• Chris
• Fabian
  • https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/

Topics:

• Oops, my 3D printer became a hobby
• GTA's AI is not trying to screw with you with its sudden lane changes and T-boning you at intersections, it's just oblivious. (Probably.)
  • Esper says: "I can confirm the traffic AI in Cyberpunk 2077 is still hilarious. I set my car to 'auto drive' and after maybe 30 seconds it took a hard right into the ocean. Maybe that’s lore accurate, who knows."
• Alberic Whale and the Enigma Layer
  • https://thespinoff.co.nz/the-best-of/31-12-2018/summer-reissue-the-mystery-of-zach-new-zealands-all-too-miraculous-medical-ai
  • https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/13-01-2020/rip-zach-probe-finds-serious-wrongdoing-over-miracle-medical-ai
• Between What I See and What I Say…, by Octavio Paz
  • https://www.wisdomportal.com/PoetryAnthology/OctavioPaz-Anthology.html

Microtopics:

• A coffee shop that exists here because of the port of Oakland.
• Popping unroasted coffee beans into your mouth like peanuts.
• The worst tasting and most caffeinated cup of coffee you've ever had.
• Your local library.
• Things that should not be businesses.
• Three possible purposes of universities.
• Finding a new hobby (derogatory)
• 3D printing a selection of action figures for your wedding.
• That one person you know who's really into 3D printers.
• Why having a broken 3D printer counts as a hobby where having a broken refrigerator is just a situation.
• Yanking out some gunk with pliers in hopes that that'll fix it.
• Your 3D printer breaking halfway through your wedding figurine project so you have to make the other other half out of milled aluminum.
• IBM Selectric Typewriters shipping with a repair guy who lives in your spare bedroom in case it breaks.
• Amazon sending an Amazon warrior to repair your 3D printer but since you only paid for the cheap extended warranty she's allowed to attack anybody including you.
• Whether Balatro is trying to deliberately find weaknesses in your build.
• Higher fidelity graphics coming with expectations of higher fidelity traffic modeling.
• Car AI in open world games being as dumb as the developers can get away with, except for in Cyberpunk 2077, where they're dumber than the developers can get away with.
• Whacking at it until it's good enough to ship.
• Traffic tuning in GTA Vice City.
• Playing games with really smart, effective AI, like Chessmaster 2000 and X-Com, and realizing that actually having really smart AI is no fun.
• Skating around with rollerblades on your elbows and knees.
• Everything's a tuna can.
• Three car accidents in six weeks.
• Conscientiously objecting to military service so they insist you get a driver's license instead.
• Driving through a haunted house to train the braking reflex in response to being startled.
• Whatever happened to ol' Alby Whale?
• The AI assistant named Zack turning out to just be a dude named Zack.
• Adorable tiny food delivery robots who turn out to just be remote controlled by a guy hiding around the corner.
• Waymo cars blocking major thoroughfares for hours at a time.
• Multitasking between all the most stressful, confusing driving situations.
• Self-driving cars (allegedly) turning self-driving off half a second before impact so the impact is blamed on the human operator.
• Several hundred tons of liquid nitrogen cooled supercomputer.
• Blaming your spelling errors on The Enigma Layer.
• Having seen more proof of your AI assistant than you have of god.
• It's scammers and hucksters all the way down.
• Whether DLSS is taking away game developer jobs.
• What happens when you go from a three word Markov model to a five word markov model.
• A giant prank with no particular end-game in sight.
• Acts of speech.
• Poetry as synesthesia.
• Trying to explain in words why that cat is acting weird when the cat doesn't think in words at all.
• My Psychosis, my Bicycle and I, by Fritz B. Simon.
• Trying to figure out how football works when you can't see the players, only the referee.
• Feeling some type of way.
• Trying to take musical ideas and apply them outside of the realm of music.
• Creating words that dance around concepts.
• Getting stuck forever in your cringe phase.
• Opportunities to write the same program over and over again.
• A melancholy linked list implementation.
• Passive-aggressive C code.
• Java Enterprise Abstract Singleton Proxy Factory Bean.
• Remember printed manuals?
• The international obfuscated C code contest.
• What made the 3D accelerated demo scene interesting again.
• How much code you can fit in 64k if you don't link to anything.
• Secret Topics.

Support Topic Lords

• Daniel
  • https://www.danielmullinsgames.com/
• Chris

Topics:

• Psychic Students In Pursuit Of Guidance (psipog)
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EIwP0zerbk
• Zhaozhou's "Wash Your Bowl" Koan
• Figwit
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figwit
• Sudo-Ku
  • https://katlehmann.weebly.com/sudo-ku-a-multi-haiku-form.html
• Game Design: The form is arbitrary and not worth much thought. What's interesting is how you play in and with the form. See The Witness, Undertale, Sokoban games, Pinball machines

Microtopics:

• Introducing yourself twice.
• Spider mites and spider mite exterminators.
• Exterminating your spider mite infestation with a washcloth.
• Diatomaceous earth mines in your hometown.
• The paperwork necessary when your diatomaceous earth mine accidentally breaks through into the neighboring nitroglycerin mine.
• How to develop psychic powers of various kinds.
• Learning to meditate in service of manifesting your psiballs.
• Learning how to spin a watch around on the Psipog Archive.
• A 90 year old dude who has been meditating all his life but still doesn't have psychic powers: maybe he's just bad at it?
• The secret geometry that lets you talk to space beings.
• Who wants to talk to space beings?
• How to make progress on what mysteries we have left.
• Reinventing all of physics from first principles.
• How does nobody know about creating energy balls with your mind??
• Choosing not to do the thought experiments that have no good possible outcome.
• Sitting at a desk made of laminated particleboard.
• Pseudo-complex meals.
• When civilization collapses, how am I gonna make a Big Mac??
• Taking the time to get to know every person you meet and understand every safety you interact with.
• Wanting to know a secret that nobody else knows.
• How not to pronounce "koan."
• What do you do after you finish your gruel?
• Becoming enlightened during Ikea furniture assembly.
• Ancient Chinese yo momma jokes.
• The enlightened experience of inhabiting a mind vs. the bowl needs to be washed again.
• Questions that science cannot answer.
• Probing your blood.
• Measuring your blood chemistry while you wash the dishes to determine whether you're a good person.
• How to measure how many people you've helped.
• Short-circuiting your friend's money metaphor before it starts.
• An incredibly wise computer refusing to tell you the answer because it's too nuanced.
• Concrete actionable advice that you can trust every time.
• Figwit pre- and post lines.
• How things went viral before social media.
• The Figwit obsession: it's weird.
• Tracking down Figwit's Topps card to look up his RBI.
• Why is it the "one" ring when all the Nazguls also have rings??
• Lord of the Rings fans and how much they love it when podcasters are confused about Lord of the Rings lore.
• Effective fandom activism at its most innocent and pure.
• Where were you when you found out Sonic was going to be in Smash?
• A button that was effective so they pushed it a lot.
• A Small Brown that Peter Jackson put inside the Real Brown.
• Topic Lords Movie Secrets Special.
• Sudo-Ku.
• A fun gimmick that results in a worse poem.
• Americans: do they do Haiku wrong??
• Syllables vs. sound units.
• One pthong and more than one pthong.
• Spending too much time reading about the form.
• Drawing a line on a grid.
• A valid approach to making interesting stuff.
• The Pacific Pinball Museum.
• Pinball as kinetic electromechanical art.
• Electromechanical puppet shows at Musee Mechanique.
• If Pixar existed in 1800, what would they do?
• What if you're playing DDR but it's a joke?
• High concept jam games.
• Alien vs. Predator but you're roommates with the Alien.
• Advantages and disadvantages of starting from an existing design.
• Advantages of having a slightly different goal from everyone else in your field.
• Chess with time travel.

Support Topic Lords

• Wacy
• Chris

Topics:

• Mysterious BART smell between 12th st. Oakland and West Oakland
• Glucose monitor
• Winston has been playing Minecraft. Have you heard about this game? Kids love it I guess.
• The Earth Wants You
  • https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/_jj6TAcC.jpg

Microtopics:

• Knowing so many Chrises that you refuse to call yourself Chris.
• Not knowing what just happened for the past how, but now there's an hour-long M4A file with your voice in it.
• A whole range of thought experiments that might bear interesting fruit.
• A scrap of papyrus containing a transcript of the first episode of Topic Lords.
• Trash-adjacent smells.
• Whether power substations smell like anything.
• A smell worth seeking out for its own experience.
• A smell for smell connoisseurs.
• A tiny BART Easter egg for your nose.
• A huge amount of substance that is replenishing the smell particles.
• Checking your apps for indescribable smells.
• Closing some Tupperware in a stinky room to preserve the smell forever.
• A rat kingdom living under the BART tracks.
• Where to talk about unsolved mysteries now that Unsolved Mysteries with Robert Stack went off the air.
• Reintroducing mystery to the world like replenishing a lake with trout.
• What is the goo under the BART 12th Street Tunnel?
• Mystery caches.
• An extremely achievable local mystery.
• Your body surfacing issues you were previously unaware of.
• The full spectrum of diabetes.
• Disposable glucose monitors.
• What type of food are you eating that spikes your blood sugar, and by how much?
• Glucose Curious.
• Sports enthusiasts needing to checking their pulse as they watch the big game.
• Going for a walk right after eating.
• Continuing walking until your blood sugar is back within tolerances.
• Having a bad habit for a few months vs. having a bad habit for your whole life.
• Learning to spot blood glucose meters in the wild.
• Measuring your blood glucose for a month to learn how your body reacts to various foods.
• Getting funneled into videos of a douchebag with spiked hair breaking shit with a hammer.
• Figuring out how to survive the first night in Minecraft with a six year old.
• A game that lets you do lots of different things but doesn't suggest any of them so you have to figure out what you can do and why you would want to do it.
• Java edition mods vs. Bedrock edition mods.
• Mods: they have they mod problem.
• Why they added copper to Minecraft.
• Purposeful exploration.
• Laying down a bunch of the stone that makes The Warden spawn so you can meet your new Warden pal.
• Exploring The End and getting your wings.
• Dragon Quest Builders.
• The Terraria tutorial.
• A weird person to be.
• Vampire Survivors: not the first Vampire Survivors-like.
• Getting to the poem before it's too late.
• Looking through your photos of graffiti
• A cat mermaid playing a violin as if it's a guitar.
• The Earth Wants You To Be Die.
• Emitting a series of tones that insert an image in the listener's mind.
• If you can't handle me at my fish, you don't deserve me at my cat.
• Missing some sleep and some teeth.
• Trying to refute an idea without exposing your audience to the original idea.
• Videos continuing to appear on your travel vlog long after you've finished traveling.

