• Ryan
• CisHetKayfaber

Topics:

• My vocal stims are getting out of control now that I don't have pets.
• Training to become a Tetris Grandmaster
  • https://www.youtube.com/@cishetkayfaber/videos
• Switching to not-bifocals
• Eagle Eye Cherry - Save Tonight
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nntd2fgMUYw

Microtopics:

• Introducing yourself or plugging something.
• Going to Cape Town for Playtopia.
• Enemies to enemies to lovers.
• A game conference with a name that sounds way too much like Fruitopia.
• What you would do for an Orbitz right now.
• An apple juice with basil seeds ensconced in it, like an Orbitz.
• I'm not mean, I'm just trying to manifest bullying.
• Semisolid Kind of Life.
• A dog following you into the kitchen and acting like a Ghostbusters trap except for all your bullshit rather than ectoplasm.
• The movie about the prep school kids who poop on the floor at their magic school.
• Making yourself laugh by doing a Gollum voice while you make a sandwich.
• Hanging up a happy face on the fridge and writing "mirror" on top of it to convince yourself that you're okay.
• An action figure that absorbs all the dark energy aimed at you.
• Giving advice to someone that you really have no basis for.
• The dog who loved your terrible celebrity impressions and the dog who gives you a look like "I expected more of you"
• Your online source for news about what water parks Jim and his family went to.
• The kind of Tetris that you become s grandmaster in.
• Tetris but the pieces don't fall, they just instantly appear at the bottom of the well.
• How the Tetris company wants you to play Tetris.
• Delayed Auto-Shift.
• Doing a hadouken move to place the zigzag piece in the correct column.
• Stack faster, stack better.
• A skill you can practice and get better at.
• Training for three or four hours a day on a hacked PlayStation Vita to become a Tetris Grandmaster.
• How the Tetris the Grandmaster community feels about leverless controls.
• Going several years between occasions to say hello to your wife.
• Going for a walk around the block so you have an excuse to say hello to your wife when you get back.
• Seeing a person and immediately infodumping at them.
• What they have now instead of bifocals.
• Training your eyes to look through the part of the lens that does the thing.
• Going to the optometrist and saying "just fuck me up"
• Why they don't make bifocals for text at the distance of a computer monitor.
• There's still time, and there's dignity.
• Watching the VOD of your own death because you missed the livestream.
• Getting used to your vision swimming in a new way when you get new glasses.
• Getting an eye exam and saying "I'd rather not say" when they ask you what letters you see.
• Freeballing your corneas.
• A fellow glasses enjoyer.
• A cursed gem that gives you astigmatism.
• Doing the Magic Eye thing in order to learn to read.
• Being born a trust fund kid, except it's your eyeballs.
• The return of the quarter speed music video.
• Even slower slow motion.
• Why can't Eagle-Eye Cherry crawl?
• Wondering why you haven't leaped yet.
• Singing to the camera while being robbed.
• Watching music videos at 1.5x speed as practice for watching them at .25x speed.
• Suddenly the dog takes its mask off and it was Eagle-Eye Cherry the whole time!
• Promising to eat your glasses frames on camera.
• Forgetting how cool your whole premise is and just stopping doing it.
• Literal music videos.
• A houseplant can't save shit. A houseplant doesn't know what time it is.
• People running around New York and looking sad at the camera.
• Buck Cherry. (Named after Chuck Berry.)

Support Topic Lords

• CisHetKayFaber
  • https://www.patreon.com/CisHetKayFaber
• Andrew
  • https://luxurybunkers.bandcamp.com/album/killer-karen

Topics:

• People say the craziest stuff in front of janitors.
• Revisiting development of a creative work after 20 years
• Naming conventions in the demo scene vs. the ZZT scene
• How to Be Perfect, by Ron Padgett
  • https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57243/how-to-be-perfect
• Floops, a 3D cartoon character generated in VRML in the mid-90's internet

Microtopics:

• Putting all your stress from the last three months into a single EP.
• Brains pooping right into your ears.
• Refusing to talk about Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music.
• Are you allowed to talk to janitors??
• Being assumed to be part of a group (openly racist people) that you are not actually part of.
• The risks of letting other people clean up after you.
• How do you know when it's time to eat candy when you don't have the candy gland?
• Giving yourself heat stroke because you don't realize it's too hot.
• Making a plan for how to not get heat stroke!
• Not having a thirst meter but your snacking meter is pegged 24/7.
• The inability to sleep and eat at the same time.
• How to tell if you're on SSRIs.
• Cyclothymia.
• "You have to do this now or I'm going to stare at you."
• A VR exercise app where if your heart rate drops too low all the NPCs start staring at you.
• The cost of not taking care of yourself.
• Clinging to your flow state for dear life.
• Feeling like you've done a thing vs. actually doing the thing.
• Sedarising and unsedarising your essay.
• The many eras of cancelling David Sedaris.
• Independent tabletop game developers in the Osaka area.
• Writing to explore your own thought space.
• Writing the program and then running the program.
• Taking a twenty year break between essay drafts so you can revisit your ideas fresh.
• Cyberpunk-coded online handles.
• Attaching a political ideology to the ZZT scene.
• Role-playing bring a small business owner as you make art in your bedroom and share it with the online community.
• Social capital in the cracking community.
• The era in your life when you didn't even know it was possible to pay for computer games.
• Who'd win in a fight, Slayer, or Mega Slayer ZZ9 Final?
• The revealed philosophies of different online communities.
• Shareware and early web nostalgia.
• A wild time to be on the Internet.
• Enjoying lo-fi versions of a thing.
• A movie with bad special effects that look great in the pirated cammed version.
• Straightening your room before you save the world.
• Not doing anything to make what you want impossible.
• Using attractive stamps, like the one with the tornado on it.
• Carrying the only poem you like around with you on index cards.
• Living in a culture where respect for the elderly is out of control.
• The age at which you get to elbow your way to the front of every line.
• Getting paid to tell people how to do things better.
• Things you had to learn outside of school.
• A guy who looks like he's eaten every lemon in the world.
• Ron Padgett celebrity lookalikes.
• An alarm clock that wakes you up by shouting "I'm looking forward to the Internet of things!" in your own voice.
• Who's been to cocktail parties and when, and did you discuss VRML?
• Hand animating 3D cartoons by typing VRML.
• Vtubers in the 90s.
• Making things and putting them on the Internet and everyone just assumes you just prompted an AI to make it.
• Demystifying the magic pixie dust.
• The burly wizard with a hammer and anvil who knows how to make the metal not brittle.
• NAND to Tetris and Cryptopals. (Not the blockchain kind.)
• Learning to never roll your own crypto.
• Magic. (Derogatory.)
• Punished for understanding the assignment.

Support Topic Lords

• CisHetKayFaber
• Maxx

Topics:

• Food-focused Japanese TV
• If "fish don't exist," then how do pescetarians?
• PicoSteveMo is back!
• https://wikipoem.org/
• Verisimilitude in play (My daughter plays GTA and Roblox) (The shifting nature of what is appropriate for children)

Microtopics:

• Emotionally connecting with a dying web site and meeting up with other users in Seattle.
• What the Cohost diaspora is doing to do.
• Drive-by bad opinions.
• Where people live in Australia, on average.
• CSS Crimes.
• Using external image hosts to continue blogging on Cohost after it is in read-only mode.
• URL shortening services reusing old links.
• Meeting up with people you have a loose association with and having a good time together.
• The Bowling League Mafia taking up every lane every day with tournaments so nobody else can bowl.
• A TV drama where a traveling salesman keeps being hungry at different train stations.
• Seeing a meal that looks delicious but you're full and can't eat a whole nother meal.
• Whether food becomes fictional as soon as you eat it.
• Watching satellite TV on your flip phone.
• OneSeg.
• Your email address being owned by your phone carrier.
• A phone that closes and has great battery life.
• The golden age of food-focused broadcast TV.
• A celebrity who's interested in food goes and eats at a restaurant.
• This Burger Weighs 30 Pounds!
• Midnight Diner.
• The Karate Kid but with ramen.
• Watching a Youtube of the video gamers.
• Ordinary People, Extraordinary Food.
• Whether pescetarians exist.
• The researchers in the shark lab you used to work at calling dolphins fish.
• Fish eyes: nature's boba.
• A block of gouda floating in the ocean.
• Fish that stop being fish when you think about it too hard.
• Disagreeing with beavers about what tree to cut down, but you're conflict avoidant so the beaver always wins.
• Haven't we all argued with beavers?
• Crows stealing the naan out of your naan and curry.
• Jungle Crows who sound like an adult man doing an impression of crows.
• Crows who are really good at Japanese T9.
• The nets you put over your garbage that can't possibly keep the crows out.
• Picking Steves from a continuity standpoint.
• Finding any excuse to make a Stephen King Sokoban.
• Deliberately awkward control schemes.
• A thousand prototyping girls in space.
• A poem without any line breaks in it.
• The zine era of web design, when people would just type HTML and it would become a web page.
• Phrases that make sense locally but not globally.
• A comedian who is in lots of things.
• The kind of poem you'd get if you put a poem on a wiki.
• The kind of thing that would probably be read on this show.
• The kind of web site that you'd run into when you're doing an ARG.
• Installing Roblox on the PS5 to teach your daughter to read English better.
• Playing a game with purple vomiting everywhere.
• The ways a 7 year old interacts with a Grand Theft Auto.
• Teaching yourself how to drive in Grand Theft Auto and obeying all the traffic laws.
• Not shielding your kid from media but talking to them about it instead.
• Academy Award winner Fisher Stevens.

