• Tim
• Chris

Topics:

• Noodles?
• Everything and More (by DFW), the "impoverishment of the question",and free will
• Choosing an integrator
  • https://gafferongames.com/post/integration_basics/
• Lucky Jim (old song)
  • https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/U7zR1RCa.png
• Collaborative music as a game design problem (see: skill gap, handicaps, engagement, peripheral participation)

Microtopics:

• Celtic Music and Corgis.
• Tim, a figure shrouded in mystery.
• Topic Monologues.
• Gluten-free noodle straws.
• Bucatini: imagine a Red Vine but made of pasta.
• Replacing food service workers with clockwork automata made of noodles that have been hardened into gears and springs.
• Giant fusilli as playground equipment.
• Noodleness and pastitude.
• Whether gnocchi is a pasta. What about cauliflower gnocchi?
• Unleavened Carrot Cake.
• Indomie: the number one selling noodle on Earth.
• Good spices: they can work in a broth.
• Soupertaster: Jim eats soup alone while talking to a volleyball with a bloody handprint on it.
• Learning math by starting with incredibly abstract unmotivated ideas.
• Some Bottomless Pits are Deeper than Others.
• Approaching a question by interpreting it as a question that if answerable.
• The significant of the perception of free will.
• How a closed system can produce multiple different outcomes.
• What happens when we decide we don't have free will.
• A completely deterministic system that has a sensation of free will.
• Taking as much time as it takes to read a book.
• Shooting the Moon (in real life)
• Taking all the bad cards and winning.
• Becoming disciplined about time
• What a modern feature phone can do.
• Dividing your day into blocks and spending them.
• The period in your life when you lived in Burlingame.
• Getting an incredibe amount of work done during your hour and a half commute.
• Topic Lords or Plug Lords?
• Something you'll be glad you did tomorrow.
• Integration Basics.
• Explicit Euler vs. Semi-Implicit Euler.
• The pros and cons of RK4.
• The physics system behind Drawn to Life.
• What it takes to be an old song.
• Hadestown and The Instigator.
• The Hadestown Tiny Desk Concert.
• How to play music with other people in a way that accounts for skill gaps.
• Going to the Starry Plough to play the penny whistle.
• Musicians sitting in a circle and talking until someone starts playing something and everyone else joins in.
• Joining in on a song you've never heard before.
• Playing Mary Had a Little Lamb at 40 BPM.
• Making a slow song more interesting by adding ornamentation.
• Star of the County Down.
• Different ideas that come out when you play music at half speed.
• Lark Camp.
• The person who hands out the cheat sheet with all the popular tunes and their chord progressions.
• Sorting tunes by frequnecy.
• The bad things about Irish sessions, from a game design perspective.
• Learning a song by reading the notation vs. learning it by playing it for 30 years.
• Star Above the Garter.

Support Topic Lords

• Chris
• Alex

Topics:

• Living without software updates
• I like Cyberpunk 2077
• I had a friend who would argue with the people collecting signatures in support of a proposed law. Not about the proposal itself, but the methodology behind it.
• PIECE A SHIT, possibly by Sam Pink
  • https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/Kl_AeoXl.jpg

Microtopics:

• Lords of Topics.
• Asking your mom if this Thanksgiving turkey is Frog Fractions 3.
• Haiku Hero.
• How to talk to the press.
• An email from the guy who sent me the quirky thing from before.
• The Last Biceps.
• Filling your house with electronics that continuously ask you to do things.
• How to interact with the Internet on an old un-updated computer.
• Snap craft something or other.
• Turning off Windows updates for over a year and nothing bad happens because security best practices are bullshit.
• Visiting twinbeard.com to find out about the beads in Jim's ears.
• Searching Google for the little balls in your ears.
• Your phone popping up a window saying "you're a year and a half out of date, would you like to update?" and hitting the back button as fast as you can.
• Windows updates adding AI functionality to MS Paint.
• Making uneducated guesses about how someone else's code works.
• Searching for a program on your computer and Windows gives you Bing results for that program's name.
• A sneaky hacker man doing non lethal takedowns.
• Making a complicated video game and then patching it into a completely different complicated video game after the guides have all been written.
• Trying to explain to someone why the story of Half-Life is cool and realizing halfway through your explanation that it's not that cool actually.
• Cool things that build immersion.
• A guy saying "have a seat" and a contextual actionicon appearing over a chair.
• Voluminous closets full of costumes for virtual dress-up.
• Delivering exposition in cars.
• All the weird things people will put on their body in the cyber future.
• A fictional city halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles.
• Recovering a stolen painting by showing a satellite.
• A city with lots of neat stuff to do.
• Querulous Friend's Advocate.
• The Everyone Gets a Pony Initiative of 2023.
• Filibustering people collecting signatures in front of the grocery store.
• How much do you believe in the political causes you're promoting?
• Watching your friend play games in a little window on your second monitor.
• Mr. Feeny recording car AI voices.
• Getting into World of Warcraft because you are stressed about starting a new job.
• Level 1 Superman killing rats to collect 10 rat pelts.
• Fun ways to fight crowds of mooks.
• The things you see on your limbs when you see your limbs.
• Replacing all the mirrors with cyber mirrors.
• The doctor pulling out your cyber eyes and putting them in a drawer and all you can see is the inside of the drawer.
• Lost games dev techniques such as palette swaps.
• A screenshot of a book.
• A poem painting a picture of a time and place.
• Maybe Sam Pink.
• Writing a bunch of messages to someone and making their phone vibrate every five seconds for a full minute.
• Notification throttling.
• Fanciful technological panaceas.
• Ultra poetry where each line has animation and timing.
• Making a word wiggle in a sine wave to indicate that it's a spooky ghost noise.
• Poem Lords.
• Seven poems on the itinerary. (But we'll only have time for three of them.)

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Hallie
  • https://twitter.com/Hallie_9000/
  • https://twitter.com/watchyourrass
  • https://twitter.com/HouseRulesCast
• Chris

Topics:

• Playing card finishes
• Esper Quinn adds: "As a decades long Magic: the Gathering player, card condition, handling and protection is something I've actually spent a lot of time thinking about. There's a guy on YouTube whose whole claim to fame is that every couple months he reviews every new sleeve (both inner and outer, for double sleeving), deck protector, carrying case, binder, etc. for card protection. Magic cardstock has actually remained consistent since 1993, though inks and printing techniques have shifted a lot over the years. In fact, new foil cards are way worse than old foils; for some reason, they tend to curl the card if not kept in a 100% humidity free environment. The curling can get so bad that sometimes judges won't allow them to be played in tournaments, since they count as marked cards!"
• If the words religion and faith didn't exist, how would we talk about them?
• Good Bones, by Maggie Smith
  • https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/89897/good-bone
• Homemade hair conditioner / masque is basically mayo

Microtopics:

• Ripe and ready topics.
• Making guests record their own obituary in case they die between when an episode is recorded and when it's released.
• Watching Your Rass.
• A podcast about people who form their identities around games, specifically Cribbage.
• The Slim-Line B-7 "True Linen" Finish.
• Switching out topics on the fly.
• Practicing a magic trick in front of a mirror and fooling yourself.
• Positive feedback loops.
• Curling -- The Thing Noodles Do.
• The benefits of cheap hobbies.
• A Clarke Sweetone with a conical bore.
• Bicycle Backs.
• How quickly you wear out a deck of playing cards when learning close-up magic.
• The most interesting card finishes.
• Cardistry.
• The Bicycle Air-Cushion finish vs. the Cartamundi True Linen finish.
• E-llusionist Magic Supplies.
• The best brand of cards to do the Faro shuffle with.
• Two pieces of paper surrounding a cardboard core and enveloped in a plastic finish.
• Peeling apart playing cards and finding a tiny map of Germany.
• Something that comes from how people are.
• Going to Blorp every Sunday morning.
• Students with different educational needs.
• Wanting to participate in a group that sets the rules but feeling really strongly that you shouldn't follow one particular rule.
• Doing a lot of moderating of teen forums.
• Conceiving of religions as fandoms of book series.
• Being a super fan of someone who spoke out against elevating individuals above their individual experiences.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky's Dune.
• Scientist clergymen exploring the world.
• The fossils of the language that we speak.
• Dictionaries as the chalk outline around language's corpse.
• Disney buying the Star Wars franchise as a metaphor for the Roman empire converting to Christianity.
• Christianity before it was cool.
• Talking dogs.
• Comic book puppy trash acts.
• The story from Kings where children make fun of a man's bald head and the man prays to God for help who sends bears to maul the children.
• Being surrounded by hundreds of children making fun of your bald head.
• Things that you thought were good but if there are ways they can be bad you want to hear about them.
• Selling the world to your child.
• Having a world view and having to learn to live with it.
• Stones Georg.
• Presenting the world's best self to your child.
• Which end of the cow is the milk end.
• The gestalt of a cow, which moos and creates milk.
• Writing a poem live on the air by saying "dah" whenever you can't think of another word.
• What happens if you shampoo but don't condition your hair.
• The FBI coming to your apartment to arrest the free radicals making your hair frizzy.
• Dropping mustard from your hair care routine because your head smells too much like a sandwich now.
• Putting bean water on your head.
• Hairdini.
• The guests you can't find on Topic Lords.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Hallie
  • @hallie_9000
• Chris will find you.

