{"version":"https://jsonfeed.org/version/1","title":"Topic Lords","home_page_url":"https://topiclords.com","feed_url":"https://topiclords.com/json","description":"Every week, Jim invites different friends to guest on Topic Lords and be excited about whatever they've been fixated on this week.","_fireside":{"subtitle":"The only place on the internet you can hear topics discussed!","pubdate":"2024-12-16T00:00:00.000-08:00","explicit":true,"copyright":"2024 by Jim Stormdancer","owner":"Jim Stormdancer","image":"https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-images-2024/podcasts/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/cover.jpg?v=2"},"items":[{"id":"5ccb4ff1-2d93-4e3f-808b-8e8a9531d56d","title":"269. Wet-Ass Planetoid","url":"https://topiclords.com/wet-ass-planetoid","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nTyriq\nAlex\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nTrying to superficially familiarize myself with every country\nThe log burner fan\n\n\nhttps://ae01.alicdn.com/kf/S68d58689db54401f9a434456881cbdfcf/4-Blade-Heat-Powered-Stove-Fan-Log-Wood-Burner-Eco-Friendly-Quiet-Fireplace-Fan-WinterWarm.jpg\n\nDrilling this chair for ancient water\nVariations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams, by Kenneth Koch\n\n\nhttps://allpoetry.com/Variations-On-A-Theme-By-William-Carlos-Williams\n\nBoichik bagels\nBoxfish skeletons are wilder than seahorse skeletons\n\n\nMicrotopics: \n\n\nSaya Gray.\nLeast-favorite UFO 50 games. \nTreating the city you live in as if you're a tourist. \nGoing to obscure corners of parking lots. \nA way to have an adventure in real life.\nThe tiny squishy seal that's no longer in your back pocket. \nWeb sites that are nothing but quizzes. \nTrying to name every country.\nThis Sporcle quiz's opinion about which disputed territories count as countries. \nFeeling more worldly after you memorize the names of every country. \nLearning katakana and then being annoyed when signs do katakana wrong.\nThe curse of perfect-pitch. \nCorrupted Pitch. \nTuning your whole band to the same out of tune guitar. \nHearing sounds in your head but only the sounds you're also hearing with your ears.\nStatw.gov hosting PDF reports of the US government's opinion of every country. \nDear diary, today I did a cool fishing trade with Norway.\nThe Four Guineas.\nThe Place Across the Woods. \nA giant CPU heat sink in gunmetal black sitting on top of your wood burning stove. \nDevices powered by ambient temperature differentials. \nThe spinning thing on the roof that looks like a macaroon.\nPutting googly eyes on your turbine roof vents. \nWhether Stirling Engines are useful for anything other than a demonstration of the principles of the Stirling Engine. \nFluids moving through spaces of different sizes. \nInjection molded hollow chunky boys. \nExtremely mundane time capsules.\nA Chair for Scientists. \nA giant plastic-encased garbage ravioli.\nEntire ecosystems that have existed without light for thousands of years. \nYour FEMA-approved disaster preparedness chair.\nSorting all the water molecules on earth from newest to oldest. \nArtists' depictions of the Hadean Earth.\nThe biggest wettest comet in the universe. \nDon Quixote, the sopping wet comet.\nFree sharps, only used once! \nWriting a piece for prepared guitar after your kid fills the guitar with crayons.\nUnprepared Pianos.\nJuicy cold March wind. \nA fair-use parody.\nAI analysis of poetry that completely misses the point. \nEditing Wikipedia to say that Lil Jon went to Harvard. \nList of Rivers in Togo. \nWhat a Specific Guy!\nRegistering an account to vandalize Wikipedia every few months for years.\nSupermarket bagels. \nBoiling round bread in water with crustaceans from the Bronx. \nMaking your own water to make coffee with. \nWhere to get food-grade lye.\nPastrami lox.\nSeahorse skeletons. \nEvery Platonic Solid Has a Fish. \nWhere babies breathe from.\nFish without ribcages. \nCaltrops arranged into a fish.\nUsing a pufferfish skeleton as a fidget toy. \nThe pufferfish at the center of our solar system. \nThe kind of decoration you see in a lobster joint. \nTropes of the open ocean. \nThe guy preventing you from being able to find search results for the Atari game Toobin'.\nThe loudest drinks in the world. \nThe Toobin' zone in LEGO Dimensions.\nChucking whole unopened cans of beer from your inner tube.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2024-12-16T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/5ccb4ff1-2d93-4e3f-808b-8e8a9531d56d.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":57746911,"duration_in_seconds":3609}]},{"id":"978f79ad-f33f-4833-87ef-97ab89de65f0","title":"268. Puzzles For Puzzle Enjoyers","url":"https://topiclords.com/puzzles-for-puzzle-enjoyers","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nJames\n\n\nhttps://pounced-on.me/@Triplefox\n\nKev\n\n\nhttps://kevzettler.com/\nhttps://www.youtube.com/@MikeMotion83\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nCopyparty\nEgg punk vs. chain punk\nGoing geocaching three times\n\n\nhttps://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/ugJWqQdP.jpg\n\nSeptic Tanks\n\n\nhttps://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/q0tW8KtD.jpg\n\nCertain kinds of trash you don't see any more\nMosquito bites\n\n\nMicrotopics: \n\n\nMultiple recurring lords.\nGoing back to an earlier episode to listen to the plugs. \nAgreeing to a copy party without knowing what it is.\nMulti-part RARs.\nPutting together educational material for your hypothetical younger self.\nManually extracting files over a physical USB connection. \nOrg-mode.\nA collection of ogg vorbis music. \nYour personal learning mind-map for learning how to draw. \nThe bottom end of expertise. \nTwo contrasting branches of the punk community. \nNerdy; dancey; influenced by Devo.\nMusical genres refusing to converge no matter how close they get. \n genres refusing to converge no matter how close they get.\nHow old you have to be to know about My Bloody Valentine.\nFinally getting your act together and installing the right app and logging into the right web site.\nFinding excuses to be more engaged with nature.\nHaving conversations, like you do with friends in a park.\nFinding an Altoids tin where you would expect to find a bunch of spider webs.\nWalking through half-nature in near-complete darkness.\nClimbing down a rocky embankment in near-complete darkness with your phone in one hand.\nCaches getting muggled.\nNull Island.\nRealizing that you're about to go on the bad kind of adventure.\nA passing wizard complimenting you on your ironic orc-detecting sword.\nA stuffed BB-8 that you use for photo opportunities.\nLeaving one line of your toilet poem blank in case you think of a good rhyme for \"too.\"\nThe kind of poem you put in your bathroom.\nA pithy way to say what to put in the toilet.\nTelling the restaurant's poet laureate that he really nailed that septic tank poem.\nUsing a black marker to redact the line about cigarette butts from your poem.\nA book that reads like browsing Reddit.\nTaking your mind off of your butt for five minutes.\nWhether Law and Order was ever an accurate depiction of police procedure.\nHow they convicted or didn't convict the latest perp.\nUncle John's Bathroom Reader.\nTV Guides lying on the street.\nThe genre of children's craft made from newspaper.\nArchaeologists finding a thousand year old USB drive and finding a bunch of PDFs and videos about how to learn to draw.\nFAT16 vs. FAT32.\nMulti-volume ARJ files.\nPutting together dual-purpose CDs for punk banks.\nCD-ROMs shaped like a business card.\nInserting mini-CDs into a slot loading CD drive.\nWhat it takes to make an indie Gamecube game.\nSide-factoids about Luigi's Mansion.\nLuigi's Mansion counting the volume of dust you've vacuumed through the whole playthrough.\nThe new Duck Tales game modeling the physics of every treasure you can collect so you can swim in them.\nMosquito activity in the midwest.\nHanging out around mosquito predators.\nMosquitos waking up for the gloaming and then going back to bed.\nFinding the one high-altitude spot in the Panhandle to avoid the mosquitos.\nFeeling bad about killng mosquitos after playing Hollow Knight.\nYour favorite mind control force.\nGolfers hitting that ball to make the number go down when they could just play less and it'd stay at 0 forever.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2024-12-09T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/978f79ad-f33f-4833-87ef-97ab89de65f0.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":57121384,"duration_in_seconds":3569}]},{"id":"4a86a57b-e574-4fcc-b9ca-b8a4c20cd52f","title":"267. Unburying The Duck","url":"https://topiclords.com/unburying-the-duck","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nJohn\nErica\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nGolden owl pre-post-mortem\n\n\nhttps://goldenowlhunt.com/\n\nTwin update: one year later\nNotepad has support for alternative line endings now\nGoodnight Moon (And/or Goodnight Dune?) \n\n\nhttps://www.firstcry.com/intelli/articles/goodnight-moon-nursery-rhyme/\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nThe waiting list to get into the Topic Lords discord. \nWhat goes on the lords-only channel. \nThe first rule of being a lord.\nIt's the end of the show somewhere in the world. \nFrog Fractions Royalty. \nTopic Lords Con East.\nChoosing pairs of lords.\nWhat lords have been on the show least recently. \nMystery with a B.\nResponsibility to the lords.\nARG goings-on.\nMaze of Games.\nRubber hose ARG solving \nDigging up the golden owl and replacing it with a duck. \nThe minimum number of golden owls you are allowed to cast in France.\nThe History of the Owl Stuff.\nCommemorating your love of the Golden Owl by purchasing this commemorative Golden Owl. \nThe Mystery of the Golden Owl that nobody wanted solved.\nIt's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.\nGoing and burying a duck \nUnburying the Duck and putting the Owl back.\nLooking through the Heart of France.\nAnother cursed treasure hunt in the can. \nAncient alternatives to zip files. \nRe-scoping your puzzle hunt on the fly. \nTelling twins apart using phrenology. \nTwin identification strategies. \nLet me see your flecks!\nChecking your placental mammals for belly buttons. \nPlatypodes.\nJock twin/nerd twin.\nHaving children as a way to practice solving problems together.\nWho forgot to take a nap today? (Everyone on the show.)\nFlailing limbs kicking your bedmate all night.\nRocking your kid to sleep and then depositing them in the crib like Indy swapping out the golden idol.\nHow to teach babies to sleep. \nWearing children until the children no longer tolerate it. \nA good selection of kid-friendly music. \nA guy with a soothing British voice saying interesting things for ten minutes.\nHow much coffee to give a six year old right before bed. \nWaiting for your kid to realize that when it's 1am he doesn't have to ask you if he can watch TV.\nJust show me the byte order marker!\nAdding tabs to Notepad. \nEveryone agreeing to go back to WordStar.\nWhat software developers do once a program is finished and perfect.\nLoading CSV files into R.\nAccidentally updating Excel.\nThe 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.\nAdobe Premiere updates that ruin your team's entire workflow.\nWhy JWZ is no longer rich. \nSeeing all the trailing spaces at the end of the line.\nJobs that require you to be able to distinguish between a tab character and the equivalent number of spaces. \nHow Unity handles upgrades and versioning.\nThe 75th anniversary of Goodnight Moon.\nWhy the New York Times's list of most borrowed children's library books of all time doesn't contain Goodnight Moon. \nWhen Goodnight Moon says \"Goodnight Nobody\" and you immediately assume that the old lady died.\nThe calming effect of going over an inventory of really nice soothing things.\nThe Margaret Wise Brown ouevre.\nGoodnight Dune.\nGood night, shai-hulud bursting out of the dune.\nGood night, Bene Gesserit witch whispering \"they tried and died.\"\nToo much of every character giving their internal monologue in italics.\nVirginia Facebook's extremely cheap antiques.\nFloating in the No-Room.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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)\r\n","date_published":"2024-12-02T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/4a86a57b-e574-4fcc-b9ca-b8a4c20cd52f.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":70379728,"duration_in_seconds":4398}]},{"id":"822381c4-b108-4b1e-a707-3c0e7b1ebf15","title":"266. Voronoi Cookies","url":"https://topiclords.com/voronoi-cookies","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nBen\nAndrew\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nBaking: precise science of measurement or do it all by feel? (People have very different philosophies of muffins)\nI'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?\nI just found out that there aren't exactly 52 weeks in a year\nThe Rules, Leila Chatti\n\n\nhttps://poets.org/poem/rules\n\nBuilding fidgeting into a Zoom lecture\nThings of Science. (Subscription science toy service that I got when I was a kid)\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nPosting pictures of pottery to social media. \nThe Hopefully Year of Layoffs. \nTeaching game development as a hobby. \nThe interactive comic books of Jason Shiga.\nLies and truth and sea monsters. \nWaiting for half an hour to find out if you fucked it up. \nBaking intuitively.\nSkimming a recipe and thinking \"hmm yes, I've made food before\"\nVoronoi cookies. \nKeeping separate baking notebooks for each season.\nHaving units that are divisible by two. \nPutting it in a Gas 4 Oven. \nHow to pronounce \"tare.\"\nSneaking into Grandma's kitchen and weighing all the ingredients.\nCruciverbalism.\nWhere to post the crosswords you've constructed.\nA Lord's Puzzle.\nGiving people a little bit of joy and avoiding hearing any feedback about it. \nLiving in the puzzle capital of the world.\nConstructing a crossword puzzle for every party you attend. \nThe MIT Mystery Hunt. \nMaking art for a really small group of people. \nCrosswordese.\nDesigning themed vs. themeless crossword puzzles. \nHow many weeks are in a leap year.\nYet another ratio that doesn't work out.\nCalendrical systems you could use.\nThings that you know that are wrong. \nWhat's your favorite thing you don't know that you don't know?\nFinding a drawer full of narwhal tusks in a bone shop and thinking \"hm, sixty unicorns died here\"\nNASA's antigravity room.\nWhy doesn't the Mars habitat work out? \nMultiple digressions on horse urine.\nRefining horse urine into progesterone on Mars.\nSuddenly realizing that you've been dead all along.\nCicadas doing whatever they do in the trees.\nAcknowledging the expectations of what a poem is. \nWhy you always turn out to have been dead at the end.\nWho is out there still making games about guns? \nAdding line breaks to make your essay look like a poem.\nInnominateness.\nGarden path level design.\nReading aloud etudes.\nMavis Beacon Teaches Elocution.\nReplacing your Zoom background with a video of yourself. \nBrain massaging video of cutting sand.\nThe calming effect of amphetamines.\nFidgeting incessantly during Zoom calls.\nFidgeting for people so they don't have to. \nBubbling noises and space harps.\nRemote testing protocols. \nPlagiarism detector snake oil.\nDoing homework to get used to the idea of doing homework. \nMass-production of adults.\nPaperwork as a method of crowd control.\nHomework as a barrier to family time vs. homework that facilitates family time. \nMailing people little bits of science. \nAerogel vs. Superslurper.\nGrowing mold in your oobleck.\nSending 1940s children asbestos in the mail. \nUsing every sense to explore the world. \nA dog sniffing your hand and walking away.\nThrowing away all the business cards that just have your Twitter handle on them. \n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2024-11-25T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/822381c4-b108-4b1e-a707-3c0e7b1ebf15.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":64491937,"duration_in_seconds":4030}]},{"id":"7a000f82-d16b-4ab6-b851-150d6ded340d","title":"265. We're Here To Make This Slide Floppy","url":"https://topiclords.com/were-here-to-make-this-slide-floppy","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nTim\nChris\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nNoodles?\nEverything and More (by DFW), the \"impoverishment of the question\",and free will\nChoosing an integrator\n\n\nhttps://gafferongames.com/post/integration_basics/\n\nLucky Jim (old song)\n\n\nhttps://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/U7zR1RCa.png\n\nCollaborative music as a game design problem (see: skill gap, handicaps, engagement, peripheral participation)\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nCeltic Music and Corgis.\nTim, a figure shrouded in mystery. \nTopic Monologues. \nGluten-free noodle straws. \nBucatini: imagine a Red Vine but made of pasta.\nReplacing food service workers with clockwork automata made of noodles that have been hardened into gears and springs. \nGiant fusilli as playground equipment. \nNoodleness and pastitude.\nWhether gnocchi is a pasta. What about cauliflower gnocchi?\nUnleavened Carrot Cake. \nIndomie: the number one selling noodle on Earth.\nGood spices: they can work in a broth.\nSoupertaster: Jim eats soup alone while talking to a volleyball with a bloody handprint on it. \nLearning math by starting with incredibly abstract unmotivated ideas.\nSome Bottomless Pits are Deeper than Others. \nApproaching a question by interpreting it as a question that if answerable.\nThe significant of the perception of free will. \nHow a closed system can produce multiple different outcomes. \nWhat happens when we decide we don't have free will. \nA completely deterministic system that has a sensation of free will. \nTaking as much time as it takes to read a book. \nShooting the Moon (in real life)\nTaking all the bad cards and winning.\nBecoming disciplined about time \nWhat a modern feature phone can do. \nDividing your day into blocks and spending them. \nThe period in your life when you lived in Burlingame. \nGetting an incredibe amount of work done during your hour and a half commute.\nTopic Lords or Plug Lords? \nSomething you'll be glad you did tomorrow. \nIntegration Basics. \nExplicit Euler vs. Semi-Implicit Euler.\nThe pros and cons of RK4.\nThe physics system behind Drawn to Life.\nWhat it takes to be an old song. \nHadestown and The Instigator.\nThe Hadestown Tiny Desk Concert.\nHow to play music with other people in a way that accounts for skill gaps.\nGoing to the Starry Plough to play the penny whistle. \nMusicians sitting in a circle and talking until someone starts playing something and everyone else joins in.\nJoining in on a song you've never heard before. \nPlaying Mary Had a Little Lamb at 40 BPM.\nMaking a slow song more interesting by adding ornamentation. \nStar of the County Down.\nDifferent ideas that come out when you play music at half speed. \nLark Camp.\nThe person who hands out the cheat sheet with all the popular tunes and their chord progressions.\nSorting tunes by frequnecy.\nThe bad things about Irish sessions, from a game design perspective.\nLearning a song by reading the notation vs. learning it by playing it for 30 years.\nStar Above the Garter.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2024-11-18T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/7a000f82-d16b-4ab6-b851-150d6ded340d.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":68010505,"duration_in_seconds":4250}]},{"id":"754ad184-e393-464a-a182-af9dbf5997ef","title":"264. Pickpocketed So Hard You Die","url":"https://topiclords.com/pickpocketed-so-hard-you-die","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nAndrew\n\n\nhttps://kittenm4ster.neocities.org/\n\nAubrianne\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nI will never get good at video games and that's okay\nDoes charging (or even allowing donations) for something change its perception as a piece of art?\nMessy game design\nTo Be of Use, Marge Piercy\n\n\nhttps://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57673/to-be-of-use\n\nFilms Noir\nComplementary Hobby Power Couples\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nJust shakin' it a little bit. \nThe royal it. \nPutting Homestar Runner on shuffle while you do homework. \nMaking Pico-8 games under an Internet name. \nYour child petting a dog but when you try to pet the dog as well the dog is like \"no, not you!\"\nA beard or long braid as a fidget tool.\nSpectrum Cheater Reveals.\nGames where you have to plan ahead. \nA very easy social slot to fit into. \nHow many extra organs does Master Chief have? \nWatching your mom fail the same jump in Animal Well for twenty minutes. \nPicking a garbage can in Fallout 3 where you keep all your stuff which works great until they patch garbage collection into the game. \nA game that requires two skills and the two skills exist in two different people. \nWhat happened to cheat codes? \nPaying the pickpocket trainer to train you and then pickpocketing your money back. \nPickpocketing someone's vital organs. \nHomestar Runner as the ultimate counter example. \nWhat quilts are worth if you charged a fair wage for your time. \nSpending half an hour convincing your nephew that this scarf really is worth $300.\nThe only two millennials who haven't professionalized their hobbies. \nConstructing your game design like a mathematical proof. \nThe promise of the text parser.\nAll the weird bespoke deaths you could find in a Sierra game.\nGames intended for people who have more free time than you. \nHow to make it completely viable to make small games.\nA clever hack to market your video game (spend a bunch of money) \nThe promise of the 50 in one pirate kart.\nTrying to get the house gifts in every game in UFO 50.\nCollecting the umbrella and the pin an least a dozen times. \nA Guided Tour of Barbuta.\nThe black sleek heads of seals bouncing like half submerged balls. \nDoing what has to be done, again and again.\nA form of idleness that produces an incredibly amount of textiles. \nPeruvian people spinning while they wait for the bus. \nWhy nobody gives a shit about rope and string.\nAppreciating the lasagna that's right in front of you. \nMaking a loaf of bread for your family that mostly eats peanut butter sandwiches.\nMaking a little frowny face at \"amphoras.\"\nMeeting a girl and wooing her with good semicolon usage. \nDressing up as Elaine and Guybrush for Halloween. \nWhoppers Jr. and Games Boys Advance. \nClassic Film Noir such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit. \nThat time Rita Hayworth made you realize you were gay. \nGetting no movies from America for years and then getting a ton of movies from America all at once. \nPulpy low-budget melodramas. \nThe Hays Code.\nThe five minute monologue where Quint describes the graphic sex scene between Jaws and the Hoth Ice Wampa\nNeo Noir. (Meaning from the 70a.)\nModern art. (Meaning from the early 20th century.)\nNeo Noir films such as the Bourne Identity and Batman Begins \nBugs Bunny inventing the smoky noir saxophone. \nA taxonomy of complementary hobby pairs. \nGetting 20 musicians in a room and it's a total disaster. \nSheep growing so much extraneous wool that they fall on their backs and explode.\nYoutube recommending a video on how to flip a sheep over. \nSheep Tips: How to Flip a Sheep.\nA 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?\"\nFellow Jorts Horsians.\nDeep lore of server outages.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2024-11-11T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/754ad184-e393-464a-a182-af9dbf5997ef.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":64827976,"duration_in_seconds":4051}]},{"id":"5a82915f-1733-4717-9f51-d08835a7d394","title":"263. Drafted Into The Applebee's Wars","url":"https://topiclords.com/drafted-into-the-applebees-wars","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nXalavier\nBrianne\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nWhy do movies about contract killers skip over the good part of negotiating in excruciating detail the contract and clauses present?\nAre fictional characters greater role models than real people?\nThe new Zelda game talks too much and I'm okay with that\nThink of Others by Mahmoud Darwish\n\n\nhttps://www.ayearofbeinghere.com/2014/11/mahmoud-darwish-think-of-others.html\n\nShould every person be forcibly drafted into a customer service job, like the military.\nThe horrible things I would do in the Criterion Closet, if given an opportunity.\n\n\nJim's evidence for why The Pest is memorable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAB8dNMoXZ0\n\n\n\nMicrotopics: \n\n\nI Am Your Beast.\nMaking 50 games in 7 years. \nA co-op Kaiju horror cooking game \nThe Name of the Rose meets Godzilla meets Lethal Company. \nPower couples in games.\nMoviegoers who want to know about contract law. \nSearch and replacing \"murder\" with \"unalive\" so that a contact killer can safely sue the client for breach of contact. \nPedantic legal contact killer law every week.\nLowering the bar so that we can all raise it later. \nDoctor Odyssey. \nDisheveled Detective.\nThe Autistic Coded Detective. \nA ahow about autistic people written by neurotypical people. \nMaking a weekly podcast and scoffing at the TV shows that can only manage 24 episodes a year. \nAsking google for the \"podcast with the fewest episodes\" and google just assuming you meant the podcast with the shortest running time. \nSending children to the sharps dump. (Because the kid asked for it and the parent signed a waiver.)\nDesperately knocking on Google's door and beginning them to tell you where the furthest Denny's is.\nThe Waluigi-owned Denny's in the Andromeda Galaxy. \nRole Models happening accidentally. \nDonald Duck becoming a sex pest after edgier writers take over.\nA form of self to aspire to.\n300 Rorschach Guys in a discord server. \nAn epic story that FromSoft will continue to plunder of its biggest plot elements for the next 30 years. \nA character that you relate to and then you realize that's bad.\nWhat do you do after you get what you want? \nLeading a horde of ninja at the dictates of an Eldritch god.\nGetting what you've been looking for and realizing that you're no longer the person who wanted that thing.\nRole-playing a princess who has to talk to a litany of insufferable people. \nSwinging your sword through grass to reveal rupees.\nZelda's Got an Onus.\nWho you're thinking about as you pay your water bills. \nThose who are nursed by clouds. \nShakespeare beeves.\nGettingTikTok Mad.\nThe Death of Arthur.\nImpacting media literacy for generations because you want to make a sassy pun.\nSlipping into Belgian because you don't have enough mana to speak French.\nThe red phone in every publicly traded franchise restaurant that connects the customer directly to a random shareholder.\nWorking a Black Friday at a retail job and being awarded a purple heart. \nWorking a Best Buy Geek Squad tour of service to earn your citizenship. \nThe Criterion Closet. \nThe level of stardom you need to attain in order to remove movies from the Criterion Collection. \nSupermarket Sweep. \nAsking someone who took one year of high school French what you call someone who owns a closet. \nI would not be normal and they would not be safe. \nLanded noblemen who are super into Amontillado.\nWhere to lock the insufferable friend who went to film school.\nHow many Miami Vice episodes ended up in the Criterion Collection. \nThe movie that you remember the least.\nForgiving the insufferable film school attendees in your life because you can't think of a good punishment for them.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2024-11-04T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/5a82915f-1733-4717-9f51-d08835a7d394.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":66899617,"duration_in_seconds":4180}]},{"id":"774b92f7-0d10-4ac7-b22d-e64e3455b0fa","title":"262. Real Meal, Fictional Man","url":"https://topiclords.com/real-meal-fictional-man","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nCisHetKayFaber\nMaxx\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nFood-focused Japanese TV\nIf \"fish don't exist,\" then how do pescetarians?\nPicoSteveMo is back!\nhttps://wikipoem.org/\nVerisimilitude in play (My daughter plays GTA and Roblox) (The shifting nature of what is appropriate for children)\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nEmotionally connecting with a dying web site and meeting up with other users in Seattle. \nWhat the Cohost diaspora is doing to do.\nDrive-by bad opinions. \nWhere people live in Australia, on average. \nCSS Crimes. \nUsing external image hosts to continue blogging on Cohost after it is in read-only mode. \nURL shortening services reusing old links. \nMeeting up with people you have a loose association with and having a good time together. \nThe Bowling League Mafia taking up every lane every day with tournaments so nobody else can bowl.\nA TV drama where a traveling salesman keeps being hungry at different train stations. \nSeeing a meal that looks delicious but you're full and can't eat a whole nother meal.\nWhether food becomes fictional as soon as you eat it. \nWatching satellite TV on your flip phone. \nOneSeg.\nYour email address being owned by your phone carrier. \nA phone that closes and has great battery life. \nThe golden age of food-focused broadcast TV.\nA celebrity who's interested in food goes and eats at a restaurant. \nThis Burger Weighs 30 Pounds! \nMidnight Diner.\nThe Karate Kid but with ramen.\nWatching a Youtube of the video gamers.\nOrdinary People, Extraordinary Food. \nWhether pescetarians exist. \nThe researchers in the shark lab you used to work at calling dolphins fish. \nFish eyes: nature's boba.\nA block of gouda floating in the ocean. \nFish that stop being fish when you think about it too hard. \nDisagreeing with beavers about what tree to cut down, but you're conflict avoidant so the beaver always wins. \nHaven't we all argued with beavers?\nCrows stealing the naan out of your naan and curry.\nJungle Crows who sound like an adult man doing an impression of crows. \nCrows who are really good at Japanese T9.\nThe nets you put over your garbage that can't possibly keep the crows out. \nPicking Steves from a continuity standpoint. \nFinding any excuse to make a Stephen King Sokoban. \nDeliberately awkward control schemes.\nA thousand prototyping girls in space.\nA poem without any line breaks in it.\nThe zine era of web design, when people would just type HTML and it would become a web page.\nPhrases that make sense locally but not globally.\nA comedian who is in lots of things.\nThe kind of poem you'd get if you put a poem on a wiki.\nThe kind of thing that would probably be read on this show.\nThe kind of web site that you'd run into when you're doing an ARG.\nInstalling Roblox on the PS5 to teach your daughter to read English better.\nPlaying a game with purple vomiting everywhere.\nThe ways a 7 year old interacts with a Grand Theft Auto.\nTeaching yourself how to drive in Grand Theft Auto and obeying all the traffic laws.\nNot shielding your kid from media but talking to them about it instead.\nAcademy Award winner Fisher Stevens.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2024-10-28T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/774b92f7-0d10-4ac7-b22d-e64e3455b0fa.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":68093073,"duration_in_seconds":4255}]},{"id":"429765dc-4c27-4000-9bfc-e861cef70663","title":"261. Chat Hurt Chatself In Chat's Confusion","url":"https://topiclords.com/chat-hurt-chatself-in-chats-confusion","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nAlex\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/@adiener\nhttps://discord.com/invite/ZkV2zdb\n\nMitch\n\n\nhttps://hbmmaster.tumblr.com/\nhttps://www.youtube.com/@HBMmaster\nhttps://www.patreon.com/hbmmaster\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nThe Wikipedia article about football\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football\n\nClassic Macintosh computers\nThe entomologist nerds get like two minutes of screen time in Silence of the Lambs, but I'm pretty sure they directly inspired the whole genre of forensic investigation TV.\nWith Apologies to Dr. Seuss, by Supper Mario Broth\n\n\nhttps://fxtwitter.com/MarioBrothBlog/status/1807077109661114636\n\nArchipelago\n\n\nhttps://archipelago.gg/\n\nThat \"chat is a fourth person pronoun\" thing is impressively wrong\n\n\nMicrotopics: \n\n\nOff-the-cuff something.\nPutting on the best talent show Cohost has ever seen. \nWww.www.www\nHow to deal with multiple things that are called the same thing.\nA list of things called Georgia. \nA very opinionated move that you would not expect from a source as neutral as Wikipedia.\nSometimes your can carry the ball; sometimes you can't carry the ball. \nWhat an IP address has to say about women in sports. \nSports: there's a place where you play it. \nWatching Mexican TV and seeing an ad for \"¡futbol americano!\"\nRepairing an old Mac that you found in an e-waste place. \nWhether programming has changed since 1985.\nRunning an Electron app on a Mac Classic. \nSwitcher allowing you to run four 128k programs at a time on a 512k Mac. \nHow the 1991 Borland C++ debugger compares to the 2024 Visual Studio debugger.\nBlah Blob, a Celeste-inspired platformer implemented as a Hypercard stack.\nSitting at the blender all day blending everything within arm's reach. \nSteve Jobs' relationship with fans. \nWrapping your Xbox 360 in a towel to reflow the cracked solder.\nAdding an extra lane to a highway to make the traffic worse. \nTwo awkwardly charming guys who help with an FBI investigation. \nCSIvania.\nThe public domain jingle that precedes the poem. \nSupper Mario Broth.\nWario's Shit Bone.\nA Rare Gooper Bloober Goop Gooble Event.\nRhyming portend with event. \nA textuovisual post.\nDr. Soup.\nWhether the folks writing the Prima guide to Mario Sunshine get to personally ask Miyamoto what the weird goop enemies are called. \nBowser's Fury: the final Mario game.\nF Boy: the F stands for fireball. \nTrying to use a social media service when you don't know anyone on it. \nIn My Tumbl Opinion.\nWeird Mario Enemies.\nF Boy (Again) \nWanting a cool nickname like F Boy.\nExplaining randomizers to someone who has never heard of video games. \nMulti-game multiplayer randomizers.\nA non-randomized randomizer.\nGetting rupee donations left and right when all you need is a sword. \nUnofficial archipelago support. \nThe hypothetical dad behind the fourth wall. \nThe hypothetical eighth month of the year. \nSubtumbling.\nHow to tell the difference between a noun and a pronoun. \nOld-fashioned home grown misinformation. \nGetting from fourth wall to fourth person. \nFourth person perspective as an alternative term for first person plural.\nWhether \"dad\" is a pronoun.\nChat hurt chatself in chat's confusion.\nRebageling images from 2014.\nAgreeing with yourself from 10 years ago about which images are interesting. \n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2024-10-21T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/429765dc-4c27-4000-9bfc-e861cef70663.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":60889546,"duration_in_seconds":3805}]},{"id":"caeb9d4f-e0fd-4bfb-b9d1-95e63c2b8510","title":"260. This Sentient Life Could've Been An Email","url":"https://topiclords.com/this-sentient-life-couldve-been-an-email","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nJenni\nChris\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nAre corporate mascots in US culture age-locked to a generation? I have done no research about this\nThe continuation of our species depends on balls being able to taste soy sauce\nBB-8 changed my tire\nThe Woodchuck, by Sam Pink\n\n\nhttps://www.reddit.com/r/Poetry/comments/wg09x5/poem_the_woodchuck_by_sam_pink/\n\n\n\nMicrotopics: \n\n\nToo much dick content for one show. \nWhat kind of fetus dong shot engagement you're looking for.\nWhen they smear the goo on your belly. \nThrowing 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.\nShipping a person in Q4.\nAutomating the Omelas kid.\nThe Disney suffering animatronic child asking passers by to walk away from Omelas. \nGen Z no longer needing to read The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas because they live in modern society. \nGardening in one of the hardest places in the world to garden. \nWhat's the grass for? \nAn office park spending millions of gallons of water to maintain a lawn nobody ever walks on or looks at.\nWhat 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. \nAn electrical problem that's very pronounced when Jenni turns on the blender. \nThe Golden Age of Corporate Mascots.\nUndead Corporate Mascots. \nTrying to find a picture of the Toucan Sam redesign and ending up on Deviant Art.\nHoward and Nester.\nWhether American kids will tolerate anime.\nPresident of the Nintendo No Fun Club. \nSpending $200 on the Nintendo hint line trying to solve the last screen in Solstice. \nAn adventure game that's also a platformer where if your toe touches a candle flame it's an instant game over. \nInventing terrible camera angles in a 2D game. \nIt's 3D, but on your Speccy!\nTrusting a YouTube documentary more the longer the video is.\nAre Domo Kun and Hello Kitty free agents? \nCap'n Crunch guest starring in the Star Wars Holiday Special. \nA Roma who was once helpful.\nEating a sandwich and getting the sandwich tattooed on your bicep because.\nA baby name that Boomer moms love. \nRemington Steel On At 7PM After Matlock Jones.\nGetting into a thing with people on Metafilter.\nPOV: when your girlfriend gets you Swedish meatballs at Ikea.\nWhether Frosthaven is important to the testicles tasting umami story. \nVanilloid receptors. \nWhy you can shock your tongue with a 9 volt battery but you can't shock your forearm even if it's wet.\nThe chef with the tiny spoon in your testicles making sure to get the exact right MSG level in your semen. \nPeppers hacking mammal biology. \nSeeds who enjoy being digested by birds. \nThe cardioprotective benefit of spicy food.\nThe Ones Who Bring it Back to Omelas.\nBroccoli evolving into crabs. \nThis is canon: BB-8 drives a 2016 Corolla.\nPretending that you are talking to a Youtube audience while you make s sandwich. \nJust a li'l guy who rolls around on a ball. \nR2D2: a mean mean man.\nThe floor falling out of the Pinto while you're driving it. \nA rubber pad with friction stripes on it. \nTurning it until it feels like you broke it, but you didn't and you have to keep going.\nAfter the cake comes out of the oven the recipe stops having steps. \nHow to get help from Linux users. \nThe entire wheel snapping off the axle as you're parking at Camerica Bank.\nDifferent car, same maintenance strategy. \nDriving a car until it can no longer be ontologically be classified as a car.\nChurchill's Irregulars.\nWaiting for Peter Jackson to mansplain to you the sound a car makes when the wheel snaps off.\nDelving too deeply into the Cars cinematic universe. \nA Mastodon setting that hides all of Jim's BB-8 toots.\nHow to find people to follow on Nectarine. \nThe dying MUD you joined in 1997.\nRadioactive names such as Hitler and Sheldon. \nJoining a social media service and it tells you there are no posts. \nSam Pink strikes again. \nThe emotional arc of putting a tiny hat on a woodchuck. \nA woodchuck you would definitely do a murder to. \nAmpersand at the beginning of the line. \nThe Furniture That Rolled Away From Omelas. \nWhy the computer is mad in I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream.\nLooking for sentient life in the universe when you have dolphins at home.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2024-10-14T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/caeb9d4f-e0fd-4bfb-b9d1-95e63c2b8510.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":72542878,"duration_in_seconds":4533}]},{"id":"9c0dd629-3157-4531-9439-04ddffc15b39","title":"259. All Bag, No Pipes","url":"https://topiclords.com/all-bag-no-pipes","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nElena\n\n\nEsper 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.\"\n\nTyriq\n\n\nhttps://50games.fun/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nBeing witty and social is my favorite power fantasy to realize\nPopular music: sometimes popular because it's good?\nWhere do we go after Cohost\nBallad of the Veliger \n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Garstang?useskin=vector#The_Ballad_of_the_Veliger\n\n\n\nMicrotopics: \n\n\nJapanese cold medicine. \nPromising the guy at the drug store you haven't taken this drug on the last week. \nLulu Attack X.\nWhat the College Humor folks went on to do after graduating. \n50 games for a fictional console.\nUFO 500.\nSuper Mario Bros but it scrolls wrong. \nGoogle docs autocorrecting your Steam keys.\nSome weird shit that you're going to maybe discover. \nWhy he's named Gordy.\nBeing sharp and on it all the time in a conversational manner.\nThe safety of a fantasy that is unrealistic to fulfill in real life.\nPicking a joke and connecting it to the prompt.\nMaking a speech check and the DM thinks of a clever thing for you to say. \nComing across as socially competent in a conversation and feeling great for the rest of the day.\nLooking at an extremely charismatic, competent character in a film and thinking \"that's me! That's me in there!\"\nPeople talking to you about Chappell Roan.\nJapanese translated cover of Good Luck Babe.\nHearing a lot about an artist and thinking \"this artist has a lot of attention and they don't need mine\"\nThe combination of a man, a woman, and bunch of instruments. \nWhere people who like pop music hear new music.\nPop music: not as popular as it used to be.\nThe pros and cons of people enjoying a wider variety of pop culture. \nFingerprints in the Clay. \nHaving to make synthesizer music in prison because they won't let you have guitars. \nNot paying attention to the political context of the unintelligible screaming in your favorite album.\nAncestors of the guitar that sound a little bit different from the guitar.\nPeople being unable to tell what amateurish synthesizer work sounds like. \nInstruments producing incidental noises that come alongside the sounds you intend to make, just by their nature as a physical object.\nPink Pony Club, a song about dancing at a club.\nAuthenticity vs. perceived authenticity.\nTrying to stay on top of fashion trends.\nMaking noises because you feel compelled to.\nFinding one way or another to pay off the Capitalism demons.\nHaving the genetic disposition to practice a lot.\nSeeking out things that are easy for you personally to become good at.\nDrawing 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.\nSinging to yourself on the bus.\nAn instrument that's just the screechy tube part of the bagpipes.\nA monotonic screech machine.\nJoining your church choir and knowing you're better than everybody else there.\nDoing a really good job and being relieved that nobody noticed.\nWhat does 12 year old Jim know? Certainly not where he's been for the past six months.\nMaking a space for humans on the internet.\nTumblr wins by doing absolutely nothing.\nThe kind of person who is like \"follow me onto this social media site I've just heard of right now\"\nArtist Alley.\nThe moral difference between \"liking\" and \"reposting.\"\nThe \"reposting something without liking it\" vs. \"liking it without reposting it\" truth table.\nA British citizen from the 19th century with a name that looks German.\nHow the gastropod got its twist.\nHorny Foot Without.\nA poem that is just literally what it says on the tin.\nA little baby sea guy.\nA sonnet about the anatomy of the eyeball.\nWhat marine biology nerds got up to in 1928.\nLarval Forms and Other Zoological Verses.\nRed Seas Under Red Skies.\nLamarckian evolution.\nSnails are great. (Except for the cone snail.)\nI'm on a sea slug diet.\nThe class of pet that you never touch or interact with in any way.\nHow to interact with fish.\nWhether koi care that you're petting them.\nInteracting with fish by having them clean your teeth.\nEnticing your pet octopus to do the dishes by covering them with fish paste.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2024-10-07T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/9c0dd629-3157-4531-9439-04ddffc15b39.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":66154855,"duration_in_seconds":4134}]},{"id":"19e20ee9-d80b-4718-9ed0-4bb3962fe50e","title":"258. Only The Head Of The Deer Sparks Joy","url":"https://topiclords.com/only-the-head-of-the-deer-sparks-joy","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nCort\nMark\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nThe best and worst thing you’ve ever found in the trash.\nTraveling with children & associated challenges/solutions\nAdventures with BB-8\nSurvey of Forms - Burma-Shave Sign, by Andrew Plotkin\n\n\nhttps://eblong.com/zarf/thod/58.html\n\nThe useless superpowers game\nDoes Mega Man ever suffer ennui?\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nDependable sources of guava.\nStaring at the raccoons as they go by at night.\nRoom temperature ice cream full of bullets.\nVietnamese guava vs. central american guava.\nGnawing through a leathery rock to impress your in-laws.\nCudgel Hero Faction.\nA life-sized deer sticking out of your neighbor's trash can.\nWhat to do with three quarters of a deer.\nSwimming around in a treasure factory and finding spices.\nExplaining to your mom where this salt and pepper came from.\nDodging a delicious treat bullet.\nBringing home a NeXT machine from the dumpsters behind Carnegie Mellon.\nThrowing away 30 year old legal books and a time traveling lawyer compares you to Hitler.\nWon't somebody think of the LA hipsters?\nFiguring out how to be okay not having exactly what you want all the time.\nGetting heatstroke in Japan.\nMr. Puddles Pineapple having the time of his life.\nGetting a photo of your stuffed penguin at a Hamlet castle holding a skull.\nIs it really fake if you're telling the truth in a fake way?\nHousekeeping having a good time with your stuffed animals.\nThe perfect companion to explore the Star Wars Galaxy by your side.\nArranging yourself external motivators.\nA skill separate from cooking that is still relevant to the dining experience.\nButterfly Pee Tea.\nInterwoven bread dough.\nThese are Zelda meatballs!\nTrying out the recipe for Dubious Food in the Zelda cookbook.\nSonic the Hedgehog chili that takes five hours to make.\nRouge the Bat's favorite dish.\nVery round droid. Rounder than most.\nThe make-your-own-lightsaber course class project room experience.\nGoing to Disneyland and asking someone in costume for directions to the speakeasy.\nA game that exists to make children sad.\nEveryone working together to blow the shit out of Bowser, Jr.\nLosing 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.\nExplaining 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.\nThe guy trying to backwards long jump the stairs to the final boss in Super Nintendo World.\nA series of billboards that turn out to be a poem.\nWhich came first, the Pizza Hut or the building shaped like a hut that you make pizza in?\nA racially insensitive fireworks store.\nDropping a CRT monitor off of a tall building vs. dropping an LCD display.\nRaccoons witnessing crimes.\nShaking exactly two aspirin out of the bottle every single time.\nAn extremely opaque Pepper's Ghost.\nMega Man defeating Ennui Man and acquiring his powers.\nMega Man can't defeat Dr. Wily because of Asimov's Three Laws.\nDr. Light deleting Mega Man's special abilities between games because he needs the hard drive space for porn.\nMega Man choosing to forget Crash Man's memories because he's tired of remembering that awkward first date.\nDr. Wily hacking everyone's iPhone to have the latest U2 album.\nSearching for lords and finding a random raccoon.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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","date_published":"2024-09-30T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/19e20ee9-d80b-4718-9ed0-4bb3962fe50e.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":62161396,"duration_in_seconds":3885}]},{"id":"9977c3ee-390c-4c4f-916c-cbcdaf825c59","title":"257. Stinky Judo","url":"https://topiclords.com/stinky-judo","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nNathan\n\n\nhttps://store.steampowered.com/app/2976260/ChainStaff/\n\nTom\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nDuring 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?\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Izzy_(mascot)\n\nGetting to an age where media is good: the writers are your contemporaries so their work doesn't feel stodgy anymore.\nHow are you saying goodbye to trigraphs?\nRain by Raymond Carver\n\n\nhttps://readalittlepoetry.com/2012/12/13/rain-by-raymond-carver/\n\nJumping levels of abstraction while explaining computery things, how to pronounce angle brackets and command-line flags\n3rd tetris playtest developed (\"rolling\"), ponder an entirely new approach to a game (or medium, or problem) that comes nearly 40 years later.\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV5DIZyqsaw\n\n\n\nMicrotopics: \n\n\nWhether the chain staff is also the grappling hook. \nHow all games ought to be made. \nUsing an ancient alien artifact as an immersion blender.\nGetting the steamer arm upgrade before you can steam the milk. \nSpace Opera by Catherynne Valente.\nBooks where you read a couple paragraphs and you're done for the day. \nA sport where if you reach just a little bit further maybe you can touch your opponent's face with your foot.\nStealing cheese rolling from France at the 2028 Olympics. \nHosting the Olympics: a huge money-loser. \nShouldering the terrible burden of hosting the 2028 Olympics. \nAging up the 1996 Olympics mascot so they'll be the right age for the 2028 Olympics. \nThe Chinese Olympics mascot Jim keeps confusing for Tingle.\nOlympic announcers just assuming everyone knows what a \"B-Boy\" is.\nThis right here is a horse.\nArranging a competition as bracket of 1v1 matches when it could just as easily be individually scored performances.\nGymnasts all over the world chalking their hands because humans are more alike than they are different. \nRunning fast at the Olympics. \nHiring Topic Lords as Olympic announcers. \nSynchronized swimming except you need to synchronize with all your competitors. \nGetting out the shotgun mics to televise basketball players trash talking each other. \nLiking television alongside people who share your generational values. \nEnjoying being part of a target demographic until you get too old. \nMaking an effort to appreciate new art more. \nThe inexhaustible supply of old movies you haven't seen. \nWhat is lost and what is gained now that we're not all watching exactly the same TV shows every night. \nRealizing your social values match the media you're consuming because you didn't roll your eyes at the Very Special Episode.\nAll the video games where you build a bionic arm for an NPC.\nTwo guys in a missile silo arguing to keep trigraphs in the C standard. \nBoring programming situations where memory leaks are impossible. \nA guy drinking a beer looking over your shoulder while you program who says \"yep\" whenever you do something he approves of.\nCompiling C++ to a web site. \nWriting a web assembly program by typing opcodes into a Javascript string.\nWhat website people are into. \nMusic that plays while you're waiting for a game to load.\nLoading the loading screen. \nSome things are being destroyed and other things rebuilt.\nWaking up and it's raining. \nSaying you have no regrets when of course you have regrets – everyone has regrets, fool!\nWhat cities were destroyed in December 2012?\nScraping information so you can stick it in a file system. \nComplete List of Destroyed Cities. \nHow grumpy Raymond Carver was as a six year old. \nHow to communicate about what you want someone to type. \nWhat they call curly braces in other countries. \nSmooth brackets.\nHow Mandarin speakers write C code. \nDrawing 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.\nMathematicians giving all their variables single letter names. \nEmbarrassing yourself by begging the compiler to not reformat your code. \nChoosing to do the easy part of your job right now.\nHow to play Tetris faster.\nStrumming arcade buttons to press them faster. \nWeird ways of holding the NES controller to move Tetris pieces faster. \nA new way to interact with this piece of plastic. \nTurning the back of the controller into a giant button. \nWhat high jump competitors thought the first time they saw the Fosbury Flop.\nLearning to do close-up magic and getting frustrated because you can't literally make the card vanish. \nFunding a weird game and finding out later if it ever ships.\nWhether the folks who made ZPF considered any better names.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2024-09-23T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/9977c3ee-390c-4c4f-916c-cbcdaf825c59.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":71686686,"duration_in_seconds":4480}]},{"id":"280c66c8-fb73-4899-a051-4a554f82d53f","title":"256. Donkey Kong Is A Tankie","url":"https://topiclords.com/donkey-kong-is-a-tankie","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nMark\n\n\nhttps://mythcarver.bandcamp.com/\nhttps://writhenhilt.bandcamp.com/album/ancient-sword-cult\nDungeon Synth:\nhttps://fief.bandcamp.com/\nhttps://auramerlin.bandcamp.com/\nhttps://shadowknell.bandcamp.com/\nhttps://hillsfar.bandcamp.com/\nhttps://erang.bandcamp.com/\n\nShirley\n\n\nhttps://www.leuchtturm1917.us/some-lines-a-day.html\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nNaming a human\nBoomers say that you get more conservative as you get older, but I just keep getting more liberal.\nI'm scared to start recording Mario Odyssey\nThe Orc\n\n\nhttps://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/6TcTlXuz.png\n\n\n\nMicrotopics: \n\n\nWrithen Hilt.\nWriting a few sentences to achieve your goal. \nBeing extremely entertained by your drunken journal entries from a year ago.\nRemembering the 140 years your son has been around. \nLearningl from the dead. \nHow the archaeologists of the future are going to cope with social media, let alone the reams of LLM generated nonsense. \nDetecting forged paintings via the radioactive isotopes that are only found in pigments manufactured after the detonation of the atomic bomb. \nLow-background steel.\nScavenging steel from shipwrecks because you just can't make steel that good any more. \nPizza Pranks.\nPackaging a USB stick as though it's a cassette tape. \nPackaging your Dungeon Synth album on cassette in a Sega Genesis cartridge box. \nPropsr Topics.\nCalling your niece Billy Zane.\nNaming your child Scooter. (Monotonously.)\nBeing unable to decide whether you're going to name your child Scooter or Squooter.\nSome Wizard of Earrhsea ahit.\nHolding power over your friends (magically, not legally) \nYour name for a person carrying with it your relationship with that person.\nWhy they shipped a game called \"Epic Mickey.*\nCompaeing this year's top 50 baby names to the top 50 a century ago.\nMikse meeting Mikes.\nThe Bob Emergency.\nOne day there will be no more Bobs, and a door will close.\nContinuing to refer to your nephew as a \"little kid\" even though he's 45 now. \nThinking you're getting more liberal but eventually realizing you're getting more apocalyptic. \nGarbage-ass subreddits full of dis- and misinformation.\nBattle Jackets vs. Jackets for Battle.\nPregnancy subreddits.\nChecking out of gamer culture entirely.\nBlack metal communities dealing with white supremacists. \nCan't we just have a place who love swords and wizards? \nHow to not run a Nazi bar. \nWhether people get more liberal or more conservative as they age.\nStone cold hippies.\nExplaining trans rights to your parents who are doing their best to understand.\nAsking the AI-generated slush pile how to update your political beliefs. \nKeeping younger people around who care about you enough to help you fix your shitty opinions. \nHungry for Jim topics.\nJapanese cultural touchstones referenced in video games that just seem like nonsense to Americans. \nSlavic folklore in the Witcher games.\nImporting video games from more and more obscure countries because Japan is played out now. \nRecognizing Greek heavy metal just from the riffs.\nVacuuming a couch and twenty one-dollar bills fly out of it. \nShagrat, you shag rats!\nRheumy weeping orbs that glare with hate.\nTruly a poem of unknown provenance.\nShagrat doesn't deserve this!\nWe had some great topics today, y'all.\nMythcarver.\nA discord for people who are due in the same month as you. \nThe Libras who won't let the dads in.\nCircle time with other pregnant couples.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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","date_published":"2024-09-16T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/280c66c8-fb73-4899-a051-4a554f82d53f.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":73263646,"duration_in_seconds":4578}]},{"id":"63557269-fef7-4987-8f70-8af5a3a13b72","title":"255. We're Truly On The Bleeding Edge Of Something","url":"https://topiclords.com/were-truly-on-the-bleeding-edge-of-something","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nAdam\n\n\nhttps://store.steampowered.com/app/2769410/Ash__Adams_GOBSMACKED/\n\nLinker\n\n\nhttps://linker.itch.io/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nWays you've changed in the last 20 years that have surprised you\nExamples of x animal software running on y animal hardware (ie. fox being cat software on dog hardware)\nThis argument about whether erasure poetry is poetry\n\n\nhttps://www.tumblr.com/whistletown/753096096947011584\n\nFavourite RPG (videogame or tabletop; open to interpretation)\n\n\nMicrotopics: \n\n\nLaunching a game in the deep past.\nIndiepocalypse.\nAfter Journey's End vol. 2.\nThe Monthly Tape Club. \nGames that are big enough or marketable enough.\nGetting excited about this month's PC Gamer demo disk.\nZine-like game distribution. \nMaking a small game to express a thought. \nMaking a living making weird shit. \nThe methods of marketing a small game. \nPractices that have existed for thousands of years.\nThe boom and bust cycle and why you might or might not get in on the next boom.\nMaking a shit-ton of money and continuing to pay your employees rather than laying them off. \nWhether Gen Z is savvy to the MBA brain worms. \nWhether Jim has a college degree.\nNew England Sarcastic.\nLearning about having kids and wondering what it'd be like to have a purpose in life.\nBeing legally responsible for the survival of the worst roommate imaginable.\nOther People's Dogs. \nHow is your life different from when you were 6 years old? \nBecoming a permanent resident of Canada.\nA local theater company producing your play. \nFrog Fractions: it came from space.\nA thing that expresses the maelstrom going on in my head (or soul) \nThe six 70s funk songs with a long enough stretch of isolated drums that they became the drums for every song ever.\nHow to make art as an expression of human needs. \nVideo games: they shouldn't exist. \nExpressing a thought with the skills you enjoy flexing.\nThe virtues of having playtesters.\nBug software running on mammal hardware. \nTiny cats in the bodies of big cats. \nService dogs for cheetahs.\nRemaining calm around humans because your dog buddy loves humans.\nErasure Poetry.\nOh Someone Oh God And Then Me.\nFormalized rules for determining who gets credit for what when a bunch of people make a piece of art.\nLegal precedents for copyright and reproduction rights.\nMagnetic fridge poetry.\nInventing an art form that's even more constrained than pixel art somehow. \nUnity of effect.\nLooking at a blurry 16x16 tile and not being quite sure what it's supposed to be. \nRPGs: what even are they?\nWhat you can get away with within the aesthetics of a black and white Game Boy game.\nWhether Breath of the Wild counts as an immersive sim and whether immersive sims count as RPGs\nGetting into the topic weeds.\nChained Echoes.\nObserving the sand running through the hourglass.\nSocial anxiety preventing you from enjoying tabletop RPGs.\nPlaying tabletop RPGs with a bunch of weird theater people.\nMeeting your friend at a bar to catch up on the latest events in his tabletop RPG sessions.\nHow to use your name on social media.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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)","date_published":"2024-09-09T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/63557269-fef7-4987-8f70-8af5a3a13b72.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":56676936,"duration_in_seconds":3542}]},{"id":"67558368-aad3-4950-8239-10217e10fb09","title":"254. Help Me Get Over The Pervert Hump","url":"https://topiclords.com/help-me-get-over-the-pervert-hump","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nRyan\n\n\nhttps://www.instagram.com/ryanikeaudio/\n\nAlicia\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nHow do I ask people what they're into without sounding like a pervert?\nArctic Expeditions and the stupid beauty of man's hubris\nAsterix Park\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parc_Astérix\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KK3Yr80lPOY\n\nI Won't Call You Pretty, by L.E. Bowman\n\n\nhttps://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/tghmy9KF.png\n\nI sent this poem to my wife and she immediately responded by writing one addressed to me that was just as good, so, that's the person I married.\n\n\nMicrotopics: \n\n\nHow to work as a freelance creative without burning yourself out.\nThe me who comes up if you google me.\nThe black egg who knows all.\nA huge egg with a second smaller egg in it.\nThe chickens who got no credit for inventing the Matrioshka doll.\nPluto: still a planet, because a dwarf planet is a kind of planet. \nTeam Moon.\nAncient Occult Magicks that you can check out from the library.\nGiving up on the fairy smut everyone is recommending because it isn't smutty enough.\nThe air I just breathed.\nOne of my Top 5 Zeldas.\nHow many goes you get at being alive.\nLuring Moongrum into the rolling boulder trap.\nBracing to hear about some online stuff.\nConference season in the game industry.\nMeeting someone at a conference and asking them a question that Black Philip would ask.\nHow to Unfuck your Sales.\nContent you Enjoyed.\nWho are the coolest hangs in game dev?\nWorking with people you know and trust.\nThe Pervert's Mound.\nImagine if I was cool.\nWearing a sandwich board with the word \"MONOGAMY\" on it so the woman you're talking to knows you're not hitting on her.\nRefusing to answer random innocuous questions so that it's not a tacit admission of guilt when you refuse to discuss an accusation.\nBirthday bookshop tours.\nClimbing as an act of disrespect to the mountain.\nThe HMS Terror and the HMS Erebus.\nPeak British Colonialism.\nIgnoring the locals' advice about what parts of animals to eat.\nSledging around your silverware.\nGetting lead poisoning from the canned food you brought with you to find the Northwest Passage.\nA cool pantsless mummy.\nParadoxical Undressing.\nHaving a hard time climbing Mount Everest because the path is choked with corpses of white people who blew it.\nOops, All Antarctic Ship Crashes.\nGetting excited about bookshelves again.\nStepping forward into whatever the next grift is going to be.\nAsterix the Gaul.\nLocalizing a book that is full of puns to dozens of different languages.\nNot 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.\nWhat would an Asterix theme park look like?\nRiding in a big inner tube down the lazy river.\nElder Millenials learning about Skibidi Toilet.\nAsterix Park is the world's 12th largest economy.\nMy brain beans are really getting steamed, here.\nBuilding an empire on that mustache.\nWatching POV rollercoaster videos with your five year old.\nRefusing to get in the sea.\nGoing up to strangers and asking what percentage of the sea is fish piss.\nWeekend at Bernie's-ing your friend's corpse to Asterix Park.\nWhat style of underwear Zeus is wearing today.\nWho makes Zeus's underwear?\nEating the boar sandwich at Asterix Park.\nTasting the terror sweat on the wild boar you just hunted down.\nThe little bald kid from the comics page has a theme park??\nPirates of the Carabiner.\nSailing through a diorama.\nThe theme park ride with the sudden drop into a pool of mercury.\nThe Haunted Garfield Theme Park.\nDeFuncoland.\nJon trying to get with the veterinarian lady he's into and Garfield ruining it.\nLet's-plays as a service.\nYou won't believe what happens when these Muppets swarm Treasure Island.\nA movie recap that is 80% of the length of the movie.\nFlirting tricks.\nThe violence of being struck by Cupid's arrow.\nComplimenting someone on something they have no control over.\nGood luck getting any continuity out of me!\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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","date_published":"2024-09-02T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/67558368-aad3-4950-8239-10217e10fb09.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":62900348,"duration_in_seconds":3931}]},{"id":"b951d075-3e40-4426-a4a5-a67486914acd","title":"253. A Unified Theory Of Hot Dog Preference","url":"https://topiclords.com/a-unified-theory-of-hot-dog-preference","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nWacy\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/@WacyandChris\n\nChris\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/mrchrislhall\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nDifficulties with long term traveling\nNorway\nWhy don't they have novelty whipped cream\nThe Dirt Man Song, by Carter Vail\n\n\nhttps://genius.com/Carter-vail-dirt-man-lyrics\n\n\n\nMicrotopics: \n\n\nSpecialty pour over filter coffee. \nA very deep rabbit hole of discovery of flavors. \nDrink the Machine: a Clean Metallic Flavor.\nWacy and Chris. \nChris or sounds like Chris.\nLiving near your friends and family and being able to see them any time you want. \nSpot-it.\nExplaining what \"on air\" means to someone who has never listened to the radio. \nWhy are flickering lights creepy? \nGetting Winston ready for swim class.\nThe pressure to hyper-optimize. \nBeing in the place where you are all the time. \nThe world: it's really big and really full of stuff.\nHow to exist in a city where you don't speak the language.\nThings you don't feel like maximizing. \nGrocery store bagged salads.\nCountries that are known for salads.\nEating nothing but pickled fish and salty licorice during your trip even though you hate both.\nBeing delighted by mediocre sushi. \nHow many times Topic Lords has been downloaded in Osaka.\nModern New-Age Scandinavian Food. \nGas station hot dogs in Norway. \nOrdering a big slab of My Girlfriend is Not Hungry.\nWays Norway is familiar to Americans. \nWalking around kicking the glaciers.\nBikepackers.\nGiant highway ferries with six lanes of traffic.\nBrown Cheese Waffles.\nDaylight all night long. \nNormal people going outside and walking their dogs at 1am.\nThe song that plays with the baby raccoon spinning in a circle. \nA country that is extremely serious about tunnels. \nOpening up your windows to let the cave air in. \nVisiting the Arctic circle in the winter. \nGood ideas, like Pesto Whipped Cream. \nOrange Cream Whipped Cream. \nThe toothpaste tubes with the colored wedges.\nBirthday Cake Coffee Creamer. \nGuava-flavored beer foam. \nCoffee creamer except for beer.\nChefs seeking out the worst food so they can understand exactly why it's bad. \nThe Friendly's Cone Head.\nThe Bad-Interesting Food Spectrum.\nSleep regression, or more generally how you don't always keep forward progress. \nWhy kids become picky eaters.\nReplicating the texture of uncooked hot dog in a novelty whipped cream.\nWhat whippets are for.\nOriginal flavorless N2O tanks.\nUsing the word for amyl nitrite that signifies that you are a VCR owner and not a drug user.\nHow to not become dirt in the dirt lair.\nThe dirt man's tithe.\nLying to your kid about cosmology. \nPretending to believe the little lies as practice for believing big lies. \nReminding your mom to make a leprechaun trap.\nMaking fake boot prints to convince your kids that god is real.\nReindeer food. (It's just hay.)\nAll the years you didn't keep dirt under your pillow. \nThe dirt man's dirt man taking you even deeper down. \nLots of great places where the dirt man can be found.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2024-08-26T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/b951d075-3e40-4426-a4a5-a67486914acd.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":61197582,"duration_in_seconds":3824}]},{"id":"d46ad0bc-759e-48f5-9a8f-112aa5c91e07","title":"252. A Properly Functioning Bag Nose","url":"https://topiclords.com/a-properly-functioning-bag-nose","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nJohnB\nKory\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nI have become a vinyl record enjoyer\nTeaching myself C++, or \"I learned C++ when I should've learned C, AMA\"\nForgetting things as a way of getting other things done\nI Sat Belonely by John Lennon\n\n\nhttps://silverbirchpress.wordpress.com/2013/05/14/i-sat-belonely-poem-by-john-lennon/\n\nThe vestigial organs of video games\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nKbones' Wire Tripper, on display at Wonderville.\nEaster eggs for fans of Gordy and the Monster Moon.\nEbirah, Horror of the Deep.\nWatching Shin Godzilla immediately after Evangelion.\nDan Ryckert's nonsense over at Giant Bomb.\nListening to a Mario Party game on the radio.\nSupplementing all your collecting hobbies with a creative hobby.\nGrabbing the record player before the garbage collector does.\nAn auto-sustaining supply of sound bars entering and leaving the trash.\nThe Digital Jim Gift Shop.\nThe Frog Fractions OST Vinyl in Bug Mars Orange.\nAuditioning for college radio by DJing a show to tape that won't be aired, just rated by a panel of experts.\nThe vinyl soundtrack to a Net Yaroze game.\nAlbums that have an odd number of sides.\nHolographic tie fighters that spin around when you shine a light on them.\nThe Funkopopization of Vinyl.\nHobbies that are better if you have friends.\nUsing wood glue to clean an LP, then using an inverse record player to play music off the glue's negative grooves.\nThe glue's glue.\nStation to Station, by David Bowie.\nThe experience of listening to an album all the way through.\nContent-producing reasons.\nAn excuse to listen to an album with friends under the auspices of being productive.\nSeeing the music by looking how wide the groove is.\nSmooth jazz appreciation.\nThe Madden NFL of the record shop.\nHow to justify going to GDC when you're not a game developer.\nHow to ship a Love2D game.\nDrag your file onto a Love Executable.\nPutting together your first Arkanoid-like in Game Boy Assembly.\nTo create Red Dead Redemption, first add two binary digits.\nSuper FML.\nObjectless games.\nThe data flow required to change screens in a Zelda-like game.\nWhat happened to various aspects of the Adobe Flash ecosystem.\nWhy console games had such sluggish menus.\nA bug where if you do it right you don't have to press A.\nHow to do a bureaucracy thing. \nKeeping an important task in mind so you can accomplish all your less important tasks.\nTrying to forget all but one thing you need to do because if you remember two things you'll just sit there being anxious.\nForgetting information that you do have vs. faking information that you don't have.\nFoveated vision.\nYesterday's List.\nHow many Frog Fractions had to die because the most dangerous task was attempted first? \nA little tiny little pig.\nBalonely.\nA Spaniard in the Works.\nReading your own book in your fictionalized biopic.\nWhimsical Elisions.\nFun whimsical vs. dark whimsical.\nComing back from India and writing a hundred one minute songs that don't mean anything.\nMusic that you've listened to so much that it's like listening to breathing air. \nDon't Pass Me By and Octopus' Garden.\nGame mechanics that still exist because nobody's thought about them in a while. \nMoon phases in Shin Megami Tensei.\nDemon Fusion.\nWhat Super Mario Wonder does with a combo since it doesn't have points.\nA potentially dangerous vestigial organ in video games.\nHow to make pinball beginner friendly. \n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2024-08-19T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/d46ad0bc-759e-48f5-9a8f-112aa5c91e07.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":62087417,"duration_in_seconds":3880}]},{"id":"ee254511-69d4-4b69-be1a-81f9008fb45c","title":"251. Organs Experiencing Red Shift","url":"https://topiclords.com/organs-experiencing-red-shift","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nErica\nCasey\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nIsn't it great to have a coelom?\nSolving problems by waiting for another bigger problem to occur and override the previous problem\nMammals learning to eat cephalopods\n\n\nhttps://crookedtimber.org/2024/03/16/occasional-paper-when-armor-met-lips/\n\nA Narrow Fellow in the Grass, by Emily Dickinson\n\n\nhttps://www.poetryoutloud.org/poem/a-narrow-fellow-in-the-grass-1096/\n\nPersonal project retrospectives\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nThat thing you just heard.\nAssigning your new hire an office. \nPlugging over a million leaking gas and oil wells in West Texas.\nThe Topic Lords Promise. \nA bag that your organs sit in. \nUndifferentiated tissues.\nHow dissecting an earthworm is different from dissecting a gummy worm.\nInflating your coelom in order to take out your spleen.\nOrganisms with high diseectability.\nThe anti-coelom lobby.\nUndifferentiated tubes of goo that get depression. \nThe gummy worm future we're all looking forward to.\nFluid things going on in the organism. \nA car that has a huge dent in it and it doesn't matter because the car still gets around no problem.\nGood car ideas.\nA bad thing happening but it's not your fault.\nBuying your house in a point and clock adventure online. \nRediscovering all the things you have stored at your parent's house. \nMulti-episode Topic Lords story arcs.\nWhich colored stripes are on Wikipedia's Non-Notable Flag.\nThe Topic Lords explainer episode where everyone finds out what this show is about. \nSerial Podcast Monogamy. \nPodcast guilt.\nDiscussing all the same topics as the last episode with no self-awareness. \nNon-Stop Coelom Celebration. \nMy own very special walking bag of guts.\nEvolving cheek muscles to suck meat out of a spiral shell. \nLosing your baby lips. \nWhat it's like to eat a planarian.\nCephalopods that have evolved to eat mammals. \nThe giant squid that have never been seen alive.\nThe colossal squid vs. the giant squid.\nFinding a mobius strip solution so borh your flag and your neighbor'a flag can be biggest.\nOur flag that represents limpness will be your downfall.\nNon-stop sensationalized documentaries about North Korea. \nOpening the border to North Korea so we can finally interview the people about the colossal squid.\nEmily Dickinson slipping into Yoda Speak.\nBeing too busy reading to understand what you're reading. \nWhether the Emily Dickinson poem about the snake is actually about a snake or about a dick or both.\nIt's coming at your feet! It likes a boggy acre!\nA polysexual attitude towards nature.\nEmily Dickinson making thousands of attempts to fix the Gilligan's Island theme. \nHerman Melville describing Moby Dick as \"the Ebon Whale\" because he didn't have Wikipedia. \nMoby Dick annotated by biologists who explain why all the whale facts are wrong. \nGame Developers doing a \"post-mortem\" of projects that are ongoing. \nBefunge.\nClojure and other Lisps.\nWatching your own programming livestreams to learn how to learn better. \nA huge block of text off to the side that tells you how to play the game. \nFine-grained tactical mistakes.\nWhy people keep telling game developers to learn to ship a game.\nThe most significant barrier between you and putting a work of art out in the world.\nInventing metrics for success for game engines that never ship.\nRewriting your game engine to have cooler tech but be way harder to make levels for.\nModern Jim-Style Content.\nArtists trash talking their own work while they're showing it to you.\nA sign on your forehead reading \"ask me about my severely negative feedback.\"\nThe George W. Bush childhood home. \nA community built on everyone's shared desire to leave.\nThe ethic of owning a shotgun. \nThe last of the Midland Odessa complaining.\nBig Bend and Carlsbad Caverns. \nAn airport full of ads for oil wells and oil well accessories.\nThe Chris Kyle American Sniper Memorial. \nA plaque on a sculpture explaining whether the flag represents a penis. \nEverything's a dick if you squint hard enough.\nAn assassin of federal judges.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2024-08-12T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/ee254511-69d4-4b69-be1a-81f9008fb45c.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":68468400,"duration_in_seconds":4279}]},{"id":"26f277ca-fd79-4b39-962f-063e1eefea14","title":"250. Almost Pickles: It's Just Cucumbers!","url":"https://topiclords.com/almost-pickles-its-just-cucumbers","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nJenni\nTyriq\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nThat mayochup and kranch\nBarry Topping\nMagic Shell\nHot Sauce by Just James\n\n\nhttps://www.poetrysoup.com/poem/hot_sauce_889972\n\nVideo games where you put toppings on things\nThe temptation of bad ice cream toppings\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nThe game where you go into your uncle's nipple and find a tiny heart. \nIsles of Sea and Sky.\nA block pushy game.\nToppings that are just recombinations of existing toppings. \nSwitching sriracha brands for labor relations reasons.\nCombining all the soda flavors because you're an iconoclast and suffering because the flavor is worse but it's worth it.\nGetting a squeeze bottle so you can drizzle sauces like on TV.\nGetting pre-ruined peanut butters so you don't need to worry about ruining it any further. \nBuying peanut butter because you no longer live with someone who is allergic to nuts.\nIntrusive and non-intrusive seeds. \nCondiment combinations sticking in your head for decades. \nKetchup and something that's kind of like a thing you might know but might not.\nAlmost Pickles: It's Just Cucumbers. \nHarmless Coconut Water. \nCranch: ranch dressing that that comes out of the can in a wobbly cylinder like cranberry sauce.\nBarry Hilary Valentine Topping.\nParadise Killer.\nWalking into court sipping your Starbucks latte.\nHopping around a beach and looking at a vaporwave pyramid.\nCollecting skate tapes, just like Mario does.\nBails hurt scores, Mario!\nStreet Uni X.\nThe Tony Hawk soundtrack except slightly more a Lilith Fair. \nEnjoying a bad N64 camera enough for the two of us. \nThe thing you squirt onto your ice cream. \nMaking your own counterfeit Kranch at home in a bottle with Kranch written on it in crayon.\nThe Cheese Remains Saucy.\nGetting a boba tea for $17 outside of LA.\nTaking the very worst bite out of your mother in law's ice cream cone.\nWorking out your jaw muscles until you can eat the entire ice cream cone in one bite.\nEating 16 pints of ice cream in six minutes. \nScreaming at ice cream until it teleports into your belly.\nAdmonishing your readers that hot sauce would not make a good wife. \nStealing the pelt of a selkie but she always wants to go back to the ocean. \nSelkie for a wife vs. ice cream for a wife. \nASMRtistry.\nSpices of life.\nUsing a food metaphor to describe the metaphorical nature to food.\nThree pop songs that compare women to food.\nA topic that is floating around in the the collective unconscious.\nSriracha sorbet.\nA flight of tea-flavored ice creams.\nSentient hot sauce putting itself on things you don't usually put hot sauce on.\nSalamander County Public Television.\nA Wario Ware that's a little bit QWOP.\nThe Pancake/Burger/Bacon trilogy. \nAn interactive thing where you put food into space.\nThe American Portion Gun.\nPut things on things.\nVideo games with hamburger building elements.\nA fast food simulator where you solve all the horror game problems that you're in.\nWhether board games count as video games since you can see them. \nVidus Gamus.\nLivin' la Video Game Loca.\nLearning how to recover from mistakes.\nPutting an entire Snickers bar in your cup of Sriracha and the clerk just shakes his head.\nAsking 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!\"\nAll the Mistake Blizzards you can eat.\nNerds Butterfinger Mistake Blizzard.\nPutting barbecue sauce on vanilla ice cream because you're out or chocolate sauce. \nWhat's your favorite cheese to put on Pop-Tarts?\nThe Ambies for Excellence in Audio.\nHow to make more of the red liquid they found in the black sarcophagus.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2024-08-05T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/26f277ca-fd79-4b39-962f-063e1eefea14.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":55533399,"duration_in_seconds":3470}]},{"id":"4ee3285f-3ff6-4a13-822f-ed3a81454c13","title":"249. Singles Night At Whole Foods","url":"https://topiclords.com/singles-night-at-whole-foods","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nIan\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tEaI_bi-i8\n\nShannon\n\n\nhttps://www.oddityroadshow.com/\nhttps://www.youtube.com/c/struccimovies\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nOfficial and unofficial remakes of Yojimbo\nDanny McBride shows, and how to balance character likability with dark comedy- examples of this done well vs poorly?\nI can't fix bad movie dialog mixing for everyone, but I can fix it in my own house\nThe Chinese Checker Players by Richard Brautigan\n\n\nhttp://kempwash.blogspot.com/2011/05/chinese-checker-players-by-richard.html\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nSongs that signify that this scene or moment is sophisticated. \nHow to pronounce Debussy.\nSouthern gothic dark comedy body horror. \nA weirdo from Twitter who can't email your employer because he doesn't know who you work for.\nThe Glass Key's remake family tree. \nA drifter samurai coming to a town. \nA dude who shows up in town and decides to play all the criminal factions against each other. \nThe scene where the protagonist sets the bed on fire and jumps out the window. \nEscaping from rum runners by convincing them that you've already escaped. \nPropping your gun on a cross and using Jesus to pull the trigger. \nA sorceress who spends the whole movie topless because it's one of those movies. \nOmega Doom starring Rutger Hauer.\nA robot who gets stabbed in a bar because the stabber needs to download his memories. \nUsing a mook as a human shield.\nThe supporting actor getting a better offer and quitting in between takes. \nWhere you put the interesting part in your movie. \nA hobo who runs two crime syndicates.\nThe story of two rival vice principals.\nJim's theory for why cringe comedy shouldn't exist. \nWhere cringe comedy has gone since Seinfeld. \nHow to make an unlikable protagonist that people don't admire. \nCharacters who aren't good at anything. \nThe schlub.\nA montage of dad destroying model airplanes with a sledge hammer.\nLiking some things about someone while not liking other things.\nA monster who is very fun to hang out with.\nThe character in the show who ends up in Florida. \nMarathoning Breaking Bad and Better Call Sail and ending up 40 years old no matter how old you were when you started \nWhy you might not throw away a sound bar. \nEntering the Konami code to enable compression. \nWhat the Clear Voice feature actually does.\nGetting really agitated and putting the subtitles on.\nThinking of something interesting to say and then forgetting it.\nWhich one's the son and which one's the dad?\nRipley vs. Ripley's Believe it or Not. \nLobbying for more mean old lesbians in theatrical productions.\nPlaying Chinese Checkers with a woman who outlived her husband by 70 years. \nWhere you were when you realized that it's possible to outlive your spouse by 70 years.\nBowling Alone.\nA place to meet people that isn't the play you go to drink or the place where you go to pray.\nAll your friends who went sober in the last year. \nLiquor stores that only sells non-alcoholic products. \nMocktail bars.\nName tags that have different foods on them.\nInappropriate attention in nerd spaces. \nFiguring out where you can go with all your sober friends. \nWho listens past the first five minutes of a podcast?\nAI-driven smell-o-vision.\nSearching automated transcripts to find things that people didn't say. \nThe subtitler writing \"knockos\" whenever people in The Wire say \"narcos\" in a Baltimore accent. \nStreaming services cutting corners wherever possible in a desperate attempt to become profitable. \nSnitching on bootlegers of racist Disney movies. \nHow to get banned from TikTok.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2024-07-29T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/4ee3285f-3ff6-4a13-822f-ed3a81454c13.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":59944123,"duration_in_seconds":3746}]},{"id":"7e25b221-0602-40af-813c-97c27bb8ec71","title":"248. The Ephemeral Nature Of Digital Fish Food","url":"https://topiclords.com/the-ephemeral-nature-of-digital-fish-food","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nElena\n\n\nhttps://www.gouletpens.com/blogs/fountain-pen-blog/sailor-shikiori-tokiwa-matsu-ink-review\n\nNathalie\n\n\nhttps://alienmelon.itch.io/ [cw:flashing lights]\n\n\n\nTopics: \n\n\nFish-based screensavers\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQpCcQhNfxM\nhttps://www.montereybayaquarium.org/animals/live-cams\n\nFire safety\n\n\nhttps://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheThingThatGoesDoink\nhttps://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/voices.uchicago.edu/dist/8/644/files/2017/08/Chiang-Lifecycle-of-Software-Objects-q3tsuw.pdf\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4Qxqmhqj1A\n\nThe Aquarium and the Glass Harmonica\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOx7zmO5ppw\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FAc3HmfoSY\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSzTPGlNa5U\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA3sA3ncX44&start=103\n\nI Am Running Into A New Year by Lucille Clifton\n\n\nhttps://nextworldover.tumblr.com/post/738271770264600576\n\nI went to Japan\n\n\nhttps://nerdparadise.com/mspaint/stereogram\nhttps://twitter.com/mischiefanimals/status/1704934776421913018\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nShikiori Ink.\nThe Computer Museum in Berlin.\nBack when you saw fish-based screen savers everywhere. \nThe Roku app fish screen saver.\nA rock in the aquarium that says \"Roku\"\n11 hours of fish content. \nFish nerds sitting in a small box at the bottom of the ocean getting hype over seeing a small worm.\nAn animated gif of fish nerds getting hype. \nA live jellyfish web cam that is just in principle. \nA web cam of the thing that goes donk and everyone cheers when it goes donk. \nThe fish screen saver where you need to keep buying floppy disks with fish food on it or the fish die. \nDon't copy that fish food! \nThe startup selling digital rabbit food going out of business so all the digital rabbits go into hibernation.\nThe Life Cycle of Software Objects. \nBeing unable to open your front door because the smart lock ran out of batteries. \nEverybody congratulating you on the infuriating guy you made up to get mad at. \nFire safety anecdotes. \nGlass top electric stoves that look just like induction stoves, as a prank. \nHow fire extinguishers taste. \nLooking at fire extinguisher dust and thinking \"let's get the blood brain barrier involved.\"\nLeaving the stove on.\nBroiling a sandwich and the whole sandwich catches fire.\nA five year old doing science experiments with a lit candle. \nThe UX design of grease fires.\nThe William Shatner song about the dangers of deep frying a turkey. \nRelating 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.\"\nSelf-moistening fingertips. \nSoaking your fingertips in water for eight minutes to get them pruny.\nThe Canon of harmonica virtuoso music.\nEthereal floating tones that fade in and out of existence. \nThe Flat Bells. \nThe Mellotron as a slightly more physical sampler. \nClara Rockmore playing \"The Swan\" on Theremin.\nBit-doers playing \"The Swan\" on Otamatone.\nLetting go of what you said to yourself about yourself when you were 16, 26, even 36.\nThe assumption that you need to be forgiven for something. \nThe sun coming up on this episode of Topic Lords. \nWorking up the courage to climb the mountain you see every day from your back yard.\nReally tall hills you can walk up. \nWhat it's like to not hear cars constantly. \nDesigning a building to sound good – even if it isn't a concert hall. \nCar-free cities.\nBiking in a bike-centric environment. \nThrowing your body into traffic and hoping drivers care about the legal liability of running someone over.\nThe intersection where you always see the skid marks from kids doing donuts. \nDoing watercolors but with ink. \nBuying a bunch of art supplies and never using them because you're afraid to waste them. \nHow do you get your paintbrush to do what you want? \nHow watercolors behave depending on how wet the painting is and how wet the paintbrush is. \nScraping your knife on the painting and it just looks like a shed. \nIs it a bunch of cats or is it the word \"gay\"?\nImages that look like stereograms but aren't. \nThe blank canvas stereogram. \nCrowds staring at the enormous stereograms hanging up in the Mall of America.\nStereogram artists accounting for pupillary distance. \nMaking a stereogram in MS Paint.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2024-07-22T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/7e25b221-0602-40af-813c-97c27bb8ec71.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":60926327,"duration_in_seconds":3807}]},{"id":"daf7c004-0687-4886-a5d5-a15a27781267","title":"247. Fish That Scrutinize; Fish That Rubberneck","url":"https://topiclords.com/fish-that-scrutinize-fish-that-rubberneck","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nAlex\nShannon\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nThe less you spend on food, the better it tastes\nThe jizz of a bird\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jizz_(birding)\n\nThe Cosmic Call\n\n\nhttps://blog.plover.com/2024/04/15/\n\nLine Fishing by Daniel Kahaulelio\n\n\nhttps://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/rWuOwlpV.png\n\nHow to order coffee in Malaysia\n\n\nhttps://kopi.guide/\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6mv7VY8YLA\n\nDice, and physically rolling them\n\n\nhttps://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.com.tann.dice\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nPaleo animators.\nMalaysia as a vacation destination.\nRestaurants that are just in s guy's house.\nThe best whole fried catfish you've ever had.\nEating mixed whole livers.\nStriving to get a B rating from the food safety inspectors because the A rating is too bougie.\nStarch and grease.\nThe shape of the price to deliciousness correlation graph.\nIf you're here to buy cake, ring the doorbell.\nYou can talk to the cops or you can have cake. You can't have both.\nWhether Americans can drink the water in Malaysia.\nBeing so desperate for fresh vegetables that you wash them with tap water.\nButterfly Pee Flour.\nJizz (birding)\nThe practice of just getting the vibe of a bird.\nI don't know, it had the jizz of a bird.\nZooniverse.\nGoing through the still images on a nature webcam and trying to identify local animals.\nTrying to tell the difference between a wood rat and a deer mouse.\nReclassifying 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.\nSmall, Brown and On the Ground.\nSubmitting 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.\nAn extremely high-stress app.\nAsking an albatross which of the twelve species is albatross it is.\nWalking around in the woods until you spot a kiwi.\nMajor gaffes in interstellar communication that future aliens will be very confused about.\nMassively synesthetic dog brains.\nReceiving a sequence of bits and deciding to arrange them in a grid.\nThe other book with the spiders.\nHumans interacting with a spider-based society.\nChildren of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky.\nExpecting monkeys to become the dominant intelligent species on a terraformed planet seeded with Earth animals.\nAdventuring into a dungeon built by the ancients and admiring the signage.\nOpening an oil drum full of concrete and tubes and being like \"where's the treasure that's supposed to be in here!\"\nWriting a song about how being near glowing cats is very dangerous.\nPublic serving meme songs.\nEngineering earworms for the public good.\nThe Museum of Hawaiian Culture in Oahu.\nFish that watch. Fish that look.\nGet those fish hungry.\nIt's just a lookin' fish.\nSleeping the lobes of your brain in shifts.\nThe lobes of your brain playing pranks on each other.\nHow can fish get some shuteye if they don't have eyelids??\nHow can fish rubberneck if they don't even have necks??\nThe 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.\nAis krim.\nWhat languages are hardest to spell in.\nAre there four silent letters at the end, and if so which ones?\nCofftea.\nRolling all them bones.\nOwning more sets of dice than you have played actual D&D sessions.\nA big pile of dice rattling around in your phone.\nRolling the dice off of the table every single time.\nA switch that goes ka-chonk.\nActively seeking out hobbies where you touch things.\nWays that continuous deployment sucks.\nText classifiers flagging your sexuality as photographic.\nImage classifiers flagging your medical photos as pornographic.\nWhich photos encapsulate what you're trying to remember and discuss.\nHow to get your life off of a corporation's hard drive.\nUnsearchable Tumblrs.\nGet out there and jizz a bird!\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2024-07-15T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/daf7c004-0687-4886-a5d5-a15a27781267.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":72648410,"duration_in_seconds":4540}]},{"id":"0a099963-182e-4e23-a9e7-c0aff556f4c2","title":"246. Send An Envelope Of Guacamole For Analysis","url":"https://topiclords.com/send-an-envelope-of-guacamole-for-analysis","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nJay\nAlex\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nMexican food outside San Diego (Having lived in Colorado, Ohio, and now Melbourne)\nReleasing my first commercial video game\nThe being an uncle of camping\nSkyscrapers by Matt Haig\n\n\nhttps://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/QM4hPodE.jpg\n\nAttempting to preserve 40 years' worth of data\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nA puzzle adventure game starring a ferret.\nDROD-likes.\nSending an envelope full of guacamole to a food lab so they can tell you a list of ingredients.\nReaching in the window so you can finally drive a million dollar Porsche.\nLetting the Ewok sit in the driver's seat but not actually letting it drive the car.\nWhether Ewoks get old enough to drive.\nThrow Rock.\nMaking a game by first making your own level editor, image editor, audio synthesizer and music composition tools.\nFinding playtesters by letting them come to you.\nAn eyeball that charges a laser when you step in front of it.\nDeliberately optimizing your game to take up as little disk space as possible.\nA project that starts moving much faster when you figure out what kind of project it should be.\nWriting a 3D modeler so that you can get your 2D game on Steam.\nWorking with a professional artist.\nRendering fur.\nGames with turns that represent less than a second of in-game time.\nThe mind-feel of a turn length.\nA game that was so good that the developers went back decades later to make it playable.\nThe Mud and the Slime.\nHow to play DROD without any roach timers.\nWhich DROD is the best one to start with.\nSokoban with swordplay.\nThe level in King Dugan's Dungeon that's nothing but roach queens.\nOptimizing your sword movements well enough that you can move forward while fighting.\nPuzzles that are just hard enough to engage your mind while you do something else.\nVisiting someone who is camping and then going home to sleep in your own bed.\nBuilding a fire and making s'mores in the bathroom.\nCamping expenses.\nGiving gifts to adults who can already buy whatever they want.\nDeliberately choosing a vacation that is especially exhausting.\nSpending two days each visiting seven different family friends.\nYour grandparents taking you camping and they sleep in the RV while you have to sleep in the tent.\nBuying an onion bloomer for $600 and insisting that your family eat a blooming onion every night to justify the purchase.\nSkyscrapers made out of words \nTraining yourself to visualize words in the wrong orientation.\nPuzzling out what the title of the poem would've been if the typesetter hadn't messed it up \nCross-sectional art.\nPoems that are intended to be viewed rather than read aloud.\nAnti-poem poems.\nEvery project you've ever worked on (on a computer)\nGood usable archives.\nThe unique digital footprint of your life.\nGetting the bits from a SCSI hard drive in an old Mac that doesn't boot up.\nApple Desktop Bus Connection.\nThe miraculous ubiquity and longevity of USB-A.\nFiguring out how to hook up a digital video player that requires a Firewire connection.\nThe MacOS resource fork.\nWhat the .sit and .hqx extensions meant.\nGamma Zee.\nUsing social media to actually do things.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2024-07-08T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/0a099963-182e-4e23-a9e7-c0aff556f4c2.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":61414921,"duration_in_seconds":3838}]},{"id":"91f0837e-8356-45a5-9cdb-14700e861ea0","title":"245. It Was You, Old Man Molyneux!","url":"https://topiclords.com/it-was-you-old-man-molyneux","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nBen\nNicholas\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nLet me describe to you the Australian treats I sent my Canadian friend\nThe UX of live sport is terrible\nGame jam idea!\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_that_Buddha_would_not_play\n\nI Continue to Dream, by Langston Hughes\n\n\nhttps://mypoeticside.com/show-classic-poem-13632\n\nBeing overly patriotic and repping the national identity but only when around foreigners, is this something everyone does or just aussies?\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nProjects that you can't talk about yet \nTelling a joke for international joke day.\nA very busy day for Australians.\nSending 3 kilos of lollies to your co-worker in Canada.\nIt's the way it shatters that matters.\nCherry Ripes.\nThe thinking man's candy.\nChicken Crimpy.\nA biscuit inspired by Golden Gaytime.\n\"It's hard to have a Gaytime on your own.\"\nRenaming chocolate jelly babies to be less racist.\nA real enthusiasm for desiccated coconut.\nButter chicken parmigiana.\nP burger candy.\nWhether kangaroos are hunted or farmed.\nWhether kangaroos are the same size as the kangaroo fruit.\nThe waiter in Japan staring at you until you eat the single slice of kiwi.\nThe official ranking of fruit prestige in Japan, with melon only being bested by keys and Galaga ships.\nHow many footballs they have in Australia. (At least three, maybe six.)\nA sport where nobody can tell when somebody has scored so the whole audience is constantly on edge.\nThe theme song for the guy coming up to bat.\nBooing when your team scores, because they didn't score more.\nWhether Eurovision is better when you're not in Europe.\nCorrelating sports with Eurovision.\nA little song and dance that's definitely not political.\nXFL camera operators running around on the field.\nImproving sports broadcasts with drone cameras.\nA comprehensive list of games that are causes for negligence.\nGames on boards with 8 or 10 rows (or the same games played in the sky).\nAvoiding the line to be avoided.\nMaking a mark on a wall and deciding if it looks like an elephant.\nThere's no throwing, Buddha! This is not a cause for negligence.\nHow the Buddha feels about the Mersenne Twister.\nAn abacus except it's a roller coaster track.\nTracing letters in the air or on a friend's back.\nEven more games Buddha would not play.\nThe minigame from the beginning of Mario 64 where you stretch out his eyes.\nWhat Shall it Be?\nIn this game you are the video game and you are the one being played.\nA video game adaptation of the less half fun of Pictionary.\nKinect Charades.\nUsing the Kinect voice to say \"it's goat!\"\nIt turns out Molyneux was wearing the business all along.\nTurning your dream into art. Like a video game! Or something more artistic.\nDubbing your podcast onto cassette tape and calling it an Audio Zine.\nThe Creative Labs Creative Zen.\nSetting up your sound card and hearing digitized speech in Leisure Suit Larry.\nFond memories of listening to digital audio on your Creative Labs Sound Blaster.\nDr. Sbaitso and Dr. Sbaitso imitators.\nWhat you do when your dad isn't around to help you boot up Red Alert.\nAn FMV adventure game set in Germany.\nThe Red Alert installation experience.\nTim Curry giving his all in the Red Alert FMV cutscenes.\nAn oral history of Tim Curry's escape into the one place uncorrupted by capitalism.\nEnjoying the Aboriginal Sauce at Outback Steakhouse.\nAustralians explaining that America also started as a prison colony \nHamilton didn't talk about this!\nThe 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.\nEveryone in your age bracket having the first ten seasons of the Simpsons memorized.\nFinding Frinkiac, analogous to discovering a new Blender plug-in.\nLying on the couch and taking a photo of the TV.\nHaving a mobile game and sending the APK to anyone who asks nicely.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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","date_published":"2024-07-01T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/91f0837e-8356-45a5-9cdb-14700e861ea0.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":70424449,"duration_in_seconds":4401}]},{"id":"6089995c-fd87-44ba-ab44-2dfe4fe2b285","title":"244. Get Gimbal Locked, Dean!","url":"https://topiclords.com/get-gimbal-locked-dean","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nDaniel\nAndrew\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nHyperthymesia\nAnimal Well\nBad news for my google alerts: \"Twinbeard\" is the name of the Helldivers 2 community manager\n\n\nTwinbeard reacts! https://twitter.com/TheTwinbeard/status/1805711034281349388\n\nDean 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.\"\nShould game developers \"soak themselves\" in games. Referring to this clip of Orson Welles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dg-qaeIcuyI\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nDoom Guy: Life in First Person \nA well full of animals.\nA game that you keep hearing is great from people that you trust.\nRemembering every detail of your life even though that's a terrible idea.\nA cop asking you what you were doing on the night of November 3rd, 2021.\nFnords.\nEidetic memory vs. photographic memory vs. hyperthymesic memory.\nChecking your memory of a time against your written records of that time.\nRemembering that you're going to have a conversation about your day tonight so you had better do something interesting.\nData mining electronic records to figure out how you met somebody.\nPlaying a Sam Barlow game with your bank records.\nNavier-Stokes fluid dynamics.\nSpending a lot of time frowning.\nDark Forest.\nA game providing you with a spoiler-free mechanism of conveying where you are in the game.\nShooting people vs. swording people.\nThe tools and verbs of just being a little guy.\nSeeing a dog doing something you didn't expect to see a dog do.\nBeing unable to turn a crank because there's a blue ghost.\nChoosing not to be a video game.\nSetting up Google alerts for your game's working title.\nFamous racehorse Secret Legend.\nLiking some parts but not liking other parts.\nHow to construct a Google alert for t the video game Tunic.\nComputer vision algorithms to increase yield and profitablity of insect farms.\nHow seniors can get into the house flipping business.\nCollaborating with a spammer to write a poem about house flipping.\nExhorting a spammer to join the discord and post their dreams in the announcements channel.\nA think tank dedicated to increasing house flipping around the world, measured by total rotation.\nHouse flipping vs. house spinning.\nA skateboard with the word \"quaternion\" written on it in a sick font.\nTrying to flip a house but it gets gimbal locked and you lose everything.\nSoaking in films. Just marinating in them.\nHaving virgin eyes in order to make great things.\nInventing video games from first principles.\nThe value of outsider art.\nShigeru Miyamoto inventing jumping.\nTrying to remember the last time you jumped in real life.\nWhether a historian has discovered the cave that inspired the Legend of Zelda.\nWhat Stories Untold says about the Orson Welles quote about having virgin eyes.\nTrying to prove yourself to a piece of software.\nTrying to tell a story about a spaceship that doesn't involve combat.\n50 Years of Text Games.\nHaving read a book back when it was a blog.\nWhether we have time for another topic.\nMixing a Red Bull with a Caffeine Free Coca Cola.\nSunlight patterns that remind you of wandering in the forest as a child \nThe disco ball as an extrapolation of dappled sunlight in the forest.\nOut of focus motes of light.\nFiguring out how to make a desert beautiful.\nLiving that home assistant life.\nGoing to a thrift store to buy a lamp to fix the terrible lighting in your hotel room.\nA motor that's constantly jiggling a pot of water.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2024-06-24T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/6089995c-fd87-44ba-ab44-2dfe4fe2b285.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":65469125,"duration_in_seconds":4091}]},{"id":"f62fa628-976f-4955-8ed6-0c124c842fea","title":"243. Welcome To The Elder Zone","url":"https://topiclords.com/welcome-to-the-elder-zone","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nAndrew\nTyriq\n\n\nLords:\n\n\nThe Church of the SubGenius\nMaking FreeCell is kind of like playing FreeCell\nHow do we get to a place where our primary tool for productivity is not also our primary avenue of distraction?\n\"<3 Team Schiff\", by Team Schiff \n\n\nhttps://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/kNKMVgFF.png\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nWorld Building Notes\nAn accent you cannot discern the origin of.\nFun worlds that I've thought of.\nA world where hair is the source of all life.\nA port of Freecell to the Playdate that might never be released.\nJ.R. Bob Dobbs, a salesman from the 1950s.\nWhether Discord (the IRC client) is named after Discordianism.\nTyriq Reads Wikipedia.\nPrincipia Discordia.\nAn extremely profitable troll.\nGood and bad reasons to troll.\nMaking your weird fun art without worrying about people taking you way too seriously fifty years from now.\nWhether submarines are named after the Church of the Subgenus.\nRewriting your entire game in C.\nPlaying Freecell Validly.\nA latecomer to Freecell.\nThe one known impossible Freecell seed.\nThe Freecell Helleed vs. the Minesweeper Dream Board.\nThe looking at the cube phase and the turning the cube phase.\nTypeshift speed run hacks.\nKnowing a 38-letter word.\nUndo trees.\nThe New York Times games package being sold separately from the newspaper.\nThe diction of the New York Times crossword puzzle.\nDoing Greek letter flash cards to up your crossword game.\nWords that come up a lot when you're mashing letters together.\nA job where you don't use a computer? In this economy?\nSequencer-based techno.\nConstraints that fit the UI extremely well.\nAn interface that makes a lot of sense for the Game Boy.\nPrinting out the entirety of Wikipedia so you can go offline for a while.\nThe compressed size of Wikipedia.\nHere's a thing and the only thing it does is have information on it.\nHanging out in the library with people vs. with books.\nThe three best things in life.\nOpening the tiny drawer and flipping through the tiny cards with your tiny hands and using your tiny eyes to read the tiny text.\nDownloading information about a spider that links to another spider.\nUsing robots.txt to ward off all kinds of creatures, not just robots.\n999: Extraterrestrial Worlds.\nAbandoning the Dewey Decimal System after you discover that numbers go higher than 999.\nStopping to end.\nThis Cat Does Not Exist.\nThe perfect source of images that have never been used before.\nAn art project that invents politicians and texts people imploring them to donate to the campaign and that's how the art project gets funding.\nWhat Socrates would have said about the Banksy that shredded itself.\nYour legal name with a bunch of letters removed.\nPicking an online handle that's very hard to pronounce to make sure people don't call you that in real life.\nGiving everybody you meet a different name for yourself.\nHaving more friends than you've ever had.\nHaving hobbies that put you in a room with people.\nLibraries as raucous hangouts.\nInviting tweens to play video games in the back rooms (but not in a shady way)\nA citizen saying \"hey, library, can I use a room?\"\nYour local library, featuring the Middle-Aged Zone.\nLego Security Theater.\nAn unordered list of links.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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 ","date_published":"2024-06-17T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/f62fa628-976f-4955-8ed6-0c124c842fea.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":60497919,"duration_in_seconds":3781}]},{"id":"1e69d7f9-e4ae-4afc-a779-cf73d4b4a854","title":"242. Malware For Labyrinths","url":"https://topiclords.com/malware-for-labyrinths","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nMaxx\nJP\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nThe different kinds of \"changing your mind\" in creative work\nWhat texture did you think clouds were as a kid?\nInfinity Island\nSleep, by Jorge Luis Borges\n\n\nhttps://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=38645\n\nChippendale Mupps and the slowest nerves\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nKnowing the names of zero outdoor cats in your neighborhood.\nCanny outdoor cats who are adapted to city life and don't need your plugs.\nObi like the belt or like the Star Wars guy?\nLoosey goosey versions \nChanging your mind while making a creative work.\nMoving a door or a window in an existing wall.\nBigger creative decisions being composed of many smaller creative decisions.\nRetaining maximum flexibility at every point in the process.\nA workflow that reflects the spectrum of flexibility.\nFlexibility Lost is Sturdiness Gained.\nTweaking the value of pi to suit your needs.\nA system where a bunch of things depend on a bunch of other things.\nAxes of flexibility that you don't end up using.\nMore specific categories of types of changing your mind.\nGoing down a deep dark hole and finding the glittering prize but not being sure whether it's worth anything.\nA loop that spirals, oscillating, into the middle.\nPutting a branch into a meditation labyrinth and changing its theological meaning.\nRewriting your novel in second person, present tense, just to see how it feels.\nThe Citation Needed guy doubting that mazes can be built with snow.\nThe ongoing Corn vs. Maize Wikipedia war.\nThe marine layer rolling in.\nLooking at clouds and totally seeing the ice cream.\nBuying aerogel samples on eBay.\nWhat stuffed animals are stuffed with.\nGoing to the sky island and it's sort of rubbery.\nWalkable clouds in the Mario series.\nCloudjacking.\nYanking Lakitu out onto the pavement and going on a joyride until the LoJack system kicks in.\nSuper Mario Bros. redubbed with Quake and Half-Life sounds.\nSuper Mario Bros. Next Gen AAA\nWhat clouds taste like.\nFizzy Lifting Drinks.\nThe soda with the glass ball.\nOrdering something red hoping for cherry, watermelon or strawberry flavor, but it's cinnamon flavored.\nEating Red Hots for the first time and realizing you've been Halloween poisoned.\nYour first bitey cinnamon food.\nA little poison, as a treat.\nFilling your mouth with tree bark.\nGames with saved progress feeling like you're participating in a responsible activity than games where you start over every time.\nDeliberate mechanical whimsy.\nMaking a complicated game and failing to teach the player how to play it.\nFor a Change, by Dan Schmidt.\nAn infinite variety of forms of confusion.\nPlaying Frog Fractions all the way through and being like \"what twist??\"\nWhy Jorge Luis Borges gets annoyed when people wake him up.\nSemi-routinely yelling in your sleep.\nBeing asleep is the inside time.\nCiting Borges as a vibe.\nA mid-pod plug.\nThe works of Ted Chiang.\nInternalizing the idea that you need sleep to function.\nStepping stones of self-reflection.\nWaking up feeling the vague sensations of having dreamt.\nSleeping with your eyes open.\nIntegration of your environment into your dreams.\nBiting your tail before you go to sleep and not feeling it until you wake up.\nPutting keys in your toast.\nRepurposing the Chippendale Mupp's nervous system to make a vintage delay pedal.\nEsports competitors putting the left mouse button between their teeth to improve reaction time, because it's closer to the brain.\nBrains evolving to process whatever whenever and assembling the timeline later.\nKuratas Heavy Industries.\nSmiling to fire the heavy machine guns.\nGripens.\nSubway ads exhorting Maximum Lethality!\nThe airport nearest to all of the oil fields in the Permean Basin.\nBillboards for enterprise services.\nWasting eyeballs.\nA couple of active web presences.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2024-06-10T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/1e69d7f9-e4ae-4afc-a779-cf73d4b4a854.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":63585801,"duration_in_seconds":3974}]},{"id":"2cc2c8a9-12d7-49ff-a017-9b3f5ee0b121","title":"241. Brad Garrett Must Eat!","url":"https://topiclords.com/brad-garrett-must-eat","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nAbby\n\n\nhttps://www.hollywoodfringe.org/projects/10813\n\nPat\n\n\nhttps://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hyperheartcom/gotchacards\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nThe pear scene\nCapsule machines vs. claw games\nDesigning UIs for TV\nThis be the Verse, by Philip Larkin\n\n\nhttps://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48419/this-be-the-verse\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nMy Brother the Car.\nA card game that is not totally random.\nDeciding to focus on something else in 2020.\nRock Paper Scissors vs. Rock Scissors Paper.\nWhich of the twins to take a kidney from \nCommitting to a bit that breaks the rhythm of what people expect you to say.\nMaking a game where people get crushed by debt but making it fun.\nEverybody Loves Raymond.\nSitcoms that have plenty of opportunity to disappoint you.\nA show that lives and dies in the performance.\nNine years to stop trying.\nThe most profitable sitcom of all time.\nAdapting Raymond.\nRay Romano explaining the concept of having parents to a puzzled audience.\nThe kind of argument where both people make sense and are both trying to be nice.\nTrying to be nice but failing.\n'Til Death.\nThe demeanor of a revenant.\nWhether Brad Garrett listens to this show.\nHitting 100 episodes and going into syndication.\nMusicians needing a body that can strike.\nWriting an increasingly ludicrous sitcom for an audience of nobody.\nA son who is always on the wacky tobacky.\nA sitcom husband who notices that his wife has been recast and realizes he's on a sitcom.\nContinuing to give Brad Garrett chances to star in sitcoms because he's so tall.\nA sitcom that made you feel seen.\nThe workplace sitcom vs. the domestic sitcom.\nAimlessness in a post-Seinfeld era.\nAbed Ghaith's striptease.\nIs that Abed Ghaith's penis in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?\nClaw game skill issues.\nA billionaire trying to figure out how best to do good in the world and who decides to operate several generous claw machines.\nDecorating a desk space with a pocket full of miniature delights.\nMona Lisa Breakdancing.\nThe rice cooker that King Piccolo was trapped in.\nRubik's Cube but all the faces are Mahjong tiles.\nThe coolest and most popular racial atrocity.\nRamen Man vs. Kikko Man.\nA bowl of ramen in the shape of a tube.\nHomer Simpson: visual ripoff of Kinnikuman.\nSeeing an aquarium fish that looks just slightly too human.\nReading a book about bugs and itching like mad.\nWorrying that you are ruining eyes for yourself.\nFamous JAV title \"Reincarnated as a Spider\"\nConveying the idea of receiving a DM on social media to a television audience.\nMy face in a tube dot com.\nSaying \"youshmoob\" really fast and hoping nobody notices.\nWanting 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.\nA joke that is very funny when you explain it but impossible to convey in any known medium.\nThe flag that says \"bang!\"\nThe Joker not being confident enough in his jokes so he has to use laughing gas.\nSilent Comedy Joker has to work a bit harder.\nNaming a difficulty level after a pop culture allusion to babies.\nThe 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.\nThe 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.\nWhere's the bridge, Larkin?\nThis be the verse you grave for me.\nPoets being jerks to all different kinds of people.\nKefka creating a tower of garbage in Final Fantasy while everyone tries to convince him it's worthwhile to have a family.\nWhich kids inspired Lord of the Flies.\nSuggesting that your mom read Chainsaw Man Part 1 so that you can talk to her about grief.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2024-06-03T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/2cc2c8a9-12d7-49ff-a017-9b3f5ee0b121.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":56829491,"duration_in_seconds":3551}]},{"id":"2b07c29c-88b1-4b58-aabe-2cdab8d0b2c2","title":"240. Who Was Emily Dickinson Owning?","url":"https://topiclords.com/who-was-emily-dickinson-owning","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nJP\nShepard\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nDamn it, Microsoft added something worthwhile to Office.\nFavorite DOS game soundtracks?\nThe Balatro Discourse\nFaith is a Fine Invention, by Emily Dickinson\n\n\nhttps://www.poemhunter.com/poem/faith-is-a-fine-invention/\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nArtist Alley.\nScrolling down a web page and seeing a bunch of cool stuff.\nSeeing a list and wondering \"how did this list happen\"?\nSteam Farming Fest.\nTrying to figure out what you want to do when you grow up.\nEating eggs and rice when you have tummy troubles.\nThe file you all edit to make the deposit slip.\nTaking data from multiple columns and putting them all in a single list.\nBecoming the spreadsheet wizard.\nInstallation wizards.\nWhy nobody calls a software feature a \"wizard\" any more\nA window into the dialectic of wizards.\nThe LLM hype tornado.\nRenting video software from Blockbuster.\nBack when any media was a \"tape\"\nEnumerating the kinds of MS-DOS audio hardware.\nEmitting a blast of data.\nEnjoying a video game in 4, 16 or 256 colors.\nHow Doom sounded on the internal PC speaker.\nPlaying multiplayer Doom on a four computer LAN where two of the computers don't have sound cards.\nThe Doom source port family tree.\nWhether Linux supported the internal PC speaker.\nPlaying each MIDI note with the off-the-track square wave.\nHolding on to a joke for several minutes.\nDoing sound effects via the Roland MT-32.\nFM synth guitars sounding more evil than real guitars.\nSynthesizers that are fancier than other synthesizers and are therefore better.\nThe ambient music on the Doom soundtrack.\nThe Lost Vikings soundtrack.\nGames with tracker soundtracks.\nThe tracker music era.\nA roguelike deck builder kind of a thing.\nA huge hit within your social horizon.\nBeginners hoping to project intelligence and competence.\nThe kind of mixing of data and code that Lua makes easy to do.\nHow to deploy a Love2D game to consoles.\nA cool game idea that's just a bunch of cards doing stuff.\nSean Barrett's STB libraries.\nThe ability to change your mind without having to throw away a bunch of work.\nAmbient complexity vs. intrinsic complexity.\nHot takes escaping containment.\nThe Celeste character controller.\nSoftware security practices that do not apply to a single player indie game.\nLooking at code and seeing all the things that it used to be.\nLooking at code solving a problem in a domain you are unfamiliar with.\nAn Emily Dickinson poem that reads like a response to an argument she had at dinner.\nSituations where you can directly observe what's happening.\nAll the filters preventing you from bursting out into song.\nEsprit de escalier.\nWho was Emily Dickinson owning?\nA contempt for faith and a sense that microscopes are good.\nKnowing that nobody reads your blog, but taking satisfaction in the knowledge that someone hypothetically could.\nExcavating spiritual truth from apocryphal ramblings.\nThe app that holds all the texts you don't send for ransom.\nDigging through people's trash but with fewer steps.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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","date_published":"2024-05-27T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/2b07c29c-88b1-4b58-aabe-2cdab8d0b2c2.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":58404361,"duration_in_seconds":3650}]},{"id":"07eb98a7-ed02-4d64-b8a0-f2117e0ccaab","title":"239. Public Universal Snoopy","url":"https://topiclords.com/public-universal-snoopy","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nAbi\n\n\nhttps://shielddoespixels.itch.io/\n\nEva\n\n\nhttps://eslee.bandcamp.com/\nhttps://eslee.itch.io/\nhttps://eslee.dev/portfolio/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nWill 2024 be the year of Snoopy girls?\n\n\nhttps://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/will-2024-be-the-year-of-snoopy-girls\nhttps://www.deviantart.com/shenki/art/Human-Snoopy-393886831\n\nAre living fossils inherently better creatures or just really lucky?\nHelious\n\n\nhttps://www.mobygames.com/game/12740/helious/\nhttps://toot.cat/@smp\n\nCertain Women \n\n\nhttps://www.hazeljaneplante.com/songbook\n\nEmulators are finally available for iOS, which is exciting until you realize you have to play Mario 64 with a touchscreen\nMiko asks: \"Public Universal Friend\"\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nWorking through mental struggles in the form of Zelda dungeons.\nDonating to Red Cross for Snoopy Merch.\nSnoopy's place in the cultural zeitgeist.\nTranscending Peanuts.\nWho doesn't want a fun bird friend?\nCrocheting and knitting making a major comeback.\nEvery year is the year of Linux on the Desktop.\nInfluencers wearing a Snoopy merch.\nNASA sending Snoopy to the Moon.\nGiving your merch to NASA for free but charging the shit out of movie makers trying to make documentaries or authentic space movies.\nAnimals that are already so good they didn't need to keep evolving.\nLeaving bacteria off your list because you couldn't even see them.\nA little blobby thing.\nScientists trying to write for the general public.\nNaming an organism after the concept of having three eyes when it only has two eyes.\nHaving two good eyes but evolving a third shitty eye just to annoy people.\nRunning executables of completely unknown provenance.\nA game that was plausibly created by aliens if you haven't played very many interesting games.\nMaking up an incredible back story for your game to explain why you have no idea why colors work.\nGood Wild Combo vs. Unused Insurance Bonus.\nLooking up the artist of a work you loved in the 90s and they're still out there tooting.\nWizened game developers posting on social media about their farm animals.\nDesigning interfaces for the phone.\nFinding out that a person made a work you loved and preferring to have imagined it came from space.\nStriving to be a cozy follow.\nRetweeting a thing that does not make people angry.\nPutting the poise in poison.\nInherently terrifying bodies of water.\nA big fish that's touching you now. \nA level of repetition that is bordering on too much.\nSongs of Love, Death and Pleasure.\nDeliberately blurring the line between poems and songs.\nThe Emulators-on-iOS era.\nKirby Canvas Curse.\nPlaying Super Mario Land on a TI-84 calculator.\nWhat old Nintendo games work well on an iPhone.\nThe EU repeatedly forcing Apple to get its shit together.\nOne- and two-thumbed smartphones.\nThe Society of Universal Friends.\nThe thought process that led to the creation of Human Snoopy.\nThe Cat Snoopy phenomenon.\nSnoopy as a Psychonauts character.\nSnoopy enjoying a pile of human femurs.\nThe Notorious PUF.\nSomeone who was interesting enough to enter the historical record.\nAn attempt to seize the Friend and carry them off in an oxcart.\nThe distinction between abstinence and celibacy, and whether it exists now or in the 19th century.\nThe Mouth of the Lord.\nNaming yourself after a branch of the government.\nDMing people on Discord.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2024-05-20T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/07eb98a7-ed02-4d64-b8a0-f2117e0ccaab.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":48217860,"duration_in_seconds":3013}]},{"id":"6544909f-94ec-48b7-9d97-e91a653a3f6d","title":"238. Talk To Me Like A Doctor Who Gives A Shit","url":"https://topiclords.com/talk-to-me-like-a-doctor-who-gives-a-shit","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nCisHetKayFaber\nJenni\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nInteresting/weird foley sounds in games\nFinding out about pop culture when it shows up in ASMR videos\n\n\nCisHetKayFaber, correcting small breast mammography takes: \"Mammograms seem to suck for everyone, and my initial take of, 'they just keep going' is correct while later discussion where I used it as an example where 'best effort,' in the healthcare system feels like lack of care wasn't appropriate even if that broader point is generally true.\"\nhttps://www.healthimages.com/how-are-mammograms-done-on-small-breasts/\n\nGoing to see the eclipse\n\n\nhttps://archive.org/details/canonofeclipsesc0000oppo\n\nHe peels off my clothes like a starving man would peel an orange, by Sharon Cherski\n\n\nhttps://www.mscl.com/characters/sharon_cherski.html\n\nGenerational punctuation differences\n\n\nhttps://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-millennial-captcha\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nPlugging the enormous void in your soul by playing Balatro.\nA card game with really good balance and numbering.\nSeeing the light at the end of the tunnel on the Rusty Lake series.\nGiving everybody grace except for yourself.\nCorpse looting foley.\nLooking through a sound library for the sound of a spider dying.\nBuying a chair from an estate sale because you love the sound it makes.\nThe Looney Tunes cartoon where some foley artist invented everyone's conception of what a pneumatic tube sounds like.\nRunning around outside and deciding to drop a soup can into the pool.\nA school project where you rerecord all the audio for five minutes of television.\nShowing your project to someone and you did such a good job that they don't even notice your project.\nAll the clothes that you're wearing making all the clothes noises.\nWatching a porn clip overdubbed with Minecraft noises at just the right time in your life.\nDoes two tails mean two assholes?\nPutting an acronym on the Tails experience.\nIf you've got a cloaca, it's gotta go in the acronym.\nOnly getting horny when an earth, somewhere in the multiverse, is being hit by a comet.\nTwo-Tails has two assholes, and I'm one of them.\nForming the Megazord.\nLance from all the various things that have Lances in them.\nWho is Lance in love with Voltron?\nGoogle giving you sports results to make incognito mode more plausible.\nIronic ASMR.\nDoin' it for the tingles.\nWhen 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.\nThe doctor explaining that this is just what your life is like now.\nHot dogging it on the blood pressure cuff.\nChanging your blood pressure just to fuck with your doctor.\nDeliberately choosing a femme-presenting chubby doctor.\nNeeding to lose about 40 pounds so you get a leg amputated.\nChecking a box on your insurance form saying \"do not give me lifestyle advice.\"\nCarrying around your patient in a folder.\nDoing the Barium test every time.\nI'm in a Barium rotisserie, I need you to work with me.\nChecking the quality of your stomach lining.\nTrying to banter with the person giving you the mammogram and deeply offending them.\nGetting small mouth shame at the dentist.\nRude Doctor ASMR.\nASMR videos where the dentist tells you your mouth is big enough.\nAssuming Hugh Laurie is not on Cameo for the purposes of the bit.\nSourcing an entire podcast through Cameo.\nThe most stony-faced magical realism twin assassins.\nTopics episode topics.\nHow to personalize a stair.\nHiring Mike Ehrmantraut to tell you how you're gonna do your taxes.\nMike Ehrmantraut administering the mammogram.\nVisiting friends who live near the totality.\nA stump that is freshly cut so it's exuding sap non-stop and is covered with bees and flies 24/7.\nWhalefall but on land.\nChekov's oozing stump coming back in the third act.\nGoing to the astronomical society web site to be sure that the eclipse glasses you get are not the counterfeit eclipse glasses.\nLooking at where the sun used to be.\nLooking at something that could only be a visual effect except it's right there in the sky.\nA thousand year old elf working through her emotions about how her human friends keep dying.\nThe day you had to be inside during recess.\nStanding up and throwing your potato salad and mint julep on the ground.\nWriting an angry email to Peter Molyneux for designing eclipses badly.\nThe cold cement basement of love.\nMedia from 1992.\nBorrowing the DVD boxed set of My So-Called Life from your manager at the pizza place.\nWriting poems for your benefactors.\nPoetry written from the point of view of a fake person.\nPoetry that could plausibly have been written by a teenager.\nDo you believe the German mathematician in the 19th century, or do you believe Google?\nA soda can that plays the Amen Break when you open it.\nTexts from your mom asking how is your \"boyfriend,\" is there anything I can do to \"help\"?\nWhat it means when someone puts two spaces after a period.\nGrowing up meaningfully on the internet.\nComposing some shit very quickly and making sure it is very needs-suiting.\nTaking all day to come up with 350 words because you did not grow up on IRC or forums.\nAll the kids discordin' like for real for real fam.\nA much wider variety of emoji than anything you can do with colons and parentheses.\nSending the semicolon-based winky face to your wife because you cannot be bothered to pull open the emoticon window and find the right icon.\nAsking your dad \"what do you think LMAO means\"\nAunts saying \"LOL\" in funeral announcements.\nEntire generations who have terrible reading comprehension because they didn't grow up texting their friends as their primary mode of communication.\nMissing entire regions of UI because they are vaguely shaped like ads.\nUsing a bigger computer to make your bigger purchases.\nMillenial CAPTCHAs.\nStraight for pay.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2024-05-13T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/6544909f-94ec-48b7-9d97-e91a653a3f6d.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":67253233,"duration_in_seconds":4202}]},{"id":"0098e138-43d0-4cc6-9121-421567b842f7","title":"237. Through The Pooping Glass","url":"https://topiclords.com/through-the-pooping-glass","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nAvery\nChris\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nCross-Country Skiing\nPutting art where advertising usually goes\nRunning Pico-8 on a Raspberry Pi\nThe Day I Fell Down the Toilet by Steve Turner\n\n\nhttps://ramblinglisasbookreviews.com/2016/09/20/poem-the-day-i-fell-down-the-toilet-by-steve-turner/\n\nI thought \"snow\" was one thing but it is about a million different things\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nLooking for a job as a programmer but finding one as a bard.\nA Transformers the Movie style power ballad.\nStopping having a job on purpose.\nAll the fun things you can do on mountains.\nCarrying around a VR helmet so you can take photos of a mountain.\nSnowy mountains on one side and lava fields on the other.\nTowns named after regular guys.\nYelling at your barista that you live in Frisco.\nThe tier list of San Francisco's rarest nicknames.\nThe wrong kind of skiing.\nA kind of hiking that is faster and also you can slide down the hill.\nCross-country snowboarding.\nRepeatedly popping out of your ski boots and landing in the snow barefoot.\nThe most winter you've experienced in your entire life.\nTaking snow home from the mountains and putting it in a cup in your freezer.\nBreaking your toe while stage jumping.\nBest ways to not save a hypothermic toe.\nDevoting a portion of your massive intellect to making your friend's life interesting.\nBack before the Internet was threatening.\nThe Avery ARG (or AARG).\nWriting a short story about your friend in the form of a dating personals ad and posting hundreds of copies all over town.\nMiranda July.\nAn app that crowdsources uncomfortable personal interactions.\nA KFC billboard that has been defaced to unrecognizability but the life-sized statue of Colonel Sanders right next to it remains untouched.\nPartnering with Safeway to distribute your zine on the back of Safeway receipts.\nMixing up your ammo with your pharmaceuticals so your mugger no longer feels iron deficient.\nWhether it's morally okay to appreciate a well-made advertisement.\nThe advertisement where the guy is now on a horse.\nSpray tan parties happening in your area.\nGoing to the buying place with your earth money.\nYour favorite deodorant being discontinued and buying the very last crate and rationing them even though you go to the gym every day.\nHandling Smellium with your bare hands.\nSmelling what happened to the scientists who discovered Smellium.\nAsking 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.\nThe 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 \nLooking at headlines first thing in the morning to make yourself angry enough to get out of bed.\nSeeing a headline saying \"10,000 people join Mastodon\" and thinking it's talking about the metal band.\nA touring photographer whose job is is to photograph EDM acts staring at their laptops.\nSoftware developers figure out a more effective way to make money than making their users happy.\nNonconsensual updates.\nWriting demos, like in the 90s, back when computers were fun.\nThe optimism of feeling like computers were going to make people's lives better.\nFinding cool programs to download onto your computer.\nGetting a job writing Picotron BBSes in Lua.\nWaiting until Chat GPT learns how to use Picotron.\nClippy but it's self-aware and hates itself.\nAsking Clippy for stories about Bill Gates.\nDesktop Pets.\nBonzi Buddy pointedly reminding you that he has your credit card number.\nWriting a poem to get your dad to stop asking you if you're off the toilet.\nThe scene from Trainspotting where the protagonist dives into the toilet.\nIn twenty years when Winston is hosting Topic Lords and making Frog Fractions sequels.\ndownpour.games\nLook at this, look what I did!\nSeeing snowflakes for the second time in your life.\nSnow: it's beautiful, unless it's in Avery's freezer.\nA frozen lake that you can just run around on and dogs love it.\nSnowboarding with a kite.\nCross country snowboarding while holding a Swiffer.\nContagious ice.\n28 different shapes for the waters to be in.\nA metastable high pressure form of ice.\nThe sci-fi lore of obscure ice.\nVirtually all the ice in the biosphere.\nPauly Shore's lifetime achievement Oscar.\nWhy climb a mountain when you could administer a Mastodon server?\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2024-05-06T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/0098e138-43d0-4cc6-9121-421567b842f7.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":70959019,"duration_in_seconds":4434}]},{"id":"7f9cff6b-cd57-4af9-ab25-66c5b288fad8","title":"236. Your Child Is About The Size Of A Game Boy Advance","url":"https://topiclords.com/your-child-is-about-the-size-of-a-game-boy-advance","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nMark\nShirley\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nEgypt sweater!\n\n\nhttps://www.etsy.com/listing/233409089/amazing-1940s-egyptian-fair-isle-jumper\n\nAt the end of this film, are we supposed to want Indy to save Elsa? To go off happily together? (I say no.)\nKazim is the best character in Last Crusade\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/shorts/IP54S-ZZtyE\n\nPortrait of my Brother as Indiana Jones\n\n\nhttps://www.tupeloquarterly.com/poetry/portrait-of-my-brother-as-indiana-jones-by-amorak-huey/\n\nSallah: The hardest brownface to swallow\nAre pits of snakes effective as circus attractions?\nThe visual of them closing themselves in a giant box while on the motorcycle\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nA nerd of the second-highest caliber.\nWorking in tech on the internet.\nQuality guests on a quality show.\nSavage Oaf vs. Savage Oath.\nGetting on Metal Archives and figuring out those bands are.\nSwearing an Oaf.\nReading \"Lord of the Rings\" because you are pregnant.\nRecommending pregnancy to someone who wants a child.\nWonder Weeks.\nYour child is about the size of a mid-sized sedan.\nA delightful looking creature about the size of a Micro Machine.\nA sister who is a chimp and other wild shit from the 1970s.\nA screwball comedy about lions living with Tippi Hedren and mauling the director of Speed.\nA movie about an archaeologist who is beloved by all his students and one of them is wearing this sweater.\n1940s Egyptian Fair Isle Jumper.\nGetting unprofessionally close to the professor you have a crush on so he can notice your cool Egypt sweater.\nWhy Dial of Destiny didn't do that well.\nAn entirely tolerable movie according to Mark circa whenever that movie came out.\nDeploying the tense night-time action music.\nGoing to Fiverr and paying someone the fair value of their labor.\nElsa's a Nazi and then we're mad at Elsa.\nEmotionally elevated moments between Indy and Elsa.\nProposing to your girlfriend on the Golden Gate Bridge in a last-ditch attempt to save your relationship.\nThe payoff of Henry Jones Sr.'s character arc.\nElsa choosing the wrong grail on purpose.\nThe 50 grails on the other side of the room that Elsa didn't even look at.\nCoffee cup movie magic.\nThe expeditious nature of film storytelling.\nThe Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword.\nKazim falling off the dock.\nKazim showing up to beat the shit out of a kid who is spending too much time reading about the grail on Wikipedia.\nThe two-part episode of MacGyver where MacGyver looks for the Holy Grail.\nStealing artifacts because they belong in museums, not with the people who originated them.\nGoing on a series of heists to steal artifacts back from museums and returning them to their people.\nSometimes chased, sometimes chasing.\nAmorak from Kalamazoo.\nLove on her eyelids.\nA certified Wocust.\nCompensation for my brother-in-law's car.\nThe depiction of Sallah in Raiders vs. in Last Crusade.\nFisher Stevens in Short Circuit.\nA movie you can give up.\nJohn Rhys-Davies playing a dwarf even though he's not even from Middle Earth.\nMiddle Earth being flat for elves but round for humans.\nA huge vat filled with undifferentiated snakes that is a circus attraction somehow.\nThe guy who lays down in the bed of snakes.\nA 1920s-era circus putting on a performance of the play that Snakes on a Plane was based on.\nGiving 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.\nNot thinking to ask a question until 30 years after you've seen the movie.\nLiking art that is flawed.\nDying from a recreational drug situation.\nSafely ensconced in the box.\nBeing chased by Nazis and taking a moment to pry open a wooden crate just in case there is a motorcycle in it.\nBatman scrolling reddit while hiding behind the curtain for the guy he's going to surprise coming back into the office.\nOf course that's what they do, and of course it worked, because you just saw it happen and it worked.\nThe pitfalls of googling your own medical symptoms.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2024-04-29T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/7f9cff6b-cd57-4af9-ab25-66c5b288fad8.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":59424599,"duration_in_seconds":3714}]},{"id":"89a0c322-695d-40b5-af47-d0e552837352","title":"235. Ennui Golf","url":"https://topiclords.com/ennui-golf","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nJenni\nXalavier\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nHow do centaur internal organs work\nWhat is the most unlikely horror franchise to adapt to games?\nDo boomerangs work?\nSerious KAAAND!\n\n\nhttps://www.reddit.com/r/TopicLords/comments/1b3j3nu/serious_kaaand/\n\nMost game mascots are the sexual avatars of their creators\nThe Ted Dabney Experience\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nRusty Lake.\nAn intriguing, terrifying morsel.\nWhether it's okay to lie on this show.\nLife Eater.\nThe horror fantasy kidnapping sim space.\nShippers shipping games.\nHow do we ship this game without destroying people?\nAll of the horse except for the head and neck.\nCosmetic centaur organs.\nIntroducing yourself to the inside of a centaur and it's extremely squishy in there.\nA single multifunctional cube that births a centaur and that's the original Xbox startup video.\nSpeaking a language that doesn't exist and every time you finish a sentence you hear church bells.\nWould a defective centaur wear a hat like this or like this?\nCentaurs always standing at their standing desks.\nA centaur wearing a horse mask.\nPlaying Wii Golf with someone who remains sitting the entire time.\nGetting off the Power Pad to long jump.\nSitting golf.\nMy Dinner with Andre the Giant.\nThe monster mash vs. monster bash.\nAdapting the Ghostbusters theme song to other media.\nPlaying as the car and running people over.\nJail for cars.\nJelly beans that taste bad on purpose.\n80s films for children that are meant to turn them into weird bisexuals when they grow up.\nJeff Minter's Dune.\nBarbarella the video game.\nMore things you can do with your Rock Band instruments.\nSticking even more games inside of Fortnite.\nThe lemur with the really big eyes.\nMicroorganisms that live in water and have the end of a comedy roast bone for a head.\nVenomousness of hybrid mammals.\nGrabbing your stress ball after learning that the duck billed platypus uses electroreception to track their prey, Xalavier Nelson, Jr.\nPlatypus patch notes.\nAdding expansions to Classic World of Warcraft.\nGauging the temperature of the room when it comes to boomerangs.\nThrowing a washing machine in a circle.\nHow you feel when the boomerang doesn't come back.\nObjects that you see on TV.\nBoomerangs 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.\nA boomerang with a heart on it that you throw to find true love.\nBoomerangs vs. Gen-Xerangs.\nGetting lazy by the time you sharpen the 7th blade on your boomerang.\nDisrupting marshmallows by making them kinda good.\nHiring 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.\nGetting Australian concussions all weekend.\nNaming your facial hair \"are you ready for the next topics\"\nHi guys call anyone knows how to buy guns and armor India?\nCrossposting between r/TopicLords to r/IndianTeenagers.\nWeeding out the cowards with Gregorian Chant.\nLooking at Glover and immediately understanding his salient sexual verbs.\nThe distinction between mascot and main character.\nYour Sonics, your Gexes and your Crashes Bandicoot.\nSwitching places with your therapist.\nNon-saucy mascots.\nHaving to pick between being horny and being a sociopath because you can't be both.\nGlover vs. Hamburger Helper vs. Thing.\nOpening yourself to a deeper Freudian zeitgeist.\nThe mascot platformer you keep seeing roms of but have never downloaded.\nBlinx 2: Masters of Time and Space.\nBlinx dressing up as the lead singer of Power Man 5000.\nExactly the sort of podcast segment you want to commit to sight unseen.\nBeing willing to give up 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand to make a friend happy.\nHow much do you want that Golden Microphone?\nThe crucible of the soul you go through to record a podcast.\nPeople in the future deciding what you would have made a podcast about if you were still alive and making that podcast.\nThe Xalavier Nelson, Jr. Experience.\nThe dream list of developers you ask to help finish your game in your will.\nLocking Albert Einsten and Genghis Khan in a haunted house and they vote each other off the show back and forth forever.\nA deeply safe field for job hunting.\nThe Ted Dabney Experience of finding out that Ted Dabney died twelve years ago.\nMrs. Columbo.\nA movie named \"This Movie Has Marky Mark In It.\"\nA game called Beyonce Battle Royale that doesn't have Beyonce in it and it's not a battle royale. (It's a clicker.)\nBeyonce: Oops All Mudkips.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2024-04-22T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/89a0c322-695d-40b5-af47-d0e552837352.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":61050461,"duration_in_seconds":3815}]},{"id":"39ac5f31-4f4d-449b-98d4-f2e6bd793494","title":"234. Plunge Correctly For High Score","url":"https://topiclords.com/plunge-correctly-for-high-score","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nJohnB\nKevin\n\n\nJADES data: https://jades.idies.jhu.edu/public/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nThoughts on approximately 5/12 of Don Quixote\nThe Time Life \"Mysteries of the Unknown\" Series (1987-1991) and its impact on a generation of young nerds\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mysteries_of_the_Unknown\nhttps://www.reddit.com/r/IcebergCharts/comments/r487u4/distant_astronomical_objects_iceberg/\nhttps://www.slideshare.net/DirkTheDaring11/timelife-mysteries-of-the-unknown-the-ufo-phenomenon\nhttps://archive.org/details/DreamsAndDreaming_201809/page/n33/mode/2up\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lal0aWAys0k\n\nThomas Edison didn't think telephones needed to ring. He figured the caller could just start yelling \"hello\" at you even before you answered the phone\nDesiderata\n\n\nhttps://www.desiderata.com/desiderata.html\nhttps://www.readwritethink.org/sites/default/files/resources/lesson_images/lesson372/PoloniusExcerpt.pdf\n\nIs pinball meant to be fun? Can you lose a quarter at an arcade faster in a game cabinet or in a pinball machine?\n\n\nhttps://arcadeblogger.com/2018/07/06/arcade-holy-grail-the-pinball-circus/\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAtVBb8rOok\nhttps://archive.org/details/TILTTheBattleToSavePinballDisc2Extras\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nDog ownership.\nA living creature that just wanders around the house.\nPicking up warm soft weird thing.\nCracking open a cold one.\nComputers flush with science data.\nThe deepest images humans have ever taken.\nFinding distances to individual galaxies.\nListicles you can peruse.\nPicking a galaxy and naming it after yourself.\nBug Mars 2.\nThe Glass Universe.\nHiring women and calling them computers.\nA guy with a lot of free time and a gold nose.\nSome public domain books being more readable than others.\nPun localization.\nNorth American otaku tilting at windmills with their katanas.\nHow people pronounce quixotic and how they ought to pronounce quixotic.\nWhether we respect English majors on this show.\nNaming a character something weird and hoping nobody argues about the pronunciation hundreds of years from now.\nButthead as Don Quixote and Beavis as Sancho Panza.\nThe Great Cornholio tilting at windmills.\nThe era of translations that don't realize Don Quixote is a parody.\nPart II of Don Quixote responding to Don Quixote fan fiction.\nDon Coyote.\nSending Mario Maker back to Miguel Cervantes to see what he would make.\nThe kinds of books your parents would have on their shelf, back when that was the only thing available to read.\nThe 80s resurgence of New Age thought.\nMystic Places.\nThe Shin Megami Tensei section in the library.\nWhere to find the books that teach you magic in the public library.\nThe canonical map of reported UFO sightings worldwide.\nBooks for the kind of person who thinks Aleister Crowley is cool.\nThe Spaceships of Ezekiel.\nThe JWST iceberg.\nThe Distant Astronomical Objects iceberg.\nA tin can and a string with a battery attached.\nHello, fellow phone owner.\nA phone call asking you to log into a web site and read a message.\nFunny ways to answer the phone.\nE.B. Games, where you can get F-Zero for Zero.\nThe size of fortune cookies in the 1920s.\nNice things to do and be.\nDesiderata vs. Deteriorata.\nAdvice giving poems.\nSkin cancer is mid.\nCasey Kasem quitting Transformers after they wrote an episode featuring Abdul, king of Carbombya.\nAvoiding loud and aggressive persons.\nPinball getting harder and more complex over the course of a century.\nBaffleball.\nPinball features to make things easier for beginners.\nThe quickest way to lose money on an arcade game.\nTilt-sensing plum bobs.\nA weird kinetic sculpture that exists just for your entertainment.\nThe Black Hole for Personal Reasons.\nA boring and easy pinball cabinet that you can play for an hour when you want to get sick of pinball.\nTilt: The Battle to Save Pinball.\nMultidisc!\nPinball tables by George Gomez.\nPinball: not actually fun, but they did their best.\nFree play skee-ball.\nPacific Pinball Museum and Musee Mecanique.\nTwitter forgiveness.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2024-04-15T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/39ac5f31-4f4d-449b-98d4-f2e6bd793494.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":67255483,"duration_in_seconds":4203}]},{"id":"8e98eeee-453a-4cd3-af63-367c254209bf","title":"233. A Huge Pile Of Gold You Just Use To Shoot Porn On","url":"https://topiclords.com/a-huge-pile-of-gold-you-just-use-to-shoot-porn-on","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nJonah\nAC\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nWhen was the last time you listened to a song backwards?\nDecentralized manufacturing\nAre there other terms like \"foodies,\" to describe those who are super into universal bodily functions?\nThe Bathroom Line, by Jesse Thurston\nPlaytesting legos\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nPet Rock Dot Site\nWhether rhythm is a kind of sound.\nA rhythm synthesizer that produces control voltages.\nAll the things you could hypothetically like about New York City.\nCrowded speculative real estate.\nCanada's role as a fire hazard.\nThe power company in charge of all the wildfires.\nWhat happened to Smokey the Bear.\nStopping for lobsters crossing the highway.\nWhether Smokey the Bear died in his sleep.\nPutting the oven on self clean and it cleans your whole house.\nBringing back Satanic Panic to make backmasking cool again.\nConstructing a cliff that echoes backwards.\nMusique Concrete.\nThe kind of people who would make an album in Csound.\nAdmitting that your music is hilarious.\nConlon Nancarrow's works for player piano.\nBlack MIDI.\nKnowing that you should be adding a constraint to your assertion but not knowing what it should be.\nIf Conlon Nancarrow had only entered cryosleep.\nLoading up a song in Sound Forge.\nSquid Salmple.\nBluetooth: it works every time!\nVirtual modular synthesizers with cool cable physics.\nThe etymology of backmasking.\nIf Wiktionary is so good, why isn't there a Wiktionary 2?\nFranchising your rhythm box.\nDoing each other's administrative work.\nDoing a labor swap to get fresh eyes on your project.\nUbering to the trail head.\nImagine: paying rent for an office.\nPoopsocking it on this family show.\nThe Armory.\nGoing back in time and having $14 million.\nSelling your forehead as advertising space.\nJoseph Circuit City Smith.\nThis man needs your help to remove his porn logo forehead tattoos.\nAspirational snake eye contacts.\nYour contacts contact.\nAntique sword knife bookmark charm sword knife pendants knife charms for bookmarks.\nGoing to the breathing club and breathing really hard.\nThe Hearty-Starty.\nTrying to joke about a thing that turns out to just be a real thing.\nA Facebook group for people who love shitting.\nBlinkos and all the nuances of the ways they love to blink.\nA whole world just for smelling.\nHow your heart doesn't stop every time you sneeze.\nGreen text vs. other colors of text.\nThe r/bluetext subreddit that's all about links to other web sites.\nNutty Gum and Fruit Spleggings.\nFinding the one while in line to poop.\nGoing to college for like a year and one of the best things about it was the bathroom graffiti.\nA chalkboard in the physics department's bathroom stall.\nHelp I'm trapped in the bathroom grout.\nPeeing while trying to think of a poem.\nPeeing your pants in the bathroom.\nDon't Backmask Me, Bro.\nFinding someone in a bar who wants to playtest your experimental game for three hours.\nThe movie Yesterday except for inventing Legos.\nFollowing instructions as a way to fidget.\nTrying to solve a difficult programming puzzle when someone comes up and starts biting you in the ass.\nAll the ways someone can be onboarded onto an experience.\nFree HTML5 Games Tagged Idle.\nTop Three Clickers.\nRoguathia.\nWaiting until you have more SP to select upgrades.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.\r\n","date_published":"2024-04-08T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/8e98eeee-453a-4cd3-af63-367c254209bf.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":69693021,"duration_in_seconds":4355}]},{"id":"b9901864-742a-46ed-91b5-b797acf1c8cc","title":"232. Where's The Poem, Zaborowske?","url":"https://topiclords.com/wheres-the-poem-zaborowske","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nChris\nDev\n\n\nhttps://devinbusha.artstation.com/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nTaking Improv classes has been life changing.\nPracticing 3 keyboard layouts at the same time\nI bought store brand salt. You wouldn't think this would be a big deal but it turns out to be\nI Once Snorted an Eight Ball with Santa, by Richie Zaborowske\n\n\nhttps://www.havehashad.com/hadposts/i-once-snorted-an-eight-ball-with-santa\n\nAre all creative ideas very derivative, or is it just my ideas\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nPickleball.\nWeird shapes the birdie flies in.\nThe sport that has level design.\nMindful breathing.\nYou are now breathing mindfully.\nLooking forward to being at square one.\nGetting the real data once you stop paying attention.\nThespians in High School.\nSpinning a wheel to figure out what emotion to feel.\nWhether the yes and rule only works for comedy.\nPancakes. Are. Starchy.\nBeing late to your job that's on fire because you were stuck behind the fire truck.\nCelebrating your own failures.\nHow to play Lemmings in 2024.\nSelf-esteem.\nImmediately vibing with a new sport.\nAutotuning except it's completely manual.\nA bunch of joysticks that you twiddle with your fingers to do letters.\nColemak vs. Colemak DH.\nKeyboards that are laid out in columns.\nSplitting up the typing test into QWERTY, Dvorak and Colemak.\nPalm Pilot Graffiti.\nThe Lord's Prayer in Gregg.\nShorthand. (Originally called Briefhand.)\nGood ciphers for room escape puzzles.\nAre QR codes based on the mazes in Zelda 2?\nFlaky sea salt vs. coarse sea salt.\nAdding a biting experience to make your food more heterogeneous.\nEdible chemistry.\nThe last time you pinched salt.\nAudially-rewarding salt grinders.\nScience Youtuber Hank Green.\nWarning pregnant women to not eat too much salty licorice.\nSupertaster-outing Tic Tacs that regular people love but supertasters immediately vomit.\nWe've got a level six kaiju supertaster on our hands!\nThe guy who gets paid too much to taste ice cream.\nThe kind of person who doesn't salt their food but instead repeatedly licks a salt lick throughout the meal.\nHeads swirling around like snow globes.\nA poem that doesn't do anything with line breaks but does do something interesting with sentence lengths.\nA poem that you might read on a bathroom stall.\nWearing the little hat and pulling on the cord that makes the horn toot.\nThe ecology that grows around the dumpster.\nThe crane swinging porta potties around.\nAn extremely expensive way to have fun \nHeading towards the era of having kids.\nAsking for payment for software that is not being maintained.\nMinesweeper but X.\nAn idea that is worth doing but not obviously worth doing.\nHow to make Missile Command fun in a new and interesting way.\nA boxing essay with questionable authenticity.\nStrategies for enjoying Frog Fractions.\nRangers and the new way they handle animals.\nYes-anding whatever ideas come to you.\nAncient primals that were interlocked in battle.\nSomeone thinking of an idea.\nConstantly listening for cues.\nWhat do inanimate objects do?\nBuying a giant bag of googly eyes and putting them on everything.\nNot posting on Twitter.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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","date_published":"2024-04-01T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/b9901864-742a-46ed-91b5-b797acf1c8cc.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":69477354,"duration_in_seconds":4342}]},{"id":"e195dcd0-a83a-4aec-8c91-43d906199bd0","title":"231. Game: The Game And Music Experience","url":"https://topiclords.com/game-the-game-and-music-experience","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nJeff\n\n\nhttp://dopeassvideogames.com/\n\nTyriq\n\n\nhttps://fourbitfriday.itch.io/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nThe shame of not remembering any good jokes for kids and having to write jokes on the spot for impatient children\nWhat's your favorite genre to consume that you have no interest in making (or think you'd suck at?)\nHigh Sidin'\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5INAxH1HD7s\n\nPoetry\n\n\nhttps://poets.org/poem/poetry\n\nEvery mammal has a fish\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nLine of sight for the fog of war.\nPlugging unplugging.\nHow to keep looking at TikTok when your phone is destroyed.\nTelling your kid that Youtube broke.\nYoutube videos that teach your child how to give a thumbs up.\nHaving more kids because it pays for itself.\nWhy did the princess have no dresses?\nExplaining to a four year old about the $20 Sack Pyramid.\nWeaning yourself off of saying /s by saying \"wocka wocka\" instead.\nTeaching your kids better standards for comedy.\nSnow White did this and then Belle was there and Ariel was there with her human legs. \nThe League of Extraordinary Gentlemen but for making pie.\nLooking up knock knock jokes online.\nYour kid finding your secret hoard of popsicle sticks and realizing you didn't just make all those jokes up from your head.\nThings you want to have made but don't want to make \nTrying to surprise yourself with your own level design.\nWallowing in the stuckness.\nWhether game developers know when they're making a bad game.\nPlaytesting the shit out of a game because you enjoy playtesting so much.\nQuestionable hip hop.\nThrashy hyperpop.\nFull-time access to a green screen and what it does to your head.\nComedy FMV games.\nMaking a career out of making bad art except it's funny and having to live with yourself.\nApproachable game projects.\nPivoting from making an action RPG to making a Vampire Survivors clone in the space of a weekend.\nMaking a bunch of efforts and they're all terrible.\nWhispering into a distortion pedal.\nPutting your vocals through a bunch of effects pedals because your lyrics are terrible.\nEnjoying an art creation process until you get too self conscious and ruin it.\nWallowing in the stuckness.\nMaking art and never showing it to anybody.\nA twin stick shooter that's just for me.\nGame Heads.\nOnlookers getting hyphy.\n\"Side Show\" by 415.\nBack when Oakland was in the 415 area code.\nTurning tight ones.\nTurning brodies in an intersection while commuters look at your 15-inch subwoofers.\nRogue car events.\nGame: the Games and Music Experience.\nA lowrider with the entirely wrong number of switches.\nWhether Boots Riley and Too Short still live in Oakland.\nAspirational trailer music choices.\nCar Stealth: drive around a corner and hide.\nMissing Rock Band but not missing it enough to install Fortnite.\nInitiating taunts in Fortnite by strumming the guitar controller.\nThe immovable critic twinkling his skin.\nImaginary gardens with real toads in them.\nPoetry with a diss track vibe to it.\nGood going, dumbass, you got into poetry.\nWhether poetry should rhyme.\nDiscriminating against business documents.\nPutting a poem on genius.com and adding a \"wocka wocka\" annotation after every joke.\nSpending an hour searching for animal names followed by \"fish\"\nWhich fish have the thickest bones?\nBuffalo Fish Wings.\nA fish that is way too big and shaped like the letter D.\nIs Beyonce a Nicki Minaj friends??\nGrandma's big bowl of worsties.\nEnergy drinks that make you want to disassemble a clock radio.\nDrinking C4.\nThe guy you know who always has at least three Red Bulls on him at all times.\nBringing home a one-of-a-kind Monet even though you know your roommate is a Monet fiend and will eat it immediately.\nThe Master P of devouring Kit Kats.\nThe Queen of Bites and Sips.\nYour duty to eat snacks before they go bad.\nEating one marshmallow right now.\nThe shitposty garbage that made Twitter fun.\nHere's some pants pooping jokes, wocka wocka.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2024-03-25T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/e195dcd0-a83a-4aec-8c91-43d906199bd0.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":68959920,"duration_in_seconds":4309}]},{"id":"09cb08e1-bc25-47e4-9576-3e8fd9e6ec2c","title":"230. What's God Even Made Of Anymore?","url":"https://topiclords.com/whats-god-even-made-of-anymore","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nMike\nJake\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nCameras are peaking -- what's next?\nIs the mysterious disappearing, or just mystery?\nPreschool security practices\nAt the Feast in the Great Hall, by Ursula Leguin\n\n\nhttps://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/1-EFinaN.png\n\nIt's not boring to talk about dreams\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nThe great state of Maine.\nA project you've been working on for a long time.\nInventing a game developer community in Michigan.\nMeaningful distinguishers on normal camera use.\nA lukewarm decisionmaking process.\nComputational photography.\nSamsung's fake moon.\nA camera that just guesses what you want to see so you don't even need to take the photo.\nA massive endless feed of the same photo with different people in it.\nWhy people use cameras.\nWhether photos exist.\nLate stages of the product category.\nPeople who need Photoshop to do their job.\nPhoto mode in real life.\nA photo you can take later.\nAdding a filter to make the guy in the background less likable.\nMeals for the Ages \nHow to get from here to perfect ubiquitous service surveillance.\nTheatrically pretending to be hit by a stationary car.\nGoing to the Gallagher movie and getting sprayed with watermelon.\nThere's just the one Bigfoot, it's the same Bigfoot every time.\nTomato sauces that are still delicious even if you learned the recipe from the Internet and not from a grandma.\nMysterious things backing into the shadows so they can remain mysterious.\nProtecting mystery wherever you find it.\nThe Museum of Jurassic Technology.\nStepping inside someone else's very strange brain.\nDawn Wall.\nAn intensely detailed exploration of the surface of a cliff.\nI wonder what it's like on the fucking moon?\nWho painted the iconic cover of the Wrinkle in Time paperback.\nThe 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.\nA reaction to the lack of organic mystery in our lives.\nThe Case of the Missing Hit and Searching for Sugarman.\nWash over me, True Story.\nWhich phone checked the kid out of preschool.\nBeing on the list of services the insurance companies consider to have checked various boxes.\nWe got pins. We can do that.\nThe three bad four-digit pins.\nStreamlining the process of rapidly accounting for all the children.\nDeveloping a system that would deterministically move the needle in a useful way.\nBlundering in the brightness.\nTelling two events from the same perspective.\nUgly crying at your desk in a public workspace.\nSpending way more time not alive than alive.\nSomething that we can experience on either side of our lives.\nA Fire Take from Jake.\nWaiter stress dreams.\nA skill that you can hone.\nOne of the more fun channels in the discord.\nHolding an increasingly large bag of stuff.\nWaking up laughing until you realize your dream was not funny.\nThe consciousness wall between you and visualization.\nTraining yourself to let your mental imagery be visible.\nSeeing clumps of color and interpreting them.\nDoing an editing pass on your dreams before relating it to your friends.\nJay-Z's favorite bleu cheese Milkshakes.\nScrewball horror.\nA splash of furry content.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2024-03-18T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/09cb08e1-bc25-47e4-9576-3e8fd9e6ec2c.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":70689435,"duration_in_seconds":4418}]},{"id":"f95abfd9-6c0a-42d3-8622-e18754efa425","title":"229. This Show Now Available On Cockroach DNA","url":"https://topiclords.com/this-show-now-available-on-cockroach-dna","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nMegan\nLexi\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nErik Satie's performance indications\n\n\nhttps://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?boardid=60&threadid=4497\n\nInstant food from other cultures (why isn't everyone eating maggi noodles??)\nSeasonal decorations\nDelhi Metro\n\n\nhttps://docs.google.com/document/d/17k75ftxEn2xR-tJkLSV4H8st5BFAxPNxE3BNCXDI6Go/edit\n\nBecoming Immortal by being predictable\nLiving in different climates (e.g. my experiences with the harsh winters of Chicago vs sweltering Austin TX summers)\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nMusic implementation for The Lamplighters League.\nWatching a streamer play games and asking them for a turn at the controls.\nHow to pronounce \"Erik Satie.\"\nHow to pronounce \"Gymnopedies.\"\nFinding 100 umbrellas in your dead friend's apartment.\nA list of Satie's performance indications.\nGrandly forgetting the present.\nWith your bones dry and distant.\nPlaying music with your forehead.\nDoing something to a piano.\nYour boss sending a memo asking you to work with a shy piety.\nPizzicato vs. Bartok pizzicato.\nAdding the hamburger so it's not just Helper.\nWhat instant foods are missing from your food vocabulary.\nAdding heavy cream to ramen broth.\nGetting an apron so you can have a little costume when you cook.\nRealizing that when you wear the apron you don't get food on your shirt.\nA big bib for Big Jim.\nNormalizing scoop bibs.\nKraft Dinner.\nHalal certified instant stir fry noodles.\nRamen in a cup or ramen where you provide your own container.\nInsurance Mac.\nCanned cheeseburgers.\nA boring house with nothing on it.\nMovable feasts.\nKeeping those 12-foot skeletons in your yard and decorating it seasonally.\nThe beetles that clean bones for you.\nRecreational Explosives Day.\nA Zachtronics programming puzzle for every holiday.\nA movable feast where you don't eat.\nDecorating your house to celebrate Toyotathon.\nFalling for strangers and their blue hair.\nA poem that is long if you read it but short if you recite it.\nTaking public transit as an act of defiance.\nA gift that is impossible to give yourself on purpose.\nInventing a shower proof phone so nobody ever has shower thoughts again.\nPutting your phone in a Ziploc bag and watching movies underwater.\nSitting down at your computer and getting stuck.\nHacking your executive function by adding friction in the right places.\nWhether Wellbutrin gives everyone tinnitus or just you.\nDeath hacks for staying mentally connected to your dead relatives.\nA service that puts your podcast on vinyl.\nUsing CRISPR to infect the cockroach population with 229 episodes of Topic Lords.\nMoving to a land where your snot doesn't freeze.\nNot trusting your own weather opinions.\nSurprising yourself by enjoying seasons.\nDriving in icy conditions.\nStanding under the heated lamps like a lizard.\nWaiting for the bus in the dark.\nLearning to drive after you move to a city with public transit.\nNot driving with kids.\nGetting rid of all the bots.\nSgt. Pepper Bot.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2024-03-11T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/f95abfd9-6c0a-42d3-8622-e18754efa425.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":52495672,"duration_in_seconds":3280}]},{"id":"d8cdd8a4-e918-4281-89fd-dfe65a7f00e8","title":"228. Detecting Myself As Spam","url":"https://topiclords.com/detecting-myself-as-spam","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nFif\nMitch\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nThe Ace Attorney series' English localization's naming conventions\nThe kissing mechanic in Bully represents both what is genius and terrible about the game\nPodcast Prep Sheet Trending Guests and Topics\nThe Tay Bridge Disaster\n\n\nhttps://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/tay-bridge-disaster/\n\nNo 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\nComments that say \"why did the algorithm recommend this to me\"\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1LhdhQEKtg\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nTwo handfuls of times.\nSomething very fivey about hands.\nDependability and a detail-oriented nature.\nPutting your resume in the show notes.\nNaming your kid a list of two things.\nA story taking place in a Los Angeles that is a satire of near future Japan.\nNaming games after verbs.\nMario Push Button.\nThe Haiku-detecting tumblr bot.\nImagining an opinion and searching for someone who has it so you can yell at them.\nAll the time we have for Topic Lords.\nKissing a kissable person. (They have kissability.)\nA dress-up fashion thing.\nWearing a reindeer patterned jumper to reduce your kissability.\nApplying triple-A polish to a boarding school setting.\nDorms in a castle.\nHey, nice face.\nDemographics based on what classes you have to take to kiss members of the demographic.\nDressing in real life like you do in a Grand Theft Auto game.\nThe one character in the entire GTA series that cares about the clothes you wear.\nSecrets Behind the Suite: Unveiling the Hidden World behind Luxury Hotels.\nEco-friendly or Eco-fail?\nLaw and Disorder: how TV crime shows get it wrong.\nSending an email to yourself and it gets detected as spam.\nThe friend who has a lot of opinions about Homestuck.\nMaking your hearts for to quail.\nPoems including civil engineering advice.\nGood vs. bad nonsense poems.\nA fun poem to read.\nPaying money to engage with content.\nDeliberately slipping on a banana peel.\nWhat it says about hitting in the Banana Rules.\nSchool administrators publishing statistics on how many banana peels you've slipped on.\nSkyrim spoiling the presence of robots on the stats screen.\nWatching what players do and rewarding every action they take.\nA good video game is a game that has three good stats screens and no bad stats screens.\nHaving a question in your head and not knowing who to ask so you ask the person in front of you.\nYoutube koans.\nShowing content to someone who will be not that jazzed about it.\nYoutube recommending a let's-play from a year ago with 10 views.\nA PMV of the character you are obsessed with.\nThe only person who takes a the Youtube Creator Surveys.\nConstantly deleting the shorts.\nPosting a tweet to youtube.com.\nPosting a link to your own videos on Youtube.\nCommunity captions and what happened to them.\nDoing annotations dirty.\nNekoneko.\nComments popping up and scrolling across the screen constantly.\nListening to a cassette tape you dug up in the desert.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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\"","date_published":"2024-03-04T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/d8cdd8a4-e918-4281-89fd-dfe65a7f00e8.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":67956818,"duration_in_seconds":4247}]},{"id":"46cc7ef6-74d0-4098-b402-5bdf5ca5a3d1","title":"227. Maximal Overlap With The Dork","url":"https://topiclords.com/maximal-overlap-with-the-dork","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nErica\nKory\n\n\nhttps://kbones.itch.io/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nMystery Hunt 2024\nDeveloping my first video game\nWearing glasses prevents COVID\nEnglish Ending Song, by Ryoji Yoshitomi\n\n\nhttps://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/AxA-XP8E.png\n\nHow to make satisfying non-violent gameplay\n\n\n@DJTentMode@mstdn.party\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nLetting go of concepts of yourself that you believe.\nLosing a concept of yourself as a person and just becoming free-floating thoughts.\n47 year old house painters.\nGrowing up to be a pluripotent human being.\nFinding cool and positive Internet spaces to hang out in.\nExcavating old Bubsy memorabilia.\nChecking the maps on your telephone.\nDefining yourself as someone who doesn't eat free cheese samples.\nScientists researching how to be cool and cringe at the same time.\n2023 Game of the Year Gordy and the Monster Moon.\nProtocols and processes that presume that if you are good at solving puzzles then you must also be good at designing puzzles.\nThe humble beginnings of the MIT Mystery Hunt.\nPuzzle Inflation.\nInstant stooging.\nPeople who are obligated to prevent their children from dying.\nServer migration problems.\nAccidentally writing the same puzzle as someone else.\nPremium content for listeners who want to subscribe.\nPutting sprites on the screen and accepting controller input.\nGame design by proxy.\nYour local Barcade with a Pico-8 cabinet.\nButtoning up a game to make it a shippable product.\nWhether the knife is detecting a dork.\nButter golems.\nBugs that make games more fun.\nBuilding a high end gaming PC and only running Pico-8 on it \nI can't believe they buttered Jorts!\nMeeting the guy who runs the Indie Arcade at Magfest.\nWaiting 40 years for opportunities to fall in your lap.\nThink Buick.\nA cat that is not on the show.\nOf all the exposed mucus membranes on your face, the eyes are two of them.\nProjectile transmission.\nDid this COVID infection rate study control for popularity?\nHitting 40 and embracing the cringe.\nWearing chemistry goggles in public.\nMyopic basketball players.\nThings you can put on your face to look like a superhero in disguise.\nThe Wario Land 4 soundtrack.\nMaking ogg vorbis rips of the Wario Land 4 soundtrack to put on Napster.\nA gem of a poem to be hidden in a Wario game.\nPlaying back vocals with single-syllable samples.\nOur collective dream diary.\nYour dreams melting into your pillow with all the dust mites.\nEverything is impermanent, especially video games.\nA shocking removal of an important human from your life.\nMaking your peace with the time you have forgotten.\nThe natural high you get from blowing things up.\nThrowing apples at a Snorlax until it wakes up.\nCooking games.\nMatching happy looking fruits of different sizes.\nWatching carefully as two peaches slide together.\nDesigning video games for 5-year olds on T.\nDropping things that merge in a two dimensional space with gravity.\nThe boy has two dads.\nWhat can I do that is nonviolent and crunchy and interesting and solvable?\nLooking for inspiration outside of video games.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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","date_published":"2024-02-26T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/46cc7ef6-74d0-4098-b402-5bdf5ca5a3d1.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":70422777,"duration_in_seconds":4401}]},{"id":"5b8c1569-66c1-4426-87b1-4faf363b5312","title":"226. Ilk-Action Lawsuit","url":"https://topiclords.com/ilk-action-lawsuit","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nRyan\nAlexander\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nGetting so agitated that you cook dinner\nWhat'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?\nTexturally enhanced alternative beverage\nBagme Bloma\n\n\nhttps://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Bagme_Bloma\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nHow the science gets done.\nMeasuring the height of a flagpole by measuring its shadow.\nUsing calculus to find the surface area of a potato.\nMeasuring and re-measuring until you get the result you want.\nConfronting your professor about their involvement in Frog Fractions 2.\nCountry and Western music fused with synth heavy prog rock.\nUsing the gun to parallel park.\nThat time Ryan died while recording Topic Lords.\nGetting so agitated that you do some differential equations.\nNew guy just dropped: guy who whenever he thinks about death he has to make a sandwich.\nThe first step towards rejecting a task: assessing the task.\nToday is a good day to fill your Prius with snakes.\nThe Raccoon Prius story.\nHilarious mothers.\nThe inside of a Prius: nothing but corners.\nOfficer, it's not what you think. No, not that either.\nPutting the AC on so the python in the back seat gets sluggish.\nGetting a fork and spoon and twirling up snakes like spaghetti.\nA taste worth busting your ass for.\nAn oral history of tricking alcohol post your tongue.\nAn entire generation that has never had to work to enjoy things because there are so many things that are easy to enjoy.\nTwelve year olds from Alabama calling you a cuck.\nNew ideas that you haven't been thinking of even without looking at your phone.\nHiking: it's just hard walking.\nGetting so agitated that you developed a taste for hiking.\nThe guy in the Fred Meyer buying Reese's cups while wearing a tuxedo.\nThe Men's Wearhome.\nThe 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.\nOrbitz. (The soft drink from 1996.)\nA proto-boba.\nDrinking a random test tube from a bioengineering lab.\nWhat 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\nBig Dick's Energy.\nFlavor-blasted slushies.\nThe sense-horror of drinking an Orbitz.\nShelf-stable tapioca pearls.\nA free-to-play game for your tongue.\nTexturally subdued beverages.\nDecaf Red Bull.\nThe hypothetical beverage enthusiast who wants a decaf Red Bull.\nHow to make Orbitz in your toilet.\nHow many Orbitz you have to drink to reach Nirvana.\neBay sellers insisting that you don't drink the thirty year old novelty beverage they're selling you.\nThinking a poem is a Middle Earth thing but it's actually a regular Earth thing.\nPoetry that is alliterative rather than rhyming.\nMaking art by fucking around with a new medium.\nMusic in a foreign language.\nWhat Simlish sounds like in different languages.\nA quest to discover why they started dotting the letter Y.\nExpecting scrolls in 3 to 5 days.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2024-02-19T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/5b8c1569-66c1-4426-87b1-4faf363b5312.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":65753337,"duration_in_seconds":4109}]},{"id":"7642077f-83d1-4974-901c-7d65abeeb1f1","title":"225. Showers: It's Wet In There","url":"https://topiclords.com/showers-its-wet-in-there","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nCisHetKayfaber\nBaseCase\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nRaising third cultural kids as a second cultural individual\nFiguring out how to do creative projects that take longer than a weekend when you aren't getting paid for them.\nSomeone sent me money on Venmo and now I need to sign up for Venmo if I want to have the money\nFarmyard Song\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmyard_Song\nhttps://www.elyrics.net/read/a/aaron-copland-lyrics/i-bought-me-a-cat-lyrics.html\n\nWe'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?\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nNot being permitted to plug anything.\nA unique situation in which you are gendered a lot less.\nAustralian Treat Arnott's Mint Slice.\nCrossover of snacks from Australia to Japan.\nGentleman's agreements among cookie manufacturers.\nPatenting your cookie recipe.\nTouring school administrators.\nBeing friends with a lot of Coca Cola people.\nReally enjoying multiculturalism.\nProducing a good person.\nTaking credit for the time your daughter didn't play Mario for six months.\nFocusing on the aspects of the situation that you find meaningful.\nWhat does and doesn't count as a childhood development milestone.\nBeing good at the work people are expecting you to do.\nDoing worksheets outside.\nWhat children report back from their experience at school.\nAttempting to pirate the Montessori curriculum.\nA really fun month.\nProjects you can accomplish in a weekend.\nWhy you don't have more to show for all your free time.\nRefusing to call someone stupid or lazy and having to figure out why they're actually failing.\nCoping strategies to get things done.\nAdvice that is not helpful for neurodivergent people.\nBreaking a task into subtasks and putting them on a schedule.\nThe first time you encountered the concept of a to-do list.\nBrain tech.\nHammock time. (Or shower time.)\nShowers: It's Wet In There.\nExultation of showers.\nWatching someone start a hobby and immediately excel at it.\nFinding a good community to learn how to do a thing.\nJoining a discord with experts in many things.\nLearning how to program and realizing that this makes you good at everything because programming is the hardest thing humans do.\nSending money to a phone number vs. sending money to an email address.\nCanadians wishing each other money.\nNice things to do when you don't want to defraud people.\nOpening a whole raft of phishing opportunities.\nVisa getting a cut of every transaction that happens ever.\nWhether every person in the world could live in Canada.\nThe Cocaine Mayor.\nA traditional that is credited to Aaron Copeland.\nCats saying \"fiddle-eye-fee.\"\nNot being a raging misogynist but engaging in raging misogyny anyway.\nThe era when the onomatopoeia for a dog barking was \"bow wow.\"\nOnomatopoeia that is literal like \"bang\" vs. onomatopoeia that is more of a stretch like \"shimmy shack shimmy shack.\"\nRiffing on Aaron Copeland's sexuality.\nTrying to shit enough to keep up with your toilet paper subscription.\nA product built for people who have kids but do not have kids.\nThe mechanism by which the \"Launch Frog Fractions 2\" button launched Frog Fractions 2.\nThe great Loot Box crash of 2019.\nSnacks that come with an instruction manual.\nKetchup flavored potato chips.\nWhat you reach for when you're feeling snacky.\nA potato chip palate that is just far too sophisticated.\nSmoked ham potato chips.\nHarry Potter jelly beans ruining snacks forever.\nOnly liking eating things that taste good.\nThis is bad, but is it bad in a new, interesting way?\nThe worst kind of bad.\nObserving a terrible sprawling work and thinking \"wow, you really did a thing here.\"\nThe recontextualization of earlier elements based on later knowledge.\nDiscord Lords.\nListening to ads because you have gloves on.\nHow to join the Topic Lords discord.\nA recently minted lord who edits the show.\nLords Eat Free.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2024-02-12T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/7642077f-83d1-4974-901c-7d65abeeb1f1.