• Alex
• Shannon

Topics:

• Japan in summer is too hot, but there's lots of cool festivals
• Why can't I have marzipan made by nuns in California?
• Podcast playlist problems
• Considering the Snail, by Thom Gunn
  • https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52887/considering-the-snail

Microtopics:

• Traveling.
• If you need a lot of stuff, or if that stuff needs you.
• Real Topic Aficionados.
• Last Life and other lives.
• Watching a TV series you like and then going back and watching the same episodes again from a different character's perspective.
• Napping all day and seeing street festivals at night.
• Walking around with a tower of flaming candles on your head that keep getting tangled in power lines.
• Why aren't the modern World's Fairs as exciting as the ones from 150 years ago?
• Making a couple weeks vanish in lieu of a millennium and a half of leap days.
• Naming your baby Person Who Packs For Themselves.
• Naming your baby "Supplanter"
• The littlest bean that's currently born.
• Growing up enough to realize that everybody is named Luke now.
• How Bob used to be the funny fake name but now it's Jeremy.
• The Bob Emergency.
• The guy you call Baker because he's a baker.
• The canonical order of ore value in video games.
• Hacking your save file at home, just like in the good old days.
• Selling marzipan in a dark room with a turntable and a bell.
• Things you can eat in some parts of the world that you can't eat in others.
• San Diego's Best Seattle Burrito.
• The essence of fine Mexican foods.
• Australians telling candy companies "stop trying to make Halloween happen"
• That friend who has digestive issues eating salmon, but only in specific countries.
• The politics of buying Girl Scout cookies.
• The best place to sell a Girl Scout cookies on UCSD campus.
• Boy Scouts trying to sell popcorn, with seemingly no awareness that popcorn is not remotely as good as Girl Scout Cookies.
• Kobey's Swap Meet.
• Getting an old timey surgical mannequin at a swap meet so you can practice your surgery.
• Kids today trying to figure out how to operate a VCR like they're playing Myst.
• What happens if you put a VHS tape in backwards?
• Netflix's "continue watching" category, for movies you didn't like enough to finish.
• We don't want to hear your bra podcasts!
• The Stanford professor you're gardening for asking you what podcast you're listening to and now you have to explain your weird hobby to your employer.
• How to listen to podcasts without your boss sneaking up on you.
• The first time you've been to the dentist without headphones this millennium.
• Introvert Dentists.
• Tooth care advice that you forget immediately.
• Extremely symmetrical knots in a power cable.
• Climbing, sailing and caving knots.
• What is a snail's fury? Why is this snail so mad?
• A turtle that's decided it's go time.
• Getting really excited about the turtle races at the Renaissance Fair.
• Watching a carnival game where four people throw five spears each at targets attached to a wall of hay, and none of them manage to hit the wall.
• Axe throwing bars, where you have a beer and throw axes.
• Taking up axe throwing as a hobby because whenever someone gets killed with an axe, the police will be sad if they don't have any suspects.
• Axe throwing failure modes.
• Dominant javelin throwing strategies.
• Throwing a javelin further by spinning around like a discus thrower.
• Bullets: they go where they want.

Support Topic Lords

• Alex
• Shannon

Topics:

• The rapid proliferation of identical mobile games
  • https://store.steampowered.com/app/2348100/YEAH_YOU_WANT_THOSE_GAMES_RIGHT_SO_HERE_YOU_GO_NOW_LETS_SEE_YOU_CLEAR_THEM/
• Randomly generated time traveler loadout
• Turning your body into 3D printer filament after you die
  • https://www.suspenders.com/products/1-1-2-undergarment-hold-up-reg-suspender-hip-clip-style-patented-no-slip-reg-clips
• Girls Only Want One Thing, Isabel Correra
  • https://www.instagram.com/isabellecorreawrites/p/Cz3t1xQOn_x/

Microtopics:

• Alien Clay.
• Gravity Falls.
• Tryharding at Duolingo.
• Removing the popsicle sticks in the right order or the king dies in lava.
• Writing a solitaire game generator and uploading 30,000 solitaires to the app store.
• Ads that are not even pretending to not be falsely advertising to you.
• Mobile game advertisers all pretending that their games are the same non-existent game genre.
• Yeah! You Want "Those Games," Right? So Here You Go! Now, Let's See You Clear Them!
• People saying "that ad for a game where you pull out popsicle sticks until a king doesn't die looks pretty good but when I click on it it's a completely different game."
• Lying to consumers in the 80s vs. lying to consumers today.
• Ads that are just two horrifying images to get your adrenalin spiking.
• Screaming Tamagotchi.
• The Paw Patrol diagetically being funded by real life Paw Patrol merch sales.
• Maximizing emotional whiplash when it doesn't matter which two emotions they are.
• Having a week to prepare for a one way trip to Northern Italy in 1326.
• Going on a trip and bringing along your undeveloped Broca's area.
• Bootlegging reproducing GMO crop seeds in Renaissance Italy.
• Wizard/Prophecy Person.
• 21st Century Traveling Merchants.
• Bringing your jar of penicillin mold to the 14th century.
• Being stranded in Renaissance Italy and becoming travelling minstrels.
• Larger bearded guy that wears suspenders (under a graphic tee)
• When were you born? The 14th century. Fuck you.
• Bringing a snack to the spooky extraterrestrial from the planet Vulcan who lives in the woods.
• Big ol' dogs.
• Non-electronic megaphones.
• A little top you can spin that's made of grandpa.
• A magic genie that can grant any wish as it's for a small striated plastic trinket.
• Getting turned into Redstone after you die.
• A poorly-made fidget spinner that used to be your husband.
• Shipping ashes and asking that ashes be put into things.
• The sloughed off skin cells coating everything you send in the mail.
• A shitty fidget spinner that just happens to have some human remains in it.
• Where human composting is allowed.
• Places it's no longer legal to bury a body.
• The problem with imbuing symbols with value.
• An alternative wedding ring that you switch to as necessary.
• A plant that is a metaphor for death.
• Grandpa living forever by being repeatedly melted down and 3D printed into a new toy when you get sick of the old once.
• Bringing 3D printing back to 14th century Italy to revolutionize reliquaries.
• Giving the world both Frog Fractions and Topics.
• How many people you pass on the street each day are wearing suspenders under their shirt.
• Hip Clips Style Under Ups.
• A poem that's in the bucket twice.
• Love is a seed and lust is a bird ravenous for seeds.
• Burying the word sorry and seeing what grows.
• Poetry that's just a paragraph of text.
• What you're going to be if you eat the fruit of the sorry fruit.
• Trying to imit inimitable things.
• There's a lot of different women and they all want different things. (Except they all want to travel back in time.)
• My Mother's Savage Daughter.
• Girls only want one thing: to not be found on the Internet.

