffee shop and asking the barista to put your iced coffee in the microwave.
  • The treat that you would least like to have in the summer.
  • Hanging your Christmas Pudding from a clothesline.
  • Hollywood Pudding.
  • The Devil's Sandwich.
  • A fancy lad who eats nothing but olives and fig newtons.
  • Morbid Distance Markers.
  • Royalophilia.
  • One princess dies and TV becomes useless for days
  • The ethical considerations of faking a news segment.
  • The last time you'll ever think about Princess Diana.
  • All your dead relatives living in your head.
  • Never saying your child's name on the internet.
  • What body part is touching the poison oak in this metaphor.
  • Refusing to go outside without an EpiPen.
  • Abraham Lincoln fighting Nazis in the cyberpunk future.
  • Bringing back beards for presidents.
  • A 60-page readme about how to run this game in various driver configurations.
  • Sitemaps.
  • Selling shirts with Abraham Lincoln's face on them at Milwaukee Marker Fair.
  • Going full neon.
  • Covering the entire surface of the shirt with a garish vaporwave pattern.
  • Describing courage without involving a dusty lion.
  • Drawing a single original word from your breast, like a rib.
  • Falling asleep with your hand in a mound of planets.
  • A fleeting moment of recognition that is often very centering.
  • Standing at the limits of language.
  • Word tattoos.
  • Mostly salt up top.
  • Describing a moment or a feeling or a concept that is unrelenting in your mind.
  • Using a trembling glass of water emoji but nobody knows whether you mean anxiety or an approaching T-Rex.
  • His and Hers Mound of Planets Tattoos.
  • The Irish guy in the room.
  • Paying respect to your Irish heritage by naming your daughter "McPhee."
  • 8 out of the top 10 baby names of 2020.
  • Having a reaction that nobody else is having.
  • Don't Start Fires mascots.
  • Thinking that Smokey the Bear is instructing you to start forest fires because you don't know what "prevent" means.
  • Only you in particular can prevent forest fires.
  • Whatever flips your boat.
  • One of those weird European psychological horrors.
  • Ha-Ha Hollywood.
  • Wanting information and figuring out how to get it.
  • John Romero still having the Apple 2's memory layout memorized 40 years later.
  • Trying to remember if you've done a podcast.
  • A cat trying to get you to come to bed.
  • Only grace tweets.
  • Overwatch boops.
  • Overwatch: Global Offensive.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Priming with a prompt.
  • Using the Inception noise too much so Christopher Nolan angrily accosts you and you can get his autograph.
  • A selection of nice suits.
  • The swirl of the chocolate and vanilla duo.
  • So classy but also so messy.
  • The counter with fifty different ice creams in buckets.
  • 99.
  • A stick of flaky wispy chocolate that you stick into your ice cream.
  • The two biggest KLF fans in America.
  • Mid-Atlantic Podcast Time.
  • Ordering a hot latte in the middle of Summer.
  • Realizing it's winter and going back into the coffee shop and asking the barista to put your iced coffee in the microwave.
  • The treat that you would least like to have in the summer.
  • Hanging your Christmas Pudding from a clothesline.
  • Hollywood Pudding.
  • The Devil's Sandwich.
  • A fancy lad who eats nothing but olives and fig newtons.
  • Morbid Distance Markers.
  • Royalophilia.
  • One princess dies and TV becomes useless for days
  • The ethical considerations of faking a news segment.
  • The last time you'll ever think about Princess Diana.
  • All your dead relatives living in your head.
  • Never saying your child's name on the internet.
  • What body part is touching the poison oak in this metaphor.
  • Refusing to go outside without an EpiPen.
  • Abraham Lincoln fighting Nazis in the cyberpunk future.
  • Bringing back beards for presidents.
  • A 60-page readme about how to run this game in various driver configurations.
  • Sitemaps.
  • Selling shirts with Abraham Lincoln's face on them at Milwaukee Marker Fair.
  • Going full neon.
  • Covering the entire surface of the shirt with a garish vaporwave pattern.
  • Describing courage without involving a dusty lion.
  • Drawing a single original word from your breast, like a rib.
  • Falling asleep with your hand in a mound of planets.
  • A fleeting moment of recognition that is often very centering.
  • Standing at the limits of language.
  • Word tattoos.
  • Mostly salt up top.
  • Describing a moment or a feeling or a concept that is unrelenting in your mind.
  • Using a trembling glass of water emoji but nobody knows whether you mean anxiety or an approaching T-Rex.
  • His and Hers Mound of Planets Tattoos.
  • The Irish guy in the room.
  • Paying respect to your Irish heritage by naming your daughter "McPhee."
  • 8 out of the top 10 baby names of 2020.
  • Having a reaction that nobody else is having.
  • Don't Start Fires mascots.
  • Thinking that Smokey the Bear is instructing you to start forest fires because you don't know what "prevent" means.
  • Only you in particular can prevent forest fires.
  • Whatever flips your boat.
  • One of those weird European psychological horrors.
  • Ha-Ha Hollywood.
  • Wanting information and figuring out how to get it.
  • John Romero still having the Apple 2's memory layout memorized 40 years later.
  • Trying to remember if you've done a podcast.
  • A cat trying to get you to come to bed.
  • Only grace tweets.
  • Overwatch boops.
  • Overwatch: Global Offensive.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+BxxewF6P ]]> Jim Stormdancer 112. Getting a Lot Of Vengabus Vibes From This https://topiclords.com/getting-a-lot-of-vengabus-vibes-from-this 6482ae40-7f55-4f23-9af6-de2f7eea13d3 Mon, 13 Dec 2021 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: JP and John B. We discuss seeing Akira and believing that that's what all anime is like, doppelganger/parodies who exist in the same world as their progenitors, the Tonkachi Editor, and There was an Old Man of St. Bees, by W.S. Gilbert. 52:17 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Capcom vs. Everyone.
  • Corpus maintenance.
  • Death from Seventh Seal vs. Death from Castlevania.
  • Moms teaming up based on both being tagged "mom."
  • The philosophy of tagging tools.
  • Alt-Universe Prompts Bot.
  • Coming up with a list of every character in pop culture.
  • The Ryu Number.
  • Gary Busey playing himself in Hitman 2.
  • Shattered Shield At Shattered Shield.
  • Saturday Night Anime on the Sci-Fi channel.
  • Roger Ebert's favorite early 90s anime.
  • Anime that is just Cyberpunk C-Span.
  • Mario's Macross for the SNES.
  • Evolutionary bottlenecks in video game design.
  • The Akira Bike Slide Tribute.
  • A completely ridiculous context in which to invoke the Akira Bike Slide.
  • Serious war movie guy plummeting to his death.
  • A generic karate guy with similar moves.
  • Spoilers for all of Mr. Karate's sons.
  • Inventing a new protagonist based on a typo.
  • Meeting a savvy and helpful hologram that is a projection of an AI run by the World Trade Organization, and later meeting the pop star the AI is based on and she's a total asshole.
  • Meeting the Evil Scooby Doo Gang in the Evil Mystery Mobile.
  • A story about the mirror people escaping from behind the mirror and it turns out you were one of them the whole time!!
  • Wholesome Comedy Doppelgangers.
  • Batzarro, the world's worst detective, who killed his own parents and is trying to solve the murder.
  • Planning out your Mario mod on graph paper and then typing it into the hex editor with the Famicom controller.
  • Conlon Nancarrow manually cutting strips of paper out of a piano roll.
  • Making tiny ROM hacks using the Game Genie.
  • The Awakening of Tinkerers.
  • A landmark case in IP law.
  • Trying out randomly generated Game Genie codes because it's the 90s and you have nothing better to do.
  • Hacking Game Genie codes to give you even more lives.
  • Parts of the logic which are scrutable.
  • Talking about garbage and finding out if it makes it into the show.
  • Scrupulously avoiding burning cast.
  • Burning Cast Xtreme Fishing.
  • A chair with only three legs.
  • Playing a glitchy video game and reality starts breaking down in front of you.
  • Dumping computational work directly into the framebuffer.
  • The episode of That 70s Show that was about circuit-bending Pong.
  • When things look like they should rhyme but don't.
  • Robot Carnival.
  • Rainy weather in San Francisco on this cursed episode of Topic Lords.
  • Overthinking the poem.
  • The Uncarrot Tarot.
  • The clashing colors of slant rhymes.
  • Metamagical Themas.
  • Jokes you can play musically.
  • A disaster episode of Topic Lords.
  • The Mote In His Eye.
  • Being here for history.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Capcom vs. Everyone.
  • Corpus maintenance.
  • Death from Seventh Seal vs. Death from Castlevania.
  • Moms teaming up based on both being tagged "mom."
  • The philosophy of tagging tools.
  • Alt-Universe Prompts Bot.
  • Coming up with a list of every character in pop culture.
  • The Ryu Number.
  • Gary Busey playing himself in Hitman 2.
  • Shattered Shield At Shattered Shield.
  • Saturday Night Anime on the Sci-Fi channel.
  • Roger Ebert's favorite early 90s anime.
  • Anime that is just Cyberpunk C-Span.
  • Mario's Macross for the SNES.
  • Evolutionary bottlenecks in video game design.
  • The Akira Bike Slide Tribute.
  • A completely ridiculous context in which to invoke the Akira Bike Slide.
  • Serious war movie guy plummeting to his death.
  • A generic karate guy with similar moves.
  • Spoilers for all of Mr. Karate's sons.
  • Inventing a new protagonist based on a typo.
  • Meeting a savvy and helpful hologram that is a projection of an AI run by the World Trade Organization, and later meeting the pop star the AI is based on and she's a total asshole.
  • Meeting the Evil Scooby Doo Gang in the Evil Mystery Mobile.
  • A story about the mirror people escaping from behind the mirror and it turns out you were one of them the whole time!!
  • Wholesome Comedy Doppelgangers.
  • Batzarro, the world's worst detective, who killed his own parents and is trying to solve the murder.
  • Planning out your Mario mod on graph paper and then typing it into the hex editor with the Famicom controller.
  • Conlon Nancarrow manually cutting strips of paper out of a piano roll.
  • Making tiny ROM hacks using the Game Genie.
  • The Awakening of Tinkerers.
  • A landmark case in IP law.
  • Trying out randomly generated Game Genie codes because it's the 90s and you have nothing better to do.
  • Hacking Game Genie codes to give you even more lives.
  • Parts of the logic which are scrutable.
  • Talking about garbage and finding out if it makes it into the show.
  • Scrupulously avoiding burning cast.
  • Burning Cast Xtreme Fishing.
  • A chair with only three legs.
  • Playing a glitchy video game and reality starts breaking down in front of you.
  • Dumping computational work directly into the framebuffer.
  • The episode of That 70s Show that was about circuit-bending Pong.
  • When things look like they should rhyme but don't.
  • Robot Carnival.
  • Rainy weather in San Francisco on this cursed episode of Topic Lords.
  • Overthinking the poem.
  • The Uncarrot Tarot.
  • The clashing colors of slant rhymes.
  • Metamagical Themas.
  • Jokes you can play musically.
  • A disaster episode of Topic Lords.
  • The Mote In His Eye.
  • Being here for history.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Capcom vs. Everyone.
  • Corpus maintenance.
  • Death from Seventh Seal vs. Death from Castlevania.
  • Moms teaming up based on both being tagged "mom."
  • The philosophy of tagging tools.
  • Alt-Universe Prompts Bot.
  • Coming up with a list of every character in pop culture.
  • The Ryu Number.
  • Gary Busey playing himself in Hitman 2.
  • Shattered Shield At Shattered Shield.
  • Saturday Night Anime on the Sci-Fi channel.
  • Roger Ebert's favorite early 90s anime.
  • Anime that is just Cyberpunk C-Span.
  • Mario's Macross for the SNES.
  • Evolutionary bottlenecks in video game design.
  • The Akira Bike Slide Tribute.
  • A completely ridiculous context in which to invoke the Akira Bike Slide.
  • Serious war movie guy plummeting to his death.
  • A generic karate guy with similar moves.
  • Spoilers for all of Mr. Karate's sons.
  • Inventing a new protagonist based on a typo.
  • Meeting a savvy and helpful hologram that is a projection of an AI run by the World Trade Organization, and later meeting the pop star the AI is based on and she's a total asshole.
  • Meeting the Evil Scooby Doo Gang in the Evil Mystery Mobile.
  • A story about the mirror people escaping from behind the mirror and it turns out you were one of them the whole time!!
  • Wholesome Comedy Doppelgangers.
  • Batzarro, the world's worst detective, who killed his own parents and is trying to solve the murder.
  • Planning out your Mario mod on graph paper and then typing it into the hex editor with the Famicom controller.
  • Conlon Nancarrow manually cutting strips of paper out of a piano roll.
  • Making tiny ROM hacks using the Game Genie.
  • The Awakening of Tinkerers.
  • A landmark case in IP law.
  • Trying out randomly generated Game Genie codes because it's the 90s and you have nothing better to do.
  • Hacking Game Genie codes to give you even more lives.
  • Parts of the logic which are scrutable.
  • Talking about garbage and finding out if it makes it into the show.
  • Scrupulously avoiding burning cast.
  • Burning Cast Xtreme Fishing.
  • A chair with only three legs.
  • Playing a glitchy video game and reality starts breaking down in front of you.
  • Dumping computational work directly into the framebuffer.
  • The episode of That 70s Show that was about circuit-bending Pong.
  • When things look like they should rhyme but don't.
  • Robot Carnival.
  • Rainy weather in San Francisco on this cursed episode of Topic Lords.
  • Overthinking the poem.
  • The Uncarrot Tarot.
  • The clashing colors of slant rhymes.
  • Metamagical Themas.
  • Jokes you can play musically.
  • A disaster episode of Topic Lords.
  • The Mote In His Eye.
  • Being here for history.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+IDmu-DNX ]]> Jim Stormdancer 111. Put It in a Vice and Squish It https://topiclords.com/put-it-in-a-vice-and-squish-it 04663495-2420-454d-a3d7-1dc4fc916028 Mon, 06 Dec 2021 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Erica and Abby. We discuss scale modeling hacks, why nobody should live here, anal sampling mechanism, The Emperor of Ice Cream, and Andrei Tarkovsky: game designer. 1:06:54 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Erica
  • Abby

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Photoshopping your co-guest's face onto a platypus or maybe it's a beaver.
  • Wanting to depict someone as having a really excellent body without knowing what that means to them, so you photoshop a swimming trophy into their hands.
  • The claw beavers use to comb oil into their fur.
  • An after-dinner lemon.
  • Memorably embarrassing yourself as a mnemonic aid.
  • Playing along with someone's schemes to get them to leave you alone.
  • A cool hacker whose anti-establishment principles drive her to pirate every episode of Digimon.
  • Differentiating between the real world and the cyberpunk dystopian future by the number of Digimon available.
  • Painting the peg of a loose action figure joint with clear nail polish so the peg gets a little thicker.
  • The downtown Los Angeles Gundam shop.
  • Not being permitted, socially, to carry around clear nail polish, so you get a flask and write "man juice" on it and pour the nail polish in.
  • Man Juice, For Men Only.
  • Finding a vice big enough to squish an entire city block.
  • Desperately searching for how to do something and finding a single forum post from fifteen years ago, with a single reply from the same poster saying "never mind, figured it out."
  • Appealing to 60 year old men who need something to put in their basement.
  • When tour wife and kids leave you and your turkey sandwich is dry and lonely.
  • Ancient web forums that aren't getting any more radicalized because nobody is posting there any more.
  • The scum of mold you get on top of your pickling brine.
  • How Koreans deal with moldy kimchi.
  • Transcending all human notions of gender by both using blush to make your Gundam model look muddy and using a soldering iron to make it look like it has bullet holes.
  • The ways The T-1000 is female-coded, actually, e.g. taking on a child care role, but the filmmakers clothe the robot in a masculine skin for some reason.
  • A beaver with a swimming trophy who doesn't want to go in the lake because it's too cold.
  • Eating your lemons and sitting in the dark of the lodge, as the winter will soon be over.
  • Whether beavers get pruny.
  • Why and how to get pruny.
  • Animals that have hands.
  • Otter brains: too bigs for their skulls.
  • Finding out what animals have in store for us.
  • Living in a town built over a big bubble of petroleum and your neighbor's yard having the cutest little oil derrick.
  • Rinsing off with distilled water after you shower so you don't get a rash.
  • Living in a town that has no social scene so on Saturday night you and your friends go downtown and try to track down where that shrimp smell is coming from.
  • Gas fields flaring all around the city.
  • A combined oil derrick/Bitcoin mining rig that you can plug right into the ground and forget about.
  • The ability to voluntarily control defecation.
  • The sixth sense that's just in our butts.
  • Taking care of you butt consciousness.
  • Shitting your pants once and upending all of science.
  • Whether anyone poops in Rain World.
  • A cat who is also a slug who is also trapped on the Wheel of Samsara.
  • Reading a poem and refusing to click on the poem guide that explains what the heck it means.
  • Approaching poems as inscrutable puzzle boxes where you have to crack the code to even figure out what the hell they're talking about.
  • Approaching making art as aN opportunity to bore the shit out of your friends and family.
  • Pulling the theme of a story like a string and the entire story falls open like a sack of grain.
  • Demanding more delicious curds and dawdling wenches at your funeral.
  • Needing a weird cow to anchor your painting of a grassy field.
  • Whether the crowd-pleasers actually have something there. Something other than all the money, I mean.
  • Making a funny reference to a contemporary TV commercial in your poem about a funeral.
  • The King of Carrot Flowers.
  • Busy wrists make for busy minds.
  • Stanislaw Lem's "Solaris" as the basis for every video game except for Rain World.
  • Stalker and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
  • The mysteries of The Zone and why it exists.
  • The Emperor of Ice Cream of Tarkovsky movies.
  • Experiencing what is like to live in a non-functional economy.
  • Being in the company of a doctor piloting someone through a pandemic-ridden city.
  • Stand-Up Tragedy.
  • The cheapest way to fame.
  • Renaming your PhD thesis "Anal Sampling Mechanism" so your advisor will finally look at it.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Erica
  • Abby

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Photoshopping your co-guest's face onto a platypus or maybe it's a beaver.
  • Wanting to depict someone as having a really excellent body without knowing what that means to them, so you photoshop a swimming trophy into their hands.
  • The claw beavers use to comb oil into their fur.
  • An after-dinner lemon.
  • Memorably embarrassing yourself as a mnemonic aid.
  • Playing along with someone's schemes to get them to leave you alone.
  • A cool hacker whose anti-establishment principles drive her to pirate every episode of Digimon.
  • Differentiating between the real world and the cyberpunk dystopian future by the number of Digimon available.
  • Painting the peg of a loose action figure joint with clear nail polish so the peg gets a little thicker.
  • The downtown Los Angeles Gundam shop.
  • Not being permitted, socially, to carry around clear nail polish, so you get a flask and write "man juice" on it and pour the nail polish in.
  • Man Juice, For Men Only.
  • Finding a vice big enough to squish an entire city block.
  • Desperately searching for how to do something and finding a single forum post from fifteen years ago, with a single reply from the same poster saying "never mind, figured it out."
  • Appealing to 60 year old men who need something to put in their basement.
  • When tour wife and kids leave you and your turkey sandwich is dry and lonely.
  • Ancient web forums that aren't getting any more radicalized because nobody is posting there any more.
  • The scum of mold you get on top of your pickling brine.
  • How Koreans deal with moldy kimchi.
  • Transcending all human notions of gender by both using blush to make your Gundam model look muddy and using a soldering iron to make it look like it has bullet holes.
  • The ways The T-1000 is female-coded, actually, e.g. taking on a child care role, but the filmmakers clothe the robot in a masculine skin for some reason.
  • A beaver with a swimming trophy who doesn't want to go in the lake because it's too cold.
  • Eating your lemons and sitting in the dark of the lodge, as the winter will soon be over.
  • Whether beavers get pruny.
  • Why and how to get pruny.
  • Animals that have hands.
  • Otter brains: too bigs for their skulls.
  • Finding out what animals have in store for us.
  • Living in a town built over a big bubble of petroleum and your neighbor's yard having the cutest little oil derrick.
  • Rinsing off with distilled water after you shower so you don't get a rash.
  • Living in a town that has no social scene so on Saturday night you and your friends go downtown and try to track down where that shrimp smell is coming from.
  • Gas fields flaring all around the city.
  • A combined oil derrick/Bitcoin mining rig that you can plug right into the ground and forget about.
  • The ability to voluntarily control defecation.
  • The sixth sense that's just in our butts.
  • Taking care of you butt consciousness.
  • Shitting your pants once and upending all of science.
  • Whether anyone poops in Rain World.
  • A cat who is also a slug who is also trapped on the Wheel of Samsara.
  • Reading a poem and refusing to click on the poem guide that explains what the heck it means.
  • Approaching poems as inscrutable puzzle boxes where you have to crack the code to even figure out what the hell they're talking about.
  • Approaching making art as aN opportunity to bore the shit out of your friends and family.
  • Pulling the theme of a story like a string and the entire story falls open like a sack of grain.
  • Demanding more delicious curds and dawdling wenches at your funeral.
  • Needing a weird cow to anchor your painting of a grassy field.
  • Whether the crowd-pleasers actually have something there. Something other than all the money, I mean.
  • Making a funny reference to a contemporary TV commercial in your poem about a funeral.
  • The King of Carrot Flowers.
  • Busy wrists make for busy minds.
  • Stanislaw Lem's "Solaris" as the basis for every video game except for Rain World.
  • Stalker and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
  • The mysteries of The Zone and why it exists.
  • The Emperor of Ice Cream of Tarkovsky movies.
  • Experiencing what is like to live in a non-functional economy.
  • Being in the company of a doctor piloting someone through a pandemic-ridden city.
  • Stand-Up Tragedy.
  • The cheapest way to fame.
  • Renaming your PhD thesis "Anal Sampling Mechanism" so your advisor will finally look at it.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Erica
  • Abby

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Photoshopping your co-guest's face onto a platypus or maybe it's a beaver.
  • Wanting to depict someone as having a really excellent body without knowing what that means to them, so you photoshop a swimming trophy into their hands.
  • The claw beavers use to comb oil into their fur.
  • An after-dinner lemon.
  • Memorably embarrassing yourself as a mnemonic aid.
  • Playing along with someone's schemes to get them to leave you alone.
  • A cool hacker whose anti-establishment principles drive her to pirate every episode of Digimon.
  • Differentiating between the real world and the cyberpunk dystopian future by the number of Digimon available.
  • Painting the peg of a loose action figure joint with clear nail polish so the peg gets a little thicker.
  • The downtown Los Angeles Gundam shop.
  • Not being permitted, socially, to carry around clear nail polish, so you get a flask and write "man juice" on it and pour the nail polish in.
  • Man Juice, For Men Only.
  • Finding a vice big enough to squish an entire city block.
  • Desperately searching for how to do something and finding a single forum post from fifteen years ago, with a single reply from the same poster saying "never mind, figured it out."
  • Appealing to 60 year old men who need something to put in their basement.
  • When tour wife and kids leave you and your turkey sandwich is dry and lonely.
  • Ancient web forums that aren't getting any more radicalized because nobody is posting there any more.
  • The scum of mold you get on top of your pickling brine.
  • How Koreans deal with moldy kimchi.
  • Transcending all human notions of gender by both using blush to make your Gundam model look muddy and using a soldering iron to make it look like it has bullet holes.
  • The ways The T-1000 is female-coded, actually, e.g. taking on a child care role, but the filmmakers clothe the robot in a masculine skin for some reason.
  • A beaver with a swimming trophy who doesn't want to go in the lake because it's too cold.
  • Eating your lemons and sitting in the dark of the lodge, as the winter will soon be over.
  • Whether beavers get pruny.
  • Why and how to get pruny.
  • Animals that have hands.
  • Otter brains: too bigs for their skulls.
  • Finding out what animals have in store for us.
  • Living in a town built over a big bubble of petroleum and your neighbor's yard having the cutest little oil derrick.
  • Rinsing off with distilled water after you shower so you don't get a rash.
  • Living in a town that has no social scene so on Saturday night you and your friends go downtown and try to track down where that shrimp smell is coming from.
  • Gas fields flaring all around the city.
  • A combined oil derrick/Bitcoin mining rig that you can plug right into the ground and forget about.
  • The ability to voluntarily control defecation.
  • The sixth sense that's just in our butts.
  • Taking care of you butt consciousness.
  • Shitting your pants once and upending all of science.
  • Whether anyone poops in Rain World.
  • A cat who is also a slug who is also trapped on the Wheel of Samsara.
  • Reading a poem and refusing to click on the poem guide that explains what the heck it means.
  • Approaching poems as inscrutable puzzle boxes where you have to crack the code to even figure out what the hell they're talking about.
  • Approaching making art as aN opportunity to bore the shit out of your friends and family.
  • Pulling the theme of a story like a string and the entire story falls open like a sack of grain.
  • Demanding more delicious curds and dawdling wenches at your funeral.
  • Needing a weird cow to anchor your painting of a grassy field.
  • Whether the crowd-pleasers actually have something there. Something other than all the money, I mean.
  • Making a funny reference to a contemporary TV commercial in your poem about a funeral.
  • The King of Carrot Flowers.
  • Busy wrists make for busy minds.
  • Stanislaw Lem's "Solaris" as the basis for every video game except for Rain World.
  • Stalker and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
  • The mysteries of The Zone and why it exists.
  • The Emperor of Ice Cream of Tarkovsky movies.
  • Experiencing what is like to live in a non-functional economy.
  • Being in the company of a doctor piloting someone through a pandemic-ridden city.
  • Stand-Up Tragedy.
  • The cheapest way to fame.
  • Renaming your PhD thesis "Anal Sampling Mechanism" so your advisor will finally look at it.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+ROUvj_pt ]]> Jim Stormdancer 110. There Will Be a Last Tweet https://topiclords.com/there-will-be-a-last-tweet 9b594200-7eb0-4f13-8f6d-caa54265f506 Mon, 29 Nov 2021 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: James and Tyriq. We discuss nostalgia and how to avoid it, nonogram puzzles, everyone cool leaving the internet, The Village of Reason, and journaling on your phone. 58:43 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Extending your failure through time.
  • Swatch clock, Swatch clock! Swatch clock, Swatch clock!
  • Swatch Internet Time.
  • Counting up from the beginning of time, January 1st, 1970.
  • The perfect method of keeping time.
  • A Swatch body horror beast.
  • The promise of being made of meat.
  • UFO 50's release date: May 5th, 5050.
  • Deciding that nobody should feel your least favorite emotion.
  • Making a new better future without looking to the past for your aspirations.
  • The world before Later On.
  • Remembering 80s pop songs way better than when you last took a shower.
  • Making a mix tape with a song on it about when you last took a shower and sending it back in time to your younger self so this kid will listen to that song over and over and you can finally remember when you last took a shower.
  • Nostalgia vs. taste.
  • Trying to replicate your favorite thing and falling to replicate it, but the failure is way more interesting than the thing you were copying.
  • Adventure 500.
  • Recreating something you love from memory.
  • A game jam where everyone picks an old video game they like and tries to recreate it from memory without looking at any references.
  • Simplifying while depicting by choosing what details to focus on.
  • An inverted form of nostalgia.
  • Cloak and Dagger (1984)
  • Putting product placement of the video game adaptation of your movie in your movie, but then the video game never comes out because it's 1984.
  • Pepper's Adventures in Time.
  • All the names of Nonogram puzzles.
  • Finding out about Nonogram puzzles and deciding to try them and finding the hardest one you can, and after a few days of being unable to solve it you put it into a Nonogram solving program and it tells you this is an impossible puzzle.
  • The Konami Pixel Puzzle Collection.
  • When you do and when you don't want to be stultified.
  • Roguelike Celebration.
  • Beach Umbrella Games.
  • Printing out a generated dungeon and solving it like a Sudoku.
  • Utter not-knowing-where-to-start-ness.
  • thewebsitethatyougotoeveryday.com
  • Rolling dice and losing all your chill.
  • Retiring to the offline colonies.
  • The potential that you could hypothetically be friends with every cool person in the world.
  • A person who tweets whimsical things.
  • A video essay on TikTok that includes screenshots of Twitter.
  • Trying to make friends by dumping your sugar in the street.
  • The different life choices you might've made if you had to make friends in real life.
  • Befriending an ant colony and watching your friend count shoot through the roof.
  • Trying to wedge a crowbar of understanding into a cryptic poem.
  • All the ways reading poetry can make you feel bad about yourself.
  • The actual thing and the shadow it casts.
  • Taking your hindbrain for a brisk jog around the block.
  • Needing to play Brain Age for the Nintendo DS before you can understand this poem.
  • Omitting words from your poetry reading because it's all about the words you don't say.
  • Whether it is entertaining to learn how to analyze poetry in public.
  • Q.R. Hand, Jr.
  • Applauding: too loud. Too scary. It startles the poet.
  • Terminator, Jr.
  • Transitioning from writing your thoughts in a journal to recording your thoughts on your phone, to just talking to yourself, as you realize what you actually want to get out of the process.
  • Trying to remember anything ever.
  • Collecting art references.
  • Reading the phrase "mariachi trumpets" in your diary and trying to figure out what it means.
  • GPS tagging your journal entries so you can retrace your steps thirty years later.
  • An open source phone that nobody will ever use because there are no apps for it.
  • A bed contraption that, when the alarm rings, dumps you into your outfit for the day and makes you breakfast.
  • Writing with your hand maybe two times a year and wondering how much more disused handwriting needs to get before people will be willing to stop teaching it in grade school.
  • Being told in math class that you need to learn this stuff because you won't have a calculator all the time which is technically true because they won't let you keep your phone while you take the SATs.
  • How to navigate the internet and discern fact from fiction.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Extending your failure through time.
  • Swatch clock, Swatch clock! Swatch clock, Swatch clock!
  • Swatch Internet Time.
  • Counting up from the beginning of time, January 1st, 1970.
  • The perfect method of keeping time.
  • A Swatch body horror beast.
  • The promise of being made of meat.
  • UFO 50's release date: May 5th, 5050.
  • Deciding that nobody should feel your least favorite emotion.
  • Making a new better future without looking to the past for your aspirations.
  • The world before Later On.
  • Remembering 80s pop songs way better than when you last took a shower.
  • Making a mix tape with a song on it about when you last took a shower and sending it back in time to your younger self so this kid will listen to that song over and over and you can finally remember when you last took a shower.
  • Nostalgia vs. taste.
  • Trying to replicate your favorite thing and falling to replicate it, but the failure is way more interesting than the thing you were copying.
  • Adventure 500.
  • Recreating something you love from memory.
  • A game jam where everyone picks an old video game they like and tries to recreate it from memory without looking at any references.
  • Simplifying while depicting by choosing what details to focus on.
  • An inverted form of nostalgia.
  • Cloak and Dagger (1984)
  • Putting product placement of the video game adaptation of your movie in your movie, but then the video game never comes out because it's 1984.
  • Pepper's Adventures in Time.
  • All the names of Nonogram puzzles.
  • Finding out about Nonogram puzzles and deciding to try them and finding the hardest one you can, and after a few days of being unable to solve it you put it into a Nonogram solving program and it tells you this is an impossible puzzle.
  • The Konami Pixel Puzzle Collection.
  • When you do and when you don't want to be stultified.
  • Roguelike Celebration.
  • Beach Umbrella Games.
  • Printing out a generated dungeon and solving it like a Sudoku.
  • Utter not-knowing-where-to-start-ness.
  • thewebsitethatyougotoeveryday.com
  • Rolling dice and losing all your chill.
  • Retiring to the offline colonies.
  • The potential that you could hypothetically be friends with every cool person in the world.
  • A person who tweets whimsical things.
  • A video essay on TikTok that includes screenshots of Twitter.
  • Trying to make friends by dumping your sugar in the street.
  • The different life choices you might've made if you had to make friends in real life.
  • Befriending an ant colony and watching your friend count shoot through the roof.
  • Trying to wedge a crowbar of understanding into a cryptic poem.
  • All the ways reading poetry can make you feel bad about yourself.
  • The actual thing and the shadow it casts.
  • Taking your hindbrain for a brisk jog around the block.
  • Needing to play Brain Age for the Nintendo DS before you can understand this poem.
  • Omitting words from your poetry reading because it's all about the words you don't say.
  • Whether it is entertaining to learn how to analyze poetry in public.
  • Q.R. Hand, Jr.
  • Applauding: too loud. Too scary. It startles the poet.
  • Terminator, Jr.
  • Transitioning from writing your thoughts in a journal to recording your thoughts on your phone, to just talking to yourself, as you realize what you actually want to get out of the process.
  • Trying to remember anything ever.
  • Collecting art references.
  • Reading the phrase "mariachi trumpets" in your diary and trying to figure out what it means.
  • GPS tagging your journal entries so you can retrace your steps thirty years later.
  • An open source phone that nobody will ever use because there are no apps for it.
  • A bed contraption that, when the alarm rings, dumps you into your outfit for the day and makes you breakfast.
  • Writing with your hand maybe two times a year and wondering how much more disused handwriting needs to get before people will be willing to stop teaching it in grade school.
  • Being told in math class that you need to learn this stuff because you won't have a calculator all the time which is technically true because they won't let you keep your phone while you take the SATs.
  • How to navigate the internet and discern fact from fiction.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Extending your failure through time.
  • Swatch clock, Swatch clock! Swatch clock, Swatch clock!
  • Swatch Internet Time.
  • Counting up from the beginning of time, January 1st, 1970.
  • The perfect method of keeping time.
  • A Swatch body horror beast.
  • The promise of being made of meat.
  • UFO 50's release date: May 5th, 5050.
  • Deciding that nobody should feel your least favorite emotion.
  • Making a new better future without looking to the past for your aspirations.
  • The world before Later On.
  • Remembering 80s pop songs way better than when you last took a shower.
  • Making a mix tape with a song on it about when you last took a shower and sending it back in time to your younger self so this kid will listen to that song over and over and you can finally remember when you last took a shower.
  • Nostalgia vs. taste.
  • Trying to replicate your favorite thing and falling to replicate it, but the failure is way more interesting than the thing you were copying.
  • Adventure 500.
  • Recreating something you love from memory.
  • A game jam where everyone picks an old video game they like and tries to recreate it from memory without looking at any references.
  • Simplifying while depicting by choosing what details to focus on.
  • An inverted form of nostalgia.
  • Cloak and Dagger (1984)
  • Putting product placement of the video game adaptation of your movie in your movie, but then the video game never comes out because it's 1984.
  • Pepper's Adventures in Time.
  • All the names of Nonogram puzzles.
  • Finding out about Nonogram puzzles and deciding to try them and finding the hardest one you can, and after a few days of being unable to solve it you put it into a Nonogram solving program and it tells you this is an impossible puzzle.
  • The Konami Pixel Puzzle Collection.
  • When you do and when you don't want to be stultified.
  • Roguelike Celebration.
  • Beach Umbrella Games.
  • Printing out a generated dungeon and solving it like a Sudoku.
  • Utter not-knowing-where-to-start-ness.
  • thewebsitethatyougotoeveryday.com
  • Rolling dice and losing all your chill.
  • Retiring to the offline colonies.
  • The potential that you could hypothetically be friends with every cool person in the world.
  • A person who tweets whimsical things.
  • A video essay on TikTok that includes screenshots of Twitter.
  • Trying to make friends by dumping your sugar in the street.
  • The different life choices you might've made if you had to make friends in real life.
  • Befriending an ant colony and watching your friend count shoot through the roof.
  • Trying to wedge a crowbar of understanding into a cryptic poem.
  • All the ways reading poetry can make you feel bad about yourself.
  • The actual thing and the shadow it casts.
  • Taking your hindbrain for a brisk jog around the block.
  • Needing to play Brain Age for the Nintendo DS before you can understand this poem.
  • Omitting words from your poetry reading because it's all about the words you don't say.
  • Whether it is entertaining to learn how to analyze poetry in public.
  • Q.R. Hand, Jr.
  • Applauding: too loud. Too scary. It startles the poet.
  • Terminator, Jr.
  • Transitioning from writing your thoughts in a journal to recording your thoughts on your phone, to just talking to yourself, as you realize what you actually want to get out of the process.
  • Trying to remember anything ever.
  • Collecting art references.
  • Reading the phrase "mariachi trumpets" in your diary and trying to figure out what it means.
  • GPS tagging your journal entries so you can retrace your steps thirty years later.
  • An open source phone that nobody will ever use because there are no apps for it.
  • A bed contraption that, when the alarm rings, dumps you into your outfit for the day and makes you breakfast.
  • Writing with your hand maybe two times a year and wondering how much more disused handwriting needs to get before people will be willing to stop teaching it in grade school.
  • Being told in math class that you need to learn this stuff because you won't have a calculator all the time which is technically true because they won't let you keep your phone while you take the SATs.
  • How to navigate the internet and discern fact from fiction.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+fV3y0aCe ]]> Jim Stormdancer 109. Ultra Rare Cheeto Shaped Like Batman Crying https://topiclords.com/ultra-rare-cheeto-shaped-like-batman-crying 4233bf75-3ac2-42b8-98ef-7e07b242a4fa Mon, 22 Nov 2021 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Stevie and Avery. We discuss collectible Cheetos on Ebay, Japanese websites stuck in the 90s, Medieval European and ancient Egyptian philosophy, denatured alcohol, and the unusual puzzles of Star Tropics. 1:08:53 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Collectable cheetos on Ebay
  • Japanese websites are stuck in the 90s. Any theories?
  • Medieval European and ancient Egyptian philosophy.
  • Brad asks "Denatured alcohol: alcohol that has poison added to it to prevent people drinking it. What other things do we / could we intentionally pollute to restrict their usage?"
  • The unusual puzzles of StarTropics.

Microtopics:

  • Defining poop by its shape.
  • The lava of the human body.
  • The Content Distribution Baby growing up into a Content Distribution Man.
  • An angry internet mob that won't say why they're angry so you just have to fix every problem until they go away.
  • Legally changing your name to add a silent and invisible Bitcoin logo.
  • Searching for collectible Cheetos on eBay.
  • A Cheeto shaped like a lobster claw.
  • Putting a Cheeto shaped like a cockatiel on eBay for months but nobody's buying so you give up and eat it.
  • Whether there is a subculture of investors collecting rare Cheetos on eBay or if it's just a subculture of people listing Cheetos on eBay as a joke.
  • heritageauctionsforcheetos.com
  • Bidding $40,000 on a Cheeto shaped like Harambe when you have no intention of paying, because the worst that can happen is that your eBay score goes down by one point.
  • Buying a penis-shaped collectible Cheeto for $1.40 but still waiting on it because it got caught up in escrow.
  • Bidding on an eBay auction and walking away when you get outbid.
  • Looking at collectible Cheeto auctions and then eBay won't stop trying to sell you posters of ladies canoodling.
  • Cheeto misprints and their value on the collectors market.
  • Arnold Schwarzenegger if his legs were joined together like a seal.
  • The web sites we visited back before the internet had the power to reach into the real world and strangle it.
  • A search engine optimized to return pages that are mostly static text.
  • Loading the bottom of your web page with keywords.
  • Keeping a designer on payroll so that every few years your interface can alternate between having gradients and being flat.
  • Asking Jeeves things and he tells you the answers, like a modern day Delphi.
  • Let's play: Flaming Hot Cheetos or Freezing Cold Cheetos?
  • A cheerleader pyramid made of butlers.
  • Scraping Wikipedia and formating the results like a book.
  • A postcard with a picture of Kim Jong Un saying "Live, Laugh, Love."
  • Pharaoh culture.
  • A Canticle for Liebowitz.
  • Medieval monks stumbling into a bomb shelter.
  • Making an illuminated manuscript of instructions on how to build a bomb so you can give it to the Pope.
  • The Learned Bede.
  • The four dudes in your culture who can write and create original work.
  • Kingdoms in medieval Europe, centered around the manors of rich noble Romans.
  • Nearly everyone dying from the plague so all the public servants are in their early teens.
  • Intelligible Forms.
  • Aristotelean ideas about science.
  • Going real alien.
  • Ultra Rare Cheeto Shaped Like The Venerable Bede.
  • The first dinosaur of Egypt.
  • Inventing the razor because of your unsightly back hair.
  • Waking up from anesthetic to find that the surgeon shaved body parts nowhere near the incision site, "because you're a hairy beast."
  • First, do no hair.
  • The Egyptian book of the Dead.
  • The Egyptian conception of the afterlife, where you go underground and a guy with a crocodile head weighs your heart against the Feather of Truth and if your heart balances, you get to sit in a long line with your male predecessors for eternity, and that's the best possible outcome.
  • Religions competing to provide the best afterlife.
  • When we as a species learned to attach afterlife outcomes to ethical behavior, as opposed to dying in battle.
  • Having a dream once where all the great kings, after they die they go to the House of Dust and eat clay for eternity, and deciding that that's a fact. That's canon now.
  • The nine parts of the soul.
  • Being constantly surrounded, your whole life, by monuments to death big enough to see from space.
  • Adding a scent to natural gas so that you can smell when it's filling your house.
  • Whether antifreeze is sweet and if so can a cat taste antifreeze.
  • How one might test whether cats can taste sweet.
  • Tongue meat analysis: a great way to tell.
  • The Inverted Qualia Problem.
  • Asking a cat if it can taste sweet, and the cat asks "what does sweet mean" and you say "sweet my internal experience when I put these white crystals in my mouth" and the cat is like "I also have an internal experience when I put these white crystals in my mouth."
  • A video game related topic.
  • Trying to locate your missing uncle who has been abducted by aliens.
  • A video game NPC asking you for a password and to find it you can to have to dip the video game's manual in water in real life.
  • An 80s video game puzzle that requires you to be familiar with solfege to solve it.
  • How you could get away with a lot more bullshit back in the 80s.
  • The experience of suddenly realizing that it's the piece of paper.
  • Going into a portable trailer made up like a cool bachelor pad and noticing that you don't have a reflection in the mirror and upon further examination realizing that the mirror is actually a window into the same room reversed, down to the clock running counterclockwise.
  • Sneaking irrelevant puzzles into someone else's room escape game.
  • Forcing the employees of an escape room to escape an escape room of their own. (Jail.)
  • The ultimate unrequited high five.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Collectable cheetos on Ebay
  • Japanese websites are stuck in the 90s. Any theories?
  • Medieval European and ancient Egyptian philosophy.
  • Brad asks "Denatured alcohol: alcohol that has poison added to it to prevent people drinking it. What other things do we / could we intentionally pollute to restrict their usage?"
  • The unusual puzzles of StarTropics.

Microtopics:

  • Defining poop by its shape.
  • The lava of the human body.
  • The Content Distribution Baby growing up into a Content Distribution Man.
  • An angry internet mob that won't say why they're angry so you just have to fix every problem until they go away.
  • Legally changing your name to add a silent and invisible Bitcoin logo.
  • Searching for collectible Cheetos on eBay.
  • A Cheeto shaped like a lobster claw.
  • Putting a Cheeto shaped like a cockatiel on eBay for months but nobody's buying so you give up and eat it.
  • Whether there is a subculture of investors collecting rare Cheetos on eBay or if it's just a subculture of people listing Cheetos on eBay as a joke.
  • heritageauctionsforcheetos.com
  • Bidding $40,000 on a Cheeto shaped like Harambe when you have no intention of paying, because the worst that can happen is that your eBay score goes down by one point.
  • Buying a penis-shaped collectible Cheeto for $1.40 but still waiting on it because it got caught up in escrow.
  • Bidding on an eBay auction and walking away when you get outbid.
  • Looking at collectible Cheeto auctions and then eBay won't stop trying to sell you posters of ladies canoodling.
  • Cheeto misprints and their value on the collectors market.
  • Arnold Schwarzenegger if his legs were joined together like a seal.
  • The web sites we visited back before the internet had the power to reach into the real world and strangle it.
  • A search engine optimized to return pages that are mostly static text.
  • Loading the bottom of your web page with keywords.
  • Keeping a designer on payroll so that every few years your interface can alternate between having gradients and being flat.
  • Asking Jeeves things and he tells you the answers, like a modern day Delphi.
  • Let's play: Flaming Hot Cheetos or Freezing Cold Cheetos?
  • A cheerleader pyramid made of butlers.
  • Scraping Wikipedia and formating the results like a book.
  • A postcard with a picture of Kim Jong Un saying "Live, Laugh, Love."
  • Pharaoh culture.
  • A Canticle for Liebowitz.
  • Medieval monks stumbling into a bomb shelter.
  • Making an illuminated manuscript of instructions on how to build a bomb so you can give it to the Pope.
  • The Learned Bede.
  • The four dudes in your culture who can write and create original work.
  • Kingdoms in medieval Europe, centered around the manors of rich noble Romans.
  • Nearly everyone dying from the plague so all the public servants are in their early teens.
  • Intelligible Forms.
  • Aristotelean ideas about science.
  • Going real alien.
  • Ultra Rare Cheeto Shaped Like The Venerable Bede.
  • The first dinosaur of Egypt.
  • Inventing the razor because of your unsightly back hair.
  • Waking up from anesthetic to find that the surgeon shaved body parts nowhere near the incision site, "because you're a hairy beast."
  • First, do no hair.
  • The Egyptian book of the Dead.
  • The Egyptian conception of the afterlife, where you go underground and a guy with a crocodile head weighs your heart against the Feather of Truth and if your heart balances, you get to sit in a long line with your male predecessors for eternity, and that's the best possible outcome.
  • Religions competing to provide the best afterlife.
  • When we as a species learned to attach afterlife outcomes to ethical behavior, as opposed to dying in battle.
  • Having a dream once where all the great kings, after they die they go to the House of Dust and eat clay for eternity, and deciding that that's a fact. That's canon now.
  • The nine parts of the soul.
  • Being constantly surrounded, your whole life, by monuments to death big enough to see from space.
  • Adding a scent to natural gas so that you can smell when it's filling your house.
  • Whether antifreeze is sweet and if so can a cat taste antifreeze.
  • How one might test whether cats can taste sweet.
  • Tongue meat analysis: a great way to tell.
  • The Inverted Qualia Problem.
  • Asking a cat if it can taste sweet, and the cat asks "what does sweet mean" and you say "sweet my internal experience when I put these white crystals in my mouth" and the cat is like "I also have an internal experience when I put these white crystals in my mouth."
  • A video game related topic.
  • Trying to locate your missing uncle who has been abducted by aliens.
  • A video game NPC asking you for a password and to find it you can to have to dip the video game's manual in water in real life.
  • An 80s video game puzzle that requires you to be familiar with solfege to solve it.
  • How you could get away with a lot more bullshit back in the 80s.
  • The experience of suddenly realizing that it's the piece of paper.
  • Going into a portable trailer made up like a cool bachelor pad and noticing that you don't have a reflection in the mirror and upon further examination realizing that the mirror is actually a window into the same room reversed, down to the clock running counterclockwise.
  • Sneaking irrelevant puzzles into someone else's room escape game.
  • Forcing the employees of an escape room to escape an escape room of their own. (Jail.)
  • The ultimate unrequited high five.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Collectable cheetos on Ebay
  • Japanese websites are stuck in the 90s. Any theories?
  • Medieval European and ancient Egyptian philosophy.
  • Brad asks "Denatured alcohol: alcohol that has poison added to it to prevent people drinking it. What other things do we / could we intentionally pollute to restrict their usage?"
  • The unusual puzzles of StarTropics.

Microtopics:

  • Defining poop by its shape.
  • The lava of the human body.
  • The Content Distribution Baby growing up into a Content Distribution Man.
  • An angry internet mob that won't say why they're angry so you just have to fix every problem until they go away.
  • Legally changing your name to add a silent and invisible Bitcoin logo.
  • Searching for collectible Cheetos on eBay.
  • A Cheeto shaped like a lobster claw.
  • Putting a Cheeto shaped like a cockatiel on eBay for months but nobody's buying so you give up and eat it.
  • Whether there is a subculture of investors collecting rare Cheetos on eBay or if it's just a subculture of people listing Cheetos on eBay as a joke.
  • heritageauctionsforcheetos.com
  • Bidding $40,000 on a Cheeto shaped like Harambe when you have no intention of paying, because the worst that can happen is that your eBay score goes down by one point.
  • Buying a penis-shaped collectible Cheeto for $1.40 but still waiting on it because it got caught up in escrow.
  • Bidding on an eBay auction and walking away when you get outbid.
  • Looking at collectible Cheeto auctions and then eBay won't stop trying to sell you posters of ladies canoodling.
  • Cheeto misprints and their value on the collectors market.
  • Arnold Schwarzenegger if his legs were joined together like a seal.
  • The web sites we visited back before the internet had the power to reach into the real world and strangle it.
  • A search engine optimized to return pages that are mostly static text.
  • Loading the bottom of your web page with keywords.
  • Keeping a designer on payroll so that every few years your interface can alternate between having gradients and being flat.
  • Asking Jeeves things and he tells you the answers, like a modern day Delphi.
  • Let's play: Flaming Hot Cheetos or Freezing Cold Cheetos?
  • A cheerleader pyramid made of butlers.
  • Scraping Wikipedia and formating the results like a book.
  • A postcard with a picture of Kim Jong Un saying "Live, Laugh, Love."
  • Pharaoh culture.
  • A Canticle for Liebowitz.
  • Medieval monks stumbling into a bomb shelter.
  • Making an illuminated manuscript of instructions on how to build a bomb so you can give it to the Pope.
  • The Learned Bede.
  • The four dudes in your culture who can write and create original work.
  • Kingdoms in medieval Europe, centered around the manors of rich noble Romans.
  • Nearly everyone dying from the plague so all the public servants are in their early teens.
  • Intelligible Forms.
  • Aristotelean ideas about science.
  • Going real alien.
  • Ultra Rare Cheeto Shaped Like The Venerable Bede.
  • The first dinosaur of Egypt.
  • Inventing the razor because of your unsightly back hair.
  • Waking up from anesthetic to find that the surgeon shaved body parts nowhere near the incision site, "because you're a hairy beast."
  • First, do no hair.
  • The Egyptian book of the Dead.
  • The Egyptian conception of the afterlife, where you go underground and a guy with a crocodile head weighs your heart against the Feather of Truth and if your heart balances, you get to sit in a long line with your male predecessors for eternity, and that's the best possible outcome.
  • Religions competing to provide the best afterlife.
  • When we as a species learned to attach afterlife outcomes to ethical behavior, as opposed to dying in battle.
  • Having a dream once where all the great kings, after they die they go to the House of Dust and eat clay for eternity, and deciding that that's a fact. That's canon now.
  • The nine parts of the soul.
  • Being constantly surrounded, your whole life, by monuments to death big enough to see from space.
  • Adding a scent to natural gas so that you can smell when it's filling your house.
  • Whether antifreeze is sweet and if so can a cat taste antifreeze.
  • How one might test whether cats can taste sweet.
  • Tongue meat analysis: a great way to tell.
  • The Inverted Qualia Problem.
  • Asking a cat if it can taste sweet, and the cat asks "what does sweet mean" and you say "sweet my internal experience when I put these white crystals in my mouth" and the cat is like "I also have an internal experience when I put these white crystals in my mouth."
  • A video game related topic.
  • Trying to locate your missing uncle who has been abducted by aliens.
  • A video game NPC asking you for a password and to find it you can to have to dip the video game's manual in water in real life.
  • An 80s video game puzzle that requires you to be familiar with solfege to solve it.
  • How you could get away with a lot more bullshit back in the 80s.
  • The experience of suddenly realizing that it's the piece of paper.
  • Going into a portable trailer made up like a cool bachelor pad and noticing that you don't have a reflection in the mirror and upon further examination realizing that the mirror is actually a window into the same room reversed, down to the clock running counterclockwise.
  • Sneaking irrelevant puzzles into someone else's room escape game.
  • Forcing the employees of an escape room to escape an escape room of their own. (Jail.)
  • The ultimate unrequited high five.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+tERW-f0J ]]> Jim Stormdancer 108. Sitting and Being Angry at Your Phone https://topiclords.com/sitting-and-being-angry-at-your-phone 136fd8f1-9acf-4647-92e7-a830043fe806 Mon, 15 Nov 2021 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Mark and Shirley. We discuss neuroscience, fertility tracking, when it turns out that a character in a movie is movie-star hot because it's a plot point, Immortal - Call of the Wintermoon, and Tiktok food trends that are more about elaborate assembly than flavors. 1:21:57 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Mark
  • Shirley

Topics:

  • Neuroscience!
  • Fertility tracking is more complicated than I realized.
  • When it turns out that a character in a movie is movie-star hot because it's a plot point, rather than because they're portrayed by a movie star, and I guess then the audience is supposed to pretend all the other characters, also played by movie stars, just look like regular schlubs.
  • Immortal - Call Of The Wintermoon
  • Tiktok food trends that are more about elaborate assembly than flavors.

Microtopics:

  • A band from Sweden that just released a demo.
  • Album art with a big giant snake and a shirtless barbarian dude whipping a mace at a guy.
  • A punk band composed of mixed race middle school riot grrls.
  • Speaking to a rude 12 year old and running off to write a bitchin' punk song about it.
  • Observing someone's career arc via the podcasts they guest on.
  • Talking yourself out of being a scientist.
  • Helping people with early-stage dementia manage activities of daily living.
  • An acquired language problem.
  • Adapting to not being in an abusive workplace environment.
  • How a process improvement is received when you suggest it to your BevMo manager vs. when you suggest it to the head of your neuroscience lab.
  • How every retail store is as understaffed as possible by design.
  • Switching from a retail job to an office job and suddenly being trusted to decide when to go to the bathroom.
  • How the world might be different if the people in charge had to live in the world they created.
  • Thriving in Our Hypercapitalist Dystopia.
  • Trying to have a kid and learning a whole bunch about your own body in the process.
  • Giving kids facts instead of ideology or even advice.
  • Going to pregnancy club and wondering if there's an aspirational pregnancy club.
  • Taking your temperature when you emerge from slumber.
  • Peeing on sticks. (A medical process.)
  • Not trying, not preventing.
  • Cervical mucus.
  • A bad batch of kombucha can kill you, and other ways kombucha is like a pregnancy.
  • Being naturally blessed with high motility sperm.
  • Asking your doctor if you should run a bunch of tests and they're like "just chill" and you're like "take my blood, please"
  • The science of trying-adjacent.
  • Drinking too deeply of the colloidal silver.
  • A bookish nerd who is portrayed by one of the most attractive humans on the planet but they're wearing glasses.
  • The incomparable Finn Carter.
  • Trying to cast an actor to play an unattractive person but Steve Buscemi is busy and you can't find a single other ugly actor so you cast Scarlet Johansson and have the makeup department put her in uglyface.
  • Doing an image search for "ugly actors" and every single result is of a South Asian and freaking out until you find out that there's a Bollywood movie called "Ugly."
  • Putting "the frumpy one" from a movie in a room next to a bunch of normal people and realizing that you need to blow way past the conventionally-attractive bell curve to even be allowed into Los Angeles.
  • A music video that was shot on VHS and uploaded to 2006-era Youtube.
  • Goth clowns scowling and looking out from behind trees.
  • A troupe of grumpy goth clowns in leather daddy outfits discovering and exploring ancient ruins.
  • Cutting your frenulum so you can stick out your tongue as far as Gene Simmons and waking up choking on your tongue meat every night.
  • Grumpy goth clowns crouching in doorways.
  • Hearing a variety of different screams and growls.
  • Training to scream for several hours a day, every day, without ruining your screamy bits.
  • Doing the crabcore thing decades before crabcore.
  • Googling "candlemass bewitched" for a good time.
  • Watching TikTok on Reddit because you're old.
  • Extremely simple and compelling recipes that can't possibly work and will in fact cause a fire in your chicken.
  • Making bad content to make people mad.
  • Trying to redefine porn as anything you enjoy.
  • Making a series of recipe videos with your nonstandard measuring cups so people need to buy your weird measuring cups to follow along.
  • Elsagate.
  • J. Kenji Lopez-Alt.
  • Hard boiling a million eggs to scientifically determine that you're super sick of eating eggs.
  • Food Wishes.
  • That's Just You Cookin'.
  • A cool chef with a cool attitude.
  • A chef with a cadence of speaking that really annoys your dad.
  • Learning to improvise when faced with an unexpected situation.
  • How to get joy out of cooking.
  • The fugu preparation certification.
  • Watching somebody spend five minutes washing some extremely starchy rice.
  • Having two gimmicks.
  • A knife that you can also use as a spatula.
  • Using fresh stream water in your forest cooking videos.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Mark
  • Shirley

Topics:

  • Neuroscience!
  • Fertility tracking is more complicated than I realized.
  • When it turns out that a character in a movie is movie-star hot because it's a plot point, rather than because they're portrayed by a movie star, and I guess then the audience is supposed to pretend all the other characters, also played by movie stars, just look like regular schlubs.
  • Immortal - Call Of The Wintermoon
  • Tiktok food trends that are more about elaborate assembly than flavors.

Microtopics:

  • A band from Sweden that just released a demo.
  • Album art with a big giant snake and a shirtless barbarian dude whipping a mace at a guy.
  • A punk band composed of mixed race middle school riot grrls.
  • Speaking to a rude 12 year old and running off to write a bitchin' punk song about it.
  • Observing someone's career arc via the podcasts they guest on.
  • Talking yourself out of being a scientist.
  • Helping people with early-stage dementia manage activities of daily living.
  • An acquired language problem.
  • Adapting to not being in an abusive workplace environment.
  • How a process improvement is received when you suggest it to your BevMo manager vs. when you suggest it to the head of your neuroscience lab.
  • How every retail store is as understaffed as possible by design.
  • Switching from a retail job to an office job and suddenly being trusted to decide when to go to the bathroom.
  • How the world might be different if the people in charge had to live in the world they created.
  • Thriving in Our Hypercapitalist Dystopia.
  • Trying to have a kid and learning a whole bunch about your own body in the process.
  • Giving kids facts instead of ideology or even advice.
  • Going to pregnancy club and wondering if there's an aspirational pregnancy club.
  • Taking your temperature when you emerge from slumber.
  • Peeing on sticks. (A medical process.)
  • Not trying, not preventing.
  • Cervical mucus.
  • A bad batch of kombucha can kill you, and other ways kombucha is like a pregnancy.
  • Being naturally blessed with high motility sperm.
  • Asking your doctor if you should run a bunch of tests and they're like "just chill" and you're like "take my blood, please"
  • The science of trying-adjacent.
  • Drinking too deeply of the colloidal silver.
  • A bookish nerd who is portrayed by one of the most attractive humans on the planet but they're wearing glasses.
  • The incomparable Finn Carter.
  • Trying to cast an actor to play an unattractive person but Steve Buscemi is busy and you can't find a single other ugly actor so you cast Scarlet Johansson and have the makeup department put her in uglyface.
  • Doing an image search for "ugly actors" and every single result is of a South Asian and freaking out until you find out that there's a Bollywood movie called "Ugly."
  • Putting "the frumpy one" from a movie in a room next to a bunch of normal people and realizing that you need to blow way past the conventionally-attractive bell curve to even be allowed into Los Angeles.
  • A music video that was shot on VHS and uploaded to 2006-era Youtube.
  • Goth clowns scowling and looking out from behind trees.
  • A troupe of grumpy goth clowns in leather daddy outfits discovering and exploring ancient ruins.
  • Cutting your frenulum so you can stick out your tongue as far as Gene Simmons and waking up choking on your tongue meat every night.
  • Grumpy goth clowns crouching in doorways.
  • Hearing a variety of different screams and growls.
  • Training to scream for several hours a day, every day, without ruining your screamy bits.
  • Doing the crabcore thing decades before crabcore.
  • Googling "candlemass bewitched" for a good time.
  • Watching TikTok on Reddit because you're old.
  • Extremely simple and compelling recipes that can't possibly work and will in fact cause a fire in your chicken.
  • Making bad content to make people mad.
  • Trying to redefine porn as anything you enjoy.
  • Making a series of recipe videos with your nonstandard measuring cups so people need to buy your weird measuring cups to follow along.
  • Elsagate.
  • J. Kenji Lopez-Alt.
  • Hard boiling a million eggs to scientifically determine that you're super sick of eating eggs.
  • Food Wishes.
  • That's Just You Cookin'.
  • A cool chef with a cool attitude.
  • A chef with a cadence of speaking that really annoys your dad.
  • Learning to improvise when faced with an unexpected situation.
  • How to get joy out of cooking.
  • The fugu preparation certification.
  • Watching somebody spend five minutes washing some extremely starchy rice.
  • Having two gimmicks.
  • A knife that you can also use as a spatula.
  • Using fresh stream water in your forest cooking videos.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Mark
  • Shirley

Topics:

  • Neuroscience!
  • Fertility tracking is more complicated than I realized.
  • When it turns out that a character in a movie is movie-star hot because it's a plot point, rather than because they're portrayed by a movie star, and I guess then the audience is supposed to pretend all the other characters, also played by movie stars, just look like regular schlubs.
  • Immortal - Call Of The Wintermoon
  • Tiktok food trends that are more about elaborate assembly than flavors.

Microtopics:

  • A band from Sweden that just released a demo.
  • Album art with a big giant snake and a shirtless barbarian dude whipping a mace at a guy.
  • A punk band composed of mixed race middle school riot grrls.
  • Speaking to a rude 12 year old and running off to write a bitchin' punk song about it.
  • Observing someone's career arc via the podcasts they guest on.
  • Talking yourself out of being a scientist.
  • Helping people with early-stage dementia manage activities of daily living.
  • An acquired language problem.
  • Adapting to not being in an abusive workplace environment.
  • How a process improvement is received when you suggest it to your BevMo manager vs. when you suggest it to the head of your neuroscience lab.
  • How every retail store is as understaffed as possible by design.
  • Switching from a retail job to an office job and suddenly being trusted to decide when to go to the bathroom.
  • How the world might be different if the people in charge had to live in the world they created.
  • Thriving in Our Hypercapitalist Dystopia.
  • Trying to have a kid and learning a whole bunch about your own body in the process.
  • Giving kids facts instead of ideology or even advice.
  • Going to pregnancy club and wondering if there's an aspirational pregnancy club.
  • Taking your temperature when you emerge from slumber.
  • Peeing on sticks. (A medical process.)
  • Not trying, not preventing.
  • Cervical mucus.
  • A bad batch of kombucha can kill you, and other ways kombucha is like a pregnancy.
  • Being naturally blessed with high motility sperm.
  • Asking your doctor if you should run a bunch of tests and they're like "just chill" and you're like "take my blood, please"
  • The science of trying-adjacent.
  • Drinking too deeply of the colloidal silver.
  • A bookish nerd who is portrayed by one of the most attractive humans on the planet but they're wearing glasses.
  • The incomparable Finn Carter.
  • Trying to cast an actor to play an unattractive person but Steve Buscemi is busy and you can't find a single other ugly actor so you cast Scarlet Johansson and have the makeup department put her in uglyface.
  • Doing an image search for "ugly actors" and every single result is of a South Asian and freaking out until you find out that there's a Bollywood movie called "Ugly."
  • Putting "the frumpy one" from a movie in a room next to a bunch of normal people and realizing that you need to blow way past the conventionally-attractive bell curve to even be allowed into Los Angeles.
  • A music video that was shot on VHS and uploaded to 2006-era Youtube.
  • Goth clowns scowling and looking out from behind trees.
  • A troupe of grumpy goth clowns in leather daddy outfits discovering and exploring ancient ruins.
  • Cutting your frenulum so you can stick out your tongue as far as Gene Simmons and waking up choking on your tongue meat every night.
  • Grumpy goth clowns crouching in doorways.
  • Hearing a variety of different screams and growls.
  • Training to scream for several hours a day, every day, without ruining your screamy bits.
  • Doing the crabcore thing decades before crabcore.
  • Googling "candlemass bewitched" for a good time.
  • Watching TikTok on Reddit because you're old.
  • Extremely simple and compelling recipes that can't possibly work and will in fact cause a fire in your chicken.
  • Making bad content to make people mad.
  • Trying to redefine porn as anything you enjoy.
  • Making a series of recipe videos with your nonstandard measuring cups so people need to buy your weird measuring cups to follow along.
  • Elsagate.
  • J. Kenji Lopez-Alt.
  • Hard boiling a million eggs to scientifically determine that you're super sick of eating eggs.
  • Food Wishes.
  • That's Just You Cookin'.
  • A cool chef with a cool attitude.
  • A chef with a cadence of speaking that really annoys your dad.
  • Learning to improvise when faced with an unexpected situation.
  • How to get joy out of cooking.
  • The fugu preparation certification.
  • Watching somebody spend five minutes washing some extremely starchy rice.
  • Having two gimmicks.
  • A knife that you can also use as a spatula.
  • Using fresh stream water in your forest cooking videos.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+Y0BC6qsD ]]> Jim Stormdancer 107. 27 Kilobytes of Pure Magic https://topiclords.com/27-kilobytes-of-pure-magic 2b8313cd-09cb-47f4-b94c-258aaa1896ea Mon, 08 Nov 2021 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Ryan and Jenni. We discuss video games providing an illusion of competency and how jarring it is when they don't, carcinization, manualism, and playing "AR games" with your own imagination. 1:05:37 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Whether Jim enjoys it when nobody can decide who should go first.
  • Whoever can blurt their name out fastest.
  • Dog Airport Game.
  • Eating pizza around a three year old.
  • Wizard With A Gun.
  • A song for a trailer where the trailer ends but the song keeps going for years.
  • Hiring a team of monks to take turns notes on a church organ for seven hours at a time.
  • When one of the monks you hired to play the organ for seven hours at a time dies and keels over onto the keys and it's a cluster chord but we'll take it.
  • Jack Pumpkin Skellington.
  • What happens when Merlin gets off in space.
  • How many wizard/firearm puns we can think of. (2)
  • Making a movie about the legend of King Arthur with all the magic removed and Merlin is just an old man who needs a bath.
  • The highly relatable legend of King Arthur buying Excalibur from the katana shop next to Spencer's Gifts.
  • That time King Arthur lost his wedding ring under the bed and had to sweep it out using Excalibur.
  • A collaboration where one person writes the first half of the story and the other person writes a 4chan reference.
  • Making paintings with the art skills of a writer.
  • The illusion of hyper-competency.
  • Moving your thumb a fraction of an inch and your avatar onscreen does a cartwheel off of a robot's face.
  • Driving behind Wario and he has that big purple caboose and you just want to slam it.
  • Blue Shell pacifists who try throw a Blue Shell without hurting any other drivers
  • Whether that skeleton who shoots lasers at you has a wife and kids at home who would also shoot lasers at you.
  • Mr. Friendly.
  • Having to solve each topic before you can move on.
  • Someone trying to pirate your music on Youtube but instead of music you poured vinegar into the tube and when they listen to the other end of the tube they just get an earful of vinegar.
  • Flies landing on your psoriasis patches because they ooze a little bit and probably smell like rotting meat or at least oozing meat.
  • Going into a psychological death spiral because you just realized that you and everyone you know is just rotting meat, and then coming out of it and letting everyone know that they can just skip the death spiral, there isn't any sweet loot down there.
  • Reminding the listener that everyone they care about will die someday but it's okay because Wario's juicy purple butt exists.
  • Providing foley for your death just in case in case you die silently while recording the show.
  • Writing a song to play at a friend's funeral but they're not allowed to hear it until then so when they die they go into the Great Unknown Mystery of whether your song is any good.
  • Whether this 27k wav file that you've been instructed to play at your funeral counts as music, strictly speaking.
  • Writing an intricate eight minute sonata with the intention of time-stretching it down to less than a second.
  • Meeting crab scientists who talk about carcinization and then turn into crabs right in front of you.
  • Transmorphing into a crab and deciding to hold a knife all the time just because you can.
  • Finding out about carcinization and then staying up all night wondering when you're going to get your crab claws.
  • Finding out whether anyone at Berkeley has designed a musical instrument for after you turn into a crab by googling for "Berkeley carcinization instrument"
  • A vent-based apparatus.
  • Wrapping your fingers in electrical tape and getting a preview of what making music will be like after we all turn into crabs.
  • Chilling with a pile of rotting meat on a beach, like "what's up?"
  • Hands feet and they're all around sticking out in every direction so we can just roll everywhere.
  • The fate of the Butthole Foot.
  • Centaur World, where everything is centaurs.
  • The mighty centaur, with the bottom half of a bull and the top half of a cenobite.
  • A centaur thing a wrinkle through time flew
  • A man with a body of a motorcycle.
  • Centaur court, the court where the bottom half is replaced with a horse.
  • Gerry the manualist.
  • Playing songs on your hands for 52 years.
  • Playing AR games with your own imagination.
  • Picking a dirty spot on the window to be your avatar and moving your head around to make it dodge obstacles in the background, which doesn't look any sillier than when you play a VR game except that since you don't have a helmet on your can see the people giving you the side eye.
  • Imagining that your parent's car shoots missiles out of the hubcaps.
  • Tony Hawk with feet sticking out in every direction except from his butthole.
  • Doing Christ Air after Christ Air on your way to get some Arby's.
  • One professor refusing to judge your thesis because the two of you go to the same school and all the other professors refusing to judge your thesis because the first professor's reason for not doing it doesn't make any sense so the school just gives up and lets you graduate.
  • Wanting it until it turns out to have been a bad idea to want it.
  • Being a professional for five seconds a week.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Whether Jim enjoys it when nobody can decide who should go first.
  • Whoever can blurt their name out fastest.
  • Dog Airport Game.
  • Eating pizza around a three year old.
  • Wizard With A Gun.
  • A song for a trailer where the trailer ends but the song keeps going for years.
  • Hiring a team of monks to take turns notes on a church organ for seven hours at a time.
  • When one of the monks you hired to play the organ for seven hours at a time dies and keels over onto the keys and it's a cluster chord but we'll take it.
  • Jack Pumpkin Skellington.
  • What happens when Merlin gets off in space.
  • How many wizard/firearm puns we can think of. (2)
  • Making a movie about the legend of King Arthur with all the magic removed and Merlin is just an old man who needs a bath.
  • The highly relatable legend of King Arthur buying Excalibur from the katana shop next to Spencer's Gifts.
  • That time King Arthur lost his wedding ring under the bed and had to sweep it out using Excalibur.
  • A collaboration where one person writes the first half of the story and the other person writes a 4chan reference.
  • Making paintings with the art skills of a writer.
  • The illusion of hyper-competency.
  • Moving your thumb a fraction of an inch and your avatar onscreen does a cartwheel off of a robot's face.
  • Driving behind Wario and he has that big purple caboose and you just want to slam it.
  • Blue Shell pacifists who try throw a Blue Shell without hurting any other drivers
  • Whether that skeleton who shoots lasers at you has a wife and kids at home who would also shoot lasers at you.
  • Mr. Friendly.
  • Having to solve each topic before you can move on.
  • Someone trying to pirate your music on Youtube but instead of music you poured vinegar into the tube and when they listen to the other end of the tube they just get an earful of vinegar.
  • Flies landing on your psoriasis patches because they ooze a little bit and probably smell like rotting meat or at least oozing meat.
  • Going into a psychological death spiral because you just realized that you and everyone you know is just rotting meat, and then coming out of it and letting everyone know that they can just skip the death spiral, there isn't any sweet loot down there.
  • Reminding the listener that everyone they care about will die someday but it's okay because Wario's juicy purple butt exists.
  • Providing foley for your death just in case in case you die silently while recording the show.
  • Writing a song to play at a friend's funeral but they're not allowed to hear it until then so when they die they go into the Great Unknown Mystery of whether your song is any good.
  • Whether this 27k wav file that you've been instructed to play at your funeral counts as music, strictly speaking.
  • Writing an intricate eight minute sonata with the intention of time-stretching it down to less than a second.
  • Meeting crab scientists who talk about carcinization and then turn into crabs right in front of you.
  • Transmorphing into a crab and deciding to hold a knife all the time just because you can.
  • Finding out about carcinization and then staying up all night wondering when you're going to get your crab claws.
  • Finding out whether anyone at Berkeley has designed a musical instrument for after you turn into a crab by googling for "Berkeley carcinization instrument"
  • A vent-based apparatus.
  • Wrapping your fingers in electrical tape and getting a preview of what making music will be like after we all turn into crabs.
  • Chilling with a pile of rotting meat on a beach, like "what's up?"
  • Hands feet and they're all around sticking out in every direction so we can just roll everywhere.
  • The fate of the Butthole Foot.
  • Centaur World, where everything is centaurs.
  • The mighty centaur, with the bottom half of a bull and the top half of a cenobite.
  • A centaur thing a wrinkle through time flew
  • A man with a body of a motorcycle.
  • Centaur court, the court where the bottom half is replaced with a horse.
  • Gerry the manualist.
  • Playing songs on your hands for 52 years.
  • Playing AR games with your own imagination.
  • Picking a dirty spot on the window to be your avatar and moving your head around to make it dodge obstacles in the background, which doesn't look any sillier than when you play a VR game except that since you don't have a helmet on your can see the people giving you the side eye.
  • Imagining that your parent's car shoots missiles out of the hubcaps.
  • Tony Hawk with feet sticking out in every direction except from his butthole.
  • Doing Christ Air after Christ Air on your way to get some Arby's.
  • One professor refusing to judge your thesis because the two of you go to the same school and all the other professors refusing to judge your thesis because the first professor's reason for not doing it doesn't make any sense so the school just gives up and lets you graduate.
  • Wanting it until it turns out to have been a bad idea to want it.
  • Being a professional for five seconds a week.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Whether Jim enjoys it when nobody can decide who should go first.
  • Whoever can blurt their name out fastest.
  • Dog Airport Game.
  • Eating pizza around a three year old.
  • Wizard With A Gun.
  • A song for a trailer where the trailer ends but the song keeps going for years.
  • Hiring a team of monks to take turns notes on a church organ for seven hours at a time.
  • When one of the monks you hired to play the organ for seven hours at a time dies and keels over onto the keys and it's a cluster chord but we'll take it.
  • Jack Pumpkin Skellington.
  • What happens when Merlin gets off in space.
  • How many wizard/firearm puns we can think of. (2)
  • Making a movie about the legend of King Arthur with all the magic removed and Merlin is just an old man who needs a bath.
  • The highly relatable legend of King Arthur buying Excalibur from the katana shop next to Spencer's Gifts.
  • That time King Arthur lost his wedding ring under the bed and had to sweep it out using Excalibur.
  • A collaboration where one person writes the first half of the story and the other person writes a 4chan reference.
  • Making paintings with the art skills of a writer.
  • The illusion of hyper-competency.
  • Moving your thumb a fraction of an inch and your avatar onscreen does a cartwheel off of a robot's face.
  • Driving behind Wario and he has that big purple caboose and you just want to slam it.
  • Blue Shell pacifists who try throw a Blue Shell without hurting any other drivers
  • Whether that skeleton who shoots lasers at you has a wife and kids at home who would also shoot lasers at you.
  • Mr. Friendly.
  • Having to solve each topic before you can move on.
  • Someone trying to pirate your music on Youtube but instead of music you poured vinegar into the tube and when they listen to the other end of the tube they just get an earful of vinegar.
  • Flies landing on your psoriasis patches because they ooze a little bit and probably smell like rotting meat or at least oozing meat.
  • Going into a psychological death spiral because you just realized that you and everyone you know is just rotting meat, and then coming out of it and letting everyone know that they can just skip the death spiral, there isn't any sweet loot down there.
  • Reminding the listener that everyone they care about will die someday but it's okay because Wario's juicy purple butt exists.
  • Providing foley for your death just in case in case you die silently while recording the show.
  • Writing a song to play at a friend's funeral but they're not allowed to hear it until then so when they die they go into the Great Unknown Mystery of whether your song is any good.
  • Whether this 27k wav file that you've been instructed to play at your funeral counts as music, strictly speaking.
  • Writing an intricate eight minute sonata with the intention of time-stretching it down to less than a second.
  • Meeting crab scientists who talk about carcinization and then turn into crabs right in front of you.
  • Transmorphing into a crab and deciding to hold a knife all the time just because you can.
  • Finding out about carcinization and then staying up all night wondering when you're going to get your crab claws.
  • Finding out whether anyone at Berkeley has designed a musical instrument for after you turn into a crab by googling for "Berkeley carcinization instrument"
  • A vent-based apparatus.
  • Wrapping your fingers in electrical tape and getting a preview of what making music will be like after we all turn into crabs.
  • Chilling with a pile of rotting meat on a beach, like "what's up?"
  • Hands feet and they're all around sticking out in every direction so we can just roll everywhere.
  • The fate of the Butthole Foot.
  • Centaur World, where everything is centaurs.
  • The mighty centaur, with the bottom half of a bull and the top half of a cenobite.
  • A centaur thing a wrinkle through time flew
  • A man with a body of a motorcycle.
  • Centaur court, the court where the bottom half is replaced with a horse.
  • Gerry the manualist.
  • Playing songs on your hands for 52 years.
  • Playing AR games with your own imagination.
  • Picking a dirty spot on the window to be your avatar and moving your head around to make it dodge obstacles in the background, which doesn't look any sillier than when you play a VR game except that since you don't have a helmet on your can see the people giving you the side eye.
  • Imagining that your parent's car shoots missiles out of the hubcaps.
  • Tony Hawk with feet sticking out in every direction except from his butthole.
  • Doing Christ Air after Christ Air on your way to get some Arby's.
  • One professor refusing to judge your thesis because the two of you go to the same school and all the other professors refusing to judge your thesis because the first professor's reason for not doing it doesn't make any sense so the school just gives up and lets you graduate.
  • Wanting it until it turns out to have been a bad idea to want it.
  • Being a professional for five seconds a week.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+W9-Y9GLf ]]> Jim Stormdancer 106. Hearses for Snakes https://topiclords.com/hearses-for-snakes 997b0471-2755-417c-9268-610a680f280a Mon, 01 Nov 2021 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Alex and Shannon. We discuss corn mazes vs. hedge mazes, projectable Halloween decoration animations, Dave Mustaine's chair sleeping incident, Rob Zombie - Dragula, and interactive Halloween costumes. 1:01:07 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Shannon
  • Alex

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Top ten dog features.
  • Top one dog feature.
  • The resident holiday specials expert.
  • One Cut of the Dead.
  • Opening the door and saying "hello!"
  • Maze season is upon us.
  • Eating your way out of the corn maze.
  • Laminating your corn maze so the corn doesn't blow over when it rains.
  • Topiary vs. Scarecrow.
  • The barrier that humanity doesn't realize it can cross until it's across the threshold.
  • Building a maze out of "employees only" and "wet floor" signs so nobody even realizes they're in a maze.
  • How to ethically put someone in a room escape situation without getting their informed consent first.
  • Whether Dustin has teeth yet.
  • The best maze material is the social contract.
  • Pepper's Ghost.
  • Bone Chillers 2.
  • Projecting animated ghost pirates rear projected onto your window.
  • An actual live human Pepper's Ghost and whether that ghost sees us as the ghosts.
  • Interactive ghosts.
  • Turtle Talk.
  • Wanting to spend all day pretending to be a skeleton.
  • Dave Mustaine's terrifying sleeping injury.
  • Saturday Night Palsy.
  • Losing feeling in your fingers because you carried groceries too much.
  • Taking law school exams without any feeling in your fingers.
  • Disrupting ambulances by taking an Uber to the hospital.
  • Keeping a big basket of Epipens and Narcan in your cab, just in case.
  • Whether they give you another one if you use your Epipen on someone else.
  • Chatting with a doctor online and they ask you your favorite kind of beans and then they're like "oh yeah you definitely need Narcan" and write you a prescription.
  • Getting your Narcan certification and treating every human interaction as an opportunity to deploy your Narcan.
  • Mr. Zombie.
  • Rob Zombie doing the "What is Love" head bob in his Dragula.
  • Withholding the Dragula for most of the music video, like how they didn't show the shark for most of Jaws.
  • Extremely tall guitars.
  • A tiki head spray painted silver.
  • T-posing Rob Zombie singing at the ceiling.
  • A woman who is in this music video to not wear a lot of clothes
  • Ghost Dad playing keytar in the back.
  • The most adorable Rob Zombie.
  • The origin of the silver headed tiki robot.
  • The silver headed tiki robot doing a high kick.
  • Watching the music video for Dragula and then excitedly searching Craigslist for hearses.
  • A hearse with a tramp stamp.
  • The two happiest days you'll ever have with your hearse.
  • hearsehub.com
  • Local rug artists.
  • The kind of person who would think it's fun to role play a Spirit Halloween employee.
  • Coronavirus is transforming the death care industry, according to Funeral and Cemetery News on hearsehub.com.
  • Getting a hearse long enough to be pulled by a mini dachshund.
  • Logrolling the snake coffin over a series of snake pallbearers.
  • Crowdsurfing for Snakes.
  • A guy dressed up like Pokemon Go for Halloween where you spin his helmet to dispense a Pokeball and then throw the Pokeball at Pokemon that are also part of the costume.
  • Reverse trick or treating.
  • Setting up a haunted maze in the front yard of every house you trick or treat at and when nobody answers you have to just wait for them to get home because dang it you spend half an hour setting up the maze.
  • Kill or Queen?
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Shannon
  • Alex

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Top ten dog features.
  • Top one dog feature.
  • The resident holiday specials expert.
  • One Cut of the Dead.
  • Opening the door and saying "hello!"
  • Maze season is upon us.
  • Eating your way out of the corn maze.
  • Laminating your corn maze so the corn doesn't blow over when it rains.
  • Topiary vs. Scarecrow.
  • The barrier that humanity doesn't realize it can cross until it's across the threshold.
  • Building a maze out of "employees only" and "wet floor" signs so nobody even realizes they're in a maze.
  • How to ethically put someone in a room escape situation without getting their informed consent first.
  • Whether Dustin has teeth yet.
  • The best maze material is the social contract.
  • Pepper's Ghost.
  • Bone Chillers 2.
  • Projecting animated ghost pirates rear projected onto your window.
  • An actual live human Pepper's Ghost and whether that ghost sees us as the ghosts.
  • Interactive ghosts.
  • Turtle Talk.
  • Wanting to spend all day pretending to be a skeleton.
  • Dave Mustaine's terrifying sleeping injury.
  • Saturday Night Palsy.
  • Losing feeling in your fingers because you carried groceries too much.
  • Taking law school exams without any feeling in your fingers.
  • Disrupting ambulances by taking an Uber to the hospital.
  • Keeping a big basket of Epipens and Narcan in your cab, just in case.
  • Whether they give you another one if you use your Epipen on someone else.
  • Chatting with a doctor online and they ask you your favorite kind of beans and then they're like "oh yeah you definitely need Narcan" and write you a prescription.
  • Getting your Narcan certification and treating every human interaction as an opportunity to deploy your Narcan.
  • Mr. Zombie.
  • Rob Zombie doing the "What is Love" head bob in his Dragula.
  • Withholding the Dragula for most of the music video, like how they didn't show the shark for most of Jaws.
  • Extremely tall guitars.
  • A tiki head spray painted silver.
  • T-posing Rob Zombie singing at the ceiling.
  • A woman who is in this music video to not wear a lot of clothes
  • Ghost Dad playing keytar in the back.
  • The most adorable Rob Zombie.
  • The origin of the silver headed tiki robot.
  • The silver headed tiki robot doing a high kick.
  • Watching the music video for Dragula and then excitedly searching Craigslist for hearses.
  • A hearse with a tramp stamp.
  • The two happiest days you'll ever have with your hearse.
  • hearsehub.com
  • Local rug artists.
  • The kind of person who would think it's fun to role play a Spirit Halloween employee.
  • Coronavirus is transforming the death care industry, according to Funeral and Cemetery News on hearsehub.com.
  • Getting a hearse long enough to be pulled by a mini dachshund.
  • Logrolling the snake coffin over a series of snake pallbearers.
  • Crowdsurfing for Snakes.
  • A guy dressed up like Pokemon Go for Halloween where you spin his helmet to dispense a Pokeball and then throw the Pokeball at Pokemon that are also part of the costume.
  • Reverse trick or treating.
  • Setting up a haunted maze in the front yard of every house you trick or treat at and when nobody answers you have to just wait for them to get home because dang it you spend half an hour setting up the maze.
  • Kill or Queen?

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Shannon
  • Alex

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Top ten dog features.
  • Top one dog feature.
  • The resident holiday specials expert.
  • One Cut of the Dead.
  • Opening the door and saying "hello!"
  • Maze season is upon us.
  • Eating your way out of the corn maze.
  • Laminating your corn maze so the corn doesn't blow over when it rains.
  • Topiary vs. Scarecrow.
  • The barrier that humanity doesn't realize it can cross until it's across the threshold.
  • Building a maze out of "employees only" and "wet floor" signs so nobody even realizes they're in a maze.
  • How to ethically put someone in a room escape situation without getting their informed consent first.
  • Whether Dustin has teeth yet.
  • The best maze material is the social contract.
  • Pepper's Ghost.
  • Bone Chillers 2.
  • Projecting animated ghost pirates rear projected onto your window.
  • An actual live human Pepper's Ghost and whether that ghost sees us as the ghosts.
  • Interactive ghosts.
  • Turtle Talk.
  • Wanting to spend all day pretending to be a skeleton.
  • Dave Mustaine's terrifying sleeping injury.
  • Saturday Night Palsy.
  • Losing feeling in your fingers because you carried groceries too much.
  • Taking law school exams without any feeling in your fingers.
  • Disrupting ambulances by taking an Uber to the hospital.
  • Keeping a big basket of Epipens and Narcan in your cab, just in case.
  • Whether they give you another one if you use your Epipen on someone else.
  • Chatting with a doctor online and they ask you your favorite kind of beans and then they're like "oh yeah you definitely need Narcan" and write you a prescription.
  • Getting your Narcan certification and treating every human interaction as an opportunity to deploy your Narcan.
  • Mr. Zombie.
  • Rob Zombie doing the "What is Love" head bob in his Dragula.
  • Withholding the Dragula for most of the music video, like how they didn't show the shark for most of Jaws.
  • Extremely tall guitars.
  • A tiki head spray painted silver.
  • T-posing Rob Zombie singing at the ceiling.
  • A woman who is in this music video to not wear a lot of clothes
  • Ghost Dad playing keytar in the back.
  • The most adorable Rob Zombie.
  • The origin of the silver headed tiki robot.
  • The silver headed tiki robot doing a high kick.
  • Watching the music video for Dragula and then excitedly searching Craigslist for hearses.
  • A hearse with a tramp stamp.
  • The two happiest days you'll ever have with your hearse.
  • hearsehub.com
  • Local rug artists.
  • The kind of person who would think it's fun to role play a Spirit Halloween employee.
  • Coronavirus is transforming the death care industry, according to Funeral and Cemetery News on hearsehub.com.
  • Getting a hearse long enough to be pulled by a mini dachshund.
  • Logrolling the snake coffin over a series of snake pallbearers.
  • Crowdsurfing for Snakes.
  • A guy dressed up like Pokemon Go for Halloween where you spin his helmet to dispense a Pokeball and then throw the Pokeball at Pokemon that are also part of the costume.
  • Reverse trick or treating.
  • Setting up a haunted maze in the front yard of every house you trick or treat at and when nobody answers you have to just wait for them to get home because dang it you spend half an hour setting up the maze.
  • Kill or Queen?

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+b7_qSXiM ]]> Jim Stormdancer 105. Ficus on a Leash https://topiclords.com/ficus-on-a-leash 89926c1d-f1ea-47bf-ac6a-1793760682d8 Mon, 25 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Tyriq and Chris. We discuss how cars age vs. how people age, learning the wrong lessons from chilldren's media, BOFH: Servers Under Siege, Korn - Freak on a Leash, whether dreams are boring, and how running is just like walking but faster. 1:09:34 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Make game.
  • The properties of houseplants.
  • TikToks of feral houseplants.
  • Three people trying to remember the name of the musical starring Rick Moranis about carnivorous plant.
  • One (1) 2004 Toyota Camry, tan.
  • Speaker covers turning into sand.
  • Sometimes being in charge of your body and sometimes being in charge of your car and sometimes being in charge of both.
  • A make of cars as an enormous number of identical twins.
  • Paint is shirts for cars.
  • Whether paint is shirts for cars or tattoos for cars.
  • Coming home with a new nose and nobody recognizes you.
  • Cars doing most of their aging in instants.
  • Seeing a car for the first time in many years and being unsure whether it accumulated all those dents and scratches over many years, or if someone took a hammer to it five minutes ago.
  • An airplane outside of your house waiting for you to finish recording this podcast so you can board.
  • Plastic surgery for an airplane.
  • Getting tired looking at your aging car so you cover it with sweet blue LEDs and now nobody can ever look at it again.
  • Being sarcastic in movie for children who are too young to understand sarcasm.
  • What happens when young foolish screenwriters try to write wise old characters.
  • Bad ways of teaching history.
  • Teaching only the things you can test.
  • Learning how to extract meaning from the things you read.
  • Triaging the attention paid to your students so your ignore your best students who don't need your help but also ignoring your worst students because what the hell am I gonna do with this guy??
  • A fun movie depicting a series of events that happen.
  • Whether hitting people with sticks is fun.
  • Bastard Operator From Hell.
  • Sysadmins writing revenge fantasies on Usenet about screwing over their incompetent users.
  • Indie games from the early aughts that are playable on the Amiga and Commodore 64.
  • A sysadmin with a rocket launcher.
  • Pokey the Penguin.
  • Arctic Circle-Candy.
  • All the Pokey the Penguin fan games that came from the Pokey the Penguin mailing list.
  • Prodly the Puffin.
  • Parchment, the Z-Machine interpreter written in JavaScript.
  • 0-Hour Game Jam.
  • RPG Maker vs. RPG Maker '99.
  • Coming on the show and donating of your time and topics.
  • Indie games starting to exist now that mainstream games are made by dozens of people.
  • MadMaze.
  • LadderMan: He's a man! He's a ladder!
  • Whether the video for Freak on a Leash could be made today and still be western-style animation.
  • Extremely red coffee.
  • Whether they're pouring steaming blood into this coffee mug or maybe you just have Flux on.
  • Playing hopscotch at the precipice of a cliff.
  • A cop drawing a gun to stop you from jumping off a cliff.
  • Where's Hopscotch Girl?
  • The kind of person who would prominently display a cookie jar and never fill it.
  • A speeding bullet rapidly leaving a party like "this party sucks"
  • A hundred page forum thread arguing about whether the plane on a treadmill will take off.
  • Weird creatures that have eyes but no mouth and vice versa.
  • A bullet bee making bullet honey.
  • A music video that is just a Ganon fight with two posters firing bullets back and forth at each other.
  • A bullet intended to pierce someone's ear but it just goes right through their gauge.
  • A DOS program you can use with your SoundBlaster.
  • A blanket you can use to increase the strangeness of your dreams.
  • Whether most people have boring dreams or whether most people are just bad storytellers.
  • Things happening because of other things.
  • Dreams where the whole dream is that you know a fact.
  • How to know whether someone is the president of Nairobi.
  • Running on the path you used to walk on and seeing way more bugs per minute.
  • Gauging your mouth so that you can collect even more bugs while running.
  • Installing a whistle tip in your mouth so you make an incredibly loud whistling noise while running around.
  • Getting into blood doping just because you want to get high.
  • The nicest form of Mustard Gas.
  • Soaking your clothes with essential oil of lavender so passers by are like "I love the smell of lavender" and then they die because all the oxygen has been replaced with lavender.
  • The new exercise fad where you go running while looking behind you, terrified.
  • Bubb Rubb lauding Missile Tips. "The missiles go woooo!"
  • Being super into being witnessed.
  • Throwing a stumble scramble into your jogging routine and everybody around you panicking as they try to figure out what you're running from.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Make game.
  • The properties of houseplants.
  • TikToks of feral houseplants.
  • Three people trying to remember the name of the musical starring Rick Moranis about carnivorous plant.
  • One (1) 2004 Toyota Camry, tan.
  • Speaker covers turning into sand.
  • Sometimes being in charge of your body and sometimes being in charge of your car and sometimes being in charge of both.
  • A make of cars as an enormous number of identical twins.
  • Paint is shirts for cars.
  • Whether paint is shirts for cars or tattoos for cars.
  • Coming home with a new nose and nobody recognizes you.
  • Cars doing most of their aging in instants.
  • Seeing a car for the first time in many years and being unsure whether it accumulated all those dents and scratches over many years, or if someone took a hammer to it five minutes ago.
  • An airplane outside of your house waiting for you to finish recording this podcast so you can board.
  • Plastic surgery for an airplane.
  • Getting tired looking at your aging car so you cover it with sweet blue LEDs and now nobody can ever look at it again.
  • Being sarcastic in movie for children who are too young to understand sarcasm.
  • What happens when young foolish screenwriters try to write wise old characters.
  • Bad ways of teaching history.
  • Teaching only the things you can test.
  • Learning how to extract meaning from the things you read.
  • Triaging the attention paid to your students so your ignore your best students who don't need your help but also ignoring your worst students because what the hell am I gonna do with this guy??
  • A fun movie depicting a series of events that happen.
  • Whether hitting people with sticks is fun.
  • Bastard Operator From Hell.
  • Sysadmins writing revenge fantasies on Usenet about screwing over their incompetent users.
  • Indie games from the early aughts that are playable on the Amiga and Commodore 64.
  • A sysadmin with a rocket launcher.
  • Pokey the Penguin.
  • Arctic Circle-Candy.
  • All the Pokey the Penguin fan games that came from the Pokey the Penguin mailing list.
  • Prodly the Puffin.
  • Parchment, the Z-Machine interpreter written in JavaScript.
  • 0-Hour Game Jam.
  • RPG Maker vs. RPG Maker '99.
  • Coming on the show and donating of your time and topics.
  • Indie games starting to exist now that mainstream games are made by dozens of people.
  • MadMaze.
  • LadderMan: He's a man! He's a ladder!
  • Whether the video for Freak on a Leash could be made today and still be western-style animation.
  • Extremely red coffee.
  • Whether they're pouring steaming blood into this coffee mug or maybe you just have Flux on.
  • Playing hopscotch at the precipice of a cliff.
  • A cop drawing a gun to stop you from jumping off a cliff.
  • Where's Hopscotch Girl?
  • The kind of person who would prominently display a cookie jar and never fill it.
  • A speeding bullet rapidly leaving a party like "this party sucks"
  • A hundred page forum thread arguing about whether the plane on a treadmill will take off.
  • Weird creatures that have eyes but no mouth and vice versa.
  • A bullet bee making bullet honey.
  • A music video that is just a Ganon fight with two posters firing bullets back and forth at each other.
  • A bullet intended to pierce someone's ear but it just goes right through their gauge.
  • A DOS program you can use with your SoundBlaster.
  • A blanket you can use to increase the strangeness of your dreams.
  • Whether most people have boring dreams or whether most people are just bad storytellers.
  • Things happening because of other things.
  • Dreams where the whole dream is that you know a fact.
  • How to know whether someone is the president of Nairobi.
  • Running on the path you used to walk on and seeing way more bugs per minute.
  • Gauging your mouth so that you can collect even more bugs while running.
  • Installing a whistle tip in your mouth so you make an incredibly loud whistling noise while running around.
  • Getting into blood doping just because you want to get high.
  • The nicest form of Mustard Gas.
  • Soaking your clothes with essential oil of lavender so passers by are like "I love the smell of lavender" and then they die because all the oxygen has been replaced with lavender.
  • The new exercise fad where you go running while looking behind you, terrified.
  • Bubb Rubb lauding Missile Tips. "The missiles go woooo!"
  • Being super into being witnessed.
  • Throwing a stumble scramble into your jogging routine and everybody around you panicking as they try to figure out what you're running from.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Make game.
  • The properties of houseplants.
  • TikToks of feral houseplants.
  • Three people trying to remember the name of the musical starring Rick Moranis about carnivorous plant.
  • One (1) 2004 Toyota Camry, tan.
  • Speaker covers turning into sand.
  • Sometimes being in charge of your body and sometimes being in charge of your car and sometimes being in charge of both.
  • A make of cars as an enormous number of identical twins.
  • Paint is shirts for cars.
  • Whether paint is shirts for cars or tattoos for cars.
  • Coming home with a new nose and nobody recognizes you.
  • Cars doing most of their aging in instants.
  • Seeing a car for the first time in many years and being unsure whether it accumulated all those dents and scratches over many years, or if someone took a hammer to it five minutes ago.
  • An airplane outside of your house waiting for you to finish recording this podcast so you can board.
  • Plastic surgery for an airplane.
  • Getting tired looking at your aging car so you cover it with sweet blue LEDs and now nobody can ever look at it again.
  • Being sarcastic in movie for children who are too young to understand sarcasm.
  • What happens when young foolish screenwriters try to write wise old characters.
  • Bad ways of teaching history.
  • Teaching only the things you can test.
  • Learning how to extract meaning from the things you read.
  • Triaging the attention paid to your students so your ignore your best students who don't need your help but also ignoring your worst students because what the hell am I gonna do with this guy??
  • A fun movie depicting a series of events that happen.
  • Whether hitting people with sticks is fun.
  • Bastard Operator From Hell.
  • Sysadmins writing revenge fantasies on Usenet about screwing over their incompetent users.
  • Indie games from the early aughts that are playable on the Amiga and Commodore 64.
  • A sysadmin with a rocket launcher.
  • Pokey the Penguin.
  • Arctic Circle-Candy.
  • All the Pokey the Penguin fan games that came from the Pokey the Penguin mailing list.
  • Prodly the Puffin.
  • Parchment, the Z-Machine interpreter written in JavaScript.
  • 0-Hour Game Jam.
  • RPG Maker vs. RPG Maker '99.
  • Coming on the show and donating of your time and topics.
  • Indie games starting to exist now that mainstream games are made by dozens of people.
  • MadMaze.
  • LadderMan: He's a man! He's a ladder!
  • Whether the video for Freak on a Leash could be made today and still be western-style animation.
  • Extremely red coffee.
  • Whether they're pouring steaming blood into this coffee mug or maybe you just have Flux on.
  • Playing hopscotch at the precipice of a cliff.
  • A cop drawing a gun to stop you from jumping off a cliff.
  • Where's Hopscotch Girl?
  • The kind of person who would prominently display a cookie jar and never fill it.
  • A speeding bullet rapidly leaving a party like "this party sucks"
  • A hundred page forum thread arguing about whether the plane on a treadmill will take off.
  • Weird creatures that have eyes but no mouth and vice versa.
  • A bullet bee making bullet honey.
  • A music video that is just a Ganon fight with two posters firing bullets back and forth at each other.
  • A bullet intended to pierce someone's ear but it just goes right through their gauge.
  • A DOS program you can use with your SoundBlaster.
  • A blanket you can use to increase the strangeness of your dreams.
  • Whether most people have boring dreams or whether most people are just bad storytellers.
  • Things happening because of other things.
  • Dreams where the whole dream is that you know a fact.
  • How to know whether someone is the president of Nairobi.
  • Running on the path you used to walk on and seeing way more bugs per minute.
  • Gauging your mouth so that you can collect even more bugs while running.
  • Installing a whistle tip in your mouth so you make an incredibly loud whistling noise while running around.
  • Getting into blood doping just because you want to get high.
  • The nicest form of Mustard Gas.
  • Soaking your clothes with essential oil of lavender so passers by are like "I love the smell of lavender" and then they die because all the oxygen has been replaced with lavender.
  • The new exercise fad where you go running while looking behind you, terrified.
  • Bubb Rubb lauding Missile Tips. "The missiles go woooo!"
  • Being super into being witnessed.
  • Throwing a stumble scramble into your jogging routine and everybody around you panicking as they try to figure out what you're running from.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+4QiHLH4_ ]]> Jim Stormdancer 104. Truck Nut, Singular https://topiclords.com/truck-nut-singular 2a917bd1-954b-4c44-af00-6affbf505cc4 Mon, 18 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Elena and Nova. We discuss being a professional matchmaker, The Mother Of All Demos, the wine-dark sea, Starlight Brigade, and challenges in scaling community organizing. 1:02:30 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Lack of confidence in your chocolate opinions.
  • Chocolate naan.
  • Fruit esters.
  • Chocolove.
  • A really mean fruit tart.
  • Giving the listeners homework.
  • Being self employed and feeling like you're constantly behind on some imaginary metric you haven't made up yet.
  • Propinquity.
  • Receiving an encrypted email asking if you want to work on a secret project and telling everybody about it on this show.
  • The Scoville scale of tidiness.
  • Doing an extremely tedious test to see if you have ADHD.
  • Laminating your ADHD certificate so you can keep it in your wallet in case you have to prove to someone that you have ADHD.
  • The power differential in relationships where one person is much more attractive than the other.
  • Retaining a panel of judges to rate all your clients' attractiveness from 1 to 10.
  • Video chatting someone who refuses to tell you where they work and you say "I'm writing down here that you work at Facebook" and then they immediately tell you where they really work, or if they just hang up then you know they work at Facebook.
  • Striving to get a good grade on your dating life, something that is normal and possible to achieve.
  • Instead of filling out your dating profile, just clicking "I'm feeling lucky."
  • The On Line System.
  • Whether smartphones are good.
  • If Facebook were more like MySpace and you could include Javascript in your status update so your status emits butterflies.
  • When Twitter didn't sanitize Javascript out of SVG uploads so you could include playable games in your avatar image.
  • TI calculators as a way to learn to program.
  • Giving kids these days the uphill-both-ways speech about how much worse TI calculators were in your day.
  • Tracker music on TI calculators.
  • From the future or from Xerox PARC?
  • What Apple did and failed to do with vertical integration.
  • An opportunity for disruption.
  • Running Turing-complete PostScript on your font cartridge.
  • Running Doom on your font cartridge.
  • The history of color perception.
  • The history of what color wine is.
  • Zeus' eyebrow color.
  • Whether all ancient Greeks were color blind or just Homer.
  • Greco-Roman poetic studies focusing on light and shadow but totally ignoring hue.
  • Dark in hue vs. dark in mood.
  • Stars that don't twinkle.
  • Catching stars from the sky by spraying them with water first.
  • A spaceship made of ferrofluid.
  • Not remembering any anime but remembering all their theme songs.
  • A genre of TV show that can only exist when there is disparity in the global economy.
  • First being scared of hyperspeed and then enjoying it and then being angry at it in the space of a few seconds.
  • Fantasy triangles.
  • A spaceship with truck nuts.
  • An ensemble of different animated character archetypes.
  • Establishing personality via the object the character is holding for their two seconds of screen time.
  • Trapping the protagonist in a simulation where they have to pretend to be a child chasing a star forever or until they sit up from the chair because it's not a very effective trap.
  • Banging on the geodesic Epcot sphere to be let inside.
  • Secret Service Ralph finally being promoted to pilot but insisting that he still be called Secret Service Ralph.
  • Everybody getting one Truck Nut and knowing you found your soul mate because your Truck Nuts match and you can pair them up.
  • Doing your best to bring up the arm count average.
  • Commander Meowch.
  • Using sentiment analysis to determine whether chat room users are about to be in a fight.
  • A Fletcher, meaning one who teleports around.
  • Figuring out which kind of moderator interventions will lead to good outcomes.
  • The September That Never Ended.
  • How to grow from a small community into a large community without changing the culture.
  • Being yelled at by 100 people each of whom aren't having the experience of harassing somebody.
  • Whether you can get rid of a forum user who is following all the rules but just nobody likes them.
  • Hot Allostatic Load.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Lack of confidence in your chocolate opinions.
  • Chocolate naan.
  • Fruit esters.
  • Chocolove.
  • A really mean fruit tart.
  • Giving the listeners homework.
  • Being self employed and feeling like you're constantly behind on some imaginary metric you haven't made up yet.
  • Propinquity.
  • Receiving an encrypted email asking if you want to work on a secret project and telling everybody about it on this show.
  • The Scoville scale of tidiness.
  • Doing an extremely tedious test to see if you have ADHD.
  • Laminating your ADHD certificate so you can keep it in your wallet in case you have to prove to someone that you have ADHD.
  • The power differential in relationships where one person is much more attractive than the other.
  • Retaining a panel of judges to rate all your clients' attractiveness from 1 to 10.
  • Video chatting someone who refuses to tell you where they work and you say "I'm writing down here that you work at Facebook" and then they immediately tell you where they really work, or if they just hang up then you know they work at Facebook.
  • Striving to get a good grade on your dating life, something that is normal and possible to achieve.
  • Instead of filling out your dating profile, just clicking "I'm feeling lucky."
  • The On Line System.
  • Whether smartphones are good.
  • If Facebook were more like MySpace and you could include Javascript in your status update so your status emits butterflies.
  • When Twitter didn't sanitize Javascript out of SVG uploads so you could include playable games in your avatar image.
  • TI calculators as a way to learn to program.
  • Giving kids these days the uphill-both-ways speech about how much worse TI calculators were in your day.
  • Tracker music on TI calculators.
  • From the future or from Xerox PARC?
  • What Apple did and failed to do with vertical integration.
  • An opportunity for disruption.
  • Running Turing-complete PostScript on your font cartridge.
  • Running Doom on your font cartridge.
  • The history of color perception.
  • The history of what color wine is.
  • Zeus' eyebrow color.
  • Whether all ancient Greeks were color blind or just Homer.
  • Greco-Roman poetic studies focusing on light and shadow but totally ignoring hue.
  • Dark in hue vs. dark in mood.
  • Stars that don't twinkle.
  • Catching stars from the sky by spraying them with water first.
  • A spaceship made of ferrofluid.
  • Not remembering any anime but remembering all their theme songs.
  • A genre of TV show that can only exist when there is disparity in the global economy.
  • First being scared of hyperspeed and then enjoying it and then being angry at it in the space of a few seconds.
  • Fantasy triangles.
  • A spaceship with truck nuts.
  • An ensemble of different animated character archetypes.
  • Establishing personality via the object the character is holding for their two seconds of screen time.
  • Trapping the protagonist in a simulation where they have to pretend to be a child chasing a star forever or until they sit up from the chair because it's not a very effective trap.
  • Banging on the geodesic Epcot sphere to be let inside.
  • Secret Service Ralph finally being promoted to pilot but insisting that he still be called Secret Service Ralph.
  • Everybody getting one Truck Nut and knowing you found your soul mate because your Truck Nuts match and you can pair them up.
  • Doing your best to bring up the arm count average.
  • Commander Meowch.
  • Using sentiment analysis to determine whether chat room users are about to be in a fight.
  • A Fletcher, meaning one who teleports around.
  • Figuring out which kind of moderator interventions will lead to good outcomes.
  • The September That Never Ended.
  • How to grow from a small community into a large community without changing the culture.
  • Being yelled at by 100 people each of whom aren't having the experience of harassing somebody.
  • Whether you can get rid of a forum user who is following all the rules but just nobody likes them.
  • Hot Allostatic Load.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Lack of confidence in your chocolate opinions.
  • Chocolate naan.
  • Fruit esters.
  • Chocolove.
  • A really mean fruit tart.
  • Giving the listeners homework.
  • Being self employed and feeling like you're constantly behind on some imaginary metric you haven't made up yet.
  • Propinquity.
  • Receiving an encrypted email asking if you want to work on a secret project and telling everybody about it on this show.
  • The Scoville scale of tidiness.
  • Doing an extremely tedious test to see if you have ADHD.
  • Laminating your ADHD certificate so you can keep it in your wallet in case you have to prove to someone that you have ADHD.
  • The power differential in relationships where one person is much more attractive than the other.
  • Retaining a panel of judges to rate all your clients' attractiveness from 1 to 10.
  • Video chatting someone who refuses to tell you where they work and you say "I'm writing down here that you work at Facebook" and then they immediately tell you where they really work, or if they just hang up then you know they work at Facebook.
  • Striving to get a good grade on your dating life, something that is normal and possible to achieve.
  • Instead of filling out your dating profile, just clicking "I'm feeling lucky."
  • The On Line System.
  • Whether smartphones are good.
  • If Facebook were more like MySpace and you could include Javascript in your status update so your status emits butterflies.
  • When Twitter didn't sanitize Javascript out of SVG uploads so you could include playable games in your avatar image.
  • TI calculators as a way to learn to program.
  • Giving kids these days the uphill-both-ways speech about how much worse TI calculators were in your day.
  • Tracker music on TI calculators.
  • From the future or from Xerox PARC?
  • What Apple did and failed to do with vertical integration.
  • An opportunity for disruption.
  • Running Turing-complete PostScript on your font cartridge.
  • Running Doom on your font cartridge.
  • The history of color perception.
  • The history of what color wine is.
  • Zeus' eyebrow color.
  • Whether all ancient Greeks were color blind or just Homer.
  • Greco-Roman poetic studies focusing on light and shadow but totally ignoring hue.
  • Dark in hue vs. dark in mood.
  • Stars that don't twinkle.
  • Catching stars from the sky by spraying them with water first.
  • A spaceship made of ferrofluid.
  • Not remembering any anime but remembering all their theme songs.
  • A genre of TV show that can only exist when there is disparity in the global economy.
  • First being scared of hyperspeed and then enjoying it and then being angry at it in the space of a few seconds.
  • Fantasy triangles.
  • A spaceship with truck nuts.
  • An ensemble of different animated character archetypes.
  • Establishing personality via the object the character is holding for their two seconds of screen time.
  • Trapping the protagonist in a simulation where they have to pretend to be a child chasing a star forever or until they sit up from the chair because it's not a very effective trap.
  • Banging on the geodesic Epcot sphere to be let inside.
  • Secret Service Ralph finally being promoted to pilot but insisting that he still be called Secret Service Ralph.
  • Everybody getting one Truck Nut and knowing you found your soul mate because your Truck Nuts match and you can pair them up.
  • Doing your best to bring up the arm count average.
  • Commander Meowch.
  • Using sentiment analysis to determine whether chat room users are about to be in a fight.
  • A Fletcher, meaning one who teleports around.
  • Figuring out which kind of moderator interventions will lead to good outcomes.
  • The September That Never Ended.
  • How to grow from a small community into a large community without changing the culture.
  • Being yelled at by 100 people each of whom aren't having the experience of harassing somebody.
  • Whether you can get rid of a forum user who is following all the rules but just nobody likes them.
  • Hot Allostatic Load.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+rcysP7Gk ]]> Jim Stormdancer 103. The 303 Beethoven Used https://topiclords.com/the-303-beethoven-used 40780df7-467e-4624-9055-043de457bdc7 Mon, 11 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: Avery and Jay. We discuss Kowloon Walled City, internet communities gaining a reputation and then changing over time as members mature, the moral cost of the 303 Devilfish clone, KLF's Justified and Ancient, and Cyber Nexus internet cafe in Lakeland Florida and late 1990s internet cafes in general. 1:13:19 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Putting all of Spotify on shuffle.
  • Spotify rejecting your album because you put lyrics on the album cover.
  • Immersing yourself in a shitty visual aesthetic until you love it and the guy at the record label rejects your album cover.
  • Renaming your company to Content Distribution Baby now but the logo is still a baby on a CD.
  • The Godaddy man and the pets dot com sock puppet.
  • A demon face in the middle of a circuit board.
  • The part of the show where we look at image search results together.
  • Visiting Kowloon Walled City for the cheap dentistry.
  • Going to a nightmare city to get your teeth worked on: an opportunity to die.
  • One of several problems with working seven days a week and never taking a break.
  • Blame! or perhaps Blam!
  • Trying to live in the dystopian future where the construction nanobots run wild and convert all matter on the planet into endless nonsense staircases and ventilation ducts.
  • The protagonist having a really cool gun.
  • When the author doesn't know what's interesting about their own setting.
  • Having to write a novel because nobody's invented D&D source books yet.
  • Feeling like an outsider because you don't know which Dale Earnhardt crashed into a wall.
  • An online pixel art isometric place to hang out.
  • Being a jerk to people in an organized manner.
  • Audio production subforums.
  • How internet communities get radicalized and how they mellow out.
  • Ironically doing outrageous stuff on the internet.
  • The strange purity of being ahead of the curve.
  • Memes as a bannable offense.
  • Getting a Something Awful forum account for your birthday and never looking at it because you don't like awful things.
  • A synthesizer for the singer songwriter who doesn't have a bass player.
  • Discovering the future of techno in the bargain bin.
  • The history of the TB-303.
  • The Prophet-5 vs. the Prophet-6.
  • A drum pad that is the first of its kind.
  • The thing with the egg breaking against a wall and how you always side with the egg.
  • Creating reproductions of saught after out of print old stuff.
  • Having two guitars, one tuned in fifths and one tuned like a ukulele.
  • Writing music that could never be played.
  • Making games because you want to get your music in front of people.
  • Jim Stormdancer and the Frog Fractions Players.
  • Finally receiving the obscurity you've been craving.
  • Writing a book about the KLF as a lens into your particular moral philosophy.
  • Drum or Brown?
  • Doom Demon Invisible.
  • 5 times voted CMA female vocalist Tammy Wynette.
  • Trying to gesture at Discordianism or other forms of alternative mysticism.
  • Making a new game in character as a character from your last game.
  • The Burning Man man.
  • Presented with the Most Coveted Living Legend Award Sponsored By TNN.
  • Hiring randos to sing and play instruments on your album and hiring entirely different randos to be in your music video.
  • King Boy D and the other guy.
  • Burning a million quid and then going around asking people why you burned a million quid.
  • Good names for internet cafes.
  • A square of computers.
  • Not recognizing Stargate decor and assuming it's just sci fi Egypt themed.
  • Losing at Quake for your birthday while your parents watch a Pink Floyd DVD with the owner of the Internet cafe.
  • Which one is Cyber and which one is Nexus?
  • Not remembering why your band was invited to play a set at the Interface of Language and Technology.
  • That's a level 12 mage, get off of that!
  • Whether an internet cafe is the same thing as a cyber cafe.
  • The regular at your coffee shop who scalps tickets for a living.
  • Whipping out a 61 key MIDI controller to write tracks at Starbucks.
  • Trying to avoid situations where you'd accidentally give a philosophy lecture.
  • What is an organism and what organisms do.
  • Whether Aristotle knows that whales are mammals.
  • A category of things that have an effect.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Putting all of Spotify on shuffle.
  • Spotify rejecting your album because you put lyrics on the album cover.
  • Immersing yourself in a shitty visual aesthetic until you love it and the guy at the record label rejects your album cover.
  • Renaming your company to Content Distribution Baby now but the logo is still a baby on a CD.
  • The Godaddy man and the pets dot com sock puppet.
  • A demon face in the middle of a circuit board.
  • The part of the show where we look at image search results together.
  • Visiting Kowloon Walled City for the cheap dentistry.
  • Going to a nightmare city to get your teeth worked on: an opportunity to die.
  • One of several problems with working seven days a week and never taking a break.
  • Blame! or perhaps Blam!
  • Trying to live in the dystopian future where the construction nanobots run wild and convert all matter on the planet into endless nonsense staircases and ventilation ducts.
  • The protagonist having a really cool gun.
  • When the author doesn't know what's interesting about their own setting.
  • Having to write a novel because nobody's invented D&D source books yet.
  • Feeling like an outsider because you don't know which Dale Earnhardt crashed into a wall.
  • An online pixel art isometric place to hang out.
  • Being a jerk to people in an organized manner.
  • Audio production subforums.
  • How internet communities get radicalized and how they mellow out.
  • Ironically doing outrageous stuff on the internet.
  • The strange purity of being ahead of the curve.
  • Memes as a bannable offense.
  • Getting a Something Awful forum account for your birthday and never looking at it because you don't like awful things.
  • A synthesizer for the singer songwriter who doesn't have a bass player.
  • Discovering the future of techno in the bargain bin.
  • The history of the TB-303.
  • The Prophet-5 vs. the Prophet-6.
  • A drum pad that is the first of its kind.
  • The thing with the egg breaking against a wall and how you always side with the egg.
  • Creating reproductions of saught after out of print old stuff.
  • Having two guitars, one tuned in fifths and one tuned like a ukulele.
  • Writing music that could never be played.
  • Making games because you want to get your music in front of people.
  • Jim Stormdancer and the Frog Fractions Players.
  • Finally receiving the obscurity you've been craving.
  • Writing a book about the KLF as a lens into your particular moral philosophy.
  • Drum or Brown?
  • Doom Demon Invisible.
  • 5 times voted CMA female vocalist Tammy Wynette.
  • Trying to gesture at Discordianism or other forms of alternative mysticism.
  • Making a new game in character as a character from your last game.
  • The Burning Man man.
  • Presented with the Most Coveted Living Legend Award Sponsored By TNN.
  • Hiring randos to sing and play instruments on your album and hiring entirely different randos to be in your music video.
  • King Boy D and the other guy.
  • Burning a million quid and then going around asking people why you burned a million quid.
  • Good names for internet cafes.
  • A square of computers.
  • Not recognizing Stargate decor and assuming it's just sci fi Egypt themed.
  • Losing at Quake for your birthday while your parents watch a Pink Floyd DVD with the owner of the Internet cafe.
  • Which one is Cyber and which one is Nexus?
  • Not remembering why your band was invited to play a set at the Interface of Language and Technology.
  • That's a level 12 mage, get off of that!
  • Whether an internet cafe is the same thing as a cyber cafe.
  • The regular at your coffee shop who scalps tickets for a living.
  • Whipping out a 61 key MIDI controller to write tracks at Starbucks.
  • Trying to avoid situations where you'd accidentally give a philosophy lecture.
  • What is an organism and what organisms do.
  • Whether Aristotle knows that whales are mammals.
  • A category of things that have an effect.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Putting all of Spotify on shuffle.
  • Spotify rejecting your album because you put lyrics on the album cover.
  • Immersing yourself in a shitty visual aesthetic until you love it and the guy at the record label rejects your album cover.
  • Renaming your company to Content Distribution Baby now but the logo is still a baby on a CD.
  • The Godaddy man and the pets dot com sock puppet.
  • A demon face in the middle of a circuit board.
  • The part of the show where we look at image search results together.
  • Visiting Kowloon Walled City for the cheap dentistry.
  • Going to a nightmare city to get your teeth worked on: an opportunity to die.
  • One of several problems with working seven days a week and never taking a break.
  • Blame! or perhaps Blam!
  • Trying to live in the dystopian future where the construction nanobots run wild and convert all matter on the planet into endless nonsense staircases and ventilation ducts.
  • The protagonist having a really cool gun.
  • When the author doesn't know what's interesting about their own setting.
  • Having to write a novel because nobody's invented D&D source books yet.
  • Feeling like an outsider because you don't know which Dale Earnhardt crashed into a wall.
  • An online pixel art isometric place to hang out.
  • Being a jerk to people in an organized manner.
  • Audio production subforums.
  • How internet communities get radicalized and how they mellow out.
  • Ironically doing outrageous stuff on the internet.
  • The strange purity of being ahead of the curve.
  • Memes as a bannable offense.
  • Getting a Something Awful forum account for your birthday and never looking at it because you don't like awful things.
  • A synthesizer for the singer songwriter who doesn't have a bass player.
  • Discovering the future of techno in the bargain bin.
  • The history of the TB-303.
  • The Prophet-5 vs. the Prophet-6.
  • A drum pad that is the first of its kind.
  • The thing with the egg breaking against a wall and how you always side with the egg.
  • Creating reproductions of saught after out of print old stuff.
  • Having two guitars, one tuned in fifths and one tuned like a ukulele.
  • Writing music that could never be played.
  • Making games because you want to get your music in front of people.
  • Jim Stormdancer and the Frog Fractions Players.
  • Finally receiving the obscurity you've been craving.
  • Writing a book about the KLF as a lens into your particular moral philosophy.
  • Drum or Brown?
  • Doom Demon Invisible.
  • 5 times voted CMA female vocalist Tammy Wynette.
  • Trying to gesture at Discordianism or other forms of alternative mysticism.
  • Making a new game in character as a character from your last game.
  • The Burning Man man.
  • Presented with the Most Coveted Living Legend Award Sponsored By TNN.
  • Hiring randos to sing and play instruments on your album and hiring entirely different randos to be in your music video.
  • King Boy D and the other guy.
  • Burning a million quid and then going around asking people why you burned a million quid.
  • Good names for internet cafes.
  • A square of computers.
  • Not recognizing Stargate decor and assuming it's just sci fi Egypt themed.
  • Losing at Quake for your birthday while your parents watch a Pink Floyd DVD with the owner of the Internet cafe.
  • Which one is Cyber and which one is Nexus?
  • Not remembering why your band was invited to play a set at the Interface of Language and Technology.
  • That's a level 12 mage, get off of that!
  • Whether an internet cafe is the same thing as a cyber cafe.
  • The regular at your coffee shop who scalps tickets for a living.
  • Whipping out a 61 key MIDI controller to write tracks at Starbucks.
  • Trying to avoid situations where you'd accidentally give a philosophy lecture.
  • What is an organism and what organisms do.
  • Whether Aristotle knows that whales are mammals.
  • A category of things that have an effect.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+xr7ICn15 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 102. I Wouldn't Touch That With a 3.048 Meter Pole https://topiclords.com/i-wouldnt-touch-that-with-a-3048-meter-pole c64ed0e5-8784-43cd-9bbc-8f8e289847c3 Mon, 04 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: Nathan and Tyriq. We discuss the length of poles with which to not touch things, how bands make money, why the Doom plasma rifle is like that, Yeasayer's Ambling Alp, and why the Metaverse looks so bland. 1:02:50 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • The length of poles with which to not touch things as a measure of repulsion
  • Weezer just released a new album. You can already listen to it, on demand, for free on youtube. How do they, or any band make money today?
  • Why is the Doom Plasma Rifle like that
  • Yeasayer - Ambling Alp
  • Why does the Metaverse look so bland?

Microtopics:

  • Getting feedback and becoming insecure.
  • Entertaining each other.
  • 400 Microsoft points.
  • What you would do if you were lame.
  • Whatever you call the boy version of Lisa Frank.
  • Pillboxing.
  • The consequences of an extremely wide screen.
  • The Big Steel Battalion Box.
  • Various pole lengths, esp. the one from How The Grinch Stole Christmas.
  • The length of the pole with which you don't want to touch continue.
  • A ten foot pole with haptic feedback so you can touch things with it.
  • Poking something with a stick to discover how gross it is.
  • Whether pole vaulting is ridiculous.
  • Whether pole vaulting is real or just exists in Tremors and The Last Jedi.
  • That Dutch town where everybody uses communal poles to vault across the river, and how it's all Uber poles now and you have to pay rental fees.
  • Nobody being trained for pole vaulting but the coach is like "does anyone want to just try it so we don't lose this pole vaulting event by default" and everyone looks at you.
  • The most salient thing about pole vaulting.
  • How a band might still make money if some rando uploads their album to Youtube.
  • Content-ID's failure modes.
  • Living in a world where piracy won over paying for things.
  • Trying to watch a movie, where piracy is easier than figuring out how to pay, vs. trying to play a video game where paying is easier than figuring out how to pirate it
  • All the ways you can support a band financially other than paying for the music, because everyone just listens for free.
  • The most American gun ever made.
  • Whether the Doom plasma rifle overheats after it runs out of ammo.
  • Punishing the player for being careful.
  • What Tom Hall would've written in the Doom Bible about the plasma rifle if he still worked at id.
  • A geodesic dome with two of the triangles painted red.
  • A guy with a mirror for a face.
  • Someone who lives in the cheese.
  • Reverse nachos, where things come out of the cheese and eat you.
  • If the Grim Reaper had a mirror instead of a skull.
  • This Squishing Face.
  • Not being allowed to punch the mirror-faced boxer above the neck.
  • Trying to sing while people pull on your lips.
  • Getting drenched in VHS fluid.
  • Homer Simpson in hell taking and spitting out one bite each of infinite burgers.
  • Whether they are mustard men or cheese men.
  • Peeling off the cheese and realizing there is a dude in your cheese.
  • Taking a bite out of a chocolate Easter bunny and the live bunny inside wriggles out and hops away.
  • Mole.
  • The music video continuing to be weird while you talk about food.
  • All the naked people in the desert lying on astronaut blankets and closing their legs relative to the camera.
  • Making s'mores in a solar oven.
  • Extremely white flesh in the bright, bright sun.
  • Facebook giving the Olive Garden treatment to Second Life.
  • Making the Metaverse as uncool as possible.
  • Shipping a half dozen telepresence robots to every employee's house so they can have a conference call.
  • Gravitating towards whatever process or technology has the least friction.
  • Spelling it as if you are giving a gift to Bit Friday.
  • Possessivemommysbestgames.com
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • The length of poles with which to not touch things as a measure of repulsion
  • Weezer just released a new album. You can already listen to it, on demand, for free on youtube. How do they, or any band make money today?
  • Why is the Doom Plasma Rifle like that
  • Yeasayer - Ambling Alp
  • Why does the Metaverse look so bland?

Microtopics:

  • Getting feedback and becoming insecure.
  • Entertaining each other.
  • 400 Microsoft points.
  • What you would do if you were lame.
  • Whatever you call the boy version of Lisa Frank.
  • Pillboxing.
  • The consequences of an extremely wide screen.
  • The Big Steel Battalion Box.
  • Various pole lengths, esp. the one from How The Grinch Stole Christmas.
  • The length of the pole with which you don't want to touch continue.
  • A ten foot pole with haptic feedback so you can touch things with it.
  • Poking something with a stick to discover how gross it is.
  • Whether pole vaulting is ridiculous.
  • Whether pole vaulting is real or just exists in Tremors and The Last Jedi.
  • That Dutch town where everybody uses communal poles to vault across the river, and how it's all Uber poles now and you have to pay rental fees.
  • Nobody being trained for pole vaulting but the coach is like "does anyone want to just try it so we don't lose this pole vaulting event by default" and everyone looks at you.
  • The most salient thing about pole vaulting.
  • How a band might still make money if some rando uploads their album to Youtube.
  • Content-ID's failure modes.
  • Living in a world where piracy won over paying for things.
  • Trying to watch a movie, where piracy is easier than figuring out how to pay, vs. trying to play a video game where paying is easier than figuring out how to pirate it
  • All the ways you can support a band financially other than paying for the music, because everyone just listens for free.
  • The most American gun ever made.
  • Whether the Doom plasma rifle overheats after it runs out of ammo.
  • Punishing the player for being careful.
  • What Tom Hall would've written in the Doom Bible about the plasma rifle if he still worked at id.
  • A geodesic dome with two of the triangles painted red.
  • A guy with a mirror for a face.
  • Someone who lives in the cheese.
  • Reverse nachos, where things come out of the cheese and eat you.
  • If the Grim Reaper had a mirror instead of a skull.
  • This Squishing Face.
  • Not being allowed to punch the mirror-faced boxer above the neck.
  • Trying to sing while people pull on your lips.
  • Getting drenched in VHS fluid.
  • Homer Simpson in hell taking and spitting out one bite each of infinite burgers.
  • Whether they are mustard men or cheese men.
  • Peeling off the cheese and realizing there is a dude in your cheese.
  • Taking a bite out of a chocolate Easter bunny and the live bunny inside wriggles out and hops away.
  • Mole.
  • The music video continuing to be weird while you talk about food.
  • All the naked people in the desert lying on astronaut blankets and closing their legs relative to the camera.
  • Making s'mores in a solar oven.
  • Extremely white flesh in the bright, bright sun.
  • Facebook giving the Olive Garden treatment to Second Life.
  • Making the Metaverse as uncool as possible.
  • Shipping a half dozen telepresence robots to every employee's house so they can have a conference call.
  • Gravitating towards whatever process or technology has the least friction.
  • Spelling it as if you are giving a gift to Bit Friday.
  • Possessivemommysbestgames.com

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • The length of poles with which to not touch things as a measure of repulsion
  • Weezer just released a new album. You can already listen to it, on demand, for free on youtube. How do they, or any band make money today?
  • Why is the Doom Plasma Rifle like that
  • Yeasayer - Ambling Alp
  • Why does the Metaverse look so bland?

Microtopics:

  • Getting feedback and becoming insecure.
  • Entertaining each other.
  • 400 Microsoft points.
  • What you would do if you were lame.
  • Whatever you call the boy version of Lisa Frank.
  • Pillboxing.
  • The consequences of an extremely wide screen.
  • The Big Steel Battalion Box.
  • Various pole lengths, esp. the one from How The Grinch Stole Christmas.
  • The length of the pole with which you don't want to touch continue.
  • A ten foot pole with haptic feedback so you can touch things with it.
  • Poking something with a stick to discover how gross it is.
  • Whether pole vaulting is ridiculous.
  • Whether pole vaulting is real or just exists in Tremors and The Last Jedi.
  • That Dutch town where everybody uses communal poles to vault across the river, and how it's all Uber poles now and you have to pay rental fees.
  • Nobody being trained for pole vaulting but the coach is like "does anyone want to just try it so we don't lose this pole vaulting event by default" and everyone looks at you.
  • The most salient thing about pole vaulting.
  • How a band might still make money if some rando uploads their album to Youtube.
  • Content-ID's failure modes.
  • Living in a world where piracy won over paying for things.
  • Trying to watch a movie, where piracy is easier than figuring out how to pay, vs. trying to play a video game where paying is easier than figuring out how to pirate it
  • All the ways you can support a band financially other than paying for the music, because everyone just listens for free.
  • The most American gun ever made.
  • Whether the Doom plasma rifle overheats after it runs out of ammo.
  • Punishing the player for being careful.
  • What Tom Hall would've written in the Doom Bible about the plasma rifle if he still worked at id.
  • A geodesic dome with two of the triangles painted red.
  • A guy with a mirror for a face.
  • Someone who lives in the cheese.
  • Reverse nachos, where things come out of the cheese and eat you.
  • If the Grim Reaper had a mirror instead of a skull.
  • This Squishing Face.
  • Not being allowed to punch the mirror-faced boxer above the neck.
  • Trying to sing while people pull on your lips.
  • Getting drenched in VHS fluid.
  • Homer Simpson in hell taking and spitting out one bite each of infinite burgers.
  • Whether they are mustard men or cheese men.
  • Peeling off the cheese and realizing there is a dude in your cheese.
  • Taking a bite out of a chocolate Easter bunny and the live bunny inside wriggles out and hops away.
  • Mole.
  • The music video continuing to be weird while you talk about food.
  • All the naked people in the desert lying on astronaut blankets and closing their legs relative to the camera.
  • Making s'mores in a solar oven.
  • Extremely white flesh in the bright, bright sun.
  • Facebook giving the Olive Garden treatment to Second Life.
  • Making the Metaverse as uncool as possible.
  • Shipping a half dozen telepresence robots to every employee's house so they can have a conference call.
  • Gravitating towards whatever process or technology has the least friction.
  • Spelling it as if you are giving a gift to Bit Friday.
  • Possessivemommysbestgames.com

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+wYe3RC-v ]]> Jim Stormdancer 101. Flatty the Flat Globe https://topiclords.com/flatty-the-flat-globe a5402c41-6c5e-46bf-a6dd-43cd456b898f Mon, 27 Sep 2021 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Nick and Greg. We discuss anthropomorphized inanimate objects, Quaker names, why car doors get shitty shut, Go West - Call Me, what's on the grill if you're "grillin up some 'good boys,'" and overly complicated navel-gazing plots in video games. 1:04:23 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Completing the set of Duckfeed guests.
  • Health care simulation.
  • The moth having himself a journey.
  • Hydrodynamics of the bloodstream.
  • Little Square Things.
  • Filling your life with media about anthropomorphized inanimate objects.
  • Whether Data needs hair.
  • Giving your shiny yellow skin for legal reasons.
  • A talking garage that is hungry for cars.
  • Does that anthropomorphic talking chair even eat ass?
  • A talking map of the United States.
  • Whether someone already mentioned the talking photo booth.
  • Clocky the talking map.
  • The "marry it" joke.
  • Cortana receiving your one-star review of trying to rename this folder.
  • Preserved Fish.
  • Morris Morris, Jr.
  • Experience Burt Merrick.
  • Preserved Fish writing his own Wikipedia page.
  • Signing in to leave a flower.
  • Leaving a Blingee on your ancestor's grave.
  • A door that is shut but it's not flush with the doorway and the "door ajar" alarm goes off.
  • A car upgrade where if you partially close the door it closes it the rest of the way for you.
  • Why don't they make two planes out of the black box material, one on top of the other.
  • A car door that is in many respects shut.
  • Go back to sleep and wake up properly, dipshit.
  • Trying to make Shitty Shut happen with Gen Z by getting on TikTok and using a filter that makes you look young and doing meme dances.
  • Teaching your three year old to call it "shitty shut" and when grownups tell him he shouldn't use the word "shitty," whispering from the bushes "yes you should!"
  • Euphemism withdrawal.
  • Steadfastly refusing to swear but still calling it a shitpost because that's what you call it.
  • The clip art dude sailing across the screen.
  • Doing one dance and your shadow doing a slightly different dance.
  • Reshooting a scene but keeping the same shadows as before.
  • Pop quiz: sideburn on only one side of the face, or slept on a greasy bench?
  • An entertaining slow watch.
  • A fire hydrant made of a pie tin and aluminum foil.
  • Singing into a fan.
  • Everybody realizing that there is someone on the ceiling.
  • The Gentle Exorcist.
  • A sheriff labeled "boy."
  • A drug store full of a band.
  • The additional challenge of a mechanical bull mounted upside down on the ceiling.
  • Figuring out how to do a special effects shot for a story moment and then deciding to put the effect in every other shot regardless of whether it makes sense.
  • Watching a 40 year old music video and then tracking down the director and asking if you win a prize for being the first to notice a specific joke.
  • The falling yellow liquid spilling forth within the billiards bar.
  • Go low, Ken and sons.
  • Whether people say that they have some "bad" "boys" on the "grill," why don't you "pop" on "over."
  • The thing where you carve a hot dog into an octopus shape.
  • A hot dog that is too polite to burst if you put it in the microwave.
  • Why every dog is a "good boy" but none of them are great.
  • The Go West Music Video Cinematic Universe.
  • Bad boys who are also bad dancers.
  • The Ultimate Good Boy.
  • Running out the time rewind potion.
  • A puzzle game with story except for the enormous lore dump at the end.
  • Bob's Game.
  • Being really into the story of the development of Bob's Game except for all the pain and human suffering.
  • ARGeez.
  • Renaming your game to "OK" so nobody can search for it.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Completing the set of Duckfeed guests.
  • Health care simulation.
  • The moth having himself a journey.
  • Hydrodynamics of the bloodstream.
  • Little Square Things.
  • Filling your life with media about anthropomorphized inanimate objects.
  • Whether Data needs hair.
  • Giving your shiny yellow skin for legal reasons.
  • A talking garage that is hungry for cars.
  • Does that anthropomorphic talking chair even eat ass?
  • A talking map of the United States.
  • Whether someone already mentioned the talking photo booth.
  • Clocky the talking map.
  • The "marry it" joke.
  • Cortana receiving your one-star review of trying to rename this folder.
  • Preserved Fish.
  • Morris Morris, Jr.
  • Experience Burt Merrick.
  • Preserved Fish writing his own Wikipedia page.
  • Signing in to leave a flower.
  • Leaving a Blingee on your ancestor's grave.
  • A door that is shut but it's not flush with the doorway and the "door ajar" alarm goes off.
  • A car upgrade where if you partially close the door it closes it the rest of the way for you.
  • Why don't they make two planes out of the black box material, one on top of the other.
  • A car door that is in many respects shut.
  • Go back to sleep and wake up properly, dipshit.
  • Trying to make Shitty Shut happen with Gen Z by getting on TikTok and using a filter that makes you look young and doing meme dances.
  • Teaching your three year old to call it "shitty shut" and when grownups tell him he shouldn't use the word "shitty," whispering from the bushes "yes you should!"
  • Euphemism withdrawal.
  • Steadfastly refusing to swear but still calling it a shitpost because that's what you call it.
  • The clip art dude sailing across the screen.
  • Doing one dance and your shadow doing a slightly different dance.
  • Reshooting a scene but keeping the same shadows as before.
  • Pop quiz: sideburn on only one side of the face, or slept on a greasy bench?
  • An entertaining slow watch.
  • A fire hydrant made of a pie tin and aluminum foil.
  • Singing into a fan.
  • Everybody realizing that there is someone on the ceiling.
  • The Gentle Exorcist.
  • A sheriff labeled "boy."
  • A drug store full of a band.
  • The additional challenge of a mechanical bull mounted upside down on the ceiling.
  • Figuring out how to do a special effects shot for a story moment and then deciding to put the effect in every other shot regardless of whether it makes sense.
  • Watching a 40 year old music video and then tracking down the director and asking if you win a prize for being the first to notice a specific joke.
  • The falling yellow liquid spilling forth within the billiards bar.
  • Go low, Ken and sons.
  • Whether people say that they have some "bad" "boys" on the "grill," why don't you "pop" on "over."
  • The thing where you carve a hot dog into an octopus shape.
  • A hot dog that is too polite to burst if you put it in the microwave.
  • Why every dog is a "good boy" but none of them are great.
  • The Go West Music Video Cinematic Universe.
  • Bad boys who are also bad dancers.
  • The Ultimate Good Boy.
  • Running out the time rewind potion.
  • A puzzle game with story except for the enormous lore dump at the end.
  • Bob's Game.
  • Being really into the story of the development of Bob's Game except for all the pain and human suffering.
  • ARGeez.
  • Renaming your game to "OK" so nobody can search for it.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Completing the set of Duckfeed guests.
  • Health care simulation.
  • The moth having himself a journey.
  • Hydrodynamics of the bloodstream.
  • Little Square Things.
  • Filling your life with media about anthropomorphized inanimate objects.
  • Whether Data needs hair.
  • Giving your shiny yellow skin for legal reasons.
  • A talking garage that is hungry for cars.
  • Does that anthropomorphic talking chair even eat ass?
  • A talking map of the United States.
  • Whether someone already mentioned the talking photo booth.
  • Clocky the talking map.
  • The "marry it" joke.
  • Cortana receiving your one-star review of trying to rename this folder.
  • Preserved Fish.
  • Morris Morris, Jr.
  • Experience Burt Merrick.
  • Preserved Fish writing his own Wikipedia page.
  • Signing in to leave a flower.
  • Leaving a Blingee on your ancestor's grave.
  • A door that is shut but it's not flush with the doorway and the "door ajar" alarm goes off.
  • A car upgrade where if you partially close the door it closes it the rest of the way for you.
  • Why don't they make two planes out of the black box material, one on top of the other.
  • A car door that is in many respects shut.
  • Go back to sleep and wake up properly, dipshit.
  • Trying to make Shitty Shut happen with Gen Z by getting on TikTok and using a filter that makes you look young and doing meme dances.
  • Teaching your three year old to call it "shitty shut" and when grownups tell him he shouldn't use the word "shitty," whispering from the bushes "yes you should!"
  • Euphemism withdrawal.
  • Steadfastly refusing to swear but still calling it a shitpost because that's what you call it.
  • The clip art dude sailing across the screen.
  • Doing one dance and your shadow doing a slightly different dance.
  • Reshooting a scene but keeping the same shadows as before.
  • Pop quiz: sideburn on only one side of the face, or slept on a greasy bench?
  • An entertaining slow watch.
  • A fire hydrant made of a pie tin and aluminum foil.
  • Singing into a fan.
  • Everybody realizing that there is someone on the ceiling.
  • The Gentle Exorcist.
  • A sheriff labeled "boy."
  • A drug store full of a band.
  • The additional challenge of a mechanical bull mounted upside down on the ceiling.
  • Figuring out how to do a special effects shot for a story moment and then deciding to put the effect in every other shot regardless of whether it makes sense.
  • Watching a 40 year old music video and then tracking down the director and asking if you win a prize for being the first to notice a specific joke.
  • The falling yellow liquid spilling forth within the billiards bar.
  • Go low, Ken and sons.
  • Whether people say that they have some "bad" "boys" on the "grill," why don't you "pop" on "over."
  • The thing where you carve a hot dog into an octopus shape.
  • A hot dog that is too polite to burst if you put it in the microwave.
  • Why every dog is a "good boy" but none of them are great.
  • The Go West Music Video Cinematic Universe.
  • Bad boys who are also bad dancers.
  • The Ultimate Good Boy.
  • Running out the time rewind potion.
  • A puzzle game with story except for the enormous lore dump at the end.
  • Bob's Game.
  • Being really into the story of the development of Bob's Game except for all the pain and human suffering.
  • ARGeez.
  • Renaming your game to "OK" so nobody can search for it.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+bP2EXcMO ]]> Jim Stormdancer 100. Cold Brew Ham https://topiclords.com/cold-brew-ham 7142af10-ce90-46ca-a4a5-f21d6cdcdfab Mon, 20 Sep 2021 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Jenni and Chris. We discuss Lord Chumley, edgelord teens, Lordosis behavior, Lordi - The Riff, Lord Dunsany the metalhead rewilding his estate, and Time Lords. 59:23 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Lord Chumley
    • Topic Lords editor Esper Quinn weighs in on Transformer lore: "The second ever podcast I really worked on was called Sound.wav, a read-along Transformers comics podcast. I knew nothing about Transformers, and my friend Nell knew everything about them. We stuck to the IDW canon, but my understanding is, Transformers show up as naturally occurring "sparks" (a sort of semi-magical soul-piece) on the surface of the planet Cybertron, which if left to incubate will form a liquidmetal shell, which eventually becomes a full-on Transformer. (There's also something called Cold Construction which takes raw sparks and puts them in purpose built bodies, but whatever.) All of this means Transformers, in my mind, DO NOT qualify as actual robots. To me, a robot has to be built by somebody, but Transformers are just a metallic alien entity. On the podcast, we eventually had James Roberts, writer of the IDW comics series, and I confronted him with this: he agreed that Transformers are not technically robots. Felt pretty smart that day."
    • "Also, again I can only speak for the IDW canon, but Transformers on Cybertron don't have much of a concept of gender at all. Indeed, Transformers who were disconnected from society for millions of years and developed their own culture are the ones who sort of pioneered gender, purely as a cultural signifier. There's even explicitly trans transformers, who were known as one gender and switched to the other, and the storylines are handled pretty well in my opinion! (Other storylines, like the one explaining Arcee is a woman because she was experimented on by a mad Cybertronian scientist, are handled far less well.)"
    • "Transformers in IDW do have romance, and have officially recognized ceremonies for both 'amica endura' (equivalent to marriage), and 'conjunx endura' which is like eternal friendship."
    • "While you stepped out, there was brief discussion of Ultra Magnus and Minimus Ambus: Minimus Ambus is a tiny dude who wears the 'Ultra Magnus Armor,' Ultra Magnus being a sort of Dread Pirate Roberts semimythical figure of the universe. Good character, who has a good romance arc with Megatron!"
  • Is an edgelord phase a standard part of being a teen or what
  • Lordosis behavior
  • Lordi - The Riff
  • Lord Dunsany the metalhead lord rewilding his estate
  • Time Lords

Microtopics:

  • Taking a picture of a dog.
  • 140 strawberries.
  • Jim Not Knowing About Video Games Day.
  • Starting with how Smurfs fuck and then moving on to how Transformers fuck.
  • Transformers hanging out with humans because the humans can wipe them in places they can't reach.
  • Where Transformers come from in the various Transformers cosmologies.
  • How Grimlock built the Dinobots.
  • Sitting down with a screwdriver to make some buddies.
  • The hypothetical 1980s girl-child who might buy an Optimus Prime toy if it was wearing a pink bow on its head.
  • R.C., the hyper-pink Transformer with the wide, child-bearing hips.
  • Finally getting to the topic at hand.
  • Whether all Transformers are aromantic.
  • What kind of god would make a car in space where there's nothing to drive on.
  • The canonical term for when two Transformers are in a relationship.
  • Rarified Energon.
  • Prime's Rib, in which Future Feminists complain that there are no female Transformers so Optimus Prime constructs one from his own body parts.
  • The Wild 80s.
  • The British big game hunter who wanted to hunt the most dangerous game, Optimus Prime.
  • Mounting the nose of the plane you shot down as a trophy in your den. (The plane was actually grounded when you shot it.)
  • Whether teen edgelords are still a thing or whether teens are now performatively wholesome to freak out the olds.
  • The Alpha Teen.
  • The two genders of edgelord.
  • Toddlers hurting you so they can practice having empathy.
  • Accidentally promising a cat sexual favors.
  • The cat sticking its butt in your face so you'll lick it clean, because that's what the cat's mom did.
  • The innie arch vs the outie arch.
  • Bears playing 20 questions with themselves to determine whether you are also a bear.
  • The scientific term for scritches.
  • Sitting vs. standing up to wipe.
  • The various orders in which you could wipe, stand up, and flush.
  • Pushing vs. dragging.
  • Tai-chi vs. chai tea.
  • A picture of Lordi getting a vaccine.
  • A toilet in the shower.
  • The scene in Mad Max Fury Road where the guy with all the water hoses down the adulant throng below, except it's toilet paper instead of water.
  • Bringing the ugliest people you know on dates with you so you seem more attractive by comparison.
  • Whether it's still a cold cut if you heat it up.
  • Zombo Cop.
  • Making Video Content during the zombie apocalypse by putting GoPros on all the zombies.
  • Live streaming a zombie trying to walk into a brick wall.
  • Looking out on the zombie apocalypse and saying "time to finally eat the rich!"
  • The flashback explaining the origin story of the huge pile of bloody toilet paper.
  • Whether David Lynch explained something once.
  • The Lobster as a benchmark for bad date movies.
  • Pokemon that are weak to Basket.
  • Scientists studying the guillotine and determining that it's actually that basket your head lands in that kills you.
  • The worst part of the zombie apocalypse: when the self checkout tells you to wait for assistance, nobody ever comes.
  • The lordiest lord of them all.
  • A cool young lord.
  • A Jack Russell terrier named Beavis and Butt-Head.
  • Two dogs, one named Sneezy, Grumpy, Dopey, Happy, Sleepy, Bashful and Doc, and the other one named The Seven Dwarfs.
  • Hearing bird song you don't recognize, going to google and typing "Weee weee wha weee what's bird is this"
  • Shazam for bird call.
  • How to identify a bird that ages backwards.
  • An app that can take photos of an object and tell you whether it's a wizard in disguise.
  • Turning 25 and realizing that most movies are no longer about you at age 20.
  • Whether Doctor Who was based on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
  • Gene Roddenberry playing Willy Wonka.
  • The Gum Chewer.
  • Deleting a tweet in which you are cranky about Doctor Who.
  • Doctor Who showrunner Stephen Wolfram.
  • The vicar turning out the be a giant wasp and the author turning out to be a transphobe.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Lord Chumley
    • Topic Lords editor Esper Quinn weighs in on Transformer lore: "The second ever podcast I really worked on was called Sound.wav, a read-along Transformers comics podcast. I knew nothing about Transformers, and my friend Nell knew everything about them. We stuck to the IDW canon, but my understanding is, Transformers show up as naturally occurring "sparks" (a sort of semi-magical soul-piece) on the surface of the planet Cybertron, which if left to incubate will form a liquidmetal shell, which eventually becomes a full-on Transformer. (There's also something called Cold Construction which takes raw sparks and puts them in purpose built bodies, but whatever.) All of this means Transformers, in my mind, DO NOT qualify as actual robots. To me, a robot has to be built by somebody, but Transformers are just a metallic alien entity. On the podcast, we eventually had James Roberts, writer of the IDW comics series, and I confronted him with this: he agreed that Transformers are not technically robots. Felt pretty smart that day."
    • "Also, again I can only speak for the IDW canon, but Transformers on Cybertron don't have much of a concept of gender at all. Indeed, Transformers who were disconnected from society for millions of years and developed their own culture are the ones who sort of pioneered gender, purely as a cultural signifier. There's even explicitly trans transformers, who were known as one gender and switched to the other, and the storylines are handled pretty well in my opinion! (Other storylines, like the one explaining Arcee is a woman because she was experimented on by a mad Cybertronian scientist, are handled far less well.)"
    • "Transformers in IDW do have romance, and have officially recognized ceremonies for both 'amica endura' (equivalent to marriage), and 'conjunx endura' which is like eternal friendship."
    • "While you stepped out, there was brief discussion of Ultra Magnus and Minimus Ambus: Minimus Ambus is a tiny dude who wears the 'Ultra Magnus Armor,' Ultra Magnus being a sort of Dread Pirate Roberts semimythical figure of the universe. Good character, who has a good romance arc with Megatron!"
  • Is an edgelord phase a standard part of being a teen or what
  • Lordosis behavior
  • Lordi - The Riff
  • Lord Dunsany the metalhead lord rewilding his estate
  • Time Lords

Microtopics:

  • Taking a picture of a dog.
  • 140 strawberries.
  • Jim Not Knowing About Video Games Day.
  • Starting with how Smurfs fuck and then moving on to how Transformers fuck.
  • Transformers hanging out with humans because the humans can wipe them in places they can't reach.
  • Where Transformers come from in the various Transformers cosmologies.
  • How Grimlock built the Dinobots.
  • Sitting down with a screwdriver to make some buddies.
  • The hypothetical 1980s girl-child who might buy an Optimus Prime toy if it was wearing a pink bow on its head.
  • R.C., the hyper-pink Transformer with the wide, child-bearing hips.
  • Finally getting to the topic at hand.
  • Whether all Transformers are aromantic.
  • What kind of god would make a car in space where there's nothing to drive on.
  • The canonical term for when two Transformers are in a relationship.
  • Rarified Energon.
  • Prime's Rib, in which Future Feminists complain that there are no female Transformers so Optimus Prime constructs one from his own body parts.
  • The Wild 80s.
  • The British big game hunter who wanted to hunt the most dangerous game, Optimus Prime.
  • Mounting the nose of the plane you shot down as a trophy in your den. (The plane was actually grounded when you shot it.)
  • Whether teen edgelords are still a thing or whether teens are now performatively wholesome to freak out the olds.
  • The Alpha Teen.
  • The two genders of edgelord.
  • Toddlers hurting you so they can practice having empathy.
  • Accidentally promising a cat sexual favors.
  • The cat sticking its butt in your face so you'll lick it clean, because that's what the cat's mom did.
  • The innie arch vs the outie arch.
  • Bears playing 20 questions with themselves to determine whether you are also a bear.
  • The scientific term for scritches.
  • Sitting vs. standing up to wipe.
  • The various orders in which you could wipe, stand up, and flush.
  • Pushing vs. dragging.
  • Tai-chi vs. chai tea.
  • A picture of Lordi getting a vaccine.
  • A toilet in the shower.
  • The scene in Mad Max Fury Road where the guy with all the water hoses down the adulant throng below, except it's toilet paper instead of water.
  • Bringing the ugliest people you know on dates with you so you seem more attractive by comparison.
  • Whether it's still a cold cut if you heat it up.
  • Zombo Cop.
  • Making Video Content during the zombie apocalypse by putting GoPros on all the zombies.
  • Live streaming a zombie trying to walk into a brick wall.
  • Looking out on the zombie apocalypse and saying "time to finally eat the rich!"
  • The flashback explaining the origin story of the huge pile of bloody toilet paper.
  • Whether David Lynch explained something once.
  • The Lobster as a benchmark for bad date movies.
  • Pokemon that are weak to Basket.
  • Scientists studying the guillotine and determining that it's actually that basket your head lands in that kills you.
  • The worst part of the zombie apocalypse: when the self checkout tells you to wait for assistance, nobody ever comes.
  • The lordiest lord of them all.
  • A cool young lord.
  • A Jack Russell terrier named Beavis and Butt-Head.
  • Two dogs, one named Sneezy, Grumpy, Dopey, Happy, Sleepy, Bashful and Doc, and the other one named The Seven Dwarfs.
  • Hearing bird song you don't recognize, going to google and typing "Weee weee wha weee what's bird is this"
  • Shazam for bird call.
  • How to identify a bird that ages backwards.
  • An app that can take photos of an object and tell you whether it's a wizard in disguise.
  • Turning 25 and realizing that most movies are no longer about you at age 20.
  • Whether Doctor Who was based on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
  • Gene Roddenberry playing Willy Wonka.
  • The Gum Chewer.
  • Deleting a tweet in which you are cranky about Doctor Who.
  • Doctor Who showrunner Stephen Wolfram.
  • The vicar turning out the be a giant wasp and the author turning out to be a transphobe.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Lord Chumley
    • Topic Lords editor Esper Quinn weighs in on Transformer lore: "The second ever podcast I really worked on was called Sound.wav, a read-along Transformers comics podcast. I knew nothing about Transformers, and my friend Nell knew everything about them. We stuck to the IDW canon, but my understanding is, Transformers show up as naturally occurring "sparks" (a sort of semi-magical soul-piece) on the surface of the planet Cybertron, which if left to incubate will form a liquidmetal shell, which eventually becomes a full-on Transformer. (There's also something called Cold Construction which takes raw sparks and puts them in purpose built bodies, but whatever.) All of this means Transformers, in my mind, DO NOT qualify as actual robots. To me, a robot has to be built by somebody, but Transformers are just a metallic alien entity. On the podcast, we eventually had James Roberts, writer of the IDW comics series, and I confronted him with this: he agreed that Transformers are not technically robots. Felt pretty smart that day."
    • "Also, again I can only speak for the IDW canon, but Transformers on Cybertron don't have much of a concept of gender at all. Indeed, Transformers who were disconnected from society for millions of years and developed their own culture are the ones who sort of pioneered gender, purely as a cultural signifier. There's even explicitly trans transformers, who were known as one gender and switched to the other, and the storylines are handled pretty well in my opinion! (Other storylines, like the one explaining Arcee is a woman because she was experimented on by a mad Cybertronian scientist, are handled far less well.)"
    • "Transformers in IDW do have romance, and have officially recognized ceremonies for both 'amica endura' (equivalent to marriage), and 'conjunx endura' which is like eternal friendship."
    • "While you stepped out, there was brief discussion of Ultra Magnus and Minimus Ambus: Minimus Ambus is a tiny dude who wears the 'Ultra Magnus Armor,' Ultra Magnus being a sort of Dread Pirate Roberts semimythical figure of the universe. Good character, who has a good romance arc with Megatron!"
  • Is an edgelord phase a standard part of being a teen or what
  • Lordosis behavior
  • Lordi - The Riff
  • Lord Dunsany the metalhead lord rewilding his estate
  • Time Lords

Microtopics:

  • Taking a picture of a dog.
  • 140 strawberries.
  • Jim Not Knowing About Video Games Day.
  • Starting with how Smurfs fuck and then moving on to how Transformers fuck.
  • Transformers hanging out with humans because the humans can wipe them in places they can't reach.
  • Where Transformers come from in the various Transformers cosmologies.
  • How Grimlock built the Dinobots.
  • Sitting down with a screwdriver to make some buddies.
  • The hypothetical 1980s girl-child who might buy an Optimus Prime toy if it was wearing a pink bow on its head.
  • R.C., the hyper-pink Transformer with the wide, child-bearing hips.
  • Finally getting to the topic at hand.
  • Whether all Transformers are aromantic.
  • What kind of god would make a car in space where there's nothing to drive on.
  • The canonical term for when two Transformers are in a relationship.
  • Rarified Energon.
  • Prime's Rib, in which Future Feminists complain that there are no female Transformers so Optimus Prime constructs one from his own body parts.
  • The Wild 80s.
  • The British big game hunter who wanted to hunt the most dangerous game, Optimus Prime.
  • Mounting the nose of the plane you shot down as a trophy in your den. (The plane was actually grounded when you shot it.)
  • Whether teen edgelords are still a thing or whether teens are now performatively wholesome to freak out the olds.
  • The Alpha Teen.
  • The two genders of edgelord.
  • Toddlers hurting you so they can practice having empathy.
  • Accidentally promising a cat sexual favors.
  • The cat sticking its butt in your face so you'll lick it clean, because that's what the cat's mom did.
  • The innie arch vs the outie arch.
  • Bears playing 20 questions with themselves to determine whether you are also a bear.
  • The scientific term for scritches.
  • Sitting vs. standing up to wipe.
  • The various orders in which you could wipe, stand up, and flush.
  • Pushing vs. dragging.
  • Tai-chi vs. chai tea.
  • A picture of Lordi getting a vaccine.
  • A toilet in the shower.
  • The scene in Mad Max Fury Road where the guy with all the water hoses down the adulant throng below, except it's toilet paper instead of water.
  • Bringing the ugliest people you know on dates with you so you seem more attractive by comparison.
  • Whether it's still a cold cut if you heat it up.
  • Zombo Cop.
  • Making Video Content during the zombie apocalypse by putting GoPros on all the zombies.
  • Live streaming a zombie trying to walk into a brick wall.
  • Looking out on the zombie apocalypse and saying "time to finally eat the rich!"
  • The flashback explaining the origin story of the huge pile of bloody toilet paper.
  • Whether David Lynch explained something once.
  • The Lobster as a benchmark for bad date movies.
  • Pokemon that are weak to Basket.
  • Scientists studying the guillotine and determining that it's actually that basket your head lands in that kills you.
  • The worst part of the zombie apocalypse: when the self checkout tells you to wait for assistance, nobody ever comes.
  • The lordiest lord of them all.
  • A cool young lord.
  • A Jack Russell terrier named Beavis and Butt-Head.
  • Two dogs, one named Sneezy, Grumpy, Dopey, Happy, Sleepy, Bashful and Doc, and the other one named The Seven Dwarfs.
  • Hearing bird song you don't recognize, going to google and typing "Weee weee wha weee what's bird is this"
  • Shazam for bird call.
  • How to identify a bird that ages backwards.
  • An app that can take photos of an object and tell you whether it's a wizard in disguise.
  • Turning 25 and realizing that most movies are no longer about you at age 20.
  • Whether Doctor Who was based on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
  • Gene Roddenberry playing Willy Wonka.
  • The Gum Chewer.
  • Deleting a tweet in which you are cranky about Doctor Who.
  • Doctor Who showrunner Stephen Wolfram.
  • The vicar turning out the be a giant wasp and the author turning out to be a transphobe.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+DkXCprwz ]]> Jim Stormdancer 99. I Want You to Never Show Me This https://topiclords.com/i-want-you-to-never-show-me-this 18433b63-bb09-4530-a28b-089e3a8403ab Mon, 13 Sep 2021 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Mitch and Xander. We discuss what qualifies as a Mario game, spectrum of porcupine tunings by eigenmonzos, the Letter C, finding the light switch in this bed and breakfast, the bizarre CD-ROM game Monty Python made in the 90s, and how Tumblr is almost good. 1:01:51 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Starting to meet up just in time for the Delta variant to show up.
  • jan Misali of the Youtube channel jan Misali.
  • Using Bing to google things.
  • A recent video you will have made.
  • How many games are in the Super Mario series.
  • Super Smash Bros / For Nintendo 3DS / It's Coming This Fall
  • Super Mario 64DS HD For Nintendo Switch.
  • The only three games that everyone can agree are Super Mario games.
  • Super Mario's Wacky Worlds for the Phillips CD-i.
  • Not knowing who to vote for comptroller so googling each candidate's name with "is good" and picking the one with the most results.
  • Whether Super Mario Run is a platformer.
  • The bare minimum of procgen required for a game to count as an endless runner.
  • When there's no consensus, there's no communication.
  • The Super Mario Artist series.
  • Any game you can look at counting as a "video game* because video is Latin for "I see."
  • Xenharmonics and microtonal music.
  • Subdividing the octave into 19 psychoacoustically equal segments.
  • The Venn diagram between people interested in microtonal music and people who understand singular value decomposition.
  • Enjoying 17-TET music but only the parts that would've sounded better in 12-TET.
  • Learning enough about Super Mario Bros. Special to decide whether it's a game.
  • All the different ways you could count things.
  • The only nontrivial solution to the cannonball problem.
  • Finding the center of a shape by cutting it out of cardboard and balancing it on your finger.
  • The Encyclopedia of Triangle Centers.
  • 39,474 different ways to find the center of a triangle.
  • Being wrong about the letter C.
  • Spelling it SD-ROM but still pronouncing it CD-ROM.
  • The fault of vulgar Latin.
  • Proto-Western Romance.
  • What Q means to us.
  • Slicing up a house into apartments by roping off a stairway.
  • Things depicted as normal in Hollywood movies that can't possibly be normal, such as flipping a switch to activate spinning blades in your sink.
  • Dedicated garbage knives that are just for cutting up garbage, that you keep next to the regular kitchen knives and they look the same but you know which ones are which.
  • The part of the infomercial for the Sink Knife Gun that's black and white where the lady is struggling to cut up her sink drain trash by sticking knives down there and wiggling them around.
  • Making a smoothie with a mortar and pestle.
  • Whether the Sarlacc Pit inspired garbage disposals or vice versa.
  • A Taco Bell built into a striking, memorable building.
  • A game you could check out at the local video store.
  • Monty Python's Complete Waste of Time.
  • CD-ROM experiences.
  • Minigames that mess with your interface.
  • The outer space labyrinth mine cart puzzle tying together all the unrelated Monty Python sketches.
  • Completing a game and it changes your desktop wallpaper to a congratulations screen.
  • Completing a level and unlocking audio you can set as your answering machine message.
  • Solving the secret for intergalactic success.
  • Topics you might like: food.
  • The quintessential Tumblr story.
  • The Tale of John Green's Favorite Taste.
  • Reblogging a post and then editing it so it looks like the person you were reblogging said something else.
  • John Green as in "The Bum Bum Song" John Green.
  • What it took to convince Tumblr to finally make it so you can't edit other people's posts.
  • Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra discussing John Green's Favorite Taste.
  • The Insane Clown Posse's web master writing a web chat server with no security whatsoever.
  • Feeling cool because you ruined it for everybody else.
  • Googling just the letter W.
  • Dueling George W. Bush to the death over ownership of the letter W.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Starting to meet up just in time for the Delta variant to show up.
  • jan Misali of the Youtube channel jan Misali.
  • Using Bing to google things.
  • A recent video you will have made.
  • How many games are in the Super Mario series.
  • Super Smash Bros / For Nintendo 3DS / It's Coming This Fall
  • Super Mario 64DS HD For Nintendo Switch.
  • The only three games that everyone can agree are Super Mario games.
  • Super Mario's Wacky Worlds for the Phillips CD-i.
  • Not knowing who to vote for comptroller so googling each candidate's name with "is good" and picking the one with the most results.
  • Whether Super Mario Run is a platformer.
  • The bare minimum of procgen required for a game to count as an endless runner.
  • When there's no consensus, there's no communication.
  • The Super Mario Artist series.
  • Any game you can look at counting as a "video game* because video is Latin for "I see."
  • Xenharmonics and microtonal music.
  • Subdividing the octave into 19 psychoacoustically equal segments.
  • The Venn diagram between people interested in microtonal music and people who understand singular value decomposition.
  • Enjoying 17-TET music but only the parts that would've sounded better in 12-TET.
  • Learning enough about Super Mario Bros. Special to decide whether it's a game.
  • All the different ways you could count things.
  • The only nontrivial solution to the cannonball problem.
  • Finding the center of a shape by cutting it out of cardboard and balancing it on your finger.
  • The Encyclopedia of Triangle Centers.
  • 39,474 different ways to find the center of a triangle.
  • Being wrong about the letter C.
  • Spelling it SD-ROM but still pronouncing it CD-ROM.
  • The fault of vulgar Latin.
  • Proto-Western Romance.
  • What Q means to us.
  • Slicing up a house into apartments by roping off a stairway.
  • Things depicted as normal in Hollywood movies that can't possibly be normal, such as flipping a switch to activate spinning blades in your sink.
  • Dedicated garbage knives that are just for cutting up garbage, that you keep next to the regular kitchen knives and they look the same but you know which ones are which.
  • The part of the infomercial for the Sink Knife Gun that's black and white where the lady is struggling to cut up her sink drain trash by sticking knives down there and wiggling them around.
  • Making a smoothie with a mortar and pestle.
  • Whether the Sarlacc Pit inspired garbage disposals or vice versa.
  • A Taco Bell built into a striking, memorable building.
  • A game you could check out at the local video store.
  • Monty Python's Complete Waste of Time.
  • CD-ROM experiences.
  • Minigames that mess with your interface.
  • The outer space labyrinth mine cart puzzle tying together all the unrelated Monty Python sketches.
  • Completing a game and it changes your desktop wallpaper to a congratulations screen.
  • Completing a level and unlocking audio you can set as your answering machine message.
  • Solving the secret for intergalactic success.
  • Topics you might like: food.
  • The quintessential Tumblr story.
  • The Tale of John Green's Favorite Taste.
  • Reblogging a post and then editing it so it looks like the person you were reblogging said something else.
  • John Green as in "The Bum Bum Song" John Green.
  • What it took to convince Tumblr to finally make it so you can't edit other people's posts.
  • Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra discussing John Green's Favorite Taste.
  • The Insane Clown Posse's web master writing a web chat server with no security whatsoever.
  • Feeling cool because you ruined it for everybody else.
  • Googling just the letter W.
  • Dueling George W. Bush to the death over ownership of the letter W.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Starting to meet up just in time for the Delta variant to show up.
  • jan Misali of the Youtube channel jan Misali.
  • Using Bing to google things.
  • A recent video you will have made.
  • How many games are in the Super Mario series.
  • Super Smash Bros / For Nintendo 3DS / It's Coming This Fall
  • Super Mario 64DS HD For Nintendo Switch.
  • The only three games that everyone can agree are Super Mario games.
  • Super Mario's Wacky Worlds for the Phillips CD-i.
  • Not knowing who to vote for comptroller so googling each candidate's name with "is good" and picking the one with the most results.
  • Whether Super Mario Run is a platformer.
  • The bare minimum of procgen required for a game to count as an endless runner.
  • When there's no consensus, there's no communication.
  • The Super Mario Artist series.
  • Any game you can look at counting as a "video game* because video is Latin for "I see."
  • Xenharmonics and microtonal music.
  • Subdividing the octave into 19 psychoacoustically equal segments.
  • The Venn diagram between people interested in microtonal music and people who understand singular value decomposition.
  • Enjoying 17-TET music but only the parts that would've sounded better in 12-TET.
  • Learning enough about Super Mario Bros. Special to decide whether it's a game.
  • All the different ways you could count things.
  • The only nontrivial solution to the cannonball problem.
  • Finding the center of a shape by cutting it out of cardboard and balancing it on your finger.
  • The Encyclopedia of Triangle Centers.
  • 39,474 different ways to find the center of a triangle.
  • Being wrong about the letter C.
  • Spelling it SD-ROM but still pronouncing it CD-ROM.
  • The fault of vulgar Latin.
  • Proto-Western Romance.
  • What Q means to us.
  • Slicing up a house into apartments by roping off a stairway.
  • Things depicted as normal in Hollywood movies that can't possibly be normal, such as flipping a switch to activate spinning blades in your sink.
  • Dedicated garbage knives that are just for cutting up garbage, that you keep next to the regular kitchen knives and they look the same but you know which ones are which.
  • The part of the infomercial for the Sink Knife Gun that's black and white where the lady is struggling to cut up her sink drain trash by sticking knives down there and wiggling them around.
  • Making a smoothie with a mortar and pestle.
  • Whether the Sarlacc Pit inspired garbage disposals or vice versa.
  • A Taco Bell built into a striking, memorable building.
  • A game you could check out at the local video store.
  • Monty Python's Complete Waste of Time.
  • CD-ROM experiences.
  • Minigames that mess with your interface.
  • The outer space labyrinth mine cart puzzle tying together all the unrelated Monty Python sketches.
  • Completing a game and it changes your desktop wallpaper to a congratulations screen.
  • Completing a level and unlocking audio you can set as your answering machine message.
  • Solving the secret for intergalactic success.
  • Topics you might like: food.
  • The quintessential Tumblr story.
  • The Tale of John Green's Favorite Taste.
  • Reblogging a post and then editing it so it looks like the person you were reblogging said something else.
  • John Green as in "The Bum Bum Song" John Green.
  • What it took to convince Tumblr to finally make it so you can't edit other people's posts.
  • Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra discussing John Green's Favorite Taste.
  • The Insane Clown Posse's web master writing a web chat server with no security whatsoever.
  • Feeling cool because you ruined it for everybody else.
  • Googling just the letter W.
  • Dueling George W. Bush to the death over ownership of the letter W.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+ykU5ygCv ]]> Jim Stormdancer 98. That's Content, Baby! https://topiclords.com/thats-content-baby ffa28451-2dcf-4a62-8934-94975fe4e629 Mon, 06 Sep 2021 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Hallie and Christine. We discuss where you lost your glasses, nighttime as the time of abstract possibility and imagination, this huge tub of homemade toum, Turn Down For What, and modern TV re-discovering the episodic format. 1:02:58 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Mining the pre-show banter for a clip.
  • Dreaming of producing content every second of your life.
  • Getting hooked up to the content matrix and spewing content out of every orifice.
  • Burnt Notice.
  • Watercresstine.
  • Looking upon Burn Notice as your weird uncle who lives in your basement.
  • A podcast about discussing episodes of a podcast discussing episodes of Burn Notice.
  • Recording a song in the style of We Are The World except instead of the proceeds going to help children in Africa you keep the money.
  • Recording a song in the style of We Are The World except instead of the proceeds going to help children in Africa, it goes to getting Doctor Who back on the air.
  • We Are The Timelords.
  • Doctor In Distress.
  • Needing to stop making a podcast before your listeners can beg you to come back.
  • How locals pronounce "Los Angeles."
  • Not knowing how to look for your glasses in an apartment because your normally live in a farmhouse.
  • How nobody in LA owns more than one chair.
  • Whether Hallie's glasses were in the fridge.
  • Posting photos of your apartment to the internet so people can help you find your glasses.
  • Whether Winston answers the phone at a Korean BBQ restaurant in LA.
  • Being awake during the day: terrible.
  • The most concrete time of day.
  • Going to preschool and answering phones for a Korean barbecue restaurant until daddy picks you up at 4.
  • Loving 2am but being in bed by 9:30pm.
  • Like a tree but shorter, louder with stickier hands.
  • No responsibility except what you make for yourself.
  • An emulsion like mayonnaise except instead of tasting like mayonnaise it tastes like garlic.
  • Vampires hating garlic because they don't like the taste.
  • Whether you can have the vampire gene but not be a vampire.
  • Vampirism as a collection of traits that often manifest together, and you're only diagnosed with vampirism if these traits interfere with your ability to do your job.
  • How many marshmallows go in fudge.
  • Converting from marshmallows when the recipe calls for mini marshmallows.
  • Using marshmallows as bait to catch God when everyone knows God hates marshmallows.
  • Videos that love to start with a black screen that goes on a little too long when you're watching at one quarter speed.
  • A man in a blue hoodie jiggling as something is taking him over.
  • Shattering furniture with the power of your raw sexuality.
  • The Scully stand-in who is extremely skeptical about how horny this guy is.
  • St. Vitus' Dry Hump.
  • Could I be a fish doing push-ups?
  • Whether there is a Hitmonchan in this bra, and whether it's evolving, and whether we should push B.
  • The relief of consuming media and not feeling the need to form any reaction whatsoever.
  • Spiking the punch with LSD.
  • A cop whose face melts because he doesn't know what you'd turn down for.
  • Contracting a bad case of Original Sin and being very angry about it.
  • A straight man who stole Elton John's sunglasses.
  • Whether DJ Snake looks like a douchebag or just looks French.
  • Characters who grow hornier and hornier as over the course of eight seasons.
  • The 1943 Watchmen TV series.
  • The Veronica Mars model of serialization.
  • Whether the Columbo renaissance implies a Murder She Wrote renaissance.
  • Whether that's content, baby.
  • A character in a romantic comedy who makes web sites for everyone but who can't make a web site for herself.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Mining the pre-show banter for a clip.
  • Dreaming of producing content every second of your life.
  • Getting hooked up to the content matrix and spewing content out of every orifice.
  • Burnt Notice.
  • Watercresstine.
  • Looking upon Burn Notice as your weird uncle who lives in your basement.
  • A podcast about discussing episodes of a podcast discussing episodes of Burn Notice.
  • Recording a song in the style of We Are The World except instead of the proceeds going to help children in Africa you keep the money.
  • Recording a song in the style of We Are The World except instead of the proceeds going to help children in Africa, it goes to getting Doctor Who back on the air.
  • We Are The Timelords.
  • Doctor In Distress.
  • Needing to stop making a podcast before your listeners can beg you to come back.
  • How locals pronounce "Los Angeles."
  • Not knowing how to look for your glasses in an apartment because your normally live in a farmhouse.
  • How nobody in LA owns more than one chair.
  • Whether Hallie's glasses were in the fridge.
  • Posting photos of your apartment to the internet so people can help you find your glasses.
  • Whether Winston answers the phone at a Korean BBQ restaurant in LA.
  • Being awake during the day: terrible.
  • The most concrete time of day.
  • Going to preschool and answering phones for a Korean barbecue restaurant until daddy picks you up at 4.
  • Loving 2am but being in bed by 9:30pm.
  • Like a tree but shorter, louder with stickier hands.
  • No responsibility except what you make for yourself.
  • An emulsion like mayonnaise except instead of tasting like mayonnaise it tastes like garlic.
  • Vampires hating garlic because they don't like the taste.
  • Whether you can have the vampire gene but not be a vampire.
  • Vampirism as a collection of traits that often manifest together, and you're only diagnosed with vampirism if these traits interfere with your ability to do your job.
  • How many marshmallows go in fudge.
  • Converting from marshmallows when the recipe calls for mini marshmallows.
  • Using marshmallows as bait to catch God when everyone knows God hates marshmallows.
  • Videos that love to start with a black screen that goes on a little too long when you're watching at one quarter speed.
  • A man in a blue hoodie jiggling as something is taking him over.
  • Shattering furniture with the power of your raw sexuality.
  • The Scully stand-in who is extremely skeptical about how horny this guy is.
  • St. Vitus' Dry Hump.
  • Could I be a fish doing push-ups?
  • Whether there is a Hitmonchan in this bra, and whether it's evolving, and whether we should push B.
  • The relief of consuming media and not feeling the need to form any reaction whatsoever.
  • Spiking the punch with LSD.
  • A cop whose face melts because he doesn't know what you'd turn down for.
  • Contracting a bad case of Original Sin and being very angry about it.
  • A straight man who stole Elton John's sunglasses.
  • Whether DJ Snake looks like a douchebag or just looks French.
  • Characters who grow hornier and hornier as over the course of eight seasons.
  • The 1943 Watchmen TV series.
  • The Veronica Mars model of serialization.
  • Whether the Columbo renaissance implies a Murder She Wrote renaissance.
  • Whether that's content, baby.
  • A character in a romantic comedy who makes web sites for everyone but who can't make a web site for herself.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Mining the pre-show banter for a clip.
  • Dreaming of producing content every second of your life.
  • Getting hooked up to the content matrix and spewing content out of every orifice.
  • Burnt Notice.
  • Watercresstine.
  • Looking upon Burn Notice as your weird uncle who lives in your basement.
  • A podcast about discussing episodes of a podcast discussing episodes of Burn Notice.
  • Recording a song in the style of We Are The World except instead of the proceeds going to help children in Africa you keep the money.
  • Recording a song in the style of We Are The World except instead of the proceeds going to help children in Africa, it goes to getting Doctor Who back on the air.
  • We Are The Timelords.
  • Doctor In Distress.
  • Needing to stop making a podcast before your listeners can beg you to come back.
  • How locals pronounce "Los Angeles."
  • Not knowing how to look for your glasses in an apartment because your normally live in a farmhouse.
  • How nobody in LA owns more than one chair.
  • Whether Hallie's glasses were in the fridge.
  • Posting photos of your apartment to the internet so people can help you find your glasses.
  • Whether Winston answers the phone at a Korean BBQ restaurant in LA.
  • Being awake during the day: terrible.
  • The most concrete time of day.
  • Going to preschool and answering phones for a Korean barbecue restaurant until daddy picks you up at 4.
  • Loving 2am but being in bed by 9:30pm.
  • Like a tree but shorter, louder with stickier hands.
  • No responsibility except what you make for yourself.
  • An emulsion like mayonnaise except instead of tasting like mayonnaise it tastes like garlic.
  • Vampires hating garlic because they don't like the taste.
  • Whether you can have the vampire gene but not be a vampire.
  • Vampirism as a collection of traits that often manifest together, and you're only diagnosed with vampirism if these traits interfere with your ability to do your job.
  • How many marshmallows go in fudge.
  • Converting from marshmallows when the recipe calls for mini marshmallows.
  • Using marshmallows as bait to catch God when everyone knows God hates marshmallows.
  • Videos that love to start with a black screen that goes on a little too long when you're watching at one quarter speed.
  • A man in a blue hoodie jiggling as something is taking him over.
  • Shattering furniture with the power of your raw sexuality.
  • The Scully stand-in who is extremely skeptical about how horny this guy is.
  • St. Vitus' Dry Hump.
  • Could I be a fish doing push-ups?
  • Whether there is a Hitmonchan in this bra, and whether it's evolving, and whether we should push B.
  • The relief of consuming media and not feeling the need to form any reaction whatsoever.
  • Spiking the punch with LSD.
  • A cop whose face melts because he doesn't know what you'd turn down for.
  • Contracting a bad case of Original Sin and being very angry about it.
  • A straight man who stole Elton John's sunglasses.
  • Whether DJ Snake looks like a douchebag or just looks French.
  • Characters who grow hornier and hornier as over the course of eight seasons.
  • The 1943 Watchmen TV series.
  • The Veronica Mars model of serialization.
  • Whether the Columbo renaissance implies a Murder She Wrote renaissance.
  • Whether that's content, baby.
  • A character in a romantic comedy who makes web sites for everyone but who can't make a web site for herself.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+vLdt_JYS ]]> Jim Stormdancer 97. A Clearly Marked Hellhole https://topiclords.com/a-clearly-marked-hellhole 86561936-4a0b-4445-b422-956c2bf54f95 Mon, 30 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Tina and Slothy. We discuss what indie devs think AAA is like, my cousin the astronaut, finding an ad for a medicare scam in my drafts folder, the Knuckle Mnemonic, Ted Lasso, and my post-burnout solo European vacation with a guy who had illicit keys to Notre Dame. 58:12 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • What do Indie devs imagine AAA is like
  • My cousin is an astronaut
  • Finding an ad for a medicare scam in my drafts folder
  • Brad asks "The '30 days hath...' rhyme sucks as a mnemonic because so many months rhyme. Everyone should just use the knuckle mnemonic instead."
  • Ted Lasso
  • My post-burnout solo European vacation with a guy who had illicit keys to Notre Dame

