• April
• Ryan

Topics:

• John asks "Puzzles/puzzle games and challenges you find pleasant and brain-expanding vs. the ones that you just cannot get your head around."
• Which foods would be the most fun or the least fun to eat if you rotated them at a 90 degree angle first.
  • https://www.ebay.com/itm/184633478236
• The Shaggs
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XR9d4ESlpHY
• Instructions for Traveling West, by Joy Sullivan
  • https://joysullivan.substack.com/p/how-to-leave-a-life
• Songs that we completely ignore how weird they are because they're famous already

Microtopics:

• Unions
• Plug guilt.
• Mentoring young composers.
• Saying smart stuff about things you know about.
• Taking the W.
• A high pitched ding whenever someone succeeds at something.
• A Good Snowman is Hard to Build.
• Into the Breach.
• Pushing the Vek to a different square.
• Making something in your environment more satisfying.
• A squid with your kid.
• Colors that have frequencies vs. compound colors.
• Indigo: a fake color.
• The banger heavy duty colors.
• A range of frequencies that is culturally mediated.
• Paint mixing vs. light mixing.
• Exploding ancient dinosaur juice constantly.
• The electricity magic vs. the valve magic.
• What does it mean to explode?
• How to tell the difference between things you know because it's common knowledge vs. things you know because it's what you obsessed about when you were 15.
• Having a responsibility to the taxpayers to not be wasteful.
• The science of what sounds good.
• The most confusing music you've ever heard.
• Food rotation.
• Imagining you have a banana coming at you. (It's not scary.)
• Biting it the way we bite it.
• Burrowing through your hamburger top to bottom.
• Living with the mayonnaise for 30 seconds.
• What happens when you turn a taco 90 degrees.
• Ike's Paradox.
• Eating a rib straight up and down.
• Pizza sandwiches.
• Explaining to your dentist that your bottom jaw is a ruinous cavern because you eat ribs top to bottom.
• Adding a thickening agent to soup so you can turn the bowl sideways and just shove your face in there.
• Buying the Ultra Rare Cheeto Shaped Like Batman Crying just to flip it.
• A li'l cute ghostie with ears.
• Affection for bands that are bad.
• A rock album recorded by three kids who have no interest in or aptitude for writing and performing music.
• Art that lives at the very tips of the horseshoe ends.
• High fashion and weird looks that aren't meant to be for everyday.
• Music that sounds bad in a way that you don't recognize.
• Music that is boring and propulsive at the same time.
• Music that is not for listening to.
• Threatening your wife with a conversation about Beatles chord progressions.
• Making art that is boring in unexpected, interesting ways.
• Inventing a new boring version of interesting that still isn't interesting but is boring in interesting ways, which should make it interesting but doesn't.
• Finding a desert and falling in.
• Watching a purple meadow quiver and drinking whiskey beside a 100 year old cactus.
• Whether Joy is a trick.
• Blowing up your life and other people's lives as well.
• The other entendre.
• Yet another example of this fucking show.
• Cooking for the rest of your life without ever washing dishes.
• Joy that can't not be real.
• Poetry that's just really well-constructed prose.
• A poem that doesn't have any line breaks because then it wouldn't fit on Instagram.
• A true poet who accounts for swiping.
• An expression of a huge evocative idea built out of tiny ideas.
• How to be happy even when you are not actively chasing your dreams.
• A song that is famous in some way.
• That fuckin' Pina Colada song.
• Marrying the same person three or four times.
• Bouncing along and going on a fun road trip while the world is ending.
• Mystifying number one hits.
• Robot Mr. Feeny in your car and you go around solving mysteries together.
• Getting your wife a Groucho Marx nose for christmas.
• Robust dependable noses.
• Think On Thine Sins, Gumshoes.
• Giving the Latin Grammar Police the L.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• John
  • https://twitter.com/robohunkx
  • https://twitter.com/AshbyBrewery/
• April
  • https://www.instagram.com/midnightgardenstitchery/

Topics:

• Playing Grand Theft Auto 5 because I miss hiking in California
• Embroidery
• Jokes that three year olds tell
• Moondrop's Tale
  • https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Q6h1_gLGH7hDy3uhWpLtqapbpRqVFkawAbQ1ywVEu4E/edit
  • Skeleton Jelly: https://imgur.com/lbIoX
• Survivor
  • https://survivingtribal.com/2017/08/04/survivor-flashback-friday-survivor-gabon-gif-end-gifs/
• Excluding certain topics from my Twitter recommendations has never been harder (and also: trying to understand why Russell Crowe keeps showing up in the "suggested posts" of the AshbyBrewery account)

Microtopics:

• Return of the Beast Lord.
• Whether the Beast Lord fucks around.
• The Beets Lord.
• Hearing clapping and encouragement and assuming it's for you.
• Being a tourist in a video game.
• Riding a quad bike up Mt. Chiliad.
• Getting past the first mission where you need to do violence to a lot of people so you can peacefully explore Los Santos.
• Driving down the highway at night and taking a random turnoff into the wilderness and going on a hike in the moonlight.
• The Grand Theft Auto V Not Hurting Anybody Challenge.
• Taking a self-guided tour of the Bay Area in Watch Dogs 2.
• A Short Hike mod for GTA V.
• A needle art or craft.
• Art vs. Craft.
• What is the Citizen Kane of needlepoint? When will we see the first needle that can make you cry?
• A piece of physical media that you look at.
• Physically doing the thing to make it look like the image you have in your head.
• An art form that has been around for as long as thread.
• The joy of buying art supplies.
• The anxiety relief of various stitches.
• A boy who contains multitudes.
• Getting dad a sidewalk for his birthday.
• Cross-stitch route planning.
• Marking notable locations in red.
• The only way out. (Through.)
• A three year old who wants to do something but delays as much as he can anyway.
• A three year old who is just like adults except with way less impulse control.
• A work in frogress.
• The tale of druid Moondrop Honeysuckle.
• A disembodied voice telling you to call it "granny."
• The ancient place beyond the dead star in the Ultraviolet City.
• Going into a random bar and hearing a poem about your mom.
• Granny the Mind Flayer.
• Falling sideways through reality and having to fight the big boss.
• Recording season 42 of Survivor over Zoom.
• The evolution of Survivor meta.
• Finding a clue in the crook of a tree.
• Throwing the flint into the ocean.
• The gif of the two women gasping and the dude behind them smiling.
• The Ashby Brewery Twitter account.
• Why the algorithm thinks you care about Ratchet and Clank.
• How to make Twitter livable on PC vs. on your phone.
• The work every internet user puts into not being shown the stuff they don't want to see.
• Mark Zuckerberg pointing at his mugger and shouting "See less of this! I'd like to see less of this!"
• Eating the rich and having to worry about biomagnification.
• Mr. Beer.
• The Ashby Brewery and Video Game Studio.
• All the Brews That's Fit to Print.
• The Ashby Brewery and Video Game Studio quarterly brewsletter.
• Being the bee man.
• Not using Twitter in a while and Twitter emails you about what Russell Crowe is doing lately.
• Extensively DMing Russell Crowe and then blocking Russell Crowe and then forgetting that either thing happened.
• Why they call him John Mystery.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Danny
  • https://twitter.com/dannyodwyer/
• April
  • https://twitter.com/aprilsaur

