• John
• Avery
• Jay

Topics:

• Being known for one thing and trying to do a different thing
  • https://jtholen.bandcamp.com/album/new-active-object
• Finding instruments on the street
• Accidentally arguing with sauna guy

Microtopics:

• Many-Time Topic Lord John Mystery.
• Talking the plunge into the Topic Lords discord.
• An unspoken constant presence like Seymour Glass in the Glass Family novels.
• The Once and Future Musician.
• Putting a formant filter on your organ so you can play the organ on Zoom.
• Why pouring hot water sounds different from pouring cold water.
• The sound of boiling hot urine.
• The top rated coffee shop in San Francisco on Yelp for seven months in a row.
• Remaining your coffee shop after Mark Zuckerberg in hopes that he'll show up in person.
• Trying to open up a coffee shop in late 90s San Francisco and only realizing too late that it's 2016.
• ADA compliant seating.
• Four-person episodes of Topic Lords.
• A 6'5" guy trying to barter a half-used spray paint can for a cup of coffee.
• The Menacing Barterer.
• Aggressive Wimpy gladly paying you tomorrow for a hamburger today or else.
• Aggressive Wimpy throwing a shoe at your espresso machine.
• Your car accidentally becoming an art car.
• Letting people spray paint your car until it's nothing but spray paint.
• Calling 911 and explaining that the guy menacing you needs marijuana.
• Being detained by Mark Zuckerberg's private security force.
• Living near Mark Zuckerberg's house so you can do whatever your fixation with Mark Zuckerberg is.
• Aggressive Barter Guy trying to barter a Porsche for a cup of coffee.
• The $6 Porsche.
• Tholen or Tholen.
• A prog album constructed from Klik n Play samples.
• When someone who does I've things decides to do something else.
• The Mountain Goats novelizations.
• Leonard Cohen's terrible poetry.
• Thinking a song is deeply meaningful until you read the lyrics.
• New Active Object.
• Lunch Music.
• Doing a thing for a long time and getting good at it.
• Who has time to read a novel?
• Having Game Boys Advance but still reading books sometimes.
• Telling your teacher that you need to go to your job at NASA and they're like "oh you must be doing something important over there"
• Working in the waterslide industry.
• The Joy of Being the Secrets Guy.
• Reading too much into it is the next Frog Fractions game.
• Admitting to your wife that you found a digital piano on the curb.
• The digital piano in the background of the Frog Fractions 2 pitch video.
• Walking by a theremin at a party and it chirps at you like a proximity car alarm.
• The Moog Etherwave.
• Staring at your broken Omnichord.
• A toddler whose first word is "mandolin."
• Living Out Yonder.
• The Roland Space Echo.
• A cassette tape except there isn't any cassette, the tape is just kind of wriggling around in there.
• Buying synthesizers from thrift shops that don't know how to tell whether synthesizers are broken.
• The Two Organs Behind Me.
• Ukelins.
• Zither-esques.
• Dulcimers vs. hammered dulcimers.
• Looping your song and picking the notes that kind of sound like they belong.
• A Xylophone For Jandek.
• Feeling like you're taking to extremely accomplished people and you're just a weird little guy.
• Who Is Sauna Guy??
• Stuck debating sauna guy while the venerated author with similar interests to yours is holding court in the next room.
• Physics Philosophy guy talking about physics and philosophy.
• An hour into the conversation, telling Sauna Guy that you don't even like being warm and he just stares at you.
• The new way to joke about forum URLs.
• Back when the Internet was full of exciting possibilities.
• What topics turn you into Sauna Guy.
• David Byrne sitting alone at the David Byrne art exhibit in Palo Alto.
• We're All Sauna Guy Now.
• Voting each other off the podcast.
• Lightning round sudden death topics.
• When the sunscreen finally makes it onto your cornea.
• Not having a home page again but meaning to someday.

Support Topic Lords

Microtopics:

• The old saw that if the teacher is 15 minutes late, you are excused.
• All the hosts forgetting about the podcast so that episode just doesn't get recorded.
• The seam in the fish video.
• Procedurally vs. manually textured terrain.
• How to texture a limestone chunk.
• Whether Donkey Kong Bananza is deliberately evoking the sickly sheen of Donkey Kong Country's raytraced art.
• Procedurally decorating terrain in Techtonica.
• A lens flare shaped like bananas.
• Mario Kart opinions.
• Doing a stunt for the next 30 seconds.
• The Baja 1000 but with Mario Kart.
• How Mario Kart tries to make highways interesting.
• A souped-up Volkswagen Beetle driving 1000 miles through the desert
• Mario Kart except it's Desert Bus.
• A Hunter S. Thompson stand-in sent to report on Mario Kart races and ranting about the Mushroom Kingdom.
• Keeping your powder dry in case your anecdote gets promoted to Topic.
• Topics that have been in the bucket for a long time and probably will remain there for a long time.
• Doing a brass fall with your mouth.
• Finally learning to play "Imagine" on piano.
• Zoom's musician mode.
  
• Going on a date with twins to the same restaurant but neither one knows about the other, so you have to keep going into the bathroom and parting your hair the other way.
• The episode of Three's Company where there's a misunderstanding.
• Don Knotts making a weird face.
• Your prospective roommates explaining that you have to pretend to be gay so the landlord doesn't think you're all having sex with each other.
• More behind than ahead.
• Keeping cats in the Storage Atrium.
• Buying an organ from a salvage yard.
  
• Bartering with the organ maker's apprentice.
• The Estey Organ Company.
• Playing a bad prog rock solo on the analog synthesizer next to your couch.
• An organ with all of its organs showing.
• An accordion with zero subtlety.
• The difference between an electric piano and a digital piano.
• The Yamaha Clavinova with Advanced Wave Modeling.
• Don't play these notes unless you want to hear them forever.
• Topic Negotiation.
• Driving every single topic into the ground.

Support Topic Lords

• Ben
• Avery

Topics:

• The Mishima Incident, in which one of the most famous authors in Japan created his own private militia of young men, attempted to overthrow the government and, upon failing, committed ritual suicide.
• City-wide game of hide and seek
• How to stick it to bad Bluetooth actors
• The Carrotman's Lament, by E.L. Hubert
  • https://x.com/sweetstench/status/1724958011754504568
  • Esper says: "Avery’s anecdote about the carrot poem being something he’d do in high school reminded me of something I did in high school, where I took the song 'The Cha Cha Slide' and removed every instance of 'slide to the right' and added a bunch of 'slide to the left' so that people eventually collapsed into the wall. I got to do it at a little party with friends, and it paid off nicely."

Microtopics:

• Where to play some crosswords.
• Cruciverbalism.
• Putting the black squares where the letters don't go.
• Putting structural jokes in your crossword puzzles.
• The cleverer the gimmick, the less fun the crossword puzzle.
• Talking into your phone's transcription software during a five hour drive and having five hours of gibberish at the end of it.
• Fifth caller wins a t-shirt!
• Impossible Owls.
• Squishy details.
• Taking on an apprenticeship with a nobel prize winner.
• The Japanese Self-Defense Force.
• Dressing in bee keeper outfits and hitting each other with sticks.
• Buying swords for your right wing ultra nationalist militia with the proceeds of your prize-winning literature.
• Exhorting the troops to reinstate the emperor of Japan but nobody can hear you because there's a helicopter flying overhead.
• A poster of a kitten next to a poster of a samurai, with diametrically opposed mantras about how you ought to handle failure.
• Topics that leave you speechless.
• Founder Brain.
• Debunking a thing from philosophy.
• The Philosophy of Reversing a Linked List.
• The alternate universe where Banksy is a totalitarian dictator.
• Vladimir Putin tagging up the streets of Bristol in the 90s.
• Top hat, eyeball and coattails.
• The Residents of Theseus.
• Rednex.
• David Bowie starring as Tesla in The Prestige and self-driving off the set.
• The percentage of Teslas on the street
• Nice Stylized T as a Screw Shirt.
• Brainstorming places to hide in Copenhagen.
• The problem of how to define the bounds of the hide and seek legal play field.
• Playing hide and seek and knocking on a stranger's door and asking if you can hide in their house.
• Knocking on the door of the company that moved into the building your company was in six years ago, asking to use the conference room because you're six years late for a meeting.
• Journey to the End of the Night.
• Playing music and speaking in riddles.
• At what point it becomes morally correct to join the zombies.
• Why is it okay to name a thing after another thing? Why is it okay to name a band after someone else's song?
• Whether Skibidi Toilet has been cool, is currently cool, will become cool temporarily, or will become cool and stay forever.
• A meme based on a Youtube thing.
  
• Dadaist comedy Internet videos made in Garry's Mod.
• Changing the head so it's not owned by Valve.
• Generations starting the alphabet over, like hurricane names.
• Turn of the millennium coffee shop war stories.
• Drinking coffee at 2 AM on January 1st, 2000, looking out the window and waiting for the satellites to come crashing down.
• Tech folks successfully convincing people that the Y2K bug is a problem, but not what the problem actually was.
• What the Y2K bug was and how we solved it.
• The Corolla Must Have Control.
• The phone is too eager and the car is too greedy.
• The phone and the bluetooth speaker agreeing to connect, and isn't there somebody you forgot to ask??
• We invented this new thing but we don't know what it's for. Let's try to solve every problem with it and see if anything sticks.
• Everybody migrating to TempleOS to get away from LLMs.
• A lightweight operating system designed to be the Third Temple from the Hebrew bible.
• Writing to your colleague to retract the continuum hypothesizing.
• God's Chosen Programmer.
• Off-Topic Lords.
• A poem on the back of a bag of carrots.
• A poem having been added to a bag of carrots by a scoundrel.
• How many carrots you need to eat before you can be called a carrot man.
• Explaining hidden tracks by first explaining that music used to come in this form called "albums."
• If you have topics to talk about, we have a show for that, you don't put it on a hidden track on a CD in the 1990s.
• Living to regret your self-own.