Support Topic Lords

• CisHetKayFaber
• Jenni

Topics:

• Interesting/weird foley sounds in games
• Finding out about pop culture when it shows up in ASMR videos
  • CisHetKayFaber, correcting small breast mammography takes: "Mammograms seem to suck for everyone, and my initial take of, 'they just keep going' is correct while later discussion where I used it as an example where 'best effort,' in the healthcare system feels like lack of care wasn't appropriate even if that broader point is generally true."
  • https://www.healthimages.com/how-are-mammograms-done-on-small-breasts/
• Going to see the eclipse
  • https://archive.org/details/canonofeclipsesc0000oppo
• He peels off my clothes like a starving man would peel an orange, by Sharon Cherski
  • https://www.mscl.com/characters/sharon_cherski.html
• Generational punctuation differences
  • https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-millennial-captcha

Microtopics:

• Plugging the enormous void in your soul by playing Balatro.
• A card game with really good balance and numbering.
• Seeing the light at the end of the tunnel on the Rusty Lake series.
• Giving everybody grace except for yourself.
• Corpse looting foley.
• Looking through a sound library for the sound of a spider dying.
• Buying a chair from an estate sale because you love the sound it makes.
• The Looney Tunes cartoon where some foley artist invented everyone's conception of what a pneumatic tube sounds like.
• Running around outside and deciding to drop a soup can into the pool.
• A school project where you rerecord all the audio for five minutes of television.
• Showing your project to someone and you did such a good job that they don't even notice your project.
• All the clothes that you're wearing making all the clothes noises.
• Watching a porn clip overdubbed with Minecraft noises at just the right time in your life.
• Does two tails mean two assholes?
• Putting an acronym on the Tails experience.
• If you've got a cloaca, it's gotta go in the acronym.
• Only getting horny when an earth, somewhere in the multiverse, is being hit by a comet.
• Two-Tails has two assholes, and I'm one of them.
• Forming the Megazord.
• Lance from all the various things that have Lances in them.
• Who is Lance in love with Voltron?
• Google giving you sports results to make incognito mode more plausible.
• Ironic ASMR.
• Doin' it for the tingles.
• When Dora the Explorer asks you what your favorite part of the show was and she says "I liked that too" except it's a video of a doctor asking you about your health.
• The doctor explaining that this is just what your life is like now.
• Hot dogging it on the blood pressure cuff.
• Changing your blood pressure just to fuck with your doctor.
• Deliberately choosing a femme-presenting chubby doctor.
• Needing to lose about 40 pounds so you get a leg amputated.
• Checking a box on your insurance form saying "do not give me lifestyle advice."
• Carrying around your patient in a folder.
• Doing the Barium test every time.
• I'm in a Barium rotisserie, I need you to work with me.
• Checking the quality of your stomach lining.
• Trying to banter with the person giving you the mammogram and deeply offending them.
• Getting small mouth shame at the dentist.
• Rude Doctor ASMR.
• ASMR videos where the dentist tells you your mouth is big enough.
• Assuming Hugh Laurie is not on Cameo for the purposes of the bit.
• Sourcing an entire podcast through Cameo.
• The most stony-faced magical realism twin assassins.
• Topics episode topics.
• How to personalize a stair.
• Hiring Mike Ehrmantraut to tell you how you're gonna do your taxes.
• Mike Ehrmantraut administering the mammogram.
• Visiting friends who live near the totality.
• A stump that is freshly cut so it's exuding sap non-stop and is covered with bees and flies 24/7.
• Whalefall but on land.
• Chekov's oozing stump coming back in the third act.
• Going to the astronomical society web site to be sure that the eclipse glasses you get are not the counterfeit eclipse glasses.
• Looking at where the sun used to be.
• Looking at something that could only be a visual effect except it's right there in the sky.
• A thousand year old elf working through her emotions about how her human friends keep dying.
• The day you had to be inside during recess.
• Standing up and throwing your potato salad and mint julep on the ground.
• Writing an angry email to Peter Molyneux for designing eclipses badly.
• The cold cement basement of love.
• Media from 1992.
• Borrowing the DVD boxed set of My So-Called Life from your manager at the pizza place.
• Writing poems for your benefactors.
• Poetry written from the point of view of a fake person.
• Poetry that could plausibly have been written by a teenager.
• Do you believe the German mathematician in the 19th century, or do you believe Google?
• A soda can that plays the Amen Break when you open it.
• Texts from your mom asking how is your "boyfriend," is there anything I can do to "help"?
• What it means when someone puts two spaces after a period.
• Growing up meaningfully on the internet.
• Composing some shit very quickly and making sure it is very needs-suiting.
• Taking all day to come up with 350 words because you did not grow up on IRC or forums.
• All the kids discordin' like for real for real fam.
• A much wider variety of emoji than anything you can do with colons and parentheses.
• Sending the semicolon-based winky face to your wife because you cannot be bothered to pull open the emoticon window and find the right icon.
• Asking your dad "what do you think LMAO means"
• Aunts saying "LOL" in funeral announcements.
• Entire generations who have terrible reading comprehension because they didn't grow up texting their friends as their primary mode of communication.
• Missing entire regions of UI because they are vaguely shaped like ads.
• Using a bigger computer to make your bigger purchases.
• Millenial CAPTCHAs.
• Straight for pay.

Support Topic Lords

• CisHetKayfaber
• BaseCase

Topics:

• Raising third cultural kids as a second cultural individual
• Figuring out how to do creative projects that take longer than a weekend when you aren't getting paid for them.
• Someone sent me money on Venmo and now I need to sign up for Venmo if I want to have the money
• Farmyard Song
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmyard_Song
  • https://www.elyrics.net/read/a/aaron-copland-lyrics/i-bought-me-a-cat-lyrics.html
• We've been subscribed to Universal Yums for over a year now, and the sweet snacks range from "unremarkable" to "unbelievably great" to "not my cup of tea but interesting", whereas the savory snacks are mostly bad. What's going on there?

