339. Become Uncoffinable
April 20th, 2026
1 hr 4 mins 36 secs
Tags
About this Episode
Lords:
- Watson
- Wren
Topics:
- Faction design in historical strategy games
- Linguistics makes it easier and harder to name things
- You belong in SLUSD. What is SLUSD?
- The Cremation of Sam McGee
- The magic systems of Brandon Sanderson
Microtopics:
- The Three-Body Problem (Not That One)
- Jade City; Jade Legacy.
- Making any non-creamy soup into a creamy soup.
- Boiling an entire civilization down to a concept simple enough to program.
- Getting to the end of the tech tree first and winning science.
- Greece as the origin of many of our modern ideas about government.
- Grand strategy games where you spend most of your time trying to not to be assassinated by your family.
- Dwarf Fortress except it's obsessed with the royal family.
- Hiring Charles Babbage to invent the analytical engine because otherwise all your game jams will have to be board game jams.
- Playing a TTRPG and having to name something so first you have to create thousands of years of linguistic history.
- The World Builder's Disease. (A.k.a. having a delightful hobby)
- What you might have named somebody back in Zelda Times.
- Developing a set of phonotactics so that you can name something plausibly.
- What is SLUSD?
- The webp of 3D model formats.
- Trans people: they belong in Ohio.
- Putting up a billboard and hoping people will look away from the road to see your content.
- What investigative journalists might do if investigative journalism still existed.
- Solving the SLUSD mystery.
- Reconstructing the history of civilization from the Topic Lords vaults.
- What did people with ADHD do before Topics?
- Strange things done in the midnight sun.
- Cremating Sam in the wreck of the Alice May.
- The secret tales of the Arctic trails that would make your blood run cold.
- A poet who mostly writes about burial rituals in the arctic circle.
- Stompin' Tom.
- Bits to Try if You Think You're About To Die.
- Supernatural small-town Alaska death promises.
- Why SETI@Home looked for three spikes.
- At what point to Doom clones become first-person shooters, and at what point do you become a conspiracy theorist for pointing out all these games are the same.
- Gandhi becoming so peaceful that he integer underflows.
- Video games as a way to cope with the outcome of civilization.
- Sanderson's four laws.
- A fictional branch of physics.
- Various metals that do various things.
- Consuming metal filings that have magical effects based on this funky diagram.
- Eating a burrito wrapped in aluminum foil.
- Coinshots shooting people with coins.
- Soothing and inflaming various emotions.
- The element of thinking about stuff in various kinds of ways, and its atomic number.
- Forcing a Mistborn to burn aluminum, as a prank.
- Creating a magic system by working backwards from the premise that tinfoil hats are effective in this universe.
- A fandom wiki. Made by fans. Not on fandom.com.
- Gradually revealing the rules of your system as they become relevant.
- Lit RPG.
- Whether fantasy and horror fiction would be better if it was more like a video game.
- Characters in a story who are trying real hard to level up.
- Establishing the reality of the fiction while also taking that reality to a very strange place.