• Andrew
• Kate

Topics:

• The strange and alienating experience of learning to drive at 40
• The mottos of the livery companies of London
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mottos_and_halls_of_the_livery_companies
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mottos
• Independent They Stand!
  • https://archive.org/details/computer-games-magazine-issue-115-june-2000/page/n83/mode/2up?view=theater
• Leda and the Swan, by William Butler Yeats
  • https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43292/leda-and-the-swan
• Predecimalization currency in the UK
• DIY TTRPG mapping software, the ridiculous way

Microtopics:

• Streaming making maps of video games on the Internet.
• The people who are willing to watch someone map out every corner of this sprawling and convoluted game.
• Writing about video games and writing video games.
• Dicey territory. (Which is only appropriate.)
• King Stephen, which will have been great.
• Fun jokes and oblique references.
• Forty and a half years old.
• Building your life around not being able to drive a car.
• Pockets of civilization separated by vast stretches of asphalt.
• The car unsteering itself unless you hold the steering wheel in place.
• Someone yelling at you with their little beep beep horn.
• Learning a skill and forgetting how you learn it.
• Learning a skill before you find out that learning is hard.
• The false sense of immortality that allows people to get into a car.
• During your driving test, pushing the drift button but the driving instructor is like "I don't see any blue sparks"
• Learning to drive when you're six years old.
• Getting your Lego Land driving license.
• Awarding the worst student in your driving class the "most spirited" driver's license.
• Explaining what livery companies are by reading the Wikipedia page also.
• The Worshipful Company of Communicators.
• Everything's so good, bread especially.
• A great motto for clockmakers.
• Does anyone know any cool Latin mottos?
• When are all these servants having time to go out and have mottos??
• The Soggiest God you can Muster.
• The Worshipful Company of Information Technologists finding a Latin word that is also a snack food for their motto.
• Painting, staining, and compelling obedience.
• Sticking with Hope Classic.
• Shoemakers making jokes about supporting their customers.
• Getting the salt/wit pun in there for people who know Latin.
• Africa: always producing some novelty.
• The 2000 IGF.
• How to read a magazine together on a podcast.
• John Carmack's Finger Server.
• Doom Guy.
• John Romero's specific type of memory.
• How they invented mouse look.
• Turning with the arrow keys and aiming a reticle around the screen with the mouse.
• Dragging the mouse to the top of your cool dinosaur mouse pad.
• Why doesn't Microsoft Excel keep the mouse cursor in the center of the screen?
• The FPS phone interface where you swipe on the touchscreen until the button you want to press is in the center of the screen, then pull the trigger on the back of the phone and a shotgun sound plays.
• Fold-away interface panels.
• Thousand Hells, by the developer of King of Dragon Pass.
• All the video games named "Rift" or "The Rift"
• How can those terrified vague pink fingers push the feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
• Zeus disguised as a swan.
• Whether Marylin Monroe will would've loved Hades.
• Going to Wikipedia's list of mottos because you need some more mottos.
• How many ha'ppenies to a thruppence?
• The half crown, worth 2/6.
• Several hundred quarterfarthings.
• Decimal Day, 1971.
• Extremely forgeable coins.
• Dividing the day into two sets of twelve.
• Decimalization. (Based on 10 fingers.)
• Tuppence and Thruppence.
• IBM calling it "hexadecimal" because they refuse to say "sexadecimal" out loud.
• Theater of the Mind storytelling.
• Importing an occlusion map.
• Tinting what the players can see green and tinting what the DM can see red or blue.
• Swapping the lenses in anaglyph glasses so one person can only see red and the other can only see blue.
• Hanging a projector from the ceiling and projecting the D&D map on the table.
• A projector of uncertain parentage.
• Harebrained vs. cockamamie.
• A fun puzzle you can run off and waste a bunch of time solving.
• A stochastic cinema where you never know if it's going to be comedy or horror and everything seems totally real to you and is about your personal failings.
• Focusing on wibbly dream state.
• How to exhale with your nose plugged.
• Losing your Apple Watch on Mt. Everest and going back up to look for it and it turns out you dropped it in the shower.
• Topics going into the bucket that nobody ever sees.
• Writing a secret on a piece of paper and burying it on a hill with a single tree on it on a moonlit night.

Support Topic Lords

• Andrew
• Kate

Topics:

• Is it okay to make a game that is boring
• My friend wants me to play WoW. Should I?
• How to melt chocolate
• Kate's Wallace and Gromit song
  • https://bsky.app/profile/hownottodraw.bsky.social/post/3lfctso62a22q
• VFX is like cooking, game design is like baking
• Looksmaxxing

Microtopics:

• Adam Atomic's Pico-8 renaissance.
• Vampire vs. Pope Army
• Still Kate.
• Grass and flowers and touching them.
• The bifurcation of Bluesky into Twitter 2 and Mastodon into Not Twitter.
• The different kinds of people who tell you you're doing it wrong on different social media services.
• Looking at Bluesky and realizing it's just like Twitter, and having a reaction to that realization.
• Comparing your mood before using an internet service to your mood afterwards.
• You're the cow, baby!
• A story about living in a village of fewer than twenty people where nothing happens for thirty years.
• Countervailing forces preventing your game design from becoming a worry stone.
• Going outside and being bored until being bored stops feeling like an assault on all your senses.
• Talking to your mates in the pub about your new socks.
• Your mayonnaise manufacturing district.
• YAGNI.
• That time your ex-husband stole your knife and without a knife you can't cut food! Or ropes!
• Needing medical help and asking the guy in your village who owns half an encyclopedia.
• A miserable experience that is worth doing.
• The big advantage of playing World of Warcraft in Hardcore mode.
• WoW Classic and WoW Classic Classic.
• A game about killing 40 rats.
• The game for children that do annoying dances.
• Who knows about causality?
• The two year period when game designers played nothing but World of Warcraft.
• Getting addicted to an MMO and never contributing anything to society ever again.
• Entering into an activity with a miserly determination to not have fun.
• What it takes to do a dungeon.
• The spaces between the exciting parts.
• Melting chocolate on top of parchment paper.
• Melting chocolate with a hair dryer.
• A Fraught Bark Experience.
• Mouthfuls of raw flour.
• Cake Batter Bark.
• Rescuing seized chocolate.
• Counterintuitive chocolate behavior.
• Baking: It's Stupid.
• Adding a tart cheese to cream of mushrooms soup.
• Reading the poem as if you're not singing it in your head.
• Asking the vicar to share a stir-fry.
• Adding swear words to the Wallace and Gromit theme.
• Leggy Desert Boy, by Percy Bysshe Shelley.
• The verse in Eleanor Rigby where they talk about cooking and eating dinner.
• Words that rhyme with "pint."
• Rhyming "pint" with "2019."
• Inventing an OC named "blorange" to solve your rhyming problems.
• Taking flavors and synthesizing new flavors.
• Hammering on the "fun" button for forty or fifty years.
• Having the one hit and not needing another hit.
• Exploring a multidimensional design space and tapping on all the walls to see which ones are destructible.
• Starting to make a game and finding out whether it's an easy game to make.
• Langoliers.
• Night Snacker.
• Releasing games exclusively in the Topic Lords discord.
• The art of turning your mortal vessel into a weapon.
• Softmaxxing vs. Hardmaxxing.
• Doing tongue exercises to sharpen your jaw.
• The Wikipedia page with the most scare quotes on it.
• Limb-lengthening surgery.
• Dabbing: it's just extremely short-term looksmaxxing.
• When two subcultures have two different words for the same idea.
• Whether the Xes in "Looksmaxxing" are the kisses and the Os the hugs, or vice versa.
• Whether the Xes in are the kisses and the Os are the hugs or whether the Xes are the dead eyes on the cartoon face.
• Archiving the VODs.

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

• Andrew
  • https://store.steampowered.com/app/1658150/Moonstone_Island/
• Kate
  • https://tunicgame.com/

Topics:

• British food is good, actually
• Really enjoying programming in MonoGame (and stop motion animation)
• Lightswitch abstraction limit
• Un petit d'un petit
• The Old Timey Computer Show
• Trying to get your friends to play a game that sucks to learn
• Winston has discovered that the ending of a story is usually the most exciting part, so he doesn't want to watch whole movies any more, just the last twenty minutes of each

Microtopics:

• Moonstone Island.
• A tiny fox in a big world.
• Cherry blues.
• Something within your culture that is awful and bad.
• Whatever can grow in the wet and dark. (Potatoes.)
• Cool Whip based salads.
• Yorkshire pudding. (The fluffy one.)
• The non-spicy gravies.
• J. Kenji Lopez-Alt's roast potato recipe.
• Lamb going with mint and pork going with applesauce.
• How to eat Vegemite or Marmite.
• A man at the end of the table whose entire job is to carve meat for you.
• A place to take your picky grandma to eat.
• Bodega cats and bodega kids.
• Doing stop motion animation as a goof.
• The fun part of Dunning Krueger.
• Doing a magic trick without knowing how the trick works and amazing yourself.
• Leaning into the good times.
• Accidentally getting good at an employable skill.
• Flailing at the wall until the light switches are in the right position.
• Off: just a different kind of on.
• Doing your first pull request.
• The fountain pen of the version control ecology.
• Getting a bunch of little plant men to turn the lights on and off for me.
• Poetry written in nonsensical French that is homophonic with English nursery rhymes.
• An entire book for a very specific kind of nerd to have a sensible chuckle.
• Allowing yourself one E, as a mistake.
• A joke written back when people knew what am omnibus was.
• Vintages footage from 1980s computer shows.
• Dousing CD-Rs.
• The Free Cake and Donuts Half-Hour.
• Getting as many 35+ computer dorks as you can under a box before you pull the string.
• Making two children fight each other on the British equivalent of Crash Bandicoot.
• A policeman on a unicycle.
• The imagined experience of programming the ZX Spectrum.
• The other Cambridge.
• Mac PCs.
• The Oliver Twins.
• Turning on all the shaders to make your programmer art look good.
• Finding three extra Dizzy games in the attic.
• Trying to tell your friends about a family tradition and while you're telling them you realize how messed up it is.
• A pile of 500 cards that should really be a computer game instead.
• A rule where every time you play a card you have to sigh a little bit.
• A game where you torture your friends.
• A food with the letter E in it.
• Trying to have fun despite your friend who is making you play the game.
• Have you guys heard about conclusions?
• A bunch of stuff happening and then there's a riddle.
• The Go Left Problem.
• When games have secrets.
• Pushing at the edges of a game and the game pops up a dialog saying "I noticed you pushing at my edges."
• A password named "Susan."
• A DVD where every interface to start the movie starts it at chapter 2 and chapter 1 is a secret.
• Reading just the last word of a book.
• Watching the first episode and the last episode of a sitcom and trying to guess which actors missing from the last episode died and which went to prison.
• How to find your Mastodon name.

Support Topic Lords