Topic Lords - Episodes Tagged with “Elena”

314. Gotta Catch Half of 'Em!

Jim Stormdancer — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 00:00:00 -0700

Lords:

Elena
Joël

Topics:

The Luck Factor:
- http://www.richardwiseman.com/resources/The_Luck_Factor.pdf
Dual pilgrim certificate
The return of PicoSteveMo
- https://itch.io/jam/picostevemo-3
Every poem, by every human
- https://www.tumblr.com/nextworldover/793694487879827456/animatedamerican-atamascolily

Microtopics:

Packing cubes.
The Rolling Method.
Modular backpacks.
Camera people: a different type of people.
Nested zippered envelopes labeled one through five.
Why does your purse say "three" on it??
Tool user opinions.
Getting ready for fiction to incorporate our new conception of what AI is.
Running experiments on people who self-identify as lucky or unlucky.
Gladstone Gander.
Paying your put-upon nephew a dime to accompany you on a trip to Zazu-Zazu.
Stan Connery's terrible taste in roles.
Natalie Portman's Tom Scott number.
Systems that are gamable but not trivially gamable.
Rick Rubin numbers vs. Sabbath Numbers.
The Kumano Kodo Trail's trail adjudicators ringing a bell and giving you a certificate to certify that you've walked their trail.
A terrible time of year to hike the Camino de Santiago.
Taking a wrong turn while hiking the Camino de Santiago and ending up on France.
All the school children running over to high five the pilgrims.
Feral Eucalyptus plantation.
Peeking into all the ancient mills.
Shrine tossing tricks.
Passing bones from chopstick to chopstick.
The three major sources of ritual pollution.
Getting sick of climbing the hill all the time so you write a poem explaining that the gods don't want the shrine to be at the top of the hill any more.
Harassment prevention for non-supervisors.
Printing and framing the certificate you got after taking the class on filling out your timecard.
The uncle so otherwise never contacts you sending you a happy birthday message on LinkedIn every year.
Endorsing your friend on LinkedIn for being a git.
Balloons in the sewer.
Sokoban mechanics that could apply Stephen King's It.
A tricycle kart racer set in the Overlook hotel.
NanoSteveMo.
The scruffy guy the hotel manager doesn't want around.
Singlehandedly supplying the fanbase for this Mo.
Hoarding Pico-8 cartridges on you desktop.
The Spore creature creator exporting your creature as a PNG.
A topic for another Topic Lords.
Concatenating a zip file to the end of a different file.
Here's this artifact. Please try it out.
Saving PNGs to Starlings.
Storing your Pico-8 game in a bird.
Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme.
Pirating software on Usenet.
Catching 50 out of 100 birds to extract the Pico-8 game from them.
Realizing that it's a plums in a refrigerator thing and moving on.
Helping a stranger grieve using your well-honed crossword skills.
Approaching classical literature as a collection of in-jokes and wanting to be in on the joke.
A book with a serrated edge.
How to read a book vs. how to read a poem.

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274. Samuel Beckett's Animal Crossing Letters

Jim Stormdancer — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 00:00:00 -0800

Lords:

John
- https://abbydenton.itch.io/the-blade-of-cutiepants-a-very-cutie-christmas
Elena

Topics:

Potluck advent calendar
NES games in my collection that are currently ranked rather low according to Science
- http://8bitnintendo.science
- Subtopic: I've grown to love engaging with criticism and differing opinions of silly things I like.
How animals read
https://ailbey.tumblr.com/post/750880084257374208

Microtopics:

Crispy Shrimp Balls.
What makes it Dim Sum?
Whether there's always a cart that you roll around.
Tapas Lords, a new ASMR podcast.
The Blade of Cutie Pants: a Very Cutie Christmas.
Christmas Dangerous Dave.
Here's a song. I'm going to scroll past that.
Stock footage of Godzilla attacks.
An album about making games in Kilk n Play.
Granny Cream's Hot Butter Ice Cream.
Jim's songs in the Hypnospace OST.
Knowing a lot of people just by hanging out and being entertaining.
Recognizing sounds by looking at them.
Tea and Jam Advent Calendars.
Tippy Tops.
3D-printed animals with wiggly arms.
Taking the economics of Halloween and applying it to Christmas.
Stocking Stuffers Every Day.
365-day Advent Calendars.
Santa with a Fanta.
Showing Home Alone to a kid who already loves setting up traps.
An Advent Calendar filled with traps.
Never playing board games but opening up the boxes and playing with the pieces.
Fake Winstons.
Getting 2.5 trinkets from each person.
Half-Lego, Half-Chocolate.
Why your favorite NES games are terrible.
Shipping a game that's no good but damned if it doesn't exist.
A Failure of Science.
Rare game or Rare game?
The Treasure Master walk cycle.
The worst NES games with the best soundtracks.
British developers succeeding on the Commodore 64 but failing on the NES because people are willing to pay 6 quid for the latest Rob Hubbard track, but not $50.
Your neighbor who had Big Nose Freaks Out.
Punching the clues.
Buying the 3D version of Urban Champion on purpose.
Trying to go back to Super Monkey Ball.
Nostalgically revisiting your best Super Monkey Ball replays.
Accidentally transposing two digits and now you have a Super Monkey Ball world record.
Making local copies of videos you want to continue to exist.
Recognizing when something works for someone else but not you.
Writing letters to your animal neighbors.
The seven criteria to judge a letter.
How to safely write a letter about VVVVVV to your Animal Crossing neighbor.
Roleplaying James Joyce in Animal Crossing.
Teaching Animal Crossing a slur and then returning the cartridge to Gamestop.
Deciding that it's okay if local news stations freak out.
Taking joy in extremely mundane activities.
How you spend your moments and how you feel about them.
Watching TV so that in several decades you can go to a bar and find out who's the same age as you.
Practicing love by trying to love yourself.
The breakup song from the Wedding Singer.
Corollaries of aphantasia.
Blind people watching TV.
Learning to draw by studying human anatomy and proportions in detail and imagining the body kinesthetics.
Looney Tunes artists making faces in the mirror.
Knowing how bones go.
The Bone Book.
That's Topics!

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259. All Bag, No Pipes

Jim Stormdancer — Mon, 07 Oct 2024 00:00:00 -0700

Lords:

Elena
- Esper says: "I will join both guests in also recommending Dropout, especially Game Changer. They are on to something really special with the shows they're making, very little makes me laugh as hard as the stuff on there."
Tyriq
- https://50games.fun/

Topics:

Being witty and social is my favorite power fantasy to realize
Popular music: sometimes popular because it's good?
Where do we go after Cohost
Ballad of the Veliger
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Garstang?useskin=vector#The_Ballad_of_the_Veliger

Microtopics:

Japanese cold medicine.
Promising the guy at the drug store you haven't taken this drug on the last week.
Lulu Attack X.
What the College Humor folks went on to do after graduating.
50 games for a fictional console.
UFO 500.
Super Mario Bros but it scrolls wrong.
Google docs autocorrecting your Steam keys.
Some weird shit that you're going to maybe discover.
Why he's named Gordy.
Being sharp and on it all the time in a conversational manner.
The safety of a fantasy that is unrealistic to fulfill in real life.
Picking a joke and connecting it to the prompt.
Making a speech check and the DM thinks of a clever thing for you to say.
Coming across as socially competent in a conversation and feeling great for the rest of the day.
Looking at an extremely charismatic, competent character in a film and thinking "that's me! That's me in there!"
People talking to you about Chappell Roan.
Japanese translated cover of Good Luck Babe.
Hearing a lot about an artist and thinking "this artist has a lot of attention and they don't need mine"
The combination of a man, a woman, and bunch of instruments.
Where people who like pop music hear new music.
Pop music: not as popular as it used to be.
The pros and cons of people enjoying a wider variety of pop culture.
Fingerprints in the Clay.
Having to make synthesizer music in prison because they won't let you have guitars.
Not paying attention to the political context of the unintelligible screaming in your favorite album.
Ancestors of the guitar that sound a little bit different from the guitar.
People being unable to tell what amateurish synthesizer work sounds like.
Instruments producing incidental noises that come alongside the sounds you intend to make, just by their nature as a physical object.
Pink Pony Club, a song about dancing at a club.
Authenticity vs. perceived authenticity.
Trying to stay on top of fashion trends.
Making noises because you feel compelled to.
Finding one way or another to pay off the Capitalism demons.
Having the genetic disposition to practice a lot.
Seeking out things that are easy for you personally to become good at.
Drawing because you are holding a pencil all the time and need to fidget, and stopping drawing forever when you are no longer in that life situation.
Singing to yourself on the bus.
An instrument that's just the screechy tube part of the bagpipes.
A monotonic screech machine.
Joining your church choir and knowing you're better than everybody else there.
Doing a really good job and being relieved that nobody noticed.
What does 12 year old Jim know? Certainly not where he's been for the past six months.
Making a space for humans on the internet.
Tumblr wins by doing absolutely nothing.
The kind of person who is like "follow me onto this social media site I've just heard of right now"
Artist Alley.
The moral difference between "liking" and "reposting."
The "reposting something without liking it" vs. "liking it without reposting it" truth table.
A British citizen from the 19th century with a name that looks German.
How the gastropod got its twist.
Horny Foot Without.
A poem that is just literally what it says on the tin.
A little baby sea guy.
A sonnet about the anatomy of the eyeball.
What marine biology nerds got up to in 1928.
Larval Forms and Other Zoological Verses.
Red Seas Under Red Skies.
Lamarckian evolution.
Snails are great. (Except for the cone snail.)
I'm on a sea slug diet.
The class of pet that you never touch or interact with in any way.
How to interact with fish.
Whether koi care that you're petting them.
Interacting with fish by having them clean your teeth.
Enticing your pet octopus to do the dishes by covering them with fish paste.

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248. The Ephemeral Nature of Digital Fish Food

Jim Stormdancer — Mon, 22 Jul 2024 00:00:00 -0700

Lords:

Elena
- https://www.gouletpens.com/blogs/fountain-pen-blog/sailor-shikiori-tokiwa-matsu-ink-review
Nathalie
- https://alienmelon.itch.io/ [cw:flashing lights]

Topics:

Fish-based screensavers
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQpCcQhNfxM
- https://www.montereybayaquarium.org/animals/live-cams
Fire safety
The Aquarium and the Glass Harmonica
I Am Running Into A New Year by Lucille Clifton
- https://nextworldover.tumblr.com/post/738271770264600576
I went to Japan
- https://nerdparadise.com/mspaint/stereogram
- https://twitter.com/mischiefanimals/status/1704934776421913018

Microtopics:

Shikiori Ink.
The Computer Museum in Berlin.
Back when you saw fish-based screen savers everywhere.
The Roku app fish screen saver.
A rock in the aquarium that says "Roku"
11 hours of fish content.
Fish nerds sitting in a small box at the bottom of the ocean getting hype over seeing a small worm.
An animated gif of fish nerds getting hype.
A live jellyfish web cam that is just in principle.
A web cam of the thing that goes donk and everyone cheers when it goes donk.
The fish screen saver where you need to keep buying floppy disks with fish food on it or the fish die.
Don't copy that fish food!
The startup selling digital rabbit food going out of business so all the digital rabbits go into hibernation.
The Life Cycle of Software Objects.
Being unable to open your front door because the smart lock ran out of batteries.
Everybody congratulating you on the infuriating guy you made up to get mad at.
Fire safety anecdotes.
Glass top electric stoves that look just like induction stoves, as a prank.
How fire extinguishers taste.
Looking at fire extinguisher dust and thinking "let's get the blood brain barrier involved."
Leaving the stove on.
Broiling a sandwich and the whole sandwich catches fire.
A five year old doing science experiments with a lit candle.
The UX design of grease fires.
The William Shatner song about the dangers of deep frying a turkey.
Relating to the teens coming into fashion for like a week and then the next week the teens are like "You're still trying to relate? That's cheugy AF."
Self-moistening fingertips.
Soaking your fingertips in water for eight minutes to get them pruny.
The Canon of harmonica virtuoso music.
Ethereal floating tones that fade in and out of existence.
The Flat Bells.
The Mellotron as a slightly more physical sampler.
Clara Rockmore playing "The Swan" on Theremin.
Bit-doers playing "The Swan" on Otamatone.
Letting go of what you said to yourself about yourself when you were 16, 26, even 36.
The assumption that you need to be forgiven for something.
The sun coming up on this episode of Topic Lords.
Working up the courage to climb the mountain you see every day from your back yard.
Really tall hills you can walk up.
What it's like to not hear cars constantly.
Designing a building to sound good – even if it isn't a concert hall.
Car-free cities.
Biking in a bike-centric environment.
Throwing your body into traffic and hoping drivers care about the legal liability of running someone over.
The intersection where you always see the skid marks from kids doing donuts.
Doing watercolors but with ink.
Buying a bunch of art supplies and never using them because you're afraid to waste them.
How do you get your paintbrush to do what you want?
How watercolors behave depending on how wet the painting is and how wet the paintbrush is.
Scraping your knife on the painting and it just looks like a shed.
Is it a bunch of cats or is it the word "gay"?
Images that look like stereograms but aren't.
The blank canvas stereogram.
Crowds staring at the enormous stereograms hanging up in the Mall of America.
Stereogram artists accounting for pupillary distance.
Making a stereogram in MS Paint.

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211. Window-Peering Jim Checking Out Your Cats

Jim Stormdancer — Mon, 06 Nov 2023 00:00:00 -0800

Lords:

Cort
- https://a.co/d/iRrEZcy
Elena

Topics:

My due date is literally tomorrow
Dogme 95 for web development
Visits from the neighborhood cats
Potato, by Jane Kenyon
- https://poets.org/poem/potato-0
Cooperative board games are hard to design
- Space themed coop trick-taking card game: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/284083/crew-quest-planet-nine
Building a conlang generator from the phonology up
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonority_hierarchy
- Linear algebra cursed conlang: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ze5i_e_ryTk

Microtopics:

The Be Real App.
Posting your mortifying skin condition for all the internet to see.
Being born.
The Dance Dance Revolution song "20,November," by Earth Wind and Fire.
PiCoSteveMo.
Tossing around hastily drawn concept art with your team.
Being born, again.
Having a kid for someone else.
Eating cigarettes off of the sidewalk.
A grab bag of thousands of possible pregnancy symptoms.
Literacy as a symptom of pregnancy.
A visceral reminder that you are part of a long chain of humans.
Which came first, humans or birth?
The comfort of the humans who are still around having individual experiences even after you die.
Tips n Tricks for dealing with fear of death.
Inviting dead people onto the show.
Asking for more pro-death art so you can feel better about death.
Pro-life, in the literal sense.
Flowers and mushrooms growing up through the bones.
Returning to the universe to nurture it.
Dumb Ways to Die.
Sum: 40 Tales from the Afterlives.
Thought experiments about something weird that could happen.
The Egg by Andy Weir.
Covering birth and death in the same topic.
Looking at photos of yourself from five years ago and thinking "oh shit!"
I am choosing to no longer have conscious experience, mom. You wouldn't understand, mom.
Swedish with a mouthful of potatoes.
Dogme 95.
Enpoopification.
A protocol for exchanging information on a computer.
Rewinding to a kinder, simpler web.
Avoiding all this gestures at the world
New rule: no web servers more powerful than a Raspberry Pi.
The cool thing that was on the web in the mid-90s.
Making art and putting it on the internet and getting a fan base.
The teenage gamer comic series making a comic about prostate exams.
Sharding the internet.
El Goonish Shive.
Anime hammers that you do when someone is being a pervert.
Coming to personal revelations regarding your neurodivergence or gender situation.
How to be a successful artist.
Not knowing if your favorite webcomic had ads because you use an adblocker.
Working at your parents animation studio as an inbetweener.
Merging your cats into one cat.
Neighborhood coyotes.
Cats beyond the reach of fear.
Window-peering Jim: he's just checking out your remodel.
Putting a GoPro on your neighbor's cat and livestreaming the inside of their house.
Cats with amazing life stories that they'll never tell you.
The consort of coffee grounds.
Making shepherd's pie for an entire hamlet.
A possibly accidental double line break.
A line break corresponding to a conceptual boundary.
The Story of Mel: a Real Programmer.
Adding left angle brackets to the start of every line until word wrap makes it a poem.
Blackout poetry.
Pumping gas as an element of Cottagecore.
A hamlet is just a city in New Jersey.
The fireworks on your forehead game.
A game where everyone stops talking.
The Yelling Game.
A dedicated period of yelling.
Space-themed trick taking games.
The Spaceteam card game.
Coming up with a set of place names that sound like they're from the same culture.
Assigning syllable groups to a morpheme.
Asking Claude.
Interpolating the obvious things.
The Sonority Hierarchy.
A gradient from less vowel-like to more vowel-like.
Cursed Conlangs.
Generating syllables and mushing them together.