Microtopics:

  • Having one name like Cher but also having more names too.
  • Giving yourself a nickname because there are too many people with just your name.
  • Creating personal boundaries in an office setting and making it clear when people cross them.
  • Working on a regimented team where everyone has specific roles and the programmers can't just say "I feel like doing sound design today."
  • How to motivate yourself to work.
  • Cultural things that can go wrong with code reviews.
  • Wondering if a feature is a good idea and implementing it in a day and putting it in front of testers to find out.
  • How long before you ship a game is good.
  • How to get a team of 300 people to change direction.
  • How to be invested enough to do a good job but not invested enough that you'll freak out if your work doesn't make it into the final product.
  • Reasons to go to GDC.
  • My Cousin The Astronaut.
  • Sitting in the bleachers to watch the space shuttle launch.
  • A building that they don't tear down because it contains things
  • Building the international space station by sending up one piece per shuttle launch.
  • Whether Buzz Aldrin is still an astronaut.
  • Deciding as a child that you want to be an astronaut and from that point on making every decision in your live based on that goal.
  • Watching your daughter carry part of the international space station across a busy freeway.
  • Space shuttles exploding and driving up NASA's insurance rates.
  • The pros and cons of relentlessly chasing your dreams.
  • Self-esteem vs. self-compassion.
  • Living in LA and having to remind your kids that not everyone works in movies.
  • Different definitions of success.
  • The least-driven game developer.
  • Enjoying the process of making art vs. enjoying the result.
  • People enjoying what you've worked on.
  • Boosting your social security check by up to $1782 per year.
  • A Special Medicare Advantage Part B Premium "Giveback" Rebate Benefit.
  • Your pocket writing an email about Medicare.
  • Having a dream about Medicare and waking up and deciding to become a spam magnate.
  • Whether the mailto: protocol can specify a subject and a body.
  • Making a pact to change your email password.
  • Mnemonics for remembering how long each month is.
  • The Knuckle Mnemonic.
  • Whether it was aliens or the pope who stole the two months we used to have after December.
  • A show about nerding out. (It's this one.)
  • How wifi works in space when planets can get in the way.
  • The first moment of freedom on Mars.
  • Living on the Grand Canyon except you have to keep your eyes closed.
  • Thanking Brad.
  • Choosing a topic for nefarious reasons.
  • The least skeptical TV show.
  • Trying to remember to give people the benefit of the doubt.
  • Buying a plane ticket to Europe without knowing what you're going to do there.
  • Your friend in Paris who has a keyring with keys to every church in the city.
  • Breaking into Notre Dame during the COVID lockdown and checking out the view from the roof.
  • The listening tower that the NSA used to spy on East Germany.
  • Using a variety of methods to get the keys to every church in Paris.
  • A wig for people who have a mohawk that is just mostly one of the sides of your head.
  • The Santa Cruz Hell Hole.
  • Building the Paris tunnels to get partying teens off the streets and underground.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • What do Indie devs imagine AAA is like
  • My cousin is an astronaut
  • Finding an ad for a medicare scam in my drafts folder
  • Brad asks "The '30 days hath...' rhyme sucks as a mnemonic because so many months rhyme. Everyone should just use the knuckle mnemonic instead."
  • Ted Lasso
  • My post-burnout solo European vacation with a guy who had illicit keys to Notre Dame

Microtopics:

  • Having one name like Cher but also having more names too.
  • Giving yourself a nickname because there are too many people with just your name.
  • Creating personal boundaries in an office setting and making it clear when people cross them.
  • Working on a regimented team where everyone has specific roles and the programmers can't just say "I feel like doing sound design today."
  • How to motivate yourself to work.
  • Cultural things that can go wrong with code reviews.
  • Wondering if a feature is a good idea and implementing it in a day and putting it in front of testers to find out.
  • How long before you ship a game is good.
  • How to get a team of 300 people to change direction.
  • How to be invested enough to do a good job but not invested enough that you'll freak out if your work doesn't make it into the final product.
  • Reasons to go to GDC.
  • My Cousin The Astronaut.
  • Sitting in the bleachers to watch the space shuttle launch.
  • A building that they don't tear down because it contains things
  • Building the international space station by sending up one piece per shuttle launch.
  • Whether Buzz Aldrin is still an astronaut.
  • Deciding as a child that you want to be an astronaut and from that point on making every decision in your live based on that goal.
  • Watching your daughter carry part of the international space station across a busy freeway.
  • Space shuttles exploding and driving up NASA's insurance rates.
  • The pros and cons of relentlessly chasing your dreams.
  • Self-esteem vs. self-compassion.
  • Living in LA and having to remind your kids that not everyone works in movies.
  • Different definitions of success.
  • The least-driven game developer.
  • Enjoying the process of making art vs. enjoying the result.
  • People enjoying what you've worked on.
  • Boosting your social security check by up to $1782 per year.
  • A Special Medicare Advantage Part B Premium "Giveback" Rebate Benefit.
  • Your pocket writing an email about Medicare.
  • Having a dream about Medicare and waking up and deciding to become a spam magnate.
  • Whether the mailto: protocol can specify a subject and a body.
  • Making a pact to change your email password.
  • Mnemonics for remembering how long each month is.
  • The Knuckle Mnemonic.
  • Whether it was aliens or the pope who stole the two months we used to have after December.
  • A show about nerding out. (It's this one.)
  • How wifi works in space when planets can get in the way.
  • The first moment of freedom on Mars.
  • Living on the Grand Canyon except you have to keep your eyes closed.
  • Thanking Brad.
  • Choosing a topic for nefarious reasons.
  • The least skeptical TV show.
  • Trying to remember to give people the benefit of the doubt.
  • Buying a plane ticket to Europe without knowing what you're going to do there.
  • Your friend in Paris who has a keyring with keys to every church in the city.
  • Breaking into Notre Dame during the COVID lockdown and checking out the view from the roof.
  • The listening tower that the NSA used to spy on East Germany.
  • Using a variety of methods to get the keys to every church in Paris.
  • A wig for people who have a mohawk that is just mostly one of the sides of your head.
  • The Santa Cruz Hell Hole.
  • Building the Paris tunnels to get partying teens off the streets and underground.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • What do Indie devs imagine AAA is like
  • My cousin is an astronaut
  • Finding an ad for a medicare scam in my drafts folder
  • Brad asks "The '30 days hath...' rhyme sucks as a mnemonic because so many months rhyme. Everyone should just use the knuckle mnemonic instead."
  • Ted Lasso
  • My post-burnout solo European vacation with a guy who had illicit keys to Notre Dame

Microtopics:

  • Having one name like Cher but also having more names too.
  • Giving yourself a nickname because there are too many people with just your name.
  • Creating personal boundaries in an office setting and making it clear when people cross them.
  • Working on a regimented team where everyone has specific roles and the programmers can't just say "I feel like doing sound design today."
  • How to motivate yourself to work.
  • Cultural things that can go wrong with code reviews.
  • Wondering if a feature is a good idea and implementing it in a day and putting it in front of testers to find out.
  • How long before you ship a game is good.
  • How to get a team of 300 people to change direction.
  • How to be invested enough to do a good job but not invested enough that you'll freak out if your work doesn't make it into the final product.
  • Reasons to go to GDC.
  • My Cousin The Astronaut.
  • Sitting in the bleachers to watch the space shuttle launch.
  • A building that they don't tear down because it contains things
  • Building the international space station by sending up one piece per shuttle launch.
  • Whether Buzz Aldrin is still an astronaut.
  • Deciding as a child that you want to be an astronaut and from that point on making every decision in your live based on that goal.
  • Watching your daughter carry part of the international space station across a busy freeway.
  • Space shuttles exploding and driving up NASA's insurance rates.
  • The pros and cons of relentlessly chasing your dreams.
  • Self-esteem vs. self-compassion.
  • Living in LA and having to remind your kids that not everyone works in movies.
  • Different definitions of success.
  • The least-driven game developer.
  • Enjoying the process of making art vs. enjoying the result.
  • People enjoying what you've worked on.
  • Boosting your social security check by up to $1782 per year.
  • A Special Medicare Advantage Part B Premium "Giveback" Rebate Benefit.
  • Your pocket writing an email about Medicare.
  • Having a dream about Medicare and waking up and deciding to become a spam magnate.
  • Whether the mailto: protocol can specify a subject and a body.
  • Making a pact to change your email password.
  • Mnemonics for remembering how long each month is.
  • The Knuckle Mnemonic.
  • Whether it was aliens or the pope who stole the two months we used to have after December.
  • A show about nerding out. (It's this one.)
  • How wifi works in space when planets can get in the way.
  • The first moment of freedom on Mars.
  • Living on the Grand Canyon except you have to keep your eyes closed.
  • Thanking Brad.
  • Choosing a topic for nefarious reasons.
  • The least skeptical TV show.
  • Trying to remember to give people the benefit of the doubt.
  • Buying a plane ticket to Europe without knowing what you're going to do there.
  • Your friend in Paris who has a keyring with keys to every church in the city.
  • Breaking into Notre Dame during the COVID lockdown and checking out the view from the roof.
  • The listening tower that the NSA used to spy on East Germany.
  • Using a variety of methods to get the keys to every church in Paris.
  • A wig for people who have a mohawk that is just mostly one of the sides of your head.
  • The Santa Cruz Hell Hole.
  • Building the Paris tunnels to get partying teens off the streets and underground.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+e7g-i8MX ]]> Jim Stormdancer 96. Get Down With Some Bugs https://topiclords.com/get-down-with-some-bugs 77fffb6e-82a5-42c8-9d68-3ede7ee2e094 Mon, 23 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Kev and Quil. We discuss ephemeral digital music, guesting on a podcast you listen to, a Bug Mars update, Dancing in the Street, and introducing video games to an adult who has never heard of video games. 51:50 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords

Topics

  • Ephemeral digital music
  • Being a guest on a podcast that you normally listen to is a weird experience because it feels like you're not supposed to talk
  • An update on Bug Mars
  • Dancing in the Street
  • If you were to meet an adult who has never even heard of video games, what would you give them to demonstrate what they are? You are not allowed to interact with them in any other way

Microtopics:

  • An awkward silence where you can't decide who goes first.
  • Having to deliver all the chapters of a book at once.
  • Kanary.
  • Cooling it on making internet people mad ever since you had a kid.
  • Overstepping your own boundaries.
  • Lending a certain patina to your Twitter thread.
  • Midis and meedees.
  • Listening to a game soundtrack on a different sound engine than your had as a child.
  • Listening to a game soundtrack on a different sound engine than the composer used.
  • Proc-gen game soundtracks.
  • A kill cam except it's a kill jingle
  • Your online game detecting when someone draws a penis in the game's graffiti system but not when they draw a penis in the music editor's note grid.
  • Ways of converting an image to audio.
  • Deciding it's not worth going into detail but going into detail anyway.
  • What executables sounds like and why they sound like that.
  • Spelling the word "minimum" in a spectrograph by singing swooping pitches.
  • A video game that induces four friends to sing cacophonously together.
  • Three strangers having a conversation that your don't get to be a part of.
  • Parasocial relationships.
  • How to instantly become friends with a famous person you are a fan of.
  • Two asymmetrical relationships snapping together to become a single symmetrical relationship.
  • What you could've had if you just picked two friends host your podcast instead of all of them.
  • A small company named after a throwaway joke.
  • Spinning up a cricket farm.
  • The Amazon of cricket protein.
  • Alternative and synthetic protein.
  • Receiving a care package of bug protein that you're definitely not going to eat.
  • Whether a cricket burger is still better for the environment than a beef burger if you have to ship it across the country.
  • Being grateful that other people will save the world in the ways that you don't.
  • A brick wall, folks.
  • SCP or rolled up carpet?
  • A leprechaun with a mullet.
  • Wearing a trench coat over a floral print jumpsuit.
  • Racing In The Street.
  • Everybody, where "everybody" means two people.
  • Not being able to afford lighting after renting that crane and asking every crew member to point their car headlights at the dancers.
  • Whether you still trigger counterfeiting laws by putting realistic money in your movie.
  • An extended shot of Mick Jagger guzzling a generic can of beer.
  • Dancing In A Stairwell.
  • Dancing In The Void.
  • Freeze frame on a couple of butts.
  • A derelict flour mill that appears in every Brit-pop music video.
  • How to tell how well you're doing in a Match Three game.
  • Choosing to not introduce the mind virus of casual games to an indigenous tribe.
  • Whether Bejeweled is more market-tested than Pong as an introductory video game.
  • The invention of the platformer.
  • Super Mario Bros. 3's budget and development timeline.
  • The ways that the developers had to make Super Mario Bros. worse to make it viable as an arcade game.
  • Finding an adult who has never heard of Mario, jumping, video games or television and locking them in a room until they beat Super Mario Bros.
  • Looking at an image on a flat surface and interpreting it as analogous to a physical scene in the real world.
  • Synesthesia but for ideas.
  • Whispering a secret to the snail.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords

Topics

  • Ephemeral digital music
  • Being a guest on a podcast that you normally listen to is a weird experience because it feels like you're not supposed to talk
  • An update on Bug Mars
  • Dancing in the Street
  • If you were to meet an adult who has never even heard of video games, what would you give them to demonstrate what they are? You are not allowed to interact with them in any other way

Microtopics:

  • An awkward silence where you can't decide who goes first.
  • Having to deliver all the chapters of a book at once.
  • Kanary.
  • Cooling it on making internet people mad ever since you had a kid.
  • Overstepping your own boundaries.
  • Lending a certain patina to your Twitter thread.
  • Midis and meedees.
  • Listening to a game soundtrack on a different sound engine than your had as a child.
  • Listening to a game soundtrack on a different sound engine than the composer used.
  • Proc-gen game soundtracks.
  • A kill cam except it's a kill jingle
  • Your online game detecting when someone draws a penis in the game's graffiti system but not when they draw a penis in the music editor's note grid.
  • Ways of converting an image to audio.
  • Deciding it's not worth going into detail but going into detail anyway.
  • What executables sounds like and why they sound like that.
  • Spelling the word "minimum" in a spectrograph by singing swooping pitches.
  • A video game that induces four friends to sing cacophonously together.
  • Three strangers having a conversation that your don't get to be a part of.
  • Parasocial relationships.
  • How to instantly become friends with a famous person you are a fan of.
  • Two asymmetrical relationships snapping together to become a single symmetrical relationship.
  • What you could've had if you just picked two friends host your podcast instead of all of them.
  • A small company named after a throwaway joke.
  • Spinning up a cricket farm.
  • The Amazon of cricket protein.
  • Alternative and synthetic protein.
  • Receiving a care package of bug protein that you're definitely not going to eat.
  • Whether a cricket burger is still better for the environment than a beef burger if you have to ship it across the country.
  • Being grateful that other people will save the world in the ways that you don't.
  • A brick wall, folks.
  • SCP or rolled up carpet?
  • A leprechaun with a mullet.
  • Wearing a trench coat over a floral print jumpsuit.
  • Racing In The Street.
  • Everybody, where "everybody" means two people.
  • Not being able to afford lighting after renting that crane and asking every crew member to point their car headlights at the dancers.
  • Whether you still trigger counterfeiting laws by putting realistic money in your movie.
  • An extended shot of Mick Jagger guzzling a generic can of beer.
  • Dancing In A Stairwell.
  • Dancing In The Void.
  • Freeze frame on a couple of butts.
  • A derelict flour mill that appears in every Brit-pop music video.
  • How to tell how well you're doing in a Match Three game.
  • Choosing to not introduce the mind virus of casual games to an indigenous tribe.
  • Whether Bejeweled is more market-tested than Pong as an introductory video game.
  • The invention of the platformer.
  • Super Mario Bros. 3's budget and development timeline.
  • The ways that the developers had to make Super Mario Bros. worse to make it viable as an arcade game.
  • Finding an adult who has never heard of Mario, jumping, video games or television and locking them in a room until they beat Super Mario Bros.
  • Looking at an image on a flat surface and interpreting it as analogous to a physical scene in the real world.
  • Synesthesia but for ideas.
  • Whispering a secret to the snail.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords

Topics

  • Ephemeral digital music
  • Being a guest on a podcast that you normally listen to is a weird experience because it feels like you're not supposed to talk
  • An update on Bug Mars
  • Dancing in the Street
  • If you were to meet an adult who has never even heard of video games, what would you give them to demonstrate what they are? You are not allowed to interact with them in any other way

Microtopics:

  • An awkward silence where you can't decide who goes first.
  • Having to deliver all the chapters of a book at once.
  • Kanary.
  • Cooling it on making internet people mad ever since you had a kid.
  • Overstepping your own boundaries.
  • Lending a certain patina to your Twitter thread.
  • Midis and meedees.
  • Listening to a game soundtrack on a different sound engine than your had as a child.
  • Listening to a game soundtrack on a different sound engine than the composer used.
  • Proc-gen game soundtracks.
  • A kill cam except it's a kill jingle
  • Your online game detecting when someone draws a penis in the game's graffiti system but not when they draw a penis in the music editor's note grid.
  • Ways of converting an image to audio.
  • Deciding it's not worth going into detail but going into detail anyway.
  • What executables sounds like and why they sound like that.
  • Spelling the word "minimum" in a spectrograph by singing swooping pitches.
  • A video game that induces four friends to sing cacophonously together.
  • Three strangers having a conversation that your don't get to be a part of.
  • Parasocial relationships.
  • How to instantly become friends with a famous person you are a fan of.
  • Two asymmetrical relationships snapping together to become a single symmetrical relationship.
  • What you could've had if you just picked two friends host your podcast instead of all of them.
  • A small company named after a throwaway joke.
  • Spinning up a cricket farm.
  • The Amazon of cricket protein.
  • Alternative and synthetic protein.
  • Receiving a care package of bug protein that you're definitely not going to eat.
  • Whether a cricket burger is still better for the environment than a beef burger if you have to ship it across the country.
  • Being grateful that other people will save the world in the ways that you don't.
  • A brick wall, folks.
  • SCP or rolled up carpet?
  • A leprechaun with a mullet.
  • Wearing a trench coat over a floral print jumpsuit.
  • Racing In The Street.
  • Everybody, where "everybody" means two people.
  • Not being able to afford lighting after renting that crane and asking every crew member to point their car headlights at the dancers.
  • Whether you still trigger counterfeiting laws by putting realistic money in your movie.
  • An extended shot of Mick Jagger guzzling a generic can of beer.
  • Dancing In A Stairwell.
  • Dancing In The Void.
  • Freeze frame on a couple of butts.
  • A derelict flour mill that appears in every Brit-pop music video.
  • How to tell how well you're doing in a Match Three game.
  • Choosing to not introduce the mind virus of casual games to an indigenous tribe.
  • Whether Bejeweled is more market-tested than Pong as an introductory video game.
  • The invention of the platformer.
  • Super Mario Bros. 3's budget and development timeline.
  • The ways that the developers had to make Super Mario Bros. worse to make it viable as an arcade game.
  • Finding an adult who has never heard of Mario, jumping, video games or television and locking them in a room until they beat Super Mario Bros.
  • Looking at an image on a flat surface and interpreting it as analogous to a physical scene in the real world.
  • Synesthesia but for ideas.
  • Whispering a secret to the snail.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+CO8exTIJ ]]> Jim Stormdancer 95. The Florida of Canada https://topiclords.com/the-florida-of-canada a5dde444-83f0-434c-b693-9c6c8940a95a Mon, 16 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Maxx and Erica. We discuss things chewed as a youth, begging Jim to use a sharp knife, explaining Canadian floating feet, being convinced by spoilers that you'd like the work, the tallest people we've met, and Egg the Arts Show. 1:02:08 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Maxx
    • @mechcem on Twitter
    • Maxx plugs sitting at various angles
  • Erica
    • @YerrikTRB on Twitter
    • Erica plugs Lovage, not the band but the spice
  • Jim
    • Jim plugs Big Boy beds, or doesn’t

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Sitting at various angles.
  • Toilets with threatening auras.
  • The butthole being the mind and the poop being the body.
  • Replacing all your spices with lovage.
  • How to use white pepper.
  • Breaking into the kitchen and finding where they keep the peppercorns.
  • Big boy beds.
  • Performatively lying on stuffed animals.
  • Baby MacGyver disassembling his crib from the inside.
  • One for the baby book.
  • The side number theory of beds.
  • Sleeping on a bed shaped like a mobius strip.
  • Sleeping on a tightrope because your triangular bed had too many sides.
  • Staying up as late as you can and then falling asleep where you stand.
  • Hiding inside the circular rack of shirts in JC Penney.
  • Climbing inside a circular rack of chastity belts at JC Penney and becoming trapped when an employee comes by and locks all the belts.
  • Collecting pins from the collars of the men's shirts and sticking them all into the calluses of your hands and running around displaying your hands to freak out the grownups.
  • Chewing all the bones so nobody in your family can play Operation.
  • An endlessly chewy grape.
  • The sign up sheet for chewing on the fake plastic grape.
  • The hierarchy of who in your 4th grade class is allowed to chew on the plastic grape next and for how long.
  • The copycat endlessly chewy grape that is not as good as the one that Erica refuses to give up.
  • Dipping the chewing sponge in whiskey to refresh its flavor.
  • Filling the endlessly chewy plastic grape with peanut butter.
  • Chewing stim toys that are designed for babies but you can totally chew on them as an adult too.
  • Eating the eyes out of the fish before anybody else gets the chance.
  • The novelty of eating an identifiable body part.
  • The Snack That Tastes Back.
  • Being faced with an ice cream bar shaped like a human and deciding whether to bite off its legs first so it can't run away or bite off its head first so it can't scream.
  • Not celebrating Easter but knowing about Easter candy because you bought it on sale afterwards.
  • Whether or not to teach a four year old kitchen knife skills.
  • Giving a cat a tail knife so that it is pointy on six out of six ends.
  • The least optimal medium for explaining how to hold a kitchen knife.
  • Seeing a two year old and needing to arm the two year old.
  • Teaching a two year old how to wield power responsibly.
  • Disarticulated feet washing ashore.
  • Sneakers being more buoyant than sneakers thirty years ago.
  • Why floating feet like landing in Canada.
  • Never a single foot.
  • Salish Sea Human Foot Discoveries.
  • As It Happens.
  • Talking to a Canadian man who was near an earthquake.
  • Cons: loose feet.
  • Lying about the quality of water.
  • Turning the amnesia pill like a kitchen timer to specify how much time you want to lose.
  • Trying to get to Twitter Zero but some people who follow you don't log on any more so you have to find them in real life and annoy them enough that they log in to Twitter to unfollow you, but not enough that they call the police.
  • Cosplaying a 2013-era Twitter asshole by uploading an egg as your profile photo.
  • Tweeting nothing but pop culture spoilers and phobia-triggering photos for months to shed as many followers as possible in your quest for Twitter Zero.
  • A Twitter bot that changes its avatar and username to the last person who tweeted at it and tweets what they said back at them.
  • Not knowing if anyone has time these days and asking the listeners to write in if they have time, but not reading any of the emails because you don't have time.
  • A language where disclosing whether you've eaten eggplant today is built into the grammar.
  • Meeting a basketball player and their suit is yards and yards of tweed going right up to the ceiling, with their head perched on top.
  • Meeting the basketball player who retired to play pinball at California Extreme.
  • Learning to spin a ball on your finger at Harlem Globetrotters basketball camp.
  • All the time you spent at basketball camp and eating avocado toast that you wish you could have back now.
  • Moving to Detroit and wanting to make neighborhoods more friendly.
  • Planting cabbages outside of smokestacks to remove heavy metals from the soil.
  • Emailing the producer of a show you liked twenty years ago to let them know that it's not online anywhere and ending up spearheading the project to archive the show permanently.
  • Doxing yourself live on the air.
  • A Twitter account that every Topic Lord can post from.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Maxx
    • @mechcem on Twitter
    • Maxx plugs sitting at various angles
  • Erica
    • @YerrikTRB on Twitter
    • Erica plugs Lovage, not the band but the spice
  • Jim
    • Jim plugs Big Boy beds, or doesn’t

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Sitting at various angles.
  • Toilets with threatening auras.
  • The butthole being the mind and the poop being the body.
  • Replacing all your spices with lovage.
  • How to use white pepper.
  • Breaking into the kitchen and finding where they keep the peppercorns.
  • Big boy beds.
  • Performatively lying on stuffed animals.
  • Baby MacGyver disassembling his crib from the inside.
  • One for the baby book.
  • The side number theory of beds.
  • Sleeping on a bed shaped like a mobius strip.
  • Sleeping on a tightrope because your triangular bed had too many sides.
  • Staying up as late as you can and then falling asleep where you stand.
  • Hiding inside the circular rack of shirts in JC Penney.
  • Climbing inside a circular rack of chastity belts at JC Penney and becoming trapped when an employee comes by and locks all the belts.
  • Collecting pins from the collars of the men's shirts and sticking them all into the calluses of your hands and running around displaying your hands to freak out the grownups.
  • Chewing all the bones so nobody in your family can play Operation.
  • An endlessly chewy grape.
  • The sign up sheet for chewing on the fake plastic grape.
  • The hierarchy of who in your 4th grade class is allowed to chew on the plastic grape next and for how long.
  • The copycat endlessly chewy grape that is not as good as the one that Erica refuses to give up.
  • Dipping the chewing sponge in whiskey to refresh its flavor.
  • Filling the endlessly chewy plastic grape with peanut butter.
  • Chewing stim toys that are designed for babies but you can totally chew on them as an adult too.
  • Eating the eyes out of the fish before anybody else gets the chance.
  • The novelty of eating an identifiable body part.
  • The Snack That Tastes Back.
  • Being faced with an ice cream bar shaped like a human and deciding whether to bite off its legs first so it can't run away or bite off its head first so it can't scream.
  • Not celebrating Easter but knowing about Easter candy because you bought it on sale afterwards.
  • Whether or not to teach a four year old kitchen knife skills.
  • Giving a cat a tail knife so that it is pointy on six out of six ends.
  • The least optimal medium for explaining how to hold a kitchen knife.
  • Seeing a two year old and needing to arm the two year old.
  • Teaching a two year old how to wield power responsibly.
  • Disarticulated feet washing ashore.
  • Sneakers being more buoyant than sneakers thirty years ago.
  • Why floating feet like landing in Canada.
  • Never a single foot.
  • Salish Sea Human Foot Discoveries.
  • As It Happens.
  • Talking to a Canadian man who was near an earthquake.
  • Cons: loose feet.
  • Lying about the quality of water.
  • Turning the amnesia pill like a kitchen timer to specify how much time you want to lose.
  • Trying to get to Twitter Zero but some people who follow you don't log on any more so you have to find them in real life and annoy them enough that they log in to Twitter to unfollow you, but not enough that they call the police.
  • Cosplaying a 2013-era Twitter asshole by uploading an egg as your profile photo.
  • Tweeting nothing but pop culture spoilers and phobia-triggering photos for months to shed as many followers as possible in your quest for Twitter Zero.
  • A Twitter bot that changes its avatar and username to the last person who tweeted at it and tweets what they said back at them.
  • Not knowing if anyone has time these days and asking the listeners to write in if they have time, but not reading any of the emails because you don't have time.
  • A language where disclosing whether you've eaten eggplant today is built into the grammar.
  • Meeting a basketball player and their suit is yards and yards of tweed going right up to the ceiling, with their head perched on top.
  • Meeting the basketball player who retired to play pinball at California Extreme.
  • Learning to spin a ball on your finger at Harlem Globetrotters basketball camp.
  • All the time you spent at basketball camp and eating avocado toast that you wish you could have back now.
  • Moving to Detroit and wanting to make neighborhoods more friendly.
  • Planting cabbages outside of smokestacks to remove heavy metals from the soil.
  • Emailing the producer of a show you liked twenty years ago to let them know that it's not online anywhere and ending up spearheading the project to archive the show permanently.
  • Doxing yourself live on the air.
  • A Twitter account that every Topic Lord can post from.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Maxx
    • @mechcem on Twitter
    • Maxx plugs sitting at various angles
  • Erica
    • @YerrikTRB on Twitter
    • Erica plugs Lovage, not the band but the spice
  • Jim
    • Jim plugs Big Boy beds, or doesn’t

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Sitting at various angles.
  • Toilets with threatening auras.
  • The butthole being the mind and the poop being the body.
  • Replacing all your spices with lovage.
  • How to use white pepper.
  • Breaking into the kitchen and finding where they keep the peppercorns.
  • Big boy beds.
  • Performatively lying on stuffed animals.
  • Baby MacGyver disassembling his crib from the inside.
  • One for the baby book.
  • The side number theory of beds.
  • Sleeping on a bed shaped like a mobius strip.
  • Sleeping on a tightrope because your triangular bed had too many sides.
  • Staying up as late as you can and then falling asleep where you stand.
  • Hiding inside the circular rack of shirts in JC Penney.
  • Climbing inside a circular rack of chastity belts at JC Penney and becoming trapped when an employee comes by and locks all the belts.
  • Collecting pins from the collars of the men's shirts and sticking them all into the calluses of your hands and running around displaying your hands to freak out the grownups.
  • Chewing all the bones so nobody in your family can play Operation.
  • An endlessly chewy grape.
  • The sign up sheet for chewing on the fake plastic grape.
  • The hierarchy of who in your 4th grade class is allowed to chew on the plastic grape next and for how long.
  • The copycat endlessly chewy grape that is not as good as the one that Erica refuses to give up.
  • Dipping the chewing sponge in whiskey to refresh its flavor.
  • Filling the endlessly chewy plastic grape with peanut butter.
  • Chewing stim toys that are designed for babies but you can totally chew on them as an adult too.
  • Eating the eyes out of the fish before anybody else gets the chance.
  • The novelty of eating an identifiable body part.
  • The Snack That Tastes Back.
  • Being faced with an ice cream bar shaped like a human and deciding whether to bite off its legs first so it can't run away or bite off its head first so it can't scream.
  • Not celebrating Easter but knowing about Easter candy because you bought it on sale afterwards.
  • Whether or not to teach a four year old kitchen knife skills.
  • Giving a cat a tail knife so that it is pointy on six out of six ends.
  • The least optimal medium for explaining how to hold a kitchen knife.
  • Seeing a two year old and needing to arm the two year old.
  • Teaching a two year old how to wield power responsibly.
  • Disarticulated feet washing ashore.
  • Sneakers being more buoyant than sneakers thirty years ago.
  • Why floating feet like landing in Canada.
  • Never a single foot.
  • Salish Sea Human Foot Discoveries.
  • As It Happens.
  • Talking to a Canadian man who was near an earthquake.
  • Cons: loose feet.
  • Lying about the quality of water.
  • Turning the amnesia pill like a kitchen timer to specify how much time you want to lose.
  • Trying to get to Twitter Zero but some people who follow you don't log on any more so you have to find them in real life and annoy them enough that they log in to Twitter to unfollow you, but not enough that they call the police.
  • Cosplaying a 2013-era Twitter asshole by uploading an egg as your profile photo.
  • Tweeting nothing but pop culture spoilers and phobia-triggering photos for months to shed as many followers as possible in your quest for Twitter Zero.
  • A Twitter bot that changes its avatar and username to the last person who tweeted at it and tweets what they said back at them.
  • Not knowing if anyone has time these days and asking the listeners to write in if they have time, but not reading any of the emails because you don't have time.
  • A language where disclosing whether you've eaten eggplant today is built into the grammar.
  • Meeting a basketball player and their suit is yards and yards of tweed going right up to the ceiling, with their head perched on top.
  • Meeting the basketball player who retired to play pinball at California Extreme.
  • Learning to spin a ball on your finger at Harlem Globetrotters basketball camp.
  • All the time you spent at basketball camp and eating avocado toast that you wish you could have back now.
  • Moving to Detroit and wanting to make neighborhoods more friendly.
  • Planting cabbages outside of smokestacks to remove heavy metals from the soil.
  • Emailing the producer of a show you liked twenty years ago to let them know that it's not online anywhere and ending up spearheading the project to archive the show permanently.
  • Doxing yourself live on the air.
  • A Twitter account that every Topic Lord can post from.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+fANMHJRt ]]> Jim Stormdancer 94. We're All Pet Shop Boys Now https://topiclords.com/were-all-pet-shop-boys-now b459cfdf-6018-49a2-a652-0c04556c8f67 Mon, 09 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: James and Tyriq. We discuss the ravens of Golden Gate Park, destroying the moon, the Novation Circuit, and Pet Shop Boys - Domino Dancing. 54:03 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • What exactly qualifies a collection of songs as an album.
  • A solid Mastodon follow.
  • Filling an album with songs until the CD is full.
  • The ravens you pass on your walk every day.
  • The guy in the brown vest who never does anything.
  • CORVID-19.
  • A raven who is extremely surprised that you don't have any food.
  • The mask everyone has agreed to wear when it's time to go cruising for trouble with the crows.
  • Wielding a cream pie so if you accidentally hit someone you are guaranteed to do 0 damage.
  • The Mythbusters episode where they figure out how to drown someone with a pancake.
  • Whittling down your hit points until you stub your toe and die.
  • Hit points as a measure of your will to go on, so when someone hits you in the face with a pie it's a serious blow as you reconsider whether you're really cut out to be an adventurer.
  • Bonus spleen damage.
  • The half-dozen extra organs Space Marines have surgically grafted in for fighting. (But none for love.)
  • Hit points representing individual vertebrae so when a high level Final Fantasy character has 999 HP that means they're basically a giraffe now.
  • Secretly replacing the moon with a hologram of the moon.
  • Fantasy settings where the moon is destroyed and strewn across the sky like the rings of Saturn.
  • Whether it'd be less work to steal a moon of Mars or to retrieve Ceres to give our moon a nice sky companion.
  • Aspirations of both destroying or romancing the moon.
  • Accidentally pushing the supervillain button to destroy all cereal crops when you meant all cold cereals.
  • Why they call them Grape Nuts.
  • Back when it was a big deal that they baked these crackers using electric power.
  • A tool that is worse at what it does than your laptop but has the advantage that you can't go on Twitter.
  • Making 80s techno because you're not ready to make a twelve-tone Schoenberg piece.
  • Wanting to make fun jams but not knowing how to play any instruments.
  • A smooth sequencer workflow.
  • Different ways to make a song.
  • Getting a guitar so you can put guitar sounds in your music and then realizing that now you have to learn to play guitar.
  • Reasons you might want to leave notes out of a chord.
  • Leaving the bass notes out because the bass player is taking care of that.
  • Nine note scales and eleven note scales and everything in between.
  • Pushing the limits of your instrument beyond what it was intended for.
  • The lived experience of wanting cool synthesizers in the 90s vs. In the 20s.
  • Music equipment manufacturers realizing you could make a toy analog synthesizer and sell it for $200 and everyone would buy it because it's a cheap fun music toy.
  • Putting a cpu in a plastic box and there's your synthesizer and all that's left is to add some buttons.
  • Synth Lords.
  • Two shirtless young men sitting by a tree.
  • Whether conventionally attractive people can work in pet shops.
  • Back in the 80s before it was legally mandated that musicians be extremely attractive.
  • Tipping your silver hard hat and saying "milady."
  • Smash cut to a Pet Shop Boy standing in the doorway and the audience gasps.
  • How you would identify the Pet Shop Boys if not for the baseball caps saying "boy."
  • Pet Shop Boyd.
  • Return of the stripy shirts.
  • Pet Shop Yinz.
  • Two shirtless youths fighting in the ocean.
  • Trying to start a fight while outdoors by saying "Do you want to take this to the beach? We can't take it outside because we're already outside! The beach is the outside of the outside! After that it goes to space! Do you want to take this to space?"
  • Walking alone on the beach while your suitors wrestle in the ocean suggestively.
  • Horses getting loose on set while you're filming a music video and getting in every shot.
  • Error with an f.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • What exactly qualifies a collection of songs as an album.
  • A solid Mastodon follow.
  • Filling an album with songs until the CD is full.
  • The ravens you pass on your walk every day.
  • The guy in the brown vest who never does anything.
  • CORVID-19.
  • A raven who is extremely surprised that you don't have any food.
  • The mask everyone has agreed to wear when it's time to go cruising for trouble with the crows.
  • Wielding a cream pie so if you accidentally hit someone you are guaranteed to do 0 damage.
  • The Mythbusters episode where they figure out how to drown someone with a pancake.
  • Whittling down your hit points until you stub your toe and die.
  • Hit points as a measure of your will to go on, so when someone hits you in the face with a pie it's a serious blow as you reconsider whether you're really cut out to be an adventurer.
  • Bonus spleen damage.
  • The half-dozen extra organs Space Marines have surgically grafted in for fighting. (But none for love.)
  • Hit points representing individual vertebrae so when a high level Final Fantasy character has 999 HP that means they're basically a giraffe now.
  • Secretly replacing the moon with a hologram of the moon.
  • Fantasy settings where the moon is destroyed and strewn across the sky like the rings of Saturn.
  • Whether it'd be less work to steal a moon of Mars or to retrieve Ceres to give our moon a nice sky companion.
  • Aspirations of both destroying or romancing the moon.
  • Accidentally pushing the supervillain button to destroy all cereal crops when you meant all cold cereals.
  • Why they call them Grape Nuts.
  • Back when it was a big deal that they baked these crackers using electric power.
  • A tool that is worse at what it does than your laptop but has the advantage that you can't go on Twitter.
  • Making 80s techno because you're not ready to make a twelve-tone Schoenberg piece.
  • Wanting to make fun jams but not knowing how to play any instruments.
  • A smooth sequencer workflow.
  • Different ways to make a song.
  • Getting a guitar so you can put guitar sounds in your music and then realizing that now you have to learn to play guitar.
  • Reasons you might want to leave notes out of a chord.
  • Leaving the bass notes out because the bass player is taking care of that.
  • Nine note scales and eleven note scales and everything in between.
  • Pushing the limits of your instrument beyond what it was intended for.
  • The lived experience of wanting cool synthesizers in the 90s vs. In the 20s.
  • Music equipment manufacturers realizing you could make a toy analog synthesizer and sell it for $200 and everyone would buy it because it's a cheap fun music toy.
  • Putting a cpu in a plastic box and there's your synthesizer and all that's left is to add some buttons.
  • Synth Lords.
  • Two shirtless young men sitting by a tree.
  • Whether conventionally attractive people can work in pet shops.
  • Back in the 80s before it was legally mandated that musicians be extremely attractive.
  • Tipping your silver hard hat and saying "milady."
  • Smash cut to a Pet Shop Boy standing in the doorway and the audience gasps.
  • How you would identify the Pet Shop Boys if not for the baseball caps saying "boy."
  • Pet Shop Boyd.
  • Return of the stripy shirts.
  • Pet Shop Yinz.
  • Two shirtless youths fighting in the ocean.
  • Trying to start a fight while outdoors by saying "Do you want to take this to the beach? We can't take it outside because we're already outside! The beach is the outside of the outside! After that it goes to space! Do you want to take this to space?"
  • Walking alone on the beach while your suitors wrestle in the ocean suggestively.
  • Horses getting loose on set while you're filming a music video and getting in every shot.
  • Error with an f.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • What exactly qualifies a collection of songs as an album.
  • A solid Mastodon follow.
  • Filling an album with songs until the CD is full.
  • The ravens you pass on your walk every day.
  • The guy in the brown vest who never does anything.
  • CORVID-19.
  • A raven who is extremely surprised that you don't have any food.
  • The mask everyone has agreed to wear when it's time to go cruising for trouble with the crows.
  • Wielding a cream pie so if you accidentally hit someone you are guaranteed to do 0 damage.
  • The Mythbusters episode where they figure out how to drown someone with a pancake.
  • Whittling down your hit points until you stub your toe and die.
  • Hit points as a measure of your will to go on, so when someone hits you in the face with a pie it's a serious blow as you reconsider whether you're really cut out to be an adventurer.
  • Bonus spleen damage.
  • The half-dozen extra organs Space Marines have surgically grafted in for fighting. (But none for love.)
  • Hit points representing individual vertebrae so when a high level Final Fantasy character has 999 HP that means they're basically a giraffe now.
  • Secretly replacing the moon with a hologram of the moon.
  • Fantasy settings where the moon is destroyed and strewn across the sky like the rings of Saturn.
  • Whether it'd be less work to steal a moon of Mars or to retrieve Ceres to give our moon a nice sky companion.
  • Aspirations of both destroying or romancing the moon.
  • Accidentally pushing the supervillain button to destroy all cereal crops when you meant all cold cereals.
  • Why they call them Grape Nuts.
  • Back when it was a big deal that they baked these crackers using electric power.
  • A tool that is worse at what it does than your laptop but has the advantage that you can't go on Twitter.
  • Making 80s techno because you're not ready to make a twelve-tone Schoenberg piece.
  • Wanting to make fun jams but not knowing how to play any instruments.
  • A smooth sequencer workflow.
  • Different ways to make a song.
  • Getting a guitar so you can put guitar sounds in your music and then realizing that now you have to learn to play guitar.
  • Reasons you might want to leave notes out of a chord.
  • Leaving the bass notes out because the bass player is taking care of that.
  • Nine note scales and eleven note scales and everything in between.
  • Pushing the limits of your instrument beyond what it was intended for.
  • The lived experience of wanting cool synthesizers in the 90s vs. In the 20s.
  • Music equipment manufacturers realizing you could make a toy analog synthesizer and sell it for $200 and everyone would buy it because it's a cheap fun music toy.
  • Putting a cpu in a plastic box and there's your synthesizer and all that's left is to add some buttons.
  • Synth Lords.
  • Two shirtless young men sitting by a tree.
  • Whether conventionally attractive people can work in pet shops.
  • Back in the 80s before it was legally mandated that musicians be extremely attractive.
  • Tipping your silver hard hat and saying "milady."
  • Smash cut to a Pet Shop Boy standing in the doorway and the audience gasps.
  • How you would identify the Pet Shop Boys if not for the baseball caps saying "boy."
  • Pet Shop Boyd.
  • Return of the stripy shirts.
  • Pet Shop Yinz.
  • Two shirtless youths fighting in the ocean.
  • Trying to start a fight while outdoors by saying "Do you want to take this to the beach? We can't take it outside because we're already outside! The beach is the outside of the outside! After that it goes to space! Do you want to take this to space?"
  • Walking alone on the beach while your suitors wrestle in the ocean suggestively.
  • Horses getting loose on set while you're filming a music video and getting in every shot.
  • Error with an f.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+7BYg5u8c ]]> Jim Stormdancer 93. A Medical Advice Podcast https://topiclords.com/a-medical-advice-podcast 3c96aeb8-819a-44e6-83d3-7984d4c142ba Mon, 02 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Mara and April. We discuss Frog and Toad core, what we would do with a bonus room in your house, saving a cat before realizing you saved the cat, pleasing the interstellar community of sapient intelligences, how to teach children to hate ads without hating all knowledge, Murder She Wrote, and asafoetida powder. 1:01:49 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Frog and Toad core
  • What would you do with a bonus room in your house?
  • My reptile brain is a cat-loving ninja
  • If you could submit one thing (a song, a building, a food, an activity, an abstract concept) to the interstellar community of sapient intelligences as your part of The Case For Why The Human Race Is Good And Cool, what would it be?
  • How earnest lessons you try to teach your children backfire
  • Murder She Wrote is back on prime
  • Asafoetida powder

Microtopics:

  • The Expanse: bigger than before.
  • A developer's guide to cognitive behavioral therapy.
  • The various circumstances under which the Frog Fractions DLC hat can be a witch hat.
  • Cottagecore vs. Frog and Toad core.
  • Cottagecore merged with an old man.
  • Embracing Frog and Toad for pride month.
  • Finding the bodice rippers with people with dark curly hair on the cover because you can imagine those are light-skinned black people.
  • The relative density of the east coast.
  • Getting out of California before it's too late.
  • A complete dearth of natural disasters.
  • Writing an offer letter for a home you want to buy and mentioning your adorable child who just needs a home several times.
  • Moving into a space that is twice as big and not knowing what to do with all the space.
  • An Austenian fantasy you have been cherishing in your bosom.
  • A perfect cosy library with chairs that trap people.
  • Installing a ladder on casters so you can ride it around the room every morning in your Belle outfit.
  • Coming up with excuses to install the ladder on casters even though you can just reach up and grab every book in your library.
  • One of those booths with a fan at the bottom that you fill by ripping a single page out of every book in your library.
  • How much extra you can charge for an Airbnb hidden behind a secret bookshelf.
  • Going into the Library of Congress to check out Bullfrog's Official Guide to Dungeon Keeper.
  • A room full of music production equipment and no internet connection.
  • Asking your child to focus at dinner when all the adults at the table have their phones out.
  • Saving a cat by applying torque to a falling chair.
  • Doing a thing before you realize you've done it and thinking "wow it's a good thing I agree with those actions."
  • Deliberately relying on your unconscious mind to do important work.
  • Whether Jim and his wife need to get checked for ADHD.
  • A teen who can write a hell of a term paper.
  • The interstellar community of sapient intelligences.
  • The case for why the human race is good and cool.
  • Winnie the Pooh.
  • Reclaiming the poop.
  • Taco Bell's cannon firing nacho cheese chalupas at the enemy spaceships.
  • Trying to convey "hygge" without being willing to try to pronounce it.
  • Learning about alien cultures by watching Star Trek.
  • A five year old explaining to you how T-Mobile are leaders in 5G technology.
  • A perfectly sensible reaction to the story of Noah's Ark.
  • Learning what fighting is and deciding to fight your mom.
  • A book about a child who needs to be reprimanded all the time.
  • Shouting "no" and throwing the phone on the floor whenever an ad plays.
  • Watching Murder She Wrote every night before bed.
  • Jessica Fletcher the serial killer and her nephew Grady, also a serial killer.
  • How good Jessica Fletcher would be at breaking up a loud graduation party.
  • Predicting when the party next door is going to end by the decade the music is from.
  • How to recognize a trap remix of the Murder She Wrote theme from just the bass.
  • Tricking your family into playing the Murder She Wrote board game.
  • Not needing a wedding ring because your husband got you the Murder She Wrote DVD boxed set.
  • Discovering what DVDs are and deciding to put them in the shower.
  • Covering the shower drain with the Wii Sports disc because they're the exact same size.
  • A bone-dry shower.
  • Always shirt-cocking it.
  • Baby poop and onions but also kind of floral but also you hate onions.
  • Resorch.
  • Dried latex from the celery family.
  • Boiling your neti pot water to kill the brain-eating bacteria that might pass through the blood brain barrier.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Frog and Toad core
  • What would you do with a bonus room in your house?
  • My reptile brain is a cat-loving ninja
  • If you could submit one thing (a song, a building, a food, an activity, an abstract concept) to the interstellar community of sapient intelligences as your part of The Case For Why The Human Race Is Good And Cool, what would it be?
  • How earnest lessons you try to teach your children backfire
  • Murder She Wrote is back on prime
  • Asafoetida powder

Microtopics:

  • The Expanse: bigger than before.
  • A developer's guide to cognitive behavioral therapy.
  • The various circumstances under which the Frog Fractions DLC hat can be a witch hat.
  • Cottagecore vs. Frog and Toad core.
  • Cottagecore merged with an old man.
  • Embracing Frog and Toad for pride month.
  • Finding the bodice rippers with people with dark curly hair on the cover because you can imagine those are light-skinned black people.
  • The relative density of the east coast.
  • Getting out of California before it's too late.
  • A complete dearth of natural disasters.
  • Writing an offer letter for a home you want to buy and mentioning your adorable child who just needs a home several times.
  • Moving into a space that is twice as big and not knowing what to do with all the space.
  • An Austenian fantasy you have been cherishing in your bosom.
  • A perfect cosy library with chairs that trap people.
  • Installing a ladder on casters so you can ride it around the room every morning in your Belle outfit.
  • Coming up with excuses to install the ladder on casters even though you can just reach up and grab every book in your library.
  • One of those booths with a fan at the bottom that you fill by ripping a single page out of every book in your library.
  • How much extra you can charge for an Airbnb hidden behind a secret bookshelf.
  • Going into the Library of Congress to check out Bullfrog's Official Guide to Dungeon Keeper.
  • A room full of music production equipment and no internet connection.
  • Asking your child to focus at dinner when all the adults at the table have their phones out.
  • Saving a cat by applying torque to a falling chair.
  • Doing a thing before you realize you've done it and thinking "wow it's a good thing I agree with those actions."
  • Deliberately relying on your unconscious mind to do important work.
  • Whether Jim and his wife need to get checked for ADHD.
  • A teen who can write a hell of a term paper.
  • The interstellar community of sapient intelligences.
  • The case for why the human race is good and cool.
  • Winnie the Pooh.
  • Reclaiming the poop.
  • Taco Bell's cannon firing nacho cheese chalupas at the enemy spaceships.
  • Trying to convey "hygge" without being willing to try to pronounce it.
  • Learning about alien cultures by watching Star Trek.
  • A five year old explaining to you how T-Mobile are leaders in 5G technology.
  • A perfectly sensible reaction to the story of Noah's Ark.
  • Learning what fighting is and deciding to fight your mom.
  • A book about a child who needs to be reprimanded all the time.
  • Shouting "no" and throwing the phone on the floor whenever an ad plays.
  • Watching Murder She Wrote every night before bed.
  • Jessica Fletcher the serial killer and her nephew Grady, also a serial killer.
  • How good Jessica Fletcher would be at breaking up a loud graduation party.
  • Predicting when the party next door is going to end by the decade the music is from.
  • How to recognize a trap remix of the Murder She Wrote theme from just the bass.
  • Tricking your family into playing the Murder She Wrote board game.
  • Not needing a wedding ring because your husband got you the Murder She Wrote DVD boxed set.
  • Discovering what DVDs are and deciding to put them in the shower.
  • Covering the shower drain with the Wii Sports disc because they're the exact same size.
  • A bone-dry shower.
  • Always shirt-cocking it.
  • Baby poop and onions but also kind of floral but also you hate onions.
  • Resorch.
  • Dried latex from the celery family.
  • Boiling your neti pot water to kill the brain-eating bacteria that might pass through the blood brain barrier.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Frog and Toad core
  • What would you do with a bonus room in your house?
  • My reptile brain is a cat-loving ninja
  • If you could submit one thing (a song, a building, a food, an activity, an abstract concept) to the interstellar community of sapient intelligences as your part of The Case For Why The Human Race Is Good And Cool, what would it be?
  • How earnest lessons you try to teach your children backfire
  • Murder She Wrote is back on prime
  • Asafoetida powder

Microtopics:

  • The Expanse: bigger than before.
  • A developer's guide to cognitive behavioral therapy.
  • The various circumstances under which the Frog Fractions DLC hat can be a witch hat.
  • Cottagecore vs. Frog and Toad core.
  • Cottagecore merged with an old man.
  • Embracing Frog and Toad for pride month.
  • Finding the bodice rippers with people with dark curly hair on the cover because you can imagine those are light-skinned black people.
  • The relative density of the east coast.
  • Getting out of California before it's too late.
  • A complete dearth of natural disasters.
  • Writing an offer letter for a home you want to buy and mentioning your adorable child who just needs a home several times.
  • Moving into a space that is twice as big and not knowing what to do with all the space.
  • An Austenian fantasy you have been cherishing in your bosom.
  • A perfect cosy library with chairs that trap people.
  • Installing a ladder on casters so you can ride it around the room every morning in your Belle outfit.
  • Coming up with excuses to install the ladder on casters even though you can just reach up and grab every book in your library.
  • One of those booths with a fan at the bottom that you fill by ripping a single page out of every book in your library.
  • How much extra you can charge for an Airbnb hidden behind a secret bookshelf.
  • Going into the Library of Congress to check out Bullfrog's Official Guide to Dungeon Keeper.
  • A room full of music production equipment and no internet connection.
  • Asking your child to focus at dinner when all the adults at the table have their phones out.
  • Saving a cat by applying torque to a falling chair.
  • Doing a thing before you realize you've done it and thinking "wow it's a good thing I agree with those actions."
  • Deliberately relying on your unconscious mind to do important work.
  • Whether Jim and his wife need to get checked for ADHD.
  • A teen who can write a hell of a term paper.
  • The interstellar community of sapient intelligences.
  • The case for why the human race is good and cool.
  • Winnie the Pooh.
  • Reclaiming the poop.
  • Taco Bell's cannon firing nacho cheese chalupas at the enemy spaceships.
  • Trying to convey "hygge" without being willing to try to pronounce it.
  • Learning about alien cultures by watching Star Trek.
  • A five year old explaining to you how T-Mobile are leaders in 5G technology.
  • A perfectly sensible reaction to the story of Noah's Ark.
  • Learning what fighting is and deciding to fight your mom.
  • A book about a child who needs to be reprimanded all the time.
  • Shouting "no" and throwing the phone on the floor whenever an ad plays.
  • Watching Murder She Wrote every night before bed.
  • Jessica Fletcher the serial killer and her nephew Grady, also a serial killer.
  • How good Jessica Fletcher would be at breaking up a loud graduation party.
  • Predicting when the party next door is going to end by the decade the music is from.
  • How to recognize a trap remix of the Murder She Wrote theme from just the bass.
  • Tricking your family into playing the Murder She Wrote board game.
  • Not needing a wedding ring because your husband got you the Murder She Wrote DVD boxed set.
  • Discovering what DVDs are and deciding to put them in the shower.
  • Covering the shower drain with the Wii Sports disc because they're the exact same size.
  • A bone-dry shower.
  • Always shirt-cocking it.
  • Baby poop and onions but also kind of floral but also you hate onions.
  • Resorch.
  • Dried latex from the celery family.
  • Boiling your neti pot water to kill the brain-eating bacteria that might pass through the blood brain barrier.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+wWC3BhpY ]]> Jim Stormdancer 92. Tomb of the Spider-Men https://topiclords.com/tomb-of-the-spider-men 47a7f971-f4e9-45a5-b790-e27f6606215e Mon, 26 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: Abby and John B. We discuss the 1998 Tips & Tricks Magazine Video Game Codebook, Grease 2 and the 60s Superman musical, Tower of Druaga, and Cibo Matto - Sugar Water. 1:00:01 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The illustrious Abby Denton.
  • A shambles.
  • Locking your Twitter so nobody knows what you're doing in there.
  • Making a whole video game magazine out of just the good parts of video game magazines.
  • Publishing a series of short stories by formatting them like cheat codes and then submitting them to Tips & Tricks magazine.
  • Nostalgia for when most of your perception of the gaming world came from tiny screenshots in magazines.
  • A book that is a bunch of fake games and paragraphs about them.
  • A duck riding a skateboard.
  • Making a book out of a Twitter thread.
  • Reading about video games in magazines probably being the optimal experience actually because most games were terrible.
  • Game Master Anthony's birthday party.
  • Street Fighter 2, the last game in the Street Fighter series.
  • NBA Jam arcade as proof that cheat codes are compatible with microtransactions.
  • Renting a game just to prove to your friend that the cheat code they heard about doesn't actually work.
  • WWF Attitude.
  • Enjoying the bouquet of Uniracers.
  • A certain quality of gibberish.
  • Publishing a fake cheat code in the annual Tips and Tricks monster issue to convey the location of your drug drop.
  • Putting Roll back in the Marvel vs. Capcom series.
  • A very mild defense.
  • Superman fighting a gang of Chinese acrobats portrayed by white heroin addicts.
  • Mafiosos cha-cha-ing around the room and chanting "Curtains for Superman!"
  • The only Superman story where kryptonite never appears.
  • An evil psychoanalyst defeating Superman by convincing him he's just a regular guy.
  • Why can't the strongest man in the world be the happiest man in the world?
  • Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark.
  • Dorky British guys trying to impress Michelle Pfeiffer.
  • Giving a three year old a DVD of Grease 2 for her birthday.
  • Everything are an opera.
  • Just barely losing the Nobel Prize for thirty years in a row.
  • Japanese arcade note-sharing culture.
  • If Atari 2600 Adventure has a dozen Easter eggs as obscure as its hidden room, and they were all necessary to finish the game.
  • One thing the NES is good at.
  • The Gilligan's Island game for NES.
  • Gilligan's Island for NES being rated only .1 star out of five less than Sonic CD.
  • Game Center CX.
  • The time you could explore Namco Museum.
  • Bubble Bobble.
  • Hiding a bunch of stuff in your indie game inspired by Frog Fractions but nobody ever finds it because nobody cared enough about your game.
  • Spelunky 2.
  • Your stuff per second rate.
  • Nightmare of Druaga.
  • How to know if you have a friend.
  • A Brian De Palma split screen dream.
  • Waking up with sugar on your head.
  • Michel Gondry's music video ouevre.
  • I, Palindrome, I.
  • A team of compositors working for six months to bring your one-second idea to fruition.
  • Hitting someone with your car and then following them down the street yelling at them.
  • A reverse strip club where the performers are moving backwards in time.
  • Practicing how to put a reverse-causality shirt on.
  • A complete understanding of why Miho Hatori is going to bed with a sugar head.
  • Teaching your son how to yawn.
  • Playing Doctor Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine with your tiny, tiny feet.
  • Jerks welcome!
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The illustrious Abby Denton.
  • A shambles.
  • Locking your Twitter so nobody knows what you're doing in there.
  • Making a whole video game magazine out of just the good parts of video game magazines.
  • Publishing a series of short stories by formatting them like cheat codes and then submitting them to Tips & Tricks magazine.
  • Nostalgia for when most of your perception of the gaming world came from tiny screenshots in magazines.
  • A book that is a bunch of fake games and paragraphs about them.
  • A duck riding a skateboard.
  • Making a book out of a Twitter thread.
  • Reading about video games in magazines probably being the optimal experience actually because most games were terrible.
  • Game Master Anthony's birthday party.
  • Street Fighter 2, the last game in the Street Fighter series.
  • NBA Jam arcade as proof that cheat codes are compatible with microtransactions.
  • Renting a game just to prove to your friend that the cheat code they heard about doesn't actually work.
  • WWF Attitude.
  • Enjoying the bouquet of Uniracers.
  • A certain quality of gibberish.
  • Publishing a fake cheat code in the annual Tips and Tricks monster issue to convey the location of your drug drop.
  • Putting Roll back in the Marvel vs. Capcom series.
  • A very mild defense.
  • Superman fighting a gang of Chinese acrobats portrayed by white heroin addicts.
  • Mafiosos cha-cha-ing around the room and chanting "Curtains for Superman!"
  • The only Superman story where kryptonite never appears.
  • An evil psychoanalyst defeating Superman by convincing him he's just a regular guy.
  • Why can't the strongest man in the world be the happiest man in the world?
  • Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark.
  • Dorky British guys trying to impress Michelle Pfeiffer.
  • Giving a three year old a DVD of Grease 2 for her birthday.
  • Everything are an opera.
  • Just barely losing the Nobel Prize for thirty years in a row.
  • Japanese arcade note-sharing culture.
  • If Atari 2600 Adventure has a dozen Easter eggs as obscure as its hidden room, and they were all necessary to finish the game.
  • One thing the NES is good at.
  • The Gilligan's Island game for NES.
  • Gilligan's Island for NES being rated only .1 star out of five less than Sonic CD.
  • Game Center CX.
  • The time you could explore Namco Museum.
  • Bubble Bobble.
  • Hiding a bunch of stuff in your indie game inspired by Frog Fractions but nobody ever finds it because nobody cared enough about your game.
  • Spelunky 2.
  • Your stuff per second rate.
  • Nightmare of Druaga.
  • How to know if you have a friend.
  • A Brian De Palma split screen dream.
  • Waking up with sugar on your head.
  • Michel Gondry's music video ouevre.
  • I, Palindrome, I.
  • A team of compositors working for six months to bring your one-second idea to fruition.
  • Hitting someone with your car and then following them down the street yelling at them.
  • A reverse strip club where the performers are moving backwards in time.
  • Practicing how to put a reverse-causality shirt on.
  • A complete understanding of why Miho Hatori is going to bed with a sugar head.
  • Teaching your son how to yawn.
  • Playing Doctor Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine with your tiny, tiny feet.
  • Jerks welcome!

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The illustrious Abby Denton.
  • A shambles.
  • Locking your Twitter so nobody knows what you're doing in there.
  • Making a whole video game magazine out of just the good parts of video game magazines.
  • Publishing a series of short stories by formatting them like cheat codes and then submitting them to Tips & Tricks magazine.
  • Nostalgia for when most of your perception of the gaming world came from tiny screenshots in magazines.
  • A book that is a bunch of fake games and paragraphs about them.
  • A duck riding a skateboard.
  • Making a book out of a Twitter thread.
  • Reading about video games in magazines probably being the optimal experience actually because most games were terrible.
  • Game Master Anthony's birthday party.
  • Street Fighter 2, the last game in the Street Fighter series.
  • NBA Jam arcade as proof that cheat codes are compatible with microtransactions.
  • Renting a game just to prove to your friend that the cheat code they heard about doesn't actually work.
  • WWF Attitude.
  • Enjoying the bouquet of Uniracers.
  • A certain quality of gibberish.
  • Publishing a fake cheat code in the annual Tips and Tricks monster issue to convey the location of your drug drop.
  • Putting Roll back in the Marvel vs. Capcom series.
  • A very mild defense.
  • Superman fighting a gang of Chinese acrobats portrayed by white heroin addicts.
  • Mafiosos cha-cha-ing around the room and chanting "Curtains for Superman!"
  • The only Superman story where kryptonite never appears.
  • An evil psychoanalyst defeating Superman by convincing him he's just a regular guy.
  • Why can't the strongest man in the world be the happiest man in the world?
  • Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark.
  • Dorky British guys trying to impress Michelle Pfeiffer.
  • Giving a three year old a DVD of Grease 2 for her birthday.
  • Everything are an opera.
  • Just barely losing the Nobel Prize for thirty years in a row.
  • Japanese arcade note-sharing culture.
  • If Atari 2600 Adventure has a dozen Easter eggs as obscure as its hidden room, and they were all necessary to finish the game.
  • One thing the NES is good at.
  • The Gilligan's Island game for NES.
  • Gilligan's Island for NES being rated only .1 star out of five less than Sonic CD.
  • Game Center CX.
  • The time you could explore Namco Museum.
  • Bubble Bobble.
  • Hiding a bunch of stuff in your indie game inspired by Frog Fractions but nobody ever finds it because nobody cared enough about your game.
  • Spelunky 2.
  • Your stuff per second rate.
  • Nightmare of Druaga.
  • How to know if you have a friend.
  • A Brian De Palma split screen dream.
  • Waking up with sugar on your head.
  • Michel Gondry's music video ouevre.
  • I, Palindrome, I.
  • A team of compositors working for six months to bring your one-second idea to fruition.
  • Hitting someone with your car and then following them down the street yelling at them.
  • A reverse strip club where the performers are moving backwards in time.
  • Practicing how to put a reverse-causality shirt on.
  • A complete understanding of why Miho Hatori is going to bed with a sugar head.
  • Teaching your son how to yawn.
  • Playing Doctor Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine with your tiny, tiny feet.
  • Jerks welcome!

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+kwD4nvu7 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 91. Careening Towards the Poop Dreads Barrier https://topiclords.com/careening-towards-the-poop-dreads-barrier 85df459f-3bf1-466e-9320-b1272a1953d7 Mon, 19 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Xalavier and Tom. We discuss novelty shaped CDs, the Steve Jackson RPG you called on the phone, Opposites Attract by Paula Abdul, how to end the Sonic franchise, double-sided pizza, and poop dreads. 57:33 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Waiting for three months to buy the fancy new LIDAR eyes for your Clydesdale.
  • Whether Microsoft would eat horseflesh, and whether that would be a bad thing.
  • Whether the hippo is a bigger threat to humanity than the Tsetse fly.
  • The only animal in the history of the planet to be equipped with a Gatling gun.
  • Whether anyone has beaten the bucket.
  • A white man in tech who has never been on a podcast.
  • An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs.
  • Having horseflesh on the mind.
  • Whether the horse runs an airport or its own dimension.
  • A bright line in the sand between the listeners and Poop Dreads.
  • Finding a CD-ROM shaped like a polyhedron at the bottom of the cereal box.
  • Filling a CD with 4k resolution dog photographs.
  • Shipping a modern game on 100 novelty shaped CDs and also shipping an enormous disc changer add-on to the PS5, called the "DataLathe."
  • Contract negotiations where you're not allowed to remove any text from the contract but you can add as much as you want to the end.
  • Your DataLathe™ exploding, covering everyone in the room with Lathecerations™.
  • Campaigning for months to get the foam disc gun from the dollar store.
  • How many dogs you could fit in a mid-sized Subaru.
  • Ordering a free starter pack for this play-by-phone RPG by sending a self-addressed stamped envelope to the company running it.
  • Sending a self-addressed stamped envelope to get a free trial of a defunct play-by-phone RPG and receiving a Moons Over My Hammy from the Denny's currently occupying that building.
  • A coked-up American businessman in 1988 making an overseas phone call and paying 38 pence a minute so he can press 3 to cast fireball.
  • A kid reading about a 900 number in the back of a magazine and just calling it and later their parents receive a phone bill and there's no regulatory oversight because the industry was replaced by the internet more quickly than lawmakers could act.
  • Tricking children into calling a phone number that bills their parents for a percentage of their net worth and inventing taxes.
  • Approaching the Poop Dreads barrier and being shot out of the sky.
  • A puff of chimney smoke that makes it look like a cat is farting.
  • Giving a cat a flat top and a goatee.
  • Ripping out the back seat of a Toyota Camry and throwing it in an alley to contrast with the relentless glamour of Paula Abdul.
  • Disco Ball earrings.
  • Whether Silent Hill 2 would've been better starring M.C. Skat Kat.
  • A funny cartoon cat man in a music video.
  • Learning about what people thought was okay in the 80s.
  • M.C. Skat Kat blaming the alley he lives in for his lack of hygiene when cats can just lick themselves to take a bath.
  • The Oral History of M.C. Skat Kat in Opposites Attract.
  • Hanging like a spider from an unseen perch.
  • Paula Abdul trying to Mario Kart dash but whiffing it.
  • A clock on the edge of the rooftop facing inwards so that the cool teens hanging out on the roof can head home before the purge starts.
  • M.C. Skat Kat's ballerina training.
  • Looking at two people whose names start with "Xa" and assuming that they're the same person.
  • The Sonic Cycle.
  • Ending the Sonic Cycle so that Sega can just focus on making Yakuza games.
  • What it would take to kill the Sonic franchise.
  • The Sonic game where players go back in time to kill Yuji Naka and destroy the timeline.
  • Sending an assassin back in time to kill Yuji Naka before he invents Sonic the Hedgehog and coming back to the present to find our cultural landscape dominated by M.C. Skat Kat.
  • Goro Majima featuring in the next Sonic the Hedgehog game.
  • Putting the toppings as far away as possible from the organ you enjoy food with.
  • Inventing double sided pizza by folding your pizza the other way.
  • Biting into the Hot Pocket before making sure it's cool enough to safely consume because they're not called Cool Enough To Safely Consume Pockets.
  • An inverted calzone.
  • A beautiful world in which you ask a street vendor for "one pepperoni please" and he hands you a balloon and the balloon is pizza filled with helium.
  • Every pizza balloon coming with a q-tip inside in case you need to clean your ears after eating.
  • Arranging litterboxes in a geodesic dome so your cat goes "finally an arrangement I respect enough to poop in."
  • Putting chicken wire around your bed but it doesn't keep the cat out because it's not cat wire.
  • The difference between polite and clean.
  • A cat who is afraid of its own hair.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Waiting for three months to buy the fancy new LIDAR eyes for your Clydesdale.
  • Whether Microsoft would eat horseflesh, and whether that would be a bad thing.
  • Whether the hippo is a bigger threat to humanity than the Tsetse fly.
  • The only animal in the history of the planet to be equipped with a Gatling gun.
  • Whether anyone has beaten the bucket.
  • A white man in tech who has never been on a podcast.
  • An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs.
  • Having horseflesh on the mind.
  • Whether the horse runs an airport or its own dimension.
  • A bright line in the sand between the listeners and Poop Dreads.
  • Finding a CD-ROM shaped like a polyhedron at the bottom of the cereal box.
  • Filling a CD with 4k resolution dog photographs.
  • Shipping a modern game on 100 novelty shaped CDs and also shipping an enormous disc changer add-on to the PS5, called the "DataLathe."
  • Contract negotiations where you're not allowed to remove any text from the contract but you can add as much as you want to the end.
  • Your DataLathe™ exploding, covering everyone in the room with Lathecerations™.
  • Campaigning for months to get the foam disc gun from the dollar store.
  • How many dogs you could fit in a mid-sized Subaru.
  • Ordering a free starter pack for this play-by-phone RPG by sending a self-addressed stamped envelope to the company running it.
  • Sending a self-addressed stamped envelope to get a free trial of a defunct play-by-phone RPG and receiving a Moons Over My Hammy from the Denny's currently occupying that building.
  • A coked-up American businessman in 1988 making an overseas phone call and paying 38 pence a minute so he can press 3 to cast fireball.
  • A kid reading about a 900 number in the back of a magazine and just calling it and later their parents receive a phone bill and there's no regulatory oversight because the industry was replaced by the internet more quickly than lawmakers could act.
  • Tricking children into calling a phone number that bills their parents for a percentage of their net worth and inventing taxes.
  • Approaching the Poop Dreads barrier and being shot out of the sky.
  • A puff of chimney smoke that makes it look like a cat is farting.
  • Giving a cat a flat top and a goatee.
  • Ripping out the back seat of a Toyota Camry and throwing it in an alley to contrast with the relentless glamour of Paula Abdul.
  • Disco Ball earrings.
  • Whether Silent Hill 2 would've been better starring M.C. Skat Kat.
  • A funny cartoon cat man in a music video.
  • Learning about what people thought was okay in the 80s.
  • M.C. Skat Kat blaming the alley he lives in for his lack of hygiene when cats can just lick themselves to take a bath.
  • The Oral History of M.C. Skat Kat in Opposites Attract.
  • Hanging like a spider from an unseen perch.
  • Paula Abdul trying to Mario Kart dash but whiffing it.
  • A clock on the edge of the rooftop facing inwards so that the cool teens hanging out on the roof can head home before the purge starts.
  • M.C. Skat Kat's ballerina training.
  • Looking at two people whose names start with "Xa" and assuming that they're the same person.
  • The Sonic Cycle.
  • Ending the Sonic Cycle so that Sega can just focus on making Yakuza games.
  • What it would take to kill the Sonic franchise.
  • The Sonic game where players go back in time to kill Yuji Naka and destroy the timeline.
  • Sending an assassin back in time to kill Yuji Naka before he invents Sonic the Hedgehog and coming back to the present to find our cultural landscape dominated by M.C. Skat Kat.
  • Goro Majima featuring in the next Sonic the Hedgehog game.
  • Putting the toppings as far away as possible from the organ you enjoy food with.
  • Inventing double sided pizza by folding your pizza the other way.
  • Biting into the Hot Pocket before making sure it's cool enough to safely consume because they're not called Cool Enough To Safely Consume Pockets.
  • An inverted calzone.
  • A beautiful world in which you ask a street vendor for "one pepperoni please" and he hands you a balloon and the balloon is pizza filled with helium.
  • Every pizza balloon coming with a q-tip inside in case you need to clean your ears after eating.
  • Arranging litterboxes in a geodesic dome so your cat goes "finally an arrangement I respect enough to poop in."
  • Putting chicken wire around your bed but it doesn't keep the cat out because it's not cat wire.
  • The difference between polite and clean.
  • A cat who is afraid of its own hair.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Waiting for three months to buy the fancy new LIDAR eyes for your Clydesdale.
  • Whether Microsoft would eat horseflesh, and whether that would be a bad thing.
  • Whether the hippo is a bigger threat to humanity than the Tsetse fly.
  • The only animal in the history of the planet to be equipped with a Gatling gun.
  • Whether anyone has beaten the bucket.
  • A white man in tech who has never been on a podcast.
  • An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs.
  • Having horseflesh on the mind.
  • Whether the horse runs an airport or its own dimension.
  • A bright line in the sand between the listeners and Poop Dreads.
  • Finding a CD-ROM shaped like a polyhedron at the bottom of the cereal box.
  • Filling a CD with 4k resolution dog photographs.
  • Shipping a modern game on 100 novelty shaped CDs and also shipping an enormous disc changer add-on to the PS5, called the "DataLathe."
  • Contract negotiations where you're not allowed to remove any text from the contract but you can add as much as you want to the end.
  • Your DataLathe™ exploding, covering everyone in the room with Lathecerations™.
  • Campaigning for months to get the foam disc gun from the dollar store.
  • How many dogs you could fit in a mid-sized Subaru.
  • Ordering a free starter pack for this play-by-phone RPG by sending a self-addressed stamped envelope to the company running it.
  • Sending a self-addressed stamped envelope to get a free trial of a defunct play-by-phone RPG and receiving a Moons Over My Hammy from the Denny's currently occupying that building.
  • A coked-up American businessman in 1988 making an overseas phone call and paying 38 pence a minute so he can press 3 to cast fireball.
  • A kid reading about a 900 number in the back of a magazine and just calling it and later their parents receive a phone bill and there's no regulatory oversight because the industry was replaced by the internet more quickly than lawmakers could act.
  • Tricking children into calling a phone number that bills their parents for a percentage of their net worth and inventing taxes.
  • Approaching the Poop Dreads barrier and being shot out of the sky.
  • A puff of chimney smoke that makes it look like a cat is farting.
  • Giving a cat a flat top and a goatee.
  • Ripping out the back seat of a Toyota Camry and throwing it in an alley to contrast with the relentless glamour of Paula Abdul.
  • Disco Ball earrings.
  • Whether Silent Hill 2 would've been better starring M.C. Skat Kat.
  • A funny cartoon cat man in a music video.
  • Learning about what people thought was okay in the 80s.
  • M.C. Skat Kat blaming the alley he lives in for his lack of hygiene when cats can just lick themselves to take a bath.
  • The Oral History of M.C. Skat Kat in Opposites Attract.
  • Hanging like a spider from an unseen perch.
  • Paula Abdul trying to Mario Kart dash but whiffing it.
  • A clock on the edge of the rooftop facing inwards so that the cool teens hanging out on the roof can head home before the purge starts.
  • M.C. Skat Kat's ballerina training.
  • Looking at two people whose names start with "Xa" and assuming that they're the same person.
  • The Sonic Cycle.
  • Ending the Sonic Cycle so that Sega can just focus on making Yakuza games.
  • What it would take to kill the Sonic franchise.
  • The Sonic game where players go back in time to kill Yuji Naka and destroy the timeline.
  • Sending an assassin back in time to kill Yuji Naka before he invents Sonic the Hedgehog and coming back to the present to find our cultural landscape dominated by M.C. Skat Kat.
  • Goro Majima featuring in the next Sonic the Hedgehog game.
  • Putting the toppings as far away as possible from the organ you enjoy food with.
  • Inventing double sided pizza by folding your pizza the other way.
  • Biting into the Hot Pocket before making sure it's cool enough to safely consume because they're not called Cool Enough To Safely Consume Pockets.
  • An inverted calzone.
  • A beautiful world in which you ask a street vendor for "one pepperoni please" and he hands you a balloon and the balloon is pizza filled with helium.
  • Every pizza balloon coming with a q-tip inside in case you need to clean your ears after eating.
  • Arranging litterboxes in a geodesic dome so your cat goes "finally an arrangement I respect enough to poop in."
  • Putting chicken wire around your bed but it doesn't keep the cat out because it's not cat wire.
  • The difference between polite and clean.
  • A cat who is afraid of its own hair.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+d78pCk3e ]]> Jim Stormdancer 90. That's My Glass Petard! https://topiclords.com/thats-my-glass-petard 147955b7-5f58-4614-849d-2a51e8efa772 Mon, 12 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Jenni and Kole. We discuss whether you should stop animal thieves, Americans finding out about Eurovision, the video game adaptation of the Blade Runner soundtrack, I Did It, your kid adopting Sonic the Hedgehog's attitudey idle animation, how to fix every plot hole in every work, and the "I won't eat the cheese" joke. 1:13:59 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • An entire crowd of Jennis all expressing their preferences at once.
  • Creative choices that make editing this show take even longer.
  • Feeling some topics right now.
  • Helping a seagull looter escape.
  • Just assuming that the seagull didn't pay for that bag of chips.
  • Sending a penguin to the market to buy fish.
  • The Keystone Kops of stopping this bird from having a cheese sandwich.
  • How nobody can get mad if you train your dog to steal from shops.
  • An adorable seagull stealing somebody's insulin.
  • Activating the motion-sensing doors to help a seagull steal the Hope Diamond.
  • Encountering a seagull smoking a tiny crack pipe and deciding whether to post a video on social media or send it to rehab.
  • How to monetize the rat trying to go up the down escalator.
  • When you post a viral video of a rat trying to go up the down escalator and monetize it by replying with an ad for mail order brides but don't give the rat a cut off the income.
  • Whether Americans know about Eurovision.
  • Pretending the listeners don't know what Eurovision is and really lording it over them.
  • Having to adjust for the altitude when you bake a souffle on your high horse.
  • If every state in the USA got to perform one song at the Super Bowl halftime show.
  • Mr. Lordy.
  • Soccer except it's singing.
  • Looking up what girding your loins means.
  • Stocking up on batteries in advance of when Americans find out about Eurovision.
  • Power-washed Cheetos.
  • A bag of bad corn snacks impaled on both a pike and a spike.
  • Cat Is How Much.
  • The specific ways in which Wikidiff is broken.
  • Retiring replidroids.
  • Knife Hopper with Boy Ratty and Dick Reckard.
  • An extremely composed and photogenic dumpster.
  • Getting ready for some very uncomfortable mugging.
  • Identifying wizards by their extremely shiny outfits.
  • Why is this man so big?
  • Smoke tentacles that are just trying to turn the TV on.
  • How badly the red wizard needs food.
  • Sugar Ray Charles playing guitar with one hand and holding champagne in the other.
  • A dojo with sauna vibes.
  • Dripping your dumpster water onto the hookah rip enjoyer.
  • Dave-- that's what his fans call him: Dave.
  • Dave Matthews's flying kick fizzling out because his bribe to the VFX artist wasn't big enough.
  • Scaring the fish with your pec shimmy.
  • Doing community service with the purple wizard who is now the orange wizard.
  • Your two most attitudey friends getting married and having a kid.
  • Deciding that Sonic the Hedgehog's "I'm waiting" idle animation from Sonic 1 is so central to the character that you decide you need to invent reasons for Sonic to be bored in every episode of the Sonic cartoon.
  • Looking at your old yearbook photos and realizing that your smirk is the same as Sonic the Hedgehog's.
  • Kids getting sucked into Sonic the Hedgehog's engorged monopupil younger and younger every year.
  • The helicopter but it gets you lift.
  • Mario's idle animation in Super Mario 64 where he just starts naming Italian foods.
  • Whether someone at Nintendo of America heard Charles Martinet's Mario audition tape and thought "Martinet's an Italian name, right? That means it can't be racist!"
  • The alternate reality where Charles Martinet does a cartoonish French accent to voice Nintendo's platformer mascot.
  • Getting offended on behalf of the French.
  • Whether we should give Shamus O'Leary a hard time for having a racist name.
  • Shamus O'Leary finding the video on Instagram where you did a cartoon Irish accent in his store's bathroom and being like "is that our choking poster??"
  • Hearing that Andy Dufresne makes a hole in a cell wall and assuming Shawshank Redemption is a sequel to Fantastic Voyage.
  • Writing a short story about a friendly rat who explains how Marty McFly's parents didn't recognize him.
  • Making it a life goal to transform every goof on IMDB into an "error made by character" by writing fan sequels on AO3.
  • Explaining how Marty McFly's parents didn't recognize him by pointing out that it was actually a movie the whole time.
  • The stage play of Super Mario Bros 2 where the audience just watches Mario snore for two hours while listening to jaunty ragtime.
  • A joke striking you loudly enough that it's still ringing in your head twenty years later.
  • Paris Syndrome.
  • Jerusalem Syndrome.
  • Planting a palm tree under the Eiffel Tower.
  • Adventure 500.
  • A game jam where you recreate a game you haven't played in years from memory.
  • Lou's voice just being a bad Sylvester Stallone accent.
  • Jenni probably appreciating your email unless it's a bad email.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • An entire crowd of Jennis all expressing their preferences at once.
  • Creative choices that make editing this show take even longer.
  • Feeling some topics right now.
  • Helping a seagull looter escape.
  • Just assuming that the seagull didn't pay for that bag of chips.
  • Sending a penguin to the market to buy fish.
  • The Keystone Kops of stopping this bird from having a cheese sandwich.
  • How nobody can get mad if you train your dog to steal from shops.
  • An adorable seagull stealing somebody's insulin.
  • Activating the motion-sensing doors to help a seagull steal the Hope Diamond.
  • Encountering a seagull smoking a tiny crack pipe and deciding whether to post a video on social media or send it to rehab.
  • How to monetize the rat trying to go up the down escalator.
  • When you post a viral video of a rat trying to go up the down escalator and monetize it by replying with an ad for mail order brides but don't give the rat a cut off the income.
  • Whether Americans know about Eurovision.
  • Pretending the listeners don't know what Eurovision is and really lording it over them.
  • Having to adjust for the altitude when you bake a souffle on your high horse.
  • If every state in the USA got to perform one song at the Super Bowl halftime show.
  • Mr. Lordy.
  • Soccer except it's singing.
  • Looking up what girding your loins means.
  • Stocking up on batteries in advance of when Americans find out about Eurovision.
  • Power-washed Cheetos.
  • A bag of bad corn snacks impaled on both a pike and a spike.
  • Cat Is How Much.
  • The specific ways in which Wikidiff is broken.
  • Retiring replidroids.
  • Knife Hopper with Boy Ratty and Dick Reckard.
  • An extremely composed and photogenic dumpster.
  • Getting ready for some very uncomfortable mugging.
  • Identifying wizards by their extremely shiny outfits.
  • Why is this man so big?
  • Smoke tentacles that are just trying to turn the TV on.
  • How badly the red wizard needs food.
  • Sugar Ray Charles playing guitar with one hand and holding champagne in the other.
  • A dojo with sauna vibes.
  • Dripping your dumpster water onto the hookah rip enjoyer.
  • Dave-- that's what his fans call him: Dave.
  • Dave Matthews's flying kick fizzling out because his bribe to the VFX artist wasn't big enough.
  • Scaring the fish with your pec shimmy.
  • Doing community service with the purple wizard who is now the orange wizard.
  • Your two most attitudey friends getting married and having a kid.
  • Deciding that Sonic the Hedgehog's "I'm waiting" idle animation from Sonic 1 is so central to the character that you decide you need to invent reasons for Sonic to be bored in every episode of the Sonic cartoon.
  • Looking at your old yearbook photos and realizing that your smirk is the same as Sonic the Hedgehog's.
  • Kids getting sucked into Sonic the Hedgehog's engorged monopupil younger and younger every year.
  • The helicopter but it gets you lift.
  • Mario's idle animation in Super Mario 64 where he just starts naming Italian foods.
  • Whether someone at Nintendo of America heard Charles Martinet's Mario audition tape and thought "Martinet's an Italian name, right? That means it can't be racist!"
  • The alternate reality where Charles Martinet does a cartoonish French accent to voice Nintendo's platformer mascot.
  • Getting offended on behalf of the French.
  • Whether we should give Shamus O'Leary a hard time for having a racist name.
  • Shamus O'Leary finding the video on Instagram where you did a cartoon Irish accent in his store's bathroom and being like "is that our choking poster??"
  • Hearing that Andy Dufresne makes a hole in a cell wall and assuming Shawshank Redemption is a sequel to Fantastic Voyage.
  • Writing a short story about a friendly rat who explains how Marty McFly's parents didn't recognize him.
  • Making it a life goal to transform every goof on IMDB into an "error made by character" by writing fan sequels on AO3.
  • Explaining how Marty McFly's parents didn't recognize him by pointing out that it was actually a movie the whole time.
  • The stage play of Super Mario Bros 2 where the audience just watches Mario snore for two hours while listening to jaunty ragtime.
  • A joke striking you loudly enough that it's still ringing in your head twenty years later.
  • Paris Syndrome.
  • Jerusalem Syndrome.
  • Planting a palm tree under the Eiffel Tower.
  • Adventure 500.
  • A game jam where you recreate a game you haven't played in years from memory.
  • Lou's voice just being a bad Sylvester Stallone accent.
  • Jenni probably appreciating your email unless it's a bad email.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • An entire crowd of Jennis all expressing their preferences at once.
  • Creative choices that make editing this show take even longer.
  • Feeling some topics right now.
  • Helping a seagull looter escape.
  • Just assuming that the seagull didn't pay for that bag of chips.
  • Sending a penguin to the market to buy fish.
  • The Keystone Kops of stopping this bird from having a cheese sandwich.
  • How nobody can get mad if you train your dog to steal from shops.
  • An adorable seagull stealing somebody's insulin.
  • Activating the motion-sensing doors to help a seagull steal the Hope Diamond.
  • Encountering a seagull smoking a tiny crack pipe and deciding whether to post a video on social media or send it to rehab.
  • How to monetize the rat trying to go up the down escalator.
  • When you post a viral video of a rat trying to go up the down escalator and monetize it by replying with an ad for mail order brides but don't give the rat a cut off the income.
  • Whether Americans know about Eurovision.
  • Pretending the listeners don't know what Eurovision is and really lording it over them.
  • Having to adjust for the altitude when you bake a souffle on your high horse.
  • If every state in the USA got to perform one song at the Super Bowl halftime show.
  • Mr. Lordy.
  • Soccer except it's singing.
  • Looking up what girding your loins means.
  • Stocking up on batteries in advance of when Americans find out about Eurovision.
  • Power-washed Cheetos.
  • A bag of bad corn snacks impaled on both a pike and a spike.
  • Cat Is How Much.
  • The specific ways in which Wikidiff is broken.
  • Retiring replidroids.
  • Knife Hopper with Boy Ratty and Dick Reckard.
  • An extremely composed and photogenic dumpster.
  • Getting ready for some very uncomfortable mugging.
  • Identifying wizards by their extremely shiny outfits.
  • Why is this man so big?
  • Smoke tentacles that are just trying to turn the TV on.
  • How badly the red wizard needs food.
  • Sugar Ray Charles playing guitar with one hand and holding champagne in the other.
  • A dojo with sauna vibes.
  • Dripping your dumpster water onto the hookah rip enjoyer.
  • Dave-- that's what his fans call him: Dave.
  • Dave Matthews's flying kick fizzling out because his bribe to the VFX artist wasn't big enough.
  • Scaring the fish with your pec shimmy.
  • Doing community service with the purple wizard who is now the orange wizard.
  • Your two most attitudey friends getting married and having a kid.
  • Deciding that Sonic the Hedgehog's "I'm waiting" idle animation from Sonic 1 is so central to the character that you decide you need to invent reasons for Sonic to be bored in every episode of the Sonic cartoon.
  • Looking at your old yearbook photos and realizing that your smirk is the same as Sonic the Hedgehog's.
  • Kids getting sucked into Sonic the Hedgehog's engorged monopupil younger and younger every year.
  • The helicopter but it gets you lift.
  • Mario's idle animation in Super Mario 64 where he just starts naming Italian foods.
  • Whether someone at Nintendo of America heard Charles Martinet's Mario audition tape and thought "Martinet's an Italian name, right? That means it can't be racist!"
  • The alternate reality where Charles Martinet does a cartoonish French accent to voice Nintendo's platformer mascot.
  • Getting offended on behalf of the French.
  • Whether we should give Shamus O'Leary a hard time for having a racist name.
  • Shamus O'Leary finding the video on Instagram where you did a cartoon Irish accent in his store's bathroom and being like "is that our choking poster??"
  • Hearing that Andy Dufresne makes a hole in a cell wall and assuming Shawshank Redemption is a sequel to Fantastic Voyage.
  • Writing a short story about a friendly rat who explains how Marty McFly's parents didn't recognize him.
  • Making it a life goal to transform every goof on IMDB into an "error made by character" by writing fan sequels on AO3.
  • Explaining how Marty McFly's parents didn't recognize him by pointing out that it was actually a movie the whole time.
  • The stage play of Super Mario Bros 2 where the audience just watches Mario snore for two hours while listening to jaunty ragtime.
  • A joke striking you loudly enough that it's still ringing in your head twenty years later.
  • Paris Syndrome.
  • Jerusalem Syndrome.
  • Planting a palm tree under the Eiffel Tower.
  • Adventure 500.
  • A game jam where you recreate a game you haven't played in years from memory.
  • Lou's voice just being a bad Sylvester Stallone accent.
  • Jenni probably appreciating your email unless it's a bad email.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+LfMUTBao ]]> Jim Stormdancer 89. Pope Hat Guy Covers You With a Towel https://topiclords.com/pope-hat-guy-covers-you-with-a-towel 02b1d330-baac-492f-9afc-fbcef0e8ea83 Mon, 05 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Nathan and Chris. We discuss whether to start your whodunit with a spoiler, strange things that come with apartments, Monster Island, No Tengo Dinero, and procrastination techniques. 1:06:16 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The symmetry of USB-C.
  • The edibility of USB-C.
  • The months-long argument at Nintendo over which version of the Flag Gordon song to play when you plug USB-C headphones into the charging port.
  • Which version of the Flash Gordon theme is more likely to get you pulled over for speeding.
  • Columbo.
  • Whether a mystery story functions as both a good story and a good puzzle.
  • Revealing the identity of the murderer in the first ten minutes of every episode of your murder mystery series.
  • The inherent mystery provided by the horror genre's willingness to deliver the bad ending.
  • Murder mysteries that are mysteries to the characters but not the audience.
  • Whether it can still be a horror movie if the audience understands the rules.
  • Knives Out.
  • Enjoying a story twice because there is pleasure in seeing a well-constructed story play out.
  • Mental air conditioning.
  • Watching a movie before you watch it, so you know what's going to happen.
  • A huge wooden ankh in the bushes right outside your front door.
  • Renting a furnished apartment and it comes with a painting called "Bad Pope Hat Guy" right above your bed.
  • Covering the painting of Lucius the Bad Pope with a towel before going to sleep on the bed underneath the painting and waking up with the towel covering your head and realizing Lucius the Bad Pope just covered you with a towel.
  • Finding a knob of unknown purpose sticking out of the wall and deciding to pull it as hard as you can.
  • Fold-out wall stools.
  • A porcelain hand that came with the apartment.
  • Storing your porcelain hand in the toilet tank.
  • Everyone having that one friend who owns a jar of mercury and does the party trick where they float a penny on top of the mercury.
  • Your new girlfriend getting upset that you own a jar of mercury so you leave it in the common area of your apartment building and the next day it's gone.
  • Whether your jar of mercury contains any of the atoms of mercury that Hitler breathed.
  • Playing an MMO by mail.
  • How many frames per second a play by mail game runs at
  • Yelling "hey!" into the abyss.
  • Non-player monsters.
  • Crossing the Crystal Hills barrier.
  • Issuing weekly patches into your Netflix original movie until none of the original story or actors remain.
  • Checking the patch notes before you watch version 2.4 of your favorite movie.
  • Where to put the new material when you add to your branching path story.
  • Inventing the t-remover so you can patch a movie starring Brad Pitt to instead star Brad Pit.
  • Whether a music video is hand animated or early CG.
  • Video Toaster.
  • A 3D animated prism that's actually a 2D animation cel that someone is rotating by hand.
  • The significance of the orange ball with sevens coming out.
  • Inventing the circuit board to be the background in your cool music video and then realizing you can use it to design electronics.
  • One tiny tank having to bear witness and the other tiny tank refusing to.
  • The same music video being the origin of circuit boards, Macromedia Flash, and the Toejam and Earl loading screens.
  • Basing your squad of teen crime solvers on a 90s fad like Magic Eye.
  • Seeing ending credits at the end of a music video and realizing you were watching a short film this whole time.
  • Being inspired to speak by images in front of your eyes.
  • Seeing a galaxy brain meme in your mind's ear.
  • An outline of an abbreviation.
  • Bragging about your photogenic memory.
  • Where your mind's ear lives.
  • Your Bluetooth headphones glitching out in a way that is both cool and nauseating.
  • Needing to flip a switch in your mind and having to be careful not to touch the mind mouse trap next to it.
  • Being productive all day and then realizing you didn't do anything fun all day.
  • Moving to Minneapolis and realizing just how much you own.
  • A two year old who draws perfect circles.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The symmetry of USB-C.
  • The edibility of USB-C.
  • The months-long argument at Nintendo over which version of the Flag Gordon song to play when you plug USB-C headphones into the charging port.
  • Which version of the Flash Gordon theme is more likely to get you pulled over for speeding.
  • Columbo.
  • Whether a mystery story functions as both a good story and a good puzzle.
  • Revealing the identity of the murderer in the first ten minutes of every episode of your murder mystery series.
  • The inherent mystery provided by the horror genre's willingness to deliver the bad ending.
  • Murder mysteries that are mysteries to the characters but not the audience.
  • Whether it can still be a horror movie if the audience understands the rules.
  • Knives Out.
  • Enjoying a story twice because there is pleasure in seeing a well-constructed story play out.
  • Mental air conditioning.
  • Watching a movie before you watch it, so you know what's going to happen.
  • A huge wooden ankh in the bushes right outside your front door.
  • Renting a furnished apartment and it comes with a painting called "Bad Pope Hat Guy" right above your bed.
  • Covering the painting of Lucius the Bad Pope with a towel before going to sleep on the bed underneath the painting and waking up with the towel covering your head and realizing Lucius the Bad Pope just covered you with a towel.
  • Finding a knob of unknown purpose sticking out of the wall and deciding to pull it as hard as you can.
  • Fold-out wall stools.
  • A porcelain hand that came with the apartment.
  • Storing your porcelain hand in the toilet tank.
  • Everyone having that one friend who owns a jar of mercury and does the party trick where they float a penny on top of the mercury.
  • Your new girlfriend getting upset that you own a jar of mercury so you leave it in the common area of your apartment building and the next day it's gone.
  • Whether your jar of mercury contains any of the atoms of mercury that Hitler breathed.
  • Playing an MMO by mail.
  • How many frames per second a play by mail game runs at
  • Yelling "hey!" into the abyss.
  • Non-player monsters.
  • Crossing the Crystal Hills barrier.
  • Issuing weekly patches into your Netflix original movie until none of the original story or actors remain.
  • Checking the patch notes before you watch version 2.4 of your favorite movie.
  • Where to put the new material when you add to your branching path story.
  • Inventing the t-remover so you can patch a movie starring Brad Pitt to instead star Brad Pit.
  • Whether a music video is hand animated or early CG.
  • Video Toaster.
  • A 3D animated prism that's actually a 2D animation cel that someone is rotating by hand.
  • The significance of the orange ball with sevens coming out.
  • Inventing the circuit board to be the background in your cool music video and then realizing you can use it to design electronics.
  • One tiny tank having to bear witness and the other tiny tank refusing to.
  • The same music video being the origin of circuit boards, Macromedia Flash, and the Toejam and Earl loading screens.
  • Basing your squad of teen crime solvers on a 90s fad like Magic Eye.
  • Seeing ending credits at the end of a music video and realizing you were watching a short film this whole time.
  • Being inspired to speak by images in front of your eyes.
  • Seeing a galaxy brain meme in your mind's ear.
  • An outline of an abbreviation.
  • Bragging about your photogenic memory.
  • Where your mind's ear lives.
  • Your Bluetooth headphones glitching out in a way that is both cool and nauseating.
  • Needing to flip a switch in your mind and having to be careful not to touch the mind mouse trap next to it.
  • Being productive all day and then realizing you didn't do anything fun all day.
  • Moving to Minneapolis and realizing just how much you own.
  • A two year old who draws perfect circles.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The symmetry of USB-C.
  • The edibility of USB-C.
  • The months-long argument at Nintendo over which version of the Flag Gordon song to play when you plug USB-C headphones into the charging port.
  • Which version of the Flash Gordon theme is more likely to get you pulled over for speeding.
  • Columbo.
  • Whether a mystery story functions as both a good story and a good puzzle.
  • Revealing the identity of the murderer in the first ten minutes of every episode of your murder mystery series.
  • The inherent mystery provided by the horror genre's willingness to deliver the bad ending.
  • Murder mysteries that are mysteries to the characters but not the audience.
  • Whether it can still be a horror movie if the audience understands the rules.
  • Knives Out.
  • Enjoying a story twice because there is pleasure in seeing a well-constructed story play out.
  • Mental air conditioning.
  • Watching a movie before you watch it, so you know what's going to happen.
  • A huge wooden ankh in the bushes right outside your front door.
  • Renting a furnished apartment and it comes with a painting called "Bad Pope Hat Guy" right above your bed.
  • Covering the painting of Lucius the Bad Pope with a towel before going to sleep on the bed underneath the painting and waking up with the towel covering your head and realizing Lucius the Bad Pope just covered you with a towel.
  • Finding a knob of unknown purpose sticking out of the wall and deciding to pull it as hard as you can.
  • Fold-out wall stools.
  • A porcelain hand that came with the apartment.
  • Storing your porcelain hand in the toilet tank.
  • Everyone having that one friend who owns a jar of mercury and does the party trick where they float a penny on top of the mercury.
  • Your new girlfriend getting upset that you own a jar of mercury so you leave it in the common area of your apartment building and the next day it's gone.
  • Whether your jar of mercury contains any of the atoms of mercury that Hitler breathed.
  • Playing an MMO by mail.
  • How many frames per second a play by mail game runs at
  • Yelling "hey!" into the abyss.
  • Non-player monsters.
  • Crossing the Crystal Hills barrier.
  • Issuing weekly patches into your Netflix original movie until none of the original story or actors remain.
  • Checking the patch notes before you watch version 2.4 of your favorite movie.
  • Where to put the new material when you add to your branching path story.
  • Inventing the t-remover so you can patch a movie starring Brad Pitt to instead star Brad Pit.
  • Whether a music video is hand animated or early CG.
  • Video Toaster.
  • A 3D animated prism that's actually a 2D animation cel that someone is rotating by hand.
  • The significance of the orange ball with sevens coming out.
  • Inventing the circuit board to be the background in your cool music video and then realizing you can use it to design electronics.
  • One tiny tank having to bear witness and the other tiny tank refusing to.
  • The same music video being the origin of circuit boards, Macromedia Flash, and the Toejam and Earl loading screens.
  • Basing your squad of teen crime solvers on a 90s fad like Magic Eye.
  • Seeing ending credits at the end of a music video and realizing you were watching a short film this whole time.
  • Being inspired to speak by images in front of your eyes.
  • Seeing a galaxy brain meme in your mind's ear.
  • An outline of an abbreviation.
  • Bragging about your photogenic memory.
  • Where your mind's ear lives.
  • Your Bluetooth headphones glitching out in a way that is both cool and nauseating.
  • Needing to flip a switch in your mind and having to be careful not to touch the mind mouse trap next to it.
  • Being productive all day and then realizing you didn't do anything fun all day.
  • Moving to Minneapolis and realizing just how much you own.
  • A two year old who draws perfect circles.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+JAwD8yRu ]]> Jim Stormdancer 88. The Horned Lizard's Final Defense https://topiclords.com/the-horned-lizards-final-defense 7140750f-8008-48ad-b45e-0a1f13b752dc Mon, 28 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Tyriq and Ryan. We discuss whether animals know things and how to find out, invisibility's place on the superpower totem pole, fixing concert videos where the audience claps on 1 and 3, Toxic by Britney Spears, and replacing your least favorite mundane tool or technology. 1:12:47 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Doing a perfect ollie your first time on a skateboard and then never skating again because you'll never top that.
  • Cooking every single dish in the human culinary encyclopedia and then starving to death because you refuse to repeat yourself.
  • Honor system rock paper scissors.
  • Making video games, one of which is called Catacomb Kids.
  • Naming your band one letter away from a common word so that your band is impossible to google.
  • An extremely austere and dour change log, like in Great Expectations.
  • Changing the "dragon breath" spell to "bear breath" because dragons aren't real but bears breathe fire.
  • A grim window into the world in which we live, dragonless and dragon breath -less.
  • A delicious treat for anyone who likes anise flavoring and salt.
  • A giant human sized licorice in a wedding gown.
  • Competing with nearby deer for the affections of the extremely salty licorice you're marrying.
  • Spendinga lot of your mental energy trying to figure out animal cognition.
  • Whether elephants worship the moon or in fact anything.
  • Dogs doing the things dogs do even if they've never been taught by another dog.
  • Where babies learn the things that their parents don't teach them.
  • Babies smiling when they see a face even though they're not happy to see you.
  • Baby reflexes that help parents bond with them during the time when they are hardest to love.
  • How to be sure that animals think and feel and have memory when we can't even be sure for other humans.
  • P-zombies.
  • A dog's mental model of the world.
  • The Far Side cartoon depicting a machine that translates dog barks into human speech.
  • Whether animals have to know stuff.
  • Meerkat accents.
  • The mantis shrimp having an innate ability to see ghosts, and learning our language to tell us that we're stepping on ghosts all the time and we're covered in ectoplasm.
  • A superpower that turns you invisible except for your eyes, so you're just a floating pair of eyeballs, not invisible at all, so you have to buy a pair of sunglasses to hide your eyes.
  • Putting two of the lamest possible superpowers together in the same married couple.
  • The lamest superpower that you would settle for.
  • The superpower of getting up when the alarm rings and not having to hit snooze even once.
  • The superpower of lactose tolerance.
  • The superpower of having practiced a lot.
  • Cutting a cantaloupe in half and the six of clubs is in there and the guy's like "yeah that's my card, but that cantaloupe was $9 at Whole Foods, thanks a lot."
  • How to convince general audiences that they should care when in the measure to clap.
  • Just assuming that audiences will be clapping in the wrong place so you add a single measure in 5/4 to your 4/4 composition to fix it.
  • Playing a concert video where the video and audio are desynchronized by exactly half a measure.
  • Inventing a snare drum that looks like a bass drum and vice versa, and filming a prank show where unsuspecting drummers play concerts with the inverted drum kit.
  • Going to fiver and asking someone to build you a drum kit that defies science and logic.
  • The one company that Topic Lords would accept sponsorship from.
  • Stopping the concert when the audience starts clapping on 1 and 3 and asking them "come on, did you spend $126 to get it wrong?"
  • Not finding out how low-poly these birds are until the quarter speed viewing.
  • Which side Britney's nails look most amazing from.
  • The outfit flight attendants had to wear in the 1950s, before they had the right to vote.
  • A flight attendant with pauldrons.
  • A loser with a sandwich that Britney wants to make out with in the bathroom.
  • Seeing someone's ass and wondering what the Blippi subreddit would think of it.
  • A dude who is a motorcycle.
  • Biketaurs.
  • Having the same facial expression as the motorcycle you're riding.
  • A sparkly Jackson Pollock that you wrap around yourself.
  • Stepping right in the laser.
  • Warning the janitor that you're turning on the office's death ladder so he's not surprised when he shows up that weekend to find 15 corpses on the floor.
  • A music video that is secretly the prequel to Jupiter Ascending.
  • Whether this hot Scandinavian guy is the same guy as the last hot Scandinavian guy.
  • Saving time shaving by dyeing your facial hair the same color as your skin.
  • Whether a stiff iron bar jabbing into your back would improve a bed or a chair.
  • Whether Britney Spears hallucinated the events of the Toxic video, and she's just an ordinary flight attendant.
  • How to fix bread closures.
  • Filling the moon with bread closures.
  • Getting a bread box so people stop having to manufacture bread closures.
  • How massive a bread is required to spin the bag at sufficient velocity to apply the bread closures.
  • Solving your headphone cord problem by never listening to audio of any kind.
  • Installing an ink sac in your fingernail so that you never have to look around for a pen.
  • A tattoo of a squid that you can squeeze to spurt ink into the eyes of your enemies, but the tattoo gets more and more faded as the ink depletes.
  • An awful thing that your ducks can do.
  • What's going on in that biome?
  • The horned lizard's final defense.
  • Dropping a tail if you need to escape.
  • A super ethical meat factory that spends all day terrifying the tails off of lizards.
  • An avocado-like spread made out of frightened lizard tail.
  • Nothing but adrenaline flavor in this tail.
  • How to live as a freelancer without being drained of all your bodily fluids.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Doing a perfect ollie your first time on a skateboard and then never skating again because you'll never top that.
  • Cooking every single dish in the human culinary encyclopedia and then starving to death because you refuse to repeat yourself.
  • Honor system rock paper scissors.
  • Making video games, one of which is called Catacomb Kids.
  • Naming your band one letter away from a common word so that your band is impossible to google.
  • An extremely austere and dour change log, like in Great Expectations.
  • Changing the "dragon breath" spell to "bear breath" because dragons aren't real but bears breathe fire.
  • A grim window into the world in which we live, dragonless and dragon breath -less.
  • A delicious treat for anyone who likes anise flavoring and salt.
  • A giant human sized licorice in a wedding gown.
  • Competing with nearby deer for the affections of the extremely salty licorice you're marrying.
  • Spendinga lot of your mental energy trying to figure out animal cognition.
  • Whether elephants worship the moon or in fact anything.
  • Dogs doing the things dogs do even if they've never been taught by another dog.
  • Where babies learn the things that their parents don't teach them.
  • Babies smiling when they see a face even though they're not happy to see you.
  • Baby reflexes that help parents bond with them during the time when they are hardest to love.
  • How to be sure that animals think and feel and have memory when we can't even be sure for other humans.
  • P-zombies.
  • A dog's mental model of the world.
  • The Far Side cartoon depicting a machine that translates dog barks into human speech.
  • Whether animals have to know stuff.
  • Meerkat accents.
  • The mantis shrimp having an innate ability to see ghosts, and learning our language to tell us that we're stepping on ghosts all the time and we're covered in ectoplasm.
  • A superpower that turns you invisible except for your eyes, so you're just a floating pair of eyeballs, not invisible at all, so you have to buy a pair of sunglasses to hide your eyes.
  • Putting two of the lamest possible superpowers together in the same married couple.
  • The lamest superpower that you would settle for.
  • The superpower of getting up when the alarm rings and not having to hit snooze even once.
  • The superpower of lactose tolerance.
  • The superpower of having practiced a lot.
  • Cutting a cantaloupe in half and the six of clubs is in there and the guy's like "yeah that's my card, but that cantaloupe was $9 at Whole Foods, thanks a lot."
  • How to convince general audiences that they should care when in the measure to clap.
  • Just assuming that audiences will be clapping in the wrong place so you add a single measure in 5/4 to your 4/4 composition to fix it.
  • Playing a concert video where the video and audio are desynchronized by exactly half a measure.
  • Inventing a snare drum that looks like a bass drum and vice versa, and filming a prank show where unsuspecting drummers play concerts with the inverted drum kit.
  • Going to fiver and asking someone to build you a drum kit that defies science and logic.
  • The one company that Topic Lords would accept sponsorship from.
  • Stopping the concert when the audience starts clapping on 1 and 3 and asking them "come on, did you spend $126 to get it wrong?"
  • Not finding out how low-poly these birds are until the quarter speed viewing.
  • Which side Britney's nails look most amazing from.
  • The outfit flight attendants had to wear in the 1950s, before they had the right to vote.
  • A flight attendant with pauldrons.
  • A loser with a sandwich that Britney wants to make out with in the bathroom.
  • Seeing someone's ass and wondering what the Blippi subreddit would think of it.
  • A dude who is a motorcycle.
  • Biketaurs.
  • Having the same facial expression as the motorcycle you're riding.
  • A sparkly Jackson Pollock that you wrap around yourself.
  • Stepping right in the laser.
  • Warning the janitor that you're turning on the office's death ladder so he's not surprised when he shows up that weekend to find 15 corpses on the floor.
  • A music video that is secretly the prequel to Jupiter Ascending.
  • Whether this hot Scandinavian guy is the same guy as the last hot Scandinavian guy.
  • Saving time shaving by dyeing your facial hair the same color as your skin.
  • Whether a stiff iron bar jabbing into your back would improve a bed or a chair.
  • Whether Britney Spears hallucinated the events of the Toxic video, and she's just an ordinary flight attendant.
  • How to fix bread closures.
  • Filling the moon with bread closures.
  • Getting a bread box so people stop having to manufacture bread closures.
  • How massive a bread is required to spin the bag at sufficient velocity to apply the bread closures.
  • Solving your headphone cord problem by never listening to audio of any kind.
  • Installing an ink sac in your fingernail so that you never have to look around for a pen.
  • A tattoo of a squid that you can squeeze to spurt ink into the eyes of your enemies, but the tattoo gets more and more faded as the ink depletes.
  • An awful thing that your ducks can do.
  • What's going on in that biome?
  • The horned lizard's final defense.
  • Dropping a tail if you need to escape.
  • A super ethical meat factory that spends all day terrifying the tails off of lizards.
  • An avocado-like spread made out of frightened lizard tail.
  • Nothing but adrenaline flavor in this tail.
  • How to live as a freelancer without being drained of all your bodily fluids.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Doing a perfect ollie your first time on a skateboard and then never skating again because you'll never top that.
  • Cooking every single dish in the human culinary encyclopedia and then starving to death because you refuse to repeat yourself.
  • Honor system rock paper scissors.
  • Making video games, one of which is called Catacomb Kids.
  • Naming your band one letter away from a common word so that your band is impossible to google.
  • An extremely austere and dour change log, like in Great Expectations.
  • Changing the "dragon breath" spell to "bear breath" because dragons aren't real but bears breathe fire.
  • A grim window into the world in which we live, dragonless and dragon breath -less.
  • A delicious treat for anyone who likes anise flavoring and salt.
  • A giant human sized licorice in a wedding gown.
  • Competing with nearby deer for the affections of the extremely salty licorice you're marrying.
  • Spendinga lot of your mental energy trying to figure out animal cognition.
  • Whether elephants worship the moon or in fact anything.
  • Dogs doing the things dogs do even if they've never been taught by another dog.
  • Where babies learn the things that their parents don't teach them.
  • Babies smiling when they see a face even though they're not happy to see you.
  • Baby reflexes that help parents bond with them during the time when they are hardest to love.
  • How to be sure that animals think and feel and have memory when we can't even be sure for other humans.
  • P-zombies.
  • A dog's mental model of the world.
  • The Far Side cartoon depicting a machine that translates dog barks into human speech.
  • Whether animals have to know stuff.
  • Meerkat accents.
  • The mantis shrimp having an innate ability to see ghosts, and learning our language to tell us that we're stepping on ghosts all the time and we're covered in ectoplasm.
  • A superpower that turns you invisible except for your eyes, so you're just a floating pair of eyeballs, not invisible at all, so you have to buy a pair of sunglasses to hide your eyes.
  • Putting two of the lamest possible superpowers together in the same married couple.
  • The lamest superpower that you would settle for.
  • The superpower of getting up when the alarm rings and not having to hit snooze even once.
  • The superpower of lactose tolerance.
  • The superpower of having practiced a lot.
  • Cutting a cantaloupe in half and the six of clubs is in there and the guy's like "yeah that's my card, but that cantaloupe was $9 at Whole Foods, thanks a lot."
  • How to convince general audiences that they should care when in the measure to clap.
  • Just assuming that audiences will be clapping in the wrong place so you add a single measure in 5/4 to your 4/4 composition to fix it.
  • Playing a concert video where the video and audio are desynchronized by exactly half a measure.
  • Inventing a snare drum that looks like a bass drum and vice versa, and filming a prank show where unsuspecting drummers play concerts with the inverted drum kit.
  • Going to fiver and asking someone to build you a drum kit that defies science and logic.
  • The one company that Topic Lords would accept sponsorship from.
  • Stopping the concert when the audience starts clapping on 1 and 3 and asking them "come on, did you spend $126 to get it wrong?"
  • Not finding out how low-poly these birds are until the quarter speed viewing.
  • Which side Britney's nails look most amazing from.
  • The outfit flight attendants had to wear in the 1950s, before they had the right to vote.
  • A flight attendant with pauldrons.
  • A loser with a sandwich that Britney wants to make out with in the bathroom.
  • Seeing someone's ass and wondering what the Blippi subreddit would think of it.
  • A dude who is a motorcycle.
  • Biketaurs.
  • Having the same facial expression as the motorcycle you're riding.
  • A sparkly Jackson Pollock that you wrap around yourself.
  • Stepping right in the laser.
  • Warning the janitor that you're turning on the office's death ladder so he's not surprised when he shows up that weekend to find 15 corpses on the floor.
  • A music video that is secretly the prequel to Jupiter Ascending.
  • Whether this hot Scandinavian guy is the same guy as the last hot Scandinavian guy.
  • Saving time shaving by dyeing your facial hair the same color as your skin.
  • Whether a stiff iron bar jabbing into your back would improve a bed or a chair.
  • Whether Britney Spears hallucinated the events of the Toxic video, and she's just an ordinary flight attendant.
  • How to fix bread closures.
  • Filling the moon with bread closures.
  • Getting a bread box so people stop having to manufacture bread closures.
  • How massive a bread is required to spin the bag at sufficient velocity to apply the bread closures.
  • Solving your headphone cord problem by never listening to audio of any kind.
  • Installing an ink sac in your fingernail so that you never have to look around for a pen.
  • A tattoo of a squid that you can squeeze to spurt ink into the eyes of your enemies, but the tattoo gets more and more faded as the ink depletes.
  • An awful thing that your ducks can do.
  • What's going on in that biome?
  • The horned lizard's final defense.
  • Dropping a tail if you need to escape.
  • A super ethical meat factory that spends all day terrifying the tails off of lizards.
  • An avocado-like spread made out of frightened lizard tail.
  • Nothing but adrenaline flavor in this tail.
  • How to live as a freelancer without being drained of all your bodily fluids.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+E1z-m4T1 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 87. Fraudl With an Umlaut https://topiclords.com/fraudl-with-an-umlaut 2b2d8998-29ed-4326-a7ad-6f5e3db4d6f6 Mon, 21 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Sam and Chris. We discuss our inability to think about space-time, non-transitive dice, the court ruling that X-Men aren't human, learning English by talking about diarrhea, and figuring out how to talk to neurotypical people. 52:56 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Being unable to describe time without using time words like "before" and "now" and "always"
  • The "media player with a scrub bar" model of space time.
  • Why time only moves forward and why we only perceive any instant of it at any given time.
  • Taking time away from spacetime and just having a frozen sculpture of an instant.
  • Michaelangelo's David being the most famous space-without-time.
  • Optical illusions as a lens into the sorts of perceptions and abilities that evolution deemed entirely unnecessary to our propagation as a species.
  • Spoilers for Arrival.
  • Whether it was physically possible for life on Earth to have developed the ability to perceive additional times and/or spaces.
  • Whether early humans transgressed somehow and their punishment was to wonder about everything all the goddamn time.
  • Whether or not we get to eat pizza after we die.
  • Being so annoyed by an optical illusion that you invent a machine to help you unsee it.
  • A non reproductive animal rolling a non-transitive die.
  • Mules vs. hinnies.
  • Mules being unable to reproduce because they're too unattractive to find a mate.
  • Putting lipstick on a cat's butt in order to measure what furniture the cat rubs its butt on, and the butt runs out of lipstick after two chairs.
  • Being too lazy to make a new line on the spreadsheet so you just append your new topic onto an existing topic.
  • Google alerting you to an imaginary 6.0 earthquake near Lake Tahoe.
  • Just sitting here waiting for the earthquake Google promised you.
  • Moving from New Jersey to California and discovering earthquakes.
  • Whether you should add 27 and 2.
  • The legal difference between a doll and a toy.
  • Having a fun time in the courtroom.
  • Getting your movie's rating changed by counting up the number of times female genitalia were mentioned.
  • Numinous dice.
  • A soundstage with a bench and a plant that are supposed to indicate that this scene takes place outside.
  • Referring to a scene transition as a wipe but everybody thinks you mean wiping your butt.
  • P-Low The Skillful Abbot.
  • Really enjoying your bad case of diarrhea.
  • Doing aerobics and chanting about having a bad case of diarrhea.
  • A classful of language learners each repping a different language on their shirts.
  • Different cultures discretizing the world differently.
  • A hypothetical culture that considers a "person" to include the hat they're wearing but not their left foot.
  • Whether the horseshoe is part of a horse.
  • Pointing at some clothes and saying "there's a person inside those clothes."
  • Pointing at a human head and saying "there's a person inside that skull."
  • Different places a person can exist within their corporeal body.
  • Feeling emotions in your gut because you have neurons in there.
  • Hanging out with dinosaurs and having to do brain surgery on their butts.
  • Finding out that your brain surgeon is a dinosaur and putting a post-it note on your butt saying "brain not in here."
  • Finding out that you are on the autism spectrum after you have your 10th concussion and aren't allowed to think hard for two years.
  • Wearing a bumper sticker on your forehead that says "How's my talking? Call 1-800-EAT-SHIT"
  • Struggling to understand why someone would use words non-literally.
  • Feeling very refrigerator about this explanation of Cockney Rhyming Slang.
  • How to apply the principles of running a playtest to human conversation.
  • Wondering about the thing you've got rattling around in your skull.
  • Conversational strategies that only work when you're talking to other autistic people.
  • Going through life assuming everybody has had a bunch of concussions.
  • Putting on Frasier to take enough of your attention that you're not thinking about anything else, but also Frasier not being worth thinking about so you don't think about that either.
  • Whether you want this show's listeners friending you on Facebook.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Being unable to describe time without using time words like "before" and "now" and "always"
  • The "media player with a scrub bar" model of space time.
  • Why time only moves forward and why we only perceive any instant of it at any given time.
  • Taking time away from spacetime and just having a frozen sculpture of an instant.
  • Michaelangelo's David being the most famous space-without-time.
  • Optical illusions as a lens into the sorts of perceptions and abilities that evolution deemed entirely unnecessary to our propagation as a species.
  • Spoilers for Arrival.
  • Whether it was physically possible for life on Earth to have developed the ability to perceive additional times and/or spaces.
  • Whether early humans transgressed somehow and their punishment was to wonder about everything all the goddamn time.
  • Whether or not we get to eat pizza after we die.
  • Being so annoyed by an optical illusion that you invent a machine to help you unsee it.
  • A non reproductive animal rolling a non-transitive die.
  • Mules vs. hinnies.
  • Mules being unable to reproduce because they're too unattractive to find a mate.
  • Putting lipstick on a cat's butt in order to measure what furniture the cat rubs its butt on, and the butt runs out of lipstick after two chairs.
  • Being too lazy to make a new line on the spreadsheet so you just append your new topic onto an existing topic.
  • Google alerting you to an imaginary 6.0 earthquake near Lake Tahoe.
  • Just sitting here waiting for the earthquake Google promised you.
  • Moving from New Jersey to California and discovering earthquakes.
  • Whether you should add 27 and 2.
  • The legal difference between a doll and a toy.
  • Having a fun time in the courtroom.
  • Getting your movie's rating changed by counting up the number of times female genitalia were mentioned.
  • Numinous dice.
  • A soundstage with a bench and a plant that are supposed to indicate that this scene takes place outside.
  • Referring to a scene transition as a wipe but everybody thinks you mean wiping your butt.
  • P-Low The Skillful Abbot.
  • Really enjoying your bad case of diarrhea.
  • Doing aerobics and chanting about having a bad case of diarrhea.
  • A classful of language learners each repping a different language on their shirts.
  • Different cultures discretizing the world differently.
  • A hypothetical culture that considers a "person" to include the hat they're wearing but not their left foot.
  • Whether the horseshoe is part of a horse.
  • Pointing at some clothes and saying "there's a person inside those clothes."
  • Pointing at a human head and saying "there's a person inside that skull."
  • Different places a person can exist within their corporeal body.
  • Feeling emotions in your gut because you have neurons in there.
  • Hanging out with dinosaurs and having to do brain surgery on their butts.
  • Finding out that your brain surgeon is a dinosaur and putting a post-it note on your butt saying "brain not in here."
  • Finding out that you are on the autism spectrum after you have your 10th concussion and aren't allowed to think hard for two years.
  • Wearing a bumper sticker on your forehead that says "How's my talking? Call 1-800-EAT-SHIT"
  • Struggling to understand why someone would use words non-literally.
  • Feeling very refrigerator about this explanation of Cockney Rhyming Slang.
  • How to apply the principles of running a playtest to human conversation.
  • Wondering about the thing you've got rattling around in your skull.
  • Conversational strategies that only work when you're talking to other autistic people.
  • Going through life assuming everybody has had a bunch of concussions.
  • Putting on Frasier to take enough of your attention that you're not thinking about anything else, but also Frasier not being worth thinking about so you don't think about that either.
  • Whether you want this show's listeners friending you on Facebook.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Being unable to describe time without using time words like "before" and "now" and "always"
  • The "media player with a scrub bar" model of space time.
  • Why time only moves forward and why we only perceive any instant of it at any given time.
  • Taking time away from spacetime and just having a frozen sculpture of an instant.
  • Michaelangelo's David being the most famous space-without-time.
  • Optical illusions as a lens into the sorts of perceptions and abilities that evolution deemed entirely unnecessary to our propagation as a species.
  • Spoilers for Arrival.
  • Whether it was physically possible for life on Earth to have developed the ability to perceive additional times and/or spaces.
  • Whether early humans transgressed somehow and their punishment was to wonder about everything all the goddamn time.
  • Whether or not we get to eat pizza after we die.
  • Being so annoyed by an optical illusion that you invent a machine to help you unsee it.
  • A non reproductive animal rolling a non-transitive die.
  • Mules vs. hinnies.
  • Mules being unable to reproduce because they're too unattractive to find a mate.
  • Putting lipstick on a cat's butt in order to measure what furniture the cat rubs its butt on, and the butt runs out of lipstick after two chairs.
  • Being too lazy to make a new line on the spreadsheet so you just append your new topic onto an existing topic.
  • Google alerting you to an imaginary 6.0 earthquake near Lake Tahoe.
  • Just sitting here waiting for the earthquake Google promised you.
  • Moving from New Jersey to California and discovering earthquakes.
  • Whether you should add 27 and 2.
  • The legal difference between a doll and a toy.
  • Having a fun time in the courtroom.
  • Getting your movie's rating changed by counting up the number of times female genitalia were mentioned.
  • Numinous dice.
  • A soundstage with a bench and a plant that are supposed to indicate that this scene takes place outside.
  • Referring to a scene transition as a wipe but everybody thinks you mean wiping your butt.
  • P-Low The Skillful Abbot.
  • Really enjoying your bad case of diarrhea.
  • Doing aerobics and chanting about having a bad case of diarrhea.
  • A classful of language learners each repping a different language on their shirts.
  • Different cultures discretizing the world differently.
  • A hypothetical culture that considers a "person" to include the hat they're wearing but not their left foot.
  • Whether the horseshoe is part of a horse.
  • Pointing at some clothes and saying "there's a person inside those clothes."
  • Pointing at a human head and saying "there's a person inside that skull."
  • Different places a person can exist within their corporeal body.
  • Feeling emotions in your gut because you have neurons in there.
  • Hanging out with dinosaurs and having to do brain surgery on their butts.
  • Finding out that your brain surgeon is a dinosaur and putting a post-it note on your butt saying "brain not in here."
  • Finding out that you are on the autism spectrum after you have your 10th concussion and aren't allowed to think hard for two years.
  • Wearing a bumper sticker on your forehead that says "How's my talking? Call 1-800-EAT-SHIT"
  • Struggling to understand why someone would use words non-literally.
  • Feeling very refrigerator about this explanation of Cockney Rhyming Slang.
  • How to apply the principles of running a playtest to human conversation.
  • Wondering about the thing you've got rattling around in your skull.
  • Conversational strategies that only work when you're talking to other autistic people.
  • Going through life assuming everybody has had a bunch of concussions.
  • Putting on Frasier to take enough of your attention that you're not thinking about anything else, but also Frasier not being worth thinking about so you don't think about that either.
  • Whether you want this show's listeners friending you on Facebook.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+fgLw0B7a ]]> Jim Stormdancer 86. Dad Boy Prime and the Shadow of Grung https://topiclords.com/dad-boy-prime-and-the-shadow-of-grung 123f9106-17a3-48d6-b7df-bab1862a8d87 Mon, 14 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Gary and Brayton. We discuss the Spirit Halloween Youtube channel, drugs we don't want to try, a list of people's favorite mugs, Devo - Theme from Doctor Detroit, undocumented game mechanics, and undead goals. 1:01:40 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • What a .tv TLD indicates.
  • Brayton's Bubbly Bog Water.
  • Airdropping incredibly earthy mineral water directly to your house.
  • Using the wrong musical sting.
  • The gas station that functions both before and after noon.
  • Drinking water out of a beer bong.
  • The algorithm providing a solid recommendation for once.
  • Going into Spirit Halloween and asking for something in an underfed Michael Myers.
  • Giving out vaseline for Halloween.
  • The truth according to vaseline.com.
  • Whether vaseline meets FDA requirements for human consumption and whether that qualifies it as a foodstuff.
  • Blooming your own onions at home so you can stop going to Outback every weekend.
  • All the other things you could bloom with your new onion bloomer.
  • A good way to go into a fugue state and have something on in the background while you're doing something else.
  • A redditor who went missing after acquiring some Datura seeds.
  • A recreational drug for which the lethal dose varies significantly from person to person.
  • Deciding whether to join a cult based on whether you hallucinated the cult leader high fiving Aquaman or selling celebrity maps under a bridge.
  • The serial rooster on the box of corn flakes who's roosting every time you see him.
  • The rooster jumping off of the Corn Flakes box, grabbing the butcher knife, and giving you career advice.
  • Explaining that cocaine isn't addictive and you would know because you do it every day.
  • Scrolling through a Twitter thread about people's favorite mugs to see all the great mugs.
  • Perusing the multivarious ways a person can like a mug.
  • The East Berlin traffic light man.
  • A trivet in your grandpa's kitchen that says Joint-S.T.A.R.S. and depicts a star firing a lightning bolt at a tank, and whether your grandpa is secretly an anime villain.
  • A dragon clutching the world in its hands with an American flag pattern on its spread wings.
  • The patriotism dragon.
  • Our favorite mugs.
  • Going on Twitter to relax.
  • Whether a big enough knife counts as a sword.
  • Devo Vevo.
  • Dan Aykroyd speed walking while people make fun of him for the entire duration of the film.
  • Mark Mothersbaugh jogging in a sealed garbage bag so he can quickly lose enough weight to qualify for his intended Devo weight class.
  • The belt from the 1920s that jiggles you.
  • Recording a commentary on a Dan Aykroyd movie as part of your podcast about Binding of Isaac collectibles.
  • Replacing every transition wipe in Star Wars with Mark Mothersbaugh floating across the screen.
  • The illusion of intentionality.
  • A beat poet playing a bass constructed out of a bass drum
  • Our favorite fake lap steel guitar solos and what synthesizers they were played on.
  • The geniuses at genius.com having absolutely nothing to say about Devo's Theme to Doctor Detroit.
  • The Charmin Bear's mom's opinions on ass wiping.
  • A Transmissible Toilet Paper Disease That Affects Only Bears.
  • Rubber Krulwich.
  • Jogging and Pimps: the Doctor Detroit Story.
  • One of those Doctor Detroit marriages you always hear about.
  • The Curse of Doctor Detroit.
  • Flying out of a still frame of a hot dog.
  • Mark Mothersbaugh wearing an inflated bodysuit so that his silhouette matches Dan Aykroyd's when they speed walk together.
  • Going to the area labeled "combat zone" in hopes of finding someone to shoot.
  • Hiding aliens in your space game and never telling anybody about them.
  • Hiding a main quest in your space game and never telling anybody about it.
  • Getting a gamer treat for peeking into corners.
  • How Portal should've warned you about its unusually high fall damage on the box.
  • The pros and cons of being a lich.
  • Whether April would stick around if Jim turned into a lich.
  • Dying at Chuckie Cheese and being stuck there as a ghost forever.
  • Whether being a zombie secretly feels awesome.
  • The tragedy of Quake's wireheading grunts.
  • Dying on the subway and having to listen to buskers for eternity.
  • The parable of the good lich and the good billionaire.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • What a .tv TLD indicates.
  • Brayton's Bubbly Bog Water.
  • Airdropping incredibly earthy mineral water directly to your house.
  • Using the wrong musical sting.
  • The gas station that functions both before and after noon.
  • Drinking water out of a beer bong.
  • The algorithm providing a solid recommendation for once.
  • Going into Spirit Halloween and asking for something in an underfed Michael Myers.
  • Giving out vaseline for Halloween.
  • The truth according to vaseline.com.
  • Whether vaseline meets FDA requirements for human consumption and whether that qualifies it as a foodstuff.
  • Blooming your own onions at home so you can stop going to Outback every weekend.
  • All the other things you could bloom with your new onion bloomer.
  • A good way to go into a fugue state and have something on in the background while you're doing something else.
  • A redditor who went missing after acquiring some Datura seeds.
  • A recreational drug for which the lethal dose varies significantly from person to person.
  • Deciding whether to join a cult based on whether you hallucinated the cult leader high fiving Aquaman or selling celebrity maps under a bridge.
  • The serial rooster on the box of corn flakes who's roosting every time you see him.
  • The rooster jumping off of the Corn Flakes box, grabbing the butcher knife, and giving you career advice.
  • Explaining that cocaine isn't addictive and you would know because you do it every day.
  • Scrolling through a Twitter thread about people's favorite mugs to see all the great mugs.
  • Perusing the multivarious ways a person can like a mug.
  • The East Berlin traffic light man.
  • A trivet in your grandpa's kitchen that says Joint-S.T.A.R.S. and depicts a star firing a lightning bolt at a tank, and whether your grandpa is secretly an anime villain.
  • A dragon clutching the world in its hands with an American flag pattern on its spread wings.
  • The patriotism dragon.
  • Our favorite mugs.
  • Going on Twitter to relax.
  • Whether a big enough knife counts as a sword.
  • Devo Vevo.
  • Dan Aykroyd speed walking while people make fun of him for the entire duration of the film.
  • Mark Mothersbaugh jogging in a sealed garbage bag so he can quickly lose enough weight to qualify for his intended Devo weight class.
  • The belt from the 1920s that jiggles you.
  • Recording a commentary on a Dan Aykroyd movie as part of your podcast about Binding of Isaac collectibles.
  • Replacing every transition wipe in Star Wars with Mark Mothersbaugh floating across the screen.
  • The illusion of intentionality.
  • A beat poet playing a bass constructed out of a bass drum
  • Our favorite fake lap steel guitar solos and what synthesizers they were played on.
  • The geniuses at genius.com having absolutely nothing to say about Devo's Theme to Doctor Detroit.
  • The Charmin Bear's mom's opinions on ass wiping.
  • A Transmissible Toilet Paper Disease That Affects Only Bears.
  • Rubber Krulwich.
  • Jogging and Pimps: the Doctor Detroit Story.
  • One of those Doctor Detroit marriages you always hear about.
  • The Curse of Doctor Detroit.
  • Flying out of a still frame of a hot dog.
  • Mark Mothersbaugh wearing an inflated bodysuit so that his silhouette matches Dan Aykroyd's when they speed walk together.
  • Going to the area labeled "combat zone" in hopes of finding someone to shoot.
  • Hiding aliens in your space game and never telling anybody about them.
  • Hiding a main quest in your space game and never telling anybody about it.
  • Getting a gamer treat for peeking into corners.
  • How Portal should've warned you about its unusually high fall damage on the box.
  • The pros and cons of being a lich.
  • Whether April would stick around if Jim turned into a lich.
  • Dying at Chuckie Cheese and being stuck there as a ghost forever.
  • Whether being a zombie secretly feels awesome.
  • The tragedy of Quake's wireheading grunts.
  • Dying on the subway and having to listen to buskers for eternity.
  • The parable of the good lich and the good billionaire.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • What a .tv TLD indicates.
  • Brayton's Bubbly Bog Water.
  • Airdropping incredibly earthy mineral water directly to your house.
  • Using the wrong musical sting.
  • The gas station that functions both before and after noon.
  • Drinking water out of a beer bong.
  • The algorithm providing a solid recommendation for once.
  • Going into Spirit Halloween and asking for something in an underfed Michael Myers.
  • Giving out vaseline for Halloween.
  • The truth according to vaseline.com.
  • Whether vaseline meets FDA requirements for human consumption and whether that qualifies it as a foodstuff.
  • Blooming your own onions at home so you can stop going to Outback every weekend.
  • All the other things you could bloom with your new onion bloomer.
  • A good way to go into a fugue state and have something on in the background while you're doing something else.
  • A redditor who went missing after acquiring some Datura seeds.
  • A recreational drug for which the lethal dose varies significantly from person to person.
  • Deciding whether to join a cult based on whether you hallucinated the cult leader high fiving Aquaman or selling celebrity maps under a bridge.
  • The serial rooster on the box of corn flakes who's roosting every time you see him.
  • The rooster jumping off of the Corn Flakes box, grabbing the butcher knife, and giving you career advice.
  • Explaining that cocaine isn't addictive and you would know because you do it every day.
  • Scrolling through a Twitter thread about people's favorite mugs to see all the great mugs.
  • Perusing the multivarious ways a person can like a mug.
  • The East Berlin traffic light man.
  • A trivet in your grandpa's kitchen that says Joint-S.T.A.R.S. and depicts a star firing a lightning bolt at a tank, and whether your grandpa is secretly an anime villain.
  • A dragon clutching the world in its hands with an American flag pattern on its spread wings.
  • The patriotism dragon.
  • Our favorite mugs.
  • Going on Twitter to relax.
  • Whether a big enough knife counts as a sword.
  • Devo Vevo.
  • Dan Aykroyd speed walking while people make fun of him for the entire duration of the film.
  • Mark Mothersbaugh jogging in a sealed garbage bag so he can quickly lose enough weight to qualify for his intended Devo weight class.
  • The belt from the 1920s that jiggles you.
  • Recording a commentary on a Dan Aykroyd movie as part of your podcast about Binding of Isaac collectibles.
  • Replacing every transition wipe in Star Wars with Mark Mothersbaugh floating across the screen.
  • The illusion of intentionality.
  • A beat poet playing a bass constructed out of a bass drum
  • Our favorite fake lap steel guitar solos and what synthesizers they were played on.
  • The geniuses at genius.com having absolutely nothing to say about Devo's Theme to Doctor Detroit.
  • The Charmin Bear's mom's opinions on ass wiping.
  • A Transmissible Toilet Paper Disease That Affects Only Bears.
  • Rubber Krulwich.
  • Jogging and Pimps: the Doctor Detroit Story.
  • One of those Doctor Detroit marriages you always hear about.
  • The Curse of Doctor Detroit.
  • Flying out of a still frame of a hot dog.
  • Mark Mothersbaugh wearing an inflated bodysuit so that his silhouette matches Dan Aykroyd's when they speed walk together.
  • Going to the area labeled "combat zone" in hopes of finding someone to shoot.
  • Hiding aliens in your space game and never telling anybody about them.
  • Hiding a main quest in your space game and never telling anybody about it.
  • Getting a gamer treat for peeking into corners.
  • How Portal should've warned you about its unusually high fall damage on the box.
  • The pros and cons of being a lich.
  • Whether April would stick around if Jim turned into a lich.
  • Dying at Chuckie Cheese and being stuck there as a ghost forever.
  • Whether being a zombie secretly feels awesome.
  • The tragedy of Quake's wireheading grunts.
  • Dying on the subway and having to listen to buskers for eternity.
  • The parable of the good lich and the good billionaire.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+1Ijeu9P- ]]> Jim Stormdancer 85. Corsets for Snakes https://topiclords.com/corsets-for-snakes 76818168-b8d3-40ea-b7b9-ebcd0b76b287 Mon, 07 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Alex and Shannon. We discuss playing escape rooms remotely, the best and worst parts of camping, shutting off the PC speaker as a service, Call Me By Your Name, and whether "The Birds" is the first genre zombie film. 1:09:42 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Alex is on the Topic Lords Discord.
  • Shannon is offering vaccines.

Topics:

  • Human-led gaming over the internet (like escape rooms). How the DM is walking a line of controlling everything vs being completely controlled by the players. How to design games to be played like this over the internet.
  • Best and worst parts of camping.
  • Shutting off the PC speaker as a service.
  • Call Me By Your Name.
  • Is "The Birds" the first genre zombie film?

Microtopics:

  • Safe and effective vaccines.
  • The difference between spring rolls and egg rolls.
  • Teleconferencing an escape room.
  • All of the items that came out of this drawer.
  • A room escape game set in outer space where the players on separate ships communicate via semaphore flags.
  • Running a massively multiplayer tabletop campaign and inventing the middle manager dungeon master.
  • How Room Escape games have adapted to the pandemic.
  • Going camping and wondering "Why are we in the woods? Why are we not in our cozy warm house?"
  • The novelty of not having your luxuries.
  • Being imprisoned on a cruise ship and only then deigning to be entertained by cruise ship entertainments.
  • Enjoying a bonfire because the woods doesn't have Netflix.
  • The novelty of sitting outside in the dark.
  • Camping as a simulacrum of being an ancient human.
  • The sound of wind through the branches.
  • Symphonies being largely unlistenable unless you're held captive in a nearly entirely quiet room.
  • The relative ease of paying attention when you're not surrounded by distractions.
  • The relentless temptation of pulling to refresh.
  • How bad the flame wars get on the fake Twitter set up just for the attendees of JoCo Cruise.
  • Waiting to find out whether your cruise ship will be permitted to land.
  • The dynamics of having a Twitter just for your dorm.
  • Bringing all 29 volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica because you won't have the Internet on the cruise ship.
  • Going to a sake bar in Japan to learn how to like booze.
  • The legality of throwing your drink in a kid's face if they give you sass.
  • Knowing it's illegal to dance on the street in Japan and deliberately adopting an exaggerated swagger whenever the police are around.
  • Japanese police's different standards for when white people are dancing.
  • Whether Japanese police have truncheons or just those flashlights with traffic cones on them.
  • Getting a job and trying to figure out how to be useful at it.
  • The PC speaker beeping long after your program has crashed.
  • Writing a program in the machine language debugger because Windows 98 still comes with programming tools.
  • A kid swinging over pits.
  • Commander Keen in: Invasion of the Vorticons.
  • Back when it was a big deal for the PC to run a game that looked like a NES game.
  • Eventually realizing that the game you're playing where the cat chases the mouse is actually just a screen saver.
  • Not being able to convince your dad to buy a CD-ROM drive for the family PC but luckily the N64 uses cartridge technology.
  • Visiting your friends who own an N64 and playing Mario Kart and Goldeneye and then going home and saying "this is the real shit, check out Pac Man 2."
  • Being informed that you are in for a treat.
  • Clouds giving the sun a big hug.
  • The influence of Spongebob Squarepants on the music video for "Call Me By Your Name" by Lil Nas X.
  • A snake turning into a cone head.
  • A very slow jog.
  • Your under-eye makeup really bringing out your scales.
  • Corsets for snakes.
  • Mini-Marge with a smaller version of the same hair.
  • The denim police taking you to denim jail for fashion crimes.
  • Wearing clothing with your name on it.
  • Sequence breaking the endless staircase in Mario 64 by giving the stairs a lapdance.
  • Nearly having descended the entire stripper pole.
  • The core strength required to give Satan an extremely slow lap dance.
  • An extremely entertaining sequence of images.
  • Exquisitely crafted metaphor that you'll miss entirely if you never look at it.
  • What zombies were before George Romero invented the modern zombie.
  • The concept of a zombie as a horde of cannibals.
  • The fresh ideas that Night of the Living Dead brought to the The Birds genre.
  • Giving Lovebirds the side-eye.
  • Night of the Living Dead being progressive regarding its black protagonist but not its woman protagonist.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Alex is on the Topic Lords Discord.
  • Shannon is offering vaccines.

Topics:

  • Human-led gaming over the internet (like escape rooms). How the DM is walking a line of controlling everything vs being completely controlled by the players. How to design games to be played like this over the internet.
  • Best and worst parts of camping.
  • Shutting off the PC speaker as a service.
  • Call Me By Your Name.
  • Is "The Birds" the first genre zombie film?

Microtopics:

  • Safe and effective vaccines.
  • The difference between spring rolls and egg rolls.
  • Teleconferencing an escape room.
  • All of the items that came out of this drawer.
  • A room escape game set in outer space where the players on separate ships communicate via semaphore flags.
  • Running a massively multiplayer tabletop campaign and inventing the middle manager dungeon master.
  • How Room Escape games have adapted to the pandemic.
  • Going camping and wondering "Why are we in the woods? Why are we not in our cozy warm house?"
  • The novelty of not having your luxuries.
  • Being imprisoned on a cruise ship and only then deigning to be entertained by cruise ship entertainments.
  • Enjoying a bonfire because the woods doesn't have Netflix.
  • The novelty of sitting outside in the dark.
  • Camping as a simulacrum of being an ancient human.
  • The sound of wind through the branches.
  • Symphonies being largely unlistenable unless you're held captive in a nearly entirely quiet room.
  • The relative ease of paying attention when you're not surrounded by distractions.
  • The relentless temptation of pulling to refresh.
  • How bad the flame wars get on the fake Twitter set up just for the attendees of JoCo Cruise.
  • Waiting to find out whether your cruise ship will be permitted to land.
  • The dynamics of having a Twitter just for your dorm.
  • Bringing all 29 volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica because you won't have the Internet on the cruise ship.
  • Going to a sake bar in Japan to learn how to like booze.
  • The legality of throwing your drink in a kid's face if they give you sass.
  • Knowing it's illegal to dance on the street in Japan and deliberately adopting an exaggerated swagger whenever the police are around.
  • Japanese police's different standards for when white people are dancing.
  • Whether Japanese police have truncheons or just those flashlights with traffic cones on them.
  • Getting a job and trying to figure out how to be useful at it.
  • The PC speaker beeping long after your program has crashed.
  • Writing a program in the machine language debugger because Windows 98 still comes with programming tools.
  • A kid swinging over pits.
  • Commander Keen in: Invasion of the Vorticons.
  • Back when it was a big deal for the PC to run a game that looked like a NES game.
  • Eventually realizing that the game you're playing where the cat chases the mouse is actually just a screen saver.
  • Not being able to convince your dad to buy a CD-ROM drive for the family PC but luckily the N64 uses cartridge technology.
  • Visiting your friends who own an N64 and playing Mario Kart and Goldeneye and then going home and saying "this is the real shit, check out Pac Man 2."
  • Being informed that you are in for a treat.
  • Clouds giving the sun a big hug.
  • The influence of Spongebob Squarepants on the music video for "Call Me By Your Name" by Lil Nas X.
  • A snake turning into a cone head.
  • A very slow jog.
  • Your under-eye makeup really bringing out your scales.
  • Corsets for snakes.
  • Mini-Marge with a smaller version of the same hair.
  • The denim police taking you to denim jail for fashion crimes.
  • Wearing clothing with your name on it.
  • Sequence breaking the endless staircase in Mario 64 by giving the stairs a lapdance.
  • Nearly having descended the entire stripper pole.
  • The core strength required to give Satan an extremely slow lap dance.
  • An extremely entertaining sequence of images.
  • Exquisitely crafted metaphor that you'll miss entirely if you never look at it.
  • What zombies were before George Romero invented the modern zombie.
  • The concept of a zombie as a horde of cannibals.
  • The fresh ideas that Night of the Living Dead brought to the The Birds genre.
  • Giving Lovebirds the side-eye.
  • Night of the Living Dead being progressive regarding its black protagonist but not its woman protagonist.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Alex is on the Topic Lords Discord.
  • Shannon is offering vaccines.

Topics:

  • Human-led gaming over the internet (like escape rooms). How the DM is walking a line of controlling everything vs being completely controlled by the players. How to design games to be played like this over the internet.
  • Best and worst parts of camping.
  • Shutting off the PC speaker as a service.
  • Call Me By Your Name.
  • Is "The Birds" the first genre zombie film?

Microtopics:

  • Safe and effective vaccines.
  • The difference between spring rolls and egg rolls.
  • Teleconferencing an escape room.
  • All of the items that came out of this drawer.
  • A room escape game set in outer space where the players on separate ships communicate via semaphore flags.
  • Running a massively multiplayer tabletop campaign and inventing the middle manager dungeon master.
  • How Room Escape games have adapted to the pandemic.
  • Going camping and wondering "Why are we in the woods? Why are we not in our cozy warm house?"
  • The novelty of not having your luxuries.
  • Being imprisoned on a cruise ship and only then deigning to be entertained by cruise ship entertainments.
  • Enjoying a bonfire because the woods doesn't have Netflix.
  • The novelty of sitting outside in the dark.
  • Camping as a simulacrum of being an ancient human.
  • The sound of wind through the branches.
  • Symphonies being largely unlistenable unless you're held captive in a nearly entirely quiet room.
  • The relative ease of paying attention when you're not surrounded by distractions.
  • The relentless temptation of pulling to refresh.
  • How bad the flame wars get on the fake Twitter set up just for the attendees of JoCo Cruise.
  • Waiting to find out whether your cruise ship will be permitted to land.
  • The dynamics of having a Twitter just for your dorm.
  • Bringing all 29 volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica because you won't have the Internet on the cruise ship.
  • Going to a sake bar in Japan to learn how to like booze.
  • The legality of throwing your drink in a kid's face if they give you sass.
  • Knowing it's illegal to dance on the street in Japan and deliberately adopting an exaggerated swagger whenever the police are around.
  • Japanese police's different standards for when white people are dancing.
  • Whether Japanese police have truncheons or just those flashlights with traffic cones on them.
  • Getting a job and trying to figure out how to be useful at it.
  • The PC speaker beeping long after your program has crashed.
  • Writing a program in the machine language debugger because Windows 98 still comes with programming tools.
  • A kid swinging over pits.
  • Commander Keen in: Invasion of the Vorticons.
  • Back when it was a big deal for the PC to run a game that looked like a NES game.
  • Eventually realizing that the game you're playing where the cat chases the mouse is actually just a screen saver.
  • Not being able to convince your dad to buy a CD-ROM drive for the family PC but luckily the N64 uses cartridge technology.
  • Visiting your friends who own an N64 and playing Mario Kart and Goldeneye and then going home and saying "this is the real shit, check out Pac Man 2."
  • Being informed that you are in for a treat.
  • Clouds giving the sun a big hug.
  • The influence of Spongebob Squarepants on the music video for "Call Me By Your Name" by Lil Nas X.
  • A snake turning into a cone head.
  • A very slow jog.
  • Your under-eye makeup really bringing out your scales.
  • Corsets for snakes.
  • Mini-Marge with a smaller version of the same hair.
  • The denim police taking you to denim jail for fashion crimes.
  • Wearing clothing with your name on it.
  • Sequence breaking the endless staircase in Mario 64 by giving the stairs a lapdance.
  • Nearly having descended the entire stripper pole.
  • The core strength required to give Satan an extremely slow lap dance.
  • An extremely entertaining sequence of images.
  • Exquisitely crafted metaphor that you'll miss entirely if you never look at it.
  • What zombies were before George Romero invented the modern zombie.
  • The concept of a zombie as a horde of cannibals.
  • The fresh ideas that Night of the Living Dead brought to the The Birds genre.
  • Giving Lovebirds the side-eye.
  • Night of the Living Dead being progressive regarding its black protagonist but not its woman protagonist.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+pIJSl-w_ ]]> Jim Stormdancer 84. Whirling Away Into the Unhearable https://topiclords.com/whirling-away-into-the-unhearable 88087d70-4042-4cf5-974d-6f9a36dcfd41 Mon, 31 May 2021 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Erica, Micah. We discuss hidden object games, redesigning the human body, excusing yourself, Beastie Boys - Sabotage, Ryan Reynolds and the Deadpool Cinematic Universe, and watching Shakespeare. 1:06:40 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Kitchen! The Musical.
  • Inviting the general public to write the musical that exists only in your head.
  • Introducing the guest who is bad at introducing himself.
  • Running a white-hat ARG on company servers to research and understand the employees you fired for running an ARG on company servers.
  • In praise of terrible games.
  • Procedurally-generated hidden object games.
  • Organizing your life in a video game when you can't organize shit in real life.
  • Where the Hidden Object Puzzle Adventure fan communities are congregating online.
  • Using the block button on the pile of dishes in the sink.
  • Asking the manliest gamers to play feminine-coded video games and discovering if they become less manly.
  • Ladies who want to wear big dresses to be fancy ballroom ladies.
  • Gamers who don't congregate online but instead enjoy video games by themselves.
  • Where the Russian developers who make games for American women congregate online.
  • Clicking on something to make it go away.
  • Improving humans by adding components vs. by replacing components.
  • The legality of inventing a new organism by adding or deleting genes.
  • The Modular Human.
  • Plants undergoing full genome duplication.
  • The Diploid Human.
  • Using your hundred tongues to speak a hundred languages at once.
  • The one line you remember from "Kitchen! The Musical"
  • Saying "excuse me" in a higher and higher pitched voice until you're only saying "excuse me" to dogs and bats.
  • Running an errand in Tucson and incidentally removing horrifying beetles from multiple strangers’ hair.
  • True bugs and untrue bugs.
  • True bugs, with piercing and sucking mouthparts.
  • A reimagining of the insect phylum that includes small dogs and especially annoying children.
  • Hissing cockroaches that repeat what they hear like a parrot, so when you walk through the forest all you hear is a chorus of raspy voices saying "agh, get it off of me!"
  • Brood X, scheduled for this summer!
  • Brood X: Brood In Space.
  • OS X: OS In Space.
  • Which is worse, piercing and sucking mouthparts or sawing and sucking mouthparts?
  • What color of flashing lights civilians are allowed to use.
  • Pretending to be police.
  • The invasive plant species that the Sabotage music video is trying to highlight.
  • Hypothetical potted plants in the background of Powerman 5000's When Worlds Collide.
  • Being sentenced to community service and filling your rap punk band's trailer with fresh vegetables.
  • Nick Cave throwing a chair.
  • A poolside interrogation to find out if someone has a waterproof phone before you push them into a pool.
  • A cloth dummy falling off of a bridge.
  • Whether that cloth dummy had a cloth family.
  • Whether 1970s porn stars styled themselves after 1970s cops, or vice versa.
  • Popeye the Sailor Moon.
  • Everybody at the party dressing up as sexy cops and handing the real police a beer when they show up at the door.
  • Accidentally bringing up sexy cops every time you're on the show.
  • Chill dudes in short ties.
  • Taking a picture of a tree out of your moving car and asking a botanist to identify a blurry mess.
  • A boss who thinks your name is Marcia.
  • Meeting somebody with overlapping energies.
  • Total freedom from all societal expectations.
  • Setting up a movie streaming service that only streams one movie to promote your new phone company.
  • Buying every copy you can find of your first movie.
  • Watching multiple sets of people trapped in the same reality where they play out the same dramas and say the same lines over and over.
  • The one time Shakespeare wrote a stage direction.
  • Every time Shakespeare has been adapted into a movie.
  • Who even likes Falstaff.
  • The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Abridged.
  • Re-subtitling your movie using lines from Shakespeare.
  • The origin of Klingons as Shakespeare characters.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Kitchen! The Musical.
  • Inviting the general public to write the musical that exists only in your head.
  • Introducing the guest who is bad at introducing himself.
  • Running a white-hat ARG on company servers to research and understand the employees you fired for running an ARG on company servers.
  • In praise of terrible games.
  • Procedurally-generated hidden object games.
  • Organizing your life in a video game when you can't organize shit in real life.
  • Where the Hidden Object Puzzle Adventure fan communities are congregating online.
  • Using the block button on the pile of dishes in the sink.
  • Asking the manliest gamers to play feminine-coded video games and discovering if they become less manly.
  • Ladies who want to wear big dresses to be fancy ballroom ladies.
  • Gamers who don't congregate online but instead enjoy video games by themselves.
  • Where the Russian developers who make games for American women congregate online.
  • Clicking on something to make it go away.
  • Improving humans by adding components vs. by replacing components.
  • The legality of inventing a new organism by adding or deleting genes.
  • The Modular Human.
  • Plants undergoing full genome duplication.
  • The Diploid Human.
  • Using your hundred tongues to speak a hundred languages at once.
  • The one line you remember from "Kitchen! The Musical"
  • Saying "excuse me" in a higher and higher pitched voice until you're only saying "excuse me" to dogs and bats.
  • Running an errand in Tucson and incidentally removing horrifying beetles from multiple strangers’ hair.
  • True bugs and untrue bugs.
  • True bugs, with piercing and sucking mouthparts.
  • A reimagining of the insect phylum that includes small dogs and especially annoying children.
  • Hissing cockroaches that repeat what they hear like a parrot, so when you walk through the forest all you hear is a chorus of raspy voices saying "agh, get it off of me!"
  • Brood X, scheduled for this summer!
  • Brood X: Brood In Space.
  • OS X: OS In Space.
  • Which is worse, piercing and sucking mouthparts or sawing and sucking mouthparts?
  • What color of flashing lights civilians are allowed to use.
  • Pretending to be police.
  • The invasive plant species that the Sabotage music video is trying to highlight.
  • Hypothetical potted plants in the background of Powerman 5000's When Worlds Collide.
  • Being sentenced to community service and filling your rap punk band's trailer with fresh vegetables.
  • Nick Cave throwing a chair.
  • A poolside interrogation to find out if someone has a waterproof phone before you push them into a pool.
  • A cloth dummy falling off of a bridge.
  • Whether that cloth dummy had a cloth family.
  • Whether 1970s porn stars styled themselves after 1970s cops, or vice versa.
  • Popeye the Sailor Moon.
  • Everybody at the party dressing up as sexy cops and handing the real police a beer when they show up at the door.
  • Accidentally bringing up sexy cops every time you're on the show.
  • Chill dudes in short ties.
  • Taking a picture of a tree out of your moving car and asking a botanist to identify a blurry mess.
  • A boss who thinks your name is Marcia.
  • Meeting somebody with overlapping energies.
  • Total freedom from all societal expectations.
  • Setting up a movie streaming service that only streams one movie to promote your new phone company.
  • Buying every copy you can find of your first movie.
  • Watching multiple sets of people trapped in the same reality where they play out the same dramas and say the same lines over and over.
  • The one time Shakespeare wrote a stage direction.
  • Every time Shakespeare has been adapted into a movie.
  • Who even likes Falstaff.
  • The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Abridged.
  • Re-subtitling your movie using lines from Shakespeare.
  • The origin of Klingons as Shakespeare characters.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Kitchen! The Musical.
  • Inviting the general public to write the musical that exists only in your head.
  • Introducing the guest who is bad at introducing himself.
  • Running a white-hat ARG on company servers to research and understand the employees you fired for running an ARG on company servers.
  • In praise of terrible games.
  • Procedurally-generated hidden object games.
  • Organizing your life in a video game when you can't organize shit in real life.
  • Where the Hidden Object Puzzle Adventure fan communities are congregating online.
  • Using the block button on the pile of dishes in the sink.
  • Asking the manliest gamers to play feminine-coded video games and discovering if they become less manly.
  • Ladies who want to wear big dresses to be fancy ballroom ladies.
  • Gamers who don't congregate online but instead enjoy video games by themselves.
  • Where the Russian developers who make games for American women congregate online.
  • Clicking on something to make it go away.
  • Improving humans by adding components vs. by replacing components.
  • The legality of inventing a new organism by adding or deleting genes.
  • The Modular Human.
  • Plants undergoing full genome duplication.
  • The Diploid Human.
  • Using your hundred tongues to speak a hundred languages at once.
  • The one line you remember from "Kitchen! The Musical"
  • Saying "excuse me" in a higher and higher pitched voice until you're only saying "excuse me" to dogs and bats.
  • Running an errand in Tucson and incidentally removing horrifying beetles from multiple strangers’ hair.
  • True bugs and untrue bugs.
  • True bugs, with piercing and sucking mouthparts.
  • A reimagining of the insect phylum that includes small dogs and especially annoying children.
  • Hissing cockroaches that repeat what they hear like a parrot, so when you walk through the forest all you hear is a chorus of raspy voices saying "agh, get it off of me!"
  • Brood X, scheduled for this summer!
  • Brood X: Brood In Space.
  • OS X: OS In Space.
  • Which is worse, piercing and sucking mouthparts or sawing and sucking mouthparts?
  • What color of flashing lights civilians are allowed to use.
  • Pretending to be police.
  • The invasive plant species that the Sabotage music video is trying to highlight.
  • Hypothetical potted plants in the background of Powerman 5000's When Worlds Collide.
  • Being sentenced to community service and filling your rap punk band's trailer with fresh vegetables.
  • Nick Cave throwing a chair.
  • A poolside interrogation to find out if someone has a waterproof phone before you push them into a pool.
  • A cloth dummy falling off of a bridge.
  • Whether that cloth dummy had a cloth family.
  • Whether 1970s porn stars styled themselves after 1970s cops, or vice versa.
  • Popeye the Sailor Moon.
  • Everybody at the party dressing up as sexy cops and handing the real police a beer when they show up at the door.
  • Accidentally bringing up sexy cops every time you're on the show.
  • Chill dudes in short ties.
  • Taking a picture of a tree out of your moving car and asking a botanist to identify a blurry mess.
  • A boss who thinks your name is Marcia.
  • Meeting somebody with overlapping energies.
  • Total freedom from all societal expectations.
  • Setting up a movie streaming service that only streams one movie to promote your new phone company.
  • Buying every copy you can find of your first movie.
  • Watching multiple sets of people trapped in the same reality where they play out the same dramas and say the same lines over and over.
  • The one time Shakespeare wrote a stage direction.
  • Every time Shakespeare has been adapted into a movie.
  • Who even likes Falstaff.
  • The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Abridged.
  • Re-subtitling your movie using lines from Shakespeare.
  • The origin of Klingons as Shakespeare characters.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+U02AiKuc ]]> Jim Stormdancer 83. The Wide World of Pores https://topiclords.com/the-wide-world-of-pores d4385b4e-dfe0-4bda-8331-2eac456250db Mon, 24 May 2021 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Stevie and Avery. We discuss fish milk, boats, Angle Grinder Man, the Safety Dance, music generated by food, and the sad Greek tragedy of Ron and Leo Gallagher. 1:01:52 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The miracle of life on this very special episode of Topic Lords.
  • Fish milk.
  • The pigeon milk t-shirt.
  • Fish lactating out of their heads so the baby fish can swim through the milk cloud to improve their complexion.
  • Photos of proud fishermen holding fish bigger than they are and drinking milk off of their heads.
  • The top ten pores.
  • The defensive pores millipedes use to shoot itchy silk at you like silly string.
  • How if arachnids couldn't eat they'd die and how that's awesome actually.
  • Solid state arachnids.
  • The velvet worm.
  • Painting so many enormous millipedes that your boyfriend goes to the pet shop to get you an enormous millipede to draw from life and he comes back with no millipedes but he does smell like almonds for a week.
  • Creating a listener survey to see how many listeners made it past the topic about fish milk.
  • Not naming the RRS Sir David Attenborough but throwing a bone to the internet by naming its little buddy boat that pops out Boaty McBoatface.
  • Whether they're actually called pilots.
  • Losing a whole boatload of rubber duckies so to this day rubber duckies are washing ashore along with disarticulated left feet.
  • A Twitter bot that just says hello and goodbye to boats entering and leaving the San Francisco Bay.
  • Tweeting at a boat to say "you're killin' it out there, boat" and being immediately suspended by moderation bots.
  • Thousands of boat watchers in dinghies all over the ocean watching boat movement through binoculars and sending updates to vesselfinder.com via carrier pigeon.
  • Birds that are constantly changing their names.
  • How slough and slough are actually two different words.
  • The rest of the boat.
  • How snowplows get their names in Scotland.
  • The top eight snowplow names in Minnesota.
  • All the plow names that didn't make the cut.
  • Plugging a hair dryer into the cigarette lighter and attaching it to your front bumper to melt the ice as you drive.
  • A cop writing you a fix it ticket because your hair dryer cables are too tangled.
  • Superheroes who make house calls.
  • The police being completely unable to apprehend Angle Grinder man when his phone number and web site are totally public.
  • Construction Luigi.
  • Angle Grinder man and Wheel Clamp man both having the same publicity shot of doing a split and grinding the concrete.
  • A mob of masked superheroes descending on you and beating you up while you try to drink a smoothie.
  • Extreme Elvis.
  • A superhero named Bear Man whose superpower is that he only eats salmon.
  • Pouring one out for the Petoskey Batman.
  • Trying to think of how The Safety Dance goes but all you can think of is the Humpty Dance.
  • Getting a taste of Youtube's time-stretching algorithm and spitting it right back out.
  • Really enjoying the tall grass.
  • How to tell if somebody is running, frolicking or fleeing.
  • An excellent prop stone wall with a bunch of old looking rocks.
  • Extreme expressions of joy bursting with love as you walk through town screaming at everyone.
  • Continuously jumping and smiling and not being sure which will tire you out first.
  • S for safety.
  • Putting a lute in the music video when there's no lute in the song.
  • A split second of trenchant-seeming serious political commentary at the very end of this lighthearted music video.
  • Chumbawumba turning out to be serious political artists.
  • Going to genius.com to find out what The Safety Dance is really about.
  • Claiming that The Safety Dance is not a nuclear protest song per se even though you don't really know what "per se" means.
  • Drum hits triggered by popcorn pooping.
  • The popcorn vessel.
  • How all music is food-based if you think about it.
  • How humans have been singing since they had mouths.
  • Using popcorn as both a source of entropy and a tasty snack.
  • Tracking down the source of experimental saxophone music in the subway so you can give them money and it turns out to be a squeaky belt in the escalator.
  • The vegetable orchestra.
  • Powering your synth rock band using a bank of potatoes.
  • How potato-covered audio cables don't sound better than regular audio cables even though they are more delicious.
  • The Gallagher Prime story.
  • The Greek Tragedy of the Gallagher Bros.
  • Hashtag let Leo work.
  • Gallagher and Alf both being popular before we discovered what entertainment was.
  • All the paperwork you need to fill out to put music on Spotify.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The miracle of life on this very special episode of Topic Lords.
  • Fish milk.
  • The pigeon milk t-shirt.
  • Fish lactating out of their heads so the baby fish can swim through the milk cloud to improve their complexion.
  • Photos of proud fishermen holding fish bigger than they are and drinking milk off of their heads.
  • The top ten pores.
  • The defensive pores millipedes use to shoot itchy silk at you like silly string.
  • How if arachnids couldn't eat they'd die and how that's awesome actually.
  • Solid state arachnids.
  • The velvet worm.
  • Painting so many enormous millipedes that your boyfriend goes to the pet shop to get you an enormous millipede to draw from life and he comes back with no millipedes but he does smell like almonds for a week.
  • Creating a listener survey to see how many listeners made it past the topic about fish milk.
  • Not naming the RRS Sir David Attenborough but throwing a bone to the internet by naming its little buddy boat that pops out Boaty McBoatface.
  • Whether they're actually called pilots.
  • Losing a whole boatload of rubber duckies so to this day rubber duckies are washing ashore along with disarticulated left feet.
  • A Twitter bot that just says hello and goodbye to boats entering and leaving the San Francisco Bay.
  • Tweeting at a boat to say "you're killin' it out there, boat" and being immediately suspended by moderation bots.
  • Thousands of boat watchers in dinghies all over the ocean watching boat movement through binoculars and sending updates to vesselfinder.com via carrier pigeon.
  • Birds that are constantly changing their names.
  • How slough and slough are actually two different words.
  • The rest of the boat.
  • How snowplows get their names in Scotland.
  • The top eight snowplow names in Minnesota.
  • All the plow names that didn't make the cut.
  • Plugging a hair dryer into the cigarette lighter and attaching it to your front bumper to melt the ice as you drive.
  • A cop writing you a fix it ticket because your hair dryer cables are too tangled.
  • Superheroes who make house calls.
  • The police being completely unable to apprehend Angle Grinder man when his phone number and web site are totally public.
  • Construction Luigi.
  • Angle Grinder man and Wheel Clamp man both having the same publicity shot of doing a split and grinding the concrete.
  • A mob of masked superheroes descending on you and beating you up while you try to drink a smoothie.
  • Extreme Elvis.
  • A superhero named Bear Man whose superpower is that he only eats salmon.
  • Pouring one out for the Petoskey Batman.
  • Trying to think of how The Safety Dance goes but all you can think of is the Humpty Dance.
  • Getting a taste of Youtube's time-stretching algorithm and spitting it right back out.
  • Really enjoying the tall grass.
  • How to tell if somebody is running, frolicking or fleeing.
  • An excellent prop stone wall with a bunch of old looking rocks.
  • Extreme expressions of joy bursting with love as you walk through town screaming at everyone.
  • Continuously jumping and smiling and not being sure which will tire you out first.
  • S for safety.
  • Putting a lute in the music video when there's no lute in the song.
  • A split second of trenchant-seeming serious political commentary at the very end of this lighthearted music video.
  • Chumbawumba turning out to be serious political artists.
  • Going to genius.com to find out what The Safety Dance is really about.
  • Claiming that The Safety Dance is not a nuclear protest song per se even though you don't really know what "per se" means.
  • Drum hits triggered by popcorn pooping.
  • The popcorn vessel.
  • How all music is food-based if you think about it.
  • How humans have been singing since they had mouths.
  • Using popcorn as both a source of entropy and a tasty snack.
  • Tracking down the source of experimental saxophone music in the subway so you can give them money and it turns out to be a squeaky belt in the escalator.
  • The vegetable orchestra.
  • Powering your synth rock band using a bank of potatoes.
  • How potato-covered audio cables don't sound better than regular audio cables even though they are more delicious.
  • The Gallagher Prime story.
  • The Greek Tragedy of the Gallagher Bros.
  • Hashtag let Leo work.
  • Gallagher and Alf both being popular before we discovered what entertainment was.
  • All the paperwork you need to fill out to put music on Spotify.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The miracle of life on this very special episode of Topic Lords.
  • Fish milk.
  • The pigeon milk t-shirt.
  • Fish lactating out of their heads so the baby fish can swim through the milk cloud to improve their complexion.
  • Photos of proud fishermen holding fish bigger than they are and drinking milk off of their heads.
  • The top ten pores.
  • The defensive pores millipedes use to shoot itchy silk at you like silly string.
  • How if arachnids couldn't eat they'd die and how that's awesome actually.
  • Solid state arachnids.
  • The velvet worm.
  • Painting so many enormous millipedes that your boyfriend goes to the pet shop to get you an enormous millipede to draw from life and he comes back with no millipedes but he does smell like almonds for a week.
  • Creating a listener survey to see how many listeners made it past the topic about fish milk.
  • Not naming the RRS Sir David Attenborough but throwing a bone to the internet by naming its little buddy boat that pops out Boaty McBoatface.
  • Whether they're actually called pilots.
  • Losing a whole boatload of rubber duckies so to this day rubber duckies are washing ashore along with disarticulated left feet.
  • A Twitter bot that just says hello and goodbye to boats entering and leaving the San Francisco Bay.
  • Tweeting at a boat to say "you're killin' it out there, boat" and being immediately suspended by moderation bots.
  • Thousands of boat watchers in dinghies all over the ocean watching boat movement through binoculars and sending updates to vesselfinder.com via carrier pigeon.
  • Birds that are constantly changing their names.
  • How slough and slough are actually two different words.
  • The rest of the boat.
  • How snowplows get their names in Scotland.
  • The top eight snowplow names in Minnesota.
  • All the plow names that didn't make the cut.
  • Plugging a hair dryer into the cigarette lighter and attaching it to your front bumper to melt the ice as you drive.
  • A cop writing you a fix it ticket because your hair dryer cables are too tangled.
  • Superheroes who make house calls.
  • The police being completely unable to apprehend Angle Grinder man when his phone number and web site are totally public.
  • Construction Luigi.
  • Angle Grinder man and Wheel Clamp man both having the same publicity shot of doing a split and grinding the concrete.
  • A mob of masked superheroes descending on you and beating you up while you try to drink a smoothie.
  • Extreme Elvis.
  • A superhero named Bear Man whose superpower is that he only eats salmon.
  • Pouring one out for the Petoskey Batman.
  • Trying to think of how The Safety Dance goes but all you can think of is the Humpty Dance.
  • Getting a taste of Youtube's time-stretching algorithm and spitting it right back out.
  • Really enjoying the tall grass.
  • How to tell if somebody is running, frolicking or fleeing.
  • An excellent prop stone wall with a bunch of old looking rocks.
  • Extreme expressions of joy bursting with love as you walk through town screaming at everyone.
  • Continuously jumping and smiling and not being sure which will tire you out first.
  • S for safety.
  • Putting a lute in the music video when there's no lute in the song.
  • A split second of trenchant-seeming serious political commentary at the very end of this lighthearted music video.
  • Chumbawumba turning out to be serious political artists.
  • Going to genius.com to find out what The Safety Dance is really about.
  • Claiming that The Safety Dance is not a nuclear protest song per se even though you don't really know what "per se" means.
  • Drum hits triggered by popcorn pooping.
  • The popcorn vessel.
  • How all music is food-based if you think about it.
  • How humans have been singing since they had mouths.
  • Using popcorn as both a source of entropy and a tasty snack.
  • Tracking down the source of experimental saxophone music in the subway so you can give them money and it turns out to be a squeaky belt in the escalator.
  • The vegetable orchestra.
  • Powering your synth rock band using a bank of potatoes.
  • How potato-covered audio cables don't sound better than regular audio cables even though they are more delicious.
  • The Gallagher Prime story.
  • The Greek Tragedy of the Gallagher Bros.
  • Hashtag let Leo work.
  • Gallagher and Alf both being popular before we discovered what entertainment was.
  • All the paperwork you need to fill out to put music on Spotify.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+zaSCrqOX ]]> Jim Stormdancer 82. Breadless French Toast a la Dig Dug https://topiclords.com/breadless-french-toast-a-la-dig-dug 8b7743a3-4f56-4964-b2ac-e798f1d54bac Mon, 17 May 2021 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Chris and Hallie. We discuss Sylveon, savory French toast, briefcases, Detective Pikachu, and the ethics of making a robot daughter. 59:29 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Hallie
    • @hallie_9000
  • Chris will find you.

