• Ben
• Andrew

Topics:

• Super Nintendo World's theming is on point
• The ABC of Style - A Guide to Plain English (book)
• Can you still rent game consoles?
• Matsuo Bashô: Frog Haiku
  • https://www.bopsecrets.org/gateway/passages/basho-frog.htm
  • https://itch.io/jam/variety-megajam-2022/topic/2514101/2nd-poem-
• Pixel art impressionism
  • https://twitter.com/MarioBrothBlog/status/1801616946837823790

Microtopics:

• The games you should've bought when the Steam Spring Sale was still going.
• Citizen Sleeper 2.
• Being excited about a new project until you landlord tells you to move out.
• Real-life POW blocks.
• Timing your punch so that the shell pops out.
• The park employees doing their best to ameliorate the bad game design of the theme park.
• Rushing to hit the snooze button so the piranha plant doesn't wake up.
• A plant that's not quite as big as Audrey II.
• Buying the wrist band so that you can punch blocks to get coins and find all the KONG letters.
• Using your shadow to interact with a video game.
• Running from the park entrance to your favorite ride right when the park opens and there's already a two hour line.
• A picture that you took with your camera and somehow they made reality look cel shaded.
• Super Mushroom Croutons.
• Clipping the AR goggles into the Mario hat.
• No matter where you look, stuff is happening all the time.
• Whether kids in Japan handle failure better than kids in California.
• A phone booth, except it exists.
• A book about pedantry.
• When to use difference vs. discrepancy.
• Reading text aloud but internalizing it not at all.
• The model of the mind where you are a passive observer sitting in the backseat thinking about pancakes while the driver is doing all the thinking and acting.
• Whether the person who struggles to read gets more out of the text than the person who reads effortlessly, because they're spending more time on it
• Two full pages about "like."
• Faces similar to faces you've never seen before.
• Drive it like you hate it vs. drive it as if you hate it.
• Utilizing a big word.
• Phrasing something in an awkward way for entertainment purposes.
• One of the more expensive things you can rent.
• Being able to afford all the games that you want. (Not that many game consoles.)
• Naughty Dog remaking The Last of Us for the third time.
• Sending an assassin to the Second to Last Blockbuster.
• Not knowing how a certain business works because you refuse to give them your social security number.
• Digitally renting a PS5. (It has fingers.)
• Putting stickers on your toilet claiming that it's an Xbox.
• Building a Mario Kart course into your house.
• Sharing your cool social security number.
• Pronouncing Japanese like someone who is covered in tattoos of Pokemon.
• Frog-jump-in Water-sound.
• Pond. Frog. Plop.
• Localizing a Japanese poem into sculpture.
• What is art? What is anything?
• Looking at a pixel art face and thinking "whoa, what's going on with that guy?"
• Pixel art being able to represent detail at a certain scale, but only if it aligns with the directionality of the grid.
• Trying to represent a cartoon world realistically.
• Walking into a dungeon and being surrounded by statues that look like sentries.
• Recognizing a blob of pixels as representing the idea of a decoration and never thinking about it again.
• Fan art of Dr. Robotnik's niece.
• High color, high detail, low resolution.
• Weird rendering techniques that are texture mapping adjacent.
• Line Cook.
• A blue lid that feels sort of mayo.
• Only realizing late in life that three lines makes a ladder.
• The main places that you don't post.

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• Ben
• Nicholas

Topics:

• Let me describe to you the Australian treats I sent my Canadian friend
• The UX of live sport is terrible
• Game jam idea!
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_that_Buddha_would_not_play
• I Continue to Dream, by Langston Hughes
  • https://mypoeticside.com/show-classic-poem-13632
• Being overly patriotic and repping the national identity but only when around foreigners, is this something everyone does or just aussies?

Microtopics:

• Projects that you can't talk about yet
• Telling a joke for international joke day.
• A very busy day for Australians.
• Sending 3 kilos of lollies to your co-worker in Canada.
• It's the way it shatters that matters.
• Cherry Ripes.
• The thinking man's candy.
• Chicken Crimpy.
• A biscuit inspired by Golden Gaytime.
• "It's hard to have a Gaytime on your own."
• Renaming chocolate jelly babies to be less racist.
• A real enthusiasm for desiccated coconut.
• Butter chicken parmigiana.
• P burger candy.
• Whether kangaroos are hunted or farmed.
• Whether kangaroos are the same size as the kangaroo fruit.
• The waiter in Japan staring at you until you eat the single slice of kiwi.
• The official ranking of fruit prestige in Japan, with melon only being bested by keys and Galaga ships.
• How many footballs they have in Australia. (At least three, maybe six.)
• A sport where nobody can tell when somebody has scored so the whole audience is constantly on edge.
• The theme song for the guy coming up to bat.
• Booing when your team scores, because they didn't score more.
• Whether Eurovision is better when you're not in Europe.
• Correlating sports with Eurovision.
• A little song and dance that's definitely not political.
• XFL camera operators running around on the field.
• Improving sports broadcasts with drone cameras.
• A comprehensive list of games that are causes for negligence.
• Games on boards with 8 or 10 rows (or the same games played in the sky).
• Avoiding the line to be avoided.
• Making a mark on a wall and deciding if it looks like an elephant.
• There's no throwing, Buddha! This is not a cause for negligence.
• How the Buddha feels about the Mersenne Twister.
• An abacus except it's a roller coaster track.
• Tracing letters in the air or on a friend's back.
• Even more games Buddha would not play.
• The minigame from the beginning of Mario 64 where you stretch out his eyes.
• What Shall it Be?
• In this game you are the video game and you are the one being played.
• A video game adaptation of the less half fun of Pictionary.
• Kinect Charades.
• Using the Kinect voice to say "it's goat!"
• It turns out Molyneux was wearing the business all along.
• Turning your dream into art. Like a video game! Or something more artistic.
• Dubbing your podcast onto cassette tape and calling it an Audio Zine.
• The Creative Labs Creative Zen.
• Setting up your sound card and hearing digitized speech in Leisure Suit Larry.
• Fond memories of listening to digital audio on your Creative Labs Sound Blaster.
• Dr. Sbaitso and Dr. Sbaitso imitators.
• What you do when your dad isn't around to help you boot up Red Alert.
• An FMV adventure game set in Germany.
• The Red Alert installation experience.
• Tim Curry giving his all in the Red Alert FMV cutscenes.
• An oral history of Tim Curry's escape into the one place uncorrupted by capitalism.
• Enjoying the Aboriginal Sauce at Outback Steakhouse.
• Australians explaining that America also started as a prison colony
• Hamilton didn't talk about this!
• The Simpsons writing room discovering the Coriolis effect and realizing that they need to tell the world so it's lucky that anything they write will be broadcast on national television and on streaming services for decades to come.
• Everyone in your age bracket having the first ten seasons of the Simpsons memorized.
• Finding Frinkiac, analogous to discovering a new Blender plug-in.
• Lying on the couch and taking a photo of the TV.
• Having a mobile game and sending the APK to anyone who asks nicely.

Support Topic Lords

• Ben
• JohnB

Topics:

• Game & Watch Gallery
• Halloween's never on the weekend, so I made Novemberween
• Square mattresses
• Eight Line Poem
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVqNJKQiPCA
  • https://genius.com/3143344
• The most entertaining bit of the new Spider-Man 2 game has been sitting on a bench

Microtopics:

• Fellow Traveler.
• Citizen Sleeper: at least one person's game of the year.
• State fair taffy.
• Where to find seasonal taffy bargains.
• Terrifying taffy flavors.
• Single game LCD handhelds.
• Gunplay Yokoi.
• Withered technology.
• The RC car that can only turn left because right was cut for scope.
• Games where things are bouncing across the screen.
• Tiger Electronics Double Dragon.
• The earliest, most boring Game and Watch game.
• A fun clock that's fun to watch.
• Putting your face as the juggler in Ball for the Game Boy Camera.
• What they did before d-pads.
• A Print the Legend situation.
• Mario Bros II for the Commodore 64.
• Porting Game and Watch games to card stock.
• Releasing a floppy disk reader for the Game Boy Advance in 2023.
• Mario's Bombs Away, in Panorama Vision.
• Moving slower the more gold you're carrying.
• Toad walking across a bunch of seagulls.
• Trying to get 16 player Faceball up and running.
• The Burger King vs. Hungry Jack's era.
• The Lost Lost Levels.
• The most polite pumpkin head person you've ever met.
• Inventing a new Halloween that happens the first weekend after Halloween so you can get candy at a discount.
• Implicating the viewers in your terrible horror movie marathon.
• Terrifying cakes with spooky words on them like "mortgage"
• Tammy and the T-Rex.
• A spooky guy in a helmet who races people in his car (and kills them)
• Putting pieces of Stonehenge into circuitry to make children's faces turn into bugs.
• A movie about a cat that vomits up another cat.
• A very spooky four dollar pumpkin man.
• Neglecting upkeep on your house for thirty years to celebrate Halloween.
• Novemberween every Sunday.
• How to celebrate Labor Day.
• Rotating a square mattress 90 degrees.
• Going into the mattress store and unrolling the amount of mattress you want from the spool and getting it cut to order.
• Alternate reality How It's Made videos.
• The Manchester Department.
• Super Passive Aggressive Xenomorph Roommate Irritation Simulator.
• Rolling the dice to determine which side of the cube mattress you're sleeping on tonight.
• Rotating the tires on your racecar bed.
• Asking the cat for poem opinions.
• Sometimes the sun is just the sun. (Not this time though – it's David Bowie.)
• Plugs within plugs.
• All the different games named "Spider-Man 2"
• Using your Spider Radar to track down the next objective.
• A video game where you go on a holiday to Greece and stab a bunch of people.
• The distressing absence of Mario Odyssey 2.
• Finally, a Super Mario game you can finish without hating yourself.
• A grown-up with adult things to do, like cooking bacon and receiving mail.
• The Trophy Seller in Nier Automata.
• Kosmology Hungry Jack.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Ben
  • https://twitter.com/KosmologyB
• Tyriq
  • https://twitter.com/FourbitFriday