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193. Pull Down Your Murphy Toilet

Jim Stormdancer — Mon, 03 Jul 2023 00:00:00 -0700

Lords:

Elena
Quil

Topics:

Human Pudding, and why popular media can't depict bad art, only bad taste
I got a van!
Corporate art: From industrial musicals of the 50s-70s to this Staples logo unveiling
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWUhqoAGsfk
https://philolexian.blogspot.com/2006/11/kilmer-2005.html

Microtopics:

A very good New York Times crossword.
Feats of crossword construction that just make the experience of solving it worse.
Cottage cheese and jam.
Fruit on the bottom cottage cheese cups.
Whether cottage cheese comes pre-curdled.
An opportunity to make money by making the richest people in the world happier.
A jams and jellies bandolier.
Going to the arcade wearing a token dispenser but also your "I don't work here" shirt.
A band that only exists so that John Stamos can be annoyed by it.
Whether the average person would misspell a word on a grocery list.
Flashy rock and roll in which the lyricss are goofy and the goofy lyrics heightens the perceived quality of the music and the music heightens the perceived goofiness of the lyrics.
Various anime in which the kids are forming a band.
The Fictitious Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
The East coast DIY music scene.
Eyeball Skeleton.
Smoosh nee Smush.
My Pal God Records.
The Most Wanted Song and The Most Unwanted Song.
Ramadan jingles.
Putting all the things people hate the most in the same song.
Single Ladies.
The Rescue Rangers dimension where the Rescue Rangers theme song is still modulating upwards to this day.
Releasing an album on vinyl that ends in a locked groove with a shepard tone.
Sprinter Vans.
Diesel vans racking up a million miles.
Van life.
Vans with indoor plumbing.
How people react when someone is sleeping in a vehicle in their neighborhood.
How to recognize a van that somebody lives in.
Living in a Wal-Mart parking lot.
Campy camping.
Living the hash tag no car life.
Bimodal distribution of van dwellers.
The Minimum Viable Van.
Living six people to a bedroom and not liking it.
A landlady who cooks for everybody in the 1800s.
Outlawing boarding houses because there are too many single men being rowdy.
The Florida Project.
Moving into the hotel across the street for a day so that you don't live in one place long enough to become a tenant.
Guessing how squatting laws work.
Staples presenting a trailer for their new logo at E3.
The history of Industrial Musicals.
Hiring video artists and composers to create massive lavish displays of brand awareness.
The documentary that Kevin Smith made about Prince just for Prince to watch and never release.
Making a funny video for mystery people to watch for mystery purposes.
The KFC VR training app.
Living close to Hamburger University.
Rerecording Prince's "1999" for every year up to 2999.
The circus ad that Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite was based on.
O Deathy Death.
Most Foul Vowel.
The Alfred Joyce Kilmer Memorial Bad Poetry Contest.
The headspace you get into as an artist when you try to make bad art.
A good example of a bad poem.
Birdemic's environmental message.
A clown photobombing your movie soundtrack.

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160. Dracula Never Brushes His Teeth

Jim Stormdancer — Mon, 14 Nov 2022 00:00:00 -0800

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Lords:

Elena
Shannon

Topics:

I went to Burning Man and now maybe I don't bite my nails?
Pros and cons of vampirism
Krista and Tatiana Hogan are conjoined at the brain. They share thoughts, senses and control of their bodies.
"Gray cube, rectangular light"
- https://codewriteplay.com/2019/09/10/legends-of-gamedev-clarissa-darling/

Microtopics:

Nominally saving everybody a big hassle but in fact completely failing to do the job.
Checking the double secret server.
Will Wood.
Listening to music but not learning a lot.
Biting your cuticles.
The Burning Man dust/paste situation.
Trying to get dust under your fingernails when you don't have fingernails.
Getting rid of the textures on your face which just causes more textures to happen.
A cuticle lab kit with fancy sticks and creams that you don't understand.
Nail-buffing cubes.
Losing some unpredictable aspect of your person at Burning Man.
A man made up of all the aspects of personalities that he stole from Burning Man attendees.
Leaving your nail biting behind in the temple.
Cutting your nails short ever since you got that gardening gig.
The weird traveling bruise you get when you hit your fingernail too hard.
Every shovelful had so much danger in it.
The perils of gardening barefoot.
Wearing gloves but not wearing shoes because you like the mud between your toes.
Dracula Daily.
Starting a mailing list for someone else's diary.
Couriers telling you that they delivered the boxes of soil and thanks for the shillings.
Explaining what a vampire is after the vampire is already dead.
Vampirism as a pyramid scheme.
Leaving and returning to your soldered-closed coffin at will.
God's meaner creatures.
Vampirism as a recipe for seasonal affective disorder.
What a bummer it'd be to discover that hell is real.
Living a thousand subjective years and learning a bunch of skills.
Getting up every night and finding a child to eat because that's all you have time for.
Dracula the trainspotter.
The Kirby dimension that his victims all go to and hang out together.
Offering value to the world that compensates for the person you have to kill and eat every day.
The guy in Dracula that is obsessed with technology and records his diary on wax cylinders but doesn't think to write the date on them.
Doctor C-Word.
The Blood of Manly Men.
God Sends Us Men When We Want Them.
Running out of manly blood but luckily a Texan shows up.
Affixing small electric lights to your chest so that you can explore a basement.
The spider that got so big that it was just a really big spider, you know, the really big spider everybody talks about.
How our intuition for what makes a person can be thrown off completely by simple biology.
Two brains that are slightly overlapped.
A closed system that can answer questions about itself.
Raising a child as if it is two people.
Split-brain patients.
Interpreting the two hemispheres of the brain as two individual people who are working in concert.
The storytelling part of our brain that we call consciousness.
Having control of three legs and an arm vs. three arms and a leg.
Trying to relate your subjective experience to other people.
What is the self?
A dog that likes another dog but doesn't like a different dog.
Cantilevered rainbows.
Clarissa Explains it All.
Clarissa Explains Indie Game Development.
Processing events in your life by making games about them.
Bringing out the special poetry lady to teach you poetry.
Writing a book of poetry where the typesetter also has to be a poet.
Writing a poem where you describe the scene from Fullmetal Alchemist where the two brothers burn down their house and your teacher is like "are you ok"
Writing a poem from the perspective of the piece of paper you're holding up to protect yourself from the rain and your poetry circle is like "I'm so sorry about your sister"
How to write a relatable poem.
The extra fridge that holds the food that you don't ever actually eat.
Who's got the tiger with the baseball bat?
Fragments of different jagged shapes.
Zero-Inbox Your Fridge.