Support Topic Lords

• Avery
• Linker

Topics:

• Twin Peaks
• Myxozoa
• How storytelling is failing us
• Bones and Shadows, by John Philip Johnson
  • https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56581/bones-and-shadows
• Novelizing films that originated as novels

Microtopics:

• A spike of interest corresponding with every episode you're on.
• How many hate listeners Topic Lords has.
• Chiaroscuro.
• Buying Linker's games so he doesn't die.
• Watching Blue Velvet while high.
• Finishing season two of Twin Peaks out of a sense of duty.
• A protagonist who you want to be happy.
• That time David Lynch bought five Woody Woodpecker dolls and named them Chucko, Buster, Pete, Bob and Dan, then had to cut them out of his life after their personalities changed.
• Focusing the energy you have on the things you love: filmmaking, painting and smoking.
• The David Lynch Foundation for the Human Mind.
• David Lynch changing the subject back to transcendental meditation.
• The permeable boundary between dreams and reality.
• David Lynch putting sawmills in every movie because he just likes sawmills.
• The disappearance of all-night diners.
• What it takes to get Denny's In small-town New Brunswick.
• Whether it's possible to mod the bad parts of Deadly Premonition.
• Putting evolutionary pressure on jellyfish to get smaller until they evolve back into a single-called organism.
• Mammals returning to the sea.
• The mutation that allows Henrietta Lacks to live forever.
• The cancerous organism that's been hitchhiking in dogs for over a thousand years.
• What kind of tumors are blowing around in the Tasmanian Devil whirlwind.
• Real and metaphorical spandrels.
• Where the Panda's sharp thumb came from.
• The kiwi egg-to-body-mass ratio.
• Big Bird, the evolutionary pinnacle of all birds.
• Introverted Darwinism.
• Keeping your toilet paper on the bed.
• It's an indie game, you have to put a dead wife in there somewhere.
• Obama's presidency as the end of history.
• That time everyone was terrified of superpredators.
• Human beings organizing facts info stories.
• One of the many human traits that cause problems.
• Interpreting observed facts differently when you are depressed.
• Virtue Ethics.
• Deducing ethics via pure reason.
• Whether it's true or false that Sherlock Holmes smoked a pipe.
• Flash games where you drone strike terrorists.
• Exploring a system by interacting with it.
• A poem about a guy being beaten up for money.
• Successfully talking.
• Becoming the bones in the last case.
• Pre-nostalgia.
• Answering a question by just saying shit.
• A video game adaption of a poem.
• An atheist take on Tarot readings.
• The opinions of someone who once read a lot of philosophy.
• Sensing the passage of time in a film clip of a stationary object.
• Splinter of the Mind's Eye and the Star Wars radio plays.
• The Weird Al song that's just the whole plot of The Phantom Menace.
• The Blade Runner and V for Vendetta novelizations.
• Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, the novelization.
• Kenneth Branagh rolling around in slime with a naked reanimated corpse because because Mary Shelley would've wanted it that way.
• A social media platform that was designed to be mindful of mental health, going out of business almost immediately.
  

Support Topic Lords

• Tyriq
• Stevie
• Avery

Topics:

• What is Dr. Mario's specialty?
• Boutique sardines
• Street Sharks (and the lies about them)
• PiCoSteveMo is over! (as of this recording)

Microtopics:

• Throwing out an idea like a plate of spaghetti, or a grenade.
• Odd Object.
• Piggy-back dual plugs.
• Now! That's What I Call Avery Burke, Vol. VII.
• Jason Shiga.
• Older kids who are into roughhousing and watching shark movies.
• Audio Issues Because of Dog.
• The only place on the Internet you can hear cardboard boxes rubbing against each other.
• Two hours of an attractive woman scraping her thumbnail on a microphone.
• Dr. Mario telling someone that they only have-a four months to live-a.
• The weird forehead mirror that old-timey doctors wear.
• The opinions of someone who's eaten cat food.
• Grandma barging in while you're eating dog food.
• Flintstones Cannibalism Vitamins.
• Barney's PTSD after the Neanderthal Wars.
• Wacky Races, the original MCU.
• Dr. Mario's pill pusherside hustle causing the opioid crisis.
• Ego Death Mario microdosing the germs in the pill bottle who transcend to the great pill bottle in the sky.
• Coming up with the conceit that your band is enemies with sea mammals and making all future audiences hate you.
• Three adorable sardines rowing a boat shaped like a dragon.
• An octopus tentacle that looks like a serial port or a 2x6 spot light.
• The animal that you're eating depicted in cartoon form as cheering you on.
• An anthropomorphic ginger root eating a ginger candy.
• Single-serving black characters.
• Eating a fish and finding an entire spine.
• The weirdest bone to find.
• Free floating animals gathering into a colony and turning into a face.
• The most popular fish sauce in ancient Rome.
• Sealing a whale hand in a trash can with duct tape for two years until it starts leaking and your roommate has to help you dispose of it wearing a hazmat suit.
• Tucking a whale bone under your trench coat and sneaking out of the museum.
• Famous whale disposal techniqus.
• Fishwife, fish life!
• Not knowing about the preexisting work that your favorite cartoon is in conversation with because you're a kid and don't know anything.
• Slammu, Ripster and Streex.
• Michelangelo, Leonardo, DiCaprio, and Don Angelo.
• Vin Diesel being very excited about the Street Sharks.
• IP Homeopathy.
• Sexy Mummy Costume.
• Using mumnies as train fuel because they are so plentiful.
• You can't get Mummy Brown any more because of Woke.
• Who has and hasn't heard of Tommy Tallarico.
• A toy that lets you shoot at the TV screen during the interactive parts of Captain Power.
• Fresh off the PiCoSteveMo boat.
• Graph going up emoji.
• Lots of different skill levels going on in there.
• Aardvarks and anteaters.
• A three hour celebration of weird things that games can be.
• Look Who's The Shining Two!
• Why the Sokoban puzzle in Ocarina of Time sucks.
• Puzzles vs. situations.
• Tony and the Tony Mechanic.
• The Thought Leader of the Thinky Games Community.

Support Topic Lords

• Avery
• Chris

Topics:

• Cross-Country Skiing
• Putting art where advertising usually goes
• Running Pico-8 on a Raspberry Pi
• The Day I Fell Down the Toilet by Steve Turner
  • https://ramblinglisasbookreviews.com/2016/09/20/poem-the-day-i-fell-down-the-toilet-by-steve-turner/
• I thought "snow" was one thing but it is about a million different things

Microtopics:

• Looking for a job as a programmer but finding one as a bard.
• A Transformers the Movie style power ballad.
• Stopping having a job on purpose.
• All the fun things you can do on mountains.
• Carrying around a VR helmet so you can take photos of a mountain.
• Snowy mountains on one side and lava fields on the other.
• Towns named after regular guys.
• Yelling at your barista that you live in Frisco.
• The tier list of San Francisco's rarest nicknames.
• The wrong kind of skiing.
• A kind of hiking that is faster and also you can slide down the hill.
• Cross-country snowboarding.
• Repeatedly popping out of your ski boots and landing in the snow barefoot.
• The most winter you've experienced in your entire life.
• Taking snow home from the mountains and putting it in a cup in your freezer.
• Breaking your toe while stage jumping.
• Best ways to not save a hypothermic toe.
• Devoting a portion of your massive intellect to making your friend's life interesting.
• Back before the Internet was threatening.
• The Avery ARG (or AARG).
• Writing a short story about your friend in the form of a dating personals ad and posting hundreds of copies all over town.
• Miranda July.
• An app that crowdsources uncomfortable personal interactions.
• A KFC billboard that has been defaced to unrecognizability but the life-sized statue of Colonel Sanders right next to it remains untouched.
• Partnering with Safeway to distribute your zine on the back of Safeway receipts.
• Mixing up your ammo with your pharmaceuticals so your mugger no longer feels iron deficient.
• Whether it's morally okay to appreciate a well-made advertisement.
• The advertisement where the guy is now on a horse.
• Spray tan parties happening in your area.
• Going to the buying place with your earth money.
• Your favorite deodorant being discontinued and buying the very last crate and rationing them even though you go to the gym every day.
• Handling Smellium with your bare hands.
• Smelling what happened to the scientists who discovered Smellium.
• Asking for a fun tool for Christmas even though you know you'll never have time to use it because maybe the idea of fun is enough.
• The screen saver only paying attention to mouse and keyboard input so when you're playing games you need to jiggle the mouse every few minutes or the screen saver kicks in
• Looking at headlines first thing in the morning to make yourself angry enough to get out of bed.
• Seeing a headline saying "10,000 people join Mastodon" and thinking it's talking about the metal band.
• A touring photographer whose job is is to photograph EDM acts staring at their laptops.
• Software developers figure out a more effective way to make money than making their users happy.
• Nonconsensual updates.
• Writing demos, like in the 90s, back when computers were fun.
• The optimism of feeling like computers were going to make people's lives better.
• Finding cool programs to download onto your computer.
• Getting a job writing Picotron BBSes in Lua.
• Waiting until Chat GPT learns how to use Picotron.
• Clippy but it's self-aware and hates itself.
• Asking Clippy for stories about Bill Gates.
• Desktop Pets.
• Bonzi Buddy pointedly reminding you that he has your credit card number.
• Writing a poem to get your dad to stop asking you if you're off the toilet.
• The scene from Trainspotting where the protagonist dives into the toilet.
• In twenty years when Winston is hosting Topic Lords and making Frog Fractions sequels.
• downpour.games
• Look at this, look what I did!
• Seeing snowflakes for the second time in your life.
• Snow: it's beautiful, unless it's in Avery's freezer.
• A frozen lake that you can just run around on and dogs love it.
• Snowboarding with a kite.
• Cross country snowboarding while holding a Swiffer.
• Contagious ice.
• 28 different shapes for the waters to be in.
• A metastable high pressure form of ice.
• The sci-fi lore of obscure ice.
• Virtually all the ice in the biosphere.
• Pauly Shore's lifetime achievement Oscar.
• Why climb a mountain when you could administer a Mastodon server?