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":76420492,"duration_in_seconds":4776}]},{"id":"0f6c713d-f900-4a73-aa83-4a9c67054140","title":"224. Following A Garden Hose Around In The Dark","url":"https://topiclords.com/following-a-garden-hose-around-in-the-dark","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nJason\n\n\nhttps://jmac.org/\nhttps://masto.nyc/@jmac\n\nNathan\n\n\nMommy's Best Games Everywhere\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nWhen 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!!!!\"\nJukebox griefing\nNintendo 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.\nHypothetical explanations for the paradox\n\n\nhttps://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/bZmUoKct.png\n\nThinking about RGB color programming for games, then wondering about how the color actually happens on monitors.\nBach 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\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nInteractive Fiction Land.\nPanoptikum Budapest.\nBumpy Grumpy's emotional arc.\nFrantic Frank.\nMen and male-presenting persons with painted nails.\nPainting just one fingernail dark green and wondering whether that's a hankie code thing.\nWhat's going on with my thumbs?\nYour non-thumb fingernails.\nPainting your nails and repeatedly rediscovering them.\nLooking like an android. (But in a cool way.)\nForehead loaves.\nStarting to pay attention to where your fingers are.\nWhy not to wear a magnetic nose stud.\nBeing 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.\nGetting into a jukebox griefing war with someone you've never met.\nWalking up to the jukebox and typing in the binary code of the WAV file you want to play.\nBinary data played back at audio rates.\nThe math describing Mario's jump arc.\nMaking the first racing video game and thinking \"well that's racing games sorted.\"\nSatoru Iwata's understanding of Mario's last name.\nMario: a weird little dude.\nDrill Dozer.\nHow 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.\nPlatformers where you go off the edge of the screen and end up on another screen and each screen has a name.\nInflation hypothesis and the youngness argument.\nEarth is purposefully isolated. (Planetarium hypothesis.)\nThey are here undetected vs. they are here unacknowledged.\nArguing about a sexy robot.\nIronically Sexy Robots\nThe Fudd Paradox, by Ray Bradbury.\nPeople who just want to toss salad and don't want to know about your weird slang.\nGender-expansive anthropomorphic rabbits.\nBlank verse vs. free verse.\nBurning Monkey Solitaire.\nWhat your cat sees when he's swatting at Kratos.\nHow blue is blue?\nWatching old episodes of Bob Ross and you can't follow along any more because they don't make Mummy Brown anymore.\nThe Opaque See-Through TV.\nSeeing 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.\"\nRibbed monitors.\nThe secret textures of the Nintendo 3DS.\nAll kinds of words that you don't know how to pronounce.\nThe Moogseum.\nBach's looping doodle.\nThe structure of the J.S. Bach speedrunning community.\nA 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.\nHungry music theorists who need human connection.\nSponsoring AGDQ with your clavier etudes.\nBlack MIDI.\nUsing up all the claviers in the world during your clavier speedrunning event.\nThe Fetaverse.\nMaking an arcade cabinet.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2024-02-05T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/0f6c713d-f900-4a73-aa83-4a9c67054140.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":67540531,"duration_in_seconds":4221}]},{"id":"044b270f-4eae-44c6-b285-1813bed6c296","title":"223. Three Hats To Scoop Up A Mouse","url":"https://topiclords.com/three-hats-to-scoop-up-a-mouse","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nAndrew\n\n\nhttps://kittenm4ster.neocities.org/\n\nAubrianne\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nKnitting patterns are open source clothing\nThis one weird trick will make your videogame feel original\n\n\nEsper 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.\"\n\nI noticed myself using insert. It turns out I use insert.\nhttps://genius.com/Shel-silverstein-the-garden-annotated\n\n\nEsper 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.'\"\n\nAphantasia but for audiation. Is that a thing?\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wW3LE8scke8\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nWool socks.\nThe thing Jim heard about wool.\nMaking a rope out of human hair.\nWhether there are multiple Columbos or just one.\nWhich one of you is the programmer and which one is the rubber duck?\nA human 3D printer.\nKeeping your hands busy.\nStim vs. fidget.\nHow to end a conversation that is not during a D&D session.\nDiscovering that your entire personality is a coping mechanism.\nYarnTube.\nThe fine line between dressing like a grandma and dressing like a really slutty grandma.\nIt's a tube. Figure it out.\nDoing it badly until you figure out how to do it better.\nMaking a game that is fun even if it doesn't have health bars.\nInstead of doing the easy and obvious things, do something really hard instead.\nWhy video games have conflict.\nDisaccord between you and everyone else in the video game.\nDefinitely arguably.\nKids learning from people who are not their parents.\nSmashing a bunch of things together until fun emerges.\nIt'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??\nDating anime ladies by clicking through text.\nA caveat among recommenders.\nVideo game dialog that makes you feel conflicted about shooting Nazis.\nRemembering people's tweets.\nThe Rule of Thirds of video game dialog.\nExecuting a bad idea very well.\nNo One Weird Trick for learning to play cello.\nThe insert key as part of your typing repertoire.\nWhether pause/break still works.\nA keyboard without the LinkedIn key.\nGetting your grandma online.\nPushing the pizza key on the keyboard and the CD-ROM drive opens and there it is.\nRifled plumbing that allows sewage to flow in a clockwise spiral while clean water flows in a counterclockwise spiral and they never touch.\nA surprise poem where none of your fruit is food.\nHow to make a poem fit on Pinterest.\nNo combat in my poems.\nDoing your best to make a good thing but never thinking your own work is good even after you experience great success.\nA grocery list with a Black Mirror twist ending.\nHaving money in Venmo but you need to sign up for Venmo to get it.\nListening to a thing if you want to know what it sounds like.\nAnauralia: the silent mind.\nIt takes your whole brain to be you, it doesn't have time to be other people too.\nNot watching Black Mirror so that you can believe everyone when they tell you lies about Black Mirror.\nIt was Emma Thompson all along.\nThe difficulty of remembering Maggie Gyllenhaal.\nGetting ripped while sitting motionless at your desk.\nThat fat jiggling machine from the 50s.\nA weighted hula hoop to massage your guts.\nJorts Horse.\nA bunch of millennials shitposting.\nTrying to distribute your games locally by stapling a floppy disk to a telephone pole \nMicrotransaction pump games.\nSneaking into an arcade with a new arcade game in your back pocket and furtively shoving your new game between two existing arcade games.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2024-01-29T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/044b270f-4eae-44c6-b285-1813bed6c296.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":69738996,"duration_in_seconds":4358}]},{"id":"0c93519c-5ae2-4568-bd7a-566d7b9501d3","title":"222. Barkley In Retrograde","url":"https://topiclords.com/barkley-in-retrograde","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nChris\nEsper\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nGeocaching\nThe Miyoo Mini and other handheld emulation consoles\nI still think I could've made it as a highly paid Super Mario Bros. 35 coach. I should've gone for it.\nThere's Not a Person Alive by David Donihue\n\n\nhttps://medium.com/@daviddonihue/theres-not-a-person-alive-poem-by-david-n-donihue-a1fcd714cc99\n\nThe strange semiparasocial relationship between a podcast editor and the people on the podcast\nStruggling to relearn high school Spanish\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nThe editor of a podcast.\nThe #1 podcast for topic fans.\nChopping at some audio until it becomes a podcast.\nEditing a recording into a podcast that's nothing but ums, mouth smacking noises and uncomfortable silence.\nZoom dynamically sensing when you're saying something dumb or boring and muting you.\nSaying yes with the Sonic ring noise and no with the Sonic taking damage noise.\nA cozy pleasant show full of fun facts.\nPrepping for a paradigm.\nHow to put audio on film.\nGoing on a web forum and receiving a quest to find a magnetic box stuck underneath a metal staircase.\nGeocaching on the Moon.\nGeocaching vs. Geohashing.\nA French pun for your board game night that nobody can remember because it's in French.\nc:geo.\nFinding a geocache by climbing a tree and pulling a paperclip attached to a fake piece of bark.\nWhat to do if you're the one who picks up a travel bug.\nFake bolts where the center unscrews and it's hollow inside.\nDeveloping a sense for when a geocache is nearby and always being wrong.\nMiyoo Mini Plus.\nCustom firmware that fixes your terrible handheld game system.\nThe Dream of the Playdate.\nThe Anbernic R something something letters numbers.\nC-ctrl.\nGoing back to the Tekken 3 well.\nA video game bar in Japan that only has Americans in it.\nA very reasonable number of video games to flip through.\nEmulators with daily runs.\nMulti Bowl.\nA game that legally can not exist.\nJohann Sebastian Joust and its meta.\nGetting one point in Rampage.\nAdvice that can literally no longer be helpful for anybody.\nHow to be an effective Goomba.\nLooking at Jim's win/loss ratio and being inspired.\nAs Garfield said, \"nothing good can stay.\"\nA stainless soul lying inspired.\nBad experiences shared by every human.\nA very smooth-brained day \nRampant poetry plagiarism on TikTok.\nA food ASMR video where someone is repeatedly stabbing chicken with a fork.\nVideos of hamsters running in wheels while listening to Dragula by Rob Zombie.\nWhether the fish enjoys playing Pokemon.\nA sweet 16 bracket of Best Kinds of Shark.\nRerecording the Topic Lords jingle with a swarm of bees.\nThe qualifications required for the person who designs electric car backing up noises.\nWhich apps to use to help you remember Spanish.\nSpeedrunning High School Spanish.\nLearning Japanese from anime.\nA 24/7 Livestream of digital cats lying around the house.\nHallucinating new languages around the house.\n52 Pickup with Gita Jackson and Alex Jaffee, about the most important comic book series of this century.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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","date_published":"2024-01-22T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/0c93519c-5ae2-4568-bd7a-566d7b9501d3.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":70460812,"duration_in_seconds":4403}]},{"id":"b1322b7b-35e1-45a1-ac6a-bb110d20956d","title":"221. Fisher-Price My First Right Click Menu","url":"https://topiclords.com/fisher-price-my-first-right-click-menu","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nChris\nAlex\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nLiving without software updates\nI like Cyberpunk 2077\nI had a friend who would argue with the people collecting signatures in support of a proposed law. Not about the proposal itself, but the methodology behind it.\nPIECE A SHIT, possibly by Sam Pink\n\n\nhttps://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/Kl_AeoXl.jpg\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nLords of Topics.\nAsking your mom if this Thanksgiving turkey is Frog Fractions 3.\nHaiku Hero.\nHow to talk to the press.\nAn email from the guy who sent me the quirky thing from before.\nThe Last Biceps.\nFilling your house with electronics that continuously ask you to do things.\nHow to interact with the Internet on an old un-updated computer.\nSnap craft something or other.\nTurning off Windows updates for over a year and nothing bad happens because security best practices are bullshit.\nVisiting twinbeard.com to find out about the beads in Jim's ears.\nSearching Google for the little balls in your ears.\nYour 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.\nWindows updates adding AI functionality to MS Paint.\nMaking uneducated guesses about how someone else's code works.\nSearching for a program on your computer and Windows gives you Bing results for that program's name.\nA sneaky hacker man doing non lethal takedowns.\nMaking a complicated video game and then patching it into a completely different complicated video game after the guides have all been written.\nTrying 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.\nCool things that build immersion.\nA guy saying \"have a seat\" and a contextual actionicon appearing over a chair.\nVoluminous closets full of costumes for virtual dress-up.\nDelivering exposition in cars.\nAll the weird things people will put on their body in the cyber future.\nA fictional city halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles.\nRecovering a stolen painting by showing a satellite.\nA city with lots of neat stuff to do.\nQuerulous Friend's Advocate.\nThe Everyone Gets a Pony Initiative of 2023.\nFilibustering people collecting signatures in front of the grocery store.\nHow much do you believe in the political causes you're promoting?\nWatching your friend play games in a little window on your second monitor.\nMr. Feeny recording car AI voices.\nGetting into World of Warcraft because you are stressed about starting a new job.\nLevel 1 Superman killing rats to collect 10 rat pelts.\nFun ways to fight crowds of mooks.\nThe things you see on your limbs when you see your limbs.\nReplacing all the mirrors with cyber mirrors.\nThe doctor pulling out your cyber eyes and putting them in a drawer and all you can see is the inside of the drawer.\nLost games dev techniques such as palette swaps.\nA screenshot of a book.\nA poem painting a picture of a time and place.\nMaybe Sam Pink.\nWriting a bunch of messages to someone and making their phone vibrate every five seconds for a full minute.\nNotification throttling.\nFanciful technological panaceas.\nUltra poetry where each line has animation and timing.\nMaking a word wiggle in a sine wave to indicate that it's a spooky ghost noise.\nPoem Lords.\nSeven poems on the itinerary. (But we'll only have time for three of them.)\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"Lords: Chris and Alex. We discuss living without software updates, Cyberpunk 2077, arguing with people collecting signatures, and PIECE A SHIT by Sam Pink.","date_published":"2024-01-15T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/b1322b7b-35e1-45a1-ac6a-bb110d20956d.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":69744430,"duration_in_seconds":4359}]},{"id":"d8100dc3-f66e-4c27-b313-0d4979a2b12c","title":"220. An Oral History Of Men Riding Cats","url":"https://topiclords.com/an-oral-history-of-men-riding-cats","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nAbby\n\n\nhttps://abbydenton.podbean.com/\n\nMichael\n\n\nhttps://www.tinybarbarian.com/\nhttps://dawnoftimecomics.com/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nThat moment when the podcast ads don't play\nLobsang Rampa\nI had a dream where I needed to recolor my teeth. Why don't video game character creators support this?\n\"I've Been Writing You A Poem,\" by Abby Denton\nCats you can ride, pre-He Man\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nCyber Cafe.\nTiny Barbarian DX.\nAn exciting new way to give me money.\nThe gamut of barbarian sizes.\nLearning the power of chat from Alan Partridge.\nA podcast deciding that you're not worth advertising to.\nLaunching into the jokes and the fiending.\n99% Inaudible.\nElvira's lawful good rival.\nSugarhill Oiljack.\nRoundtree's fruit pastilles.\nA more colorful playful treat time.\nThe comic book guy sizing you up and stapling appropriate ads into the comic you're buying.\nFinding out a lot of very interesting information about Texas Railroad Commissioner and forgetting it all immediately.\nPage after page of ads and then a back cover.\nA hardcore Bush-era ad explaining that Klonoa's gonna kill your mom.\nTwo Dollar Groos.\nWriting a fan letter to the guy who letters Groo the Wanderer.\nGroo ASMR on GrooTube.\nA man in the 50s. (And the 60s.)\nA plumber from London who found success writing books about Tibetan mysticism.\nWhat English sounds like to an Italian speaker.\nPrisencolinescionalciusol.\nLobsang Rampa getting an extra bump from people misspelling Danganronpa.\nPainting your teeth mother of pearl.\nThe Xbox 360s mii knockoffs.\nBreath of the Wild's NPC faces.\nMr. Potato Head Plug and Play Mouth.\nMainly a tooth-oriented game.\nDentists wearing a back sack over their head.\nHow dentures happen.\nInsulin price caps.\nExplaining to the nice lady who works at the grocery store that the company she works for is monstrous.\nTrashy people in all walks of life.\nWhy shouldn't I be able to give Bayonetta missing teeth?\nPost-hoc nightmares where they only upset you after you wake up.\nThe bladder comes to me, I don't go to the bladder.\nChanging the scansion on the fly.\nWriting a poem for a relative who won't appreciate it.\nWhether children only like 3D animation now.\nWhether it's cheaper to do 3D or 2D animation.\nWanting to play with the person you see even though they can't step out of the phone.\nPeople who love being perceived.\nThis poem's threen.\nVamping about an ambiguous number because of diabetes.\nFeeling shaky even though you are not shaking.\nFat cats in Washington and what they're sitting on.\nTwo people in the universe with perfectly incompatible needs.\nThe only member of your family who didn't go into the hard sciences.\nThe giant cats in Tom and Jerry going their weird shifting their muscles walk.\nA mockery of a crown.\nThere he is; the poopy man.\nThinking of a man riding on a cat.\nThe Lure of the Basilisk.\nThe Gandalara Cycle.\nTeleport vs. New Body.\nA big cat-riding opportunity.\nRiding around on a cat made of pure vinyl.\nHow did Cringer get like that, Prince Adam?\nLittle jokes you do with your partner.\nWingor, Trunkor and Unkor.\nShe-Ra taking it back from the boys.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2024-01-08T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/d8100dc3-f66e-4c27-b313-0d4979a2b12c.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":65295254,"duration_in_seconds":4080}]},{"id":"8ad01b98-baa5-4480-99dc-fb7d898bb58b","title":"219. Jeff Bezos's Butthole Guy","url":"https://topiclords.com/jeff-bezos-butthole-guy","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nJay\nJenni\n\n\nhttps://youtube.com/@kiwami-japan?si=z03WRlRnur883JkN\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nThe dying art of learning a skill on a message board, such as pixel art or having long hair\nThe Baldur's Gate 3 butthole chart\n\n\nhttps://www.reddit.com/r/BaldursGate3/comments/16dlml1/behold_the_chart_ever_made/\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGhcSupkNs8\n\nIs giving people ideas helpful?\n\n\nhttps://itch.io/jam/picostevemo\n\nJames asks \"Why is configuring the thing more enjoyable than using the thing?\"\nI read one time that the way you know if you live urbanly or rurally is if you live in the city you know a place and if you live in the country you have a guy\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nThree people with social anxiety.\nYour left ear not working at the post office.\n80 people in a post office screaming at each other.\nKeeping your broken item and just buying another because you don't want to go to the post office.\nNaming your band after a way to transmit audio.\nI'm good that they're exist.\nGetting your New Year's Resolution off of the Mastodon Tooter.\nFinding a kid at Applebee's to sit next to.\nForming a seal on your face when there's hair.\nA hip burger or hot dog joint hanging a sign saying \"Take it to Squirts-Town\" over their condiment counter.\nAn app to track how much emotional load you've dumped on each friend recently.\nPreparing to hold space for your feelings.\nGoing outside and banging on pots and pans at midnight.\nGetting really into Casey Kasem's Rockin' New Year.\nGetting twelve grapes and trying to eat a grape on every bong of the clock.\nHow far apart are the bongs?\nWhack it for a huge dong!\nThe second message board you signed up for. (After The Sims.)\nEntirely abandoning the idea of drawing with your hands.\nThe Three Tile Rule.\nNew Year, New Wife!\nBeing approached in a Trader Joe's by a guy who runs a message board for men with long hair.\nHow to find people to follow on Cohost.\nSearching 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.\"\nMessage boards about tying knots.\nA ghost giving you a hug.\nShadebobs and searching on Youtube for shadebobs.\nShadebob Squarepixels.\nTurn-based speed runs.\nOxygenarian runs.\nStarting with meat. Ending with meat.\nWhether it's okay to do a Butthole Chart for people who are still alive.\nThe Shade of the Butthole.\nSpecial people with hairy buttholes.\nWhen God asks you to bring him 50 buttholes, what body parts he'll accept as the butthole.\nButthole purism.\nPersonality traits that correspond with butthole traits in popular culture.\nWhat to do if you don't like the shade or the smell of your butthole.\nGoing on T because you want a hairier butthole.\nWhether billionaires are real people.\nThe Butthole of Dorian Gray.\nHiring a person to take care of your butthole situation.\nMaking eye contact with the guy who cleans Jeff Bezos's butthole but you can't stop and help, you have to catch your train.\nPiCoSteveMo outcomes.\nSelf-driving taxis paving the entire planet.\nSuggesting ideas as a way to make sure nobody will implement those ideas.\nReceiving a new CD for Christmas in the post-Napster era.\nWhat we can still use as stocking stuffers now that CDs and DVDs don't make sense any more.\nYour life partner going through a Brandon Sanderson phase and giving you a huge Brandon Sanderson book to read.\nWhat you call the plug that goes into a plug.\nGetting paid to learn to solder.\nDeliberately introducing mpeg artifacts into a video stream.\nHow to troubleshoot a motherboard now that they don't beep any more.\nHow many Intels they're up to now.\nA memory of fun that you can't go back to.\nAwful Fantasy.\nPutting a foul-mouthed rom hack on your SNES Classic and then forgetting that happened when you give it away to your friends' kids.\nImagining how great a product is going to be while you're buying the product.\nAsking for a toy for Christmas even though you know you'll never make time for it.\nGoing to a friend's house and seeing a bajillion guitar pedals that you can't afford.\nGiving your guitar pedals away to someone who'll actually use them rather than just reselling them.\nHanging out with the kind of person who's playing Rock Band in 2023.\nThe only generation that learned how to use computers.\nWorrying that the five year old computer geniuses are going to hack your foot so you can't walk.\nLiving in New Holstein Wisconsin and needing psychic healing.\nLiving 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.\nMoving to the country so you can hang out of the hot dog guy.\nA place that's not even really a place because you can't catch Pokemon there.\nTwo Guys and a Place.\nBringing independent gas stations their coffee.\nYacht Man Cologne.\nStuff You're Not Allowed To Eat dot com.\nArguing with GPT-4 until it agrees that your Garfield dating sim idea is ethical.\nPutting on your face shoes.\nThis Is Cake Bread!\nTholen vs. Tholen.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2024-01-01T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/8ad01b98-baa5-4480-99dc-fb7d898bb58b.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":72610560,"duration_in_seconds":4538}]},{"id":"6066d4c3-69e3-4d42-b4a2-d0d2031d9a69","title":"218. Darmok And Jalad Go To White Castle","url":"https://topiclords.com/darmok-and-jalad-go-to-white-castle","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nStevie\nAvery\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nA tour of silly medieval musical instruments\nThe House of David, the baseball cult who all looked like oldtimey barbers.\nArguing with Winston about how needing to pee works\nAvery's Non Mammalian Milk Corner\nOde on the Mammoth Cheese Weighing over 7,000 Pounds\n\n\nhttps://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/content/ode-mammoth-cheese-weighing-over-7000-pounds\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nWhy the show works like that.\nAsking people if they understand what's going on.\nSpy software.\nExactly the kind of game you don't want to explain.\nSomeone who has a sense of humor and thinks something is funny.\nA hat you can put on your frog.\nWhy frogs are so damn popular.\nThe game with the magnifying glass.\nWhether the recorder is a real instrument or a crappy toy for babies.\nJust how thicc this bass recorder is \nThe supercomputer that's also a couch.\nTalking to your mom on the phone for 45 minutes because she can't stop listing medieval instruments.\nRecorders that are double recorders.\nMichael Fassbender teaching his clone how to play the flute.\nEating a pair of garden shears.\nAn umbrella handle that was given growth hormones that sounds kind of like a stylophone.\nAn instrument that is curved so that you can play it on horseback without bonking the horse.\nThe sackbut.\nA selfie stick but for a trombone.\nSausage bassoons.\nUnholy Rackett.\nHow long how many strings look it up?\nInsufflation tubes and dudelsacks..\nVersatile, like the Pogues.\nBears riding unicycles but not very well.\nOverblowing.\nJim the Overblower.\nBringing up bugles to someone who works hospice.\nHow many songs you can play on a bugle.\nNot wanting to play Beatles Rock Band because you with at BevMo.\nA photo of an early 20th century cult/baseball team that looks like a modern-day metal band.\nNot being able to make it to the majors so you settle for House of Dave.\nSomeone who's never played Blaseball trying to explain Blaseball.\nAmusement parks started by cults.\nA pretty good way to end a baseball league.\nAdditional amusement.\nPreserving tiny railways built by a baseball cult.\nA busy man who has no time to pee.\nPeristalsis.\nPersons currently experiencing hubris.\nWhat happens to your knowledge when you're not actively thinking about it.\nWhen you can truly say you know the capital of the United States.\nWaking up needing to pee and trying to fall back to sleep so that you forget you need to pee.\nHaving a dream about urinals overflowing. \nCutting nature at its joints.\nPreparing for Topicking.\nWhether the Jejune Institute made money.\nWhen Sacky Meets Butty.\nSigning a contract in someone else's blood.\nYet another non-mammalian milk. \nJacked, yoked, ripped and swole spiders.\nImagery that's only unsettling because you don't regularly drink spider milk.\nVestigial web butts.\nSympathy for the young.\nPutting on a spider silk dress and never being able to take it off.\nA communal spider butthole web.\nBlinded by the milk, wrapped up in a douche.\nThe first boutique New York restaurant to serve spider milk pancakes.\nCutting out all the parts where people say something dumb.\nDrum Pants. (It turns your pants into a drum set.)\nWe have seen the a Queen of Cheese.\nThe worst rhyme scheme.\nA poem that screams 5th grade.\nWhy does this web site have line numbers?\nAre you a bad enough dude to save the president's cheese?\nA poetic technique that can be really cool (but not in this poem)\nConfusing this mammoth cheese with another mammoth cheese.\nThe most mammalian of all mammals.\nMy Mother Milked a Million Mostly Male Mammoths.\nA huge ice cream tub carried by four ponies.\n35 tons of milk \nExtremely fake beards.\nA thing people once said to sell chicken.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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","date_published":"2023-12-25T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/6066d4c3-69e3-4d42-b4a2-d0d2031d9a69.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":61276742,"duration_in_seconds":3829}]},{"id":"ebe5bfca-44f2-4c81-81d1-325e26746fed","title":"217. Rotate Your Plate Breakage","url":"https://topiclords.com/rotate-your-plate-breakage","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nMaxx\nNick\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nPuzzmo\nI'm worried about my tableware rotation strategy\nEnnigaldi-Nanna's museum\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ennigaldi-Nanna's_museum\n\nIt Was A Coffin That Sang, by Olena Davis\n\n\nhttps://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/xBLG36yN.png\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nInstead of giving someone a business card, stamping your information on them so they have to call you before they take a shower.\nWhere's George?\nGeorge isn't here. George was never here.\nCanadians looking forward to when they can walk around with King Charles' face in their pocket.\nGiving the barista a coupla chucks for a cup of coffee.\nMoney with RadarSat on it.\ninaturalist dot org.\nTaking a photo of a weird plant with a weird seed pod.\nThe fantasy of collecting information.\nThe game where you try to name every street in San Francisco.\nRunning all the streets in your city over the course of a decade.\nGames Genie.\nLexicographic Ordering and Time Travel.\nA sanctioned topic. (It's on the list.)\nWario Ware presenting you with a full sized crossword and giving you six seconds to solve it.\nA fun little histogram.\nFinally implementing the letter T.\nDoing the crossword on paper and making your daughter enter your answers into the app.\nWill Shortz coming out of his orb to carry out a hit on a competing puzzle.\nFugue Orbs.\nComparing the interface design of Connections and Red Herring.\nThings Relating to Wonder Woman.\nExtremely well SEO'd pestilences.\nArranging your dinner plates in a stack vs. in a queue.\nUsing all your plates evenly so they all break at the same time.\nRotating the Stock.\nThe dangers of Low-Sodium Perpetual Stew.\nDefault plates from the food service factory.\nAirplane boarding algorithms and how to convince everyone in the terminal to follow yours.\nPlates that are made for using.\nA whole Jefferson, in your Republic dollars.\nThe urge to queue.\nLanesplitting your backpack.\nHistory: it's a lot older than we think \nAncient cash registers.\nPranksters organizing the topic bucket.\nHow many museums deep are we?\nThe human wife.\nEfficient.. Successful. Human.\nTop five lists of your life.\nHow small a flavoring agent has to be to be considered a spice.\nA twelve foot tall statue of either Zeus or Poseidon.\nMyth- and Nationhood- Making.\nA museum where you can feel wood cut with various tools.\nHearing about a cool metalworking museum but fixating on how the bathroom works.\nCool Bathroom Ghost.\nThe toilet commenting on your performance.\nPiping bookshop noises into your bathroom.\nRobert Stack's Solved Mysteries.\nBeing sad and trying to have a good sadness.\nMichael Brough talking about his design process.\nFun exercise vs. shitty boring exercise.\nWhat to do about the world ending.\nDriving in circles around the McDonald's drive-thru ordering more and more coffee until they catch on.\nTelling a joke on Twitter and an archaeologist getting it 1000 years from now.\nThe world's oldest joke.\nA fart joke from 1900 BCE.\nReconstructive historical linguistics.\nThe linguistics of swearing and taboo.\nEater of bees.\nTop five stanzas.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"Lords: Maxx and Nick. We discuss Puzzmo, tableware rotation strategy, Ennigaldi-Nanna's museum, and \"It Was A Coffin That Sang,\" by Olena Davis","date_published":"2023-12-18T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/ebe5bfca-44f2-4c81-81d1-325e26746fed.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":64323917,"duration_in_seconds":4020}]},{"id":"cc9da316-6e3f-457f-b9ce-4e1ca7f160b8","title":"216. I Forget What We Do But We're About To Do It","url":"https://topiclords.com/i-forget-what-we-do-but-were-about-to-do-it","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nTyriq\nJay\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nI recently moved and I think I understand Having Stuff more now.\nTeaching my 3-year-old to use a mouse and keyboard. Kids learning software being a ghost of its former self.\nInterface traps\nYelp! Review for God by Willow James Claire \n\n\nhttps://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/ib998beS.jpg\n\nStarting a YouTube Channel for kids and the lack of useful information on the topic.\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nBen and Jerry's Cookie Dough ice cream.\nWashing the ice cream off of the cookie dough ice cream and baking cookies.\nSnacking dough.\nLiving on your own and owning silverware for the first time.\nLosing a fork that they don't make any more and having mismatched forks forever.\nA hodgepodge of styles.\nDifferent spaces each with their own internal consistency.\nGoing to your ex-roommate's Halloween party as a guest for the first time.\nParties that you can leave.\nFinding out you were right about what you thought you'd like.\nMoving house in an hour.\nYour 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.\nTeaching kids to read by giving them a Kindle tablet.\nTyping \"stop\" fifty times in notepad.\nDell Rugged.\nWhat Mavis Beacon is up to nowadays.\nComputers as the exciting future vs. computers as the boring shitty present.\nGetting a laptop without a touch screen so your kid can learn to use the mouse.\nDifferent ways to not understand folders.\nWhether 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.\nApps that appear to be native apps but they're secretly running in a web browser.\nComing into possession of a child.\nAn overworld where you can walk in 8 directions and bump into NPCs.\nBoots Quest.\nAuto Shooting Survival.\nRoguelike Turn-Based Auto Shooting Survival.\nMini Yoto.\nUsing the insert key on purpose.\nThe Jay's Wife of Scroll Lock.\nThe two Smush tracks on the Hypnospace Outlaw soundtrack.\nWhy there are separate shift and caps lock keys but no separate toggle insert and hold to insert keys.\nSticky Keys.\nCaps lock keys that physically toggle.\nToon Boom Harmony and other way too expensive subscription software.\nCan't draw can't see pencil in toon boom reddit\nLock the taskbar, lock the taskbar.\nThe pros and cons of different start menu orientations.\nGetting kissed in the vegetable aisle, so to speak.\nTalking about dungeons and dragons and getting something slightly wrong about dungeons or dragons.\nThe laws of physics preventing you from kidding boys.\nOn the one hand growing up as a trans poet in Arizona. On the other, drinking a whole lot of strawberry kiwi kombucha.\nFour out of five stars for inventing an extremely dry mouth.\nA dry, scratchy, sandpaper cat tongue.\nA song about a ghost eating toast.\nWatching your kid watch things.\nWhere to put video content on the internet.\nIdeas that are occluded by ideas that are better search-engine optimized.\nWhether librarians are scarier in Germany.\nCombining three people with social anxiety to make one really big person with social anxiety.\nFixing kids software for 100 people because it's too hard to fix it for the whole world.\nX for Extreme.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2023-12-11T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/cc9da316-6e3f-457f-b9ce-4e1ca7f160b8.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":70757563,"duration_in_seconds":4422}]},{"id":"16bb6dec-9931-4c64-b5f8-90e33d28e164","title":"215. Taffy Arbitrage Tips","url":"https://topiclords.com/taffy-arbitrage-tips","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nBen\nJohnB\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nGame & Watch Gallery\nHalloween's never on the weekend, so I made Novemberween\nSquare mattresses\nEight Line Poem\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVqNJKQiPCA\nhttps://genius.com/3143344\n\nThe most entertaining bit of the new Spider-Man 2 game has been sitting on a bench\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nFellow Traveler.\nCitizen Sleeper: at least one person's game of the year.\nState fair taffy.\nWhere to find seasonal taffy bargains.\nTerrifying taffy flavors.\nSingle game LCD handhelds.\nGunplay Yokoi.\nWithered technology.\nThe RC car that can only turn left because right was cut for scope.\nGames where things are bouncing across the screen.\nTiger Electronics Double Dragon.\nThe earliest, most boring Game and Watch game.\nA fun clock that's fun to watch.\nPutting your face as the juggler in Ball for the Game Boy Camera.\nWhat they did before d-pads.\nA Print the Legend situation.\nMario Bros II for the Commodore 64.\nPorting Game and Watch games to card stock.\nReleasing a floppy disk reader for the Game Boy Advance in 2023.\nMario's Bombs Away, in Panorama Vision.\nMoving slower the more gold you're carrying.\nToad walking across a bunch of seagulls.\nTrying to get 16 player Faceball up and running.\nThe Burger King vs. Hungry Jack's era.\nThe Lost Lost Levels.\nThe most polite pumpkin head person you've ever met.\nInventing a new Halloween that happens the first weekend after Halloween so you can get candy at a discount.\nImplicating the viewers in your terrible horror movie marathon.\nTerrifying cakes with spooky words on them like \"mortgage\"\nTammy and the T-Rex.\nA spooky guy in a helmet who races people in his car (and kills them)\nPutting pieces of Stonehenge into circuitry to make children's faces turn into bugs.\nA movie about a cat that vomits up another cat.\nA very spooky four dollar pumpkin man.\nNeglecting upkeep on your house for thirty years to celebrate Halloween.\nNovemberween every Sunday.\nHow to celebrate Labor Day.\nRotating a square mattress 90 degrees.\nGoing into the mattress store and unrolling the amount of mattress you want from the spool and getting it cut to order.\nAlternate reality How It's Made videos.\nThe Manchester Department.\nSuper Passive Aggressive Xenomorph Roommate Irritation Simulator.\nRolling the dice to determine which side of the cube mattress you're sleeping on tonight.\nRotating the tires on your racecar bed.\nAsking the cat for poem opinions.\nSometimes the sun is just the sun. (Not this time though – it's David Bowie.) \nPlugs within plugs.\nAll the different games named \"Spider-Man 2\"\nUsing your Spider Radar to track down the next objective.\nA video game where you go on a holiday to Greece and stab a bunch of people.\nThe distressing absence of Mario Odyssey 2.\nFinally, a Super Mario game you can finish without hating yourself.\nA grown-up with adult things to do, like cooking bacon and receiving mail.\nThe Trophy Seller in Nier Automata.\nKosmology Hungry Jack.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2023-12-04T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/16bb6dec-9931-4c64-b5f8-90e33d28e164.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":60780877,"duration_in_seconds":3798}]},{"id":"5c14804c-b73d-4727-8358-cc2be876c4f1","title":"214. Oh Shit! That Guy's Got Horse Legs!","url":"https://topiclords.com/oh-shit-that-guys-got-horse-legs","content_text":"Lords\n\n\nDaniel\n\n\nhttps://www.cocoongame.com/\nhttps://kbones.itch.io/dorks\n\nAlexander\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nOctopus dreams\nPerception of memories. Why does actual recency and percieved recency often seem so at odds\nHike on 58\nhttps://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45087/sonnet-18-shall-i-compare-thee-to-a-summers-day\nWorld of Warcraft over the years / WoW Hardcore Mode\nThe highest honor you can receive in mathematics is to have your name uncapitalized.\nPolywater\nMy brain is polluted by trochaic trimeter recognition\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nPreventative care.\nCOVID lucky streaks.\nBeing able to go to the ER.\nHow to spell Cocoon.\nMoth guys carrying orbs on their backs.\nBoss battles that you wouldn't expect.\nWilford Brimley's agelessness.\nOctopus nightmares.\nThe octopus equivalent of rapid eye movement.\nMeeting sapient crows and asking them whether Y or Z should be up.\nWhich memories stick better.\nPerception of time when you have a routine vs. when you don't.\nArranging your life to maximize perceived lifespan.\nDifferent ways to have an adventure.\nShooby doooby doggie.\nA sports rule that sounds like a 17776 plot point \nWhy the Bob Emergency is an emergency.\nThe best quarterbacks getting stuck in an endless hike and football ending forever.\nThe one person who hasn't played Frog Fractions but just listens to Topic Lords because they like topics so much.\nSummer's lease.\nReading a poem aloud without knowing what \"ow'st\" means or how to pronounce it.\nWords that used to rhyme but don't anymore.\nMeter recognize meter.\nWriting all your sonnets during COVID lockdown.\nA poem about a dude that Shakespeare is not in love with.\nWoe is me, etc.\nPiss Jugman vs Piss Jugm'n.\nMaking phonetic reforms that don't take.\nSmoothing off any rough edges or peculiarities.\nPermadeath taking inspiration from real life.\nA fun thing that you wouldn't have expected to see.\nEnjoying spending time in the world.\nHold the W key and cruise through it.\nThe difference between wanting something vs. liking it.\nAbelian.\nThe opposite of how you would think honor works.\nGreat honors: brands hate them!\nWhether to capitalize \"lynchian,\" \"kafkaesque\" or \"quixotic\"\nEternal abstract universal objects.\nTeaching truck drivers where to put their piss jugs.\nThe highest honor Piss Jugman can receive.\nThe surname Piss.\nWhat is the average Piss lifespan?\nA real life Bobby Tables moment.\nThe Polywater Gap.\nWater that scientists have sweated in.\nBuying a can of Soviet Scientist Sweat in a Japanese vending machine.\nPolyester intoxication.\nLiquids with a lower freezing temperature than water.\nThe Polywater Doodle.\nA metabolism described by Richard Feynman.\nBrain Pollution.\nThe particular better of the first line of Aqualung by Jethro Tull.\nSinging \"parallelipiped\" to the tune of Aqualung.\nHearing random phrases in your life.\nSpelling \"yogurt\" backwards.\nTrying to understand the New York Times' effect on man.\nA killer rap album based on alliteration rather than rhyming.\nPoetry that rhymes on the second to last syllable rather than the last.\nThe baffling cosmology of Butter Dorks.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2023-11-27T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/5c14804c-b73d-4727-8358-cc2be876c4f1.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":62705997,"duration_in_seconds":3919}]},{"id":"567066d6-50d1-46d8-bdbe-782d22f3fb7d","title":"213. Urine-Based Interactions With The Scientific Community","url":"https://topiclords.com/urine-based-interactions-with-the-scientific-community","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nErica\nRyan\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nDog Bone Facts\nWe went to Cuba\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candidatus_Desulforudis_audaxviator\nhttps://www.poemhunter.com/poem/avoid-the-noid/\nCancelling Texas: Praise the Sun\nMy sister has played video games her whole life and somehow doesn't know about [the thing everyone knows happens in Final Fantasy VII] and I need help shielding her from this knowledge.\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nThe COVID booster as a form of recreational drug use.\nPuking, but not for the listeners at home.\nThe only way you can know if you're doing well.\nWavHog.\nTrying a lot of things that aren't working out.\nA chat log that's organized poorly.\nAn ever-growing cacophony.\nThe million dollar web page.\nBuying ad space on a web page that's entirely ads.\nGordy and the Monster Moon.\nLittle Buddy mode vs. Little Nemesis mode.\nMaking a noise whenever you wonder about something.\nThe sound of the aurora borealis.\nThe Northern Lights explaining to you how many bones are in a dog's body.\nPeeing on your equipment to keep the foxes away.\nMaintaining curiosity about things.\nBurying a question and seeing if it comes back to you.\nRecording a podcast even though you don't know anything.\nAn information strategy that is much more enchanting than looking things up.\nLeaving through your journals.\nTannish white hair.\nBurying a dog bone so that it grows into a dog bone tree.\nFarms with no distinct edges.\nCholera vegetables.\nInventing your own COVID-19 vaccine.\nPutting a whole country in a snow globe.\nTube ham.\nDrinking a soda branded \"your ass.\"\nKnight Anoles.\nGerrymandering Florida to fix Cuba.\nLord Kensingtonitis.\nA bacterium named after a Jules Verne quote.\nThe only known organism to exist in an ecosystem containing only itself.\nA biome that's just a bunch of clones of you making a go of it together.\nSlurping up radiation from the good good surrounding bedrock.\nAll the little guys out there being interesting.\nThe credentials you need to call yourself a scientist.\nWhich bacteria are most bothered by their Wikipedia pages.\nEveryone's MRCA.\nMeteorites throwing amino assets into space.\nExtremely grabby carbon.\nMoldy bathtubs all over the universe.\nLittle Buddy mode but for bacteria.\nThe works of Florence P. Wordsmith.\nThe origin myth of the Noid.\nWhether the Noid is wearing a suit or if that's just his skin.\nYo! Noid and Yo! Noid 2: Enter the Void.\nA layer of water that's waving up and down.\nEmpathizing with how the Noid sees the world.\nWriting a poem about the Noid and, instead of hiding it in shame, putting it on the internet for all to see.\nGetting a game over before you finish the first level but at least you killed a lot of seagulls with a yoyo.\nThe sun making a big X over Texas.\nDrilling for oil in the Permian Basin.\nThe last total eclipse of the sun of our lifetimes.\nCheckmate, scientists!\nSolar noon.\nGrab your glasses and get lookin'!\nMeeting Topic Lords all summer.\nGoing sightseeing to find out where all your gasoline comes from.\nGoing to see the solar eclipse or just closing your eyes to get the same effect.\nA big pile of polygonal Doritos killing another pile of polygonal Doritos.\nMaking sequels to the Final Fantasy 7 remake.\nThe porn web site named after a Final Fantasy 7 plot point.\naerisdies.com vs. aerithdies.com.\nRetransliterations.\nHusbands who are dead (asleep).\nThe option that makes you look like less of a douchebag.\nWatching 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.\nSending your sister to media literacy classes so that she can understand when Aeris dies.\nA pile of snack chips fighting each other.\nShowing Star Wars to kids who have never seen it but know every plot point in advance.\nA 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.\nA big red button you can push whenever you want.\nThe only time you've ever been accused of underthinking something.\nPutting your first name and last name together to make a person.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2023-11-20T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/567066d6-50d1-46d8-bdbe-782d22f3fb7d.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":80265298,"duration_in_seconds":5016}]},{"id":"852f0f94-acae-468d-a370-9aedef1e5a3e","title":"212. Back In My Day, Kids Actually Crossied The Road","url":"https://topiclords.com/back-in-my-day-kids-actually-crossied-the-road","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nMitch\n\n\nhttps://janmisali.tumblr.com/\nhttps://www.seximal.net/\n\nAndrew\n\n\nhttps://kittenm4ster.neocities.org/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nSuper Mario Bros. Wonder is the first mainline 2D Mario game since... (how many Super Mario games are there? update)\n\n\nOriginal video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XejJ6PzPtEw\nNew survey: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScsj0Yibs4rJjHWjIRVb3wwHsgVS64qYOAoUWqRwrXEfgVeag/viewform\n\nOwning the domain emailfordogs.com for some reason\nWhen I took my driver's test, a kid ran out onto the road in front of me, I braked, and the proctor made a check mark on his forms.\nLove in the Age of Google by Brian Bilston\n\n\nhttps://brianbilston.com/2018/08/\n\nThe Burrito Run (a form of physical exercise)\nThe WarioWare series has become increasingly story-driven in every game since WarioWare: Snapped! (DSi, 2008)\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nYour names.\nJokes that have or have not been done.\nThe real Jim Stormdancer. (On my birth certificate.)\nA game which has no sequels.\nPizza Panda dot Pizza.\nCultivating an audience who loves clicking links.\nA polling feature that is great for polling people.\nWhy not use one thing? Just have one place where you post everything.\nHow to make your audience stop clicking links.\n358 games that might or might not be Super Mario games.\nA game called Super Mario Bros. Something.\nAll the different years there hasn't been a new Super Mario game since.\nA controversy, but not one people care about.\nNew guy just dropped: guy who gets in arguments about whether New Super Mario Bros. 2 is a mainline Super Mario game.\nSuper Mario Bros. and Friends: When I Grow Up.\nSuper Mario and his friends discussing what career paths they might take.\nLooking at all these MS-DOS colors.\nBrian A. Rice, Inc.: it's just a guy!\nMario games for MS-DOS.\nA Mario fan theory that has been disproven extremely recently.\nPrincess Peach and Princess Daisy having a conversation about something other than a man.\nThe description of Daisy in Smash Ultimate trying to come up with convincing reasons why Peach and Daisy are different people.\nNew Super Mario Bros. Mii.\nSuper Mariologists studying Super Mariology.\nSuper Mario Bros. Special.\nA smeary snapshot of your mind.\nA Mario game that was extremely expensive to make.\nWorking on a game until it's ready.\nIf you like Mario games, then it's one of them. If you don't then it's not.\nSuper Mario Bros. Tudor.\nSuper Mario Bros. Oneder.\nGetting email for dogs at emailfordogs.com.\nA hobby you used to be able to have.\nEnough people making up fake emails for their dogs that some them send email to your fake dog email domain name.\nRip the old spacejam.com.\nSpace Jam: a New Legacy.\nReusing apacejam.com to capture all the people clicking on novelty domain names that redirect to spacejam.com.\nA very small scale conspiracy, between one driver's test examiner and one child.\nBeing too flustered to deliberately fail your test.\nA checkbox on the DMV test labeled \"did not assassinate my arch rival, whom I now owe five dollars.\"\nBack in my day kids actually Crossied the Road.\nA smoke made with the fume of sighs.\nA poem that scans as a poem.\nA million monkeys using a million trackers.\nOne extremely busy monkey using a million trackers.\nA new form of physical exercise.\nTerraforming the hill to make your exercise routine more effective.\nCopylefted exercise routines.\nThere are very few perfect things in life but this is the perfect exercise routine.\nDogs who are like dogs.\nDog theory.\nWhat's more habitual than eating lunch?\nMathematical proof that all horses are the same color. (Except for the horse of a different color.)\nBooger joke fart joke silly game.\nA history of storytelling in the Wario Ware series.\nWario's hiring process.\nA thing that happens after Wario puts a toilet on his head.\nWhy the latest Wario Ware game has microgames in it.\nThe Wario Ware employee who joined the company because he was such a big fan of previous games in the series.\nNintendo games that implicitly support unionization and fan-fiction.\nThe man who was too many Marios.\nHearing Wario speak in full sentences.\nA thing that is nothing to write home about but writing home about it anyways.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2023-11-13T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/852f0f94-acae-468d-a370-9aedef1e5a3e.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":68014914,"duration_in_seconds":4250}]},{"id":"228d0f9c-d36a-444b-90aa-7cbe5b49736b","title":"211. Window-Peering Jim Checking Out Your Cats","url":"https://topiclords.com/window-peering-jim-checking-out-your-cats","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nCort\n\n\nhttps://a.co/d/iRrEZcy\n\nElena\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nMy due date is literally tomorrow\nDogme 95 for web development\nVisits from the neighborhood cats\nPotato, by Jane Kenyon\n\n\nhttps://poets.org/poem/potato-0\n\nCooperative board games are hard to design\n\n\nSpace themed coop trick-taking card game: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/284083/crew-quest-planet-nine \n\nBuilding a conlang generator from the phonology up\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonority_hierarchy\nLinear algebra cursed conlang: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ze5i_e_ryTk \n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nThe Be Real App.\nPosting your mortifying skin condition for all the internet to see.\nBeing born.\nThe Dance Dance Revolution song \"20,November,\" by Earth Wind and Fire.\nPiCoSteveMo.\nTossing around hastily drawn concept art with your team.\nBeing born, again.\nHaving a kid for someone else.\nEating cigarettes off of the sidewalk.\nA grab bag of thousands of possible pregnancy symptoms.\nLiteracy as a symptom of pregnancy.\nA visceral reminder that you are part of a long chain of humans.\nWhich came first, humans or birth?\nThe comfort of the humans who are still around having individual experiences even after you die.\nTips n Tricks for dealing with fear of death.\nInviting dead people onto the show.\nAsking for more pro-death art so you can feel better about death.\nPro-life, in the literal sense.\nFlowers and mushrooms growing up through the bones.\nReturning to the universe to nurture it.\nDumb Ways to Die.\nSum: 40 Tales from the Afterlives.\nThought experiments about something weird that could happen.\nThe Egg by Andy Weir.\nCovering birth and death in the same topic.\nLooking at photos of yourself from five years ago and thinking \"oh shit!\"\nI am choosing to no longer have conscious experience, mom. You wouldn't understand, mom.\nSwedish with a mouthful of potatoes.\nDogme 95.\nEnpoopification.\nA protocol for exchanging information on a computer.\nRewinding to a kinder, simpler web.\nAvoiding all this gestures at the world\nNew rule: no web servers more powerful than a Raspberry Pi.\nThe cool thing that was on the web in the mid-90s.\nMaking art and putting it on the internet and getting a fan base.\nThe teenage gamer comic series making a comic about prostate exams.\nSharding the internet.\nEl Goonish Shive.\nAnime hammers that you do when someone is being a pervert.\nComing to personal revelations regarding your neurodivergence or gender situation.\nHow to be a successful artist.\nNot knowing if your favorite webcomic had ads because you use an adblocker.\nWorking at your parents animation studio as an inbetweener.\nMerging your cats into one cat.\nNeighborhood coyotes.\nCats beyond the reach of fear.\nWindow-peering Jim: he's just checking out your remodel.\nPutting a GoPro on your neighbor's cat and livestreaming the inside of their house.\nCats with amazing life stories that they'll never tell you.\nThe consort of coffee grounds.\nMaking shepherd's pie for an entire hamlet.\nA possibly accidental double line break.\nA line break corresponding to a conceptual boundary.\nThe Story of Mel: a Real Programmer.\nAdding left angle brackets to the start of every line until word wrap makes it a poem.\nBlackout poetry.\nPumping gas as an element of Cottagecore.\nA hamlet is just a city in New Jersey.\nThe fireworks on your forehead game.\nA game where everyone stops talking.\nThe Yelling Game.\nA dedicated period of yelling.\nSpace-themed trick taking games.\nThe Spaceteam card game.\nComing up with a set of place names that sound like they're from the same culture.\nAssigning syllable groups to a morpheme.\nAsking Claude.\nInterpolating the obvious things.\nThe Sonority Hierarchy.\nA gradient from less vowel-like to more vowel-like.\nCursed Conlangs.\nGenerating syllables and mushing them together.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2023-11-06T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/228d0f9c-d36a-444b-90aa-7cbe5b49736b.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":61755140,"duration_in_seconds":3859}]},{"id":"96ec3e9c-d108-40f5-ba7a-b5c84a39aa5b","title":"210. Good Ideas For Sam Barlow","url":"https://topiclords.com/good-ideas-for-sam-barlow","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nAndrew\n\n\nhttps://store.steampowered.com/app/1658150/Moonstone_Island/\n\nKate\n\n\nhttps://tunicgame.com/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nBritish food is good, actually\nReally enjoying programming in MonoGame (and stop motion animation)\nLightswitch abstraction limit\nUn petit d'un petit\nThe Old Timey Computer Show\nTrying to get your friends to play a game that sucks to learn\nWinston 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\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nMoonstone Island.\nA tiny fox in a big world.\nCherry blues.\nSomething within your culture that is awful and bad.\nWhatever can grow in the wet and dark. (Potatoes.)\nCool Whip based salads.\nYorkshire pudding. (The fluffy one.)\nThe non-spicy gravies.\nJ. Kenji Lopez-Alt's roast potato recipe.\nLamb going with mint and pork going with applesauce.\nHow to eat Vegemite or Marmite.\nA man at the end of the table whose entire job is to carve meat for you.\nA place to take your picky grandma to eat.\nBodega cats and bodega kids.\nDoing stop motion animation as a goof.\nThe fun part of Dunning Krueger.\nDoing a magic trick without knowing how the trick works and amazing yourself.\nLeaning into the good times.\nAccidentally getting good at an employable skill.\nFlailing at the wall until the light switches are in the right position.\nOff: just a different kind of on.\nDoing your first pull request.\nThe fountain pen of the version control ecology.\nGetting a bunch of little plant men to turn the lights on and off for me.\nPoetry written in nonsensical French that is homophonic with English nursery rhymes.\nAn entire book for a very specific kind of nerd to have a sensible chuckle.\nAllowing yourself one E, as a mistake.\nA joke written back when people knew what am omnibus was.\nVintages footage from 1980s computer shows.\nDousing CD-Rs.\nThe Free Cake and Donuts Half-Hour.\nGetting as many 35+ computer dorks as you can under a box before you pull the string.\nMaking two children fight each other on the British equivalent of Crash Bandicoot.\nA policeman on a unicycle.\nThe imagined experience of programming the ZX Spectrum.\nThe other Cambridge.\nMac PCs.\nThe Oliver Twins.\nTurning on all the shaders to make your programmer art look good.\nFinding three extra Dizzy games in the attic.\nTrying to tell your friends about a family tradition and while you're telling them you realize how messed up it is.\nA pile of 500 cards that should really be a computer game instead.\nA rule where every time you play a card you have to sigh a little bit.\nA game where you torture your friends.\nA food with the letter E in it.\nTrying to have fun despite your friend who is making you play the game.\nHave you guys heard about conclusions?\nA bunch of stuff happening and then there's a riddle.\nThe Go Left Problem.\nWhen games have secrets.\nPushing at the edges of a game and the game pops up a dialog saying \"I noticed you pushing at my edges.\"\nA password named \"Susan.\"\nA DVD where every interface to start the movie starts it at chapter 2 and chapter 1 is a secret.\nReading just the last word of a book.\nWatching 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.\nHow to find your Mastodon name.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2023-10-30T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/96ec3e9c-d108-40f5-ba7a-b5c84a39aa5b.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":70786057,"duration_in_seconds":4423}]},{"id":"9d1b3985-c0e2-4b51-ab4b-4d82a9f29815","title":"209. Do Caterpillars Anticipate?","url":"https://topiclords.com/do-caterpillars-anticipate","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nWill\nChris\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nCanoes\nBlowing soap bubbles with your hands, making cricket noises, \"party tricks\"\nnissan.com\nNothing Is Too Small Not To Be Wondered About, by Mary Oliver\n\n\nhttps://thevalueofsparrows.wordpress.com/2017/05/20/poetry-nothing-is-too-small-not-to-be-wondered-about-by-mary-oliver/\n\nWould zombies try to hide the fact that they were zombies?\nMagic\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nSoda Drinker Pro for the Nintendo Entertainment System.\nFinding someone to port your game to NES via LinkedIn.\nThe Vivian Clark Experience.\nMaking certain contortions slightly easier.\nRock climbing. (Not a topic.)\nThe Phantom Lapboard.\nThe Only Viable Product. (OVP.)\nWhat if you could mouse and keyboard on the couch?\nGrowing up in a canoe family.\nPaddling vs. rowing.\nCarbon fiber paddles for canoe racing.\nWaterwalker by Bill Mason.\nYour favorite memories of a kayak.\nWaking up in your kayak to see a snapping turtle staring at you.\nFloating up and wiggling all over the place.\nKayaking to lunch from your office.\nLiving in a ski cabin and your office is at the bottom of the mountain.\nLiving at a Lagrange point and your office is at the bottom of the zipline.\nBoston Unity Knights.\nDoing a game jam every month for four years.\nKnowing enough people in your field that you no longer need to network.\nFive really worthy zero-hour games.\nMaking a therapeutic horror game.\nGoing to a terrifying party in an abandoned train tunnel and finding a burned-out police car.\nQuestionable poisonous air filled with unknown tunnel organisms.\nDoing mouth stuff in VR.\nMaking the soda line up with your mouth.\nThe Ferris Bueller water drop noise.\nThe thing where you play a blade of grass like a reed instrument.\nCheek-flapping noises.\nMagic tricks vs. Party Tricks.\nInhaler magic.\nTwenty levels of spinning pens.\nA different horrible knife game.\nA game about chopping off fingers named \"Chop the Finger.\"\nShooting arrows in the air while your friend run away.\nThe keyboard shortcut for finding someone to port your game to NES.\nA web site where you endorse people as thought leaders.\nEntering the LinkedIn cheat code on Xbox 360.\nPorting your video game to a robotic arm.\nMaking it move when you think about it.\nUzi Nissan v. Nissan Motors.\nIt can happen to you or someone you know!\nPicturing conceptual rabbit holes in your head.\nSylvester Stallone's Mom's web site.\nSylvester Stallone's mom doing palm readings of your ass.\nAll our favorite apps, such as buffalo wings and boneless spare ribs.\nThinking about a cricket's interiority.\nPutting some nature in your poem.\nUsing cricket noises to tell what temperature it is.\nHaving the same number of wings you've always had.\nDo any bugs make a plan.\nLeaving \"I gave up\" pheromones \nLeaving a map of a physical space in the space.\nSizable ants.\nFewer scorpions than you'd expect.\nPutting a bug into your awareness.\nPseudoscorpions hanging out on old stuff.\nLittle guys in random places very occasionally.\nZombies going to Whole Foods.\nGoing quiescent until a dude walks by with a tasty-looking scalp.\nPainting a brain on your helmet to fool the zombies.\nA short-hair wig taped to your grandfather's basketball.\nDropping your scalp like a lizard tail and the zombie shakes your scalp back and forth in its teeth.\nAn analyst commissioned by a think tank to write a book explicating how to deal with the zombie apocalypse.\nSound Reading Trainer.\nHaving a bunch of magic props that you never show anyone how to use.\nThe casino OJ got arrested at.\nTommy Wonder.\nReviewing a product on YouTube without ever showing it or saying what it does.\nHow stage hypnosis works.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2023-10-23T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/9d1b3985-c0e2-4b51-ab4b-4d82a9f29815.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":77529337,"duration_in_seconds":4845}]},{"id":"b31677bf-7e49-4f89-aa25-ebbc3bdf158e","title":"208. E.T. Shot First","url":"https://topiclords.com/et-shot-first","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nHallie\nTyriq\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nPeople really like potatoes and I don't get it\nI wear shorts now.\nWhy are these ants on my desk?\nThe go-getters of predawn gym\nNon feathered dinosaurs in the public imagination\n\n\nEsper 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\n\nMcPop\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nNot counting the Zelda game you made.\nMashing up the hummus beans.\nTahini texture.\nGarbanzo merengue.\nCutting-edge vegan technology.\nMaking video games until you learn better.\nThe freezer popsicle that's just a tube of flavored water.\nPotato struggle sessions.\nCurly fries versus seasoned curly fries.\nA waste of a hearty food that should last longer.\nCentury potatoes.\nBurying a potato in the ground and setting a peat bog on fire.\nTaro chips.\nThe 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.\nAnti-shorts positions.\nA tattoo in a conspicuous place.\nShowing up to a game jam in a Voldo harness.\nA tattoo that makes it look like you've been scratching a rash.\nGetting a cool tattoo and starting going to the gym because you want to be worthy of the tattoo.\nA slovenly dude in a fedora getting a sick tattoo of a slovenly dude in a fedora.\nYakuza style tattoos except it's all video game shit.\nLeaving an olive under your desk.\nWhat the ants are into lately.\nHouse Ants.\nStorehouses of finger dust.\nLetting the ants have the olive.\nMice with an exoskeleton.\nSitting on a toilet made of ants and instantly becoming one with the ants.\nA bottle of Ginger Ants.\nExtremely tangy abyss.\nWhat is in my mouth? What is in my bed?\nRolling a ball of goo over your keyboard.\nFinding some good goo and keeping it to yourself.\nThe validity of shipping yourself with things.\nMerging your cats.\nMotivated brothers.\nWaking up at 5:30 to go to the gym.\nGo-gettitude.\nChronotypes.\nExpressing all the aspirational aspects of yourself.\nThe only person flexing in the mirrors.\nWhy is this young teen here so early?\nPretty ripped. (For a child.)\nGiving up on waking up before dawn and becoming the kind of go-getter who gets later things.\nReconstructing dinosaurs based on what people think they should look like.\nSemi-mythical creatures. (That actually existed.)\nMicroraptors that are slightly melty.\n65, with Adam Driver.\nAn interesting concept, executed poorly.\nThe Pepsisaur.\nAdam 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.\nHaving 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.\nTwelve gauge flashlights.\nLemmings but with babies.\nOne of each type of eye.\nEyes that are so human looking that it kind of fucks you up.\nA reverse The Fly situation.\nMcPopHouse.\nThe Junta of Tralfaz.\nPicking up a new key and trying it on every locked door you've ever seen.\nPressing insert to empty your sexual tension meter.\nBack before Microsoft Word owned the .doc extension.\nA hoary pld PD Turbo 3.0 include file circa 1985.\nSentences from shareware documentation that have been in your head for 30 years.\nBBS Doors.\nLegend of the Red Dragon.\nReprising your role as Olmec.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2023-10-16T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/b31677bf-7e49-4f89-aa25-ebbc3bdf158e.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":59018761,"duration_in_seconds":3688}]},{"id":"06ba70c9-4ca6-4a59-b0e6-7851cf7994f4","title":"207. Muppet Bird Generation Ship","url":"https://topiclords.com/muppet-bird-generation-ship","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nLesley\nNathan\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nThinking of survival shows like Alone, is \"wilderness survival\" a sport?\nRegional differences in the tone and caliber of NextDoor posts\nPastry arbitrage\nThe Light That Shines When Things End\n\n\nhttps://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/bOfIPmqs.png\n\nWild takahē (TAH-kah-hay) have been reintroduced into the mountains of New Zealand\nHow are we feeling about the Boston Robotics advancements? Welcome our new robot overlords or not?\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nHyper Light Breaker.\nBumpy Grumpy.\nRecording a podcast from inside a toilet.\nFishtank bubbling noises.\nAssigning a point value to eating reindeer lichen.\nEating your belt because someone famous ate their belt once in the 19th century.\nStarving contests.\nCalling in an air drop for your favorite outdoor survivalists.\nThe reality show where a guy is living alone in an apartment scouring thousands of magazines for offers of free stuff.\nThe \"it's a living\" joke.\nPez Guy.\nTrying to redeem Pepsi tokens for a fighter jet.\nA boiler room full of people tilting soda bottles.\nWeary cereal mascots.\nHippies living in a canyon until Topanga emerges.\nMaking 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.\"\nMaking 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.\"\nEncouraging microcultures.\nSurfacing positive comments to the top of Youtube videos.\nUsing technology to steer people away from being terrible.\nWriting a story about a guy with a sword.\nWriting a parody of bad fanfiction and building Minecraft worlds to support your world building.\nWhether jokes are funnier now or if old jokes are just out of fashion.\nTrying to relate to the kids by saying \"I can has cheeseburger?\"\nHow art used to happen before copyright law fucked everything up.\nThe dudes at the farmers market selling tomatoes that are obviously from the grocery store.\nThe 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.\"\nThe Quasi-Authentic Experience.\nA pumpkin velcroed to a vine.\nA large hill. (Not a mountain.)\nMaking the light a liar, at least until your mid-thirties. \nRuining an otherwise amazing moment.\nA Minority Report precog murder kind of situation.\nWhether the light has a bell too.\nA poem that's just a shower thought if you think about it.\nTaking the eggs to an incubation center.\nMuppet Bird flavor.\nCutting open a cookie monster to reveal the cookie layers inside.\nSeeing the Cookie Monster's leg in the window of the butcher shop.\nThe roast chicken saying \"It's a living!\" as you slice it up.\nRobots that sound like bees.\nSlipping on the ice and hearing the bees.\nWhether fun robots are even scarier than serious robots.\nMoxie the child companion robot.\nA dog named Spot and his SDK.\nToo loud, too scary, too many bees.\nPeople who can pollinate.\nIf it's empty, fill it with bees.\nMemes that the kids don't think are old because they have fallen out of the cultural memory entirely.\nStill being on Twitter because you have games to sell.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2023-10-09T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/06ba70c9-4ca6-4a59-b0e6-7851cf7994f4.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":68789811,"duration_in_seconds":4299}]},{"id":"f7c88162-9481-41d2-b6e9-1ddd2d777d39","title":"206. Waiting Around For Laundry To Be Invented","url":"https://topiclords.com/waiting-around-for-laundry-to-be-invented","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nJP\nStyger\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nWouldn't mind hearing Jim's thoughts on the recent Super Mario Bros Wonder video\nSouls departing / cartoon ghosts\nYou're supposed to use a \"spacer\" with inhalers now\nProbably not a full topic but I finally ate that apple I was hyped for in my fist Topic Lords appearance\nQuestions for a more experienced musician about learning to play piano + songwriting\nHow do we teach our children to pirate?\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nThe flu shot.\nYour TV patching itself.\nGoing wading in a bog until laundry is invented.\nDying of smoke inhalation until someone invents the chimney.\nA topic for Jim.\nSoliciting Mario opinions.\nMurdering an 80s kid with Mario footage.\nSquat anime Link.\nMario with a grappling hook.\nMario with asynchronous co-op partners.\nThe new Mario game bringing the real freak shit.\nDeveloper quality of life.\nThe unfortunate mythology of the industry.\nGetting to the moon more sustainably.\nMike Mika's Donkey Kong gender swap mod.\nBig globs of ragu flying out of rotoscoped pixel men.\nThe evolutionary dynamic range of AAA games.\nThe boringness of violence.\n Realistic present day modern warfare.\nMaking garbage that makes the world worse forever.\nWanting to see your medium grow.\nA puzzle platformer using a first person shooter interface.\nReaching a little bit for a different thing.\nDealing a little bit of damage to a wall.\nA door turning a corpse into a squished blood paste sprite.\nPikmin 3 as the most honest war game.\nNo Dead Pikmin Speed Run.\nGetting more stuff back to your onion.\nRevisiting game mechanics from throughout the series.\nOutgrowing your childhood diseases.\nA big plastic cylinder the size of a breath.\nAudio iconography saying \"look at this dickhead\"\nA bong for your inhaler.\nAll the surfaces between the air and your bronchial tubes.\nA major change in inhaler technology.\nPutting a bunch of programmer time into making conference calls sound good.\nRespironix Optichamber Diamond.\nAlgorithms to cancel out the Mentos Jingle.\nFinally trying the new apple varietal on your birthday.\nHaphazard produce sections.\nHeapsorting apples.\nThis apple is going to make you its bitch.\nBad mealy apples in the 80s.\nBanana lore.\nAs Seen In Snopes: Verified Not Bullshit Fruit.\nGetting the gist of a song and being able to do your own thing with it.\nMaking noises that sound like nice music.\nLearning to play guitar while waiting for your maps to compile.\nEdly's Music Theory for Practical People.\nLearning to which suspicious-looking websites to trust.\nThe Golden Age of Scams.\noldversion.com\nSpiffy new Windows NT computers.\nStreaming services that you refuse to give money to.\nDoers of Game Piracy.\nPublic opinion turning on piracy and copyright.\nInformation literacy.\nThe surviving websites where you don't mind being found.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2023-10-02T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/f7c88162-9481-41d2-b6e9-1ddd2d777d39.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":78409977,"duration_in_seconds":4900}]},{"id":"dd0a4c66-cb95-47fc-b194-ad2b5135b11b","title":"205. It's Cool To Get A Letter","url":"https://topiclords.com/its-cool-to-get-a-letter","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nAlex\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSjSkaBRD7k&list=PLBk6-z6v3pDKi3Q-9MeqUfupJswozircH&index=7\n\nJohn\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nThat time I spent 4 days fasting in the woods\nTwins! Coming soon! Ahhhhh!\nThe Zelda 1 second quest\nhttps://www.goodreads.com/quotes/806592-now-the-world-has-gone-to-bed-darkness-won-t-engulf\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nJoyful communities.\nWhether discord logs can be subpoenaed.\nEncoding all your mail in ROT13 to keep them safe from the snoops at the NSA.\nFinishing with your DSP design work so your employer sends you into the basement to make cardboard boxes.\nSomeone in the early 2000s with a high pitched voice.\nRemembering your grandma's phone number from when you were six but not remembering any phone numbers since then.\nThinky Puzzle Games.\nAn Alan Hazelden thing.\nTom Brown's Tracker School.\nGoing into the woods and sitting in one spot for four days.\nA good, productive, safe time.\nKeeping control of your emotions.\nHow to know when to stop.\nDoing a ritual at sunrise.\nHaving animal encounters.\nTrees dripping water on you.\nDoing the most boring thing for four days straight so you can never be bored again.\nA really cool thing to do in your twenties.\nSonic showers screaming at you until you're clean.\nLacking the experience to understand what's coming for you.\nGoing through some shit and loving it.\nWhat if it all works out?\nThe experience of knowing twins.\nTaking advantage of the Groupon for college tuition.\nHanging your fears on milestones.\nTaking your parental leave consecutively.\nDaycare as a microcosm of communal living.\nShowing people what you're working on.\nMaking a living putting your kids on social media until your kids get old enough to express that they don't like it.\nWearing a shirt saying \"I do not consent to be photographed.\"\nA conversation with a five year old about scrub jays.\nSharing media with an allowlist.\nSetting permissions on who can see your photos.\nSharing photos with your family by handing out USB drives.\nA visual novel that is extremely interested in your personal financial information.\nA pen connected to a matrix of hundreds of other pens so you can sign your name hundreds of times at once.\nThe Zelda one-second quest.\nNaming yourself Zelda as a shortcut for understanding this topic.\nNaming your character Zelda without understanding the consequences.\nRed bubbles that take your sword away.\nAn obvious door that you can walk through.\nIwata Asks.\nAccidentally using only half the space available.\nZelda randomizers.\nSMZ3.\nHow to make Super Mario World a metroidvania.\nMarvin putting in work.\nCapturing a particular level of snark.\nReading books in high school that you won't understand until you're 30.\nThe California Raisins as the sequel to the Grapes of Wrath.\nThe kind of person who works really hard in high school.\nXanthan gum.\nTrochaic something or other.\nI had a theory about music and then I made all these friends!\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2023-09-25T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/dd0a4c66-cb95-47fc-b194-ad2b5135b11b.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":65654281,"duration_in_seconds":4103}]},{"id":"2fc4d385-6f34-4f4b-8eed-bd840725da99","title":"204. Defrag My Colon","url":"https://topiclords.com/defrag-my-colon","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nJohnB\nCisHetKayFaber\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nThe human body is more similar than I'd like to shitty software (humans have chitinase in our DNA, immune system works like an antivirus)\nThe origin of hiccups\n\n\nhttps://derinthescarletpescatarian.tumblr.com/post/723161770948231168/okay-so-the-thing-about-hiccups-is-that-you-have\n\nTwenty years ago there were like three real books about videogames that weren't strategy guides and now there are hundreds.\n\"untitled\" by Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz\n\n\nhttps://allpoetry.com/poem/13310612-Prostetnic-Vogon-Jeltz-by-Bollox\n\nTV shows that have inspired original mathematics - yes, it has happened more than once\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nWhether it's okay to catch up.\nAir conditioning on hot days.\nA steel mill catching fire and the whole east bay smells like the back of a cathode ray tube.\nShaking yellow sand out of your laundry.\nImporting brushfire smoke from Canada.\nUsing bad metaphors to explain RAM.\nStochastic immunology.\nAlphabetizing all your gut bacteria.\nWhitman's Anal Sampling Mechanism.\nThe Bonzi Buddy of the human body.\nYour inkjet printer waking up at 5am to cycle some ink.\nThe optimal humidity to reflow your ink cartridges.\nNorton Commander.\nSelecting files with the arrow keys and viewing them with F3.\nHow Thunking ruined Jim's Norton Commander clone.\nYour fish nervous system trying to be a fish again.\nReciting the anti-hiccup poem to cure your hiccups.\nFish reminding each other to not take ten small sips of water or they'll stop breathing.\nScaly swimmers.\nWorking in a shark lab.\nWhether a fish sandwich is a fish or a sandwich.\nOffering people a \"tuna roll\" and when they say yes guessing whether they think you mean the sushi or tuna salad on a bready roll.\nMeditating on the concept of hiccups.\nCongratulations, you won the game!\nHow to Beat the Atari Home Video Games.\nWhere a library would shelve those books of type-in BASIC programs.\nDave (2018) and Dave Demo (2018)\nWhich Boss Fight Books are good.\nStarting your kid on Mario Maker.\nGame Engine Black Book: Doom and Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D.\nMario Galaxy's camera-oriented level design.\nYour body telling you when it's time to drink water.\nUsing Final Fantasy 4 as a bridge to talk about localization.\nDeveloping a light gun game to install in all the bowling alleys now that the bowling fad has faded.\nThe Countdown to Irrelevance.\nBooks that used to be blogs.\nInventing criteria for how you beat Galaga.\nLearning what micturations are twenty years after reading that Vogon poem and wondering which seeming nonsense words you'll learn in the next twenty years.\nThe BBC TV Hitchhiker's Guide series.\nThe second-worst poetry in the galaxy.\nRed Dwarf airing on Dave.\nA better way to think about it. (If you are a math person.)\nDrive-by Mathematics.\nNesting your watch orders.\nWatching every episode in every possible order to get the maximum possible amount of context for every scene.\nMarylin vos Savant.\nThe Monty Hall Problem.\nA game design that presumes the player does not want a goat.\nWhether you want to switch to the other goat.\nOpening 98 doors, revealing goats behind each one.\nPushing limits and talking about calculus.\nLearning Japanese because you want to read the smutty manga.\nX: The Everything App.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2023-09-18T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/2fc4d385-6f34-4f4b-8eed-bd840725da99.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":67815966,"duration_in_seconds":4238}]},{"id":"135fc497-e847-40f6-9834-3bd991d0a3b4","title":"203. Only Girls Get Duck Combs For Christmas","url":"https://topiclords.com/only-girls-get-duck-combs-for-christmas","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nCisHetKayFaber\nPhone\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nCorrection regarding a previous topic where I stated that Metal Gear Solid 2 was the most important game of 2023\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/othatsraspberry\n\nChildren cannot be trusted to enjoy things, and maybe that's fine\nThis list of extremely specific danger signs\n\n\nhttps://nextworldover.tumblr.com/post/720069329613357056\nhttps://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/Tkr719yF.jpg\nhttps://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/9unswnr6.jpg\n\n\"Bank Account\" by Louis Cole\n\n\nhttps://genius.com/Louis-cole-bank-account-lyrics\n\nTechnical beliefs you have which may be regarded as superstition, but are true to your experience (I'm convinced my new microphone is worse)\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nThe part where Jim talks.\nSplitting your mutuals.\nThe kind of person who goes to Bluesky vs. who goes to Mastodon.\nA relationship with an editor. (Like Emacs.) (Or Vim)\nWanting to see what Shaq posts.\nThe human zoo of bad takes.\nWho sent Shaq a Bluesky invite??\nO' That's Raspberry\nMetal Gear Apologies.\nSending Konami money to fund the port of Metal Gear Solid 4.\nOptimizing for extremely specific hardware and getting entrenched.\nShaders languishing on PS3.\nPT's final resting place.\nKonami diversifying into video games in the 80s when it's lucrative and dediversifying when it stops being as lucrative in the 2010s\nA lot of weird business practices involving Slurpees and banking\nAll the places the Vita port of Metal Gear Solid 2 went on to.\nThe Worlds of Power novelization of Metal Gear.\nA Narpas Sword scenario.\nCutscene inflation.\nWhat happened to cutscene lengths after voice acting became cheap.\nEncoding movies on a disc for free.\nTime to Crate vs. Time to When Your Input Matters.\nRamen waterslides.\nAnnoying things that little kids do that adults also do.\nPlaying video games and parenting at the same time.\nWhether it's still abuse if it's happening in the Netherlands.\nExpectations people place on their children for Christmas vs. for Halloween.\nDistorted beer.\nGetting a bunch of stuff you don't want for Christmas.\nA sweater with Mario or a cool dinosaur on it.\nSwapping the Barbie and GI Joe voice boxes and whether that's a plot point of the Barbie movie.\nChewbacca dancing on top of the twin towers as they collapse.\nTaking wire cutters to the electrical substation and getting some free copper.\nI don't feel 130 kilovolts; I'm a perfect sphere.\nCreating a situation where people are safe even if they're not paying attention.\nFlying around in a tornado googling \"what do you do when you're flying around in a tornado\"\nIs it .webm or .webnn?\nAll the three letter acronyms that ought to be on the internet rug you can't get.\nThe giant System 7 floppy disk blanket.\nA blanket with the Mac startup sound on it.\nMissing out on some drum solos.\nA poem based on a true story.\nBeing afraid to look at your tax returns.\nGetting single taxed and double social security benefits.\nReplacing your old snowball with a new snowball.\nYour thing as a person trained in audio engineering.\nGetting a very insensitive microphone so that it only picks up the sounds you want it to.\nJim's advice for recording your voice.\nA Shure SM-57B with the Cloudlifter.\nTechnical knowledge for smart people.\nSolid state drives failing without warning.\nA high pitched whine imparting a natural warmth to your voice.\nRecording your voice with a $15 boom arm.\nUsing shittier tools as you get more experienced.\nA cover of a Weezer song that's rendered unlistenable hematite l because of the string squeak.\nThe inability to process and retain information about LinkedIn's purpose.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2023-09-11T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/135fc497-e847-40f6-9834-3bd991d0a3b4.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":65557314,"duration_in_seconds":4097}]},{"id":"8488587e-5abf-4cf7-9ca0-5f50d9398698","title":"202. Tim Was My Jim","url":"https://topiclords.com/tim-was-my-jim","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nMark\nShirley\n\n\nTopics\n\n\nLawn Angst: Why does the city get to decide what is a weed vs an acceptable plant?\nLearning to code is like a cheat code for life, or at least work\nPoop epidemiology \n\n\nhttps://nextworldover.tumblr.com/post/720886587343454208\n\nInsomnolence by Charles Rafferty\n\n\nhttps://poets.org/poem/insomnolence\n\nVille 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\"\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nChamber Mage.\nTouring on the strength of your one song.\nHeartstopper, by Alice Oseman.\nThe city issuing a ticket because you have a weed on your lawn.\nDeclaring certain plants weeds when they're all good plants, Bront.\nAll the different signs you could put on your lawn to tell off your neighbors.\nHow tall a CB tower you're allowed to build without a permit.\nThe youngest homeowners on the block.\nA natural space that isn't so manufactured.\nA society that loves some plants and hates others.\nHow to grow flowers on the moon.\nMaking 660 folders based on an excel spreadsheet.\nThe stick-to-it-iveness required to fight a bunch of bugs.\nWhat LLMs are good at and bad at.\nA Dragonborn Paladin with aphasia.\nGenerating humans with too many fingers.\nWhere to post your Wordle results and Dall-E shitposts.\nA cryptic lineage of COVID in Columbus, Ohio.\nGross but amazing.\nSome seriously bad-ass science.\nExpecting more diligence after you start paying your volunteers.\nThe Paxlovid Rebound.\nGin Gin Ginger Chews\nGenetically altering your tongue to taste the most possible bitter flavor all the time.\nPlacing a ginger chew on your tongue and allowing it to dissolve over the course of an hour.\nPaxlovid Mouth.\nHow to sleep with a cough.\nNumbing your coughing agents.\nStashing the lozenge on your gums.\nWaking with a hard candy stuck to your teeth.\nScarring your vocal folds by coughing as much as you can.\nPoets: good at writing in a poetic way.\nPoetry that's just prose if you think about it.\nTurning a poet in to the authorities for writing prose.\nAt night, in the woods.\nStanding here a thousand years ago and feeling the exact same thing.\nNot being able to upgrade our armor any more because bokoblins are extinct.\nFinding and giving up on a new ingredient every week.\nRIP Bean Paste.\nH-Mart.\nGooey Duck.\nBuying a bunch of dumplings without any idea what's in them and having a tasting party.\nA tiny freezer with only durian in it.\nA smoothie that tastes like drinking a gas leak.\nJackfruit as a crab or pulled meat alternative vs. jackfruit as a tasty treat.\nGetting foodstuffs stuck behind your soft palate.\nAsafoetida risks.\nGolden Mountain Sauce.\nBrown Umami Boosters.\nFish sauce tastings.\nThree Crabs vs. Flying Lion.\nHow to say \"Serving Suggestion\" in all the different Asian languages.\nLoving all your listeners, even the problematic ones.\nThrone of Iron.\nHeavy metal music about D&D.\nFinding yourself on the internet.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2023-09-04T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/8488587e-5abf-4cf7-9ca0-5f50d9398698.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":73051790,"duration_in_seconds":4548}]},{"id":"8c599edf-3f4f-4841-bead-45980fdb33d6","title":"201. Don't Be Distressed, It's Just Australia","url":"https://topiclords.com/dont-be-distressed-its-just-australia","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nAlex\nShannon\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nTree law\n\n\nhttps://www.tumblr.com/whistletown/721716818422677504\nhttps://www.tumblr.com/whistletown/723346723280453632\n\nTax Heaven 3000\nWhen I was a kid I read about a magic trick where if you touch your index fingers together and cross your eyes, a disembodied third finger appears between them.This is the kind of thing we had for entertainment in the 80s.\n\n\nhttps://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/156405/outbreaks\n\nBest food byproducts\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nExhausting topics before the show even starts.\nShould we give bee educators guns?\nLords with lord awards.\nMegalords lording over huge swaths of topics.\nGetting your partner a very smooth engagement ring so it hurts less when they punch you in the face.\nTrimming a tree in the middle of summer.\nTree law consequences.\nThe Hitman games, you know, with the bald guy \nWhether Hit People are hired to kill likable or dislikable people.\nGames with missions designed to make you feel bad about what you're doing but also to give you no choice but to do it.\nInjured while sl searching for bodies in Lake Mead? Demand compensation!\nA cute anime girl who really wants to help you prepare your taxes.\nMSCHF.\nCalling the Key 4 All hotline for real time data on the car's location and speed.\nPlaying Geoguessr to determine where the car is.\nReverse engineering the smell of WD-40.\nUsing the car for purposes of a car.\nThe legal standing of Public Universal Car.\nDon't rotate the donut, you gave to rotate the pie \nLegal MSCHF.\nTaking the SATs for money.\nWriting a list of demands in a child's scrawl and sending it to your senator.\nSeeing the Vienna sausage with knuckles.\nGetting 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.\nA jump scare in Magic Eye form.\nWhy we all need glasses.\nListening to your dad listening to a podcast.\nDisappearing your own nose.\nThe purpose of feeling boredom.\nThe impossibility of being bored when libraries exist.\nPaleolithic man enjoying memes.\nWhy campfire smoke always blows into your eyes.\nBuilding a prehistoric highway system and using one of those printers that prints on the road so paleolithic man can enjoy dank memes.\nWhat kids get in their stockings today now that iTunes gift cards are obsolete.\nWhy keep any DVDs?\nA common metaphor for a problem that can be overcome by relaxing.\nThe most racist shrimp.\nIt's not a firearm, it's just an explosive knife.\nBegging your mom to buy you the Krazy Krabs.\nPutting on a brine shrimp show for your family members.\nA spring loaded rigid whip.\nKitchen Somebody.\nSearching for comfort and the eels come.\nThe neon 24 hour fried chicken sign gleaming behind the pines.\nFinding god in a cluster of eels beneath your palms.\nHave you given god a pizza?\nA different eel pizza meme.\nAll 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.\nFeeding the sharks by stuffing a dive suit full of chum.\nA cooking process that creates a byproduct that you can use to cook something else.\nCalling bean juice \"aqua fava\" and styling.\nBrowning the whey to create a delicious paste loaf.\nThe two-in-one, in which they put two taquitos into a burrito.\nGlorpamole.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2023-08-28T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/8c599edf-3f4f-4841-bead-45980fdb33d6.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":62897890,"duration_in_seconds":3916}]},{"id":"ea60729f-39cf-4493-be8a-57dad15558fd","title":"200. My Banana Has Bones","url":"https://topiclords.com/my-banana-has-bones","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nJenni\nTyriq\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nKing Leonardo and His Short Subjects\n\n\nhttps://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/WesternAnimation/KingLeonardoAndHisShortSubjects\n\nNervous Subject\n\n\nhttps://sims.fandom.com/wiki/Nervous_Subject\n\nSubject Zero\n\n\nhttps://masseffect.fandom.com/wiki/Jack\n\nOn the Subject of Poetry By W. S. Merwin\n\n\nhttps://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=26014\n\nRoyal subjects\nSubject 13\n\n\nhttps://www.mobygames.com/game/84773/subject-13/\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nThe only place on the internet you can hear subjects discussed.\nSubject Lords.\nFinding video games in places that don't exist.\nRenaming the spreadsheet to the Subject Bucket.\nA hand me down Rocky and Bullwinkle bedsheet set.\nRocky and Bullwinkle indoctrination.\nHow many seasons the Flintstones ran for.\nThe Classic Wikipedia Was.\nWacky Racers.\nWhether Winston has ever tried Circus Peanuts.\nEnjoying one Circus Peanut every three years.\nHow to buy just one Circus Peanut.\nSawing a nickel in half before money became pre-scored.\nWhether jokes were funny in the past.\nTwo troublemaking nephews named Duke and Earl.\nMr. Mad's plan to trap the king.\nOne actor playing more than one character all in one take.\nSomebody the Explainer.\nA Nancy strip where the joke revolves around knowing that people used to take their shoes off in movie theaters.\nShow Swap day at the movie theater.\nWaiting in the closet for the grim reaper to show up and then jumping out and being really seductive.\nCloset-pilled.\nMultiple people dying in the same yoga class and the grim reaper just sticks around instead of leaving and coming back.\nYogaing while old. (YWO.)\nFirst name nervous, last name subject.\nBorn pregnant by aliens.\nNervous Subject vs. Nervous Object.\nPressing X to wisecrack.\nGetting quests from Lord British and killing some monsters.\nThe Vic Viper and the Road British.\nA pop culture character who hits the center of the Venn diagram.\nWriting Mass Effect fanfiction for Glittermitten Grove \n10,000 Boolean variables that can be triggered by your narrative choices.\nNarratively justifying how getting a donut leads to your death.\nGenerating alive/dead states for everybody.\nThe tortured but boring space marine guy with a tragic soldier past that isn't very interesting.\nThe girl who is just a cloud of gas under her hazard suit.\nThe man who slouches listening to the wheel revolving in the stream, yet there is no wheel there to revolve.\nThe reason the wheel turns – though there is no wheel.\nSitting at the end of March.\nDeckard Bane.\nHortatoriness.\nHow do we feel about monarchies?\nTropical fruit tree drama.\nThe Miami Fruit Organization.\nOrdering a moonbeam in a jar from Instacart.\nWhere in the fruit the seed wants to be.\nThe 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.\nFiguring out how to hold an avocado like a gun.\nFruit with Velcro-style hook and loop.\nFruit you should avoid if you have a mucous membrane.\nSubscribing to durians for $199 per week.\nTurning the pineapple upside down.\nThe pineapple as a symbol of hospitality.\nA video game with many of the components a video game would have.\nThe taking robots from the System Shock series.\nA pre-rendered background Final Fantasy 7 type deal.\nCinematic platformers starring spheres.\nConflating two games made by Francophones.\nNamable group chats.\nGetting a Bluesky invite just so you can park your domain.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2023-08-21T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/ea60729f-39cf-4493-be8a-57dad15558fd.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":64668333,"duration_in_seconds":4021}]},{"id":"1167b0e7-dbaf-4852-9638-c567d9e5f2f9","title":"199. The Hum Of The Universe Sounded Like A Bug Zapper","url":"https://topiclords.com/the-hum-of-the-universe-sounded-like-a-bug-zapper","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nApril\nRyan\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nJohn asks \"Puzzles/puzzle games and challenges you find pleasant and brain-expanding vs. the ones that you just cannot get your head around.\"\nWhich foods would be the most fun or the least fun to eat if you rotated them at a 90 degree angle first.\n\n\nhttps://www.ebay.com/itm/184633478236\n\nThe Shaggs\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XR9d4ESlpHY\n\nInstructions for Traveling West, by Joy Sullivan\n\n\nhttps://joysullivan.substack.com/p/how-to-leave-a-life\n\nSongs that we completely ignore how weird they are because they're famous already\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nUnions\nPlug guilt.\nMentoring young composers.\nSaying smart stuff about things you know about.\nTaking the W.\nA high pitched ding whenever someone succeeds at something.\nA Good Snowman is Hard to Build.\nInto the Breach.\nPushing the Vek to a different square.\nMaking something in your environment more satisfying.\nA squid with your kid.\nColors that have frequencies vs. compound colors.\nIndigo: a fake color.\nThe banger heavy duty colors.\nA range of frequencies that is culturally mediated.\nPaint mixing vs. light mixing.\nExploding ancient dinosaur juice constantly.\nThe electricity magic vs. the valve magic.\nWhat does it mean to explode?\nHow 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.\nHaving a responsibility to the taxpayers to not be wasteful.\nThe science of what sounds good.\nThe most confusing music you've ever heard.\nFood rotation.\nImagining you have a banana coming at you. (It's not scary.)\nBiting it the way we bite it.\nBurrowing through your hamburger top to bottom.\nLiving with the mayonnaise for 30 seconds.\nWhat happens when you turn a taco 90 degrees.\nIke's Paradox.\nEating a rib straight up and down.\nPizza sandwiches.\nExplaining to your dentist that your bottom jaw is a ruinous cavern because you eat ribs top to bottom.\nAdding a thickening agent to soup so you can turn the bowl sideways and just shove your face in there.\nBuying the Ultra Rare Cheeto Shaped Like Batman Crying just to flip it.\nA li'l cute ghostie with ears.\nAffection for bands that are bad.\nA rock album recorded by three kids who have no interest in or aptitude for writing and performing music.\nArt that lives at the very tips of the horseshoe ends.\nHigh fashion and weird looks that aren't meant to be for everyday.\nMusic that sounds bad in a way that you don't recognize.\nMusic that is boring and propulsive at the same time.\nMusic that is not for listening to.\nThreatening your wife with a conversation about Beatles chord progressions.\nMaking art that is boring in unexpected, interesting ways.\nInventing 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.\nFinding a desert and falling in.\nWatching a purple meadow quiver and drinking whiskey beside a 100 year old cactus.\nWhether Joy is a trick.\nBlowing up your life and other people's lives as well.\nThe other entendre.\nYet another example of this fucking show.\nCooking for the rest of your life without ever washing dishes.\nJoy that can't not be real.\nPoetry that's just really well-constructed prose.\nA poem that doesn't have any line breaks because then it wouldn't fit on Instagram.\nA true poet who accounts for swiping.\nAn expression of a huge evocative idea built out of tiny ideas.\nHow to be happy even when you are not actively chasing your dreams.\nA song that is famous in some way.\nThat fuckin' Pina Colada song.\nMarrying the same person three or four times.\nBouncing along and going on a fun road trip while the world is ending.\nMystifying number one hits.\nRobot Mr. Feeny in your car and you go around solving mysteries together.\nGetting your wife a Groucho Marx nose for christmas.\nRobust dependable noses.\nThink On Thine Sins, Gumshoes.\nGiving the Latin Grammar Police the L.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2023-08-14T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/1167b0e7-dbaf-4852-9638-c567d9e5f2f9.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":74279030,"duration_in_seconds":4626}]},{"id":"38aa587a-b8a2-4b75-8b1b-68606572fc03","title":"198. I'm Not Leaving Until Someone Sequences This Cup Of Spit","url":"https://topiclords.com/im-not-leaving-until-someone-sequences-this-cup-of-spit","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nMaxx\nAvery\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nChange Ringing\nThe differences between American and Japanese robotics teams\nThis rug\n\n\nhttps://www.rugstudio.com/funrugsfuntimeshapecomfts-163multi.aspx\nA few days after I ordered it they emailed me canceling the order. I'm pretty sure this rug doesn't exist.\n\nLook what we found in the park in the dark\n\n\nhttps://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/KmODxwhW.jpg\n\nGrandma giving you a world's best grandma mug\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nTopics. Disgust.\nA video game experience that you will find relatable if you've ever moved.\nMaking prototype furniture out of huge Tetris blocks and then forcing your friends to carry them around every time you move onto a new house.\nThe kind of friend who believes the world should be a certain way and then acts like it is.\nJust frogs. Toads too. Mostly turtles.\nFrog-themed 8th birthday parties.\nRunning a frog rescue out of your van.\nFrog Fractions 2: Revenge of the Fallen.\nWriting Bonfire of the Vanities but never reading it.\nSport meets art: spart.\nMethod ringing with two cycle sine waves.\nInstalling 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.\nFree Pianos On Line!\nBabysitting someone's upright piano while they go on the lam.\nThe mattress story but with a piano.\nWhere the warehouse came from.\nWhen 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.\nGetting a pipe organ so you can play it while holding your brain in a jar and cackling.\nSliding down the whale rib.\nDonating your brain to art so that they can slide it down the whale rib and try to hit a target.\nExperiencing change ringing in a regal square.\nMemorial ringing \nBell ringing machines.\nRobots competing in team sports.\nMicrosumo.\nSumo printers smashing into each other.\nMaking a fighting toaster for the fighting toaster league.\nBattle Bots vs. Robot Jox.\nDepartment stores with an entire floor for stationery.\nBuying Gundam models and never putting them together and just having a bunch of robot heads lying around.\nMajor innovations in robot mouse maze navigation.\nA mouse with an inverted helicopter to keep it on the ground.\nA 3D maze with a robot mouse that can walk on walls and ceilings.\nFun rugs fun time shapes to impress your teens with a trendy sense of style when you bring it into their room.\nA rug covered with keywords from the 90s internet.\n$87 for not that big of a rug.\nBonding with your child over ISP servers.\nA visitor trying to bond with you about your ironic decor and you have to explain that sorry, no, it's supposed to be ironic.\nThe illuminated manuscript version of an the ironic internet rug.\nA fantastic place to buy nuts and other bulk items.\nA limit of 1 kilogram of tapioca pearls per customer.\nBringing the tapioca balls to life in the rice cooker.\nInventing a new way to dispose of tapioca pearls every single day.\nTiktok 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.\nHaving anxiety dreams about the coffee shop you worked at years ago.\nNon-mammalian milk enthusiasm.\nBeing someone's non-mammalian milk guy.\nA bipedal walrus with jaundiced eyes in a jar the size of a walrus and it knows you're here.\nLeaving 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.\nCompanies that are named after the business that used to be in the building.\nA 1950s sign with a bowling pin on it that says \"Safeway.\"\nWalking into the DNA lounge and demanding that they sequence some DNA.\nMilitary challenge coins.\nMeeting the world's best grandma and she hands you a \"world's greatest grandma\" mug to prove it.\nSeek god coin??\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2023-08-07T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/38aa587a-b8a2-4b75-8b1b-68606572fc03.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":62234443,"duration_in_seconds":3866}]},{"id":"e388a089-4fbf-4c12-a209-6755e5b510b6","title":"197. It's No Moist Shit, But I'll Eat It","url":"https://topiclords.com/its-no-moist-shit-but-ill-eat-it","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nMikel\n\n\nhttps://www.lasertimepodcast.com/category/videogame-apocalypse/\n\nDiana\n\n\nhttps://www.lasertimepodcast.com/category/thirty-twenty-ten/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nBanishment is still legal as a punishment in Georgia (the state)\nFrom an evolutionary standpoint, why is it so hard to admit you're wrong?\nMinesweeper speed running\n\n\nhttp://www.minesweeper.info/wiki/Dreamboard\n\nSometime During Eternity, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti\n\n\nhttps://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42860/sometime-during-eternity-\n\nMarsupials: Have they got it figured out?\nVenture Bros. rewatch - things gleaned from a binge rewatch 20 years after it debuted, ahead of the finale\n\n\nEsper 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.\"\n\nThe origin of dungeons\n\n\nhttps://cohost.org/mogwai-poet/post/1771576-if-you-look-up-dung\nEsper says: \"The 'big B' is, according to my high school German knowledge, called an 'esset,' and can be replaced by 'ss' in just about any word using it. It's just a double S sound.\"\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nVidjagame Apocalypse.\n30 20 10.\nThe day when new games used to come out.\nWhy podcasts come out at certain times.\nBanishing someone from 158 counties.\nTaking drugs to regulate your brain chemistry.\nFiguring out some way you were right every time you're wrong.\nSignaling and countersignaling.\nBeing so high status that you don't even need to pretend to be right.\nComing back two days later to prove that Steven Spielberg directed Star Wars.\nMinesweeper board generation.\nThe Dreamboard.\n16 vs 32-bit PRNGs.\nSpeed running a game regardless of whether it's fun to speed run.\nWatching speed run attempts live.\nUsing up one of your Life Stalks.\nThe shame of confusing Minesweeper and Minecraft.\nThe origins of Minesweeper.\nMinesweeper the Game the Movie.\nHarrison Ford on a boat fighting aliens.\nRihanna on a boat fighting aliens.\nManning an aircraft carrier with four guys, two of whom are over 90.\nBack when they were still making movie video games.\nAn Advance Wars clone made as a tie-in to the movie Battleship.\nSome scroll-type parchments that some henchmen left lying around the Dead Sea.\nJesus sitting in on your jazz combo.\nSitting there looking dead.\nGoing all in on Beatnik Jargon.\nAsking centenarian beat legend Lawrence Ferlinghetti what he thinks about Minesweeper.\nFlies holding their noses to eat durians.\nIf humans had elephant-length gestation periods and the kids came out walking and talking.\nGiving birth to peanut-sized babies and expecting the babies to climb into your pouch on their own.\nHaving half a dozen kids because you need help emailing PDFs.\nAdorable tiny possums that look like weasels all over South America.\nMarsupials transplanting babies between pouches.\nSome K-Type shit.\nMunching on opiates your entire life.\nWhat if Jonny Quest grew up to become a fail son?\nThe slowest rollout of a TV show in the history of television.\nGee willikers, I can't wait to solve this mystery!\nMaking a sequel that reflects the fact that you've grown since you made the original.\nAdventure cartoon archetypes.\nDavid Bowie showing up and yelling at you.\nThe deadly sting of the monarch butterfly.\nOne of the things that you put up against your throat and it vibrates.\nA little straw that you put in your mouth to make it sound like you're talking through a didgeridoo.\nWhat a regular person thinks of when they hear \"dungeon\" vs. what a nerd thinks of.\nWhat was this place before it was a monster-infested dungeon?\nA labyrinth full of guys.\nFill it with a few wonders and you got yourself a dungeon.\nThe Tomb of the Qin Emperor.\nWhy they only made some of the pharaoh's tomb a trap, rather than the whole thing.\nLetters we used to have.\nThe German letter that looks like a big B.\nMewterhead.\nLa Fiesta de Quince Anos.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2023-07-31T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/e388a089-4fbf-4c12-a209-6755e5b510b6.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":56821818,"duration_in_seconds":3504}]},{"id":"657a5ed9-37d8-4469-87a7-06787c24a752","title":"196. Active Time Battle Internet Relay Chat","url":"https://topiclords.com/active-time-battle-internet-relay-chat","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nJohn\nJohnB\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nThe word \"juxtapose\" seemed hyperspecific and esoteric when I first learned it in school, but has proven incredibly common and useful\nFarewell to Cheap Bots Done Quick and the tens of thousands benevolent Twitter bots it powered: \n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/v21/status/1643932890105884673\n\nTemple of Apshai's manual\n\n\nhttps://fogknife.com/2023-05-31-the-book-of-apshai-a-personal-exegesis-.html\n\n\"Seen and Not Seen\" by Talking Heads\n\n\nhttps://genius.com/Talking-heads-seen-and-not-seen-lyrics\n\nThe new Zelda game several weeks in feels like the phase of a Civilization game where much, but not all, of the world has been revealed\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nJohn and John as well.\nA John of Many Names.\nThe Frog Fractions Soundtrack of the Decade Edition Vinyl.\nBeing sued for copying a song's vibes.\nAldi Barcodes.\nNoise-cancelling the sound of eating crackers.\nJust scan it. It's food.\nA word full of high-scoring Scrabble tiles.\nJuxtaposing a police station.\nA history of \"juxtapose\" waiting in the wings like a Batman origin story.\nPre-35 words.\nBiff going back in time to 17th century Prague to be thrown out a window but surviving because he landed in a pile of manure.\nAn upbeat song about tolerating people that you hate.\nThe invention of defenestration.\nFarewell to Cheap Bots Done Quick.\nSharing a fun tweet.\nBeing technical enough to look at nested braces and know what that means.\nBots in Space.\nCapcom vs. Everyone.\nTemple of Apshai.\nA text adventure except they couldn't fit any of the text on the floppy.\nAction RPGs that demand you manage your stats and inventory on paper.\nSolo D&D adventure books.\nDragon's on a Chip.\nVideo games that come with books that you need to read to play the game.\nA thick boy, full of lore.\nThe philosophy of city planning.\nWhat is an Earth for?\nTunic.\nWhat StarTropics did with the letter.\nSentinel Worlds One: Future Magic.\n[See paragraph 3.]\n1980s computer game copy protection.\nBringing the Shenzhen I/O manual to work to study it on the job.\nWhy the main campaign in Shenzhen I/O is so much better than the bonus campaign.\nKeeping an ideal facial structure fixed in your mind for years.\nMusical mumbling.\nSongs that are just a Shower Thoughts post.\nThe long-term discipline of adjusting your facial features over time.\nThinking about wider, thinner lips during the instrumental breakdown.\nTrying to save SACD albums.\nThe Depths.\nSharing your location precisely.\nThere are four places: go to them.\nThe Ghost King Rauru.\nThe Calamity Ganon Calamity.\nA dragon with really weird exaggerated eyelashes that you can run around on.\nGiving up on horses.\nUnique items of dubious usefulness.\nOkay boomer, it's called a Purah Pad now.\nFinding a tiny rock to jump off of to go into bullet time.\nThe two-fan hoverbike.\nSkating around atop frozen gourmet meat.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2023-07-24T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/657a5ed9-37d8-4469-87a7-06787c24a752.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":68594168,"duration_in_seconds":4261}]},{"id":"0e545454-be2c-44ac-be3d-4c790176a8db","title":"195. Persian Castle Day At The Climbing Gym","url":"https://topiclords.com/persian-castle-day-at-the-climbing-gym","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nAlexicographic\nKev\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nSports are good actually? Apparently?\nHaunted articles of clothing\nBurrito R&D\nCasey at the Bat\n\n\nhttps://discoverpoetry.com/poems/ernest-lawrence-thayer/casey-at-the-bat/\n\nBecoming a vtuber after losing a bet\nGetting a guided tour of a TV show\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nStreaming daily.\nThe Tears of the Kingdom thread in the Topic Lords discord.\nA rigid self-conception as someone who does not like sports.\nRoller derby.\nWhether skateboarding is a sport.\nGoing fast and shoving past people.\nAn athletic endeavor.\nHow much hockey fights feed back into the actual game.\nBaseball nerds.\nChart Party.\nStorytelling using data.\nThe Bob Emergency.\nSeven Bobs left, and they're all aged.\nWho was the top Bob?\nEast Bay Bike Party.\nFloyd Rose Bridge Valves.\nFiguring out how to make video games without involving Bay Area salaries.\nPersian Castle Day at the climbing gym.\nTaking the leather jacket that your drug dealer OD'd in.\nSigning the bathroom guest book every time you poop at your grandma's house.\nSchwarzenegger DNA on eBay.\nThe Clothes People Have Died In line at Value Village.\nThis Shirt Will Kill You.\nA detailed cosmology of how hauntings work.\nGhosts of people who are still alive, following you around and asking for their hat back.\nTaco Shop Guacamole.\nA completely different foodstuff from what you were accustomed to.\nWet Burritos.\nAirport Head.\nA 3 oz container of guacamole that the TSA will allow on the plane.\nBurrito night at the Stormdancer household.\nLulus and Cakes.\nSpheroids.\nBaseball Hagiography.\nA Quora reply from three years ago.\nSearching for cake and Google asking you to prove that you're not a robot.\nBethlehem slang from 1888.\nVtuber tooling.\nPicking a punishment for yourself that you already want to do.\nAnimated fish backgrounds.\nA more compatible CUDA API.\nMixtapes of TV episodes and video game levels.\nSomeone's top ten list of Star Trek episodes.\nWhat the kids call Cliff's Notes.\nThe skill of understanding someone else's taste.\nThese are the songs that I love, perhaps you will also love them and if so we could fall in love.\nExchanging Spotify playlists because that's what we have now instead of mixtapes.\nTrying to get into Homestuck via Problem Sleuth.\nAn 11 year old with the patience to wait a year to read Harry Potter book 2.\nPhish Food.\nRecording Topic Lords before lunch and getting a well-deserved burrito afterwards.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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","date_published":"2023-07-17T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/0e545454-be2c-44ac-be3d-4c790176a8db.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":50202166,"duration_in_seconds":3125}]},{"id":"96a5fc09-5f39-4497-808b-5732a965e01c","title":"194. How Good It Was, To Have A Toe","url":"https://topiclords.com/how-good-it-was-to-have-a-toe","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nDanny\nDanny\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nMost Song Lyrics are redundant\nPerfect fourths and fifths are named wrong\nIt's almost summer and that means it's time for Mark Salud's \"Forever in Summer\"\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ip_K5DHZlfg\n\nWho wants to do a smutty poem?? We haven't done one of those\n\n\nhttps://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47339/upon-julias-clothes\n\nOh yes\nCelebrity Deaths are getting out of control\nZZT has achievements now\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nWhich Danny should go first.\nThe Noclip Archive.\nNight Brunch.\nPlugging before demonstrating your plugworthiness.\nWhatever happened to MySpace.\nThe gnarliest weirdest thing you can get away with.\nStop making weird things!\nFeeling passionately about individual words without considering their actual message.\nWriting lyrics by stringing together abstract vowel sounds and then filling in the rest of the word later.\nThe native language of rock and roll.\nPrisencolinensinainciusol.\nIrish rap.\nAll the ways music is redundant.\nA very inefficient way to communicate factual information.\nThe Mentos jingle.\nSpoonman: a famous guy who played the spoons.\nMusic's ability to convey ideas that shouldn't be conveyed.\nTeaching kids to love it.\nWhat's perfect about a perfect fifth.\nMusic theory homework that calls it a \"perfect unison.\"\nLydian to Locrian.\nAn extremely popular nostalgic songwriting device.\nTrying to bring up topics out in the wild.\nEven majorer then major.\nWhat it means to be far from A.\nA thing that happened on Public Access TV in San Diego.\nKeyjazzing.\nWeirdos making weirdo outsider art.\nThe tradition of using an Amiga 500 as a musical instrument.\nWatching a musical performance by looking at the back of the performer's head.\nSomething to watch.\nEconomy of movement.\nPlaying drums so as to take up the most possible space.\nThe kind of singing that the Rock Band scoring system encourages.\nPre-singing the note so you're getting points as soon as the note starts.\nSmutty poetry.\nWhether singer songwriters have parentheses.\nThe Diamond Fleece.\nWhether liquefaction is a Bay Area word.\nBrave Vibrations.\nWhat people thought was sexy in the 1600s.\nTalking about a topic because people can hear you.\nThe 80s-90s thing of saying \"as if\"\nAmerica's Whitest City.\nA phrase that Zoomers use to mean that they don't believe what they just said.\nInvestigating the Cool S for ten years.\nFinding the Cool S in ancient Sumeria.\nPeople in Latvia who don't know who Marilyn Manson is but they know he had a rib surgically removed.\nThe first celebrity.\nIncreasing numbers of celebrities.\nIndustrialized celebrity.\nAdopting a future grief machine.\nPracticing grief.\nSeveral generations of digital fish.\nTrugoy the Dove.\nDisembodied consciousnesses living on a Dyson Sphere simulating Tina Turner's music.\nDownsides of everyone living forever.\nThis is a mistake. (Here I go.)\nPre-dead.\nQuestions that will not be answered on this show because they are not topics.\nFish swimming in the background of someone's Zoom call.\nWhat a time to not want to be alive!\nDoing squats so you can get out of a chair.\nMaximizing broken limbs while minimizing brain trauma.\nRenaming Potomac Computer Systems to Epic Megagames.\nZZT: an Epic Game Store exclusive.\nCaverns of Kroz.\nAn Amiga platformer sponsored by Chupa-Chups.\nRetro Achievements.\nModding emulators to add achievements to old games.\nAdding achievements to the Fairchild Channel F.\nAchievements as a ludological device.\nAssigning a point value to all the things your lizard brain needs an extra incentive for.\nCitizen Game.\nA game design trope that can be deployed with taste or not.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2023-07-10T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/96a5fc09-5f39-4497-808b-5732a965e01c.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":76440050,"duration_in_seconds":4755}]},{"id":"dd553b6e-3808-46b4-ac07-2a1000b02fdc","title":"193. Pull Down Your Murphy Toilet","url":"https://topiclords.com/pull-down-your-murphy-toilet","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nElena\nQuil\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nHuman Pudding, and why popular media can't depict bad art, only bad taste\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfHmctamVEA\nhttps://www.notinhalloffame.com/\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gPuH1yeZ08\n\nI got a van!\nCorporate art: From industrial musicals of the 50s-70s to this Staples logo unveiling\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWUhqoAGsfk\n\nhttps://philolexian.blogspot.com/2006/11/kilmer-2005.html\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nA very good New York Times crossword.\nFeats of crossword construction that just make the experience of solving it worse.\nCottage cheese and jam.\nFruit on the bottom cottage cheese cups.\nWhether cottage cheese comes pre-curdled.\nAn opportunity to make money by making the richest people in the world happier.\nA jams and jellies bandolier.\nGoing to the arcade wearing a token dispenser but also your \"I don't work here\" shirt.\nA band that only exists so that John Stamos can be annoyed by it.\nWhether the average person would misspell a word on a grocery list.\nFlashy 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.\nVarious anime in which the kids are forming a band.\nThe Fictitious Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.\nThe East coast DIY music scene.\nEyeball Skeleton.\nSmoosh nee Smush.\nMy Pal God Records.\nThe Most Wanted Song and The Most Unwanted Song.\nRamadan jingles.\nPutting all the things people hate the most in the same song.\nSingle Ladies.\nThe Rescue Rangers dimension where the Rescue Rangers theme song is still modulating upwards to this day.\nReleasing an album on vinyl that ends in a locked groove with a shepard tone.\nSprinter Vans.\nDiesel vans racking up a million miles.\nVan life.\nVans with indoor plumbing.\nHow people react when someone is sleeping in a vehicle in their neighborhood.\nHow to recognize a van that somebody lives in.\nLiving in a Wal-Mart parking lot.\nCampy camping.\nLiving the hash tag no car life.\nBimodal distribution of van dwellers.\nThe Minimum Viable Van.\nLiving six people to a bedroom and not liking it.\nA landlady who cooks for everybody in the 1800s.\nOutlawing boarding houses because there are too many single men being rowdy.\nThe Florida Project.\nMoving into the hotel across the street for a day so that you don't live in one place long enough to become a tenant.\nGuessing how squatting laws work.\nStaples presenting a trailer for their new logo at E3.\nThe history of Industrial Musicals.\nHiring video artists and composers to create massive lavish displays of brand awareness.\nThe documentary that Kevin Smith made about Prince just for Prince to watch and never release.\nMaking a funny video for mystery people to watch for mystery purposes.\nThe KFC VR training app.\nLiving close to Hamburger University.\nRerecording Prince's \"1999\" for every year up to 2999.\nThe circus ad that Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite was based on.\nO Deathy Death.\nMost Foul Vowel.\nThe Alfred Joyce Kilmer Memorial Bad Poetry Contest.\nThe headspace you get into as an artist when you try to make bad art.\nA good example of a bad poem.\nBirdemic's environmental message.\nA clown photobombing your movie soundtrack.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2023-07-03T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/dd553b6e-3808-46b4-ac07-2a1000b02fdc.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":55911688,"duration_in_seconds":3493}]},{"id":"4fac278b-58fb-4e30-9e08-587de91c3f48","title":"192. The Prime Number Shitting Bear","url":"https://topiclords.com/the-prime-number-shitting-bear","content_text":"Lords\n\n\nCisHetKayfaber\nCharlie\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nUmbrellas, siphons, and other physical things that seem like hacky bullshit but actually work\nArticulating the shape of your internal cause-and-effect network and applying it as a learning superpower (futurevision)\nI'm not sure what archipelago.gg is but if I read this paragraph aloud maybe we can figure it out together\n\n\nhttps://archipelago.gg/\n\nA copypasta from this page:\n\n\nhttps://www.followchain.org/best-copypastas/#3\n\nWhy is a skill less valued the more we love it? Shouldn't it be the opposite? Is this arguable?\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nSupporting someone's video game dream in Denmark.\nEscaping from idle games.\nVideo games drawing the screen as often as they can.\nThe pauses getting longer and longer whenever the bear needs to shit a new prime number.\nThe prime number shitting bear getting constipated.\nHow to calculate prime numbers faster.\nMath stuff.\nA choo choo train of thought.\nMeditation apps that play ads while you're in the middle of meditating.\nThe thing where you put your mouth on the tube and then have to spit out the gas or you get neurological damage.\nCreating a low pressure system by sucking on a tube.\nWhether umbrellas make sense.\nUmbrella side-drip.\nHow bicycles stay upright.\nDoes a bicycle on a treadmill stay upright?\nPattern recognition.\nSeeing a situation you recognize and understanding what's going to happen.\nPredicting where someone's sentence is going to end up.\nPutting your water glass in a zone where it's going to get knocked over.\nThe shape of your mind's cause and effect network.\nSeeing scenes from the future, like in Law and Order.\nPredicting the future so that you can be a more efficient organism.\nMashing air molecules at you.\nSpeaking a language that your coworkers don't.\nApplying FutureVision to your creative process.\nNonlinear creative processes.\nOne unique large musical story where nothing repeats.\nA physical task you are doing inside your head.\nThe pet that is closest to having a kid.\nImporting a portal gun into Tears of the Kingdom.\nFinding the hookshot in Metroid and your friend then bring able to use it in Link to the Past.\nHow to know what your friends want.\nAll the bad ways an idea could be implemented \nSurprise boomerangs.\nArchipelago's Release System.\nThe era of couch co-op games.\nA multiplayer season where everybody picks a different game.\nDoing the oration.\nWho the colored lights in your keyboard are for.\nPolygonal dudes with long hair head banging in the background.\nWeirdly modern music.\nFifteen years of everything else.\nRhythm games vs. music games.\nLiving in a society.\nDevaluing the skills you love.\nListening to a song and really appreciating its use of rests.\nHow note lengths and rests work in tracker music.\nStopping a note without starting a new one.\nRunning experiments to determine exactly when a note should stop.\nThe micro decisions of things that people don't think about or care about.\nA bird named Mabel.\nA bird figuring out how to enjoy music.\nA tepid delicate series of notes.\nAttractivision.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"Lords: CisHetKayfaber and Charlie. We discuss umbrellas, siphons, and other physical things that seem like hacky bullshit but actually work,\r\narticulating 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","date_published":"2023-06-26T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/4fac278b-58fb-4e30-9e08-587de91c3f48.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":64406445,"duration_in_seconds":4012}]},{"id":"fea884c2-5843-4d6b-9bf7-3326e3e2a782","title":"191. Carbonated Cream Of Mushroom Latte","url":"https://topiclords.com/carbonated-cream-of-mushroom-latte","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nChris\nWacy\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nCrafting little guys\nNegotiating how to play Zelda together\nCream of mushroom latte\nChatGPT wrote a poem about zelda\nClimbing real rocks\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nThe Marble Hornets/Slender Man oeuvre.\nCopying and pasting a video.\nSharing a movie you liked with a friend over IM by copying and pasting the title.\nThe turnip in Breath of the Wild.\nAttempting and failing to enjoy wood carving.\nStabbing the Korok until it is less fuzzy.\nA Snapchat filter that makes it look like you're made of felt.\nLosing your needle-felted Lorax and getting upset.\nKirby eating Halo.\nHobbies that double as fidget toys.\nCarving a stick into a squirrel.\nFinding polymer clay out in the woods.\nNaturally-occurring fission reactors.\nNature with really good graphic design.\nSharing a Zelda save with your life partner and learning a lot about each other.\nFinding every turnip.\nLearning spoilers at an interesting space.\nThe huge thing.\nTarget's 30-day return policy.\nWhat Switch games support local wireless multiplayer.\nPlaying halfway through a video game before you figure out the most of the systems.\nStirring until the lumps go away.\nKombucha milk.\nAn incredibly cheap gas.\nThe Sus Engineering DIY carbonation guide.\nCream of Cow Latte.\nTarget getting out the UV light to detect traces of cream of mushroom soup on the espresso machine you're trying to return.\nFrothy oily coffees.\nInventing a culinary taxonomy in which mushrooms and cheese are both fruit.\nSweet cheese and savory fruit.\nSweet cheesus!\nMaking a yes or no answer incredibly long.\nRewriting each paragraph until it ends with a word on a line by itself.\nRapping about Zelda in 1980s.\nFinding plot holes in this poem about the Legend of Zelda.\nUsing video games to ignore that you're on a plane for six hours.\nHorror poems.\n\"A Crow Looked at Me\" by Mt. Eerie.\nKnowing why someone wrote an album but not why people listen to it.\nBad Two-Sentence Horror.\nWhether Poe's The Raven counts as horror.\nBusinesses named after the thing that the building they're in used to be used for.\nBerkeley Bowl's produce section.\nClimbing a boulder that is not labeled with its difficulty level.\nDifficulty inflation at the climbing gym.\nHow rocks are shaped.\nA lump that you pinch with your whole hand.\nReading 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.\nWhat camping is like in England.\nTaking a four year old to a parkour gym.\nBeing a kid and looking forward to finally growing tall enough to skate on the power lines.\nA table full of rock obstacle courses.\nThe standards body that certifies what playground equipment is safe to install.\nOld Enough.\nAchieving the Milk Task.\nNot teaching children cursive.\nHaving a name because your mom liked it.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2023-06-19T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/fea884c2-5843-4d6b-9bf7-3326e3e2a782.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":61002803,"duration_in_seconds":3796}]},{"id":"59a0292a-1147-441a-970e-651b93846514","title":"190. The Linguistic Eggplant-Dick Collapse","url":"https://topiclords.com/the-linguistic-eggplant-dick-collapse","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nTyriq\nHallie\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nThe world needs more clues for secrets nearby\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUXow3d3-b0\n\nHow kids on tv used to hate leftovers\nSmartphone sales declined 11% in 2022 while sales of flip phones doubled\nhttps://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44272/the-road-not-taken\nWhat will emoji look like in 100 years?\nI have invented a conspiracy regarding the shape of hand-held supermarket baskets\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nLumps.\nLumpy Space Princess.\nThe best Space Princesses.\nA completely different two Ls.\nA good first vertically scrolling shooter.\nElectric vehicle backing up noises.\nCollecting Tesla license plates whenever you hear the Tesla collectible item noise.\nThe most sound-designed thing you interact with on a regular basis.\nWhat kind of noises electric motorcycles make.\nThe laser you can point at any window to turn it into a speaker.\nBubb Rubb's reaction to whistle tips.\nAn urban legend about a haunted car driving down the freeway.\nAdvertisers beaming holograms directly into your AR goggles.\nThe 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.\nWandering into the woods to escape the ubiquitous advertising but the birds have learned to repeat the ads.\nBirds who sing the song that turns your skull into a speaker.\nA 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.\nDescribing memes on podcasts.\nThe fungus that killed all the leftovers so the leftovers we eat today are a completely different varietal of leftovers.\nWhy leftovers-flavored jelly beans don't taste like real leftovers.\nSpending more money so people don't perceive you as poor.\nFood that you don't have to cook again.\nEating pizza straight out of the freezer.\nTaking an ice cold slice of pizza into a hot shower.\nToaster pizza.\nCat body temperature pizza.\nRosemary garlic pop tarts.\nWhether a day old poptart you forgot in the toaster counts as leftovers.\nLeftunders.\nIncreasing crime by 100% but it's all good crime.\nFlip phones Georg and whether he should be counted.\nIf anyone in the world decides not to eat something, that thing is canonically leftovers.\nWanting to be in a forest.\nDudes talking about themselves and the roads they've traveled.\nThe Most Misread Poem in America.\nPop quiz: individualism or fake individualism?\nDoing a Twitter poll every time you are making a life decision and then taking the road less traveled by.\nDialects of emoji.\nWhat Unicode looks like in the future where we communicate by swapping brain lobes with each other momentarily.\nDoing the emoji hand clap for every word thing in your Great American Novel.\nA screen reader reading out ascii art of a forest and after six minutes the blind user is like \"nice forest!\"\nWhat the audio book for House of Leaves sounds like.\nLexicalogical collapse.\nVeiny eggplant.\nWhich end of the eggplant emoji the droplets go on.\nGenetically 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.\nGoing to the bulk bin and scooping rice directly into your shopping basket.\nIf rice is like water and Bruce Lee is like water then Bruce Lee is like rice.\nTrying to Tetris into a curve.\nWhen a service works perfectly fine and they change things for no reason.\nSearching Podcast Addict for a podcast and it comes back with a one episode podcast called \"Please Update Podcast Addict\"\nUber and Lyft becoming uncompetitive because they're trying to be profitable.\nAds that aren't even beamed directly into your skull so that good are they?\nAdvertising by teleporting a brain hemisphere of someone who loves your product with your target audience so you can share their knowledge.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2023-06-12T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/59a0292a-1147-441a-970e-651b93846514.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":54175096,"duration_in_seconds":3371}]},{"id":"1723faec-3e10-4c71-bc19-f8f63e7f2d02","title":"189. If You Don't Know Who Your Wario Is, You're The Wario","url":"https://topiclords.com/if-you-dont-know-who-your-wario-is-youre-the-wario","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nAlexander\nYaros\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nSomewhat Dim Mirror\nUnique and weird self-bootstrapping computer language - Forth\nI'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?\nThe Kraken, by Alfred Tennyson\n\n\nhttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kraken_(poem)\n\nNES dev scene and new games still being released\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0Yg0GAX5vw\n\nYou have to heat a black hole to cool it down\nWinston 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\nEsper 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.\"\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nJust playing games you already know whenever you find the time for games.\nDystopian fiction about all the little annoying things.\nDystopian fiction about all the terrible TV shows that are on now.\nA guy who thought his idea would work but it didn't.\nA black mirror but a little less black.\nHow really shiny black things work.\nLogging in to watch people make themselves miserable.\nReverse polish notation.\nGiving up on operating systems and deciding to live inside a Forth interpreter.\nGoing back to the Cambrian period and being like \"what is this shell thing and what is it trying to accomplish?\"\nHow Forth is like Eurovision.\nBorrowing someone's RPN calculator and being very confused for a moment.\nYour Dymaxion map of the globe.\nThe next emulations of Hewlett-Packard reverse polish notation calculators.\nOnline Casino Guides and the kinds of email they send.\nA gaming and entertainment experience.\nNaming your movie @ and getting incredible engagement on Twitter.\nHow recently Nethack has been patched.\nCarpetology and the study of rugs and carpets even though they're not in the same phylum.\nThe Dungeons and Dragons Chick Tract.\nA kid named Wario.\nThe Abysmal Sea.\nUnnumbered and enormous polypi.\nInterpreting a poem as a political statement when it's clearly about how giant squids are super cool.\nLauding this poet's skill with language even though he didn't know the difference between abyssal and abysmal.\nCalling a poem a sonnet when it doesn't meet the criteria of a sonnet just because Tennyson wrote it.\nWanting to be huge and eat sponges, like the kraken.\nDendy.\nBuying NES games made this year.\nSokoban with a Twist.\nMOON 8.\nReleasing chiptunes on vinyl shaped like a square.\nRussian Roulette for the NES making good use of the Zapper.\nTwo people who are really bad at archery.\nPointing your Rambo exploding arrow at the exploding barrel sitting right next to you.\nA turn-based thing where you can kill zombies.\nForklift simulators in VR.\nNES Maker and GB Studio.\nLLVM's NES back-end.\nMaking a NES game in C and never using local variables.\nFinding the free time to do all your hobbies.\nThe bigger I am the colder I am, and if you heat me up I get bigger and colder. What am I?\nA tear in geometry that just leaks shit.\nCare and feeding of your pet black hole.\nPascal's Breakfast.\nWhether it's in your best interest to believe in waffles.\nThe International Cult Registry.\nTrying to make a portmanteau of waffle and apocalypse.\nViolence against putty monsters.\nThe Horsemen of the Apocalypse Power Rangers spinoff.\nA Power Rangers spinoff made in the last three years that has the exact same production values of the original.\nWriting a new TV show around the action scenes from a different TV show.\nTaking the most expensive special effects shots from every movie and putting them all in one uber-movie.\nTricking Harrison Ford into being in your movie because he's so old now.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"","date_published":"2023-06-05T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/1723faec-3e10-4c71-bc19-f8f63e7f2d02.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":53817401,"duration_in_seconds":3344}]},{"id":"59fa30ff-abc0-465d-80be-89b3eee8a659","title":"188. An Extremely Gendered Sniper Rifle","url":"https://topiclords.com/an-extremely-gendered-sniper-rifle","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nMaxx\nErica\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nZines and Jam Games; stuff that's understood to be breakable\n\n\nhttps://itch.io/c/689872/indiepocalypse\n\nBirding in the pandemic\nItinerant Filmmakers\n\n\nhttp://www.meltonbarker.org/\n\nMeditation on Capitalism\n\n\nI found the tweet that the image came from, but still don't know the author of the poem: https://twitter.com/Sierra_OffLine/status/1100852286585221122\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nThe Bugzooka\nBooms and busts of little insect invasions.\nA little vacuum chamber that you squish closed.\nSucking a fly through a tube.\nCry havoc and let slip the bugs of war.\nEgads, Bugzooks!\nThe Bug-A-Salt Passion Assassin 3.0.\nA middle aged dad of the type that would buy a salt gun \nA bugzooka in active use.\nA balding man who looks like Jeffery Epstein crawling on the floor in his underwear to promote the Bug-A-Salt.\nProfessor Fly Presents: Fly Facts.\nJudging the anatomical correctness of Professor Fly.\nHammacher-Schlemmer ads for bug-catching devices.\nWhether women make better snipers.\nAiming at the fly on the wall with your laser sight.\nMr. Pinch.\nA fly in a lab coat who lives in Seattle.\nA photocopied leaflet about your band or political cause.\nThe best, most well-produced musicians in the world.\nWays to frame game jams.\nA good brain hack for if you feel the urge to be a product.\nIndiepocalypse.\nElectric Zine Maker.\nWhether the pandemic is over.\nOne of the birdiest places in the United States.\nTalk Irby to Me.\nBecoming texting buddies with a famous bird systematist from Cornell.\nA Big Year.\nYelling bird coordinates at someone you just met.\nWinston's favorite bird and why he likes it so much.\nKnowing something about ravens. (Not what they eat.)\nThe Northwestern Crow.\nA crow catching live shrimp and stashing them in the moss.\nCollecting black walnut husks to dye wool.\nFeeding crows who bring you lipstick from the 1940s.\nWhat to do with a 10 pound bag of unsalted peanuts.\nA movie where every kid in town foils an attempted kidnapping and then holds a talent show.\nArk Music Factory.\nHiring 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.\nSocial media survivors.\nStardom: it's not good for you.\nWhether kids today still want to be movie stars.\nBitmojis and other things that put you in a little cartoon.\nA customized birthday greeting from a Weird Al.\nPaying Rudy Giuliani a pittance to wish your mom a happy birthday.\nOne of the Breaking Bad hitman twins undercutting the other by $300 on Cameo.\nPreserving your Too Short custom rap tape on Youtube.\nA poem written in BASIC that is spoilers for Mad Men.\nThe light in your Ikea bookshelf recognizing the light in you.\nDoing line number archaeology when reading a BASIC program.\nSeeing text from the other side of the page through the page.\nDo It.\nInstructional Art.\nFinding 25 identical objects and naming them all Jimmy.\nFlying Maxx to the Permian Basin to teach your students how to repair microscopes.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"Lords: Maxx and Erica. We discuss zines and jam games, birding in the pandemic, itinerant filmmakers, and \"Meditation on Capitalism.\"","date_published":"2023-05-29T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/59fa30ff-abc0-465d-80be-89b3eee8a659.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":55485336,"duration_in_seconds":3467}]},{"id":"5f84c33d-04eb-435e-876b-0b91d5b59ac0","title":"187. The Second-Best Whale Playground In Emeryville","url":"https://topiclords.com/the-second-best-whale-playground-in-emeryville","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nCort\nStephan\n\n\nhttps://lonelystarsoftware.itch.io/playdapon\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nUSB-C cables that only work in one orientation\n\n\nhttp://blog.zarfhome.com/2023/04/usb-c-and-plague-of-grackles.html\n\nPlaygrounds seem to have gotten really good again in the last ten years\nBedtime guitar update\nWhere the Wild Things Are\n\n\nhttps://genius.com/Maurice-sendak-where-the-wild-things-are-annotated\n\nClassic hardware has become a kind of fantasy console\n\n\nhttps://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/04/wi-fi-in-an-nes-cartridge-super-tilt-bro-takes-the-1985-console-online/\nhttps://www.thenew8bitheroes.com/\nhttps://www.gbstudio.dev/\n\nConstructing a computing environment as a nested series of cages for a child to escape\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nExtra plugs.\nMr. Saitou\nHow to sideload software onto the Playdate.\nTrying to make Sifteo happen.\nWhere to find all the fancy MacIntosh dithering algorithms.\nAbleton for the Sega Megadrive.\nWho Zarf is.\nEU 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.\"\nGetting rid of your bucket of cables.\nNever throwing away wood because you might need one that shape some day \nNever throwing away oddly shaped pieces of wood because you might become a carpenter some day.\nPlaygrounds getting bad and then good again.\nGetting breakfast at the Emeryville Public Market.\nWhether swings or seesaws still exist.\nGiant wooden castles with bridges going between them.\nHow to make the spinny playground things safe.\nA regionally variable playground.\nWhat countries have and don't have playgrounds.\nThe San Lorenzo Community Park.\nA big stone bear you can climb on.\nWhether any of those playground speaking tubes have ever worked.\nWanting the world to have magic in it so you lie to your kid about science.\nThe Dennis the Menace playground in Monterey.\nPeriodically removing the poison oak.\nGrowing up and being on the other side of the memory.\nThe Dead Dad playground turning into a fenced-off deathtrap.\nProcedural memory for nice melodies.\nMountain dulcimers vs. hammered dulcimers.\nWalking around with a bandolier of mountain dulcimers, one for every key.\nWhat happens when you're living in the Appalachians and you want to make a violin but you can't.\nWhat to do with your ability to play an instrument when you have no free time.\nMaintaining a consistent strumming pattern while singing.\nStrumming and finding finger positions intuitively.\nHere's all the notes. Play the right ones at the right times.\nThe Virtual Console of musical instruments.\nJim's favorite note in the mixolydian mode.\nWhere the Wild Things Are for Xbox 360.\nA poem with hardly any punctuation.\nGoing on a journey of many weeks in just a few pages.\nMax in a wolf suit fighting bees with a stick.\nMaurice Sendak Kart Racer.\nDinosaur Time.\nClapping for names you know.\nA building with dinosaur bones in it.\nRumpusing things.\nGames where you whack shadow spiders with a stick.\nGB Studio.\nPutting a wifi adapter in an NES cartridge.\nThe Mario modding tool set.\nAn IDE for making NES games.\nPi-Boy D.\nDoing homebrew development on a system that is still in active use.\nCastlevania: Passacaglia of Disrepair.\nGBA of Theseus.\nMaking a Lynx game that supports 8-player multiplayer, when there aren't 8 people who own the system.\nPorting a game about matching colors to a monochrome display.\nGiving your kids a computer running Linux to teach them sysadmin skills, but they just play games on their phone instead.\nBranded Scratch Wrappers.\nComposing new music for the extended What the Golf? cinematic universe.\nHow to unlock your school laptop to play the Chrome Dinosaur Game.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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 ","date_published":"2023-05-22T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/5f84c33d-04eb-435e-876b-0b91d5b59ac0.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":65815287,"duration_in_seconds":4093}]},{"id":"e076e051-4483-48be-adf5-584397fb1c33","title":"186. ADHD Shame Graveyard Of Browser Tabs","url":"https://topiclords.com/adhd-shame-graveyard-of-browser-tabs","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nTim\nBen\n\n\nhttps://linktr.ee/zerofiftyone\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nMy Thursday Night\nThe 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.\nI'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.\nFine Feather\n\n\nhttps://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/vyy9So4K.jpg\n\nThe terrifying field of Hostile Nuclear Architecture\n\n\nhttps://vm.tiktok.com/ZGJmB4MFj/\n\nDo you have 103 tabs open in Chrome?\nIn 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.\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nHaving something to unplug.\nContinuing to take care of your children.\nGoing to see the Mountain Goats for your birthday.\nSleep meds that don't interact well with grapefruit.\nCaring for a newborn for a month and then suddenly having a nice meal.\nA cocktail of factors.\nFinding an amazing new artist you become obsessed with for the next few months.\nListening to music while you work.\nA poster containing the source code for Pitfall.\nHow to keep finding new music in your thirties.\nPhonograph.\nAuto-brewery syndrome but for methamphetamines.\nA good song that everybody likes.\nFear of stories.\nRefusing to see a movie because you're afraid of what it'll make you feel.\nGoing camping in the woods in order to watch a movie.\nReliving your past experience in memory.\nThe soap operas that your ex's mom would watch.\nBuying sheet music and playing it yourself in anticipation of when the orchestra comes to your town to play you the real thing.\nSheet music as a pre-release hype document.\nReading the manual of your new video game on the car ride home.\nCrestfallenness.\nListening to a record with somebody.\nRogue topics that keep threatening to come up.\nPlaytesting as a way to get to know your friends better.\nApproaching the things that are valuable to you through the lens of an illusion that you know is an illusion.\nLockdown hobbies.\nHow to enjoy hobbies.\nStarting 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.\nDehydrating beer to get yeast out of it.\nMaking beer out of the yeast that's just hanging out in the air around you.\nGordy and the Monster Moon.\nNine year olds who are incredible at climbing because they refuse to eat fish.\nA sparrow showing you its whole ass.\nWhether sparrows are detested.\nHow to dispose of nuclear waste.\nAttempts to make you hind brain think \"I need to leave here immediately.\"\nThe meme of the skeleton playing the trumpet.\nA field of Aztec death whistles activated by the wind blowing.\nTrying to save the lives of people who live far in the future.\nSpeaking across time.\nWhether this place is a place of honor.\nAn ADHD Shame Graveyard of Browser Tabs.\nGoing over all your browser tabs to see which ones remain relevant to you.\nDetails of how one bathes oneself that we never discuss in public.\nA web browser that'll tell you \"no, I think you've had enough tabs\"\nA brick that gives you a key.\nHow Elden Ring is structured.\nA game that is a foray into a new design space that demonstrates how not to solve these design problems.\nA scavenger hunt to find the next Topic Lords guest.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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","date_published":"2023-05-15T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/e076e051-4483-48be-adf5-584397fb1c33.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":57751527,"duration_in_seconds":3594}]},{"id":"eb6fd239-7960-41c0-b77c-c37d6936c595","title":"185. 2000-Year-Old Head, Again??","url":"https://topiclords.com/2000-year-old-head-again","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nDanny\nKim\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nAnimorphs\nMy keyboard is registering double inputs again help me\nYoutube channels that summarize movies like Cliff's Notes\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyXD1jAZBdZ4u0K-GLYC77Q/videos\nhttps://www.mezzacotta.net/garfield/?comic=2799\n\nCatGPT\nM3gan; technology horror movies\nYou don't get points for coins in Super Mario World!\n\n\nMicrotopics\n\n\nA video game man.\nThe Animorphs train.\nChildren committing war crimes and having to live with the consequences.\nHow many books are in the Animorphs series.\nThe Visser Chronicles.\nYeerks living in the Yeerk pool.\nFinding the person whose car you stole and explaining \"here's your car back, I did a bunch of war crimes in it\"\nHearing someone explain Animorphs repeatedly and never forming a single opinion.\nThe horror of noses moving around.\nRefusing to read graphic novels because you can't read and look at pictures at the same time.\nAnimorphs: Shattered Reality.\nWhy boys don't read Animorphs.\nMarco turning into an Andalyte.\nEating via your hooves.\nF for Furry.\nThe canonical source for all sexualities.\nNon-Consensual Dippin' Dots.\nHaunted Headphones.\nHow to compliment your partner's flams.\nTaking a movie and turning it into a TikTok.\nThe dude from Dark with the face.\nTwisted social experiment: whoever survives til the end gets to live.\n2000 Year Old Head Again??\nBlind Man Who Robbers Are Trying To Avoid For A Movie.\nThis Garfield Comic is Too Highbrow.\nA Simple Rhyming Man.\nI Had a Lover's Quarrel with the World.\nA chat bot that only replies with cat memes.\nAn extremely asymmetric cat.\nHiding inside the couch.\nA cat wearing a neckerchief.\nAI dolls in horror movies.\nA movie that is advertised relentlessly on whatever wavelength you're on.\nContent warning: hilarious child death. The whole movie theater will laugh.\nHaunted TikTok.\nTopic Lords M3gan Edition.\nRobot vs. Firmware Updates.\nRobot vs. EULA.\nHorror stories about firmware updates.\nA toilet that screams at you if you're not licensed to shit in it.\nBathrooms that self clean whether you're still in there or not.\nHow many points coins are worth in all the different Mario games.\nIncentivizing children to stomp on goombas.\nFrog Fractions as an expression of score-related trauma.\nAn email where it's hard to tell who is fucking with whom.\nThe 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.\nCurling: the most horny sport.\nThe game where people crouch really low and try to get a stone into a button.\nPlaying Frog Fractions for 420 hours.\nThe modern experience of being verified on Twitter.\nThe time Frog Fractions was crashing when you played it in France.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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","date_published":"2023-05-08T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/eb6fd239-7960-41c0-b77c-c37d6936c595.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":58537328,"duration_in_seconds":3633}]},{"id":"d960d39d-0ad6-4e40-b8d6-429e84024a66","title":"184. Times New Orange","url":"https://topiclords.com/times-new-orange","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nAlexicographic\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/alexicographic\nhttps://www.twitch.tv/damaplaysgames\n\nAndrew\n\n\nhttps://kittenm4ster.neocities.org/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nThe 3-food problem: what 3 foods are pairwise good but bad all together?\nTalking loudly during movie trailers as an act of anticapitalist subversion\nMoon Mode on your phone camera is probably just pasting a good picture of the moon over your bad one.\n\n\nhttps://in.mashable.com/tech/3114/are-the-moon-shots-from-the-huawei-p30-pro-fake\n\nThe Orange by Wendy Cope\n\n\nhttps://gladdestthing.com/poems/the-orange\n\nLearning Italian from a cartoon dog\nBeing able to identify McElroy fans by how they complement my woodworking\n\n\nhttps://www.themcelroy.family/2020/7/31/21348515/maxfundrive-2020-how-to-fake-an-interest-in-woodworking\n\nRIP List of Video Games Considered Artistic\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/List_of_video_games_considered_artistic\nhttps://www.everywhereist.com/2021/12/bros-restaurant-lecce-we-eat-at-the-worst-michelin-starred-restaurant-ever/\nhttps://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21152082-declaration-by-chef-floriano-pellegrino\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nkittenm4ster's PICO-8 games.\nVibing with the Alfonzo's Bowling Challenge ethos.\nA game that is implemented in under 8000 tokens.\nThe ideal game pitch.\nChocolate and cheese and something.\nChoccoli.\nChocolate and gravy.\nA lukewarm Americano.\nA bunch of foodies who really know their foodstuffs.\nA fish being strangled by Red Vines.\nA GPU that has food inside of it.\nThe Turing test for whether computers can taste foods.\nAsking Chat GPT what three foods you can combine to create a bomb in your kitchen.\nWhether Gallium has calories.\nThree people on a podcast who all think \"trailers\" should come after the movie \nFinding out about a movie by seeing a trailer in a movie theater even though trailers are constantly spilling out of every screen you own.\nGetting the wiggles out.\nHow to make the lives of people who enjoy looking at ads a little bit worse.\nYelling \"fire\" before the movie starts so fewer people pay attention to the pre-movie ads.\nWanting to become the reason all movies have \"no leopards in the theater\" PSAs now.\nA toddler watching Youtube, yelling \"no!\" and throwing the phone on the ground when an ad plays.\nPushing the lever to receive your stochastic reward.\nYoutube deciding you've seen enough ads lately and taking pity on you.\nTrying to explain to a four year old how to play a light gun game but the game is over before you finish explaining.\nThe Space Alien Busting Song.\nDrawing new mountains on the moon to test your camera's moon mode.\nHere's the moon again.\nA filter to replace pictures of your wife with the moon.\nA Snapchat filter that makes you feel like you used to be attractive.\nA filter that takes your bad photos of the moon and makes them even worse.\nThe worst bunny in the moon.\nA good poem that rhymes.\nTurtle metaconsistency.\nEnormous and hilarious oranges.\nGood art here, you guys.\nReading poetry in the original Helvetica.\nBorgiaPro on various font downloading sites.\nA cartoon that is entertaining even if you are not learning Italian.\nFinding Armando's old hat in the attic.\nAsking the clouds to move so that your hat can protect you from the sun.\nWorking within a constraint that produces delightful nonsense.\nPhotocopying yourself to create a black and white clone.\nWhat drugs they'll give to kids in what countries.\nGrowing up but continuing to take the same drugs.\nA little girl who is also a dog.\nSubtitles that don't match what's being said aloud.\nWatching Italian TV using a VPN.\nThe Andrew Lloyd Weber musical with the roller skates.\nRoller bladers dancing in weird futuristic costumes.\nHaving positive fun experiences with language.\nLearning a new language while skydiving.\nHiring an experienced skydiver who can give you foreign language lessons while you're both falling from a plane.\nGetting bored while skydiving and looking at your phone but there's no WiFi up there.\nHow McElroy fans compliment someone's woodworking.\nHow to Fake an Interest in Woodworking.\nArguing about whether games are art.\nAll the games that anyone's ever called art.\nFinding information about a deleted page on Wikipedia.\nPhilosophical debate on the creative qualia of electronic structured play. (Roger Ebert has a subheading.)\nWhether the List of Zombie Video Games on Wikipedia includes philosophical zombies.\nWhether the List of Zombie Video Games on Wikipedia includes voodoo zombies.\nWhat Casinos are trying to do to attract kids who like video games.\nWhether Lechuck is a voodoo zombie or a Romero zombie.\nHohokum.\nFinding a bunch of snakes that each have different names.\nWhat happens when you collect all the things. (Art.)\nList of Paintings Considered Artistic.\nGimmick food that is more about the experience of eating a weird thing than the food itself.\nA restaurant that doesn't have plates and just pours the food into your cupped hands.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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","date_published":"2023-05-01T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/d960d39d-0ad6-4e40-b8d6-429e84024a66.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":60889759,"duration_in_seconds":3788}]},{"id":"e8e4a1cc-31b1-468c-b52c-d9e052aea795","title":"183. The Radioactive Scone Problem","url":"https://topiclords.com/the-radioactive-scone-problem","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nJohn\nQuil\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nTaking advantage of a rare opportunity to play a Legend of Zelda game before every aspect of it is documented on the internet\nRCA's implementation of color television is one of the most impressive engineering feats of the 20th century\nThe 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.\nhttp://blueridgejournal.com/poems/rl-fall.htm\nAre dumplings universal? It seems like every civilization has at some point invented their version of 'carbs around a protein' food\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nThe best part of the show.\nThe Great Lakes Pigeon Rescue.\nHow best to keep a pigeon.\nHiding in the discord \nSolving problems in interesting ways.\nA very interesting idea that just barely pays off.\nPlaying a new game all weekend for the first time in your life.\nA game that is too spiky to be solved by one person.\nA matchmaking service that puts you on a forum with fifty people who are each starting a Dark Souls game for the first time.\nAccidentally playing geez Fez with your sister.\nA riddle about risk management.\nNot being able to throw away radioactive waste because you don't want to waste food.\nDeciding which cookie to put in your mouth \nFinding the password to someone's laptop in a video game by googling their information in real life.\nDigital vs. Analog circuitry.\nPiggybacking the color signal on top of the black and white signal.\nQuadrature amplitude modulation.\nRacing the Beam.\nBeing banished from the kingdom for partly understanding how television works.\nInventing two televisions so you can run one backwards.\nExtroverts who when meeting an introvert, think to themselves \"it's my job to bridge the gap\"\nEscaping when someone is distracted by Girl Scout Cookies.\nEncountering the ARG that you made for yourself and then forgot about.\nNot getting as many free pitbulls as you thought.\nGetting 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.\"\nYour wife who hates when you impersonate a cop.\nThe episode of Train Hot Dog which was just Jim reading a stack trace for twenty minutes.\nTrying to figure out what web site you can browse on your phone to get the person sitting next to you to stand up.\nJim's preferred San Francisco residents.\nThe orange bland ambassadorial face of the moon.\nWild spiders crying together.\nWhat to do when the air raid sirens go off.\nMoving to a new place where they don't have monthly nuclear accident drills.\nJohn Vanderslice.\nThe Human Missile Crisis.\nShowing fear for humanity before it's cool.\nPoetry that is not meant to be read aloud.\nStripping the formatting out of e e cummings's poetry.\nA poem that skips around on the page like Chutes and Ladders.\nTopic Troves.\nCarbs around a protein food.\nA rooster named Pierogi.\nWhether dumplings have to be slimy.\nPutting the pudding in a protein.\nA particleboard meat.\nA McRib that's been injected with custard.\nSweet and savory things placed inside a carb.\nWhat civilizations have never invented the dumpling.\nHow to get from agriculture to the Hot Pocket.\nThe singular of funfetti.\nHow to get into the Topic Lords discord.\nTopic Lords the Phone Game.\nCheap Bots Toot Sweet.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2023-04-24T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/e8e4a1cc-31b1-468c-b52c-d9e052aea795.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":59057741,"duration_in_seconds":3677}]},{"id":"f326396f-7fb5-4a61-b39e-69a0b0ef6e82","title":"182. Baby Baby Mario","url":"https://topiclords.com/baby-baby-mario","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nJenni\n\n\nhttps://intfiction.org/t/lets-play-cragne-manor/56472\n\nChris\n\n\nhttps://trustory.fm/cool-time-dice-hour/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nAll the stuff we did in the 90s that is horrifying to modern parents now, like sleepovers and latchkey kids\nThe movie for Jurassic Park 2 is somehow worse than the book and the book is very bad.\nThe VR episode of Nowhere Man\nI fucked up my car by running over a mattress on purpose\n\n\nhttps://vhsviscera.tumblr.com/post/705867030403973120\n\nThere was a space battle over Nuremberg in 1561 and the local broadsheets reported on it with woodcuts:\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1561_celestial_phenomenon_over_Nuremberg\nhttp://blog.zarfhome.com/2022/01/way-up-in-middle-of-air.html\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nBaby Mario and Baby Luigi being two different species.\nRiff and Jenni play Rusty Lake.\nAbsorbing most of your twin in the womb and all that's left is his heart behind your nipple.\nNippleheart.\nCool Time Dice Hour.\nCragne Manor.\nHeck of a project, terrible game, not recommended at all.\nCragne Manor's TV Tropes page.\nA Metafilter thread about sleepovers.\nYour mom asking for a report on all the swear words in the book you're reading.\nElsa Screams at Dentist.\nWatching Elsa Screaming videos on Youtube to learn how to scream better.\nGoing to the bookstore by yourself when your are 13 years old.\nCalling the anime repair guy when your anime goes out.\nNew 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.\nSocializing your kids poorly so nobody will invite them to sleepovers.\nLearning how sex works and then calling a conference on the playground to explain it to everyone.\nCalvin's dad explaining that women only pee once a month.\nPicking up the broken glass that your meth dealer neighbor keeps throwing in your cactus garden.\nThe tiny-handed thin-necked final girl.\nAbraham Lincoln's wrestling career.\nThe one where they defeat the veloraptors with gymnastics.\nThe one where they defeat the velociraptors by showing them Elsa Screaming videos on Youtube.\nTaking a bad book and adapting it into an even worse movie.\nDoing drugs until the dinosaurs look like they have feathers.\nMicroscopic dust particles on the slicey bits.\nWhy blowing into the cartridge did or didn't work \nHunter-gatherers blowing on a blinking raspberry bush and cursing the defective lockout chip.\nBeing unable to hunt bison because of bison DRM.\nA completely made-up kind of VR.\nDownloading your estranged wife from the internet so you can reunite in VR.\nA Rough Whimper of Insanity.\nMax Headroom: a guy with a weird forehead who shows up in media sometimes, like a California Raisin.\nExplaining Mac Tonight to a 22 year old.\nThe worst car you could have possibly imagined.\nDelightful clean all-ages nonsense.\nDemonstrating your allegiance to 90s-era edgelordism.\nCresting the event horizon of random bullshit.\nThe VR apparatus hanging off of your wasted body.\nAdding more vanilla than the recipe calls for.\nPutting a hapenny on the spice vendor's tongue and reaching into his trench coat to pull out a bag of cumin.\nPoking bytes into memory to mod Cyberpunk 2077.\nWhether Pico-8 is more or less racist than Dickens Fair.\nThe space battle that took place over Nuremberg in 1561.\nUFOs vs. UAPs.\nTie-Fighters and Star Destroyers over Nuremberg.\nThe All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office: if you got an anomaly, yo, they'll resolve it.\nAsking the Pentagon for money for a cab fare to go investigate unexplained aerial phenomena.\nA mass hysteria of the collective unconscious.\nMarrying your cousin and going into space.\nAnakin 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.\nThe fan theory where Jar-Jar is the Sith Lord.\nThe origin of angels as a terror.\nPre-hurricane ice crystal patterns.\nMaking biblically accurate angels out of everything.\nGenerational memory from back when we had wings.\nFish wings.\nBeing drunk all the time because you don't trust the water.\nAspartame's bitter aftertaste, and also fuck Stevia.\nCoke Grownups.\nPepsi Peeps.\nEating 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.\nFood that exists to overwhelm your senses and your ability to make decisions.\nThe two genders of time.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2023-04-17T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/f326396f-7fb5-4a61-b39e-69a0b0ef6e82.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":60669194,"duration_in_seconds":3773}]},{"id":"9a6f9ecf-1e61-4e88-b23f-9a6cc06ba374","title":"181. My Own Personal Kennedy Assassination","url":"https://topiclords.com/my-own-personal-kennedy-assassination","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nAvery\nTyriq\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nAdam, Father of all humankind, was maybe a giant\nHeathcliff is still going and it's weird\nI've heard a million novelty metal covers but still nobody's done Truly Scrumptious / Doll on a Music Box from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang\n\"The Phone Call\" by James Tate\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nWithholding all your best URLs until the end of the episode.\nUsing lowercase Ls in place of Is and seeing if anybody notices.\nLeaving capitalizations to the whims of chaos. (Your fingers.)\nTeachers explaining that if you can't write in cursive by junior high your teachers will throw things at you and call you stupid.\nAdam and Eve growing to 18 feet tall.\nPre-flood humans and their towering heights/lifespans/IQs.\nHow to make your wisdom teeth fit again.\nConspiracy theories that have no bearing on anything.\nFighting wars over the estimated radius of the earth.\nThe Nephilim.\nYHWH fanfiction.\nHow many Jesuses are alive today.\nThe friend you have with superhuman charisma and whether they ended up starting a cult.\nGetcherself a nice cult, settle down, have a thousand babies.\nThe guy who was both a dwarf and a giant during his lifetime.\nEvery tall person having been short at one point.\nChain-smoking tweens drinking martinis and yelling at their secretaries.\nA Topic Lords ouroboros.\nHypothesizing why the elderly people Heathcliff lives with have a child.\nHaving a child for some reason.\nA humanoid robot with the word \"meat\" printed on its chest.\nThe kind of people who read comics every day.\nZippy the Pinhead.\nA weird underground subculture comic that somehow made it into newspaper syndication.\nMustache Mondays vs. Mustache Lasagna.\nA milk mustache but for lasagna.\nA cartoon anvil that has its weight imprinted on it.\nTwo side characters explaining the situation to each other.\nOne of the birds says to the other, \"Christ, what an asshole.\"\nHistorians a thousand years from now deciding whether Heathcliff should be included in the Bible.\nAfter recorded media stops being a thing, episodes of The Simpsons being passed down as oral history.\nRhapsodes.\nContests for the best rhapsode.\nHector of the Shining Helmet vs. Hector the Booty Inspector.\nFillet episodes in the Odyssey and the Iliad.\nThe Flaming Lips album that comes on four CDs that your supposed to play simultaneously, but nobody's ever bothered.\nHow they handle hidden tracks on Spotify.\nHow to deal with skits when you're ripping rap albums to mp3.\nThe Meat Puppets playing a set in the middle of Nirvana'a MTV Unplugged set.\nWriting 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.\nWorking at the Brill Building.\nTin Pan Alley.\nNearly jumping out of your pants.\nTaking a high-paying job as a murder victim.\nThe one where people wear horse skulls.\nThe Scrambler, from issue #12 where the panels were all out of order.\nWorking at the oil refinery until a giant spider comes and steals the Light of the Silmarils.\nWhether there's a werewolf in the Silmarillion.\nBiblical Exigesis.\nGetting email saying that your art is improving someone's life.\nA phone that can receive text messages but you have to pay extra to know who they're from.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2023-04-10T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/9a6f9ecf-1e61-4e88-b23f-9a6cc06ba374.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":61694659,"duration_in_seconds":3840}]},{"id":"40800d8e-d393-40f0-a757-cd167bd79899","title":"180. We Are All Stardust Poop","url":"https://topiclords.com/we-are-all-stardust-poop","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nIchiro\nAdam\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nI 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)\nI created a Totally Human Rapper that can read up on a game and cut a rap video.\nFrog Fractions is banned from AGDQ\n\"Frog Fractions\" by Totally Human Rapper\nTiny Mass Games small games cycle.\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nOne of the episodes with a cold open.\nLive from New York, it's.\nUsing ocean water as a mixer.\nBeing of poop and returning to poop.\nUsing the Boston river as a mixer.\nLearning everything you know about love from Robotech.\nLosing your fiancee and marrying an alien instead.\nPaying $6/hr to play a MUD.\nCorresponding with your MUD lover via dead tree letters.\nPlaying a MUD and cheating on one avatar with another avatar and eventually realizing that they are played by the same person.\nSleep is Death.\nThe cool part of the Metaverse circa 2005.\nLearning what human relationships look like by watching Saturday morning cartoons.\nSarah and Duck.\nPocoyo.\nBusting ghosts. (A very important time in a boy's life.)\nRetired Men's Nude Beach Volleyball League.\nThe center of your Venn diagram as a creator.\nIchiro Paydirt.\nIf Tank Girl were a streamer.\nEndless Seinfeld pulling a Microsoft Tay.\nThe year of the deluge of AI generated crap.\nMaking a BBS door game about traveling into space.\nZooming out of yourself and looking at it with ghost eyes.\nA game that appears to be family-friendly but is actually porn-adjacent.\nThe Timic skip.\nA very respectful way to play Frog Fractions.\nThe two concessions Jim made to game design in the Frog Fractions remaster.\nCatering to the you demographic.\nBlanking on Tim Ambrogi's name.\nNoted base jumping game \"ahh\"\nAn underlying engine that just won't swear.\nSaying something interesting enough to be debated by a bunch of people.\nStemming the tide of mediocrity across streaming platforms.\nThe value of making dinner for two people vs. making art for millions of people.\nHaving a thought in your head and wanting people to hear it.\nGluing all the ports shut.\nGames that gradually destroy themselves.\nFollow the Frog, an arcade action adventure.\nWhere Totally Human Rapper gets his ideas.\nHow to jailbreak ChatGPT.\nA deck building auto battler without the deck.\nA well-scoped game design.\nNot really having anything to say but loving to wrestle with language.\nAn AI generated game about AI generated games.\nPolishing a prototype enough to put it in front of a mass audience.\nRating AI-generated food.\nSynergies and combinatorics.\nThe development process for each Frog Fractions game.\nAnswering to ask things.\n\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2023-04-03T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/40800d8e-d393-40f0-a757-cd167bd79899.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":57829074,"duration_in_seconds":3601}]},{"id":"1d4dfbe3-ae53-45f6-9db0-93e1da605b5d","title":"179. Get Bad","url":"https://topiclords.com/get-bad","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nAlex\nShannon\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nReading music badly\nMinigame: guess the animal from bad old-timey descriptions\nHow to pronounce \"MacPaint\"\nhttps://www.tumblr.com/destinationtoast/708530541060816896\nAirport teleportation\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nGames that you should not play if you get addicted to games.\nRoguelikes that take a reasonable amount of time to play if you are bad at them.\nWe're Not That Bad!™\nThe Sunnyvale Singers.\nProducing music with a piano.\nTwo guards, one who can't read a book and the other one who can read a book aloud but doesn't know the language.\nButtons corresponding to the doots.\nGiven a starting note, figuring out what the next note is supposed to be.\nNot being able to sight sing but faking it by looking at the vertical distance between notes.\nMusic direction reading \"lower than you think\" (but in Italian)\nKnowing the chord progressions to 10,000 pop songs.\nWays to make music.\nMoving between shapes even without hearing them.\nPlaying accompaniment to silent films.\nImprovising music differently each time.\nPliny the Elder describing the camel leopard.\nAn animal with the neck of a horse but the head of a camel.\nA bigness answering thereto.\nEnjoying the alligator too much.\nA curse on four legs, equally pernicious on land and river.\nInflating the chameleon.\nSpontaneous generation.\nHorned ghosts catapulting themselves around.\nHunting an elephant by tricking it into leaning on a tree that won't support it.\nWhether elephants have knees.\nVultures gestating for three years and giving live birth.\nVultures and condors reproducing without mating.\nYour good friend Ms. Paint.\nNaming your dog a Japanese-sounding name with no regard to Japanese phonotactics and then arguing with people who try to correct you.\nBaking a cake that is 80% vanilla extract.\nA poem in the options of a Tumblr poll.\nStarting from a point of trust but slowly starting to doubt yourself.\nOrpheus and Eurydice.\nA poignant way of putting the reader in the character's frame of mind.\nThe value of Oregon Trail.\nIterating the Orpheus and Eurydice prisoner's dilemma, where whether looking back is the right move is different every time.\nChoosing 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.\nExtremely short form interactive fiction.\nMaking an important decision and never finding out if it was the right decision.\nPerforming Sicilian Reasoning to finesse the outcome of this online cake ingredient poll.\nMaking a perfect stairway in an online poll.\nMaking a phone app to help people choose the best option in the cake ingredient poll.\nInstantly teleporting from your seat on the flight to the entrance to your destination airport.\nTeleporting from the TSA interrogation room to the entrance of the airport.\nTeleportation gravity wells.\nEstablishing an international airport out of your home.\nHoping the cops never figure out that you can only teleport to the entrance of an airport.\nStuperpowers \nGerrymandering your teleport destinations.\nAn international airport that is 100 miles long and 1 centimeter wide.\nAsking a friend to convince you that a certain building is an international airport.\nDrinking a glass of water while standing on your head to convince yourself of what an airport is.\nHiccups Gone Install.\nYou Only Get Screamered Once.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2023-03-27T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/1d4dfbe3-ae53-45f6-9db0-93e1da605b5d.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":60677754,"duration_in_seconds":3782}]},{"id":"31d8c4cd-287d-4951-9679-7c8ad40138b0","title":"178. The Lathe Of Kojima","url":"https://topiclords.com/the-lathe-of-kojima","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nCisHetKeyfaber\nPhone\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nCalculus ruined incremental games for me\nSFF PCs are ridiculous and hilarious\nWhat's the deal with HDR?\nOde to Ice Cream by Vada Sultenfuss (from the movie My Girl)\nMetal Gear Solid 2 is the most important game of 2023\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nAppropriating wrestling culture.\nIdle games vs. incremental games.\nTrimps.\nPhysics and calculus educators each pretending the other field doesn't exist.\nJerk as a unit of measurement.\nRuining a child's mathematical career by teaching them linear algebra.\nFloating point precision.\nOptimizing the area under the curve.\nWhat's the jerk of my progress?\nPosition, speed, acceleration, jerk, jounce, hyperjerk, metajounce, binge warp, migrational spank, barflurch, dark jaunt, catastrophic snap, whipfuck, and Newton's Torment.\nA real aerodynamic phenomenon.\nRuining the bench racers.\nThe kind of people who form an online community around a game.\nThe NGU IDLE speedrunning community.\nSlaying the starting area killing slimes for 90 hours.\nHow big 26.8 liters is.\nRehoming your PC.\nHow many shoeboxes your PC case is equivalent to.\nA graphics card that is perpendicular to the motherboard.\nHow many parakeets could fit in your PC case using modern parakeet packing algorithms.\nMaking a novelty enormous soda can to use as a fake scale comparison in photos.\nBending your hand at a weird angle.\nJEBKAC.\nThe jerk of your PC case.\nTurning the gamma up in order to see a video game.\nSquashed gamuts.\nAdding more bits to describe the color.\nHDMI stratification.\nThe colors that future mankind will invent.\nBeing unable to use certain hex color triplets because the Pantone license expired.\nWhen ice cream tastes good.\nPoems written by works in progress.\nB.R.R. (Before Rocky Road)\nNot having seen My Girl but having seen the cover at Blockbuster.\nGrowing up in a mortuary.\nBragging that you know how to play the theme to Jaws on the piano.\nNick at Nite.\nPlaying with Legos with I Love Lucy in the background.\nTimeshared cable channels.\nNickelodeon's audience being kids and Nick at Nite's audience being the elderly so the channel's average audience is middle-aged.\nThe most important game of 2023.\nThe core switcheroo.\nPsycho Mantis reading your memory card.\nPlaying a really whiny guy who just sucks.\nWhether they've invented pausing cutscenes yet.\nPausing a 40 minute cutscene to go make pizza rolls.\nAI heel turns.\nMetal Gear Solid 2 beating out Vampire Survivors for most important game of 2022.\nWhy Hideo Kojima's dialog sounds like an American 90s movie.\nPolitical theory outsider art.\nThe anti-Noby Noby Boy.\nA discord channel brimming with Lords.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2023-03-20T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/31d8c4cd-287d-4951-9679-7c8ad40138b0.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":63767259,"duration_in_seconds":3975}]},{"id":"798a25c3-7d5d-4c06-8e5d-69a16b3f3b24","title":"177. An Episode Your Landlord Should Not Listen To","url":"https://topiclords.com/an-episode-your-landlord-should-not-listen-to","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nAlicia\nRyan\n\n\nJust type his name into google.\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nSeattle's reaction to snow vs the Bay Area's reaction to rain: who is more dramatic?\nWould you rather fart bones once a month or have Goldeneye \"big head mode\" on in real life for a year?\nMoral philosophy lessons from the California DMV\nNancy \n\n\nhttps://www.nybooks.com/articles/1966/08/18/nancy/\n\nCommon everyday items that make you mentally \"time travel\"\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nStructurally reinforcing the scrotum.\nPlugging mundane chores around the house.\nWhy do you live here, Seattle?\nThe lamentation of a failed joke being funnier than the joke itself would've been.\nTurning the tire towards the curb when parking on a hill.\nDriving in inclement weather.\nMilking oats.\nWhat it means for society when you make oat milk at home.\nThe rain we occasionally get except way more.\nBettie White-out.\nWhen an imaginary kid uses his last words to put you on blast.\nThe advantages and disadvantages of big head mode.\nHow to get on the bus with big head mode on.\nWhose bones you're farting right now.\nBig Head Mode Confirmed in GoldenEye 007.\nThe yoga pose that is most optimal for shitting bones.\nGetting your GoldenEye big head stuck in the automatic doors at TJ Maxx.\nWhale bones on your mattress.\nWhich bones you can do without.\nBone pellets.\nUsing your broken tooth as a fidget toy.\nAn absolutely staggering amount of dental work.\nA perfectly lovely root canal.\nUsing your bone-lasered rib as a fidget toy.\nExtra ribs just loose in your torso somewhere.\nRibs of betrayal stabbing you in your soft pink innards.\nMcRib, more like MacBethRib.\nThe DMV letting you know that your custom license plate is \"in the mail, you fucking pervert.\"\nA grizzled PI paid to determine whether Dr. Puff is a real doctor.\nDark, but fair.\nThe moral philosophy of the DMV.\nThe 4chan veteran the DMV hires to detect profanity in custom license plate applications.\nThree letters that mean a car thing.\nYou just got passed by a bad driver.\nNancyverse lore.\nThe one place in the world where the cost of living is higher than San Francisco.\nSlant rhymes that slant so much they fall over.\nWriting a Nancy fan poem just so you can slip increasingly awful rhymes into it.\nMaking your poem worse and worse as it goes on because what are the readers going to do, stop reading? Nobody has Netflix in 1966.\nUsing hand-crank egg-beaters when it's not the Prohibition.\nEverybody at the office party with those paper guillotines, going to town on reams of paper.\nJim's hotel waffle story again.\nPaying $8 for this novelty bust of Duke Nukem because you liked Duke Nukem 1.\nHigh school kids dressing just like you dressed when you were in high school 20 years ago.\nJNCO jeans with a dragon on the back pocket.\nThat Nostalgia Cycle: it's gonna come around.\nUsing two different keys to unlock and start your car.\nThe best car for the kidnapper on the go.\nThe first car to use the same key for the door, trunk and ignition.\nLocking the exhaust pipe so nobody can put a banana in there.\nSeparate keys for locking your sun and moonroof.\n","content_html":"