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138. From Infracheddar to Ultrableu

Jim Stormdancer — Mon, 13 Jun 2022 00:00:00 -0700

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Lords:

Elena
Alexander plugs https://www.constantpodcast.com/

Topics:

Hosting a party is way better than going to a party
The Pearl Jam Liner Notes method of writing first drafts
Lagrange Point Lasagna
Jonathan Swift, "Ode on the Longitude"
- https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Works_of_the_Rev._Jonathan_Swift/Volume_17/Ode_on_the_Longitude
The theory of spontaneous generation
It turns out Sunday Roasts are a whole Deal
Diagnose my tongue!
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI3yD3WAcz4
- https://www.buzzfeed.com/danielralston/the-true-story-of-the-fake-zombies-the-strangest-con-in-rock

Microtopics:

Unfindable Lords.
The Constant: a History of Getting Things Wrong.
Continuous vs. discontinuous weighted blankets.
People asking you about your life so you have to give them all the necessary context on your life so they'll understand.
A masquerade ball where you receive a quest to find someone wearing a dog mask and talk to them about topology.
The smallest of talk.
A continuous unplanned unstructured talking with each other that you expect to just happen by itself.
Bringing a cheeseboard to a party so you can go sort it whenever the conversation gets awkward
Sorting the cheeseboard from sharp to mild and then sorting the cheese by color but nobody at the party is allowed to actually eat any.
From Infracheddar to Ultrableu.
A sorting algorithm gaining intelligence and trying to understand itself.
Teaching your friends sign language so they'll be quieter at parties.
The weirdness of reading aloud.
Writing while talking.
A species of alien that can follow two conversations at once.
Balancing the complexity of your word choices so your sentence flows nicely.
Writing the most important word of each sentence first and then going back and filling in the rest of the sentence.
Worrying about commas later.
Taking so long to implement the core of your idea that you've forgotten the details.
How to bake brownies that are all edge pieces.
How to bake brownies that's all center pieces.
Sous vide brownies.
People who only like the center of the falafel.
The perfect solution for the person who prefers the grossest part of the brownie.
Opening a portal to the lasagna dimension and scooping some out and feeling safe because there's no e. coli in the lasagna dimension, just lasagna.
Tectonic plates in the lasagna dimension.
Subduction lasagna.
The asteroid equivalent of brownie soup.
Forming trade alliances with the people who live in the air pockets of the lasagna dimension.
Lasagna creationists.
The Earth is a rock lasagna.
Whether lasagna or baked ziti is more likely to be naturally occurring.
Bepst and besht.
A long-standing problem in navigation.
Figuring out how to determine longitude in the Age of Navigation.
Getting kicked out of Cambridge because you don't accept the Trinity.
Firing a cannon at noon so everyone knows what time it is.
Such explosive ships, in such known locations.
A new method for discovering longitude both at sea and land, humbly proposed for the consideration of the public.
The Jewish Space Lasers of the 1700s.
The sense in which GPS is extremely loud.
Putting a log on the fire and salamanders come out.
The riddle where to understand the answer you have to know that bees come from lion carcasses.
How earth used to have enough energy to spawn humans out of clay but now it only has enough juice left to make bugs and snails.
A recipe for scorpions.
The Tragedy of the Sunday Roast.
The St. Tuppensday Brouhaha.
Million Shilling Idea: serving Sunday Roast all week.
Victorian orphans mining for Bitcoin (or "bittums") out on the Playa.
Eating a Yorkshire pudding at a Lagrange point and sopping up gravy from the gravy dimension.
Via Gravia.
Nega-scurvy, where you eat too much fruit and grow extra teeth.
The Yes Ship of Theseus.
That time the Zombies broke up and then had a hit record and then fake Zombies started touring the US until someone from the real band noticed.
The Caramelldansen saga.

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114. Memento Maury Povich

Jim Stormdancer — Mon, 27 Dec 2021 08:00:00 -0800

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Lords:

Maxx
- maxx.infinity@gmail.com
Elena
- https://propinquity.me/

Topics:

Been playing Celeste recently and I'm real into the themes of conflict with oneself vs acceptance of oneself
The museum of Jurassic Technology and when it's okay to lie to your audience
Human jaw shrinkage
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_jaw_shrinkage
Feeding the Worms, by Danusha Lameris
- http://poetrytreeonthecharles.net/2020/09/feeding-the-worms-by-danusha-lameris/
Linguistics of Swearing and Taboo
- The weird Mummy trailer with the missing audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1jg5YlQuT8

Microtopics:

Getting a lot of calories for your money.
All your amino acids right there.
Superman grabbing the bumper and lifting the entire gestalt of the car.
A "superfood" in the sense of being beyond the concept of food, e.g. antidepressants.
Whether you get better at running events after running events for a decade.
Ultimately reconciling with yourself after making a video game about reconciling with yourself.
A platformer about depression and panic attacks.
The checkbox in a hard game's accessibility options that allows you to give yourself permission to use the disability options.
The 8-way joystick gate on the Nintendo 64 and the Gamecube.
Installing little pigeon spikes on the thumb stick to remind yourself to use the d-pad when playing Celeste.
Iterating when everything you do is slightly difficult.
A mixed record of enjoying platformers.
Putting in the effort to making someone's holy video game genre, such as the scrolling shooter or the masocore platformer, accessible to a non-believer.
A culture of something.
Being unable to process what's going on in a movie so you look up the Wikipedia plot summary mid-movie.
Media-related experiences that you miss out on because your priorities lie elsewhere.
Hating very difficult platformers but also being so good at platformers that you only get mildly frustrated at platformers that are generally considered very difficult.
An art installation that pretends to be a museum.
Visiting a museum and at the end of it being unsure what a museum is.
A glitch in your house where rooms occasionally disappear.
The genre of joke that takes the form of telling a lie, and the failure modes where the listener believes the lie and gets confused, or where they don't realize it's supposed to be amusing and think you're trying to deceive them.
Listening to someone tell a story from their life with growing horror and only realizing midway through that they're describing a dream.
Subscribe to Nitro on Discord and needing to write a SQL query to find the right emoji reaction.
Using a normally innocuous emoji in a way that is not innocuous on this particular Discord server.
Using emoji reactions to replace the parental paratextual back channel of information that body language gives you in a real life conversation.
Whether "human jaw shrinkage" refers to over an individual lifetime or over millennia of evolution.
Human jaws getting smaller not because of evolutionary pressure, but because we aren't chewing tough grains and nuts as much as our ancestors did.
Not experiencing pain, fear or anxiety and not realizing it until you're in your sixties.
Not experiencing pain, fear or anxiety so you only feel mild disappointment when you get a cut on your foot and your dog eats your foot while you're not paying attention.
The tickly sensation of yanking metal wire out of the ground.
Recreational anaphylaxis.
Drinking hot tea to burn your tongue so your dad won't be disappointed when you react to incredibly spicy ramen.
The sweetness of apples permeating the pores all over your stringy body.
The feathery tops of carrots.
At what point things become gross.
High and low variance fruit.
Mush that is beyond comprehension.
If going on the bus to work was that chaotic Willy Wonka tunnel.
Getting more reminders of life in your life.
Google procedurally generating a vacation montage of the time you visited a Holocaust memorial, and playing a jaunty tune over it.
Giving people unlabeled interfaces that they subconsciously learn how to use.
Using a fishing rod to hanging a sad mannequin head in front of the lens when you're taking photos that you don't want Google to create a jaunty montage of three years from now.
Ling 269.
What that guy is saying in the weird Mummy trailer.
Pan-Pan the Human Man.
Studying the brain of the guy who can only say "pan," and there in his brain wrinkles you can read the word "pan" in the place where most people have the dictionary etched.
An aphasic situation.
A comprehensive timeline of euphemisms for genitals going back to the 12th century.
A novel mince to your swear.
Practicing minced oaths until they are internalized enough to move into swear storage in your brain.
Finding a stranger in the Alps.
Americans coming back from World War I with a bunch of new slurs.
The Holy Shit Shift, where the offensive part of the phrase "holy shit" shifted from one word to the other over time.