Topics:

• Which real life occupations are the closest thing to actual Adventuring? And would you want to do any of them?
• Getting a tattoo has somehow motivated me to be healthier
• It's weird that some instruments you play with your hands and others you put in your mouth
• The Mushroom Hunters
  • https://www.themarginalian.org/2019/11/25/the-mushroom-hunters-animation-neil-gaiman/
• Discovering how much butter and sugar is in your common or garden cake has filled me with sheer horror
• A public call to action for the creation of Violence/Threat Jazz as a genre

Microtopics:

• The collection of music songs that you put on the internet last year.
• The Citizen Sleeper trailer.
• Managing a game's Steam store page.
• The conversations you don't have.
• Adventuring as it is conceived of and perceived.
• Going into the field and being exposed to health hazards.
• Rock climbing and its relationship to speed running.
• All the big parts of the world having been discovered already so you need to be satisfied with discovering tiny parts.
• The difficulty of spending a lifetime rock climbing when you don't enjoy rock climbing.
• Whether being sent off to war feels or ought to feel like an adventure.
• Lockdown tattoos.
• The uncle who convinced you to get an eyebrow ring.
• Designing a tattoo so that it still looks right if the recipient suddenly gets swole.
• The Clean and Jerk.
• Compressing yourself inwards as you hit the ground.
• The idea of caring about your appearance.
• Looking in the mirror and feeling good about yourself.
• A portion of meat that is ruining your aesthetic.
• Your full-sleeve Gigantamax Meowth tattoo.
• Ark from Terranigma.
• A tattoo of a goat because you love goats a lot.
• Putting pictures on your body and looking cool.
• Going full body-mod in your old age.
• A Rotom right up there in your armpit.
• Walking around looking like a JRPG character with an asymmetrical pauldron.
• The right torso for me.
• Bone tattoos that are just for you because nobody can see your bones.
• Waiting until you are 80 years old for eyeball tattoo technology to get safer.
• Screaming higher and higher until you take a shower.
• Airflow and handflow.
• Licking a musical instrument that makes noise when it's wet.
• Chromatic spittoon virtuosos.
• Melody Pops.
• How to survive long car trips before portable video games.
• Lollipops you could write with.
• Chocolate cigarettes wrapped in rice paper.
• Rebranding your offensive children's cigarette brand to "Fads."
• The formulation of laws to follow facts revealed.
• Food Tasters.
• One king left and so much food to eat.
• Why so much fiction is so obsessed with royalty.
• Cracking a nut in your brain.
• The moon's excellent product placement.
• Cakes for people to jump out of.
• How to marble a cake.
• The butter iceberg.
• The inside scoop behind all the drama.
• The Sharks and the Jets snapping at each other.
• The dude in Mad Max Fury Road playing a flaming guitar on top of a moving truck.
• Where to see Ben's cats.

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Lords:

• Ben
  • https://twitter.com/AussieBen
• Michelle
  • https://twitter.com/riding_red
  • https://www.sciencealert.com/

Topics:

• Dora the Explorer and the City of Gold was a delightful surprise
• We're about to land another rover on Mars and that is super way cool
  • Michelle: "Just clarifying that most discarded rocket stages don't end up in low-Earth orbit forever, they're designed to deorbit and burn up on atmospheric reentry. Sometimes things just go a bit awry."
• Scratch-off Donkey Kong
  • http://catfish.it.cx/trsrockin/trsrockin.com/dkcards.html
• Ville asks "Tangential to dishwasher salmon, there are multiple coffee maker cookbooks, including a Finnish one that includes recipes like lamb and carrots in balsamic dressing, and wild mushroom risotto."
• Do you want to ask me stuff about exoplanets
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyeball_planet
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Jupiter

