• Megan
• Lexi

Topics:

• Erik Satie's performance indications
  • https://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?boardid=60&threadid=4497
• Instant food from other cultures (why isn't everyone eating maggi noodles??)
• Seasonal decorations
• Delhi Metro
  • https://docs.google.com/document/d/17k75ftxEn2xR-tJkLSV4H8st5BFAxPNxE3BNCXDI6Go/edit
• Becoming Immortal by being predictable
• Living in different climates (e.g. my experiences with the harsh winters of Chicago vs sweltering Austin TX summers)

Microtopics:

• Music implementation for The Lamplighters League.
• Watching a streamer play games and asking them for a turn at the controls.
• How to pronounce "Erik Satie."
• How to pronounce "Gymnopedies."
• Finding 100 umbrellas in your dead friend's apartment.
• A list of Satie's performance indications.
• Grandly forgetting the present.
• With your bones dry and distant.
• Playing music with your forehead.
• Doing something to a piano.
• Your boss sending a memo asking you to work with a shy piety.
• Pizzicato vs. Bartok pizzicato.
• Adding the hamburger so it's not just Helper.
• What instant foods are missing from your food vocabulary.
• Adding heavy cream to ramen broth.
• Getting an apron so you can have a little costume when you cook.
• Realizing that when you wear the apron you don't get food on your shirt.
• A big bib for Big Jim.
• Normalizing scoop bibs.
• Kraft Dinner.
• Halal certified instant stir fry noodles.
• Ramen in a cup or ramen where you provide your own container.
• Insurance Mac.
• Canned cheeseburgers.
• A boring house with nothing on it.
• Movable feasts.
• Keeping those 12-foot skeletons in your yard and decorating it seasonally.
• The beetles that clean bones for you.
• Recreational Explosives Day.
• A Zachtronics programming puzzle for every holiday.
• A movable feast where you don't eat.
• Decorating your house to celebrate Toyotathon.
• Falling for strangers and their blue hair.
• A poem that is long if you read it but short if you recite it.
• Taking public transit as an act of defiance.
• A gift that is impossible to give yourself on purpose.
• Inventing a shower proof phone so nobody ever has shower thoughts again.
• Putting your phone in a Ziploc bag and watching movies underwater.
• Sitting down at your computer and getting stuck.
• Hacking your executive function by adding friction in the right places.
• Whether Wellbutrin gives everyone tinnitus or just you.
• Death hacks for staying mentally connected to your dead relatives.
• A service that puts your podcast on vinyl.
• Using CRISPR to infect the cockroach population with 229 episodes of Topic Lords.
• Moving to a land where your snot doesn't freeze.
• Not trusting your own weather opinions.
• Surprising yourself by enjoying seasons.
• Driving in icy conditions.
• Standing under the heated lamps like a lizard.
• Waiting for the bus in the dark.
• Learning to drive after you move to a city with public transit.
• Not driving with kids.
• Getting rid of all the bots.
• Sgt. Pepper Bot.

Support Topic Lords

• Alexicographic
• Kev

Topics:

• Sports are good actually? Apparently?
• Haunted articles of clothing
• Burrito R&D
• Casey at the Bat
  • https://discoverpoetry.com/poems/ernest-lawrence-thayer/casey-at-the-bat/
• Becoming a vtuber after losing a bet
• Getting a guided tour of a TV show

Microtopics:

• Streaming daily.
• The Tears of the Kingdom thread in the Topic Lords discord.
• A rigid self-conception as someone who does not like sports.
• Roller derby.
• Whether skateboarding is a sport.
• Going fast and shoving past people.
• An athletic endeavor.
• How much hockey fights feed back into the actual game.
• Baseball nerds.
• Chart Party.
• Storytelling using data.
• The Bob Emergency.
• Seven Bobs left, and they're all aged.
• Who was the top Bob?
• East Bay Bike Party.
• Floyd Rose Bridge Valves.
• Figuring out how to make video games without involving Bay Area salaries.
• Persian Castle Day at the climbing gym.
• Taking the leather jacket that your drug dealer OD'd in.
• Signing the bathroom guest book every time you poop at your grandma's house.
• Schwarzenegger DNA on eBay.
• The Clothes People Have Died In line at Value Village.
• This Shirt Will Kill You.
• A detailed cosmology of how hauntings work.
• Ghosts of people who are still alive, following you around and asking for their hat back.
• Taco Shop Guacamole.
• A completely different foodstuff from what you were accustomed to.
• Wet Burritos.
• Airport Head.
• A 3 oz container of guacamole that the TSA will allow on the plane.
• Burrito night at the Stormdancer household.
• Lulus and Cakes.
• Spheroids.
• Baseball Hagiography.
• A Quora reply from three years ago.
• Searching for cake and Google asking you to prove that you're not a robot.
• Bethlehem slang from 1888.
• Vtuber tooling.
• Picking a punishment for yourself that you already want to do.
• Animated fish backgrounds.
• A more compatible CUDA API.
• Mixtapes of TV episodes and video game levels.
• Someone's top ten list of Star Trek episodes.
• What the kids call Cliff's Notes.
• The skill of understanding someone else's taste.
• These are the songs that I love, perhaps you will also love them and if so we could fall in love.
• Exchanging Spotify playlists because that's what we have now instead of mixtapes.
• Trying to get into Homestuck via Problem Sleuth.
• An 11 year old with the patience to wait a year to read Harry Potter book 2.
• Phish Food.
• Recording Topic Lords before lunch and getting a well-deserved burrito afterwards.

Support Topic Lords

• Alexicographic
  • https://twitter.com/alexicographic
  • https://www.twitch.tv/damaplaysgames
• Andrew
  • https://kittenm4ster.neocities.org/

Topics:

• The 3-food problem: what 3 foods are pairwise good but bad all together?
• Talking loudly during movie trailers as an act of anticapitalist subversion
• Moon Mode on your phone camera is probably just pasting a good picture of the moon over your bad one.
  • https://in.mashable.com/tech/3114/are-the-moon-shots-from-the-huawei-p30-pro-fake
• The Orange by Wendy Cope
  • https://gladdestthing.com/poems/the-orange
• Learning Italian from a cartoon dog
• Being able to identify McElroy fans by how they complement my woodworking
  • https://www.themcelroy.family/2020/7/31/21348515/maxfundrive-2020-how-to-fake-an-interest-in-woodworking
• RIP List of Video Games Considered Artistic
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/List_of_video_games_considered_artistic
  • https://www.everywhereist.com/2021/12/bros-restaurant-lecce-we-eat-at-the-worst-michelin-starred-restaurant-ever/
  • https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21152082-declaration-by-chef-floriano-pellegrino

Microtopics:

• kittenm4ster's PICO-8 games.
• Vibing with the Alfonzo's Bowling Challenge ethos.
• A game that is implemented in under 8000 tokens.
• The ideal game pitch.
• Chocolate and cheese and something.
• Choccoli.
• Chocolate and gravy.
• A lukewarm Americano.
• A bunch of foodies who really know their foodstuffs.
• A fish being strangled by Red Vines.
• A GPU that has food inside of it.
• The Turing test for whether computers can taste foods.
• Asking Chat GPT what three foods you can combine to create a bomb in your kitchen.
• Whether Gallium has calories.
• Three people on a podcast who all think "trailers" should come after the movie
• Finding out about a movie by seeing a trailer in a movie theater even though trailers are constantly spilling out of every screen you own.
• Getting the wiggles out.
• How to make the lives of people who enjoy looking at ads a little bit worse.
• Yelling "fire" before the movie starts so fewer people pay attention to the pre-movie ads.
• Wanting to become the reason all movies have "no leopards in the theater" PSAs now.
• A toddler watching Youtube, yelling "no!" and throwing the phone on the ground when an ad plays.
• Pushing the lever to receive your stochastic reward.
• Youtube deciding you've seen enough ads lately and taking pity on you.
• Trying to explain to a four year old how to play a light gun game but the game is over before you finish explaining.
• The Space Alien Busting Song.
• Drawing new mountains on the moon to test your camera's moon mode.
• Here's the moon again.
• A filter to replace pictures of your wife with the moon.
• A Snapchat filter that makes you feel like you used to be attractive.
• A filter that takes your bad photos of the moon and makes them even worse.
• The worst bunny in the moon.
• A good poem that rhymes.
• Turtle metaconsistency.
• Enormous and hilarious oranges.
• Good art here, you guys.
• Reading poetry in the original Helvetica.
• BorgiaPro on various font downloading sites.
• A cartoon that is entertaining even if you are not learning Italian.
• Finding Armando's old hat in the attic.
• Asking the clouds to move so that your hat can protect you from the sun.
• Working within a constraint that produces delightful nonsense.
• Photocopying yourself to create a black and white clone.
• What drugs they'll give to kids in what countries.
• Growing up but continuing to take the same drugs.
• A little girl who is also a dog.
• Subtitles that don't match what's being said aloud.
• Watching Italian TV using a VPN.
• The Andrew Lloyd Weber musical with the roller skates.
• Roller bladers dancing in weird futuristic costumes.
• Having positive fun experiences with language.
• Learning a new language while skydiving.
• Hiring an experienced skydiver who can give you foreign language lessons while you're both falling from a plane.
• Getting bored while skydiving and looking at your phone but there's no WiFi up there.
• How McElroy fans compliment someone's woodworking.
• How to Fake an Interest in Woodworking.
• Arguing about whether games are art.
• All the games that anyone's ever called art.
• Finding information about a deleted page on Wikipedia.
• Philosophical debate on the creative qualia of electronic structured play. (Roger Ebert has a subheading.)
• Whether the List of Zombie Video Games on Wikipedia includes philosophical zombies.
• Whether the List of Zombie Video Games on Wikipedia includes voodoo zombies.
• What Casinos are trying to do to attract kids who like video games.
• Whether Lechuck is a voodoo zombie or a Romero zombie.
• Hohokum.
• Finding a bunch of snakes that each have different names.
• What happens when you collect all the things. (Art.)
• List of Paintings Considered Artistic.
• Gimmick food that is more about the experience of eating a weird thing than the food itself.
• A restaurant that doesn't have plates and just pours the food into your cupped hands.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Alex
  • https://twitter.com/alexicographic
  • https://www.twitch.tv/damaplaysgames/
• JP
  • http://vectorpoem.com/

Topics:

• Your 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?
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9u8Fd7EHYAg
• Counting the beats in eenie-meenie
• SoundScan and the SoundScan Era
  • https://www.theringer.com/music/2021/5/25/22452539/soundscan-billboard-charts-streaming-numbers
• There Will Come Soft Rains
  • https://poets.org/poem/there-will-come-soft-rains
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Will_Come_Soft_Rains_(short_story)
• The scorched-earth strategy for Lowest Positive Unique Integer
• "Leaving beautiful ruins" in a videogame

Microtopics:

• A return of many-storied adventure game developers.
• A point and click adventure game that changed the trajectory of your life.
• Suspenders as an architectural feature.
• Onesie pajamas with a trap door.
• People sneaking up behind you and trying to unbutton your poop flap.
• Thoughts that are meant to remain unthought.
• The famous elongated "some."
• A marketing executive saying "nobody will know what a 'tetralogy' is."
• Whether your game studio logo has a sound.
• Console startup noises.
• The button your loved ones can press on your gravestone to hear the Dreamcast startup sound.
• King Solomoning the gif-vs-gif debate.
• The governing body that decides whether your death is cool enough to warrant a gif of your death on your tombstone.
• The kind of people who gravitate to a job that rates everyone's deaths on a five-star scale.
• The IP situation surrounding your gravestone's looping wav button.
• Your 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.
• Wagering on your ability to read emergent situations.
• Electric Football.
• Covering a metal plate with quarters and flipping the switch that makes the plate vibrate, creating the quarter configuration for optimal money gouging.
• Becoming really good at beating a rigged game.
• Becoming really good at funnel cake.
• Dentists not understanding the motivations people have for drinking soda.
• Largest Sip.
• The liminal space between a Sip and a Gulp.
• Gaming the outcome in Eenie Meenie Miney Moe.
• Whether Eenie Meenie Miney Moe is a solved game.
• A great opportunity to practice believing the lies that we form our wesociety on.
• When 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.
• Rockists fudging the numbers.
• The pros and cons of getting a Billboard Hot 100 hit.
• Jukebox charts.
• The Billboard Humming chart based on them listening to the songs people are humming to themselves on the street.
• Who loves the radio hits that everyone you know hates? (People you don't know.)
• Knowing where to stick that quarter.
• White dudes making 17 minute songs.
• Axis of Discourse.
• A directory of mp3s in your Jellyfin server.
• Napster pivoting to NFTs but nobody notices or cares.
• Nostalgia for the Spanish Flu.
• A giant ball of iron with life forms clinging to it.
• The earth continuing to be a lump of iron no matter how badly we treat it.
• Potential human extinction and whether birds would notice it.
• A fully-automated human house of the near to far future.
• A band of roving pranksters in the post-apocalypse who are running around transmitting bad Roomba firmware updates.
• Rolling up on prom with your entourage of four Half-Life scientists and five Barneys.
• Rolling up on the rap battle with your entourage of backup singer Roombas trailing behind you.
• The Mad Max series as prepper porn.
• A good shelf to rest on in the collective psyche.
• Friend deterrent strategies.
• How strategy disclosure alters the gameplay of Rock Paper Scissors.
• Disclosing 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.
• Satisfactory: an open-world factory building game.
• Building your factories and then leaving them behind.
• Emergent haunted houses in abandoned player-built structures in persistent-world multiplayer games.
• Having an idea for a game feature and having to build the whole game to try the feature out.
• Being scared of weird old crap.
• Adding Pokemon to Minecraft.
• The last gasp of mainstream PC gaming before phones happened.
• An 11 year old game developer getting thrown into the Capitalist snake pit.
• The Human Attention Zoo.
• Kids (or adults) having goofs.
• The Golden Age of the Moddable Game Engine.
• Getting a job based on your Roblox portfolio.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Danielle
  • https://www.twitch.tv/damaplaysgames
  • https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2Fq8V-L5rfNvGa-DAQBPsg
• Alexander
  • https://twitter.com/adlleong

Topics:

• Learning to figure skate as an adult
• Cursed mnemonics we never question
• What was the first thing you remember buying online?
• "Chi dara fine al gran dolore? L’ore" from House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski
• My daughter has strong beliefs about the afterlife
• I don't actually want to speedrun anything, I just want to learn how they do it
• Once 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?

Microtopics:

• Spin Rhythm XD and the Spin Rhythm XD level design community.
• Learning to figure skate.
• How to convert axels into 360s.
• Figure skating in a half pipe.
• Clockwise and widdershins figure skaters.
• Putting a hair dryer in reverse so it blows cool air.
• Using Zamboni technology to invent the ice skating treadmill.
• Covering a carousel with ice and then realizing you don't need the carousel part because you can just skate in a circle.
• The Beginner Effect.
• Finding time for hobbies.
• Cursed mnemonics for remembering how to spell "because"
• Using eggs.
• The extremely entertaining mnemonic that Jim uses to remember his social security number, but can't share with anyone.
• Man Very Early Made Jars Stand Up Nearly Perpendicular.
• My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Noodles And Used Soft Eggs.
• Elephants Go Ballistic Doing Flips.
• Idioms translated from other languages.
• Whether it's good for a stone to gather moss.
• When it stopped being a big deal to enter your credit card information on a web site.
• A piece of wood that tells you what the weather is going to be.
• Buying 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.
• Speculating about how many game developers actually made a living from shareware in the 90s.
• Cashing a check on the bus.
• Asking 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.
• Buying a lot of used books on half.com
• Reading and discussing a poem in Italian.
• The percentage of Topic Lords listeners who have read House of Leaves.
• Removing all the outer layers of the onion to get to the SCP inside.
• What events did and didn't happen in various layers of fiction in House of Leaves.
• Listing every known building not designed in a Brutalist style.
• Device 6 by Simogo.
• 50 Years of Text Games.
• Print-on-demand procgen novels.
• Creepy endless houses.
• Loving babies and wanting to be a baby.
• Inventing reincarnation from first principles.
• Where six year olds learn about the afterlife.
• Getting really worked up about the flu shot you're going to get in eight months.
• Hearing a gross thing described but not being disgusted because you can't visualize it.
• ADHD and Autism Tiktok.
• The "rubbing styrofoam" diagnostic for ADHD.
• Learning all the speedrun skills but never actually doing any speed runs.
• Learning to do an ultra to get this strawberry.
• The nega-set of games that don't have a bunch of stressful violence and also don't have a bunch of overbearing dialog.
• Writing an album and then designing a level around each song.
• Bisexual lighting.
• Queen Latifah showing up to ask if you want to skip to the next checkpoint.
• The kind of friendship where if you ever talked about anything but music the friendship would immediately collapse.
• Known iPhone protocol weirdnesses.
• Why is Apple like this?
• How to set a custom ringtone on your phone back before everyone put their phone on vibrate.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Danny is @dannyBstyle on Twitter and plugs vaping.
• Alex is @adlleong on Twitter and plugs the Ian Knot shoelace tying method. https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ianknot.htm