Microtopics:

• Not being permitted to plug anything.
• A unique situation in which you are gendered a lot less.
• Australian Treat Arnott's Mint Slice.
• Crossover of snacks from Australia to Japan.
• Gentleman's agreements among cookie manufacturers.
• Patenting your cookie recipe.
• Touring school administrators.
• Being friends with a lot of Coca Cola people.
• Really enjoying multiculturalism.
• Producing a good person.
• Taking credit for the time your daughter didn't play Mario for six months.
• Focusing on the aspects of the situation that you find meaningful.
• What does and doesn't count as a childhood development milestone.
• Being good at the work people are expecting you to do.
• Doing worksheets outside.
• What children report back from their experience at school.
• Attempting to pirate the Montessori curriculum.
• A really fun month.
• Projects you can accomplish in a weekend.
• Why you don't have more to show for all your free time.
• Refusing to call someone stupid or lazy and having to figure out why they're actually failing.
• Coping strategies to get things done.
• Advice that is not helpful for neurodivergent people.
• Breaking a task into subtasks and putting them on a schedule.
• The first time you encountered the concept of a to-do list.
• Brain tech.
• Hammock time. (Or shower time.)
• Showers: It's Wet In There.
• Exultation of showers.
• Watching someone start a hobby and immediately excel at it.
• Finding a good community to learn how to do a thing.
• Joining a discord with experts in many things.
• Learning how to program and realizing that this makes you good at everything because programming is the hardest thing humans do.
• Sending money to a phone number vs. sending money to an email address.
• Canadians wishing each other money.
• Nice things to do when you don't want to defraud people.
• Opening a whole raft of phishing opportunities.
• Visa getting a cut of every transaction that happens ever.
• Whether every person in the world could live in Canada.
• The Cocaine Mayor.
• A traditional that is credited to Aaron Copeland.
• Cats saying "fiddle-eye-fee."
• Not being a raging misogynist but engaging in raging misogyny anyway.
• The era when the onomatopoeia for a dog barking was "bow wow."
• Onomatopoeia that is literal like "bang" vs. onomatopoeia that is more of a stretch like "shimmy shack shimmy shack."
• Riffing on Aaron Copeland's sexuality.
• Trying to shit enough to keep up with your toilet paper subscription.
• A product built for people who have kids but do not have kids.
• The mechanism by which the "Launch Frog Fractions 2" button launched Frog Fractions 2.
• The great Loot Box crash of 2019.
• Snacks that come with an instruction manual.
• Ketchup flavored potato chips.
• What you reach for when you're feeling snacky.
• A potato chip palate that is just far too sophisticated.
• Smoked ham potato chips.
• Harry Potter jelly beans ruining snacks forever.
• Only liking eating things that taste good.
• This is bad, but is it bad in a new, interesting way?
• The worst kind of bad.
• Observing a terrible sprawling work and thinking "wow, you really did a thing here."
• The recontextualization of earlier elements based on later knowledge.
• Discord Lords.
• Listening to ads because you have gloves on.
• How to join the Topic Lords discord.
• A recently minted lord who edits the show.
• Lords Eat Free.

Support Topic Lords

• JohnB
• CisHetKayFaber

Topics:

• The human body is more similar than I'd like to shitty software (humans have chitinase in our DNA, immune system works like an antivirus)
• The origin of hiccups
  • https://derinthescarletpescatarian.tumblr.com/post/723161770948231168/okay-so-the-thing-about-hiccups-is-that-you-have
• Twenty years ago there were like three real books about videogames that weren't strategy guides and now there are hundreds.
• "untitled" by Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz
  • https://allpoetry.com/poem/13310612-Prostetnic-Vogon-Jeltz-by-Bollox
• TV shows that have inspired original mathematics - yes, it has happened more than once

Microtopics:

• Whether it's okay to catch up.
• Air conditioning on hot days.
• A steel mill catching fire and the whole east bay smells like the back of a cathode ray tube.
• Shaking yellow sand out of your laundry.
• Importing brushfire smoke from Canada.
• Using bad metaphors to explain RAM.
• Stochastic immunology.
• Alphabetizing all your gut bacteria.
• Whitman's Anal Sampling Mechanism.
• The Bonzi Buddy of the human body.
• Your inkjet printer waking up at 5am to cycle some ink.
• The optimal humidity to reflow your ink cartridges.
• Norton Commander.
• Selecting files with the arrow keys and viewing them with F3.
• How Thunking ruined Jim's Norton Commander clone.
• Your fish nervous system trying to be a fish again.
• Reciting the anti-hiccup poem to cure your hiccups.
• Fish reminding each other to not take ten small sips of water or they'll stop breathing.
• Scaly swimmers.
• Working in a shark lab.
• Whether a fish sandwich is a fish or a sandwich.
• Offering people a "tuna roll" and when they say yes guessing whether they think you mean the sushi or tuna salad on a bready roll.
• Meditating on the concept of hiccups.
• Congratulations, you won the game!
• How to Beat the Atari Home Video Games.
• Where a library would shelve those books of type-in BASIC programs.
• Dave (2018) and Dave Demo (2018)
• Which Boss Fight Books are good.
• Starting your kid on Mario Maker.
• Game Engine Black Book: Doom and Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D.
• Mario Galaxy's camera-oriented level design.
• Your body telling you when it's time to drink water.
• Using Final Fantasy 4 as a bridge to talk about localization.
• Developing a light gun game to install in all the bowling alleys now that the bowling fad has faded.
• The Countdown to Irrelevance.
• Books that used to be blogs.
• Inventing criteria for how you beat Galaga.
• Learning what micturations are twenty years after reading that Vogon poem and wondering which seeming nonsense words you'll learn in the next twenty years.
• The BBC TV Hitchhiker's Guide series.
• The second-worst poetry in the galaxy.
• Red Dwarf airing on Dave.
• A better way to think about it. (If you are a math person.)
• Drive-by Mathematics.
• Nesting your watch orders.
• Watching every episode in every possible order to get the maximum possible amount of context for every scene.
• Marylin vos Savant.
• The Monty Hall Problem.
• A game design that presumes the player does not want a goat.
• Whether you want to switch to the other goat.
• Opening 98 doors, revealing goats behind each one.
• Pushing limits and talking about calculus.
• Learning Japanese because you want to read the smutty manga.
• X: The Everything App.

