• Jonah
• AC

Topics:

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

Microtopics:

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

Support Topic Lords

Lords

• Maxx
  • maxx.infinity@gmail.com
  • http://mechcem.itch.io/
• Aaron
  • http://aaronsee.media/

Topics:

• The TV Show Russian Doll and emotionally correct magic logic
• My favorite captchas
  • http://www.captchacomics.com/index.php?i=1540
• AI-remastered Rick Astley
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ocykBzWDiM
• Kegel based video games and sex UI
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OYmIexjX8U
• Death Stranding, Tenet, and responsible creativity

Microtopics:

• The green fuzzy stuff, and how nice it is to touch.
• Moss on all sides of a tree.
• Moss directionality at various latitudes.
• Having a water-borne moss ball instead of a fidget spinner.
• Russian Doll.
• Whether there is or ought to be another season of Russian Doll.
• Restarting from the same point every time you die.
• Every episode of a TV series depicting the same four years of high school except the protagonist joins a different club.
• The three names of Edge of Tomorrow.
• All You Need is Kill: Edge of Tomorrow: Live Die Repeat.
• Naming your book like an eBay auction.
• Time travel between adjacent panels of a comic.
• Characters in a story trying to figure out how the author's mind works.
• Successfully fusing world building with a character-driven story.
• Designing a game where the game rules change based on choices players make in the story.
• Celebrities in Prison.
• Any given playthrough of a game being consistent with itself, but not with other playthroughs.
• Playing an interactive story on the Wayback Machine, where it's no longer interactive.
• Running a MUD and exposing its creative tools to your players.
• Matching spiral galaxies to demonstrate your humanity.
• Putting pedestrians at risk by giving bad information to CAPTCHAs.
• Figuring out who your CAPTCHA buddy is so that you can give the driving AI bad information together.
• A CAPTCHA asking you how many instances of the letter i are in the author's name, then after you answer revealing their middle name.
• A spammer caring enough to figure out your bespoke commenting system so that they can spam it.
• A CAPTCHA saying "if you are human, type the word 'human' into this box" and filtering out the spam bots because they type in "spam bot" instead.
• Crook things.
• A phrase both too specific and too general to be useful.
• Doing divination readings by writing kanji with swinging pendulums.
• Using images as the source of randomness in a roguelike's daily run.
• Here was a song but now it's a building.
• Questioning the validity of converting songs to buildings.
• Having a lot of things and needing to create names for them.
• An incredible bomble.
• Deleting this entire discussion and replacing it with Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up.
• Reacting to the gestalt of Rick Astley singing in front of a fence.
• Upscaling a music video to 4k and then applying a CRT filter to make it look like it's on an old TV.
• Content aware fill but for time instead of space.
• Using content aware scale to make videos of hilarious cartoon people.
• Lighting the underside of a bridge by reflecting a searchlight off of a pot of water.
• A shadow of Rick Astley clapping his hands and his right hand just vanishes.
• Finally noticing the bartender in the Rick Astley music video.
• Doing a graceful dance nice that most people would wreck themselves trying without even conveying to onlookers that they're trying to dance.
• Trying to dragon punch but missing the timing so Ryu just flails uselessly for a few seconds.
• Flappy Bird with a kegels controller.
• The portable urination games that you see people playing on the subway and wonder if they're winning.
• Repeatedly firing a semiautomatic rifle by kegeling as rapidly as possible and then doing a backflip to reload.
• Werewolf except you're interrogating everyone to figure out who has just eaten a spicy pepper.
• Creative responsibility.
• What's good and bad about walking in video games.
• Winner vs. Loser.
• Spamming the forward button to run.
• Tapping the forward button at a certain rate or the protagonist trips and falls.
• Just being a capsule and going to zero velocity when you hit a wall.
• Filling your AAA hiking simulator with questionable exposition.
• Hiking through the United States except it's actually Iceland.
• Pressing a button to react to strong winds.
• What happens when you try to make games that aren't shooting people.
• Really thinking hard about what it means to walk.
• Making a AAA walking simulator and breaking down your org chart into the left foot team, the right foot team, the left knee team, &c.
• Hiking barefoot on an intensely beautiful mountain and not seeing any of it because you're looking at your footing.
• Taking in the beauty of your environment.
• Building a hill the size of a large building but painting it to look like a 20,000 foot mountain.
• The difficulty of emulating a Windows 95 game.
• How to install Windows 95 on a modern computer when modern computers don't have CD-ROM drives.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Jonah
  • https://works.rip/
• Aaron
  • https://aaronsee.media/ku.html

