• Jenni
• Chris

Topics:

• Are corporate mascots in US culture age-locked to a generation? I have done no research about this
• The continuation of our species depends on balls being able to taste soy sauce
• BB-8 changed my tire
• The Woodchuck, by Sam Pink
  • https://www.reddit.com/r/Poetry/comments/wg09x5/poem_the_woodchuck_by_sam_pink/

Microtopics:

• Too much dick content for one show.
• What kind of fetus dong shot engagement you're looking for.
• When they smear the goo on your belly.
• Throwing a gender reveal party and the uncle nobody wants around is like "I don't believe you" and you get to whip out the photo of the kid's dick.
• Shipping a person in Q4.
• Automating the Omelas kid.
• The Disney suffering animatronic child asking passers by to walk away from Omelas.
• Gen Z no longer needing to read The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas because they live in modern society.
• Gardening in one of the hardest places in the world to garden.
• What's the grass for?
• An office park spending millions of gallons of water to maintain a lawn nobody ever walks on or looks at.
• What if the Omelas kid is a dick? What if they're treating him really well and he just has impossibly high standards and hates everything.
• An electrical problem that's very pronounced when Jenni turns on the blender.
• The Golden Age of Corporate Mascots.
• Undead Corporate Mascots.
• Trying to find a picture of the Toucan Sam redesign and ending up on Deviant Art.
• Howard and Nester.
• Whether American kids will tolerate anime.
• President of the Nintendo No Fun Club.
• Spending $200 on the Nintendo hint line trying to solve the last screen in Solstice.
• An adventure game that's also a platformer where if your toe touches a candle flame it's an instant game over.
• Inventing terrible camera angles in a 2D game.
• It's 3D, but on your Speccy!
• Trusting a YouTube documentary more the longer the video is.
• Are Domo Kun and Hello Kitty free agents?
• Cap'n Crunch guest starring in the Star Wars Holiday Special.
• A Roma who was once helpful.
• Eating a sandwich and getting the sandwich tattooed on your bicep because.
• A baby name that Boomer moms love.
• Remington Steel On At 7PM After Matlock Jones.
• Getting into a thing with people on Metafilter.
• POV: when your girlfriend gets you Swedish meatballs at Ikea.
• Whether Frosthaven is important to the testicles tasting umami story.
• Vanilloid receptors.
• Why you can shock your tongue with a 9 volt battery but you can't shock your forearm even if it's wet.
• The chef with the tiny spoon in your testicles making sure to get the exact right MSG level in your semen.
• Peppers hacking mammal biology.
• Seeds who enjoy being digested by birds.
• The cardioprotective benefit of spicy food.
• The Ones Who Bring it Back to Omelas.
• Broccoli evolving into crabs.
• This is canon: BB-8 drives a 2016 Corolla.
• Pretending that you are talking to a Youtube audience while you make s sandwich.
• Just a li'l guy who rolls around on a ball.
• R2D2: a mean mean man.
• The floor falling out of the Pinto while you're driving it.
• A rubber pad with friction stripes on it.
• Turning it until it feels like you broke it, but you didn't and you have to keep going.
• After the cake comes out of the oven the recipe stops having steps.
• How to get help from Linux users.
• The entire wheel snapping off the axle as you're parking at Camerica Bank.
• Different car, same maintenance strategy.
• Driving a car until it can no longer be ontologically be classified as a car.
• Churchill's Irregulars.
• Waiting for Peter Jackson to mansplain to you the sound a car makes when the wheel snaps off.
• Delving too deeply into the Cars cinematic universe.
• A Mastodon setting that hides all of Jim's BB-8 toots.
• How to find people to follow on Nectarine.
• The dying MUD you joined in 1997.
• Radioactive names such as Hitler and Sheldon.
• Joining a social media service and it tells you there are no posts.
• Sam Pink strikes again.
• The emotional arc of putting a tiny hat on a woodchuck.
• A woodchuck you would definitely do a murder to.
• Ampersand at the beginning of the line.
• The Furniture That Rolled Away From Omelas.
• Why the computer is mad in I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream.
• Looking for sentient life in the universe when you have dolphins at home.

Support Topic Lords

• Jenni
  • https://intfiction.org/t/lets-play-cragne-manor/56472
• Chris
  • https://trustory.fm/cool-time-dice-hour/

Topics:

• All the stuff we did in the 90s that is horrifying to modern parents now, like sleepovers and latchkey kids
• The movie for Jurassic Park 2 is somehow worse than the book and the book is very bad.
• The VR episode of Nowhere Man
• I fucked up my car by running over a mattress on purpose
  • https://vhsviscera.tumblr.com/post/705867030403973120
• There was a space battle over Nuremberg in 1561 and the local broadsheets reported on it with woodcuts:
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1561_celestial_phenomenon_over_Nuremberg
  • http://blog.zarfhome.com/2022/01/way-up-in-middle-of-air.html