Support Topic Lords

• Tyriq
• Alex

Topics:

• Trying to superficially familiarize myself with every country
• The log burner fan
  • https://ae01.alicdn.com/kf/S68d58689db54401f9a434456881cbdfcf/4-Blade-Heat-Powered-Stove-Fan-Log-Wood-Burner-Eco-Friendly-Quiet-Fireplace-Fan-WinterWarm.jpg
• Drilling this chair for ancient water
• Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams, by Kenneth Koch
  • https://allpoetry.com/Variations-On-A-Theme-By-William-Carlos-Williams
• Boichik bagels
• Boxfish skeletons are wilder than seahorse skeletons

Microtopics:

• Saya Gray.
• Least-favorite UFO 50 games.
• Treating the city you live in as if you're a tourist.
• Going to obscure corners of parking lots.
• A way to have an adventure in real life.
• The tiny squishy seal that's no longer in your back pocket.
• Web sites that are nothing but quizzes.
• Trying to name every country.
• This Sporcle quiz's opinion about which disputed territories count as countries.
• Feeling more worldly after you memorize the names of every country.
• Learning katakana and then being annoyed when signs do katakana wrong.
• The curse of perfect-pitch.
• Corrupted Pitch.
• Tuning your whole band to the same out of tune guitar.
• Hearing sounds in your head but only the sounds you're also hearing with your ears.
• State.gov hosting PDF reports of the US government's opinion of every country.
• Dear diary, today I did a cool fishing trade with Norway.
• The Four Guineas.
• The Place Across the Woods.
• A giant CPU heat sink in gunmetal black sitting on top of your wood burning stove.
• Devices powered by ambient temperature differentials.
• The spinning thing on the roof that looks like a macaroon.
• Putting googly eyes on your turbine roof vents.
• Whether Stirling Engines are useful for anything other than a demonstration of the principles of the Stirling Engine.
• Fluids moving through spaces of different sizes.
• Injection molded hollow chunky boys.
• Extremely mundane time capsules.
• A Chair for Scientists.
• A giant plastic-encased garbage ravioli.
• Entire ecosystems that have existed without light for thousands of years.
• Your FEMA-approved disaster preparedness chair.
• Sorting all the water molecules on earth from newest to oldest.
• Artists' depictions of the Hadean Earth.
• The biggest wettest comet in the universe.
• Don Quixote, the sopping wet comet.
• Free sharps, only used once!
• Writing a piece for prepared guitar after your kid fills the guitar with crayons.
• Unprepared Pianos.
• Juicy cold March wind.
• A fair-use parody.
• AI analysis of poetry that completely misses the point.
• Editing Wikipedia to say that Lil Jon went to Harvard.
• List of Rivers in Togo.
• What a Specific Guy!
• Registering an account to vandalize Wikipedia every few months for years.
• Supermarket bagels.
• Boiling round bread in water with crustaceans from the Bronx.
• Making your own water to make coffee with.
• Where to get food-grade lye.
• Pastrami lox.
• Seahorse skeletons.
• Every Platonic Solid Has a Fish.
• Where babies breathe from.
• Fish without ribcages.
• Caltrops arranged into a fish.
• Using a pufferfish skeleton as a fidget toy.
• The pufferfish at the center of our solar system.
• The kind of decoration you see in a lobster joint.
• Tropes of the open ocean.
• The guy preventing you from being able to find search results for the Atari game Toobin'.
• The loudest drinks in the world.
• The Toobin' zone in LEGO Dimensions.
• Chucking whole unopened cans of beer from your inner tube.

Support Topic Lords

• Alex
• Shannon

Topics:

• The less you spend on food, the better it tastes
• The jizz of a bird
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jizz_(birding)
• The Cosmic Call
  • https://blog.plover.com/2024/04/15/
• Line Fishing by Daniel Kahaulelio
  • https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/rWuOwlpV.png
• How to order coffee in Malaysia
  • https://kopi.guide/
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6mv7VY8YLA
• Dice, and physically rolling them
  • https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.com.tann.dice

Microtopics:

• Paleo animators.
• Malaysia as a vacation destination.
• Restaurants that are just in s guy's house.
• The best whole fried catfish you've ever had.
• Eating mixed whole livers.
• Striving to get a B rating from the food safety inspectors because the A rating is too bougie.
• Starch and grease.
• The shape of the price to deliciousness correlation graph.
• If you're here to buy cake, ring the doorbell.
• You can talk to the cops or you can have cake. You can't have both.
• Whether Americans can drink the water in Malaysia.
• Being so desperate for fresh vegetables that you wash them with tap water.
• Butterfly Pee Flour.
• Jizz (birding)
• The practice of just getting the vibe of a bird.
• I don't know, it had the jizz of a bird.
• Zooniverse.
• Going through the still images on a nature webcam and trying to identify local animals.
• Trying to tell the difference between a wood rat and a deer mouse.
• Reclassifying 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.
• Small, Brown and On the Ground.
• Submitting 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.
• An extremely high-stress app.
• Asking an albatross which of the twelve species is albatross it is.
• Walking around in the woods until you spot a kiwi.
• Major gaffes in interstellar communication that future aliens will be very confused about.
• Massively synesthetic dog brains.
• Receiving a sequence of bits and deciding to arrange them in a grid.
• The other book with the spiders.
• Humans interacting with a spider-based society.
• Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
• Expecting monkeys to become the dominant intelligent species on a terraformed planet seeded with Earth animals.
• Adventuring into a dungeon built by the ancients and admiring the signage.
• Opening an oil drum full of concrete and tubes and being like "where's the treasure that's supposed to be in here!"
• Writing a song about how being near glowing cats is very dangerous.
• Public serving meme songs.
• Engineering earworms for the public good.
• The Museum of Hawaiian Culture in Oahu.
• Fish that watch. Fish that look.
• Get those fish hungry.
• It's just a lookin' fish.
• Sleeping the lobes of your brain in shifts.
• The lobes of your brain playing pranks on each other.
• How can fish get some shuteye if they don't have eyelids??
• How can fish rubberneck if they don't even have necks??
• The 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.
• Ais krim.
• What languages are hardest to spell in.
• Are there four silent letters at the end, and if so which ones?
• Cofftea.
• Rolling all them bones.
• Owning more sets of dice than you have played actual D&D sessions.
• A big pile of dice rattling around in your phone.
• Rolling the dice off of the table every single time.
• A switch that goes ka-chonk.
• Actively seeking out hobbies where you touch things.
• Ways that continuous deployment sucks.
• Text classifiers flagging your sexuality as photographic.
• Image classifiers flagging your medical photos as pornographic.
• Which photos encapsulate what you're trying to remember and discuss.
• How to get your life off of a corporation's hard drive.
• Unsearchable Tumblrs.
• Get out there and jizz a bird!

Support Topic Lords

• Alex
• Shannon

Topics:

• Tree law
  • https://www.tumblr.com/whistletown/721716818422677504
  • https://www.tumblr.com/whistletown/723346723280453632
• Tax Heaven 3000
• When 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.
  • https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/156405/outbreaks
• Best food byproducts

Microtopics:

• Exhausting topics before the show even starts.
• Should we give bee educators guns?
• Lords with lord awards.
• Megalords lording over huge swaths of topics.
• Getting your partner a very smooth engagement ring so it hurts less when they punch you in the face.
• Trimming a tree in the middle of summer.
• Tree law consequences.
• The Hitman games, you know, with the bald guy
• Whether Hit People are hired to kill likable or dislikable people.
• Games with missions designed to make you feel bad about what you're doing but also to give you no choice but to do it.
• Injured while sl searching for bodies in Lake Mead? Demand compensation!
• A cute anime girl who really wants to help you prepare your taxes.
• MSCHF.
• Calling the Key 4 All hotline for real time data on the car's location and speed.
• Playing Geoguessr to determine where the car is.
• Reverse engineering the smell of WD-40.
• Using the car for purposes of a car.
• The legal standing of Public Universal Car.
• Don't rotate the donut, you gave to rotate the pie
• Legal MSCHF.
• Taking the SATs for money.
• Writing a list of demands in a child's scrawl and sending it to your senator.
• Seeing the Vienna sausage with knuckles.
• Getting 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.
• A jump scare in Magic Eye form.
• Why we all need glasses.
• Listening to your dad listening to a podcast.
• Disappearing your own nose.
• The purpose of feeling boredom.
• The impossibility of being bored when libraries exist.
• Paleolithic man enjoying memes.
• Why campfire smoke always blows into your eyes.
• Building a prehistoric highway system and using one of those printers that prints on the road so paleolithic man can enjoy dank memes.
• What kids get in their stockings today now that iTunes gift cards are obsolete.
• Why keep any DVDs?
• A common metaphor for a problem that can be overcome by relaxing.
• The most racist shrimp.
• It's not a firearm, it's just an explosive knife.
• Begging your mom to buy you the Krazy Krabs.
• Putting on a brine shrimp show for your family members.
• A spring loaded rigid whip.
• Kitchen Somebody.
• Searching for comfort and the eels come.
• The neon 24 hour fried chicken sign gleaming behind the pines.
• Finding god in a cluster of eels beneath your palms.
• Have you given god a pizza?
• A different eel pizza meme.
• All 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.
• Feeding the sharks by stuffing a dive suit full of chum.
• A cooking process that creates a byproduct that you can use to cook something else.
• Calling bean juice "aqua fava" and styling.
• Browning the whey to create a delicious paste loaf.
• The two-in-one, in which they put two taquitos into a burrito.
• Glorpamole.

Support Topic Lords

• Alex
• Shannon

Topics:

• Reading music badly
• Minigame: guess the animal from bad old-timey descriptions
• How to pronounce "MacPaint"
• https://www.tumblr.com/destinationtoast/708530541060816896
• Airport teleportation

Microtopics:

• Games that you should not play if you get addicted to games.
• Roguelikes that take a reasonable amount of time to play if you are bad at them.
• We're Not That Bad!™
• The Sunnyvale Singers.
• Producing music with a piano.
• Two guards, one who can't read a book and the other one who can read a book aloud but doesn't know the language.
• Buttons corresponding to the doots.
• Given a starting note, figuring out what the next note is supposed to be.
• Not being able to sight sing but faking it by looking at the vertical distance between notes.
• Music direction reading "lower than you think" (but in Italian)
• Knowing the chord progressions to 10,000 pop songs.
• Ways to make music.
• Moving between shapes even without hearing them.
• Playing accompaniment to silent films.
• Improvising music differently each time.
• Pliny the Elder describing the camel leopard.
• An animal with the neck of a horse but the head of a camel.
• A bigness answering thereto.
• Enjoying the alligator too much.
• A curse on four legs, equally pernicious on land and river.
• Inflating the chameleon.
• Spontaneous generation.
• Horned ghosts catapulting themselves around.
• Hunting an elephant by tricking it into leaning on a tree that won't support it.
• Whether elephants have knees.
• Vultures gestating for three years and giving live birth.
• Vultures and condors reproducing without mating.
• Your good friend Ms. Paint.
• Naming your dog a Japanese-sounding name with no regard to Japanese phonotactics and then arguing with people who try to correct you.
• Baking a cake that is 80% vanilla extract.
• A poem in the options of a Tumblr poll.
• Starting from a point of trust but slowly starting to doubt yourself.
• Orpheus and Eurydice.
• A poignant way of putting the reader in the character's frame of mind.
• The value of Oregon Trail.
• Iterating the Orpheus and Eurydice prisoner's dilemma, where whether looking back is the right move is different every time.
• Choosing 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.
• Extremely short form interactive fiction.
• Making an important decision and never finding out if it was the right decision.
• Performing Sicilian Reasoning to finesse the outcome of this online cake ingredient poll.
• Making a perfect stairway in an online poll.
• Making a phone app to help people choose the best option in the cake ingredient poll.
• Instantly teleporting from your seat on the flight to the entrance to your destination airport.
• Teleporting from the TSA interrogation room to the entrance of the airport.
• Teleportation gravity wells.
• Establishing an international airport out of your home.
• Hoping the cops never figure out that you can only teleport to the entrance of an airport.
• Stuperpowers
• Gerrymandering your teleport destinations.
• An international airport that is 100 miles long and 1 centimeter wide.
• Asking a friend to convince you that a certain building is an international airport.
• Drinking a glass of water while standing on your head to convince yourself of what an airport is.
• Hiccups Gone Install.
• You Only Get Screamered Once.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Alex
• Shannon

Topics:

• Incomprehensible PSAs (Remember to slip, slop, slap, seek and slide)
• Games which use player ignorance as a major mechanic (Outer Wilds, Tunic)
• Man out of Space Easiest
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOOSE
• Stepped on a plum (overripe plum) (barefoot)
  • https://utopians.tumblr.com/post/659350035592609792/stepped-on-a-plum-overripe-plum-barefoot-it
• Australia trends (pre vs post pay, pay at pump vs parking meter vs toll camera)
• Bats! Micro & Mega

Microtopics:

• The Broken Earth Trilogy.
• The Lightly-Massaged Earth Trilogy.
• Turkish Delight vs. a Turkish Delight candy bar.
• A candy that gives you the feeling of nostalgia but no corresponding memories.
• Remembering to slip, slop, slap, seek and slide in the kitchen.
• The three onomatopoeias for applying sunscreen.
• Lamenting to your partner that you forgot to slip.
• Posters that just say "don't forget to slip slop slap seek and slide" with no further context.
• A cool grandpa following safety instructions.
• Actionable snake advice.
• Various ways to distinguish goats and sheep.
• A music video that is also a drunk driving PSA.
• How to use search atoms.
• If you're on the train, that's a shame.
• Rhyming platitudes about how social media is bad for your mental health and society as a whole.
• A music video trying to get across a safe sex message to the kids.
• Do They Even Know it's Christmas?
• Something jarring to hear on the radio.
• A desert wasteland full of crying children.
• Tunic.
• Reading the manual of the video game you just bought on the drive home.
• Evoking the idea of playing old video games.
• Jumping puzzles that cost you twenty minutes of your life if you fall.
• A Jules Verne conception of the solar system where other planets are a five minute rocket trip away.
• Learning a code and keeping it in your brain.
• The Hourglass Twins.
• Not being sure what to do so you go look at the moon.
• The kind of game where most of the fun is figuring out how to play the game.
• AAA games trying to make artistic statements about AAA games.
• Hatoful Boyfriend as a better Doki Doki Literature Club.
• A horror story about pigeons.
• An ablative heat shield on your butt.
• Manually aiming the rocket without being to look outside of your polyester bag.
• The legality of dropping a moose out of a spaceship.
• A safety mechanism that is not appealing to aerospace professionals.
• Landing an airplane on Mars and then remote-piloting Mars rovers from inside the airplane.
• The world's largest saltwater crocodile.
• Pulling the quick release flap on the crocodile's mouth.
• Don't Go To Space.
• It's the 60s, and it's a bag.
• A snorkel for when you land in the ocean and can't get out of your foam entombment capsule.
• Bringing along a shotgun in case your escape pod lands in Siberia.
• Clown First Lover Second.
• A single paragraph with 19 parenthetical phrases and no other punctuation.
• Deciding to hem your sweatpants.
• Plum Nightmare.
• Finding two extra poems inside an existing poem.
• What to expect when you read a poem.
• Whether it's illegal to drive barefoot.
• Bare feet and there's textures down here.
• The utter lack of technology at the pump.
• No-flush toilets.
• What kinds of towels they use to clean up messes in Australia.
• Public restrooms that automatically eject you if you're not done in ten minutes.
• Honeycomb candy with the same texture as instant coffee.
• Look to your left; look to your right; one of you is a bat.
• Visiting baby bats in the bat hospital.
• Bats as pollinators.
• Giving stuffed animals to baby bats.
• The pollinating and bug-eating ecosystem.
• A bat the size of a bat.
• Spectacled flying foxes.
• Bats reverse-nicheing back into mice.
• Bats becoming nocturnal to avoid their creditors.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Alex
• Shannon

Topics:

• Rebranding a Country
• The single-celled dog
• Joe Hart still hasn't cleared out the vampire dens
  • https://imgur.com/a/ODW4pBI
• i hate it when i cant even write a poem about something because its too obvious.
  • https://tooquirkytolose.tumblr.com/post/689145075338543104
• National Butterscotch Pudding Day (Sep 19)

Microtopics:

• Tying on the tiebreaker.
• Cambodian street food.
• Topic Time!!
• Two countries in the process of changing their names.
• Whether sovereignty was ceded.
• Tourism videos encouraging people to pronounce your country's name correctly.
• History continuing to happen after you leave high school.
• Changing your name to North Your Name to get an alliance with NATO.
• A bonanza for globe manufacturers.
• The United States of Mexico.
• Germany's reaction to the United States changing its name to The United States of Germany.
• Playing the wrong Korea's national anthem by mistake.
• Switching to Roguelike Alphabetical Order so Zimbabwe doesn't always go last.
• What does it mean to be a particular kind of animal?
• Transmissible cancer.
• A breed of dog that no longer exists as a dog but does exist as a strain of transmissible cancer.
• CTVT.
• HeLa cells.
• Whether Henrietta Lacks is still alive.
• How to fix 20,000 years of evolution.
• A dog that is unlike extant dogs.
• When you decide to change your evolutionary niche from macro to microorganism.
• Cancer that is smart enough to not kill its host.
• How cancer interacts with your mutant healing factor.
• What this is and why it's happening to you.
• Why a two year old wants to play in a copper mine.
• What kind of mines New England vampires lived in.
• Rearranging a corpse so that the vampire can't walk.
• No Arizona Mine Draculas.
• Joe Hart: defending our vampires.
• Change that you can really make, if you live in Arizona.
• Not getting the Google results you want because of sports mans.
• The pros and cons of vampire bats.
• Abandoned mines serving as habitats for 28 bat species that are crucial to the local ecology.
• Persons currently experiencing vampirism.
• Can't Have Shitting Gotham.
• Adding line breaks to someone's complaint about a glow in the dark star to make a poem.
• The imprint of one little glow in the dark star that had been missed and painted over in landlord white.
• A 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.
• A monologue that you could read in many different ways.
• Returning to Tumblr because you have more thoughts on the painted-over star.
• Responding to every text from your daughter as if it's a formal letter to a long-lost cousin.
• Putting glow in the dark eyeballs on your closet door.
• Putting you pudding under the Pudding Tree for Father Pudding.
• How you grow the Pudding Tree.
• Werther's Compromise.
• Using Werther's Originals as dentures and you have to replace them every hour.
• Removing the butter from scotch to get butterscotch.
• Soft crack vs. hard crack.
• Those terrifying Pillsbury tins that you bang on the counter and they explode and breadsticks come out.
• How to determine if your candy in progress is in the soft ball stage.
• What is pudding?
• Having an existential crisis on Butterscotch Pudding Day.
• Butterscotch Buttercream Frosting.
• All the Lords that are fit to print.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Alex
• Shannon

Topics:

• Regional Trash animals
• Dynamic water features
• The Pee Pee Dance is nowhere to be found on Wikipedia
• The Bells, by Edgar Allen Poe
  • https://poets.org/poem/bells
• Recipe essentialism
• Sei Shonagon's Hateful Things are relatable
  • https://www.basicincome.com/bp/hatefulthings.htm

Microtopics:

• Striving to sound like a motor that has just been switched off.
• A very healthy vasovagal response.
• Separating the platelets from the plasma.
• Donating blood to anybody on the street with a needle and some brownie brittle.
• Determining the blood type of this synthetic fake blood.
• Brownies except they shatter like glass between your teeth.
• Trashimals.
• Visiting a new place and delighting at all the local pests.
• Living in Florida and just bumping into crocodiles on the street.
• Monkeys climbing your body to steal your food and break your camera.
• Fairy penguins nesting in your storm drains.
• Scooping rattlesnakes into a bucket, going to a military base and dumping them into the tank cockpits.
• Only realizing that it's weird to have a rattlesnake in a jar on your porch when a Frenchman wants to come see.
• It's a Canyon Thing.
• Finding out that a mongoose is not the size of a goose.
• One of the more hazardous trashimals.
• Looking 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.
• The mountain lion who visited downtown Berkeley.
• A regular household goose.
• Turning off Niagara falls at night.
• Seeing behind the veil of the world when Niagara falls gets switched off.
• Going to Hawaii to see the milky way.
• A universal human experience that remains completely undocumented.
• The squeeze and grab strategy.
• Something you wouldn't want to sample in Costco.
• The tiny sommelier in your butt.
• Recipes calling for eggs or milk but not specifying which kind.
• Pee shivers.
• A reading face for radio.
• A sort of runic rhyme.
• The rhyming and the chiming of the bells bells bells bells bells bells bells.
• Edgar Allan Poe as an emo Dr. Seuss.
• The gamut of all the things bells can be.
• Adding more bells to the end of each verse.
• The Jabberwocky rewritten in the style of incomprehensible in-jokes.
• A cake recipe with two ingredients.
• Keto-something something cookies.
• Mashing the crosshatch shape with a fork.
• The Easy Cookbook: Over 100 Satisfying Recipes Made with Four Ingredients or Less.
• Ice cream made from eggs and peanut butter.
• The fourth ingredient is your car.
• Writing a book of listicles in the 11th century.
• The way the snow looks on the roofs of the village under moonlight, and how the plebian villagers can't appreciate it.
• When one is in a hurry to leave but one's visitor keeps chattering away.
• Shameless old people putting their feet up on braziers.
• One's attachment to a man depending largely on the elegance of his leave-taking.
• Trying to maintain all your clandestine relationships in a palace where the walls are made of paper.
• A person who recites a spell after sneezing.
• When one is about to be told some interesting piece of news and a baby starts crying.
• The exorcist staying up too late and falling asleep in the middle of the exorcism.
• All the interesting poetry and prose from a historical era being written by women because the men were expected to write in their second language.
• The 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."