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

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\n\n","summary":"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.\"","date_published":"2023-03-13T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/798a25c3-7d5d-4c06-8e5d-69a16b3f3b24.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":61303783,"duration_in_seconds":3815}]},{"id":"127a7a67-7bc2-4d2f-aace-fe8c21d779c4","title":"176. A Diglett Slightly Tan","url":"https://topiclords.com/a-diglett-slightly-tan","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nHallie\nJohn B\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nTabletop RPGs as educational platform\nFlicky-likes\nEtch A Sketch Animator 2000\nPoem: \"My Brother's Head Should Be Replaced\" by Jack Prelutsky\n\n\nhttps://youtu.be/TYXJyxT7QN4?t=1330\n\nBuff Diglett\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\n471 very positive reviews.\nPizza Tower, the Tower of Pizza.\nSnoopy's Silly Sports Spectacular.\nTaking a drink of your Safeway brand Diet Cola Caffeine Free Soda.\nBouncy the Rat and her friends in the Wild Wood.\nProviding a platform for people to talk to each other and learn about boundaries.\nWhy to add numbers together.\nTeaching children math when everyone has a pocket calculator in their pocket at all times.\nA peek under the curtain.\nThe edutainment classics.\nThree D&D combat system as a way to get comfortable doing arithmetic in your head.\nProviding an experiential experience.\nA tiny video game console that looks like a Sega Genesis.\nTrying to sex Flicky.\nMaximizing your combo chain in Flicky.\nSonic 3D Blast as a sequel to Flicky.\nSuper Rub-a-Dub.\nFlicking the controller to make the rubber ducky jump.\nA dude collecting dudes who follow you in a trail.\nPix the Cat.\nAll the Bubble Bobble sequels, none of which use the bubbling mechanic.\nRainbow Islands: Towering Adventure.\nWhip Whip: the word \"whip\" twice.\nThe Etch-a-Sketch: a terrible toy for terrible people.\nMaking animations that are perhaps five or six frames long.\nControlling with the knobbies.\nThe Magic Touch Pad.\nA button that says \"recall\" on it.\nPutt-Nuts Go to the Moon, featuring Alan Shepard.\nPlugging your Etch-a-Sketch into your VCR to save your art.\nThe powder leaking out of the Etch-a-Sketch because you used it too much.\nIt's like painting but on a TV but worse than regular painting.\n2000 gray squares.\nThe poet laureate of children.\nThe golden age of the CD-ROM.\nWanting a tomato to be bigger.\nThe Tomato Centipede.\nPoems about homework.\nA mole-type Pokemon.\nEverybody independently coming to the conclusion that Diglett has a muscular human body down there.\nBuff kittens.\nWhether Dugtrio has one muscular human body down there, or three.\nThree human bodybuilders cosplaying as Dugtrio.\nTrying to search for \"naked diglett\" but Google autocorrects you to \"naked woman\"\nSpace Dentist!!\nThat one dentist out of ten who recommends that you go to space.\nOrganizing your video game garbo.\n","content_html":"

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

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Lords:

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2023-03-06T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/127a7a67-7bc2-4d2f-aace-fe8c21d779c4.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":52643607,"duration_in_seconds":3268}]},{"id":"391dbde0-f68c-4730-9934-a50429cfa65b","title":"175. This Movie Has Marky Mark In It","url":"https://topiclords.com/this-movie-has-marky-mark-in-it","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nErica\nJesse\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nThere's a Spanish word which officially cannot be written because the grammar and orthography conflict about how it should spelled/pronounced.\nMy personal relationship with Disco Elysium\nClue II: Murder in Disguise\nAll of the Words on a Bottle of Rolling Rock Beer in a Different Order\n\n\nhttps://expatriotact.blogspot.com/2006/10/poets-corner-demetri-martin.html\n\nThis year's beast of a Mystery Hunt\nShareable alarms\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nTexans with nothing to plug.\nThe Army Corp of Engineers coming to your town and kicking ass.\nNo, and no.\nFuck em, just get a laptop.\nFact checking the dinner table conversation with your laptop.\nAn interaction deemed normal.\nThe Spanish double-L sound.\nFinally finding a way that spelling in English is more sensible than spelling in Spanish.\nDesperately avoiding hearing French spoken incorrectly.\nA place that is less like the rest of Canada than any part of the United States is like the United States.\nA good relaxing podcast that leads to substantial academic progress.\nStormdancer Zero.\nSecret of Monkey Island with additional D&D stat checks and communism.\nContinents not connected to tectonic plates but instead freely floating in the mist.\nWhen your stats talk to you.\nEquipping a philosophical idea in your thought cabinet.\nWhere the resource extraction happens.\nAn alcoholic amnesiac video game protagonist.\nFinding the richest person in town to explain to you how the world works.\nRecreating all your characters from the ground up to be optimized for the game engine.\nCheating past the final boss in Baldur's Gate because the alternative is starting from scratch with a viable build.\nRevising your thinking about the Gros Michel banana.\nCampy goofballs doing campy goofball shit except it's not Tim Curry this time.\nThe guy whose name Jim can't remember who played Chuck on Better Call Saul.\nThe VCR board game phenomenon.\nScenes sort of adding up into a narrative if you squint.\nSeeing John Lithgow when nobody else sees him.\nHow to get Michael Land to talk to you at CES.\nOut-of-work FMV actors.\nSpecializing in loving horrible FMV games.\nThe one place that hasn't been corrupted by capitalism.\nDVD games vs. VCR games.\nA DVD arriving too late to save a drowning VCR game industry.\nThe pride of seeing your topic grow up and take its place in the world.\nPanache, aplomb, and savoir-faire.\nRolling, glass tanks of beverages that rocked that lined mountain.\nWomen as the exception to implied maleness.\nA folk pop album featuring a disgraced CDC employee.\n50 Cent rapping about going to prison for insider trading.\nThe Topic Lords Guarantee.\nA series of interconnected puzzles that you solve as a team.\nFlavor text explaining why it's fun to solve this math problem.\nA beautiful puzzle hunt that is way too long.\nAssuming that being good at solving puzzles is the same skill as constructing puzzles.\nWaiting all year for a chocolate box that ends up being a marathon through Death Valley.\nHow to test a 100-person puzzle hunt.\nAdmonishing astronomers to \"get good.\"\nPuzzles that are like tiny little gifts that open up and dance in front of you.\nA chip that controls a single light point on the wall.\nDoing something for free vs. doing it for a pittance.\nLosing your wedding ring but also your wedding ring screams once a day.\nYour screaming wedding ring following you from house to house.\nOne o’clock: Time for Pants.\nRemembering that it's time for pants no matter what time zone you're in.\nThe Playstation Vita's pants alarm.\nPlaying a competitive minigame to see who can wake up fastest.\nEarning achievements for getting out of bed.\nThe app that is the opposite of sex.\n","content_html":"

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

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2023-02-27T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/391dbde0-f68c-4730-9934-a50429cfa65b.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":71574642,"duration_in_seconds":4456}]},{"id":"324adc98-4c2d-44b9-86c8-3b347d6c478b","title":"174. Occam's Raccoon","url":"https://topiclords.com/occams-raccoon","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nChris\nAlexander\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nWords with similar sounds/meanings but no relation to each other at all.\nVirtual marble runs with guns\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/@mikan2d\n\nThe \"broom method\" of dealing with a hydrogen leak\n\n\nhttps://nextworldover.tumblr.com/post/706885583716466688\n\nPoem by Dr. Seuss: “I have heard there are troubles of more than one kind. Some come from ahead and some come from behind. But I've bought a big bat. I'm all ready you see. Now my troubles are going to have troubles with me!”\nLoveland Frog (Ohio frog bigfoot?)\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loveland_frog\n\nGhosts are real: what are the economic consequences?\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nSpace Warlord Organ Trading Simulator.\nLords starting with Xa.\nMoving boxes that have handles built in.\nAll else being equal, a raccoon did it.\nProto-Indo-European.\nPutting the S in Island.\nThe era of Topic Lords when we only discussed Shakespeare.\nSome of the things you expect are wrong, and vice-versa.\nBacteria finding proteins hanging around and deciding \"this is part of me now.\"\nBranching path structures shooting red and blue bullets at each other.\nEscalating Revenge Core Destruction.\nIf pachinko were extremely elaborate and violent.\nOil timers.\nTurning over the rectangle on your desk and forcing the red and green combatants to fight for you once more.\nApollonian circles.\nThe ancestry of Firefox.\nWeb browsers surrounded by water on all sides.\nUsing the entirety of your computing resources to do basically nothing.\nA phone app that makes your phone display Flying Toasters but only while it's in your pocket.\nComputers that are really good at getting hot and not very good at not getting hot.\nAn air conditioner but backwards.\nMarbula One.\nMarble races except every marble is armed with an assault rifle.\nThe year you finally get into Blaseball.\nHow Blaseball works.\nHow to detect a fire that you can't see.\nGlass Onion: debunked.\nA hell planet completely saturated with a volatile gas populated by lava monsters.\nWhy leave the house? Just send a probe and infer the existence of your neighbors.\nWhat \"from\" means in \"escape from the tank\"\nThe jingle the hydrogen truck plays as it trundles by.\nThe Snack of the Stars.\nSafety testing various propellants.\nWhat your voice sounds like without any transmission medium.\nThe Gregorian Underwater Choir.\nNaming Helium after the sun because that's where we discovered it.\nThe Lorax threatening you with a bat.\nMy huge sawed off flashlight.\nStay back, officer, it's just just a flashlight.\nReplacing your self-defense rabies bat every time it dies.\nBrushing your self-defense bat's teeth.\nDr. Zeus's book of adult poetry.\nIs the Death Star brutalist? Can brutalist architecture be round?\nBee Barns.\nA four foot tall frog guy who lives in the woods.\nA frog guy. A guy who is a frog.\nA frog guy caught between two worlds of posture.\nA Wikipedia user whose thing is to make photo illustrations of cryptids and extinct animals.\nWhat happens to Pikachu's soul when it dies.\nGhosts: what do they do all day?\nGhosts exist, and they can talk, and they know all about the afterlife, but also they're huge liars.\n","content_html":"

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

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Lords:

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\n\n","summary":"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?","date_published":"2023-02-20T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/324adc98-4c2d-44b9-86c8-3b347d6c478b.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":63371884,"duration_in_seconds":3942}]},{"id":"6f482bfc-4c44-4232-abf1-253291584b2d","title":"173. How Much Anxiety Does Your Car Have?","url":"https://topiclords.com/how-much-anxiety-does-your-car-have","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nMaxx\nTyriq\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nNancy and having a continuous tone for a hundred years\nRecommendations\nAdding trinkets to other people's time capsules\nA Psalm for the Wild-Built https://nextworldover.tumblr.com/post/705362430786748416/guooey-a-psalm-for-the-wild-built-becky\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nLooking down a lot while you're on a walk.\nWhat is this Meta for?\nDiscovering that there is a cliff and having a brief high-octane experience.\nSitting on the bus and saying the lore of the land.\nA lego minifig that you found on the street.\nFritzi Ritz.\nMaking millennial shitposts in the 1930s.\nBeing wholesomely surreal for a hundred years.\nAccruing canon.\nSimple archetypes that have been honed to a point.\nWriting a new punchline to the same joke every day for a hundred years.\nComics going on two silent retreats, one for the setup (at a monastery) and the other for the punchline (at an empty lot)\nCoronation St.\nThe kids we met in 1964.\nWhether South Park is still a thing.\nFinding success at a young age and staying the same person for the rest of your life.\nRetirement or Blade Runner Retirement?\nUser Friendly.\nWeb comics that started when the hardest part about making a web comic is uploading an image to the internet.\nWeb comics going from having bad art to having good art.\nTelling someone to like art other than the art they like.\nPolitely accepting advice and then ignoring it.\nSpeaking into the void to ask for music recommendations.\nIf you don't see it, that's what you paid for.\nDelivering Nancy comics daily for over 100 years.\nWorking on the same game for 10 years even though you like different kinds of games now.\nWorking within the framework of past you.\nEvery page of a webcomic as a collage of all the previous pages.\nPokey the Penguin: updated sporadically.\nEnjoying a webcomic a lot.\nWeird semi-robot creatures.\nHaribogosean.\nRecommending someone a nice leaf.\nWanting to accept recommendations but hating them viscerally.\nTricking music recommendations into someone's life like a fairy tale gremlin.\nIntroducing hot jams to the people of the future.\nBurying a can of cheese for a hundred years.\nExtra old tardigrades.\nA sealed piggy bank where if you want to get the tardigrades out you have to smash it on the floor.\nOpening up your terrarium every so often to swap out the moss.\nThis wholesome man with this forty year old bottle ecosystem.\nThe most advanced level of mummification, in which you become a mannequin.\nDumping a pile of garbage in the forest and leaving it to your children in your will.\nThe Artemis Program.\nReturning to the moon to get the geocache back.\nInserting a completely fictional topic into the historical record.\nWax House, Baby!\nA fake fact about the world that has been purged from Wikipedia but is still everywhere that scraped the data from Wikipedia.\nChosts from chostville.\nThe age of monetizing all your hobbies.\nTrying to make a human connection via your art.\nDigging up, modifying, and reburying other people's time capsules even though nobody's paying you to do it.\nKeeping your citizens happy and healthy.\nAn intentionally altered view of how automated clothing production is.\nGoing on a journey together with a robot.\nCozy books entirely lacking in high-octane moments.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2023-02-13T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/6f482bfc-4c44-4232-abf1-253291584b2d.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":61356315,"duration_in_seconds":3821}]},{"id":"488b719e-bff8-4c3f-9b42-6d71811fb6de","title":"172. Don't Apply Any Torque To This Bag","url":"https://topiclords.com/dont-apply-any-torque-to-this-bag","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nAlex\nShannon\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nIncomprehensible PSAs (Remember to slip, slop, slap, seek and slide)\nGames which use player ignorance as a major mechanic (Outer Wilds, Tunic)\nMan out of Space Easiest\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOOSE\n\nStepped on a plum (overripe plum) (barefoot)\n\n\nhttps://utopians.tumblr.com/post/659350035592609792/stepped-on-a-plum-overripe-plum-barefoot-it\n\nAustralia trends (pre vs post pay, pay at pump vs parking meter vs toll camera)\nBats! Micro & Mega\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nThe Broken Earth Trilogy.\nThe Lightly-Massaged Earth Trilogy.\nTurkish Delight vs. a Turkish Delight candy bar.\nA candy that gives you the feeling of nostalgia but no corresponding memories.\nRemembering to slip, slop, slap, seek and slide in the kitchen.\nThe three onomatopoeias for applying sunscreen.\nLamenting to your partner that you forgot to slip.\nPosters that just say \"don't forget to slip slop slap seek and slide\" with no further context.\nA cool grandpa following safety instructions.\nActionable snake advice.\nVarious ways to distinguish goats and sheep.\nA music video that is also a drunk driving PSA.\nHow to use search atoms.\nIf you're on the train, that's a shame.\nRhyming platitudes about how social media is bad for your mental health and society as a whole.\nA music video trying to get across a safe sex message to the kids.\nDo They Even Know it's Christmas?\nSomething jarring to hear on the radio.\nA desert wasteland full of crying children.\nTunic.\nReading the manual of the video game you just bought on the drive home.\nEvoking the idea of playing old video games.\nJumping puzzles that cost you twenty minutes of your life if you fall.\nA Jules Verne conception of the solar system where other planets are a five minute rocket trip away.\nLearning a code and keeping it in your brain.\nThe Hourglass Twins.\nNot being sure what to do so you go look at the moon.\nThe kind of game where most of the fun is figuring out how to play the game.\nAAA games trying to make artistic statements about AAA games.\nHatoful Boyfriend as a better Doki Doki Literature Club.\nA horror story about pigeons.\nAn ablative heat shield on your butt.\nManually aiming the rocket without being to look outside of your polyester bag.\nThe legality of dropping a moose out of a spaceship.\nA safety mechanism that is not appealing to aerospace professionals.\nLanding an airplane on Mars and then remote-piloting Mars rovers from inside the airplane.\nThe world's largest saltwater crocodile.\nPulling the quick release flap on the crocodile's mouth.\nDon't Go To Space.\nIt's the 60s, and it's a bag.\nA snorkel for when you land in the ocean and can't get out of your foam entombment capsule.\nBringing along a shotgun in case your escape pod lands in Siberia.\nClown First Lover Second.\nA single paragraph with 19 parenthetical phrases and no other punctuation.\nDeciding to hem your sweatpants.\nPlum Nightmare.\nFinding two extra poems inside an existing poem.\nWhat to expect when you read a poem.\nWhether it's illegal to drive barefoot.\nBare feet and there's textures down here.\nThe utter lack of technology at the pump.\nNo-flush toilets.\nWhat kinds of towels they use to clean up messes in Australia.\nPublic restrooms that automatically eject you if you're not done in ten minutes.\nHoneycomb candy with the same texture as instant coffee.\nLook to your left; look to your right; one of you is a bat.\nVisiting baby bats in the bat hospital.\nBats as pollinators.\nGiving stuffed animals to baby bats.\nThe pollinating and bug-eating ecosystem.\nA bat the size of a bat.\nSpectacled flying foxes.\nBats reverse-nicheing back into mice.\nBats becoming nocturnal to avoid their creditors.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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!","date_published":"2023-02-06T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/488b719e-bff8-4c3f-9b42-6d71811fb6de.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":73615569,"duration_in_seconds":4600}]},{"id":"666f81f7-c38b-4b38-a5f5-51b1b87feb7c","title":"171. Reasons To Not Throw Your Phone In The Ocean","url":"https://topiclords.com/reasons-to-not-throw-your-phone-in-the-ocean","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nCisHetKayFaber\nKev\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nFood from dreams and nightmares\n\n\nhttps://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/adeonibada/man-dream-kings-hand-snack\n\nHan Unification happened in Unicode and every time they add more emojis to the Unicode spec it literally hurts\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification\n\nThe Super Mega Crossword\n\n\nhttps://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/18/crosswords/super-mega-2022-clues.html\n\nDown by the Bay by Raffi\n\n\nhttps://www.vulture.com/2015/12/finding-raffi-c-v-r.html\n\nVideo game franchises known for secrets\nFive-tined forks\n\n\n[NMS] https://www.google.com/search?q=five-tined+forks&tbm=isch\n\nHorrible exceptions to rule34\n\n\nAfter recording, CisHetKayFaber managed to find their holy grail videos depicting the \"exception.\" Jim's example is much better, but Kev was also correct in having faith in human ingenuity.\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nFirst time long time.\nA very light hobby that is kind of shallow.\nGetting really into Rubik's Cube because you already love flash cards.\nBeing reminded of something right before you were about to forget it.\nHow best to memorize pizza coding and microphone specs.\nIgnoring the room and being annoyed when people talk to you.\nWork life balance being too tilted toward life\nThe King's Hand.\nOrange Creamsicle Mashed Potatoes.\nM&M fingernails.\nA tweet and what happened with it.\nBiting something with the wrong texture and having to stare at a wall for ten minutes.\nUTF-8 character encoding.\nAdding support for Asian languages to Unicode without consulting any native speakers for advice.\nThe international new global meme language of the internet.\nPuzzleMania.\nAll the downsides of doing a crossword on paper.\nWords that just happen a lot when you're constructing a crossword puzzle.\nThe Elden Ring of crossword puzzles.\nDoing 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.\nReading crossword puzzle clues to your wife as she falls asleep.\nA time traveler from the future who invented time travel to bring us excellent children's songs.\nA national treasure (Canada)\nA fly wearing a tie, a bear combing its hair, a llama eating pajamas, &c.\nA song intended to be performed improvisationally.\nExtending the finger family song by adding more fingers.\nMessing the cadence up with your fake mother voice.\nWhere the watermelons roam.\nA mom saying nonsense that really makes you think.\nAvoiding your mom because she keeps saying weird shit about a goose kissing a moose.\nUnlocking a branch of a storyline by fulfilling a set of conditions.\nSubverting overused fantasy tropes.\nFinding a cool castle by going down a secret cliffside stairway into a hidden cave.\nSystems that point you everywhere on the map.\nSecrets of all sorts of scopes.\nThe Doom thing where they point out that you didn't find all the secrets.\nFrog Fractions containing Rule 34 of itself.\nReacting to five-tined fork.\nThe fork optimization function that decided that four is the right number of tines.\nUnknowing a conversation.\nA Victorian flex of a fork.\nWhen die-casting was invented.\nA shovel with teeth.\nSeven-tined sporks.\nThe Pornography Lord.\nHuman pairings and human activities that you would expect there to be pornography of.\nLinda Hunt smugly declaring \"ass to ass\"\nAI pornographers buying sex dice on eBay.\nWeird combinations of words you can plug into a search engine.\nPeople don't want everything; people only want some things.\nThe Frog Fractions pornography gap.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2023-01-30T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/666f81f7-c38b-4b38-a5f5-51b1b87feb7c.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":67191773,"duration_in_seconds":4188}]},{"id":"c6cdc2d0-01b3-4c7f-a3ef-e8afb3000e26","title":"170. My Brain Likes The Things I Like","url":"https://topiclords.com/my-brain-likes-the-things-i-like","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nTyriq\n\n\nFourBitFriday in all the places\n\nCort\n\n\nLeftover Pumpkin Pie Curry https://savethefood.com/recipes/leftover-pumpkin-pie-and-turkey-curry/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nFantasy consoles\n\n\nhttps://github.com/paladin-t/fantasy\n\nTyriq's 80s homework\n\n\n80s homework playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3SbI8kec0NtJp8szqsl4Ek0lZHqvHjaX\nTyriq's reaction: https://topiclords.com/articles/80s-homework-reaction\nI meant New Kids on the Block, of course.\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Starr\n\nYou can't slake an earworm with 3/4 of a chorus\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlAeEcVnnvo\nhttps://youtu.be/rI3yD3WAcz4\n\nAesop Rock - Ruby 81\n\n\nhttps://genius.com/Aesop-rock-ruby-81-lyrics\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nThe album you finished.\nA song that is entirely made of uncleared samples.\nTurning leftover pumpkin pie into delicious pumpkin spice curry.\nInteractive Pico-8 holiday cards.\nArtificial constraints pegged at a level of technology somewhere in the 80s.\nWriting specs for Pico-16 so that you don't accidentally make Pico-16 when you're making Pico-8.\nSeeking a box to work within.\nThe most played entry in your Steam library is something your kids left running for weeks.\nA collection of 50 games made for a console that never existed.\nList of Fantasy Consoles.\nThe fantasy console hidden as an Easter egg in the Frog Fractions hat DLC.\nFour joysticks in your garage waiting for an arcade machine to be installed into.\nLanguages that transpile to Lua.\nEmulating the PlayStation 9.\nA fantasy console for making 4D games.\nA popular game engine that starts with the letters UN.\nCivilisation's relationship with art.\nHop's Big Adventure in the Gift Dimension.\nAll the problems with Lua.\nThe Pico-8 show with the Pico-Lords.\nAll the things people were doing in the 80s.\nPlaying an inaudible guitar.\nThe sound of somebody being chased.\nAll the good Meat Loaf albums.\nAn inspiring thing that shows up a lot in your life.\nA hip hop album entirely devoid of metaphor.\nListening to the first fifteen seconds of each song on an album.\nDrums that are emblematic of everything you hate about the 80s.\nA big decade with a lot of things happening.\nGil Scott-Heron.\nMusic that is distinctly of the 80s vs. music that happened to be released in the 80s.\nThe musical equivalent of oatmeal.\nNot liking the whole chorus, but liking the first chord change in the chorus.\nThe bass part of Like a Prayer.\nYour superpower: knowing what marmite tastes like and knowing your don't like it.\nHyperactive j-pop with way too many chord changes.\nCreating a mashup that is better than the sum of its parts, but only for ten seconds.\nPurging an earworm with another earworm.\nWe Need a Bigger Dumpster, by Cheek Face.\nThe parts of your brain that you're not on speaking terms with.\nA photographic memory for all audio except for words.\nSongs about love or romance or being horny: get that shit out of here.\n\"Baby Got Back,\" a song about Sir Mix A Lot's infant and her extremely loaded diaper.\nWaking the sleeping beagle.\nSome kind of intentional arson.\nPainting an evocative picture of an extremely specific moment in time.\nUncles and aunts and stuff everywhere.\nThank you, Genius!\nBad or text-to-speech bad?\nTrying to fix all instances of a given fact that is wrong everywhere on the internet.\nWesley Willis writing the story song \"Oil Express\" because he wanted to write about oil changes.\nLords Rule, Nuff Said.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2023-01-23T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/c6cdc2d0-01b3-4c7f-a3ef-e8afb3000e26.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":66393910,"duration_in_seconds":4132}]},{"id":"0f6097a4-73cf-436c-8e36-30503e78c4dd","title":"169. Topicless","url":"https://topiclords.com/topicless","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nJohn\n\n\nrobohunkx on Twitter, robohunk on most social media platforms\n\nTim\n\n\nJamestown+\nThe Pathless\nhttps://github.com/westquote/squidtasks\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nAmerica's self-denying culture of compartmentalization\nDeus 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.\nNapster pranks and more generally, fun with the early internet's poor security\nThe Last Titan\n\n\nhttps://topiclords.com/articles/the-last-titan\n\nTopic Lords update: A review of the Gros Michel (aka \"Big Mike\") banana\nIf AI can tell better stories than you, is it still worth telling them (and why)?\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nPlanning around time zone differences.\nWhat bots are left after the bot purge.\nText parsers that make it sound like you have silly accents.\nC++ Coroutines for Everyone!\nPlaying the Frog Fractions soundtrack on mandolin at Jim's wedding reception.\nSeeing friends catch up.\nWaiting until the weekend to celebrate your birthday because weekdays are not for fun things.\nTopicless Topic Peasants.\nPlanning to do things all week so you have things to look forward to all week.\nHow to schedule a movie night.\nHow to hang out with your friends on weekends.\nHanging out with your friends once a week because your internet audience demands it.\nSetting traps for yourself so that you involuntarily have fun.\nHow you felt in the Fall of 2014.\nEmbracing making bad things.\nMaking bad art and dropping it in the company Slack.\nApril cameos.\nWhat to do when Jim makes a mistake.\nWatching a 3D film on a 2D viewing apparatus.\nNew super duper secret places to sneak around in.\nLay D Denton.\nLet me tell you about my Napster pranks.\nA very specific example of Napster interactions.\nAuthorless messages.\nRenaming your band's music to have the same name as popular songs so people will download it on Napster.\nA very benign internet security prank.\nTelling 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.\nPhilly Boys.\nTaking bets on whether any given domain name leads to porn.\nWriting 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.\nGetting out of legal jeopardy by constructing a gay porn web site.\nAn old god, his glory lost to memory.\nA computer named Roboticus that you can't bear to decommission.\nLooking on a diorama of dusty objects that represent your lost past.\nBanana history.\nA banana that you've never tasted.\nBuying fruit from the Miami Fruit Organization.\nThe shocking flavor of electrolytes.\nFat Mike vs. Big Mike.\nQuantifying 45 apple varietals without realizing that there is also wide variance within varietals.\nHaving to eat 10,000 bananas before you can safely say you know what they taste like.\nEating a bunch of types of bananas and realizing that they all pretty much taste the same.\nCotton candy flavored grapes.\nStrawberries the size (and flavor) of a human heart.\nGrapples vs. grapples.\nA banana that is certainly a banana that you can eat.\nThe time Deep Blue glitched out and made a random chess move and Garry Kasparov couldn't figure it out and resigned the match.\nTeaching a computer how to get flummoxed.\nThe purpose of making art.\nWhat about Mario coins?\nK-Mart music.\nSmarty Pants, Brain Quest and Booty Blocks.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2023-01-16T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/0f6097a4-73cf-436c-8e36-30503e78c4dd.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":69375230,"duration_in_seconds":4324}]},{"id":"84f716ee-bf63-44b8-8e88-0839d87abb80","title":"168. Take A Gasket, Leave A Gasket","url":"https://topiclords.com/take-a-gasket-leave-a-gasket","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nErica\nJenni\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nStronger with Stogner\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-o0MwD8dyko\n\nWhat is & isn't ahegao, prescriptivistly\nWanna Feel Old? 10 Hilarious Examples Of Anti-Piracy Measures In Video Games\n\n\nhttps://screenrant.com/anti-piracy-video-games-funny/\n\nThe Lanyard by Billy Collins \n\n\nhttps://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50975/the-lanyard\n\nThe \"what the fuck\" genre of narrative & why it frequently has an unsatisfying ending\nEd O'Brien on backing vocals\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWuAn6C8Mfc\nhttps://floodmagazine.com/44288/ed-from-radiohead-sing-his-own-name/\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nFighting for credit.\nThe discord: it's fun in there.\nForgetting an entire lord.\nA lot of work to get twice as many views.\nA convenient thing you can put old food in so it doesn't go bad as quickly.\nGaskets: there's a name for them.\nThe British vs. the American conception of a frown.\nFrowning with your face gaskets.\nDoing a cartwheel to feel happier.\nAlan Snape.\nDoing a racy political ad on top of a 40-foot pumpjack.\nWhat the Texas Railroad Commission does.\nGetting the idea for OPEC from Texas.\nA political ad using the Sugar Hill Gang cover of Apache as a soundtrack.\nThe suburban Texan mom solving the climate crisis single-handedly.\nTwerking at the sunrise.\nField-dressing a moose.\nFantasy-footballing a female running mate for Theodore Roosevelt even though they didn't have women back then.\nGetting so annoyed at an ad that you have to log back into Twitter.\nScrolling social media and getting angry by yourself.\nThe crucial elements that comprise the ahegao face.\nElectronic Girl.\nThe phylogeny of the e-girl.\nIs it Soup?\nLooking at Zelda's face and thinking \"okay, that's soup.\"\nWhether ahegao or Betty Boop are sexy.\nA face that people make to indicate horniness.\nThe Betty Boop ahegao: it's bad, folks.\nWhat is otaku's plan for us?\nProject Lords.\nA web site with JavaScript implementations of video game code wheels of various 90s video games.\nEverybody playing the free version of chess for thousands of years when the paid version is a way better game.\nWhy there is no Casio Loopy emulator.\nFinding a tiny blood reservoir for the smallest blood sacrifices.\nWho wrote the Vagina Monologues?\nMoving as if underwater from typewriter to piano.\nWhat a lanyard is and what it's for.\nHow to repay your mom for all the things that she's given you.\nGod's Eyes.\nReplacing your son's butt-gasket.\nBeing old enough to remember when it was normal for schoolchildren to make their parents an ashtray.\nMaking a gumball dispenser in wood shop and using it to convince your mom to buy you a big bag of gumballs.\n1899.\nA sequence of mysterious things happening.\nA mysterious TV show that ends when you overwater all of your boyfriend's plants.\nThe final episode of Lost, where the giant panda shows up and explains that \"I'm god and you're in my dream!\"\nComedy typing directly into the Topic Bucket.\nWhat makes a good ending to a mystery-focused story.\nMystery as marketing hook.\nHow to end a mystery-focused story in a satisfying way without solving the mystery.\nThe most normal-looking guy in Radiohead.\nThe one guy in Radiohead who doesn't have any fans.\nFrom the Basement in Rainbows.\nA super chill guy keeping time with his leg.\nDoes Ed from Radiohead only sing his own name?\nA Pokemon Named Ed.\nIdiosyncratic ways to describe your favorite band member, that unlock your unique adoration.\nThe only member of the band who smiles.\nAbsorbing it all as the luckiest person alive playing with your pals in a huge venue.\nThe 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.\nThe kind of Topic Lord who listens to the show.\nHaving some delightful chats in Texas.\nPosing on the pumpjack where nobody will ever see you.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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","date_published":"2023-01-09T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/84f716ee-bf63-44b8-8e88-0839d87abb80.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":76754968,"duration_in_seconds":4777}]},{"id":"094b238d-fcca-4b38-80c7-7728873e409d","title":"167. Riker's Doing The Biting","url":"https://topiclords.com/rikers-doing-the-biting","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nDanny\n\n\nhttps://dbsoundworks.bandcamp.com/\n\nAkash\n\n\nhttps://www.akashthakkar.com/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\n100KHz microphones\nThere's an entire town in Alaska that's contained entirely in one building - https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2015/07/us/whittier-alaska-american-story/\nTired: CRT filter in emulated video games. Wired: grainy magazine screenshot filter in emulated video games\nhttp://folklore.usc.edu/childrens-song-hitler-is-a-jerk/\nComing back to games months after starting, forgetting what happened, totally forgetting how to play, and never playing again/starting over\nVampire Survivors genre name\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nSleeping with 20,000 podcasts.\nHyper Light Waiter.\nRift of the Necrodancer.\nPicking up a dog ribcage and the rest of the dog comes with it.\nA cat flowing out of your hands like water.\nWhich organ you smell with.\nDipping your fingies into the chicken vat to refresh the chicken smell.\nSerendipity, providence, kismet, fate: Stormdancing.\nNyquist vs. Dayquist.\nA big talking world snake named Carlosti, just like in the Edda.\nPitching a character's voice down four semitones to indicate that they're the bad guy.\nInventing a sound never heard before.\nDoing a fun click.\nWhether to take Tidal seriously.\nMoving to a town that lives in a shopping mall.\nSnowpiercer but the wheels fell off.\nSigning your kids up for Twitter because they have to learn about death somehow.\nA tiktok sensation dancing with a subway sandwich.\nVisiting the sewage treatment plant next to the Forever 21.\nThe only two Invisible War fans in the world, on the same podcast together.\nCrimothy, Jermdom and Frenchalor.\nThe Archie Effect.\nA video card that's broken in an extremely specific way.\nReading a brochure about Super Metroid over and over.\nA controller made of marzipan.\n2x Sai vs. SuperEagle.\nDLSS but for pixel art.\nStar Wars but every six seconds it's a different director.\nPaying composers to make original music because you enjoy the idea of paying people to do work.\nA poem by Nega-Kanye West.\nThe engine that drives the popularity of the \"Whistle while you work / Hitler is a jerk\" rhyme.\nBratwurst vs. Vienna Sausage.\nWhether Data has functional genitalia.\nThe 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.\nStar Trek Next Generation Triple-X Porn Parody: it's a satire.\nTrying 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.\nSearching the internet and the universe for an answer.\nPressing both the sticks in and the sea monkeys come out.\nWhat's cool about Dark Souls.\nTrying to get your mom to play Skyrim with the Macho Man Randy Savage mod installed.\nVideo games: fuck the whole town!\nGame of the Year in the sense of Time Magazine's Man of the Year.\nRoguelikes: they're like Rogue.\nSingle-stick shooters.\nThe kind of game that a CSI character would play.\nWhat Fortnite was before it was a PubG clone.\nThe extremely bitter blog post about the Edge team giving up and wrapping Chromium.\nWhere to play Frog Fractions 4 and 5.\nHow to feel about numbers.\nThe most expensive Vampire Survivor-likes.\nWhere to find Drop 7 2.\nArcade Paradise.\nBootleg Fractions.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2023-01-02T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/094b238d-fcca-4b38-80c7-7728873e409d.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":62854996,"duration_in_seconds":3913}]},{"id":"685b1b60-aab5-4a6d-b73b-ef28c59401a7","title":"166. There's Only One Best Topic","url":"https://topiclords.com/theres-only-one-best-topic","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nErica\nMaxx\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nFreesound.org and the delight of sharing things without fame\n\n\nhttps://freesound.org/people/Bram/sounds/15543/\nhttps://freesound.org/people/Mrthenoronha/sounds/369065/\nhttps://freesound.org/people/smokenweewALT/\n\nShutting down the FF2 ARG Twitter account\nLeisure in the 70s\nSnow by David Berman\n\n\nhttps://www.poetrynook.com/poem/snow-14\n\nThe some potatoes diet\nPlants that can see sorta? \n\n\nhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8903786/\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nThe Topic Lords discord.\nMeeting friends in the Kingdom of Loathing chat.\nA virtual birthday party crashing app.\nPiranesi.\nA website where people post sound.\nWav laundering.\nPurchasing a lion sound effect from an off-Broadway sound effect shop.\nSending over the can crushing noises that you selected.\nSomeone's friend pretending to be a bird.\nHaving a roommate named Phil all of whose passwords were “Phil”\nAAA games with Freesound user names in the credits.\nRecognizing Brick Drop 5 from Dope Dragon 69's Freesound portfolio.\nOfficer, I was just making a video game!\nThe psychology of why no Freesound user has uploaded a good pneumatic tube delivery sound.\nThe bank teller watching you and registering your surprise at being delivered a tube.\nThe bank tellers noticing that you are shitting into the pneumatic delivery tube and lifting the Gallagher tarp in front of their faces.\nGetting ready for bed and then suddenly recording an episode of Topic Lords.\nSmokenweewALT recording water flowing sounds in Flushing, Queens.\nThe best Wikipedia pages.\nToe Cleavage.\nCats who have jobs.\nFinding things on Wikipedia that are not directly related to one another.\nTweeting your disappointment that a weird thing turns out to be part of the Frog Fractions ARG.\nThe alternate reality where Frog Fractions 2 launched but nobody ever found it.\nThe final unsolved (and now unsolvable) FF2 ARG puzzle.\nWho was solving things?\nNew ways to not be at work.\nAnother word for having a good time.\nChoosing photos to represent the concept of leisure.\nPhil relaxing on the couch next to his toilet paper.\nSomeone who doesn't have a bed but does have two lanterns.\nThe guy who has spent fifteen years uploading pictures of his foreskin to Wikipedia just in case someone needs a picture of foreskin.\nSpending so long thinking about someone that you're unsure whether they're notorious to anyone but you.\nA foreskin in repose.\nBelieving that genes are immortal survival machines that use our disposable bodies to endlessly replicate themselves.\nThe concept of leisure as a human right.\nSerious vs. casual leisure.\nProject-based leisure projects.\nA poem stapled to the wall in a laundromat in Massachusetts.\nVoices hanging close in the new acoustics.\nExplaining to your little brother that the snow angels are angel corpses that a nearby farmer murdered.\nLying to your child just a little bit, as a treat.\nThe Seattle Space Noodle.\nThe last Burger King in Amsterdam.\nThe most normal person you know.\nRunning an impromptu experiment on the internet by asking strangers to eat nothing but potatoes and report back.\nTrying the all-potatoes diet for thirty years.\nEating 40 potatoes a day.\nGame designer and science communicator Nicky Case.\nHalftato.\nOverdosing on potassium.\nDoctors telling you to cool it with the potassium.\nWhy doctors don't know how much chemotherapy to give obese people.\nThe doctor from the phrenology department measuring your neck to see if you have sleep apnea.\nParasitic plants imitating the host plant's leaves.\nRecognizing silhouettes of birds from an 8x8 monochrome image.\nRapidly changing the hydraulics of your leaves.\nA forest of Max mimicry.\n","content_html":"

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

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2022-12-26T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/685b1b60-aab5-4a6d-b73b-ef28c59401a7.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":68904262,"duration_in_seconds":4291}]},{"id":"931972ed-56d6-49bd-b736-cc4acb6c354c","title":"165. Spitting Wiggly Air","url":"https://topiclords.com/spitting-wiggly-air","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nMark\nShirley\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nWhat would you do if you came downstairs and all of my clothes and my glasses were on the floor in a heap in a puddle of water?\nAphasia: What doesn't it mean?\nDr. Icecreamwala\n\n\nhttps://www.icecreamderm.com/\n\nEternal Champion - I Am The Hammer\n\n\nhttps://eternalchampion.bandcamp.com/track/i-am-the-hammer\n\nTeen Censorship (what to restrict, if anything?)\nSCA stuff: social skills in the SCA, thrown weapons, and winter camping!\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nEEG, EKG and ECG.\nDogs and video games.\nKingdom: Two Crowns.\nWhoops, I'm Dead!\nBorker and Starina.\nWaking up in the morning and telling your wife \"and we're back!\"\nSleeping with the Shirley-cicle.\nWhen 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.\nHedge witches.\nAn Alex Mack situation.\nTurning yourself into a goo accidentally vs. on purpose.\nA dog athletic enough to pee on your glasses while you're wearing them.\nFiguring out what muscle to flex to telepathically communicate as a glass of water.\nBelieving things you see written in an authoritative voice.\nThe kind of movies Bruce Willis has been making lately.\nAphasia vs. Primary Progressive Aphasia.\nThe four primary modalities of human language.\nFiguring out how to hang out with someone you can't talk to.\nDecoupling the word \"yes\" from its literal meaning.\nApraxia of speech.\nThanking colonialism for this moment of delight.\nServing your patients their prescription in a waffle cone.\nFlying to the Bay Area to get some light dermatology done.\nThe battle-starved riders of Tarsul.\nThe demon priests of ill Nitaar.\nNolan Bushnell receiving feedback about the name Atari.\nThe God Blade.\nFist-pumpin', sword-swingin' heavy metal.\nA good source of lore.\nCosmologies where god is a species.\nDrinking his blood to see what happens.\nHeavy metal bands fronted by blacksmiths.\nWanting your teenager to feel safe listening to fascist heavy metal in front of you so that you can talk to them about it.\nInstalling a web filter so that your child doesn't accidentally stumble into gross abusive porn.\nOpinions about parent-child relationships from someone who was once a child.\nHeavy metal bands who write music about white nationalism vs. heavy metal bands who are just white nationalist without writing about it.\nDeliberately not separating the art from the artist so you get the extra enjoyment out of musicians who are cool people.\nVideos of common household items being crushed under the wheels of a car.\nVideos of people building things in the woods.\nDevil's toothpaste.\nReacting to the sugar tax by angrily boycotting soda.\nThe Society for Creative Anachronism kicking you out if you dress up as a time traveler from the future or a 1950s greaser.\nThe SCA re-enacting the before-times, when morning zoo radio didn't exist yet.\nApex Nerds.\nGeniuses above petty squabbling.\nA better system of chilling out.\nGoing into the woods with your friend who likes building stuff in the woods and watching him build stuff in the woods.\nMovies set in the 80s that have absolutely nothing from the 70s in them because everybody threw all that shit away on January 1st, 1980.\nHanding out arm rings to your sworn men.\nInstituting a buddy system where you buy each other awards.\nHappy baby cow.\n","content_html":"

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

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2022-12-19T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/931972ed-56d6-49bd-b736-cc4acb6c354c.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":68708444,"duration_in_seconds":4282}]},{"id":"06d046ab-78d8-40b5-80db-0ed5ceb12953","title":"164. Dead Bodies Are Always In The First Place You Look","url":"https://topiclords.com/dead-bodies-are-always-in-the-first-place-you-look","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nNathan\n\n\nMommysBestGames on Twitter.\n\nTyriq\n\n\nFourBitFriday everywhere.\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nOctopodes, continued\nMy wife and I are both teaching our son to drive, with separate lessons. It's going OK but with bumps.\nThe most widely-used crack for The Colonel's Bequest works by breaking the random number generator. This has wide-ranging effects on the gameplay.\n\n\nhttps://www.benshoof.org/blog/case-cracked\n\nHow are we going to fix the camera in Mario Odyssey?\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nGame Type DX.\nImplementing the Xbox dashboard and trying to get it approved by Sony.\nThe most serious episode of Topic Lords.\nBringing up Octopuses every three years.\nGiving yourself an electric shock because you're so bored.\nSea pork.\nEating the animals that are extremely convenient to farm.\nAoes sitting around waiting for something interesting to happen.\nChimpanzee pranks.\nMaking art because that's what people do.\nTrying to disentangle making art from making a living.\nWhether zoo animals would prefer their natural habitat or whether they just enjoy a chill cool time.\nInventing an octopus psychologist to figure out what parts of their lives they like and what parts could be improved.\nChildren of Time and Children of Ruin.\nMolluscs having a good time.\nTerraforming gone awry.\nThe impossibility of talking smart people out of bad ideas.\nWhy a teenager might or might not want to learn to drive.\nHow hard to push the brakes and how hard to push the gas.\nPushing the gas too hard and the car is like no, take a deep breath and try again.\nTerrifying two lane roads.\nWhether to start turning before you reach the stop sign.\nDriving in Atlanta.\nLearning to drive because you have to get to college somehow.\nThe responsibility of being in charge of heavy machinery.\nDriving and suddenly realizing you need to be paying way more attention right now.\nSaying the worst possible thing to someone who is already anxious.\nDetective adventure game structure.\nThe botched Red Baron Easter egg.\nWalking by windows whenever possible.\nBlinking, fidgeting and moving with lifeless constancy.\nSerious Sam 3's copy protection scorpion.\nFinding the thing you're not expecting in the first place you look.\nWhether the Law and Order video games implement both Law and Order.\nA detective game where you spend most of your energy preventing the detective from having a nervous breakdown or hurting somebody.\nGame design that is driven by fun tech.\nGetting a fancy new drill press and for a while all the furniture you make has a bunch of extra holes for no apparent reason.\nAn RPG character with the ability to manipulate the RNG.\nA game design critique of darts.\nFingers in the brain, squishing.\nWhy Game Genie codes are encrypted.\nThe Sonic the Hedgehog 2 level editor.\nBASIC Programming and Computer Intro.\nThe guy who wrote half of the Odyssey 2's game catalog.\nWhether console exclusives, or indeed video game systems at all, should exist.\nWhy they set Mario Galaxy on planetoids.\nLooking into a shoebox of fun.\nMario's fluctuating weight throughout the series.\nA classic 3D platformer problem.\nManipulating the camera while you touch all kinds of other buttons.\nThe kind of Mario game that your dad can play.\nBeen solved. Not fun.\nTrying to show Portal to people who have never played first-person shooters.\n","content_html":"

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

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2022-12-12T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/06d046ab-78d8-40b5-80db-0ed5ceb12953.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":70263555,"duration_in_seconds":4376}]},{"id":"65dd8d59-7751-407a-b7b0-6cc96898fa1e","title":"163. The Mean Horse Scenario","url":"https://topiclords.com/the-mean-horse-scenario","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nMitch\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/@HBMmaster\nhttps://www.google.com/search?q=w\nhttps://www.seximal.net/\n\nLaura\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/lmichet\nhttps://cohost.org/lmichet\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nWhat 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?\nThe Super Mario Wiki is a beacon that other fan wikis should look to for inspiration\nThe GTA San Andreas conversation system\nLast Straw, by George Starbuck http://reesewarner.blogspot.com/2021/04/george-starbuck-nationalpoetrymonth.html\nThe gradual inflation of standard youtube video length\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nLowercase jan, capital Misali.\nCollecting all 905 Pokemon after 25 years.\nR-rated Pokemon competitor, \"Seximals.\"\nFree-range porn, or legitimate educational resource?\nFirst impressions of seximal.net.\nCounting up to 99 on your hands.\nCollege basketball's tactical use of base 6.\nThe binary number represented by flipping someone the bird with both hands.\nThe Airworld situation.\nA sled pulled by domesticated zombies.\nSolving the tire problem so you can bike around in the post-apocalypse.\nHorses destroying society by kicking every building down with their powerful legs.\nHorsefingers.\nHorseknuckles.\nBeing just tall enough for a horse to try to eat your hair.\nShoveling poop out of the bear bone barn.\nStandards of accuracy and editorial quality in the Super Mario Wiki.\nNiwa, the Nintendo Independent Wiki Alliance.\nWhat Mario Wiki has to say about the Berlin Wall.\nAbraham Lincoln's place in the Mario Canon.\nOrganizing the Marvel Wiki by universe number.\nThe most objective possible method of sorting a list of universes.\nRegular Peter Parker vs. Ultimate Peter Parker.\n10 seconds of scrolling.\nA wealth of information not intended for a phone screen.\nThe ontological difference between characters and allies.\nWhat species exist in the world of Mario?\nAction Toad.\nThe wiki article about Baby Mario, a distinct character from the times various Marios have been babies.\nThe love child of Bowser and Shigeru Miyamoto.\nMaking invitations to your bachelor party with Mario Print World.\nDifferent forms of pounding your butt on the ground.\nThe Ground Pound, also known as the Hip Drop, Pound the Ground attack, Bounce, Butt-Bash, Jump Smash, Smash Attack, and Butt Stomp.\nHow wikis get away with not being normalized databases.\nA loose simulacrum of conversation.\nA conversation that takes the form of a hand wave and then a gulf a million miles wide.\nPausing for several minutes to contemplate whether you've ever eaten octopus for breakfast.\nFifty ways to say \"please don't hit me in the head with that wrench.\"\nThe Heaven's Vault conversation system.\nTen different voice actors saying the same twenty lines.\nA normal poetry thing.\nTrying 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.\nPoems that use two meters at once.\nShowing the frivolity of the line lengths.\nBack when Youtube videos were limited to ten minutes.\nJust sitting here making feature films by myself.\nAl Gore, the guy who invented the Algorithm.\nPromising things in the show notes that definitely aren't going to go there.\nWhat happens in an ecosystem where there is no pressure to make your work shorter.\nPeople who have time to watch a three hour Youtube video.\nWatching a movie over the course of a week, ten minutes at a time.\nMultitasking poorly.\nHow to find people on Cohost.\n","content_html":"

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

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2022-12-05T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/65dd8d59-7751-407a-b7b0-6cc96898fa1e.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":61882171,"duration_in_seconds":3855}]},{"id":"c74c1d63-183d-4f51-98b2-377a6d84efad","title":"162. The Best Lawyer On Fiverr","url":"https://topiclords.com/the-best-lawyer-on-fiverr","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nQuil\nMaxx\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nMaybe I just don't like apples\nOpposite Costco\nThe Sweet Science\nThe Village and the Curious Hole\n\n\nhttp://thesciencesalon.blogspot.com/p/village-and-curious-hole.html\n\nBALLU the best robot\n\n\nhttps://youtu.be/EdSoUbXirVI\nhttps://www.strandbeest.com/\nhttps://youtube.com/shorts/lbxJlwQ6-U8\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nMaking robots and video games in Seattle.\nCohost dot org.\nTumblr without Tumblr's weird nesting.\nFinding interesting people to follow in 2005.\nCohost's discovery apparatus.\nMaking bad music on the internet that's not very enjoyable.\nThe worst fruit. (Apples.)\nThe enormous gulf between the audiovisual experience of watching someone eat an apple and eating that apple yourself.\nThe world's most apple growing place.\n\"Extra honey\" apples.\nUpgrading your teeth so that you can eat stone fruit without pitting them.\nInstalling a machine in your mouth that you can pour wheat into and it extrudes noodles right into your throat.\nWhat wheat becomes if you chew it.\nPasta-flavored gum.\nVaguely salty orange chewing gum.\nInstalling an app to play a \"biting an apple\" ringtone into whenever you bite any fruit.\nJapan's canonical fruit ranking with melon at the top, as seen in Pac-Man.\nThe way in which the B-tier melons are substandard.\nThe most cherries per slot machine.\nPivoting to chewing gum after San Francisco bans your gambling machines.\nBuying just one leaf of parsley from Opposite Costco.\nNaming your company after the idea of charging for things.\nBuying hundreds of jigsaw puzzle pieces in bulk.\nTito Beverage.\nYou win stun, you lose stun.\nDoug Bowser's Heel Turn.\nInaptronyms.\nPunching somebody and all their honey comes out.\nPreferring to punch people who bruise extremely precisely.\nHypothesizing that you are about to be punched in the face and setting up a control group.\nUsing science in an interesting way in 1832.\nLittle Alchemy and other combine-'em-ups.\nWhat to play if you like adventure game inventory puzzles but not the rest of the adventure game.\nThe phone number you could call as part of the Frog Fractions ARG.\nInvestigating where the wind knocked over the fox shrine.\nFinding an infinitely deep hole and dumping all your garbage in it until you realize you can use it to solve the housing crisis.\nThe deepest man-made hole.\nThe town that is permanently on fire.\nAn extremely plausible hellmouth.\nThanks, Hellmouth!\nInventing Hell in the 1970s.\nA video that you can silently play in the background.\nA robot that is just a large helium balloon.\nA robot that is neutrally buoyant.\nStrandbeests.\nMaking the goofiest lil guy.\nThe exploded cell phone ghosts.\nA traffic cone skateboarding with ska playing in the background.\nThe Topic Lords startup incubator.\nCony Hawk.\n","content_html":"

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

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\n\n","summary":"Lords: Quil and Maxx. We discuss not liking apples, Opposite Costco, the Sweet Science, the Village and the Curious Hole, and Balu the best robot.","date_published":"2022-11-28T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/c74c1d63-183d-4f51-98b2-377a6d84efad.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":54969465,"duration_in_seconds":3424}]},{"id":"e3b739b0-53c7-4be8-b06f-90d9501a7b20","title":"161. How Much Can This Dog Deadlift?","url":"https://topiclords.com/how-much-can-this-dog-deadlift","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nShannon\nAvery\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nMeasure words\nIs color even real?\nhttps://www.reddit.com/r/Poetry/comments/hdrdlt/poem_my_cat_is_sad_spencer_madsen/\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nGame Changer.\nWhy various albums aren't on Spotify.\nDuring the American Revolution when the British were always quartering punk bands in colonial household.\nThe Bug Porn calendar that Shannon drew for the FF2 ARG.\nA singular bug in a pin-up pose.\nA praying mantis cosplaying as a nun.\nLearning a language and then forgetting it because you're too embarrassed to speak it around people.\nA soup vs. a bowl of soup.\nThousands of years of associating this thing with this other thing.\nHow singing works in tonal languages.\nThe people who keep insisting that orange doesn't rhyme with anything.\nThat time Tom Lehrer rhymed \"orange\" with \"bizarre enjoyment.\"\nMemory palaces.\nStand over mouth next to person equals.\nThe \"two six-packs\" mnemonic for remembering what the two dots on the guitar fretboard mean.\nMnemonics that you would prefer to forget.\nThe blue/black/gold/white dress.\nChanging the perceived color of an object by changing the lighting in the room.\nWhether light is real.\nNaming a color and never telling anybody the name.\nKeeping a color swatch because your memory of a color might drift over time, but the swatch fades.\nPerfect pitch for color perception.\nGetting two sensory outputs from a single sensory input.\nA deeply visual species.\nStriving to be amazed and confused by things normal people take for granted.\nVisualization but for smells.\nA list of attributes of what your daughter looks like.\nBlind sight.\nSeeing but having no experience of sight.\nHashtag Kant Folks.\nDiscerning green and pink.\nDo these two sexy nazi ponies look the same to you?\nThe purpose of music theory.\nThe invention of standardized tunings.\nWhere to find poems.\nA cat who does not have a cat.\nA cat wondering why nobody else in his family is a cat.\nThings it is funny for a cat to be sad about.\nWhy the family cat didn't go to college.\nMaking sure to get a pet early enough that you child can see it die before going to college.\nGetting a second dog vs. getting your dog a dog.\nDog IQ tests.\nThe placards at the dog shelter listing each dog's D&D stats and alignment.\nCockatiel owners.\nA sporting event that measures how hungry you are.\nHow many cinder blocks you'd pull for a kingdom's Klondike bar.\nLooking into a well during the full moon and saying Avery's name a hundred times.\nDating a string of Lisas.\nSix Songs For Lisa.\nStarting your six song album on song number three.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"Lords: Shannon and Avery. We discuss measure words, what even is color, and My Cat is Sad by Spenser Madsen.","date_published":"2022-11-21T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/e3b739b0-53c7-4be8-b06f-90d9501a7b20.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":56014971,"duration_in_seconds":3488}]},{"id":"bdde6ab6-1b6d-4be1-8158-3998ce19bc7b","title":"160. Dracula Never Brushes His Teeth","url":"https://topiclords.com/dracula-never-brushes-his-teeth","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nElena\nShannon\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nI went to Burning Man and now maybe I don't bite my nails?\nPros and cons of vampirism\nKrista and Tatiana Hogan are conjoined at the brain. They share thoughts, senses and control of their bodies.\n\"Gray cube, rectangular light\"\n\n\nhttps://codewriteplay.com/2019/09/10/legends-of-gamedev-clarissa-darling/\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nNominally saving everybody a big hassle but in fact completely failing to do the job.\nChecking the double secret server.\nWill Wood.\nListening to music but not learning a lot.\nBiting your cuticles.\nThe Burning Man dust/paste situation.\nTrying to get dust under your fingernails when you don't have fingernails.\nGetting rid of the textures on your face which just causes more textures to happen.\nA cuticle lab kit with fancy sticks and creams that you don't understand.\nNail-buffing cubes.\nLosing some unpredictable aspect of your person at Burning Man.\nA man made up of all the aspects of personalities that he stole from Burning Man attendees.\nLeaving your nail biting behind in the temple.\nCutting your nails short ever since you got that gardening gig.\nThe weird traveling bruise you get when you hit your fingernail too hard.\nEvery shovelful had so much danger in it.\nThe perils of gardening barefoot.\nWearing gloves but not wearing shoes because you like the mud between your toes.\nDracula Daily.\nStarting a mailing list for someone else's diary.\nCouriers telling you that they delivered the boxes of soil and thanks for the shillings.\nExplaining what a vampire is after the vampire is already dead.\nVampirism as a pyramid scheme.\nLeaving and returning to your soldered-closed coffin at will.\nGod's meaner creatures.\nVampirism as a recipe for seasonal affective disorder.\nWhat a bummer it'd be to discover that hell is real.\nLiving a thousand subjective years and learning a bunch of skills.\nGetting up every night and finding a child to eat because that's all you have time for.\nDracula the trainspotter.\nThe Kirby dimension that his victims all go to and hang out together.\nOffering value to the world that compensates for the person you have to kill and eat every day.\nThe 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.\nDoctor C-Word.\nThe Blood of Manly Men.\nGod Sends Us Men When We Want Them.\nRunning out of manly blood but luckily a Texan shows up.\nAffixing small electric lights to your chest so that you can explore a basement.\nThe spider that got so big that it was just a really big spider, you know, the really big spider everybody talks about.\nHow our intuition for what makes a person can be thrown off completely by simple biology.\nTwo brains that are slightly overlapped.\nA closed system that can answer questions about itself.\nRaising a child as if it is two people.\nSplit-brain patients.\nInterpreting the two hemispheres of the brain as two individual people who are working in concert.\nThe storytelling part of our brain that we call consciousness.\nHaving control of three legs and an arm vs. three arms and a leg.\nTrying to relate your subjective experience to other people.\nWhat is the self?\nA dog that likes another dog but doesn't like a different dog.\nCantilevered rainbows.\nClarissa Explains it All.\nClarissa Explains Indie Game Development.\nProcessing events in your life by making games about them.\nBringing out the special poetry lady to teach you poetry.\nWriting a book of poetry where the typesetter also has to be a poet.\nWriting 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\"\nWriting 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\"\nHow to write a relatable poem.\nThe extra fridge that holds the food that you don't ever actually eat.\nWho's got the tiger with the baseball bat?\nFragments of different jagged shapes.\nZero-Inbox Your Fridge.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2022-11-14T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/bdde6ab6-1b6d-4be1-8158-3998ce19bc7b.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":62776216,"duration_in_seconds":3923}]},{"id":"b6eab021-dcb9-4c7d-9d3e-802376104117","title":"159. It's Beautiful That We Once Existed","url":"https://topiclords.com/its-beautiful-that-we-once-existed","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nKev\nCort\n\n\nCort's new album: https://postgoodism.bandcamp.com/album/tourism\nThe Frog Fractions vinyl: https://www.turtlepalstapes.com/product/frog-fractions-green\nMonty Python's three-sided record: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monty_Python_Matching_Tie_and_Handkerchief\nLocked grooves: https://www.yoursoundmatters.com/locked-grooves-endless-fun-literally/\nThe Most Wanted Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jId-qaEwuvI\nThe Most Unwanted Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gPuH1yeZ08\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nBefore age ~4 you don't really make long-term memories, but you can develop long-term habits. How to best exploit this.\n\n\nSpark : The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain https://www.amazon.com/Spark-Revolutionary-Science-Exercise-Brain/dp/B08RZD6D4Z\n\nExtreme \"kids in trench coat\" trope scenarios\n\n\nNecrophilic landscape http://2dcloud.com/the-necrophilic-landscape\nArtist Morgan Vogel https://www.tcj.com/morgan-vogel-1986-2020/\n\nKrista and Tatiana Hogan are conjoined at the brain. They share thoughts, senses and control of their bodies.\n\"Autopsy\" by Ross Sutherland\n\n\nI can't find a text transcript online, just a few records of Ross performing the poem. Nor does Ross himself have a \"home page\" per se. Here's a link to his podcast, it's great: https://www.imaginaryadvice.com/\n\nNeighbors overplaying the same playlist\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Woman_(soundtrack)\nhttps://www.worstideaofalltime.com/\n\nIs it unambiguously good that technology makes creative expression easier?\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nMic on, pants off.\nThe inherent meaningless of \"limited editions\" in a finite universe ultimately bound for a slow heat death.\nVinyl record Easter eggs.\nA big ol' spiral cut into the vinyl.\nLimited characteristics of a physical process.\nMental models of what it means to master an album.\nNovelty vinyl colors.\nJim's burgeoning record collection.\nThe most glorious twenty minute act of art terrorism.\nLosing access to your old memories because your brain changed formats.\nHow to erase medical debt by just not paying it.\nBorrowing money from your toddler.\nSpark: the revolution of exercise or some other subtitle.\nMollusks eating their own nervous systems.\nEating your own childhood to launch yourself into adulthood.\nUpping the emotional stakes with large animals and near-death experiences.\nPutting your girlfriend in mortal danger so that she's more likely to want to marry you.\nGetting pigeonholed as a really good butt.\nGetting surgically separated so you can disguise yourself as two kids in a trench coat.\nThe hemispheres of the brain as independent entities which happen to share a body.\nLumps of biology.\nEvery person's unique inability to speak to other people's interiority.\nWalkie-talkie telepathy vs. \"perfect mutual understanding\" telepathy.\nOne mind with two faces.\nSuperhuman limb/vocal cord coordination.\nSegue Week.\nBurroughs cut-ups.\nVigorous grandparenting with a face of terror.\nA modern-day television quiz show phoenix.\nThe impenetrable free-form rhymes of a heart attack in October.\nThe greets.\nTracker music instrument names as cut-up poetry generators.\nSuper Obituaries!\nThe potentially transformative effect of reading your own obituary.\nThe perverse incentives behind soliciting reviews of unfinished games.\nThe awesome power of knowing that your feedback will be considered.\nThe neighbor who only listens to Rod Stewart's Greatest Hits over and over again.\nListening to entire albums until you're so sick of them that you underflow and love them again.\nThe song you have to listen to to get to Roxette's It Must Have Been Love.\nBad podcast ideas.\nNovelty t-shirts whose joke is only funny once, but you still wear it once a week\nThe shirt with the Fight Club and the cognitive science reference on it.\nShirts/tattoos as pop culture dog whistles.\nGetting a tattoo of the Colossus' weak points so that you can meet the people who stab you there.\nNaming your game's public alpha something innocent so it doesn't arouse suspicion when your friends see you playing it.\nThe hazards of wearing a shirt promoting a pop culture reference you know nothing about.\nWearing a shirt that makes people try to talk to you about a video game you've never played.\nAll the people you disappointed in high school.\nNPCs in Thief Deadly Shadows talking about how hard it is to get a job making games.\nA bright future where nobody can make a living making video games.\nA bright future where AIs curate collections of AI-generated content.\nA case for the 1991 film \"Super Mario Brothers\" as the pinnacle of entertainment.\nCharles Martinet doing the Mario voice as he leaps to his death from a roof in \"The Game.\"\n","content_html":"

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Lords:

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2022-11-07T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/b6eab021-dcb9-4c7d-9d3e-802376104117.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":64286089,"duration_in_seconds":4007}]},{"id":"255180cb-e886-4b86-b199-03a109ba825a","title":"158. Bark Mitzvah: Where Your Good Boy Becomes A Mensch","url":"https://topiclords.com/bark-mitzvah-where-your-good-boy-becomes-a-mensch","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nErica\nThe Real John B\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nThe Nancy Drew Point and Click adventure series\nAdvances in garbage food technology\nThe mysterious grunting voice playing over the American Airlines intercom\n\n\nhttps://waxy.org/2022/09/a-mysterious-voice-is-haunting-american-airlines-in-flight-announcements-and-nobody-knows-how/\n\nA poem I found: \"The Cow\" by Oliver Herford\n\n\n https://twitter.com/YouOldSoAndSo/status/1053873522823446528\n\nKlik, freeware and indie games in the late 90s and early 2000s\n\n\nhttp://freegames.org/GameHippo\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nOther topic podcasts biting Jim's steeze.\nSpending the next hour blushing.\nHolding a Bark Mitzvah to watch your Good Boy become a mensch.\nReleasing a director's cut from beyond the grave.\nBad games that you can't get enough of.\nAdventure games that make you feel like when grandma would visit and bring you donuts.\nSecret Fandoms.\nThe new Nancy Drew series where Nancy Drew is an airhead and nobody likes her.\nA 70 year old woman playing a teenager.\nWhether game designers play anything other than World of Warcraft.\nWhy the Nancy Drew adventure games are not on phones.\nPutting Nancy Drew in Fortnite.\nFriend of the show, Dropsy.\nYou don't have to be an American to eat a garbage diet, but it sure helps.\nFood color technology over time.\nWhen Froot Loops added the fourth color.\nSpeaking truth to power about the little silver disc that you microwave pizza on.\nThe starchy packet that helps the noodles cook.\nA job that requires the skill sets of both a chef and a materials engineer.\nThings that come out of boxes nowadays.\nWatching meat substitutes grow up.\nPlastic golems living in your body.\nGetting your first reading glasses at your Old Mitzvah and giving a speech starting with \"now I am an old.\"\nThe second person this hour who has admitted to the pharmacist that they need reading glasses.\nThe baby technology section at Walmart.\nSnot removers that'd also be great for insect collection.\nA sock that measures blood oxygenation.\nEarwitness accounts.\nWorking on the American Airlines announcement system and adding strange grunting noises to the playlist.\nElectrical noise that is being interpreted by a system intended to transmit the human voice.\nThe guy who does all the grunt voices.\nA sound that is like audio from a music album.\nAn incredible technical smartass who got annoyed at luggage fees.\nA fridge full of snacks in the middle of the plane.\nEvery passenger getting up and going to the snack pit.\nWrestling for Cheez-Its.\nAll the folks who are into weird pranks and technical glitches making a pilgrimage to the American Airlines flight with the weird grunting.\nNancy-likes.\nThe Three Investigators, presented by Alfred Hitchcock.\nJoining the discord for more on the ukulele plane.\nBack in 1901 when they worried about Peak Cow.\nMilk punch.\nEggless egg nog.\nCelebrating all the positive ways cows influence our lives, and also we eat them.\nWhether scientists knew extinctions were possible in 1901.\nLooking for free games on the internet in 1999.\nLetting the Game Hippo domain lapse and a domain squatter picks it up and the rest is history.\nDink Smallwood.\nA multidirectional shooter with a cool perspective trick.\nAll the search engines they had before google.\nThe Williams College MUD that you could log in to and visit Williams College in the MUD.\nGraal Online.\nReceiving a box of shareware from your mom's coworker.\nPC games from before developers realized that computers would get faster.\nTyping swim fast enough that you don't drown.\nPlease Copy That Floppy!\n","content_html":"

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Lords:

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2022-10-31T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/255180cb-e886-4b86-b199-03a109ba825a.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":66540048,"duration_in_seconds":4144}]},{"id":"a81c32dc-04f2-47c0-8a30-f70ed3f5a0f4","title":"157. The Boy Who Cried ARG","url":"https://topiclords.com/the-boy-who-cried-arg","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nTyriq\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/FourbitFriday\nhttps://frror.bandcamp.com/\n\nChall\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/mrchrislhall\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nThe future/present of Jim's mario videos.\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3SbI8kec0Ntxnf9mof2tU-QZLQ0Mq6zd\n\nCatatcomb Kids lore in the context of the fact that I like worldbuilding but find it hard to tell actual stories.\nBigger Luke\nThe Green Street Mortuary Marching Band.\n\n\nhttp://www.syndicjournal.us/a-ferlinghetti-memorial-supplement-60-narrations/ferlinghetti-memorial-supplement-the-green-street-mortuary-marching-band/\n\nHave you seen any phantom kangaroos? And also: should I choose to believe in cryptids? If so, which ones?\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nGiving someone else's biography.\n7-Day Roguelikes.\nFeeling ambiently like you are hanging out with somebody.\nAn emulator that works when you are not screen-capturing in OBS, but freezes when you are.\nMaking a backup of your Bowser's Fury save.\nVideo recording setup evolutions.\nThe pros and cons of extremely variable video lengths.\nPlaying Tony Hawk with Mario modded in.\nWhat working on a Zelda game does to a person, psychologically.\nDoing things that make people believe you're doing an ARG.\nTwinbeard Rates Mario.\nA robot co-host that eventually starts finishing your words for you.\nWanting to be a writer until you try writing.\nA world that naturally develops in your brain.\nHow to tell stories.\nComing up with a bunch of characters that want things.\nReading stories in hopes that stories rub off on you.\nPutting yourself in a situation where you write a lot of dialog trees.\nHow to make a platformer without doing any level design.\nExpecting the same person to write the music and the lyrics.\nThe difference in the ideation process of world building and story telling.\nA fact about the world that is true.\nCaptain Thalmoo surveying the battlefield.\nFiguring out mid-burrito that there was a war, and deciding who won it.\nA grain that flowers like lavender.\nSearching Fiverr for Conlangers.\nPaying $2 for something at the Dollar Store.\nLogging Onto JimNet.\nThe Canon Bigger Luke Hypothesis vs. the Hamill Hypothesis.\nThe Inch-Luke Hypothesis.\nInch-Lukers.\nBigger Luke conspiracy theorists just assume that Han Solo stays the same size.\nThe real Skywalker was the bigger Luke all along.\nThe Boy Who Cried ARG.\nPromising your wife that your son will not be Frog Fractions 3.\nHow many pages of laws a person is subject to at any given time.\nDesigning an ARG for your teenage son and he's like \"ugh dad, again?\"\nMortuary marching bands.\nThe patriarch who has just croaked.\nThe sister with the bent frame.\nUncle Louie with the wig.\nGetting a free concert because someone died.\nA funeral as a pleasant gathering of people you haven't seen in a long time.\nGetting arrested for publishing Allen Ginsberg's \"Howl.\"\nDressing up as an ancient sea captain.\nHow many funerals this marching band is playing today.\nHiring your nephew who has a Casiotone keyboard to play your funeral.\nHiring the Green Street Mortuary Marching Band to play at your kid's birthday but all they know how to play is Taps.\nBringing an axe to the funeral in case there's an emergency and you need to open up the coffin quickly.\nIf a guitar is an axe, a tuba is a bent axe.\nUnbending the Tuba.\nWhy brass instruments are so twisty.\nIf you unwind a French horn it'll reach the moon and back.\nThe large flutes that are curly.\nThe son of a flautist.\nA bookshelf that you blow into and music comes out.\nPotential downsides of cryptids.\nWanting to take EMF meters into a creepy house even though you don't believe in ghosts.\nThe script scientists developed to let you fall in love at will.\nHow many blue coins out of five you would rate your wife.\nTaking the Race IAT every week and analyzing your results over time.\n","content_html":"

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Lords:

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2022-10-24T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/a81c32dc-04f2-47c0-8a30-f70ed3f5a0f4.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":67827888,"duration_in_seconds":4223}]},{"id":"35defb5a-5f80-4a99-b4e3-f8bf088a7c00","title":"156. Society Is Moving In A Direction","url":"https://topiclords.com/society-is-moving-in-a-direction","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nAlex\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/alexicographic\nhttps://www.twitch.tv/damaplaysgames/\n\nJP\n\n\nhttp://vectorpoem.com/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nYour gravestone has a button people can press to play a sound clip, 10 seconds or less. It can loop or be a one-shot, your preference. What sound clip does your gravestone play?\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9u8Fd7EHYAg\n\nCounting the beats in eenie-meenie\nSoundScan and the SoundScan Era\n\n\nhttps://www.theringer.com/music/2021/5/25/22452539/soundscan-billboard-charts-streaming-numbers\n\nThere Will Come Soft Rains\n\n\nhttps://poets.org/poem/there-will-come-soft-rains\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Will_Come_Soft_Rains_(short_story)\n\nThe scorched-earth strategy for Lowest Positive Unique Integer\n\"Leaving beautiful ruins\" in a videogame\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nA return of many-storied adventure game developers.\nA point and click adventure game that changed the trajectory of your life.\nSuspenders as an architectural feature.\nOnesie pajamas with a trap door.\nPeople sneaking up behind you and trying to unbutton your poop flap.\nThoughts that are meant to remain unthought.\nThe famous elongated \"some.\"\nA marketing executive saying \"nobody will know what a 'tetralogy' is.\"\nWhether your game studio logo has a sound.\nConsole startup noises.\nThe button your loved ones can press on your gravestone to hear the Dreamcast startup sound.\nKing Solomoning the gif-vs-gif debate.\nThe governing body that decides whether your death is cool enough to warrant a gif of your death on your tombstone.\nThe kind of people who gravitate to a job that rates everyone's deaths on a five-star scale.\nThe IP situation surrounding your gravestone's looping wav button.\nYour 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.\nWagering on your ability to read emergent situations.\nElectric Football.\nCovering a metal plate with quarters and flipping the switch that makes the plate vibrate, creating the quarter configuration for optimal money gouging.\nBecoming really good at beating a rigged game.\nBecoming really good at funnel cake.\nDentists not understanding the motivations people have for drinking soda.\nLargest Sip.\nThe liminal space between a Sip and a Gulp.\nGaming the outcome in Eenie Meenie Miney Moe.\nWhether Eenie Meenie Miney Moe is a solved game.\nA great opportunity to practice believing the lies that we form our wesociety on.\nWhen 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.\nRockists fudging the numbers.\nThe pros and cons of getting a Billboard Hot 100 hit.\nJukebox charts.\nThe Billboard Humming chart based on them listening to the songs people are humming to themselves on the street.\nWho loves the radio hits that everyone you know hates? (People you don't know.)\nKnowing where to stick that quarter.\nWhite dudes making 17 minute songs.\nAxis of Discourse.\nA directory of mp3s in your Jellyfin server.\nNapster pivoting to NFTs but nobody notices or cares.\nNostalgia for the Spanish Flu.\nA giant ball of iron with life forms clinging to it.\nThe earth continuing to be a lump of iron no matter how badly we treat it.\nPotential human extinction and whether birds would notice it.\nA fully-automated human house of the near to far future.\nA band of roving pranksters in the post-apocalypse who are running around transmitting bad Roomba firmware updates.\nRolling up on prom with your entourage of four Half-Life scientists and five Barneys.\nRolling up on the rap battle with your entourage of backup singer Roombas trailing behind you.\nThe Mad Max series as prepper porn.\nA good shelf to rest on in the collective psyche.\nFriend deterrent strategies.\nHow strategy disclosure alters the gameplay of Rock Paper Scissors.\nDisclosing 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.\nSatisfactory: an open-world factory building game.\nBuilding your factories and then leaving them behind.\nEmergent haunted houses in abandoned player-built structures in persistent-world multiplayer games.\nHaving an idea for a game feature and having to build the whole game to try the feature out.\nBeing scared of weird old crap.\nAdding Pokemon to Minecraft.\nThe last gasp of mainstream PC gaming before phones happened.\nAn 11 year old game developer getting thrown into the Capitalist snake pit.\nThe Human Attention Zoo.\nKids (or adults) having goofs.\nThe Golden Age of the Moddable Game Engine.\nGetting a job based on your Roblox portfolio.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2022-10-17T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/35defb5a-5f80-4a99-b4e3-f8bf088a7c00.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":63028366,"duration_in_seconds":3926}]},{"id":"c4155803-5180-4ab9-82e6-df3f883dc4d0","title":"155. Do AI Researchers Know About Having Kids?","url":"https://topiclords.com/do-ai-researchers-know-about-having-kids","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nJude\n\n\nhttps://bikechurch.santacruzhub.org/\nhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/jude-jackson-605680100/\n\nShepard\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nThe attention schema model of consciousness\n\n\nhttps://books.google.com/books?id=Ta4eAAAAQBAJ&pg=PP1\n\nStudying a children's picture book in academia because it was successfully banned out of existence\nYour favorite floor cocktail\nOde to Waluigi\n\n\nhttps://www.stalberttoday.ca/local-news/student-poet-wins-national-award-1278635\n\nDid generations used to be a thing?\nRemembering what the mnemonic is but not what it is supposed to remind you.\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nBike Church.\nLearning to fix a bike.\nThe audio book for Watership Down.\nThe book that inspired the plugging.\nOur own brain's mental model of our attention.\nIf you are what you think then suddenly you're this other thing.\nThe brain's proprioception of itself.\nThe Turning Test as praxis.\nA second brain that tries to second-guess the first brain.\nAn idea that is brilliant or not.\nHave machine learning researchers heard about having kids?\nX: A Child's Story.\nA discount dystopian nightmare.\nA book that is banned in twenty states but otherwise nobody cares about it.\nKids who inexplicably look like Charles Bronson.\nThe consolidation of media into six megacorporations.\nKids learning how to pirate again.\nA specific right that can be sold or exchanged.\nThe end of the golden age of streaming.\nWhat Napster was like.\nDownloading an MP3 from an FTP site and then recording it to a cassette tape because you don't have that much hard drive space.\nIce that is still ice.\nWhen the bartender pours your drink on the floor and gives you a straw.\nThe Forbidden Jungle Juice.\nA story from back when most of Jim's friends were alcoholics.\nNoticing 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\"\nChecking the ceiling of the elevator for ninjas.\nThe problem with the wine bar spit urn.\nThe coffee that you give to the poor.\nPouring your excess coffee into the donation box at church.\nDropping a loose muffin into the mail drop box to show thanks to the mail carrier.\nA floor made of mail.\nA dastardly Nintendo villain.\nThy time to attack Mario and Luigi.\nWhy thou dost not have thine own video fame.\nWhy thou art always cranky.\nWhether a power flower fell in you mouth when thou wast a baby.\nWhat it wouldst be like to be friends with Bowser and thou.\nFighting Geno the Explorer dangerously.\nWhy thou art not in Super Smash Bros. Brawl.\nA poem that asks many important questions and provides no answers.\nHyper Mecha Sonic.\nA thriller about video game mascots.\nThe bright line in the sand that makes Yoshi a pet rather than a friend.\nDumping 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.\nTrying desperately to find or create a purple-moustachioed Waluigi.\nThe eight named generations.\nThe Reprisal Generation, of the Nomad/Reactive archetypes.\nWhy the concept of generational cohorts is unique to modern Americans.\nMing Dynasty Boomers.\nViolence that is continuous and normal.\nThe Greatest Generation, who had no idea at the time how Great they had it.\nA Radical for Fingers.\nSeeing a king wearing a hat and trying to remember what that's supposed to remind you of.\nLooking at your hands and trying to remember why this is important.\nNot figuring out that your grandpa is hilarious until a week before he dies.\nWaiting in the bathroom for the test to start.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2022-10-10T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/c4155803-5180-4ab9-82e6-df3f883dc4d0.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":56192944,"duration_in_seconds":3500}]},{"id":"dadaa3ed-54f3-4e79-9108-54b7b4c9dcda","title":"154. QWERTY In The Streets, Colemak In The Sheets","url":"https://topiclords.com/qwerty-in-the-streets-colemak-in-the-sheets","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nTyriq\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/FourbitFriday\nhttps://frror.bandcamp.com/\n\nStevie\n\n\ncodroid@gmail.com\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nStriped humans\nAlternative keyboard layouts: teaching yourself to type in new horrible ways\nWhere did I get these floppy disks?\nThe floppy disk poems\nHow do I give a tech talk?\n\n\nhttps://vimeo.com/91436410\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59hwI9Ae1qU\nhttp://paperdino.com/save-the-date/\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nThe extent of Jim's patience vis-a-vis delayed plugging.\nWishing you didn't make things so you could talk about the things you didn't make.\nPlugging the small random things in life, like bugs.\nSitting in a chair right now.\nTrying desperately for forty years to never use Bluetooth.\nGeorge Michael's \"Faith\"\nGeorge Michael rehearsing a Queen song.\nA Faith listening party.\nThe etymology of \"Lobster.\"\nPlugging bugs and unplugging crustaceans.\nInvisible stripes along one's epidermis.\nMosaicism (as distinct from Chimerism.)\nBlaschko Lines.\nA secret invisible power to be striped.\nThe show where nobody knows anything.\nSpiraling outward from a central point.\nA thing that is a fact if you believe Wikipedia.\nDescribing an egg as ovoid because it is similar to an ovum, i.e. an egg.\nWhether a factoid is bullshit.\nWhether humans are humanoid.\nThe distinction between a fact and a factoid and how it has changed over time.\nBeing slightly hungry and eating a single macaronus.\nBatman training his successor in the sci-fi future.\nJoining the villain faction because they get the cool hooves and horns.\nTurning 90 and getting your internal organs tattooed.\nCheck it out, here's my solar plexus. Enjoy.\nAn injection that makes your bones glow in the dark.\nCold-Turkey Colemak Switchin'.\nHolding your left pinky on the tab key to keep your place.\nIterating until you find the episode title.\nTyping without twerking.\nBeing able to get your hands to do what you want without hurting.\nGetting a split keyboard so your hands keep working.\nThe ease and laziness of the Wiimote and nunchuk allowing you to put your hands anywhere you want.\nTwitchy aim dominating the PC FPS design space regardless of what the game designer wants.\nMaking poem floppy disks and using them as drinking coasters.\nCleaning out your mouse.\nDisassembling a floppy disk and folding it into the shape of the Starship Enterprise.\nRemembering where the USB floppy drive might stuff.\nWhether cursed demoscene executables still curse you if you run them in DosBox.\nWhether the Ring video still cursed you after it's digitized to DVD.\nMaybe'm or maybe'm not.\nA pretty cool knick knack.\nA human head like pancake batter.\nBread that you put in a blender.\nThe old good lord, bad lord routine.\nPicking a god and channeling its power into your tech talk.\nA community of people that you want to like and respect you.\nVarious ways to prepare to give a talk, and why Tyriq always does it the wrong way.\nGoing to a talk and thereby consenting to be lectured by the person giving the talk.\nBlaming the audience for picking the wrong talk if they don't like your talk.\nHow to run an ARG for no money.\nDeconstructing the idea that canon and headcanon are in any way different.\nRe-telling the same story over and over again.\nSame bullshit, different number of dimensions.\nA movie that was cooler when it was just a throwaway line in another movie.\nDepicting the same overarching event but with details changed.\nGames that require you to make a choice that you can't take back.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2022-10-03T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/dadaa3ed-54f3-4e79-9108-54b7b4c9dcda.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":75148159,"duration_in_seconds":4679}]},{"id":"30f5c80e-1447-4f6a-8eb0-de9019bae6a8","title":"153. I Can't Wait For My Cockroach Lipids","url":"https://topiclords.com/i-cant-wait-for-my-cockroach-lipids","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nJames\nAvery\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nStone paper\n\"The Flashing Blade\"\nThe Number Ones\n\n\nhttps://www.stereogum.com/category/columns/the-number-ones/\n\nhttps://www.americanpoems.com/poets/stanley-kunitz/king-of-the-river/\nBREAKING NON MAMMALIAN MILK NEWS!! Sorry mammals, cockroaches make milk and it is considered a complete food\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nThe latest on whether or not you've been canceled.\nSpotify rejecting your album because you don't believe in yourself enough.\nSpagbol.\nThe very one that is being digested by you now.\nthisbolognesedoesnotexist.com\nPaper that is 60% stone.\nThe price you pay for participating in art.\nCoffee that is more powerful than a laptop.\nWhat happens if you try to shred margarine.\nDocuments only for the document control society.\nThe Novelty FBI raiding your house and confiscating your Novelty Top Secret Documents and hiding them in their fake Groucho Marx glasses.\nThe guy who bought the last 100 Groucho Marx glasses from Party City.\nMoustache Ninja.\nWhy more people aren't talking about Moustache Ninja.\nThe height of Pirate Ninja Robot Mustache Mania.\nAnkle Biter Man.\nAtrocities Guide.\nOne of many reasons why real life superheroes are a bad idea.\nSuperheroes: police except there is no oversight whatsoever.\nAvery's Angels on Phoenix Jones.\nIf Seattle police arrest you for being nude, they are legally obligated to provide you with a dinner jacket for your jail stay.\nHeath Ledger instructing the audience to charge their shower.\nThe Masked Magician Revealed.\nTV stage magic.\nDavid Copperfield raising the Titanic.\nThe Cheap Trick song that got to #1.\nThe songs that hit #1 because General Hospital used them on the soundtrack.\nAn antidote to the idea that music used to be better.\nBreaking Up is Hard to Do.\nFinding a way to enjoy art that you didn't like before.\nGetting old and liking boring music.\nWhat radio formats overlap with Beautiful Music.\nA foam snake that shoots thirty feet into the air and then drifts into a nearby tree.\nTumbling over the rocks until you paint them with your belly's blood.\nThat other flesh, heavy with milt, bruised, battering toward the dam that lips the orgiastic pool.\nLimber and firm in the state of his shining, forever inheriting his salt kingdom, from which he is banished forever.\nThe most animalistic and primitive part of your consciousness.\nAn Atari 2600 game inspired by a poem about a fish.\nThe level in Dante's Inferno where you have to fight unbaptized babies.\nA 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.\nA great use of thumbsticks.\nWhether Wisdom Tree would've published the Dante's Inferno video game.\nSpending your entire life obsessed with the pear you stole as a kid.\nAn illumination of someone kneeling in front of a pear tree and weeping.\nPop songs about relationship situations.\nAn idea that is not as old as music.\nA piece of music going right for the emotion, like the Windows Startup Sound.\nMelody in lyrics, in conversation with each other.\nSeeing a person and drawing a stick figure.\nHow do I get too much into my own head?\nWhy you're turning into a fish, and what the fish represents.\nSea Monkeys' Garden of Earthly Delights.\nDo we want to get to the Cockroach Milk?\nBeing 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\"\nHow many cockroaches it takes to make one serving of cockroach milk.\nSobbing in front of the slab of meat that Rocky punched.\nPouring cockroach milk onto stone paper to prove its resiliency.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"Lords: James and Avery. We discuss stone paper, The Flashing Blade, The Number Ones, King of the River, and cockroach milk.","date_published":"2022-09-26T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/30f5c80e-1447-4f6a-8eb0-de9019bae6a8.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":61239444,"duration_in_seconds":3814}]},{"id":"5281a6c6-9376-4e99-bff5-b2731041d42e","title":"152. National Butterscotch Pudding Day's Eve","url":"https://topiclords.com/national-butterscotch-pudding-days-eve","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nAlex\nShannon\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nRebranding a Country\nThe single-celled dog\nJoe Hart still hasn't cleared out the vampire dens\n\n\nhttps://imgur.com/a/ODW4pBI\n\ni hate it when i cant even write a poem about something because its too obvious.\n\n\nhttps://tooquirkytolose.tumblr.com/post/689145075338543104\n\nNational Butterscotch Pudding Day (Sep 19)\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nTying on the tiebreaker.\nCambodian street food.\nTopic Time!!\nTwo countries in the process of changing their names.\nWhether sovereignty was ceded.\nTourism videos encouraging people to pronounce your country's name correctly.\nHistory continuing to happen after you leave high school.\nChanging your name to North Your Name to get an alliance with NATO.\nA bonanza for globe manufacturers.\nThe United States of Mexico.\nGermany's reaction to the United States changing its name to The United States of Germany.\nPlaying the wrong Korea's national anthem by mistake.\nSwitching to Roguelike Alphabetical Order so Zimbabwe doesn't always go last.\nWhat does it mean to be a particular kind of animal?\nTransmissible cancer.\nA breed of dog that no longer exists as a dog but does exist as a strain of transmissible cancer.\nCTVT.\nHeLa cells.\nWhether Henrietta Lacks is still alive.\nHow to fix 20,000 years of evolution.\nA dog that is unlike extant dogs.\nWhen you decide to change your evolutionary niche from macro to microorganism.\nCancer that is smart enough to not kill its host.\nHow cancer interacts with your mutant healing factor.\nWhat this is and why it's happening to you.\nWhy a two year old wants to play in a copper mine.\nWhat kind of mines New England vampires lived in.\nRearranging a corpse so that the vampire can't walk.\nNo Arizona Mine Draculas.\nJoe Hart: defending our vampires.\nChange that you can really make, if you live in Arizona.\nNot getting the Google results you want because of sports mans.\nThe pros and cons of vampire bats.\nAbandoned mines serving as habitats for 28 bat species that are crucial to the local ecology.\nPersons currently experiencing vampirism.\nCan't Have Shitting Gotham.\nAdding line breaks to someone's complaint about a glow in the dark star to make a poem.\nThe imprint of one little glow in the dark star that had been missed and painted over in landlord white.\nA 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.\nA monologue that you could read in many different ways.\nReturning to Tumblr because you have more thoughts on the painted-over star.\nResponding to every text from your daughter as if it's a formal letter to a long-lost cousin.\nPutting glow in the dark eyeballs on your closet door.\nPutting you pudding under the Pudding Tree for Father Pudding.\nHow you grow the Pudding Tree.\nWerther's Compromise.\nUsing Werther's Originals as dentures and you have to replace them every hour.\nRemoving the butter from scotch to get butterscotch.\nSoft crack vs. hard crack.\nThose terrifying Pillsbury tins that you bang on the counter and they explode and breadsticks come out.\nHow to determine if your candy in progress is in the soft ball stage.\nWhat is pudding?\nHaving an existential crisis on Butterscotch Pudding Day.\nButterscotch Buttercream Frosting.\nAll the Lords that are fit to print.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2022-09-19T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/5281a6c6-9376-4e99-bff5-b2731041d42e.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":58144208,"duration_in_seconds":3624}]},{"id":"198897fc-6d06-47d5-9d04-fca3202f0662","title":"151. A Fantastic Way To Escape From Your Loved Ones","url":"https://topiclords.com/a-fantastic-way-to-escape-from-your-loved-ones","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nMike\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/mikeambrogi\n\nAdam\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/adamdeGrandis/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nCooking is awesome\n\n\nhttps://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1023147-tuna-crunch-sandwiches\n\nProfound kid questions (\"how do you like something?\")\nMr. Jaws\n\n\nhttps://youtu.be/JeYCOFblZRg\n\nDistant Regard by Tony Hoagland\n\n\nhttps://condofire.com/2018/12/16/poem-of-the-week-distant-regard-by-tony-hoagland-via-alison-mcghee/\n\nHaving very tight standards that you hold in one part of your creative life that you totally ignore in other parts. As a game artist, it drives me crazy when people make creative decisions without solid design to back them up (\"My game has a PSX art style because I think that's neat\"), but as a musician I played in a garage rock band without any reason other than \"50 year old music is neat\".\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nDesktop Dungeons Rewind.\nA rug that looks like a cat's face.\nStarting a game studio with your life.\nHow the whole butch/femme thing works.\nAfter the fall of civilization when the guy with an iPod is the most important person in the village.\nYour FK-IK rigging skills really paying off in the post-apocalypse.\nHow much kayfabe is happening right now?\nWhether the PS5 exists and whether you can play Jamestown Plus on it.\nA great way to nurture and nourish your loved ones while also staying away from them.\nSoaking Ls.\nWhether Jim has a sister-in-law.\nTop three texture-bothers-me foods.\nJim's position on eating eyeballs.\nA snack that can look back.\nSucking on the window to the soul.\nOrdering your tuna salad extra starchy.\nA deep appreciation of the sandwich arts.\nMaking 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.\nGetting a real video editor to do the parts that are edited like a normal video but editing all the parts that are bullshit yourself.\nA daughter in rock climbing camp.\nDescribing Cosmic Cat socks to your dad.\nHow to enjoy things.\nA series of experiences that enter your body via your sensory organs.\nLaying a framework for understanding the self.\nEncoding your musical taste in a C program.\nConfiguring human behavior on an iPad.\nFeeding the Reddit grist mill with season 4 of Westworld.\nLiving near a pleasing combination of straightaways and turns so you have to hear people racing motorcycles at all hours.\nThe emotional status of the teenager who flipped his car in front of your house.\nWhat to say after a car accident to convince passers by to not call 911.\nAn SUV that looks like a t-rex just tried to eat it driving the wrong way on the Bay Bridge.\nBombing back into San Francisco in your exploded car.\nSeeing someone driving recklessly but it's okay because the car has a bumper sticker saying \"Everything is fine. We're not drinking in here.\"\nTaking a joke that someone else made and making another joke out of it.\nAs topical an artifact as you can imagine.\nRepetitive and familiar two-minute chunks of sound.\nThe They Might Be Giants album that has the giant squid on the cover.\nSinging Fingertips from start to finish.\nThe amount of work that went into the cover art of Dickie Goodman's Mr. Jaws.\nDJing from a dinghy.\nWriting a thank you note to your travel agent.\nThe clouds blowing overhead like governments and years.\nSecular Americans having to reinvent gratitude since they don't pray.\nParts of you that you think make you a better person.\nValuing something in yourself but not being sure how you got there.\nHaving taught yourself a bunch of hard things and learning to trust the process of learning a skill.\nCivilization: something we agreed to do.\nThe difference between doing something professionally and doing it for fun.\nTrying to sneak into a giant hovering ball of rock.\nPeople who are hungry for topics refusing to hire you.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2022-09-12T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/198897fc-6d06-47d5-9d04-fca3202f0662.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":65290283,"duration_in_seconds":4065}]},{"id":"1189c2ea-2e66-4d9a-842a-4dab3ef1412c","title":"150. Your Honking Monotoe","url":"https://topiclords.com/your-honking-monotoe","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nJenni\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/horsewizrd\n\nTyriq\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/FourbitFriday\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nHot Topic\nToe picks\n\n\nhttps://imgur.com/a/ARHZn5x\n\nTopical medication\nGroke 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\"\nTest of Proficiency in Korean\nTopic Records\n\n\nhttps://myhomeworkdone.com/blog/poetry-topics/\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nWho has been on Topic Lords the most often.\nPlugging a leaky dog.\nWhether dogs know about consent.\nA store in the mall that teenagers go to.\nStranger Things merch in the Hot Topic.\nSqueezing the timeline.\nThe goth-emo shift of the aughts.\nThe phrase \"big tiddy goth girlfriend\" which will far outlast the word \"goth\" in general usage.\nDark Academia: emo but in school.\nTrying to do actual research in an Elden Ring library.\nRustic Dark Academics.\nBuying a sweet Kirby t-shirt at GameStop and getting a compliment on it from your therapist.\nMinnesota: the Land of Lakes.\nDogehouse Laser Tag.\nA variety show that shows a variety of Youtube videos.\nThe internet and real life merging, to the detriment of both realms.\nEveryone's top four toes.\nIntrusive thoughts about feet, the worst body part.\nWhat the guy who runs the nude model sketch thing thinks of your feet vis-a-vis your age.\nThe most awkward encounter of your life until the next day when you run into the same guy again.\nSending a picture of your feet to the same friend every year.\nPutting 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.\nTop ten toe beans.\nMr. Frito-Lay smelling a dog foot and thinking \"I want a chip that smells like this!\"\nNothin' but thumbs.\nWhether a horse hoof is just one big toenail.\nWhat people would look like if they had the proportions of animals.\nThe indecency of seeing a bird's knee.\nMedication you're supposed to use topically but it also tastes good.\nThe 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.\nVery petroleum-based very fake coconut.\nChris 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.\nDeep-frying the inedible part of the edamame.\nChewing your food as many times as possible.\nElaborate traffic jam metaphors for chewing food.\nHitting the big four-two.\nThe Box of Celebrations.\nDescribing a Twix bar without ever saying the name Twix.\nWhen the moon hits your eye like a big chocolate gravy, that's a mole.\nTrying 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.\"\nTriscuit: it's one more than a biscuit.\nChampion Racehorse Electricity Biscuit.\nThe Shape of Electricity, starring Pikachu.\nWinston drinking all of your water.\nBeing 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.\nSneaking into somebody's room and replacing their diary with their diary translated into Korean.\nSaloon: just a salon with an extra O.\nThe room where you keep your art collection in a pile on the floor and visitors can come in to dig through it.\nThe podcast where we talk about Robin Tunney.\nSelling Soviet and left-wing political music by mail order.\nThe Hundred Best Poetry Topics.\nWhy it is so frustrating to be frustrated.\n","content_html":"