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104. Truck Nut, Singular

Jim Stormdancer — Mon, 18 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0700

Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Elena
- https://www.propinquity.me/
Nova
- https://novalinium.com/

Topics:

Things I have learned about myself from being a professional matchmaker
The Mother of All Demos
The wine-dark sea
TWRP - Starlight Brigade
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9Q3i5w6-Ug
- Unedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/VsFcnzBJlt4
Challenges in scaling community organizing
- https://youtu.be/DAN0OCagHzQ
- https://thenewinquiry.com/hot-allostatic-load/

Microtopics:

Lack of confidence in your chocolate opinions.
Chocolate naan.
Fruit esters.
Chocolove.
A really mean fruit tart.
Giving the listeners homework.
Being self employed and feeling like you're constantly behind on some imaginary metric you haven't made up yet.
Propinquity.
Receiving an encrypted email asking if you want to work on a secret project and telling everybody about it on this show.
The Scoville scale of tidiness.
Doing an extremely tedious test to see if you have ADHD.
Laminating your ADHD certificate so you can keep it in your wallet in case you have to prove to someone that you have ADHD.
The power differential in relationships where one person is much more attractive than the other.
Retaining a panel of judges to rate all your clients' attractiveness from 1 to 10.
Video chatting someone who refuses to tell you where they work and you say "I'm writing down here that you work at Facebook" and then they immediately tell you where they really work, or if they just hang up then you know they work at Facebook.
Striving to get a good grade on your dating life, something that is normal and possible to achieve.
Instead of filling out your dating profile, just clicking "I'm feeling lucky."
The On Line System.
Whether smartphones are good.
If Facebook were more like MySpace and you could include Javascript in your status update so your status emits butterflies.
When Twitter didn't sanitize Javascript out of SVG uploads so you could include playable games in your avatar image.
TI calculators as a way to learn to program.
Giving kids these days the uphill-both-ways speech about how much worse TI calculators were in your day.
Tracker music on TI calculators.
From the future or from Xerox PARC?
What Apple did and failed to do with vertical integration.
An opportunity for disruption.
Running Turing-complete PostScript on your font cartridge.
Running Doom on your font cartridge.
The history of color perception.
The history of what color wine is.
Zeus' eyebrow color.
Whether all ancient Greeks were color blind or just Homer.
Greco-Roman poetic studies focusing on light and shadow but totally ignoring hue.
Dark in hue vs. dark in mood.
Stars that don't twinkle.
Catching stars from the sky by spraying them with water first.
A spaceship made of ferrofluid.
Not remembering any anime but remembering all their theme songs.
A genre of TV show that can only exist when there is disparity in the global economy.
First being scared of hyperspeed and then enjoying it and then being angry at it in the space of a few seconds.
Fantasy triangles.
A spaceship with truck nuts.
An ensemble of different animated character archetypes.
Establishing personality via the object the character is holding for their two seconds of screen time.
Trapping the protagonist in a simulation where they have to pretend to be a child chasing a star forever or until they sit up from the chair because it's not a very effective trap.
Banging on the geodesic Epcot sphere to be let inside.
Secret Service Ralph finally being promoted to pilot but insisting that he still be called Secret Service Ralph.
Everybody getting one Truck Nut and knowing you found your soul mate because your Truck Nuts match and you can pair them up.
Doing your best to bring up the arm count average.
Commander Meowch.
Using sentiment analysis to determine whether chat room users are about to be in a fight.
A Fletcher, meaning one who teleports around.
Figuring out which kind of moderator interventions will lead to good outcomes.
The September That Never Ended.
How to grow from a small community into a large community without changing the culture.
Being yelled at by 100 people each of whom aren't having the experience of harassing somebody.
Whether you can get rid of a forum user who is following all the rules but just nobody likes them.
Hot Allostatic Load.

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71. There's No Chicken Nine Because Chicken Six Seven Ate Nine

Jim Stormdancer — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 08:00:00 -0800

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Lords:

Elena
Quil

Topics:

Some people put on music and then just talk over it instead of singing along?? Why
Being the only person in a movie theater/concert
A Spirograph but for your butt
Daniel asks "Legacy board games such as Pandemic Legacy or Gloomhaven."
Weird sleeping apparatuses
"House Special Live Frog in Hot Stone Pot" on the delivery menu

Microtopics:

A girl who is raised as a boy in pre-revolutionary France and becomes Marie Antoinette's guard.
Turn of the millennium club music.
Finding out that Itsy Bitsy Spider has been about perseverance all this time.
Having to restrain yourself from singing along when you're at the opera.
Trying to eat dinner but you can't eat because you need to sing along to your sea shanty playlist.
Trying to eat bites of dinner during the verses because you keep having to sing along to the choruses.
Properties of sea shanties.
Having a different song for every task.
Everybody performing music before recorded music was a thing, because that was how you had music in your life.
The horrible historical handwriting that historians never show you.
Celebrating the new decade with Cats (2019) and when you walk out of the theater you're the only person in the building.
Seeing Pitch Perfect 3 at 10pm on Christmas Eve and probably ruining a bunch of theater employees plans to have a party in that empty theater.
When you're the only person in the theater, asking the projectionist to pause the movie while you go to the bathroom.
Being the last person seeing an awful live band because everyone else walked out, and realizing that if you too walk out, they'll be playing to an empty room.
A drummer and a guitarist who are both playing too loud to hear each other.
The only live performance you've ever walked out on.
Pooping in a spiral.
Nature's sharpie.
The origin of topics.
A disc that you sit on.
A combination nausea inducer and butt spirograph.
Cake icing videos.
Asking your son what his life is a commentary on.
A shark embedded in a formaldehyde solution.
Work that aggressively annoys the art community.
Ironic cocaine.
Sneaking into the museum to hang up your own work.
Taking photos of a painting and then destroying the original and then taking photos of the photos and destroying the original artist.
Modifying the rules as you play the game.
Opening up more and more of your board game every time you play, like an Advent calendar.
A board game that you learn like a video game.
Memorizing a dozen page book before you can start playing a game.
Copyrighting the concept of a legacy.
Proposing to your wife by intentionally losing a board game over and over again.
The thing you were working towards screwing you over and now you have to undo it.
Trying to think of a board game you've played more than a few times.
Really looking forward to a board game and finally getting it and deciding to just watch your friends play.
Whether it's apparati or apparatodes.
The doublet of apparat.
Wanting to be hyper correct in everything you do.
Buying a tent to go over your bed because your blackout curtains aren't cutting it.
Buying a bunch of weird pillows to compensate for the position your arms automatically get into when you sleep.
How CPAP machines all have a SIM card and phone home with your sleep behavior and there's no way to turn it off.
Nasal pillows.
Sleeping with a weird contraption blowing air into your face constantly.
Discovering that it is much easier to fall asleep when you are very tired at the end of the day.
Ranking your morningness and eveningness.
Sleeping in a hammock.
Making a nest of pillows around you.
Putting on your velcro pajamas and jumping onto the velcro wall to fall asleep.
Your velcro bed waking you up with a loud ripping sound every time you switch positions.
Time-release velcro.
Ice velcro.
Making a salt igloo at the salt flats.
A weighted blanket that is so heavy you can't get up until a crane rescues you.
Sleeping under a chainmail sheet.
A quilt made out of beanbags.
The first thing you searched for when you got on the internet.
Youtube videos about your idealized farm life.
Ordering a pet frog from your Szechuan delivery menu.
Getting Hot Pot delivered and the Pot arrives cold.
Ordering Chicken 65 because there are no other numbered items on the menu.
Not wanting to eat animals whole because there's poop in there.
Frog Fractions 65.
If Chicken 6 was so good, why isn't there a Chicken 6 5?
A Kidz Bop version of Ocean's 11.

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58. Sparkles on Top of the Brain

Jim Stormdancer — Mon, 30 Nov 2020 08:00:00 -0800

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Lords:

Elena is on the Topic Lords discord
Tyriq is FourbitFriday everywhere
- https://www.ckgame.net/

Topics:

What's the youngest age at which you can become the kind of old person you want to be
Reborrowings: https://starkeycomics.com/2020/06/06/reborrowings/
- https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/624028907162566657/724080214128197672/etymologies-_1.png
- https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D1%81%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%B0"
I made pork katsu for dinner and Winston pronounced it "pork costume" and I'm pretty sure that's it, that's peak dad experience and it's all downhill from here
Stephen asks "Textual dialects. Range of timbre and tools available in punctuation, capitalization, emphasis and emojis. Apparently periods come off as assertive/rude to younger folks."
The tone deafness test
- https://www.themusiclab.org/quizzes/td

Microtopics:

Whether complice is the opposite of accomplice.
Intending to clean the fridge.
A short but sweet plug that you manage to drag out of your guest.
Thinking an early access game is dead when the developer is right there in your kitchen streaming making breakfast.
Feeling too young to just go around handing out Werther's Originals.
Whether at some age all your teeth fall out or whether they just decided once, in the 1950s maybe, that it's time to pull everyone's teeth.
Whether the lady with twenty cats accrued the cats over the course of your life or just adopted twenty cats at once.
Learning to regrow your teeth so you can change your teeth style every few months, like you can your hair.
Transhuman augmentation of the teeth.
Being sure that a pop culture concept doesn't exist in Japan because you didn't see it in that one Yakuza game you played.
Sharpening your teeth to look like a cat.
The world record for most permanent transformations to look like an animal.
Whether dead people can still be the fastest person in the world.
The world record for most permanent transformations to look like something other than an animal.
How Stalking Cat decided to become a cat.
Wanting to be more like a tiger and having your ears transplanted to the top of your head.
Getting a job as a programmer to fund your body modification plans so you can be the old person you dream about being.
Running plastic tubes from the fake ears on top of your head down to the place your ears used to be.
The major themes of Stalking Cat's LiveJournal.
Seeing someone's LiveJournal post saying just "I start shooting today" and wondering if you should be worried.
Getting back to being old.
Cultivating the witchy vibe when you're not really a witch.
Not having any enormous flowing skirts any more because you moved across the country and they all caught the wind and flew out of the back of the car.
Making a skirt out of chainmail and refusing to twirl it because a four year old lives in your house.
Asking the manufacturer of your favorite towel whether they make bathrobes and they send back a one word email saying "no."
Wanting to look like a dapper old man but hating fashion norms.
Appropriating the parts of fashion that you like while subverting the idea that you're participating in the fashion hierarchy.
Wanting to eventually look like a dapper old man and starting by buying one dapper sock.
Codpieces.
Wearing full plate armor to church or to court.
Stalking Cat's profile page on wikifur.com
The Romans enslaving so many Slavs that Slav becomes their word for it.
All the different times that nature has evolved a tree.
Palm trees not really being trees and just being weird grass.
A plant deciding to get tall where the sun is and reinventing wood.
Languages borrowing words from other languages and then giving them back after completely changing the meaning.
Whether Italy has any Pizza Huts.
Trying to cover a song by a singer with a weird accent and discovering that you need that weird accent for the song to work and deciding if you're willing to adopt the weird accent for your cover.
English poetry that is too old.
A two year old pronouncing pork katsu as "pork costume."
Dressing your two year old in pork for Halloween like the tiny ham he is.
Really giving somebody the pork costume.
Realizing your best work is behind you when you haven't done anything notable.
An entirely sideways mouth that has fallen off your face.
Chekov's Book.
A throne but you can poop in it.
Hiding a piece of matzo somewhere in your house on Passover and eventually your house fills up with matzo.
Yelling at your coworker for only using the "slight smile" emoji because they weren't happy enough.
Image searching for the Unicode character "slight smile" and seeing a field of smiley faces that are just the classic yellow smiley, but then there's one that's this smirking douchebag.
How autocorrect ought to be able to code switch based on who you're talking to and what you're talking about.
Walking around the house and discovering that you can't use the word "okay" in the kitchen.
Putting the sparkles on top of the brain.
Trying to talk about bringing your head below something and autocorrect is like "did you mean: fucking"
Youtube's automatic captioning now censoring swear words.
Censoring swear words by replacing the word "shit" with a picture of shit.
Whether the eggplant emoji would ejaculate from the stem end or the bulb end.
Squeezing mayonnaise out of the stem end of an eggplant emoji squeeze bottle.
The tone deaf and the tone hearing.
Being surprised to meet people who can't sing at all, even though you just met someone like that a couple days ago.
Hearing a pitch and having no idea whether it's higher or lower than what you're singing.
Not letting anyone into your painting club who can't distinguish red and green.
Greyie Pie.
Applying a deuteranopic filter to a My Little Pony episode and instantly being incredibly depressed.
Not knowing the right answer but the person in your head heckling you does.

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46. Fetch Me a Renaissance Italy Nostalgia!

Jim Stormdancer — Mon, 07 Sep 2020 08:00:00 -0700

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Lords:

Elena plugs whale sharks.
Kappa is Kappa on glowfic.com and viniferavaria on Twitch.
- https://www.twitch.tv/viniferavaria

Topics:

Whale sharks.
Ask Me About My Bizarre Quasi-Fanfiction (Animorphs/Madoka thematic fusion, sword of truth retake, lilite satanist narnia...)
Did you see that video where the Super Monkey Ball superfan went on a quest to find the narrator's voice actor?
- Quest to find narrator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inUkotGb-K4
- A supposed new SMB game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gA4bjZm902c
A ZZT community member recreated the lost ZZT source code from scratch and it compiles to a byte-identical executable
- https://blog.asie.pl/2020/08/reconstructing-zzt/
Josh asks "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuai_Kuai_culture"
- Van Halen and the brown M&Ms http://www.compliancebuilding.com/2009/08/03/compliance-van-halen-and-brown-mms/
Bug reports and changelogs from video games that are just close enough to real life to be surreal

Microtopics:

The whale shark's incredibly silly face.
Lilite Satanist Narnia.
The Satanist version of what Narnia is to Christians and Golden Compass is to atheists.
Telling your best friend about the magical key you just found and going off together to have adventures.
Suddenly becoming monarch of a place you've never heard of and having to set policy when you're thirteen years old and have never taken an economics class in your life and also it's a magical kingdom so it uses magic economics anyway.
Building a paradise for people against their will.
Seeing enough sexism that you have to invent a splinter sect to get rid of it.
Nostalgic fiction from people with really weird backgrounds.
An 80s-ass computer terminal with an extremely full ashtray next to it.
Nostalgia for 16th century Polynesia.
Second-hand nostalgia.
Going on a quest to find the voice actor of a beloved video game.
Whether or not Sega is currently producing another Super Monkey Ball.
Whether or not you should monkey some balls.
Turning dials at the edge of a board and a ball bearing falls into a hole.
Going into the recording both with no context for the lines you are about to read.
Actors reading individual lines in a vacuum rather than reacting to each other.
Not having a good way to order the lines in your branching script so you deliver the lines to the actor in alphabetical order.
Using CD audio to store your sounds so you can only have 99 individual things you can play.
The last of the Guild of Weavers.
All the adults getting turned into swans and flying away.
An adventure game where you play a sequence of notes to select a verb.
Not having perfect pitch but being glad that there is a game mode for people who do.
Trying to summon a demon from beyond time.
Escaping reality with the other Weavers and all your friends are horrifically murdered and their ghosts are angry at you.
Pointing a decompiler at the game and typing in Pascal until it basically matches.
Comparing two executables by loading them both in a decompiler, rapidly switching between the windows and looking for differences on the screen.
Using the decompiler released by the NSA to reverse engineer ZZT, so you know the NSA must've reverse-engineered ZZT internally decades ago.
Whether or not the ZZT source code was lost in an interesting way.
How ZZT and Unreal were both sold as a video game but really the part people were interested in was the level editor.
More man-hours than a man has.
MMO developers releasing the client source code but not being allowed to release the server source code.
Nobody wanting to port a million line code base to another language.
Doing your best to elide over the more boring details.
Fixing about 30 complier errors and getting about another 30 because the compiler doesn't have great error recovery.
Going back to Flickr to find even higher resolution photos of bugs having sex.
Changing all the stars on the American flag to bugs.
What was going on in France.
How to fix the problem when your game is crashing in France.
One browser interpreting your integer as a percentage and the other interpreting it as a decimal.
Upending all of science because it's easier than disabling auto-formatting dates in Excel.
Approaching a project with the design goal of being as outrageous as possible.
Playing a game where you're unsure whether the time it crashed was intentional.
The rigid set of best practices for using snack foods to ensure machinery keeps working correctly.
The Van Halen brown M&M story as a conscientiousness filter.
That time Van Halen refused to play because there were brown M&Ms backstage and also the stage wasn't strong enough to hold all their equipment.
Rules that exist mostly as a way to determine how much the participant cares about being a good member of the community.
Forgetting your girlfriend's birthday and going back in time to get her a present.
Spending all day evaluating your list of people you might want to castrate.
Satanists ritually sacrificing themselves.
Being attacked by necromantically re-animated yak hooves and hair.
Your memories of seeing a lovely waterfall being amputated and necromantically re-animated and trying to drown you and it's extremely unclear how to kill the memory of a waterfall.
The process of getting dwarves to a place where they can do dwarf stuff.
Sadness that the badgers never made it into Faeries vs. Badgers.
A son waking up any minute now.