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Whether it's possible to do Soupertasters remotely.
  • What show this even is.
  • Never watching the best episode of a show because if you do the rest will be worse than that.
  • A game where you explore a tavern and then the game ends.
  • History littered with the corpses of couch-co-op-only games.
  • A hypothetical podcast about the dark history of cribbage.
  • The best vertically scrolling shooter set on British colonial Mars.
  • Adding faeries to rebalance the meta which has been overrun by dragons.
  • A little quadruped with features.
  • Ribbon-like feelers that make you drop your guard.
  • OG European fairies who steal children and leave rusty nails in their place.
  • A cute fairy dog that will fuck your shit up when you're not looking vibe.
  • The mortifying ordeal of realizing that all the Pokemon who look like they're wearing clothes? That's actually their skin.
  • A Syveon swinging around Viridian City like Spider-Man, eating birds and avoiding cold iron.
  • Turkey-flavored bread.
  • Making a Monte Cristo with savory French toast.
  • A sweet omelette with a lot more bread than egg.
  • Breadless French toast.
  • Omelette a la Dig Dug.
  • Filling crepes.
  • Using eggs as glue for putting a bunch of yummies together.
  • Lobster burritos.
  • What briefcases are for.
  • A game where you've got a corgi and you've gotta get her somewhere to do stuff.
  • Bringing a knife to a briefcase fight.
  • Using briefcases to store underwear.
  • Whether you want to sit in the briefcase or boxercase section.
  • Asking president Clinton "boxers or briefs?" on a live Q&A.
  • An adorable chonky Pikachu.
  • Detective Pikachu turning out way better than it had any right to be.
  • Two and a half hours of Pikachu jazzercising.
  • Whether Pikachu is made of shiny plastic like in Pokemon Go or is furry like a mouse like in Detective Pikachu.
  • Hiring internet meme people to do concept art for your movie.
  • Pokemon MC Hammer's extremely baggy purple leg skin.
  • Realistic Homer Simpson and realistic Mario.
  • Diving straight into your uncanny valley reflex and poking it with a stick.
  • Doing an image search for "realistic Mr. Mime" and regretting it immediately.
  • Psychic stigmata.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation and Frankenstein's conflicting takes on whether it's a good idea to construct an artificial person.
  • Trying to make a robot daughter but accidently making a murder bot.
  • Committing your kid to Git so you can roll back when they find out about the time you spent on 4chan.
  • Best practices for doing AI research without committing murder all the time.
  • The "bunch of delicious stuff in a pan plus eggs" approach to AI research vs. the "frittata" approach to AI research.
  • Observing and understanding the outcome of training a neural network and writing an ordinary program to do the same thing.
  • Agreement.
  • The alternate ending of Frankenstein where Dr. Frankenstein accidentally installs a baker's hand on the monster and it goes on a baking rampage using up all the flour in town.
  • To what degree parents can be held responsible for what their children do.
  • How it's okay to disown your parents but not your children.
  • A chatbot with servomotors in it.
  • A Furby molar.
  • A burden too great to bear alone.
  • A Furby living in a hollowed out tooth filled with corks.
  • Waking up next to a ceramic tooth with a face every morning.
  • Whether MAME has Furby support.
  • Douglas.
  • A Furby with baked beans instead of skin.
  • A Furby with teeth in the middle and it's not okay.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Hallie
    • @hallie_9000
  • Chris will find you.

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Whether it's possible to do Soupertasters remotely.
  • What show this even is.
  • Never watching the best episode of a show because if you do the rest will be worse than that.
  • A game where you explore a tavern and then the game ends.
  • History littered with the corpses of couch-co-op-only games.
  • A hypothetical podcast about the dark history of cribbage.
  • The best vertically scrolling shooter set on British colonial Mars.
  • Adding faeries to rebalance the meta which has been overrun by dragons.
  • A little quadruped with features.
  • Ribbon-like feelers that make you drop your guard.
  • OG European fairies who steal children and leave rusty nails in their place.
  • A cute fairy dog that will fuck your shit up when you're not looking vibe.
  • The mortifying ordeal of realizing that all the Pokemon who look like they're wearing clothes? That's actually their skin.
  • A Syveon swinging around Viridian City like Spider-Man, eating birds and avoiding cold iron.
  • Turkey-flavored bread.
  • Making a Monte Cristo with savory French toast.
  • A sweet omelette with a lot more bread than egg.
  • Breadless French toast.
  • Omelette a la Dig Dug.
  • Filling crepes.
  • Using eggs as glue for putting a bunch of yummies together.
  • Lobster burritos.
  • What briefcases are for.
  • A game where you've got a corgi and you've gotta get her somewhere to do stuff.
  • Bringing a knife to a briefcase fight.
  • Using briefcases to store underwear.
  • Whether you want to sit in the briefcase or boxercase section.
  • Asking president Clinton "boxers or briefs?" on a live Q&A.
  • An adorable chonky Pikachu.
  • Detective Pikachu turning out way better than it had any right to be.
  • Two and a half hours of Pikachu jazzercising.
  • Whether Pikachu is made of shiny plastic like in Pokemon Go or is furry like a mouse like in Detective Pikachu.
  • Hiring internet meme people to do concept art for your movie.
  • Pokemon MC Hammer's extremely baggy purple leg skin.
  • Realistic Homer Simpson and realistic Mario.
  • Diving straight into your uncanny valley reflex and poking it with a stick.
  • Doing an image search for "realistic Mr. Mime" and regretting it immediately.
  • Psychic stigmata.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation and Frankenstein's conflicting takes on whether it's a good idea to construct an artificial person.
  • Trying to make a robot daughter but accidently making a murder bot.
  • Committing your kid to Git so you can roll back when they find out about the time you spent on 4chan.
  • Best practices for doing AI research without committing murder all the time.
  • The "bunch of delicious stuff in a pan plus eggs" approach to AI research vs. the "frittata" approach to AI research.
  • Observing and understanding the outcome of training a neural network and writing an ordinary program to do the same thing.
  • Agreement.
  • The alternate ending of Frankenstein where Dr. Frankenstein accidentally installs a baker's hand on the monster and it goes on a baking rampage using up all the flour in town.
  • To what degree parents can be held responsible for what their children do.
  • How it's okay to disown your parents but not your children.
  • A chatbot with servomotors in it.
  • A Furby molar.
  • A burden too great to bear alone.
  • A Furby living in a hollowed out tooth filled with corks.
  • Waking up next to a ceramic tooth with a face every morning.
  • Whether MAME has Furby support.
  • Douglas.
  • A Furby with baked beans instead of skin.
  • A Furby with teeth in the middle and it's not okay.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Hallie
    • @hallie_9000
  • Chris will find you.

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Whether it's possible to do Soupertasters remotely.
  • What show this even is.
  • Never watching the best episode of a show because if you do the rest will be worse than that.
  • A game where you explore a tavern and then the game ends.
  • History littered with the corpses of couch-co-op-only games.
  • A hypothetical podcast about the dark history of cribbage.
  • The best vertically scrolling shooter set on British colonial Mars.
  • Adding faeries to rebalance the meta which has been overrun by dragons.
  • A little quadruped with features.
  • Ribbon-like feelers that make you drop your guard.
  • OG European fairies who steal children and leave rusty nails in their place.
  • A cute fairy dog that will fuck your shit up when you're not looking vibe.
  • The mortifying ordeal of realizing that all the Pokemon who look like they're wearing clothes? That's actually their skin.
  • A Syveon swinging around Viridian City like Spider-Man, eating birds and avoiding cold iron.
  • Turkey-flavored bread.
  • Making a Monte Cristo with savory French toast.
  • A sweet omelette with a lot more bread than egg.
  • Breadless French toast.
  • Omelette a la Dig Dug.
  • Filling crepes.
  • Using eggs as glue for putting a bunch of yummies together.
  • Lobster burritos.
  • What briefcases are for.
  • A game where you've got a corgi and you've gotta get her somewhere to do stuff.
  • Bringing a knife to a briefcase fight.
  • Using briefcases to store underwear.
  • Whether you want to sit in the briefcase or boxercase section.
  • Asking president Clinton "boxers or briefs?" on a live Q&A.
  • An adorable chonky Pikachu.
  • Detective Pikachu turning out way better than it had any right to be.
  • Two and a half hours of Pikachu jazzercising.
  • Whether Pikachu is made of shiny plastic like in Pokemon Go or is furry like a mouse like in Detective Pikachu.
  • Hiring internet meme people to do concept art for your movie.
  • Pokemon MC Hammer's extremely baggy purple leg skin.
  • Realistic Homer Simpson and realistic Mario.
  • Diving straight into your uncanny valley reflex and poking it with a stick.
  • Doing an image search for "realistic Mr. Mime" and regretting it immediately.
  • Psychic stigmata.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation and Frankenstein's conflicting takes on whether it's a good idea to construct an artificial person.
  • Trying to make a robot daughter but accidently making a murder bot.
  • Committing your kid to Git so you can roll back when they find out about the time you spent on 4chan.
  • Best practices for doing AI research without committing murder all the time.
  • The "bunch of delicious stuff in a pan plus eggs" approach to AI research vs. the "frittata" approach to AI research.
  • Observing and understanding the outcome of training a neural network and writing an ordinary program to do the same thing.
  • Agreement.
  • The alternate ending of Frankenstein where Dr. Frankenstein accidentally installs a baker's hand on the monster and it goes on a baking rampage using up all the flour in town.
  • To what degree parents can be held responsible for what their children do.
  • How it's okay to disown your parents but not your children.
  • A chatbot with servomotors in it.
  • A Furby molar.
  • A burden too great to bear alone.
  • A Furby living in a hollowed out tooth filled with corks.
  • Waking up next to a ceramic tooth with a face every morning.
  • Whether MAME has Furby support.
  • Douglas.
  • A Furby with baked beans instead of skin.
  • A Furby with teeth in the middle and it's not okay.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+gehJWdKj ]]> Jim Stormdancer 81. The Pianist-Oboist War https://topiclords.com/the-pianist-oboist-war f4644d9d-6c2a-48d7-a696-c7a9dc179660 Mon, 10 May 2021 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Alexander and Amanda. We discuss sci-fi stories that are just reskins of stuff that already happens, ancient bitcoin, that time Wienerschnitzel actually served schnitzel, first encountering a song through parody, and bad habits that adventure games teach you. 50:01 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Alexander
  • Amanda

Topics:

  • The disappointment of sci-fi stories that are just reskins of stuff that happens on Earth.
  • My bitcoin.
  • I can't decide whether I'm more annoyed that Wienerschnitzel doesn't serve schnitzel, or that they did for three months in 2017 as a gag.
  • Jesse asks "First encountering a song through parody."
  • Bad habits that adventure games teach you.

Microtopics:

  • Shrinking your pony until it's really small.
  • Pulling down the console and typing +mlook.
  • Skyrim modding as a more convincing representation of magic than the spell system in the game itself.
  • A very cryptic twitter account that just posts numbers.
  • What @math_ebooks did to be suspended.
  • Wanting to land on a planet and look for Bob but a different planet gets in your way first.
  • Sci-fi as a safe lens for exploring our culture without getting people's defenses up.
  • Reverse mystery stories.
  • Starfish people who communicate through music.
  • Watching Solaris because you're really into boring sci-fi.
  • An alien invasion movie without the invasion.
  • Final Jeopardy asking you to identify the Close Encounters of the Third Kind melody from the interval names.
  • The fires of Musical Jeopardy.
  • The correlation between how tightly strung your instrument is vs. how tightly strung you are.
  • The Star Trek episode where the Enterprise discovers a musician planet where there's a war between the pianists and the oboists.
  • Edmonton, the early Bitcoin hub.
  • SETI@home never finding anything interesting.
  • Losing your Bitcoin wallet.
  • Buying a $40,000 coffee with Bitcoin in 2013.
  • Giving your college hard drive to a friend to ask them to try to find your Bitcoin wallet without first scouring it for incriminating evidence.
  • Deciding you no longer need a memes folder on your hard drive because you can easily find as many memes as you need on the Internet.
  • Dressing up as the Murder She Wrote theme song for Meme Day.
  • Whether the Murder She Wrote theme song is a meme.
  • The barbecue joint that accepts Dogecoin.
  • Going to Remedy Chai in Edmonton and getting a butter chicken wrap and a $40,000 chai.
  • Liking both hot dogs and schnitzel but hating Wienerschnitzel.
  • A joke that most people won't get or notice, and the people who do will be annoyed by it.
  • My First Book of Space.
  • Hating potatoes until you discover that they are delicious and then hating them even more.
  • Your refusal to admit that actually you like potatoes as foreshadowing to every argument you ever have on the Internet.
  • The Wienerschnitzel chili cheese dog burrito skipping right from marketing's brain to consumer's mouths without ever being taste-tested by anyone.
  • The Brain to Mouth social movement.
  • The culinary dimensional space of meat product folded into bread product.
  • A hybrid chef/engineer who has an understanding of both fast food pipelines and how to prepare a tasty meal.
  • Hearing every Weird Al version of a song before you hear the originals.
  • Mathnet.
  • Bible versions of pop culture songs so you can sing along to the radio without being full of sin.
  • The guy at Bible Camp who rewrote the lyrics of pop music to be about God, who retired back when Christianity was groovy, so the most recent pop music you're allowed to sing is from the 1970s.
  • It's getting cold in here, so put on all your coats.
  • Sherlock Hemlock.
  • Vincent Twice Vincent Twice.
  • Monty Python's popularity among Americans who are completely oblivious to what it's satirizing, so a whole generation of American nerds grew up thinking inscrutable nonsense is the pinnacle of comedy. (Which it is.)
  • A combination of things you usually don't see tickling your neurons in a novel way.
  • The scene in the Hitchhiker's Guide radio show where Douglas Adams is making fun of disco.
  • The missing album that the Backstreet Boys only released in Canada so they could practice being famous.
  • Time traveling to past and future Space Quests.
  • Doing ridiculous adventure game shit to get a book of matches when you could just go to a store and buy a gosh darned book of matches.
  • An adventure game where you can do what makes sense.
  • How the Infocom hard boiled detective text adventures were structured differently from traditional text adventures.
  • Wanting Roberta Williams to adopt you and now you've blown it.
  • The Seattle of Mexico.
  • San Francisco, The Everbrown State.
  • Roberta Williams tracking you down and adopting you against your will.
  • Luring Roberta Williams to your house with promises of trained chickens jumping through hula hoops.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Alexander
  • Amanda

Topics:

  • The disappointment of sci-fi stories that are just reskins of stuff that happens on Earth.
  • My bitcoin.
  • I can't decide whether I'm more annoyed that Wienerschnitzel doesn't serve schnitzel, or that they did for three months in 2017 as a gag.
  • Jesse asks "First encountering a song through parody."
  • Bad habits that adventure games teach you.

Microtopics:

  • Shrinking your pony until it's really small.
  • Pulling down the console and typing +mlook.
  • Skyrim modding as a more convincing representation of magic than the spell system in the game itself.
  • A very cryptic twitter account that just posts numbers.
  • What @math_ebooks did to be suspended.
  • Wanting to land on a planet and look for Bob but a different planet gets in your way first.
  • Sci-fi as a safe lens for exploring our culture without getting people's defenses up.
  • Reverse mystery stories.
  • Starfish people who communicate through music.
  • Watching Solaris because you're really into boring sci-fi.
  • An alien invasion movie without the invasion.
  • Final Jeopardy asking you to identify the Close Encounters of the Third Kind melody from the interval names.
  • The fires of Musical Jeopardy.
  • The correlation between how tightly strung your instrument is vs. how tightly strung you are.
  • The Star Trek episode where the Enterprise discovers a musician planet where there's a war between the pianists and the oboists.
  • Edmonton, the early Bitcoin hub.
  • SETI@home never finding anything interesting.
  • Losing your Bitcoin wallet.
  • Buying a $40,000 coffee with Bitcoin in 2013.
  • Giving your college hard drive to a friend to ask them to try to find your Bitcoin wallet without first scouring it for incriminating evidence.
  • Deciding you no longer need a memes folder on your hard drive because you can easily find as many memes as you need on the Internet.
  • Dressing up as the Murder She Wrote theme song for Meme Day.
  • Whether the Murder She Wrote theme song is a meme.
  • The barbecue joint that accepts Dogecoin.
  • Going to Remedy Chai in Edmonton and getting a butter chicken wrap and a $40,000 chai.
  • Liking both hot dogs and schnitzel but hating Wienerschnitzel.
  • A joke that most people won't get or notice, and the people who do will be annoyed by it.
  • My First Book of Space.
  • Hating potatoes until you discover that they are delicious and then hating them even more.
  • Your refusal to admit that actually you like potatoes as foreshadowing to every argument you ever have on the Internet.
  • The Wienerschnitzel chili cheese dog burrito skipping right from marketing's brain to consumer's mouths without ever being taste-tested by anyone.
  • The Brain to Mouth social movement.
  • The culinary dimensional space of meat product folded into bread product.
  • A hybrid chef/engineer who has an understanding of both fast food pipelines and how to prepare a tasty meal.
  • Hearing every Weird Al version of a song before you hear the originals.
  • Mathnet.
  • Bible versions of pop culture songs so you can sing along to the radio without being full of sin.
  • The guy at Bible Camp who rewrote the lyrics of pop music to be about God, who retired back when Christianity was groovy, so the most recent pop music you're allowed to sing is from the 1970s.
  • It's getting cold in here, so put on all your coats.
  • Sherlock Hemlock.
  • Vincent Twice Vincent Twice.
  • Monty Python's popularity among Americans who are completely oblivious to what it's satirizing, so a whole generation of American nerds grew up thinking inscrutable nonsense is the pinnacle of comedy. (Which it is.)
  • A combination of things you usually don't see tickling your neurons in a novel way.
  • The scene in the Hitchhiker's Guide radio show where Douglas Adams is making fun of disco.
  • The missing album that the Backstreet Boys only released in Canada so they could practice being famous.
  • Time traveling to past and future Space Quests.
  • Doing ridiculous adventure game shit to get a book of matches when you could just go to a store and buy a gosh darned book of matches.
  • An adventure game where you can do what makes sense.
  • How the Infocom hard boiled detective text adventures were structured differently from traditional text adventures.
  • Wanting Roberta Williams to adopt you and now you've blown it.
  • The Seattle of Mexico.
  • San Francisco, The Everbrown State.
  • Roberta Williams tracking you down and adopting you against your will.
  • Luring Roberta Williams to your house with promises of trained chickens jumping through hula hoops.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Alexander
  • Amanda

Topics:

  • The disappointment of sci-fi stories that are just reskins of stuff that happens on Earth.
  • My bitcoin.
  • I can't decide whether I'm more annoyed that Wienerschnitzel doesn't serve schnitzel, or that they did for three months in 2017 as a gag.
  • Jesse asks "First encountering a song through parody."
  • Bad habits that adventure games teach you.

Microtopics:

  • Shrinking your pony until it's really small.
  • Pulling down the console and typing +mlook.
  • Skyrim modding as a more convincing representation of magic than the spell system in the game itself.
  • A very cryptic twitter account that just posts numbers.
  • What @math_ebooks did to be suspended.
  • Wanting to land on a planet and look for Bob but a different planet gets in your way first.
  • Sci-fi as a safe lens for exploring our culture without getting people's defenses up.
  • Reverse mystery stories.
  • Starfish people who communicate through music.
  • Watching Solaris because you're really into boring sci-fi.
  • An alien invasion movie without the invasion.
  • Final Jeopardy asking you to identify the Close Encounters of the Third Kind melody from the interval names.
  • The fires of Musical Jeopardy.
  • The correlation between how tightly strung your instrument is vs. how tightly strung you are.
  • The Star Trek episode where the Enterprise discovers a musician planet where there's a war between the pianists and the oboists.
  • Edmonton, the early Bitcoin hub.
  • SETI@home never finding anything interesting.
  • Losing your Bitcoin wallet.
  • Buying a $40,000 coffee with Bitcoin in 2013.
  • Giving your college hard drive to a friend to ask them to try to find your Bitcoin wallet without first scouring it for incriminating evidence.
  • Deciding you no longer need a memes folder on your hard drive because you can easily find as many memes as you need on the Internet.
  • Dressing up as the Murder She Wrote theme song for Meme Day.
  • Whether the Murder She Wrote theme song is a meme.
  • The barbecue joint that accepts Dogecoin.
  • Going to Remedy Chai in Edmonton and getting a butter chicken wrap and a $40,000 chai.
  • Liking both hot dogs and schnitzel but hating Wienerschnitzel.
  • A joke that most people won't get or notice, and the people who do will be annoyed by it.
  • My First Book of Space.
  • Hating potatoes until you discover that they are delicious and then hating them even more.
  • Your refusal to admit that actually you like potatoes as foreshadowing to every argument you ever have on the Internet.
  • The Wienerschnitzel chili cheese dog burrito skipping right from marketing's brain to consumer's mouths without ever being taste-tested by anyone.
  • The Brain to Mouth social movement.
  • The culinary dimensional space of meat product folded into bread product.
  • A hybrid chef/engineer who has an understanding of both fast food pipelines and how to prepare a tasty meal.
  • Hearing every Weird Al version of a song before you hear the originals.
  • Mathnet.
  • Bible versions of pop culture songs so you can sing along to the radio without being full of sin.
  • The guy at Bible Camp who rewrote the lyrics of pop music to be about God, who retired back when Christianity was groovy, so the most recent pop music you're allowed to sing is from the 1970s.
  • It's getting cold in here, so put on all your coats.
  • Sherlock Hemlock.
  • Vincent Twice Vincent Twice.
  • Monty Python's popularity among Americans who are completely oblivious to what it's satirizing, so a whole generation of American nerds grew up thinking inscrutable nonsense is the pinnacle of comedy. (Which it is.)
  • A combination of things you usually don't see tickling your neurons in a novel way.
  • The scene in the Hitchhiker's Guide radio show where Douglas Adams is making fun of disco.
  • The missing album that the Backstreet Boys only released in Canada so they could practice being famous.
  • Time traveling to past and future Space Quests.
  • Doing ridiculous adventure game shit to get a book of matches when you could just go to a store and buy a gosh darned book of matches.
  • An adventure game where you can do what makes sense.
  • How the Infocom hard boiled detective text adventures were structured differently from traditional text adventures.
  • Wanting Roberta Williams to adopt you and now you've blown it.
  • The Seattle of Mexico.
  • San Francisco, The Everbrown State.
  • Roberta Williams tracking you down and adopting you against your will.
  • Luring Roberta Williams to your house with promises of trained chickens jumping through hula hoops.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+NmD76-_u ]]> Jim Stormdancer 80. Xenogears Disc 3 for Smash https://topiclords.com/xenogears-disc-3-for-smash bc92920f-3e26-4055-8cb9-9ede5371a472 Mon, 03 May 2021 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Styger and JP. We discuss food as fan fiction, the most unexpected CD to be launched from the face of the Cenobite from Hellraiser 3 that launches CDs out of his face, mandolin slicers, Ghostbusters by Ray Parker Jr., the oldest food you've eaten, why pigeons love nacho cheese, and a list of every move in every Mario game. 1:04:32 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Attack the Block.
  • Movies where a delineated area is involved in some kind of fight.
  • Lord quality: trying to keep it high.
  • Cooking dinner as a fusion of the cuisines of the two countries that you are about to watch play a sport.
  • White game designers in the 70s deciding that there isn't anything spicier than paprika in this astonishing fantasy world.
  • Doing some home cooking and inventing a new sandwich in the style of the McDonald's fish fillet.
  • The $100 cheese steak.
  • A chef getting famous by serving incredibly high end Big Macs to rich people.
  • Each bottle of Tabasco tasting uniform even though they're all composed of peppers grown in many different countries.
  • How to explain cenobites to Thomas Jefferson.
  • A transporter accident aesthetic.
  • Not liking the music in the club so you turn the DJ into a cenobite with a CD drive for a mouth.
  • Supertramp's Breakfast in America.
  • All known AOL installer CD-ROMs originating with the cenobite who launches CDs out of his face.
  • A CD that was killed by Mountain Dew.
  • The cenobite with a CD drive for a face launching Xenogears disc 3 at you.
  • Xenogears disc 3 for Super Smash Bros.
  • Sympathy for the developers of Xenogears and in fact of any video game.
  • Novelty CD shapes.
  • CD-ROMs cut to the size of business cards with your portfolio on them.
  • Destroying a slot loading CD drive by putting a small or oddly shaped CD in it.
  • Learning to trust yourself to be around sharp knives.
  • Strapping a mandolin slicer to yourself like a keytar.
  • A great spooky house under the freeway.
  • A house made of neon tubing like the ghost ship at the end of Monkey Island.
  • Telekinesing the furniture.
  • Being haunted by ghosts that are clearly just a couple dudes in t-shirts.
  • Getting a bunch of B-list celebrities to shout "Ghostbusters" and act scared.
  • Getting movie footage for your music video by pointing a video camera at the movie screen.
  • Finding synergies between disparate elements of pop culture.
  • Bleh hands.
  • Slimer with a dozen cocktail weenies in his craw.
  • Reaching a compromise that will allow Ray Parker Jr. to haunt your home in peace.
  • The Ghostbusters hiring spectral Ray Parker Jr. to haunt folks and drum up business.
  • Vincent Schiavelli's filmography.
  • A Ghostbusters/Columbo crossover episode.
  • The trick where Chevy Chase eats a cigarette.
  • Slimer always believing that he ate the whole thing.
  • Food age.
  • Eating extremely old cough drops.
  • Not being able to tell if cough drops have gone bad because they always taste like that.
  • Asking someone with a philosophy degree whether cough drops are a food.
  • Accidentally taking enough philosophy classes to qualify for a degree and someone tracks you down to hand you your philosophy degree like a subpoena.
  • Bog cheese.
  • Whether anyone has successfully eaten millennia-old frozen mammoth meat or if it all turned into black goo.
  • Several thousand year old tomb honey.
  • Unboxing and eating military rations on video.
  • Eating hardtack from the American civil war in 2016.
  • Being extremely upbeat about rancid meat.
  • How to tell if vacuum sealed food has botulism.
  • Having the vocabulary to describe all the different ways food can go bad.
  • Trying to buy civil war hardtack on eBay and bidding on a pile of rocks.
  • The most pigeon-dense place you've lived.
  • Taking incredible risks for a single cheeto.
  • Whether nacho cheese is incredibly beautiful to a tetrachromat.
  • Nacho cheese as a nest building materials.
  • Global incidence of human tetrachromacy.
  • Space photos recolored into the visible spectrum so humans can look at them.
  • Pointing a spectroscope at nacho cheese to figure out what pigeons see.
  • The world's tiniest superpower.
  • How to grow up in America without having played a bunch of Mario games.
  • List of soups.
  • Sitting at your Wizard's Desk for too long and getting Wizard's Foot.
  • Fan wikis taking the shape of fan patience.
  • Begging the wiki editors to turn this list into a normalized database table.
  • An exhaustive list of games in which Mario can jump.
  • An exhaustive list of games in which Mario can't jump.
  • Mario visiting San Francisco.
  • The Golden Gate Bridge existing in the Mario multiverse.
  • Japan fitting perfectly in the Super Mario Bros. 3 universe, because Japan is also a magical foreign land I've never visited.
  • The alternate reality where Mario Odyssey depicted world tourism in a hyper-realistic fashion.
  • Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 as a fictionalized depiction of an Olympics that never happened.
  • ESPN broadcasting CPU vs. CPU basketball matches in NBA 2K.
  • Linking to a web site but not encouraging people to go there.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Attack the Block.
  • Movies where a delineated area is involved in some kind of fight.
  • Lord quality: trying to keep it high.
  • Cooking dinner as a fusion of the cuisines of the two countries that you are about to watch play a sport.
  • White game designers in the 70s deciding that there isn't anything spicier than paprika in this astonishing fantasy world.
  • Doing some home cooking and inventing a new sandwich in the style of the McDonald's fish fillet.
  • The $100 cheese steak.
  • A chef getting famous by serving incredibly high end Big Macs to rich people.
  • Each bottle of Tabasco tasting uniform even though they're all composed of peppers grown in many different countries.
  • How to explain cenobites to Thomas Jefferson.
  • A transporter accident aesthetic.
  • Not liking the music in the club so you turn the DJ into a cenobite with a CD drive for a mouth.
  • Supertramp's Breakfast in America.
  • All known AOL installer CD-ROMs originating with the cenobite who launches CDs out of his face.
  • A CD that was killed by Mountain Dew.
  • The cenobite with a CD drive for a face launching Xenogears disc 3 at you.
  • Xenogears disc 3 for Super Smash Bros.
  • Sympathy for the developers of Xenogears and in fact of any video game.
  • Novelty CD shapes.
  • CD-ROMs cut to the size of business cards with your portfolio on them.
  • Destroying a slot loading CD drive by putting a small or oddly shaped CD in it.
  • Learning to trust yourself to be around sharp knives.
  • Strapping a mandolin slicer to yourself like a keytar.
  • A great spooky house under the freeway.
  • A house made of neon tubing like the ghost ship at the end of Monkey Island.
  • Telekinesing the furniture.
  • Being haunted by ghosts that are clearly just a couple dudes in t-shirts.
  • Getting a bunch of B-list celebrities to shout "Ghostbusters" and act scared.
  • Getting movie footage for your music video by pointing a video camera at the movie screen.
  • Finding synergies between disparate elements of pop culture.
  • Bleh hands.
  • Slimer with a dozen cocktail weenies in his craw.
  • Reaching a compromise that will allow Ray Parker Jr. to haunt your home in peace.
  • The Ghostbusters hiring spectral Ray Parker Jr. to haunt folks and drum up business.
  • Vincent Schiavelli's filmography.
  • A Ghostbusters/Columbo crossover episode.
  • The trick where Chevy Chase eats a cigarette.
  • Slimer always believing that he ate the whole thing.
  • Food age.
  • Eating extremely old cough drops.
  • Not being able to tell if cough drops have gone bad because they always taste like that.
  • Asking someone with a philosophy degree whether cough drops are a food.
  • Accidentally taking enough philosophy classes to qualify for a degree and someone tracks you down to hand you your philosophy degree like a subpoena.
  • Bog cheese.
  • Whether anyone has successfully eaten millennia-old frozen mammoth meat or if it all turned into black goo.
  • Several thousand year old tomb honey.
  • Unboxing and eating military rations on video.
  • Eating hardtack from the American civil war in 2016.
  • Being extremely upbeat about rancid meat.
  • How to tell if vacuum sealed food has botulism.
  • Having the vocabulary to describe all the different ways food can go bad.
  • Trying to buy civil war hardtack on eBay and bidding on a pile of rocks.
  • The most pigeon-dense place you've lived.
  • Taking incredible risks for a single cheeto.
  • Whether nacho cheese is incredibly beautiful to a tetrachromat.
  • Nacho cheese as a nest building materials.
  • Global incidence of human tetrachromacy.
  • Space photos recolored into the visible spectrum so humans can look at them.
  • Pointing a spectroscope at nacho cheese to figure out what pigeons see.
  • The world's tiniest superpower.
  • How to grow up in America without having played a bunch of Mario games.
  • List of soups.
  • Sitting at your Wizard's Desk for too long and getting Wizard's Foot.
  • Fan wikis taking the shape of fan patience.
  • Begging the wiki editors to turn this list into a normalized database table.
  • An exhaustive list of games in which Mario can jump.
  • An exhaustive list of games in which Mario can't jump.
  • Mario visiting San Francisco.
  • The Golden Gate Bridge existing in the Mario multiverse.
  • Japan fitting perfectly in the Super Mario Bros. 3 universe, because Japan is also a magical foreign land I've never visited.
  • The alternate reality where Mario Odyssey depicted world tourism in a hyper-realistic fashion.
  • Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 as a fictionalized depiction of an Olympics that never happened.
  • ESPN broadcasting CPU vs. CPU basketball matches in NBA 2K.
  • Linking to a web site but not encouraging people to go there.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Attack the Block.
  • Movies where a delineated area is involved in some kind of fight.
  • Lord quality: trying to keep it high.
  • Cooking dinner as a fusion of the cuisines of the two countries that you are about to watch play a sport.
  • White game designers in the 70s deciding that there isn't anything spicier than paprika in this astonishing fantasy world.
  • Doing some home cooking and inventing a new sandwich in the style of the McDonald's fish fillet.
  • The $100 cheese steak.
  • A chef getting famous by serving incredibly high end Big Macs to rich people.
  • Each bottle of Tabasco tasting uniform even though they're all composed of peppers grown in many different countries.
  • How to explain cenobites to Thomas Jefferson.
  • A transporter accident aesthetic.
  • Not liking the music in the club so you turn the DJ into a cenobite with a CD drive for a mouth.
  • Supertramp's Breakfast in America.
  • All known AOL installer CD-ROMs originating with the cenobite who launches CDs out of his face.
  • A CD that was killed by Mountain Dew.
  • The cenobite with a CD drive for a face launching Xenogears disc 3 at you.
  • Xenogears disc 3 for Super Smash Bros.
  • Sympathy for the developers of Xenogears and in fact of any video game.
  • Novelty CD shapes.
  • CD-ROMs cut to the size of business cards with your portfolio on them.
  • Destroying a slot loading CD drive by putting a small or oddly shaped CD in it.
  • Learning to trust yourself to be around sharp knives.
  • Strapping a mandolin slicer to yourself like a keytar.
  • A great spooky house under the freeway.
  • A house made of neon tubing like the ghost ship at the end of Monkey Island.
  • Telekinesing the furniture.
  • Being haunted by ghosts that are clearly just a couple dudes in t-shirts.
  • Getting a bunch of B-list celebrities to shout "Ghostbusters" and act scared.
  • Getting movie footage for your music video by pointing a video camera at the movie screen.
  • Finding synergies between disparate elements of pop culture.
  • Bleh hands.
  • Slimer with a dozen cocktail weenies in his craw.
  • Reaching a compromise that will allow Ray Parker Jr. to haunt your home in peace.
  • The Ghostbusters hiring spectral Ray Parker Jr. to haunt folks and drum up business.
  • Vincent Schiavelli's filmography.
  • A Ghostbusters/Columbo crossover episode.
  • The trick where Chevy Chase eats a cigarette.
  • Slimer always believing that he ate the whole thing.
  • Food age.
  • Eating extremely old cough drops.
  • Not being able to tell if cough drops have gone bad because they always taste like that.
  • Asking someone with a philosophy degree whether cough drops are a food.
  • Accidentally taking enough philosophy classes to qualify for a degree and someone tracks you down to hand you your philosophy degree like a subpoena.
  • Bog cheese.
  • Whether anyone has successfully eaten millennia-old frozen mammoth meat or if it all turned into black goo.
  • Several thousand year old tomb honey.
  • Unboxing and eating military rations on video.
  • Eating hardtack from the American civil war in 2016.
  • Being extremely upbeat about rancid meat.
  • How to tell if vacuum sealed food has botulism.
  • Having the vocabulary to describe all the different ways food can go bad.
  • Trying to buy civil war hardtack on eBay and bidding on a pile of rocks.
  • The most pigeon-dense place you've lived.
  • Taking incredible risks for a single cheeto.
  • Whether nacho cheese is incredibly beautiful to a tetrachromat.
  • Nacho cheese as a nest building materials.
  • Global incidence of human tetrachromacy.
  • Space photos recolored into the visible spectrum so humans can look at them.
  • Pointing a spectroscope at nacho cheese to figure out what pigeons see.
  • The world's tiniest superpower.
  • How to grow up in America without having played a bunch of Mario games.
  • List of soups.
  • Sitting at your Wizard's Desk for too long and getting Wizard's Foot.
  • Fan wikis taking the shape of fan patience.
  • Begging the wiki editors to turn this list into a normalized database table.
  • An exhaustive list of games in which Mario can jump.
  • An exhaustive list of games in which Mario can't jump.
  • Mario visiting San Francisco.
  • The Golden Gate Bridge existing in the Mario multiverse.
  • Japan fitting perfectly in the Super Mario Bros. 3 universe, because Japan is also a magical foreign land I've never visited.
  • The alternate reality where Mario Odyssey depicted world tourism in a hyper-realistic fashion.
  • Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 as a fictionalized depiction of an Olympics that never happened.
  • ESPN broadcasting CPU vs. CPU basketball matches in NBA 2K.
  • Linking to a web site but not encouraging people to go there.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+SyNkAPaS ]]> Jim Stormdancer 79. Loose Meat Krispie Treats https://topiclords.com/loose-meat-krispie-treats 00d8b75f-ef35-448e-9320-e9322a673641 Mon, 26 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: John and Alex. We discuss Blaseball: the Musical, keeping the spirit of invention alive, mixing things into ground turkey, As Slow As Possible, existing outside the school system, and the experience of getting glasses. 1:16:07 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • A modern take on Lunar Lander.
  • Flying a rocket ship underwater.
  • John Mystery's true identity.
  • The true identity of the investigator who uncovered John Mystery's true identity.
  • Blaseball: the Musical: the Deaths of Sebastian Telephone.
  • Whether it's okay to not be the most obsessed participant in your chosen fandom.
  • Take Me Out to the Blall Game.
  • Writing, recording and editing a musical in 72 hours.
  • Screaming about how Jessica Telephone looked at you.
  • The pros and cons of being cagey about your identity.
  • The ten most interesting things that happened in Blaseball this week.
  • Newsletters: the podcast that comes into your email.
  • The pros and cons of reinventing the wheel.
  • A non-destructive audio synthesizer that integrates into your makefile.
  • Writing the simplest version of a program that's exactly what you need vs. learning how to use someone else's complicated program that does all the things anyone could want.
  • Reinventing the wheel to learn how a wheel works.
  • Passing variously aggregated files back and forth between R and Python scripts.
  • NPM as exhibit A in the argument that maybe it's a good idea to reinvent the wheel sometimes.
  • Relying on a thousand strangers not breaking their NPM module so that your commercial web site can keep running.
  • Perpetually living in fear of the enormous arcane machine you've created.
  • Rice Krispie Treat Burgers.
  • The hidden dangers of putting diced onion in your meat loaf.
  • Ingredients blending into a homogenous mass.
  • Sweet Sundae Ramen.
  • Homemade fudge vs hot fudge.
  • A food dish that looks like something tasty.
  • A brown sludge at the end.
  • Whether this noodley carb would look more appetizing if it weren't dyed blue.
  • Adapting a 4chan cooking thread into a Youtube channel with MST3K style silhouettes heckling the whole time.
  • Shipping your symphony with instructions on how to remix it.
  • Indeterminacy.
  • Observing someone across the street when cars are passing by.
  • As Slow as Possible As Fast as Possible.
  • Basing the tempo of your performance on the wavelength of the shortest note in the piece.
  • Not knowing what to expect but being thoroughly satisfied by what you got.
  • Homeschooling vs. Unschooling.
  • A very positive thing for you that might not be great for other people.
  • Wanting to be a baker when you grow up but not knowing how to proceed because you already are a baker.
  • Learning by doing.
  • The correlation between people who like the structure of school and who people learn best by reading rather than doing.
  • The first person in your family to not be homeschooled.
  • Learning to play music because there are instruments in your house.
  • Growing up outside the school system and encountering the Pledge of Allegiance for the first time in your thirties.
  • Sending your homeschooled kids to high school so all their little personality quirks get beaten out of them by their peers.
  • Everyone American diagnosed with PTSD actually having PTSD twice, because they also went to middle school.
  • Learning how to deal with other humans once you're mature enough to have a little bit of emotional intelligence.
  • Embarrassment of your past self as a sign of growth.
  • A topic asking for the perspective of someone who is not on the podcast.
  • Getting glasses that make objects in your left eye look farther away than in your right eye.
  • Radially-oriented bifocals.
  • Finally achieving everyone else's normal.
  • Putting up with blurry vision for most of your life but wearing glasses when you hike because you want to see all the pretty leaves.
  • Putting on someone else's glasses as a joke but things do actually look a little bit sharper but assuming it's just an illusion.
  • Thinking you have normal vision until someone actually measures your corneas.
  • Swimming at the edges of your vision because lenses work best in the middle.
  • Wearing glasses that flip your vision vertically and your brain eventually learning to correct for it, and then taking the glasses off and your brain is like "oh shit it's this again!"
  • The thing where you put a mirror under your chin and walk around and the popcorn on the ceiling looks like the surface of the moon.
  • Objects shrinking every time you get new glasses.
  • Objectively measuring your perception by sticking a tape measure into your brain.
  • Writing one really excellent tweet and then hiding it behind a bunch of tweets promoting the musical you were in.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • A modern take on Lunar Lander.
  • Flying a rocket ship underwater.
  • John Mystery's true identity.
  • The true identity of the investigator who uncovered John Mystery's true identity.
  • Blaseball: the Musical: the Deaths of Sebastian Telephone.
  • Whether it's okay to not be the most obsessed participant in your chosen fandom.
  • Take Me Out to the Blall Game.
  • Writing, recording and editing a musical in 72 hours.
  • Screaming about how Jessica Telephone looked at you.
  • The pros and cons of being cagey about your identity.
  • The ten most interesting things that happened in Blaseball this week.
  • Newsletters: the podcast that comes into your email.
  • The pros and cons of reinventing the wheel.
  • A non-destructive audio synthesizer that integrates into your makefile.
  • Writing the simplest version of a program that's exactly what you need vs. learning how to use someone else's complicated program that does all the things anyone could want.
  • Reinventing the wheel to learn how a wheel works.
  • Passing variously aggregated files back and forth between R and Python scripts.
  • NPM as exhibit A in the argument that maybe it's a good idea to reinvent the wheel sometimes.
  • Relying on a thousand strangers not breaking their NPM module so that your commercial web site can keep running.
  • Perpetually living in fear of the enormous arcane machine you've created.
  • Rice Krispie Treat Burgers.
  • The hidden dangers of putting diced onion in your meat loaf.
  • Ingredients blending into a homogenous mass.
  • Sweet Sundae Ramen.
  • Homemade fudge vs hot fudge.
  • A food dish that looks like something tasty.
  • A brown sludge at the end.
  • Whether this noodley carb would look more appetizing if it weren't dyed blue.
  • Adapting a 4chan cooking thread into a Youtube channel with MST3K style silhouettes heckling the whole time.
  • Shipping your symphony with instructions on how to remix it.
  • Indeterminacy.
  • Observing someone across the street when cars are passing by.
  • As Slow as Possible As Fast as Possible.
  • Basing the tempo of your performance on the wavelength of the shortest note in the piece.
  • Not knowing what to expect but being thoroughly satisfied by what you got.
  • Homeschooling vs. Unschooling.
  • A very positive thing for you that might not be great for other people.
  • Wanting to be a baker when you grow up but not knowing how to proceed because you already are a baker.
  • Learning by doing.
  • The correlation between people who like the structure of school and who people learn best by reading rather than doing.
  • The first person in your family to not be homeschooled.
  • Learning to play music because there are instruments in your house.
  • Growing up outside the school system and encountering the Pledge of Allegiance for the first time in your thirties.
  • Sending your homeschooled kids to high school so all their little personality quirks get beaten out of them by their peers.
  • Everyone American diagnosed with PTSD actually having PTSD twice, because they also went to middle school.
  • Learning how to deal with other humans once you're mature enough to have a little bit of emotional intelligence.
  • Embarrassment of your past self as a sign of growth.
  • A topic asking for the perspective of someone who is not on the podcast.
  • Getting glasses that make objects in your left eye look farther away than in your right eye.
  • Radially-oriented bifocals.
  • Finally achieving everyone else's normal.
  • Putting up with blurry vision for most of your life but wearing glasses when you hike because you want to see all the pretty leaves.
  • Putting on someone else's glasses as a joke but things do actually look a little bit sharper but assuming it's just an illusion.
  • Thinking you have normal vision until someone actually measures your corneas.
  • Swimming at the edges of your vision because lenses work best in the middle.
  • Wearing glasses that flip your vision vertically and your brain eventually learning to correct for it, and then taking the glasses off and your brain is like "oh shit it's this again!"
  • The thing where you put a mirror under your chin and walk around and the popcorn on the ceiling looks like the surface of the moon.
  • Objects shrinking every time you get new glasses.
  • Objectively measuring your perception by sticking a tape measure into your brain.
  • Writing one really excellent tweet and then hiding it behind a bunch of tweets promoting the musical you were in.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • A modern take on Lunar Lander.
  • Flying a rocket ship underwater.
  • John Mystery's true identity.
  • The true identity of the investigator who uncovered John Mystery's true identity.
  • Blaseball: the Musical: the Deaths of Sebastian Telephone.
  • Whether it's okay to not be the most obsessed participant in your chosen fandom.
  • Take Me Out to the Blall Game.
  • Writing, recording and editing a musical in 72 hours.
  • Screaming about how Jessica Telephone looked at you.
  • The pros and cons of being cagey about your identity.
  • The ten most interesting things that happened in Blaseball this week.
  • Newsletters: the podcast that comes into your email.
  • The pros and cons of reinventing the wheel.
  • A non-destructive audio synthesizer that integrates into your makefile.
  • Writing the simplest version of a program that's exactly what you need vs. learning how to use someone else's complicated program that does all the things anyone could want.
  • Reinventing the wheel to learn how a wheel works.
  • Passing variously aggregated files back and forth between R and Python scripts.
  • NPM as exhibit A in the argument that maybe it's a good idea to reinvent the wheel sometimes.
  • Relying on a thousand strangers not breaking their NPM module so that your commercial web site can keep running.
  • Perpetually living in fear of the enormous arcane machine you've created.
  • Rice Krispie Treat Burgers.
  • The hidden dangers of putting diced onion in your meat loaf.
  • Ingredients blending into a homogenous mass.
  • Sweet Sundae Ramen.
  • Homemade fudge vs hot fudge.
  • A food dish that looks like something tasty.
  • A brown sludge at the end.
  • Whether this noodley carb would look more appetizing if it weren't dyed blue.
  • Adapting a 4chan cooking thread into a Youtube channel with MST3K style silhouettes heckling the whole time.
  • Shipping your symphony with instructions on how to remix it.
  • Indeterminacy.
  • Observing someone across the street when cars are passing by.
  • As Slow as Possible As Fast as Possible.
  • Basing the tempo of your performance on the wavelength of the shortest note in the piece.
  • Not knowing what to expect but being thoroughly satisfied by what you got.
  • Homeschooling vs. Unschooling.
  • A very positive thing for you that might not be great for other people.
  • Wanting to be a baker when you grow up but not knowing how to proceed because you already are a baker.
  • Learning by doing.
  • The correlation between people who like the structure of school and who people learn best by reading rather than doing.
  • The first person in your family to not be homeschooled.
  • Learning to play music because there are instruments in your house.
  • Growing up outside the school system and encountering the Pledge of Allegiance for the first time in your thirties.
  • Sending your homeschooled kids to high school so all their little personality quirks get beaten out of them by their peers.
  • Everyone American diagnosed with PTSD actually having PTSD twice, because they also went to middle school.
  • Learning how to deal with other humans once you're mature enough to have a little bit of emotional intelligence.
  • Embarrassment of your past self as a sign of growth.
  • A topic asking for the perspective of someone who is not on the podcast.
  • Getting glasses that make objects in your left eye look farther away than in your right eye.
  • Radially-oriented bifocals.
  • Finally achieving everyone else's normal.
  • Putting up with blurry vision for most of your life but wearing glasses when you hike because you want to see all the pretty leaves.
  • Putting on someone else's glasses as a joke but things do actually look a little bit sharper but assuming it's just an illusion.
  • Thinking you have normal vision until someone actually measures your corneas.
  • Swimming at the edges of your vision because lenses work best in the middle.
  • Wearing glasses that flip your vision vertically and your brain eventually learning to correct for it, and then taking the glasses off and your brain is like "oh shit it's this again!"
  • The thing where you put a mirror under your chin and walk around and the popcorn on the ceiling looks like the surface of the moon.
  • Objects shrinking every time you get new glasses.
  • Objectively measuring your perception by sticking a tape measure into your brain.
  • Writing one really excellent tweet and then hiding it behind a bunch of tweets promoting the musical you were in.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+tnfhotYR ]]> Jim Stormdancer 78. Uvula Hadouken https://topiclords.com/uvula-hadouken 4e2d1ae2-6b42-460f-afc1-1d85bbcda081 Mon, 19 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Laura and Brendon and special guest April. Topics: Home Depot Battle Royale, improving teeth, workshopping a joke about a cat's name, Chickens turn into crocodiles, how to fix queueing in Westworld, and your new pandemic skills. 1:03:39 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • If you were locked in a Home Depot overnight with 19 other people and you wouldn’t be let out until only one person survived, and also all the lights were turned off, what would you do?
  • What's up with teeth. They seem designed to be tedious to brush and floss and maintain. Is this really the best version of mandible?
  • Help me workshop this joke: Eve/eave
  • Chickens turn into crocodiles
  • If you make an IRL Westworld theme park, how do you prevent having two dozen people on the same quest to have a showdown duel with the bad guy. Do you just have 24 people draw their gun and shoot the bad guy at the same time? Or is this even a problem in the first place?
  • New skills learned during the pandemic--what skills have you learned? Was it worth it?

Microtopics:

  • The Skin Deep Beacon.
  • The voice of maintenance.
  • Reviewing the bucket.
  • Confronting the darkness within yourself at Home Depot.
  • Murdering your competitors on a soft pile of dog beds.
  • A chainsaw's efficacy as a murder weapon.
  • Tying a chainsaw to the top of your head to foil air assassinations.
  • Hot dog beds.
  • The bow rack at Home Depot that holds three bows with four arrows each so you can fire twelve arrows at once.
  • Trying to opt out of the Battle Royale.
  • Using night vision binoculars to observe the burglar from across your bedroom.
  • Buying a varmint-proof AT-AT in the hunting aisle of Home Depot.
  • Pushing the shelves over like dominos and killing all your Home Depot Battle Royale competitors at once.
  • A very specific thing that happens in shonen.
  • Being spirited away to this Home Depot with no warning.
  • Not having night vision googled so you superglue these night vision binoculars to your face.
  • The people horrible enough to survive the Home Depot murder game.
  • A Chippendale dancer removing their tearaway pants revealing their pants gun and killing everyone in the room.
  • Hitman always introducing himself using the same pseudonym, xXx_69_KillerMan.
  • The necessity of inventing pulling teeth.
  • Instead of having teeth, having a single non-sectional chomper that grows continuously like a goat horn.
  • A human's astounding ability to only occasionally bite their own cheeks and tongue.
  • Instead of having to chew, your uvula throws a hadouken, incinerating the food.
  • Instead of chewing, simply increasing the pressure in your mouth until the food becomes a diamond.
  • How Neanderthals all had perfectly straight teeth like a pop star.
  • Humans evolving smaller heads so they could fit through the neck of a t-shirt.
  • The first humans in history to regularly eat refined sugars.
  • The advantages of rotating your jaw 90 degrees.
  • Finding a partner whose nose is oriented opposite yours, so instead of tilting your face to kiss, you just breathe back and forth forever.
  • How humans would eat soup and sandwiches if their mouth orientation changed.
  • Why eaves exist.
  • Lowering energy bills using your cat.
  • A very sharp quadruped.
  • Figuring out how to make fun of a cat.
  • Misspelling your cat's name as "Eave" when the census taker comes around and your property taxes go up by millions of dollars.
  • Four chickens covered in colored vinyl.
  • Chickens walking into a jello mold.
  • An algorithmically created video for children.
  • Every permutation of every animal walking through every liquid and turning into every other animal.
  • The fashion trajectory of the designer of Super Monkey Ball.
  • Walking through the fountain portal and losing one of your beards.
  • Coolest video I ever seen: Adult.
  • Spanish Cat in the Sky.
  • More of the same, but this time there's a cat saying it.
  • The black hat cowboy wearing an additional bulletproof vest for every member of your assassination party.
  • Making sure there's only one serial killer at a time in your theme park.
  • Teaming up to hug this enormous mechanical cowboy.
  • The MMO version of David Fincher's The Game where twenty people show up on the rooftop at once so they have to take turns accidentally shooting their brother, having an emotional breakdown, and jumping off the roof to find their personal banquet.
  • Going to a series of weird interactive theater events after you move to LA.
  • Being diverted into a room where you swing in a wicker basket hanging from the ceiling.
  • Paying $30 for a bunch of weird people to wave their fingers at you and draw on you with a sharpie and lock you in a freight elevator.
  • Employing both kinds of maze construction materials: bedsheets and garbage bags.
  • Sleep No More.
  • Wanting to get into a hobby but not being sure how to learn to love the actual process of performing the hobby.
  • Access to a wider variety of flavors in your life.
  • Making Ants on a Log with Thai peanut sauce.
  • Getting children to eat celery by making it unhealthy.
  • Getting the quick dopamine hit of the early stages of learning a hobby, then quitting.
  • Taking screenshots of a web site and reading the screenshots so the web site can't pop up any more ads.
  • Just who is responsible for the state of web media.
  • Scrolling past twelve life stories to figure out how to make dinner.
  • Writing an angry letter to a corporation and getting a response from a minimum wage employee whose entire job is doing emotional labor to assuage angry customers.
  • Not knowing how to advance in an adventure game and writing to the developers to tell them their game is broken.
  • Goading game developers into revealing their puzzle solutions rather than calling the hint line.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • If you were locked in a Home Depot overnight with 19 other people and you wouldn’t be let out until only one person survived, and also all the lights were turned off, what would you do?
  • What's up with teeth. They seem designed to be tedious to brush and floss and maintain. Is this really the best version of mandible?
  • Help me workshop this joke: Eve/eave
  • Chickens turn into crocodiles
  • If you make an IRL Westworld theme park, how do you prevent having two dozen people on the same quest to have a showdown duel with the bad guy. Do you just have 24 people draw their gun and shoot the bad guy at the same time? Or is this even a problem in the first place?
  • New skills learned during the pandemic--what skills have you learned? Was it worth it?

Microtopics:

  • The Skin Deep Beacon.
  • The voice of maintenance.
  • Reviewing the bucket.
  • Confronting the darkness within yourself at Home Depot.
  • Murdering your competitors on a soft pile of dog beds.
  • A chainsaw's efficacy as a murder weapon.
  • Tying a chainsaw to the top of your head to foil air assassinations.
  • Hot dog beds.
  • The bow rack at Home Depot that holds three bows with four arrows each so you can fire twelve arrows at once.
  • Trying to opt out of the Battle Royale.
  • Using night vision binoculars to observe the burglar from across your bedroom.
  • Buying a varmint-proof AT-AT in the hunting aisle of Home Depot.
  • Pushing the shelves over like dominos and killing all your Home Depot Battle Royale competitors at once.
  • A very specific thing that happens in shonen.
  • Being spirited away to this Home Depot with no warning.
  • Not having night vision googled so you superglue these night vision binoculars to your face.
  • The people horrible enough to survive the Home Depot murder game.
  • A Chippendale dancer removing their tearaway pants revealing their pants gun and killing everyone in the room.
  • Hitman always introducing himself using the same pseudonym, xXx_69_KillerMan.
  • The necessity of inventing pulling teeth.
  • Instead of having teeth, having a single non-sectional chomper that grows continuously like a goat horn.
  • A human's astounding ability to only occasionally bite their own cheeks and tongue.
  • Instead of having to chew, your uvula throws a hadouken, incinerating the food.
  • Instead of chewing, simply increasing the pressure in your mouth until the food becomes a diamond.
  • How Neanderthals all had perfectly straight teeth like a pop star.
  • Humans evolving smaller heads so they could fit through the neck of a t-shirt.
  • The first humans in history to regularly eat refined sugars.
  • The advantages of rotating your jaw 90 degrees.
  • Finding a partner whose nose is oriented opposite yours, so instead of tilting your face to kiss, you just breathe back and forth forever.
  • How humans would eat soup and sandwiches if their mouth orientation changed.
  • Why eaves exist.
  • Lowering energy bills using your cat.
  • A very sharp quadruped.
  • Figuring out how to make fun of a cat.
  • Misspelling your cat's name as "Eave" when the census taker comes around and your property taxes go up by millions of dollars.
  • Four chickens covered in colored vinyl.
  • Chickens walking into a jello mold.
  • An algorithmically created video for children.
  • Every permutation of every animal walking through every liquid and turning into every other animal.
  • The fashion trajectory of the designer of Super Monkey Ball.
  • Walking through the fountain portal and losing one of your beards.
  • Coolest video I ever seen: Adult.
  • Spanish Cat in the Sky.
  • More of the same, but this time there's a cat saying it.
  • The black hat cowboy wearing an additional bulletproof vest for every member of your assassination party.
  • Making sure there's only one serial killer at a time in your theme park.
  • Teaming up to hug this enormous mechanical cowboy.
  • The MMO version of David Fincher's The Game where twenty people show up on the rooftop at once so they have to take turns accidentally shooting their brother, having an emotional breakdown, and jumping off the roof to find their personal banquet.
  • Going to a series of weird interactive theater events after you move to LA.
  • Being diverted into a room where you swing in a wicker basket hanging from the ceiling.
  • Paying $30 for a bunch of weird people to wave their fingers at you and draw on you with a sharpie and lock you in a freight elevator.
  • Employing both kinds of maze construction materials: bedsheets and garbage bags.
  • Sleep No More.
  • Wanting to get into a hobby but not being sure how to learn to love the actual process of performing the hobby.
  • Access to a wider variety of flavors in your life.
  • Making Ants on a Log with Thai peanut sauce.
  • Getting children to eat celery by making it unhealthy.
  • Getting the quick dopamine hit of the early stages of learning a hobby, then quitting.
  • Taking screenshots of a web site and reading the screenshots so the web site can't pop up any more ads.
  • Just who is responsible for the state of web media.
  • Scrolling past twelve life stories to figure out how to make dinner.
  • Writing an angry letter to a corporation and getting a response from a minimum wage employee whose entire job is doing emotional labor to assuage angry customers.
  • Not knowing how to advance in an adventure game and writing to the developers to tell them their game is broken.
  • Goading game developers into revealing their puzzle solutions rather than calling the hint line.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • If you were locked in a Home Depot overnight with 19 other people and you wouldn’t be let out until only one person survived, and also all the lights were turned off, what would you do?
  • What's up with teeth. They seem designed to be tedious to brush and floss and maintain. Is this really the best version of mandible?
  • Help me workshop this joke: Eve/eave
  • Chickens turn into crocodiles
  • If you make an IRL Westworld theme park, how do you prevent having two dozen people on the same quest to have a showdown duel with the bad guy. Do you just have 24 people draw their gun and shoot the bad guy at the same time? Or is this even a problem in the first place?
  • New skills learned during the pandemic--what skills have you learned? Was it worth it?

Microtopics:

  • The Skin Deep Beacon.
  • The voice of maintenance.
  • Reviewing the bucket.
  • Confronting the darkness within yourself at Home Depot.
  • Murdering your competitors on a soft pile of dog beds.
  • A chainsaw's efficacy as a murder weapon.
  • Tying a chainsaw to the top of your head to foil air assassinations.
  • Hot dog beds.
  • The bow rack at Home Depot that holds three bows with four arrows each so you can fire twelve arrows at once.
  • Trying to opt out of the Battle Royale.
  • Using night vision binoculars to observe the burglar from across your bedroom.
  • Buying a varmint-proof AT-AT in the hunting aisle of Home Depot.
  • Pushing the shelves over like dominos and killing all your Home Depot Battle Royale competitors at once.
  • A very specific thing that happens in shonen.
  • Being spirited away to this Home Depot with no warning.
  • Not having night vision googled so you superglue these night vision binoculars to your face.
  • The people horrible enough to survive the Home Depot murder game.
  • A Chippendale dancer removing their tearaway pants revealing their pants gun and killing everyone in the room.
  • Hitman always introducing himself using the same pseudonym, xXx_69_KillerMan.
  • The necessity of inventing pulling teeth.
  • Instead of having teeth, having a single non-sectional chomper that grows continuously like a goat horn.
  • A human's astounding ability to only occasionally bite their own cheeks and tongue.
  • Instead of having to chew, your uvula throws a hadouken, incinerating the food.
  • Instead of chewing, simply increasing the pressure in your mouth until the food becomes a diamond.
  • How Neanderthals all had perfectly straight teeth like a pop star.
  • Humans evolving smaller heads so they could fit through the neck of a t-shirt.
  • The first humans in history to regularly eat refined sugars.
  • The advantages of rotating your jaw 90 degrees.
  • Finding a partner whose nose is oriented opposite yours, so instead of tilting your face to kiss, you just breathe back and forth forever.
  • How humans would eat soup and sandwiches if their mouth orientation changed.
  • Why eaves exist.
  • Lowering energy bills using your cat.
  • A very sharp quadruped.
  • Figuring out how to make fun of a cat.
  • Misspelling your cat's name as "Eave" when the census taker comes around and your property taxes go up by millions of dollars.
  • Four chickens covered in colored vinyl.
  • Chickens walking into a jello mold.
  • An algorithmically created video for children.
  • Every permutation of every animal walking through every liquid and turning into every other animal.
  • The fashion trajectory of the designer of Super Monkey Ball.
  • Walking through the fountain portal and losing one of your beards.
  • Coolest video I ever seen: Adult.
  • Spanish Cat in the Sky.
  • More of the same, but this time there's a cat saying it.
  • The black hat cowboy wearing an additional bulletproof vest for every member of your assassination party.
  • Making sure there's only one serial killer at a time in your theme park.
  • Teaming up to hug this enormous mechanical cowboy.
  • The MMO version of David Fincher's The Game where twenty people show up on the rooftop at once so they have to take turns accidentally shooting their brother, having an emotional breakdown, and jumping off the roof to find their personal banquet.
  • Going to a series of weird interactive theater events after you move to LA.
  • Being diverted into a room where you swing in a wicker basket hanging from the ceiling.
  • Paying $30 for a bunch of weird people to wave their fingers at you and draw on you with a sharpie and lock you in a freight elevator.
  • Employing both kinds of maze construction materials: bedsheets and garbage bags.
  • Sleep No More.
  • Wanting to get into a hobby but not being sure how to learn to love the actual process of performing the hobby.
  • Access to a wider variety of flavors in your life.
  • Making Ants on a Log with Thai peanut sauce.
  • Getting children to eat celery by making it unhealthy.
  • Getting the quick dopamine hit of the early stages of learning a hobby, then quitting.
  • Taking screenshots of a web site and reading the screenshots so the web site can't pop up any more ads.
  • Just who is responsible for the state of web media.
  • Scrolling past twelve life stories to figure out how to make dinner.
  • Writing an angry letter to a corporation and getting a response from a minimum wage employee whose entire job is doing emotional labor to assuage angry customers.
  • Not knowing how to advance in an adventure game and writing to the developers to tell them their game is broken.
  • Goading game developers into revealing their puzzle solutions rather than calling the hint line.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+QSJcOZOu ]]> Jim Stormdancer 77. A Vocal Quirk of Your Mind (For Other People) https://topiclords.com/a-vocal-quirk-of-your-mind-for-other-people 44899718-ea4a-4e3a-85d1-6d5503f2219d Mon, 12 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Tyriq, Chris. We discuss revisiting Game Maker, our anime/JRPG vocal quirks, electric showers, the music video for "Someday" by Weval, and UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Lists. 1:08:14 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • A game that has been in early access for 7,000 years.
  • Coming back to software you last used a decade ago and finding that it has a night theme now.
  • Old vs. new Game Maker.
  • Knowing the context a word is borrowed from and assuming more meaning carried over than actually did.
  • Terms that programming borrowed from philosophy, like "monad" and "blockchain."
  • Function-shaped functions.
  • Seeing people misuse a tool and trying to decide whether it'd be better to teach them how to use the tool, or make a new tool that works how they expect.
  • That time someone tried to port Catacomb Kids to C++ before realizing that someone had been adding features to this game for ten years.
  • The Dark Theme era.
  • Jim just happening to know how many lines of code the Frog Fractions remaster is.
  • How many lines of code is reasonable for an action roguelike that one person has worked on for ten years.
  • Measuring code complexity by zipping it and looking at the file size.
  • Designing the rules of a game to stop people from ruining it for themselves.
  • How your laugh maps to your blood type.
  • Deciding that when a character says "..." that means that they farted, and suddenly being able to enjoy Visual Novels.
  • Whether Jay Gatsby saying "old sport" all the time is the same phenomenon as Moogles always saying "kupo."
  • Typing in a swear word when an Animal Crossing character asks you for a new catchphrase and returning the cartridge to GameStop who will sell it to a small child and it'll end up on the local news.
  • Incorporating goat noises into your speech in a subtle enough way that people aren't sure if you just made a goat noise.
  • Everybody having their own weird noise that they made repeatedly instead of just having a face.
  • Deciding that your signature isn't cool enough and hiring a signature designer to help you out.
  • Whether "signature designer" is a real job you can make a living doing.
  • Designing a different unique fart for every character in your JRPG so they each have a fart that fits your personality.
  • Why making a fart noise with your tongue is called a "raspberry."
  • How nobody can tell you've got a duck call under your COVID mask until it's too late.
  • A showerhead plugged into a wall outlet.
  • Heating water as it passes through the showerhead.
  • Reassuring onlookers that you've been showering in an electric shower for decades and you've only been shocked a few times and you just have to not touch the metal plumbing.
  • Wearing rubber shoes in the shower so the electric showerhead doesn't electrocute you.
  • How nobody posting in the thread about electric showers has died.
  • Electric showers waking you up even more effectively than regular showers.
  • Not knowing what people want from things.
  • Nuclear pacemakers.
  • The number of nuclear pacemakers still in use today.
  • Your nuclear pacemaker keeping your heart beating long after the rest of you has died.
  • The Council of the Nuclear Hearts.
  • Plugging your electric shower right into your nuclear heart.
  • Electric flamethrowers.
  • Lighting your cigarette with a tiny taser.
  • 24 seconds of zooming in on the forest canopy.
  • A video which is very dense with frames.
  • A video which is exactly the kind of video that video codecs are be bad at encoding.
  • Star Turns.
  • A web site where people can repost your content uncredited and go viral.
  • A guest accidentally unplugging their headphones followed by thirty seconds of "can you hear me? I can hear you."
  • Standing on a floor that is painted to give you vertigo.
  • Buildings that are cool in this video.
  • Getting really excited every time you see aerial photography.
  • Freeways.
  • Starting with macro shots of urban environments and transitioning to wider shots of rural environments.
  • Canopy shyness.
  • Voronoi diagrams.
  • Preserving aspects of human culture that don't take the form of a physical object.
  • Intangible cultural heritage in need of urgent safeguarding.
  • Intangible culture lost in the natural process of human becomingness.
  • Whether history is worth knowing.
  • A series of Duke Nukem strategy guides collected in the Library of Congress, rebound to look like a hardcover from the 1950s.
  • What it takes to preserve a skill that a community of people practices over the course of their lives.
  • Dance notation for very constrained types of dance.
  • Tugging rituals.
  • Avalanche risk management.
  • Notation for bee dances.
  • Dance notation which is just a list of where all the ping pong balls were.
  • How every culture agrees that Kiki is the spiky one and Bouba is the round one.
  • Wine horses.
  • A very Western centric view of how many instruments have ever existed.
  • How to make the number four out of only letters.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • A game that has been in early access for 7,000 years.
  • Coming back to software you last used a decade ago and finding that it has a night theme now.
  • Old vs. new Game Maker.
  • Knowing the context a word is borrowed from and assuming more meaning carried over than actually did.
  • Terms that programming borrowed from philosophy, like "monad" and "blockchain."
  • Function-shaped functions.
  • Seeing people misuse a tool and trying to decide whether it'd be better to teach them how to use the tool, or make a new tool that works how they expect.
  • That time someone tried to port Catacomb Kids to C++ before realizing that someone had been adding features to this game for ten years.
  • The Dark Theme era.
  • Jim just happening to know how many lines of code the Frog Fractions remaster is.
  • How many lines of code is reasonable for an action roguelike that one person has worked on for ten years.
  • Measuring code complexity by zipping it and looking at the file size.
  • Designing the rules of a game to stop people from ruining it for themselves.
  • How your laugh maps to your blood type.
  • Deciding that when a character says "..." that means that they farted, and suddenly being able to enjoy Visual Novels.
  • Whether Jay Gatsby saying "old sport" all the time is the same phenomenon as Moogles always saying "kupo."
  • Typing in a swear word when an Animal Crossing character asks you for a new catchphrase and returning the cartridge to GameStop who will sell it to a small child and it'll end up on the local news.
  • Incorporating goat noises into your speech in a subtle enough way that people aren't sure if you just made a goat noise.
  • Everybody having their own weird noise that they made repeatedly instead of just having a face.
  • Deciding that your signature isn't cool enough and hiring a signature designer to help you out.
  • Whether "signature designer" is a real job you can make a living doing.
  • Designing a different unique fart for every character in your JRPG so they each have a fart that fits your personality.
  • Why making a fart noise with your tongue is called a "raspberry."
  • How nobody can tell you've got a duck call under your COVID mask until it's too late.
  • A showerhead plugged into a wall outlet.
  • Heating water as it passes through the showerhead.
  • Reassuring onlookers that you've been showering in an electric shower for decades and you've only been shocked a few times and you just have to not touch the metal plumbing.
  • Wearing rubber shoes in the shower so the electric showerhead doesn't electrocute you.
  • How nobody posting in the thread about electric showers has died.
  • Electric showers waking you up even more effectively than regular showers.
  • Not knowing what people want from things.
  • Nuclear pacemakers.
  • The number of nuclear pacemakers still in use today.
  • Your nuclear pacemaker keeping your heart beating long after the rest of you has died.
  • The Council of the Nuclear Hearts.
  • Plugging your electric shower right into your nuclear heart.
  • Electric flamethrowers.
  • Lighting your cigarette with a tiny taser.
  • 24 seconds of zooming in on the forest canopy.
  • A video which is very dense with frames.
  • A video which is exactly the kind of video that video codecs are be bad at encoding.
  • Star Turns.
  • A web site where people can repost your content uncredited and go viral.
  • A guest accidentally unplugging their headphones followed by thirty seconds of "can you hear me? I can hear you."
  • Standing on a floor that is painted to give you vertigo.
  • Buildings that are cool in this video.
  • Getting really excited every time you see aerial photography.
  • Freeways.
  • Starting with macro shots of urban environments and transitioning to wider shots of rural environments.
  • Canopy shyness.
  • Voronoi diagrams.
  • Preserving aspects of human culture that don't take the form of a physical object.
  • Intangible cultural heritage in need of urgent safeguarding.
  • Intangible culture lost in the natural process of human becomingness.
  • Whether history is worth knowing.
  • A series of Duke Nukem strategy guides collected in the Library of Congress, rebound to look like a hardcover from the 1950s.
  • What it takes to preserve a skill that a community of people practices over the course of their lives.
  • Dance notation for very constrained types of dance.
  • Tugging rituals.
  • Avalanche risk management.
  • Notation for bee dances.
  • Dance notation which is just a list of where all the ping pong balls were.
  • How every culture agrees that Kiki is the spiky one and Bouba is the round one.
  • Wine horses.
  • A very Western centric view of how many instruments have ever existed.
  • How to make the number four out of only letters.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • A game that has been in early access for 7,000 years.
  • Coming back to software you last used a decade ago and finding that it has a night theme now.
  • Old vs. new Game Maker.
  • Knowing the context a word is borrowed from and assuming more meaning carried over than actually did.
  • Terms that programming borrowed from philosophy, like "monad" and "blockchain."
  • Function-shaped functions.
  • Seeing people misuse a tool and trying to decide whether it'd be better to teach them how to use the tool, or make a new tool that works how they expect.
  • That time someone tried to port Catacomb Kids to C++ before realizing that someone had been adding features to this game for ten years.
  • The Dark Theme era.
  • Jim just happening to know how many lines of code the Frog Fractions remaster is.
  • How many lines of code is reasonable for an action roguelike that one person has worked on for ten years.
  • Measuring code complexity by zipping it and looking at the file size.
  • Designing the rules of a game to stop people from ruining it for themselves.
  • How your laugh maps to your blood type.
  • Deciding that when a character says "..." that means that they farted, and suddenly being able to enjoy Visual Novels.
  • Whether Jay Gatsby saying "old sport" all the time is the same phenomenon as Moogles always saying "kupo."
  • Typing in a swear word when an Animal Crossing character asks you for a new catchphrase and returning the cartridge to GameStop who will sell it to a small child and it'll end up on the local news.
  • Incorporating goat noises into your speech in a subtle enough way that people aren't sure if you just made a goat noise.
  • Everybody having their own weird noise that they made repeatedly instead of just having a face.
  • Deciding that your signature isn't cool enough and hiring a signature designer to help you out.
  • Whether "signature designer" is a real job you can make a living doing.
  • Designing a different unique fart for every character in your JRPG so they each have a fart that fits your personality.
  • Why making a fart noise with your tongue is called a "raspberry."
  • How nobody can tell you've got a duck call under your COVID mask until it's too late.
  • A showerhead plugged into a wall outlet.
  • Heating water as it passes through the showerhead.
  • Reassuring onlookers that you've been showering in an electric shower for decades and you've only been shocked a few times and you just have to not touch the metal plumbing.
  • Wearing rubber shoes in the shower so the electric showerhead doesn't electrocute you.
  • How nobody posting in the thread about electric showers has died.
  • Electric showers waking you up even more effectively than regular showers.
  • Not knowing what people want from things.
  • Nuclear pacemakers.
  • The number of nuclear pacemakers still in use today.
  • Your nuclear pacemaker keeping your heart beating long after the rest of you has died.
  • The Council of the Nuclear Hearts.
  • Plugging your electric shower right into your nuclear heart.
  • Electric flamethrowers.
  • Lighting your cigarette with a tiny taser.
  • 24 seconds of zooming in on the forest canopy.
  • A video which is very dense with frames.
  • A video which is exactly the kind of video that video codecs are be bad at encoding.
  • Star Turns.
  • A web site where people can repost your content uncredited and go viral.
  • A guest accidentally unplugging their headphones followed by thirty seconds of "can you hear me? I can hear you."
  • Standing on a floor that is painted to give you vertigo.
  • Buildings that are cool in this video.
  • Getting really excited every time you see aerial photography.
  • Freeways.
  • Starting with macro shots of urban environments and transitioning to wider shots of rural environments.
  • Canopy shyness.
  • Voronoi diagrams.
  • Preserving aspects of human culture that don't take the form of a physical object.
  • Intangible cultural heritage in need of urgent safeguarding.
  • Intangible culture lost in the natural process of human becomingness.
  • Whether history is worth knowing.
  • A series of Duke Nukem strategy guides collected in the Library of Congress, rebound to look like a hardcover from the 1950s.
  • What it takes to preserve a skill that a community of people practices over the course of their lives.
  • Dance notation for very constrained types of dance.
  • Tugging rituals.
  • Avalanche risk management.
  • Notation for bee dances.
  • Dance notation which is just a list of where all the ping pong balls were.
  • How every culture agrees that Kiki is the spiky one and Bouba is the round one.
  • Wine horses.
  • A very Western centric view of how many instruments have ever existed.
  • How to make the number four out of only letters.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+Mbl2ARqW ]]> Jim Stormdancer 76. The Validity of Converting Songs to Buildings https://topiclords.com/the-validity-of-converting-songs-to-buildings 4752c1bd-d4f0-4c62-80ba-eec71940856e Mon, 05 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Maxx and Aaron. We discuss emotionally correct magic logic, our favorite captchas, AI-remastered Rick Astley, Kegel-based video games, and responsible creativity. 1:12:39 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The green fuzzy stuff, and how nice it is to touch.
  • Moss on all sides of a tree.
  • Moss directionality at various latitudes.
  • Having a water-borne moss ball instead of a fidget spinner.
  • Russian Doll.
  • Whether there is or ought to be another season of Russian Doll.
  • Restarting from the same point every time you die.
  • Every episode of a TV series depicting the same four years of high school except the protagonist joins a different club.
  • The three names of Edge of Tomorrow.
  • All You Need is Kill: Edge of Tomorrow: Live Die Repeat.
  • Naming your book like an eBay auction.
  • Time travel between adjacent panels of a comic.
  • Characters in a story trying to figure out how the author's mind works.
  • Successfully fusing world building with a character-driven story.
  • Designing a game where the game rules change based on choices players make in the story.
  • Celebrities in Prison.
  • Any given playthrough of a game being consistent with itself, but not with other playthroughs.
  • Playing an interactive story on the Wayback Machine, where it's no longer interactive.
  • Running a MUD and exposing its creative tools to your players.
  • Matching spiral galaxies to demonstrate your humanity.
  • Putting pedestrians at risk by giving bad information to CAPTCHAs.
  • Figuring out who your CAPTCHA buddy is so that you can give the driving AI bad information together.
  • A CAPTCHA asking you how many instances of the letter i are in the author's name, then after you answer revealing their middle name.
  • A spammer caring enough to figure out your bespoke commenting system so that they can spam it.
  • A CAPTCHA saying "if you are human, type the word 'human' into this box" and filtering out the spam bots because they type in "spam bot" instead.
  • Crook things.
  • A phrase both too specific and too general to be useful.
  • Doing divination readings by writing kanji with swinging pendulums.
  • Using images as the source of randomness in a roguelike's daily run.
  • Here was a song but now it's a building.
  • Questioning the validity of converting songs to buildings.
  • Having a lot of things and needing to create names for them.
  • An incredible bomble.
  • Deleting this entire discussion and replacing it with Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up.
  • Reacting to the gestalt of Rick Astley singing in front of a fence.
  • Upscaling a music video to 4k and then applying a CRT filter to make it look like it's on an old TV.
  • Content aware fill but for time instead of space.
  • Using content aware scale to make videos of hilarious cartoon people.
  • Lighting the underside of a bridge by reflecting a searchlight off of a pot of water.
  • A shadow of Rick Astley clapping his hands and his right hand just vanishes.
  • Finally noticing the bartender in the Rick Astley music video.
  • Doing a graceful dance nice that most people would wreck themselves trying without even conveying to onlookers that they're trying to dance.
  • Trying to dragon punch but missing the timing so Ryu just flails uselessly for a few seconds.
  • Flappy Bird with a kegels controller.
  • The portable urination games that you see people playing on the subway and wonder if they're winning.
  • Repeatedly firing a semiautomatic rifle by kegeling as rapidly as possible and then doing a backflip to reload.
  • Werewolf except you're interrogating everyone to figure out who has just eaten a spicy pepper.
  • Creative responsibility.
  • What's good and bad about walking in video games.
  • Winner vs. Loser.
  • Spamming the forward button to run.
  • Tapping the forward button at a certain rate or the protagonist trips and falls.
  • Just being a capsule and going to zero velocity when you hit a wall.
  • Filling your AAA hiking simulator with questionable exposition.
  • Hiking through the United States except it's actually Iceland.
  • Pressing a button to react to strong winds.
  • What happens when you try to make games that aren't shooting people.
  • Really thinking hard about what it means to walk.
  • Making a AAA walking simulator and breaking down your org chart into the left foot team, the right foot team, the left knee team, &c.
  • Hiking barefoot on an intensely beautiful mountain and not seeing any of it because you're looking at your footing.
  • Taking in the beauty of your environment.
  • Building a hill the size of a large building but painting it to look like a 20,000 foot mountain.
  • The difficulty of emulating a Windows 95 game.
  • How to install Windows 95 on a modern computer when modern computers don't have CD-ROM drives.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The green fuzzy stuff, and how nice it is to touch.
  • Moss on all sides of a tree.
  • Moss directionality at various latitudes.
  • Having a water-borne moss ball instead of a fidget spinner.
  • Russian Doll.
  • Whether there is or ought to be another season of Russian Doll.
  • Restarting from the same point every time you die.
  • Every episode of a TV series depicting the same four years of high school except the protagonist joins a different club.
  • The three names of Edge of Tomorrow.
  • All You Need is Kill: Edge of Tomorrow: Live Die Repeat.
  • Naming your book like an eBay auction.
  • Time travel between adjacent panels of a comic.
  • Characters in a story trying to figure out how the author's mind works.
  • Successfully fusing world building with a character-driven story.
  • Designing a game where the game rules change based on choices players make in the story.
  • Celebrities in Prison.
  • Any given playthrough of a game being consistent with itself, but not with other playthroughs.
  • Playing an interactive story on the Wayback Machine, where it's no longer interactive.
  • Running a MUD and exposing its creative tools to your players.
  • Matching spiral galaxies to demonstrate your humanity.
  • Putting pedestrians at risk by giving bad information to CAPTCHAs.
  • Figuring out who your CAPTCHA buddy is so that you can give the driving AI bad information together.
  • A CAPTCHA asking you how many instances of the letter i are in the author's name, then after you answer revealing their middle name.
  • A spammer caring enough to figure out your bespoke commenting system so that they can spam it.
  • A CAPTCHA saying "if you are human, type the word 'human' into this box" and filtering out the spam bots because they type in "spam bot" instead.
  • Crook things.
  • A phrase both too specific and too general to be useful.
  • Doing divination readings by writing kanji with swinging pendulums.
  • Using images as the source of randomness in a roguelike's daily run.
  • Here was a song but now it's a building.
  • Questioning the validity of converting songs to buildings.
  • Having a lot of things and needing to create names for them.
  • An incredible bomble.
  • Deleting this entire discussion and replacing it with Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up.
  • Reacting to the gestalt of Rick Astley singing in front of a fence.
  • Upscaling a music video to 4k and then applying a CRT filter to make it look like it's on an old TV.
  • Content aware fill but for time instead of space.
  • Using content aware scale to make videos of hilarious cartoon people.
  • Lighting the underside of a bridge by reflecting a searchlight off of a pot of water.
  • A shadow of Rick Astley clapping his hands and his right hand just vanishes.
  • Finally noticing the bartender in the Rick Astley music video.
  • Doing a graceful dance nice that most people would wreck themselves trying without even conveying to onlookers that they're trying to dance.
  • Trying to dragon punch but missing the timing so Ryu just flails uselessly for a few seconds.
  • Flappy Bird with a kegels controller.
  • The portable urination games that you see people playing on the subway and wonder if they're winning.
  • Repeatedly firing a semiautomatic rifle by kegeling as rapidly as possible and then doing a backflip to reload.
  • Werewolf except you're interrogating everyone to figure out who has just eaten a spicy pepper.
  • Creative responsibility.
  • What's good and bad about walking in video games.
  • Winner vs. Loser.
  • Spamming the forward button to run.
  • Tapping the forward button at a certain rate or the protagonist trips and falls.
  • Just being a capsule and going to zero velocity when you hit a wall.
  • Filling your AAA hiking simulator with questionable exposition.
  • Hiking through the United States except it's actually Iceland.
  • Pressing a button to react to strong winds.
  • What happens when you try to make games that aren't shooting people.
  • Really thinking hard about what it means to walk.
  • Making a AAA walking simulator and breaking down your org chart into the left foot team, the right foot team, the left knee team, &c.
  • Hiking barefoot on an intensely beautiful mountain and not seeing any of it because you're looking at your footing.
  • Taking in the beauty of your environment.
  • Building a hill the size of a large building but painting it to look like a 20,000 foot mountain.
  • The difficulty of emulating a Windows 95 game.
  • How to install Windows 95 on a modern computer when modern computers don't have CD-ROM drives.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The green fuzzy stuff, and how nice it is to touch.
  • Moss on all sides of a tree.
  • Moss directionality at various latitudes.
  • Having a water-borne moss ball instead of a fidget spinner.
  • Russian Doll.
  • Whether there is or ought to be another season of Russian Doll.
  • Restarting from the same point every time you die.
  • Every episode of a TV series depicting the same four years of high school except the protagonist joins a different club.
  • The three names of Edge of Tomorrow.
  • All You Need is Kill: Edge of Tomorrow: Live Die Repeat.
  • Naming your book like an eBay auction.
  • Time travel between adjacent panels of a comic.
  • Characters in a story trying to figure out how the author's mind works.
  • Successfully fusing world building with a character-driven story.
  • Designing a game where the game rules change based on choices players make in the story.
  • Celebrities in Prison.
  • Any given playthrough of a game being consistent with itself, but not with other playthroughs.
  • Playing an interactive story on the Wayback Machine, where it's no longer interactive.
  • Running a MUD and exposing its creative tools to your players.
  • Matching spiral galaxies to demonstrate your humanity.
  • Putting pedestrians at risk by giving bad information to CAPTCHAs.
  • Figuring out who your CAPTCHA buddy is so that you can give the driving AI bad information together.
  • A CAPTCHA asking you how many instances of the letter i are in the author's name, then after you answer revealing their middle name.
  • A spammer caring enough to figure out your bespoke commenting system so that they can spam it.
  • A CAPTCHA saying "if you are human, type the word 'human' into this box" and filtering out the spam bots because they type in "spam bot" instead.
  • Crook things.
  • A phrase both too specific and too general to be useful.
  • Doing divination readings by writing kanji with swinging pendulums.
  • Using images as the source of randomness in a roguelike's daily run.
  • Here was a song but now it's a building.
  • Questioning the validity of converting songs to buildings.
  • Having a lot of things and needing to create names for them.
  • An incredible bomble.
  • Deleting this entire discussion and replacing it with Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up.
  • Reacting to the gestalt of Rick Astley singing in front of a fence.
  • Upscaling a music video to 4k and then applying a CRT filter to make it look like it's on an old TV.
  • Content aware fill but for time instead of space.
  • Using content aware scale to make videos of hilarious cartoon people.
  • Lighting the underside of a bridge by reflecting a searchlight off of a pot of water.
  • A shadow of Rick Astley clapping his hands and his right hand just vanishes.
  • Finally noticing the bartender in the Rick Astley music video.
  • Doing a graceful dance nice that most people would wreck themselves trying without even conveying to onlookers that they're trying to dance.
  • Trying to dragon punch but missing the timing so Ryu just flails uselessly for a few seconds.
  • Flappy Bird with a kegels controller.
  • The portable urination games that you see people playing on the subway and wonder if they're winning.
  • Repeatedly firing a semiautomatic rifle by kegeling as rapidly as possible and then doing a backflip to reload.
  • Werewolf except you're interrogating everyone to figure out who has just eaten a spicy pepper.
  • Creative responsibility.
  • What's good and bad about walking in video games.
  • Winner vs. Loser.
  • Spamming the forward button to run.
  • Tapping the forward button at a certain rate or the protagonist trips and falls.
  • Just being a capsule and going to zero velocity when you hit a wall.
  • Filling your AAA hiking simulator with questionable exposition.
  • Hiking through the United States except it's actually Iceland.
  • Pressing a button to react to strong winds.
  • What happens when you try to make games that aren't shooting people.
  • Really thinking hard about what it means to walk.
  • Making a AAA walking simulator and breaking down your org chart into the left foot team, the right foot team, the left knee team, &c.
  • Hiking barefoot on an intensely beautiful mountain and not seeing any of it because you're looking at your footing.
  • Taking in the beauty of your environment.
  • Building a hill the size of a large building but painting it to look like a 20,000 foot mountain.
  • The difficulty of emulating a Windows 95 game.
  • How to install Windows 95 on a modern computer when modern computers don't have CD-ROM drives.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+3ciROlZn ]]> Jim Stormdancer 75. Just Yawn It Out, Brah https://topiclords.com/just-yawn-it-out-brah 08cedf72-c999-43c4-a3a7-a901402a94b1 Mon, 29 Mar 2021 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Ryan and Alicia. We discuss throw pillows, why yawning is considered a sign of boredom, art packs/music disks, trying to play every CRPG in chronological order, and whether listening to an audio book is "reading." 1:09:36 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • How many throw pillows is too many? Does it depend on number of pillows? Size of furniture? Number of family members? Softness/firmness level?
  • Why are yawns considered a sign of boredom?
  • Art packs/music disks
  • Ville asks "Chester Bolingbroke is blogging his attempt to finish every computer RPG ever in chronological order, despite this being clearly impossible. He started at The Dungeon (1975) and is currently up to Legends of Valour: Ragged Chet (1992)."
  • Do you consider listening to an audio book "reading?" What about having a book read to you by someone, live? Could we interpret radio plays or listening to a film with our eyes closed "reading?"

Microtopics:

  • Getting good enough at English to speak in Instruction Manual.
  • Back before the content ocean.
  • A whole slew of trucks that have jobs.
  • Your two year old wishing you good luck by leaving a cement mixer on your desk.
  • A lateral career move where you decide to stop releasing games.
  • Occult and magic in the Greco-Roman world.
  • Talking the kids out of going to college.
  • Using Greco-Roman erotic curse tablets and binding spells to examine romantic relationships of the time period.
  • How nobody calls love potions "curses" any more.
  • Variable demand for throw pillows over the course of the day.
  • Needing to get more dogs because your have too many throw pillows for the number of dogs you have.
  • A bowling pin orientation of ten to twelve pillows that you have to clear out of the way before you can sleep.
  • A barricade of squish.
  • A wheezing Darth Vader mask.
  • Sleeping in an ominous dark orb next to your wife in bed and she complains that your orb is too hard and it pinches when it closes.
  • A lacerating throw pillow.
  • Opening yourself up to the soft life.
  • A badminton racket in your closet that you haven't used in over a decade.
  • Edible pillows.
  • Yawning whenever you see the sun.
  • Possible origins of the myth that yawning indicates boredom.
  • A yawn factory to your left.
  • Trying to change society in the next ten minutes.
  • A manatee at the zoo giving you a hard time because you yawned at their enclosure.
  • Oxygenating before you charge an invader.
  • Hippos yawning in order to fuck you up.
  • Getting kicked out of the zoo after yawning at the chimpanzees and the admission booth putting up a photo of your gaping mouth saying "don't let these teeth in."
  • What you get for challenging a peacock.
  • Living in a bad society and being tired all the time.
  • Yawning it out.
  • Sticking a finger in your elderly dog's mouth when they yawn because they don't have enough teeth left to bite you.
  • What you did with a modem before the internet was a thing.
  • BBS operators commissioning ANSI art to differentiate their BBS from other BBSes.
  • Making elaborate works of art within the constraints of IBM PC text mode.
  • An executable that displays procedural animations on the screen and describes the features of a BBS.
  • What Minnesota locals think of Bruno Mars' hats.
  • Minnesota not having any LAN parties but you can get a deep fried floppy disk on a stick at the state fair.
  • How to fool 2008-YouTube into allocating extra bandwidth to your fluorescent waffle pattern.
  • A logo that is shimmering so hard that it is impossible to read.
  • Never reading a video title because you don't want to be biased going into it.
  • The script you would read on the side of an obelisk on an ancient asteroid.
  • Whether the sci-fi story you just wrote is just Mass Effect again.
  • Making art for your friends.
  • Inventing a podcast because you need an excuse to chat with friends.
  • Watching your wife's phone ring and asking if she's going to do something about that.
  • Being on a podcast where you have to do homework.
  • The LAN party of podcasting.
  • Creating a box for your podcast so you can put a quote on it.
  • Legends of Valour: Ragged Chet.
  • Creating content in order to make friends.
  • Whether you can play every RPG faster than they are released.
  • When it's okay to feed Gremlins again.
  • Setting out on a quest to do something esoteric that nobody has asked for.
  • Whether the guy in Zelda who said "tenth enemy has the bomb" made sense in Japanese.
  • Whether Gremlins respect the daylight savings time changeover.
  • Whether leaving food out on the counter that the Gremlin later eats counts as "feeding" it.
  • A Bubsy 3D-style Gremlins sequel.
  • Abandoning the topic to just talk about Gremlins for ten minutes.
  • Yelling to the sky in impotent rage when an inanimate object rips one of your earbuds out.
  • Buying a pianist an incredibly sharp kitchen knife.
  • Cutting your sandwiches with a machine gun.
  • Getting knife proof gloves for the kitchen and then just wearing them all the time because who knows when your fancy new chef's knife will strike.
  • Engaging with the story and creating a construct in your imagination.
  • Whether it's okay to "read" a book on tape.
  • Calling NES cartridges "tapes" because Nintendo deliberately designed them to resemble VHS tapes.
  • A sci-fi video game filled with Data Prisms which have identical storage capacity and security properties to Post-It notes but are way more futuristic.
  • Leaving a note saying "Don't forget to get paper towels at Fred Meyer" for the post-apocalyptic scavenger exploring your kitchen.
  • Dying together on the toilet in a heartwarming embrace.
  • A framed Post-It note saying "Ryan's favorite number is 63."
  • Digging Jim's corpse up and squeezing him like a bagpipe into his CPAP machine to unlock Frog Fractions 3.
  • How at Taco Bell "supreme" means sour cream and tomatoes but at Pizza Hut "supreme" means sausage and green peppers but at the combination Taco Bell and Pizza Hut it means pouring Baja Blast on your Pizzone.
  • Choosing your bad handle and owning it.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • How many throw pillows is too many? Does it depend on number of pillows? Size of furniture? Number of family members? Softness/firmness level?
  • Why are yawns considered a sign of boredom?
  • Art packs/music disks
  • Ville asks "Chester Bolingbroke is blogging his attempt to finish every computer RPG ever in chronological order, despite this being clearly impossible. He started at The Dungeon (1975) and is currently up to Legends of Valour: Ragged Chet (1992)."
  • Do you consider listening to an audio book "reading?" What about having a book read to you by someone, live? Could we interpret radio plays or listening to a film with our eyes closed "reading?"

Microtopics:

  • Getting good enough at English to speak in Instruction Manual.
  • Back before the content ocean.
  • A whole slew of trucks that have jobs.
  • Your two year old wishing you good luck by leaving a cement mixer on your desk.
  • A lateral career move where you decide to stop releasing games.
  • Occult and magic in the Greco-Roman world.
  • Talking the kids out of going to college.
  • Using Greco-Roman erotic curse tablets and binding spells to examine romantic relationships of the time period.
  • How nobody calls love potions "curses" any more.
  • Variable demand for throw pillows over the course of the day.
  • Needing to get more dogs because your have too many throw pillows for the number of dogs you have.
  • A bowling pin orientation of ten to twelve pillows that you have to clear out of the way before you can sleep.
  • A barricade of squish.
  • A wheezing Darth Vader mask.
  • Sleeping in an ominous dark orb next to your wife in bed and she complains that your orb is too hard and it pinches when it closes.
  • A lacerating throw pillow.
  • Opening yourself up to the soft life.
  • A badminton racket in your closet that you haven't used in over a decade.
  • Edible pillows.
  • Yawning whenever you see the sun.
  • Possible origins of the myth that yawning indicates boredom.
  • A yawn factory to your left.
  • Trying to change society in the next ten minutes.
  • A manatee at the zoo giving you a hard time because you yawned at their enclosure.
  • Oxygenating before you charge an invader.
  • Hippos yawning in order to fuck you up.
  • Getting kicked out of the zoo after yawning at the chimpanzees and the admission booth putting up a photo of your gaping mouth saying "don't let these teeth in."
  • What you get for challenging a peacock.
  • Living in a bad society and being tired all the time.
  • Yawning it out.
  • Sticking a finger in your elderly dog's mouth when they yawn because they don't have enough teeth left to bite you.
  • What you did with a modem before the internet was a thing.
  • BBS operators commissioning ANSI art to differentiate their BBS from other BBSes.
  • Making elaborate works of art within the constraints of IBM PC text mode.
  • An executable that displays procedural animations on the screen and describes the features of a BBS.
  • What Minnesota locals think of Bruno Mars' hats.
  • Minnesota not having any LAN parties but you can get a deep fried floppy disk on a stick at the state fair.
  • How to fool 2008-YouTube into allocating extra bandwidth to your fluorescent waffle pattern.
  • A logo that is shimmering so hard that it is impossible to read.
  • Never reading a video title because you don't want to be biased going into it.
  • The script you would read on the side of an obelisk on an ancient asteroid.
  • Whether the sci-fi story you just wrote is just Mass Effect again.
  • Making art for your friends.
  • Inventing a podcast because you need an excuse to chat with friends.
  • Watching your wife's phone ring and asking if she's going to do something about that.
  • Being on a podcast where you have to do homework.
  • The LAN party of podcasting.
  • Creating a box for your podcast so you can put a quote on it.
  • Legends of Valour: Ragged Chet.
  • Creating content in order to make friends.
  • Whether you can play every RPG faster than they are released.
  • When it's okay to feed Gremlins again.
  • Setting out on a quest to do something esoteric that nobody has asked for.
  • Whether the guy in Zelda who said "tenth enemy has the bomb" made sense in Japanese.
  • Whether Gremlins respect the daylight savings time changeover.
  • Whether leaving food out on the counter that the Gremlin later eats counts as "feeding" it.
  • A Bubsy 3D-style Gremlins sequel.
  • Abandoning the topic to just talk about Gremlins for ten minutes.
  • Yelling to the sky in impotent rage when an inanimate object rips one of your earbuds out.
  • Buying a pianist an incredibly sharp kitchen knife.
  • Cutting your sandwiches with a machine gun.
  • Getting knife proof gloves for the kitchen and then just wearing them all the time because who knows when your fancy new chef's knife will strike.
  • Engaging with the story and creating a construct in your imagination.
  • Whether it's okay to "read" a book on tape.
  • Calling NES cartridges "tapes" because Nintendo deliberately designed them to resemble VHS tapes.
  • A sci-fi video game filled with Data Prisms which have identical storage capacity and security properties to Post-It notes but are way more futuristic.
  • Leaving a note saying "Don't forget to get paper towels at Fred Meyer" for the post-apocalyptic scavenger exploring your kitchen.
  • Dying together on the toilet in a heartwarming embrace.
  • A framed Post-It note saying "Ryan's favorite number is 63."
  • Digging Jim's corpse up and squeezing him like a bagpipe into his CPAP machine to unlock Frog Fractions 3.
  • How at Taco Bell "supreme" means sour cream and tomatoes but at Pizza Hut "supreme" means sausage and green peppers but at the combination Taco Bell and Pizza Hut it means pouring Baja Blast on your Pizzone.
  • Choosing your bad handle and owning it.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • How many throw pillows is too many? Does it depend on number of pillows? Size of furniture? Number of family members? Softness/firmness level?
  • Why are yawns considered a sign of boredom?
  • Art packs/music disks
  • Ville asks "Chester Bolingbroke is blogging his attempt to finish every computer RPG ever in chronological order, despite this being clearly impossible. He started at The Dungeon (1975) and is currently up to Legends of Valour: Ragged Chet (1992)."
  • Do you consider listening to an audio book "reading?" What about having a book read to you by someone, live? Could we interpret radio plays or listening to a film with our eyes closed "reading?"

Microtopics:

  • Getting good enough at English to speak in Instruction Manual.
  • Back before the content ocean.
  • A whole slew of trucks that have jobs.
  • Your two year old wishing you good luck by leaving a cement mixer on your desk.
  • A lateral career move where you decide to stop releasing games.
  • Occult and magic in the Greco-Roman world.
  • Talking the kids out of going to college.
  • Using Greco-Roman erotic curse tablets and binding spells to examine romantic relationships of the time period.
  • How nobody calls love potions "curses" any more.
  • Variable demand for throw pillows over the course of the day.
  • Needing to get more dogs because your have too many throw pillows for the number of dogs you have.
  • A bowling pin orientation of ten to twelve pillows that you have to clear out of the way before you can sleep.
  • A barricade of squish.
  • A wheezing Darth Vader mask.
  • Sleeping in an ominous dark orb next to your wife in bed and she complains that your orb is too hard and it pinches when it closes.
  • A lacerating throw pillow.
  • Opening yourself up to the soft life.
  • A badminton racket in your closet that you haven't used in over a decade.
  • Edible pillows.
  • Yawning whenever you see the sun.
  • Possible origins of the myth that yawning indicates boredom.
  • A yawn factory to your left.
  • Trying to change society in the next ten minutes.
  • A manatee at the zoo giving you a hard time because you yawned at their enclosure.
  • Oxygenating before you charge an invader.
  • Hippos yawning in order to fuck you up.
  • Getting kicked out of the zoo after yawning at the chimpanzees and the admission booth putting up a photo of your gaping mouth saying "don't let these teeth in."
  • What you get for challenging a peacock.
  • Living in a bad society and being tired all the time.
  • Yawning it out.
  • Sticking a finger in your elderly dog's mouth when they yawn because they don't have enough teeth left to bite you.
  • What you did with a modem before the internet was a thing.
  • BBS operators commissioning ANSI art to differentiate their BBS from other BBSes.
  • Making elaborate works of art within the constraints of IBM PC text mode.
  • An executable that displays procedural animations on the screen and describes the features of a BBS.
  • What Minnesota locals think of Bruno Mars' hats.
  • Minnesota not having any LAN parties but you can get a deep fried floppy disk on a stick at the state fair.
  • How to fool 2008-YouTube into allocating extra bandwidth to your fluorescent waffle pattern.
  • A logo that is shimmering so hard that it is impossible to read.
  • Never reading a video title because you don't want to be biased going into it.
  • The script you would read on the side of an obelisk on an ancient asteroid.
  • Whether the sci-fi story you just wrote is just Mass Effect again.
  • Making art for your friends.
  • Inventing a podcast because you need an excuse to chat with friends.
  • Watching your wife's phone ring and asking if she's going to do something about that.
  • Being on a podcast where you have to do homework.
  • The LAN party of podcasting.
  • Creating a box for your podcast so you can put a quote on it.
  • Legends of Valour: Ragged Chet.
  • Creating content in order to make friends.
  • Whether you can play every RPG faster than they are released.
  • When it's okay to feed Gremlins again.
  • Setting out on a quest to do something esoteric that nobody has asked for.
  • Whether the guy in Zelda who said "tenth enemy has the bomb" made sense in Japanese.
  • Whether Gremlins respect the daylight savings time changeover.
  • Whether leaving food out on the counter that the Gremlin later eats counts as "feeding" it.
  • A Bubsy 3D-style Gremlins sequel.
  • Abandoning the topic to just talk about Gremlins for ten minutes.
  • Yelling to the sky in impotent rage when an inanimate object rips one of your earbuds out.
  • Buying a pianist an incredibly sharp kitchen knife.
  • Cutting your sandwiches with a machine gun.
  • Getting knife proof gloves for the kitchen and then just wearing them all the time because who knows when your fancy new chef's knife will strike.
  • Engaging with the story and creating a construct in your imagination.
  • Whether it's okay to "read" a book on tape.
  • Calling NES cartridges "tapes" because Nintendo deliberately designed them to resemble VHS tapes.
  • A sci-fi video game filled with Data Prisms which have identical storage capacity and security properties to Post-It notes but are way more futuristic.
  • Leaving a note saying "Don't forget to get paper towels at Fred Meyer" for the post-apocalyptic scavenger exploring your kitchen.
  • Dying together on the toilet in a heartwarming embrace.
  • A framed Post-It note saying "Ryan's favorite number is 63."
  • Digging Jim's corpse up and squeezing him like a bagpipe into his CPAP machine to unlock Frog Fractions 3.
  • How at Taco Bell "supreme" means sour cream and tomatoes but at Pizza Hut "supreme" means sausage and green peppers but at the combination Taco Bell and Pizza Hut it means pouring Baja Blast on your Pizzone.
  • Choosing your bad handle and owning it.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+eSbtm4rw ]]> Jim Stormdancer 74. The Beef Bar https://topiclords.com/the-beef-bar 52e5cbfb-b311-47dc-88d9-a3a712fa22fe Mon, 22 Mar 2021 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Avery and Stevie. We discuss bad public art, the purpose of t-rex arms, Doom 1.0's proto-VR mode, and philosophical questions and concepts you independently discovered as a child regardless of how well-equipped you may or may not have been to explore them in depth. 1:02:51 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • In my home town of San Jose, CA there is a Statue of the serpent god Quetzalcoatl. It looks like a large piece of perfectly formed dog poop. Everyone calls it "the poop snake." Let's talk about bad public art.
  • Some paleontologists think that T-Rex used its tiny arms to help it get up after sleeping. I wish I had a pair of tiny arms to help me get up after sleeping.
  • Doom 1.0's proto-VR mode
  • John asks "Philosophical questions and concepts you independently discovered as a child regardless of how well-equipped you may or may not have been to explore them in depth."

Microtopics:

  • Putting your album on Spotify.
  • Demanding your barista debate you and call him a coward.
  • Reading about the philosopher who owns a coffee shop and debating them about ancient Roman tax codes for hours without buying anything.
  • Going into a coffee shop just to prove a point.
  • The hypothesis that the worse someone is at reading, the better they are at hearing and pronunciation.
  • Inventing a time machine so you can be in the San Jose town square when the sculptor uncovers the obsidian poop snake.
  • A statue of a ragdoll in a running pose with a realistic baby face superimposed on its stomach.
  • A bust of Jesus made out of marshmallow Peeps.
  • Trying to depict a half moon in 3D and ending up with a toenail clipping.
  • The Pumpkin Fucker.
  • A statue of a man being hit in the head with a bottle thrown by a babies flying biplanes.
  • The statue at the border of Berkeley and Oakland they put there to remind everybody that Berkeley is us and Oakland is them.
  • Being halfway through the Museum of Severed Body Parts when you decide you've had enough.
  • The Dunning Kruger effect turning out to be fake.
  • A strange way to find out that you have to stop being smug in this particular way.
  • A T-rex curled up like a kitten.
  • A T-rex sleeping hanging upside down like a bat.
  • Dino Riders.
  • Getting your wish for an extra pair of arms to help you get out of bed at night, but not being sure where to install them.
  • The purpose of Grimace's second set of arms.
  • Hiring a large unhappy looking purple guy to be your chain restaurant spokesperson.
  • Hearing that the t-rex used his tiny arms to get up after sleeping and stealing t-rex arms from the local Natural History museum so you can use them to get out of bed.
  • Deciding not move to the countryside and not heist any more after reading that paleontologists no longer think the t-rex uses its arms to get up from sleeping.
  • The movie ending when the protagonists decide to cancel the movie's production.
  • A topic you didn't write down.
  • A reference to the lord because he's the lord.
  • The Keck Cave.
  • Some people paying thousands of dollars for a VR setup when these lab mice get it for free.
  • Going to a mall in the early 90s and putting on a terrible VR headset that's guaranteed to make you throw up or your money back.
  • The two independent promises of early 90s VR, one of which came to fruition decades ago.
  • Connecting three monitors over an ipecac network.
  • Accidentally saturating the network with packets so that nobody else can use it.
  • A networked video game interpreting any incoming packets as a new game state regardless of their provenance.
  • VR coming to prominence in the 90s after the Garbage Pail Kids made puking mainstream.
  • The R-Zone.
  • A VR setup that only shows images to one eye.
  • The R-Zone chip tune rendition of the Daytona USA theme.
  • Writing a program to convert MIDI music into a monophonic square wave and just accepting its output as the best possible result.
  • Asking your parents for Marble Madness and they buy you the Tiger Electronics version of Marble Madness.
  • A d-pad dressed up to look like a trackball, to fool your mom.
  • Well-designed games that fit within the constraints of the medium.
  • A Game and Watch game revealing its final boss by unlocking the hinge that lets you fold the LCD screen together like a Mad Fold-In.
  • Barcode Battler.
  • A slot to swipe cards.
  • Trying to find the best barcode to swipe to create the swolest Barcode Battler.
  • Doctoring barcodes with a sharpie by making the Beef Bar thicker.
  • Learning to read barcodes by sight.
  • Bleeping out a story with the R-Zone Daytona USA theme if it turns out you've already heard the story before.
  • Convincing a barista to sign up for your Bitcoin wallet software so you can pay for your coffee in Bitcoin.
  • Putting up QR codes of your coffee shop's menu all around the city so curious people can scan your QR code and be like "oh, luckily I was looking for a coffee shop, I wonder if this one is nearby."
  • Tattooing a QR code of your coffee menu on your arm.
  • Inventing the philosophical concept of the toothbrush and thinking "nah, that'd never work."
  • Staring at the bathroom tiles while you invent the Pythagorean Theorem.
  • Independently inventing the philosophical concept of Alf.
  • Alf's real name in the Alf lore.
  • Seeing Alf mourn the destruction of his home planet and realizing that one day everyone you know will die.
  • A real rip-the-bandaid-off approach to introducing the concept of mortality.
  • Alf Clausen, the composer of the ALF theme song.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • In my home town of San Jose, CA there is a Statue of the serpent god Quetzalcoatl. It looks like a large piece of perfectly formed dog poop. Everyone calls it "the poop snake." Let's talk about bad public art.
  • Some paleontologists think that T-Rex used its tiny arms to help it get up after sleeping. I wish I had a pair of tiny arms to help me get up after sleeping.
  • Doom 1.0's proto-VR mode
  • John asks "Philosophical questions and concepts you independently discovered as a child regardless of how well-equipped you may or may not have been to explore them in depth."

Microtopics:

  • Putting your album on Spotify.
  • Demanding your barista debate you and call him a coward.
  • Reading about the philosopher who owns a coffee shop and debating them about ancient Roman tax codes for hours without buying anything.
  • Going into a coffee shop just to prove a point.
  • The hypothesis that the worse someone is at reading, the better they are at hearing and pronunciation.
  • Inventing a time machine so you can be in the San Jose town square when the sculptor uncovers the obsidian poop snake.
  • A statue of a ragdoll in a running pose with a realistic baby face superimposed on its stomach.
  • A bust of Jesus made out of marshmallow Peeps.
  • Trying to depict a half moon in 3D and ending up with a toenail clipping.
  • The Pumpkin Fucker.
  • A statue of a man being hit in the head with a bottle thrown by a babies flying biplanes.
  • The statue at the border of Berkeley and Oakland they put there to remind everybody that Berkeley is us and Oakland is them.
  • Being halfway through the Museum of Severed Body Parts when you decide you've had enough.
  • The Dunning Kruger effect turning out to be fake.
  • A strange way to find out that you have to stop being smug in this particular way.
  • A T-rex curled up like a kitten.
  • A T-rex sleeping hanging upside down like a bat.
  • Dino Riders.
  • Getting your wish for an extra pair of arms to help you get out of bed at night, but not being sure where to install them.
  • The purpose of Grimace's second set of arms.
  • Hiring a large unhappy looking purple guy to be your chain restaurant spokesperson.
  • Hearing that the t-rex used his tiny arms to get up after sleeping and stealing t-rex arms from the local Natural History museum so you can use them to get out of bed.
  • Deciding not move to the countryside and not heist any more after reading that paleontologists no longer think the t-rex uses its arms to get up from sleeping.
  • The movie ending when the protagonists decide to cancel the movie's production.
  • A topic you didn't write down.
  • A reference to the lord because he's the lord.
  • The Keck Cave.
  • Some people paying thousands of dollars for a VR setup when these lab mice get it for free.
  • Going to a mall in the early 90s and putting on a terrible VR headset that's guaranteed to make you throw up or your money back.
  • The two independent promises of early 90s VR, one of which came to fruition decades ago.
  • Connecting three monitors over an ipecac network.
  • Accidentally saturating the network with packets so that nobody else can use it.
  • A networked video game interpreting any incoming packets as a new game state regardless of their provenance.
  • VR coming to prominence in the 90s after the Garbage Pail Kids made puking mainstream.
  • The R-Zone.
  • A VR setup that only shows images to one eye.
  • The R-Zone chip tune rendition of the Daytona USA theme.
  • Writing a program to convert MIDI music into a monophonic square wave and just accepting its output as the best possible result.
  • Asking your parents for Marble Madness and they buy you the Tiger Electronics version of Marble Madness.
  • A d-pad dressed up to look like a trackball, to fool your mom.
  • Well-designed games that fit within the constraints of the medium.
  • A Game and Watch game revealing its final boss by unlocking the hinge that lets you fold the LCD screen together like a Mad Fold-In.
  • Barcode Battler.
  • A slot to swipe cards.
  • Trying to find the best barcode to swipe to create the swolest Barcode Battler.
  • Doctoring barcodes with a sharpie by making the Beef Bar thicker.
  • Learning to read barcodes by sight.
  • Bleeping out a story with the R-Zone Daytona USA theme if it turns out you've already heard the story before.
  • Convincing a barista to sign up for your Bitcoin wallet software so you can pay for your coffee in Bitcoin.
  • Putting up QR codes of your coffee shop's menu all around the city so curious people can scan your QR code and be like "oh, luckily I was looking for a coffee shop, I wonder if this one is nearby."
  • Tattooing a QR code of your coffee menu on your arm.
  • Inventing the philosophical concept of the toothbrush and thinking "nah, that'd never work."
  • Staring at the bathroom tiles while you invent the Pythagorean Theorem.
  • Independently inventing the philosophical concept of Alf.
  • Alf's real name in the Alf lore.
  • Seeing Alf mourn the destruction of his home planet and realizing that one day everyone you know will die.
  • A real rip-the-bandaid-off approach to introducing the concept of mortality.
  • Alf Clausen, the composer of the ALF theme song.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • In my home town of San Jose, CA there is a Statue of the serpent god Quetzalcoatl. It looks like a large piece of perfectly formed dog poop. Everyone calls it "the poop snake." Let's talk about bad public art.
  • Some paleontologists think that T-Rex used its tiny arms to help it get up after sleeping. I wish I had a pair of tiny arms to help me get up after sleeping.
  • Doom 1.0's proto-VR mode
  • John asks "Philosophical questions and concepts you independently discovered as a child regardless of how well-equipped you may or may not have been to explore them in depth."

Microtopics:

  • Putting your album on Spotify.
  • Demanding your barista debate you and call him a coward.
  • Reading about the philosopher who owns a coffee shop and debating them about ancient Roman tax codes for hours without buying anything.
  • Going into a coffee shop just to prove a point.
  • The hypothesis that the worse someone is at reading, the better they are at hearing and pronunciation.
  • Inventing a time machine so you can be in the San Jose town square when the sculptor uncovers the obsidian poop snake.
  • A statue of a ragdoll in a running pose with a realistic baby face superimposed on its stomach.
  • A bust of Jesus made out of marshmallow Peeps.
  • Trying to depict a half moon in 3D and ending up with a toenail clipping.
  • The Pumpkin Fucker.
  • A statue of a man being hit in the head with a bottle thrown by a babies flying biplanes.
  • The statue at the border of Berkeley and Oakland they put there to remind everybody that Berkeley is us and Oakland is them.
  • Being halfway through the Museum of Severed Body Parts when you decide you've had enough.
  • The Dunning Kruger effect turning out to be fake.
  • A strange way to find out that you have to stop being smug in this particular way.
  • A T-rex curled up like a kitten.
  • A T-rex sleeping hanging upside down like a bat.
  • Dino Riders.
  • Getting your wish for an extra pair of arms to help you get out of bed at night, but not being sure where to install them.
  • The purpose of Grimace's second set of arms.
  • Hiring a large unhappy looking purple guy to be your chain restaurant spokesperson.
  • Hearing that the t-rex used his tiny arms to get up after sleeping and stealing t-rex arms from the local Natural History museum so you can use them to get out of bed.
  • Deciding not move to the countryside and not heist any more after reading that paleontologists no longer think the t-rex uses its arms to get up from sleeping.
  • The movie ending when the protagonists decide to cancel the movie's production.
  • A topic you didn't write down.
  • A reference to the lord because he's the lord.
  • The Keck Cave.
  • Some people paying thousands of dollars for a VR setup when these lab mice get it for free.
  • Going to a mall in the early 90s and putting on a terrible VR headset that's guaranteed to make you throw up or your money back.
  • The two independent promises of early 90s VR, one of which came to fruition decades ago.
  • Connecting three monitors over an ipecac network.
  • Accidentally saturating the network with packets so that nobody else can use it.
  • A networked video game interpreting any incoming packets as a new game state regardless of their provenance.
  • VR coming to prominence in the 90s after the Garbage Pail Kids made puking mainstream.
  • The R-Zone.
  • A VR setup that only shows images to one eye.
  • The R-Zone chip tune rendition of the Daytona USA theme.
  • Writing a program to convert MIDI music into a monophonic square wave and just accepting its output as the best possible result.
  • Asking your parents for Marble Madness and they buy you the Tiger Electronics version of Marble Madness.
  • A d-pad dressed up to look like a trackball, to fool your mom.
  • Well-designed games that fit within the constraints of the medium.
  • A Game and Watch game revealing its final boss by unlocking the hinge that lets you fold the LCD screen together like a Mad Fold-In.
  • Barcode Battler.
  • A slot to swipe cards.
  • Trying to find the best barcode to swipe to create the swolest Barcode Battler.
  • Doctoring barcodes with a sharpie by making the Beef Bar thicker.
  • Learning to read barcodes by sight.
  • Bleeping out a story with the R-Zone Daytona USA theme if it turns out you've already heard the story before.
  • Convincing a barista to sign up for your Bitcoin wallet software so you can pay for your coffee in Bitcoin.
  • Putting up QR codes of your coffee shop's menu all around the city so curious people can scan your QR code and be like "oh, luckily I was looking for a coffee shop, I wonder if this one is nearby."
  • Tattooing a QR code of your coffee menu on your arm.
  • Inventing the philosophical concept of the toothbrush and thinking "nah, that'd never work."
  • Staring at the bathroom tiles while you invent the Pythagorean Theorem.
  • Independently inventing the philosophical concept of Alf.
  • Alf's real name in the Alf lore.
  • Seeing Alf mourn the destruction of his home planet and realizing that one day everyone you know will die.
  • A real rip-the-bandaid-off approach to introducing the concept of mortality.
  • Alf Clausen, the composer of the ALF theme song.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+b4B2rHtN ]]> Jim Stormdancer 73. 100 Free Pulls for Your Left Kidney https://topiclords.com/100-free-pulls-for-your-left-kidney 2c9bfdb1-8d0b-4484-9735-b8ffe68298b7 Mon, 15 Mar 2021 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Max and Ryan. We discuss the fascination with miniature things, things people assume about you, how to fix speed runs, games you love but wish you didn't, motion smoothing, why hippos hate humans, and a restaurant where all the glasses are the same size but if you order a large it gets poured out of a 55 gallon drum and if you order a small it gets filled with an eye dropper. 1:11:02 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • What do you think is behind the human fascination with miniature things?
  • What are things people assume about you, based on your profession, look, or general vibe, that are always untrue?
  • How to fix speed runs
  • Yuri asks "Games you love, but really wish you did not. Maybe even games you really don't like much, but keep playing anyway, like a terrible reality tv show you can't look away from."
  • Does anyone actually like Frame Interpolation? Am I the only one who always turns it off?
  • There seems to be a zoological consensus that hippos share a unique, communal, organized hatred of humankind for reasons that cannot be explained through typical animal behavioral reasoning.
  • A restaurant where all the glasses are the same size but if you order a large it gets poured out of a 55 gallon drum and if you order a small it gets filled with an eye dropper.

Microtopics:

  • Running a novelty Twitter account about Nonstandard McDonalds.
  • Grabbing every flashlight on your house to light your live TV news appearance.
  • Running a novelty Twitter account about the mundane business details of running a Long John Silver's.
  • White Castle except even stinkier somehow.
  • Making tiny novelty hamburgers out of gelatin and cornstarch.
  • Miniature things which are their normal size but are smaller than you.
  • Sneaking a secret, more interesting topic in after your overt one.
  • Elixirs in a JRPG having expiration dates so you don't end the game with 80 of them, never having used a single one.
  • Holding a Lego minifig in your hands and thinking "I could pop your head off any time I feel like it."
  • Converting inches of height to thousands of dollars per year in salary, and how that works differently for men and women.
  • Taking a knife edge turn into the patriarchy.
  • Knowing you could mash the person you're talking to like a paper bird, but reassuring them that of course you would never do that.
  • Mixing powders into paste and then pressing the paste into a mold.
  • Going down the rabbit hole on slurry-based miniature food construction.
  • The sad sashimi special you get at a shitty bar after work.
  • New shapes of ennui that you've never known as a human being.
  • Biting the brick of instant ramen and then washing it down with a bite of the brick of Golden Curry.
  • Wanting to produce high quality audio but not really caring much about the quality of audio you listen to.
  • Mostly playing video games on consoles that are at least ten years old.
  • Tech workers wanting the least internet-connected kitchen appliances available.
  • Growing up with hair that makes you look like you do a lot of drugs.
  • Getting tossed into camp dirtbag.
  • Trading McDonald's jokes with your novelty McDonald's account followers.
  • Thinking about long hamburgers every day.
  • A tablet you would etch your name into in ancient Egypt, on a hoagie bun.
  • Getting a hoagie delivered from a pizza place like some kind of maniac.
  • Resetting a game until you get a favorable result.
  • Oops All Marathon Strats.
  • Why Speedrun?
  • Speedrunning as a way to share a game you love with the audience.
  • The Timic Skip.
  • The changes Jim made to Frog Fractions: Game of the Decade Edition to make speedrunning it more fun.
  • Designing your game to be interesting to reverse engineer.
  • Tetris: The Grand Master.
  • Cranking the skill ceiling on every aspect of Tetris to the absolute maximum.
  • Stretching the rules of Tetris so much that the Tetris Company says "this has gone too far" and revokes your Tetris license.
  • Designing a game with the assumption of fervent frame by frame analysis by the player base.
  • Returning again and again to a game that doesn't respect your time.
  • BeamNG.drive
  • Gran Turismo Meets Garry's Mod.
  • The most satisfying car crash simulator.
  • Sitting in a sandbox and smashing Micro Machines together.
  • A soft-body physics engine that is supposed to be for gearhead nerds but that you use to crash cars into each other and giggle.
  • The cynicism setting in long before the dopamine cycle wears off.
  • Deliberately avoiding gacha games because you might start paying for spins.
  • Discreetly turning motion smoothing off on your parents' TV.
  • Screening your roommates for whether or not they like motion smoothing.
  • Looking at a 4k TV and not really noticing a difference.
  • The hypothetical audience for motion smoothing.
  • Whether Best Buy is your Best Bud.
  • Stretching a 4:3 image to cover your 16:9 TV.
  • The consumer paying for the chocolate company advertising on the chocolate bar.
  • Negotiating with the car dealership by threatening to remove the license plate frame with the dealership's name on it from your car.
  • The raw power of a hippopotamus.
  • The hippo as a reification of mother earth's desire to cleanse the earth of humanity.
  • Hippo Accelerationism.
  • Importing hippos into every continent so they can kill even more people even faster.
  • The fried banana stand at the San Diego Zoo.
  • Why toucans don't swarm and devour humans.
  • An abominably fat crow forging relationships left and right.
  • Liking someone so much that you leave a big chunk of drywall on their doorstep.
  • A forklift robot that can pour a beverage directly out of a 55 gallon drum.
  • A chemical you can pour on any part of the pizza to form a crust there.
  • A pizza fractal and it never stops, baby.
  • Walking into a Sizzler and asking for the fruit lasagna.
  • The buffet boom of the 80s.
  • Sizzler representing choice in a country about freedom of choice.
  • A four minute indoctrination video shown to new Sizzler employees.
  • The thickest glasses known to man.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • What do you think is behind the human fascination with miniature things?
  • What are things people assume about you, based on your profession, look, or general vibe, that are always untrue?
  • How to fix speed runs
  • Yuri asks "Games you love, but really wish you did not. Maybe even games you really don't like much, but keep playing anyway, like a terrible reality tv show you can't look away from."
  • Does anyone actually like Frame Interpolation? Am I the only one who always turns it off?
  • There seems to be a zoological consensus that hippos share a unique, communal, organized hatred of humankind for reasons that cannot be explained through typical animal behavioral reasoning.
  • A restaurant where all the glasses are the same size but if you order a large it gets poured out of a 55 gallon drum and if you order a small it gets filled with an eye dropper.

Microtopics:

  • Running a novelty Twitter account about Nonstandard McDonalds.
  • Grabbing every flashlight on your house to light your live TV news appearance.
  • Running a novelty Twitter account about the mundane business details of running a Long John Silver's.
  • White Castle except even stinkier somehow.
  • Making tiny novelty hamburgers out of gelatin and cornstarch.
  • Miniature things which are their normal size but are smaller than you.
  • Sneaking a secret, more interesting topic in after your overt one.
  • Elixirs in a JRPG having expiration dates so you don't end the game with 80 of them, never having used a single one.
  • Holding a Lego minifig in your hands and thinking "I could pop your head off any time I feel like it."
  • Converting inches of height to thousands of dollars per year in salary, and how that works differently for men and women.
  • Taking a knife edge turn into the patriarchy.
  • Knowing you could mash the person you're talking to like a paper bird, but reassuring them that of course you would never do that.
  • Mixing powders into paste and then pressing the paste into a mold.
  • Going down the rabbit hole on slurry-based miniature food construction.
  • The sad sashimi special you get at a shitty bar after work.
  • New shapes of ennui that you've never known as a human being.
  • Biting the brick of instant ramen and then washing it down with a bite of the brick of Golden Curry.
  • Wanting to produce high quality audio but not really caring much about the quality of audio you listen to.
  • Mostly playing video games on consoles that are at least ten years old.
  • Tech workers wanting the least internet-connected kitchen appliances available.
  • Growing up with hair that makes you look like you do a lot of drugs.
  • Getting tossed into camp dirtbag.
  • Trading McDonald's jokes with your novelty McDonald's account followers.
  • Thinking about long hamburgers every day.
  • A tablet you would etch your name into in ancient Egypt, on a hoagie bun.
  • Getting a hoagie delivered from a pizza place like some kind of maniac.
  • Resetting a game until you get a favorable result.
  • Oops All Marathon Strats.
  • Why Speedrun?
  • Speedrunning as a way to share a game you love with the audience.
  • The Timic Skip.
  • The changes Jim made to Frog Fractions: Game of the Decade Edition to make speedrunning it more fun.
  • Designing your game to be interesting to reverse engineer.
  • Tetris: The Grand Master.
  • Cranking the skill ceiling on every aspect of Tetris to the absolute maximum.
  • Stretching the rules of Tetris so much that the Tetris Company says "this has gone too far" and revokes your Tetris license.
  • Designing a game with the assumption of fervent frame by frame analysis by the player base.
  • Returning again and again to a game that doesn't respect your time.
  • BeamNG.drive
  • Gran Turismo Meets Garry's Mod.
  • The most satisfying car crash simulator.
  • Sitting in a sandbox and smashing Micro Machines together.
  • A soft-body physics engine that is supposed to be for gearhead nerds but that you use to crash cars into each other and giggle.
  • The cynicism setting in long before the dopamine cycle wears off.
  • Deliberately avoiding gacha games because you might start paying for spins.
  • Discreetly turning motion smoothing off on your parents' TV.
  • Screening your roommates for whether or not they like motion smoothing.
  • Looking at a 4k TV and not really noticing a difference.
  • The hypothetical audience for motion smoothing.
  • Whether Best Buy is your Best Bud.
  • Stretching a 4:3 image to cover your 16:9 TV.
  • The consumer paying for the chocolate company advertising on the chocolate bar.
  • Negotiating with the car dealership by threatening to remove the license plate frame with the dealership's name on it from your car.
  • The raw power of a hippopotamus.
  • The hippo as a reification of mother earth's desire to cleanse the earth of humanity.
  • Hippo Accelerationism.
  • Importing hippos into every continent so they can kill even more people even faster.
  • The fried banana stand at the San Diego Zoo.
  • Why toucans don't swarm and devour humans.
  • An abominably fat crow forging relationships left and right.
  • Liking someone so much that you leave a big chunk of drywall on their doorstep.
  • A forklift robot that can pour a beverage directly out of a 55 gallon drum.
  • A chemical you can pour on any part of the pizza to form a crust there.
  • A pizza fractal and it never stops, baby.
  • Walking into a Sizzler and asking for the fruit lasagna.
  • The buffet boom of the 80s.
  • Sizzler representing choice in a country about freedom of choice.
  • A four minute indoctrination video shown to new Sizzler employees.
  • The thickest glasses known to man.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • What do you think is behind the human fascination with miniature things?
  • What are things people assume about you, based on your profession, look, or general vibe, that are always untrue?
  • How to fix speed runs
  • Yuri asks "Games you love, but really wish you did not. Maybe even games you really don't like much, but keep playing anyway, like a terrible reality tv show you can't look away from."
  • Does anyone actually like Frame Interpolation? Am I the only one who always turns it off?
  • There seems to be a zoological consensus that hippos share a unique, communal, organized hatred of humankind for reasons that cannot be explained through typical animal behavioral reasoning.
  • A restaurant where all the glasses are the same size but if you order a large it gets poured out of a 55 gallon drum and if you order a small it gets filled with an eye dropper.

Microtopics:

  • Running a novelty Twitter account about Nonstandard McDonalds.
  • Grabbing every flashlight on your house to light your live TV news appearance.
  • Running a novelty Twitter account about the mundane business details of running a Long John Silver's.
  • White Castle except even stinkier somehow.
  • Making tiny novelty hamburgers out of gelatin and cornstarch.
  • Miniature things which are their normal size but are smaller than you.
  • Sneaking a secret, more interesting topic in after your overt one.
  • Elixirs in a JRPG having expiration dates so you don't end the game with 80 of them, never having used a single one.
  • Holding a Lego minifig in your hands and thinking "I could pop your head off any time I feel like it."
  • Converting inches of height to thousands of dollars per year in salary, and how that works differently for men and women.
  • Taking a knife edge turn into the patriarchy.
  • Knowing you could mash the person you're talking to like a paper bird, but reassuring them that of course you would never do that.
  • Mixing powders into paste and then pressing the paste into a mold.
  • Going down the rabbit hole on slurry-based miniature food construction.
  • The sad sashimi special you get at a shitty bar after work.
  • New shapes of ennui that you've never known as a human being.
  • Biting the brick of instant ramen and then washing it down with a bite of the brick of Golden Curry.
  • Wanting to produce high quality audio but not really caring much about the quality of audio you listen to.
  • Mostly playing video games on consoles that are at least ten years old.
  • Tech workers wanting the least internet-connected kitchen appliances available.
  • Growing up with hair that makes you look like you do a lot of drugs.
  • Getting tossed into camp dirtbag.
  • Trading McDonald's jokes with your novelty McDonald's account followers.
  • Thinking about long hamburgers every day.
  • A tablet you would etch your name into in ancient Egypt, on a hoagie bun.
  • Getting a hoagie delivered from a pizza place like some kind of maniac.
  • Resetting a game until you get a favorable result.
  • Oops All Marathon Strats.
  • Why Speedrun?
  • Speedrunning as a way to share a game you love with the audience.
  • The Timic Skip.
  • The changes Jim made to Frog Fractions: Game of the Decade Edition to make speedrunning it more fun.
  • Designing your game to be interesting to reverse engineer.
  • Tetris: The Grand Master.
  • Cranking the skill ceiling on every aspect of Tetris to the absolute maximum.
  • Stretching the rules of Tetris so much that the Tetris Company says "this has gone too far" and revokes your Tetris license.
  • Designing a game with the assumption of fervent frame by frame analysis by the player base.
  • Returning again and again to a game that doesn't respect your time.
  • BeamNG.drive
  • Gran Turismo Meets Garry's Mod.
  • The most satisfying car crash simulator.
  • Sitting in a sandbox and smashing Micro Machines together.
  • A soft-body physics engine that is supposed to be for gearhead nerds but that you use to crash cars into each other and giggle.
  • The cynicism setting in long before the dopamine cycle wears off.
  • Deliberately avoiding gacha games because you might start paying for spins.
  • Discreetly turning motion smoothing off on your parents' TV.
  • Screening your roommates for whether or not they like motion smoothing.
  • Looking at a 4k TV and not really noticing a difference.
  • The hypothetical audience for motion smoothing.
  • Whether Best Buy is your Best Bud.
  • Stretching a 4:3 image to cover your 16:9 TV.
  • The consumer paying for the chocolate company advertising on the chocolate bar.
  • Negotiating with the car dealership by threatening to remove the license plate frame with the dealership's name on it from your car.
  • The raw power of a hippopotamus.
  • The hippo as a reification of mother earth's desire to cleanse the earth of humanity.
  • Hippo Accelerationism.
  • Importing hippos into every continent so they can kill even more people even faster.
  • The fried banana stand at the San Diego Zoo.
  • Why toucans don't swarm and devour humans.
  • An abominably fat crow forging relationships left and right.
  • Liking someone so much that you leave a big chunk of drywall on their doorstep.
  • A forklift robot that can pour a beverage directly out of a 55 gallon drum.
  • A chemical you can pour on any part of the pizza to form a crust there.
  • A pizza fractal and it never stops, baby.
  • Walking into a Sizzler and asking for the fruit lasagna.
  • The buffet boom of the 80s.
  • Sizzler representing choice in a country about freedom of choice.
  • A four minute indoctrination video shown to new Sizzler employees.
  • The thickest glasses known to man.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+Bqxrhk3x ]]> Jim Stormdancer 72. Gaseous Iron and the Hot Jupiters https://topiclords.com/gaseous-iron-and-the-hot-jupiters 536a3266-0a2c-49c5-8bc7-45d70c0a56af Mon, 08 Mar 2021 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Ben and Michelle. We discuss the Dora the Explorer movie, landing a rover on mars, scratch-off Donkey Kong, coffee maker recipes, and exoplanets. 52:53 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Dora the Explorer and the City of Gold was a delightful surprise
  • We're about to land another rover on Mars and that is super way cool
    • Michelle: "Just clarifying that most discarded rocket stages don't end up in low-Earth orbit forever, they're designed to deorbit and burn up on atmospheric reentry. Sometimes things just go a bit awry."
  • Scratch-off Donkey Kong
  • Ville asks "Tangential to dishwasher salmon, there are multiple coffee maker cookbooks, including a Finnish one that includes recipes like lamb and carrots in balsamic dressing, and wild mushroom risotto."
  • Do you want to ask me stuff about exoplanets

Microtopics:

  • Growing your own mushrooms.
  • Aliens growing out of your mycelium.
  • Growing your own toxic mushrooms from murder mushroom kits.
  • The incredible mushroom picking season that COVID facilitated.
  • One of those styrofoam boxes from the fruit shop.
  • When a teenager says "ok boomer" to you and you're like "dude I'm thirty."
  • Signing up for the free trial of Amazon Prime so you can watch the live action Dora the Explorer movie.
  • Looking at the camera and asking the viewer "Can you say 'deadly neurotoxin?'"
  • Accidentally getting boxed in a crate and sent to the jungle.
  • A CG animated fox voiced by Benicio del Toro.
  • The nerd character getting beaten up in the background as the protagonist walks away.
  • Singing the poo song and burying your poo with the poo shovel while everybody else is fleeing from the hail of arrows.
  • Why Diego exists. (Because American audiences couldn't handle boys watching a show about a girl.)
  • How to stop Swyper from swiping.
  • ABC, the Australian analog of the BBC.
  • Percy the Perseverance Robot.
  • Whether it would be more exciting for the Mars Rover to land safely or explode in a fireball.
  • How to transfer between two different orbits.
  • Making a beeline for Mars.
  • Attaching a broom to Perseverance to sweep the dust off of Opportunity's solar panels.
  • Returning a soil sample from Mars.
  • Returning a rock sample from an asteroid.
  • Not being able to tell the difference between water and just a different colored dirt.
  • Signs of ancient microbes.
  • Choosing which way you want Mario to go and then scratching off a silver oval to see what happens.
  • Choosable Path Adventures.
  • ChooseCo is preparing to sue you right now.
  • Writing the novelization of Super Mario Bros. when all you have for reference is the instruction manual.
  • Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf.
  • A story from Jim's youth.
  • A little cardboard door that you open to see if you won a prize.
  • How children were so starved for entertainment in the 80s that scratch off Donkey Kong seemed cool.
  • Shrinking down a full size comic to fit in a cereal box so you need to read it with a microscope.
  • Magazines that are printed with that red/blue 3D effect that doesn't quite work.
  • A sponge pen with reactive ink in it that you brush against the seemingly blank page to reveal clues.
  • How the "Yes & Know" invisible ink puzzle books have a completely different atrocious pun for a title in Australia, "Mr. Mystery."
  • Knowing your parents really like you if you get a Scrooge McDuck comic.
  • How to find a drip coffee maker in Australia.
  • Going to a McDonald's in the 1980s to try out your novelty lamb and carrots in the drip coffee maker recipe, because there's nowhere else to find a drip coffee maker in Australia.
  • Someone giving you a drip coffee machine as a gift and you're like "what the hell am I gonna do with this" and then you remember that wild mushroom risotto coffee machine recipe.
  • Comparing your "no and" current guest to the guest who tried microwaving Coca Cola during the episode.
  • An American lady on TikTok showing you all the wrong ways to make common British food.
  • The best exoplanet.
  • Eyeball planets.
  • Tidally locked planets possibly being habitable at The Terminator.
  • Using our scientific expertise to turn the moon into an eyeball.
  • Detecting exoplanets via periodic dimming of stars.
  • A weird little ice world.
  • An exoplanet named "Steve" that has wronged you in some way.
  • Exoplanet naming conventions.
  • Tasking Reddit with naming all 4,300 known exoplanets.
  • Hundreds of hypothetical dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt.
  • Taking a two year break from Twitter and feeling much better.
  • Rescuing greyhounds.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Dora the Explorer and the City of Gold was a delightful surprise
  • We're about to land another rover on Mars and that is super way cool
    • Michelle: "Just clarifying that most discarded rocket stages don't end up in low-Earth orbit forever, they're designed to deorbit and burn up on atmospheric reentry. Sometimes things just go a bit awry."
  • Scratch-off Donkey Kong
  • Ville asks "Tangential to dishwasher salmon, there are multiple coffee maker cookbooks, including a Finnish one that includes recipes like lamb and carrots in balsamic dressing, and wild mushroom risotto."
  • Do you want to ask me stuff about exoplanets

Microtopics:

  • Growing your own mushrooms.
  • Aliens growing out of your mycelium.
  • Growing your own toxic mushrooms from murder mushroom kits.
  • The incredible mushroom picking season that COVID facilitated.
  • One of those styrofoam boxes from the fruit shop.
  • When a teenager says "ok boomer" to you and you're like "dude I'm thirty."
  • Signing up for the free trial of Amazon Prime so you can watch the live action Dora the Explorer movie.
  • Looking at the camera and asking the viewer "Can you say 'deadly neurotoxin?'"
  • Accidentally getting boxed in a crate and sent to the jungle.
  • A CG animated fox voiced by Benicio del Toro.
  • The nerd character getting beaten up in the background as the protagonist walks away.
  • Singing the poo song and burying your poo with the poo shovel while everybody else is fleeing from the hail of arrows.
  • Why Diego exists. (Because American audiences couldn't handle boys watching a show about a girl.)
  • How to stop Swyper from swiping.
  • ABC, the Australian analog of the BBC.
  • Percy the Perseverance Robot.
  • Whether it would be more exciting for the Mars Rover to land safely or explode in a fireball.
  • How to transfer between two different orbits.
  • Making a beeline for Mars.
  • Attaching a broom to Perseverance to sweep the dust off of Opportunity's solar panels.
  • Returning a soil sample from Mars.
  • Returning a rock sample from an asteroid.
  • Not being able to tell the difference between water and just a different colored dirt.
  • Signs of ancient microbes.
  • Choosing which way you want Mario to go and then scratching off a silver oval to see what happens.
  • Choosable Path Adventures.
  • ChooseCo is preparing to sue you right now.
  • Writing the novelization of Super Mario Bros. when all you have for reference is the instruction manual.
  • Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf.
  • A story from Jim's youth.
  • A little cardboard door that you open to see if you won a prize.
  • How children were so starved for entertainment in the 80s that scratch off Donkey Kong seemed cool.
  • Shrinking down a full size comic to fit in a cereal box so you need to read it with a microscope.
  • Magazines that are printed with that red/blue 3D effect that doesn't quite work.
  • A sponge pen with reactive ink in it that you brush against the seemingly blank page to reveal clues.
  • How the "Yes & Know" invisible ink puzzle books have a completely different atrocious pun for a title in Australia, "Mr. Mystery."
  • Knowing your parents really like you if you get a Scrooge McDuck comic.
  • How to find a drip coffee maker in Australia.
  • Going to a McDonald's in the 1980s to try out your novelty lamb and carrots in the drip coffee maker recipe, because there's nowhere else to find a drip coffee maker in Australia.
  • Someone giving you a drip coffee machine as a gift and you're like "what the hell am I gonna do with this" and then you remember that wild mushroom risotto coffee machine recipe.
  • Comparing your "no and" current guest to the guest who tried microwaving Coca Cola during the episode.
  • An American lady on TikTok showing you all the wrong ways to make common British food.
  • The best exoplanet.
  • Eyeball planets.
  • Tidally locked planets possibly being habitable at The Terminator.
  • Using our scientific expertise to turn the moon into an eyeball.
  • Detecting exoplanets via periodic dimming of stars.
  • A weird little ice world.
  • An exoplanet named "Steve" that has wronged you in some way.
  • Exoplanet naming conventions.
  • Tasking Reddit with naming all 4,300 known exoplanets.
  • Hundreds of hypothetical dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt.
  • Taking a two year break from Twitter and feeling much better.
  • Rescuing greyhounds.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Dora the Explorer and the City of Gold was a delightful surprise
  • We're about to land another rover on Mars and that is super way cool
    • Michelle: "Just clarifying that most discarded rocket stages don't end up in low-Earth orbit forever, they're designed to deorbit and burn up on atmospheric reentry. Sometimes things just go a bit awry."
  • Scratch-off Donkey Kong
  • Ville asks "Tangential to dishwasher salmon, there are multiple coffee maker cookbooks, including a Finnish one that includes recipes like lamb and carrots in balsamic dressing, and wild mushroom risotto."
  • Do you want to ask me stuff about exoplanets

Microtopics:

  • Growing your own mushrooms.
  • Aliens growing out of your mycelium.
  • Growing your own toxic mushrooms from murder mushroom kits.
  • The incredible mushroom picking season that COVID facilitated.
  • One of those styrofoam boxes from the fruit shop.
  • When a teenager says "ok boomer" to you and you're like "dude I'm thirty."
  • Signing up for the free trial of Amazon Prime so you can watch the live action Dora the Explorer movie.
  • Looking at the camera and asking the viewer "Can you say 'deadly neurotoxin?'"
  • Accidentally getting boxed in a crate and sent to the jungle.
  • A CG animated fox voiced by Benicio del Toro.
  • The nerd character getting beaten up in the background as the protagonist walks away.
  • Singing the poo song and burying your poo with the poo shovel while everybody else is fleeing from the hail of arrows.
  • Why Diego exists. (Because American audiences couldn't handle boys watching a show about a girl.)
  • How to stop Swyper from swiping.
  • ABC, the Australian analog of the BBC.
  • Percy the Perseverance Robot.
  • Whether it would be more exciting for the Mars Rover to land safely or explode in a fireball.
  • How to transfer between two different orbits.
  • Making a beeline for Mars.
  • Attaching a broom to Perseverance to sweep the dust off of Opportunity's solar panels.
  • Returning a soil sample from Mars.
  • Returning a rock sample from an asteroid.
  • Not being able to tell the difference between water and just a different colored dirt.
  • Signs of ancient microbes.
  • Choosing which way you want Mario to go and then scratching off a silver oval to see what happens.
  • Choosable Path Adventures.
  • ChooseCo is preparing to sue you right now.
  • Writing the novelization of Super Mario Bros. when all you have for reference is the instruction manual.
  • Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf.
  • A story from Jim's youth.
  • A little cardboard door that you open to see if you won a prize.
  • How children were so starved for entertainment in the 80s that scratch off Donkey Kong seemed cool.
  • Shrinking down a full size comic to fit in a cereal box so you need to read it with a microscope.
  • Magazines that are printed with that red/blue 3D effect that doesn't quite work.
  • A sponge pen with reactive ink in it that you brush against the seemingly blank page to reveal clues.
  • How the "Yes & Know" invisible ink puzzle books have a completely different atrocious pun for a title in Australia, "Mr. Mystery."
  • Knowing your parents really like you if you get a Scrooge McDuck comic.
  • How to find a drip coffee maker in Australia.
  • Going to a McDonald's in the 1980s to try out your novelty lamb and carrots in the drip coffee maker recipe, because there's nowhere else to find a drip coffee maker in Australia.
  • Someone giving you a drip coffee machine as a gift and you're like "what the hell am I gonna do with this" and then you remember that wild mushroom risotto coffee machine recipe.
  • Comparing your "no and" current guest to the guest who tried microwaving Coca Cola during the episode.
  • An American lady on TikTok showing you all the wrong ways to make common British food.
  • The best exoplanet.
  • Eyeball planets.
  • Tidally locked planets possibly being habitable at The Terminator.
  • Using our scientific expertise to turn the moon into an eyeball.
  • Detecting exoplanets via periodic dimming of stars.
  • A weird little ice world.
  • An exoplanet named "Steve" that has wronged you in some way.
  • Exoplanet naming conventions.
  • Tasking Reddit with naming all 4,300 known exoplanets.
  • Hundreds of hypothetical dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt.
  • Taking a two year break from Twitter and feeling much better.
  • Rescuing greyhounds.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+iu7KZ_va ]]> Jim Stormdancer 71. There's No Chicken Nine Because Chicken Six Seven Ate Nine https://topiclords.com/theres-no-chicken-nine-because-chicken-six-seven-ate-nine 56ee0436-2cac-4c1f-9077-a2a054ff2579 Mon, 01 Mar 2021 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Elena and Quil. We discuss being compelled to sing along, being the only person at a concert, a spirograph for your butt, legacy board games, weird sleeping apparatodes, and the logistics of delivering live frogs. 1:07:43 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Elena
  • Quil

Topics:

  • Some people put on music and then just talk over it instead of singing along?? Why
  • Being the only person in a movie theater/concert
  • A Spirograph but for your butt
  • Daniel asks "Legacy board games such as Pandemic Legacy or Gloomhaven."
  • Weird sleeping apparatuses
  • "House Special Live Frog in Hot Stone Pot" on the delivery menu

Microtopics:

  • A girl who is raised as a boy in pre-revolutionary France and becomes Marie Antoinette's guard.
  • Turn of the millennium club music.
  • Finding out that Itsy Bitsy Spider has been about perseverance all this time.
  • Having to restrain yourself from singing along when you're at the opera.
  • Trying to eat dinner but you can't eat because you need to sing along to your sea shanty playlist.
  • Trying to eat bites of dinner during the verses because you keep having to sing along to the choruses.
  • Properties of sea shanties.
  • Having a different song for every task.
  • Everybody performing music before recorded music was a thing, because that was how you had music in your life.
  • The horrible historical handwriting that historians never show you.
  • Celebrating the new decade with Cats (2019) and when you walk out of the theater you're the only person in the building.
  • Seeing Pitch Perfect 3 at 10pm on Christmas Eve and probably ruining a bunch of theater employees plans to have a party in that empty theater.
  • When you're the only person in the theater, asking the projectionist to pause the movie while you go to the bathroom.
  • Being the last person seeing an awful live band because everyone else walked out, and realizing that if you too walk out, they'll be playing to an empty room.
  • A drummer and a guitarist who are both playing too loud to hear each other.
  • The only live performance you've ever walked out on.
  • Pooping in a spiral.
  • Nature's sharpie.
  • The origin of topics.
  • A disc that you sit on.
  • A combination nausea inducer and butt spirograph.
  • Cake icing videos.
  • Asking your son what his life is a commentary on.
  • A shark embedded in a formaldehyde solution.
  • Work that aggressively annoys the art community.
  • Ironic cocaine.
  • Sneaking into the museum to hang up your own work.
  • Taking photos of a painting and then destroying the original and then taking photos of the photos and destroying the original artist.
  • Modifying the rules as you play the game.
  • Opening up more and more of your board game every time you play, like an Advent calendar.
  • A board game that you learn like a video game.
  • Memorizing a dozen page book before you can start playing a game.
  • Copyrighting the concept of a legacy.
  • Proposing to your wife by intentionally losing a board game over and over again.
  • The thing you were working towards screwing you over and now you have to undo it.
  • Trying to think of a board game you've played more than a few times.
  • Really looking forward to a board game and finally getting it and deciding to just watch your friends play.
  • Whether it's apparati or apparatodes.
  • The doublet of apparat.
  • Wanting to be hyper correct in everything you do.
  • Buying a tent to go over your bed because your blackout curtains aren't cutting it.
  • Buying a bunch of weird pillows to compensate for the position your arms automatically get into when you sleep.
  • How CPAP machines all have a SIM card and phone home with your sleep behavior and there's no way to turn it off.
  • Nasal pillows.
  • Sleeping with a weird contraption blowing air into your face constantly.
  • Discovering that it is much easier to fall asleep when you are very tired at the end of the day.
  • Ranking your morningness and eveningness.
  • Sleeping in a hammock.
  • Making a nest of pillows around you.
  • Putting on your velcro pajamas and jumping onto the velcro wall to fall asleep.
  • Your velcro bed waking you up with a loud ripping sound every time you switch positions.
  • Time-release velcro.
  • Ice velcro.
  • Making a salt igloo at the salt flats.
  • A weighted blanket that is so heavy you can't get up until a crane rescues you.
  • Sleeping under a chainmail sheet.
  • A quilt made out of beanbags.
  • The first thing you searched for when you got on the internet.
  • Youtube videos about your idealized farm life.
  • Ordering a pet frog from your Szechuan delivery menu.
  • Getting Hot Pot delivered and the Pot arrives cold.
  • Ordering Chicken 65 because there are no other numbered items on the menu.
  • Not wanting to eat animals whole because there's poop in there.
  • Frog Fractions 65.
  • If Chicken 6 was so good, why isn't there a Chicken 6 5?
  • A Kidz Bop version of Ocean's 11.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Elena
  • Quil

Topics:

  • Some people put on music and then just talk over it instead of singing along?? Why
  • Being the only person in a movie theater/concert
  • A Spirograph but for your butt
  • Daniel asks "Legacy board games such as Pandemic Legacy or Gloomhaven."
  • Weird sleeping apparatuses
  • "House Special Live Frog in Hot Stone Pot" on the delivery menu

Microtopics:

  • A girl who is raised as a boy in pre-revolutionary France and becomes Marie Antoinette's guard.
  • Turn of the millennium club music.
  • Finding out that Itsy Bitsy Spider has been about perseverance all this time.
  • Having to restrain yourself from singing along when you're at the opera.
  • Trying to eat dinner but you can't eat because you need to sing along to your sea shanty playlist.
  • Trying to eat bites of dinner during the verses because you keep having to sing along to the choruses.
  • Properties of sea shanties.
  • Having a different song for every task.
  • Everybody performing music before recorded music was a thing, because that was how you had music in your life.
  • The horrible historical handwriting that historians never show you.
  • Celebrating the new decade with Cats (2019) and when you walk out of the theater you're the only person in the building.
  • Seeing Pitch Perfect 3 at 10pm on Christmas Eve and probably ruining a bunch of theater employees plans to have a party in that empty theater.
  • When you're the only person in the theater, asking the projectionist to pause the movie while you go to the bathroom.
  • Being the last person seeing an awful live band because everyone else walked out, and realizing that if you too walk out, they'll be playing to an empty room.
  • A drummer and a guitarist who are both playing too loud to hear each other.
  • The only live performance you've ever walked out on.
  • Pooping in a spiral.
  • Nature's sharpie.
  • The origin of topics.
  • A disc that you sit on.
  • A combination nausea inducer and butt spirograph.
  • Cake icing videos.
  • Asking your son what his life is a commentary on.
  • A shark embedded in a formaldehyde solution.
  • Work that aggressively annoys the art community.
  • Ironic cocaine.
  • Sneaking into the museum to hang up your own work.
  • Taking photos of a painting and then destroying the original and then taking photos of the photos and destroying the original artist.
  • Modifying the rules as you play the game.
  • Opening up more and more of your board game every time you play, like an Advent calendar.
  • A board game that you learn like a video game.
  • Memorizing a dozen page book before you can start playing a game.
  • Copyrighting the concept of a legacy.
  • Proposing to your wife by intentionally losing a board game over and over again.
  • The thing you were working towards screwing you over and now you have to undo it.
  • Trying to think of a board game you've played more than a few times.
  • Really looking forward to a board game and finally getting it and deciding to just watch your friends play.
  • Whether it's apparati or apparatodes.
  • The doublet of apparat.
  • Wanting to be hyper correct in everything you do.
  • Buying a tent to go over your bed because your blackout curtains aren't cutting it.
  • Buying a bunch of weird pillows to compensate for the position your arms automatically get into when you sleep.
  • How CPAP machines all have a SIM card and phone home with your sleep behavior and there's no way to turn it off.
  • Nasal pillows.
  • Sleeping with a weird contraption blowing air into your face constantly.
  • Discovering that it is much easier to fall asleep when you are very tired at the end of the day.
  • Ranking your morningness and eveningness.
  • Sleeping in a hammock.
  • Making a nest of pillows around you.
  • Putting on your velcro pajamas and jumping onto the velcro wall to fall asleep.
  • Your velcro bed waking you up with a loud ripping sound every time you switch positions.
  • Time-release velcro.
  • Ice velcro.
  • Making a salt igloo at the salt flats.
  • A weighted blanket that is so heavy you can't get up until a crane rescues you.
  • Sleeping under a chainmail sheet.
  • A quilt made out of beanbags.
  • The first thing you searched for when you got on the internet.
  • Youtube videos about your idealized farm life.
  • Ordering a pet frog from your Szechuan delivery menu.
  • Getting Hot Pot delivered and the Pot arrives cold.
  • Ordering Chicken 65 because there are no other numbered items on the menu.
  • Not wanting to eat animals whole because there's poop in there.
  • Frog Fractions 65.
  • If Chicken 6 was so good, why isn't there a Chicken 6 5?
  • A Kidz Bop version of Ocean's 11.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Elena
  • Quil

Topics:

  • Some people put on music and then just talk over it instead of singing along?? Why
  • Being the only person in a movie theater/concert
  • A Spirograph but for your butt
  • Daniel asks "Legacy board games such as Pandemic Legacy or Gloomhaven."
  • Weird sleeping apparatuses
  • "House Special Live Frog in Hot Stone Pot" on the delivery menu

Microtopics:

  • A girl who is raised as a boy in pre-revolutionary France and becomes Marie Antoinette's guard.
  • Turn of the millennium club music.
  • Finding out that Itsy Bitsy Spider has been about perseverance all this time.
  • Having to restrain yourself from singing along when you're at the opera.
  • Trying to eat dinner but you can't eat because you need to sing along to your sea shanty playlist.
  • Trying to eat bites of dinner during the verses because you keep having to sing along to the choruses.
  • Properties of sea shanties.
  • Having a different song for every task.
  • Everybody performing music before recorded music was a thing, because that was how you had music in your life.
  • The horrible historical handwriting that historians never show you.
  • Celebrating the new decade with Cats (2019) and when you walk out of the theater you're the only person in the building.
  • Seeing Pitch Perfect 3 at 10pm on Christmas Eve and probably ruining a bunch of theater employees plans to have a party in that empty theater.
  • When you're the only person in the theater, asking the projectionist to pause the movie while you go to the bathroom.
  • Being the last person seeing an awful live band because everyone else walked out, and realizing that if you too walk out, they'll be playing to an empty room.
  • A drummer and a guitarist who are both playing too loud to hear each other.
  • The only live performance you've ever walked out on.
  • Pooping in a spiral.
  • Nature's sharpie.
  • The origin of topics.
  • A disc that you sit on.
  • A combination nausea inducer and butt spirograph.
  • Cake icing videos.
  • Asking your son what his life is a commentary on.
  • A shark embedded in a formaldehyde solution.
  • Work that aggressively annoys the art community.
  • Ironic cocaine.
  • Sneaking into the museum to hang up your own work.
  • Taking photos of a painting and then destroying the original and then taking photos of the photos and destroying the original artist.
  • Modifying the rules as you play the game.
  • Opening up more and more of your board game every time you play, like an Advent calendar.
  • A board game that you learn like a video game.
  • Memorizing a dozen page book before you can start playing a game.
  • Copyrighting the concept of a legacy.
  • Proposing to your wife by intentionally losing a board game over and over again.
  • The thing you were working towards screwing you over and now you have to undo it.
  • Trying to think of a board game you've played more than a few times.
  • Really looking forward to a board game and finally getting it and deciding to just watch your friends play.
  • Whether it's apparati or apparatodes.
  • The doublet of apparat.
  • Wanting to be hyper correct in everything you do.
  • Buying a tent to go over your bed because your blackout curtains aren't cutting it.
  • Buying a bunch of weird pillows to compensate for the position your arms automatically get into when you sleep.
  • How CPAP machines all have a SIM card and phone home with your sleep behavior and there's no way to turn it off.
  • Nasal pillows.
  • Sleeping with a weird contraption blowing air into your face constantly.
  • Discovering that it is much easier to fall asleep when you are very tired at the end of the day.
  • Ranking your morningness and eveningness.
  • Sleeping in a hammock.
  • Making a nest of pillows around you.
  • Putting on your velcro pajamas and jumping onto the velcro wall to fall asleep.
  • Your velcro bed waking you up with a loud ripping sound every time you switch positions.
  • Time-release velcro.
  • Ice velcro.
  • Making a salt igloo at the salt flats.
  • A weighted blanket that is so heavy you can't get up until a crane rescues you.
  • Sleeping under a chainmail sheet.
  • A quilt made out of beanbags.
  • The first thing you searched for when you got on the internet.
  • Youtube videos about your idealized farm life.
  • Ordering a pet frog from your Szechuan delivery menu.
  • Getting Hot Pot delivered and the Pot arrives cold.
  • Ordering Chicken 65 because there are no other numbered items on the menu.
  • Not wanting to eat animals whole because there's poop in there.
  • Frog Fractions 65.
  • If Chicken 6 was so good, why isn't there a Chicken 6 5?
  • A Kidz Bop version of Ocean's 11.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+8qgmOekn ]]> Jim Stormdancer 70. The Cow Tools Experience https://topiclords.com/the-cow-tools-experience fb839d11-0f77-483f-bda8-c08c66b56d2f Mon, 22 Feb 2021 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: James and Jesse. We discuss where Nazi war criminals live, What's Michael?, the other cartoon fat cat, the patent for Tapper, consuming twice your body weight in a day, realizing pop cans are 355 mL because that's 12 US fluid ounces, and macaroni and cheese around the world. 57:21 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • An oddly temperate day in the park in the middle of January.
  • Not necessarily recognizing the war criminal who lives in your town.
  • Checking the box that says "I did not do the Holocaust" on the immigration form.
  • How it takes 50 years to deport a Nazi from Canada.
  • Berlin, Canada.
  • Getting a steak and a beer with the 110 year old who works with you at the grocery store.
  • Where you go if you're really young and you want to become a war criminal.
  • A thing that is strange but also very ordinary.
  • Explaining Garfield.
  • Heathcliff, the other other fat orange cartoon cat.
  • Explaining cow tools.
  • Tools that don't really look like anything but it's the best a cow can do.
  • What it means when Heathcliff wears the gravy helmet.
  • When an ancient comic strip gets funny again because the original artist finally retired and got replaced by a Tumblr user.
  • Stealing all the fish from the fish counter and the vendor can't do anything about it because you're wearing a helmet that says "fish."
  • Scrolling a web page and discovering how many helmets Heathcliff has.
  • Managing the flow of mugs in this Space Invaders clone.
  • The best electromechanical bar game that triggers your trypophobia.
  • A story-heavy RPG adaptation of an electromechanical bar game.
  • Playing a story heavy game and wishing the story and the game parts were separable.
  • How magical girl shows and JRPGs both presentationally separate story from combat.
  • Taking the fight scenes from a robot combat show and writing new scenes where the robots are going to high school.
  • Learning to fly in place.
  • Becoming a hummingbird and learning to do what hummingbirds do.
  • Consuming the densest possible foods such as lead.
  • Assuming that iron is the densest element because it's at the Earth's core and must have sunk there.
  • Searching for densest foods and Google gives you the most nutrient dense foods, which is definitively not what you asked for.
  • Arctic explorers bringing sleds full of frozen butter to eat.
  • Eating your weight in salt every day.
  • Whether 1 milliliter of water weighs exactly one gram everywhere, or just in that locked vault in Paris.
  • The Canadian hotline you can call to report bars that serve you an American pint of beer.
  • The metric pint.
  • Ounces per ounce.
  • Writing to Stephen Wolfram to complain about the dry ounce.
  • That double gotcha bar trivia question about whether an ounce of feathers is lighter than an ounce of gold.
  • Europeans getting confused when Americans talk about calories when they mean kilocalories.
  • Using more significant digits than the speaker intended when doing unit conversion.
  • Whether someone saying "a thousand" to mean "a lot" is one significant digit or zero.
  • Whether in the Bible "forty" is used colloquially to mean "a lot."
  • Taking a dialect quiz that tries to guess where you're from but it doesn't know about Canada so it guesses you're from the American Midwest.
  • Whether recycling is still a thing or in fact ever was.
  • Keeping people employed at a factory sorting plastic for no particular reason.
  • Pasta and cheese being popular all over the world.
  • How Canadians have Kraft macaroni and cheese for dinner all the time.
  • The biscuit you eat!
  • How Pad Thai is a psyop.
  • Putting fish in a bucket and waiting until it becomes fish sauce.
  • Fear of discovering the fish flavor in fish sauce and ruining Thai food forever.
  • Putting fish sauce on pizza yourself because Domino's doesn't offer it as a topping.
  • Opening a Taco Bell in Mexico.
  • Asking not for whom the Baja Blasts.
  • A can of cream of mushroom soup inside of a Shepherd's Pie.
  • Another salty MSG flavored brown liquid.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • An oddly temperate day in the park in the middle of January.
  • Not necessarily recognizing the war criminal who lives in your town.
  • Checking the box that says "I did not do the Holocaust" on the immigration form.
  • How it takes 50 years to deport a Nazi from Canada.
  • Berlin, Canada.
  • Getting a steak and a beer with the 110 year old who works with you at the grocery store.
  • Where you go if you're really young and you want to become a war criminal.
  • A thing that is strange but also very ordinary.
  • Explaining Garfield.
  • Heathcliff, the other other fat orange cartoon cat.
  • Explaining cow tools.
  • Tools that don't really look like anything but it's the best a cow can do.
  • What it means when Heathcliff wears the gravy helmet.
  • When an ancient comic strip gets funny again because the original artist finally retired and got replaced by a Tumblr user.
  • Stealing all the fish from the fish counter and the vendor can't do anything about it because you're wearing a helmet that says "fish."
  • Scrolling a web page and discovering how many helmets Heathcliff has.
  • Managing the flow of mugs in this Space Invaders clone.
  • The best electromechanical bar game that triggers your trypophobia.
  • A story-heavy RPG adaptation of an electromechanical bar game.
  • Playing a story heavy game and wishing the story and the game parts were separable.
  • How magical girl shows and JRPGs both presentationally separate story from combat.
  • Taking the fight scenes from a robot combat show and writing new scenes where the robots are going to high school.
  • Learning to fly in place.
  • Becoming a hummingbird and learning to do what hummingbirds do.
  • Consuming the densest possible foods such as lead.
  • Assuming that iron is the densest element because it's at the Earth's core and must have sunk there.
  • Searching for densest foods and Google gives you the most nutrient dense foods, which is definitively not what you asked for.
  • Arctic explorers bringing sleds full of frozen butter to eat.
  • Eating your weight in salt every day.
  • Whether 1 milliliter of water weighs exactly one gram everywhere, or just in that locked vault in Paris.
  • The Canadian hotline you can call to report bars that serve you an American pint of beer.
  • The metric pint.
  • Ounces per ounce.
  • Writing to Stephen Wolfram to complain about the dry ounce.
  • That double gotcha bar trivia question about whether an ounce of feathers is lighter than an ounce of gold.
  • Europeans getting confused when Americans talk about calories when they mean kilocalories.
  • Using more significant digits than the speaker intended when doing unit conversion.
  • Whether someone saying "a thousand" to mean "a lot" is one significant digit or zero.
  • Whether in the Bible "forty" is used colloquially to mean "a lot."
  • Taking a dialect quiz that tries to guess where you're from but it doesn't know about Canada so it guesses you're from the American Midwest.
  • Whether recycling is still a thing or in fact ever was.
  • Keeping people employed at a factory sorting plastic for no particular reason.
  • Pasta and cheese being popular all over the world.
  • How Canadians have Kraft macaroni and cheese for dinner all the time.
  • The biscuit you eat!
  • How Pad Thai is a psyop.
  • Putting fish in a bucket and waiting until it becomes fish sauce.
  • Fear of discovering the fish flavor in fish sauce and ruining Thai food forever.
  • Putting fish sauce on pizza yourself because Domino's doesn't offer it as a topping.
  • Opening a Taco Bell in Mexico.
  • Asking not for whom the Baja Blasts.
  • A can of cream of mushroom soup inside of a Shepherd's Pie.
  • Another salty MSG flavored brown liquid.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • An oddly temperate day in the park in the middle of January.
  • Not necessarily recognizing the war criminal who lives in your town.
  • Checking the box that says "I did not do the Holocaust" on the immigration form.
  • How it takes 50 years to deport a Nazi from Canada.
  • Berlin, Canada.
  • Getting a steak and a beer with the 110 year old who works with you at the grocery store.
  • Where you go if you're really young and you want to become a war criminal.
  • A thing that is strange but also very ordinary.
  • Explaining Garfield.
  • Heathcliff, the other other fat orange cartoon cat.
  • Explaining cow tools.
  • Tools that don't really look like anything but it's the best a cow can do.
  • What it means when Heathcliff wears the gravy helmet.
  • When an ancient comic strip gets funny again because the original artist finally retired and got replaced by a Tumblr user.
  • Stealing all the fish from the fish counter and the vendor can't do anything about it because you're wearing a helmet that says "fish."
  • Scrolling a web page and discovering how many helmets Heathcliff has.
  • Managing the flow of mugs in this Space Invaders clone.
  • The best electromechanical bar game that triggers your trypophobia.
  • A story-heavy RPG adaptation of an electromechanical bar game.
  • Playing a story heavy game and wishing the story and the game parts were separable.
  • How magical girl shows and JRPGs both presentationally separate story from combat.
  • Taking the fight scenes from a robot combat show and writing new scenes where the robots are going to high school.
  • Learning to fly in place.
  • Becoming a hummingbird and learning to do what hummingbirds do.
  • Consuming the densest possible foods such as lead.
  • Assuming that iron is the densest element because it's at the Earth's core and must have sunk there.
  • Searching for densest foods and Google gives you the most nutrient dense foods, which is definitively not what you asked for.
  • Arctic explorers bringing sleds full of frozen butter to eat.
  • Eating your weight in salt every day.
  • Whether 1 milliliter of water weighs exactly one gram everywhere, or just in that locked vault in Paris.
  • The Canadian hotline you can call to report bars that serve you an American pint of beer.
  • The metric pint.
  • Ounces per ounce.
  • Writing to Stephen Wolfram to complain about the dry ounce.
  • That double gotcha bar trivia question about whether an ounce of feathers is lighter than an ounce of gold.
  • Europeans getting confused when Americans talk about calories when they mean kilocalories.
  • Using more significant digits than the speaker intended when doing unit conversion.
  • Whether someone saying "a thousand" to mean "a lot" is one significant digit or zero.
  • Whether in the Bible "forty" is used colloquially to mean "a lot."
  • Taking a dialect quiz that tries to guess where you're from but it doesn't know about Canada so it guesses you're from the American Midwest.
  • Whether recycling is still a thing or in fact ever was.
  • Keeping people employed at a factory sorting plastic for no particular reason.
  • Pasta and cheese being popular all over the world.
  • How Canadians have Kraft macaroni and cheese for dinner all the time.
  • The biscuit you eat!
  • How Pad Thai is a psyop.
  • Putting fish in a bucket and waiting until it becomes fish sauce.
  • Fear of discovering the fish flavor in fish sauce and ruining Thai food forever.
  • Putting fish sauce on pizza yourself because Domino's doesn't offer it as a topping.
  • Opening a Taco Bell in Mexico.
  • Asking not for whom the Baja Blasts.
  • A can of cream of mushroom soup inside of a Shepherd's Pie.
  • Another salty MSG flavored brown liquid.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+eicQbgl2 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 69. Wave-Cat Duality https://topiclords.com/wave-cat-duality ed238cd6-5f21-4ed0-9591-f6f036f04fbc Mon, 15 Feb 2021 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: Hallie and Jenni. We discuss tarot readings using meme templates, jellicle cats and the heaviside layer, Disney characters attending your funeral, lemonade candy, moose licking your car, jokes as motivation to learn, and unkomario and kintamario. 1:05:13 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Whether this is going to be a fun episode or if it's going to crash and burn after two minutes.
  • Trying to eat a watermelon in December and nature punishing you for your hubris.
  • A tarot deck of memes.
  • Describing memes in an audio medium.
  • Arby's.
  • Getting ASMR live on the podcast.
  • The Deck of Old Memes.
  • Where the horsey sauce comes out.
  • Your Arby's cups with a radioactive ghost.
  • The Loss Spread.
  • Literary analysis of a work of art, except it's a roguelike.
  • Jellicle cats.
  • Making noises even if you have nothing to say.
  • Loving Cats unironically except for the fatphobic one.
  • Advertisements for the stage musical Cats making it seem like Les Miserables, a show you go to to cry for three hours.
  • Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat.
  • Fantasizing that the hipster guy at the moustache wax store is your boyfriend.
  • Platonic forms that have been banished to earth and must prove themselves sufficiently perfect to return to the realm of ideas.
  • Whether pollicle is a back formation from jellicle.
  • Never having met a pollicle dog, nor watched a fever dream of a movie where they sing to you.
  • The good content that you can't keep it together through.
  • Reinforcing Goofy's head so that it doesn't fall into the casket when he kisses the body.
  • Burying you with a solar powered mp3 player so that you can hear "It's A Small World" on loop for eternity.
  • Hiring someone to be you from the past so they can have it out with Goofy dressed as the Ghost of Christmas Future at your funeral.
  • Planning the Best Funeral Ever.
  • Whether Disney is willing to DMCA takedown your novelty Disney funeral.
  • Our Cyberpunk Future being cool as heck and also unimaginably awful, like Lovecraft.
  • Our Cool Cyberpunk Future, where there are cool things and terrible things, and the rich people have the cool things, and you can try to steal them from them.
  • To what degree we got our Dystopian Cyberpunk Future because Jeff Bezos loved Neuromancer and wanted to make it happen for real.
  • Hiring Hiro Protagonist from Snow Crash to come to your funeral and kiss you on the lips, and getting a Meme Virus that persists through your death.
  • Hiring Tron Guy to come to your funeral and kiss you on the list.
  • Refusing to let Tron Guy see Tron Legacy at your movie theater because Ernest Cline would just buy the theater immediately.
  • Pickle brine that tastes a lot like peppery lemonade.
  • The hierarchy of sour candies.
  • Sour candy marketing in the 90s proclaiming that "your mom hates these!"
  • The difference between macaroons and macarons, and whether it exists.
  • The difference between pies and tarts, and whether it exists.
  • Graham cracker crust quiche.
  • The same podcast episode but you keep editing new guest commentary in so that gets longer and longer.
  • Not letting a moose lick your car, because their tongue might get stuck.
  • Driving away after the moose's tongue gets stuck to your bumper and the moose flies behind you like a kite.
  • Driving in bemoosed roads.
  • Driving away when a moose tries to lick your car.
  • Moose seeing a car and thinking "oh good a source of salt."
  • The hippos of the West.
  • Telling your child that every animal is imaginary so they can have the magical moment of discovering the truth over and over again.
  • Frightening a bear away by putting moose antlers on it and showing it a mirror.
  • Inventing and testing sour honey live on this podcast.
  • The patron saint of standing on your head.
  • A sour honey update: it's fine.
  • The new sour salty honey candy, "Are They Gonna Give Me That Sour Salty Honey?"
  • People and learning and why they do it.
  • The thing about jokes.
  • Putting a bunch of bad programming means on the classroom wall because students will want to understand the joke.
  • Learning a little about many things and becoming a generalist.
  • The only STEM person in this anatomy and physiology class making jokes about how the kidneys are a linked list.
  • A meme in the sense of making your calculator say "BOOBIES"
  • An extremely elaborate process for making it kinda look like Mario is pooping.
  • Duolingo finally paying off when you can discern which Mario is pooping and which Mario has testicles.
  • An official Nintendo product acknowledging the schoolyard meme where it looks like Mario is pooping.
  • Inventing new things to do with video games.
  • The Green Demon.
  • The essence of swag.
  • Memes with good cinematography.
  • Inventing rules to apply to yourself to make video games harder.
  • Beating Pokemon with all Woopers.
  • A problematic Kojima game?!
  • Opting out of having an adult name.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Whether this is going to be a fun episode or if it's going to crash and burn after two minutes.
  • Trying to eat a watermelon in December and nature punishing you for your hubris.
  • A tarot deck of memes.
  • Describing memes in an audio medium.
  • Arby's.
  • Getting ASMR live on the podcast.
  • The Deck of Old Memes.
  • Where the horsey sauce comes out.
  • Your Arby's cups with a radioactive ghost.
  • The Loss Spread.
  • Literary analysis of a work of art, except it's a roguelike.
  • Jellicle cats.
  • Making noises even if you have nothing to say.
  • Loving Cats unironically except for the fatphobic one.
  • Advertisements for the stage musical Cats making it seem like Les Miserables, a show you go to to cry for three hours.
  • Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat.
  • Fantasizing that the hipster guy at the moustache wax store is your boyfriend.
  • Platonic forms that have been banished to earth and must prove themselves sufficiently perfect to return to the realm of ideas.
  • Whether pollicle is a back formation from jellicle.
  • Never having met a pollicle dog, nor watched a fever dream of a movie where they sing to you.
  • The good content that you can't keep it together through.
  • Reinforcing Goofy's head so that it doesn't fall into the casket when he kisses the body.
  • Burying you with a solar powered mp3 player so that you can hear "It's A Small World" on loop for eternity.
  • Hiring someone to be you from the past so they can have it out with Goofy dressed as the Ghost of Christmas Future at your funeral.
  • Planning the Best Funeral Ever.
  • Whether Disney is willing to DMCA takedown your novelty Disney funeral.
  • Our Cyberpunk Future being cool as heck and also unimaginably awful, like Lovecraft.
  • Our Cool Cyberpunk Future, where there are cool things and terrible things, and the rich people have the cool things, and you can try to steal them from them.
  • To what degree we got our Dystopian Cyberpunk Future because Jeff Bezos loved Neuromancer and wanted to make it happen for real.
  • Hiring Hiro Protagonist from Snow Crash to come to your funeral and kiss you on the lips, and getting a Meme Virus that persists through your death.
  • Hiring Tron Guy to come to your funeral and kiss you on the list.
  • Refusing to let Tron Guy see Tron Legacy at your movie theater because Ernest Cline would just buy the theater immediately.
  • Pickle brine that tastes a lot like peppery lemonade.
  • The hierarchy of sour candies.
  • Sour candy marketing in the 90s proclaiming that "your mom hates these!"
  • The difference between macaroons and macarons, and whether it exists.
  • The difference between pies and tarts, and whether it exists.
  • Graham cracker crust quiche.
  • The same podcast episode but you keep editing new guest commentary in so that gets longer and longer.
  • Not letting a moose lick your car, because their tongue might get stuck.
  • Driving away after the moose's tongue gets stuck to your bumper and the moose flies behind you like a kite.
  • Driving in bemoosed roads.
  • Driving away when a moose tries to lick your car.
  • Moose seeing a car and thinking "oh good a source of salt."
  • The hippos of the West.
  • Telling your child that every animal is imaginary so they can have the magical moment of discovering the truth over and over again.
  • Frightening a bear away by putting moose antlers on it and showing it a mirror.
  • Inventing and testing sour honey live on this podcast.
  • The patron saint of standing on your head.
  • A sour honey update: it's fine.
  • The new sour salty honey candy, "Are They Gonna Give Me That Sour Salty Honey?"
  • People and learning and why they do it.
  • The thing about jokes.
  • Putting a bunch of bad programming means on the classroom wall because students will want to understand the joke.
  • Learning a little about many things and becoming a generalist.
  • The only STEM person in this anatomy and physiology class making jokes about how the kidneys are a linked list.
  • A meme in the sense of making your calculator say "BOOBIES"
  • An extremely elaborate process for making it kinda look like Mario is pooping.
  • Duolingo finally paying off when you can discern which Mario is pooping and which Mario has testicles.
  • An official Nintendo product acknowledging the schoolyard meme where it looks like Mario is pooping.
  • Inventing new things to do with video games.
  • The Green Demon.
  • The essence of swag.
  • Memes with good cinematography.
  • Inventing rules to apply to yourself to make video games harder.
  • Beating Pokemon with all Woopers.
  • A problematic Kojima game?!
  • Opting out of having an adult name.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Whether this is going to be a fun episode or if it's going to crash and burn after two minutes.
  • Trying to eat a watermelon in December and nature punishing you for your hubris.
  • A tarot deck of memes.
  • Describing memes in an audio medium.
  • Arby's.
  • Getting ASMR live on the podcast.
  • The Deck of Old Memes.
  • Where the horsey sauce comes out.
  • Your Arby's cups with a radioactive ghost.
  • The Loss Spread.
  • Literary analysis of a work of art, except it's a roguelike.
  • Jellicle cats.
  • Making noises even if you have nothing to say.
  • Loving Cats unironically except for the fatphobic one.
  • Advertisements for the stage musical Cats making it seem like Les Miserables, a show you go to to cry for three hours.
  • Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat.
  • Fantasizing that the hipster guy at the moustache wax store is your boyfriend.
  • Platonic forms that have been banished to earth and must prove themselves sufficiently perfect to return to the realm of ideas.
  • Whether pollicle is a back formation from jellicle.
  • Never having met a pollicle dog, nor watched a fever dream of a movie where they sing to you.
  • The good content that you can't keep it together through.
  • Reinforcing Goofy's head so that it doesn't fall into the casket when he kisses the body.
  • Burying you with a solar powered mp3 player so that you can hear "It's A Small World" on loop for eternity.
  • Hiring someone to be you from the past so they can have it out with Goofy dressed as the Ghost of Christmas Future at your funeral.
  • Planning the Best Funeral Ever.
  • Whether Disney is willing to DMCA takedown your novelty Disney funeral.
  • Our Cyberpunk Future being cool as heck and also unimaginably awful, like Lovecraft.
  • Our Cool Cyberpunk Future, where there are cool things and terrible things, and the rich people have the cool things, and you can try to steal them from them.
  • To what degree we got our Dystopian Cyberpunk Future because Jeff Bezos loved Neuromancer and wanted to make it happen for real.
  • Hiring Hiro Protagonist from Snow Crash to come to your funeral and kiss you on the lips, and getting a Meme Virus that persists through your death.
  • Hiring Tron Guy to come to your funeral and kiss you on the list.
  • Refusing to let Tron Guy see Tron Legacy at your movie theater because Ernest Cline would just buy the theater immediately.
  • Pickle brine that tastes a lot like peppery lemonade.
  • The hierarchy of sour candies.
  • Sour candy marketing in the 90s proclaiming that "your mom hates these!"
  • The difference between macaroons and macarons, and whether it exists.
  • The difference between pies and tarts, and whether it exists.
  • Graham cracker crust quiche.
  • The same podcast episode but you keep editing new guest commentary in so that gets longer and longer.
  • Not letting a moose lick your car, because their tongue might get stuck.
  • Driving away after the moose's tongue gets stuck to your bumper and the moose flies behind you like a kite.
  • Driving in bemoosed roads.
  • Driving away when a moose tries to lick your car.
  • Moose seeing a car and thinking "oh good a source of salt."
  • The hippos of the West.
  • Telling your child that every animal is imaginary so they can have the magical moment of discovering the truth over and over again.
  • Frightening a bear away by putting moose antlers on it and showing it a mirror.
  • Inventing and testing sour honey live on this podcast.
  • The patron saint of standing on your head.
  • A sour honey update: it's fine.
  • The new sour salty honey candy, "Are They Gonna Give Me That Sour Salty Honey?"
  • People and learning and why they do it.
  • The thing about jokes.
  • Putting a bunch of bad programming means on the classroom wall because students will want to understand the joke.
  • Learning a little about many things and becoming a generalist.
  • The only STEM person in this anatomy and physiology class making jokes about how the kidneys are a linked list.
  • A meme in the sense of making your calculator say "BOOBIES"
  • An extremely elaborate process for making it kinda look like Mario is pooping.
  • Duolingo finally paying off when you can discern which Mario is pooping and which Mario has testicles.
  • An official Nintendo product acknowledging the schoolyard meme where it looks like Mario is pooping.
  • Inventing new things to do with video games.
  • The Green Demon.
  • The essence of swag.
  • Memes with good cinematography.
  • Inventing rules to apply to yourself to make video games harder.
  • Beating Pokemon with all Woopers.
  • A problematic Kojima game?!
  • Opting out of having an adult name.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+ub7QEr04 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 68. Unprotected Left in a Hard Vacuum https://topiclords.com/unprotected-left-in-a-hard-vacuum ce6fa17d-ed4c-4b2b-b522-1e7a9b72a09d Mon, 08 Feb 2021 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Mara and Derek. We discuss sparing children from our own nostalgia, working libraries of famous people getting acquired by institutions, flouting the toilet mimics, toddler sense of humor, and toddlers who are incredible at video games. 1:04:39 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Should we spare our children from our own game nostalgia?
  • Working libraries of famous people getting acquired by institutions
  • Winston's latest thing is that before peeing in the potty he'll find a hairball on the floor and put it in the potty so he can pee on it
  • John asks "In watching my 3 year old develop her own sense of comedy I have realized that comedy might actually be a kind of innate human reaction to interesting incongruity. She likes toilet humor quite a lot despite my partner and I never liking those kinds of jokes. However, I think she likes it because it's very easy for her to understand something like singing 'Happy Birthday to Poop!' whereas other subtler kinds of humor are out of her reach right now."
  • Toddlers who secretly compete in pro-gaming tournaments