Support Topic Lords

• CisHetKayFaber
• Phone

Topics:

• Correction regarding a previous topic where I stated that Metal Gear Solid 2 was the most important game of 2023
  • https://twitter.com/othatsraspberry
• Children cannot be trusted to enjoy things, and maybe that's fine
• This list of extremely specific danger signs
  • https://nextworldover.tumblr.com/post/720069329613357056
  • https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/Tkr719yF.jpg
  • https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/9unswnr6.jpg
• "Bank Account" by Louis Cole
  • https://genius.com/Louis-cole-bank-account-lyrics
• Technical beliefs you have which may be regarded as superstition, but are true to your experience (I'm convinced my new microphone is worse)

Microtopics:

• The part where Jim talks.
• Splitting your mutuals.
• The kind of person who goes to Bluesky vs. who goes to Mastodon.
• A relationship with an editor. (Like Emacs.) (Or Vim)
• Wanting to see what Shaq posts.
• The human zoo of bad takes.
• Who sent Shaq a Bluesky invite??
• O' That's Raspberry
• Metal Gear Apologies.
• Sending Konami money to fund the port of Metal Gear Solid 4.
• Optimizing for extremely specific hardware and getting entrenched.
• Shaders languishing on PS3.
• PT's final resting place.
• Konami diversifying into video games in the 80s when it's lucrative and dediversifying when it stops being as lucrative in the 2010s
• A lot of weird business practices involving Slurpees and banking
• All the places the Vita port of Metal Gear Solid 2 went on to.
• The Worlds of Power novelization of Metal Gear.
• A Narpas Sword scenario.
• Cutscene inflation.
• What happened to cutscene lengths after voice acting became cheap.
• Encoding movies on a disc for free.
• Time to Crate vs. Time to When Your Input Matters.
• Ramen waterslides.
• Annoying things that little kids do that adults also do.
• Playing video games and parenting at the same time.
• Whether it's still abuse if it's happening in the Netherlands.
• Expectations people place on their children for Christmas vs. for Halloween.
• Distorted beer.
• Getting a bunch of stuff you don't want for Christmas.
• A sweater with Mario or a cool dinosaur on it.
• Swapping the Barbie and GI Joe voice boxes and whether that's a plot point of the Barbie movie.
• Chewbacca dancing on top of the twin towers as they collapse.
• Taking wire cutters to the electrical substation and getting some free copper.
• I don't feel 130 kilovolts; I'm a perfect sphere.
• Creating a situation where people are safe even if they're not paying attention.
• Flying around in a tornado googling "what do you do when you're flying around in a tornado"
• Is it .webm or .webnn?
• All the three letter acronyms that ought to be on the internet rug you can't get.
• The giant System 7 floppy disk blanket.
• A blanket with the Mac startup sound on it.
• Missing out on some drum solos.
• A poem based on a true story.
• Being afraid to look at your tax returns.
• Getting single taxed and double social security benefits.
• Replacing your old snowball with a new snowball.
• Your thing as a person trained in audio engineering.
• Getting a very insensitive microphone so that it only picks up the sounds you want it to.
• Jim's advice for recording your voice.
• A Shure SM-57B with the Cloudlifter.
• Technical knowledge for smart people.
• Solid state drives failing without warning.
• A high pitched whine imparting a natural warmth to your voice.
• Recording your voice with a $15 boom arm.
• Using shittier tools as you get more experienced.
• A cover of a Weezer song that's rendered unlistenable hematite l because of the string squeak.
• The inability to process and retain information about LinkedIn's purpose.

Support Topic Lords

• CisHetKayfaber
• Charlie

Topics:

• Umbrellas, siphons, and other physical things that seem like hacky bullshit but actually work
• Articulating the shape of your internal cause-and-effect network and applying it as a learning superpower (futurevision)
• I'm not sure what archipelago.gg is but if I read this paragraph aloud maybe we can figure it out together
  • https://archipelago.gg/
• A copypasta from this page:
  • https://www.followchain.org/best-copypastas/#3
• Why is a skill less valued the more we love it? Shouldn't it be the opposite? Is this arguable?