Support Topic Lords

• Alexander
  • https://youtube.com/@L4MPLIGHT
• Chall

Topics:

• Having an address after not having an address
• Slopsquatting
• Book curses
• This boke ys myne, Eleanor Worcester
  • https://15thcfeminist.substack.com/p/the-preservation-of-womens-words
• The David Lynch random number generator
  • Esper says: My personal favorite use of numbers stations is the brief “station ID” type messages on Secret Agent Radio, a radio station that plays funky groovy Bond soundtrack-type music. Every now and then between songs, you’ll get a brief clip of creepy French-accented actual number station recordings, which really sells the vibe: https://somafm.com/player24/station/secretagent
• Do game designers ever go into public policy or vice-versa?

Microtopics:

• Math.
• An incredible youtube channel you don't know how to search for.
• Lamplight but with a four.
• Making art that only a tetrachromat could appreciate and then finding a tetrachromat to appreciate it.
• The secret color: yellow.
• Crashlands 2.
• Watching X-Files until you've already seen all the Darin Morgan episodes.
• Having twenty shirts to choose from and the same place to sit every day.
• How long it takes to tire off the non-stop stream of novelty.
• Working for yourself vs. working for someone else.
• How to stop feeling like life is rushing past you.
• Running a Kickstarter to get chores done around the house.
• How to get your ADHD brain to do work in purpose.
• Trying to get past the gauntlet of open browser tabs to the one where you get work done.
• Running 100 times.
• Productivity!
• Buying a productivity calendar and then glaring at the calendar and saying "you can't trick me, calendar"
• Nefarious NPM packages really popping off in the past few years.
• Cool pens dot com.
• Kazaam vs. Shazaam.
• What people knew before they could search things on the Internet.
• Dog bone facts.
• The apocryphal things that LLMs like to say.
• Lost books that we know about because they were mentioned in less old books.
• The Actual Monster Mash.
• Jeff Minter's Polybius.
• Nobody ever releasing a fake Frog Fractions 2 even though Jim could never disavow it.
• Hash tag relatable stories about medieval scribes.
• Laws about book mishandling.
• Dukes collecting books like treasures.
• Putting a curse in your book to make sure nobody steals it.
• The Falling Disease.
• Irascibly Incoherent Book Curses.
• May your NPM packages be infected with the falling disease.
• A curse that can only curse people who can read.
• Young people getting their grubby fingers dirty in the yard and leaving fingerprints in your books.
• Someone left their bookmark in my book and the bookmark rotted again.
• Cursing podcast bootleggers with the affliction where they always put their headphones on backwards.
• The cheat code to unlock Nukey.
• May your X button get stuck.
• The wildest spelling that could possibly make sense.
• A book that once belonged to a library.
• Borrowing a book about space from your first grade teacher and forgetting to return it and learning about the ADHD shame procrastination spiral.
• Blessed be he who steals this book.
• Walking into a library and instantly being completely overwhelmed.
• Giving your child the talk about where Little Free Libraries come from.
• David Lynch giving you the weather in his all caps voice.
• Why David Lynch never draws a 7.
• The Reproducibility Crisis.
• The Law of the Iterated Logarithm.
• All the ways we make mistakes.
• Coded drug drop messages on Britney Spears' Insagram.
• The 485.152nd Amendment.
• A great source of puns that must've existed for thousands of years.
• How to predict whether your idea will work and then how to test whether it worked.
• The Double Crossover Diamond Interchange.

Support Topic Lords

• Maxx
  • https://comicfury.com/comicprofile.php?url=mildreth
  • https://comicfury.com/comicprofile.php?url=delia
  • https://comicfury.com/comicprofile.php?url=cosmicfault
• Chall

Topics:

• I love the steam deck
• The puzzle of the Wikipedia did you know section
• The neuroplasticity theory of why we dream
  • https://www.instagram.com/reel/DELHsgYRamy/
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-eye_hallucination
  • https://www.mirror.co.uk/science/viral-image-unrecognisable-objects-creepy-14705067
• She Needed a Hobby, by Maxx

Microtopics:

• Comic Fury.
• The most mediocre comic.
• Mildreth of the Night.
• Collage vs. ransom note.
• A squirrel that finds a way to contact aliens.
• Using Redbubble to host your webcomic.
• Direct-to-cassette podcast episodes.
• A co-op game that makes you raise your voice.
• Overcooked but it's a train.
• The part of the train that keeps you moist and warm.
• How to run Pico-8 on the Steam Deck.
• Not wanting to get a Steam Deck because you might drop it on your face.
• How many liters a parrot is.
• One of those massage beds where your face goes in a little hole and your hands dangle to reach the controls of the Steam Deck that's lying on the ground.
• Waterproofing the Vive.
• Games Done Pwick.
• Sonic the Hedgehog looking like he ought to be a progress bar but he definitely isn't.
• Emulators: you can do that!
• Extremely intricate marble runs.
• Retiring so you have enough time to configure the warping on your enormous loom.
• The pleasant monotony of weaving vs. the meticulous craft of warping.
• Tuning 1000 pianos at once.
• Using a drop spindle to turn wool into thread.
• Spinning wool straight from the rabbit.
• Breeding for maximum stats on every axis.
• Facts that are not particularly fun.
• Seeing what the Wikipedia home page looks like on January 2nd, 2525.
• Why is a mountain landscape?
• Make-your-own-fun fun facts.
• Who is this man? Why did he steal a horse?
• Clicking on the nomination wizard.
• Five Clicks to Jesus and other Wikipedia routing games.
• Getting really into patterns and categories.
• Shoehorning your favorite pop culture thing into everywhere you can fit it.
• Mock Guffin.
• Breaking down a story into a list of tropes.
• Screen savers for the visual cortex.
• Finding stories in the noise.
• Different levels of the thing where you see patterns on the back of your eyelids.
• How much can you see behind your eyes?
• Running experiments on your own physiology.
• New places on your body you haven't pressed yet.
• Strobe lights for your ears.
• Covering the speaker on your phone because you're too place to turn down the volume.
• How text looks in your dreams.
• Latching onto the idea of a story.
• Tasting a lot of math problems before you go to sleep.
• A gross crinkled dog texture.
• Accidentally crocheting so much that you remake the universe.
• The names of such unthinkable numbers.
• A crochet pattern for an infinite Mobius strip.
• Cool yarns from the local crafting store.
• The ability to stick with a hobby.
• Crocheting a functional internal combustion engine.

Support Topic Lords

• Wacy
  • https://www.youtube.com/@WacyandChris
• Chris
  • https://twitter.com/mrchrislhall

Topics:

• Difficulties with long term traveling
• Norway
• Why don't they have novelty whipped cream
• The Dirt Man Song, by Carter Vail
  • https://genius.com/Carter-vail-dirt-man-lyrics

Microtopics:

• Specialty pour over filter coffee.
• A very deep rabbit hole of discovery of flavors.
• Drink the Machine: a Clean Metallic Flavor.
• Wacy and Chris.
• Chris or sounds like Chris.
• Living near your friends and family and being able to see them any time you want.
• Spot-it.
• Explaining what "on air" means to someone who has never listened to the radio.
• Why are flickering lights creepy?
• Getting Winston ready for swim class.
• The pressure to hyper-optimize.
• Being in the place where you are all the time.
• The world: it's really big and really full of stuff.
• How to exist in a city where you don't speak the language.
• Things you don't feel like maximizing.
• Grocery store bagged salads.
• Countries that are known for salads.
• Eating nothing but pickled fish and salty licorice during your trip even though you hate both.
• Being delighted by mediocre sushi.
• How many times Topic Lords has been downloaded in Osaka.
• Modern New-Age Scandinavian Food.
• Gas station hot dogs in Norway.
• Ordering a big slab of My Girlfriend is Not Hungry.
• Ways Norway is familiar to Americans.
• Walking around kicking the glaciers.
• Bikepackers.
• Giant highway ferries with six lanes of traffic.
• Brown Cheese Waffles.
• Daylight all night long.
• Normal people going outside and walking their dogs at 1am.
• The song that plays with the baby raccoon spinning in a circle.
• A country that is extremely serious about tunnels.
• Opening up your windows to let the cave air in.
• Visiting the Arctic circle in the winter.
• Good ideas, like Pesto Whipped Cream.
• Orange Cream Whipped Cream.
• The toothpaste tubes with the colored wedges.
• Birthday Cake Coffee Creamer.
• Guava-flavored beer foam.
• Coffee creamer except for beer.
• Chefs seeking out the worst food so they can understand exactly why it's bad.
• The Friendly's Cone Head.
• The Bad-Interesting Food Spectrum.
• Sleep regression, or more generally how you don't always keep forward progress.
• Why kids become picky eaters.
• Replicating the texture of uncooked hot dog in a novelty whipped cream.
• What whippets are for.
• Original flavorless N2O tanks.
• Using the word for amyl nitrite that signifies that you are a VCR owner and not a drug user.
• How to not become dirt in the dirt lair.
• The dirt man's tithe.
• Lying to your kid about cosmology.
• Pretending to believe the little lies as practice for believing big lies.
• Reminding your mom to make a leprechaun trap.
• Making fake boot prints to convince your kids that god is real.
• Reindeer food. (It's just hay.)
• All the years you didn't keep dirt under your pillow.
• The dirt man's dirt man taking you even deeper down.
• Lots of great places where the dirt man can be found.

