Lords:

• Erica
• David

Topics:

• A partnership between you and a tool
• Schmalhausen and Vernadsky, my own personal ARG
• Stop trying to make "a wedge is a machine" happen. It's not going to happen
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine
• The Poetry Teacher, by Mary Oliver
  • https://voetica.com/voetica.php?collection=2&poet=27&poem=5712
• Drinking vinegar
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-chain_fatty_acid

Microtopics:

• Taking an allergy pill and getting something unexpected.
• Nap skeptics.
• Non-stop napping.
• Wanting to eat nothing but spinach for two days so you go to Disney World and pay extra for all the park employees to tell you that in the happiest place on Earth we only eat spinach.
• Who gets to chew the grape next and for how long.
• Forgetting a story after you tell it, so you can tell the story back and forth forever.
• A plastic grape that dissolves in your nose.
• The least favorite thing that you bought during the pandemic.
• The collective politico-pandemical nightmare.
• A shitty partnership between you and a shitty tool.
• Ol’ Slicky.
• Tools that bring you distress.
• Whether it's legal to open carry a claymore in Texas.
• A decoration you can put on your truck just in case nobody knows what an asshole you are.
• Whether you can open-carry a dildo in Texas if the dildo is also an assault rifle.
• Gluing a penis to things you don't like and explaining that "this is a partnership between you and a tool."
• Papers that you really approve should've read fifteen years ago.
• The parallel world of the Modern Synthesis.
• Soviet biologists who were recognized in their time but have since been forgotten.
• Stalin's purge of scientists researching Mendelian genetics.
• Being evacuated to Kazakhstan and fed only wilted spinach so that you can finally write the book you've been thinking about.
• Bringing your adopted pet wolf back with you from Kazakhstan.
• Growing up after the Russian revolution in St. Petersburg.
• Delegating research by convincing the Game Detectives folks that there is a pop culture reward behind it.
• Your own personal ARG that only you care about and doesn't lead to any goal except knowing more facts.
• The point of games.
• The creativity that exists in fiction that you wish you could capture in nonfiction.
• The advantages of reality over fiction.
• Becoming disenchanted with capitalism in the 1920s.
• The Demon Haunted World.
• Escaping from Stalinist Russia into Nazi Germany.
• Cheers to a boring life.
• A slightly tilted floor.
• Electrifying the wedge so it's finally a machine.
• The xkcd comic from 15 years ago that lampooned the way Wikipedia articles used to be stereotypically bad.
• Being good at math and assuming that also means you'd be good at writing an encyclopedia.
• Whether Wildlife Ecology is a different field from Wildlife Biology.
• The shittiest source that Wikipedia will accept as a citation.
• Citing George W. Bush as a source in your peer-reviewed paper about climate change.
• All the dogs arriving at once.
• Dogs teaching students how to write thirsty happy poems.
• Dog Songs (2013)
• Deliberately putting line breaks where they seem least intentional.
• The Wedge of the Poetry World.
• Dinging the pan to proceed.
• The manufacture and use of short-chain fatty acids.
• Fixing an ulcer with vinegar.
• Fuck you, I'm drinking a shrub.
• Drinking balsamic vinegar and then rinsing with baking soda.
• Butter and vinegar, together at last.

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Lords:

• David
• Erica
  • https://https://twitter.com/YerrikTRB/

Topics:

• Two plant families for the apocalypse
  • I choose you, Marine Phytoplankton! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytoplankton#Diversity
  • I choose you, Apiaceae! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apiaceae
  • I choose you, Poaceae! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poaceae
  • I choose you, Fabaceae! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabaceae
  • I choose you, Rosaceae! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosaceae
  • I choose you, Liliaceae! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liliaceae
  • I choose you, Rubiaceae! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubiaceae
• Alternation of generations
  • https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/beauty/ferns/reproduction.shtml
  • I can't believe I primed myself to think of 80s horror by bringing up Ghoulies 2 and subsequently didn't think about Gremlins.
• I got a Fitbit for Christmas. It keeps track of how many hours of the day I've taken 250 steps to encourage me to get up from my desk frequently. I've been getting up and walking three minutes at the end of each hour and continuing to walk for three minutes at the start of the next.
• Ode to Spot
  • https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Ode_to_Spot
• Stonecoin
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones
• Things that have not gone wrong yet