Topics:

• The Pokemon Sylveon is supposed to be cute but it freaks me out and let me tell you why
• Savory french toast.
• Remember briefcases? People would just bring paperwork home with them. To work more, at home, for free. Fucked up, if you think about it.
• Everytime we touch Detective Pikachu
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQyM2AU7nZo
  • https://youtu.be/YUWq_aBiE_s
• The ethics of making a robot daughter
  • https://www.etsy.com/listing/955388068/long-furby-custom-plush
  • https://www.etsy.com/listing/912086346/3-ft-long-furby-purple-fur-customizable
  • https://www.google.com/search?q=furby+sylveon&tbm=isch
  • https://www.etsy.com/listing/951517045/custom-furby-oddbody-long-furby-alien

Microtopics:

• Whether it's possible to do Soupertasters remotely.
• What show this even is.
• Never watching the best episode of a show because if you do the rest will be worse than that.
• A game where you explore a tavern and then the game ends.
• History littered with the corpses of couch-co-op-only games.
• A hypothetical podcast about the dark history of cribbage.
• The best vertically scrolling shooter set on British colonial Mars.
• Adding faeries to rebalance the meta which has been overrun by dragons.
• A little quadruped with features.
• Ribbon-like feelers that make you drop your guard.
• OG European fairies who steal children and leave rusty nails in their place.
• A cute fairy dog that will fuck your shit up when you're not looking vibe.
• The mortifying ordeal of realizing that all the Pokemon who look like they're wearing clothes? That's actually their skin.
• A Syveon swinging around Viridian City like Spider-Man, eating birds and avoiding cold iron.
• Turkey-flavored bread.
• Making a Monte Cristo with savory French toast.
• A sweet omelette with a lot more bread than egg.
• Breadless French toast.
• Omelette a la Dig Dug.
• Filling crepes.
• Using eggs as glue for putting a bunch of yummies together.
• Lobster burritos.
• What briefcases are for.
• A game where you've got a corgi and you've gotta get her somewhere to do stuff.
• Bringing a knife to a briefcase fight.
• Using briefcases to store underwear.
• Whether you want to sit in the briefcase or boxercase section.
• Asking president Clinton "boxers or briefs?" on a live Q&A.
• An adorable chonky Pikachu.
• Detective Pikachu turning out way better than it had any right to be.
• Two and a half hours of Pikachu jazzercising.
• Whether Pikachu is made of shiny plastic like in Pokemon Go or is furry like a mouse like in Detective Pikachu.
• Hiring internet meme people to do concept art for your movie.
• Pokemon MC Hammer's extremely baggy purple leg skin.
• Realistic Homer Simpson and realistic Mario.
• Diving straight into your uncanny valley reflex and poking it with a stick.
• Doing an image search for "realistic Mr. Mime" and regretting it immediately.
• Psychic stigmata.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation and Frankenstein's conflicting takes on whether it's a good idea to construct an artificial person.
• Trying to make a robot daughter but accidently making a murder bot.
• Committing your kid to Git so you can roll back when they find out about the time you spent on 4chan.
• Best practices for doing AI research without committing murder all the time.
• The "bunch of delicious stuff in a pan plus eggs" approach to AI research vs. the "frittata" approach to AI research.
• Observing and understanding the outcome of training a neural network and writing an ordinary program to do the same thing.
• Agreement.
• The alternate ending of Frankenstein where Dr. Frankenstein accidentally installs a baker's hand on the monster and it goes on a baking rampage using up all the flour in town.
• To what degree parents can be held responsible for what their children do.
• How it's okay to disown your parents but not your children.
• A chatbot with servomotors in it.
• A Furby molar.
• A burden too great to bear alone.
• A Furby living in a hollowed out tooth filled with corks.
• Waking up next to a ceramic tooth with a face every morning.
• Whether MAME has Furby support.
• Douglas.
• A Furby with baked beans instead of skin.
• A Furby with teeth in the middle and it's not okay.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Chris
  • https://imgur.com/a/7dFeaa8
• Mitch
  • https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJOh5FKisc0hUlEeWFBlD-w
  • https://twitter.com/hbmmaster
  • https://www.patreon.com/hbmmaster