Topics:

• Favorite desserts for when it's hot out
• The horror of almost being older than Princess Diana
• The developer of Abraham Lincolnland has gone on to run a business selling shirts with Vaporwave Abraham Lincoln's Face on them.
  • http://www.lincolnsoft.com/games/all/
  • https://lincolnapparel.com/
• I Would Like to Describe by Zbigniew Herbert
  • https://poets.org/poem/i-would-describe
• Irish surnames as American girl names
• Words that you misunderstood as a child and how that affected your life
• Jordan Mechner calling E.Y. Harburg on the phone
  • https://jordanmechner.com/archive/#2009-11-rainbo

Microtopics:

• Priming with a prompt.
• Using the Inception noise too much so Christopher Nolan angrily accosts you and you can get his autograph.
• A selection of nice suits.
• The swirl of the chocolate and vanilla duo.
• So classy but also so messy.
• The counter with fifty different ice creams in buckets.
• 99.
• A stick of flaky wispy chocolate that you stick into your ice cream.
• The two biggest KLF fans in America.
• Mid-Atlantic Podcast Time.
• Ordering a hot latte in the middle of Summer.
• Realizing it's winter and going back into the coffee shop and asking the barista to put your iced coffee in the microwave.
• The treat that you would least like to have in the summer.
• Hanging your Christmas Pudding from a clothesline.
• Hollywood Pudding.
• The Devil's Sandwich.
• A fancy lad who eats nothing but olives and fig newtons.
• Morbid Distance Markers.
• Royalophilia.
• One princess dies and TV becomes useless for days
• The ethical considerations of faking a news segment.
• The last time you'll ever think about Princess Diana.
• All your dead relatives living in your head.
• Never saying your child's name on the internet.
• What body part is touching the poison oak in this metaphor.
• Refusing to go outside without an EpiPen.
• Abraham Lincoln fighting Nazis in the cyberpunk future.
• Bringing back beards for presidents.
• A 60-page readme about how to run this game in various driver configurations.
• Sitemaps.
• Selling shirts with Abraham Lincoln's face on them at Milwaukee Marker Fair.
• Going full neon.
• Covering the entire surface of the shirt with a garish vaporwave pattern.
• Describing courage without involving a dusty lion.
• Drawing a single original word from your breast, like a rib.
• Falling asleep with your hand in a mound of planets.
• A fleeting moment of recognition that is often very centering.
• Standing at the limits of language.
• Word tattoos.
• Mostly salt up top.
• Describing a moment or a feeling or a concept that is unrelenting in your mind.
• Using a trembling glass of water emoji but nobody knows whether you mean anxiety or an approaching T-Rex.
• His and Hers Mound of Planets Tattoos.
• The Irish guy in the room.
• Paying respect to your Irish heritage by naming your daughter "McPhee."
• 8 out of the top 10 baby names of 2020.
• Having a reaction that nobody else is having.
• Don't Start Fires mascots.
• Thinking that Smokey the Bear is instructing you to start forest fires because you don't know what "prevent" means.
• Only you in particular can prevent forest fires.
• Whatever flips your boat.
• One of those weird European psychological horrors.
• Ha-Ha Hollywood.
• Wanting information and figuring out how to get it.
• John Romero still having the Apple 2's memory layout memorized 40 years later.
• Trying to remember if you've done a podcast.
• A cat trying to get you to come to bed.
• Only grace tweets.
• Overwatch boops.
• Overwatch: Global Offensive.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Mara
  • https://twitter.com/McaelinL
• April
  • https://twitter.com/aprilsaur/

Topics:

• Frog and Toad core
• What would you do with a bonus room in your house?
• My reptile brain is a cat-loving ninja
• If you could submit one thing (a song, a building, a food, an activity, an abstract concept) to the interstellar community of sapient intelligences as your part of The Case For Why The Human Race Is Good And Cool, what would it be?
• How earnest lessons you try to teach your children backfire
• Murder She Wrote is back on prime
• Asafoetida powder

Microtopics:

• The Expanse: bigger than before.
• A developer's guide to cognitive behavioral therapy.
• The various circumstances under which the Frog Fractions DLC hat can be a witch hat.
• Cottagecore vs. Frog and Toad core.
• Cottagecore merged with an old man.
• Embracing Frog and Toad for pride month.
• Finding the bodice rippers with people with dark curly hair on the cover because you can imagine those are light-skinned black people.
• The relative density of the east coast.
• Getting out of California before it's too late.
• A complete dearth of natural disasters.
• Writing an offer letter for a home you want to buy and mentioning your adorable child who just needs a home several times.
• Moving into a space that is twice as big and not knowing what to do with all the space.
• An Austenian fantasy you have been cherishing in your bosom.
• A perfect cosy library with chairs that trap people.
• Installing a ladder on casters so you can ride it around the room every morning in your Belle outfit.
• Coming up with excuses to install the ladder on casters even though you can just reach up and grab every book in your library.
• One of those booths with a fan at the bottom that you fill by ripping a single page out of every book in your library.
• How much extra you can charge for an Airbnb hidden behind a secret bookshelf.
• Going into the Library of Congress to check out Bullfrog's Official Guide to Dungeon Keeper.
• A room full of music production equipment and no internet connection.
• Asking your child to focus at dinner when all the adults at the table have their phones out.
• Saving a cat by applying torque to a falling chair.
• Doing a thing before you realize you've done it and thinking "wow it's a good thing I agree with those actions."
• Deliberately relying on your unconscious mind to do important work.
• Whether Jim and his wife need to get checked for ADHD.
• A teen who can write a hell of a term paper.
• The interstellar community of sapient intelligences.
• The case for why the human race is good and cool.
• Winnie the Pooh.
• Reclaiming the poop.
• Taco Bell's cannon firing nacho cheese chalupas at the enemy spaceships.
• Trying to convey "hygge" without being willing to try to pronounce it.
• Learning about alien cultures by watching Star Trek.
• A five year old explaining to you how T-Mobile are leaders in 5G technology.
• A perfectly sensible reaction to the story of Noah's Ark.
• Learning what fighting is and deciding to fight your mom.
• A book about a child who needs to be reprimanded all the time.
• Shouting "no" and throwing the phone on the floor whenever an ad plays.
• Watching Murder She Wrote every night before bed.
• Jessica Fletcher the serial killer and her nephew Grady, also a serial killer.
• How good Jessica Fletcher would be at breaking up a loud graduation party.
• Predicting when the party next door is going to end by the decade the music is from.
• How to recognize a trap remix of the Murder She Wrote theme from just the bass.
• Tricking your family into playing the Murder She Wrote board game.
• Not needing a wedding ring because your husband got you the Murder She Wrote DVD boxed set.
• Discovering what DVDs are and deciding to put them in the shower.
• Covering the shower drain with the Wii Sports disc because they're the exact same size.
• A bone-dry shower.
• Always shirt-cocking it.
• Baby poop and onions but also kind of floral but also you hate onions.
• Resorch.
• Dried latex from the celery family.
• Boiling your neti pot water to kill the brain-eating bacteria that might pass through the blood brain barrier.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Laura
  • https://twitter.com/lmichet
• Brendon
  • https://twitter.com/BlendoGames
• April
  • https://twitter.com/aprilsaur