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

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Lords:

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2022-09-05T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/1189c2ea-2e66-4d9a-842a-4dab3ef1412c.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":59614389,"duration_in_seconds":3706}]},{"id":"251fd623-15ca-40cb-9ba0-29561eb1ac8c","title":"149. Croc Nutz","url":"https://topiclords.com/croc-nutz","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nErica\nDavid\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nA partnership between you and a tool\nSchmalhausen and Vernadsky, my own personal ARG\nStop trying to make \"a wedge is a machine\" happen. It's not going to happen\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine\n\nThe Poetry Teacher, by Mary Oliver\n\n\nhttps://voetica.com/voetica.php?collection=2&poet=27&poem=5712\n\nDrinking vinegar\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-chain_fatty_acid\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nTaking an allergy pill and getting something unexpected.\nNap skeptics.\nNon-stop napping.\nWanting 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.\nWho gets to chew the grape next and for how long.\nForgetting a story after you tell it, so you can tell the story back and forth forever.\nA plastic grape that dissolves in your nose.\nThe least favorite thing that you bought during the pandemic.\nThe collective politico-pandemical nightmare.\nA shitty partnership between you and a shitty tool.\nOl’ Slicky.\nTools that bring you distress.\nWhether it's legal to open carry a claymore in Texas.\nA decoration you can put on your truck just in case nobody knows what an asshole you are.\nWhether you can open-carry a dildo in Texas if the dildo is also an assault rifle.\nGluing a penis to things you don't like and explaining that \"this is a partnership between you and a tool.\"\nPapers that you really approve should've read fifteen years ago.\nThe parallel world of the Modern Synthesis.\nSoviet biologists who were recognized in their time but have since been forgotten.\nStalin's purge of scientists researching Mendelian genetics.\nBeing evacuated to Kazakhstan and fed only wilted spinach so that you can finally write the book you've been thinking about.\nBringing your adopted pet wolf back with you from Kazakhstan.\nGrowing up after the Russian revolution in St. Petersburg.\nDelegating research by convincing the Game Detectives folks that there is a pop culture reward behind it.\nYour own personal ARG that only you care about and doesn't lead to any goal except knowing more facts.\nThe point of games.\nThe creativity that exists in fiction that you wish you could capture in nonfiction.\nThe advantages of reality over fiction.\nBecoming disenchanted with capitalism in the 1920s.\nThe Demon Haunted World.\nEscaping from Stalinist Russia into Nazi Germany.\nCheers to a boring life.\nA slightly tilted floor.\nElectrifying the wedge so it's finally a machine.\nThe xkcd comic from 15 years ago that lampooned the way Wikipedia articles used to be stereotypically bad.\nBeing good at math and assuming that also means you'd be good at writing an encyclopedia.\nWhether Wildlife Ecology is a different field from Wildlife Biology.\nThe shittiest source that Wikipedia will accept as a citation.\nCiting George W. Bush as a source in your peer-reviewed paper about climate change.\nAll the dogs arriving at once.\nDogs teaching students how to write thirsty happy poems.\nDog Songs (2013)\nDeliberately putting line breaks where they seem least intentional.\nThe Wedge of the Poetry World.\nDinging the pan to proceed.\nThe manufacture and use of short-chain fatty acids.\nFixing an ulcer with vinegar.\nFuck you, I'm drinking a shrub.\nDrinking balsamic vinegar and then rinsing with baking soda.\nButter and vinegar, together at last.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2022-08-29T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/251fd623-15ca-40cb-9ba0-29561eb1ac8c.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":63576045,"duration_in_seconds":3960}]},{"id":"0e2ac5ab-cebf-4c87-9413-3a3b2a257725","title":"148. Dual-Wielding Ingresses","url":"https://topiclords.com/dual-wielding-ingresses","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nCisHetKayFaber\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/CisHetKayFaber/\n\nPhone\n\n\nTopic Lords:\n\n\nWhy are Japanese adult video titles so long and weird?\n3DS Street Pass\nService at Lou's Diner is incredible\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYnEmyq-0sA\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJb-czNC_ls\n\nThe Revolution Will Not Be Televised, by Gil Scott Heron.\n\n\nhttps://genius.com/Gil-scott-heron-the-revolution-will-not-be-televised-lyrics\n\nPeople that do things\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nSeeking penance from the Topic Lord.\nDual-purpose infotainment.\nGetting a new job that is better for your mental health.\nThe People's Republic of Wal-Mart.\nMaximizing human dignity.\nJennifer Government.\nWorks of stilted microfiction describing porn contents.\nInformation density and reading speed in Japanese writing.\nAccidentally machine-translating the wrong field.\nOrganizing your porn by publisher.\nThe full title of Robinson Crusoe.\nWhen movie trailers stopped giving the whole plot away as a matter of course.\nSetting your most recently played game to \"Health and Safety Information\" before going out to collect 3DS street-passes.\nTrying to get 3DS street passes on in suburbia.\nEdging towards the playground to get 3DS street passes without getting close enough that people notice you edging towards the playground.\nWalking backwards into the playground, staring at your 3DS.\nTaking over a gym and leaving something behind.\nA 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.\nCollecting all the territories in 3DS street pass.\nThe critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XVIV now with the free expansion up to level 60.\nA problem that helps you exercise.\nWandering around Willow Glen dual wielding Ingresses.\nAttacking a portal in an AR game and some guy in cargo shorts comes out of his house to politely ask you to stop.\nMin-maxing your Burger King visits to become the mayor of Burger King.\nHacking the limiter on your chocolate milk tap.\nLou's superhuman beverage production.\nThe era of automats.\nHow they stored coffee in the 1950s.\nHaving one of each thing on your menu ready to give to potential customers immediately.\nThe turnaround on a queue of hamburgers.\nSpaghetti and blankets at the Japanese McDonald's.\nThe MegaMuffin.\nThe Bojangles biscuit game.\nLosing yourself on skag and skipping out for beer during commercials.\nNixon playing a bugle.\nA revolution to get rid of the nubs.\nSliding a color TV into a stolen ambulance.\nOnly letting people into the revolution who can't spell Natalie Wood's name.\nDreaming about the end of television.\nThe BBC covering climate change by talking about how nice and sunny it is.\nThe guy who wanted to work at Nintendo so he got a job working at Nintendo.\nImproving your tools and workflow because you're procrastinating doing actual work.\nPlaying Tetris on a gamepad vs. on a keyboard.\nTetris APM.\nSwitching joycon hands because you're accustomed to using the arrow keys with your right hand.\nMaking friends the wrong way in Japan.\nMaking things on purpose vs. making them accidentally.\nKnowing how to act in a Japanese meeting.\nLearning how to work towards a goal every day whether or not you feel like it.\nHow to tell when a game is ready to ship.\nGoing 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.\"\n","content_html":"

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

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Lords:

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2022-08-22T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/0e2ac5ab-cebf-4c87-9413-3a3b2a257725.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":65544778,"duration_in_seconds":4096}]},{"id":"2ccf1006-92ec-4777-a7ad-2d101154a7af","title":"147. Part-Time Cryptids","url":"https://topiclords.com/part-time-cryptids","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nLaura\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/lmichet/\n\nNick\n\n\nhttp://nicknicknicknick.net/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nCan the biological function of expelling waste be improved in any way? Should humans expel waste differently?\nThe Hobbit: Dopesmoker Edition. (it's great)\nGato Gonzales and the Guts Pose\n\n\nNick at the Montreal Screwjob: https://imgur.com/a/45Opfxq\n\nThe Fish, by Elizabeth Bishop\n\n\nhttps://poets.org/poem/fish-2\n\nTwitter's UI has changed \"Top 3\" and \"Top Fives\" into \"Top Four\"\nEvery 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.\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nThe type of band that has four songs per album.\nCreating ambient soundscapes via a series of guitar pedals.\nJohnny To.\nInterpersonal violence and the right to be perceived as human.\nA world where everyone knows Judo for some reason and they fight each other with Judo all the time.\nThe quality of life edge that birds have over humans (their urine to feces ratio)\nA 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.\nImproving the human condition with a wall hole and maybe a wall tank.\nBurying 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.\nHow geniuses empty dumpsters.\nEveryone taking the first Monday of the month off of work to poop and at 6pm the city's plumbing system explodes.\nHow to monetize pooping teens.\nAmerican poor being condemned to a low quality poop zone whereas in Europe they have luxury poop villas.\nLocking your dumpster so it's not filled with old carpet overnight by marauding carpet installers.\nA Person on Twitter.\nPlaying a stoner album at the same time as a stoner movie.\nAn album/movie combo entirely bereft of revelatory synchronicities.\nThe most wrinkly hobbit.\nWhether Gandalf was actually smoking something or if that's just something people joke about.\nBrian Moriarty's multiple GDC talks about looking for secrets where there are none.\nWriting a classic rock album intended to be played simultaneously with Boss Baby 2.\nRodolfo \"Gato\" Gonzales's legacy in Japan.\nWhat the Guts Pose means to you.\nAssigning elaborate meaning to each fist in a fist pump.\nHenry Cavill reloading his fists.\nPlaying Rock Paper Scissors with Mario whenever he collects a moon.\nA little head tilt to get you in the right mood to pick up rocks.\nWhether Guts Berserk is named after Guts.\nElden Ring as Berserk fanfic.\nUnderstanding and enjoying Elden Ring in a new way.\nAttending the Montreal Screw-Job but not having any idea what's going on.\nTaking 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.\nA poem describing a fish.\nA five-haired beard of wisdom.\nA poem with fantastic mouth feel.\nCatching 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.\nDownloading a poem to your hard drive.\nA good idea or at least a fun idea.\nWhether you can believe the web design on this whitehouse.gov.\nKilling software like only a 90s dad can.\nEating nachos every night.\nWanting to do things in fours because on Twitter you can attach four images to a post.\nTop Four Favorite Sandwiches.\nRefusing to share your top anythings.\nThat time Nintendo burned a hole in the palms of millions of children.\nThe ways Pokemon Go encourages you to put your phone down.\nThe kinds of places that society benefits from Pokemon Go not being played.\nThe Pokestop Review Process.\nTwo excellent reasons not to ship the Virtual Boy as a helmet.\nVR chaperones.\nBeing okay with growing too tall but only if you have friends who are also growing way too tall.\nSmall inconvenient things about growing taller.\nA cryptic giant living on a mountaintop.\nBeing 10 feet tall and retired and figuring out how to live in a normal sized house.\nDoing CSG with caves and shirts.\nModular clothes that you can reconfigure to cover your changing body.\nA wisp of a person with an eternal tube sweater.\nNot wanting to become a spaghetti but respecting anybody who wants to become a spaghetti.\nGrowing to twice your adult height and getting cast as the monster in every horror movie.\n","content_html":"

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

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2022-08-15T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/2ccf1006-92ec-4777-a7ad-2d101154a7af.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":57926656,"duration_in_seconds":3604}]},{"id":"8ad1c87a-9545-4304-a985-42e4aaab17d6","title":"146. If You Can't Pay The Time, Don't Do The Feet Liking","url":"https://topiclords.com/if-you-cant-pay-the-time-dont-do-the-feet-liking","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nMaxx\n\n\nhttp://false-panels.com/\n\nNelson\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/WritNelson/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nHow many random numbers you can dial before you contact someone who is expecting you\nPocket versions of your art. (Mini games, mini sculpture, mini songs?)\nhttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Matthews_Band_Chicago_River_incident\nhttps://poets.org/poem/so-you-want-be-writer\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nBeing non-binary in Washington.\nWitch Strandings.\nThe crucial aspects that define a traditional Strand-Like.\nWhat makes the nurturing not feel bad/weird?\nPhysically inhabiting a mouse cursor.\nPlaying shuffleboard on a Mario Golf power meter using the Oblivion persuasion wheel.\nSeveral things that people like, existing at the same time.\nWhy nobody but Jim is making Frog Fractions games.\nDialing random phone numbers until you reach someone you know.\nA nightmare creature from the abyss waiting by the phone for your call.\nEveryone having exactly one mom and exactly one faceless nightmare creature waiting by the phone.\nPhone number Minesweeper.\nBirthday parties as an opportunity to force your friends to play the weird game you just designed.\nGuessing the phone number of the burner phone in front of you.\nComputers you can talk to in your local area.\nHacking the government mainframe that has all the Nintendo games.\nNeeding to have a soul before your soul can be sucked out through the phone.\nFinding out how smart dolphins are after they meet the being from beyond the abyss.\nHolding on to your childhood dreams of stealing a series of towers for your tower collection.\nFiguring out how to put custom ringtones on your flip phone even though the Verizon rep said it was impossible.\nWhat the Kidz Bop version says instead of \"it smells like R. Kelly's sheets.\"\nA coat that smells like my baseball cleats, yikesssss.\nWhat if football wasn't good?\nWhat would happen if a child held all of baseball in their hands?\nFutilitris.\nSupernova SWF Enabler.\nWorking in the Kidz Bop factory.\nWho Put Goku In Fortnite?\nEnding the game immediately when somebody drops the come bomb.\nNot being allowed to say dang or shit.\nThe through line from miniature replica sculptures to Kidz Bop Breaking Bad.\nKidz Bop Oldboy.\nThe 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.\nIf Jim was arrested for dumping 800 pounds of sewage on an open air tour boat, how many people would try to solve the ARG?\nWiping the raw sewage off of your face and wondering aloud \"is this Frog Fractions 2?\"\nGoing to jail for making a cursed tweet.\nWhat if your tweet only goes viral after the cursed tweet law is enacted?\nHaving to read your tweet aloud to everyone who liked it.\nGoing to jail for writing a cursed tweet and being sentenced to having to explain it to your mom.\nAll-ages interactive sculptures.\nA child with a tiny screwdriver installing an emergency communication system in case someone has a bad time in their Radio Flyer.\nA pretty intense poem by a pretty intense dude.\nWhy or why not to be a writer.\nWarning young people against destroying themselves.\nBeing deeply desperately driven by the essence of what you are creating.\nNeeding somebody to remind you that your work has value.\nThe different coping strategies required to create a work that takes half an hour to finish vs. years to finish.\nFalse panels.\n","content_html":"

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Lords:

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2022-08-08T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/8ad1c87a-9545-4304-a985-42e4aaab17d6.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":46839481,"duration_in_seconds":2915}]},{"id":"96cff35e-7878-4fc3-9cc0-4a5a68dc7b3b","title":"145. A Visceral Tobacco Consumption Experience","url":"https://topiclords.com/a-visceral-tobacco-consumption-experience","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nHallie\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/Hallie_9000/\n\nJohn\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/robohunkx\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nFinding value in shared imagined spaces and worlds outside of religious contexts\nFinal Fantasy Challenge: Zero Story; and other vaporware games & mods of which no record exists on the internet\nYoutube streams movies now, and they have comments\nCanterbury Tales General Prologue, by Geoffrey Chaucer\n\n\nhttps://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43926/the-canterbury-tales-general-prologue\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nThe Ten Timers Club.\nPodcasting for three years straight.\nFantastical ideas for famous bands covering Garages songs.\nAn increasingly hard to describe person.\nReclaiming the asshole.\nThe sort of thing that sometimes happens in Maine.\nFinding the right microphone settings.\nA podcast about what people think about that ends up being a video game podcast because that's what they're thinking about.\nThe barnacle on the indie game scene life.\nMaking a video game good on purpose.\nTalking to your friends who talk you out of grad school because you need to be talked out of grad school again \nYour own personal relationship with the divine.\nShared imagined worlds and how we talk about them.\nYour friend asks how you're doing and you say \"Han and Leia at the end of Empire\" and your friend just nods.\nFighting a great beast together.\nPromoting group cohesion by developing a shared frame of reference.\nHow 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.\nWaxy potatoes vs. starchy potatoes.\nWhere to find non-starchy potatoes.\nHarry Potter and the Sacred Texts.\nThe act of interpretation and the creation of shared symbols.\nA Final Fantasy mod that you were very excited about in the early 00s but that now has no results on google.\nAbraham Lincoln Land vanishing from the internet.\nAll the bad video games starring Tux.\nYour boss saying \"let me show you how the Peter Principle works\" and promoting you to Project Manager.\nErasing the projects you are ashamed of from your personal web site.\nAdding a clause to your will about deleting all your novelty web sites.\nA web site where you write a bunch of fake reviews of fake bands and eventually start writing the songs yourself.\nMutually executable languages.\nA betrayal of both movies and Youtube.\nCommenting with a timestamp of your favorite part of Napoleon Dynamite.\nWhether Pedro won the election on his own merits.\nCreating 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.\nWhether John will ever release the video of him dancing like Napoleon Dynamite.\nAn entire stanza of completely unintelligible Middle English.\nWanting to go on pilgrimages to seek the Holy Blissful Martyr because spring is coming.\nPronouncing all the silent letters.\nA well-SparkesNotes'd text.\nHaving a poem memorized but not in order.\nHow wishing someone a happy birthday before their birthday is illegal in Germany.\nThe least surfer dude.\nVarious tobacco saliva receptacles, some of which ding and some of which don't.\nChewing tobacco but not having the self-respect to get a spittoon.\nThe nicotine delivery method where you stick a tobacco blob under your lip like a walrus tusk and make TikTok videos.\nDip a.k.a. Snus.\nA cool friend from Tennessee.\nBig League Chew, again.\nAsking the clerk for tar patches because nicotine patches don't give you melanoma.\nEnding the show early because you believe so vehemently that vaping is good for you.\nA pithy German word for having guested on Topic Lords ten times.\n","content_html":"

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Lords:

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2022-08-01T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/96cff35e-7878-4fc3-9cc0-4a5a68dc7b3b.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":58719605,"duration_in_seconds":3654}]},{"id":"f6df4126-6916-450e-ac57-f123b9e2d0ed","title":"144. Vultures Who Know The Difference (Between Sugar And Aspartame)","url":"https://topiclords.com/vultures-who-know-the-difference-between-sugar-and-aspartame","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nJohnB\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/YouOldSoAndSo\n\nJesse\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nWario64\nWe need to bring back Dogme 95\nSeeking Mr. Eaten's Name Again\n\n\nhttps://saint-arthur.tumblr.com/\n\nThis Is Just To Say, by William Carlos Williams\n\n\nhttps://poets.org/poem/just-say\n\nWhatever happened to outdoor pop machines?\n\n\nhttps://lovepittsburghshop.com/blogs/love-pittsburgh/may-the-pop-machine-be-with-you\n\nGodzilla\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nA Link's Awakening speedrun that may surprise you.\nLord clouds.\nWhat's the deal with Wario 64?\nAsking Webster's Dictionary to define Wario 64.\nYour source for video game deals.\nHow Wario64 feels about Chris Pratt voicing Mario.\nGeralt in the bathtub.\nWario World for the GameCube.\nThe hidden origins of Wario64.\nTen rules for how to make a movie.\nLars von Trier being traumatized by a dolly shot and inventing Dogme 95.\nUnintentional Dogme 95 movies.\nUnboxing a Criterion Collection DVD live on the show and there's just a DVD in there.\nCreative freedom, the worst constraint.\nA recipe for the worst movies in the fucking world.\nDogme 95 drinking game.\nMaking a flag in the bucket.\nThe Adventure 2600 continuity.\nBats that can steal things that shouldn't be able to be stolen.\nA video game quest that was very difficult and obscure until someone wrote a FAQ.\nThe ludonarrative consonance of following your self-destructive obsession at the same time your character follows their self-destructive obsession.\nBeing confused about a story beat in a video game and having to seek out a lore genius on the internet.\nThe Random House Annotated Fallen London.\nBecoming St. Gawain's Candle.\nHow the icebox plums poem became a meme.\nLearning about poutine on social media.\nSatirical poetry in the 1960s.\nThings that are Ira Glass's fault.\nExtreme meminess.\nWanting a god damn plum right now.\nPictures of normal people that are considered heresy.\nDeliberately making your podcast guest's audio sound bad.\nContinuing to read poetry even though you're terrible at it.\nAsking Siri to get you a substantial raise.\nChecking the change return slots on the mobile phone bank for quarters, to do your part to sustain the soda vending machine economy.\nThe cost of a 510 ml bottle of pop these days.\nThe fastest pop machine in the world.\nJoking 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.\nApplying the sugar tax to beverages sweetened with aspartame.\nThe Godzilla movie with Inspector Gadget in it.\nRedheaded Stepzilla.\nThe three Godzilla movies that are out of print in the US. (But not on archive.org)\nHaving to license all the Kaiju separately.\nMovies that are in the public domain because they were not explicitly labeled as copyrighted.\nPublic Domain Day.\nThe personality traits of Sherlock Holmes that are and aren't copyrighted.\nThe Beast at 20,000 Fathoms.\nMessing 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.\nMaking a movie where you can do as many takes as you want but they all have to go in the finished film.\nGodzilla taking some much needed time off.\nInvasion of Astro-Monster.\nWatching the entire Godzilla series and learning why people think Avengers: Endgame is good.\nA latchkey kid in 1960s Japan overcoming his bullies by imagining that Godzilla is his friend.\nA dinosaur falling in love with a lighthouse.\nEmpathizing with the dinosaur who is completely misunderstanding the situation.\nWhy the English speakers in Japanese or Korean films are such bad actors.\nAn island protector of these native people brought to society for reasons of Capitalism.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2022-07-25T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/f6df4126-6916-450e-ac57-f123b9e2d0ed.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":70337253,"duration_in_seconds":4379}]},{"id":"4ea72677-7982-4e14-886c-4659e55cc64b","title":"143. Your Face Is Looking A Little Impact Resistant","url":"https://topiclords.com/your-face-is-looking-a-little-impact-resistant","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nChall\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/MrChrisLHall\n\nJenni\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/horsewizrd\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nFrogs evolved leaping before they evolved landing and a couple species haven't figured out the \"landing\" part yet.\n\n\nhttps://defector.com/why-is-this-tiny-frog-so-awful-at-jumping/\nhttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/horrifying-sculpture-depicts-human-evolved-survive-car-crash-180959878/\n\nI got a weird device called a charachorder. Haven't used it yet though, it came 2 hours ago.\n\n\nhttps://charachorder.com/products/charachorder-one\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_organ\n\nSpeedrun health hazards\n\"Bananas Bananas,\" by Greg\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4aHhM624oI\n\nI assumed the Chicago Bean would be kinda lame. I was wrong. It is super neat\nVideo games that are just a little place and you walk around and maybe go to a museum\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnTeqsh47jw\nEsper says: Speaking of low-stress games about existing in a space, I am forced by the powers of self-promotion to mention my own Hang Out In The Basement Simulator, a game about chilling in a basement. There's a nerf gun, a little guitar you can strum a few notes on, records, and over 30 hours of watchable TV (all scraped from little Internet Archive weirdnesses). https://aceofwands.itch.io/hoitbs\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nNose Goes.\nAllergy medication that does not make you drowsy.\nComing out of the womb sleep-deprived.\nJenni from the Blockchain.\nPokemon Gockchain.\nA good speedrun idea for somebody else.\nWatching Mario 64 let's-plays to distract us from the disaster of our own interiority.\nWhy Can't the Pumpkin Toadlet Land?\nLanding in a t-pose and rigid-bodying your way into a pratfall.\nWhich frog would win the X Games of frogs?\nThe distant future when everyone has evolved to survive car crashes and nobody is allowed to wear a shirt in the payroll department.\nAn editorial team choosing what links will go on the front page.\nPhotoshop This Tractor.\n\"Gone drinking\" as a euphemism for crashing into a lake.\nThe history of social media on the internet.\nChoosing the most obnoxious possible video to be your Zoom background.\nWhat's stopping developers from compiling ffmpeg to Webassembly and including it in every web page.\nChorded word entry.\nGetting an exciting new keyboard where it takes you three minutes to type youtube.com.\nSwitching keyboard layouts to fix your abysmal typing posture.\nA very dim room full of typewriters.\nThinking about the cubic watermelons.\nAnother one from the Deck of Old Memes.\nWhether Plato ever got to prove his cave allegory correct.\nRSI in the speedrunning scene.\nWaving your right hand up and down for twelve hours a day.\nHypertapping.\nTap to Survive!\nClickers that require you to watch the game run to efficiently progress.\nThe deep crevasse where Cookie Clicker lives in your brain.\nGetting RSI from watching speedruns all the time.\nCoping with the mental anguish of speedrunning.\nLeomard Sportsinterviews.\nMaking a mixtape of yourself playing clarinet and your younger brother reading poems, for your girlfriend Sara.\nYour vengeful ex-girlfriend turning you in to VEVO for music piracy using the mixtape you gave her as proof.\nUsing music to anchor a repeated moment.\nUsing this episode of Topic Lords to score your morning routine.\nWarrant canaries.\nBananas: they're underground.\nThe return of the Banana Box.\nThe tropical fruit that tastes like mayonnaise.\nThe cheese of the sea.\nCloud Gate in Millennium Park.\nChicago Bean Radiation.\nWalking 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.\nWearing a hospital wrist band informing your duel opponent that your internal organs are mirrored left to right.\nMirror image twins.\nFighting little ASCII bears and solving exploding bomb puzzles.\nWhat you do in Proteus.\nThe game where you hit the ball back and forth over a net.\nA board game where you vacation in feudal Japan.\nThe Museum of Other Realities.\nSeiklus and Gebub's Adventure.\nA place to wander while interesting things happen to you.\nThe talking tree that says \"invest in leaves.\"\nLegends of Murder.\n","content_html":"

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Lords:

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2022-07-18T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/4ea72677-7982-4e14-886c-4659e55cc64b.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":61933573,"duration_in_seconds":3851}]},{"id":"811bca70-b3a0-4df2-a73e-bd75fbe68067","title":"142. Threatjazz","url":"https://topiclords.com/threatjazz","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nBen\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/KosmologyB\n\nTyriq\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/FourbitFriday\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nWhich real life occupations are the closest thing to actual Adventuring? And would you want to do any of them?\nGetting a tattoo has somehow motivated me to be healthier\nIt's weird that some instruments you play with your hands and others you put in your mouth\nThe Mushroom Hunters\n\n\nhttps://www.themarginalian.org/2019/11/25/the-mushroom-hunters-animation-neil-gaiman/\n\nDiscovering how much butter and sugar is in your common or garden cake has filled me with sheer horror\nA public call to action for the creation of Violence/Threat Jazz as a genre\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nThe collection of music songs that you put on the internet last year.\nThe Citizen Sleeper trailer.\nManaging a game's Steam store page.\nThe conversations you don't have.\nAdventuring as it is conceived of and perceived.\nGoing into the field and being exposed to health hazards.\nRock climbing and its relationship to speed running.\nAll the big parts of the world having been discovered already so you need to be satisfied with discovering tiny parts.\nThe difficulty of spending a lifetime rock climbing when you don't enjoy rock climbing.\nWhether being sent off to war feels or ought to feel like an adventure.\nLockdown tattoos.\nThe uncle who convinced you to get an eyebrow ring.\nDesigning a tattoo so that it still looks right if the recipient suddenly gets swole.\nThe Clean and Jerk.\nCompressing yourself inwards as you hit the ground.\nThe idea of caring about your appearance.\nLooking in the mirror and feeling good about yourself.\nA portion of meat that is ruining your aesthetic.\nYour full-sleeve Gigantamax Meowth tattoo.\nArk from Terranigma.\nA tattoo of a goat because you love goats a lot.\nPutting pictures on your body and looking cool.\nGoing full body-mod in your old age.\nA Rotom right up there in your armpit.\nWalking around looking like a JRPG character with an asymmetrical pauldron.\nThe right torso for me.\nBone tattoos that are just for you because nobody can see your bones.\nWaiting until you are 80 years old for eyeball tattoo technology to get safer.\nScreaming higher and higher until you take a shower.\nAirflow and handflow.\nLicking a musical instrument that makes noise when it's wet.\nChromatic spittoon virtuosos.\nMelody Pops.\nHow to survive long car trips before portable video games.\nLollipops you could write with.\nChocolate cigarettes wrapped in rice paper.\nRebranding your offensive children's cigarette brand to \"Fads.\"\nThe formulation of laws to follow facts revealed.\nFood Tasters.\nOne king left and so much food to eat.\nWhy so much fiction is so obsessed with royalty.\nCracking a nut in your brain.\nThe moon's excellent product placement.\nCakes for people to jump out of.\nHow to marble a cake.\nThe butter iceberg.\nThe inside scoop behind all the drama.\nThe Sharks and the Jets snapping at each other.\nThe dude in Mad Max Fury Road playing a flaming guitar on top of a moving truck.\nWhere to see Ben's cats.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2022-07-11T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/811bca70-b3a0-4df2-a73e-bd75fbe68067.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":65477077,"duration_in_seconds":4077}]},{"id":"e0135fe2-eb2d-4fb9-be68-199e610ba0d1","title":"141. Toast In Its Original Format","url":"https://topiclords.com/toast-in-its-original-format","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nAvery\nJesse\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nLaserdisc\nTracing the lineage of racehorses on Wikipedia\nBread is too wide to fit in toasters\nhttps://twitter.com/mogwai_poet/status/1335354217335148546/photo/1\nVariants of bowling, now mostly lost to history, are like glimpses into possible worlds metaphysically close to our own\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nHow to sound like a douchebag if you are a programmer who lives in Oakland.\nA Social Security Number that has way too many sixes in it.\nA disc that is the same size as an LP but looks like a CD and has a movie on it.\nArcade games breaking whenever you transport them.\nLaserdiscs rusting.\nIntegrating the likely degradation of the viewing medium into the piece itself.\nThe Matrix on Betamax.\nThe guy who owns all the Betamax players in your province.\nThe canonical paths to becoming a Laserdisc collector.\nAll the criteria used to curate the Criterion Collection.\nThe advantages and disadvantages of CAV discs over CLV.\nGetting off the couch to flip the disc over halfway through the movie.\nAsking your robot butler to flip the Laserdisc over.\nPotoooooooo.\nSeeing 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.\nFinding the They Live sunglasses and finally being able to read the Snickers ads.\nThe three racehorses that all thoroughbred racehorses are descended from.\nKnowing more about the history of racehorses than about your own family tree, because racehorses are worth more than people.\nWar booty from the battle of Vienna.\nThe General Studbook.\nGoing blind in one eye from staying up for three days straight doing logarithms.\nBell Right Hooks and Cuban Menstrual Crisis.\nWhether the clown face registry still exists for juggalos.\nNothing Sweet About Bees.\nWhat happened to bread?\nYour basic 4:3 bread vs. 4K ultra-wide bread.\nYour favorite toaster from the 1940s.\nA four slice toaster kind of day.\nMaking food better with science and it's going to be way better than nature because it's science.\nConvincing Mr. Smeg not to put his name on the toasters his company manufactures.\nWhat market research firm decided that podcast listeners want underwear and mattresses.\nConstant angular velocity: the only way to rewind a movie.\nA magnetic poetry set that includes the word \"Kafkaesque.\"\nHow Kafkaesque the miscreant insects are.\nWhether Jim has ever touched any other human being.\nHow Zoomers don't know about Graggle Simpson.\nA possible scenario that is metaphysically close to our own.\nHow metaphysically close Canada is to the United States.\nGetting up at 4pm every day and bowling.\nA 3D model recreation of five-pin bowling.\nThe amount of data visualization competence that went into dimensions.com.\nCandlepin and Duckpin bowling.\nThe dimensions of various famous bowlers.\nGetting a parakeet and finding out how much water it displaces.\nMaking a flask out of a parakeet so people think you just brought your pet parakeet to work and aren't drinking on the job.\nBuying a propane tank to use as a water bottle.\nWhat's wrong with Jim's listeners?\nKarate tournaments in the 80s and 90s.\nAssuming Avery's identity and looking in the mirror.\nTo Mock A Mockingbird.\nCertified Bird Mockers.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2022-07-04T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/e0135fe2-eb2d-4fb9-be68-199e610ba0d1.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":63794876,"duration_in_seconds":3970}]},{"id":"3244b87a-fba9-4b4e-829f-d3a8c1f1d154","title":"140. The Most Edible Petrochemical","url":"https://topiclords.com/the-most-edible-petrochemical","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nKevin\n\n\nhttps://www.jwst.nasa.gov/ or http://ircamera.as.arizona.edu/nircam/\nhttps://youtu.be/in6RZzdGki8\nhttps://youtu.be/lrY04VPDg8I\n\nJohn\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nReading the other headlines/articles on newspapers in films that flash on screen solely for the headline\n\n\nhttp://www.chess-in-the-cinema.de/\n\nThe Game Boy Camera/revisiting the PXL-2000 topic and other toy cameras/tech\nBest Halloween candy: candy corn or pumpkin-shaped candy corn?\nIcarus, by Edward Field \n\n\nhttps://genius.com/Edward-field-icarus-annotated\n\nDouglas Hofstadter\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nThe James Webb Space Telescope.\nThe thing you get the most DMs about.\nRecording a fan's answering machine message in the Mario Frustration voice.\nThe guy who \"fixed\" the NES triangle wave.\nBandlimiting your oscillators.\nWhat the real Lordheads know.\nAnother place to shitpost.\n3D entertainment.\nDeku momentum problems.\nThe analog stick mod for Mario 64 DS.\nA remaster that is in direct conversation with what it's remastering.\nThe pros and cons of Mario 64 DS.\nAbandoned let's-plays.\nWaterworld for the Virtual Boy.\nWario Ware and Rhythm Heaven.\nHow to give Nintendo money in 2022.\nProdigy Child Wins Every Award Given.\nPausing movies to read the nonsense headlines that the prop designers didn't expect you to read.\nPausing the movie to complain about the nonsensical Scrabble game depicted.\nA movie about people who don't know how to play Clue.\nA mahjongg game that is a literary microcosm of the players' lives.\nLeaning across the couch to your girlfriend and saying \"that's Chappie's chess game.\"\nPlaying Super Mario Bros. with the Power Glove.\nThe Steam reviews for the 8-bit wrestling game that appears for three seconds in The Wrestler.\nThe only digital camera that was under $100 in the 90s.\nHow to get images off of the Game Boy Camera.\nHooking 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.\nAn in-your-face student film about what happens when computers can detect emotion.\nUsing your Game Boy Camera as a webcam on Twitch.\nThe Game Boy Camera's music sequencer.\nThe Game Boy Camera asking ROM hackers if they are feeling ok.\nThe Gold Zelda Camera.\nThe gold Breath of the Wild cartridge that tastes like the Master Sword.\nThe Cool Cam.\nThe Lefty RX.\nRanking candy by its volume to surface area ratio.\n Getting sick of candy corn naysayers.\nWax Lips: Ya Gotta Eat 'Em!\nA powder that's been glued into a little puck.\nWhat the American Oil and Gas Historical Society has to say about wax lips.\nThe oleaginous history of wax lips.\nEdible dinosaur bones.\nBananasaurus Rex-flavored string cheese.\nThe Genius of the Hero falling to the Middling Stature of the Merely Talented.\nLooking back on your best work and knowing you'll probably never best it but still liking your life more now.\nA short story with extra line breaks.\nTurning any text into a poem by resizing the window so there are extra line breaks.\nRobert Altman's follow-up to MASH.\nA retelling of Icarus featuring the wicked witch saying a slur.\nWhat it means to be conscious.\nGodel, Escher, Bach: I am a Strange Loop except more confusing.\nWriting a book for the general public and having to figure out how to make your ideas fun.\nSearching YouTube for \"Crab Cannon\" and only finding music for weirdos and no cannons of any kind.\nMartin Gardner's column about math games in Scientific American.\nMetamagical Themas.\nUsing math to do fun space stuff.\nStream Frasier Online Free.\nRubik's Cube except spelled like an asshole.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.\r\n","date_published":"2022-06-27T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/3244b87a-fba9-4b4e-829f-d3a8c1f1d154.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":72385803,"duration_in_seconds":4509}]},{"id":"4c539ebf-ac44-4504-b9cb-80d55ed26c7d","title":"139. She Died As A Space Racist","url":"https://topiclords.com/she-died-as-a-space-racist","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nDan\n\n\nhttps://strangecurrencies.org/\nhttps://twitter.com/SC_Reviews_Dan\n\nShepard\n\n\nThey are known as Earthnova in the Discord and has one published work: http://thelitmag.com/2021-edition/this-story-has-a-ghost-in-it/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nOnly playing narrative/story-driven video games once\nSometimes life is like an adventure game, a skill or item that's useless when you get it is needed years later\nSleng Teng Riddim\n\n\nhttps://www.engadget.com/2015-12-04-casio-and-the-sleng-teng-riddim.html\nHere's an argument that the riff originated with David Bowie: https://axischemicals.wordpress.com/2016/01/11/david-bowie-digital-reggae-kingpin/\n\nTyger! Tyger! by Robin Johnson\n\n\nhttps://mobile.twitter.com/rdouglasjohnson/status/1517804673998237697\n\nThe internet and college are two great tastes that taste terrible together.\nThe first time I beat my father at Scrabble\nExplaining traffic jams, or at least this one traffic jam\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nWanting to see all the stuff.\nReplaying a series of four RPG length games to see the alternate endings.\nGetting the most video game endings for your dollar.\nTenable and untenable ways to have an adventure.\nRecapturing the magic of your first time (with emulators).\nGetting every video game you wanted for a system and then enjoying that for 10 minutes.\nA giant archive of every DOS game ever.\nLosing your nostalgia for old games via emulation, but keeping your nostalgia for the box art.\nFalling out of love with Windows Vista.\nKeeping your custard pie intact until the yeti needs it.\nThe bread maker approach to learning a new skill.\nWhy there are no cupcakes in Frog Fractions 2.\nPlaying Go against someone better than you and suddenly losing.\nThe Go community rallying around the identity that computers can't beat the best Go players.\nWhether computer Go has shaped the way humans play Go.\nAn extra creative extra special humany thing.\nBeating a chess expert by convincing them to play something else.\nJohn Henry's retirement plan. \nBeing promised a Yamaha DX7 but receiving a Casio MT-40 instead.\nWriting a part for a rock and roll rhythm section that is accidentally a great reggae rhythm section.\nThe origins of the Amen Break.\nSetting up a situation where you can write your own notes.\nFiguring out where the genre can go with this new tonality.\nStripy guys and chonky units.\nThe best kind of tigers. (Floofers.)\nLearning about slant rhymes one morning and that afternoon writing a poem that rhymes \"eye\" with \"symmetry.\"\nBlake 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.\nGoogling why Blake tried to rhyme \"eye\" with \"symmetry\" and finding dozens of implausible theories, all expressed with complete confidence.\nMaking an impression on the world of poetry by not being good at it.\nHipster throwbacks to the great vowel shift.\nCalvin and Hobbes panoply of tiger poems.\nHolding off on reading more Calvin and Hobbes tiger poems until you’re done recording the podcast.\nNot letting online schooling get in the way of your online education.\nWhether someone will figure out how to do a college class online before we transition back to in-person classes.\nWhether ASL is especially well suited to bring taught over Zoom.\nDoing yard work and wearing protective equipment so you can't pull out your phone to check Twitter.\nLying down in court.\nRealizing for the first time that your parents don't know everything.\nA framed photo of the one time your mom won at Risk.\nThe one thing you and your dad are both interested in.\nSports montage of getting better at Scrabble.\nDriving or better yet watching movies with cars in them.\nEverybody slowing down to take a look at the two headed chicken.\nDriving towards a shadow and being blinded by the sun to what's beyond the shadow.\nA 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.\nA car driving on a road.\nStacking a bunch of human reaction speeds on top of each other.\nSlot cars as a fun and disastrous solution to traffic.\nThe slot car model of public transit.\nFinding everybody on the Discord.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2022-06-20T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/4c539ebf-ac44-4504-b9cb-80d55ed26c7d.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":56445114,"duration_in_seconds":3516}]},{"id":"60234a09-43a4-43c6-9858-0b71e77e857f","title":"138. From Infracheddar To Ultrableu","url":"https://topiclords.com/from-infracheddar-to-ultrableu","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nElena\nAlexander plugs https://www.constantpodcast.com/\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nHosting a party is way better than going to a party\nThe Pearl Jam Liner Notes method of writing first drafts\nLagrange Point Lasagna\nJonathan Swift, \"Ode on the Longitude\"\n\n\nhttps://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Works_of_the_Rev._Jonathan_Swift/Volume_17/Ode_on_the_Longitude\n\nThe theory of spontaneous generation\nIt turns out Sunday Roasts are a whole Deal\nDiagnose my tongue!\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI3yD3WAcz4\nhttps://www.buzzfeed.com/danielralston/the-true-story-of-the-fake-zombies-the-strangest-con-in-rock\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nUnfindable Lords.\nThe Constant: a History of Getting Things Wrong.\nContinuous vs. discontinuous weighted blankets.\nPeople asking you about your life so you have to give them all the necessary context on your life so they'll understand.\nA masquerade ball where you receive a quest to find someone wearing a dog mask and talk to them about topology.\nThe smallest of talk.\nA continuous unplanned unstructured talking with each other that you expect to just happen by itself.\nBringing a cheeseboard to a party so you can go sort it whenever the conversation gets awkward \nSorting the cheeseboard from sharp to mild and then sorting the cheese by color but nobody at the party is allowed to actually eat any.\nFrom Infracheddar to Ultrableu.\nA sorting algorithm gaining intelligence and trying to understand itself.\nTeaching your friends sign language so they'll be quieter at parties.\nThe weirdness of reading aloud.\nWriting while talking.\nA species of alien that can follow two conversations at once.\nBalancing the complexity of your word choices so your sentence flows nicely.\nWriting the most important word of each sentence first and then going back and filling in the rest of the sentence.\nWorrying about commas later.\nTaking so long to implement the core of your idea that you've forgotten the details.\nHow to bake brownies that are all edge pieces.\nHow to bake brownies that's all center pieces.\nSous vide brownies.\nPeople who only like the center of the falafel.\nThe perfect solution for the person who prefers the grossest part of the brownie.\nOpening 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.\nTectonic plates in the lasagna dimension.\nSubduction lasagna.\nThe asteroid equivalent of brownie soup.\nForming trade alliances with the people who live in the air pockets of the lasagna dimension.\nLasagna creationists.\nThe Earth is a rock lasagna.\nWhether lasagna or baked ziti is more likely to be naturally occurring.\nBepst and besht.\nA long-standing problem in navigation.\nFiguring out how to determine longitude in the Age of Navigation.\nGetting kicked out of Cambridge because you don't accept the Trinity.\nFiring a cannon at noon so everyone knows what time it is.\nSuch explosive ships, in such known locations.\nA new method for discovering longitude both at sea and land, humbly proposed for the consideration of the public.\nThe Jewish Space Lasers of the 1700s.\nThe sense in which GPS is extremely loud.\nPutting a log on the fire and salamanders come out.\nThe riddle where to understand the answer you have to know that bees come from lion carcasses.\nHow 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.\nA recipe for scorpions.\nThe Tragedy of the Sunday Roast.\nThe St. Tuppensday Brouhaha.\nMillion Shilling Idea: serving Sunday Roast all week.\nVictorian orphans mining for Bitcoin (or \"bittums\") out on the Playa.\nEating a Yorkshire pudding at a Lagrange point and sopping up gravy from the gravy dimension.\nVia Gravia.\nNega-scurvy, where you eat too much fruit and grow extra teeth.\nThe Yes Ship of Theseus.\nThat 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.\nThe Caramelldansen saga.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2022-06-13T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/60234a09-43a4-43c6-9858-0b71e77e857f.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":58604805,"duration_in_seconds":3644}]},{"id":"f5ee9ffd-0c2c-4a91-b395-9dce8e4b3f1a","title":"137. Burying The Machete (So Nobody Can Open The Coconuts) ","url":"https://topiclords.com/burying-the-machete-so-nobody-can-open-the-coconuts","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nJohn\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/robohunkx\nhttps://twitter.com/AshbyBrewery/\n\nApril\n\n\nhttps://www.instagram.com/midnightgardenstitchery/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nPlaying Grand Theft Auto 5 because I miss hiking in California\nEmbroidery\nJokes that three year olds tell\nMoondrop's Tale\n\n\nhttps://docs.google.com/document/d/1Q6h1_gLGH7hDy3uhWpLtqapbpRqVFkawAbQ1ywVEu4E/edit\nSkeleton Jelly: https://imgur.com/lbIoX\n\nSurvivor\n\n\nhttps://survivingtribal.com/2017/08/04/survivor-flashback-friday-survivor-gabon-gif-end-gifs/\n\nExcluding certain topics from my Twitter recommendations has never been harder (and also: trying to understand why Russell Crowe keeps showing up in the \"suggested posts\" of the AshbyBrewery account)\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nReturn of the Beast Lord.\nWhether the Beast Lord fucks around.\nThe Beets Lord.\nHearing clapping and encouragement and assuming it's for you.\nBeing a tourist in a video game.\nRiding a quad bike up Mt. Chiliad.\nGetting past the first mission where you need to do violence to a lot of people so you can peacefully explore Los Santos.\nDriving down the highway at night and taking a random turnoff into the wilderness and going on a hike in the moonlight.\nThe Grand Theft Auto V Not Hurting Anybody Challenge.\nTaking a self-guided tour of the Bay Area in Watch Dogs 2.\nA Short Hike mod for GTA V.\nA needle art or craft.\nArt vs. Craft.\nWhat is the Citizen Kane of needlepoint? When will we see the first needle that can make you cry?\nA piece of physical media that you look at.\nPhysically doing the thing to make it look like the image you have in your head.\nAn art form that has been around for as long as thread.\nThe joy of buying art supplies.\nThe anxiety relief of various stitches.\nA boy who contains multitudes.\nGetting dad a sidewalk for his birthday.\nCross-stitch route planning.\nMarking notable locations in red.\nThe only way out. (Through.)\nA three year old who wants to do something but delays as much as he can anyway.\nA three year old who is just like adults except with way less impulse control.\nA work in frogress.\nThe tale of druid Moondrop Honeysuckle.\nA disembodied voice telling you to call it \"granny.\"\nThe ancient place beyond the dead star in the Ultraviolet City.\nGoing into a random bar and hearing a poem about your mom.\nGranny the Mind Flayer.\nFalling sideways through reality and having to fight the big boss.\nRecording season 42 of Survivor over Zoom.\nThe evolution of Survivor meta.\nFinding a clue in the crook of a tree.\nThrowing the flint into the ocean.\nThe gif of the two women gasping and the dude behind them smiling.\nThe Ashby Brewery Twitter account.\nWhy the algorithm thinks you care about Ratchet and Clank.\nHow to make Twitter livable on PC vs. on your phone.\nThe work every internet user puts into not being shown the stuff they don't want to see.\nMark Zuckerberg pointing at his mugger and shouting \"See less of this! I'd like to see less of this!\"\nEating the rich and having to worry about biomagnification.\nMr. Beer.\nThe Ashby Brewery and Video Game Studio.\nAll the Brews That's Fit to Print.\nThe Ashby Brewery and Video Game Studio quarterly brewsletter.\nBeing the bee man.\nNot using Twitter in a while and Twitter emails you about what Russell Crowe is doing lately.\nExtensively DMing Russell Crowe and then blocking Russell Crowe and then forgetting that either thing happened.\nWhy they call him John Mystery.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2022-06-06T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/f5ee9ffd-0c2c-4a91-b395-9dce8e4b3f1a.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":73221037,"duration_in_seconds":4563}]},{"id":"29da53b4-9d51-418f-8033-9ed3d3f3825d","title":"136. Thanks For Inventing Dengue Fever, Mark Rosewater","url":"https://topiclords.com/thanks-for-inventing-dengue-fever-mark-rosewater","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nErica plugs increasing optional mask compliance by farting\nJenni plugs birds\nJim plugs metaplugs repeating plugs\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nThe System, and by extension, The Talenti Cup System\nDecentralizing social media is gonna be real good for people not yelling at each other & kinda bad for sharing specialized information\nWe 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\n\n\nhttps://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45521/i-wandered-lonely-as-a-cloud\n\nMark Rosewater designed devil fruits\nEsper 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.\"\nDecarbonizing the language\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nMeta-plugging repeating plugs.\nBee Movie but it’s text to speech.\nIncreasing optional mask compliance by farting.\nMass: the volume of gas inside you, and how to increase its compliance.\nA meme that people teach to each other.\nPacking a shoe into a box and opening up a big box of mold years later.\nCategories of things that fit into one-pint gelato cups.\nThe Body Box.\nHow to make itinerant lifestyles bearable and possible.\nOrganizing your entire house into the House Box.\nUsing your Dunbar number to keep track of your house plants.\nGetting on Topic Lords by searching \"pineapple on pizza\"\nSocial media platforms that are owned by a rich asshole.\nDrastically improving productivity in the workplace by banning the email forwarding of news articles.\nThe overwhelming feeling of shame when you don't have a take on the latest discourse.\nGoing on Tori Amos AOL chat to talk to your social group.\nBuddha's list of 89 things that make you angry.\nWe've invented a new way to be angry.\nRepeating topics because you've forgotten what you were just talking about.\nPeeing in the laundry closet and calling it peeing in the woods.\nExplaining to a three year old when it's ok and when it's not ok to pee outside.\nPee-ka-boo.\nEverything sucks and I have no control over anything but I can poop in the front yard.\nTaking increasingly larger shits in Richard Kind's cat box.\nHow George Clooney gets away with poop modification.\nTaking increasingly larger shits in the Li-Cor machine that measures leaf respiration.\nWhether playing Tom Jones at work constitutes sexual harassment.\nTom Jones in his leisure suit.\nCleaning 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.\"\nWhether it's still sexual harassment if nobody points out that it's sexual harassment.\nJocund company.\nTelling the story of the time you saw a bunch of daffodils.\nSeeing a bunch of daffodils and shouting \"Fuck! These fucking flowers are fucking pretty as shit!\"\nConceiving of yourself as an indoor person, separate from the outdoors.\nReading a Japanese dictionary of dirty words and saying \"Fuck! These fucking dirty words are fucking good as shit!\"\nConceiving of interior spaces as being one with exterior spaced.\nYou can't unpee the bush.\nFinding and eating devil fruits.\nEating the fruit that lets you talk to dragons when dragons don't exist.\nSeeing 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.\nWhat happens if you eat a second devil fruit.\nDengue fever creeping up into Texas from Mexico.\nThe best place to contract Dengue Fever.\nBurning the candle at both ends of the day.\nEating the burrito from both ends.\nHarvesting the bioluminescent fungus.\nTurbines on a windless morn.\nBurning solar panels as a fuel source.\nThe worst thing to happen to Twitter/the best thing to happen to Mastodon.\nThe Dunbar Number for plants.\nVoting someone out of the marriage because there's only room for one person in here.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2022-05-30T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/29da53b4-9d51-418f-8033-9ed3d3f3825d.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":61717478,"duration_in_seconds":3805}]},{"id":"62021d3f-ecad-4087-9e62-acd4981e9808","title":"135. I've Been A Bad, Bad French","url":"https://topiclords.com/ive-been-a-bad-bad-french","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nNate\n\n\nhttp://mommysbestgames.com/\nhttps://twitter.com/MommysBestGames/\n\nFred\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/brobbeh\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nWhy do rice cookers play music but not microwaves?\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/_LucasRizzotto/status/1516205625662836739\n\nIf all your needs are met in a utopian society will we still need sports and competition?\nHot Ice, Cool Sounds\nGoblin Time by Emma \n\n\nhttps://mastodon.art/@emmajuettner/108103474257806186\nEsper 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.\"\n\nNerds candy has a Dungeons and Dragons themed box. Is this good for D&D?\nIf the four horsemen of the apocalypse were recruiting for a fifth member, how would you convince them to hire you?\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nA shmup about how Microsoft screwed up their Xbox 360 dashboard.\nScreaming for 24 hours straight and having a heart attack, or vice versa.\nRemastering your obscure protest game and needing to build a museum explaining the context for the protest.\nAn educational title about how to find games on the new Xbox 360 dashboard.\nAn infinite runner with extremely awkward horse controls.\nUsing all the right dark patterns.\nMeeting 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.\nA pot that's specifically for rice and it knows when to school cooking the rice.\nOnly rice cookers get to sing a song.\nInstalling an AI in your microwave so your microwave can try to murder you.\nA codependent washing machine.\nLandlords in California doing an end run around renter's rights.\nThe 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.\n3D printing some laundry to fold because people are bored in your Utopia.\nExtremely soporific TV.\nA mashup of music and sports.\nGathering to watch a live band play while a chef makes crepes.\nWhether you can be bored while watching two things at the same time.\nAn orchestra trying to live-score a basketball game.\nTrying to listen to an arcade game in the arcade.\nGoblins in our community.\nA bullet point list of how you can help a goblin.\nSpicy radish waffles.\nBlackwheat crepes and whether they're really black.\nLemonade crepes.\nDipping a sandwich in mustard.\nThe pros and cons of salting food.\nChickens laying pre-salted eggs.\nPaying a monthly subscription to Monsanto to keep up the injections that make your tongue exude its own salt.\nGetting in line to hate Monsanto.\nWhether nerds are more or less likely to eat Nerds candy.\nA candy for people who forgot D&D exists.\nCandy&D.\nA series of Nerds-themed D&D campaigns.\nHiring people and paying them.\nStar Trek Jeopardy where 70% of the answers are 1980s pop culture because the federation is obsessed with the 80s.\nSeeing yet another college sports question in the New York Times crossword and deciding whether to get irrationally angry at Will Shortz.\nWhat Jim embodies that is the worst thing.\nDeath, war, famine, pestilence, crypto and late-onset melatonin.\nJohn Cleese teaching sex ed in a boarding school.\nStarting with death and going downhill from there.\nConvincing Death to not kill anyone and Death just rides off and mopes.\nWhether the four horsemen listen to podcasts or if the internet is down during the apocalypse.\nThe four new horsemen of the new apocalypse: crypto, gaslighting, late-onset melatonin and Elon Musk.\nHow to find people to follow on Mastodon.\nHow to be a part of a human-sized community.\nThe Topic Lords subreddit.\nThe photo of a middle school basketball team that somebody posted to the Topic Lords subreddit.\nHow to keep spam bots out of your Discord.\nBatbarian.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2022-05-23T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/62021d3f-ecad-4087-9e62-acd4981e9808.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":73233237,"duration_in_seconds":4523}]},{"id":"d9d3723c-e626-4125-ae48-c088fc494390","title":"134. A Bad Case Of Footmouse","url":"https://topiclords.com/a-bad-case-of-footmouse","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nMaxx\n\n\nmaxx.infinity@gmail.com\n\nMichael\n\n\nhttps://www.instagram.com/softseabunny/\nhttps://www.tiktok.com/@creative.rabbit\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\n\"World's greatest author Chuck Tingle\"\nWay of making moving easier, collective tips?\n\n\nhttps://overmental.com/content/the-beautiful-zelda-artwork-of-katsuya-terada-7898\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DataHand\n\nMelatonin parenting decisions\nhttp://false-panels.com/fjf/\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nRabbit nose speeds.\nA stranger from Australia handing you a twenty dollar bill.\nLining a trench coat with Steam keys.\nHow to make Elden Ring feel like a video game rather than a slog.\nAn incredible variety of fantastical biomes filled with body horror monstrosities that are inexplicably bad at killing you.\nPlaying Elden Ring with passive enemies \nBig columns with massively muscular horsemen.\nSheep curling up into a wheel and rolling away.\nFostering a different sense of what accomplishment means.\nRamps interweaving the stairway.\nGoing into a spooky house and the house is like \"why would you come in here? Can't you see I'm haunted\"\nGoing into a spooky house in hopes of seeing bespoke content.\nAn author of real books that people think are memes.\nA tornado that has a butthole because it must've picked it up with all the other debris.\nLesbian candy corn.\nHigh-functioning chocoholics.\nHaving sex with the State of California and reading the list of things that the State of California has found to cause cancer.\n Making a career out of exploring the weird connections in your own mind.\nWriting to Chuck Tingle to ask for more details about the 747's genitalia.\nMoving house and then moving house again immediately, to save yourself a packing/unpacking cycle.\nHaving many shamefully confusing objects and making the movers wear blindfolds.\nMaking your friends wear blindfolds and rely on LIDAR when they come into your house.\nPutting all your vacation souvenirs in storage and going to your storage unit when you want to remember your vacation.\nThree drawers of cables organized into power cables, USB cables and audio cables, all neatly constrained with velcro.\nGiving your rabbit decoy cables to chew on so that the important cables remain safe.\nThrowing away 70% of your stuff.\nWhether it's a lie if you have books on your shelf that you haven't read yet.\nApocryphal John Waters quotes.\nHaving an outfit for hacktivism.\nMounting the spines of books you've read above your hearth.\nData Hands.\nA keyboard that doesn't work in direct sunlight.\nFoot Mouse and the Data Hands.\nStaring into the abyss, wiggling your fingers.\nUnderwear computing.\nLate-onset melatonin generation.\nHow to deal when everybody in the family gets sick at once.\nAn island made of bureaucracy.\nThe fax machine in your underwear computer.\nHow to pronounce \"James\" according to Jim's facebook profile.\nArmchairing a request for poetry in the rudest way possible.\nStreets that duel like coarse teeth.\nThe matted thing that leaves its woman without the duck.\nHooking your poetry generator up to a receipt printer so people can print a new poem on demand.\nWriting a poem and finding out what you meant later.\nSoup repair.\nA man who is nice on British TV but angry on American TV.\nOld Enough!\nAn extremely relatable two year old.\nBeing tasked with juicing some oranges and spending the next hour chasing the dog.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"Lords: Maxx and Michael. We discuss World's Greatest Author Chuck Tingle, ways of making moving easier, melatonin parenting decisions, and fjf.","date_published":"2022-05-16T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/d9d3723c-e626-4125-ae48-c088fc494390.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":58500403,"duration_in_seconds":3655}]},{"id":"bf2f6770-f0f2-405a-bda7-adf0df69c9d8","title":"133. Every Tumbleweed Is An Antique","url":"https://topiclords.com/every-tumbleweed-is-an-antique","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nDuncan\n\n\nhttp://duncanrobson.com/\nhttps://twitter.com/dunkr\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8V6QtlRbro\n\nAvery\n\n\nhttps://averyburke.bandcamp.com/releases\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nJudging by the selection on eBay, the 1960's and 1970's seems to have been the golden age of belt buckles.\n\n\nhttps://www.filfre.net/2019/07/chief-gates-comes-to-oakhurst-a-cop-drama/\n\nThe time a parent of my kid's friend said \"Do you remember Tetris?\"\nJVC PocketMail \n\n\nhttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PocketMail\n\nThe Prelude, by Matthew Zapruder\n\n\nhttps://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/53843/the-prelude\n\nHyperspecific collections\nYiwum, the city in China that produces 60% of all the Christmas decorations in the world\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nAn album that someday will be available on Spotify.\nThe Mauretania comics by Detective Pikachu.\nThe kind of work that falls out of relaxation.\nThe Golden Age of Belt Buckles.\nGoing into an eBay fugue state.\nPromotional belt buckles.\nThe British obsession with American long haul truckers.\nThe kind of video game where you have to file copious paperwork before and after you shoot someone.\nWhat Police Quest was before and after Daryl Gates was hired as lead designer.\nWhether there were any racist belt buckles in the 1960s.\nBuying 20 $2 games for Christmas rather than the one $40 game your kid actually asked for.\nMen's names from the 1960s and 1970s.\nHewlett Packard belt buckles.\nThe personalized belt buckles you'll sell at your merch table when you go back on tour.\nA conference about fingers.\nTalking to the funeral director before you're dead just in case you die someday.\nA point-of-sale system for funeral directors.\nBidding on a Cheeto and getting outbid.\nHaving It's-Its and That's-Its in the freezer and completing your collection with a What's-It.\nRemembering Tetris.\nBeing a parent and making friends with people you have basically nothing in common with.\nTalking to normies about your nerd interests.\nGoing into the Forever 21 and yelling \"Skeletor!\" and everybody cheers.\nPeople high-fiving you as you walk down the street in your Wolverine costume.\nListening 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.\nStar Wars fans trying to convince each other that being based on the Hero's Journey makes a story good art.\nReading 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.\nRemember Tetris? This is a topic about Tetris.\nWriting email in the jungle and getting the chance to send it if you survive all the quicksand.\nA product using technologies developed by NASA, i.e. one of the programmers drank Tang once.\nDongling things to the Palm Pilot.\nAn article from 1999 titled \"Email on the Move.\"\nCheck your pocket… you've got mail!\nPreserving your Motorola Razr M in amber so Jim can buy it on eBay the next time he's ordering a batch of Orbitz.\nThe Linux open source phone that everybody likes but nobody's heard of.\nThe idea of chocolate.\nA disappointing and super creepy bed and breakfast.\nArt where the artist has disguised a message for you.\nContrasting a Diet Coke with Coleridge and Wordsworth.\nFreedom Power Style Motion.\nHaving a bunch of Tumblrs and never going on Tumblr.\nHours Played.\nA new weird thing that a video game can be.\nCollecting tumbleweeds.\nA tumbleweed the size of a car that stops at the red light.\nMovies from the 1930s giving a false impression of how much you need to worry about quicksand.\nSentient poison oak.\nThe sentient tumbleweed episode of The Outer Limits.\nConsuming media by fast-forwarding to the tumbleweed parts.\nA book of polaroids of all your favorite lighting fixtures.\nA list of every move in every game that Mario has ever been in.\nDesert Chrome.\nDrawing a van and airbrushing your drawing of a van.\nJean-Claude Van Dad.\nSpending the rest of your life googling \"van dad.\"\nZoning your city by the kind of Christmas decorations sold.\nAn ocean of booths selling plastic Santa Clauses as far as the eye can see.\nThe city that sells the other 40% of Christmas decorations.\nThe Christmas memeplex.\nClone shoes with strange names.\nRunning shoes for dogs.\nA romantic comedy set in the city in China entirely dedicated to selling Christmas decorations.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2022-05-09T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/bf2f6770-f0f2-405a-bda7-adf0df69c9d8.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":59207969,"duration_in_seconds":3700}]},{"id":"8eb98b94-a315-412f-85d9-f7db663362ac","title":"132. A Miserable Pile Of Knuckles","url":"https://topiclords.com/a-miserable-pile-of-knuckles","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nCort\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/postgoodism\n\nJenni\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/horsewizrd/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nNovel uses for hundreds of surplus ceramic clown statues\nThinking about household stuff as a system you can design to meet your needs instead of a cultural lifestyle obligation\nSidetalkin'\n\n\nhttps://sidetalkin.com/\n\nBig Black Elephant\n\n\nhttps://www.poem-generator.org.uk/18tpkl8q/big-black-elephant.html\n\nPeople are reluctant to shift their paradigm in real life but give them a video game & they're all for it\n\n\nhttp://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/12/invaders-from-mars.html\n\nGames or sports that started out as fictional, but that people actually play\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nJenni, she slash her.\nA poem that could've been an email.\nOST Jam.\nIf every time you were in a room there was someone else in the room doing the game thing you were doing.\nJust trying to enjoy a leisurely video game when suddenly a co-op partner shows up and starts getting impatient with you.\nAnimals but wet.\nAnimals but they are in the ocean and don't have legs so they can't kick butt.\nThe duality of having legs.\nThe many-faceted world butt.\nTry fish: you're welcome.\nBecoming deeply involved in the design and production of novelty clown statues.\nWho's this unsold clown?\nWhether the prenup addresses any of the potential clown situations.\nHow many clowns could fit in a bed and breakfast.\nMonogrammed businessclowns.\nHow to buy yourself a Lordy.\nSending unsolicited clowns in the mail.\nStacking the clowns until you can ascend to clown heaven.\nCleaning help and support for neurodivergent people to clean our filthy filthy houses.\nThe act of living in a house and putting things in places.\nKeeping your silverware in the freezer.\nA house where the forks turn into spoons.\nA basket for clothes that are not so dirty that they need to be washed immediately.\nFood that is technically rotten but not so rotten that you can't eat it.\nThe room in your house where the gravity is lower and you float.\nHolding a phone up to your face like a taco.\nHundreds of pictures of people holding weird shit up to their heads.\nWhy all the women are at the end of the page.\nAnnouncing a new consumer electronics device by submitting it to sidetalkin.com.\nSide-snorin'.\nA fun web site for if you want to look at objects.\nA pregnant woman with her belly painted to look like your face.\nCopying all the worst aspects of the Virtual Boy.\nWhether you want to download jivetalkin.midi.\nA poem shaped like something.\nUpdo bleak curious quiet.\nDesert thumbs.\nRather pale pagasus.\nA poem that generates its own blurb.\nThe entire front edge of the pegasus.\nWhy so political, pagasus?\nAny thumb you want it to be.\nDefining a thumb by its oppositionality.\nRooting for and with the thumb.\nYour boomer aunt who has a really specific idea of gender roles.\nDisrupting your toothbrush.\nYour 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.\nWillingness to think through processes and systems.\nA shmup where you control a whale research vessel.\nTaking the one skill you have in this life and using it to create heavy handed, ineffective political satire.\nMaking 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.\nWhat paradigm you're imagining shifting, exactly.\nEvery game developer's cottage-core retirement fantasy.\nMaking video games without ever talking to anyone on Twitter.\nWho's the beardy guy dot com.\nScrolling through pictures of beardy guys until you find the right one.\nJugger.\nCarrying the macguffin into your opponent's goal.\nArcane rules about who's allowed to touch the dog skull and when.\nThe global governing body in charge of the rules of Discs of Tron.\nThe schism in the Jugger community.\nTeaching a three year old chess boxing.\nSnapdragon.\nTaking turns grabbing raisins of a flaming bowl of brandy.\nTucking 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.\nFlaming tennis ball catch.\nCalvin Ball, III.\nThe 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.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.\r\n","date_published":"2022-05-02T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/8eb98b94-a315-412f-85d9-f7db663362ac.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":48868206,"duration_in_seconds":3054}]},{"id":"a4a62a70-7224-4253-aefa-eed6e1cff696","title":"131. GDC Santa Rides Again","url":"https://topiclords.com/gdc-santa-rides-again","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nMike\nKev\n\n\nhttp://www.radcade.com/\n\n\n\nTopics\n\n\nEmbracing creative chaos is very hard but paradoxically extremely common?\nThanatosensitivity\nGDC happened this year! They really did it\nTarantulas on the Lifebuoy By Thomas Lux\n\n\nhttps://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48483/tarantulas-on-the-lifebuoy\n\nBeing left handed in a right handed world\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nWanting to learn to program and moving to Maine.\nLearning to program by implementing a meticulous copy of Metroid for the NES.\nChoosing to live a life that feels like an anime training montage.\nHow to learn to program while having kids.\nRadical content for radical gamers.\nHaving one's mind blown by works of art, as one does.\nThe \"stone soup bubblegum and baling wire everything went wrong\" method of making art.\nWhat happens when the plan makes contact with the enemy.\nWriting a film with the magic of wintertime as a core theme and not being able to get the permit to film until spring.\nIterating on your idea with insights you've gleaned from working on your idea.\nAscertaining the recoverability of any given error.\nThe kind of disaster that happens when a culture accustomed to low-cost-error problems tries to work on high-cost-error problems.\nImprovising bridges.\nProgramming vs. the disciplined engineering fields.\nThe pros and cons of storing a bunch of elephants on the roof.\nThe user experience of death.\nDigital ghosts on LinkedIn.\nLogging in to LinkedIn for the first time in eight years and getting a bunch of IMs from a friend who died six years ago.\nDealing with your dead friend's estate and having to close out all the relationships they were maintaining on OkCupid.\nThanatechnologies.\nThe human events taking place on a separate flow of time than internet time.\nSlug World.\nA human brain computer interaction conference at Noisebridge.\nalt.ctrl.GDC\nSpending all of GDC on the lawn.\nA GDC talk except instead of talking to an auditorium full of 500 people, you're talking to a hotel room full of five people.\nThe Unconference Phenomenon.\nSubstance-to-fluff ratios.\nYour three GDC lives.\nGoing to the talks where they talk about the stuff we're doing to figure out how we can do our stuff better.\nThe ascended platonic GDC.\nGetting all Dunbar's Numbered-out and spending all your time talking to people you know.\nShowing 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.\nMaking a leveraged play on your charisma and luck stats.\nGDC Santa with the sack of boxed copies of Glittermitten Grove.\nA map of TXT World stitched together out of screenshots, like in the good old days.\nA greybeard coming out of the woodwork to admire your ANSI art map.\nDisrespecting the expo.\nRealizing 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.\nKatie hauling off and gassing you up.\nThe hazards of being Jim Stormdancer.\nA reward for not loving the death of the ugly and even the dangerous.\nThe tangled underworld of your socks.\nPretending to not be afraid of spiders because you don't want your son to be afraid of spiders.\nGrowing up with rhino beetles in Liberia.\nHog snakes.\nThe extremely specific feeling of a desperate beetle clinging to your pruny fingertip.\nFormative bug experiences.\nMillions of termites growing wings to do their big ol' termite sex party.\nSweeping up all the termites who are taking a nap after mating season to fry in palm oil as a special treat.\nThe morning where the entire town is covered in bugs which sucks but you get to eat them which rules.\nReminiscing about which body parts of a termite are saltiest.\nGetting accustomed to eating termites by the time you get to the bottom of the bag.\nLeft-handed zippers.\nTrying to use the wrong scissors and assuming that you have some kind of developmental problem.\nThe Uniball Jetstream Rollerball, with a pressurized ink reservoir.\nThe prince who was promised.\nFretting with your dominant hand.\nPicking a specific guitar string at speed.\nWhether handedness exists.\nDrawing with gross motor movements.\nLeft-handed mugs.\nLeft-handed drums vs. open-handed drums.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2022-04-25T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/a4a62a70-7224-4253-aefa-eed6e1cff696.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":64878328,"duration_in_seconds":4040}]},{"id":"e6cd14b8-1d06-434d-83d7-fea9e80cfe8a","title":"130. Gilding The Lemur","url":"https://topiclords.com/gilding-the-lemur","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nTyriq\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/FourbitFriday\nhttps://frror.bandcamp.com/\n\nStevie\n\n\nhttps://www.hryx.net\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nWatching TAS videos and wondering how much of what is happening is necessary vs flourish\nIf Jeff Bezos wanted to recreate Jurassic Park\nChocolate-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\nStrong Men, Riding Horses by Gwendolyn Brooks\n\n\nhttps://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=28113\n\nThe creators of Earthworm Jim: Where are they now?\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nTunic.\nFinding collectible pages of a game's manual inside the game.\nGames in fake languages.\nPlaying imported games in emulation and trying to figure out how to play even though you don't speak the language.\nCurveballs.\nA monthly in-person cozy casual game development meetup.\nDiscovering what people mean by \"within\" when people say \"inquire within.\"\nWhat happened to all of the art.\nWhat a whale bone smells like after you clean it.\nWhether it's grosser to drink bone marrow or eat oysters.\nThe most charming of all the crabs.\nTAS runs.\nThe various kinds of tools that might assist you in creating a tool-assisted speed run.\nHuman-Mediated Speed Runs, or HMSRs.\nProving the ideal speed run.\nSome kind of sequence that is based on a timer.\nWhen 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.\nThe game became Snake.\nWhether coffee cures or causes cancer.\nLike listening in a mirror.\nThe vapors.\nTrillionaires not being as rich as they used to be.\nA big big island full of organisms that are just waiting to be coated in gold.\nPainting your entire body and dying somehow.\nLemur-friendly paints.\nPeople who've eaten breakfast and then died.\nDipping some shit in some crap.\nWatching Food Network to discover the Science of Chocolate.\nAn attractive morsel.\nPastries with fruit fillings.\nA solid cube of a mass of dessert-object.\nTaking advice from someone who hasn't even been on several hundred podcasts.\nFrantically putting the Topic Lords banner back on your wall when you see Jim approaching.\nReleasing Topic Lords episodes.\nShuffling off of this mortal topic.\nMaking a movie to promote your new chocolate bar.\nA type of chocolate that tries to be solid.\nSpaghetti-Os as a back formation of Spaghetti-O-ification, which is what happens when pasta passes through a black hole's event horizon.\nUsing Hawking radiation to retrieve lost Spaghetti-Os from within black holes.\nThe movie playing the sound of somebody peeing to let you know that now's when you get up to use the bathroom.\nA crowd of people doing foley work for a restaurant scene in Murder She Wrote.\nPicking somebody for Animatronic Angela Lansbury to murder and then picking somebody for her to pin it on when she solves the crime.\nThe fine line between true and false.\nThe fine line between foot and floor.\nDesert-eyed, rentless strong men pasted to stars already.\nA source of praise for the patriarchy.\nAddled by landlords.\nWhether being pasted to the stars is good.\nThe elbow of the topics.\nEarthworm Jim.\nA muscular goofball earthworm.\nWhether you can say \"groovy\" and still be angry.\nA strict no-sequels policy.\nNot the thing you're here to talk about.\nGeorge \"The Fat Man\" Sanger.\nWall-E but a Roomba but also one of those 90s wireless phone cradles.\nGames you can play for free on the web.\nAll the good times we had at Blockbuster Video renting movies from Blockbuster Video.\nHow 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.\nA perfect solution to a problem that everybody wants solved urgently.\nWeirdly buff creatures that should not be buff.\nMusic band with animal companion solves mystery.\nThe Dog & The Stoner & The Band & The Ghost.\nQueen Slug-for-a-Butt.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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?\r\n","date_published":"2022-04-18T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/e6cd14b8-1d06-434d-83d7-fea9e80cfe8a.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":70230212,"duration_in_seconds":4369}]},{"id":"6296ee85-9044-4876-bfd7-0de897ec93ed","title":"129. Yet Another Country Where They Don't Pee","url":"https://topiclords.com/yet-another-country-where-they-dont-pee","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nAlex\nShannon\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nRegional Trash animals\nDynamic water features\nThe Pee Pee Dance is nowhere to be found on Wikipedia\nThe Bells, by Edgar Allen Poe\n\n\nhttps://poets.org/poem/bells\n\nRecipe essentialism\nSei Shonagon's Hateful Things are relatable\n\n\nhttps://www.basicincome.com/bp/hatefulthings.htm\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nStriving to sound like a motor that has just been switched off.\nA very healthy vasovagal response.\nSeparating the platelets from the plasma.\nDonating blood to anybody on the street with a needle and some brownie brittle.\nDetermining the blood type of this synthetic fake blood.\nBrownies except they shatter like glass between your teeth.\nTrashimals.\nVisiting a new place and delighting at all the local pests.\nLiving in Florida and just bumping into crocodiles on the street.\nMonkeys climbing your body to steal your food and break your camera.\nFairy penguins nesting in your storm drains.\nScooping rattlesnakes into a bucket, going to a military base and dumping them into the tank cockpits.\nOnly realizing that it's weird to have a rattlesnake in a jar on your porch when a Frenchman wants to come see.\nIt's a Canyon Thing.\nFinding out that a mongoose is not the size of a goose.\nOne of the more hazardous trashimals.\nLooking 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.\nThe mountain lion who visited downtown Berkeley.\nA regular household goose.\nTurning off Niagara falls at night.\nSeeing behind the veil of the world when Niagara falls gets switched off.\nGoing to Hawaii to see the milky way.\nA universal human experience that remains completely undocumented.\nThe squeeze and grab strategy.\nSomething you wouldn't want to sample in Costco.\nThe tiny sommelier in your butt.\nRecipes calling for eggs or milk but not specifying which kind.\nPee shivers.\nA reading face for radio.\nA sort of runic rhyme.\nThe rhyming and the chiming of the bells bells bells bells bells bells bells.\nEdgar Allan Poe as an emo Dr. Seuss.\nThe gamut of all the things bells can be.\nAdding more bells to the end of each verse.\nThe Jabberwocky rewritten in the style of incomprehensible in-jokes.\nA cake recipe with two ingredients.\nKeto-something something cookies.\nMashing the crosshatch shape with a fork.\nThe Easy Cookbook: Over 100 Satisfying Recipes Made with Four Ingredients or Less.\nIce cream made from eggs and peanut butter.\nThe fourth ingredient is your car.\nWriting a book of listicles in the 11th century.\nThe way the snow looks on the roofs of the village under moonlight, and how the plebian villagers can't appreciate it.\nWhen one is in a hurry to leave but one's visitor keeps chattering away.\nShameless old people putting their feet up on braziers.\nOne's attachment to a man depending largely on the elegance of his leave-taking.\nTrying to maintain all your clandestine relationships in a palace where the walls are made of paper.\nA person who recites a spell after sneezing.\nWhen one is about to be told some interesting piece of news and a baby starts crying.\nThe exorcist staying up too late and falling asleep in the middle of the exorcism.\nAll the interesting poetry and prose from a historical era being written by women because the men were expected to write in their second language.\nThe 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.\"\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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,\r\nand Sei Shonagon's Hateful Things.","date_published":"2022-04-11T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/6296ee85-9044-4876-bfd7-0de897ec93ed.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":64593042,"duration_in_seconds":4025}]},{"id":"b5146e85-d065-49ea-8718-98066c6492e4","title":"128. Intermittent Fasting Kirby","url":"https://topiclords.com/intermittent-fasting-kirby","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nJenni\nChris\n\n\nhttps://imgur.com/a/t34TMw8\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nEvery tree in this desert is a bean\nThe statute of limitations on spoilers implies a social contract where we agree to consume media as soon as it's available instead of consuming it at the right time for ourselves\nThis list of words that men know but women don't, and vice versa\n\n\nhttps://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13428-018-1077-9/tables/2\nhttps://twitter.com/v21/status/1372635082205364226/photo/1\n\nOzymandias by Percy Shelley\n\n\nhttps://discoverpoetry.com/poems/percy-bysshe-shelley/ozymandias/\nhttps://twitter.com/PateraQuetzaI/status/1156300892733243392\n\n41 out of 42 people start life with some time to chill by themselves in the womb but twins don't, what's that like\nOldschool AD&D is hard to start but ultimately less video/board gamey which is great\nWordle speed runs are surprisingly riveting\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk4qPtOelv8\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nPlugging every Xalavier Nelson game.\nStanding in a three bean soup.\nEveryone's favorite Fire Emblem hero, Spiky Ball Tree.\nSweetgum.\nProducing liquid amber but not calling it liquid amber for trademark reasons.\nWhether it's possible to have green wood.\nA traumatic formative art school experience that you take out on trees for the rest of your life.\nAblative armor.\nSpoilers for the first novel ever written.\nSeeing Empire Strikes Back dozens of times in the theater while in the womb.\nA spoiler policy that makes people hate you.\nGetting consent to gaslight your girlfriend about movies she hasn't watched.\nPicking a movie line to be the only joke you ever say.\nThe list of movies for which there is no statute of limitations on spoilers.\nUsing a pen knife to cut open your forearm to reveal the servomotors inside any time there's a lull in the conversation.\nThe SpoilOrbs.\nInventing the video game haptics to allow a game designer to kick you in the balls.\nKittencore Dark Souls.\nJunji-ito's cat diary.\nClutter in movies.\nHiring excellent schlubby actors.\nBack when it was notable and interesting that Linda Hamilton got fit for Terminator 2.\nGetting an AI on the job.\nLaura Panini.\nLive coding skeletal animation.\nRotating around a creepy lady.\nAsking if anyone's seen something but nobody has.\nWhen you push the button on the monitor and it goes all wibbly wobbly for a second.\nA list going there.\nA word that you only know if you read a lot of G.K. Chesterson.\nLittle Kirbys that help you out in the event of a prolapse.\nHow nobody in the UK knows what \"goober\" or \"wine gums\" means.\nAbseiling and rappelling.\nPutting \"kerbside\" on a list of words that Americans don't know.\nPolearms that were descended from boar hunting.\nAsking a thousand Americans to say yes or no to every word in the dictionary.\nThe Katana Yakuza Thesis.\nReading poetry in a funny voice.\nThe kind of person who would end a poem with a semicolon.\nReciting a poem about a guy you met yesterday who told you most of the poem.\nHearing from a guy about a rotting stump of a conquest.\nWriting 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.\nYelling at a long dead poet about punctuation.\nPoetry about not knowing something but it's unclear whether nobody knows the thing or if it's just the poet's personal ignorance.\nPainting ancient Greek statues flesh-colored.\nPercy Shelley the nonsense man.\nSmash Mouth cancelling their concert at your county fair after they got famous.\nHow to pronounce \"shewed\"\nWhat's wrong with looking upon me?\n23 And Me informing you that you have a mom.\nThe familial incest tab on 23 And Me.\nTwins: There's Two Of Them.\nTwins in the womb listening to the Empire Strikes Back soundtrack and elbowing each other.\nA person who could exist and would be attractive.\nGeocities turn of the century vibes.\nThe t-shirt that Jim's wife bought him.\nHow Futurama made the name \"Hubert\" cool but \"Pubert\" is still no good.\nHaving six kids and naming them all Pubert.\nNaming an ice cream shop \"Fucklers\" because who can stop you? (The police.)\nFucklers: Sole Owner of my Name Ice-Creamery.\nThe holding company that owns every disused mascot.\nThe Hamm's Beer Bear.\nWordle speed run categories.\nMathematicians who debunk Minecraft speed runs.\nTrying to invent fake commentary for a sport you know nothing about.\nYelling advice to recorded speed runs.\nWatching everybody believe Wordle conspiracy theories.\nComparing notes about reality.\nPreferring having friends over being right.\nThe absolute best time to get off of social media.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2022-04-04T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/b5146e85-d065-49ea-8718-98066c6492e4.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":65266251,"duration_in_seconds":4057}]},{"id":"60e8ca87-b7a3-43a1-aa5b-fbf9664888ea","title":"127. Let's e e cummings This Up","url":"https://topiclords.com/lets-e-e-cummings-this-up","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nCort\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/postgoodism\n\nFabian\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/rygorous\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nBlack Square Day (inventing holidays and subsequently forgetting everything about them)\nNostalgia for old computers isn't because they were good, but because they sucked in ways that were simple to understand\nThe Dirtywave M8 tracker\nStopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, by Robert Frost\n\n\nhttps://www.greatestpoems.com/stopping-by-woods-on-a-snowy-evening/\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nThe music videos of Max Cooper.\nStyptic pencils.\nDoing archaeology on your own Google calendar.\nA stable time loop where your future self adds \"Black Square Day\" to your calendar.\nBringing a palindrome to the palindrome party.\nTelling your visitors \"it's Black Square Day; dress appropriately.\"\nCelebrating the day you really burned the casserole.\nBlack Squaroling.\nA way that your community organizes itself.\nGetting in a pissing contest with your neighbors about whose house has the most black squares.\nBooting 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)\nHow the Commodore 64 BASIC determined where the line you were editing started and ended.\nHow Commodore 64 BASIC stored lines of code internally.\nSurvivorship bias among early microcomputer users.\nAccepting a certain level of brokenness because fixing the problem will take an unbounded amount of time.\nMachines that are simple enough for a single human to understand vs. those that are not.\nWhat percentage of the Commodore 64's ROM is dedicated to implementing floating point math.\nVarying levels of nostalgia for developing for the Playstation 3.\nThe room in London that the Playstation 2 had instead of a debugger.\nThe Tool PS2.\nFetishization of the mid-2010s tower PC \nSecond order nostalgia, for what 90s emulation of 80s games looked like.\nNostalgia for objectively terrible art style.\nAll the walls swimming all the time.\nThe 15 year nostalgia gap where nobody wants to remember the early 3D console games.\nMaking music on the toilet every day.\nTrackers.\nWhat Trackers are better at vs. traditional DAWs.\nMusic that ships with its own source code.\nTechnical limitations transforming into a unique aesthetic.\nHow to hide a second song in the same tracker module.\nDoing a thing on the screen while music loops.\nA portable device to edit spreadsheets that only has a trackball.\nLooking at your song through a straw.\nLoading a ProTracker module in FastTracker.\nTrying to identify which tracker created the MOD you're reading by looking for file format bugs unique to that tracker.\nFixing bugs by hex editing an executable and that becomes the version everybody uses now.\nWhat you call it when an archaeologist writes the file spec.\nUnknown sources of dubious quality.\nLore of unknown provenance about how to play a mod file.\nWatching dense notation scrolling by.\nLoading tracker music into various players to see how their performances of the same material vary.\nTrying to load up music you wrote fifteen years ago and needing to source old versions of all the plugins you used.\nWatching the woods fill up with snow.\nA very evocative one of those.\nWhether sleep represents death in this poem or if it's just sleep this time.\nWhy write a poem.\nInterviewing the author of a poem and then interviewing everyone who ever read the poem before writing the authoritative interpretation of that poem.\nA joke that doesn't really seem like a joke at all.\nRating a poem on a five star scale and then deciding how many of those stars belong to each of the stanzas.\nThe Three Musketeers sequels that nobody has read.\nGetting paid by the line and adding a character to your story that speaks only one word at a time.\nHow to write 300 books a year.\nTaking out the but because there's nothing for it to but.\nCeramic clown statues.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2022-03-28T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/60e8ca87-b7a3-43a1-aa5b-fbf9664888ea.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":71139382,"duration_in_seconds":4430}]},{"id":"db5d98d2-ffda-4646-a84a-9f84073fdb20","title":"126. Toast Is A Fruit","url":"https://topiclords.com/toast-is-a-fruit","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nDavid\nErica\n\n\nhttps://https://twitter.com/YerrikTRB/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nTwo plant families for the apocalypse\n\n\nI choose you, Marine Phytoplankton! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytoplankton#Diversity\nI choose you, Apiaceae! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apiaceae\nI choose you, Poaceae! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poaceae\nI choose you, Fabaceae! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabaceae\nI choose you, Rosaceae! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosaceae\nI choose you, Liliaceae! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liliaceae\nI choose you, Rubiaceae! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubiaceae\n\nAlternation of generations\n\n\nhttps://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/beauty/ferns/reproduction.shtml\nI can't believe I primed myself to think of 80s horror by bringing up Ghoulies 2 and subsequently didn't think about Gremlins.\n\nI got a Fitbit for Christmas. It keeps track of how many hours of the day I've taken 250 steps to encourage me to get up from my desk frequently. I've been getting up and walking three minutes at the end of each hour and continuing to walk for three minutes at the start of the next.\nOde to Spot \n\n\nhttps://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Ode_to_Spot\n\nStonecoin\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones\n\nThings that have not gone wrong yet\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nUncovering the fatal flaw in the premise of the topic.\nThe Frog Fractions Extended Universe.\nMarrying someone from the Frog Fractions Extended Universe.\nPicking out insect photos that are still on the Internet.\nPosting photos to social media as a way of convincing yourself that you have a good life.\nA stranger's child slathered in various foodstuffs.\nUsing social media to curate a list of everything you were upset about today.\nGetting a concerned phone call from a family member when you post angrily about world events and changing your phone number.\nWhich two plant families you'd take with you into the apocalypse.\nTouching Cow Parsnip and then running for shelter.\nTaking grass with you into the apocalypse so you can keep eating rice.\nDrinking coffee and eating onions in the post-apocalypse.\nVegetables that are technically fruits.\nWhether croutons are classified as a fruit or a vegetable.\nLeaves vs. fronds.\nThe organs that produce spores.\nFinding two distinct forms of plants that always appear together and eventually realizing that these are the same species.\nEvolving cocoons when it would be way easier to just evolve a second mouth.\nIf 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\"\nGhoulies 3: Ghoulies go to College.\nHard-Sporing Citizens.\nA health metric invented by pedometer salesmen.\nMuscles contracting to pump blood throughout your body.\nThe differing benefits of running vs. walking.\nThe evolutionary benefits of gigantic asses.\nLinking intention to activity.\nWalking around saying quotes from Rick and Morty and the hospice nurse just assumes you have dementia.\nThe racism hormone.\nWhy it's so satisfying to dismiss ideas that are different from your own.\nCuring dementia by googling the things your grandma says and realizing she's just referencing TV shows nobody's seen in 30 years.\nTwo marathons looking backwards through time.\nSubvocal oscillations.\nThe best 45 seconds of TV of the 80s.\nThe guy who writes all of Data's dialog regardless of who writes the rest of the screenplay.\nThe Cyberiad, by Stanislaw Lem.\nA love poem about tensor algebra.\nThe bar for what constitutes a love poem to tensor algebra.\nWriting a poem about a cat to the cat even though the cat doesn't understand.\nWeb sites eating each other.\nLiving inside the Library of Alexandria as it burns down.\nAn alternative hypertext protocol similar to The HTTP and The Gopher.\nNerdy high schoolers who exist today.\nWhether any given internet protocol is for the olds.\nWorrying about all of these cryptos.\nWatching the Olympics streaming on NBC and discovering that not only does TV still exist, it has ads for cryptocurrency now.\nThe Island of Yap, part of the Federated States of Micronesia.\nCoin famousness scaling by size.\nAn oral history of money where everyone just remembers who paid for what and how much money everyone has.\nA flat exchange rate of inches in diameter to US dollars.\nThe stability of a currency that is not currently being speculated on.\nThe guy who wrote jokes for Obama.\nPresidential speechwriters paying attention to internet memes and incorporating them into the State of the Union address.\nThe inflection point in 2014 where suddenly everyone became much more aware of every bad thing in the world.\nA comprehensive list of everything that has gone right.\nThe number of languages in which you have not embarrassed yourself this year.\nInventing ink live on the show.\nAn enormous 3D printer of clear domes.\nBaked slimy okra.\nBaking a couple dozen of your sporulated forms and their gametophytes into a pie crust, who immediately start singing when you cut the pie open.\nA headlamp named Petzl.\nWhy is daddy laughing?\nThe magic summoning word of little boys.\nAn armchair fan of podcasts.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2022-03-21T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/db5d98d2-ffda-4646-a84a-9f84073fdb20.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":64161987,"duration_in_seconds":3991}]},{"id":"4c93905f-fb62-47bd-b133-3e609d713339","title":"125. Your Mom Won't Cry","url":"https://topiclords.com/your-mom-wont-cry","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nDanielle\n\n\nhttps://www.twitch.tv/damaplaysgames\nhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2Fq8V-L5rfNvGa-DAQBPsg\n\nAlexander\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/adlleong\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nLearning to figure skate as an adult\nCursed mnemonics we never question\nWhat was the first thing you remember buying online?\n\"Chi dara fine al gran dolore? L’ore\" from House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski\nMy daughter has strong beliefs about the afterlife\nI don't actually want to speedrun anything, I just want to learn how they do it\nOnce 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?\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nSpin Rhythm XD and the Spin Rhythm XD level design community.\nLearning to figure skate.\nHow to convert axels into 360s.\nFigure skating in a half pipe.\nClockwise and widdershins figure skaters.\nPutting a hair dryer in reverse so it blows cool air.\nUsing Zamboni technology to invent the ice skating treadmill.\nCovering a carousel with ice and then realizing you don't need the carousel part because you can just skate in a circle.\nThe Beginner Effect.\nFinding time for hobbies.\nCursed mnemonics for remembering how to spell \"because\"\nUsing eggs.\nThe extremely entertaining mnemonic that Jim uses to remember his social security number, but can't share with anyone.\nMan Very Early Made Jars Stand Up Nearly Perpendicular.\nMy Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Noodles And Used Soft Eggs.\nElephants Go Ballistic Doing Flips.\nIdioms translated from other languages.\nWhether it's good for a stone to gather moss.\nWhen it stopped being a big deal to enter your credit card information on a web site.\nA piece of wood that tells you what the weather is going to be.\nBuying 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.\nSpeculating about how many game developers actually made a living from shareware in the 90s.\nCashing a check on the bus.\nAsking 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.\nBuying a lot of used books on half.com\nReading and discussing a poem in Italian.\nThe percentage of Topic Lords listeners who have read House of Leaves.\nRemoving all the outer layers of the onion to get to the SCP inside.\nWhat events did and didn't happen in various layers of fiction in House of Leaves.\nListing every known building not designed in a Brutalist style.\nDevice 6 by Simogo.\n50 Years of Text Games.\nPrint-on-demand procgen novels.\nCreepy endless houses.\nLoving babies and wanting to be a baby.\nInventing reincarnation from first principles.\nWhere six year olds learn about the afterlife.\nGetting really worked up about the flu shot you're going to get in eight months.\nHearing a gross thing described but not being disgusted because you can't visualize it.\nADHD and Autism Tiktok.\nThe \"rubbing styrofoam\" diagnostic for ADHD.\nLearning all the speedrun skills but never actually doing any speed runs.\nLearning to do an ultra to get this strawberry.\nThe nega-set of games that don't have a bunch of stressful violence and also don't have a bunch of overbearing dialog.\nWriting an album and then designing a level around each song.\nBisexual lighting.\nQueen Latifah showing up to ask if you want to skip to the next checkpoint.\nThe kind of friendship where if you ever talked about anything but music the friendship would immediately collapse.\nKnown iPhone protocol weirdnesses.\nWhy is Apple like this?\nHow to set a custom ringtone on your phone back before everyone put their phone on vibrate.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2022-03-14T00:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/4c93905f-fb62-47bd-b133-3e609d713339.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":61295530,"duration_in_seconds":3815}]},{"id":"bbbecf8a-8e87-461f-b675-26f3493e8368","title":"124. Call Me Da5id; Da4id Was My Father","url":"https://topiclords.com/call-me-da5id-da4id-was-my-father","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nTyriq\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/FourbitFriday\n\nXander\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nThe year was 1998, and choosing a name with numbers in it was a completely normal thing to do.\n\n\nhttp://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_are_switching_written_numbers_when_scanning\n\nHow do you overcome the inertia of old familiar tools when trying to learn new ways to do the same thing?\nI confused Daniel Day-Lewis with Lou Diamond Phillips for years, thinking they were the same person. I'm not sure why but my hypothesis is that it's because they both have three names and they both have that \"lou\" sound in there.\n\n\nIf you really have to know: https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/dtxjg/til_that_limp_bizkit_actually_means/\n\nSweater Weather: a Love Song to Language, by Sharon Bryan\n\n\nhttps://www.writersalmanac.org/index.html%3Fp=5543.html\n\nI'm gonna try to make a bartop arcade machine with unconventional controls, I think. Anybody have any tips or suggestions or anything? Also more generally: How about that meatspace creativity? Anybody make anything that occupies real world space lately?\nIthkuil: the inscrutable conlang that was co-opted by Russian Buddhist cultists\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nMaking games and albums.\nIn the pluggable range.\nThe history of Byzantium.\nThe weird mysteries of what happened, what we know, what we don't know, and what didn't happen.\nAn average of all the books that don't exist.\nTaking the average of two books.\nThe square root of negative Garfield.\nA lossy compression algorithm for plain text.\nThe most information dense thing you can change.\nLLLL Cool J.\nBeware the LLs of March.\nAll the numbers you might append to your user name.\nWanting or not wanting to be like Xeno746.\nSocial signaling by putting numbers in your user name or by not putting numbers in your user name.\nRole-playing having sponsors because all your idols are influencers.\nUsing the term \"Information Superhighway\" unironically.\nVisually decorating your name.\nPutting card suit emojis around your name and then appending \"-chocolate\"\nEncoding your identity in emojis and adding them to your user name.\nThe double inertias of trying to move plus leaving your comfort zones.\nJim's advice for learning a new tool.\nWorking with a tool the way it's intended to be used.\nPetting a cat the wrong way as a metaphor.\nActors we confuse with each other.\nHearing two bands on the same mixtape and getting them confused for the rest of your life.\nRefusing to explain a gross band name on the show.\nTrying to figure out what sex act your parents named you after.\nThat Tom Lehrer song that's just a list of all the elements, except it's all your favorite turns of phrase.\nMaking a melody so dissonant and weird that the listener dissociates from music and just hears a sequence of pitches on its own merits.\nHaving a tongue party in your mouth.\nThe Sultan of Swat.\nLoose Lips Buck Up.\nLifty Nifty, Bright and Shifty.\nMaking a bartop arcade machine with unconventional controls.\nThe kinetic feel of throwing and catching a flywheel.\nFlipping a series of switches in quick succession.\nA totally arbitrary control scheme that would be weird and interesting for one game but it's been used for thousands.\nDesigning your pinball table so that players nudge your pinball cabinet a bit but not too much.\nReasons for subtle variation in how pinball tables play.\nBuying banned pinball parts at the pinball black market.\nA pinball simulation of shooting cans with a gun.\nThe seesaw lever thing for going along the rails.\nBowling with a shuffleboard.\nBeing over monetizing your art.\nNon-Functional Bullshit.\nNon-Fungible Game Experiences, such as when the party you're DMing tries to intimidate NPCs with a severed leg.\nHobbies that feed your family.\nMaking sure your game remains mysterious by ensuring nobody cares enough to solve them.\nSimmering on a thought before you express it.\nCrunchy conlangs.\nIdiosyncratic Oblasts of Russia.\nTelling 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.\nTaking something functional and making something non-functional out of it to find out what it would look like.\nA Dewey Decimal System for individual words.\nInventing a categorization system for all human knowledge that's extremely focused on maritime concerns.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2022-03-07T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/bbbecf8a-8e87-461f-b675-26f3493e8368.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":59513378,"duration_in_seconds":3699}]},{"id":"501e1b89-c9e7-4b41-9c9a-b325cc8a197d","title":"123. Go Up, You Bald Head!","url":"https://topiclords.com/go-up-you-bald-head","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nHallie\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/Hallie_9000/\nhttps://twitter.com/watchyourrass\nhttps://twitter.com/HouseRulesCast\n\nChris\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nPlaying card finishes\nEsper 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!\"\nIf the words religion and faith didn't exist, how would we talk about them?\nGood Bones, by Maggie Smith\n\n\nhttps://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/89897/good-bone\n\nHomemade hair conditioner / masque is basically mayo\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nRipe and ready topics.\nMaking guests record their own obituary in case they die between when an episode is recorded and when it's released.\nWatching Your Rass.\nA podcast about people who form their identities around games, specifically Cribbage.\nThe Slim-Line B-7 \"True Linen\" Finish.\nSwitching out topics on the fly.\nPracticing a magic trick in front of a mirror and fooling yourself.\nPositive feedback loops.\nCurling -- The Thing Noodles Do.\nThe benefits of cheap hobbies.\nA Clarke Sweetone with a conical bore.\nBicycle Backs.\nHow quickly you wear out a deck of playing cards when learning close-up magic.\nThe most interesting card finishes.\nCardistry.\nThe Bicycle Air-Cushion finish vs. the Cartamundi True Linen finish.\nE-llusionist Magic Supplies.\nThe best brand of cards to do the Faro shuffle with.\nTwo pieces of paper surrounding a cardboard core and enveloped in a plastic finish.\nPeeling apart playing cards and finding a tiny map of Germany.\nSomething that comes from how people are.\nGoing to Blorp every Sunday morning.\nStudents with different educational needs.\nWanting to participate in a group that sets the rules but feeling really strongly that you shouldn't follow one particular rule.\nDoing a lot of moderating of teen forums.\nConceiving of religions as fandoms of book series.\nBeing a super fan of someone who spoke out against elevating individuals above their individual experiences.\nEliezer Yudkowsky's Dune.\nScientist clergymen exploring the world.\nThe fossils of the language that we speak.\nDictionaries as the chalk outline around language's corpse.\nDisney buying the Star Wars franchise as a metaphor for the Roman empire converting to Christianity.\nChristianity before it was cool.\nTalking dogs.\nComic book puppy trash acts.\nThe 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.\nBeing surrounded by hundreds of children making fun of your bald head.\nThings that you thought were good but if there are ways they can be bad you want to hear about them.\nSelling the world to your child.\nHaving a world view and having to learn to live with it.\nStones Georg.\nPresenting the world's best self to your child.\nWhich end of the cow is the milk end.\nThe gestalt of a cow, which moos and creates milk.\nWriting a poem live on the air by saying \"dah\" whenever you can't think of another word.\nWhat happens if you shampoo but don't condition your hair.\nThe FBI coming to your apartment to arrest the free radicals making your hair frizzy.\nDropping mustard from your hair care routine because your head smells too much like a sandwich now.\nPutting bean water on your head.\nHairdini.\nThe guests you can't find on Topic Lords.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2022-02-28T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/501e1b89-c9e7-4b41-9c9a-b325cc8a197d.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":61041255,"duration_in_seconds":3795}]},{"id":"4cc9dea4-81fc-4816-976a-588ab7cb934b","title":"122. If You're Cold, Your Oatmeal Is Cold","url":"https://topiclords.com/if-youre-cold-your-oatmeal-is-cold","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nMaxx\n\n\nhttps://mechcem.itch.io/\nhttps://www.instagram.com/maxxyamasaki/\n\nAnanda\n\n\nhttps://www.instagram.com/a__gabo/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nRare videos of European Hamsters.\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cf06WJQ4FnE\n\nWould you rather eat: the last dragon or a human being?\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hufu\n\nWhat 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?\nAll Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace, by Richard Brautigan\n\n\nhttps://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/weekend-poem-all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving-grace/245251/\nEsper 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.\"\n\nDiatomite and our weird relationship to tiny cursed skeletons.\nMaking fermented foods. I want to make stinky tofu.\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nChoosing to believe when somebody last ate oatmeal.\nOutside oatmeal vs. inside oatmeal.\nThe wide world of breakfast goops.\nWriting your to-do lists in calligraphy.\nMinutes from the meeting where you are every member of the board of directors and you agree with yourself that you should remain CEO.\nJodorowsky's Hamster.\nVideos of aggressive wild hamsters that they don't want you to see.\nEthical hamster breeders in your area.\nShipping 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.\nThe kind of habitat that pet hamsters need.\nA German naturalist's hamster cage.\nKing Solomon's Ring, by Konrad Z. Lorenz.\nImporting an entire pond into your house so you can observe it more efficiently.\nA cheese shop in a small town staffed by the same person who runs the travel agency and the general store.\nImitation cannibalism hoax \"Hufu.\"\nWhether Winston can say good night.\nWhether a three year old understands the ethical calculus behind eating or not eating the last dragon.\nEating raw dragon and getting Mad Dragon Disease.\nWhether biomagnification would be worse in dragon or human meat.\nWhether Wikipedia pages for difficult ideas should have tutorials.\nA series of date nights in which you make Powerpoint presentations about armadillos for each other.\nThe Seven-Banded Armadillo.\nA detailed technical description of the scoots on the Seven-Banded Armadillo's fourth moveable band.\nVolunteer opportunities to study Paraguayan fauna.\nSpending four years in Paraguay discovering and describing a new species of armadillo by going to the museum where they are stuffed and mounted.\nThe relief of discovering that other people fail at things too.\nMutually programming harmony, like pure water touching clear sky.\nA cybernetic forest filled with pines and electronics.\nThe counterculture era of hippies and computers.\nSolving every problem.\nMaking a machine to water your plants and going back to sleep.\nMaking art that is deeply alarming but also incredibly pleasant.\nViolently bright emotions for short moments.\nHow to recognize utopias from the outside.\nFixing a poem you almost like and posting the result on Instagram.\nCrypto bros perishing in the wildfires of this cybernetic ecosystem.\nExploring and coming to terms with the complications of the field you were uncomplicatedly excited about as a kid.\nThe set of questions that don't have words attached to them.\nThe Mossman Lock Collection.\nBranches of technology that we didn't take.\nUsing a slab of diatomaceous earth as your bath mat.\nThe multivarious uses of the skeletons left behind after the primordial seas dried up.\nSurrounding 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.\nPouring nitroglycerin into ancient tiny skeletons to invent dynamite.\nScrubbing the exposed parts of your skeleton with much smaller skeletons.\nLate night snack vendors.\nSarcophagus tofu.\nPreserved organ dishes.\nThe difficulty of acquiring stinky tofu during a global pandemic.\nFermented meat products.\nHow to tell when your stinky tofu turned out wrong.\nDrinking the band-aid beer.\nPaying a nominal fee for a lab to DNA sequence your mystery meat.\nComparing sludge notes.\nAdding kimchi to pizza sauce.\nDrawing 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.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2022-02-21T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/4cc9dea4-81fc-4816-976a-588ab7cb934b.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":56618283,"duration_in_seconds":3513}]},{"id":"19b64bce-3e01-4563-a9a8-7217d8bfa38c","title":"121. A Delicious Treat For Your Brain's Ass","url":"https://topiclords.com/a-delicious-treat-for-your-brains-ass","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nRyan\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/ryanikecomposer/\nhttps://www.instagram.com/ryanikeaudio\n\nChall\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/MrChrisLHall/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nWhat position do you sleep in and based on that which of us on the podcast is going to die first?\nAre limes overpowered?\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citrus_taxonomy#/media/File:Citrus_tern_cb_simplified_1.svg\n\nWhy do we have fingernails? Sure they protect the nail bed but the nail bed wouldn't need protection if the nail weren't there. Are they really just claws but shitty?\nThis poem written on a whiteboard, author(s) unknown:\n\n\nhttps://imgur.com/a/dDRjZuX\nhttps://cafemom.com/entertainment/kourtney-kardashian-travis-barker-relationship-timeline/valentines-day-Kardashian-Barker\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nReading someone's grocery list and trying to decide if it's ironic.\nThe importance of firing Jimmy Wales.\nTrying to make a garbage fire better but it's not better yet.\nFilming yourself becoming the villain so that the documentary won't be disappointing.\nTopic Sloars.\nNot really knowing what a sloar is except that you can roast in the belly of it.\nThe place for Buster-Heads.\nSleeping the wrongest.\nGoing to your dentist for sleeping advice.\nSleeping in a position to minimize the number of times per hour you stop breathing.\nThe sleep paralysis demon not being able to sit on your chest because you sleep on your side.\nSleeping in a nanofiber web suspended from the ceiling.\nWhether sleeping cuddling a pillow is good or bad for various bones and organs.\nFamous Racist Pillow Peddler.\nDoctor Wu says you're going to eat shit.\nSleeping like the number four.\nLying in entirely different positions at the beach because you don't want anyone to know how you sleep.\nTrying the number four leg and letting Ryan know how it goes in the morning.\nA night of making cocktails using limes.\nDeciding that limes are too powerful and we need to put them in their place.\nGarnishing your beverage with cornflakes.\nAll citrus fruit descending from the mustard plant.\nDemanding that every foodstuff be as delicious and useful as limes are.\nA pile of nasty pasta mistake.\nChocolate pasta that you boil and put on your ice cream.\nA Wikipedia rabbit hole of citrus fruits.\nThe three ur-fruits that control the fate of every citrus fruit you've ever eaten.\nAn open faced lime growing in the wild.\nOptimus Lime.\nThinking of a pop culture pun and asking the bartender for it because it's probably a beer.\nExtremely lumpy limes.\nFilling city hall with gorillas so they'll eat all the snakes.\nHot dog fingers that are homogenous all the way to the end.\nManatee toenails.\nWhere whales keep their finger bones.\nAwesome ladies with orca fingernails.\nAn extremely informative image search that you don't recommend to anyone.\nAll the gross ways Takis can fail.\nOrigami claws.\nThe state of the spit valves on those Cool Ranch Bugles.\nSweet and Salty and Chocolate and Peanut Butter Bugles.\nUltra-Powerful Butter Flavor.\nComing 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\"\nMaking 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.\nSelling visitation rights to your collection of rare Cheetos.\nRare Cheeto NFTs.\nBuying Cheeto earrings and becoming Cheeto Earrings Guy.\nSomething in red that was where \"garlic bread\" is -- erased.\nPainters buying big slabs of bathroom stall at craft stores so they can paint on it.\nKeeping your finger on the pulse of garlic bread related poetry.\nThe dark recesses of Jim's Travis Barker poetry headcanon.\nA traveling japesman who modifies any exposed whiteboard poetry to be about food.\nWhere you do your business after dark.\n","content_html":"

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

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2022-02-14T00:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/19b64bce-3e01-4563-a9a8-7217d8bfa38c.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":62018456,"duration_in_seconds":3876}]},{"id":"fe51ad17-d1cb-4ada-8675-eb3b63dcd068","title":"120. The Mouse Is For Hippies And Slackers","url":"https://topiclords.com/the-mouse-is-for-hippies-and-slackers","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nDaniel\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/dmullinsgames\n\nJonah\n\n\nhttps://works.rip/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nChop socky – when are we gonna get that energy back into the world media producing environment? Also listening to movies instead of watching them.\nThe Resident Evil series\nFlettner airplanes\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlmvHfIAszo\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6geOms33Dk\n\nDouble feature: \n\n\nThe Eel by Ogden Nash https://poetrysplash.tripod.com/ogdennash2.htm\nThe Lama, by Ogden Nash https://www.madisonpubliclibrary.org/poetry/poem-a-day/lama\n\nIndonesia: The 4th most populous nation on Earth. You never hear about it\nWatching stuff \"going into it without hearing anything about it\" -- how do people actually do that? Also me walking into a movie theater.\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nA website for dead people who will pay $12/year for as long as they're dead.\nHummus.\nWhether Inscryption is more popular than hummus.\nStarting a topic with an anecdote.\nWalking around a city with the audio of a movie playing on your headphones.\nWatching a foreign film subbed because you're too cool to realize there's a subbed version in the settings.\nWhat you notice when you strip the visuals out of a visual medium.\nPorting Doom to ears.\nWhether blind people have their own Steam.\nGoing through several iterations of reinventing how you shoot zombies.\nA woman scaled up 2x on every axis.\nBrazil's first new console after the Megadrive.\nPorting Resident Evil 4 to the Megadrive.\nJim's entire history with the Resident Evil stories.\nA goofy Zelda boss but it's in a horror game for some reason.\nTurning doing donuts in a two car garage into a boss fight.\nBeing bad at puzzles that aren't supposed to be puzzles, like how to use this can opener.\nA Flettner airplane made out of KFC buckets.\nThe Magnus effect.\nThe downside of an airplane that drops like a rock if the engines lose power.\nThe world's first portable steamroller.\nAn airplane that is heavy enough to create its own runway.\nPutting a dog in the Youtube thumbnail.\nA poem that was short even before you cut the last 25%.\nA joke poem that becomes even more of a joke when you cut out the punchline.\nDad giving you permission to memorize the shortest possible poem.\nWeb design nostalgia.\nHypertext protocols that predated HTTP.\nHow HTTP ate every other hypertext protocol's lunch.\nThis thing that was invented in the 70s.\nTetris the Grand Master, and how it would be better with mouse input.\nHypothetical keyboard-only interfaces for audio editing software.\nA keyboard macro scripting language thing for transcribing sheet music.\nHow to pronounce \"Latex\"\nPronouncing the typesetting puns.\nBeing surprised when a country has almost as many people as the United States.\nGamelan.\nBeing Indonesian and knowing more about Indonesia than most people.\nWhether modern day Greeks get annoyed when you try to engage them about Greece 2000 years ago.\nThinking you know where New Zealand is but not.\nGrowing 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.\nTalking about yourself in any person.\nWhy nobody reviews Frog Fractions games.\nSoda speak.\nDivesting yourself of places you might get spoiled.\nMiddling Marvel Movie Buddies.\nHow to make choices without having enough information to decide.\nTotally wasting your plug.\nThe premier place to send answers to the Inscryption ARG.\nCounting the number of syllables in the sentence that claims to not be an ARG clue.\n","content_html":"

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

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\n\n","summary":"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.\r\n","date_published":"2022-02-07T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/fe51ad17-d1cb-4ada-8675-eb3b63dcd068.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":59168969,"duration_in_seconds":3672}]},{"id":"bc823082-5a56-4442-8ae7-2e8819d71fb3","title":"119. Book 'Em, Dildano","url":"https://topiclords.com/book-em-dildano","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nJenni\n\n\n@horsewizrd\n\nChris\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nThe coming schism between Wordle purists & Wordle metagamers\nAmazon kindle fantasy best-sellers is ruled by niches that nobody outside of kindle or Royal Road users have heard of\n\n\nhttps://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football\n\nIn 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!\nThe Tiger, by Nael, Age 6 \n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/826DC/status/966009025090473985\n\nWhy 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?\nZardoz & Barbarella have similar energy except Zardoz comes across as sincere & Barbarella comes across as falsely ironic to hide the sincerity\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nJim's sip of tea.\nMaking your husband Sleepytime tea so he goes to sleep while recording the podcast.\nMaking a video of yourself arguing with your cooking teacher to post to social media.\nWhat is a Wordle?\nThe Wordle sheriff joke.\nMuting the green block emoji so you stop seeing all the Wordle bragging.\nHow to improve Wordle's psychic damage output.\nWordle except instead of five letters it's five abstract concepts.\nParanormal reverse-harem.\nPricing 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!\"\nAll the topics you can't sell books about on Amazon and all the coded tags you use to sell them anyway.\nWhether Amazon will ban your book as containing bestiality if the genitalia is on the human side of the minotaur.\nA horse with human intelligence with a penis growing out of its back, and whether anyone has sex with the penis.\nThe liminal space between bestiality and reverse-bestiality.\nArguing 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.\nDoing a crime just to go to Horse Court and see that horse judge you.\nAdmitting that you are That Guy.\nSending your pens to the pen dimension.\nGraduating from high school and discovering that the weird lump on the knuckle of your middle finger isn't just you having a weird skeleton.\nWriting good handwriting.\nRefilling the salt pig from the salt cylinder.\nWhen the sauce is burning and the only solution is to salt it right now.\nGoing to Horse Court to decide which of you bought the pepper grinder.\nPopular with the robots.\nWhether the poem works on a third level.\nWriting the best poem.\nViral Poetry Sensation \"The Tiger.\"\nAn \"invisibility cloak\" which is just an empty hanger.\nA magic supply store where half the items are just jokes on the purchaser.\nThe 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.\nTrying to look at the thumb tips your friends are going on about.\nBraving Omicron to buy a thumb tip.\nHypnotizing a napkin.\nA magic trick where you make a rubber band disappear, but only for yourself.\nAging two years while dead.\nWhether Nethack's difficulty curve is better than D&D's.\nA weird combination of spells that is broken in a non-numerical way.\nWhat the wizard did when the spaghetti-os were on too high a shelf to reach.\nLetting the players fight Thor even though you know they'll figure out a way to kill Thor.\nThor swinging his hammer and killing you without having to roll any dice because Thor doesn't have stats.\nThe Dying Earth series by Jack Vance.\nGodlike wizards feuding over who took the leftovers out of the office fridge because they ran out of real problems to solve.\nThe Dying Earth series by Jack Vance, except with football.\nThat Insidious Beast by Zack Parsons.\nInstructions for a fruit.\nThere is no Antimemetics Division, by qntm.\nCounterfeit Monkey by Emily Short.\nSean Connery in a red diaperkini.\nThe big head that floats around and vomits guns and explains how guns are better than penes.\nWhen they invented the concept of copies of movies.\nYour 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.\nScantily clad rocket people.\nBarbarella lying in a thumb harp being yelled at by a dude wearing a Dalek and reading from a piano roll.\nLearning how to draw by looking at promotional shots from Barbarella.\nMario fanfiction through the lens of Cyberpunk.\nWhether they have sarcasm in Japan.\nTom Nook slapping his own nipples for ten hours.\n","content_html":"

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Microtopics:

\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2022-01-31T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/bc823082-5a56-4442-8ae7-2e8819d71fb3.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":61476903,"duration_in_seconds":3812}]},{"id":"582d7a73-dc69-453c-8e8a-8a2910e372f2","title":"118. The Dinosaur Poetry Gap","url":"https://topiclords.com/the-dinosaur-poetry-gap","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nEitan\n\n\nhttps://www.firehosegames.com/\n\nXalavier\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/WritNelson\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nWhen 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\nHow long is it polite to stare at a person before it gets weird for you, specifically (assuming they haven't seen you).\nWhen asked why some people find her music to be spiritual, Enya explained that \"It's the amount of reverb we use.\"\n\"Eighty Million Years Ago,\" by Bill Watterson\n\n\nhttps://sites.google.com/site/mrkoofloradale/common-lessons/language/languagemorecalvinandhobbespoetry\n\nUntrue facts about human anatomy\nThings 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\nWhy do cows have four stomachs but only one butthole?\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nSpace Warlord Organ Trading Simulator.\nAs many digits as you can imagine.\nThe trope where you change costumes at a party to make people think you are more than one person.\nYour game's extremely long title breaking Steam's web site.\nPetting dogs using a different hand each time.\nA cat person who made a game about dogs.\nA giant person insisting that you go outside and play sports.\nWhen seagulls are full grown but they haven't realized they're adults yet so they're still begging other seagulls for food.\nA teenager realizing that they are now bigger than their parents and could beat the shit out of either of them at any time.\nRemembering 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.\nObserving and fearing that you will be observed in turn.\nTrying to predict who will decide you are a creep.\nDeciding whether you are a creep vs. letting others decide.\nWatching an elderly person for as long as they are still alive.\nStaring at someone forever in a nursing home and nobody gives a shit because there's no staring time limit in a nursing home.\nPvP for Perverts.\nFinding white papers to determine how long it's safe to stare at strangers under various conditions.\nKnowing everything you need to know about someone after seeing them for 1/10th of a second.\nPaying doppelgangers to do good deeds so people instinctively associate your appearance with good deeds.\nThe Serious Batmans.\nA guy who is the Penguin who was raised by penguins.\nFiguring out how to make everybody feel every emotion all the time.\nYour own voice being very small but the voices you hear being really big.\nListening from inside the Gregorian chanter's mouth.\nFinding a dungeon in which to sacrifice your goats.\nThe Church of Satan asking to put their goat on display.\nPicking the most terrifying name for your rationalist philosophy.\nA 10 year old putting the Transformers movie on hold at the local library.\nA 30 minute toy commercial that somehow got run on television.\nWatching Optimus Prime die.\nA surprisingly queer road trip impacting robot-kind through time and space.\nTransformers: More Than Meets The Eye.\nChasing after a glowing cube that's going to give you power.\nEdison making documentary about electrocuting an elephant to prove that DC power is dangerous.\nFalling in love with a pigeon with laser eyes.\nThe Christmas story where bloodthirsty reindeer are stalking Rudolph and he hides in a closet and they spot the light glowing under the door.\nGiving your child the talk about where Fortnite skins come from.\nThe Santa FPS where your gun is all the reindeer and instead of muzzle flash Rudolph's nose glows.\nA ripped Santa Claus running over Peter Parker.\nFore and aft serrations.\nDawdling by the candy shop and being devoured.\nThe terrible secret of Ragnasaurth's bones.\nTaking back the soul of the nation via Tyrannosaur poetry.\nTikTok? More like \"tick tock it's time to write some dinosaur poetry.\"\nHow neurotransmitters definitely don't work.\nThe volunteer who proved that if you uncoil all the blood vessels in the human body they will reach the moon and back seven times.\nAll your serotonin languishing under a heat lamp because whoever runs the diner in your brain is a real dick.\nHow to convey facial expressions via sound effects in an audio medium.\nGymnasts getting hiccups by rotating too much and having to rotate the other way to cure them.\nNot being old enough to have a bucket list.\nFried butter.\nWaiting on tenterhooks for when it's ok to eat fried butter again.\nDeciding on your deathbed to take a bath in butter.\nLearning enough about tubes that you can hack the IV bag whenever you want to get more opiates.\nTwo-socks McGillicuddy.\nWhether the guy's name is Fried Jesus or Fried Jesus.\nWhen you saw one set of footprints in the sand it was because you collapsed thirty miles back.\nLoss-leader churros.\nA really ethical company in a sea of Wal-marts.\nThe pros and cons of having four stomachs in sequence vs. four stomachs in parallel.\nThe 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.\nHow much of your surface area needs to be butthole before you are yourself considered a butthole.\nA 76% butthole being.\nIf the new butthole is shaped like a smiley face, does that mean the cow is happy?\nProfessional with a capital p.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2022-01-24T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/582d7a73-dc69-453c-8e8a-8a2910e372f2.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":57617376,"duration_in_seconds":3581}]},{"id":"2ef0c71c-8f26-44be-a064-26a540434ae0","title":"117. Your Self-Inflicted Artistic Purgatory","url":"https://topiclords.com/your-self-inflicted-artistic-purgatory","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nBrad\n\n\n@bradspendlove on Twitter\nCheck out https://twitter.com/so_writing, especially episode 6\n\nQuil\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nWhat superpowers like shrinking and invisibility suggest about how we conceptualize reality\nIs there a point where you can call the silly things you make \"art\" and not feel like an absolute tool about it? Not a debate about what is vs is not art. But I feel weird if I make a bunch of bad music and call it \"my art\"\nStinky meat and stinky feet\n\n\nhttp://www.stinkymeat.net/\nhttps://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hamilton-if-it-was-sung-entirely-by-adam-sandler/id1382504305\n\nHope is a Thing with Feathers, by Emily Dickinson\n\n\nhttps://poets.org/poem/hope-thing-feathers-254\n\nVisual novels are neat, but I'm never sure whether they belong in my video game queue or book queue and therefore I rarely play them because I always think I could be playing a \"real\" video game or reading a \"real\" book\nCortical homunculus \n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortical_homunculus\nhttps://www.etsy.com/listing/509252848/angry-little-friend-taxidermy-monster\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homunculus_loxodontus\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nAccidentally agreeing to be on the show.\nDoing nothing in Chicago.\nComputer creativity.\nMaking an argument that a computer program is creative.\n\"Honey I Shrunk The Kids\" as a philosophical text.\nUsing a set of mirrors to give yourself 360 degree vision.\nImagining additional colors.\nAssuming the listener knows what cellular automata is.\nA platonic dude in the way you would conceive of a dude.\nTrying to find a game that uses cellular automata but it's occluded by search results for Conway's Life and Nier Automata.\nThe top four Live 'em Ups.\nA game that left the world when Flash stopped being a thing.\nPutting tremendous creative effort into a project but not being willing to call it your art because that would be pretentious.\nCalling your bad music your \"works\" because they make ye listeners despair.\nHow you conceptualize the things that you make.\nAttaching a label to the semiotic representation of a thing and thereby changing the nature of the thing.\nMaking a song in the amount of time the song takes to elapse.\nHaving done NaNoWriMo once and then being able to tell people you're working on your second novel.\nWanting to have the identity of being a creator.\nSomething that is cool to be and do.\nHow to make art that feels meaningful when you are surrounded by art that is way better than yours.\nAncient handwriting samples.\nDoing psychic damage by singing the wrong words to a song.\nLeaving a plate of meat in your neighbor's yard.\nDeciding it's time to stop your science experiment and go to a doctor.\nA storied history of people screwing up their bodies for the sake of internet points.\nThe melding of art and science.\nPiss Christ and other works that are intended to annoy.\nTrying to elicit a strong emotion but not caring too much which emotion it is.\nWhat it takes to know Bennett Foddy.\nThe idea that heavy metal bands were trying to get listeners to kill themselves.\nThe euphemism treadmill and the inverted euphemism treadmill.\nHow come there are still kids if kids keep growing up??\nSlurs in various stages of reclamation.\nHow there are stupid people out there and they're not bad people, they're just stupid.\nJabroni origins.\nReplacing all your pejoratives with \"ridiculous.\"\nMario running up the infinite euphemism treadmill saying successively more watered down swears.\nThe purpose of comparing an emotion to a bird.\nWhat is a poem? A pile of lines about a bird.\nConceiving of hope as a bird sitting outside your window and waking you up way too early.\nEnclosing poems in letters to your friends.\nMaking art for a person and sharing it just with that person.\nReading \"Hope is the Thing with Feathers\" in the Sick Sad World announcer voice.\nReading poems in a sarcastic voice and analyzing how it makes you feel.\nReading Emily Dickinson poetry in the voice of somebody begging for their life.\nWhether Poe's Law is the sarcasm thing.\nWhether Machiavelli was doing a bit.\nA performance of the entirety of Hamilton in the Adam Sandler voice.\nGetting famous for singing \"All Star\" and having to sing it for the rest of your life.\nThe realm between video games and books.\nHow the phone would be the perfect venue for a visual novel if it weren't for all the phone games.\nApproaches to consuming media.\nWatching half a movie and then falling asleep and eventually realizing that now there are at least five movies you've watched half of.\nA library book from 2019 that you still haven't returned.\nMapping the size of your body parts to how much space they take up in your brain.\nA Cortical Homunculus Funko Pop.\nShrimp Obama Magnet.\nT-shirts about adrenal cancer.\nAngry Little Friend Taxidermy Monster Sculpture Oddity.\nToo good an idea to just let be a joke.\nSymbolizing the emotions of people who wait at the dentist's office.\nMax Rebo, the popular jizz-wailer.\nSeeing the two tabs but not knowing the difference between them.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2022-01-17T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/2ef0c71c-8f26-44be-a064-26a540434ae0.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":60423942,"duration_in_seconds":3776}]},{"id":"172a8030-829b-420e-8414-5f4738c18d15","title":"116. I Don't Trust Toilets Any More","url":"https://topiclords.com/i-dont-trust-toilets-any-more","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nLaura\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/lmichet/\nhttps://lauramichet.itch.io/tallbagel2\n\nRachel\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/rachel_sala/\nhttp://wildhonesty.com/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nYou 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.)\nWhat's the best way to hang out with friends long distance?\nMy childhood impressions of Zelda 1 were apparently formed during my twenties.\n\"A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts,\" by Wallace Stevens\n\n\nhttps://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/21816/a-rabbit-as-king-of-the-ghosts\n\nIf there was one food you could delete from Earth forever, what would it be?\nWhat should be a flavor of soda that isn’t?\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nTall Bagel 2: Avocado Hardtack\nAwkward family dinner simulators\nA topic that has been percolating in the bucket since its inception, getting better every year.\nSafely scratching your butt when your hand suddenly turns into a gun.\nMaking a list of safe things for your hand to spontaneously turn into, like a hawk.\nPutting 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.\nPutting a sandwich in the hand drawer so your hand turns into a sandwich at lunchtime.\nSpending a lot of time at a computer drawing cartoon animals.\nFinding out how sandwiches feel about being eaten.\nHypothetical questions that make you want to figure out how to break the laws of thermodynamics.\nKeeping your magic drawer away from evil government researchers.\nKnowing what is like to be a cannibal and to be cannibalized, because you chew your fingernails.\nThe consequences of replacing your hand with a gold coin.\nFully mediating which of your actions are perceived by the other party.\nFighting a large poisonous skull with your friends.\nTalking to your friends for an hour without any awkward lulls.\nTopic Lords, Jr.\nFinding out that a cherished childhood memory could not possibly have happened the way you remember it.\nReceiving photocopies of the Legend of Zelda manual months before receiving the game itself.\nReliability of witness identification.\nWeird encounters that you tell as stories to your friends.\nBecoming Samuel Pepys.\nAcquiring most of your impressions of world history via what Victorians thought were important.\nRemembering too much about your life and wishing you could forget.\nLying to your future self in your journal.\nBenevolently gaslighting yourself.\nThat monument of cat, the cat forgotten in the moon.\nSitting with your head like a carving in space.\nPoetry that is angry at the concept of making sense.\nLetting the syllables wash over you.\nThe inversion of the power relationships you would expect in nature.\nWhether Wallace Stevens had peers.\nCorrectly identifying 100 poem authors in a row.\nCaring a lot about American poetry until you discover video games.\nbasketballsintrafficcones.com\nNotes towards a supreme fiction.\nWhat green things the cat was thinking about.\nBeing perceived by a rabbit as tall as outer space.\nWriting for an assumed audience who doesn't exist any more.\nRecommending enjoying being weirded out.\nDeleting ranch dressing because it's just weird vinegary mayonnaise.\nGetting that fake garlic grease zone going on \nScreaming in people's ears all night.\nMisspeaking and having to commit to what you said.\nThrowing your back out by sitting in a relaxed position.\nGag sodas.\nSoda flavor innovation.\nPebble ice.\nSavory beverages like sipping vinegar or a cup of warm broth.\nThe fakest orange you ever did taste.\nBeing disempowered at dinner.\nA relatable game where you can steal food from other people's plates with your long tongue.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2022-01-10T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/172a8030-829b-420e-8414-5f4738c18d15.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":56914609,"duration_in_seconds":3537}]},{"id":"213bfcf6-5d65-4af3-b915-bc4ae0e414c4","title":"115. Intrusive Thought Simulator","url":"https://topiclords.com/intrusive-thought-simulator","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nCisHetKayFaber\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/CisHetKayFaber\nhttps://www.upturnedtable.com/weekly-podcast-2/\n\nDan\n\n\nhttps://strangecurrencies.org/\nhttps://twitter.com/SC_Reviews_Dan\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nLearning something by doing, so you don't understand the theory behind it\nThe lonely realization that most people don't really care that much about the things that make you unique (not depressing) (I promise)\nShrek got a ten minute standing ovation at Cannes in 2001.\nThe Jabberwocky \n\n\nhttps://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42916/jabberwocky\n\nCursed connectors and adapters\nVacationing alone is extremely efficient\nSeeking Mr. Eaten's Name\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nA name that has nothing to do with wrestling.\nUpturned Table.\nTopic hunger.\nHearing something and playing it back.\nThe particular rat-a-tat of that ratio.\nThe difficulty of making art compelling and simple at the same time.\nIn C.\nA proc-gen song that is different every time you hear it but you have to pick just version to put on the record.\nMeeting 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.\nNot wanting to tell your family that you are trans because they would be very interested.\nThe dream of owning a board and card game store.\nTrying to convince an extremely modest person to tell you something interesting about themselves.\nDoing an interesting thing but not making a mental note to tell your friends about it because you never learned to tell stories.\nA 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.\nDiscovering a viable competitor to Disney.\nDevaluing the Cannes Standing Ovation.\nThe Sarcastic Standing Ovation.\nShepard Tones.\nHow many people you need to pay to stand and clap to extend a standing ovation indefinitely.\nBeing the one guy who is yelling at everyone to stop applauding.\nMoving 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.\nReading a game credits list on MobyGames and giving a standing ovation at the end.\nVorpal, manxome, uffish, frabjous and other words that didn't exist at one point but now do.\nUnderstanding the rhythm of language even if the words don't make sense.\nAlice Liddel.\nA faithful musical TV adaptation of the entire Alice in Wonderland series.\nAn adapter from pneumatic air to stereo XLR.\nSpeakers and microphones as adapters between air pressure and electrical signal.\nUsing a microphone as a speaker and a speaker as a microphone.\nThe downsides of USB-C.\nA sticker with induction coils on it.\nCounting the pins on a Famicom cartridge.\nHow you're supposed to blow into cartridges differently in the United States and in Japan.\nBreathing into your NES cartridge to apply a layer of condensation to the pins and improve connectivity.\nDry vs. wet exhale.\nBagpipe to stereo XLR connectors.\nA vacation where you go exactly where you want when you want and never need to form a consensus.\nThe kind of AAA vacation that a 4000 person team of Ubisoft employees would go on.\nSpending most of your vacation listening to podcasts in your hotel room.\nGoing on a vacation in order to scout out potential locations for future vacations.\nWalking into a book store and going to the zine section and downloading some bespoke local podcasts.\nAsking the concierge at the hotel what podcasts are good to listen to around here, and they suggest This American Life and Radiolab.\nA cloud of scenarios that you can choose to interact with.\nWhether the Last Constable is really last or whether she's just called that.\nPaying for a second candle.\nWaking up in the middle of the night to spend the turns you've accumulated so they don't go to waste.\nSailing the Unterzee in a majestic pleasure yacht.\nDreaming about going north.\nBreaking into a dentist's office to steak the jar of teeth from the cupboard in the back.\nBuilding up your Obscurity to endgame levels.\nKnowing that to solve the mystery you'll need to destroy yourself, and choosing to do it anyway.\nPlaying the game to get to the text that you're trying to read.\nThe grindiest content in the game.\nSelling your soul to devils and then realizing that you need to get it back so you can destroy it yourself.\nHammering on the button until it tells you where to go.\nWhether anyone knows the plot of World of Warcraft.\nA great place to discuss topics with people who might become your friends.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2022-01-03T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/213bfcf6-5d65-4af3-b915-bc4ae0e414c4.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":76722372,"duration_in_seconds":4780}]},{"id":"a47cc454-cba8-4b7e-81cf-9746c825e8a6","title":"114. Memento Maury Povich","url":"https://topiclords.com/memento-maury-povich","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nMaxx\n\n\nmaxx.infinity@gmail.com\n\nElena\n\n\nhttps://propinquity.me/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nBeen playing Celeste recently and I'm real into the themes of conflict with oneself vs acceptance of oneself\nThe museum of Jurassic Technology and when it's okay to lie to your audience\nHuman jaw shrinkage\n\n\nhttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_jaw_shrinkage\n\nFeeding the Worms, by Danusha Lameris\n\n\nhttp://poetrytreeonthecharles.net/2020/09/feeding-the-worms-by-danusha-lameris/\n\nLinguistics of Swearing and Taboo\n\n\nThe weird Mummy trailer with the missing audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1jg5YlQuT8\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nGetting a lot of calories for your money.\nAll your amino acids right there.\nSuperman grabbing the bumper and lifting the entire gestalt of the car.\nA \"superfood\" in the sense of being beyond the concept of food, e.g. antidepressants.\nWhether you get better at running events after running events for a decade.\nUltimately reconciling with yourself after making a video game about reconciling with yourself.\nA platformer about depression and panic attacks.\nThe checkbox in a hard game's accessibility options that allows you to give yourself permission to use the disability options.\nThe 8-way joystick gate on the Nintendo 64 and the Gamecube.\nInstalling little pigeon spikes on the thumb stick to remind yourself to use the d-pad when playing Celeste.\nIterating when everything you do is slightly difficult.\nA mixed record of enjoying platformers.\nPutting 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.\nA culture of something.\nBeing unable to process what's going on in a movie so you look up the Wikipedia plot summary mid-movie.\nMedia-related experiences that you miss out on because your priorities lie elsewhere.\nHating very difficult platformers but also being so good at platformers that you only get mildly frustrated at platformers that are generally considered very difficult.\nAn art installation that pretends to be a museum.\nVisiting a museum and at the end of it being unsure what a museum is.\nA glitch in your house where rooms occasionally disappear.\nThe 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.\nListening to someone tell a story from their life with growing horror and only realizing midway through that they're describing a dream.\nSubscribe to Nitro on Discord and needing to write a SQL query to find the right emoji reaction.\nUsing a normally innocuous emoji in a way that is not innocuous on this particular Discord server.\nUsing emoji reactions to replace the parental paratextual back channel of information that body language gives you in a real life conversation.\nWhether \"human jaw shrinkage\" refers to over an individual lifetime or over millennia of evolution.\nHuman jaws getting smaller not because of evolutionary pressure, but because we aren't chewing tough grains and nuts as much as our ancestors did.\nNot experiencing pain, fear or anxiety and not realizing it until you're in your sixties.\nNot 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.\nThe tickly sensation of yanking metal wire out of the ground.\nRecreational anaphylaxis.\nDrinking hot tea to burn your tongue so your dad won't be disappointed when you react to incredibly spicy ramen.\nThe sweetness of apples permeating the pores all over your stringy body.\nThe feathery tops of carrots.\nAt what point things become gross.\nHigh and low variance fruit.\nMush that is beyond comprehension.\nIf going on the bus to work was that chaotic Willy Wonka tunnel.\nGetting more reminders of life in your life.\nGoogle procedurally generating a vacation montage of the time you visited a Holocaust memorial, and playing a jaunty tune over it.\nGiving people unlabeled interfaces that they subconsciously learn how to use.\nUsing 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.\nLing 269.\nWhat that guy is saying in the weird Mummy trailer.\nPan-Pan the Human Man.\nStudying 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.\nAn aphasic situation.\nA comprehensive timeline of euphemisms for genitals going back to the 12th century.\nA novel mince to your swear.\nPracticing minced oaths until they are internalized enough to move into swear storage in your brain.\nFinding a stranger in the Alps.\nAmericans coming back from World War I with a bunch of new slurs.\nThe Holy Shit Shift, where the offensive part of the phrase \"holy shit\" shifted from one word to the other over time.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-12-27T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/a47cc454-cba8-4b7e-81cf-9746c825e8a6.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":61115577,"duration_in_seconds":3788}]},{"id":"f899a0a1-5152-49c0-8190-24cca06e8517","title":"113. Only You In Particular Can Prevent Forest Fires","url":"https://topiclords.com/only-you-in-particular-can-prevent-forest-fires","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nDanny\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/dannyodwyer/\n\nApril\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/aprilsaur\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nFavorite desserts for when it's hot out\nThe horror of almost being older than Princess Diana\nThe developer of Abraham Lincolnland has gone on to run a business selling shirts with Vaporwave Abraham Lincoln's Face on them.\n\n\nhttp://www.lincolnsoft.com/games/all/\nhttps://lincolnapparel.com/\n\nI Would Like to Describe by Zbigniew Herbert\n\n\nhttps://poets.org/poem/i-would-describe\n\nIrish surnames as American girl names\nWords that you misunderstood as a child and how that affected your life\nJordan Mechner calling E.Y. Harburg on the phone\n\n\nhttps://jordanmechner.com/archive/#2009-11-rainbo\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nPriming with a prompt.\nUsing the Inception noise too much so Christopher Nolan angrily accosts you and you can get his autograph.\nA selection of nice suits.\nThe swirl of the chocolate and vanilla duo.\nSo classy but also so messy.\nThe counter with fifty different ice creams in buckets.\n99.\nA stick of flaky wispy chocolate that you stick into your ice cream.\nThe two biggest KLF fans in America.\nMid-Atlantic Podcast Time.\nOrdering a hot latte in the middle of Summer.\nRealizing it's winter and going back into the coffee shop and asking the barista to put your iced coffee in the microwave.\nThe treat that you would least like to have in the summer.\nHanging your Christmas Pudding from a clothesline.\nHollywood Pudding.\nThe Devil's Sandwich.\nA fancy lad who eats nothing but olives and fig newtons.\nMorbid Distance Markers.\nRoyalophilia.\nOne princess dies and TV becomes useless for days\nThe ethical considerations of faking a news segment.\nThe last time you'll ever think about Princess Diana.\nAll your dead relatives living in your head.\nNever saying your child's name on the internet.\nWhat body part is touching the poison oak in this metaphor.\nRefusing to go outside without an EpiPen.\nAbraham Lincoln fighting Nazis in the cyberpunk future.\nBringing back beards for presidents.\nA 60-page readme about how to run this game in various driver configurations.\nSitemaps.\nSelling shirts with Abraham Lincoln's face on them at Milwaukee Marker Fair.\nGoing full neon.\nCovering the entire surface of the shirt with a garish vaporwave pattern.\nDescribing courage without involving a dusty lion.\nDrawing a single original word from your breast, like a rib.\nFalling asleep with your hand in a mound of planets.\nA fleeting moment of recognition that is often very centering.\nStanding at the limits of language.\nWord tattoos.\nMostly salt up top.\nDescribing a moment or a feeling or a concept that is unrelenting in your mind.\nUsing a trembling glass of water emoji but nobody knows whether you mean anxiety or an approaching T-Rex.\nHis and Hers Mound of Planets Tattoos.\nThe Irish guy in the room.\nPaying respect to your Irish heritage by naming your daughter \"McPhee.\"\n8 out of the top 10 baby names of 2020.\nHaving a reaction that nobody else is having.\nDon't Start Fires mascots.\nThinking that Smokey the Bear is instructing you to start forest fires because you don't know what \"prevent\" means.\nOnly you in particular can prevent forest fires.\nWhatever flips your boat.\nOne of those weird European psychological horrors.\nHa-Ha Hollywood.\nWanting information and figuring out how to get it.\nJohn Romero still having the Apple 2's memory layout memorized 40 years later.\nTrying to remember if you've done a podcast.\nA cat trying to get you to come to bed.\nOnly grace tweets.\nOverwatch boops.\nOverwatch: Global Offensive.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-12-20T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/f899a0a1-5152-49c0-8190-24cca06e8517.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":64820468,"duration_in_seconds":4028}]},{"id":"6482ae40-7f55-4f23-9af6-de2f7eea13d3","title":"112. Getting A Lot Of Vengabus Vibes From This","url":"https://topiclords.com/getting-a-lot-of-vengabus-vibes-from-this","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nJP\nJohn B\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/YouOldSoAndSo\nhttps://twitter.com/vs_everyone\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nShowing \"Akira\" to someone who has never seen any anime before and telling them, \"this is what all anime is like\"\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/kbonds420/status/1378850398665125892\n\nBizarro, Dan Hibiki, Homsar, and other not-quite-doppelgangers/parodies who exist in the same world as their progenitors\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/TheDemoScout/status/1457602338013728769\n\nThe Tonkachi Editor\n\n\nhttps://glitchcat7.com/the-complete-history-of-kaizo-mario/\n\n\"There was an Old Man of St. Bees, by W.S. Gilbert\n\n\nhttps://edwardleartrail.wordpress.com/2016/04/16/there-was-an-old-man-of-st-bees/\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nCapcom vs. Everyone.\nCorpus maintenance.\nDeath from Seventh Seal vs. Death from Castlevania.\nMoms teaming up based on both being tagged \"mom.\"\nThe philosophy of tagging tools.\nAlt-Universe Prompts Bot.\nComing up with a list of every character in pop culture.\nThe Ryu Number.\nGary Busey playing himself in Hitman 2.\nShattered Shield At Shattered Shield.\nSaturday Night Anime on the Sci-Fi channel.\nRoger Ebert's favorite early 90s anime.\nAnime that is just Cyberpunk C-Span.\nMario's Macross for the SNES.\nEvolutionary bottlenecks in video game design.\nThe Akira Bike Slide Tribute.\nA completely ridiculous context in which to invoke the Akira Bike Slide.\nSerious war movie guy plummeting to his death.\nA generic karate guy with similar moves.\nSpoilers for all of Mr. Karate's sons.\nInventing a new protagonist based on a typo.\nMeeting 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.\nMeeting the Evil Scooby Doo Gang in the Evil Mystery Mobile.\nA story about the mirror people escaping from behind the mirror and it turns out you were one of them the whole time!!\nWholesome Comedy Doppelgangers.\nBatzarro, the world's worst detective, who killed his own parents and is trying to solve the murder.\nPlanning out your Mario mod on graph paper and then typing it into the hex editor with the Famicom controller.\nConlon Nancarrow manually cutting strips of paper out of a piano roll.\nMaking tiny ROM hacks using the Game Genie.\nThe Awakening of Tinkerers.\nA landmark case in IP law.\nTrying out randomly generated Game Genie codes because it's the 90s and you have nothing better to do.\nHacking Game Genie codes to give you even more lives.\nParts of the logic which are scrutable.\nTalking about garbage and finding out if it makes it into the show.\nScrupulously avoiding burning cast.\nBurning Cast Xtreme Fishing.\nA chair with only three legs.\nPlaying a glitchy video game and reality starts breaking down in front of you.\nDumping computational work directly into the framebuffer.\nThe episode of That 70s Show that was about circuit-bending Pong.\nWhen things look like they should rhyme but don't.\nRobot Carnival.\nRainy weather in San Francisco on this cursed episode of Topic Lords.\nOverthinking the poem.\nThe Uncarrot Tarot.\nThe clashing colors of slant rhymes.\nMetamagical Themas.\nJokes you can play musically.\nA disaster episode of Topic Lords.\nThe Mote In His Eye.\nBeing here for history.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-12-13T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/6482ae40-7f55-4f23-9af6-de2f7eea13d3.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":50634280,"duration_in_seconds":3137}]},{"id":"04663495-2420-454d-a3d7-1dc4fc916028","title":"111. Put It In A Vice And Squish It","url":"https://topiclords.com/put-it-in-a-vice-and-squish-it","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nErica\nAbby\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nScale modeling hacks for broke hobbyists\nNobody should live here redux: nobody should live here either\nAnal Sampling Mechanism\nWallace Stevens - The Emperor of Ice Cream\n\n\nhttps://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45234/the-emperor-of-ice-cream\n\nAndrei Tarkovsky, game designer\n\n\n https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyzFSsNQYoXBo4zjmTmncoA\n https://www.youtube.com/c/SulMatul\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nPhotoshopping your co-guest's face onto a platypus or maybe it's a beaver.\nWanting 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.\nThe claw beavers use to comb oil into their fur.\nAn after-dinner lemon.\nMemorably embarrassing yourself as a mnemonic aid.\nPlaying along with someone's schemes to get them to leave you alone.\nA cool hacker whose anti-establishment principles drive her to pirate every episode of Digimon.\nDifferentiating between the real world and the cyberpunk dystopian future by the number of Digimon available.\nPainting the peg of a loose action figure joint with clear nail polish so the peg gets a little thicker.\nThe downtown Los Angeles Gundam shop.\nNot 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.\nMan Juice, For Men Only.\nFinding a vice big enough to squish an entire city block.\nDesperately 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.\"\nAppealing to 60 year old men who need something to put in their basement.\nWhen tour wife and kids leave you and your turkey sandwich is dry and lonely.\nAncient web forums that aren't getting any more radicalized because nobody is posting there any more.\nThe scum of mold you get on top of your pickling brine.\nHow Koreans deal with moldy kimchi.\nTranscending 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.\nThe 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.\nA beaver with a swimming trophy who doesn't want to go in the lake because it's too cold.\nEating your lemons and sitting in the dark of the lodge, as the winter will soon be over.\nWhether beavers get pruny.\nWhy and how to get pruny.\nAnimals that have hands.\nOtter brains: too bigs for their skulls.\nFinding out what animals have in store for us.\nLiving in a town built over a big bubble of petroleum and your neighbor's yard having the cutest little oil derrick.\nRinsing off with distilled water after you shower so you don't get a rash.\nLiving 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.\nGas fields flaring all around the city.\nA combined oil derrick/Bitcoin mining rig that you can plug right into the ground and forget about.\nThe ability to voluntarily control defecation.\nThe sixth sense that's just in our butts.\nTaking care of you butt consciousness.\nShitting your pants once and upending all of science.\nWhether anyone poops in Rain World.\nA cat who is also a slug who is also trapped on the Wheel of Samsara.\nReading a poem and refusing to click on the poem guide that explains what the heck it means.\nApproaching poems as inscrutable puzzle boxes where you have to crack the code to even figure out what the hell they're talking about.\nApproaching making art as aN opportunity to bore the shit out of your friends and family.\nPulling the theme of a story like a string and the entire story falls open like a sack of grain.\nDemanding more delicious curds and dawdling wenches at your funeral.\nNeeding a weird cow to anchor your painting of a grassy field.\nWhether the crowd-pleasers actually have something there. Something other than all the money, I mean.\nMaking a funny reference to a contemporary TV commercial in your poem about a funeral.\nThe King of Carrot Flowers.\nBusy wrists make for busy minds.\nStanislaw Lem's \"Solaris\" as the basis for every video game except for Rain World.\nStalker and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.\nThe mysteries of The Zone and why it exists.\nThe Emperor of Ice Cream of Tarkovsky movies.\nExperiencing what is like to live in a non-functional economy.\nBeing in the company of a doctor piloting someone through a pandemic-ridden city.\nStand-Up Tragedy.\nThe cheapest way to fame.\nRenaming your PhD thesis \"Anal Sampling Mechanism\" so your advisor will finally look at it.\n","content_html":"

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

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-12-06T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/04663495-2420-454d-a3d7-1dc4fc916028.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":64804177,"duration_in_seconds":4014}]},{"id":"9b594200-7eb0-4f13-8f6d-caa54265f506","title":"110. There Will Be A Last Tweet","url":"https://topiclords.com/there-will-be-a-last-tweet","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nJames\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/triplefox\n\nTyriq\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/FourbitFriday\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nNostalgia is a curse\n\n\nhttps://bluerenga.blog/tag/adventure-500/?order=ASC\n\nNonogram puzzles\n\n\nhttps://www.kesiev.com/stampadia/\n\nAs the exodus continues, all that will be left of the public-facing internet will increasingly be the people too hard-headed or hard-hearted to burn out.\n\n\nhttps://inessential.com/2021/10/04/in_case_i_dont_write_here_again\n\nThe Village of Reason\n\n\nhttps://www.lyrikline.org/en/poems/village-reason-8055\n\nInstead of writing in a journal, recording the journal on the phone\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nExtending your failure through time.\nSwatch clock, Swatch clock! Swatch clock, Swatch clock! \nSwatch Internet Time.\nCounting up from the beginning of time, January 1st, 1970.\nThe perfect method of keeping time.\nA Swatch body horror beast.\nThe promise of being made of meat.\nUFO 50's release date: May 5th, 5050.\nDeciding that nobody should feel your least favorite emotion.\nMaking a new better future without looking to the past for your aspirations.\nThe world before Later On.\nRemembering 80s pop songs way better than when you last took a shower.\nMaking 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.\nNostalgia vs. taste.\nTrying to replicate your favorite thing and falling to replicate it, but the failure is way more interesting than the thing you were copying.\nAdventure 500.\nRecreating something you love from memory.\nA game jam where everyone picks an old video game they like and tries to recreate it from memory without looking at any references.\nSimplifying while depicting by choosing what details to focus on.\nAn inverted form of nostalgia.\nCloak and Dagger (1984)\nPutting 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.\nPepper's Adventures in Time.\nAll the names of Nonogram puzzles.\nFinding 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.\nThe Konami Pixel Puzzle Collection.\nWhen you do and when you don't want to be stultified.\nRoguelike Celebration.\nBeach Umbrella Games.\nPrinting out a generated dungeon and solving it like a Sudoku.\nUtter not-knowing-where-to-start-ness.\nthewebsitethatyougotoeveryday.com\nRolling dice and losing all your chill.\nRetiring to the offline colonies.\nThe potential that you could hypothetically be friends with every cool person in the world.\nA person who tweets whimsical things.\nA video essay on TikTok that includes screenshots of Twitter.\nTrying to make friends by dumping your sugar in the street.\nThe different life choices you might've made if you had to make friends in real life.\nBefriending an ant colony and watching your friend count shoot through the roof.\nTrying to wedge a crowbar of understanding into a cryptic poem.\nAll the ways reading poetry can make you feel bad about yourself.\nThe actual thing and the shadow it casts.\nTaking your hindbrain for a brisk jog around the block.\nNeeding to play Brain Age for the Nintendo DS before you can understand this poem.\nOmitting words from your poetry reading because it's all about the words you don't say.\nWhether it is entertaining to learn how to analyze poetry in public.\nQ.R. Hand, Jr.\nApplauding: too loud. Too scary. It startles the poet.\nTerminator, Jr.\nTransitioning 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.\nTrying to remember anything ever.\nCollecting art references.\nReading the phrase \"mariachi trumpets\" in your diary and trying to figure out what it means.\nGPS tagging your journal entries so you can retrace your steps thirty years later.\nAn open source phone that nobody will ever use because there are no apps for it.\nA bed contraption that, when the alarm rings, dumps you into your outfit for the day and makes you breakfast.\nWriting 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.\nBeing 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.\nHow to navigate the internet and discern fact from fiction.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-11-29T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/9b594200-7eb0-4f13-8f6d-caa54265f506.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":56374888,"duration_in_seconds":3523}]},{"id":"4233bf75-3ac2-42b8-98ef-7e07b242a4fa","title":"109. Ultra Rare Cheeto Shaped Like Batman Crying","url":"https://topiclords.com/ultra-rare-cheeto-shaped-like-batman-crying","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nStevie\nAvery\n\n\nhttps://averyburke.bandcamp.com/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nCollectable cheetos on Ebay\n\n\nhttps://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=rare+cheeto\n\nJapanese websites are stuck in the 90s. Any theories?\n\n\nhttps://search.marginalia.nu/\n\nMedieval European and ancient Egyptian philosophy.\nBrad 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?\"\nThe unusual puzzles of StarTropics.\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nDefining poop by its shape.\nThe lava of the human body.\nThe Content Distribution Baby growing up into a Content Distribution Man.\nAn angry internet mob that won't say why they're angry so you just have to fix every problem until they go away.\nLegally changing your name to add a silent and invisible Bitcoin logo.\nSearching for collectible Cheetos on eBay.\nA Cheeto shaped like a lobster claw.\nPutting a Cheeto shaped like a cockatiel on eBay for months but nobody's buying so you give up and eat it.\nWhether 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.\nheritageauctionsforcheetos.com\nBidding $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.\nBuying a penis-shaped collectible Cheeto for $1.40 but still waiting on it because it got caught up in escrow.\nBidding on an eBay auction and walking away when you get outbid.\nLooking at collectible Cheeto auctions and then eBay won't stop trying to sell you posters of ladies canoodling.\nCheeto misprints and their value on the collectors market.\nArnold Schwarzenegger if his legs were joined together like a seal.\nThe web sites we visited back before the internet had the power to reach into the real world and strangle it.\nA search engine optimized to return pages that are mostly static text.\nLoading the bottom of your web page with keywords.\nKeeping a designer on payroll so that every few years your interface can alternate between having gradients and being flat.\nAsking Jeeves things and he tells you the answers, like a modern day Delphi.\nLet's play: Flaming Hot Cheetos or Freezing Cold Cheetos?\nA cheerleader pyramid made of butlers.\nScraping Wikipedia and formating the results like a book.\nA postcard with a picture of Kim Jong Un saying \"Live, Laugh, Love.\"\nPharaoh culture.\nA Canticle for Liebowitz.\nMedieval monks stumbling into a bomb shelter.\nMaking an illuminated manuscript of instructions on how to build a bomb so you can give it to the Pope.\nThe Learned Bede.\nThe four dudes in your culture who can write and create original work.\nKingdoms in medieval Europe, centered around the manors of rich noble Romans.\nNearly everyone dying from the plague so all the public servants are in their early teens.\nIntelligible Forms.\nAristotelean ideas about science.\nGoing real alien.\nUltra Rare Cheeto Shaped Like The Venerable Bede.\nThe first dinosaur of Egypt.\nInventing the razor because of your unsightly back hair.\nWaking up from anesthetic to find that the surgeon shaved body parts nowhere near the incision site, \"because you're a hairy beast.\"\nFirst, do no hair.\nThe Egyptian book of the Dead.\nThe 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.\nReligions competing to provide the best afterlife.\nWhen we as a species learned to attach afterlife outcomes to ethical behavior, as opposed to dying in battle.\nHaving 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.\nThe nine parts of the soul.\nBeing constantly surrounded, your whole life, by monuments to death big enough to see from space.\nAdding a scent to natural gas so that you can smell when it's filling your house.\nWhether antifreeze is sweet and if so can a cat taste antifreeze.\nHow one might test whether cats can taste sweet.\nTongue meat analysis: a great way to tell.\nThe Inverted Qualia Problem.\nAsking 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.\"\nA video game related topic.\nTrying to locate your missing uncle who has been abducted by aliens.\nA 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.\nAn 80s video game puzzle that requires you to be familiar with solfege to solve it.\nHow you could get away with a lot more bullshit back in the 80s.\nThe experience of suddenly realizing that it's the piece of paper.\nGoing 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.\nSneaking irrelevant puzzles into someone else's room escape game.\nForcing the employees of an escape room to escape an escape room of their own. (Jail.)\nThe ultimate unrequited high five.\n","content_html":"

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Lords:

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Microtopics:

\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-11-22T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/4233bf75-3ac2-42b8-98ef-7e07b242a4fa.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":66669653,"duration_in_seconds":4133}]},{"id":"136fd8f1-9acf-4647-92e7-a830043fe806","title":"108. Sitting And Being Angry At Your Phone","url":"https://topiclords.com/sitting-and-being-angry-at-your-phone","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nMark\nShirley\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nNeuroscience!\nFertility tracking is more complicated than I realized.\nWhen 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.\nImmortal - Call Of The Wintermoon\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VBdAY8eA9w\nUnedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/I4XK7YqwgFg\n\nTiktok food trends that are more about elaborate assembly than flavors.\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vesYREe6_uk\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nA band from Sweden that just released a demo.\nAlbum art with a big giant snake and a shirtless barbarian dude whipping a mace at a guy.\nA punk band composed of mixed race middle school riot grrls.\nSpeaking to a rude 12 year old and running off to write a bitchin' punk song about it.\nObserving someone's career arc via the podcasts they guest on.\nTalking yourself out of being a scientist.\nHelping people with early-stage dementia manage activities of daily living.\nAn acquired language problem.\nAdapting to not being in an abusive workplace environment.\nHow 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.\nHow every retail store is as understaffed as possible by design.\nSwitching from a retail job to an office job and suddenly being trusted to decide when to go to the bathroom.\nHow the world might be different if the people in charge had to live in the world they created.\nThriving in Our Hypercapitalist Dystopia.\nTrying to have a kid and learning a whole bunch about your own body in the process.\nGiving kids facts instead of ideology or even advice.\nGoing to pregnancy club and wondering if there's an aspirational pregnancy club.\nTaking your temperature when you emerge from slumber.\nPeeing on sticks. (A medical process.)\nNot trying, not preventing.\nCervical mucus.\nA bad batch of kombucha can kill you, and other ways kombucha is like a pregnancy.\nBeing naturally blessed with high motility sperm.\nAsking your doctor if you should run a bunch of tests and they're like \"just chill\" and you're like \"take my blood, please\"\nThe science of trying-adjacent.\nDrinking too deeply of the colloidal silver.\nA bookish nerd who is portrayed by one of the most attractive humans on the planet but they're wearing glasses.\nThe incomparable Finn Carter.\nTrying 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.\nDoing 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.\"\nPutting \"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.\nA music video that was shot on VHS and uploaded to 2006-era Youtube.\nGoth clowns scowling and looking out from behind trees.\nA troupe of grumpy goth clowns in leather daddy outfits discovering and exploring ancient ruins.\nCutting your frenulum so you can stick out your tongue as far as Gene Simmons and waking up choking on your tongue meat every night.\nGrumpy goth clowns crouching in doorways.\nHearing a variety of different screams and growls.\nTraining to scream for several hours a day, every day, without ruining your screamy bits.\nDoing the crabcore thing decades before crabcore.\nGoogling \"candlemass bewitched\" for a good time.\nWatching TikTok on Reddit because you're old.\nExtremely simple and compelling recipes that can't possibly work and will in fact cause a fire in your chicken.\nMaking bad content to make people mad.\nTrying to redefine porn as anything you enjoy.\nMaking a series of recipe videos with your nonstandard measuring cups so people need to buy your weird measuring cups to follow along.\nElsagate.\nJ. Kenji Lopez-Alt.\nHard boiling a million eggs to scientifically determine that you're super sick of eating eggs.\nFood Wishes.\nThat's Just You Cookin'.\nA cool chef with a cool attitude.\nA chef with a cadence of speaking that really annoys your dad.\nLearning to improvise when faced with an unexpected situation.\nHow to get joy out of cooking.\nThe fugu preparation certification.\nWatching somebody spend five minutes washing some extremely starchy rice.\nHaving two gimmicks.\nA knife that you can also use as a spatula.\nUsing fresh stream water in your forest cooking videos.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-11-15T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/136fd8f1-9acf-4647-92e7-a830043fe806.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":79125752,"duration_in_seconds":4917}]},{"id":"2b8313cd-09cb-47f4-b94c-258aaa1896ea","title":"107. 27 Kilobytes Of Pure Magic","url":"https://topiclords.com/27-kilobytes-of-pure-magic","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nRyan\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/ryanikecomposer/\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldtX4d5qanA\n\nJenni\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/horsewizrd/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nVideo games providing an illusion of competency & how jarring it is when they don't\nCarcinization\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation\n\nManualism\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwxvOKuLUQ0\n\nDid you ever play \"AR games\" with your own imagination when you were a kid? What kind?\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nWhether Jim enjoys it when nobody can decide who should go first.\nWhoever can blurt their name out fastest.\nDog Airport Game.\nEating pizza around a three year old.\nWizard With A Gun.\nA song for a trailer where the trailer ends but the song keeps going for years.\nHiring a team of monks to take turns notes on a church organ for seven hours at a time.\nWhen 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.\nJack Pumpkin Skellington.\nWhat happens when Merlin gets off in space.\nHow many wizard/firearm puns we can think of. (2)\nMaking a movie about the legend of King Arthur with all the magic removed and Merlin is just an old man who needs a bath.\nThe highly relatable legend of King Arthur buying Excalibur from the katana shop next to Spencer's Gifts.\nThat time King Arthur lost his wedding ring under the bed and had to sweep it out using Excalibur.\nA collaboration where one person writes the first half of the story and the other person writes a 4chan reference.\nMaking paintings with the art skills of a writer.\nThe illusion of hyper-competency.\nMoving your thumb a fraction of an inch and your avatar onscreen does a cartwheel off of a robot's face.\nDriving behind Wario and he has that big purple caboose and you just want to slam it.\nBlue Shell pacifists who try throw a Blue Shell without hurting any other drivers \nWhether that skeleton who shoots lasers at you has a wife and kids at home who would also shoot lasers at you.\nMr. Friendly.\nHaving to solve each topic before you can move on.\nSomeone 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.\nFlies landing on your psoriasis patches because they ooze a little bit and probably smell like rotting meat or at least oozing meat.\nGoing 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.\nReminding the listener that everyone they care about will die someday but it's okay because Wario's juicy purple butt exists.\nProviding foley for your death just in case in case you die silently while recording the show.\nWriting 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.\nWhether this 27k wav file that you've been instructed to play at your funeral counts as music, strictly speaking.\nWriting an intricate eight minute sonata with the intention of time-stretching it down to less than a second.\nMeeting crab scientists who talk about carcinization and then turn into crabs right in front of you.\nTransmorphing into a crab and deciding to hold a knife all the time just because you can.\nFinding out about carcinization and then staying up all night wondering when you're going to get your crab claws.\nFinding out whether anyone at Berkeley has designed a musical instrument for after you turn into a crab by googling for \"Berkeley carcinization instrument\"\nA vent-based apparatus.\nWrapping your fingers in electrical tape and getting a preview of what making music will be like after we all turn into crabs.\nChilling with a pile of rotting meat on a beach, like \"what's up?\"\nHands feet and they're all around sticking out in every direction so we can just roll everywhere.\nThe fate of the Butthole Foot.\nCentaur World, where everything is centaurs.\nThe mighty centaur, with the bottom half of a bull and the top half of a cenobite.\nA centaur thing a wrinkle through time flew \nA man with a body of a motorcycle.\nCentaur court, the court where the bottom half is replaced with a horse.\nGerry the manualist.\nPlaying songs on your hands for 52 years.\nPlaying AR games with your own imagination.\nPicking 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.\nImagining that your parent's car shoots missiles out of the hubcaps.\nTony Hawk with feet sticking out in every direction except from his butthole.\nDoing Christ Air after Christ Air on your way to get some Arby's.\nOne 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.\nWanting it until it turns out to have been a bad idea to want it.\nBeing a professional for five seconds a week.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-11-08T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/2b8313cd-09cb-47f4-b94c-258aaa1896ea.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":63345830,"duration_in_seconds":3937}]},{"id":"997b0471-2755-417c-9268-610a680f280a","title":"106. Hearses For Snakes","url":"https://topiclords.com/hearses-for-snakes","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nShannon\nAlex\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nCorn maze vs hedge maze: which one is better? What's the best maze material?\n\n\nWorld Record Corn Maze in Dixon CA: https://www.coolpatchpumpkins.com/\n\nProjectable Halloween Decoration Animations\n\n\nhttps://vimeo.com/465549120\n\nFor the halloween season: the spookiest story I know, about Dave Mustaine sleeping on a chair.\nRob Zombie - Dragula\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqQuihD0hoI\nUnedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/tRtRpWqxh5o\n\nGoogle spirit\nInteractive halloween costumes\n\n\nReverse Trick or Treating: https://youtu.be/xhS_CjECO90\nhttps://www.hearsehub.com/\nOne Cut of the Dead 100% Tomatometer rating: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/one_cut_of_the_dead\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nTop ten dog features.\nTop one dog feature.\nThe resident holiday specials expert.\nOne Cut of the Dead.\nOpening the door and saying \"hello!\"\nMaze season is upon us.\nEating your way out of the corn maze.\nLaminating your corn maze so the corn doesn't blow over when it rains.\nTopiary vs. Scarecrow.\nThe barrier that humanity doesn't realize it can cross until it's across the threshold.\nBuilding a maze out of \"employees only\" and \"wet floor\" signs so nobody even realizes they're in a maze.\nHow to ethically put someone in a room escape situation without getting their informed consent first.\nWhether Dustin has teeth yet.\nThe best maze material is the social contract.\nPepper's Ghost.\nBone Chillers 2.\nProjecting animated ghost pirates rear projected onto your window.\nAn actual live human Pepper's Ghost and whether that ghost sees us as the ghosts.\nInteractive ghosts.\nTurtle Talk.\nWanting to spend all day pretending to be a skeleton.\nDave Mustaine's terrifying sleeping injury.\nSaturday Night Palsy.\nLosing feeling in your fingers because you carried groceries too much.\nTaking law school exams without any feeling in your fingers.\nDisrupting ambulances by taking an Uber to the hospital.\nKeeping a big basket of Epipens and Narcan in your cab, just in case.\nWhether they give you another one if you use your Epipen on someone else.\nChatting 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.\nGetting your Narcan certification and treating every human interaction as an opportunity to deploy your Narcan.\nMr. Zombie.\nRob Zombie doing the \"What is Love\" head bob in his Dragula.\nWithholding the Dragula for most of the music video, like how they didn't show the shark for most of Jaws.\nExtremely tall guitars.\nA tiki head spray painted silver.\nT-posing Rob Zombie singing at the ceiling.\nA woman who is in this music video to not wear a lot of clothes \nGhost Dad playing keytar in the back.\nThe most adorable Rob Zombie.\nThe origin of the silver headed tiki robot.\nThe silver headed tiki robot doing a high kick.\nWatching the music video for Dragula and then excitedly searching Craigslist for hearses.\nA hearse with a tramp stamp.\nThe two happiest days you'll ever have with your hearse.\nhearsehub.com\nLocal rug artists.\nThe kind of person who would think it's fun to role play a Spirit Halloween employee.\nCoronavirus is transforming the death care industry, according to Funeral and Cemetery News on hearsehub.com.\nGetting a hearse long enough to be pulled by a mini dachshund.\nLogrolling the snake coffin over a series of snake pallbearers.\nCrowdsurfing for Snakes.\nA 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.\nReverse trick or treating.\nSetting 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.\nKill or Queen?\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-11-01T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/997b0471-2755-417c-9268-610a680f280a.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":58934536,"duration_in_seconds":3667}]},{"id":"89926c1d-f1ea-47bf-ac6a-1793760682d8","title":"105. Ficus On A Leash","url":"https://topiclords.com/ficus-on-a-leash","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nTyriq\n\n\nFourBitFriday everywhere.\nhttps://www.ckgame.net/\n\nChall\n\n\n@MrChrisLHall\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nHow cars age vs how people age\nLearning the wrong lesson from childrens media (due to being an incompetent child)\nBOFH: Servers Under Siege\n\n\nhttps://www.old-games.com/download/1796/bastard-operator-from-hell-servers\n\nKorn - Freak on a Leash\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRGrNDV2mKc\nUnedited (syncable) commentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_L7WeZVlQ0\n\nDo other people just have boring dreams??\n\n\nForgot to mention on the show, but on the Topic Lords discord, dreams go in #announcements.\n\nTurns out, running has everything I love about walking, but it's very time efficient\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUXow3d3-b0\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nMake game.\nThe properties of houseplants.\nTikToks of feral houseplants.\nThree people trying to remember the name of the musical starring Rick Moranis about carnivorous plant.\nOne (1) 2004 Toyota Camry, tan.\nSpeaker covers turning into sand.\nSometimes being in charge of your body and sometimes being in charge of your car and sometimes being in charge of both.\nA make of cars as an enormous number of identical twins.\nPaint is shirts for cars.\nWhether paint is shirts for cars or tattoos for cars.\nComing home with a new nose and nobody recognizes you.\nCars doing most of their aging in instants.\nSeeing 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.\nAn airplane outside of your house waiting for you to finish recording this podcast so you can board.\nPlastic surgery for an airplane.\nGetting tired looking at your aging car so you cover it with sweet blue LEDs and now nobody can ever look at it again.\nBeing sarcastic in movie for children who are too young to understand sarcasm.\nWhat happens when young foolish screenwriters try to write wise old characters.\nBad ways of teaching history.\nTeaching only the things you can test.\nLearning how to extract meaning from the things you read.\nTriaging 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??\nA fun movie depicting a series of events that happen.\nWhether hitting people with sticks is fun.\nBastard Operator From Hell.\nSysadmins writing revenge fantasies on Usenet about screwing over their incompetent users.\nIndie games from the early aughts that are playable on the Amiga and Commodore 64.\nA sysadmin with a rocket launcher.\nPokey the Penguin.\nArctic Circle-Candy.\nAll the Pokey the Penguin fan games that came from the Pokey the Penguin mailing list.\nProdly the Puffin.\nParchment, the Z-Machine interpreter written in JavaScript.\n0-Hour Game Jam.\nRPG Maker vs. RPG Maker '99.\nComing on the show and donating of your time and topics.\nIndie games starting to exist now that mainstream games are made by dozens of people.\nMadMaze.\nLadderMan: He's a man! He's a ladder!\nWhether the video for Freak on a Leash could be made today and still be western-style animation.\nExtremely red coffee.\nWhether they're pouring steaming blood into this coffee mug or maybe you just have Flux on.\nPlaying hopscotch at the precipice of a cliff.\nA cop drawing a gun to stop you from jumping off a cliff.\nWhere's Hopscotch Girl?\nThe kind of person who would prominently display a cookie jar and never fill it.\nA speeding bullet rapidly leaving a party like \"this party sucks\"\nA hundred page forum thread arguing about whether the plane on a treadmill will take off.\nWeird creatures that have eyes but no mouth and vice versa.\nA bullet bee making bullet honey.\nA music video that is just a Ganon fight with two posters firing bullets back and forth at each other.\nA bullet intended to pierce someone's ear but it just goes right through their gauge.\nA DOS program you can use with your SoundBlaster.\nA blanket you can use to increase the strangeness of your dreams.\nWhether most people have boring dreams or whether most people are just bad storytellers.\nThings happening because of other things.\nDreams where the whole dream is that you know a fact.\nHow to know whether someone is the president of Nairobi.\nRunning on the path you used to walk on and seeing way more bugs per minute.\nGauging your mouth so that you can collect even more bugs while running.\nInstalling a whistle tip in your mouth so you make an incredibly loud whistling noise while running around.\nGetting into blood doping just because you want to get high.\nThe nicest form of Mustard Gas.\nSoaking 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.\nThe new exercise fad where you go running while looking behind you, terrified.\nBubb Rubb lauding Missile Tips. \"The missiles go woooo!\"\nBeing super into being witnessed.\nThrowing a stumble scramble into your jogging routine and everybody around you panicking as they try to figure out what you're running from.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-10-25T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/89926c1d-f1ea-47bf-ac6a-1793760682d8.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":67362002,"duration_in_seconds":4174}]},{"id":"2a917bd1-954b-4c44-af00-6affbf505cc4","title":"104. Truck Nut, Singular","url":"https://topiclords.com/truck-nut-singular","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nElena\n\n\nhttps://www.propinquity.me/\n\nNova\n\n\nhttps://novalinium.com/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nThings I have learned about myself from being a professional matchmaker\nThe Mother of All Demos\nThe wine-dark sea\nTWRP - Starlight Brigade\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9Q3i5w6-Ug\nUnedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/VsFcnzBJlt4\n\nChallenges in scaling community organizing\n\n\nhttps://youtu.be/DAN0OCagHzQ\nhttps://thenewinquiry.com/hot-allostatic-load/\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nLack of confidence in your chocolate opinions.\nChocolate naan.\nFruit esters.\nChocolove.\nA really mean fruit tart.\nGiving the listeners homework.\nBeing self employed and feeling like you're constantly behind on some imaginary metric you haven't made up yet.\nPropinquity.\nReceiving an encrypted email asking if you want to work on a secret project and telling everybody about it on this show.\nThe Scoville scale of tidiness.\nDoing an extremely tedious test to see if you have ADHD.\nLaminating your ADHD certificate so you can keep it in your wallet in case you have to prove to someone that you have ADHD.\nThe power differential in relationships where one person is much more attractive than the other.\nRetaining a panel of judges to rate all your clients' attractiveness from 1 to 10.\nVideo 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.\nStriving to get a good grade on your dating life, something that is normal and possible to achieve.\nInstead of filling out your dating profile, just clicking \"I'm feeling lucky.\"\nThe On Line System.\nWhether smartphones are good.\nIf Facebook were more like MySpace and you could include Javascript in your status update so your status emits butterflies.\nWhen Twitter didn't sanitize Javascript out of SVG uploads so you could include playable games in your avatar image.\nTI calculators as a way to learn to program.\nGiving kids these days the uphill-both-ways speech about how much worse TI calculators were in your day.\nTracker music on TI calculators.\nFrom the future or from Xerox PARC?\nWhat Apple did and failed to do with vertical integration.\nAn opportunity for disruption.\nRunning Turing-complete PostScript on your font cartridge.\nRunning Doom on your font cartridge.\nThe history of color perception.\nThe history of what color wine is.\nZeus' eyebrow color.\nWhether all ancient Greeks were color blind or just Homer.\nGreco-Roman poetic studies focusing on light and shadow but totally ignoring hue.\nDark in hue vs. dark in mood.\nStars that don't twinkle.\nCatching stars from the sky by spraying them with water first.\nA spaceship made of ferrofluid.\nNot remembering any anime but remembering all their theme songs.\nA genre of TV show that can only exist when there is disparity in the global economy.\nFirst being scared of hyperspeed and then enjoying it and then being angry at it in the space of a few seconds.\nFantasy triangles.\nA spaceship with truck nuts.\nAn ensemble of different animated character archetypes.\nEstablishing personality via the object the character is holding for their two seconds of screen time.\nTrapping 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.\nBanging on the geodesic Epcot sphere to be let inside.\nSecret Service Ralph finally being promoted to pilot but insisting that he still be called Secret Service Ralph.\nEverybody getting one Truck Nut and knowing you found your soul mate because your Truck Nuts match and you can pair them up.\nDoing your best to bring up the arm count average.\nCommander Meowch.\nUsing sentiment analysis to determine whether chat room users are about to be in a fight.\nA Fletcher, meaning one who teleports around.\nFiguring out which kind of moderator interventions will lead to good outcomes.\nThe September That Never Ended.\nHow to grow from a small community into a large community without changing the culture.\nBeing yelled at by 100 people each of whom aren't having the experience of harassing somebody.\nWhether you can get rid of a forum user who is following all the rules but just nobody likes them.\nHot Allostatic Load.\n","content_html":"

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Microtopics:

\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-10-18T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/2a917bd1-954b-4c44-af00-6affbf505cc4.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":60518431,"duration_in_seconds":3750}]},{"id":"40780df7-467e-4624-9055-043de457bdc7","title":"103. The 303 Beethoven Used","url":"https://topiclords.com/the-303-beethoven-used","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nAvery\n\n\nhttps://averyburke.bandcamp.com/releases\n\nJay\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/jaytholen\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nKowloon Walled City\nInternet communities gaining a reputation and then changing over time as members mature.\nThe moral cost of the 303 Devilfish clone\nJustified and Ancient\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XP5oHL3zBDg\nUnedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/Peeo6xZqeVs\n\nCyber Nexus internet cafe in Lakeland Florida and late 1990s internet cafes in general\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/jaytholen/status/1370002162063990786\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nPutting all of Spotify on shuffle.\nSpotify rejecting your album because you put lyrics on the album cover.\nImmersing yourself in a shitty visual aesthetic until you love it and the guy at the record label rejects your album cover.\nRenaming your company to Content Distribution Baby now but the logo is still a baby on a CD.\nThe Godaddy man and the pets dot com sock puppet.\nA demon face in the middle of a circuit board.\nThe part of the show where we look at image search results together.\nVisiting Kowloon Walled City for the cheap dentistry.\nGoing to a nightmare city to get your teeth worked on: an opportunity to die.\nOne of several problems with working seven days a week and never taking a break.\nBlame! or perhaps Blam!\nTrying 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.\nThe protagonist having a really cool gun.\nWhen the author doesn't know what's interesting about their own setting.\nHaving to write a novel because nobody's invented D&D source books yet.\nFeeling like an outsider because you don't know which Dale Earnhardt crashed into a wall.\nAn online pixel art isometric place to hang out.\nBeing a jerk to people in an organized manner.\nAudio production subforums.\nHow internet communities get radicalized and how they mellow out.\nIronically doing outrageous stuff on the internet.\nThe strange purity of being ahead of the curve.\nMemes as a bannable offense.\nGetting a Something Awful forum account for your birthday and never looking at it because you don't like awful things.\nA synthesizer for the singer songwriter who doesn't have a bass player.\nDiscovering the future of techno in the bargain bin.\nThe history of the TB-303.\nThe Prophet-5 vs. the Prophet-6.\nA drum pad that is the first of its kind.\nThe thing with the egg breaking against a wall and how you always side with the egg.\nCreating reproductions of saught after out of print old stuff.\nHaving two guitars, one tuned in fifths and one tuned like a ukulele.\nWriting music that could never be played.\nMaking games because you want to get your music in front of people.\nJim Stormdancer and the Frog Fractions Players.\nFinally receiving the obscurity you've been craving.\nWriting a book about the KLF as a lens into your particular moral philosophy.\nDrum or Brown?\nDoom Demon Invisible.\n5 times voted CMA female vocalist Tammy Wynette.\nTrying to gesture at Discordianism or other forms of alternative mysticism.\nMaking a new game in character as a character from your last game.\nThe Burning Man man.\nPresented with the Most Coveted Living Legend Award Sponsored By TNN.\nHiring randos to sing and play instruments on your album and hiring entirely different randos to be in your music video.\nKing Boy D and the other guy.\nBurning a million quid and then going around asking people why you burned a million quid.\nGood names for internet cafes.\nA square of computers.\nNot recognizing Stargate decor and assuming it's just sci fi Egypt themed.\nLosing at Quake for your birthday while your parents watch a Pink Floyd DVD with the owner of the Internet cafe.\nWhich one is Cyber and which one is Nexus?\nNot remembering why your band was invited to play a set at the Interface of Language and Technology.\nThat's a level 12 mage, get off of that!\nWhether an internet cafe is the same thing as a cyber cafe.\nThe regular at your coffee shop who scalps tickets for a living.\nWhipping out a 61 key MIDI controller to write tracks at Starbucks.\nTrying to avoid situations where you'd accidentally give a philosophy lecture.\nWhat is an organism and what organisms do.\nWhether Aristotle knows that whales are mammals.\nA category of things that have an effect.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.\r\n","date_published":"2021-10-11T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/40780df7-467e-4624-9055-043de457bdc7.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":70993582,"duration_in_seconds":4399}]},{"id":"c64ed0e5-8784-43cd-9bbc-8f8e289847c3","title":"102. I Wouldn't Touch That With A 3.048 Meter Pole","url":"https://topiclords.com/i-wouldnt-touch-that-with-a-3048-meter-pole","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nNathan\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/MommysBestGames/\nhttp://www.mommysbestgames.com/\n\nTyriq\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/FourbitFriday/\nhttps://www.ckgame.net/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nThe length of poles with which to not touch things as a measure of repulsion\nWeezer 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?\nWhy is the Doom Plasma Rifle like that\nYeasayer - Ambling Alp\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyBl5ZgnEr4\nUnedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/avmEL1T03qA\n\nWhy does the Metaverse look so bland?\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nGetting feedback and becoming insecure.\nEntertaining each other.\n400 Microsoft points.\nWhat you would do if you were lame.\nWhatever you call the boy version of Lisa Frank.\nPillboxing.\nThe consequences of an extremely wide screen.\nThe Big Steel Battalion Box.\nVarious pole lengths, esp. the one from How The Grinch Stole Christmas.\nThe length of the pole with which you don't want to touch continue.\nA ten foot pole with haptic feedback so you can touch things with it.\nPoking something with a stick to discover how gross it is.\nWhether pole vaulting is ridiculous.\nWhether pole vaulting is real or just exists in Tremors and The Last Jedi.\nThat 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.\nNobody 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.\nThe most salient thing about pole vaulting.\nHow a band might still make money if some rando uploads their album to Youtube.\nContent-ID's failure modes.\nLiving in a world where piracy won over paying for things.\nTrying 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 \nAll the ways you can support a band financially other than paying for the music, because everyone just listens for free.\nThe most American gun ever made.\nWhether the Doom plasma rifle overheats after it runs out of ammo.\nPunishing the player for being careful.\nWhat Tom Hall would've written in the Doom Bible about the plasma rifle if he still worked at id.\nA geodesic dome with two of the triangles painted red.\nA guy with a mirror for a face.\nSomeone who lives in the cheese.\nReverse nachos, where things come out of the cheese and eat you.\nIf the Grim Reaper had a mirror instead of a skull.\nThis Squishing Face.\nNot being allowed to punch the mirror-faced boxer above the neck.\nTrying to sing while people pull on your lips.\nGetting drenched in VHS fluid.\nHomer Simpson in hell taking and spitting out one bite each of infinite burgers.\nWhether they are mustard men or cheese men.\nPeeling off the cheese and realizing there is a dude in your cheese.\nTaking a bite out of a chocolate Easter bunny and the live bunny inside wriggles out and hops away.\nMole.\nThe music video continuing to be weird while you talk about food.\nAll the naked people in the desert lying on astronaut blankets and closing their legs relative to the camera.\nMaking s'mores in a solar oven.\nExtremely white flesh in the bright, bright sun.\nFacebook giving the Olive Garden treatment to Second Life.\nMaking the Metaverse as uncool as possible.\nShipping a half dozen telepresence robots to every employee's house so they can have a conference call.\nGravitating towards whatever process or technology has the least friction.\nSpelling it as if you are giving a gift to Bit Friday.\nPossessivemommysbestgames.com\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-10-04T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/c64ed0e5-8784-43cd-9bbc-8f8e289847c3.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":60861144,"duration_in_seconds":3770}]},{"id":"a5402c41-6c5e-46bf-a6dd-43cd456b898f","title":"101. Flatty The Flat Globe","url":"https://topiclords.com/flatty-the-flat-globe","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nNick\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/NickPancakes\n\nGreg\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/simgreed\nhttps://store.steampowered.com/app/945490/Little_Square_Things/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nAnthropomorphized inanimate objects\nQuaker Names\n\n\nhttps://zeugmalitotes.tumblr.com/post/656465316855119872/fishpilled-these-guys-were-onto-something-i-think\n\nWhy do car doors get Shitty Shut\nGo West - Call Me\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AV0ugZumyJU\n\nWhat's on the grill if you're \"grillin up some 'good boys'\"\nOverly complicated navel-gazing plots in video games, especially those that absolutely do not need plots\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nCompleting the set of Duckfeed guests.\nHealth care simulation.\nThe moth having himself a journey.\nHydrodynamics of the bloodstream.\nLittle Square Things.\nFilling your life with media about anthropomorphized inanimate objects.\nWhether Data needs hair.\nGiving your shiny yellow skin for legal reasons.\nA talking garage that is hungry for cars.\nDoes that anthropomorphic talking chair even eat ass?\nA talking map of the United States.\nWhether someone already mentioned the talking photo booth.\nClocky the talking map.\nThe \"marry it\" joke.\nCortana receiving your one-star review of trying to rename this folder.\nPreserved Fish.\nMorris Morris, Jr.\nExperience Burt Merrick.\nPreserved Fish writing his own Wikipedia page.\nSigning in to leave a flower.\nLeaving a Blingee on your ancestor's grave.\nA door that is shut but it's not flush with the doorway and the \"door ajar\" alarm goes off.\nA car upgrade where if you partially close the door it closes it the rest of the way for you.\nWhy don't they make two planes out of the black box material, one on top of the other.\nA car door that is in many respects shut.\nGo back to sleep and wake up properly, dipshit.\nTrying 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.\nTeaching 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!\"\nEuphemism withdrawal.\nSteadfastly refusing to swear but still calling it a shitpost because that's what you call it.\nThe clip art dude sailing across the screen.\nDoing one dance and your shadow doing a slightly different dance.\nReshooting a scene but keeping the same shadows as before.\nPop quiz: sideburn on only one side of the face, or slept on a greasy bench?\nAn entertaining slow watch.\nA fire hydrant made of a pie tin and aluminum foil.\nSinging into a fan.\nEverybody realizing that there is someone on the ceiling.\nThe Gentle Exorcist.\nA sheriff labeled \"boy.\"\nA drug store full of a band.\nThe additional challenge of a mechanical bull mounted upside down on the ceiling.\nFiguring 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.\nWatching 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.\nThe falling yellow liquid spilling forth within the billiards bar.\nGo low, Ken and sons.\nWhether people say that they have some \"bad\" \"boys\" on the \"grill,\" why don't you \"pop\" on \"over.\"\nThe thing where you carve a hot dog into an octopus shape.\nA hot dog that is too polite to burst if you put it in the microwave.\nWhy every dog is a \"good boy\" but none of them are great.\nThe Go West Music Video Cinematic Universe.\nBad boys who are also bad dancers.\nThe Ultimate Good Boy.\nRunning out the time rewind potion.\nA puzzle game with story except for the enormous lore dump at the end.\nBob's Game.\nBeing really into the story of the development of Bob's Game except for all the pain and human suffering.\nARGeez.\nRenaming your game to \"OK\" so nobody can search for it.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-09-27T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/a5402c41-6c5e-46bf-a6dd-43cd456b898f.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":62189159,"duration_in_seconds":3863}]},{"id":"7142af10-ce90-46ca-a4a5-f21d6cdcdfab","title":"100. Cold Brew Ham","url":"https://topiclords.com/cold-brew-ham","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nJenni\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/horsewizrd/\n\nChris\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nLord Chumley\n\n\nTopic 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.\"\n\"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.)\"\n\"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.\"\n\"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!\"\n\nIs an edgelord phase a standard part of being a teen or what\nLordosis behavior\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lordosis_behavior\n\nLordi - The Riff\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zr9AattFkqo\nUnedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/6qwGyZw_DNI\n\nLord Dunsany the metalhead lord rewilding his estate\n\n\nhttps://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/07/people-think-youre-an-idiot-death-metal-irish-baron-rewilds-his-estate\n\nTime Lords\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nTaking a picture of a dog.\n140 strawberries.\nJim Not Knowing About Video Games Day.\nStarting with how Smurfs fuck and then moving on to how Transformers fuck.\nTransformers hanging out with humans because the humans can wipe them in places they can't reach.\nWhere Transformers come from in the various Transformers cosmologies.\nHow Grimlock built the Dinobots.\nSitting down with a screwdriver to make some buddies.\nThe hypothetical 1980s girl-child who might buy an Optimus Prime toy if it was wearing a pink bow on its head.\nR.C., the hyper-pink Transformer with the wide, child-bearing hips.\nFinally getting to the topic at hand.\nWhether all Transformers are aromantic.\nWhat kind of god would make a car in space where there's nothing to drive on.\nThe canonical term for when two Transformers are in a relationship.\nRarified Energon.\nPrime's Rib, in which Future Feminists complain that there are no female Transformers so Optimus Prime constructs one from his own body parts.\nThe Wild 80s.\nThe British big game hunter who wanted to hunt the most dangerous game, Optimus Prime.\nMounting the nose of the plane you shot down as a trophy in your den. (The plane was actually grounded when you shot it.)\nWhether teen edgelords are still a thing or whether teens are now performatively wholesome to freak out the olds.\nThe Alpha Teen.\nThe two genders of edgelord.\nToddlers hurting you so they can practice having empathy.\nAccidentally promising a cat sexual favors.\nThe cat sticking its butt in your face so you'll lick it clean, because that's what the cat's mom did.\nThe innie arch vs the outie arch.\nBears playing 20 questions with themselves to determine whether you are also a bear.\nThe scientific term for scritches.\nSitting vs. standing up to wipe.\nThe various orders in which you could wipe, stand up, and flush.\nPushing vs. dragging.\nTai-chi vs. chai tea.\nA picture of Lordi getting a vaccine.\nA toilet in the shower.\nThe 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.\nBringing the ugliest people you know on dates with you so you seem more attractive by comparison.\nWhether it's still a cold cut if you heat it up.\nZombo Cop.\nMaking Video Content during the zombie apocalypse by putting GoPros on all the zombies.\nLive streaming a zombie trying to walk into a brick wall.\nLooking out on the zombie apocalypse and saying \"time to finally eat the rich!\"\nThe flashback explaining the origin story of the huge pile of bloody toilet paper.\nWhether David Lynch explained something once.\nThe Lobster as a benchmark for bad date movies.\nPokemon that are weak to Basket.\nScientists studying the guillotine and determining that it's actually that basket your head lands in that kills you.\nThe worst part of the zombie apocalypse: when the self checkout tells you to wait for assistance, nobody ever comes.\nThe lordiest lord of them all.\nA cool young lord. \nA Jack Russell terrier named Beavis and Butt-Head.\nTwo dogs, one named Sneezy, Grumpy, Dopey, Happy, Sleepy, Bashful and Doc, and the other one named The Seven Dwarfs.\nHearing bird song you don't recognize, going to google and typing \"Weee weee wha weee what's bird is this\"\nShazam for bird call.\nHow to identify a bird that ages backwards.\nAn app that can take photos of an object and tell you whether it's a wizard in disguise.\nTurning 25 and realizing that most movies are no longer about you at age 20.\nWhether Doctor Who was based on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.\nGene Roddenberry playing Willy Wonka.\nThe Gum Chewer.\nDeleting a tweet in which you are cranky about Doctor Who.\nDoctor Who showrunner Stephen Wolfram.\nThe vicar turning out the be a giant wasp and the author turning out to be a transphobe.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-09-20T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/7142af10-ce90-46ca-a4a5-f21d6cdcdfab.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":57438167,"duration_in_seconds":3563}]},{"id":"18433b63-bb09-4530-a28b-089e3a8403ab","title":"99. I Want You To Never Show Me This","url":"https://topiclords.com/i-want-you-to-never-show-me-this","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nMitch\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/hbmmaster/\nhttps://www.youtube.com/user/HBMmaster8472\n\nXander\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nThe title \"Super Smash Brothers for Nintendo 3DS\" is the first two lines of a haiku\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XejJ6PzPtEw\n\nSpectrum of porcupine tunings by eigenmonzos\nThe Letter C\nFinding the light switch in this bed and breakfast\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/mogwai_poet/status/1419337769386536964\n\nThe bizarre CD-ROM game Monty Python made in the 90s\nTumblr would be a good website if it wasn't such a bad website\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nStarting to meet up just in time for the Delta variant to show up.\njan Misali of the Youtube channel jan Misali.\nUsing Bing to google things.\nA recent video you will have made.\nHow many games are in the Super Mario series.\nSuper Smash Bros / For Nintendo 3DS / It's Coming This Fall\nSuper Mario 64DS HD For Nintendo Switch.\nThe only three games that everyone can agree are Super Mario games.\nSuper Mario's Wacky Worlds for the Phillips CD-i.\nNot knowing who to vote for comptroller so googling each candidate's name with \"is good\" and picking the one with the most results.\nWhether Super Mario Run is a platformer.\nThe bare minimum of procgen required for a game to count as an endless runner.\nWhen there's no consensus, there's no communication.\nThe Super Mario Artist series.\nAny game you can look at counting as a \"video game* because video is Latin for \"I see.\"\nXenharmonics and microtonal music.\nSubdividing the octave into 19 psychoacoustically equal segments.\nThe Venn diagram between people interested in microtonal music and people who understand singular value decomposition.\nEnjoying 17-TET music but only the parts that would've sounded better in 12-TET.\nLearning enough about Super Mario Bros. Special to decide whether it's a game.\nAll the different ways you could count things.\nThe only nontrivial solution to the cannonball problem.\nFinding the center of a shape by cutting it out of cardboard and balancing it on your finger.\nThe Encyclopedia of Triangle Centers.\n 39,474 different ways to find the center of a triangle.\nBeing wrong about the letter C.\nSpelling it SD-ROM but still pronouncing it CD-ROM.\nThe fault of vulgar Latin.\nProto-Western Romance.\nWhat Q means to us.\nSlicing up a house into apartments by roping off a stairway.\nThings depicted as normal in Hollywood movies that can't possibly be normal, such as flipping a switch to activate spinning blades in your sink.\nDedicated 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.\nThe 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.\nMaking a smoothie with a mortar and pestle.\nWhether the Sarlacc Pit inspired garbage disposals or vice versa.\nA Taco Bell built into a striking, memorable building.\nA game you could check out at the local video store.\nMonty Python's Complete Waste of Time.\nCD-ROM experiences.\nMinigames that mess with your interface.\nThe outer space labyrinth mine cart puzzle tying together all the unrelated Monty Python sketches.\nCompleting a game and it changes your desktop wallpaper to a congratulations screen.\nCompleting a level and unlocking audio you can set as your answering machine message.\nSolving the secret for intergalactic success.\nTopics you might like: food.\nThe quintessential Tumblr story.\nThe Tale of John Green's Favorite Taste.\nReblogging a post and then editing it so it looks like the person you were reblogging said something else.\nJohn Green as in \"The Bum Bum Song\" John Green.\nWhat it took to convince Tumblr to finally make it so you can't edit other people's posts.\nDarmok and Jalad at Tanagra discussing John Green's Favorite Taste.\nThe Insane Clown Posse's web master writing a web chat server with no security whatsoever.\nFeeling cool because you ruined it for everybody else.\nGoogling just the letter W.\nDueling George W. Bush to the death over ownership of the letter W.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-09-13T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/18433b63-bb09-4530-a28b-089e3a8403ab.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":59796595,"duration_in_seconds":3711}]},{"id":"ffa28451-2dcf-4a62-8934-94975fe4e629","title":"98. That's Content, Baby!","url":"https://topiclords.com/thats-content-baby","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nHallie\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/hallie_9000\n\nChristine\n\n\nhttp://thechrischerry.com\nhttps://twitter.com/chriscereza\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nWhere are my glasses?\nNighttime is the time of abstract possibility and imagination because the world is gone.\nThis huge tub of homemade toum\nTurn Down For What\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMUDVMiITOU\nUnedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/Q9oXE3ibmmM\n\nModern TV re-discovering the episodic format\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nMining the pre-show banter for a clip.\nDreaming of producing content every second of your life.\nGetting hooked up to the content matrix and spewing content out of every orifice.\nBurnt Notice.\nWatercresstine.\nLooking upon Burn Notice as your weird uncle who lives in your basement.\nA podcast about discussing episodes of a podcast discussing episodes of Burn Notice.\nRecording 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.\nRecording 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.\nWe Are The Timelords.\nDoctor In Distress.\nNeeding to stop making a podcast before your listeners can beg you to come back.\nHow locals pronounce \"Los Angeles.\"\nNot knowing how to look for your glasses in an apartment because your normally live in a farmhouse.\nHow nobody in LA owns more than one chair.\nWhether Hallie's glasses were in the fridge.\nPosting photos of your apartment to the internet so people can help you find your glasses.\nWhether Winston answers the phone at a Korean BBQ restaurant in LA.\nBeing awake during the day: terrible.\nThe most concrete time of day.\nGoing to preschool and answering phones for a Korean barbecue restaurant until daddy picks you up at 4.\nLoving 2am but being in bed by 9:30pm.\nLike a tree but shorter, louder with stickier hands.\nNo responsibility except what you make for yourself.\nAn emulsion like mayonnaise except instead of tasting like mayonnaise it tastes like garlic.\nVampires hating garlic because they don't like the taste.\nWhether you can have the vampire gene but not be a vampire.\nVampirism 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.\nHow many marshmallows go in fudge.\nConverting from marshmallows when the recipe calls for mini marshmallows.\nUsing marshmallows as bait to catch God when everyone knows God hates marshmallows.\nVideos that love to start with a black screen that goes on a little too long when you're watching at one quarter speed.\nA man in a blue hoodie jiggling as something is taking him over.\nShattering furniture with the power of your raw sexuality.\nThe Scully stand-in who is extremely skeptical about how horny this guy is.\nSt. Vitus' Dry Hump.\nCould I be a fish doing push-ups?\nWhether there is a Hitmonchan in this bra, and whether it's evolving, and whether we should push B.\nThe relief of consuming media and not feeling the need to form any reaction whatsoever.\nSpiking the punch with LSD.\nA cop whose face melts because he doesn't know what you'd turn down for.\nContracting a bad case of Original Sin and being very angry about it.\nA straight man who stole Elton John's sunglasses.\nWhether DJ Snake looks like a douchebag or just looks French.\nCharacters who grow hornier and hornier as over the course of eight seasons.\nThe 1943 Watchmen TV series.\nThe Veronica Mars model of serialization.\nWhether the Columbo renaissance implies a Murder She Wrote renaissance.\nWhether that's content, baby.\nA character in a romantic comedy who makes web sites for everyone but who can't make a web site for herself.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-09-06T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/ffa28451-2dcf-4a62-8934-94975fe4e629.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":60714674,"duration_in_seconds":3778}]},{"id":"86561936-4a0b-4445-b422-956c2bf54f95","title":"97. A Clearly Marked Hellhole","url":"https://topiclords.com/a-clearly-marked-hellhole","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nTina\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/Teanah/\n\nSlothy\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/jonshiring\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nWhat do Indie devs imagine AAA is like\nMy cousin is an astronaut\nFinding an ad for a medicare scam in my drafts folder\nBrad asks \"The '30 days hath...' rhyme sucks as a mnemonic because so many months rhyme. Everyone should just use the knuckle mnemonic instead.\"\n\n\nhttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuckle_mnemonic\n\nTed Lasso\nMy post-burnout solo European vacation with a guy who had illicit keys to Notre Dame\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nHaving one name like Cher but also having more names too.\nGiving yourself a nickname because there are too many people with just your name.\nCreating personal boundaries in an office setting and making it clear when people cross them.\nWorking on a regimented team where everyone has specific roles and the programmers can't just say \"I feel like doing sound design today.\"\nHow to motivate yourself to work.\nCultural things that can go wrong with code reviews.\nWondering if a feature is a good idea and implementing it in a day and putting it in front of testers to find out.\nHow long before you ship a game is good.\nHow to get a team of 300 people to change direction.\nHow 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.\nReasons to go to GDC.\nMy Cousin The Astronaut.\nSitting in the bleachers to watch the space shuttle launch.\nA building that they don't tear down because it contains things \nBuilding the international space station by sending up one piece per shuttle launch.\nWhether Buzz Aldrin is still an astronaut.\nDeciding 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.\nWatching your daughter carry part of the international space station across a busy freeway.\nSpace shuttles exploding and driving up NASA's insurance rates.\nThe pros and cons of relentlessly chasing your dreams.\nSelf-esteem vs. self-compassion.\nLiving in LA and having to remind your kids that not everyone works in movies.\nDifferent definitions of success.\nThe least-driven game developer.\nEnjoying the process of making art vs. enjoying the result.\nPeople enjoying what you've worked on.\nBoosting your social security check by up to $1782 per year.\nA Special Medicare Advantage Part B Premium \"Giveback\" Rebate Benefit.\nYour pocket writing an email about Medicare.\nHaving a dream about Medicare and waking up and deciding to become a spam magnate.\nWhether the mailto: protocol can specify a subject and a body.\nMaking a pact to change your email password.\nMnemonics for remembering how long each month is.\nThe Knuckle Mnemonic.\nWhether it was aliens or the pope who stole the two months we used to have after December.\nA show about nerding out. (It's this one.)\nHow wifi works in space when planets can get in the way.\nThe first moment of freedom on Mars.\nLiving on the Grand Canyon except you have to keep your eyes closed.\nThanking Brad.\nChoosing a topic for nefarious reasons.\nThe least skeptical TV show.\nTrying to remember to give people the benefit of the doubt.\nBuying a plane ticket to Europe without knowing what you're going to do there.\nYour friend in Paris who has a keyring with keys to every church in the city.\nBreaking into Notre Dame during the COVID lockdown and checking out the view from the roof.\nThe listening tower that the NSA used to spy on East Germany.\nUsing a variety of methods to get the keys to every church in Paris.\nA wig for people who have a mohawk that is just mostly one of the sides of your head.\nThe Santa Cruz Hell Hole.\nBuilding the Paris tunnels to get partying teens off the streets and underground.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-08-30T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/86561936-4a0b-4445-b422-956c2bf54f95.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":56266177,"duration_in_seconds":3492}]},{"id":"77fffb6e-82a5-42c8-9d68-3ede7ee2e094","title":"96. Get Down With Some Bugs","url":"https://topiclords.com/get-down-with-some-bugs","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords\n\n\nKev\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/kevzettler\n\nQuil\n\n\nWhisper your secret to a snail.\n\n\n\nTopics\n\n\nEphemeral digital music\nBeing a guest on a podcast that you normally listen to is a weird experience because it feels like you're not supposed to talk\nAn update on Bug Mars\nDancing in the Street \n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HasaQvHCv4w\nUnedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/3O9JRuv3WXA\n\nIf 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\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nAn awkward silence where you can't decide who goes first.\nHaving to deliver all the chapters of a book at once.\nKanary.\nCooling it on making internet people mad ever since you had a kid.\nOverstepping your own boundaries.\nLending a certain patina to your Twitter thread.\nMidis and meedees.\nListening to a game soundtrack on a different sound engine than your had as a child.\nListening to a game soundtrack on a different sound engine than the composer used.\nProc-gen game soundtracks.\nA kill cam except it's a kill jingle \nYour 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.\nWays of converting an image to audio.\nDeciding it's not worth going into detail but going into detail anyway.\nWhat executables sounds like and why they sound like that.\nSpelling the word \"minimum\" in a spectrograph by singing swooping pitches.\nA video game that induces four friends to sing cacophonously together.\nThree strangers having a conversation that your don't get to be a part of.\nParasocial relationships.\nHow to instantly become friends with a famous person you are a fan of.\nTwo asymmetrical relationships snapping together to become a single symmetrical relationship.\nWhat you could've had if you just picked two friends host your podcast instead of all of them.\nA small company named after a throwaway joke.\nSpinning up a cricket farm.\nThe Amazon of cricket protein.\nAlternative and synthetic protein.\nReceiving a care package of bug protein that you're definitely not going to eat.\nWhether a cricket burger is still better for the environment than a beef burger if you have to ship it across the country.\nBeing grateful that other people will save the world in the ways that you don't.\nA brick wall, folks.\nSCP or rolled up carpet?\nA leprechaun with a mullet.\nWearing a trench coat over a floral print jumpsuit.\nRacing In The Street.\nEverybody, where \"everybody\" means two people.\nNot being able to afford lighting after renting that crane and asking every crew member to point their car headlights at the dancers.\nWhether you still trigger counterfeiting laws by putting realistic money in your movie.\nAn extended shot of Mick Jagger guzzling a generic can of beer.\nDancing In A Stairwell.\nDancing In The Void.\nFreeze frame on a couple of butts.\nA derelict flour mill that appears in every Brit-pop music video.\nHow to tell how well you're doing in a Match Three game.\nChoosing to not introduce the mind virus of casual games to an indigenous tribe.\nWhether Bejeweled is more market-tested than Pong as an introductory video game.\nThe invention of the platformer.\nSuper Mario Bros. 3's budget and development timeline.\nThe ways that the developers had to make Super Mario Bros. worse to make it viable as an arcade game.\nFinding 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.\nLooking at an image on a flat surface and interpreting it as analogous to a physical scene in the real world.\nSynesthesia but for ideas.\nWhispering a secret to the snail.\n","content_html":"

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

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-08-23T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/77fffb6e-82a5-42c8-9d68-3ede7ee2e094.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":50288292,"duration_in_seconds":3110}]},{"id":"a5dde444-83f0-434c-b693-9c6c8940a95a","title":"95. The Florida Of Canada","url":"https://topiclords.com/the-florida-of-canada","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nMaxx\n\n\n@mechcem on Twitter\nMaxx plugs sitting at various angles\n\nErica\n\n\n@YerrikTRB on Twitter\nErica plugs Lovage, not the band but the spice\n\nJim\n\n\nJim plugs Big Boy beds, or doesn’t\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nThings I Chewed as a Youth.\nIn which I beg Jim to use a sharp knife or at least let me teach his child to.\nCanadian floating feet: explained.\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salish_Sea_human_foot_discoveries\n\nBrad asks \"Listening to spoilery discussion of a piece of media because you think you don't care about it, but then being convinced by said discussion that you actually would have liked it.\"\nDo you know off hand the tallest person you've met? And other things I wish we tracked culturally.\n\n\nAt 7 feet 0 inches: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_MacCulloch\nAt 6 feet 9 inches: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Bird \n\nEgg the Arts Show\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EGG,_the_Arts_Show\nSome of EGG on VIMEO https://vimeo.com/user10049545\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nSitting at various angles.\nToilets with threatening auras.\nThe butthole being the mind and the poop being the body.\nReplacing all your spices with lovage.\nHow to use white pepper.\nBreaking into the kitchen and finding where they keep the peppercorns.\nBig boy beds.\nPerformatively lying on stuffed animals.\nBaby MacGyver disassembling his crib from the inside.\nOne for the baby book.\nThe side number theory of beds.\nSleeping on a bed shaped like a mobius strip.\nSleeping on a tightrope because your triangular bed had too many sides.\nStaying up as late as you can and then falling asleep where you stand.\nHiding inside the circular rack of shirts in JC Penney.\nClimbing inside a circular rack of chastity belts at JC Penney and becoming trapped when an employee comes by and locks all the belts.\nCollecting 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.\nChewing all the bones so nobody in your family can play Operation.\nAn endlessly chewy grape.\nThe sign up sheet for chewing on the fake plastic grape.\nThe hierarchy of who in your 4th grade class is allowed to chew on the plastic grape next and for how long.\nThe copycat endlessly chewy grape that is not as good as the one that Erica refuses to give up.\nDipping the chewing sponge in whiskey to refresh its flavor.\nFilling the endlessly chewy plastic grape with peanut butter.\nChewing stim toys that are designed for babies but you can totally chew on them as an adult too.\nEating the eyes out of the fish before anybody else gets the chance.\nThe novelty of eating an identifiable body part.\nThe Snack That Tastes Back.\nBeing 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.\nNot celebrating Easter but knowing about Easter candy because you bought it on sale afterwards.\nWhether or not to teach a four year old kitchen knife skills.\nGiving a cat a tail knife so that it is pointy on six out of six ends.\nThe least optimal medium for explaining how to hold a kitchen knife.\nSeeing a two year old and needing to arm the two year old.\nTeaching a two year old how to wield power responsibly.\nDisarticulated feet washing ashore.\nSneakers being more buoyant than sneakers thirty years ago.\nWhy floating feet like landing in Canada.\nNever a single foot.\nSalish Sea Human Foot Discoveries.\nAs It Happens.\nTalking to a Canadian man who was near an earthquake.\nCons: loose feet.\nLying about the quality of water.\nTurning the amnesia pill like a kitchen timer to specify how much time you want to lose.\nTrying 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.\nCosplaying a 2013-era Twitter asshole by uploading an egg as your profile photo.\nTweeting nothing but pop culture spoilers and phobia-triggering photos for months to shed as many followers as possible in your quest for Twitter Zero.\nA Twitter bot that changes its avatar and username to the last person who tweeted at it and tweets what they said back at them.\nNot 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.\nA language where disclosing whether you've eaten eggplant today is built into the grammar.\nMeeting a basketball player and their suit is yards and yards of tweed going right up to the ceiling, with their head perched on top.\nMeeting the basketball player who retired to play pinball at California Extreme.\nLearning to spin a ball on your finger at Harlem Globetrotters basketball camp.\nAll the time you spent at basketball camp and eating avocado toast that you wish you could have back now.\nMoving to Detroit and wanting to make neighborhoods more friendly.\nPlanting cabbages outside of smokestacks to remove heavy metals from the soil.\nEmailing 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.\nDoxing yourself live on the air.\nA Twitter account that every Topic Lord can post from.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-08-16T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/a5dde444-83f0-434c-b693-9c6c8940a95a.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":60235790,"duration_in_seconds":3728}]},{"id":"b459cfdf-6018-49a2-a652-0c04556c8f67","title":"94. We're All Pet Shop Boys Now","url":"https://topiclords.com/were-all-pet-shop-boys-now","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nJames\n\n\nhttps://vulpine.club/@triplefox\nhttps://twitter.com/triplefox\n\nTyriq\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/FourbitFriday/\nhttps://fourbitfriday.itch.io/catacombkids\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nRavens of Golden Gate Park\nDo you also want to destroy the moon? Or: What kind of supervillain are you\nNovation Circuit\nDomino Dancing\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ik2YF05iX2w\nUnedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/u9gcW8sBgQ0\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nWhat exactly qualifies a collection of songs as an album.\nA solid Mastodon follow.\nFilling an album with songs until the CD is full.\nThe ravens you pass on your walk every day.\nThe guy in the brown vest who never does anything.\nCORVID-19.\nA raven who is extremely surprised that you don't have any food.\nThe mask everyone has agreed to wear when it's time to go cruising for trouble with the crows.\nWielding a cream pie so if you accidentally hit someone you are guaranteed to do 0 damage.\nThe Mythbusters episode where they figure out how to drown someone with a pancake.\nWhittling down your hit points until you stub your toe and die.\nHit 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.\nBonus spleen damage.\nThe half-dozen extra organs Space Marines have surgically grafted in for fighting. (But none for love.)\nHit points representing individual vertebrae so when a high level Final Fantasy character has 999 HP that means they're basically a giraffe now.\nSecretly replacing the moon with a hologram of the moon.\nFantasy settings where the moon is destroyed and strewn across the sky like the rings of Saturn.\nWhether it'd be less work to steal a moon of Mars or to retrieve Ceres to give our moon a nice sky companion.\nAspirations of both destroying or romancing the moon.\nAccidentally pushing the supervillain button to destroy all cereal crops when you meant all cold cereals.\nWhy they call them Grape Nuts.\nBack when it was a big deal that they baked these crackers using electric power.\nA tool that is worse at what it does than your laptop but has the advantage that you can't go on Twitter.\nMaking 80s techno because you're not ready to make a twelve-tone Schoenberg piece.\nWanting to make fun jams but not knowing how to play any instruments.\nA smooth sequencer workflow.\nDifferent ways to make a song.\nGetting a guitar so you can put guitar sounds in your music and then realizing that now you have to learn to play guitar.\nReasons you might want to leave notes out of a chord.\nLeaving the bass notes out because the bass player is taking care of that.\nNine note scales and eleven note scales and everything in between.\nPushing the limits of your instrument beyond what it was intended for.\nThe lived experience of wanting cool synthesizers in the 90s vs. In the 20s.\nMusic 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.\nPutting a cpu in a plastic box and there's your synthesizer and all that's left is to add some buttons.\nSynth Lords.\nTwo shirtless young men sitting by a tree.\nWhether conventionally attractive people can work in pet shops.\nBack in the 80s before it was legally mandated that musicians be extremely attractive.\nTipping your silver hard hat and saying \"milady.\"\nSmash cut to a Pet Shop Boy standing in the doorway and the audience gasps.\nHow you would identify the Pet Shop Boys if not for the baseball caps saying \"boy.\"\nPet Shop Boyd.\nReturn of the stripy shirts.\nPet Shop Yinz.\nTwo shirtless youths fighting in the ocean.\nTrying 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?\"\nWalking alone on the beach while your suitors wrestle in the ocean suggestively.\nHorses getting loose on set while you're filming a music video and getting in every shot.\nError with an f.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"Lords: James and Tyriq. We discuss the ravens of Golden Gate Park, destroying the moon, the Novation Circuit, and Pet Shop Boys - Domino Dancing.","date_published":"2021-08-09T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/b459cfdf-6018-49a2-a652-0c04556c8f67.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":51906467,"duration_in_seconds":3243}]},{"id":"3c96aeb8-819a-44e6-83d3-7984d4c142ba","title":"93. A Medical Advice Podcast","url":"https://topiclords.com/a-medical-advice-podcast","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nMara\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/McaelinL\n\nApril\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/aprilsaur/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nFrog and Toad core\nWhat would you do with a bonus room in your house?\nMy reptile brain is a cat-loving ninja\nIf 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?\nHow earnest lessons you try to teach your children backfire\nMurder She Wrote is back on prime\nAsafoetida powder\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nThe Expanse: bigger than before.\nA developer's guide to cognitive behavioral therapy.\nThe various circumstances under which the Frog Fractions DLC hat can be a witch hat.\nCottagecore vs. Frog and Toad core.\nCottagecore merged with an old man.\nEmbracing Frog and Toad for pride month.\nFinding the bodice rippers with people with dark curly hair on the cover because you can imagine those are light-skinned black people.\nThe relative density of the east coast.\nGetting out of California before it's too late.\nA complete dearth of natural disasters.\nWriting an offer letter for a home you want to buy and mentioning your adorable child who just needs a home several times.\nMoving into a space that is twice as big and not knowing what to do with all the space.\nAn Austenian fantasy you have been cherishing in your bosom.\nA perfect cosy library with chairs that trap people.\nInstalling a ladder on casters so you can ride it around the room every morning in your Belle outfit.\nComing up with excuses to install the ladder on casters even though you can just reach up and grab every book in your library.\nOne of those booths with a fan at the bottom that you fill by ripping a single page out of every book in your library.\nHow much extra you can charge for an Airbnb hidden behind a secret bookshelf.\nGoing into the Library of Congress to check out Bullfrog's Official Guide to Dungeon Keeper.\nA room full of music production equipment and no internet connection.\nAsking your child to focus at dinner when all the adults at the table have their phones out.\nSaving a cat by applying torque to a falling chair.\nDoing a thing before you realize you've done it and thinking \"wow it's a good thing I agree with those actions.\"\nDeliberately relying on your unconscious mind to do important work.\nWhether Jim and his wife need to get checked for ADHD.\nA teen who can write a hell of a term paper.\nThe interstellar community of sapient intelligences.\nThe case for why the human race is good and cool.\nWinnie the Pooh.\nReclaiming the poop.\nTaco Bell's cannon firing nacho cheese chalupas at the enemy spaceships.\nTrying to convey \"hygge\" without being willing to try to pronounce it.\nLearning about alien cultures by watching Star Trek.\nA five year old explaining to you how T-Mobile are leaders in 5G technology.\nA perfectly sensible reaction to the story of Noah's Ark.\nLearning what fighting is and deciding to fight your mom.\nA book about a child who needs to be reprimanded all the time.\nShouting \"no\" and throwing the phone on the floor whenever an ad plays.\nWatching Murder She Wrote every night before bed.\nJessica Fletcher the serial killer and her nephew Grady, also a serial killer.\nHow good Jessica Fletcher would be at breaking up a loud graduation party.\nPredicting when the party next door is going to end by the decade the music is from.\nHow to recognize a trap remix of the Murder She Wrote theme from just the bass.\nTricking your family into playing the Murder She Wrote board game.\nNot needing a wedding ring because your husband got you the Murder She Wrote DVD boxed set.\nDiscovering what DVDs are and deciding to put them in the shower.\nCovering the shower drain with the Wii Sports disc because they're the exact same size.\nA bone-dry shower.\nAlways shirt-cocking it.\nBaby poop and onions but also kind of floral but also you hate onions.\nResorch.\nDried latex from the celery family.\nBoiling your neti pot water to kill the brain-eating bacteria that might pass through the blood brain barrier.\n","content_html":"

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Lords:

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Microtopics:

\n\n","summary":"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.\r\n","date_published":"2021-08-02T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/3c96aeb8-819a-44e6-83d3-7984d4c142ba.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":59348115,"duration_in_seconds":3709}]},{"id":"47a7f971-f4e9-45a5-b790-e27f6606215e","title":"92. Tomb Of The Spider-Men","url":"https://topiclords.com/tomb-of-the-spider-men","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nAbby\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/mizabitha\nhttp://abbydenton.podbean.com/\n\nJohn B\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/YouOldSoAndSo\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nThe 1998 Tips & Tricks Magazine Video Game Codebook, a Larry Flynt publication that is not porn but, in a certain sense, is not unlike porn\nWhy grease 2 is the best superhero musical; a mild defense of the 60s superman musical\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNXbdLDZLKM\n\nTower of Druaga\nCibo Matto - Sugar Water \n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EN9auBn6Jys\nUnedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/qgqxxX_yLfo\nhttps://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/02/17/68-michel-gondry/\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nThe illustrious Abby Denton.\nA shambles.\nLocking your Twitter so nobody knows what you're doing in there.\nMaking a whole video game magazine out of just the good parts of video game magazines.\nPublishing a series of short stories by formatting them like cheat codes and then submitting them to Tips & Tricks magazine.\nNostalgia for when most of your perception of the gaming world came from tiny screenshots in magazines.\nA book that is a bunch of fake games and paragraphs about them.\nA duck riding a skateboard.\nMaking a book out of a Twitter thread.\nReading about video games in magazines probably being the optimal experience actually because most games were terrible.\nGame Master Anthony's birthday party.\nStreet Fighter 2, the last game in the Street Fighter series.\nNBA Jam arcade as proof that cheat codes are compatible with microtransactions.\nRenting a game just to prove to your friend that the cheat code they heard about doesn't actually work.\nWWF Attitude.\nEnjoying the bouquet of Uniracers.\nA certain quality of gibberish.\nPublishing a fake cheat code in the annual Tips and Tricks monster issue to convey the location of your drug drop.\nPutting Roll back in the Marvel vs. Capcom series.\nA very mild defense.\nSuperman fighting a gang of Chinese acrobats portrayed by white heroin addicts.\nMafiosos cha-cha-ing around the room and chanting \"Curtains for Superman!\"\nThe only Superman story where kryptonite never appears.\nAn evil psychoanalyst defeating Superman by convincing him he's just a regular guy.\nWhy can't the strongest man in the world be the happiest man in the world?\nSpider-Man: Turn off the Dark.\nDorky British guys trying to impress Michelle Pfeiffer.\nGiving a three year old a DVD of Grease 2 for her birthday.\nEverything are an opera.\nJust barely losing the Nobel Prize for thirty years in a row.\nJapanese arcade note-sharing culture.\nIf Atari 2600 Adventure has a dozen Easter eggs as obscure as its hidden room, and they were all necessary to finish the game.\nOne thing the NES is good at.\nThe Gilligan's Island game for NES.\nGilligan's Island for NES being rated only .1 star out of five less than Sonic CD.\nGame Center CX.\nThe time you could explore Namco Museum.\nBubble Bobble.\nHiding a bunch of stuff in your indie game inspired by Frog Fractions but nobody ever finds it because nobody cared enough about your game.\nSpelunky 2.\nYour stuff per second rate.\nNightmare of Druaga.\nHow to know if you have a friend.\nA Brian De Palma split screen dream.\nWaking up with sugar on your head.\nMichel Gondry's music video ouevre.\nI, Palindrome, I.\nA team of compositors working for six months to bring your one-second idea to fruition.\nHitting someone with your car and then following them down the street yelling at them.\nA reverse strip club where the performers are moving backwards in time.\nPracticing how to put a reverse-causality shirt on.\nA complete understanding of why Miho Hatori is going to bed with a sugar head.\nTeaching your son how to yawn.\nPlaying Doctor Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine with your tiny, tiny feet.\nJerks welcome!\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-07-26T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/47a7f971-f4e9-45a5-b790-e27f6606215e.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":57627795,"duration_in_seconds":3601}]},{"id":"85df459f-3bf1-466e-9320-b1272a1953d7","title":"91. Careening Towards The Poop Dreads Barrier","url":"https://topiclords.com/careening-towards-the-poop-dreads-barrier","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nXalavier\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/WritNelson\nhttps://store.steampowered.com/app/1246250/An_Airport_for_Aliens_Currently_Run_by_Dogs/\n\nTom\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/tv_neato\nhttps://www.patreon.com/StrangeScaffold\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nShaped CDs and other data formats too cool to live in 2021\n\n\nhttps://vgmdb.net/album/819\n\nThe Steve Jackson RPG you called on the telephone in 1988\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy_Interactive_Scenarios_by_Telephone\n\nOpposites Attract\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xweiQukBM_k\nUnedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/Jnkc7diIpdo\n\nLet's brainstorm ideas for how to make the next Sonic game so bad that it kills the sonic franchise once and for all\nDouble-sided pizza\n\n\nhttp://www.thenibble.com/zine/archives/yanni-grilling-cheese.asp\n\nPoop dreads\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nWaiting for three months to buy the fancy new LIDAR eyes for your Clydesdale.\nWhether Microsoft would eat horseflesh, and whether that would be a bad thing.\nWhether the hippo is a bigger threat to humanity than the Tsetse fly.\nThe only animal in the history of the planet to be equipped with a Gatling gun.\nWhether anyone has beaten the bucket.\nA white man in tech who has never been on a podcast.\nAn Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs.\nHaving horseflesh on the mind.\nWhether the horse runs an airport or its own dimension.\nA bright line in the sand between the listeners and Poop Dreads.\nFinding a CD-ROM shaped like a polyhedron at the bottom of the cereal box.\nFilling a CD with 4k resolution dog photographs.\nShipping a modern game on 100 novelty shaped CDs and also shipping an enormous disc changer add-on to the PS5, called the \"DataLathe.\"\nContract 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.\nYour DataLathe™ exploding, covering everyone in the room with Lathecerations™.\nCampaigning for months to get the foam disc gun from the dollar store.\nHow many dogs you could fit in a mid-sized Subaru.\nOrdering a free starter pack for this play-by-phone RPG by sending a self-addressed stamped envelope to the company running it.\nSending 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.\nA 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.\nA 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.\nTricking children into calling a phone number that bills their parents for a percentage of their net worth and inventing taxes.\nApproaching the Poop Dreads barrier and being shot out of the sky.\nA puff of chimney smoke that makes it look like a cat is farting.\nGiving a cat a flat top and a goatee.\nRipping out the back seat of a Toyota Camry and throwing it in an alley to contrast with the relentless glamour of Paula Abdul.\nDisco Ball earrings.\nWhether Silent Hill 2 would've been better starring M.C. Skat Kat.\nA funny cartoon cat man in a music video.\nLearning about what people thought was okay in the 80s.\nM.C. Skat Kat blaming the alley he lives in for his lack of hygiene when cats can just lick themselves to take a bath.\nThe Oral History of M.C. Skat Kat in Opposites Attract.\nHanging like a spider from an unseen perch.\nPaula Abdul trying to Mario Kart dash but whiffing it.\nA 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.\nM.C. Skat Kat's ballerina training.\nLooking at two people whose names start with \"Xa\" and assuming that they're the same person.\nThe Sonic Cycle.\nEnding the Sonic Cycle so that Sega can just focus on making Yakuza games.\nWhat it would take to kill the Sonic franchise.\nThe Sonic game where players go back in time to kill Yuji Naka and destroy the timeline.\nSending 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.\nGoro Majima featuring in the next Sonic the Hedgehog game.\nPutting the toppings as far away as possible from the organ you enjoy food with.\nInventing double sided pizza by folding your pizza the other way.\nBiting 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.\nAn inverted calzone.\nA 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.\nEvery pizza balloon coming with a q-tip inside in case you need to clean your ears after eating.\nArranging litterboxes in a geodesic dome so your cat goes \"finally an arrangement I respect enough to poop in.\"\nPutting chicken wire around your bed but it doesn't keep the cat out because it's not cat wire.\nThe difference between polite and clean.\nA cat who is afraid of its own hair.\n","content_html":"

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Lords:

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Microtopics:

\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-07-19T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/85df459f-3bf1-466e-9320-b1272a1953d7.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":55257130,"duration_in_seconds":3453}]},{"id":"147955b7-5f58-4614-849d-2a51e8efa772","title":"90. That's My Glass Petard!","url":"https://topiclords.com/thats-my-glass-petard","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nJenni\n\n\njenni@jennipolodna.com\n\nKole\n\n\nhttps://duckfeed.tv/\nhttps://twitter.com/koleross\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nWhether or not you should stop animals who are thieves.\nWe're gonna reach a point where Americans know about Eurovision pretty soon, so prepare for that\n\"CRL couldn't afford the movie license for their video game adaptation of Blade Runner, so they just licensed the soundtrack.\n\n\nhttp://www.hardcoregaming101.net/blade-runner-1985/\n\nI Did It by Dave Matthews Band\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRXZkdEj7YI\nUnedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/gN_7KtRoZWU\n\nShowing your kid the Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon & him immediately adopting Sonic's attitudey idle animation\nFixing every plot hole in media by writing a \"Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead\"-like work where minor characters directly address them.\nThe \"I won't eat the cheese\" joke\n\n\nAdventure 500: https://bluerenga.blog/tag/adventure-500/?order=ASC\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nAn entire crowd of Jennis all expressing their preferences at once.\nCreative choices that make editing this show take even longer.\nFeeling some topics right now.\nHelping a seagull looter escape.\nJust assuming that the seagull didn't pay for that bag of chips.\nSending a penguin to the market to buy fish.\nThe Keystone Kops of stopping this bird from having a cheese sandwich.\nHow nobody can get mad if you train your dog to steal from shops.\nAn adorable seagull stealing somebody's insulin.\nActivating the motion-sensing doors to help a seagull steal the Hope Diamond.\nEncountering a seagull smoking a tiny crack pipe and deciding whether to post a video on social media or send it to rehab.\nHow to monetize the rat trying to go up the down escalator.\nWhen 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.\nWhether Americans know about Eurovision.\nPretending the listeners don't know what Eurovision is and really lording it over them.\nHaving to adjust for the altitude when you bake a souffle on your high horse.\nIf every state in the USA got to perform one song at the Super Bowl halftime show.\nMr. Lordy.\nSoccer except it's singing.\nLooking up what girding your loins means.\nStocking up on batteries in advance of when Americans find out about Eurovision.\nPower-washed Cheetos.\nA bag of bad corn snacks impaled on both a pike and a spike.\nCat Is How Much.\nThe specific ways in which Wikidiff is broken.\nRetiring replidroids.\nKnife Hopper with Boy Ratty and Dick Reckard.\nAn extremely composed and photogenic dumpster.\nGetting ready for some very uncomfortable mugging.\nIdentifying wizards by their extremely shiny outfits.\nWhy is this man so big?\nSmoke tentacles that are just trying to turn the TV on.\nHow badly the red wizard needs food.\nSugar Ray Charles playing guitar with one hand and holding champagne in the other.\nA dojo with sauna vibes.\nDripping your dumpster water onto the hookah rip enjoyer.\nDave-- that's what his fans call him: Dave.\nDave Matthews's flying kick fizzling out because his bribe to the VFX artist wasn't big enough.\nScaring the fish with your pec shimmy.\nDoing community service with the purple wizard who is now the orange wizard.\nYour two most attitudey friends getting married and having a kid.\nDeciding 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.\nLooking at your old yearbook photos and realizing that your smirk is the same as Sonic the Hedgehog's.\nKids getting sucked into Sonic the Hedgehog's engorged monopupil younger and younger every year.\nThe helicopter but it gets you lift.\nMario's idle animation in Super Mario 64 where he just starts naming Italian foods.\nWhether 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!\"\nThe alternate reality where Charles Martinet does a cartoonish French accent to voice Nintendo's platformer mascot.\nGetting offended on behalf of the French.\nWhether we should give Shamus O'Leary a hard time for having a racist name.\nShamus 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??\"\nHearing that Andy Dufresne makes a hole in a cell wall and assuming Shawshank Redemption is a sequel to Fantastic Voyage.\nWriting a short story about a friendly rat who explains how Marty McFly's parents didn't recognize him.\nMaking it a life goal to transform every goof on IMDB into an \"error made by character\" by writing fan sequels on AO3.\nExplaining how Marty McFly's parents didn't recognize him by pointing out that it was actually a movie the whole time.\nThe stage play of Super Mario Bros 2 where the audience just watches Mario snore for two hours while listening to jaunty ragtime.\nA joke striking you loudly enough that it's still ringing in your head twenty years later.\nParis Syndrome.\nJerusalem Syndrome.\nPlanting a palm tree under the Eiffel Tower.\nAdventure 500.\nA game jam where you recreate a game you haven't played in years from memory.\nLou's voice just being a bad Sylvester Stallone accent.\nJenni probably appreciating your email unless it's a bad email.\n","content_html":"

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Lords:

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-07-12T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/147955b7-5f58-4614-849d-2a51e8efa772.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":71569698,"duration_in_seconds":4439}]},{"id":"02b1d330-baac-492f-9afc-fbcef0e8ea83","title":"89. Pope Hat Guy Covers You With A Towel","url":"https://topiclords.com/pope-hat-guy-covers-you-with-a-towel","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nNathan \n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/NathanShorts\n\nChris\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/MrChrisLHall/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nAre mysteries actually better when you know who dun it?\nRenting apartments that come with weird artifacts\nMonster Island was a play-by-mail MMO written in QuickBasic that ran from 1989 to 2017.\n\n\nhttps://if50.substack.com/p/1989-monster-island\nhttps://if50.substack.com/\n\nNo Tengo Dinero by Righeira\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwxIGe1oOJQ\nUnedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/raj5mJ1sma4\n\nProcrastinating because if I do anything I'll feel like I have to do everything\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nThe symmetry of USB-C.\nThe edibility of USB-C.\nThe 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.\nWhich version of the Flash Gordon theme is more likely to get you pulled over for speeding.\nColumbo.\nWhether a mystery story functions as both a good story and a good puzzle.\nRevealing the identity of the murderer in the first ten minutes of every episode of your murder mystery series.\nThe inherent mystery provided by the horror genre's willingness to deliver the bad ending.\nMurder mysteries that are mysteries to the characters but not the audience.\nWhether it can still be a horror movie if the audience understands the rules.\nKnives Out.\nEnjoying a story twice because there is pleasure in seeing a well-constructed story play out.\nMental air conditioning.\nWatching a movie before you watch it, so you know what's going to happen.\nA huge wooden ankh in the bushes right outside your front door.\nRenting a furnished apartment and it comes with a painting called \"Bad Pope Hat Guy\" right above your bed.\nCovering 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.\nFinding a knob of unknown purpose sticking out of the wall and deciding to pull it as hard as you can.\nFold-out wall stools.\nA porcelain hand that came with the apartment.\nStoring your porcelain hand in the toilet tank.\nEveryone 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.\nYour 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.\nWhether your jar of mercury contains any of the atoms of mercury that Hitler breathed.\nPlaying an MMO by mail.\nHow many frames per second a play by mail game runs at \nYelling \"hey!\" into the abyss.\nNon-player monsters.\nCrossing the Crystal Hills barrier.\nIssuing weekly patches into your Netflix original movie until none of the original story or actors remain.\nChecking the patch notes before you watch version 2.4 of your favorite movie.\nWhere to put the new material when you add to your branching path story.\nInventing the t-remover so you can patch a movie starring Brad Pitt to instead star Brad Pit.\nWhether a music video is hand animated or early CG.\nVideo Toaster.\nA 3D animated prism that's actually a 2D animation cel that someone is rotating by hand.\nThe significance of the orange ball with sevens coming out.\nInventing the circuit board to be the background in your cool music video and then realizing you can use it to design electronics.\nOne tiny tank having to bear witness and the other tiny tank refusing to.\nThe same music video being the origin of circuit boards, Macromedia Flash, and the Toejam and Earl loading screens.\nBasing your squad of teen crime solvers on a 90s fad like Magic Eye.\nSeeing ending credits at the end of a music video and realizing you were watching a short film this whole time.\nBeing inspired to speak by images in front of your eyes.\nSeeing a galaxy brain meme in your mind's ear.\nAn outline of an abbreviation.\nBragging about your photogenic memory.\nWhere your mind's ear lives.\nYour Bluetooth headphones glitching out in a way that is both cool and nauseating.\nNeeding to flip a switch in your mind and having to be careful not to touch the mind mouse trap next to it.\nBeing productive all day and then realizing you didn't do anything fun all day.\nMoving to Minneapolis and realizing just how much you own.\nA two year old who draws perfect circles.\n","content_html":"

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Lords:

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Topics:

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Microtopics:

\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-07-05T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/02b1d330-baac-492f-9afc-fbcef0e8ea83.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":64160881,"duration_in_seconds":3976}]},{"id":"7140750f-8008-48ad-b45e-0a1f13b752dc","title":"88. The Horned Lizard's Final Defense","url":"https://topiclords.com/the-horned-lizards-final-defense","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nTyriq\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/FourbitFriday/\nhttps://frror.bandcamp.com/releases\n\nRyan\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/RyanIkeComposer\nhttps://www.instagram.com/ryanikeaudio/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nWhat do animals know? Do they know things? How do we find out?\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F\n\nCan we all just be adults and admit that invisibility sucks as a superpower?\nWhere is the machine learning startup promising to fix the concert videos where the audience claps on 1 and 3\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UinRq_29jPk\n\nToxic by Britney Spears\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOZuxwVk7TU\nUnedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/x3eUVHdw54k\n\nWhat mundane tool/item/technology do you wish were irrelevant, and what would you replace it with?\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nDoing a perfect ollie your first time on a skateboard and then never skating again because you'll never top that.\nCooking every single dish in the human culinary encyclopedia and then starving to death because you refuse to repeat yourself.\nHonor system rock paper scissors.\nMaking video games, one of which is called Catacomb Kids.\nNaming your band one letter away from a common word so that your band is impossible to google.\nAn extremely austere and dour change log, like in Great Expectations.\nChanging the \"dragon breath\" spell to \"bear breath\" because dragons aren't real but bears breathe fire.\nA grim window into the world in which we live, dragonless and dragon breath -less.\nA delicious treat for anyone who likes anise flavoring and salt.\nA giant human sized licorice in a wedding gown.\nCompeting with nearby deer for the affections of the extremely salty licorice you're marrying.\nSpendinga lot of your mental energy trying to figure out animal cognition.\nWhether elephants worship the moon or in fact anything.\nDogs doing the things dogs do even if they've never been taught by another dog.\nWhere babies learn the things that their parents don't teach them.\nBabies smiling when they see a face even though they're not happy to see you.\nBaby reflexes that help parents bond with them during the time when they are hardest to love.\nHow to be sure that animals think and feel and have memory when we can't even be sure for other humans.\nP-zombies.\nA dog's mental model of the world.\nThe Far Side cartoon depicting a machine that translates dog barks into human speech.\nWhether animals have to know stuff.\nMeerkat accents.\nThe 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.\nA 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.\nPutting two of the lamest possible superpowers together in the same married couple.\nThe lamest superpower that you would settle for.\nThe superpower of getting up when the alarm rings and not having to hit snooze even once.\nThe superpower of lactose tolerance.\nThe superpower of having practiced a lot.\nCutting 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.\"\nHow to convince general audiences that they should care when in the measure to clap.\nJust 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.\nPlaying a concert video where the video and audio are desynchronized by exactly half a measure.\nInventing 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.\nGoing to fiver and asking someone to build you a drum kit that defies science and logic.\nThe one company that Topic Lords would accept sponsorship from.\nStopping the concert when the audience starts clapping on 1 and 3 and asking them \"come on, did you spend $126 to get it wrong?\"\nNot finding out how low-poly these birds are until the quarter speed viewing.\nWhich side Britney's nails look most amazing from.\nThe outfit flight attendants had to wear in the 1950s, before they had the right to vote.\nA flight attendant with pauldrons.\nA loser with a sandwich that Britney wants to make out with in the bathroom.\nSeeing someone's ass and wondering what the Blippi subreddit would think of it.\nA dude who is a motorcycle.\nBiketaurs.\nHaving the same facial expression as the motorcycle you're riding.\nA sparkly Jackson Pollock that you wrap around yourself.\nStepping right in the laser.\nWarning 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.\nA music video that is secretly the prequel to Jupiter Ascending.\nWhether this hot Scandinavian guy is the same guy as the last hot Scandinavian guy.\nSaving time shaving by dyeing your facial hair the same color as your skin.\nWhether a stiff iron bar jabbing into your back would improve a bed or a chair.\nWhether Britney Spears hallucinated the events of the Toxic video, and she's just an ordinary flight attendant.\nHow to fix bread closures.\nFilling the moon with bread closures.\nGetting a bread box so people stop having to manufacture bread closures.\nHow massive a bread is required to spin the bag at sufficient velocity to apply the bread closures.\nSolving your headphone cord problem by never listening to audio of any kind.\nInstalling an ink sac in your fingernail so that you never have to look around for a pen.\nA 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.\nAn awful thing that your ducks can do.\nWhat's going on in that biome?\nThe horned lizard's final defense.\nDropping a tail if you need to escape.\nA super ethical meat factory that spends all day terrifying the tails off of lizards.\nAn avocado-like spread made out of frightened lizard tail.\nNothing but adrenaline flavor in this tail.\nHow to live as a freelancer without being drained of all your bodily fluids.\n","content_html":"

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Microtopics:

\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-06-28T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/7140750f-8008-48ad-b45e-0a1f13b752dc.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":69874417,"duration_in_seconds":4367}]},{"id":"2b2d8998-29ed-4326-a7ad-6f5e3db4d6f6","title":"87. Fraudl With An Umlaut","url":"https://topiclords.com/fraudl-with-an-umlaut","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nSam\n\n\n@SamJ314 on Twitter.\n\nChris\n\n\nchrism3141@gmail.com\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nWe can't even describe spacetime because of our faulty perception of time, and how it relates to optical illusions.\n\n\nOptical illusion: https://imgur.com/t6YdyVr\nFlatland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland \n\n3 guys with non-transitive dice and a non-reproducing animal.\n\n\nhttps://trick-dice.com/product/nontransitive-dice-set-of-3/ \nhttps://imgur.com/Rh3ubda\nhttps://www.mentalfloss.com/article/646004/do-cat-buttholes-touch-all-surfaces\n\nIn 2003, a judge ruled that the X-Men aren't human.\n\n\nhttps://www.polygon.com/comics/2019/9/12/20862474/x-men-series-toys-human-legal-issue-marvel-comics\nThe Hustle, Rebel's arbitration deposition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8yD4dVrzZY\n\n\"I have a bad case of diarrhea - Japanese learning English\"\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKjaFG4YN6g\nUnedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/UQmuZui_ajM\nZuiikin' English https://youtube.com/user/satisfyinglife \n\nHow concepts across languages differ but when we learn words as children we form this concept of a thing that the word represents.\n\n\nFun German words for English speakers: https://www.thelocal.at/20150806/ten-wonderfully-literal-german-words/ \nSplagchnizomai https://www.bibletools.org/index.cfm/fuseaction/Topical.show/RTD/cgg/ID/7650/Splagchnizomai.htm \n\nAspie couple in the world, running our approaches with normies for evaluation with each other.\n\n\nhttps://musingsofanaspie.com/2012/10/19/rules-to-live-by/ \nInteresting fiction read for Aspies: The Rosie Project https://g.co/kgs/RUwYG3 \nCockney rhyming slang https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyming_slang \n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nBeing unable to describe time without using time words like \"before\" and \"now\" and \"always\"\nThe \"media player with a scrub bar\" model of space time.\nWhy time only moves forward and why we only perceive any instant of it at any given time.\nTaking time away from spacetime and just having a frozen sculpture of an instant.\nMichaelangelo's David being the most famous space-without-time.\nOptical illusions as a lens into the sorts of perceptions and abilities that evolution deemed entirely unnecessary to our propagation as a species.\nSpoilers for Arrival.\nWhether it was physically possible for life on Earth to have developed the ability to perceive additional times and/or spaces.\nWhether early humans transgressed somehow and their punishment was to wonder about everything all the goddamn time.\nWhether or not we get to eat pizza after we die.\nBeing so annoyed by an optical illusion that you invent a machine to help you unsee it.\nA non reproductive animal rolling a non-transitive die.\nMules vs. hinnies.\nMules being unable to reproduce because they're too unattractive to find a mate.\nPutting 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.\nBeing too lazy to make a new line on the spreadsheet so you just append your new topic onto an existing topic.\nGoogle alerting you to an imaginary 6.0 earthquake near Lake Tahoe.\nJust sitting here waiting for the earthquake Google promised you.\nMoving from New Jersey to California and discovering earthquakes.\nWhether you should add 27 and 2.\nThe legal difference between a doll and a toy.\nHaving a fun time in the courtroom.\nGetting your movie's rating changed by counting up the number of times female genitalia were mentioned.\nNuminous dice.\nA soundstage with a bench and a plant that are supposed to indicate that this scene takes place outside.\nReferring to a scene transition as a wipe but everybody thinks you mean wiping your butt.\nP-Low The Skillful Abbot.\nReally enjoying your bad case of diarrhea.\nDoing aerobics and chanting about having a bad case of diarrhea.\nA classful of language learners each repping a different language on their shirts.\nDifferent cultures discretizing the world differently.\nA hypothetical culture that considers a \"person\" to include the hat they're wearing but not their left foot.\nWhether the horseshoe is part of a horse.\nPointing at some clothes and saying \"there's a person inside those clothes.\"\nPointing at a human head and saying \"there's a person inside that skull.\"\nDifferent places a person can exist within their corporeal body.\nFeeling emotions in your gut because you have neurons in there.\nHanging out with dinosaurs and having to do brain surgery on their butts.\nFinding out that your brain surgeon is a dinosaur and putting a post-it note on your butt saying \"brain not in here.\"\nFinding out that you are on the autism spectrum after you have your 10th concussion and aren't allowed to think hard for two years.\nWearing a bumper sticker on your forehead that says \"How's my talking? Call 1-800-EAT-SHIT\"\nStruggling to understand why someone would use words non-literally.\nFeeling very refrigerator about this explanation of Cockney Rhyming Slang.\nHow to apply the principles of running a playtest to human conversation.\nWondering about the thing you've got rattling around in your skull.\nConversational strategies that only work when you're talking to other autistic people.\nGoing through life assuming everybody has had a bunch of concussions.\nPutting 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.\nWhether you want this show's listeners friending you on Facebook.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-06-21T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/2b2d8998-29ed-4326-a7ad-6f5e3db4d6f6.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":50825509,"duration_in_seconds":3176}]},{"id":"123f9106-17a3-48d6-b7df-bab1862a8d87","title":"86. Dad Boy Prime And The Shadow of Grung","url":"https://topiclords.com/dad-boy-prime-and-the-shadow-of-grung","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nGary\n\n\nhttp://duckfeed.tv/\nhttps://www.patreon.com/duckfeedtv/\nhttps://twitter.com/garybuh\n\nBrayton\n\n\nBogwater convention coming to your town soon!\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nSpirit Halloween's Youtube Channel\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3PL2DxHye4\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJIbE6_Lt2w\n\nA drug you never want to try\nThis list of people's favorite mugs, and how to generalize it\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/AnnaHollinrake/status/1382392715074211849\nhttps://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/1385291669801631744\n\nDevo - Theme from Doctor Detroit\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_A8Xe9M0NY\nUnedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/QIK-ngWWhhs\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqnPciNhQXU\n\nMechanics or features of a game that the game doesn't tell you about\nWhich undead would you most like to become? Lich? Ghoul? Skeleton? Ghost? Zombie? Wight? Revenant?\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nWhat a .tv TLD indicates.\nBrayton's Bubbly Bog Water.\nAirdropping incredibly earthy mineral water directly to your house.\nUsing the wrong musical sting.\nThe gas station that functions both before and after noon.\nDrinking water out of a beer bong.\nThe algorithm providing a solid recommendation for once.\nGoing into Spirit Halloween and asking for something in an underfed Michael Myers.\nGiving out vaseline for Halloween.\nThe truth according to vaseline.com.\nWhether vaseline meets FDA requirements for human consumption and whether that qualifies it as a foodstuff.\nBlooming your own onions at home so you can stop going to Outback every weekend.\nAll the other things you could bloom with your new onion bloomer.\nA good way to go into a fugue state and have something on in the background while you're doing something else.\nA redditor who went missing after acquiring some Datura seeds.\nA recreational drug for which the lethal dose varies significantly from person to person.\nDeciding whether to join a cult based on whether you hallucinated the cult leader high fiving Aquaman or selling celebrity maps under a bridge.\nThe serial rooster on the box of corn flakes who's roosting every time you see him.\nThe rooster jumping off of the Corn Flakes box, grabbing the butcher knife, and giving you career advice.\nExplaining that cocaine isn't addictive and you would know because you do it every day.\nScrolling through a Twitter thread about people's favorite mugs to see all the great mugs.\nPerusing the multivarious ways a person can like a mug.\nThe East Berlin traffic light man.\nA 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.\nA dragon clutching the world in its hands with an American flag pattern on its spread wings.\nThe patriotism dragon.\nOur favorite mugs.\nGoing on Twitter to relax.\nWhether a big enough knife counts as a sword.\nDevo Vevo.\nDan Aykroyd speed walking while people make fun of him for the entire duration of the film.\nMark Mothersbaugh jogging in a sealed garbage bag so he can quickly lose enough weight to qualify for his intended Devo weight class.\nThe belt from the 1920s that jiggles you.\nRecording a commentary on a Dan Aykroyd movie as part of your podcast about Binding of Isaac collectibles.\nReplacing every transition wipe in Star Wars with Mark Mothersbaugh floating across the screen.\nThe illusion of intentionality.\nA beat poet playing a bass constructed out of a bass drum \nOur favorite fake lap steel guitar solos and what synthesizers they were played on.\nThe geniuses at genius.com having absolutely nothing to say about Devo's Theme to Doctor Detroit.\nThe Charmin Bear's mom's opinions on ass wiping.\nA Transmissible Toilet Paper Disease That Affects Only Bears.\nRubber Krulwich.\nJogging and Pimps: the Doctor Detroit Story.\nOne of those Doctor Detroit marriages you always hear about.\nThe Curse of Doctor Detroit.\nFlying out of a still frame of a hot dog.\nMark Mothersbaugh wearing an inflated bodysuit so that his silhouette matches Dan Aykroyd's when they speed walk together.\nGoing to the area labeled \"combat zone\" in hopes of finding someone to shoot.\nHiding aliens in your space game and never telling anybody about them.\nHiding a main quest in your space game and never telling anybody about it.\nGetting a gamer treat for peeking into corners.\nHow Portal should've warned you about its unusually high fall damage on the box.\nThe pros and cons of being a lich.\nWhether April would stick around if Jim turned into a lich.\nDying at Chuckie Cheese and being stuck there as a ghost forever.\nWhether being a zombie secretly feels awesome.\nThe tragedy of Quake's wireheading grunts.\nDying on the subway and having to listen to buskers for eternity.\nThe parable of the good lich and the good billionaire.\n","content_html":"

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Lords:

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-06-14T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/123f9106-17a3-48d6-b7df-bab1862a8d87.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":59203919,"duration_in_seconds":3700}]},{"id":"76818168-b8d3-40ea-b7b9-ebcd0b76b287","title":"85. Corsets For Snakes","url":"https://topiclords.com/corsets-for-snakes","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nAlex is on the Topic Lords Discord.\nShannon is offering vaccines.\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nHuman-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.\nBest and worst parts of camping.\nShutting off the PC speaker as a service.\nCall Me By Your Name.\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6swmTBVI83k\nUnedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/a1u_79xLemA\n\nIs \"The Birds\" the first genre zombie film?\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nSafe and effective vaccines.\nThe difference between spring rolls and egg rolls.\nTeleconferencing an escape room.\nAll of the items that came out of this drawer.\nA room escape game set in outer space where the players on separate ships communicate via semaphore flags.\nRunning a massively multiplayer tabletop campaign and inventing the middle manager dungeon master.\nHow Room Escape games have adapted to the pandemic.\nGoing camping and wondering \"Why are we in the woods? Why are we not in our cozy warm house?\"\nThe novelty of not having your luxuries.\nBeing imprisoned on a cruise ship and only then deigning to be entertained by cruise ship entertainments.\nEnjoying a bonfire because the woods doesn't have Netflix.\nThe novelty of sitting outside in the dark.\nCamping as a simulacrum of being an ancient human.\nThe sound of wind through the branches.\nSymphonies being largely unlistenable unless you're held captive in a nearly entirely quiet room.\nThe relative ease of paying attention when you're not surrounded by distractions.\nThe relentless temptation of pulling to refresh.\nHow bad the flame wars get on the fake Twitter set up just for the attendees of JoCo Cruise.\nWaiting to find out whether your cruise ship will be permitted to land.\nThe dynamics of having a Twitter just for your dorm.\nBringing all 29 volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica because you won't have the Internet on the cruise ship.\nGoing to a sake bar in Japan to learn how to like booze.\nThe legality of throwing your drink in a kid's face if they give you sass.\nKnowing it's illegal to dance on the street in Japan and deliberately adopting an exaggerated swagger whenever the police are around.\nJapanese police's different standards for when white people are dancing.\nWhether Japanese police have truncheons or just those flashlights with traffic cones on them.\nGetting a job and trying to figure out how to be useful at it.\nThe PC speaker beeping long after your program has crashed.\nWriting a program in the machine language debugger because Windows 98 still comes with programming tools.\nA kid swinging over pits.\nCommander Keen in: Invasion of the Vorticons.\nBack when it was a big deal for the PC to run a game that looked like a NES game.\nEventually realizing that the game you're playing where the cat chases the mouse is actually just a screen saver.\nNot being able to convince your dad to buy a CD-ROM drive for the family PC but luckily the N64 uses cartridge technology.\nVisiting 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.\"\nBeing informed that you are in for a treat.\nClouds giving the sun a big hug.\nThe influence of Spongebob Squarepants on the music video for \"Call Me By Your Name\" by Lil Nas X.\nA snake turning into a cone head.\nA very slow jog.\nYour under-eye makeup really bringing out your scales.\nCorsets for snakes.\nMini-Marge with a smaller version of the same hair.\nThe denim police taking you to denim jail for fashion crimes.\nWearing clothing with your name on it.\nSequence breaking the endless staircase in Mario 64 by giving the stairs a lapdance.\nNearly having descended the entire stripper pole.\nThe core strength required to give Satan an extremely slow lap dance.\nAn extremely entertaining sequence of images.\nExquisitely crafted metaphor that you'll miss entirely if you never look at it.\nWhat zombies were before George Romero invented the modern zombie.\nThe concept of a zombie as a horde of cannibals.\nThe fresh ideas that Night of the Living Dead brought to the The Birds genre.\nGiving Lovebirds the side-eye.\nNight of the Living Dead being progressive regarding its black protagonist but not its woman protagonist.\n","content_html":"

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Lords:

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Microtopics:

\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-06-07T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/76818168-b8d3-40ea-b7b9-ebcd0b76b287.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":66919027,"duration_in_seconds":4182}]},{"id":"88087d70-4042-4cf5-974d-6f9a36dcfd41","title":"84. Whirling Away Into The Unhearable","url":"https://topiclords.com/whirling-away-into-the-unhearable","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nErica\n\n\n@YerrikTRB on Twitter\nErica plugs Kitchen! The Musical, and also Micah’s books: https://tinyurl.com/46k5zfnm\n\nMicah\n\n\n@micahwrites on Twitter\nMicah plugs Bermudez Triangle, “Chilling Tales for Dark Nights” https://www.youtube.com/user/chillingtaleswi\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nIn praise of bad hidden object games\n\n\nHOPAs, or Hidden Object Puzzle Adventures, made by studios in Hong Kong and Eastern Europe: \nhttps://www.eipix.com/hopa-games/\nhttp://blueteagames.com/\nhttps://elephant-games.com/games/\nhttps://www.world-loom.com/\nHOPA Let’s Plays: https://www.youtube.com/c/YourGibs/playlists\n\nBetter designs for the human body\n\n\nModularity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modularity_(biology)\nCRISPR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR\n\nWhen you say \"excuse me\" you're asking forgiveness for doing something rude, such as burping. When you say \"excuse me\" as a demand that someone move out of the way because you're impatient to get past, the demand is itself the rude thing, so you should have to say it twice.\n\n\nBrood X: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/22362042/cicada-brood-x-map-2021\nPalo Verde beetles \nhttps://www.azfamily.com/weather/phoenix_weather_blog/the-monsoon-monster-beetle/article_bb4bd606-0476-5c0e-ae2a-ddbe1467d9d5.html\nhttps://arizonareport.com/big-black-arizona-beetle-palo-verde/\nMadagascar Hissing Cockroaches: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_hissing_cockroach\n\nBeastie Boys - Sabotage\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5rRZdiu1UE\nhttps://youtu.be/-TQgbVk9jss\nDeodar Cedars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cedrus_deodara\n\nRyan Reynolds and the Deadpool Cinematic Universe\nWatching Shakespeare\n\n\nThe Hollow Crown: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hollow_Crown_(TV_series)\nHenry V: https://globeplayer.tv/videos/henry-v\nFalstaff, who is actually more in Henry IV than Henry V: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Falstaff\nHamlet in the original Klingon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RF0k4qV1I1Y\nRichard II (the one that precedes Henry IV) https://tinyurl.com/344kjjp4\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nKitchen! The Musical.\nInviting the general public to write the musical that exists only in your head.\nIntroducing the guest who is bad at introducing himself.\nRunning a white-hat ARG on company servers to research and understand the employees you fired for running an ARG on company servers.\nIn praise of terrible games.\nProcedurally-generated hidden object games.\nOrganizing your life in a video game when you can't organize shit in real life.\nWhere the Hidden Object Puzzle Adventure fan communities are congregating online.\nUsing the block button on the pile of dishes in the sink.\nAsking the manliest gamers to play feminine-coded video games and discovering if they become less manly.\nLadies who want to wear big dresses to be fancy ballroom ladies.\nGamers who don't congregate online but instead enjoy video games by themselves.\nWhere the Russian developers who make games for American women congregate online.\nClicking on something to make it go away.\nImproving humans by adding components vs. by replacing components.\nThe legality of inventing a new organism by adding or deleting genes.\nThe Modular Human.\nPlants undergoing full genome duplication.\nThe Diploid Human.\nUsing your hundred tongues to speak a hundred languages at once.\nThe one line you remember from \"Kitchen! The Musical\"\nSaying \"excuse me\" in a higher and higher pitched voice until you're only saying \"excuse me\" to dogs and bats.\nRunning an errand in Tucson and incidentally removing horrifying beetles from multiple strangers’ hair.\nTrue bugs and untrue bugs.\nTrue bugs, with piercing and sucking mouthparts.\nA reimagining of the insect phylum that includes small dogs and especially annoying children.\nHissing 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!\"\nBrood X, scheduled for this summer!\nBrood X: Brood In Space.\nOS X: OS In Space.\nWhich is worse, piercing and sucking mouthparts or sawing and sucking mouthparts?\nWhat color of flashing lights civilians are allowed to use.\nPretending to be police.\nThe invasive plant species that the Sabotage music video is trying to highlight.\nHypothetical potted plants in the background of Powerman 5000's When Worlds Collide.\nBeing sentenced to community service and filling your rap punk band's trailer with fresh vegetables.\nNick Cave throwing a chair.\nA poolside interrogation to find out if someone has a waterproof phone before you push them into a pool.\nA cloth dummy falling off of a bridge.\nWhether that cloth dummy had a cloth family.\nWhether 1970s porn stars styled themselves after 1970s cops, or vice versa.\nPopeye the Sailor Moon.\nEverybody at the party dressing up as sexy cops and handing the real police a beer when they show up at the door.\nAccidentally bringing up sexy cops every time you're on the show.\nChill dudes in short ties.\nTaking a picture of a tree out of your moving car and asking a botanist to identify a blurry mess.\nA boss who thinks your name is Marcia.\nMeeting somebody with overlapping energies.\nTotal freedom from all societal expectations.\nSetting up a movie streaming service that only streams one movie to promote your new phone company.\nBuying every copy you can find of your first movie.\nWatching multiple sets of people trapped in the same reality where they play out the same dramas and say the same lines over and over.\nThe one time Shakespeare wrote a stage direction.\nEvery time Shakespeare has been adapted into a movie.\nWho even likes Falstaff.\nThe Complete Works of Shakespeare, Abridged.\nRe-subtitling your movie using lines from Shakespeare.\nThe origin of Klingons as Shakespeare characters.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-05-31T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/88087d70-4042-4cf5-974d-6f9a36dcfd41.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":64007524,"duration_in_seconds":4000}]},{"id":"d4385b4e-dfe0-4bda-8331-2eac456250db","title":"83. The Wide World Of Pores","url":"https://topiclords.com/the-wide-world-of-pores","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nStevie\n\n\nhttps://www.hryx.net/\n\nAvery might be on Spotify.\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nBREAKING NON MAMMALIAN MILK NEWS: the Arapaima, the largest freshwater fish, feeds its young with a milky white substance that has a hormone found in mammal milk.\nBoats\n\n\nhttps://www.vesselfinder.com/\nhttps://twitter.com/sfships\nhttps://twitter.com/Nature_Grrrl/status/1375168720495075338\n\nAngle Grinder Man\n\n\nhttps://wiki.rlsh.net/wiki/Angle_Grinder_Man\nhttps://wiki.rlsh.net/wiki/Bearman\n\nThe Safety Dance, by Men Without Hats\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjPau5QYtYs\nUnedited (syncable) commentary segment: https://youtu.be/NxucdoBgtSc\n\nMusic generated by food\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/simongeist/status/1366072913301037057\n\nRon Gallagher, who toured small clubs doing his famous brother's act, eventually resulting in a lawsuit and the estrangement of Leo Gallaher (the famous Gallagher) from his family\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nThe miracle of life on this very special episode of Topic Lords.\nFish milk.\nThe pigeon milk t-shirt.\nFish lactating out of their heads so the baby fish can swim through the milk cloud to improve their complexion.\nPhotos of proud fishermen holding fish bigger than they are and drinking milk off of their heads.\nThe top ten pores.\nThe defensive pores millipedes use to shoot itchy silk at you like silly string.\nHow if arachnids couldn't eat they'd die and how that's awesome actually.\nSolid state arachnids.\nThe velvet worm.\nPainting 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.\nCreating a listener survey to see how many listeners made it past the topic about fish milk.\nNot naming the RRS Sir David Attenborough but throwing a bone to the internet by naming its little buddy boat that pops out Boaty McBoatface.\nWhether they're actually called pilots.\nLosing a whole boatload of rubber duckies so to this day rubber duckies are washing ashore along with disarticulated left feet.\nA Twitter bot that just says hello and goodbye to boats entering and leaving the San Francisco Bay.\nTweeting at a boat to say \"you're killin' it out there, boat\" and being immediately suspended by moderation bots.\nThousands of boat watchers in dinghies all over the ocean watching boat movement through binoculars and sending updates to vesselfinder.com via carrier pigeon.\nBirds that are constantly changing their names.\nHow slough and slough are actually two different words.\nThe rest of the boat.\nHow snowplows get their names in Scotland.\nThe top eight snowplow names in Minnesota.\nAll the plow names that didn't make the cut.\nPlugging a hair dryer into the cigarette lighter and attaching it to your front bumper to melt the ice as you drive.\nA cop writing you a fix it ticket because your hair dryer cables are too tangled.\nSuperheroes who make house calls.\nThe police being completely unable to apprehend Angle Grinder man when his phone number and web site are totally public.\nConstruction Luigi.\nAngle Grinder man and Wheel Clamp man both having the same publicity shot of doing a split and grinding the concrete.\nA mob of masked superheroes descending on you and beating you up while you try to drink a smoothie.\nExtreme Elvis.\nA superhero named Bear Man whose superpower is that he only eats salmon.\nPouring one out for the Petoskey Batman.\nTrying to think of how The Safety Dance goes but all you can think of is the Humpty Dance.\nGetting a taste of Youtube's time-stretching algorithm and spitting it right back out.\nReally enjoying the tall grass.\nHow to tell if somebody is running, frolicking or fleeing.\nAn excellent prop stone wall with a bunch of old looking rocks.\nExtreme expressions of joy bursting with love as you walk through town screaming at everyone.\nContinuously jumping and smiling and not being sure which will tire you out first.\nS for safety.\nPutting a lute in the music video when there's no lute in the song.\nA split second of trenchant-seeming serious political commentary at the very end of this lighthearted music video.\nChumbawumba turning out to be serious political artists.\nGoing to genius.com to find out what The Safety Dance is really about.\nClaiming that The Safety Dance is not a nuclear protest song per se even though you don't really know what \"per se\" means.\nDrum hits triggered by popcorn pooping.\nThe popcorn vessel.\nHow all music is food-based if you think about it.\nHow humans have been singing since they had mouths.\nUsing popcorn as both a source of entropy and a tasty snack.\nTracking 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.\nThe vegetable orchestra.\nPowering your synth rock band using a bank of potatoes.\nHow potato-covered audio cables don't sound better than regular audio cables even though they are more delicious.\nThe Gallagher Prime story.\nThe Greek Tragedy of the Gallagher Bros.\nHashtag let Leo work.\nGallagher and Alf both being popular before we discovered what entertainment was.\nAll the paperwork you need to fill out to put music on Spotify.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-05-24T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/d4385b4e-dfe0-4bda-8331-2eac456250db.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":59398688,"duration_in_seconds":3712}]},{"id":"8b7743a3-4f56-4964-b2ac-e798f1d54bac","title":"82. Breadless French Toast a la Dig Dug","url":"https://topiclords.com/breadless-french-toast-a-la-dig-dug","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nHallie\n\n\n@hallie_9000\n\nChris will find you.\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nThe Pokemon Sylveon is supposed to be cute but it freaks me out and let me tell you why\nSavory french toast.\nRemember briefcases? People would just bring paperwork home with them. To work more, at home, for free. Fucked up, if you think about it.\nEverytime we touch Detective Pikachu\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQyM2AU7nZo\nhttps://youtu.be/YUWq_aBiE_s\n\nThe ethics of making a robot daughter\n\n\nhttps://www.etsy.com/listing/955388068/long-furby-custom-plush\nhttps://www.etsy.com/listing/912086346/3-ft-long-furby-purple-fur-customizable\nhttps://www.google.com/search?q=furby+sylveon&tbm=isch\nhttps://www.etsy.com/listing/951517045/custom-furby-oddbody-long-furby-alien\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nWhether it's possible to do Soupertasters remotely.\nWhat show this even is.\nNever watching the best episode of a show because if you do the rest will be worse than that.\nA game where you explore a tavern and then the game ends.\nHistory littered with the corpses of couch-co-op-only games.\nA hypothetical podcast about the dark history of cribbage.\nThe best vertically scrolling shooter set on British colonial Mars.\nAdding faeries to rebalance the meta which has been overrun by dragons.\nA little quadruped with features.\nRibbon-like feelers that make you drop your guard.\nOG European fairies who steal children and leave rusty nails in their place.\nA cute fairy dog that will fuck your shit up when you're not looking vibe.\nThe mortifying ordeal of realizing that all the Pokemon who look like they're wearing clothes? That's actually their skin.\nA Syveon swinging around Viridian City like Spider-Man, eating birds and avoiding cold iron.\nTurkey-flavored bread.\nMaking a Monte Cristo with savory French toast.\nA sweet omelette with a lot more bread than egg.\nBreadless French toast.\nOmelette a la Dig Dug.\nFilling crepes.\nUsing eggs as glue for putting a bunch of yummies together.\nLobster burritos.\nWhat briefcases are for.\nA game where you've got a corgi and you've gotta get her somewhere to do stuff.\nBringing a knife to a briefcase fight.\nUsing briefcases to store underwear.\nWhether you want to sit in the briefcase or boxercase section.\nAsking president Clinton \"boxers or briefs?\" on a live Q&A.\nAn adorable chonky Pikachu.\nDetective Pikachu turning out way better than it had any right to be.\nTwo and a half hours of Pikachu jazzercising.\nWhether Pikachu is made of shiny plastic like in Pokemon Go or is furry like a mouse like in Detective Pikachu.\nHiring internet meme people to do concept art for your movie.\nPokemon MC Hammer's extremely baggy purple leg skin.\nRealistic Homer Simpson and realistic Mario.\nDiving straight into your uncanny valley reflex and poking it with a stick.\nDoing an image search for \"realistic Mr. Mime\" and regretting it immediately.\nPsychic stigmata.\nStar Trek: The Next Generation and Frankenstein's conflicting takes on whether it's a good idea to construct an artificial person.\nTrying to make a robot daughter but accidently making a murder bot.\nCommitting your kid to Git so you can roll back when they find out about the time you spent on 4chan.\nBest practices for doing AI research without committing murder all the time.\nThe \"bunch of delicious stuff in a pan plus eggs\" approach to AI research vs. the \"frittata\" approach to AI research.\nObserving and understanding the outcome of training a neural network and writing an ordinary program to do the same thing.\nAgreement.\nThe 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.\nTo what degree parents can be held responsible for what their children do.\nHow it's okay to disown your parents but not your children.\nA chatbot with servomotors in it.\nA Furby molar.\nA burden too great to bear alone.\nA Furby living in a hollowed out tooth filled with corks.\nWaking up next to a ceramic tooth with a face every morning.\nWhether MAME has Furby support.\nDouglas.\nA Furby with baked beans instead of skin.\nA Furby with teeth in the middle and it's not okay.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"Lords: Chris and Hallie. We discuss Sylveon, savory French toast, briefcases, Detective Pikachu, and the ethics of making a robot daughter.\r\n","date_published":"2021-05-17T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/8b7743a3-4f56-4964-b2ac-e798f1d54bac.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":57116631,"duration_in_seconds":3569}]},{"id":"f4644d9d-6c2a-48d7-a696-c7a9dc179660","title":"81. The Pianist-Oboist War","url":"https://topiclords.com/the-pianist-oboist-war","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nAlexander\nAmanda\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nThe disappointment of sci-fi stories that are just reskins of stuff that happens on Earth.\nMy bitcoin.\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/mogwai_poet/status/543952090800734209\n\nI 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.\nJesse asks \"First encountering a song through parody.\"\nBad habits that adventure games teach you.\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nShrinking your pony until it's really small.\nPulling down the console and typing +mlook.\nSkyrim modding as a more convincing representation of magic than the spell system in the game itself.\nA very cryptic twitter account that just posts numbers.\nWhat @math_ebooks did to be suspended.\nWanting to land on a planet and look for Bob but a different planet gets in your way first.\nSci-fi as a safe lens for exploring our culture without getting people's defenses up.\nReverse mystery stories.\nStarfish people who communicate through music.\nWatching Solaris because you're really into boring sci-fi.\nAn alien invasion movie without the invasion.\nFinal Jeopardy asking you to identify the Close Encounters of the Third Kind melody from the interval names.\nThe fires of Musical Jeopardy.\nThe correlation between how tightly strung your instrument is vs. how tightly strung you are.\nThe Star Trek episode where the Enterprise discovers a musician planet where there's a war between the pianists and the oboists.\nEdmonton, the early Bitcoin hub.\nSETI@home never finding anything interesting.\nLosing your Bitcoin wallet.\nBuying a $40,000 coffee with Bitcoin in 2013.\nGiving your college hard drive to a friend to ask them to try to find your Bitcoin wallet without first scouring it for incriminating evidence.\nDeciding 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.\nDressing up as the Murder She Wrote theme song for Meme Day.\nWhether the Murder She Wrote theme song is a meme.\nThe barbecue joint that accepts Dogecoin.\nGoing to Remedy Chai in Edmonton and getting a butter chicken wrap and a $40,000 chai.\nLiking both hot dogs and schnitzel but hating Wienerschnitzel.\nA joke that most people won't get or notice, and the people who do will be annoyed by it.\nMy First Book of Space.\nHating potatoes until you discover that they are delicious and then hating them even more.\nYour refusal to admit that actually you like potatoes as foreshadowing to every argument you ever have on the Internet.\nThe Wienerschnitzel chili cheese dog burrito skipping right from marketing's brain to consumer's mouths without ever being taste-tested by anyone.\nThe Brain to Mouth social movement.\nThe culinary dimensional space of meat product folded into bread product.\nA hybrid chef/engineer who has an understanding of both fast food pipelines and how to prepare a tasty meal.\nHearing every Weird Al version of a song before you hear the originals.\nMathnet.\nBible versions of pop culture songs so you can sing along to the radio without being full of sin.\nThe 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.\nIt's getting cold in here, so put on all your coats.\nSherlock Hemlock.\nVincent Twice Vincent Twice.\nMonty 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.)\nA combination of things you usually don't see tickling your neurons in a novel way.\nThe scene in the Hitchhiker's Guide radio show where Douglas Adams is making fun of disco.\nThe missing album that the Backstreet Boys only released in Canada so they could practice being famous.\nTime traveling to past and future Space Quests.\nDoing 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.\nAn adventure game where you can do what makes sense.\nHow the Infocom hard boiled detective text adventures were structured differently from traditional text adventures.\nWanting Roberta Williams to adopt you and now you've blown it.\nThe Seattle of Mexico.\nSan Francisco, The Everbrown State.\nRoberta Williams tracking you down and adopting you against your will.\nLuring Roberta Williams to your house with promises of trained chickens jumping through hula hoops.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-05-10T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/f4644d9d-6c2a-48d7-a696-c7a9dc179660.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":48017659,"duration_in_seconds":3001}]},{"id":"bc92920f-3e26-4055-8cb9-9ede5371a472","title":"80. Xenogears Disc 3 For Smash","url":"https://topiclords.com/xenogears-disc-3-for-smash","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nStyger\nJP\n\n\nhttp://vectorpoem.com/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nComestibles as fan fiction\nThe most unexpected CD to be launched from the face of the Cenobite from Hellraiser 3 that launches CDs out of his face.\n\n\nhttps://cenobite.fandom.com/wiki/CD\n\nI got a mandolin slicer for Christmas from someone who was afraid to use it, and I am also afraid to use it.\nGhostbusters, by Ray Parker Jr.\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe93CLbHjxQ\nBustin'. https://youtu.be/0tdyU_gW6WE\nYou Could Stop at Five or Six Stores https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7T1OHha9agg\nJeffrey Tambor Is NOT the Guy From \"Ghost\" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVLWybF_pwo\nJoJo: Trick with cigarettes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJwD8q-OXLQ\n\nOldest food you've eaten. ie oldest substance or object you've consumed.\n\n\nhttps://youtu.be/Ga5JrN9DrVI\n\nDo pigeons love nacho cheese?\nHere's an alphabetical list of every move in every Mario game, from \"1,000-Fold Arms – Paper Mario: The Origami King\" to \"Zero Laser – Super Smash Bros. Brawl.\" \n\n\nhttps://www.mariowiki.com/List_of_special_moves\nA. How would you fix this list?\nB. Who wants to do a podcast series where we rank them all?\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nAttack the Block.\nMovies where a delineated area is involved in some kind of fight.\nLord quality: trying to keep it high.\nCooking dinner as a fusion of the cuisines of the two countries that you are about to watch play a sport.\nWhite game designers in the 70s deciding that there isn't anything spicier than paprika in this astonishing fantasy world.\nDoing some home cooking and inventing a new sandwich in the style of the McDonald's fish fillet.\nThe $100 cheese steak.\nA chef getting famous by serving incredibly high end Big Macs to rich people.\nEach bottle of Tabasco tasting uniform even though they're all composed of peppers grown in many different countries.\nHow to explain cenobites to Thomas Jefferson.\nA transporter accident aesthetic.\nNot liking the music in the club so you turn the DJ into a cenobite with a CD drive for a mouth.\nSupertramp's Breakfast in America.\nAll known AOL installer CD-ROMs originating with the cenobite who launches CDs out of his face.\nA CD that was killed by Mountain Dew.\nThe cenobite with a CD drive for a face launching Xenogears disc 3 at you.\nXenogears disc 3 for Super Smash Bros.\nSympathy for the developers of Xenogears and in fact of any video game.\nNovelty CD shapes.\nCD-ROMs cut to the size of business cards with your portfolio on them.\nDestroying a slot loading CD drive by putting a small or oddly shaped CD in it.\nLearning to trust yourself to be around sharp knives.\nStrapping a mandolin slicer to yourself like a keytar.\nA great spooky house under the freeway.\nA house made of neon tubing like the ghost ship at the end of Monkey Island.\nTelekinesing the furniture.\nBeing haunted by ghosts that are clearly just a couple dudes in t-shirts.\nGetting a bunch of B-list celebrities to shout \"Ghostbusters\" and act scared.\nGetting movie footage for your music video by pointing a video camera at the movie screen.\nFinding synergies between disparate elements of pop culture.\nBleh hands.\nSlimer with a dozen cocktail weenies in his craw.\nReaching a compromise that will allow Ray Parker Jr. to haunt your home in peace.\nThe Ghostbusters hiring spectral Ray Parker Jr. to haunt folks and drum up business.\nVincent Schiavelli's filmography.\nA Ghostbusters/Columbo crossover episode.\nThe trick where Chevy Chase eats a cigarette.\nSlimer always believing that he ate the whole thing.\nFood age.\nEating extremely old cough drops.\nNot being able to tell if cough drops have gone bad because they always taste like that.\nAsking someone with a philosophy degree whether cough drops are a food.\nAccidentally taking enough philosophy classes to qualify for a degree and someone tracks you down to hand you your philosophy degree like a subpoena.\nBog cheese.\nWhether anyone has successfully eaten millennia-old frozen mammoth meat or if it all turned into black goo.\nSeveral thousand year old tomb honey.\nUnboxing and eating military rations on video.\nEating hardtack from the American civil war in 2016.\nBeing extremely upbeat about rancid meat.\nHow to tell if vacuum sealed food has botulism.\nHaving the vocabulary to describe all the different ways food can go bad.\nTrying to buy civil war hardtack on eBay and bidding on a pile of rocks.\nThe most pigeon-dense place you've lived.\nTaking incredible risks for a single cheeto.\nWhether nacho cheese is incredibly beautiful to a tetrachromat.\nNacho cheese as a nest building materials.\nGlobal incidence of human tetrachromacy.\nSpace photos recolored into the visible spectrum so humans can look at them.\nPointing a spectroscope at nacho cheese to figure out what pigeons see.\nThe world's tiniest superpower.\nHow to grow up in America without having played a bunch of Mario games.\nList of soups.\nSitting at your Wizard's Desk for too long and getting Wizard's Foot.\nFan wikis taking the shape of fan patience.\nBegging the wiki editors to turn this list into a normalized database table.\nAn exhaustive list of games in which Mario can jump.\nAn exhaustive list of games in which Mario can't jump.\nMario visiting San Francisco.\nThe Golden Gate Bridge existing in the Mario multiverse.\nJapan fitting perfectly in the Super Mario Bros. 3 universe, because Japan is also a magical foreign land I've never visited.\nThe alternate reality where Mario Odyssey depicted world tourism in a hyper-realistic fashion.\nMario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 as a fictionalized depiction of an Olympics that never happened.\nESPN broadcasting CPU vs. CPU basketball matches in NBA 2K.\nLinking to a web site but not encouraging people to go there.\n","content_html":"

