116. I Don't Trust Toilets Any More

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Lords:

• Laura
  • https://twitter.com/lmichet/
  • https://lauramichet.itch.io/tallbagel2
• Rachel
  • https://twitter.com/rachel_sala/
  • http://wildhonesty.com/

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
  • https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/21816/a-rabbit-as-king-of-the-ghosts
• 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.