Topics:

• If you were locked in a Home Depot overnight with 19 other people and you wouldn’t be let out until only one person survived, and also all the lights were turned off, what would you do?
• What's up with teeth. They seem designed to be tedious to brush and floss and maintain. Is this really the best version of mandible?
• Help me workshop this joke: Eve/eave
• Chickens turn into crocodiles
  • https://youtu.be/vTic1y37ueY
  • https://youtu.be/zQOkwoUPNgQ
• If you make an IRL Westworld theme park, how do you prevent having two dozen people on the same quest to have a showdown duel with the bad guy. Do you just have 24 people draw their gun and shoot the bad guy at the same time? Or is this even a problem in the first place?
• New skills learned during the pandemic--what skills have you learned? Was it worth it?

Microtopics:

• The Skin Deep Beacon.
• The voice of maintenance.
• Reviewing the bucket.
• Confronting the darkness within yourself at Home Depot.
• Murdering your competitors on a soft pile of dog beds.
• A chainsaw's efficacy as a murder weapon.
• Tying a chainsaw to the top of your head to foil air assassinations.
• Hot dog beds.
• The bow rack at Home Depot that holds three bows with four arrows each so you can fire twelve arrows at once.
• Trying to opt out of the Battle Royale.
• Using night vision binoculars to observe the burglar from across your bedroom.
• Buying a varmint-proof AT-AT in the hunting aisle of Home Depot.
• Pushing the shelves over like dominos and killing all your Home Depot Battle Royale competitors at once.
• A very specific thing that happens in shonen.
• Being spirited away to this Home Depot with no warning.
• Not having night vision googled so you superglue these night vision binoculars to your face.
• The people horrible enough to survive the Home Depot murder game.
• A Chippendale dancer removing their tearaway pants revealing their pants gun and killing everyone in the room.
• Hitman always introducing himself using the same pseudonym, xXx_69_KillerMan.
• The necessity of inventing pulling teeth.
• Instead of having teeth, having a single non-sectional chomper that grows continuously like a goat horn.
• A human's astounding ability to only occasionally bite their own cheeks and tongue.
• Instead of having to chew, your uvula throws a hadouken, incinerating the food.
• Instead of chewing, simply increasing the pressure in your mouth until the food becomes a diamond.
• How Neanderthals all had perfectly straight teeth like a pop star.
• Humans evolving smaller heads so they could fit through the neck of a t-shirt.
• The first humans in history to regularly eat refined sugars.
• The advantages of rotating your jaw 90 degrees.
• Finding a partner whose nose is oriented opposite yours, so instead of tilting your face to kiss, you just breathe back and forth forever.
• How humans would eat soup and sandwiches if their mouth orientation changed.
• Why eaves exist.
• Lowering energy bills using your cat.
• A very sharp quadruped.
• Figuring out how to make fun of a cat.
• Misspelling your cat's name as "Eave" when the census taker comes around and your property taxes go up by millions of dollars.
• Four chickens covered in colored vinyl.
• Chickens walking into a jello mold.
• An algorithmically created video for children.
• Every permutation of every animal walking through every liquid and turning into every other animal.
• The fashion trajectory of the designer of Super Monkey Ball.
• Walking through the fountain portal and losing one of your beards.
• Coolest video I ever seen: Adult.
• Spanish Cat in the Sky.
• More of the same, but this time there's a cat saying it.
• The black hat cowboy wearing an additional bulletproof vest for every member of your assassination party.
• Making sure there's only one serial killer at a time in your theme park.
• Teaming up to hug this enormous mechanical cowboy.
• The MMO version of David Fincher's The Game where twenty people show up on the rooftop at once so they have to take turns accidentally shooting their brother, having an emotional breakdown, and jumping off the roof to find their personal banquet.
• Going to a series of weird interactive theater events after you move to LA.
• Being diverted into a room where you swing in a wicker basket hanging from the ceiling.
• Paying $30 for a bunch of weird people to wave their fingers at you and draw on you with a sharpie and lock you in a freight elevator.
• Employing both kinds of maze construction materials: bedsheets and garbage bags.
• Sleep No More.
• Wanting to get into a hobby but not being sure how to learn to love the actual process of performing the hobby.
• Access to a wider variety of flavors in your life.
• Making Ants on a Log with Thai peanut sauce.
• Getting children to eat celery by making it unhealthy.
• Getting the quick dopamine hit of the early stages of learning a hobby, then quitting.
• Taking screenshots of a web site and reading the screenshots so the web site can't pop up any more ads.
• Just who is responsible for the state of web media.
• Scrolling past twelve life stories to figure out how to make dinner.
• Writing an angry letter to a corporation and getting a response from a minimum wage employee whose entire job is doing emotional labor to assuage angry customers.
• Not knowing how to advance in an adventure game and writing to the developers to tell them their game is broken.
• Goading game developers into revealing their puzzle solutions rather than calling the hint line.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• April
  • https://twitter.com/aprilsaur
• John
  • https://ostparty.podbean.com/
  • https://twitter.com/YouOldSoAndSo
  • https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/pooplers-switch/
  • https://twitter.com/lizardengland/status/1333825611144556547/photo/1

Topics:

• Woodworking
• Mentors and mentorship in general
• Advent calendar dice
• Scott asks "Please discuss Rax and Mr. Delicious"
  • https://boingboing.net/2020/10/09/meet-mr-delicious-the-weirdest-fast-food-spokesperson-ever.html
• Mariko Aoki Phenomenon. The phenomenon of having to poop when entering a bookstore. Named after the woman who experienced it and brought it to wider attention. If you wish to elaborate further, what's an inexplicable condition that you've experienced and suspect is shared with some portion of the populace? Would you want it named after you?