Support Topic Lords

• Stevie
• Avery

Topics:

• A tour of silly medieval musical instruments
• The House of David, the baseball cult who all looked like oldtimey barbers.
• Arguing with Winston about how needing to pee works
• Avery's Non Mammalian Milk Corner
• Ode on the Mammoth Cheese Weighing over 7,000 Pounds
  • https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/content/ode-mammoth-cheese-weighing-over-7000-pounds

Microtopics:

• Why the show works like that.
• Asking people if they understand what's going on.
• Spy software.
• Exactly the kind of game you don't want to explain.
• Someone who has a sense of humor and thinks something is funny.
• A hat you can put on your frog.
• Why frogs are so damn popular.
• The game with the magnifying glass.
• Whether the recorder is a real instrument or a crappy toy for babies.
• Just how thicc this bass recorder is
• The supercomputer that's also a couch.
• Talking to your mom on the phone for 45 minutes because she can't stop listing medieval instruments.
• Recorders that are double recorders.
• Michael Fassbender teaching his clone how to play the flute.
• Eating a pair of garden shears.
• An umbrella handle that was given growth hormones that sounds kind of like a stylophone.
• An instrument that is curved so that you can play it on horseback without bonking the horse.
• The sackbut.
• A selfie stick but for a trombone.
• Sausage bassoons.
• Unholy Rackett.
• How long how many strings look it up?
• Insufflation tubes and dudelsacks..
• Versatile, like the Pogues.
• Bears riding unicycles but not very well.
• Overblowing.
• Jim the Overblower.
• Bringing up bugles to someone who works hospice.
• How many songs you can play on a bugle.
• Not wanting to play Beatles Rock Band because you with at BevMo.
• A photo of an early 20th century cult/baseball team that looks like a modern-day metal band.
• Not being able to make it to the majors so you settle for House of Dave.
• Someone who's never played Blaseball trying to explain Blaseball.
• Amusement parks started by cults.
• A pretty good way to end a baseball league.
• Additional amusement.
• Preserving tiny railways built by a baseball cult.
• A busy man who has no time to pee.
• Peristalsis.
• Persons currently experiencing hubris.
• What happens to your knowledge when you're not actively thinking about it.
• When you can truly say you know the capital of the United States.
• Waking up needing to pee and trying to fall back to sleep so that you forget you need to pee.
• Having a dream about urinals overflowing.
• Cutting nature at its joints.
• Preparing for Topicking.
• Whether the Jejune Institute made money.
• When Sacky Meets Butty.
• Signing a contract in someone else's blood.
• Yet another non-mammalian milk.
• Jacked, yoked, ripped and swole spiders.
• Imagery that's only unsettling because you don't regularly drink spider milk.
• Vestigial web butts.
• Sympathy for the young.
• Putting on a spider silk dress and never being able to take it off.
• A communal spider butthole web.
• Blinded by the milk, wrapped up in a douche.
• The first boutique New York restaurant to serve spider milk pancakes.
• Cutting out all the parts where people say something dumb.
• Drum Pants. (It turns your pants into a drum set.)
• We have seen the a Queen of Cheese.
• The worst rhyme scheme.
• A poem that screams 5th grade.
• Why does this web site have line numbers?
• Are you a bad enough dude to save the president's cheese?
• A poetic technique that can be really cool (but not in this poem)
• Confusing this mammoth cheese with another mammoth cheese.
• The most mammalian of all mammals.
• My Mother Milked a Million Mostly Male Mammoths.
• A huge ice cream tub carried by four ponies.
• 35 tons of milk
• Extremely fake beards.
• A thing people once said to sell chicken.

Support Topic Lords

• Maxx
• Avery

Topics:

• Change Ringing
• The differences between American and Japanese robotics teams
• This rug
  • https://www.rugstudio.com/funrugsfuntimeshapecomfts-163multi.aspx
  • A few days after I ordered it they emailed me canceling the order. I'm pretty sure this rug doesn't exist.
• Look what we found in the park in the dark
  • https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/KmODxwhW.jpg
• Grandma giving you a world's best grandma mug

Microtopics:

• Topics. Disgust.
• A video game experience that you will find relatable if you've ever moved.
• Making prototype furniture out of huge Tetris blocks and then forcing your friends to carry them around every time you move onto a new house.
• The kind of friend who believes the world should be a certain way and then acts like it is.
• Just frogs. Toads too. Mostly turtles.
• Frog-themed 8th birthday parties.
• Running a frog rescue out of your van.
• Frog Fractions 2: Revenge of the Fallen.
• Writing Bonfire of the Vanities but never reading it.
• Sport meets art: spart.
• Method ringing with two cycle sine waves.
• Installing a huge church organ in your home because they were giving it away for free but when you play a note the whole building catches on fire.
• Free Pianos On Line!
• Babysitting someone's upright piano while they go on the lam.
• The mattress story but with a piano.
• Where the warehouse came from.
• When the landlord comes by and you have to put a microphone over your bed to convince him that this is a recording studio, not a bedroom.
• Getting a pipe organ so you can play it while holding your brain in a jar and cackling.
• Sliding down the whale rib.
• Donating your brain to art so that they can slide it down the whale rib and try to hit a target.
• Experiencing change ringing in a regal square.
• Memorial ringing
• Bell ringing machines.
• Robots competing in team sports.
• Microsumo.
• Sumo printers smashing into each other.
• Making a fighting toaster for the fighting toaster league.
• Battle Bots vs. Robot Jox.
• Department stores with an entire floor for stationery.
• Buying Gundam models and never putting them together and just having a bunch of robot heads lying around.
• Major innovations in robot mouse maze navigation.
• A mouse with an inverted helicopter to keep it on the ground.
• A 3D maze with a robot mouse that can walk on walls and ceilings.
• Fun rugs fun time shapes to impress your teens with a trendy sense of style when you bring it into their room.
• A rug covered with keywords from the 90s internet.
• $87 for not that big of a rug.
• Bonding with your child over ISP servers.
• A visitor trying to bond with you about your ironic decor and you have to explain that sorry, no, it's supposed to be ironic.
• The illuminated manuscript version of an the ironic internet rug.
• A fantastic place to buy nuts and other bulk items.
• A limit of 1 kilogram of tapioca pearls per customer.
• Bringing the tapioca balls to life in the rice cooker.
• Inventing a new way to dispose of tapioca pearls every single day.
• Tiktok schticks that are connected to a minimum wage jobs so even if your tiktok starts making a bunch of money you still can't quit your shitty job.
• Having anxiety dreams about the coffee shop you worked at years ago.
• Non-mammalian milk enthusiasm.
• Being someone's non-mammalian milk guy.
• A bipedal walrus with jaundiced eyes in a jar the size of a walrus and it knows you're here.
• Leaving a turtle in the park and it's a 50/50 tossup whether it immediately dies or has a litter of a thousand baby turtles that devour the entire ecosystem.
• Companies that are named after the business that used to be in the building.
• A 1950s sign with a bowling pin on it that says "Safeway."
• Walking into the DNA lounge and demanding that they sequence some DNA.
• Military challenge coins.
• Meeting the world's best grandma and she hands you a "world's greatest grandma" mug to prove it.
• Seek god coin??

Support Topic Lords

• Avery
• Tyriq

Topics:

• Adam, Father of all humankind, was maybe a giant
• Heathcliff is still going and it's weird
• I've heard a million novelty metal covers but still nobody's done Truly Scrumptious / Doll on a Music Box from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
• "The Phone Call" by James Tate

Microtopics:

• Withholding all your best URLs until the end of the episode.
• Using lowercase Ls in place of Is and seeing if anybody notices.
• Leaving capitalizations to the whims of chaos. (Your fingers.)
• Teachers explaining that if you can't write in cursive by junior high your teachers will throw things at you and call you stupid.
• Adam and Eve growing to 18 feet tall.
• Pre-flood humans and their towering heights/lifespans/IQs.
• How to make your wisdom teeth fit again.
• Conspiracy theories that have no bearing on anything.
• Fighting wars over the estimated radius of the earth.
• The Nephilim.
• YHWH fanfiction.
• How many Jesuses are alive today.
• The friend you have with superhuman charisma and whether they ended up starting a cult.
• Getcherself a nice cult, settle down, have a thousand babies.
• The guy who was both a dwarf and a giant during his lifetime.
• Every tall person having been short at one point.
• Chain-smoking tweens drinking martinis and yelling at their secretaries.
• A Topic Lords ouroboros.
• Hypothesizing why the elderly people Heathcliff lives with have a child.
• Having a child for some reason.
• A humanoid robot with the word "meat" printed on its chest.
• The kind of people who read comics every day.
• Zippy the Pinhead.
• A weird underground subculture comic that somehow made it into newspaper syndication.
• Mustache Mondays vs. Mustache Lasagna.
• A milk mustache but for lasagna.
• A cartoon anvil that has its weight imprinted on it.
• Two side characters explaining the situation to each other.
• One of the birds says to the other, "Christ, what an asshole."
• Historians a thousand years from now deciding whether Heathcliff should be included in the Bible.
• After recorded media stops being a thing, episodes of The Simpsons being passed down as oral history.
• Rhapsodes.
• Contests for the best rhapsode.
• Hector of the Shining Helmet vs. Hector the Booty Inspector.
• Fillet episodes in the Odyssey and the Iliad.
• The Flaming Lips album that comes on four CDs that your supposed to play simultaneously, but nobody's ever bothered.
• How they handle hidden tracks on Spotify.
• How to deal with skits when you're ripping rap albums to mp3.
• The Meat Puppets playing a set in the middle of Nirvana'a MTV Unplugged set.
• Writing a song about a shooting star who's been turned into a rat and has just fallen in love with someone named Tristran, and trying to figure out what rhymes with Tristran.
• Working at the Brill Building.
• Tin Pan Alley.
• Nearly jumping out of your pants.
• Taking a high-paying job as a murder victim.
• The one where people wear horse skulls.
• The Scrambler, from issue #12 where the panels were all out of order.
• Working at the oil refinery until a giant spider comes and steals the Light of the Silmarils.
• Whether there's a werewolf in the Silmarillion.
• Biblical Exigesis.
• Getting email saying that your art is improving someone's life.
• A phone that can receive text messages but you have to pay extra to know who they're from.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Shannon
• Avery