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

• Chris
• Dev
  • https://devinbusha.artstation.com/

Topics:

• Taking Improv classes has been life changing.
• Practicing 3 keyboard layouts at the same time
• I bought store brand salt. You wouldn't think this would be a big deal but it turns out to be
• I Once Snorted an Eight Ball with Santa, by Richie Zaborowske
  • https://www.havehashad.com/hadposts/i-once-snorted-an-eight-ball-with-santa
• Are all creative ideas very derivative, or is it just my ideas

Microtopics:

• Pickleball.
• Weird shapes the birdie flies in.
• The sport that has level design.
• Mindful breathing.
• You are now breathing mindfully.
• Looking forward to being at square one.
• Getting the real data once you stop paying attention.
• Thespians in High School.
• Spinning a wheel to figure out what emotion to feel.
• Whether the yes and rule only works for comedy.
• Pancakes. Are. Starchy.
• Being late to your job that's on fire because you were stuck behind the fire truck.
• Celebrating your own failures.
• How to play Lemmings in 2024.
• Self-esteem.
• Immediately vibing with a new sport.
• Autotuning except it's completely manual.
• A bunch of joysticks that you twiddle with your fingers to do letters.
• Colemak vs. Colemak DH.
• Keyboards that are laid out in columns.
• Splitting up the typing test into QWERTY, Dvorak and Colemak.
• Palm Pilot Graffiti.
• The Lord's Prayer in Gregg.
• Shorthand. (Originally called Briefhand.)
• Good ciphers for room escape puzzles.
• Are QR codes based on the mazes in Zelda 2?
• Flaky sea salt vs. coarse sea salt.
• Adding a biting experience to make your food more heterogeneous.
• Edible chemistry.
• The last time you pinched salt.
• Audially-rewarding salt grinders.
• Science Youtuber Hank Green.
• Warning pregnant women to not eat too much salty licorice.
• Supertaster-outing Tic Tacs that regular people love but supertasters immediately vomit.
• We've got a level six kaiju supertaster on our hands!
• The guy who gets paid too much to taste ice cream.
• The kind of person who doesn't salt their food but instead repeatedly licks a salt lick throughout the meal.
• Heads swirling around like snow globes.
• A poem that doesn't do anything with line breaks but does do something interesting with sentence lengths.
• A poem that you might read on a bathroom stall.
• Wearing the little hat and pulling on the cord that makes the horn toot.
• The ecology that grows around the dumpster.
• The crane swinging porta potties around.
• An extremely expensive way to have fun
• Heading towards the era of having kids.
• Asking for payment for software that is not being maintained.
• Minesweeper but X.
• An idea that is worth doing but not obviously worth doing.
• How to make Missile Command fun in a new and interesting way.
• A boxing essay with questionable authenticity.
• Strategies for enjoying Frog Fractions.
• Rangers and the new way they handle animals.
• Yes-anding whatever ideas come to you.
• Ancient primals that were interlocked in battle.
• Someone thinking of an idea.
• Constantly listening for cues.
• What do inanimate objects do?
• Buying a giant bag of googly eyes and putting them on everything.
• Not posting on Twitter.

Support Topic Lords

• Chris
• Esper

Topics:

• Geocaching
• The Miyoo Mini and other handheld emulation consoles
• I still think I could've made it as a highly paid Super Mario Bros. 35 coach. I should've gone for it.
• There's Not a Person Alive by David Donihue
  • https://medium.com/@daviddonihue/theres-not-a-person-alive-poem-by-david-n-donihue-a1fcd714cc99
• The strange semiparasocial relationship between a podcast editor and the people on the podcast
• Struggling to relearn high school Spanish

Microtopics:

• The editor of a podcast.
• The #1 podcast for topic fans.
• Chopping at some audio until it becomes a podcast.
• Editing a recording into a podcast that's nothing but ums, mouth smacking noises and uncomfortable silence.
• Zoom dynamically sensing when you're saying something dumb or boring and muting you.
• Saying yes with the Sonic ring noise and no with the Sonic taking damage noise.
• A cozy pleasant show full of fun facts.
• Prepping for a paradigm.
• How to put audio on film.
• Going on a web forum and receiving a quest to find a magnetic box stuck underneath a metal staircase.
• Geocaching on the Moon.
• Geocaching vs. Geohashing.
• A French pun for your board game night that nobody can remember because it's in French.
• c:geo.
• Finding a geocache by climbing a tree and pulling a paperclip attached to a fake piece of bark.
• What to do if you're the one who picks up a travel bug.
• Fake bolts where the center unscrews and it's hollow inside.
• Developing a sense for when a geocache is nearby and always being wrong.
• Miyoo Mini Plus.
• Custom firmware that fixes your terrible handheld game system.
• The Dream of the Playdate.
• The Anbernic R something something letters numbers.
• C-ctrl.
• Going back to the Tekken 3 well.
• A video game bar in Japan that only has Americans in it.
• A very reasonable number of video games to flip through.
• Emulators with daily runs.
• Multi Bowl.
• A game that legally can not exist.
• Johann Sebastian Joust and its meta.
• Getting one point in Rampage.
• Advice that can literally no longer be helpful for anybody.
• How to be an effective Goomba.
• Looking at Jim's win/loss ratio and being inspired.
• As Garfield said, "nothing good can stay."
• A stainless soul lying inspired.
• Bad experiences shared by every human.
• A very smooth-brained day
• Rampant poetry plagiarism on TikTok.
• A food ASMR video where someone is repeatedly stabbing chicken with a fork.
• Videos of hamsters running in wheels while listening to Dragula by Rob Zombie.
• Whether the fish enjoys playing Pokemon.
• A sweet 16 bracket of Best Kinds of Shark.
• Rerecording the Topic Lords jingle with a swarm of bees.
• The qualifications required for the person who designs electric car backing up noises.
• Which apps to use to help you remember Spanish.
• Speedrunning High School Spanish.
• Learning Japanese from anime.
• A 24/7 Livestream of digital cats lying around the house.
• Hallucinating new languages around the house.
• 52 Pickup with Gita Jackson and Alex Jaffee, about the most important comic book series of this century.

Support Topic Lords

• Will
• Chris

Topics:

• Canoes
• Blowing soap bubbles with your hands, making cricket noises, "party tricks"
• nissan.com
• Nothing Is Too Small Not To Be Wondered About, by Mary Oliver
  • https://thevalueofsparrows.wordpress.com/2017/05/20/poetry-nothing-is-too-small-not-to-be-wondered-about-by-mary-oliver/
• Would zombies try to hide the fact that they were zombies?
• Magic

Microtopics:

• Soda Drinker Pro for the Nintendo Entertainment System.
• Finding someone to port your game to NES via LinkedIn.
• The Vivian Clark Experience.
• Making certain contortions slightly easier.
• Rock climbing. (Not a topic.)
• The Phantom Lapboard.
• The Only Viable Product. (OVP.)
• What if you could mouse and keyboard on the couch?
• Growing up in a canoe family.
• Paddling vs. rowing.
• Carbon fiber paddles for canoe racing.
• Waterwalker by Bill Mason.
• Your favorite memories of a kayak.
• Waking up in your kayak to see a snapping turtle staring at you.
• Floating up and wiggling all over the place.
• Kayaking to lunch from your office.
• Living in a ski cabin and your office is at the bottom of the mountain.
• Living at a Lagrange point and your office is at the bottom of the zipline.
• Boston Unity Knights.
• Doing a game jam every month for four years.
• Knowing enough people in your field that you no longer need to network.
• Five really worthy zero-hour games.
• Making a therapeutic horror game.
• Going to a terrifying party in an abandoned train tunnel and finding a burned-out police car.
• Questionable poisonous air filled with unknown tunnel organisms.
• Doing mouth stuff in VR.
• Making the soda line up with your mouth.
• The Ferris Bueller water drop noise.
• The thing where you play a blade of grass like a reed instrument.
• Cheek-flapping noises.
• Magic tricks vs. Party Tricks.
• Inhaler magic.
• Twenty levels of spinning pens.
• A different horrible knife game.
• A game about chopping off fingers named "Chop the Finger."
• Shooting arrows in the air while your friend run away.
• The keyboard shortcut for finding someone to port your game to NES.
• A web site where you endorse people as thought leaders.
• Entering the LinkedIn cheat code on Xbox 360.
• Porting your video game to a robotic arm.
• Making it move when you think about it.
• Uzi Nissan v. Nissan Motors.
• It can happen to you or someone you know!
• Picturing conceptual rabbit holes in your head.
• Sylvester Stallone's Mom's web site.
• Sylvester Stallone's mom doing palm readings of your ass.
• All our favorite apps, such as buffalo wings and boneless spare ribs.
• Thinking about a cricket's interiority.
• Putting some nature in your poem.
• Using cricket noises to tell what temperature it is.
• Having the same number of wings you've always had.
• Do any bugs make a plan.
• Leaving "I gave up" pheromones
• Leaving a map of a physical space in the space.
• Sizable ants.
• Fewer scorpions than you'd expect.
• Putting a bug into your awareness.
• Pseudoscorpions hanging out on old stuff.
• Little guys in random places very occasionally.
• Zombies going to Whole Foods.
• Going quiescent until a dude walks by with a tasty-looking scalp.
• Painting a brain on your helmet to fool the zombies.
• A short-hair wig taped to your grandfather's basketball.
• Dropping your scalp like a lizard tail and the zombie shakes your scalp back and forth in its teeth.
• An analyst commissioned by a think tank to write a book explicating how to deal with the zombie apocalypse.
• Sound Reading Trainer.
• Having a bunch of magic props that you never show anyone how to use.
• The casino OJ got arrested at.
• Tommy Wonder.
• Reviewing a product on YouTube without ever showing it or saying what it does.
• How stage hypnosis works.