Microtopics:

• Using your work name on the internet for a thing you don't want work to see.
• Neither of the guests plugging Topic Lords, for the 65th time in a row.
• Trying to guess the channel The Expanse used to be on.
• How movies used to be teal and orange but now they're just green.
• Letting all the cats into the room to purr into the microphones.
• Things people expect you to be good at when you're a park ranger.
• Woodworking.
• Protecting your food from raccoons and turkeys.
• The peace of bringing a physical object to fruition.
• Making a napkin holder in middle school wood shop.
• How it's ok to make fun of someone's face as long as you've never seen their face.
• Building a bridge out of popsicle sticks.
• Building a bridge out of sentient goo-balls.
• The first sense you use to consume a meal.
• How pleased everyone is with Jim's new hobby.
• A knock knock joke if the punch line was playing peek-a-boo.
• Eating cold pizza right out of the freezer.
• Growing into a preference for being around people who aren't assholes.
• Looking up to people in your field.
• Only realizing that your mentors were mentors in retrospect.
• A recurring topic on this show.
• Knowing several librarians independent of the time you worked in the library.
• Playing Zork on your uncle's laptop.
• Printing your nephew's MS Paint art rather than just using your printer for taxes.
• An Advent calendar except instead of being laid out in the grid the candy goes in a 25 sided die.
• Forgetting about your Advent calendar after a few days and having extra candy next year.
• An Advent calendar where behind each numbered door is a die with that number of faces.
• Extruding a coin and inventing the three sided die.
• Putting stickers in your Advent calendar instead of candy, because you hate your child.
• Question asking games.
• Rolling a natural 1 on your Advent calendar dice and having to throw all your presents in the garbage.
• Games where even if you're bad at games you still have a chance to win.
• The importance of being bored.
• The growing ubiquitousness of video games.
• An epidemic that demands everybody spend a full year at the DMV.
• Desperately trying to change your last name before your child is born so that your names will match.
• Whether gestational diabetes counts for your diabetes threepeat.
• Derailing the conversation about fast food advertising with your top two Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
• Mythical roast beef venue RAX.
• Opening your trench coat to reveal one of those silver food domes that you lift up.
• Talking about your vasectomy in an advertisement for roast beef sandwiches.
• Fast food for adults advertised with Ronald McDonald holding a briefcase.
• The luxury of two leaves of iceberg lettuce.
• Charles Nelson Reilly, recurring guest on Match Game.
• That time you wanted to watch American Gladiators and there was exactly one episode on YouTube.
• Asking a kid if they know what Kumon is and they make the sad face.
• The tutoring place you take your kid to if you want them to know math instead of being happy.
• Whether you're allowed to have impostor syndrome about something you do professionally.
• Reframing your impostor syndrome as being about how good you are at fooling people into thinking you have worth.
• Getting rid of the clown.
• Bringing the clown man back.
• Love in the time of Beavis and Butthead.
• The content that our listeners crave.
• Our frothing demand to find a bathroom increases.
• How bookstores and toilets smell the same in Japan.
• The full body sensation you get right before you're about to do cocaine.
• Training your toddler to pee at a whistle tone and then making them wet their pants on all their first dates.
• The mental link between books and pooping.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• April is @aprilsaur on Twitter.
• Freddie is @fwong on Twitter.

Topics:

• Burger opinions
• Revisiting Breath of the Wild
• Taking care of a kid for 8 hours a day is making me doubt my chronotype
• Dennis asks: "Vtubers"
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_YouTuber

Micro topics:

• Finally, a place for topics.
• A podcast that is surprisingly not a BDSM podcast.
• Being the best town for chili with spaghetti because nobody else bothered.
• A very good part about a hamburger.
• The potential utility of a hamburger.
• Wanting each bite of a foodstuff to contain every ingredient.
• The sleeping baby preventing you from going to Five Guys.
• A very specific smell manufactured in New Jersey that does not trigger any kind of nostalgia at all.
• Deciding to stop cooking your fries in beef tallow and needing to add a fake scent to get the old smell back.
• A burger joint that is the love child of In-N-Out and Dairy Queen.
• Rating hamburgers by their mouth hinge requirements.
• The ideal order of ingredients in a hamburger stack.
• Putting a tomato between the patty and the slice of cheese in a cheeseburger.
• Burger crimes.
• Becoming convinced that Democrats really ought to be armed.
• Years of playing Call of Duty and Counterstrike training you for your role in the revolution.
• Years of playing The Sims training you for your role in the revolution.
• Whether George Washington was a gamer.
• Playing Breath of the Wild long enough to see the cool opening vista and thinking "I definitely don't want to go to these mountains."
• A very American Truck Simulator approach to playing an open world game.
• Winching yourself out of the mud.
• The experience of drawing a map in order to understand your surroundings.
• Two weeks worth of photos of your TV.
• Trying to distinguish whether a childhood feeling of a video game came from the game design or came from being a child.
• Designing puzzles that demand the player take physical notes.
• The fun of inconvenience.
• Playing D&D and catching the cartography bug.
• Capturing the joy of a blank piece of paper.
• A game about paperwork.
• The video game expanding beyond the executable file you run.
• Gambling with the game's demo to change the full game's price.
• What it would take to stream Breath of the Wild.
• Tiny little leaf people hiding all over the world each hovering with a tiny leaf they spin like a helicopter blade.
• Hestu's incredible maraca dance.
• Tattooing the entire DK Rap across your back.
• An attractive person remaining attractive even when wearing a goofy outfit.
• Staying home to take care of your kid and not sending them to daycare during a pandemic.
• Changing your sleep schedule from waking up at 11am to waking up at 7am.
• Vitamin D: turns out we need it.
• Being unable to sleep in even though you used to be a sleeping in champion.
• Being tired because it's the end of the day.
• Making dinner and becoming a puddle on whatever surface you happen to land on.
• Going camping because you have a kid when you would never care enough to go camping if it was just you.
• Downloading Youtube tutorials on how to split a log so you can impress your kid when you go camping.
• Using digital puppetry to make an anime avatar play video games on Twitch.
• Cranking out content 24/7.
• Livestreamers taking a vacation and losing 20% of their viewers.
• The Tupac hologram except playing Fortnite on Twitch.
• Producing a CG animation TV show where all the animation is live puppeteering.
• Exhuming Tupac so you can do a body scan for the hologram concert tour.
• Indiana Jones except with a really tiny head.
• The career prospects of Indiana Jones themed strippers.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• April is @aprilsaur on Twitter.
• John remains a mystery.

Topics:

• Climate-aware architecture
  • https://twitter.com/wrathofgnon/status/1013941701293928449
  • https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/thermal-delight/
• On Dungeons & Dragons: focusing on the characters vs focusing on the story
• Why do people say "ahh" after taking a drink
  • https://www.lbc.co.uk/radio/special-shows/the-mystery-hour/human-body/why-do-people-say-ahh-after-finishing-a-drink/
• Miko asks: "Perpetual Stew, a food that instead of being cooked once and then eaten, continues to be cooked for up to five hundred years (while occasionally also being eaten, but not in its entirety)"
• That strange feeling when you move to a new state and the laws around plastic bags are different, and other weird differences between places
  • The Afghan-Mexican fusion burrito shop in Albany that we didn't name on the podcast: https://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/the-hot-shop/Location?oid=1113434
  • You want the "tropical" or the "cajun," depending on how spicy you like it.