Microtopics:

  • Libby.
  • A really good way to use your public library without leaving your house.
  • Getting one of those hollowed out books from a Poirot novel where the vial of poison goes except you put your phone in there so people think you're reading books rather than looking at your phone.
  • Librivox.
  • Listening to some randos reading public domain books.
  • Square jawed scientists taking on the world and neither the government nor their frail wives can hold them back.
  • Trying to show your four year old Wind Waker and he's annoyed that it's not the Wind Waker remaster for Wii U.
  • Subtly guiding your child away from games that prey on gambling addiction.
  • Planning a closed environment where you can introduce the history of video games to your child in chronological order, and then realizing that that's how we got modern gamers.
  • How to revisit your nostalgia when it's locked inside early Macintosh educational games with bad emulation support.
  • Wandering isolated in a sad soundscape.
  • Whether World of Warcraft caused your depression or whether losing your job (because of World of Warcraft) caused your depression.
  • Eve Online.
  • Going into nullsec where there is no sec.
  • Forgetting about Eve Online for ten years and coming back to find that your avatar has been practicing whittling cedar this entire time and is now a grandmaster cedar whittler.
  • Going to turning left school for five years.
  • Collecting all the books in a famous author's working library so scholars can catalogue all the Cheeto fingerprints.
  • Studying the working library of the greatest American novelist of all time and it's just autographed copies of all the Twilight novels and the board game "Wits and Wagers."
  • Filling your working library with books to impress the scholars studying your life in a hundred years.
  • Giving your source code to the Video Game History Foundation for safe keeping.
  • The difficulty of preserving the history of online video games.
  • Whether an economy based on trading nudes can sustain your video game preservation endowment.
  • That time of year when Wikipedia is begging for the nudes again.
  • Toilet Mimics
  • Whether you have to pee on Cheerios or whether any cereal will do.
  • A man's irrepressible need to piss on a fly.
  • Monetizing urination.
  • The alternate reality where all video games are controlled by a stream of urine, and some fringe developers are making games you control with your hands, and people are like "Is that even a game? You don't even piss on it!"
  • Being cornered at a party by an inventor describing his idea for a toilet seat that vibrates at the brown note.
  • The brown note as a consent issue.
  • All-singing, all-dancing, all-peeing.
  • Calling your mom on the toilet phone so she can whistle at the frequency that makes you pee.
  • Two-factor authentication for pooping.
  • When you can't poop because your smart toilet can't connect to the wifi.
  • Toilet uptime.
  • Every child independently inventing the "happy birthday to poop" song.
  • Singing "happy birthday to poop" when the poop has no way to blow out the candles.
  • The fecal stage of the Freudian theory of child development.
  • The calculus of why we don't find the same joke funny again.
  • A gingerbread house that is an architect's nightmare.
  • Adults and children making jokes past each other.
  • Pete of the Chickens.
  • Four year olds who are incredibly good at Rocket League.
  • Swearing that you are only four years old so Epic doesn't kick you out of the Rocket League League.
  • How physics-driven video games are the perfect constrained environment for a child to excel in.
  • Whether your Rocket League skills translate to any other aspect of your life.
  • A four year old gamer complaining about noobs.
  • Saying "don't forget to like comment and subscribe" instead of "goodbye."
  • Being leery of playing video games because every time you touch a controller the truck video stops.
  • Texting your grandmother a thousand emojis.
  • An app that lets your four year old pretend to text his grandma a thousand emojis.
  • Your true self on the Fediverse.
  • The realest person on Mastodon.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Should we spare our children from our own game nostalgia?
  • Working libraries of famous people getting acquired by institutions
  • Winston's latest thing is that before peeing in the potty he'll find a hairball on the floor and put it in the potty so he can pee on it
  • John asks "In watching my 3 year old develop her own sense of comedy I have realized that comedy might actually be a kind of innate human reaction to interesting incongruity. She likes toilet humor quite a lot despite my partner and I never liking those kinds of jokes. However, I think she likes it because it's very easy for her to understand something like singing 'Happy Birthday to Poop!' whereas other subtler kinds of humor are out of her reach right now."
  • Toddlers who secretly compete in pro-gaming tournaments

Microtopics:

  • Libby.
  • A really good way to use your public library without leaving your house.
  • Getting one of those hollowed out books from a Poirot novel where the vial of poison goes except you put your phone in there so people think you're reading books rather than looking at your phone.
  • Librivox.
  • Listening to some randos reading public domain books.
  • Square jawed scientists taking on the world and neither the government nor their frail wives can hold them back.
  • Trying to show your four year old Wind Waker and he's annoyed that it's not the Wind Waker remaster for Wii U.
  • Subtly guiding your child away from games that prey on gambling addiction.
  • Planning a closed environment where you can introduce the history of video games to your child in chronological order, and then realizing that that's how we got modern gamers.
  • How to revisit your nostalgia when it's locked inside early Macintosh educational games with bad emulation support.
  • Wandering isolated in a sad soundscape.
  • Whether World of Warcraft caused your depression or whether losing your job (because of World of Warcraft) caused your depression.
  • Eve Online.
  • Going into nullsec where there is no sec.
  • Forgetting about Eve Online for ten years and coming back to find that your avatar has been practicing whittling cedar this entire time and is now a grandmaster cedar whittler.
  • Going to turning left school for five years.
  • Collecting all the books in a famous author's working library so scholars can catalogue all the Cheeto fingerprints.
  • Studying the working library of the greatest American novelist of all time and it's just autographed copies of all the Twilight novels and the board game "Wits and Wagers."
  • Filling your working library with books to impress the scholars studying your life in a hundred years.
  • Giving your source code to the Video Game History Foundation for safe keeping.
  • The difficulty of preserving the history of online video games.
  • Whether an economy based on trading nudes can sustain your video game preservation endowment.
  • That time of year when Wikipedia is begging for the nudes again.
  • Toilet Mimics
  • Whether you have to pee on Cheerios or whether any cereal will do.
  • A man's irrepressible need to piss on a fly.
  • Monetizing urination.
  • The alternate reality where all video games are controlled by a stream of urine, and some fringe developers are making games you control with your hands, and people are like "Is that even a game? You don't even piss on it!"
  • Being cornered at a party by an inventor describing his idea for a toilet seat that vibrates at the brown note.
  • The brown note as a consent issue.
  • All-singing, all-dancing, all-peeing.
  • Calling your mom on the toilet phone so she can whistle at the frequency that makes you pee.
  • Two-factor authentication for pooping.
  • When you can't poop because your smart toilet can't connect to the wifi.
  • Toilet uptime.
  • Every child independently inventing the "happy birthday to poop" song.
  • Singing "happy birthday to poop" when the poop has no way to blow out the candles.
  • The fecal stage of the Freudian theory of child development.
  • The calculus of why we don't find the same joke funny again.
  • A gingerbread house that is an architect's nightmare.
  • Adults and children making jokes past each other.
  • Pete of the Chickens.
  • Four year olds who are incredibly good at Rocket League.
  • Swearing that you are only four years old so Epic doesn't kick you out of the Rocket League League.
  • How physics-driven video games are the perfect constrained environment for a child to excel in.
  • Whether your Rocket League skills translate to any other aspect of your life.
  • A four year old gamer complaining about noobs.
  • Saying "don't forget to like comment and subscribe" instead of "goodbye."
  • Being leery of playing video games because every time you touch a controller the truck video stops.
  • Texting your grandmother a thousand emojis.
  • An app that lets your four year old pretend to text his grandma a thousand emojis.
  • Your true self on the Fediverse.
  • The realest person on Mastodon.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Should we spare our children from our own game nostalgia?
  • Working libraries of famous people getting acquired by institutions
  • Winston's latest thing is that before peeing in the potty he'll find a hairball on the floor and put it in the potty so he can pee on it
  • John asks "In watching my 3 year old develop her own sense of comedy I have realized that comedy might actually be a kind of innate human reaction to interesting incongruity. She likes toilet humor quite a lot despite my partner and I never liking those kinds of jokes. However, I think she likes it because it's very easy for her to understand something like singing 'Happy Birthday to Poop!' whereas other subtler kinds of humor are out of her reach right now."
  • Toddlers who secretly compete in pro-gaming tournaments

Microtopics:

  • Libby.
  • A really good way to use your public library without leaving your house.
  • Getting one of those hollowed out books from a Poirot novel where the vial of poison goes except you put your phone in there so people think you're reading books rather than looking at your phone.
  • Librivox.
  • Listening to some randos reading public domain books.
  • Square jawed scientists taking on the world and neither the government nor their frail wives can hold them back.
  • Trying to show your four year old Wind Waker and he's annoyed that it's not the Wind Waker remaster for Wii U.
  • Subtly guiding your child away from games that prey on gambling addiction.
  • Planning a closed environment where you can introduce the history of video games to your child in chronological order, and then realizing that that's how we got modern gamers.
  • How to revisit your nostalgia when it's locked inside early Macintosh educational games with bad emulation support.
  • Wandering isolated in a sad soundscape.
  • Whether World of Warcraft caused your depression or whether losing your job (because of World of Warcraft) caused your depression.
  • Eve Online.
  • Going into nullsec where there is no sec.
  • Forgetting about Eve Online for ten years and coming back to find that your avatar has been practicing whittling cedar this entire time and is now a grandmaster cedar whittler.
  • Going to turning left school for five years.
  • Collecting all the books in a famous author's working library so scholars can catalogue all the Cheeto fingerprints.
  • Studying the working library of the greatest American novelist of all time and it's just autographed copies of all the Twilight novels and the board game "Wits and Wagers."
  • Filling your working library with books to impress the scholars studying your life in a hundred years.
  • Giving your source code to the Video Game History Foundation for safe keeping.
  • The difficulty of preserving the history of online video games.
  • Whether an economy based on trading nudes can sustain your video game preservation endowment.
  • That time of year when Wikipedia is begging for the nudes again.
  • Toilet Mimics
  • Whether you have to pee on Cheerios or whether any cereal will do.
  • A man's irrepressible need to piss on a fly.
  • Monetizing urination.
  • The alternate reality where all video games are controlled by a stream of urine, and some fringe developers are making games you control with your hands, and people are like "Is that even a game? You don't even piss on it!"
  • Being cornered at a party by an inventor describing his idea for a toilet seat that vibrates at the brown note.
  • The brown note as a consent issue.
  • All-singing, all-dancing, all-peeing.
  • Calling your mom on the toilet phone so she can whistle at the frequency that makes you pee.
  • Two-factor authentication for pooping.
  • When you can't poop because your smart toilet can't connect to the wifi.
  • Toilet uptime.
  • Every child independently inventing the "happy birthday to poop" song.
  • Singing "happy birthday to poop" when the poop has no way to blow out the candles.
  • The fecal stage of the Freudian theory of child development.
  • The calculus of why we don't find the same joke funny again.
  • A gingerbread house that is an architect's nightmare.
  • Adults and children making jokes past each other.
  • Pete of the Chickens.
  • Four year olds who are incredibly good at Rocket League.
  • Swearing that you are only four years old so Epic doesn't kick you out of the Rocket League League.
  • How physics-driven video games are the perfect constrained environment for a child to excel in.
  • Whether your Rocket League skills translate to any other aspect of your life.
  • A four year old gamer complaining about noobs.
  • Saying "don't forget to like comment and subscribe" instead of "goodbye."
  • Being leery of playing video games because every time you touch a controller the truck video stops.
  • Texting your grandmother a thousand emojis.
  • An app that lets your four year old pretend to text his grandma a thousand emojis.
  • Your true self on the Fediverse.
  • The realest person on Mastodon.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+PP1CEJQj ]]> Jim Stormdancer 67. Immersion Blended Lasagna https://topiclords.com/immersion-blended-lasagna dab6cfb4-d3cb-4499-a930-8b4b17f8b254 Mon, 01 Feb 2021 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Nathan and Tim. We discuss easy modes, art that depresses or scares us, solving unsolvable problems in multiplayer, youtube videos all having the same sound effects, playing games with your kids, sports that would be more interesting in low gravity, and vegan commune disaster stories. 1:08:20 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Are there any negatives to having an easy mode that takes the player through the entire game? Should the "best ending" be locked somehow in easy mode?
  • Why are we drawn to art that updisturbs, depresses, or scares? (And yes, "catharsis" is a weak answer!)
  • How Super Mario 35 (and maybe battle royales in general) solved the worst unsolvable problem of multiplayer
  • John asks: "Licensing issues and content guidelines have led to a homogenized aesthetic on YouTube that leads to all produced-in-bulk videos for children having the same sound effects and music."
  • What's different (better or worse) about playing games with kids? Do you play games with your kids?
  • What sports would be more interesting with low/0 gravity? Or with higher gravity?
  • Tim's vegan commune cooking disaster stories

Microtopics:

  • Shoot 1-Up.
  • Controlling all your spaceships at the same time.
  • The big thing about Galaga.
  • The forever scrolling timeline of new content that you're fed all the time.
  • The funniest Boris Vallejo painting.
  • Being bummed to find out that Boris Vallejo was looking at people and painting them rather than just imagining them.
  • Name-dropping Tom of Finland.
  • Staring at pink blobs all the time.
  • Making sure you're not wearing your good socks because they're about to be blown off.
  • Looping the game twice with no deaths and no bombs.
  • Jamestown.
  • Being forced to do something unpleasant to feel a sense of satisfaction when you are given what you want.
  • Not supporting an easy mode as well as you should have because you assumed those people could just play co-op.
  • Bringing in a playtester who has never used a mouse before.
  • Not valuing your own fake accomplishments as much because other people accomplished the same fake accomplishments more easily.
  • Save the Date, by Chris Cornell.
  • Having to wake up to play Super Hard mode.
  • The necessity of hand-tuning all the enemy AI in shoot em up difficulty levels.
  • Psychoanalyzing the entire human race at once.
  • People turning to media to experience strong emotions.
  • Whether it's easier to elicit good or bad emotions in the viewer.
  • The safety of seeing a horrible thing that will definitely never happen to you.
  • Being unusually upset by the Boston Marathon bombing because you recently ran a marathon.
  • Knowing that an album is going to fuck you up because it is too proximate, and choosing not to listen.
  • A scary movie taking months to purge from your brain.
  • The relief of when the demons show up.
  • People lining up at a party to play That Dragon Cancer.
  • How movies basically never hurt children.
  • Wanting to know what's in the box but also knowing that what's in the box will ruin your life for months.
  • How you lose half the time in multiplayer games.
  • Super Mario 35.
  • The various ways video games can make you feel like you're winning harder.
  • Taking turns feeling good at video games.
  • We Didn't Playtest This At All
  • Everybody choosing a number and everybody who chose 5 being the winner.
  • Trying to win at Scrabble based on style points.
  • Coming up with as many secondary win conditions as possible so that everybody can win even if they lost.
  • Choosing a safeword to indicate that it's time to switch topics.
  • Making all your own opulently animated scenes.
  • Playing games as a way to develop social relationships.
  • Empowering your son to express himself even though he's making a shitty Pokemon deck.
  • Finding non-combat activities to do with the Pokemon that are not very good at combat.
  • Buying SNES Classic to play games with your son and then realizing that there are more worthwhile games to play than those that merely entertain.
  • Games which give you value that you can take out into the world.
  • Wanting to show your kid the good stuff so that they can have a better life than you did.
  • Learning music theory by listening to Justin Bieber.
  • Worrying that you'll pollute your kid's natural interests with your taste in video games.
  • A very nice video game world for other people to explore.
  • Staring at people and saying "papaya" until they're like "why do you keep saying papaya"
  • Skateboarding in low gravity.
  • Full contact basketball with trampolines.
  • Immersion Blender Night.
  • Immersion blended salad.
  • Immersion blended vegan lasagna.
  • Learning the hard way that flambe does not burn off that much of the alcohol.
  • A gargantuan stock pot of chocolatey oatmeal that is far too salty for human consumption.
  • Improvising around your cooking mistakes.
  • Promising to talk about Paddington 2 next episode.
  • Going to the Giant Squid web page and checking out Tim's bio.
  • Barf-sealed copies of Pig Eat Ball.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Are there any negatives to having an easy mode that takes the player through the entire game? Should the "best ending" be locked somehow in easy mode?
  • Why are we drawn to art that updisturbs, depresses, or scares? (And yes, "catharsis" is a weak answer!)
  • How Super Mario 35 (and maybe battle royales in general) solved the worst unsolvable problem of multiplayer
  • John asks: "Licensing issues and content guidelines have led to a homogenized aesthetic on YouTube that leads to all produced-in-bulk videos for children having the same sound effects and music."
  • What's different (better or worse) about playing games with kids? Do you play games with your kids?
  • What sports would be more interesting with low/0 gravity? Or with higher gravity?
  • Tim's vegan commune cooking disaster stories

Microtopics:

  • Shoot 1-Up.
  • Controlling all your spaceships at the same time.
  • The big thing about Galaga.
  • The forever scrolling timeline of new content that you're fed all the time.
  • The funniest Boris Vallejo painting.
  • Being bummed to find out that Boris Vallejo was looking at people and painting them rather than just imagining them.
  • Name-dropping Tom of Finland.
  • Staring at pink blobs all the time.
  • Making sure you're not wearing your good socks because they're about to be blown off.
  • Looping the game twice with no deaths and no bombs.
  • Jamestown.
  • Being forced to do something unpleasant to feel a sense of satisfaction when you are given what you want.
  • Not supporting an easy mode as well as you should have because you assumed those people could just play co-op.
  • Bringing in a playtester who has never used a mouse before.
  • Not valuing your own fake accomplishments as much because other people accomplished the same fake accomplishments more easily.
  • Save the Date, by Chris Cornell.
  • Having to wake up to play Super Hard mode.
  • The necessity of hand-tuning all the enemy AI in shoot em up difficulty levels.
  • Psychoanalyzing the entire human race at once.
  • People turning to media to experience strong emotions.
  • Whether it's easier to elicit good or bad emotions in the viewer.
  • The safety of seeing a horrible thing that will definitely never happen to you.
  • Being unusually upset by the Boston Marathon bombing because you recently ran a marathon.
  • Knowing that an album is going to fuck you up because it is too proximate, and choosing not to listen.
  • A scary movie taking months to purge from your brain.
  • The relief of when the demons show up.
  • People lining up at a party to play That Dragon Cancer.
  • How movies basically never hurt children.
  • Wanting to know what's in the box but also knowing that what's in the box will ruin your life for months.
  • How you lose half the time in multiplayer games.
  • Super Mario 35.
  • The various ways video games can make you feel like you're winning harder.
  • Taking turns feeling good at video games.
  • We Didn't Playtest This At All
  • Everybody choosing a number and everybody who chose 5 being the winner.
  • Trying to win at Scrabble based on style points.
  • Coming up with as many secondary win conditions as possible so that everybody can win even if they lost.
  • Choosing a safeword to indicate that it's time to switch topics.
  • Making all your own opulently animated scenes.
  • Playing games as a way to develop social relationships.
  • Empowering your son to express himself even though he's making a shitty Pokemon deck.
  • Finding non-combat activities to do with the Pokemon that are not very good at combat.
  • Buying SNES Classic to play games with your son and then realizing that there are more worthwhile games to play than those that merely entertain.
  • Games which give you value that you can take out into the world.
  • Wanting to show your kid the good stuff so that they can have a better life than you did.
  • Learning music theory by listening to Justin Bieber.
  • Worrying that you'll pollute your kid's natural interests with your taste in video games.
  • A very nice video game world for other people to explore.
  • Staring at people and saying "papaya" until they're like "why do you keep saying papaya"
  • Skateboarding in low gravity.
  • Full contact basketball with trampolines.
  • Immersion Blender Night.
  • Immersion blended salad.
  • Immersion blended vegan lasagna.
  • Learning the hard way that flambe does not burn off that much of the alcohol.
  • A gargantuan stock pot of chocolatey oatmeal that is far too salty for human consumption.
  • Improvising around your cooking mistakes.
  • Promising to talk about Paddington 2 next episode.
  • Going to the Giant Squid web page and checking out Tim's bio.
  • Barf-sealed copies of Pig Eat Ball.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Are there any negatives to having an easy mode that takes the player through the entire game? Should the "best ending" be locked somehow in easy mode?
  • Why are we drawn to art that updisturbs, depresses, or scares? (And yes, "catharsis" is a weak answer!)
  • How Super Mario 35 (and maybe battle royales in general) solved the worst unsolvable problem of multiplayer
  • John asks: "Licensing issues and content guidelines have led to a homogenized aesthetic on YouTube that leads to all produced-in-bulk videos for children having the same sound effects and music."
  • What's different (better or worse) about playing games with kids? Do you play games with your kids?
  • What sports would be more interesting with low/0 gravity? Or with higher gravity?
  • Tim's vegan commune cooking disaster stories

Microtopics:

  • Shoot 1-Up.
  • Controlling all your spaceships at the same time.
  • The big thing about Galaga.
  • The forever scrolling timeline of new content that you're fed all the time.
  • The funniest Boris Vallejo painting.
  • Being bummed to find out that Boris Vallejo was looking at people and painting them rather than just imagining them.
  • Name-dropping Tom of Finland.
  • Staring at pink blobs all the time.
  • Making sure you're not wearing your good socks because they're about to be blown off.
  • Looping the game twice with no deaths and no bombs.
  • Jamestown.
  • Being forced to do something unpleasant to feel a sense of satisfaction when you are given what you want.
  • Not supporting an easy mode as well as you should have because you assumed those people could just play co-op.
  • Bringing in a playtester who has never used a mouse before.
  • Not valuing your own fake accomplishments as much because other people accomplished the same fake accomplishments more easily.
  • Save the Date, by Chris Cornell.
  • Having to wake up to play Super Hard mode.
  • The necessity of hand-tuning all the enemy AI in shoot em up difficulty levels.
  • Psychoanalyzing the entire human race at once.
  • People turning to media to experience strong emotions.
  • Whether it's easier to elicit good or bad emotions in the viewer.
  • The safety of seeing a horrible thing that will definitely never happen to you.
  • Being unusually upset by the Boston Marathon bombing because you recently ran a marathon.
  • Knowing that an album is going to fuck you up because it is too proximate, and choosing not to listen.
  • A scary movie taking months to purge from your brain.
  • The relief of when the demons show up.
  • People lining up at a party to play That Dragon Cancer.
  • How movies basically never hurt children.
  • Wanting to know what's in the box but also knowing that what's in the box will ruin your life for months.
  • How you lose half the time in multiplayer games.
  • Super Mario 35.
  • The various ways video games can make you feel like you're winning harder.
  • Taking turns feeling good at video games.
  • We Didn't Playtest This At All
  • Everybody choosing a number and everybody who chose 5 being the winner.
  • Trying to win at Scrabble based on style points.
  • Coming up with as many secondary win conditions as possible so that everybody can win even if they lost.
  • Choosing a safeword to indicate that it's time to switch topics.
  • Making all your own opulently animated scenes.
  • Playing games as a way to develop social relationships.
  • Empowering your son to express himself even though he's making a shitty Pokemon deck.
  • Finding non-combat activities to do with the Pokemon that are not very good at combat.
  • Buying SNES Classic to play games with your son and then realizing that there are more worthwhile games to play than those that merely entertain.
  • Games which give you value that you can take out into the world.
  • Wanting to show your kid the good stuff so that they can have a better life than you did.
  • Learning music theory by listening to Justin Bieber.
  • Worrying that you'll pollute your kid's natural interests with your taste in video games.
  • A very nice video game world for other people to explore.
  • Staring at people and saying "papaya" until they're like "why do you keep saying papaya"
  • Skateboarding in low gravity.
  • Full contact basketball with trampolines.
  • Immersion Blender Night.
  • Immersion blended salad.
  • Immersion blended vegan lasagna.
  • Learning the hard way that flambe does not burn off that much of the alcohol.
  • A gargantuan stock pot of chocolatey oatmeal that is far too salty for human consumption.
  • Improvising around your cooking mistakes.
  • Promising to talk about Paddington 2 next episode.
  • Going to the Giant Squid web page and checking out Tim's bio.
  • Barf-sealed copies of Pig Eat Ball.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+d9OJNb2N ]]> Jim Stormdancer 66. There's No One Way To Suck Glass https://topiclords.com/theres-no-one-way-to-suck-glass 57c8638d-f927-464f-8749-7c40b29d7c2a Mon, 25 Jan 2021 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Xalavier Nelson, Jr. and Kev. Topics: professional wrestling, stealing the declaration of independence to save Nicolas Cage's life, Atari 2600 Adventure's effectiveness as a port of Crowther and Woods Adventure, that time everyone in America didn't win a free taco, non-violent communication, when something is so big that you're no longer impressed, and sucking a glass onto your face. 58:59 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • The fine art of professional wrestling
  • Stealing the declaration of independence to save Nicolas Cage's life
  • Atari 2600 Adventure's effectiveness as a port of Crowther and Woods Adventure
  • Larry asks "That one time Taco Bell promised every American a free taco if the Mir space station hit a taco target in the indian Ocean but it missed by an entire hemisphere."
  • Non-violent communication
  • The threshold between an object/entity being large, and SO large that your brain can no longer process it effectively and you're no longer impressed
  • Sucking a glass onto your face

Microtopics:

  • Still the raddest place to play web games.
  • An Airport For Aliens Currently Run By Dogs.
  • Interacting with dogs in a whole new way.
  • Being clean and dirty at the same time.
  • Dog synergies.
  • The legal standing of a game downloading a random guitar tab from the internet to make a dog play guitar.
  • A scope creep game that ships.
  • Whether professional wrestling is trashy.
  • Audience-reactive improv theater performed by professional stunt men.
  • Pro wrestling jargon creeping into your
  • A work for marks who are smart marks and don't know when they're being worked or if they're not.
  • Stealing vocabulary from Victorian urchins.
  • Whether women's wrestling is still about macho posturing.
  • Meme warfare thought devices.
  • Muscled theatrical performers doing their dangedest
  • Whether GDC is ever going to happen again.
  • Whether GDC will be the same without Simon Carless.
  • Whether Lost Levels can exist without GDC bringing everyone physically together and secretly reserving the physical venue.
  • Every D-level game dev celebrity entering an arena and only one D-level game dev celebrity leaving.
  • A contract sealed in blood that is a matter of public record.
  • Having an hour and 45 minutes to save Nicholas Cage's life by stealing the Declaration of Independence.
  • Finding out that Nicholas Cage was injured in a bear fighting accident and realizing that now's your time to shine.
  • Finding out that isnicholascagenexttoabear.com isn't based on geolocation technology, it just scrapes TMZ for headlines that contain both "cage" and "bear."
  • Why we still have to steal the Declaration of Independence if everyone is aware of the Nicholas Cage situation.
  • Conspicuously walking down the street with the Declaration of Independence rolled up under your arm like a newspaper so that an urchin can snatch it away from you and you can pretend to be incensed.
  • Finding out what Habeas Corpus means.
  • Atari 2600 Adventure vs. Crowther and Woods Adventure.
  • Adapting a text adventure to computer system that can't render text.
  • Making a game where you explore until you find an ending in a context where all anyone's ever seen is games where you play for a high score.
  • Remakes changing the meaning of the original.
  • Inventing a 4D game platform to port Demon's Souls to.
  • Hitting a taco target in the Indian ocean.
  • Whether 40'x40' is a big taco or a small target for a space station.
  • All of America having a taco-in-the-streets party.
  • Dipping your girlfriend and smooching her as taco cheese falls from the sky.
  • Mir falling from the sky every day being a small price to pay to solve world hunger.
  • Taco Bell beginning to sweat as they realize the revolution is about to start.
  • Alternate history fiction where the branch point is that Taco Bell gave every American a free taco after Mir hit their taco target.
  • Non-Violent Communication.
  • Communicating your lived experience backed with justification and couched in empathy.
  • Instead of saying "you're annoying me," saying "I am annoyed because of you."
  • The HALT principle.
  • Big things making your brain go "ooh!"
  • Being terrified of the scale of Jupiter but the sun being like "meh"
  • Being terrified by an enormous mammoth but less terrified of the Earth when the Earth is bigger and closer than the mammoth.
  • Being unable to process the scale of a large city but eventually becoming desensitized to it.
  • Deciding whether to be impressed by something's size based on whether it's horizontal or vertical.
  • The relief and comfort of realizing that humans don't make any fricking sense.
  • Making New Year's Resolution of finally making sense of yourself and of the world.
  • Different goals emerging from the same root: hubris.
  • Not being able to form a seal on your face because you have a beard.
  • Normalizing shaving a hole in your beard sized and situated to suck a drinking glass onto your face.
  • Putting a drinking glass on your face in various configurations until one feels right.
  • A drinking glass size rooted in a human arrogance that you can appreciate but that you can't encourage.
  • Learning to suck a glass onto your face from the kid next to you at Applebee's.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • The fine art of professional wrestling
  • Stealing the declaration of independence to save Nicolas Cage's life
  • Atari 2600 Adventure's effectiveness as a port of Crowther and Woods Adventure
  • Larry asks "That one time Taco Bell promised every American a free taco if the Mir space station hit a taco target in the indian Ocean but it missed by an entire hemisphere."
  • Non-violent communication
  • The threshold between an object/entity being large, and SO large that your brain can no longer process it effectively and you're no longer impressed
  • Sucking a glass onto your face

Microtopics:

  • Still the raddest place to play web games.
  • An Airport For Aliens Currently Run By Dogs.
  • Interacting with dogs in a whole new way.
  • Being clean and dirty at the same time.
  • Dog synergies.
  • The legal standing of a game downloading a random guitar tab from the internet to make a dog play guitar.
  • A scope creep game that ships.
  • Whether professional wrestling is trashy.
  • Audience-reactive improv theater performed by professional stunt men.
  • Pro wrestling jargon creeping into your
  • A work for marks who are smart marks and don't know when they're being worked or if they're not.
  • Stealing vocabulary from Victorian urchins.
  • Whether women's wrestling is still about macho posturing.
  • Meme warfare thought devices.
  • Muscled theatrical performers doing their dangedest
  • Whether GDC is ever going to happen again.
  • Whether GDC will be the same without Simon Carless.
  • Whether Lost Levels can exist without GDC bringing everyone physically together and secretly reserving the physical venue.
  • Every D-level game dev celebrity entering an arena and only one D-level game dev celebrity leaving.
  • A contract sealed in blood that is a matter of public record.
  • Having an hour and 45 minutes to save Nicholas Cage's life by stealing the Declaration of Independence.
  • Finding out that Nicholas Cage was injured in a bear fighting accident and realizing that now's your time to shine.
  • Finding out that isnicholascagenexttoabear.com isn't based on geolocation technology, it just scrapes TMZ for headlines that contain both "cage" and "bear."
  • Why we still have to steal the Declaration of Independence if everyone is aware of the Nicholas Cage situation.
  • Conspicuously walking down the street with the Declaration of Independence rolled up under your arm like a newspaper so that an urchin can snatch it away from you and you can pretend to be incensed.
  • Finding out what Habeas Corpus means.
  • Atari 2600 Adventure vs. Crowther and Woods Adventure.
  • Adapting a text adventure to computer system that can't render text.
  • Making a game where you explore until you find an ending in a context where all anyone's ever seen is games where you play for a high score.
  • Remakes changing the meaning of the original.
  • Inventing a 4D game platform to port Demon's Souls to.
  • Hitting a taco target in the Indian ocean.
  • Whether 40'x40' is a big taco or a small target for a space station.
  • All of America having a taco-in-the-streets party.
  • Dipping your girlfriend and smooching her as taco cheese falls from the sky.
  • Mir falling from the sky every day being a small price to pay to solve world hunger.
  • Taco Bell beginning to sweat as they realize the revolution is about to start.
  • Alternate history fiction where the branch point is that Taco Bell gave every American a free taco after Mir hit their taco target.
  • Non-Violent Communication.
  • Communicating your lived experience backed with justification and couched in empathy.
  • Instead of saying "you're annoying me," saying "I am annoyed because of you."
  • The HALT principle.
  • Big things making your brain go "ooh!"
  • Being terrified of the scale of Jupiter but the sun being like "meh"
  • Being terrified by an enormous mammoth but less terrified of the Earth when the Earth is bigger and closer than the mammoth.
  • Being unable to process the scale of a large city but eventually becoming desensitized to it.
  • Deciding whether to be impressed by something's size based on whether it's horizontal or vertical.
  • The relief and comfort of realizing that humans don't make any fricking sense.
  • Making New Year's Resolution of finally making sense of yourself and of the world.
  • Different goals emerging from the same root: hubris.
  • Not being able to form a seal on your face because you have a beard.
  • Normalizing shaving a hole in your beard sized and situated to suck a drinking glass onto your face.
  • Putting a drinking glass on your face in various configurations until one feels right.
  • A drinking glass size rooted in a human arrogance that you can appreciate but that you can't encourage.
  • Learning to suck a glass onto your face from the kid next to you at Applebee's.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • The fine art of professional wrestling
  • Stealing the declaration of independence to save Nicolas Cage's life
  • Atari 2600 Adventure's effectiveness as a port of Crowther and Woods Adventure
  • Larry asks "That one time Taco Bell promised every American a free taco if the Mir space station hit a taco target in the indian Ocean but it missed by an entire hemisphere."
  • Non-violent communication
  • The threshold between an object/entity being large, and SO large that your brain can no longer process it effectively and you're no longer impressed
  • Sucking a glass onto your face

Microtopics:

  • Still the raddest place to play web games.
  • An Airport For Aliens Currently Run By Dogs.
  • Interacting with dogs in a whole new way.
  • Being clean and dirty at the same time.
  • Dog synergies.
  • The legal standing of a game downloading a random guitar tab from the internet to make a dog play guitar.
  • A scope creep game that ships.
  • Whether professional wrestling is trashy.
  • Audience-reactive improv theater performed by professional stunt men.
  • Pro wrestling jargon creeping into your
  • A work for marks who are smart marks and don't know when they're being worked or if they're not.
  • Stealing vocabulary from Victorian urchins.
  • Whether women's wrestling is still about macho posturing.
  • Meme warfare thought devices.
  • Muscled theatrical performers doing their dangedest
  • Whether GDC is ever going to happen again.
  • Whether GDC will be the same without Simon Carless.
  • Whether Lost Levels can exist without GDC bringing everyone physically together and secretly reserving the physical venue.
  • Every D-level game dev celebrity entering an arena and only one D-level game dev celebrity leaving.
  • A contract sealed in blood that is a matter of public record.
  • Having an hour and 45 minutes to save Nicholas Cage's life by stealing the Declaration of Independence.
  • Finding out that Nicholas Cage was injured in a bear fighting accident and realizing that now's your time to shine.
  • Finding out that isnicholascagenexttoabear.com isn't based on geolocation technology, it just scrapes TMZ for headlines that contain both "cage" and "bear."
  • Why we still have to steal the Declaration of Independence if everyone is aware of the Nicholas Cage situation.
  • Conspicuously walking down the street with the Declaration of Independence rolled up under your arm like a newspaper so that an urchin can snatch it away from you and you can pretend to be incensed.
  • Finding out what Habeas Corpus means.
  • Atari 2600 Adventure vs. Crowther and Woods Adventure.
  • Adapting a text adventure to computer system that can't render text.
  • Making a game where you explore until you find an ending in a context where all anyone's ever seen is games where you play for a high score.
  • Remakes changing the meaning of the original.
  • Inventing a 4D game platform to port Demon's Souls to.
  • Hitting a taco target in the Indian ocean.
  • Whether 40'x40' is a big taco or a small target for a space station.
  • All of America having a taco-in-the-streets party.
  • Dipping your girlfriend and smooching her as taco cheese falls from the sky.
  • Mir falling from the sky every day being a small price to pay to solve world hunger.
  • Taco Bell beginning to sweat as they realize the revolution is about to start.
  • Alternate history fiction where the branch point is that Taco Bell gave every American a free taco after Mir hit their taco target.
  • Non-Violent Communication.
  • Communicating your lived experience backed with justification and couched in empathy.
  • Instead of saying "you're annoying me," saying "I am annoyed because of you."
  • The HALT principle.
  • Big things making your brain go "ooh!"
  • Being terrified of the scale of Jupiter but the sun being like "meh"
  • Being terrified by an enormous mammoth but less terrified of the Earth when the Earth is bigger and closer than the mammoth.
  • Being unable to process the scale of a large city but eventually becoming desensitized to it.
  • Deciding whether to be impressed by something's size based on whether it's horizontal or vertical.
  • The relief and comfort of realizing that humans don't make any fricking sense.
  • Making New Year's Resolution of finally making sense of yourself and of the world.
  • Different goals emerging from the same root: hubris.
  • Not being able to form a seal on your face because you have a beard.
  • Normalizing shaving a hole in your beard sized and situated to suck a drinking glass onto your face.
  • Putting a drinking glass on your face in various configurations until one feels right.
  • A drinking glass size rooted in a human arrogance that you can appreciate but that you can't encourage.
  • Learning to suck a glass onto your face from the kid next to you at Applebee's.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+wYX8uMYt ]]> Jim Stormdancer 65. Love in the Time of Beavis and Butthead https://topiclords.com/love-in-the-time-of-beavis-and-butthead 066a5a83-3b31-4591-938b-c5b6774c048c Mon, 18 Jan 2021 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: April and John. Topics: woodworking, mentors and mentorship in general, Advent calendar dice, RAX and Mr. Delicious, and having to poop when entering a bookstore. 1:03:37 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Woodworking
  • Mentors and mentorship in general
  • Advent calendar dice
  • Scott asks "Please discuss Rax and Mr. Delicious"
  • Mariko Aoki Phenomenon. The phenomenon of having to poop when entering a bookstore. Named after the woman who experienced it and brought it to wider attention. If you wish to elaborate further, what's an inexplicable condition that you've experienced and suspect is shared with some portion of the populace? Would you want it named after you?

Microtopics:

  • Using your work name on the internet for a thing you don't want work to see.
  • Neither of the guests plugging Topic Lords, for the 65th time in a row.
  • Trying to guess the channel The Expanse used to be on.
  • How movies used to be teal and orange but now they're just green.
  • Letting all the cats into the room to purr into the microphones.
  • Things people expect you to be good at when you're a park ranger.
  • Woodworking.
  • Protecting your food from raccoons and turkeys.
  • The peace of bringing a physical object to fruition.
  • Making a napkin holder in middle school wood shop.
  • How it's ok to make fun of someone's face as long as you've never seen their face.
  • Building a bridge out of popsicle sticks.
  • Building a bridge out of sentient goo-balls.
  • The first sense you use to consume a meal.
  • How pleased everyone is with Jim's new hobby.
  • A knock knock joke if the punch line was playing peek-a-boo.
  • Eating cold pizza right out of the freezer.
  • Growing into a preference for being around people who aren't assholes.
  • Looking up to people in your field.
  • Only realizing that your mentors were mentors in retrospect.
  • A recurring topic on this show.
  • Knowing several librarians independent of the time you worked in the library.
  • Playing Zork on your uncle's laptop.
  • Printing your nephew's MS Paint art rather than just using your printer for taxes.
  • An Advent calendar except instead of being laid out in the grid the candy goes in a 25 sided die.
  • Forgetting about your Advent calendar after a few days and having extra candy next year.
  • An Advent calendar where behind each numbered door is a die with that number of faces.
  • Extruding a coin and inventing the three sided die.
  • Putting stickers in your Advent calendar instead of candy, because you hate your child.
  • Question asking games.
  • Rolling a natural 1 on your Advent calendar dice and having to throw all your presents in the garbage.
  • Games where even if you're bad at games you still have a chance to win.
  • The importance of being bored.
  • The growing ubiquitousness of video games.
  • An epidemic that demands everybody spend a full year at the DMV.
  • Desperately trying to change your last name before your child is born so that your names will match.
  • Whether gestational diabetes counts for your diabetes threepeat.
  • Derailing the conversation about fast food advertising with your top two Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
  • Mythical roast beef venue RAX.
  • Opening your trench coat to reveal one of those silver food domes that you lift up.
  • Talking about your vasectomy in an advertisement for roast beef sandwiches.
  • Fast food for adults advertised with Ronald McDonald holding a briefcase.
  • The luxury of two leaves of iceberg lettuce.
  • Charles Nelson Reilly, recurring guest on Match Game.
  • That time you wanted to watch American Gladiators and there was exactly one episode on YouTube.
  • Asking a kid if they know what Kumon is and they make the sad face.
  • The tutoring place you take your kid to if you want them to know math instead of being happy.
  • Whether you're allowed to have impostor syndrome about something you do professionally.
  • Reframing your impostor syndrome as being about how good you are at fooling people into thinking you have worth.
  • Getting rid of the clown.
  • Bringing the clown man back.
  • Love in the time of Beavis and Butthead.
  • The content that our listeners crave.
  • Our frothing demand to find a bathroom increases.
  • How bookstores and toilets smell the same in Japan.
  • The full body sensation you get right before you're about to do cocaine.
  • Training your toddler to pee at a whistle tone and then making them wet their pants on all their first dates.
  • The mental link between books and pooping.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Woodworking
  • Mentors and mentorship in general
  • Advent calendar dice
  • Scott asks "Please discuss Rax and Mr. Delicious"
  • Mariko Aoki Phenomenon. The phenomenon of having to poop when entering a bookstore. Named after the woman who experienced it and brought it to wider attention. If you wish to elaborate further, what's an inexplicable condition that you've experienced and suspect is shared with some portion of the populace? Would you want it named after you?

Microtopics:

  • Using your work name on the internet for a thing you don't want work to see.
  • Neither of the guests plugging Topic Lords, for the 65th time in a row.
  • Trying to guess the channel The Expanse used to be on.
  • How movies used to be teal and orange but now they're just green.
  • Letting all the cats into the room to purr into the microphones.
  • Things people expect you to be good at when you're a park ranger.
  • Woodworking.
  • Protecting your food from raccoons and turkeys.
  • The peace of bringing a physical object to fruition.
  • Making a napkin holder in middle school wood shop.
  • How it's ok to make fun of someone's face as long as you've never seen their face.
  • Building a bridge out of popsicle sticks.
  • Building a bridge out of sentient goo-balls.
  • The first sense you use to consume a meal.
  • How pleased everyone is with Jim's new hobby.
  • A knock knock joke if the punch line was playing peek-a-boo.
  • Eating cold pizza right out of the freezer.
  • Growing into a preference for being around people who aren't assholes.
  • Looking up to people in your field.
  • Only realizing that your mentors were mentors in retrospect.
  • A recurring topic on this show.
  • Knowing several librarians independent of the time you worked in the library.
  • Playing Zork on your uncle's laptop.
  • Printing your nephew's MS Paint art rather than just using your printer for taxes.
  • An Advent calendar except instead of being laid out in the grid the candy goes in a 25 sided die.
  • Forgetting about your Advent calendar after a few days and having extra candy next year.
  • An Advent calendar where behind each numbered door is a die with that number of faces.
  • Extruding a coin and inventing the three sided die.
  • Putting stickers in your Advent calendar instead of candy, because you hate your child.
  • Question asking games.
  • Rolling a natural 1 on your Advent calendar dice and having to throw all your presents in the garbage.
  • Games where even if you're bad at games you still have a chance to win.
  • The importance of being bored.
  • The growing ubiquitousness of video games.
  • An epidemic that demands everybody spend a full year at the DMV.
  • Desperately trying to change your last name before your child is born so that your names will match.
  • Whether gestational diabetes counts for your diabetes threepeat.
  • Derailing the conversation about fast food advertising with your top two Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
  • Mythical roast beef venue RAX.
  • Opening your trench coat to reveal one of those silver food domes that you lift up.
  • Talking about your vasectomy in an advertisement for roast beef sandwiches.
  • Fast food for adults advertised with Ronald McDonald holding a briefcase.
  • The luxury of two leaves of iceberg lettuce.
  • Charles Nelson Reilly, recurring guest on Match Game.
  • That time you wanted to watch American Gladiators and there was exactly one episode on YouTube.
  • Asking a kid if they know what Kumon is and they make the sad face.
  • The tutoring place you take your kid to if you want them to know math instead of being happy.
  • Whether you're allowed to have impostor syndrome about something you do professionally.
  • Reframing your impostor syndrome as being about how good you are at fooling people into thinking you have worth.
  • Getting rid of the clown.
  • Bringing the clown man back.
  • Love in the time of Beavis and Butthead.
  • The content that our listeners crave.
  • Our frothing demand to find a bathroom increases.
  • How bookstores and toilets smell the same in Japan.
  • The full body sensation you get right before you're about to do cocaine.
  • Training your toddler to pee at a whistle tone and then making them wet their pants on all their first dates.
  • The mental link between books and pooping.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Woodworking
  • Mentors and mentorship in general
  • Advent calendar dice
  • Scott asks "Please discuss Rax and Mr. Delicious"
  • Mariko Aoki Phenomenon. The phenomenon of having to poop when entering a bookstore. Named after the woman who experienced it and brought it to wider attention. If you wish to elaborate further, what's an inexplicable condition that you've experienced and suspect is shared with some portion of the populace? Would you want it named after you?

Microtopics:

  • Using your work name on the internet for a thing you don't want work to see.
  • Neither of the guests plugging Topic Lords, for the 65th time in a row.
  • Trying to guess the channel The Expanse used to be on.
  • How movies used to be teal and orange but now they're just green.
  • Letting all the cats into the room to purr into the microphones.
  • Things people expect you to be good at when you're a park ranger.
  • Woodworking.
  • Protecting your food from raccoons and turkeys.
  • The peace of bringing a physical object to fruition.
  • Making a napkin holder in middle school wood shop.
  • How it's ok to make fun of someone's face as long as you've never seen their face.
  • Building a bridge out of popsicle sticks.
  • Building a bridge out of sentient goo-balls.
  • The first sense you use to consume a meal.
  • How pleased everyone is with Jim's new hobby.
  • A knock knock joke if the punch line was playing peek-a-boo.
  • Eating cold pizza right out of the freezer.
  • Growing into a preference for being around people who aren't assholes.
  • Looking up to people in your field.
  • Only realizing that your mentors were mentors in retrospect.
  • A recurring topic on this show.
  • Knowing several librarians independent of the time you worked in the library.
  • Playing Zork on your uncle's laptop.
  • Printing your nephew's MS Paint art rather than just using your printer for taxes.
  • An Advent calendar except instead of being laid out in the grid the candy goes in a 25 sided die.
  • Forgetting about your Advent calendar after a few days and having extra candy next year.
  • An Advent calendar where behind each numbered door is a die with that number of faces.
  • Extruding a coin and inventing the three sided die.
  • Putting stickers in your Advent calendar instead of candy, because you hate your child.
  • Question asking games.
  • Rolling a natural 1 on your Advent calendar dice and having to throw all your presents in the garbage.
  • Games where even if you're bad at games you still have a chance to win.
  • The importance of being bored.
  • The growing ubiquitousness of video games.
  • An epidemic that demands everybody spend a full year at the DMV.
  • Desperately trying to change your last name before your child is born so that your names will match.
  • Whether gestational diabetes counts for your diabetes threepeat.
  • Derailing the conversation about fast food advertising with your top two Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
  • Mythical roast beef venue RAX.
  • Opening your trench coat to reveal one of those silver food domes that you lift up.
  • Talking about your vasectomy in an advertisement for roast beef sandwiches.
  • Fast food for adults advertised with Ronald McDonald holding a briefcase.
  • The luxury of two leaves of iceberg lettuce.
  • Charles Nelson Reilly, recurring guest on Match Game.
  • That time you wanted to watch American Gladiators and there was exactly one episode on YouTube.
  • Asking a kid if they know what Kumon is and they make the sad face.
  • The tutoring place you take your kid to if you want them to know math instead of being happy.
  • Whether you're allowed to have impostor syndrome about something you do professionally.
  • Reframing your impostor syndrome as being about how good you are at fooling people into thinking you have worth.
  • Getting rid of the clown.
  • Bringing the clown man back.
  • Love in the time of Beavis and Butthead.
  • The content that our listeners crave.
  • Our frothing demand to find a bathroom increases.
  • How bookstores and toilets smell the same in Japan.
  • The full body sensation you get right before you're about to do cocaine.
  • Training your toddler to pee at a whistle tone and then making them wet their pants on all their first dates.
  • The mental link between books and pooping.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+xbwWPILO ]]> Jim Stormdancer 64. Going Out for Tacos In Germany https://topiclords.com/going-out-for-tacos-in-germany 6b7355c1-40c6-4b4a-b4d9-a8bbd8cbf8ca Mon, 11 Jan 2021 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: John and Jay. Topics: caring more about news about a thing than the thing itself, saying funny lines from movies, the Terminator 2 soundtrack and the Fairlight CMI 3, the diminishing returns of each console generation, and delicious things we've made recently. 1:07:12 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • When you're more interested in following news about things than the things themselves: When will the rumored The Cure albums come out? No Man's Sky updates. What is Josh Sawyer working on?
  • Realizing that your funny friend as a child was just repeating lines from HBO comedy specials that you weren't allowed to watch.
  • The Terminator 2 soundtrack and the Fairlight CMI 3
  • Kevin asks "The diminishing returns technologically with each passing console generation. For instance, NES to SNES was a massive leap, whereas you can barely distinguish ps4 games from ps5 games."
  • Adventures in cooking: share tales of delicious things you have made recently

Microtopics:

  • A game about the old internet.
  • Figuring out who DMed John.
  • Doing better at a game than all the people who don't know that the game exists.
  • Searching things a lot when you're on the toilet.
  • Being more interested in news about the cure for COVID than about the cure itself.
  • The three rumored The Cure albums that have been teased for the past four years.
  • Identifying as someone who cares about video games long after you no longer have time to play video games.
  • The cultural event of Blaseball.
  • Whether you are less interested in things as you get older or if you just have less time.
  • Not buying a Raspberry Pi because you definitely don't have time to play with it.
  • Sitting two feet away from a 50 inch television and trying to get RetroArch working.
  • Buying a NES and SNES Classic but never actually playing the games.
  • Whether Bonk's Adventure is good in 2020.
  • Kanye West naming an album Turbo Grafx 16.
  • Naming your The Beatles tribute band The Beatles.
  • Being exposed to Monty Python primarily by your friends who constantly quote lines out of context.
  • Finally watching Monty Python and realizing your funny friend has never made an original joke in his life.
  • Friends who communicate solely in movie one liners.
  • Making friends with a kid who always says lines from Duke Nukem 3D and learning to say them yourself even though you've never heard of Duke Nukem.
  • Whether anyone actually knew what Cornholio actually was.
  • The abject cultural domination of Beavis and Butthead.
  • Whether or not the listeners will want to know what a ROMpler is.
  • A $60,000 industrial-strength sampler/synthesizer in your garage.
  • Playing naturalistic orchestral samples at unnaturally low playback speeds.
  • A terrifying grindy klaxon sound.
  • An unstoppable liquid metal monster with a jaunty soundtrack.
  • Supercomputers producing digital audio in not real time.
  • The Mellotron.
  • The brass hit sample used in Owner of a Lonely Heart.
  • Whether Fairlight the warez group has any relation to Fairlight the synthesizer company.
  • Emulating the crustiness of the Fairlight CMI.
  • Where to find all the samples that came built-in to the Fairlight CMI.
  • Audible frowns.
  • Just throwing polygons at the rasterizer.
  • Being clever and squeezing every last drop of performance out of the new consoles and it still doesn't look that much better.
  • The visual quality of a console you grew up playing being acceptable forever.
  • Noticing the hottest new game graphics for fifteen minutes and after that you're just playing a video game again.
  • How we could be up to the NES 6 or the Wii U by now.
  • Playing Wii Sports and not noticing or caring that the Wii can play other games.
  • Completely ignoring F2P games until one of your relatives turns out to be susceptible to gambling addiction.
  • How Nintendo spent the Breath of the Wild budget.
  • Shielding your eyes when you see a map because you don't want to know too much about the world.
  • Which Breath of the Wild HUD modes include a compass.
  • Stuffed mushrooms.
  • The only recipe that your family makes literally every Thanksgiving.
  • Making a tray of stuffed mushrooms where the seasoning is different on every mushroom.
  • A Delicious Chore.
  • Eggs on toast with remoulade.
  • The default thing you put on a sandwich.
  • Espresso machine eggs.
  • The hypothetical standalone steamer arm.
  • Promising to not promote anyone's Kickstarter.
  • What Jim will do with a sharp knife if he gets one for Christmas.
  • Putting a salmon in the fridge until it desiccates.
  • Whether scales are a kind of skin.
  • Knowing you really ought to eat fish.
  • Putting cabbage in the oven until it's melted cabbage.
  • Two people who are the same height but one looks taller because their legs are longer.
  • Dog content on this podcast.
  • Allowing both pronunciations of Jay's name.
  • Katie content on this podcast.
  • A baby becoming a person after basically being a potato for a while.
  • John's one (1) tweet.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • When you're more interested in following news about things than the things themselves: When will the rumored The Cure albums come out? No Man's Sky updates. What is Josh Sawyer working on?
  • Realizing that your funny friend as a child was just repeating lines from HBO comedy specials that you weren't allowed to watch.
  • The Terminator 2 soundtrack and the Fairlight CMI 3
  • Kevin asks "The diminishing returns technologically with each passing console generation. For instance, NES to SNES was a massive leap, whereas you can barely distinguish ps4 games from ps5 games."
  • Adventures in cooking: share tales of delicious things you have made recently

Microtopics:

  • A game about the old internet.
  • Figuring out who DMed John.
  • Doing better at a game than all the people who don't know that the game exists.
  • Searching things a lot when you're on the toilet.
  • Being more interested in news about the cure for COVID than about the cure itself.
  • The three rumored The Cure albums that have been teased for the past four years.
  • Identifying as someone who cares about video games long after you no longer have time to play video games.
  • The cultural event of Blaseball.
  • Whether you are less interested in things as you get older or if you just have less time.
  • Not buying a Raspberry Pi because you definitely don't have time to play with it.
  • Sitting two feet away from a 50 inch television and trying to get RetroArch working.
  • Buying a NES and SNES Classic but never actually playing the games.
  • Whether Bonk's Adventure is good in 2020.
  • Kanye West naming an album Turbo Grafx 16.
  • Naming your The Beatles tribute band The Beatles.
  • Being exposed to Monty Python primarily by your friends who constantly quote lines out of context.
  • Finally watching Monty Python and realizing your funny friend has never made an original joke in his life.
  • Friends who communicate solely in movie one liners.
  • Making friends with a kid who always says lines from Duke Nukem 3D and learning to say them yourself even though you've never heard of Duke Nukem.
  • Whether anyone actually knew what Cornholio actually was.
  • The abject cultural domination of Beavis and Butthead.
  • Whether or not the listeners will want to know what a ROMpler is.
  • A $60,000 industrial-strength sampler/synthesizer in your garage.
  • Playing naturalistic orchestral samples at unnaturally low playback speeds.
  • A terrifying grindy klaxon sound.
  • An unstoppable liquid metal monster with a jaunty soundtrack.
  • Supercomputers producing digital audio in not real time.
  • The Mellotron.
  • The brass hit sample used in Owner of a Lonely Heart.
  • Whether Fairlight the warez group has any relation to Fairlight the synthesizer company.
  • Emulating the crustiness of the Fairlight CMI.
  • Where to find all the samples that came built-in to the Fairlight CMI.
  • Audible frowns.
  • Just throwing polygons at the rasterizer.
  • Being clever and squeezing every last drop of performance out of the new consoles and it still doesn't look that much better.
  • The visual quality of a console you grew up playing being acceptable forever.
  • Noticing the hottest new game graphics for fifteen minutes and after that you're just playing a video game again.
  • How we could be up to the NES 6 or the Wii U by now.
  • Playing Wii Sports and not noticing or caring that the Wii can play other games.
  • Completely ignoring F2P games until one of your relatives turns out to be susceptible to gambling addiction.
  • How Nintendo spent the Breath of the Wild budget.
  • Shielding your eyes when you see a map because you don't want to know too much about the world.
  • Which Breath of the Wild HUD modes include a compass.
  • Stuffed mushrooms.
  • The only recipe that your family makes literally every Thanksgiving.
  • Making a tray of stuffed mushrooms where the seasoning is different on every mushroom.
  • A Delicious Chore.
  • Eggs on toast with remoulade.
  • The default thing you put on a sandwich.
  • Espresso machine eggs.
  • The hypothetical standalone steamer arm.
  • Promising to not promote anyone's Kickstarter.
  • What Jim will do with a sharp knife if he gets one for Christmas.
  • Putting a salmon in the fridge until it desiccates.
  • Whether scales are a kind of skin.
  • Knowing you really ought to eat fish.
  • Putting cabbage in the oven until it's melted cabbage.
  • Two people who are the same height but one looks taller because their legs are longer.
  • Dog content on this podcast.
  • Allowing both pronunciations of Jay's name.
  • Katie content on this podcast.
  • A baby becoming a person after basically being a potato for a while.
  • John's one (1) tweet.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • When you're more interested in following news about things than the things themselves: When will the rumored The Cure albums come out? No Man's Sky updates. What is Josh Sawyer working on?
  • Realizing that your funny friend as a child was just repeating lines from HBO comedy specials that you weren't allowed to watch.
  • The Terminator 2 soundtrack and the Fairlight CMI 3
  • Kevin asks "The diminishing returns technologically with each passing console generation. For instance, NES to SNES was a massive leap, whereas you can barely distinguish ps4 games from ps5 games."
  • Adventures in cooking: share tales of delicious things you have made recently

Microtopics:

  • A game about the old internet.
  • Figuring out who DMed John.
  • Doing better at a game than all the people who don't know that the game exists.
  • Searching things a lot when you're on the toilet.
  • Being more interested in news about the cure for COVID than about the cure itself.
  • The three rumored The Cure albums that have been teased for the past four years.
  • Identifying as someone who cares about video games long after you no longer have time to play video games.
  • The cultural event of Blaseball.
  • Whether you are less interested in things as you get older or if you just have less time.
  • Not buying a Raspberry Pi because you definitely don't have time to play with it.
  • Sitting two feet away from a 50 inch television and trying to get RetroArch working.
  • Buying a NES and SNES Classic but never actually playing the games.
  • Whether Bonk's Adventure is good in 2020.
  • Kanye West naming an album Turbo Grafx 16.
  • Naming your The Beatles tribute band The Beatles.
  • Being exposed to Monty Python primarily by your friends who constantly quote lines out of context.
  • Finally watching Monty Python and realizing your funny friend has never made an original joke in his life.
  • Friends who communicate solely in movie one liners.
  • Making friends with a kid who always says lines from Duke Nukem 3D and learning to say them yourself even though you've never heard of Duke Nukem.
  • Whether anyone actually knew what Cornholio actually was.
  • The abject cultural domination of Beavis and Butthead.
  • Whether or not the listeners will want to know what a ROMpler is.
  • A $60,000 industrial-strength sampler/synthesizer in your garage.
  • Playing naturalistic orchestral samples at unnaturally low playback speeds.
  • A terrifying grindy klaxon sound.
  • An unstoppable liquid metal monster with a jaunty soundtrack.
  • Supercomputers producing digital audio in not real time.
  • The Mellotron.
  • The brass hit sample used in Owner of a Lonely Heart.
  • Whether Fairlight the warez group has any relation to Fairlight the synthesizer company.
  • Emulating the crustiness of the Fairlight CMI.
  • Where to find all the samples that came built-in to the Fairlight CMI.
  • Audible frowns.
  • Just throwing polygons at the rasterizer.
  • Being clever and squeezing every last drop of performance out of the new consoles and it still doesn't look that much better.
  • The visual quality of a console you grew up playing being acceptable forever.
  • Noticing the hottest new game graphics for fifteen minutes and after that you're just playing a video game again.
  • How we could be up to the NES 6 or the Wii U by now.
  • Playing Wii Sports and not noticing or caring that the Wii can play other games.
  • Completely ignoring F2P games until one of your relatives turns out to be susceptible to gambling addiction.
  • How Nintendo spent the Breath of the Wild budget.
  • Shielding your eyes when you see a map because you don't want to know too much about the world.
  • Which Breath of the Wild HUD modes include a compass.
  • Stuffed mushrooms.
  • The only recipe that your family makes literally every Thanksgiving.
  • Making a tray of stuffed mushrooms where the seasoning is different on every mushroom.
  • A Delicious Chore.
  • Eggs on toast with remoulade.
  • The default thing you put on a sandwich.
  • Espresso machine eggs.
  • The hypothetical standalone steamer arm.
  • Promising to not promote anyone's Kickstarter.
  • What Jim will do with a sharp knife if he gets one for Christmas.
  • Putting a salmon in the fridge until it desiccates.
  • Whether scales are a kind of skin.
  • Knowing you really ought to eat fish.
  • Putting cabbage in the oven until it's melted cabbage.
  • Two people who are the same height but one looks taller because their legs are longer.
  • Dog content on this podcast.
  • Allowing both pronunciations of Jay's name.
  • Katie content on this podcast.
  • A baby becoming a person after basically being a potato for a while.
  • John's one (1) tweet.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+HAg-g-Lg ]]> Jim Stormdancer 63. How To Travel With a Dishwasher Salmon https://topiclords.com/how-to-travel-with-a-dishwasher-salmon cfe378cf-31d1-4b4e-b76d-b55fa0f52d84 Mon, 04 Jan 2021 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Mitch and Chris. Topics: Hades, turning "literally" pedantry back on itself, gasoline toast, mismatched timelines, how The Game (mind game) is not very well designed, and the worst letters of the alphabet. 1:05:38 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Why the game Hades is great
  • People who get upset about the use of the word "literally" often say stuff like "you don't mean literally, you mean figuratively!", even though the use they're complaining about very obviously does not mean figuratively
  • Gasoline toast
  • Ville asks "Oxford University was founded 200 years before the Aztec Empire and the subway in London began operation during the American Civil War. Either someone's messing with the timeline or we all have a very askew picture of how history's supposed to be laid out."
  • The Game (the one Wikipedia helpfully disambiguates as "The Game (mind game)") is not very well designed
  • The Best Five Plants

Microtopics:

  • Writing your title in lowercase so that you know it's not part of your name.
  • Taking one look at a game and saying "this is a Chris game."
  • Hades.
  • A video game set in a Mike Mignola painting.
  • Game development legerdemain.
  • Pressing left trigger to pet Cerberus.
  • Voice acting in video games.
  • Needing to change a voice line and having to splice together existing lines because you're never going to see the actor again.
  • Needing to generalize a voice acted tutorial saying "press the A button" and just cutting out the word A.
  • Doing your best impression of the Afro Samurai and Samuel L Jackson angrily knocks at the door dressed as the Afro Samurai.
  • Knowing enough Greek mythology to appreciate these Greek mythology gags.
  • Describing your backstory to the bard.
  • Fishing minigames.
  • Getting the voice actor to learn Blender so you can finally pet the other two heads.
  • How people use "literally" these days.
  • How "really" used to mean "actually" and "very" meant "truly" but people started using them in hyperbole and now it's just an intensifier.
  • Sarcasm as a driver of linguistic change.
  • Covering food with gasoline and setting it on fire.
  • How the little plastic clip influences the bread's flavor.
  • Gasoline clams.
  • Covering a bagged loaf of bread in gasoline and setting it on fire and a loaf of perfect toast emerges.
  • Remembering that you were going to say something about the bag clip thing.
  • Making gasoline toast when gas prices were negative and getting your toast for free.
  • The Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group.
  • Going to a web site about bag clips and not seeing anything with a spring in it.
  • Soaking your fish in lye until it becomes a delicacy.
  • Dishwasher salmon.
  • How every dishwasher is at the perfect temperature to cook salmon.
  • Trying to cook salmon in your dishwasher because you're not a serious dude yet.
  • Cooking a salmon in dishwashers around the world.
  • Going on the internet and telling lies about salmon preparation.
  • Lutefisk, and specifically how somebody invented Lutefisk.
  • The gravest of apologies to anyone currently eating dishwasher salmon.
  • The third time Jim went to jail for an idea originating on this podcast.
  • Cleopatra's temporal proximity to Pizza Hut.
  • Time and pizza being flat circles.
  • A quote-shaped hole in this conversation that you have the chance to fill.
  • Whether a hole in the ground that a wheelbarrow goes through counts as a subway.
  • Impressing your Corgi with facts about London.
  • The Game (mind game)
  • A game you can't stop playing, according to the rules.
  • How to win The Game (mind game)
  • Whether it's a game if you can't choose not to play.
  • People explaining The Game to you over and over again in hopes that you'll become as angry as they are that you just lost the game.
  • The sort of thing that passed for cool in board games from before 1990.
  • Video games with hexagons in them.
  • Arguing about the best five of something.
  • The worst five forbs.
  • Coating the hillside with six inch hemispheres of itching hairs.
  • A forb that is always full of doves, which is bad somehow.
  • The Angry Video Game Nerd except it's a plant nerd being angry about plants.
  • The bottom five letters of the alphabet.
  • The sequel to lowercase b.
  • Taking the q out of queen so it's spelled ueen. (But still pronounced "queen.")
  • Updating the alphabet to get rid of c k s w and q.
  • British people always dropping the t even though they supposedly love it.
  • Revising English spelling so that every word is just spelled "a" but each word has a unique font size.
  • Registering google.com except instead of two os it's the "oo" ligature.
  • The origin of uppercase.
  • Explaining to the clerk at the DMV that your name is Chris except the C is illuminated.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Why the game Hades is great
  • People who get upset about the use of the word "literally" often say stuff like "you don't mean literally, you mean figuratively!", even though the use they're complaining about very obviously does not mean figuratively
  • Gasoline toast
  • Ville asks "Oxford University was founded 200 years before the Aztec Empire and the subway in London began operation during the American Civil War. Either someone's messing with the timeline or we all have a very askew picture of how history's supposed to be laid out."
  • The Game (the one Wikipedia helpfully disambiguates as "The Game (mind game)") is not very well designed
  • The Best Five Plants

Microtopics:

  • Writing your title in lowercase so that you know it's not part of your name.
  • Taking one look at a game and saying "this is a Chris game."
  • Hades.
  • A video game set in a Mike Mignola painting.
  • Game development legerdemain.
  • Pressing left trigger to pet Cerberus.
  • Voice acting in video games.
  • Needing to change a voice line and having to splice together existing lines because you're never going to see the actor again.
  • Needing to generalize a voice acted tutorial saying "press the A button" and just cutting out the word A.
  • Doing your best impression of the Afro Samurai and Samuel L Jackson angrily knocks at the door dressed as the Afro Samurai.
  • Knowing enough Greek mythology to appreciate these Greek mythology gags.
  • Describing your backstory to the bard.
  • Fishing minigames.
  • Getting the voice actor to learn Blender so you can finally pet the other two heads.
  • How people use "literally" these days.
  • How "really" used to mean "actually" and "very" meant "truly" but people started using them in hyperbole and now it's just an intensifier.
  • Sarcasm as a driver of linguistic change.
  • Covering food with gasoline and setting it on fire.
  • How the little plastic clip influences the bread's flavor.
  • Gasoline clams.
  • Covering a bagged loaf of bread in gasoline and setting it on fire and a loaf of perfect toast emerges.
  • Remembering that you were going to say something about the bag clip thing.
  • Making gasoline toast when gas prices were negative and getting your toast for free.
  • The Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group.
  • Going to a web site about bag clips and not seeing anything with a spring in it.
  • Soaking your fish in lye until it becomes a delicacy.
  • Dishwasher salmon.
  • How every dishwasher is at the perfect temperature to cook salmon.
  • Trying to cook salmon in your dishwasher because you're not a serious dude yet.
  • Cooking a salmon in dishwashers around the world.
  • Going on the internet and telling lies about salmon preparation.
  • Lutefisk, and specifically how somebody invented Lutefisk.
  • The gravest of apologies to anyone currently eating dishwasher salmon.
  • The third time Jim went to jail for an idea originating on this podcast.
  • Cleopatra's temporal proximity to Pizza Hut.
  • Time and pizza being flat circles.
  • A quote-shaped hole in this conversation that you have the chance to fill.
  • Whether a hole in the ground that a wheelbarrow goes through counts as a subway.
  • Impressing your Corgi with facts about London.
  • The Game (mind game)
  • A game you can't stop playing, according to the rules.
  • How to win The Game (mind game)
  • Whether it's a game if you can't choose not to play.
  • People explaining The Game to you over and over again in hopes that you'll become as angry as they are that you just lost the game.
  • The sort of thing that passed for cool in board games from before 1990.
  • Video games with hexagons in them.
  • Arguing about the best five of something.
  • The worst five forbs.
  • Coating the hillside with six inch hemispheres of itching hairs.
  • A forb that is always full of doves, which is bad somehow.
  • The Angry Video Game Nerd except it's a plant nerd being angry about plants.
  • The bottom five letters of the alphabet.
  • The sequel to lowercase b.
  • Taking the q out of queen so it's spelled ueen. (But still pronounced "queen.")
  • Updating the alphabet to get rid of c k s w and q.
  • British people always dropping the t even though they supposedly love it.
  • Revising English spelling so that every word is just spelled "a" but each word has a unique font size.
  • Registering google.com except instead of two os it's the "oo" ligature.
  • The origin of uppercase.
  • Explaining to the clerk at the DMV that your name is Chris except the C is illuminated.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Why the game Hades is great
  • People who get upset about the use of the word "literally" often say stuff like "you don't mean literally, you mean figuratively!", even though the use they're complaining about very obviously does not mean figuratively
  • Gasoline toast
  • Ville asks "Oxford University was founded 200 years before the Aztec Empire and the subway in London began operation during the American Civil War. Either someone's messing with the timeline or we all have a very askew picture of how history's supposed to be laid out."
  • The Game (the one Wikipedia helpfully disambiguates as "The Game (mind game)") is not very well designed
  • The Best Five Plants

Microtopics:

  • Writing your title in lowercase so that you know it's not part of your name.
  • Taking one look at a game and saying "this is a Chris game."
  • Hades.
  • A video game set in a Mike Mignola painting.
  • Game development legerdemain.
  • Pressing left trigger to pet Cerberus.
  • Voice acting in video games.
  • Needing to change a voice line and having to splice together existing lines because you're never going to see the actor again.
  • Needing to generalize a voice acted tutorial saying "press the A button" and just cutting out the word A.
  • Doing your best impression of the Afro Samurai and Samuel L Jackson angrily knocks at the door dressed as the Afro Samurai.
  • Knowing enough Greek mythology to appreciate these Greek mythology gags.
  • Describing your backstory to the bard.
  • Fishing minigames.
  • Getting the voice actor to learn Blender so you can finally pet the other two heads.
  • How people use "literally" these days.
  • How "really" used to mean "actually" and "very" meant "truly" but people started using them in hyperbole and now it's just an intensifier.
  • Sarcasm as a driver of linguistic change.
  • Covering food with gasoline and setting it on fire.
  • How the little plastic clip influences the bread's flavor.
  • Gasoline clams.
  • Covering a bagged loaf of bread in gasoline and setting it on fire and a loaf of perfect toast emerges.
  • Remembering that you were going to say something about the bag clip thing.
  • Making gasoline toast when gas prices were negative and getting your toast for free.
  • The Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group.
  • Going to a web site about bag clips and not seeing anything with a spring in it.
  • Soaking your fish in lye until it becomes a delicacy.
  • Dishwasher salmon.
  • How every dishwasher is at the perfect temperature to cook salmon.
  • Trying to cook salmon in your dishwasher because you're not a serious dude yet.
  • Cooking a salmon in dishwashers around the world.
  • Going on the internet and telling lies about salmon preparation.
  • Lutefisk, and specifically how somebody invented Lutefisk.
  • The gravest of apologies to anyone currently eating dishwasher salmon.
  • The third time Jim went to jail for an idea originating on this podcast.
  • Cleopatra's temporal proximity to Pizza Hut.
  • Time and pizza being flat circles.
  • A quote-shaped hole in this conversation that you have the chance to fill.
  • Whether a hole in the ground that a wheelbarrow goes through counts as a subway.
  • Impressing your Corgi with facts about London.
  • The Game (mind game)
  • A game you can't stop playing, according to the rules.
  • How to win The Game (mind game)
  • Whether it's a game if you can't choose not to play.
  • People explaining The Game to you over and over again in hopes that you'll become as angry as they are that you just lost the game.
  • The sort of thing that passed for cool in board games from before 1990.
  • Video games with hexagons in them.
  • Arguing about the best five of something.
  • The worst five forbs.
  • Coating the hillside with six inch hemispheres of itching hairs.
  • A forb that is always full of doves, which is bad somehow.
  • The Angry Video Game Nerd except it's a plant nerd being angry about plants.
  • The bottom five letters of the alphabet.
  • The sequel to lowercase b.
  • Taking the q out of queen so it's spelled ueen. (But still pronounced "queen.")
  • Updating the alphabet to get rid of c k s w and q.
  • British people always dropping the t even though they supposedly love it.
  • Revising English spelling so that every word is just spelled "a" but each word has a unique font size.
  • Registering google.com except instead of two os it's the "oo" ligature.
  • The origin of uppercase.
  • Explaining to the clerk at the DMV that your name is Chris except the C is illuminated.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+HKtJjr5N ]]> Jim Stormdancer 62. A Real Egg Hobbyist https://topiclords.com/a-real-egg-hobbyist c432d02d-70e3-4096-ad99-3a3cbc54d7ce Mon, 28 Dec 2020 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Mark and Shirley. We discuss the trend of positive media, our favorite magic paradigm, why there isn't more Space Wizard fiction, transitioning from being able to cook a dish to being able to cook a meal, yearbooks, and parenting advice. 1:05:11 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Mark plugs Ravening Iron
  • Shirley plugs a silicone reusable popcorn maker

Topics:

  • The trend of positive media (Great British Baking Show, etc.)
  • What is your favorite magic paradigm? Related: Space Wizards: What happened??
  • Transitioning from being able to cook a dish to being able to cook a meal
  • Larry asks "Yearbooks. Do you still have them? Have you ever actually used one? Is it full of signatures and stuff like that?"
  • "Dude, maybe Jim can give us parenting advice" is what I just said out loud, what do you think of that, Jim?

Microtopics:

  • Whether Ravening Iron slaps.
  • The life-changing silicone popcorn maker.
  • A cup that says "tea" on it that's filled with bourbon.
  • Dirty Harry except he's shooting the mishandling of evidence in the face.
  • Dirty Harry except instead of shooting perps in the face he takes a bath.
  • Watching Joker (2019) and thinking "finally, the IPs of my youth are real art now"
  • A slow motion replay of a lady forgetting to put ice cream back in the fridge.
  • Choosing the biggest burliest man you can find who is moved to tears at the drop of a hat to judge your reality show.
  • Being moved to tears because a jug is unexpectedly light.
  • A manual of non-toxic masculinity.
  • Men Feeling Feelings.
  • Collecting magic paradigms.
  • Staying up all night studying your book of magic and then the next day you can cast one (1) fireball.
  • Studying magic for years and then having spells in your head that you never cast.
  • All the spells in a wizard's head going off at once when the wizard dies, like that fireworks show in San Diego.
  • Accidentally learning the spell that will unmake reality.
  • Learning the magic words and swizzling a wand.
  • Teaching children that magic is an inherent ability that you either have or don't have.
  • Why there are so few space wizards.
  • Waking up in the middle of a night with a great story idea and in the morning you realize it's Star Wars.
  • Doctor Who explaining the science behind space vampires.
  • What if Marty McFly's photo of his brother was an actual person and his body parts started to vanish.
  • Battle mages carrying around notepads and calligraphy pens and battling by writing notes at each other.
  • Magical inscriptions all over your body rendering you invulnerable to physical harm everywhere except your face because your retail job doesn't allow face tattoos.
  • Recognizing Rise of the Skywalker as bad but still basically enjoying it because you just don't care that much any more.
  • The plot of a long running movie franchise suddenly hinging on the protagonist needing to find a bathroom when they've never been depicted as pooping even once.
  • Growing out of hating art.
  • Loving this topic.
  • Breakfast being easier to cook than other meals because it's okay to just make one dish and call it breakfast.
  • Breakfast being easier to cook than other meals because it uses a smaller set of potential ingredients.
  • Learning to look at a set of available ingredients and plan a meal out of them.
  • Learning how to cook to learn about process and flexibility.
  • Following a recipe but ultimately having to make the decision yourself that the food you're making is ready to be taken off the heat and served.
  • Skimming a recipe to get the gist and then just being able to make the thing because you know how food works.
  • The canonical flavor pairings of breakfast.
  • Figuring out your flavor profile and then your main protein and working outwards to the sides.
  • Learning to make scrambled eggs and realizing now you can just have scrambled eggs any time.
  • A Real Egg Hobbyist
  • Leaving behind audio logs for future civilizations.
  • A paint pigment made out of mummies, and more generally how every pigment is made from some different weird thing.
  • Every ingredient in your kitchen coming from a different weird and often horrifying animal or plant process.
  • Humans possibly developing larger brains because we invented cooking.
  • Raw food enthusiasts just enjoying digesting harder than the rest of us.
  • Measuring the calories in a food by making the food explode.
  • The millennia-long development of corn as a staple crop.
  • Posing with a crazy hat because your yearbook editors didn't have enough photos of Crazy Hat Day.
  • Falsifying the historical record.
  • Seeing a yearbook on a friend's bookshelf and offering to sign it.
  • Paying extra to get your high school yearbook pre-signed.
  • Seeing your parent's yearbook and realizing for the first time that they had hobbies once.
  • A nice kid who is always doing their best.
  • Seeing your high school teacher in street clothes at the grocery store and realizing that he is just a few years older than you.
  • How a task seems impossible until you have a strong enough incentive to do it.
  • The switch that flips in your brain once you have a kid where it becomes unthinkable to not have a kid or want to have a kid.
  • Childbirth lawyers.
  • Having an extra plug.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Mark plugs Ravening Iron
  • Shirley plugs a silicone reusable popcorn maker

Topics:

  • The trend of positive media (Great British Baking Show, etc.)
  • What is your favorite magic paradigm? Related: Space Wizards: What happened??
  • Transitioning from being able to cook a dish to being able to cook a meal
  • Larry asks "Yearbooks. Do you still have them? Have you ever actually used one? Is it full of signatures and stuff like that?"
  • "Dude, maybe Jim can give us parenting advice" is what I just said out loud, what do you think of that, Jim?

Microtopics:

  • Whether Ravening Iron slaps.
  • The life-changing silicone popcorn maker.
  • A cup that says "tea" on it that's filled with bourbon.
  • Dirty Harry except he's shooting the mishandling of evidence in the face.
  • Dirty Harry except instead of shooting perps in the face he takes a bath.
  • Watching Joker (2019) and thinking "finally, the IPs of my youth are real art now"
  • A slow motion replay of a lady forgetting to put ice cream back in the fridge.
  • Choosing the biggest burliest man you can find who is moved to tears at the drop of a hat to judge your reality show.
  • Being moved to tears because a jug is unexpectedly light.
  • A manual of non-toxic masculinity.
  • Men Feeling Feelings.
  • Collecting magic paradigms.
  • Staying up all night studying your book of magic and then the next day you can cast one (1) fireball.
  • Studying magic for years and then having spells in your head that you never cast.
  • All the spells in a wizard's head going off at once when the wizard dies, like that fireworks show in San Diego.
  • Accidentally learning the spell that will unmake reality.
  • Learning the magic words and swizzling a wand.
  • Teaching children that magic is an inherent ability that you either have or don't have.
  • Why there are so few space wizards.
  • Waking up in the middle of a night with a great story idea and in the morning you realize it's Star Wars.
  • Doctor Who explaining the science behind space vampires.
  • What if Marty McFly's photo of his brother was an actual person and his body parts started to vanish.
  • Battle mages carrying around notepads and calligraphy pens and battling by writing notes at each other.
  • Magical inscriptions all over your body rendering you invulnerable to physical harm everywhere except your face because your retail job doesn't allow face tattoos.
  • Recognizing Rise of the Skywalker as bad but still basically enjoying it because you just don't care that much any more.
  • The plot of a long running movie franchise suddenly hinging on the protagonist needing to find a bathroom when they've never been depicted as pooping even once.
  • Growing out of hating art.
  • Loving this topic.
  • Breakfast being easier to cook than other meals because it's okay to just make one dish and call it breakfast.
  • Breakfast being easier to cook than other meals because it uses a smaller set of potential ingredients.
  • Learning to look at a set of available ingredients and plan a meal out of them.
  • Learning how to cook to learn about process and flexibility.
  • Following a recipe but ultimately having to make the decision yourself that the food you're making is ready to be taken off the heat and served.
  • Skimming a recipe to get the gist and then just being able to make the thing because you know how food works.
  • The canonical flavor pairings of breakfast.
  • Figuring out your flavor profile and then your main protein and working outwards to the sides.
  • Learning to make scrambled eggs and realizing now you can just have scrambled eggs any time.
  • A Real Egg Hobbyist
  • Leaving behind audio logs for future civilizations.
  • A paint pigment made out of mummies, and more generally how every pigment is made from some different weird thing.
  • Every ingredient in your kitchen coming from a different weird and often horrifying animal or plant process.
  • Humans possibly developing larger brains because we invented cooking.
  • Raw food enthusiasts just enjoying digesting harder than the rest of us.
  • Measuring the calories in a food by making the food explode.
  • The millennia-long development of corn as a staple crop.
  • Posing with a crazy hat because your yearbook editors didn't have enough photos of Crazy Hat Day.
  • Falsifying the historical record.
  • Seeing a yearbook on a friend's bookshelf and offering to sign it.
  • Paying extra to get your high school yearbook pre-signed.
  • Seeing your parent's yearbook and realizing for the first time that they had hobbies once.
  • A nice kid who is always doing their best.
  • Seeing your high school teacher in street clothes at the grocery store and realizing that he is just a few years older than you.
  • How a task seems impossible until you have a strong enough incentive to do it.
  • The switch that flips in your brain once you have a kid where it becomes unthinkable to not have a kid or want to have a kid.
  • Childbirth lawyers.
  • Having an extra plug.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Mark plugs Ravening Iron
  • Shirley plugs a silicone reusable popcorn maker

Topics:

  • The trend of positive media (Great British Baking Show, etc.)
  • What is your favorite magic paradigm? Related: Space Wizards: What happened??
  • Transitioning from being able to cook a dish to being able to cook a meal
  • Larry asks "Yearbooks. Do you still have them? Have you ever actually used one? Is it full of signatures and stuff like that?"
  • "Dude, maybe Jim can give us parenting advice" is what I just said out loud, what do you think of that, Jim?

Microtopics:

  • Whether Ravening Iron slaps.
  • The life-changing silicone popcorn maker.
  • A cup that says "tea" on it that's filled with bourbon.
  • Dirty Harry except he's shooting the mishandling of evidence in the face.
  • Dirty Harry except instead of shooting perps in the face he takes a bath.
  • Watching Joker (2019) and thinking "finally, the IPs of my youth are real art now"
  • A slow motion replay of a lady forgetting to put ice cream back in the fridge.
  • Choosing the biggest burliest man you can find who is moved to tears at the drop of a hat to judge your reality show.
  • Being moved to tears because a jug is unexpectedly light.
  • A manual of non-toxic masculinity.
  • Men Feeling Feelings.
  • Collecting magic paradigms.
  • Staying up all night studying your book of magic and then the next day you can cast one (1) fireball.
  • Studying magic for years and then having spells in your head that you never cast.
  • All the spells in a wizard's head going off at once when the wizard dies, like that fireworks show in San Diego.
  • Accidentally learning the spell that will unmake reality.
  • Learning the magic words and swizzling a wand.
  • Teaching children that magic is an inherent ability that you either have or don't have.
  • Why there are so few space wizards.
  • Waking up in the middle of a night with a great story idea and in the morning you realize it's Star Wars.
  • Doctor Who explaining the science behind space vampires.
  • What if Marty McFly's photo of his brother was an actual person and his body parts started to vanish.
  • Battle mages carrying around notepads and calligraphy pens and battling by writing notes at each other.
  • Magical inscriptions all over your body rendering you invulnerable to physical harm everywhere except your face because your retail job doesn't allow face tattoos.
  • Recognizing Rise of the Skywalker as bad but still basically enjoying it because you just don't care that much any more.
  • The plot of a long running movie franchise suddenly hinging on the protagonist needing to find a bathroom when they've never been depicted as pooping even once.
  • Growing out of hating art.
  • Loving this topic.
  • Breakfast being easier to cook than other meals because it's okay to just make one dish and call it breakfast.
  • Breakfast being easier to cook than other meals because it uses a smaller set of potential ingredients.
  • Learning to look at a set of available ingredients and plan a meal out of them.
  • Learning how to cook to learn about process and flexibility.
  • Following a recipe but ultimately having to make the decision yourself that the food you're making is ready to be taken off the heat and served.
  • Skimming a recipe to get the gist and then just being able to make the thing because you know how food works.
  • The canonical flavor pairings of breakfast.
  • Figuring out your flavor profile and then your main protein and working outwards to the sides.
  • Learning to make scrambled eggs and realizing now you can just have scrambled eggs any time.
  • A Real Egg Hobbyist
  • Leaving behind audio logs for future civilizations.
  • A paint pigment made out of mummies, and more generally how every pigment is made from some different weird thing.
  • Every ingredient in your kitchen coming from a different weird and often horrifying animal or plant process.
  • Humans possibly developing larger brains because we invented cooking.
  • Raw food enthusiasts just enjoying digesting harder than the rest of us.
  • Measuring the calories in a food by making the food explode.
  • The millennia-long development of corn as a staple crop.
  • Posing with a crazy hat because your yearbook editors didn't have enough photos of Crazy Hat Day.
  • Falsifying the historical record.
  • Seeing a yearbook on a friend's bookshelf and offering to sign it.
  • Paying extra to get your high school yearbook pre-signed.
  • Seeing your parent's yearbook and realizing for the first time that they had hobbies once.
  • A nice kid who is always doing their best.
  • Seeing your high school teacher in street clothes at the grocery store and realizing that he is just a few years older than you.
  • How a task seems impossible until you have a strong enough incentive to do it.
  • The switch that flips in your brain once you have a kid where it becomes unthinkable to not have a kid or want to have a kid.
  • Childbirth lawyers.
  • Having an extra plug.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+t6tw2gz5 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 61. NHS Surveillance Elves https://topiclords.com/nhs-surveillance-elves ceddabb6-7313-4879-b1c2-d507986a50c0 Mon, 21 Dec 2020 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Alex and Shannon. We discuss: Youtube channels we like, using ice witch powers for good, why fish have up and down, video games with "lord" in the name, lying to kids about Santa, and building things in the snow. 1:05:15 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Which came first, the beer or the bread?
  • What Big Bread doesn't want you to know.
  • Accidentally setting up your Etsy store in Canada.
  • Selling pixel art with instructions on how to turn it into cross stitch.
  • A cool guy and his cool microscope.
  • Finding cool organisms to stream on your Twitch Plays Microscope channel.
  • Your grandma's room full of jars of pond scum and microscopes.
  • Making dinner wearing a GoPro.
  • Burning out on making your extremely overproduced podcast.
  • Getting in a knock down drag out fight on Twitter with the guy trying to convince you playing video games isn't a waste of time.
  • Cutting your video only when the GoPro is about to overheat.
  • The delight of somebody who is really excited about stuff.
  • Filling your house with ants and realizing you need a new house and building a new house and now you have two houses filled with ants.
  • You won't believe what happens next: ants.
  • Ruining your whole country real bad with your ice witch powers.
  • Using your ice witch powers for fire suppression.
  • Making beverages cold with your ice witch powers.
  • Harnessing the powers of Elsa and a Charizard to run a Stirling engine to solve the energy crisis.
  • Finding the Frozen lore bible to find out if Elsa can help cool superconductors.
  • Principles of homeopathic medicine factoring into the plot of Frozen 2.
  • Sating your hunger for topics.
  • Why fish only pitch and yaw and never roll.
  • Interviewing a guy named "Fish" for an article about fish but never mentioning his name once.
  • Countershading.
  • Having predators both above and below you at all times.
  • The boring answer to every question about evolution.
  • Being banned from Yellowstone for trying to fry a chicken in a geyser because you can only boil a chicken in a geyser.
  • Fish always swimming in the same orientation because they haven't read Ender's Game.
  • No Spine Don't Care.
  • The sh-sounding thing that looks like a capital B.
  • Whether you can read about the House of Lords on Mobygames.
  • Crusader Kings 2: Horse Lords
  • Making your own horse dynasty.
  • Thinking about an entirely different unicorn-based game from the other Lord.
  • Putting "re" in front of stuff to indicate a sequel.
  • Might of the Slither Lords.
  • What the Slither Lords eat and how often they use the bathroom.
  • Believing the lie about Santa Claus as practice for believing bigger lies later in life, such as "life has meaning."
  • Demonstrating to your children that authority figures will lie to you and laugh about it.
  • Baby's First Critical Thinking Exercise.
  • Santa Claus as a test run for evaluating beliefs based on the evidence rather than blindly believing what authority figures tell you.
  • Learning to pretend to believe in all the lies that form the foundation of society, like that you want to talk to the person next to you or that alcohol tastes good.
  • Not being allowed to tell dad that the Easter Bunny isn't real.
  • All the older kids getting to be part of perpetuating the Santa lie once they figure it out, but the youngest kid just getting to be sad.
  • Doing wholesome activities in a sneaky anonymous way.
  • Pirate Santa Works Twice As Hard.
  • The real joy of Christmas being that Santa will never learn your name properly.
  • Putting a barcode on your child's neck so Santa knows which present to give them.
  • A period of heightened observation of children.
  • All the elves working for the NHS.
  • Not being willing to lie to your child so you hire a Santa Lecturer to give a seminar at your house.
  • Whether five is a young age.
  • Setting up a dope haunted house that nobody can visit because there's a pandemic on.
  • Home Alone except instead of defending your house, you're breaking into people's houses to do nice things.
  • The laws of physics and the laws of man not applying to Santa but still applying to your five year old child.
  • The moment you need to explain criminal statutes to your five year old.
  • Permanently ruining your back by building snow forts in a winter wonderland.
  • Making igloos.
  • Starting to carve Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's name in the snow in front of your house during an election year and realizing you need a longer house.
  • Making giant ice buildings by spraying fire hoses everywhere.
  • Providing structural support to your ice building using ice I-beams made out of heavy water.
  • Making a snow maze for your tiny dog.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Which came first, the beer or the bread?
  • What Big Bread doesn't want you to know.
  • Accidentally setting up your Etsy store in Canada.
  • Selling pixel art with instructions on how to turn it into cross stitch.
  • A cool guy and his cool microscope.
  • Finding cool organisms to stream on your Twitch Plays Microscope channel.
  • Your grandma's room full of jars of pond scum and microscopes.
  • Making dinner wearing a GoPro.
  • Burning out on making your extremely overproduced podcast.
  • Getting in a knock down drag out fight on Twitter with the guy trying to convince you playing video games isn't a waste of time.
  • Cutting your video only when the GoPro is about to overheat.
  • The delight of somebody who is really excited about stuff.
  • Filling your house with ants and realizing you need a new house and building a new house and now you have two houses filled with ants.
  • You won't believe what happens next: ants.
  • Ruining your whole country real bad with your ice witch powers.
  • Using your ice witch powers for fire suppression.
  • Making beverages cold with your ice witch powers.
  • Harnessing the powers of Elsa and a Charizard to run a Stirling engine to solve the energy crisis.
  • Finding the Frozen lore bible to find out if Elsa can help cool superconductors.
  • Principles of homeopathic medicine factoring into the plot of Frozen 2.
  • Sating your hunger for topics.
  • Why fish only pitch and yaw and never roll.
  • Interviewing a guy named "Fish" for an article about fish but never mentioning his name once.
  • Countershading.
  • Having predators both above and below you at all times.
  • The boring answer to every question about evolution.
  • Being banned from Yellowstone for trying to fry a chicken in a geyser because you can only boil a chicken in a geyser.
  • Fish always swimming in the same orientation because they haven't read Ender's Game.
  • No Spine Don't Care.
  • The sh-sounding thing that looks like a capital B.
  • Whether you can read about the House of Lords on Mobygames.
  • Crusader Kings 2: Horse Lords
  • Making your own horse dynasty.
  • Thinking about an entirely different unicorn-based game from the other Lord.
  • Putting "re" in front of stuff to indicate a sequel.
  • Might of the Slither Lords.
  • What the Slither Lords eat and how often they use the bathroom.
  • Believing the lie about Santa Claus as practice for believing bigger lies later in life, such as "life has meaning."
  • Demonstrating to your children that authority figures will lie to you and laugh about it.
  • Baby's First Critical Thinking Exercise.
  • Santa Claus as a test run for evaluating beliefs based on the evidence rather than blindly believing what authority figures tell you.
  • Learning to pretend to believe in all the lies that form the foundation of society, like that you want to talk to the person next to you or that alcohol tastes good.
  • Not being allowed to tell dad that the Easter Bunny isn't real.
  • All the older kids getting to be part of perpetuating the Santa lie once they figure it out, but the youngest kid just getting to be sad.
  • Doing wholesome activities in a sneaky anonymous way.
  • Pirate Santa Works Twice As Hard.
  • The real joy of Christmas being that Santa will never learn your name properly.
  • Putting a barcode on your child's neck so Santa knows which present to give them.
  • A period of heightened observation of children.
  • All the elves working for the NHS.
  • Not being willing to lie to your child so you hire a Santa Lecturer to give a seminar at your house.
  • Whether five is a young age.
  • Setting up a dope haunted house that nobody can visit because there's a pandemic on.
  • Home Alone except instead of defending your house, you're breaking into people's houses to do nice things.
  • The laws of physics and the laws of man not applying to Santa but still applying to your five year old child.
  • The moment you need to explain criminal statutes to your five year old.
  • Permanently ruining your back by building snow forts in a winter wonderland.
  • Making igloos.
  • Starting to carve Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's name in the snow in front of your house during an election year and realizing you need a longer house.
  • Making giant ice buildings by spraying fire hoses everywhere.
  • Providing structural support to your ice building using ice I-beams made out of heavy water.
  • Making a snow maze for your tiny dog.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Which came first, the beer or the bread?
  • What Big Bread doesn't want you to know.
  • Accidentally setting up your Etsy store in Canada.
  • Selling pixel art with instructions on how to turn it into cross stitch.
  • A cool guy and his cool microscope.
  • Finding cool organisms to stream on your Twitch Plays Microscope channel.
  • Your grandma's room full of jars of pond scum and microscopes.
  • Making dinner wearing a GoPro.
  • Burning out on making your extremely overproduced podcast.
  • Getting in a knock down drag out fight on Twitter with the guy trying to convince you playing video games isn't a waste of time.
  • Cutting your video only when the GoPro is about to overheat.
  • The delight of somebody who is really excited about stuff.
  • Filling your house with ants and realizing you need a new house and building a new house and now you have two houses filled with ants.
  • You won't believe what happens next: ants.
  • Ruining your whole country real bad with your ice witch powers.
  • Using your ice witch powers for fire suppression.
  • Making beverages cold with your ice witch powers.
  • Harnessing the powers of Elsa and a Charizard to run a Stirling engine to solve the energy crisis.
  • Finding the Frozen lore bible to find out if Elsa can help cool superconductors.
  • Principles of homeopathic medicine factoring into the plot of Frozen 2.
  • Sating your hunger for topics.
  • Why fish only pitch and yaw and never roll.
  • Interviewing a guy named "Fish" for an article about fish but never mentioning his name once.
  • Countershading.
  • Having predators both above and below you at all times.
  • The boring answer to every question about evolution.
  • Being banned from Yellowstone for trying to fry a chicken in a geyser because you can only boil a chicken in a geyser.
  • Fish always swimming in the same orientation because they haven't read Ender's Game.
  • No Spine Don't Care.
  • The sh-sounding thing that looks like a capital B.
  • Whether you can read about the House of Lords on Mobygames.
  • Crusader Kings 2: Horse Lords
  • Making your own horse dynasty.
  • Thinking about an entirely different unicorn-based game from the other Lord.
  • Putting "re" in front of stuff to indicate a sequel.
  • Might of the Slither Lords.
  • What the Slither Lords eat and how often they use the bathroom.
  • Believing the lie about Santa Claus as practice for believing bigger lies later in life, such as "life has meaning."
  • Demonstrating to your children that authority figures will lie to you and laugh about it.
  • Baby's First Critical Thinking Exercise.
  • Santa Claus as a test run for evaluating beliefs based on the evidence rather than blindly believing what authority figures tell you.
  • Learning to pretend to believe in all the lies that form the foundation of society, like that you want to talk to the person next to you or that alcohol tastes good.
  • Not being allowed to tell dad that the Easter Bunny isn't real.
  • All the older kids getting to be part of perpetuating the Santa lie once they figure it out, but the youngest kid just getting to be sad.
  • Doing wholesome activities in a sneaky anonymous way.
  • Pirate Santa Works Twice As Hard.
  • The real joy of Christmas being that Santa will never learn your name properly.
  • Putting a barcode on your child's neck so Santa knows which present to give them.
  • A period of heightened observation of children.
  • All the elves working for the NHS.
  • Not being willing to lie to your child so you hire a Santa Lecturer to give a seminar at your house.
  • Whether five is a young age.
  • Setting up a dope haunted house that nobody can visit because there's a pandemic on.
  • Home Alone except instead of defending your house, you're breaking into people's houses to do nice things.
  • The laws of physics and the laws of man not applying to Santa but still applying to your five year old child.
  • The moment you need to explain criminal statutes to your five year old.
  • Permanently ruining your back by building snow forts in a winter wonderland.
  • Making igloos.
  • Starting to carve Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's name in the snow in front of your house during an election year and realizing you need a longer house.
  • Making giant ice buildings by spraying fire hoses everywhere.
  • Providing structural support to your ice building using ice I-beams made out of heavy water.
  • Making a snow maze for your tiny dog.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+Tv7XyjVl ]]> Jim Stormdancer 60. Pachinko Lava Lamp https://topiclords.com/pachinko-lava-lamp ec22bc96-ec3e-4588-b7dc-d198fefcce88 Mon, 14 Dec 2020 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: Chris and James. We discuss too-small microwaves, fantasy consoles, recreating pinball in software, the trade-off between customer satisfaction and worker safety, recommending music when you never listen to music recommendations yourself, and relearning how to run. 1:05:55 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • A shoelace knot that you are amazed by.
  • Whether somebody knows good ways of tying knots.
  • Not having any ads on the show but the same shoelace knot being independently plugged by three separate guests.
  • Looking outside and seeing someone furtively deposit the world's smallest microwave on the sidewalk.
  • A microwave that is awesome until you try to put popcorn in it.
  • A dollhouse microwave that can microwave popcorn one kernel at a time.
  • The Easy Bake Microwave.
  • That one kid you knew whose family was rich enough that he had a microwave in his bedroom.
  • The Easy Bake TV which is just a light bulb that you stare into.
  • Downsizing your lifestyle.
  • Ultra-miniaturized microwaves that are just big enough for a can of Coca Cola.
  • Hot Coke.
  • Deciding to try Hot Coke after the show because your microwave is too small to fit anything bigger than a mug of Coca Cola.
  • A hot tub with a volume of half a cubic foot.
  • Whether the Whirlpool hot tub actually spins.
  • Recording an entire additional episode of Topic Lords after this, that only we get to hear.
  • Deciding that your fantasy console should be linear without knowing what linear means.
  • Making software last a long time by targeting an emulator.
  • Deciding that your entire approach to your current project is wrong and inverting its structure and then deciding to make a pinball game instead.
  • Having to fake the physical pinball interactions because physics engines still aren't precise enough.
  • Not having a ball bearing bouncing around inside of your phone.
  • Applying an impulse when the ball hits a collision volume.
  • The actual electromechanical mechanism of those triangles near the flippers that push the ball back.
  • A physics solver that does mixed rigid and soft body deformation.
  • Ordering pinball flippers online so you can measure them because you can't find specs describing their exact shape and size anywhere.
  • How pop bumpers work.
  • The ball rolling over the skirt and triggering the thrusters.
  • Modeling an invisible cone that drives itself down.
  • Buying a nice plastic skirt and an extremely high-current solenoid.
  • Making a functional pinball table out of cardboard.
  • A pinball table inside of a wine bottle.
  • Pinball tables all having the common constraint that they need to fit through the door.
  • "Hercules," the pinball table where the gimmick is that it's too big to fit through the door.
  • How to draw the rest of the owl.
  • Pinball except instead of a ball it's water.
  • A PSP except instead of a portable video game system it's one of those games where you squeeze water to get rings onto posts.
  • Christmas except every present is just a box of avocados.
  • Pachinko except it's an oil timer.
  • Physically impossible but physically accurate pinball machines.
  • Pachinko except there's fire everywhere and what's falling through the pins is your dead body and all your individual bones.
  • Getting licensed to make scrambled eggs with an espresso machine.
  • A Big Black Egg Gauntlet.
  • A big black glove that smells but doesn't look like rotten eggs.
  • The pressure of an egg.
  • Whether an egg could be held aloft by a shop vac.
  • The video of an egg being sucked into a bottle that google shows you when it doesn't have any good results, because you can't stay mad when you get to see an egg sucked into a bottle.
  • The ethics of asking your wife to take a video of cafe workers making scrambled eggs.
  • The violence of recommendations.
  • Whether or not you can get mad about your time being wasted for twenty seconds.
  • Doing everything in your power to like your favorite band's new album.
  • Your first "Hero's Journey" vs. your hundredth.
  • The kind of media you consume while doing other things vs. the kind you actively study.
  • Mentoring teenagers and exhorting that they listen to as much music as possible before they get old like you, and handing them some Linkin Park CDs.
  • Getting better at stuff.
  • Each sport having a different set of recommended vitamin supplements.
  • Lurching forward on your ankles.
  • Looking up how runners run on Youtube and immediately realizing how you can run way faster.
  • Getting running shoes that force you to spring around on your toes rather than landing on your heel.
  • Getting it but not liking it.
  • Studying Full Tilt.
  • Taking your kick scooter on the freeway.
  • Pre-Stormdancer problems.
  • Googling your own name and finding erotic short fiction starring a gay lumberjack with your name.
  • The sound of probably not being able to hear anything
  • Whether a beverage can be both hot and carbonated.
  • Sadness when you can't carbonate soup.
  • The audio signature of Coke being microwaved.
  • A microwave% run of Super Mario 64 where you need to turn on the microwave next to the Nintendo 64 at the exact right frame.
  • Honey refusing to dissolve in tea no matter how much you stir.
  • Putting your mug of flat microwaved Coke in the Sodastream to recarbonate it.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • A shoelace knot that you are amazed by.
  • Whether somebody knows good ways of tying knots.
  • Not having any ads on the show but the same shoelace knot being independently plugged by three separate guests.
  • Looking outside and seeing someone furtively deposit the world's smallest microwave on the sidewalk.
  • A microwave that is awesome until you try to put popcorn in it.
  • A dollhouse microwave that can microwave popcorn one kernel at a time.
  • The Easy Bake Microwave.
  • That one kid you knew whose family was rich enough that he had a microwave in his bedroom.
  • The Easy Bake TV which is just a light bulb that you stare into.
  • Downsizing your lifestyle.
  • Ultra-miniaturized microwaves that are just big enough for a can of Coca Cola.
  • Hot Coke.
  • Deciding to try Hot Coke after the show because your microwave is too small to fit anything bigger than a mug of Coca Cola.
  • A hot tub with a volume of half a cubic foot.
  • Whether the Whirlpool hot tub actually spins.
  • Recording an entire additional episode of Topic Lords after this, that only we get to hear.
  • Deciding that your fantasy console should be linear without knowing what linear means.
  • Making software last a long time by targeting an emulator.
  • Deciding that your entire approach to your current project is wrong and inverting its structure and then deciding to make a pinball game instead.
  • Having to fake the physical pinball interactions because physics engines still aren't precise enough.
  • Not having a ball bearing bouncing around inside of your phone.
  • Applying an impulse when the ball hits a collision volume.
  • The actual electromechanical mechanism of those triangles near the flippers that push the ball back.
  • A physics solver that does mixed rigid and soft body deformation.
  • Ordering pinball flippers online so you can measure them because you can't find specs describing their exact shape and size anywhere.
  • How pop bumpers work.
  • The ball rolling over the skirt and triggering the thrusters.
  • Modeling an invisible cone that drives itself down.
  • Buying a nice plastic skirt and an extremely high-current solenoid.
  • Making a functional pinball table out of cardboard.
  • A pinball table inside of a wine bottle.
  • Pinball tables all having the common constraint that they need to fit through the door.
  • "Hercules," the pinball table where the gimmick is that it's too big to fit through the door.
  • How to draw the rest of the owl.
  • Pinball except instead of a ball it's water.
  • A PSP except instead of a portable video game system it's one of those games where you squeeze water to get rings onto posts.
  • Christmas except every present is just a box of avocados.
  • Pachinko except it's an oil timer.
  • Physically impossible but physically accurate pinball machines.
  • Pachinko except there's fire everywhere and what's falling through the pins is your dead body and all your individual bones.
  • Getting licensed to make scrambled eggs with an espresso machine.
  • A Big Black Egg Gauntlet.
  • A big black glove that smells but doesn't look like rotten eggs.
  • The pressure of an egg.
  • Whether an egg could be held aloft by a shop vac.
  • The video of an egg being sucked into a bottle that google shows you when it doesn't have any good results, because you can't stay mad when you get to see an egg sucked into a bottle.
  • The ethics of asking your wife to take a video of cafe workers making scrambled eggs.
  • The violence of recommendations.
  • Whether or not you can get mad about your time being wasted for twenty seconds.
  • Doing everything in your power to like your favorite band's new album.
  • Your first "Hero's Journey" vs. your hundredth.
  • The kind of media you consume while doing other things vs. the kind you actively study.
  • Mentoring teenagers and exhorting that they listen to as much music as possible before they get old like you, and handing them some Linkin Park CDs.
  • Getting better at stuff.
  • Each sport having a different set of recommended vitamin supplements.
  • Lurching forward on your ankles.
  • Looking up how runners run on Youtube and immediately realizing how you can run way faster.
  • Getting running shoes that force you to spring around on your toes rather than landing on your heel.
  • Getting it but not liking it.
  • Studying Full Tilt.
  • Taking your kick scooter on the freeway.
  • Pre-Stormdancer problems.
  • Googling your own name and finding erotic short fiction starring a gay lumberjack with your name.
  • The sound of probably not being able to hear anything
  • Whether a beverage can be both hot and carbonated.
  • Sadness when you can't carbonate soup.
  • The audio signature of Coke being microwaved.
  • A microwave% run of Super Mario 64 where you need to turn on the microwave next to the Nintendo 64 at the exact right frame.
  • Honey refusing to dissolve in tea no matter how much you stir.
  • Putting your mug of flat microwaved Coke in the Sodastream to recarbonate it.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • A shoelace knot that you are amazed by.
  • Whether somebody knows good ways of tying knots.
  • Not having any ads on the show but the same shoelace knot being independently plugged by three separate guests.
  • Looking outside and seeing someone furtively deposit the world's smallest microwave on the sidewalk.
  • A microwave that is awesome until you try to put popcorn in it.
  • A dollhouse microwave that can microwave popcorn one kernel at a time.
  • The Easy Bake Microwave.
  • That one kid you knew whose family was rich enough that he had a microwave in his bedroom.
  • The Easy Bake TV which is just a light bulb that you stare into.
  • Downsizing your lifestyle.
  • Ultra-miniaturized microwaves that are just big enough for a can of Coca Cola.
  • Hot Coke.
  • Deciding to try Hot Coke after the show because your microwave is too small to fit anything bigger than a mug of Coca Cola.
  • A hot tub with a volume of half a cubic foot.
  • Whether the Whirlpool hot tub actually spins.
  • Recording an entire additional episode of Topic Lords after this, that only we get to hear.
  • Deciding that your fantasy console should be linear without knowing what linear means.
  • Making software last a long time by targeting an emulator.
  • Deciding that your entire approach to your current project is wrong and inverting its structure and then deciding to make a pinball game instead.
  • Having to fake the physical pinball interactions because physics engines still aren't precise enough.
  • Not having a ball bearing bouncing around inside of your phone.
  • Applying an impulse when the ball hits a collision volume.
  • The actual electromechanical mechanism of those triangles near the flippers that push the ball back.
  • A physics solver that does mixed rigid and soft body deformation.
  • Ordering pinball flippers online so you can measure them because you can't find specs describing their exact shape and size anywhere.
  • How pop bumpers work.
  • The ball rolling over the skirt and triggering the thrusters.
  • Modeling an invisible cone that drives itself down.
  • Buying a nice plastic skirt and an extremely high-current solenoid.
  • Making a functional pinball table out of cardboard.
  • A pinball table inside of a wine bottle.
  • Pinball tables all having the common constraint that they need to fit through the door.
  • "Hercules," the pinball table where the gimmick is that it's too big to fit through the door.
  • How to draw the rest of the owl.
  • Pinball except instead of a ball it's water.
  • A PSP except instead of a portable video game system it's one of those games where you squeeze water to get rings onto posts.
  • Christmas except every present is just a box of avocados.
  • Pachinko except it's an oil timer.
  • Physically impossible but physically accurate pinball machines.
  • Pachinko except there's fire everywhere and what's falling through the pins is your dead body and all your individual bones.
  • Getting licensed to make scrambled eggs with an espresso machine.
  • A Big Black Egg Gauntlet.
  • A big black glove that smells but doesn't look like rotten eggs.
  • The pressure of an egg.
  • Whether an egg could be held aloft by a shop vac.
  • The video of an egg being sucked into a bottle that google shows you when it doesn't have any good results, because you can't stay mad when you get to see an egg sucked into a bottle.
  • The ethics of asking your wife to take a video of cafe workers making scrambled eggs.
  • The violence of recommendations.
  • Whether or not you can get mad about your time being wasted for twenty seconds.
  • Doing everything in your power to like your favorite band's new album.
  • Your first "Hero's Journey" vs. your hundredth.
  • The kind of media you consume while doing other things vs. the kind you actively study.
  • Mentoring teenagers and exhorting that they listen to as much music as possible before they get old like you, and handing them some Linkin Park CDs.
  • Getting better at stuff.
  • Each sport having a different set of recommended vitamin supplements.
  • Lurching forward on your ankles.
  • Looking up how runners run on Youtube and immediately realizing how you can run way faster.
  • Getting running shoes that force you to spring around on your toes rather than landing on your heel.
  • Getting it but not liking it.
  • Studying Full Tilt.
  • Taking your kick scooter on the freeway.
  • Pre-Stormdancer problems.
  • Googling your own name and finding erotic short fiction starring a gay lumberjack with your name.
  • The sound of probably not being able to hear anything
  • Whether a beverage can be both hot and carbonated.
  • Sadness when you can't carbonate soup.
  • The audio signature of Coke being microwaved.
  • A microwave% run of Super Mario 64 where you need to turn on the microwave next to the Nintendo 64 at the exact right frame.
  • Honey refusing to dissolve in tea no matter how much you stir.
  • Putting your mug of flat microwaved Coke in the Sodastream to recarbonate it.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+m4T_o3mp ]]> Jim Stormdancer 59. 1-800-Ask-a-Harpsichord.com https://topiclords.com/1-800-ask-a-harpsichord-dot-com 549dc05d-d381-4127-9a42-515c62980a44 Mon, 07 Dec 2020 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: Amanda and Xander. We discuss the care and feeding of harpsichords, shareware floppies in grocery stores, the outlandish economic world of Neopets, and running a Beanie Baby empire on 30 minutes of screen time/day. 1:11:31 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Programming industrial robots to lift really heavy things.
  • Trying teach kids Python when you don't know Python, but it's okay because knowing how for loops work gets you 90% of the way there.
  • The consequences of buggy code when the robot is lifting a test tube vs. a car.
  • Whether three rotary axes mounted on a big linear slide counts as a robot or is just a fancy conveyer belt.
  • A failed branch on the evolutionary tree of keyboard instruments.
  • Having to retune your harpsichord multiple times a day if not multiple times per song.
  • A harpsichord jumping into organ territory.
  • A medieval troubador who is not playing power chords.
  • The Famichord.
  • Omitting the note that is most heavily implied by the other three notes.
  • Conflating Super Mario World and Link to the Past because they both use spooky harpsichord music.
  • The difficulty of synthesizing a piano sound.
  • A really slow early version of machine learning.
  • Conveying musical intensity when you have no volume control.
  • Sharpening your own crow quills to maintain your piano.
  • Sneaking broken harpsichords into somebody's house while they're sleeping.
  • Rompler rock.
  • Recognizing a Bach piece because once you typed it into your Commodore 128 as a PLAY statement.
  • A floppy disk that you bought in a grocery store when you were six.
  • Whether Sir Mix A Lot is actually dead or just represents a dead person in this analogy.
  • The internals of the Quake engine.
  • A C-like language with no arrays so you need to do everything with linked lists.
  • How long humans have been taking square roots for.
  • Real-time operating systems.
  • Putting your audio code in the same thread as your game code so the audio breaks up if you frame rate dips too low.
  • Sending Jim a sample of moustache man.
  • A pinball game that plays sound effects at significantly different rates depending on the version of the sound chip.
  • Buying a shareware game on a floppy disk at a grocery store for the same price as a blank floppy disk.
  • Playing the shareware episode of Doom and being like "I played Doom already, I don't need to pay for it."
  • Getting a call from your harpsichord landlord because you haven't paid your harpsichord loans and he refuses to take the harpsichord back.
  • Harpsichords requiring daily maintenance or they break down over the span of months.
  • Putting your harpsichord in a sauna to keep it moisturized.
  • A squirrel in ancient Rome fighting with gladiators over pizza.
  • A folder hidden by your mom's inability to do a recursive directory listing.
  • Deciding, as a culture, that the way to advance the 2D platformer as a genre is to make it as hard as possible.
  • Getting perforated printer paper at the library and drawing your own Prince of Persia levels.
  • Writing your opus with fire flowers and station wagons.
  • Whether or not it's cool that Mario Paint Composer graduated to twelve tones.
  • Back when there was a point to writing songs in different keys.
  • 1-800-harpsichord-facts.com
  • Delving into Neopets as an outsider and seeing real life principles of economics mirrored in a distorted reflection.
  • Making a bad search engine for the player shops so non-competitive shops run by inexperienced players get as much shop traffic as the competitive ones, and so finding a particular item feels like a discovery rather than a given.
  • Exploring the outcomes of a search engine that is bad in an interesting way.
  • Neopets voter fraud.
  • Designing daily quests to keep player shop prices high.
  • Writing gradient descent optimized algorithms to optimize your Neopets casino strategy.
  • Learning to code because you want the nicest Neopets shop.
  • Pushing HTML5 to its limits to get a really big sparkling snowflake in the middle of your ice themed Neopets shop.
  • Intentionally broken search bringing back the art of gift giving in the digital age.
  • Intentionally not buying something for yourself so someone can give it to you for your birthday.
  • Winning a trophy for reading books to your Neopet.
  • Reading 140 of the 150 possible space themed books to your Neopet to get that Neopet on the space themed books high score table.
  • A nine year old running a Neopets crime syndicate.
  • Pre-PayPal digital currencies.
  • Convincing your grandma to get you a PO Box and bank account so you can run an underground Beanie Babies empire.
  • The minimum and maximum permitted age for legal Beanie Baby arbitrage.
  • Editing a magazine and asking them to pay you in online gift cards so they won't figure out you're ten years old and not a 55 year old graduate of the University of Vermont.
  • The responsible young scammer who takes the profits from their Beanie Baby arbitrage and uses it to pay for less than their first semester of college tuition.
  • Getting an insider tip that Ty is going to retire every Beanie Baby at the end of 1999 and the market is going to tank but not being able to act on it because eBay kicked you off because you're 12 years old.
  • Going to juvie for insider trading.
  • Living off of Wonder Bread for four months after you get out of your oppressive parents no-wheat household.
  • Asking your dad what the internet is and the next day he prints the W3 consortium HTML spec at work and comes home and hands it to you.
  • Meeting your best friend in college because you both learned a variant of C++ that will only compile in Microsoft's compiler.
  • Making your own podcast, "Ask a Harpsichord," to put all the remaining harpsichord facts that didn't fit in this episode.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Programming industrial robots to lift really heavy things.
  • Trying teach kids Python when you don't know Python, but it's okay because knowing how for loops work gets you 90% of the way there.
  • The consequences of buggy code when the robot is lifting a test tube vs. a car.
  • Whether three rotary axes mounted on a big linear slide counts as a robot or is just a fancy conveyer belt.
  • A failed branch on the evolutionary tree of keyboard instruments.
  • Having to retune your harpsichord multiple times a day if not multiple times per song.
  • A harpsichord jumping into organ territory.
  • A medieval troubador who is not playing power chords.
  • The Famichord.
  • Omitting the note that is most heavily implied by the other three notes.
  • Conflating Super Mario World and Link to the Past because they both use spooky harpsichord music.
  • The difficulty of synthesizing a piano sound.
  • A really slow early version of machine learning.
  • Conveying musical intensity when you have no volume control.
  • Sharpening your own crow quills to maintain your piano.
  • Sneaking broken harpsichords into somebody's house while they're sleeping.
  • Rompler rock.
  • Recognizing a Bach piece because once you typed it into your Commodore 128 as a PLAY statement.
  • A floppy disk that you bought in a grocery store when you were six.
  • Whether Sir Mix A Lot is actually dead or just represents a dead person in this analogy.
  • The internals of the Quake engine.
  • A C-like language with no arrays so you need to do everything with linked lists.
  • How long humans have been taking square roots for.
  • Real-time operating systems.
  • Putting your audio code in the same thread as your game code so the audio breaks up if you frame rate dips too low.
  • Sending Jim a sample of moustache man.
  • A pinball game that plays sound effects at significantly different rates depending on the version of the sound chip.
  • Buying a shareware game on a floppy disk at a grocery store for the same price as a blank floppy disk.
  • Playing the shareware episode of Doom and being like "I played Doom already, I don't need to pay for it."
  • Getting a call from your harpsichord landlord because you haven't paid your harpsichord loans and he refuses to take the harpsichord back.
  • Harpsichords requiring daily maintenance or they break down over the span of months.
  • Putting your harpsichord in a sauna to keep it moisturized.
  • A squirrel in ancient Rome fighting with gladiators over pizza.
  • A folder hidden by your mom's inability to do a recursive directory listing.
  • Deciding, as a culture, that the way to advance the 2D platformer as a genre is to make it as hard as possible.
  • Getting perforated printer paper at the library and drawing your own Prince of Persia levels.
  • Writing your opus with fire flowers and station wagons.
  • Whether or not it's cool that Mario Paint Composer graduated to twelve tones.
  • Back when there was a point to writing songs in different keys.
  • 1-800-harpsichord-facts.com
  • Delving into Neopets as an outsider and seeing real life principles of economics mirrored in a distorted reflection.
  • Making a bad search engine for the player shops so non-competitive shops run by inexperienced players get as much shop traffic as the competitive ones, and so finding a particular item feels like a discovery rather than a given.
  • Exploring the outcomes of a search engine that is bad in an interesting way.
  • Neopets voter fraud.
  • Designing daily quests to keep player shop prices high.
  • Writing gradient descent optimized algorithms to optimize your Neopets casino strategy.
  • Learning to code because you want the nicest Neopets shop.
  • Pushing HTML5 to its limits to get a really big sparkling snowflake in the middle of your ice themed Neopets shop.
  • Intentionally broken search bringing back the art of gift giving in the digital age.
  • Intentionally not buying something for yourself so someone can give it to you for your birthday.
  • Winning a trophy for reading books to your Neopet.
  • Reading 140 of the 150 possible space themed books to your Neopet to get that Neopet on the space themed books high score table.
  • A nine year old running a Neopets crime syndicate.
  • Pre-PayPal digital currencies.
  • Convincing your grandma to get you a PO Box and bank account so you can run an underground Beanie Babies empire.
  • The minimum and maximum permitted age for legal Beanie Baby arbitrage.
  • Editing a magazine and asking them to pay you in online gift cards so they won't figure out you're ten years old and not a 55 year old graduate of the University of Vermont.
  • The responsible young scammer who takes the profits from their Beanie Baby arbitrage and uses it to pay for less than their first semester of college tuition.
  • Getting an insider tip that Ty is going to retire every Beanie Baby at the end of 1999 and the market is going to tank but not being able to act on it because eBay kicked you off because you're 12 years old.
  • Going to juvie for insider trading.
  • Living off of Wonder Bread for four months after you get out of your oppressive parents no-wheat household.
  • Asking your dad what the internet is and the next day he prints the W3 consortium HTML spec at work and comes home and hands it to you.
  • Meeting your best friend in college because you both learned a variant of C++ that will only compile in Microsoft's compiler.
  • Making your own podcast, "Ask a Harpsichord," to put all the remaining harpsichord facts that didn't fit in this episode.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Programming industrial robots to lift really heavy things.
  • Trying teach kids Python when you don't know Python, but it's okay because knowing how for loops work gets you 90% of the way there.
  • The consequences of buggy code when the robot is lifting a test tube vs. a car.
  • Whether three rotary axes mounted on a big linear slide counts as a robot or is just a fancy conveyer belt.
  • A failed branch on the evolutionary tree of keyboard instruments.
  • Having to retune your harpsichord multiple times a day if not multiple times per song.
  • A harpsichord jumping into organ territory.
  • A medieval troubador who is not playing power chords.
  • The Famichord.
  • Omitting the note that is most heavily implied by the other three notes.
  • Conflating Super Mario World and Link to the Past because they both use spooky harpsichord music.
  • The difficulty of synthesizing a piano sound.
  • A really slow early version of machine learning.
  • Conveying musical intensity when you have no volume control.
  • Sharpening your own crow quills to maintain your piano.
  • Sneaking broken harpsichords into somebody's house while they're sleeping.
  • Rompler rock.
  • Recognizing a Bach piece because once you typed it into your Commodore 128 as a PLAY statement.
  • A floppy disk that you bought in a grocery store when you were six.
  • Whether Sir Mix A Lot is actually dead or just represents a dead person in this analogy.
  • The internals of the Quake engine.
  • A C-like language with no arrays so you need to do everything with linked lists.
  • How long humans have been taking square roots for.
  • Real-time operating systems.
  • Putting your audio code in the same thread as your game code so the audio breaks up if you frame rate dips too low.
  • Sending Jim a sample of moustache man.
  • A pinball game that plays sound effects at significantly different rates depending on the version of the sound chip.
  • Buying a shareware game on a floppy disk at a grocery store for the same price as a blank floppy disk.
  • Playing the shareware episode of Doom and being like "I played Doom already, I don't need to pay for it."
  • Getting a call from your harpsichord landlord because you haven't paid your harpsichord loans and he refuses to take the harpsichord back.
  • Harpsichords requiring daily maintenance or they break down over the span of months.
  • Putting your harpsichord in a sauna to keep it moisturized.
  • A squirrel in ancient Rome fighting with gladiators over pizza.
  • A folder hidden by your mom's inability to do a recursive directory listing.
  • Deciding, as a culture, that the way to advance the 2D platformer as a genre is to make it as hard as possible.
  • Getting perforated printer paper at the library and drawing your own Prince of Persia levels.
  • Writing your opus with fire flowers and station wagons.
  • Whether or not it's cool that Mario Paint Composer graduated to twelve tones.
  • Back when there was a point to writing songs in different keys.
  • 1-800-harpsichord-facts.com
  • Delving into Neopets as an outsider and seeing real life principles of economics mirrored in a distorted reflection.
  • Making a bad search engine for the player shops so non-competitive shops run by inexperienced players get as much shop traffic as the competitive ones, and so finding a particular item feels like a discovery rather than a given.
  • Exploring the outcomes of a search engine that is bad in an interesting way.
  • Neopets voter fraud.
  • Designing daily quests to keep player shop prices high.
  • Writing gradient descent optimized algorithms to optimize your Neopets casino strategy.
  • Learning to code because you want the nicest Neopets shop.
  • Pushing HTML5 to its limits to get a really big sparkling snowflake in the middle of your ice themed Neopets shop.
  • Intentionally broken search bringing back the art of gift giving in the digital age.
  • Intentionally not buying something for yourself so someone can give it to you for your birthday.
  • Winning a trophy for reading books to your Neopet.
  • Reading 140 of the 150 possible space themed books to your Neopet to get that Neopet on the space themed books high score table.
  • A nine year old running a Neopets crime syndicate.
  • Pre-PayPal digital currencies.
  • Convincing your grandma to get you a PO Box and bank account so you can run an underground Beanie Babies empire.
  • The minimum and maximum permitted age for legal Beanie Baby arbitrage.
  • Editing a magazine and asking them to pay you in online gift cards so they won't figure out you're ten years old and not a 55 year old graduate of the University of Vermont.
  • The responsible young scammer who takes the profits from their Beanie Baby arbitrage and uses it to pay for less than their first semester of college tuition.
  • Getting an insider tip that Ty is going to retire every Beanie Baby at the end of 1999 and the market is going to tank but not being able to act on it because eBay kicked you off because you're 12 years old.
  • Going to juvie for insider trading.
  • Living off of Wonder Bread for four months after you get out of your oppressive parents no-wheat household.
  • Asking your dad what the internet is and the next day he prints the W3 consortium HTML spec at work and comes home and hands it to you.
  • Meeting your best friend in college because you both learned a variant of C++ that will only compile in Microsoft's compiler.
  • Making your own podcast, "Ask a Harpsichord," to put all the remaining harpsichord facts that didn't fit in this episode.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+q4GlCIwh ]]> Jim Stormdancer 58. Sparkles on Top of the Brain https://topiclords.com/sparkles-on-top-of-the-brain 187a4398-1385-4ef5-a717-933f06a414f7 Mon, 30 Nov 2020 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: Elena and Tyriq. We discuss becoming the old person you want to be, reborrowings, peak dad experience, textual dialects, and the tone deafness test. 1:13:15 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Whether complice is the opposite of accomplice.
  • Intending to clean the fridge.
  • A short but sweet plug that you manage to drag out of your guest.
  • Thinking an early access game is dead when the developer is right there in your kitchen streaming making breakfast.
  • Feeling too young to just go around handing out Werther's Originals.
  • Whether at some age all your teeth fall out or whether they just decided once, in the 1950s maybe, that it's time to pull everyone's teeth.
  • Whether the lady with twenty cats accrued the cats over the course of your life or just adopted twenty cats at once.
  • Learning to regrow your teeth so you can change your teeth style every few months, like you can your hair.
  • Transhuman augmentation of the teeth.
  • Being sure that a pop culture concept doesn't exist in Japan because you didn't see it in that one Yakuza game you played.
  • Sharpening your teeth to look like a cat.
  • The world record for most permanent transformations to look like an animal.
  • Whether dead people can still be the fastest person in the world.
  • The world record for most permanent transformations to look like something other than an animal.
  • How Stalking Cat decided to become a cat.
  • Wanting to be more like a tiger and having your ears transplanted to the top of your head.
  • Getting a job as a programmer to fund your body modification plans so you can be the old person you dream about being.
  • Running plastic tubes from the fake ears on top of your head down to the place your ears used to be.
  • The major themes of Stalking Cat's LiveJournal.
  • Seeing someone's LiveJournal post saying just "I start shooting today" and wondering if you should be worried.
  • Getting back to being old.
  • Cultivating the witchy vibe when you're not really a witch.
  • Not having any enormous flowing skirts any more because you moved across the country and they all caught the wind and flew out of the back of the car.
  • Making a skirt out of chainmail and refusing to twirl it because a four year old lives in your house.
  • Asking the manufacturer of your favorite towel whether they make bathrobes and they send back a one word email saying "no."
  • Wanting to look like a dapper old man but hating fashion norms.
  • Appropriating the parts of fashion that you like while subverting the idea that you're participating in the fashion hierarchy.
  • Wanting to eventually look like a dapper old man and starting by buying one dapper sock.
  • Codpieces.
  • Wearing full plate armor to church or to court.
  • Stalking Cat's profile page on wikifur.com
  • The Romans enslaving so many Slavs that Slav becomes their word for it.
  • All the different times that nature has evolved a tree.
  • Palm trees not really being trees and just being weird grass.
  • A plant deciding to get tall where the sun is and reinventing wood.
  • Languages borrowing words from other languages and then giving them back after completely changing the meaning.
  • Whether Italy has any Pizza Huts.
  • Trying to cover a song by a singer with a weird accent and discovering that you need that weird accent for the song to work and deciding if you're willing to adopt the weird accent for your cover.
  • English poetry that is too old.
  • A two year old pronouncing pork katsu as "pork costume."
  • Dressing your two year old in pork for Halloween like the tiny ham he is.
  • Really giving somebody the pork costume.
  • Realizing your best work is behind you when you haven't done anything notable.
  • An entirely sideways mouth that has fallen off your face.
  • Chekov's Book.
  • A throne but you can poop in it.
  • Hiding a piece of matzo somewhere in your house on Passover and eventually your house fills up with matzo.
  • Yelling at your coworker for only using the "slight smile" emoji because they weren't happy enough.
  • Image searching for the Unicode character "slight smile" and seeing a field of smiley faces that are just the classic yellow smiley, but then there's one that's this smirking douchebag.
  • How autocorrect ought to be able to code switch based on who you're talking to and what you're talking about.
  • Walking around the house and discovering that you can't use the word "okay" in the kitchen.
  • Putting the sparkles on top of the brain.
  • Trying to talk about bringing your head below something and autocorrect is like "did you mean: fucking"
  • Youtube's automatic captioning now censoring swear words.
  • Censoring swear words by replacing the word "shit" with a picture of shit.
  • Whether the eggplant emoji would ejaculate from the stem end or the bulb end.
  • Squeezing mayonnaise out of the stem end of an eggplant emoji squeeze bottle.
  • The tone deaf and the tone hearing.
  • Being surprised to meet people who can't sing at all, even though you just met someone like that a couple days ago.
  • Hearing a pitch and having no idea whether it's higher or lower than what you're singing.
  • Not letting anyone into your painting club who can't distinguish red and green.
  • Greyie Pie.
  • Applying a deuteranopic filter to a My Little Pony episode and instantly being incredibly depressed.
  • Not knowing the right answer but the person in your head heckling you does.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Whether complice is the opposite of accomplice.
  • Intending to clean the fridge.
  • A short but sweet plug that you manage to drag out of your guest.
  • Thinking an early access game is dead when the developer is right there in your kitchen streaming making breakfast.
  • Feeling too young to just go around handing out Werther's Originals.
  • Whether at some age all your teeth fall out or whether they just decided once, in the 1950s maybe, that it's time to pull everyone's teeth.
  • Whether the lady with twenty cats accrued the cats over the course of your life or just adopted twenty cats at once.
  • Learning to regrow your teeth so you can change your teeth style every few months, like you can your hair.
  • Transhuman augmentation of the teeth.
  • Being sure that a pop culture concept doesn't exist in Japan because you didn't see it in that one Yakuza game you played.
  • Sharpening your teeth to look like a cat.
  • The world record for most permanent transformations to look like an animal.
  • Whether dead people can still be the fastest person in the world.
  • The world record for most permanent transformations to look like something other than an animal.
  • How Stalking Cat decided to become a cat.
  • Wanting to be more like a tiger and having your ears transplanted to the top of your head.
  • Getting a job as a programmer to fund your body modification plans so you can be the old person you dream about being.
  • Running plastic tubes from the fake ears on top of your head down to the place your ears used to be.
  • The major themes of Stalking Cat's LiveJournal.
  • Seeing someone's LiveJournal post saying just "I start shooting today" and wondering if you should be worried.
  • Getting back to being old.
  • Cultivating the witchy vibe when you're not really a witch.
  • Not having any enormous flowing skirts any more because you moved across the country and they all caught the wind and flew out of the back of the car.
  • Making a skirt out of chainmail and refusing to twirl it because a four year old lives in your house.
  • Asking the manufacturer of your favorite towel whether they make bathrobes and they send back a one word email saying "no."
  • Wanting to look like a dapper old man but hating fashion norms.
  • Appropriating the parts of fashion that you like while subverting the idea that you're participating in the fashion hierarchy.
  • Wanting to eventually look like a dapper old man and starting by buying one dapper sock.
  • Codpieces.
  • Wearing full plate armor to church or to court.
  • Stalking Cat's profile page on wikifur.com
  • The Romans enslaving so many Slavs that Slav becomes their word for it.
  • All the different times that nature has evolved a tree.
  • Palm trees not really being trees and just being weird grass.
  • A plant deciding to get tall where the sun is and reinventing wood.
  • Languages borrowing words from other languages and then giving them back after completely changing the meaning.
  • Whether Italy has any Pizza Huts.
  • Trying to cover a song by a singer with a weird accent and discovering that you need that weird accent for the song to work and deciding if you're willing to adopt the weird accent for your cover.
  • English poetry that is too old.
  • A two year old pronouncing pork katsu as "pork costume."
  • Dressing your two year old in pork for Halloween like the tiny ham he is.
  • Really giving somebody the pork costume.
  • Realizing your best work is behind you when you haven't done anything notable.
  • An entirely sideways mouth that has fallen off your face.
  • Chekov's Book.
  • A throne but you can poop in it.
  • Hiding a piece of matzo somewhere in your house on Passover and eventually your house fills up with matzo.
  • Yelling at your coworker for only using the "slight smile" emoji because they weren't happy enough.
  • Image searching for the Unicode character "slight smile" and seeing a field of smiley faces that are just the classic yellow smiley, but then there's one that's this smirking douchebag.
  • How autocorrect ought to be able to code switch based on who you're talking to and what you're talking about.
  • Walking around the house and discovering that you can't use the word "okay" in the kitchen.
  • Putting the sparkles on top of the brain.
  • Trying to talk about bringing your head below something and autocorrect is like "did you mean: fucking"
  • Youtube's automatic captioning now censoring swear words.
  • Censoring swear words by replacing the word "shit" with a picture of shit.
  • Whether the eggplant emoji would ejaculate from the stem end or the bulb end.
  • Squeezing mayonnaise out of the stem end of an eggplant emoji squeeze bottle.
  • The tone deaf and the tone hearing.
  • Being surprised to meet people who can't sing at all, even though you just met someone like that a couple days ago.
  • Hearing a pitch and having no idea whether it's higher or lower than what you're singing.
  • Not letting anyone into your painting club who can't distinguish red and green.
  • Greyie Pie.
  • Applying a deuteranopic filter to a My Little Pony episode and instantly being incredibly depressed.
  • Not knowing the right answer but the person in your head heckling you does.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Whether complice is the opposite of accomplice.
  • Intending to clean the fridge.
  • A short but sweet plug that you manage to drag out of your guest.
  • Thinking an early access game is dead when the developer is right there in your kitchen streaming making breakfast.
  • Feeling too young to just go around handing out Werther's Originals.
  • Whether at some age all your teeth fall out or whether they just decided once, in the 1950s maybe, that it's time to pull everyone's teeth.
  • Whether the lady with twenty cats accrued the cats over the course of your life or just adopted twenty cats at once.
  • Learning to regrow your teeth so you can change your teeth style every few months, like you can your hair.
  • Transhuman augmentation of the teeth.
  • Being sure that a pop culture concept doesn't exist in Japan because you didn't see it in that one Yakuza game you played.
  • Sharpening your teeth to look like a cat.
  • The world record for most permanent transformations to look like an animal.
  • Whether dead people can still be the fastest person in the world.
  • The world record for most permanent transformations to look like something other than an animal.
  • How Stalking Cat decided to become a cat.
  • Wanting to be more like a tiger and having your ears transplanted to the top of your head.
  • Getting a job as a programmer to fund your body modification plans so you can be the old person you dream about being.
  • Running plastic tubes from the fake ears on top of your head down to the place your ears used to be.
  • The major themes of Stalking Cat's LiveJournal.
  • Seeing someone's LiveJournal post saying just "I start shooting today" and wondering if you should be worried.
  • Getting back to being old.
  • Cultivating the witchy vibe when you're not really a witch.
  • Not having any enormous flowing skirts any more because you moved across the country and they all caught the wind and flew out of the back of the car.
  • Making a skirt out of chainmail and refusing to twirl it because a four year old lives in your house.
  • Asking the manufacturer of your favorite towel whether they make bathrobes and they send back a one word email saying "no."
  • Wanting to look like a dapper old man but hating fashion norms.
  • Appropriating the parts of fashion that you like while subverting the idea that you're participating in the fashion hierarchy.
  • Wanting to eventually look like a dapper old man and starting by buying one dapper sock.
  • Codpieces.
  • Wearing full plate armor to church or to court.
  • Stalking Cat's profile page on wikifur.com
  • The Romans enslaving so many Slavs that Slav becomes their word for it.
  • All the different times that nature has evolved a tree.
  • Palm trees not really being trees and just being weird grass.
  • A plant deciding to get tall where the sun is and reinventing wood.
  • Languages borrowing words from other languages and then giving them back after completely changing the meaning.
  • Whether Italy has any Pizza Huts.
  • Trying to cover a song by a singer with a weird accent and discovering that you need that weird accent for the song to work and deciding if you're willing to adopt the weird accent for your cover.
  • English poetry that is too old.
  • A two year old pronouncing pork katsu as "pork costume."
  • Dressing your two year old in pork for Halloween like the tiny ham he is.
  • Really giving somebody the pork costume.
  • Realizing your best work is behind you when you haven't done anything notable.
  • An entirely sideways mouth that has fallen off your face.
  • Chekov's Book.
  • A throne but you can poop in it.
  • Hiding a piece of matzo somewhere in your house on Passover and eventually your house fills up with matzo.
  • Yelling at your coworker for only using the "slight smile" emoji because they weren't happy enough.
  • Image searching for the Unicode character "slight smile" and seeing a field of smiley faces that are just the classic yellow smiley, but then there's one that's this smirking douchebag.
  • How autocorrect ought to be able to code switch based on who you're talking to and what you're talking about.
  • Walking around the house and discovering that you can't use the word "okay" in the kitchen.
  • Putting the sparkles on top of the brain.
  • Trying to talk about bringing your head below something and autocorrect is like "did you mean: fucking"
  • Youtube's automatic captioning now censoring swear words.
  • Censoring swear words by replacing the word "shit" with a picture of shit.
  • Whether the eggplant emoji would ejaculate from the stem end or the bulb end.
  • Squeezing mayonnaise out of the stem end of an eggplant emoji squeeze bottle.
  • The tone deaf and the tone hearing.
  • Being surprised to meet people who can't sing at all, even though you just met someone like that a couple days ago.
  • Hearing a pitch and having no idea whether it's higher or lower than what you're singing.
  • Not letting anyone into your painting club who can't distinguish red and green.
  • Greyie Pie.
  • Applying a deuteranopic filter to a My Little Pony episode and instantly being incredibly depressed.
  • Not knowing the right answer but the person in your head heckling you does.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+jtrMMJML ]]> Jim Stormdancer 57. A Rationale for Mountains https://topiclords.com/a-rationale-for-mountains f81d81c6-50de-4e01-a89b-7e5f637c4e28 Mon, 23 Nov 2020 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Aaron and Jonah. We discuss graffitti-based arguments, unphysical physically-motivated procedural content generation, the inventor of "None Pizza With Left Beef" and "Young Sheldon," the hobo code, and designing a game around semantic prime theory. 1:12:01 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • A game that is not about toppling governments.
  • Seeing a political message spray painted on the wall and painting a reasoned response beneath it.
  • Going around Athens and restenciling graffiti to be more legible.
  • Going to the bathroom to catch up on the latest stall graffiti.
  • Graffiti as art versus graffiti as a forum for communication.
  • Seeing that there is no graffiti on the bathroom walls at your new office job and bringing a mechanical pencil to work in order to get the party started.
  • Sticker bombing your school with stickers saying "good source of fiber" and "for rectal use only."
  • The potential of industrial glues.
  • Waiting for a telephone pole to be covered with posters thick enough that you can carve a room out of the posters to have your band practice in.
  • A city on a massive hill where the hill is made of all the previous cities that were conquered in that place.
  • The best edible band flyer glues.
  • Generating Perlin noise and picking an elevation for the water level to generate your video game world.
  • Simulating tectonic plates to generate your video game world.
  • Exploring the Mandelbulb.
  • A rationale for mountains.
  • Making an apple pie from scratch and having to invent the universe, except it's not an apple pie, it's an alien planetary body.
  • Attempting to solve a problem with no reasonable way to validate your solution.
  • Doing world building but it's not just putting orcs in a mountain range inventing a way for planets to work that is not plate tectonics.
  • The new Frog Fractions game spoiling for all of pop culture including itself.
  • A photograph of a disc of plain dough with meatballs scattered loose in the box.
  • Hacking the Domino's garlic bread by ordering a pizza with just garlic on it.
  • Hatewatching your favorite sitcom.
  • Moving to Greece and everybody finding out that you're a nerd and being like "oh I know what your favorite show is."
  • Making a TV show where the whole joke is that the main character has Asperger's.
  • Finding Chuck Lorre's email address and writing to ask why the show is called "The Big Bang Theory."
  • One level of pun connoisseurship up from "what's up dog"
  • Ungoogleable questions such as "why is the show called 'big bang theory'" and "what is the volume of a parakeet"
  • Finding out the volume of a parrot via water displacement.
  • Emailing every combination of letters at gmail.com and asking them all why the show is called "the big bang theory" and hoping that one of them is show creator Chuck Lorre.
  • A duck that means "free telephone"
  • The canonical hobo object.
  • Sitting around the fire with a lead mug you're drinking chili out of.
  • How often you need to pretend to faint.
  • Reading Wikipedia aloud and going "huh!"
  • An alternative Topic Lords podcast with train noises dubbed over it.
  • Recording a podcast where you read a stack trace for ten minutes and your seatmate moving to a different place on the train.
  • A podcast episode where the host gets carted off in handcuffs and yells "avenge me!" and hits upload with their toe.
  • Being arrested on live TV and your fans assuming that it's another mysterious lore drop.
  • The optimal minimal subset of all languages.
  • The 65 words that can express any human idea.
  • A Pinteresty soundbite of knowledge.
  • Deep philosophical conversations with your toddler.
  • A semantic substrate that is our natural world.
  • Persuasive systems having some fundamental level of plausibility because at some level the system has to function.
  • Making a career out of building persuasive systems.
  • Overcoming difficulty with persistence.
  • Telling the story of overcoming difficulty with persistence via a masocore platformer.
  • A couple of sentences on a sheet of paper that you then enact.
  • Investigating an opaque system and taking away a message.
  • Some Frank Lantz tweet threads.
  • The indie game community transitioning from focusing on game design to focusing on art design.
  • How juicy you should make a game.
  • How good the screen shake was on Rod Humble's "The Marriage."
  • Spreadsheets like you've never felt them before.
  • Cracking knuckles on the juice hose.
  • Eating the concept of frying something.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • A game that is not about toppling governments.
  • Seeing a political message spray painted on the wall and painting a reasoned response beneath it.
  • Going around Athens and restenciling graffiti to be more legible.
  • Going to the bathroom to catch up on the latest stall graffiti.
  • Graffiti as art versus graffiti as a forum for communication.
  • Seeing that there is no graffiti on the bathroom walls at your new office job and bringing a mechanical pencil to work in order to get the party started.
  • Sticker bombing your school with stickers saying "good source of fiber" and "for rectal use only."
  • The potential of industrial glues.
  • Waiting for a telephone pole to be covered with posters thick enough that you can carve a room out of the posters to have your band practice in.
  • A city on a massive hill where the hill is made of all the previous cities that were conquered in that place.
  • The best edible band flyer glues.
  • Generating Perlin noise and picking an elevation for the water level to generate your video game world.
  • Simulating tectonic plates to generate your video game world.
  • Exploring the Mandelbulb.
  • A rationale for mountains.
  • Making an apple pie from scratch and having to invent the universe, except it's not an apple pie, it's an alien planetary body.
  • Attempting to solve a problem with no reasonable way to validate your solution.
  • Doing world building but it's not just putting orcs in a mountain range inventing a way for planets to work that is not plate tectonics.
  • The new Frog Fractions game spoiling for all of pop culture including itself.
  • A photograph of a disc of plain dough with meatballs scattered loose in the box.
  • Hacking the Domino's garlic bread by ordering a pizza with just garlic on it.
  • Hatewatching your favorite sitcom.
  • Moving to Greece and everybody finding out that you're a nerd and being like "oh I know what your favorite show is."
  • Making a TV show where the whole joke is that the main character has Asperger's.
  • Finding Chuck Lorre's email address and writing to ask why the show is called "The Big Bang Theory."
  • One level of pun connoisseurship up from "what's up dog"
  • Ungoogleable questions such as "why is the show called 'big bang theory'" and "what is the volume of a parakeet"
  • Finding out the volume of a parrot via water displacement.
  • Emailing every combination of letters at gmail.com and asking them all why the show is called "the big bang theory" and hoping that one of them is show creator Chuck Lorre.
  • A duck that means "free telephone"
  • The canonical hobo object.
  • Sitting around the fire with a lead mug you're drinking chili out of.
  • How often you need to pretend to faint.
  • Reading Wikipedia aloud and going "huh!"
  • An alternative Topic Lords podcast with train noises dubbed over it.
  • Recording a podcast where you read a stack trace for ten minutes and your seatmate moving to a different place on the train.
  • A podcast episode where the host gets carted off in handcuffs and yells "avenge me!" and hits upload with their toe.
  • Being arrested on live TV and your fans assuming that it's another mysterious lore drop.
  • The optimal minimal subset of all languages.
  • The 65 words that can express any human idea.
  • A Pinteresty soundbite of knowledge.
  • Deep philosophical conversations with your toddler.
  • A semantic substrate that is our natural world.
  • Persuasive systems having some fundamental level of plausibility because at some level the system has to function.
  • Making a career out of building persuasive systems.
  • Overcoming difficulty with persistence.
  • Telling the story of overcoming difficulty with persistence via a masocore platformer.
  • A couple of sentences on a sheet of paper that you then enact.
  • Investigating an opaque system and taking away a message.
  • Some Frank Lantz tweet threads.
  • The indie game community transitioning from focusing on game design to focusing on art design.
  • How juicy you should make a game.
  • How good the screen shake was on Rod Humble's "The Marriage."
  • Spreadsheets like you've never felt them before.
  • Cracking knuckles on the juice hose.
  • Eating the concept of frying something.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • A game that is not about toppling governments.
  • Seeing a political message spray painted on the wall and painting a reasoned response beneath it.
  • Going around Athens and restenciling graffiti to be more legible.
  • Going to the bathroom to catch up on the latest stall graffiti.
  • Graffiti as art versus graffiti as a forum for communication.
  • Seeing that there is no graffiti on the bathroom walls at your new office job and bringing a mechanical pencil to work in order to get the party started.
  • Sticker bombing your school with stickers saying "good source of fiber" and "for rectal use only."
  • The potential of industrial glues.
  • Waiting for a telephone pole to be covered with posters thick enough that you can carve a room out of the posters to have your band practice in.
  • A city on a massive hill where the hill is made of all the previous cities that were conquered in that place.
  • The best edible band flyer glues.
  • Generating Perlin noise and picking an elevation for the water level to generate your video game world.
  • Simulating tectonic plates to generate your video game world.
  • Exploring the Mandelbulb.
  • A rationale for mountains.
  • Making an apple pie from scratch and having to invent the universe, except it's not an apple pie, it's an alien planetary body.
  • Attempting to solve a problem with no reasonable way to validate your solution.
  • Doing world building but it's not just putting orcs in a mountain range inventing a way for planets to work that is not plate tectonics.
  • The new Frog Fractions game spoiling for all of pop culture including itself.
  • A photograph of a disc of plain dough with meatballs scattered loose in the box.
  • Hacking the Domino's garlic bread by ordering a pizza with just garlic on it.
  • Hatewatching your favorite sitcom.
  • Moving to Greece and everybody finding out that you're a nerd and being like "oh I know what your favorite show is."
  • Making a TV show where the whole joke is that the main character has Asperger's.
  • Finding Chuck Lorre's email address and writing to ask why the show is called "The Big Bang Theory."
  • One level of pun connoisseurship up from "what's up dog"
  • Ungoogleable questions such as "why is the show called 'big bang theory'" and "what is the volume of a parakeet"
  • Finding out the volume of a parrot via water displacement.
  • Emailing every combination of letters at gmail.com and asking them all why the show is called "the big bang theory" and hoping that one of them is show creator Chuck Lorre.
  • A duck that means "free telephone"
  • The canonical hobo object.
  • Sitting around the fire with a lead mug you're drinking chili out of.
  • How often you need to pretend to faint.
  • Reading Wikipedia aloud and going "huh!"
  • An alternative Topic Lords podcast with train noises dubbed over it.
  • Recording a podcast where you read a stack trace for ten minutes and your seatmate moving to a different place on the train.
  • A podcast episode where the host gets carted off in handcuffs and yells "avenge me!" and hits upload with their toe.
  • Being arrested on live TV and your fans assuming that it's another mysterious lore drop.
  • The optimal minimal subset of all languages.
  • The 65 words that can express any human idea.
  • A Pinteresty soundbite of knowledge.
  • Deep philosophical conversations with your toddler.
  • A semantic substrate that is our natural world.
  • Persuasive systems having some fundamental level of plausibility because at some level the system has to function.
  • Making a career out of building persuasive systems.
  • Overcoming difficulty with persistence.
  • Telling the story of overcoming difficulty with persistence via a masocore platformer.
  • A couple of sentences on a sheet of paper that you then enact.
  • Investigating an opaque system and taking away a message.
  • Some Frank Lantz tweet threads.
  • The indie game community transitioning from focusing on game design to focusing on art design.
  • How juicy you should make a game.
  • How good the screen shake was on Rod Humble's "The Marriage."
  • Spreadsheets like you've never felt them before.
  • Cracking knuckles on the juice hose.
  • Eating the concept of frying something.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+TfwVQ1gL ]]> Jim Stormdancer 56. Ethical Snorlax Pasture https://topiclords.com/ethical-snorlax-pasture 8c4f9da8-fd1d-4ae3-8955-ee9abba36a20 Mon, 16 Nov 2020 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: Laura and JP. We discusss the least horny sport, the best task-tracking software, driving around with a photo of yourself on your vehicle, gaskets, Pokemon-proofing your house, and sending a film back to 1960. 1:13:11 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Laura is @lmichet on Twitter and just shipped A Monster's Expedition.
  • JP is @vectorpoem on Twitter.

Topics:

  • What is the least horny sport?
  • Best task-tracking software. Definition of "best" here is not necessarily the one you think has the best features, but the one you used longest and with the best attitude. Which is that?
  • Driving around with a photo of yourself on your vehicle
  • Stephen asks: "A fictional world, the discovery of which prompted global obsession and study which gradually allowed Tlön to bleed into and eventually replace the real world. Kind of like the internet."
  • Safety-proofing your house to keep a Pokemon in it, if Pokemon were real--what would this entail? Would you do it, or just give up on having a Pokemon?
  • You can send one print of a single film of your choosing back to 1960. What film do you choose, and why?

Microtopics:

  • Typing in all lowercase because anyone who uses capital letters is a cop.
  • The Lowercase Age.
  • Capital letters and punctuation reflecting a certain social context.
  • Whether Laura has ever spoken to someone in person.
  • A very chill video game with cute jokes in it.
  • One of the better ways to enjoy life.
  • The eSport played by the oldest people.
  • Car Lords.
  • The hypothetical horniness of the train similar speed running scene.
  • Whether you can be fired from your train job in Train Simulator or is you're just shot on the spot.
  • The height of golf's horniness ceiling.
  • The horniness differential between simulated golf and real life miniature golf.
  • A medieval shepherd saying "caring for sheep in the Scottish Highlands is a low demand activity so I'm going to use this stick to hit rocks and eventually a sport will coalesce."
  • Not wanting to guess how to say "coalesce" in a Scottish accent.
  • Not wanting to call your coworkers at 9pm, the devil's hour.
  • Hiring a sensitivity reader to figure out how to respectfully create a pinup calendar of accents around the world.
  • A sample of Meg Ryan faking an orgasm.
  • "When Harry Met Sally" faked orgasm sound board.
  • Admiring the UI of task tracking software.
  • Using a text file to do task tracking.
  • An ignorant caveman who is working harder rather than smarter.
  • The miserable state of programming tools (compilers excepted)
  • How if GitHub had built their web site around any VCS, it would now be the dominant VCS, but it would be weird that they called it "GitHub."
  • Using SVN to talk to GitHub.
  • Game development putting the folks who can get value out of Git alongside the folks Git just makes miserable and forcing them to collaborate somehow.
  • Data mining your blood sugar levels over time.
  • Data mining your enamel pin collection.
  • Complaining that your wife really likes her new baby.
  • Having your phone number on your car so that if someone doesn't like your driving they can give you a call.
  • Decals on your rear window with stick figures representing every member of your family, with their social security numbers beneath them.
  • The parallel reality where everyone has their faces on their car and PictoChat on their DS so you can drive up to someone you recognize on the freeway and send them a drawing of a dick.
  • Not being willing to put a photo of yourself on your car but covering your tiny electric motorcycle with them.
  • A helmet with a huge depiction of your face, like you're in big head mode.
  • Gigantic electric skateboards with wacky shocks.
  • Eddie Murphy driving Eddie Murphy's giant head car.
  • Coopting someone's write-in to talk about manufacturing gaskets.
  • A question that makes you feel inadequate so you resent it.
  • Learning how to make gaskets because everyone who works at the gasket manufacturer needs to know how to make gaskets.
  • Gasket manufacturing equipment probably cutting rubber with a laser or maybe a big knife.
  • A chore wheel by which everyone at the company eventually does every job.
  • Treating all of humanity as a single organism, and not in the gross "this disadvantaged person needs to take one for the team" kind of way.
  • Gasket perishability.
  • A gasket failing and causing a terrible disaster because it was left on the front porch too long.
  • Having a plant product like perishability.
  • A piston seal pointing its piston tusks at the ground and launching itself into the air.
  • The fantasy of having a little animal who is in fire.
  • A dog or cat already being able to mess up your house pretty bad even though they don't have pyrokinetic powers.
  • Not being willing to give any dog you've ever met elemental magic powers.
  • A Problem Charmander.
  • The entire Pokemon universe is a hologram running on a GameBoy.
  • Whether you can be held legally liable for your pet Charmander burning your neighbor's house down.
  • Training your grass-type Pokemon to repeatedly fire solarbeam at your solar panels.
  • The ones who walk away from Nomekop.
  • The Pokemon species that became dominant and enslaved all the others. "Human human!"
  • Spending enough time in nature to develop a personal opinion about nature.
  • Journeying through the world and having fun equitable relationships with magical creatures.
  • The only anime that is about adults rather than teenagers.
  • Sending space movies back in time to feed the conspiracy theory that the moon landings were faked.
  • Repeatedly sending the sports almanac back in time to construct an optimal run of 20th century sports betting.
  • Sending a sports almanac back in time to everyone so everyone wins every sports bet.
  • Sending a white dude back in time so that a white dude can invent rock and roll.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Laura is @lmichet on Twitter and just shipped A Monster's Expedition.
  • JP is @vectorpoem on Twitter.

Topics:

  • What is the least horny sport?
  • Best task-tracking software. Definition of "best" here is not necessarily the one you think has the best features, but the one you used longest and with the best attitude. Which is that?
  • Driving around with a photo of yourself on your vehicle
  • Stephen asks: "A fictional world, the discovery of which prompted global obsession and study which gradually allowed Tlön to bleed into and eventually replace the real world. Kind of like the internet."
  • Safety-proofing your house to keep a Pokemon in it, if Pokemon were real--what would this entail? Would you do it, or just give up on having a Pokemon?
  • You can send one print of a single film of your choosing back to 1960. What film do you choose, and why?

Microtopics:

  • Typing in all lowercase because anyone who uses capital letters is a cop.
  • The Lowercase Age.
  • Capital letters and punctuation reflecting a certain social context.
  • Whether Laura has ever spoken to someone in person.
  • A very chill video game with cute jokes in it.
  • One of the better ways to enjoy life.
  • The eSport played by the oldest people.
  • Car Lords.
  • The hypothetical horniness of the train similar speed running scene.
  • Whether you can be fired from your train job in Train Simulator or is you're just shot on the spot.
  • The height of golf's horniness ceiling.
  • The horniness differential between simulated golf and real life miniature golf.
  • A medieval shepherd saying "caring for sheep in the Scottish Highlands is a low demand activity so I'm going to use this stick to hit rocks and eventually a sport will coalesce."
  • Not wanting to guess how to say "coalesce" in a Scottish accent.
  • Not wanting to call your coworkers at 9pm, the devil's hour.
  • Hiring a sensitivity reader to figure out how to respectfully create a pinup calendar of accents around the world.
  • A sample of Meg Ryan faking an orgasm.
  • "When Harry Met Sally" faked orgasm sound board.
  • Admiring the UI of task tracking software.
  • Using a text file to do task tracking.
  • An ignorant caveman who is working harder rather than smarter.
  • The miserable state of programming tools (compilers excepted)
  • How if GitHub had built their web site around any VCS, it would now be the dominant VCS, but it would be weird that they called it "GitHub."
  • Using SVN to talk to GitHub.
  • Game development putting the folks who can get value out of Git alongside the folks Git just makes miserable and forcing them to collaborate somehow.
  • Data mining your blood sugar levels over time.
  • Data mining your enamel pin collection.
  • Complaining that your wife really likes her new baby.
  • Having your phone number on your car so that if someone doesn't like your driving they can give you a call.
  • Decals on your rear window with stick figures representing every member of your family, with their social security numbers beneath them.
  • The parallel reality where everyone has their faces on their car and PictoChat on their DS so you can drive up to someone you recognize on the freeway and send them a drawing of a dick.
  • Not being willing to put a photo of yourself on your car but covering your tiny electric motorcycle with them.
  • A helmet with a huge depiction of your face, like you're in big head mode.
  • Gigantic electric skateboards with wacky shocks.
  • Eddie Murphy driving Eddie Murphy's giant head car.
  • Coopting someone's write-in to talk about manufacturing gaskets.
  • A question that makes you feel inadequate so you resent it.
  • Learning how to make gaskets because everyone who works at the gasket manufacturer needs to know how to make gaskets.
  • Gasket manufacturing equipment probably cutting rubber with a laser or maybe a big knife.
  • A chore wheel by which everyone at the company eventually does every job.
  • Treating all of humanity as a single organism, and not in the gross "this disadvantaged person needs to take one for the team" kind of way.
  • Gasket perishability.
  • A gasket failing and causing a terrible disaster because it was left on the front porch too long.
  • Having a plant product like perishability.
  • A piston seal pointing its piston tusks at the ground and launching itself into the air.
  • The fantasy of having a little animal who is in fire.
  • A dog or cat already being able to mess up your house pretty bad even though they don't have pyrokinetic powers.
  • Not being willing to give any dog you've ever met elemental magic powers.
  • A Problem Charmander.
  • The entire Pokemon universe is a hologram running on a GameBoy.
  • Whether you can be held legally liable for your pet Charmander burning your neighbor's house down.
  • Training your grass-type Pokemon to repeatedly fire solarbeam at your solar panels.
  • The ones who walk away from Nomekop.
  • The Pokemon species that became dominant and enslaved all the others. "Human human!"
  • Spending enough time in nature to develop a personal opinion about nature.
  • Journeying through the world and having fun equitable relationships with magical creatures.
  • The only anime that is about adults rather than teenagers.
  • Sending space movies back in time to feed the conspiracy theory that the moon landings were faked.
  • Repeatedly sending the sports almanac back in time to construct an optimal run of 20th century sports betting.
  • Sending a sports almanac back in time to everyone so everyone wins every sports bet.
  • Sending a white dude back in time so that a white dude can invent rock and roll.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Laura is @lmichet on Twitter and just shipped A Monster's Expedition.
  • JP is @vectorpoem on Twitter.

Topics:

  • What is the least horny sport?
  • Best task-tracking software. Definition of "best" here is not necessarily the one you think has the best features, but the one you used longest and with the best attitude. Which is that?
  • Driving around with a photo of yourself on your vehicle
  • Stephen asks: "A fictional world, the discovery of which prompted global obsession and study which gradually allowed Tlön to bleed into and eventually replace the real world. Kind of like the internet."
  • Safety-proofing your house to keep a Pokemon in it, if Pokemon were real--what would this entail? Would you do it, or just give up on having a Pokemon?
  • You can send one print of a single film of your choosing back to 1960. What film do you choose, and why?