Microtopics:

• Baby Mario and Baby Luigi being two different species.
• Riff and Jenni play Rusty Lake.
• Absorbing most of your twin in the womb and all that's left is his heart behind your nipple.
• Nippleheart.
• Cool Time Dice Hour.
• Cragne Manor.
• Heck of a project, terrible game, not recommended at all.
• Cragne Manor's TV Tropes page.
• A Metafilter thread about sleepovers.
• Your mom asking for a report on all the swear words in the book you're reading.
• Elsa Screams at Dentist.
• Watching Elsa Screaming videos on Youtube to learn how to scream better.
• Going to the bookstore by yourself when your are 13 years old.
• Calling the anime repair guy when your anime goes out.
• New guy just dropped: guy with trench coat full of VHS tapes who won't hand you the VHS tapes, he makes you reach in and take them.
• Socializing your kids poorly so nobody will invite them to sleepovers.
• Learning how sex works and then calling a conference on the playground to explain it to everyone.
• Calvin's dad explaining that women only pee once a month.
• Picking up the broken glass that your meth dealer neighbor keeps throwing in your cactus garden.
• The tiny-handed thin-necked final girl.
• Abraham Lincoln's wrestling career.
• The one where they defeat the veloraptors with gymnastics.
• The one where they defeat the velociraptors by showing them Elsa Screaming videos on Youtube.
• Taking a bad book and adapting it into an even worse movie.
• Doing drugs until the dinosaurs look like they have feathers.
• Microscopic dust particles on the slicey bits.
• Why blowing into the cartridge did or didn't work
• Hunter-gatherers blowing on a blinking raspberry bush and cursing the defective lockout chip.
• Being unable to hunt bison because of bison DRM.
• A completely made-up kind of VR.
• Downloading your estranged wife from the internet so you can reunite in VR.
• A Rough Whimper of Insanity.
• Max Headroom: a guy with a weird forehead who shows up in media sometimes, like a California Raisin.
• Explaining Mac Tonight to a 22 year old.
• The worst car you could have possibly imagined.
• Delightful clean all-ages nonsense.
• Demonstrating your allegiance to 90s-era edgelordism.
• Cresting the event horizon of random bullshit.
• The VR apparatus hanging off of your wasted body.
• Adding more vanilla than the recipe calls for.
• Putting a hapenny on the spice vendor's tongue and reaching into his trench coat to pull out a bag of cumin.
• Poking bytes into memory to mod Cyberpunk 2077.
• Whether Pico-8 is more or less racist than Dickens Fair.
• The space battle that took place over Nuremberg in 1561.
• UFOs vs. UAPs.
• Tie-Fighters and Star Destroyers over Nuremberg.
• The All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office: if you got an anomaly, yo, they'll resolve it.
• Asking the Pentagon for money for a cab fare to go investigate unexplained aerial phenomena.
• A mass hysteria of the collective unconscious.
• Marrying your cousin and going into space.
• Anakin is of the species Baby Mario and Padme is a Baby Luigi so when they breed they'll have an infertile Baby Wario or Baby Waluigi.
• The fan theory where Jar-Jar is the Sith Lord.
• The origin of angels as a terror.
• Pre-hurricane ice crystal patterns.
• Making biblically accurate angels out of everything.
• Generational memory from back when we had wings.
• Fish wings.
• Being drunk all the time because you don't trust the water.
• Aspartame's bitter aftertaste, and also fuck Stevia.
• Coke Grownups.
• Pepsi Peeps.
• Eating the whole bag of Pepsi Syrup Peep Gushers and now you can't play D&D tonight because you just have to lie on the floor clutching your belly and complaining that nobody saved you from your life choices.
• Food that exists to overwhelm your senses and your ability to make decisions.
• The two genders of time.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Jenni
• Chris
  • https://imgur.com/a/t34TMw8

Topics:

• Every tree in this desert is a bean
  
• The statute of limitations on spoilers implies a social contract where we agree to consume media as soon as it's available instead of consuming it at the right time for ourselves
  
• This list of words that men know but women don't, and vice versa
  • https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13428-018-1077-9/tables/2
  • https://twitter.com/v21/status/1372635082205364226/photo/1
• Ozymandias by Percy Shelley
  • https://discoverpoetry.com/poems/percy-bysshe-shelley/ozymandias/
  • https://twitter.com/PateraQuetzaI/status/1156300892733243392
• 41 out of 42 people start life with some time to chill by themselves in the womb but twins don't, what's that like
  
• Oldschool AD&D is hard to start but ultimately less video/board gamey which is great
  
• Wordle speed runs are surprisingly riveting
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk4qPtOelv8

Microtopics:

• Plugging every Xalavier Nelson game.
• Standing in a three bean soup.
• Everyone's favorite Fire Emblem hero, Spiky Ball Tree.
• Sweetgum.
• Producing liquid amber but not calling it liquid amber for trademark reasons.
• Whether it's possible to have green wood.
• A traumatic formative art school experience that you take out on trees for the rest of your life.
• Ablative armor.
• Spoilers for the first novel ever written.
• Seeing Empire Strikes Back dozens of times in the theater while in the womb.
• A spoiler policy that makes people hate you.
• Getting consent to gaslight your girlfriend about movies she hasn't watched.
• Picking a movie line to be the only joke you ever say.
• The list of movies for which there is no statute of limitations on spoilers.
• Using a pen knife to cut open your forearm to reveal the servomotors inside any time there's a lull in the conversation.
• The SpoilOrbs.
• Inventing the video game haptics to allow a game designer to kick you in the balls.
• Kittencore Dark Souls.
• Junji-ito's cat diary.
• Clutter in movies.
• Hiring excellent schlubby actors.
• Back when it was notable and interesting that Linda Hamilton got fit for Terminator 2.
• Getting an AI on the job.
• Laura Panini.
• Live coding skeletal animation.
• Rotating around a creepy lady.
• Asking if anyone's seen something but nobody has.
• When you push the button on the monitor and it goes all wibbly wobbly for a second.
• A list going there.
• A word that you only know if you read a lot of G.K. Chesterson.
• Little Kirbys that help you out in the event of a prolapse.
• How nobody in the UK knows what "goober" or "wine gums" means.
• Abseiling and rappelling.
• Putting "kerbside" on a list of words that Americans don't know.
• Polearms that were descended from boar hunting.
• Asking a thousand Americans to say yes or no to every word in the dictionary.
• The Katana Yakuza Thesis.
• Reading poetry in a funny voice.
• The kind of person who would end a poem with a semicolon.
• Reciting a poem about a guy you met yesterday who told you most of the poem.
• Hearing from a guy about a rotting stump of a conquest.
• Writing a poem where you meet a guy who tells you about a song that used to be on his iPod that you can no longer download from mp3 dot com.
• Yelling at a long dead poet about punctuation.
• Poetry about not knowing something but it's unclear whether nobody knows the thing or if it's just the poet's personal ignorance.
• Painting ancient Greek statues flesh-colored.
• Percy Shelley the nonsense man.
• Smash Mouth cancelling their concert at your county fair after they got famous.
• How to pronounce "shewed"
• What's wrong with looking upon me?
• 23 And Me informing you that you have a mom.
• The familial incest tab on 23 And Me.
• Twins: There's Two Of Them.
• Twins in the womb listening to the Empire Strikes Back soundtrack and elbowing each other.
• A person who could exist and would be attractive.
• Geocities turn of the century vibes.
• The t-shirt that Jim's wife bought him.
• How Futurama made the name "Hubert" cool but "Pubert" is still no good.
• Having six kids and naming them all Pubert.
• Naming an ice cream shop "Fucklers" because who can stop you? (The police.)
• Fucklers: Sole Owner of my Name Ice-Creamery.
• The holding company that owns every disused mascot.
• The Hamm's Beer Bear.
• Wordle speed run categories.
• Mathematicians who debunk Minecraft speed runs.
• Trying to invent fake commentary for a sport you know nothing about.
• Yelling advice to recorded speed runs.
• Watching everybody believe Wordle conspiracy theories.
• Comparing notes about reality.
• Preferring having friends over being right.
• The absolute best time to get off of social media.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Jenni
  • @horsewizrd
• Chris

Topics:

• The coming schism between Wordle purists & Wordle metagamers
• Amazon kindle fantasy best-sellers is ruled by niches that nobody outside of kindle or Royal Road users have heard of
  • https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football
• In high school I knew a guy who, one time, managed to use up all the ink in a ball-point pen. The ink tube in there was just totally empty, it was astonishing. Nowadays whenever we run out of olive oil I get the same thrill. I did it! I used all the oil!
• The Tiger, by Nael, Age 6
  • https://twitter.com/826DC/status/966009025090473985
• Why can't Wizards or any of the clones figure out how to make D&D fun to play at high levels? Why is this an unsolved design?
• Zardoz & Barbarella have similar energy except Zardoz comes across as sincere & Barbarella comes across as falsely ironic to hide the sincerity

Microtopics:

• Jim's sip of tea.
• Making your husband Sleepytime tea so he goes to sleep while recording the podcast.
• Making a video of yourself arguing with your cooking teacher to post to social media.
• What is a Wordle?
• The Wordle sheriff joke.
• Muting the green block emoji so you stop seeing all the Wordle bragging.
• How to improve Wordle's psychic damage output.
• Wordle except instead of five letters it's five abstract concepts.
• Paranormal reverse-harem.
• Pricing your paranormal reverse-harem book at $250 and discounting it 99% so users are like "paranormal reverse-harem for $2.50? I can't afford not to!"
• All the topics you can't sell books about on Amazon and all the coded tags you use to sell them anyway.
• Whether Amazon will ban your book as containing bestiality if the genitalia is on the human side of the minotaur.
• A horse with human intelligence with a penis growing out of its back, and whether anyone has sex with the penis.
• The liminal space between bestiality and reverse-bestiality.
• Arguing in traffic court that your car is just a collection of atoms and the distinction between those atoms and those of the world it's traveling with respect to exists entirely in our minds.
• Doing a crime just to go to Horse Court and see that horse judge you.
• Admitting that you are That Guy.
• Sending your pens to the pen dimension.
• Graduating from high school and discovering that the weird lump on the knuckle of your middle finger isn't just you having a weird skeleton.
• Writing good handwriting.
• Refilling the salt pig from the salt cylinder.
• When the sauce is burning and the only solution is to salt it right now.
• Going to Horse Court to decide which of you bought the pepper grinder.
• Popular with the robots.
• Whether the poem works on a third level.
• Writing the best poem.
• Viral Poetry Sensation "The Tiger."
• An "invisibility cloak" which is just an empty hanger.
• A magic supply store where half the items are just jokes on the purchaser.
• The adult poetry workshop where you drink a glass of wine and transcribe "The Tiger" by Nael, age 6, then take it home and show it to your parents.
• Trying to look at the thumb tips your friends are going on about.
• Braving Omicron to buy a thumb tip.
• Hypnotizing a napkin.
• A magic trick where you make a rubber band disappear, but only for yourself.
• Aging two years while dead.
• Whether Nethack's difficulty curve is better than D&D's.
• A weird combination of spells that is broken in a non-numerical way.
• What the wizard did when the spaghetti-os were on too high a shelf to reach.
• Letting the players fight Thor even though you know they'll figure out a way to kill Thor.
• Thor swinging his hammer and killing you without having to roll any dice because Thor doesn't have stats.
• The Dying Earth series by Jack Vance.
• Godlike wizards feuding over who took the leftovers out of the office fridge because they ran out of real problems to solve.
• The Dying Earth series by Jack Vance, except with football.
• That Insidious Beast by Zack Parsons.
• Instructions for a fruit.
• There is no Antimemetics Division, by qntm.
• Counterfeit Monkey by Emily Short.
• Sean Connery in a red diaperkini.
• The big head that floats around and vomits guns and explains how guns are better than penes.
• When they invented the concept of copies of movies.
• Your deal with the devil where if you fail to make Lord of the Rings you have to make Zardoz, but you succeed you get to make King Kong.
• Scantily clad rocket people.
• Barbarella lying in a thumb harp being yelled at by a dude wearing a Dalek and reading from a piano roll.
• Learning how to draw by looking at promotional shots from Barbarella.
• Mario fanfiction through the lens of Cyberpunk.
• Whether they have sarcasm in Japan.
• Tom Nook slapping his own nipples for ten hours.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Jenni
  • https://twitter.com/horsewizrd/
• Chris

Topics:

• Lord Chumley
  • Topic Lords editor Esper Quinn weighs in on Transformer lore: "The second ever podcast I really worked on was called Sound.wav, a read-along Transformers comics podcast. I knew nothing about Transformers, and my friend Nell knew everything about them. We stuck to the IDW canon, but my understanding is, Transformers show up as naturally occurring "sparks" (a sort of semi-magical soul-piece) on the surface of the planet Cybertron, which if left to incubate will form a liquidmetal shell, which eventually becomes a full-on Transformer. (There's also something called Cold Construction which takes raw sparks and puts them in purpose built bodies, but whatever.) All of this means Transformers, in my mind, DO NOT qualify as actual robots. To me, a robot has to be built by somebody, but Transformers are just a metallic alien entity. On the podcast, we eventually had James Roberts, writer of the IDW comics series, and I confronted him with this: he agreed that Transformers are not technically robots. Felt pretty smart that day."
  • "Also, again I can only speak for the IDW canon, but Transformers on Cybertron don't have much of a concept of gender at all. Indeed, Transformers who were disconnected from society for millions of years and developed their own culture are the ones who sort of pioneered gender, purely as a cultural signifier. There's even explicitly trans transformers, who were known as one gender and switched to the other, and the storylines are handled pretty well in my opinion! (Other storylines, like the one explaining Arcee is a woman because she was experimented on by a mad Cybertronian scientist, are handled far less well.)"
  • "Transformers in IDW do have romance, and have officially recognized ceremonies for both 'amica endura' (equivalent to marriage), and 'conjunx endura' which is like eternal friendship."
  • "While you stepped out, there was brief discussion of Ultra Magnus and Minimus Ambus: Minimus Ambus is a tiny dude who wears the 'Ultra Magnus Armor,' Ultra Magnus being a sort of Dread Pirate Roberts semimythical figure of the universe. Good character, who has a good romance arc with Megatron!"
• Is an edgelord phase a standard part of being a teen or what
• Lordosis behavior
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lordosis_behavior
• Lordi - The Riff
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zr9AattFkqo
  • Unedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/6qwGyZw_DNI
• Lord Dunsany the metalhead lord rewilding his estate
  • https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/07/people-think-youre-an-idiot-death-metal-irish-baron-rewilds-his-estate
• Time Lords