Microtopics:

• Seasons that aren't summer and states that aren't California.
• John of the Commonwealth of Virginia Johns.
• Calling yourself a Commonwealther but not knowing all the deep Commonwealth cuts.
• Not having a city name because you're between cities and so calling yourself a "census designated place."
• An experience that you had that is in the past.
• Plugging a suspiciously expensive hat that players love.
• Not being able to have hobbies because you just bought a house.
• California, where it's sunny for hundreds of years and then suddenly a thunderstorm covers the entire state in tens of thousands of lightning strikes.
• Not having to get your home repairs done before people visit because nobody can ever visit.
• The good news is: podcasting.
• Not having had a basement in decades.
• Discovering that Virgina is a tiny piece of a giant land mass called North America.
• Buying the Frog Fractions hat DLC for all your friends.
• An extremely Californian form of hell.
• Architects forgetting that climate exists after air conditioning is invented.
• Fantasizing about winning the lottery when you never play the lottery.
• The downside of climate control via architecture.
• The feeling of tatami mats under your feet.
• Realizing that having bugs in your floor sometimes is just the price you pay for having floor mats that bugs like to live in.
• The tortilla mouse story.
• Discovering that a mouse is living in your bag of tortillas and signing a contract with the mouse that it will just eat the tortillas and not destroy the rest of your house or breed.
• Cats discovering extremely stale candy in the cabinet under the sink.
• A squirrel spinning a corn tortilla like a steering wheel and eating it from the outside in.
• A squirrel spinning a tortilla like a sign spinner.
• Joining a D&D campaign late.
• Knowing what your characters are about and creating situations where the characters have something to play against.
• Making sure your players have stakes in the story being told.
• A dope encounter on a luxury liner where you have to follow a bard with an anti-magic field.
• A D&D campaign where all the players just hang out and eat Doritos.
• Crafting a narrative by building outwards from a single dramatic moment.
• Not knowing anything about the company you own half of.
• The mystery of the Ultraviolet City.
• Collaboratively inventing a story with your friends.
• Having a beverage with you and being able to test a beverage hypothesis.
• The sensation of a little bit of cool air passing over the various nerve endings in the inner mouth area.
• Whether pooping is a social construct.
• A two year old fixating on the color of Pepsi.
• Tripping out on your own sensory experience.
• Some real good honest mischief.
• Taking a deeper breath so you can drink more.
• Getting out the whiteboard to teach your infant son how to drink and belch.
• A gentle sweet boy forcibly closing your laptop so you'll pay attention to him.
• Perpetual stool, which also hangs around for 500 years.
• Living for as long as you can keep the stew going.
• Being caretaker for a stew that is 300 years older than you.
• Making sure you eat all the meat out of your stew before it goes bad and spoils the rest of the stew.
• Filling your house with the smell of fresh baked bread.
• A bread recipe where you just put all the ingredients in a pan and then bake it.
• A gradient of cheese.
• Broccoli with horrible stinky cheese melted on top.
• Jumping on any excuse to make an elaborate ridiculous meal.
• Visiting your friends in Virginia but never talking to them because of COVID.
• Going ballistic whenever you see a deer.
• Making everyone sign an NDA before they can listen to this episode of your podcast.
• Some sort of palace of food.
• Two grocery bags being filled before you even realize what's happening.
• Stipulating that the burrito rant has occurred.
• Differing vehicle registration laws in Virginia and California.
• Running a bunch of stop signs because they don't write the word "stop" on the ground in Portland, they only have the red sign.
• How to proceed with the ARG when you believe you've solved the mystery of John's identity.

Support Topic Lords

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

Lords:

• Jenni is reachable at jenni@jennipolodna.com.
  • Chris is making cooking videos at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRsnCRAIi-VsRPPX4AtzVGQ/
• April is @aprilsaur on Twitter.

Topics:

• Befriending ravens
  • Just Say No. https://www.reddit.com/r/Ornithology/comments/29y31o/id_like_to_befriend_some_local_ravens_but_should/
• What if part of the government apparatus was a PVP mobile game & billionaires willingly sent in tax dollars in exchange for units to pwn everyone else but the game was balanced so they only had a tiny edge?
• Clone ethics: can you consent on behalf of your clone? What about a different person with the same name as you?
• Larry asks: "Best ways to meet your own death as part of a puzzle or game"
  • Carnivorous mushroom death at 0:58. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=58
• My sister is doing her bathroom sea-monster themed; does anyone have unsolicited recommendations for sea monster bathroom amenities?
• The badger story.
• How do we survive from when we learn to climb on the furniture to when we get scared of climbing on the furniture?
• The white-spotted clearwing
  • https://www.instagram.com/p/CBYeqqgAdrp/

Microtopics:

• Plugging an activity nobody but you can do.
• Eating trash out of the dumpster and fighting over dead skunk carcasses.
• Recognizing jerks and being rude to them.
• Feeding tiny bento boxes to nearby ravens.
• Mobbing random strangers to demand a tiny bento box.
• The ravens constantly pooping on your shoulders but it's ok because it's just your work shirt.
• Meeting your shitting on things quota.
• Befriending Odin's ravens and becoming Odin.
• Being the one who operates firearms in this relationship.
• Replacing taxes with a mobile game targeted at Elon Musk.
• Elon Musk being defeated at a PVP mobile game by a seven year old in a Tinkerbell outfit and deciding he doesn't like the game any more so the company forms a team whose only job is to lose to Elon Musk.
• Creating a GoFundMe to pay your rent while you save the world.
• Whether Jenni is the raven or the game designer in her relationship.
• Sharing DNA implying shared consent.
• Explaining parents.
• How consent works with conjoined twins.
• All three hosts having a different interpretation of the listener's question.
• Puzzles created in the before-times where if you solve them you see the face of god and then die.
• Cool ways to die in video games.
• A game that is great for people who have a lot of free time and don't have a child.
• Requesting ideas for sea monster themed bathroom decorations and getting answers six months after you finished remodeling you bathroom.
• A plunger shaped like a tentacle where the plunging part is just a huge suction cup.
• All of your failings as a wife being forgiven by your ability to use a firearm.
• Not knowing how to safely use a gun so you just kick it down the hill.
• Guarding the coast from sea monsters but not being allowed to talk about it.
• A shower curtain shaped like an octopus so you can paint a negative space octopus out of water all over the bathroom.
• Failing to plan your sister's bachelorette party and she's still waiting to get married eight years later.
• A COVID-19 Zoom Bachelorette Party eight years in the making.
• Having a Mukbang instead of a bachelorette party.
• Whether or not a pirate is a sea monster.
• Marrying an indie game developer for the money.
• Messaging your future husband on OkCupid because he thinks about Arnold Schwarzenegger wiping his ass a lot.
• Being a piler of things.
• Owing your wife a game about trolls but first having to train your son to be a game artist.
• Skipping a step and having your child draw directly on the fridge.
• Being asked to do something about the badger bothering people on the beach and making a joke about the badger badgering people.
• The consequences of your county's limited animal control budget.
• A badger hiding underneath the bench in the changing room.
• Catching a badger with a dog catching stick even though it's not a dog at all.
• Having a badger at the end of a stick.
• What they call closets in the park district.
• Riding in the back of a pickup truck wrangling a badger between your legs.
• Carrying around a rattlesnake from a picnic area by putting it in a garbage bag and the snake repeatedly biting through the bag with venom dripping through the holes.
• Restraining a snake inside your esophagus until you're ready to release it.
• Latin being way older than the girl scouts.
• Moving a snake with a steam shovel.
• Only moving snakes where if you accidentally slice them in half they become two snakes.
• A toddler smashing a drinking glass on the kitchen floor and saying "mess!"
• Your child's milestones coming with commensurate levels of danger.
• Hitting the ground with 1/10ths of the force as your dad when you fall.
• Talking only about animals on this episode and the animal expert heckling you from the Discord.
• The glass-like quality of a White Spotted Clearwing becoming revealed against the dappled light of the forest understory.
• Making sure your transparent wings don't reflect light by covering them with nanopillars.
• The butterfly not getting a cut of your profits from the invention you based on its wing design.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• April is a beast lord and Jim's wife. @AprilSaur
• Ryan is somehow also Jim's wife? @RyanIkeComposer