Support Topic Lords

• Chris
• Wacy

Topics:

• Crafting little guys
• Negotiating how to play Zelda together
• Cream of mushroom latte
• ChatGPT wrote a poem about zelda
• Climbing real rocks

Microtopics:

• The Marble Hornets/Slender Man oeuvre.
• Copying and pasting a video.
• Sharing a movie you liked with a friend over IM by copying and pasting the title.
• The turnip in Breath of the Wild.
• Attempting and failing to enjoy wood carving.
• Stabbing the Korok until it is less fuzzy.
• A Snapchat filter that makes it look like you're made of felt.
• Losing your needle-felted Lorax and getting upset.
• Kirby eating Halo.
• Hobbies that double as fidget toys.
• Carving a stick into a squirrel.
• Finding polymer clay out in the woods.
• Naturally-occurring fission reactors.
• Nature with really good graphic design.
• Sharing a Zelda save with your life partner and learning a lot about each other.
• Finding every turnip.
• Learning spoilers at an interesting space.
• The huge thing.
• Target's 30-day return policy.
• What Switch games support local wireless multiplayer.
• Playing halfway through a video game before you figure out the most of the systems.
• Stirring until the lumps go away.
• Kombucha milk.
• An incredibly cheap gas.
• The Sus Engineering DIY carbonation guide.
• Cream of Cow Latte.
• Target getting out the UV light to detect traces of cream of mushroom soup on the espresso machine you're trying to return.
• Frothy oily coffees.
• Inventing a culinary taxonomy in which mushrooms and cheese are both fruit.
• Sweet cheese and savory fruit.
• Sweet cheesus!
• Making a yes or no answer incredibly long.
• Rewriting each paragraph until it ends with a word on a line by itself.
• Rapping about Zelda in 1980s.
• Finding plot holes in this poem about the Legend of Zelda.
• Using video games to ignore that you're on a plane for six hours.
• Horror poems.
• "A Crow Looked at Me" by Mt. Eerie.
• Knowing why someone wrote an album but not why people listen to it.
• Bad Two-Sentence Horror.
• Whether Poe's The Raven counts as horror.
• Businesses named after the thing that the building they're in used to be used for.
• Berkeley Bowl's produce section.
• Climbing a boulder that is not labeled with its difficulty level.
• Difficulty inflation at the climbing gym.
• How rocks are shaped.
• A lump that you pinch with your whole hand.
• Reading about a weird thing in Harry Potter and not knowing if it's weird because it's a magical kingdom or if that's how England does things.
• What camping is like in England.
• Taking a four year old to a parkour gym.
• Being a kid and looking forward to finally growing tall enough to skate on the power lines.
• A table full of rock obstacle courses.
• The standards body that certifies what playground equipment is safe to install.
• Old Enough.
• Achieving the Milk Task.
• Not teaching children cursive.
• Having a name because your mom liked it.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Chris
• Alexander

Topics:

• Words with similar sounds/meanings but no relation to each other at all.
• Virtual marble runs with guns
  • https://www.youtube.com/@mikan2d
• The "broom method" of dealing with a hydrogen leak
  • https://nextworldover.tumblr.com/post/706885583716466688
• Poem by Dr. Seuss: “I have heard there are troubles of more than one kind. Some come from ahead and some come from behind. But I've bought a big bat. I'm all ready you see. Now my troubles are going to have troubles with me!”
• Loveland Frog (Ohio frog bigfoot?)
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loveland_frog
• Ghosts are real: what are the economic consequences?

Microtopics:

• Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator.
• Lords starting with Xa.
• Moving boxes that have handles built in.
• All else being equal, a raccoon did it.
• Proto-Indo-European.
• Putting the S in Island.
• The era of Topic Lords when we only discussed Shakespeare.
• Some of the things you expect are wrong, and vice-versa.
• Bacteria finding proteins hanging around and deciding "this is part of me now."
• Branching path structures shooting red and blue bullets at each other.
• Escalating Revenge Core Destruction.
• If pachinko were extremely elaborate and violent.
• Oil timers.
• Turning over the rectangle on your desk and forcing the red and green combatants to fight for you once more.
• Apollonian circles.
• The ancestry of Firefox.
• Web browsers surrounded by water on all sides.
• Using the entirety of your computing resources to do basically nothing.
• A phone app that makes your phone display Flying Toasters but only while it's in your pocket.
• Computers that are really good at getting hot and not very good at not getting hot.
• An air conditioner but backwards.
• Marbula One.
• Marble races except every marble is armed with an assault rifle.
• The year you finally get into Blaseball.
• How Blaseball works.
• How to detect a fire that you can't see.
• Glass Onion: debunked.
• A hell planet completely saturated with a volatile gas populated by lava monsters.
• Why leave the house? Just send a probe and infer the existence of your neighbors.
• What "from" means in "escape from the tank"
• The jingle the hydrogen truck plays as it trundles by.
• The Snack of the Stars.
• Safety testing various propellants.
• What your voice sounds like without any transmission medium.
• The Gregorian Underwater Choir.
• Naming Helium after the sun because that's where we discovered it.
• The Lorax threatening you with a bat.
• My huge sawed off flashlight.
• Stay back, officer, it's just just a flashlight.
• Replacing your self-defense rabies bat every time it dies.
• Brushing your self-defense bat's teeth.
• Dr. Zeus's book of adult poetry.
• Is the Death Star brutalist? Can brutalist architecture be round?
• Bee Barns.
• A four foot tall frog guy who lives in the woods.
• A frog guy. A guy who is a frog.
• A frog guy caught between two worlds of posture.
• A Wikipedia user whose thing is to make photo illustrations of cryptids and extinct animals.
• What happens to Pikachu's soul when it dies.
• Ghosts: what do they do all day?
• Ghosts exist, and they can talk, and they know all about the afterlife, but also they're huge liars.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Tyriq
  • https://twitter.com/FourbitFriday
  • https://frror.bandcamp.com/
• Chall
  • https://twitter.com/mrchrislhall

Topics:

• The future/present of Jim's mario videos.
  • https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3SbI8kec0Ntxnf9mof2tU-QZLQ0Mq6zd
• Catatcomb Kids lore in the context of the fact that I like worldbuilding but find it hard to tell actual stories.
• Bigger Luke
• The Green Street Mortuary Marching Band.
  • http://www.syndicjournal.us/a-ferlinghetti-memorial-supplement-60-narrations/ferlinghetti-memorial-supplement-the-green-street-mortuary-marching-band/
• Have you seen any phantom kangaroos? And also: should I choose to believe in cryptids? If so, which ones?

Microtopics:

• Giving someone else's biography.
• 7-Day Roguelikes.
• Feeling ambiently like you are hanging out with somebody.
• An emulator that works when you are not screen-capturing in OBS, but freezes when you are.
• Making a backup of your Bowser's Fury save.
• Video recording setup evolutions.
• The pros and cons of extremely variable video lengths.
• Playing Tony Hawk with Mario modded in.
• What working on a Zelda game does to a person, psychologically.
• Doing things that make people believe you're doing an ARG.
• Twinbeard Rates Mario.
• A robot co-host that eventually starts finishing your words for you.
• Wanting to be a writer until you try writing.
• A world that naturally develops in your brain.
• How to tell stories.
• Coming up with a bunch of characters that want things.
• Reading stories in hopes that stories rub off on you.
• Putting yourself in a situation where you write a lot of dialog trees.
• How to make a platformer without doing any level design.
• Expecting the same person to write the music and the lyrics.
• The difference in the ideation process of world building and story telling.
• A fact about the world that is true.
• Captain Thalmoo surveying the battlefield.
• Figuring out mid-burrito that there was a war, and deciding who won it.
• A grain that flowers like lavender.
• Searching Fiverr for Conlangers.
• Paying $2 for something at the Dollar Store.
• Logging Onto JimNet.
• The Canon Bigger Luke Hypothesis vs. the Hamill Hypothesis.
• The Inch-Luke Hypothesis.
• Inch-Lukers.
• Bigger Luke conspiracy theorists just assume that Han Solo stays the same size.
• The real Skywalker was the bigger Luke all along.
• The Boy Who Cried ARG.
• Promising your wife that your son will not be Frog Fractions 3.
• How many pages of laws a person is subject to at any given time.
• Designing an ARG for your teenage son and he's like "ugh dad, again?"
• Mortuary marching bands.
• The patriarch who has just croaked.
• The sister with the bent frame.
• Uncle Louie with the wig.
• Getting a free concert because someone died.
• A funeral as a pleasant gathering of people you haven't seen in a long time.
• Getting arrested for publishing Allen Ginsberg's "Howl."
• Dressing up as an ancient sea captain.
• How many funerals this marching band is playing today.
• Hiring your nephew who has a Casiotone keyboard to play your funeral.
• Hiring the Green Street Mortuary Marching Band to play at your kid's birthday but all they know how to play is Taps.
• Bringing an axe to the funeral in case there's an emergency and you need to open up the coffin quickly.
• If a guitar is an axe, a tuba is a bent axe.
• Unbending the Tuba.
• Why brass instruments are so twisty.
• If you unwind a French horn it'll reach the moon and back.
• The large flutes that are curly.
• The son of a flautist.
• A bookshelf that you blow into and music comes out.
• Potential downsides of cryptids.
• Wanting to take EMF meters into a creepy house even though you don't believe in ghosts.
• The script scientists developed to let you fall in love at will.
• How many blue coins out of five you would rate your wife.
• Taking the Race IAT every week and analyzing your results over time.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Chall
  • https://twitter.com/MrChrisLHall
• Jenni
  • https://twitter.com/horsewizrd

Topics:

• Frogs evolved leaping before they evolved landing and a couple species haven't figured out the "landing" part yet.
  • https://defector.com/why-is-this-tiny-frog-so-awful-at-jumping/
  • https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/horrifying-sculpture-depicts-human-evolved-survive-car-crash-180959878/
• I got a weird device called a charachorder. Haven't used it yet though, it came 2 hours ago.
  • https://charachorder.com/products/charachorder-one
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_organ
• Speedrun health hazards
• "Bananas Bananas," by Greg
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4aHhM624oI
• I assumed the Chicago Bean would be kinda lame. I was wrong. It is super neat
• Video games that are just a little place and you walk around and maybe go to a museum
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnTeqsh47jw
  • Esper says: Speaking of low-stress games about existing in a space, I am forced by the powers of self-promotion to mention my own Hang Out In The Basement Simulator, a game about chilling in a basement. There's a nerf gun, a little guitar you can strum a few notes on, records, and over 30 hours of watchable TV (all scraped from little Internet Archive weirdnesses). https://aceofwands.itch.io/hoitbs