Topics:

• Why the game Hades is great
• People who get upset about the use of the word "literally" often say stuff like "you don't mean literally, you mean figuratively!", even though the use they're complaining about very obviously does not mean figuratively
• Gasoline toast
  • HORG: http://www.horg.com/horg/
  • Dishwasher salmon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N8q2xkirCQ
• Ville asks "Oxford University was founded 200 years before the Aztec Empire and the subway in London began operation during the American Civil War. Either someone's messing with the timeline or we all have a very askew picture of how history's supposed to be laid out."
• The Game (the one Wikipedia helpfully disambiguates as "The Game (mind game)") is not very well designed
• The Best Five Plants
  • Multiocular O: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiocular_O
  • W: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sg2j7mZ9-2Y

Microtopics:

• Writing your title in lowercase so that you know it's not part of your name.
• Taking one look at a game and saying "this is a Chris game."
• Hades.
• A video game set in a Mike Mignola painting.
• Game development legerdemain.
• Pressing left trigger to pet Cerberus.
• Voice acting in video games.
• Needing to change a voice line and having to splice together existing lines because you're never going to see the actor again.
• Needing to generalize a voice acted tutorial saying "press the A button" and just cutting out the word A.
• Doing your best impression of the Afro Samurai and Samuel L Jackson angrily knocks at the door dressed as the Afro Samurai.
• Knowing enough Greek mythology to appreciate these Greek mythology gags.
• Describing your backstory to the bard.
• Fishing minigames.
• Getting the voice actor to learn Blender so you can finally pet the other two heads.
• How people use "literally" these days.
• How "really" used to mean "actually" and "very" meant "truly" but people started using them in hyperbole and now it's just an intensifier.
• Sarcasm as a driver of linguistic change.
• Covering food with gasoline and setting it on fire.
• How the little plastic clip influences the bread's flavor.
• Gasoline clams.
• Covering a bagged loaf of bread in gasoline and setting it on fire and a loaf of perfect toast emerges.
• Remembering that you were going to say something about the bag clip thing.
• Making gasoline toast when gas prices were negative and getting your toast for free.
• The Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group.
• Going to a web site about bag clips and not seeing anything with a spring in it.
• Soaking your fish in lye until it becomes a delicacy.
• Dishwasher salmon.
• How every dishwasher is at the perfect temperature to cook salmon.
• Trying to cook salmon in your dishwasher because you're not a serious dude yet.
• Cooking a salmon in dishwashers around the world.
• Going on the internet and telling lies about salmon preparation.
• Lutefisk, and specifically how somebody invented Lutefisk.
• The gravest of apologies to anyone currently eating dishwasher salmon.
• The third time Jim went to jail for an idea originating on this podcast.
• Cleopatra's temporal proximity to Pizza Hut.
• Time and pizza being flat circles.
• A quote-shaped hole in this conversation that you have the chance to fill.
• Whether a hole in the ground that a wheelbarrow goes through counts as a subway.
• Impressing your Corgi with facts about London.
• The Game (mind game)
• A game you can't stop playing, according to the rules.
• How to win The Game (mind game)
• Whether it's a game if you can't choose not to play.
• People explaining The Game to you over and over again in hopes that you'll become as angry as they are that you just lost the game.
• The sort of thing that passed for cool in board games from before 1990.
• Video games with hexagons in them.
• Arguing about the best five of something.
• The worst five forbs.
• Coating the hillside with six inch hemispheres of itching hairs.
• A forb that is always full of doves, which is bad somehow.
• The Angry Video Game Nerd except it's a plant nerd being angry about plants.
• The bottom five letters of the alphabet.
• The sequel to lowercase b.
• Taking the q out of queen so it's spelled ueen. (But still pronounced "queen.")
• Updating the alphabet to get rid of c k s w and q.
• British people always dropping the t even though they supposedly love it.
• Revising English spelling so that every word is just spelled "a" but each word has a unique font size.
• Registering google.com except instead of two os it's the "oo" ligature.
• The origin of uppercase.
• Explaining to the clerk at the DMV that your name is Chris except the C is illuminated.

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.

Support Topic Lords