About the show

Every week, Jim invites different friends to guest on Topic Lords and be excited about whatever they've been fixated on this week.

Episodes

  • 45. Remember To Pronounce The Apostrophe

    August 31st, 2020  |  1 hr 3 mins
    johnb, nick

    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.

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    44. Oops! All Biogel

    August 24th, 2020  |  58 mins 1 sec
    jenni, maxx

    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.

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    43. You Vs. The One Your Mom Told You To Worry About

    August 17th, 2020  |  1 hr 4 mins
    jonah, xander

    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.

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    42. Refrigerator Roy, or Stephanie I'm So Sorry

    August 10th, 2020  |  1 hr 14 mins
    elizabeth, erica

    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.

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    41. Non-Euclidean Christianity

    August 3rd, 2020  |  1 hr 10 mins
    ryan, tyriq

    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.

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    40. I'll Show Them... I'll Invent Superman!

    July 27th, 2020  |  1 hr 11 mins
    jesse, john

    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.

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    39. A Delicious Mushball

    July 20th, 2020  |  1 hr 8 mins
    nathan, shane

    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.

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    38. Inside The Atomic Purple Man

    July 13th, 2020  |  56 mins 11 secs
    nathalie, rachel

    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.

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    37. Fela Cooties

    July 6th, 2020  |  59 mins 36 secs
    beek, jay

    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.

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    36. Look At An Octopus While You Shower

    June 29th, 2020  |  51 mins 14 secs
    april, jenni

    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.

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    35. Nick Cave's Meow Mix Murder Ballads

    June 22nd, 2020  |  1 hr 12 mins
    dan, erica

    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.

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    34. We Don't Talk About Poop Stonehenge

    June 15th, 2020  |  1 hr 8 mins
    elena, shannon

    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.

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    33. Two-Grass Of The Face

    June 8th, 2020  |  59 mins 6 secs
    craig, strucci

    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.

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    32. Tandem CPAP

    June 1st, 2020  |  1 hr 4 mins
    laura, rachel

    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.

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    31. seedhutch.horse

    May 25th, 2020  |  54 mins 57 secs
    chris, jenni

    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.

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    30. Century Of The Fruitbat

    May 18th, 2020  |  1 hr 11 mins
    chall, cornell

    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.