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Lords:

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Microtopics:

\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-05-03T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/bc92920f-3e26-4055-8cb9-9ede5371a472.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":61962449,"duration_in_seconds":3872}]},{"id":"00d8b75f-ef35-448e-9320-e9322a673641","title":"79. Loose Meat Krispie Treats","url":"https://topiclords.com/loose-meat-krispie-treats","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nJohn Bettonville\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/robohunkx\n\nAlex Diener \n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/ThemsAllTook\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nBlaseball: the Musical\n\n\nhttps://blaseballthemusical.com\nhttps://blaseballpodcast.com\nhttps://catacalypto.substack.com\nhttps://blandcamp.com\nhttps://medium.com/the-game-bland/shell-your-idols-blaseball-and-the-attention-economy-74037293776e\n\nKeeping the spirit of invention alive\nA couple weeks ago I made turkey burgers with shredded zucchini mixed in and it was great. Today I mixed in shredded cheese too, and now I'm convinced I could mix anything in and it'd be great.\n\n\nhttps://imgur.com/Q7B5JkS\n\nMiko asks \"do you know about As Slow As Possible or should I put it in the Topic Bucket\"\n\n\nAs Slow as Possible as Fast as Possible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5-Yo328Rp4\nIndeterminacy: https://youtu.be/_lOMHUrgM_s\n\nExisting completely outside the school system\n\n\nPeter Gray on How Our Schools Thwart Passions: https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_gray_how_our_schools_thwart_passions \n\nGlasses: getting them for the first time as an adult vs when you were younger\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nA modern take on Lunar Lander.\nFlying a rocket ship underwater.\nJohn Mystery's true identity.\nThe true identity of the investigator who uncovered John Mystery's true identity.\nBlaseball: the Musical: the Deaths of Sebastian Telephone.\nWhether it's okay to not be the most obsessed participant in your chosen fandom.\nTake Me Out to the Blall Game.\nWriting, recording and editing a musical in 72 hours.\nScreaming about how Jessica Telephone looked at you.\nThe pros and cons of being cagey about your identity.\nThe ten most interesting things that happened in Blaseball this week.\nNewsletters: the podcast that comes into your email.\nThe pros and cons of reinventing the wheel.\nA non-destructive audio synthesizer that integrates into your makefile.\nWriting 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.\nReinventing the wheel to learn how a wheel works.\nPassing variously aggregated files back and forth between R and Python scripts.\nNPM as exhibit A in the argument that maybe it's a good idea to reinvent the wheel sometimes.\nRelying on a thousand strangers not breaking their NPM module so that your commercial web site can keep running.\nPerpetually living in fear of the enormous arcane machine you've created.\nRice Krispie Treat Burgers.\nThe hidden dangers of putting diced onion in your meat loaf.\nIngredients blending into a homogenous mass.\nSweet Sundae Ramen.\nHomemade fudge vs hot fudge.\nA food dish that looks like something tasty.\nA brown sludge at the end.\nWhether this noodley carb would look more appetizing if it weren't dyed blue.\nAdapting a 4chan cooking thread into a Youtube channel with MST3K style silhouettes heckling the whole time.\nShipping your symphony with instructions on how to remix it.\nIndeterminacy.\nObserving someone across the street when cars are passing by.\nAs Slow as Possible As Fast as Possible.\nBasing the tempo of your performance on the wavelength of the shortest note in the piece.\nNot knowing what to expect but being thoroughly satisfied by what you got.\nHomeschooling vs. Unschooling.\nA very positive thing for you that might not be great for other people.\nWanting to be a baker when you grow up but not knowing how to proceed because you already are a baker.\nLearning by doing.\nThe correlation between people who like the structure of school and who people learn best by reading rather than doing.\nThe first person in your family to not be homeschooled.\nLearning to play music because there are instruments in your house.\nGrowing up outside the school system and encountering the Pledge of Allegiance for the first time in your thirties.\nSending your homeschooled kids to high school so all their little personality quirks get beaten out of them by their peers.\nEveryone American diagnosed with PTSD actually having PTSD twice, because they also went to middle school.\nLearning how to deal with other humans once you're mature enough to have a little bit of emotional intelligence.\nEmbarrassment of your past self as a sign of growth.\nA topic asking for the perspective of someone who is not on the podcast.\nGetting glasses that make objects in your left eye look farther away than in your right eye.\nRadially-oriented bifocals.\nFinally achieving everyone else's normal.\nPutting up with blurry vision for most of your life but wearing glasses when you hike because you want to see all the pretty leaves.\nPutting on someone else's glasses as a joke but things do actually look a little bit sharper but assuming it's just an illusion.\nThinking you have normal vision until someone actually measures your corneas.\nSwimming at the edges of your vision because lenses work best in the middle.\nWearing 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!\"\nThe 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.\nObjects shrinking every time you get new glasses.\nObjectively measuring your perception by sticking a tape measure into your brain.\nWriting one really excellent tweet and then hiding it behind a bunch of tweets promoting the musical you were in.\n","content_html":"

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

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Lords:

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Microtopics:

\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-04-26T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/00d8b75f-ef35-448e-9320-e9322a673641.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":73076402,"duration_in_seconds":4567}]},{"id":"4e2d1ae2-6b42-460f-afc1-1d85bbcda081","title":"78. Uvula Hadouken","url":"https://topiclords.com/uvula-hadouken","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nLaura\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/lmichet\n\nBrendon\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/BlendoGames\n\nApril\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/aprilsaur\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nIf 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?\nWhat's up with teeth. They seem designed to be tedious to brush and floss and maintain. Is this really the best version of mandible?\nHelp me workshop this joke: Eve/eave\nChickens turn into crocodiles\n\n\nhttps://youtu.be/vTic1y37ueY\nhttps://youtu.be/zQOkwoUPNgQ\n\nIf 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?\nNew skills learned during the pandemic--what skills have you learned? Was it worth it?\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nThe Skin Deep Beacon.\nThe voice of maintenance.\nReviewing the bucket.\nConfronting the darkness within yourself at Home Depot.\nMurdering your competitors on a soft pile of dog beds.\nA chainsaw's efficacy as a murder weapon.\nTying a chainsaw to the top of your head to foil air assassinations.\nHot dog beds.\nThe bow rack at Home Depot that holds three bows with four arrows each so you can fire twelve arrows at once.\nTrying to opt out of the Battle Royale.\nUsing night vision binoculars to observe the burglar from across your bedroom.\nBuying a varmint-proof AT-AT in the hunting aisle of Home Depot.\nPushing the shelves over like dominos and killing all your Home Depot Battle Royale competitors at once.\nA very specific thing that happens in shonen.\nBeing spirited away to this Home Depot with no warning.\nNot having night vision googled so you superglue these night vision binoculars to your face.\nThe people horrible enough to survive the Home Depot murder game.\nA Chippendale dancer removing their tearaway pants revealing their pants gun and killing everyone in the room.\nHitman always introducing himself using the same pseudonym, xXx_69_KillerMan.\nThe necessity of inventing pulling teeth.\nInstead of having teeth, having a single non-sectional chomper that grows continuously like a goat horn.\nA human's astounding ability to only occasionally bite their own cheeks and tongue.\nInstead of having to chew, your uvula throws a hadouken, incinerating the food.\nInstead of chewing, simply increasing the pressure in your mouth until the food becomes a diamond.\nHow Neanderthals all had perfectly straight teeth like a pop star.\nHumans evolving smaller heads so they could fit through the neck of a t-shirt.\nThe first humans in history to regularly eat refined sugars.\nThe advantages of rotating your jaw 90 degrees.\nFinding a partner whose nose is oriented opposite yours, so instead of tilting your face to kiss, you just breathe back and forth forever.\nHow humans would eat soup and sandwiches if their mouth orientation changed.\nWhy eaves exist.\nLowering energy bills using your cat.\nA very sharp quadruped.\nFiguring out how to make fun of a cat.\nMisspelling your cat's name as \"Eave\" when the census taker comes around and your property taxes go up by millions of dollars.\nFour chickens covered in colored vinyl.\nChickens walking into a jello mold.\nAn algorithmically created video for children.\nEvery permutation of every animal walking through every liquid and turning into every other animal.\nThe fashion trajectory of the designer of Super Monkey Ball.\nWalking through the fountain portal and losing one of your beards.\nCoolest video I ever seen: Adult.\nSpanish Cat in the Sky.\nMore of the same, but this time there's a cat saying it.\nThe black hat cowboy wearing an additional bulletproof vest for every member of your assassination party.\nMaking sure there's only one serial killer at a time in your theme park.\nTeaming up to hug this enormous mechanical cowboy.\nThe 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.\nGoing to a series of weird interactive theater events after you move to LA.\nBeing diverted into a room where you swing in a wicker basket hanging from the ceiling.\nPaying $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.\nEmploying both kinds of maze construction materials: bedsheets and garbage bags.\nSleep No More.\nWanting to get into a hobby but not being sure how to learn to love the actual process of performing the hobby.\nAccess to a wider variety of flavors in your life.\nMaking Ants on a Log with Thai peanut sauce.\nGetting children to eat celery by making it unhealthy.\nGetting the quick dopamine hit of the early stages of learning a hobby, then quitting.\nTaking screenshots of a web site and reading the screenshots so the web site can't pop up any more ads.\nJust who is responsible for the state of web media.\nScrolling past twelve life stories to figure out how to make dinner.\nWriting 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.\nNot knowing how to advance in an adventure game and writing to the developers to tell them their game is broken.\nGoading game developers into revealing their puzzle solutions rather than calling the hint line.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-04-19T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/4e2d1ae2-6b42-460f-afc1-1d85bbcda081.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":61117754,"duration_in_seconds":3819}]},{"id":"44899718-ea4a-4e3a-85d1-6d5503f2219d","title":"77. A Vocal Quirk Of Your Mind (For Other People)","url":"https://topiclords.com/a-vocal-quirk-of-your-mind-for-other-people","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nTyriq\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/FourbitFriday\n\nChris\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/MrChrisLHall\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nRevisiting Game Maker after 10 years, and getting right back into it\nWhat's your jrpg/anime vocal quirk?\nElectric showers\nWeval - Someday\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-wEvzqdDZg\n\nUNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Lists\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNESCO_Intangible_Cultural_Heritage_Lists\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nA game that has been in early access for 7,000 years.\nComing back to software you last used a decade ago and finding that it has a night theme now.\nOld vs. new Game Maker.\nKnowing the context a word is borrowed from and assuming more meaning carried over than actually did.\nTerms that programming borrowed from philosophy, like \"monad\" and \"blockchain.\"\nFunction-shaped functions.\nSeeing 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.\nThat time someone tried to port Catacomb Kids to C++ before realizing that someone had been adding features to this game for ten years.\nThe Dark Theme era.\nJim just happening to know how many lines of code the Frog Fractions remaster is.\nHow many lines of code is reasonable for an action roguelike that one person has worked on for ten years.\nMeasuring code complexity by zipping it and looking at the file size.\nDesigning the rules of a game to stop people from ruining it for themselves.\nHow your laugh maps to your blood type.\nDeciding that when a character says \"...\" that means that they farted, and suddenly being able to enjoy Visual Novels.\nWhether Jay Gatsby saying \"old sport\" all the time is the same phenomenon as Moogles always saying \"kupo.\"\nTyping 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.\nIncorporating goat noises into your speech in a subtle enough way that people aren't sure if you just made a goat noise.\nEverybody having their own weird noise that they made repeatedly instead of just having a face.\nDeciding that your signature isn't cool enough and hiring a signature designer to help you out.\nWhether \"signature designer\" is a real job you can make a living doing.\nDesigning a different unique fart for every character in your JRPG so they each have a fart that fits your personality.\nWhy making a fart noise with your tongue is called a \"raspberry.\"\nHow nobody can tell you've got a duck call under your COVID mask until it's too late.\nA showerhead plugged into a wall outlet.\nHeating water as it passes through the showerhead.\nReassuring 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.\nWearing rubber shoes in the shower so the electric showerhead doesn't electrocute you.\nHow nobody posting in the thread about electric showers has died.\nElectric showers waking you up even more effectively than regular showers.\nNot knowing what people want from things.\nNuclear pacemakers.\nThe number of nuclear pacemakers still in use today.\nYour nuclear pacemaker keeping your heart beating long after the rest of you has died.\nThe Council of the Nuclear Hearts.\nPlugging your electric shower right into your nuclear heart.\nElectric flamethrowers.\nLighting your cigarette with a tiny taser.\n24 seconds of zooming in on the forest canopy.\nA video which is very dense with frames.\nA video which is exactly the kind of video that video codecs are be bad at encoding.\nStar Turns.\nA web site where people can repost your content uncredited and go viral.\nA guest accidentally unplugging their headphones followed by thirty seconds of \"can you hear me? I can hear you.\"\nStanding on a floor that is painted to give you vertigo.\nBuildings that are cool in this video.\nGetting really excited every time you see aerial photography.\nFreeways.\nStarting with macro shots of urban environments and transitioning to wider shots of rural environments.\nCanopy shyness.\nVoronoi diagrams.\nPreserving aspects of human culture that don't take the form of a physical object.\nIntangible cultural heritage in need of urgent safeguarding.\nIntangible culture lost in the natural process of human becomingness.\nWhether history is worth knowing.\nA series of Duke Nukem strategy guides collected in the Library of Congress, rebound to look like a hardcover from the 1950s.\nWhat it takes to preserve a skill that a community of people practices over the course of their lives.\nDance notation for very constrained types of dance.\nTugging rituals.\nAvalanche risk management.\nNotation for bee dances.\nDance notation which is just a list of where all the ping pong balls were.\nHow every culture agrees that Kiki is the spiky one and Bouba is the round one.\nWine horses.\nA very Western centric view of how many instruments have ever existed.\nHow to make the number four out of only letters.\n","content_html":"

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

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Lords:

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Microtopics:

\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-04-12T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/44899718-ea4a-4e3a-85d1-6d5503f2219d.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":65517610,"duration_in_seconds":4094}]},{"id":"4752c1bd-d4f0-4c62-80ba-eec71940856e","title":"76. The Validity Of Converting Songs To Buildings","url":"https://topiclords.com/the-validity-of-converting-songs-to-buildings","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords\n\n\nMaxx\n\n\nmaxx.infinity@gmail.com\nhttp://mechcem.itch.io/\n\nAaron\n\n\nhttp://aaronsee.media/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nThe TV Show Russian Doll and emotionally correct magic logic\nMy favorite captchas\n\n\nhttp://www.captchacomics.com/index.php?i=1540\n\nAI-remastered Rick Astley \n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ocykBzWDiM\n\nKegel based video games and sex UI\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OYmIexjX8U\n\nDeath Stranding, Tenet, and responsible creativity\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nThe green fuzzy stuff, and how nice it is to touch.\nMoss on all sides of a tree.\nMoss directionality at various latitudes.\nHaving a water-borne moss ball instead of a fidget spinner.\nRussian Doll.\nWhether there is or ought to be another season of Russian Doll.\nRestarting from the same point every time you die.\nEvery episode of a TV series depicting the same four years of high school except the protagonist joins a different club.\nThe three names of Edge of Tomorrow.\nAll You Need is Kill: Edge of Tomorrow: Live Die Repeat.\nNaming your book like an eBay auction.\nTime travel between adjacent panels of a comic.\nCharacters in a story trying to figure out how the author's mind works.\nSuccessfully fusing world building with a character-driven story.\nDesigning a game where the game rules change based on choices players make in the story.\nCelebrities in Prison.\nAny given playthrough of a game being consistent with itself, but not with other playthroughs.\nPlaying an interactive story on the Wayback Machine, where it's no longer interactive.\nRunning a MUD and exposing its creative tools to your players.\nMatching spiral galaxies to demonstrate your humanity.\nPutting pedestrians at risk by giving bad information to CAPTCHAs.\nFiguring out who your CAPTCHA buddy is so that you can give the driving AI bad information together.\nA CAPTCHA asking you how many instances of the letter i are in the author's name, then after you answer revealing their middle name.\nA spammer caring enough to figure out your bespoke commenting system so that they can spam it.\nA 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.\nCrook things.\nA phrase both too specific and too general to be useful.\nDoing divination readings by writing kanji with swinging pendulums.\nUsing images as the source of randomness in a roguelike's daily run.\nHere was a song but now it's a building.\nQuestioning the validity of converting songs to buildings.\nHaving a lot of things and needing to create names for them.\nAn incredible bomble.\nDeleting this entire discussion and replacing it with Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up.\nReacting to the gestalt of Rick Astley singing in front of a fence.\nUpscaling a music video to 4k and then applying a CRT filter to make it look like it's on an old TV.\nContent aware fill but for time instead of space.\nUsing content aware scale to make videos of hilarious cartoon people.\nLighting the underside of a bridge by reflecting a searchlight off of a pot of water.\nA shadow of Rick Astley clapping his hands and his right hand just vanishes.\nFinally noticing the bartender in the Rick Astley music video.\nDoing a graceful dance nice that most people would wreck themselves trying without even conveying to onlookers that they're trying to dance.\nTrying to dragon punch but missing the timing so Ryu just flails uselessly for a few seconds.\nFlappy Bird with a kegels controller.\nThe portable urination games that you see people playing on the subway and wonder if they're winning.\nRepeatedly firing a semiautomatic rifle by kegeling as rapidly as possible and then doing a backflip to reload.\nWerewolf except you're interrogating everyone to figure out who has just eaten a spicy pepper.\nCreative responsibility.\nWhat's good and bad about walking in video games.\nWinner vs. Loser.\nSpamming the forward button to run.\nTapping the forward button at a certain rate or the protagonist trips and falls.\nJust being a capsule and going to zero velocity when you hit a wall.\nFilling your AAA hiking simulator with questionable exposition.\nHiking through the United States except it's actually Iceland.\nPressing a button to react to strong winds.\nWhat happens when you try to make games that aren't shooting people.\nReally thinking hard about what it means to walk.\nMaking a AAA walking simulator and breaking down your org chart into the left foot team, the right foot team, the left knee team, &c.\nHiking barefoot on an intensely beautiful mountain and not seeing any of it because you're looking at your footing.\nTaking in the beauty of your environment.\nBuilding a hill the size of a large building but painting it to look like a 20,000 foot mountain.\nThe difficulty of emulating a Windows 95 game.\nHow to install Windows 95 on a modern computer when modern computers don't have CD-ROM drives.\n","content_html":"

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

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Lords

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Topics:

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Microtopics:

\n\n","summary":"Lords: Maxx and Aaron. We discuss emotionally correct magic logic, our favorite captchas, AI-remastered Rick Astley, Kegel-based video games, and responsible creativity.","date_published":"2021-04-05T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/4752c1bd-d4f0-4c62-80ba-eec71940856e.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":69744849,"duration_in_seconds":4359}]},{"id":"08cedf72-c999-43c4-a3a7-a901402a94b1","title":"75. Just Yawn It Out, Brah","url":"https://topiclords.com/just-yawn-it-out-brah","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nRyan \n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/RyanIkeComposer\n\nAlicia \n\n\nhttps://www.instagram.com/historianraptor/ \n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nHow many throw pillows is too many? Does it depend on number of pillows? Size of furniture? Number of family members? Softness/firmness level?\nWhy are yawns considered a sign of boredom?\nArt packs/music disks\n\n\nhttps://16colo.rs/pack/wiz-0296/\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlvsDtevNJ0&feature=youtu.be\n\nVille 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).\"\n\n\nhttp://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/\n\nDo 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?\"\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nGetting good enough at English to speak in Instruction Manual.\nBack before the content ocean.\nA whole slew of trucks that have jobs.\nYour two year old wishing you good luck by leaving a cement mixer on your desk.\nA lateral career move where you decide to stop releasing games.\nOccult and magic in the Greco-Roman world.\nTalking the kids out of going to college.\nUsing Greco-Roman erotic curse tablets and binding spells to examine romantic relationships of the time period.\nHow nobody calls love potions \"curses\" any more.\nVariable demand for throw pillows over the course of the day.\nNeeding to get more dogs because your have too many throw pillows for the number of dogs you have.\nA bowling pin orientation of ten to twelve pillows that you have to clear out of the way before you can sleep.\nA barricade of squish.\nA wheezing Darth Vader mask.\nSleeping 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.\nA lacerating throw pillow.\nOpening yourself up to the soft life.\nA badminton racket in your closet that you haven't used in over a decade.\nEdible pillows.\nYawning whenever you see the sun.\nPossible origins of the myth that yawning indicates boredom.\nA yawn factory to your left.\nTrying to change society in the next ten minutes.\nA manatee at the zoo giving you a hard time because you yawned at their enclosure.\nOxygenating before you charge an invader.\nHippos yawning in order to fuck you up.\nGetting 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.\"\nWhat you get for challenging a peacock.\nLiving in a bad society and being tired all the time.\nYawning it out.\nSticking a finger in your elderly dog's mouth when they yawn because they don't have enough teeth left to bite you.\nWhat you did with a modem before the internet was a thing.\nBBS operators commissioning ANSI art to differentiate their BBS from other BBSes.\nMaking elaborate works of art within the constraints of IBM PC text mode.\nAn executable that displays procedural animations on the screen and describes the features of a BBS.\nWhat Minnesota locals think of Bruno Mars' hats.\nMinnesota not having any LAN parties but you can get a deep fried floppy disk on a stick at the state fair.\nHow to fool 2008-YouTube into allocating extra bandwidth to your fluorescent waffle pattern.\nA logo that is shimmering so hard that it is impossible to read.\nNever reading a video title because you don't want to be biased going into it.\nThe script you would read on the side of an obelisk on an ancient asteroid.\nWhether the sci-fi story you just wrote is just Mass Effect again.\nMaking art for your friends.\nInventing a podcast because you need an excuse to chat with friends.\nWatching your wife's phone ring and asking if she's going to do something about that.\nBeing on a podcast where you have to do homework.\nThe LAN party of podcasting.\nCreating a box for your podcast so you can put a quote on it.\nLegends of Valour: Ragged Chet.\nCreating content in order to make friends.\nWhether you can play every RPG faster than they are released.\nWhen it's okay to feed Gremlins again.\nSetting out on a quest to do something esoteric that nobody has asked for.\nWhether the guy in Zelda who said \"tenth enemy has the bomb\" made sense in Japanese.\nWhether Gremlins respect the daylight savings time changeover.\nWhether leaving food out on the counter that the Gremlin later eats counts as \"feeding\" it.\nA Bubsy 3D-style Gremlins sequel.\nAbandoning the topic to just talk about Gremlins for ten minutes.\nYelling to the sky in impotent rage when an inanimate object rips one of your earbuds out.\nBuying a pianist an incredibly sharp kitchen knife.\nCutting your sandwiches with a machine gun.\nGetting 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.\nEngaging with the story and creating a construct in your imagination.\nWhether it's okay to \"read\" a book on tape.\nCalling NES cartridges \"tapes\" because Nintendo deliberately designed them to resemble VHS tapes.\nA 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.\nLeaving a note saying \"Don't forget to get paper towels at Fred Meyer\" for the post-apocalyptic scavenger exploring your kitchen.\nDying together on the toilet in a heartwarming embrace.\nA framed Post-It note saying \"Ryan's favorite number is 63.\"\nDigging Jim's corpse up and squeezing him like a bagpipe into his CPAP machine to unlock Frog Fractions 3.\nHow 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.\nChoosing your bad handle and owning it.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.\"","date_published":"2021-03-29T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/08cedf72-c999-43c4-a3a7-a901402a94b1.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":66831674,"duration_in_seconds":4176}]},{"id":"52e5cbfb-b311-47dc-88d9-a3a712fa22fe","title":"74. The Beef Bar","url":"https://topiclords.com/the-beef-bar","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nAvery might be on Spotify!\n\n\nhttps://averyburke.bandcamp.com/releases\n\nStevie is at @hryx on Twitter, and hryx.net\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nIn 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.\nSome 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.\nDoom 1.0's proto-VR mode\nJohn 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.\"\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convolution_reverb\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nPutting your album on Spotify.\nDemanding your barista debate you and call him a coward.\nReading about the philosopher who owns a coffee shop and debating them about ancient Roman tax codes for hours without buying anything.\nGoing into a coffee shop just to prove a point.\nThe hypothesis that the worse someone is at reading, the better they are at hearing and pronunciation.\nInventing a time machine so you can be in the San Jose town square when the sculptor uncovers the obsidian poop snake.\nA statue of a ragdoll in a running pose with a realistic baby face superimposed on its stomach.\nA bust of Jesus made out of marshmallow Peeps.\nTrying to depict a half moon in 3D and ending up with a toenail clipping.\nThe Pumpkin Fucker.\nA statue of a man being hit in the head with a bottle thrown by a babies flying biplanes.\nThe statue at the border of Berkeley and Oakland they put there to remind everybody that Berkeley is us and Oakland is them.\nBeing halfway through the Museum of Severed Body Parts when you decide you've had enough.\nThe Dunning Kruger effect turning out to be fake.\nA strange way to find out that you have to stop being smug in this particular way.\nA T-rex curled up like a kitten.\nA T-rex sleeping hanging upside down like a bat.\nDino Riders.\nGetting 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.\nThe purpose of Grimace's second set of arms.\nHiring a large unhappy looking purple guy to be your chain restaurant spokesperson.\nHearing 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.\nDeciding 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.\nThe movie ending when the protagonists decide to cancel the movie's production.\nA topic you didn't write down.\nA reference to the lord because he's the lord.\nThe Keck Cave.\nSome people paying thousands of dollars for a VR setup when these lab mice get it for free.\nGoing 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.\nThe two independent promises of early 90s VR, one of which came to fruition decades ago.\nConnecting three monitors over an ipecac network.\nAccidentally saturating the network with packets so that nobody else can use it.\nA networked video game interpreting any incoming packets as a new game state regardless of their provenance.\nVR coming to prominence in the 90s after the Garbage Pail Kids made puking mainstream.\nThe R-Zone.\nA VR setup that only shows images to one eye.\nThe R-Zone chip tune rendition of the Daytona USA theme.\nWriting a program to convert MIDI music into a monophonic square wave and just accepting its output as the best possible result.\nAsking your parents for Marble Madness and they buy you the Tiger Electronics version of Marble Madness.\nA d-pad dressed up to look like a trackball, to fool your mom.\nWell-designed games that fit within the constraints of the medium.\nA 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.\nBarcode Battler.\nA slot to swipe cards.\nTrying to find the best barcode to swipe to create the swolest Barcode Battler.\nDoctoring barcodes with a sharpie by making the Beef Bar thicker.\nLearning to read barcodes by sight.\nBleeping out a story with the R-Zone Daytona USA theme if it turns out you've already heard the story before.\nConvincing a barista to sign up for your Bitcoin wallet software so you can pay for your coffee in Bitcoin.\nPutting 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.\"\nTattooing a QR code of your coffee menu on your arm.\nInventing the philosophical concept of the toothbrush and thinking \"nah, that'd never work.\"\nStaring at the bathroom tiles while you invent the Pythagorean Theorem.\nIndependently inventing the philosophical concept of Alf.\nAlf's real name in the Alf lore.\nSeeing Alf mourn the destruction of his home planet and realizing that one day everyone you know will die.\nA real rip-the-bandaid-off approach to introducing the concept of mortality.\nAlf Clausen, the composer of the ALF theme song.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-03-22T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/52e5cbfb-b311-47dc-88d9-a3a712fa22fe.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":60349545,"duration_in_seconds":3771}]},{"id":"2c9bfdb1-8d0b-4484-9735-b8ffe68298b7","title":"73. 100 Free Pulls For Your Left Kidney","url":"https://topiclords.com/100-free-pulls-for-your-left-kidney","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nMax\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/MaxKriegerVG\nhttps://twitter.com/nonstandardmcd\n\nRyan\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/RyanIkeComposer\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nWhat do you think is behind the human fascination with miniature things?\nWhat are things people assume about you, based on your profession, look, or general vibe, that are always untrue?\nHow to fix speed runs\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/RavenWorks/status/1214615137056899072\n\nYuri 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.\"\nDoes anyone actually like Frame Interpolation? Am I the only one who always turns it off?\nThere 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.\nA 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.\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3YGtQ40Qvs\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nRunning a novelty Twitter account about Nonstandard McDonalds.\nGrabbing every flashlight on your house to light your live TV news appearance.\nRunning a novelty Twitter account about the mundane business details of running a Long John Silver's.\nWhite Castle except even stinkier somehow.\nMaking tiny novelty hamburgers out of gelatin and cornstarch.\nMiniature things which are their normal size but are smaller than you.\nSneaking a secret, more interesting topic in after your overt one.\nElixirs in a JRPG having expiration dates so you don't end the game with 80 of them, never having used a single one.\nHolding a Lego minifig in your hands and thinking \"I could pop your head off any time I feel like it.\"\nConverting inches of height to thousands of dollars per year in salary, and how that works differently for men and women.\nTaking a knife edge turn into the patriarchy.\nKnowing you could mash the person you're talking to like a paper bird, but reassuring them that of course you would never do that.\nMixing powders into paste and then pressing the paste into a mold.\nGoing down the rabbit hole on slurry-based miniature food construction.\nThe sad sashimi special you get at a shitty bar after work.\nNew shapes of ennui that you've never known as a human being.\nBiting the brick of instant ramen and then washing it down with a bite of the brick of Golden Curry.\nWanting to produce high quality audio but not really caring much about the quality of audio you listen to.\nMostly playing video games on consoles that are at least ten years old.\nTech workers wanting the least internet-connected kitchen appliances available.\nGrowing up with hair that makes you look like you do a lot of drugs.\nGetting tossed into camp dirtbag.\nTrading McDonald's jokes with your novelty McDonald's account followers.\nThinking about long hamburgers every day.\nA tablet you would etch your name into in ancient Egypt, on a hoagie bun.\nGetting a hoagie delivered from a pizza place like some kind of maniac.\nResetting a game until you get a favorable result.\nOops All Marathon Strats.\nWhy Speedrun?\nSpeedrunning as a way to share a game you love with the audience.\nThe Timic Skip.\nThe changes Jim made to Frog Fractions: Game of the Decade Edition to make speedrunning it more fun.\nDesigning your game to be interesting to reverse engineer.\nTetris: The Grand Master.\nCranking the skill ceiling on every aspect of Tetris to the absolute maximum.\nStretching the rules of Tetris so much that the Tetris Company says \"this has gone too far\" and revokes your Tetris license.\nDesigning a game with the assumption of fervent frame by frame analysis by the player base.\nReturning again and again to a game that doesn't respect your time.\nBeamNG.drive\nGran Turismo Meets Garry's Mod.\nThe most satisfying car crash simulator.\nSitting in a sandbox and smashing Micro Machines together.\nA soft-body physics engine that is supposed to be for gearhead nerds but that you use to crash cars into each other and giggle.\nThe cynicism setting in long before the dopamine cycle wears off.\nDeliberately avoiding gacha games because you might start paying for spins.\nDiscreetly turning motion smoothing off on your parents' TV.\nScreening your roommates for whether or not they like motion smoothing.\nLooking at a 4k TV and not really noticing a difference.\nThe hypothetical audience for motion smoothing.\nWhether Best Buy is your Best Bud.\nStretching a 4:3 image to cover your 16:9 TV.\nThe consumer paying for the chocolate company advertising on the chocolate bar.\nNegotiating with the car dealership by threatening to remove the license plate frame with the dealership's name on it from your car.\nThe raw power of a hippopotamus.\nThe hippo as a reification of mother earth's desire to cleanse the earth of humanity.\nHippo Accelerationism.\nImporting hippos into every continent so they can kill even more people even faster.\nThe fried banana stand at the San Diego Zoo.\nWhy toucans don't swarm and devour humans.\nAn abominably fat crow forging relationships left and right.\nLiking someone so much that you leave a big chunk of drywall on their doorstep.\nA forklift robot that can pour a beverage directly out of a 55 gallon drum.\nA chemical you can pour on any part of the pizza to form a crust there.\nA pizza fractal and it never stops, baby.\nWalking into a Sizzler and asking for the fruit lasagna.\nThe buffet boom of the 80s.\nSizzler representing choice in a country about freedom of choice.\nA four minute indoctrination video shown to new Sizzler employees.\nThe thickest glasses known to man.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-03-15T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/2c9bfdb1-8d0b-4484-9735-b8ffe68298b7.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":68199654,"duration_in_seconds":4262}]},{"id":"536a3266-0a2c-49c5-8bc7-45d70c0a56af","title":"72. Gaseous Iron And The Hot Jupiters","url":"https://topiclords.com/gaseous-iron-and-the-hot-jupiters","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nBen\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/AussieBen\n\nMichelle\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/riding_red\nhttps://www.sciencealert.com/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nDora the Explorer and the City of Gold was a delightful surprise\nWe're about to land another rover on Mars and that is super way cool\n\n\nMichelle: \"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.\"\n\nScratch-off Donkey Kong\n\n\nhttp://catfish.it.cx/trsrockin/trsrockin.com/dkcards.html\n\nVille 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.\"\nDo you want to ask me stuff about exoplanets\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyeball_planet\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Jupiter\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nGrowing your own mushrooms.\nAliens growing out of your mycelium.\nGrowing your own toxic mushrooms from murder mushroom kits.\nThe incredible mushroom picking season that COVID facilitated.\nOne of those styrofoam boxes from the fruit shop.\nWhen a teenager says \"ok boomer\" to you and you're like \"dude I'm thirty.\"\nSigning up for the free trial of Amazon Prime so you can watch the live action Dora the Explorer movie.\nLooking at the camera and asking the viewer \"Can you say 'deadly neurotoxin?'\"\nAccidentally getting boxed in a crate and sent to the jungle.\nA CG animated fox voiced by Benicio del Toro.\nThe nerd character getting beaten up in the background as the protagonist walks away.\nSinging the poo song and burying your poo with the poo shovel while everybody else is fleeing from the hail of arrows.\nWhy Diego exists. (Because American audiences couldn't handle boys watching a show about a girl.)\nHow to stop Swyper from swiping.\nABC, the Australian analog of the BBC.\nPercy the Perseverance Robot.\nWhether it would be more exciting for the Mars Rover to land safely or explode in a fireball.\nHow to transfer between two different orbits.\nMaking a beeline for Mars.\nAttaching a broom to Perseverance to sweep the dust off of Opportunity's solar panels.\nReturning a soil sample from Mars.\nReturning a rock sample from an asteroid.\nNot being able to tell the difference between water and just a different colored dirt.\nSigns of ancient microbes.\nChoosing which way you want Mario to go and then scratching off a silver oval to see what happens.\nChoosable Path Adventures.\nChooseCo is preparing to sue you right now.\nWriting the novelization of Super Mario Bros. when all you have for reference is the instruction manual.\nFighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf.\nA story from Jim's youth.\nA little cardboard door that you open to see if you won a prize.\nHow children were so starved for entertainment in the 80s that scratch off Donkey Kong seemed cool.\nShrinking down a full size comic to fit in a cereal box so you need to read it with a microscope.\nMagazines that are printed with that red/blue 3D effect that doesn't quite work.\nA sponge pen with reactive ink in it that you brush against the seemingly blank page to reveal clues.\nHow the \"Yes & Know\" invisible ink puzzle books have a completely different atrocious pun for a title in Australia, \"Mr. Mystery.\"\nKnowing your parents really like you if you get a Scrooge McDuck comic.\nHow to find a drip coffee maker in Australia.\nGoing 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.\nSomeone 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.\nComparing your \"no and\" current guest to the guest who tried microwaving Coca Cola during the episode.\nAn American lady on TikTok showing you all the wrong ways to make common British food.\nThe best exoplanet.\nEyeball planets.\nTidally locked planets possibly being habitable at The Terminator.\nUsing our scientific expertise to turn the moon into an eyeball.\nDetecting exoplanets via periodic dimming of stars.\nA weird little ice world.\nAn exoplanet named \"Steve\" that has wronged you in some way.\nExoplanet naming conventions.\nTasking Reddit with naming all 4,300 known exoplanets.\nHundreds of hypothetical dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt.\nTaking a two year break from Twitter and feeling much better.\nRescuing greyhounds.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-03-08T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/536a3266-0a2c-49c5-8bc7-45d70c0a56af.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":50776190,"duration_in_seconds":3173}]},{"id":"56ee0436-2cac-4c1f-9077-a2a054ff2579","title":"71. There's No Chicken Nine Because Chicken Six Seven Ate Nine","url":"https://topiclords.com/theres-no-chicken-nine-because-chicken-six-seven-ate-nine","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nElena\nQuil\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nSome people put on music and then just talk over it instead of singing along?? Why\nBeing the only person in a movie theater/concert\nA Spirograph but for your butt\nDaniel asks \"Legacy board games such as Pandemic Legacy or Gloomhaven.\"\nWeird sleeping apparatuses\n\"House Special Live Frog in Hot Stone Pot\" on the delivery menu\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nA girl who is raised as a boy in pre-revolutionary France and becomes Marie Antoinette's guard.\nTurn of the millennium club music.\nFinding out that Itsy Bitsy Spider has been about perseverance all this time.\nHaving to restrain yourself from singing along when you're at the opera.\nTrying to eat dinner but you can't eat because you need to sing along to your sea shanty playlist.\nTrying to eat bites of dinner during the verses because you keep having to sing along to the choruses.\nProperties of sea shanties.\nHaving a different song for every task.\nEverybody performing music before recorded music was a thing, because that was how you had music in your life.\nThe horrible historical handwriting that historians never show you.\nCelebrating the new decade with Cats (2019) and when you walk out of the theater you're the only person in the building.\nSeeing 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.\nWhen you're the only person in the theater, asking the projectionist to pause the movie while you go to the bathroom.\nBeing 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.\nA drummer and a guitarist who are both playing too loud to hear each other.\nThe only live performance you've ever walked out on.\nPooping in a spiral.\nNature's sharpie.\nThe origin of topics.\nA disc that you sit on.\nA combination nausea inducer and butt spirograph.\nCake icing videos.\nAsking your son what his life is a commentary on.\nA shark embedded in a formaldehyde solution.\nWork that aggressively annoys the art community.\nIronic cocaine.\nSneaking into the museum to hang up your own work.\nTaking photos of a painting and then destroying the original and then taking photos of the photos and destroying the original artist.\nModifying the rules as you play the game.\nOpening up more and more of your board game every time you play, like an Advent calendar.\nA board game that you learn like a video game.\nMemorizing a dozen page book before you can start playing a game.\nCopyrighting the concept of a legacy.\nProposing to your wife by intentionally losing a board game over and over again.\nThe thing you were working towards screwing you over and now you have to undo it.\nTrying to think of a board game you've played more than a few times.\nReally looking forward to a board game and finally getting it and deciding to just watch your friends play.\nWhether it's apparati or apparatodes.\nThe doublet of apparat.\nWanting to be hyper correct in everything you do.\nBuying a tent to go over your bed because your blackout curtains aren't cutting it.\nBuying a bunch of weird pillows to compensate for the position your arms automatically get into when you sleep.\nHow CPAP machines all have a SIM card and phone home with your sleep behavior and there's no way to turn it off.\nNasal pillows.\nSleeping with a weird contraption blowing air into your face constantly.\nDiscovering that it is much easier to fall asleep when you are very tired at the end of the day.\nRanking your morningness and eveningness.\nSleeping in a hammock.\nMaking a nest of pillows around you.\nPutting on your velcro pajamas and jumping onto the velcro wall to fall asleep.\nYour velcro bed waking you up with a loud ripping sound every time you switch positions.\nTime-release velcro.\nIce velcro.\nMaking a salt igloo at the salt flats.\nA weighted blanket that is so heavy you can't get up until a crane rescues you.\nSleeping under a chainmail sheet.\nA quilt made out of beanbags.\nThe first thing you searched for when you got on the internet.\nYoutube videos about your idealized farm life.\nOrdering a pet frog from your Szechuan delivery menu.\nGetting Hot Pot delivered and the Pot arrives cold.\nOrdering Chicken 65 because there are no other numbered items on the menu.\nNot wanting to eat animals whole because there's poop in there.\nFrog Fractions 65.\nIf Chicken 6 was so good, why isn't there a Chicken 6 5?\nA Kidz Bop version of Ocean's 11.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-03-01T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/56ee0436-2cac-4c1f-9077-a2a054ff2579.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":65018567,"duration_in_seconds":4063}]},{"id":"fb839d11-0f77-483f-bda8-c08c66b56d2f","title":"70. The Cow Tools Experience","url":"https://topiclords.com/the-cow-tools-experience","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nJames is on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Triplefox\nJesse is on Twitter.\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nOne of the last \"most wanted\" Nazi war criminals lives in my town.\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmut_Oberlander\n\nWhat's Michael?, the other cartoon fat cat\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_Michael%3F\nThere are several What's Michael anime series, one of them has a particularly amazing music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWZLz1LQRnY&t=116s\nThe opening of the Heathcliff Cartoon uses one of the numerous Shuki Levy 80's cartoon themes. It rhymes \"jubilee\" with \"superiority\"! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LLb8EBU9nQ\nHe’s Wearing The Gravy Helmet, Again : The Greatest Single Panel in Modern American Comics: https://medium.com/@videocrime/hes-wearing-the-gravy-helmet-again-the-greatest-single-panel-in-modern-american-comics-10c269ca4102\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_cats_in_comics\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_cats_in_animation\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Tools\n\nIn the patent for Tapper, the developers admit that it's just Space Invaders turned on its side\n\n\nhttps://www.kmjn.org/notes/tapper_videogame_patent.html\n\"Upon an advancing patron such as the cowboy 54e in FIG. 2 receiving a filled mug 58b, the receiving patron will be moved or repelled back toward the door end of the bar a predetermined incremental distance. If the patron is moved to the boundary at the door image 52, the patron goes off screen for a predetermined time interval and then reenters the same bar at the door 52. However, if the repelled thirsty patron remains on screen, the patron will then be shown in a drinking pose 54f as in FIG. 3. When the patron, after a predetermined delay, finishes drinking the beverage, the empty mug 58c, is slid back toward the supply or keg end of the bar.\"\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_Cold_Beer\nIce Cold Beer has an official digitization in \"Zeke's Peak\" https://store.steampowered.com/app/1093800/Zekes_Peak/\nhttps://store.steampowered.com/app/457890/TumbleSeed/\nhttp://isoraqathedh.github.io/Orsaibts/anticharacterism.html\nShogun Assassin (1980) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081506/\n\nBrad asks \"Hummingbirds have to consume twice their body weight in a day to survive. If you had to do this, what would your strategy be?\"\nRealizing pop cans are 355 mL because that's 12 US fluid ounces.\n\n\nThe ounce is a unit of mass and the dry ounce of volume, but the pint and the dry pint are both units of volume.\nhttps://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/mc-mc.nsf/eng/h_lm00007.html\nSoda vs Pop vs. Coke: Who Says What, And Where? https://www.huffpost.com/entry/soda-vs-pop_n_2103764\nPlastic Recycling is an Actual Scam https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJnJ8mK3Q3g\nHow China Broke the World's Recycling https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXRtNwUju5g\n\nIs macaroni and cheese known outside of America? Or, if you were opening a restaurant in a foreign country, what cuisine would it be?\n\n\nHow Thai food took over America https://www.splendidtable.org/story/2019/01/10/how-thai-food-took-over-america\nWhat Color Is a Tennis Ball? https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/what-color-tennis-ball-green-yellow/523521/\nhttps://www.pizzapizza.ca/catalog/config/dipping-sauce-product_1919/store/1/delivery\nWikipedia lists these other related dishes: \nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonara\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chili_mac\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filipino_spaghetti\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A4sesp%C3%A4tzle\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nAn oddly temperate day in the park in the middle of January.\nNot necessarily recognizing the war criminal who lives in your town.\nChecking the box that says \"I did not do the Holocaust\" on the immigration form.\nHow it takes 50 years to deport a Nazi from Canada.\nBerlin, Canada.\nGetting a steak and a beer with the 110 year old who works with you at the grocery store.\nWhere you go if you're really young and you want to become a war criminal.\nA thing that is strange but also very ordinary.\nExplaining Garfield.\nHeathcliff, the other other fat orange cartoon cat.\nExplaining cow tools.\nTools that don't really look like anything but it's the best a cow can do.\nWhat it means when Heathcliff wears the gravy helmet.\nWhen an ancient comic strip gets funny again because the original artist finally retired and got replaced by a Tumblr user.\nStealing 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.\"\nScrolling a web page and discovering how many helmets Heathcliff has.\nManaging the flow of mugs in this Space Invaders clone.\nThe best electromechanical bar game that triggers your trypophobia.\nA story-heavy RPG adaptation of an electromechanical bar game.\nPlaying a story heavy game and wishing the story and the game parts were separable.\nHow magical girl shows and JRPGs both presentationally separate story from combat.\nTaking the fight scenes from a robot combat show and writing new scenes where the robots are going to high school.\nLearning to fly in place.\nBecoming a hummingbird and learning to do what hummingbirds do.\nConsuming the densest possible foods such as lead.\nAssuming that iron is the densest element because it's at the Earth's core and must have sunk there.\nSearching for densest foods and Google gives you the most nutrient dense foods, which is definitively not what you asked for.\nArctic explorers bringing sleds full of frozen butter to eat.\nEating your weight in salt every day.\nWhether 1 milliliter of water weighs exactly one gram everywhere, or just in that locked vault in Paris.\nThe Canadian hotline you can call to report bars that serve you an American pint of beer.\nThe metric pint.\nOunces per ounce.\nWriting to Stephen Wolfram to complain about the dry ounce.\nThat double gotcha bar trivia question about whether an ounce of feathers is lighter than an ounce of gold.\nEuropeans getting confused when Americans talk about calories when they mean kilocalories.\nUsing more significant digits than the speaker intended when doing unit conversion.\nWhether someone saying \"a thousand\" to mean \"a lot\" is one significant digit or zero.\nWhether in the Bible \"forty\" is used colloquially to mean \"a lot.\"\nTaking 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.\nWhether recycling is still a thing or in fact ever was.\nKeeping people employed at a factory sorting plastic for no particular reason.\nPasta and cheese being popular all over the world.\nHow Canadians have Kraft macaroni and cheese for dinner all the time.\nThe biscuit you eat!\nHow Pad Thai is a psyop.\nPutting fish in a bucket and waiting until it becomes fish sauce.\nFear of discovering the fish flavor in fish sauce and ruining Thai food forever.\nPutting fish sauce on pizza yourself because Domino's doesn't offer it as a topping.\nOpening a Taco Bell in Mexico.\nAsking not for whom the Baja Blasts.\nA can of cream of mushroom soup inside of a Shepherd's Pie.\nAnother salty MSG flavored brown liquid.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-02-22T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/fb839d11-0f77-483f-bda8-c08c66b56d2f.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":55063197,"duration_in_seconds":3441}]},{"id":"ed238cd6-5f21-4ed0-9591-f6f036f04fbc","title":"69. Wave-Cat Duality","url":"https://topiclords.com/wave-cat-duality","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nHallie\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/Hallie_9000\n\nJenni\n\n\njenni@jennipolodna.com\nRiff and Jenni play Policenauts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dnaryt7Vd-U&list=PLQqC_GkS4_4ZgJEvjj31kQpY75-Pnmbul\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nTarot readings using meme templates\nIn the musical Cats, jellicle cats ascend to the Heaviside Layer & come back reborn, therefore cats are radio waves, discuss\n\n\nhttps://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1382102/Now-Lloyd-Webber-puts-Eliots-dogs-to-music.html\nOriginal twitter thread about platonic cats: https://twitter.com/chriscereza/status/1316118239785574400\nWhy the Music In Cats Is Worse Than You Thought https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3aK-EK5V2k\n\nDisney attending your funeral\n\n\nhttp://magicalpassings.com/\n\nJohn asks \"Country Time Lemonade lent their brand name to the best lemon candy I ever had which I discovered right about the time it was discontinued\"\nWhy are you not supposed to let a moose lick your car, is it because their tongues will get stuck, how do you stop them\nJokes as motivation to learn\nUnkomario and kintamario\n\n\nhttps://i.imgur.com/83LapJQ.png\nhttps://i.imgur.com/Vj3nsyW.png\n18-Volt squatting on a coin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJKFZVEKHYY\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nWhether this is going to be a fun episode or if it's going to crash and burn after two minutes.\nTrying to eat a watermelon in December and nature punishing you for your hubris.\nA tarot deck of memes.\nDescribing memes in an audio medium.\nArby's.\nGetting ASMR live on the podcast.\nThe Deck of Old Memes.\nWhere the horsey sauce comes out.\nYour Arby's cups with a radioactive ghost.\nThe Loss Spread.\nLiterary analysis of a work of art, except it's a roguelike.\nJellicle cats.\nMaking noises even if you have nothing to say.\nLoving Cats unironically except for the fatphobic one.\nAdvertisements for the stage musical Cats making it seem like Les Miserables, a show you go to to cry for three hours.\nSkimbleshanks the Railway Cat.\nFantasizing that the hipster guy at the moustache wax store is your boyfriend.\nPlatonic forms that have been banished to earth and must prove themselves sufficiently perfect to return to the realm of ideas.\nWhether pollicle is a back formation from jellicle.\nNever having met a pollicle dog, nor watched a fever dream of a movie where they sing to you.\nThe good content that you can't keep it together through.\nReinforcing Goofy's head so that it doesn't fall into the casket when he kisses the body.\nBurying you with a solar powered mp3 player so that you can hear \"It's A Small World\" on loop for eternity.\nHiring 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.\nPlanning the Best Funeral Ever.\nWhether Disney is willing to DMCA takedown your novelty Disney funeral.\nOur Cyberpunk Future being cool as heck and also unimaginably awful, like Lovecraft.\nOur 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.\nTo what degree we got our Dystopian Cyberpunk Future because Jeff Bezos loved Neuromancer and wanted to make it happen for real.\nHiring 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.\nHiring Tron Guy to come to your funeral and kiss you on the list.\nRefusing to let Tron Guy see Tron Legacy at your movie theater because Ernest Cline would just buy the theater immediately.\nPickle brine that tastes a lot like peppery lemonade.\nThe hierarchy of sour candies.\nSour candy marketing in the 90s proclaiming that \"your mom hates these!\"\nThe difference between macaroons and macarons, and whether it exists.\nThe difference between pies and tarts, and whether it exists.\nGraham cracker crust quiche.\nThe same podcast episode but you keep editing new guest commentary in so that gets longer and longer.\nNot letting a moose lick your car, because their tongue might get stuck.\nDriving away after the moose's tongue gets stuck to your bumper and the moose flies behind you like a kite.\nDriving in bemoosed roads.\nDriving away when a moose tries to lick your car.\nMoose seeing a car and thinking \"oh good a source of salt.\"\nThe hippos of the West.\nTelling your child that every animal is imaginary so they can have the magical moment of discovering the truth over and over again.\nFrightening a bear away by putting moose antlers on it and showing it a mirror.\nInventing and testing sour honey live on this podcast.\nThe patron saint of standing on your head.\nA sour honey update: it's fine.\nThe new sour salty honey candy, \"Are They Gonna Give Me That Sour Salty Honey?\"\nPeople and learning and why they do it.\nThe thing about jokes.\nPutting a bunch of bad programming means on the classroom wall because students will want to understand the joke.\nLearning a little about many things and becoming a generalist.\nThe only STEM person in this anatomy and physiology class making jokes about how the kidneys are a linked list.\nA meme in the sense of making your calculator say \"BOOBIES\"\nAn extremely elaborate process for making it kinda look like Mario is pooping.\nDuolingo finally paying off when you can discern which Mario is pooping and which Mario has testicles.\nAn official Nintendo product acknowledging the schoolyard meme where it looks like Mario is pooping.\nInventing new things to do with video games.\nThe Green Demon.\nThe essence of swag.\nMemes with good cinematography.\nInventing rules to apply to yourself to make video games harder.\nBeating Pokemon with all Woopers.\nA problematic Kojima game?!\nOpting out of having an adult name.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-02-15T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/ed238cd6-5f21-4ed0-9591-f6f036f04fbc.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":62609032,"duration_in_seconds":3913}]},{"id":"ce6fa17d-ed4c-4b2b-b522-1e7a9b72a09d","title":"68. Unprotected Left In A Hard Vacuum","url":"https://topiclords.com/unprotected-left-in-a-hard-vacuum","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nMara plugs Libby. https://libbyapp.com/welcome\n\n\nmaracaelin@gmail.com\n\nDerek plugs LibriVox. https://librivox.org/\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/derekcaelin\nhttps://mastodon.technology/@argus\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nShould we spare our children from our own game nostalgia?\nWorking libraries of famous people getting acquired by institutions\nWinston'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\nJohn 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.\"\nToddlers who secretly compete in pro-gaming tournaments\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nLibby.\nA really good way to use your public library without leaving your house.\nGetting 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.\nLibrivox.\nListening to some randos reading public domain books.\nSquare jawed scientists taking on the world and neither the government nor their frail wives can hold them back.\nTrying to show your four year old Wind Waker and he's annoyed that it's not the Wind Waker remaster for Wii U.\nSubtly guiding your child away from games that prey on gambling addiction.\nPlanning 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.\nHow to revisit your nostalgia when it's locked inside early Macintosh educational games with bad emulation support.\nWandering isolated in a sad soundscape.\nWhether World of Warcraft caused your depression or whether losing your job (because of World of Warcraft) caused your depression.\nEve Online.\nGoing into nullsec where there is no sec.\nForgetting 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.\nGoing to turning left school for five years.\nCollecting all the books in a famous author's working library so scholars can catalogue all the Cheeto fingerprints.\nStudying 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.\"\nFilling your working library with books to impress the scholars studying your life in a hundred years.\nGiving your source code to the Video Game History Foundation for safe keeping.\nThe difficulty of preserving the history of online video games.\nWhether an economy based on trading nudes can sustain your video game preservation endowment.\nThat time of year when Wikipedia is begging for the nudes again.\nToilet Mimics\nWhether you have to pee on Cheerios or whether any cereal will do.\nA man's irrepressible need to piss on a fly.\nMonetizing urination.\nThe 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!\"\nBeing cornered at a party by an inventor describing his idea for a toilet seat that vibrates at the brown note.\nThe brown note as a consent issue.\nAll-singing, all-dancing, all-peeing.\nCalling your mom on the toilet phone so she can whistle at the frequency that makes you pee.\nTwo-factor authentication for pooping.\nWhen you can't poop because your smart toilet can't connect to the wifi.\nToilet uptime.\nEvery child independently inventing the \"happy birthday to poop\" song.\nSinging \"happy birthday to poop\" when the poop has no way to blow out the candles.\nThe fecal stage of the Freudian theory of child development.\n The calculus of why we don't find the same joke funny again.\nA gingerbread house that is an architect's nightmare.\nAdults and children making jokes past each other.\nPete of the Chickens.\nFour year olds who are incredibly good at Rocket League.\nSwearing that you are only four years old so Epic doesn't kick you out of the Rocket League League.\nHow physics-driven video games are the perfect constrained environment for a child to excel in.\nWhether your Rocket League skills translate to any other aspect of your life.\nA four year old gamer complaining about noobs.\nSaying \"don't forget to like comment and subscribe\" instead of \"goodbye.\"\nBeing leery of playing video games because every time you touch a controller the truck video stops.\nTexting your grandmother a thousand emojis.\nAn app that lets your four year old pretend to text his grandma a thousand emojis.\nYour true self on the Fediverse.\nThe realest person on Mastodon.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-02-08T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/ce6fa17d-ed4c-4b2b-b522-1e7a9b72a09d.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":62071955,"duration_in_seconds":3879}]},{"id":"dab6cfb4-d3cb-4499-a930-8b4b17f8b254","title":"67. Immersion Blended Lasagna","url":"https://topiclords.com/immersion-blended-lasagna","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nTim\n\n\nhttps://giantsquidstudios.com/\n\nNathan\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/MommysBestGames\nhttp://mommysbestgames.com/website_store/index.html\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nAre 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?\nWhy are we drawn to art that updisturbs, depresses, or scares? (And yes, \"catharsis\" is a weak answer!)\nHow Super Mario 35 (and maybe battle royales in general) solved the worst unsolvable problem of multiplayer\nJohn 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.\"\nWhat's different (better or worse) about playing games with kids? Do you play games with your kids?\nWhat sports would be more interesting with low/0 gravity? Or with higher gravity?\nTim's vegan commune cooking disaster stories\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nShoot 1-Up.\nControlling all your spaceships at the same time.\nThe big thing about Galaga.\nThe forever scrolling timeline of new content that you're fed all the time.\nThe funniest Boris Vallejo painting.\nBeing bummed to find out that Boris Vallejo was looking at people and painting them rather than just imagining them.\nName-dropping Tom of Finland.\nStaring at pink blobs all the time.\nMaking sure you're not wearing your good socks because they're about to be blown off.\nLooping the game twice with no deaths and no bombs.\nJamestown.\nBeing forced to do something unpleasant to feel a sense of satisfaction when you are given what you want.\nNot supporting an easy mode as well as you should have because you assumed those people could just play co-op.\nBringing in a playtester who has never used a mouse before.\nNot valuing your own fake accomplishments as much because other people accomplished the same fake accomplishments more easily.\nSave the Date, by Chris Cornell.\nHaving to wake up to play Super Hard mode.\nThe necessity of hand-tuning all the enemy AI in shoot em up difficulty levels.\nPsychoanalyzing the entire human race at once.\nPeople turning to media to experience strong emotions.\nWhether it's easier to elicit good or bad emotions in the viewer.\nThe safety of seeing a horrible thing that will definitely never happen to you.\nBeing unusually upset by the Boston Marathon bombing because you recently ran a marathon.\nKnowing that an album is going to fuck you up because it is too proximate, and choosing not to listen.\nA scary movie taking months to purge from your brain.\nThe relief of when the demons show up.\nPeople lining up at a party to play That Dragon Cancer.\nHow movies basically never hurt children.\nWanting to know what's in the box but also knowing that what's in the box will ruin your life for months.\nHow you lose half the time in multiplayer games.\nSuper Mario 35.\nThe various ways video games can make you feel like you're winning harder.\nTaking turns feeling good at video games.\nWe Didn't Playtest This At All\nEverybody choosing a number and everybody who chose 5 being the winner.\nTrying to win at Scrabble based on style points.\nComing up with as many secondary win conditions as possible so that everybody can win even if they lost.\nChoosing a safeword to indicate that it's time to switch topics.\nMaking all your own opulently animated scenes.\nPlaying games as a way to develop social relationships.\nEmpowering your son to express himself even though he's making a shitty Pokemon deck.\nFinding non-combat activities to do with the Pokemon that are not very good at combat.\nBuying SNES Classic to play games with your son and then realizing that there are more worthwhile games to play than those that merely entertain.\nGames which give you value that you can take out into the world.\nWanting to show your kid the good stuff so that they can have a better life than you did.\nLearning music theory by listening to Justin Bieber.\nWorrying that you'll pollute your kid's natural interests with your taste in video games.\nA very nice video game world for other people to explore.\nStaring at people and saying \"papaya\" until they're like \"why do you keep saying papaya\"\nSkateboarding in low gravity.\nFull contact basketball with trampolines.\nImmersion Blender Night.\nImmersion blended salad.\nImmersion blended vegan lasagna.\nLearning the hard way that flambe does not burn off that much of the alcohol.\nA gargantuan stock pot of chocolatey oatmeal that is far too salty for human consumption.\nImprovising around your cooking mistakes.\nPromising to talk about Paddington 2 next episode.\nGoing to the Giant Squid web page and checking out Tim's bio.\nBarf-sealed copies of Pig Eat Ball.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-02-01T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/dab6cfb4-d3cb-4499-a930-8b4b17f8b254.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":65609143,"duration_in_seconds":4100}]},{"id":"57c8638d-f927-464f-8749-7c40b29d7c2a","title":"66. There's No One Way To Suck Glass","url":"https://topiclords.com/theres-no-one-way-to-suck-glass","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nKev Zettler\n\n\nhttp://radcade.com/\n\nXalavier Nelson, Jr.\n\n\nhttps://xalaviermakeswords.itch.io/strange-scaffold-comics-vol-1\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nThe fine art of professional wrestling\nStealing the declaration of independence to save Nicolas Cage's life\nAtari 2600 Adventure's effectiveness as a port of Crowther and Woods Adventure\nLarry 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.\"\nNon-violent communication\nThe 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\nSucking a glass onto your face\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nStill the raddest place to play web games.\nAn Airport For Aliens Currently Run By Dogs.\nInteracting with dogs in a whole new way.\nBeing clean and dirty at the same time.\nDog synergies.\nThe legal standing of a game downloading a random guitar tab from the internet to make a dog play guitar.\nA scope creep game that ships.\nWhether professional wrestling is trashy.\nAudience-reactive improv theater performed by professional stunt men.\nPro wrestling jargon creeping into your\nA work for marks who are smart marks and don't know when they're being worked or if they're not.\nStealing vocabulary from Victorian urchins.\nWhether women's wrestling is still about macho posturing.\nMeme warfare thought devices.\nMuscled theatrical performers doing their dangedest\nWhether GDC is ever going to happen again.\nWhether GDC will be the same without Simon Carless.\nWhether Lost Levels can exist without GDC bringing everyone physically together and secretly reserving the physical venue.\nEvery D-level game dev celebrity entering an arena and only one D-level game dev celebrity leaving.\nA contract sealed in blood that is a matter of public record.\nHaving an hour and 45 minutes to save Nicholas Cage's life by stealing the Declaration of Independence.\nFinding out that Nicholas Cage was injured in a bear fighting accident and realizing that now's your time to shine.\nFinding out that isnicholascagenexttoabear.com isn't based on geolocation technology, it just scrapes TMZ for headlines that contain both \"cage\" and \"bear.\"\nWhy we still have to steal the Declaration of Independence if everyone is aware of the Nicholas Cage situation.\nConspicuously 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.\nFinding out what Habeas Corpus means.\nAtari 2600 Adventure vs. Crowther and Woods Adventure. \nAdapting a text adventure to computer system that can't render text.\nMaking 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.\nRemakes changing the meaning of the original.\nInventing a 4D game platform to port Demon's Souls to.\nHitting a taco target in the Indian ocean.\nWhether 40'x40' is a big taco or a small target for a space station.\nAll of America having a taco-in-the-streets party.\nDipping your girlfriend and smooching her as taco cheese falls from the sky.\nMir falling from the sky every day being a small price to pay to solve world hunger.\nTaco Bell beginning to sweat as they realize the revolution is about to start.\nAlternate history fiction where the branch point is that Taco Bell gave every American a free taco after Mir hit their taco target.\nNon-Violent Communication.\nCommunicating your lived experience backed with justification and couched in empathy.\nInstead of saying \"you're annoying me,\" saying \"I am annoyed because of you.\"\nThe HALT principle.\nBig things making your brain go \"ooh!\"\nBeing terrified of the scale of Jupiter but the sun being like \"meh\"\nBeing terrified by an enormous mammoth but less terrified of the Earth when the Earth is bigger and closer than the mammoth.\nBeing unable to process the scale of a large city but eventually becoming desensitized to it.\nDeciding whether to be impressed by something's size based on whether it's horizontal or vertical.\nThe relief and comfort of realizing that humans don't make any fricking sense.\nMaking New Year's Resolution of finally making sense of yourself and of the world.\nDifferent goals emerging from the same root: hubris.\nNot being able to form a seal on your face because you have a beard.\nNormalizing shaving a hole in your beard sized and situated to suck a drinking glass onto your face.\nPutting a drinking glass on your face in various configurations until one feels right.\nA drinking glass size rooted in a human arrogance that you can appreciate but that you can't encourage.\nLearning to suck a glass onto your face from the kid next to you at Applebee's.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-01-25T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/57c8638d-f927-464f-8749-7c40b29d7c2a.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":56626365,"duration_in_seconds":3539}]},{"id":"066a5a83-3b31-4591-938b-c5b6774c048c","title":"65. Love In The Time Of Beavis And Butthead","url":"https://topiclords.com/love-in-the-time-of-beavis-and-butthead","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nApril\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/aprilsaur\n\nJohn\n\n\nhttps://ostparty.podbean.com/\nhttps://twitter.com/YouOldSoAndSo\nhttps://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/pooplers-switch/\nhttps://twitter.com/lizardengland/status/1333825611144556547/photo/1\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nWoodworking\nMentors and mentorship in general\nAdvent calendar dice\nScott asks \"Please discuss Rax and Mr. Delicious\"\n\n\nhttps://boingboing.net/2020/10/09/meet-mr-delicious-the-weirdest-fast-food-spokesperson-ever.html\n\nMariko 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?\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nUsing your work name on the internet for a thing you don't want work to see.\nNeither of the guests plugging Topic Lords, for the 65th time in a row.\nTrying to guess the channel The Expanse used to be on.\nHow movies used to be teal and orange but now they're just green.\nLetting all the cats into the room to purr into the microphones.\nThings people expect you to be good at when you're a park ranger.\nWoodworking.\nProtecting your food from raccoons and turkeys.\nThe peace of bringing a physical object to fruition.\nMaking a napkin holder in middle school wood shop.\nHow it's ok to make fun of someone's face as long as you've never seen their face.\nBuilding a bridge out of popsicle sticks.\nBuilding a bridge out of sentient goo-balls.\nThe first sense you use to consume a meal.\nHow pleased everyone is with Jim's new hobby.\nA knock knock joke if the punch line was playing peek-a-boo.\nEating cold pizza right out of the freezer.\nGrowing into a preference for being around people who aren't assholes.\nLooking up to people in your field.\nOnly realizing that your mentors were mentors in retrospect.\nA recurring topic on this show.\nKnowing several librarians independent of the time you worked in the library.\nPlaying Zork on your uncle's laptop.\nPrinting your nephew's MS Paint art rather than just using your printer for taxes.\nAn Advent calendar except instead of being laid out in the grid the candy goes in a 25 sided die.\nForgetting about your Advent calendar after a few days and having extra candy next year.\nAn Advent calendar where behind each numbered door is a die with that number of faces.\nExtruding a coin and inventing the three sided die.\nPutting stickers in your Advent calendar instead of candy, because you hate your child.\nQuestion asking games.\nRolling a natural 1 on your Advent calendar dice and having to throw all your presents in the garbage.\nGames where even if you're bad at games you still have a chance to win.\nThe importance of being bored.\nThe growing ubiquitousness of video games.\nAn epidemic that demands everybody spend a full year at the DMV.\nDesperately trying to change your last name before your child is born so that your names will match.\nWhether gestational diabetes counts for your diabetes threepeat.\nDerailing the conversation about fast food advertising with your top two Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.\nMythical roast beef venue RAX.\nOpening your trench coat to reveal one of those silver food domes that you lift up.\nTalking about your vasectomy in an advertisement for roast beef sandwiches.\nFast food for adults advertised with Ronald McDonald holding a briefcase.\nThe luxury of two leaves of iceberg lettuce.\nCharles Nelson Reilly, recurring guest on Match Game.\nThat time you wanted to watch American Gladiators and there was exactly one episode on YouTube.\nAsking a kid if they know what Kumon is and they make the sad face.\nThe tutoring place you take your kid to if you want them to know math instead of being happy.\nWhether you're allowed to have impostor syndrome about something you do professionally.\nReframing your impostor syndrome as being about how good you are at fooling people into thinking you have worth.\nGetting rid of the clown.\nBringing the clown man back.\nLove in the time of Beavis and Butthead.\nThe content that our listeners crave.\nOur frothing demand to find a bathroom increases.\nHow bookstores and toilets smell the same in Japan.\nThe full body sensation you get right before you're about to do cocaine.\nTraining your toddler to pee at a whistle tone and then making them wet their pants on all their first dates.\nThe mental link between books and pooping.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-01-18T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/066a5a83-3b31-4591-938b-c5b6774c048c.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":61085989,"duration_in_seconds":3817}]},{"id":"6b7355c1-40c6-4b4a-b4d9-a8bbd8cbf8ca","title":"64. Going Out For Tacos In Germany","url":"https://topiclords.com/going-out-for-tacos-in-germany","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nJohn of the Maryland Johns\nJay of Hypnospace\n\n\nhttp://www.hypnospace.net/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nWhen 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?\nRealizing that your funny friend as a child was just repeating lines from HBO comedy specials that you weren't allowed to watch.\nThe Terminator 2 soundtrack and the Fairlight CMI 3\n\n\n https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnpYowxlwsU\nI couldn't find a source for the analog modeling synth running on a 60s mainframe, but I did find this example of early digital synthesis from 1961: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41U78QP8nBk\nFairlight is the name of a village in East Sussex, England. I could've sworn it was one of Santa's reindeer or something like that.\n\nKevin 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.\"\nAdventures in cooking: share tales of delicious things you have made recently\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nA game about the old internet.\nFiguring out who DMed John.\nDoing better at a game than all the people who don't know that the game exists.\nSearching things a lot when you're on the toilet.\nBeing more interested in news about the cure for COVID than about the cure itself.\nThe three rumored The Cure albums that have been teased for the past four years.\nIdentifying as someone who cares about video games long after you no longer have time to play video games.\nThe cultural event of Blaseball.\nWhether you are less interested in things as you get older or if you just have less time.\nNot buying a Raspberry Pi because you definitely don't have time to play with it.\nSitting two feet away from a 50 inch television and trying to get RetroArch working.\nBuying a NES and SNES Classic but never actually playing the games.\nWhether Bonk's Adventure is good in 2020.\nKanye West naming an album Turbo Grafx 16.\nNaming your The Beatles tribute band The Beatles.\nBeing exposed to Monty Python primarily by your friends who constantly quote lines out of context.\nFinally watching Monty Python and realizing your funny friend has never made an original joke in his life.\nFriends who communicate solely in movie one liners.\nMaking 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.\nWhether anyone actually knew what Cornholio actually was.\nThe abject cultural domination of Beavis and Butthead.\nWhether or not the listeners will want to know what a ROMpler is.\nA $60,000 industrial-strength sampler/synthesizer in your garage.\nPlaying naturalistic orchestral samples at unnaturally low playback speeds.\nA terrifying grindy klaxon sound.\nAn unstoppable liquid metal monster with a jaunty soundtrack.\nSupercomputers producing digital audio in not real time.\nThe Mellotron.\nThe brass hit sample used in Owner of a Lonely Heart.\nWhether Fairlight the warez group has any relation to Fairlight the synthesizer company.\nEmulating the crustiness of the Fairlight CMI.\nWhere to find all the samples that came built-in to the Fairlight CMI.\nAudible frowns.\nJust throwing polygons at the rasterizer.\nBeing clever and squeezing every last drop of performance out of the new consoles and it still doesn't look that much better.\nThe visual quality of a console you grew up playing being acceptable forever.\nNoticing the hottest new game graphics for fifteen minutes and after that you're just playing a video game again.\nHow we could be up to the NES 6 or the Wii U by now.\nPlaying Wii Sports and not noticing or caring that the Wii can play other games.\nCompletely ignoring F2P games until one of your relatives turns out to be susceptible to gambling addiction.\nHow Nintendo spent the Breath of the Wild budget.\nShielding your eyes when you see a map because you don't want to know too much about the world.\nWhich Breath of the Wild HUD modes include a compass.\nStuffed mushrooms.\nThe only recipe that your family makes literally every Thanksgiving.\nMaking a tray of stuffed mushrooms where the seasoning is different on every mushroom.\nA Delicious Chore.\nEggs on toast with remoulade.\nThe default thing you put on a sandwich.\nEspresso machine eggs.\nThe hypothetical standalone steamer arm.\nPromising to not promote anyone's Kickstarter.\nWhat Jim will do with a sharp knife if he gets one for Christmas.\nPutting a salmon in the fridge until it desiccates.\nWhether scales are a kind of skin.\nKnowing you really ought to eat fish.\nPutting cabbage in the oven until it's melted cabbage.\nTwo people who are the same height but one looks taller because their legs are longer.\nDog content on this podcast.\nAllowing both pronunciations of Jay's name.\nKatie content on this podcast.\nA baby becoming a person after basically being a potato for a while.\nJohn's one (1) tweet.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-01-11T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/6b7355c1-40c6-4b4a-b4d9-a8bbd8cbf8ca.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":64516180,"duration_in_seconds":4032}]},{"id":"cfe378cf-31d1-4b4e-b76d-b55fa0f52d84","title":"63. How To Travel With A Dishwasher Salmon","url":"https://topiclords.com/how-to-travel-with-a-dishwasher-salmon","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nChris\n\n\nhttps://imgur.com/a/7dFeaa8\n\nMitch\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJOh5FKisc0hUlEeWFBlD-w\nhttps://twitter.com/hbmmaster\nhttps://www.patreon.com/hbmmaster\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nWhy the game Hades is great\nPeople 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\nGasoline toast\n\n\nHORG: http://www.horg.com/horg/\nDishwasher salmon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N8q2xkirCQ\n\nVille 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.\"\nThe Game (the one Wikipedia helpfully disambiguates as \"The Game (mind game)\") is not very well designed\nThe Best Five Plants\n\n\nMultiocular O: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiocular_O\nW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sg2j7mZ9-2Y\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nWriting your title in lowercase so that you know it's not part of your name.\nTaking one look at a game and saying \"this is a Chris game.\"\nHades.\nA video game set in a Mike Mignola painting.\nGame development legerdemain.\nPressing left trigger to pet Cerberus.\nVoice acting in video games.\nNeeding to change a voice line and having to splice together existing lines because you're never going to see the actor again.\nNeeding to generalize a voice acted tutorial saying \"press the A button\" and just cutting out the word A.\nDoing your best impression of the Afro Samurai and Samuel L Jackson angrily knocks at the door dressed as the Afro Samurai.\nKnowing enough Greek mythology to appreciate these Greek mythology gags.\nDescribing your backstory to the bard.\nFishing minigames.\nGetting the voice actor to learn Blender so you can finally pet the other two heads.\nHow people use \"literally\" these days.\nHow \"really\" used to mean \"actually\" and \"very\" meant \"truly\" but people started using them in hyperbole and now it's just an intensifier.\nSarcasm as a driver of linguistic change.\nCovering food with gasoline and setting it on fire.\nHow the little plastic clip influences the bread's flavor.\nGasoline clams.\nCovering a bagged loaf of bread in gasoline and setting it on fire and a loaf of perfect toast emerges.\nRemembering that you were going to say something about the bag clip thing.\nMaking gasoline toast when gas prices were negative and getting your toast for free.\nThe Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group.\nGoing to a web site about bag clips and not seeing anything with a spring in it.\nSoaking your fish in lye until it becomes a delicacy.\nDishwasher salmon.\nHow every dishwasher is at the perfect temperature to cook salmon.\nTrying to cook salmon in your dishwasher because you're not a serious dude yet.\nCooking a salmon in dishwashers around the world.\nGoing on the internet and telling lies about salmon preparation.\nLutefisk, and specifically how somebody invented Lutefisk.\nThe gravest of apologies to anyone currently eating dishwasher salmon.\nThe third time Jim went to jail for an idea originating on this podcast.\nCleopatra's temporal proximity to Pizza Hut.\nTime and pizza being flat circles.\nA quote-shaped hole in this conversation that you have the chance to fill.\nWhether a hole in the ground that a wheelbarrow goes through counts as a subway.\nImpressing your Corgi with facts about London.\nThe Game (mind game)\nA game you can't stop playing, according to the rules.\nHow to win The Game (mind game)\nWhether it's a game if you can't choose not to play.\nPeople 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.\nThe sort of thing that passed for cool in board games from before 1990.\nVideo games with hexagons in them.\nArguing about the best five of something.\nThe worst five forbs.\nCoating the hillside with six inch hemispheres of itching hairs.\nA forb that is always full of doves, which is bad somehow.\nThe Angry Video Game Nerd except it's a plant nerd being angry about plants.\nThe bottom five letters of the alphabet.\nThe sequel to lowercase b.\nTaking the q out of queen so it's spelled ueen. (But still pronounced \"queen.\")\nUpdating the alphabet to get rid of c k s w and q.\nBritish people always dropping the t even though they supposedly love it.\nRevising English spelling so that every word is just spelled \"a\" but each word has a unique font size.\nRegistering google.com except instead of two os it's the \"oo\" ligature.\nThe origin of uppercase.\nExplaining to the clerk at the DMV that your name is Chris except the C is illuminated.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2021-01-04T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/cfe378cf-31d1-4b4e-b76d-b55fa0f52d84.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":63012363,"duration_in_seconds":3938}]},{"id":"c432d02d-70e3-4096-ad99-3a3cbc54d7ce","title":"62. A Real Egg Hobbyist","url":"https://topiclords.com/a-real-egg-hobbyist","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nMark plugs Ravening Iron\nShirley plugs a silicone reusable popcorn maker\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nThe trend of positive media (Great British Baking Show, etc.)\nWhat is your favorite magic paradigm? Related: Space Wizards: What happened??\nTransitioning from being able to cook a dish to being able to cook a meal\nLarry asks \"Yearbooks. Do you still have them? Have you ever actually used one? Is it full of signatures and stuff like that?\"\n\"Dude, maybe Jim can give us parenting advice\" is what I just said out loud, what do you think of that, Jim?\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nWhether Ravening Iron slaps.\nThe life-changing silicone popcorn maker.\nA cup that says \"tea\" on it that's filled with bourbon.\nDirty Harry except he's shooting the mishandling of evidence in the face.\nDirty Harry except instead of shooting perps in the face he takes a bath.\nWatching Joker (2019) and thinking \"finally, the IPs of my youth are real art now\"\nA slow motion replay of a lady forgetting to put ice cream back in the fridge.\nChoosing the biggest burliest man you can find who is moved to tears at the drop of a hat to judge your reality show.\nBeing moved to tears because a jug is unexpectedly light.\nA manual of non-toxic masculinity.\nMen Feeling Feelings.\nCollecting magic paradigms.\nStaying up all night studying your book of magic and then the next day you can cast one (1) fireball.\nStudying magic for years and then having spells in your head that you never cast.\nAll the spells in a wizard's head going off at once when the wizard dies, like that fireworks show in San Diego.\nAccidentally learning the spell that will unmake reality.\nLearning the magic words and swizzling a wand.\nTeaching children that magic is an inherent ability that you either have or don't have.\nWhy there are so few space wizards.\nWaking up in the middle of a night with a great story idea and in the morning you realize it's Star Wars.\nDoctor Who explaining the science behind space vampires.\nWhat if Marty McFly's photo of his brother was an actual person and his body parts started to vanish.\nBattle mages carrying around notepads and calligraphy pens and battling by writing notes at each other.\nMagical inscriptions all over your body rendering you invulnerable to physical harm everywhere except your face because your retail job doesn't allow face tattoos.\nRecognizing Rise of the Skywalker as bad but still basically enjoying it because you just don't care that much any more.\nThe 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.\nGrowing out of hating art.\nLoving this topic.\nBreakfast being easier to cook than other meals because it's okay to just make one dish and call it breakfast.\nBreakfast being easier to cook than other meals because it uses a smaller set of potential ingredients.\nLearning to look at a set of available ingredients and plan a meal out of them.\nLearning how to cook to learn about process and flexibility.\nFollowing 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.\nSkimming a recipe to get the gist and then just being able to make the thing because you know how food works.\nThe canonical flavor pairings of breakfast.\nFiguring out your flavor profile and then your main protein and working outwards to the sides.\nLearning to make scrambled eggs and realizing now you can just have scrambled eggs any time.\nA Real Egg Hobbyist\nLeaving behind audio logs for future civilizations.\nA paint pigment made out of mummies, and more generally how every pigment is made from some different weird thing.\nEvery ingredient in your kitchen coming from a different weird and often horrifying animal or plant process.\nHumans possibly developing larger brains because we invented cooking.\nRaw food enthusiasts just enjoying digesting harder than the rest of us.\nMeasuring the calories in a food by making the food explode.\nThe millennia-long development of corn as a staple crop.\nPosing with a crazy hat because your yearbook editors didn't have enough photos of Crazy Hat Day.\nFalsifying the historical record.\nSeeing a yearbook on a friend's bookshelf and offering to sign it.\nPaying extra to get your high school yearbook pre-signed.\nSeeing your parent's yearbook and realizing for the first time that they had hobbies once.\nA nice kid who is always doing their best.\nSeeing your high school teacher in street clothes at the grocery store and realizing that he is just a few years older than you.\nHow a task seems impossible until you have a strong enough incentive to do it.\nThe 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.\nChildbirth lawyers.\nHaving an extra plug.\n","content_html":"

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Lords:

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Topics:

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-12-28T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/c432d02d-70e3-4096-ad99-3a3cbc54d7ce.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":62579775,"duration_in_seconds":3911}]},{"id":"ceddabb6-7313-4879-b1c2-d507986a50c0","title":"61. NHS Surveillance Elves","url":"https://topiclords.com/nhs-surveillance-elves","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nAlex is on the Topic Lords discord.\nShannon\n\n\nhttps://www.etsy.com/shop/NaturalStitchery\nhttps://whistletown.tumblr.com/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nDiscovered any cool new youtube channels lately?\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLy1Z3yawOIkZCWf92DPThdC0H8ESbXxnn\nhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGjs772Xkfnr8tSwkjw2vkg\nhttps://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGPT1t4CqpfhCpZH56JQfJuF6SvxCMrHL\n\nHow to use ice witch powers for the good of mankind\nWhy do fish have up and down\nBrandon asks: \"Have you talked about all the video games with the word 'lords' in them? And you can change the title of the show to be Topic: Lords for that episode\"\nLying to kids about Santa\nIf you had a big front yard with lots of fresh snow and a free afternoon, what would you build?\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nWhich came first, the beer or the bread?\nWhat Big Bread doesn't want you to know.\nAccidentally setting up your Etsy store in Canada.\nSelling pixel art with instructions on how to turn it into cross stitch.\nA cool guy and his cool microscope.\nFinding cool organisms to stream on your Twitch Plays Microscope channel.\nYour grandma's room full of jars of pond scum and microscopes.\nMaking dinner wearing a GoPro.\nBurning out on making your extremely overproduced podcast.\nGetting 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.\nCutting your video only when the GoPro is about to overheat.\nThe delight of somebody who is really excited about stuff.\nFilling 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.\nYou won't believe what happens next: ants.\nRuining your whole country real bad with your ice witch powers.\nUsing your ice witch powers for fire suppression.\nMaking beverages cold with your ice witch powers.\nHarnessing the powers of Elsa and a Charizard to run a Stirling engine to solve the energy crisis.\nFinding the Frozen lore bible to find out if Elsa can help cool superconductors.\nPrinciples of homeopathic medicine factoring into the plot of Frozen 2.\nSating your hunger for topics.\nWhy fish only pitch and yaw and never roll.\nInterviewing a guy named \"Fish\" for an article about fish but never mentioning his name once.\nCountershading.\nHaving predators both above and below you at all times.\nThe boring answer to every question about evolution.\nBeing banned from Yellowstone for trying to fry a chicken in a geyser because you can only boil a chicken in a geyser.\nFish always swimming in the same orientation because they haven't read Ender's Game.\nNo Spine Don't Care.\nThe sh-sounding thing that looks like a capital B.\nWhether you can read about the House of Lords on Mobygames.\nCrusader Kings 2: Horse Lords\nMaking your own horse dynasty.\nThinking about an entirely different unicorn-based game from the other Lord.\nPutting \"re\" in front of stuff to indicate a sequel.\nMight of the Slither Lords.\nWhat the Slither Lords eat and how often they use the bathroom.\nBelieving the lie about Santa Claus as practice for believing bigger lies later in life, such as \"life has meaning.\"\nDemonstrating to your children that authority figures will lie to you and laugh about it.\nBaby's First Critical Thinking Exercise.\nSanta Claus as a test run for evaluating beliefs based on the evidence rather than blindly believing what authority figures tell you.\nLearning 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.\nNot being allowed to tell dad that the Easter Bunny isn't real.\nAll 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.\nDoing wholesome activities in a sneaky anonymous way.\nPirate Santa Works Twice As Hard.\nThe real joy of Christmas being that Santa will never learn your name properly.\nPutting a barcode on your child's neck so Santa knows which present to give them.\nA period of heightened observation of children.\nAll the elves working for the NHS.\nNot being willing to lie to your child so you hire a Santa Lecturer to give a seminar at your house.\nWhether five is a young age.\nSetting up a dope haunted house that nobody can visit because there's a pandemic on.\nHome Alone except instead of defending your house, you're breaking into people's houses to do nice things.\nThe laws of physics and the laws of man not applying to Santa but still applying to your five year old child.\nThe moment you need to explain criminal statutes to your five year old.\nPermanently ruining your back by building snow forts in a winter wonderland.\nMaking igloos.\nStarting 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.\nMaking giant ice buildings by spraying fire hoses everywhere.\nProviding structural support to your ice building using ice I-beams made out of heavy water.\nMaking a snow maze for your tiny dog.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-12-21T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/ceddabb6-7313-4879-b1c2-d507986a50c0.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":62646649,"duration_in_seconds":3915}]},{"id":"ec22bc96-ec3e-4588-b7dc-d198fefcce88","title":"60. Pachinko Lava Lamp","url":"https://topiclords.com/pachinko-lava-lamp","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nChris\n\n\nhttps://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ianknot.htm\n\nJames\n\n\nhttps://triplefox.itch.io/\nhttps://youtu.be/I8uStVXNf0M\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nAn adopted microwave which is too small for popcorn, begging the question: what is it for?\n\n\nhttps://compassandquill.com/2012/03/12/how-to-cook-microwave-popcorn-on-the-stove/\n\nWhat happened to Galapagos? (And recreating pinball in software.)\n\n\nhttps://triplefox.itch.io/galapagos\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tmg5WOvPKpU\n\nThe trade-off between customer satisfaction and worker safety\nJohn asks \"Skipping over links to music when your friends post them, and in turn posting links to music without a shred of self-awareness/the mental barrier to recommending or sharing music.\"\nRelearning how to run\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nA shoelace knot that you are amazed by.\nWhether somebody knows good ways of tying knots.\nNot having any ads on the show but the same shoelace knot being independently plugged by three separate guests.\nLooking outside and seeing someone furtively deposit the world's smallest microwave on the sidewalk.\nA microwave that is awesome until you try to put popcorn in it.\nA dollhouse microwave that can microwave popcorn one kernel at a time.\nThe Easy Bake Microwave.\nThat one kid you knew whose family was rich enough that he had a microwave in his bedroom.\nThe Easy Bake TV which is just a light bulb that you stare into.\nDownsizing your lifestyle.\nUltra-miniaturized microwaves that are just big enough for a can of Coca Cola.\nHot Coke.\nDeciding to try Hot Coke after the show because your microwave is too small to fit anything bigger than a mug of Coca Cola.\nA hot tub with a volume of half a cubic foot.\nWhether the Whirlpool hot tub actually spins.\nRecording an entire additional episode of Topic Lords after this, that only we get to hear.\nDeciding that your fantasy console should be linear without knowing what linear means.\nMaking software last a long time by targeting an emulator.\nDeciding that your entire approach to your current project is wrong and inverting its structure and then deciding to make a pinball game instead.\nHaving to fake the physical pinball interactions because physics engines still aren't precise enough.\nNot having a ball bearing bouncing around inside of your phone.\nApplying an impulse when the ball hits a collision volume.\nThe actual electromechanical mechanism of those triangles near the flippers that push the ball back.\nA physics solver that does mixed rigid and soft body deformation.\nOrdering pinball flippers online so you can measure them because you can't find specs describing their exact shape and size anywhere.\nHow pop bumpers work.\nThe ball rolling over the skirt and triggering the thrusters.\nModeling an invisible cone that drives itself down.\nBuying a nice plastic skirt and an extremely high-current solenoid.\nMaking a functional pinball table out of cardboard.\nA pinball table inside of a wine bottle.\nPinball tables all having the common constraint that they need to fit through the door.\n\"Hercules,\" the pinball table where the gimmick is that it's too big to fit through the door.\nHow to draw the rest of the owl.\nPinball except instead of a ball it's water.\nA PSP except instead of a portable video game system it's one of those games where you squeeze water to get rings onto posts.\nChristmas except every present is just a box of avocados.\nPachinko except it's an oil timer.\nPhysically impossible but physically accurate pinball machines.\nPachinko except there's fire everywhere and what's falling through the pins is your dead body and all your individual bones.\nGetting licensed to make scrambled eggs with an espresso machine.\nA Big Black Egg Gauntlet.\nA big black glove that smells but doesn't look like rotten eggs.\nThe pressure of an egg.\nWhether an egg could be held aloft by a shop vac.\nThe 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.\nThe ethics of asking your wife to take a video of cafe workers making scrambled eggs.\nThe violence of recommendations.\nWhether or not you can get mad about your time being wasted for twenty seconds.\nDoing everything in your power to like your favorite band's new album.\nYour first \"Hero's Journey\" vs. your hundredth.\nThe kind of media you consume while doing other things vs. the kind you actively study.\nMentoring 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.\nGetting better at stuff.\nEach sport having a different set of recommended vitamin supplements.\nLurching forward on your ankles.\nLooking up how runners run on Youtube and immediately realizing how you can run way faster.\nGetting running shoes that force you to spring around on your toes rather than landing on your heel.\nGetting it but not liking it.\nStudying Full Tilt.\nTaking your kick scooter on the freeway.\nPre-Stormdancer problems.\nGoogling your own name and finding erotic short fiction starring a gay lumberjack with your name.\nThe sound of probably not being able to hear anything\nWhether a beverage can be both hot and carbonated.\nSadness when you can't carbonate soup.\nThe audio signature of Coke being microwaved.\nA microwave% run of Super Mario 64 where you need to turn on the microwave next to the Nintendo 64 at the exact right frame.\nHoney refusing to dissolve in tea no matter how much you stir.\nPutting your mug of flat microwaved Coke in the Sodastream to recarbonate it.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-12-14T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/ec22bc96-ec3e-4588-b7dc-d198fefcce88.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":63286126,"duration_in_seconds":3955}]},{"id":"549dc05d-d381-4127-9a42-515c62980a44","title":"59. 1-800-Ask-A-Harpsichord.com","url":"https://topiclords.com/1-800-ask-a-harpsichord-dot-com","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nAmanda\n\n\nakotchon@gmail.com\n\nAlexander is still a math professor\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nHarpsichord music in public domain for spooky chiptune soundtracks\n\n\nThe elements of chip music. https://www.linusakesson.net/music/elements/index.php\n\nShareware floppies! Remember those?\n\n\nSkunny the Squirrel: Save Our Pizzas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tceqj1x_Q8Q\nSkunny Kart https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0JzpjINeE0\n\nThe outlandish economic world of Neopets\n\n\nhttps://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1297485937384001537.html\n\nRunning a Beanie Baby arbitrage empire.\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nProgramming industrial robots to lift really heavy things.\nTrying 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.\nThe consequences of buggy code when the robot is lifting a test tube vs. a car.\nWhether three rotary axes mounted on a big linear slide counts as a robot or is just a fancy conveyer belt.\nA failed branch on the evolutionary tree of keyboard instruments.\nHaving to retune your harpsichord multiple times a day if not multiple times per song.\nA harpsichord jumping into organ territory.\nA medieval troubador who is not playing power chords.\nThe Famichord.\nOmitting the note that is most heavily implied by the other three notes.\nConflating Super Mario World and Link to the Past because they both use spooky harpsichord music.\nThe difficulty of synthesizing a piano sound.\nA really slow early version of machine learning.\nConveying musical intensity when you have no volume control.\nSharpening your own crow quills to maintain your piano.\nSneaking broken harpsichords into somebody's house while they're sleeping.\nRompler rock.\nRecognizing a Bach piece because once you typed it into your Commodore 128 as a PLAY statement.\nA floppy disk that you bought in a grocery store when you were six.\nWhether Sir Mix A Lot is actually dead or just represents a dead person in this analogy.\nThe internals of the Quake engine.\nA C-like language with no arrays so you need to do everything with linked lists.\nHow long humans have been taking square roots for.\nReal-time operating systems.\nPutting your audio code in the same thread as your game code so the audio breaks up if you frame rate dips too low.\nSending Jim a sample of moustache man.\nA pinball game that plays sound effects at significantly different rates depending on the version of the sound chip.\nBuying a shareware game on a floppy disk at a grocery store for the same price as a blank floppy disk.\nPlaying the shareware episode of Doom and being like \"I played Doom already, I don't need to pay for it.\"\nGetting a call from your harpsichord landlord because you haven't paid your harpsichord loans and he refuses to take the harpsichord back.\nHarpsichords requiring daily maintenance or they break down over the span of months.\nPutting your harpsichord in a sauna to keep it moisturized.\nA squirrel in ancient Rome fighting with gladiators over pizza.\nA folder hidden by your mom's inability to do a recursive directory listing.\nDeciding, as a culture, that the way to advance the 2D platformer as a genre is to make it as hard as possible.\nGetting perforated printer paper at the library and drawing your own Prince of Persia levels.\nWriting your opus with fire flowers and station wagons.\nWhether or not it's cool that Mario Paint Composer graduated to twelve tones.\nBack when there was a point to writing songs in different keys.\n1-800-harpsichord-facts.com\nDelving into Neopets as an outsider and seeing real life principles of economics mirrored in a distorted reflection.\nMaking 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.\nExploring the outcomes of a search engine that is bad in an interesting way.\nNeopets voter fraud.\nDesigning daily quests to keep player shop prices high.\nWriting gradient descent optimized algorithms to optimize your Neopets casino strategy.\nLearning to code because you want the nicest Neopets shop.\nPushing HTML5 to its limits to get a really big sparkling snowflake in the middle of your ice themed Neopets shop.\nIntentionally broken search bringing back the art of gift giving in the digital age.\nIntentionally not buying something for yourself so someone can give it to you for your birthday.\nWinning a trophy for reading books to your Neopet.\nReading 140 of the 150 possible space themed books to your Neopet to get that Neopet on the space themed books high score table.\nA nine year old running a Neopets crime syndicate.\nPre-PayPal digital currencies.\nConvincing your grandma to get you a PO Box and bank account so you can run an underground Beanie Babies empire.\nThe minimum and maximum permitted age for legal Beanie Baby arbitrage.\nEditing 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.\nThe 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.\nGetting 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.\nGoing to juvie for insider trading.\nLiving off of Wonder Bread for four months after you get out of your oppressive parents no-wheat household.\nAsking 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.\nMeeting your best friend in college because you both learned a variant of C++ that will only compile in Microsoft's compiler.\nMaking your own podcast, \"Ask a Harpsichord,\" to put all the remaining harpsichord facts that didn't fit in this episode.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-12-07T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/549dc05d-d381-4127-9a42-515c62980a44.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":68656484,"duration_in_seconds":4291}]},{"id":"187a4398-1385-4ef5-a717-933f06a414f7","title":"58. Sparkles On Top Of The Brain","url":"https://topiclords.com/sparkles-on-top-of-the-brain","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nElena is on the Topic Lords discord\nTyriq is FourbitFriday everywhere\n\n\nhttps://www.ckgame.net/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nWhat's the youngest age at which you can become the kind of old person you want to be\nReborrowings: https://starkeycomics.com/2020/06/06/reborrowings/\n\n\nhttps://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/624028907162566657/724080214128197672/etymologies-_1.png\nhttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D1%81%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%B0\"\n\nI made pork katsu for dinner and Winston pronounced it \"pork costume\" and I'm pretty sure that's it, that's peak dad experience and it's all downhill from here\nStephen asks \"Textual dialects. Range of timbre and tools available in punctuation, capitalization, emphasis and emojis. Apparently periods come off as assertive/rude to younger folks.\"\nThe tone deafness test\n\n\nhttps://www.themusiclab.org/quizzes/td\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nWhether complice is the opposite of accomplice.\nIntending to clean the fridge.\nA short but sweet plug that you manage to drag out of your guest.\nThinking an early access game is dead when the developer is right there in your kitchen streaming making breakfast.\nFeeling too young to just go around handing out Werther's Originals.\nWhether 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.\nWhether the lady with twenty cats accrued the cats over the course of your life or just adopted twenty cats at once.\nLearning to regrow your teeth so you can change your teeth style every few months, like you can your hair.\nTranshuman augmentation of the teeth.\nBeing sure that a pop culture concept doesn't exist in Japan because you didn't see it in that one Yakuza game you played.\nSharpening your teeth to look like a cat.\nThe world record for most permanent transformations to look like an animal.\nWhether dead people can still be the fastest person in the world.\nThe world record for most permanent transformations to look like something other than an animal.\nHow Stalking Cat decided to become a cat.\nWanting to be more like a tiger and having your ears transplanted to the top of your head.\nGetting a job as a programmer to fund your body modification plans so you can be the old person you dream about being.\nRunning plastic tubes from the fake ears on top of your head down to the place your ears used to be.\nThe major themes of Stalking Cat's LiveJournal.\nSeeing someone's LiveJournal post saying just \"I start shooting today\" and wondering if you should be worried.\nGetting back to being old.\nCultivating the witchy vibe when you're not really a witch.\nNot 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.\nMaking a skirt out of chainmail and refusing to twirl it because a four year old lives in your house.\nAsking the manufacturer of your favorite towel whether they make bathrobes and they send back a one word email saying \"no.\"\nWanting to look like a dapper old man but hating fashion norms.\nAppropriating the parts of fashion that you like while subverting the idea that you're participating in the fashion hierarchy.\nWanting to eventually look like a dapper old man and starting by buying one dapper sock.\nCodpieces.\nWearing full plate armor to church or to court.\nStalking Cat's profile page on wikifur.com\nThe Romans enslaving so many Slavs that Slav becomes their word for it.\nAll the different times that nature has evolved a tree.\nPalm trees not really being trees and just being weird grass.\nA plant deciding to get tall where the sun is and reinventing wood.\nLanguages borrowing words from other languages and then giving them back after completely changing the meaning.\nWhether Italy has any Pizza Huts.\nTrying 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.\nEnglish poetry that is too old.\nA two year old pronouncing pork katsu as \"pork costume.\"\nDressing your two year old in pork for Halloween like the tiny ham he is.\nReally giving somebody the pork costume.\nRealizing your best work is behind you when you haven't done anything notable.\nAn entirely sideways mouth that has fallen off your face.\nChekov's Book.\nA throne but you can poop in it.\nHiding a piece of matzo somewhere in your house on Passover and eventually your house fills up with matzo.\nYelling at your coworker for only using the \"slight smile\" emoji because they weren't happy enough.\nImage 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.\nHow autocorrect ought to be able to code switch based on who you're talking to and what you're talking about.\nWalking around the house and discovering that you can't use the word \"okay\" in the kitchen.\nPutting the sparkles on top of the brain.\nTrying to talk about bringing your head below something and autocorrect is like \"did you mean: fucking\"\nYoutube's automatic captioning now censoring swear words.\nCensoring swear words by replacing the word \"shit\" with a picture of shit.\nWhether the eggplant emoji would ejaculate from the stem end or the bulb end.\nSqueezing mayonnaise out of the stem end of an eggplant emoji squeeze bottle.\nThe tone deaf and the tone hearing.\nBeing surprised to meet people who can't sing at all, even though you just met someone like that a couple days ago.\nHearing a pitch and having no idea whether it's higher or lower than what you're singing.\nNot letting anyone into your painting club who can't distinguish red and green.\nGreyie Pie.\nApplying a deuteranopic filter to a My Little Pony episode and instantly being incredibly depressed.\nNot knowing the right answer but the person in your head heckling you does.\n","content_html":"

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Lords:

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Microtopics:

\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-11-30T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/187a4398-1385-4ef5-a717-933f06a414f7.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":70323305,"duration_in_seconds":4395}]},{"id":"f81d81c6-50de-4e01-a89b-7e5f637c4e28","title":"57. A Rationale For Mountains","url":"https://topiclords.com/a-rationale-for-mountains","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nJonah\n\n\nhttps://works.rip/\n\nAaron\n\n\nhttps://aaronsee.media/ku.html\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nGraffitti based arguments\nUnphysical physically-motivated procedural content generation\n\n\nMandelbulb: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTpbP5BVtiA\n\nThe inventor of \"None Pizza With Left Beef\" went on to create \"Young Sheldon\"\n\n\nThe 10th anniversary of None Pizza Left Beef: https://gizmodo.com/reflections-on-the-10th-anniversary-of-none-pizza-with-1819692097\n\nJesse asks: \"Hobo code\"\n\n\nhttps://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a25174860/hobo-code/\n\nDesigning a game around semantic prime theory\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nA game that is not about toppling governments.\nSeeing a political message spray painted on the wall and painting a reasoned response beneath it.\nGoing around Athens and restenciling graffiti to be more legible.\nGoing to the bathroom to catch up on the latest stall graffiti.\nGraffiti as art versus graffiti as a forum for communication.\nSeeing 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.\nSticker bombing your school with stickers saying \"good source of fiber\" and \"for rectal use only.\"\nThe potential of industrial glues.\nWaiting 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.\nA city on a massive hill where the hill is made of all the previous cities that were conquered in that place.\nThe best edible band flyer glues.\nGenerating Perlin noise and picking an elevation for the water level to generate your video game world.\nSimulating tectonic plates to generate your video game world.\nExploring the Mandelbulb.\nA rationale for mountains.\nMaking an apple pie from scratch and having to invent the universe, except it's not an apple pie, it's an alien planetary body.\nAttempting to solve a problem with no reasonable way to validate your solution.\nDoing 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.\nThe new Frog Fractions game spoiling for all of pop culture including itself.\nA photograph of a disc of plain dough with meatballs scattered loose in the box.\nHacking the Domino's garlic bread by ordering a pizza with just garlic on it.\nHatewatching your favorite sitcom.\nMoving to Greece and everybody finding out that you're a nerd and being like \"oh I know what your favorite show is.\"\nMaking a TV show where the whole joke is that the main character has Asperger's.\nFinding Chuck Lorre's email address and writing to ask why the show is called \"The Big Bang Theory.\"\nOne level of pun connoisseurship up from \"what's up dog\"\nUngoogleable questions such as \"why is the show called 'big bang theory'\" and \"what is the volume of a parakeet\"\nFinding out the volume of a parrot via water displacement.\nEmailing 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.\nA duck that means \"free telephone\"\nThe canonical hobo object.\nSitting around the fire with a lead mug you're drinking chili out of.\nHow often you need to pretend to faint.\nReading Wikipedia aloud and going \"huh!\"\nAn alternative Topic Lords podcast with train noises dubbed over it.\nRecording a podcast where you read a stack trace for ten minutes and your seatmate moving to a different place on the train.\nA podcast episode where the host gets carted off in handcuffs and yells \"avenge me!\" and hits upload with their toe.\nBeing arrested on live TV and your fans assuming that it's another mysterious lore drop.\nThe optimal minimal subset of all languages.\nThe 65 words that can express any human idea.\nA Pinteresty soundbite of knowledge.\nDeep philosophical conversations with your toddler.\nA semantic substrate that is our natural world.\nPersuasive systems having some fundamental level of plausibility because at some level the system has to function.\nMaking a career out of building persuasive systems.\nOvercoming difficulty with persistence.\nTelling the story of overcoming difficulty with persistence via a masocore platformer.\nA couple of sentences on a sheet of paper that you then enact.\nInvestigating an opaque system and taking away a message.\nSome Frank Lantz tweet threads.\nThe indie game community transitioning from focusing on game design to focusing on art design.\nHow juicy you should make a game.\nHow good the screen shake was on Rod Humble's \"The Marriage.\"\nSpreadsheets like you've never felt them before.\nCracking knuckles on the juice hose.\nEating the concept of frying something.\n","content_html":"

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Microtopics:

\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-11-23T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/f81d81c6-50de-4e01-a89b-7e5f637c4e28.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":69678356,"duration_in_seconds":4321}]},{"id":"8c4f9da8-fd1d-4ae3-8955-ee9abba36a20","title":"56. Ethical Snorlax Pasture","url":"https://topiclords.com/ethical-snorlax-pasture","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nLaura is @lmichet on Twitter and just shipped A Monster's Expedition.\nJP is @vectorpoem on Twitter.\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nWhat is the least horny sport?\nBest 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?\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban is an entire scheduling methodology, not merely the board-and-card-based task system used by various Scrum etc teams.\nAll comments relating to our critiques of git can be directed to highly_valued_git_feedback@whitehouse.gov\n\nDriving around with a photo of yourself on your vehicle\n\n\nTimothy Dalton's character in Hot Fuzz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfICiLbwz8I (that 1-second clip captures the visual gag but not the comedic timing; good enough)\nThe Giant Eddie Murphy Head trailer thing was part of a promotional campaign for the 2008 movie \"Meet Dave\", and that one specific photo of it in highway traffic went viral. Neil Cicierega used it as the profile image for his last.fm page, and so it showed up as the album art for all non-album Lemon Demon tracks. https://kottke.org/08/06/eddie-murphys-giant-head https://www.reddit.com/r/tumblr/comments/c6m2nn/does_this_remind_you_of_something/\n\nStephen 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.\"\nSafety-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?\n\n\nAn animal's cuteness being weaponized to promote its own exploitation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hL4b0Pc1xIs\n\nYou can send one print of a single film of your choosing back to 1960. What film do you choose, and why?\n\n\nFerris Bueller supplements his own bodily function noises with an E-mu Emulator II. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATkUqWssSGc\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nTyping in all lowercase because anyone who uses capital letters is a cop.\nThe Lowercase Age.\nCapital letters and punctuation reflecting a certain social context.\nWhether Laura has ever spoken to someone in person.\nA very chill video game with cute jokes in it.\nOne of the better ways to enjoy life.\nThe eSport played by the oldest people.\nCar Lords.\nThe hypothetical horniness of the train similar speed running scene.\nWhether you can be fired from your train job in Train Simulator or is you're just shot on the spot.\nThe height of golf's horniness ceiling.\nThe horniness differential between simulated golf and real life miniature golf.\nA 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.\"\nNot wanting to guess how to say \"coalesce\" in a Scottish accent.\nNot wanting to call your coworkers at 9pm, the devil's hour.\nHiring a sensitivity reader to figure out how to respectfully create a pinup calendar of accents around the world.\nA sample of Meg Ryan faking an orgasm.\n\"When Harry Met Sally\" faked orgasm sound board.\nAdmiring the UI of task tracking software.\nUsing a text file to do task tracking.\nAn ignorant caveman who is working harder rather than smarter.\nThe miserable state of programming tools (compilers excepted)\nHow 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.\"\nUsing SVN to talk to GitHub.\nGame development putting the folks who can get value out of Git alongside the folks Git just makes miserable and forcing them to collaborate somehow.\nData mining your blood sugar levels over time.\nData mining your enamel pin collection.\nComplaining that your wife really likes her new baby.\nHaving your phone number on your car so that if someone doesn't like your driving they can give you a call.\nDecals on your rear window with stick figures representing every member of your family, with their social security numbers beneath them.\nThe 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.\nNot being willing to put a photo of yourself on your car but covering your tiny electric motorcycle with them.\nA helmet with a huge depiction of your face, like you're in big head mode.\nGigantic electric skateboards with wacky shocks.\nEddie Murphy driving Eddie Murphy's giant head car.\nCoopting someone's write-in to talk about manufacturing gaskets.\nA question that makes you feel inadequate so you resent it.\nLearning how to make gaskets because everyone who works at the gasket manufacturer needs to know how to make gaskets.\nGasket manufacturing equipment probably cutting rubber with a laser or maybe a big knife.\nA chore wheel by which everyone at the company eventually does every job.\nTreating 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.\nGasket perishability.\nA gasket failing and causing a terrible disaster because it was left on the front porch too long.\nHaving a plant product like perishability.\nA piston seal pointing its piston tusks at the ground and launching itself into the air.\nThe fantasy of having a little animal who is in fire.\nA dog or cat already being able to mess up your house pretty bad even though they don't have pyrokinetic powers.\nNot being willing to give any dog you've ever met elemental magic powers.\nA Problem Charmander.\nThe entire Pokemon universe is a hologram running on a GameBoy.\nWhether you can be held legally liable for your pet Charmander burning your neighbor's house down.\nTraining your grass-type Pokemon to repeatedly fire solarbeam at your solar panels.\nThe ones who walk away from Nomekop.\nThe Pokemon species that became dominant and enslaved all the others. \"Human human!\"\nSpending enough time in nature to develop a personal opinion about nature.\nJourneying through the world and having fun equitable relationships with magical creatures.\nThe only anime that is about adults rather than teenagers.\nSending space movies back in time to feed the conspiracy theory that the moon landings were faked.\nRepeatedly sending the sports almanac back in time to construct an optimal run of 20th century sports betting.\nSending a sports almanac back in time to everyone so everyone wins every sports bet.\nSending a white dude back in time so that a white dude can invent rock and roll.\n","content_html":"

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Lords:

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Microtopics:

\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-11-16T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/8c4f9da8-fd1d-4ae3-8955-ee9abba36a20.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":70263955,"duration_in_seconds":4391}]},{"id":"a11094d1-d871-49fc-a1eb-aa28418d07f3","title":"55. Burger Crimes","url":"https://topiclords.com/burger-crimes","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nApril is @aprilsaur on Twitter.\nFreddie is @fwong on Twitter.\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nBurger opinions\nRevisiting Breath of the Wild\nTaking care of a kid for 8 hours a day is making me doubt my chronotype\nDennis asks: \"Vtubers\"\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_YouTuber\n\n\n\nMicro topics:\n\n\nFinally, a place for topics.\nA podcast that is surprisingly not a BDSM podcast.\nBeing the best town for chili with spaghetti because nobody else bothered.\nA very good part about a hamburger.\nThe potential utility of a hamburger.\nWanting each bite of a foodstuff to contain every ingredient.\nThe sleeping baby preventing you from going to Five Guys.\nA very specific smell manufactured in New Jersey that does not trigger any kind of nostalgia at all.\nDeciding to stop cooking your fries in beef tallow and needing to add a fake scent to get the old smell back.\nA burger joint that is the love child of In-N-Out and Dairy Queen.\nRating hamburgers by their mouth hinge requirements.\nThe ideal order of ingredients in a hamburger stack.\nPutting a tomato between the patty and the slice of cheese in a cheeseburger.\nBurger crimes.\nBecoming convinced that Democrats really ought to be armed.\nYears of playing Call of Duty and Counterstrike training you for your role in the revolution.\nYears of playing The Sims training you for your role in the revolution.\nWhether George Washington was a gamer.\nPlaying Breath of the Wild long enough to see the cool opening vista and thinking \"I definitely don't want to go to these mountains.\"\nA very American Truck Simulator approach to playing an open world game.\nWinching yourself out of the mud.\nThe experience of drawing a map in order to understand your surroundings.\nTwo weeks worth of photos of your TV.\nTrying to distinguish whether a childhood feeling of a video game came from the game design or came from being a child.\nDesigning puzzles that demand the player take physical notes.\nThe fun of inconvenience.\nPlaying D&D and catching the cartography bug.\nCapturing the joy of a blank piece of paper.\nA game about paperwork.\nThe video game expanding beyond the executable file you run.\nGambling with the game's demo to change the full game's price.\nWhat it would take to stream Breath of the Wild.\nTiny little leaf people hiding all over the world each hovering with a tiny leaf they spin like a helicopter blade.\nHestu's incredible maraca dance.\nTattooing the entire DK Rap across your back.\nAn attractive person remaining attractive even when wearing a goofy outfit.\nStaying home to take care of your kid and not sending them to daycare during a pandemic.\nChanging your sleep schedule from waking up at 11am to waking up at 7am.\nVitamin D: turns out we need it.\nBeing unable to sleep in even though you used to be a sleeping in champion.\nBeing tired because it's the end of the day.\nMaking dinner and becoming a puddle on whatever surface you happen to land on.\nGoing camping because you have a kid when you would never care enough to go camping if it was just you.\nDownloading Youtube tutorials on how to split a log so you can impress your kid when you go camping.\nUsing digital puppetry to make an anime avatar play video games on Twitch.\nCranking out content 24/7.\nLivestreamers taking a vacation and losing 20% of their viewers.\nThe Tupac hologram except playing Fortnite on Twitch.\nProducing a CG animation TV show where all the animation is live puppeteering.\nExhuming Tupac so you can do a body scan for the hologram concert tour.\nIndiana Jones except with a really tiny head.\nThe career prospects of Indiana Jones themed strippers.\n","content_html":"

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Lords:

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Micro topics:

\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-11-09T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/a11094d1-d871-49fc-a1eb-aa28418d07f3.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":64056007,"duration_in_seconds":4003}]},{"id":"538f494d-ecb2-4b6f-8df0-293c28159961","title":"54. Stab 'Em Into Place","url":"https://topiclords.com/stab-em-into-place","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nAdina is @FeyTechnologist on Twitter.\nAlex is @ThemsAllTook on Twitter.\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/user/adiener\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nAnarcho-communism for basic bitches\nHow I overcame my inability to stick with a project for the long haul\n\n\nhttps://pomodoro-tracker.com/\n\nSimulating the fluidity of natural group conversations in voice chat\nStephen asks: \"The Damascus steel of maze generation algorithms\"\n\n\nhttps://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190919-the-maze-puzzle-hidden-within-an-early-video-game\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root\n\nThe hidden worlds of each person's living space\nLearning every craft to become the ultimate craft wizard\n\n\nhttps://consumerist.com/2016/12/12/a-few-pen-strokes-on-this-mcdonalds-coffee-cup-give-warmest-greetings-a-new-meaning/\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nFabric and circus arts.\nGetting private trampoline lessons at the largest nonprofit circus in Seattle.\nBeing happy with an audience size that doesn't require you to moderate very much.\nForming smaller communities to take care of the people left behind by large governmental systems.\nEmpowering smaller communities to take care of each other.\nKnowing your neighbors and caring more about them than people you don't know.\nCultivating a neighborhood to make sure you live near people you want to know.\nThe long term viability of the nuclear family.\nA commune of queer people funded by a couple of tech jobs.\nMotorizing two wooden planks and hooking them up to the internet to get hugs online.\nGetting a whole lot done when you don't have internet access but now there's internet access everywhere.\nAdding a physical ritual to a mental activity to make it feel real.\nPutting the tomato on a different shelf to indicate that you are done with it.\nAn accountability mailing list where people might hypothetically judge you for what you haven't gotten done.\nFake accountability that feels real.\nTrying to replicate a warehouse full of indie game devs on Discord.\nAsking you for friends' lunch table to be enlarged so you can fit.\nWriting a Discord bot that replicates the chat of every voice channel in every other voice channel.\nSolving a social problem with social change rather than software.\nHow many clicks it takes to switch chat rooms.\nRunning through a procedurally generated maze.\nDoing floating point math by aliasing the bytes to an integer and subtracting it from a weird magic number.\nCode that is so self contained and stable that it's not really a problem that nobody understands it.\nOld programmers retiring and their knowledge leaving with them because they didn't document anything.\nWriting a megabyte long brain dump of everything you know about a project before it leaves your head.\nThe talk Jim didn't give describing the shaving cream technology in Glittermitten Grove.\nBeing too tired from your shaving cream rendering R&D project to do a good job on your beard rendering R&D project.\nWario Ware except with relaxing minigames rather than stressful ones.\nPorting your game from modern systems to MS-DOS so you can sell it on a floppy disk.\nHow scratch and sniff failed where a Smell-O-Vision video gaming peripheral will succeed.\nA swear filter but for smells.\nThe Femicom museum.\nGoing for walks around your neighborhood and seeing the outside of someone's house.\nThe hidden interior of a stranger's home as an allegory for their unknowable mind.\nPeeking into your neighbor's window whenever you get the chance.\nWhich service jobs let you go into people's houses and see how they live.\nHow it's okay to let the cleaning service employees see your secrets because you don't consider the working poor to be real people.\nWhether house cleaners get a small amount of joy in knowing the weird secrets of rich people.\nThe guy who comes in every few months for repairs because your computer is completely full of porn.\nSeeing someone's deepest darkest secrets and being like \"it was aight\"\nWanting a nicely interior-designed house but not wanting to put in any effort.\nWanting to paint your house and painting one wall and thinking \"I'm good.\"\nGetting the kind of paint that seems like a normal wall color but changes to a garish color after it dries, to fool your wife.\nBeing ready to learn all the new hobbies as lockdown starts but someone already bought all the sewing machines and felting needles.\nHow many more ways you can fuck up a sewing project vs. a knitting project.\nPulling out all the stitches in a pleated skirt for the third time and deciding you want a different hobby.\nTaking natural animal fibers and stabbing them into place.\nA sewing project having to hang on someone's body in a particular way.\nLearning every game development skill so you can make games without ever talking to anyone.\nSmearing goo on a white surface and it becoming a picture somehow.\nThe hobbies we'd have if we had infinite time.\nLooking at a painting and seeing which parts the painter messed up by looking for the parts that are thickest.\nThe \"warmest greetings\" coffee cup.\nThe animated gif where they poke a hole in the coffee cup and coffee spurts out.\nMaking a d-pad feel like a fresh control scheme by attaching a jetski to it.\nInventing a solution while also entertaining your audience.\nCo-op TIS-100, where each player gets their own CPU cell.\n","content_html":"

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Lords:

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Microtopics:

\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-11-02T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/538f494d-ecb2-4b6f-8df0-293c28159961.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":60423524,"duration_in_seconds":3776}]},{"id":"0cc8bfbe-5b77-42b7-ba01-75fc03b65198","title":"53. Pedialyte Teargas","url":"https://topiclords.com/pedialyte-teargas","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nDanny is @dannyBstyle on Twitter and plugs vaping.\nAlex is @adlleong on Twitter and plugs the Ian Knot shoelace tying method. https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ianknot.htm\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nInvisible walls in games\nBluBlockers\nBees take their lives into their hands every time they get thirsty\nNick Asks \"♪ God only knows what I’d pee without poo ♪\"\nMy wife is afraid of dogs that wear people clothes\nEvery response to \"thank you\" is rude\nThe multivarious ways being a child genius can screw you\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nThe good content.\nSome kind of invisible wall.\nWhat we already know about Blaseball.\nA fantastic way to keep the player inbounds.\nManically trying to explore this island while on the run from the military.\nCops being the yetis of life.\nBlizzard blowing up your best party spot by shipping the final Ironforge Airfield.\nWhether Microsoft will ruin Bethesda games by making them fix all those fun bugs before launching.\nFixing all the bugs in your game by applying The Cloud to it.\nPlaying the Turok remaster and they ruined it by removing all the fog.\nGoing to Canadian Tire because you live in Canada now.\nThe most technologically advanced sunglasses you can buy.\nA Geordi Laforge type of deal.\nDipping your whole head in the black film you use to watch solar eclipses so you can get a good night's sleep.\nHow to get back from Canada.\nCanada being so polite they even let the smoke in.\nStill not being able to do a Canadian accent after two years.\nMoving to Vancouver expecting a frozen wasteland.\nThrill-seeking bees refusing to wear their masks.\nBeing stung by one of those wasps that look like bees and being scared of bees for decades.\nWhether insects have the capacity for complex emotions such as vengeance.\nWhy Danny isn't doing better if unbridled anger is such an evolutionary advantage.\nReplacing creative workers with AI that you can pay in exposure.\nWhether \"brown area\" is a less racist term than \"gray area.\"\nSeeing the most enormous dog butthole and screaming inside your heart.\nTrimming back the hair around your dog's butthole to make it look bigger.\nA poster with a dog butthole in it saying \"Have you seen this butthole? Now you have.\"\nDoing AI upscaling on the picture of the dog butthole that looks like Jesus so we can see the true face of God.\nAssholes being okay until the poop comes out.\nA human proportioned body with a dog head.\nA therapy session by proxy.\nWhy dog clothes only cover the butt in Canada.\nDogs wearing ties on PBS.\nSaying \"my uncanny valley is just really wide\" to your partner every night before bed instead of \"I love you.\"\nMoving to Canada expecting everyone to be polite but they're just rude with an \"eh\" after it.\nA full-throated \"hey.\"\nThe most terrifying thing about being in Canada.\nWhether anyone has checked on the Canadian bacon.\nWriting to Tim Horton and demanding that in Canada Canadian bacon just be called \"here bacon.\"\nA new credit card payment device where you need to punch in your zip code with your nose.\nEnacting publicly-funded health care so that everyone can afford to grow a moustache and use StachePay.\nLeveraging 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.\nGetting along better with your teachers than with other kids, because you want to talk about what Gorbachev is up to.\nGetting through school and several jobs without ever learning how to work.\nThriving when given instructions to follow.\nThe shame of discovering that just because the school system worked for you, that doesn't mean it'll work for everyone.\nWalking around wearing a t-shirt saying \"ask me about the pledge of allegiance\" and leaving a trail of horrified Canadians in your wake.\nTaking your four year old to protests because now they have tear gas made out of Pedialyte.\nBeing $300 deep into the Dark Souls series but still not liking any of them.\nReplaying old video games because playing new ones is too stressful.\nRevisiting old media you've liked not because of the story but because it puts you in a place or mood.\nDeciding 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.\nHow Animal Crossing New Horizons probably saved the human species.\nOnly having so many button presses before your joints start to hurt.\nWhether 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.\n","content_html":"

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Lords:

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Microtopics:

\n\n","summary":"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.\r\n","date_published":"2020-10-26T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/0cc8bfbe-5b77-42b7-ba01-75fc03b65198.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":61158296,"duration_in_seconds":3822}]},{"id":"71af4c13-4d01-40cc-80b3-81ffa7d5300e","title":"52. Speak Moistly And Carry A Wet Stick","url":"https://topiclords.com/speak-moistly-and-carry-a-wet-stick","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nJenni is reachable at jenni@jennipolodna.com.\nChris is making cooking videos at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRsnCRAIi-VsRPPX4AtzVGQ/\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nPossibly having doppelgangers in the same physical universe on the other side of the Big Bang is creepy\nNever interfacing with the cool parts of baseball because the front-facing parts didn't appeal to you\n\n\nhttps://music.metafilter.com/8889/Jaylen-Please-Dont-Bean-My-Man\n\nThe 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?\nMiko 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.\"\nThe virality of the Cool S\nAZ 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?)\nAncient magicks and the price we pay for them\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nThe Korean spam company that owns the Video Games Taco domain name.\nWho owns the Video Games Taco AOL keyword.\nEditing video on an iPhone because you spilled coffee on your computer.\nRefusing to use your girlfriend's salty leavings to edit video.\nA symmetrical big bang implying an identical doppelganger Earth across the universe.\nTraveling across the universe to destroy your big bang doppelgangers with the understanding that they want the same thing and will meet you halfway.\nArguments that exist only to depress people because you can't do anything with the information.\nWhether or not the Big Bang knew about mirrors.\nHigher order thought leading to the possibility of altruism.\nThe Chris Hegemony.\nAn automatic eternal baseball simulation.\nGuessing what the cool part of baseball is and getting partial credit.\nSpeaking moistly and carrying a wet stick.\nVoting to open the forbidden book and now the umpires can incinerate you.\nMMO 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.\nMMO players designating certain players to run around and hit you with a stick until you stop breaking the rules.\nFinding out about Blaseball by dating and living with someone who is really into Blaseball.\nRefusing to read Homestuck because you've already read Problem Sleuth.\nBaseball having interesting rules but steadfastly refusing to market itself to game nerds.\nWhen the sausages would race.\nWhether there is Canadian bacon in this sausage race.\nFinding the web site that keeps track of the sausage mascot race results.\nWhether or not the chorizo sausage costume is wearing a sombrero.\nTrading the player who assaulted the sausage mascot to the Chicago Cubs.\nThe sausage race promotional posters having surprisingly interesting composition.\nPerforming an act of necromancy on Jaylen Hotdogfingers.\nRecreating the experience of people talking about a sport you don't follow except for a fake sport.\nA first-person confessional of what it's like to be a racing sausage.\nFinding out that the sausage races are never fixed and feeling relief that you can still believe in something.\nWhether you grew up trusting dishwashers.\nHow to get stabbed in the hand.\nHaving dish-related trauma.\nHaving an incredibly high spoon to fork ratio.\nYour spaghetti spoon.\nTaking a saw and turning any spoon into a fork.\nLoading the silverware drawer with four slots full of murder sporks pointing the wrong way.\nExisting for four nanoseconds and spending all four being angry about how your husband wants to load the silverware drawer.\nGod blaming you when they were the one who made the universe deterministic.\nRefusing to take the dish out of the dishwasher if it's still dirty, because god dang it you did your part.\nPunting a task to when you have more brain.\nWhether viewing your future self as a separate person is universal or distinct to American psychology students.\nDoing a study for the beer money and screwing up the study because you're ordering beer online during the study.\nHearing about a \"costumed ball\" and picturing Pom Pom in a Halloween episode.\nNot giving the inventor of roller skates too much credit because he didn't think of putting all the wheels in a row.\nInventing 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.\nDetermining 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.\nJohn Joseph Merlin's fart remover.\nThe Cool S of topics.\nGrowing up in a parallel Earth without the Cool S.\nPeople in the Amazon Basin who've never seen Goatse or the Cool S.\nWaking 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.\nFinding the Cool S in a painting from 1533, right above the hidden anamorphic skull.\nNeither the Animorphs or the Digimons having been invented in 1533.\nPutting a skateboarding dog in American Gothic.\nGoing back in time to hide the plot of 50 First Dates with Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore in the Edda.\nArizona's death of poisonous marsupials.\nGila Monsters being enraged at the sight of human testicles.\nFinding a black widow, a scorpion and a Gila monster in your yard all in the same day.\nImporting tropical plants without phyto certificates.\nBefriending the guy you met at the Sprint store.\nThe kind of person who seems cooler while they're working at the Verizon store than on Twitter.\nClinging to any shred of humanity you can find in the Sprint shop.\nThe wizard explaining that it's going to be another hour when you can see your curse amulet right there on the counter.\nApple biting Star Trek's style\nSitting down at the genius bar and ordering a Roy Rogers.\nApple running a contact tracing program so they can find out if you know any Android users.\nFinally deleting your Facebook and feeling free.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-10-19T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/71af4c13-4d01-40cc-80b3-81ffa7d5300e.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":59643612,"duration_in_seconds":3727}]},{"id":"95d4f09f-7e2e-408d-a8e0-80ecd96d23c3","title":"51. I Don't Want To Eat This Bug, Obviously","url":"https://topiclords.com/i-dont-want-to-eat-this-bug-obviously","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nBen is not on the Internet but is just happy to be here. He recommends Lindsay Ellis, an excellent film critic:\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCG1h-Wqjtwz7uUANw6gazRw \n\nRyan is The Man Who Messed Up Walking His Dog So Badly It Made The News.\n\n\nhttp://ryannorth.ca/\nhttps://twitter.com/ryanqnorth\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nBeing able to cook a recipe from your mind without being able to explain how.\n\n\nEvery 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.\n\nHow many times a day do you remember something stupid you've done in the past? Am I normal and developing as I should?\n\n\nThe Ice Magic jingle in Ben’s head for the rest of his life: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0rfL9d4MDJY\n\nI miss making a game that was immune to bug reports.\nDan 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:\n\n\nHuman: How do you avoid race conditions?\nAlien: We just look at the different futures and pick one without data races.\nAlien: How do you calm arithmetic when it's angry?\nHuman: Our math is not sentient.\"\nThe Atari 2600 screenshot Jim was thinking of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message\n\nWhat's the worst thing you've ever put in your mouth?\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_razor_clam\nFlake in Australia is a deep fried fillet of fish you can order at fish and chip shops: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flake_(fish) Usually about the length of a dinner plate.\n\nNintendo Labo is an industrial design marvel.\n\n\nWatch someone transform a Nintendo Labo keyboard into an actual synth! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CjLOElL0rY\n\nHas anyone else noticed that long-anticipated events eventually \"happen\" and are thereafter \"in the past\"?\nFor years my personal blog was the top internet resource for earlobe cysts.\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nTraveling to E3 from Australia.\nMaking games for the Nokia N-Gage.\nJust now realizing that \"Squirrel Girl\" rhymes.\nBluffing your way through a title pun because there's limited time in a game jam.\nA pun that you need to be both from England and New Zealand to get.\nProcedures for recreating an unknown recipe when the recipe changes as it's observed.\nA discrete series of steps that can be reproduced \nA bottomless measuring cup that keeps track of how much a substance that passed through it.\nA measuring cup that tells an anonymous third party you how much of a thing it holds, but doesn't tell the user.\nWhether or not anything comes up if you search the internet for minestrone soup recipes.\nGetting owned on Twitter after posting about the Ship of Theseus.\nFeeling dumb and then later feeling dumb about how you felt dumb.\nThe mortifying ordeal of being known.\nDismissing intrusive thoughts with a vocal tic or a spasm.\nRemembering advertising jingles from the 1980s all the goddamned time.\nWhether or not the Zest jingle invented the word \"zestfully\"\nCorporations owing serious back rent on the space in your brain taken up by advertising jingles.\nCrackly choc-ice.\nGoing into a deep existential dread about a forty-year-old t-shirt.\nCalling it the \"WC\" when it takes way longer to say \"WC\" than \"water closet\"\nAsking the waitress where the toilet is and she gives you a weird look and says \"in the bathroom, sir.\"\nOffering your top hat for the nobleman to micturate into.\nHaving an audience who sees cool literary references in your work and assumes you did them on purpose.\nWriting an impossible season cliffhanger believe that you're quiting the show, but then not quitting the show and having to somehow resolve the cliffhanger.\nThe biggest spoiler being whether or not a work is good or not.\nLiving vicariously through someone watching your favorite TV series for the first time.\nMeeting an alien race with sentient math.\nHaving just the one math but being certain that it's the only math.\nDoing your best to communicate with intelligent aliens but you can't think of anything to talk about.\nOnly trying to contact alien races that you have enough in common with to meaningfully communicate.\nWhat kind of math a salt-leech would invent.\nCoherent systems of mathematics that don't reflect reality.\nMaths that would hypothetically reflect reality better than ours, and how ours could do better.\nThe guy waking you up from your cryogenic sleep explaining to you that we know how to divide by zero now.\nKnowing that if the laws of physics change, your program will break.\nRecompiling once a year to make sure your program breaks when mathematical laws are updated.\nRealizing that the anecdote you're about to tell actually happened to your brother, not you.\nDiscovering that ants are extremely sour.\nOrdering 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!\"\nCrickets just being crunchy until you look at them and realize that you're definitely eating an entire being right now.\nBeing stuck with your lame fish and chips when Australians have badass shark and chips.\nThings you learned as a kid and never critically examined as an adult.\nRazor clams: the meal that bites back.\nBuilding a fully functional steering wheel, with levers and adjustable dials that click, out of cardboard and rubber bands.\nThe visual programming environment that comes with Nintendo Labo.\nBuying toys for an eight year old when your son is born because one day he'll be eight.\nArtisanal reprinted Nintendo Labo cardboard components on Etsy.\nTaking your cardboard Nintendo Labo synth on tour and seeing how many gigs it lasts for.\nEverybody really wanting to hear Jim's earlobe cyst story.\nJim's primary claim to fame before Frog Fractions.\nJim's top 3 earlobe cyst tips.\nJust how deceptively close to the jugular the earlobe is.\nGetting to watch a stranger's kid grow up because they don't believe you when you say they've got the wrong email address.\nThe kind of person who just assumes their email address is their name at gmail.com.\nHolding onto the last vapors of 2012 Twitter.\nLike finally talking to T-Rex.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-10-12T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/95d4f09f-7e2e-408d-a8e0-80ecd96d23c3.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":58318263,"duration_in_seconds":3644}]},{"id":"bf71354b-8621-4ed9-858b-bd5824aa480b","title":"50. Big Jesus Retouch Energy","url":"https://topiclords.com/big-jesus-retouch-energy","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nKev - https://www.radcade.com/\nChall - https://twitter.com/MrChrisLHall\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nRick Astley's Youtube channel in 2020\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/c/RickastleyCoUkOfficial/videos\nhttps://twitter.com/Foone/status/1303143128740720640?s=19\nhttps://twitter.com/necrosofty/status/1300908917896085505\n\nUnconsciously adjusting for sensory deficiencies\n\n\nhttps://www.improbable.com/2010/02/15/ig-nobel-acceptance-speech-knuckle-cracking/\nhttps://news.bme.com/2013/03/06/adding-and-subtracting/\n\nAll food photography of prawns in the UK use the same six genetically engineered prawns.\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/LRBbookshop/status/1301469852599754753\nhttps://youtu.be/J1NV6CUJl18\n\nNot A Butt Face asks: \"Numbers in games are too big. We should just use smaller numbers. YuGiOh and final fantasy monsters having tens of thousands of HP and your attacks doing hundreds or thousands of damage looks cool when you have those quad 9s pop up... but games like Paper Mario or Megaman Battle Network keeping damage and health numbers in the tens to hundreds range means you can mentally calculate damage difference and feel the impact more granularly.\"\n\n\nhttps://thespelunkyshowlike.libsyn.com/\nI forgot to mention another important aspect of BCD, which is that it rounds more intuitively than binary floating point math. Hence its use in calculators.\n\nMichael Jackson and the Sonic 3 soundtrack\n\n\nSonic Robo Blast 2: https://www.srb2.org/\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nThe raddest place to play web games.\nTopic Time.\nSomething the Algorithm decided you should know about.\nHaving a hairstyle identical to the one you had in that music video thirty years ago.\nHaving an appropriate face for your voice.\nRickroll Georg who lives in a cave and has rickrolled people over a billion times.\nThe patron saint of being disappointed.\nA bobblehead of Rick Astley on a crucifix.\nTaking the loupe out of your breast pocket to check if your date's crucifix is really Jesus or if it's Rick Astley again.\nThe YouTube algorithm deciding it's important that everyone learn how to make a house out of sticks in the swamp.\nWhat the Dancing Baby is up to these days.\nHow memes propagated before social media.\nA deep learning up-rez of the Dancing Baby at 1080p and 60FPS.\nA reverse engineered Diddy Kong 3D model with big Retouched Jesus energy.\nMemes: look 'em up.\nThe ethics of adding a moment of silence in post.\nGiving Rick Astley the Topic Lords Bump.\nMemorizing the eye test they give you at the DMV because you keep forgetting your glasses.\nThe guy who only cracked the knuckles of one of his hands to test the hypothesis that cracking your knuckles causes arthritis.\nRepeatedly breaking your knuckles so you can have enormous terrifying swollen knuckles and calling it a \"bone trick\"\nThe Bone Trick Brothers trying to out knuckle each other.\nThe doors that are now open to the Bone Trick Brothers.\nThe Bone Trick Brothers growing up to be insurance investigators specializing in knuckleheads.\nThe complete impossibility of photographing prawns.\nHaving to tell a\nA derivatives market for trading futures contracts against the six genetically engineered prawns used in all food photography.\nBeing totally bought into a complete lie because it was written in a convincing authorial voice.\nBeing convinced by photo evidence even though you haven't looked at the photo evidence.\nGetting your one mistake out of the way and having smooth sailing for the rest of your life.\nThis Headline is False.\nSquinting at a plate of colorful rice and trying to see a negative space prawn.\nScientists just realizing that nobody has cooked a real prawn in decades.\nThe last topic being a complete fabrication.\nOpening a hole in reality and pulling in alternate reality Topic Lords episodes where Jim is in a biker club and has guests named Rex.\nGetting notifications any time a podcast anywhere in the multiverse talks about you.\nNot even liking notifications from this universe.\nLyrics that sound like words but are not words.\nA podcast as a way for people who miss you after you die to listen to you talk for hours about inane bullshit.\nThe first year of Topic Lords topics in a coffee table book.\nWhen GPT-3 Jim is narrating the podcast of the future.\nInstead 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.\"\nWhether we're still talking about prawns.\nChunky Integers.\nFeeling the weight of smaller numbers better than enormous ones.\nThe advantages and disadvantages of binary-coded decimal.\nFeeding a virtual pet except you're just clicking on cookies.\nComparing sizes and distances and only really caring about order of magnitude.\nA ragtag team of Internet people spending decades elaborating on your game idea.\nDozens of people adding features that they think will be cool and hoping that after ten years of this a good game design will emerge.\nHow Micheal Jackson might hypothetically have written the Sonic 3 soundtrack.\nGetting excited to go down a YouTube rabbit hole.\nAn even cooler mystery than the mystery of the prawns.\nWhether you like a song being predicated on exactly how familiar it is to you.\nLoving the Sonic 3 soundtrack so much that you track down this Michael Jackson guy's other music.\nLike playing an ARG except you're just living your life.\nA 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.\nModding room-over-room into the Doom engine so that you can put loop-the-loops in Sonic Robo Blast 2.\nA great place you got here, lotta nice topics, really screams \"party.\"\nA part time paid employee who just came out of the woodwork.\nBeing a leaf node on the employment tree.\n","content_html":"