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Shannon
• Alex

Topics:

• Corn maze vs hedge maze: which one is better? What's the best maze material?
  • World Record Corn Maze in Dixon CA: https://www.coolpatchpumpkins.com/
• Projectable Halloween Decoration Animations
  • https://vimeo.com/465549120
• For the halloween season: the spookiest story I know, about Dave Mustaine sleeping on a chair.
• Rob Zombie - Dragula
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqQuihD0hoI
  • Unedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/tRtRpWqxh5o
• Google spirit
• Interactive halloween costumes
  • Reverse Trick or Treating: https://youtu.be/xhS_CjECO90
  • https://www.hearsehub.com/
  • One Cut of the Dead 100% Tomatometer rating: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/one_cut_of_the_dead

Microtopics:

• Top ten dog features.
• Top one dog feature.
• The resident holiday specials expert.
• One Cut of the Dead.
• Opening the door and saying "hello!"
• Maze season is upon us.
• Eating your way out of the corn maze.
• Laminating your corn maze so the corn doesn't blow over when it rains.
• Topiary vs. Scarecrow.
• The barrier that humanity doesn't realize it can cross until it's across the threshold.
• Building a maze out of "employees only" and "wet floor" signs so nobody even realizes they're in a maze.
• How to ethically put someone in a room escape situation without getting their informed consent first.
• Whether Dustin has teeth yet.
• The best maze material is the social contract.
• Pepper's Ghost.
• Bone Chillers 2.
• Projecting animated ghost pirates rear projected onto your window.
• An actual live human Pepper's Ghost and whether that ghost sees us as the ghosts.
• Interactive ghosts.
• Turtle Talk.
• Wanting to spend all day pretending to be a skeleton.
• Dave Mustaine's terrifying sleeping injury.
• Saturday Night Palsy.
• Losing feeling in your fingers because you carried groceries too much.
• Taking law school exams without any feeling in your fingers.
• Disrupting ambulances by taking an Uber to the hospital.
• Keeping a big basket of Epipens and Narcan in your cab, just in case.
• Whether they give you another one if you use your Epipen on someone else.
• Chatting 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.
• Getting your Narcan certification and treating every human interaction as an opportunity to deploy your Narcan.
• Mr. Zombie.
• Rob Zombie doing the "What is Love" head bob in his Dragula.
• Withholding the Dragula for most of the music video, like how they didn't show the shark for most of Jaws.
• Extremely tall guitars.
• A tiki head spray painted silver.
• T-posing Rob Zombie singing at the ceiling.
• A woman who is in this music video to not wear a lot of clothes
• Ghost Dad playing keytar in the back.
• The most adorable Rob Zombie.
• The origin of the silver headed tiki robot.
• The silver headed tiki robot doing a high kick.
• Watching the music video for Dragula and then excitedly searching Craigslist for hearses.
• A hearse with a tramp stamp.
• The two happiest days you'll ever have with your hearse.
• hearsehub.com
• Local rug artists.
• The kind of person who would think it's fun to role play a Spirit Halloween employee.
• Coronavirus is transforming the death care industry, according to Funeral and Cemetery News on hearsehub.com.
• Getting a hearse long enough to be pulled by a mini dachshund.
• Logrolling the snake coffin over a series of snake pallbearers.
• Crowdsurfing for Snakes.
• A 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.
• Reverse trick or treating.
• Setting 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.
• Kill or Queen?

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Alex is on the Topic Lords Discord.
• Shannon is offering vaccines.

Topics:

• Human-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.
• Best and worst parts of camping.
• Shutting off the PC speaker as a service.
• Call Me By Your Name.
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6swmTBVI83k
  • Unedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/a1u_79xLemA
• Is "The Birds" the first genre zombie film?

Microtopics:

• Safe and effective vaccines.
• The difference between spring rolls and egg rolls.
• Teleconferencing an escape room.
• All of the items that came out of this drawer.
• A room escape game set in outer space where the players on separate ships communicate via semaphore flags.
• Running a massively multiplayer tabletop campaign and inventing the middle manager dungeon master.
• How Room Escape games have adapted to the pandemic.
• Going camping and wondering "Why are we in the woods? Why are we not in our cozy warm house?"
• The novelty of not having your luxuries.
• Being imprisoned on a cruise ship and only then deigning to be entertained by cruise ship entertainments.
• Enjoying a bonfire because the woods doesn't have Netflix.
• The novelty of sitting outside in the dark.
• Camping as a simulacrum of being an ancient human.
• The sound of wind through the branches.
• Symphonies being largely unlistenable unless you're held captive in a nearly entirely quiet room.
• The relative ease of paying attention when you're not surrounded by distractions.
• The relentless temptation of pulling to refresh.
• How bad the flame wars get on the fake Twitter set up just for the attendees of JoCo Cruise.
• Waiting to find out whether your cruise ship will be permitted to land.
• The dynamics of having a Twitter just for your dorm.
• Bringing all 29 volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica because you won't have the Internet on the cruise ship.
• Going to a sake bar in Japan to learn how to like booze.
• The legality of throwing your drink in a kid's face if they give you sass.
• Knowing it's illegal to dance on the street in Japan and deliberately adopting an exaggerated swagger whenever the police are around.
• Japanese police's different standards for when white people are dancing.
• Whether Japanese police have truncheons or just those flashlights with traffic cones on them.
• Getting a job and trying to figure out how to be useful at it.
• The PC speaker beeping long after your program has crashed.
• Writing a program in the machine language debugger because Windows 98 still comes with programming tools.
• A kid swinging over pits.
• Commander Keen in: Invasion of the Vorticons.
• Back when it was a big deal for the PC to run a game that looked like a NES game.
• Eventually realizing that the game you're playing where the cat chases the mouse is actually just a screen saver.
• Not being able to convince your dad to buy a CD-ROM drive for the family PC but luckily the N64 uses cartridge technology.
• Visiting 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."
• Being informed that you are in for a treat.
• Clouds giving the sun a big hug.
• The influence of Spongebob Squarepants on the music video for "Call Me By Your Name" by Lil Nas X.
• A snake turning into a cone head.
• A very slow jog.
• Your under-eye makeup really bringing out your scales.
• Corsets for snakes.
• Mini-Marge with a smaller version of the same hair.
• The denim police taking you to denim jail for fashion crimes.
• Wearing clothing with your name on it.
• Sequence breaking the endless staircase in Mario 64 by giving the stairs a lapdance.
• Nearly having descended the entire stripper pole.
• The core strength required to give Satan an extremely slow lap dance.
• An extremely entertaining sequence of images.
• Exquisitely crafted metaphor that you'll miss entirely if you never look at it.
• What zombies were before George Romero invented the modern zombie.
• The concept of a zombie as a horde of cannibals.
• The fresh ideas that Night of the Living Dead brought to the The Birds genre.
• Giving Lovebirds the side-eye.
• Night of the Living Dead being progressive regarding its black protagonist but not its woman protagonist.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Alex is on the Topic Lords discord.
• Shannon
  • https://www.etsy.com/shop/NaturalStitchery
  • https://whistletown.tumblr.com/

