• Alex
  • https://www.youtube.com/@adiener
  • https://discord.com/invite/ZkV2zdb
• Mitch
  • https://hbmmaster.tumblr.com/
  • https://www.youtube.com/@HBMmaster
  • https://www.patreon.com/hbmmaster

Topics:

• The Wikipedia article about football
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football
• Classic Macintosh computers
• The entomologist nerds get like two minutes of screen time in Silence of the Lambs, but I'm pretty sure they directly inspired the whole genre of forensic investigation TV.
• With Apologies to Dr. Seuss, by Supper Mario Broth
  • https://fxtwitter.com/MarioBrothBlog/status/1807077109661114636
• Archipelago
  • https://archipelago.gg/
• That "chat is a fourth person pronoun" thing is impressively wrong

Microtopics:

• Off-the-cuff something.
• Putting on the best talent show Cohost has ever seen.
• Www.www.www
• How to deal with multiple things that are called the same thing.
• A list of things called Georgia.
• A very opinionated move that you would not expect from a source as neutral as Wikipedia.
• Sometimes your can carry the ball; sometimes you can't carry the ball.
• What an IP address has to say about women in sports.
• Sports: there's a place where you play it.
• Watching Mexican TV and seeing an ad for "¡futbol americano!"
• Repairing an old Mac that you found in an e-waste place.
• Whether programming has changed since 1985.
• Running an Electron app on a Mac Classic.
• Switcher allowing you to run four 128k programs at a time on a 512k Mac.
• How the 1991 Borland C++ debugger compares to the 2024 Visual Studio debugger.
• Blah Blob, a Celeste-inspired platformer implemented as a Hypercard stack.
• Sitting at the blender all day blending everything within arm's reach.
• Steve Jobs' relationship with fans.
• Wrapping your Xbox 360 in a towel to reflow the cracked solder.
• Adding an extra lane to a highway to make the traffic worse.
• Two awkwardly charming guys who help with an FBI investigation.
• CSIvania.
• The public domain jingle that precedes the poem.
• Supper Mario Broth.
• Wario's Shit Bone.
• A Rare Gooper Bloober Goop Gooble Event.
• Rhyming portend with event.
• A textuovisual post.
• Dr. Soup.
• Whether the folks writing the Prima guide to Mario Sunshine get to personally ask Miyamoto what the weird goop enemies are called.
• Bowser's Fury: the final Mario game.
• F Boy: the F stands for fireball.
• Trying to use a social media service when you don't know anyone on it.
• In My Tumbl Opinion.
• Weird Mario Enemies.
• F Boy (Again)
• Wanting a cool nickname like F Boy.
• Explaining randomizers to someone who has never heard of video games.
• Multi-game multiplayer randomizers.
• A non-randomized randomizer.
• Getting rupee donations left and right when all you need is a sword.
• Unofficial archipelago support.
• The hypothetical dad behind the fourth wall.
• The hypothetical eighth month of the year.
• Subtumbling.
• How to tell the difference between a noun and a pronoun.
• Old-fashioned home grown misinformation.
• Getting from fourth wall to fourth person.
• Fourth person perspective as an alternative term for first person plural.
• Whether "dad" is a pronoun.
• Chat hurt chatself in chat's confusion.
• Rebageling images from 2014.
• Agreeing with yourself from 10 years ago about which images are interesting.

Support Topic Lords

• Jay
• Alex

Topics:

• Mexican food outside San Diego (Having lived in Colorado, Ohio, and now Melbourne)
• Releasing my first commercial video game
• The being an uncle of camping
• Skyscrapers by Matt Haig
  • https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/QM4hPodE.jpg
• Attempting to preserve 40 years' worth of data

Microtopics:

• A puzzle adventure game starring a ferret.
• DROD-likes.
• Sending an envelope full of guacamole to a food lab so they can tell you a list of ingredients.
• Reaching in the window so you can finally drive a million dollar Porsche.
• Letting the Ewok sit in the driver's seat but not actually letting it drive the car.
• Whether Ewoks get old enough to drive.
• Throw Rock.
• Making a game by first making your own level editor, image editor, audio synthesizer and music composition tools.
• Finding playtesters by letting them come to you.
• An eyeball that charges a laser when you step in front of it.
• Deliberately optimizing your game to take up as little disk space as possible.
• A project that starts moving much faster when you figure out what kind of project it should be.
• Writing a 3D modeler so that you can get your 2D game on Steam.
• Working with a professional artist.
• Rendering fur.
• Games with turns that represent less than a second of in-game time.
• The mind-feel of a turn length.
• A game that was so good that the developers went back decades later to make it playable.
• The Mud and the Slime.
• How to play DROD without any roach timers.
• Which DROD is the best one to start with.
• Sokoban with swordplay.
• The level in King Dugan's Dungeon that's nothing but roach queens.
• Optimizing your sword movements well enough that you can move forward while fighting.
• Puzzles that are just hard enough to engage your mind while you do something else.
• Visiting someone who is camping and then going home to sleep in your own bed.
• Building a fire and making s'mores in the bathroom.
• Camping expenses.
• Giving gifts to adults who can already buy whatever they want.
• Deliberately choosing a vacation that is especially exhausting.
• Spending two days each visiting seven different family friends.
• Your grandparents taking you camping and they sleep in the RV while you have to sleep in the tent.
• Buying an onion bloomer for $600 and insisting that your family eat a blooming onion every night to justify the purchase.
• Skyscrapers made out of words
• Training yourself to visualize words in the wrong orientation.
• Puzzling out what the title of the poem would've been if the typesetter hadn't messed it up
• Cross-sectional art.
• Poems that are intended to be viewed rather than read aloud.
• Anti-poem poems.
• Every project you've ever worked on (on a computer)
• Good usable archives.
• The unique digital footprint of your life.
• Getting the bits from a SCSI hard drive in an old Mac that doesn't boot up.
• Apple Desktop Bus Connection.
• The miraculous ubiquity and longevity of USB-A.
• Figuring out how to hook up a digital video player that requires a Firewire connection.
• The MacOS resource fork.
• What the .sit and .hqx extensions meant.
• Gamma Zee.
• Using social media to actually do things.

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

• Alex
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSjSkaBRD7k&list=PLBk6-z6v3pDKi3Q-9MeqUfupJswozircH&index=7
• John

Topics:

• That time I spent 4 days fasting in the woods
• Twins! Coming soon! Ahhhhh!
• The Zelda 1 second quest
• https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/806592-now-the-world-has-gone-to-bed-darkness-won-t-engulf

Microtopics:

• Joyful communities.
• Whether discord logs can be subpoenaed.
• Encoding all your mail in ROT13 to keep them safe from the snoops at the NSA.
• Finishing with your DSP design work so your employer sends you into the basement to make cardboard boxes.
• Someone in the early 2000s with a high pitched voice.
• Remembering your grandma's phone number from when you were six but not remembering any phone numbers since then.
• Thinky Puzzle Games.
• An Alan Hazelden thing.
• Tom Brown's Tracker School.
• Going into the woods and sitting in one spot for four days.
• A good, productive, safe time.
• Keeping control of your emotions.
• How to know when to stop.
• Doing a ritual at sunrise.
• Having animal encounters.
• Trees dripping water on you.
• Doing the most boring thing for four days straight so you can never be bored again.
• A really cool thing to do in your twenties.
• Sonic showers screaming at you until you're clean.
• Lacking the experience to understand what's coming for you.
• Going through some shit and loving it.
• What if it all works out?
• The experience of knowing twins.
• Taking advantage of the Groupon for college tuition.
• Hanging your fears on milestones.
• Taking your parental leave consecutively.
• Daycare as a microcosm of communal living.
• Showing people what you're working on.
• Making a living putting your kids on social media until your kids get old enough to express that they don't like it.
• Wearing a shirt saying "I do not consent to be photographed."
• A conversation with a five year old about scrub jays.
• Sharing media with an allowlist.
• Setting permissions on who can see your photos.
• Sharing photos with your family by handing out USB drives.
• A visual novel that is extremely interested in your personal financial information.
• A pen connected to a matrix of hundreds of other pens so you can sign your name hundreds of times at once.
• The Zelda one-second quest.
• Naming yourself Zelda as a shortcut for understanding this topic.
• Naming your character Zelda without understanding the consequences.
• Red bubbles that take your sword away.
• An obvious door that you can walk through.
• Iwata Asks.
• Accidentally using only half the space available.
• Zelda randomizers.
• SMZ3.
• How to make Super Mario World a metroidvania.
• Marvin putting in work.
• Capturing a particular level of snark.
• Reading books in high school that you won't understand until you're 30.
• The California Raisins as the sequel to the Grapes of Wrath.
• The kind of person who works really hard in high school.
• Xanthan gum.
• Trochaic something or other.
• I had a theory about music and then I made all these friends!