Microtopics:

• Growing your own mushrooms.
• Aliens growing out of your mycelium.
• Growing your own toxic mushrooms from murder mushroom kits.
• The incredible mushroom picking season that COVID facilitated.
• One of those styrofoam boxes from the fruit shop.
• When a teenager says "ok boomer" to you and you're like "dude I'm thirty."
• Signing up for the free trial of Amazon Prime so you can watch the live action Dora the Explorer movie.
• Looking at the camera and asking the viewer "Can you say 'deadly neurotoxin?'"
• Accidentally getting boxed in a crate and sent to the jungle.
• A CG animated fox voiced by Benicio del Toro.
• The nerd character getting beaten up in the background as the protagonist walks away.
• Singing the poo song and burying your poo with the poo shovel while everybody else is fleeing from the hail of arrows.
• Why Diego exists. (Because American audiences couldn't handle boys watching a show about a girl.)
• How to stop Swyper from swiping.
• ABC, the Australian analog of the BBC.
• Percy the Perseverance Robot.
• Whether it would be more exciting for the Mars Rover to land safely or explode in a fireball.
• How to transfer between two different orbits.
• Making a beeline for Mars.
• Attaching a broom to Perseverance to sweep the dust off of Opportunity's solar panels.
• Returning a soil sample from Mars.
• Returning a rock sample from an asteroid.
• Not being able to tell the difference between water and just a different colored dirt.
• Signs of ancient microbes.
• Choosing which way you want Mario to go and then scratching off a silver oval to see what happens.
• Choosable Path Adventures.
• ChooseCo is preparing to sue you right now.
• Writing the novelization of Super Mario Bros. when all you have for reference is the instruction manual.
• Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf.
• A story from Jim's youth.
• A little cardboard door that you open to see if you won a prize.
• How children were so starved for entertainment in the 80s that scratch off Donkey Kong seemed cool.
• Shrinking down a full size comic to fit in a cereal box so you need to read it with a microscope.
• Magazines that are printed with that red/blue 3D effect that doesn't quite work.
• A sponge pen with reactive ink in it that you brush against the seemingly blank page to reveal clues.
• How the "Yes & Know" invisible ink puzzle books have a completely different atrocious pun for a title in Australia, "Mr. Mystery."
• Knowing your parents really like you if you get a Scrooge McDuck comic.
• How to find a drip coffee maker in Australia.
• Going to a McDonald's in the 1980s to try out your novelty lamb and carrots in the drip coffee maker recipe, because there's nowhere else to find a drip coffee maker in Australia.
• Someone giving you a drip coffee machine as a gift and you're like "what the hell am I gonna do with this" and then you remember that wild mushroom risotto coffee machine recipe.
• Comparing your "no and" current guest to the guest who tried microwaving Coca Cola during the episode.
• An American lady on TikTok showing you all the wrong ways to make common British food.
• The best exoplanet.
• Eyeball planets.
• Tidally locked planets possibly being habitable at The Terminator.
• Using our scientific expertise to turn the moon into an eyeball.
• Detecting exoplanets via periodic dimming of stars.
• A weird little ice world.
• An exoplanet named "Steve" that has wronged you in some way.
• Exoplanet naming conventions.
• Tasking Reddit with naming all 4,300 known exoplanets.
• Hundreds of hypothetical dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt.
• Taking a two year break from Twitter and feeling much better.
• Rescuing greyhounds.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Ben is not on the Internet but is just happy to be here. He recommends Lindsay Ellis, an excellent film critic:
  • https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCG1h-Wqjtwz7uUANw6gazRw
• Ryan is The Man Who Messed Up Walking His Dog So Badly It Made The News.
  • http://ryannorth.ca/
  • https://twitter.com/ryanqnorth

Topics:

• Being able to cook a recipe from your mind without being able to explain how.
  • Every recipe has a step called "to taste" that is a mini version of this. How much salt, pepper, chili powder and cumin do I add to these chilaquiles? I donno, it's just muscle memory. But the muscle memory only works for three eggs. More or fewer, I screw it up.
• How many times a day do you remember something stupid you've done in the past? Am I normal and developing as I should?
  • The Ice Magic jingle in Ben’s head for the rest of his life: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0rfL9d4MDJY
• I miss making a game that was immune to bug reports.
• Dan asks: "What would we have in common with intelligent aliens? It seems common for analytical-minded people to claim that mathematical theories are discovered rather than invented. There's a programming theory personality named Phillip Wadler who's claimed that if we met aliens, they would have Lambda Calculus. Another programming personality (on the 'math is invented' side) posted a hypothetical conversation between a human programmer and an alien programmer that went like this:
  • Human: How do you avoid race conditions?
  • Alien: We just look at the different futures and pick one without data races.
  • Alien: How do you calm arithmetic when it's angry?
  • Human: Our math is not sentient."
  • The Atari 2600 screenshot Jim was thinking of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message
• What's the worst thing you've ever put in your mouth?
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_razor_clam
  • Flake in Australia is a deep fried fillet of fish you can order at fish and chip shops: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flake_(fish) Usually about the length of a dinner plate.
• Nintendo Labo is an industrial design marvel.
  • Watch someone transform a Nintendo Labo keyboard into an actual synth! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CjLOElL0rY
• Has anyone else noticed that long-anticipated events eventually "happen" and are thereafter "in the past"?
• For years my personal blog was the top internet resource for earlobe cysts.

Microtopics:

• Traveling to E3 from Australia.
• Making games for the Nokia N-Gage.
• Just now realizing that "Squirrel Girl" rhymes.
• Bluffing your way through a title pun because there's limited time in a game jam.
• A pun that you need to be both from England and New Zealand to get.
• Procedures for recreating an unknown recipe when the recipe changes as it's observed.
• A discrete series of steps that can be reproduced
• A bottomless measuring cup that keeps track of how much a substance that passed through it.
• A measuring cup that tells an anonymous third party you how much of a thing it holds, but doesn't tell the user.
• Whether or not anything comes up if you search the internet for minestrone soup recipes.
• Getting owned on Twitter after posting about the Ship of Theseus.
• Feeling dumb and then later feeling dumb about how you felt dumb.
• The mortifying ordeal of being known.
• Dismissing intrusive thoughts with a vocal tic or a spasm.
• Remembering advertising jingles from the 1980s all the goddamned time.
• Whether or not the Zest jingle invented the word "zestfully"
• Corporations owing serious back rent on the space in your brain taken up by advertising jingles.
• Crackly choc-ice.
• Going into a deep existential dread about a forty-year-old t-shirt.
• Calling it the "WC" when it takes way longer to say "WC" than "water closet"
• Asking the waitress where the toilet is and she gives you a weird look and says "in the bathroom, sir."
• Offering your top hat for the nobleman to micturate into.
• Having an audience who sees cool literary references in your work and assumes you did them on purpose.
• Writing an impossible season cliffhanger believe that you're quiting the show, but then not quitting the show and having to somehow resolve the cliffhanger.
• The biggest spoiler being whether or not a work is good or not.
• Living vicariously through someone watching your favorite TV series for the first time.
• Meeting an alien race with sentient math.
• Having just the one math but being certain that it's the only math.
• Doing your best to communicate with intelligent aliens but you can't think of anything to talk about.
• Only trying to contact alien races that you have enough in common with to meaningfully communicate.
• What kind of math a salt-leech would invent.
• Coherent systems of mathematics that don't reflect reality.
• Maths that would hypothetically reflect reality better than ours, and how ours could do better.
• The guy waking you up from your cryogenic sleep explaining to you that we know how to divide by zero now.
• Knowing that if the laws of physics change, your program will break.
• Recompiling once a year to make sure your program breaks when mathematical laws are updated.
• Realizing that the anecdote you're about to tell actually happened to your brother, not you.
• Discovering that ants are extremely sour.
• Ordering a shark kebab and the guy asks if you want crickets on it and you're certain you misheard him so you ask "what are those?" and he says "they're tiny bugs!"
• Crickets just being crunchy until you look at them and realize that you're definitely eating an entire being right now.
• Being stuck with your lame fish and chips when Australians have badass shark and chips.
• Things you learned as a kid and never critically examined as an adult.
• Razor clams: the meal that bites back.
• Building a fully functional steering wheel, with levers and adjustable dials that click, out of cardboard and rubber bands.
• The visual programming environment that comes with Nintendo Labo.
• Buying toys for an eight year old when your son is born because one day he'll be eight.
• Artisanal reprinted Nintendo Labo cardboard components on Etsy.
• Taking your cardboard Nintendo Labo synth on tour and seeing how many gigs it lasts for.
• Everybody really wanting to hear Jim's earlobe cyst story.
• Jim's primary claim to fame before Frog Fractions.
• Jim's top 3 earlobe cyst tips.
• Just how deceptively close to the jugular the earlobe is.
• Getting to watch a stranger's kid grow up because they don't believe you when you say they've got the wrong email address.
• The kind of person who just assumes their email address is their name at gmail.com.
• Holding onto the last vapors of 2012 Twitter.
• Like finally talking to T-Rex.

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