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34. We Don't Talk About Poop Stonehenge

Jim Stormdancer — Mon, 15 Jun 2020 08:00:00 -0700

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Lords:

Elena is on the Topic Lords Discord and recommends https://buriedwithoutceremony.com/monsterhearts
Shannon lives in a cave and recommends https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modelland

Topics:

2:14 Lucid dreaming and/or recurrent dreams - do you have them?
- Can't find the link for Dream Wikipedia here but I'll keep looking. https://wikimediafoundation.org/support/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_monster
14:04 Eight kinds of fun.
- https://theangrygm.com/gaming-for-fun-part-1-eight-kinds-of-fun/
- Real-play podcasts:
- https://critrole.com/podcast/
- http://friendsatthetable.net/
- https://maximumfun.org/podcasts/adventure-zone/
- The Kiri. https://criticalrole.fandom.com/wiki/Kiri
30:05 Your favorite Dewey Decimal System category?
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dewey_Decimal_classes
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bancroft_Library
43:55 NotAButtFace asks "Being 'The Guy With The Hats' to future proof your identity against going bald"
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichotillomania
55:25 Plants
- "Kale, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, and cabbage are all varieties of a single magical plant species" https://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/8/6/5974989/kale-cauliflower-cabbage-broccoli-same-plant

Microtopics:

Not remembering what you were going to say about the topics you picked.
Finding a tabletop RPG system to support your supernatural teen romance.
A novel written by Tyra Banks that is basically Harry Potter but for supermodels.
Being aware that you're dreaming but not having control and just being annoyed that you have to spend so long in your fake life.
Dreaming about recording a podcast before waking up and recording the real world podcast and ending up with two podcasts.
Your dream friends being rude to you because you are rude to yourself.
Realizing you are in a dream and trying to convince your dream friends to do what you want but instead they convince you to do what they want because they will die as soon as you wake up.
Improving your dream friend's lives in your recurring Disneyland dream until they have the perfect day and you never wake up.
Careening off the cliff and going "zhoop" and uncrashing the car.
Improving your dream friends' princess dress-up game by leaving the room and observing them from the security room instead.
A creepy carnival in the hills that sometimes shows up.
Remembering eight dreams in ten years.
Jimmy Wales' appearing in your dream to ask for dream money to keep dream Wikipedia running.
The real reason why there's no etymological connection between Samhain and the minced oath "Sam Hill."
Poop Stonehenge.
Ranking the eight kinds of fun.
Everybody ranking submission/abnegation last when listing what they want out of a tabletop RPG.
Submitting yourself to a ritualized task and discovering the pleasures of being clockwork.
Deciding how you want to build your treehouse and then going to fight the moon.
Whether a DM describing an axe swing exceptionally well counts as sensory pleasure.
Listening to a lot of TTRPG podcasts but not playing a lot of TTRPGs yourself because who has the time and energy to organize it?
Agreeing to role play all the people who are missing from this D&D session and immediately drowning everyone, making everything a lot politically simpler.
Remembering everything your players say so you can role play a sapient bird who can only communicate by mimicking things it has heard.
Leaving the elf in the cart because if you take him out everyone will want to interrogate him and you don't want to bother RPing that hard.
Learning how to GM in LARPs where there are no NPCs and all you have to do is set up some plot hooks and then watch the players go wild.
Saying "you are in a shed" and thereby declaring yourself the GM.
Telling people in your RPG session that they're playing themselves and they're like "okay I boot up Animal Crossing."
Not being able to relate to your younger sister because she's too young to have used the Dewey Decimal System.
Describing all of human knowledge using only ten categories.
The Dewey Decimal System no longer having classifications for Mormonism or education of women.
000-099 being the best Dewey Decimal classification because it has the books about computer programming and UFOs and the paranormal.
Where to find cute animal pictures under the Dewey Decimal System.
Being shown you how to find something with the Dewey Decimal Drawers and being like "why wouldn't you just walk around until you find it."
Recording an episode in the library because where better to find out about topics.
Libraries being wild and raucous places now that the libraries don't shush you.
Going to the library all the time because there are Pokemon there but never going inside because they come out to meet you.
Going four floors underground in complete silence and wondering if you can still hear.
Making sure nobody is in the library shelves you're about to move before turning that big metal wheel.
Going into an anechoic chamber and hearing your synapses firing.
Going into an anechoic chamber and hearing ground hum because you needed to plug in your laptop.
Amazing 3D sound scapes that you can't appreciate because your head is the wrong shape.
Making a game that induces panic attacks and deciding you want to make a less horrible experience next.
People who do actual night dives being less terrified when playing Subnautica.
Knowing a cool guy with hats and liking the hats.
Self medicating using hats.
A twelve year old girl with otherwise extremely thick hair wearing a hat being less suspicious than a middle aged cis man wearing a hat.
Growing a beard to make up for your bald spot because hopefully people will think your head is upside down.
The pros and cons of wearing wigs.
Sending a picture of yourself wearing a wig and colored contacts to your mom and she asks "I don't recognize that friend, who is she and why is she wearing that tacky wig and colored contacts?"
Whether or not plants are so good.
Knowing how far apart to put the holes but not knowing how many seeds to put in each hole and your bok choy all growing on top of one another.
Tiling your entire yard with garden planters so you can actually fit all the cabbage you planted.
Your friends going into the back yard and getting blasted with water by the device you rigged to deter neighbor cats from digging in your vegetable garden.
Beautiful white butterflies that are wrecking the shit out of your cabbages.
All the plants that taste good technically being cabbages.
Not being able to be mad at the squirrels when they eat your plants as soon as they sprout because that's also what you were going to do.

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21. Strip Laser Tag

Jim Stormdancer — Mon, 16 Mar 2020 08:00:00 -0700

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Lords:

Josh makes Thunk. https://www.youtube.com/user/THUNKShow
Elena is on the Topic Lords discord.

Topics:

2:29 Procrastination, or, avoidance as a protective coping mechanism
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buridan%27s_ass
13:08 Newcomb's Problem
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomb%27s_paradox
19:46 Celebrating Christmas by saying you have a machine gun
- https://twitter.com/mogwai_poet/status/1210729053465931781
26:16 Kevin asks: "The fear that other podcasts will steal your idea to discuss topics."
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_sleep
- http://bash.org/
32:09 McMaster-Carr
- https://www.mcmaster.com/
- http://thistothat.com/
- "Satisfying Spiral Liquid Bubbler Timer" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFLNpSqzn7o
41:34 Conlanging with toddlers
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language
50:26 Preserving old software
- THUG Pro. http://www.thugpro.com/
- "Ozimals did give rabbit owners a brief chance to save their rabbits. Before shutting down, they gave away items which make rabbits not need food – and leaves them sterile. Some rabbits will live on forever, the last of their kind." https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/05/19/second-life-ozimals-pet-rabbits-dying/
- The Lifecycle of Software Objects. https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/voices.uchicago.edu/dist/8/644/files/2017/08/Chiang-Lifecycle-of-Software-Objects-q3tsuw.pdf
- Rolled Out, the Super Monkey Ball clone. https://blog.rolledoutgame.com/

Microtopics:

Being old and knowing nothing.
Finding out that you can buy citric acid and put it in your drinking water.
Finding out that you can buy concrete and put it in your toilet.
The refreshing concrete toilet.
Regretting agreeing to do a thing you really enjoy.
Defeating procrastinating by discovering what you're afraid of and reframing it or interceding.
Worrying that you're incapable of surviving in a capitalist system.
Tracing every fear back to a fear of dying alone, like how every page on Wikipedia leads to Philosophy.
Wanting to do a thing but having no effective mechanism to prefer any given thing over any other and doing nothing.
Hearing syllables and then "ass" and pretending you understand.
Learning a word that you didn't know and then explaining it to other people.
Breaking your task into small steps and doing the first step.
Listening to your emotion and being like "what's your deal"
Self-acceptance helping when beating yourself up doesn't.
Instead of writing, taking copious notes and then skipping right to editing the notes into a completed text.
Laying out an outline and then finishing the essay by removing the bullet points.
Having an idea in each hand and holding two more in your left foot and trying to squinch them together into a linear series of thoughts.
Everything being related to everything else.
Giving people the tools they need to engage with topics.
A future-knowing genie who knows you're going to have pizza tonight.
Someone having done this topic already on a different podcast.
Being the genie you want to see in the world.
Causality seeming to flow in reverse.
Reassuring the genie that you're not the kind of person who takes two boxes.
The genie turning out to just be a guy with a rubber duck.
An odd Christmas greeting that you are here for.
Living next to people who think it's festive to announce how armed they are.
Knocking on your neighbor's door and asking for a cup of machine gun.
A corpse wearing a santa hat.
Trying to think of any movie that doesn't depict a corpse that could've worn a santa hat.
Some of your best friends having machine guns.
Being charmed by the utilitarian and efficient design of firearms.
Crying in a VR game and the tears filling up the mask until you drown.
Strip laser tag.
A topic peasant just waltzing in and talking about topics.
Editing out the guy hiding with a gun in post.
Having an unconscionable amount of bash.org memorized.
Waking up from your drugged haze to a flaming burnt cake in the oven and your house is burning down.
Being sad because the folks at Chipotle forgot your burrito but then your wife reminds you that you've eaten it already and you just forgot.
Everything that you could possibly need to build a thing.
Spinning around in an enormous magical hardware store with arms outstretched and an inventory robot fluttering around your skirt and landing on your finger.
Metal boxy objects of mysterious provenance.
The reaction speed of your transition lenses.
Welding masks transitioning to near-opaque in less than a millisecond because at any moment you might use a plasma beam that is brighter than the surface of the sun.
Installing permanent earplugs powered by your greasy earwax.
Not needing McMaster-Carr after Josh just tells you the answer.
An oil timer forcing a door to open or close slowly.
Having an idea for a cool Youtube video and assuming there's probably a cool Youtube guy who's already done it.
A toddler teaching you how to teach dragon language and the dragons being annoyed you didn't ask them.
Asking one of the indigineous people what the name of the hated rival tribe is named and them saying a slur and then being like "okay you're all that now."
Circumlocuting around the concept of the color green.
Summing up your engineering degree as "f=ma" and "you can't push a rope" and saving your listeners five years.
A fairly ingenious use of math that we've had sitting around forever.
Sliding rules getting us to the moon because we hadn't invented calculators yet.
The content being the same but the context changing.
The NES being the game dev platform that is most likely to survive the next thousand years.
Trolling through aerospace source code looking for funny comments.
Deleting your source code to free up space because nobody is ever going to need to port or revise Final Fantasy 7.
Planning a heist to retrieve the floppy disks stashed above the acoustic ceiling tiles of a dry cleaning service.
Games being reasonably well-preserved but other kinds of software being mostly lost because teenaged nerds don't care about it.
AI pets dying because the company that manufactured them went out of business.
Your GMO dog dying because the manufacturer's SSL certificate expired.

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4. Don't Freak Out, But I'm Arresting You

Jim Stormdancer — Mon, 18 Nov 2019 08:00:00 -0800

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Lords:

Elena is reading Cordyceps by Benedict_SC. https://archiveofourown.org/works/6178036/chapters/14154868
Avery's solo album is on Bandcamp. https://averyburke.bandcamp.com/releases

Topics:

2:58 Male pigeons feed their young with "crop milk" produced in glands in their throat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_milk
- Fennec Foxes. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=fennec&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images
- "Squid will survive and may even flourish under even the worst-case ocean acidification scenarios." https://news-oceanacidification-icc.org/2019/06/14/squid-could-thrive-under-climate-change/
- The Honeyguide will show you the honey. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeyguide
- Do birds sweat? https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20061208141845AAtuY9L
- "Several months before his death, Lee had an operation to remove the sweat glands from his armpits." And this may have lead to his death from heat stroke. https://www.history.com/news/bruce-lee-death-mystery-solved-sweat-glands
18:07 Elena's friends use lexicalized emoji to communicate.
- Alice and Kev, homeless Sims. https://aliceandkev.wordpress.com/
- Happy Birthday, Wanda June. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Birthday,_Wanda_June
35:08 The story of the guy who wanted and then didn't want a mattress.
- Vintage Pump Organs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiqnINpIz74
44:46 Singing cowboys and their ethical codes, which demanded their young fans keep clean and invest in savings accounts. http://www.cowboyway.com/GeneAutry.htm
- Alice's Restaurant Massacree: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPx2t7xoF1k
55:40 Dimensions in candy space: chocolate, fruit, ...?
- All figs contain a dissolved wasp. https://gardencollage.com/inspire/wild-earth/true-dead-wasps-inside-figs/
- "An emerald cockroach wasp (Ampulex compressa) can control the minds of roaches with a sting of its venom." https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2018/02/parasitic-wasps-parkinsons-future-research-spd/
- The neotenized Domesticated Red Fox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_red_fox
- Humans may have domesticated themselves: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/how-humans-maybe-domesticated-themselves

Microtopics:

Infohazards.
Living in a house with instruments on the wall because you're a musician, not because you're a massive hipster.
Scientists who would describe cottage cheese as creamy.
Pigeon milk cappuccinos.
Animals that thrive in the city biome.
Anaerobic squid thriving in the oceans we ruined.
Honey-loving birds ditching their lame badger companions for fire-making humans.
Flame-throwing badgers demanding bird exes take them back.
Birds sweating out of their throats.
East Asian people have different earwax from white people.
Going deaf every few months due to earwax buildup.
Monetizing your overactive sebaceous glands.
Transplanting superior Asian sebaceous glands into your shitty white person's body.
What do mammals have that birds haven't taken from us?
The kiwi bird has ostrich-sized eggs.
Realizing that the kiwi isn't the size of a kiwi.
Thanking people by applying a turkey to them.
Missing the rest of the conversation because you were trying to find the perfect emoji.
Needing more than one train emoji.
Starving because your food options are equidistant.
Building the perfect Sims family so you can wreck their lives.
Walking into a random house and the occupants being fine with it.
Debuting moon landing footage you found in the bathroom.
Opening up a cabinet at NASA and moon rocks spilling out.
Your bosses at NASA not really caring when you destroy old SETI documents.
Cats climbing discarded mattresses to hunt.
Sense of thirst being hereditary.
Kidney stones as a delayed sign of thirst.
Finally getting to the part where the guy wants a mattress.
Being finished loving the mattress.
The Sunken Mattress Fallacy.
Discovering the organ you just destroyed was from the 19th century.
Playing music by touching the bones of a dead creature.
Being the de facto authority because everyone else knows even less.
Putting money into Gene Autrey's savings account.
Building good citizens through singing cowboys.
Issuing an arrest warrant for secret reasons.
Appreciating the 19th-century sheriff's weird forehead while waiting to be arrested.
Sitting there on the Group W bench.
Teacher rewarding you with the cheapest possible candy.
Mistaking your deodorant for tamarind candy.
Being weird in the way that figs are weird.
Fertilizing figs with your dissolved corpse.
Sharing your fig with a friend so only one of you eats a dissolved wasp.
Not believing new information because it's implausible that you didn't already know it.
Wasps parasiting other wasps.
Figs no longer being considered vegan.
Closing your tiger restaurant because tigers are infeasible to farm.
Accidentally inventing puppies when you just wanted your fox farm to be safer.
Collecting a breeding population of raccoons.
Rats escaping their cage so they can cuddle you.
Outliving your pet parrot.
Being an ageless rat guardian.
Orcas rubbing themselves on flat rocks and nobody knows why.
Orcas rubbing themselves on flat rocks because they're itchy.
An octopus friend to untangle wires for you.
Uplifting the octopus race merely by lengthening their lifespan.
Uplifted octopodes inventing Twitter and becoming miserable.
Thinking your chimp knows ASL because it's mirroring your actions.
Worshiping Cthulhu in a secular humanist kind of way.
Making jokes no-one will get instead of doing proper marketing.

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