Topics:

• 3:56 The "spigot question" Jim keeps avoiding.
  • https://norse-mythology.org/gods-and-creatures/others/hugin-and-munin/
  • A second person may be "cured" of HIV. https://www.vox.com/2019/3/5/18249607/hiv-cure-2019
• 13:05 New Decade reading resolution.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Witcher
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seanan_McGuire
  • http://www.scp-wiki.net/antimemetics-division-hub
  • I personally recommend starting with "Introductory Antimemetics," which is a good intro to the concepts, then everything starting at "Case Colourless Green," which is the main storyline.
  • https://shadesofmagic.fandom.com/wiki/A_Darker_Shade_of_Magic
• 22:54 What does the Nakatomi corporation do?
  • http://www.scp-wiki.net/
  • https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/33713/was-nakatomi-corp-involved-in-illegal-activity
• 31:07 Favorite zoo animal.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embryonic_diapause
• 40:07 What sandwiches are better suited to a straight or diagonal cut?
• 44:28 I stayed in a hotel in Florence in 2009 where our room had a private bidet but the whole floor shared a toilet.

Microtopics:

• Making a good dad joke on twitter.
• The ravens that have been building a nest behind your corpyard at work.
• The squabbling raven couple next door.
• Being the neighbor who didn't call animal control.
• Trying to remember the names of Odin's ravens.
• Distributing podcast episodes in a post-internet wasteland.
• The kid in middle school who guessed you were from New York because of how you say "basketball."
• Why Jim is such a coward.
• Reaching deep into the topic bucket and pulling out a black ichorous monster.
• A garden hose spigot installed in your butt such that poop sprays forward instead of down.
• Bodily fluids canceling each other out when you miss the toilet and so you just end up with a wet wall.
• Liking ketchup so much you CRISPR a biological ketchup dispenser into your elbow.
• Accidentally triggering your ketchup hands when you're icing a cake.
• Putting a cap on your ketchup elbow so you don't drip ketchup everywhere.
• Whether your new dispenser is a squishy flesh hose or a brass steampunk spigot.
• Reframing your fleshy protuberance that shoots someone else's blood to sound scary and eldritch.
• A spigot that shoots liquid money.
• Making up for your horrifying blood pranks by giving blood.
• Whipping blood into stiff peaks.
• Carnivorous merengue.
• Using science to make human blood safe to eat.
• Letting the listeners hear the good podcast juice.
• Falling down on your New Year's resolution starting in March.
• Watching the Witcher show and then reading the Witcher short stories it was based on and knowing exactly what's going to happen.
• Alchemy and math and words.
• Whether or not reading on a screen still counts.
• Reading your driver's license every night before you go to bed.
• Getting hungry immediately after the body spigot discussion.
• Being over your meal by the time you're done cooking it.
• Assembling duck a l'orange ingredient by ingredient in your tummy and by the time you finish cooking it you're like "I've already eaten this."
• Something standing right in front of you that you can't perceive.
• Deciding not to read scary stories to your wife right before bed.
• Getting ready for prose form, motherfuckers.
• Trying to remember someone's name and only remembering that they have initials.
• Medieval fantasy Londons and their relationships to magic.
• Reading ahead in the tabletop adventure book.
• A vault with 8 different kinds of locks on it, filled with non-negotiable bearer bonds.
• A regular bearer bond except you can't negotiate for it.
• A non-negotiable bond except you can hold it.
• The database documenting the contents of the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
• Manufacturing tiny toy guns and not being able to fight back against terrorists because your guns are too small.
• Explaining why your tiny gun manufacturer has a money basement.
• Tiny toy guns using only the tiniest gunpowder.
• Writing the first season of your mystery show with the certainty that it'll be canceled after one season.
• Having to figure out what polar bears are after your show gets renewed.
• When a duck decides to start whispering its quacks.
• The most convenient jaguar.
• Biting each other in the face and having a good Bear Time.
• Bats' closest relatives being humans because all their other relatives died.
• Delaying gestation until everyone's pregnant at once.
• Bats all giving birth at the same time and overwhelming the health care system.
• A zoo except for the sea.
• Watching a jellyfish enclosure and asking "what are they doing in there?"
• Plastic bags floating around in the sea except they're alive and they'll still be alive after you're dead.
• The universe being a big stupid donut.
• Nobody giving a shit that you read Great Expectations.
• Garfield being the great literature of the coming era.
• Allegorical lasagna.
• Caramelizing all your onions at once.
• Cutting your sandwich into a pair of rhombuses.
• Sitting on a stack of the most prestigious award in the country.
• Figuring out what axis you can cut a hamburger on diagonally.
• When the burrito guy folds your burrito wrong and the first bite is entirely sour cream.
• Burrito Gaia, filled with loam, mantle and magma.
• Naming your next kid after your least-favorite burrito.
• The food dictator making you a cup of Crispix when all you wanted was grilled cheese.
• The puzzle with the farmer trying to get a hen, fox and grain across the river except it's your butt, your poop, and a jet of water.
• Taking it to squirts-town.
• Building a hotel before they invented the combination toilet/bidet.
• The french word for when you take a dump in somebody's bidet.
• Hygiene strategies if a bird poops on your butthole.
• The nose being an evolutionary strategy to protect our mouths from bird poop.
• Dunking your whole ass in the ass-height sink.
• Just making zoo noises until you've reached the required minimum podcast length.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• April is Jim's wife again and still a Beast Lord.
  • https://twitter.com/aprilsaur
  • https://www1.flightrising.com/lair/463464
• John is a Mystery.