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• John Bettonville
  • https://twitter.com/robohunkx
• Alex Diener
  • https://twitter.com/ThemsAllTook

Topics:

• Blaseball: the Musical
  • https://blaseballthemusical.com
  • https://blaseballpodcast.com
  • https://catacalypto.substack.com
  • https://blandcamp.com
  • https://medium.com/the-game-bland/shell-your-idols-blaseball-and-the-attention-economy-74037293776e
• Keeping the spirit of invention alive
• A couple weeks ago I made turkey burgers with shredded zucchini mixed in and it was great. Today I mixed in shredded cheese too, and now I'm convinced I could mix anything in and it'd be great.
  • https://imgur.com/Q7B5JkS
• Miko asks "do you know about As Slow As Possible or should I put it in the Topic Bucket"
  • As Slow as Possible as Fast as Possible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5-Yo328Rp4
  • Indeterminacy: https://youtu.be/_lOMHUrgM_s
• Existing completely outside the school system
  • Peter Gray on How Our Schools Thwart Passions: https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_gray_how_our_schools_thwart_passions
• Glasses: getting them for the first time as an adult vs when you were younger

Microtopics:

• A modern take on Lunar Lander.
• Flying a rocket ship underwater.
• John Mystery's true identity.
• The true identity of the investigator who uncovered John Mystery's true identity.
• Blaseball: the Musical: the Deaths of Sebastian Telephone.
• Whether it's okay to not be the most obsessed participant in your chosen fandom.
• Take Me Out to the Blall Game.
• Writing, recording and editing a musical in 72 hours.
• Screaming about how Jessica Telephone looked at you.
• The pros and cons of being cagey about your identity.
• The ten most interesting things that happened in Blaseball this week.
• Newsletters: the podcast that comes into your email.
• The pros and cons of reinventing the wheel.
• A non-destructive audio synthesizer that integrates into your makefile.
• Writing the simplest version of a program that's exactly what you need vs. learning how to use someone else's complicated program that does all the things anyone could want.
• Reinventing the wheel to learn how a wheel works.
• Passing variously aggregated files back and forth between R and Python scripts.
• NPM as exhibit A in the argument that maybe it's a good idea to reinvent the wheel sometimes.
• Relying on a thousand strangers not breaking their NPM module so that your commercial web site can keep running.
• Perpetually living in fear of the enormous arcane machine you've created.
• Rice Krispie Treat Burgers.
• The hidden dangers of putting diced onion in your meat loaf.
• Ingredients blending into a homogenous mass.
• Sweet Sundae Ramen.
• Homemade fudge vs hot fudge.
• A food dish that looks like something tasty.
• A brown sludge at the end.
• Whether this noodley carb would look more appetizing if it weren't dyed blue.
• Adapting a 4chan cooking thread into a Youtube channel with MST3K style silhouettes heckling the whole time.
• Shipping your symphony with instructions on how to remix it.
• Indeterminacy.
• Observing someone across the street when cars are passing by.
• As Slow as Possible As Fast as Possible.
• Basing the tempo of your performance on the wavelength of the shortest note in the piece.
• Not knowing what to expect but being thoroughly satisfied by what you got.
• Homeschooling vs. Unschooling.
• A very positive thing for you that might not be great for other people.
• Wanting to be a baker when you grow up but not knowing how to proceed because you already are a baker.
• Learning by doing.
• The correlation between people who like the structure of school and who people learn best by reading rather than doing.
• The first person in your family to not be homeschooled.
• Learning to play music because there are instruments in your house.
• Growing up outside the school system and encountering the Pledge of Allegiance for the first time in your thirties.
• Sending your homeschooled kids to high school so all their little personality quirks get beaten out of them by their peers.
• Everyone American diagnosed with PTSD actually having PTSD twice, because they also went to middle school.
• Learning how to deal with other humans once you're mature enough to have a little bit of emotional intelligence.
• Embarrassment of your past self as a sign of growth.
• A topic asking for the perspective of someone who is not on the podcast.
• Getting glasses that make objects in your left eye look farther away than in your right eye.
• Radially-oriented bifocals.
• Finally achieving everyone else's normal.
• Putting up with blurry vision for most of your life but wearing glasses when you hike because you want to see all the pretty leaves.
• Putting on someone else's glasses as a joke but things do actually look a little bit sharper but assuming it's just an illusion.
• Thinking you have normal vision until someone actually measures your corneas.
• Swimming at the edges of your vision because lenses work best in the middle.
• Wearing glasses that flip your vision vertically and your brain eventually learning to correct for it, and then taking the glasses off and your brain is like "oh shit it's this again!"
• The thing where you put a mirror under your chin and walk around and the popcorn on the ceiling looks like the surface of the moon.
• Objects shrinking every time you get new glasses.
• Objectively measuring your perception by sticking a tape measure into your brain.
• Writing one really excellent tweet and then hiding it behind a bunch of tweets promoting the musical you were in.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Adina is @FeyTechnologist on Twitter.
• Alex is @ThemsAllTook on Twitter.
  • https://www.youtube.com/user/adiener