Microtopics:

• Taking a picture of a dog.
• 140 strawberries.
• Jim Not Knowing About Video Games Day.
• Starting with how Smurfs fuck and then moving on to how Transformers fuck.
• Transformers hanging out with humans because the humans can wipe them in places they can't reach.
• Where Transformers come from in the various Transformers cosmologies.
• How Grimlock built the Dinobots.
• Sitting down with a screwdriver to make some buddies.
• The hypothetical 1980s girl-child who might buy an Optimus Prime toy if it was wearing a pink bow on its head.
• R.C., the hyper-pink Transformer with the wide, child-bearing hips.
• Finally getting to the topic at hand.
• Whether all Transformers are aromantic.
• What kind of god would make a car in space where there's nothing to drive on.
• The canonical term for when two Transformers are in a relationship.
• Rarified Energon.
• Prime's Rib, in which Future Feminists complain that there are no female Transformers so Optimus Prime constructs one from his own body parts.
• The Wild 80s.
• The British big game hunter who wanted to hunt the most dangerous game, Optimus Prime.
• Mounting the nose of the plane you shot down as a trophy in your den. (The plane was actually grounded when you shot it.)
• Whether teen edgelords are still a thing or whether teens are now performatively wholesome to freak out the olds.
• The Alpha Teen.
• The two genders of edgelord.
• Toddlers hurting you so they can practice having empathy.
• Accidentally promising a cat sexual favors.
• The cat sticking its butt in your face so you'll lick it clean, because that's what the cat's mom did.
• The innie arch vs the outie arch.
• Bears playing 20 questions with themselves to determine whether you are also a bear.
• The scientific term for scritches.
• Sitting vs. standing up to wipe.
• The various orders in which you could wipe, stand up, and flush.
• Pushing vs. dragging.
• Tai-chi vs. chai tea.
• A picture of Lordi getting a vaccine.
• A toilet in the shower.
• The scene in Mad Max Fury Road where the guy with all the water hoses down the adulant throng below, except it's toilet paper instead of water.
• Bringing the ugliest people you know on dates with you so you seem more attractive by comparison.
• Whether it's still a cold cut if you heat it up.
• Zombo Cop.
• Making Video Content during the zombie apocalypse by putting GoPros on all the zombies.
• Live streaming a zombie trying to walk into a brick wall.
• Looking out on the zombie apocalypse and saying "time to finally eat the rich!"
• The flashback explaining the origin story of the huge pile of bloody toilet paper.
• Whether David Lynch explained something once.
• The Lobster as a benchmark for bad date movies.
• Pokemon that are weak to Basket.
• Scientists studying the guillotine and determining that it's actually that basket your head lands in that kills you.
• The worst part of the zombie apocalypse: when the self checkout tells you to wait for assistance, nobody ever comes.
• The lordiest lord of them all.
• A cool young lord.
• A Jack Russell terrier named Beavis and Butt-Head.
• Two dogs, one named Sneezy, Grumpy, Dopey, Happy, Sleepy, Bashful and Doc, and the other one named The Seven Dwarfs.
• Hearing bird song you don't recognize, going to google and typing "Weee weee wha weee what's bird is this"
• Shazam for bird call.
• How to identify a bird that ages backwards.
• An app that can take photos of an object and tell you whether it's a wizard in disguise.
• Turning 25 and realizing that most movies are no longer about you at age 20.
• Whether Doctor Who was based on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
• Gene Roddenberry playing Willy Wonka.
• The Gum Chewer.
• Deleting a tweet in which you are cranky about Doctor Who.
• Doctor Who showrunner Stephen Wolfram.
• The vicar turning out the be a giant wasp and the author turning out to be a transphobe.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

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

Topics:

• Possibly having doppelgangers in the same physical universe on the other side of the Big Bang is creepy
• Never interfacing with the cool parts of baseball because the front-facing parts didn't appeal to you
  • https://music.metafilter.com/8889/Jaylen-Please-Dont-Bean-My-Man
• The two kinds of people: people who can just put a dish in the dishwasher and be happy with the outcome, and people who have to wash each dish by hand before putting it in the dishwasher, in which case what's even the point?
• Miko asks "John Joseph Merlin (!) introduced the world to roller skates by rolling into a costumed ball, playing a violin, and immediately crashing into a mirror because he hadn't invented brakes yet."
• The virality of the Cool S
• AZ is the only state in the union where you can get one of every kind of venomous animal in your yard in the same day, I think (edit: except marsupials?)
• Ancient magicks and the price we pay for them

Microtopics:

• The Korean spam company that owns the Video Games Taco domain name.
• Who owns the Video Games Taco AOL keyword.
• Editing video on an iPhone because you spilled coffee on your computer.
• Refusing to use your girlfriend's salty leavings to edit video.
• A symmetrical big bang implying an identical doppelganger Earth across the universe.
• Traveling across the universe to destroy your big bang doppelgangers with the understanding that they want the same thing and will meet you halfway.
• Arguments that exist only to depress people because you can't do anything with the information.
• Whether or not the Big Bang knew about mirrors.
• Higher order thought leading to the possibility of altruism.
• The Chris Hegemony.
• An automatic eternal baseball simulation.
• Guessing what the cool part of baseball is and getting partial credit.
• Speaking moistly and carrying a wet stick.
• Voting to open the forbidden book and now the umpires can incinerate you.
• MMO players voting in a law against running stoplights and expressing the devs to write code to enforce it like it's the law of gravity.
• MMO players designating certain players to run around and hit you with a stick until you stop breaking the rules.
• Finding out about Blaseball by dating and living with someone who is really into Blaseball.
• Refusing to read Homestuck because you've already read Problem Sleuth.
• Baseball having interesting rules but steadfastly refusing to market itself to game nerds.
• When the sausages would race.
• Whether there is Canadian bacon in this sausage race.
• Finding the web site that keeps track of the sausage mascot race results.
• Whether or not the chorizo sausage costume is wearing a sombrero.
• Trading the player who assaulted the sausage mascot to the Chicago Cubs.
• The sausage race promotional posters having surprisingly interesting composition.
• Performing an act of necromancy on Jaylen Hotdogfingers.
• Recreating the experience of people talking about a sport you don't follow except for a fake sport.
• A first-person confessional of what it's like to be a racing sausage.
• Finding out that the sausage races are never fixed and feeling relief that you can still believe in something.
• Whether you grew up trusting dishwashers.
• How to get stabbed in the hand.
• Having dish-related trauma.
• Having an incredibly high spoon to fork ratio.
• Your spaghetti spoon.
• Taking a saw and turning any spoon into a fork.
• Loading the silverware drawer with four slots full of murder sporks pointing the wrong way.
• Existing for four nanoseconds and spending all four being angry about how your husband wants to load the silverware drawer.
• God blaming you when they were the one who made the universe deterministic.
• Refusing to take the dish out of the dishwasher if it's still dirty, because god dang it you did your part.
• Punting a task to when you have more brain.
• Whether viewing your future self as a separate person is universal or distinct to American psychology students.
• Doing a study for the beer money and screwing up the study because you're ordering beer online during the study.
• Hearing about a "costumed ball" and picturing Pom Pom in a Halloween episode.
• Not giving the inventor of roller skates too much credit because he didn't think of putting all the wheels in a row.
• Inventing the car and debuting it by driving into a petting zoo, honking La Cucaracha and trying to steal novelty hats off of the racing sausages.
• Determining whether you need to steal the hats off of the sausages while they're racing or if you can wait until they've taken the hats off at the end of the day.
• John Joseph Merlin's fart remover.
• The Cool S of topics.
• Growing up in a parallel Earth without the Cool S.
• People in the Amazon Basin who've never seen Goatse or the Cool S.
• Waking up in a world without the Cool S and getting to be the one who teaches all the kids who can't draw how to draw one cool thing.
• Finding the Cool S in a painting from 1533, right above the hidden anamorphic skull.
• Neither the Animorphs or the Digimons having been invented in 1533.
• Putting a skateboarding dog in American Gothic.
• Going back in time to hide the plot of 50 First Dates with Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore in the Edda.
• Arizona's death of poisonous marsupials.
• Gila Monsters being enraged at the sight of human testicles.
• Finding a black widow, a scorpion and a Gila monster in your yard all in the same day.
• Importing tropical plants without phyto certificates.
• Befriending the guy you met at the Sprint store.
• The kind of person who seems cooler while they're working at the Verizon store than on Twitter.
• Clinging to any shred of humanity you can find in the Sprint shop.
• The wizard explaining that it's going to be another hour when you can see your curse amulet right there on the counter.
• Apple biting Star Trek's style
• Sitting down at the genius bar and ordering a Roy Rogers.
• Apple running a contact tracing program so they can find out if you know any Android users.
• Finally deleting your Facebook and feeling free.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

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

Topics:

• 2:42 Suddenly Anxiety and OCD are culturally adaptive behaviors.
• 8:16 Opening negotiations with your real-life employer to get them to pay you in Nook Miles
• 13:44 Animal Crossing speed runs
  • Animal Crossing 100% in 19h25m. https://www.speedrun.com/ac/run/y21ejk7z
  • Animal Crossing New Horizons All Debts in 1h52m. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdH-pj1ZUac
  • Super Mario Sunshine Lockout Bingo at AGDQ 2019 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ch3eSzem1v4
  • Animal Crossing Lockout Bingo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hhgu-fObME
• 20:23 Gary asks: "Printing Toilet Paper at Home"
  • How to make paper out of blue jeans. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPdZPvMVMZk
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chank_Diesel
• 26:54 Owning 5.25" floppies & suddenly having to be aware of magnets again as a threat in your life
  • Masquerade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masquerade_%28book%29
  • France's 25-year treasure hunt for a golden owl. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45005072
• 32:20 Apocalypse gardening and warlord potential
• 37:52 Amazon took Murder She Wrote away from us
• 47:07 Winding up with more social obligations than you had before quarantine