Topics:

• 2:25 Create a D&D character right now
  • Drizzt the Drow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drizzt_Do%27Urden
  • Moai eyes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moai#Eyes
• 12:51 Being friends with people who are more than ten years older/younger than you: not weird until suddenly it is?
  • Teaching English in Japan. https://www.internationalteflacademy.com/teach-english-in-japan
  • Nova. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_(eikaiwa)
• 24:31 Being in another country and seeing a person from your own country: is a head nod appropriate or not?
• 30:05 You can get Big Mike bananas from a specialty dealer in Miami
  • https://miamifruit.org/
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rambutan
• 43:04 Relational memory/mind palaces/file structures from long-retired computers
• 46:37 What's your preferred method for migrating your stuff from your old computer to your new computer?
• 56:43 Willow asks: "Methods for assembling great salads"

Microtopics:

• Refusing to be a Topic Lord because you're just on Topic Lords to promote your alternative podcast Beast Lords.
• Not having anyone to plug this time either but maybe you have a Soundcloud somewhere.
• Choosing all of your topics while driving to the zoo.
• Containing multitudes and being super excited.
• A band of adventurers being led by an operatic soprano.
• A party of all bards.
• Appropriating spam musubi because it's delicious.
• Not technically being part of a band of adventurers but you play a tambourine and own the van.
• Stealing the spam musubi from your bass player's bag of holding because they're going to go bad eventually.
• Keeping both gold coins and spam musubi in the same bag of holding and having to dig around for the money when you buy anything.
• Finally having a dog on this podcast.
• Putting your dead dog in every D&D party you're in for the rest of your life.
• Putting your dead dog in every platformer you make for the rest of your life.
• All your D&D adventures going wrong because you're just musicians and can't actually deal with monsters.
• Putting monsters onto the bus to the next town over.
• Putting a fishtank bubbler on your bag of holding so all the monsters in there can breathe.
• Fixing it then ruining it.
• Coming to your chosen profession late in your life.
• Age gaps getting less weird as time goes on.
• Thinking about watching new TV to be able to relate to young people and deciding nobody has that kind of time.
• Old people being full of stories from their lives.
• Not talking to your friend as much as you used to because she lives in Ohio now.
• Spending your retirement taking care of dogs.
• Responding to difficult situations with grace and tact.
• Stopping going to work because they stopped paying you.
• The English teacher bubble in Japan.
• Seeing the only other white person for a mile in any direction and wondering if you should nod at them.
• Seeing the only other white person for a mile in any direction and thinking "frickin Americans!"
• Not wanting to talk to strangers except in your favorite coffee shop.
• Telling your wife something a week ago and then finding out it's a myth and having to correct her on a podcast.
• Bananas being especially susceptible to disease.
• Replacing the Cavendish banana with an even shittier banana after it succumbs.
• Hiding your bananas because if your son sees them he won't be able to think about anything else.
• Giving your son bananas because he already poops enough.
• Foot-long avocados.
• A giant box of intimidating tropical fruit being the best Christmas gift.
• Drinking soursop juice tasting flights at a Mexican restaurant.
• Bananas that look like a buzzsaw made of bananas.
• Your infant son seeing a rambutan and realizing that maybe some things don't go in your mouth.
• Haunted fruit.
• Remembering trauma that happened when you were way too young to remember stuff.
• Visiting your dad in prison and he's wearing fake shoes.
• Riding in the back of a pickup truck and sharing Now & Laters with your older sister.
• The US government deciding that televising court trials is a terrible idea after televising the OJ Simpson trial.
• Knowing when a thing happened because you remember where it happened.
• Trying to construct a mind palace like Hannibal and Sherlock and after a day of hard work deciding you don't need to remember anything that badly.
• Yelling "story math!" when you correctly predict a story beat.
• Realizing at the end of the episode that he's been inside his mind palace the entire time.
• Copying your old hard drive onto the new one always working until one day you get an SSD drive and nothing fits.
• Paying Dropbox money to get more storage and Dropbox starting to spam you about features you don't care about.
• Only having a laptop to more effectively play your favorite web game.
• Most people not really having any use for a desktop PC any more.
• Having to remember life milestones differently because your life has settled down.
• Liking a salad that doesn't have any lettuce in it.
• Never having so badly wanted to go make a salad.
• Peeling cucumbers so you don't get Cucumber Gas.
• A hot cucumber.
• Flashing your King.com CEO badge to get into the food truck even.
• The burger joint offering you a salad with cheddar cheese crumbles on it and it turns out to just be a slice of cheddar they broke into a few pieces.
• Crisping cheddar cheese in the broiler and throwing away the rest of your meal because you've peaked.
• Trying to convince your wife that if you add mayo to a cheese plate it becomes a salad.
• Not understanding when the young folks talk about going to sleep.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• April is a park ranger at @aprilsaur.
• Danny makes video game documentaries at https://noclip.website/ and is on Twitter at @dannyodwyer.

Topics:

• 4:26 Intentionally teaching your child the wrong word for something.
  • Dogtooth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogtooth_(film)
  • It turns out the kid's mom was talking to him in English at the same time -- a bilingual household. https://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/news/article/13011269/klingon-as-a-second-language
  • The "I Can Eat Glass" project. https://www.oocities.org/nodotus/hbglass.html
• 14:44 Harbinger households.
  • https://boingboing.net/2019/12/03/harbringer-of-doom.html
• 21:29 Men's wallets.
• 31:45 Quill asks: "I've been planning to change my name recently. The first name that I came up with is 'Quill,' but I can't think of a good last name to go with it. Could you give me some suggestions, or some advice on how to come up with cool names?"
  • We used Hitch Switch to change our names and it saved us a lot of work. (It still involved a lot of work.) https://www.hitchswitch.com/
  • The Aphantasia study. https://www.eugencpopa.ro/wp-content/uploads/Afantazia-.pdf
• 41:17 Shen Yun commercials are literally everywhere.
  • Shen Yun 2019 official trailer. https://youtu.be/7H-kYoczCp0
  • Shen Yun is "essentially, religious-political propaganda—or, more generously, an extremely elaborate commercial for Falun Dafa’s spiritual teachings and its plight vis-à-vis the Chinese Communist regime." https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/stepping-into-the-uncanny-unsettling-world-of-shen-yun
  • How to use an abacus. https://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/abacus/intro.html
  • How to use a slide rule. https://www.sliderulemuseum.com/SR_Course.htm
  • Baby friendly movie theaters. https://babyfriendlyamerica.com/2016/06/movies/
• 49:50 Woodpeckers can withstand impacts of 100gs.
  • Woodpecker eating. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPhzGpSspSHx1cA1O-FAAtsFu34MZbg-t
  • A weasel riding a woodpecker. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/3/150303-weasels-woodpeckers-animals-science-weaselpecker-photos/
  • The best source I could find describing the mechanism of any self sharpening maw: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/adfm.201001546
• 57:24 Being an extremely unimaginative kid.