Microtopics:

• Nose Goes.
• Allergy medication that does not make you drowsy.
• Coming out of the womb sleep-deprived.
• Jenni from the Blockchain.
• Pokemon Gockchain.
• A good speedrun idea for somebody else.
• Watching Mario 64 let's-plays to distract us from the disaster of our own interiority.
• Why Can't the Pumpkin Toadlet Land?
• Landing in a t-pose and rigid-bodying your way into a pratfall.
• Which frog would win the X Games of frogs?
• The distant future when everyone has evolved to survive car crashes and nobody is allowed to wear a shirt in the payroll department.
• An editorial team choosing what links will go on the front page.
• Photoshop This Tractor.
• "Gone drinking" as a euphemism for crashing into a lake.
• The history of social media on the internet.
• Choosing the most obnoxious possible video to be your Zoom background.
• What's stopping developers from compiling ffmpeg to Webassembly and including it in every web page.
• Chorded word entry.
• Getting an exciting new keyboard where it takes you three minutes to type youtube.com.
• Switching keyboard layouts to fix your abysmal typing posture.
• A very dim room full of typewriters.
• Thinking about the cubic watermelons.
• Another one from the Deck of Old Memes.
• Whether Plato ever got to prove his cave allegory correct.
• RSI in the speedrunning scene.
• Waving your right hand up and down for twelve hours a day.
• Hypertapping.
• Tap to Survive!
• Clickers that require you to watch the game run to efficiently progress.
• The deep crevasse where Cookie Clicker lives in your brain.
• Getting RSI from watching speedruns all the time.
• Coping with the mental anguish of speedrunning.
• Leomard Sportsinterviews.
• Making a mixtape of yourself playing clarinet and your younger brother reading poems, for your girlfriend Sara.
• Your vengeful ex-girlfriend turning you in to VEVO for music piracy using the mixtape you gave her as proof.
• Using music to anchor a repeated moment.
• Using this episode of Topic Lords to score your morning routine.
• Warrant canaries.
• Bananas: they're underground.
• The return of the Banana Box.
• The tropical fruit that tastes like mayonnaise.
• The cheese of the sea.
• Cloud Gate in Millennium Park.
• Chicago Bean Radiation.
• Walking through the Chicago Bean and getting mirrored left to right and subsequently only being able to digest animals that also wandered through the Chicago Bean that you catch and kill.
• Wearing a hospital wrist band informing your duel opponent that your internal organs are mirrored left to right.
• Mirror image twins.
• Fighting little ASCII bears and solving exploding bomb puzzles.
• What you do in Proteus.
• The game where you hit the ball back and forth over a net.
• A board game where you vacation in feudal Japan.
• The Museum of Other Realities.
• Seiklus and Gebub's Adventure.
• A place to wander while interesting things happen to you.
• The talking tree that says "invest in leaves."
• Legends of Murder.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Ryan
  • https://twitter.com/ryanikecomposer/
  • https://www.instagram.com/ryanikeaudio
• Chall
  • https://twitter.com/MrChrisLHall/

Topics:

• What position do you sleep in and based on that which of us on the podcast is going to die first?
• Are limes overpowered?
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citrus_taxonomy#/media/File:Citrus_tern_cb_simplified_1.svg
• Why do we have fingernails? Sure they protect the nail bed but the nail bed wouldn't need protection if the nail weren't there. Are they really just claws but shitty?
• This poem written on a whiteboard, author(s) unknown:
  • https://imgur.com/a/dDRjZuX
  • https://cafemom.com/entertainment/kourtney-kardashian-travis-barker-relationship-timeline/valentines-day-Kardashian-Barker

Microtopics:

• Reading someone's grocery list and trying to decide if it's ironic.
• The importance of firing Jimmy Wales.
• Trying to make a garbage fire better but it's not better yet.
• Filming yourself becoming the villain so that the documentary won't be disappointing.
• Topic Sloars.
• Not really knowing what a sloar is except that you can roast in the belly of it.
• The place for Buster-Heads.
• Sleeping the wrongest.
• Going to your dentist for sleeping advice.
• Sleeping in a position to minimize the number of times per hour you stop breathing.
• The sleep paralysis demon not being able to sit on your chest because you sleep on your side.
• Sleeping in a nanofiber web suspended from the ceiling.
• Whether sleeping cuddling a pillow is good or bad for various bones and organs.
• Famous Racist Pillow Peddler.
• Doctor Wu says you're going to eat shit.
• Sleeping like the number four.
• Lying in entirely different positions at the beach because you don't want anyone to know how you sleep.
• Trying the number four leg and letting Ryan know how it goes in the morning.
• A night of making cocktails using limes.
• Deciding that limes are too powerful and we need to put them in their place.
• Garnishing your beverage with cornflakes.
• All citrus fruit descending from the mustard plant.
• Demanding that every foodstuff be as delicious and useful as limes are.
• A pile of nasty pasta mistake.
• Chocolate pasta that you boil and put on your ice cream.
• A Wikipedia rabbit hole of citrus fruits.
• The three ur-fruits that control the fate of every citrus fruit you've ever eaten.
• An open faced lime growing in the wild.
• Optimus Lime.
• Thinking of a pop culture pun and asking the bartender for it because it's probably a beer.
• Extremely lumpy limes.
• Filling city hall with gorillas so they'll eat all the snakes.
• Hot dog fingers that are homogenous all the way to the end.
• Manatee toenails.
• Where whales keep their finger bones.
• Awesome ladies with orca fingernails.
• An extremely informative image search that you don't recommend to anyone.
• All the gross ways Takis can fail.
• Origami claws.
• The state of the spit valves on those Cool Ranch Bugles.
• Sweet and Salty and Chocolate and Peanut Butter Bugles.
• Ultra-Powerful Butter Flavor.
• Coming out of your bunker after 200 years and not knowing who Batman is but seeing the "ultra rare cheeto shaped like batman crying" and thinking "wow it's like a man, but also a bat, and he's weeping because he'll never solve his parents murder"
• Making NFTs of every character in FF2 minigame Biker Chicks and then trying to get all the Kickstarter backers who sent in photos to buy their own face, because if they don't someone else is going to own their face.
• Selling visitation rights to your collection of rare Cheetos.
• Rare Cheeto NFTs.
• Buying Cheeto earrings and becoming Cheeto Earrings Guy.
• Something in red that was where "garlic bread" is -- erased.
• Painters buying big slabs of bathroom stall at craft stores so they can paint on it.
• Keeping your finger on the pulse of garlic bread related poetry.
• The dark recesses of Jim's Travis Barker poetry headcanon.
• A traveling japesman who modifies any exposed whiteboard poetry to be about food.
• Where you do your business after dark.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Tyriq
  • FourBitFriday everywhere.
  • https://www.ckgame.net/
• Chall
  • @MrChrisLHall

Topics:

• How cars age vs how people age
• Learning the wrong lesson from childrens media (due to being an incompetent child)
• BOFH: Servers Under Siege
  • https://www.old-games.com/download/1796/bastard-operator-from-hell-servers
• Korn - Freak on a Leash
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRGrNDV2mKc
  • Unedited (syncable) commentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_L7WeZVlQ0
• Do other people just have boring dreams??
  • Forgot to mention on the show, but on the Topic Lords discord, dreams go in #announcements.
• Turns out, running has everything I love about walking, but it's very time efficient
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUXow3d3-b0

Microtopics:

• Make game.
• The properties of houseplants.
• TikToks of feral houseplants.
• Three people trying to remember the name of the musical starring Rick Moranis about carnivorous plant.
• One (1) 2004 Toyota Camry, tan.
• Speaker covers turning into sand.
• Sometimes being in charge of your body and sometimes being in charge of your car and sometimes being in charge of both.
• A make of cars as an enormous number of identical twins.
• Paint is shirts for cars.
• Whether paint is shirts for cars or tattoos for cars.
• Coming home with a new nose and nobody recognizes you.
• Cars doing most of their aging in instants.
• Seeing a car for the first time in many years and being unsure whether it accumulated all those dents and scratches over many years, or if someone took a hammer to it five minutes ago.
• An airplane outside of your house waiting for you to finish recording this podcast so you can board.
• Plastic surgery for an airplane.
• Getting tired looking at your aging car so you cover it with sweet blue LEDs and now nobody can ever look at it again.
• Being sarcastic in movie for children who are too young to understand sarcasm.
• What happens when young foolish screenwriters try to write wise old characters.
• Bad ways of teaching history.
• Teaching only the things you can test.
• Learning how to extract meaning from the things you read.
• Triaging the attention paid to your students so your ignore your best students who don't need your help but also ignoring your worst students because what the hell am I gonna do with this guy??
• A fun movie depicting a series of events that happen.
• Whether hitting people with sticks is fun.
• Bastard Operator From Hell.
• Sysadmins writing revenge fantasies on Usenet about screwing over their incompetent users.
• Indie games from the early aughts that are playable on the Amiga and Commodore 64.
• A sysadmin with a rocket launcher.
• Pokey the Penguin.
• Arctic Circle-Candy.
• All the Pokey the Penguin fan games that came from the Pokey the Penguin mailing list.
• Prodly the Puffin.
• Parchment, the Z-Machine interpreter written in JavaScript.
• 0-Hour Game Jam.
• RPG Maker vs. RPG Maker '99.
• Coming on the show and donating of your time and topics.
• Indie games starting to exist now that mainstream games are made by dozens of people.
• MadMaze.
• LadderMan: He's a man! He's a ladder!
• Whether the video for Freak on a Leash could be made today and still be western-style animation.
• Extremely red coffee.
• Whether they're pouring steaming blood into this coffee mug or maybe you just have Flux on.
• Playing hopscotch at the precipice of a cliff.
• A cop drawing a gun to stop you from jumping off a cliff.
• Where's Hopscotch Girl?
• The kind of person who would prominently display a cookie jar and never fill it.
• A speeding bullet rapidly leaving a party like "this party sucks"
• A hundred page forum thread arguing about whether the plane on a treadmill will take off.
• Weird creatures that have eyes but no mouth and vice versa.
• A bullet bee making bullet honey.
• A music video that is just a Ganon fight with two posters firing bullets back and forth at each other.
• A bullet intended to pierce someone's ear but it just goes right through their gauge.
• A DOS program you can use with your SoundBlaster.
• A blanket you can use to increase the strangeness of your dreams.
• Whether most people have boring dreams or whether most people are just bad storytellers.
• Things happening because of other things.
• Dreams where the whole dream is that you know a fact.
• How to know whether someone is the president of Nairobi.
• Running on the path you used to walk on and seeing way more bugs per minute.
• Gauging your mouth so that you can collect even more bugs while running.
• Installing a whistle tip in your mouth so you make an incredibly loud whistling noise while running around.
• Getting into blood doping just because you want to get high.
• The nicest form of Mustard Gas.
• Soaking your clothes with essential oil of lavender so passers by are like "I love the smell of lavender" and then they die because all the oxygen has been replaced with lavender.
• The new exercise fad where you go running while looking behind you, terrified.
• Bubb Rubb lauding Missile Tips. "The missiles go woooo!"
• Being super into being witnessed.
• Throwing a stumble scramble into your jogging routine and everybody around you panicking as they try to figure out what you're running from.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Nathan
  • https://twitter.com/NathanShorts
• Chris
  • https://twitter.com/MrChrisLHall/