Topics:

• Measure words
• Is color even real?
• https://www.reddit.com/r/Poetry/comments/hdrdlt/poem_my_cat_is_sad_spencer_madsen/

Microtopics:

• Game Changer.
• Why various albums aren't on Spotify.
• During the American Revolution when the British were always quartering punk bands in colonial household.
• The Bug Porn calendar that Shannon drew for the FF2 ARG.
• A singular bug in a pin-up pose.
• A praying mantis cosplaying as a nun.
• Learning a language and then forgetting it because you're too embarrassed to speak it around people.
• A soup vs. a bowl of soup.
• Thousands of years of associating this thing with this other thing.
• How singing works in tonal languages.
• The people who keep insisting that orange doesn't rhyme with anything.
• That time Tom Lehrer rhymed "orange" with "bizarre enjoyment."
• Memory palaces.
• Stand over mouth next to person equals.
• The "two six-packs" mnemonic for remembering what the two dots on the guitar fretboard mean.
• Mnemonics that you would prefer to forget.
• The blue/black/gold/white dress.
• Changing the perceived color of an object by changing the lighting in the room.
• Whether light is real.
• Naming a color and never telling anybody the name.
• Keeping a color swatch because your memory of a color might drift over time, but the swatch fades.
• Perfect pitch for color perception.
• Getting two sensory outputs from a single sensory input.
• A deeply visual species.
• Striving to be amazed and confused by things normal people take for granted.
• Visualization but for smells.
• A list of attributes of what your daughter looks like.
• Blind sight.
• Seeing but having no experience of sight.
• Hashtag Kant Folks.
• Discerning green and pink.
• Do these two sexy nazi ponies look the same to you?
• The purpose of music theory.
• The invention of standardized tunings.
• Where to find poems.
• A cat who does not have a cat.
• A cat wondering why nobody else in his family is a cat.
• Things it is funny for a cat to be sad about.
• Why the family cat didn't go to college.
• Making sure to get a pet early enough that you child can see it die before going to college.
• Getting a second dog vs. getting your dog a dog.
• Dog IQ tests.
• The placards at the dog shelter listing each dog's D&D stats and alignment.
• Cockatiel owners.
• A sporting event that measures how hungry you are.
• How many cinder blocks you'd pull for a kingdom's Klondike bar.
• Looking into a well during the full moon and saying Avery's name a hundred times.
• Dating a string of Lisas.
• Six Songs For Lisa.
• Starting your six song album on song number three.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• James
• Avery

Topics:

• Stone paper
• "The Flashing Blade"
• The Number Ones
  • https://www.stereogum.com/category/columns/the-number-ones/
• https://www.americanpoems.com/poets/stanley-kunitz/king-of-the-river/
• BREAKING NON MAMMALIAN MILK NEWS!! Sorry mammals, cockroaches make milk and it is considered a complete food

Microtopics:

• The latest on whether or not you've been canceled.
• Spotify rejecting your album because you don't believe in yourself enough.
• Spagbol.
• The very one that is being digested by you now.
• thisbolognesedoesnotexist.com
• Paper that is 60% stone.
• The price you pay for participating in art.
• Coffee that is more powerful than a laptop.
• What happens if you try to shred margarine.
• Documents only for the document control society.
• The Novelty FBI raiding your house and confiscating your Novelty Top Secret Documents and hiding them in their fake Groucho Marx glasses.
• The guy who bought the last 100 Groucho Marx glasses from Party City.
• Moustache Ninja.
• Why more people aren't talking about Moustache Ninja.
• The height of Pirate Ninja Robot Mustache Mania.
• Ankle Biter Man.
• Atrocities Guide.
• One of many reasons why real life superheroes are a bad idea.
• Superheroes: police except there is no oversight whatsoever.
• Avery's Angels on Phoenix Jones.
• If Seattle police arrest you for being nude, they are legally obligated to provide you with a dinner jacket for your jail stay.
• Heath Ledger instructing the audience to charge their shower.
• The Masked Magician Revealed.
• TV stage magic.
• David Copperfield raising the Titanic.
• The Cheap Trick song that got to #1.
• The songs that hit #1 because General Hospital used them on the soundtrack.
• An antidote to the idea that music used to be better.
• Breaking Up is Hard to Do.
• Finding a way to enjoy art that you didn't like before.
• Getting old and liking boring music.
• What radio formats overlap with Beautiful Music.
• A foam snake that shoots thirty feet into the air and then drifts into a nearby tree.
• Tumbling over the rocks until you paint them with your belly's blood.
• That other flesh, heavy with milt, bruised, battering toward the dam that lips the orgiastic pool.
• Limber and firm in the state of his shining, forever inheriting his salt kingdom, from which he is banished forever.
• The most animalistic and primitive part of your consciousness.
• An Atari 2600 game inspired by a poem about a fish.
• The level in Dante's Inferno where you have to fight unbaptized babies.
• A game with one foot in the majesty of Greek mythology and the other foot in what it's like to bash someone's head into the concrete.
• A great use of thumbsticks.
• Whether Wisdom Tree would've published the Dante's Inferno video game.
• Spending your entire life obsessed with the pear you stole as a kid.
• An illumination of someone kneeling in front of a pear tree and weeping.
• Pop songs about relationship situations.
• An idea that is not as old as music.
• A piece of music going right for the emotion, like the Windows Startup Sound.
• Melody in lyrics, in conversation with each other.
• Seeing a person and drawing a stick figure.
• How do I get too much into my own head?
• Why you're turning into a fish, and what the fish represents.
• Sea Monkeys' Garden of Earthly Delights.
• Do we want to get to the Cockroach Milk?
• Being accosted on the street by Topic Lords fans asking for non-mammalian milk news but you're like "sorry I'm saving this for Topic Lords"
• How many cockroaches it takes to make one serving of cockroach milk.
• Sobbing in front of the slab of meat that Rocky punched.
• Pouring cockroach milk onto stone paper to prove its resiliency.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Avery
• Jesse

Topics:

• Laserdisc
• Tracing the lineage of racehorses on Wikipedia
• Bread is too wide to fit in toasters
• https://twitter.com/mogwai_poet/status/1335354217335148546/photo/1
• Variants of bowling, now mostly lost to history, are like glimpses into possible worlds metaphysically close to our own

Microtopics:

• How to sound like a douchebag if you are a programmer who lives in Oakland.
• A Social Security Number that has way too many sixes in it.
• A disc that is the same size as an LP but looks like a CD and has a movie on it.
• Arcade games breaking whenever you transport them.
• Laserdiscs rusting.
• Integrating the likely degradation of the viewing medium into the piece itself.
• The Matrix on Betamax.
• The guy who owns all the Betamax players in your province.
• The canonical paths to becoming a Laserdisc collector.
• All the criteria used to curate the Criterion Collection.
• The advantages and disadvantages of CAV discs over CLV.
• Getting off the couch to flip the disc over halfway through the movie.
• Asking your robot butler to flip the Laserdisc over.
• Potoooooooo.
• Seeing the name of the Wii for the first time and wondering if it's a typo for World War 2 or if it's a typo for WiFi.
• Finding the They Live sunglasses and finally being able to read the Snickers ads.
• The three racehorses that all thoroughbred racehorses are descended from.
• Knowing more about the history of racehorses than about your own family tree, because racehorses are worth more than people.
• War booty from the battle of Vienna.
• The General Studbook.
• Going blind in one eye from staying up for three days straight doing logarithms.
• Bell Right Hooks and Cuban Menstrual Crisis.
• Whether the clown face registry still exists for juggalos.
• Nothing Sweet About Bees.
• What happened to bread?
• Your basic 4:3 bread vs. 4K ultra-wide bread.
• Your favorite toaster from the 1940s.
• A four slice toaster kind of day.
• Making food better with science and it's going to be way better than nature because it's science.
• Convincing Mr. Smeg not to put his name on the toasters his company manufactures.
• What market research firm decided that podcast listeners want underwear and mattresses.
• Constant angular velocity: the only way to rewind a movie.
• A magnetic poetry set that includes the word "Kafkaesque."
• How Kafkaesque the miscreant insects are.
• Whether Jim has ever touched any other human being.
• How Zoomers don't know about Graggle Simpson.
• A possible scenario that is metaphysically close to our own.
• How metaphysically close Canada is to the United States.
• Getting up at 4pm every day and bowling.
• A 3D model recreation of five-pin bowling.
• The amount of data visualization competence that went into dimensions.com.
• Candlepin and Duckpin bowling.
• The dimensions of various famous bowlers.
• Getting a parakeet and finding out how much water it displaces.
• Making a flask out of a parakeet so people think you just brought your pet parakeet to work and aren't drinking on the job.
• Buying a propane tank to use as a water bottle.
• What's wrong with Jim's listeners?
• Karate tournaments in the 80s and 90s.
• Assuming Avery's identity and looking in the mirror.
• To Mock A Mockingbird.
• Certified Bird Mockers.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Duncan
  • http://duncanrobson.com/
  • https://twitter.com/dunkr
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8V6QtlRbro
• Avery
  • https://averyburke.bandcamp.com/releases