Topics:

• Graffitti based arguments
• Unphysical physically-motivated procedural content generation
  • Mandelbulb: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTpbP5BVtiA
• The inventor of "None Pizza With Left Beef" went on to create "Young Sheldon"
  • The 10th anniversary of None Pizza Left Beef: https://gizmodo.com/reflections-on-the-10th-anniversary-of-none-pizza-with-1819692097
• Jesse asks: "Hobo code"
  • https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a25174860/hobo-code/
• Designing a game around semantic prime theory

Microtopics:

• A game that is not about toppling governments.
• Seeing a political message spray painted on the wall and painting a reasoned response beneath it.
• Going around Athens and restenciling graffiti to be more legible.
• Going to the bathroom to catch up on the latest stall graffiti.
• Graffiti as art versus graffiti as a forum for communication.
• Seeing that there is no graffiti on the bathroom walls at your new office job and bringing a mechanical pencil to work in order to get the party started.
• Sticker bombing your school with stickers saying "good source of fiber" and "for rectal use only."
• The potential of industrial glues.
• Waiting for a telephone pole to be covered with posters thick enough that you can carve a room out of the posters to have your band practice in.
• A city on a massive hill where the hill is made of all the previous cities that were conquered in that place.
• The best edible band flyer glues.
• Generating Perlin noise and picking an elevation for the water level to generate your video game world.
• Simulating tectonic plates to generate your video game world.
• Exploring the Mandelbulb.
• A rationale for mountains.
• Making an apple pie from scratch and having to invent the universe, except it's not an apple pie, it's an alien planetary body.
• Attempting to solve a problem with no reasonable way to validate your solution.
• Doing world building but it's not just putting orcs in a mountain range inventing a way for planets to work that is not plate tectonics.
• The new Frog Fractions game spoiling for all of pop culture including itself.
• A photograph of a disc of plain dough with meatballs scattered loose in the box.
• Hacking the Domino's garlic bread by ordering a pizza with just garlic on it.
• Hatewatching your favorite sitcom.
• Moving to Greece and everybody finding out that you're a nerd and being like "oh I know what your favorite show is."
• Making a TV show where the whole joke is that the main character has Asperger's.
• Finding Chuck Lorre's email address and writing to ask why the show is called "The Big Bang Theory."
• One level of pun connoisseurship up from "what's up dog"
• Ungoogleable questions such as "why is the show called 'big bang theory'" and "what is the volume of a parakeet"
• Finding out the volume of a parrot via water displacement.
• Emailing every combination of letters at gmail.com and asking them all why the show is called "the big bang theory" and hoping that one of them is show creator Chuck Lorre.
• A duck that means "free telephone"
• The canonical hobo object.
• Sitting around the fire with a lead mug you're drinking chili out of.
• How often you need to pretend to faint.
• Reading Wikipedia aloud and going "huh!"
• An alternative Topic Lords podcast with train noises dubbed over it.
• Recording a podcast where you read a stack trace for ten minutes and your seatmate moving to a different place on the train.
• A podcast episode where the host gets carted off in handcuffs and yells "avenge me!" and hits upload with their toe.
• Being arrested on live TV and your fans assuming that it's another mysterious lore drop.
• The optimal minimal subset of all languages.
• The 65 words that can express any human idea.
• A Pinteresty soundbite of knowledge.
• Deep philosophical conversations with your toddler.
• A semantic substrate that is our natural world.
• Persuasive systems having some fundamental level of plausibility because at some level the system has to function.
• Making a career out of building persuasive systems.
• Overcoming difficulty with persistence.
• Telling the story of overcoming difficulty with persistence via a masocore platformer.
• A couple of sentences on a sheet of paper that you then enact.
• Investigating an opaque system and taking away a message.
• Some Frank Lantz tweet threads.
• The indie game community transitioning from focusing on game design to focusing on art design.
• How juicy you should make a game.
• How good the screen shake was on Rod Humble's "The Marriage."
• Spreadsheets like you've never felt them before.
• Cracking knuckles on the juice hose.
• Eating the concept of frying something.

Support Topic Lords