Topics:

• Are mysteries actually better when you know who dun it?
• Renting apartments that come with weird artifacts
• Monster Island was a play-by-mail MMO written in QuickBasic that ran from 1989 to 2017.
  • https://if50.substack.com/p/1989-monster-island
  • https://if50.substack.com/
• No Tengo Dinero by Righeira
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwxIGe1oOJQ
  • Unedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/raj5mJ1sma4
• Procrastinating because if I do anything I'll feel like I have to do everything

Microtopics:

• The symmetry of USB-C.
• The edibility of USB-C.
• The months-long argument at Nintendo over which version of the Flag Gordon song to play when you plug USB-C headphones into the charging port.
• Which version of the Flash Gordon theme is more likely to get you pulled over for speeding.
• Columbo.
• Whether a mystery story functions as both a good story and a good puzzle.
• Revealing the identity of the murderer in the first ten minutes of every episode of your murder mystery series.
• The inherent mystery provided by the horror genre's willingness to deliver the bad ending.
• Murder mysteries that are mysteries to the characters but not the audience.
• Whether it can still be a horror movie if the audience understands the rules.
• Knives Out.
• Enjoying a story twice because there is pleasure in seeing a well-constructed story play out.
• Mental air conditioning.
• Watching a movie before you watch it, so you know what's going to happen.
• A huge wooden ankh in the bushes right outside your front door.
• Renting a furnished apartment and it comes with a painting called "Bad Pope Hat Guy" right above your bed.
• Covering the painting of Lucius the Bad Pope with a towel before going to sleep on the bed underneath the painting and waking up with the towel covering your head and realizing Lucius the Bad Pope just covered you with a towel.
• Finding a knob of unknown purpose sticking out of the wall and deciding to pull it as hard as you can.
• Fold-out wall stools.
• A porcelain hand that came with the apartment.
• Storing your porcelain hand in the toilet tank.
• Everyone having that one friend who owns a jar of mercury and does the party trick where they float a penny on top of the mercury.
• Your new girlfriend getting upset that you own a jar of mercury so you leave it in the common area of your apartment building and the next day it's gone.
• Whether your jar of mercury contains any of the atoms of mercury that Hitler breathed.
• Playing an MMO by mail.
• How many frames per second a play by mail game runs at
• Yelling "hey!" into the abyss.
• Non-player monsters.
• Crossing the Crystal Hills barrier.
• Issuing weekly patches into your Netflix original movie until none of the original story or actors remain.
• Checking the patch notes before you watch version 2.4 of your favorite movie.
• Where to put the new material when you add to your branching path story.
• Inventing the t-remover so you can patch a movie starring Brad Pitt to instead star Brad Pit.
• Whether a music video is hand animated or early CG.
• Video Toaster.
• A 3D animated prism that's actually a 2D animation cel that someone is rotating by hand.
• The significance of the orange ball with sevens coming out.
• Inventing the circuit board to be the background in your cool music video and then realizing you can use it to design electronics.
• One tiny tank having to bear witness and the other tiny tank refusing to.
• The same music video being the origin of circuit boards, Macromedia Flash, and the Toejam and Earl loading screens.
• Basing your squad of teen crime solvers on a 90s fad like Magic Eye.
• Seeing ending credits at the end of a music video and realizing you were watching a short film this whole time.
• Being inspired to speak by images in front of your eyes.
• Seeing a galaxy brain meme in your mind's ear.
• An outline of an abbreviation.
• Bragging about your photogenic memory.
• Where your mind's ear lives.
• Your Bluetooth headphones glitching out in a way that is both cool and nauseating.
• Needing to flip a switch in your mind and having to be careful not to touch the mind mouse trap next to it.
• Being productive all day and then realizing you didn't do anything fun all day.
• Moving to Minneapolis and realizing just how much you own.
• A two year old who draws perfect circles.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Tyriq
  • https://twitter.com/FourbitFriday
• Chris
  • https://twitter.com/MrChrisLHall

Topics:

• Revisiting Game Maker after 10 years, and getting right back into it
• What's your jrpg/anime vocal quirk?
• Electric showers
• Weval - Someday
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-wEvzqdDZg
• UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Lists
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNESCO_Intangible_Cultural_Heritage_Lists

Microtopics:

• A game that has been in early access for 7,000 years.
• Coming back to software you last used a decade ago and finding that it has a night theme now.
• Old vs. new Game Maker.
• Knowing the context a word is borrowed from and assuming more meaning carried over than actually did.
• Terms that programming borrowed from philosophy, like "monad" and "blockchain."
• Function-shaped functions.
• Seeing people misuse a tool and trying to decide whether it'd be better to teach them how to use the tool, or make a new tool that works how they expect.
• That time someone tried to port Catacomb Kids to C++ before realizing that someone had been adding features to this game for ten years.
• The Dark Theme era.
• Jim just happening to know how many lines of code the Frog Fractions remaster is.
• How many lines of code is reasonable for an action roguelike that one person has worked on for ten years.
• Measuring code complexity by zipping it and looking at the file size.
• Designing the rules of a game to stop people from ruining it for themselves.
• How your laugh maps to your blood type.
• Deciding that when a character says "..." that means that they farted, and suddenly being able to enjoy Visual Novels.
• Whether Jay Gatsby saying "old sport" all the time is the same phenomenon as Moogles always saying "kupo."
• Typing in a swear word when an Animal Crossing character asks you for a new catchphrase and returning the cartridge to GameStop who will sell it to a small child and it'll end up on the local news.
• Incorporating goat noises into your speech in a subtle enough way that people aren't sure if you just made a goat noise.
• Everybody having their own weird noise that they made repeatedly instead of just having a face.
• Deciding that your signature isn't cool enough and hiring a signature designer to help you out.
• Whether "signature designer" is a real job you can make a living doing.
• Designing a different unique fart for every character in your JRPG so they each have a fart that fits your personality.
• Why making a fart noise with your tongue is called a "raspberry."
• How nobody can tell you've got a duck call under your COVID mask until it's too late.
• A showerhead plugged into a wall outlet.
• Heating water as it passes through the showerhead.
• Reassuring onlookers that you've been showering in an electric shower for decades and you've only been shocked a few times and you just have to not touch the metal plumbing.
• Wearing rubber shoes in the shower so the electric showerhead doesn't electrocute you.
• How nobody posting in the thread about electric showers has died.
• Electric showers waking you up even more effectively than regular showers.
• Not knowing what people want from things.
• Nuclear pacemakers.
• The number of nuclear pacemakers still in use today.
• Your nuclear pacemaker keeping your heart beating long after the rest of you has died.
• The Council of the Nuclear Hearts.
• Plugging your electric shower right into your nuclear heart.
• Electric flamethrowers.
• Lighting your cigarette with a tiny taser.
• 24 seconds of zooming in on the forest canopy.
• A video which is very dense with frames.
• A video which is exactly the kind of video that video codecs are be bad at encoding.
• Star Turns.
• A web site where people can repost your content uncredited and go viral.
• A guest accidentally unplugging their headphones followed by thirty seconds of "can you hear me? I can hear you."
• Standing on a floor that is painted to give you vertigo.
• Buildings that are cool in this video.
• Getting really excited every time you see aerial photography.
• Freeways.
• Starting with macro shots of urban environments and transitioning to wider shots of rural environments.
• Canopy shyness.
• Voronoi diagrams.
• Preserving aspects of human culture that don't take the form of a physical object.
• Intangible cultural heritage in need of urgent safeguarding.
• Intangible culture lost in the natural process of human becomingness.
• Whether history is worth knowing.
• A series of Duke Nukem strategy guides collected in the Library of Congress, rebound to look like a hardcover from the 1950s.
• What it takes to preserve a skill that a community of people practices over the course of their lives.
• Dance notation for very constrained types of dance.
• Tugging rituals.
• Avalanche risk management.
• Notation for bee dances.
• Dance notation which is just a list of where all the ping pong balls were.
• How every culture agrees that Kiki is the spiky one and Bouba is the round one.
• Wine horses.
• A very Western centric view of how many instruments have ever existed.
• How to make the number four out of only letters.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Chris
  • https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ianknot.htm
• James
  • https://triplefox.itch.io/
  • https://youtu.be/I8uStVXNf0M

Topics:

• An adopted microwave which is too small for popcorn, begging the question: what is it for?
  • https://compassandquill.com/2012/03/12/how-to-cook-microwave-popcorn-on-the-stove/
• What happened to Galapagos? (And recreating pinball in software.)
  • https://triplefox.itch.io/galapagos
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tmg5WOvPKpU
• The trade-off between customer satisfaction and worker safety
• John asks "Skipping over links to music when your friends post them, and in turn posting links to music without a shred of self-awareness/the mental barrier to recommending or sharing music."
• Relearning how to run