Topics:

• Judging by the selection on eBay, the 1960's and 1970's seems to have been the golden age of belt buckles.
  • https://www.filfre.net/2019/07/chief-gates-comes-to-oakhurst-a-cop-drama/
• The time a parent of my kid's friend said "Do you remember Tetris?"
• JVC PocketMail
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PocketMail
• The Prelude, by Matthew Zapruder
  • https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/53843/the-prelude
• Hyperspecific collections
• Yiwum, the city in China that produces 60% of all the Christmas decorations in the world

Microtopics:

• An album that someday will be available on Spotify.
• The Mauretania comics by Detective Pikachu.
• The kind of work that falls out of relaxation.
• The Golden Age of Belt Buckles.
• Going into an eBay fugue state.
• Promotional belt buckles.
• The British obsession with American long haul truckers.
• The kind of video game where you have to file copious paperwork before and after you shoot someone.
• What Police Quest was before and after Daryl Gates was hired as lead designer.
• Whether there were any racist belt buckles in the 1960s.
• Buying 20 $2 games for Christmas rather than the one $40 game your kid actually asked for.
• Men's names from the 1960s and 1970s.
• Hewlett Packard belt buckles.
• The personalized belt buckles you'll sell at your merch table when you go back on tour.
• A conference about fingers.
• Talking to the funeral director before you're dead just in case you die someday.
• A point-of-sale system for funeral directors.
• Bidding on a Cheeto and getting outbid.
• Having It's-Its and That's-Its in the freezer and completing your collection with a What's-It.
• Remembering Tetris.
• Being a parent and making friends with people you have basically nothing in common with.
• Talking to normies about your nerd interests.
• Going into the Forever 21 and yelling "Skeletor!" and everybody cheers.
• People high-fiving you as you walk down the street in your Wolverine costume.
• Listening to an adult man gush about Power Rangers to you and realizing that probably Star Wars isn't any good after all and you just happened to be the right age for it.
• Star Wars fans trying to convince each other that being based on the Hero's Journey makes a story good art.
• Reading a mathematical proof that Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is actually exactly as good as Raiders of the Lost Ark and having no choice but to believe it.
• Remember Tetris? This is a topic about Tetris.
• Writing email in the jungle and getting the chance to send it if you survive all the quicksand.
• A product using technologies developed by NASA, i.e. one of the programmers drank Tang once.
• Dongling things to the Palm Pilot.
• An article from 1999 titled "Email on the Move."
• Check your pocket… you've got mail!
• Preserving your Motorola Razr M in amber so Jim can buy it on eBay the next time he's ordering a batch of Orbitz.
• The Linux open source phone that everybody likes but nobody's heard of.
• The idea of chocolate.
• A disappointing and super creepy bed and breakfast.
• Art where the artist has disguised a message for you.
• Contrasting a Diet Coke with Coleridge and Wordsworth.
• Freedom Power Style Motion.
• Having a bunch of Tumblrs and never going on Tumblr.
• Hours Played.
• A new weird thing that a video game can be.
• Collecting tumbleweeds.
• A tumbleweed the size of a car that stops at the red light.
• Movies from the 1930s giving a false impression of how much you need to worry about quicksand.
• Sentient poison oak.
• The sentient tumbleweed episode of The Outer Limits.
• Consuming media by fast-forwarding to the tumbleweed parts.
• A book of polaroids of all your favorite lighting fixtures.
• A list of every move in every game that Mario has ever been in.
• Desert Chrome.
• Drawing a van and airbrushing your drawing of a van.
• Jean-Claude Van Dad.
• Spending the rest of your life googling "van dad."
• Zoning your city by the kind of Christmas decorations sold.
• An ocean of booths selling plastic Santa Clauses as far as the eye can see.
• The city that sells the other 40% of Christmas decorations.
• The Christmas memeplex.
• Clone shoes with strange names.
• Running shoes for dogs.
• A romantic comedy set in the city in China entirely dedicated to selling Christmas decorations.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Stevie
• Avery
  • https://averyburke.bandcamp.com/

Topics:

• Collectable cheetos on Ebay
  • https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=rare+cheeto
• Japanese websites are stuck in the 90s. Any theories?
  • https://search.marginalia.nu/
• Medieval European and ancient Egyptian philosophy.
• Brad asks "Denatured alcohol: alcohol that has poison added to it to prevent people drinking it. What other things do we / could we intentionally pollute to restrict their usage?"
• The unusual puzzles of StarTropics.

Microtopics:

• Defining poop by its shape.
• The lava of the human body.
• The Content Distribution Baby growing up into a Content Distribution Man.
• An angry internet mob that won't say why they're angry so you just have to fix every problem until they go away.
• Legally changing your name to add a silent and invisible Bitcoin logo.
• Searching for collectible Cheetos on eBay.
• A Cheeto shaped like a lobster claw.
• Putting a Cheeto shaped like a cockatiel on eBay for months but nobody's buying so you give up and eat it.
• Whether there is a subculture of investors collecting rare Cheetos on eBay or if it's just a subculture of people listing Cheetos on eBay as a joke.
• heritageauctionsforcheetos.com
• Bidding $40,000 on a Cheeto shaped like Harambe when you have no intention of paying, because the worst that can happen is that your eBay score goes down by one point.
• Buying a penis-shaped collectible Cheeto for $1.40 but still waiting on it because it got caught up in escrow.
• Bidding on an eBay auction and walking away when you get outbid.
• Looking at collectible Cheeto auctions and then eBay won't stop trying to sell you posters of ladies canoodling.
• Cheeto misprints and their value on the collectors market.
• Arnold Schwarzenegger if his legs were joined together like a seal.
• The web sites we visited back before the internet had the power to reach into the real world and strangle it.
• A search engine optimized to return pages that are mostly static text.
• Loading the bottom of your web page with keywords.
• Keeping a designer on payroll so that every few years your interface can alternate between having gradients and being flat.
• Asking Jeeves things and he tells you the answers, like a modern day Delphi.
• Let's play: Flaming Hot Cheetos or Freezing Cold Cheetos?
• A cheerleader pyramid made of butlers.
• Scraping Wikipedia and formating the results like a book.
• A postcard with a picture of Kim Jong Un saying "Live, Laugh, Love."
• Pharaoh culture.
• A Canticle for Liebowitz.
• Medieval monks stumbling into a bomb shelter.
• Making an illuminated manuscript of instructions on how to build a bomb so you can give it to the Pope.
• The Learned Bede.
• The four dudes in your culture who can write and create original work.
• Kingdoms in medieval Europe, centered around the manors of rich noble Romans.
• Nearly everyone dying from the plague so all the public servants are in their early teens.
• Intelligible Forms.
• Aristotelean ideas about science.
• Going real alien.
• Ultra Rare Cheeto Shaped Like The Venerable Bede.
• The first dinosaur of Egypt.
• Inventing the razor because of your unsightly back hair.
• Waking up from anesthetic to find that the surgeon shaved body parts nowhere near the incision site, "because you're a hairy beast."
• First, do no hair.
• The Egyptian book of the Dead.
• The Egyptian conception of the afterlife, where you go underground and a guy with a crocodile head weighs your heart against the Feather of Truth and if your heart balances, you get to sit in a long line with your male predecessors for eternity, and that's the best possible outcome.
• Religions competing to provide the best afterlife.
• When we as a species learned to attach afterlife outcomes to ethical behavior, as opposed to dying in battle.
• Having a dream once where all the great kings, after they die they go to the House of Dust and eat clay for eternity, and deciding that that's a fact. That's canon now.
• The nine parts of the soul.
• Being constantly surrounded, your whole life, by monuments to death big enough to see from space.
• Adding a scent to natural gas so that you can smell when it's filling your house.
• Whether antifreeze is sweet and if so can a cat taste antifreeze.
• How one might test whether cats can taste sweet.
• Tongue meat analysis: a great way to tell.
• The Inverted Qualia Problem.
• Asking a cat if it can taste sweet, and the cat asks "what does sweet mean" and you say "sweet my internal experience when I put these white crystals in my mouth" and the cat is like "I also have an internal experience when I put these white crystals in my mouth."
• A video game related topic.
• Trying to locate your missing uncle who has been abducted by aliens.
• A video game NPC asking you for a password and to find it you can to have to dip the video game's manual in water in real life.
• An 80s video game puzzle that requires you to be familiar with solfege to solve it.
• How you could get away with a lot more bullshit back in the 80s.
• The experience of suddenly realizing that it's the piece of paper.
• Going into a portable trailer made up like a cool bachelor pad and noticing that you don't have a reflection in the mirror and upon further examination realizing that the mirror is actually a window into the same room reversed, down to the clock running counterclockwise.
• Sneaking irrelevant puzzles into someone else's room escape game.
• Forcing the employees of an escape room to escape an escape room of their own. (Jail.)
• The ultimate unrequited high five.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Avery
  • https://averyburke.bandcamp.com/releases
• Jay
  • https://twitter.com/jaytholen

