Lords:

• Dan
  • https://strangecurrencies.org/
  • https://twitter.com/SC_Reviews_Dan
• Shepard
  • They are known as Earthnova in the Discord and has one published work: http://thelitmag.com/2021-edition/this-story-has-a-ghost-in-it/

Topics:

• Only playing narrative/story-driven video games once
• Sometimes life is like an adventure game, a skill or item that's useless when you get it is needed years later
• Sleng Teng Riddim
  • https://www.engadget.com/2015-12-04-casio-and-the-sleng-teng-riddim.html
  • Here's an argument that the riff originated with David Bowie: https://axischemicals.wordpress.com/2016/01/11/david-bowie-digital-reggae-kingpin/
• Tyger! Tyger! by Robin Johnson
  • https://mobile.twitter.com/rdouglasjohnson/status/1517804673998237697
• The internet and college are two great tastes that taste terrible together.
• The first time I beat my father at Scrabble
• Explaining traffic jams, or at least this one traffic jam

Microtopics:

• Wanting to see all the stuff.
• Replaying a series of four RPG length games to see the alternate endings.
• Getting the most video game endings for your dollar.
• Tenable and untenable ways to have an adventure.
• Recapturing the magic of your first time (with emulators).
• Getting every video game you wanted for a system and then enjoying that for 10 minutes.
• A giant archive of every DOS game ever.
• Losing your nostalgia for old games via emulation, but keeping your nostalgia for the box art.
• Falling out of love with Windows Vista.
• Keeping your custard pie intact until the yeti needs it.
• The bread maker approach to learning a new skill.
• Why there are no cupcakes in Frog Fractions 2.
• Playing Go against someone better than you and suddenly losing.
• The Go community rallying around the identity that computers can't beat the best Go players.
• Whether computer Go has shaped the way humans play Go.
• An extra creative extra special humany thing.
• Beating a chess expert by convincing them to play something else.
• John Henry's retirement plan.
• Being promised a Yamaha DX7 but receiving a Casio MT-40 instead.
• Writing a part for a rock and roll rhythm section that is accidentally a great reggae rhythm section.
• The origins of the Amen Break.
• Setting up a situation where you can write your own notes.
• Figuring out where the genre can go with this new tonality.
• Stripy guys and chonky units.
• The best kind of tigers. (Floofers.)
• Learning about slant rhymes one morning and that afternoon writing a poem that rhymes "eye" with "symmetry."
• Blake hearing about the Great Vowel Shift from his grandpa and deciding that that would be a great way to make Tyger! Tyger! sound old timey.
• Googling why Blake tried to rhyme "eye" with "symmetry" and finding dozens of implausible theories, all expressed with complete confidence.
• Making an impression on the world of poetry by not being good at it.
• Hipster throwbacks to the great vowel shift.
• Calvin and Hobbes panoply of tiger poems.
• Holding off on reading more Calvin and Hobbes tiger poems until you’re done recording the podcast.
• Not letting online schooling get in the way of your online education.
• Whether someone will figure out how to do a college class online before we transition back to in-person classes.
• Whether ASL is especially well suited to bring taught over Zoom.
• Doing yard work and wearing protective equipment so you can't pull out your phone to check Twitter.
• Lying down in court.
• Realizing for the first time that your parents don't know everything.
• A framed photo of the one time your mom won at Risk.
• The one thing you and your dad are both interested in.
• Sports montage of getting better at Scrabble.
• Driving or better yet watching movies with cars in them.
• Everybody slowing down to take a look at the two headed chicken.
• Driving towards a shadow and being blinded by the sun to what's beyond the shadow.
• A time loop where the car in front of you slows down for no reason and then you slow down for a good reason but the car behind you thinks you're slowing down for no reason.
• A car driving on a road.
• Stacking a bunch of human reaction speeds on top of each other.
• Slot cars as a fun and disastrous solution to traffic.
• The slot car model of public transit.
• Finding everybody on the Discord.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

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

Topics:

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

Microtopics:

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

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