Topics:

• Invisible walls in games
• BluBlockers
• Bees take their lives into their hands every time they get thirsty
• Nick Asks "♪ God only knows what I’d pee without poo ♪"
• My wife is afraid of dogs that wear people clothes
• Every response to "thank you" is rude
• The multivarious ways being a child genius can screw you

Microtopics:

• The good content.
• Some kind of invisible wall.
• What we already know about Blaseball.
• A fantastic way to keep the player inbounds.
• Manically trying to explore this island while on the run from the military.
• Cops being the yetis of life.
• Blizzard blowing up your best party spot by shipping the final Ironforge Airfield.
• Whether Microsoft will ruin Bethesda games by making them fix all those fun bugs before launching.
• Fixing all the bugs in your game by applying The Cloud to it.
• Playing the Turok remaster and they ruined it by removing all the fog.
• Going to Canadian Tire because you live in Canada now.
• The most technologically advanced sunglasses you can buy.
• A Geordi Laforge type of deal.
• Dipping your whole head in the black film you use to watch solar eclipses so you can get a good night's sleep.
• How to get back from Canada.
• Canada being so polite they even let the smoke in.
• Still not being able to do a Canadian accent after two years.
• Moving to Vancouver expecting a frozen wasteland.
• Thrill-seeking bees refusing to wear their masks.
• Being stung by one of those wasps that look like bees and being scared of bees for decades.
• Whether insects have the capacity for complex emotions such as vengeance.
• Why Danny isn't doing better if unbridled anger is such an evolutionary advantage.
• Replacing creative workers with AI that you can pay in exposure.
• Whether "brown area" is a less racist term than "gray area."
• Seeing the most enormous dog butthole and screaming inside your heart.
• Trimming back the hair around your dog's butthole to make it look bigger.
• A poster with a dog butthole in it saying "Have you seen this butthole? Now you have."
• Doing AI upscaling on the picture of the dog butthole that looks like Jesus so we can see the true face of God.
• Assholes being okay until the poop comes out.
• A human proportioned body with a dog head.
• A therapy session by proxy.
• Why dog clothes only cover the butt in Canada.
• Dogs wearing ties on PBS.
• Saying "my uncanny valley is just really wide" to your partner every night before bed instead of "I love you."
• Moving to Canada expecting everyone to be polite but they're just rude with an "eh" after it.
• A full-throated "hey."
• The most terrifying thing about being in Canada.
• Whether anyone has checked on the Canadian bacon.
• Writing to Tim Horton and demanding that in Canada Canadian bacon just be called "here bacon."
• A new credit card payment device where you need to punch in your zip code with your nose.
• Enacting publicly-funded health care so that everyone can afford to grow a moustache and use StachePay.
• Leveraging 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.
• Getting along better with your teachers than with other kids, because you want to talk about what Gorbachev is up to.
• Getting through school and several jobs without ever learning how to work.
• Thriving when given instructions to follow.
• The shame of discovering that just because the school system worked for you, that doesn't mean it'll work for everyone.
• Walking around wearing a t-shirt saying "ask me about the pledge of allegiance" and leaving a trail of horrified Canadians in your wake.
• Taking your four year old to protests because now they have tear gas made out of Pedialyte.
• Being $300 deep into the Dark Souls series but still not liking any of them.
• Replaying old video games because playing new ones is too stressful.
• Revisiting old media you've liked not because of the story but because it puts you in a place or mood.
• Deciding 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.
• How Animal Crossing New Horizons probably saved the human species.
• Only having so many button presses before your joints start to hurt.
• Whether 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.

Support Topic Lords