Microtopics:

• Supporting someone's video game dream in Denmark.
• Escaping from idle games.
• Video games drawing the screen as often as they can.
• The pauses getting longer and longer whenever the bear needs to shit a new prime number.
• The prime number shitting bear getting constipated.
• How to calculate prime numbers faster.
• Math stuff.
• A choo choo train of thought.
• Meditation apps that play ads while you're in the middle of meditating.
• The thing where you put your mouth on the tube and then have to spit out the gas or you get neurological damage.
• Creating a low pressure system by sucking on a tube.
• Whether umbrellas make sense.
• Umbrella side-drip.
• How bicycles stay upright.
• Does a bicycle on a treadmill stay upright?
• Pattern recognition.
• Seeing a situation you recognize and understanding what's going to happen.
• Predicting where someone's sentence is going to end up.
• Putting your water glass in a zone where it's going to get knocked over.
• The shape of your mind's cause and effect network.
• Seeing scenes from the future, like in Law and Order.
• Predicting the future so that you can be a more efficient organism.
• Mashing air molecules at you.
• Speaking a language that your coworkers don't.
• Applying FutureVision to your creative process.
• Nonlinear creative processes.
• One unique large musical story where nothing repeats.
• A physical task you are doing inside your head.
• The pet that is closest to having a kid.
• Importing a portal gun into Tears of the Kingdom.
• Finding the hookshot in Metroid and your friend then bring able to use it in Link to the Past.
• How to know what your friends want.
• All the bad ways an idea could be implemented
• Surprise boomerangs.
• Archipelago's Release System.
• The era of couch co-op games.
• A multiplayer season where everybody picks a different game.
• Doing the oration.
• Who the colored lights in your keyboard are for.
• Polygonal dudes with long hair head banging in the background.
• Weirdly modern music.
• Fifteen years of everything else.
• Rhythm games vs. music games.
• Living in a society.
• Devaluing the skills you love.
• Listening to a song and really appreciating its use of rests.
• How note lengths and rests work in tracker music.
• Stopping a note without starting a new one.
• Running experiments to determine exactly when a note should stop.
• The micro decisions of things that people don't think about or care about.
• A bird named Mabel.
• A bird figuring out how to enjoy music.
• A tepid delicate series of notes.
• Attractivision.

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• CisHetKeyfaber
• Phone

Topics:

• Calculus ruined incremental games for me
• SFF PCs are ridiculous and hilarious
• What's the deal with HDR?
• Ode to Ice Cream by Vada Sultenfuss (from the movie My Girl)
• Metal Gear Solid 2 is the most important game of 2023

Microtopics:

• Appropriating wrestling culture.
• Idle games vs. incremental games.
• Trimps.
• Physics and calculus educators each pretending the other field doesn't exist.
• Jerk as a unit of measurement.
• Ruining a child's mathematical career by teaching them linear algebra.
• Floating point precision.
• Optimizing the area under the curve.
• What's the jerk of my progress?
• Position, speed, acceleration, jerk, jounce, hyperjerk, metajounce, binge warp, migrational spank, barflurch, dark jaunt, catastrophic snap, whipfuck, and Newton's Torment.
• A real aerodynamic phenomenon.
• Ruining the bench racers.
• The kind of people who form an online community around a game.
• The NGU IDLE speedrunning community.
• Slaying the starting area killing slimes for 90 hours.
• How big 26.8 liters is.
• Rehoming your PC.
• How many shoeboxes your PC case is equivalent to.
• A graphics card that is perpendicular to the motherboard.
• How many parakeets could fit in your PC case using modern parakeet packing algorithms.
• Making a novelty enormous soda can to use as a fake scale comparison in photos.
• Bending your hand at a weird angle.
• JEBKAC.
• The jerk of your PC case.
• Turning the gamma up in order to see a video game.
• Squashed gamuts.
• Adding more bits to describe the color.
• HDMI stratification.
• The colors that future mankind will invent.
• Being unable to use certain hex color triplets because the Pantone license expired.
• When ice cream tastes good.
• Poems written by works in progress.
• B.R.R. (Before Rocky Road)
• Not having seen My Girl but having seen the cover at Blockbuster.
• Growing up in a mortuary.
• Bragging that you know how to play the theme to Jaws on the piano.
• Nick at Nite.
• Playing with Legos with I Love Lucy in the background.
• Timeshared cable channels.
• Nickelodeon's audience being kids and Nick at Nite's audience being the elderly so the channel's average audience is middle-aged.
• The most important game of 2023.
• The core switcheroo.
• Psycho Mantis reading your memory card.
• Playing a really whiny guy who just sucks.
• Whether they've invented pausing cutscenes yet.
• Pausing a 40 minute cutscene to go make pizza rolls.
• AI heel turns.
• Metal Gear Solid 2 beating out Vampire Survivors for most important game of 2022.
• Why Hideo Kojima's dialog sounds like an American 90s movie.
• Political theory outsider art.
• The anti-Noby Noby Boy.
• A discord channel brimming with Lords.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• CisHetKayFaber
• Kev

Topics:

• Food from dreams and nightmares
  • https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/adeonibada/man-dream-kings-hand-snack
• Han Unification happened in Unicode and every time they add more emojis to the Unicode spec it literally hurts
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification
• The Super Mega Crossword
  • https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/18/crosswords/super-mega-2022-clues.html
• Down by the Bay by Raffi
  • https://www.vulture.com/2015/12/finding-raffi-c-v-r.html
• Video game franchises known for secrets
• Five-tined forks
  • [NMS] https://www.google.com/search?q=five-tined+forks&tbm=isch
• Horrible exceptions to rule34
  • After recording, CisHetKayFaber managed to find their holy grail videos depicting the "exception." Jim's example is much better, but Kev was also correct in having faith in human ingenuity.