Microtopics:

  • Typing in all lowercase because anyone who uses capital letters is a cop.
  • The Lowercase Age.
  • Capital letters and punctuation reflecting a certain social context.
  • Whether Laura has ever spoken to someone in person.
  • A very chill video game with cute jokes in it.
  • One of the better ways to enjoy life.
  • The eSport played by the oldest people.
  • Car Lords.
  • The hypothetical horniness of the train similar speed running scene.
  • Whether you can be fired from your train job in Train Simulator or is you're just shot on the spot.
  • The height of golf's horniness ceiling.
  • The horniness differential between simulated golf and real life miniature golf.
  • A medieval shepherd saying "caring for sheep in the Scottish Highlands is a low demand activity so I'm going to use this stick to hit rocks and eventually a sport will coalesce."
  • Not wanting to guess how to say "coalesce" in a Scottish accent.
  • Not wanting to call your coworkers at 9pm, the devil's hour.
  • Hiring a sensitivity reader to figure out how to respectfully create a pinup calendar of accents around the world.
  • A sample of Meg Ryan faking an orgasm.
  • "When Harry Met Sally" faked orgasm sound board.
  • Admiring the UI of task tracking software.
  • Using a text file to do task tracking.
  • An ignorant caveman who is working harder rather than smarter.
  • The miserable state of programming tools (compilers excepted)
  • How if GitHub had built their web site around any VCS, it would now be the dominant VCS, but it would be weird that they called it "GitHub."
  • Using SVN to talk to GitHub.
  • Game development putting the folks who can get value out of Git alongside the folks Git just makes miserable and forcing them to collaborate somehow.
  • Data mining your blood sugar levels over time.
  • Data mining your enamel pin collection.
  • Complaining that your wife really likes her new baby.
  • Having your phone number on your car so that if someone doesn't like your driving they can give you a call.
  • Decals on your rear window with stick figures representing every member of your family, with their social security numbers beneath them.
  • The parallel reality where everyone has their faces on their car and PictoChat on their DS so you can drive up to someone you recognize on the freeway and send them a drawing of a dick.
  • Not being willing to put a photo of yourself on your car but covering your tiny electric motorcycle with them.
  • A helmet with a huge depiction of your face, like you're in big head mode.
  • Gigantic electric skateboards with wacky shocks.
  • Eddie Murphy driving Eddie Murphy's giant head car.
  • Coopting someone's write-in to talk about manufacturing gaskets.
  • A question that makes you feel inadequate so you resent it.
  • Learning how to make gaskets because everyone who works at the gasket manufacturer needs to know how to make gaskets.
  • Gasket manufacturing equipment probably cutting rubber with a laser or maybe a big knife.
  • A chore wheel by which everyone at the company eventually does every job.
  • Treating all of humanity as a single organism, and not in the gross "this disadvantaged person needs to take one for the team" kind of way.
  • Gasket perishability.
  • A gasket failing and causing a terrible disaster because it was left on the front porch too long.
  • Having a plant product like perishability.
  • A piston seal pointing its piston tusks at the ground and launching itself into the air.
  • The fantasy of having a little animal who is in fire.
  • A dog or cat already being able to mess up your house pretty bad even though they don't have pyrokinetic powers.
  • Not being willing to give any dog you've ever met elemental magic powers.
  • A Problem Charmander.
  • The entire Pokemon universe is a hologram running on a GameBoy.
  • Whether you can be held legally liable for your pet Charmander burning your neighbor's house down.
  • Training your grass-type Pokemon to repeatedly fire solarbeam at your solar panels.
  • The ones who walk away from Nomekop.
  • The Pokemon species that became dominant and enslaved all the others. "Human human!"
  • Spending enough time in nature to develop a personal opinion about nature.
  • Journeying through the world and having fun equitable relationships with magical creatures.
  • The only anime that is about adults rather than teenagers.
  • Sending space movies back in time to feed the conspiracy theory that the moon landings were faked.
  • Repeatedly sending the sports almanac back in time to construct an optimal run of 20th century sports betting.
  • Sending a sports almanac back in time to everyone so everyone wins every sports bet.
  • Sending a white dude back in time so that a white dude can invent rock and roll.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+ajuM4PM1 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 55. Burger Crimes https://topiclords.com/burger-crimes a11094d1-d871-49fc-a1eb-aa28418d07f3 Mon, 09 Nov 2020 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: April and Freddie. We discuss burger opinions, replaying Breath of the Wild, changing your chronotype via taking care of a small child, and Vtubers. 1:06:43 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • April is @aprilsaur on Twitter.
  • Freddie is @fwong on Twitter.

Topics:

Micro topics:

  • Finally, a place for topics.
  • A podcast that is surprisingly not a BDSM podcast.
  • Being the best town for chili with spaghetti because nobody else bothered.
  • A very good part about a hamburger.
  • The potential utility of a hamburger.
  • Wanting each bite of a foodstuff to contain every ingredient.
  • The sleeping baby preventing you from going to Five Guys.
  • A very specific smell manufactured in New Jersey that does not trigger any kind of nostalgia at all.
  • Deciding to stop cooking your fries in beef tallow and needing to add a fake scent to get the old smell back.
  • A burger joint that is the love child of In-N-Out and Dairy Queen.
  • Rating hamburgers by their mouth hinge requirements.
  • The ideal order of ingredients in a hamburger stack.
  • Putting a tomato between the patty and the slice of cheese in a cheeseburger.
  • Burger crimes.
  • Becoming convinced that Democrats really ought to be armed.
  • Years of playing Call of Duty and Counterstrike training you for your role in the revolution.
  • Years of playing The Sims training you for your role in the revolution.
  • Whether George Washington was a gamer.
  • Playing Breath of the Wild long enough to see the cool opening vista and thinking "I definitely don't want to go to these mountains."
  • A very American Truck Simulator approach to playing an open world game.
  • Winching yourself out of the mud.
  • The experience of drawing a map in order to understand your surroundings.
  • Two weeks worth of photos of your TV.
  • Trying to distinguish whether a childhood feeling of a video game came from the game design or came from being a child.
  • Designing puzzles that demand the player take physical notes.
  • The fun of inconvenience.
  • Playing D&D and catching the cartography bug.
  • Capturing the joy of a blank piece of paper.
  • A game about paperwork.
  • The video game expanding beyond the executable file you run.
  • Gambling with the game's demo to change the full game's price.
  • What it would take to stream Breath of the Wild.
  • Tiny little leaf people hiding all over the world each hovering with a tiny leaf they spin like a helicopter blade.
  • Hestu's incredible maraca dance.
  • Tattooing the entire DK Rap across your back.
  • An attractive person remaining attractive even when wearing a goofy outfit.
  • Staying home to take care of your kid and not sending them to daycare during a pandemic.
  • Changing your sleep schedule from waking up at 11am to waking up at 7am.
  • Vitamin D: turns out we need it.
  • Being unable to sleep in even though you used to be a sleeping in champion.
  • Being tired because it's the end of the day.
  • Making dinner and becoming a puddle on whatever surface you happen to land on.
  • Going camping because you have a kid when you would never care enough to go camping if it was just you.
  • Downloading Youtube tutorials on how to split a log so you can impress your kid when you go camping.
  • Using digital puppetry to make an anime avatar play video games on Twitch.
  • Cranking out content 24/7.
  • Livestreamers taking a vacation and losing 20% of their viewers.
  • The Tupac hologram except playing Fortnite on Twitch.
  • Producing a CG animation TV show where all the animation is live puppeteering.
  • Exhuming Tupac so you can do a body scan for the hologram concert tour.
  • Indiana Jones except with a really tiny head.
  • The career prospects of Indiana Jones themed strippers.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • April is @aprilsaur on Twitter.
  • Freddie is @fwong on Twitter.

Topics:

Micro topics:

  • Finally, a place for topics.
  • A podcast that is surprisingly not a BDSM podcast.
  • Being the best town for chili with spaghetti because nobody else bothered.
  • A very good part about a hamburger.
  • The potential utility of a hamburger.
  • Wanting each bite of a foodstuff to contain every ingredient.
  • The sleeping baby preventing you from going to Five Guys.
  • A very specific smell manufactured in New Jersey that does not trigger any kind of nostalgia at all.
  • Deciding to stop cooking your fries in beef tallow and needing to add a fake scent to get the old smell back.
  • A burger joint that is the love child of In-N-Out and Dairy Queen.
  • Rating hamburgers by their mouth hinge requirements.
  • The ideal order of ingredients in a hamburger stack.
  • Putting a tomato between the patty and the slice of cheese in a cheeseburger.
  • Burger crimes.
  • Becoming convinced that Democrats really ought to be armed.
  • Years of playing Call of Duty and Counterstrike training you for your role in the revolution.
  • Years of playing The Sims training you for your role in the revolution.
  • Whether George Washington was a gamer.
  • Playing Breath of the Wild long enough to see the cool opening vista and thinking "I definitely don't want to go to these mountains."
  • A very American Truck Simulator approach to playing an open world game.
  • Winching yourself out of the mud.
  • The experience of drawing a map in order to understand your surroundings.
  • Two weeks worth of photos of your TV.
  • Trying to distinguish whether a childhood feeling of a video game came from the game design or came from being a child.
  • Designing puzzles that demand the player take physical notes.
  • The fun of inconvenience.
  • Playing D&D and catching the cartography bug.
  • Capturing the joy of a blank piece of paper.
  • A game about paperwork.
  • The video game expanding beyond the executable file you run.
  • Gambling with the game's demo to change the full game's price.
  • What it would take to stream Breath of the Wild.
  • Tiny little leaf people hiding all over the world each hovering with a tiny leaf they spin like a helicopter blade.
  • Hestu's incredible maraca dance.
  • Tattooing the entire DK Rap across your back.
  • An attractive person remaining attractive even when wearing a goofy outfit.
  • Staying home to take care of your kid and not sending them to daycare during a pandemic.
  • Changing your sleep schedule from waking up at 11am to waking up at 7am.
  • Vitamin D: turns out we need it.
  • Being unable to sleep in even though you used to be a sleeping in champion.
  • Being tired because it's the end of the day.
  • Making dinner and becoming a puddle on whatever surface you happen to land on.
  • Going camping because you have a kid when you would never care enough to go camping if it was just you.
  • Downloading Youtube tutorials on how to split a log so you can impress your kid when you go camping.
  • Using digital puppetry to make an anime avatar play video games on Twitch.
  • Cranking out content 24/7.
  • Livestreamers taking a vacation and losing 20% of their viewers.
  • The Tupac hologram except playing Fortnite on Twitch.
  • Producing a CG animation TV show where all the animation is live puppeteering.
  • Exhuming Tupac so you can do a body scan for the hologram concert tour.
  • Indiana Jones except with a really tiny head.
  • The career prospects of Indiana Jones themed strippers.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • April is @aprilsaur on Twitter.
  • Freddie is @fwong on Twitter.

Topics:

Micro topics:

  • Finally, a place for topics.
  • A podcast that is surprisingly not a BDSM podcast.
  • Being the best town for chili with spaghetti because nobody else bothered.
  • A very good part about a hamburger.
  • The potential utility of a hamburger.
  • Wanting each bite of a foodstuff to contain every ingredient.
  • The sleeping baby preventing you from going to Five Guys.
  • A very specific smell manufactured in New Jersey that does not trigger any kind of nostalgia at all.
  • Deciding to stop cooking your fries in beef tallow and needing to add a fake scent to get the old smell back.
  • A burger joint that is the love child of In-N-Out and Dairy Queen.
  • Rating hamburgers by their mouth hinge requirements.
  • The ideal order of ingredients in a hamburger stack.
  • Putting a tomato between the patty and the slice of cheese in a cheeseburger.
  • Burger crimes.
  • Becoming convinced that Democrats really ought to be armed.
  • Years of playing Call of Duty and Counterstrike training you for your role in the revolution.
  • Years of playing The Sims training you for your role in the revolution.
  • Whether George Washington was a gamer.
  • Playing Breath of the Wild long enough to see the cool opening vista and thinking "I definitely don't want to go to these mountains."
  • A very American Truck Simulator approach to playing an open world game.
  • Winching yourself out of the mud.
  • The experience of drawing a map in order to understand your surroundings.
  • Two weeks worth of photos of your TV.
  • Trying to distinguish whether a childhood feeling of a video game came from the game design or came from being a child.
  • Designing puzzles that demand the player take physical notes.
  • The fun of inconvenience.
  • Playing D&D and catching the cartography bug.
  • Capturing the joy of a blank piece of paper.
  • A game about paperwork.
  • The video game expanding beyond the executable file you run.
  • Gambling with the game's demo to change the full game's price.
  • What it would take to stream Breath of the Wild.
  • Tiny little leaf people hiding all over the world each hovering with a tiny leaf they spin like a helicopter blade.
  • Hestu's incredible maraca dance.
  • Tattooing the entire DK Rap across your back.
  • An attractive person remaining attractive even when wearing a goofy outfit.
  • Staying home to take care of your kid and not sending them to daycare during a pandemic.
  • Changing your sleep schedule from waking up at 11am to waking up at 7am.
  • Vitamin D: turns out we need it.
  • Being unable to sleep in even though you used to be a sleeping in champion.
  • Being tired because it's the end of the day.
  • Making dinner and becoming a puddle on whatever surface you happen to land on.
  • Going camping because you have a kid when you would never care enough to go camping if it was just you.
  • Downloading Youtube tutorials on how to split a log so you can impress your kid when you go camping.
  • Using digital puppetry to make an anime avatar play video games on Twitch.
  • Cranking out content 24/7.
  • Livestreamers taking a vacation and losing 20% of their viewers.
  • The Tupac hologram except playing Fortnite on Twitch.
  • Producing a CG animation TV show where all the animation is live puppeteering.
  • Exhuming Tupac so you can do a body scan for the hologram concert tour.
  • Indiana Jones except with a really tiny head.
  • The career prospects of Indiana Jones themed strippers.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+3SFG9B-e ]]> Jim Stormdancer 54. Stab 'Em Into Place https://topiclords.com/stab-em-into-place 538f494d-ecb2-4b6f-8df0-293c28159961 Mon, 02 Nov 2020 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: Adina and Alex. We discuss anarcho-communism, learning to stick with a project, poorly-understood algorithms, the hidden worlds of each person's living space, and learning all the crafts. 1:02:56 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Fabric and circus arts.
  • Getting private trampoline lessons at the largest nonprofit circus in Seattle.
  • Being happy with an audience size that doesn't require you to moderate very much.
  • Forming smaller communities to take care of the people left behind by large governmental systems.
  • Empowering smaller communities to take care of each other.
  • Knowing your neighbors and caring more about them than people you don't know.
  • Cultivating a neighborhood to make sure you live near people you want to know.
  • The long term viability of the nuclear family.
  • A commune of queer people funded by a couple of tech jobs.
  • Motorizing two wooden planks and hooking them up to the internet to get hugs online.
  • Getting a whole lot done when you don't have internet access but now there's internet access everywhere.
  • Adding a physical ritual to a mental activity to make it feel real.
  • Putting the tomato on a different shelf to indicate that you are done with it.
  • An accountability mailing list where people might hypothetically judge you for what you haven't gotten done.
  • Fake accountability that feels real.
  • Trying to replicate a warehouse full of indie game devs on Discord.
  • Asking you for friends' lunch table to be enlarged so you can fit.
  • Writing a Discord bot that replicates the chat of every voice channel in every other voice channel.
  • Solving a social problem with social change rather than software.
  • How many clicks it takes to switch chat rooms.
  • Running through a procedurally generated maze.
  • Doing floating point math by aliasing the bytes to an integer and subtracting it from a weird magic number.
  • Code that is so self contained and stable that it's not really a problem that nobody understands it.
  • Old programmers retiring and their knowledge leaving with them because they didn't document anything.
  • Writing a megabyte long brain dump of everything you know about a project before it leaves your head.
  • The talk Jim didn't give describing the shaving cream technology in Glittermitten Grove.
  • Being too tired from your shaving cream rendering R&D project to do a good job on your beard rendering R&D project.
  • Wario Ware except with relaxing minigames rather than stressful ones.
  • Porting your game from modern systems to MS-DOS so you can sell it on a floppy disk.
  • How scratch and sniff failed where a Smell-O-Vision video gaming peripheral will succeed.
  • A swear filter but for smells.
  • The Femicom museum.
  • Going for walks around your neighborhood and seeing the outside of someone's house.
  • The hidden interior of a stranger's home as an allegory for their unknowable mind.
  • Peeking into your neighbor's window whenever you get the chance.
  • Which service jobs let you go into people's houses and see how they live.
  • How it's okay to let the cleaning service employees see your secrets because you don't consider the working poor to be real people.
  • Whether house cleaners get a small amount of joy in knowing the weird secrets of rich people.
  • The guy who comes in every few months for repairs because your computer is completely full of porn.
  • Seeing someone's deepest darkest secrets and being like "it was aight"
  • Wanting a nicely interior-designed house but not wanting to put in any effort.
  • Wanting to paint your house and painting one wall and thinking "I'm good."
  • Getting the kind of paint that seems like a normal wall color but changes to a garish color after it dries, to fool your wife.
  • Being ready to learn all the new hobbies as lockdown starts but someone already bought all the sewing machines and felting needles.
  • How many more ways you can fuck up a sewing project vs. a knitting project.
  • Pulling out all the stitches in a pleated skirt for the third time and deciding you want a different hobby.
  • Taking natural animal fibers and stabbing them into place.
  • A sewing project having to hang on someone's body in a particular way.
  • Learning every game development skill so you can make games without ever talking to anyone.
  • Smearing goo on a white surface and it becoming a picture somehow.
  • The hobbies we'd have if we had infinite time.
  • Looking at a painting and seeing which parts the painter messed up by looking for the parts that are thickest.
  • The "warmest greetings" coffee cup.
  • The animated gif where they poke a hole in the coffee cup and coffee spurts out.
  • Making a d-pad feel like a fresh control scheme by attaching a jetski to it.
  • Inventing a solution while also entertaining your audience.
  • Co-op TIS-100, where each player gets their own CPU cell.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Fabric and circus arts.
  • Getting private trampoline lessons at the largest nonprofit circus in Seattle.
  • Being happy with an audience size that doesn't require you to moderate very much.
  • Forming smaller communities to take care of the people left behind by large governmental systems.
  • Empowering smaller communities to take care of each other.
  • Knowing your neighbors and caring more about them than people you don't know.
  • Cultivating a neighborhood to make sure you live near people you want to know.
  • The long term viability of the nuclear family.
  • A commune of queer people funded by a couple of tech jobs.
  • Motorizing two wooden planks and hooking them up to the internet to get hugs online.
  • Getting a whole lot done when you don't have internet access but now there's internet access everywhere.
  • Adding a physical ritual to a mental activity to make it feel real.
  • Putting the tomato on a different shelf to indicate that you are done with it.
  • An accountability mailing list where people might hypothetically judge you for what you haven't gotten done.
  • Fake accountability that feels real.
  • Trying to replicate a warehouse full of indie game devs on Discord.
  • Asking you for friends' lunch table to be enlarged so you can fit.
  • Writing a Discord bot that replicates the chat of every voice channel in every other voice channel.
  • Solving a social problem with social change rather than software.
  • How many clicks it takes to switch chat rooms.
  • Running through a procedurally generated maze.
  • Doing floating point math by aliasing the bytes to an integer and subtracting it from a weird magic number.
  • Code that is so self contained and stable that it's not really a problem that nobody understands it.
  • Old programmers retiring and their knowledge leaving with them because they didn't document anything.
  • Writing a megabyte long brain dump of everything you know about a project before it leaves your head.
  • The talk Jim didn't give describing the shaving cream technology in Glittermitten Grove.
  • Being too tired from your shaving cream rendering R&D project to do a good job on your beard rendering R&D project.
  • Wario Ware except with relaxing minigames rather than stressful ones.
  • Porting your game from modern systems to MS-DOS so you can sell it on a floppy disk.
  • How scratch and sniff failed where a Smell-O-Vision video gaming peripheral will succeed.
  • A swear filter but for smells.
  • The Femicom museum.
  • Going for walks around your neighborhood and seeing the outside of someone's house.
  • The hidden interior of a stranger's home as an allegory for their unknowable mind.
  • Peeking into your neighbor's window whenever you get the chance.
  • Which service jobs let you go into people's houses and see how they live.
  • How it's okay to let the cleaning service employees see your secrets because you don't consider the working poor to be real people.
  • Whether house cleaners get a small amount of joy in knowing the weird secrets of rich people.
  • The guy who comes in every few months for repairs because your computer is completely full of porn.
  • Seeing someone's deepest darkest secrets and being like "it was aight"
  • Wanting a nicely interior-designed house but not wanting to put in any effort.
  • Wanting to paint your house and painting one wall and thinking "I'm good."
  • Getting the kind of paint that seems like a normal wall color but changes to a garish color after it dries, to fool your wife.
  • Being ready to learn all the new hobbies as lockdown starts but someone already bought all the sewing machines and felting needles.
  • How many more ways you can fuck up a sewing project vs. a knitting project.
  • Pulling out all the stitches in a pleated skirt for the third time and deciding you want a different hobby.
  • Taking natural animal fibers and stabbing them into place.
  • A sewing project having to hang on someone's body in a particular way.
  • Learning every game development skill so you can make games without ever talking to anyone.
  • Smearing goo on a white surface and it becoming a picture somehow.
  • The hobbies we'd have if we had infinite time.
  • Looking at a painting and seeing which parts the painter messed up by looking for the parts that are thickest.
  • The "warmest greetings" coffee cup.
  • The animated gif where they poke a hole in the coffee cup and coffee spurts out.
  • Making a d-pad feel like a fresh control scheme by attaching a jetski to it.
  • Inventing a solution while also entertaining your audience.
  • Co-op TIS-100, where each player gets their own CPU cell.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Fabric and circus arts.
  • Getting private trampoline lessons at the largest nonprofit circus in Seattle.
  • Being happy with an audience size that doesn't require you to moderate very much.
  • Forming smaller communities to take care of the people left behind by large governmental systems.
  • Empowering smaller communities to take care of each other.
  • Knowing your neighbors and caring more about them than people you don't know.
  • Cultivating a neighborhood to make sure you live near people you want to know.
  • The long term viability of the nuclear family.
  • A commune of queer people funded by a couple of tech jobs.
  • Motorizing two wooden planks and hooking them up to the internet to get hugs online.
  • Getting a whole lot done when you don't have internet access but now there's internet access everywhere.
  • Adding a physical ritual to a mental activity to make it feel real.
  • Putting the tomato on a different shelf to indicate that you are done with it.
  • An accountability mailing list where people might hypothetically judge you for what you haven't gotten done.
  • Fake accountability that feels real.
  • Trying to replicate a warehouse full of indie game devs on Discord.
  • Asking you for friends' lunch table to be enlarged so you can fit.
  • Writing a Discord bot that replicates the chat of every voice channel in every other voice channel.
  • Solving a social problem with social change rather than software.
  • How many clicks it takes to switch chat rooms.
  • Running through a procedurally generated maze.
  • Doing floating point math by aliasing the bytes to an integer and subtracting it from a weird magic number.
  • Code that is so self contained and stable that it's not really a problem that nobody understands it.
  • Old programmers retiring and their knowledge leaving with them because they didn't document anything.
  • Writing a megabyte long brain dump of everything you know about a project before it leaves your head.
  • The talk Jim didn't give describing the shaving cream technology in Glittermitten Grove.
  • Being too tired from your shaving cream rendering R&D project to do a good job on your beard rendering R&D project.
  • Wario Ware except with relaxing minigames rather than stressful ones.
  • Porting your game from modern systems to MS-DOS so you can sell it on a floppy disk.
  • How scratch and sniff failed where a Smell-O-Vision video gaming peripheral will succeed.
  • A swear filter but for smells.
  • The Femicom museum.
  • Going for walks around your neighborhood and seeing the outside of someone's house.
  • The hidden interior of a stranger's home as an allegory for their unknowable mind.
  • Peeking into your neighbor's window whenever you get the chance.
  • Which service jobs let you go into people's houses and see how they live.
  • How it's okay to let the cleaning service employees see your secrets because you don't consider the working poor to be real people.
  • Whether house cleaners get a small amount of joy in knowing the weird secrets of rich people.
  • The guy who comes in every few months for repairs because your computer is completely full of porn.
  • Seeing someone's deepest darkest secrets and being like "it was aight"
  • Wanting a nicely interior-designed house but not wanting to put in any effort.
  • Wanting to paint your house and painting one wall and thinking "I'm good."
  • Getting the kind of paint that seems like a normal wall color but changes to a garish color after it dries, to fool your wife.
  • Being ready to learn all the new hobbies as lockdown starts but someone already bought all the sewing machines and felting needles.
  • How many more ways you can fuck up a sewing project vs. a knitting project.
  • Pulling out all the stitches in a pleated skirt for the third time and deciding you want a different hobby.
  • Taking natural animal fibers and stabbing them into place.
  • A sewing project having to hang on someone's body in a particular way.
  • Learning every game development skill so you can make games without ever talking to anyone.
  • Smearing goo on a white surface and it becoming a picture somehow.
  • The hobbies we'd have if we had infinite time.
  • Looking at a painting and seeing which parts the painter messed up by looking for the parts that are thickest.
  • The "warmest greetings" coffee cup.
  • The animated gif where they poke a hole in the coffee cup and coffee spurts out.
  • Making a d-pad feel like a fresh control scheme by attaching a jetski to it.
  • Inventing a solution while also entertaining your audience.
  • Co-op TIS-100, where each player gets their own CPU cell.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+OLBLK8oq ]]> Jim Stormdancer 53. Pedialyte Teargas https://topiclords.com/pedialyte-teargas 0cc8bfbe-5b77-42b7-ba01-75fc03b65198 Mon, 26 Oct 2020 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: Danny and Alexander. We discuss invisible walls in games, BluBlockers, bees taking their lives into their hands every time they get thirsty, being afraid of dogs that wear people clothes, every response to "thank you" being rude and the multivarious ways being a child genius can screw you. 1:03:42 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Invisible walls in games
  • BluBlockers
  • Bees take their lives into their hands every time they get thirsty
  • Nick Asks "♪ God only knows what I’d pee without poo ♪"
  • My wife is afraid of dogs that wear people clothes
  • Every response to "thank you" is rude
  • The multivarious ways being a child genius can screw you

Microtopics:

  • The good content.
  • Some kind of invisible wall.
  • What we already know about Blaseball.
  • A fantastic way to keep the player inbounds.
  • Manically trying to explore this island while on the run from the military.
  • Cops being the yetis of life.
  • Blizzard blowing up your best party spot by shipping the final Ironforge Airfield.
  • Whether Microsoft will ruin Bethesda games by making them fix all those fun bugs before launching.
  • Fixing all the bugs in your game by applying The Cloud to it.
  • Playing the Turok remaster and they ruined it by removing all the fog.
  • Going to Canadian Tire because you live in Canada now.
  • The most technologically advanced sunglasses you can buy.
  • A Geordi Laforge type of deal.
  • Dipping your whole head in the black film you use to watch solar eclipses so you can get a good night's sleep.
  • How to get back from Canada.
  • Canada being so polite they even let the smoke in.
  • Still not being able to do a Canadian accent after two years.
  • Moving to Vancouver expecting a frozen wasteland.
  • Thrill-seeking bees refusing to wear their masks.
  • Being stung by one of those wasps that look like bees and being scared of bees for decades.
  • Whether insects have the capacity for complex emotions such as vengeance.
  • Why Danny isn't doing better if unbridled anger is such an evolutionary advantage.
  • Replacing creative workers with AI that you can pay in exposure.
  • Whether "brown area" is a less racist term than "gray area."
  • Seeing the most enormous dog butthole and screaming inside your heart.
  • Trimming back the hair around your dog's butthole to make it look bigger.
  • A poster with a dog butthole in it saying "Have you seen this butthole? Now you have."
  • Doing AI upscaling on the picture of the dog butthole that looks like Jesus so we can see the true face of God.
  • Assholes being okay until the poop comes out.
  • A human proportioned body with a dog head.
  • A therapy session by proxy.
  • Why dog clothes only cover the butt in Canada.
  • Dogs wearing ties on PBS.
  • Saying "my uncanny valley is just really wide" to your partner every night before bed instead of "I love you."
  • Moving to Canada expecting everyone to be polite but they're just rude with an "eh" after it.
  • A full-throated "hey."
  • The most terrifying thing about being in Canada.
  • Whether anyone has checked on the Canadian bacon.
  • Writing to Tim Horton and demanding that in Canada Canadian bacon just be called "here bacon."
  • A new credit card payment device where you need to punch in your zip code with your nose.
  • Enacting publicly-funded health care so that everyone can afford to grow a moustache and use StachePay.
  • Leveraging your raw intelligence to do your school assignments, rather than learning the material, and eventually hitting a brick wall because you've never actually learned anything.
  • Getting along better with your teachers than with other kids, because you want to talk about what Gorbachev is up to.
  • Getting through school and several jobs without ever learning how to work.
  • Thriving when given instructions to follow.
  • The shame of discovering that just because the school system worked for you, that doesn't mean it'll work for everyone.
  • Walking around wearing a t-shirt saying "ask me about the pledge of allegiance" and leaving a trail of horrified Canadians in your wake.
  • Taking your four year old to protests because now they have tear gas made out of Pedialyte.
  • Being $300 deep into the Dark Souls series but still not liking any of them.
  • Replaying old video games because playing new ones is too stressful.
  • Revisiting old media you've liked not because of the story but because it puts you in a place or mood.
  • Deciding to play a game because of its aesthetics and then having to find out what the game is like moment to moment and whether you want to do that with your life.
  • How Animal Crossing New Horizons probably saved the human species.
  • Only having so many button presses before your joints start to hurt.
  • Whether in Japan, every time you enter or leave a room, you have to politely listen to someone recite a prepared speech at you for 30 seconds, like in Animal Crossing.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Invisible walls in games
  • BluBlockers
  • Bees take their lives into their hands every time they get thirsty
  • Nick Asks "♪ God only knows what I’d pee without poo ♪"
  • My wife is afraid of dogs that wear people clothes
  • Every response to "thank you" is rude
  • The multivarious ways being a child genius can screw you

Microtopics:

  • The good content.
  • Some kind of invisible wall.
  • What we already know about Blaseball.
  • A fantastic way to keep the player inbounds.
  • Manically trying to explore this island while on the run from the military.
  • Cops being the yetis of life.
  • Blizzard blowing up your best party spot by shipping the final Ironforge Airfield.
  • Whether Microsoft will ruin Bethesda games by making them fix all those fun bugs before launching.
  • Fixing all the bugs in your game by applying The Cloud to it.
  • Playing the Turok remaster and they ruined it by removing all the fog.
  • Going to Canadian Tire because you live in Canada now.
  • The most technologically advanced sunglasses you can buy.
  • A Geordi Laforge type of deal.
  • Dipping your whole head in the black film you use to watch solar eclipses so you can get a good night's sleep.
  • How to get back from Canada.
  • Canada being so polite they even let the smoke in.
  • Still not being able to do a Canadian accent after two years.
  • Moving to Vancouver expecting a frozen wasteland.
  • Thrill-seeking bees refusing to wear their masks.
  • Being stung by one of those wasps that look like bees and being scared of bees for decades.
  • Whether insects have the capacity for complex emotions such as vengeance.
  • Why Danny isn't doing better if unbridled anger is such an evolutionary advantage.
  • Replacing creative workers with AI that you can pay in exposure.
  • Whether "brown area" is a less racist term than "gray area."
  • Seeing the most enormous dog butthole and screaming inside your heart.
  • Trimming back the hair around your dog's butthole to make it look bigger.
  • A poster with a dog butthole in it saying "Have you seen this butthole? Now you have."
  • Doing AI upscaling on the picture of the dog butthole that looks like Jesus so we can see the true face of God.
  • Assholes being okay until the poop comes out.
  • A human proportioned body with a dog head.
  • A therapy session by proxy.
  • Why dog clothes only cover the butt in Canada.
  • Dogs wearing ties on PBS.
  • Saying "my uncanny valley is just really wide" to your partner every night before bed instead of "I love you."
  • Moving to Canada expecting everyone to be polite but they're just rude with an "eh" after it.
  • A full-throated "hey."
  • The most terrifying thing about being in Canada.
  • Whether anyone has checked on the Canadian bacon.
  • Writing to Tim Horton and demanding that in Canada Canadian bacon just be called "here bacon."
  • A new credit card payment device where you need to punch in your zip code with your nose.
  • Enacting publicly-funded health care so that everyone can afford to grow a moustache and use StachePay.
  • Leveraging your raw intelligence to do your school assignments, rather than learning the material, and eventually hitting a brick wall because you've never actually learned anything.
  • Getting along better with your teachers than with other kids, because you want to talk about what Gorbachev is up to.
  • Getting through school and several jobs without ever learning how to work.
  • Thriving when given instructions to follow.
  • The shame of discovering that just because the school system worked for you, that doesn't mean it'll work for everyone.
  • Walking around wearing a t-shirt saying "ask me about the pledge of allegiance" and leaving a trail of horrified Canadians in your wake.
  • Taking your four year old to protests because now they have tear gas made out of Pedialyte.
  • Being $300 deep into the Dark Souls series but still not liking any of them.
  • Replaying old video games because playing new ones is too stressful.
  • Revisiting old media you've liked not because of the story but because it puts you in a place or mood.
  • Deciding to play a game because of its aesthetics and then having to find out what the game is like moment to moment and whether you want to do that with your life.
  • How Animal Crossing New Horizons probably saved the human species.
  • Only having so many button presses before your joints start to hurt.
  • Whether in Japan, every time you enter or leave a room, you have to politely listen to someone recite a prepared speech at you for 30 seconds, like in Animal Crossing.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Invisible walls in games
  • BluBlockers
  • Bees take their lives into their hands every time they get thirsty
  • Nick Asks "♪ God only knows what I’d pee without poo ♪"
  • My wife is afraid of dogs that wear people clothes
  • Every response to "thank you" is rude
  • The multivarious ways being a child genius can screw you

Microtopics:

  • The good content.
  • Some kind of invisible wall.
  • What we already know about Blaseball.
  • A fantastic way to keep the player inbounds.
  • Manically trying to explore this island while on the run from the military.
  • Cops being the yetis of life.
  • Blizzard blowing up your best party spot by shipping the final Ironforge Airfield.
  • Whether Microsoft will ruin Bethesda games by making them fix all those fun bugs before launching.
  • Fixing all the bugs in your game by applying The Cloud to it.
  • Playing the Turok remaster and they ruined it by removing all the fog.
  • Going to Canadian Tire because you live in Canada now.
  • The most technologically advanced sunglasses you can buy.
  • A Geordi Laforge type of deal.
  • Dipping your whole head in the black film you use to watch solar eclipses so you can get a good night's sleep.
  • How to get back from Canada.
  • Canada being so polite they even let the smoke in.
  • Still not being able to do a Canadian accent after two years.
  • Moving to Vancouver expecting a frozen wasteland.
  • Thrill-seeking bees refusing to wear their masks.
  • Being stung by one of those wasps that look like bees and being scared of bees for decades.
  • Whether insects have the capacity for complex emotions such as vengeance.
  • Why Danny isn't doing better if unbridled anger is such an evolutionary advantage.
  • Replacing creative workers with AI that you can pay in exposure.
  • Whether "brown area" is a less racist term than "gray area."
  • Seeing the most enormous dog butthole and screaming inside your heart.
  • Trimming back the hair around your dog's butthole to make it look bigger.
  • A poster with a dog butthole in it saying "Have you seen this butthole? Now you have."
  • Doing AI upscaling on the picture of the dog butthole that looks like Jesus so we can see the true face of God.
  • Assholes being okay until the poop comes out.
  • A human proportioned body with a dog head.
  • A therapy session by proxy.
  • Why dog clothes only cover the butt in Canada.
  • Dogs wearing ties on PBS.
  • Saying "my uncanny valley is just really wide" to your partner every night before bed instead of "I love you."
  • Moving to Canada expecting everyone to be polite but they're just rude with an "eh" after it.
  • A full-throated "hey."
  • The most terrifying thing about being in Canada.
  • Whether anyone has checked on the Canadian bacon.
  • Writing to Tim Horton and demanding that in Canada Canadian bacon just be called "here bacon."
  • A new credit card payment device where you need to punch in your zip code with your nose.
  • Enacting publicly-funded health care so that everyone can afford to grow a moustache and use StachePay.
  • Leveraging your raw intelligence to do your school assignments, rather than learning the material, and eventually hitting a brick wall because you've never actually learned anything.
  • Getting along better with your teachers than with other kids, because you want to talk about what Gorbachev is up to.
  • Getting through school and several jobs without ever learning how to work.
  • Thriving when given instructions to follow.
  • The shame of discovering that just because the school system worked for you, that doesn't mean it'll work for everyone.
  • Walking around wearing a t-shirt saying "ask me about the pledge of allegiance" and leaving a trail of horrified Canadians in your wake.
  • Taking your four year old to protests because now they have tear gas made out of Pedialyte.
  • Being $300 deep into the Dark Souls series but still not liking any of them.
  • Replaying old video games because playing new ones is too stressful.
  • Revisiting old media you've liked not because of the story but because it puts you in a place or mood.
  • Deciding to play a game because of its aesthetics and then having to find out what the game is like moment to moment and whether you want to do that with your life.
  • How Animal Crossing New Horizons probably saved the human species.
  • Only having so many button presses before your joints start to hurt.
  • Whether in Japan, every time you enter or leave a room, you have to politely listen to someone recite a prepared speech at you for 30 seconds, like in Animal Crossing.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+mX_EG6yZ ]]> Jim Stormdancer 52. Speak Moistly and Carry a Wet Stick https://topiclords.com/speak-moistly-and-carry-a-wet-stick 71af4c13-4d01-40cc-80b3-81ffa7d5300e Mon, 19 Oct 2020 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Jenni and Chris. We discuss: mirror galaxy doppelgangers, blaseball, ways to interact with dishwashers, the inventor of roller skates, the cool s again, and every toxic animal in Arizona. 1:02:07 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Possibly having doppelgangers in the same physical universe on the other side of the Big Bang is creepy
  • Never interfacing with the cool parts of baseball because the front-facing parts didn't appeal to you
  • The two kinds of people: people who can just put a dish in the dishwasher and be happy with the outcome, and people who have to wash each dish by hand before putting it in the dishwasher, in which case what's even the point?
  • Miko asks "John Joseph Merlin (!) introduced the world to roller skates by rolling into a costumed ball, playing a violin, and immediately crashing into a mirror because he hadn't invented brakes yet."
  • The virality of the Cool S
  • AZ is the only state in the union where you can get one of every kind of venomous animal in your yard in the same day, I think (edit: except marsupials?)
  • Ancient magicks and the price we pay for them

Microtopics:

  • The Korean spam company that owns the Video Games Taco domain name.
  • Who owns the Video Games Taco AOL keyword.
  • Editing video on an iPhone because you spilled coffee on your computer.
  • Refusing to use your girlfriend's salty leavings to edit video.
  • A symmetrical big bang implying an identical doppelganger Earth across the universe.
  • Traveling across the universe to destroy your big bang doppelgangers with the understanding that they want the same thing and will meet you halfway.
  • Arguments that exist only to depress people because you can't do anything with the information.
  • Whether or not the Big Bang knew about mirrors.
  • Higher order thought leading to the possibility of altruism.
  • The Chris Hegemony.
  • An automatic eternal baseball simulation.
  • Guessing what the cool part of baseball is and getting partial credit.
  • Speaking moistly and carrying a wet stick.
  • Voting to open the forbidden book and now the umpires can incinerate you.
  • MMO players voting in a law against running stoplights and expressing the devs to write code to enforce it like it's the law of gravity.
  • MMO players designating certain players to run around and hit you with a stick until you stop breaking the rules.
  • Finding out about Blaseball by dating and living with someone who is really into Blaseball.
  • Refusing to read Homestuck because you've already read Problem Sleuth.
  • Baseball having interesting rules but steadfastly refusing to market itself to game nerds.
  • When the sausages would race.
  • Whether there is Canadian bacon in this sausage race.
  • Finding the web site that keeps track of the sausage mascot race results.
  • Whether or not the chorizo sausage costume is wearing a sombrero.
  • Trading the player who assaulted the sausage mascot to the Chicago Cubs.
  • The sausage race promotional posters having surprisingly interesting composition.
  • Performing an act of necromancy on Jaylen Hotdogfingers.
  • Recreating the experience of people talking about a sport you don't follow except for a fake sport.
  • A first-person confessional of what it's like to be a racing sausage.
  • Finding out that the sausage races are never fixed and feeling relief that you can still believe in something.
  • Whether you grew up trusting dishwashers.
  • How to get stabbed in the hand.
  • Having dish-related trauma.
  • Having an incredibly high spoon to fork ratio.
  • Your spaghetti spoon.
  • Taking a saw and turning any spoon into a fork.
  • Loading the silverware drawer with four slots full of murder sporks pointing the wrong way.
  • Existing for four nanoseconds and spending all four being angry about how your husband wants to load the silverware drawer.
  • God blaming you when they were the one who made the universe deterministic.
  • Refusing to take the dish out of the dishwasher if it's still dirty, because god dang it you did your part.
  • Punting a task to when you have more brain.
  • Whether viewing your future self as a separate person is universal or distinct to American psychology students.
  • Doing a study for the beer money and screwing up the study because you're ordering beer online during the study.
  • Hearing about a "costumed ball" and picturing Pom Pom in a Halloween episode.
  • Not giving the inventor of roller skates too much credit because he didn't think of putting all the wheels in a row.
  • Inventing the car and debuting it by driving into a petting zoo, honking La Cucaracha and trying to steal novelty hats off of the racing sausages.
  • Determining whether you need to steal the hats off of the sausages while they're racing or if you can wait until they've taken the hats off at the end of the day.
  • John Joseph Merlin's fart remover.
  • The Cool S of topics.
  • Growing up in a parallel Earth without the Cool S.
  • People in the Amazon Basin who've never seen Goatse or the Cool S.
  • Waking up in a world without the Cool S and getting to be the one who teaches all the kids who can't draw how to draw one cool thing.
  • Finding the Cool S in a painting from 1533, right above the hidden anamorphic skull.
  • Neither the Animorphs or the Digimons having been invented in 1533.
  • Putting a skateboarding dog in American Gothic.
  • Going back in time to hide the plot of 50 First Dates with Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore in the Edda.
  • Arizona's death of poisonous marsupials.
  • Gila Monsters being enraged at the sight of human testicles.
  • Finding a black widow, a scorpion and a Gila monster in your yard all in the same day.
  • Importing tropical plants without phyto certificates.
  • Befriending the guy you met at the Sprint store.
  • The kind of person who seems cooler while they're working at the Verizon store than on Twitter.
  • Clinging to any shred of humanity you can find in the Sprint shop.
  • The wizard explaining that it's going to be another hour when you can see your curse amulet right there on the counter.
  • Apple biting Star Trek's style
  • Sitting down at the genius bar and ordering a Roy Rogers.
  • Apple running a contact tracing program so they can find out if you know any Android users.
  • Finally deleting your Facebook and feeling free.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Possibly having doppelgangers in the same physical universe on the other side of the Big Bang is creepy
  • Never interfacing with the cool parts of baseball because the front-facing parts didn't appeal to you
  • The two kinds of people: people who can just put a dish in the dishwasher and be happy with the outcome, and people who have to wash each dish by hand before putting it in the dishwasher, in which case what's even the point?
  • Miko asks "John Joseph Merlin (!) introduced the world to roller skates by rolling into a costumed ball, playing a violin, and immediately crashing into a mirror because he hadn't invented brakes yet."
  • The virality of the Cool S
  • AZ is the only state in the union where you can get one of every kind of venomous animal in your yard in the same day, I think (edit: except marsupials?)
  • Ancient magicks and the price we pay for them

Microtopics:

  • The Korean spam company that owns the Video Games Taco domain name.
  • Who owns the Video Games Taco AOL keyword.
  • Editing video on an iPhone because you spilled coffee on your computer.
  • Refusing to use your girlfriend's salty leavings to edit video.
  • A symmetrical big bang implying an identical doppelganger Earth across the universe.
  • Traveling across the universe to destroy your big bang doppelgangers with the understanding that they want the same thing and will meet you halfway.
  • Arguments that exist only to depress people because you can't do anything with the information.
  • Whether or not the Big Bang knew about mirrors.
  • Higher order thought leading to the possibility of altruism.
  • The Chris Hegemony.
  • An automatic eternal baseball simulation.
  • Guessing what the cool part of baseball is and getting partial credit.
  • Speaking moistly and carrying a wet stick.
  • Voting to open the forbidden book and now the umpires can incinerate you.
  • MMO players voting in a law against running stoplights and expressing the devs to write code to enforce it like it's the law of gravity.
  • MMO players designating certain players to run around and hit you with a stick until you stop breaking the rules.
  • Finding out about Blaseball by dating and living with someone who is really into Blaseball.
  • Refusing to read Homestuck because you've already read Problem Sleuth.
  • Baseball having interesting rules but steadfastly refusing to market itself to game nerds.
  • When the sausages would race.
  • Whether there is Canadian bacon in this sausage race.
  • Finding the web site that keeps track of the sausage mascot race results.
  • Whether or not the chorizo sausage costume is wearing a sombrero.
  • Trading the player who assaulted the sausage mascot to the Chicago Cubs.
  • The sausage race promotional posters having surprisingly interesting composition.
  • Performing an act of necromancy on Jaylen Hotdogfingers.
  • Recreating the experience of people talking about a sport you don't follow except for a fake sport.
  • A first-person confessional of what it's like to be a racing sausage.
  • Finding out that the sausage races are never fixed and feeling relief that you can still believe in something.
  • Whether you grew up trusting dishwashers.
  • How to get stabbed in the hand.
  • Having dish-related trauma.
  • Having an incredibly high spoon to fork ratio.
  • Your spaghetti spoon.
  • Taking a saw and turning any spoon into a fork.
  • Loading the silverware drawer with four slots full of murder sporks pointing the wrong way.
  • Existing for four nanoseconds and spending all four being angry about how your husband wants to load the silverware drawer.
  • God blaming you when they were the one who made the universe deterministic.
  • Refusing to take the dish out of the dishwasher if it's still dirty, because god dang it you did your part.
  • Punting a task to when you have more brain.
  • Whether viewing your future self as a separate person is universal or distinct to American psychology students.
  • Doing a study for the beer money and screwing up the study because you're ordering beer online during the study.
  • Hearing about a "costumed ball" and picturing Pom Pom in a Halloween episode.
  • Not giving the inventor of roller skates too much credit because he didn't think of putting all the wheels in a row.
  • Inventing the car and debuting it by driving into a petting zoo, honking La Cucaracha and trying to steal novelty hats off of the racing sausages.
  • Determining whether you need to steal the hats off of the sausages while they're racing or if you can wait until they've taken the hats off at the end of the day.
  • John Joseph Merlin's fart remover.
  • The Cool S of topics.
  • Growing up in a parallel Earth without the Cool S.
  • People in the Amazon Basin who've never seen Goatse or the Cool S.
  • Waking up in a world without the Cool S and getting to be the one who teaches all the kids who can't draw how to draw one cool thing.
  • Finding the Cool S in a painting from 1533, right above the hidden anamorphic skull.
  • Neither the Animorphs or the Digimons having been invented in 1533.
  • Putting a skateboarding dog in American Gothic.
  • Going back in time to hide the plot of 50 First Dates with Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore in the Edda.
  • Arizona's death of poisonous marsupials.
  • Gila Monsters being enraged at the sight of human testicles.
  • Finding a black widow, a scorpion and a Gila monster in your yard all in the same day.
  • Importing tropical plants without phyto certificates.
  • Befriending the guy you met at the Sprint store.
  • The kind of person who seems cooler while they're working at the Verizon store than on Twitter.
  • Clinging to any shred of humanity you can find in the Sprint shop.
  • The wizard explaining that it's going to be another hour when you can see your curse amulet right there on the counter.
  • Apple biting Star Trek's style
  • Sitting down at the genius bar and ordering a Roy Rogers.
  • Apple running a contact tracing program so they can find out if you know any Android users.
  • Finally deleting your Facebook and feeling free.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Possibly having doppelgangers in the same physical universe on the other side of the Big Bang is creepy
  • Never interfacing with the cool parts of baseball because the front-facing parts didn't appeal to you
  • The two kinds of people: people who can just put a dish in the dishwasher and be happy with the outcome, and people who have to wash each dish by hand before putting it in the dishwasher, in which case what's even the point?
  • Miko asks "John Joseph Merlin (!) introduced the world to roller skates by rolling into a costumed ball, playing a violin, and immediately crashing into a mirror because he hadn't invented brakes yet."
  • The virality of the Cool S
  • AZ is the only state in the union where you can get one of every kind of venomous animal in your yard in the same day, I think (edit: except marsupials?)
  • Ancient magicks and the price we pay for them

Microtopics:

  • The Korean spam company that owns the Video Games Taco domain name.
  • Who owns the Video Games Taco AOL keyword.
  • Editing video on an iPhone because you spilled coffee on your computer.
  • Refusing to use your girlfriend's salty leavings to edit video.
  • A symmetrical big bang implying an identical doppelganger Earth across the universe.
  • Traveling across the universe to destroy your big bang doppelgangers with the understanding that they want the same thing and will meet you halfway.
  • Arguments that exist only to depress people because you can't do anything with the information.
  • Whether or not the Big Bang knew about mirrors.
  • Higher order thought leading to the possibility of altruism.
  • The Chris Hegemony.
  • An automatic eternal baseball simulation.
  • Guessing what the cool part of baseball is and getting partial credit.
  • Speaking moistly and carrying a wet stick.
  • Voting to open the forbidden book and now the umpires can incinerate you.
  • MMO players voting in a law against running stoplights and expressing the devs to write code to enforce it like it's the law of gravity.
  • MMO players designating certain players to run around and hit you with a stick until you stop breaking the rules.
  • Finding out about Blaseball by dating and living with someone who is really into Blaseball.
  • Refusing to read Homestuck because you've already read Problem Sleuth.
  • Baseball having interesting rules but steadfastly refusing to market itself to game nerds.
  • When the sausages would race.
  • Whether there is Canadian bacon in this sausage race.
  • Finding the web site that keeps track of the sausage mascot race results.
  • Whether or not the chorizo sausage costume is wearing a sombrero.
  • Trading the player who assaulted the sausage mascot to the Chicago Cubs.
  • The sausage race promotional posters having surprisingly interesting composition.
  • Performing an act of necromancy on Jaylen Hotdogfingers.
  • Recreating the experience of people talking about a sport you don't follow except for a fake sport.
  • A first-person confessional of what it's like to be a racing sausage.
  • Finding out that the sausage races are never fixed and feeling relief that you can still believe in something.
  • Whether you grew up trusting dishwashers.
  • How to get stabbed in the hand.
  • Having dish-related trauma.
  • Having an incredibly high spoon to fork ratio.
  • Your spaghetti spoon.
  • Taking a saw and turning any spoon into a fork.
  • Loading the silverware drawer with four slots full of murder sporks pointing the wrong way.
  • Existing for four nanoseconds and spending all four being angry about how your husband wants to load the silverware drawer.
  • God blaming you when they were the one who made the universe deterministic.
  • Refusing to take the dish out of the dishwasher if it's still dirty, because god dang it you did your part.
  • Punting a task to when you have more brain.
  • Whether viewing your future self as a separate person is universal or distinct to American psychology students.
  • Doing a study for the beer money and screwing up the study because you're ordering beer online during the study.
  • Hearing about a "costumed ball" and picturing Pom Pom in a Halloween episode.
  • Not giving the inventor of roller skates too much credit because he didn't think of putting all the wheels in a row.
  • Inventing the car and debuting it by driving into a petting zoo, honking La Cucaracha and trying to steal novelty hats off of the racing sausages.
  • Determining whether you need to steal the hats off of the sausages while they're racing or if you can wait until they've taken the hats off at the end of the day.
  • John Joseph Merlin's fart remover.
  • The Cool S of topics.
  • Growing up in a parallel Earth without the Cool S.
  • People in the Amazon Basin who've never seen Goatse or the Cool S.
  • Waking up in a world without the Cool S and getting to be the one who teaches all the kids who can't draw how to draw one cool thing.
  • Finding the Cool S in a painting from 1533, right above the hidden anamorphic skull.
  • Neither the Animorphs or the Digimons having been invented in 1533.
  • Putting a skateboarding dog in American Gothic.
  • Going back in time to hide the plot of 50 First Dates with Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore in the Edda.
  • Arizona's death of poisonous marsupials.
  • Gila Monsters being enraged at the sight of human testicles.
  • Finding a black widow, a scorpion and a Gila monster in your yard all in the same day.
  • Importing tropical plants without phyto certificates.
  • Befriending the guy you met at the Sprint store.
  • The kind of person who seems cooler while they're working at the Verizon store than on Twitter.
  • Clinging to any shred of humanity you can find in the Sprint shop.
  • The wizard explaining that it's going to be another hour when you can see your curse amulet right there on the counter.
  • Apple biting Star Trek's style
  • Sitting down at the genius bar and ordering a Roy Rogers.
  • Apple running a contact tracing program so they can find out if you know any Android users.
  • Finally deleting your Facebook and feeling free.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+vz4sr2tD ]]> Jim Stormdancer 51. I Don't Want To Eat This Bug, Obviously https://topiclords.com/i-dont-want-to-eat-this-bug-obviously 95d4f09f-7e2e-408d-a8e0-80ecd96d23c3 Mon, 12 Oct 2020 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Ben and Ryan. We discuss: cooking from muscle memory, remembering your mistakes, what we'd have in common with intelligent aliens, the worst thing you've put in your mouth, Nintendo Labo, long anticipated events eventually happening, and accidentally becoming the top resources for earlobe cysts. 1:00:44 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Being able to cook a recipe from your mind without being able to explain how.
    • Every recipe has a step called "to taste" that is a mini version of this. How much salt, pepper, chili powder and cumin do I add to these chilaquiles? I donno, it's just muscle memory. But the muscle memory only works for three eggs. More or fewer, I screw it up.
  • How many times a day do you remember something stupid you've done in the past? Am I normal and developing as I should?
  • I miss making a game that was immune to bug reports.
  • Dan asks: "What would we have in common with intelligent aliens? It seems common for analytical-minded people to claim that mathematical theories are discovered rather than invented. There's a programming theory personality named Phillip Wadler who's claimed that if we met aliens, they would have Lambda Calculus. Another programming personality (on the 'math is invented' side) posted a hypothetical conversation between a human programmer and an alien programmer that went like this:
    • Human: How do you avoid race conditions?
    • Alien: We just look at the different futures and pick one without data races.
    • Alien: How do you calm arithmetic when it's angry?
    • Human: Our math is not sentient."
    • The Atari 2600 screenshot Jim was thinking of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message
  • What's the worst thing you've ever put in your mouth?
  • Nintendo Labo is an industrial design marvel.
  • Has anyone else noticed that long-anticipated events eventually "happen" and are thereafter "in the past"?
  • For years my personal blog was the top internet resource for earlobe cysts.

Microtopics:

  • Traveling to E3 from Australia.
  • Making games for the Nokia N-Gage.
  • Just now realizing that "Squirrel Girl" rhymes.
  • Bluffing your way through a title pun because there's limited time in a game jam.
  • A pun that you need to be both from England and New Zealand to get.
  • Procedures for recreating an unknown recipe when the recipe changes as it's observed.
  • A discrete series of steps that can be reproduced
  • A bottomless measuring cup that keeps track of how much a substance that passed through it.
  • A measuring cup that tells an anonymous third party you how much of a thing it holds, but doesn't tell the user.
  • Whether or not anything comes up if you search the internet for minestrone soup recipes.
  • Getting owned on Twitter after posting about the Ship of Theseus.
  • Feeling dumb and then later feeling dumb about how you felt dumb.
  • The mortifying ordeal of being known.
  • Dismissing intrusive thoughts with a vocal tic or a spasm.
  • Remembering advertising jingles from the 1980s all the goddamned time.
  • Whether or not the Zest jingle invented the word "zestfully"
  • Corporations owing serious back rent on the space in your brain taken up by advertising jingles.
  • Crackly choc-ice.
  • Going into a deep existential dread about a forty-year-old t-shirt.
  • Calling it the "WC" when it takes way longer to say "WC" than "water closet"
  • Asking the waitress where the toilet is and she gives you a weird look and says "in the bathroom, sir."
  • Offering your top hat for the nobleman to micturate into.
  • Having an audience who sees cool literary references in your work and assumes you did them on purpose.
  • Writing an impossible season cliffhanger believe that you're quiting the show, but then not quitting the show and having to somehow resolve the cliffhanger.
  • The biggest spoiler being whether or not a work is good or not.
  • Living vicariously through someone watching your favorite TV series for the first time.
  • Meeting an alien race with sentient math.
  • Having just the one math but being certain that it's the only math.
  • Doing your best to communicate with intelligent aliens but you can't think of anything to talk about.
  • Only trying to contact alien races that you have enough in common with to meaningfully communicate.
  • What kind of math a salt-leech would invent.
  • Coherent systems of mathematics that don't reflect reality.
  • Maths that would hypothetically reflect reality better than ours, and how ours could do better.
  • The guy waking you up from your cryogenic sleep explaining to you that we know how to divide by zero now.
  • Knowing that if the laws of physics change, your program will break.
  • Recompiling once a year to make sure your program breaks when mathematical laws are updated.
  • Realizing that the anecdote you're about to tell actually happened to your brother, not you.
  • Discovering that ants are extremely sour.
  • Ordering a shark kebab and the guy asks if you want crickets on it and you're certain you misheard him so you ask "what are those?" and he says "they're tiny bugs!"
  • Crickets just being crunchy until you look at them and realize that you're definitely eating an entire being right now.
  • Being stuck with your lame fish and chips when Australians have badass shark and chips.
  • Things you learned as a kid and never critically examined as an adult.
  • Razor clams: the meal that bites back.
  • Building a fully functional steering wheel, with levers and adjustable dials that click, out of cardboard and rubber bands.
  • The visual programming environment that comes with Nintendo Labo.
  • Buying toys for an eight year old when your son is born because one day he'll be eight.
  • Artisanal reprinted Nintendo Labo cardboard components on Etsy.
  • Taking your cardboard Nintendo Labo synth on tour and seeing how many gigs it lasts for.
  • Everybody really wanting to hear Jim's earlobe cyst story.
  • Jim's primary claim to fame before Frog Fractions.
  • Jim's top 3 earlobe cyst tips.
  • Just how deceptively close to the jugular the earlobe is.
  • Getting to watch a stranger's kid grow up because they don't believe you when you say they've got the wrong email address.
  • The kind of person who just assumes their email address is their name at gmail.com.
  • Holding onto the last vapors of 2012 Twitter.
  • Like finally talking to T-Rex.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Being able to cook a recipe from your mind without being able to explain how.
    • Every recipe has a step called "to taste" that is a mini version of this. How much salt, pepper, chili powder and cumin do I add to these chilaquiles? I donno, it's just muscle memory. But the muscle memory only works for three eggs. More or fewer, I screw it up.
  • How many times a day do you remember something stupid you've done in the past? Am I normal and developing as I should?
  • I miss making a game that was immune to bug reports.
  • Dan asks: "What would we have in common with intelligent aliens? It seems common for analytical-minded people to claim that mathematical theories are discovered rather than invented. There's a programming theory personality named Phillip Wadler who's claimed that if we met aliens, they would have Lambda Calculus. Another programming personality (on the 'math is invented' side) posted a hypothetical conversation between a human programmer and an alien programmer that went like this:
    • Human: How do you avoid race conditions?
    • Alien: We just look at the different futures and pick one without data races.
    • Alien: How do you calm arithmetic when it's angry?
    • Human: Our math is not sentient."
    • The Atari 2600 screenshot Jim was thinking of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message
  • What's the worst thing you've ever put in your mouth?
  • Nintendo Labo is an industrial design marvel.
  • Has anyone else noticed that long-anticipated events eventually "happen" and are thereafter "in the past"?
  • For years my personal blog was the top internet resource for earlobe cysts.

Microtopics:

  • Traveling to E3 from Australia.
  • Making games for the Nokia N-Gage.
  • Just now realizing that "Squirrel Girl" rhymes.
  • Bluffing your way through a title pun because there's limited time in a game jam.
  • A pun that you need to be both from England and New Zealand to get.
  • Procedures for recreating an unknown recipe when the recipe changes as it's observed.
  • A discrete series of steps that can be reproduced
  • A bottomless measuring cup that keeps track of how much a substance that passed through it.
  • A measuring cup that tells an anonymous third party you how much of a thing it holds, but doesn't tell the user.
  • Whether or not anything comes up if you search the internet for minestrone soup recipes.
  • Getting owned on Twitter after posting about the Ship of Theseus.
  • Feeling dumb and then later feeling dumb about how you felt dumb.
  • The mortifying ordeal of being known.
  • Dismissing intrusive thoughts with a vocal tic or a spasm.
  • Remembering advertising jingles from the 1980s all the goddamned time.
  • Whether or not the Zest jingle invented the word "zestfully"
  • Corporations owing serious back rent on the space in your brain taken up by advertising jingles.
  • Crackly choc-ice.
  • Going into a deep existential dread about a forty-year-old t-shirt.
  • Calling it the "WC" when it takes way longer to say "WC" than "water closet"
  • Asking the waitress where the toilet is and she gives you a weird look and says "in the bathroom, sir."
  • Offering your top hat for the nobleman to micturate into.
  • Having an audience who sees cool literary references in your work and assumes you did them on purpose.
  • Writing an impossible season cliffhanger believe that you're quiting the show, but then not quitting the show and having to somehow resolve the cliffhanger.
  • The biggest spoiler being whether or not a work is good or not.
  • Living vicariously through someone watching your favorite TV series for the first time.
  • Meeting an alien race with sentient math.
  • Having just the one math but being certain that it's the only math.
  • Doing your best to communicate with intelligent aliens but you can't think of anything to talk about.
  • Only trying to contact alien races that you have enough in common with to meaningfully communicate.
  • What kind of math a salt-leech would invent.
  • Coherent systems of mathematics that don't reflect reality.
  • Maths that would hypothetically reflect reality better than ours, and how ours could do better.
  • The guy waking you up from your cryogenic sleep explaining to you that we know how to divide by zero now.
  • Knowing that if the laws of physics change, your program will break.
  • Recompiling once a year to make sure your program breaks when mathematical laws are updated.
  • Realizing that the anecdote you're about to tell actually happened to your brother, not you.
  • Discovering that ants are extremely sour.
  • Ordering a shark kebab and the guy asks if you want crickets on it and you're certain you misheard him so you ask "what are those?" and he says "they're tiny bugs!"
  • Crickets just being crunchy until you look at them and realize that you're definitely eating an entire being right now.
  • Being stuck with your lame fish and chips when Australians have badass shark and chips.
  • Things you learned as a kid and never critically examined as an adult.
  • Razor clams: the meal that bites back.
  • Building a fully functional steering wheel, with levers and adjustable dials that click, out of cardboard and rubber bands.
  • The visual programming environment that comes with Nintendo Labo.
  • Buying toys for an eight year old when your son is born because one day he'll be eight.
  • Artisanal reprinted Nintendo Labo cardboard components on Etsy.
  • Taking your cardboard Nintendo Labo synth on tour and seeing how many gigs it lasts for.
  • Everybody really wanting to hear Jim's earlobe cyst story.
  • Jim's primary claim to fame before Frog Fractions.
  • Jim's top 3 earlobe cyst tips.
  • Just how deceptively close to the jugular the earlobe is.
  • Getting to watch a stranger's kid grow up because they don't believe you when you say they've got the wrong email address.
  • The kind of person who just assumes their email address is their name at gmail.com.
  • Holding onto the last vapors of 2012 Twitter.
  • Like finally talking to T-Rex.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Being able to cook a recipe from your mind without being able to explain how.
    • Every recipe has a step called "to taste" that is a mini version of this. How much salt, pepper, chili powder and cumin do I add to these chilaquiles? I donno, it's just muscle memory. But the muscle memory only works for three eggs. More or fewer, I screw it up.
  • How many times a day do you remember something stupid you've done in the past? Am I normal and developing as I should?
  • I miss making a game that was immune to bug reports.
  • Dan asks: "What would we have in common with intelligent aliens? It seems common for analytical-minded people to claim that mathematical theories are discovered rather than invented. There's a programming theory personality named Phillip Wadler who's claimed that if we met aliens, they would have Lambda Calculus. Another programming personality (on the 'math is invented' side) posted a hypothetical conversation between a human programmer and an alien programmer that went like this:
    • Human: How do you avoid race conditions?
    • Alien: We just look at the different futures and pick one without data races.
    • Alien: How do you calm arithmetic when it's angry?
    • Human: Our math is not sentient."
    • The Atari 2600 screenshot Jim was thinking of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message
  • What's the worst thing you've ever put in your mouth?
  • Nintendo Labo is an industrial design marvel.
  • Has anyone else noticed that long-anticipated events eventually "happen" and are thereafter "in the past"?
  • For years my personal blog was the top internet resource for earlobe cysts.

Microtopics:

  • Traveling to E3 from Australia.
  • Making games for the Nokia N-Gage.
  • Just now realizing that "Squirrel Girl" rhymes.
  • Bluffing your way through a title pun because there's limited time in a game jam.
  • A pun that you need to be both from England and New Zealand to get.
  • Procedures for recreating an unknown recipe when the recipe changes as it's observed.
  • A discrete series of steps that can be reproduced
  • A bottomless measuring cup that keeps track of how much a substance that passed through it.
  • A measuring cup that tells an anonymous third party you how much of a thing it holds, but doesn't tell the user.
  • Whether or not anything comes up if you search the internet for minestrone soup recipes.
  • Getting owned on Twitter after posting about the Ship of Theseus.
  • Feeling dumb and then later feeling dumb about how you felt dumb.
  • The mortifying ordeal of being known.
  • Dismissing intrusive thoughts with a vocal tic or a spasm.
  • Remembering advertising jingles from the 1980s all the goddamned time.
  • Whether or not the Zest jingle invented the word "zestfully"
  • Corporations owing serious back rent on the space in your brain taken up by advertising jingles.
  • Crackly choc-ice.
  • Going into a deep existential dread about a forty-year-old t-shirt.
  • Calling it the "WC" when it takes way longer to say "WC" than "water closet"
  • Asking the waitress where the toilet is and she gives you a weird look and says "in the bathroom, sir."
  • Offering your top hat for the nobleman to micturate into.
  • Having an audience who sees cool literary references in your work and assumes you did them on purpose.
  • Writing an impossible season cliffhanger believe that you're quiting the show, but then not quitting the show and having to somehow resolve the cliffhanger.
  • The biggest spoiler being whether or not a work is good or not.
  • Living vicariously through someone watching your favorite TV series for the first time.
  • Meeting an alien race with sentient math.
  • Having just the one math but being certain that it's the only math.
  • Doing your best to communicate with intelligent aliens but you can't think of anything to talk about.
  • Only trying to contact alien races that you have enough in common with to meaningfully communicate.
  • What kind of math a salt-leech would invent.
  • Coherent systems of mathematics that don't reflect reality.
  • Maths that would hypothetically reflect reality better than ours, and how ours could do better.
  • The guy waking you up from your cryogenic sleep explaining to you that we know how to divide by zero now.
  • Knowing that if the laws of physics change, your program will break.
  • Recompiling once a year to make sure your program breaks when mathematical laws are updated.
  • Realizing that the anecdote you're about to tell actually happened to your brother, not you.
  • Discovering that ants are extremely sour.
  • Ordering a shark kebab and the guy asks if you want crickets on it and you're certain you misheard him so you ask "what are those?" and he says "they're tiny bugs!"
  • Crickets just being crunchy until you look at them and realize that you're definitely eating an entire being right now.
  • Being stuck with your lame fish and chips when Australians have badass shark and chips.
  • Things you learned as a kid and never critically examined as an adult.
  • Razor clams: the meal that bites back.
  • Building a fully functional steering wheel, with levers and adjustable dials that click, out of cardboard and rubber bands.
  • The visual programming environment that comes with Nintendo Labo.
  • Buying toys for an eight year old when your son is born because one day he'll be eight.
  • Artisanal reprinted Nintendo Labo cardboard components on Etsy.
  • Taking your cardboard Nintendo Labo synth on tour and seeing how many gigs it lasts for.
  • Everybody really wanting to hear Jim's earlobe cyst story.
  • Jim's primary claim to fame before Frog Fractions.
  • Jim's top 3 earlobe cyst tips.
  • Just how deceptively close to the jugular the earlobe is.
  • Getting to watch a stranger's kid grow up because they don't believe you when you say they've got the wrong email address.
  • The kind of person who just assumes their email address is their name at gmail.com.
  • Holding onto the last vapors of 2012 Twitter.
  • Like finally talking to T-Rex.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+VAWbybAQ ]]> Jim Stormdancer 50. Big Jesus Retouch Energy https://topiclords.com/big-jesus-retouch-energy bf71354b-8621-4ed9-858b-bd5824aa480b Mon, 05 Oct 2020 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Kev and Chall. We discuss Rick Astley's Youtube Channel, adjusting for sensory deficiencies, food photography hoaxes, number sizes in game design, and Michael Jackson writing the Sonic 3 soundtrack. 1:02:09 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The raddest place to play web games.
  • Topic Time.
  • Something the Algorithm decided you should know about.
  • Having a hairstyle identical to the one you had in that music video thirty years ago.
  • Having an appropriate face for your voice.
  • Rickroll Georg who lives in a cave and has rickrolled people over a billion times.
  • The patron saint of being disappointed.
  • A bobblehead of Rick Astley on a crucifix.
  • Taking the loupe out of your breast pocket to check if your date's crucifix is really Jesus or if it's Rick Astley again.
  • The YouTube algorithm deciding it's important that everyone learn how to make a house out of sticks in the swamp.
  • What the Dancing Baby is up to these days.
  • How memes propagated before social media.
  • A deep learning up-rez of the Dancing Baby at 1080p and 60FPS.
  • A reverse engineered Diddy Kong 3D model with big Retouched Jesus energy.
  • Memes: look 'em up.
  • The ethics of adding a moment of silence in post.
  • Giving Rick Astley the Topic Lords Bump.
  • Memorizing the eye test they give you at the DMV because you keep forgetting your glasses.
  • The guy who only cracked the knuckles of one of his hands to test the hypothesis that cracking your knuckles causes arthritis.
  • Repeatedly breaking your knuckles so you can have enormous terrifying swollen knuckles and calling it a "bone trick"
  • The Bone Trick Brothers trying to out knuckle each other.
  • The doors that are now open to the Bone Trick Brothers.
  • The Bone Trick Brothers growing up to be insurance investigators specializing in knuckleheads.
  • The complete impossibility of photographing prawns.
  • Having to tell a
  • A derivatives market for trading futures contracts against the six genetically engineered prawns used in all food photography.
  • Being totally bought into a complete lie because it was written in a convincing authorial voice.
  • Being convinced by photo evidence even though you haven't looked at the photo evidence.
  • Getting your one mistake out of the way and having smooth sailing for the rest of your life.
  • This Headline is False.
  • Squinting at a plate of colorful rice and trying to see a negative space prawn.
  • Scientists just realizing that nobody has cooked a real prawn in decades.
  • The last topic being a complete fabrication.
  • Opening a hole in reality and pulling in alternate reality Topic Lords episodes where Jim is in a biker club and has guests named Rex.
  • Getting notifications any time a podcast anywhere in the multiverse talks about you.
  • Not even liking notifications from this universe.
  • Lyrics that sound like words but are not words.
  • A podcast as a way for people who miss you after you die to listen to you talk for hours about inane bullshit.
  • The first year of Topic Lords topics in a coffee table book.
  • When GPT-3 Jim is narrating the podcast of the future.
  • Instead of doing the whole trial, just doing the first few minutes of the trial and sending the transcript through GPT-3 and searching for "verdict."
  • Whether we're still talking about prawns.
  • Chunky Integers.
  • Feeling the weight of smaller numbers better than enormous ones.
  • The advantages and disadvantages of binary-coded decimal.
  • Feeding a virtual pet except you're just clicking on cookies.
  • Comparing sizes and distances and only really caring about order of magnitude.
  • A ragtag team of Internet people spending decades elaborating on your game idea.
  • Dozens of people adding features that they think will be cool and hoping that after ten years of this a good game design will emerge.
  • How Micheal Jackson might hypothetically have written the Sonic 3 soundtrack.
  • Getting excited to go down a YouTube rabbit hole.
  • An even cooler mystery than the mystery of the prawns.
  • Whether you like a song being predicated on exactly how familiar it is to you.
  • Loving the Sonic 3 soundtrack so much that you track down this Michael Jackson guy's other music.
  • Like playing an ARG except you're just living your life.
  • A Doom mod secretly being the best Sonic the Hedgehog game even though Doom doesn't support slopes so they can't do the loop-the-loop.
  • Modding room-over-room into the Doom engine so that you can put loop-the-loops in Sonic Robo Blast 2.
  • A great place you got here, lotta nice topics, really screams "party."
  • A part time paid employee who just came out of the woodwork.
  • Being a leaf node on the employment tree.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The raddest place to play web games.
  • Topic Time.
  • Something the Algorithm decided you should know about.
  • Having a hairstyle identical to the one you had in that music video thirty years ago.
  • Having an appropriate face for your voice.
  • Rickroll Georg who lives in a cave and has rickrolled people over a billion times.
  • The patron saint of being disappointed.
  • A bobblehead of Rick Astley on a crucifix.
  • Taking the loupe out of your breast pocket to check if your date's crucifix is really Jesus or if it's Rick Astley again.
  • The YouTube algorithm deciding it's important that everyone learn how to make a house out of sticks in the swamp.
  • What the Dancing Baby is up to these days.
  • How memes propagated before social media.
  • A deep learning up-rez of the Dancing Baby at 1080p and 60FPS.
  • A reverse engineered Diddy Kong 3D model with big Retouched Jesus energy.
  • Memes: look 'em up.
  • The ethics of adding a moment of silence in post.
  • Giving Rick Astley the Topic Lords Bump.
  • Memorizing the eye test they give you at the DMV because you keep forgetting your glasses.
  • The guy who only cracked the knuckles of one of his hands to test the hypothesis that cracking your knuckles causes arthritis.
  • Repeatedly breaking your knuckles so you can have enormous terrifying swollen knuckles and calling it a "bone trick"
  • The Bone Trick Brothers trying to out knuckle each other.
  • The doors that are now open to the Bone Trick Brothers.
  • The Bone Trick Brothers growing up to be insurance investigators specializing in knuckleheads.
  • The complete impossibility of photographing prawns.
  • Having to tell a
  • A derivatives market for trading futures contracts against the six genetically engineered prawns used in all food photography.
  • Being totally bought into a complete lie because it was written in a convincing authorial voice.
  • Being convinced by photo evidence even though you haven't looked at the photo evidence.
  • Getting your one mistake out of the way and having smooth sailing for the rest of your life.
  • This Headline is False.
  • Squinting at a plate of colorful rice and trying to see a negative space prawn.
  • Scientists just realizing that nobody has cooked a real prawn in decades.
  • The last topic being a complete fabrication.
  • Opening a hole in reality and pulling in alternate reality Topic Lords episodes where Jim is in a biker club and has guests named Rex.
  • Getting notifications any time a podcast anywhere in the multiverse talks about you.
  • Not even liking notifications from this universe.
  • Lyrics that sound like words but are not words.
  • A podcast as a way for people who miss you after you die to listen to you talk for hours about inane bullshit.
  • The first year of Topic Lords topics in a coffee table book.
  • When GPT-3 Jim is narrating the podcast of the future.
  • Instead of doing the whole trial, just doing the first few minutes of the trial and sending the transcript through GPT-3 and searching for "verdict."
  • Whether we're still talking about prawns.
  • Chunky Integers.
  • Feeling the weight of smaller numbers better than enormous ones.
  • The advantages and disadvantages of binary-coded decimal.
  • Feeding a virtual pet except you're just clicking on cookies.
  • Comparing sizes and distances and only really caring about order of magnitude.
  • A ragtag team of Internet people spending decades elaborating on your game idea.
  • Dozens of people adding features that they think will be cool and hoping that after ten years of this a good game design will emerge.
  • How Micheal Jackson might hypothetically have written the Sonic 3 soundtrack.
  • Getting excited to go down a YouTube rabbit hole.
  • An even cooler mystery than the mystery of the prawns.
  • Whether you like a song being predicated on exactly how familiar it is to you.
  • Loving the Sonic 3 soundtrack so much that you track down this Michael Jackson guy's other music.
  • Like playing an ARG except you're just living your life.
  • A Doom mod secretly being the best Sonic the Hedgehog game even though Doom doesn't support slopes so they can't do the loop-the-loop.
  • Modding room-over-room into the Doom engine so that you can put loop-the-loops in Sonic Robo Blast 2.
  • A great place you got here, lotta nice topics, really screams "party."
  • A part time paid employee who just came out of the woodwork.
  • Being a leaf node on the employment tree.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The raddest place to play web games.
  • Topic Time.
  • Something the Algorithm decided you should know about.
  • Having a hairstyle identical to the one you had in that music video thirty years ago.
  • Having an appropriate face for your voice.
  • Rickroll Georg who lives in a cave and has rickrolled people over a billion times.
  • The patron saint of being disappointed.
  • A bobblehead of Rick Astley on a crucifix.
  • Taking the loupe out of your breast pocket to check if your date's crucifix is really Jesus or if it's Rick Astley again.
  • The YouTube algorithm deciding it's important that everyone learn how to make a house out of sticks in the swamp.
  • What the Dancing Baby is up to these days.
  • How memes propagated before social media.
  • A deep learning up-rez of the Dancing Baby at 1080p and 60FPS.
  • A reverse engineered Diddy Kong 3D model with big Retouched Jesus energy.
  • Memes: look 'em up.
  • The ethics of adding a moment of silence in post.
  • Giving Rick Astley the Topic Lords Bump.
  • Memorizing the eye test they give you at the DMV because you keep forgetting your glasses.
  • The guy who only cracked the knuckles of one of his hands to test the hypothesis that cracking your knuckles causes arthritis.
  • Repeatedly breaking your knuckles so you can have enormous terrifying swollen knuckles and calling it a "bone trick"
  • The Bone Trick Brothers trying to out knuckle each other.
  • The doors that are now open to the Bone Trick Brothers.
  • The Bone Trick Brothers growing up to be insurance investigators specializing in knuckleheads.
  • The complete impossibility of photographing prawns.
  • Having to tell a
  • A derivatives market for trading futures contracts against the six genetically engineered prawns used in all food photography.
  • Being totally bought into a complete lie because it was written in a convincing authorial voice.
  • Being convinced by photo evidence even though you haven't looked at the photo evidence.
  • Getting your one mistake out of the way and having smooth sailing for the rest of your life.
  • This Headline is False.
  • Squinting at a plate of colorful rice and trying to see a negative space prawn.
  • Scientists just realizing that nobody has cooked a real prawn in decades.
  • The last topic being a complete fabrication.
  • Opening a hole in reality and pulling in alternate reality Topic Lords episodes where Jim is in a biker club and has guests named Rex.
  • Getting notifications any time a podcast anywhere in the multiverse talks about you.
  • Not even liking notifications from this universe.
  • Lyrics that sound like words but are not words.
  • A podcast as a way for people who miss you after you die to listen to you talk for hours about inane bullshit.
  • The first year of Topic Lords topics in a coffee table book.
  • When GPT-3 Jim is narrating the podcast of the future.
  • Instead of doing the whole trial, just doing the first few minutes of the trial and sending the transcript through GPT-3 and searching for "verdict."
  • Whether we're still talking about prawns.
  • Chunky Integers.
  • Feeling the weight of smaller numbers better than enormous ones.
  • The advantages and disadvantages of binary-coded decimal.
  • Feeding a virtual pet except you're just clicking on cookies.
  • Comparing sizes and distances and only really caring about order of magnitude.
  • A ragtag team of Internet people spending decades elaborating on your game idea.
  • Dozens of people adding features that they think will be cool and hoping that after ten years of this a good game design will emerge.
  • How Micheal Jackson might hypothetically have written the Sonic 3 soundtrack.
  • Getting excited to go down a YouTube rabbit hole.
  • An even cooler mystery than the mystery of the prawns.
  • Whether you like a song being predicated on exactly how familiar it is to you.
  • Loving the Sonic 3 soundtrack so much that you track down this Michael Jackson guy's other music.
  • Like playing an ARG except you're just living your life.
  • A Doom mod secretly being the best Sonic the Hedgehog game even though Doom doesn't support slopes so they can't do the loop-the-loop.
  • Modding room-over-room into the Doom engine so that you can put loop-the-loops in Sonic Robo Blast 2.
  • A great place you got here, lotta nice topics, really screams "party."
  • A part time paid employee who just came out of the woodwork.
  • Being a leaf node on the employment tree.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+feFo5xWC ]]> Jim Stormdancer 49. A Very Wet Hell https://topiclords.com/a-very-wet-hell e9505236-aa26-4174-b592-ebc60ccf45ba Mon, 28 Sep 2020 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: April and John. Topics: climate-aware architecture, focusing on characters vs. story, why we say "ahh" after drinking, perpetual stew and laws and customs differing in different places. 1:08:00 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • April is @aprilsaur on Twitter.
  • John remains a mystery.

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Seasons that aren't summer and states that aren't California.
  • John of the Commonwealth of Virginia Johns.
  • Calling yourself a Commonwealther but not knowing all the deep Commonwealth cuts.
  • Not having a city name because you're between cities and so calling yourself a "census designated place."
  • An experience that you had that is in the past.
  • Plugging a suspiciously expensive hat that players love.
  • Not being able to have hobbies because you just bought a house.
  • California, where it's sunny for hundreds of years and then suddenly a thunderstorm covers the entire state in tens of thousands of lightning strikes.
  • Not having to get your home repairs done before people visit because nobody can ever visit.
  • The good news is: podcasting.
  • Not having had a basement in decades.
  • Discovering that Virgina is a tiny piece of a giant land mass called North America.
  • Buying the Frog Fractions hat DLC for all your friends.
  • An extremely Californian form of hell.
  • Architects forgetting that climate exists after air conditioning is invented.
  • Fantasizing about winning the lottery when you never play the lottery.
  • The downside of climate control via architecture.
  • The feeling of tatami mats under your feet.
  • Realizing that having bugs in your floor sometimes is just the price you pay for having floor mats that bugs like to live in.
  • The tortilla mouse story.
  • Discovering that a mouse is living in your bag of tortillas and signing a contract with the mouse that it will just eat the tortillas and not destroy the rest of your house or breed.
  • Cats discovering extremely stale candy in the cabinet under the sink.
  • A squirrel spinning a corn tortilla like a steering wheel and eating it from the outside in.
  • A squirrel spinning a tortilla like a sign spinner.
  • Joining a D&D campaign late.
  • Knowing what your characters are about and creating situations where the characters have something to play against.
  • Making sure your players have stakes in the story being told.
  • A dope encounter on a luxury liner where you have to follow a bard with an anti-magic field.
  • A D&D campaign where all the players just hang out and eat Doritos.
  • Crafting a narrative by building outwards from a single dramatic moment.
  • Not knowing anything about the company you own half of.
  • The mystery of the Ultraviolet City.
  • Collaboratively inventing a story with your friends.
  • Having a beverage with you and being able to test a beverage hypothesis.
  • The sensation of a little bit of cool air passing over the various nerve endings in the inner mouth area.
  • Whether pooping is a social construct.
  • A two year old fixating on the color of Pepsi.
  • Tripping out on your own sensory experience.
  • Some real good honest mischief.
  • Taking a deeper breath so you can drink more.
  • Getting out the whiteboard to teach your infant son how to drink and belch.
  • A gentle sweet boy forcibly closing your laptop so you'll pay attention to him.
  • Perpetual stool, which also hangs around for 500 years.
  • Living for as long as you can keep the stew going.
  • Being caretaker for a stew that is 300 years older than you.
  • Making sure you eat all the meat out of your stew before it goes bad and spoils the rest of the stew.
  • Filling your house with the smell of fresh baked bread.
  • A bread recipe where you just put all the ingredients in a pan and then bake it.
  • A gradient of cheese.
  • Broccoli with horrible stinky cheese melted on top.
  • Jumping on any excuse to make an elaborate ridiculous meal.
  • Visiting your friends in Virginia but never talking to them because of COVID.
  • Going ballistic whenever you see a deer.
  • Making everyone sign an NDA before they can listen to this episode of your podcast.
  • Some sort of palace of food.
  • Two grocery bags being filled before you even realize what's happening.
  • Stipulating that the burrito rant has occurred.
  • Differing vehicle registration laws in Virginia and California.
  • Running a bunch of stop signs because they don't write the word "stop" on the ground in Portland, they only have the red sign.
  • How to proceed with the ARG when you believe you've solved the mystery of John's identity.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • April is @aprilsaur on Twitter.
  • John remains a mystery.

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Seasons that aren't summer and states that aren't California.
  • John of the Commonwealth of Virginia Johns.
  • Calling yourself a Commonwealther but not knowing all the deep Commonwealth cuts.
  • Not having a city name because you're between cities and so calling yourself a "census designated place."
  • An experience that you had that is in the past.
  • Plugging a suspiciously expensive hat that players love.
  • Not being able to have hobbies because you just bought a house.
  • California, where it's sunny for hundreds of years and then suddenly a thunderstorm covers the entire state in tens of thousands of lightning strikes.
  • Not having to get your home repairs done before people visit because nobody can ever visit.
  • The good news is: podcasting.
  • Not having had a basement in decades.
  • Discovering that Virgina is a tiny piece of a giant land mass called North America.
  • Buying the Frog Fractions hat DLC for all your friends.
  • An extremely Californian form of hell.
  • Architects forgetting that climate exists after air conditioning is invented.
  • Fantasizing about winning the lottery when you never play the lottery.
  • The downside of climate control via architecture.
  • The feeling of tatami mats under your feet.
  • Realizing that having bugs in your floor sometimes is just the price you pay for having floor mats that bugs like to live in.
  • The tortilla mouse story.
  • Discovering that a mouse is living in your bag of tortillas and signing a contract with the mouse that it will just eat the tortillas and not destroy the rest of your house or breed.
  • Cats discovering extremely stale candy in the cabinet under the sink.
  • A squirrel spinning a corn tortilla like a steering wheel and eating it from the outside in.
  • A squirrel spinning a tortilla like a sign spinner.
  • Joining a D&D campaign late.
  • Knowing what your characters are about and creating situations where the characters have something to play against.
  • Making sure your players have stakes in the story being told.
  • A dope encounter on a luxury liner where you have to follow a bard with an anti-magic field.
  • A D&D campaign where all the players just hang out and eat Doritos.
  • Crafting a narrative by building outwards from a single dramatic moment.
  • Not knowing anything about the company you own half of.
  • The mystery of the Ultraviolet City.
  • Collaboratively inventing a story with your friends.
  • Having a beverage with you and being able to test a beverage hypothesis.
  • The sensation of a little bit of cool air passing over the various nerve endings in the inner mouth area.
  • Whether pooping is a social construct.
  • A two year old fixating on the color of Pepsi.
  • Tripping out on your own sensory experience.
  • Some real good honest mischief.
  • Taking a deeper breath so you can drink more.
  • Getting out the whiteboard to teach your infant son how to drink and belch.
  • A gentle sweet boy forcibly closing your laptop so you'll pay attention to him.
  • Perpetual stool, which also hangs around for 500 years.
  • Living for as long as you can keep the stew going.
  • Being caretaker for a stew that is 300 years older than you.
  • Making sure you eat all the meat out of your stew before it goes bad and spoils the rest of the stew.
  • Filling your house with the smell of fresh baked bread.
  • A bread recipe where you just put all the ingredients in a pan and then bake it.
  • A gradient of cheese.
  • Broccoli with horrible stinky cheese melted on top.
  • Jumping on any excuse to make an elaborate ridiculous meal.
  • Visiting your friends in Virginia but never talking to them because of COVID.
  • Going ballistic whenever you see a deer.
  • Making everyone sign an NDA before they can listen to this episode of your podcast.
  • Some sort of palace of food.
  • Two grocery bags being filled before you even realize what's happening.
  • Stipulating that the burrito rant has occurred.
  • Differing vehicle registration laws in Virginia and California.
  • Running a bunch of stop signs because they don't write the word "stop" on the ground in Portland, they only have the red sign.
  • How to proceed with the ARG when you believe you've solved the mystery of John's identity.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • April is @aprilsaur on Twitter.
  • John remains a mystery.

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Seasons that aren't summer and states that aren't California.
  • John of the Commonwealth of Virginia Johns.
  • Calling yourself a Commonwealther but not knowing all the deep Commonwealth cuts.
  • Not having a city name because you're between cities and so calling yourself a "census designated place."
  • An experience that you had that is in the past.
  • Plugging a suspiciously expensive hat that players love.
  • Not being able to have hobbies because you just bought a house.
  • California, where it's sunny for hundreds of years and then suddenly a thunderstorm covers the entire state in tens of thousands of lightning strikes.
  • Not having to get your home repairs done before people visit because nobody can ever visit.
  • The good news is: podcasting.
  • Not having had a basement in decades.
  • Discovering that Virgina is a tiny piece of a giant land mass called North America.
  • Buying the Frog Fractions hat DLC for all your friends.
  • An extremely Californian form of hell.
  • Architects forgetting that climate exists after air conditioning is invented.
  • Fantasizing about winning the lottery when you never play the lottery.
  • The downside of climate control via architecture.
  • The feeling of tatami mats under your feet.
  • Realizing that having bugs in your floor sometimes is just the price you pay for having floor mats that bugs like to live in.
  • The tortilla mouse story.
  • Discovering that a mouse is living in your bag of tortillas and signing a contract with the mouse that it will just eat the tortillas and not destroy the rest of your house or breed.
  • Cats discovering extremely stale candy in the cabinet under the sink.
  • A squirrel spinning a corn tortilla like a steering wheel and eating it from the outside in.
  • A squirrel spinning a tortilla like a sign spinner.
  • Joining a D&D campaign late.
  • Knowing what your characters are about and creating situations where the characters have something to play against.
  • Making sure your players have stakes in the story being told.
  • A dope encounter on a luxury liner where you have to follow a bard with an anti-magic field.
  • A D&D campaign where all the players just hang out and eat Doritos.
  • Crafting a narrative by building outwards from a single dramatic moment.
  • Not knowing anything about the company you own half of.
  • The mystery of the Ultraviolet City.
  • Collaboratively inventing a story with your friends.
  • Having a beverage with you and being able to test a beverage hypothesis.
  • The sensation of a little bit of cool air passing over the various nerve endings in the inner mouth area.
  • Whether pooping is a social construct.
  • A two year old fixating on the color of Pepsi.
  • Tripping out on your own sensory experience.
  • Some real good honest mischief.
  • Taking a deeper breath so you can drink more.
  • Getting out the whiteboard to teach your infant son how to drink and belch.
  • A gentle sweet boy forcibly closing your laptop so you'll pay attention to him.
  • Perpetual stool, which also hangs around for 500 years.
  • Living for as long as you can keep the stew going.
  • Being caretaker for a stew that is 300 years older than you.
  • Making sure you eat all the meat out of your stew before it goes bad and spoils the rest of the stew.
  • Filling your house with the smell of fresh baked bread.
  • A bread recipe where you just put all the ingredients in a pan and then bake it.
  • A gradient of cheese.
  • Broccoli with horrible stinky cheese melted on top.
  • Jumping on any excuse to make an elaborate ridiculous meal.
  • Visiting your friends in Virginia but never talking to them because of COVID.
  • Going ballistic whenever you see a deer.
  • Making everyone sign an NDA before they can listen to this episode of your podcast.
  • Some sort of palace of food.
  • Two grocery bags being filled before you even realize what's happening.
  • Stipulating that the burrito rant has occurred.
  • Differing vehicle registration laws in Virginia and California.
  • Running a bunch of stop signs because they don't write the word "stop" on the ground in Portland, they only have the red sign.
  • How to proceed with the ARG when you believe you've solved the mystery of John's identity.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+YQIFY7G2 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 48. Long Furby https://topiclords.com/long-furby 6057f430-b9c3-4cfa-b271-96b569b965ca Mon, 21 Sep 2020 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Abby and John. We discuss A-Life and V-Pets, San Diego, Bloodlust Software, and a found-footage style web series depicting a creature lurking at the edge of the frame in a series of porn videos. 1:08:32 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Being a cyborg and being out of the closet.
  • Doing standup comedy in an empty room.
  • Figuring out the best way to get a podcast onto your phone.
  • Kevin Spacey ruining your podcast.
  • A 20th-anniversary digital Tamagotchi.
  • F2P Tamagotchi all getting horrible pain disorders that demand you pay daily microtransactions or they just scream all day.
  • A large company that operates suspiciously.
  • Reading a lot of Newsweek in grade school.
  • Getting high on your own supply of Newsweek.
  • An eight year old wearing a blazer with elbow pads picking up a Newsweek at the book fair to read about Tamagotchi.
  • Shaking the Chao garden to make the Chao fight.
  • Whether or not Nintendogs go to heaven.
  • Neglecting your real dog because you have an exciting new virtual dog.
  • Sickening podcast guests with your Pokemon Go strategies.
  • The sensor on Wappy Dog's tail that only exists so it can get upset that you pulled its tail.
  • That one banger on the Wappy Dog OST.
  • Your Robotic Operating Buddy's ability to pick up discs of a certain size and move them in an arc around itself.
  • Playing Stack Up over Skype and having to call your friend and have him reset the puzzle whenever ROB fucks up and drops the pieces on the floor.
  • The baffling absence of YouTube videos of Gizmo Furby interacting with Yoda Furby.
  • Steven Spielberg patrolling the internet for videos of Gizmo Furby talking to Yoda Furby and shutting them the heck down because that's not canon. (George Lucas is fine with it.)
  • A village of Furbies living on after the extinction of the human race.
  • Yes! Dad does!
  • Wappy Dog being immortal, but if he did die somehow he'd go straight to hell.
  • Pikachu turning to the player and asking "who was the last person you kissed?"
  • Trying to make a game that creates the same reaction in every player.
  • Confusing Yoot Saito and Noob Saibot.
  • Playing SimCity 2000 on a Game Boy Advance.
  • Becoming a chef so that you can figure out why burritos are better in San Diego than anywhere else in the world.
  • A library raised up in little feet with a swirly tail called The Spang-Dangler Building.
  • A library that looks like a big concrete tree.
  • A library that looks like a space invader.
  • Discovering Finnish Salty Licorice and finally not having to share your candy with your friends.
  • Lurking in the floorboards so that you can visit your introvert friend without them noticing.
  • Those big concrete nipples on Camp Pendleton.
  • Driving from Camp Pendleton to Mexico in less than a minute and then turning around and driving across an aircraft carrier.
  • Doctor Seuss's favorite San Diego hangouts.
  • Whether Jack Lemmon likes it hot in the ending of Some Like It Hot.
  • Taking part in the panda breeding program in the 70s.
  • Not knowing what the San Diego Convention Center looks like outside of Comic Con and just assuming it's always swarming with nerds.
  • None of the speakers showing up for the big Robotech panel at Wondercon so the marketing director steps up with PowerPoint presentation describing Robotech merch.
  • Everyone losing their shit over Robotech skate decks.
  • Singing and dancing when the sky turns black.
  • Trying to hide violence from children so the children rebel by celebrating violence as much as possible.
  • A full-featured Mortal Kombat clone developed by two high school students.
  • Whether One Must Fall stands up.
  • Choosing to release the first free-and-good-enough NES emulator and calling it NESticle.
  • How the mouse pointer for NESticle was actually a severed hand, and only the Windows icon was a scrotum.
  • Keeping your emulation legit by deleting your ROMs every 24 hours.
  • The only place the long-rumored SNESticle was ever released.
  • How early SNES emulators didn't handle transparency so you had to manually toggle the cloud layer in order to see anything.
  • Shock value Flash cartoons before and after 9/11.
  • A gif of a plane crashing into Oprah.
  • Going into work each day with the intent of trying to get fired.
  • Who today is carrying on the Bloodlust Software ethos.
  • Making the same ultra-violent video game as everyone else but adding narration explaining that "violence is bad and this game is important."
  • A hyper-detailed art style evocative of biology and gross innards without actually depicting any gore.
  • A tasteful logo that represents a butt pooping.
  • A barely-visible monster lurking in the background of every video uploaded to Pornhub.
  • Porkin' Across America.
  • Finding people who were already going to make a series of sex tapes and offering to lurk in the background in your Slenderman costume.
  • Training a neural network to insert Slenderman into the background of every movie.
  • Writing erotic House of Leaves fan fiction and waiting for the Internet to discover and reenact it.
  • An art critic giving your life a B+.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Being a cyborg and being out of the closet.
  • Doing standup comedy in an empty room.
  • Figuring out the best way to get a podcast onto your phone.
  • Kevin Spacey ruining your podcast.
  • A 20th-anniversary digital Tamagotchi.
  • F2P Tamagotchi all getting horrible pain disorders that demand you pay daily microtransactions or they just scream all day.
  • A large company that operates suspiciously.
  • Reading a lot of Newsweek in grade school.
  • Getting high on your own supply of Newsweek.
  • An eight year old wearing a blazer with elbow pads picking up a Newsweek at the book fair to read about Tamagotchi.
  • Shaking the Chao garden to make the Chao fight.
  • Whether or not Nintendogs go to heaven.
  • Neglecting your real dog because you have an exciting new virtual dog.
  • Sickening podcast guests with your Pokemon Go strategies.
  • The sensor on Wappy Dog's tail that only exists so it can get upset that you pulled its tail.
  • That one banger on the Wappy Dog OST.
  • Your Robotic Operating Buddy's ability to pick up discs of a certain size and move them in an arc around itself.
  • Playing Stack Up over Skype and having to call your friend and have him reset the puzzle whenever ROB fucks up and drops the pieces on the floor.
  • The baffling absence of YouTube videos of Gizmo Furby interacting with Yoda Furby.
  • Steven Spielberg patrolling the internet for videos of Gizmo Furby talking to Yoda Furby and shutting them the heck down because that's not canon. (George Lucas is fine with it.)
  • A village of Furbies living on after the extinction of the human race.
  • Yes! Dad does!
  • Wappy Dog being immortal, but if he did die somehow he'd go straight to hell.
  • Pikachu turning to the player and asking "who was the last person you kissed?"
  • Trying to make a game that creates the same reaction in every player.
  • Confusing Yoot Saito and Noob Saibot.
  • Playing SimCity 2000 on a Game Boy Advance.
  • Becoming a chef so that you can figure out why burritos are better in San Diego than anywhere else in the world.
  • A library raised up in little feet with a swirly tail called The Spang-Dangler Building.
  • A library that looks like a big concrete tree.
  • A library that looks like a space invader.
  • Discovering Finnish Salty Licorice and finally not having to share your candy with your friends.
  • Lurking in the floorboards so that you can visit your introvert friend without them noticing.
  • Those big concrete nipples on Camp Pendleton.
  • Driving from Camp Pendleton to Mexico in less than a minute and then turning around and driving across an aircraft carrier.
  • Doctor Seuss's favorite San Diego hangouts.
  • Whether Jack Lemmon likes it hot in the ending of Some Like It Hot.
  • Taking part in the panda breeding program in the 70s.
  • Not knowing what the San Diego Convention Center looks like outside of Comic Con and just assuming it's always swarming with nerds.
  • None of the speakers showing up for the big Robotech panel at Wondercon so the marketing director steps up with PowerPoint presentation describing Robotech merch.
  • Everyone losing their shit over Robotech skate decks.
  • Singing and dancing when the sky turns black.
  • Trying to hide violence from children so the children rebel by celebrating violence as much as possible.
  • A full-featured Mortal Kombat clone developed by two high school students.
  • Whether One Must Fall stands up.
  • Choosing to release the first free-and-good-enough NES emulator and calling it NESticle.
  • How the mouse pointer for NESticle was actually a severed hand, and only the Windows icon was a scrotum.
  • Keeping your emulation legit by deleting your ROMs every 24 hours.
  • The only place the long-rumored SNESticle was ever released.
  • How early SNES emulators didn't handle transparency so you had to manually toggle the cloud layer in order to see anything.
  • Shock value Flash cartoons before and after 9/11.
  • A gif of a plane crashing into Oprah.
  • Going into work each day with the intent of trying to get fired.
  • Who today is carrying on the Bloodlust Software ethos.
  • Making the same ultra-violent video game as everyone else but adding narration explaining that "violence is bad and this game is important."
  • A hyper-detailed art style evocative of biology and gross innards without actually depicting any gore.
  • A tasteful logo that represents a butt pooping.
  • A barely-visible monster lurking in the background of every video uploaded to Pornhub.
  • Porkin' Across America.
  • Finding people who were already going to make a series of sex tapes and offering to lurk in the background in your Slenderman costume.
  • Training a neural network to insert Slenderman into the background of every movie.
  • Writing erotic House of Leaves fan fiction and waiting for the Internet to discover and reenact it.
  • An art critic giving your life a B+.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Being a cyborg and being out of the closet.
  • Doing standup comedy in an empty room.
  • Figuring out the best way to get a podcast onto your phone.
  • Kevin Spacey ruining your podcast.
  • A 20th-anniversary digital Tamagotchi.
  • F2P Tamagotchi all getting horrible pain disorders that demand you pay daily microtransactions or they just scream all day.
  • A large company that operates suspiciously.
  • Reading a lot of Newsweek in grade school.
  • Getting high on your own supply of Newsweek.
  • An eight year old wearing a blazer with elbow pads picking up a Newsweek at the book fair to read about Tamagotchi.
  • Shaking the Chao garden to make the Chao fight.
  • Whether or not Nintendogs go to heaven.
  • Neglecting your real dog because you have an exciting new virtual dog.
  • Sickening podcast guests with your Pokemon Go strategies.
  • The sensor on Wappy Dog's tail that only exists so it can get upset that you pulled its tail.
  • That one banger on the Wappy Dog OST.
  • Your Robotic Operating Buddy's ability to pick up discs of a certain size and move them in an arc around itself.
  • Playing Stack Up over Skype and having to call your friend and have him reset the puzzle whenever ROB fucks up and drops the pieces on the floor.
  • The baffling absence of YouTube videos of Gizmo Furby interacting with Yoda Furby.
  • Steven Spielberg patrolling the internet for videos of Gizmo Furby talking to Yoda Furby and shutting them the heck down because that's not canon. (George Lucas is fine with it.)
  • A village of Furbies living on after the extinction of the human race.
  • Yes! Dad does!
  • Wappy Dog being immortal, but if he did die somehow he'd go straight to hell.
  • Pikachu turning to the player and asking "who was the last person you kissed?"
  • Trying to make a game that creates the same reaction in every player.
  • Confusing Yoot Saito and Noob Saibot.
  • Playing SimCity 2000 on a Game Boy Advance.
  • Becoming a chef so that you can figure out why burritos are better in San Diego than anywhere else in the world.
  • A library raised up in little feet with a swirly tail called The Spang-Dangler Building.
  • A library that looks like a big concrete tree.
  • A library that looks like a space invader.
  • Discovering Finnish Salty Licorice and finally not having to share your candy with your friends.
  • Lurking in the floorboards so that you can visit your introvert friend without them noticing.
  • Those big concrete nipples on Camp Pendleton.
  • Driving from Camp Pendleton to Mexico in less than a minute and then turning around and driving across an aircraft carrier.
  • Doctor Seuss's favorite San Diego hangouts.
  • Whether Jack Lemmon likes it hot in the ending of Some Like It Hot.
  • Taking part in the panda breeding program in the 70s.
  • Not knowing what the San Diego Convention Center looks like outside of Comic Con and just assuming it's always swarming with nerds.
  • None of the speakers showing up for the big Robotech panel at Wondercon so the marketing director steps up with PowerPoint presentation describing Robotech merch.
  • Everyone losing their shit over Robotech skate decks.
  • Singing and dancing when the sky turns black.
  • Trying to hide violence from children so the children rebel by celebrating violence as much as possible.
  • A full-featured Mortal Kombat clone developed by two high school students.
  • Whether One Must Fall stands up.
  • Choosing to release the first free-and-good-enough NES emulator and calling it NESticle.
  • How the mouse pointer for NESticle was actually a severed hand, and only the Windows icon was a scrotum.
  • Keeping your emulation legit by deleting your ROMs every 24 hours.
  • The only place the long-rumored SNESticle was ever released.
  • How early SNES emulators didn't handle transparency so you had to manually toggle the cloud layer in order to see anything.
  • Shock value Flash cartoons before and after 9/11.
  • A gif of a plane crashing into Oprah.
  • Going into work each day with the intent of trying to get fired.
  • Who today is carrying on the Bloodlust Software ethos.
  • Making the same ultra-violent video game as everyone else but adding narration explaining that "violence is bad and this game is important."
  • A hyper-detailed art style evocative of biology and gross innards without actually depicting any gore.
  • A tasteful logo that represents a butt pooping.
  • A barely-visible monster lurking in the background of every video uploaded to Pornhub.
  • Porkin' Across America.
  • Finding people who were already going to make a series of sex tapes and offering to lurk in the background in your Slenderman costume.
  • Training a neural network to insert Slenderman into the background of every movie.
  • Writing erotic House of Leaves fan fiction and waiting for the Internet to discover and reenact it.
  • An art critic giving your life a B+.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+REDwOOLF ]]> Jim Stormdancer 47. Santa Barbarella https://topiclords.com/santa-barbarella ad133e0c-219a-446b-93f6-6650e51b1bff Mon, 14 Sep 2020 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Chris and Jimmy. We discuss what Obispo means, Starflight, drums you play standing up, tweeting Fred Flintstone's frozen carcass before you dig in, and the failure of CD audio. 58:52 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Plugging a 21 year old song that you still can't believe you wrote.
  • Musicians deserving royalties.
  • The secret fourth guest.
  • The rolling golden hills driving down the 101.
  • Knowing all the technical musical terms in Spanish but not knowing how to say "mop."
  • What would happen to the Cookie Monster if Big Bird was blue.
  • Whether or not the Topic Lords audience knows about the demo scene.
  • Whether or not Unreal by Future Crew is the same thing as Unreal Engine by Tim Sweeney.
  • Demo scenes and then demo parties.
  • Visiting Montreal and hiding in a high school gym for three days rather than seeing the amazing city with its amazing architecture.
  • Wanting to hold the Great American Demo Party.
  • Whether or not you should cover the ice when you hold a huge party in an ice rink.
  • Assembly 2010 mostly being a big LAN party with the demo scene folks tucked away in the corner.
  • The sun going down at 11 PM.
  • Boozembly 2010 taking place in the woods behind Assembly 2010.
  • Plugging a PC keyboard into your Mac and all the keys work perfectly in Schism Tracker.
  • Giving up on the Macintosh after decades because Mac hardware and MacOS are terrible now.
  • A laptop that is so broken that it shuts down every computer on the wifi network you try to connect it to.
  • Advertising the latest Macbook as having a physical escape key.
  • Running Ubuntu as an app on Windows.
  • The secret 16-color CGA mode if you plug in a composite monitor.
  • Modern nostalgia for the terrible four-color CGA palettes.
  • Storing an entire universe on a two-sided 360k floppy disk.
  • Landing on a planet and finding The Ancients and finding enough fuel to get to three stars over.
  • Stuffing The Ancients into your warp drive because there is no better fuel.
  • A project where you don't have to worry about bugfixes because if something breaks, the user just runs it again.
  • The thousands or millions of people out there who would give you money if they knew your product existed.
  • The market for Frog Fractions-themed N95 masks.
  • Making a live post to r/tipofmyjoystick asking for the identity of an educational space game during the podcast in hopes that someone replies before we finish recording.
  • Misremembering which band's drummer plays a snare drum and a tranceaphone.
  • A drum kit with tom toms so high that you have to jump up to reach them.
  • Two wildly different drum heads using the same resonation chamber.
  • Soundproofing a shed by adding 2500 pounds of sheet rock to the walls.
  • Converting sound pressure waves into heat.
  • Measuring the frequency response of these egg crates.
  • Putting squares on the walls having no effect on the sound of your saxophone escaping the room and annoying the people on the other side of the wall.
  • Walking right up to your wall and speaking and it sounding like you plugged your ears.
  • Placing yourself in a space by listening to reflections.
  • Spinning up the Periscope server on Fred Flintstone's frozen carcass so that you can Periscope yourself eating Fred Flintstone.
  • Making Fred Flintstone's frozen carcass lip-sync to WAP.
  • Who, exactly, needs to apologize for this topic.
  • Discovering that humans don't have a gizzard and really wanting a gizzard.
  • Whether or not a Twinkie is technically meat.
  • Texas Twinkies.
  • Wanting to eat 35,000 year old Mammoth meat but it turns into a smelly liquid when you thaw it.
  • Thousand year eggs not looking a day older than 150.
  • Which genres CD quality is and isn't good enough for.
  • Frequency-based MP3 audio being decoded into PCM so it can be sent out of a speaker, and then back into a frequency-based format by your cochlea so it can reach your brain.
  • The Magic Mushroom PC dot com.
  • Running timecube.com at the DOS prompt.
  • Classical music having way too much dynamic range.
  • Riding the volume knob to not go deaf while listening to the William Tell Overture.
  • Visible color banding during dark scenes in a movie.
  • El Camino except it's Del like Del Taco.
  • What LinkedIn is for.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Plugging a 21 year old song that you still can't believe you wrote.
  • Musicians deserving royalties.
  • The secret fourth guest.
  • The rolling golden hills driving down the 101.
  • Knowing all the technical musical terms in Spanish but not knowing how to say "mop."
  • What would happen to the Cookie Monster if Big Bird was blue.
  • Whether or not the Topic Lords audience knows about the demo scene.
  • Whether or not Unreal by Future Crew is the same thing as Unreal Engine by Tim Sweeney.
  • Demo scenes and then demo parties.
  • Visiting Montreal and hiding in a high school gym for three days rather than seeing the amazing city with its amazing architecture.
  • Wanting to hold the Great American Demo Party.
  • Whether or not you should cover the ice when you hold a huge party in an ice rink.
  • Assembly 2010 mostly being a big LAN party with the demo scene folks tucked away in the corner.
  • The sun going down at 11 PM.
  • Boozembly 2010 taking place in the woods behind Assembly 2010.
  • Plugging a PC keyboard into your Mac and all the keys work perfectly in Schism Tracker.
  • Giving up on the Macintosh after decades because Mac hardware and MacOS are terrible now.
  • A laptop that is so broken that it shuts down every computer on the wifi network you try to connect it to.
  • Advertising the latest Macbook as having a physical escape key.
  • Running Ubuntu as an app on Windows.
  • The secret 16-color CGA mode if you plug in a composite monitor.
  • Modern nostalgia for the terrible four-color CGA palettes.
  • Storing an entire universe on a two-sided 360k floppy disk.
  • Landing on a planet and finding The Ancients and finding enough fuel to get to three stars over.
  • Stuffing The Ancients into your warp drive because there is no better fuel.
  • A project where you don't have to worry about bugfixes because if something breaks, the user just runs it again.
  • The thousands or millions of people out there who would give you money if they knew your product existed.
  • The market for Frog Fractions-themed N95 masks.
  • Making a live post to r/tipofmyjoystick asking for the identity of an educational space game during the podcast in hopes that someone replies before we finish recording.
  • Misremembering which band's drummer plays a snare drum and a tranceaphone.
  • A drum kit with tom toms so high that you have to jump up to reach them.
  • Two wildly different drum heads using the same resonation chamber.
  • Soundproofing a shed by adding 2500 pounds of sheet rock to the walls.
  • Converting sound pressure waves into heat.
  • Measuring the frequency response of these egg crates.
  • Putting squares on the walls having no effect on the sound of your saxophone escaping the room and annoying the people on the other side of the wall.
  • Walking right up to your wall and speaking and it sounding like you plugged your ears.
  • Placing yourself in a space by listening to reflections.
  • Spinning up the Periscope server on Fred Flintstone's frozen carcass so that you can Periscope yourself eating Fred Flintstone.
  • Making Fred Flintstone's frozen carcass lip-sync to WAP.
  • Who, exactly, needs to apologize for this topic.
  • Discovering that humans don't have a gizzard and really wanting a gizzard.
  • Whether or not a Twinkie is technically meat.
  • Texas Twinkies.
  • Wanting to eat 35,000 year old Mammoth meat but it turns into a smelly liquid when you thaw it.
  • Thousand year eggs not looking a day older than 150.
  • Which genres CD quality is and isn't good enough for.
  • Frequency-based MP3 audio being decoded into PCM so it can be sent out of a speaker, and then back into a frequency-based format by your cochlea so it can reach your brain.
  • The Magic Mushroom PC dot com.
  • Running timecube.com at the DOS prompt.
  • Classical music having way too much dynamic range.
  • Riding the volume knob to not go deaf while listening to the William Tell Overture.
  • Visible color banding during dark scenes in a movie.
  • El Camino except it's Del like Del Taco.
  • What LinkedIn is for.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Plugging a 21 year old song that you still can't believe you wrote.
  • Musicians deserving royalties.
  • The secret fourth guest.
  • The rolling golden hills driving down the 101.
  • Knowing all the technical musical terms in Spanish but not knowing how to say "mop."
  • What would happen to the Cookie Monster if Big Bird was blue.
  • Whether or not the Topic Lords audience knows about the demo scene.
  • Whether or not Unreal by Future Crew is the same thing as Unreal Engine by Tim Sweeney.
  • Demo scenes and then demo parties.
  • Visiting Montreal and hiding in a high school gym for three days rather than seeing the amazing city with its amazing architecture.
  • Wanting to hold the Great American Demo Party.
  • Whether or not you should cover the ice when you hold a huge party in an ice rink.
  • Assembly 2010 mostly being a big LAN party with the demo scene folks tucked away in the corner.
  • The sun going down at 11 PM.
  • Boozembly 2010 taking place in the woods behind Assembly 2010.
  • Plugging a PC keyboard into your Mac and all the keys work perfectly in Schism Tracker.
  • Giving up on the Macintosh after decades because Mac hardware and MacOS are terrible now.
  • A laptop that is so broken that it shuts down every computer on the wifi network you try to connect it to.
  • Advertising the latest Macbook as having a physical escape key.
  • Running Ubuntu as an app on Windows.
  • The secret 16-color CGA mode if you plug in a composite monitor.
  • Modern nostalgia for the terrible four-color CGA palettes.
  • Storing an entire universe on a two-sided 360k floppy disk.
  • Landing on a planet and finding The Ancients and finding enough fuel to get to three stars over.
  • Stuffing The Ancients into your warp drive because there is no better fuel.
  • A project where you don't have to worry about bugfixes because if something breaks, the user just runs it again.
  • The thousands or millions of people out there who would give you money if they knew your product existed.
  • The market for Frog Fractions-themed N95 masks.
  • Making a live post to r/tipofmyjoystick asking for the identity of an educational space game during the podcast in hopes that someone replies before we finish recording.
  • Misremembering which band's drummer plays a snare drum and a tranceaphone.
  • A drum kit with tom toms so high that you have to jump up to reach them.
  • Two wildly different drum heads using the same resonation chamber.
  • Soundproofing a shed by adding 2500 pounds of sheet rock to the walls.
  • Converting sound pressure waves into heat.
  • Measuring the frequency response of these egg crates.
  • Putting squares on the walls having no effect on the sound of your saxophone escaping the room and annoying the people on the other side of the wall.
  • Walking right up to your wall and speaking and it sounding like you plugged your ears.
  • Placing yourself in a space by listening to reflections.
  • Spinning up the Periscope server on Fred Flintstone's frozen carcass so that you can Periscope yourself eating Fred Flintstone.
  • Making Fred Flintstone's frozen carcass lip-sync to WAP.
  • Who, exactly, needs to apologize for this topic.
  • Discovering that humans don't have a gizzard and really wanting a gizzard.
  • Whether or not a Twinkie is technically meat.
  • Texas Twinkies.
  • Wanting to eat 35,000 year old Mammoth meat but it turns into a smelly liquid when you thaw it.
  • Thousand year eggs not looking a day older than 150.
  • Which genres CD quality is and isn't good enough for.
  • Frequency-based MP3 audio being decoded into PCM so it can be sent out of a speaker, and then back into a frequency-based format by your cochlea so it can reach your brain.
  • The Magic Mushroom PC dot com.
  • Running timecube.com at the DOS prompt.
  • Classical music having way too much dynamic range.
  • Riding the volume knob to not go deaf while listening to the William Tell Overture.
  • Visible color banding during dark scenes in a movie.
  • El Camino except it's Del like Del Taco.
  • What LinkedIn is for.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+NvRXxE_0 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 46. Fetch Me a Renaissance Italy Nostalgia! https://topiclords.com/fetch-me-a-renaissance-italy-nostalgia d6133b6c-b999-466a-84cf-36814a887960 Mon, 07 Sep 2020 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Elena and Kappa. We discuss Lilite Satanist Narnia, the Super Monkey Ball narrator, reconstructing the lost ZZT source code, Kuai Kuai culture, and Bug reports and changelogs from video games that are just close enough to real life to be surreal 1:03:13 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The whale shark's incredibly silly face.
  • Lilite Satanist Narnia.
  • The Satanist version of what Narnia is to Christians and Golden Compass is to atheists.
  • Telling your best friend about the magical key you just found and going off together to have adventures.
  • Suddenly becoming monarch of a place you've never heard of and having to set policy when you're thirteen years old and have never taken an economics class in your life and also it's a magical kingdom so it uses magic economics anyway.
  • Building a paradise for people against their will.
  • Seeing enough sexism that you have to invent a splinter sect to get rid of it.
  • Nostalgic fiction from people with really weird backgrounds.
  • An 80s-ass computer terminal with an extremely full ashtray next to it.
  • Nostalgia for 16th century Polynesia.
  • Second-hand nostalgia.
  • Going on a quest to find the voice actor of a beloved video game.
  • Whether or not Sega is currently producing another Super Monkey Ball.
  • Whether or not you should monkey some balls.
  • Turning dials at the edge of a board and a ball bearing falls into a hole.
  • Going into the recording both with no context for the lines you are about to read.
  • Actors reading individual lines in a vacuum rather than reacting to each other.
  • Not having a good way to order the lines in your branching script so you deliver the lines to the actor in alphabetical order.
  • Using CD audio to store your sounds so you can only have 99 individual things you can play.
  • The last of the Guild of Weavers.
  • All the adults getting turned into swans and flying away.
  • An adventure game where you play a sequence of notes to select a verb.
  • Not having perfect pitch but being glad that there is a game mode for people who do.
  • Trying to summon a demon from beyond time.
  • Escaping reality with the other Weavers and all your friends are horrifically murdered and their ghosts are angry at you.
  • Pointing a decompiler at the game and typing in Pascal until it basically matches.
  • Comparing two executables by loading them both in a decompiler, rapidly switching between the windows and looking for differences on the screen.
  • Using the decompiler released by the NSA to reverse engineer ZZT, so you know the NSA must've reverse-engineered ZZT internally decades ago.
  • Whether or not the ZZT source code was lost in an interesting way.
  • How ZZT and Unreal were both sold as a video game but really the part people were interested in was the level editor.
  • More man-hours than a man has.
  • MMO developers releasing the client source code but not being allowed to release the server source code.
  • Nobody wanting to port a million line code base to another language.
  • Doing your best to elide over the more boring details.
  • Fixing about 30 complier errors and getting about another 30 because the compiler doesn't have great error recovery.
  • Going back to Flickr to find even higher resolution photos of bugs having sex.
  • Changing all the stars on the American flag to bugs.
  • What was going on in France.
  • How to fix the problem when your game is crashing in France.
  • One browser interpreting your integer as a percentage and the other interpreting it as a decimal.
  • Upending all of science because it's easier than disabling auto-formatting dates in Excel.
  • Approaching a project with the design goal of being as outrageous as possible.
  • Playing a game where you're unsure whether the time it crashed was intentional.
  • The rigid set of best practices for using snack foods to ensure machinery keeps working correctly.
  • The Van Halen brown M&M story as a conscientiousness filter.
  • That time Van Halen refused to play because there were brown M&Ms backstage and also the stage wasn't strong enough to hold all their equipment.
  • Rules that exist mostly as a way to determine how much the participant cares about being a good member of the community.
  • Forgetting your girlfriend's birthday and going back in time to get her a present.
  • Spending all day evaluating your list of people you might want to castrate.
  • Satanists ritually sacrificing themselves.
  • Being attacked by necromantically re-animated yak hooves and hair.
  • Your memories of seeing a lovely waterfall being amputated and necromantically re-animated and trying to drown you and it's extremely unclear how to kill the memory of a waterfall.
  • The process of getting dwarves to a place where they can do dwarf stuff.
  • Sadness that the badgers never made it into Faeries vs. Badgers.
  • A son waking up any minute now.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The whale shark's incredibly silly face.
  • Lilite Satanist Narnia.
  • The Satanist version of what Narnia is to Christians and Golden Compass is to atheists.
  • Telling your best friend about the magical key you just found and going off together to have adventures.
  • Suddenly becoming monarch of a place you've never heard of and having to set policy when you're thirteen years old and have never taken an economics class in your life and also it's a magical kingdom so it uses magic economics anyway.
  • Building a paradise for people against their will.
  • Seeing enough sexism that you have to invent a splinter sect to get rid of it.
  • Nostalgic fiction from people with really weird backgrounds.
  • An 80s-ass computer terminal with an extremely full ashtray next to it.
  • Nostalgia for 16th century Polynesia.
  • Second-hand nostalgia.
  • Going on a quest to find the voice actor of a beloved video game.
  • Whether or not Sega is currently producing another Super Monkey Ball.
  • Whether or not you should monkey some balls.
  • Turning dials at the edge of a board and a ball bearing falls into a hole.
  • Going into the recording both with no context for the lines you are about to read.
  • Actors reading individual lines in a vacuum rather than reacting to each other.
  • Not having a good way to order the lines in your branching script so you deliver the lines to the actor in alphabetical order.
  • Using CD audio to store your sounds so you can only have 99 individual things you can play.
  • The last of the Guild of Weavers.
  • All the adults getting turned into swans and flying away.
  • An adventure game where you play a sequence of notes to select a verb.
  • Not having perfect pitch but being glad that there is a game mode for people who do.
  • Trying to summon a demon from beyond time.
  • Escaping reality with the other Weavers and all your friends are horrifically murdered and their ghosts are angry at you.
  • Pointing a decompiler at the game and typing in Pascal until it basically matches.
  • Comparing two executables by loading them both in a decompiler, rapidly switching between the windows and looking for differences on the screen.
  • Using the decompiler released by the NSA to reverse engineer ZZT, so you know the NSA must've reverse-engineered ZZT internally decades ago.
  • Whether or not the ZZT source code was lost in an interesting way.
  • How ZZT and Unreal were both sold as a video game but really the part people were interested in was the level editor.
  • More man-hours than a man has.
  • MMO developers releasing the client source code but not being allowed to release the server source code.
  • Nobody wanting to port a million line code base to another language.
  • Doing your best to elide over the more boring details.
  • Fixing about 30 complier errors and getting about another 30 because the compiler doesn't have great error recovery.
  • Going back to Flickr to find even higher resolution photos of bugs having sex.
  • Changing all the stars on the American flag to bugs.
  • What was going on in France.
  • How to fix the problem when your game is crashing in France.
  • One browser interpreting your integer as a percentage and the other interpreting it as a decimal.
  • Upending all of science because it's easier than disabling auto-formatting dates in Excel.
  • Approaching a project with the design goal of being as outrageous as possible.
  • Playing a game where you're unsure whether the time it crashed was intentional.
  • The rigid set of best practices for using snack foods to ensure machinery keeps working correctly.
  • The Van Halen brown M&M story as a conscientiousness filter.
  • That time Van Halen refused to play because there were brown M&Ms backstage and also the stage wasn't strong enough to hold all their equipment.
  • Rules that exist mostly as a way to determine how much the participant cares about being a good member of the community.
  • Forgetting your girlfriend's birthday and going back in time to get her a present.
  • Spending all day evaluating your list of people you might want to castrate.
  • Satanists ritually sacrificing themselves.
  • Being attacked by necromantically re-animated yak hooves and hair.
  • Your memories of seeing a lovely waterfall being amputated and necromantically re-animated and trying to drown you and it's extremely unclear how to kill the memory of a waterfall.
  • The process of getting dwarves to a place where they can do dwarf stuff.
  • Sadness that the badgers never made it into Faeries vs. Badgers.
  • A son waking up any minute now.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The whale shark's incredibly silly face.
  • Lilite Satanist Narnia.
  • The Satanist version of what Narnia is to Christians and Golden Compass is to atheists.
  • Telling your best friend about the magical key you just found and going off together to have adventures.
  • Suddenly becoming monarch of a place you've never heard of and having to set policy when you're thirteen years old and have never taken an economics class in your life and also it's a magical kingdom so it uses magic economics anyway.
  • Building a paradise for people against their will.
  • Seeing enough sexism that you have to invent a splinter sect to get rid of it.
  • Nostalgic fiction from people with really weird backgrounds.
  • An 80s-ass computer terminal with an extremely full ashtray next to it.
  • Nostalgia for 16th century Polynesia.
  • Second-hand nostalgia.
  • Going on a quest to find the voice actor of a beloved video game.
  • Whether or not Sega is currently producing another Super Monkey Ball.
  • Whether or not you should monkey some balls.
  • Turning dials at the edge of a board and a ball bearing falls into a hole.
  • Going into the recording both with no context for the lines you are about to read.
  • Actors reading individual lines in a vacuum rather than reacting to each other.
  • Not having a good way to order the lines in your branching script so you deliver the lines to the actor in alphabetical order.
  • Using CD audio to store your sounds so you can only have 99 individual things you can play.
  • The last of the Guild of Weavers.
  • All the adults getting turned into swans and flying away.
  • An adventure game where you play a sequence of notes to select a verb.
  • Not having perfect pitch but being glad that there is a game mode for people who do.
  • Trying to summon a demon from beyond time.
  • Escaping reality with the other Weavers and all your friends are horrifically murdered and their ghosts are angry at you.
  • Pointing a decompiler at the game and typing in Pascal until it basically matches.
  • Comparing two executables by loading them both in a decompiler, rapidly switching between the windows and looking for differences on the screen.
  • Using the decompiler released by the NSA to reverse engineer ZZT, so you know the NSA must've reverse-engineered ZZT internally decades ago.
  • Whether or not the ZZT source code was lost in an interesting way.
  • How ZZT and Unreal were both sold as a video game but really the part people were interested in was the level editor.
  • More man-hours than a man has.
  • MMO developers releasing the client source code but not being allowed to release the server source code.
  • Nobody wanting to port a million line code base to another language.
  • Doing your best to elide over the more boring details.
  • Fixing about 30 complier errors and getting about another 30 because the compiler doesn't have great error recovery.
  • Going back to Flickr to find even higher resolution photos of bugs having sex.
  • Changing all the stars on the American flag to bugs.
  • What was going on in France.
  • How to fix the problem when your game is crashing in France.
  • One browser interpreting your integer as a percentage and the other interpreting it as a decimal.
  • Upending all of science because it's easier than disabling auto-formatting dates in Excel.
  • Approaching a project with the design goal of being as outrageous as possible.
  • Playing a game where you're unsure whether the time it crashed was intentional.
  • The rigid set of best practices for using snack foods to ensure machinery keeps working correctly.
  • The Van Halen brown M&M story as a conscientiousness filter.
  • That time Van Halen refused to play because there were brown M&Ms backstage and also the stage wasn't strong enough to hold all their equipment.
  • Rules that exist mostly as a way to determine how much the participant cares about being a good member of the community.
  • Forgetting your girlfriend's birthday and going back in time to get her a present.
  • Spending all day evaluating your list of people you might want to castrate.
  • Satanists ritually sacrificing themselves.
  • Being attacked by necromantically re-animated yak hooves and hair.
  • Your memories of seeing a lovely waterfall being amputated and necromantically re-animated and trying to drown you and it's extremely unclear how to kill the memory of a waterfall.
  • The process of getting dwarves to a place where they can do dwarf stuff.
  • Sadness that the badgers never made it into Faeries vs. Badgers.
  • A son waking up any minute now.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+zdjXROBr ]]> Jim Stormdancer 45. Remember to Pronounce the Apostrophe https://topiclords.com/remember-to-pronounce-the-apostrophe 1c9cfd57-bd96-46e1-ad6b-fdfb36abbe03 Mon, 31 Aug 2020 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: John B and Nick. We discuss micro game jams, human knowledge as grist for comedy, Roblox as the most popular game platform, things unexpectedly named after people, becoming a film nerd, and Barkley 2. 1:03:14 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • What the insulin pod had to say.
  • An extremely sexy insulin pod telegraphing its own death.
  • Mourning many insulin pods at a rapid clip.
  • President Garfield's proof of the Pythagorean theorem.
  • Making your first ZZT game.
  • Doing fetch quest after fetch quest until two AIs fall in love and a nuclear reactor explodes.
  • Attempts to archive the user-uploaded games before the Wario Ware DIY servers get shut down.
  • The only Meat Boy game to come out for the Wii.
  • A demon that can only exist on sand and is formed of the sand.
  • ShareCart, the save format shared between many different games so you can save in one game and load in another.
  • How much Dr. Sbaitso likes you and how much his henchmen like you.
  • Spending an afternoon trying out randomly generated Game Genie codes.
  • Flipping random bits to see what comes out there other end.
  • Generating a hash of a large file twice in a row and getting two different results.
  • Seeing an exciting glitch in Super Mario 64 and nobody being able to replicate it until someone tries flipping bits in RAM like a solar ray might.
  • The randomizer hack that combines Link to the Past and Super Metroid into a single game.
  • Thirty people all making different games and hoping something interesting comes from mashing them together.
  • Why the heck everyone is suddenly talking about cake.
  • The primary use for your understanding of the world being making and understanding comedy.
  • Your filters going to sleep first, so you make weirder connections when you're half-asleep.
  • How everyone would know all the world capitals if you had also been obsessed with them as a child.
  • Spending 10% of your brain on how to spell antidisestablishmentarianism and the rest on the lyrics to "We Didn't Start The Fire."
  • How to download Wikipedia so you can give your son Wikipedia before you give him internet access.
  • How Roblox is a much more popular game platform than any you've ever touched.
  • Not knowing how to make games that appeal to children, but knowing how to make games that remind 40 year olds of when they were children.
  • The incredibly accurate clone of Counterstrike that some rando made inside of Roblox.
  • Roblox users calling platforming levels "Obbies."
  • The window in your life where you don't talk to children.
  • Watching a four year old play Minecraft and they're just breaking and replacing the same block over and over to see if it happens the same way every time.
  • A Roblox level that is just a series of waterslides.
  • "I Wanna Maker," for making your own masocore platformers.
  • How PageRank is named after Larry Page and Debian is named after Deb and Ian.
  • How Price Club is named after Sol Price and Main St. in San Fransisco is named after Charles Main.
  • Jim trying to figure out when humans first called a street Main St. and giving up.
  • "Taco Bell" appropriating respectfully because it respects the romance language adjective-noun order.
  • Reading about aptronyms in Marilyn vos Savant's column.
  • Sending your octuplets to a carnival owned by Larry Kidkill.
  • The late NASCAR racer Dick Trickle.
  • Changing our names to Fuck and starting a band called The Fucks and that's it, that's the tweet.
  • Unemployment as a prerequisite for starting any hobby as an adult.
  • Film Noir figuring out how to tell adult stories after the Hayes Code was enacted.
  • The constraints of being set on a train leading to compelling storytelling.
  • The train movie as a slightly less constrained bottle episode.
  • Whether they allow trains on the Internet Movie Car Database.
  • Yelling at librarians until morale improved.
  • Libraries often offering ebooks and movie streaming.
  • Netflix streaming having a limited selection of movies but the disc mailing service having every DVD, but it takes two or three days to get it.
  • Filmmakers being huge nerds and that's why they keep making movies about making movies.
  • 1939 and 1957 in filmmaking.
  • The history of Barkley Shut Up And Jam Gaiden.
  • Destroying Manhattan by performing a Chaos Dunk.
  • Setting your cyberpunk universe after basketball has been outlawed.
  • The dangers of running a successful Kickstarter.
  • The game design conceit that there should be way too much of everything.
  • Bizarre unthinkable development processes that somehow in the end produce a shippable game.
  • A 397-page forum thread of people asking "Where is Barkley 2?"
  • The second concrete product of the Barkley 2 Kickstarter, after the CyberDwarf body pillow.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • What the insulin pod had to say.
  • An extremely sexy insulin pod telegraphing its own death.
  • Mourning many insulin pods at a rapid clip.
  • President Garfield's proof of the Pythagorean theorem.
  • Making your first ZZT game.
  • Doing fetch quest after fetch quest until two AIs fall in love and a nuclear reactor explodes.
  • Attempts to archive the user-uploaded games before the Wario Ware DIY servers get shut down.
  • The only Meat Boy game to come out for the Wii.
  • A demon that can only exist on sand and is formed of the sand.
  • ShareCart, the save format shared between many different games so you can save in one game and load in another.
  • How much Dr. Sbaitso likes you and how much his henchmen like you.
  • Spending an afternoon trying out randomly generated Game Genie codes.
  • Flipping random bits to see what comes out there other end.
  • Generating a hash of a large file twice in a row and getting two different results.
  • Seeing an exciting glitch in Super Mario 64 and nobody being able to replicate it until someone tries flipping bits in RAM like a solar ray might.
  • The randomizer hack that combines Link to the Past and Super Metroid into a single game.
  • Thirty people all making different games and hoping something interesting comes from mashing them together.
  • Why the heck everyone is suddenly talking about cake.
  • The primary use for your understanding of the world being making and understanding comedy.
  • Your filters going to sleep first, so you make weirder connections when you're half-asleep.
  • How everyone would know all the world capitals if you had also been obsessed with them as a child.
  • Spending 10% of your brain on how to spell antidisestablishmentarianism and the rest on the lyrics to "We Didn't Start The Fire."
  • How to download Wikipedia so you can give your son Wikipedia before you give him internet access.
  • How Roblox is a much more popular game platform than any you've ever touched.
  • Not knowing how to make games that appeal to children, but knowing how to make games that remind 40 year olds of when they were children.
  • The incredibly accurate clone of Counterstrike that some rando made inside of Roblox.
  • Roblox users calling platforming levels "Obbies."
  • The window in your life where you don't talk to children.
  • Watching a four year old play Minecraft and they're just breaking and replacing the same block over and over to see if it happens the same way every time.
  • A Roblox level that is just a series of waterslides.
  • "I Wanna Maker," for making your own masocore platformers.
  • How PageRank is named after Larry Page and Debian is named after Deb and Ian.
  • How Price Club is named after Sol Price and Main St. in San Fransisco is named after Charles Main.
  • Jim trying to figure out when humans first called a street Main St. and giving up.
  • "Taco Bell" appropriating respectfully because it respects the romance language adjective-noun order.
  • Reading about aptronyms in Marilyn vos Savant's column.
  • Sending your octuplets to a carnival owned by Larry Kidkill.
  • The late NASCAR racer Dick Trickle.
  • Changing our names to Fuck and starting a band called The Fucks and that's it, that's the tweet.
  • Unemployment as a prerequisite for starting any hobby as an adult.
  • Film Noir figuring out how to tell adult stories after the Hayes Code was enacted.
  • The constraints of being set on a train leading to compelling storytelling.
  • The train movie as a slightly less constrained bottle episode.
  • Whether they allow trains on the Internet Movie Car Database.
  • Yelling at librarians until morale improved.
  • Libraries often offering ebooks and movie streaming.
  • Netflix streaming having a limited selection of movies but the disc mailing service having every DVD, but it takes two or three days to get it.
  • Filmmakers being huge nerds and that's why they keep making movies about making movies.
  • 1939 and 1957 in filmmaking.
  • The history of Barkley Shut Up And Jam Gaiden.
  • Destroying Manhattan by performing a Chaos Dunk.
  • Setting your cyberpunk universe after basketball has been outlawed.
  • The dangers of running a successful Kickstarter.
  • The game design conceit that there should be way too much of everything.
  • Bizarre unthinkable development processes that somehow in the end produce a shippable game.
  • A 397-page forum thread of people asking "Where is Barkley 2?"
  • The second concrete product of the Barkley 2 Kickstarter, after the CyberDwarf body pillow.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • What the insulin pod had to say.
  • An extremely sexy insulin pod telegraphing its own death.
  • Mourning many insulin pods at a rapid clip.
  • President Garfield's proof of the Pythagorean theorem.
  • Making your first ZZT game.
  • Doing fetch quest after fetch quest until two AIs fall in love and a nuclear reactor explodes.
  • Attempts to archive the user-uploaded games before the Wario Ware DIY servers get shut down.
  • The only Meat Boy game to come out for the Wii.
  • A demon that can only exist on sand and is formed of the sand.
  • ShareCart, the save format shared between many different games so you can save in one game and load in another.
  • How much Dr. Sbaitso likes you and how much his henchmen like you.
  • Spending an afternoon trying out randomly generated Game Genie codes.
  • Flipping random bits to see what comes out there other end.
  • Generating a hash of a large file twice in a row and getting two different results.
  • Seeing an exciting glitch in Super Mario 64 and nobody being able to replicate it until someone tries flipping bits in RAM like a solar ray might.
  • The randomizer hack that combines Link to the Past and Super Metroid into a single game.
  • Thirty people all making different games and hoping something interesting comes from mashing them together.
  • Why the heck everyone is suddenly talking about cake.
  • The primary use for your understanding of the world being making and understanding comedy.
  • Your filters going to sleep first, so you make weirder connections when you're half-asleep.
  • How everyone would know all the world capitals if you had also been obsessed with them as a child.
  • Spending 10% of your brain on how to spell antidisestablishmentarianism and the rest on the lyrics to "We Didn't Start The Fire."
  • How to download Wikipedia so you can give your son Wikipedia before you give him internet access.
  • How Roblox is a much more popular game platform than any you've ever touched.
  • Not knowing how to make games that appeal to children, but knowing how to make games that remind 40 year olds of when they were children.
  • The incredibly accurate clone of Counterstrike that some rando made inside of Roblox.
  • Roblox users calling platforming levels "Obbies."
  • The window in your life where you don't talk to children.
  • Watching a four year old play Minecraft and they're just breaking and replacing the same block over and over to see if it happens the same way every time.
  • A Roblox level that is just a series of waterslides.
  • "I Wanna Maker," for making your own masocore platformers.
  • How PageRank is named after Larry Page and Debian is named after Deb and Ian.
  • How Price Club is named after Sol Price and Main St. in San Fransisco is named after Charles Main.
  • Jim trying to figure out when humans first called a street Main St. and giving up.
  • "Taco Bell" appropriating respectfully because it respects the romance language adjective-noun order.
  • Reading about aptronyms in Marilyn vos Savant's column.
  • Sending your octuplets to a carnival owned by Larry Kidkill.
  • The late NASCAR racer Dick Trickle.
  • Changing our names to Fuck and starting a band called The Fucks and that's it, that's the tweet.
  • Unemployment as a prerequisite for starting any hobby as an adult.
  • Film Noir figuring out how to tell adult stories after the Hayes Code was enacted.
  • The constraints of being set on a train leading to compelling storytelling.
  • The train movie as a slightly less constrained bottle episode.
  • Whether they allow trains on the Internet Movie Car Database.
  • Yelling at librarians until morale improved.
  • Libraries often offering ebooks and movie streaming.
  • Netflix streaming having a limited selection of movies but the disc mailing service having every DVD, but it takes two or three days to get it.
  • Filmmakers being huge nerds and that's why they keep making movies about making movies.
  • 1939 and 1957 in filmmaking.
  • The history of Barkley Shut Up And Jam Gaiden.
  • Destroying Manhattan by performing a Chaos Dunk.
  • Setting your cyberpunk universe after basketball has been outlawed.
  • The dangers of running a successful Kickstarter.
  • The game design conceit that there should be way too much of everything.
  • Bizarre unthinkable development processes that somehow in the end produce a shippable game.
  • A 397-page forum thread of people asking "Where is Barkley 2?"
  • The second concrete product of the Barkley 2 Kickstarter, after the CyberDwarf body pillow.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+-qk14lPb ]]> Jim Stormdancer 44. Oops! All Biogel https://topiclords.com/oops-all-biogel 0ec26867-9a65-40df-8bb2-56a10881837e Mon, 24 Aug 2020 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Jenni and Maxx. We discuss having a good time duplicating thought work, the Japanese crop microbiome, the PXL-2000 camcorder, embedding a movie in the Wikipedia page about the movie, pooping the shape of what you ate, and discovering that you love writing dialog trees. 58:01 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Not caring if you're duplicating thought work that was done by a ton of people forever ago because you're having a good time.
  • Correction on Japanese crop microbiome.
  • The PXL-2000 camcorder
  • This is the first Wikipedia page for a movie that has the entire movie embedded in the page:
  • Search and rescue as an excuse for robotics research.
  • What if poop worked like, you ate dinosaur chicken nuggets, you got dinosaur poops.
  • It's annoying that it took me so long to realize I love writing dialog trees.

Microtopics:

  • Thinking that other people have had sex, when they haven't.
  • Making a very good one about fried green boys.
  • The dominant recessive two alleles punnett square stuff.
  • All the mystery flowers that have been reproducing willy nilly.
  • Finding out about Redstone and reinventing computing from scratch.
  • Whether figuring out all the crafting shapes is a good part of Minecraft.
  • Waking up in an abandoned cryogenics facility and enjoying the plastic bag upgrade tree.
  • Waking up in an abandoned cryogenics facility but there's lots of fish sticks so you just eat fish sticks.
  • Whether fish sticks are frozen fish or are born sticks.
  • Making a stick into a spear by holding it in your hand.
  • A shopping cart breaking into almost enough pieces to make a new shopping cart.
  • The soul of the shopping cart ascending into heaven so you have to play a fishing minigame to get it back.
  • A good starter project where after your finish it there are birds in it right now.
  • Beginner knowledge work projects feeling useless because somebody already wrote the program you just wrote.
  • 3D printer projects resulting in a physical artifact even when there's an error.
  • Constantly being annoyed that you're not a scientist in the 1300s.
  • How Tycho Brahe was the "greatest naked eye astronomer" because he owned a sextant and had a bunch of spare time that he spent looking up.
  • An "octant" possibly being 33% more than a sextant but nobody on the podcast is sure.
  • Trying to figure out what "congresstant" means.
  • Japanese far right nationalists being terrified of Koreans touching their rice.
  • Hearing a Japanese person say a fact about Japan and just assuming that it's true.
  • Wes Anderson accidentally validating far right Japanese nationalists by putting their caricatures of a foreigner in Isle of Dogs.
  • Watching Japanese television because your Japanese isn't good enough to tell who's being a far right douchebag.
  • Muting a TV show and procedurally generating subtitles whenever someone speaks.
  • Localizing an anime without knowing what characters were originally saying.
  • Sitting there with your 2020 sensibilities going "oh my god."
  • Saving video to audio cassette.
  • The camera that filmed the two minute performance art scene in Richard Linklater's Slacker.
  • Not having time to watch Monty Python movies but hanging eventually internalizing the whole oeuvre from when fans quote it.
  • Picking a movie and having to communicate only in lines from that movie for the rest of your life.
  • Looking for the movie with the most words in it but Google only wants to tell you the movie with the most f-words in it.
  • Not having seen Casino but deciding to say only things that they say in Casino from now on.
  • According to this one web page Jim found, Team America World Police only having 1600 words in it.
  • Hearing a line from Casino and immediately forgetting it.
  • Singing Come to my Window by Melissa Etheridge except with blueberries.
  • A mask that covers your eyes but plays a tone in your ears based on the distance of the closest object in front of each eye.
  • Watching the entire movie inside the Wikipedia page for the movie.
  • Embedding Myst in Wikipedia.
  • Putting on your business card that the Frog Fractions Wikipedia page is rated "GA" for "good article."
  • Plugging the Wikipedia article for Frog Fractions into GPT-2 and learning facts about future sequels.
  • Insect-inspired robots.
  • People asking what your robot design is for and always saying "search and rescue" and everybody believing you even though search and rescue people never use robots.
  • Making robots that are too small to get military funding because they can't carry a payload.
  • Taking an ultrasound of a fly while it's flying.
  • Inventing the idiom "cheap as a moth."
  • Harvesting antennae from dead moths and attaching it to your circuit board with Bio Gel and your circuit board has a sense of smell until the antenna rots away an hour later.
  • Moths not having a circulatory system but they do some stuff with liquids.
  • Whether or not Jim's wife needs an army of robot bugs for her park ranger crew.
  • Your life goal being to annoy your neighbors with the self-replicating robot mosquito you invented.
  • Smearing bio gel on you battery connectors and then inserting any foodstuff into the battery compartment.
  • Putting flies on leashes.
  • A robot-fighting praying mantis with a perfect record.
  • The mantis refusing to fight any given robot more than once.
  • Oops, All Biogel.
  • Enjoying looking at all your little dinosaur poops.
  • Eating alphabet soup consecutively and sending a photo of the toilet to your message recipient.
  • Discovering your superpowers at a baby food tasting party.
  • Eating baby food for the first time and vienna sausages bursting from every pore.
  • Identifying a strange substance by putting it in your mouth.
  • Tasting the ash of a cremated person and pooping out their face, then applying the electricity and they come back to life.
  • Not discovering that you love writing dialog trees until you're 41.
  • Making a mixtape of Nintendo DS ROMs for your partner.
  • Writing a dialog tree into a stressful email so you get all the future stressful emails out of the way too.
  • Your girlfriend reading your dialog tree linearly so she thinks you want to break up, get married, have a baby, and move to Pittsburgh.
  • Gmail basically being a dialog tree nowadays.
  • The Gmail Labs feature that predicts the three suggested responses that your recipient will see, so you can rewrite your email until they only get three variations of "Wow, what a great email!"
  • Ostensibly being a comedy writer but laughing harder at dialog written by an algorithm.
  • Japanese people making an acknowledgement noise for every word you say, and feeling way too validated.
  • Reading RPG-style text and imagining somebody making a grunting noise every time a letter appears.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Not caring if you're duplicating thought work that was done by a ton of people forever ago because you're having a good time.
  • Correction on Japanese crop microbiome.
  • The PXL-2000 camcorder
  • This is the first Wikipedia page for a movie that has the entire movie embedded in the page:
  • Search and rescue as an excuse for robotics research.
  • What if poop worked like, you ate dinosaur chicken nuggets, you got dinosaur poops.
  • It's annoying that it took me so long to realize I love writing dialog trees.

Microtopics:

  • Thinking that other people have had sex, when they haven't.
  • Making a very good one about fried green boys.
  • The dominant recessive two alleles punnett square stuff.
  • All the mystery flowers that have been reproducing willy nilly.
  • Finding out about Redstone and reinventing computing from scratch.
  • Whether figuring out all the crafting shapes is a good part of Minecraft.
  • Waking up in an abandoned cryogenics facility and enjoying the plastic bag upgrade tree.
  • Waking up in an abandoned cryogenics facility but there's lots of fish sticks so you just eat fish sticks.
  • Whether fish sticks are frozen fish or are born sticks.
  • Making a stick into a spear by holding it in your hand.
  • A shopping cart breaking into almost enough pieces to make a new shopping cart.
  • The soul of the shopping cart ascending into heaven so you have to play a fishing minigame to get it back.
  • A good starter project where after your finish it there are birds in it right now.
  • Beginner knowledge work projects feeling useless because somebody already wrote the program you just wrote.
  • 3D printer projects resulting in a physical artifact even when there's an error.
  • Constantly being annoyed that you're not a scientist in the 1300s.
  • How Tycho Brahe was the "greatest naked eye astronomer" because he owned a sextant and had a bunch of spare time that he spent looking up.
  • An "octant" possibly being 33% more than a sextant but nobody on the podcast is sure.
  • Trying to figure out what "congresstant" means.
  • Japanese far right nationalists being terrified of Koreans touching their rice.
  • Hearing a Japanese person say a fact about Japan and just assuming that it's true.
  • Wes Anderson accidentally validating far right Japanese nationalists by putting their caricatures of a foreigner in Isle of Dogs.
  • Watching Japanese television because your Japanese isn't good enough to tell who's being a far right douchebag.
  • Muting a TV show and procedurally generating subtitles whenever someone speaks.
  • Localizing an anime without knowing what characters were originally saying.
  • Sitting there with your 2020 sensibilities going "oh my god."
  • Saving video to audio cassette.
  • The camera that filmed the two minute performance art scene in Richard Linklater's Slacker.
  • Not having time to watch Monty Python movies but hanging eventually internalizing the whole oeuvre from when fans quote it.
  • Picking a movie and having to communicate only in lines from that movie for the rest of your life.
  • Looking for the movie with the most words in it but Google only wants to tell you the movie with the most f-words in it.
  • Not having seen Casino but deciding to say only things that they say in Casino from now on.
  • According to this one web page Jim found, Team America World Police only having 1600 words in it.
  • Hearing a line from Casino and immediately forgetting it.
  • Singing Come to my Window by Melissa Etheridge except with blueberries.
  • A mask that covers your eyes but plays a tone in your ears based on the distance of the closest object in front of each eye.
  • Watching the entire movie inside the Wikipedia page for the movie.
  • Embedding Myst in Wikipedia.
  • Putting on your business card that the Frog Fractions Wikipedia page is rated "GA" for "good article."
  • Plugging the Wikipedia article for Frog Fractions into GPT-2 and learning facts about future sequels.
  • Insect-inspired robots.
  • People asking what your robot design is for and always saying "search and rescue" and everybody believing you even though search and rescue people never use robots.
  • Making robots that are too small to get military funding because they can't carry a payload.
  • Taking an ultrasound of a fly while it's flying.
  • Inventing the idiom "cheap as a moth."
  • Harvesting antennae from dead moths and attaching it to your circuit board with Bio Gel and your circuit board has a sense of smell until the antenna rots away an hour later.
  • Moths not having a circulatory system but they do some stuff with liquids.
  • Whether or not Jim's wife needs an army of robot bugs for her park ranger crew.
  • Your life goal being to annoy your neighbors with the self-replicating robot mosquito you invented.
  • Smearing bio gel on you battery connectors and then inserting any foodstuff into the battery compartment.
  • Putting flies on leashes.
  • A robot-fighting praying mantis with a perfect record.
  • The mantis refusing to fight any given robot more than once.
  • Oops, All Biogel.
  • Enjoying looking at all your little dinosaur poops.
  • Eating alphabet soup consecutively and sending a photo of the toilet to your message recipient.
  • Discovering your superpowers at a baby food tasting party.
  • Eating baby food for the first time and vienna sausages bursting from every pore.
  • Identifying a strange substance by putting it in your mouth.
  • Tasting the ash of a cremated person and pooping out their face, then applying the electricity and they come back to life.
  • Not discovering that you love writing dialog trees until you're 41.
  • Making a mixtape of Nintendo DS ROMs for your partner.
  • Writing a dialog tree into a stressful email so you get all the future stressful emails out of the way too.
  • Your girlfriend reading your dialog tree linearly so she thinks you want to break up, get married, have a baby, and move to Pittsburgh.
  • Gmail basically being a dialog tree nowadays.
  • The Gmail Labs feature that predicts the three suggested responses that your recipient will see, so you can rewrite your email until they only get three variations of "Wow, what a great email!"
  • Ostensibly being a comedy writer but laughing harder at dialog written by an algorithm.
  • Japanese people making an acknowledgement noise for every word you say, and feeling way too validated.
  • Reading RPG-style text and imagining somebody making a grunting noise every time a letter appears.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Not caring if you're duplicating thought work that was done by a ton of people forever ago because you're having a good time.
  • Correction on Japanese crop microbiome.
  • The PXL-2000 camcorder
  • This is the first Wikipedia page for a movie that has the entire movie embedded in the page:
  • Search and rescue as an excuse for robotics research.
  • What if poop worked like, you ate dinosaur chicken nuggets, you got dinosaur poops.
  • It's annoying that it took me so long to realize I love writing dialog trees.

Microtopics:

  • Thinking that other people have had sex, when they haven't.
  • Making a very good one about fried green boys.
  • The dominant recessive two alleles punnett square stuff.
  • All the mystery flowers that have been reproducing willy nilly.
  • Finding out about Redstone and reinventing computing from scratch.
  • Whether figuring out all the crafting shapes is a good part of Minecraft.
  • Waking up in an abandoned cryogenics facility and enjoying the plastic bag upgrade tree.
  • Waking up in an abandoned cryogenics facility but there's lots of fish sticks so you just eat fish sticks.
  • Whether fish sticks are frozen fish or are born sticks.
  • Making a stick into a spear by holding it in your hand.
  • A shopping cart breaking into almost enough pieces to make a new shopping cart.
  • The soul of the shopping cart ascending into heaven so you have to play a fishing minigame to get it back.
  • A good starter project where after your finish it there are birds in it right now.
  • Beginner knowledge work projects feeling useless because somebody already wrote the program you just wrote.
  • 3D printer projects resulting in a physical artifact even when there's an error.
  • Constantly being annoyed that you're not a scientist in the 1300s.
  • How Tycho Brahe was the "greatest naked eye astronomer" because he owned a sextant and had a bunch of spare time that he spent looking up.
  • An "octant" possibly being 33% more than a sextant but nobody on the podcast is sure.
  • Trying to figure out what "congresstant" means.
  • Japanese far right nationalists being terrified of Koreans touching their rice.
  • Hearing a Japanese person say a fact about Japan and just assuming that it's true.
  • Wes Anderson accidentally validating far right Japanese nationalists by putting their caricatures of a foreigner in Isle of Dogs.
  • Watching Japanese television because your Japanese isn't good enough to tell who's being a far right douchebag.
  • Muting a TV show and procedurally generating subtitles whenever someone speaks.
  • Localizing an anime without knowing what characters were originally saying.
  • Sitting there with your 2020 sensibilities going "oh my god."
  • Saving video to audio cassette.
  • The camera that filmed the two minute performance art scene in Richard Linklater's Slacker.
  • Not having time to watch Monty Python movies but hanging eventually internalizing the whole oeuvre from when fans quote it.
  • Picking a movie and having to communicate only in lines from that movie for the rest of your life.
  • Looking for the movie with the most words in it but Google only wants to tell you the movie with the most f-words in it.
  • Not having seen Casino but deciding to say only things that they say in Casino from now on.
  • According to this one web page Jim found, Team America World Police only having 1600 words in it.
  • Hearing a line from Casino and immediately forgetting it.
  • Singing Come to my Window by Melissa Etheridge except with blueberries.
  • A mask that covers your eyes but plays a tone in your ears based on the distance of the closest object in front of each eye.
  • Watching the entire movie inside the Wikipedia page for the movie.
  • Embedding Myst in Wikipedia.
  • Putting on your business card that the Frog Fractions Wikipedia page is rated "GA" for "good article."
  • Plugging the Wikipedia article for Frog Fractions into GPT-2 and learning facts about future sequels.
  • Insect-inspired robots.
  • People asking what your robot design is for and always saying "search and rescue" and everybody believing you even though search and rescue people never use robots.
  • Making robots that are too small to get military funding because they can't carry a payload.
  • Taking an ultrasound of a fly while it's flying.
  • Inventing the idiom "cheap as a moth."
  • Harvesting antennae from dead moths and attaching it to your circuit board with Bio Gel and your circuit board has a sense of smell until the antenna rots away an hour later.
  • Moths not having a circulatory system but they do some stuff with liquids.
  • Whether or not Jim's wife needs an army of robot bugs for her park ranger crew.
  • Your life goal being to annoy your neighbors with the self-replicating robot mosquito you invented.
  • Smearing bio gel on you battery connectors and then inserting any foodstuff into the battery compartment.
  • Putting flies on leashes.
  • A robot-fighting praying mantis with a perfect record.
  • The mantis refusing to fight any given robot more than once.
  • Oops, All Biogel.
  • Enjoying looking at all your little dinosaur poops.
  • Eating alphabet soup consecutively and sending a photo of the toilet to your message recipient.
  • Discovering your superpowers at a baby food tasting party.
  • Eating baby food for the first time and vienna sausages bursting from every pore.
  • Identifying a strange substance by putting it in your mouth.
  • Tasting the ash of a cremated person and pooping out their face, then applying the electricity and they come back to life.
  • Not discovering that you love writing dialog trees until you're 41.
  • Making a mixtape of Nintendo DS ROMs for your partner.
  • Writing a dialog tree into a stressful email so you get all the future stressful emails out of the way too.
  • Your girlfriend reading your dialog tree linearly so she thinks you want to break up, get married, have a baby, and move to Pittsburgh.
  • Gmail basically being a dialog tree nowadays.
  • The Gmail Labs feature that predicts the three suggested responses that your recipient will see, so you can rewrite your email until they only get three variations of "Wow, what a great email!"
  • Ostensibly being a comedy writer but laughing harder at dialog written by an algorithm.
  • Japanese people making an acknowledgement noise for every word you say, and feeling way too validated.
  • Reading RPG-style text and imagining somebody making a grunting noise every time a letter appears.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+6XwCXQNz ]]> Jim Stormdancer 43. You vs. The One Your Mom Told You To Worry About https://topiclords.com/you-vs-the-one-your-mom-told-you-to-worry-about 46c7904d-ecda-4b8a-a7d8-77ebdc843861 Mon, 17 Aug 2020 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Alexander and Jonah. We discuss games on the TI-83, the jazz fusion act that secretly inspired all video game music, Wikipedia disagreeing with itself, rap cliche origins, leisurely game jamming, cartography on weirdly-shaped worlds, and the Doctor Who theme. 1:04:51 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Alexander teaches math at the college level, which has been quite an experience the past few months.
  • Jonah makes music for video games, for example Pony Island.

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Using only the funny TLDs.
  • Trying to figure it out as you go.
  • Getting seriously into online homework grading.
  • Learning the weird object-based Perl they use for checking homework answers.
  • A podcast with a larger than normal demographic of math teachers.
  • The most accessible way to develop very small games.
  • Whether Tie Fighter / Bobsled / Indy 500 is one game or several.
  • Swapping games over the audio port.
  • Adding a line from Cool Runnings and renaming your racing game to Bobsled.
  • Remaking the entirety of Pokemon Red in a TI calculator.
  • All real world work being done in ways that would get you expelled if you were still in college.
  • Commissioning your high school classmate to make a bowling minigame in TI-Basic.
  • A thousand years in the future when nobody knows where TI calculators came from or how they work, but they're still the only calculator allowed on standardized tests.
  • Jazz fusion's towering influence over video game music.
  • Thinking a work is wholly original because you have no context for its inspirations.
  • Playing a riff from Kirby's Dream Land in a solo over Chick Correa's "Spain."
  • A band fronted by duelling wind controllers.
  • Having fun exploring and jumping on things.
  • Jumping into any part of a three hour concert and hearing a water level.
  • Japanese video games' sense of mystery benefitting from the American ignorance of their influences.
  • Deliberately exposing children to risk in play.
  • Rigorous safety procedures pushing back against incredibly unlikely outcomes.
  • Small children being basically indestructible.
  • 48 hours of sitting in a room with fans blowing on you, and you're a ghost.
  • Getting a lot of nosebleeds and hearing everyone's pet remedy for nosebleeds.
  • Trying all the nosebleed remedies and ending up with a bunch of cool hobbies.
  • Your favorite nosebleed remedy being dipping your french fries in the chocolate shake, not because it stops the bleeding but because it's delicious.
  • Wikipedia's surprising plausibility.
  • Reading Wikipedia and believing things on it even though anyone can edit it at any time.
  • Private services that seem like they really ought to be a branch of the government.
  • The pre-history dark ages from which we have no mind uploads.
  • Each of the Rice Krispies elves singing a verse about their onomatopoeic sound.
  • Grandmaster Flash watching that Chiquita Banana commercial in the 40s and being like "someday I'm gonna be a rapper and bite that one line."
  • Tracing a Miami Bass chorus back to a football chant.
  • The Cool S and the Epic of Gilgamesh being of similarly obscure origins.
  • The intense frustration of not being able to tell the difference between writing a song and remembering a song.
  • The damning similarities between "Yesterday" and "Georgia on my Mind."
  • Music lawsuits being decided by juries of non-musicians.
  • A Midsummer Night's Dream containing a performance of the Greek play that Shakespeare ripped off when writing Romeo and Juliet.
  • How to pronounce Ludum Dare.
  • Taking the weekend to do a game jam and making a game in about four hours and then deciding to watch a movie and relax.
  • Acrobats with extreme control of their bodies, except for time management.
  • Learning to scope on the fly by doing game jams.
  • Starting with a bouncing ball no matter how big your game idea is.
  • Doing an entire company's worth of git merges and everything collapses into a steaming heap.
  • Joining a game jam as a scrum master.
  • Putting separate minigames together into a single game.
  • Having no idea how to estimate the time it takes to do tasks you do every day.
  • Making a spreadsheet to find out whether you're making a new web site for your Fall class.
  • Playing Frog Fractions 2 to find Alexander's chess jam game.
  • A problem with no fully satisfying solution but hundreds of partially satisfying solutions.
  • Peeling an orange and then try to make the peel as flat as possible.
  • What the day/night cycle would be like on a donut planet.
  • Trying to imagine the political machinations informing the cartography of a fantasy race.
  • A tide chart for if you have two moons and you're inside a donut.
  • Land-biased maps where the land is displayed intact but oceans are cut into pieces.
  • A map displaying any given straight-line path from the front of a penny to the back.
  • Unwittingly making merciless caricatures of Mr. Lincoln.
  • You vs. the one she told you not to worry about vs. the one you told her not to worry about vs. the one your mom told you not to worry about vs. the one your mom told you to worry about.
  • The performance of the 1963 Doctor Who theme.
  • Doing what feels like interesting work enabled by modern tools and finding out someone did similar work 100 years ago using much more primitive tools.
  • Cutting audio tape into microscopic strips and rearranging them into interesting sonic textures.
  • A weird proto-physical synth non-synth thing.
  • Moving your hand in physical space with no visual reference like a chump.
  • Artists doing laborious work with primitive tools when they could've just waited 100 years and it would've been so much easier.
  • A phone app that you take photos with but you have to wait three days after you finish the roll to see the photos.
  • All the joy of constraint and none of the headache of actually working with 8-bit hardware.
  • Inventing the math and physics to predict the tides as you're building your tide-predicting machine.
  • Writing a song about how to get a #1 single and then doing it.
  • Having a bunch of hit singles and then burning the money you made.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Alexander teaches math at the college level, which has been quite an experience the past few months.
  • Jonah makes music for video games, for example Pony Island.

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Using only the funny TLDs.
  • Trying to figure it out as you go.
  • Getting seriously into online homework grading.
  • Learning the weird object-based Perl they use for checking homework answers.
  • A podcast with a larger than normal demographic of math teachers.
  • The most accessible way to develop very small games.
  • Whether Tie Fighter / Bobsled / Indy 500 is one game or several.
  • Swapping games over the audio port.
  • Adding a line from Cool Runnings and renaming your racing game to Bobsled.
  • Remaking the entirety of Pokemon Red in a TI calculator.
  • All real world work being done in ways that would get you expelled if you were still in college.
  • Commissioning your high school classmate to make a bowling minigame in TI-Basic.
  • A thousand years in the future when nobody knows where TI calculators came from or how they work, but they're still the only calculator allowed on standardized tests.
  • Jazz fusion's towering influence over video game music.
  • Thinking a work is wholly original because you have no context for its inspirations.
  • Playing a riff from Kirby's Dream Land in a solo over Chick Correa's "Spain."
  • A band fronted by duelling wind controllers.
  • Having fun exploring and jumping on things.
  • Jumping into any part of a three hour concert and hearing a water level.
  • Japanese video games' sense of mystery benefitting from the American ignorance of their influences.
  • Deliberately exposing children to risk in play.
  • Rigorous safety procedures pushing back against incredibly unlikely outcomes.
  • Small children being basically indestructible.
  • 48 hours of sitting in a room with fans blowing on you, and you're a ghost.
  • Getting a lot of nosebleeds and hearing everyone's pet remedy for nosebleeds.
  • Trying all the nosebleed remedies and ending up with a bunch of cool hobbies.
  • Your favorite nosebleed remedy being dipping your french fries in the chocolate shake, not because it stops the bleeding but because it's delicious.
  • Wikipedia's surprising plausibility.
  • Reading Wikipedia and believing things on it even though anyone can edit it at any time.
  • Private services that seem like they really ought to be a branch of the government.
  • The pre-history dark ages from which we have no mind uploads.
  • Each of the Rice Krispies elves singing a verse about their onomatopoeic sound.
  • Grandmaster Flash watching that Chiquita Banana commercial in the 40s and being like "someday I'm gonna be a rapper and bite that one line."
  • Tracing a Miami Bass chorus back to a football chant.
  • The Cool S and the Epic of Gilgamesh being of similarly obscure origins.
  • The intense frustration of not being able to tell the difference between writing a song and remembering a song.
  • The damning similarities between "Yesterday" and "Georgia on my Mind."
  • Music lawsuits being decided by juries of non-musicians.
  • A Midsummer Night's Dream containing a performance of the Greek play that Shakespeare ripped off when writing Romeo and Juliet.
  • How to pronounce Ludum Dare.
  • Taking the weekend to do a game jam and making a game in about four hours and then deciding to watch a movie and relax.
  • Acrobats with extreme control of their bodies, except for time management.
  • Learning to scope on the fly by doing game jams.
  • Starting with a bouncing ball no matter how big your game idea is.
  • Doing an entire company's worth of git merges and everything collapses into a steaming heap.
  • Joining a game jam as a scrum master.
  • Putting separate minigames together into a single game.
  • Having no idea how to estimate the time it takes to do tasks you do every day.
  • Making a spreadsheet to find out whether you're making a new web site for your Fall class.
  • Playing Frog Fractions 2 to find Alexander's chess jam game.
  • A problem with no fully satisfying solution but hundreds of partially satisfying solutions.
  • Peeling an orange and then try to make the peel as flat as possible.
  • What the day/night cycle would be like on a donut planet.
  • Trying to imagine the political machinations informing the cartography of a fantasy race.
  • A tide chart for if you have two moons and you're inside a donut.
  • Land-biased maps where the land is displayed intact but oceans are cut into pieces.
  • A map displaying any given straight-line path from the front of a penny to the back.
  • Unwittingly making merciless caricatures of Mr. Lincoln.
  • You vs. the one she told you not to worry about vs. the one you told her not to worry about vs. the one your mom told you not to worry about vs. the one your mom told you to worry about.
  • The performance of the 1963 Doctor Who theme.
  • Doing what feels like interesting work enabled by modern tools and finding out someone did similar work 100 years ago using much more primitive tools.
  • Cutting audio tape into microscopic strips and rearranging them into interesting sonic textures.
  • A weird proto-physical synth non-synth thing.
  • Moving your hand in physical space with no visual reference like a chump.
  • Artists doing laborious work with primitive tools when they could've just waited 100 years and it would've been so much easier.
  • A phone app that you take photos with but you have to wait three days after you finish the roll to see the photos.
  • All the joy of constraint and none of the headache of actually working with 8-bit hardware.
  • Inventing the math and physics to predict the tides as you're building your tide-predicting machine.
  • Writing a song about how to get a #1 single and then doing it.
  • Having a bunch of hit singles and then burning the money you made.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Alexander teaches math at the college level, which has been quite an experience the past few months.
  • Jonah makes music for video games, for example Pony Island.