Topics:

• Kowloon Walled City
• Internet communities gaining a reputation and then changing over time as members mature.
• The moral cost of the 303 Devilfish clone
• Justified and Ancient
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XP5oHL3zBDg
  • Unedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/Peeo6xZqeVs
• Cyber Nexus internet cafe in Lakeland Florida and late 1990s internet cafes in general
  • https://twitter.com/jaytholen/status/1370002162063990786

Microtopics:

• Putting all of Spotify on shuffle.
• Spotify rejecting your album because you put lyrics on the album cover.
• Immersing yourself in a shitty visual aesthetic until you love it and the guy at the record label rejects your album cover.
• Renaming your company to Content Distribution Baby now but the logo is still a baby on a CD.
• The Godaddy man and the pets dot com sock puppet.
• A demon face in the middle of a circuit board.
• The part of the show where we look at image search results together.
• Visiting Kowloon Walled City for the cheap dentistry.
• Going to a nightmare city to get your teeth worked on: an opportunity to die.
• One of several problems with working seven days a week and never taking a break.
• Blame! or perhaps Blam!
• Trying to live in the dystopian future where the construction nanobots run wild and convert all matter on the planet into endless nonsense staircases and ventilation ducts.
• The protagonist having a really cool gun.
• When the author doesn't know what's interesting about their own setting.
• Having to write a novel because nobody's invented D&D source books yet.
• Feeling like an outsider because you don't know which Dale Earnhardt crashed into a wall.
• An online pixel art isometric place to hang out.
• Being a jerk to people in an organized manner.
• Audio production subforums.
• How internet communities get radicalized and how they mellow out.
• Ironically doing outrageous stuff on the internet.
• The strange purity of being ahead of the curve.
• Memes as a bannable offense.
• Getting a Something Awful forum account for your birthday and never looking at it because you don't like awful things.
• A synthesizer for the singer songwriter who doesn't have a bass player.
• Discovering the future of techno in the bargain bin.
• The history of the TB-303.
• The Prophet-5 vs. the Prophet-6.
• A drum pad that is the first of its kind.
• The thing with the egg breaking against a wall and how you always side with the egg.
• Creating reproductions of saught after out of print old stuff.
• Having two guitars, one tuned in fifths and one tuned like a ukulele.
• Writing music that could never be played.
• Making games because you want to get your music in front of people.
• Jim Stormdancer and the Frog Fractions Players.
• Finally receiving the obscurity you've been craving.
• Writing a book about the KLF as a lens into your particular moral philosophy.
• Drum or Brown?
• Doom Demon Invisible.
• 5 times voted CMA female vocalist Tammy Wynette.
• Trying to gesture at Discordianism or other forms of alternative mysticism.
• Making a new game in character as a character from your last game.
• The Burning Man man.
• Presented with the Most Coveted Living Legend Award Sponsored By TNN.
• Hiring randos to sing and play instruments on your album and hiring entirely different randos to be in your music video.
• King Boy D and the other guy.
• Burning a million quid and then going around asking people why you burned a million quid.
• Good names for internet cafes.
• A square of computers.
• Not recognizing Stargate decor and assuming it's just sci fi Egypt themed.
• Losing at Quake for your birthday while your parents watch a Pink Floyd DVD with the owner of the Internet cafe.
• Which one is Cyber and which one is Nexus?
• Not remembering why your band was invited to play a set at the Interface of Language and Technology.
• That's a level 12 mage, get off of that!
• Whether an internet cafe is the same thing as a cyber cafe.
• The regular at your coffee shop who scalps tickets for a living.
• Whipping out a 61 key MIDI controller to write tracks at Starbucks.
• Trying to avoid situations where you'd accidentally give a philosophy lecture.
• What is an organism and what organisms do.
• Whether Aristotle knows that whales are mammals.
• A category of things that have an effect.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Stevie
  • https://www.hryx.net/
• Avery might be on Spotify.

Topics:

• BREAKING NON MAMMALIAN MILK NEWS: the Arapaima, the largest freshwater fish, feeds its young with a milky white substance that has a hormone found in mammal milk.
• Boats
  • https://www.vesselfinder.com/
  • https://twitter.com/sfships
  • https://twitter.com/Nature_Grrrl/status/1375168720495075338
• Angle Grinder Man
  • https://wiki.rlsh.net/wiki/Angle_Grinder_Man
  • https://wiki.rlsh.net/wiki/Bearman
• The Safety Dance, by Men Without Hats
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjPau5QYtYs
  • Unedited (syncable) commentary segment: https://youtu.be/NxucdoBgtSc
• Music generated by food
  • https://twitter.com/simongeist/status/1366072913301037057
• Ron Gallagher, who toured small clubs doing his famous brother's act, eventually resulting in a lawsuit and the estrangement of Leo Gallaher (the famous Gallagher) from his family

Microtopics:

• The miracle of life on this very special episode of Topic Lords.
• Fish milk.
• The pigeon milk t-shirt.
• Fish lactating out of their heads so the baby fish can swim through the milk cloud to improve their complexion.
• Photos of proud fishermen holding fish bigger than they are and drinking milk off of their heads.
• The top ten pores.
• The defensive pores millipedes use to shoot itchy silk at you like silly string.
• How if arachnids couldn't eat they'd die and how that's awesome actually.
• Solid state arachnids.
• The velvet worm.
• Painting so many enormous millipedes that your boyfriend goes to the pet shop to get you an enormous millipede to draw from life and he comes back with no millipedes but he does smell like almonds for a week.
• Creating a listener survey to see how many listeners made it past the topic about fish milk.
• Not naming the RRS Sir David Attenborough but throwing a bone to the internet by naming its little buddy boat that pops out Boaty McBoatface.
• Whether they're actually called pilots.
• Losing a whole boatload of rubber duckies so to this day rubber duckies are washing ashore along with disarticulated left feet.
• A Twitter bot that just says hello and goodbye to boats entering and leaving the San Francisco Bay.
• Tweeting at a boat to say "you're killin' it out there, boat" and being immediately suspended by moderation bots.
• Thousands of boat watchers in dinghies all over the ocean watching boat movement through binoculars and sending updates to vesselfinder.com via carrier pigeon.
• Birds that are constantly changing their names.
• How slough and slough are actually two different words.
• The rest of the boat.
• How snowplows get their names in Scotland.
• The top eight snowplow names in Minnesota.
• All the plow names that didn't make the cut.
• Plugging a hair dryer into the cigarette lighter and attaching it to your front bumper to melt the ice as you drive.
• A cop writing you a fix it ticket because your hair dryer cables are too tangled.
• Superheroes who make house calls.
• The police being completely unable to apprehend Angle Grinder man when his phone number and web site are totally public.
• Construction Luigi.
• Angle Grinder man and Wheel Clamp man both having the same publicity shot of doing a split and grinding the concrete.
• A mob of masked superheroes descending on you and beating you up while you try to drink a smoothie.
• Extreme Elvis.
• A superhero named Bear Man whose superpower is that he only eats salmon.
• Pouring one out for the Petoskey Batman.
• Trying to think of how The Safety Dance goes but all you can think of is the Humpty Dance.
• Getting a taste of Youtube's time-stretching algorithm and spitting it right back out.
• Really enjoying the tall grass.
• How to tell if somebody is running, frolicking or fleeing.
• An excellent prop stone wall with a bunch of old looking rocks.
• Extreme expressions of joy bursting with love as you walk through town screaming at everyone.
• Continuously jumping and smiling and not being sure which will tire you out first.
• S for safety.
• Putting a lute in the music video when there's no lute in the song.
• A split second of trenchant-seeming serious political commentary at the very end of this lighthearted music video.
• Chumbawumba turning out to be serious political artists.
• Going to genius.com to find out what The Safety Dance is really about.
• Claiming that The Safety Dance is not a nuclear protest song per se even though you don't really know what "per se" means.
• Drum hits triggered by popcorn pooping.
• The popcorn vessel.
• How all music is food-based if you think about it.
• How humans have been singing since they had mouths.
• Using popcorn as both a source of entropy and a tasty snack.
• Tracking down the source of experimental saxophone music in the subway so you can give them money and it turns out to be a squeaky belt in the escalator.
• The vegetable orchestra.
• Powering your synth rock band using a bank of potatoes.
• How potato-covered audio cables don't sound better than regular audio cables even though they are more delicious.
• The Gallagher Prime story.
• The Greek Tragedy of the Gallagher Bros.
• Hashtag let Leo work.
• Gallagher and Alf both being popular before we discovered what entertainment was.
• All the paperwork you need to fill out to put music on Spotify.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Avery might be on Spotify!
  • https://averyburke.bandcamp.com/releases
• Stevie is at @hryx on Twitter, and hryx.net

Topics:

• In my home town of San Jose, CA there is a Statue of the serpent god Quetzalcoatl. It looks like a large piece of perfectly formed dog poop. Everyone calls it "the poop snake." Let's talk about bad public art.
• Some paleontologists think that T-Rex used its tiny arms to help it get up after sleeping. I wish I had a pair of tiny arms to help me get up after sleeping.
• Doom 1.0's proto-VR mode
• John asks "Philosophical questions and concepts you independently discovered as a child regardless of how well-equipped you may or may not have been to explore them in depth."
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convolution_reverb

Microtopics:

• Putting your album on Spotify.
• Demanding your barista debate you and call him a coward.
• Reading about the philosopher who owns a coffee shop and debating them about ancient Roman tax codes for hours without buying anything.
• Going into a coffee shop just to prove a point.
• The hypothesis that the worse someone is at reading, the better they are at hearing and pronunciation.
• Inventing a time machine so you can be in the San Jose town square when the sculptor uncovers the obsidian poop snake.
• A statue of a ragdoll in a running pose with a realistic baby face superimposed on its stomach.
• A bust of Jesus made out of marshmallow Peeps.
• Trying to depict a half moon in 3D and ending up with a toenail clipping.
• The Pumpkin Fucker.
• A statue of a man being hit in the head with a bottle thrown by a babies flying biplanes.
• The statue at the border of Berkeley and Oakland they put there to remind everybody that Berkeley is us and Oakland is them.
• Being halfway through the Museum of Severed Body Parts when you decide you've had enough.
• The Dunning Kruger effect turning out to be fake.
• A strange way to find out that you have to stop being smug in this particular way.
• A T-rex curled up like a kitten.
• A T-rex sleeping hanging upside down like a bat.
• Dino Riders.
• Getting your wish for an extra pair of arms to help you get out of bed at night, but not being sure where to install them.
• The purpose of Grimace's second set of arms.
• Hiring a large unhappy looking purple guy to be your chain restaurant spokesperson.
• Hearing that the t-rex used his tiny arms to get up after sleeping and stealing t-rex arms from the local Natural History museum so you can use them to get out of bed.
• Deciding not move to the countryside and not heist any more after reading that paleontologists no longer think the t-rex uses its arms to get up from sleeping.
• The movie ending when the protagonists decide to cancel the movie's production.
• A topic you didn't write down.
• A reference to the lord because he's the lord.
• The Keck Cave.
• Some people paying thousands of dollars for a VR setup when these lab mice get it for free.
• Going to a mall in the early 90s and putting on a terrible VR headset that's guaranteed to make you throw up or your money back.
• The two independent promises of early 90s VR, one of which came to fruition decades ago.
• Connecting three monitors over an ipecac network.
• Accidentally saturating the network with packets so that nobody else can use it.
• A networked video game interpreting any incoming packets as a new game state regardless of their provenance.
• VR coming to prominence in the 90s after the Garbage Pail Kids made puking mainstream.
• The R-Zone.
• A VR setup that only shows images to one eye.
• The R-Zone chip tune rendition of the Daytona USA theme.
• Writing a program to convert MIDI music into a monophonic square wave and just accepting its output as the best possible result.
• Asking your parents for Marble Madness and they buy you the Tiger Electronics version of Marble Madness.
• A d-pad dressed up to look like a trackball, to fool your mom.
• Well-designed games that fit within the constraints of the medium.
• A Game and Watch game revealing its final boss by unlocking the hinge that lets you fold the LCD screen together like a Mad Fold-In.
• Barcode Battler.
• A slot to swipe cards.
• Trying to find the best barcode to swipe to create the swolest Barcode Battler.
• Doctoring barcodes with a sharpie by making the Beef Bar thicker.
• Learning to read barcodes by sight.
• Bleeping out a story with the R-Zone Daytona USA theme if it turns out you've already heard the story before.
• Convincing a barista to sign up for your Bitcoin wallet software so you can pay for your coffee in Bitcoin.
• Putting up QR codes of your coffee shop's menu all around the city so curious people can scan your QR code and be like "oh, luckily I was looking for a coffee shop, I wonder if this one is nearby."
• Tattooing a QR code of your coffee menu on your arm.
• Inventing the philosophical concept of the toothbrush and thinking "nah, that'd never work."
• Staring at the bathroom tiles while you invent the Pythagorean Theorem.
• Independently inventing the philosophical concept of Alf.
• Alf's real name in the Alf lore.
• Seeing Alf mourn the destruction of his home planet and realizing that one day everyone you know will die.
• A real rip-the-bandaid-off approach to introducing the concept of mortality.
• Alf Clausen, the composer of the ALF theme song.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Jesse is @thefringthing on Twitter.
• Avery has a Facebook somewhere and if you find it you can ask him whether he's playing any live shows.

Topics:

• 2:03 Math problems that are easy to explain but unsolved or unsolvable.
  • https://www2.stetson.edu/~efriedma/squinsqu/
• 13:28 The list of Mr. Potato Head's accomplishments on his Wikipedia page makes him sound like a real person who was perhaps an ambassador.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Potato_Head
  • https://www.ashrita.com/about/
• 23:36 Hypothesis: a steadily tedious job becomes bearable when you procrastinate and then do it in short, frenetic bursts
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_ladder
  • Salmon cannon. https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/animals/a28678200/fish-tube-video/
• 35:25 Kaz asks: your conversation about language changing to people's misunderstandings reminded me of how "pitted" olives have no pits in them, and how "inflammable" is confusing, so "flammable" was coined.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunked_term
• 44:33 Theory: humans are unconsciously driving the evolution of some kinds of small birds toward cuter features and behaviors.
  • Samurai-lookin' crab. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heikegani
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Dan-no-ura
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution
• 48:10 The "Please Call Stella" accent database
  • http://accent.gmu.edu/browse_language.php?function=detail&speakerid=145
  • WMAC Masters. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqJSKeBKCM0
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFL_(2020) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFL_(2001)
  • Slam Ball TOP PLAYS. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PPuV7jK33k

Microtopics:

• Writing a song and realizing that you just wrote Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies by mistake.
• Not the coolest thing to accidentally be ripping off.
• Rapidly shutting down the entire idea of introducing yourself.
• Continuing to talk about about how mysterious Jesse is.
• The question of whether a problem that has been proven unsolvable is as solved as it can be.
• Asking two people to simultaneously explain Goldbach's Conjecture.
• Four followed by more zeroes that would be in a trillion.
• Determine whether the RDA of Iron is a multiple of two primes while choosing a can of soup.
• Hitting the last prime number and running out.
• Paul Erdos' advice for dealing with aliens who request Diagonal Ramsey Numbers.
• Avery's favorite math proof.
• Explaining to your bosses that your current task is technically uncomputable.
• Not being able to elaborate on packing arc segments because biotech analysts might have you killed.
• Yelling excitedly about graph isomorphism at the gym and tripping the Lunk Alarm.
• Disappointment that Mr. Potato Head doesn't have an honorary doctorate.
• Mr. Potato Head's presidential physical fitness award.
• Potato cannibalism.
• Most Votes For Mr. Potato Head In A Political Campaign.
• Everyone who has finished Super Mario Bros. 2 in front of a Twin Galaxies representative.
• A strange man lurking behind you while you play Mario, writing down your score.
• The guy 120 Guinness World Records, or 119 if you don't count the "Most Guinness Records Held At Once" record.
• Potato sack racing a yak across the Mongolian desert.
• Most Yaks Raced Through The Mongolian Desert. (1)
• The near worldwide tie of Most Guinness Records Not Held At Once.
• Walking using shovels as stilts.
• Most balloons inflated to inches in one hour. (671)
• Slicing potatoes while hopping on a shovel.
• Inheriting two shovels from your uncle's estate and trying to figure out what world records you can set using them.
• Longest distance continuously somersaulting. (12 miles)
• Whether cartwheeling for 12 miles is more strenuous than somersaulting for 12 miles.
• Jumping on a pogo stick until your O2 tank is depleted.
• Sleeping holding a brick.
• Most Injuries Not Incurred Trying To Break World Records.
• Trying to remember Fish Ladders but being derailed by the Fish Cannon.
• Taking a break from counting fish.
• Not performing any medicine for 10 hours and then in the next hour frantically performing 10x as much medicine as you normally would.
• Buying a short-range electric car to teach yourself to plan better.
• Being really confused by the turtle appearing on your dashboard and then the car turning off.
• A dashboard light that's like the no smoking sign except instead of a cigarette it's a picture of your car.
• Sneaking onto a billionaire's estate to furtively charge your Nissan Leaf.
• Looking at security cam footage and seeing that you gave electricity to Doctor Who in a time of need.
• The incredible variety of charge ports on a Nissan Leaf.
• Having trophies ready to distribute as soon as you're allowed to leave the house.
• Ordering yourself a "best attitude" trophy.
• The gradient of a trophy's meaninglessness.
• Ordering a bunch of trophies from Crown Awards and subsequently every ad you see being for Crown Awards.
• Delving too deep into what a trophy is until it loses all meaning.
• Realizing you could've ordered trophies better and throwing your existing trophies in the trash.
• Passions being both flammable and inflammable.
• Words that have changed meanings because of persistent misunderstandings.
• Having a story about corn husks.
• Holding a corn husk in the grocery store and saying "Ah! Corn husks!"
• Explaining to schoolchildren that they used corn husks to wipe before toilet paper was invented but the children don't know what husks are so they assume you mean corn cobs.
• Not eating the crabs that look like your forefathers.
• Paying more attention to cats who cry at the same frequency as human babies.
• Not eating the moths that look more like the soot-covered trees they're hiding on.
• Sphinx Of Black Quartz, Judge My Vow except for the IPA.
• Comparing accents visually.
• Inventing new accents to compensate for accents merging into each other.
• Having a particularly grating way of speaking and blaming it on being from San Francisco.
• Your dead relative not listening to this podcast.
• Whether or not Dragon's Lair is a pun.
• Yelling like a soda jerk when the order is ready and nobody coming to pick it up because they can't understand what you're saying.
• The British TV show that Sanford & Son was based on.
• Memorizing your favorite carnival barker pitch and reciting it unprompted at family gatherings.
• Field recordings of carnival barkers from the 1950s.
• Pro Wrestling somehow retaining its weird 19th-century carny-speak for over a century.
• Channeling the dark energy from your urn while you fight Hulk Hogan.
• WMAC Masters, the martial arts tournament series with health bars on the screen.
• If Undertaker and Hulk Hogan were trucks.
• Hockey except you play it with a basketball and there are trampolines on the floor.
• Taking basketball and making it extreme.
• Sitting around until one of you thinks of a way to end the show.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Tyriq is working on video games including Catacomb Kids: https://fourbitfriday.itch.io/catacombkids and has a Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/FourbitFriday
• Avery still made that solo album. https://averyburke.bandcamp.com/releases