Microtopics:

• First time long time.
• A very light hobby that is kind of shallow.
• Getting really into Rubik's Cube because you already love flash cards.
• Being reminded of something right before you were about to forget it.
• How best to memorize pizza coding and microphone specs.
• Ignoring the room and being annoyed when people talk to you.
• Work life balance being too tilted toward life
• The King's Hand.
• Orange Creamsicle Mashed Potatoes.
• M&M fingernails.
• A tweet and what happened with it.
• Biting something with the wrong texture and having to stare at a wall for ten minutes.
• UTF-8 character encoding.
• Adding support for Asian languages to Unicode without consulting any native speakers for advice.
• The international new global meme language of the internet.
• PuzzleMania.
• All the downsides of doing a crossword on paper.
• Words that just happen a lot when you're constructing a crossword puzzle.
• The Elden Ring of crossword puzzles.
• Doing the crossword puzzle on paper so that when you're done you can say "looks right to me" and there's no app to tell you you're wrong.
• Reading crossword puzzle clues to your wife as she falls asleep.
• A time traveler from the future who invented time travel to bring us excellent children's songs.
• A national treasure (Canada)
• A fly wearing a tie, a bear combing its hair, a llama eating pajamas, &c.
• A song intended to be performed improvisationally.
• Extending the finger family song by adding more fingers.
• Messing the cadence up with your fake mother voice.
• Where the watermelons roam.
• A mom saying nonsense that really makes you think.
• Avoiding your mom because she keeps saying weird shit about a goose kissing a moose.
• Unlocking a branch of a storyline by fulfilling a set of conditions.
• Subverting overused fantasy tropes.
• Finding a cool castle by going down a secret cliffside stairway into a hidden cave.
• Systems that point you everywhere on the map.
• Secrets of all sorts of scopes.
• The Doom thing where they point out that you didn't find all the secrets.
• Frog Fractions containing Rule 34 of itself.
• Reacting to five-tined fork.
• The fork optimization function that decided that four is the right number of tines.
• Unknowing a conversation.
• A Victorian flex of a fork.
• When die-casting was invented.
• A shovel with teeth.
• Seven-tined sporks.
• The Pornography Lord.
• Human pairings and human activities that you would expect there to be pornography of.
• Linda Hunt smugly declaring "ass to ass"
• AI pornographers buying sex dice on eBay.
• Weird combinations of words you can plug into a search engine.
• People don't want everything; people only want some things.
• The Frog Fractions pornography gap.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• CisHetKayFaber
  • https://twitter.com/CisHetKayFaber/
• Phone

Topic Lords:

• Why are Japanese adult video titles so long and weird?
• 3DS Street Pass
• Service at Lou's Diner is incredible
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYnEmyq-0sA
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJb-czNC_ls
• The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, by Gil Scott Heron.
  • https://genius.com/Gil-scott-heron-the-revolution-will-not-be-televised-lyrics
• People that do things

Microtopics:

• Seeking penance from the Topic Lord.
• Dual-purpose infotainment.
• Getting a new job that is better for your mental health.
• The People's Republic of Wal-Mart.
• Maximizing human dignity.
• Jennifer Government.
• Works of stilted microfiction describing porn contents.
• Information density and reading speed in Japanese writing.
• Accidentally machine-translating the wrong field.
• Organizing your porn by publisher.
• The full title of Robinson Crusoe.
• When movie trailers stopped giving the whole plot away as a matter of course.
• Setting your most recently played game to "Health and Safety Information" before going out to collect 3DS street-passes.
• Trying to get 3DS street passes on in suburbia.
• Edging towards the playground to get 3DS street passes without getting close enough that people notice you edging towards the playground.
• Walking backwards into the playground, staring at your 3DS.
• Taking over a gym and leaving something behind.
• A lady with three phones and a tablet out who you are sure is making a drug deal but it turns out she's just playing Pokemon.
• Collecting all the territories in 3DS street pass.
• The critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XVIV now with the free expansion up to level 60.
• A problem that helps you exercise.
• Wandering around Willow Glen dual wielding Ingresses.
• Attacking a portal in an AR game and some guy in cargo shorts comes out of his house to politely ask you to stop.
• Min-maxing your Burger King visits to become the mayor of Burger King.
• Hacking the limiter on your chocolate milk tap.
• Lou's superhuman beverage production.
• The era of automats.
• How they stored coffee in the 1950s.
• Having one of each thing on your menu ready to give to potential customers immediately.
• The turnaround on a queue of hamburgers.
• Spaghetti and blankets at the Japanese McDonald's.
• The MegaMuffin.
• The Bojangles biscuit game.
• Losing yourself on skag and skipping out for beer during commercials.
• Nixon playing a bugle.
• A revolution to get rid of the nubs.
• Sliding a color TV into a stolen ambulance.
• Only letting people into the revolution who can't spell Natalie Wood's name.
• Dreaming about the end of television.
• The BBC covering climate change by talking about how nice and sunny it is.
• The guy who wanted to work at Nintendo so he got a job working at Nintendo.
• Improving your tools and workflow because you're procrastinating doing actual work.
• Playing Tetris on a gamepad vs. on a keyboard.
• Tetris APM.
• Switching joycon hands because you're accustomed to using the arrow keys with your right hand.
• Making friends the wrong way in Japan.
• Making things on purpose vs. making them accidentally.
• Knowing how to act in a Japanese meeting.
• Learning how to work towards a goal every day whether or not you feel like it.
• How to tell when a game is ready to ship.
• Going to the grocery store and explaining to the cashier about the cool art you make and they're like "great but you still have to pay for this food with money."