Microtopics:

• Reading numbers off of a list because topics haven't been invented yet.
• Giving someone a funny look where the funny part is that you're not looking at them.
• Cows that are so cute you want to want to put them in your mouth, which would surely kill them.
• The fuzzy cows only being fuzzy because it's winter.
• Falling off a cliff being the only way to hurt yourself in Ireland.
• The song they teach Irish children about American tourists falling off cliffs.
• Age differences being insignificant when you're millions of years old.
• Knowing two people but calling them both the same thing because one of their names is too hard to say.
• Which animals are close enough to a dog to call "dog."
• A perfect 1960s household but the dad is a cenobite.
• Not being sure if you have bad luck or if you're just a bad person.
• Product researchers studying what you like because everything you like fails.
• Lying to researchers so companies will still make products you like.
• Eating banana flavored corn flakes while you watch Milli Vanilli music videos on your Betamax player and Ralph Nader is the mayor.
• Moving to a zip code where all your neighbors have your same contrary taste in products.
• A wallet the size of four king-sized Snickers bars.
• Finding paradise in the wrong gender's department at Target.
• Feeling the thrill of being free of a giant heavy brick.
• Having to buy an expensive, fashionable watch because otherwise your peers won't take you seriously.
• Taking a photo of your ID and just showing the cop your Instagram.
• Getting a non-folding wallet so your dollar bills won't have creases.
• Explaining to the barista that the last guy put the crease in the dollar bill, not you.
• Promising the barista you won't fold the coffee either.
• Getting a note press so this sort of thing won't happen again.
• Getting to say your cool last name into a walkie talkie at work.
• Technically not appropriating anything because you're just using culture that's already been appropriated by someone else.
• A day full of mostly making people happy, for a change.
• Changing your last name to Ass and owing royalties to Ass owners.
• An opportunity for some serious synergy.
• Radio listeners celebrating other radio listeners.
• Deciding to throw the blue checkmark people in with gen pop.
• Waiting until you're on your deathbed to watch something to maximize anticipation.
• The last thing you see before they turn off the dialysis machine.
• Missing out on pop culture because you always click "skip ad" as soon as possible.
• Advertising your audience into submission.
• Trying to explain a slide rule without understanding what a slide rule is.
• Watching Alien in the theater with a baby strapped to your chest.
• Evolving to not kill yourself when you head butt a tree.
• Having an incredibly fancy tongue.
• Squirrels eating every single bulb from your string lights to humiliate you.
• A peregrine falcon drowning a songbird in a creek while looking you in the eye.
• Always being sure to catch the woodpecker with the beak facing away from you.
• Letting the other kids on the playground do the imagining for you.
• Deciding whether it's actually "great" to "e-meet" you.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• April is a Park Ranger and a Beast Lord and Jim's wife
• Ryan Ike Composer is a topic bucket at https://twitter.com/RyanIkeComposer/

Topics:

• 4:58 Inventing secular rituals for children
• 19:25 Playing a Tabletop RPG can make you a better person
• 33:02 Which key is most fun to jam in, on the piano?
  • The Strong Songs episode about "I Wish," by Stevie Wonder. http://strongsongspodcast.com/i-wish-by-stevie-wonder
  • "I Wish," by Stevie Wonder. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYKYka-PNt0
  • Perfect Pitch. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_pitch
  • A=432 tuning. https://attunedvibrations.com/432hz-healing/
  • Patent: Vibrating toilet seat. https://patents.google.com/patent/US4920583A/en
• 40:30 The Muddler asks: "What would happen if we outlawed moss, botanically and culturally?"
  • Reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone. https://youtu.be/ysa5OBhXz-Q
• 47:27 Monster Kabinett is a robot-hell you can pay to go to in Berlin, why don't we have these here? https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/monster-kabinett
  • The cliffs of Dún Aonghasa. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%BAn_Aonghasa
  • Oneonta falls. https://www.whentobewhere.com/travel-listing/oneonta-gorge-lower-oneonta-falls
• 58:18 "Dance Monkey," by The Tones and I. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0hyYWKXF0Q

Microtopics:

• Taking the beast lord before someone else does.
• Being the bucket.
• Being rooted to the ground and going down with the ship.
• Brains autocorrecting puns out of existence.
• Vouching for a deer prancing across a beach.
• Not marrying someone born in the early 2000s.
• Getting into that bucket.
• Getting to sing in a room that's made for singing in.
• A cat wanting to get into the recording studio really bad.
• A cask of amontillado situation except the cask is the entire world outside the recording studio.
• Choosing to consciously develop rituals for your son.
• Throwing all of spirituality out with the bathwater.
• Going to Hell even though you tried your best.
• Being a steward of the land.
• Recoiling from going out in public because social media has drained all your life energy.
• Calling a dog a good dog when they're just being a dog.
• Having a quiet reflection about the Solstice in the middle of a labyrinth.
• Changing your real name because your pseudonym is better.
• The murder squad rolling out.
• Giving polygons the business and feeling bad for them.
• Figuring out how to be a good person even though you're literally a monster.
• The laws of physics demanding that you torture a goblin.
• Turning into a grouse and being like "peace out, losers."
• Creating an even worse relationship dynamic but at least this one isn't racist.
• Rolling up a CVS middle manager for your D&D one-shot.
• Working to become blind but always knowing you could work harder.
• Meeting someone who won't admit that they like fun shapes.
• Your local goth park ranger with a tattoo covered in flowers.
• A toilet seat that vibrates at the brown note.
• Knowing from experience that eventually you run out of poop.
• Clicking random grids while you think about moss being illegal.
• Outlawing Kate Moss as an unintentional side-effect of your moss legislation.
• Being the moss lord.
• Being the moss beast.
• Muddling your mimosa because you're ahead of the curve.
• Not drinking, but knowing so much about it that it'd be dangerous if you did.
• Moss turning out to be the linchpin to global biological harmony.
• Taking the time you used to spend itching and spending it reproducing.
• Everybody being everything.
• A Delightful Nightmare.
• Having to wait because Mother is not ready yet.
• Mother being ready now.
• Mother turning out to be a free-roaming robotic spider about the size of a smart car.
• Mother malfunctioning and kicking an aluminum folding chair across the room.
• Mother vibrating out of the way like a cheap hotel bed.
• A robot sticking out of the wall with crazy proboscis lips.
• A robot that knows how to use chopsticks.
• A flesh robot playing German industrial metal while you try to escape.
• Mother remembering you and wanting to drink your blood.
• Guessing sweaters until the beast lord tells you to stop.
• A tourist attraction with a bunch of signs saying "don't come here"
• Not wanting to die but on the other hand wanting a cool inscrutable death.
• Having an animated gif of your cool death on your tombstone.
• Joanna Newsom doing Aretha Franklin.
• Not wanting to admit whether you're a doctor.
• Playing a miniature game of snake in the spreadsheet that only you can perceive.
• Still not having a catchphrase.
• Being the beast bucket.

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