Topics:

• Discovered any cool new youtube channels lately?
  • https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLy1Z3yawOIkZCWf92DPThdC0H8ESbXxnn
  • https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGjs772Xkfnr8tSwkjw2vkg
  • https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGPT1t4CqpfhCpZH56JQfJuF6SvxCMrHL
• How to use ice witch powers for the good of mankind
• Why do fish have up and down
• Brandon 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"
• Lying to kids about Santa
• If you had a big front yard with lots of fresh snow and a free afternoon, what would you build?

Microtopics:

• Which came first, the beer or the bread?
• What Big Bread doesn't want you to know.
• Accidentally setting up your Etsy store in Canada.
• Selling pixel art with instructions on how to turn it into cross stitch.
• A cool guy and his cool microscope.
• Finding cool organisms to stream on your Twitch Plays Microscope channel.
• Your grandma's room full of jars of pond scum and microscopes.
• Making dinner wearing a GoPro.
• Burning out on making your extremely overproduced podcast.
• Getting 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.
• Cutting your video only when the GoPro is about to overheat.
• The delight of somebody who is really excited about stuff.
• Filling 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.
• You won't believe what happens next: ants.
• Ruining your whole country real bad with your ice witch powers.
• Using your ice witch powers for fire suppression.
• Making beverages cold with your ice witch powers.
• Harnessing the powers of Elsa and a Charizard to run a Stirling engine to solve the energy crisis.
• Finding the Frozen lore bible to find out if Elsa can help cool superconductors.
• Principles of homeopathic medicine factoring into the plot of Frozen 2.
• Sating your hunger for topics.
• Why fish only pitch and yaw and never roll.
• Interviewing a guy named "Fish" for an article about fish but never mentioning his name once.
• Countershading.
• Having predators both above and below you at all times.
• The boring answer to every question about evolution.
• Being banned from Yellowstone for trying to fry a chicken in a geyser because you can only boil a chicken in a geyser.
• Fish always swimming in the same orientation because they haven't read Ender's Game.
• No Spine Don't Care.
• The sh-sounding thing that looks like a capital B.
• Whether you can read about the House of Lords on Mobygames.
• Crusader Kings 2: Horse Lords
• Making your own horse dynasty.
• Thinking about an entirely different unicorn-based game from the other Lord.
• Putting "re" in front of stuff to indicate a sequel.
• Might of the Slither Lords.
• What the Slither Lords eat and how often they use the bathroom.
• Believing the lie about Santa Claus as practice for believing bigger lies later in life, such as "life has meaning."
• Demonstrating to your children that authority figures will lie to you and laugh about it.
• Baby's First Critical Thinking Exercise.
• Santa Claus as a test run for evaluating beliefs based on the evidence rather than blindly believing what authority figures tell you.
• Learning 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.
• Not being allowed to tell dad that the Easter Bunny isn't real.
• All 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.
• Doing wholesome activities in a sneaky anonymous way.
• Pirate Santa Works Twice As Hard.
• The real joy of Christmas being that Santa will never learn your name properly.
• Putting a barcode on your child's neck so Santa knows which present to give them.
• A period of heightened observation of children.
• All the elves working for the NHS.
• Not being willing to lie to your child so you hire a Santa Lecturer to give a seminar at your house.
• Whether five is a young age.
• Setting up a dope haunted house that nobody can visit because there's a pandemic on.
• Home Alone except instead of defending your house, you're breaking into people's houses to do nice things.
• The laws of physics and the laws of man not applying to Santa but still applying to your five year old child.
• The moment you need to explain criminal statutes to your five year old.
• Permanently ruining your back by building snow forts in a winter wonderland.
• Making igloos.
• Starting 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.
• Making giant ice buildings by spraying fire hoses everywhere.
• Providing structural support to your ice building using ice I-beams made out of heavy water.
• Making a snow maze for your tiny dog.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Shannon is a time traveler and an unemployed attorney.
• Alex likes oranges and drove the getaway car.

