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

Topics:

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

Microtopics:

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

Support Topic Lords

• Daniel
• Andrew

Topics:

• Hyperthymesia
• Animal Well
• Bad news for my google alerts: "Twinbeard" is the name of the Helldivers 2 community manager
  • Twinbeard reacts! https://twitter.com/TheTwinbeard/status/1805711034281349388
• Dean asks "I know there are many seniors who are looking to start a business during retirement. For those who haven't settled on an idea yet, I'd love to suggest house flipping as a good way to earn income. May I write about this topic in a free article for your website -- specifically, how seniors can get into the house flipping business and become successful at it? I'll be sure to cover all the basics, including how to find the perfect property, how to finance the expenses, how to manage payroll for employees and contractors, etc. I'll also feature a link back to your website."
• Should game developers "soak themselves" in games. Referring to this clip of Orson Welles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dg-qaeIcuyI

Microtopics:

• Doom Guy: Life in First Person
• A well full of animals.
• A game that you keep hearing is great from people that you trust.
• Remembering every detail of your life even though that's a terrible idea.
• A cop asking you what you were doing on the night of November 3rd, 2021.
  
• Fnords.
• Eidetic memory vs. photographic memory vs. hyperthymesic memory.
• Checking your memory of a time against your written records of that time.
• Remembering that you're going to have a conversation about your day tonight so you had better do something interesting.
• Data mining electronic records to figure out how you met somebody.
• Playing a Sam Barlow game with your bank records.
• Navier-Stokes fluid dynamics.
• Spending a lot of time frowning.
• Dark Forest.
• A game providing you with a spoiler-free mechanism of conveying where you are in the game.
• Shooting people vs. swording people.
• The tools and verbs of just being a little guy.
• Seeing a dog doing something you didn't expect to see a dog do.
• Being unable to turn a crank because there's a blue ghost.
• Choosing not to be a video game.
• Setting up Google alerts for your game's working title.
• Famous racehorse Secret Legend.
• Liking some parts but not liking other parts.
• How to construct a Google alert for t the video game Tunic.
• Computer vision algorithms to increase yield and profitablity of insect farms.
• How seniors can get into the house flipping business.
• Collaborating with a spammer to write a poem about house flipping.
• Exhorting a spammer to join the discord and post their dreams in the announcements channel.
• A think tank dedicated to increasing house flipping around the world, measured by total rotation.
• House flipping vs. house spinning.
• A skateboard with the word "quaternion" written on it in a sick font.
• Trying to flip a house but it gets gimbal locked and you lose everything.
• Soaking in films. Just marinating in them.
• Having virgin eyes in order to make great things.
• Inventing video games from first principles.
• The value of outsider art.
• Shigeru Miyamoto inventing jumping.
• Trying to remember the last time you jumped in real life.
• Whether a historian has discovered the cave that inspired the Legend of Zelda.
• What Stories Untold says about the Orson Welles quote about having virgin eyes.
• Trying to prove yourself to a piece of software.
• Trying to tell a story about a spaceship that doesn't involve combat.
• 50 Years of Text Games.
• Having read a book back when it was a blog.
• Whether we have time for another topic.
• Mixing a Red Bull with a Caffeine Free Coca Cola.
• Sunlight patterns that remind you of wandering in the forest as a child
• The disco ball as an extrapolation of dappled sunlight in the forest.
• Out of focus motes of light.
• Figuring out how to make a desert beautiful.
• Living that home assistant life.
• Going to a thrift store to buy a lamp to fix the terrible lighting in your hotel room.
• A motor that's constantly jiggling a pot of water.

Support Topic Lords

• Daniel
  • https://www.cocoongame.com/
  • https://kbones.itch.io/dorks
• Alexander

Topics:

• Octopus dreams
• Perception of memories. Why does actual recency and percieved recency often seem so at odds
• Hike on 58
• https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45087/sonnet-18-shall-i-compare-thee-to-a-summers-day
• World of Warcraft over the years / WoW Hardcore Mode
• The highest honor you can receive in mathematics is to have your name uncapitalized.
• Polywater
• My brain is polluted by trochaic trimeter recognition

Microtopics:

• Preventative care.
• COVID lucky streaks.
• Being able to go to the ER.
• How to spell Cocoon.
• Moth guys carrying orbs on their backs.
• Boss battles that you wouldn't expect.
• Wilford Brimley's agelessness.
• Octopus nightmares.
• The octopus equivalent of rapid eye movement.
• Meeting sapient crows and asking them whether Y or Z should be up.
• Which memories stick better.
• Perception of time when you have a routine vs. when you don't.
• Arranging your life to maximize perceived lifespan.
• Different ways to have an adventure.
• Shooby doooby doggie.
• A sports rule that sounds like a 17776 plot point
• Why the Bob Emergency is an emergency.
• The best quarterbacks getting stuck in an endless hike and football ending forever.
• The one person who hasn't played Frog Fractions but just listens to Topic Lords because they like topics so much.
• Summer's lease.
• Reading a poem aloud without knowing what "ow'st" means or how to pronounce it.
• Words that used to rhyme but don't anymore.
• Meter recognize meter.
• Writing all your sonnets during COVID lockdown.
• A poem about a dude that Shakespeare is not in love with.
• Woe is me, etc.
• Piss Jugman vs Piss Jugm'n.
• Making phonetic reforms that don't take.
• Smoothing off any rough edges or peculiarities.
• Permadeath taking inspiration from real life.
• A fun thing that you wouldn't have expected to see.
• Enjoying spending time in the world.
• Hold the W key and cruise through it.
• The difference between wanting something vs. liking it.
• Abelian.
• The opposite of how you would think honor works.
• Great honors: brands hate them!
• Whether to capitalize "lynchian," "kafkaesque" or "quixotic"
• Eternal abstract universal objects.
• Teaching truck drivers where to put their piss jugs.
• The highest honor Piss Jugman can receive.
• The surname Piss.
• What is the average Piss lifespan?
• A real life Bobby Tables moment.
• The Polywater Gap.
• Water that scientists have sweated in.
• Buying a can of Soviet Scientist Sweat in a Japanese vending machine.
• Polyester intoxication.
• Liquids with a lower freezing temperature than water.
• The Polywater Doodle.
• A metabolism described by Richard Feynman.
• Brain Pollution.
• The particular better of the first line of Aqualung by Jethro Tull.
• Singing "parallelipiped" to the tune of Aqualung.
• Hearing random phrases in your life.
• Spelling "yogurt" backwards.
• Trying to understand the New York Times' effect on man.
• A killer rap album based on alliteration rather than rhyming.
• Poetry that rhymes on the second to last syllable rather than the last.
• The baffling cosmology of Butter Dorks.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Daniel
  • https://twitter.com/dmullinsgames
• Jonah
  • https://works.rip/

Topics:

• Chop socky – when are we gonna get that energy back into the world media producing environment? Also listening to movies instead of watching them.
• The Resident Evil series
• Flettner airplanes
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlmvHfIAszo
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6geOms33Dk
• Double feature:
  • The Eel by Ogden Nash https://poetrysplash.tripod.com/ogdennash2.htm
  • The Lama, by Ogden Nash https://www.madisonpubliclibrary.org/poetry/poem-a-day/lama
• Indonesia: The 4th most populous nation on Earth. You never hear about it
• Watching stuff "going into it without hearing anything about it" -- how do people actually do that? Also me walking into a movie theater.

Microtopics:

• A website for dead people who will pay $12/year for as long as they're dead.
• Hummus.
• Whether Inscryption is more popular than hummus.
• Starting a topic with an anecdote.
• Walking around a city with the audio of a movie playing on your headphones.
• Watching a foreign film subbed because you're too cool to realize there's a subbed version in the settings.
• What you notice when you strip the visuals out of a visual medium.
• Porting Doom to ears.
• Whether blind people have their own Steam.
• Going through several iterations of reinventing how you shoot zombies.
• A woman scaled up 2x on every axis.
• Brazil's first new console after the Megadrive.
• Porting Resident Evil 4 to the Megadrive.
• Jim's entire history with the Resident Evil stories.
• A goofy Zelda boss but it's in a horror game for some reason.
• Turning doing donuts in a two car garage into a boss fight.
• Being bad at puzzles that aren't supposed to be puzzles, like how to use this can opener.
• A Flettner airplane made out of KFC buckets.
• The Magnus effect.
• The downside of an airplane that drops like a rock if the engines lose power.
• The world's first portable steamroller.
• An airplane that is heavy enough to create its own runway.
• Putting a dog in the Youtube thumbnail.
• A poem that was short even before you cut the last 25%.
• A joke poem that becomes even more of a joke when you cut out the punchline.
• Dad giving you permission to memorize the shortest possible poem.
• Web design nostalgia.
• Hypertext protocols that predated HTTP.
• How HTTP ate every other hypertext protocol's lunch.
• This thing that was invented in the 70s.
• Tetris the Grand Master, and how it would be better with mouse input.
• Hypothetical keyboard-only interfaces for audio editing software.
• A keyboard macro scripting language thing for transcribing sheet music.
• How to pronounce "Latex"
• Pronouncing the typesetting puns.
• Being surprised when a country has almost as many people as the United States.
• Gamelan.
• Being Indonesian and knowing more about Indonesia than most people.
• Whether modern day Greeks get annoyed when you try to engage them about Greece 2000 years ago.
• Thinking you know where New Zealand is but not.
• Growing up in the US and spending all your geography points on remembering which state is which and not having any left for the rest of the world.
• Talking about yourself in any person.
• Why nobody reviews Frog Fractions games.
• Soda speak.
• Divesting yourself of places you might get spoiled.
• Middling Marvel Movie Buddies.
• How to make choices without having enough information to decide.
• Totally wasting your plug.
• The premier place to send answers to the Inscryption ARG.
• Counting the number of syllables in the sentence that claims to not be an ARG clue.

Support Topic Lords