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Using only the funny TLDs.
  • Trying to figure it out as you go.
  • Getting seriously into online homework grading.
  • Learning the weird object-based Perl they use for checking homework answers.
  • A podcast with a larger than normal demographic of math teachers.
  • The most accessible way to develop very small games.
  • Whether Tie Fighter / Bobsled / Indy 500 is one game or several.
  • Swapping games over the audio port.
  • Adding a line from Cool Runnings and renaming your racing game to Bobsled.
  • Remaking the entirety of Pokemon Red in a TI calculator.
  • All real world work being done in ways that would get you expelled if you were still in college.
  • Commissioning your high school classmate to make a bowling minigame in TI-Basic.
  • A thousand years in the future when nobody knows where TI calculators came from or how they work, but they're still the only calculator allowed on standardized tests.
  • Jazz fusion's towering influence over video game music.
  • Thinking a work is wholly original because you have no context for its inspirations.
  • Playing a riff from Kirby's Dream Land in a solo over Chick Correa's "Spain."
  • A band fronted by duelling wind controllers.
  • Having fun exploring and jumping on things.
  • Jumping into any part of a three hour concert and hearing a water level.
  • Japanese video games' sense of mystery benefitting from the American ignorance of their influences.
  • Deliberately exposing children to risk in play.
  • Rigorous safety procedures pushing back against incredibly unlikely outcomes.
  • Small children being basically indestructible.
  • 48 hours of sitting in a room with fans blowing on you, and you're a ghost.
  • Getting a lot of nosebleeds and hearing everyone's pet remedy for nosebleeds.
  • Trying all the nosebleed remedies and ending up with a bunch of cool hobbies.
  • Your favorite nosebleed remedy being dipping your french fries in the chocolate shake, not because it stops the bleeding but because it's delicious.
  • Wikipedia's surprising plausibility.
  • Reading Wikipedia and believing things on it even though anyone can edit it at any time.
  • Private services that seem like they really ought to be a branch of the government.
  • The pre-history dark ages from which we have no mind uploads.
  • Each of the Rice Krispies elves singing a verse about their onomatopoeic sound.
  • Grandmaster Flash watching that Chiquita Banana commercial in the 40s and being like "someday I'm gonna be a rapper and bite that one line."
  • Tracing a Miami Bass chorus back to a football chant.
  • The Cool S and the Epic of Gilgamesh being of similarly obscure origins.
  • The intense frustration of not being able to tell the difference between writing a song and remembering a song.
  • The damning similarities between "Yesterday" and "Georgia on my Mind."
  • Music lawsuits being decided by juries of non-musicians.
  • A Midsummer Night's Dream containing a performance of the Greek play that Shakespeare ripped off when writing Romeo and Juliet.
  • How to pronounce Ludum Dare.
  • Taking the weekend to do a game jam and making a game in about four hours and then deciding to watch a movie and relax.
  • Acrobats with extreme control of their bodies, except for time management.
  • Learning to scope on the fly by doing game jams.
  • Starting with a bouncing ball no matter how big your game idea is.
  • Doing an entire company's worth of git merges and everything collapses into a steaming heap.
  • Joining a game jam as a scrum master.
  • Putting separate minigames together into a single game.
  • Having no idea how to estimate the time it takes to do tasks you do every day.
  • Making a spreadsheet to find out whether you're making a new web site for your Fall class.
  • Playing Frog Fractions 2 to find Alexander's chess jam game.
  • A problem with no fully satisfying solution but hundreds of partially satisfying solutions.
  • Peeling an orange and then try to make the peel as flat as possible.
  • What the day/night cycle would be like on a donut planet.
  • Trying to imagine the political machinations informing the cartography of a fantasy race.
  • A tide chart for if you have two moons and you're inside a donut.
  • Land-biased maps where the land is displayed intact but oceans are cut into pieces.
  • A map displaying any given straight-line path from the front of a penny to the back.
  • Unwittingly making merciless caricatures of Mr. Lincoln.
  • You vs. the one she told you not to worry about vs. the one you told her not to worry about vs. the one your mom told you not to worry about vs. the one your mom told you to worry about.
  • The performance of the 1963 Doctor Who theme.
  • Doing what feels like interesting work enabled by modern tools and finding out someone did similar work 100 years ago using much more primitive tools.
  • Cutting audio tape into microscopic strips and rearranging them into interesting sonic textures.
  • A weird proto-physical synth non-synth thing.
  • Moving your hand in physical space with no visual reference like a chump.
  • Artists doing laborious work with primitive tools when they could've just waited 100 years and it would've been so much easier.
  • A phone app that you take photos with but you have to wait three days after you finish the roll to see the photos.
  • All the joy of constraint and none of the headache of actually working with 8-bit hardware.
  • Inventing the math and physics to predict the tides as you're building your tide-predicting machine.
  • Writing a song about how to get a #1 single and then doing it.
  • Having a bunch of hit singles and then burning the money you made.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+9_2oTnSK ]]> Jim Stormdancer 42. Refrigerator Roy, or Stephanie I'm So Sorry https://topiclords.com/refrigerator-roy-or-stephanie-im-so-sorry cca84e58-7e01-4157-b6d7-972ae18ea13b Mon, 10 Aug 2020 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Elizabeth and Erica. We discuss driving the bookmobile in rural Washington, arguing with your husband about the insects in your fridge, picking an effective charity, erotica in the public library, and hiring assistants (for field biology) and then trying to live with them. 1:14:02 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Breaking format.
  • Representing Native Americans with integrity and dignity.
  • A video game that is full of surprises.
  • A baby who wants string cheese so much he pulls the entire handle off of the refrigerator.
  • Little walking chaos machines with a penchant for string cheese.
  • The story of why you don't have a phone.
  • Dying of dysentery because of string cheese.
  • Really getting the soap deep into that charging port.
  • A giant red school bus but instead of seats it has bookshelves.
  • Bookshelves with seat belts.
  • A very serious version of the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile.
  • A small town with a population of 300 where nobody sees each other except for once a month when the bookmobile visits.
  • A literacy earthquake.
  • A therapy goat that doesn't have any paperwork because you just discovered that being around the goat makes you less anxious.
  • Spreading hay all over the conference room and letting the guinea pigs loose.
  • Guinea pigs who are not embraced by the community at large.
  • Goats and libraries being natural enemies.
  • An enormous encyclopedia flying at your head every time you hit a bump in the road.
  • Small children encircling the Bookmobile and chanting because they are excited for books.
  • Lust for literacy.
  • Removing the governor from your riding mower and driving it over an obstacle course at 90mph.
  • Dividing your lawnmower races into weight classes.
  • Souping up your eight foot chainsaw and every child in town immediately crying when you turn it on because your Hot Saw is so loud.
  • Taking your three year old to see Jaws.
  • Sleeping through Alien (1979) as a six month old shaping your creative direction forever.
  • Buying a corn dog the length of your femur.
  • A corn dog that is so long that you can't hold it and put it in your mouth at the same time.
  • Putting down a blue tarp because it's Washington and everything is done with blue tarps.
  • Covering a tarp with dishwashing liquid and then putting kids in full body rubber tubes and goggles with slug antenna and making them race.
  • Making your slug race medal out of a metal that is constantly slimy.
  • Negotiating getting a minifridge with your future roommate.
  • The special kind of organism that can overcome a plant's defenses to live inside of it.
  • A moth living in your fridge and your husband is like "that's not my moth."
  • Not being able to release your refrigerator moth into the wild because you don't know that biome it came from.
  • Finding out what parts of your diet you share with the moth in your fridge.
  • A symphony of Roys.
  • The ant colony that has entirely taken over the bathroom who are all named Roy.
  • The amount of biomass required to observe you pooping before you'll get embarrassed.
  • Giving a Lordy award to Refrigerator Roy.
  • Whether what a given charity uses your money for is even that effective in the grand scheme of things.
  • Not feeling the need to donate to the charity of the week because you've already given money to an organization addressing the systemic causes of the problem.
  • Receiving more donations in a week than you have in the past 10 years and not having any idea what to do with the money.
  • Giving money to the folks in the office passing the hat around, then finding out that they're using the money to go on vacation.
  • Grocery stores gauging your level of disposable income by asking you to make charitable donations at checkout.
  • Libraries shifting from providing people books they ought to read, to providing people with porn.
  • Judging porn by its cover.
  • Recommending Hot Cops without reading it yourself.
  • Bodice rippers written in the 90s starting a romantic relationship with a rape, but modern bodice rippers depicting explicit conversations about consent.
  • Treating every request with dignity because if you have a cranky day you immediately lose the trust of the community.
  • A middle-aged woman from a conservative community trusting you enough to ask for porn recommendations.
  • A feud in the garden club about the etymology of the Purple Prussian Potato.
  • Coming in every week to ask the librarians how the Purple Prussian Potato got its name when it predates Prussia.
  • A librarian getting through the terrible parts of their job so they can focus on the ridiculous potato question somebody asked.
  • "Unicorn Butt Cops Beach Patrol" doing what it says on the tin.
  • Having to sleep in the same tent as your field assistant for months, but not being able to be friends with them because then they won't take orders.
  • Calling a friend who is a manager at a food processing plant to ask for advice on de-conflicting your field assistants who are constantly blowing up at each other.
  • Hiring field assistants to measure bird populations for eight months, but instead of counting birds they write a critically acclaimed album about the North Carolina landscape and wildlife.
  • All these problems going away if you just had a budget to hire people.
  • Having to carry twice as much water because the adrenaline jockey rushing ahead of you thinks he won't need any water.
  • Measuring plants for 14 hours a day.
  • LI-COR machines that measure leaf respiration.
  • Coming back from your field work after six months and your friends gave up on you because they haven't been able to call you on the phone.
  • The exhaustion of having to be in charge all the time because you live with your employees.
  • Refusing to go to town for pizza because you can't afford to be friends with your employees.
  • Realizing you're becoming somebody's dinner party story.
  • Developing OCD in your first quarter of college and your roommate moving out because you don't have any coping strategies yet.
  • Your time to blossom and find other weirdos like yourself, except it turns out even the weirdos don't want to know you.
  • Discovering that you are crazy in your first year of college and then having to figure out how to navigate this country's broken mental health system while crazy.
  • Maintaining totally symmetrical stimulus on the left and right sides of your body.
  • Steamboat captains obsessed with navigating exactly down the middle of the Mississippi river.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Breaking format.
  • Representing Native Americans with integrity and dignity.
  • A video game that is full of surprises.
  • A baby who wants string cheese so much he pulls the entire handle off of the refrigerator.
  • Little walking chaos machines with a penchant for string cheese.
  • The story of why you don't have a phone.
  • Dying of dysentery because of string cheese.
  • Really getting the soap deep into that charging port.
  • A giant red school bus but instead of seats it has bookshelves.
  • Bookshelves with seat belts.
  • A very serious version of the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile.
  • A small town with a population of 300 where nobody sees each other except for once a month when the bookmobile visits.
  • A literacy earthquake.
  • A therapy goat that doesn't have any paperwork because you just discovered that being around the goat makes you less anxious.
  • Spreading hay all over the conference room and letting the guinea pigs loose.
  • Guinea pigs who are not embraced by the community at large.
  • Goats and libraries being natural enemies.
  • An enormous encyclopedia flying at your head every time you hit a bump in the road.
  • Small children encircling the Bookmobile and chanting because they are excited for books.
  • Lust for literacy.
  • Removing the governor from your riding mower and driving it over an obstacle course at 90mph.
  • Dividing your lawnmower races into weight classes.
  • Souping up your eight foot chainsaw and every child in town immediately crying when you turn it on because your Hot Saw is so loud.
  • Taking your three year old to see Jaws.
  • Sleeping through Alien (1979) as a six month old shaping your creative direction forever.
  • Buying a corn dog the length of your femur.
  • A corn dog that is so long that you can't hold it and put it in your mouth at the same time.
  • Putting down a blue tarp because it's Washington and everything is done with blue tarps.
  • Covering a tarp with dishwashing liquid and then putting kids in full body rubber tubes and goggles with slug antenna and making them race.
  • Making your slug race medal out of a metal that is constantly slimy.
  • Negotiating getting a minifridge with your future roommate.
  • The special kind of organism that can overcome a plant's defenses to live inside of it.
  • A moth living in your fridge and your husband is like "that's not my moth."
  • Not being able to release your refrigerator moth into the wild because you don't know that biome it came from.
  • Finding out what parts of your diet you share with the moth in your fridge.
  • A symphony of Roys.
  • The ant colony that has entirely taken over the bathroom who are all named Roy.
  • The amount of biomass required to observe you pooping before you'll get embarrassed.
  • Giving a Lordy award to Refrigerator Roy.
  • Whether what a given charity uses your money for is even that effective in the grand scheme of things.
  • Not feeling the need to donate to the charity of the week because you've already given money to an organization addressing the systemic causes of the problem.
  • Receiving more donations in a week than you have in the past 10 years and not having any idea what to do with the money.
  • Giving money to the folks in the office passing the hat around, then finding out that they're using the money to go on vacation.
  • Grocery stores gauging your level of disposable income by asking you to make charitable donations at checkout.
  • Libraries shifting from providing people books they ought to read, to providing people with porn.
  • Judging porn by its cover.
  • Recommending Hot Cops without reading it yourself.
  • Bodice rippers written in the 90s starting a romantic relationship with a rape, but modern bodice rippers depicting explicit conversations about consent.
  • Treating every request with dignity because if you have a cranky day you immediately lose the trust of the community.
  • A middle-aged woman from a conservative community trusting you enough to ask for porn recommendations.
  • A feud in the garden club about the etymology of the Purple Prussian Potato.
  • Coming in every week to ask the librarians how the Purple Prussian Potato got its name when it predates Prussia.
  • A librarian getting through the terrible parts of their job so they can focus on the ridiculous potato question somebody asked.
  • "Unicorn Butt Cops Beach Patrol" doing what it says on the tin.
  • Having to sleep in the same tent as your field assistant for months, but not being able to be friends with them because then they won't take orders.
  • Calling a friend who is a manager at a food processing plant to ask for advice on de-conflicting your field assistants who are constantly blowing up at each other.
  • Hiring field assistants to measure bird populations for eight months, but instead of counting birds they write a critically acclaimed album about the North Carolina landscape and wildlife.
  • All these problems going away if you just had a budget to hire people.
  • Having to carry twice as much water because the adrenaline jockey rushing ahead of you thinks he won't need any water.
  • Measuring plants for 14 hours a day.
  • LI-COR machines that measure leaf respiration.
  • Coming back from your field work after six months and your friends gave up on you because they haven't been able to call you on the phone.
  • The exhaustion of having to be in charge all the time because you live with your employees.
  • Refusing to go to town for pizza because you can't afford to be friends with your employees.
  • Realizing you're becoming somebody's dinner party story.
  • Developing OCD in your first quarter of college and your roommate moving out because you don't have any coping strategies yet.
  • Your time to blossom and find other weirdos like yourself, except it turns out even the weirdos don't want to know you.
  • Discovering that you are crazy in your first year of college and then having to figure out how to navigate this country's broken mental health system while crazy.
  • Maintaining totally symmetrical stimulus on the left and right sides of your body.
  • Steamboat captains obsessed with navigating exactly down the middle of the Mississippi river.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Breaking format.
  • Representing Native Americans with integrity and dignity.
  • A video game that is full of surprises.
  • A baby who wants string cheese so much he pulls the entire handle off of the refrigerator.
  • Little walking chaos machines with a penchant for string cheese.
  • The story of why you don't have a phone.
  • Dying of dysentery because of string cheese.
  • Really getting the soap deep into that charging port.
  • A giant red school bus but instead of seats it has bookshelves.
  • Bookshelves with seat belts.
  • A very serious version of the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile.
  • A small town with a population of 300 where nobody sees each other except for once a month when the bookmobile visits.
  • A literacy earthquake.
  • A therapy goat that doesn't have any paperwork because you just discovered that being around the goat makes you less anxious.
  • Spreading hay all over the conference room and letting the guinea pigs loose.
  • Guinea pigs who are not embraced by the community at large.
  • Goats and libraries being natural enemies.
  • An enormous encyclopedia flying at your head every time you hit a bump in the road.
  • Small children encircling the Bookmobile and chanting because they are excited for books.
  • Lust for literacy.
  • Removing the governor from your riding mower and driving it over an obstacle course at 90mph.
  • Dividing your lawnmower races into weight classes.
  • Souping up your eight foot chainsaw and every child in town immediately crying when you turn it on because your Hot Saw is so loud.
  • Taking your three year old to see Jaws.
  • Sleeping through Alien (1979) as a six month old shaping your creative direction forever.
  • Buying a corn dog the length of your femur.
  • A corn dog that is so long that you can't hold it and put it in your mouth at the same time.
  • Putting down a blue tarp because it's Washington and everything is done with blue tarps.
  • Covering a tarp with dishwashing liquid and then putting kids in full body rubber tubes and goggles with slug antenna and making them race.
  • Making your slug race medal out of a metal that is constantly slimy.
  • Negotiating getting a minifridge with your future roommate.
  • The special kind of organism that can overcome a plant's defenses to live inside of it.
  • A moth living in your fridge and your husband is like "that's not my moth."
  • Not being able to release your refrigerator moth into the wild because you don't know that biome it came from.
  • Finding out what parts of your diet you share with the moth in your fridge.
  • A symphony of Roys.
  • The ant colony that has entirely taken over the bathroom who are all named Roy.
  • The amount of biomass required to observe you pooping before you'll get embarrassed.
  • Giving a Lordy award to Refrigerator Roy.
  • Whether what a given charity uses your money for is even that effective in the grand scheme of things.
  • Not feeling the need to donate to the charity of the week because you've already given money to an organization addressing the systemic causes of the problem.
  • Receiving more donations in a week than you have in the past 10 years and not having any idea what to do with the money.
  • Giving money to the folks in the office passing the hat around, then finding out that they're using the money to go on vacation.
  • Grocery stores gauging your level of disposable income by asking you to make charitable donations at checkout.
  • Libraries shifting from providing people books they ought to read, to providing people with porn.
  • Judging porn by its cover.
  • Recommending Hot Cops without reading it yourself.
  • Bodice rippers written in the 90s starting a romantic relationship with a rape, but modern bodice rippers depicting explicit conversations about consent.
  • Treating every request with dignity because if you have a cranky day you immediately lose the trust of the community.
  • A middle-aged woman from a conservative community trusting you enough to ask for porn recommendations.
  • A feud in the garden club about the etymology of the Purple Prussian Potato.
  • Coming in every week to ask the librarians how the Purple Prussian Potato got its name when it predates Prussia.
  • A librarian getting through the terrible parts of their job so they can focus on the ridiculous potato question somebody asked.
  • "Unicorn Butt Cops Beach Patrol" doing what it says on the tin.
  • Having to sleep in the same tent as your field assistant for months, but not being able to be friends with them because then they won't take orders.
  • Calling a friend who is a manager at a food processing plant to ask for advice on de-conflicting your field assistants who are constantly blowing up at each other.
  • Hiring field assistants to measure bird populations for eight months, but instead of counting birds they write a critically acclaimed album about the North Carolina landscape and wildlife.
  • All these problems going away if you just had a budget to hire people.
  • Having to carry twice as much water because the adrenaline jockey rushing ahead of you thinks he won't need any water.
  • Measuring plants for 14 hours a day.
  • LI-COR machines that measure leaf respiration.
  • Coming back from your field work after six months and your friends gave up on you because they haven't been able to call you on the phone.
  • The exhaustion of having to be in charge all the time because you live with your employees.
  • Refusing to go to town for pizza because you can't afford to be friends with your employees.
  • Realizing you're becoming somebody's dinner party story.
  • Developing OCD in your first quarter of college and your roommate moving out because you don't have any coping strategies yet.
  • Your time to blossom and find other weirdos like yourself, except it turns out even the weirdos don't want to know you.
  • Discovering that you are crazy in your first year of college and then having to figure out how to navigate this country's broken mental health system while crazy.
  • Maintaining totally symmetrical stimulus on the left and right sides of your body.
  • Steamboat captains obsessed with navigating exactly down the middle of the Mississippi river.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+6ZDpzbm- ]]> Jim Stormdancer 41. Non-Euclidean Christianity https://topiclords.com/non-euclidean-christianity 6d7266ce-87d7-48b1-899d-302ba6686011 Mon, 03 Aug 2020 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: Ryan and Tyriq. We discuss fandoms you can't be a part of, pointless automatons, vegan jazz standards, grappling with your legacy, consistency of idiolect, and how to appeal to Gen Z so we don't get guillotined along with the boomers. 1:10:16 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Ryan is @RyanIkeComposer on Twitter and @RyanIkeAudio on Instagram and is probably not working on Skyrim 2?
  • Tyriq is FourbitFriday everywhere and really wants to finish Catacomb Kids.

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Clapping just because it's fun.
  • A trainwreck of three people talking over each other.
  • Being in a corridor and punching a weird alien.
  • Topic thirst.
  • Pokemon Snap making you even more of a pariah, if that's even possible.
  • Throwing apples at a Snorlax until it wakes up, like the shitty kid at the zoo.
  • A reverse body snatcher situation, where you're the only alien walking around in a skin suit.
  • Enjoying a game more if it doesn't involve collecting things.
  • Going to a free R&B concert every Sunday.
  • Going to a white small town Lutheran church which was boring and lame.
  • The organ coming in for particularly high-energy moments.
  • Somebody telling you that you are inches away from going to hell in the same basement that they just had an alcoholics anonymous meeting four seconds ago.
  • Having to worry about all your atheist friends going to hell.
  • Non-Euclidean Christianity.
  • Refusing to put anything in your ears to make the music be less music and going deaf for three days.
  • Big moving contraptions that resemble some sort of life form made out of shafts of PVC that wander along the beaches.
  • Having no purpose other than to exist.
  • Having made so many things extinct that you feel obligated to fill the ecosystem with weird new robots.
  • Sentient scooters running wild in New York City.
  • An adorable robot that can only roll forward and relies on passers-by to navigate.
  • Automations existing wholly outside of the human sphere.
  • A battlebot that got loose in the forest, a ramp rolling around the forest floor flipping over pinecones.
  • Wanting to believe that battlebots are real so badly that you forget that they have RC drivers.
  • A robot with a nuke or at least a flail.
  • A village of Rube Goldberg machines triggering each other forever.
  • Listing jazz standards except replacing one of the words in each title with "nooch."
  • One of those jokes that you construct for 17 people to get, but those 17 people really appreciate it.
  • Slipping in the shower and the last thought in your head before you die is the game of the jazz standard that makes the best nooch pun.
  • Not being sure whether an answer to your question is possible but proceeding under the assumption that it is.
  • Not allowing yourself to die until you know the answer.
  • Carrying around the answer to your life's question in your wallet so whenever you're ready to die you can read it and the paramedics will find you crumpled on the floor holding a note that just says "The Girl From Ipanoocha."
  • Just wanting to be a person who has a finished game.
  • Being driven to finish your current project so you can start the next one.
  • Realizing that just because you made a promise to finish one project, you're allowed to do other things too.
  • The projects that anyone can come in and finish vs. the projects that will die with you.
  • Not having the attention span to finish a big project unless you owe it to somebody.
  • Having some realizations right here on the podcast.
  • Convincing yourself that the thing you want to do can fit as part of your larger project.
  • Making music and never playing it for anybody because you're just making music because you enjoy it.
  • All the great artists of the past having had a record label or a church they were beholden to.
  • Michelangelo just deciding "this ceiling looks wack, I'm gonna fix it."
  • Thinking of your unpublished works as increasing your posthumous clout.
  • Putting your unpublished works in the attic because that's where people find posthumous art.
  • Selling one album to somebody in New Jersey in your twelve year music career.
  • Starting a patreon for people who want to support your main work and putting only unrelated works behind the patreon paywall.
  • Uploading yourself to the cloud and making jam games forever for an audience of nobody.
  • Adopting new phrases into your lexicon and letting other ones vanish.
  • Adopting the vocal mannerisms and vocabulary of people you hang out with.
  • Needing a phrase that means "diggity dang" but replacing each one after six months as you get sick of it.
  • Talking to someone who doesn't use "umm" or "like" and instead just pauses for the same amount of time, and never being sure if they're done talking or if they are about to headbutt you.
  • So-called "disfluencies" like "umm" and "uh" providing value to the listener in that they signify that the upcoming idea is more complex.
  • Why everyone talked so fast in the early 20th century.
  • Op-eds from Victorian times complaining about how young women are constantly saying "prithee" and "perchance" now.
  • Needing the revolution to start soon because the boomers are about to die of old age and then the guillotine falls squarely on Gen X.
  • Boomers writing op-eds about how Gen Z hates Gen X and millennials too, in hopes of inventing a generational divide that they're not on the wrong side of.
  • Giving the next generation instructions on how and why to destroy you.
  • The age segregation in the American school system resulting in most people knowing only people their own age for much of their lives.
  • Cultural generations shortening as cultural change speeds up, until twins born minutes apart are on opposite sides of a war.
  • Starting an Instagram to try to connect with the kids.
  • College costing either zero or infinity dollars depending on the letter your last name starts with.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Ryan is @RyanIkeComposer on Twitter and @RyanIkeAudio on Instagram and is probably not working on Skyrim 2?
  • Tyriq is FourbitFriday everywhere and really wants to finish Catacomb Kids.

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Clapping just because it's fun.
  • A trainwreck of three people talking over each other.
  • Being in a corridor and punching a weird alien.
  • Topic thirst.
  • Pokemon Snap making you even more of a pariah, if that's even possible.
  • Throwing apples at a Snorlax until it wakes up, like the shitty kid at the zoo.
  • A reverse body snatcher situation, where you're the only alien walking around in a skin suit.
  • Enjoying a game more if it doesn't involve collecting things.
  • Going to a free R&B concert every Sunday.
  • Going to a white small town Lutheran church which was boring and lame.
  • The organ coming in for particularly high-energy moments.
  • Somebody telling you that you are inches away from going to hell in the same basement that they just had an alcoholics anonymous meeting four seconds ago.
  • Having to worry about all your atheist friends going to hell.
  • Non-Euclidean Christianity.
  • Refusing to put anything in your ears to make the music be less music and going deaf for three days.
  • Big moving contraptions that resemble some sort of life form made out of shafts of PVC that wander along the beaches.
  • Having no purpose other than to exist.
  • Having made so many things extinct that you feel obligated to fill the ecosystem with weird new robots.
  • Sentient scooters running wild in New York City.
  • An adorable robot that can only roll forward and relies on passers-by to navigate.
  • Automations existing wholly outside of the human sphere.
  • A battlebot that got loose in the forest, a ramp rolling around the forest floor flipping over pinecones.
  • Wanting to believe that battlebots are real so badly that you forget that they have RC drivers.
  • A robot with a nuke or at least a flail.
  • A village of Rube Goldberg machines triggering each other forever.
  • Listing jazz standards except replacing one of the words in each title with "nooch."
  • One of those jokes that you construct for 17 people to get, but those 17 people really appreciate it.
  • Slipping in the shower and the last thought in your head before you die is the game of the jazz standard that makes the best nooch pun.
  • Not being sure whether an answer to your question is possible but proceeding under the assumption that it is.
  • Not allowing yourself to die until you know the answer.
  • Carrying around the answer to your life's question in your wallet so whenever you're ready to die you can read it and the paramedics will find you crumpled on the floor holding a note that just says "The Girl From Ipanoocha."
  • Just wanting to be a person who has a finished game.
  • Being driven to finish your current project so you can start the next one.
  • Realizing that just because you made a promise to finish one project, you're allowed to do other things too.
  • The projects that anyone can come in and finish vs. the projects that will die with you.
  • Not having the attention span to finish a big project unless you owe it to somebody.
  • Having some realizations right here on the podcast.
  • Convincing yourself that the thing you want to do can fit as part of your larger project.
  • Making music and never playing it for anybody because you're just making music because you enjoy it.
  • All the great artists of the past having had a record label or a church they were beholden to.
  • Michelangelo just deciding "this ceiling looks wack, I'm gonna fix it."
  • Thinking of your unpublished works as increasing your posthumous clout.
  • Putting your unpublished works in the attic because that's where people find posthumous art.
  • Selling one album to somebody in New Jersey in your twelve year music career.
  • Starting a patreon for people who want to support your main work and putting only unrelated works behind the patreon paywall.
  • Uploading yourself to the cloud and making jam games forever for an audience of nobody.
  • Adopting new phrases into your lexicon and letting other ones vanish.
  • Adopting the vocal mannerisms and vocabulary of people you hang out with.
  • Needing a phrase that means "diggity dang" but replacing each one after six months as you get sick of it.
  • Talking to someone who doesn't use "umm" or "like" and instead just pauses for the same amount of time, and never being sure if they're done talking or if they are about to headbutt you.
  • So-called "disfluencies" like "umm" and "uh" providing value to the listener in that they signify that the upcoming idea is more complex.
  • Why everyone talked so fast in the early 20th century.
  • Op-eds from Victorian times complaining about how young women are constantly saying "prithee" and "perchance" now.
  • Needing the revolution to start soon because the boomers are about to die of old age and then the guillotine falls squarely on Gen X.
  • Boomers writing op-eds about how Gen Z hates Gen X and millennials too, in hopes of inventing a generational divide that they're not on the wrong side of.
  • Giving the next generation instructions on how and why to destroy you.
  • The age segregation in the American school system resulting in most people knowing only people their own age for much of their lives.
  • Cultural generations shortening as cultural change speeds up, until twins born minutes apart are on opposite sides of a war.
  • Starting an Instagram to try to connect with the kids.
  • College costing either zero or infinity dollars depending on the letter your last name starts with.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Ryan is @RyanIkeComposer on Twitter and @RyanIkeAudio on Instagram and is probably not working on Skyrim 2?
  • Tyriq is FourbitFriday everywhere and really wants to finish Catacomb Kids.

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Clapping just because it's fun.
  • A trainwreck of three people talking over each other.
  • Being in a corridor and punching a weird alien.
  • Topic thirst.
  • Pokemon Snap making you even more of a pariah, if that's even possible.
  • Throwing apples at a Snorlax until it wakes up, like the shitty kid at the zoo.
  • A reverse body snatcher situation, where you're the only alien walking around in a skin suit.
  • Enjoying a game more if it doesn't involve collecting things.
  • Going to a free R&B concert every Sunday.
  • Going to a white small town Lutheran church which was boring and lame.
  • The organ coming in for particularly high-energy moments.
  • Somebody telling you that you are inches away from going to hell in the same basement that they just had an alcoholics anonymous meeting four seconds ago.
  • Having to worry about all your atheist friends going to hell.
  • Non-Euclidean Christianity.
  • Refusing to put anything in your ears to make the music be less music and going deaf for three days.
  • Big moving contraptions that resemble some sort of life form made out of shafts of PVC that wander along the beaches.
  • Having no purpose other than to exist.
  • Having made so many things extinct that you feel obligated to fill the ecosystem with weird new robots.
  • Sentient scooters running wild in New York City.
  • An adorable robot that can only roll forward and relies on passers-by to navigate.
  • Automations existing wholly outside of the human sphere.
  • A battlebot that got loose in the forest, a ramp rolling around the forest floor flipping over pinecones.
  • Wanting to believe that battlebots are real so badly that you forget that they have RC drivers.
  • A robot with a nuke or at least a flail.
  • A village of Rube Goldberg machines triggering each other forever.
  • Listing jazz standards except replacing one of the words in each title with "nooch."
  • One of those jokes that you construct for 17 people to get, but those 17 people really appreciate it.
  • Slipping in the shower and the last thought in your head before you die is the game of the jazz standard that makes the best nooch pun.
  • Not being sure whether an answer to your question is possible but proceeding under the assumption that it is.
  • Not allowing yourself to die until you know the answer.
  • Carrying around the answer to your life's question in your wallet so whenever you're ready to die you can read it and the paramedics will find you crumpled on the floor holding a note that just says "The Girl From Ipanoocha."
  • Just wanting to be a person who has a finished game.
  • Being driven to finish your current project so you can start the next one.
  • Realizing that just because you made a promise to finish one project, you're allowed to do other things too.
  • The projects that anyone can come in and finish vs. the projects that will die with you.
  • Not having the attention span to finish a big project unless you owe it to somebody.
  • Having some realizations right here on the podcast.
  • Convincing yourself that the thing you want to do can fit as part of your larger project.
  • Making music and never playing it for anybody because you're just making music because you enjoy it.
  • All the great artists of the past having had a record label or a church they were beholden to.
  • Michelangelo just deciding "this ceiling looks wack, I'm gonna fix it."
  • Thinking of your unpublished works as increasing your posthumous clout.
  • Putting your unpublished works in the attic because that's where people find posthumous art.
  • Selling one album to somebody in New Jersey in your twelve year music career.
  • Starting a patreon for people who want to support your main work and putting only unrelated works behind the patreon paywall.
  • Uploading yourself to the cloud and making jam games forever for an audience of nobody.
  • Adopting new phrases into your lexicon and letting other ones vanish.
  • Adopting the vocal mannerisms and vocabulary of people you hang out with.
  • Needing a phrase that means "diggity dang" but replacing each one after six months as you get sick of it.
  • Talking to someone who doesn't use "umm" or "like" and instead just pauses for the same amount of time, and never being sure if they're done talking or if they are about to headbutt you.
  • So-called "disfluencies" like "umm" and "uh" providing value to the listener in that they signify that the upcoming idea is more complex.
  • Why everyone talked so fast in the early 20th century.
  • Op-eds from Victorian times complaining about how young women are constantly saying "prithee" and "perchance" now.
  • Needing the revolution to start soon because the boomers are about to die of old age and then the guillotine falls squarely on Gen X.
  • Boomers writing op-eds about how Gen Z hates Gen X and millennials too, in hopes of inventing a generational divide that they're not on the wrong side of.
  • Giving the next generation instructions on how and why to destroy you.
  • The age segregation in the American school system resulting in most people knowing only people their own age for much of their lives.
  • Cultural generations shortening as cultural change speeds up, until twins born minutes apart are on opposite sides of a war.
  • Starting an Instagram to try to connect with the kids.
  • College costing either zero or infinity dollars depending on the letter your last name starts with.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+YVZvGI6Y ]]> Jim Stormdancer 40. I'll Show Them... I'll Invent Superman! https://topiclords.com/ill-show-them-ill-invent-superman 83062bf2-17f4-4aa4-99ca-7f2d01273643 Mon, 27 Jul 2020 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: John and Jesse. We discuss Canadian Heritage Minutes, working with people of a different skill level, 3D games being ugly, losing your old web sites, and the lost Willie Brown records. 1:11:27 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Being a playable character in Frog Fractions 2.
  • Ranking every Biker Chick from worst to best.
  • Regretting not having more Canadian Lords on the show.
  • Still making your TV PSAs even though nobody watches TV any more.
  • The big robotic articulating arm on the space shuttles.
  • That time Quebec was going to quit Canada.
  • A group shot with one teen of every ethnicity and gender configuration.
  • Reenacting the time someone told the creator of Superman that nobody will care about Superman.
  • Canada's revolting safety PSAs.
  • Hanging maple syrup for treason.
  • The biggest man-made explosion prior to the invention of nuclear weapons.
  • Celebrating the people who people who became successful after leaving your country.
  • Trading on the low-key anti-Americanism that is part of the Canadian national identity.
  • Taking a 45 minute break to worship the military.
  • Deciding that an idea is important and jamming it into the brain of millions of people.
  • Doing your best to enjoy yourself even though you are the worst musician at this particular jam session.
  • The high pressure world of game jamming.
  • The anxiety of waiting to be picked for a sports team.
  • Trusting your collaborators.
  • Not being a mentor so much as a friend who is around to answer questions.
  • Feeling like you failed your tutoring student but he was pleased and passed his course, so probably it was fine.
  • The ongoing war between R programmers and Python programmers.
  • Making your favorite programming language tolerable by totally replacing the syntax.
  • The smoke effect in Super Mario 64 looking like the MS Paint graffiti tool.
  • Goldeneye slappy hands.
  • The difficulty of going back to the video games of the Ugly Period.
  • Playing old video games on an unreasonably large CRT TV that you can't move by yourself.
  • Using modern technology to remove the texture filtering from Nintendo 64 games.
  • Conditioning gamers to desire the next step in graphical realism.
  • An epic story with three CDs full of cutscenes.
  • The old movie connoisseurs who want to see only the best examples of terrible stilted 1940s acting.
  • Making a video game in the mid 00s and having to support both SD and HD aspect ratios.
  • Moving your web site from Geocities to a cooler hosting provider in France who then stops hosting web sites because of a change in French law.
  • A gap in your personal history where no written records exist because they were on the early internet.
  • Letting a web site expire because you built it on old technology that your hosting provider now charges extra to support.
  • A government form asking you to remember every place you've lived for the past fifteen years.
  • The threshold for memory sticking.
  • What we would do with our missing histories if we had them.
  • Allowing yourself to remember a period in your life and then putting it in deep storage.
  • The object as a record of a moment.
  • Dredging the river near the defunct Paramount Records factory in Wisconsin, in hopes of finding pre-war blues records.
  • Old blues music now being exclusively the province of rich white boomers.
  • Writing and recording a fake Willie Brown song to prank record collectors.
  • Recording blues albums so you can sell phonograph cabinets to Black folks who can finally afford nice things.
  • Your record company being unable to obtain shellac during World War 2, so you go back to making chairs.
  • Training a neural network on old blues records to recreate a song using the single shard of the shattered shellac record you found.
  • Finding shards of different shattered shellac records that happen to fit together, and mashing them up.
  • Digitizing LPs by putting them on a flatbed scanner.
  • That time a news broadcast showed the QR code of someone's Bitcoin wallet on screen and someone immediately emptied it.
  • Cutting a new key based on a photograph of someone's key ring, when it's way easier to just break a window.
  • Recovering ancient room ambience by analyzing the striation on ancient pottery.
  • Breaking a code by beating the decryption key out of somebody and not having to read any cryptanalysis white papers.
  • Putting fake information about yourself on Spokeo as part of your personal ARG.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Being a playable character in Frog Fractions 2.
  • Ranking every Biker Chick from worst to best.
  • Regretting not having more Canadian Lords on the show.
  • Still making your TV PSAs even though nobody watches TV any more.
  • The big robotic articulating arm on the space shuttles.
  • That time Quebec was going to quit Canada.
  • A group shot with one teen of every ethnicity and gender configuration.
  • Reenacting the time someone told the creator of Superman that nobody will care about Superman.
  • Canada's revolting safety PSAs.
  • Hanging maple syrup for treason.
  • The biggest man-made explosion prior to the invention of nuclear weapons.
  • Celebrating the people who people who became successful after leaving your country.
  • Trading on the low-key anti-Americanism that is part of the Canadian national identity.
  • Taking a 45 minute break to worship the military.
  • Deciding that an idea is important and jamming it into the brain of millions of people.
  • Doing your best to enjoy yourself even though you are the worst musician at this particular jam session.
  • The high pressure world of game jamming.
  • The anxiety of waiting to be picked for a sports team.
  • Trusting your collaborators.
  • Not being a mentor so much as a friend who is around to answer questions.
  • Feeling like you failed your tutoring student but he was pleased and passed his course, so probably it was fine.
  • The ongoing war between R programmers and Python programmers.
  • Making your favorite programming language tolerable by totally replacing the syntax.
  • The smoke effect in Super Mario 64 looking like the MS Paint graffiti tool.
  • Goldeneye slappy hands.
  • The difficulty of going back to the video games of the Ugly Period.
  • Playing old video games on an unreasonably large CRT TV that you can't move by yourself.
  • Using modern technology to remove the texture filtering from Nintendo 64 games.
  • Conditioning gamers to desire the next step in graphical realism.
  • An epic story with three CDs full of cutscenes.
  • The old movie connoisseurs who want to see only the best examples of terrible stilted 1940s acting.
  • Making a video game in the mid 00s and having to support both SD and HD aspect ratios.
  • Moving your web site from Geocities to a cooler hosting provider in France who then stops hosting web sites because of a change in French law.
  • A gap in your personal history where no written records exist because they were on the early internet.
  • Letting a web site expire because you built it on old technology that your hosting provider now charges extra to support.
  • A government form asking you to remember every place you've lived for the past fifteen years.
  • The threshold for memory sticking.
  • What we would do with our missing histories if we had them.
  • Allowing yourself to remember a period in your life and then putting it in deep storage.
  • The object as a record of a moment.
  • Dredging the river near the defunct Paramount Records factory in Wisconsin, in hopes of finding pre-war blues records.
  • Old blues music now being exclusively the province of rich white boomers.
  • Writing and recording a fake Willie Brown song to prank record collectors.
  • Recording blues albums so you can sell phonograph cabinets to Black folks who can finally afford nice things.
  • Your record company being unable to obtain shellac during World War 2, so you go back to making chairs.
  • Training a neural network on old blues records to recreate a song using the single shard of the shattered shellac record you found.
  • Finding shards of different shattered shellac records that happen to fit together, and mashing them up.
  • Digitizing LPs by putting them on a flatbed scanner.
  • That time a news broadcast showed the QR code of someone's Bitcoin wallet on screen and someone immediately emptied it.
  • Cutting a new key based on a photograph of someone's key ring, when it's way easier to just break a window.
  • Recovering ancient room ambience by analyzing the striation on ancient pottery.
  • Breaking a code by beating the decryption key out of somebody and not having to read any cryptanalysis white papers.
  • Putting fake information about yourself on Spokeo as part of your personal ARG.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Being a playable character in Frog Fractions 2.
  • Ranking every Biker Chick from worst to best.
  • Regretting not having more Canadian Lords on the show.
  • Still making your TV PSAs even though nobody watches TV any more.
  • The big robotic articulating arm on the space shuttles.
  • That time Quebec was going to quit Canada.
  • A group shot with one teen of every ethnicity and gender configuration.
  • Reenacting the time someone told the creator of Superman that nobody will care about Superman.
  • Canada's revolting safety PSAs.
  • Hanging maple syrup for treason.
  • The biggest man-made explosion prior to the invention of nuclear weapons.
  • Celebrating the people who people who became successful after leaving your country.
  • Trading on the low-key anti-Americanism that is part of the Canadian national identity.
  • Taking a 45 minute break to worship the military.
  • Deciding that an idea is important and jamming it into the brain of millions of people.
  • Doing your best to enjoy yourself even though you are the worst musician at this particular jam session.
  • The high pressure world of game jamming.
  • The anxiety of waiting to be picked for a sports team.
  • Trusting your collaborators.
  • Not being a mentor so much as a friend who is around to answer questions.
  • Feeling like you failed your tutoring student but he was pleased and passed his course, so probably it was fine.
  • The ongoing war between R programmers and Python programmers.
  • Making your favorite programming language tolerable by totally replacing the syntax.
  • The smoke effect in Super Mario 64 looking like the MS Paint graffiti tool.
  • Goldeneye slappy hands.
  • The difficulty of going back to the video games of the Ugly Period.
  • Playing old video games on an unreasonably large CRT TV that you can't move by yourself.
  • Using modern technology to remove the texture filtering from Nintendo 64 games.
  • Conditioning gamers to desire the next step in graphical realism.
  • An epic story with three CDs full of cutscenes.
  • The old movie connoisseurs who want to see only the best examples of terrible stilted 1940s acting.
  • Making a video game in the mid 00s and having to support both SD and HD aspect ratios.
  • Moving your web site from Geocities to a cooler hosting provider in France who then stops hosting web sites because of a change in French law.
  • A gap in your personal history where no written records exist because they were on the early internet.
  • Letting a web site expire because you built it on old technology that your hosting provider now charges extra to support.
  • A government form asking you to remember every place you've lived for the past fifteen years.
  • The threshold for memory sticking.
  • What we would do with our missing histories if we had them.
  • Allowing yourself to remember a period in your life and then putting it in deep storage.
  • The object as a record of a moment.
  • Dredging the river near the defunct Paramount Records factory in Wisconsin, in hopes of finding pre-war blues records.
  • Old blues music now being exclusively the province of rich white boomers.
  • Writing and recording a fake Willie Brown song to prank record collectors.
  • Recording blues albums so you can sell phonograph cabinets to Black folks who can finally afford nice things.
  • Your record company being unable to obtain shellac during World War 2, so you go back to making chairs.
  • Training a neural network on old blues records to recreate a song using the single shard of the shattered shellac record you found.
  • Finding shards of different shattered shellac records that happen to fit together, and mashing them up.
  • Digitizing LPs by putting them on a flatbed scanner.
  • That time a news broadcast showed the QR code of someone's Bitcoin wallet on screen and someone immediately emptied it.
  • Cutting a new key based on a photograph of someone's key ring, when it's way easier to just break a window.
  • Recovering ancient room ambience by analyzing the striation on ancient pottery.
  • Breaking a code by beating the decryption key out of somebody and not having to read any cryptanalysis white papers.
  • Putting fake information about yourself on Spokeo as part of your personal ARG.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+--WahF2a ]]> Jim Stormdancer 39. A Delicious Mushball https://topiclords.com/a-delicious-mushball 528841ca-99a7-4824-b596-04f9263d1961 Mon, 20 Jul 2020 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: Shane and Nathan. We discuss Beforeigners, curating your child's entertainment so they grow up with good taste, watching someone do Sudoku, taking care of children vs. taking care of pets, jobs game designers could find after they leave game dev, and the history of changing worldviews. 1:08:03 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Beforeigners (Norwegian TV show about refugees from different historical periods showing up in present-day)
  • Curating your child's entertainment so they grow up with good taste
  • I spent half an hour watching someone solve a Sudoku and it was amazing
  • Brandon asks: "Taking care of children vs taking care of pets"
  • Other jobs game designers would do well performing, after they leave game dev
  • History of changing worldviews -- not just Darwin, but things like the Big Bang and Continental Drift were originally seen as crackpot fringe theories

Microtopics:

  • Saying your names at the beginning of the podcast and activating your wonder twin powers.
  • Quality inventive gameplay-driven entertainment.
  • Doing an earnest plug for once.
  • Figuring out how to make games for someone other than gamers.
  • Your game dev heroes being in their fifties and chasing success they had in their twenties.
  • Taking a vow of poverty and annoying off your wife and child.
  • Needing to find a patron because your art is not commercially viable.
  • No longer having your finger on the pulse of indie games.
  • Assuming the internet will be all over a particular TV series but somehow there are not endless memes about it.
  • Vikings apparating into modern Oslo and and solving a murder mystery.
  • The show about Vikings solving a modern-day murder mystery somehow not incorporating The Immigrant Song.
  • The American remake of Beforeigners where it's still about vikings so the protagonists can be white.
  • Finding out that a game is only four hours long and asking if it could be two hours instead.
  • Introducing video games to your child in order of release so they develop a taste for the classics.
  • Figuring out how to introduce your child to the Internet without ruining them.
  • Installing an internet proxy to protect your child from depraved porn by replacing it with videos of normal people having normal sex.
  • Today's teens playing Bushido Blade and discovering that it has a pocket sand button.
  • The classic game history situations.
  • Wanting your child to like all the hobbies you think are boring.
  • Watching a man repeatedly astonish himself at his own ability to solve a puzzle.
  • Feeling like you are in conversation with the puzzle designer.
  • Watching a movie over and over again.
  • Taking the smallest possible step when a problem seems impossible.
  • One of those Master Class videos if the person was discovering that they were a master while making the video.
  • A five year old taking the family car to California to buy a Lamborghini with the $3 in his pocket.
  • Feeling your family tree stretching out forwards into the future and behind you into the past.
  • Watching your child grow agency and opinions and knowing it's your responsibility to shape them.
  • You and the cat enjoying each other's company while the cat doesn't die.
  • Your kid doing something bad and everybody looking at you.
  • Cheering when your child goes down the stairs correctly.
  • Game design teaching you to see the world as systems.
  • Studying economics at an academic level and feeling like you're turning our game design skills inside out.
  • Trying to convince people outside of game development that being a game developer has taught you anything meaningful.
  • Being failed up to a level design role because anyone can scrub out a tile map.
  • Level designers getting more respect when it started requiring technical chops.
  • Needing a web page and getting your nephew to do it rather than paying an expensive consultant, because frankly 99% of people can't tell the difference.
  • Trying to write your own CSS renderer because you don't want to just make it a web page.
  • Trying to convince your friends that you were once a big shot in the game dev world.
  • The Societate Jesu having an incredible faction progression.
  • Giving people progressively cooler titles instead of raises.
  • Getting an extra year of being a priest before you die.
  • Doing a cool thing while you're alone and getting bummed out that nobody saw it.
  • Trying to throw fruits and vegetables as close as possible to the ceiling without actually hitting it.
  • Hating doing marketing so much that you invent a project where the whole point is that it's a secret and you'll never promote it.
  • How South America kind of fits right into Africa.
  • Hypothesizing continental drift and the scientific community telling you to fuck right off.
  • The lost continent of Lemuria.
  • Fringe scientific theories only gaining traction when existing scientists die.
  • Taking comfort in the fact that how people in the past were wrong but what we believe now is definitely correct and we'll never have to change our minds.
  • Being presented with contrary evidence and dying on the spot.
  • The most delicious bolus.
  • Eating cookie dough rather than ruining it by putting it in the oven.
  • The variety of textures and flavors of drinking milk and then eating cookies. (Not dipping the cookies in milk.)
  • The worldview shift that leads you to change your handle from Cynical Panda to Optimist Panda.
  • Playing Bomberman '93 with your nine year old and eventually having to explain to him that 93 is your dad's age.
  • An alternate-history Spock-with-a-goatee video game console.
  • Living in your house for 30 years and suddenly discovering three additional rooms.
  • Buying a NES and SNES classic even though you've been playing those games in emulation since the 90s.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Beforeigners (Norwegian TV show about refugees from different historical periods showing up in present-day)
  • Curating your child's entertainment so they grow up with good taste
  • I spent half an hour watching someone solve a Sudoku and it was amazing
  • Brandon asks: "Taking care of children vs taking care of pets"
  • Other jobs game designers would do well performing, after they leave game dev
  • History of changing worldviews -- not just Darwin, but things like the Big Bang and Continental Drift were originally seen as crackpot fringe theories

Microtopics:

  • Saying your names at the beginning of the podcast and activating your wonder twin powers.
  • Quality inventive gameplay-driven entertainment.
  • Doing an earnest plug for once.
  • Figuring out how to make games for someone other than gamers.
  • Your game dev heroes being in their fifties and chasing success they had in their twenties.
  • Taking a vow of poverty and annoying off your wife and child.
  • Needing to find a patron because your art is not commercially viable.
  • No longer having your finger on the pulse of indie games.
  • Assuming the internet will be all over a particular TV series but somehow there are not endless memes about it.
  • Vikings apparating into modern Oslo and and solving a murder mystery.
  • The show about Vikings solving a modern-day murder mystery somehow not incorporating The Immigrant Song.
  • The American remake of Beforeigners where it's still about vikings so the protagonists can be white.
  • Finding out that a game is only four hours long and asking if it could be two hours instead.
  • Introducing video games to your child in order of release so they develop a taste for the classics.
  • Figuring out how to introduce your child to the Internet without ruining them.
  • Installing an internet proxy to protect your child from depraved porn by replacing it with videos of normal people having normal sex.
  • Today's teens playing Bushido Blade and discovering that it has a pocket sand button.
  • The classic game history situations.
  • Wanting your child to like all the hobbies you think are boring.
  • Watching a man repeatedly astonish himself at his own ability to solve a puzzle.
  • Feeling like you are in conversation with the puzzle designer.
  • Watching a movie over and over again.
  • Taking the smallest possible step when a problem seems impossible.
  • One of those Master Class videos if the person was discovering that they were a master while making the video.
  • A five year old taking the family car to California to buy a Lamborghini with the $3 in his pocket.
  • Feeling your family tree stretching out forwards into the future and behind you into the past.
  • Watching your child grow agency and opinions and knowing it's your responsibility to shape them.
  • You and the cat enjoying each other's company while the cat doesn't die.
  • Your kid doing something bad and everybody looking at you.
  • Cheering when your child goes down the stairs correctly.
  • Game design teaching you to see the world as systems.
  • Studying economics at an academic level and feeling like you're turning our game design skills inside out.
  • Trying to convince people outside of game development that being a game developer has taught you anything meaningful.
  • Being failed up to a level design role because anyone can scrub out a tile map.
  • Level designers getting more respect when it started requiring technical chops.
  • Needing a web page and getting your nephew to do it rather than paying an expensive consultant, because frankly 99% of people can't tell the difference.
  • Trying to write your own CSS renderer because you don't want to just make it a web page.
  • Trying to convince your friends that you were once a big shot in the game dev world.
  • The Societate Jesu having an incredible faction progression.
  • Giving people progressively cooler titles instead of raises.
  • Getting an extra year of being a priest before you die.
  • Doing a cool thing while you're alone and getting bummed out that nobody saw it.
  • Trying to throw fruits and vegetables as close as possible to the ceiling without actually hitting it.
  • Hating doing marketing so much that you invent a project where the whole point is that it's a secret and you'll never promote it.
  • How South America kind of fits right into Africa.
  • Hypothesizing continental drift and the scientific community telling you to fuck right off.
  • The lost continent of Lemuria.
  • Fringe scientific theories only gaining traction when existing scientists die.
  • Taking comfort in the fact that how people in the past were wrong but what we believe now is definitely correct and we'll never have to change our minds.
  • Being presented with contrary evidence and dying on the spot.
  • The most delicious bolus.
  • Eating cookie dough rather than ruining it by putting it in the oven.
  • The variety of textures and flavors of drinking milk and then eating cookies. (Not dipping the cookies in milk.)
  • The worldview shift that leads you to change your handle from Cynical Panda to Optimist Panda.
  • Playing Bomberman '93 with your nine year old and eventually having to explain to him that 93 is your dad's age.
  • An alternate-history Spock-with-a-goatee video game console.
  • Living in your house for 30 years and suddenly discovering three additional rooms.
  • Buying a NES and SNES classic even though you've been playing those games in emulation since the 90s.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

  • Beforeigners (Norwegian TV show about refugees from different historical periods showing up in present-day)
  • Curating your child's entertainment so they grow up with good taste
  • I spent half an hour watching someone solve a Sudoku and it was amazing
  • Brandon asks: "Taking care of children vs taking care of pets"
  • Other jobs game designers would do well performing, after they leave game dev
  • History of changing worldviews -- not just Darwin, but things like the Big Bang and Continental Drift were originally seen as crackpot fringe theories

Microtopics:

  • Saying your names at the beginning of the podcast and activating your wonder twin powers.
  • Quality inventive gameplay-driven entertainment.
  • Doing an earnest plug for once.
  • Figuring out how to make games for someone other than gamers.
  • Your game dev heroes being in their fifties and chasing success they had in their twenties.
  • Taking a vow of poverty and annoying off your wife and child.
  • Needing to find a patron because your art is not commercially viable.
  • No longer having your finger on the pulse of indie games.
  • Assuming the internet will be all over a particular TV series but somehow there are not endless memes about it.
  • Vikings apparating into modern Oslo and and solving a murder mystery.
  • The show about Vikings solving a modern-day murder mystery somehow not incorporating The Immigrant Song.
  • The American remake of Beforeigners where it's still about vikings so the protagonists can be white.
  • Finding out that a game is only four hours long and asking if it could be two hours instead.
  • Introducing video games to your child in order of release so they develop a taste for the classics.
  • Figuring out how to introduce your child to the Internet without ruining them.
  • Installing an internet proxy to protect your child from depraved porn by replacing it with videos of normal people having normal sex.
  • Today's teens playing Bushido Blade and discovering that it has a pocket sand button.
  • The classic game history situations.
  • Wanting your child to like all the hobbies you think are boring.
  • Watching a man repeatedly astonish himself at his own ability to solve a puzzle.
  • Feeling like you are in conversation with the puzzle designer.
  • Watching a movie over and over again.
  • Taking the smallest possible step when a problem seems impossible.
  • One of those Master Class videos if the person was discovering that they were a master while making the video.
  • A five year old taking the family car to California to buy a Lamborghini with the $3 in his pocket.
  • Feeling your family tree stretching out forwards into the future and behind you into the past.
  • Watching your child grow agency and opinions and knowing it's your responsibility to shape them.
  • You and the cat enjoying each other's company while the cat doesn't die.
  • Your kid doing something bad and everybody looking at you.
  • Cheering when your child goes down the stairs correctly.
  • Game design teaching you to see the world as systems.
  • Studying economics at an academic level and feeling like you're turning our game design skills inside out.
  • Trying to convince people outside of game development that being a game developer has taught you anything meaningful.
  • Being failed up to a level design role because anyone can scrub out a tile map.
  • Level designers getting more respect when it started requiring technical chops.
  • Needing a web page and getting your nephew to do it rather than paying an expensive consultant, because frankly 99% of people can't tell the difference.
  • Trying to write your own CSS renderer because you don't want to just make it a web page.
  • Trying to convince your friends that you were once a big shot in the game dev world.
  • The Societate Jesu having an incredible faction progression.
  • Giving people progressively cooler titles instead of raises.
  • Getting an extra year of being a priest before you die.
  • Doing a cool thing while you're alone and getting bummed out that nobody saw it.
  • Trying to throw fruits and vegetables as close as possible to the ceiling without actually hitting it.
  • Hating doing marketing so much that you invent a project where the whole point is that it's a secret and you'll never promote it.
  • How South America kind of fits right into Africa.
  • Hypothesizing continental drift and the scientific community telling you to fuck right off.
  • The lost continent of Lemuria.
  • Fringe scientific theories only gaining traction when existing scientists die.
  • Taking comfort in the fact that how people in the past were wrong but what we believe now is definitely correct and we'll never have to change our minds.
  • Being presented with contrary evidence and dying on the spot.
  • The most delicious bolus.
  • Eating cookie dough rather than ruining it by putting it in the oven.
  • The variety of textures and flavors of drinking milk and then eating cookies. (Not dipping the cookies in milk.)
  • The worldview shift that leads you to change your handle from Cynical Panda to Optimist Panda.
  • Playing Bomberman '93 with your nine year old and eventually having to explain to him that 93 is your dad's age.
  • An alternate-history Spock-with-a-goatee video game console.
  • Living in your house for 30 years and suddenly discovering three additional rooms.
  • Buying a NES and SNES classic even though you've been playing those games in emulation since the 90s.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+3MjMJXZ_ ]]> Jim Stormdancer 38. Inside the Atomic Purple Man https://topiclords.com/inside-the-atomic-purple-man 84c1d474-676e-4d67-ab4a-8bb623ab81b9 Mon, 13 Jul 2020 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: Nathalie and Rachel. We discuss horse-sized ridable animals, depicting dinosaurs as giant birds, daylight savings time abuse in speed runs, hands-free browsing, upgrading yourself, putting a dog in a video game that you can't pet, the cool S, whether it's okay to name something you're about to eat, and terrible foods from your childhood. 56:11 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Living in the same city all your life.
  • Migrating your physical co-working space to a virtual co-working space.
  • Splashing around in your artwork.
  • A horse-sized great Dane that you ride around.
  • How human civilization would have been different if early man rode giant chickens rather than horses.
  • The most testosterone-filled Saturday morning cartoon available.
  • Transforming into a buff confident cat when it's time to save the day.
  • Chicken dressage.
  • Whether Poland has unicorn chickens, and if so, why didn't they put them in The Witcher.
  • Your giant chicken companion laying a giant egg and staring at you expectantly until you eat the egg.
  • Chilling out and eating bugs and vegetable scraps.
  • Having a pair of pliers for a face.
  • The stupendous cowardice of Steven Spielberg refusing to add feathers to the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.
  • Just how fluffy velociraptors would have to become in order to be considered birbs.
  • Velociraptors having been about the size of a turkey.
  • Being eaten by an adorable bird and hugging it from the inside.
  • Whether Pom Pom is about the size of a beach ball or about the size of a shoggoth.
  • Sitting on Pom Pom like a pilates ball, and whether he'd be into that.
  • An extremely clever abuse of our cultural understanding of time.
  • Making a video game in zero hours.
  • Preferring tools maintained by small communities.
  • Making a replacement for Flash without understanding why people like Flash.
  • Really giving touchscreens the business.
  • Whether or not touchscreens will be as good as mice and keyboards if we give them another thirty years to evolve.
  • Noticing a grease print where your ear touched your phone's screen during a call.
  • Keyboards also being excellent mirrors for how filthy humans are.
  • Your hands feeling like they're doing something meaningful when you touch your letters.
  • Starting a hobby where you touch mysterious peppers.
  • The Schmidt Sting Pain Index making certain stings sound delightful.
  • The sting of the digger bee: almost pleasant, a lover just bit your earlobe a little too hard.
  • The sting of the sweat bee: light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.
  • The sting of the bullet ant: pure, intense, brilliant pain, like walking over charcoal with a three-inch nail embedded in your heel.
  • Whether the Bullet Ant is named so because their sting makes you feel like you've been shot.
  • Couches, where humans go.
  • Detaching your stuffy nose and leaving it at home until your cold gets better.
  • Trying to hide from your employer that you don't need to sleep.
  • Whether or not you'd sleep on purpose even if you didn't have to.
  • Switching from food and beverages to photosynthesis.
  • The Atomic Purple boy showing off his pineal gland in anatomy class.
  • Whether dogs think other dogs are good dogs.
  • Putting a dog and a petting interface in your game so that you can pet the dog.
  • Not knowing how to draw but still being able to draw the cool S.
  • A fantastically evocative way to talk about typing.
  • Trying to think of something clever and alliterative to say.
  • Re-learning how to make the "Itsy Bitsy Spider" hand motion when you're 40 years old.
  • Getting some sourdough starter in a mason jar and immediately shattering the jar on the ground before you even get the chance to name it "Gerald."
  • Counting the number of bubbles that your sourdough starter makes.
  • Eating only a small piece of Gerald each time you make a loaf of sourdough.
  • The yeast throwing a party while the dough rises.
  • An alternate reality where it's seen as good and noble to eat the dead.
  • Feeding your prospective lover your body hair.
  • Adding an egg to ramen so that it's technically healthy.
  • A parrot that needs to be convinced to eat fruit.
  • The simplest carb and fat blast you can imagine.
  • Feeding your parrot whatever it is you're eating for dinner.
  • Hot dogs and grapes being the perfect size to choke to death on.
  • Salad Minus The D.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Living in the same city all your life.
  • Migrating your physical co-working space to a virtual co-working space.
  • Splashing around in your artwork.
  • A horse-sized great Dane that you ride around.
  • How human civilization would have been different if early man rode giant chickens rather than horses.
  • The most testosterone-filled Saturday morning cartoon available.
  • Transforming into a buff confident cat when it's time to save the day.
  • Chicken dressage.
  • Whether Poland has unicorn chickens, and if so, why didn't they put them in The Witcher.
  • Your giant chicken companion laying a giant egg and staring at you expectantly until you eat the egg.
  • Chilling out and eating bugs and vegetable scraps.
  • Having a pair of pliers for a face.
  • The stupendous cowardice of Steven Spielberg refusing to add feathers to the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.
  • Just how fluffy velociraptors would have to become in order to be considered birbs.
  • Velociraptors having been about the size of a turkey.
  • Being eaten by an adorable bird and hugging it from the inside.
  • Whether Pom Pom is about the size of a beach ball or about the size of a shoggoth.
  • Sitting on Pom Pom like a pilates ball, and whether he'd be into that.
  • An extremely clever abuse of our cultural understanding of time.
  • Making a video game in zero hours.
  • Preferring tools maintained by small communities.
  • Making a replacement for Flash without understanding why people like Flash.
  • Really giving touchscreens the business.
  • Whether or not touchscreens will be as good as mice and keyboards if we give them another thirty years to evolve.
  • Noticing a grease print where your ear touched your phone's screen during a call.
  • Keyboards also being excellent mirrors for how filthy humans are.
  • Your hands feeling like they're doing something meaningful when you touch your letters.
  • Starting a hobby where you touch mysterious peppers.
  • The Schmidt Sting Pain Index making certain stings sound delightful.
  • The sting of the digger bee: almost pleasant, a lover just bit your earlobe a little too hard.
  • The sting of the sweat bee: light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.
  • The sting of the bullet ant: pure, intense, brilliant pain, like walking over charcoal with a three-inch nail embedded in your heel.
  • Whether the Bullet Ant is named so because their sting makes you feel like you've been shot.
  • Couches, where humans go.
  • Detaching your stuffy nose and leaving it at home until your cold gets better.
  • Trying to hide from your employer that you don't need to sleep.
  • Whether or not you'd sleep on purpose even if you didn't have to.
  • Switching from food and beverages to photosynthesis.
  • The Atomic Purple boy showing off his pineal gland in anatomy class.
  • Whether dogs think other dogs are good dogs.
  • Putting a dog and a petting interface in your game so that you can pet the dog.
  • Not knowing how to draw but still being able to draw the cool S.
  • A fantastically evocative way to talk about typing.
  • Trying to think of something clever and alliterative to say.
  • Re-learning how to make the "Itsy Bitsy Spider" hand motion when you're 40 years old.
  • Getting some sourdough starter in a mason jar and immediately shattering the jar on the ground before you even get the chance to name it "Gerald."
  • Counting the number of bubbles that your sourdough starter makes.
  • Eating only a small piece of Gerald each time you make a loaf of sourdough.
  • The yeast throwing a party while the dough rises.
  • An alternate reality where it's seen as good and noble to eat the dead.
  • Feeding your prospective lover your body hair.
  • Adding an egg to ramen so that it's technically healthy.
  • A parrot that needs to be convinced to eat fruit.
  • The simplest carb and fat blast you can imagine.
  • Feeding your parrot whatever it is you're eating for dinner.
  • Hot dogs and grapes being the perfect size to choke to death on.
  • Salad Minus The D.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Living in the same city all your life.
  • Migrating your physical co-working space to a virtual co-working space.
  • Splashing around in your artwork.
  • A horse-sized great Dane that you ride around.
  • How human civilization would have been different if early man rode giant chickens rather than horses.
  • The most testosterone-filled Saturday morning cartoon available.
  • Transforming into a buff confident cat when it's time to save the day.
  • Chicken dressage.
  • Whether Poland has unicorn chickens, and if so, why didn't they put them in The Witcher.
  • Your giant chicken companion laying a giant egg and staring at you expectantly until you eat the egg.
  • Chilling out and eating bugs and vegetable scraps.
  • Having a pair of pliers for a face.
  • The stupendous cowardice of Steven Spielberg refusing to add feathers to the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.
  • Just how fluffy velociraptors would have to become in order to be considered birbs.
  • Velociraptors having been about the size of a turkey.
  • Being eaten by an adorable bird and hugging it from the inside.
  • Whether Pom Pom is about the size of a beach ball or about the size of a shoggoth.
  • Sitting on Pom Pom like a pilates ball, and whether he'd be into that.
  • An extremely clever abuse of our cultural understanding of time.
  • Making a video game in zero hours.
  • Preferring tools maintained by small communities.
  • Making a replacement for Flash without understanding why people like Flash.
  • Really giving touchscreens the business.
  • Whether or not touchscreens will be as good as mice and keyboards if we give them another thirty years to evolve.
  • Noticing a grease print where your ear touched your phone's screen during a call.
  • Keyboards also being excellent mirrors for how filthy humans are.
  • Your hands feeling like they're doing something meaningful when you touch your letters.
  • Starting a hobby where you touch mysterious peppers.
  • The Schmidt Sting Pain Index making certain stings sound delightful.
  • The sting of the digger bee: almost pleasant, a lover just bit your earlobe a little too hard.
  • The sting of the sweat bee: light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.
  • The sting of the bullet ant: pure, intense, brilliant pain, like walking over charcoal with a three-inch nail embedded in your heel.
  • Whether the Bullet Ant is named so because their sting makes you feel like you've been shot.
  • Couches, where humans go.
  • Detaching your stuffy nose and leaving it at home until your cold gets better.
  • Trying to hide from your employer that you don't need to sleep.
  • Whether or not you'd sleep on purpose even if you didn't have to.
  • Switching from food and beverages to photosynthesis.
  • The Atomic Purple boy showing off his pineal gland in anatomy class.
  • Whether dogs think other dogs are good dogs.
  • Putting a dog and a petting interface in your game so that you can pet the dog.
  • Not knowing how to draw but still being able to draw the cool S.
  • A fantastically evocative way to talk about typing.
  • Trying to think of something clever and alliterative to say.
  • Re-learning how to make the "Itsy Bitsy Spider" hand motion when you're 40 years old.
  • Getting some sourdough starter in a mason jar and immediately shattering the jar on the ground before you even get the chance to name it "Gerald."
  • Counting the number of bubbles that your sourdough starter makes.
  • Eating only a small piece of Gerald each time you make a loaf of sourdough.
  • The yeast throwing a party while the dough rises.
  • An alternate reality where it's seen as good and noble to eat the dead.
  • Feeding your prospective lover your body hair.
  • Adding an egg to ramen so that it's technically healthy.
  • A parrot that needs to be convinced to eat fruit.
  • The simplest carb and fat blast you can imagine.
  • Feeding your parrot whatever it is you're eating for dinner.
  • Hot dogs and grapes being the perfect size to choke to death on.
  • Salad Minus The D.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+7IkmjrEO ]]> Jim Stormdancer 37. Fela Cooties https://topiclords.com/fela-cooties c7bb6f7d-7b92-4c5c-b77e-e9c64fb461c2 Mon, 06 Jul 2020 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: Jay and Chris. We discuss songwriting constraint decks, the advantages of CD-ROMs over web sites, bananas, sample choices in 90s techno, the genres available in the ID3 tag, and everything2.com. 59:36 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Adding even more Internet to your fake Internet.
  • Hearing someone pronounce their own name wrong in a YouTube video and shaking your fist at the screen.
  • Changing your name because you're just looking to make your way.
  • The multitude of four-letter B and K names in the demo scene.
  • Promoting your album because hopefully you'll finish it before this episode is out.
  • Dreaming your friend a horrible job history.
  • A pair of tongs with a sticker on them saying "Super Atheist."
  • The guy in the pharmacy whose only job is to not give people their prescription.
  • Getting your doctorate for free because you're dating a doctor.
  • Forgetting all about Peter Schmidt.
  • Buying chord pack after chord pack and eventually giving up and buying the ultra-rare G11/F# card from a collector.
  • An app that scans your Spotify play list and generates a list of constraints to write songs under.
  • A team of researchers writing the perfect song by surveying listeners about what elements of music that they like the most.
  • A team of researchers writing the worst possible song by surveying listeners about what elements of music that they hate the most.
  • A rap opera about life on the farm with a children's choir singing holiday and corporate jingles.
  • Breaking your jaw harp because your jaw is just too strong.
  • People hating different kinds of music in 2020 from what they hated in the 1990s.
  • The identity of the accordion player on the floppy disks Jim dropped as he was arrested by time travelers.
  • Round Robin Key Clicks From A Skype Call.
  • Waiting for CD-ROMs in the 90s being faster than modern web pages.
  • Clicking on Miles Davis' face and reading about Hard Bop.
  • A topic you are interested enough in to buy a CD-ROM about it.
  • Jobs paying well until investors realize they're money-losers.
  • One person's perspective on how all electronic music breaks down.
  • Information that is thorough and well-presented memetically dominating over information that is arguably more accurate but less accessible.
  • Finding a guide to obscure music genres and worrying that they might be magic spells.
  • Eating a bunch of weird bananas and deciding that all bananas basically taste the same.
  • Militant banana forums rallying the troops to take down Jim's boring banana opinions.
  • Recognizing differences between apple cultivars.
  • Growing up eating the Red Delicious because it's red and delicious.
  • Which apple cultivar Snow White ate.
  • The apple core as a social construct.
  • Why the Japanese don't like cheese when your toddler proves that it's super easy to develop a taste for cheese.
  • Seagulls eating rats now that humans are out of the way.
  • Whether or not the Ballz Directors Cut for 3DO OST is homophobic.
  • Analyzing the music theory behind the Ballz Directors Cut for 3DO OST.
  • Getting a band together and playing a song you all remember poorly and that's it, that's the album.
  • Having heard 20 seconds of a comedy song and not needing to listen to the remaining five minutes.
  • Trying to make fun of a clown.
  • Writing questions that generate techno samples in response.
  • All protocol and format technology decisions being made by 14 year olds.
  • Whether or not Chanson is a portmanteau of Chiptune Hanson.
  • The difference between Afrobeat and Afrobeats.
  • Not adding Shoegaze to Winamp until 2010.
  • A pre-Wikipedia attempt to invent the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.
  • Making your web that is a sequel to your previous web site, so you give it the same name but add a 2.
  • Wikipedia except that instead of an editorial voice it has a poem about a pomegranate.
  • The most popular chord progressions staying about the same for the past 20 years.
  • Sliding an open chord up the neck and leaving the open strings where they are.
  • There probably being a music theory name for the musical trick you like to do.
  • Counting in binary while meditating because if you just count in decimal you'll lose track when you think of something else.
  • A classic web app where you submit a form and the server generates the HTML you will see in response.
  • Accidentally lording it over someone.
  • Having a fake thing you fool yourself into believing is important so you can procrastinate doing it and get the real work done.
  • How to abbreviate Murder Hornet Keeper into a demo scene handle.
  • Learning German from Wolfenstein 3D.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Adding even more Internet to your fake Internet.
  • Hearing someone pronounce their own name wrong in a YouTube video and shaking your fist at the screen.
  • Changing your name because you're just looking to make your way.
  • The multitude of four-letter B and K names in the demo scene.
  • Promoting your album because hopefully you'll finish it before this episode is out.
  • Dreaming your friend a horrible job history.
  • A pair of tongs with a sticker on them saying "Super Atheist."
  • The guy in the pharmacy whose only job is to not give people their prescription.
  • Getting your doctorate for free because you're dating a doctor.
  • Forgetting all about Peter Schmidt.
  • Buying chord pack after chord pack and eventually giving up and buying the ultra-rare G11/F# card from a collector.
  • An app that scans your Spotify play list and generates a list of constraints to write songs under.
  • A team of researchers writing the perfect song by surveying listeners about what elements of music that they like the most.
  • A team of researchers writing the worst possible song by surveying listeners about what elements of music that they hate the most.
  • A rap opera about life on the farm with a children's choir singing holiday and corporate jingles.
  • Breaking your jaw harp because your jaw is just too strong.
  • People hating different kinds of music in 2020 from what they hated in the 1990s.
  • The identity of the accordion player on the floppy disks Jim dropped as he was arrested by time travelers.
  • Round Robin Key Clicks From A Skype Call.
  • Waiting for CD-ROMs in the 90s being faster than modern web pages.
  • Clicking on Miles Davis' face and reading about Hard Bop.
  • A topic you are interested enough in to buy a CD-ROM about it.
  • Jobs paying well until investors realize they're money-losers.
  • One person's perspective on how all electronic music breaks down.
  • Information that is thorough and well-presented memetically dominating over information that is arguably more accurate but less accessible.
  • Finding a guide to obscure music genres and worrying that they might be magic spells.
  • Eating a bunch of weird bananas and deciding that all bananas basically taste the same.
  • Militant banana forums rallying the troops to take down Jim's boring banana opinions.
  • Recognizing differences between apple cultivars.
  • Growing up eating the Red Delicious because it's red and delicious.
  • Which apple cultivar Snow White ate.
  • The apple core as a social construct.
  • Why the Japanese don't like cheese when your toddler proves that it's super easy to develop a taste for cheese.
  • Seagulls eating rats now that humans are out of the way.
  • Whether or not the Ballz Directors Cut for 3DO OST is homophobic.
  • Analyzing the music theory behind the Ballz Directors Cut for 3DO OST.
  • Getting a band together and playing a song you all remember poorly and that's it, that's the album.
  • Having heard 20 seconds of a comedy song and not needing to listen to the remaining five minutes.
  • Trying to make fun of a clown.
  • Writing questions that generate techno samples in response.
  • All protocol and format technology decisions being made by 14 year olds.
  • Whether or not Chanson is a portmanteau of Chiptune Hanson.
  • The difference between Afrobeat and Afrobeats.
  • Not adding Shoegaze to Winamp until 2010.
  • A pre-Wikipedia attempt to invent the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.
  • Making your web that is a sequel to your previous web site, so you give it the same name but add a 2.
  • Wikipedia except that instead of an editorial voice it has a poem about a pomegranate.
  • The most popular chord progressions staying about the same for the past 20 years.
  • Sliding an open chord up the neck and leaving the open strings where they are.
  • There probably being a music theory name for the musical trick you like to do.
  • Counting in binary while meditating because if you just count in decimal you'll lose track when you think of something else.
  • A classic web app where you submit a form and the server generates the HTML you will see in response.
  • Accidentally lording it over someone.
  • Having a fake thing you fool yourself into believing is important so you can procrastinate doing it and get the real work done.
  • How to abbreviate Murder Hornet Keeper into a demo scene handle.
  • Learning German from Wolfenstein 3D.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Adding even more Internet to your fake Internet.
  • Hearing someone pronounce their own name wrong in a YouTube video and shaking your fist at the screen.
  • Changing your name because you're just looking to make your way.
  • The multitude of four-letter B and K names in the demo scene.
  • Promoting your album because hopefully you'll finish it before this episode is out.
  • Dreaming your friend a horrible job history.
  • A pair of tongs with a sticker on them saying "Super Atheist."
  • The guy in the pharmacy whose only job is to not give people their prescription.
  • Getting your doctorate for free because you're dating a doctor.
  • Forgetting all about Peter Schmidt.
  • Buying chord pack after chord pack and eventually giving up and buying the ultra-rare G11/F# card from a collector.
  • An app that scans your Spotify play list and generates a list of constraints to write songs under.
  • A team of researchers writing the perfect song by surveying listeners about what elements of music that they like the most.
  • A team of researchers writing the worst possible song by surveying listeners about what elements of music that they hate the most.
  • A rap opera about life on the farm with a children's choir singing holiday and corporate jingles.
  • Breaking your jaw harp because your jaw is just too strong.
  • People hating different kinds of music in 2020 from what they hated in the 1990s.
  • The identity of the accordion player on the floppy disks Jim dropped as he was arrested by time travelers.
  • Round Robin Key Clicks From A Skype Call.
  • Waiting for CD-ROMs in the 90s being faster than modern web pages.
  • Clicking on Miles Davis' face and reading about Hard Bop.
  • A topic you are interested enough in to buy a CD-ROM about it.
  • Jobs paying well until investors realize they're money-losers.
  • One person's perspective on how all electronic music breaks down.
  • Information that is thorough and well-presented memetically dominating over information that is arguably more accurate but less accessible.
  • Finding a guide to obscure music genres and worrying that they might be magic spells.
  • Eating a bunch of weird bananas and deciding that all bananas basically taste the same.
  • Militant banana forums rallying the troops to take down Jim's boring banana opinions.
  • Recognizing differences between apple cultivars.
  • Growing up eating the Red Delicious because it's red and delicious.
  • Which apple cultivar Snow White ate.
  • The apple core as a social construct.
  • Why the Japanese don't like cheese when your toddler proves that it's super easy to develop a taste for cheese.
  • Seagulls eating rats now that humans are out of the way.
  • Whether or not the Ballz Directors Cut for 3DO OST is homophobic.
  • Analyzing the music theory behind the Ballz Directors Cut for 3DO OST.
  • Getting a band together and playing a song you all remember poorly and that's it, that's the album.
  • Having heard 20 seconds of a comedy song and not needing to listen to the remaining five minutes.
  • Trying to make fun of a clown.
  • Writing questions that generate techno samples in response.
  • All protocol and format technology decisions being made by 14 year olds.
  • Whether or not Chanson is a portmanteau of Chiptune Hanson.
  • The difference between Afrobeat and Afrobeats.
  • Not adding Shoegaze to Winamp until 2010.
  • A pre-Wikipedia attempt to invent the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.
  • Making your web that is a sequel to your previous web site, so you give it the same name but add a 2.
  • Wikipedia except that instead of an editorial voice it has a poem about a pomegranate.
  • The most popular chord progressions staying about the same for the past 20 years.
  • Sliding an open chord up the neck and leaving the open strings where they are.
  • There probably being a music theory name for the musical trick you like to do.
  • Counting in binary while meditating because if you just count in decimal you'll lose track when you think of something else.
  • A classic web app where you submit a form and the server generates the HTML you will see in response.
  • Accidentally lording it over someone.
  • Having a fake thing you fool yourself into believing is important so you can procrastinate doing it and get the real work done.
  • How to abbreviate Murder Hornet Keeper into a demo scene handle.
  • Learning German from Wolfenstein 3D.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+BPV8Cizb ]]> Jim Stormdancer 36. Look at an Octopus While You Shower https://topiclords.com/look-at-an-octopus-while-you-shower 7e278179-f2ed-41b4-a7a7-5a7187f5570c Mon, 29 Jun 2020 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer The show we recorded live at Duckfest 2020! Lords: Jenni and April. We discuss befriending ravens, replacing taxes with a PVP mobile game, consenting on behalf of your clone, ways to die in a puzzle game, sea monster bathroom bathroom decorations, wrangling badgers, babies climbing on furniture, and the White-Spotted Clearwing. 51:14 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

This is the show we recorded live at Duckfest 2020! http://duckfeed.tv/duckfest

Lords:

Topics:

  • Befriending ravens
  • What if part of the government apparatus was a PVP mobile game & billionaires willingly sent in tax dollars in exchange for units to pwn everyone else but the game was balanced so they only had a tiny edge?
  • Clone ethics: can you consent on behalf of your clone? What about a different person with the same name as you?
  • Larry asks: "Best ways to meet your own death as part of a puzzle or game"
  • My sister is doing her bathroom sea-monster themed; does anyone have unsolicited recommendations for sea monster bathroom amenities?
  • The badger story.
  • How do we survive from when we learn to climb on the furniture to when we get scared of climbing on the furniture?
  • The white-spotted clearwing

Microtopics:

  • Plugging an activity nobody but you can do.
  • Eating trash out of the dumpster and fighting over dead skunk carcasses.
  • Recognizing jerks and being rude to them.
  • Feeding tiny bento boxes to nearby ravens.
  • Mobbing random strangers to demand a tiny bento box.
  • The ravens constantly pooping on your shoulders but it's ok because it's just your work shirt.
  • Meeting your shitting on things quota.
  • Befriending Odin's ravens and becoming Odin.
  • Being the one who operates firearms in this relationship.
  • Replacing taxes with a mobile game targeted at Elon Musk.
  • Elon Musk being defeated at a PVP mobile game by a seven year old in a Tinkerbell outfit and deciding he doesn't like the game any more so the company forms a team whose only job is to lose to Elon Musk.
  • Creating a GoFundMe to pay your rent while you save the world.
  • Whether Jenni is the raven or the game designer in her relationship.
  • Sharing DNA implying shared consent.
  • Explaining parents.
  • How consent works with conjoined twins.
  • All three hosts having a different interpretation of the listener's question.
  • Puzzles created in the before-times where if you solve them you see the face of god and then die.
  • Cool ways to die in video games.
  • A game that is great for people who have a lot of free time and don't have a child.
  • Requesting ideas for sea monster themed bathroom decorations and getting answers six months after you finished remodeling you bathroom.
  • A plunger shaped like a tentacle where the plunging part is just a huge suction cup.
  • All of your failings as a wife being forgiven by your ability to use a firearm.
  • Not knowing how to safely use a gun so you just kick it down the hill.
  • Guarding the coast from sea monsters but not being allowed to talk about it.
  • A shower curtain shaped like an octopus so you can paint a negative space octopus out of water all over the bathroom.
  • Failing to plan your sister's bachelorette party and she's still waiting to get married eight years later.
  • A COVID-19 Zoom Bachelorette Party eight years in the making.
  • Having a Mukbang instead of a bachelorette party.
  • Whether or not a pirate is a sea monster.
  • Marrying an indie game developer for the money.
  • Messaging your future husband on OkCupid because he thinks about Arnold Schwarzenegger wiping his ass a lot.
  • Being a piler of things.
  • Owing your wife a game about trolls but first having to train your son to be a game artist.
  • Skipping a step and having your child draw directly on the fridge.
  • Being asked to do something about the badger bothering people on the beach and making a joke about the badger badgering people.
  • The consequences of your county's limited animal control budget.
  • A badger hiding underneath the bench in the changing room.
  • Catching a badger with a dog catching stick even though it's not a dog at all.
  • Having a badger at the end of a stick.
  • What they call closets in the park district.
  • Riding in the back of a pickup truck wrangling a badger between your legs.
  • Carrying around a rattlesnake from a picnic area by putting it in a garbage bag and the snake repeatedly biting through the bag with venom dripping through the holes.
  • Restraining a snake inside your esophagus until you're ready to release it.
  • Latin being way older than the girl scouts.
  • Moving a snake with a steam shovel.
  • Only moving snakes where if you accidentally slice them in half they become two snakes.
  • A toddler smashing a drinking glass on the kitchen floor and saying "mess!"
  • Your child's milestones coming with commensurate levels of danger.
  • Hitting the ground with 1/10ths of the force as your dad when you fall.
  • Talking only about animals on this episode and the animal expert heckling you from the Discord.
  • The glass-like quality of a White Spotted Clearwing becoming revealed against the dappled light of the forest understory.
  • Making sure your transparent wings don't reflect light by covering them with nanopillars.
  • The butterfly not getting a cut of your profits from the invention you based on its wing design.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

This is the show we recorded live at Duckfest 2020! http://duckfeed.tv/duckfest

Lords:

Topics:

  • Befriending ravens
  • What if part of the government apparatus was a PVP mobile game & billionaires willingly sent in tax dollars in exchange for units to pwn everyone else but the game was balanced so they only had a tiny edge?
  • Clone ethics: can you consent on behalf of your clone? What about a different person with the same name as you?
  • Larry asks: "Best ways to meet your own death as part of a puzzle or game"
  • My sister is doing her bathroom sea-monster themed; does anyone have unsolicited recommendations for sea monster bathroom amenities?
  • The badger story.
  • How do we survive from when we learn to climb on the furniture to when we get scared of climbing on the furniture?
  • The white-spotted clearwing

Microtopics:

  • Plugging an activity nobody but you can do.
  • Eating trash out of the dumpster and fighting over dead skunk carcasses.
  • Recognizing jerks and being rude to them.
  • Feeding tiny bento boxes to nearby ravens.
  • Mobbing random strangers to demand a tiny bento box.
  • The ravens constantly pooping on your shoulders but it's ok because it's just your work shirt.
  • Meeting your shitting on things quota.
  • Befriending Odin's ravens and becoming Odin.
  • Being the one who operates firearms in this relationship.
  • Replacing taxes with a mobile game targeted at Elon Musk.
  • Elon Musk being defeated at a PVP mobile game by a seven year old in a Tinkerbell outfit and deciding he doesn't like the game any more so the company forms a team whose only job is to lose to Elon Musk.
  • Creating a GoFundMe to pay your rent while you save the world.
  • Whether Jenni is the raven or the game designer in her relationship.
  • Sharing DNA implying shared consent.
  • Explaining parents.
  • How consent works with conjoined twins.
  • All three hosts having a different interpretation of the listener's question.
  • Puzzles created in the before-times where if you solve them you see the face of god and then die.
  • Cool ways to die in video games.
  • A game that is great for people who have a lot of free time and don't have a child.
  • Requesting ideas for sea monster themed bathroom decorations and getting answers six months after you finished remodeling you bathroom.
  • A plunger shaped like a tentacle where the plunging part is just a huge suction cup.
  • All of your failings as a wife being forgiven by your ability to use a firearm.
  • Not knowing how to safely use a gun so you just kick it down the hill.
  • Guarding the coast from sea monsters but not being allowed to talk about it.
  • A shower curtain shaped like an octopus so you can paint a negative space octopus out of water all over the bathroom.
  • Failing to plan your sister's bachelorette party and she's still waiting to get married eight years later.
  • A COVID-19 Zoom Bachelorette Party eight years in the making.
  • Having a Mukbang instead of a bachelorette party.
  • Whether or not a pirate is a sea monster.
  • Marrying an indie game developer for the money.
  • Messaging your future husband on OkCupid because he thinks about Arnold Schwarzenegger wiping his ass a lot.
  • Being a piler of things.
  • Owing your wife a game about trolls but first having to train your son to be a game artist.
  • Skipping a step and having your child draw directly on the fridge.
  • Being asked to do something about the badger bothering people on the beach and making a joke about the badger badgering people.
  • The consequences of your county's limited animal control budget.
  • A badger hiding underneath the bench in the changing room.
  • Catching a badger with a dog catching stick even though it's not a dog at all.
  • Having a badger at the end of a stick.
  • What they call closets in the park district.
  • Riding in the back of a pickup truck wrangling a badger between your legs.
  • Carrying around a rattlesnake from a picnic area by putting it in a garbage bag and the snake repeatedly biting through the bag with venom dripping through the holes.
  • Restraining a snake inside your esophagus until you're ready to release it.
  • Latin being way older than the girl scouts.
  • Moving a snake with a steam shovel.
  • Only moving snakes where if you accidentally slice them in half they become two snakes.
  • A toddler smashing a drinking glass on the kitchen floor and saying "mess!"
  • Your child's milestones coming with commensurate levels of danger.
  • Hitting the ground with 1/10ths of the force as your dad when you fall.
  • Talking only about animals on this episode and the animal expert heckling you from the Discord.
  • The glass-like quality of a White Spotted Clearwing becoming revealed against the dappled light of the forest understory.
  • Making sure your transparent wings don't reflect light by covering them with nanopillars.
  • The butterfly not getting a cut of your profits from the invention you based on its wing design.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

This is the show we recorded live at Duckfest 2020! http://duckfeed.tv/duckfest

Lords:

Topics:

  • Befriending ravens
  • What if part of the government apparatus was a PVP mobile game & billionaires willingly sent in tax dollars in exchange for units to pwn everyone else but the game was balanced so they only had a tiny edge?
  • Clone ethics: can you consent on behalf of your clone? What about a different person with the same name as you?
  • Larry asks: "Best ways to meet your own death as part of a puzzle or game"
  • My sister is doing her bathroom sea-monster themed; does anyone have unsolicited recommendations for sea monster bathroom amenities?
  • The badger story.
  • How do we survive from when we learn to climb on the furniture to when we get scared of climbing on the furniture?
  • The white-spotted clearwing

Microtopics:

  • Plugging an activity nobody but you can do.
  • Eating trash out of the dumpster and fighting over dead skunk carcasses.
  • Recognizing jerks and being rude to them.
  • Feeding tiny bento boxes to nearby ravens.
  • Mobbing random strangers to demand a tiny bento box.
  • The ravens constantly pooping on your shoulders but it's ok because it's just your work shirt.
  • Meeting your shitting on things quota.
  • Befriending Odin's ravens and becoming Odin.
  • Being the one who operates firearms in this relationship.
  • Replacing taxes with a mobile game targeted at Elon Musk.
  • Elon Musk being defeated at a PVP mobile game by a seven year old in a Tinkerbell outfit and deciding he doesn't like the game any more so the company forms a team whose only job is to lose to Elon Musk.
  • Creating a GoFundMe to pay your rent while you save the world.
  • Whether Jenni is the raven or the game designer in her relationship.
  • Sharing DNA implying shared consent.
  • Explaining parents.
  • How consent works with conjoined twins.
  • All three hosts having a different interpretation of the listener's question.
  • Puzzles created in the before-times where if you solve them you see the face of god and then die.
  • Cool ways to die in video games.
  • A game that is great for people who have a lot of free time and don't have a child.
  • Requesting ideas for sea monster themed bathroom decorations and getting answers six months after you finished remodeling you bathroom.
  • A plunger shaped like a tentacle where the plunging part is just a huge suction cup.
  • All of your failings as a wife being forgiven by your ability to use a firearm.
  • Not knowing how to safely use a gun so you just kick it down the hill.
  • Guarding the coast from sea monsters but not being allowed to talk about it.
  • A shower curtain shaped like an octopus so you can paint a negative space octopus out of water all over the bathroom.
  • Failing to plan your sister's bachelorette party and she's still waiting to get married eight years later.
  • A COVID-19 Zoom Bachelorette Party eight years in the making.
  • Having a Mukbang instead of a bachelorette party.
  • Whether or not a pirate is a sea monster.
  • Marrying an indie game developer for the money.
  • Messaging your future husband on OkCupid because he thinks about Arnold Schwarzenegger wiping his ass a lot.
  • Being a piler of things.
  • Owing your wife a game about trolls but first having to train your son to be a game artist.
  • Skipping a step and having your child draw directly on the fridge.
  • Being asked to do something about the badger bothering people on the beach and making a joke about the badger badgering people.
  • The consequences of your county's limited animal control budget.
  • A badger hiding underneath the bench in the changing room.
  • Catching a badger with a dog catching stick even though it's not a dog at all.
  • Having a badger at the end of a stick.
  • What they call closets in the park district.
  • Riding in the back of a pickup truck wrangling a badger between your legs.
  • Carrying around a rattlesnake from a picnic area by putting it in a garbage bag and the snake repeatedly biting through the bag with venom dripping through the holes.
  • Restraining a snake inside your esophagus until you're ready to release it.
  • Latin being way older than the girl scouts.
  • Moving a snake with a steam shovel.
  • Only moving snakes where if you accidentally slice them in half they become two snakes.
  • A toddler smashing a drinking glass on the kitchen floor and saying "mess!"
  • Your child's milestones coming with commensurate levels of danger.
  • Hitting the ground with 1/10ths of the force as your dad when you fall.
  • Talking only about animals on this episode and the animal expert heckling you from the Discord.
  • The glass-like quality of a White Spotted Clearwing becoming revealed against the dappled light of the forest understory.
  • Making sure your transparent wings don't reflect light by covering them with nanopillars.
  • The butterfly not getting a cut of your profits from the invention you based on its wing design.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+z3lrREMl ]]> Jim Stormdancer 35. Nick Cave's Meow Mix Murder Ballads https://topiclords.com/nick-caves-meow-mix-murder-ballads d48ef29e-8883-4ed3-a24f-6285bb90fd89 Mon, 22 Jun 2020 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: Erica and Dan. We discuss unreliable narrators in pop music, everything bad about where we live, toddlers remembering everything you don't want them to, simulating people's voices, ants, and Pokemon Stay. 1:12:33 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Staying inside and definitely being totally sane.
  • Being on the Hypnospace Outlaw soundtrack but not being Seepage.
  • Driving people away from you and writing songs about how they're gone.
  • Betraying the concept of music by putting it in advertising.
  • Singing about the fish you're going to eat.
  • Listening to music for a decade before realizing it's horrifying.
  • Being deeply obsessed with an art form others explicitly disregard.
  • An eight year old singing a pop song about sex.
  • Assuming that a song written in the first person is autobiographical.
  • Writing a song about cheating on your wife and everybody assuming you're endorsing it so you write a last verse that's like "/s"
  • The last verse of "I Want Your Sex" being about how George Michael doesn't really want your sex.
  • Putting together a choreographed dance routine to "I Want Your Sex" at summer camp.
  • Whether Dad Jr. has anything to say about it.
  • An angry crowd proclaiming that Jesus is a slut.
  • The Robert Browning poem where he evidently thought "twat" is an item of nun's clothing and rhymes with "bat."
  • Describing the white whale as obsidian and ebony because you don't have the internet and can't look up what obsidian means.
  • A beautiful desert with amazing food where you have scorpions in your house.
  • A microwasp stinging your hand leaving a patch of cell death that lasts for almost a year.
  • The dirt being impossible to dig in so there are no storm drains and when the monsoon comes the water rises up to your windshield.
  • The front door's doorknob being too hot to touch in the summer.
  • The process of getting into a car when it's 118 degrees outside.
  • Sedona being much more livable than most of Arizona because it's in the mountains.
  • Growing up in Oklahoma where it's incredibly hot during the day and cools down two degrees at night.
  • Going tide pooling where there are dozens of species of snail that
  • A subtropical jungle with stunningly beautiful coral reefs where all the wildlife is lethal.
  • Going tide pooling where dozens of species of cone snails are extremely interested in your death.
  • A fish that looks like a rock in a stream that will kill you if you step on it.
  • Encountering a dozen lethally venomous animals every time you go to the beach.
  • Living in the Bay Area where we have programmers.
  • Resenting programmers but getting along with them really well.
  • Getting a tech job and having to practice your self-compassion.
  • Repping the city in the world with the biggest economic disparity.
  • The power company shutting your power off because they can't be bothered to keep the lines clear of trees.
  • Discerning the different kinds of plants that are burning in a brushfire by smell.
  • Being performatively off-put by brushfire smoke that smells different from brushfire smoke in your hometown.
  • Cheese scarcity in Okinawa.
  • Whether or not you're allowed to bring suitcases full of cheese into Japan.
  • If Gandalf really liked cheese.
  • The Scottish guy who sells cheese in Okinawa for $100 per kilogram.
  • Long grain rice connoisseurs in Japan importing basmati from California.
  • Being unable to export farming and food preparation processes because your are getting assistance from local microbiomes.
  • Japanese laws restricting rice imports so they don't corrupt the local rice microbes, but they don't give a shit about the cheese.
  • RNA sequencing the brine from a batch of pickles that turned out really well.
  • Celebrating the 69,000th generation of your yeast culture by posting "nice" on Twitter.
  • Toddlers learning a lesson far too well.
  • Telling each other stories from the spreadsheet of all the ways machine learning has failed.
  • Breaking land speed records by falling over really fast.
  • Reassembling Barack Obama's audiobook into a story about a demigod with the head of a dog who recreates the world after the apocalypse.
  • Reality now being more ridiculous than your satire from four years ago.
  • Spending a lot of time trying to identify birds.
  • The basis for discussion of whether something is something or isn't something else.
  • Convincing the people with the money that your field of study will eventually help somebody some day.
  • The growing sense in the world that maybe not all progress is good and maybe we should skip out on some knowledge.
  • The number of lines of code it takes to destroy society.
  • Doing science because there is a trust that some day someone will want to know your results.
  • Wanting a place to have a conversation about anything other than Elon Musk's kids name.
  • Starting a podcast and never talking about anything depressing.
  • Trying to transplant your neighbor's leafcutter ants into your own yard because you are a field biologist who can't go outside.
  • Being waylaid by ant stings because you are allergic to wasps.
  • Ants biting you with their mandibles, but only to hang on so they can sting you like wasps because they're technically in the wasp family.
  • Ants being around long after humans are gone.
  • Filling an ant colony with lead because humans will get more value out of a model of an ant colony than the ants get out of being alive.
  • Filling an ant colony with jello and having a tasty dessert.
  • Ending up in an ant lab and doing ant things.
  • Studying the effects of climate change on Pokemon.
  • The exchange rate between Pokecoins and Bitcoins.
  • Coordinating Pokemon Go raids on Nextdoor.
  • Asking Pokemon Go players if they're registered to vote and they answer that they're doing a raid when that doesn't tell you whether or not they're registered to vote at all.
  • Trying to avoid the Audubon society losers at the ornithology conference.
  • Birds permitting you to identify them even though they could easily fly away.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Staying inside and definitely being totally sane.
  • Being on the Hypnospace Outlaw soundtrack but not being Seepage.
  • Driving people away from you and writing songs about how they're gone.
  • Betraying the concept of music by putting it in advertising.
  • Singing about the fish you're going to eat.
  • Listening to music for a decade before realizing it's horrifying.
  • Being deeply obsessed with an art form others explicitly disregard.
  • An eight year old singing a pop song about sex.
  • Assuming that a song written in the first person is autobiographical.
  • Writing a song about cheating on your wife and everybody assuming you're endorsing it so you write a last verse that's like "/s"
  • The last verse of "I Want Your Sex" being about how George Michael doesn't really want your sex.
  • Putting together a choreographed dance routine to "I Want Your Sex" at summer camp.
  • Whether Dad Jr. has anything to say about it.
  • An angry crowd proclaiming that Jesus is a slut.
  • The Robert Browning poem where he evidently thought "twat" is an item of nun's clothing and rhymes with "bat."
  • Describing the white whale as obsidian and ebony because you don't have the internet and can't look up what obsidian means.
  • A beautiful desert with amazing food where you have scorpions in your house.
  • A microwasp stinging your hand leaving a patch of cell death that lasts for almost a year.
  • The dirt being impossible to dig in so there are no storm drains and when the monsoon comes the water rises up to your windshield.
  • The front door's doorknob being too hot to touch in the summer.
  • The process of getting into a car when it's 118 degrees outside.
  • Sedona being much more livable than most of Arizona because it's in the mountains.
  • Growing up in Oklahoma where it's incredibly hot during the day and cools down two degrees at night.
  • Going tide pooling where there are dozens of species of snail that
  • A subtropical jungle with stunningly beautiful coral reefs where all the wildlife is lethal.
  • Going tide pooling where dozens of species of cone snails are extremely interested in your death.
  • A fish that looks like a rock in a stream that will kill you if you step on it.
  • Encountering a dozen lethally venomous animals every time you go to the beach.
  • Living in the Bay Area where we have programmers.
  • Resenting programmers but getting along with them really well.
  • Getting a tech job and having to practice your self-compassion.
  • Repping the city in the world with the biggest economic disparity.
  • The power company shutting your power off because they can't be bothered to keep the lines clear of trees.
  • Discerning the different kinds of plants that are burning in a brushfire by smell.
  • Being performatively off-put by brushfire smoke that smells different from brushfire smoke in your hometown.
  • Cheese scarcity in Okinawa.
  • Whether or not you're allowed to bring suitcases full of cheese into Japan.
  • If Gandalf really liked cheese.
  • The Scottish guy who sells cheese in Okinawa for $100 per kilogram.
  • Long grain rice connoisseurs in Japan importing basmati from California.
  • Being unable to export farming and food preparation processes because your are getting assistance from local microbiomes.
  • Japanese laws restricting rice imports so they don't corrupt the local rice microbes, but they don't give a shit about the cheese.
  • RNA sequencing the brine from a batch of pickles that turned out really well.
  • Celebrating the 69,000th generation of your yeast culture by posting "nice" on Twitter.
  • Toddlers learning a lesson far too well.
  • Telling each other stories from the spreadsheet of all the ways machine learning has failed.
  • Breaking land speed records by falling over really fast.
  • Reassembling Barack Obama's audiobook into a story about a demigod with the head of a dog who recreates the world after the apocalypse.
  • Reality now being more ridiculous than your satire from four years ago.
  • Spending a lot of time trying to identify birds.
  • The basis for discussion of whether something is something or isn't something else.
  • Convincing the people with the money that your field of study will eventually help somebody some day.
  • The growing sense in the world that maybe not all progress is good and maybe we should skip out on some knowledge.
  • The number of lines of code it takes to destroy society.
  • Doing science because there is a trust that some day someone will want to know your results.
  • Wanting a place to have a conversation about anything other than Elon Musk's kids name.
  • Starting a podcast and never talking about anything depressing.
  • Trying to transplant your neighbor's leafcutter ants into your own yard because you are a field biologist who can't go outside.
  • Being waylaid by ant stings because you are allergic to wasps.
  • Ants biting you with their mandibles, but only to hang on so they can sting you like wasps because they're technically in the wasp family.
  • Ants being around long after humans are gone.
  • Filling an ant colony with lead because humans will get more value out of a model of an ant colony than the ants get out of being alive.
  • Filling an ant colony with jello and having a tasty dessert.
  • Ending up in an ant lab and doing ant things.
  • Studying the effects of climate change on Pokemon.
  • The exchange rate between Pokecoins and Bitcoins.
  • Coordinating Pokemon Go raids on Nextdoor.
  • Asking Pokemon Go players if they're registered to vote and they answer that they're doing a raid when that doesn't tell you whether or not they're registered to vote at all.
  • Trying to avoid the Audubon society losers at the ornithology conference.
  • Birds permitting you to identify them even though they could easily fly away.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Staying inside and definitely being totally sane.
  • Being on the Hypnospace Outlaw soundtrack but not being Seepage.
  • Driving people away from you and writing songs about how they're gone.
  • Betraying the concept of music by putting it in advertising.
  • Singing about the fish you're going to eat.
  • Listening to music for a decade before realizing it's horrifying.
  • Being deeply obsessed with an art form others explicitly disregard.
  • An eight year old singing a pop song about sex.
  • Assuming that a song written in the first person is autobiographical.
  • Writing a song about cheating on your wife and everybody assuming you're endorsing it so you write a last verse that's like "/s"
  • The last verse of "I Want Your Sex" being about how George Michael doesn't really want your sex.
  • Putting together a choreographed dance routine to "I Want Your Sex" at summer camp.
  • Whether Dad Jr. has anything to say about it.
  • An angry crowd proclaiming that Jesus is a slut.
  • The Robert Browning poem where he evidently thought "twat" is an item of nun's clothing and rhymes with "bat."
  • Describing the white whale as obsidian and ebony because you don't have the internet and can't look up what obsidian means.
  • A beautiful desert with amazing food where you have scorpions in your house.
  • A microwasp stinging your hand leaving a patch of cell death that lasts for almost a year.
  • The dirt being impossible to dig in so there are no storm drains and when the monsoon comes the water rises up to your windshield.
  • The front door's doorknob being too hot to touch in the summer.
  • The process of getting into a car when it's 118 degrees outside.
  • Sedona being much more livable than most of Arizona because it's in the mountains.
  • Growing up in Oklahoma where it's incredibly hot during the day and cools down two degrees at night.
  • Going tide pooling where there are dozens of species of snail that
  • A subtropical jungle with stunningly beautiful coral reefs where all the wildlife is lethal.
  • Going tide pooling where dozens of species of cone snails are extremely interested in your death.
  • A fish that looks like a rock in a stream that will kill you if you step on it.
  • Encountering a dozen lethally venomous animals every time you go to the beach.
  • Living in the Bay Area where we have programmers.
  • Resenting programmers but getting along with them really well.
  • Getting a tech job and having to practice your self-compassion.
  • Repping the city in the world with the biggest economic disparity.
  • The power company shutting your power off because they can't be bothered to keep the lines clear of trees.
  • Discerning the different kinds of plants that are burning in a brushfire by smell.
  • Being performatively off-put by brushfire smoke that smells different from brushfire smoke in your hometown.
  • Cheese scarcity in Okinawa.
  • Whether or not you're allowed to bring suitcases full of cheese into Japan.
  • If Gandalf really liked cheese.
  • The Scottish guy who sells cheese in Okinawa for $100 per kilogram.
  • Long grain rice connoisseurs in Japan importing basmati from California.
  • Being unable to export farming and food preparation processes because your are getting assistance from local microbiomes.
  • Japanese laws restricting rice imports so they don't corrupt the local rice microbes, but they don't give a shit about the cheese.
  • RNA sequencing the brine from a batch of pickles that turned out really well.
  • Celebrating the 69,000th generation of your yeast culture by posting "nice" on Twitter.
  • Toddlers learning a lesson far too well.
  • Telling each other stories from the spreadsheet of all the ways machine learning has failed.
  • Breaking land speed records by falling over really fast.
  • Reassembling Barack Obama's audiobook into a story about a demigod with the head of a dog who recreates the world after the apocalypse.
  • Reality now being more ridiculous than your satire from four years ago.
  • Spending a lot of time trying to identify birds.
  • The basis for discussion of whether something is something or isn't something else.
  • Convincing the people with the money that your field of study will eventually help somebody some day.
  • The growing sense in the world that maybe not all progress is good and maybe we should skip out on some knowledge.
  • The number of lines of code it takes to destroy society.
  • Doing science because there is a trust that some day someone will want to know your results.
  • Wanting a place to have a conversation about anything other than Elon Musk's kids name.
  • Starting a podcast and never talking about anything depressing.
  • Trying to transplant your neighbor's leafcutter ants into your own yard because you are a field biologist who can't go outside.
  • Being waylaid by ant stings because you are allergic to wasps.
  • Ants biting you with their mandibles, but only to hang on so they can sting you like wasps because they're technically in the wasp family.
  • Ants being around long after humans are gone.
  • Filling an ant colony with lead because humans will get more value out of a model of an ant colony than the ants get out of being alive.
  • Filling an ant colony with jello and having a tasty dessert.
  • Ending up in an ant lab and doing ant things.
  • Studying the effects of climate change on Pokemon.
  • The exchange rate between Pokecoins and Bitcoins.
  • Coordinating Pokemon Go raids on Nextdoor.
  • Asking Pokemon Go players if they're registered to vote and they answer that they're doing a raid when that doesn't tell you whether or not they're registered to vote at all.
  • Trying to avoid the Audubon society losers at the ornithology conference.
  • Birds permitting you to identify them even though they could easily fly away.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+od7qaJCQ ]]> Jim Stormdancer 34. We Don't Talk About Poop Stonehenge https://topiclords.com/we-dont-talk-about-poop-stonehenge 078f8b4f-af29-4111-a802-f93117aa65d2 Mon, 15 Jun 2020 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: Elena and Shannon. We discuss lucid or recurring dreams, the eight kinds of fun, our favorite Dewey Decimal System classification, being the guy with hats just in case you go bald, and plants. 1:08:31 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Not remembering what you were going to say about the topics you picked.
  • Finding a tabletop RPG system to support your supernatural teen romance.
  • A novel written by Tyra Banks that is basically Harry Potter but for supermodels.
  • Being aware that you're dreaming but not having control and just being annoyed that you have to spend so long in your fake life.
  • Dreaming about recording a podcast before waking up and recording the real world podcast and ending up with two podcasts.
  • Your dream friends being rude to you because you are rude to yourself.
  • Realizing you are in a dream and trying to convince your dream friends to do what you want but instead they convince you to do what they want because they will die as soon as you wake up.
  • Improving your dream friend's lives in your recurring Disneyland dream until they have the perfect day and you never wake up.
  • Careening off the cliff and going "zhoop" and uncrashing the car.
  • Improving your dream friends' princess dress-up game by leaving the room and observing them from the security room instead.
  • A creepy carnival in the hills that sometimes shows up.
  • Remembering eight dreams in ten years.
  • Jimmy Wales' appearing in your dream to ask for dream money to keep dream Wikipedia running.
  • The real reason why there's no etymological connection between Samhain and the minced oath "Sam Hill."
  • Poop Stonehenge.
  • Ranking the eight kinds of fun.
  • Everybody ranking submission/abnegation last when listing what they want out of a tabletop RPG.
  • Submitting yourself to a ritualized task and discovering the pleasures of being clockwork.
  • Deciding how you want to build your treehouse and then going to fight the moon.
  • Whether a DM describing an axe swing exceptionally well counts as sensory pleasure.
  • Listening to a lot of TTRPG podcasts but not playing a lot of TTRPGs yourself because who has the time and energy to organize it?
  • Agreeing to role play all the people who are missing from this D&D session and immediately drowning everyone, making everything a lot politically simpler.
  • Remembering everything your players say so you can role play a sapient bird who can only communicate by mimicking things it has heard.
  • Leaving the elf in the cart because if you take him out everyone will want to interrogate him and you don't want to bother RPing that hard.
  • Learning how to GM in LARPs where there are no NPCs and all you have to do is set up some plot hooks and then watch the players go wild.
  • Saying "you are in a shed" and thereby declaring yourself the GM.
  • Telling people in your RPG session that they're playing themselves and they're like "okay I boot up Animal Crossing."
  • Not being able to relate to your younger sister because she's too young to have used the Dewey Decimal System.
  • Describing all of human knowledge using only ten categories.
  • The Dewey Decimal System no longer having classifications for Mormonism or education of women.
  • 000-099 being the best Dewey Decimal classification because it has the books about computer programming and UFOs and the paranormal.
  • Where to find cute animal pictures under the Dewey Decimal System.
  • Being shown you how to find something with the Dewey Decimal Drawers and being like "why wouldn't you just walk around until you find it."
  • Recording an episode in the library because where better to find out about topics.
  • Libraries being wild and raucous places now that the libraries don't shush you.
  • Going to the library all the time because there are Pokemon there but never going inside because they come out to meet you.
  • Going four floors underground in complete silence and wondering if you can still hear.
  • Making sure nobody is in the library shelves you're about to move before turning that big metal wheel.
  • Going into an anechoic chamber and hearing your synapses firing.
  • Going into an anechoic chamber and hearing ground hum because you needed to plug in your laptop.
  • Amazing 3D sound scapes that you can't appreciate because your head is the wrong shape.
  • Making a game that induces panic attacks and deciding you want to make a less horrible experience next.
  • People who do actual night dives being less terrified when playing Subnautica.
  • Knowing a cool guy with hats and liking the hats.
  • Self medicating using hats.
  • A twelve year old girl with otherwise extremely thick hair wearing a hat being less suspicious than a middle aged cis man wearing a hat.
  • Growing a beard to make up for your bald spot because hopefully people will think your head is upside down.
  • The pros and cons of wearing wigs.
  • Sending a picture of yourself wearing a wig and colored contacts to your mom and she asks "I don't recognize that friend, who is she and why is she wearing that tacky wig and colored contacts?"
  • Whether or not plants are so good.
  • Knowing how far apart to put the holes but not knowing how many seeds to put in each hole and your bok choy all growing on top of one another.
  • Tiling your entire yard with garden planters so you can actually fit all the cabbage you planted.
  • Your friends going into the back yard and getting blasted with water by the device you rigged to deter neighbor cats from digging in your vegetable garden.
  • Beautiful white butterflies that are wrecking the shit out of your cabbages.
  • All the plants that taste good technically being cabbages.
  • Not being able to be mad at the squirrels when they eat your plants as soon as they sprout because that's also what you were going to do.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Not remembering what you were going to say about the topics you picked.
  • Finding a tabletop RPG system to support your supernatural teen romance.
  • A novel written by Tyra Banks that is basically Harry Potter but for supermodels.
  • Being aware that you're dreaming but not having control and just being annoyed that you have to spend so long in your fake life.
  • Dreaming about recording a podcast before waking up and recording the real world podcast and ending up with two podcasts.
  • Your dream friends being rude to you because you are rude to yourself.
  • Realizing you are in a dream and trying to convince your dream friends to do what you want but instead they convince you to do what they want because they will die as soon as you wake up.
  • Improving your dream friend's lives in your recurring Disneyland dream until they have the perfect day and you never wake up.
  • Careening off the cliff and going "zhoop" and uncrashing the car.
  • Improving your dream friends' princess dress-up game by leaving the room and observing them from the security room instead.
  • A creepy carnival in the hills that sometimes shows up.
  • Remembering eight dreams in ten years.
  • Jimmy Wales' appearing in your dream to ask for dream money to keep dream Wikipedia running.
  • The real reason why there's no etymological connection between Samhain and the minced oath "Sam Hill."
  • Poop Stonehenge.
  • Ranking the eight kinds of fun.
  • Everybody ranking submission/abnegation last when listing what they want out of a tabletop RPG.
  • Submitting yourself to a ritualized task and discovering the pleasures of being clockwork.
  • Deciding how you want to build your treehouse and then going to fight the moon.
  • Whether a DM describing an axe swing exceptionally well counts as sensory pleasure.
  • Listening to a lot of TTRPG podcasts but not playing a lot of TTRPGs yourself because who has the time and energy to organize it?
  • Agreeing to role play all the people who are missing from this D&D session and immediately drowning everyone, making everything a lot politically simpler.
  • Remembering everything your players say so you can role play a sapient bird who can only communicate by mimicking things it has heard.
  • Leaving the elf in the cart because if you take him out everyone will want to interrogate him and you don't want to bother RPing that hard.
  • Learning how to GM in LARPs where there are no NPCs and all you have to do is set up some plot hooks and then watch the players go wild.
  • Saying "you are in a shed" and thereby declaring yourself the GM.
  • Telling people in your RPG session that they're playing themselves and they're like "okay I boot up Animal Crossing."
  • Not being able to relate to your younger sister because she's too young to have used the Dewey Decimal System.
  • Describing all of human knowledge using only ten categories.
  • The Dewey Decimal System no longer having classifications for Mormonism or education of women.
  • 000-099 being the best Dewey Decimal classification because it has the books about computer programming and UFOs and the paranormal.
  • Where to find cute animal pictures under the Dewey Decimal System.
  • Being shown you how to find something with the Dewey Decimal Drawers and being like "why wouldn't you just walk around until you find it."
  • Recording an episode in the library because where better to find out about topics.
  • Libraries being wild and raucous places now that the libraries don't shush you.
  • Going to the library all the time because there are Pokemon there but never going inside because they come out to meet you.
  • Going four floors underground in complete silence and wondering if you can still hear.
  • Making sure nobody is in the library shelves you're about to move before turning that big metal wheel.
  • Going into an anechoic chamber and hearing your synapses firing.
  • Going into an anechoic chamber and hearing ground hum because you needed to plug in your laptop.
  • Amazing 3D sound scapes that you can't appreciate because your head is the wrong shape.
  • Making a game that induces panic attacks and deciding you want to make a less horrible experience next.
  • People who do actual night dives being less terrified when playing Subnautica.
  • Knowing a cool guy with hats and liking the hats.
  • Self medicating using hats.
  • A twelve year old girl with otherwise extremely thick hair wearing a hat being less suspicious than a middle aged cis man wearing a hat.
  • Growing a beard to make up for your bald spot because hopefully people will think your head is upside down.
  • The pros and cons of wearing wigs.
  • Sending a picture of yourself wearing a wig and colored contacts to your mom and she asks "I don't recognize that friend, who is she and why is she wearing that tacky wig and colored contacts?"
  • Whether or not plants are so good.
  • Knowing how far apart to put the holes but not knowing how many seeds to put in each hole and your bok choy all growing on top of one another.
  • Tiling your entire yard with garden planters so you can actually fit all the cabbage you planted.
  • Your friends going into the back yard and getting blasted with water by the device you rigged to deter neighbor cats from digging in your vegetable garden.
  • Beautiful white butterflies that are wrecking the shit out of your cabbages.
  • All the plants that taste good technically being cabbages.
  • Not being able to be mad at the squirrels when they eat your plants as soon as they sprout because that's also what you were going to do.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Not remembering what you were going to say about the topics you picked.
  • Finding a tabletop RPG system to support your supernatural teen romance.
  • A novel written by Tyra Banks that is basically Harry Potter but for supermodels.
  • Being aware that you're dreaming but not having control and just being annoyed that you have to spend so long in your fake life.
  • Dreaming about recording a podcast before waking up and recording the real world podcast and ending up with two podcasts.
  • Your dream friends being rude to you because you are rude to yourself.
  • Realizing you are in a dream and trying to convince your dream friends to do what you want but instead they convince you to do what they want because they will die as soon as you wake up.
  • Improving your dream friend's lives in your recurring Disneyland dream until they have the perfect day and you never wake up.
  • Careening off the cliff and going "zhoop" and uncrashing the car.
  • Improving your dream friends' princess dress-up game by leaving the room and observing them from the security room instead.
  • A creepy carnival in the hills that sometimes shows up.
  • Remembering eight dreams in ten years.
  • Jimmy Wales' appearing in your dream to ask for dream money to keep dream Wikipedia running.
  • The real reason why there's no etymological connection between Samhain and the minced oath "Sam Hill."
  • Poop Stonehenge.
  • Ranking the eight kinds of fun.
  • Everybody ranking submission/abnegation last when listing what they want out of a tabletop RPG.
  • Submitting yourself to a ritualized task and discovering the pleasures of being clockwork.
  • Deciding how you want to build your treehouse and then going to fight the moon.
  • Whether a DM describing an axe swing exceptionally well counts as sensory pleasure.
  • Listening to a lot of TTRPG podcasts but not playing a lot of TTRPGs yourself because who has the time and energy to organize it?
  • Agreeing to role play all the people who are missing from this D&D session and immediately drowning everyone, making everything a lot politically simpler.
  • Remembering everything your players say so you can role play a sapient bird who can only communicate by mimicking things it has heard.
  • Leaving the elf in the cart because if you take him out everyone will want to interrogate him and you don't want to bother RPing that hard.
  • Learning how to GM in LARPs where there are no NPCs and all you have to do is set up some plot hooks and then watch the players go wild.
  • Saying "you are in a shed" and thereby declaring yourself the GM.
  • Telling people in your RPG session that they're playing themselves and they're like "okay I boot up Animal Crossing."
  • Not being able to relate to your younger sister because she's too young to have used the Dewey Decimal System.
  • Describing all of human knowledge using only ten categories.
  • The Dewey Decimal System no longer having classifications for Mormonism or education of women.
  • 000-099 being the best Dewey Decimal classification because it has the books about computer programming and UFOs and the paranormal.
  • Where to find cute animal pictures under the Dewey Decimal System.
  • Being shown you how to find something with the Dewey Decimal Drawers and being like "why wouldn't you just walk around until you find it."
  • Recording an episode in the library because where better to find out about topics.
  • Libraries being wild and raucous places now that the libraries don't shush you.
  • Going to the library all the time because there are Pokemon there but never going inside because they come out to meet you.
  • Going four floors underground in complete silence and wondering if you can still hear.
  • Making sure nobody is in the library shelves you're about to move before turning that big metal wheel.
  • Going into an anechoic chamber and hearing your synapses firing.
  • Going into an anechoic chamber and hearing ground hum because you needed to plug in your laptop.
  • Amazing 3D sound scapes that you can't appreciate because your head is the wrong shape.
  • Making a game that induces panic attacks and deciding you want to make a less horrible experience next.
  • People who do actual night dives being less terrified when playing Subnautica.
  • Knowing a cool guy with hats and liking the hats.
  • Self medicating using hats.
  • A twelve year old girl with otherwise extremely thick hair wearing a hat being less suspicious than a middle aged cis man wearing a hat.
  • Growing a beard to make up for your bald spot because hopefully people will think your head is upside down.
  • The pros and cons of wearing wigs.
  • Sending a picture of yourself wearing a wig and colored contacts to your mom and she asks "I don't recognize that friend, who is she and why is she wearing that tacky wig and colored contacts?"
  • Whether or not plants are so good.
  • Knowing how far apart to put the holes but not knowing how many seeds to put in each hole and your bok choy all growing on top of one another.
  • Tiling your entire yard with garden planters so you can actually fit all the cabbage you planted.
  • Your friends going into the back yard and getting blasted with water by the device you rigged to deter neighbor cats from digging in your vegetable garden.
  • Beautiful white butterflies that are wrecking the shit out of your cabbages.
  • All the plants that taste good technically being cabbages.
  • Not being able to be mad at the squirrels when they eat your plants as soon as they sprout because that's also what you were going to do.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+R86CeSSM ]]> Jim Stormdancer 33. Two-Grass of the Face https://topiclords.com/two-grass-of-the-face 89a34825-7bf3-4b06-bc34-0fa46a1ce8cc Mon, 08 Jun 2020 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: Shannon and Craig. We discuss desirable collaborator attributes, Tok Pisin, TempleOS, our first memories of a computer, faking your own non-existence, whether or not guilty pleasures exist, and daytime soaps somehow producing 250 episodes a year. 59:06 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords this week:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Getting some emails in six weeks.
  • Tweeting about a book about olives and getting in touch with the author and starting a podcast about olives.
  • A dumb joke that you are taking very seriously.
  • Creating one podcast episode per olive cultivar.
  • Deciding that you'd rather work with people you like than talented people.
  • The hypothetical coworker who is sufficiently good at their job that you put up with the death of everyone who enters the room with them.
  • The origin of the 10x programmer myth.
  • Never having met a 10x programmer, but having met a 10x QA tester.
  • The 10x singer who sings at 10x the pitch of regular singers.
  • Noodling vs. deliberate, thoughtful creation.
  • Whether having rock stars in your rock band is worth all the trashed hotel rooms.
  • A language derived from Australian sailor slang.
  • Mouth grass.
  • Trying to express a technical idea without using technical vocabulary.
  • The correspondence between the simplicity of vocabulary and the speed of spoken language.
  • Leaving space for audience participation.
  • A language that isn't a big compost heap like English.
  • English 2, where every single word is a swear word.
  • Making an operating system because God told you to.
  • Making a new operating system to talk to God because you don't trust MS-DOS.
  • Whether talking to God has more or less stringent security requirements than a voting machine.
  • Which mental illnesses make you a better programmer.
  • Implementing Minesweeper in your new OS in case you get bored talking to God.
  • The TempleOS indie game scene.
  • The music video generator Jim is never going to make.
  • Reconciling how you feel about a mentally ill asshole.
  • Being very online and really into the N-word.
  • Everyone loving your forum posts about weird bespoke operating system but being less into your race war posts.
  • Art and technology paradropped in from an alternate timeline.
  • Outsider art suspension bridges.
  • A trash peninsula that no longer has any homeless encampments on it.
  • Building a castle out of shopping carts and reclaimed concrete.
  • The text adventure that they named the genre after.
  • Dad bringing home an Amiga 500 and playing Marble Madness with you.
  • Accidentally flood-filling the wrong place and getting really upset because you don't know about the undo button.
  • The cool kid with the advanced Amiga 500 who becomes progressively less cool over time because his dad refuses to get a new computer.
  • Seeing Doom and realizing that your beloved Amiga is done for, and Commodore going out of business later that year.
  • Telling journalists that you don't exist when they approach you for an interview.
  • Backing away from the ARG puzzle you're designing when you realize solving it would involve doxxing yourself.
  • Building rapport with games journalists, but taking so long to make your next game that they've left the industry.
  • The impossibility of building a fan following in video games after 2013.
  • Wearing a ratty fake mustache for your Problematic Jim alter ego.
  • Lying about how you made the horse talk.
  • Trying and failing to preserve the mystery by giving a fake mundane answer.
  • Finding value in a work while still being critical of it.
  • Becoming the avatar of embarrassing pop music.
  • Reclaiming "guilty pleasure" to mean something you enjoy by a problematic creator.
  • Society shaming you more for liking Fall Out Buy than liking a Polanski film.
  • What it would take to turn the average band into sex pests.
  • Soap opera production schedules.
  • Actors playing the same role for sixty years.
  • Not watching The Simpsons or South Park any more, but figuring that South Park must be holding up better because nobody is posting embarrassing clips of it on Twitter.
  • Your creative voice ossifying in the 90s and having to write in that voice for the rest of your life.
  • Remaining in the Garfield mines for the rest of your life when Garfield's legacy of shitposts is already secure.
  • Hoping that "goodbye" in Tok Pisin is a transliteration of "see you in hell."
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords this week:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Getting some emails in six weeks.
  • Tweeting about a book about olives and getting in touch with the author and starting a podcast about olives.
  • A dumb joke that you are taking very seriously.
  • Creating one podcast episode per olive cultivar.
  • Deciding that you'd rather work with people you like than talented people.
  • The hypothetical coworker who is sufficiently good at their job that you put up with the death of everyone who enters the room with them.
  • The origin of the 10x programmer myth.
  • Never having met a 10x programmer, but having met a 10x QA tester.
  • The 10x singer who sings at 10x the pitch of regular singers.
  • Noodling vs. deliberate, thoughtful creation.
  • Whether having rock stars in your rock band is worth all the trashed hotel rooms.
  • A language derived from Australian sailor slang.
  • Mouth grass.
  • Trying to express a technical idea without using technical vocabulary.
  • The correspondence between the simplicity of vocabulary and the speed of spoken language.
  • Leaving space for audience participation.
  • A language that isn't a big compost heap like English.
  • English 2, where every single word is a swear word.
  • Making an operating system because God told you to.
  • Making a new operating system to talk to God because you don't trust MS-DOS.
  • Whether talking to God has more or less stringent security requirements than a voting machine.
  • Which mental illnesses make you a better programmer.
  • Implementing Minesweeper in your new OS in case you get bored talking to God.
  • The TempleOS indie game scene.
  • The music video generator Jim is never going to make.
  • Reconciling how you feel about a mentally ill asshole.
  • Being very online and really into the N-word.
  • Everyone loving your forum posts about weird bespoke operating system but being less into your race war posts.
  • Art and technology paradropped in from an alternate timeline.
  • Outsider art suspension bridges.
  • A trash peninsula that no longer has any homeless encampments on it.
  • Building a castle out of shopping carts and reclaimed concrete.
  • The text adventure that they named the genre after.
  • Dad bringing home an Amiga 500 and playing Marble Madness with you.
  • Accidentally flood-filling the wrong place and getting really upset because you don't know about the undo button.
  • The cool kid with the advanced Amiga 500 who becomes progressively less cool over time because his dad refuses to get a new computer.
  • Seeing Doom and realizing that your beloved Amiga is done for, and Commodore going out of business later that year.
  • Telling journalists that you don't exist when they approach you for an interview.
  • Backing away from the ARG puzzle you're designing when you realize solving it would involve doxxing yourself.
  • Building rapport with games journalists, but taking so long to make your next game that they've left the industry.
  • The impossibility of building a fan following in video games after 2013.
  • Wearing a ratty fake mustache for your Problematic Jim alter ego.
  • Lying about how you made the horse talk.
  • Trying and failing to preserve the mystery by giving a fake mundane answer.
  • Finding value in a work while still being critical of it.
  • Becoming the avatar of embarrassing pop music.
  • Reclaiming "guilty pleasure" to mean something you enjoy by a problematic creator.
  • Society shaming you more for liking Fall Out Buy than liking a Polanski film.
  • What it would take to turn the average band into sex pests.
  • Soap opera production schedules.
  • Actors playing the same role for sixty years.
  • Not watching The Simpsons or South Park any more, but figuring that South Park must be holding up better because nobody is posting embarrassing clips of it on Twitter.
  • Your creative voice ossifying in the 90s and having to write in that voice for the rest of your life.
  • Remaining in the Garfield mines for the rest of your life when Garfield's legacy of shitposts is already secure.
  • Hoping that "goodbye" in Tok Pisin is a transliteration of "see you in hell."

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords this week:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Getting some emails in six weeks.
  • Tweeting about a book about olives and getting in touch with the author and starting a podcast about olives.
  • A dumb joke that you are taking very seriously.
  • Creating one podcast episode per olive cultivar.
  • Deciding that you'd rather work with people you like than talented people.
  • The hypothetical coworker who is sufficiently good at their job that you put up with the death of everyone who enters the room with them.
  • The origin of the 10x programmer myth.
  • Never having met a 10x programmer, but having met a 10x QA tester.
  • The 10x singer who sings at 10x the pitch of regular singers.
  • Noodling vs. deliberate, thoughtful creation.
  • Whether having rock stars in your rock band is worth all the trashed hotel rooms.
  • A language derived from Australian sailor slang.
  • Mouth grass.
  • Trying to express a technical idea without using technical vocabulary.
  • The correspondence between the simplicity of vocabulary and the speed of spoken language.
  • Leaving space for audience participation.
  • A language that isn't a big compost heap like English.
  • English 2, where every single word is a swear word.
  • Making an operating system because God told you to.
  • Making a new operating system to talk to God because you don't trust MS-DOS.
  • Whether talking to God has more or less stringent security requirements than a voting machine.
  • Which mental illnesses make you a better programmer.
  • Implementing Minesweeper in your new OS in case you get bored talking to God.
  • The TempleOS indie game scene.
  • The music video generator Jim is never going to make.
  • Reconciling how you feel about a mentally ill asshole.
  • Being very online and really into the N-word.
  • Everyone loving your forum posts about weird bespoke operating system but being less into your race war posts.
  • Art and technology paradropped in from an alternate timeline.
  • Outsider art suspension bridges.
  • A trash peninsula that no longer has any homeless encampments on it.
  • Building a castle out of shopping carts and reclaimed concrete.
  • The text adventure that they named the genre after.
  • Dad bringing home an Amiga 500 and playing Marble Madness with you.
  • Accidentally flood-filling the wrong place and getting really upset because you don't know about the undo button.
  • The cool kid with the advanced Amiga 500 who becomes progressively less cool over time because his dad refuses to get a new computer.
  • Seeing Doom and realizing that your beloved Amiga is done for, and Commodore going out of business later that year.
  • Telling journalists that you don't exist when they approach you for an interview.
  • Backing away from the ARG puzzle you're designing when you realize solving it would involve doxxing yourself.
  • Building rapport with games journalists, but taking so long to make your next game that they've left the industry.
  • The impossibility of building a fan following in video games after 2013.
  • Wearing a ratty fake mustache for your Problematic Jim alter ego.
  • Lying about how you made the horse talk.
  • Trying and failing to preserve the mystery by giving a fake mundane answer.
  • Finding value in a work while still being critical of it.
  • Becoming the avatar of embarrassing pop music.
  • Reclaiming "guilty pleasure" to mean something you enjoy by a problematic creator.
  • Society shaming you more for liking Fall Out Buy than liking a Polanski film.
  • What it would take to turn the average band into sex pests.
  • Soap opera production schedules.
  • Actors playing the same role for sixty years.
  • Not watching The Simpsons or South Park any more, but figuring that South Park must be holding up better because nobody is posting embarrassing clips of it on Twitter.
  • Your creative voice ossifying in the 90s and having to write in that voice for the rest of your life.
  • Remaining in the Garfield mines for the rest of your life when Garfield's legacy of shitposts is already secure.
  • Hoping that "goodbye" in Tok Pisin is a transliteration of "see you in hell."

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+-dOTT2Tg ]]> Jim Stormdancer 32. Tandem CPAP https://topiclords.com/tandem-cpap a53b522a-2e24-4f51-b473-4175633e46c9 Mon, 01 Jun 2020 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: Rachel and Laura. We discuss wooden clothes hangers, anthropomorphic food, breathing soup in your sleep, sliding doors, magically acquiring useless skills, trying to interpret stories from hundreds of years ago, and Multi-Mario races. 1:04:08 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The comfort of a Discord voice channel where everyone is muted.
  • A Discord voice channel where you go to poop.
  • Perceiving a pun and wanting to forget it.
  • Being in total agreement as to whether we should discuss topics.
  • The hidden cost of plastic coat hangers.
  • Contemplating the luxury of your collection of fancy wooden coat hangers.
  • Never having purchased coat hangers in your life but still ending up with a bunch of them.
  • Accruing heavier and heavier clothing as you age.
  • Not needing coat hangers because you just drape all your clothes over the back of a folding chair.
  • A barbecue joint where the mascot is a sapient pig that is super thrilled that you're about to eat him.
  • Alienation from the food production process.
  • The weird zone where pigs are slaughtered in an alternate dimension outside our ken.
  • Chuck E. Cheese's real name.
  • The sweetest meat you'll ever eat.
  • Sweetmeats vs. sweetbreads.
  • A restaurant with the slogan "the sweetest bread you'll ever eat" and the mascot is a talking Thymus gland.
  • Thymus glands just being in you someplace.
  • Putting soup in your humidifier and saving yourself the trouble of making breakfast.
  • Accidentally blasting yourself with mold all night.
  • Sharing a CPAP machine with your life partner, like a tandem bike.
  • Adding a splash of bleach to your soup so it won't grow mold in your humidifier overnight.
  • Taking action to ensure huge amounts of water enters your body because otherwise the water will probably just sit there.
  • Every sliding glass door having a big colorful sticker on it because once someone ran into it and broke their nose or crashed through or both.
  • The worst-designed lateral thinking puzzle exacerbating your fear of heights.
  • All the rollers in the sliding glass door being crushed so you're just dragging a huge pane of glass along the ground.
  • Sliding glass doors being perfectly safe because they cannot break; they can only become windows.
  • Increasing the amount of natural light in your home via strategic placement of mirrors.
  • Holding a mirror and pointing the sun at your face.
  • Everyone loving your ukulele cover of Smells Like Teen Spirit, but only the first time they hear it.
  • Knowing how to play a bunch of instruments but they all weigh 300 pounds.
  • Making a xylophone out PVC pipes you found in a dumpster and playing Ode to Joy on it.
  • Solving this portable xylophone problem once and for all by googling "portable xylophone."
  • A gigantic marimba that is built into the room it's in like a supercomputer of sound.
  • Wanting to go on a weird xylophone tour.
  • Being good enough to impress people who don't know anything about that particular skill.
  • Wanting to play an instrument that leaves your mouth free to have a jolly conversation.
  • Combining our powers to identify the hexagonal pirate accordion.
  • Circus jazz.
  • Scottish peasants swaying together like kindergarteners singing a jolly pagan song as the flames approach.
  • Fifty years ago, being horrified when pagans burn the character representing cops and religious authority alive, but nowadays everybody owns a guillotine and worships Alan Moore's snake god.
  • Whether the Nicholas Cage Wicker Man being hilarious at release was inspired by the 1970s Wicker Man being hilarious in a modern context.
  • Jokes that modern audiences don't have the context to understand.
  • Works written in 17th or 18th century English needing localization as much as works in a foreign language.
  • Not linking to an edifying Tumblr thread because Tumblr's threading is the worst.
  • People in the 1940s just talking like that actually.
  • Movie actors finally learning to act sometime around 1950.
  • Staying awake for 38 hours to get every star, moon and shine in the 3D Mario series.
  • Our failings as adult humans.
  • Doing game jams where you actually sleep.
  • Scoping your game development project to allow sleep during development.
  • Romanticizing the idea of staying up all night doing something fun because now you're an adult with adult responsibilities and shirt resilience.
  • Not being able to justify doing something for fun so you tack on a charity drive.
  • The shifting sense of what's important and what's moral that defines the human experience over time.
  • Whether or not you could pay us to play World of Warcraft.
  • Your guild leader getting in fistfights all the time and eventually going up jail and appointing you temporary guild leader because he doesn't realize you're a woman.
  • Training your brain to be okay playing just one video game for a while.
  • A hat that is so ugly you had to give it to a friend.
  • Giving your goth dog friend pastel outfits to wear on Bunny Day.
  • Lamenting that there is no other place or time to discuss topics.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The comfort of a Discord voice channel where everyone is muted.
  • A Discord voice channel where you go to poop.
  • Perceiving a pun and wanting to forget it.
  • Being in total agreement as to whether we should discuss topics.
  • The hidden cost of plastic coat hangers.
  • Contemplating the luxury of your collection of fancy wooden coat hangers.
  • Never having purchased coat hangers in your life but still ending up with a bunch of them.
  • Accruing heavier and heavier clothing as you age.
  • Not needing coat hangers because you just drape all your clothes over the back of a folding chair.
  • A barbecue joint where the mascot is a sapient pig that is super thrilled that you're about to eat him.
  • Alienation from the food production process.
  • The weird zone where pigs are slaughtered in an alternate dimension outside our ken.
  • Chuck E. Cheese's real name.
  • The sweetest meat you'll ever eat.
  • Sweetmeats vs. sweetbreads.
  • A restaurant with the slogan "the sweetest bread you'll ever eat" and the mascot is a talking Thymus gland.
  • Thymus glands just being in you someplace.
  • Putting soup in your humidifier and saving yourself the trouble of making breakfast.
  • Accidentally blasting yourself with mold all night.
  • Sharing a CPAP machine with your life partner, like a tandem bike.
  • Adding a splash of bleach to your soup so it won't grow mold in your humidifier overnight.
  • Taking action to ensure huge amounts of water enters your body because otherwise the water will probably just sit there.
  • Every sliding glass door having a big colorful sticker on it because once someone ran into it and broke their nose or crashed through or both.
  • The worst-designed lateral thinking puzzle exacerbating your fear of heights.
  • All the rollers in the sliding glass door being crushed so you're just dragging a huge pane of glass along the ground.
  • Sliding glass doors being perfectly safe because they cannot break; they can only become windows.
  • Increasing the amount of natural light in your home via strategic placement of mirrors.
  • Holding a mirror and pointing the sun at your face.
  • Everyone loving your ukulele cover of Smells Like Teen Spirit, but only the first time they hear it.
  • Knowing how to play a bunch of instruments but they all weigh 300 pounds.
  • Making a xylophone out PVC pipes you found in a dumpster and playing Ode to Joy on it.
  • Solving this portable xylophone problem once and for all by googling "portable xylophone."
  • A gigantic marimba that is built into the room it's in like a supercomputer of sound.
  • Wanting to go on a weird xylophone tour.
  • Being good enough to impress people who don't know anything about that particular skill.
  • Wanting to play an instrument that leaves your mouth free to have a jolly conversation.
  • Combining our powers to identify the hexagonal pirate accordion.
  • Circus jazz.
  • Scottish peasants swaying together like kindergarteners singing a jolly pagan song as the flames approach.
  • Fifty years ago, being horrified when pagans burn the character representing cops and religious authority alive, but nowadays everybody owns a guillotine and worships Alan Moore's snake god.
  • Whether the Nicholas Cage Wicker Man being hilarious at release was inspired by the 1970s Wicker Man being hilarious in a modern context.
  • Jokes that modern audiences don't have the context to understand.
  • Works written in 17th or 18th century English needing localization as much as works in a foreign language.
  • Not linking to an edifying Tumblr thread because Tumblr's threading is the worst.
  • People in the 1940s just talking like that actually.
  • Movie actors finally learning to act sometime around 1950.
  • Staying awake for 38 hours to get every star, moon and shine in the 3D Mario series.
  • Our failings as adult humans.
  • Doing game jams where you actually sleep.
  • Scoping your game development project to allow sleep during development.
  • Romanticizing the idea of staying up all night doing something fun because now you're an adult with adult responsibilities and shirt resilience.
  • Not being able to justify doing something for fun so you tack on a charity drive.
  • The shifting sense of what's important and what's moral that defines the human experience over time.
  • Whether or not you could pay us to play World of Warcraft.
  • Your guild leader getting in fistfights all the time and eventually going up jail and appointing you temporary guild leader because he doesn't realize you're a woman.
  • Training your brain to be okay playing just one video game for a while.
  • A hat that is so ugly you had to give it to a friend.
  • Giving your goth dog friend pastel outfits to wear on Bunny Day.
  • Lamenting that there is no other place or time to discuss topics.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The comfort of a Discord voice channel where everyone is muted.
  • A Discord voice channel where you go to poop.
  • Perceiving a pun and wanting to forget it.
  • Being in total agreement as to whether we should discuss topics.
  • The hidden cost of plastic coat hangers.
  • Contemplating the luxury of your collection of fancy wooden coat hangers.
  • Never having purchased coat hangers in your life but still ending up with a bunch of them.
  • Accruing heavier and heavier clothing as you age.
  • Not needing coat hangers because you just drape all your clothes over the back of a folding chair.
  • A barbecue joint where the mascot is a sapient pig that is super thrilled that you're about to eat him.
  • Alienation from the food production process.
  • The weird zone where pigs are slaughtered in an alternate dimension outside our ken.
  • Chuck E. Cheese's real name.
  • The sweetest meat you'll ever eat.
  • Sweetmeats vs. sweetbreads.
  • A restaurant with the slogan "the sweetest bread you'll ever eat" and the mascot is a talking Thymus gland.
  • Thymus glands just being in you someplace.
  • Putting soup in your humidifier and saving yourself the trouble of making breakfast.
  • Accidentally blasting yourself with mold all night.
  • Sharing a CPAP machine with your life partner, like a tandem bike.
  • Adding a splash of bleach to your soup so it won't grow mold in your humidifier overnight.
  • Taking action to ensure huge amounts of water enters your body because otherwise the water will probably just sit there.
  • Every sliding glass door having a big colorful sticker on it because once someone ran into it and broke their nose or crashed through or both.
  • The worst-designed lateral thinking puzzle exacerbating your fear of heights.
  • All the rollers in the sliding glass door being crushed so you're just dragging a huge pane of glass along the ground.
  • Sliding glass doors being perfectly safe because they cannot break; they can only become windows.
  • Increasing the amount of natural light in your home via strategic placement of mirrors.
  • Holding a mirror and pointing the sun at your face.
  • Everyone loving your ukulele cover of Smells Like Teen Spirit, but only the first time they hear it.
  • Knowing how to play a bunch of instruments but they all weigh 300 pounds.
  • Making a xylophone out PVC pipes you found in a dumpster and playing Ode to Joy on it.
  • Solving this portable xylophone problem once and for all by googling "portable xylophone."
  • A gigantic marimba that is built into the room it's in like a supercomputer of sound.
  • Wanting to go on a weird xylophone tour.
  • Being good enough to impress people who don't know anything about that particular skill.
  • Wanting to play an instrument that leaves your mouth free to have a jolly conversation.
  • Combining our powers to identify the hexagonal pirate accordion.
  • Circus jazz.
  • Scottish peasants swaying together like kindergarteners singing a jolly pagan song as the flames approach.
  • Fifty years ago, being horrified when pagans burn the character representing cops and religious authority alive, but nowadays everybody owns a guillotine and worships Alan Moore's snake god.
  • Whether the Nicholas Cage Wicker Man being hilarious at release was inspired by the 1970s Wicker Man being hilarious in a modern context.
  • Jokes that modern audiences don't have the context to understand.
  • Works written in 17th or 18th century English needing localization as much as works in a foreign language.
  • Not linking to an edifying Tumblr thread because Tumblr's threading is the worst.
  • People in the 1940s just talking like that actually.
  • Movie actors finally learning to act sometime around 1950.
  • Staying awake for 38 hours to get every star, moon and shine in the 3D Mario series.
  • Our failings as adult humans.
  • Doing game jams where you actually sleep.
  • Scoping your game development project to allow sleep during development.
  • Romanticizing the idea of staying up all night doing something fun because now you're an adult with adult responsibilities and shirt resilience.
  • Not being able to justify doing something for fun so you tack on a charity drive.
  • The shifting sense of what's important and what's moral that defines the human experience over time.
  • Whether or not you could pay us to play World of Warcraft.
  • Your guild leader getting in fistfights all the time and eventually going up jail and appointing you temporary guild leader because he doesn't realize you're a woman.
  • Training your brain to be okay playing just one video game for a while.
  • A hat that is so ugly you had to give it to a friend.
  • Giving your goth dog friend pastel outfits to wear on Bunny Day.
  • Lamenting that there is no other place or time to discuss topics.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+FbBfs6-K ]]> Jim Stormdancer 31. seedhutch.horse https://topiclords.com/seed-hutch-dot-horse e9716878-f065-4728-a588-dc455c0e00e0 Mon, 25 May 2020 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: Jenni and Chris. We discuss anxiety and OCD as culturally adaptive behaviors, asking your employer to pay you in Nook Miles, Animal Crossing speed runs, printing toilet paper at home, protecting your floppy disks from magnets, apocalypse gardening, Amazon taking Murder She Wrote away from us, and winding up with more social obligations than you had before quarantine. 54:57 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Being confident in your recording setup because you're too lazy to verify it.
  • The old lady who lives in your ductwork who you can't hear because she only shrieks exactly when you're talking.
  • Finding out about the apocalypse from a podcast recorded months ago.
  • The subtle distinction between self care and overeating.
  • Feeling better about your anxiety disorder because the world has gotten worse to meet your mood.
  • A behavior that looks maladaptive but must secretly be awesome because it has survived for millennia.
  • A poltergeist that keeps turning your stove off.
  • Worshipping gods that turn out to be evil aliens.
  • Trying to make "Christian Splinter Faiths" scan to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme.
  • Going for the cosmetic upgrade before the inventory upgrade and causing your partner physical pain.
  • Clearcutting the entire island you're visiting because when you leave it will cease to exist.
  • Harvesting trees in a checkerboard pattern because they grow better that way.
  • A financial startup specializing in converting British pounds to Nook miles.
  • Putting pounds and dollars in the same bank account and they crossbreed while they're in there.
  • 100%-ing Animal Crossing as fast as possible.
  • Speed runs that are entertaining to describe but not to watch.
  • Bingo races as the improvisation-heavy antidote to rote speed runs.
  • Forcing Caleb Hart to livestream Mega Man X any time anyone listens to this episode.
  • Feeding toilet paper into your inkjet printer to create a cool pattern to wipe your ass with.
  • Using Silly Putty to copy the stock market info from the newspaper.
  • Not being able to print toilet paper with your 3D printer, but printing a bidet instead.
  • Running out of toilet paper and 3D printing corn husks.
  • Buying the Taco Bell Grande Meal to eat the beans out of the burrito and then wiping your ass with the corn tortilla and wax paper wrapper.
  • Skipping a step and putting the burrito right in the toilet.
  • Introducing an awesome person to your friend and then ruining them in the very next sentence.
  • The outside of the printer paper protecting you from the horrifying inside of the toilet paper.
  • Pulping spare blue jeans to manufacture your own artisanal toilet paper.
  • Figuring out how to put your front yard in your back yard to hide it from the HOA.
  • Reporting your neighbor to the HOA for weeds in the middle of a global pandemic.
  • Getting notices from the HOA that you need to power wash your driveway and power washing the words "fuck you" into it.
  • Confusing Day of the Dead and Cinco De Mayo because they both happen in the same year.
  • An object you need to keep safe from magnets.
  • Advice on dealing with floppy disks in the Year of our Lord 2020.
  • Something in France that hasn't been found yet.
  • A Wikipedia list of things that have not been found in France.
  • Burying a microtransaction-heavy game in the desert and hoping the person who finds it is a whale.
  • Throwing a microtransaction-heavy game into the ocean and it traveling back in time and Captain Ahab hears about it and becomes obsessed with finding the whale who owns it.
  • Trying to think of a really big expensive home and your brain coming back with "a bucket!"
  • The train stopping slightly and thinking "maybe society is breaking down" and then the train starting again and thinking "I guess I'll just go to my boring job."
  • Part of you wanting to live in interesting times and be part of historical events.
  • Bringing your axe made out of a sharpened hubcap to work because Phil's allowed to bring his Leatherman.
  • Not being able to train to be a warlord in the post-apocalypse because during the apocalypse all the MMA gyms are closed.
  • Realizing that Amazon Prime Video doesn't have Murder She Wrote any more and wanting to just burn it all down.
  • The magical time in your life when you thought Netflix's selection of streaming video would only keep getting bigger.
  • Conflating Murder She Wrote with the Golden Girls.
  • Deadpanning ridiculous things that happen in St. Olaf, Minnesota.
  • Angry texts from your mom about how you ruined Murder She Wrote by telling her about the theory that Jessica Fletcher is a serial killer.
  • A big city businesswoman looking to take over her parents' failing Christmas ornament shop.
  • CG compositing Christmas ornaments into the background of every shot of Golden Girls.
  • Everybody playing online games all the time now because their extrovert friends have figured out the Internet.
  • Extroverts agreeing to watch speed runs with you because they're desperate to talk to anybody.
  • Finding an eight hour smooth jazz video and eventually realizing it's two minutes of smooth jazz looping for eight hours.
  • Trying to solve playing music with friends over the Internet.
  • Solving the problem of jamming with friends over the Internet by only playing music with precogs.
  • Sticking it to the HOA by dressing up as a weed and when they come by to report you, jumping out and yelling "I'm no weed, I'm a guy!"
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Being confident in your recording setup because you're too lazy to verify it.
  • The old lady who lives in your ductwork who you can't hear because she only shrieks exactly when you're talking.
  • Finding out about the apocalypse from a podcast recorded months ago.
  • The subtle distinction between self care and overeating.
  • Feeling better about your anxiety disorder because the world has gotten worse to meet your mood.
  • A behavior that looks maladaptive but must secretly be awesome because it has survived for millennia.
  • A poltergeist that keeps turning your stove off.
  • Worshipping gods that turn out to be evil aliens.
  • Trying to make "Christian Splinter Faiths" scan to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme.
  • Going for the cosmetic upgrade before the inventory upgrade and causing your partner physical pain.
  • Clearcutting the entire island you're visiting because when you leave it will cease to exist.
  • Harvesting trees in a checkerboard pattern because they grow better that way.
  • A financial startup specializing in converting British pounds to Nook miles.
  • Putting pounds and dollars in the same bank account and they crossbreed while they're in there.
  • 100%-ing Animal Crossing as fast as possible.
  • Speed runs that are entertaining to describe but not to watch.
  • Bingo races as the improvisation-heavy antidote to rote speed runs.
  • Forcing Caleb Hart to livestream Mega Man X any time anyone listens to this episode.
  • Feeding toilet paper into your inkjet printer to create a cool pattern to wipe your ass with.
  • Using Silly Putty to copy the stock market info from the newspaper.
  • Not being able to print toilet paper with your 3D printer, but printing a bidet instead.
  • Running out of toilet paper and 3D printing corn husks.
  • Buying the Taco Bell Grande Meal to eat the beans out of the burrito and then wiping your ass with the corn tortilla and wax paper wrapper.
  • Skipping a step and putting the burrito right in the toilet.
  • Introducing an awesome person to your friend and then ruining them in the very next sentence.
  • The outside of the printer paper protecting you from the horrifying inside of the toilet paper.
  • Pulping spare blue jeans to manufacture your own artisanal toilet paper.
  • Figuring out how to put your front yard in your back yard to hide it from the HOA.
  • Reporting your neighbor to the HOA for weeds in the middle of a global pandemic.
  • Getting notices from the HOA that you need to power wash your driveway and power washing the words "fuck you" into it.
  • Confusing Day of the Dead and Cinco De Mayo because they both happen in the same year.
  • An object you need to keep safe from magnets.
  • Advice on dealing with floppy disks in the Year of our Lord 2020.
  • Something in France that hasn't been found yet.
  • A Wikipedia list of things that have not been found in France.
  • Burying a microtransaction-heavy game in the desert and hoping the person who finds it is a whale.
  • Throwing a microtransaction-heavy game into the ocean and it traveling back in time and Captain Ahab hears about it and becomes obsessed with finding the whale who owns it.
  • Trying to think of a really big expensive home and your brain coming back with "a bucket!"
  • The train stopping slightly and thinking "maybe society is breaking down" and then the train starting again and thinking "I guess I'll just go to my boring job."
  • Part of you wanting to live in interesting times and be part of historical events.
  • Bringing your axe made out of a sharpened hubcap to work because Phil's allowed to bring his Leatherman.
  • Not being able to train to be a warlord in the post-apocalypse because during the apocalypse all the MMA gyms are closed.
  • Realizing that Amazon Prime Video doesn't have Murder She Wrote any more and wanting to just burn it all down.
  • The magical time in your life when you thought Netflix's selection of streaming video would only keep getting bigger.
  • Conflating Murder She Wrote with the Golden Girls.
  • Deadpanning ridiculous things that happen in St. Olaf, Minnesota.
  • Angry texts from your mom about how you ruined Murder She Wrote by telling her about the theory that Jessica Fletcher is a serial killer.
  • A big city businesswoman looking to take over her parents' failing Christmas ornament shop.
  • CG compositing Christmas ornaments into the background of every shot of Golden Girls.
  • Everybody playing online games all the time now because their extrovert friends have figured out the Internet.
  • Extroverts agreeing to watch speed runs with you because they're desperate to talk to anybody.
  • Finding an eight hour smooth jazz video and eventually realizing it's two minutes of smooth jazz looping for eight hours.
  • Trying to solve playing music with friends over the Internet.
  • Solving the problem of jamming with friends over the Internet by only playing music with precogs.
  • Sticking it to the HOA by dressing up as a weed and when they come by to report you, jumping out and yelling "I'm no weed, I'm a guy!"

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Being confident in your recording setup because you're too lazy to verify it.
  • The old lady who lives in your ductwork who you can't hear because she only shrieks exactly when you're talking.
  • Finding out about the apocalypse from a podcast recorded months ago.
  • The subtle distinction between self care and overeating.
  • Feeling better about your anxiety disorder because the world has gotten worse to meet your mood.
  • A behavior that looks maladaptive but must secretly be awesome because it has survived for millennia.
  • A poltergeist that keeps turning your stove off.
  • Worshipping gods that turn out to be evil aliens.
  • Trying to make "Christian Splinter Faiths" scan to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme.
  • Going for the cosmetic upgrade before the inventory upgrade and causing your partner physical pain.
  • Clearcutting the entire island you're visiting because when you leave it will cease to exist.
  • Harvesting trees in a checkerboard pattern because they grow better that way.
  • A financial startup specializing in converting British pounds to Nook miles.
  • Putting pounds and dollars in the same bank account and they crossbreed while they're in there.
  • 100%-ing Animal Crossing as fast as possible.
  • Speed runs that are entertaining to describe but not to watch.
  • Bingo races as the improvisation-heavy antidote to rote speed runs.
  • Forcing Caleb Hart to livestream Mega Man X any time anyone listens to this episode.
  • Feeding toilet paper into your inkjet printer to create a cool pattern to wipe your ass with.
  • Using Silly Putty to copy the stock market info from the newspaper.
  • Not being able to print toilet paper with your 3D printer, but printing a bidet instead.
  • Running out of toilet paper and 3D printing corn husks.
  • Buying the Taco Bell Grande Meal to eat the beans out of the burrito and then wiping your ass with the corn tortilla and wax paper wrapper.
  • Skipping a step and putting the burrito right in the toilet.
  • Introducing an awesome person to your friend and then ruining them in the very next sentence.
  • The outside of the printer paper protecting you from the horrifying inside of the toilet paper.
  • Pulping spare blue jeans to manufacture your own artisanal toilet paper.
  • Figuring out how to put your front yard in your back yard to hide it from the HOA.
  • Reporting your neighbor to the HOA for weeds in the middle of a global pandemic.
  • Getting notices from the HOA that you need to power wash your driveway and power washing the words "fuck you" into it.
  • Confusing Day of the Dead and Cinco De Mayo because they both happen in the same year.
  • An object you need to keep safe from magnets.
  • Advice on dealing with floppy disks in the Year of our Lord 2020.
  • Something in France that hasn't been found yet.
  • A Wikipedia list of things that have not been found in France.
  • Burying a microtransaction-heavy game in the desert and hoping the person who finds it is a whale.
  • Throwing a microtransaction-heavy game into the ocean and it traveling back in time and Captain Ahab hears about it and becomes obsessed with finding the whale who owns it.
  • Trying to think of a really big expensive home and your brain coming back with "a bucket!"
  • The train stopping slightly and thinking "maybe society is breaking down" and then the train starting again and thinking "I guess I'll just go to my boring job."
  • Part of you wanting to live in interesting times and be part of historical events.
  • Bringing your axe made out of a sharpened hubcap to work because Phil's allowed to bring his Leatherman.
  • Not being able to train to be a warlord in the post-apocalypse because during the apocalypse all the MMA gyms are closed.
  • Realizing that Amazon Prime Video doesn't have Murder She Wrote any more and wanting to just burn it all down.
  • The magical time in your life when you thought Netflix's selection of streaming video would only keep getting bigger.
  • Conflating Murder She Wrote with the Golden Girls.
  • Deadpanning ridiculous things that happen in St. Olaf, Minnesota.
  • Angry texts from your mom about how you ruined Murder She Wrote by telling her about the theory that Jessica Fletcher is a serial killer.
  • A big city businesswoman looking to take over her parents' failing Christmas ornament shop.
  • CG compositing Christmas ornaments into the background of every shot of Golden Girls.
  • Everybody playing online games all the time now because their extrovert friends have figured out the Internet.
  • Extroverts agreeing to watch speed runs with you because they're desperate to talk to anybody.
  • Finding an eight hour smooth jazz video and eventually realizing it's two minutes of smooth jazz looping for eight hours.
  • Trying to solve playing music with friends over the Internet.
  • Solving the problem of jamming with friends over the Internet by only playing music with precogs.
  • Sticking it to the HOA by dressing up as a weed and when they come by to report you, jumping out and yelling "I'm no weed, I'm a guy!"