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• CisHetKayFaber
  • https://twitter.com/CisHetKayFaber
  • https://www.upturnedtable.com/weekly-podcast-2/
• Dan
  • https://strangecurrencies.org/
  • https://twitter.com/SC_Reviews_Dan

Topics:

• Learning something by doing, so you don't understand the theory behind it
• The lonely realization that most people don't really care that much about the things that make you unique (not depressing) (I promise)
• Shrek got a ten minute standing ovation at Cannes in 2001.
• The Jabberwocky
  • https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42916/jabberwocky
• Cursed connectors and adapters
• Vacationing alone is extremely efficient
• Seeking Mr. Eaten's Name

Microtopics:

• A name that has nothing to do with wrestling.
• Upturned Table.
• Topic hunger.
• Hearing something and playing it back.
• The particular rat-a-tat of that ratio.
• The difficulty of making art compelling and simple at the same time.
• In C.
• A proc-gen song that is different every time you hear it but you have to pick just version to put on the record.
• Meeting a group of people who all learned a skill in a certain context and being unable to convince them that you also have the skill but you learned it in a different context.
• Not wanting to tell your family that you are trans because they would be very interested.
• The dream of owning a board and card game store.
• Trying to convince an extremely modest person to tell you something interesting about themselves.
• Doing an interesting thing but not making a mental note to tell your friends about it because you never learned to tell stories.
• A guy whose family fled a corrupt governmental regime being surprised that you think that's interesting, because he knows hundreds of people who lived under a corrupt governmental regime.
• Discovering a viable competitor to Disney.
• Devaluing the Cannes Standing Ovation.
• The Sarcastic Standing Ovation.
• Shepard Tones.
• How many people you need to pay to stand and clap to extend a standing ovation indefinitely.
• Being the one guy who is yelling at everyone to stop applauding.
• Moving the last scene to after the credits roll so that people have to find out who the key grip is to see the whole story.
• Reading a game credits list on MobyGames and giving a standing ovation at the end.
• Vorpal, manxome, uffish, frabjous and other words that didn't exist at one point but now do.
• Understanding the rhythm of language even if the words don't make sense.
• Alice Liddel.
• A faithful musical TV adaptation of the entire Alice in Wonderland series.
• An adapter from pneumatic air to stereo XLR.
• Speakers and microphones as adapters between air pressure and electrical signal.
• Using a microphone as a speaker and a speaker as a microphone.
• The downsides of USB-C.
• A sticker with induction coils on it.
• Counting the pins on a Famicom cartridge.
• How you're supposed to blow into cartridges differently in the United States and in Japan.
• Breathing into your NES cartridge to apply a layer of condensation to the pins and improve connectivity.
• Dry vs. wet exhale.
• Bagpipe to stereo XLR connectors.
• A vacation where you go exactly where you want when you want and never need to form a consensus.
• The kind of AAA vacation that a 4000 person team of Ubisoft employees would go on.
• Spending most of your vacation listening to podcasts in your hotel room.
• Going on a vacation in order to scout out potential locations for future vacations.
• Walking into a book store and going to the zine section and downloading some bespoke local podcasts.
• Asking the concierge at the hotel what podcasts are good to listen to around here, and they suggest This American Life and Radiolab.
• A cloud of scenarios that you can choose to interact with.
• Whether the Last Constable is really last or whether she's just called that.
• Paying for a second candle.
• Waking up in the middle of the night to spend the turns you've accumulated so they don't go to waste.
• Sailing the Unterzee in a majestic pleasure yacht.
• Dreaming about going north.
• Breaking into a dentist's office to steak the jar of teeth from the cupboard in the back.
• Building up your Obscurity to endgame levels.
• Knowing that to solve the mystery you'll need to destroy yourself, and choosing to do it anyway.
• Playing the game to get to the text that you're trying to read.
• The grindiest content in the game.
• Selling your soul to devils and then realizing that you need to get it back so you can destroy it yourself.
• Hammering on the button until it tells you where to go.
• Whether anyone knows the plot of World of Warcraft.
• A great place to discuss topics with people who might become your friends.

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