Microtopics:

• Being confident in your recording setup because you're too lazy to verify it.
• The old lady who lives in your ductwork who you can't hear because she only shrieks exactly when you're talking.
• Finding out about the apocalypse from a podcast recorded months ago.
• The subtle distinction between self care and overeating.
• Feeling better about your anxiety disorder because the world has gotten worse to meet your mood.
• A behavior that looks maladaptive but must secretly be awesome because it has survived for millennia.
• A poltergeist that keeps turning your stove off.
• Worshipping gods that turn out to be evil aliens.
• Trying to make "Christian Splinter Faiths" scan to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme.
• Going for the cosmetic upgrade before the inventory upgrade and causing your partner physical pain.
• Clearcutting the entire island you're visiting because when you leave it will cease to exist.
• Harvesting trees in a checkerboard pattern because they grow better that way.
• A financial startup specializing in converting British pounds to Nook miles.
• Putting pounds and dollars in the same bank account and they crossbreed while they're in there.
• 100%-ing Animal Crossing as fast as possible.
• Speed runs that are entertaining to describe but not to watch.
• Bingo races as the improvisation-heavy antidote to rote speed runs.
• Forcing Caleb Hart to livestream Mega Man X any time anyone listens to this episode.
• Feeding toilet paper into your inkjet printer to create a cool pattern to wipe your ass with.
• Using Silly Putty to copy the stock market info from the newspaper.
• Not being able to print toilet paper with your 3D printer, but printing a bidet instead.
• Running out of toilet paper and 3D printing corn husks.
• Buying the Taco Bell Grande Meal to eat the beans out of the burrito and then wiping your ass with the corn tortilla and wax paper wrapper.
• Skipping a step and putting the burrito right in the toilet.
• Introducing an awesome person to your friend and then ruining them in the very next sentence.
• The outside of the printer paper protecting you from the horrifying inside of the toilet paper.
• Pulping spare blue jeans to manufacture your own artisanal toilet paper.
• Figuring out how to put your front yard in your back yard to hide it from the HOA.
• Reporting your neighbor to the HOA for weeds in the middle of a global pandemic.
• Getting notices from the HOA that you need to power wash your driveway and power washing the words "fuck you" into it.
• Confusing Day of the Dead and Cinco De Mayo because they both happen in the same year.
• An object you need to keep safe from magnets.
• Advice on dealing with floppy disks in the Year of our Lord 2020.
• Something in France that hasn't been found yet.
• A Wikipedia list of things that have not been found in France.
• Burying a microtransaction-heavy game in the desert and hoping the person who finds it is a whale.
• Throwing a microtransaction-heavy game into the ocean and it traveling back in time and Captain Ahab hears about it and becomes obsessed with finding the whale who owns it.
• Trying to think of a really big expensive home and your brain coming back with "a bucket!"
• The train stopping slightly and thinking "maybe society is breaking down" and then the train starting again and thinking "I guess I'll just go to my boring job."
• Part of you wanting to live in interesting times and be part of historical events.
• Bringing your axe made out of a sharpened hubcap to work because Phil's allowed to bring his Leatherman.
• Not being able to train to be a warlord in the post-apocalypse because during the apocalypse all the MMA gyms are closed.
• Realizing that Amazon Prime Video doesn't have Murder She Wrote any more and wanting to just burn it all down.
• The magical time in your life when you thought Netflix's selection of streaming video would only keep getting bigger.
• Conflating Murder She Wrote with the Golden Girls.
• Deadpanning ridiculous things that happen in St. Olaf, Minnesota.
• Angry texts from your mom about how you ruined Murder She Wrote by telling her about the theory that Jessica Fletcher is a serial killer.
• A big city businesswoman looking to take over her parents' failing Christmas ornament shop.
• CG compositing Christmas ornaments into the background of every shot of Golden Girls.
• Everybody playing online games all the time now because their extrovert friends have figured out the Internet.
• Extroverts agreeing to watch speed runs with you because they're desperate to talk to anybody.
• Finding an eight hour smooth jazz video and eventually realizing it's two minutes of smooth jazz looping for eight hours.
• Trying to solve playing music with friends over the Internet.
• Solving the problem of jamming with friends over the Internet by only playing music with precogs.
• Sticking it to the HOA by dressing up as a weed and when they come by to report you, jumping out and yelling "I'm no weed, I'm a guy!"