Microtopics:

• Uncovering the fatal flaw in the premise of the topic.
• The Frog Fractions Extended Universe.
• Marrying someone from the Frog Fractions Extended Universe.
• Picking out insect photos that are still on the Internet.
• Posting photos to social media as a way of convincing yourself that you have a good life.
• A stranger's child slathered in various foodstuffs.
• Using social media to curate a list of everything you were upset about today.
• Getting a concerned phone call from a family member when you post angrily about world events and changing your phone number.
• Which two plant families you'd take with you into the apocalypse.
• Touching Cow Parsnip and then running for shelter.
• Taking grass with you into the apocalypse so you can keep eating rice.
• Drinking coffee and eating onions in the post-apocalypse.
• Vegetables that are technically fruits.
• Whether croutons are classified as a fruit or a vegetable.
• Leaves vs. fronds.
• The organs that produce spores.
• Finding two distinct forms of plants that always appear together and eventually realizing that these are the same species.
• Evolving cocoons when it would be way easier to just evolve a second mouth.
• If humans didn't reproduce directly but instead spored little goblins who ran off to fuck each other and had human babies and we were like "ugh those goblins again"
• Ghoulies 3: Ghoulies go to College.
• Hard-Sporing Citizens.
• A health metric invented by pedometer salesmen.
• Muscles contracting to pump blood throughout your body.
• The differing benefits of running vs. walking.
• The evolutionary benefits of gigantic asses.
• Linking intention to activity.
• Walking around saying quotes from Rick and Morty and the hospice nurse just assumes you have dementia.
• The racism hormone.
• Why it's so satisfying to dismiss ideas that are different from your own.
• Curing dementia by googling the things your grandma says and realizing she's just referencing TV shows nobody's seen in 30 years.
• Two marathons looking backwards through time.
• Subvocal oscillations.
• The best 45 seconds of TV of the 80s.
• The guy who writes all of Data's dialog regardless of who writes the rest of the screenplay.
• The Cyberiad, by Stanislaw Lem.
• A love poem about tensor algebra.
• The bar for what constitutes a love poem to tensor algebra.
• Writing a poem about a cat to the cat even though the cat doesn't understand.
• Web sites eating each other.
• Living inside the Library of Alexandria as it burns down.
• An alternative hypertext protocol similar to The HTTP and The Gopher.
• Nerdy high schoolers who exist today.
• Whether any given internet protocol is for the olds.
• Worrying about all of these cryptos.
• Watching the Olympics streaming on NBC and discovering that not only does TV still exist, it has ads for cryptocurrency now.
• The Island of Yap, part of the Federated States of Micronesia.
• Coin famousness scaling by size.
• An oral history of money where everyone just remembers who paid for what and how much money everyone has.
• A flat exchange rate of inches in diameter to US dollars.
• The stability of a currency that is not currently being speculated on.
• The guy who wrote jokes for Obama.
• Presidential speechwriters paying attention to internet memes and incorporating them into the State of the Union address.
• The inflection point in 2014 where suddenly everyone became much more aware of every bad thing in the world.
• A comprehensive list of everything that has gone right.
• The number of languages in which you have not embarrassed yourself this year.
• Inventing ink live on the show.
• An enormous 3D printer of clear domes.
• Baked slimy okra.
• Baking a couple dozen of your sporulated forms and their gametophytes into a pie crust, who immediately start singing when you cut the pie open.
• A headlamp named Petzl.
• Why is daddy laughing?
• The magic summoning word of little boys.
• An armchair fan of podcasts.

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