Topics

• 5:12 Reading non-religious texts as scripture.
  • Harry Potter and the Sacred Text. http://www.harrypottersacredtext.com/
  • Orphans of the Sky. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphans_of_the_Sky
  • Generation Ships. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_ship
  • Water. https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Water
  • Wookieepedia has removed Poggle the Greater so I guess their editors are just as serious-business as Wikipedia's.
  • Video Game Advisor. https://twitter.com/VGAdvisor
• 18:13 I just found out that "pitched battle" means "pitch" as in "sales pitch" as opposed to "fever pitch."
  • Pitched battle on Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitched_battle
  • Pitched battle on Merriam Webster. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pitched%20battle
• 24:01 How do you really use carrier pigeons?
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homing_pigeon
  • Pigeon racing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeon_racing
• 32:05 Larry asks: "Which ship is the best one?"
  • Earthships. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthship
  • Dyson spheres. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
  • Is it Hogwarts or just Britain? https://www.reddit.com/r/harrypotter/comments/ajmpqi/nonbritish_harry_potter_fans_what_are_some_things/
• 40:53 One of two ways of doing a thing.
• 52:17 The switch in ancient Greece from clothed to naked sports.

Microtopics:

• Taking a bite out of a cartoon bird and leaving a tooth-shaped hole, like a cookie.
• Empire Records now being more real than Tower Records.
• Not remembering record stores.
• Mowing your face into a lawn made of tiny green clones of you.
• Trusting that in a couple years your record will be classic enough that dads will want it for Christmas.
• Trying to glean philosophy and life lessons out of the Bible even if you don't believe it's real.
• Trying to glean philosophy and life lessons out of Harry Potter even if you don't believe it's real.
• Star Wars being more real than Tower Records.
• Mixing methamphetamines and marriage.
• Language changing to mean the thing people misunderstand it to mean.
• Drinking tea and watching war as if it's a sport.
• Wearing enormous flags so people can see at a glance how the battle is going.
• Pantsed and unpantsed meaning the same thing.
• The union of shells and the union of unshelledness.
• The dude whose job it is to take homing pigeons away from home.
• Homing pigeons basically being a rubber band.
• Defcon attendees hacking the pigeon timestamp machine to win the pigeon race.
• Buying a signed shot polisher from the guy who won the International Barista Championships.
• Going to the barista gym up keep your skills up between barista gigs.
• Coming back from your barista sabbatical and discovering all coffee is now made in node.js.
• Not letting anyone else use the espresso machine you convinced management to pay for.
• Being both a barista and a bard at GitHub.
• Singing to GitHub employees a tale of the GitHub CEOs valor.
• The Roman alphabet existing in the Star Wars universe.
• Being a huge fan of Dyson spheres.
• Shamefully burying your fanfic in the desert, like E.T.
• Wanting to live in a pile of garbage.
• Wanting to live in a desert house, but not in the desert itself.
• Forming complex structures using simple rules.
• Wizards just pooping on the ground and magicking it away.
• Being furious when someone peels a banana wrong.
• Orienting your toilet paper so it's harder for cats to unroll.
• Cats sticking their paws under the door.
• Being sad because the doors are too flush with the ground for a cat paw to say hi.
• Bringing your guitar case to lure your cat admirer away from you.
• Waking up screaming about raccoons.
• A cat's ability to form a mental model of the world.
• Unloading the front door from memory when you get to the second floor.
• Never getting the dog you wanted so you get an iguana instead.
• Waking up snuggling a cold handbag.
• Whether lizards snuggle with sleeping deer in the wild.
• Earnestly proposing a Utopia ruled by you and your friends.
• Doing the Olympics naked being a week-long fad at best.
• Soccer fandoms gaining political power and going to war with one another.
• Soccer's popularity fading immediately after its invention, being just one of millions of microsports.
• Going into the wrestling pit with a spring loaded revolver up your sleeve.
• Voting somebody off the island of Earth.
• Biting open your cell phone tooth and the liquid going into a mold in your stomach shaped like a cell phone and pooping out a cell phone.
• There also being a mold for a cell tower in your stomach.
• Being qualified to gatekeep a culture because you once dated someone of that culture.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Elena is reading Cordyceps by Benedict_SC. https://archiveofourown.org/works/6178036/chapters/14154868
• Avery's solo album is on Bandcamp. https://averyburke.bandcamp.com/releases

Topics:

• 2:58 Male pigeons feed their young with "crop milk" produced in glands in their throat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_milk
  • Fennec Foxes. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=fennec&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images
  • "Squid will survive and may even flourish under even the worst-case ocean acidification scenarios." https://news-oceanacidification-icc.org/2019/06/14/squid-could-thrive-under-climate-change/
  • The Honeyguide will show you the honey. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeyguide
  • Do birds sweat? https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20061208141845AAtuY9L
  • "Several months before his death, Lee had an operation to remove the sweat glands from his armpits." And this may have lead to his death from heat stroke. https://www.history.com/news/bruce-lee-death-mystery-solved-sweat-glands
• 18:07 Elena's friends use lexicalized emoji to communicate.
  • Alice and Kev, homeless Sims. https://aliceandkev.wordpress.com/
  • Happy Birthday, Wanda June. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Birthday,_Wanda_June
• 35:08 The story of the guy who wanted and then didn't want a mattress.
  • Vintage Pump Organs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiqnINpIz74
• 44:46 Singing cowboys and their ethical codes, which demanded their young fans keep clean and invest in savings accounts. http://www.cowboyway.com/GeneAutry.htm
  • Alice's Restaurant Massacree: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPx2t7xoF1k
• 55:40 Dimensions in candy space: chocolate, fruit, ...?
  • All figs contain a dissolved wasp. https://gardencollage.com/inspire/wild-earth/true-dead-wasps-inside-figs/
  • "An emerald cockroach wasp (Ampulex compressa) can control the minds of roaches with a sting of its venom." https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2018/02/parasitic-wasps-parkinsons-future-research-spd/
  • The neotenized Domesticated Red Fox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_red_fox
  • Humans may have domesticated themselves: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/how-humans-maybe-domesticated-themselves

Microtopics:

• Infohazards.
• Living in a house with instruments on the wall because you're a musician, not because you're a massive hipster.
• Scientists who would describe cottage cheese as creamy.
• Pigeon milk cappuccinos.
• Animals that thrive in the city biome.
• Anaerobic squid thriving in the oceans we ruined.
• Honey-loving birds ditching their lame badger companions for fire-making humans.
• Flame-throwing badgers demanding bird exes take them back.
• Birds sweating out of their throats.
• East Asian people have different earwax from white people.
• Going deaf every few months due to earwax buildup.
• Monetizing your overactive sebaceous glands.
• Transplanting superior Asian sebaceous glands into your shitty white person's body.
• What do mammals have that birds haven't taken from us?
• The kiwi bird has ostrich-sized eggs.
• Realizing that the kiwi isn't the size of a kiwi.
• Thanking people by applying a turkey to them.
• Missing the rest of the conversation because you were trying to find the perfect emoji.
• Needing more than one train emoji.
• Starving because your food options are equidistant.
• Building the perfect Sims family so you can wreck their lives.
• Walking into a random house and the occupants being fine with it.
• Debuting moon landing footage you found in the bathroom.
• Opening up a cabinet at NASA and moon rocks spilling out.
• Your bosses at NASA not really caring when you destroy old SETI documents.
• Cats climbing discarded mattresses to hunt.
• Sense of thirst being hereditary.
• Kidney stones as a delayed sign of thirst.
• Finally getting to the part where the guy wants a mattress.
• Being finished loving the mattress.
• The Sunken Mattress Fallacy.
• Discovering the organ you just destroyed was from the 19th century.
• Playing music by touching the bones of a dead creature.
• Being the de facto authority because everyone else knows even less.
• Putting money into Gene Autrey's savings account.
• Building good citizens through singing cowboys.
• Issuing an arrest warrant for secret reasons.
• Appreciating the 19th-century sheriff's weird forehead while waiting to be arrested.
• Sitting there on the Group W bench.
• Teacher rewarding you with the cheapest possible candy.
• Mistaking your deodorant for tamarind candy.
• Being weird in the way that figs are weird.
• Fertilizing figs with your dissolved corpse.
• Sharing your fig with a friend so only one of you eats a dissolved wasp.
• Not believing new information because it's implausible that you didn't already know it.
• Wasps parasiting other wasps.
• Figs no longer being considered vegan.
• Closing your tiger restaurant because tigers are infeasible to farm.
• Accidentally inventing puppies when you just wanted your fox farm to be safer.
• Collecting a breeding population of raccoons.
• Rats escaping their cage so they can cuddle you.
• Outliving your pet parrot.
• Being an ageless rat guardian.
• Orcas rubbing themselves on flat rocks and nobody knows why.
• Orcas rubbing themselves on flat rocks because they're itchy.
• An octopus friend to untangle wires for you.
• Uplifting the octopus race merely by lengthening their lifespan.
• Uplifted octopodes inventing Twitter and becoming miserable.
• Thinking your chimp knows ASL because it's mirroring your actions.
• Worshiping Cthulhu in a secular humanist kind of way.
• Making jokes no-one will get instead of doing proper marketing.

Support Topic Lords