Topics:

• Anarcho-communism for basic bitches
• How I overcame my inability to stick with a project for the long haul
  • https://pomodoro-tracker.com/
• Simulating the fluidity of natural group conversations in voice chat
• Stephen asks: "The Damascus steel of maze generation algorithms"
  • https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190919-the-maze-puzzle-hidden-within-an-early-video-game
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root
• The hidden worlds of each person's living space
• Learning every craft to become the ultimate craft wizard
  • https://consumerist.com/2016/12/12/a-few-pen-strokes-on-this-mcdonalds-coffee-cup-give-warmest-greetings-a-new-meaning/

Microtopics:

• Fabric and circus arts.
• Getting private trampoline lessons at the largest nonprofit circus in Seattle.
• Being happy with an audience size that doesn't require you to moderate very much.
• Forming smaller communities to take care of the people left behind by large governmental systems.
• Empowering smaller communities to take care of each other.
• Knowing your neighbors and caring more about them than people you don't know.
• Cultivating a neighborhood to make sure you live near people you want to know.
• The long term viability of the nuclear family.
• A commune of queer people funded by a couple of tech jobs.
• Motorizing two wooden planks and hooking them up to the internet to get hugs online.
• Getting a whole lot done when you don't have internet access but now there's internet access everywhere.
• Adding a physical ritual to a mental activity to make it feel real.
• Putting the tomato on a different shelf to indicate that you are done with it.
• An accountability mailing list where people might hypothetically judge you for what you haven't gotten done.
• Fake accountability that feels real.
• Trying to replicate a warehouse full of indie game devs on Discord.
• Asking you for friends' lunch table to be enlarged so you can fit.
• Writing a Discord bot that replicates the chat of every voice channel in every other voice channel.
• Solving a social problem with social change rather than software.
• How many clicks it takes to switch chat rooms.
• Running through a procedurally generated maze.
• Doing floating point math by aliasing the bytes to an integer and subtracting it from a weird magic number.
• Code that is so self contained and stable that it's not really a problem that nobody understands it.
• Old programmers retiring and their knowledge leaving with them because they didn't document anything.
• Writing a megabyte long brain dump of everything you know about a project before it leaves your head.
• The talk Jim didn't give describing the shaving cream technology in Glittermitten Grove.
• Being too tired from your shaving cream rendering R&D project to do a good job on your beard rendering R&D project.
• Wario Ware except with relaxing minigames rather than stressful ones.
• Porting your game from modern systems to MS-DOS so you can sell it on a floppy disk.
• How scratch and sniff failed where a Smell-O-Vision video gaming peripheral will succeed.
• A swear filter but for smells.
• The Femicom museum.
• Going for walks around your neighborhood and seeing the outside of someone's house.
• The hidden interior of a stranger's home as an allegory for their unknowable mind.
• Peeking into your neighbor's window whenever you get the chance.
• Which service jobs let you go into people's houses and see how they live.
• How it's okay to let the cleaning service employees see your secrets because you don't consider the working poor to be real people.
• Whether house cleaners get a small amount of joy in knowing the weird secrets of rich people.
• The guy who comes in every few months for repairs because your computer is completely full of porn.
• Seeing someone's deepest darkest secrets and being like "it was aight"
• Wanting a nicely interior-designed house but not wanting to put in any effort.
• Wanting to paint your house and painting one wall and thinking "I'm good."
• Getting the kind of paint that seems like a normal wall color but changes to a garish color after it dries, to fool your wife.
• Being ready to learn all the new hobbies as lockdown starts but someone already bought all the sewing machines and felting needles.
• How many more ways you can fuck up a sewing project vs. a knitting project.
• Pulling out all the stitches in a pleated skirt for the third time and deciding you want a different hobby.
• Taking natural animal fibers and stabbing them into place.
• A sewing project having to hang on someone's body in a particular way.
• Learning every game development skill so you can make games without ever talking to anyone.
• Smearing goo on a white surface and it becoming a picture somehow.
• The hobbies we'd have if we had infinite time.
• Looking at a painting and seeing which parts the painter messed up by looking for the parts that are thickest.
• The "warmest greetings" coffee cup.
• The animated gif where they poke a hole in the coffee cup and coffee spurts out.
• Making a d-pad feel like a fresh control scheme by attaching a jetski to it.
• Inventing a solution while also entertaining your audience.
• Co-op TIS-100, where each player gets their own CPU cell.

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