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

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Lords:

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-10-05T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/bf71354b-8621-4ed9-858b-bd5824aa480b.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":59670361,"duration_in_seconds":3729}]},{"id":"e9505236-aa26-4174-b592-ebc60ccf45ba","title":"49. A Very Wet Hell","url":"https://topiclords.com/a-very-wet-hell","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nApril is @aprilsaur on Twitter.\nJohn remains a mystery.\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nClimate-aware architecture\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/wrathofgnon/status/1013941701293928449\nhttps://99percentinvisible.org/episode/thermal-delight/\n\nOn Dungeons & Dragons: focusing on the characters vs focusing on the story\nWhy do people say \"ahh\" after taking a drink\n\n\nhttps://www.lbc.co.uk/radio/special-shows/the-mystery-hour/human-body/why-do-people-say-ahh-after-finishing-a-drink/\n\nMiko asks: \"Perpetual Stew, a food that instead of being cooked once and then eaten, continues to be cooked for up to five hundred years (while occasionally also being eaten, but not in its entirety)\"\nThat strange feeling when you move to a new state and the laws around plastic bags are different, and other weird differences between places\n\n\nThe Afghan-Mexican fusion burrito shop in Albany that we didn't name on the podcast: https://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/the-hot-shop/Location?oid=1113434\nYou want the \"tropical\" or the \"cajun,\" depending on how spicy you like it.\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nSeasons that aren't summer and states that aren't California.\nJohn of the Commonwealth of Virginia Johns.\nCalling yourself a Commonwealther but not knowing all the deep Commonwealth cuts.\nNot having a city name because you're between cities and so calling yourself a \"census designated place.\"\nAn experience that you had that is in the past.\nPlugging a suspiciously expensive hat that players love.\nNot being able to have hobbies because you just bought a house.\nCalifornia, where it's sunny for hundreds of years and then suddenly a thunderstorm covers the entire state in tens of thousands of lightning strikes.\nNot having to get your home repairs done before people visit because nobody can ever visit.\nThe good news is: podcasting.\nNot having had a basement in decades.\nDiscovering that Virgina is a tiny piece of a giant land mass called North America.\nBuying the Frog Fractions hat DLC for all your friends.\nAn extremely Californian form of hell.\nArchitects forgetting that climate exists after air conditioning is invented.\nFantasizing about winning the lottery when you never play the lottery.\nThe downside of climate control via architecture.\nThe feeling of tatami mats under your feet.\nRealizing that having bugs in your floor sometimes is just the price you pay for having floor mats that bugs like to live in.\nThe tortilla mouse story.\nDiscovering 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.\nCats discovering extremely stale candy in the cabinet under the sink.\nA squirrel spinning a corn tortilla like a steering wheel and eating it from the outside in.\nA squirrel spinning a tortilla like a sign spinner.\nJoining a D&D campaign late.\nKnowing what your characters are about and creating situations where the characters have something to play against.\nMaking sure your players have stakes in the story being told.\nA dope encounter on a luxury liner where you have to follow a bard with an anti-magic field.\nA D&D campaign where all the players just hang out and eat Doritos.\nCrafting a narrative by building outwards from a single dramatic moment.\nNot knowing anything about the company you own half of.\nThe mystery of the Ultraviolet City.\nCollaboratively inventing a story with your friends.\nHaving a beverage with you and being able to test a beverage hypothesis.\nThe sensation of a little bit of cool air passing over the various nerve endings in the inner mouth area.\nWhether pooping is a social construct.\nA two year old fixating on the color of Pepsi.\nTripping out on your own sensory experience.\nSome real good honest mischief.\nTaking a deeper breath so you can drink more.\nGetting out the whiteboard to teach your infant son how to drink and belch.\nA gentle sweet boy forcibly closing your laptop so you'll pay attention to him.\nPerpetual stool, which also hangs around for 500 years.\nLiving for as long as you can keep the stew going.\nBeing caretaker for a stew that is 300 years older than you.\nMaking sure you eat all the meat out of your stew before it goes bad and spoils the rest of the stew.\nFilling your house with the smell of fresh baked bread.\nA bread recipe where you just put all the ingredients in a pan and then bake it.\nA gradient of cheese.\nBroccoli with horrible stinky cheese melted on top.\nJumping on any excuse to make an elaborate ridiculous meal.\nVisiting your friends in Virginia but never talking to them because of COVID.\nGoing ballistic whenever you see a deer.\nMaking everyone sign an NDA before they can listen to this episode of your podcast.\nSome sort of palace of food.\nTwo grocery bags being filled before you even realize what's happening.\nStipulating that the burrito rant has occurred.\nDiffering vehicle registration laws in Virginia and California.\nRunning a bunch of stop signs because they don't write the word \"stop\" on the ground in Portland, they only have the red sign.\nHow to proceed with the ARG when you believe you've solved the mystery of John's identity.\n","content_html":"

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Microtopics:

\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-09-28T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/e9505236-aa26-4174-b592-ebc60ccf45ba.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":65281881,"duration_in_seconds":4080}]},{"id":"6057f430-b9c3-4cfa-b271-96b569b965ca","title":"48. Long Furby","url":"https://topiclords.com/long-furby","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nAbby\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/mizabitha\nhttp://abbydenton.podbean.com/\n\nJohn\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/YouOldSoAndSo\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nA-life and v-pets of the late 90s: why did they die, where do we see them today (pokemon go, etc)\n\n\nNano Pets commercial with catchy jingle: https://youtu.be/R_KIwHHMVmQ?t=298\nThe only Wappy dog review on Metacritic: https://www.pocketgamer.com/articles/047860/wappy-dog/\nStack Up video by Jeremy Parish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cb8RHzSW2yo\nStack Up in WarioWare, Inc.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WBXh5cLJt4\nA Long Furby: https://twitter.com/LongFurby/status/1002690751988453379\nAnother Long Furby: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/long-furby-wife-guy\nFurby source code: http://www.seanriddle.com/furbysource.pdf\nDadDoes review of Wappy Dog: http://www.daddoes.com/3912/wappy-dog-review/\n\nSan Diego, CA\n\n\nEverything John forgot to mention: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Diego_County,_California\nTorrey Pines State Natural Reserve®: https://torreypine.org/\nGeisel Library: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geisel_Library\nSan Diego Zoo Safari Park: https://www.sdzsafaripark.org/\nInternational Cottages at Balboa Park: http://www.sdhpr.org/\nSalty licorice/salmiak: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salty_liquorice\nI have many friends, and am very popular, and awesome, and rumors about my smell are greatly exaggerated- John.\nSan Onofre Nuclear Generating Station: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Onofre_Nuclear_Generating_Station\nSan Diego depicted in the 1998 Midway arcade game California Speed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8lSX1aUHQw\nHotel del Coronado: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel_del_Coronado\n“Nobody’s perfect.”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mHhr-aaLnI\nHarmony Gold’s most popular move in years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qk3p6hIdVeM\nSend your Robotech questions and comments to: https://twitter.com/marwilliamson\nCalifornia is on fire; get in the van, loser, we’re all moving to Pittsburgh.\n\nBloodlust Software and the 90s indie game scene\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rf5KIss6csA\nhttps://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9a48z3/the-story-of-nesticle-the-ambitious-emulator-that-redefined-retro-gaming\n\nNot A Butt Face asks: \"Marble Hornets Sex Tape ie. A Found Footage Style Webseries but the footage being sifted through is on Sex Tapes and just out of frame or partially obscured is a lurking unknown creature. Could this ever work?\"\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nBeing a cyborg and being out of the closet.\nDoing standup comedy in an empty room.\nFiguring out the best way to get a podcast onto your phone.\nKevin Spacey ruining your podcast.\nA 20th-anniversary digital Tamagotchi.\nF2P Tamagotchi all getting horrible pain disorders that demand you pay daily microtransactions or they just scream all day.\nA large company that operates suspiciously.\nReading a lot of Newsweek in grade school.\nGetting high on your own supply of Newsweek.\nAn eight year old wearing a blazer with elbow pads picking up a Newsweek at the book fair to read about Tamagotchi.\nShaking the Chao garden to make the Chao fight.\nWhether or not Nintendogs go to heaven.\nNeglecting your real dog because you have an exciting new virtual dog.\nSickening podcast guests with your Pokemon Go strategies.\nThe sensor on Wappy Dog's tail that only exists so it can get upset that you pulled its tail.\nThat one banger on the Wappy Dog OST.\nYour Robotic Operating Buddy's ability to pick up discs of a certain size and move them in an arc around itself.\nPlaying 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.\nThe baffling absence of YouTube videos of Gizmo Furby interacting with Yoda Furby.\nSteven 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.)\nA village of Furbies living on after the extinction of the human race.\nYes! Dad does!\nWappy Dog being immortal, but if he did die somehow he'd go straight to hell.\nPikachu turning to the player and asking \"who was the last person you kissed?\"\nTrying to make a game that creates the same reaction in every player.\nConfusing Yoot Saito and Noob Saibot.\nPlaying SimCity 2000 on a Game Boy Advance.\nBecoming a chef so that you can figure out why burritos are better in San Diego than anywhere else in the world.\nA library raised up in little feet with a swirly tail called The Spang-Dangler Building.\nA library that looks like a big concrete tree.\nA library that looks like a space invader.\nDiscovering Finnish Salty Licorice and finally not having to share your candy with your friends.\nLurking in the floorboards so that you can visit your introvert friend without them noticing.\nThose big concrete nipples on Camp Pendleton.\nDriving from Camp Pendleton to Mexico in less than a minute and then turning around and driving across an aircraft carrier.\nDoctor Seuss's favorite San Diego hangouts.\nWhether Jack Lemmon likes it hot in the ending of Some Like It Hot.\nTaking part in the panda breeding program in the 70s.\nNot knowing what the San Diego Convention Center looks like outside of Comic Con and just assuming it's always swarming with nerds.\nNone of the speakers showing up for the big Robotech panel at Wondercon so the marketing director steps up with PowerPoint presentation describing Robotech merch.\nEveryone losing their shit over Robotech skate decks.\nSinging and dancing when the sky turns black.\nTrying to hide violence from children so the children rebel by celebrating violence as much as possible.\nA full-featured Mortal Kombat clone developed by two high school students.\nWhether One Must Fall stands up.\nChoosing to release the first free-and-good-enough NES emulator and calling it NESticle.\nHow the mouse pointer for NESticle was actually a severed hand, and only the Windows icon was a scrotum.\nKeeping your emulation legit by deleting your ROMs every 24 hours.\nThe only place the long-rumored SNESticle was ever released.\nHow early SNES emulators didn't handle transparency so you had to manually toggle the cloud layer in order to see anything.\nShock value Flash cartoons before and after 9/11.\nA gif of a plane crashing into Oprah.\nGoing into work each day with the intent of trying to get fired.\nWho today is carrying on the Bloodlust Software ethos.\nMaking the same ultra-violent video game as everyone else but adding narration explaining that \"violence is bad and this game is important.\"\nA hyper-detailed art style evocative of biology and gross innards without actually depicting any gore.\nA tasteful logo that represents a butt pooping.\nA barely-visible monster lurking in the background of every video uploaded to Pornhub.\nPorkin' Across America.\nFinding people who were already going to make a series of sex tapes and offering to lurk in the background in your Slenderman costume.\nTraining a neural network to insert Slenderman into the background of every movie.\nWriting erotic House of Leaves fan fiction and waiting for the Internet to discover and reenact it.\nAn art critic giving your life a B+.\n","content_html":"

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

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Lords:

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-09-21T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/6057f430-b9c3-4cfa-b271-96b569b965ca.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":65805166,"duration_in_seconds":4112}]},{"id":"ad133e0c-219a-446b-93f6-6650e51b1bff","title":"47. Santa Barbarella","url":"https://topiclords.com/santa-barbarella","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nChris's album \"The Lost Backups\" is out now!\n\n\nhttps://b-e-e-k.bandcamp.com/\nhttps://twitter.com/CHRISdelCAMINO\nhttps://www.instagram.com/chrisdelcamino/\n\nJimmy is on LinkedIn.\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkd3_fowcFs\nhttps://open.spotify.com/track/4nHfs2e1bRAeS5JHVa50yh?si=EO2vB_DQSrGJ5ov7s5x0Bw \n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\n22 years later, I am able to answer Rimbo's question he asked me on the way to Wesside '98: \"What is an Obispo\"\nWhy \"Starflight\" is the greatest PC game ever made\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starflight\n\nDrums that you play standing up (and double-sided drums)\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pz8XELwxAuw\n\nBulbous Cretin asks: \"Tweeting the contents of Fred Flinstone’s frozen carcass before you dig in\"\n\n\nhttps://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/12/permafrozen-dinner/604069/\n\n16 bits is not enough and destroyed music\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nPlugging a 21 year old song that you still can't believe you wrote.\nMusicians deserving royalties.\nThe secret fourth guest.\nThe rolling golden hills driving down the 101.\nKnowing all the technical musical terms in Spanish but not knowing how to say \"mop.\"\nWhat would happen to the Cookie Monster if Big Bird was blue.\nWhether or not the Topic Lords audience knows about the demo scene.\nWhether or not Unreal by Future Crew is the same thing as Unreal Engine by Tim Sweeney.\nDemo scenes and then demo parties.\nVisiting Montreal and hiding in a high school gym for three days rather than seeing the amazing city with its amazing architecture.\nWanting to hold the Great American Demo Party.\nWhether or not you should cover the ice when you hold a huge party in an ice rink.\nAssembly 2010 mostly being a big LAN party with the demo scene folks tucked away in the corner.\nThe sun going down at 11 PM.\nBoozembly 2010 taking place in the woods behind Assembly 2010.\nPlugging a PC keyboard into your Mac and all the keys work perfectly in Schism Tracker.\nGiving up on the Macintosh after decades because Mac hardware and MacOS are terrible now.\nA laptop that is so broken that it shuts down every computer on the wifi network you try to connect it to.\nAdvertising the latest Macbook as having a physical escape key.\nRunning Ubuntu as an app on Windows.\nThe secret 16-color CGA mode if you plug in a composite monitor.\nModern nostalgia for the terrible four-color CGA palettes.\nStoring an entire universe on a two-sided 360k floppy disk.\nLanding on a planet and finding The Ancients and finding enough fuel to get to three stars over.\nStuffing The Ancients into your warp drive because there is no better fuel.\nA project where you don't have to worry about bugfixes because if something breaks, the user just runs it again.\nThe thousands or millions of people out there who would give you money if they knew your product existed.\nThe market for Frog Fractions-themed N95 masks.\nMaking 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.\nMisremembering which band's drummer plays a snare drum and a tranceaphone.\nA drum kit with tom toms so high that you have to jump up to reach them.\nTwo wildly different drum heads using the same resonation chamber.\nSoundproofing a shed by adding 2500 pounds of sheet rock to the walls.\nConverting sound pressure waves into heat.\nMeasuring the frequency response of these egg crates.\nPutting 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.\nWalking right up to your wall and speaking and it sounding like you plugged your ears.\nPlacing yourself in a space by listening to reflections.\nSpinning up the Periscope server on Fred Flintstone's frozen carcass so that you can Periscope yourself eating Fred Flintstone.\nMaking Fred Flintstone's frozen carcass lip-sync to WAP.\nWho, exactly, needs to apologize for this topic.\nDiscovering that humans don't have a gizzard and really wanting a gizzard.\nWhether or not a Twinkie is technically meat.\nTexas Twinkies.\nWanting to eat 35,000 year old Mammoth meat but it turns into a smelly liquid when you thaw it.\nThousand year eggs not looking a day older than 150.\nWhich genres CD quality is and isn't good enough for.\nFrequency-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.\nThe Magic Mushroom PC dot com.\nRunning timecube.com at the DOS prompt.\nClassical music having way too much dynamic range.\nRiding the volume knob to not go deaf while listening to the William Tell Overture.\nVisible color banding during dark scenes in a movie.\nEl Camino except it's Del like Del Taco.\nWhat LinkedIn is for.\n","content_html":"

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

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-09-14T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/ad133e0c-219a-446b-93f6-6650e51b1bff.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":56519367,"duration_in_seconds":3532}]},{"id":"d6133b6c-b999-466a-84cf-36814a887960","title":"46. Fetch Me A Renaissance Italy Nostalgia!","url":"https://topiclords.com/fetch-me-a-renaissance-italy-nostalgia","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nElena plugs whale sharks.\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_shark\nGood whale shark faces: \nhttps://www.businessinsider.com/whale-shark-was-caught-on-camera-trying-to-mate-2019-7\nhttps://www.livescience.com/55412-whale-sharks.html\n\nKappa is Kappa on glowfic.com and viniferavaria on Twitch.\n\n\nhttps://www.twitch.tv/viniferavaria\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nWhale sharks.\nAsk Me About My Bizarre Quasi-Fanfiction (Animorphs/Madoka thematic fusion, sword of truth retake, lilite satanist narnia...)\nDid you see that video where the Super Monkey Ball superfan went on a quest to find the narrator's voice actor?\n\n\nQuest to find narrator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inUkotGb-K4\nA supposed new SMB game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gA4bjZm902c\n\nA ZZT community member recreated the lost ZZT source code from scratch and it compiles to a byte-identical executable\n\n\nhttps://blog.asie.pl/2020/08/reconstructing-zzt/\n\nJosh asks \"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuai_Kuai_culture\"\n\n\nVan Halen and the brown M&Ms http://www.compliancebuilding.com/2009/08/03/compliance-van-halen-and-brown-mms/\n\nBug reports and changelogs from video games that are just close enough to real life to be surreal\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nThe whale shark's incredibly silly face.\nLilite Satanist Narnia.\nThe Satanist version of what Narnia is to Christians and Golden Compass is to atheists.\nTelling your best friend about the magical key you just found and going off together to have adventures.\nSuddenly 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.\nBuilding a paradise for people against their will.\nSeeing enough sexism that you have to invent a splinter sect to get rid of it.\nNostalgic fiction from people with really weird backgrounds.\nAn 80s-ass computer terminal with an extremely full ashtray next to it.\nNostalgia for 16th century Polynesia.\nSecond-hand nostalgia.\nGoing on a quest to find the voice actor of a beloved video game.\nWhether or not Sega is currently producing another Super Monkey Ball.\nWhether or not you should monkey some balls.\nTurning dials at the edge of a board and a ball bearing falls into a hole.\nGoing into the recording both with no context for the lines you are about to read.\nActors reading individual lines in a vacuum rather than reacting to each other.\nNot having a good way to order the lines in your branching script so you deliver the lines to the actor in alphabetical order.\nUsing CD audio to store your sounds so you can only have 99 individual things you can play.\nThe last of the Guild of Weavers.\nAll the adults getting turned into swans and flying away.\nAn adventure game where you play a sequence of notes to select a verb.\nNot having perfect pitch but being glad that there is a game mode for people who do.\nTrying to summon a demon from beyond time.\nEscaping reality with the other Weavers and all your friends are horrifically murdered and their ghosts are angry at you.\nPointing a decompiler at the game and typing in Pascal until it basically matches.\nComparing two executables by loading them both in a decompiler, rapidly switching between the windows and looking for differences on the screen.\nUsing the decompiler released by the NSA to reverse engineer ZZT, so you know the NSA must've reverse-engineered ZZT internally decades ago.\nWhether or not the ZZT source code was lost in an interesting way.\nHow ZZT and Unreal were both sold as a video game but really the part people were interested in was the level editor.\nMore man-hours than a man has.\nMMO developers releasing the client source code but not being allowed to release the server source code.\nNobody wanting to port a million line code base to another language.\nDoing your best to elide over the more boring details.\nFixing about 30 complier errors and getting about another 30 because the compiler doesn't have great error recovery.\nGoing back to Flickr to find even higher resolution photos of bugs having sex.\nChanging all the stars on the American flag to bugs.\nWhat was going on in France.\nHow to fix the problem when your game is crashing in France.\nOne browser interpreting your integer as a percentage and the other interpreting it as a decimal.\nUpending all of science because it's easier than disabling auto-formatting dates in Excel.\nApproaching a project with the design goal of being as outrageous as possible.\nPlaying a game where you're unsure whether the time it crashed was intentional.\nThe rigid set of best practices for using snack foods to ensure machinery keeps working correctly.\nThe Van Halen brown M&M story as a conscientiousness filter.\nThat 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.\nRules that exist mostly as a way to determine how much the participant cares about being a good member of the community.\nForgetting your girlfriend's birthday and going back in time to get her a present.\nSpending all day evaluating your list of people you might want to castrate.\nSatanists ritually sacrificing themselves.\nBeing attacked by necromantically re-animated yak hooves and hair.\nYour 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.\nThe process of getting dwarves to a place where they can do dwarf stuff.\nSadness that the badgers never made it into Faeries vs. Badgers.\nA son waking up any minute now.\n","content_html":"

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

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Lords:

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\n\n","summary":"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","date_published":"2020-09-07T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/d6133b6c-b999-466a-84cf-36814a887960.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":60693525,"duration_in_seconds":3793}]},{"id":"1c9cfd57-bd96-46e1-ad6b-fdfb36abbe03","title":"45. Remember To Pronounce The Apostrophe","url":"https://topiclords.com/remember-to-pronounce-the-apostrophe","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nJohn B is @YouOldSoAndSo everywhere.\n\n\n20th President of the United States James Garfield's proof of the Pythagorean Theorem: https://www.maa.org/press/periodicals/convergence/mathematical-treasure-james-a-garfields-proof-of-the-pythagorean-theorem\nKhan Academy video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EINpkcphsPQ\n\nNick is @NickPancakes on Twitter.\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nMicro game jams, Weekend of ZZT\n\n\nWarioWare D.I.Y. archive: https://archive.org/details/WarioWareDIYWarehouse\nSuper Metroid and A Link to the Past Randomizer (a.k.a. SMZ3): https://samus.link/\nSGDQ2019 co-op speedrun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uujsW7yFkZU\n\nThe primary motivation for information acquisition being grist for making and understanding jokes\n\n\nKen Jennings' books about knowledge acquisition and comedy:\nhttps://www.goodreads.com/book/show/79195.Brainiac\nhttps://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36373629-planet-funny\nThese two contain the sum of all human knowledge:\nhttps://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/1745/8107/products/IMG_E1971_1400x.JPG?v=1571480346\nhttps://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/45/BillyJoel_StormFront.jpg\n\nRoblox as the most popular game platform\n\n\nDownloading Wikipedia: https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/how-to-download-wikipedia/\nAll roads lead to \"philosophy\" on Wikipedia: https://flowingdata.com/2011/06/08/all-roads-lead-to-philosophy-on-wikipedia/\nAdopt Me!, one of the most popular games created in Roblox: https://roblox.fandom.com/wiki/DreamCraft/Adopt_Me!\nI Wanna Maker: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1114940/I_Wanna_Maker/\n\nQuill points out: this list of things unexpectedly named after people: https://notes.rolandcrosby.com/posts/unexpectedly-eponymous/\n\n\n\"Widenius has three children – My, Max, and Maria – who inspired the names for MySQL, MaxDB and the MySQL-Max distribution, and MariaDB\" https://twitter.com/davidjustodavid/status/1288903463422722049 \n\nBecoming a film nerd\n\n\nTurner Classic Movies, from the same company that brings you Mortal Kombat: http://www.tcm.com/\nThey Shoot Pictures, Don't They? - 1,000 Greatest Films, compiled using a Metacritic-like approach of looking at other people's lists: https://www.theyshootpictures.com/gf1000.htm\nAlso, their 1,000 Noir Films list: https://www.theyshootpictures.com/noir1000.htm\nThe Narrow Margin (1952): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044954/\nThe Tall Target (1951): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044105/\nA good starting list for train movies, by no means exhaustive or definitive: https://allgiftsconsidered.com/the-31-best-train-movies-of-all-time/\nList of films on Netflix from the year 2000 and before, total count at the time of search approx. 250, compared to around 3,500 for 2001-2020 : https://reelgood.com/movies/source/netflix?filter-year_end=2000\nKanopy, a movie streaming service you may be able to use through your local library: https://www.kanopy.com/\nQwikster, b. 2011 d. 2011: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/10/5-reasons-why-qwikster-is-now-deadster/246465/\n1939, Hollywood's \"annus mirabilis\": https://ew.com/movies/2019/12/22/1939-hollywoods-greatest-year/\n1957 in Film: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1957_in_film\nPatton Oswalt's book about becoming a film nerd, Silver Screen Fiend: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17571109-silver-screen-fiend\n\nCBoyardee, Barkley: Shut Up and Jam Gaiden, and the failure of Barkley 2.\n\n\nCBoyardee's Dilbert trilogy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6rGUlVvVJ4\nwww.nfl.com: Just check it out.\nBarkley, Shut Up and Jam Gaiden: https://www.talesofgames.com/related_game/barkley-shut-up-jam-gaiden/\nHardcore Gaming 101 article about the game: http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/barkley-shut-up-and-jam-gaiden/\nBarkley 2 Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/talesofgames/barkley-2-an-rpg-sequel-to-barkley-shut-up-and-jam\nBarkley 2 PAX Prime 2015 interview for PC Gamer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHSyDq_IyYE\nA longer look at Barkley 2 from that same PAX: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ni2hceqpqHA\nBarkley 2 - Janky Demo: https://talesofgames.itch.io/barkley-2\nThe gun's of Barkley 2: https://bowelflies.tumblr.com/post/185855518364/the-magical-realms-of-t%C3%ADr-na-n%C3%B3g-escape-from\nDingletopia, Gortarius' game that actually came out: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1286140/Dingletopia_Nation_Under_Siege_by_Orcs/\nNot mentioned in the show, but CBoyardee also did some writing on the 2019 video game Katana ZERO: https://www.katanazero.com/\nCyberdwarf Body Pillow (Warning: Tsundere): https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/767094-dakimakura-body-pillow\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nWhat the insulin pod had to say.\nAn extremely sexy insulin pod telegraphing its own death.\nMourning many insulin pods at a rapid clip.\nPresident Garfield's proof of the Pythagorean theorem.\nMaking your first ZZT game.\nDoing fetch quest after fetch quest until two AIs fall in love and a nuclear reactor explodes.\nAttempts to archive the user-uploaded games before the Wario Ware DIY servers get shut down.\nThe only Meat Boy game to come out for the Wii.\nA demon that can only exist on sand and is formed of the sand.\nShareCart, the save format shared between many different games so you can save in one game and load in another.\nHow much Dr. Sbaitso likes you and how much his henchmen like you.\nSpending an afternoon trying out randomly generated Game Genie codes.\nFlipping random bits to see what comes out there other end.\nGenerating a hash of a large file twice in a row and getting two different results.\nSeeing 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.\nThe randomizer hack that combines Link to the Past and Super Metroid into a single game.\nThirty people all making different games and hoping something interesting comes from mashing them together.\nWhy the heck everyone is suddenly talking about cake.\nThe primary use for your understanding of the world being making and understanding comedy.\nYour filters going to sleep first, so you make weirder connections when you're half-asleep.\nHow everyone would know all the world capitals if you had also been obsessed with them as a child.\nSpending 10% of your brain on how to spell antidisestablishmentarianism and the rest on the lyrics to \"We Didn't Start The Fire.\"\nHow to download Wikipedia so you can give your son Wikipedia before you give him internet access.\nHow Roblox is a much more popular game platform than any you've ever touched.\nNot 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.\nThe incredibly accurate clone of Counterstrike that some rando made inside of Roblox.\nRoblox users calling platforming levels \"Obbies.\"\nThe window in your life where you don't talk to children.\nWatching 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.\nA Roblox level that is just a series of waterslides.\n\"I Wanna Maker,\" for making your own masocore platformers.\nHow PageRank is named after Larry Page and Debian is named after Deb and Ian.\nHow Price Club is named after Sol Price and Main St. in San Fransisco is named after Charles Main.\nJim trying to figure out when humans first called a street Main St. and giving up.\n\"Taco Bell\" appropriating respectfully because it respects the romance language adjective-noun order.\nReading about aptronyms in Marilyn vos Savant's column.\nSending your octuplets to a carnival owned by Larry Kidkill.\nThe late NASCAR racer Dick Trickle.\nChanging our names to Fuck and starting a band called The Fucks and that's it, that's the tweet.\nUnemployment as a prerequisite for starting any hobby as an adult.\nFilm Noir figuring out how to tell adult stories after the Hayes Code was enacted.\nThe constraints of being set on a train leading to compelling storytelling.\nThe train movie as a slightly less constrained bottle episode.\nWhether they allow trains on the Internet Movie Car Database.\nYelling at librarians until morale improved.\nLibraries often offering ebooks and movie streaming.\nNetflix 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.\nFilmmakers being huge nerds and that's why they keep making movies about making movies.\n1939 and 1957 in filmmaking.\nThe history of Barkley Shut Up And Jam Gaiden.\nDestroying Manhattan by performing a Chaos Dunk.\nSetting your cyberpunk universe after basketball has been outlawed.\nThe dangers of running a successful Kickstarter.\nThe game design conceit that there should be way too much of everything.\nBizarre unthinkable development processes that somehow in the end produce a shippable game.\nA 397-page forum thread of people asking \"Where is Barkley 2?\"\nThe second concrete product of the Barkley 2 Kickstarter, after the CyberDwarf body pillow.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-08-31T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/1c9cfd57-bd96-46e1-ad6b-fdfb36abbe03.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":60716931,"duration_in_seconds":3794}]},{"id":"0ec26867-9a65-40df-8bb2-56a10881837e","title":"44. Oops! All Biogel","url":"https://topiclords.com/oops-all-biogel","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nJenni is emailable at jenni@jennipolodna.com and plugs Chris's cooking channel on Youtube. \nhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRsnCRAIi-VsRPPX4AtzVGQ/\nMaxx is on Twitter as @mechcem or emailable at maxx.infinity@gmail.com and plugs their game bookclub thing.\nhttps://groups.google.com/g/game-book-club/about\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nNot caring if you're duplicating thought work that was done by a ton of people forever ago because you're having a good time.\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punnett_square\n\nCorrection on Japanese crop microbiome.\nThe PXL-2000 camcorder\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PXL-2000\n\nThis is the first Wikipedia page for a movie that has the entire movie embedded in the page:\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_to_Bali\n\nSearch and rescue as an excuse for robotics research.\nWhat if poop worked like, you ate dinosaur chicken nuggets, you got dinosaur poops.\nIt's annoying that it took me so long to realize I love writing dialog trees.\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nThinking that other people have had sex, when they haven't.\nMaking a very good one about fried green boys.\nThe dominant recessive two alleles punnett square stuff.\nAll the mystery flowers that have been reproducing willy nilly.\nFinding out about Redstone and reinventing computing from scratch.\nWhether figuring out all the crafting shapes is a good part of Minecraft.\nWaking up in an abandoned cryogenics facility and enjoying the plastic bag upgrade tree.\nWaking up in an abandoned cryogenics facility but there's lots of fish sticks so you just eat fish sticks.\nWhether fish sticks are frozen fish or are born sticks.\nMaking a stick into a spear by holding it in your hand.\nA shopping cart breaking into almost enough pieces to make a new shopping cart.\nThe soul of the shopping cart ascending into heaven so you have to play a fishing minigame to get it back.\nA good starter project where after your finish it there are birds in it right now.\nBeginner knowledge work projects feeling useless because somebody already wrote the program you just wrote.\n3D printer projects resulting in a physical artifact even when there's an error.\nConstantly being annoyed that you're not a scientist in the 1300s.\nHow 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.\nAn \"octant\" possibly being 33% more than a sextant but nobody on the podcast is sure.\nTrying to figure out what \"congresstant\" means.\nJapanese far right nationalists being terrified of Koreans touching their rice.\nHearing a Japanese person say a fact about Japan and just assuming that it's true.\nWes Anderson accidentally validating far right Japanese nationalists by putting their caricatures of a foreigner in Isle of Dogs.\nWatching Japanese television because your Japanese isn't good enough to tell who's being a far right douchebag.\nMuting a TV show and procedurally generating subtitles whenever someone speaks.\nLocalizing an anime without knowing what characters were originally saying.\nSitting there with your 2020 sensibilities going \"oh my god.\"\nSaving video to audio cassette.\nThe camera that filmed the two minute performance art scene in Richard Linklater's Slacker.\nNot having time to watch Monty Python movies but hanging eventually internalizing the whole oeuvre from when fans quote it.\nPicking a movie and having to communicate only in lines from that movie for the rest of your life.\nLooking 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.\nNot having seen Casino but deciding to say only things that they say in Casino from now on.\nAccording to this one web page Jim found, Team America World Police only having 1600 words in it.\nHearing a line from Casino and immediately forgetting it.\nSinging Come to my Window by Melissa Etheridge except with blueberries.\nA 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.\nWatching the entire movie inside the Wikipedia page for the movie.\nEmbedding Myst in Wikipedia.\nPutting on your business card that the Frog Fractions Wikipedia page is rated \"GA\" for \"good article.\"\nPlugging the Wikipedia article for Frog Fractions into GPT-2 and learning facts about future sequels.\nInsect-inspired robots.\nPeople 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.\nMaking robots that are too small to get military funding because they can't carry a payload.\nTaking an ultrasound of a fly while it's flying.\nInventing the idiom \"cheap as a moth.\"\nHarvesting 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.\nMoths not having a circulatory system but they do some stuff with liquids.\nWhether or not Jim's wife needs an army of robot bugs for her park ranger crew.\nYour life goal being to annoy your neighbors with the self-replicating robot mosquito you invented.\nSmearing bio gel on you battery connectors and then inserting any foodstuff into the battery compartment.\nPutting flies on leashes.\nA robot-fighting praying mantis with a perfect record.\nThe mantis refusing to fight any given robot more than once.\nOops, All Biogel.\nEnjoying looking at all your little dinosaur poops.\nEating alphabet soup consecutively and sending a photo of the toilet to your message recipient.\nDiscovering your superpowers at a baby food tasting party.\nEating baby food for the first time and vienna sausages bursting from every pore.\nIdentifying a strange substance by putting it in your mouth.\nTasting the ash of a cremated person and pooping out their face, then applying the electricity and they come back to life.\nNot discovering that you love writing dialog trees until you're 41.\nMaking a mixtape of Nintendo DS ROMs for your partner.\nWriting a dialog tree into a stressful email so you get all the future stressful emails out of the way too.\nYour girlfriend reading your dialog tree linearly so she thinks you want to break up, get married, have a baby, and move to Pittsburgh.\nGmail basically being a dialog tree nowadays.\nThe 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!\"\nOstensibly being a comedy writer but laughing harder at dialog written by an algorithm.\nJapanese people making an acknowledgement noise for every word you say, and feeling way too validated.\nReading RPG-style text and imagining somebody making a grunting noise every time a letter appears.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.\r\n","date_published":"2020-08-24T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/0ec26867-9a65-40df-8bb2-56a10881837e.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":55710198,"duration_in_seconds":3481}]},{"id":"46c7904d-ecda-4b8a-a7d8-77ebdc843861","title":"43. You Vs. The One Your Mom Told You To Worry About","url":"https://topiclords.com/you-vs-the-one-your-mom-told-you-to-worry-about","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nAlexander teaches math at the college level, which has been quite an experience the past few months.\nJonah makes music for video games, for example Pony Island.\n\n\nhttp://works.rip/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nTI-83 games. Specifically, Tie Fighter / Bobsled / Indy500.\nThe jazz fusion act that inspired all video game music.\n\n\nThis is the concert we refer to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBD1_mrRUIk\nBut these are the specific T-Square songs included in the episode:\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZaUPGjjA4c\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRRmA1I3UNY\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6V3KDQh9DVI\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYie77YHkns\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EWI_%28musical_instrument%29\n\"Pronounced EE-wee also known as a robo-oboe\"\nThis particular Adventure Playground seems to imply the purpose of the nails is to allow children to build things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_Playground_(Berkeley)\n\nWikipedia in different languages has different opinions on stuff.\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture-bound_syndrome\n\nQuill asks: \"My name is [name] and i'm here to say [...]\" rap cliche can be dated back to a 1940's Chiquita banana commercial\"\n\n\nhttps://youtu.be/RFDOI24RRAE\nhttps://99percentinvisible.org/episode/whomst-among-us-let-the-dogs-out/\nhttp://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/VOLUME05/Oldsweetsongs.shtml\n\nJamming at full leisure speed.\n\n\nhttps://jsenzel.itch.io/old-friends\n\nCartography and meteorology on weirdly-shaped fantasy worlds.\n\n\nhttps://imgur.com/a/AFwvAoB\n\nThe Doctor Who theme was created before widely available synthesizers.\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75V4ClJZME4\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkIEkLww3lg\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0aflcF0-ys\nhttps://goodak.weebly.com/\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tide-predicting_machine#/media/File:099-tpm3-sk.jpg\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_KLF\nhttps://freshonthenet.co.uk/the-manual-by-the-klf/\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nUsing only the funny TLDs.\nTrying to figure it out as you go.\nGetting seriously into online homework grading.\nLearning the weird object-based Perl they use for checking homework answers.\nA podcast with a larger than normal demographic of math teachers.\nThe most accessible way to develop very small games.\nWhether Tie Fighter / Bobsled / Indy 500 is one game or several.\nSwapping games over the audio port.\nAdding a line from Cool Runnings and renaming your racing game to Bobsled.\nRemaking the entirety of Pokemon Red in a TI calculator.\nAll real world work being done in ways that would get you expelled if you were still in college.\nCommissioning your high school classmate to make a bowling minigame in TI-Basic.\nA 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.\nJazz fusion's towering influence over video game music.\nThinking a work is wholly original because you have no context for its inspirations.\nPlaying a riff from Kirby's Dream Land in a solo over Chick Correa's \"Spain.\"\nA band fronted by duelling wind controllers.\nHaving fun exploring and jumping on things.\nJumping into any part of a three hour concert and hearing a water level.\nJapanese video games' sense of mystery benefitting from the American ignorance of their influences.\nDeliberately exposing children to risk in play.\nRigorous safety procedures pushing back against incredibly unlikely outcomes.\nSmall children being basically indestructible.\n48 hours of sitting in a room with fans blowing on you, and you're a ghost.\nGetting a lot of nosebleeds and hearing everyone's pet remedy for nosebleeds.\nTrying all the nosebleed remedies and ending up with a bunch of cool hobbies.\nYour favorite nosebleed remedy being dipping your french fries in the chocolate shake, not because it stops the bleeding but because it's delicious.\nWikipedia's surprising plausibility.\nReading Wikipedia and believing things on it even though anyone can edit it at any time.\nPrivate services that seem like they really ought to be a branch of the government.\nThe pre-history dark ages from which we have no mind uploads.\nEach of the Rice Krispies elves singing a verse about their onomatopoeic sound.\nGrandmaster Flash watching that Chiquita Banana commercial in the 40s and being like \"someday I'm gonna be a rapper and bite that one line.\"\nTracing a Miami Bass chorus back to a football chant.\nThe Cool S and the Epic of Gilgamesh being of similarly obscure origins.\nThe intense frustration of not being able to tell the difference between writing a song and remembering a song.\nThe damning similarities between \"Yesterday\" and \"Georgia on my Mind.\"\nMusic lawsuits being decided by juries of non-musicians.\nA Midsummer Night's Dream containing a performance of the Greek play that Shakespeare ripped off when writing Romeo and Juliet.\nHow to pronounce Ludum Dare.\nTaking the weekend to do a game jam and making a game in about four hours and then deciding to watch a movie and relax.\nAcrobats with extreme control of their bodies, except for time management.\nLearning to scope on the fly by doing game jams.\nStarting with a bouncing ball no matter how big your game idea is.\nDoing an entire company's worth of git merges and everything collapses into a steaming heap.\nJoining a game jam as a scrum master.\nPutting separate minigames together into a single game.\nHaving no idea how to estimate the time it takes to do tasks you do every day.\nMaking a spreadsheet to find out whether you're making a new web site for your Fall class.\nPlaying Frog Fractions 2 to find Alexander's chess jam game.\nA problem with no fully satisfying solution but hundreds of partially satisfying solutions.\nPeeling an orange and then try to make the peel as flat as possible.\nWhat the day/night cycle would be like on a donut planet.\nTrying to imagine the political machinations informing the cartography of a fantasy race.\nA tide chart for if you have two moons and you're inside a donut.\nLand-biased maps where the land is displayed intact but oceans are cut into pieces.\nA map displaying any given straight-line path from the front of a penny to the back.\nUnwittingly making merciless caricatures of Mr. Lincoln.\nYou 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.\nThe performance of the 1963 Doctor Who theme.\nDoing what feels like interesting work enabled by modern tools and finding out someone did similar work 100 years ago using much more primitive tools.\nCutting audio tape into microscopic strips and rearranging them into interesting sonic textures.\nA weird proto-physical synth non-synth thing.\nMoving your hand in physical space with no visual reference like a chump.\nArtists doing laborious work with primitive tools when they could've just waited 100 years and it would've been so much easier.\nA phone app that you take photos with but you have to wait three days after you finish the roll to see the photos.\nAll the joy of constraint and none of the headache of actually working with 8-bit hardware.\nInventing the math and physics to predict the tides as you're building your tide-predicting machine.\nWriting a song about how to get a #1 single and then doing it.\nHaving a bunch of hit singles and then burning the money you made.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-08-17T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/46c7904d-ecda-4b8a-a7d8-77ebdc843861.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":62260036,"duration_in_seconds":3891}]},{"id":"cca84e58-7e01-4157-b6d7-972ae18ea13b","title":"42. Refrigerator Roy, or Stephanie I'm So Sorry","url":"https://topiclords.com/refrigerator-roy-or-stephanie-im-so-sorry","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nElizabeth is not on the Internet but plugs http://oyate.org/, which puts historically accurate books in the hands of Native American children.\nErica is already on the roof of your car and plugs Glittermitten Grove, a game which is full of surprises https://store.steampowered.com/app/536890/Glittermitten_Grove/\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nI'm going to have to ask you to leave the goat outside: driving the bookmobile in rural Washington.\n\n\nBookmobiles as a center of rural life: https://news.wsu.edu/2015/04/08/the-world-on-wheels-bookmobile-the-center-of-rural-life/\n\"Every time we avalanched from one end of the stage to the other, the Unabridged Dictionary would come too\" and other hazards of driving with books, from Mark Twain’s \"Roughing It\": https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3177/3177-h/3177-h.htm#linkch03\nThe Ellerbe Lawnmower Races: https://www.yourdailyjournal.com/sports/72886/ellerbe-lions-club-hosting-local-race-saturday\nHot Saw: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Saw\n\nArguing with your husband about the insects in your fridge.\n\n\nThe tiny moth that haunts Erica’s fridge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracillariidae\n\nHow do you pick an effective charity?\n\n\nErica's effective charities:\nAmerican Civil Liberties Union: https://www.aclu.org/\nSouthern Poverty Law Center: https://www.splcenter.org/\nNatural Resources Defense Council: https://www.nrdc.org/\nDoctors Without Borders: https://stories.msf.org.uk/rescue/index.html\nPage Ahead: http://www.pageahead.org/\nOkapi Conservation Project: https://www.okapiconservation.org/\n\nErotica in the public library.\n\n\nElizabeth says: \"The best way to find the erotica in your library is to use the subject headings in the [WorldCat] catalog [https://www.worldcat.org/]. The easiest way to do this is probably to search the catalog for '50 Shades of Grey' or some other erotic novel you know is in the collection, select the book to open up it’s library record, then scroll down to the subject headings and select 'Erotic Fiction.' That should bring up everything in your local library system. If you’re looking for a particular kink, I suggest searching for a reading list on goodreads, then checking the world catalog, located at WorldCat.org to find the library copy closest to you. Remember, even if your library doesn’t own a copy, you can still request an inner library loan- just call the branch nearest to you and ask for help. :)\"\nMenage series H.O.T. Cops: https://www.goodreads.com/series/60473-h-o-t-cops\nHot cops, the gay erotica series: https://books.google.com/books/about/Hot_Cops.html?id=z_4Gp2msCZIC\nA real Tingler: Unicorn Butt Cops Beach Patrol https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24896554-unicorn-butt-cops\n\nHiring assistants (for field biology) and then trying to live with them.\n\n\nThe Bowerbirds Hymn for a Dark Horse, written during an otherwise unproductive field season: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3JoUAJv82I&list=PLOJWuc3CN303oJ_TuSjU1C4J03uAGWlgv\nIt's all tied up with memories of living in the Rocky Mountains for me, but it's a very North Carolina album. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yf1v9_ZOtY&list=RDv3JoUAJv82I&index=2\nThe Bowerbirds get their own details wrong interview: https://redefinemag.net/2009/bowerbirds-band-interview/\nObsessive Compulsive Disorder is not just about being neat: https://greatist.com/live/what-is-ocd-not-a-neat-freak#1\n\"[Passengers] always run to the side when there is anything to see, whereas a conscientious and experienced steamboatman would stick to the center of the boat and part his hair in the middle with a spirit level,\" and other wisdom of evenness from Mark Twain’s \"Life on the Mississippi\": https://www.gutenberg.org/files/245/245-h/245-h.htm \n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nBreaking format.\nRepresenting Native Americans with integrity and dignity.\nA video game that is full of surprises.\nA baby who wants string cheese so much he pulls the entire handle off of the refrigerator.\nLittle walking chaos machines with a penchant for string cheese.\nThe story of why you don't have a phone.\nDying of dysentery because of string cheese.\nReally getting the soap deep into that charging port.\nA giant red school bus but instead of seats it has bookshelves.\nBookshelves with seat belts.\nA very serious version of the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile.\nA small town with a population of 300 where nobody sees each other except for once a month when the bookmobile visits.\nA literacy earthquake.\nA therapy goat that doesn't have any paperwork because you just discovered that being around the goat makes you less anxious.\nSpreading hay all over the conference room and letting the guinea pigs loose.\nGuinea pigs who are not embraced by the community at large.\nGoats and libraries being natural enemies.\nAn enormous encyclopedia flying at your head every time you hit a bump in the road.\nSmall children encircling the Bookmobile and chanting because they are excited for books.\nLust for literacy.\nRemoving the governor from your riding mower and driving it over an obstacle course at 90mph.\nDividing your lawnmower races into weight classes.\nSouping up your eight foot chainsaw and every child in town immediately crying when you turn it on because your Hot Saw is so loud.\nTaking your three year old to see Jaws.\nSleeping through Alien (1979) as a six month old shaping your creative direction forever.\nBuying a corn dog the length of your femur.\nA corn dog that is so long that you can't hold it and put it in your mouth at the same time.\nPutting down a blue tarp because it's Washington and everything is done with blue tarps.\nCovering a tarp with dishwashing liquid and then putting kids in full body rubber tubes and goggles with slug antenna and making them race.\nMaking your slug race medal out of a metal that is constantly slimy.\nNegotiating getting a minifridge with your future roommate.\nThe special kind of organism that can overcome a plant's defenses to live inside of it.\nA moth living in your fridge and your husband is like \"that's not my moth.\"\nNot being able to release your refrigerator moth into the wild because you don't know that biome it came from.\nFinding out what parts of your diet you share with the moth in your fridge.\nA symphony of Roys.\nThe ant colony that has entirely taken over the bathroom who are all named Roy.\nThe amount of biomass required to observe you pooping before you'll get embarrassed.\nGiving a Lordy award to Refrigerator Roy.\nWhether what a given charity uses your money for is even that effective in the grand scheme of things.\nNot 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.\nReceiving more donations in a week than you have in the past 10 years and not having any idea what to do with the money.\nGiving money to the folks in the office passing the hat around, then finding out that they're using the money to go on vacation.\nGrocery stores gauging your level of disposable income by asking you to make charitable donations at checkout.\nLibraries shifting from providing people books they ought to read, to providing people with porn.\nJudging porn by its cover.\nRecommending Hot Cops without reading it yourself.\nBodice rippers written in the 90s starting a romantic relationship with a rape, but modern bodice rippers depicting explicit conversations about consent.\nTreating every request with dignity because if you have a cranky day you immediately lose the trust of the community.\nA middle-aged woman from a conservative community trusting you enough to ask for porn recommendations.\nA feud in the garden club about the etymology of the Purple Prussian Potato.\nComing in every week to ask the librarians how the Purple Prussian Potato got its name when it predates Prussia.\nA librarian getting through the terrible parts of their job so they can focus on the ridiculous potato question somebody asked.\n\"Unicorn Butt Cops Beach Patrol\" doing what it says on the tin.\nHaving 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.\nCalling 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.\nHiring 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.\nAll these problems going away if you just had a budget to hire people.\nHaving to carry twice as much water because the adrenaline jockey rushing ahead of you thinks he won't need any water.\nMeasuring plants for 14 hours a day.\nLI-COR machines that measure leaf respiration.\nComing 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.\nThe exhaustion of having to be in charge all the time because you live with your employees.\nRefusing to go to town for pizza because you can't afford to be friends with your employees.\nRealizing you're becoming somebody's dinner party story.\nDeveloping OCD in your first quarter of college and your roommate moving out because you don't have any coping strategies yet.\nYour time to blossom and find other weirdos like yourself, except it turns out even the weirdos don't want to know you.\nDiscovering 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.\nMaintaining totally symmetrical stimulus on the left and right sides of your body.\nSteamboat captains obsessed with navigating exactly down the middle of the Mississippi river.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-08-10T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/cca84e58-7e01-4157-b6d7-972ae18ea13b.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":71083991,"duration_in_seconds":4442}]},{"id":"6d7266ce-87d7-48b1-899d-302ba6686011","title":"41. Non-Euclidean Christianity","url":"https://topiclords.com/non-euclidean-christianity","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nRyan is @RyanIkeComposer on Twitter and @RyanIkeAudio on Instagram and is probably not working on Skyrim 2?\nTyriq is FourbitFriday everywhere and really wants to finish Catacomb Kids.\n\n\nhttps://www.ckgame.net/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nWhat's a fandom you're not a part of, but kind of wish you were?\nPointless Automatons\n\n\nhttps://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/opinion/future-scooters-central-park.html\nhttps://www.strandbeest.com/\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HitchBOT\nhttp://www.tweenbots.com\n\nPlease help reconstruct this lost pun: \"vegan jazz standards\" with nutritional yeast\nMallow asks: \"how do you grapple with / think about your legacy? (things that sprang to mind included the relevant timeframe, obligations to the future, how/what people inherit from their ancestors, and how (self-)censorship is a way to cut off a legacy)\"\nConsistency of idiolect\n\n\nDisfluencies providing value to the listener: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000300.html\n\nHow can we appeal to Gen Z so when they take over we aren't executed along with the Boomers?\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nClapping just because it's fun.\nA trainwreck of three people talking over each other.\nBeing in a corridor and punching a weird alien.\nTopic thirst.\nPokemon Snap making you even more of a pariah, if that's even possible.\nThrowing apples at a Snorlax until it wakes up, like the shitty kid at the zoo.\nA reverse body snatcher situation, where you're the only alien walking around in a skin suit.\nEnjoying a game more if it doesn't involve collecting things.\nGoing to a free R&B concert every Sunday.\nGoing to a white small town Lutheran church which was boring and lame.\nThe organ coming in for particularly high-energy moments.\nSomebody 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.\nHaving to worry about all your atheist friends going to hell.\nNon-Euclidean Christianity.\nRefusing to put anything in your ears to make the music be less music and going deaf for three days.\nBig moving contraptions that resemble some sort of life form made out of shafts of PVC that wander along the beaches.\nHaving no purpose other than to exist.\nHaving made so many things extinct that you feel obligated to fill the ecosystem with weird new robots.\nSentient scooters running wild in New York City.\nAn adorable robot that can only roll forward and relies on passers-by to navigate.\nAutomations existing wholly outside of the human sphere.\nA battlebot that got loose in the forest, a ramp rolling around the forest floor flipping over pinecones.\nWanting to believe that battlebots are real so badly that you forget that they have RC drivers.\nA robot with a nuke or at least a flail.\nA village of Rube Goldberg machines triggering each other forever.\nListing jazz standards except replacing one of the words in each title with \"nooch.\"\nOne of those jokes that you construct for 17 people to get, but those 17 people really appreciate it.\nSlipping 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.\nNot being sure whether an answer to your question is possible but proceeding under the assumption that it is.\nNot allowing yourself to die until you know the answer.\nCarrying 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.\"\nJust wanting to be a person who has a finished game.\nBeing driven to finish your current project so you can start the next one.\nRealizing that just because you made a promise to finish one project, you're allowed to do other things too.\nThe projects that anyone can come in and finish vs. the projects that will die with you.\nNot having the attention span to finish a big project unless you owe it to somebody.\nHaving some realizations right here on the podcast.\nConvincing yourself that the thing you want to do can fit as part of your larger project.\nMaking music and never playing it for anybody because you're just making music because you enjoy it.\nAll the great artists of the past having had a record label or a church they were beholden to.\nMichelangelo just deciding \"this ceiling looks wack, I'm gonna fix it.\"\nThinking of your unpublished works as increasing your posthumous clout.\nPutting your unpublished works in the attic because that's where people find posthumous art.\nSelling one album to somebody in New Jersey in your twelve year music career.\nStarting a patreon for people who want to support your main work and putting only unrelated works behind the patreon paywall.\nUploading yourself to the cloud and making jam games forever for an audience of nobody.\nAdopting new phrases into your lexicon and letting other ones vanish.\nAdopting the vocal mannerisms and vocabulary of people you hang out with.\nNeeding a phrase that means \"diggity dang\" but replacing each one after six months as you get sick of it.\nTalking 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.\nSo-called \"disfluencies\" like \"umm\" and \"uh\" providing value to the listener in that they signify that the upcoming idea is more complex.\nWhy everyone talked so fast in the early 20th century.\nOp-eds from Victorian times complaining about how young women are constantly saying \"prithee\" and \"perchance\" now.\nNeeding the revolution to start soon because the boomers are about to die of old age and then the guillotine falls squarely on Gen X.\nBoomers 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.\nGiving the next generation instructions on how and why to destroy you.\nThe age segregation in the American school system resulting in most people knowing only people their own age for much of their lives.\nCultural generations shortening as cultural change speeds up, until twins born minutes apart are on opposite sides of a war.\nStarting an Instagram to try to connect with the kids.\nCollege costing either zero or infinity dollars depending on the letter your last name starts with.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-08-03T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/6d7266ce-87d7-48b1-899d-302ba6686011.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":67471151,"duration_in_seconds":4216}]},{"id":"83062bf2-17f4-4aa4-99ca-7f2d01273643","title":"40. I'll Show Them... I'll Invent Superman!","url":"https://topiclords.com/ill-show-them-ill-invent-superman","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nJohn\n\n\nBiker Chicks Tier List. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1591151119\n\nJesse\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/thefringthing\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nCanadian Heritage Minutes\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadarm\nYouTube playlist of Heritage Minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCWANopglXI&list=PL1848FF9428CA9A4A\nList of Heritage Minutes on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritage_Minutes\n\nWhat are your tips for collaborating with people with a higher or lower skill level than you?\nAre we allowed to talk yet about how for decades all 3D games were incredibly ugly\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/BlazeHedgehog/status/1247200134057717760\n\nThe website I build in high school & college is lost to the ages, or: how to reconstruct memories of your past without external records\nThe lost Willie Brown records\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shellac\nWillie Brown - Future Blues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=An9rC8olaVY\n\"Grandma Blues\" cover (prank?): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5F9xhKLJbXs\nPBS History Detectives episode about Paramount Records: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKQbZV4lQk4\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nBeing a playable character in Frog Fractions 2.\nRanking every Biker Chick from worst to best.\nRegretting not having more Canadian Lords on the show.\nStill making your TV PSAs even though nobody watches TV any more.\nThe big robotic articulating arm on the space shuttles.\nThat time Quebec was going to quit Canada.\nA group shot with one teen of every ethnicity and gender configuration.\nReenacting the time someone told the creator of Superman that nobody will care about Superman.\nCanada's revolting safety PSAs.\nHanging maple syrup for treason.\nThe biggest man-made explosion prior to the invention of nuclear weapons.\nCelebrating the people who people who became successful after leaving your country.\nTrading on the low-key anti-Americanism that is part of the Canadian national identity.\nTaking a 45 minute break to worship the military.\nDeciding that an idea is important and jamming it into the brain of millions of people.\nDoing your best to enjoy yourself even though you are the worst musician at this particular jam session.\nThe high pressure world of game jamming.\nThe anxiety of waiting to be picked for a sports team.\nTrusting your collaborators.\nNot being a mentor so much as a friend who is around to answer questions.\nFeeling like you failed your tutoring student but he was pleased and passed his course, so probably it was fine.\nThe ongoing war between R programmers and Python programmers.\nMaking your favorite programming language tolerable by totally replacing the syntax.\nThe smoke effect in Super Mario 64 looking like the MS Paint graffiti tool.\nGoldeneye slappy hands.\nThe difficulty of going back to the video games of the Ugly Period.\nPlaying old video games on an unreasonably large CRT TV that you can't move by yourself.\nUsing modern technology to remove the texture filtering from Nintendo 64 games.\nConditioning gamers to desire the next step in graphical realism.\nAn epic story with three CDs full of cutscenes.\nThe old movie connoisseurs who want to see only the best examples of terrible stilted 1940s acting.\nMaking a video game in the mid 00s and having to support both SD and HD aspect ratios.\nMoving 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.\nA gap in your personal history where no written records exist because they were on the early internet.\nLetting a web site expire because you built it on old technology that your hosting provider now charges extra to support.\nA government form asking you to remember every place you've lived for the past fifteen years.\nThe threshold for memory sticking.\nWhat we would do with our missing histories if we had them.\nAllowing yourself to remember a period in your life and then putting it in deep storage.\nThe object as a record of a moment.\nDredging the river near the defunct Paramount Records factory in Wisconsin, in hopes of finding pre-war blues records.\nOld blues music now being exclusively the province of rich white boomers.\nWriting and recording a fake Willie Brown song to prank record collectors.\nRecording blues albums so you can sell phonograph cabinets to Black folks who can finally afford nice things.\nYour record company being unable to obtain shellac during World War 2, so you go back to making chairs.\nTraining a neural network on old blues records to recreate a song using the single shard of the shattered shellac record you found.\nFinding shards of different shattered shellac records that happen to fit together, and mashing them up.\nDigitizing LPs by putting them on a flatbed scanner.\nThat time a news broadcast showed the QR code of someone's Bitcoin wallet on screen and someone immediately emptied it.\nCutting a new key based on a photograph of someone's key ring, when it's way easier to just break a window.\nRecovering ancient room ambience by analyzing the striation on ancient pottery.\nBreaking a code by beating the decryption key out of somebody and not having to read any cryptanalysis white papers.\nPutting fake information about yourself on Spokeo as part of your personal ARG.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-07-27T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/83062bf2-17f4-4aa4-99ca-7f2d01273643.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":68607165,"duration_in_seconds":4287}]},{"id":"528841ca-99a7-4824-b596-04f9263d1961","title":"39. A Delicious Mushball","url":"https://topiclords.com/a-delicious-mushball","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nShane is a Jesuit Regent who used to make video games.\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/OptimistPanda\nDonate to the Jesuit Refugee Service: https://jrs.net/donate\n\nNathan makes games mostly about jumping and shooting 2D monsters.\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/MommysBestGames\nhttp://mommysbestgames.com/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nBeforeigners (Norwegian TV show about refugees from different historical periods showing up in present-day) \n\n\nTrailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASr0n5LnWnU \n\nCurating your child's entertainment so they grow up with good taste\nI spent half an hour watching someone solve a Sudoku and it was amazing\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKf9aUIxdb4\n\nBrandon asks: \"Taking care of children vs taking care of pets\"\nOther jobs game designers would do well performing, after they leave game dev\nHistory of changing worldviews -- not just Darwin, but things like the Big Bang and Continental Drift were originally seen as crackpot fringe theories\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nSaying your names at the beginning of the podcast and activating your wonder twin powers.\nQuality inventive gameplay-driven entertainment.\nDoing an earnest plug for once.\nFiguring out how to make games for someone other than gamers.\nYour game dev heroes being in their fifties and chasing success they had in their twenties.\nTaking a vow of poverty and annoying off your wife and child.\nNeeding to find a patron because your art is not commercially viable.\nNo longer having your finger on the pulse of indie games.\nAssuming the internet will be all over a particular TV series but somehow there are not endless memes about it.\nVikings apparating into modern Oslo and and solving a murder mystery.\nThe show about Vikings solving a modern-day murder mystery somehow not incorporating The Immigrant Song.\nThe American remake of Beforeigners where it's still about vikings so the protagonists can be white.\nFinding out that a game is only four hours long and asking if it could be two hours instead.\nIntroducing video games to your child in order of release so they develop a taste for the classics.\nFiguring out how to introduce your child to the Internet without ruining them.\nInstalling an internet proxy to protect your child from depraved porn by replacing it with videos of normal people having normal sex.\nToday's teens playing Bushido Blade and discovering that it has a pocket sand button.\nThe classic game history situations.\nWanting your child to like all the hobbies you think are boring.\nWatching a man repeatedly astonish himself at his own ability to solve a puzzle.\nFeeling like you are in conversation with the puzzle designer.\nWatching a movie over and over again.\nTaking the smallest possible step when a problem seems impossible.\nOne of those Master Class videos if the person was discovering that they were a master while making the video.\nA five year old taking the family car to California to buy a Lamborghini with the $3 in his pocket.\nFeeling your family tree stretching out forwards into the future and behind you into the past.\nWatching your child grow agency and opinions and knowing it's your responsibility to shape them.\nYou and the cat enjoying each other's company while the cat doesn't die.\nYour kid doing something bad and everybody looking at you.\nCheering when your child goes down the stairs correctly.\nGame design teaching you to see the world as systems.\nStudying economics at an academic level and feeling like you're turning our game design skills inside out.\nTrying to convince people outside of game development that being a game developer has taught you anything meaningful.\nBeing failed up to a level design role because anyone can scrub out a tile map.\nLevel designers getting more respect when it started requiring technical chops.\nNeeding 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.\nTrying to write your own CSS renderer because you don't want to just make it a web page.\nTrying to convince your friends that you were once a big shot in the game dev world.\nThe Societate Jesu having an incredible faction progression.\nGiving people progressively cooler titles instead of raises.\nGetting an extra year of being a priest before you die.\nDoing a cool thing while you're alone and getting bummed out that nobody saw it.\nTrying to throw fruits and vegetables as close as possible to the ceiling without actually hitting it.\nHating 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.\nHow South America kind of fits right into Africa.\nHypothesizing continental drift and the scientific community telling you to fuck right off.\nThe lost continent of Lemuria.\nFringe scientific theories only gaining traction when existing scientists die.\nTaking 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.\nBeing presented with contrary evidence and dying on the spot.\nThe most delicious bolus.\nEating cookie dough rather than ruining it by putting it in the oven.\nThe variety of textures and flavors of drinking milk and then eating cookies. (Not dipping the cookies in milk.)\nThe worldview shift that leads you to change your handle from Cynical Panda to Optimist Panda.\nPlaying Bomberman '93 with your nine year old and eventually having to explain to him that 93 is your dad's age.\nAn alternate-history Spock-with-a-goatee video game console.\nLiving in your house for 30 years and suddenly discovering three additional rooms.\nBuying a NES and SNES classic even though you've been playing those games in emulation since the 90s.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-07-20T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/528841ca-99a7-4824-b596-04f9263d1961.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":65340814,"duration_in_seconds":4083}]},{"id":"84c1d474-676e-4d67-ab4a-8bb623ab81b9","title":"38. Inside The Atomic Purple Man","url":"https://topiclords.com/inside-the-atomic-purple-man","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nRachel helps run Glitch City. \n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/rachel_sala\nhttps://glitch.city/\n\nNatalie makes art games.\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/alienmelon\nhttps://alienmelon.itch.io/electric-zine-maker\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nIf there was another animal that was horse sized and rideable, what would you want it to be?\n\n\nHe-Man Sings. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32FB-gYr49Y\nChicken beauty pageants. https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2014/03/the-bizarre-world-of-chicken-beauty-pageants-photographed-by-ernest-goh/\n\nWould Jurassic Park be the same if the dinosaurs were depicted as giant birds instead of giant lizards and can you even be afraid of fluffy dinosaurs? Also, would your first instinct really be to run away from a fluffy dinosaur?\nDaylight savings time abuse in speed runs\n\n\nZero hour game jam. http://www.0hgame.eu/\n\nBrad asks: \"Hands-free browsing seeming great until you sneeze and close all your tabs\"\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schmidt_sting_pain_index\nIf humans got an upgrade, what changes would you want to make? E.g. no pooping, only 4 hours of sleep.\nGraham, who evolved to survive car crashes. https://stanflouride.com/2016/07/22/meet-graham-a-human-evolved-to-survive-a-car-crash/\nhttps://www.mariowiki.com/File:GBC_Atomic_Purple.png\n\nIs it bad representation to put a dog in a video game and then not let you pet it? How would dogs feel about this?\nThe \"Cool S\" and the alphabet shovel\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQdxHi4_Pvc\n\nIs it morally conscientious to make sourdough, name it, and basically form a bond with it the way you would with a pet, and then eat it? Is it ok to eat something you've named and deeply care about?\nWhat's a terrible food from your childhood that you love?\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nLiving in the same city all your life.\nMigrating your physical co-working space to a virtual co-working space.\nSplashing around in your artwork.\nA horse-sized great Dane that you ride around.\nHow human civilization would have been different if early man rode giant chickens rather than horses.\nThe most testosterone-filled Saturday morning cartoon available.\nTransforming into a buff confident cat when it's time to save the day.\nChicken dressage.\nWhether Poland has unicorn chickens, and if so, why didn't they put them in The Witcher.\nYour giant chicken companion laying a giant egg and staring at you expectantly until you eat the egg.\nChilling out and eating bugs and vegetable scraps.\nHaving a pair of pliers for a face.\nThe stupendous cowardice of Steven Spielberg refusing to add feathers to the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.\nJust how fluffy velociraptors would have to become in order to be considered birbs.\nVelociraptors having been about the size of a turkey.\nBeing eaten by an adorable bird and hugging it from the inside.\nWhether Pom Pom is about the size of a beach ball or about the size of a shoggoth.\nSitting on Pom Pom like a pilates ball, and whether he'd be into that.\nAn extremely clever abuse of our cultural understanding of time.\nMaking a video game in zero hours.\nPreferring tools maintained by small communities.\nMaking a replacement for Flash without understanding why people like Flash.\nReally giving touchscreens the business.\nWhether or not touchscreens will be as good as mice and keyboards if we give them another thirty years to evolve.\nNoticing a grease print where your ear touched your phone's screen during a call.\nKeyboards also being excellent mirrors for how filthy humans are.\nYour hands feeling like they're doing something meaningful when you touch your letters.\nStarting a hobby where you touch mysterious peppers.\nThe Schmidt Sting Pain Index making certain stings sound delightful.\nThe sting of the digger bee: almost pleasant, a lover just bit your earlobe a little too hard.\nThe sting of the sweat bee: light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.\nThe sting of the bullet ant: pure, intense, brilliant pain, like walking over charcoal with a three-inch nail embedded in your heel.\nWhether the Bullet Ant is named so because their sting makes you feel like you've been shot.\nCouches, where humans go.\nDetaching your stuffy nose and leaving it at home until your cold gets better.\nTrying to hide from your employer that you don't need to sleep.\nWhether or not you'd sleep on purpose even if you didn't have to.\nSwitching from food and beverages to photosynthesis.\nThe Atomic Purple boy showing off his pineal gland in anatomy class.\nWhether dogs think other dogs are good dogs.\nPutting a dog and a petting interface in your game so that you can pet the dog.\nNot knowing how to draw but still being able to draw the cool S.\nA fantastically evocative way to talk about typing.\nTrying to think of something clever and alliterative to say.\nRe-learning how to make the \"Itsy Bitsy Spider\" hand motion when you're 40 years old.\nGetting 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.\"\nCounting the number of bubbles that your sourdough starter makes.\nEating only a small piece of Gerald each time you make a loaf of sourdough.\nThe yeast throwing a party while the dough rises.\nAn alternate reality where it's seen as good and noble to eat the dead.\nFeeding your prospective lover your body hair.\nAdding an egg to ramen so that it's technically healthy.\nA parrot that needs to be convinced to eat fruit.\nThe simplest carb and fat blast you can imagine.\nFeeding your parrot whatever it is you're eating for dinner.\nHot dogs and grapes being the perfect size to choke to death on.\nSalad Minus The D.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-07-13T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/84c1d474-676e-4d67-ab4a-8bb623ab81b9.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":53939305,"duration_in_seconds":3371}]},{"id":"c7bb6f7d-7b92-4c5c-b77e-e9c64fb461c2","title":"37. Fela Cooties","url":"https://topiclords.com/fela-cooties","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nJay is working on an expansion to Hypnospace Outlaw.\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/jaytholen\nRollin' With Tholen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXZFm1FLx6E\n\nChris's album \"The Lost Backups\" will hopefully be out by the time this episode airs.\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/CHRISdelCAMINO\nhttps://twitter.com/beekChiptunes\nhttps://www.instagram.com/chrisdelcamino/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\n7:06 I'm looking for ideas for my \"songwriters\" \"tarot deck\"\n\n\nThe Most Wanted Song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McIfIx29tSg\nThe Most Unwanted Song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gPuH1yeZ08\n\n19:05 Did CD-ROM multimedia programs have advantages over later formats (fancy websites, mobile apps, etc.) or is it just nostalgia?\n\n\nIshkur's Guide. http://music.ishkur.com/\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishkur%27s_Guide_to_Electronic_Music\n\n26:47 Banana Variety Box results\n\n\n\"The Coronavirus Is Bringing Back a 1,000-Year-Old ‘Cheese’ in Japan\" https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-to-make-so-cheese\n\n33:58 Craig asks: \"Picking the right speech sample for the breakdown in your '90s techno. Compare and contrast, 'I am not an Atomic Playboy' from Second Reality vs. 'Ow that hurts' from Ballz: The Director's Cut for 3DO\"\n\n\nBallz. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AhNn9vB-Lw\nSecond Reality. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJF0vUtVpCM\nLegion of Rock Stars. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqSsybm3hJ5g6P7wbhfTXUk_RtM1wbUFA\n2 Legit 2 Quit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Yun_uAiaVY\nThe Mollusk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5K_w9Tbhoc\n\n41:23 The genres available in the ID3 tag. They look like a 14 year old just started naming genres off the top of his head and stopped when he hit 128. Where did this come from and why have we let it persist for so long?\n\n\nMilton Fludgecow. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWl8phxrP78&list=PLvKD5LjgylqZhQaxtDa00t1sh19MYzB9R\n\n46:14 Who remembers everything2.com?\n\n\nhttps://everything2.com/user/chrisjh\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nAdding even more Internet to your fake Internet.\nHearing someone pronounce their own name wrong in a YouTube video and shaking your fist at the screen.\nChanging your name because you're just looking to make your way.\nThe multitude of four-letter B and K names in the demo scene.\nPromoting your album because hopefully you'll finish it before this episode is out.\nDreaming your friend a horrible job history.\nA pair of tongs with a sticker on them saying \"Super Atheist.\"\nThe guy in the pharmacy whose only job is to not give people their prescription.\nGetting your doctorate for free because you're dating a doctor.\nForgetting all about Peter Schmidt.\nBuying chord pack after chord pack and eventually giving up and buying the ultra-rare G11/F# card from a collector.\nAn app that scans your Spotify play list and generates a list of constraints to write songs under.\nA team of researchers writing the perfect song by surveying listeners about what elements of music that they like the most.\nA team of researchers writing the worst possible song by surveying listeners about what elements of music that they hate the most.\nA rap opera about life on the farm with a children's choir singing holiday and corporate jingles.\nBreaking your jaw harp because your jaw is just too strong.\nPeople hating different kinds of music in 2020 from what they hated in the 1990s.\nThe identity of the accordion player on the floppy disks Jim dropped as he was arrested by time travelers.\nRound Robin Key Clicks From A Skype Call.\nWaiting for CD-ROMs in the 90s being faster than modern web pages.\nClicking on Miles Davis' face and reading about Hard Bop.\nA topic you are interested enough in to buy a CD-ROM about it.\nJobs paying well until investors realize they're money-losers.\nOne person's perspective on how all electronic music breaks down.\nInformation that is thorough and well-presented memetically dominating over information that is arguably more accurate but less accessible.\nFinding a guide to obscure music genres and worrying that they might be magic spells.\nEating a bunch of weird bananas and deciding that all bananas basically taste the same.\nMilitant banana forums rallying the troops to take down Jim's boring banana opinions.\nRecognizing differences between apple cultivars.\nGrowing up eating the Red Delicious because it's red and delicious.\nWhich apple cultivar Snow White ate.\nThe apple core as a social construct.\nWhy the Japanese don't like cheese when your toddler proves that it's super easy to develop a taste for cheese.\nSeagulls eating rats now that humans are out of the way.\nWhether or not the Ballz Directors Cut for 3DO OST is homophobic.\nAnalyzing the music theory behind the Ballz Directors Cut for 3DO OST. \nGetting a band together and playing a song you all remember poorly and that's it, that's the album.\nHaving heard 20 seconds of a comedy song and not needing to listen to the remaining five minutes.\nTrying to make fun of a clown.\nWriting questions that generate techno samples in response.\nAll protocol and format technology decisions being made by 14 year olds.\nWhether or not Chanson is a portmanteau of Chiptune Hanson.\nThe difference between Afrobeat and Afrobeats.\nNot adding Shoegaze to Winamp until 2010.\nA pre-Wikipedia attempt to invent the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.\nMaking your web that is a sequel to your previous web site, so you give it the same name but add a 2.\nWikipedia except that instead of an editorial voice it has a poem about a pomegranate.\nThe most popular chord progressions staying about the same for the past 20 years.\nSliding an open chord up the neck and leaving the open strings where they are.\nThere probably being a music theory name for the musical trick you like to do.\nCounting in binary while meditating because if you just count in decimal you'll lose track when you think of something else.\nA classic web app where you submit a form and the server generates the HTML you will see in response.\nAccidentally lording it over someone.\nHaving a fake thing you fool yourself into believing is important so you can procrastinate doing it and get the real work done.\nHow to abbreviate Murder Hornet Keeper into a demo scene handle.\nLearning German from Wolfenstein 3D.\n","content_html":"

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Lords:

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Microtopics:

\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-07-06T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/c7bb6f7d-7b92-4c5c-b77e-e9c64fb461c2.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":57216941,"duration_in_seconds":3576}]},{"id":"7e278179-f2ed-41b4-a7a7-5a7187f5570c","title":"36. Look At An Octopus While You Shower","url":"https://topiclords.com/look-at-an-octopus-while-you-shower","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nThis is the show we recorded live at Duckfest 2020! http://duckfeed.tv/duckfest\n\nLords:\n\n\nJenni is reachable at jenni@jennipolodna.com.\n\n\nChris is making cooking videos at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRsnCRAIi-VsRPPX4AtzVGQ/\n\nApril is @aprilsaur on Twitter.\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\nBefriending ravens\n\n\nJust Say No. https://www.reddit.com/r/Ornithology/comments/29y31o/id_like_to_befriend_some_local_ravens_but_should/\n\nWhat 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?\nClone ethics: can you consent on behalf of your clone? What about a different person with the same name as you?\nLarry asks: \"Best ways to meet your own death as part of a puzzle or game\"\n\n\nCarnivorous mushroom death at 0:58. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=58\n\nMy sister is doing her bathroom sea-monster themed; does anyone have unsolicited recommendations for sea monster bathroom amenities?\nThe badger story.\nHow do we survive from when we learn to climb on the furniture to when we get scared of climbing on the furniture?\nThe white-spotted clearwing\n\n\nhttps://www.instagram.com/p/CBYeqqgAdrp/\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nPlugging an activity nobody but you can do.\nEating trash out of the dumpster and fighting over dead skunk carcasses.\nRecognizing jerks and being rude to them.\nFeeding tiny bento boxes to nearby ravens.\nMobbing random strangers to demand a tiny bento box.\nThe ravens constantly pooping on your shoulders but it's ok because it's just your work shirt.\nMeeting your shitting on things quota.\nBefriending Odin's ravens and becoming Odin.\nBeing the one who operates firearms in this relationship.\nReplacing taxes with a mobile game targeted at Elon Musk.\nElon 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.\nCreating a GoFundMe to pay your rent while you save the world.\nWhether Jenni is the raven or the game designer in her relationship.\nSharing DNA implying shared consent.\nExplaining parents.\nHow consent works with conjoined twins.\nAll three hosts having a different interpretation of the listener's question.\nPuzzles created in the before-times where if you solve them you see the face of god and then die.\nCool ways to die in video games.\nA game that is great for people who have a lot of free time and don't have a child.\nRequesting ideas for sea monster themed bathroom decorations and getting answers six months after you finished remodeling you bathroom.\nA plunger shaped like a tentacle where the plunging part is just a huge suction cup.\nAll of your failings as a wife being forgiven by your ability to use a firearm.\nNot knowing how to safely use a gun so you just kick it down the hill.\nGuarding the coast from sea monsters but not being allowed to talk about it.\nA shower curtain shaped like an octopus so you can paint a negative space octopus out of water all over the bathroom.\nFailing to plan your sister's bachelorette party and she's still waiting to get married eight years later.\nA COVID-19 Zoom Bachelorette Party eight years in the making.\nHaving a Mukbang instead of a bachelorette party.\nWhether or not a pirate is a sea monster.\nMarrying an indie game developer for the money.\nMessaging your future husband on OkCupid because he thinks about Arnold Schwarzenegger wiping his ass a lot.\nBeing a piler of things.\nOwing your wife a game about trolls but first having to train your son to be a game artist.\nSkipping a step and having your child draw directly on the fridge.\nBeing asked to do something about the badger bothering people on the beach and making a joke about the badger badgering people.\nThe consequences of your county's limited animal control budget.\nA badger hiding underneath the bench in the changing room.\nCatching a badger with a dog catching stick even though it's not a dog at all.\nHaving a badger at the end of a stick.\nWhat they call closets in the park district.\nRiding in the back of a pickup truck wrangling a badger between your legs.\nCarrying 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.\nRestraining a snake inside your esophagus until you're ready to release it.\nLatin being way older than the girl scouts.\nMoving a snake with a steam shovel.\nOnly moving snakes where if you accidentally slice them in half they become two snakes.\nA toddler smashing a drinking glass on the kitchen floor and saying \"mess!\"\nYour child's milestones coming with commensurate levels of danger.\nHitting the ground with 1/10ths of the force as your dad when you fall.\nTalking only about animals on this episode and the animal expert heckling you from the Discord.\nThe glass-like quality of a White Spotted Clearwing becoming revealed against the dappled light of the forest understory.\nMaking sure your transparent wings don't reflect light by covering them with nanopillars.\nThe butterfly not getting a cut of your profits from the invention you based on its wing design.\n","content_html":"

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

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This is the show we recorded live at Duckfest 2020! http://duckfeed.tv/duckfest

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Lords:

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-06-29T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/7e278179-f2ed-41b4-a7a7-5a7187f5570c.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":49195050,"duration_in_seconds":3074}]},{"id":"d48ef29e-8883-4ed3-a24f-6285bb90fd89","title":"35. Nick Cave's Meow Mix Murder Ballads","url":"https://topiclords.com/nick-caves-meow-mix-murder-ballads","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nErica is @yerrikTRB on Twitter, and is thinking about birds\nDan is @danlwarren on Twitter, and is at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (https://www.oist.jp/). His soundcloud is https://soundcloud.com/danwarren. He is writing music for Hypnospace Outlaw https://store.steampowered.com/app/844590/Hypnospace_Outlaw/\n\n\nTopics: \n\n\n1:58 The unreliable narrator in songwriting and/or songs where the POV character is a jerk\n\n\nWe all hope Ben Folds is an unreliable narrator in his song “Brick.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wt5EHAqhR1c\nNick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Murder Ballads https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmzP977za2bJ8gj8pVmOxSCBNcVZjGy6D\nMoby Dick is bad https://medium.com/@jayshams/moby-dick-is-not-a-novel-e19e41fec946\nGeorge Michael was maybe not that into monogamy https://www.songfacts.com/facts/george-michael/i-want-your-sex\n\n15:20 No one should live in this city (whatever city you're in edition)\n\n\nChitras flies and things that sting you https://indacampo.wordpress.com/2012/10/13/why-you-should-never-fall-asleep-in-your-hammock-at-twilight-in-panama/\nToo much water all at once, monsoon edition https://www.kold.com/video/2019/07/31/watch-people-rescued-stranded-vehicle-tucson/\nhttps://www.kgun9.com/weather/monsoon\nThe cheese guy in Okinawa fills in for a clear lack of cheese http://thecheeseguyinokinawa.com/about-us/\nRichard Lenski breeds 69,000 generations of E. coli (not yeast) https://twitter.com/relenski/status/993671677748838400\n\n http://myxo.css.msu.edu/\n38:51 Toddlers have incredible memories and if you put something somewhere once because you were lazy they'll remember it goes there forever\n\n\nhttps://slate.com/human-interest/2012/04/childrens-memories-toddlers-remember-better-than-you-think.html\nHere’s the AI spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/e/2PACX-1vRPiprOaC3HsCf5Tuum8bRfzYUiKLRqJmbOoC-32JorNdfyTiRRsR7Ea5eWtvsWzuxo8bjOxCG84dAg/pubhtml\nAI evolves an organism that is tall. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-wIZuAA3EY\n\n43:20 Kaz asks: You guys talked about simulating people's voices, and I'd like to point out that there's been a lot of progress in this area. Take a look here for some examples: https://google.github.io/tacotron/publications/speaker_adaptation\n\n\nThat Obama thing is called Son of Strelka, Son of God. There’s a Youtube playlist here where four of the nine chapters are illustrated/animated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Any38uNUelM&list=PLw-jIvFxpgIDIlxOnvHr9rN_2TUv87Ju_\nThe album can be downloaded here: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Dan_Warren/Son_of_Strelka_Son_of_God\nThe Trump thing is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGYeTmHHZQM\nEvolution Control Committee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DX4nsobHW8 \nNegativland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6gPSSYxex0\nCassetteboy is one of the most active and well-known people doing this stuff nowadays: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LI87PRgIKks\n\n55:48 ANTS\n\n\nAcromyrmex versicolor on the AntWiki https://www.antwiki.org/wiki/Acromyrmex_versicolor\nWalter Tschinkel’s aluminum ant colony casts https://www.core77.com/posts/23607/walter-tschinkels-aluminum-casts-of-ant-colonies-reveals-insect-architecture-23607\nStrangely named ant reproductive strategies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate\nhttps://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/02/170217095939.htm\n\n1:03:39 Pokemon Stay (the opposite of Pokemon Go): what's happening to outdoorsy AR games these days.\n\n\nhttps://pokemongolive.com/en/post/\nhttps://nianticlabs.com/blog/stay-safe/\nhttps://www.pinterest.com/pin/35114072073932236/\nhttp://www.birderslibrary.com/images/excerpts/kaufman_advanced_birding/empid_plate.jpg\nhttps://ebird.org/news/confusing-flycatchers\nhttps://www.thespruce.com/flycatcher-identification-tips-3859843\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nStaying inside and definitely being totally sane.\nBeing on the Hypnospace Outlaw soundtrack but not being Seepage.\nDriving people away from you and writing songs about how they're gone.\nBetraying the concept of music by putting it in advertising.\nSinging about the fish you're going to eat.\nListening to music for a decade before realizing it's horrifying.\nBeing deeply obsessed with an art form others explicitly disregard.\nAn eight year old singing a pop song about sex.\nAssuming that a song written in the first person is autobiographical.\nWriting a song about cheating on your wife and everybody assuming you're endorsing it so you write a last verse that's like \"/s\"\nThe last verse of \"I Want Your Sex\" being about how George Michael doesn't really want your sex.\nPutting together a choreographed dance routine to \"I Want Your Sex\" at summer camp.\nWhether Dad Jr. has anything to say about it.\nAn angry crowd proclaiming that Jesus is a slut.\nThe Robert Browning poem where he evidently thought \"twat\" is an item of nun's clothing and rhymes with \"bat.\"\nDescribing the white whale as obsidian and ebony because you don't have the internet and can't look up what obsidian means.\nA beautiful desert with amazing food where you have scorpions in your house.\nA microwasp stinging your hand leaving a patch of cell death that lasts for almost a year.\nThe dirt being impossible to dig in so there are no storm drains and when the monsoon comes the water rises up to your windshield.\nThe front door's doorknob being too hot to touch in the summer.\nThe process of getting into a car when it's 118 degrees outside.\nSedona being much more livable than most of Arizona because it's in the mountains.\nGrowing up in Oklahoma where it's incredibly hot during the day and cools down two degrees at night.\nGoing tide pooling where there are dozens of species of snail that\nA subtropical jungle with stunningly beautiful coral reefs where all the wildlife is lethal.\nGoing tide pooling where dozens of species of cone snails are extremely interested in your death.\nA fish that looks like a rock in a stream that will kill you if you step on it.\nEncountering a dozen lethally venomous animals every time you go to the beach.\nLiving in the Bay Area where we have programmers.\nResenting programmers but getting along with them really well.\nGetting a tech job and having to practice your self-compassion.\nRepping the city in the world with the biggest economic disparity.\nThe power company shutting your power off because they can't be bothered to keep the lines clear of trees.\nDiscerning the different kinds of plants that are burning in a brushfire by smell.\nBeing performatively off-put by brushfire smoke that smells different from brushfire smoke in your hometown.\nCheese scarcity in Okinawa.\nWhether or not you're allowed to bring suitcases full of cheese into Japan.\nIf Gandalf really liked cheese.\nThe Scottish guy who sells cheese in Okinawa for $100 per kilogram.\nLong grain rice connoisseurs in Japan importing basmati from California.\nBeing unable to export farming and food preparation processes because your are getting assistance from local microbiomes.\nJapanese laws restricting rice imports so they don't corrupt the local rice microbes, but they don't give a shit about the cheese.\nRNA sequencing the brine from a batch of pickles that turned out really well.\nCelebrating the 69,000th generation of your yeast culture by posting \"nice\" on Twitter.\nToddlers learning a lesson far too well.\nTelling each other stories from the spreadsheet of all the ways machine learning has failed.\nBreaking land speed records by falling over really fast.\nReassembling Barack Obama's audiobook into a story about a demigod with the head of a dog who recreates the world after the apocalypse.\nReality now being more ridiculous than your satire from four years ago.\nSpending a lot of time trying to identify birds.\nThe basis for discussion of whether something is something or isn't something else.\nConvincing the people with the money that your field of study will eventually help somebody some day.\nThe growing sense in the world that maybe not all progress is good and maybe we should skip out on some knowledge.\nThe number of lines of code it takes to destroy society.\nDoing science because there is a trust that some day someone will want to know your results.\nWanting a place to have a conversation about anything other than Elon Musk's kids name.\nStarting a podcast and never talking about anything depressing.\nTrying to transplant your neighbor's leafcutter ants into your own yard because you are a field biologist who can't go outside.\nBeing waylaid by ant stings because you are allergic to wasps.\nAnts 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.\nAnts being around long after humans are gone.\nFilling 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.\nFilling an ant colony with jello and having a tasty dessert.\nEnding up in an ant lab and doing ant things.\nStudying the effects of climate change on Pokemon.\nThe exchange rate between Pokecoins and Bitcoins.\nCoordinating Pokemon Go raids on Nextdoor.\nAsking 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.\nTrying to avoid the Audubon society losers at the ornithology conference.\nBirds permitting you to identify them even though they could easily fly away.\n","content_html":"

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Lords:

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Topics:

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Microtopics:

\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-06-22T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/d48ef29e-8883-4ed3-a24f-6285bb90fd89.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":69658750,"duration_in_seconds":4353}]},{"id":"078f8b4f-af29-4111-a802-f93117aa65d2","title":"34. We Don't Talk About Poop Stonehenge","url":"https://topiclords.com/we-dont-talk-about-poop-stonehenge","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nElena is on the Topic Lords Discord and recommends https://buriedwithoutceremony.com/monsterhearts\nShannon lives in a cave and recommends https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modelland \n\n\nTopics:\n\n\n2:14 Lucid dreaming and/or recurrent dreams - do you have them?\n\n\nCan't find the link for Dream Wikipedia here but I'll keep looking. https://wikimediafoundation.org/support/\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_monster\n\n14:04 Eight kinds of fun. \n\n\nhttps://theangrygm.com/gaming-for-fun-part-1-eight-kinds-of-fun/\nReal-play podcasts:\nhttps://critrole.com/podcast/\nhttp://friendsatthetable.net/\nhttps://maximumfun.org/podcasts/adventure-zone/ \nThe Kiri. https://criticalrole.fandom.com/wiki/Kiri \n\n30:05 Your favorite Dewey Decimal System category?\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dewey_Decimal_classes\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bancroft_Library\n\n43:55 NotAButtFace asks \"Being 'The Guy With The Hats' to future proof your identity against going bald\"\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichotillomania\n\n55:25 Plants\n\n\n\"Kale, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, and cabbage are all varieties of a single magical plant species\" https://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/8/6/5974989/kale-cauliflower-cabbage-broccoli-same-plant\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nNot remembering what you were going to say about the topics you picked.\nFinding a tabletop RPG system to support your supernatural teen romance.\nA novel written by Tyra Banks that is basically Harry Potter but for supermodels.\nBeing aware that you're dreaming but not having control and just being annoyed that you have to spend so long in your fake life.\nDreaming about recording a podcast before waking up and recording the real world podcast and ending up with two podcasts.\nYour dream friends being rude to you because you are rude to yourself.\nRealizing 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.\nImproving your dream friend's lives in your recurring Disneyland dream until they have the perfect day and you never wake up.\nCareening off the cliff and going \"zhoop\" and uncrashing the car.\nImproving your dream friends' princess dress-up game by leaving the room and observing them from the security room instead.\nA creepy carnival in the hills that sometimes shows up.\nRemembering eight dreams in ten years.\nJimmy Wales' appearing in your dream to ask for dream money to keep dream Wikipedia running.\nThe real reason why there's no etymological connection between Samhain and the minced oath \"Sam Hill.\"\nPoop Stonehenge.\nRanking the eight kinds of fun.\nEverybody ranking submission/abnegation last when listing what they want out of a tabletop RPG.\nSubmitting yourself to a ritualized task and discovering the pleasures of being clockwork.\nDeciding how you want to build your treehouse and then going to fight the moon.\nWhether a DM describing an axe swing exceptionally well counts as sensory pleasure.\nListening to a lot of TTRPG podcasts but not playing a lot of TTRPGs yourself because who has the time and energy to organize it? \nAgreeing to role play all the people who are missing from this D&D session and immediately drowning everyone, making everything a lot politically simpler.\nRemembering everything your players say so you can role play a sapient bird who can only communicate by mimicking things it has heard.\nLeaving 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.\nLearning 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.\nSaying \"you are in a shed\" and thereby declaring yourself the GM.\nTelling people in your RPG session that they're playing themselves and they're like \"okay I boot up Animal Crossing.\"\nNot being able to relate to your younger sister because she's too young to have used the Dewey Decimal System.\nDescribing all of human knowledge using only ten categories.\nThe Dewey Decimal System no longer having classifications for Mormonism or education of women.\n000-099 being the best Dewey Decimal classification because it has the books about computer programming and UFOs and the paranormal.\nWhere to find cute animal pictures under the Dewey Decimal System.\nBeing 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.\"\nRecording an episode in the library because where better to find out about topics.\nLibraries being wild and raucous places now that the libraries don't shush you.\nGoing to the library all the time because there are Pokemon there but never going inside because they come out to meet you.\nGoing four floors underground in complete silence and wondering if you can still hear.\nMaking sure nobody is in the library shelves you're about to move before turning that big metal wheel.\nGoing into an anechoic chamber and hearing your synapses firing.\nGoing into an anechoic chamber and hearing ground hum because you needed to plug in your laptop.\nAmazing 3D sound scapes that you can't appreciate because your head is the wrong shape.\nMaking a game that induces panic attacks and deciding you want to make a less horrible experience next.\nPeople who do actual night dives being less terrified when playing Subnautica.\nKnowing a cool guy with hats and liking the hats.\nSelf medicating using hats.\nA twelve year old girl with otherwise extremely thick hair wearing a hat being less suspicious than a middle aged cis man wearing a hat.\nGrowing a beard to make up for your bald spot because hopefully people will think your head is upside down.\nThe pros and cons of wearing wigs.\nSending 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?\"\nWhether or not plants are so good.\nKnowing 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.\nTiling your entire yard with garden planters so you can actually fit all the cabbage you planted.\nYour 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.\nBeautiful white butterflies that are wrecking the shit out of your cabbages.\nAll the plants that taste good technically being cabbages.\nNot 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.\n","content_html":"

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Topics:

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Microtopics:

\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-06-15T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/078f8b4f-af29-4111-a802-f93117aa65d2.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":65783850,"duration_in_seconds":4111}]},{"id":"89a34825-7bf3-4b06-bc34-0fa46a1ce8cc","title":"33. Two-Grass Of The Face","url":"https://topiclords.com/two-grass-of-the-face","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords this week:\n\n\nCraig was Jim's collaborator on Glittermitten Grove.\n\n\n@craigtimpany on Twitter.\nhttps://www.mostlytigerproof.com/\nhttps://pinballheresies.com/\n\nShannon does a lot of different stuff!\n\n\n@plentyofalcoves on Twitter.\nStrucci Movies. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCh9DnjvObUcvvwrYbJ4-cLQ\nHbomberguy. https://www.youtube.com/user/hbomberguy\nStruggle Sessions. http://www.strugglesession.us/\nCritical Bits. https://www.criticalbitcast.com/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\n2:51 What are the best attributes for a collaborator to have? The worst?\n10:45 Craig's favourite language, Tok Pisin of Papua New Guinea.\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tok_Pisin#Vocabulary\n\n18:17 TempleOS\n\n\nhttp://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-templeos/\nTempleOS games. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQtLv9GizKM\n\n31:28 Quill asks: \"What's your first memory being exposed to a computer?\"\n35:30 Why faking one's non-existence might not be a great career move.\n41:32 Re: media consumption- \"there are no guilty pleasures\"- do you agree?\n49:26 Did you know that daytime soaps air a new episode every weekday? How is this possible?\n\n\nEvery episode of Passions, on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCu1cfjN6h09z6ssQcRwsJ8A/videos?view=0&sort=da&flow=grid\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nGetting some emails in six weeks.\nTweeting about a book about olives and getting in touch with the author and starting a podcast about olives.\nA dumb joke that you are taking very seriously.\nCreating one podcast episode per olive cultivar.\nDeciding that you'd rather work with people you like than talented people.\nThe hypothetical coworker who is sufficiently good at their job that you put up with the death of everyone who enters the room with them.\nThe origin of the 10x programmer myth.\nNever having met a 10x programmer, but having met a 10x QA tester.\nThe 10x singer who sings at 10x the pitch of regular singers.\nNoodling vs. deliberate, thoughtful creation.\nWhether having rock stars in your rock band is worth all the trashed hotel rooms.\nA language derived from Australian sailor slang.\nMouth grass.\nTrying to express a technical idea without using technical vocabulary.\nThe correspondence between the simplicity of vocabulary and the speed of spoken language.\nLeaving space for audience participation.\nA language that isn't a big compost heap like English.\nEnglish 2, where every single word is a swear word.\nMaking an operating system because God told you to.\nMaking a new operating system to talk to God because you don't trust MS-DOS.\nWhether talking to God has more or less stringent security requirements than a voting machine.\nWhich mental illnesses make you a better programmer.\nImplementing Minesweeper in your new OS in case you get bored talking to God.\nThe TempleOS indie game scene.\nThe music video generator Jim is never going to make.\nReconciling how you feel about a mentally ill asshole.\nBeing very online and really into the N-word.\nEveryone loving your forum posts about weird bespoke operating system but being less into your race war posts.\nArt and technology paradropped in from an alternate timeline.\nOutsider art suspension bridges.\nA trash peninsula that no longer has any homeless encampments on it.\nBuilding a castle out of shopping carts and reclaimed concrete.\nThe text adventure that they named the genre after.\nDad bringing home an Amiga 500 and playing Marble Madness with you.\nAccidentally flood-filling the wrong place and getting really upset because you don't know about the undo button.\nThe cool kid with the advanced Amiga 500 who becomes progressively less cool over time because his dad refuses to get a new computer.\nSeeing Doom and realizing that your beloved Amiga is done for, and Commodore going out of business later that year.\nTelling journalists that you don't exist when they approach you for an interview.\nBacking away from the ARG puzzle you're designing when you realize solving it would involve doxxing yourself.\nBuilding rapport with games journalists, but taking so long to make your next game that they've left the industry.\nThe impossibility of building a fan following in video games after 2013.\nWearing a ratty fake mustache for your Problematic Jim alter ego.\nLying about how you made the horse talk.\nTrying and failing to preserve the mystery by giving a fake mundane answer.\nFinding value in a work while still being critical of it.\nBecoming the avatar of embarrassing pop music.\nReclaiming \"guilty pleasure\" to mean something you enjoy by a problematic creator.\nSociety shaming you more for liking Fall Out Buy than liking a Polanski film.\nWhat it would take to turn the average band into sex pests.\nSoap opera production schedules.\nActors playing the same role for sixty years.\nNot 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.\nYour creative voice ossifying in the 90s and having to write in that voice for the rest of your life.\nRemaining in the Garfield mines for the rest of your life when Garfield's legacy of shitposts is already secure.\nHoping that \"goodbye\" in Tok Pisin is a transliteration of \"see you in hell.\"\n","content_html":"

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Lords this week:

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Topics:

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Microtopics:

\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-06-08T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/89a34825-7bf3-4b06-bc34-0fa46a1ce8cc.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":56737124,"duration_in_seconds":3546}]},{"id":"a53b522a-2e24-4f51-b473-4175633e46c9","title":"32. Tandem CPAP","url":"https://topiclords.com/tandem-cpap","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nRachel is on Twitter as @rachel_sala. Check out Glitch CIty! https://glitch.city/\nLaura is on Twitter as @lmichet and the web at http://lauramichet.com/. Check out Industries of Titan! https://braceyourselfgames.com/industries-of-titan/\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\n4:10 All clothes hangers should be made of wood rather than wire or plastic.\n8:32 How do you feel about food mascots shaped like the food you're about to eat?\n\n\nWill Graham discovers Hannibal's love for sweetbreads at ~3:10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbcI6h1_bHg\n\n12:31 I could put any liquid in my CPAP humidifier.\n18:21 Mallow asks: \"Sliding doors. Are people in favor? Opposed? Terrified of them? Feels like in the US we've converged on a kind of door that just isn't that great.\"\n23:48 If there was one silly skill you could acquire with no effort, like being good at karaoke, what would it be?\n\n\nhttps://platypusegg.bandcamp.com/\n\n34:08 People in different eras interpreting subtleties in media differently--for example, people not \"getting\" all of Shakespeare's jokes, interpreting the ending of The Wicker Man differently, etc.\n\n\nhttps://nextworldover.tumblr.com/post/615235424343998464/patricia-von-arundel-friendlytroll\n\n45:07 Multi-Mario races.\n\n\nWorld record Mario 1862 run in 37h57m. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/588944589\nhttps://iggmarathon.com/\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nThe comfort of a Discord voice channel where everyone is muted.\nA Discord voice channel where you go to poop.\nPerceiving a pun and wanting to forget it.\nBeing in total agreement as to whether we should discuss topics.\nThe hidden cost of plastic coat hangers.\nContemplating the luxury of your collection of fancy wooden coat hangers.\nNever having purchased coat hangers in your life but still ending up with a bunch of them.\nAccruing heavier and heavier clothing as you age.\nNot needing coat hangers because you just drape all your clothes over the back of a folding chair.\nA barbecue joint where the mascot is a sapient pig that is super thrilled that you're about to eat him.\nAlienation from the food production process.\nThe weird zone where pigs are slaughtered in an alternate dimension outside our ken.\nChuck E. Cheese's real name.\nThe sweetest meat you'll ever eat.\nSweetmeats vs. sweetbreads.\nA restaurant with the slogan \"the sweetest bread you'll ever eat\" and the mascot is a talking Thymus gland.\nThymus glands just being in you someplace.\nPutting soup in your humidifier and saving yourself the trouble of making breakfast.\nAccidentally blasting yourself with mold all night.\nSharing a CPAP machine with your life partner, like a tandem bike.\nAdding a splash of bleach to your soup so it won't grow mold in your humidifier overnight.\nTaking action to ensure huge amounts of water enters your body because otherwise the water will probably just sit there.\nEvery 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.\nThe worst-designed lateral thinking puzzle exacerbating your fear of heights.\nAll the rollers in the sliding glass door being crushed so you're just dragging a huge pane of glass along the ground.\nSliding glass doors being perfectly safe because they cannot break; they can only become windows.\nIncreasing the amount of natural light in your home via strategic placement of mirrors.\nHolding a mirror and pointing the sun at your face.\nEveryone loving your ukulele cover of Smells Like Teen Spirit, but only the first time they hear it.\nKnowing how to play a bunch of instruments but they all weigh 300 pounds.\nMaking a xylophone out PVC pipes you found in a dumpster and playing Ode to Joy on it.\nSolving this portable xylophone problem once and for all by googling \"portable xylophone.\"\nA gigantic marimba that is built into the room it's in like a supercomputer of sound.\nWanting to go on a weird xylophone tour.\nBeing good enough to impress people who don't know anything about that particular skill.\nWanting to play an instrument that leaves your mouth free to have a jolly conversation.\nCombining our powers to identify the hexagonal pirate accordion.\nCircus jazz.\nScottish peasants swaying together like kindergarteners singing a jolly pagan song as the flames approach.\nFifty 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.\nWhether the Nicholas Cage Wicker Man being hilarious at release was inspired by the 1970s Wicker Man being hilarious in a modern context.\nJokes that modern audiences don't have the context to understand.\nWorks written in 17th or 18th century English needing localization as much as works in a foreign language.\nNot linking to an edifying Tumblr thread because Tumblr's threading is the worst.\nPeople in the 1940s just talking like that actually.\nMovie actors finally learning to act sometime around 1950.\nStaying awake for 38 hours to get every star, moon and shine in the 3D Mario series.\nOur failings as adult humans.\nDoing game jams where you actually sleep.\nScoping your game development project to allow sleep during development.\nRomanticizing the idea of staying up all night doing something fun because now you're an adult with adult responsibilities and shirt resilience.\nNot being able to justify doing something for fun so you tack on a charity drive.\nThe shifting sense of what's important and what's moral that defines the human experience over time.\nWhether or not you could pay us to play World of Warcraft.\nYour 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.\nTraining your brain to be okay playing just one video game for a while.\nA hat that is so ugly you had to give it to a friend. \nGiving your goth dog friend pastel outfits to wear on Bunny Day.\nLamenting that there is no other place or time to discuss topics.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.\r\n","date_published":"2020-06-01T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/a53b522a-2e24-4f51-b473-4175633e46c9.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":61578763,"duration_in_seconds":3848}]},{"id":"e9716878-f065-4728-a588-dc455c0e00e0","title":"31. seedhutch.horse","url":"https://topiclords.com/seed-hutch-dot-horse","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nJenni is reachable at jenni@jennipolodna.com.\nChris is making cooking videos at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRsnCRAIi-VsRPPX4AtzVGQ/\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\n2:42 Suddenly Anxiety and OCD are culturally adaptive behaviors.\n8:16 Opening negotiations with your real-life employer to get them to pay you in Nook Miles\n13:44 Animal Crossing speed runs\n\n\nAnimal Crossing 100% in 19h25m. https://www.speedrun.com/ac/run/y21ejk7z\nAnimal Crossing New Horizons All Debts in 1h52m. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdH-pj1ZUac\nSuper Mario Sunshine Lockout Bingo at AGDQ 2019 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ch3eSzem1v4\nAnimal Crossing Lockout Bingo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hhgu-fObME\n\n20:23 Gary asks: \"Printing Toilet Paper at Home\"\n\n\nHow to make paper out of blue jeans. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPdZPvMVMZk\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chank_Diesel\n\n26:54 Owning 5.25\" floppies & suddenly having to be aware of magnets again as a threat in your life\n\n\nMasquerade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masquerade_%28book%29\nFrance's 25-year treasure hunt for a golden owl. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45005072\n\n32:20 Apocalypse gardening and warlord potential\n37:52 Amazon took Murder She Wrote away from us\n47:07 Winding up with more social obligations than you had before quarantine\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nBeing confident in your recording setup because you're too lazy to verify it.\nThe old lady who lives in your ductwork who you can't hear because she only shrieks exactly when you're talking.\nFinding out about the apocalypse from a podcast recorded months ago.\nThe subtle distinction between self care and overeating.\nFeeling better about your anxiety disorder because the world has gotten worse to meet your mood.\nA behavior that looks maladaptive but must secretly be awesome because it has survived for millennia.\nA poltergeist that keeps turning your stove off.\nWorshipping gods that turn out to be evil aliens.\nTrying to make \"Christian Splinter Faiths\" scan to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme.\nGoing for the cosmetic upgrade before the inventory upgrade and causing your partner physical pain.\nClearcutting the entire island you're visiting because when you leave it will cease to exist.\nHarvesting trees in a checkerboard pattern because they grow better that way.\nA financial startup specializing in converting British pounds to Nook miles.\nPutting pounds and dollars in the same bank account and they crossbreed while they're in there.\n100%-ing Animal Crossing as fast as possible.\nSpeed runs that are entertaining to describe but not to watch.\nBingo races as the improvisation-heavy antidote to rote speed runs.\nForcing Caleb Hart to livestream Mega Man X any time anyone listens to this episode.\nFeeding toilet paper into your inkjet printer to create a cool pattern to wipe your ass with.\nUsing Silly Putty to copy the stock market info from the newspaper.\nNot being able to print toilet paper with your 3D printer, but printing a bidet instead.\nRunning out of toilet paper and 3D printing corn husks.\nBuying 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.\nSkipping a step and putting the burrito right in the toilet.\nIntroducing an awesome person to your friend and then ruining them in the very next sentence.\nThe outside of the printer paper protecting you from the horrifying inside of the toilet paper.\nPulping spare blue jeans to manufacture your own artisanal toilet paper.\nFiguring out how to put your front yard in your back yard to hide it from the HOA.\nReporting your neighbor to the HOA for weeds in the middle of a global pandemic.\nGetting notices from the HOA that you need to power wash your driveway and power washing the words \"fuck you\" into it.\nConfusing Day of the Dead and Cinco De Mayo because they both happen in the same year.\nAn object you need to keep safe from magnets.\nAdvice on dealing with floppy disks in the Year of our Lord 2020.\nSomething in France that hasn't been found yet.\nA Wikipedia list of things that have not been found in France.\nBurying a microtransaction-heavy game in the desert and hoping the person who finds it is a whale.\nThrowing 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.\nTrying to think of a really big expensive home and your brain coming back with \"a bucket!\"\nThe 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.\"\nPart of you wanting to live in interesting times and be part of historical events.\nBringing your axe made out of a sharpened hubcap to work because Phil's allowed to bring his Leatherman.\nNot being able to train to be a warlord in the post-apocalypse because during the apocalypse all the MMA gyms are closed.\nRealizing that Amazon Prime Video doesn't have Murder She Wrote any more and wanting to just burn it all down.\nThe magical time in your life when you thought Netflix's selection of streaming video would only keep getting bigger.\nConflating Murder She Wrote with the Golden Girls.\nDeadpanning ridiculous things that happen in St. Olaf, Minnesota.\nAngry texts from your mom about how you ruined Murder She Wrote by telling her about the theory that Jessica Fletcher is a serial killer.\nA big city businesswoman looking to take over her parents' failing Christmas ornament shop.\nCG compositing Christmas ornaments into the background of every shot of Golden Girls.\nEverybody playing online games all the time now because their extrovert friends have figured out the Internet.\nExtroverts agreeing to watch speed runs with you because they're desperate to talk to anybody.\nFinding an eight hour smooth jazz video and eventually realizing it's two minutes of smooth jazz looping for eight hours.\nTrying to solve playing music with friends over the Internet.\nSolving the problem of jamming with friends over the Internet by only playing music with precogs.\nSticking 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!\"\n","content_html":"

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Lords:

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-05-25T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/e9716878-f065-4728-a588-dc455c0e00e0.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":52758152,"duration_in_seconds":3297}]},{"id":"f08ee111-b53c-4d4d-afc2-57ae316cf7ac","title":"30. Century Of The Fruitbat","url":"https://topiclords.com/century-of-the-fruitbat","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nChris will find you. He is working on Core Editor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RyUjnpyJY4\nChris is @MrChrisLHall on Twitter and is working on https://www.adventurelab.fun/\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\n2:07 Wikipedia descriptions of fighting game stories\n\n\nThe Rad Project. http://web.archive.org/web/20070406100535/http://www.flammie.net/vse/things/rad/index.htm\n\n13:05 Is there a 21st century version of the thank-you note?\n\n\nThe Double Disappearance of Walter Fozbek. http://bookembob.blogspot.com/2011/07/double-disappearance-of-walter-fozbek.html\nThe Selective Attention Test. https://youtu.be/vJG698U2Mvo\n\n26:27 I'm pretty sure I could write a book about anything\n\n\nDolphin flip in slow motion. https://youtu.be/37C1KOSgTAk\n\n32:49 Kevin asks: \"Tom Nook: Robber Baron or Captain of Industry?\"\n38:37 Melodica purchased online\n48:43 Ursula Vernon is rad\n\n\nWeird fruit gallery: https://www.deviantart.com/ursulav/gallery/7872409/weird-fruit\n\n57:01 Peering in on skateboard culture from the outside\n\n\nSo Deep + juggling pins. https://youtu.be/9pvzWY-lSRw\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nRisking sounding like a corporate shill.\nWhether or not Wikipedia is pretty great.\nWikipedia's editorial tone when describing ridiculous stories.\nFinding a video embed in the middle of a textbook page and trying to press it.\nA book with squiggle underlines wherever the author screwed up.\nHaving to come up with narrative justification for 500 one-on-one fights in a row.\nThe guy you just kicked off a cliff offering you cakes because nobody should have to fight on an empty stomach.\nYour 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.\nThe Japanese version of the wacky frog tank story just being factions at war in the post apocalypse.\nMega Man except you are a gnarly wizard instead of a robot.\nA floating Buddha named \"Surprise\" shooting you in the back.\nIf Astro Boy were a mailman.\nMerging the wacky frog tank story and the post apocalyptic war story into a single canonical timeline in the new Switch release.\nWriting on paper made of trees with a pen and it's 2020.\nWriting a thank you note when a relative hands you a twenty dollar bill.\nWriting a jam game for every special occasion because it's more fun than writing a card.\nThe correct plural of Magnum Opus.\nReturning to Lazy Land.\nThe videos you like best inevitably being taken down due to copyright strikes because that's the world we live in now.\nYouTube telling you that some videos have been removed from your playlist but not telling you which.\nA digital representation of what it's like to grow old.\nMaking a USB drive ark and taking two of every genre of music.\nYour 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.\nGoing to work and nobody remembering who you are.\nGoing 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.\nUsing a gorilla Snapchat filter on a gorilla to make it look like a human who's trying to look like a gorilla.\nWaking 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.\nMaking a note of how to disguise yourself as a dinosaur because you never know when you'll end up in dinosaur world.\nDoing a face swap with your cat during the conference call so everyone is too horrified to notice the gorilla in the background.\nA pedalboard except it's Instagram filters.\nChaining Instagram filters to create a truly epic fursona.\nReverse college, where you get paid to forget things.\nGetting paid a dollar per paragraph about skateboard tricks.\nA varial kickflip except instead of splitting the axes of rotation between your feet, doing all the rotation with your front foot.\nWriting a book with your 18 month old and it's just the words poop, ball, bath and meow over and over and over.\nYour toddler growing up to discover axes and cops, like leaves changing colors in autumn.\nA raccoon who is very friendly and has taken a lot of your money.\nWhether Tom Nook is a slum lord.\nA dog with five fingers, an apron, and a whole lot of bells.\nBeing in debt forever because your landlord keeps building you a bigger and bigger house.\nA 100% speedrun of Adobe Photoshop.\nAdding achievements, particle effects, and screenshake to Visual Studio.\nTwo melodica players coincidentally bringing their instruments to the same party and locking eyes from across the room.\nCheap, portable musical instruments you can have with you at all times and practice with at the drop of a hat.\nA tube with six holes in it.\nPenny whistles always being in D because it's one more than C.\nWikipedia diving deep into the lore of each musical scale.\nThe cute face of the otamatone being almost assuredly more entertaining than the notes you play with it.\nPenny whistles with a conical bore staying in tune better than cylindrical ones.\nThe 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.\nThe origin of the pear-with-teeth meme.\nThe Biting Pear of Salamanca.\nWhether anyone named Ursula is still alive today. \nAn interesting reaction to discovering that your daughter is made of birch bark.\nA dead whale falling to the ocean floor and feeding scavengers for years.\nSpending your whole life waiting for a whale to die.\nZombie worms growing like flowers in the lightless garden of a sunken whale corpse.\nA tiny kobold fondling an eggplant.\nGiving your wife a picture of a fruit with teeth for her birthday.\nYour skateboard being stolen twice in the same day.\nAngsty skateboarders lashing out at the world around them via sick kickflips.\nFighting everyone around you being morally equivalent to fighting no-one.\nA nine year old girl in a tutu doing a double heelflip.\nThe cost of skateboarding being measured in hospital visits, especially when you are 40 and overweight.\nWearing an inflatable dinosaur suit and skateboarding in a bounce house for maximum safety.\nWanting to get into skateboarding but you're scared of dying and none of your friends have trucks.\nHacky sack looking fun but actually it's a lie built on a throne of falsehoods and pain.\nNarrowing an artefact's origin down to the Century of the Fruitbat.\nMusicians 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.\nBeing entirely out of both topics and lords.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-05-18T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/f08ee111-b53c-4d4d-afc2-57ae316cf7ac.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":68900572,"duration_in_seconds":4306}]},{"id":"83877e09-d0e3-4268-936c-20b04cbb566b","title":"29. Respect The Hustler, Not The Hustle","url":"https://topiclords.com/respect-the-hustler-not-the-hustle","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nJenni is on an internet break but you can email her at jenni@jennipolodna.com.\nGary is @GaryBuh on Twitter and does podcasts at the Duckfeed network. http://duckfeed.tv/\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\n1:41 How did people decide to eat certain vegetables, even though they don't look like food and sometimes taste like shit?\n4:18 Stephen King writing about boners (there is a Tumblr)\n\n\nhttps://stephenkingsboners.tumblr.com/\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald%27s_Game#Plot\n\n12:28 Airplane respiration strategies\n\n\nhttps://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/05/explore-transparent-plants/\n\n16:45 Being resourceful when you don't have the correct tool. For example, I recently unblocked a toilet by using a mouse pad in place of a plunger.\n23:28 Replacing combat in video games with other stuff to slow down the pacing\n33:27 What age were you meaningfully aware of your mortality? Did something happen?\n38:06 The MT-80s MIDI boom box\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/cabel/status/979097369936502785\nhttps://vgmusic.com/\n\n48:21 Things that you do so people will think you're an adult but you can't figure out if there's another purpose for doing them\n55:10 You can only listen to one song for the rest of eternity, you don't get to pick. How much money would it take, what song is the worst.\n\n\nGunhouse trailer with the title screen jingle I was talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WB0yAm6iXEw\nHere's a better trailer for a later version of Gunhouse, with better music FWIW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzokB1821Mw\nTony Hawk's Two Second Music Loop https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uofB1_Y1gOk\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nGoin' Polodna.\nGoin' Polodna but bein' named Butterfield.\nOnly car thieves remaining.\nGiving your guest a hard time for plugging something when you just asked them to plug something.\nBeing inspired by an eggplant you once had.\nStockholm syndrome but for vegetables.\nA color that doesn't exist on earth.\nTrying to cook every substance for every amount of time because you don't have Netflix.\nLaundering a horse through a book.\nThe pe-noose.\nTrying to Google which Stephen King book had the necklace of penises.\nDeeming a penis to be a boner.\nLooking upon a pubic hair topiary and despairing.\nSculpting the day your paramour will die into your pubic hair on the first date.\nFred Meyer's daughter, J.C. Penney.\nNot having any particular insight into this boner blog.\nBeing a little bit hornt up despite being trapped in a Fred Meyer by the murder frog outside.\nWhether or not \"pud\" is short for \"pudding\" or indeed anything.\nA zoetrope showing Goofy pulling down his pants every 7 seconds.\nA plexiglass box that is big enough for your head and a fern.\nHacking the oxygen mask to come down when you just need a hit.\nSprinkling some foliage on your head to make it look like the fern next to your head is just a lump on your face.\nSticking 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.\nThe tactile sensation of unclogging a toilet using a mouse pad.\nThe best water level for plunging a toilet.\nNeeding an articulated arm like Krang's to plunge the toilet from around the corner.\nTrying to guess the Game Boy games being used to prop up a projector.\nThe Podcaster's Dilemma.\nMaligning the Final Fantasy Legend series.\nDeciding that your punishment will be a good night's sleep and a stern toothbrushing.\nPlaying Final Fantasy Legend while you brush each other's teeth live on AGDQ.\nAsking a question that you'd already answered in a previous episode and just copy-pasting the answer from there.\nNot being in good enough shape to sleep everywhere.\nRipping through the topics and needing to dip into the extended bucket.\nA gigantic bucket of shelf-stable potato soup that you save for the end times.\nSetting 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.\nA Visual Studio plugin that lets you play text adventures anyone while looking like you're at work.\nPressing 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.\nHaving a child to reduce your mortality anxiety.\nHaving a child so they can do the heimlich when you choke on a ham sandwich.\nSubtweeting your cat.\nNot being meaningfully aware of your mortality but still making decisions based on not dying.\nOvercorrecting and turning into a maudlin fucker.\nA boom box with a floppy drive playing canyon.mid.\nA product with no conceivable audience except the nerds who will think it's cool and nostalgic thirty years from now.\nOpening a cabinet and your coffee mug singing the Zelda \"you found the thing\" jingle.\nThe intentionality of listening to music in the most inconvenient way possible.\nListening to music and lighting random pieces of paper on fire.\nA very zinelike activity.\nIndependent movie theaters all vanishing in an eyeblink.\nFilling the delivery tube with potato soup and sending it to the bank teller.\nChuck E. Cheese classing it up with woodfired, chef-inspired pizza.\nGetting carryout from the Chuck E. Cheese and your chef-inspired pizza coming with a side of orange spider rings.\nSleeping on a mattress on the floor for years until your new girlfriend insists you get a real bed.\nPutting a tennis ball on top of the screws you're supposed to attach the footboard to so you know where to park your keister.\nYour migrating bedframe, a keter-class problem in the bedroom.\nThe one time it makes sense to have a strong opinion about someone else's bed.\nWiping down the incision site because if you get an infection after you die it's just never going to heal.\nOnly being allowed to listen to one song for the rest of your life.\nThe one song you're allowed to listen to also replacing music you hear in your head or anything you sing.\nTrying to sing Happy Birthday to a co-worker but it always comes out as the chorus of \"Selling the Drama\" by Live.\nAll music in the world being replaced by the Intel Inside jingle.\nThe Zelda item noise secretly being the same as the Addams Family theme song.\nGoing to a concert and suddenly the band can only play the song you are cursed with.\nThe CIA discovering your musical curse and studying you on the dissection table like in Project ALF.\n$10 million per For Fighting.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-05-11T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/83877e09-d0e3-4268-936c-20b04cbb566b.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":61137816,"duration_in_seconds":3821}]},{"id":"01150674-14eb-453e-b494-278620090529","title":"28. Stealing The Dead Skunk Back And Forth Forever","url":"https://topiclords.com/stealing-the-dead-skunk-back-and-forth-forever","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nApril is a beast lord and Jim's wife. @AprilSaur\nRyan is somehow also Jim's wife? @RyanIkeComposer\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\n3:56 The \"spigot question\" Jim keeps avoiding.\n\n\nhttps://norse-mythology.org/gods-and-creatures/others/hugin-and-munin/\nA second person may be \"cured\" of HIV. https://www.vox.com/2019/3/5/18249607/hiv-cure-2019\n\n13:05 New Decade reading resolution.\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Witcher\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seanan_McGuire\nhttp://www.scp-wiki.net/antimemetics-division-hub\nI personally recommend starting with \"Introductory Antimemetics,\" which is a good intro to the concepts, then everything starting at \"Case Colourless Green,\" which is the main storyline.\nhttps://shadesofmagic.fandom.com/wiki/A_Darker_Shade_of_Magic\n\n22:54 What does the Nakatomi corporation do?\n\n\nhttp://www.scp-wiki.net/\nhttps://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/33713/was-nakatomi-corp-involved-in-illegal-activity\n\n31:07 Favorite zoo animal.\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embryonic_diapause\n\n40:07 What sandwiches are better suited to a straight or diagonal cut?\n44:28 I stayed in a hotel in Florence in 2009 where our room had a private bidet but the whole floor shared a toilet.\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nMaking a good dad joke on twitter.\nThe ravens that have been building a nest behind your corpyard at work.\nThe squabbling raven couple next door.\nBeing the neighbor who didn't call animal control.\nTrying to remember the names of Odin's ravens.\nDistributing podcast episodes in a post-internet wasteland.\nThe kid in middle school who guessed you were from New York because of how you say \"basketball.\"\nWhy Jim is such a coward.\nReaching deep into the topic bucket and pulling out a black ichorous monster.\nA garden hose spigot installed in your butt such that poop sprays forward instead of down.\nBodily fluids canceling each other out when you miss the toilet and so you just end up with a wet wall.\nLiking ketchup so much you CRISPR a biological ketchup dispenser into your elbow.\nAccidentally triggering your ketchup hands when you're icing a cake.\nPutting a cap on your ketchup elbow so you don't drip ketchup everywhere.\nWhether your new dispenser is a squishy flesh hose or a brass steampunk spigot.\nReframing your fleshy protuberance that shoots someone else's blood to sound scary and eldritch.\nA spigot that shoots liquid money.\nMaking up for your horrifying blood pranks by giving blood.\nWhipping blood into stiff peaks.\nCarnivorous merengue.\nUsing science to make human blood safe to eat.\nLetting the listeners hear the good podcast juice.\nFalling down on your New Year's resolution starting in March.\nWatching the Witcher show and then reading the Witcher short stories it was based on and knowing exactly what's going to happen.\nAlchemy and math and words.\nWhether or not reading on a screen still counts.\nReading your driver's license every night before you go to bed.\nGetting hungry immediately after the body spigot discussion.\nBeing over your meal by the time you're done cooking it.\nAssembling 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.\"\nSomething standing right in front of you that you can't perceive.\nDeciding not to read scary stories to your wife right before bed.\nGetting ready for prose form, motherfuckers.\nTrying to remember someone's name and only remembering that they have initials.\nMedieval fantasy Londons and their relationships to magic.\nReading ahead in the tabletop adventure book.\nA vault with 8 different kinds of locks on it, filled with non-negotiable bearer bonds.\nA regular bearer bond except you can't negotiate for it.\nA non-negotiable bond except you can hold it.\nThe database documenting the contents of the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.\nManufacturing tiny toy guns and not being able to fight back against terrorists because your guns are too small.\nExplaining why your tiny gun manufacturer has a money basement.\nTiny toy guns using only the tiniest gunpowder.\nWriting the first season of your mystery show with the certainty that it'll be canceled after one season.\nHaving to figure out what polar bears are after your show gets renewed.\nWhen a duck decides to start whispering its quacks.\nThe most convenient jaguar.\nBiting each other in the face and having a good Bear Time.\nBats' closest relatives being humans because all their other relatives died.\nDelaying gestation until everyone's pregnant at once.\nBats all giving birth at the same time and overwhelming the health care system.\nA zoo except for the sea.\nWatching a jellyfish enclosure and asking \"what are they doing in there?\"\nPlastic bags floating around in the sea except they're alive and they'll still be alive after you're dead.\nThe universe being a big stupid donut.\nNobody giving a shit that you read Great Expectations.\nGarfield being the great literature of the coming era.\nAllegorical lasagna.\nCaramelizing all your onions at once.\nCutting your sandwich into a pair of rhombuses.\nSitting on a stack of the most prestigious award in the country.\nFiguring out what axis you can cut a hamburger on diagonally.\nWhen the burrito guy folds your burrito wrong and the first bite is entirely sour cream.\nBurrito Gaia, filled with loam, mantle and magma.\nNaming your next kid after your least-favorite burrito.\nThe food dictator making you a cup of Crispix when all you wanted was grilled cheese.\nThe 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.\nTaking it to squirts-town.\nBuilding a hotel before they invented the combination toilet/bidet.\nThe french word for when you take a dump in somebody's bidet.\nHygiene strategies if a bird poops on your butthole.\nThe nose being an evolutionary strategy to protect our mouths from bird poop.\nDunking your whole ass in the ass-height sink.\nJust making zoo noises until you've reached the required minimum podcast length.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-05-04T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/01150674-14eb-453e-b494-278620090529.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":51857032,"duration_in_seconds":3241}]},{"id":"5d799c45-4961-4ec1-8c15-2b40c939644d","title":"27. The Great Mongolian Potato Sack Yak Race","url":"https://topiclords.com/the-great-mongolian-potato-sack-yak-race","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nJesse is @thefringthing on Twitter.\nAvery has a Facebook somewhere and if you find it you can ask him whether he's playing any live shows.\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\n2:03 Math problems that are easy to explain but unsolved or unsolvable.\n\n\nhttps://www2.stetson.edu/~efriedma/squinsqu/\n\n13:28 The list of Mr. Potato Head's accomplishments on his Wikipedia page makes him sound like a real person who was perhaps an ambassador.\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Potato_Head\nhttps://www.ashrita.com/about/\n\n23:36 Hypothesis: a steadily tedious job becomes bearable when you procrastinate and then do it in short, frenetic bursts\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_ladder\nSalmon cannon. https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/animals/a28678200/fish-tube-video/\n\n35:25 Kaz asks: your conversation about language changing to people's misunderstandings reminded me of how \"pitted\" olives have no pits in them, and how \"inflammable\" is confusing, so \"flammable\" was coined.\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunked_term\n\n44:33 Theory: humans are unconsciously driving the evolution of some kinds of small birds toward cuter features and behaviors.\n\n\nSamurai-lookin' crab. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heikegani\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Dan-no-ura\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution\n\n48:10 The \"Please Call Stella\" accent database\n\n\nhttp://accent.gmu.edu/browse_language.php?function=detail&speakerid=145\nWMAC Masters. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqJSKeBKCM0\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFL_(2020) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFL_(2001)\nSlam Ball TOP PLAYS. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PPuV7jK33k\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nWriting a song and realizing that you just wrote Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies by mistake.\nNot the coolest thing to accidentally be ripping off.\nRapidly shutting down the entire idea of introducing yourself.\nContinuing to talk about about how mysterious Jesse is.\nThe question of whether a problem that has been proven unsolvable is as solved as it can be.\nAsking two people to simultaneously explain Goldbach's Conjecture.\nFour followed by more zeroes that would be in a trillion.\nDetermine whether the RDA of Iron is a multiple of two primes while choosing a can of soup.\nHitting the last prime number and running out.\nPaul Erdos' advice for dealing with aliens who request Diagonal Ramsey Numbers.\nAvery's favorite math proof.\nExplaining to your bosses that your current task is technically uncomputable.\nNot being able to elaborate on packing arc segments because biotech analysts might have you killed.\nYelling excitedly about graph isomorphism at the gym and tripping the Lunk Alarm.\nDisappointment that Mr. Potato Head doesn't have an honorary doctorate.\nMr. Potato Head's presidential physical fitness award.\nPotato cannibalism.\nMost Votes For Mr. Potato Head In A Political Campaign.\nEveryone who has finished Super Mario Bros. 2 in front of a Twin Galaxies representative.\nA strange man lurking behind you while you play Mario, writing down your score.\nThe guy 120 Guinness World Records, or 119 if you don't count the \"Most Guinness Records Held At Once\" record.\nPotato sack racing a yak across the Mongolian desert.\nMost Yaks Raced Through The Mongolian Desert. (1)\nThe near worldwide tie of Most Guinness Records Not Held At Once.\nWalking using shovels as stilts.\nMost balloons inflated to inches in one hour. (671)\nSlicing potatoes while hopping on a shovel.\nInheriting two shovels from your uncle's estate and trying to figure out what world records you can set using them.\nLongest distance continuously somersaulting. (12 miles)\nWhether cartwheeling for 12 miles is more strenuous than somersaulting for 12 miles.\nJumping on a pogo stick until your O2 tank is depleted.\nSleeping holding a brick.\nMost Injuries Not Incurred Trying To Break World Records.\nTrying to remember Fish Ladders but being derailed by the Fish Cannon.\nTaking a break from counting fish.\nNot performing any medicine for 10 hours and then in the next hour frantically performing 10x as much medicine as you normally would.\nBuying a short-range electric car to teach yourself to plan better.\nBeing really confused by the turtle appearing on your dashboard and then the car turning off.\nA dashboard light that's like the no smoking sign except instead of a cigarette it's a picture of your car.\nSneaking onto a billionaire's estate to furtively charge your Nissan Leaf.\nLooking at security cam footage and seeing that you gave electricity to Doctor Who in a time of need.\nThe incredible variety of charge ports on a Nissan Leaf.\nHaving trophies ready to distribute as soon as you're allowed to leave the house.\nOrdering yourself a \"best attitude\" trophy.\nThe gradient of a trophy's meaninglessness.\nOrdering a bunch of trophies from Crown Awards and subsequently every ad you see being for Crown Awards.\nDelving too deep into what a trophy is until it loses all meaning.\nRealizing you could've ordered trophies better and throwing your existing trophies in the trash.\nPassions being both flammable and inflammable.\nWords that have changed meanings because of persistent misunderstandings.\nHaving a story about corn husks.\nHolding a corn husk in the grocery store and saying \"Ah! Corn husks!\"\nExplaining 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.\nNot eating the crabs that look like your forefathers.\nPaying more attention to cats who cry at the same frequency as human babies.\nNot eating the moths that look more like the soot-covered trees they're hiding on.\nSphinx Of Black Quartz, Judge My Vow except for the IPA.\nComparing accents visually.\nInventing new accents to compensate for accents merging into each other.\nHaving a particularly grating way of speaking and blaming it on being from San Francisco.\nYour dead relative not listening to this podcast.\nWhether or not Dragon's Lair is a pun.\nYelling 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.\nThe British TV show that Sanford & Son was based on.\nMemorizing your favorite carnival barker pitch and reciting it unprompted at family gatherings.\nField recordings of carnival barkers from the 1950s.\nPro Wrestling somehow retaining its weird 19th-century carny-speak for over a century.\nChanneling the dark energy from your urn while you fight Hulk Hogan.\nWMAC Masters, the martial arts tournament series with health bars on the screen.\nIf Undertaker and Hulk Hogan were trucks.\nHockey except you play it with a basketball and there are trampolines on the floor.\nTaking basketball and making it extreme.\nSitting around until one of you thinks of a way to end the show.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-04-27T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/5d799c45-4961-4ec1-8c15-2b40c939644d.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":60665104,"duration_in_seconds":3791}]},{"id":"b669131d-4276-4c46-9954-e5687455b51f","title":"26. The Double Equilibrium Point Of Water (For Fish)","url":"https://topiclords.com/the-double-equilibrium-point-of-water-for-fish","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords\n\n\nJohn Mystery lives in Maryland. https://googlethatforyou.com?q=john%20mystery%20maryland\nNelson is making An Airport For Aliens Currently Run By Dogs.\n\n\n@WritNelson on Twitter.\nhttps://www.patreon.com/StrangeScaffold\nhttps://store.steampowered.com/app/1246250/An_Airport_for_Aliens_Currently_Run_by_Dogs/\nhttps://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/epic-pictures-launch-gaming-venture-1289270\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\n6:15 My worst fear as an adolescent: gravity reverses while I am in the family car on the 110 and I am flung into the sky at 9.8m/s2\n\n\nVVVVVV https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf06P-_1lkU\n\n15:31 Kaiju who should know each other, but don't.\n\n\nI'm pretty sure the male description of the RBLD dating persona is actually suggesting you stop dating entirely.\nThe Wild Rose: https://web.archive.org/web/20141031024714/http://www.okcupid.com/personality?type=RBLD&g=0&o=1\nThe Manchild: https://web.archive.org/web/20141024161727/http://www.okcupid.com/personality?type=RBLD&g=1&o=1\n\n21:52 This Arkanoid TAS:\n\n\nhttp://tasvideos.org/6347S.html\nThe \"Super Mario World vs. the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Physics\" video has been taken down but here's the original blog post: https://msm.runhello.com/p/20\nAnd here's a similar video that gets the idea across. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIb2F7OLQJw\n\n30:39 Yuri asks: \"I was wondering what you and your fellow lords do to warm up prior to getting started on some creative thing. Does it change comparing coding to making music, drawing, crocheting, etc.?\"\n\n\nGunhouse, on sale on Switch for $1 until April 26th! https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/gunhouse-switch/\n(Also available on a bunch of other platforms.)\n\n47:21 Would a Cool Sentient Dog in a graveyard dig up the bodies? Would that make him the anti-caretaker?\n\n\nOiled Up Sax Guy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1dY6OkPb7E\nInterview with Oiled Up Sax Guy, who it turns out really did arrange and perform that cover. https://dangerousminds.net/comments/the_infamous_sexy_sax_man_from_the_lost_boys_still_still_believes_a_chat_wi\nhttps://nymag.com/intelligencer/2015/12/tumblr-users-are-talking-about-bone-stealing.html\n\n56:38 Experiencing FOMO about activities that you do not want to do\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nJohn of the Maryland Johns.\nRuining the show before it's really even started.\nHigh fiving a friend from six feet away using your selfie stick with a hand at the end of it.\nWashing the hand at the end of your selfie stick after high-fiving someone with it.\nMotion detectors not detecting black people so corporate hires white people to follow black people around and activate the motion detectors.\nA black person walking in front of the Kinect and the Kinect being like \"I think I just saw a ghost!\"\nLoving your punchline and so letting it go.\nBeing flung away from the earth at 9.8 meters per second per second.\nThe unfathomable horror of your senator voting in favor of the \"subtly tweak the laws of physics\" bill.\nFinding the highrise apartment building that is most likely to remain attached to the Earth if gravity reverses.\nBeing deeply bothered by children who know the metric system and understand calculus.\nHaving known you were going to die but now being able to put a number to exactly how fast.\nAlways paying attention to whether you feel slightly lighter now, because that means gravity is starting to reverse.\nGravity's power suddenly doubling and the only survivors being people hanging out in trampoline parks and bounce houses at the time.\nOur only hope being heroes in mech suits but unfortunately everyone who owns a mech suit is a billionaire.\nFish living through gravity doubling because they can swim up to a lower water pressure.\nThe moon crashing into the Earth.\nKaiju who are lonely because they don't know any other kaiju.\nWhether Swamp Thing and Godzilla would be friends.\nA giant dog who is perpetually alone because there is no Mothra equivalent in his universe.\nBigfoot technically being a kaiju because his feet are so big.\nWhether Bigger Luke is big enough to be considered a kaiju.\nThe League of Extraordinary Gentlemen except for kaiju.\nWhether Jack the Ripper looms large enough in our minds that he should be banned from our Kaiju-only dating app.\nThe OkCupid dating personality result that was fine for women but if you're a dude they were like \"please stop dating\"\nA tiny green cat as dense as a neutron star.\nHaving 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.\nRunning your Arkanoid simulation on six cores for over a year to find optimal Arkanoid strategies.\nMario dancing with the fish for 15 seconds and then the credits play.\nMartial arts masters going into the mountains and practicing one move for 30 years.\nThe Many Worlds interpretation of Super Mario World.\nA speedrunner finding a COVID-19 vaccine faster than anybody else but the FDA blocks them from releasing it.\nPhilosophers 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.\nSitting down to create while being fully aware that you might not create anything worthwhile today.\nThrowing nothing away and making everything.\nA cool game that is available on a variety of platforms.\nBeing 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.\nMaking a bad game fun by association, by placing it in a fun context.\nHiring 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.\nAdding a bunch of things to your game that will definitely bite you in the ass later because you cannot be stopped.\nRunning 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.\nFragile people in a fragile people world attempting to make juice and having empathy for each other.\nSitting at the text editor to create and creativity not happening fast enough so you go browse Reddit.\nBeing stuck on a hard problem and going to play video games while your subconscious works on the problem.\nWatching Zodiac while you're working on your cross-stitch and you look down and you've spelled out the name of the real killer.\nTrying 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.\nHaving made your topic list and having to sleep in them.\nGifts to ourselves.\nCyber-Washington with carbon fiber dentures and a minigun that fires the teeth of his slaves.\nA cool sentient dog wearing a leather jacket and sunglasses digging up bodies and putting them in cool poses.\nCool Dog digging for bones in the easiest place possible, the human body.\nThe movie with the oiled muscle-man singing and playing a saxophone.\nBuff Weird Al Yankovic.\nPromising to name this episode \"Stacksophone\" but lying.\nCool Dog turning out to be a very uncool dog if you think about it.\nLost Boys, exhibit A in the debate of whether being a jerk is cool.\nCool sentient dogs in the 90s digging up bodies in graveyards, but cool sentient dogs in 2020 awooing on Mastodon.\nPreferring to use human bones in your occult rituals because you relate better to the energy they carry.\nSelling your leftover human bones after you're done doing all your curses.\nWhether or not the guy selling human bones on Etsy is cool, and whether they'd be cooler if they were a dog.\nLoving Bribe Dog even though by all rights he ought to be in jail.\nA small dog gumming at a stranger's ankles and not breaking the skin but they get upset anyway for some reason.\nThe life-long FOMO of wondering what you're missing out on from activities you never do because you hate doing them.\nCorrectly guessing that the other guest is subtweeting Animal Crossing.\nA game that is fun until it becomes your job.\nNot needing to buy a new video game because Breath of the Wild still exists.\nNot wanting to do an activity so much as be a part of the community that does the activity.\nThat month where everyone in the world was playing Pokemon Go.\nRecommending a video game to two people who have already played it.\nLeveling up as a person the first time you've ever made a non-optimal decision in a game to retain your quality of life.\nYour Animal Crossing villagers expressing shock as you chop down your entire orchard in front of them.\nOpening an iPad feeling special, like someone confessing that they love you and not loving them back.\nGetting FOMO about everyone you're not in love with.\nThe future where instead of social media, everybody drops an ARG about themselves that you have to solve in order to talk to them.\nA thing that sounds exciting that you don't want to do.\nAn alternate reality where nothing happens and no-one cares.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-04-20T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/b669131d-4276-4c46-9954-e5687455b51f.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":69018436,"duration_in_seconds":4313}]},{"id":"0e02f1dd-c16e-4b56-90b3-2cdd57c28609","title":"25. Which One Is Eggteen?","url":"https://topiclords.com/which-one-is-eggteen","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nRusty is Rusty#1990 on Discord.\n\n\nRusty's Discord bot: https://deepfake-bot.readthedocs.io/en/latest/\n\nChris is @MrChrisLHall on Twitter.\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\n2:39 Games that are work.\n12:40 Twitter bots posting photos of people and cats that do not exist\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/DoesNotExistBot\nhttps://twitter.com/normalcatpics\n\n17:15 The best way to future proof your job against AI takeover is to get a job that machines are already better at but humans still do it anyway.\n24:34 Quill asks: \"Have you ever seen the different verbal naming systems for hexadecimal? They're all amazing. My favorite numbers are eggteen and chris.\"\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexadecimal#Verbal_and_digital_representations\n\n28:07 Where do you find folk games? Like Sticks or Contact or Fish Bowl. There must be some really amazing ones out there that I've never heard of.\n36:55 My recording rig for podcasting\n\n\nhttp://sonic-pi.net/\nLive coding an ambient electro set w/ Sonic Pi. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1m0aX9Lpts\nThe Failure of the iPad. http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2020/01/29/the_failure_of_the_ipad/\n\n45:02 When you're old and only remember jokes, the only way to learn new things is to make jokes about them.\n\n\nhttps://mnemosyne-proj.org/\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nNon-consensually turning a Discord user into a Discord bot.\nA recurring topic on this particular episode.\nLightly-flavored seltzer water.\nEntering the Konami code at a soda fountain to get the secret flavor.\nGetting tasks in your inbox and doing the tasks and getting more tasks as a reward.\nNot having to take part in the office drama.\nA complete lack of scrum master.\nThe fantasy of doing a job and getting fairly compensated.\nThe plausibility of having fun at your job.\nLetting others pay the cost of the harm you're doing to the world.\nLoving to play games where you clean up messes while your real life home gets worse and worse.\nPlaying a game about a housecleaning robot and deciding doing housework could make you happy in real life too.\nNot falling for it when mom tries to turn cleaning your room into a game.\nTeenagers going out of their way to be helpful in the household.\nToddlers wanting to do what adults do.\nFinding out 18 years later your theory is correct.\nThe lego: nature's caltrop.\nWriting an angry letter to the Lego corporation asking why they don't make squishy legos.\nWearing only half a pair of glasses.\nChoosing Markov Chains because they work better than Tensorflow.\nHaving enough ram to store 1.5 billion floating point values.\nWhether the Dalai Lama has ever used ICQ, and if so why hasn't Jim talked to him.\nSome people running really fast, but not as fast as cars, but we still pay them to do it.\nThe emergency board meeting that the CEO of running called when the speed of cars eclipsed the speed of runners.\nBecoming an artisanal trucker on Etsy when computers take your trucking job.\nDecking out your artisanal delivery truck in old-timey neon reminiscent of the 80s when people still had jobs.\nThe part of your brain dedicated to determining the gender of the driver who is trying to kill you.\nBeing a very chill person except when you're driving alone.\nAn angry meditation on driving in heavy traffic.\nThe only time your infant son has ever heard you be angry.\nBringing your date to see Black Swan without realizing it's secretly a horror movie.\nJust waiting for the great black scary bird to show up.\nPronouncing 1E as \"Eggteen.\"\nKnowing your pointer is a bad pointer when it's pointing to DEADBEEF.\nMagic numbers such as 0xDECAFC0FFEE15BAD.\nMichael Jackson moonwalking on the moon.\nThat feeling when you find that the altar is co-aligned in Minetown in Nethack.\nPlaying tag but not knowing who invented it.\nHaving water at home but trying not to brag about it.\nA really inefficient way of getting at musicking.\nChoosing a software package because you just download and run it without doing a bunch of sysadmin bullshit.\nBeing frustrated that there are still some things you can do on a computer but not on a phone.\nHaving an example that you wanted to use but not being able to remember what it was.\nRemembering what a word means because you once imagined a monkey saying it.\nDeliberately cracking yourself up so you can remember Bob's last name.\nThinking of the time I thought your name was \"Blob.\"\nOnly remembering to buy the funniest items on your grocery list.\nMemorizing your grocery list and then being stuck with the same grocery list for the rest of your life.\nThe persistent allure of a shelf of physical media even in the era of digital downloads.\nBeing intrigued by Bee Simulator but not being $48 intrigued.\nBee dances that are sufficiently expressive to articulate game reviews.\nGit cloning the mind of someone with a good memory so you can remember things better.\nOnly being able to remember monkeys brachiating, but remembering the hell out of it.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-04-13T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/0e02f1dd-c16e-4b56-90b3-2cdd57c28609.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":52114913,"duration_in_seconds":3257}]},{"id":"c0c7d795-b66b-4830-a20d-700200aeb0dd","title":"24. So Horrible And Yet So Tiny","url":"https://topiclords.com/so-horrible-and-yet-so-tiny","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nJenni is on an internet break but you can email her at jenni@jennipolodna.com.\nTyriq is @fourbitfriday on Twitter and elsewhere, and is making Catacomb Kids. https://www.ckgame.net/\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\n2:13 Hot Topic\n\n\n\"Peaches, meet your fate!\" https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/blna2q/hot_topic_employees_of_reddit_what_are_your/emqprnc/\n\n8:28 Toe picks\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_56TYtCggc\nMike Vallely yells at Tony Hawk about pressure flips. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQCe6guSOOM\nA more detailed take on what happened with inlining and the X-Games. https://www.reddit.com/r/rollerblading/comments/1jpost/why_hasnt_rollerblading_come_back_to_the_xgames/cbhemrd/\n\n22:15 Topical medication\n30:42 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.'\"\n34:45 Test of Proficiency in Korean\n\n\nNifflas's braille labeling purchase snafu. https://twitter.com/Nifflas/status/1230232736734031878\nConstructed scripts. https://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/english.htm\nNicaraguan sign language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language\n\n49:36 Topic Records\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nListening to a lot of dolphin podcasts.\nDiscussing only topics on the Topic Special.\nBelching instead of answering the question.\nYour project going well lately and being slightly less afraid that it's going to be awful.\nA store that isn't in your local mall so you have to drive half an hour to the cool mall.\nBeing afraid cool teenagers will stare you down and you'll evaporate on the spot.\nA store selling pop culture stuff you've actually heard of.\nNot having a Hot Topic story but telling one you read on the Internet.\nAn anime version of Ben Stiller's character from Reality Bites.\nThe Hot Topic in Ben Stiller's thought bubble that you can only shop at if Ben Stiller thinks of you.\nAll food vanishing from the world because Ben Stiller has thought of it all and it's trapped in his mind.\nAll the wiki pages that popped up for the movie Primer.\nHaving sorted the spreadsheet and being unable to un-sort the spreadsheet.\nThinking toe picks are a gross hygiene thing but actually they're for doing a triple lutz.\nAmputee guitarists who are pretty proficient at foot guitaring.\nSkates with four wheels in a rectangle being way less cool than skates with four wheels in a row because that's what girls do.\nIce skates being harder to turn in than inline skates, because they cut a groove in the surface.\nTurning on the toe pick.\nSucking at tourism because nothing interests you.\nChanging the subject to Tony Hawk's Pro Skater.\nWhich indie game developers were previously pro inline skaters.\nMike Vallely storming off angrily at the concept of doing pressure flips.\nA 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.\nTony Hawk being cool and teaching you vert tricks and Mike Vallely refusing to talk to anyone who isn't a skateboarder.\nSkateboarders getting petty and insecure and getting inline skating removed from the X-Games.\nCompleting the entire gap checklist in Tony Hawk 2 and putting it on your resume.\nDropping the franchise completely after Tony Hawk 2 because the Playstation 1 version of Tony Hawk 3 doesn't have female custom skaters.\nThe mission in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 where you follow a homeless person around Venice Beach and harass him until he leaves town.\nOllie the Magic Bum getting good at skateboarding so he can exact revenge.\nA full-contact, Tony-Hawk-And-Bully-Had-A-Baby roller derby game.\nPunxsutawney Phil looking down and seeing poop and so there'll be six more weeks of poop.\nHaving to shove pills down a cat's throat twice a day for the rest of her life.\nGiving away your spare geckos and explaining to the recipient that they eat sunlight.\nA gecko eating another gecko like a corncob because they're not social animals after all.\nThree creatures each nesting-dolled in the mouth of another creature.\nThe vet seemingly not knowing about lizards shedding when they put the cast on the lizard.\nThe gecko still being alive so you're doing okay at pet ownership.\nHiring a nurse that is also a gecko to take care of your gecko injections.\nA mystery that we are still trying to discover.\nEven the manufacturer not knowing why the candy bar is called Topic.\nInventing the jaw that can take the smallest possible bite.\nMarzipan but with almonds.\nNot liking how they pronounce \"urinal\" in the UK. Not liking it at all.\nThings taking a dark turn and someone turning up dead.\nNot going out of your way to inform people that your product's name is shockingly racist.\nPreferring the language proficiency test that is more similar to Skee-Ball.\nChanging the subject to Tony Hawk's Pro Skater again.\nWanting to feel sick about everything and doing all the missions at \"sick\" difficulty.\nDoing a few missions at \"sick\" difficulty and deciding that's enough sick for you.\nThe Korean alphabet having been invented by a dude who thought ideograms were a bad idea.\nBorrowing ideograms from Chinese and then later going back for more.\nNifflas inventing his own alphabet so doesn't have to hide his notes when he DMs.\nThe process of training yourself to read your weirdo moon-man alphabet.\nWanting to get into Lojban.\nLiking a phrase as much as Tolkien likes \"cellar door.\"\nInventing the language that magic is spoken in.\nInventing a language for your game and demanding your players become fluent in it.\nThe Nicaraguan school for deaf children doing a terrible job at teaching deaf children, but the children inventing Nicaraguan Sign Language.\nCollecting your paycheck for doing nothing.\nA corpus of industrial folk songs.\nYelling \"peaches meet your fate!\" and making the chainsaws kiss.\nMother-32 needing an offering of your hair every morning.\nThe composition process you enjoy most not leading to the kind of music you enjoy most.\nNot wanting to make prototypes in the final medium because working in the final medium is a pain to work in.\nGML being the wax and 6502 assembly being the marble in this analogy.\nLive streaming video to the Apple II.\nHaving time for hobbies because you quit Twitter.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-04-06T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/c0c7d795-b66b-4830-a20d-700200aeb0dd.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":59288765,"duration_in_seconds":3705}]},{"id":"cf81c163-7fc8-4a29-a0cd-1d2f314bc24b","title":"23. Purpleface's Face Isn't Purple","url":"https://topiclords.com/purplefaces-face-isnt-purple","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nDanny enjoys bananas.\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/itsdannymusic\nhttps://www.youtube.com/dannymusic\nhttps://www.twitch.tv/dannymusic\n\nLauren streams on Twitch and plays in The Returners. \n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/laurentheflute\nhttps://www.twitch.tv/laurentheflute\nhttp://the-returners.com/\n\n\n\nTopics\n\n\n1:12 If every Tetris piece has a personality, which piece would you most prefer to be stuck with on a deserted island?\n\n\nThe History of Tetris Randomizers. https://simon.lc/the-history-of-tetris-randomizers\n\n12:45 The sense of smell is most closely tied to memory. Are there any really strong associations you have?\n\n\nUlillillia's relationship with music: http://www.ulillillia.us/aboutme/music.shtml\nTXT World: A Journey Of The Nose. https://twitter.com/mogwai_poet/status/1196511832220917760\n\"We carry the WORLDS LARGEST Selection of Scratch N' Sniff scents!\" http://www.promobrands.com/scratchandsniffscents.htm\n\n22:15 Convincing my son that sleep is a good thing when I don't believe it myself\n28:46 Groke asks: \"Transitioning from making art for its own sake to making it to keep a roof over your head (or vice-versa)\"\n\n\nBasil's Adventure. http://twinbeard.com/basil/\n\n40:55 Why IS a raven like a writing desk?\n\n\nhttps://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1173/why-is-a-raven-like-a-writing-desk/\n\n46:36 In the last week, what is the best thing that you have seen, done, and/or eaten?\n\n\nNew Study Reveals Just How Sick Families With Kids Get. https://gizmodo.com/new-study-reveals-just-how-sick-families-with-kids-get-1722654292\nHow butter chicken roti became a Toronto classic. https://www.thestar.com/life/food_wine/2019/08/13/how-butter-chicken-roti-became-a-toronto-classic.html\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nDoing video game music.\nBreaking a problem into subproblems.\nAn unusual form of synesthesia where you perceive Tetris pieces as personalities.\nMaking rude buzzer noises when the guest gets it wrong.\nThe Tetris I-piece being egotistical and always late when you need it most.\nSiblings who are not identical but are mistaken for identical.\nThe stem cell of Tetris pieces.\nThe Tetris T-piece being useful for opening coconuts because it's shaped like a bottle opener.\nPlaying Tetris without realizing that you can rotate the pieces.\nThe Tetris T-piece standing for Trauma.\nNot realizing you push B to run in Super Mario Bros. because it doesn't do anything when you're not moving.\nThe smell of candles reminding you of the holidays.\nFinding the cologne that speaks to your soul and wearing it literally every day.\nA cartoon character design except it's how you smell.\nBringing around an MP3 player to play your theme song on loop as you walk around campus.\nTesting how long you can listen to the Bubble Bobble theme.\nEating only carrots for a week because you want to really feel the fine distinctions between each individual carrot.\nThe particular mix of sweat and grass that makes you think of playing soccer.\nNot being able to think of the word for when the water in a river is extremely busy.\nThe idealized smells of Frog Fractions 2 where everything smells like candy because of all the bright colors.\nGoing to sleep being the worst thing but your son going to sleep being the best thing.\nReading your child books about sleeping to convince them that sleeping is a good thing.\nRefusing 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.\nHaving vivid dreams and taking ideas from them to use in fiction.\nHating to go to sleep and hating to wake up so maybe what you actually hate is just the transition one way or the other.\nWanting to go to sleep but going into a depressive spiral instead.\nReminiscing about making art as a hobby.\nDoing the same amount of work but not burning out because you change the kind of work you're doing.\nCreativity through limitations.\nGetting to the point where you can afford to say no to freelance projects.\nHaving an audience and feeling obligated to serve the audience literally all the time.\nMaking dinner as an act of creative fulfillment.\nBaking intuitively by just putting ingredients in a pan until it feels right.\nGiving your guest baker a challenge ingredient to incorporate into their cake.\nPicking activities that force you to not be perfect.\nForcing everybody to read a sentence from your novel before they get a cookie.\nWhether \"smartass\" is really a swear.\nFinding 11 socks in your desk at the end of the school year.\nBoth a raven and a writing desk having legs, but different numbers of legs.\nWhether desks lay eggs to reproduce.\nFinding the image that is exactly halfway between a raven and a writing desk.\nNever having been sick as often as when you worked in a bounce house birthday party place.\nSchoolteachers no longer getting sick because they've gotten literally every disease.\nPutting the curry inside of the flatbread like they do in Toronto.\nThe relief of seeing a stray cat you haven't seen in a while.\nA cat named Purrcy.\nArranging music for a friend and your band mates being excited to record it.\nArtists appreciating art you made for them more than non-artists would.\nGiving grandma your new noisecore album for Christmas.\nGrandma sticking your new noisecore album to the fridge with a magnet.\nSomeone asking to read your fiction and then actually reading it.\nA gift secretly being a demand for the recipient's time.\nA gift made not just for somebody but made with their needs in mind.\nLaura, Lauren, Laurie, and Laurel all being the same name if you think about it.\nProfundity on demand.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-03-30T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/cf81c163-7fc8-4a29-a0cd-1d2f314bc24b.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":59679556,"duration_in_seconds":3729}]},{"id":"8e7dcbb4-7f6a-4a9d-ab04-94f08be9b6eb","title":"22. Abstinent Train Polycule","url":"https://topiclords.com/abstinent-train-polycule","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nRyan (@ryanikecomposer) made a great grilled cheese sandwich in an air fryer two weeks ago. \n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_fryer\n\nAlexander is a math professor at DigiPen and trades his chicken flock's eggs to a neighbor for home-roasted coffee beans.\n\n\nhttps://www.quora.com/profile/Alexander-Young-2\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\n8:41 Creativity from a seed vs from a box\n18:41 Every fucking comedy trailer in the 90s used Hall of the Mountain king and it sucked and I hated it and why don't we do that any more\n\n\nhttps://www.20k.org/episodes/thebooj\n\n29:04 Some guy you just met asks to install an HDMI port on your foot. You decide to go for it. When you plug in a TV, what's playing on your foot?\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Hawk%27s_Skate_Jam\nhttps://twitter.com/tonyhawk/status/5184156673\n\n40:12 David asks: \"Yak shaving in your profession or hobby\"\n\n\nhttps://i.imgur.com/t0XHtgJ.gif\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeboxing\n\n49:01 I think about the \"abstinence train\" from a high school health class video once a week. How can I turn this from distraction into motivation?\n1:02:00 Multi-lingual animals\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nMaking a transcendent grilled cheese in the air fryer.\nDipping food in terrifyingly hot golden juice that might burn your face off.\nWalking into your friend's house and seeing an edifice.\nEsoteric kitchen appliances that we find invaluable.\nA Kevin Bacon co-working situation.\nAn espresso machine where you have to screw the lid down properly or it explodes.\nThe adrenaline rush of surviving the cooking process making the food taste way better.\nTrading your chicken's fresh eggs for your neighbor's home-roasted coffee beans.\nTrading jam games for fresh jam.\nGetting super excited by discovering that something is impossible.\nProving the theorem that something can never be equal to something else.\nUsing a constraint to make something new.\nAI-driven space helmets that generate plausible sounds for the space vista you're looking at.\nA naval battle In Space!!;\nTaking the script of an existing movie and adding a bunch of jokes to it.\nEverybody knowing that Shakespeare was a hack but being afraid to say it.\nMarching on the National Mall shrieking about public domain music usage in movie trailers.\nGetting nostalgic about trends you always hated.\nAphantasia but for envisioning loudspeakers.\nBeing the kind of kid that keeps a database of classical music used in film trailers.\nOwen Wilson's goblin-like face, sitting in his hall.\nLooney Tunes characters creeping around while pizzicato strings punctuate their footsteps.\nAll classical music being recontextualized as Looney Tunes music.\nJohn Williams changing one note of your opus and now it's the soundtrack to Star Wars.\nLearning to play a mid-90s cartoon theme on harpsichord and realizing it's basically Hall of the Mountain King with every third note removed.\nThe booj.\nListening to a fake movie trailer and growing excited for a movie that doesn't exist.\nA young child singing a Judas Priest song as if it's a nursery rhyme.\nPutting the booj in trailers for Casablanca and giving 1940s audiences a heart attack.\nPlaying the booj outside ancient Rome and Romans inventing the film camera because they want to see the movie so badly.\nSomehow removing even more agency from a \"would you rather\" question.\nThe HDMI port in your foot playing pretzel advertisements.\nAsking 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.\nBeing assured that whatever comes out of your foot won't kill you.\nThe HDMI port in your foot not hurting unless you try to run.\nThe HDMI port on your foot playing memories of you running with the Columbia City Running Club.\nForgetting 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.\nAn AR Tony Hawk skating game where you skate on power lines by holding your phone camera up to them.\nTony Hawk being a Pokemon.\nThe cat bus from My Neighbor Totoro.\nToddlers discovering the front yard.\nA toddler whaling on a cat but she refuses to run away and just gets annoyed.\nGetting all your cat poking and yanking out of the way as a toddler.\nYak shaving being a metaphor, hopefully.\nGetting anxiety from hearing yak shaving explained.\nGrowing up with an antagonistic relationship with sleeping and by extension your own body.\nThinking of sleep as step 0 for anything you want to get done tomorrow.\nWanting a free uninterrupted hour and getting it by sleeping an hour less tonight.\nThe hemispheres of your brain having two different chronotypes.\nTrying way too hard to relate to the teens.\nTeens in the 90s being way into locomotives.\nThree 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.\nThe two front cars of the train polycule trying to convince the caboose that Abstinence Street is really cool actually.\nThe Abstinence Train PSA being the direct inspiration for The Human Centipede.\nRyan being the caboose in this metaphor.\nThe awards organization that gives you a trophy for eating your very last peanut butter and jelly sandwich.\nAn abstinent train polycule in the railyard of ideas, validating each other's impulses.\nAn abstinent train polycule changing the law to allow polygamy.\nBecoming a Zen Master but when your followers think you're meditating, you're actually repeating the Abstinence Train PSA in your head.\nFinally finding the Abstinence Train on YouTube and vaporizing into the atmosphere, your purpose fulfilled.\nA homebrew recreation of the famous Abstinence Train video.\nThe results you get when you type \"Abstinence Train\" into YouTube.\nWanting 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.\nMean Girls but all the time and they never grow out of it.\nChickens having a particular call they make when a hawk appears that means everyone should hide.\nA crow that knows when chickens are warning other chickens about the incipient hawk.\nBeing very frustrated that the host put the topics in the wrong order.\nThe host leaving the show early but the guests continuing to talk for another fifteen minutes.\nAssuring the listener that you're not bragging when you explain just how many podcasts you've been on.\nBeing called out by a podcast you were listening to but not otherwise involved in.\nBeing a doctor of mathematics but weighing in on whether dinosaurs were domesticable because it's Quora after all.\nChickens being way more shareable than your latest math problem.\nRemembering the face of the human that threatened your nest.\nMaking decoy nests to fool the government agency trying to get rid of you.\nA crow really just being a black pigeon.\nThe sound of a juvenile crow hassling their mom for food.\nThrowing an olive at a murder of crows to meet the one crow who is willing to approach it like it's a live grenade.\nSeattle residents exchanging crow attack stories.\nJim not being here to ask you if you want to plug anything.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-03-23T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/8e7dcbb4-7f6a-4a9d-ab04-94f08be9b6eb.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":72468271,"duration_in_seconds":4529}]},{"id":"21980aac-4622-4cbf-a0ab-f4c38f6014bd","title":"21. Strip Laser Tag","url":"https://topiclords.com/strip-laser-tag","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nJosh makes Thunk. https://www.youtube.com/user/THUNKShow\nElena is on the Topic Lords discord.\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\n2:29 Procrastination, or, avoidance as a protective coping mechanism\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buridan%27s_ass\n\n13:08 Newcomb's Problem\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomb%27s_paradox\n\n19:46 Celebrating Christmas by saying you have a machine gun\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/mogwai_poet/status/1210729053465931781\n\n26:16 Kevin asks: \"The fear that other podcasts will steal your idea to discuss topics.\"\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_sleep\nhttp://bash.org/\n\n32:09 McMaster-Carr\n\n\nhttps://www.mcmaster.com/\nhttp://thistothat.com/\n\"Satisfying Spiral Liquid Bubbler Timer\" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFLNpSqzn7o\n\n41:34 Conlanging with toddlers\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language\n\n50:26 Preserving old software\n\n\nTHUG Pro. http://www.thugpro.com/\n\"Ozimals did give rabbit owners a brief chance to save their rabbits. Before shutting down, they gave away items which make rabbits not need food – and leaves them sterile. Some rabbits will live on forever, the last of their kind.\" https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/05/19/second-life-ozimals-pet-rabbits-dying/\nThe Lifecycle of Software Objects. https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/voices.uchicago.edu/dist/8/644/files/2017/08/Chiang-Lifecycle-of-Software-Objects-q3tsuw.pdf\nRolled Out, the Super Monkey Ball clone. https://blog.rolledoutgame.com/\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nBeing old and knowing nothing.\nFinding out that you can buy citric acid and put it in your drinking water.\nFinding out that you can buy concrete and put it in your toilet.\nThe refreshing concrete toilet.\nRegretting agreeing to do a thing you really enjoy.\nDefeating procrastinating by discovering what you're afraid of and reframing it or interceding.\nWorrying that you're incapable of surviving in a capitalist system.\nTracing every fear back to a fear of dying alone, like how every page on Wikipedia leads to Philosophy.\nWanting to do a thing but having no effective mechanism to prefer any given thing over any other and doing nothing.\nHearing syllables and then \"ass\" and pretending you understand.\nLearning a word that you didn't know and then explaining it to other people.\nBreaking your task into small steps and doing the first step.\nListening to your emotion and being like \"what's your deal\"\nSelf-acceptance helping when beating yourself up doesn't.\nInstead of writing, taking copious notes and then skipping right to editing the notes into a completed text.\nLaying out an outline and then finishing the essay by removing the bullet points.\nHaving 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.\nEverything being related to everything else.\nGiving people the tools they need to engage with topics.\nA future-knowing genie who knows you're going to have pizza tonight.\nSomeone having done this topic already on a different podcast.\nBeing the genie you want to see in the world.\nCausality seeming to flow in reverse.\nReassuring the genie that you're not the kind of person who takes two boxes.\nThe genie turning out to just be a guy with a rubber duck.\nAn odd Christmas greeting that you are here for.\nLiving next to people who think it's festive to announce how armed they are.\nKnocking on your neighbor's door and asking for a cup of machine gun.\nA corpse wearing a santa hat.\nTrying to think of any movie that doesn't depict a corpse that could've worn a santa hat.\nSome of your best friends having machine guns.\nBeing charmed by the utilitarian and efficient design of firearms.\nCrying in a VR game and the tears filling up the mask until you drown.\nStrip laser tag.\nA topic peasant just waltzing in and talking about topics.\nEditing out the guy hiding with a gun in post.\nHaving an unconscionable amount of bash.org memorized.\nWaking up from your drugged haze to a flaming burnt cake in the oven and your house is burning down.\nBeing 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.\nEverything that you could possibly need to build a thing.\nSpinning around in an enormous magical hardware store with arms outstretched and an inventory robot fluttering around your skirt and landing on your finger.\nMetal boxy objects of mysterious provenance.\nThe reaction speed of your transition lenses.\nWelding 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.\nInstalling permanent earplugs powered by your greasy earwax.\nNot needing McMaster-Carr after Josh just tells you the answer.\nAn oil timer forcing a door to open or close slowly.\nHaving an idea for a cool Youtube video and assuming there's probably a cool Youtube guy who's already done it.\nA toddler teaching you how to teach dragon language and the dragons being annoyed you didn't ask them.\nAsking 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.\"\nCircumlocuting around the concept of the color green.\nSumming up your engineering degree as \"f=ma\" and \"you can't push a rope\" and saving your listeners five years.\nA fairly ingenious use of math that we've had sitting around forever.\nSliding rules getting us to the moon because we hadn't invented calculators yet.\nThe content being the same but the context changing.\nThe NES being the game dev platform that is most likely to survive the next thousand years.\nTrolling through aerospace source code looking for funny comments.\nDeleting your source code to free up space because nobody is ever going to need to port or revise Final Fantasy 7.\nPlanning a heist to retrieve the floppy disks stashed above the acoustic ceiling tiles of a dry cleaning service.\nGames being reasonably well-preserved but other kinds of software being mostly lost because teenaged nerds don't care about it.\nAI pets dying because the company that manufactured them went out of business.\nYour GMO dog dying because the manufacturer's SSL certificate expired.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-03-16T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/21980aac-4622-4cbf-a0ab-f4c38f6014bd.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":65170286,"duration_in_seconds":4073}]},{"id":"b95f4345-0aa8-4f2f-98a7-2d7dd8f113ae","title":"20. The Bowerbird's Apprentice","url":"https://topiclords.com/the-bowerbirds-apprentice","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nMark's meme is https://imgur.com/a/YFTXteU plus the caption \"When you get on the bus and it's rush hour and the only free space is being taken up by someone's bag.\"\nShirley's meme is https://imgur.com/a/9oyR7fa\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\n1:10 Living abroad/Third Culture Kid experience\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_culture_kid\nUnderstanding prejudice: the Implicit Association Test. https://secure.understandingprejudice.org/iat/\n\n11:19 Camgirl life\n27:14 Why don't most animals need to learn to walk?\n\n\nBowerbird. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowerbird\n\n35:43 Quill asks: \"What bones have you broken and how?\"\n48:51 Hypnagogic hallucination/anxiety\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nJim's favorite episodes of this show.\nNot being plugged in and having no idea what's going on.\nThe podcast ruining somebody's lack of internet presence.\nNot being sure whether you defined Third Culture Kid correctly.\nThe four types of Third Culture Kids.\nBeing within five minutes of a Coca Cola at any given moment no matter where you go in the world.\nMeeting a child of a Coca Cola executive at every international school.\nBathroom metaphors for your childhood identity.\nThoroughly describing the procedure of a scientific test.\nThe 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.\nShowing kids pictures of faces of different races and asking them which one is the liar.\nChildren turning out racist despite never having been explicitly instructed to be racist.\nTaking a Third Culture Kid refresher course to refresh your lack of racial bias.\nConfusing being a minority with being oppressed.\nNobody having enough experience with your race to know whether or not to be prejudiced against you.\nPeople who sound like they have no accent because they live near Hollywood, California.\nTurning on a camera and expecting the money to pour down around you.\nNobody giving you money because you're a boring naked person.\nSometimes logging on and making $0 and sometimes logging on and making thousands of dollars.\nThe liberation of leaving your retail job.\nThe ability to say no when you don't want to do something.\nRealizing your ability to consent is way more present at your sex work job than at your retail job.\nNot being able to ban the worst customers from the store you work at.\nFeeling like you can get to the life you want if you stick through the hard times.\nQuitting one job that sucks and ending up at another job that sucks.\nWorking 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.\nHeading back to the kitchen before your tray of hors d'oeuvres is empty in hopes that you can eat the last few yourself.\nTaking the deviled egg tax every time you make deviled eggs.\nRealizing that being a scientist is way cooler than working retail.\nWhen the one guy you know who's always had it figured out suddenly changes it up.\nThe cool high school robotics teacher with a top knot.\nGod-tier hipsters.\nAll babies being born early because their head gets too big.\nThe word for when someone is deliberately slow at work.\nBeing jealous of your son's ability to learn skills extremely quickly.\nBeing jealous of your son's enormous head circumference.\nKangaroos 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.\nDeciding this bower sucks, chirping out and trying to find a better bower bird with a better bower.\nBowerbirds innately knowing that they want to build big, blue bowers, but sucking at it until they apprentice under experienced bowerbirds.\nInnately preferring big bowers and you can not lie.\nBowerbirds being super impressed by blue headphones with bluetooth support.\nJoking 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.\nTripping into a plexiglass window and realizing the guy from Hudsucker Proxy saved your life.\nHaving a rich friend who owns a golf cart and tearing the golf cart around while South African golfers shake their fists at you.\nThe golf cart not having a third seat so you just stand in the indentations where the golf bags usually go.\nDiving off of a golf cart that is about to tip over.\nSustaining grave head injuries but the gate attendant still not letting you take the golf cart out of the parking lot.\nPeeling the hair off your friend's face to reveal why the gate attendant should let you out of the parking lot.\nAfter 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.\nGetting 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.\nEmbedding a second PSA within your PSA.\nBreaking a toe by kicking the softest thing you can think of.\nBringing up the Big Mike for maybe the third episode in a row.\nNeeding 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.\nGiving a name to the dude you keep hallucinating standing in the corner of the room as you sleep.\nRearranging your bedroom to minimize shadows because the creepy dude only materializes in darkness.\nYour 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.\nNot wanting to tell anyone you hallucinate while you sleep because of mental illness stigma.\nSleep paralysis and hypnagogic hallucinations totally explaining why people used to believe in ghosts.\nHaving the fun doesn't-ruin-your-life kind of hypnagogic hallucinations.\nExistential dread only getting worse as your life goes on.\nNot being able to finish watching an episode of Gargoyles because a shot from very high up gave you mortal terror.\nNot being on the Internet except to look for memes.\nEnrolling in every Cognitive Neuroscience program in the country because you're trying to befriend this week's guests to get their memes.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-03-09T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/b95f4345-0aa8-4f2f-98a7-2d7dd8f113ae.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":62405486,"duration_in_seconds":3900}]},{"id":"ec687e98-4dd0-42d5-8808-9b4d345b124a","title":"19. A Pickled Egg Christmas","url":"https://topiclords.com/a-pickled-egg-christmas","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nJeff is an event planner at https://www.acesup.com/ and blogged at https://80isenough.wordpress.com/ back when he was unemployed.\nJoe is.\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\n0:52 Not having time to be a geek.\n10:21 Pickled egg ordering paranoia.\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickled_egg\n\n20:04 This topic is mostly an excuse to ask Joe how he raised such good kids.\n\n\nThe Blank Slate, by Steven Pinker. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blank_Slate\n\n33:05 Quill asks: \"What sort of art did you make when you were younger?\"\n\n\nDouble reed instruments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_reed\n\n45:44 Augmented reality killer app: the etymology explorer\n\n\nThe Online Etymology Dictionary. https://www.etymonline.com/\n\n49:46 80% is enough.\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nHaving nothing to plug.\nConsuming all the media available because you're in high school and it's the 80s.\nNot being sure if the media you're consuming, or about to consume, is worth your time.\nForgetting everything else as a prerequisite for getting anything done.\nHumans figuring out what to do with their drive to make art once computers are better at making art.\nCollectively choosing to limit the art you consume to create an artificial culture in your collective.\nA fake band invented by the internet come alive.\nComputers taking over art curation, too.\nMaking a statement in a specific context that can't be as easily transplanted into another context and that making you a luddite weirdo.\nCultivating a healthy creative space being super weird now, but will make more sense in the future when the creative.\nLiking pickled eggs but not being able to find them in any local store.\nThe hypothetical fraughtness of purchasing pickled eggs online.\nBuying a bunch of gross stuff and being disappointed.\nHating the pickled eggs you bulk-purchased and feeding them all to your dogs.\nPickled sausages -- a southern specialty.\nSelling your pickled products at a discount because they're past their sell-by date.\nPickled Thai eggplant about the size of marbles.\nNot 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.\nThe entire egg pickling community thinking your egg pickling method is heretical.\nAsking everybody in your family for pickled eggs for Christmas and throwing a pickled egg party to get rid of all your danged pickled eggs.\nConsuming twenty pounds of pickled eggs on a Topic Lords live show.\nBeing really impressed by somebody's child-rearing technique.\nThe \"blank slate\" theory -- that children are born with no personality -- being total bullshit.\nA sample size of three technically counting as a pattern.\nHaving a dialog with your children rather than just telling them what to do.\nGrowing up hating authority and how that informs parenting strategy.\nDoing the bare minimum and getting great results because everyone else just sucks.\nParents who are basically still children themselves.\nNot having any parenting books to read because you are the first person who has ever been a parent.\nDoing everything being indistinguishable from doing nothing.\nNot having any good way to choose between all the available child-rearing options.\nNot knowing why you read a particular parenting book twenty years ago and also not being sure if it shaped your parenting strategy.\nMaking bad decisions because we're all human and we all make bad decisions.\nBeing well-equipped to adapt to a changing world.\nNot making a lot of art because your penmanship is terrible and it would just be a blob of nothing.\nYour 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.\nKids rarely being good at anything.\nThe amazing child drummer who amazingly turns into a commensurately even more amazing adult drummer.\nNoodling around with a keyboard as an adult being informed by a decade of rigorous piano lessons as a child.\nLoving Mechwarrior and spending all of grade school drawing spaceships and giant robots.\nGrowing up a Scream Tracker kid.\nLoading up a song you like into a tracker and digging deep into its technical details.\nExplaining that this song is only four channels and 200 kilobytes and your mom remaining unimpressed.\nAn incredible technical feat that is entirely meaningless to anybody not embedded in its context.\nComing from a position of empathy and charity by default.\nTwo wooden reeds tied together like a duckbill creating a much smoother sound than a wooden reed resting against a hard surface.\nYour band teacher not knowing enough about the bassoon to critique your bassoon playing and your next band teacher switching you to piano.\nTrying to remember all the words you want to look up the etymology of next time you're at a computer.\nConjectural etymology that seems sensible but isn't actually backed up by evidence.\nReading ahead because you are bored in class, but that just meaning you'll be even more bored later.\nGetting to 80th percentile of a skill or subject and then moving on to another skill or subject.\nAccidentally hiring someone pretty good at both social work and IT work but it being ridiculous to try to hire someone like that on purpose.\nThe multivarious sub-skills required to run a UPS store.\nNot recommending anybody follow your career path because your resume looks like you have some kind of personality disorder.\nNobody wanting to hire a generalist.\nJust shipping at 90% done because most likely that's good enough.\nMaking the news one day but in a year a kid breaking your record.\nEverybody 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.\nGetting really good at a skill and then computers taking your job anyway.\nEnjoying learning for the intrinsic value of learning.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-03-02T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/ec687e98-4dd0-42d5-8808-9b4d345b124a.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":58748761,"duration_in_seconds":3671}]},{"id":"1debb662-4b49-47ef-86b6-5dada47c3d84","title":"18. Yelling Sweater","url":"https://topiclords.com/yelling-sweater","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nJames is working on Galapagos. https://triplefox.itch.io/galapagos\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/Triplefox\nhttp://ludamix.com/\n\nJay is on Twitter. https://twitter.com/jaytholen\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\n1:38 References dating things and/or making them inaccessible. Examples: older Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes and that Winter Wonderland song where they say a snowman looks like Parson Brown. Who the heck is that??\n\n\nWhat color is Parson Brown? https://www.datalounge.com/thread/18081042-what-color-is-parson-brown-\n\"What are your favorite culturally untranslatable phrases?\" https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/efee7/what_are_your_favorite_culturally_untranslateable/\n\n9:33 How four-year-olds perceive Lego(tm)\n\n\nThe Game Engine Black Book: Doom. http://fabiensanglard.net/gebbdoom/\nRomero's Sigil Doom episode, featuring Buckethead. https://www.romerogames.ie/si6il\n\n19:25 Watching behind-the-music documentaries and realizing all the meatheads I was judging from their appearance in music videos in the 90s are as huge music theory nerds as any of my friends.\n\n\nT-Pain without autotune: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyzlUUqxXYs\n\n25:06 Groke asks: \"Cheap musical instruments are cool, aren't they? Penny whistles, harmonicas, ocarinas... any personal experiences with these?\"\n\n\nThe Thomas the Tank Engine theme played on Otamatone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugW_eU5jgIM\nThe Tastee Bros. play the Olympic Fanfare https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hs5ioAc_oY8\nThe Tastee Bros. 300 tips for playing a trumpet really high: http://www.gibble.org/high.htm\n\"A dodecaphonic scream trumpet homage to Christmas the Tastee Bros and Mr Santa. X\" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Udvy8XYzH4U\n\n32:35 Timberwolf/husky breeds and their incredible jaws.\n38:49 Losing the ability to know when things are conventionally aesthetically pleasing.\n\n\nOne Terabyte of Kilobyte Age. https://blog.geocities.institute/\n\n53:04 This CPAP machine is really putting a damper on my dreams of growing a Santa beard one day.\n\n\n\"Your Source for CPAP Mask Sealant Specially for Bearded Men\" https://cpapbeardandmustacheseal.com/\n\"The 'Machine Bow' is a reality!\" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hs5ioAc_oY8\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nYour co-host not saying his last name so you're not sure whether he knows how to pronounce it.\nSometimes working in the same room and sometimes getting coffee together.\nLiving in Germany and not being able to not bring it up.\nTrying to enjoy topical comedy from decades ago.\nTrying to enjoy topical comedy from centuries ago and having to rely on footnotes.\nJokes that are so dated nobody even perceives them as a joke.\nLiking a joke better before you get it.\nTranslating a text that is full of French puns into English puns.\nA police officer yelling \"sweater\" at a lady driving down the road.\nTrying to find an authoritative answer but only finding answers.yahoo.com.\nParsons being so ubiquitous that everyone must know a \"Parson Brown.\"\nYour 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.\nA four year old wanting answers and older people having all the answers.\nA giraffe staying forever in a park because you surrounded the park with a fence and it's a happy giraffe.\nPlaying 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.\nTrying to evoke a feeling by doing the thing that did it thirty years ago.\nBeing inspired to try exciting new creative tools but as soon as you get in there it just immediately feels like work.\nGames that you need to read a textbook to be able to enjoy.\nSeeing something happen once and assuming it's going to happen that way every time.\nA baby throwing a cup on the ground over and over again to make sure it falls downwards every time.\nMost people having a much higher drive to be cool than you do.\nA nu-metal punk sitting at a piano and talking about jazz chords.\nBeing surprised when people who look fashionable are also skilled.\nHaving being in your early teens when Grunge hit and that affecting your fashion sense for your entire life.\nA photo of your nu-metal phase somehow not ending up in Hypnospace Outlaw.\nFinding dorky button up shirts some Silicon Valley folks would've worn in the late 90s and making that be just your fashion sense.\nMethod acting but for video games.\nBilly Idol insisting that interviewers need to have read Neuromancer but not having read it himself.\nNot having time to read so insisting that interviewers read a book for you and tell you about it while they interview you.\nThe note getting louder when you squeeze the face.\nThinking an effect is a digital filter but it turns out to just be the mouth opening and closing.\nWhen you put your thumb over the Game Boy speaker and slowly peel it off.\nJust sticking the head of a plunger into your trumpet.\nGetting 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.\nLearning to hit those high notes because it's cool, not because it's particularly musically useful.\nBeing obsessed with claves because of Brian Eno's \"St. Elmo's Fire,\" but not being sure how to pronounce \"claves.\"\nFinding a melodica in your wife's parents' basement.\nMost dogs just looking at your hand but this one bringing its entire jaw over your arm sideways.\nNoisebridge being an anarchist collective where anything can happen.\nLaughing when your kid does stuff you really ought to be discouraging.\nAccidentally teaching a small child to call people fat.\nYour 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.\nWriting in your first-grade journal that you don't like when your parents take you to \"the dark place.\"\nWriting 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.\nThe borrowed tribal iconography mixed with tech themes that Internet companies to show a new era of togetherness and communication.\nFinding beauty in a Geocities web page with random animated images everywhere and a tiled background.\nImmersing yourself in an aesthetic until you like it.\nArt getting way better when the image links start breaking.\nYour sense of aesthetics being your only guide for knowing how to make something.\nSlowly learning to trust your sense of aesthetics when people like your work.\nNot trusting your own sense of aesthetics and turning to philosophy to come up with interesting aesthetic rules to follow instead.\nTrying a new pixel art aesthetic that's even more rectangular than before.\nThe threshold between mere aesthetic weirdness and people immediately dismissing a work as ugly.\nDeliberately choosing your system palette in the way that 8-bit microcomputers and early consoles did not.\nConsidering yourself done after the first draft of an idea if the idea is difficult and complicated to implement, but iterating if it's simple.\nHaving an aesthetic plan for growing old.\nDoing a cursory Google search before giving up on your dreams.\nNot trusting cheapcpapsupplies.com because they probably just want to sell you their CPAP supplies -- but at least it's cheap.\nInstagram figuring out that you have sleep apnea.\nThe potions master brewing up a snoring solution as a punishment.\nDressing 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.\nHaving a distinctive laugh for when you're firing your longbow extremely rapidly.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-02-24T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/1debb662-4b49-47ef-86b6-5dada47c3d84.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":57923710,"duration_in_seconds":3620}]},{"id":"f5abed05-968b-424e-a77a-8a2c64dbbd92","title":"17. A Buzzsaw Made Of Bananas","url":"https://topiclords.com/a-buzzsaw-made-of-bananas","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nApril is Jim's wife again and still a Beast Lord.\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/aprilsaur\nhttps://www1.flightrising.com/lair/463464\n\nJohn is a Mystery.\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\n2:25 Create a D&D character right now\n\n\nDrizzt the Drow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drizzt_Do%27Urden\nMoai eyes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moai#Eyes\n\n12:51 Being friends with people who are more than ten years older/younger than you: not weird until suddenly it is?\n\n\nTeaching English in Japan. https://www.internationalteflacademy.com/teach-english-in-japan\nNova. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_(eikaiwa)\n\n24:31 Being in another country and seeing a person from your own country: is a head nod appropriate or not?\n30:05 You can get Big Mike bananas from a specialty dealer in Miami\n\n\nhttps://miamifruit.org/\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rambutan\n\n43:04 Relational memory/mind palaces/file structures from long-retired computers\n46:37 What's your preferred method for migrating your stuff from your old computer to your new computer?\n56:43 Willow asks: \"Methods for assembling great salads\"\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nRefusing to be a Topic Lord because you're just on Topic Lords to promote your alternative podcast Beast Lords.\nNot having anyone to plug this time either but maybe you have a Soundcloud somewhere.\nChoosing all of your topics while driving to the zoo.\nContaining multitudes and being super excited.\nA band of adventurers being led by an operatic soprano.\nA party of all bards.\nAppropriating spam musubi because it's delicious.\nNot technically being part of a band of adventurers but you play a tambourine and own the van.\nStealing the spam musubi from your bass player's bag of holding because they're going to go bad eventually.\nKeeping both gold coins and spam musubi in the same bag of holding and having to dig around for the money when you buy anything.\nFinally having a dog on this podcast.\nPutting your dead dog in every D&D party you're in for the rest of your life.\nPutting your dead dog in every platformer you make for the rest of your life.\nAll your D&D adventures going wrong because you're just musicians and can't actually deal with monsters.\nPutting monsters onto the bus to the next town over.\nPutting a fishtank bubbler on your bag of holding so all the monsters in there can breathe.\nFixing it then ruining it.\nComing to your chosen profession late in your life.\nAge gaps getting less weird as time goes on.\nThinking about watching new TV to be able to relate to young people and deciding nobody has that kind of time.\nOld people being full of stories from their lives.\nNot talking to your friend as much as you used to because she lives in Ohio now.\nSpending your retirement taking care of dogs.\nResponding to difficult situations with grace and tact.\nStopping going to work because they stopped paying you.\nThe English teacher bubble in Japan.\nSeeing the only other white person for a mile in any direction and wondering if you should nod at them.\nSeeing the only other white person for a mile in any direction and thinking \"frickin Americans!\"\nNot wanting to talk to strangers except in your favorite coffee shop.\nTelling your wife something a week ago and then finding out it's a myth and having to correct her on a podcast.\nBananas being especially susceptible to disease.\nReplacing the Cavendish banana with an even shittier banana after it succumbs.\nHiding your bananas because if your son sees them he won't be able to think about anything else.\nGiving your son bananas because he already poops enough.\nFoot-long avocados.\nA giant box of intimidating tropical fruit being the best Christmas gift.\nDrinking soursop juice tasting flights at a Mexican restaurant.\nBananas that look like a buzzsaw made of bananas.\nYour infant son seeing a rambutan and realizing that maybe some things don't go in your mouth.\nHaunted fruit.\nRemembering trauma that happened when you were way too young to remember stuff.\nVisiting your dad in prison and he's wearing fake shoes.\nRiding in the back of a pickup truck and sharing Now & Laters with your older sister.\nThe US government deciding that televising court trials is a terrible idea after televising the OJ Simpson trial.\nKnowing when a thing happened because you remember where it happened.\nTrying 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.\nYelling \"story math!\" when you correctly predict a story beat.\nRealizing at the end of the episode that he's been inside his mind palace the entire time.\nCopying your old hard drive onto the new one always working until one day you get an SSD drive and nothing fits.\nPaying Dropbox money to get more storage and Dropbox starting to spam you about features you don't care about.\nOnly having a laptop to more effectively play your favorite web game.\nMost people not really having any use for a desktop PC any more.\nHaving to remember life milestones differently because your life has settled down.\nLiking a salad that doesn't have any lettuce in it.\nNever having so badly wanted to go make a salad.\nPeeling cucumbers so you don't get Cucumber Gas.\nA hot cucumber.\nFlashing your King.com CEO badge to get into the food truck even.\nThe 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.\nCrisping cheddar cheese in the broiler and throwing away the rest of your meal because you've peaked.\nTrying to convince your wife that if you add mayo to a cheese plate it becomes a salad.\nNot understanding when the young folks talk about going to sleep.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-02-17T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/f5abed05-968b-424e-a77a-8a2c64dbbd92.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":68704131,"duration_in_seconds":4294}]},{"id":"c3c157a4-2900-4cd9-a11c-1667ab43db84","title":"16. I Don't Want To Be Skin Dad","url":"https://topiclords.com/i-dont-want-to-be-skin-dad","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords this week:\n\n\nTim made Jamestown and just shipped Jamestown+ on PC and Switch. http://jamestownplus.com/\nKole makes podcasts at Duckfeed. http://duckfeed.tv/\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\n2:42 Cat trees for humans.\n\n\nNinja Warrior. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJPP7M1hQZE\n\"Find an American Ninja Warrior Gym.\" http://www.ninjawarriorgyms.com/\n\n7:37 Non-analytical storytelling/writing (flash writing, story time, songwriting)\n\n\nAlice's Restaurant. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m57gzA2JCcM\n\n15:08 The ephemerality of AI Dungeon.\n\n\nAI Dungeon: https://www.aidungeon.io/\nAI Dungeon patreon: https://www.patreon.com/AIDungeon\nArt breeder: https://artbreeder.com/\n\n25:13 Brett asks: \"The assertion that programming and in particular programmers are getting worse.\"\n36:20 Sonder\n\n\n\"This Is Water.\" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI\n\"Laziness Does Not Exist\" https://humanparts.medium.com/laziness-does-not-exist-3af27e312d01\n\n47:48 What determines if an inanimate object (car, home, golf club) gets a proper name.\n56:09 Fruity Cheezma\n\n\n\"Cheese Tea: It’s Real and It’s Spectacular\" https://www.dinnerpartydownload.org/cheese-tea/\nOrbitz (drink). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbitz_(drink)\nJim's Fruity Cheezma outcome: https://twitter.com/mogwai_poet/status/1210328506359414785?s=20\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nReleasing the same game over and over again because it keeps being your best move.\nSuffering through and finding the magic but still believing you shouldn't have had to suffer.\nAsking yourself what the problem is and breaking it down.\nBeing here for topics.\nUnderstanding that the question you're asking is ridiculous but asking it anyway.\nWhat you want only existing for children because their needs are greater.\nUsing adult-sized playgrounds for physical therapy. \nUsing adult-sized playgrounds for physical therapy keeping those blades sharp.\nThe through line from bouldering to Ninja Warrior to Super Mario Bros.\nWatching the first half of Full Metal Jacket and thinking the obstacle course looks really fun.\nPutting game show contestants in a video game for the viewers at home but the contestants themselves are just looking at a big green wall.\nProfessional skaters having skate parks in their back yard.\nDoing American Ninja Warrior every day and getting a lot more miles on the tires.\nTony Hawk getting away with skateboarding in a 50-year-old body because he's good enough to not faceplant all the time.\nGiving a skateboard to an average 50-year-old and saying \"go for it buddy.\"\nRestarting civilization around your business plan.\nMaking up stories for your children in real-time.\nBeing a DM except nobody else gets a turn, you just keep going.\nFive years of daily practice to wake up your storytelling brain.\nGoing to an Arlo Guthrie concert because you're old and go to Arlo Guthrie concerts.\nAll of Arlo Guthrie's songs being twenty minute stories like Alice's Restaurant.\nThinking that advice sounds wise for somebody else.\nDavid Lynch's book on storytelling turning out to actually be about Transcendental Meditation.\nActually possibly having deep insights about the universe while being high on drugs.\nWriting a book by just writing down something you already said and it feeling like someone else wrote the book.\nLetting the story write itself and then taking credit for it.\nHaving children because you want to become a great writer.\nIncurring $10,000 of hosting costs because you misconfigured your CDN.\nA text adventure telling you what you did but not telling you what happened as a result.\nMarkov chain text generation.\nAI replacing musicians and ultimately most art.\nAI musicians giving you another album from your favorite band.\nExploring AI generated music and sharing your unique discoveries.\nSeeing creative work as the last bastion of human work that AI can't take from us, but being wrong.\nFeeling wonder at the achievement but also complete dismay that we've made ourselves irrelevant.\nBasic income allowing us to look forward to the machines taking all our jobs.\nAll the advantages of AI just turning into more profit for billionaires.\nSkating through a lucid fever dream and trying to make sense of the chaos, but it's really just chaos.\nAI Dungeon being a good improv partner but a terrible game.\nAI 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.\nProgrammers getting worse as a discipline vs. getting worse as people.\nForcing everyone on Earth to participate in NaNoWriMo.\nBuilding software on top of a teetering stack of dependencies 1,000 feet high because your company probably won't last out the year.\nProgrammers getting better in the same way speed metal guitarists are getting better.\nJust making the thing and not caring how you make it because it just doesn't matter.\nNot bothering working really hard to do the easy part really well because the hard part is what matters.\nCompanies being possibly good at their focus and everything else being good enough at best.\nSome of your best friends being assholes.\nThe best programmers you've met being super sociable and cooperative.\nStaying 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.\nNot being sure if your co-workers are nice to everyone or just you because you have seniority.\nThe coming generation of programmers seeing programming as a hobby or a career rather than an identity.\nBlocking the guy driving too fast on the freeway but then it turns out the guy driving too fast was going to the hospital.\nDoing your best to live like people invented in storybooks.\nRealizing that everyone around you has lives just as complex and nuanced as you or anyone you know.\nThe 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.\nProjecting an arbitrary order onto the chaos and definitely being wrong.\nDefinitely being wrong anyway so why not think a positive thing rather than a negative one.\nChanging how you see somebody by imagining them differently.\nConceiving of a universe without yourself at the center.\nFlying off the handle because you've had shit piled on you all day and not because you dislike Kole specifically.\nRunning 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.\nWorking hard to build positive interactions and trying to see the best possible version of somebody.\nInstagram being a source of misery because you're comparing yourself to the prettiest people's prettiest moments.\nComparing your backstage to someone else's front stage.\nChoosing to shape your world such that you're not walking around angry all the time.\nHaving a boat and the boat having a name.\nNot giving your cat a name but permitting it to have a name.\nAnthropomorphizing the objects you rely.\nCalling it \"the mud room\" even though there's no mud and no room.\nNaming furniture that hurts you \"kneebreaker charlie\" and not hating it so much because it's a little bit funny.\nThinking 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.\nBeing happier loving things.\nA generic bunny holding an Easter Egg that nobody plays with until you give it a name.\nThe only time you've bought a plant in your life being that time they put googly eyes on a cactus.\nYour roommate who took all the bows off of the presents under the tree and then shit on the floor.\nNot wanting to be the skin dad.\nHaving animals to project love onto so your society is more placid and malleable.\nCats being way more lovable than most human children.\nEmpathizing with the kid crying on the airplane because you feel like crying too.\nThe kid who's allowed to scream in the grocery store when if you screamed you'd get thrown out of the store or arrested.\nPutting hundreds of googly eyes on a Roomba because you can't just buy two googly eyes and calling it \"Kos-ba.\"\nPutting two eyes on the outside of the Roomba and the rest on the inside because you don't want to freak out the squares.\nWhat's fruity, cheezma?\nTrying to get your friends to follow the script of your joke but they keep making their own jokes instead.\nTweeting about there being no hits for \"fruity cheezma\" and now there being one hit for \"fruity cheezma.\"\nThe cheese tea rocking the boba world.\nCopping to a certain amount of midwestern provincialism.\nThe probability of inhaling boba being very high but it's great though.\nBlowing a tapioca ball directly into the mouth of your enemy right as they're inhaling.\nThe end of your boba beverage being like The Very Hungry Caterpillar.\nA dare than someone should not have taken and that someone having possibly been you.\nCream cheese and fruit going together.\nThe kind of logic you don't want to be applying to food.\nPutting all your old food combo ideas on the menu without testing any of them because Fruity Cheezma worked out somehow.\nWanting peanut butter to work with sliced cheese because you can roll it up like a taquito.\nFiguring out that milk and Cheerios go together because they're both kind of off-white so next you try orange juice and Cheez-Its.\nCheez-Its staying crispy in orange juice because they're so oily.\nA Cheez-It being named Arthur and loving its mother.\nThe 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.\nA telling being told or not being told.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-02-10T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/c3c157a4-2900-4cd9-a11c-1667ab43db84.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":65404343,"duration_in_seconds":4087}]},{"id":"5ef61bbf-7a35-45dc-aea2-84d3f0428619","title":"15. More Real Than Tower Records","url":"https://topiclords.com/more-real-than-tower-records","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nTyriq is working on video games including Catacomb Kids: https://fourbitfriday.itch.io/catacombkids and has a Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/FourbitFriday\nAvery still made that solo album. https://averyburke.bandcamp.com/releases\n\n\nTopics\n\n\n5:12 Reading non-religious texts as scripture.\n\n\nHarry Potter and the Sacred Text. http://www.harrypottersacredtext.com/\nOrphans of the Sky. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphans_of_the_Sky\nGeneration Ships. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_ship\nWater. https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Water\nWookieepedia has removed Poggle the Greater so I guess their editors are just as serious-business as Wikipedia's.\nVideo Game Advisor. https://twitter.com/VGAdvisor\n\n18:13 I just found out that \"pitched battle\" means \"pitch\" as in \"sales pitch\" as opposed to \"fever pitch.\"\n\n\nPitched battle on Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitched_battle\nPitched battle on Merriam Webster. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pitched%20battle\n\n24:01 How do you really use carrier pigeons? \n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homing_pigeon\nPigeon racing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeon_racing\n\n32:05 Larry asks: \"Which ship is the best one?\"\n\n\nEarthships. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthship\nDyson spheres. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere\nIs it Hogwarts or just Britain? https://www.reddit.com/r/harrypotter/comments/ajmpqi/nonbritish_harry_potter_fans_what_are_some_things/\n\n40:53 One of two ways of doing a thing.\n52:17 The switch in ancient Greece from clothed to naked sports.\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nTaking a bite out of a cartoon bird and leaving a tooth-shaped hole, like a cookie.\nEmpire Records now being more real than Tower Records.\nNot remembering record stores.\nMowing your face into a lawn made of tiny green clones of you.\nTrusting that in a couple years your record will be classic enough that dads will want it for Christmas.\nTrying to glean philosophy and life lessons out of the Bible even if you don't believe it's real.\nTrying to glean philosophy and life lessons out of Harry Potter even if you don't believe it's real.\nStar Wars being more real than Tower Records.\nMixing methamphetamines and marriage.\nLanguage changing to mean the thing people misunderstand it to mean.\nDrinking tea and watching war as if it's a sport.\nWearing enormous flags so people can see at a glance how the battle is going.\nPantsed and unpantsed meaning the same thing.\nThe union of shells and the union of unshelledness.\nThe dude whose job it is to take homing pigeons away from home.\nHoming pigeons basically being a rubber band.\nDefcon attendees hacking the pigeon timestamp machine to win the pigeon race.\nBuying a signed shot polisher from the guy who won the International Barista Championships.\nGoing to the barista gym up keep your skills up between barista gigs.\nComing back from your barista sabbatical and discovering all coffee is now made in node.js.\nNot letting anyone else use the espresso machine you convinced management to pay for.\nBeing both a barista and a bard at GitHub.\nSinging to GitHub employees a tale of the GitHub CEOs valor.\nThe Roman alphabet existing in the Star Wars universe.\nBeing a huge fan of Dyson spheres.\nShamefully burying your fanfic in the desert, like E.T.\nWanting to live in a pile of garbage.\nWanting to live in a desert house, but not in the desert itself.\nForming complex structures using simple rules.\nWizards just pooping on the ground and magicking it away.\nBeing furious when someone peels a banana wrong.\nOrienting your toilet paper so it's harder for cats to unroll.\nCats sticking their paws under the door.\nBeing sad because the doors are too flush with the ground for a cat paw to say hi.\nBringing your guitar case to lure your cat admirer away from you.\nWaking up screaming about raccoons.\nA cat's ability to form a mental model of the world.\nUnloading the front door from memory when you get to the second floor.\nNever getting the dog you wanted so you get an iguana instead.\nWaking up snuggling a cold handbag.\nWhether lizards snuggle with sleeping deer in the wild.\nEarnestly proposing a Utopia ruled by you and your friends.\nDoing the Olympics naked being a week-long fad at best.\nSoccer fandoms gaining political power and going to war with one another.\nSoccer's popularity fading immediately after its invention, being just one of millions of microsports.\nGoing into the wrestling pit with a spring loaded revolver up your sleeve.\nVoting somebody off the island of Earth.\nBiting 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.\nThere also being a mold for a cell tower in your stomach.\nBeing qualified to gatekeep a culture because you once dated someone of that culture.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-02-03T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/5ef61bbf-7a35-45dc-aea2-84d3f0428619.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":65336634,"duration_in_seconds":4083}]},{"id":"98ad7633-ab05-4753-8b3d-8e4e32506f0e","title":"14. Dad Is A Cenobite","url":"https://topiclords.com/dad-is-a-cenobite","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nApril is a park ranger at @aprilsaur.\nDanny makes video game documentaries at https://noclip.website/ and is on Twitter at @dannyodwyer.\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\n4:26 Intentionally teaching your child the wrong word for something.\n\n\nDogtooth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogtooth_(film)\nIt turns out the kid's mom was talking to him in English at the same time -- a bilingual household. https://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/news/article/13011269/klingon-as-a-second-language\nThe \"I Can Eat Glass\" project. https://www.oocities.org/nodotus/hbglass.html\n\n14:44 Harbinger households.\n\n\nhttps://boingboing.net/2019/12/03/harbringer-of-doom.html\n\n21:29 Men's wallets.\n31:45 Quill asks: \"I've been planning to change my name recently. The first name that I came up with is 'Quill,' but I can't think of a good last name to go with it. Could you give me some suggestions, or some advice on how to come up with cool names?\"\n\n\nWe used Hitch Switch to change our names and it saved us a lot of work. (It still involved a lot of work.) https://www.hitchswitch.com/\nThe Aphantasia study. https://www.eugencpopa.ro/wp-content/uploads/Afantazia-.pdf\n\n41:17 Shen Yun commercials are literally everywhere.\n\n\nShen Yun 2019 official trailer. https://youtu.be/7H-kYoczCp0\nShen Yun is \"essentially, religious-political propaganda—or, more generously, an extremely elaborate commercial for Falun Dafa’s spiritual teachings and its plight vis-à-vis the Chinese Communist regime.\" https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/stepping-into-the-uncanny-unsettling-world-of-shen-yun\nHow to use an abacus. https://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/abacus/intro.html\nHow to use a slide rule. https://www.sliderulemuseum.com/SR_Course.htm\nBaby friendly movie theaters. https://babyfriendlyamerica.com/2016/06/movies/\n\n49:50 Woodpeckers can withstand impacts of 100gs.\n\n\nWoodpecker eating. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPhzGpSspSHx1cA1O-FAAtsFu34MZbg-t\nA weasel riding a woodpecker. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/3/150303-weasels-woodpeckers-animals-science-weaselpecker-photos/\nThe best source I could find describing the mechanism of any self sharpening maw: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/adfm.201001546\n\n57:24 Being an extremely unimaginative kid.\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nReading numbers off of a list because topics haven't been invented yet.\nGiving someone a funny look where the funny part is that you're not looking at them.\nCows that are so cute you want to want to put them in your mouth, which would surely kill them.\nThe fuzzy cows only being fuzzy because it's winter.\nFalling off a cliff being the only way to hurt yourself in Ireland.\nThe song they teach Irish children about American tourists falling off cliffs.\nAge differences being insignificant when you're millions of years old.\nKnowing two people but calling them both the same thing because one of their names is too hard to say.\nWhich animals are close enough to a dog to call \"dog.\"\nA perfect 1960s household but the dad is a cenobite.\nNot being sure if you have bad luck or if you're just a bad person.\nProduct researchers studying what you like because everything you like fails.\nLying to researchers so companies will still make products you like.\nEating banana flavored corn flakes while you watch Milli Vanilli music videos on your Betamax player and Ralph Nader is the mayor.\nMoving to a zip code where all your neighbors have your same contrary taste in products.\nA wallet the size of four king-sized Snickers bars.\nFinding paradise in the wrong gender's department at Target.\nFeeling the thrill of being free of a giant heavy brick.\nHaving to buy an expensive, fashionable watch because otherwise your peers won't take you seriously.\nTaking a photo of your ID and just showing the cop your Instagram.\nGetting a non-folding wallet so your dollar bills won't have creases.\nExplaining to the barista that the last guy put the crease in the dollar bill, not you.\nPromising the barista you won't fold the coffee either.\nGetting a note press so this sort of thing won't happen again.\nGetting to say your cool last name into a walkie talkie at work.\nTechnically not appropriating anything because you're just using culture that's already been appropriated by someone else.\nA day full of mostly making people happy, for a change.\nChanging your last name to Ass and owing royalties to Ass owners.\nAn opportunity for some serious synergy.\nRadio listeners celebrating other radio listeners.\nDeciding to throw the blue checkmark people in with gen pop.\nWaiting until you're on your deathbed to watch something to maximize anticipation.\nThe last thing you see before they turn off the dialysis machine.\nMissing out on pop culture because you always click \"skip ad\" as soon as possible.\nAdvertising your audience into submission.\nTrying to explain a slide rule without understanding what a slide rule is.\nWatching Alien in the theater with a baby strapped to your chest.\nEvolving to not kill yourself when you head butt a tree.\nHaving an incredibly fancy tongue.\nSquirrels eating every single bulb from your string lights to humiliate you.\nA peregrine falcon drowning a songbird in a creek while looking you in the eye.\nAlways being sure to catch the woodpecker with the beak facing away from you.\nLetting the other kids on the playground do the imagining for you.\nDeciding whether it's actually \"great\" to \"e-meet\" you.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-01-27T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/98ad7633-ab05-4753-8b3d-8e4e32506f0e.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":62679249,"duration_in_seconds":3917}]},{"id":"7ca0ad29-773e-4a33-acb8-c424e0dd2425","title":"13. Kurt Cobain Vocaloid","url":"https://topiclords.com/kurt-cobain-vocaloid","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nShannon Strucci does video essays at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCh9DnjvObUcvvwrYbJ4-cLQ and is a film correspondent for http://www.strugglesession.us/ and is a teen superhero on https://www.criticalbitcast.com/\nJP makes stuff at http://vectorpoem.com, especially game tourism mods: http://vectorpoem.com/tourism/\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\n2:43 The pressure to monetize hobbies or perform them for social media vs just having hobbies\n13:25 If you could create a 5 acre island in the middle of the remote south Pacific ocean, what would you use it for?\n17:25 Level design lessons from Hawaii\n\n\nGoats for hire, preventing wildfires in California. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n56opj5gJhc\nKalij pheasants. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C63tykplkhU\n\n28:30 \"The 2012 Oakland Athletics adapted 'Movin' Like Bernie' into their celebration routines after Coco Crisp played the song for third baseman Brandon Inge in the team's clubhouse before a game.\"\n\n\nOakland A's Bernie Lean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJMBmsK5hXc\nBOILeR season 2017 playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLj5IcL4eAydWVS2hTWFIjB7YFJBwt4D3A\n\n34:07 Fictions that, as a throwaway gag, exist within their own worlds (Remembrance of the Daleks, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure)\n\n\nDick Justice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3epcX07t78M\nSimlish pop songs: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeTlCMqy3jFUU_eqNhjiPBO88SU2PXZqI\n\n46:05 First time you tried your favorite foods? Especially if you first tried them as an adult\n\n\nBrussels Sprouts are less bitter than they used to be. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/10/30/773457637/from-culinary-dud-to-stud-how-dutch-plant-breeders-built-our-brussels-sprouts-bo\n\n52:06 Time Trap and creating mysteries from the outside in\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Trap_%28film%29\nA definitive Timeline for Primer: https://unrealitymag.com/at-last-a-definitive-timeline-for-primer/\nThe self-lacing Nike MAG. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NimGxU4Qnhk\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nBeing confused by the existence of two separate Shannons.\nVideo games where nobody bothers you, and arguably that being the whole point of video games.\nDoing calligraphy on Twitch.\nDoing calligraphy just for yourself and that being way better.\nThe cost of getting more than one kind of value out of something.\nHaving an audience and feeling the need to entertain the audience whenever possible.\nFinally deciding to get a real job because you have a kid on the way.\nImagining having a job as a programmer and not being happy about it.\nDoing creative work in private because you're not good enough to do it publicly.\nProducing a complete song in five minutes when it takes five years to make a game.\nAlways being able to see the geological phenomenon that will take your life one day.\nThe base of the Sutro Tower basically being a Quake level.\nBeing shot at as you approach the Sutro Tower.\nSeeing Batman's head and knowing which way to go.\nDragonCon's failure to produce parchment realm maps.\nHawaii having lava, hostile creatures and good landmarking.\nPlaying your anime theme song on your phone as you show up at the manga and wall scroll store with your katana.\nHaving an animated gif that represents your identity.\nHow to turn Binding of Isaac into an e-sport.\nStupefyingly long TV series lifetimes.\nText-to-speech deepfakes.\nChopping up Garret's voice to create dialog for your Thief fan mission.\nMeasuring Ian McKellen's voice and sending the data to people who have never heard Ian McKellen so they have plausible deniability.\nLiving on your own and eating Indian food for the first time.\nDiscovering a new continent at the Indian buffet.\nNot wanting to eat a salad because probably there are bugs in there.\nStepping stones to eating sushi.\nFood preferences being heavily shaped by first impressions.\nLiking Primer two different ways, ten years apart, and being right both times.\nThe important lesson being hidden behind the interesting puzzle.\nUnsolvable mysteries that haunt you for the rest of your life.\nEnclosing a narrative with another narrative.\nAssuming the Wii will remain ascendant because it's 1989 and Nintendo dominates your culture.\nThe story turning to mush when it comes time to actually answer to the question.\nThe thrill of reactive, improvisational storytelling.\nThe strength of remaining vague about whether your show is supernatural or not.\nImagining what happens next in a story as a way of enjoying the story. \nThe nectar that mystery storytelling is trying to extract.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"Lords this week: Shannon Strucci and JP LeBreton.\r\n\r\nWe 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.","date_published":"2020-01-20T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/7ca0ad29-773e-4a33-acb8-c424e0dd2425.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":67431027,"duration_in_seconds":4214}]},{"id":"b4ccb19c-bbaa-4faa-93c5-02c99c0e0bcc","title":"12. The Charisma And The Loneliness Of The Moth Man","url":"https://topiclords.com/the-charisma-and-the-loneliness-of-the-moth-man","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nLaura Michet makes both indie games and huge megacorp games and just published a short story in Realms of Runeterra. https://leagueoflegends.fandom.com/wiki/Realms_of_Runeterra\nXalavier Nelson, Jr. is a freelance narrative director, currently making An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs. https://www.patreon.com/StrangeScaffold\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\n5:10 Moth Man. Discuss. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothman\n\n\nThe Leatherman, 10-fingered vagabond. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leatherman_(vagabond)\nThe Kelly-Hopkinsville encounter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly%E2%80%93Hopkinsville_encounter\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mothman_Prophecies_(film)\nOwls that look like aliens. https://twitter.com/MariettaDaviz/status/1195194263866429441?s=20\nStorytelling, with Odds Bodkin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rISdBiNhzb0&list=PLR1edeZ72f3yI53_wj_3WOxSNwlS_1Y-b\n\n18:19 Why aren’t there more types of chair in common use? We have so many chair types in global society and we use basically only Couch and Regular Chair chairs in public.\n26:03 Peeing a thimbleful while pregnant, and other shop talk.\n30:33 Are you more likely to trust any given dog or any given cat?\n36:54 Would it actually be any fun to be an animal? \n45:00 Advantages and disadvantages of different book bindings.\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nMaking an igloo out of rigid body, shadow casting boarding passes.\nCryptids appealing to adult males 18-35.\nCryptids losing their cryptid status when they turn out to be real.\nKeeping your fingers because you are wise and have a cave.\nWikipedia pages that really ought to put the subject's finger count front and center.\nConfusing Odds Bodkin with Odd Bodkins.\nBooking your favorite banjo-playing grandpa to play at your game development megacorp.\nTaking a bullet for a friend you wouldn't go to a concert with.\nBecoming increasingly annoyed with Richard Gere and his relationship with the moth man.\nDistinguishing thrones from non-thrones.\nSnarling like an evil prince with your leg over the arm of your throne.\nWhether there are more cats indoors or outdoors, especially in El Paso Texas.\nLegal prohibition of attempting to disperse a large enough group of cats.\nConvincing the judge that your rocking chair was not intended to disperse the cats.\nCat sovereignty.\nRampaging cat unions recognized by the UN.\nReagan sending in cat scabs to replace rampaging cat unions.\nBeing terrified of military veterans returning home and taking our jobs.\nA Jim Stormdancer-shaped hole that an Air Force veteran is destined to fill.\nThe agent of the greater space, the arch-demon, the plane itself, the car itself, the boat itself.\nThe rage of seeing a teaspoon of any liquid.\nRecording a conversation so you can decide later whether it's ethical to listen to it.\nImmediately going to murder.\nTrusting a dog to be your accountant.\nA dog being much more likely than a cat to be helpful but also being more likely to maim you.\nBeing a jester for a cat's pleasure.\nBeing hyper aware of the dark side of dogdom.\nDogs representing in joy in a complicated world.\nNeeding permission to pee.\nCats not wanting to move to Hollywood.\nCats that are cognizant of a better world they can no longer have.\nAn animal with a sense of hubris, entropy and regret.\nA larger squirrel being mean to you.\nGetting the horny disease once a season.\nGetting all your horny out of the way at once, like Spock.\nSpraying eggs everywhere and not taking up anyone else's time.\nWhen the page curves because the other pages are in the way and the image on the page is annoyingly distorted.\nThe stigma against the paperback being an act of class warfare.\nWanting the physical trophy of the book on your shelf as much as the experience of reading it.\nAppreciating the people who have previously read the same copy of the book you have.\nRenting Final Fantasy II from Blockbuster and appreciating the previous player's save file.\nBeing too mature for fart jokes and then being mature enough to enjoy fart jokes again.\nHaving to make a noise every time you get out of a chair.\n","content_html":"

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Lords:

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\n\n","summary":"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.\r\n","date_published":"2020-01-13T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/b4ccb19c-bbaa-4faa-93c5-02c99c0e0bcc.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":56439537,"duration_in_seconds":3527}]},{"id":"242536bd-0a49-44e0-9264-79b2f4997af6","title":"11. The Unfriendly Potty Tries To Put It Back","url":"https://topiclords.com/the-unfriendly-potty-tries-to-put-it-back","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords this week:\n\n\nJenni is let's-playing Flower Sun and Rain with Riff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDmj6Kt5p_g&list=PLQqC_GkS4_4YvUIsmDBnd5vX8W1Fme6vu\nJay is late!\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\n2:07 Trying to get immersion in a language when you don't know any native speakers & you're not in the country.\n\n\nLook at that horse. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sv5woNs9WRE\n\n13:52 If you have scars on the inside of your cheek along where your teeth meet, that means your mouth is too small.\n\n\n https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linea_alba_(cheek)\nMold-a-rama: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mold-A-Rama\n\n18:45 When you're not expecting food.\n20:38 Road trips in Germany: paying to pee, no tourist traps. (Though public transport owns for non-leisure trips.)\n31:18 Thomas \"Dolby\" Robertson's early 90s online music service.\n\n\nManufacture of cheddar cheese: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacture_of_Cheddar_cheese\nWho coined the term \"world wide web\"? https://www.quora.com/Who-coined-the-term-world-wide-web\n\n39:07 Being ok with admitting it when you don't know about something.\n\n\nQuantum suicide and immortality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortality\nOne Terabyte of the Kilobyte Age. https://blog.geocities.institute/\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nOstensibly being in a hotel to stop an act of terrorism but first having to get someone's mojo back.\nA portable computer that you call Catherine.\nA time loop, here on Topic Lords.\nQuitting that owl. Telling that owl where he can shove his heroin.\nDuo Lingo being named after its founder and enforcer, Duo.\nGamification ruining your productivity because you can't help but care about these poorly-designed leaderboards.\nThis being a video games podcast now, I guess.\nPutting in the effort to suck at a game so you can get more out of it.\nDoing a couple squats and all the monsters dying and feeling like a badass because of all your gains.\nGuessing that a higher intensity means a higher ratio of reps to jogging.\nGuessing that lowering the workout intensity will increase your heart rate.\nSquatting and catching the coins.\nBeing surprised that legal let them put squats in the workout game beacuse you can super fuck up your knees by doing squats wrong.\nLearning Japanese so you can watch anime while also keeping an eye on that spider.\nAsking your co-lord to stereotype an entire species.\nAsking your co-lord about the personality of a spider when you made the spider up in this scenario.\nDoing the equivalent of the look at the horse thing.\nExplaining funny Youtube videos to each other.\nA half hour of getting head massages and trying to make a face as if you're enjoying the head massage.\nThe mind whisk not working when you do it to yourself but a vibrating one might.\nNot wanting to swear around clean boys.\nSalvaging a terrible kale broccoli smoothie by adding rum.\nFrying your terrible kale broccoli smoothie into falafels.\nThe only memory you have of a dentist being him telling you that you have a tiny mouth.\nNot brushing your teeth or going to the dentist for four years.\nJim's good dentist costing twice as much as every other dentist and only being a 12-hour drive away.\nThe seam on a molded toy where the mold came together.\nKnowing what the other person is talking about if it's the same thing that you were just talking about.\nGoing 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.\nWithdrawing all your money from the bank in black crayons.\nPutting 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.\nA prank show that swaps out your half a sandwich with a different half a sandwich.\nGetting 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.\nSearching 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.\nRealizing at the last second that a delicious gulp of Dr. Pepper is actually milk, then it turning out to actually be iced tea.\nBeverageception.\nHow we all left fifty glasses of water in our room in case the aliens invade because that's a normal thing.\nMilk not coming out of your glass when you try to drink because it's yogurt now.\nCombination sleep mask and headphones.\nTurning twenty half-full cans of Dr. Pepper into ten full cans of Dr. Pepper.\nNot being able to take the last sip of anything because that sip is tainted.\nConvincing yourself that if you just take a smaller sip it won't be the last sip.\nHaving five euros worth of pee vouchers because nobody actually accepts your pee vouchers.\nNot having any concept of what it's like to drive without seeing tourist traps.\nFiguring out what the German equivalent of Elvis is and instantly becoming a millionaire.\nStarting to optimize your bathroom trips because now there's a currency involved.\nThe friendly potty making things weird.\nThe unfriendly potty trying to put it back.\nGetting the smallest piece of chocolate imaginable at the end of your chocolate museum tour.\nHelping the prince and his dragon friend make some chocolate shoes after the dragon accidentally melts the previous pair of chocolate shoes and melts them.\nBrushing up on your chocolate trivia so you can get the sticker that says \"Chocolate Genius.\"\nHiring a writer and telling them \"it's a kingdom, and it's chocolatey -- go!\"\nTrying to convince museum attendees that you aren't exploiting laborers even though there are pictures of exploited laborers right there.\nTheatrically fiddling with your synthesizers at because Channel 9 news is here.\nNaming yourself after a music technology company because you also do music technology.\nMissing an opportunity to name yourself after cheese.\nCheddars that have not undergone the cheddaring process.\nMistaking Thomas Dolby for Thomas Colby and cheddaring him but not getting cheddar for some reason.\nGoing grocery shopping with your mom and asking her for a candy bar and an Internet World Magazine.\nSticking with Gopher VR because the World Wide Web will never replace Telnet.\nThe term \"World Wide Web\" having been coined by Joseph McCarthy to describe Soviet influence in America.\nNodding along but feeling bad about not being able to connect with these people because you're 15 and don't know anything.\nBeing proud of not knowing about something.\nChoosing to not be around people who make fun of you.\nProgramming being excellent practice for humility because you're demonstrably wrong all the goddamned time.\nWishing that you wanted to go outside more.\nSynthesizer enthusiasts knocking over your trash can to look for patch cables.\nLiving on a canal and seeing a bunch of cool sea creatures all the time.\nSpraying tap water into the canal to attract manatees and every one of them having propeller scars.\nWatching shuttle launches from your back yard.\nSlipping on frozen sprinkler water and somehow not hitting your head on your way down into the canal.\nEvery person ending up alone in the universe after everyone else has died.\nAnswering to Betty because you want to be polite and don't want to correct the person who thinks your name is Betty.\nBetty Boop shooting to the top of the list of people you don't want to be confused with.\nBeing confused about whether Betty Boop is supposed to be sexy or a dog or both.\nBetty Boop's apparent sexiness being like reading Shakespeare and not knowing what moiety means.\nJudging somebody by the trucks you've seen with bootleg stickers of them on the back.\nA bumper sticker of John Calvin peeing on whatever he doesn't like.\nInventing your own web safe palette.\nFloyd-Steinberg fans high-fiving each other.\nGood lording all around!\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2020-01-06T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/242536bd-0a49-44e0-9264-79b2f4997af6.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":67877408,"duration_in_seconds":4242}]},{"id":"4ee1a762-f53c-47e9-ae5d-378df3c1e7cf","title":"10. The Entire Weirdness Of Plants","url":"https://topiclords.com/the-entire-weirdness-of-plants","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nErica talks about birds and plants on Twitter at @YerrikTRB and wants you to listen to the Frog Fractions 2 soundtrack. https://ryanike.bandcamp.com/album/frog-fractions-2-original-soundtrack\nJustin talks about puzzles on Twitter at @firetrucknpl\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\n2:34 Children are terrifying.\n8:41 The Frog Fractions ARG, culminating in its Christmas release\n\n\nThe FF2 ARG on the Game Detectives wiki. https://wiki.gamedetectives.net/index.php?title=Frog_Fractions_2\nBefunge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Befunge\n\n22:02 Bringing interesting puzzles to people with boring jobs.\n\n\nReading with Rover. https://www.readingwithrover.org/\n\n28:00 Paraphrased asks: \"What were you doing before you're doing what you are now?\"\n41:38 Weird Christmas / holiday foods.\n\n\nTraditional Lithualian Christmas Eve dinner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C5%AB%C4%8Dios\nLithuanian Christmas Eve recipes. http://www.maskoliunasfamilyproject.com/christmas-eve-recipes-and-others/\nVinegretas. https://www.receptai.lt/receptas/burokeliu-salotos-su-pupelemis-1455\nYule Sandwich Log. http://www.midcenturymenu.com/2011/01/the-mid-century-menuyule-sandwich-log/\n\n52:37 Weird Christmas / holiday birds.\n\n\nPassenger Pigeon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_pigeon\n\n54:12 Incorrect plant genera in video games.\n\n\nPlants of Star Trek. https://twitter.com/search?q=%23plantsofstartrek\nBirds of Google Maps. https://twitter.com/search?q=%23birdsofgooglemaps\nColumnar cacti. https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=%23columnarcacti&src=typd\nFlora of the Colorado Plateau. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flora_of_the_Colorado_Plateau_and_Canyonlands_region\nHecho cactus. https://imgur.com/gallery/kVXqnhR\nOrgan pipe cactus. https://www.nps.gov/articles/organ-pipe-cactus.htm\nCardon, the world's largest cactus. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnWeiSi9s2w\nThe black bars on the left of the screen in Atari 2600 games (\"hmove lines\") are caused by repositioning sprites in the middle of drawing the frame. http://www.ataricompendium.com/faq/faq.html#general18\nExtrasolar. https://extrasolar.com/\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nPeople who celebrate Christmas on January 6th.\nAddressing the least-served Christmas demographic.\nMuting your mutuals because it turns out you have no common interests.\nNot being sure if the Frog Fractions 2 Soundtrack liner notes exist any more.\nYour three year old opening all the Advent Calendar doors and hiding the chocolates in his Halloween bag.\nYour three year old pushing chairs from the kitchen to climb on top of the refrigerator because that's where you keep the cookies.\nDeveloping problem-solving skills long before you develop a sense of ethics or self-preservation.\nYour two year old deciding it's time to be a cool pirate and picking the biggest sword possible out of the kitchen knives.\nTaking 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.\nHalf of all children dying before the age of five so they never amass the numbers needed to overthrow the adults.\nYour one year old overcoming the child safety lock by ripping the entire door off.\nHalf your age plus seven being your personal cutoff for when someone stops being a child.\n18 year olds being allowed to vote and drive and get married.\nTeenagers having infinite energy to learn and get things done, but no judgement for what are good things to learn or do.\nDescribing 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.\nPlacing bets on the three-legged toddler races.\nTaking bets on high school track events being illegal, so that's why a Silicon Valley startup has to do it.\nCleverly tying your collective bragging to the holiday season.\nWriting a book about the Frog Fractions 2 ARG and hiding it inside of another book.\nMaking a GameFAQs-style guide to document how the game works while it's still in your head.\nYour Skype work partner probably not looking at the screen, but maybe they are, maybe they know you're not working.\nTeaching people to read by having them read to dogs because dogs are uncritical and just love the attention.\nSkyping with a dog all day to motivate you to write your book.\nHaving a friend come onto the show and do a dog voice because real dogs pick terrible topics.\nGameFAQs turning out to actually have standards.\nGameFAQs rejecting your submission with the rejection note just saying \"Boxing.\"\nGameFAQs rejecting your submission with a subtle joke about the previous game in the series.\nActual FAQs being pretty rare on GameFAQs.\nWriting an angry letter to the New York Times about your walkthrough being rejected from GameFAQs.\nProgramming languages that are deliberately constructed to be difficult to think about and work in.\nThe Museum of Artifacts From Collapsed Timelines.\nLeaving your release date in the hands of the players and players deciding you should release on Christmas.\nLetting ARG audience members take over your ARG design because you're busy making an executable.\nWanting something to be a commercial success and so hiding it as well as possible.\nReneging on your vow of obscurity at the last second and raking in the dough.\nNot being able to put your game on sale because it would violate truth in advertising laws around the world.\nPricing your game high because games should cost money -- but that also meaning people have to pay that money.\nTrying to convince the IRS that they've already deposited the check for the amount they're sending you a due notice for.\nEnabling your bank teller to feel like a private investigator.\nAdding quest flavor text when you ask things of retail workers so they feel like they'll get XP by helping you.\nAsking 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.\nHearing somebody playing Gershwin in the next practice room over and playing Gershwin with them and them fleeing because the conservatory is haunted.\nAsking the librarian to research paranormal activity on your property.\nTracking down the records of everyone who died in a house but entirely ignoring the fractals that may have died in the house.\nNot accepting that although some things are known, you'll never know how they're known.\nRealizing that economics and economists are dreadful.\nLuminary physicists all having killed themselves because nobody took their theories seriously in their lifetimes.\nHiding behind freelance work because you're terrified try to to follow up your accidental success.\nNot knowing what you're going to make, but definitely knowing how to sell it.\nBacteria just hanging out and waiting for you to succumb.\nThe bacteria in your jaw being the true legacy of your life's work.\nTaking until your mid-30s to figure out how to work on purpose and not just when you're excited about something.\nSleeping when you want to sleep and getting up after you're not tired anymore.\nMeeting a wife and coming to a sleep schedule compromise.\nHaving more dictionaries than you've ever had in your life.\nThinking your traditional holiday foods are weird until you hear about the other guy's holiday foods.\nPagan traditions intersecting with Christmas in ways that lead to incredibly weird food.\nThinking of whales as fish because you're allowed to eat them on Christmas Eve.\nThe food you like being impossible to find in a store or restaurant because it's horrifying.\nA 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.\nEating poppy seed soup and failing every drug test for the rest of your life.\nA puce soy milk served cold.\nSkimming off the thick layer of poppy seed fat so your soup won't poison people.\nTiny dumplings representing food for the dead, because the dead don't need to eat a lot.\nPirate Santa, Santa's evil brother who likes puzzles and hiding presents.\nPirate Santa running the Christmas Puzzle Hunt to find all the ingredients for the Christmas appetizer log sandwich.\nA 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.\nA combination of savory, sweet and salty that is pleasing even if you've read the recipe.\nA garden gnome except it's a duck.\nDecorating a duck for holidays rather than a tree.\nTwo ninja turtle doves.\nBeing disappointed with depictions of columnar cacti in popular media.\nBeing disappointed with depictions of Atari 2600 games in popular media.\nBeing subpoenaed to the Supreme Court to testify about whether an Atari 2600 video capture is a forgery.\nStar Trek either being filmed in California, or every planet in the universe having a mediterranean-style biome.\nPlants on Earth being way weirder than alien plants depicted in sci-fi.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2019-12-30T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/4ee1a762-f53c-47e9-ae5d-378df3c1e7cf.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":60217888,"duration_in_seconds":3763}]},{"id":"d424072b-92ff-4da4-a802-7719b6e7e156","title":"9. Ask The Propagated Cactus","url":"https://topiclords.com/ask-the-propagated-cactus","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nShannon is a time traveler and an unemployed attorney.\nAlex likes oranges and drove the getaway car.\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\n1:29 What if people propagated like plants?\n\n\nHow succulents propagate: https://collectivegen.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Guide-to-Propogating-Succulents-778x1608@2x.jpg\n\n8:16 Aphantasia and technical work.\n\n\nVividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ): https://www.eugencpopa.ro/wp-content/uploads/Afantazia-.pdf \n\n\nAlex scored 22/80.\nShannon scored 68/80\nJim scored a perfect 16/80 and needs to reevaluate his life, or maybe the test is totally subjective.\n\nFun fact: if you do not have aphantasia, you are phantastic! [Ed. note: \"phantasic\", but ok.]\n\n19:24 Fruit cocktail and manufactured scarcity.\n\n\n“We offer our maraschino cherries in the following sizes: * Plastic Drum (500 lbs)” https://leelanaufruit.com/maraschino-cherries/\n\n25:59 Mike asks \"What is the most famous meal of the day?\"\n\n\nGoogle has an opinion: https://www.google.com/search?q=What+is+the+most+famous+meal+of+the+day%3F\nHistory of Breakfast: https://books.google.com/books?id=5LghYCqDJw8C\nBreakfast Around the World: https://www.thedailymeal.com/travel/what-people-eat-breakfast-around-world-slideshow\n\n30:39 Best smoothie ingredients?\n33:55 Participating in religious ceremonies that aren't your religion.\n\n\nCommon religions with tradition of evangelism: Christianity, Islam.\nCommon religions without: Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism.\nOh No Ross and Carrie podcast: http://ohnopodcast.com/\n\n59:10 Your friend works in a shower curtain factory. He offers you a free shower curtain with whatever you want printed on it. What pattern do you get?\n\n\nYou can actually get shower curtains featuring the shadow of a knife-wielding maniac. \n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nNot liking oranges because of orange soda and orange-flavored carsickness pills.\nRecognizing guest lords from the time they were a time traveler and drove the getaway car.\nGrowing an entire additional self out of your self if you lose a limb.\nInstead of everybody being related to Genghis Khan, everybody actually being Genghis Khan.\nThe tooth fairy growing clones of you from your teeth.\nEach of your tooth clones also losing teeth.\nBecoming a shark mom because you escaped a shark attack.\nBarbershops installing incinerators so your hairs don't each grow into a full human.\nA homunculus made of fingers growing out of your finger stump.\nEvery animal starting with the butt because the butt is the most important part of any organism.\nA new self growing out of your severed finger but also a second self growing out of your finger stump.\nTechnical workers being worse at envisioning objects or scenes.\nImagining an elephant standing on one foot, wearing a beret, and singing Gizmo's song.\nA 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.\nThinking of a red cube on a white background.\nImagining Harry Potter turning left at a corner and then the book says he goes right and your mind movie having to backtrack.\nAn elephant's mouth probably having some teeth in it.\nKnowing what a trumpet sounds like in the same way you might know what cinnamon tastes like.\nScrewing yourself in a learning process because your teacher doesn't realize how good you are at faking it.\nReinventing the abacus with your body parts.\nTurning the slot machine into a foodstuff.\n\"Oops, All Cherries\" fruit cocktail.\nFruit cocktail manufacturers A/B testing cherry ratios.\nLiking maraschino cherries because they're delicious.\nHating maraschino cherries because you hate almonds.\nMaraschino cherries being flavored with almond extract because cherry pits are toxic.\nSolving the murder and it was almond extract all along.\nStar inflation in Guitar Hero.\nGetting 40 stars being way better than your piddly 5 stars.\nNot being able to release this episode because the information in it is too dangerous.\nBig Breakfast inventing breakfast to sell more breakfast.\nBeing confused when someone eats lunch for dinner.\nBreakfast looming so large in our minds because what counts a breakfast food is so heavily policed.\nDrinking a smoothie and being like \"what would be the ultimate smoothie?\"\nSaving your smoothie for last because it'll be the best one.\nRefusing to put fruit juice in your fruit smoothie.\nThe tipping point at which your smoothie stops being a smoothie and stops being a sorbet.\nTaking any cuisine and reimagining the fast food industry around it.\nThe manifold advantages of hamburgers.\nMaking chicken tikka masala portable by putting it in a samosa.\nMaking chicken tikka masala portable by running it through a food processor with naan and drinking it through a boba straw.\nMainlining chicken tikka masala through a one-inch boba straw.\nParticipating in religious ceremonies while not believing in them or knowing how they work.\nUsing a small child as an excuse to go to every church.\nTrying to use a small dog as an excuse to go to every church but the churches not being super into dogs.\nUsing a small child as an excuse to do things you'd otherwise be too lazy to do.\nNot knowing how to take communion and the guy with the piece of bread just shaking his head sadly at you.\nKneeling 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.\nAmericans not really knowing how to squat either.\nHanukkah being always the same day on the Jewish calendar but being a roving day on the Gregorian calendar.\nNot having any particular bad experiences with organized religion but thinking it's more trouble than it's worth.\nSecular churches for atheists who miss the community of church.\nAmericans becoming atheist and eventually having to figure out how to get back what they lost when they abandoned religion.\nThe nuclear family only having been invented after World War 2.\nLooking fondly on living in a dorm because you were living with a bunch of friends.\nLiving with a bunch of friends and everybody looking at you funny even though that's how humanity lived for most of its existence.\nAvoiding groups because you're frustrated by group-think.\nAccepting that a little bit of group-think isn't the end of the world.\nHaving a good one-on-one relationship with your wife and then ruining it by adding a kid.\nFeeling like a boomer because you don't understand how your friends use emojis.\nAdding a meta chat room where you try to figure out what the regular chat room is trying to say.\nThe 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.\"\nThe compromise between efficiency of communication and the difficulty of learning your new language.\nMaking your shower curtain out of chainmail.\nA shower curtain with an image of what is exactly behind the shower curtain.\nHaving a clear shower curtain so you can see if there's a murderer in the shower without opening the curtain.\nA clear shower curtain with a tuxedo body on it so you can take selfies that look like you wear a tux in the shower.\nA motorized showing curtain with all the books you don't have time to read printed on them.\nNot being able to wash your hair because you have to keep reading.\nAllowing your guest lord to be a topic lady.\nNot remembering the catchphrase.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2019-12-23T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/d424072b-92ff-4da4-a802-7719b6e7e156.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":60434809,"duration_in_seconds":3777}]},{"id":"1ab828b2-3087-42c2-9029-eb1b4be063d1","title":"8. I Hate This Gilded Boat","url":"https://topiclords.com/i-hate-this-gilded-boat","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nRyan Ike is a composer at @RyanIkeComposer. Where The Water Tastes Like Wine is now available on Switch!\nGary Butterfield is a podcaster at @GaryBuh (terfieldPodcaster). He will be torturing himself for your entertainment from Dec 20-23. http://duckfeed.tv/duckstream/\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\n4:45 How long do you spend on media you don't like before giving up?\n19:05 What if food screamed when you ate it??\n\n\nBarbershop performers usually sing major 7th chords in just intonation. For all the gushing over it in the citations, to my ear the \"comparison with equal temperament\" at the bottom of the page just sounds grossly out of tune. 31 cents flat, yuck. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_seventh_chord#Barbershop_seventh\n\n26:46 The SP-1200 and other fetishized creative tools.\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mu_SP-1200\nMaking beats with the SP-1200. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npkxjOTkZBM\n\"'You feel the power in the click,' PewDiePie proclaims while taking his new gaming mouse for a test drive.\" https://manofmany.com/featured/pewdiepies-camera-desk-setup-gear-money\n\n35:12 If you had anything close to Kojima's level of auteur power in your field, what would you do with it?\n45:05 How would you be useful in a post-apocalypse?\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number\n\n53:30 Why can't we run in a non-athletic setting?\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nIntroducing yourself like a Pokemon.\nGraduating to being level two e-friends.\nThe Spider-Man channel, the Ice Man channel, and the Firestar channel.\nConsuming things between now and when you die.\nMaking game as if people have nothing to do but play your game.\nBeing okay with never consuming the art you purchase.\nMin-maxing your enjoyment you have before you become a pile of inanimate carbon.\nChecking in on The Ice Man Christmas Spectacular and it's already snowing.\nFailing to explain the Battle of the Bulge.\nThe intended cadence of using two question marks.\nTopic Joker's Trick.\nAssociating the sound of screaming with everything tasty.\nString cheese yelling \"string cheese\" as you eat it to raise string cheese awareness.\nEveryone remembering where they were when food started screaming.\nDeaf people all remembering when they got Subway and learned to hear.\nDavid Fincher's Seven 2: Ate.\nThe wailing of the ghosts of Hades echoing through Hamilton Middle School.\nThe screaming and eating minutes.\nThe horrible price of being a Topic Lord.\nAll the layers of your sandwich singing like a barbershop quartet.\nHumanity learning to photosynthesize.\nThe glucose in an IV drip whispering the time you'll die as it goes into your vein.\nMailing your representative to ask them to vote no on the Screaming Food Act.\nThe totemic power of a sampler with 256k of ram.\nPewDiePie endorsing a particular brand of streaming microphone.\nMaking a cooking knife made out of dinosaur bones.\nRecording a song with Kurt Cobain's guitar.\nRecording a song with a guitar made from Kurt Cobain's body.\nA rock legend being bone-morphed into a Stratocaster.\nBeing totally down with your bones used for something cool.\nBeing a Topic Knave.\nBeing called a genius until it breaks you.\nBeing confused about whether a boat is a fortunate or unfortunate boat.\nPutting together a team to make the game to match your vanity soundtrack.\nMaking a soundtrack you could paint on the side of a van.\nAuteur power inevitably turning you into a monster, and choosing to lean into that.\nLiving with the comfort hose pointed at your face.\nHaving no knees and a lot of money.\nEating yourself because you are among the 1% most self-actualized.\nDancing 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.\nGetting real good at the spoons because pianos are too heavy.\nAccidentally starting fires with your thick prescription glasses.\nMurdering every Applebee's employee so you're the best chef in your future village.\nBeing good with children even though you hate them.\nTerrifying passers-by because you just wanted to get your shopping done faster.\nRunning to catch your yogurt like it's a bus.\nOnlookers wondering why you're always breaking up with Janine every time they see you.\nThinking you're going to get a free sample but instead getting a sales pitch.\nTalking into a celery stalk to get out of an awkward situation.\n","content_html":"

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Lords:

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Microtopics:

\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2019-12-16T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/1ab828b2-3087-42c2-9029-eb1b4be063d1.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":64104072,"duration_in_seconds":4006}]},{"id":"b3c0a149-baef-416c-848f-fc1d8cb468ad","title":"7. I Love A Good Mind Poop","url":"https://topiclords.com/i-love-a-good-mind-poop","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nApril is a Park Ranger and a Beast Lord and Jim's wife\nRyan Ike Composer is a topic bucket at https://twitter.com/RyanIkeComposer/\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\n4:58 Inventing secular rituals for children\n19:25 Playing a Tabletop RPG can make you a better person\n33:02 Which key is most fun to jam in, on the piano?\n\n\nThe Strong Songs episode about \"I Wish,\" by Stevie Wonder. http://strongsongspodcast.com/i-wish-by-stevie-wonder\n\"I Wish,\" by Stevie Wonder. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYKYka-PNt0\nPerfect Pitch. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_pitch\nA=432 tuning. https://attunedvibrations.com/432hz-healing/\nPatent: Vibrating toilet seat. https://patents.google.com/patent/US4920583A/en\n\n40:30 The Muddler asks: \"What would happen if we outlawed moss, botanically and culturally?\"\n\n\nReintroducing wolves to Yellowstone. https://youtu.be/ysa5OBhXz-Q\n\n47:27 Monster Kabinett is a robot-hell you can pay to go to in Berlin, why don't we have these here? https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/monster-kabinett\n\n\nThe cliffs of Dún Aonghasa. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%BAn_Aonghasa\nOneonta falls. https://www.whentobewhere.com/travel-listing/oneonta-gorge-lower-oneonta-falls\n\n58:18 \"Dance Monkey,\" by The Tones and I. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0hyYWKXF0Q\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nTaking the beast lord before someone else does.\nBeing the bucket.\nBeing rooted to the ground and going down with the ship.\nBrains autocorrecting puns out of existence.\nVouching for a deer prancing across a beach.\nNot marrying someone born in the early 2000s.\nGetting into that bucket.\nGetting to sing in a room that's made for singing in.\nA cat wanting to get into the recording studio really bad.\nA cask of amontillado situation except the cask is the entire world outside the recording studio.\nChoosing to consciously develop rituals for your son.\nThrowing all of spirituality out with the bathwater.\nGoing to Hell even though you tried your best.\nBeing a steward of the land.\nRecoiling from going out in public because social media has drained all your life energy.\nCalling a dog a good dog when they're just being a dog.\nHaving a quiet reflection about the Solstice in the middle of a labyrinth.\nChanging your real name because your pseudonym is better.\nThe murder squad rolling out.\nGiving polygons the business and feeling bad for them.\nFiguring out how to be a good person even though you're literally a monster.\nThe laws of physics demanding that you torture a goblin.\nTurning into a grouse and being like \"peace out, losers.\"\nCreating an even worse relationship dynamic but at least this one isn't racist.\nRolling up a CVS middle manager for your D&D one-shot.\nWorking to become blind but always knowing you could work harder.\nMeeting someone who won't admit that they like fun shapes.\nYour local goth park ranger with a tattoo covered in flowers.\nA toilet seat that vibrates at the brown note.\nKnowing from experience that eventually you run out of poop.\nClicking random grids while you think about moss being illegal.\nOutlawing Kate Moss as an unintentional side-effect of your moss legislation.\nBeing the moss lord.\nBeing the moss beast.\nMuddling your mimosa because you're ahead of the curve.\nNot drinking, but knowing so much about it that it'd be dangerous if you did.\nMoss turning out to be the linchpin to global biological harmony.\nTaking the time you used to spend itching and spending it reproducing.\nEverybody being everything.\nA Delightful Nightmare.\nHaving to wait because Mother is not ready yet.\nMother being ready now.\nMother turning out to be a free-roaming robotic spider about the size of a smart car.\nMother malfunctioning and kicking an aluminum folding chair across the room.\nMother vibrating out of the way like a cheap hotel bed.\nA robot sticking out of the wall with crazy proboscis lips.\nA robot that knows how to use chopsticks.\nA flesh robot playing German industrial metal while you try to escape.\nMother remembering you and wanting to drink your blood.\nGuessing sweaters until the beast lord tells you to stop.\nA tourist attraction with a bunch of signs saying \"don't come here\"\nNot wanting to die but on the other hand wanting a cool inscrutable death.\nHaving an animated gif of your cool death on your tombstone.\nJoanna Newsom doing Aretha Franklin.\nNot wanting to admit whether you're a doctor.\nPlaying a miniature game of snake in the spreadsheet that only you can perceive.\nStill not having a catchphrase.\nBeing the beast bucket.\n","content_html":"

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Lords:

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2019-12-09T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/b3c0a149-baef-416c-848f-fc1d8cb468ad.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":63480477,"duration_in_seconds":3967}]},{"id":"2aec344d-ea36-4e34-acb4-37f8c9ea9f51","title":"6. hotcoldman@hotcoldmail.com","url":"https://topiclords.com/hot-coldman-at-hot-coldmail-dot-com","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords this week:\n\n\nJenni is on Twitter as @horsewizrd and wants you to back Aaron Reed's Subcutanea: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/subcutanean-a-novel-where-each-copy-is-different#/\nChris is a social media ghost.\n\n\nTopics discussed:\n\n\n1:46 There are SO MANY VEGETABLES when you peek outside cultural silos. SO MANY that we don't use or know about.\n\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddha%27s_hand\n\n8:25 Concrete pipes stacked in vacant lots becoming the warp pipe.\n\n\nI Am Error, by Nathan Altice: https://mitpress.mit.edu/contributors/nathan-altice\nThe Surprising History of the Warp Pipe: https://reichanjapan.wordpress.com/2016/02/24/the-surprising-history-of-the-warp-pipe/\nThe Enigma of Amigara Fault: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyo#%22The_Enigma_of_Amigara_Fault%22\n\n16:45 Recurring segment: Jim's Baby Thigh Thickness Watch?\n23:48 ZZT\n\n\nThe Museum of ZZT: https://museumofzzt.com/\nJim's interview at the Museum of ZZT: https://museumofzzt.com/article/201/an-interview-with-jim-crawford-frog-fractions-2-and-zzt\nWhere Are The Cowboys??? https://museumofzzt.com/file/w/Cowboys.zip\nFunny Kumquat: https://funnykumquat.blogspot.com/2011/10/jokes.html\nShrek Retold: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pM70TROZQsI\nStar Wars Uncut: https://vimeo.com/34948855\n\"Our future selves are strangers to us.\" https://slate.com/technology/2017/04/why-people-are-so-bad-at-thinking-about-the-future.html\n\n41:16 Creative work (writing especially) looks like you're doing nothing, from the outside, a lot of the time. True for other creatives?\n47:23 Food As Revenge\n\n\nRevenge Bento: http://www.iromegane.com/entertainment/foods/the-japanese-wives-revenge-bento-after-the-fight-shikaeshi-bento/\n\n53:01 The \"Only\" comma\n\n\nhttps://www.arrantpedantry.com/2019/10/24/the-only-comma-pt-1/\nHups! https://en.bab.la/dictionary/finnish-english/hups\nANUG: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acute_necrotizing_ulcerative_gingivitis\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nFalse promises about updating a podcast in-place.\nFinding a creepy lemon hand in the Safeway lying there like a monkey's paw.\nFinding citrus fruit in the toilet.\nFinding talking fruit in the toilet.\nWhether the toilet is a dish or a soup.\nAccidentally paying $11 for cashew milk.\nAsking the cashier to remove a weird squash.\nDistracting the cashier with pictures of missing nuts.\nThe nut abduction clinic.\nA grape that you have to peel like a shrimp.\nA grape that is constantly pooping itself.\nWriting grants for prawn farmers.\nDraining the entire pond to grab all the prawns.\nSound re-use in Super Mario Bros.\nTropes that are boring in Japan but still interesting in other cultures.\nKing of the Hill being a relatable honor story about a salaryman.\nMisutā Supākoru.\nImitation concrete pipes that won't roll over and crush you.\nBeing too socially inept to realize you're being excluded.\nTrying to kill half your friends but only in retrospect.\nThe Goat Simulator stage of baby development.\nThe Goat Simulator stage of game development.\nBeing at the pinnacle of your child body.\nRealizing halfway through the creative process that you should've been writing a novel.\nDying and giving a soliloquy about so dying representative democracy.\nHaving pages of justification for why you're covered with nipples.\nThe story about missing cowboys actually being about North Korea.\nNot wanting to share your kumquat jokes.\nExplaining a meme from 2010 to your grandchildren.\nSisqo playing a love interest dentist.\nReplacing the love interest in the sequel.\nHangover 2 just having another hangover in it.\nMaking friends with Mexican paramilitary organizations to save the world.\nRaising your child on a diet of guns and kung fu before the government takes him away.\nThe most woke Shrek movie.\nDeciding whether you want to hear \"All Star\" literally all the time.\nMoving pieces of paper around and not being sure you're making anything better.\nBeing yelled at by your sister to wash potatoes faster.\nYour yelling sister following you from job to job.\nA sandwich being well beyond your cognitive load.\nOrdering a viking at Subway.\nEating the devil given physical form every Wednesday for lunch.\nWriting summoning words in your sandwich order.\nThinking of the exact same demon as your guest lord.\nWriting an entire sentence with no commas at all because commas make you pretentious.\nPutting a period in your minimalist font because you have to be able to refer to \"Dr. Awesome.\"\nAgreeing that \"UPS\" is a one-syllable word.\nThat one Finnish word that Jim still uses regularly.\nSinging \"Finnish Affectation\" to the tune of \"Wave of Mutilation\"\nLegislature that would force corporations to pay ongoing rent for the space their jingles take up in your brain.\nGetting scurvy to cure your trench mouth.\nTrading your oral health for the opportunity to make weird troll games for a living.\n","content_html":"

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

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Lords this week:

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Topics discussed:

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Microtopics:

\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2019-12-02T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/2aec344d-ea36-4e34-acb4-37f8c9ea9f51.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":64534152,"duration_in_seconds":4033}]},{"id":"c233bd8f-f1c7-4a04-95b8-db095a34411c","title":"5. Very Hype About This Apple","url":"https://topiclords.com/very-hype-about-this-apple","content_text":"Lords:\n\n\nJP recommends Esperpento. http://esperpentotapasrestaurant.com/\nStyger recommends Esperpento and Yamo. https://www.theinfatuation.com/san-francisco/reviews/yamo\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\n1:52 A brief history of JP using \"Lords\" as a comedy word, 2008-present, and why British people will probably never \"get\" this quasijoke.\n9:00 Emergency preparedness!\n\n\nThe SFFD neighborhood emergency response team: https://sf-fire.org/neighborhood-emergency-response-team-nert\n\n16:55 The apple with a launch date. https://story.californiasunday.com/cosmic-crisp-apple-launch\n23:15 Larry asks: \"Are there horses\" \n\n\nMiniature horses as service animals: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=miniature+therapy+horse&ia=images&iax=images\n\n28:39 Being an amateur naturalist from another part of the country.\n\n\nSneakers: navigating San Francisco by sound. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuIheGaiFLM\n\"Watch Dogs 2: Touring San Francisco's Famous Landmarks\"\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F9_l19j4XY\n\n43:15 What makes some hotels scarier than others?\n\n\n\"It should be illegal for horror movies to advertise.\" https://twitter.com/okexactly/status/1185756975612727297?s=20\n\"If you make that film as a bleak drama, then we’re making it for like, an audience of three. So what might be a deterrent to an audience in one genre suddenly becomes a virtue in another, and it just felt like a no-brainer to channel that through a horror-movie filter.\" https://www.vulture.com/2018/06/hereditarys-ari-aster-breaks-down-his-upsetting-film.html\nScratch and sniff feelie in Leather Goddesses of Phobos. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leather_Goddesses_of_Phobos\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nHypothesizing about how much business your internet review gets a small business.\nA restaurant in San Francisco somehow not going out of business.\nReassuring meme carriers that they are still good people.\nMajestic yet ridiculous muscledudes.\nDreaming a GDC talk.\nTaking the \"lord\" title seriously because you are probably ruled by literal lords.\nOur sister podcast across the pond, Topic Senators.\nDistinguishing lords from non-lords by their shoulder armor.\nPreppers going from being a joke to an aspiration.\nRealizing that literally none of your skills would help you in the apocalypse.\nDrinking pee through a Life Straw and it still tasting like pee.\nCalifornia-branded disasters.\nNaming your produce via an Internet poll.\nProduce having a launch date.\nLining up at Safeway for produce's midnight launch.\nEating berries exclusive to your region.\nBelieving horses still exist because you've seen them once.\nBeing almost sure horses aren't a hoax.\nInserting horses into the historical record.\nDuckbilled platypi being obviously bullshit.\nEvery platypus having been secretly manufactured by the Tyrell Corporation.\nLA and San Francisco merging because Philip K Dick didn't predict rising construction costs.\nFinding out that miniature horses can be service animals.\nService ponies in the soup aisle.\nSomeone defacing an explanatory sign to make people believe that horses can be service animals.\nMiniature ponies being grandfathered in.\nEveryone choosing the mockingbird as their state bird.\nBeing annoyed that trees are the wrong trees.\nBeing young enough for them to just be trees I guess.\nThe sky being the wrong sky.\nSeeing freeway exit signs for Jupiter.\nThe Golden Gate Bridge getting wrecked.\nA story being grounded in geography.\nStepping out of the movie theater into the neighborhood the movie you saw was set in and feeling like you're still in the movie.\nEveryone's effective hometown being San Francisco because that's where every movie is set.\nGetting experience points for taking selfies.\nThe Coit Tower secretly being a giant hologram full of horses.\nThe arbitrariness of what makes a hotel scary.\nThe horror of a hotel room possibly having bedbugs.\nNot being scared by a movie because you chose to watch it.\nThe cute robot doing all the murders.\nThe TV edit of Robocop somehow being even more traumatic.\nSneaking an art house movie into your horror movie.\nNo longer being affected by supernatural horror but being terrified of movies with car accidents.\nThe implicit social contract that horror movies shouldn't address the horror of real life.\nThe ethics of advertising horror movies.\nThe ad that places a horrible idea in your mind and promises closure/the antidote if you pay for the full movie.\nBuying a tub of baked beans at the concession stand and feeling good for five minutes.\nRefilling the essential oil cartridge for gunfire.\nNot wanting to smell Bioshock, or most video games really.\n","content_html":"

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\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2019-11-25T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/c233bd8f-f1c7-4a04-95b8-db095a34411c.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":61439583,"duration_in_seconds":3839}]},{"id":"e690a646-28ef-43bf-a57e-cff5bd2e24c3","title":"4. Don't Freak Out, But I'm Arresting You","url":"https://topiclords.com/dont-freak-out-but-im-arresting-you","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nElena is reading Cordyceps by Benedict_SC. https://archiveofourown.org/works/6178036/chapters/14154868\nAvery's solo album is on Bandcamp. https://averyburke.bandcamp.com/releases\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\n2:58 Male pigeons feed their young with \"crop milk\" produced in glands in their throat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_milk\n\n\nFennec Foxes. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=fennec&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images\n\"Squid will survive and may even flourish under even the worst-case ocean acidification scenarios.\" https://news-oceanacidification-icc.org/2019/06/14/squid-could-thrive-under-climate-change/\nThe Honeyguide will show you the honey. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeyguide\nDo birds sweat? https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20061208141845AAtuY9L\n\"Several months before his death, Lee had an operation to remove the sweat glands from his armpits.\" And this may have lead to his death from heat stroke. https://www.history.com/news/bruce-lee-death-mystery-solved-sweat-glands\n\n18:07 Elena's friends use lexicalized emoji to communicate.\n\n\nAlice and Kev, homeless Sims. https://aliceandkev.wordpress.com/\nHappy Birthday, Wanda June. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Birthday,_Wanda_June\n\n35:08 The story of the guy who wanted and then didn't want a mattress.\n\n\nVintage Pump Organs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiqnINpIz74\n\n44:46 Singing cowboys and their ethical codes, which demanded their young fans keep clean and invest in savings accounts. http://www.cowboyway.com/GeneAutry.htm\n\n\nAlice's Restaurant Massacree: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPx2t7xoF1k\n\n55:40 Dimensions in candy space: chocolate, fruit, ...?\n\n\nAll figs contain a dissolved wasp. https://gardencollage.com/inspire/wild-earth/true-dead-wasps-inside-figs/\n\"An emerald cockroach wasp (Ampulex compressa) can control the minds of roaches with a sting of its venom.\" https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2018/02/parasitic-wasps-parkinsons-future-research-spd/\nThe neotenized Domesticated Red Fox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_red_fox\nHumans may have domesticated themselves: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/how-humans-maybe-domesticated-themselves\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nInfohazards.\nLiving in a house with instruments on the wall because you're a musician, not because you're a massive hipster.\nScientists who would describe cottage cheese as creamy.\nPigeon milk cappuccinos.\nAnimals that thrive in the city biome.\nAnaerobic squid thriving in the oceans we ruined.\nHoney-loving birds ditching their lame badger companions for fire-making humans.\nFlame-throwing badgers demanding bird exes take them back.\nBirds sweating out of their throats.\nEast Asian people have different earwax from white people.\nGoing deaf every few months due to earwax buildup.\nMonetizing your overactive sebaceous glands.\nTransplanting superior Asian sebaceous glands into your shitty white person's body.\nWhat do mammals have that birds haven't taken from us?\nThe kiwi bird has ostrich-sized eggs.\nRealizing that the kiwi isn't the size of a kiwi.\nThanking people by applying a turkey to them.\nMissing the rest of the conversation because you were trying to find the perfect emoji.\nNeeding more than one train emoji.\nStarving because your food options are equidistant.\nBuilding the perfect Sims family so you can wreck their lives.\nWalking into a random house and the occupants being fine with it.\nDebuting moon landing footage you found in the bathroom.\nOpening up a cabinet at NASA and moon rocks spilling out.\nYour bosses at NASA not really caring when you destroy old SETI documents.\nCats climbing discarded mattresses to hunt.\nSense of thirst being hereditary.\nKidney stones as a delayed sign of thirst.\nFinally getting to the part where the guy wants a mattress.\nBeing finished loving the mattress.\nThe Sunken Mattress Fallacy.\nDiscovering the organ you just destroyed was from the 19th century.\nPlaying music by touching the bones of a dead creature.\nBeing the de facto authority because everyone else knows even less.\nPutting money into Gene Autrey's savings account.\nBuilding good citizens through singing cowboys.\nIssuing an arrest warrant for secret reasons.\nAppreciating the 19th-century sheriff's weird forehead while waiting to be arrested.\nSitting there on the Group W bench.\nTeacher rewarding you with the cheapest possible candy.\nMistaking your deodorant for tamarind candy.\nBeing weird in the way that figs are weird.\nFertilizing figs with your dissolved corpse.\nSharing your fig with a friend so only one of you eats a dissolved wasp.\nNot believing new information because it's implausible that you didn't already know it.\nWasps parasiting other wasps.\nFigs no longer being considered vegan.\nClosing your tiger restaurant because tigers are infeasible to farm.\nAccidentally inventing puppies when you just wanted your fox farm to be safer.\nCollecting a breeding population of raccoons.\nRats escaping their cage so they can cuddle you.\nOutliving your pet parrot.\nBeing an ageless rat guardian.\nOrcas rubbing themselves on flat rocks and nobody knows why.\nOrcas rubbing themselves on flat rocks because they're itchy.\nAn octopus friend to untangle wires for you.\nUplifting the octopus race merely by lengthening their lifespan.\nUplifted octopodes inventing Twitter and becoming miserable.\nThinking your chimp knows ASL because it's mirroring your actions.\nWorshiping Cthulhu in a secular humanist kind of way.\nMaking jokes no-one will get instead of doing proper marketing.\n","content_html":"

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Lords:

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Microtopics:

\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2019-11-18T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/e690a646-28ef-43bf-a57e-cff5bd2e24c3.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":78464732,"duration_in_seconds":4904}]},{"id":"3e3b1013-1782-47cb-9fc1-1124b8c58054","title":"3. The Screaming Man Simulator","url":"https://topiclords.com/the-screaming-man-simulator","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nJay worked on Hypnospace Outlaw. http://www.hypnospace.net/\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/jaytholen\n\nJames is working on Galapagos. https://triplefox.itch.io/galapagos\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/Triplefox\nhttp://ludamix.com/\n\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\n3:25 James is taking a storytelling class at City College\n15:49 Propizio Chittara: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9xiOqfkKBM\n20:12 Library and Production music. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Production_music\n\n\nPrefab FM. https://twitter.com/PrefabFM\n86 hour Spotify playlist of ~90s Production music: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1O7DMdjlJqBeAqGEVVihXD?\nDavid Vorhaus - My Brain's Full! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GI617uJKlg0\nWhite Noise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Noise_(band)\n\n29:46 Gottlieb \"Street Level\" Pinball. https://www.retrorefurbs.com/the-history-of-street-level-pinballs/\n\n\nFree Gold Watch custom screen printing and pinball and video arcade. http://freegoldwatch.com/newhome/home.html\nPacific Pinball Museum. https://www.pacificpinball.org/\nPinside. https://pinside.com/\n\n44:10 Jim's new life sleeping like Darth Vader\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nAccidentally only booking guests with your same first initial.\nValues systems driving design decisions.\nTaking only the fun classes in college.\nChildren as an ideal audience for storytelling.\nA job fair for monsters.\nBlack people being friends with metaphors for black people.\nOnly wanting to go to school after it's unavailable to you.\nNever going to museums where you live because that's what tourists do.\nPaying to do manual labor to entertain your infant son.\nInsisting on talking to babies even though they don't understand you.\nNot knowing who Arcade Fire is.\nKnowing who Arcade Fire is.\nSpraying guitar samples into the DAW just to fill space.\nGoing up to strangers talking in a bar to tell them their conversation is boring.\nTweeting with as much context resiliency as possible.\nHearing an instrumental in the 90s and wondering about it for the rest of your life.\nThe saddest accordion solo.\nA laughing baby indicating lack of cruelty.\nLibrary/production music that is just as avant garde as your personal work.\nCorporate contexts appropriating music that was popular 10 years ago.\nWhen the retro discount kicks in for production music.\nAbsorbing your friend's shoegaze album into your video game.\nReinventing General MIDI for your alternate timeline's soundtrack.\nPicking a name for your combination pinball parlor and print shop.\nThe timeline of pinball speed.\nThe timeline of pinball interactivity.\nAnalog video games frustrating the speed running scene.\nVideo game sound effects in the reality that never invented the speaker.\nSwitching around the pneumatic tubes on your brother's Call of Duty sound setup.\nSneaking into an amusement park to play the calliope.\nCalliope MIDI playback as an online service.\nRobotic percussion as an online service.\nSleep studies are take-home tests now.\nStopping breathing 25 times per hour.\nAcclimating to your Darth Vader mask.\nNever living to regret your bad decisions.\nNot being sure how to pronounce your own name.\n","content_html":"

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Lords:

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Topics:

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Microtopics:

\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2019-11-11T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/3e3b1013-1782-47cb-9fc1-1124b8c58054.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":49733156,"duration_in_seconds":3075}]},{"id":"98cd634b-713e-44b8-b6b2-7ede1ccc0b1c","title":"2. Conjure A False Gobot","url":"https://topiclords.com/conjure-a-false-gobot","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nJohn is excited to be a Topic Lord\nJP does stuff at http://vectorpoem.com/\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\n1:36 Horses will climb stairs but can't get back down again.\n\n\nhttp://www.firecritic.com/2009/08/18/fire-pole-or-sliding-chute/\nCLOP: http://www.foddy.net/CLOP.html\n\n12:13 Do you get enough sleep? If so, how?\n21:36 The ad for a movie sequel that was the entirety of the previous movie in the series.\n\n\nThe Wendy's tabletop RPG: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/10/dd-licious-wendys-now-has-a-tabletop-rpg-and-the-villain-is-frozen-beef/\nToo Many Cooks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrGrOK8oZG8\nBandersnatch, the semi-interactive Black Mirror thing on Netflix: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror%3A_Bandersnatch\nAdaptation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptation_(film)\nThe weird trailer for Identity that preceded Adaptation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8fjyxM7DgU\n\n35:34 How much work would it take to insert a fictional person into the historical record?\n\n\nFall; or, Dodge in Hell - A novel by Neal Stephenson about near-future technological advancements like uploading your consciousness to the cloud and curating your online existence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall;_or,_Dodge_in_Hell\n\n49:18 John's recurring dream about seeing the wrong image and ending all levels of reality\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nLord enthusiasm.\nThinking of Ghostbusters because you can't imagine a firefighter.\nForaging for oats on the top floor of a fire station.\nInstalling a pole because your infant son can't descend stairs.\nFinding a horse in a tree.\nPlaying CLOP to learn empathy for the descending horse.\nReplacing a spiral staircase with a normal staircase.\nThe entire city burning down because the firefighters can't get past the horse that's stuck on the landing.\nBecoming a morning person because of your government job.\nYour child possibly loving the daycare lady more than he loves you.\nTaking melatonin because you don't have the discipline for not looking at screens before bed.\nThe shitty dreams of melatonin boot camp.\nGnawing on the melatonin and leaving it on the nightstand for next time.\nYour body getting stuck on a particular sleep schedule long past its relevance.\nHypothesizing how much long-lasting damage you did with your teenage sleep habits.\nFocusing better because everyone else is asleep.\nWorking until 4am because you're being so productive.\nNot knowing how ads work because you have an ad-blocker installed.\nFinding about how ads work from an 11 year old.\nYour alternate reality self who enjoys a good advertisement now and again.\nMaintaining the pace of film trailers for over an hour.\nMistaking the trailer before the movie as being part of the movie.\nNobody being fooled by your fake trailer because people don't watch movies in theaters any more.\nAvoiding watching Bandersnatch because you're a completionist.\nThe technical difficulties of adding late choice points to an otherwise linear film.\nBeing nostalgic for old UIs of web services.\nFinding a web page that hasn't changed in 15 years.\nFinding a web page that looks 15 years old but also has a mobile style sheet.\nEditing an innocuous fact on Wikipedia that nobody will bother to fact-check.\nAsking to view a historical document and sneaking in a quill pen and inkwell to modify it.\nCiting your doctored document on Wikipedia.\nBefriending a history professor and asking them to mention your fake Kansas senator in a published paper.\nFalsifying movie running times just because you can get away with it.\nCiting an obscure magazine as your source on Wikipedia because nobody will bother to check.\nClinging to the scraps of the past that you've salvaged from eBay and garage sale VHS tapes.\nPoor documentation of pop culture leading to compelling mysteries.\nDrowning true information with false information.\nThe downside of having a unique Google string.\nHaving repercussions on all levels of nested reality.\nDreams as really lazy storytelling.\nRemembering facts without remembering their origin.\nGetting stuck opening a door to mask dream loading time.\nMaking up any old bullshit and being convinced it's a Beatles rarity.\nDesperately fleeing from the \"The End\" title card.\nRealizing your dream is actually just the plot of The Neverending Story.\n","content_html":"

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

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Lords:

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Topics:

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Microtopics:

\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2019-11-04T08:00:00.000-08:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/98cd634b-713e-44b8-b6b2-7ede1ccc0b1c.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":60012252,"duration_in_seconds":3750}]},{"id":"eb5f0c01-22c3-412d-b35b-a50f06636f06","title":"1. The Shoulderblade Is A Girl","url":"https://topiclords.com/the-shoulderblade-is-a-girl","content_text":"Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!\n\nLords:\n\n\nJenni does stuff at http://www.jennipolodna.com/\nJay worked on Hypnospace Outlaw. http://www.hypnospace.net/\n\n\nTopics:\n\n\n 0:38 Jay is frustrated that he learned to play the ukulele rather than any other fretted instrument.\n\n\n(I actually meant Super Mario Bros. 3 world 1. Here are the chords: 000x 0000 0002 0000 000x 0000 0002, then barre up to 222x, etc.)\nSomewhere Over the Rainbow ukulele cover by Israel \"IZ\" Kamakawiwoʻole. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1bFr2SWP1I\n\n11:16 Jenni attended a Stripper Karaoke performance. https://www.devilspointbar.com/stripparaoke\n\n\nA dial tone is 350hz and 440hz, very close to F4 and A4.\n\n19:26 Jim discovers how to make spaghetti edible.\n\n\nThe only evidence I could find that Japanese alphabet soup might exist: https://i.imgur.com/tDWu43P.png\n\n22:44 There are no yeasty donuts in Germany, only cake donuts.\n\n\nLondon cab drivers need to memorize the entire city: https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/10/21/450235327/londons-cabbies-say-the-knowledge-is-better-than-uber-and-a-gps\n\n31:02 Jenni discovers how to make chicken wings edible\n\n\nPad thai was standardized by the Thailand government as the official Thai dish for westerners: https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/food-drink/article/3007657/history-pad-thai-how-stir-fried-noodle-dish-was-invented-thai\n\n45:43 Jim talks about fixing a wet phone\n\n\nTekDry possibly saved my phone: https://www.tekdry.com/\n\n49:02 Jenni figures out how many peppers is too many peppers, but the jury is still out on how many is just enough.\n\n\nThe old process for measuring scoville was to dilute it until testers said \"this isn't hot\" and then report the dilutedness. Now they use science. https://www.thespruceeats.com/hot-chile-peppers-scoville-scale-1807552\n\n\n\nMicrotopics:\n\n\nNot remembering the name of your own show.\nCursing oneself by learning the wrong skill.\nLooking like a huge lumberjack playing a tiny instrument.\nEnjoying music wrong.\nNever asking for advice because you know people will tell you it's a bad idea.\nThe mythical non-portable ukulele.\nConfusing Prog Rock and Prague Rock.\nPunting a conversation to later because you can't brain right now.\nOff-season Cirque du Soleil performers normalizing strip club culture.\nHaving just the right stripping outfit for someone's karaoke choice.\nWhy singing for the Rock Band high score doesn't sound like good singing.\nWaking up your partner to join your loud video game.\nCalling your partner to ask to make a dial tone together.\nEveryone agreeing on the worst pasta shape.\nGetting into a spaghetti situation.\nInventing short spaghetti.\nEarning your satiation with the gamer's pasta.\nSoup screaming at you if it doesn't like you.\nFiguring out how to type during a podcast.\nDonuts being slightly shiny to fool you.\nGermans presenting Americans with fake donuts to collect their tears.\nSwimming the English Channel in hopes that they have real donuts there.\nMemorizing every street in London because cab drivers aren't allowed to use Mapquest.\nNot feeling like any more of a monster than usual.\nEating a taco above another taco to grow its powers.\nTaco Bell provocateurs rewriting history.\nGoing to a sushi restaurant when you don't like fish.\nInsisting your wife only speak to you in German.\nNot learning the local language because watching Netflix is easier.\nImpressing people by setting the bar extremely low.\nBeing the only adult at the kid's table.\nDropping your phone in a freshwater vs. a saltwater toilet.\nUsing magical beams to get the water out.\nApologizing for your router.\nThe clerk knowing you eat Hot Cheetos just by looking at you.\nShaming customers into ordering the mild.\nMoving to a country where everyone else is as spice-intolerant as you are.\nConfusing being spicy and being spicy.\nTactically voting each other off the podcast.\n","content_html":"

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

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Lords:

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Topics:

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Microtopics:

\n\n","summary":"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.","date_published":"2019-10-28T08:00:00.000-07:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/eb5f0c01-22c3-412d-b35b-a50f06636f06.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":56929385,"duration_in_seconds":3558}]}]}