Microtopics:

• A shoelace knot that you are amazed by.
• Whether somebody knows good ways of tying knots.
• Not having any ads on the show but the same shoelace knot being independently plugged by three separate guests.
• Looking outside and seeing someone furtively deposit the world's smallest microwave on the sidewalk.
• A microwave that is awesome until you try to put popcorn in it.
• A dollhouse microwave that can microwave popcorn one kernel at a time.
• The Easy Bake Microwave.
• That one kid you knew whose family was rich enough that he had a microwave in his bedroom.
• The Easy Bake TV which is just a light bulb that you stare into.
• Downsizing your lifestyle.
• Ultra-miniaturized microwaves that are just big enough for a can of Coca Cola.
• Hot Coke.
• Deciding to try Hot Coke after the show because your microwave is too small to fit anything bigger than a mug of Coca Cola.
• A hot tub with a volume of half a cubic foot.
• Whether the Whirlpool hot tub actually spins.
• Recording an entire additional episode of Topic Lords after this, that only we get to hear.
• Deciding that your fantasy console should be linear without knowing what linear means.
• Making software last a long time by targeting an emulator.
• Deciding that your entire approach to your current project is wrong and inverting its structure and then deciding to make a pinball game instead.
• Having to fake the physical pinball interactions because physics engines still aren't precise enough.
• Not having a ball bearing bouncing around inside of your phone.
• Applying an impulse when the ball hits a collision volume.
• The actual electromechanical mechanism of those triangles near the flippers that push the ball back.
• A physics solver that does mixed rigid and soft body deformation.
• Ordering pinball flippers online so you can measure them because you can't find specs describing their exact shape and size anywhere.
• How pop bumpers work.
• The ball rolling over the skirt and triggering the thrusters.
• Modeling an invisible cone that drives itself down.
• Buying a nice plastic skirt and an extremely high-current solenoid.
• Making a functional pinball table out of cardboard.
• A pinball table inside of a wine bottle.
• Pinball tables all having the common constraint that they need to fit through the door.
• "Hercules," the pinball table where the gimmick is that it's too big to fit through the door.
• How to draw the rest of the owl.
• Pinball except instead of a ball it's water.
• A PSP except instead of a portable video game system it's one of those games where you squeeze water to get rings onto posts.
• Christmas except every present is just a box of avocados.
• Pachinko except it's an oil timer.
• Physically impossible but physically accurate pinball machines.
• Pachinko except there's fire everywhere and what's falling through the pins is your dead body and all your individual bones.
• Getting licensed to make scrambled eggs with an espresso machine.
• A Big Black Egg Gauntlet.
• A big black glove that smells but doesn't look like rotten eggs.
• The pressure of an egg.
• Whether an egg could be held aloft by a shop vac.
• The video of an egg being sucked into a bottle that google shows you when it doesn't have any good results, because you can't stay mad when you get to see an egg sucked into a bottle.
• The ethics of asking your wife to take a video of cafe workers making scrambled eggs.
• The violence of recommendations.
• Whether or not you can get mad about your time being wasted for twenty seconds.
• Doing everything in your power to like your favorite band's new album.
• Your first "Hero's Journey" vs. your hundredth.
• The kind of media you consume while doing other things vs. the kind you actively study.
• Mentoring teenagers and exhorting that they listen to as much music as possible before they get old like you, and handing them some Linkin Park CDs.
• Getting better at stuff.
• Each sport having a different set of recommended vitamin supplements.
• Lurching forward on your ankles.
• Looking up how runners run on Youtube and immediately realizing how you can run way faster.
• Getting running shoes that force you to spring around on your toes rather than landing on your heel.
• Getting it but not liking it.
• Studying Full Tilt.
• Taking your kick scooter on the freeway.
• Pre-Stormdancer problems.
• Googling your own name and finding erotic short fiction starring a gay lumberjack with your name.
• The sound of probably not being able to hear anything
• Whether a beverage can be both hot and carbonated.
• Sadness when you can't carbonate soup.
• The audio signature of Coke being microwaved.
• A microwave% run of Super Mario 64 where you need to turn on the microwave next to the Nintendo 64 at the exact right frame.
• Honey refusing to dissolve in tea no matter how much you stir.
• Putting your mug of flat microwaved Coke in the Sodastream to recarbonate it.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Kev - https://www.radcade.com/
• Chall - https://twitter.com/MrChrisLHall

Topics:

• Rick Astley's Youtube channel in 2020
  • https://www.youtube.com/c/RickastleyCoUkOfficial/videos
  • https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1303143128740720640?s=19
  • https://twitter.com/necrosofty/status/1300908917896085505
• Unconsciously adjusting for sensory deficiencies
  • https://www.improbable.com/2010/02/15/ig-nobel-acceptance-speech-knuckle-cracking/
  • https://news.bme.com/2013/03/06/adding-and-subtracting/
• All food photography of prawns in the UK use the same six genetically engineered prawns.
  • https://twitter.com/LRBbookshop/status/1301469852599754753
  • https://youtu.be/J1NV6CUJl18
• Not A Butt Face asks: "Numbers in games are too big. We should just use smaller numbers. YuGiOh and final fantasy monsters having tens of thousands of HP and your attacks doing hundreds or thousands of damage looks cool when you have those quad 9s pop up... but games like Paper Mario or Megaman Battle Network keeping damage and health numbers in the tens to hundreds range means you can mentally calculate damage difference and feel the impact more granularly."
  • https://thespelunkyshowlike.libsyn.com/
  • I forgot to mention another important aspect of BCD, which is that it rounds more intuitively than binary floating point math. Hence its use in calculators.
• Michael Jackson and the Sonic 3 soundtrack
  • Sonic Robo Blast 2: https://www.srb2.org/

Microtopics:

• The raddest place to play web games.
• Topic Time.
• Something the Algorithm decided you should know about.
• Having a hairstyle identical to the one you had in that music video thirty years ago.
• Having an appropriate face for your voice.
• Rickroll Georg who lives in a cave and has rickrolled people over a billion times.
• The patron saint of being disappointed.
• A bobblehead of Rick Astley on a crucifix.
• Taking the loupe out of your breast pocket to check if your date's crucifix is really Jesus or if it's Rick Astley again.
• The YouTube algorithm deciding it's important that everyone learn how to make a house out of sticks in the swamp.
• What the Dancing Baby is up to these days.
• How memes propagated before social media.
• A deep learning up-rez of the Dancing Baby at 1080p and 60FPS.
• A reverse engineered Diddy Kong 3D model with big Retouched Jesus energy.
• Memes: look 'em up.
• The ethics of adding a moment of silence in post.
• Giving Rick Astley the Topic Lords Bump.
• Memorizing the eye test they give you at the DMV because you keep forgetting your glasses.
• The guy who only cracked the knuckles of one of his hands to test the hypothesis that cracking your knuckles causes arthritis.
• Repeatedly breaking your knuckles so you can have enormous terrifying swollen knuckles and calling it a "bone trick"
• The Bone Trick Brothers trying to out knuckle each other.
• The doors that are now open to the Bone Trick Brothers.
• The Bone Trick Brothers growing up to be insurance investigators specializing in knuckleheads.
• The complete impossibility of photographing prawns.
• Having to tell a
• A derivatives market for trading futures contracts against the six genetically engineered prawns used in all food photography.
• Being totally bought into a complete lie because it was written in a convincing authorial voice.
• Being convinced by photo evidence even though you haven't looked at the photo evidence.
• Getting your one mistake out of the way and having smooth sailing for the rest of your life.
• This Headline is False.
• Squinting at a plate of colorful rice and trying to see a negative space prawn.
• Scientists just realizing that nobody has cooked a real prawn in decades.
• The last topic being a complete fabrication.
• Opening a hole in reality and pulling in alternate reality Topic Lords episodes where Jim is in a biker club and has guests named Rex.
• Getting notifications any time a podcast anywhere in the multiverse talks about you.
• Not even liking notifications from this universe.
• Lyrics that sound like words but are not words.
• A podcast as a way for people who miss you after you die to listen to you talk for hours about inane bullshit.
• The first year of Topic Lords topics in a coffee table book.
• When GPT-3 Jim is narrating the podcast of the future.
• Instead of doing the whole trial, just doing the first few minutes of the trial and sending the transcript through GPT-3 and searching for "verdict."
• Whether we're still talking about prawns.
• Chunky Integers.
• Feeling the weight of smaller numbers better than enormous ones.
• The advantages and disadvantages of binary-coded decimal.
• Feeding a virtual pet except you're just clicking on cookies.
• Comparing sizes and distances and only really caring about order of magnitude.
• A ragtag team of Internet people spending decades elaborating on your game idea.
• Dozens of people adding features that they think will be cool and hoping that after ten years of this a good game design will emerge.
• How Micheal Jackson might hypothetically have written the Sonic 3 soundtrack.
• Getting excited to go down a YouTube rabbit hole.
• An even cooler mystery than the mystery of the prawns.
• Whether you like a song being predicated on exactly how familiar it is to you.
• Loving the Sonic 3 soundtrack so much that you track down this Michael Jackson guy's other music.
• Like playing an ARG except you're just living your life.
• A Doom mod secretly being the best Sonic the Hedgehog game even though Doom doesn't support slopes so they can't do the loop-the-loop.
• Modding room-over-room into the Doom engine so that you can put loop-the-loops in Sonic Robo Blast 2.
• A great place you got here, lotta nice topics, really screams "party."
• A part time paid employee who just came out of the woodwork.
• Being a leaf node on the employment tree.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Chris will find you. He is working on Core Editor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RyUjnpyJY4
• Chris is @MrChrisLHall on Twitter and is working on https://www.adventurelab.fun/

Topics:

• 2:07 Wikipedia descriptions of fighting game stories
  • The Rad Project. http://web.archive.org/web/20070406100535/http://www.flammie.net/vse/things/rad/index.htm
• 13:05 Is there a 21st century version of the thank-you note?
  • The Double Disappearance of Walter Fozbek. http://bookembob.blogspot.com/2011/07/double-disappearance-of-walter-fozbek.html
  • The Selective Attention Test. https://youtu.be/vJG698U2Mvo
• 26:27 I'm pretty sure I could write a book about anything
  • Dolphin flip in slow motion. https://youtu.be/37C1KOSgTAk
• 32:49 Kevin asks: "Tom Nook: Robber Baron or Captain of Industry?"
• 38:37 Melodica purchased online
• 48:43 Ursula Vernon is rad
  • Weird fruit gallery: https://www.deviantart.com/ursulav/gallery/7872409/weird-fruit
• 57:01 Peering in on skateboard culture from the outside
  • So Deep + juggling pins. https://youtu.be/9pvzWY-lSRw

Microtopics:

• Risking sounding like a corporate shill.
• Whether or not Wikipedia is pretty great.
• Wikipedia's editorial tone when describing ridiculous stories.
• Finding a video embed in the middle of a textbook page and trying to press it.
• A book with squiggle underlines wherever the author screwed up.
• Having to come up with narrative justification for 500 one-on-one fights in a row.
• The guy you just kicked off a cliff offering you cakes because nobody should have to fight on an empty stomach.
• Your pet frog jumping on a box in your back yard marked radioactive, growing to massive size, then jumping down a huge hole that is also in your back yard for some reason.
• The Japanese version of the wacky frog tank story just being factions at war in the post apocalypse.
• Mega Man except you are a gnarly wizard instead of a robot.
• A floating Buddha named "Surprise" shooting you in the back.
• If Astro Boy were a mailman.
• Merging the wacky frog tank story and the post apocalyptic war story into a single canonical timeline in the new Switch release.
• Writing on paper made of trees with a pen and it's 2020.
• Writing a thank you note when a relative hands you a twenty dollar bill.
• Writing a jam game for every special occasion because it's more fun than writing a card.
• The correct plural of Magnum Opus.
• Returning to Lazy Land.
• The videos you like best inevitably being taken down due to copyright strikes because that's the world we live in now.
• YouTube telling you that some videos have been removed from your playlist but not telling you which.
• A digital representation of what it's like to grow old.
• Making a USB drive ark and taking two of every genre of music.
• Your Google ad profile gaining sentience and making credit card purchases behind your back but also getting a job and making your credit card payments on time.
• Going to work and nobody remembering who you are.
• Going into the office wearing a gorilla costume and eventually sending in a gorilla to do your job and it turns out the gorilla is better at your job than you are.
• Using a gorilla Snapchat filter on a gorilla to make it look like a human who's trying to look like a gorilla.
• Waking up in parallel dino world where everyone is a dinosaur and your dinosaur twin waking up in human world where everyone is a human, because you both had a mad scientist neighbor.
• Making a note of how to disguise yourself as a dinosaur because you never know when you'll end up in dinosaur world.
• Doing a face swap with your cat during the conference call so everyone is too horrified to notice the gorilla in the background.
• A pedalboard except it's Instagram filters.
• Chaining Instagram filters to create a truly epic fursona.
• Reverse college, where you get paid to forget things.
• Getting paid a dollar per paragraph about skateboard tricks.
• A varial kickflip except instead of splitting the axes of rotation between your feet, doing all the rotation with your front foot.
• Writing a book with your 18 month old and it's just the words poop, ball, bath and meow over and over and over.
• Your toddler growing up to discover axes and cops, like leaves changing colors in autumn.
• A raccoon who is very friendly and has taken a lot of your money.
• Whether Tom Nook is a slum lord.
• A dog with five fingers, an apron, and a whole lot of bells.
• Being in debt forever because your landlord keeps building you a bigger and bigger house.
• A 100% speedrun of Adobe Photoshop.
• Adding achievements, particle effects, and screenshake to Visual Studio.
• Two melodica players coincidentally bringing their instruments to the same party and locking eyes from across the room.
• Cheap, portable musical instruments you can have with you at all times and practice with at the drop of a hat.
• A tube with six holes in it.
• Penny whistles always being in D because it's one more than C.
• Wikipedia diving deep into the lore of each musical scale.
• The cute face of the otamatone being almost assuredly more entertaining than the notes you play with it.
• Penny whistles with a conical bore staying in tune better than cylindrical ones.
• The monomyth of the boy who sneaks up on a seal while she's bathing and steals her skin and she turns out to be a beautiful human woman and now she has to marry him.
• The origin of the pear-with-teeth meme.
• The Biting Pear of Salamanca.
• Whether anyone named Ursula is still alive today.
• An interesting reaction to discovering that your daughter is made of birch bark.
• A dead whale falling to the ocean floor and feeding scavengers for years.
• Spending your whole life waiting for a whale to die.
• Zombie worms growing like flowers in the lightless garden of a sunken whale corpse.
• A tiny kobold fondling an eggplant.
• Giving your wife a picture of a fruit with teeth for her birthday.
• Your skateboard being stolen twice in the same day.
• Angsty skateboarders lashing out at the world around them via sick kickflips.
• Fighting everyone around you being morally equivalent to fighting no-one.
• A nine year old girl in a tutu doing a double heelflip.
• The cost of skateboarding being measured in hospital visits, especially when you are 40 and overweight.
• Wearing an inflatable dinosaur suit and skateboarding in a bounce house for maximum safety.
• Wanting to get into skateboarding but you're scared of dying and none of your friends have trucks.
• Hacky sack looking fun but actually it's a lie built on a throne of falsehoods and pain.
• Narrowing an artefact's origin down to the Century of the Fruitbat.
• Musicians dancing while they play just to show off that they are good enough at music and dancing that they can do both at the same time.
• Being entirely out of both topics and lords.

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Lords:

• Rusty is Rusty#1990 on Discord.
  • Rusty's Discord bot: https://deepfake-bot.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
• Chris is @MrChrisLHall on Twitter.

Topics:

• 2:39 Games that are work.
• 12:40 Twitter bots posting photos of people and cats that do not exist
  • https://twitter.com/DoesNotExistBot
  • https://twitter.com/normalcatpics
• 17:15 The best way to future proof your job against AI takeover is to get a job that machines are already better at but humans still do it anyway.
• 24:34 Quill asks: "Have you ever seen the different verbal naming systems for hexadecimal? They're all amazing. My favorite numbers are eggteen and chris."
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexadecimal#Verbal_and_digital_representations
• 28:07 Where do you find folk games? Like Sticks or Contact or Fish Bowl. There must be some really amazing ones out there that I've never heard of.
• 36:55 My recording rig for podcasting
  • http://sonic-pi.net/
  • Live coding an ambient electro set w/ Sonic Pi. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1m0aX9Lpts
  • The Failure of the iPad. http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2020/01/29/the_failure_of_the_ipad/
• 45:02 When you're old and only remember jokes, the only way to learn new things is to make jokes about them.
  • https://mnemosyne-proj.org/

Microtopics:

• Non-consensually turning a Discord user into a Discord bot.
• A recurring topic on this particular episode.
• Lightly-flavored seltzer water.
• Entering the Konami code at a soda fountain to get the secret flavor.
• Getting tasks in your inbox and doing the tasks and getting more tasks as a reward.
• Not having to take part in the office drama.
• A complete lack of scrum master.
• The fantasy of doing a job and getting fairly compensated.
• The plausibility of having fun at your job.
• Letting others pay the cost of the harm you're doing to the world.
• Loving to play games where you clean up messes while your real life home gets worse and worse.
• Playing a game about a housecleaning robot and deciding doing housework could make you happy in real life too.
• Not falling for it when mom tries to turn cleaning your room into a game.
• Teenagers going out of their way to be helpful in the household.
• Toddlers wanting to do what adults do.
• Finding out 18 years later your theory is correct.
• The lego: nature's caltrop.
• Writing an angry letter to the Lego corporation asking why they don't make squishy legos.
• Wearing only half a pair of glasses.
• Choosing Markov Chains because they work better than Tensorflow.
• Having enough ram to store 1.5 billion floating point values.
• Whether the Dalai Lama has ever used ICQ, and if so why hasn't Jim talked to him.
• Some people running really fast, but not as fast as cars, but we still pay them to do it.
• The emergency board meeting that the CEO of running called when the speed of cars eclipsed the speed of runners.
• Becoming an artisanal trucker on Etsy when computers take your trucking job.
• Decking out your artisanal delivery truck in old-timey neon reminiscent of the 80s when people still had jobs.
• The part of your brain dedicated to determining the gender of the driver who is trying to kill you.
• Being a very chill person except when you're driving alone.
• An angry meditation on driving in heavy traffic.
• The only time your infant son has ever heard you be angry.
• Bringing your date to see Black Swan without realizing it's secretly a horror movie.
• Just waiting for the great black scary bird to show up.
• Pronouncing 1E as "Eggteen."
• Knowing your pointer is a bad pointer when it's pointing to DEADBEEF.
• Magic numbers such as 0xDECAFC0FFEE15BAD.
• Michael Jackson moonwalking on the moon.
• That feeling when you find that the altar is co-aligned in Minetown in Nethack.
• Playing tag but not knowing who invented it.
• Having water at home but trying not to brag about it.
• A really inefficient way of getting at musicking.
• Choosing a software package because you just download and run it without doing a bunch of sysadmin bullshit.
• Being frustrated that there are still some things you can do on a computer but not on a phone.
• Having an example that you wanted to use but not being able to remember what it was.
• Remembering what a word means because you once imagined a monkey saying it.
• Deliberately cracking yourself up so you can remember Bob's last name.
• Thinking of the time I thought your name was "Blob."
• Only remembering to buy the funniest items on your grocery list.
• Memorizing your grocery list and then being stuck with the same grocery list for the rest of your life.
• The persistent allure of a shelf of physical media even in the era of digital downloads.
• Being intrigued by Bee Simulator but not being $48 intrigued.
• Bee dances that are sufficiently expressive to articulate game reviews.
• Git cloning the mind of someone with a good memory so you can remember things better.
• Only being able to remember monkeys brachiating, but remembering the hell out of it.

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