Topics:

• 1:29 What if people propagated like plants?
  • How succulents propagate: https://collectivegen.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Guide-to-Propogating-Succulents-778x1608@2x.jpg
• 8:16 Aphantasia and technical work.
  • Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ): https://www.eugencpopa.ro/wp-content/uploads/Afantazia-.pdf
    • Alex scored 22/80.
    • Shannon scored 68/80
    • Jim scored a perfect 16/80 and needs to reevaluate his life, or maybe the test is totally subjective.
  • Fun fact: if you do not have aphantasia, you are phantastic! [Ed. note: "phantasic", but ok.]
• 19:24 Fruit cocktail and manufactured scarcity.
  • “We offer our maraschino cherries in the following sizes: * Plastic Drum (500 lbs)” https://leelanaufruit.com/maraschino-cherries/
• 25:59 Mike asks "What is the most famous meal of the day?"
  • Google has an opinion: https://www.google.com/search?q=What+is+the+most+famous+meal+of+the+day%3F
  • History of Breakfast: https://books.google.com/books?id=5LghYCqDJw8C
  • Breakfast Around the World: https://www.thedailymeal.com/travel/what-people-eat-breakfast-around-world-slideshow
• 30:39 Best smoothie ingredients?
• 33:55 Participating in religious ceremonies that aren't your religion.
  • Common religions with tradition of evangelism: Christianity, Islam.
  • Common religions without: Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism.
  • Oh No Ross and Carrie podcast: http://ohnopodcast.com/
• 59:10 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?
  • You can actually get shower curtains featuring the shadow of a knife-wielding maniac.

Microtopics:

• Not liking oranges because of orange soda and orange-flavored carsickness pills.
• Recognizing guest lords from the time they were a time traveler and drove the getaway car.
• Growing an entire additional self out of your self if you lose a limb.
• Instead of everybody being related to Genghis Khan, everybody actually being Genghis Khan.
• The tooth fairy growing clones of you from your teeth.
• Each of your tooth clones also losing teeth.
• Becoming a shark mom because you escaped a shark attack.
• Barbershops installing incinerators so your hairs don't each grow into a full human.
• A homunculus made of fingers growing out of your finger stump.
• Every animal starting with the butt because the butt is the most important part of any organism.
• A new self growing out of your severed finger but also a second self growing out of your finger stump.
• Technical workers being worse at envisioning objects or scenes.
• Imagining an elephant standing on one foot, wearing a beret, and singing Gizmo's song.
• A 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.
• Thinking of a red cube on a white background.
• Imagining Harry Potter turning left at a corner and then the book says he goes right and your mind movie having to backtrack.
• An elephant's mouth probably having some teeth in it.
• Knowing what a trumpet sounds like in the same way you might know what cinnamon tastes like.
• Screwing yourself in a learning process because your teacher doesn't realize how good you are at faking it.
• Reinventing the abacus with your body parts.
• Turning the slot machine into a foodstuff.
• "Oops, All Cherries" fruit cocktail.
• Fruit cocktail manufacturers A/B testing cherry ratios.
• Liking maraschino cherries because they're delicious.
• Hating maraschino cherries because you hate almonds.
• Maraschino cherries being flavored with almond extract because cherry pits are toxic.
• Solving the murder and it was almond extract all along.
• Star inflation in Guitar Hero.
• Getting 40 stars being way better than your piddly 5 stars.
• Not being able to release this episode because the information in it is too dangerous.
• Big Breakfast inventing breakfast to sell more breakfast.
• Being confused when someone eats lunch for dinner.
• Breakfast looming so large in our minds because what counts a breakfast food is so heavily policed.
• Drinking a smoothie and being like "what would be the ultimate smoothie?"
• Saving your smoothie for last because it'll be the best one.
• Refusing to put fruit juice in your fruit smoothie.
• The tipping point at which your smoothie stops being a smoothie and stops being a sorbet.
• Taking any cuisine and reimagining the fast food industry around it.
• The manifold advantages of hamburgers.
• Making chicken tikka masala portable by putting it in a samosa.
• Making chicken tikka masala portable by running it through a food processor with naan and drinking it through a boba straw.
• Mainlining chicken tikka masala through a one-inch boba straw.
• Participating in religious ceremonies while not believing in them or knowing how they work.
• Using a small child as an excuse to go to every church.
• Trying to use a small dog as an excuse to go to every church but the churches not being super into dogs.
• Using a small child as an excuse to do things you'd otherwise be too lazy to do.
• Not knowing how to take communion and the guy with the piece of bread just shaking his head sadly at you.
• Kneeling 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.
• Americans not really knowing how to squat either.
• Hanukkah being always the same day on the Jewish calendar but being a roving day on the Gregorian calendar.
• Not having any particular bad experiences with organized religion but thinking it's more trouble than it's worth.
• Secular churches for atheists who miss the community of church.
• Americans becoming atheist and eventually having to figure out how to get back what they lost when they abandoned religion.
• The nuclear family only having been invented after World War 2.
• Looking fondly on living in a dorm because you were living with a bunch of friends.
• Living with a bunch of friends and everybody looking at you funny even though that's how humanity lived for most of its existence.
• Avoiding groups because you're frustrated by group-think.
• Accepting that a little bit of group-think isn't the end of the world.
• Having a good one-on-one relationship with your wife and then ruining it by adding a kid.
• Feeling like a boomer because you don't understand how your friends use emojis.
• Adding a meta chat room where you try to figure out what the regular chat room is trying to say.
• The 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."
• The compromise between efficiency of communication and the difficulty of learning your new language.
• Making your shower curtain out of chainmail.
• A shower curtain with an image of what is exactly behind the shower curtain.
• Having a clear shower curtain so you can see if there's a murderer in the shower without opening the curtain.
• A clear shower curtain with a tuxedo body on it so you can take selfies that look like you wear a tux in the shower.
• A motorized showing curtain with all the books you don't have time to read printed on them.
• Not being able to wash your hair because you have to keep reading.
• Allowing your guest lord to be a topic lady.
• Not remembering the catchphrase.

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