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+KfzNLHvT ]]> Jim Stormdancer 30. Century of the Fruitbat https://topiclords.com/century-of-the-fruitbat f08ee111-b53c-4d4d-afc2-57ae316cf7ac Mon, 18 May 2020 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: Chris and Chris. We discuss Wikipedia descriptions of plots, the modern thank you note, writing a book about anything, Tom Nook, melodicas, Ursula Vernon, and skateboard culture. 1:11:46 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Risking sounding like a corporate shill.
  • Whether or not Wikipedia is pretty great.
  • Wikipedia's editorial tone when describing ridiculous stories.
  • Finding a video embed in the middle of a textbook page and trying to press it.
  • A book with squiggle underlines wherever the author screwed up.
  • Having to come up with narrative justification for 500 one-on-one fights in a row.
  • The guy you just kicked off a cliff offering you cakes because nobody should have to fight on an empty stomach.
  • Your pet frog jumping on a box in your back yard marked radioactive, growing to massive size, then jumping down a huge hole that is also in your back yard for some reason.
  • The Japanese version of the wacky frog tank story just being factions at war in the post apocalypse.
  • Mega Man except you are a gnarly wizard instead of a robot.
  • A floating Buddha named "Surprise" shooting you in the back.
  • If Astro Boy were a mailman.
  • Merging the wacky frog tank story and the post apocalyptic war story into a single canonical timeline in the new Switch release.
  • Writing on paper made of trees with a pen and it's 2020.
  • Writing a thank you note when a relative hands you a twenty dollar bill.
  • Writing a jam game for every special occasion because it's more fun than writing a card.
  • The correct plural of Magnum Opus.
  • Returning to Lazy Land.
  • The videos you like best inevitably being taken down due to copyright strikes because that's the world we live in now.
  • YouTube telling you that some videos have been removed from your playlist but not telling you which.
  • A digital representation of what it's like to grow old.
  • Making a USB drive ark and taking two of every genre of music.
  • Your Google ad profile gaining sentience and making credit card purchases behind your back but also getting a job and making your credit card payments on time.
  • Going to work and nobody remembering who you are.
  • Going into the office wearing a gorilla costume and eventually sending in a gorilla to do your job and it turns out the gorilla is better at your job than you are.
  • Using a gorilla Snapchat filter on a gorilla to make it look like a human who's trying to look like a gorilla.
  • Waking up in parallel dino world where everyone is a dinosaur and your dinosaur twin waking up in human world where everyone is a human, because you both had a mad scientist neighbor.
  • Making a note of how to disguise yourself as a dinosaur because you never know when you'll end up in dinosaur world.
  • Doing a face swap with your cat during the conference call so everyone is too horrified to notice the gorilla in the background.
  • A pedalboard except it's Instagram filters.
  • Chaining Instagram filters to create a truly epic fursona.
  • Reverse college, where you get paid to forget things.
  • Getting paid a dollar per paragraph about skateboard tricks.
  • A varial kickflip except instead of splitting the axes of rotation between your feet, doing all the rotation with your front foot.
  • Writing a book with your 18 month old and it's just the words poop, ball, bath and meow over and over and over.
  • Your toddler growing up to discover axes and cops, like leaves changing colors in autumn.
  • A raccoon who is very friendly and has taken a lot of your money.
  • Whether Tom Nook is a slum lord.
  • A dog with five fingers, an apron, and a whole lot of bells.
  • Being in debt forever because your landlord keeps building you a bigger and bigger house.
  • A 100% speedrun of Adobe Photoshop.
  • Adding achievements, particle effects, and screenshake to Visual Studio.
  • Two melodica players coincidentally bringing their instruments to the same party and locking eyes from across the room.
  • Cheap, portable musical instruments you can have with you at all times and practice with at the drop of a hat.
  • A tube with six holes in it.
  • Penny whistles always being in D because it's one more than C.
  • Wikipedia diving deep into the lore of each musical scale.
  • The cute face of the otamatone being almost assuredly more entertaining than the notes you play with it.
  • Penny whistles with a conical bore staying in tune better than cylindrical ones.
  • The monomyth of the boy who sneaks up on a seal while she's bathing and steals her skin and she turns out to be a beautiful human woman and now she has to marry him.
  • The origin of the pear-with-teeth meme.
  • The Biting Pear of Salamanca.
  • Whether anyone named Ursula is still alive today.
  • An interesting reaction to discovering that your daughter is made of birch bark.
  • A dead whale falling to the ocean floor and feeding scavengers for years.
  • Spending your whole life waiting for a whale to die.
  • Zombie worms growing like flowers in the lightless garden of a sunken whale corpse.
  • A tiny kobold fondling an eggplant.
  • Giving your wife a picture of a fruit with teeth for her birthday.
  • Your skateboard being stolen twice in the same day.
  • Angsty skateboarders lashing out at the world around them via sick kickflips.
  • Fighting everyone around you being morally equivalent to fighting no-one.
  • A nine year old girl in a tutu doing a double heelflip.
  • The cost of skateboarding being measured in hospital visits, especially when you are 40 and overweight.
  • Wearing an inflatable dinosaur suit and skateboarding in a bounce house for maximum safety.
  • Wanting to get into skateboarding but you're scared of dying and none of your friends have trucks.
  • Hacky sack looking fun but actually it's a lie built on a throne of falsehoods and pain.
  • Narrowing an artefact's origin down to the Century of the Fruitbat.
  • Musicians dancing while they play just to show off that they are good enough at music and dancing that they can do both at the same time.
  • Being entirely out of both topics and lords.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Risking sounding like a corporate shill.
  • Whether or not Wikipedia is pretty great.
  • Wikipedia's editorial tone when describing ridiculous stories.
  • Finding a video embed in the middle of a textbook page and trying to press it.
  • A book with squiggle underlines wherever the author screwed up.
  • Having to come up with narrative justification for 500 one-on-one fights in a row.
  • The guy you just kicked off a cliff offering you cakes because nobody should have to fight on an empty stomach.
  • Your pet frog jumping on a box in your back yard marked radioactive, growing to massive size, then jumping down a huge hole that is also in your back yard for some reason.
  • The Japanese version of the wacky frog tank story just being factions at war in the post apocalypse.
  • Mega Man except you are a gnarly wizard instead of a robot.
  • A floating Buddha named "Surprise" shooting you in the back.
  • If Astro Boy were a mailman.
  • Merging the wacky frog tank story and the post apocalyptic war story into a single canonical timeline in the new Switch release.
  • Writing on paper made of trees with a pen and it's 2020.
  • Writing a thank you note when a relative hands you a twenty dollar bill.
  • Writing a jam game for every special occasion because it's more fun than writing a card.
  • The correct plural of Magnum Opus.
  • Returning to Lazy Land.
  • The videos you like best inevitably being taken down due to copyright strikes because that's the world we live in now.
  • YouTube telling you that some videos have been removed from your playlist but not telling you which.
  • A digital representation of what it's like to grow old.
  • Making a USB drive ark and taking two of every genre of music.
  • Your Google ad profile gaining sentience and making credit card purchases behind your back but also getting a job and making your credit card payments on time.
  • Going to work and nobody remembering who you are.
  • Going into the office wearing a gorilla costume and eventually sending in a gorilla to do your job and it turns out the gorilla is better at your job than you are.
  • Using a gorilla Snapchat filter on a gorilla to make it look like a human who's trying to look like a gorilla.
  • Waking up in parallel dino world where everyone is a dinosaur and your dinosaur twin waking up in human world where everyone is a human, because you both had a mad scientist neighbor.
  • Making a note of how to disguise yourself as a dinosaur because you never know when you'll end up in dinosaur world.
  • Doing a face swap with your cat during the conference call so everyone is too horrified to notice the gorilla in the background.
  • A pedalboard except it's Instagram filters.
  • Chaining Instagram filters to create a truly epic fursona.
  • Reverse college, where you get paid to forget things.
  • Getting paid a dollar per paragraph about skateboard tricks.
  • A varial kickflip except instead of splitting the axes of rotation between your feet, doing all the rotation with your front foot.
  • Writing a book with your 18 month old and it's just the words poop, ball, bath and meow over and over and over.
  • Your toddler growing up to discover axes and cops, like leaves changing colors in autumn.
  • A raccoon who is very friendly and has taken a lot of your money.
  • Whether Tom Nook is a slum lord.
  • A dog with five fingers, an apron, and a whole lot of bells.
  • Being in debt forever because your landlord keeps building you a bigger and bigger house.
  • A 100% speedrun of Adobe Photoshop.
  • Adding achievements, particle effects, and screenshake to Visual Studio.
  • Two melodica players coincidentally bringing their instruments to the same party and locking eyes from across the room.
  • Cheap, portable musical instruments you can have with you at all times and practice with at the drop of a hat.
  • A tube with six holes in it.
  • Penny whistles always being in D because it's one more than C.
  • Wikipedia diving deep into the lore of each musical scale.
  • The cute face of the otamatone being almost assuredly more entertaining than the notes you play with it.
  • Penny whistles with a conical bore staying in tune better than cylindrical ones.
  • The monomyth of the boy who sneaks up on a seal while she's bathing and steals her skin and she turns out to be a beautiful human woman and now she has to marry him.
  • The origin of the pear-with-teeth meme.
  • The Biting Pear of Salamanca.
  • Whether anyone named Ursula is still alive today.
  • An interesting reaction to discovering that your daughter is made of birch bark.
  • A dead whale falling to the ocean floor and feeding scavengers for years.
  • Spending your whole life waiting for a whale to die.
  • Zombie worms growing like flowers in the lightless garden of a sunken whale corpse.
  • A tiny kobold fondling an eggplant.
  • Giving your wife a picture of a fruit with teeth for her birthday.
  • Your skateboard being stolen twice in the same day.
  • Angsty skateboarders lashing out at the world around them via sick kickflips.
  • Fighting everyone around you being morally equivalent to fighting no-one.
  • A nine year old girl in a tutu doing a double heelflip.
  • The cost of skateboarding being measured in hospital visits, especially when you are 40 and overweight.
  • Wearing an inflatable dinosaur suit and skateboarding in a bounce house for maximum safety.
  • Wanting to get into skateboarding but you're scared of dying and none of your friends have trucks.
  • Hacky sack looking fun but actually it's a lie built on a throne of falsehoods and pain.
  • Narrowing an artefact's origin down to the Century of the Fruitbat.
  • Musicians dancing while they play just to show off that they are good enough at music and dancing that they can do both at the same time.
  • Being entirely out of both topics and lords.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Risking sounding like a corporate shill.
  • Whether or not Wikipedia is pretty great.
  • Wikipedia's editorial tone when describing ridiculous stories.
  • Finding a video embed in the middle of a textbook page and trying to press it.
  • A book with squiggle underlines wherever the author screwed up.
  • Having to come up with narrative justification for 500 one-on-one fights in a row.
  • The guy you just kicked off a cliff offering you cakes because nobody should have to fight on an empty stomach.
  • Your pet frog jumping on a box in your back yard marked radioactive, growing to massive size, then jumping down a huge hole that is also in your back yard for some reason.
  • The Japanese version of the wacky frog tank story just being factions at war in the post apocalypse.
  • Mega Man except you are a gnarly wizard instead of a robot.
  • A floating Buddha named "Surprise" shooting you in the back.
  • If Astro Boy were a mailman.
  • Merging the wacky frog tank story and the post apocalyptic war story into a single canonical timeline in the new Switch release.
  • Writing on paper made of trees with a pen and it's 2020.
  • Writing a thank you note when a relative hands you a twenty dollar bill.
  • Writing a jam game for every special occasion because it's more fun than writing a card.
  • The correct plural of Magnum Opus.
  • Returning to Lazy Land.
  • The videos you like best inevitably being taken down due to copyright strikes because that's the world we live in now.
  • YouTube telling you that some videos have been removed from your playlist but not telling you which.
  • A digital representation of what it's like to grow old.
  • Making a USB drive ark and taking two of every genre of music.
  • Your Google ad profile gaining sentience and making credit card purchases behind your back but also getting a job and making your credit card payments on time.
  • Going to work and nobody remembering who you are.
  • Going into the office wearing a gorilla costume and eventually sending in a gorilla to do your job and it turns out the gorilla is better at your job than you are.
  • Using a gorilla Snapchat filter on a gorilla to make it look like a human who's trying to look like a gorilla.
  • Waking up in parallel dino world where everyone is a dinosaur and your dinosaur twin waking up in human world where everyone is a human, because you both had a mad scientist neighbor.
  • Making a note of how to disguise yourself as a dinosaur because you never know when you'll end up in dinosaur world.
  • Doing a face swap with your cat during the conference call so everyone is too horrified to notice the gorilla in the background.
  • A pedalboard except it's Instagram filters.
  • Chaining Instagram filters to create a truly epic fursona.
  • Reverse college, where you get paid to forget things.
  • Getting paid a dollar per paragraph about skateboard tricks.
  • A varial kickflip except instead of splitting the axes of rotation between your feet, doing all the rotation with your front foot.
  • Writing a book with your 18 month old and it's just the words poop, ball, bath and meow over and over and over.
  • Your toddler growing up to discover axes and cops, like leaves changing colors in autumn.
  • A raccoon who is very friendly and has taken a lot of your money.
  • Whether Tom Nook is a slum lord.
  • A dog with five fingers, an apron, and a whole lot of bells.
  • Being in debt forever because your landlord keeps building you a bigger and bigger house.
  • A 100% speedrun of Adobe Photoshop.
  • Adding achievements, particle effects, and screenshake to Visual Studio.
  • Two melodica players coincidentally bringing their instruments to the same party and locking eyes from across the room.
  • Cheap, portable musical instruments you can have with you at all times and practice with at the drop of a hat.
  • A tube with six holes in it.
  • Penny whistles always being in D because it's one more than C.
  • Wikipedia diving deep into the lore of each musical scale.
  • The cute face of the otamatone being almost assuredly more entertaining than the notes you play with it.
  • Penny whistles with a conical bore staying in tune better than cylindrical ones.
  • The monomyth of the boy who sneaks up on a seal while she's bathing and steals her skin and she turns out to be a beautiful human woman and now she has to marry him.
  • The origin of the pear-with-teeth meme.
  • The Biting Pear of Salamanca.
  • Whether anyone named Ursula is still alive today.
  • An interesting reaction to discovering that your daughter is made of birch bark.
  • A dead whale falling to the ocean floor and feeding scavengers for years.
  • Spending your whole life waiting for a whale to die.
  • Zombie worms growing like flowers in the lightless garden of a sunken whale corpse.
  • A tiny kobold fondling an eggplant.
  • Giving your wife a picture of a fruit with teeth for her birthday.
  • Your skateboard being stolen twice in the same day.
  • Angsty skateboarders lashing out at the world around them via sick kickflips.
  • Fighting everyone around you being morally equivalent to fighting no-one.
  • A nine year old girl in a tutu doing a double heelflip.
  • The cost of skateboarding being measured in hospital visits, especially when you are 40 and overweight.
  • Wearing an inflatable dinosaur suit and skateboarding in a bounce house for maximum safety.
  • Wanting to get into skateboarding but you're scared of dying and none of your friends have trucks.
  • Hacky sack looking fun but actually it's a lie built on a throne of falsehoods and pain.
  • Narrowing an artefact's origin down to the Century of the Fruitbat.
  • Musicians dancing while they play just to show off that they are good enough at music and dancing that they can do both at the same time.
  • Being entirely out of both topics and lords.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+cUFli6Bt ]]> Jim Stormdancer 29. Respect the Hustler, Not the Hustle https://topiclords.com/respect-the-hustler-not-the-hustle 83877e09-d0e3-4268-936c-20b04cbb566b Mon, 11 May 2020 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: Jenni and Gary. We discuss deciding to eat vegetables, Stephen King writing about boners, airplane respiration strategies, resourcefulness when you don't have the right tool, becoming aware of your mortality, the MT-80s MIDI boom box, doing things because you assume it's what other adults do, and being cursed to listen to only one song for eternity. 1:03:41 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Goin' Polodna.
  • Goin' Polodna but bein' named Butterfield.
  • Only car thieves remaining.
  • Giving your guest a hard time for plugging something when you just asked them to plug something.
  • Being inspired by an eggplant you once had.
  • Stockholm syndrome but for vegetables.
  • A color that doesn't exist on earth.
  • Trying to cook every substance for every amount of time because you don't have Netflix.
  • Laundering a horse through a book.
  • The pe-noose.
  • Trying to Google which Stephen King book had the necklace of penises.
  • Deeming a penis to be a boner.
  • Looking upon a pubic hair topiary and despairing.
  • Sculpting the day your paramour will die into your pubic hair on the first date.
  • Fred Meyer's daughter, J.C. Penney.
  • Not having any particular insight into this boner blog.
  • Being a little bit hornt up despite being trapped in a Fred Meyer by the murder frog outside.
  • Whether or not "pud" is short for "pudding" or indeed anything.
  • A zoetrope showing Goofy pulling down his pants every 7 seconds.
  • A plexiglass box that is big enough for your head and a fern.
  • Hacking the oxygen mask to come down when you just need a hit.
  • Sprinkling some foliage on your head to make it look like the fern next to your head is just a lump on your face.
  • Sticking your head in the fern box under the seat in front of you and painting your face on your pants so your butt can wear the oxygen mask.
  • The tactile sensation of unclogging a toilet using a mouse pad.
  • The best water level for plunging a toilet.
  • Needing an articulated arm like Krang's to plunge the toilet from around the corner.
  • Trying to guess the Game Boy games being used to prop up a projector.
  • The Podcaster's Dilemma.
  • Maligning the Final Fantasy Legend series.
  • Deciding that your punishment will be a good night's sleep and a stern toothbrushing.
  • Playing Final Fantasy Legend while you brush each other's teeth live on AGDQ.
  • Asking a question that you'd already answered in a previous episode and just copy-pasting the answer from there.
  • Not being in good enough shape to sleep everywhere.
  • Ripping through the topics and needing to dip into the extended bucket.
  • A gigantic bucket of shelf-stable potato soup that you save for the end times.
  • Setting up a P.O. box so your listeners can send you a big pile of food and toy cars so you can not eat for a week and then eat an enormous megameal.
  • A Visual Studio plugin that lets you play text adventures anyone while looking like you're at work.
  • Pressing the boss key to hide that you're playing an ancient video game and your boss asking you why you're writing emails in Word Perfect 2.0.
  • Having a child to reduce your mortality anxiety.
  • Having a child so they can do the heimlich when you choke on a ham sandwich.
  • Subtweeting your cat.
  • Not being meaningfully aware of your mortality but still making decisions based on not dying.
  • Overcorrecting and turning into a maudlin fucker.
  • A boom box with a floppy drive playing canyon.mid.
  • A product with no conceivable audience except the nerds who will think it's cool and nostalgic thirty years from now.
  • Opening a cabinet and your coffee mug singing the Zelda "you found the thing" jingle.
  • The intentionality of listening to music in the most inconvenient way possible.
  • Listening to music and lighting random pieces of paper on fire.
  • A very zinelike activity.
  • Independent movie theaters all vanishing in an eyeblink.
  • Filling the delivery tube with potato soup and sending it to the bank teller.
  • Chuck E. Cheese classing it up with woodfired, chef-inspired pizza.
  • Getting carryout from the Chuck E. Cheese and your chef-inspired pizza coming with a side of orange spider rings.
  • Sleeping on a mattress on the floor for years until your new girlfriend insists you get a real bed.
  • Putting a tennis ball on top of the screws you're supposed to attach the footboard to so you know where to park your keister.
  • Your migrating bedframe, a keter-class problem in the bedroom.
  • The one time it makes sense to have a strong opinion about someone else's bed.
  • Wiping down the incision site because if you get an infection after you die it's just never going to heal.
  • Only being allowed to listen to one song for the rest of your life.
  • The one song you're allowed to listen to also replacing music you hear in your head or anything you sing.
  • Trying to sing Happy Birthday to a co-worker but it always comes out as the chorus of "Selling the Drama" by Live.
  • All music in the world being replaced by the Intel Inside jingle.
  • The Zelda item noise secretly being the same as the Addams Family theme song.
  • Going to a concert and suddenly the band can only play the song you are cursed with.
  • The CIA discovering your musical curse and studying you on the dissection table like in Project ALF.
  • $10 million per For Fighting.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Goin' Polodna.
  • Goin' Polodna but bein' named Butterfield.
  • Only car thieves remaining.
  • Giving your guest a hard time for plugging something when you just asked them to plug something.
  • Being inspired by an eggplant you once had.
  • Stockholm syndrome but for vegetables.
  • A color that doesn't exist on earth.
  • Trying to cook every substance for every amount of time because you don't have Netflix.
  • Laundering a horse through a book.
  • The pe-noose.
  • Trying to Google which Stephen King book had the necklace of penises.
  • Deeming a penis to be a boner.
  • Looking upon a pubic hair topiary and despairing.
  • Sculpting the day your paramour will die into your pubic hair on the first date.
  • Fred Meyer's daughter, J.C. Penney.
  • Not having any particular insight into this boner blog.
  • Being a little bit hornt up despite being trapped in a Fred Meyer by the murder frog outside.
  • Whether or not "pud" is short for "pudding" or indeed anything.
  • A zoetrope showing Goofy pulling down his pants every 7 seconds.
  • A plexiglass box that is big enough for your head and a fern.
  • Hacking the oxygen mask to come down when you just need a hit.
  • Sprinkling some foliage on your head to make it look like the fern next to your head is just a lump on your face.
  • Sticking your head in the fern box under the seat in front of you and painting your face on your pants so your butt can wear the oxygen mask.
  • The tactile sensation of unclogging a toilet using a mouse pad.
  • The best water level for plunging a toilet.
  • Needing an articulated arm like Krang's to plunge the toilet from around the corner.
  • Trying to guess the Game Boy games being used to prop up a projector.
  • The Podcaster's Dilemma.
  • Maligning the Final Fantasy Legend series.
  • Deciding that your punishment will be a good night's sleep and a stern toothbrushing.
  • Playing Final Fantasy Legend while you brush each other's teeth live on AGDQ.
  • Asking a question that you'd already answered in a previous episode and just copy-pasting the answer from there.
  • Not being in good enough shape to sleep everywhere.
  • Ripping through the topics and needing to dip into the extended bucket.
  • A gigantic bucket of shelf-stable potato soup that you save for the end times.
  • Setting up a P.O. box so your listeners can send you a big pile of food and toy cars so you can not eat for a week and then eat an enormous megameal.
  • A Visual Studio plugin that lets you play text adventures anyone while looking like you're at work.
  • Pressing the boss key to hide that you're playing an ancient video game and your boss asking you why you're writing emails in Word Perfect 2.0.
  • Having a child to reduce your mortality anxiety.
  • Having a child so they can do the heimlich when you choke on a ham sandwich.
  • Subtweeting your cat.
  • Not being meaningfully aware of your mortality but still making decisions based on not dying.
  • Overcorrecting and turning into a maudlin fucker.
  • A boom box with a floppy drive playing canyon.mid.
  • A product with no conceivable audience except the nerds who will think it's cool and nostalgic thirty years from now.
  • Opening a cabinet and your coffee mug singing the Zelda "you found the thing" jingle.
  • The intentionality of listening to music in the most inconvenient way possible.
  • Listening to music and lighting random pieces of paper on fire.
  • A very zinelike activity.
  • Independent movie theaters all vanishing in an eyeblink.
  • Filling the delivery tube with potato soup and sending it to the bank teller.
  • Chuck E. Cheese classing it up with woodfired, chef-inspired pizza.
  • Getting carryout from the Chuck E. Cheese and your chef-inspired pizza coming with a side of orange spider rings.
  • Sleeping on a mattress on the floor for years until your new girlfriend insists you get a real bed.
  • Putting a tennis ball on top of the screws you're supposed to attach the footboard to so you know where to park your keister.
  • Your migrating bedframe, a keter-class problem in the bedroom.
  • The one time it makes sense to have a strong opinion about someone else's bed.
  • Wiping down the incision site because if you get an infection after you die it's just never going to heal.
  • Only being allowed to listen to one song for the rest of your life.
  • The one song you're allowed to listen to also replacing music you hear in your head or anything you sing.
  • Trying to sing Happy Birthday to a co-worker but it always comes out as the chorus of "Selling the Drama" by Live.
  • All music in the world being replaced by the Intel Inside jingle.
  • The Zelda item noise secretly being the same as the Addams Family theme song.
  • Going to a concert and suddenly the band can only play the song you are cursed with.
  • The CIA discovering your musical curse and studying you on the dissection table like in Project ALF.
  • $10 million per For Fighting.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Goin' Polodna.
  • Goin' Polodna but bein' named Butterfield.
  • Only car thieves remaining.
  • Giving your guest a hard time for plugging something when you just asked them to plug something.
  • Being inspired by an eggplant you once had.
  • Stockholm syndrome but for vegetables.
  • A color that doesn't exist on earth.
  • Trying to cook every substance for every amount of time because you don't have Netflix.
  • Laundering a horse through a book.
  • The pe-noose.
  • Trying to Google which Stephen King book had the necklace of penises.
  • Deeming a penis to be a boner.
  • Looking upon a pubic hair topiary and despairing.
  • Sculpting the day your paramour will die into your pubic hair on the first date.
  • Fred Meyer's daughter, J.C. Penney.
  • Not having any particular insight into this boner blog.
  • Being a little bit hornt up despite being trapped in a Fred Meyer by the murder frog outside.
  • Whether or not "pud" is short for "pudding" or indeed anything.
  • A zoetrope showing Goofy pulling down his pants every 7 seconds.
  • A plexiglass box that is big enough for your head and a fern.
  • Hacking the oxygen mask to come down when you just need a hit.
  • Sprinkling some foliage on your head to make it look like the fern next to your head is just a lump on your face.
  • Sticking your head in the fern box under the seat in front of you and painting your face on your pants so your butt can wear the oxygen mask.
  • The tactile sensation of unclogging a toilet using a mouse pad.
  • The best water level for plunging a toilet.
  • Needing an articulated arm like Krang's to plunge the toilet from around the corner.
  • Trying to guess the Game Boy games being used to prop up a projector.
  • The Podcaster's Dilemma.
  • Maligning the Final Fantasy Legend series.
  • Deciding that your punishment will be a good night's sleep and a stern toothbrushing.
  • Playing Final Fantasy Legend while you brush each other's teeth live on AGDQ.
  • Asking a question that you'd already answered in a previous episode and just copy-pasting the answer from there.
  • Not being in good enough shape to sleep everywhere.
  • Ripping through the topics and needing to dip into the extended bucket.
  • A gigantic bucket of shelf-stable potato soup that you save for the end times.
  • Setting up a P.O. box so your listeners can send you a big pile of food and toy cars so you can not eat for a week and then eat an enormous megameal.
  • A Visual Studio plugin that lets you play text adventures anyone while looking like you're at work.
  • Pressing the boss key to hide that you're playing an ancient video game and your boss asking you why you're writing emails in Word Perfect 2.0.
  • Having a child to reduce your mortality anxiety.
  • Having a child so they can do the heimlich when you choke on a ham sandwich.
  • Subtweeting your cat.
  • Not being meaningfully aware of your mortality but still making decisions based on not dying.
  • Overcorrecting and turning into a maudlin fucker.
  • A boom box with a floppy drive playing canyon.mid.
  • A product with no conceivable audience except the nerds who will think it's cool and nostalgic thirty years from now.
  • Opening a cabinet and your coffee mug singing the Zelda "you found the thing" jingle.
  • The intentionality of listening to music in the most inconvenient way possible.
  • Listening to music and lighting random pieces of paper on fire.
  • A very zinelike activity.
  • Independent movie theaters all vanishing in an eyeblink.
  • Filling the delivery tube with potato soup and sending it to the bank teller.
  • Chuck E. Cheese classing it up with woodfired, chef-inspired pizza.
  • Getting carryout from the Chuck E. Cheese and your chef-inspired pizza coming with a side of orange spider rings.
  • Sleeping on a mattress on the floor for years until your new girlfriend insists you get a real bed.
  • Putting a tennis ball on top of the screws you're supposed to attach the footboard to so you know where to park your keister.
  • Your migrating bedframe, a keter-class problem in the bedroom.
  • The one time it makes sense to have a strong opinion about someone else's bed.
  • Wiping down the incision site because if you get an infection after you die it's just never going to heal.
  • Only being allowed to listen to one song for the rest of your life.
  • The one song you're allowed to listen to also replacing music you hear in your head or anything you sing.
  • Trying to sing Happy Birthday to a co-worker but it always comes out as the chorus of "Selling the Drama" by Live.
  • All music in the world being replaced by the Intel Inside jingle.
  • The Zelda item noise secretly being the same as the Addams Family theme song.
  • Going to a concert and suddenly the band can only play the song you are cursed with.
  • The CIA discovering your musical curse and studying you on the dissection table like in Project ALF.
  • $10 million per For Fighting.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+zPVrONYw ]]> Jim Stormdancer 28. Stealing the Dead Skunk Back and Forth Forever https://topiclords.com/stealing-the-dead-skunk-back-and-forth-forever 01150674-14eb-453e-b494-278620090529 Mon, 04 May 2020 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: April and Ryan. We discuss the spigot question Jim keeps avoiding, reading in the new decade, what the Nakatomi corporation does, favorite zoo animals, cutting sandwiches diagonally, and having a private bidet but not a private toilet. 54:01 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • April is a beast lord and Jim's wife. @AprilSaur
  • Ryan is somehow also Jim's wife? @RyanIkeComposer

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Making a good dad joke on twitter.
  • The ravens that have been building a nest behind your corpyard at work.
  • The squabbling raven couple next door.
  • Being the neighbor who didn't call animal control.
  • Trying to remember the names of Odin's ravens.
  • Distributing podcast episodes in a post-internet wasteland.
  • The kid in middle school who guessed you were from New York because of how you say "basketball."
  • Why Jim is such a coward.
  • Reaching deep into the topic bucket and pulling out a black ichorous monster.
  • A garden hose spigot installed in your butt such that poop sprays forward instead of down.
  • Bodily fluids canceling each other out when you miss the toilet and so you just end up with a wet wall.
  • Liking ketchup so much you CRISPR a biological ketchup dispenser into your elbow.
  • Accidentally triggering your ketchup hands when you're icing a cake.
  • Putting a cap on your ketchup elbow so you don't drip ketchup everywhere.
  • Whether your new dispenser is a squishy flesh hose or a brass steampunk spigot.
  • Reframing your fleshy protuberance that shoots someone else's blood to sound scary and eldritch.
  • A spigot that shoots liquid money.
  • Making up for your horrifying blood pranks by giving blood.
  • Whipping blood into stiff peaks.
  • Carnivorous merengue.
  • Using science to make human blood safe to eat.
  • Letting the listeners hear the good podcast juice.
  • Falling down on your New Year's resolution starting in March.
  • Watching the Witcher show and then reading the Witcher short stories it was based on and knowing exactly what's going to happen.
  • Alchemy and math and words.
  • Whether or not reading on a screen still counts.
  • Reading your driver's license every night before you go to bed.
  • Getting hungry immediately after the body spigot discussion.
  • Being over your meal by the time you're done cooking it.
  • Assembling duck a l'orange ingredient by ingredient in your tummy and by the time you finish cooking it you're like "I've already eaten this."
  • Something standing right in front of you that you can't perceive.
  • Deciding not to read scary stories to your wife right before bed.
  • Getting ready for prose form, motherfuckers.
  • Trying to remember someone's name and only remembering that they have initials.
  • Medieval fantasy Londons and their relationships to magic.
  • Reading ahead in the tabletop adventure book.
  • A vault with 8 different kinds of locks on it, filled with non-negotiable bearer bonds.
  • A regular bearer bond except you can't negotiate for it.
  • A non-negotiable bond except you can hold it.
  • The database documenting the contents of the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
  • Manufacturing tiny toy guns and not being able to fight back against terrorists because your guns are too small.
  • Explaining why your tiny gun manufacturer has a money basement.
  • Tiny toy guns using only the tiniest gunpowder.
  • Writing the first season of your mystery show with the certainty that it'll be canceled after one season.
  • Having to figure out what polar bears are after your show gets renewed.
  • When a duck decides to start whispering its quacks.
  • The most convenient jaguar.
  • Biting each other in the face and having a good Bear Time.
  • Bats' closest relatives being humans because all their other relatives died.
  • Delaying gestation until everyone's pregnant at once.
  • Bats all giving birth at the same time and overwhelming the health care system.
  • A zoo except for the sea.
  • Watching a jellyfish enclosure and asking "what are they doing in there?"
  • Plastic bags floating around in the sea except they're alive and they'll still be alive after you're dead.
  • The universe being a big stupid donut.
  • Nobody giving a shit that you read Great Expectations.
  • Garfield being the great literature of the coming era.
  • Allegorical lasagna.
  • Caramelizing all your onions at once.
  • Cutting your sandwich into a pair of rhombuses.
  • Sitting on a stack of the most prestigious award in the country.
  • Figuring out what axis you can cut a hamburger on diagonally.
  • When the burrito guy folds your burrito wrong and the first bite is entirely sour cream.
  • Burrito Gaia, filled with loam, mantle and magma.
  • Naming your next kid after your least-favorite burrito.
  • The food dictator making you a cup of Crispix when all you wanted was grilled cheese.
  • The puzzle with the farmer trying to get a hen, fox and grain across the river except it's your butt, your poop, and a jet of water.
  • Taking it to squirts-town.
  • Building a hotel before they invented the combination toilet/bidet.
  • The french word for when you take a dump in somebody's bidet.
  • Hygiene strategies if a bird poops on your butthole.
  • The nose being an evolutionary strategy to protect our mouths from bird poop.
  • Dunking your whole ass in the ass-height sink.
  • Just making zoo noises until you've reached the required minimum podcast length.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • April is a beast lord and Jim's wife. @AprilSaur
  • Ryan is somehow also Jim's wife? @RyanIkeComposer

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Making a good dad joke on twitter.
  • The ravens that have been building a nest behind your corpyard at work.
  • The squabbling raven couple next door.
  • Being the neighbor who didn't call animal control.
  • Trying to remember the names of Odin's ravens.
  • Distributing podcast episodes in a post-internet wasteland.
  • The kid in middle school who guessed you were from New York because of how you say "basketball."
  • Why Jim is such a coward.
  • Reaching deep into the topic bucket and pulling out a black ichorous monster.
  • A garden hose spigot installed in your butt such that poop sprays forward instead of down.
  • Bodily fluids canceling each other out when you miss the toilet and so you just end up with a wet wall.
  • Liking ketchup so much you CRISPR a biological ketchup dispenser into your elbow.
  • Accidentally triggering your ketchup hands when you're icing a cake.
  • Putting a cap on your ketchup elbow so you don't drip ketchup everywhere.
  • Whether your new dispenser is a squishy flesh hose or a brass steampunk spigot.
  • Reframing your fleshy protuberance that shoots someone else's blood to sound scary and eldritch.
  • A spigot that shoots liquid money.
  • Making up for your horrifying blood pranks by giving blood.
  • Whipping blood into stiff peaks.
  • Carnivorous merengue.
  • Using science to make human blood safe to eat.
  • Letting the listeners hear the good podcast juice.
  • Falling down on your New Year's resolution starting in March.
  • Watching the Witcher show and then reading the Witcher short stories it was based on and knowing exactly what's going to happen.
  • Alchemy and math and words.
  • Whether or not reading on a screen still counts.
  • Reading your driver's license every night before you go to bed.
  • Getting hungry immediately after the body spigot discussion.
  • Being over your meal by the time you're done cooking it.
  • Assembling duck a l'orange ingredient by ingredient in your tummy and by the time you finish cooking it you're like "I've already eaten this."
  • Something standing right in front of you that you can't perceive.
  • Deciding not to read scary stories to your wife right before bed.
  • Getting ready for prose form, motherfuckers.
  • Trying to remember someone's name and only remembering that they have initials.
  • Medieval fantasy Londons and their relationships to magic.
  • Reading ahead in the tabletop adventure book.
  • A vault with 8 different kinds of locks on it, filled with non-negotiable bearer bonds.
  • A regular bearer bond except you can't negotiate for it.
  • A non-negotiable bond except you can hold it.
  • The database documenting the contents of the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
  • Manufacturing tiny toy guns and not being able to fight back against terrorists because your guns are too small.
  • Explaining why your tiny gun manufacturer has a money basement.
  • Tiny toy guns using only the tiniest gunpowder.
  • Writing the first season of your mystery show with the certainty that it'll be canceled after one season.
  • Having to figure out what polar bears are after your show gets renewed.
  • When a duck decides to start whispering its quacks.
  • The most convenient jaguar.
  • Biting each other in the face and having a good Bear Time.
  • Bats' closest relatives being humans because all their other relatives died.
  • Delaying gestation until everyone's pregnant at once.
  • Bats all giving birth at the same time and overwhelming the health care system.
  • A zoo except for the sea.
  • Watching a jellyfish enclosure and asking "what are they doing in there?"
  • Plastic bags floating around in the sea except they're alive and they'll still be alive after you're dead.
  • The universe being a big stupid donut.
  • Nobody giving a shit that you read Great Expectations.
  • Garfield being the great literature of the coming era.
  • Allegorical lasagna.
  • Caramelizing all your onions at once.
  • Cutting your sandwich into a pair of rhombuses.
  • Sitting on a stack of the most prestigious award in the country.
  • Figuring out what axis you can cut a hamburger on diagonally.
  • When the burrito guy folds your burrito wrong and the first bite is entirely sour cream.
  • Burrito Gaia, filled with loam, mantle and magma.
  • Naming your next kid after your least-favorite burrito.
  • The food dictator making you a cup of Crispix when all you wanted was grilled cheese.
  • The puzzle with the farmer trying to get a hen, fox and grain across the river except it's your butt, your poop, and a jet of water.
  • Taking it to squirts-town.
  • Building a hotel before they invented the combination toilet/bidet.
  • The french word for when you take a dump in somebody's bidet.
  • Hygiene strategies if a bird poops on your butthole.
  • The nose being an evolutionary strategy to protect our mouths from bird poop.
  • Dunking your whole ass in the ass-height sink.
  • Just making zoo noises until you've reached the required minimum podcast length.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • April is a beast lord and Jim's wife. @AprilSaur
  • Ryan is somehow also Jim's wife? @RyanIkeComposer

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Making a good dad joke on twitter.
  • The ravens that have been building a nest behind your corpyard at work.
  • The squabbling raven couple next door.
  • Being the neighbor who didn't call animal control.
  • Trying to remember the names of Odin's ravens.
  • Distributing podcast episodes in a post-internet wasteland.
  • The kid in middle school who guessed you were from New York because of how you say "basketball."
  • Why Jim is such a coward.
  • Reaching deep into the topic bucket and pulling out a black ichorous monster.
  • A garden hose spigot installed in your butt such that poop sprays forward instead of down.
  • Bodily fluids canceling each other out when you miss the toilet and so you just end up with a wet wall.
  • Liking ketchup so much you CRISPR a biological ketchup dispenser into your elbow.
  • Accidentally triggering your ketchup hands when you're icing a cake.
  • Putting a cap on your ketchup elbow so you don't drip ketchup everywhere.
  • Whether your new dispenser is a squishy flesh hose or a brass steampunk spigot.
  • Reframing your fleshy protuberance that shoots someone else's blood to sound scary and eldritch.
  • A spigot that shoots liquid money.
  • Making up for your horrifying blood pranks by giving blood.
  • Whipping blood into stiff peaks.
  • Carnivorous merengue.
  • Using science to make human blood safe to eat.
  • Letting the listeners hear the good podcast juice.
  • Falling down on your New Year's resolution starting in March.
  • Watching the Witcher show and then reading the Witcher short stories it was based on and knowing exactly what's going to happen.
  • Alchemy and math and words.
  • Whether or not reading on a screen still counts.
  • Reading your driver's license every night before you go to bed.
  • Getting hungry immediately after the body spigot discussion.
  • Being over your meal by the time you're done cooking it.
  • Assembling duck a l'orange ingredient by ingredient in your tummy and by the time you finish cooking it you're like "I've already eaten this."
  • Something standing right in front of you that you can't perceive.
  • Deciding not to read scary stories to your wife right before bed.
  • Getting ready for prose form, motherfuckers.
  • Trying to remember someone's name and only remembering that they have initials.
  • Medieval fantasy Londons and their relationships to magic.
  • Reading ahead in the tabletop adventure book.
  • A vault with 8 different kinds of locks on it, filled with non-negotiable bearer bonds.
  • A regular bearer bond except you can't negotiate for it.
  • A non-negotiable bond except you can hold it.
  • The database documenting the contents of the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
  • Manufacturing tiny toy guns and not being able to fight back against terrorists because your guns are too small.
  • Explaining why your tiny gun manufacturer has a money basement.
  • Tiny toy guns using only the tiniest gunpowder.
  • Writing the first season of your mystery show with the certainty that it'll be canceled after one season.
  • Having to figure out what polar bears are after your show gets renewed.
  • When a duck decides to start whispering its quacks.
  • The most convenient jaguar.
  • Biting each other in the face and having a good Bear Time.
  • Bats' closest relatives being humans because all their other relatives died.
  • Delaying gestation until everyone's pregnant at once.
  • Bats all giving birth at the same time and overwhelming the health care system.
  • A zoo except for the sea.
  • Watching a jellyfish enclosure and asking "what are they doing in there?"
  • Plastic bags floating around in the sea except they're alive and they'll still be alive after you're dead.
  • The universe being a big stupid donut.
  • Nobody giving a shit that you read Great Expectations.
  • Garfield being the great literature of the coming era.
  • Allegorical lasagna.
  • Caramelizing all your onions at once.
  • Cutting your sandwich into a pair of rhombuses.
  • Sitting on a stack of the most prestigious award in the country.
  • Figuring out what axis you can cut a hamburger on diagonally.
  • When the burrito guy folds your burrito wrong and the first bite is entirely sour cream.
  • Burrito Gaia, filled with loam, mantle and magma.
  • Naming your next kid after your least-favorite burrito.
  • The food dictator making you a cup of Crispix when all you wanted was grilled cheese.
  • The puzzle with the farmer trying to get a hen, fox and grain across the river except it's your butt, your poop, and a jet of water.
  • Taking it to squirts-town.
  • Building a hotel before they invented the combination toilet/bidet.
  • The french word for when you take a dump in somebody's bidet.
  • Hygiene strategies if a bird poops on your butthole.
  • The nose being an evolutionary strategy to protect our mouths from bird poop.
  • Dunking your whole ass in the ass-height sink.
  • Just making zoo noises until you've reached the required minimum podcast length.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+dAupaXXO ]]> Jim Stormdancer 27. The Great Mongolian Potato Sack Yak Race https://topiclords.com/the-great-mongolian-potato-sack-yak-race 5d799c45-4961-4ec1-8c15-2b40c939644d Mon, 27 Apr 2020 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: Jesse and Avery. We discuss unsolved math problems, Mr. Potatohead's accomplishments, managing a tedious job, auto-antonyms, humans driving the evolution of cuter and cuter birds, and the "Please Call Stella" accent database. 1:03:11 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Jesse is @thefringthing on Twitter.
  • Avery has a Facebook somewhere and if you find it you can ask him whether he's playing any live shows.

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Writing a song and realizing that you just wrote Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies by mistake.
  • Not the coolest thing to accidentally be ripping off.
  • Rapidly shutting down the entire idea of introducing yourself.
  • Continuing to talk about about how mysterious Jesse is.
  • The question of whether a problem that has been proven unsolvable is as solved as it can be.
  • Asking two people to simultaneously explain Goldbach's Conjecture.
  • Four followed by more zeroes that would be in a trillion.
  • Determine whether the RDA of Iron is a multiple of two primes while choosing a can of soup.
  • Hitting the last prime number and running out.
  • Paul Erdos' advice for dealing with aliens who request Diagonal Ramsey Numbers.
  • Avery's favorite math proof.
  • Explaining to your bosses that your current task is technically uncomputable.
  • Not being able to elaborate on packing arc segments because biotech analysts might have you killed.
  • Yelling excitedly about graph isomorphism at the gym and tripping the Lunk Alarm.
  • Disappointment that Mr. Potato Head doesn't have an honorary doctorate.
  • Mr. Potato Head's presidential physical fitness award.
  • Potato cannibalism.
  • Most Votes For Mr. Potato Head In A Political Campaign.
  • Everyone who has finished Super Mario Bros. 2 in front of a Twin Galaxies representative.
  • A strange man lurking behind you while you play Mario, writing down your score.
  • The guy 120 Guinness World Records, or 119 if you don't count the "Most Guinness Records Held At Once" record.
  • Potato sack racing a yak across the Mongolian desert.
  • Most Yaks Raced Through The Mongolian Desert. (1)
  • The near worldwide tie of Most Guinness Records Not Held At Once.
  • Walking using shovels as stilts.
  • Most balloons inflated to inches in one hour. (671)
  • Slicing potatoes while hopping on a shovel.
  • Inheriting two shovels from your uncle's estate and trying to figure out what world records you can set using them.
  • Longest distance continuously somersaulting. (12 miles)
  • Whether cartwheeling for 12 miles is more strenuous than somersaulting for 12 miles.
  • Jumping on a pogo stick until your O2 tank is depleted.
  • Sleeping holding a brick.
  • Most Injuries Not Incurred Trying To Break World Records.
  • Trying to remember Fish Ladders but being derailed by the Fish Cannon.
  • Taking a break from counting fish.
  • Not performing any medicine for 10 hours and then in the next hour frantically performing 10x as much medicine as you normally would.
  • Buying a short-range electric car to teach yourself to plan better.
  • Being really confused by the turtle appearing on your dashboard and then the car turning off.
  • A dashboard light that's like the no smoking sign except instead of a cigarette it's a picture of your car.
  • Sneaking onto a billionaire's estate to furtively charge your Nissan Leaf.
  • Looking at security cam footage and seeing that you gave electricity to Doctor Who in a time of need.
  • The incredible variety of charge ports on a Nissan Leaf.
  • Having trophies ready to distribute as soon as you're allowed to leave the house.
  • Ordering yourself a "best attitude" trophy.
  • The gradient of a trophy's meaninglessness.
  • Ordering a bunch of trophies from Crown Awards and subsequently every ad you see being for Crown Awards.
  • Delving too deep into what a trophy is until it loses all meaning.
  • Realizing you could've ordered trophies better and throwing your existing trophies in the trash.
  • Passions being both flammable and inflammable.
  • Words that have changed meanings because of persistent misunderstandings.
  • Having a story about corn husks.
  • Holding a corn husk in the grocery store and saying "Ah! Corn husks!"
  • Explaining to schoolchildren that they used corn husks to wipe before toilet paper was invented but the children don't know what husks are so they assume you mean corn cobs.
  • Not eating the crabs that look like your forefathers.
  • Paying more attention to cats who cry at the same frequency as human babies.
  • Not eating the moths that look more like the soot-covered trees they're hiding on.
  • Sphinx Of Black Quartz, Judge My Vow except for the IPA.
  • Comparing accents visually.
  • Inventing new accents to compensate for accents merging into each other.
  • Having a particularly grating way of speaking and blaming it on being from San Francisco.
  • Your dead relative not listening to this podcast.
  • Whether or not Dragon's Lair is a pun.
  • Yelling like a soda jerk when the order is ready and nobody coming to pick it up because they can't understand what you're saying.
  • The British TV show that Sanford & Son was based on.
  • Memorizing your favorite carnival barker pitch and reciting it unprompted at family gatherings.
  • Field recordings of carnival barkers from the 1950s.
  • Pro Wrestling somehow retaining its weird 19th-century carny-speak for over a century.
  • Channeling the dark energy from your urn while you fight Hulk Hogan.
  • WMAC Masters, the martial arts tournament series with health bars on the screen.
  • If Undertaker and Hulk Hogan were trucks.
  • Hockey except you play it with a basketball and there are trampolines on the floor.
  • Taking basketball and making it extreme.
  • Sitting around until one of you thinks of a way to end the show.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Jesse is @thefringthing on Twitter.
  • Avery has a Facebook somewhere and if you find it you can ask him whether he's playing any live shows.

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Writing a song and realizing that you just wrote Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies by mistake.
  • Not the coolest thing to accidentally be ripping off.
  • Rapidly shutting down the entire idea of introducing yourself.
  • Continuing to talk about about how mysterious Jesse is.
  • The question of whether a problem that has been proven unsolvable is as solved as it can be.
  • Asking two people to simultaneously explain Goldbach's Conjecture.
  • Four followed by more zeroes that would be in a trillion.
  • Determine whether the RDA of Iron is a multiple of two primes while choosing a can of soup.
  • Hitting the last prime number and running out.
  • Paul Erdos' advice for dealing with aliens who request Diagonal Ramsey Numbers.
  • Avery's favorite math proof.
  • Explaining to your bosses that your current task is technically uncomputable.
  • Not being able to elaborate on packing arc segments because biotech analysts might have you killed.
  • Yelling excitedly about graph isomorphism at the gym and tripping the Lunk Alarm.
  • Disappointment that Mr. Potato Head doesn't have an honorary doctorate.
  • Mr. Potato Head's presidential physical fitness award.
  • Potato cannibalism.
  • Most Votes For Mr. Potato Head In A Political Campaign.
  • Everyone who has finished Super Mario Bros. 2 in front of a Twin Galaxies representative.
  • A strange man lurking behind you while you play Mario, writing down your score.
  • The guy 120 Guinness World Records, or 119 if you don't count the "Most Guinness Records Held At Once" record.
  • Potato sack racing a yak across the Mongolian desert.
  • Most Yaks Raced Through The Mongolian Desert. (1)
  • The near worldwide tie of Most Guinness Records Not Held At Once.
  • Walking using shovels as stilts.
  • Most balloons inflated to inches in one hour. (671)
  • Slicing potatoes while hopping on a shovel.
  • Inheriting two shovels from your uncle's estate and trying to figure out what world records you can set using them.
  • Longest distance continuously somersaulting. (12 miles)
  • Whether cartwheeling for 12 miles is more strenuous than somersaulting for 12 miles.
  • Jumping on a pogo stick until your O2 tank is depleted.
  • Sleeping holding a brick.
  • Most Injuries Not Incurred Trying To Break World Records.
  • Trying to remember Fish Ladders but being derailed by the Fish Cannon.
  • Taking a break from counting fish.
  • Not performing any medicine for 10 hours and then in the next hour frantically performing 10x as much medicine as you normally would.
  • Buying a short-range electric car to teach yourself to plan better.
  • Being really confused by the turtle appearing on your dashboard and then the car turning off.
  • A dashboard light that's like the no smoking sign except instead of a cigarette it's a picture of your car.
  • Sneaking onto a billionaire's estate to furtively charge your Nissan Leaf.
  • Looking at security cam footage and seeing that you gave electricity to Doctor Who in a time of need.
  • The incredible variety of charge ports on a Nissan Leaf.
  • Having trophies ready to distribute as soon as you're allowed to leave the house.
  • Ordering yourself a "best attitude" trophy.
  • The gradient of a trophy's meaninglessness.
  • Ordering a bunch of trophies from Crown Awards and subsequently every ad you see being for Crown Awards.
  • Delving too deep into what a trophy is until it loses all meaning.
  • Realizing you could've ordered trophies better and throwing your existing trophies in the trash.
  • Passions being both flammable and inflammable.
  • Words that have changed meanings because of persistent misunderstandings.
  • Having a story about corn husks.
  • Holding a corn husk in the grocery store and saying "Ah! Corn husks!"
  • Explaining to schoolchildren that they used corn husks to wipe before toilet paper was invented but the children don't know what husks are so they assume you mean corn cobs.
  • Not eating the crabs that look like your forefathers.
  • Paying more attention to cats who cry at the same frequency as human babies.
  • Not eating the moths that look more like the soot-covered trees they're hiding on.
  • Sphinx Of Black Quartz, Judge My Vow except for the IPA.
  • Comparing accents visually.
  • Inventing new accents to compensate for accents merging into each other.
  • Having a particularly grating way of speaking and blaming it on being from San Francisco.
  • Your dead relative not listening to this podcast.
  • Whether or not Dragon's Lair is a pun.
  • Yelling like a soda jerk when the order is ready and nobody coming to pick it up because they can't understand what you're saying.
  • The British TV show that Sanford & Son was based on.
  • Memorizing your favorite carnival barker pitch and reciting it unprompted at family gatherings.
  • Field recordings of carnival barkers from the 1950s.
  • Pro Wrestling somehow retaining its weird 19th-century carny-speak for over a century.
  • Channeling the dark energy from your urn while you fight Hulk Hogan.
  • WMAC Masters, the martial arts tournament series with health bars on the screen.
  • If Undertaker and Hulk Hogan were trucks.
  • Hockey except you play it with a basketball and there are trampolines on the floor.
  • Taking basketball and making it extreme.
  • Sitting around until one of you thinks of a way to end the show.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Jesse is @thefringthing on Twitter.
  • Avery has a Facebook somewhere and if you find it you can ask him whether he's playing any live shows.

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Writing a song and realizing that you just wrote Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies by mistake.
  • Not the coolest thing to accidentally be ripping off.
  • Rapidly shutting down the entire idea of introducing yourself.
  • Continuing to talk about about how mysterious Jesse is.
  • The question of whether a problem that has been proven unsolvable is as solved as it can be.
  • Asking two people to simultaneously explain Goldbach's Conjecture.
  • Four followed by more zeroes that would be in a trillion.
  • Determine whether the RDA of Iron is a multiple of two primes while choosing a can of soup.
  • Hitting the last prime number and running out.
  • Paul Erdos' advice for dealing with aliens who request Diagonal Ramsey Numbers.
  • Avery's favorite math proof.
  • Explaining to your bosses that your current task is technically uncomputable.
  • Not being able to elaborate on packing arc segments because biotech analysts might have you killed.
  • Yelling excitedly about graph isomorphism at the gym and tripping the Lunk Alarm.
  • Disappointment that Mr. Potato Head doesn't have an honorary doctorate.
  • Mr. Potato Head's presidential physical fitness award.
  • Potato cannibalism.
  • Most Votes For Mr. Potato Head In A Political Campaign.
  • Everyone who has finished Super Mario Bros. 2 in front of a Twin Galaxies representative.
  • A strange man lurking behind you while you play Mario, writing down your score.
  • The guy 120 Guinness World Records, or 119 if you don't count the "Most Guinness Records Held At Once" record.
  • Potato sack racing a yak across the Mongolian desert.
  • Most Yaks Raced Through The Mongolian Desert. (1)
  • The near worldwide tie of Most Guinness Records Not Held At Once.
  • Walking using shovels as stilts.
  • Most balloons inflated to inches in one hour. (671)
  • Slicing potatoes while hopping on a shovel.
  • Inheriting two shovels from your uncle's estate and trying to figure out what world records you can set using them.
  • Longest distance continuously somersaulting. (12 miles)
  • Whether cartwheeling for 12 miles is more strenuous than somersaulting for 12 miles.
  • Jumping on a pogo stick until your O2 tank is depleted.
  • Sleeping holding a brick.
  • Most Injuries Not Incurred Trying To Break World Records.
  • Trying to remember Fish Ladders but being derailed by the Fish Cannon.
  • Taking a break from counting fish.
  • Not performing any medicine for 10 hours and then in the next hour frantically performing 10x as much medicine as you normally would.
  • Buying a short-range electric car to teach yourself to plan better.
  • Being really confused by the turtle appearing on your dashboard and then the car turning off.
  • A dashboard light that's like the no smoking sign except instead of a cigarette it's a picture of your car.
  • Sneaking onto a billionaire's estate to furtively charge your Nissan Leaf.
  • Looking at security cam footage and seeing that you gave electricity to Doctor Who in a time of need.
  • The incredible variety of charge ports on a Nissan Leaf.
  • Having trophies ready to distribute as soon as you're allowed to leave the house.
  • Ordering yourself a "best attitude" trophy.
  • The gradient of a trophy's meaninglessness.
  • Ordering a bunch of trophies from Crown Awards and subsequently every ad you see being for Crown Awards.
  • Delving too deep into what a trophy is until it loses all meaning.
  • Realizing you could've ordered trophies better and throwing your existing trophies in the trash.
  • Passions being both flammable and inflammable.
  • Words that have changed meanings because of persistent misunderstandings.
  • Having a story about corn husks.
  • Holding a corn husk in the grocery store and saying "Ah! Corn husks!"
  • Explaining to schoolchildren that they used corn husks to wipe before toilet paper was invented but the children don't know what husks are so they assume you mean corn cobs.
  • Not eating the crabs that look like your forefathers.
  • Paying more attention to cats who cry at the same frequency as human babies.
  • Not eating the moths that look more like the soot-covered trees they're hiding on.
  • Sphinx Of Black Quartz, Judge My Vow except for the IPA.
  • Comparing accents visually.
  • Inventing new accents to compensate for accents merging into each other.
  • Having a particularly grating way of speaking and blaming it on being from San Francisco.
  • Your dead relative not listening to this podcast.
  • Whether or not Dragon's Lair is a pun.
  • Yelling like a soda jerk when the order is ready and nobody coming to pick it up because they can't understand what you're saying.
  • The British TV show that Sanford & Son was based on.
  • Memorizing your favorite carnival barker pitch and reciting it unprompted at family gatherings.
  • Field recordings of carnival barkers from the 1950s.
  • Pro Wrestling somehow retaining its weird 19th-century carny-speak for over a century.
  • Channeling the dark energy from your urn while you fight Hulk Hogan.
  • WMAC Masters, the martial arts tournament series with health bars on the screen.
  • If Undertaker and Hulk Hogan were trucks.
  • Hockey except you play it with a basketball and there are trampolines on the floor.
  • Taking basketball and making it extreme.
  • Sitting around until one of you thinks of a way to end the show.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+N-uWPzp1 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 26. The Double Equilibrium Point of Water (For Fish) https://topiclords.com/the-double-equilibrium-point-of-water-for-fish b669131d-4276-4c46-9954-e5687455b51f Mon, 20 Apr 2020 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: John and Nelson. We discuss falling into the sky, lonely kaiju, this cool Arkanoid TAS, warming up to doing creative work, a sentient dog digging up a graveyard, and experiencing FOMO about things you don't want to do. 1:11:53 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • John of the Maryland Johns.
  • Ruining the show before it's really even started.
  • High fiving a friend from six feet away using your selfie stick with a hand at the end of it.
  • Washing the hand at the end of your selfie stick after high-fiving someone with it.
  • Motion detectors not detecting black people so corporate hires white people to follow black people around and activate the motion detectors.
  • A black person walking in front of the Kinect and the Kinect being like "I think I just saw a ghost!"
  • Loving your punchline and so letting it go.
  • Being flung away from the earth at 9.8 meters per second per second.
  • The unfathomable horror of your senator voting in favor of the "subtly tweak the laws of physics" bill.
  • Finding the highrise apartment building that is most likely to remain attached to the Earth if gravity reverses.
  • Being deeply bothered by children who know the metric system and understand calculus.
  • Having known you were going to die but now being able to put a number to exactly how fast.
  • Always paying attention to whether you feel slightly lighter now, because that means gravity is starting to reverse.
  • Gravity's power suddenly doubling and the only survivors being people hanging out in trampoline parks and bounce houses at the time.
  • Our only hope being heroes in mech suits but unfortunately everyone who owns a mech suit is a billionaire.
  • Fish living through gravity doubling because they can swim up to a lower water pressure.
  • The moon crashing into the Earth.
  • Kaiju who are lonely because they don't know any other kaiju.
  • Whether Swamp Thing and Godzilla would be friends.
  • A giant dog who is perpetually alone because there is no Mothra equivalent in his universe.
  • Bigfoot technically being a kaiju because his feet are so big.
  • Whether Bigger Luke is big enough to be considered a kaiju.
  • The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen except for kaiju.
  • Whether Jack the Ripper looms large enough in our minds that he should be banned from our Kaiju-only dating app.
  • The OkCupid dating personality result that was fine for women but if you're a dude they were like "please stop dating"
  • A tiny green cat as dense as a neutron star.
  • Having to explain what a TAS, speed runs, Arkanoid, Breakout, and video games are before you can get to the part that's cool about this Arkanoid TAS.
  • Running your Arkanoid simulation on six cores for over a year to find optimal Arkanoid strategies.
  • Mario dancing with the fish for 15 seconds and then the credits play.
  • Martial arts masters going into the mountains and practicing one move for 30 years.
  • The Many Worlds interpretation of Super Mario World.
  • A speedrunner finding a COVID-19 vaccine faster than anybody else but the FDA blocks them from releasing it.
  • Philosophers not allowing themselves to have any fun because they're trying to counter the image of philosophers lazing around and not doing any real work.
  • Sitting down to create while being fully aware that you might not create anything worthwhile today.
  • Throwing nothing away and making everything.
  • A cool game that is available on a variety of platforms.
  • Being a year into making a game and it isn't fun yet and you have to trust in the iteration process that you'll find the fun before you ship, but actually maybe you won't, but you still have to ship anyway so it's not a total loss.
  • Making a bad game fun by association, by placing it in a fun context.
  • Hiring a narrative designer a couple months away from shipping your deeply text-centered game, because there is currently no text or story in the game and everything is on fire.
  • Adding a bunch of things to your game that will definitely bite you in the ass later because you cannot be stopped.
  • Running a D&D game that you haven't prepped enough and your players getting to the part of the scenario where your notes are blank.
  • Fragile people in a fragile people world attempting to make juice and having empathy for each other.
  • Sitting at the text editor to create and creativity not happening fast enough so you go browse Reddit.
  • Being stuck on a hard problem and going to play video games while your subconscious works on the problem.
  • Watching Zodiac while you're working on your cross-stitch and you look down and you've spelled out the name of the real killer.
  • Trying to pick a speed run to watch in the background while you work that will keep you from being bored but not be interesting enough that you watch it instead of working.
  • Having made your topic list and having to sleep in them.
  • Gifts to ourselves.
  • Cyber-Washington with carbon fiber dentures and a minigun that fires the teeth of his slaves.
  • A cool sentient dog wearing a leather jacket and sunglasses digging up bodies and putting them in cool poses.
  • Cool Dog digging for bones in the easiest place possible, the human body.
  • The movie with the oiled muscle-man singing and playing a saxophone.
  • Buff Weird Al Yankovic.
  • Promising to name this episode "Stacksophone" but lying.
  • Cool Dog turning out to be a very uncool dog if you think about it.
  • Lost Boys, exhibit A in the debate of whether being a jerk is cool.
  • Cool sentient dogs in the 90s digging up bodies in graveyards, but cool sentient dogs in 2020 awooing on Mastodon.
  • Preferring to use human bones in your occult rituals because you relate better to the energy they carry.
  • Selling your leftover human bones after you're done doing all your curses.
  • Whether or not the guy selling human bones on Etsy is cool, and whether they'd be cooler if they were a dog.
  • Loving Bribe Dog even though by all rights he ought to be in jail.
  • A small dog gumming at a stranger's ankles and not breaking the skin but they get upset anyway for some reason.
  • The life-long FOMO of wondering what you're missing out on from activities you never do because you hate doing them.
  • Correctly guessing that the other guest is subtweeting Animal Crossing.
  • A game that is fun until it becomes your job.
  • Not needing to buy a new video game because Breath of the Wild still exists.
  • Not wanting to do an activity so much as be a part of the community that does the activity.
  • That month where everyone in the world was playing Pokemon Go.
  • Recommending a video game to two people who have already played it.
  • Leveling up as a person the first time you've ever made a non-optimal decision in a game to retain your quality of life.
  • Your Animal Crossing villagers expressing shock as you chop down your entire orchard in front of them.
  • Opening an iPad feeling special, like someone confessing that they love you and not loving them back.
  • Getting FOMO about everyone you're not in love with.
  • The future where instead of social media, everybody drops an ARG about themselves that you have to solve in order to talk to them.
  • A thing that sounds exciting that you don't want to do.
  • An alternate reality where nothing happens and no-one cares.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • John of the Maryland Johns.
  • Ruining the show before it's really even started.
  • High fiving a friend from six feet away using your selfie stick with a hand at the end of it.
  • Washing the hand at the end of your selfie stick after high-fiving someone with it.
  • Motion detectors not detecting black people so corporate hires white people to follow black people around and activate the motion detectors.
  • A black person walking in front of the Kinect and the Kinect being like "I think I just saw a ghost!"
  • Loving your punchline and so letting it go.
  • Being flung away from the earth at 9.8 meters per second per second.
  • The unfathomable horror of your senator voting in favor of the "subtly tweak the laws of physics" bill.
  • Finding the highrise apartment building that is most likely to remain attached to the Earth if gravity reverses.
  • Being deeply bothered by children who know the metric system and understand calculus.
  • Having known you were going to die but now being able to put a number to exactly how fast.
  • Always paying attention to whether you feel slightly lighter now, because that means gravity is starting to reverse.
  • Gravity's power suddenly doubling and the only survivors being people hanging out in trampoline parks and bounce houses at the time.
  • Our only hope being heroes in mech suits but unfortunately everyone who owns a mech suit is a billionaire.
  • Fish living through gravity doubling because they can swim up to a lower water pressure.
  • The moon crashing into the Earth.
  • Kaiju who are lonely because they don't know any other kaiju.
  • Whether Swamp Thing and Godzilla would be friends.
  • A giant dog who is perpetually alone because there is no Mothra equivalent in his universe.
  • Bigfoot technically being a kaiju because his feet are so big.
  • Whether Bigger Luke is big enough to be considered a kaiju.
  • The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen except for kaiju.
  • Whether Jack the Ripper looms large enough in our minds that he should be banned from our Kaiju-only dating app.
  • The OkCupid dating personality result that was fine for women but if you're a dude they were like "please stop dating"
  • A tiny green cat as dense as a neutron star.
  • Having to explain what a TAS, speed runs, Arkanoid, Breakout, and video games are before you can get to the part that's cool about this Arkanoid TAS.
  • Running your Arkanoid simulation on six cores for over a year to find optimal Arkanoid strategies.
  • Mario dancing with the fish for 15 seconds and then the credits play.
  • Martial arts masters going into the mountains and practicing one move for 30 years.
  • The Many Worlds interpretation of Super Mario World.
  • A speedrunner finding a COVID-19 vaccine faster than anybody else but the FDA blocks them from releasing it.
  • Philosophers not allowing themselves to have any fun because they're trying to counter the image of philosophers lazing around and not doing any real work.
  • Sitting down to create while being fully aware that you might not create anything worthwhile today.
  • Throwing nothing away and making everything.
  • A cool game that is available on a variety of platforms.
  • Being a year into making a game and it isn't fun yet and you have to trust in the iteration process that you'll find the fun before you ship, but actually maybe you won't, but you still have to ship anyway so it's not a total loss.
  • Making a bad game fun by association, by placing it in a fun context.
  • Hiring a narrative designer a couple months away from shipping your deeply text-centered game, because there is currently no text or story in the game and everything is on fire.
  • Adding a bunch of things to your game that will definitely bite you in the ass later because you cannot be stopped.
  • Running a D&D game that you haven't prepped enough and your players getting to the part of the scenario where your notes are blank.
  • Fragile people in a fragile people world attempting to make juice and having empathy for each other.
  • Sitting at the text editor to create and creativity not happening fast enough so you go browse Reddit.
  • Being stuck on a hard problem and going to play video games while your subconscious works on the problem.
  • Watching Zodiac while you're working on your cross-stitch and you look down and you've spelled out the name of the real killer.
  • Trying to pick a speed run to watch in the background while you work that will keep you from being bored but not be interesting enough that you watch it instead of working.
  • Having made your topic list and having to sleep in them.
  • Gifts to ourselves.
  • Cyber-Washington with carbon fiber dentures and a minigun that fires the teeth of his slaves.
  • A cool sentient dog wearing a leather jacket and sunglasses digging up bodies and putting them in cool poses.
  • Cool Dog digging for bones in the easiest place possible, the human body.
  • The movie with the oiled muscle-man singing and playing a saxophone.
  • Buff Weird Al Yankovic.
  • Promising to name this episode "Stacksophone" but lying.
  • Cool Dog turning out to be a very uncool dog if you think about it.
  • Lost Boys, exhibit A in the debate of whether being a jerk is cool.
  • Cool sentient dogs in the 90s digging up bodies in graveyards, but cool sentient dogs in 2020 awooing on Mastodon.
  • Preferring to use human bones in your occult rituals because you relate better to the energy they carry.
  • Selling your leftover human bones after you're done doing all your curses.
  • Whether or not the guy selling human bones on Etsy is cool, and whether they'd be cooler if they were a dog.
  • Loving Bribe Dog even though by all rights he ought to be in jail.
  • A small dog gumming at a stranger's ankles and not breaking the skin but they get upset anyway for some reason.
  • The life-long FOMO of wondering what you're missing out on from activities you never do because you hate doing them.
  • Correctly guessing that the other guest is subtweeting Animal Crossing.
  • A game that is fun until it becomes your job.
  • Not needing to buy a new video game because Breath of the Wild still exists.
  • Not wanting to do an activity so much as be a part of the community that does the activity.
  • That month where everyone in the world was playing Pokemon Go.
  • Recommending a video game to two people who have already played it.
  • Leveling up as a person the first time you've ever made a non-optimal decision in a game to retain your quality of life.
  • Your Animal Crossing villagers expressing shock as you chop down your entire orchard in front of them.
  • Opening an iPad feeling special, like someone confessing that they love you and not loving them back.
  • Getting FOMO about everyone you're not in love with.
  • The future where instead of social media, everybody drops an ARG about themselves that you have to solve in order to talk to them.
  • A thing that sounds exciting that you don't want to do.
  • An alternate reality where nothing happens and no-one cares.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • John of the Maryland Johns.
  • Ruining the show before it's really even started.
  • High fiving a friend from six feet away using your selfie stick with a hand at the end of it.
  • Washing the hand at the end of your selfie stick after high-fiving someone with it.
  • Motion detectors not detecting black people so corporate hires white people to follow black people around and activate the motion detectors.
  • A black person walking in front of the Kinect and the Kinect being like "I think I just saw a ghost!"
  • Loving your punchline and so letting it go.
  • Being flung away from the earth at 9.8 meters per second per second.
  • The unfathomable horror of your senator voting in favor of the "subtly tweak the laws of physics" bill.
  • Finding the highrise apartment building that is most likely to remain attached to the Earth if gravity reverses.
  • Being deeply bothered by children who know the metric system and understand calculus.
  • Having known you were going to die but now being able to put a number to exactly how fast.
  • Always paying attention to whether you feel slightly lighter now, because that means gravity is starting to reverse.
  • Gravity's power suddenly doubling and the only survivors being people hanging out in trampoline parks and bounce houses at the time.
  • Our only hope being heroes in mech suits but unfortunately everyone who owns a mech suit is a billionaire.
  • Fish living through gravity doubling because they can swim up to a lower water pressure.
  • The moon crashing into the Earth.
  • Kaiju who are lonely because they don't know any other kaiju.
  • Whether Swamp Thing and Godzilla would be friends.
  • A giant dog who is perpetually alone because there is no Mothra equivalent in his universe.
  • Bigfoot technically being a kaiju because his feet are so big.
  • Whether Bigger Luke is big enough to be considered a kaiju.
  • The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen except for kaiju.
  • Whether Jack the Ripper looms large enough in our minds that he should be banned from our Kaiju-only dating app.
  • The OkCupid dating personality result that was fine for women but if you're a dude they were like "please stop dating"
  • A tiny green cat as dense as a neutron star.
  • Having to explain what a TAS, speed runs, Arkanoid, Breakout, and video games are before you can get to the part that's cool about this Arkanoid TAS.
  • Running your Arkanoid simulation on six cores for over a year to find optimal Arkanoid strategies.
  • Mario dancing with the fish for 15 seconds and then the credits play.
  • Martial arts masters going into the mountains and practicing one move for 30 years.
  • The Many Worlds interpretation of Super Mario World.
  • A speedrunner finding a COVID-19 vaccine faster than anybody else but the FDA blocks them from releasing it.
  • Philosophers not allowing themselves to have any fun because they're trying to counter the image of philosophers lazing around and not doing any real work.
  • Sitting down to create while being fully aware that you might not create anything worthwhile today.
  • Throwing nothing away and making everything.
  • A cool game that is available on a variety of platforms.
  • Being a year into making a game and it isn't fun yet and you have to trust in the iteration process that you'll find the fun before you ship, but actually maybe you won't, but you still have to ship anyway so it's not a total loss.
  • Making a bad game fun by association, by placing it in a fun context.
  • Hiring a narrative designer a couple months away from shipping your deeply text-centered game, because there is currently no text or story in the game and everything is on fire.
  • Adding a bunch of things to your game that will definitely bite you in the ass later because you cannot be stopped.
  • Running a D&D game that you haven't prepped enough and your players getting to the part of the scenario where your notes are blank.
  • Fragile people in a fragile people world attempting to make juice and having empathy for each other.
  • Sitting at the text editor to create and creativity not happening fast enough so you go browse Reddit.
  • Being stuck on a hard problem and going to play video games while your subconscious works on the problem.
  • Watching Zodiac while you're working on your cross-stitch and you look down and you've spelled out the name of the real killer.
  • Trying to pick a speed run to watch in the background while you work that will keep you from being bored but not be interesting enough that you watch it instead of working.
  • Having made your topic list and having to sleep in them.
  • Gifts to ourselves.
  • Cyber-Washington with carbon fiber dentures and a minigun that fires the teeth of his slaves.
  • A cool sentient dog wearing a leather jacket and sunglasses digging up bodies and putting them in cool poses.
  • Cool Dog digging for bones in the easiest place possible, the human body.
  • The movie with the oiled muscle-man singing and playing a saxophone.
  • Buff Weird Al Yankovic.
  • Promising to name this episode "Stacksophone" but lying.
  • Cool Dog turning out to be a very uncool dog if you think about it.
  • Lost Boys, exhibit A in the debate of whether being a jerk is cool.
  • Cool sentient dogs in the 90s digging up bodies in graveyards, but cool sentient dogs in 2020 awooing on Mastodon.
  • Preferring to use human bones in your occult rituals because you relate better to the energy they carry.
  • Selling your leftover human bones after you're done doing all your curses.
  • Whether or not the guy selling human bones on Etsy is cool, and whether they'd be cooler if they were a dog.
  • Loving Bribe Dog even though by all rights he ought to be in jail.
  • A small dog gumming at a stranger's ankles and not breaking the skin but they get upset anyway for some reason.
  • The life-long FOMO of wondering what you're missing out on from activities you never do because you hate doing them.
  • Correctly guessing that the other guest is subtweeting Animal Crossing.
  • A game that is fun until it becomes your job.
  • Not needing to buy a new video game because Breath of the Wild still exists.
  • Not wanting to do an activity so much as be a part of the community that does the activity.
  • That month where everyone in the world was playing Pokemon Go.
  • Recommending a video game to two people who have already played it.
  • Leveling up as a person the first time you've ever made a non-optimal decision in a game to retain your quality of life.
  • Your Animal Crossing villagers expressing shock as you chop down your entire orchard in front of them.
  • Opening an iPad feeling special, like someone confessing that they love you and not loving them back.
  • Getting FOMO about everyone you're not in love with.
  • The future where instead of social media, everybody drops an ARG about themselves that you have to solve in order to talk to them.
  • A thing that sounds exciting that you don't want to do.
  • An alternate reality where nothing happens and no-one cares.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+b3sU8qCy ]]> Jim Stormdancer 25. Which One Is Eggteen? https://topiclords.com/which-one-is-eggteen 0e02f1dd-c16e-4b56-90b3-2cdd57c28609 Mon, 13 Apr 2020 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: Rusty and Chris. We discuss games as work, photos of people and cats that do not exist, doing a job machines are already better at, hexadecimal naming systems, folk games, recording rigs for podcasting, and jokes as a mnemonic device. 54:17 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Non-consensually turning a Discord user into a Discord bot.
  • A recurring topic on this particular episode.
  • Lightly-flavored seltzer water.
  • Entering the Konami code at a soda fountain to get the secret flavor.
  • Getting tasks in your inbox and doing the tasks and getting more tasks as a reward.
  • Not having to take part in the office drama.
  • A complete lack of scrum master.
  • The fantasy of doing a job and getting fairly compensated.
  • The plausibility of having fun at your job.
  • Letting others pay the cost of the harm you're doing to the world.
  • Loving to play games where you clean up messes while your real life home gets worse and worse.
  • Playing a game about a housecleaning robot and deciding doing housework could make you happy in real life too.
  • Not falling for it when mom tries to turn cleaning your room into a game.
  • Teenagers going out of their way to be helpful in the household.
  • Toddlers wanting to do what adults do.
  • Finding out 18 years later your theory is correct.
  • The lego: nature's caltrop.
  • Writing an angry letter to the Lego corporation asking why they don't make squishy legos.
  • Wearing only half a pair of glasses.
  • Choosing Markov Chains because they work better than Tensorflow.
  • Having enough ram to store 1.5 billion floating point values.
  • Whether the Dalai Lama has ever used ICQ, and if so why hasn't Jim talked to him.
  • Some people running really fast, but not as fast as cars, but we still pay them to do it.
  • The emergency board meeting that the CEO of running called when the speed of cars eclipsed the speed of runners.
  • Becoming an artisanal trucker on Etsy when computers take your trucking job.
  • Decking out your artisanal delivery truck in old-timey neon reminiscent of the 80s when people still had jobs.
  • The part of your brain dedicated to determining the gender of the driver who is trying to kill you.
  • Being a very chill person except when you're driving alone.
  • An angry meditation on driving in heavy traffic.
  • The only time your infant son has ever heard you be angry.
  • Bringing your date to see Black Swan without realizing it's secretly a horror movie.
  • Just waiting for the great black scary bird to show up.
  • Pronouncing 1E as "Eggteen."
  • Knowing your pointer is a bad pointer when it's pointing to DEADBEEF.
  • Magic numbers such as 0xDECAFC0FFEE15BAD.
  • Michael Jackson moonwalking on the moon.
  • That feeling when you find that the altar is co-aligned in Minetown in Nethack.
  • Playing tag but not knowing who invented it.
  • Having water at home but trying not to brag about it.
  • A really inefficient way of getting at musicking.
  • Choosing a software package because you just download and run it without doing a bunch of sysadmin bullshit.
  • Being frustrated that there are still some things you can do on a computer but not on a phone.
  • Having an example that you wanted to use but not being able to remember what it was.
  • Remembering what a word means because you once imagined a monkey saying it.
  • Deliberately cracking yourself up so you can remember Bob's last name.
  • Thinking of the time I thought your name was "Blob."
  • Only remembering to buy the funniest items on your grocery list.
  • Memorizing your grocery list and then being stuck with the same grocery list for the rest of your life.
  • The persistent allure of a shelf of physical media even in the era of digital downloads.
  • Being intrigued by Bee Simulator but not being $48 intrigued.
  • Bee dances that are sufficiently expressive to articulate game reviews.
  • Git cloning the mind of someone with a good memory so you can remember things better.
  • Only being able to remember monkeys brachiating, but remembering the hell out of it.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Non-consensually turning a Discord user into a Discord bot.
  • A recurring topic on this particular episode.
  • Lightly-flavored seltzer water.
  • Entering the Konami code at a soda fountain to get the secret flavor.
  • Getting tasks in your inbox and doing the tasks and getting more tasks as a reward.
  • Not having to take part in the office drama.
  • A complete lack of scrum master.
  • The fantasy of doing a job and getting fairly compensated.
  • The plausibility of having fun at your job.
  • Letting others pay the cost of the harm you're doing to the world.
  • Loving to play games where you clean up messes while your real life home gets worse and worse.
  • Playing a game about a housecleaning robot and deciding doing housework could make you happy in real life too.
  • Not falling for it when mom tries to turn cleaning your room into a game.
  • Teenagers going out of their way to be helpful in the household.
  • Toddlers wanting to do what adults do.
  • Finding out 18 years later your theory is correct.
  • The lego: nature's caltrop.
  • Writing an angry letter to the Lego corporation asking why they don't make squishy legos.
  • Wearing only half a pair of glasses.
  • Choosing Markov Chains because they work better than Tensorflow.
  • Having enough ram to store 1.5 billion floating point values.
  • Whether the Dalai Lama has ever used ICQ, and if so why hasn't Jim talked to him.
  • Some people running really fast, but not as fast as cars, but we still pay them to do it.
  • The emergency board meeting that the CEO of running called when the speed of cars eclipsed the speed of runners.
  • Becoming an artisanal trucker on Etsy when computers take your trucking job.
  • Decking out your artisanal delivery truck in old-timey neon reminiscent of the 80s when people still had jobs.
  • The part of your brain dedicated to determining the gender of the driver who is trying to kill you.
  • Being a very chill person except when you're driving alone.
  • An angry meditation on driving in heavy traffic.
  • The only time your infant son has ever heard you be angry.
  • Bringing your date to see Black Swan without realizing it's secretly a horror movie.
  • Just waiting for the great black scary bird to show up.
  • Pronouncing 1E as "Eggteen."
  • Knowing your pointer is a bad pointer when it's pointing to DEADBEEF.
  • Magic numbers such as 0xDECAFC0FFEE15BAD.
  • Michael Jackson moonwalking on the moon.
  • That feeling when you find that the altar is co-aligned in Minetown in Nethack.
  • Playing tag but not knowing who invented it.
  • Having water at home but trying not to brag about it.
  • A really inefficient way of getting at musicking.
  • Choosing a software package because you just download and run it without doing a bunch of sysadmin bullshit.
  • Being frustrated that there are still some things you can do on a computer but not on a phone.
  • Having an example that you wanted to use but not being able to remember what it was.
  • Remembering what a word means because you once imagined a monkey saying it.
  • Deliberately cracking yourself up so you can remember Bob's last name.
  • Thinking of the time I thought your name was "Blob."
  • Only remembering to buy the funniest items on your grocery list.
  • Memorizing your grocery list and then being stuck with the same grocery list for the rest of your life.
  • The persistent allure of a shelf of physical media even in the era of digital downloads.
  • Being intrigued by Bee Simulator but not being $48 intrigued.
  • Bee dances that are sufficiently expressive to articulate game reviews.
  • Git cloning the mind of someone with a good memory so you can remember things better.
  • Only being able to remember monkeys brachiating, but remembering the hell out of it.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Non-consensually turning a Discord user into a Discord bot.
  • A recurring topic on this particular episode.
  • Lightly-flavored seltzer water.
  • Entering the Konami code at a soda fountain to get the secret flavor.
  • Getting tasks in your inbox and doing the tasks and getting more tasks as a reward.
  • Not having to take part in the office drama.
  • A complete lack of scrum master.
  • The fantasy of doing a job and getting fairly compensated.
  • The plausibility of having fun at your job.
  • Letting others pay the cost of the harm you're doing to the world.
  • Loving to play games where you clean up messes while your real life home gets worse and worse.
  • Playing a game about a housecleaning robot and deciding doing housework could make you happy in real life too.
  • Not falling for it when mom tries to turn cleaning your room into a game.
  • Teenagers going out of their way to be helpful in the household.
  • Toddlers wanting to do what adults do.
  • Finding out 18 years later your theory is correct.
  • The lego: nature's caltrop.
  • Writing an angry letter to the Lego corporation asking why they don't make squishy legos.
  • Wearing only half a pair of glasses.
  • Choosing Markov Chains because they work better than Tensorflow.
  • Having enough ram to store 1.5 billion floating point values.
  • Whether the Dalai Lama has ever used ICQ, and if so why hasn't Jim talked to him.
  • Some people running really fast, but not as fast as cars, but we still pay them to do it.
  • The emergency board meeting that the CEO of running called when the speed of cars eclipsed the speed of runners.
  • Becoming an artisanal trucker on Etsy when computers take your trucking job.
  • Decking out your artisanal delivery truck in old-timey neon reminiscent of the 80s when people still had jobs.
  • The part of your brain dedicated to determining the gender of the driver who is trying to kill you.
  • Being a very chill person except when you're driving alone.
  • An angry meditation on driving in heavy traffic.
  • The only time your infant son has ever heard you be angry.
  • Bringing your date to see Black Swan without realizing it's secretly a horror movie.
  • Just waiting for the great black scary bird to show up.
  • Pronouncing 1E as "Eggteen."
  • Knowing your pointer is a bad pointer when it's pointing to DEADBEEF.
  • Magic numbers such as 0xDECAFC0FFEE15BAD.
  • Michael Jackson moonwalking on the moon.
  • That feeling when you find that the altar is co-aligned in Minetown in Nethack.
  • Playing tag but not knowing who invented it.
  • Having water at home but trying not to brag about it.
  • A really inefficient way of getting at musicking.
  • Choosing a software package because you just download and run it without doing a bunch of sysadmin bullshit.
  • Being frustrated that there are still some things you can do on a computer but not on a phone.
  • Having an example that you wanted to use but not being able to remember what it was.
  • Remembering what a word means because you once imagined a monkey saying it.
  • Deliberately cracking yourself up so you can remember Bob's last name.
  • Thinking of the time I thought your name was "Blob."
  • Only remembering to buy the funniest items on your grocery list.
  • Memorizing your grocery list and then being stuck with the same grocery list for the rest of your life.
  • The persistent allure of a shelf of physical media even in the era of digital downloads.
  • Being intrigued by Bee Simulator but not being $48 intrigued.
  • Bee dances that are sufficiently expressive to articulate game reviews.
  • Git cloning the mind of someone with a good memory so you can remember things better.
  • Only being able to remember monkeys brachiating, but remembering the hell out of it.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+7_s9UvA6 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 24. So Horrible and Yet So Tiny https://topiclords.com/so-horrible-and-yet-so-tiny c0c7d795-b66b-4830-a20d-700200aeb0dd Mon, 06 Apr 2020 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: Tyriq and Jenni. We discuss Hot Topic, toe picks, topical medication, Topic (the candy bar), Test Of Proficiency In Korean, and Topic Records. 1:01:45 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Listening to a lot of dolphin podcasts.
  • Discussing only topics on the Topic Special.
  • Belching instead of answering the question.
  • Your project going well lately and being slightly less afraid that it's going to be awful.
  • A store that isn't in your local mall so you have to drive half an hour to the cool mall.
  • Being afraid cool teenagers will stare you down and you'll evaporate on the spot.
  • A store selling pop culture stuff you've actually heard of.
  • Not having a Hot Topic story but telling one you read on the Internet.
  • An anime version of Ben Stiller's character from Reality Bites.
  • The Hot Topic in Ben Stiller's thought bubble that you can only shop at if Ben Stiller thinks of you.
  • All food vanishing from the world because Ben Stiller has thought of it all and it's trapped in his mind.
  • All the wiki pages that popped up for the movie Primer.
  • Having sorted the spreadsheet and being unable to un-sort the spreadsheet.
  • Thinking toe picks are a gross hygiene thing but actually they're for doing a triple lutz.
  • Amputee guitarists who are pretty proficient at foot guitaring.
  • Skates with four wheels in a rectangle being way less cool than skates with four wheels in a row because that's what girls do.
  • Ice skates being harder to turn in than inline skates, because they cut a groove in the surface.
  • Turning on the toe pick.
  • Sucking at tourism because nothing interests you.
  • Changing the subject to Tony Hawk's Pro Skater.
  • Which indie game developers were previously pro inline skaters.
  • Mike Vallely storming off angrily at the concept of doing pressure flips.
  • A kickflip except you don't make the ollie motion with your front foot, you just kick the tail down and scoop it forward with your rear foot.
  • Tony Hawk being cool and teaching you vert tricks and Mike Vallely refusing to talk to anyone who isn't a skateboarder.
  • Skateboarders getting petty and insecure and getting inline skating removed from the X-Games.
  • Completing the entire gap checklist in Tony Hawk 2 and putting it on your resume.
  • Dropping the franchise completely after Tony Hawk 2 because the Playstation 1 version of Tony Hawk 3 doesn't have female custom skaters.
  • The mission in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 where you follow a homeless person around Venice Beach and harass him until he leaves town.
  • Ollie the Magic Bum getting good at skateboarding so he can exact revenge.
  • A full-contact, Tony-Hawk-And-Bully-Had-A-Baby roller derby game.
  • Punxsutawney Phil looking down and seeing poop and so there'll be six more weeks of poop.
  • Having to shove pills down a cat's throat twice a day for the rest of her life.
  • Giving away your spare geckos and explaining to the recipient that they eat sunlight.
  • A gecko eating another gecko like a corncob because they're not social animals after all.
  • Three creatures each nesting-dolled in the mouth of another creature.
  • The vet seemingly not knowing about lizards shedding when they put the cast on the lizard.
  • The gecko still being alive so you're doing okay at pet ownership.
  • Hiring a nurse that is also a gecko to take care of your gecko injections.
  • A mystery that we are still trying to discover.
  • Even the manufacturer not knowing why the candy bar is called Topic.
  • Inventing the jaw that can take the smallest possible bite.
  • Marzipan but with almonds.
  • Not liking how they pronounce "urinal" in the UK. Not liking it at all.
  • Things taking a dark turn and someone turning up dead.
  • Not going out of your way to inform people that your product's name is shockingly racist.
  • Preferring the language proficiency test that is more similar to Skee-Ball.
  • Changing the subject to Tony Hawk's Pro Skater again.
  • Wanting to feel sick about everything and doing all the missions at "sick" difficulty.
  • Doing a few missions at "sick" difficulty and deciding that's enough sick for you.
  • The Korean alphabet having been invented by a dude who thought ideograms were a bad idea.
  • Borrowing ideograms from Chinese and then later going back for more.
  • Nifflas inventing his own alphabet so doesn't have to hide his notes when he DMs.
  • The process of training yourself to read your weirdo moon-man alphabet.
  • Wanting to get into Lojban.
  • Liking a phrase as much as Tolkien likes "cellar door."
  • Inventing the language that magic is spoken in.
  • Inventing a language for your game and demanding your players become fluent in it.
  • The Nicaraguan school for deaf children doing a terrible job at teaching deaf children, but the children inventing Nicaraguan Sign Language.
  • Collecting your paycheck for doing nothing.
  • A corpus of industrial folk songs.
  • Yelling "peaches meet your fate!" and making the chainsaws kiss.
  • Mother-32 needing an offering of your hair every morning.
  • The composition process you enjoy most not leading to the kind of music you enjoy most.
  • Not wanting to make prototypes in the final medium because working in the final medium is a pain to work in.
  • GML being the wax and 6502 assembly being the marble in this analogy.
  • Live streaming video to the Apple II.
  • Having time for hobbies because you quit Twitter.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Listening to a lot of dolphin podcasts.
  • Discussing only topics on the Topic Special.
  • Belching instead of answering the question.
  • Your project going well lately and being slightly less afraid that it's going to be awful.
  • A store that isn't in your local mall so you have to drive half an hour to the cool mall.
  • Being afraid cool teenagers will stare you down and you'll evaporate on the spot.
  • A store selling pop culture stuff you've actually heard of.
  • Not having a Hot Topic story but telling one you read on the Internet.
  • An anime version of Ben Stiller's character from Reality Bites.
  • The Hot Topic in Ben Stiller's thought bubble that you can only shop at if Ben Stiller thinks of you.
  • All food vanishing from the world because Ben Stiller has thought of it all and it's trapped in his mind.
  • All the wiki pages that popped up for the movie Primer.
  • Having sorted the spreadsheet and being unable to un-sort the spreadsheet.
  • Thinking toe picks are a gross hygiene thing but actually they're for doing a triple lutz.
  • Amputee guitarists who are pretty proficient at foot guitaring.
  • Skates with four wheels in a rectangle being way less cool than skates with four wheels in a row because that's what girls do.
  • Ice skates being harder to turn in than inline skates, because they cut a groove in the surface.
  • Turning on the toe pick.
  • Sucking at tourism because nothing interests you.
  • Changing the subject to Tony Hawk's Pro Skater.
  • Which indie game developers were previously pro inline skaters.
  • Mike Vallely storming off angrily at the concept of doing pressure flips.
  • A kickflip except you don't make the ollie motion with your front foot, you just kick the tail down and scoop it forward with your rear foot.
  • Tony Hawk being cool and teaching you vert tricks and Mike Vallely refusing to talk to anyone who isn't a skateboarder.
  • Skateboarders getting petty and insecure and getting inline skating removed from the X-Games.
  • Completing the entire gap checklist in Tony Hawk 2 and putting it on your resume.
  • Dropping the franchise completely after Tony Hawk 2 because the Playstation 1 version of Tony Hawk 3 doesn't have female custom skaters.
  • The mission in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 where you follow a homeless person around Venice Beach and harass him until he leaves town.
  • Ollie the Magic Bum getting good at skateboarding so he can exact revenge.
  • A full-contact, Tony-Hawk-And-Bully-Had-A-Baby roller derby game.
  • Punxsutawney Phil looking down and seeing poop and so there'll be six more weeks of poop.
  • Having to shove pills down a cat's throat twice a day for the rest of her life.
  • Giving away your spare geckos and explaining to the recipient that they eat sunlight.
  • A gecko eating another gecko like a corncob because they're not social animals after all.
  • Three creatures each nesting-dolled in the mouth of another creature.
  • The vet seemingly not knowing about lizards shedding when they put the cast on the lizard.
  • The gecko still being alive so you're doing okay at pet ownership.
  • Hiring a nurse that is also a gecko to take care of your gecko injections.
  • A mystery that we are still trying to discover.
  • Even the manufacturer not knowing why the candy bar is called Topic.
  • Inventing the jaw that can take the smallest possible bite.
  • Marzipan but with almonds.
  • Not liking how they pronounce "urinal" in the UK. Not liking it at all.
  • Things taking a dark turn and someone turning up dead.
  • Not going out of your way to inform people that your product's name is shockingly racist.
  • Preferring the language proficiency test that is more similar to Skee-Ball.
  • Changing the subject to Tony Hawk's Pro Skater again.
  • Wanting to feel sick about everything and doing all the missions at "sick" difficulty.
  • Doing a few missions at "sick" difficulty and deciding that's enough sick for you.
  • The Korean alphabet having been invented by a dude who thought ideograms were a bad idea.
  • Borrowing ideograms from Chinese and then later going back for more.
  • Nifflas inventing his own alphabet so doesn't have to hide his notes when he DMs.
  • The process of training yourself to read your weirdo moon-man alphabet.
  • Wanting to get into Lojban.
  • Liking a phrase as much as Tolkien likes "cellar door."
  • Inventing the language that magic is spoken in.
  • Inventing a language for your game and demanding your players become fluent in it.
  • The Nicaraguan school for deaf children doing a terrible job at teaching deaf children, but the children inventing Nicaraguan Sign Language.
  • Collecting your paycheck for doing nothing.
  • A corpus of industrial folk songs.
  • Yelling "peaches meet your fate!" and making the chainsaws kiss.
  • Mother-32 needing an offering of your hair every morning.
  • The composition process you enjoy most not leading to the kind of music you enjoy most.
  • Not wanting to make prototypes in the final medium because working in the final medium is a pain to work in.
  • GML being the wax and 6502 assembly being the marble in this analogy.
  • Live streaming video to the Apple II.
  • Having time for hobbies because you quit Twitter.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Listening to a lot of dolphin podcasts.
  • Discussing only topics on the Topic Special.
  • Belching instead of answering the question.
  • Your project going well lately and being slightly less afraid that it's going to be awful.
  • A store that isn't in your local mall so you have to drive half an hour to the cool mall.
  • Being afraid cool teenagers will stare you down and you'll evaporate on the spot.
  • A store selling pop culture stuff you've actually heard of.
  • Not having a Hot Topic story but telling one you read on the Internet.
  • An anime version of Ben Stiller's character from Reality Bites.
  • The Hot Topic in Ben Stiller's thought bubble that you can only shop at if Ben Stiller thinks of you.
  • All food vanishing from the world because Ben Stiller has thought of it all and it's trapped in his mind.
  • All the wiki pages that popped up for the movie Primer.
  • Having sorted the spreadsheet and being unable to un-sort the spreadsheet.
  • Thinking toe picks are a gross hygiene thing but actually they're for doing a triple lutz.
  • Amputee guitarists who are pretty proficient at foot guitaring.
  • Skates with four wheels in a rectangle being way less cool than skates with four wheels in a row because that's what girls do.
  • Ice skates being harder to turn in than inline skates, because they cut a groove in the surface.
  • Turning on the toe pick.
  • Sucking at tourism because nothing interests you.
  • Changing the subject to Tony Hawk's Pro Skater.
  • Which indie game developers were previously pro inline skaters.
  • Mike Vallely storming off angrily at the concept of doing pressure flips.
  • A kickflip except you don't make the ollie motion with your front foot, you just kick the tail down and scoop it forward with your rear foot.
  • Tony Hawk being cool and teaching you vert tricks and Mike Vallely refusing to talk to anyone who isn't a skateboarder.
  • Skateboarders getting petty and insecure and getting inline skating removed from the X-Games.
  • Completing the entire gap checklist in Tony Hawk 2 and putting it on your resume.
  • Dropping the franchise completely after Tony Hawk 2 because the Playstation 1 version of Tony Hawk 3 doesn't have female custom skaters.
  • The mission in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 where you follow a homeless person around Venice Beach and harass him until he leaves town.
  • Ollie the Magic Bum getting good at skateboarding so he can exact revenge.
  • A full-contact, Tony-Hawk-And-Bully-Had-A-Baby roller derby game.
  • Punxsutawney Phil looking down and seeing poop and so there'll be six more weeks of poop.
  • Having to shove pills down a cat's throat twice a day for the rest of her life.
  • Giving away your spare geckos and explaining to the recipient that they eat sunlight.
  • A gecko eating another gecko like a corncob because they're not social animals after all.
  • Three creatures each nesting-dolled in the mouth of another creature.
  • The vet seemingly not knowing about lizards shedding when they put the cast on the lizard.
  • The gecko still being alive so you're doing okay at pet ownership.
  • Hiring a nurse that is also a gecko to take care of your gecko injections.
  • A mystery that we are still trying to discover.
  • Even the manufacturer not knowing why the candy bar is called Topic.
  • Inventing the jaw that can take the smallest possible bite.
  • Marzipan but with almonds.
  • Not liking how they pronounce "urinal" in the UK. Not liking it at all.
  • Things taking a dark turn and someone turning up dead.
  • Not going out of your way to inform people that your product's name is shockingly racist.
  • Preferring the language proficiency test that is more similar to Skee-Ball.
  • Changing the subject to Tony Hawk's Pro Skater again.
  • Wanting to feel sick about everything and doing all the missions at "sick" difficulty.
  • Doing a few missions at "sick" difficulty and deciding that's enough sick for you.
  • The Korean alphabet having been invented by a dude who thought ideograms were a bad idea.
  • Borrowing ideograms from Chinese and then later going back for more.
  • Nifflas inventing his own alphabet so doesn't have to hide his notes when he DMs.
  • The process of training yourself to read your weirdo moon-man alphabet.
  • Wanting to get into Lojban.
  • Liking a phrase as much as Tolkien likes "cellar door."
  • Inventing the language that magic is spoken in.
  • Inventing a language for your game and demanding your players become fluent in it.
  • The Nicaraguan school for deaf children doing a terrible job at teaching deaf children, but the children inventing Nicaraguan Sign Language.
  • Collecting your paycheck for doing nothing.
  • A corpus of industrial folk songs.
  • Yelling "peaches meet your fate!" and making the chainsaws kiss.
  • Mother-32 needing an offering of your hair every morning.
  • The composition process you enjoy most not leading to the kind of music you enjoy most.
  • Not wanting to make prototypes in the final medium because working in the final medium is a pain to work in.
  • GML being the wax and 6502 assembly being the marble in this analogy.
  • Live streaming video to the Apple II.
  • Having time for hobbies because you quit Twitter.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+snF2UVU1 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 23. Purpleface's Face Isn't Purple https://topiclords.com/purplefaces-face-isnt-purple cf81c163-7fc8-4a29-a0cd-1d2f314bc24b Mon, 30 Mar 2020 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: Danny and Lauren. We discuss Tetris piece personalities, smell-memory associations, convincing my son sleep is a good thing, making art for money vs. for its own sake, a raven being like a writing desk, and the best things that happened to you this week. 1:02:09 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics

Microtopics:

  • Doing video game music.
  • Breaking a problem into subproblems.
  • An unusual form of synesthesia where you perceive Tetris pieces as personalities.
  • Making rude buzzer noises when the guest gets it wrong.
  • The Tetris I-piece being egotistical and always late when you need it most.
  • Siblings who are not identical but are mistaken for identical.
  • The stem cell of Tetris pieces.
  • The Tetris T-piece being useful for opening coconuts because it's shaped like a bottle opener.
  • Playing Tetris without realizing that you can rotate the pieces.
  • The Tetris T-piece standing for Trauma.
  • Not realizing you push B to run in Super Mario Bros. because it doesn't do anything when you're not moving.
  • The smell of candles reminding you of the holidays.
  • Finding the cologne that speaks to your soul and wearing it literally every day.
  • A cartoon character design except it's how you smell.
  • Bringing around an MP3 player to play your theme song on loop as you walk around campus.
  • Testing how long you can listen to the Bubble Bobble theme.
  • Eating only carrots for a week because you want to really feel the fine distinctions between each individual carrot.
  • The particular mix of sweat and grass that makes you think of playing soccer.
  • Not being able to think of the word for when the water in a river is extremely busy.
  • The idealized smells of Frog Fractions 2 where everything smells like candy because of all the bright colors.
  • Going to sleep being the worst thing but your son going to sleep being the best thing.
  • Reading your child books about sleeping to convince them that sleeping is a good thing.
  • Refusing to teach your child about how certain activities are for boys and some are for girls, but then they learn about it in school anyway.
  • Having vivid dreams and taking ideas from them to use in fiction.
  • Hating to go to sleep and hating to wake up so maybe what you actually hate is just the transition one way or the other.
  • Wanting to go to sleep but going into a depressive spiral instead.
  • Reminiscing about making art as a hobby.
  • Doing the same amount of work but not burning out because you change the kind of work you're doing.
  • Creativity through limitations.
  • Getting to the point where you can afford to say no to freelance projects.
  • Having an audience and feeling obligated to serve the audience literally all the time.
  • Making dinner as an act of creative fulfillment.
  • Baking intuitively by just putting ingredients in a pan until it feels right.
  • Giving your guest baker a challenge ingredient to incorporate into their cake.
  • Picking activities that force you to not be perfect.
  • Forcing everybody to read a sentence from your novel before they get a cookie.
  • Whether "smartass" is really a swear.
  • Finding 11 socks in your desk at the end of the school year.
  • Both a raven and a writing desk having legs, but different numbers of legs.
  • Whether desks lay eggs to reproduce.
  • Finding the image that is exactly halfway between a raven and a writing desk.
  • Never having been sick as often as when you worked in a bounce house birthday party place.
  • Schoolteachers no longer getting sick because they've gotten literally every disease.
  • Putting the curry inside of the flatbread like they do in Toronto.
  • The relief of seeing a stray cat you haven't seen in a while.
  • A cat named Purrcy.
  • Arranging music for a friend and your band mates being excited to record it.
  • Artists appreciating art you made for them more than non-artists would.
  • Giving grandma your new noisecore album for Christmas.
  • Grandma sticking your new noisecore album to the fridge with a magnet.
  • Someone asking to read your fiction and then actually reading it.
  • A gift secretly being a demand for the recipient's time.
  • A gift made not just for somebody but made with their needs in mind.
  • Laura, Lauren, Laurie, and Laurel all being the same name if you think about it.
  • Profundity on demand.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics

Microtopics:

  • Doing video game music.
  • Breaking a problem into subproblems.
  • An unusual form of synesthesia where you perceive Tetris pieces as personalities.
  • Making rude buzzer noises when the guest gets it wrong.
  • The Tetris I-piece being egotistical and always late when you need it most.
  • Siblings who are not identical but are mistaken for identical.
  • The stem cell of Tetris pieces.
  • The Tetris T-piece being useful for opening coconuts because it's shaped like a bottle opener.
  • Playing Tetris without realizing that you can rotate the pieces.
  • The Tetris T-piece standing for Trauma.
  • Not realizing you push B to run in Super Mario Bros. because it doesn't do anything when you're not moving.
  • The smell of candles reminding you of the holidays.
  • Finding the cologne that speaks to your soul and wearing it literally every day.
  • A cartoon character design except it's how you smell.
  • Bringing around an MP3 player to play your theme song on loop as you walk around campus.
  • Testing how long you can listen to the Bubble Bobble theme.
  • Eating only carrots for a week because you want to really feel the fine distinctions between each individual carrot.
  • The particular mix of sweat and grass that makes you think of playing soccer.
  • Not being able to think of the word for when the water in a river is extremely busy.
  • The idealized smells of Frog Fractions 2 where everything smells like candy because of all the bright colors.
  • Going to sleep being the worst thing but your son going to sleep being the best thing.
  • Reading your child books about sleeping to convince them that sleeping is a good thing.
  • Refusing to teach your child about how certain activities are for boys and some are for girls, but then they learn about it in school anyway.
  • Having vivid dreams and taking ideas from them to use in fiction.
  • Hating to go to sleep and hating to wake up so maybe what you actually hate is just the transition one way or the other.
  • Wanting to go to sleep but going into a depressive spiral instead.
  • Reminiscing about making art as a hobby.
  • Doing the same amount of work but not burning out because you change the kind of work you're doing.
  • Creativity through limitations.
  • Getting to the point where you can afford to say no to freelance projects.
  • Having an audience and feeling obligated to serve the audience literally all the time.
  • Making dinner as an act of creative fulfillment.
  • Baking intuitively by just putting ingredients in a pan until it feels right.
  • Giving your guest baker a challenge ingredient to incorporate into their cake.
  • Picking activities that force you to not be perfect.
  • Forcing everybody to read a sentence from your novel before they get a cookie.
  • Whether "smartass" is really a swear.
  • Finding 11 socks in your desk at the end of the school year.
  • Both a raven and a writing desk having legs, but different numbers of legs.
  • Whether desks lay eggs to reproduce.
  • Finding the image that is exactly halfway between a raven and a writing desk.
  • Never having been sick as often as when you worked in a bounce house birthday party place.
  • Schoolteachers no longer getting sick because they've gotten literally every disease.
  • Putting the curry inside of the flatbread like they do in Toronto.
  • The relief of seeing a stray cat you haven't seen in a while.
  • A cat named Purrcy.
  • Arranging music for a friend and your band mates being excited to record it.
  • Artists appreciating art you made for them more than non-artists would.
  • Giving grandma your new noisecore album for Christmas.
  • Grandma sticking your new noisecore album to the fridge with a magnet.
  • Someone asking to read your fiction and then actually reading it.
  • A gift secretly being a demand for the recipient's time.
  • A gift made not just for somebody but made with their needs in mind.
  • Laura, Lauren, Laurie, and Laurel all being the same name if you think about it.
  • Profundity on demand.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics

Microtopics:

  • Doing video game music.
  • Breaking a problem into subproblems.
  • An unusual form of synesthesia where you perceive Tetris pieces as personalities.
  • Making rude buzzer noises when the guest gets it wrong.
  • The Tetris I-piece being egotistical and always late when you need it most.
  • Siblings who are not identical but are mistaken for identical.
  • The stem cell of Tetris pieces.
  • The Tetris T-piece being useful for opening coconuts because it's shaped like a bottle opener.
  • Playing Tetris without realizing that you can rotate the pieces.
  • The Tetris T-piece standing for Trauma.
  • Not realizing you push B to run in Super Mario Bros. because it doesn't do anything when you're not moving.
  • The smell of candles reminding you of the holidays.
  • Finding the cologne that speaks to your soul and wearing it literally every day.
  • A cartoon character design except it's how you smell.
  • Bringing around an MP3 player to play your theme song on loop as you walk around campus.
  • Testing how long you can listen to the Bubble Bobble theme.
  • Eating only carrots for a week because you want to really feel the fine distinctions between each individual carrot.
  • The particular mix of sweat and grass that makes you think of playing soccer.
  • Not being able to think of the word for when the water in a river is extremely busy.
  • The idealized smells of Frog Fractions 2 where everything smells like candy because of all the bright colors.
  • Going to sleep being the worst thing but your son going to sleep being the best thing.
  • Reading your child books about sleeping to convince them that sleeping is a good thing.
  • Refusing to teach your child about how certain activities are for boys and some are for girls, but then they learn about it in school anyway.
  • Having vivid dreams and taking ideas from them to use in fiction.
  • Hating to go to sleep and hating to wake up so maybe what you actually hate is just the transition one way or the other.
  • Wanting to go to sleep but going into a depressive spiral instead.
  • Reminiscing about making art as a hobby.
  • Doing the same amount of work but not burning out because you change the kind of work you're doing.
  • Creativity through limitations.
  • Getting to the point where you can afford to say no to freelance projects.
  • Having an audience and feeling obligated to serve the audience literally all the time.
  • Making dinner as an act of creative fulfillment.
  • Baking intuitively by just putting ingredients in a pan until it feels right.
  • Giving your guest baker a challenge ingredient to incorporate into their cake.
  • Picking activities that force you to not be perfect.
  • Forcing everybody to read a sentence from your novel before they get a cookie.
  • Whether "smartass" is really a swear.
  • Finding 11 socks in your desk at the end of the school year.
  • Both a raven and a writing desk having legs, but different numbers of legs.
  • Whether desks lay eggs to reproduce.
  • Finding the image that is exactly halfway between a raven and a writing desk.
  • Never having been sick as often as when you worked in a bounce house birthday party place.
  • Schoolteachers no longer getting sick because they've gotten literally every disease.
  • Putting the curry inside of the flatbread like they do in Toronto.
  • The relief of seeing a stray cat you haven't seen in a while.
  • A cat named Purrcy.
  • Arranging music for a friend and your band mates being excited to record it.
  • Artists appreciating art you made for them more than non-artists would.
  • Giving grandma your new noisecore album for Christmas.
  • Grandma sticking your new noisecore album to the fridge with a magnet.
  • Someone asking to read your fiction and then actually reading it.
  • A gift secretly being a demand for the recipient's time.
  • A gift made not just for somebody but made with their needs in mind.
  • Laura, Lauren, Laurie, and Laurel all being the same name if you think about it.
  • Profundity on demand.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+NiK4qn2A ]]> Jim Stormdancer 22. Abstinent Train Polycule https://topiclords.com/abstinent-train-polycule 8e7dcbb4-7f6a-4a9d-ab04-94f08be9b6eb Mon, 23 Mar 2020 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: Ryan and Alexander. Topics: creativity from a seed vs. from a box, using Hall of the Mountain King in comedy trailers, HDMI ports in your feet, yak shaving, the Abstinence Train, and multi-lingual animals. 1:15:29 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Making a transcendent grilled cheese in the air fryer.
  • Dipping food in terrifyingly hot golden juice that might burn your face off.
  • Walking into your friend's house and seeing an edifice.
  • Esoteric kitchen appliances that we find invaluable.
  • A Kevin Bacon co-working situation.
  • An espresso machine where you have to screw the lid down properly or it explodes.
  • The adrenaline rush of surviving the cooking process making the food taste way better.
  • Trading your chicken's fresh eggs for your neighbor's home-roasted coffee beans.
  • Trading jam games for fresh jam.
  • Getting super excited by discovering that something is impossible.
  • Proving the theorem that something can never be equal to something else.
  • Using a constraint to make something new.
  • AI-driven space helmets that generate plausible sounds for the space vista you're looking at.
  • A naval battle In Space!!;
  • Taking the script of an existing movie and adding a bunch of jokes to it.
  • Everybody knowing that Shakespeare was a hack but being afraid to say it.
  • Marching on the National Mall shrieking about public domain music usage in movie trailers.
  • Getting nostalgic about trends you always hated.
  • Aphantasia but for envisioning loudspeakers.
  • Being the kind of kid that keeps a database of classical music used in film trailers.
  • Owen Wilson's goblin-like face, sitting in his hall.
  • Looney Tunes characters creeping around while pizzicato strings punctuate their footsteps.
  • All classical music being recontextualized as Looney Tunes music.
  • John Williams changing one note of your opus and now it's the soundtrack to Star Wars.
  • Learning to play a mid-90s cartoon theme on harpsichord and realizing it's basically Hall of the Mountain King with every third note removed.
  • The booj.
  • Listening to a fake movie trailer and growing excited for a movie that doesn't exist.
  • A young child singing a Judas Priest song as if it's a nursery rhyme.
  • Putting the booj in trailers for Casablanca and giving 1940s audiences a heart attack.
  • Playing the booj outside ancient Rome and Romans inventing the film camera because they want to see the movie so badly.
  • Somehow removing even more agency from a "would you rather" question.
  • The HDMI port in your foot playing pretzel advertisements.
  • Asking your friend if they see the creepy guy staring at the camera in the background of this People's Court episode, but your friend can't get past that the TV episode is playing via an HDMI port on your foot.
  • Being assured that whatever comes out of your foot won't kill you.
  • The HDMI port in your foot not hurting unless you try to run.
  • The HDMI port on your foot playing memories of you running with the Columbia City Running Club.
  • Forgetting to run your brain screen saver and getting brain burn-in and the last thing someone said to you faintly ringing in your head forever.
  • An AR Tony Hawk skating game where you skate on power lines by holding your phone camera up to them.
  • Tony Hawk being a Pokemon.
  • The cat bus from My Neighbor Totoro.
  • Toddlers discovering the front yard.
  • A toddler whaling on a cat but she refuses to run away and just gets annoyed.
  • Getting all your cat poking and yanking out of the way as a toddler.
  • Yak shaving being a metaphor, hopefully.
  • Getting anxiety from hearing yak shaving explained.
  • Growing up with an antagonistic relationship with sleeping and by extension your own body.
  • Thinking of sleep as step 0 for anything you want to get done tomorrow.
  • Wanting a free uninterrupted hour and getting it by sleeping an hour less tonight.
  • The hemispheres of your brain having two different chronotypes.
  • Trying way too hard to relate to the teens.
  • Teens in the 90s being way into locomotives.
  • Three humans dressed up as train cars heading for Abstinence Street and the caboose trying to unhook himself because he wants to feel something right now.
  • The two front cars of the train polycule trying to convince the caboose that Abstinence Street is really cool actually.
  • The Abstinence Train PSA being the direct inspiration for The Human Centipede.
  • Ryan being the caboose in this metaphor.
  • The awards organization that gives you a trophy for eating your very last peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
  • An abstinent train polycule in the railyard of ideas, validating each other's impulses.
  • An abstinent train polycule changing the law to allow polygamy.
  • Becoming a Zen Master but when your followers think you're meditating, you're actually repeating the Abstinence Train PSA in your head.
  • Finally finding the Abstinence Train on YouTube and vaporizing into the atmosphere, your purpose fulfilled.
  • A homebrew recreation of the famous Abstinence Train video.
  • The results you get when you type "Abstinence Train" into YouTube.
  • Wanting to get a job at Google to fix YouTube's search engine so you can search for "Abstinence Train" but having to shave a yak first.
  • Mean Girls but all the time and they never grow out of it.
  • Chickens having a particular call they make when a hawk appears that means everyone should hide.
  • A crow that knows when chickens are warning other chickens about the incipient hawk.
  • Being very frustrated that the host put the topics in the wrong order.
  • The host leaving the show early but the guests continuing to talk for another fifteen minutes.
  • Assuring the listener that you're not bragging when you explain just how many podcasts you've been on.
  • Being called out by a podcast you were listening to but not otherwise involved in.
  • Being a doctor of mathematics but weighing in on whether dinosaurs were domesticable because it's Quora after all.
  • Chickens being way more shareable than your latest math problem.
  • Remembering the face of the human that threatened your nest.
  • Making decoy nests to fool the government agency trying to get rid of you.
  • A crow really just being a black pigeon.
  • The sound of a juvenile crow hassling their mom for food.
  • Throwing an olive at a murder of crows to meet the one crow who is willing to approach it like it's a live grenade.
  • Seattle residents exchanging crow attack stories.
  • Jim not being here to ask you if you want to plug anything.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Making a transcendent grilled cheese in the air fryer.
  • Dipping food in terrifyingly hot golden juice that might burn your face off.
  • Walking into your friend's house and seeing an edifice.
  • Esoteric kitchen appliances that we find invaluable.
  • A Kevin Bacon co-working situation.
  • An espresso machine where you have to screw the lid down properly or it explodes.
  • The adrenaline rush of surviving the cooking process making the food taste way better.
  • Trading your chicken's fresh eggs for your neighbor's home-roasted coffee beans.
  • Trading jam games for fresh jam.
  • Getting super excited by discovering that something is impossible.
  • Proving the theorem that something can never be equal to something else.
  • Using a constraint to make something new.
  • AI-driven space helmets that generate plausible sounds for the space vista you're looking at.
  • A naval battle In Space!!;
  • Taking the script of an existing movie and adding a bunch of jokes to it.
  • Everybody knowing that Shakespeare was a hack but being afraid to say it.
  • Marching on the National Mall shrieking about public domain music usage in movie trailers.
  • Getting nostalgic about trends you always hated.
  • Aphantasia but for envisioning loudspeakers.
  • Being the kind of kid that keeps a database of classical music used in film trailers.
  • Owen Wilson's goblin-like face, sitting in his hall.
  • Looney Tunes characters creeping around while pizzicato strings punctuate their footsteps.
  • All classical music being recontextualized as Looney Tunes music.
  • John Williams changing one note of your opus and now it's the soundtrack to Star Wars.
  • Learning to play a mid-90s cartoon theme on harpsichord and realizing it's basically Hall of the Mountain King with every third note removed.
  • The booj.
  • Listening to a fake movie trailer and growing excited for a movie that doesn't exist.
  • A young child singing a Judas Priest song as if it's a nursery rhyme.
  • Putting the booj in trailers for Casablanca and giving 1940s audiences a heart attack.
  • Playing the booj outside ancient Rome and Romans inventing the film camera because they want to see the movie so badly.
  • Somehow removing even more agency from a "would you rather" question.
  • The HDMI port in your foot playing pretzel advertisements.
  • Asking your friend if they see the creepy guy staring at the camera in the background of this People's Court episode, but your friend can't get past that the TV episode is playing via an HDMI port on your foot.
  • Being assured that whatever comes out of your foot won't kill you.
  • The HDMI port in your foot not hurting unless you try to run.
  • The HDMI port on your foot playing memories of you running with the Columbia City Running Club.
  • Forgetting to run your brain screen saver and getting brain burn-in and the last thing someone said to you faintly ringing in your head forever.
  • An AR Tony Hawk skating game where you skate on power lines by holding your phone camera up to them.
  • Tony Hawk being a Pokemon.
  • The cat bus from My Neighbor Totoro.
  • Toddlers discovering the front yard.
  • A toddler whaling on a cat but she refuses to run away and just gets annoyed.
  • Getting all your cat poking and yanking out of the way as a toddler.
  • Yak shaving being a metaphor, hopefully.
  • Getting anxiety from hearing yak shaving explained.
  • Growing up with an antagonistic relationship with sleeping and by extension your own body.
  • Thinking of sleep as step 0 for anything you want to get done tomorrow.
  • Wanting a free uninterrupted hour and getting it by sleeping an hour less tonight.
  • The hemispheres of your brain having two different chronotypes.
  • Trying way too hard to relate to the teens.
  • Teens in the 90s being way into locomotives.
  • Three humans dressed up as train cars heading for Abstinence Street and the caboose trying to unhook himself because he wants to feel something right now.
  • The two front cars of the train polycule trying to convince the caboose that Abstinence Street is really cool actually.
  • The Abstinence Train PSA being the direct inspiration for The Human Centipede.
  • Ryan being the caboose in this metaphor.
  • The awards organization that gives you a trophy for eating your very last peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
  • An abstinent train polycule in the railyard of ideas, validating each other's impulses.
  • An abstinent train polycule changing the law to allow polygamy.
  • Becoming a Zen Master but when your followers think you're meditating, you're actually repeating the Abstinence Train PSA in your head.
  • Finally finding the Abstinence Train on YouTube and vaporizing into the atmosphere, your purpose fulfilled.
  • A homebrew recreation of the famous Abstinence Train video.
  • The results you get when you type "Abstinence Train" into YouTube.
  • Wanting to get a job at Google to fix YouTube's search engine so you can search for "Abstinence Train" but having to shave a yak first.
  • Mean Girls but all the time and they never grow out of it.
  • Chickens having a particular call they make when a hawk appears that means everyone should hide.
  • A crow that knows when chickens are warning other chickens about the incipient hawk.
  • Being very frustrated that the host put the topics in the wrong order.
  • The host leaving the show early but the guests continuing to talk for another fifteen minutes.
  • Assuring the listener that you're not bragging when you explain just how many podcasts you've been on.
  • Being called out by a podcast you were listening to but not otherwise involved in.
  • Being a doctor of mathematics but weighing in on whether dinosaurs were domesticable because it's Quora after all.
  • Chickens being way more shareable than your latest math problem.
  • Remembering the face of the human that threatened your nest.
  • Making decoy nests to fool the government agency trying to get rid of you.
  • A crow really just being a black pigeon.
  • The sound of a juvenile crow hassling their mom for food.
  • Throwing an olive at a murder of crows to meet the one crow who is willing to approach it like it's a live grenade.
  • Seattle residents exchanging crow attack stories.
  • Jim not being here to ask you if you want to plug anything.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Making a transcendent grilled cheese in the air fryer.
  • Dipping food in terrifyingly hot golden juice that might burn your face off.
  • Walking into your friend's house and seeing an edifice.
  • Esoteric kitchen appliances that we find invaluable.
  • A Kevin Bacon co-working situation.
  • An espresso machine where you have to screw the lid down properly or it explodes.
  • The adrenaline rush of surviving the cooking process making the food taste way better.
  • Trading your chicken's fresh eggs for your neighbor's home-roasted coffee beans.
  • Trading jam games for fresh jam.
  • Getting super excited by discovering that something is impossible.
  • Proving the theorem that something can never be equal to something else.
  • Using a constraint to make something new.
  • AI-driven space helmets that generate plausible sounds for the space vista you're looking at.
  • A naval battle In Space!!;
  • Taking the script of an existing movie and adding a bunch of jokes to it.
  • Everybody knowing that Shakespeare was a hack but being afraid to say it.
  • Marching on the National Mall shrieking about public domain music usage in movie trailers.
  • Getting nostalgic about trends you always hated.
  • Aphantasia but for envisioning loudspeakers.
  • Being the kind of kid that keeps a database of classical music used in film trailers.
  • Owen Wilson's goblin-like face, sitting in his hall.
  • Looney Tunes characters creeping around while pizzicato strings punctuate their footsteps.
  • All classical music being recontextualized as Looney Tunes music.
  • John Williams changing one note of your opus and now it's the soundtrack to Star Wars.
  • Learning to play a mid-90s cartoon theme on harpsichord and realizing it's basically Hall of the Mountain King with every third note removed.
  • The booj.
  • Listening to a fake movie trailer and growing excited for a movie that doesn't exist.
  • A young child singing a Judas Priest song as if it's a nursery rhyme.
  • Putting the booj in trailers for Casablanca and giving 1940s audiences a heart attack.
  • Playing the booj outside ancient Rome and Romans inventing the film camera because they want to see the movie so badly.
  • Somehow removing even more agency from a "would you rather" question.
  • The HDMI port in your foot playing pretzel advertisements.
  • Asking your friend if they see the creepy guy staring at the camera in the background of this People's Court episode, but your friend can't get past that the TV episode is playing via an HDMI port on your foot.
  • Being assured that whatever comes out of your foot won't kill you.
  • The HDMI port in your foot not hurting unless you try to run.
  • The HDMI port on your foot playing memories of you running with the Columbia City Running Club.
  • Forgetting to run your brain screen saver and getting brain burn-in and the last thing someone said to you faintly ringing in your head forever.
  • An AR Tony Hawk skating game where you skate on power lines by holding your phone camera up to them.
  • Tony Hawk being a Pokemon.
  • The cat bus from My Neighbor Totoro.
  • Toddlers discovering the front yard.
  • A toddler whaling on a cat but she refuses to run away and just gets annoyed.
  • Getting all your cat poking and yanking out of the way as a toddler.
  • Yak shaving being a metaphor, hopefully.
  • Getting anxiety from hearing yak shaving explained.
  • Growing up with an antagonistic relationship with sleeping and by extension your own body.
  • Thinking of sleep as step 0 for anything you want to get done tomorrow.
  • Wanting a free uninterrupted hour and getting it by sleeping an hour less tonight.
  • The hemispheres of your brain having two different chronotypes.
  • Trying way too hard to relate to the teens.
  • Teens in the 90s being way into locomotives.
  • Three humans dressed up as train cars heading for Abstinence Street and the caboose trying to unhook himself because he wants to feel something right now.
  • The two front cars of the train polycule trying to convince the caboose that Abstinence Street is really cool actually.
  • The Abstinence Train PSA being the direct inspiration for The Human Centipede.
  • Ryan being the caboose in this metaphor.
  • The awards organization that gives you a trophy for eating your very last peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
  • An abstinent train polycule in the railyard of ideas, validating each other's impulses.
  • An abstinent train polycule changing the law to allow polygamy.
  • Becoming a Zen Master but when your followers think you're meditating, you're actually repeating the Abstinence Train PSA in your head.
  • Finally finding the Abstinence Train on YouTube and vaporizing into the atmosphere, your purpose fulfilled.
  • A homebrew recreation of the famous Abstinence Train video.
  • The results you get when you type "Abstinence Train" into YouTube.
  • Wanting to get a job at Google to fix YouTube's search engine so you can search for "Abstinence Train" but having to shave a yak first.
  • Mean Girls but all the time and they never grow out of it.
  • Chickens having a particular call they make when a hawk appears that means everyone should hide.
  • A crow that knows when chickens are warning other chickens about the incipient hawk.
  • Being very frustrated that the host put the topics in the wrong order.
  • The host leaving the show early but the guests continuing to talk for another fifteen minutes.
  • Assuring the listener that you're not bragging when you explain just how many podcasts you've been on.
  • Being called out by a podcast you were listening to but not otherwise involved in.
  • Being a doctor of mathematics but weighing in on whether dinosaurs were domesticable because it's Quora after all.
  • Chickens being way more shareable than your latest math problem.
  • Remembering the face of the human that threatened your nest.
  • Making decoy nests to fool the government agency trying to get rid of you.
  • A crow really just being a black pigeon.
  • The sound of a juvenile crow hassling their mom for food.
  • Throwing an olive at a murder of crows to meet the one crow who is willing to approach it like it's a live grenade.
  • Seattle residents exchanging crow attack stories.
  • Jim not being here to ask you if you want to plug anything.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+DZqbro3I ]]> Jim Stormdancer 21. Strip Laser Tag https://topiclords.com/strip-laser-tag 21980aac-4622-4cbf-a0ab-f4c38f6014bd Mon, 16 Mar 2020 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: Elena and Josh. We discuss procrastination as a coping mechanism, Newcomb's problem, celebrating Christmas by saying you have a machine gun, the fear that other podcasts might start discussing topics, McMaster-Carr, conlanging with toddlers, and preserving old software. 1:07:53 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Being old and knowing nothing.
  • Finding out that you can buy citric acid and put it in your drinking water.
  • Finding out that you can buy concrete and put it in your toilet.
  • The refreshing concrete toilet.
  • Regretting agreeing to do a thing you really enjoy.
  • Defeating procrastinating by discovering what you're afraid of and reframing it or interceding.
  • Worrying that you're incapable of surviving in a capitalist system.
  • Tracing every fear back to a fear of dying alone, like how every page on Wikipedia leads to Philosophy.
  • Wanting to do a thing but having no effective mechanism to prefer any given thing over any other and doing nothing.
  • Hearing syllables and then "ass" and pretending you understand.
  • Learning a word that you didn't know and then explaining it to other people.
  • Breaking your task into small steps and doing the first step.
  • Listening to your emotion and being like "what's your deal"
  • Self-acceptance helping when beating yourself up doesn't.
  • Instead of writing, taking copious notes and then skipping right to editing the notes into a completed text.
  • Laying out an outline and then finishing the essay by removing the bullet points.
  • Having an idea in each hand and holding two more in your left foot and trying to squinch them together into a linear series of thoughts.
  • Everything being related to everything else.
  • Giving people the tools they need to engage with topics.
  • A future-knowing genie who knows you're going to have pizza tonight.
  • Someone having done this topic already on a different podcast.
  • Being the genie you want to see in the world.
  • Causality seeming to flow in reverse.
  • Reassuring the genie that you're not the kind of person who takes two boxes.
  • The genie turning out to just be a guy with a rubber duck.
  • An odd Christmas greeting that you are here for.
  • Living next to people who think it's festive to announce how armed they are.
  • Knocking on your neighbor's door and asking for a cup of machine gun.
  • A corpse wearing a santa hat.
  • Trying to think of any movie that doesn't depict a corpse that could've worn a santa hat.
  • Some of your best friends having machine guns.
  • Being charmed by the utilitarian and efficient design of firearms.
  • Crying in a VR game and the tears filling up the mask until you drown.
  • Strip laser tag.
  • A topic peasant just waltzing in and talking about topics.
  • Editing out the guy hiding with a gun in post.
  • Having an unconscionable amount of bash.org memorized.
  • Waking up from your drugged haze to a flaming burnt cake in the oven and your house is burning down.
  • Being sad because the folks at Chipotle forgot your burrito but then your wife reminds you that you've eaten it already and you just forgot.
  • Everything that you could possibly need to build a thing.
  • Spinning around in an enormous magical hardware store with arms outstretched and an inventory robot fluttering around your skirt and landing on your finger.
  • Metal boxy objects of mysterious provenance.
  • The reaction speed of your transition lenses.
  • Welding masks transitioning to near-opaque in less than a millisecond because at any moment you might use a plasma beam that is brighter than the surface of the sun.
  • Installing permanent earplugs powered by your greasy earwax.
  • Not needing McMaster-Carr after Josh just tells you the answer.
  • An oil timer forcing a door to open or close slowly.
  • Having an idea for a cool Youtube video and assuming there's probably a cool Youtube guy who's already done it.
  • A toddler teaching you how to teach dragon language and the dragons being annoyed you didn't ask them.
  • Asking one of the indigineous people what the name of the hated rival tribe is named and them saying a slur and then being like "okay you're all that now."
  • Circumlocuting around the concept of the color green.
  • Summing up your engineering degree as "f=ma" and "you can't push a rope" and saving your listeners five years.
  • A fairly ingenious use of math that we've had sitting around forever.
  • Sliding rules getting us to the moon because we hadn't invented calculators yet.
  • The content being the same but the context changing.
  • The NES being the game dev platform that is most likely to survive the next thousand years.
  • Trolling through aerospace source code looking for funny comments.
  • Deleting your source code to free up space because nobody is ever going to need to port or revise Final Fantasy 7.
  • Planning a heist to retrieve the floppy disks stashed above the acoustic ceiling tiles of a dry cleaning service.
  • Games being reasonably well-preserved but other kinds of software being mostly lost because teenaged nerds don't care about it.
  • AI pets dying because the company that manufactured them went out of business.
  • Your GMO dog dying because the manufacturer's SSL certificate expired.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Being old and knowing nothing.
  • Finding out that you can buy citric acid and put it in your drinking water.
  • Finding out that you can buy concrete and put it in your toilet.
  • The refreshing concrete toilet.
  • Regretting agreeing to do a thing you really enjoy.
  • Defeating procrastinating by discovering what you're afraid of and reframing it or interceding.
  • Worrying that you're incapable of surviving in a capitalist system.
  • Tracing every fear back to a fear of dying alone, like how every page on Wikipedia leads to Philosophy.
  • Wanting to do a thing but having no effective mechanism to prefer any given thing over any other and doing nothing.
  • Hearing syllables and then "ass" and pretending you understand.
  • Learning a word that you didn't know and then explaining it to other people.
  • Breaking your task into small steps and doing the first step.
  • Listening to your emotion and being like "what's your deal"
  • Self-acceptance helping when beating yourself up doesn't.
  • Instead of writing, taking copious notes and then skipping right to editing the notes into a completed text.
  • Laying out an outline and then finishing the essay by removing the bullet points.
  • Having an idea in each hand and holding two more in your left foot and trying to squinch them together into a linear series of thoughts.
  • Everything being related to everything else.
  • Giving people the tools they need to engage with topics.
  • A future-knowing genie who knows you're going to have pizza tonight.
  • Someone having done this topic already on a different podcast.
  • Being the genie you want to see in the world.
  • Causality seeming to flow in reverse.
  • Reassuring the genie that you're not the kind of person who takes two boxes.
  • The genie turning out to just be a guy with a rubber duck.
  • An odd Christmas greeting that you are here for.
  • Living next to people who think it's festive to announce how armed they are.
  • Knocking on your neighbor's door and asking for a cup of machine gun.
  • A corpse wearing a santa hat.
  • Trying to think of any movie that doesn't depict a corpse that could've worn a santa hat.
  • Some of your best friends having machine guns.
  • Being charmed by the utilitarian and efficient design of firearms.
  • Crying in a VR game and the tears filling up the mask until you drown.
  • Strip laser tag.
  • A topic peasant just waltzing in and talking about topics.
  • Editing out the guy hiding with a gun in post.
  • Having an unconscionable amount of bash.org memorized.
  • Waking up from your drugged haze to a flaming burnt cake in the oven and your house is burning down.
  • Being sad because the folks at Chipotle forgot your burrito but then your wife reminds you that you've eaten it already and you just forgot.
  • Everything that you could possibly need to build a thing.
  • Spinning around in an enormous magical hardware store with arms outstretched and an inventory robot fluttering around your skirt and landing on your finger.
  • Metal boxy objects of mysterious provenance.
  • The reaction speed of your transition lenses.
  • Welding masks transitioning to near-opaque in less than a millisecond because at any moment you might use a plasma beam that is brighter than the surface of the sun.
  • Installing permanent earplugs powered by your greasy earwax.
  • Not needing McMaster-Carr after Josh just tells you the answer.
  • An oil timer forcing a door to open or close slowly.
  • Having an idea for a cool Youtube video and assuming there's probably a cool Youtube guy who's already done it.
  • A toddler teaching you how to teach dragon language and the dragons being annoyed you didn't ask them.
  • Asking one of the indigineous people what the name of the hated rival tribe is named and them saying a slur and then being like "okay you're all that now."
  • Circumlocuting around the concept of the color green.
  • Summing up your engineering degree as "f=ma" and "you can't push a rope" and saving your listeners five years.
  • A fairly ingenious use of math that we've had sitting around forever.
  • Sliding rules getting us to the moon because we hadn't invented calculators yet.
  • The content being the same but the context changing.
  • The NES being the game dev platform that is most likely to survive the next thousand years.
  • Trolling through aerospace source code looking for funny comments.
  • Deleting your source code to free up space because nobody is ever going to need to port or revise Final Fantasy 7.
  • Planning a heist to retrieve the floppy disks stashed above the acoustic ceiling tiles of a dry cleaning service.
  • Games being reasonably well-preserved but other kinds of software being mostly lost because teenaged nerds don't care about it.
  • AI pets dying because the company that manufactured them went out of business.
  • Your GMO dog dying because the manufacturer's SSL certificate expired.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Being old and knowing nothing.
  • Finding out that you can buy citric acid and put it in your drinking water.
  • Finding out that you can buy concrete and put it in your toilet.
  • The refreshing concrete toilet.
  • Regretting agreeing to do a thing you really enjoy.
  • Defeating procrastinating by discovering what you're afraid of and reframing it or interceding.
  • Worrying that you're incapable of surviving in a capitalist system.
  • Tracing every fear back to a fear of dying alone, like how every page on Wikipedia leads to Philosophy.
  • Wanting to do a thing but having no effective mechanism to prefer any given thing over any other and doing nothing.
  • Hearing syllables and then "ass" and pretending you understand.
  • Learning a word that you didn't know and then explaining it to other people.
  • Breaking your task into small steps and doing the first step.
  • Listening to your emotion and being like "what's your deal"
  • Self-acceptance helping when beating yourself up doesn't.
  • Instead of writing, taking copious notes and then skipping right to editing the notes into a completed text.
  • Laying out an outline and then finishing the essay by removing the bullet points.
  • Having an idea in each hand and holding two more in your left foot and trying to squinch them together into a linear series of thoughts.
  • Everything being related to everything else.
  • Giving people the tools they need to engage with topics.
  • A future-knowing genie who knows you're going to have pizza tonight.
  • Someone having done this topic already on a different podcast.
  • Being the genie you want to see in the world.
  • Causality seeming to flow in reverse.
  • Reassuring the genie that you're not the kind of person who takes two boxes.
  • The genie turning out to just be a guy with a rubber duck.
  • An odd Christmas greeting that you are here for.
  • Living next to people who think it's festive to announce how armed they are.
  • Knocking on your neighbor's door and asking for a cup of machine gun.
  • A corpse wearing a santa hat.
  • Trying to think of any movie that doesn't depict a corpse that could've worn a santa hat.
  • Some of your best friends having machine guns.
  • Being charmed by the utilitarian and efficient design of firearms.
  • Crying in a VR game and the tears filling up the mask until you drown.
  • Strip laser tag.
  • A topic peasant just waltzing in and talking about topics.
  • Editing out the guy hiding with a gun in post.
  • Having an unconscionable amount of bash.org memorized.
  • Waking up from your drugged haze to a flaming burnt cake in the oven and your house is burning down.
  • Being sad because the folks at Chipotle forgot your burrito but then your wife reminds you that you've eaten it already and you just forgot.
  • Everything that you could possibly need to build a thing.
  • Spinning around in an enormous magical hardware store with arms outstretched and an inventory robot fluttering around your skirt and landing on your finger.
  • Metal boxy objects of mysterious provenance.
  • The reaction speed of your transition lenses.
  • Welding masks transitioning to near-opaque in less than a millisecond because at any moment you might use a plasma beam that is brighter than the surface of the sun.
  • Installing permanent earplugs powered by your greasy earwax.
  • Not needing McMaster-Carr after Josh just tells you the answer.
  • An oil timer forcing a door to open or close slowly.
  • Having an idea for a cool Youtube video and assuming there's probably a cool Youtube guy who's already done it.
  • A toddler teaching you how to teach dragon language and the dragons being annoyed you didn't ask them.
  • Asking one of the indigineous people what the name of the hated rival tribe is named and them saying a slur and then being like "okay you're all that now."
  • Circumlocuting around the concept of the color green.
  • Summing up your engineering degree as "f=ma" and "you can't push a rope" and saving your listeners five years.
  • A fairly ingenious use of math that we've had sitting around forever.
  • Sliding rules getting us to the moon because we hadn't invented calculators yet.
  • The content being the same but the context changing.
  • The NES being the game dev platform that is most likely to survive the next thousand years.
  • Trolling through aerospace source code looking for funny comments.
  • Deleting your source code to free up space because nobody is ever going to need to port or revise Final Fantasy 7.
  • Planning a heist to retrieve the floppy disks stashed above the acoustic ceiling tiles of a dry cleaning service.
  • Games being reasonably well-preserved but other kinds of software being mostly lost because teenaged nerds don't care about it.
  • AI pets dying because the company that manufactured them went out of business.
  • Your GMO dog dying because the manufacturer's SSL certificate expired.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+BrWpLX-G ]]> Jim Stormdancer 20. The Bowerbird's Apprentice https://topiclords.com/the-bowerbirds-apprentice b95f4345-0aa8-4f2f-98a7-2d7dd8f113ae Mon, 09 Mar 2020 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: Mark and Shirley. We discuss the Third Culture Kid experience, camgirl life, why most animals don't need to walk, what bones we've broken, and hypnagogic hallucination. 1:05:00 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Jim's favorite episodes of this show.
  • Not being plugged in and having no idea what's going on.
  • The podcast ruining somebody's lack of internet presence.
  • Not being sure whether you defined Third Culture Kid correctly.
  • The four types of Third Culture Kids.
  • Being within five minutes of a Coca Cola at any given moment no matter where you go in the world.
  • Meeting a child of a Coca Cola executive at every international school.
  • Bathroom metaphors for your childhood identity.
  • Thoroughly describing the procedure of a scientific test.
  • The only guy you know who didn't show any bias on the Implicit Bias Test showing plenty of bias after living in the United States for 15 years.
  • Showing kids pictures of faces of different races and asking them which one is the liar.
  • Children turning out racist despite never having been explicitly instructed to be racist.
  • Taking a Third Culture Kid refresher course to refresh your lack of racial bias.
  • Confusing being a minority with being oppressed.
  • Nobody having enough experience with your race to know whether or not to be prejudiced against you.
  • People who sound like they have no accent because they live near Hollywood, California.
  • Turning on a camera and expecting the money to pour down around you.
  • Nobody giving you money because you're a boring naked person.
  • Sometimes logging on and making $0 and sometimes logging on and making thousands of dollars.
  • The liberation of leaving your retail job.
  • The ability to say no when you don't want to do something.
  • Realizing your ability to consent is way more present at your sex work job than at your retail job.
  • Not being able to ban the worst customers from the store you work at.
  • Feeling like you can get to the life you want if you stick through the hard times.
  • Quitting one job that sucks and ending up at another job that sucks.
  • Working 16 hours straight at your catering job and only being able to eat when you reach in and scoop a handful of spaghetti and meatballs out of the tray you're about to serve.
  • Heading back to the kitchen before your tray of hors d'oeuvres is empty in hopes that you can eat the last few yourself.
  • Taking the deviled egg tax every time you make deviled eggs.
  • Realizing that being a scientist is way cooler than working retail.
  • When the one guy you know who's always had it figured out suddenly changes it up.
  • The cool high school robotics teacher with a top knot.
  • God-tier hipsters.
  • All babies being born early because their head gets too big.
  • The word for when someone is deliberately slow at work.
  • Being jealous of your son's ability to learn skills extremely quickly.
  • Being jealous of your son's enormous head circumference.
  • Kangaroos basically giving birth to a fetus and the fetus climbing up into the mother's pouch when your kid is sixteen months old and still can't climb worth a damn.
  • Deciding this bower sucks, chirping out and trying to find a better bower bird with a better bower.
  • Bowerbirds innately knowing that they want to build big, blue bowers, but sucking at it until they apprentice under experienced bowerbirds.
  • Innately preferring big bowers and you can not lie.
  • Bowerbirds being super impressed by blue headphones with bluetooth support.
  • Joking about introducing paint to bowerbirds and finding out they already mix their own pigments to paint the interior of their bowers blue and realizing who is the true blue master here.
  • Tripping into a plexiglass window and realizing the guy from Hudsucker Proxy saved your life.
  • Having a rich friend who owns a golf cart and tearing the golf cart around while South African golfers shake their fists at you.
  • The golf cart not having a third seat so you just stand in the indentations where the golf bags usually go.
  • Diving off of a golf cart that is about to tip over.
  • Sustaining grave head injuries but the gate attendant still not letting you take the golf cart out of the parking lot.
  • Peeling the hair off your friend's face to reveal why the gate attendant should let you out of the parking lot.
  • After your concussion, not remembering who the president is or what year it is, but still remembering that you're going to get drinks at O'Hagen's tonight.
  • Getting a security briefing at the U.S. consulate about how to deal with a carjacking and he says to just give the guy a car.
  • Embedding a second PSA within your PSA.
  • Breaking a toe by kicking the softest thing you can think of.
  • Bringing up the Big Mike for maybe the third episode in a row.
  • Needing to come back on the show to tell the people the banana truth if it turns out that the Big Mike really does taste like the fake banana flavoring.
  • Giving a name to the dude you keep hallucinating standing in the corner of the room as you sleep.
  • Rearranging your bedroom to minimize shadows because the creepy dude only materializes in darkness.
  • Your wife waking you up to tell you someone's standing in the corner of the room and saying "ok good luck with that babe" and going back to sleep.
  • Not wanting to tell anyone you hallucinate while you sleep because of mental illness stigma.
  • Sleep paralysis and hypnagogic hallucinations totally explaining why people used to believe in ghosts.
  • Having the fun doesn't-ruin-your-life kind of hypnagogic hallucinations.
  • Existential dread only getting worse as your life goes on.
  • Not being able to finish watching an episode of Gargoyles because a shot from very high up gave you mortal terror.
  • Not being on the Internet except to look for memes.
  • Enrolling in every Cognitive Neuroscience program in the country because you're trying to befriend this week's guests to get their memes.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Jim's favorite episodes of this show.
  • Not being plugged in and having no idea what's going on.
  • The podcast ruining somebody's lack of internet presence.
  • Not being sure whether you defined Third Culture Kid correctly.
  • The four types of Third Culture Kids.
  • Being within five minutes of a Coca Cola at any given moment no matter where you go in the world.
  • Meeting a child of a Coca Cola executive at every international school.
  • Bathroom metaphors for your childhood identity.
  • Thoroughly describing the procedure of a scientific test.
  • The only guy you know who didn't show any bias on the Implicit Bias Test showing plenty of bias after living in the United States for 15 years.
  • Showing kids pictures of faces of different races and asking them which one is the liar.
  • Children turning out racist despite never having been explicitly instructed to be racist.
  • Taking a Third Culture Kid refresher course to refresh your lack of racial bias.
  • Confusing being a minority with being oppressed.
  • Nobody having enough experience with your race to know whether or not to be prejudiced against you.
  • People who sound like they have no accent because they live near Hollywood, California.
  • Turning on a camera and expecting the money to pour down around you.
  • Nobody giving you money because you're a boring naked person.
  • Sometimes logging on and making $0 and sometimes logging on and making thousands of dollars.
  • The liberation of leaving your retail job.
  • The ability to say no when you don't want to do something.
  • Realizing your ability to consent is way more present at your sex work job than at your retail job.
  • Not being able to ban the worst customers from the store you work at.
  • Feeling like you can get to the life you want if you stick through the hard times.
  • Quitting one job that sucks and ending up at another job that sucks.
  • Working 16 hours straight at your catering job and only being able to eat when you reach in and scoop a handful of spaghetti and meatballs out of the tray you're about to serve.
  • Heading back to the kitchen before your tray of hors d'oeuvres is empty in hopes that you can eat the last few yourself.
  • Taking the deviled egg tax every time you make deviled eggs.
  • Realizing that being a scientist is way cooler than working retail.
  • When the one guy you know who's always had it figured out suddenly changes it up.
  • The cool high school robotics teacher with a top knot.
  • God-tier hipsters.
  • All babies being born early because their head gets too big.
  • The word for when someone is deliberately slow at work.
  • Being jealous of your son's ability to learn skills extremely quickly.
  • Being jealous of your son's enormous head circumference.
  • Kangaroos basically giving birth to a fetus and the fetus climbing up into the mother's pouch when your kid is sixteen months old and still can't climb worth a damn.
  • Deciding this bower sucks, chirping out and trying to find a better bower bird with a better bower.
  • Bowerbirds innately knowing that they want to build big, blue bowers, but sucking at it until they apprentice under experienced bowerbirds.
  • Innately preferring big bowers and you can not lie.
  • Bowerbirds being super impressed by blue headphones with bluetooth support.
  • Joking about introducing paint to bowerbirds and finding out they already mix their own pigments to paint the interior of their bowers blue and realizing who is the true blue master here.
  • Tripping into a plexiglass window and realizing the guy from Hudsucker Proxy saved your life.
  • Having a rich friend who owns a golf cart and tearing the golf cart around while South African golfers shake their fists at you.
  • The golf cart not having a third seat so you just stand in the indentations where the golf bags usually go.
  • Diving off of a golf cart that is about to tip over.
  • Sustaining grave head injuries but the gate attendant still not letting you take the golf cart out of the parking lot.
  • Peeling the hair off your friend's face to reveal why the gate attendant should let you out of the parking lot.
  • After your concussion, not remembering who the president is or what year it is, but still remembering that you're going to get drinks at O'Hagen's tonight.
  • Getting a security briefing at the U.S. consulate about how to deal with a carjacking and he says to just give the guy a car.
  • Embedding a second PSA within your PSA.
  • Breaking a toe by kicking the softest thing you can think of.
  • Bringing up the Big Mike for maybe the third episode in a row.
  • Needing to come back on the show to tell the people the banana truth if it turns out that the Big Mike really does taste like the fake banana flavoring.
  • Giving a name to the dude you keep hallucinating standing in the corner of the room as you sleep.
  • Rearranging your bedroom to minimize shadows because the creepy dude only materializes in darkness.
  • Your wife waking you up to tell you someone's standing in the corner of the room and saying "ok good luck with that babe" and going back to sleep.
  • Not wanting to tell anyone you hallucinate while you sleep because of mental illness stigma.
  • Sleep paralysis and hypnagogic hallucinations totally explaining why people used to believe in ghosts.
  • Having the fun doesn't-ruin-your-life kind of hypnagogic hallucinations.
  • Existential dread only getting worse as your life goes on.
  • Not being able to finish watching an episode of Gargoyles because a shot from very high up gave you mortal terror.
  • Not being on the Internet except to look for memes.
  • Enrolling in every Cognitive Neuroscience program in the country because you're trying to befriend this week's guests to get their memes.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Jim's favorite episodes of this show.
  • Not being plugged in and having no idea what's going on.
  • The podcast ruining somebody's lack of internet presence.
  • Not being sure whether you defined Third Culture Kid correctly.
  • The four types of Third Culture Kids.
  • Being within five minutes of a Coca Cola at any given moment no matter where you go in the world.
  • Meeting a child of a Coca Cola executive at every international school.
  • Bathroom metaphors for your childhood identity.
  • Thoroughly describing the procedure of a scientific test.
  • The only guy you know who didn't show any bias on the Implicit Bias Test showing plenty of bias after living in the United States for 15 years.
  • Showing kids pictures of faces of different races and asking them which one is the liar.
  • Children turning out racist despite never having been explicitly instructed to be racist.
  • Taking a Third Culture Kid refresher course to refresh your lack of racial bias.
  • Confusing being a minority with being oppressed.
  • Nobody having enough experience with your race to know whether or not to be prejudiced against you.
  • People who sound like they have no accent because they live near Hollywood, California.
  • Turning on a camera and expecting the money to pour down around you.
  • Nobody giving you money because you're a boring naked person.
  • Sometimes logging on and making $0 and sometimes logging on and making thousands of dollars.
  • The liberation of leaving your retail job.
  • The ability to say no when you don't want to do something.
  • Realizing your ability to consent is way more present at your sex work job than at your retail job.
  • Not being able to ban the worst customers from the store you work at.
  • Feeling like you can get to the life you want if you stick through the hard times.
  • Quitting one job that sucks and ending up at another job that sucks.
  • Working 16 hours straight at your catering job and only being able to eat when you reach in and scoop a handful of spaghetti and meatballs out of the tray you're about to serve.
  • Heading back to the kitchen before your tray of hors d'oeuvres is empty in hopes that you can eat the last few yourself.
  • Taking the deviled egg tax every time you make deviled eggs.
  • Realizing that being a scientist is way cooler than working retail.
  • When the one guy you know who's always had it figured out suddenly changes it up.
  • The cool high school robotics teacher with a top knot.
  • God-tier hipsters.
  • All babies being born early because their head gets too big.
  • The word for when someone is deliberately slow at work.
  • Being jealous of your son's ability to learn skills extremely quickly.
  • Being jealous of your son's enormous head circumference.
  • Kangaroos basically giving birth to a fetus and the fetus climbing up into the mother's pouch when your kid is sixteen months old and still can't climb worth a damn.
  • Deciding this bower sucks, chirping out and trying to find a better bower bird with a better bower.
  • Bowerbirds innately knowing that they want to build big, blue bowers, but sucking at it until they apprentice under experienced bowerbirds.
  • Innately preferring big bowers and you can not lie.
  • Bowerbirds being super impressed by blue headphones with bluetooth support.
  • Joking about introducing paint to bowerbirds and finding out they already mix their own pigments to paint the interior of their bowers blue and realizing who is the true blue master here.
  • Tripping into a plexiglass window and realizing the guy from Hudsucker Proxy saved your life.
  • Having a rich friend who owns a golf cart and tearing the golf cart around while South African golfers shake their fists at you.
  • The golf cart not having a third seat so you just stand in the indentations where the golf bags usually go.
  • Diving off of a golf cart that is about to tip over.
  • Sustaining grave head injuries but the gate attendant still not letting you take the golf cart out of the parking lot.
  • Peeling the hair off your friend's face to reveal why the gate attendant should let you out of the parking lot.
  • After your concussion, not remembering who the president is or what year it is, but still remembering that you're going to get drinks at O'Hagen's tonight.
  • Getting a security briefing at the U.S. consulate about how to deal with a carjacking and he says to just give the guy a car.
  • Embedding a second PSA within your PSA.
  • Breaking a toe by kicking the softest thing you can think of.
  • Bringing up the Big Mike for maybe the third episode in a row.
  • Needing to come back on the show to tell the people the banana truth if it turns out that the Big Mike really does taste like the fake banana flavoring.
  • Giving a name to the dude you keep hallucinating standing in the corner of the room as you sleep.
  • Rearranging your bedroom to minimize shadows because the creepy dude only materializes in darkness.
  • Your wife waking you up to tell you someone's standing in the corner of the room and saying "ok good luck with that babe" and going back to sleep.
  • Not wanting to tell anyone you hallucinate while you sleep because of mental illness stigma.
  • Sleep paralysis and hypnagogic hallucinations totally explaining why people used to believe in ghosts.
  • Having the fun doesn't-ruin-your-life kind of hypnagogic hallucinations.
  • Existential dread only getting worse as your life goes on.
  • Not being able to finish watching an episode of Gargoyles because a shot from very high up gave you mortal terror.
  • Not being on the Internet except to look for memes.
  • Enrolling in every Cognitive Neuroscience program in the country because you're trying to befriend this week's guests to get their memes.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+wmG0yb7y ]]> Jim Stormdancer 19. A Pickled Egg Christmas https://topiclords.com/a-pickled-egg-christmas ec687e98-4dd0-42d5-8808-9b4d345b124a Mon, 02 Mar 2020 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: Jeff and Joe. We discuss finding the time to be a geek, the difficulty of ordering pickled eggs, raising kids, art you made as a kid, etymology, and only getting 80% good at things. 1:01:11 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Having nothing to plug.
  • Consuming all the media available because you're in high school and it's the 80s.
  • Not being sure if the media you're consuming, or about to consume, is worth your time.
  • Forgetting everything else as a prerequisite for getting anything done.
  • Humans figuring out what to do with their drive to make art once computers are better at making art.
  • Collectively choosing to limit the art you consume to create an artificial culture in your collective.
  • A fake band invented by the internet come alive.
  • Computers taking over art curation, too.
  • Making a statement in a specific context that can't be as easily transplanted into another context and that making you a luddite weirdo.
  • Cultivating a healthy creative space being super weird now, but will make more sense in the future when the creative.
  • Liking pickled eggs but not being able to find them in any local store.
  • The hypothetical fraughtness of purchasing pickled eggs online.
  • Buying a bunch of gross stuff and being disappointed.
  • Hating the pickled eggs you bulk-purchased and feeding them all to your dogs.
  • Pickled sausages -- a southern specialty.
  • Selling your pickled products at a discount because they're past their sell-by date.
  • Pickled Thai eggplant about the size of marbles.
  • Not being diligent enough to look up how to include Pickled Banana Blossoms in a prepared dish and just eating them like popcorn and being disappointed.
  • The entire egg pickling community thinking your egg pickling method is heretical.
  • Asking everybody in your family for pickled eggs for Christmas and throwing a pickled egg party to get rid of all your danged pickled eggs.
  • Consuming twenty pounds of pickled eggs on a Topic Lords live show.
  • Being really impressed by somebody's child-rearing technique.
  • The "blank slate" theory -- that children are born with no personality -- being total bullshit.
  • A sample size of three technically counting as a pattern.
  • Having a dialog with your children rather than just telling them what to do.
  • Growing up hating authority and how that informs parenting strategy.
  • Doing the bare minimum and getting great results because everyone else just sucks.
  • Parents who are basically still children themselves.
  • Not having any parenting books to read because you are the first person who has ever been a parent.
  • Doing everything being indistinguishable from doing nothing.
  • Not having any good way to choose between all the available child-rearing options.
  • Not knowing why you read a particular parenting book twenty years ago and also not being sure if it shaped your parenting strategy.
  • Making bad decisions because we're all human and we all make bad decisions.
  • Being well-equipped to adapt to a changing world.
  • Not making a lot of art because your penmanship is terrible and it would just be a blob of nothing.
  • Your parents forcing you to take guitar lessons because it would help you get into a good school and it actually getting you into a good school.
  • Kids rarely being good at anything.
  • The amazing child drummer who amazingly turns into a commensurately even more amazing adult drummer.
  • Noodling around with a keyboard as an adult being informed by a decade of rigorous piano lessons as a child.
  • Loving Mechwarrior and spending all of grade school drawing spaceships and giant robots.
  • Growing up a Scream Tracker kid.
  • Loading up a song you like into a tracker and digging deep into its technical details.
  • Explaining that this song is only four channels and 200 kilobytes and your mom remaining unimpressed.
  • An incredible technical feat that is entirely meaningless to anybody not embedded in its context.
  • Coming from a position of empathy and charity by default.
  • Two wooden reeds tied together like a duckbill creating a much smoother sound than a wooden reed resting against a hard surface.
  • Your band teacher not knowing enough about the bassoon to critique your bassoon playing and your next band teacher switching you to piano.
  • Trying to remember all the words you want to look up the etymology of next time you're at a computer.
  • Conjectural etymology that seems sensible but isn't actually backed up by evidence.
  • Reading ahead because you are bored in class, but that just meaning you'll be even more bored later.
  • Getting to 80th percentile of a skill or subject and then moving on to another skill or subject.
  • Accidentally hiring someone pretty good at both social work and IT work but it being ridiculous to try to hire someone like that on purpose.
  • The multivarious sub-skills required to run a UPS store.
  • Not recommending anybody follow your career path because your resume looks like you have some kind of personality disorder.
  • Nobody wanting to hire a generalist.
  • Just shipping at 90% done because most likely that's good enough.
  • Making the news one day but in a year a kid breaking your record.
  • Everybody being sad because they're not the best in the world and the best in the world being sad because they're not even better.
  • Getting really good at a skill and then computers taking your job anyway.
  • Enjoying learning for the intrinsic value of learning.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Having nothing to plug.
  • Consuming all the media available because you're in high school and it's the 80s.
  • Not being sure if the media you're consuming, or about to consume, is worth your time.
  • Forgetting everything else as a prerequisite for getting anything done.
  • Humans figuring out what to do with their drive to make art once computers are better at making art.
  • Collectively choosing to limit the art you consume to create an artificial culture in your collective.
  • A fake band invented by the internet come alive.
  • Computers taking over art curation, too.
  • Making a statement in a specific context that can't be as easily transplanted into another context and that making you a luddite weirdo.
  • Cultivating a healthy creative space being super weird now, but will make more sense in the future when the creative.
  • Liking pickled eggs but not being able to find them in any local store.
  • The hypothetical fraughtness of purchasing pickled eggs online.
  • Buying a bunch of gross stuff and being disappointed.
  • Hating the pickled eggs you bulk-purchased and feeding them all to your dogs.
  • Pickled sausages -- a southern specialty.
  • Selling your pickled products at a discount because they're past their sell-by date.
  • Pickled Thai eggplant about the size of marbles.
  • Not being diligent enough to look up how to include Pickled Banana Blossoms in a prepared dish and just eating them like popcorn and being disappointed.
  • The entire egg pickling community thinking your egg pickling method is heretical.
  • Asking everybody in your family for pickled eggs for Christmas and throwing a pickled egg party to get rid of all your danged pickled eggs.
  • Consuming twenty pounds of pickled eggs on a Topic Lords live show.
  • Being really impressed by somebody's child-rearing technique.
  • The "blank slate" theory -- that children are born with no personality -- being total bullshit.
  • A sample size of three technically counting as a pattern.
  • Having a dialog with your children rather than just telling them what to do.
  • Growing up hating authority and how that informs parenting strategy.
  • Doing the bare minimum and getting great results because everyone else just sucks.
  • Parents who are basically still children themselves.
  • Not having any parenting books to read because you are the first person who has ever been a parent.
  • Doing everything being indistinguishable from doing nothing.
  • Not having any good way to choose between all the available child-rearing options.
  • Not knowing why you read a particular parenting book twenty years ago and also not being sure if it shaped your parenting strategy.
  • Making bad decisions because we're all human and we all make bad decisions.
  • Being well-equipped to adapt to a changing world.
  • Not making a lot of art because your penmanship is terrible and it would just be a blob of nothing.
  • Your parents forcing you to take guitar lessons because it would help you get into a good school and it actually getting you into a good school.
  • Kids rarely being good at anything.
  • The amazing child drummer who amazingly turns into a commensurately even more amazing adult drummer.
  • Noodling around with a keyboard as an adult being informed by a decade of rigorous piano lessons as a child.
  • Loving Mechwarrior and spending all of grade school drawing spaceships and giant robots.
  • Growing up a Scream Tracker kid.
  • Loading up a song you like into a tracker and digging deep into its technical details.
  • Explaining that this song is only four channels and 200 kilobytes and your mom remaining unimpressed.
  • An incredible technical feat that is entirely meaningless to anybody not embedded in its context.
  • Coming from a position of empathy and charity by default.
  • Two wooden reeds tied together like a duckbill creating a much smoother sound than a wooden reed resting against a hard surface.
  • Your band teacher not knowing enough about the bassoon to critique your bassoon playing and your next band teacher switching you to piano.
  • Trying to remember all the words you want to look up the etymology of next time you're at a computer.
  • Conjectural etymology that seems sensible but isn't actually backed up by evidence.
  • Reading ahead because you are bored in class, but that just meaning you'll be even more bored later.
  • Getting to 80th percentile of a skill or subject and then moving on to another skill or subject.
  • Accidentally hiring someone pretty good at both social work and IT work but it being ridiculous to try to hire someone like that on purpose.
  • The multivarious sub-skills required to run a UPS store.
  • Not recommending anybody follow your career path because your resume looks like you have some kind of personality disorder.
  • Nobody wanting to hire a generalist.
  • Just shipping at 90% done because most likely that's good enough.
  • Making the news one day but in a year a kid breaking your record.
  • Everybody being sad because they're not the best in the world and the best in the world being sad because they're not even better.
  • Getting really good at a skill and then computers taking your job anyway.
  • Enjoying learning for the intrinsic value of learning.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Having nothing to plug.
  • Consuming all the media available because you're in high school and it's the 80s.
  • Not being sure if the media you're consuming, or about to consume, is worth your time.
  • Forgetting everything else as a prerequisite for getting anything done.
  • Humans figuring out what to do with their drive to make art once computers are better at making art.
  • Collectively choosing to limit the art you consume to create an artificial culture in your collective.
  • A fake band invented by the internet come alive.
  • Computers taking over art curation, too.
  • Making a statement in a specific context that can't be as easily transplanted into another context and that making you a luddite weirdo.
  • Cultivating a healthy creative space being super weird now, but will make more sense in the future when the creative.
  • Liking pickled eggs but not being able to find them in any local store.
  • The hypothetical fraughtness of purchasing pickled eggs online.
  • Buying a bunch of gross stuff and being disappointed.
  • Hating the pickled eggs you bulk-purchased and feeding them all to your dogs.
  • Pickled sausages -- a southern specialty.
  • Selling your pickled products at a discount because they're past their sell-by date.
  • Pickled Thai eggplant about the size of marbles.
  • Not being diligent enough to look up how to include Pickled Banana Blossoms in a prepared dish and just eating them like popcorn and being disappointed.
  • The entire egg pickling community thinking your egg pickling method is heretical.
  • Asking everybody in your family for pickled eggs for Christmas and throwing a pickled egg party to get rid of all your danged pickled eggs.
  • Consuming twenty pounds of pickled eggs on a Topic Lords live show.
  • Being really impressed by somebody's child-rearing technique.
  • The "blank slate" theory -- that children are born with no personality -- being total bullshit.
  • A sample size of three technically counting as a pattern.
  • Having a dialog with your children rather than just telling them what to do.
  • Growing up hating authority and how that informs parenting strategy.
  • Doing the bare minimum and getting great results because everyone else just sucks.
  • Parents who are basically still children themselves.
  • Not having any parenting books to read because you are the first person who has ever been a parent.
  • Doing everything being indistinguishable from doing nothing.
  • Not having any good way to choose between all the available child-rearing options.
  • Not knowing why you read a particular parenting book twenty years ago and also not being sure if it shaped your parenting strategy.
  • Making bad decisions because we're all human and we all make bad decisions.
  • Being well-equipped to adapt to a changing world.
  • Not making a lot of art because your penmanship is terrible and it would just be a blob of nothing.
  • Your parents forcing you to take guitar lessons because it would help you get into a good school and it actually getting you into a good school.
  • Kids rarely being good at anything.
  • The amazing child drummer who amazingly turns into a commensurately even more amazing adult drummer.
  • Noodling around with a keyboard as an adult being informed by a decade of rigorous piano lessons as a child.
  • Loving Mechwarrior and spending all of grade school drawing spaceships and giant robots.
  • Growing up a Scream Tracker kid.
  • Loading up a song you like into a tracker and digging deep into its technical details.
  • Explaining that this song is only four channels and 200 kilobytes and your mom remaining unimpressed.
  • An incredible technical feat that is entirely meaningless to anybody not embedded in its context.
  • Coming from a position of empathy and charity by default.
  • Two wooden reeds tied together like a duckbill creating a much smoother sound than a wooden reed resting against a hard surface.
  • Your band teacher not knowing enough about the bassoon to critique your bassoon playing and your next band teacher switching you to piano.
  • Trying to remember all the words you want to look up the etymology of next time you're at a computer.
  • Conjectural etymology that seems sensible but isn't actually backed up by evidence.
  • Reading ahead because you are bored in class, but that just meaning you'll be even more bored later.
  • Getting to 80th percentile of a skill or subject and then moving on to another skill or subject.
  • Accidentally hiring someone pretty good at both social work and IT work but it being ridiculous to try to hire someone like that on purpose.
  • The multivarious sub-skills required to run a UPS store.
  • Not recommending anybody follow your career path because your resume looks like you have some kind of personality disorder.
  • Nobody wanting to hire a generalist.
  • Just shipping at 90% done because most likely that's good enough.
  • Making the news one day but in a year a kid breaking your record.
  • Everybody being sad because they're not the best in the world and the best in the world being sad because they're not even better.
  • Getting really good at a skill and then computers taking your job anyway.
  • Enjoying learning for the intrinsic value of learning.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+BznR-t_c ]]> Jim Stormdancer 18. Yelling Sweater https://topiclords.com/yelling-sweater 1debb662-4b49-47ef-86b6-5dada47c3d84 Mon, 24 Feb 2020 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: Jay and James. We discuss old references making jokes inaccessible, how four year olds perceive legos, realizing stylish people can also be skilled, cheap musical instruments, timberwolf jaws, losing touch with popular aesthetics, and growing a Santa beard in spite of your CPAP machine. 1:00:20 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Your co-host not saying his last name so you're not sure whether he knows how to pronounce it.
  • Sometimes working in the same room and sometimes getting coffee together.
  • Living in Germany and not being able to not bring it up.
  • Trying to enjoy topical comedy from decades ago.
  • Trying to enjoy topical comedy from centuries ago and having to rely on footnotes.
  • Jokes that are so dated nobody even perceives them as a joke.
  • Liking a joke better before you get it.
  • Translating a text that is full of French puns into English puns.
  • A police officer yelling "sweater" at a lady driving down the road.
  • Trying to find an authoritative answer but only finding answers.yahoo.com.
  • Parsons being so ubiquitous that everyone must know a "Parson Brown."
  • Your four year old niece asking you what a Lego is and it probably being a part of a wing from a Toy Story kit or something.
  • A four year old wanting answers and older people having all the answers.
  • A giraffe staying forever in a park because you surrounded the park with a fence and it's a happy giraffe.
  • Playing with Legos with your uncle but not really wanting to build anything and just wanting your uncle to tell you a story about something that already exists.
  • Trying to evoke a feeling by doing the thing that did it thirty years ago.
  • Being inspired to try exciting new creative tools but as soon as you get in there it just immediately feels like work.
  • Games that you need to read a textbook to be able to enjoy.
  • Seeing something happen once and assuming it's going to happen that way every time.
  • A baby throwing a cup on the ground over and over again to make sure it falls downwards every time.
  • Most people having a much higher drive to be cool than you do.
  • A nu-metal punk sitting at a piano and talking about jazz chords.
  • Being surprised when people who look fashionable are also skilled.
  • Having being in your early teens when Grunge hit and that affecting your fashion sense for your entire life.
  • A photo of your nu-metal phase somehow not ending up in Hypnospace Outlaw.
  • Finding dorky button up shirts some Silicon Valley folks would've worn in the late 90s and making that be just your fashion sense.
  • Method acting but for video games.
  • Billy Idol insisting that interviewers need to have read Neuromancer but not having read it himself.
  • Not having time to read so insisting that interviewers read a book for you and tell you about it while they interview you.
  • The note getting louder when you squeeze the face.
  • Thinking an effect is a digital filter but it turns out to just be the mouth opening and closing.
  • When you put your thumb over the Game Boy speaker and slowly peel it off.
  • Just sticking the head of a plunger into your trumpet.
  • Getting a reed instrument for Christmas and not being able to make it make anything that sounds like a note before your mouth gets tired of vibrating.
  • Learning to hit those high notes because it's cool, not because it's particularly musically useful.
  • Being obsessed with claves because of Brian Eno's "St. Elmo's Fire," but not being sure how to pronounce "claves."
  • Finding a melodica in your wife's parents' basement.
  • Most dogs just looking at your hand but this one bringing its entire jaw over your arm sideways.
  • Noisebridge being an anarchist collective where anything can happen.
  • Laughing when your kid does stuff you really ought to be discouraging.
  • Accidentally teaching a small child to call people fat.
  • Your kid calling a Wal*Mart customer "fat" and trying to pretend he meant "hat" because she's wearing a hat and the kid emphatically clarifying that no, he meant she's super fat.
  • Writing in your first-grade journal that you don't like when your parents take you to "the dark place."
  • Writing in your first-grade journal that "on 911 a fire happens" with an illustration of a burning building but you just meant the TV show "911" about emergency responders.
  • The borrowed tribal iconography mixed with tech themes that Internet companies to show a new era of togetherness and communication.
  • Finding beauty in a Geocities web page with random animated images everywhere and a tiled background.
  • Immersing yourself in an aesthetic until you like it.
  • Art getting way better when the image links start breaking.
  • Your sense of aesthetics being your only guide for knowing how to make something.
  • Slowly learning to trust your sense of aesthetics when people like your work.
  • Not trusting your own sense of aesthetics and turning to philosophy to come up with interesting aesthetic rules to follow instead.
  • Trying a new pixel art aesthetic that's even more rectangular than before.
  • The threshold between mere aesthetic weirdness and people immediately dismissing a work as ugly.
  • Deliberately choosing your system palette in the way that 8-bit microcomputers and early consoles did not.
  • Considering yourself done after the first draft of an idea if the idea is difficult and complicated to implement, but iterating if it's simple.
  • Having an aesthetic plan for growing old.
  • Doing a cursory Google search before giving up on your dreams.
  • Not trusting cheapcpapsupplies.com because they probably just want to sell you their CPAP supplies -- but at least it's cheap.
  • Instagram figuring out that you have sleep apnea.
  • The potions master brewing up a snoring solution as a punishment.
  • Dressing up like disguised Santa and if a kid finds out you're santa, pulling open your trench coat to reveal the S emblazoned on your chest.
  • Having a distinctive laugh for when you're firing your longbow extremely rapidly.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Your co-host not saying his last name so you're not sure whether he knows how to pronounce it.
  • Sometimes working in the same room and sometimes getting coffee together.
  • Living in Germany and not being able to not bring it up.
  • Trying to enjoy topical comedy from decades ago.
  • Trying to enjoy topical comedy from centuries ago and having to rely on footnotes.
  • Jokes that are so dated nobody even perceives them as a joke.
  • Liking a joke better before you get it.
  • Translating a text that is full of French puns into English puns.
  • A police officer yelling "sweater" at a lady driving down the road.
  • Trying to find an authoritative answer but only finding answers.yahoo.com.
  • Parsons being so ubiquitous that everyone must know a "Parson Brown."
  • Your four year old niece asking you what a Lego is and it probably being a part of a wing from a Toy Story kit or something.
  • A four year old wanting answers and older people having all the answers.
  • A giraffe staying forever in a park because you surrounded the park with a fence and it's a happy giraffe.
  • Playing with Legos with your uncle but not really wanting to build anything and just wanting your uncle to tell you a story about something that already exists.
  • Trying to evoke a feeling by doing the thing that did it thirty years ago.
  • Being inspired to try exciting new creative tools but as soon as you get in there it just immediately feels like work.
  • Games that you need to read a textbook to be able to enjoy.
  • Seeing something happen once and assuming it's going to happen that way every time.
  • A baby throwing a cup on the ground over and over again to make sure it falls downwards every time.
  • Most people having a much higher drive to be cool than you do.
  • A nu-metal punk sitting at a piano and talking about jazz chords.
  • Being surprised when people who look fashionable are also skilled.
  • Having being in your early teens when Grunge hit and that affecting your fashion sense for your entire life.
  • A photo of your nu-metal phase somehow not ending up in Hypnospace Outlaw.
  • Finding dorky button up shirts some Silicon Valley folks would've worn in the late 90s and making that be just your fashion sense.
  • Method acting but for video games.
  • Billy Idol insisting that interviewers need to have read Neuromancer but not having read it himself.
  • Not having time to read so insisting that interviewers read a book for you and tell you about it while they interview you.
  • The note getting louder when you squeeze the face.
  • Thinking an effect is a digital filter but it turns out to just be the mouth opening and closing.
  • When you put your thumb over the Game Boy speaker and slowly peel it off.
  • Just sticking the head of a plunger into your trumpet.
  • Getting a reed instrument for Christmas and not being able to make it make anything that sounds like a note before your mouth gets tired of vibrating.
  • Learning to hit those high notes because it's cool, not because it's particularly musically useful.
  • Being obsessed with claves because of Brian Eno's "St. Elmo's Fire," but not being sure how to pronounce "claves."
  • Finding a melodica in your wife's parents' basement.
  • Most dogs just looking at your hand but this one bringing its entire jaw over your arm sideways.
  • Noisebridge being an anarchist collective where anything can happen.
  • Laughing when your kid does stuff you really ought to be discouraging.
  • Accidentally teaching a small child to call people fat.
  • Your kid calling a Wal*Mart customer "fat" and trying to pretend he meant "hat" because she's wearing a hat and the kid emphatically clarifying that no, he meant she's super fat.
  • Writing in your first-grade journal that you don't like when your parents take you to "the dark place."
  • Writing in your first-grade journal that "on 911 a fire happens" with an illustration of a burning building but you just meant the TV show "911" about emergency responders.
  • The borrowed tribal iconography mixed with tech themes that Internet companies to show a new era of togetherness and communication.
  • Finding beauty in a Geocities web page with random animated images everywhere and a tiled background.
  • Immersing yourself in an aesthetic until you like it.
  • Art getting way better when the image links start breaking.
  • Your sense of aesthetics being your only guide for knowing how to make something.
  • Slowly learning to trust your sense of aesthetics when people like your work.
  • Not trusting your own sense of aesthetics and turning to philosophy to come up with interesting aesthetic rules to follow instead.
  • Trying a new pixel art aesthetic that's even more rectangular than before.
  • The threshold between mere aesthetic weirdness and people immediately dismissing a work as ugly.
  • Deliberately choosing your system palette in the way that 8-bit microcomputers and early consoles did not.
  • Considering yourself done after the first draft of an idea if the idea is difficult and complicated to implement, but iterating if it's simple.
  • Having an aesthetic plan for growing old.
  • Doing a cursory Google search before giving up on your dreams.
  • Not trusting cheapcpapsupplies.com because they probably just want to sell you their CPAP supplies -- but at least it's cheap.
  • Instagram figuring out that you have sleep apnea.
  • The potions master brewing up a snoring solution as a punishment.
  • Dressing up like disguised Santa and if a kid finds out you're santa, pulling open your trench coat to reveal the S emblazoned on your chest.
  • Having a distinctive laugh for when you're firing your longbow extremely rapidly.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Your co-host not saying his last name so you're not sure whether he knows how to pronounce it.
  • Sometimes working in the same room and sometimes getting coffee together.
  • Living in Germany and not being able to not bring it up.
  • Trying to enjoy topical comedy from decades ago.
  • Trying to enjoy topical comedy from centuries ago and having to rely on footnotes.
  • Jokes that are so dated nobody even perceives them as a joke.
  • Liking a joke better before you get it.
  • Translating a text that is full of French puns into English puns.
  • A police officer yelling "sweater" at a lady driving down the road.
  • Trying to find an authoritative answer but only finding answers.yahoo.com.
  • Parsons being so ubiquitous that everyone must know a "Parson Brown."
  • Your four year old niece asking you what a Lego is and it probably being a part of a wing from a Toy Story kit or something.
  • A four year old wanting answers and older people having all the answers.
  • A giraffe staying forever in a park because you surrounded the park with a fence and it's a happy giraffe.
  • Playing with Legos with your uncle but not really wanting to build anything and just wanting your uncle to tell you a story about something that already exists.
  • Trying to evoke a feeling by doing the thing that did it thirty years ago.
  • Being inspired to try exciting new creative tools but as soon as you get in there it just immediately feels like work.
  • Games that you need to read a textbook to be able to enjoy.
  • Seeing something happen once and assuming it's going to happen that way every time.
  • A baby throwing a cup on the ground over and over again to make sure it falls downwards every time.
  • Most people having a much higher drive to be cool than you do.
  • A nu-metal punk sitting at a piano and talking about jazz chords.
  • Being surprised when people who look fashionable are also skilled.
  • Having being in your early teens when Grunge hit and that affecting your fashion sense for your entire life.
  • A photo of your nu-metal phase somehow not ending up in Hypnospace Outlaw.
  • Finding dorky button up shirts some Silicon Valley folks would've worn in the late 90s and making that be just your fashion sense.
  • Method acting but for video games.
  • Billy Idol insisting that interviewers need to have read Neuromancer but not having read it himself.
  • Not having time to read so insisting that interviewers read a book for you and tell you about it while they interview you.
  • The note getting louder when you squeeze the face.
  • Thinking an effect is a digital filter but it turns out to just be the mouth opening and closing.
  • When you put your thumb over the Game Boy speaker and slowly peel it off.
  • Just sticking the head of a plunger into your trumpet.
  • Getting a reed instrument for Christmas and not being able to make it make anything that sounds like a note before your mouth gets tired of vibrating.
  • Learning to hit those high notes because it's cool, not because it's particularly musically useful.
  • Being obsessed with claves because of Brian Eno's "St. Elmo's Fire," but not being sure how to pronounce "claves."
  • Finding a melodica in your wife's parents' basement.
  • Most dogs just looking at your hand but this one bringing its entire jaw over your arm sideways.
  • Noisebridge being an anarchist collective where anything can happen.
  • Laughing when your kid does stuff you really ought to be discouraging.
  • Accidentally teaching a small child to call people fat.
  • Your kid calling a Wal*Mart customer "fat" and trying to pretend he meant "hat" because she's wearing a hat and the kid emphatically clarifying that no, he meant she's super fat.
  • Writing in your first-grade journal that you don't like when your parents take you to "the dark place."
  • Writing in your first-grade journal that "on 911 a fire happens" with an illustration of a burning building but you just meant the TV show "911" about emergency responders.
  • The borrowed tribal iconography mixed with tech themes that Internet companies to show a new era of togetherness and communication.
  • Finding beauty in a Geocities web page with random animated images everywhere and a tiled background.
  • Immersing yourself in an aesthetic until you like it.
  • Art getting way better when the image links start breaking.
  • Your sense of aesthetics being your only guide for knowing how to make something.
  • Slowly learning to trust your sense of aesthetics when people like your work.
  • Not trusting your own sense of aesthetics and turning to philosophy to come up with interesting aesthetic rules to follow instead.
  • Trying a new pixel art aesthetic that's even more rectangular than before.
  • The threshold between mere aesthetic weirdness and people immediately dismissing a work as ugly.
  • Deliberately choosing your system palette in the way that 8-bit microcomputers and early consoles did not.
  • Considering yourself done after the first draft of an idea if the idea is difficult and complicated to implement, but iterating if it's simple.
  • Having an aesthetic plan for growing old.
  • Doing a cursory Google search before giving up on your dreams.
  • Not trusting cheapcpapsupplies.com because they probably just want to sell you their CPAP supplies -- but at least it's cheap.
  • Instagram figuring out that you have sleep apnea.
  • The potions master brewing up a snoring solution as a punishment.
  • Dressing up like disguised Santa and if a kid finds out you're santa, pulling open your trench coat to reveal the S emblazoned on your chest.
  • Having a distinctive laugh for when you're firing your longbow extremely rapidly.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+Q5SrV1Ob ]]> Jim Stormdancer 17. A Buzzsaw Made of Bananas https://topiclords.com/a-buzzsaw-made-of-bananas f5abed05-968b-424e-a77a-8a2c64dbbd92 Mon, 17 Feb 2020 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: April and John. We discuss creating D&D characters, being friends with people older/younger than you, when a head nod is appropriate, where to find the Big Mike banana, mind palaces, migrating your files from one computer to the next, and making great salads. 1:11:34 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Refusing to be a Topic Lord because you're just on Topic Lords to promote your alternative podcast Beast Lords.
  • Not having anyone to plug this time either but maybe you have a Soundcloud somewhere.
  • Choosing all of your topics while driving to the zoo.
  • Containing multitudes and being super excited.
  • A band of adventurers being led by an operatic soprano.
  • A party of all bards.
  • Appropriating spam musubi because it's delicious.
  • Not technically being part of a band of adventurers but you play a tambourine and own the van.
  • Stealing the spam musubi from your bass player's bag of holding because they're going to go bad eventually.
  • Keeping both gold coins and spam musubi in the same bag of holding and having to dig around for the money when you buy anything.
  • Finally having a dog on this podcast.
  • Putting your dead dog in every D&D party you're in for the rest of your life.
  • Putting your dead dog in every platformer you make for the rest of your life.
  • All your D&D adventures going wrong because you're just musicians and can't actually deal with monsters.
  • Putting monsters onto the bus to the next town over.
  • Putting a fishtank bubbler on your bag of holding so all the monsters in there can breathe.
  • Fixing it then ruining it.
  • Coming to your chosen profession late in your life.
  • Age gaps getting less weird as time goes on.
  • Thinking about watching new TV to be able to relate to young people and deciding nobody has that kind of time.
  • Old people being full of stories from their lives.
  • Not talking to your friend as much as you used to because she lives in Ohio now.
  • Spending your retirement taking care of dogs.
  • Responding to difficult situations with grace and tact.
  • Stopping going to work because they stopped paying you.
  • The English teacher bubble in Japan.
  • Seeing the only other white person for a mile in any direction and wondering if you should nod at them.
  • Seeing the only other white person for a mile in any direction and thinking "frickin Americans!"
  • Not wanting to talk to strangers except in your favorite coffee shop.
  • Telling your wife something a week ago and then finding out it's a myth and having to correct her on a podcast.
  • Bananas being especially susceptible to disease.
  • Replacing the Cavendish banana with an even shittier banana after it succumbs.
  • Hiding your bananas because if your son sees them he won't be able to think about anything else.
  • Giving your son bananas because he already poops enough.
  • Foot-long avocados.
  • A giant box of intimidating tropical fruit being the best Christmas gift.
  • Drinking soursop juice tasting flights at a Mexican restaurant.
  • Bananas that look like a buzzsaw made of bananas.
  • Your infant son seeing a rambutan and realizing that maybe some things don't go in your mouth.
  • Haunted fruit.
  • Remembering trauma that happened when you were way too young to remember stuff.
  • Visiting your dad in prison and he's wearing fake shoes.
  • Riding in the back of a pickup truck and sharing Now & Laters with your older sister.
  • The US government deciding that televising court trials is a terrible idea after televising the OJ Simpson trial.
  • Knowing when a thing happened because you remember where it happened.
  • Trying to construct a mind palace like Hannibal and Sherlock and after a day of hard work deciding you don't need to remember anything that badly.
  • Yelling "story math!" when you correctly predict a story beat.
  • Realizing at the end of the episode that he's been inside his mind palace the entire time.
  • Copying your old hard drive onto the new one always working until one day you get an SSD drive and nothing fits.
  • Paying Dropbox money to get more storage and Dropbox starting to spam you about features you don't care about.
  • Only having a laptop to more effectively play your favorite web game.
  • Most people not really having any use for a desktop PC any more.
  • Having to remember life milestones differently because your life has settled down.
  • Liking a salad that doesn't have any lettuce in it.
  • Never having so badly wanted to go make a salad.
  • Peeling cucumbers so you don't get Cucumber Gas.
  • A hot cucumber.
  • Flashing your King.com CEO badge to get into the food truck even.
  • The burger joint offering you a salad with cheddar cheese crumbles on it and it turns out to just be a slice of cheddar they broke into a few pieces.
  • Crisping cheddar cheese in the broiler and throwing away the rest of your meal because you've peaked.
  • Trying to convince your wife that if you add mayo to a cheese plate it becomes a salad.
  • Not understanding when the young folks talk about going to sleep.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Refusing to be a Topic Lord because you're just on Topic Lords to promote your alternative podcast Beast Lords.
  • Not having anyone to plug this time either but maybe you have a Soundcloud somewhere.
  • Choosing all of your topics while driving to the zoo.
  • Containing multitudes and being super excited.
  • A band of adventurers being led by an operatic soprano.
  • A party of all bards.
  • Appropriating spam musubi because it's delicious.
  • Not technically being part of a band of adventurers but you play a tambourine and own the van.
  • Stealing the spam musubi from your bass player's bag of holding because they're going to go bad eventually.
  • Keeping both gold coins and spam musubi in the same bag of holding and having to dig around for the money when you buy anything.
  • Finally having a dog on this podcast.
  • Putting your dead dog in every D&D party you're in for the rest of your life.
  • Putting your dead dog in every platformer you make for the rest of your life.
  • All your D&D adventures going wrong because you're just musicians and can't actually deal with monsters.
  • Putting monsters onto the bus to the next town over.
  • Putting a fishtank bubbler on your bag of holding so all the monsters in there can breathe.
  • Fixing it then ruining it.
  • Coming to your chosen profession late in your life.
  • Age gaps getting less weird as time goes on.
  • Thinking about watching new TV to be able to relate to young people and deciding nobody has that kind of time.
  • Old people being full of stories from their lives.
  • Not talking to your friend as much as you used to because she lives in Ohio now.
  • Spending your retirement taking care of dogs.
  • Responding to difficult situations with grace and tact.
  • Stopping going to work because they stopped paying you.
  • The English teacher bubble in Japan.
  • Seeing the only other white person for a mile in any direction and wondering if you should nod at them.
  • Seeing the only other white person for a mile in any direction and thinking "frickin Americans!"
  • Not wanting to talk to strangers except in your favorite coffee shop.
  • Telling your wife something a week ago and then finding out it's a myth and having to correct her on a podcast.
  • Bananas being especially susceptible to disease.
  • Replacing the Cavendish banana with an even shittier banana after it succumbs.
  • Hiding your bananas because if your son sees them he won't be able to think about anything else.
  • Giving your son bananas because he already poops enough.
  • Foot-long avocados.
  • A giant box of intimidating tropical fruit being the best Christmas gift.
  • Drinking soursop juice tasting flights at a Mexican restaurant.
  • Bananas that look like a buzzsaw made of bananas.
  • Your infant son seeing a rambutan and realizing that maybe some things don't go in your mouth.
  • Haunted fruit.
  • Remembering trauma that happened when you were way too young to remember stuff.
  • Visiting your dad in prison and he's wearing fake shoes.
  • Riding in the back of a pickup truck and sharing Now & Laters with your older sister.
  • The US government deciding that televising court trials is a terrible idea after televising the OJ Simpson trial.
  • Knowing when a thing happened because you remember where it happened.
  • Trying to construct a mind palace like Hannibal and Sherlock and after a day of hard work deciding you don't need to remember anything that badly.
  • Yelling "story math!" when you correctly predict a story beat.
  • Realizing at the end of the episode that he's been inside his mind palace the entire time.
  • Copying your old hard drive onto the new one always working until one day you get an SSD drive and nothing fits.
  • Paying Dropbox money to get more storage and Dropbox starting to spam you about features you don't care about.
  • Only having a laptop to more effectively play your favorite web game.
  • Most people not really having any use for a desktop PC any more.
  • Having to remember life milestones differently because your life has settled down.
  • Liking a salad that doesn't have any lettuce in it.
  • Never having so badly wanted to go make a salad.
  • Peeling cucumbers so you don't get Cucumber Gas.
  • A hot cucumber.
  • Flashing your King.com CEO badge to get into the food truck even.
  • The burger joint offering you a salad with cheddar cheese crumbles on it and it turns out to just be a slice of cheddar they broke into a few pieces.
  • Crisping cheddar cheese in the broiler and throwing away the rest of your meal because you've peaked.
  • Trying to convince your wife that if you add mayo to a cheese plate it becomes a salad.
  • Not understanding when the young folks talk about going to sleep.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Refusing to be a Topic Lord because you're just on Topic Lords to promote your alternative podcast Beast Lords.
  • Not having anyone to plug this time either but maybe you have a Soundcloud somewhere.
  • Choosing all of your topics while driving to the zoo.
  • Containing multitudes and being super excited.
  • A band of adventurers being led by an operatic soprano.
  • A party of all bards.
  • Appropriating spam musubi because it's delicious.
  • Not technically being part of a band of adventurers but you play a tambourine and own the van.
  • Stealing the spam musubi from your bass player's bag of holding because they're going to go bad eventually.
  • Keeping both gold coins and spam musubi in the same bag of holding and having to dig around for the money when you buy anything.
  • Finally having a dog on this podcast.
  • Putting your dead dog in every D&D party you're in for the rest of your life.
  • Putting your dead dog in every platformer you make for the rest of your life.
  • All your D&D adventures going wrong because you're just musicians and can't actually deal with monsters.
  • Putting monsters onto the bus to the next town over.
  • Putting a fishtank bubbler on your bag of holding so all the monsters in there can breathe.
  • Fixing it then ruining it.
  • Coming to your chosen profession late in your life.
  • Age gaps getting less weird as time goes on.
  • Thinking about watching new TV to be able to relate to young people and deciding nobody has that kind of time.
  • Old people being full of stories from their lives.
  • Not talking to your friend as much as you used to because she lives in Ohio now.
  • Spending your retirement taking care of dogs.
  • Responding to difficult situations with grace and tact.
  • Stopping going to work because they stopped paying you.
  • The English teacher bubble in Japan.
  • Seeing the only other white person for a mile in any direction and wondering if you should nod at them.
  • Seeing the only other white person for a mile in any direction and thinking "frickin Americans!"
  • Not wanting to talk to strangers except in your favorite coffee shop.
  • Telling your wife something a week ago and then finding out it's a myth and having to correct her on a podcast.
  • Bananas being especially susceptible to disease.
  • Replacing the Cavendish banana with an even shittier banana after it succumbs.
  • Hiding your bananas because if your son sees them he won't be able to think about anything else.
  • Giving your son bananas because he already poops enough.
  • Foot-long avocados.
  • A giant box of intimidating tropical fruit being the best Christmas gift.
  • Drinking soursop juice tasting flights at a Mexican restaurant.
  • Bananas that look like a buzzsaw made of bananas.
  • Your infant son seeing a rambutan and realizing that maybe some things don't go in your mouth.
  • Haunted fruit.
  • Remembering trauma that happened when you were way too young to remember stuff.
  • Visiting your dad in prison and he's wearing fake shoes.
  • Riding in the back of a pickup truck and sharing Now & Laters with your older sister.
  • The US government deciding that televising court trials is a terrible idea after televising the OJ Simpson trial.
  • Knowing when a thing happened because you remember where it happened.
  • Trying to construct a mind palace like Hannibal and Sherlock and after a day of hard work deciding you don't need to remember anything that badly.
  • Yelling "story math!" when you correctly predict a story beat.
  • Realizing at the end of the episode that he's been inside his mind palace the entire time.
  • Copying your old hard drive onto the new one always working until one day you get an SSD drive and nothing fits.
  • Paying Dropbox money to get more storage and Dropbox starting to spam you about features you don't care about.
  • Only having a laptop to more effectively play your favorite web game.
  • Most people not really having any use for a desktop PC any more.
  • Having to remember life milestones differently because your life has settled down.
  • Liking a salad that doesn't have any lettuce in it.
  • Never having so badly wanted to go make a salad.
  • Peeling cucumbers so you don't get Cucumber Gas.
  • A hot cucumber.
  • Flashing your King.com CEO badge to get into the food truck even.
  • The burger joint offering you a salad with cheddar cheese crumbles on it and it turns out to just be a slice of cheddar they broke into a few pieces.
  • Crisping cheddar cheese in the broiler and throwing away the rest of your meal because you've peaked.
  • Trying to convince your wife that if you add mayo to a cheese plate it becomes a salad.
  • Not understanding when the young folks talk about going to sleep.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+uDS2BRim ]]> Jim Stormdancer 16. I Don't Want To Be Skin Dad https://topiclords.com/i-dont-want-to-be-skin-dad c3c157a4-2900-4cd9-a11c-1667ab43db84 Mon, 10 Feb 2020 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: Tim and Kole. We discuss cat trees for humans, non-analytical storytelling, AI Dungeon, whether programmers are worse than they used to be, sonder, what inanimate objects get a proper name, and fruity cheezma. 1:08:07 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords this week:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Releasing the same game over and over again because it keeps being your best move.
  • Suffering through and finding the magic but still believing you shouldn't have had to suffer.
  • Asking yourself what the problem is and breaking it down.
  • Being here for topics.
  • Understanding that the question you're asking is ridiculous but asking it anyway.
  • What you want only existing for children because their needs are greater.
  • Using adult-sized playgrounds for physical therapy.
  • Using adult-sized playgrounds for physical therapy keeping those blades sharp.
  • The through line from bouldering to Ninja Warrior to Super Mario Bros.
  • Watching the first half of Full Metal Jacket and thinking the obstacle course looks really fun.
  • Putting game show contestants in a video game for the viewers at home but the contestants themselves are just looking at a big green wall.
  • Professional skaters having skate parks in their back yard.
  • Doing American Ninja Warrior every day and getting a lot more miles on the tires.
  • Tony Hawk getting away with skateboarding in a 50-year-old body because he's good enough to not faceplant all the time.
  • Giving a skateboard to an average 50-year-old and saying "go for it buddy."
  • Restarting civilization around your business plan.
  • Making up stories for your children in real-time.
  • Being a DM except nobody else gets a turn, you just keep going.
  • Five years of daily practice to wake up your storytelling brain.
  • Going to an Arlo Guthrie concert because you're old and go to Arlo Guthrie concerts.
  • All of Arlo Guthrie's songs being twenty minute stories like Alice's Restaurant.
  • Thinking that advice sounds wise for somebody else.
  • David Lynch's book on storytelling turning out to actually be about Transcendental Meditation.
  • Actually possibly having deep insights about the universe while being high on drugs.
  • Writing a book by just writing down something you already said and it feeling like someone else wrote the book.
  • Letting the story write itself and then taking credit for it.
  • Having children because you want to become a great writer.
  • Incurring $10,000 of hosting costs because you misconfigured your CDN.
  • A text adventure telling you what you did but not telling you what happened as a result.
  • Markov chain text generation.
  • AI replacing musicians and ultimately most art.
  • AI musicians giving you another album from your favorite band.
  • Exploring AI generated music and sharing your unique discoveries.
  • Seeing creative work as the last bastion of human work that AI can't take from us, but being wrong.
  • Feeling wonder at the achievement but also complete dismay that we've made ourselves irrelevant.
  • Basic income allowing us to look forward to the machines taking all our jobs.
  • All the advantages of AI just turning into more profit for billionaires.
  • Skating through a lucid fever dream and trying to make sense of the chaos, but it's really just chaos.
  • AI Dungeon being a good improv partner but a terrible game.
  • AI generated text being effectively sampled at an unknown granularity and having no idea if this is a unique sentence or if it's lifted wholesale from a Sonic fanfic.
  • Programmers getting worse as a discipline vs. getting worse as people.
  • Forcing everyone on Earth to participate in NaNoWriMo.
  • Building software on top of a teetering stack of dependencies 1,000 feet high because your company probably won't last out the year.
  • Programmers getting better in the same way speed metal guitarists are getting better.
  • Just making the thing and not caring how you make it because it just doesn't matter.
  • Not bothering working really hard to do the easy part really well because the hard part is what matters.
  • Companies being possibly good at their focus and everything else being good enough at best.
  • Some of your best friends being assholes.
  • The best programmers you've met being super sociable and cooperative.
  • Staying and asshole and flaming out because nobody wants to work with you or maturing and sanding off the rough edges and becoming more productive and less of a drag.
  • Not being sure if your co-workers are nice to everyone or just you because you have seniority.
  • The coming generation of programmers seeing programming as a hobby or a career rather than an identity.
  • Blocking the guy driving too fast on the freeway but then it turns out the guy driving too fast was going to the hospital.
  • Doing your best to live like people invented in storybooks.
  • Realizing that everyone around you has lives just as complex and nuanced as you or anyone you know.
  • The violence of walking past someone on the street and dismissing their entire context and history because you have no choice if you want to get on with your life.
  • Projecting an arbitrary order onto the chaos and definitely being wrong.
  • Definitely being wrong anyway so why not think a positive thing rather than a negative one.
  • Changing how you see somebody by imagining them differently.
  • Conceiving of a universe without yourself at the center.
  • Flying off the handle because you've had shit piled on you all day and not because you dislike Kole specifically.
  • Running late about 5% of the time you're driving and also being annoyed by about 5% of drivers going too fast because they're just irresponsible people.
  • Working hard to build positive interactions and trying to see the best possible version of somebody.
  • Instagram being a source of misery because you're comparing yourself to the prettiest people's prettiest moments.
  • Comparing your backstage to someone else's front stage.
  • Choosing to shape your world such that you're not walking around angry all the time.
  • Having a boat and the boat having a name.
  • Not giving your cat a name but permitting it to have a name.
  • Anthropomorphizing the objects you rely.
  • Calling it "the mud room" even though there's no mud and no room.
  • Naming furniture that hurts you "kneebreaker charlie" and not hating it so much because it's a little bit funny.
  • Thinking of an old car that's always breaking down as being like an old friend who's kind of a pain in the ass but you've been through so much together.
  • Being happier loving things.
  • A generic bunny holding an Easter Egg that nobody plays with until you give it a name.
  • The only time you've bought a plant in your life being that time they put googly eyes on a cactus.
  • Your roommate who took all the bows off of the presents under the tree and then shit on the floor.
  • Not wanting to be the skin dad.
  • Having animals to project love onto so your society is more placid and malleable.
  • Cats being way more lovable than most human children.
  • Empathizing with the kid crying on the airplane because you feel like crying too.
  • The kid who's allowed to scream in the grocery store when if you screamed you'd get thrown out of the store or arrested.
  • Putting hundreds of googly eyes on a Roomba because you can't just buy two googly eyes and calling it "Kos-ba."
  • Putting two eyes on the outside of the Roomba and the rest on the inside because you don't want to freak out the squares.
  • What's fruity, cheezma?
  • Trying to get your friends to follow the script of your joke but they keep making their own jokes instead.
  • Tweeting about there being no hits for "fruity cheezma" and now there being one hit for "fruity cheezma."
  • The cheese tea rocking the boba world.
  • Copping to a certain amount of midwestern provincialism.
  • The probability of inhaling boba being very high but it's great though.
  • Blowing a tapioca ball directly into the mouth of your enemy right as they're inhaling.
  • The end of your boba beverage being like The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
  • A dare than someone should not have taken and that someone having possibly been you.
  • Cream cheese and fruit going together.
  • The kind of logic you don't want to be applying to food.
  • Putting all your old food combo ideas on the menu without testing any of them because Fruity Cheezma worked out somehow.
  • Wanting peanut butter to work with sliced cheese because you can roll it up like a taquito.
  • Figuring out that milk and Cheerios go together because they're both kind of off-white so next you try orange juice and Cheez-Its.
  • Cheez-Its staying crispy in orange juice because they're so oily.
  • A Cheez-It being named Arthur and loving its mother.
  • The driver in front of you making a right turn on red from the third lane over because she was in a hurry to get to the library and walking up to her to ask for reparations.
  • A telling being told or not being told.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords this week:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Releasing the same game over and over again because it keeps being your best move.
  • Suffering through and finding the magic but still believing you shouldn't have had to suffer.
  • Asking yourself what the problem is and breaking it down.
  • Being here for topics.
  • Understanding that the question you're asking is ridiculous but asking it anyway.
  • What you want only existing for children because their needs are greater.
  • Using adult-sized playgrounds for physical therapy.
  • Using adult-sized playgrounds for physical therapy keeping those blades sharp.
  • The through line from bouldering to Ninja Warrior to Super Mario Bros.
  • Watching the first half of Full Metal Jacket and thinking the obstacle course looks really fun.
  • Putting game show contestants in a video game for the viewers at home but the contestants themselves are just looking at a big green wall.
  • Professional skaters having skate parks in their back yard.
  • Doing American Ninja Warrior every day and getting a lot more miles on the tires.
  • Tony Hawk getting away with skateboarding in a 50-year-old body because he's good enough to not faceplant all the time.
  • Giving a skateboard to an average 50-year-old and saying "go for it buddy."
  • Restarting civilization around your business plan.
  • Making up stories for your children in real-time.
  • Being a DM except nobody else gets a turn, you just keep going.
  • Five years of daily practice to wake up your storytelling brain.
  • Going to an Arlo Guthrie concert because you're old and go to Arlo Guthrie concerts.
  • All of Arlo Guthrie's songs being twenty minute stories like Alice's Restaurant.
  • Thinking that advice sounds wise for somebody else.
  • David Lynch's book on storytelling turning out to actually be about Transcendental Meditation.
  • Actually possibly having deep insights about the universe while being high on drugs.
  • Writing a book by just writing down something you already said and it feeling like someone else wrote the book.
  • Letting the story write itself and then taking credit for it.
  • Having children because you want to become a great writer.
  • Incurring $10,000 of hosting costs because you misconfigured your CDN.
  • A text adventure telling you what you did but not telling you what happened as a result.
  • Markov chain text generation.
  • AI replacing musicians and ultimately most art.
  • AI musicians giving you another album from your favorite band.
  • Exploring AI generated music and sharing your unique discoveries.
  • Seeing creative work as the last bastion of human work that AI can't take from us, but being wrong.
  • Feeling wonder at the achievement but also complete dismay that we've made ourselves irrelevant.
  • Basic income allowing us to look forward to the machines taking all our jobs.
  • All the advantages of AI just turning into more profit for billionaires.
  • Skating through a lucid fever dream and trying to make sense of the chaos, but it's really just chaos.
  • AI Dungeon being a good improv partner but a terrible game.
  • AI generated text being effectively sampled at an unknown granularity and having no idea if this is a unique sentence or if it's lifted wholesale from a Sonic fanfic.
  • Programmers getting worse as a discipline vs. getting worse as people.
  • Forcing everyone on Earth to participate in NaNoWriMo.
  • Building software on top of a teetering stack of dependencies 1,000 feet high because your company probably won't last out the year.
  • Programmers getting better in the same way speed metal guitarists are getting better.
  • Just making the thing and not caring how you make it because it just doesn't matter.
  • Not bothering working really hard to do the easy part really well because the hard part is what matters.
  • Companies being possibly good at their focus and everything else being good enough at best.
  • Some of your best friends being assholes.
  • The best programmers you've met being super sociable and cooperative.
  • Staying and asshole and flaming out because nobody wants to work with you or maturing and sanding off the rough edges and becoming more productive and less of a drag.
  • Not being sure if your co-workers are nice to everyone or just you because you have seniority.
  • The coming generation of programmers seeing programming as a hobby or a career rather than an identity.
  • Blocking the guy driving too fast on the freeway but then it turns out the guy driving too fast was going to the hospital.
  • Doing your best to live like people invented in storybooks.
  • Realizing that everyone around you has lives just as complex and nuanced as you or anyone you know.
  • The violence of walking past someone on the street and dismissing their entire context and history because you have no choice if you want to get on with your life.
  • Projecting an arbitrary order onto the chaos and definitely being wrong.
  • Definitely being wrong anyway so why not think a positive thing rather than a negative one.
  • Changing how you see somebody by imagining them differently.
  • Conceiving of a universe without yourself at the center.
  • Flying off the handle because you've had shit piled on you all day and not because you dislike Kole specifically.
  • Running late about 5% of the time you're driving and also being annoyed by about 5% of drivers going too fast because they're just irresponsible people.
  • Working hard to build positive interactions and trying to see the best possible version of somebody.
  • Instagram being a source of misery because you're comparing yourself to the prettiest people's prettiest moments.
  • Comparing your backstage to someone else's front stage.
  • Choosing to shape your world such that you're not walking around angry all the time.
  • Having a boat and the boat having a name.
  • Not giving your cat a name but permitting it to have a name.
  • Anthropomorphizing the objects you rely.
  • Calling it "the mud room" even though there's no mud and no room.
  • Naming furniture that hurts you "kneebreaker charlie" and not hating it so much because it's a little bit funny.
  • Thinking of an old car that's always breaking down as being like an old friend who's kind of a pain in the ass but you've been through so much together.
  • Being happier loving things.
  • A generic bunny holding an Easter Egg that nobody plays with until you give it a name.
  • The only time you've bought a plant in your life being that time they put googly eyes on a cactus.
  • Your roommate who took all the bows off of the presents under the tree and then shit on the floor.
  • Not wanting to be the skin dad.
  • Having animals to project love onto so your society is more placid and malleable.
  • Cats being way more lovable than most human children.
  • Empathizing with the kid crying on the airplane because you feel like crying too.
  • The kid who's allowed to scream in the grocery store when if you screamed you'd get thrown out of the store or arrested.
  • Putting hundreds of googly eyes on a Roomba because you can't just buy two googly eyes and calling it "Kos-ba."
  • Putting two eyes on the outside of the Roomba and the rest on the inside because you don't want to freak out the squares.
  • What's fruity, cheezma?
  • Trying to get your friends to follow the script of your joke but they keep making their own jokes instead.
  • Tweeting about there being no hits for "fruity cheezma" and now there being one hit for "fruity cheezma."
  • The cheese tea rocking the boba world.
  • Copping to a certain amount of midwestern provincialism.
  • The probability of inhaling boba being very high but it's great though.
  • Blowing a tapioca ball directly into the mouth of your enemy right as they're inhaling.
  • The end of your boba beverage being like The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
  • A dare than someone should not have taken and that someone having possibly been you.
  • Cream cheese and fruit going together.
  • The kind of logic you don't want to be applying to food.
  • Putting all your old food combo ideas on the menu without testing any of them because Fruity Cheezma worked out somehow.
  • Wanting peanut butter to work with sliced cheese because you can roll it up like a taquito.
  • Figuring out that milk and Cheerios go together because they're both kind of off-white so next you try orange juice and Cheez-Its.
  • Cheez-Its staying crispy in orange juice because they're so oily.
  • A Cheez-It being named Arthur and loving its mother.
  • The driver in front of you making a right turn on red from the third lane over because she was in a hurry to get to the library and walking up to her to ask for reparations.
  • A telling being told or not being told.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords this week:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Releasing the same game over and over again because it keeps being your best move.
  • Suffering through and finding the magic but still believing you shouldn't have had to suffer.
  • Asking yourself what the problem is and breaking it down.
  • Being here for topics.
  • Understanding that the question you're asking is ridiculous but asking it anyway.
  • What you want only existing for children because their needs are greater.
  • Using adult-sized playgrounds for physical therapy.
  • Using adult-sized playgrounds for physical therapy keeping those blades sharp.
  • The through line from bouldering to Ninja Warrior to Super Mario Bros.
  • Watching the first half of Full Metal Jacket and thinking the obstacle course looks really fun.
  • Putting game show contestants in a video game for the viewers at home but the contestants themselves are just looking at a big green wall.
  • Professional skaters having skate parks in their back yard.
  • Doing American Ninja Warrior every day and getting a lot more miles on the tires.
  • Tony Hawk getting away with skateboarding in a 50-year-old body because he's good enough to not faceplant all the time.
  • Giving a skateboard to an average 50-year-old and saying "go for it buddy."
  • Restarting civilization around your business plan.
  • Making up stories for your children in real-time.
  • Being a DM except nobody else gets a turn, you just keep going.
  • Five years of daily practice to wake up your storytelling brain.
  • Going to an Arlo Guthrie concert because you're old and go to Arlo Guthrie concerts.
  • All of Arlo Guthrie's songs being twenty minute stories like Alice's Restaurant.
  • Thinking that advice sounds wise for somebody else.
  • David Lynch's book on storytelling turning out to actually be about Transcendental Meditation.
  • Actually possibly having deep insights about the universe while being high on drugs.
  • Writing a book by just writing down something you already said and it feeling like someone else wrote the book.
  • Letting the story write itself and then taking credit for it.
  • Having children because you want to become a great writer.
  • Incurring $10,000 of hosting costs because you misconfigured your CDN.
  • A text adventure telling you what you did but not telling you what happened as a result.
  • Markov chain text generation.
  • AI replacing musicians and ultimately most art.
  • AI musicians giving you another album from your favorite band.
  • Exploring AI generated music and sharing your unique discoveries.
  • Seeing creative work as the last bastion of human work that AI can't take from us, but being wrong.
  • Feeling wonder at the achievement but also complete dismay that we've made ourselves irrelevant.
  • Basic income allowing us to look forward to the machines taking all our jobs.
  • All the advantages of AI just turning into more profit for billionaires.
  • Skating through a lucid fever dream and trying to make sense of the chaos, but it's really just chaos.
  • AI Dungeon being a good improv partner but a terrible game.
  • AI generated text being effectively sampled at an unknown granularity and having no idea if this is a unique sentence or if it's lifted wholesale from a Sonic fanfic.
  • Programmers getting worse as a discipline vs. getting worse as people.
  • Forcing everyone on Earth to participate in NaNoWriMo.
  • Building software on top of a teetering stack of dependencies 1,000 feet high because your company probably won't last out the year.
  • Programmers getting better in the same way speed metal guitarists are getting better.
  • Just making the thing and not caring how you make it because it just doesn't matter.
  • Not bothering working really hard to do the easy part really well because the hard part is what matters.
  • Companies being possibly good at their focus and everything else being good enough at best.
  • Some of your best friends being assholes.
  • The best programmers you've met being super sociable and cooperative.
  • Staying and asshole and flaming out because nobody wants to work with you or maturing and sanding off the rough edges and becoming more productive and less of a drag.
  • Not being sure if your co-workers are nice to everyone or just you because you have seniority.
  • The coming generation of programmers seeing programming as a hobby or a career rather than an identity.
  • Blocking the guy driving too fast on the freeway but then it turns out the guy driving too fast was going to the hospital.
  • Doing your best to live like people invented in storybooks.
  • Realizing that everyone around you has lives just as complex and nuanced as you or anyone you know.
  • The violence of walking past someone on the street and dismissing their entire context and history because you have no choice if you want to get on with your life.
  • Projecting an arbitrary order onto the chaos and definitely being wrong.
  • Definitely being wrong anyway so why not think a positive thing rather than a negative one.
  • Changing how you see somebody by imagining them differently.
  • Conceiving of a universe without yourself at the center.
  • Flying off the handle because you've had shit piled on you all day and not because you dislike Kole specifically.
  • Running late about 5% of the time you're driving and also being annoyed by about 5% of drivers going too fast because they're just irresponsible people.
  • Working hard to build positive interactions and trying to see the best possible version of somebody.
  • Instagram being a source of misery because you're comparing yourself to the prettiest people's prettiest moments.
  • Comparing your backstage to someone else's front stage.
  • Choosing to shape your world such that you're not walking around angry all the time.
  • Having a boat and the boat having a name.
  • Not giving your cat a name but permitting it to have a name.
  • Anthropomorphizing the objects you rely.
  • Calling it "the mud room" even though there's no mud and no room.
  • Naming furniture that hurts you "kneebreaker charlie" and not hating it so much because it's a little bit funny.
  • Thinking of an old car that's always breaking down as being like an old friend who's kind of a pain in the ass but you've been through so much together.
  • Being happier loving things.
  • A generic bunny holding an Easter Egg that nobody plays with until you give it a name.
  • The only time you've bought a plant in your life being that time they put googly eyes on a cactus.
  • Your roommate who took all the bows off of the presents under the tree and then shit on the floor.
  • Not wanting to be the skin dad.
  • Having animals to project love onto so your society is more placid and malleable.
  • Cats being way more lovable than most human children.
  • Empathizing with the kid crying on the airplane because you feel like crying too.
  • The kid who's allowed to scream in the grocery store when if you screamed you'd get thrown out of the store or arrested.
  • Putting hundreds of googly eyes on a Roomba because you can't just buy two googly eyes and calling it "Kos-ba."
  • Putting two eyes on the outside of the Roomba and the rest on the inside because you don't want to freak out the squares.
  • What's fruity, cheezma?
  • Trying to get your friends to follow the script of your joke but they keep making their own jokes instead.
  • Tweeting about there being no hits for "fruity cheezma" and now there being one hit for "fruity cheezma."
  • The cheese tea rocking the boba world.
  • Copping to a certain amount of midwestern provincialism.
  • The probability of inhaling boba being very high but it's great though.
  • Blowing a tapioca ball directly into the mouth of your enemy right as they're inhaling.
  • The end of your boba beverage being like The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
  • A dare than someone should not have taken and that someone having possibly been you.
  • Cream cheese and fruit going together.
  • The kind of logic you don't want to be applying to food.
  • Putting all your old food combo ideas on the menu without testing any of them because Fruity Cheezma worked out somehow.
  • Wanting peanut butter to work with sliced cheese because you can roll it up like a taquito.
  • Figuring out that milk and Cheerios go together because they're both kind of off-white so next you try orange juice and Cheez-Its.
  • Cheez-Its staying crispy in orange juice because they're so oily.
  • A Cheez-It being named Arthur and loving its mother.
  • The driver in front of you making a right turn on red from the third lane over because she was in a hurry to get to the library and walking up to her to ask for reparations.
  • A telling being told or not being told.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+9nTG0Lm8 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 15. More Real Than Tower Records https://topiclords.com/more-real-than-tower-records 5ef61bbf-7a35-45dc-aea2-84d3f0428619 Mon, 03 Feb 2020 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: Tyriq and Avery. We discuss reading non-religious texts as scripture, what "pitched battle" secretly means, practical usage of carrier pigeons, what ship is the best ship, doing a thing in one way or the other way, and ancient Greeks doing sports clothed and then deciding naked is better. 1:08:03 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics

Microtopics:

  • Taking a bite out of a cartoon bird and leaving a tooth-shaped hole, like a cookie.
  • Empire Records now being more real than Tower Records.
  • Not remembering record stores.
  • Mowing your face into a lawn made of tiny green clones of you.
  • Trusting that in a couple years your record will be classic enough that dads will want it for Christmas.
  • Trying to glean philosophy and life lessons out of the Bible even if you don't believe it's real.
  • Trying to glean philosophy and life lessons out of Harry Potter even if you don't believe it's real.
  • Star Wars being more real than Tower Records.
  • Mixing methamphetamines and marriage.
  • Language changing to mean the thing people misunderstand it to mean.
  • Drinking tea and watching war as if it's a sport.
  • Wearing enormous flags so people can see at a glance how the battle is going.
  • Pantsed and unpantsed meaning the same thing.
  • The union of shells and the union of unshelledness.
  • The dude whose job it is to take homing pigeons away from home.
  • Homing pigeons basically being a rubber band.
  • Defcon attendees hacking the pigeon timestamp machine to win the pigeon race.
  • Buying a signed shot polisher from the guy who won the International Barista Championships.
  • Going to the barista gym up keep your skills up between barista gigs.
  • Coming back from your barista sabbatical and discovering all coffee is now made in node.js.
  • Not letting anyone else use the espresso machine you convinced management to pay for.
  • Being both a barista and a bard at GitHub.
  • Singing to GitHub employees a tale of the GitHub CEOs valor.
  • The Roman alphabet existing in the Star Wars universe.
  • Being a huge fan of Dyson spheres.
  • Shamefully burying your fanfic in the desert, like E.T.
  • Wanting to live in a pile of garbage.
  • Wanting to live in a desert house, but not in the desert itself.
  • Forming complex structures using simple rules.
  • Wizards just pooping on the ground and magicking it away.
  • Being furious when someone peels a banana wrong.
  • Orienting your toilet paper so it's harder for cats to unroll.
  • Cats sticking their paws under the door.
  • Being sad because the doors are too flush with the ground for a cat paw to say hi.
  • Bringing your guitar case to lure your cat admirer away from you.
  • Waking up screaming about raccoons.
  • A cat's ability to form a mental model of the world.
  • Unloading the front door from memory when you get to the second floor.
  • Never getting the dog you wanted so you get an iguana instead.
  • Waking up snuggling a cold handbag.
  • Whether lizards snuggle with sleeping deer in the wild.
  • Earnestly proposing a Utopia ruled by you and your friends.
  • Doing the Olympics naked being a week-long fad at best.
  • Soccer fandoms gaining political power and going to war with one another.
  • Soccer's popularity fading immediately after its invention, being just one of millions of microsports.
  • Going into the wrestling pit with a spring loaded revolver up your sleeve.
  • Voting somebody off the island of Earth.
  • Biting open your cell phone tooth and the liquid going into a mold in your stomach shaped like a cell phone and pooping out a cell phone.
  • There also being a mold for a cell tower in your stomach.
  • Being qualified to gatekeep a culture because you once dated someone of that culture.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics

Microtopics:

  • Taking a bite out of a cartoon bird and leaving a tooth-shaped hole, like a cookie.
  • Empire Records now being more real than Tower Records.
  • Not remembering record stores.
  • Mowing your face into a lawn made of tiny green clones of you.
  • Trusting that in a couple years your record will be classic enough that dads will want it for Christmas.
  • Trying to glean philosophy and life lessons out of the Bible even if you don't believe it's real.
  • Trying to glean philosophy and life lessons out of Harry Potter even if you don't believe it's real.
  • Star Wars being more real than Tower Records.
  • Mixing methamphetamines and marriage.
  • Language changing to mean the thing people misunderstand it to mean.
  • Drinking tea and watching war as if it's a sport.
  • Wearing enormous flags so people can see at a glance how the battle is going.
  • Pantsed and unpantsed meaning the same thing.
  • The union of shells and the union of unshelledness.
  • The dude whose job it is to take homing pigeons away from home.
  • Homing pigeons basically being a rubber band.
  • Defcon attendees hacking the pigeon timestamp machine to win the pigeon race.
  • Buying a signed shot polisher from the guy who won the International Barista Championships.
  • Going to the barista gym up keep your skills up between barista gigs.
  • Coming back from your barista sabbatical and discovering all coffee is now made in node.js.
  • Not letting anyone else use the espresso machine you convinced management to pay for.
  • Being both a barista and a bard at GitHub.
  • Singing to GitHub employees a tale of the GitHub CEOs valor.
  • The Roman alphabet existing in the Star Wars universe.
  • Being a huge fan of Dyson spheres.
  • Shamefully burying your fanfic in the desert, like E.T.
  • Wanting to live in a pile of garbage.
  • Wanting to live in a desert house, but not in the desert itself.
  • Forming complex structures using simple rules.
  • Wizards just pooping on the ground and magicking it away.
  • Being furious when someone peels a banana wrong.
  • Orienting your toilet paper so it's harder for cats to unroll.
  • Cats sticking their paws under the door.
  • Being sad because the doors are too flush with the ground for a cat paw to say hi.
  • Bringing your guitar case to lure your cat admirer away from you.
  • Waking up screaming about raccoons.
  • A cat's ability to form a mental model of the world.
  • Unloading the front door from memory when you get to the second floor.
  • Never getting the dog you wanted so you get an iguana instead.
  • Waking up snuggling a cold handbag.
  • Whether lizards snuggle with sleeping deer in the wild.
  • Earnestly proposing a Utopia ruled by you and your friends.
  • Doing the Olympics naked being a week-long fad at best.
  • Soccer fandoms gaining political power and going to war with one another.
  • Soccer's popularity fading immediately after its invention, being just one of millions of microsports.
  • Going into the wrestling pit with a spring loaded revolver up your sleeve.
  • Voting somebody off the island of Earth.
  • Biting open your cell phone tooth and the liquid going into a mold in your stomach shaped like a cell phone and pooping out a cell phone.
  • There also being a mold for a cell tower in your stomach.
  • Being qualified to gatekeep a culture because you once dated someone of that culture.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics

Microtopics:

  • Taking a bite out of a cartoon bird and leaving a tooth-shaped hole, like a cookie.
  • Empire Records now being more real than Tower Records.
  • Not remembering record stores.
  • Mowing your face into a lawn made of tiny green clones of you.
  • Trusting that in a couple years your record will be classic enough that dads will want it for Christmas.
  • Trying to glean philosophy and life lessons out of the Bible even if you don't believe it's real.
  • Trying to glean philosophy and life lessons out of Harry Potter even if you don't believe it's real.
  • Star Wars being more real than Tower Records.
  • Mixing methamphetamines and marriage.
  • Language changing to mean the thing people misunderstand it to mean.
  • Drinking tea and watching war as if it's a sport.
  • Wearing enormous flags so people can see at a glance how the battle is going.
  • Pantsed and unpantsed meaning the same thing.
  • The union of shells and the union of unshelledness.
  • The dude whose job it is to take homing pigeons away from home.
  • Homing pigeons basically being a rubber band.
  • Defcon attendees hacking the pigeon timestamp machine to win the pigeon race.
  • Buying a signed shot polisher from the guy who won the International Barista Championships.
  • Going to the barista gym up keep your skills up between barista gigs.
  • Coming back from your barista sabbatical and discovering all coffee is now made in node.js.
  • Not letting anyone else use the espresso machine you convinced management to pay for.
  • Being both a barista and a bard at GitHub.
  • Singing to GitHub employees a tale of the GitHub CEOs valor.
  • The Roman alphabet existing in the Star Wars universe.
  • Being a huge fan of Dyson spheres.
  • Shamefully burying your fanfic in the desert, like E.T.
  • Wanting to live in a pile of garbage.
  • Wanting to live in a desert house, but not in the desert itself.
  • Forming complex structures using simple rules.
  • Wizards just pooping on the ground and magicking it away.
  • Being furious when someone peels a banana wrong.
  • Orienting your toilet paper so it's harder for cats to unroll.
  • Cats sticking their paws under the door.
  • Being sad because the doors are too flush with the ground for a cat paw to say hi.
  • Bringing your guitar case to lure your cat admirer away from you.
  • Waking up screaming about raccoons.
  • A cat's ability to form a mental model of the world.
  • Unloading the front door from memory when you get to the second floor.
  • Never getting the dog you wanted so you get an iguana instead.
  • Waking up snuggling a cold handbag.
  • Whether lizards snuggle with sleeping deer in the wild.
  • Earnestly proposing a Utopia ruled by you and your friends.
  • Doing the Olympics naked being a week-long fad at best.
  • Soccer fandoms gaining political power and going to war with one another.
  • Soccer's popularity fading immediately after its invention, being just one of millions of microsports.
  • Going into the wrestling pit with a spring loaded revolver up your sleeve.
  • Voting somebody off the island of Earth.
  • Biting open your cell phone tooth and the liquid going into a mold in your stomach shaped like a cell phone and pooping out a cell phone.
  • There also being a mold for a cell tower in your stomach.
  • Being qualified to gatekeep a culture because you once dated someone of that culture.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+j_RvqKxI ]]> Jim Stormdancer 14. Dad is a Cenobite https://topiclords.com/dad-is-a-cenobite 98ad7633-ab05-4753-8b3d-8e4e32506f0e Mon, 27 Jan 2020 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: April and Danny. We discuss teaching your child the wrong word for something, harbinger households, men's wallets, choosing a new name, the ubiquity of Shen Yun ads, and growing up an extremely unimaginative kid. 1:05:17 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • April is a park ranger at @aprilsaur.
  • Danny makes video game documentaries at https://noclip.website/ and is on Twitter at @dannyodwyer.

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Reading numbers off of a list because topics haven't been invented yet.
  • Giving someone a funny look where the funny part is that you're not looking at them.
  • Cows that are so cute you want to want to put them in your mouth, which would surely kill them.
  • The fuzzy cows only being fuzzy because it's winter.
  • Falling off a cliff being the only way to hurt yourself in Ireland.
  • The song they teach Irish children about American tourists falling off cliffs.
  • Age differences being insignificant when you're millions of years old.
  • Knowing two people but calling them both the same thing because one of their names is too hard to say.
  • Which animals are close enough to a dog to call "dog."
  • A perfect 1960s household but the dad is a cenobite.
  • Not being sure if you have bad luck or if you're just a bad person.
  • Product researchers studying what you like because everything you like fails.
  • Lying to researchers so companies will still make products you like.
  • Eating banana flavored corn flakes while you watch Milli Vanilli music videos on your Betamax player and Ralph Nader is the mayor.
  • Moving to a zip code where all your neighbors have your same contrary taste in products.
  • A wallet the size of four king-sized Snickers bars.
  • Finding paradise in the wrong gender's department at Target.
  • Feeling the thrill of being free of a giant heavy brick.
  • Having to buy an expensive, fashionable watch because otherwise your peers won't take you seriously.
  • Taking a photo of your ID and just showing the cop your Instagram.
  • Getting a non-folding wallet so your dollar bills won't have creases.
  • Explaining to the barista that the last guy put the crease in the dollar bill, not you.
  • Promising the barista you won't fold the coffee either.
  • Getting a note press so this sort of thing won't happen again.
  • Getting to say your cool last name into a walkie talkie at work.
  • Technically not appropriating anything because you're just using culture that's already been appropriated by someone else.
  • A day full of mostly making people happy, for a change.
  • Changing your last name to Ass and owing royalties to Ass owners.
  • An opportunity for some serious synergy.
  • Radio listeners celebrating other radio listeners.
  • Deciding to throw the blue checkmark people in with gen pop.
  • Waiting until you're on your deathbed to watch something to maximize anticipation.
  • The last thing you see before they turn off the dialysis machine.
  • Missing out on pop culture because you always click "skip ad" as soon as possible.
  • Advertising your audience into submission.
  • Trying to explain a slide rule without understanding what a slide rule is.
  • Watching Alien in the theater with a baby strapped to your chest.
  • Evolving to not kill yourself when you head butt a tree.
  • Having an incredibly fancy tongue.
  • Squirrels eating every single bulb from your string lights to humiliate you.
  • A peregrine falcon drowning a songbird in a creek while looking you in the eye.
  • Always being sure to catch the woodpecker with the beak facing away from you.
  • Letting the other kids on the playground do the imagining for you.
  • Deciding whether it's actually "great" to "e-meet" you.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • April is a park ranger at @aprilsaur.
  • Danny makes video game documentaries at https://noclip.website/ and is on Twitter at @dannyodwyer.

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Reading numbers off of a list because topics haven't been invented yet.
  • Giving someone a funny look where the funny part is that you're not looking at them.
  • Cows that are so cute you want to want to put them in your mouth, which would surely kill them.
  • The fuzzy cows only being fuzzy because it's winter.
  • Falling off a cliff being the only way to hurt yourself in Ireland.
  • The song they teach Irish children about American tourists falling off cliffs.
  • Age differences being insignificant when you're millions of years old.
  • Knowing two people but calling them both the same thing because one of their names is too hard to say.
  • Which animals are close enough to a dog to call "dog."
  • A perfect 1960s household but the dad is a cenobite.
  • Not being sure if you have bad luck or if you're just a bad person.
  • Product researchers studying what you like because everything you like fails.
  • Lying to researchers so companies will still make products you like.
  • Eating banana flavored corn flakes while you watch Milli Vanilli music videos on your Betamax player and Ralph Nader is the mayor.
  • Moving to a zip code where all your neighbors have your same contrary taste in products.
  • A wallet the size of four king-sized Snickers bars.
  • Finding paradise in the wrong gender's department at Target.
  • Feeling the thrill of being free of a giant heavy brick.
  • Having to buy an expensive, fashionable watch because otherwise your peers won't take you seriously.
  • Taking a photo of your ID and just showing the cop your Instagram.
  • Getting a non-folding wallet so your dollar bills won't have creases.
  • Explaining to the barista that the last guy put the crease in the dollar bill, not you.
  • Promising the barista you won't fold the coffee either.
  • Getting a note press so this sort of thing won't happen again.
  • Getting to say your cool last name into a walkie talkie at work.
  • Technically not appropriating anything because you're just using culture that's already been appropriated by someone else.
  • A day full of mostly making people happy, for a change.
  • Changing your last name to Ass and owing royalties to Ass owners.
  • An opportunity for some serious synergy.
  • Radio listeners celebrating other radio listeners.
  • Deciding to throw the blue checkmark people in with gen pop.
  • Waiting until you're on your deathbed to watch something to maximize anticipation.
  • The last thing you see before they turn off the dialysis machine.
  • Missing out on pop culture because you always click "skip ad" as soon as possible.
  • Advertising your audience into submission.
  • Trying to explain a slide rule without understanding what a slide rule is.
  • Watching Alien in the theater with a baby strapped to your chest.
  • Evolving to not kill yourself when you head butt a tree.
  • Having an incredibly fancy tongue.
  • Squirrels eating every single bulb from your string lights to humiliate you.
  • A peregrine falcon drowning a songbird in a creek while looking you in the eye.
  • Always being sure to catch the woodpecker with the beak facing away from you.
  • Letting the other kids on the playground do the imagining for you.
  • Deciding whether it's actually "great" to "e-meet" you.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • April is a park ranger at @aprilsaur.
  • Danny makes video game documentaries at https://noclip.website/ and is on Twitter at @dannyodwyer.

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Reading numbers off of a list because topics haven't been invented yet.
  • Giving someone a funny look where the funny part is that you're not looking at them.
  • Cows that are so cute you want to want to put them in your mouth, which would surely kill them.
  • The fuzzy cows only being fuzzy because it's winter.
  • Falling off a cliff being the only way to hurt yourself in Ireland.
  • The song they teach Irish children about American tourists falling off cliffs.
  • Age differences being insignificant when you're millions of years old.
  • Knowing two people but calling them both the same thing because one of their names is too hard to say.
  • Which animals are close enough to a dog to call "dog."
  • A perfect 1960s household but the dad is a cenobite.
  • Not being sure if you have bad luck or if you're just a bad person.
  • Product researchers studying what you like because everything you like fails.
  • Lying to researchers so companies will still make products you like.
  • Eating banana flavored corn flakes while you watch Milli Vanilli music videos on your Betamax player and Ralph Nader is the mayor.
  • Moving to a zip code where all your neighbors have your same contrary taste in products.
  • A wallet the size of four king-sized Snickers bars.
  • Finding paradise in the wrong gender's department at Target.
  • Feeling the thrill of being free of a giant heavy brick.
  • Having to buy an expensive, fashionable watch because otherwise your peers won't take you seriously.
  • Taking a photo of your ID and just showing the cop your Instagram.
  • Getting a non-folding wallet so your dollar bills won't have creases.
  • Explaining to the barista that the last guy put the crease in the dollar bill, not you.
  • Promising the barista you won't fold the coffee either.
  • Getting a note press so this sort of thing won't happen again.
  • Getting to say your cool last name into a walkie talkie at work.
  • Technically not appropriating anything because you're just using culture that's already been appropriated by someone else.
  • A day full of mostly making people happy, for a change.
  • Changing your last name to Ass and owing royalties to Ass owners.
  • An opportunity for some serious synergy.
  • Radio listeners celebrating other radio listeners.
  • Deciding to throw the blue checkmark people in with gen pop.
  • Waiting until you're on your deathbed to watch something to maximize anticipation.
  • The last thing you see before they turn off the dialysis machine.
  • Missing out on pop culture because you always click "skip ad" as soon as possible.
  • Advertising your audience into submission.
  • Trying to explain a slide rule without understanding what a slide rule is.
  • Watching Alien in the theater with a baby strapped to your chest.
  • Evolving to not kill yourself when you head butt a tree.
  • Having an incredibly fancy tongue.
  • Squirrels eating every single bulb from your string lights to humiliate you.
  • A peregrine falcon drowning a songbird in a creek while looking you in the eye.
  • Always being sure to catch the woodpecker with the beak facing away from you.
  • Letting the other kids on the playground do the imagining for you.
  • Deciding whether it's actually "great" to "e-meet" you.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+0BLeiLkb ]]> Jim Stormdancer 13. Kurt Cobain Vocaloid https://topiclords.com/kurt-cobain-vocaloid 7ca0ad29-773e-4a33-acb8-c424e0dd2425 Mon, 20 Jan 2020 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: Shannon Strucci and JP LeBreton. We discuss monetizing hobbies vs. just having hobbies, inventing a 5 acre island in the remote south Pacific, level design lessons from Hawaii, the Oakland Athletics adopting "Movin' Like Bernie," fictions containing themselves as a gag, the first time you've tried your favorite foods, and Time Trap and creating mysteries from the outside in. 1:10:14 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Being confused by the existence of two separate Shannons.
  • Video games where nobody bothers you, and arguably that being the whole point of video games.
  • Doing calligraphy on Twitch.
  • Doing calligraphy just for yourself and that being way better.
  • The cost of getting more than one kind of value out of something.
  • Having an audience and feeling the need to entertain the audience whenever possible.
  • Finally deciding to get a real job because you have a kid on the way.
  • Imagining having a job as a programmer and not being happy about it.
  • Doing creative work in private because you're not good enough to do it publicly.
  • Producing a complete song in five minutes when it takes five years to make a game.
  • Always being able to see the geological phenomenon that will take your life one day.
  • The base of the Sutro Tower basically being a Quake level.
  • Being shot at as you approach the Sutro Tower.
  • Seeing Batman's head and knowing which way to go.
  • DragonCon's failure to produce parchment realm maps.
  • Hawaii having lava, hostile creatures and good landmarking.
  • Playing your anime theme song on your phone as you show up at the manga and wall scroll store with your katana.
  • Having an animated gif that represents your identity.
  • How to turn Binding of Isaac into an e-sport.
  • Stupefyingly long TV series lifetimes.
  • Text-to-speech deepfakes.
  • Chopping up Garret's voice to create dialog for your Thief fan mission.
  • Measuring Ian McKellen's voice and sending the data to people who have never heard Ian McKellen so they have plausible deniability.
  • Living on your own and eating Indian food for the first time.
  • Discovering a new continent at the Indian buffet.
  • Not wanting to eat a salad because probably there are bugs in there.
  • Stepping stones to eating sushi.
  • Food preferences being heavily shaped by first impressions.
  • Liking Primer two different ways, ten years apart, and being right both times.
  • The important lesson being hidden behind the interesting puzzle.
  • Unsolvable mysteries that haunt you for the rest of your life.
  • Enclosing a narrative with another narrative.
  • Assuming the Wii will remain ascendant because it's 1989 and Nintendo dominates your culture.
  • The story turning to mush when it comes time to actually answer to the question.
  • The thrill of reactive, improvisational storytelling.
  • The strength of remaining vague about whether your show is supernatural or not.
  • Imagining what happens next in a story as a way of enjoying the story.
  • The nectar that mystery storytelling is trying to extract.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Being confused by the existence of two separate Shannons.
  • Video games where nobody bothers you, and arguably that being the whole point of video games.
  • Doing calligraphy on Twitch.
  • Doing calligraphy just for yourself and that being way better.
  • The cost of getting more than one kind of value out of something.
  • Having an audience and feeling the need to entertain the audience whenever possible.
  • Finally deciding to get a real job because you have a kid on the way.
  • Imagining having a job as a programmer and not being happy about it.
  • Doing creative work in private because you're not good enough to do it publicly.
  • Producing a complete song in five minutes when it takes five years to make a game.
  • Always being able to see the geological phenomenon that will take your life one day.
  • The base of the Sutro Tower basically being a Quake level.
  • Being shot at as you approach the Sutro Tower.
  • Seeing Batman's head and knowing which way to go.
  • DragonCon's failure to produce parchment realm maps.
  • Hawaii having lava, hostile creatures and good landmarking.
  • Playing your anime theme song on your phone as you show up at the manga and wall scroll store with your katana.
  • Having an animated gif that represents your identity.
  • How to turn Binding of Isaac into an e-sport.
  • Stupefyingly long TV series lifetimes.
  • Text-to-speech deepfakes.
  • Chopping up Garret's voice to create dialog for your Thief fan mission.
  • Measuring Ian McKellen's voice and sending the data to people who have never heard Ian McKellen so they have plausible deniability.
  • Living on your own and eating Indian food for the first time.
  • Discovering a new continent at the Indian buffet.
  • Not wanting to eat a salad because probably there are bugs in there.
  • Stepping stones to eating sushi.
  • Food preferences being heavily shaped by first impressions.
  • Liking Primer two different ways, ten years apart, and being right both times.
  • The important lesson being hidden behind the interesting puzzle.
  • Unsolvable mysteries that haunt you for the rest of your life.
  • Enclosing a narrative with another narrative.
  • Assuming the Wii will remain ascendant because it's 1989 and Nintendo dominates your culture.
  • The story turning to mush when it comes time to actually answer to the question.
  • The thrill of reactive, improvisational storytelling.
  • The strength of remaining vague about whether your show is supernatural or not.
  • Imagining what happens next in a story as a way of enjoying the story.
  • The nectar that mystery storytelling is trying to extract.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Being confused by the existence of two separate Shannons.
  • Video games where nobody bothers you, and arguably that being the whole point of video games.
  • Doing calligraphy on Twitch.
  • Doing calligraphy just for yourself and that being way better.
  • The cost of getting more than one kind of value out of something.
  • Having an audience and feeling the need to entertain the audience whenever possible.
  • Finally deciding to get a real job because you have a kid on the way.
  • Imagining having a job as a programmer and not being happy about it.
  • Doing creative work in private because you're not good enough to do it publicly.
  • Producing a complete song in five minutes when it takes five years to make a game.
  • Always being able to see the geological phenomenon that will take your life one day.
  • The base of the Sutro Tower basically being a Quake level.
  • Being shot at as you approach the Sutro Tower.
  • Seeing Batman's head and knowing which way to go.
  • DragonCon's failure to produce parchment realm maps.
  • Hawaii having lava, hostile creatures and good landmarking.
  • Playing your anime theme song on your phone as you show up at the manga and wall scroll store with your katana.
  • Having an animated gif that represents your identity.
  • How to turn Binding of Isaac into an e-sport.
  • Stupefyingly long TV series lifetimes.
  • Text-to-speech deepfakes.
  • Chopping up Garret's voice to create dialog for your Thief fan mission.
  • Measuring Ian McKellen's voice and sending the data to people who have never heard Ian McKellen so they have plausible deniability.
  • Living on your own and eating Indian food for the first time.
  • Discovering a new continent at the Indian buffet.
  • Not wanting to eat a salad because probably there are bugs in there.
  • Stepping stones to eating sushi.
  • Food preferences being heavily shaped by first impressions.
  • Liking Primer two different ways, ten years apart, and being right both times.
  • The important lesson being hidden behind the interesting puzzle.
  • Unsolvable mysteries that haunt you for the rest of your life.
  • Enclosing a narrative with another narrative.
  • Assuming the Wii will remain ascendant because it's 1989 and Nintendo dominates your culture.
  • The story turning to mush when it comes time to actually answer to the question.
  • The thrill of reactive, improvisational storytelling.
  • The strength of remaining vague about whether your show is supernatural or not.
  • Imagining what happens next in a story as a way of enjoying the story.
  • The nectar that mystery storytelling is trying to extract.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+UFFypjRY ]]> Jim Stormdancer 12. The Charisma and the Loneliness of the Moth Man https://topiclords.com/the-charisma-and-the-loneliness-of-the-moth-man b4ccb19c-bbaa-4faa-93c5-02c99c0e0bcc Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: Laura Michet and Xalavier Nelson, Jr. We discuss Moth Man, surprisingly limited chair options, peeing a thimbleful while pregnant, the trustworthiness of dogs vs. cats, whether wild animals ever lead good, happy lives, and the pros and cons of various book bindings. 58:47 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Making an igloo out of rigid body, shadow casting boarding passes.
  • Cryptids appealing to adult males 18-35.
  • Cryptids losing their cryptid status when they turn out to be real.
  • Keeping your fingers because you are wise and have a cave.
  • Wikipedia pages that really ought to put the subject's finger count front and center.
  • Confusing Odds Bodkin with Odd Bodkins.
  • Booking your favorite banjo-playing grandpa to play at your game development megacorp.
  • Taking a bullet for a friend you wouldn't go to a concert with.
  • Becoming increasingly annoyed with Richard Gere and his relationship with the moth man.
  • Distinguishing thrones from non-thrones.
  • Snarling like an evil prince with your leg over the arm of your throne.
  • Whether there are more cats indoors or outdoors, especially in El Paso Texas.
  • Legal prohibition of attempting to disperse a large enough group of cats.
  • Convincing the judge that your rocking chair was not intended to disperse the cats.
  • Cat sovereignty.
  • Rampaging cat unions recognized by the UN.
  • Reagan sending in cat scabs to replace rampaging cat unions.
  • Being terrified of military veterans returning home and taking our jobs.
  • A Jim Stormdancer-shaped hole that an Air Force veteran is destined to fill.
  • The agent of the greater space, the arch-demon, the plane itself, the car itself, the boat itself.
  • The rage of seeing a teaspoon of any liquid.
  • Recording a conversation so you can decide later whether it's ethical to listen to it.
  • Immediately going to murder.
  • Trusting a dog to be your accountant.
  • A dog being much more likely than a cat to be helpful but also being more likely to maim you.
  • Being a jester for a cat's pleasure.
  • Being hyper aware of the dark side of dogdom.
  • Dogs representing in joy in a complicated world.
  • Needing permission to pee.
  • Cats not wanting to move to Hollywood.
  • Cats that are cognizant of a better world they can no longer have.
  • An animal with a sense of hubris, entropy and regret.
  • A larger squirrel being mean to you.
  • Getting the horny disease once a season.
  • Getting all your horny out of the way at once, like Spock.
  • Spraying eggs everywhere and not taking up anyone else's time.
  • When the page curves because the other pages are in the way and the image on the page is annoyingly distorted.
  • The stigma against the paperback being an act of class warfare.
  • Wanting the physical trophy of the book on your shelf as much as the experience of reading it.
  • Appreciating the people who have previously read the same copy of the book you have.
  • Renting Final Fantasy II from Blockbuster and appreciating the previous player's save file.
  • Being too mature for fart jokes and then being mature enough to enjoy fart jokes again.
  • Having to make a noise every time you get out of a chair.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Making an igloo out of rigid body, shadow casting boarding passes.
  • Cryptids appealing to adult males 18-35.
  • Cryptids losing their cryptid status when they turn out to be real.
  • Keeping your fingers because you are wise and have a cave.
  • Wikipedia pages that really ought to put the subject's finger count front and center.
  • Confusing Odds Bodkin with Odd Bodkins.
  • Booking your favorite banjo-playing grandpa to play at your game development megacorp.
  • Taking a bullet for a friend you wouldn't go to a concert with.
  • Becoming increasingly annoyed with Richard Gere and his relationship with the moth man.
  • Distinguishing thrones from non-thrones.
  • Snarling like an evil prince with your leg over the arm of your throne.
  • Whether there are more cats indoors or outdoors, especially in El Paso Texas.
  • Legal prohibition of attempting to disperse a large enough group of cats.
  • Convincing the judge that your rocking chair was not intended to disperse the cats.
  • Cat sovereignty.
  • Rampaging cat unions recognized by the UN.
  • Reagan sending in cat scabs to replace rampaging cat unions.
  • Being terrified of military veterans returning home and taking our jobs.
  • A Jim Stormdancer-shaped hole that an Air Force veteran is destined to fill.
  • The agent of the greater space, the arch-demon, the plane itself, the car itself, the boat itself.
  • The rage of seeing a teaspoon of any liquid.
  • Recording a conversation so you can decide later whether it's ethical to listen to it.
  • Immediately going to murder.
  • Trusting a dog to be your accountant.
  • A dog being much more likely than a cat to be helpful but also being more likely to maim you.
  • Being a jester for a cat's pleasure.
  • Being hyper aware of the dark side of dogdom.
  • Dogs representing in joy in a complicated world.
  • Needing permission to pee.
  • Cats not wanting to move to Hollywood.
  • Cats that are cognizant of a better world they can no longer have.
  • An animal with a sense of hubris, entropy and regret.
  • A larger squirrel being mean to you.
  • Getting the horny disease once a season.
  • Getting all your horny out of the way at once, like Spock.
  • Spraying eggs everywhere and not taking up anyone else's time.
  • When the page curves because the other pages are in the way and the image on the page is annoyingly distorted.
  • The stigma against the paperback being an act of class warfare.
  • Wanting the physical trophy of the book on your shelf as much as the experience of reading it.
  • Appreciating the people who have previously read the same copy of the book you have.
  • Renting Final Fantasy II from Blockbuster and appreciating the previous player's save file.
  • Being too mature for fart jokes and then being mature enough to enjoy fart jokes again.
  • Having to make a noise every time you get out of a chair.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Making an igloo out of rigid body, shadow casting boarding passes.
  • Cryptids appealing to adult males 18-35.
  • Cryptids losing their cryptid status when they turn out to be real.
  • Keeping your fingers because you are wise and have a cave.
  • Wikipedia pages that really ought to put the subject's finger count front and center.
  • Confusing Odds Bodkin with Odd Bodkins.
  • Booking your favorite banjo-playing grandpa to play at your game development megacorp.
  • Taking a bullet for a friend you wouldn't go to a concert with.
  • Becoming increasingly annoyed with Richard Gere and his relationship with the moth man.
  • Distinguishing thrones from non-thrones.
  • Snarling like an evil prince with your leg over the arm of your throne.
  • Whether there are more cats indoors or outdoors, especially in El Paso Texas.
  • Legal prohibition of attempting to disperse a large enough group of cats.
  • Convincing the judge that your rocking chair was not intended to disperse the cats.
  • Cat sovereignty.
  • Rampaging cat unions recognized by the UN.
  • Reagan sending in cat scabs to replace rampaging cat unions.
  • Being terrified of military veterans returning home and taking our jobs.
  • A Jim Stormdancer-shaped hole that an Air Force veteran is destined to fill.
  • The agent of the greater space, the arch-demon, the plane itself, the car itself, the boat itself.
  • The rage of seeing a teaspoon of any liquid.
  • Recording a conversation so you can decide later whether it's ethical to listen to it.
  • Immediately going to murder.
  • Trusting a dog to be your accountant.
  • A dog being much more likely than a cat to be helpful but also being more likely to maim you.
  • Being a jester for a cat's pleasure.
  • Being hyper aware of the dark side of dogdom.
  • Dogs representing in joy in a complicated world.
  • Needing permission to pee.
  • Cats not wanting to move to Hollywood.
  • Cats that are cognizant of a better world they can no longer have.
  • An animal with a sense of hubris, entropy and regret.
  • A larger squirrel being mean to you.
  • Getting the horny disease once a season.
  • Getting all your horny out of the way at once, like Spock.
  • Spraying eggs everywhere and not taking up anyone else's time.
  • When the page curves because the other pages are in the way and the image on the page is annoyingly distorted.
  • The stigma against the paperback being an act of class warfare.
  • Wanting the physical trophy of the book on your shelf as much as the experience of reading it.
  • Appreciating the people who have previously read the same copy of the book you have.
  • Renting Final Fantasy II from Blockbuster and appreciating the previous player's save file.
  • Being too mature for fart jokes and then being mature enough to enjoy fart jokes again.
  • Having to make a noise every time you get out of a chair.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+8IBr9_Z5 ]]> Jim Stormdancer 11. The Unfriendly Potty Tries To Put It Back https://topiclords.com/the-unfriendly-potty-tries-to-put-it-back 242536bd-0a49-44e0-9264-79b2f4997af6 Mon, 06 Jan 2020 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: Jenni and Jay. We discuss getting immersion in a language when you don't know any native speakers, scars that mean your mouth is too small, food when you're expecting different food, paying to pee on road trips in Germany, Thomas Dolby's early 90s online music service, and being ok with admitting when you don't know something. 1:10:42 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords this week:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Ostensibly being in a hotel to stop an act of terrorism but first having to get someone's mojo back.
  • A portable computer that you call Catherine.
  • A time loop, here on Topic Lords.
  • Quitting that owl. Telling that owl where he can shove his heroin.
  • Duo Lingo being named after its founder and enforcer, Duo.
  • Gamification ruining your productivity because you can't help but care about these poorly-designed leaderboards.
  • This being a video games podcast now, I guess.
  • Putting in the effort to suck at a game so you can get more out of it.
  • Doing a couple squats and all the monsters dying and feeling like a badass because of all your gains.
  • Guessing that a higher intensity means a higher ratio of reps to jogging.
  • Guessing that lowering the workout intensity will increase your heart rate.
  • Squatting and catching the coins.
  • Being surprised that legal let them put squats in the workout game beacuse you can super fuck up your knees by doing squats wrong.
  • Learning Japanese so you can watch anime while also keeping an eye on that spider.
  • Asking your co-lord to stereotype an entire species.
  • Asking your co-lord about the personality of a spider when you made the spider up in this scenario.
  • Doing the equivalent of the look at the horse thing.
  • Explaining funny Youtube videos to each other.
  • A half hour of getting head massages and trying to make a face as if you're enjoying the head massage.
  • The mind whisk not working when you do it to yourself but a vibrating one might.
  • Not wanting to swear around clean boys.
  • Salvaging a terrible kale broccoli smoothie by adding rum.
  • Frying your terrible kale broccoli smoothie into falafels.
  • The only memory you have of a dentist being him telling you that you have a tiny mouth.
  • Not brushing your teeth or going to the dentist for four years.
  • Jim's good dentist costing twice as much as every other dentist and only being a 12-hour drive away.
  • The seam on a molded toy where the mold came together.
  • Knowing what the other person is talking about if it's the same thing that you were just talking about.
  • Going to the bank and giving them all your change and them giving you back half a black crayon and a couple of flatten pennies with dinosaurs on it and a lego.
  • Withdrawing all your money from the bank in black crayons.
  • Putting down the other half of your hot pepper bacon jam and peanut butter sandwich and later taking a bite, forgetting about the hot pepper bacon part.
  • A prank show that swaps out your half a sandwich with a different half a sandwich.
  • Getting food poisoning because someone on a podcast from the future gave you a bad recommendation and you paused it before hearing them say they were only kidding.
  • Searching for Jim Stormdancer who gave you a food poisoning recommendation on a time looped podcast but no results come back because that's not their name yet.
  • Realizing at the last second that a delicious gulp of Dr. Pepper is actually milk, then it turning out to actually be iced tea.
  • Beverageception.
  • How we all left fifty glasses of water in our room in case the aliens invade because that's a normal thing.
  • Milk not coming out of your glass when you try to drink because it's yogurt now.
  • Combination sleep mask and headphones.
  • Turning twenty half-full cans of Dr. Pepper into ten full cans of Dr. Pepper.
  • Not being able to take the last sip of anything because that sip is tainted.
  • Convincing yourself that if you just take a smaller sip it won't be the last sip.
  • Having five euros worth of pee vouchers because nobody actually accepts your pee vouchers.
  • Not having any concept of what it's like to drive without seeing tourist traps.
  • Figuring out what the German equivalent of Elvis is and instantly becoming a millionaire.
  • Starting to optimize your bathroom trips because now there's a currency involved.
  • The friendly potty making things weird.
  • The unfriendly potty trying to put it back.
  • Getting the smallest piece of chocolate imaginable at the end of your chocolate museum tour.
  • Helping the prince and his dragon friend make some chocolate shoes after the dragon accidentally melts the previous pair of chocolate shoes and melts them.
  • Brushing up on your chocolate trivia so you can get the sticker that says "Chocolate Genius."
  • Hiring a writer and telling them "it's a kingdom, and it's chocolatey -- go!"
  • Trying to convince museum attendees that you aren't exploiting laborers even though there are pictures of exploited laborers right there.
  • Theatrically fiddling with your synthesizers at because Channel 9 news is here.
  • Naming yourself after a music technology company because you also do music technology.
  • Missing an opportunity to name yourself after cheese.
  • Cheddars that have not undergone the cheddaring process.
  • Mistaking Thomas Dolby for Thomas Colby and cheddaring him but not getting cheddar for some reason.
  • Going grocery shopping with your mom and asking her for a candy bar and an Internet World Magazine.
  • Sticking with Gopher VR because the World Wide Web will never replace Telnet.
  • The term "World Wide Web" having been coined by Joseph McCarthy to describe Soviet influence in America.
  • Nodding along but feeling bad about not being able to connect with these people because you're 15 and don't know anything.
  • Being proud of not knowing about something.
  • Choosing to not be around people who make fun of you.
  • Programming being excellent practice for humility because you're demonstrably wrong all the goddamned time.
  • Wishing that you wanted to go outside more.
  • Synthesizer enthusiasts knocking over your trash can to look for patch cables.
  • Living on a canal and seeing a bunch of cool sea creatures all the time.
  • Spraying tap water into the canal to attract manatees and every one of them having propeller scars.
  • Watching shuttle launches from your back yard.
  • Slipping on frozen sprinkler water and somehow not hitting your head on your way down into the canal.
  • Every person ending up alone in the universe after everyone else has died.
  • Answering to Betty because you want to be polite and don't want to correct the person who thinks your name is Betty.
  • Betty Boop shooting to the top of the list of people you don't want to be confused with.
  • Being confused about whether Betty Boop is supposed to be sexy or a dog or both.
  • Betty Boop's apparent sexiness being like reading Shakespeare and not knowing what moiety means.
  • Judging somebody by the trucks you've seen with bootleg stickers of them on the back.
  • A bumper sticker of John Calvin peeing on whatever he doesn't like.
  • Inventing your own web safe palette.
  • Floyd-Steinberg fans high-fiving each other.
  • Good lording all around!
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords this week:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Ostensibly being in a hotel to stop an act of terrorism but first having to get someone's mojo back.
  • A portable computer that you call Catherine.
  • A time loop, here on Topic Lords.
  • Quitting that owl. Telling that owl where he can shove his heroin.
  • Duo Lingo being named after its founder and enforcer, Duo.
  • Gamification ruining your productivity because you can't help but care about these poorly-designed leaderboards.
  • This being a video games podcast now, I guess.
  • Putting in the effort to suck at a game so you can get more out of it.
  • Doing a couple squats and all the monsters dying and feeling like a badass because of all your gains.
  • Guessing that a higher intensity means a higher ratio of reps to jogging.
  • Guessing that lowering the workout intensity will increase your heart rate.
  • Squatting and catching the coins.
  • Being surprised that legal let them put squats in the workout game beacuse you can super fuck up your knees by doing squats wrong.
  • Learning Japanese so you can watch anime while also keeping an eye on that spider.
  • Asking your co-lord to stereotype an entire species.
  • Asking your co-lord about the personality of a spider when you made the spider up in this scenario.
  • Doing the equivalent of the look at the horse thing.
  • Explaining funny Youtube videos to each other.
  • A half hour of getting head massages and trying to make a face as if you're enjoying the head massage.
  • The mind whisk not working when you do it to yourself but a vibrating one might.
  • Not wanting to swear around clean boys.
  • Salvaging a terrible kale broccoli smoothie by adding rum.
  • Frying your terrible kale broccoli smoothie into falafels.
  • The only memory you have of a dentist being him telling you that you have a tiny mouth.
  • Not brushing your teeth or going to the dentist for four years.
  • Jim's good dentist costing twice as much as every other dentist and only being a 12-hour drive away.
  • The seam on a molded toy where the mold came together.
  • Knowing what the other person is talking about if it's the same thing that you were just talking about.
  • Going to the bank and giving them all your change and them giving you back half a black crayon and a couple of flatten pennies with dinosaurs on it and a lego.
  • Withdrawing all your money from the bank in black crayons.
  • Putting down the other half of your hot pepper bacon jam and peanut butter sandwich and later taking a bite, forgetting about the hot pepper bacon part.
  • A prank show that swaps out your half a sandwich with a different half a sandwich.
  • Getting food poisoning because someone on a podcast from the future gave you a bad recommendation and you paused it before hearing them say they were only kidding.
  • Searching for Jim Stormdancer who gave you a food poisoning recommendation on a time looped podcast but no results come back because that's not their name yet.
  • Realizing at the last second that a delicious gulp of Dr. Pepper is actually milk, then it turning out to actually be iced tea.
  • Beverageception.
  • How we all left fifty glasses of water in our room in case the aliens invade because that's a normal thing.
  • Milk not coming out of your glass when you try to drink because it's yogurt now.
  • Combination sleep mask and headphones.
  • Turning twenty half-full cans of Dr. Pepper into ten full cans of Dr. Pepper.
  • Not being able to take the last sip of anything because that sip is tainted.
  • Convincing yourself that if you just take a smaller sip it won't be the last sip.
  • Having five euros worth of pee vouchers because nobody actually accepts your pee vouchers.
  • Not having any concept of what it's like to drive without seeing tourist traps.
  • Figuring out what the German equivalent of Elvis is and instantly becoming a millionaire.
  • Starting to optimize your bathroom trips because now there's a currency involved.
  • The friendly potty making things weird.
  • The unfriendly potty trying to put it back.
  • Getting the smallest piece of chocolate imaginable at the end of your chocolate museum tour.
  • Helping the prince and his dragon friend make some chocolate shoes after the dragon accidentally melts the previous pair of chocolate shoes and melts them.
  • Brushing up on your chocolate trivia so you can get the sticker that says "Chocolate Genius."
  • Hiring a writer and telling them "it's a kingdom, and it's chocolatey -- go!"
  • Trying to convince museum attendees that you aren't exploiting laborers even though there are pictures of exploited laborers right there.
  • Theatrically fiddling with your synthesizers at because Channel 9 news is here.
  • Naming yourself after a music technology company because you also do music technology.
  • Missing an opportunity to name yourself after cheese.
  • Cheddars that have not undergone the cheddaring process.
  • Mistaking Thomas Dolby for Thomas Colby and cheddaring him but not getting cheddar for some reason.
  • Going grocery shopping with your mom and asking her for a candy bar and an Internet World Magazine.
  • Sticking with Gopher VR because the World Wide Web will never replace Telnet.
  • The term "World Wide Web" having been coined by Joseph McCarthy to describe Soviet influence in America.
  • Nodding along but feeling bad about not being able to connect with these people because you're 15 and don't know anything.
  • Being proud of not knowing about something.
  • Choosing to not be around people who make fun of you.
  • Programming being excellent practice for humility because you're demonstrably wrong all the goddamned time.
  • Wishing that you wanted to go outside more.
  • Synthesizer enthusiasts knocking over your trash can to look for patch cables.
  • Living on a canal and seeing a bunch of cool sea creatures all the time.
  • Spraying tap water into the canal to attract manatees and every one of them having propeller scars.
  • Watching shuttle launches from your back yard.
  • Slipping on frozen sprinkler water and somehow not hitting your head on your way down into the canal.
  • Every person ending up alone in the universe after everyone else has died.
  • Answering to Betty because you want to be polite and don't want to correct the person who thinks your name is Betty.
  • Betty Boop shooting to the top of the list of people you don't want to be confused with.
  • Being confused about whether Betty Boop is supposed to be sexy or a dog or both.
  • Betty Boop's apparent sexiness being like reading Shakespeare and not knowing what moiety means.
  • Judging somebody by the trucks you've seen with bootleg stickers of them on the back.
  • A bumper sticker of John Calvin peeing on whatever he doesn't like.
  • Inventing your own web safe palette.
  • Floyd-Steinberg fans high-fiving each other.
  • Good lording all around!

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords this week:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Ostensibly being in a hotel to stop an act of terrorism but first having to get someone's mojo back.
  • A portable computer that you call Catherine.
  • A time loop, here on Topic Lords.
  • Quitting that owl. Telling that owl where he can shove his heroin.
  • Duo Lingo being named after its founder and enforcer, Duo.
  • Gamification ruining your productivity because you can't help but care about these poorly-designed leaderboards.
  • This being a video games podcast now, I guess.
  • Putting in the effort to suck at a game so you can get more out of it.
  • Doing a couple squats and all the monsters dying and feeling like a badass because of all your gains.
  • Guessing that a higher intensity means a higher ratio of reps to jogging.
  • Guessing that lowering the workout intensity will increase your heart rate.
  • Squatting and catching the coins.
  • Being surprised that legal let them put squats in the workout game beacuse you can super fuck up your knees by doing squats wrong.
  • Learning Japanese so you can watch anime while also keeping an eye on that spider.
  • Asking your co-lord to stereotype an entire species.
  • Asking your co-lord about the personality of a spider when you made the spider up in this scenario.
  • Doing the equivalent of the look at the horse thing.
  • Explaining funny Youtube videos to each other.
  • A half hour of getting head massages and trying to make a face as if you're enjoying the head massage.
  • The mind whisk not working when you do it to yourself but a vibrating one might.
  • Not wanting to swear around clean boys.
  • Salvaging a terrible kale broccoli smoothie by adding rum.
  • Frying your terrible kale broccoli smoothie into falafels.
  • The only memory you have of a dentist being him telling you that you have a tiny mouth.
  • Not brushing your teeth or going to the dentist for four years.
  • Jim's good dentist costing twice as much as every other dentist and only being a 12-hour drive away.
  • The seam on a molded toy where the mold came together.
  • Knowing what the other person is talking about if it's the same thing that you were just talking about.
  • Going to the bank and giving them all your change and them giving you back half a black crayon and a couple of flatten pennies with dinosaurs on it and a lego.
  • Withdrawing all your money from the bank in black crayons.
  • Putting down the other half of your hot pepper bacon jam and peanut butter sandwich and later taking a bite, forgetting about the hot pepper bacon part.
  • A prank show that swaps out your half a sandwich with a different half a sandwich.
  • Getting food poisoning because someone on a podcast from the future gave you a bad recommendation and you paused it before hearing them say they were only kidding.
  • Searching for Jim Stormdancer who gave you a food poisoning recommendation on a time looped podcast but no results come back because that's not their name yet.
  • Realizing at the last second that a delicious gulp of Dr. Pepper is actually milk, then it turning out to actually be iced tea.
  • Beverageception.
  • How we all left fifty glasses of water in our room in case the aliens invade because that's a normal thing.
  • Milk not coming out of your glass when you try to drink because it's yogurt now.
  • Combination sleep mask and headphones.
  • Turning twenty half-full cans of Dr. Pepper into ten full cans of Dr. Pepper.
  • Not being able to take the last sip of anything because that sip is tainted.
  • Convincing yourself that if you just take a smaller sip it won't be the last sip.
  • Having five euros worth of pee vouchers because nobody actually accepts your pee vouchers.
  • Not having any concept of what it's like to drive without seeing tourist traps.
  • Figuring out what the German equivalent of Elvis is and instantly becoming a millionaire.
  • Starting to optimize your bathroom trips because now there's a currency involved.
  • The friendly potty making things weird.
  • The unfriendly potty trying to put it back.
  • Getting the smallest piece of chocolate imaginable at the end of your chocolate museum tour.
  • Helping the prince and his dragon friend make some chocolate shoes after the dragon accidentally melts the previous pair of chocolate shoes and melts them.
  • Brushing up on your chocolate trivia so you can get the sticker that says "Chocolate Genius."
  • Hiring a writer and telling them "it's a kingdom, and it's chocolatey -- go!"
  • Trying to convince museum attendees that you aren't exploiting laborers even though there are pictures of exploited laborers right there.
  • Theatrically fiddling with your synthesizers at because Channel 9 news is here.
  • Naming yourself after a music technology company because you also do music technology.
  • Missing an opportunity to name yourself after cheese.
  • Cheddars that have not undergone the cheddaring process.
  • Mistaking Thomas Dolby for Thomas Colby and cheddaring him but not getting cheddar for some reason.
  • Going grocery shopping with your mom and asking her for a candy bar and an Internet World Magazine.
  • Sticking with Gopher VR because the World Wide Web will never replace Telnet.
  • The term "World Wide Web" having been coined by Joseph McCarthy to describe Soviet influence in America.
  • Nodding along but feeling bad about not being able to connect with these people because you're 15 and don't know anything.
  • Being proud of not knowing about something.
  • Choosing to not be around people who make fun of you.
  • Programming being excellent practice for humility because you're demonstrably wrong all the goddamned time.
  • Wishing that you wanted to go outside more.
  • Synthesizer enthusiasts knocking over your trash can to look for patch cables.
  • Living on a canal and seeing a bunch of cool sea creatures all the time.
  • Spraying tap water into the canal to attract manatees and every one of them having propeller scars.
  • Watching shuttle launches from your back yard.
  • Slipping on frozen sprinkler water and somehow not hitting your head on your way down into the canal.
  • Every person ending up alone in the universe after everyone else has died.
  • Answering to Betty because you want to be polite and don't want to correct the person who thinks your name is Betty.
  • Betty Boop shooting to the top of the list of people you don't want to be confused with.
  • Being confused about whether Betty Boop is supposed to be sexy or a dog or both.
  • Betty Boop's apparent sexiness being like reading Shakespeare and not knowing what moiety means.
  • Judging somebody by the trucks you've seen with bootleg stickers of them on the back.
  • A bumper sticker of John Calvin peeing on whatever he doesn't like.
  • Inventing your own web safe palette.
  • Floyd-Steinberg fans high-fiving each other.
  • Good lording all around!

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+eRXyv-1J ]]> Jim Stormdancer 10. The Entire Weirdness of Plants https://topiclords.com/the-entire-weirdness-of-plants 4ee1a762-f53c-47e9-ae5d-378df3c1e7cf Mon, 30 Dec 2019 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: Erica and Justin. We discuss children being terrifying, the Frog Fractions 2 ARG and its holiday release, bringing interesting puzzles to people with boring jobs, what we were doing before vs. now, weird holiday foods, weird holiday birds, and incorrect plants in video games. 1:02:43 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • People who celebrate Christmas on January 6th.
  • Addressing the least-served Christmas demographic.
  • Muting your mutuals because it turns out you have no common interests.
  • Not being sure if the Frog Fractions 2 Soundtrack liner notes exist any more.
  • Your three year old opening all the Advent Calendar doors and hiding the chocolates in his Halloween bag.
  • Your three year old pushing chairs from the kitchen to climb on top of the refrigerator because that's where you keep the cookies.
  • Developing problem-solving skills long before you develop a sense of ethics or self-preservation.
  • Your two year old deciding it's time to be a cool pirate and picking the biggest sword possible out of the kitchen knives.
  • Taking comfort in only half of prehistoric children dying before the age of five, so with modern medicine and safety advances your child has a pretty decent shot.
  • Half of all children dying before the age of five so they never amass the numbers needed to overthrow the adults.
  • Your one year old overcoming the child safety lock by ripping the entire door off.
  • Half your age plus seven being your personal cutoff for when someone stops being a child.
  • 18 year olds being allowed to vote and drive and get married.
  • Teenagers having infinite energy to learn and get things done, but no judgement for what are good things to learn or do.
  • Describing your relationship with your high school student as a jockey/horse scenario but not being sure if he's the horse and you're the jockey, or vice-versa.
  • Placing bets on the three-legged toddler races.
  • Taking bets on high school track events being illegal, so that's why a Silicon Valley startup has to do it.
  • Cleverly tying your collective bragging to the holiday season.
  • Writing a book about the Frog Fractions 2 ARG and hiding it inside of another book.
  • Making a GameFAQs-style guide to document how the game works while it's still in your head.
  • Your Skype work partner probably not looking at the screen, but maybe they are, maybe they know you're not working.
  • Teaching people to read by having them read to dogs because dogs are uncritical and just love the attention.
  • Skyping with a dog all day to motivate you to write your book.
  • Having a friend come onto the show and do a dog voice because real dogs pick terrible topics.
  • GameFAQs turning out to actually have standards.
  • GameFAQs rejecting your submission with the rejection note just saying "Boxing."
  • GameFAQs rejecting your submission with a subtle joke about the previous game in the series.
  • Actual FAQs being pretty rare on GameFAQs.
  • Writing an angry letter to the New York Times about your walkthrough being rejected from GameFAQs.
  • Programming languages that are deliberately constructed to be difficult to think about and work in.
  • The Museum of Artifacts From Collapsed Timelines.
  • Leaving your release date in the hands of the players and players deciding you should release on Christmas.
  • Letting ARG audience members take over your ARG design because you're busy making an executable.
  • Wanting something to be a commercial success and so hiding it as well as possible.
  • Reneging on your vow of obscurity at the last second and raking in the dough.
  • Not being able to put your game on sale because it would violate truth in advertising laws around the world.
  • Pricing your game high because games should cost money -- but that also meaning people have to pay that money.
  • Trying to convince the IRS that they've already deposited the check for the amount they're sending you a due notice for.
  • Enabling your bank teller to feel like a private investigator.
  • Adding quest flavor text when you ask things of retail workers so they feel like they'll get XP by helping you.
  • Asking the restaurant pianist to play Happy Birthday in a minor key and the pianist just being grateful that you didn't ask him to play Billy Joel's "Piano Man" for the fortieth time today.
  • Hearing somebody playing Gershwin in the next practice room over and playing Gershwin with them and them fleeing because the conservatory is haunted.
  • Asking the librarian to research paranormal activity on your property.
  • Tracking down the records of everyone who died in a house but entirely ignoring the fractals that may have died in the house.
  • Not accepting that although some things are known, you'll never know how they're known.
  • Realizing that economics and economists are dreadful.
  • Luminary physicists all having killed themselves because nobody took their theories seriously in their lifetimes.
  • Hiding behind freelance work because you're terrified try to to follow up your accidental success.
  • Not knowing what you're going to make, but definitely knowing how to sell it.
  • Bacteria just hanging out and waiting for you to succumb.
  • The bacteria in your jaw being the true legacy of your life's work.
  • Taking until your mid-30s to figure out how to work on purpose and not just when you're excited about something.
  • Sleeping when you want to sleep and getting up after you're not tired anymore.
  • Meeting a wife and coming to a sleep schedule compromise.
  • Having more dictionaries than you've ever had in your life.
  • Thinking your traditional holiday foods are weird until you hear about the other guy's holiday foods.
  • Pagan traditions intersecting with Christmas in ways that lead to incredibly weird food.
  • Thinking of whales as fish because you're allowed to eat them on Christmas Eve.
  • The food you like being impossible to find in a store or restaurant because it's horrifying.
  • A beet salad made with sour cream and beans and vinegar and peas and carrots and onions and a huge amount of pickles and nobody wanting to try it because it's the color of Pepto Bismol.
  • Eating poppy seed soup and failing every drug test for the rest of your life.
  • A puce soy milk served cold.
  • Skimming off the thick layer of poppy seed fat so your soup won't poison people.
  • Tiny dumplings representing food for the dead, because the dead don't need to eat a lot.
  • Pirate Santa, Santa's evil brother who likes puzzles and hiding presents.
  • Pirate Santa running the Christmas Puzzle Hunt to find all the ingredients for the Christmas appetizer log sandwich.
  • A Yule Sandwich Log, made from hard-boiled eggs, crumbled bacon, bread, avocado, pineapple, pimento cheese, shrimp, chili sauce, cranberry sauce, deviled ham, peanut butter and a dill pickle, all dipped in cream cheese and decorated with canned pears and maraschino cherries.
  • A combination of savory, sweet and salty that is pleasing even if you've read the recipe.
  • A garden gnome except it's a duck.
  • Decorating a duck for holidays rather than a tree.
  • Two ninja turtle doves.
  • Being disappointed with depictions of columnar cacti in popular media.
  • Being disappointed with depictions of Atari 2600 games in popular media.
  • Being subpoenaed to the Supreme Court to testify about whether an Atari 2600 video capture is a forgery.
  • Star Trek either being filmed in California, or every planet in the universe having a mediterranean-style biome.
  • Plants on Earth being way weirder than alien plants depicted in sci-fi.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • People who celebrate Christmas on January 6th.
  • Addressing the least-served Christmas demographic.
  • Muting your mutuals because it turns out you have no common interests.
  • Not being sure if the Frog Fractions 2 Soundtrack liner notes exist any more.
  • Your three year old opening all the Advent Calendar doors and hiding the chocolates in his Halloween bag.
  • Your three year old pushing chairs from the kitchen to climb on top of the refrigerator because that's where you keep the cookies.
  • Developing problem-solving skills long before you develop a sense of ethics or self-preservation.
  • Your two year old deciding it's time to be a cool pirate and picking the biggest sword possible out of the kitchen knives.
  • Taking comfort in only half of prehistoric children dying before the age of five, so with modern medicine and safety advances your child has a pretty decent shot.
  • Half of all children dying before the age of five so they never amass the numbers needed to overthrow the adults.
  • Your one year old overcoming the child safety lock by ripping the entire door off.
  • Half your age plus seven being your personal cutoff for when someone stops being a child.
  • 18 year olds being allowed to vote and drive and get married.
  • Teenagers having infinite energy to learn and get things done, but no judgement for what are good things to learn or do.
  • Describing your relationship with your high school student as a jockey/horse scenario but not being sure if he's the horse and you're the jockey, or vice-versa.
  • Placing bets on the three-legged toddler races.
  • Taking bets on high school track events being illegal, so that's why a Silicon Valley startup has to do it.
  • Cleverly tying your collective bragging to the holiday season.
  • Writing a book about the Frog Fractions 2 ARG and hiding it inside of another book.
  • Making a GameFAQs-style guide to document how the game works while it's still in your head.
  • Your Skype work partner probably not looking at the screen, but maybe they are, maybe they know you're not working.
  • Teaching people to read by having them read to dogs because dogs are uncritical and just love the attention.
  • Skyping with a dog all day to motivate you to write your book.
  • Having a friend come onto the show and do a dog voice because real dogs pick terrible topics.
  • GameFAQs turning out to actually have standards.
  • GameFAQs rejecting your submission with the rejection note just saying "Boxing."
  • GameFAQs rejecting your submission with a subtle joke about the previous game in the series.
  • Actual FAQs being pretty rare on GameFAQs.
  • Writing an angry letter to the New York Times about your walkthrough being rejected from GameFAQs.
  • Programming languages that are deliberately constructed to be difficult to think about and work in.
  • The Museum of Artifacts From Collapsed Timelines.
  • Leaving your release date in the hands of the players and players deciding you should release on Christmas.
  • Letting ARG audience members take over your ARG design because you're busy making an executable.
  • Wanting something to be a commercial success and so hiding it as well as possible.
  • Reneging on your vow of obscurity at the last second and raking in the dough.
  • Not being able to put your game on sale because it would violate truth in advertising laws around the world.
  • Pricing your game high because games should cost money -- but that also meaning people have to pay that money.
  • Trying to convince the IRS that they've already deposited the check for the amount they're sending you a due notice for.
  • Enabling your bank teller to feel like a private investigator.
  • Adding quest flavor text when you ask things of retail workers so they feel like they'll get XP by helping you.
  • Asking the restaurant pianist to play Happy Birthday in a minor key and the pianist just being grateful that you didn't ask him to play Billy Joel's "Piano Man" for the fortieth time today.
  • Hearing somebody playing Gershwin in the next practice room over and playing Gershwin with them and them fleeing because the conservatory is haunted.
  • Asking the librarian to research paranormal activity on your property.
  • Tracking down the records of everyone who died in a house but entirely ignoring the fractals that may have died in the house.
  • Not accepting that although some things are known, you'll never know how they're known.
  • Realizing that economics and economists are dreadful.
  • Luminary physicists all having killed themselves because nobody took their theories seriously in their lifetimes.
  • Hiding behind freelance work because you're terrified try to to follow up your accidental success.
  • Not knowing what you're going to make, but definitely knowing how to sell it.
  • Bacteria just hanging out and waiting for you to succumb.
  • The bacteria in your jaw being the true legacy of your life's work.
  • Taking until your mid-30s to figure out how to work on purpose and not just when you're excited about something.
  • Sleeping when you want to sleep and getting up after you're not tired anymore.
  • Meeting a wife and coming to a sleep schedule compromise.
  • Having more dictionaries than you've ever had in your life.
  • Thinking your traditional holiday foods are weird until you hear about the other guy's holiday foods.
  • Pagan traditions intersecting with Christmas in ways that lead to incredibly weird food.
  • Thinking of whales as fish because you're allowed to eat them on Christmas Eve.
  • The food you like being impossible to find in a store or restaurant because it's horrifying.
  • A beet salad made with sour cream and beans and vinegar and peas and carrots and onions and a huge amount of pickles and nobody wanting to try it because it's the color of Pepto Bismol.
  • Eating poppy seed soup and failing every drug test for the rest of your life.
  • A puce soy milk served cold.
  • Skimming off the thick layer of poppy seed fat so your soup won't poison people.
  • Tiny dumplings representing food for the dead, because the dead don't need to eat a lot.
  • Pirate Santa, Santa's evil brother who likes puzzles and hiding presents.
  • Pirate Santa running the Christmas Puzzle Hunt to find all the ingredients for the Christmas appetizer log sandwich.
  • A Yule Sandwich Log, made from hard-boiled eggs, crumbled bacon, bread, avocado, pineapple, pimento cheese, shrimp, chili sauce, cranberry sauce, deviled ham, peanut butter and a dill pickle, all dipped in cream cheese and decorated with canned pears and maraschino cherries.
  • A combination of savory, sweet and salty that is pleasing even if you've read the recipe.
  • A garden gnome except it's a duck.
  • Decorating a duck for holidays rather than a tree.
  • Two ninja turtle doves.
  • Being disappointed with depictions of columnar cacti in popular media.
  • Being disappointed with depictions of Atari 2600 games in popular media.
  • Being subpoenaed to the Supreme Court to testify about whether an Atari 2600 video capture is a forgery.
  • Star Trek either being filmed in California, or every planet in the universe having a mediterranean-style biome.
  • Plants on Earth being way weirder than alien plants depicted in sci-fi.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • People who celebrate Christmas on January 6th.
  • Addressing the least-served Christmas demographic.
  • Muting your mutuals because it turns out you have no common interests.
  • Not being sure if the Frog Fractions 2 Soundtrack liner notes exist any more.
  • Your three year old opening all the Advent Calendar doors and hiding the chocolates in his Halloween bag.
  • Your three year old pushing chairs from the kitchen to climb on top of the refrigerator because that's where you keep the cookies.
  • Developing problem-solving skills long before you develop a sense of ethics or self-preservation.
  • Your two year old deciding it's time to be a cool pirate and picking the biggest sword possible out of the kitchen knives.
  • Taking comfort in only half of prehistoric children dying before the age of five, so with modern medicine and safety advances your child has a pretty decent shot.
  • Half of all children dying before the age of five so they never amass the numbers needed to overthrow the adults.
  • Your one year old overcoming the child safety lock by ripping the entire door off.
  • Half your age plus seven being your personal cutoff for when someone stops being a child.
  • 18 year olds being allowed to vote and drive and get married.
  • Teenagers having infinite energy to learn and get things done, but no judgement for what are good things to learn or do.
  • Describing your relationship with your high school student as a jockey/horse scenario but not being sure if he's the horse and you're the jockey, or vice-versa.
  • Placing bets on the three-legged toddler races.
  • Taking bets on high school track events being illegal, so that's why a Silicon Valley startup has to do it.
  • Cleverly tying your collective bragging to the holiday season.
  • Writing a book about the Frog Fractions 2 ARG and hiding it inside of another book.
  • Making a GameFAQs-style guide to document how the game works while it's still in your head.
  • Your Skype work partner probably not looking at the screen, but maybe they are, maybe they know you're not working.
  • Teaching people to read by having them read to dogs because dogs are uncritical and just love the attention.
  • Skyping with a dog all day to motivate you to write your book.
  • Having a friend come onto the show and do a dog voice because real dogs pick terrible topics.
  • GameFAQs turning out to actually have standards.
  • GameFAQs rejecting your submission with the rejection note just saying "Boxing."
  • GameFAQs rejecting your submission with a subtle joke about the previous game in the series.
  • Actual FAQs being pretty rare on GameFAQs.
  • Writing an angry letter to the New York Times about your walkthrough being rejected from GameFAQs.
  • Programming languages that are deliberately constructed to be difficult to think about and work in.
  • The Museum of Artifacts From Collapsed Timelines.
  • Leaving your release date in the hands of the players and players deciding you should release on Christmas.
  • Letting ARG audience members take over your ARG design because you're busy making an executable.
  • Wanting something to be a commercial success and so hiding it as well as possible.
  • Reneging on your vow of obscurity at the last second and raking in the dough.
  • Not being able to put your game on sale because it would violate truth in advertising laws around the world.
  • Pricing your game high because games should cost money -- but that also meaning people have to pay that money.
  • Trying to convince the IRS that they've already deposited the check for the amount they're sending you a due notice for.
  • Enabling your bank teller to feel like a private investigator.
  • Adding quest flavor text when you ask things of retail workers so they feel like they'll get XP by helping you.
  • Asking the restaurant pianist to play Happy Birthday in a minor key and the pianist just being grateful that you didn't ask him to play Billy Joel's "Piano Man" for the fortieth time today.
  • Hearing somebody playing Gershwin in the next practice room over and playing Gershwin with them and them fleeing because the conservatory is haunted.
  • Asking the librarian to research paranormal activity on your property.
  • Tracking down the records of everyone who died in a house but entirely ignoring the fractals that may have died in the house.
  • Not accepting that although some things are known, you'll never know how they're known.
  • Realizing that economics and economists are dreadful.
  • Luminary physicists all having killed themselves because nobody took their theories seriously in their lifetimes.
  • Hiding behind freelance work because you're terrified try to to follow up your accidental success.
  • Not knowing what you're going to make, but definitely knowing how to sell it.
  • Bacteria just hanging out and waiting for you to succumb.
  • The bacteria in your jaw being the true legacy of your life's work.
  • Taking until your mid-30s to figure out how to work on purpose and not just when you're excited about something.
  • Sleeping when you want to sleep and getting up after you're not tired anymore.
  • Meeting a wife and coming to a sleep schedule compromise.
  • Having more dictionaries than you've ever had in your life.
  • Thinking your traditional holiday foods are weird until you hear about the other guy's holiday foods.
  • Pagan traditions intersecting with Christmas in ways that lead to incredibly weird food.
  • Thinking of whales as fish because you're allowed to eat them on Christmas Eve.
  • The food you like being impossible to find in a store or restaurant because it's horrifying.
  • A beet salad made with sour cream and beans and vinegar and peas and carrots and onions and a huge amount of pickles and nobody wanting to try it because it's the color of Pepto Bismol.
  • Eating poppy seed soup and failing every drug test for the rest of your life.
  • A puce soy milk served cold.
  • Skimming off the thick layer of poppy seed fat so your soup won't poison people.
  • Tiny dumplings representing food for the dead, because the dead don't need to eat a lot.
  • Pirate Santa, Santa's evil brother who likes puzzles and hiding presents.
  • Pirate Santa running the Christmas Puzzle Hunt to find all the ingredients for the Christmas appetizer log sandwich.
  • A Yule Sandwich Log, made from hard-boiled eggs, crumbled bacon, bread, avocado, pineapple, pimento cheese, shrimp, chili sauce, cranberry sauce, deviled ham, peanut butter and a dill pickle, all dipped in cream cheese and decorated with canned pears and maraschino cherries.
  • A combination of savory, sweet and salty that is pleasing even if you've read the recipe.
  • A garden gnome except it's a duck.
  • Decorating a duck for holidays rather than a tree.
  • Two ninja turtle doves.
  • Being disappointed with depictions of columnar cacti in popular media.
  • Being disappointed with depictions of Atari 2600 games in popular media.
  • Being subpoenaed to the Supreme Court to testify about whether an Atari 2600 video capture is a forgery.
  • Star Trek either being filmed in California, or every planet in the universe having a mediterranean-style biome.
  • Plants on Earth being way weirder than alien plants depicted in sci-fi.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+9sXKCRBG ]]> Jim Stormdancer 9. Ask the Propagated Cactus https://topiclords.com/ask-the-propagated-cactus d424072b-92ff-4da4-a802-7719b6e7e156 Mon, 23 Dec 2019 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: Alex and Shannon. We discuss growing new people from cuttings, seeing images in your head, fruit cocktail and manufactured scarcity, the most famous meal of the day, the best smoothie ingredients, participating in religious ceremonies when you have no idea what you're doing, and shower curtain ideas. 1:02:57 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Shannon is a time traveler and an unemployed attorney.
  • Alex likes oranges and drove the getaway car.

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Not liking oranges because of orange soda and orange-flavored carsickness pills.
  • Recognizing guest lords from the time they were a time traveler and drove the getaway car.
  • Growing an entire additional self out of your self if you lose a limb.
  • Instead of everybody being related to Genghis Khan, everybody actually being Genghis Khan.
  • The tooth fairy growing clones of you from your teeth.
  • Each of your tooth clones also losing teeth.
  • Becoming a shark mom because you escaped a shark attack.
  • Barbershops installing incinerators so your hairs don't each grow into a full human.
  • A homunculus made of fingers growing out of your finger stump.
  • Every animal starting with the butt because the butt is the most important part of any organism.
  • A new self growing out of your severed finger but also a second self growing out of your finger stump.
  • Technical workers being worse at envisioning objects or scenes.
  • Imagining an elephant standing on one foot, wearing a beret, and singing Gizmo's song.
  • A cartoon elephant standing on its back right leg, on a ball, wobbling to keep its balance, in the savannah, wearing a human-size black beret at the edge of one of its ears, its trunk lifted up, mouth open, the uvula shaking, singing Figaro's Aria.
  • Thinking of a red cube on a white background.
  • Imagining Harry Potter turning left at a corner and then the book says he goes right and your mind movie having to backtrack.
  • An elephant's mouth probably having some teeth in it.
  • Knowing what a trumpet sounds like in the same way you might know what cinnamon tastes like.
  • Screwing yourself in a learning process because your teacher doesn't realize how good you are at faking it.
  • Reinventing the abacus with your body parts.
  • Turning the slot machine into a foodstuff.
  • "Oops, All Cherries" fruit cocktail.
  • Fruit cocktail manufacturers A/B testing cherry ratios.
  • Liking maraschino cherries because they're delicious.
  • Hating maraschino cherries because you hate almonds.
  • Maraschino cherries being flavored with almond extract because cherry pits are toxic.
  • Solving the murder and it was almond extract all along.
  • Star inflation in Guitar Hero.
  • Getting 40 stars being way better than your piddly 5 stars.
  • Not being able to release this episode because the information in it is too dangerous.
  • Big Breakfast inventing breakfast to sell more breakfast.
  • Being confused when someone eats lunch for dinner.
  • Breakfast looming so large in our minds because what counts a breakfast food is so heavily policed.
  • Drinking a smoothie and being like "what would be the ultimate smoothie?"
  • Saving your smoothie for last because it'll be the best one.
  • Refusing to put fruit juice in your fruit smoothie.
  • The tipping point at which your smoothie stops being a smoothie and stops being a sorbet.
  • Taking any cuisine and reimagining the fast food industry around it.
  • The manifold advantages of hamburgers.
  • Making chicken tikka masala portable by putting it in a samosa.
  • Making chicken tikka masala portable by running it through a food processor with naan and drinking it through a boba straw.
  • Mainlining chicken tikka masala through a one-inch boba straw.
  • Participating in religious ceremonies while not believing in them or knowing how they work.
  • Using a small child as an excuse to go to every church.
  • Trying to use a small dog as an excuse to go to every church but the churches not being super into dogs.
  • Using a small child as an excuse to do things you'd otherwise be too lazy to do.
  • Not knowing how to take communion and the guy with the piece of bread just shaking his head sadly at you.
  • Kneeling perfectly still for two hours in a Shinto ceremony and then suddenly having to get up and come forward and falling into the person behind you because your legs had fallen asleep.
  • Americans not really knowing how to squat either.
  • Hanukkah being always the same day on the Jewish calendar but being a roving day on the Gregorian calendar.
  • Not having any particular bad experiences with organized religion but thinking it's more trouble than it's worth.
  • Secular churches for atheists who miss the community of church.
  • Americans becoming atheist and eventually having to figure out how to get back what they lost when they abandoned religion.
  • The nuclear family only having been invented after World War 2.
  • Looking fondly on living in a dorm because you were living with a bunch of friends.
  • Living with a bunch of friends and everybody looking at you funny even though that's how humanity lived for most of its existence.
  • Avoiding groups because you're frustrated by group-think.
  • Accepting that a little bit of group-think isn't the end of the world.
  • Having a good one-on-one relationship with your wife and then ruining it by adding a kid.
  • Feeling like a boomer because you don't understand how your friends use emojis.
  • Adding a meta chat room where you try to figure out what the regular chat room is trying to say.
  • The chick hatching out of an egg emoji meaning "oh that's cute" but the deer emoji meaning "oh dear that's concerning" and the hatching chick with antlers emoji meaning "that's cute but also concerning."
  • The compromise between efficiency of communication and the difficulty of learning your new language.
  • Making your shower curtain out of chainmail.
  • A shower curtain with an image of what is exactly behind the shower curtain.
  • Having a clear shower curtain so you can see if there's a murderer in the shower without opening the curtain.
  • A clear shower curtain with a tuxedo body on it so you can take selfies that look like you wear a tux in the shower.
  • A motorized showing curtain with all the books you don't have time to read printed on them.
  • Not being able to wash your hair because you have to keep reading.
  • Allowing your guest lord to be a topic lady.
  • Not remembering the catchphrase.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Shannon is a time traveler and an unemployed attorney.
  • Alex likes oranges and drove the getaway car.

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Not liking oranges because of orange soda and orange-flavored carsickness pills.
  • Recognizing guest lords from the time they were a time traveler and drove the getaway car.
  • Growing an entire additional self out of your self if you lose a limb.
  • Instead of everybody being related to Genghis Khan, everybody actually being Genghis Khan.
  • The tooth fairy growing clones of you from your teeth.
  • Each of your tooth clones also losing teeth.
  • Becoming a shark mom because you escaped a shark attack.
  • Barbershops installing incinerators so your hairs don't each grow into a full human.
  • A homunculus made of fingers growing out of your finger stump.
  • Every animal starting with the butt because the butt is the most important part of any organism.
  • A new self growing out of your severed finger but also a second self growing out of your finger stump.
  • Technical workers being worse at envisioning objects or scenes.
  • Imagining an elephant standing on one foot, wearing a beret, and singing Gizmo's song.
  • A cartoon elephant standing on its back right leg, on a ball, wobbling to keep its balance, in the savannah, wearing a human-size black beret at the edge of one of its ears, its trunk lifted up, mouth open, the uvula shaking, singing Figaro's Aria.
  • Thinking of a red cube on a white background.
  • Imagining Harry Potter turning left at a corner and then the book says he goes right and your mind movie having to backtrack.
  • An elephant's mouth probably having some teeth in it.
  • Knowing what a trumpet sounds like in the same way you might know what cinnamon tastes like.
  • Screwing yourself in a learning process because your teacher doesn't realize how good you are at faking it.
  • Reinventing the abacus with your body parts.
  • Turning the slot machine into a foodstuff.
  • "Oops, All Cherries" fruit cocktail.
  • Fruit cocktail manufacturers A/B testing cherry ratios.
  • Liking maraschino cherries because they're delicious.
  • Hating maraschino cherries because you hate almonds.
  • Maraschino cherries being flavored with almond extract because cherry pits are toxic.
  • Solving the murder and it was almond extract all along.
  • Star inflation in Guitar Hero.
  • Getting 40 stars being way better than your piddly 5 stars.
  • Not being able to release this episode because the information in it is too dangerous.
  • Big Breakfast inventing breakfast to sell more breakfast.
  • Being confused when someone eats lunch for dinner.
  • Breakfast looming so large in our minds because what counts a breakfast food is so heavily policed.
  • Drinking a smoothie and being like "what would be the ultimate smoothie?"
  • Saving your smoothie for last because it'll be the best one.
  • Refusing to put fruit juice in your fruit smoothie.
  • The tipping point at which your smoothie stops being a smoothie and stops being a sorbet.
  • Taking any cuisine and reimagining the fast food industry around it.
  • The manifold advantages of hamburgers.
  • Making chicken tikka masala portable by putting it in a samosa.
  • Making chicken tikka masala portable by running it through a food processor with naan and drinking it through a boba straw.
  • Mainlining chicken tikka masala through a one-inch boba straw.
  • Participating in religious ceremonies while not believing in them or knowing how they work.
  • Using a small child as an excuse to go to every church.
  • Trying to use a small dog as an excuse to go to every church but the churches not being super into dogs.
  • Using a small child as an excuse to do things you'd otherwise be too lazy to do.
  • Not knowing how to take communion and the guy with the piece of bread just shaking his head sadly at you.
  • Kneeling perfectly still for two hours in a Shinto ceremony and then suddenly having to get up and come forward and falling into the person behind you because your legs had fallen asleep.
  • Americans not really knowing how to squat either.
  • Hanukkah being always the same day on the Jewish calendar but being a roving day on the Gregorian calendar.
  • Not having any particular bad experiences with organized religion but thinking it's more trouble than it's worth.
  • Secular churches for atheists who miss the community of church.
  • Americans becoming atheist and eventually having to figure out how to get back what they lost when they abandoned religion.
  • The nuclear family only having been invented after World War 2.
  • Looking fondly on living in a dorm because you were living with a bunch of friends.
  • Living with a bunch of friends and everybody looking at you funny even though that's how humanity lived for most of its existence.
  • Avoiding groups because you're frustrated by group-think.
  • Accepting that a little bit of group-think isn't the end of the world.
  • Having a good one-on-one relationship with your wife and then ruining it by adding a kid.
  • Feeling like a boomer because you don't understand how your friends use emojis.
  • Adding a meta chat room where you try to figure out what the regular chat room is trying to say.
  • The chick hatching out of an egg emoji meaning "oh that's cute" but the deer emoji meaning "oh dear that's concerning" and the hatching chick with antlers emoji meaning "that's cute but also concerning."
  • The compromise between efficiency of communication and the difficulty of learning your new language.
  • Making your shower curtain out of chainmail.
  • A shower curtain with an image of what is exactly behind the shower curtain.
  • Having a clear shower curtain so you can see if there's a murderer in the shower without opening the curtain.
  • A clear shower curtain with a tuxedo body on it so you can take selfies that look like you wear a tux in the shower.
  • A motorized showing curtain with all the books you don't have time to read printed on them.
  • Not being able to wash your hair because you have to keep reading.
  • Allowing your guest lord to be a topic lady.
  • Not remembering the catchphrase.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Shannon is a time traveler and an unemployed attorney.
  • Alex likes oranges and drove the getaway car.

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Not liking oranges because of orange soda and orange-flavored carsickness pills.
  • Recognizing guest lords from the time they were a time traveler and drove the getaway car.
  • Growing an entire additional self out of your self if you lose a limb.
  • Instead of everybody being related to Genghis Khan, everybody actually being Genghis Khan.
  • The tooth fairy growing clones of you from your teeth.
  • Each of your tooth clones also losing teeth.
  • Becoming a shark mom because you escaped a shark attack.
  • Barbershops installing incinerators so your hairs don't each grow into a full human.
  • A homunculus made of fingers growing out of your finger stump.
  • Every animal starting with the butt because the butt is the most important part of any organism.
  • A new self growing out of your severed finger but also a second self growing out of your finger stump.
  • Technical workers being worse at envisioning objects or scenes.
  • Imagining an elephant standing on one foot, wearing a beret, and singing Gizmo's song.
  • A cartoon elephant standing on its back right leg, on a ball, wobbling to keep its balance, in the savannah, wearing a human-size black beret at the edge of one of its ears, its trunk lifted up, mouth open, the uvula shaking, singing Figaro's Aria.
  • Thinking of a red cube on a white background.
  • Imagining Harry Potter turning left at a corner and then the book says he goes right and your mind movie having to backtrack.
  • An elephant's mouth probably having some teeth in it.
  • Knowing what a trumpet sounds like in the same way you might know what cinnamon tastes like.
  • Screwing yourself in a learning process because your teacher doesn't realize how good you are at faking it.
  • Reinventing the abacus with your body parts.
  • Turning the slot machine into a foodstuff.
  • "Oops, All Cherries" fruit cocktail.
  • Fruit cocktail manufacturers A/B testing cherry ratios.
  • Liking maraschino cherries because they're delicious.
  • Hating maraschino cherries because you hate almonds.
  • Maraschino cherries being flavored with almond extract because cherry pits are toxic.
  • Solving the murder and it was almond extract all along.
  • Star inflation in Guitar Hero.
  • Getting 40 stars being way better than your piddly 5 stars.
  • Not being able to release this episode because the information in it is too dangerous.
  • Big Breakfast inventing breakfast to sell more breakfast.
  • Being confused when someone eats lunch for dinner.
  • Breakfast looming so large in our minds because what counts a breakfast food is so heavily policed.
  • Drinking a smoothie and being like "what would be the ultimate smoothie?"
  • Saving your smoothie for last because it'll be the best one.
  • Refusing to put fruit juice in your fruit smoothie.
  • The tipping point at which your smoothie stops being a smoothie and stops being a sorbet.
  • Taking any cuisine and reimagining the fast food industry around it.
  • The manifold advantages of hamburgers.
  • Making chicken tikka masala portable by putting it in a samosa.
  • Making chicken tikka masala portable by running it through a food processor with naan and drinking it through a boba straw.
  • Mainlining chicken tikka masala through a one-inch boba straw.
  • Participating in religious ceremonies while not believing in them or knowing how they work.
  • Using a small child as an excuse to go to every church.
  • Trying to use a small dog as an excuse to go to every church but the churches not being super into dogs.
  • Using a small child as an excuse to do things you'd otherwise be too lazy to do.
  • Not knowing how to take communion and the guy with the piece of bread just shaking his head sadly at you.
  • Kneeling perfectly still for two hours in a Shinto ceremony and then suddenly having to get up and come forward and falling into the person behind you because your legs had fallen asleep.
  • Americans not really knowing how to squat either.
  • Hanukkah being always the same day on the Jewish calendar but being a roving day on the Gregorian calendar.
  • Not having any particular bad experiences with organized religion but thinking it's more trouble than it's worth.
  • Secular churches for atheists who miss the community of church.
  • Americans becoming atheist and eventually having to figure out how to get back what they lost when they abandoned religion.
  • The nuclear family only having been invented after World War 2.
  • Looking fondly on living in a dorm because you were living with a bunch of friends.
  • Living with a bunch of friends and everybody looking at you funny even though that's how humanity lived for most of its existence.
  • Avoiding groups because you're frustrated by group-think.
  • Accepting that a little bit of group-think isn't the end of the world.
  • Having a good one-on-one relationship with your wife and then ruining it by adding a kid.
  • Feeling like a boomer because you don't understand how your friends use emojis.
  • Adding a meta chat room where you try to figure out what the regular chat room is trying to say.
  • The chick hatching out of an egg emoji meaning "oh that's cute" but the deer emoji meaning "oh dear that's concerning" and the hatching chick with antlers emoji meaning "that's cute but also concerning."
  • The compromise between efficiency of communication and the difficulty of learning your new language.
  • Making your shower curtain out of chainmail.
  • A shower curtain with an image of what is exactly behind the shower curtain.
  • Having a clear shower curtain so you can see if there's a murderer in the shower without opening the curtain.
  • A clear shower curtain with a tuxedo body on it so you can take selfies that look like you wear a tux in the shower.
  • A motorized showing curtain with all the books you don't have time to read printed on them.
  • Not being able to wash your hair because you have to keep reading.
  • Allowing your guest lord to be a topic lady.
  • Not remembering the catchphrase.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+Agi43KAM ]]> Jim Stormdancer 8. I Hate This Gilded Boat https://topiclords.com/i-hate-this-gilded-boat 1ab828b2-3087-42c2-9029-eb1b4be063d1 Mon, 16 Dec 2019 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: Ryan Ike and Gary Butterfield. We discuss deciding when to quit a show you don't like, what if food screamed when you ate it, fetishizing creative tools, auteur-power fantasies, being useful post-apocalypse, and running in non-athletic settings. 1:06:46 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Ryan Ike is a composer at @RyanIkeComposer. Where The Water Tastes Like Wine is now available on Switch!
  • Gary Butterfield is a podcaster at @GaryBuh (terfieldPodcaster). He will be torturing himself for your entertainment from Dec 20-23. http://duckfeed.tv/duckstream/

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Introducing yourself like a Pokemon.
  • Graduating to being level two e-friends.
  • The Spider-Man channel, the Ice Man channel, and the Firestar channel.
  • Consuming things between now and when you die.
  • Making game as if people have nothing to do but play your game.
  • Being okay with never consuming the art you purchase.
  • Min-maxing your enjoyment you have before you become a pile of inanimate carbon.
  • Checking in on The Ice Man Christmas Spectacular and it's already snowing.
  • Failing to explain the Battle of the Bulge.
  • The intended cadence of using two question marks.
  • Topic Joker's Trick.
  • Associating the sound of screaming with everything tasty.
  • String cheese yelling "string cheese" as you eat it to raise string cheese awareness.
  • Everyone remembering where they were when food started screaming.
  • Deaf people all remembering when they got Subway and learned to hear.
  • David Fincher's Seven 2: Ate.
  • The wailing of the ghosts of Hades echoing through Hamilton Middle School.
  • The screaming and eating minutes.
  • The horrible price of being a Topic Lord.
  • All the layers of your sandwich singing like a barbershop quartet.
  • Humanity learning to photosynthesize.
  • The glucose in an IV drip whispering the time you'll die as it goes into your vein.
  • Mailing your representative to ask them to vote no on the Screaming Food Act.
  • The totemic power of a sampler with 256k of ram.
  • PewDiePie endorsing a particular brand of streaming microphone.
  • Making a cooking knife made out of dinosaur bones.
  • Recording a song with Kurt Cobain's guitar.
  • Recording a song with a guitar made from Kurt Cobain's body.
  • A rock legend being bone-morphed into a Stratocaster.
  • Being totally down with your bones used for something cool.
  • Being a Topic Knave.
  • Being called a genius until it breaks you.
  • Being confused about whether a boat is a fortunate or unfortunate boat.
  • Putting together a team to make the game to match your vanity soundtrack.
  • Making a soundtrack you could paint on the side of a van.
  • Auteur power inevitably turning you into a monster, and choosing to lean into that.
  • Living with the comfort hose pointed at your face.
  • Having no knees and a lot of money.
  • Eating yourself because you are among the 1% most self-actualized.
  • Dancing in a cage for a warlord because nobody needs your chiptune cover of Carry On My Wayward Son after the screaming vegetables cause World War 3.
  • Getting real good at the spoons because pianos are too heavy.
  • Accidentally starting fires with your thick prescription glasses.
  • Murdering every Applebee's employee so you're the best chef in your future village.
  • Being good with children even though you hate them.
  • Terrifying passers-by because you just wanted to get your shopping done faster.
  • Running to catch your yogurt like it's a bus.
  • Onlookers wondering why you're always breaking up with Janine every time they see you.
  • Thinking you're going to get a free sample but instead getting a sales pitch.
  • Talking into a celery stalk to get out of an awkward situation.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Ryan Ike is a composer at @RyanIkeComposer. Where The Water Tastes Like Wine is now available on Switch!
  • Gary Butterfield is a podcaster at @GaryBuh (terfieldPodcaster). He will be torturing himself for your entertainment from Dec 20-23. http://duckfeed.tv/duckstream/

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Introducing yourself like a Pokemon.
  • Graduating to being level two e-friends.
  • The Spider-Man channel, the Ice Man channel, and the Firestar channel.
  • Consuming things between now and when you die.
  • Making game as if people have nothing to do but play your game.
  • Being okay with never consuming the art you purchase.
  • Min-maxing your enjoyment you have before you become a pile of inanimate carbon.
  • Checking in on The Ice Man Christmas Spectacular and it's already snowing.
  • Failing to explain the Battle of the Bulge.
  • The intended cadence of using two question marks.
  • Topic Joker's Trick.
  • Associating the sound of screaming with everything tasty.
  • String cheese yelling "string cheese" as you eat it to raise string cheese awareness.
  • Everyone remembering where they were when food started screaming.
  • Deaf people all remembering when they got Subway and learned to hear.
  • David Fincher's Seven 2: Ate.
  • The wailing of the ghosts of Hades echoing through Hamilton Middle School.
  • The screaming and eating minutes.
  • The horrible price of being a Topic Lord.
  • All the layers of your sandwich singing like a barbershop quartet.
  • Humanity learning to photosynthesize.
  • The glucose in an IV drip whispering the time you'll die as it goes into your vein.
  • Mailing your representative to ask them to vote no on the Screaming Food Act.
  • The totemic power of a sampler with 256k of ram.
  • PewDiePie endorsing a particular brand of streaming microphone.
  • Making a cooking knife made out of dinosaur bones.
  • Recording a song with Kurt Cobain's guitar.
  • Recording a song with a guitar made from Kurt Cobain's body.
  • A rock legend being bone-morphed into a Stratocaster.
  • Being totally down with your bones used for something cool.
  • Being a Topic Knave.
  • Being called a genius until it breaks you.
  • Being confused about whether a boat is a fortunate or unfortunate boat.
  • Putting together a team to make the game to match your vanity soundtrack.
  • Making a soundtrack you could paint on the side of a van.
  • Auteur power inevitably turning you into a monster, and choosing to lean into that.
  • Living with the comfort hose pointed at your face.
  • Having no knees and a lot of money.
  • Eating yourself because you are among the 1% most self-actualized.
  • Dancing in a cage for a warlord because nobody needs your chiptune cover of Carry On My Wayward Son after the screaming vegetables cause World War 3.
  • Getting real good at the spoons because pianos are too heavy.
  • Accidentally starting fires with your thick prescription glasses.
  • Murdering every Applebee's employee so you're the best chef in your future village.
  • Being good with children even though you hate them.
  • Terrifying passers-by because you just wanted to get your shopping done faster.
  • Running to catch your yogurt like it's a bus.
  • Onlookers wondering why you're always breaking up with Janine every time they see you.
  • Thinking you're going to get a free sample but instead getting a sales pitch.
  • Talking into a celery stalk to get out of an awkward situation.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Ryan Ike is a composer at @RyanIkeComposer. Where The Water Tastes Like Wine is now available on Switch!
  • Gary Butterfield is a podcaster at @GaryBuh (terfieldPodcaster). He will be torturing himself for your entertainment from Dec 20-23. http://duckfeed.tv/duckstream/

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Introducing yourself like a Pokemon.
  • Graduating to being level two e-friends.
  • The Spider-Man channel, the Ice Man channel, and the Firestar channel.
  • Consuming things between now and when you die.
  • Making game as if people have nothing to do but play your game.
  • Being okay with never consuming the art you purchase.
  • Min-maxing your enjoyment you have before you become a pile of inanimate carbon.
  • Checking in on The Ice Man Christmas Spectacular and it's already snowing.
  • Failing to explain the Battle of the Bulge.
  • The intended cadence of using two question marks.
  • Topic Joker's Trick.
  • Associating the sound of screaming with everything tasty.
  • String cheese yelling "string cheese" as you eat it to raise string cheese awareness.
  • Everyone remembering where they were when food started screaming.
  • Deaf people all remembering when they got Subway and learned to hear.
  • David Fincher's Seven 2: Ate.
  • The wailing of the ghosts of Hades echoing through Hamilton Middle School.
  • The screaming and eating minutes.
  • The horrible price of being a Topic Lord.
  • All the layers of your sandwich singing like a barbershop quartet.
  • Humanity learning to photosynthesize.
  • The glucose in an IV drip whispering the time you'll die as it goes into your vein.
  • Mailing your representative to ask them to vote no on the Screaming Food Act.
  • The totemic power of a sampler with 256k of ram.
  • PewDiePie endorsing a particular brand of streaming microphone.
  • Making a cooking knife made out of dinosaur bones.
  • Recording a song with Kurt Cobain's guitar.
  • Recording a song with a guitar made from Kurt Cobain's body.
  • A rock legend being bone-morphed into a Stratocaster.
  • Being totally down with your bones used for something cool.
  • Being a Topic Knave.
  • Being called a genius until it breaks you.
  • Being confused about whether a boat is a fortunate or unfortunate boat.
  • Putting together a team to make the game to match your vanity soundtrack.
  • Making a soundtrack you could paint on the side of a van.
  • Auteur power inevitably turning you into a monster, and choosing to lean into that.
  • Living with the comfort hose pointed at your face.
  • Having no knees and a lot of money.
  • Eating yourself because you are among the 1% most self-actualized.
  • Dancing in a cage for a warlord because nobody needs your chiptune cover of Carry On My Wayward Son after the screaming vegetables cause World War 3.
  • Getting real good at the spoons because pianos are too heavy.
  • Accidentally starting fires with your thick prescription glasses.
  • Murdering every Applebee's employee so you're the best chef in your future village.
  • Being good with children even though you hate them.
  • Terrifying passers-by because you just wanted to get your shopping done faster.
  • Running to catch your yogurt like it's a bus.
  • Onlookers wondering why you're always breaking up with Janine every time they see you.
  • Thinking you're going to get a free sample but instead getting a sales pitch.
  • Talking into a celery stalk to get out of an awkward situation.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+kGSE0f_b ]]> Jim Stormdancer 7. I Love a Good Mind Poop https://topiclords.com/i-love-a-good-mind-poop b3c0a149-baef-416c-848f-fc1d8cb468ad Mon, 09 Dec 2019 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: April Stormdancer and Ryan Ike. We discuss inventing secular rituals for children, self-improvement via D&D, the most fun key to jam in, the ramifications of outlawing moss, German robot-hell "Monster Kabinett," and "Dance Monkey," by The Tones and I. 1:06:07 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Taking the beast lord before someone else does.
  • Being the bucket.
  • Being rooted to the ground and going down with the ship.
  • Brains autocorrecting puns out of existence.
  • Vouching for a deer prancing across a beach.
  • Not marrying someone born in the early 2000s.
  • Getting into that bucket.
  • Getting to sing in a room that's made for singing in.
  • A cat wanting to get into the recording studio really bad.
  • A cask of amontillado situation except the cask is the entire world outside the recording studio.
  • Choosing to consciously develop rituals for your son.
  • Throwing all of spirituality out with the bathwater.
  • Going to Hell even though you tried your best.
  • Being a steward of the land.
  • Recoiling from going out in public because social media has drained all your life energy.
  • Calling a dog a good dog when they're just being a dog.
  • Having a quiet reflection about the Solstice in the middle of a labyrinth.
  • Changing your real name because your pseudonym is better.
  • The murder squad rolling out.
  • Giving polygons the business and feeling bad for them.
  • Figuring out how to be a good person even though you're literally a monster.
  • The laws of physics demanding that you torture a goblin.
  • Turning into a grouse and being like "peace out, losers."
  • Creating an even worse relationship dynamic but at least this one isn't racist.
  • Rolling up a CVS middle manager for your D&D one-shot.
  • Working to become blind but always knowing you could work harder.
  • Meeting someone who won't admit that they like fun shapes.
  • Your local goth park ranger with a tattoo covered in flowers.
  • A toilet seat that vibrates at the brown note.
  • Knowing from experience that eventually you run out of poop.
  • Clicking random grids while you think about moss being illegal.
  • Outlawing Kate Moss as an unintentional side-effect of your moss legislation.
  • Being the moss lord.
  • Being the moss beast.
  • Muddling your mimosa because you're ahead of the curve.
  • Not drinking, but knowing so much about it that it'd be dangerous if you did.
  • Moss turning out to be the linchpin to global biological harmony.
  • Taking the time you used to spend itching and spending it reproducing.
  • Everybody being everything.
  • A Delightful Nightmare.
  • Having to wait because Mother is not ready yet.
  • Mother being ready now.
  • Mother turning out to be a free-roaming robotic spider about the size of a smart car.
  • Mother malfunctioning and kicking an aluminum folding chair across the room.
  • Mother vibrating out of the way like a cheap hotel bed.
  • A robot sticking out of the wall with crazy proboscis lips.
  • A robot that knows how to use chopsticks.
  • A flesh robot playing German industrial metal while you try to escape.
  • Mother remembering you and wanting to drink your blood.
  • Guessing sweaters until the beast lord tells you to stop.
  • A tourist attraction with a bunch of signs saying "don't come here"
  • Not wanting to die but on the other hand wanting a cool inscrutable death.
  • Having an animated gif of your cool death on your tombstone.
  • Joanna Newsom doing Aretha Franklin.
  • Not wanting to admit whether you're a doctor.
  • Playing a miniature game of snake in the spreadsheet that only you can perceive.
  • Still not having a catchphrase.
  • Being the beast bucket.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Taking the beast lord before someone else does.
  • Being the bucket.
  • Being rooted to the ground and going down with the ship.
  • Brains autocorrecting puns out of existence.
  • Vouching for a deer prancing across a beach.
  • Not marrying someone born in the early 2000s.
  • Getting into that bucket.
  • Getting to sing in a room that's made for singing in.
  • A cat wanting to get into the recording studio really bad.
  • A cask of amontillado situation except the cask is the entire world outside the recording studio.
  • Choosing to consciously develop rituals for your son.
  • Throwing all of spirituality out with the bathwater.
  • Going to Hell even though you tried your best.
  • Being a steward of the land.
  • Recoiling from going out in public because social media has drained all your life energy.
  • Calling a dog a good dog when they're just being a dog.
  • Having a quiet reflection about the Solstice in the middle of a labyrinth.
  • Changing your real name because your pseudonym is better.
  • The murder squad rolling out.
  • Giving polygons the business and feeling bad for them.
  • Figuring out how to be a good person even though you're literally a monster.
  • The laws of physics demanding that you torture a goblin.
  • Turning into a grouse and being like "peace out, losers."
  • Creating an even worse relationship dynamic but at least this one isn't racist.
  • Rolling up a CVS middle manager for your D&D one-shot.
  • Working to become blind but always knowing you could work harder.
  • Meeting someone who won't admit that they like fun shapes.
  • Your local goth park ranger with a tattoo covered in flowers.
  • A toilet seat that vibrates at the brown note.
  • Knowing from experience that eventually you run out of poop.
  • Clicking random grids while you think about moss being illegal.
  • Outlawing Kate Moss as an unintentional side-effect of your moss legislation.
  • Being the moss lord.
  • Being the moss beast.
  • Muddling your mimosa because you're ahead of the curve.
  • Not drinking, but knowing so much about it that it'd be dangerous if you did.
  • Moss turning out to be the linchpin to global biological harmony.
  • Taking the time you used to spend itching and spending it reproducing.
  • Everybody being everything.
  • A Delightful Nightmare.
  • Having to wait because Mother is not ready yet.
  • Mother being ready now.
  • Mother turning out to be a free-roaming robotic spider about the size of a smart car.
  • Mother malfunctioning and kicking an aluminum folding chair across the room.
  • Mother vibrating out of the way like a cheap hotel bed.
  • A robot sticking out of the wall with crazy proboscis lips.
  • A robot that knows how to use chopsticks.
  • A flesh robot playing German industrial metal while you try to escape.
  • Mother remembering you and wanting to drink your blood.
  • Guessing sweaters until the beast lord tells you to stop.
  • A tourist attraction with a bunch of signs saying "don't come here"
  • Not wanting to die but on the other hand wanting a cool inscrutable death.
  • Having an animated gif of your cool death on your tombstone.
  • Joanna Newsom doing Aretha Franklin.
  • Not wanting to admit whether you're a doctor.
  • Playing a miniature game of snake in the spreadsheet that only you can perceive.
  • Still not having a catchphrase.
  • Being the beast bucket.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Taking the beast lord before someone else does.
  • Being the bucket.
  • Being rooted to the ground and going down with the ship.
  • Brains autocorrecting puns out of existence.
  • Vouching for a deer prancing across a beach.
  • Not marrying someone born in the early 2000s.
  • Getting into that bucket.
  • Getting to sing in a room that's made for singing in.
  • A cat wanting to get into the recording studio really bad.
  • A cask of amontillado situation except the cask is the entire world outside the recording studio.
  • Choosing to consciously develop rituals for your son.
  • Throwing all of spirituality out with the bathwater.
  • Going to Hell even though you tried your best.
  • Being a steward of the land.
  • Recoiling from going out in public because social media has drained all your life energy.
  • Calling a dog a good dog when they're just being a dog.
  • Having a quiet reflection about the Solstice in the middle of a labyrinth.
  • Changing your real name because your pseudonym is better.
  • The murder squad rolling out.
  • Giving polygons the business and feeling bad for them.
  • Figuring out how to be a good person even though you're literally a monster.
  • The laws of physics demanding that you torture a goblin.
  • Turning into a grouse and being like "peace out, losers."
  • Creating an even worse relationship dynamic but at least this one isn't racist.
  • Rolling up a CVS middle manager for your D&D one-shot.
  • Working to become blind but always knowing you could work harder.
  • Meeting someone who won't admit that they like fun shapes.
  • Your local goth park ranger with a tattoo covered in flowers.
  • A toilet seat that vibrates at the brown note.
  • Knowing from experience that eventually you run out of poop.
  • Clicking random grids while you think about moss being illegal.
  • Outlawing Kate Moss as an unintentional side-effect of your moss legislation.
  • Being the moss lord.
  • Being the moss beast.
  • Muddling your mimosa because you're ahead of the curve.
  • Not drinking, but knowing so much about it that it'd be dangerous if you did.
  • Moss turning out to be the linchpin to global biological harmony.
  • Taking the time you used to spend itching and spending it reproducing.
  • Everybody being everything.
  • A Delightful Nightmare.
  • Having to wait because Mother is not ready yet.
  • Mother being ready now.
  • Mother turning out to be a free-roaming robotic spider about the size of a smart car.
  • Mother malfunctioning and kicking an aluminum folding chair across the room.
  • Mother vibrating out of the way like a cheap hotel bed.
  • A robot sticking out of the wall with crazy proboscis lips.
  • A robot that knows how to use chopsticks.
  • A flesh robot playing German industrial metal while you try to escape.
  • Mother remembering you and wanting to drink your blood.
  • Guessing sweaters until the beast lord tells you to stop.
  • A tourist attraction with a bunch of signs saying "don't come here"
  • Not wanting to die but on the other hand wanting a cool inscrutable death.
  • Having an animated gif of your cool death on your tombstone.
  • Joanna Newsom doing Aretha Franklin.
  • Not wanting to admit whether you're a doctor.
  • Playing a miniature game of snake in the spreadsheet that only you can perceive.
  • Still not having a catchphrase.
  • Being the beast bucket.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+TezFiUxm ]]> Jim Stormdancer 6. hotcoldman@hotcoldmail.com https://topiclords.com/hot-coldman-at-hot-coldmail-dot-com 2aec344d-ea36-4e34-acb4-37f8c9ea9f51 Mon, 02 Dec 2019 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: Jenni and Chris. Topics discussed: other cultures' produce, the secret origin of the warp pipe, Jim's kid, Unreal Engine 0 a.k.a. ZZT, how creative work looks exactly like being a layabout, revenge food, and the "only" comma. 1:07:13 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords this week:

Topics discussed:

Microtopics:

  • False promises about updating a podcast in-place.
  • Finding a creepy lemon hand in the Safeway lying there like a monkey's paw.
  • Finding citrus fruit in the toilet.
  • Finding talking fruit in the toilet.
  • Whether the toilet is a dish or a soup.
  • Accidentally paying $11 for cashew milk.
  • Asking the cashier to remove a weird squash.
  • Distracting the cashier with pictures of missing nuts.
  • The nut abduction clinic.
  • A grape that you have to peel like a shrimp.
  • A grape that is constantly pooping itself.
  • Writing grants for prawn farmers.
  • Draining the entire pond to grab all the prawns.
  • Sound re-use in Super Mario Bros.
  • Tropes that are boring in Japan but still interesting in other cultures.
  • King of the Hill being a relatable honor story about a salaryman.
  • Misutā Supākoru.
  • Imitation concrete pipes that won't roll over and crush you.
  • Being too socially inept to realize you're being excluded.
  • Trying to kill half your friends but only in retrospect.
  • The Goat Simulator stage of baby development.
  • The Goat Simulator stage of game development.
  • Being at the pinnacle of your child body.
  • Realizing halfway through the creative process that you should've been writing a novel.
  • Dying and giving a soliloquy about so dying representative democracy.
  • Having pages of justification for why you're covered with nipples.
  • The story about missing cowboys actually being about North Korea.
  • Not wanting to share your kumquat jokes.
  • Explaining a meme from 2010 to your grandchildren.
  • Sisqo playing a love interest dentist.
  • Replacing the love interest in the sequel.
  • Hangover 2 just having another hangover in it.
  • Making friends with Mexican paramilitary organizations to save the world.
  • Raising your child on a diet of guns and kung fu before the government takes him away.
  • The most woke Shrek movie.
  • Deciding whether you want to hear "All Star" literally all the time.
  • Moving pieces of paper around and not being sure you're making anything better.
  • Being yelled at by your sister to wash potatoes faster.
  • Your yelling sister following you from job to job.
  • A sandwich being well beyond your cognitive load.
  • Ordering a viking at Subway.
  • Eating the devil given physical form every Wednesday for lunch.
  • Writing summoning words in your sandwich order.
  • Thinking of the exact same demon as your guest lord.
  • Writing an entire sentence with no commas at all because commas make you pretentious.
  • Putting a period in your minimalist font because you have to be able to refer to "Dr. Awesome."
  • Agreeing that "UPS" is a one-syllable word.
  • That one Finnish word that Jim still uses regularly.
  • Singing "Finnish Affectation" to the tune of "Wave of Mutilation"
  • Legislature that would force corporations to pay ongoing rent for the space their jingles take up in your brain.
  • Getting scurvy to cure your trench mouth.
  • Trading your oral health for the opportunity to make weird troll games for a living.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords this week:

Topics discussed:

Microtopics:

  • False promises about updating a podcast in-place.
  • Finding a creepy lemon hand in the Safeway lying there like a monkey's paw.
  • Finding citrus fruit in the toilet.
  • Finding talking fruit in the toilet.
  • Whether the toilet is a dish or a soup.
  • Accidentally paying $11 for cashew milk.
  • Asking the cashier to remove a weird squash.
  • Distracting the cashier with pictures of missing nuts.
  • The nut abduction clinic.
  • A grape that you have to peel like a shrimp.
  • A grape that is constantly pooping itself.
  • Writing grants for prawn farmers.
  • Draining the entire pond to grab all the prawns.
  • Sound re-use in Super Mario Bros.
  • Tropes that are boring in Japan but still interesting in other cultures.
  • King of the Hill being a relatable honor story about a salaryman.
  • Misutā Supākoru.
  • Imitation concrete pipes that won't roll over and crush you.
  • Being too socially inept to realize you're being excluded.
  • Trying to kill half your friends but only in retrospect.
  • The Goat Simulator stage of baby development.
  • The Goat Simulator stage of game development.
  • Being at the pinnacle of your child body.
  • Realizing halfway through the creative process that you should've been writing a novel.
  • Dying and giving a soliloquy about so dying representative democracy.
  • Having pages of justification for why you're covered with nipples.
  • The story about missing cowboys actually being about North Korea.
  • Not wanting to share your kumquat jokes.
  • Explaining a meme from 2010 to your grandchildren.
  • Sisqo playing a love interest dentist.
  • Replacing the love interest in the sequel.
  • Hangover 2 just having another hangover in it.
  • Making friends with Mexican paramilitary organizations to save the world.
  • Raising your child on a diet of guns and kung fu before the government takes him away.
  • The most woke Shrek movie.
  • Deciding whether you want to hear "All Star" literally all the time.
  • Moving pieces of paper around and not being sure you're making anything better.
  • Being yelled at by your sister to wash potatoes faster.
  • Your yelling sister following you from job to job.
  • A sandwich being well beyond your cognitive load.
  • Ordering a viking at Subway.
  • Eating the devil given physical form every Wednesday for lunch.
  • Writing summoning words in your sandwich order.
  • Thinking of the exact same demon as your guest lord.
  • Writing an entire sentence with no commas at all because commas make you pretentious.
  • Putting a period in your minimalist font because you have to be able to refer to "Dr. Awesome."
  • Agreeing that "UPS" is a one-syllable word.
  • That one Finnish word that Jim still uses regularly.
  • Singing "Finnish Affectation" to the tune of "Wave of Mutilation"
  • Legislature that would force corporations to pay ongoing rent for the space their jingles take up in your brain.
  • Getting scurvy to cure your trench mouth.
  • Trading your oral health for the opportunity to make weird troll games for a living.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords this week:

Topics discussed:

Microtopics:

  • False promises about updating a podcast in-place.
  • Finding a creepy lemon hand in the Safeway lying there like a monkey's paw.
  • Finding citrus fruit in the toilet.
  • Finding talking fruit in the toilet.
  • Whether the toilet is a dish or a soup.
  • Accidentally paying $11 for cashew milk.
  • Asking the cashier to remove a weird squash.
  • Distracting the cashier with pictures of missing nuts.
  • The nut abduction clinic.
  • A grape that you have to peel like a shrimp.
  • A grape that is constantly pooping itself.
  • Writing grants for prawn farmers.
  • Draining the entire pond to grab all the prawns.
  • Sound re-use in Super Mario Bros.
  • Tropes that are boring in Japan but still interesting in other cultures.
  • King of the Hill being a relatable honor story about a salaryman.
  • Misutā Supākoru.
  • Imitation concrete pipes that won't roll over and crush you.
  • Being too socially inept to realize you're being excluded.
  • Trying to kill half your friends but only in retrospect.
  • The Goat Simulator stage of baby development.
  • The Goat Simulator stage of game development.
  • Being at the pinnacle of your child body.
  • Realizing halfway through the creative process that you should've been writing a novel.
  • Dying and giving a soliloquy about so dying representative democracy.
  • Having pages of justification for why you're covered with nipples.
  • The story about missing cowboys actually being about North Korea.
  • Not wanting to share your kumquat jokes.
  • Explaining a meme from 2010 to your grandchildren.
  • Sisqo playing a love interest dentist.
  • Replacing the love interest in the sequel.
  • Hangover 2 just having another hangover in it.
  • Making friends with Mexican paramilitary organizations to save the world.
  • Raising your child on a diet of guns and kung fu before the government takes him away.
  • The most woke Shrek movie.
  • Deciding whether you want to hear "All Star" literally all the time.
  • Moving pieces of paper around and not being sure you're making anything better.
  • Being yelled at by your sister to wash potatoes faster.
  • Your yelling sister following you from job to job.
  • A sandwich being well beyond your cognitive load.
  • Ordering a viking at Subway.
  • Eating the devil given physical form every Wednesday for lunch.
  • Writing summoning words in your sandwich order.
  • Thinking of the exact same demon as your guest lord.
  • Writing an entire sentence with no commas at all because commas make you pretentious.
  • Putting a period in your minimalist font because you have to be able to refer to "Dr. Awesome."
  • Agreeing that "UPS" is a one-syllable word.
  • That one Finnish word that Jim still uses regularly.
  • Singing "Finnish Affectation" to the tune of "Wave of Mutilation"
  • Legislature that would force corporations to pay ongoing rent for the space their jingles take up in your brain.
  • Getting scurvy to cure your trench mouth.
  • Trading your oral health for the opportunity to make weird troll games for a living.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+h7Ec3Bzg ]]> Jim Stormdancer 5. Very Hype About This Apple https://topiclords.com/very-hype-about-this-apple c233bd8f-f1c7-4a04-95b8-db095a34411c Mon, 25 Nov 2019 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords: JP and Styger. We discuss using the word "lord" as a joke, emergency preparedness, Cosmic Crisp: the apple with a launch date, whether horses exist, being an amateur naturalist from another part of the country, and what makes hotels scary. 1:03:59 true Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Hypothesizing about how much business your internet review gets a small business.
  • A restaurant in San Francisco somehow not going out of business.
  • Reassuring meme carriers that they are still good people.
  • Majestic yet ridiculous muscledudes.
  • Dreaming a GDC talk.
  • Taking the "lord" title seriously because you are probably ruled by literal lords.
  • Our sister podcast across the pond, Topic Senators.
  • Distinguishing lords from non-lords by their shoulder armor.
  • Preppers going from being a joke to an aspiration.
  • Realizing that literally none of your skills would help you in the apocalypse.
  • Drinking pee through a Life Straw and it still tasting like pee.
  • California-branded disasters.
  • Naming your produce via an Internet poll.
  • Produce having a launch date.
  • Lining up at Safeway for produce's midnight launch.
  • Eating berries exclusive to your region.
  • Believing horses still exist because you've seen them once.
  • Being almost sure horses aren't a hoax.
  • Inserting horses into the historical record.
  • Duckbilled platypi being obviously bullshit.
  • Every platypus having been secretly manufactured by the Tyrell Corporation.
  • LA and San Francisco merging because Philip K Dick didn't predict rising construction costs.
  • Finding out that miniature horses can be service animals.
  • Service ponies in the soup aisle.
  • Someone defacing an explanatory sign to make people believe that horses can be service animals.
  • Miniature ponies being grandfathered in.
  • Everyone choosing the mockingbird as their state bird.
  • Being annoyed that trees are the wrong trees.
  • Being young enough for them to just be trees I guess.
  • The sky being the wrong sky.
  • Seeing freeway exit signs for Jupiter.
  • The Golden Gate Bridge getting wrecked.
  • A story being grounded in geography.
  • Stepping out of the movie theater into the neighborhood the movie you saw was set in and feeling like you're still in the movie.
  • Everyone's effective hometown being San Francisco because that's where every movie is set.
  • Getting experience points for taking selfies.
  • The Coit Tower secretly being a giant hologram full of horses.
  • The arbitrariness of what makes a hotel scary.
  • The horror of a hotel room possibly having bedbugs.
  • Not being scared by a movie because you chose to watch it.
  • The cute robot doing all the murders.
  • The TV edit of Robocop somehow being even more traumatic.
  • Sneaking an art house movie into your horror movie.
  • No longer being affected by supernatural horror but being terrified of movies with car accidents.
  • The implicit social contract that horror movies shouldn't address the horror of real life.
  • The ethics of advertising horror movies.
  • The ad that places a horrible idea in your mind and promises closure/the antidote if you pay for the full movie.
  • Buying a tub of baked beans at the concession stand and feeling good for five minutes.
  • Refilling the essential oil cartridge for gunfire.
  • Not wanting to smell Bioshock, or most video games really.
]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Hypothesizing about how much business your internet review gets a small business.
  • A restaurant in San Francisco somehow not going out of business.
  • Reassuring meme carriers that they are still good people.
  • Majestic yet ridiculous muscledudes.
  • Dreaming a GDC talk.
  • Taking the "lord" title seriously because you are probably ruled by literal lords.
  • Our sister podcast across the pond, Topic Senators.
  • Distinguishing lords from non-lords by their shoulder armor.
  • Preppers going from being a joke to an aspiration.
  • Realizing that literally none of your skills would help you in the apocalypse.
  • Drinking pee through a Life Straw and it still tasting like pee.
  • California-branded disasters.
  • Naming your produce via an Internet poll.
  • Produce having a launch date.
  • Lining up at Safeway for produce's midnight launch.
  • Eating berries exclusive to your region.
  • Believing horses still exist because you've seen them once.
  • Being almost sure horses aren't a hoax.
  • Inserting horses into the historical record.
  • Duckbilled platypi being obviously bullshit.
  • Every platypus having been secretly manufactured by the Tyrell Corporation.
  • LA and San Francisco merging because Philip K Dick didn't predict rising construction costs.
  • Finding out that miniature horses can be service animals.
  • Service ponies in the soup aisle.
  • Someone defacing an explanatory sign to make people believe that horses can be service animals.
  • Miniature ponies being grandfathered in.
  • Everyone choosing the mockingbird as their state bird.
  • Being annoyed that trees are the wrong trees.
  • Being young enough for them to just be trees I guess.
  • The sky being the wrong sky.
  • Seeing freeway exit signs for Jupiter.
  • The Golden Gate Bridge getting wrecked.
  • A story being grounded in geography.
  • Stepping out of the movie theater into the neighborhood the movie you saw was set in and feeling like you're still in the movie.
  • Everyone's effective hometown being San Francisco because that's where every movie is set.
  • Getting experience points for taking selfies.
  • The Coit Tower secretly being a giant hologram full of horses.
  • The arbitrariness of what makes a hotel scary.
  • The horror of a hotel room possibly having bedbugs.
  • Not being scared by a movie because you chose to watch it.
  • The cute robot doing all the murders.
  • The TV edit of Robocop somehow being even more traumatic.
  • Sneaking an art house movie into your horror movie.
  • No longer being affected by supernatural horror but being terrified of movies with car accidents.
  • The implicit social contract that horror movies shouldn't address the horror of real life.
  • The ethics of advertising horror movies.
  • The ad that places a horrible idea in your mind and promises closure/the antidote if you pay for the full movie.
  • Buying a tub of baked beans at the concession stand and feeling good for five minutes.
  • Refilling the essential oil cartridge for gunfire.
  • Not wanting to smell Bioshock, or most video games really.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Hypothesizing about how much business your internet review gets a small business.
  • A restaurant in San Francisco somehow not going out of business.
  • Reassuring meme carriers that they are still good people.
  • Majestic yet ridiculous muscledudes.
  • Dreaming a GDC talk.
  • Taking the "lord" title seriously because you are probably ruled by literal lords.
  • Our sister podcast across the pond, Topic Senators.
  • Distinguishing lords from non-lords by their shoulder armor.
  • Preppers going from being a joke to an aspiration.
  • Realizing that literally none of your skills would help you in the apocalypse.
  • Drinking pee through a Life Straw and it still tasting like pee.
  • California-branded disasters.
  • Naming your produce via an Internet poll.
  • Produce having a launch date.
  • Lining up at Safeway for produce's midnight launch.
  • Eating berries exclusive to your region.
  • Believing horses still exist because you've seen them once.
  • Being almost sure horses aren't a hoax.
  • Inserting horses into the historical record.
  • Duckbilled platypi being obviously bullshit.
  • Every platypus having been secretly manufactured by the Tyrell Corporation.
  • LA and San Francisco merging because Philip K Dick didn't predict rising construction costs.
  • Finding out that miniature horses can be service animals.
  • Service ponies in the soup aisle.
  • Someone defacing an explanatory sign to make people believe that horses can be service animals.
  • Miniature ponies being grandfathered in.
  • Everyone choosing the mockingbird as their state bird.
  • Being annoyed that trees are the wrong trees.
  • Being young enough for them to just be trees I guess.
  • The sky being the wrong sky.
  • Seeing freeway exit signs for Jupiter.
  • The Golden Gate Bridge getting wrecked.
  • A story being grounded in geography.
  • Stepping out of the movie theater into the neighborhood the movie you saw was set in and feeling like you're still in the movie.
  • Everyone's effective hometown being San Francisco because that's where every movie is set.
  • Getting experience points for taking selfies.
  • The Coit Tower secretly being a giant hologram full of horses.
  • The arbitrariness of what makes a hotel scary.
  • The horror of a hotel room possibly having bedbugs.
  • Not being scared by a movie because you chose to watch it.
  • The cute robot doing all the murders.
  • The TV edit of Robocop somehow being even more traumatic.
  • Sneaking an art house movie into your horror movie.
  • No longer being affected by supernatural horror but being terrified of movies with car accidents.
  • The implicit social contract that horror movies shouldn't address the horror of real life.
  • The ethics of advertising horror movies.
  • The ad that places a horrible idea in your mind and promises closure/the antidote if you pay for the full movie.
  • Buying a tub of baked beans at the concession stand and feeling good for five minutes.
  • Refilling the essential oil cartridge for gunfire.
  • Not wanting to smell Bioshock, or most video games really.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+EWvPkd-A ]]> Jim Stormdancer 4. Don't Freak Out, But I'm Arresting You https://topiclords.com/dont-freak-out-but-im-arresting-you e690a646-28ef-43bf-a57e-cff5bd2e24c3 Mon, 18 Nov 2019 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this episode: Elena and Avery. We discuss pigeon throat milk, lexicalized emoji, changing your mind about a mattress, the ethical codes of singing cowboys, and dimensions in candy space. 1:21:44 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Infohazards.
  • Living in a house with instruments on the wall because you're a musician, not because you're a massive hipster.
  • Scientists who would describe cottage cheese as creamy.
  • Pigeon milk cappuccinos.
  • Animals that thrive in the city biome.
  • Anaerobic squid thriving in the oceans we ruined.
  • Honey-loving birds ditching their lame badger companions for fire-making humans.
  • Flame-throwing badgers demanding bird exes take them back.
  • Birds sweating out of their throats.
  • East Asian people have different earwax from white people.
  • Going deaf every few months due to earwax buildup.
  • Monetizing your overactive sebaceous glands.
  • Transplanting superior Asian sebaceous glands into your shitty white person's body.
  • What do mammals have that birds haven't taken from us?
  • The kiwi bird has ostrich-sized eggs.
  • Realizing that the kiwi isn't the size of a kiwi.
  • Thanking people by applying a turkey to them.
  • Missing the rest of the conversation because you were trying to find the perfect emoji.
  • Needing more than one train emoji.
  • Starving because your food options are equidistant.
  • Building the perfect Sims family so you can wreck their lives.
  • Walking into a random house and the occupants being fine with it.
  • Debuting moon landing footage you found in the bathroom.
  • Opening up a cabinet at NASA and moon rocks spilling out.
  • Your bosses at NASA not really caring when you destroy old SETI documents.
  • Cats climbing discarded mattresses to hunt.
  • Sense of thirst being hereditary.
  • Kidney stones as a delayed sign of thirst.
  • Finally getting to the part where the guy wants a mattress.
  • Being finished loving the mattress.
  • The Sunken Mattress Fallacy.
  • Discovering the organ you just destroyed was from the 19th century.
  • Playing music by touching the bones of a dead creature.
  • Being the de facto authority because everyone else knows even less.
  • Putting money into Gene Autrey's savings account.
  • Building good citizens through singing cowboys.
  • Issuing an arrest warrant for secret reasons.
  • Appreciating the 19th-century sheriff's weird forehead while waiting to be arrested.
  • Sitting there on the Group W bench.
  • Teacher rewarding you with the cheapest possible candy.
  • Mistaking your deodorant for tamarind candy.
  • Being weird in the way that figs are weird.
  • Fertilizing figs with your dissolved corpse.
  • Sharing your fig with a friend so only one of you eats a dissolved wasp.
  • Not believing new information because it's implausible that you didn't already know it.
  • Wasps parasiting other wasps.
  • Figs no longer being considered vegan.
  • Closing your tiger restaurant because tigers are infeasible to farm.
  • Accidentally inventing puppies when you just wanted your fox farm to be safer.
  • Collecting a breeding population of raccoons.
  • Rats escaping their cage so they can cuddle you.
  • Outliving your pet parrot.
  • Being an ageless rat guardian.
  • Orcas rubbing themselves on flat rocks and nobody knows why.
  • Orcas rubbing themselves on flat rocks because they're itchy.
  • An octopus friend to untangle wires for you.
  • Uplifting the octopus race merely by lengthening their lifespan.
  • Uplifted octopodes inventing Twitter and becoming miserable.
  • Thinking your chimp knows ASL because it's mirroring your actions.
  • Worshiping Cthulhu in a secular humanist kind of way.
  • Making jokes no-one will get instead of doing proper marketing.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Infohazards.
  • Living in a house with instruments on the wall because you're a musician, not because you're a massive hipster.
  • Scientists who would describe cottage cheese as creamy.
  • Pigeon milk cappuccinos.
  • Animals that thrive in the city biome.
  • Anaerobic squid thriving in the oceans we ruined.
  • Honey-loving birds ditching their lame badger companions for fire-making humans.
  • Flame-throwing badgers demanding bird exes take them back.
  • Birds sweating out of their throats.
  • East Asian people have different earwax from white people.
  • Going deaf every few months due to earwax buildup.
  • Monetizing your overactive sebaceous glands.
  • Transplanting superior Asian sebaceous glands into your shitty white person's body.
  • What do mammals have that birds haven't taken from us?
  • The kiwi bird has ostrich-sized eggs.
  • Realizing that the kiwi isn't the size of a kiwi.
  • Thanking people by applying a turkey to them.
  • Missing the rest of the conversation because you were trying to find the perfect emoji.
  • Needing more than one train emoji.
  • Starving because your food options are equidistant.
  • Building the perfect Sims family so you can wreck their lives.
  • Walking into a random house and the occupants being fine with it.
  • Debuting moon landing footage you found in the bathroom.
  • Opening up a cabinet at NASA and moon rocks spilling out.
  • Your bosses at NASA not really caring when you destroy old SETI documents.
  • Cats climbing discarded mattresses to hunt.
  • Sense of thirst being hereditary.
  • Kidney stones as a delayed sign of thirst.
  • Finally getting to the part where the guy wants a mattress.
  • Being finished loving the mattress.
  • The Sunken Mattress Fallacy.
  • Discovering the organ you just destroyed was from the 19th century.
  • Playing music by touching the bones of a dead creature.
  • Being the de facto authority because everyone else knows even less.
  • Putting money into Gene Autrey's savings account.
  • Building good citizens through singing cowboys.
  • Issuing an arrest warrant for secret reasons.
  • Appreciating the 19th-century sheriff's weird forehead while waiting to be arrested.
  • Sitting there on the Group W bench.
  • Teacher rewarding you with the cheapest possible candy.
  • Mistaking your deodorant for tamarind candy.
  • Being weird in the way that figs are weird.
  • Fertilizing figs with your dissolved corpse.
  • Sharing your fig with a friend so only one of you eats a dissolved wasp.
  • Not believing new information because it's implausible that you didn't already know it.
  • Wasps parasiting other wasps.
  • Figs no longer being considered vegan.
  • Closing your tiger restaurant because tigers are infeasible to farm.
  • Accidentally inventing puppies when you just wanted your fox farm to be safer.
  • Collecting a breeding population of raccoons.
  • Rats escaping their cage so they can cuddle you.
  • Outliving your pet parrot.
  • Being an ageless rat guardian.
  • Orcas rubbing themselves on flat rocks and nobody knows why.
  • Orcas rubbing themselves on flat rocks because they're itchy.
  • An octopus friend to untangle wires for you.
  • Uplifting the octopus race merely by lengthening their lifespan.
  • Uplifted octopodes inventing Twitter and becoming miserable.
  • Thinking your chimp knows ASL because it's mirroring your actions.
  • Worshiping Cthulhu in a secular humanist kind of way.
  • Making jokes no-one will get instead of doing proper marketing.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Infohazards.
  • Living in a house with instruments on the wall because you're a musician, not because you're a massive hipster.
  • Scientists who would describe cottage cheese as creamy.
  • Pigeon milk cappuccinos.
  • Animals that thrive in the city biome.
  • Anaerobic squid thriving in the oceans we ruined.
  • Honey-loving birds ditching their lame badger companions for fire-making humans.
  • Flame-throwing badgers demanding bird exes take them back.
  • Birds sweating out of their throats.
  • East Asian people have different earwax from white people.
  • Going deaf every few months due to earwax buildup.
  • Monetizing your overactive sebaceous glands.
  • Transplanting superior Asian sebaceous glands into your shitty white person's body.
  • What do mammals have that birds haven't taken from us?
  • The kiwi bird has ostrich-sized eggs.
  • Realizing that the kiwi isn't the size of a kiwi.
  • Thanking people by applying a turkey to them.
  • Missing the rest of the conversation because you were trying to find the perfect emoji.
  • Needing more than one train emoji.
  • Starving because your food options are equidistant.
  • Building the perfect Sims family so you can wreck their lives.
  • Walking into a random house and the occupants being fine with it.
  • Debuting moon landing footage you found in the bathroom.
  • Opening up a cabinet at NASA and moon rocks spilling out.
  • Your bosses at NASA not really caring when you destroy old SETI documents.
  • Cats climbing discarded mattresses to hunt.
  • Sense of thirst being hereditary.
  • Kidney stones as a delayed sign of thirst.
  • Finally getting to the part where the guy wants a mattress.
  • Being finished loving the mattress.
  • The Sunken Mattress Fallacy.
  • Discovering the organ you just destroyed was from the 19th century.
  • Playing music by touching the bones of a dead creature.
  • Being the de facto authority because everyone else knows even less.
  • Putting money into Gene Autrey's savings account.
  • Building good citizens through singing cowboys.
  • Issuing an arrest warrant for secret reasons.
  • Appreciating the 19th-century sheriff's weird forehead while waiting to be arrested.
  • Sitting there on the Group W bench.
  • Teacher rewarding you with the cheapest possible candy.
  • Mistaking your deodorant for tamarind candy.
  • Being weird in the way that figs are weird.
  • Fertilizing figs with your dissolved corpse.
  • Sharing your fig with a friend so only one of you eats a dissolved wasp.
  • Not believing new information because it's implausible that you didn't already know it.
  • Wasps parasiting other wasps.
  • Figs no longer being considered vegan.
  • Closing your tiger restaurant because tigers are infeasible to farm.
  • Accidentally inventing puppies when you just wanted your fox farm to be safer.
  • Collecting a breeding population of raccoons.
  • Rats escaping their cage so they can cuddle you.
  • Outliving your pet parrot.
  • Being an ageless rat guardian.
  • Orcas rubbing themselves on flat rocks and nobody knows why.
  • Orcas rubbing themselves on flat rocks because they're itchy.
  • An octopus friend to untangle wires for you.
  • Uplifting the octopus race merely by lengthening their lifespan.
  • Uplifted octopodes inventing Twitter and becoming miserable.
  • Thinking your chimp knows ASL because it's mirroring your actions.
  • Worshiping Cthulhu in a secular humanist kind of way.
  • Making jokes no-one will get instead of doing proper marketing.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+3KmNVnWV ]]> Jim Stormdancer 3. The Screaming Man Simulator https://topiclords.com/the-screaming-man-simulator 3e3b1013-1782-47cb-9fc1-1124b8c58054 Mon, 11 Nov 2019 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this episode: Jay Tholen and James Hofmann. We discuss storytelling class, music that's so boring it's interesting, library and production music, designing pinball tables to be cheap to manufacture, and cosplaying Darth Vader in bed. 51:15 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Accidentally only booking guests with your same first initial.
  • Values systems driving design decisions.
  • Taking only the fun classes in college.
  • Children as an ideal audience for storytelling.
  • A job fair for monsters.
  • Black people being friends with metaphors for black people.
  • Only wanting to go to school after it's unavailable to you.
  • Never going to museums where you live because that's what tourists do.
  • Paying to do manual labor to entertain your infant son.
  • Insisting on talking to babies even though they don't understand you.
  • Not knowing who Arcade Fire is.
  • Knowing who Arcade Fire is.
  • Spraying guitar samples into the DAW just to fill space.
  • Going up to strangers talking in a bar to tell them their conversation is boring.
  • Tweeting with as much context resiliency as possible.
  • Hearing an instrumental in the 90s and wondering about it for the rest of your life.
  • The saddest accordion solo.
  • A laughing baby indicating lack of cruelty.
  • Library/production music that is just as avant garde as your personal work.
  • Corporate contexts appropriating music that was popular 10 years ago.
  • When the retro discount kicks in for production music.
  • Absorbing your friend's shoegaze album into your video game.
  • Reinventing General MIDI for your alternate timeline's soundtrack.
  • Picking a name for your combination pinball parlor and print shop.
  • The timeline of pinball speed.
  • The timeline of pinball interactivity.
  • Analog video games frustrating the speed running scene.
  • Video game sound effects in the reality that never invented the speaker.
  • Switching around the pneumatic tubes on your brother's Call of Duty sound setup.
  • Sneaking into an amusement park to play the calliope.
  • Calliope MIDI playback as an online service.
  • Robotic percussion as an online service.
  • Sleep studies are take-home tests now.
  • Stopping breathing 25 times per hour.
  • Acclimating to your Darth Vader mask.
  • Never living to regret your bad decisions.
  • Not being sure how to pronounce your own name.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Accidentally only booking guests with your same first initial.
  • Values systems driving design decisions.
  • Taking only the fun classes in college.
  • Children as an ideal audience for storytelling.
  • A job fair for monsters.
  • Black people being friends with metaphors for black people.
  • Only wanting to go to school after it's unavailable to you.
  • Never going to museums where you live because that's what tourists do.
  • Paying to do manual labor to entertain your infant son.
  • Insisting on talking to babies even though they don't understand you.
  • Not knowing who Arcade Fire is.
  • Knowing who Arcade Fire is.
  • Spraying guitar samples into the DAW just to fill space.
  • Going up to strangers talking in a bar to tell them their conversation is boring.
  • Tweeting with as much context resiliency as possible.
  • Hearing an instrumental in the 90s and wondering about it for the rest of your life.
  • The saddest accordion solo.
  • A laughing baby indicating lack of cruelty.
  • Library/production music that is just as avant garde as your personal work.
  • Corporate contexts appropriating music that was popular 10 years ago.
  • When the retro discount kicks in for production music.
  • Absorbing your friend's shoegaze album into your video game.
  • Reinventing General MIDI for your alternate timeline's soundtrack.
  • Picking a name for your combination pinball parlor and print shop.
  • The timeline of pinball speed.
  • The timeline of pinball interactivity.
  • Analog video games frustrating the speed running scene.
  • Video game sound effects in the reality that never invented the speaker.
  • Switching around the pneumatic tubes on your brother's Call of Duty sound setup.
  • Sneaking into an amusement park to play the calliope.
  • Calliope MIDI playback as an online service.
  • Robotic percussion as an online service.
  • Sleep studies are take-home tests now.
  • Stopping breathing 25 times per hour.
  • Acclimating to your Darth Vader mask.
  • Never living to regret your bad decisions.
  • Not being sure how to pronounce your own name.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Accidentally only booking guests with your same first initial.
  • Values systems driving design decisions.
  • Taking only the fun classes in college.
  • Children as an ideal audience for storytelling.
  • A job fair for monsters.
  • Black people being friends with metaphors for black people.
  • Only wanting to go to school after it's unavailable to you.
  • Never going to museums where you live because that's what tourists do.
  • Paying to do manual labor to entertain your infant son.
  • Insisting on talking to babies even though they don't understand you.
  • Not knowing who Arcade Fire is.
  • Knowing who Arcade Fire is.
  • Spraying guitar samples into the DAW just to fill space.
  • Going up to strangers talking in a bar to tell them their conversation is boring.
  • Tweeting with as much context resiliency as possible.
  • Hearing an instrumental in the 90s and wondering about it for the rest of your life.
  • The saddest accordion solo.
  • A laughing baby indicating lack of cruelty.
  • Library/production music that is just as avant garde as your personal work.
  • Corporate contexts appropriating music that was popular 10 years ago.
  • When the retro discount kicks in for production music.
  • Absorbing your friend's shoegaze album into your video game.
  • Reinventing General MIDI for your alternate timeline's soundtrack.
  • Picking a name for your combination pinball parlor and print shop.
  • The timeline of pinball speed.
  • The timeline of pinball interactivity.
  • Analog video games frustrating the speed running scene.
  • Video game sound effects in the reality that never invented the speaker.
  • Switching around the pneumatic tubes on your brother's Call of Duty sound setup.
  • Sneaking into an amusement park to play the calliope.
  • Calliope MIDI playback as an online service.
  • Robotic percussion as an online service.
  • Sleep studies are take-home tests now.
  • Stopping breathing 25 times per hour.
  • Acclimating to your Darth Vader mask.
  • Never living to regret your bad decisions.
  • Not being sure how to pronounce your own name.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+nkS-LzyU ]]> Jim Stormdancer 2. Conjure a False Gobot https://topiclords.com/conjure-a-false-gobot 98cd634b-713e-44b8-b6b2-7ede1ccc0b1c Mon, 04 Nov 2019 08:00:00 -0800 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: John Mystery and JP LeBreton. We discuss horses climbing stairs, getting enough sleep, shitpost movie advertising, doctoring the historical record, and ending all reality from within a dream. 1:02:30 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Lord enthusiasm.
  • Thinking of Ghostbusters because you can't imagine a firefighter.
  • Foraging for oats on the top floor of a fire station.
  • Installing a pole because your infant son can't descend stairs.
  • Finding a horse in a tree.
  • Playing CLOP to learn empathy for the descending horse.
  • Replacing a spiral staircase with a normal staircase.
  • The entire city burning down because the firefighters can't get past the horse that's stuck on the landing.
  • Becoming a morning person because of your government job.
  • Your child possibly loving the daycare lady more than he loves you.
  • Taking melatonin because you don't have the discipline for not looking at screens before bed.
  • The shitty dreams of melatonin boot camp.
  • Gnawing on the melatonin and leaving it on the nightstand for next time.
  • Your body getting stuck on a particular sleep schedule long past its relevance.
  • Hypothesizing how much long-lasting damage you did with your teenage sleep habits.
  • Focusing better because everyone else is asleep.
  • Working until 4am because you're being so productive.
  • Not knowing how ads work because you have an ad-blocker installed.
  • Finding about how ads work from an 11 year old.
  • Your alternate reality self who enjoys a good advertisement now and again.
  • Maintaining the pace of film trailers for over an hour.
  • Mistaking the trailer before the movie as being part of the movie.
  • Nobody being fooled by your fake trailer because people don't watch movies in theaters any more.
  • Avoiding watching Bandersnatch because you're a completionist.
  • The technical difficulties of adding late choice points to an otherwise linear film.
  • Being nostalgic for old UIs of web services.
  • Finding a web page that hasn't changed in 15 years.
  • Finding a web page that looks 15 years old but also has a mobile style sheet.
  • Editing an innocuous fact on Wikipedia that nobody will bother to fact-check.
  • Asking to view a historical document and sneaking in a quill pen and inkwell to modify it.
  • Citing your doctored document on Wikipedia.
  • Befriending a history professor and asking them to mention your fake Kansas senator in a published paper.
  • Falsifying movie running times just because you can get away with it.
  • Citing an obscure magazine as your source on Wikipedia because nobody will bother to check.
  • Clinging to the scraps of the past that you've salvaged from eBay and garage sale VHS tapes.
  • Poor documentation of pop culture leading to compelling mysteries.
  • Drowning true information with false information.
  • The downside of having a unique Google string.
  • Having repercussions on all levels of nested reality.
  • Dreams as really lazy storytelling.
  • Remembering facts without remembering their origin.
  • Getting stuck opening a door to mask dream loading time.
  • Making up any old bullshit and being convinced it's a Beatles rarity.
  • Desperately fleeing from the "The End" title card.
  • Realizing your dream is actually just the plot of The Neverending Story.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Lord enthusiasm.
  • Thinking of Ghostbusters because you can't imagine a firefighter.
  • Foraging for oats on the top floor of a fire station.
  • Installing a pole because your infant son can't descend stairs.
  • Finding a horse in a tree.
  • Playing CLOP to learn empathy for the descending horse.
  • Replacing a spiral staircase with a normal staircase.
  • The entire city burning down because the firefighters can't get past the horse that's stuck on the landing.
  • Becoming a morning person because of your government job.
  • Your child possibly loving the daycare lady more than he loves you.
  • Taking melatonin because you don't have the discipline for not looking at screens before bed.
  • The shitty dreams of melatonin boot camp.
  • Gnawing on the melatonin and leaving it on the nightstand for next time.
  • Your body getting stuck on a particular sleep schedule long past its relevance.
  • Hypothesizing how much long-lasting damage you did with your teenage sleep habits.
  • Focusing better because everyone else is asleep.
  • Working until 4am because you're being so productive.
  • Not knowing how ads work because you have an ad-blocker installed.
  • Finding about how ads work from an 11 year old.
  • Your alternate reality self who enjoys a good advertisement now and again.
  • Maintaining the pace of film trailers for over an hour.
  • Mistaking the trailer before the movie as being part of the movie.
  • Nobody being fooled by your fake trailer because people don't watch movies in theaters any more.
  • Avoiding watching Bandersnatch because you're a completionist.
  • The technical difficulties of adding late choice points to an otherwise linear film.
  • Being nostalgic for old UIs of web services.
  • Finding a web page that hasn't changed in 15 years.
  • Finding a web page that looks 15 years old but also has a mobile style sheet.
  • Editing an innocuous fact on Wikipedia that nobody will bother to fact-check.
  • Asking to view a historical document and sneaking in a quill pen and inkwell to modify it.
  • Citing your doctored document on Wikipedia.
  • Befriending a history professor and asking them to mention your fake Kansas senator in a published paper.
  • Falsifying movie running times just because you can get away with it.
  • Citing an obscure magazine as your source on Wikipedia because nobody will bother to check.
  • Clinging to the scraps of the past that you've salvaged from eBay and garage sale VHS tapes.
  • Poor documentation of pop culture leading to compelling mysteries.
  • Drowning true information with false information.
  • The downside of having a unique Google string.
  • Having repercussions on all levels of nested reality.
  • Dreams as really lazy storytelling.
  • Remembering facts without remembering their origin.
  • Getting stuck opening a door to mask dream loading time.
  • Making up any old bullshit and being convinced it's a Beatles rarity.
  • Desperately fleeing from the "The End" title card.
  • Realizing your dream is actually just the plot of The Neverending Story.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Lord enthusiasm.
  • Thinking of Ghostbusters because you can't imagine a firefighter.
  • Foraging for oats on the top floor of a fire station.
  • Installing a pole because your infant son can't descend stairs.
  • Finding a horse in a tree.
  • Playing CLOP to learn empathy for the descending horse.
  • Replacing a spiral staircase with a normal staircase.
  • The entire city burning down because the firefighters can't get past the horse that's stuck on the landing.
  • Becoming a morning person because of your government job.
  • Your child possibly loving the daycare lady more than he loves you.
  • Taking melatonin because you don't have the discipline for not looking at screens before bed.
  • The shitty dreams of melatonin boot camp.
  • Gnawing on the melatonin and leaving it on the nightstand for next time.
  • Your body getting stuck on a particular sleep schedule long past its relevance.
  • Hypothesizing how much long-lasting damage you did with your teenage sleep habits.
  • Focusing better because everyone else is asleep.
  • Working until 4am because you're being so productive.
  • Not knowing how ads work because you have an ad-blocker installed.
  • Finding about how ads work from an 11 year old.
  • Your alternate reality self who enjoys a good advertisement now and again.
  • Maintaining the pace of film trailers for over an hour.
  • Mistaking the trailer before the movie as being part of the movie.
  • Nobody being fooled by your fake trailer because people don't watch movies in theaters any more.
  • Avoiding watching Bandersnatch because you're a completionist.
  • The technical difficulties of adding late choice points to an otherwise linear film.
  • Being nostalgic for old UIs of web services.
  • Finding a web page that hasn't changed in 15 years.
  • Finding a web page that looks 15 years old but also has a mobile style sheet.
  • Editing an innocuous fact on Wikipedia that nobody will bother to fact-check.
  • Asking to view a historical document and sneaking in a quill pen and inkwell to modify it.
  • Citing your doctored document on Wikipedia.
  • Befriending a history professor and asking them to mention your fake Kansas senator in a published paper.
  • Falsifying movie running times just because you can get away with it.
  • Citing an obscure magazine as your source on Wikipedia because nobody will bother to check.
  • Clinging to the scraps of the past that you've salvaged from eBay and garage sale VHS tapes.
  • Poor documentation of pop culture leading to compelling mysteries.
  • Drowning true information with false information.
  • The downside of having a unique Google string.
  • Having repercussions on all levels of nested reality.
  • Dreams as really lazy storytelling.
  • Remembering facts without remembering their origin.
  • Getting stuck opening a door to mask dream loading time.
  • Making up any old bullshit and being convinced it's a Beatles rarity.
  • Desperately fleeing from the "The End" title card.
  • Realizing your dream is actually just the plot of The Neverending Story.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+EMDHgVnJ ]]> Jim Stormdancer 1. The Shoulderblade Is a Girl https://topiclords.com/the-shoulderblade-is-a-girl eb5f0c01-22c3-412d-b35b-a50f06636f06 Mon, 28 Oct 2019 08:00:00 -0700 [email protected] (Jim Stormdancer) full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: Jenni Poloda and Jay Tholen. We discuss the regretting the ukulele, stripper karaoke, spaghetti eating hacks, the problem with German donuts, drying a wet phone, and fine-tuning spicy food. 59:18 true Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Not remembering the name of your own show.
  • Cursing oneself by learning the wrong skill.
  • Looking like a huge lumberjack playing a tiny instrument.
  • Enjoying music wrong.
  • Never asking for advice because you know people will tell you it's a bad idea.
  • The mythical non-portable ukulele.
  • Confusing Prog Rock and Prague Rock.
  • Punting a conversation to later because you can't brain right now.
  • Off-season Cirque du Soleil performers normalizing strip club culture.
  • Having just the right stripping outfit for someone's karaoke choice.
  • Why singing for the Rock Band high score doesn't sound like good singing.
  • Waking up your partner to join your loud video game.
  • Calling your partner to ask to make a dial tone together.
  • Everyone agreeing on the worst pasta shape.
  • Getting into a spaghetti situation.
  • Inventing short spaghetti.
  • Earning your satiation with the gamer's pasta.
  • Soup screaming at you if it doesn't like you.
  • Figuring out how to type during a podcast.
  • Donuts being slightly shiny to fool you.
  • Germans presenting Americans with fake donuts to collect their tears.
  • Swimming the English Channel in hopes that they have real donuts there.
  • Memorizing every street in London because cab drivers aren't allowed to use Mapquest.
  • Not feeling like any more of a monster than usual.
  • Eating a taco above another taco to grow its powers.
  • Taco Bell provocateurs rewriting history.
  • Going to a sushi restaurant when you don't like fish.
  • Insisting your wife only speak to you in German.
  • Not learning the local language because watching Netflix is easier.
  • Impressing people by setting the bar extremely low.
  • Being the only adult at the kid's table.
  • Dropping your phone in a freshwater vs. a saltwater toilet.
  • Using magical beams to get the water out.
  • Apologizing for your router.
  • The clerk knowing you eat Hot Cheetos just by looking at you.
  • Shaming customers into ordering the mild.
  • Moving to a country where everyone else is as spice-intolerant as you are.
  • Confusing being spicy and being spicy.
  • Tactically voting each other off the podcast.
]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Not remembering the name of your own show.
  • Cursing oneself by learning the wrong skill.
  • Looking like a huge lumberjack playing a tiny instrument.
  • Enjoying music wrong.
  • Never asking for advice because you know people will tell you it's a bad idea.
  • The mythical non-portable ukulele.
  • Confusing Prog Rock and Prague Rock.
  • Punting a conversation to later because you can't brain right now.
  • Off-season Cirque du Soleil performers normalizing strip club culture.
  • Having just the right stripping outfit for someone's karaoke choice.
  • Why singing for the Rock Band high score doesn't sound like good singing.
  • Waking up your partner to join your loud video game.
  • Calling your partner to ask to make a dial tone together.
  • Everyone agreeing on the worst pasta shape.
  • Getting into a spaghetti situation.
  • Inventing short spaghetti.
  • Earning your satiation with the gamer's pasta.
  • Soup screaming at you if it doesn't like you.
  • Figuring out how to type during a podcast.
  • Donuts being slightly shiny to fool you.
  • Germans presenting Americans with fake donuts to collect their tears.
  • Swimming the English Channel in hopes that they have real donuts there.
  • Memorizing every street in London because cab drivers aren't allowed to use Mapquest.
  • Not feeling like any more of a monster than usual.
  • Eating a taco above another taco to grow its powers.
  • Taco Bell provocateurs rewriting history.
  • Going to a sushi restaurant when you don't like fish.
  • Insisting your wife only speak to you in German.
  • Not learning the local language because watching Netflix is easier.
  • Impressing people by setting the bar extremely low.
  • Being the only adult at the kid's table.
  • Dropping your phone in a freshwater vs. a saltwater toilet.
  • Using magical beams to get the water out.
  • Apologizing for your router.
  • The clerk knowing you eat Hot Cheetos just by looking at you.
  • Shaming customers into ordering the mild.
  • Moving to a country where everyone else is as spice-intolerant as you are.
  • Confusing being spicy and being spicy.
  • Tactically voting each other off the podcast.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Not remembering the name of your own show.
  • Cursing oneself by learning the wrong skill.
  • Looking like a huge lumberjack playing a tiny instrument.
  • Enjoying music wrong.
  • Never asking for advice because you know people will tell you it's a bad idea.
  • The mythical non-portable ukulele.
  • Confusing Prog Rock and Prague Rock.
  • Punting a conversation to later because you can't brain right now.
  • Off-season Cirque du Soleil performers normalizing strip club culture.
  • Having just the right stripping outfit for someone's karaoke choice.
  • Why singing for the Rock Band high score doesn't sound like good singing.
  • Waking up your partner to join your loud video game.
  • Calling your partner to ask to make a dial tone together.
  • Everyone agreeing on the worst pasta shape.
  • Getting into a spaghetti situation.
  • Inventing short spaghetti.
  • Earning your satiation with the gamer's pasta.
  • Soup screaming at you if it doesn't like you.
  • Figuring out how to type during a podcast.
  • Donuts being slightly shiny to fool you.
  • Germans presenting Americans with fake donuts to collect their tears.
  • Swimming the English Channel in hopes that they have real donuts there.
  • Memorizing every street in London because cab drivers aren't allowed to use Mapquest.
  • Not feeling like any more of a monster than usual.
  • Eating a taco above another taco to grow its powers.
  • Taco Bell provocateurs rewriting history.
  • Going to a sushi restaurant when you don't like fish.
  • Insisting your wife only speak to you in German.
  • Not learning the local language because watching Netflix is easier.
  • Impressing people by setting the bar extremely low.
  • Being the only adult at the kid's table.
  • Dropping your phone in a freshwater vs. a saltwater toilet.
  • Using magical beams to get the water out.
  • Apologizing for your router.
  • The clerk knowing you eat Hot Cheetos just by looking at you.
  • Shaming customers into ordering the mild.
  • Moving to a country where everyone else is as spice-intolerant as you are.
  • Confusing being spicy and being spicy.
  • Tactically voting each other off the podcast.

Support Topic Lords

]]> https://fireside.fm/player/v2/Wjlwj3_Y+JtkJZKAZ ]]> Jim Stormdancer