Support Topic Lords

Lords this week:

• Jenni is on Twitter as @horsewizrd and wants you to back Aaron Reed's Subcutanea: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/subcutanean-a-novel-where-each-copy-is-different#/
• Chris is a social media ghost.

Topics discussed:

• 1:46 There are SO MANY VEGETABLES when you peek outside cultural silos. SO MANY that we don't use or know about.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddha%27s_hand
• 8:25 Concrete pipes stacked in vacant lots becoming the warp pipe.
  • I Am Error, by Nathan Altice: https://mitpress.mit.edu/contributors/nathan-altice
  • The Surprising History of the Warp Pipe: https://reichanjapan.wordpress.com/2016/02/24/the-surprising-history-of-the-warp-pipe/
  • The Enigma of Amigara Fault: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyo#%22The_Enigma_of_Amigara_Fault%22
• 16:45 Recurring segment: Jim's Baby Thigh Thickness Watch?
• 23:48 ZZT
  • The Museum of ZZT: https://museumofzzt.com/
  • Jim's interview at the Museum of ZZT: https://museumofzzt.com/article/201/an-interview-with-jim-crawford-frog-fractions-2-and-zzt
  • Where Are The Cowboys??? https://museumofzzt.com/file/w/Cowboys.zip
  • Funny Kumquat: https://funnykumquat.blogspot.com/2011/10/jokes.html
  • Shrek Retold: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pM70TROZQsI
  • Star Wars Uncut: https://vimeo.com/34948855
  • "Our future selves are strangers to us." https://slate.com/technology/2017/04/why-people-are-so-bad-at-thinking-about-the-future.html
• 41:16 Creative work (writing especially) looks like you're doing nothing, from the outside, a lot of the time. True for other creatives?
• 47:23 Food As Revenge
  • Revenge Bento: http://www.iromegane.com/entertainment/foods/the-japanese-wives-revenge-bento-after-the-fight-shikaeshi-bento/
• 53:01 The "Only" comma
  • https://www.arrantpedantry.com/2019/10/24/the-only-comma-pt-1/
  • Hups! https://en.bab.la/dictionary/finnish-english/hups
  • ANUG: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acute_necrotizing_ulcerative_gingivitis

Microtopics:

• False promises about updating a podcast in-place.
• Finding a creepy lemon hand in the Safeway lying there like a monkey's paw.
• Finding citrus fruit in the toilet.
• Finding talking fruit in the toilet.
• Whether the toilet is a dish or a soup.
• Accidentally paying $11 for cashew milk.
• Asking the cashier to remove a weird squash.
• Distracting the cashier with pictures of missing nuts.
• The nut abduction clinic.
• A grape that you have to peel like a shrimp.
• A grape that is constantly pooping itself.
• Writing grants for prawn farmers.
• Draining the entire pond to grab all the prawns.
• Sound re-use in Super Mario Bros.
• Tropes that are boring in Japan but still interesting in other cultures.
• King of the Hill being a relatable honor story about a salaryman.
• Misutā Supākoru.
• Imitation concrete pipes that won't roll over and crush you.
• Being too socially inept to realize you're being excluded.
• Trying to kill half your friends but only in retrospect.
• The Goat Simulator stage of baby development.
• The Goat Simulator stage of game development.
• Being at the pinnacle of your child body.
• Realizing halfway through the creative process that you should've been writing a novel.
• Dying and giving a soliloquy about so dying representative democracy.
• Having pages of justification for why you're covered with nipples.
• The story about missing cowboys actually being about North Korea.
• Not wanting to share your kumquat jokes.
• Explaining a meme from 2010 to your grandchildren.
• Sisqo playing a love interest dentist.
• Replacing the love interest in the sequel.
• Hangover 2 just having another hangover in it.
• Making friends with Mexican paramilitary organizations to save the world.
• Raising your child on a diet of guns and kung fu before the government takes him away.
• The most woke Shrek movie.
• Deciding whether you want to hear "All Star" literally all the time.
• Moving pieces of paper around and not being sure you're making anything better.
• Being yelled at by your sister to wash potatoes faster.
• Your yelling sister following you from job to job.
• A sandwich being well beyond your cognitive load.
• Ordering a viking at Subway.
• Eating the devil given physical form every Wednesday for lunch.
• Writing summoning words in your sandwich order.
• Thinking of the exact same demon as your guest lord.
• Writing an entire sentence with no commas at all because commas make you pretentious.
• Putting a period in your minimalist font because you have to be able to refer to "Dr. Awesome."
• Agreeing that "UPS" is a one-syllable word.
• That one Finnish word that Jim still uses regularly.
• Singing "Finnish Affectation" to the tune of "Wave of Mutilation"
• Legislature that would force corporations to pay ongoing rent for the space their jingles take up in your brain.
• Getting scurvy to cure your trench mouth.
• Trading your oral health for the opportunity to make weird troll games for a living.

Support Topic Lords