• Kory
• James

Topics:

• I've been reading more lately, and ditching the eReader sure has helped
• Journey to the Planets
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEWiJ1Mn-aY
• Send Me to Heaven
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Send_Me_to_Heaven
• My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun, by William Shakespeare
  • https://poets.org/poem/my-mistress-eyes-are-nothing-sun-sonnet-130
• Re: Smooth Criminal. Are criminals like peanut butter?
• My journey to make photography as labor intensive as possible and learn to enjoy it again in the process

Microtopics:

• A circulating cadre of hobbies.
• Corpseflower blooms.
• A forum to complain about the state of e-Readers.
• eReaders launching as a perfect product and then slowly morphing into shitty phones.
• Autosleep anxiety.
• Increased difficulty of finding reference art now that stable diffusion exists.
• Turning off all your screens in order to accomplish something.
• Accordioning ebooks.
• Breaking out into meat space with tiny Greek busts.
• Freedom to do it the wrong way.
• Reading the last page of a book so you don't have the temptation of reading the last page of the book.
• Physical bit rot books.
• Buying more than one book.
• Collecting treasure in order to get home.
• A flying around in space mini game.
• Dying from comets.
• Designing a game that you would never play.
  
• Art that is better in some contexts than others.
• King's Quest.
• Tuning your adventure game difficulty based on how distracting the real world is.
• Difficulty ramping in adventure games.
• The text adventure prototype of Outer Wilds.
• Untitled Goose Game's melding of the adventure game and the stealth sandbox.
• Brock the Investigator's melding of the adventure game and the belt scroller.
• An adventure game where the solution to the puzzle is to run up and kick something.
• Games that would've been a useful referent for Gunhouse if it had existed.
• The I'm Rich era of phone app development.
• Let's Play videos of Send Me to Heaven.
• App Store review bits that are not very well received.
• If hairs be wires then black wires growing on her head.
• Quoting a Shakespeare sonnet in your diss track.
• Whether "reeks" has the same connotation in Early Modern English.
• It's true but you shouldn't say it vs. I just think they're neat.
• Whether the Smooth Criminal is the kind where you need to stir the oil in
• Smooth criminals vs. chunky criminals.
• In what ways criminals are like peanut butter?
• What would a chunky rap sheet look like?
• A pristine unopened criminal.
• Getting merged in some sort of valve situation.
• Scientists studying the stripey toothpaste to discover how it stays striped.
• That movie where every character is the same person.
• Regressing to the analog wherever possible.
• Developing film without a dark room, using a dark bag.
• Obsessing over a single photograph until the color balance is perfect.
• Photography tropes that read as fancy.
• The instinct to replicate the superficial qualities of an analog process in its digital equivalent.
• Authentically taking a terrible picture with a terrible camera.
• Getting sick of what fancy used to mean and figuring out what fancy means going forward.
• Hypernice photography.
• Art that has way too much detail.

Support Topic Lords

• James
  • https://pounced-on.me/@Triplefox
• Kev
  • https://kevzettler.com/
  • https://www.youtube.com/@MikeMotion83

Topics:

• Copyparty
• Egg punk vs. chain punk
• Going geocaching three times
  • https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/ugJWqQdP.jpg
• Septic Tanks
  • https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/q0tW8KtD.jpg
• Certain kinds of trash you don't see any more
• Mosquito bites

Microtopics:

• Multiple recurring lords.
• Going back to an earlier episode to listen to the plugs.
• Agreeing to a copy party without knowing what it is.
• Multi-part RARs.
• Putting together educational material for your hypothetical younger self.
• Manually extracting files over a physical USB connection.
• Org-mode.
• A collection of ogg vorbis music.
• Your personal learning mind-map for learning how to draw.
• The bottom end of expertise.
• Two contrasting branches of the punk community.
• Nerdy; dancey; influenced by Devo.
• Musical genres refusing to converge no matter how close they get.
• genres refusing to converge no matter how close they get.
• How old you have to be to know about My Bloody Valentine.
• Finally getting your act together and installing the right app and logging into the right web site.
• Finding excuses to be more engaged with nature.
• Having conversations, like you do with friends in a park.
• Finding an Altoids tin where you would expect to find a bunch of spider webs.
• Walking through half-nature in near-complete darkness.
• Climbing down a rocky embankment in near-complete darkness with your phone in one hand.
• Caches getting muggled.
• Null Island.
• Realizing that you're about to go on the bad kind of adventure.
• A passing wizard complimenting you on your ironic orc-detecting sword.
• A stuffed BB-8 that you use for photo opportunities.
• Leaving one line of your toilet poem blank in case you think of a good rhyme for "too."
• The kind of poem you put in your bathroom.
• A pithy way to say what to put in the toilet.
• Telling the restaurant's poet laureate that he really nailed that septic tank poem.
• Using a black marker to redact the line about cigarette butts from your poem.
• A book that reads like browsing Reddit.
• Taking your mind off of your butt for five minutes.
• Whether Law and Order was ever an accurate depiction of police procedure.
• How they convicted or didn't convict the latest perp.
• Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.
• TV Guides lying on the street.
• The genre of children's craft made from newspaper.
• Archaeologists finding a thousand year old USB drive and finding a bunch of PDFs and videos about how to learn to draw.
• FAT16 vs. FAT32.
• Multi-volume ARJ files.
• Putting together dual-purpose CDs for punk banks.
• CD-ROMs shaped like a business card.
• Inserting mini-CDs into a slot loading CD drive.
• What it takes to make an indie Gamecube game.
• Side-factoids about Luigi's Mansion.
• Luigi's Mansion counting the volume of dust you've vacuumed through the whole playthrough.
• The new Duck Tales game modeling the physics of every treasure you can collect so you can swim in them.
• Mosquito activity in the midwest.
• Hanging out around mosquito predators.
• Mosquitos waking up for the gloaming and then going back to bed.
• Finding the one high-altitude spot in the Panhandle to avoid the mosquitos.
• Feeling bad about killng mosquitos after playing Hollow Knight.
• Your favorite mind control force.
• Golfers hitting that ball to make the number go down when they could just play less and it'd stay at 0 forever.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• James
• Avery

Topics:

• Stone paper
• "The Flashing Blade"
• The Number Ones
  • https://www.stereogum.com/category/columns/the-number-ones/
• https://www.americanpoems.com/poets/stanley-kunitz/king-of-the-river/
• BREAKING NON MAMMALIAN MILK NEWS!! Sorry mammals, cockroaches make milk and it is considered a complete food

Microtopics:

• The latest on whether or not you've been canceled.
• Spotify rejecting your album because you don't believe in yourself enough.
• Spagbol.
• The very one that is being digested by you now.
• thisbolognesedoesnotexist.com
• Paper that is 60% stone.
• The price you pay for participating in art.
• Coffee that is more powerful than a laptop.
• What happens if you try to shred margarine.
• Documents only for the document control society.
• The Novelty FBI raiding your house and confiscating your Novelty Top Secret Documents and hiding them in their fake Groucho Marx glasses.
• The guy who bought the last 100 Groucho Marx glasses from Party City.
• Moustache Ninja.
• Why more people aren't talking about Moustache Ninja.
• The height of Pirate Ninja Robot Mustache Mania.
• Ankle Biter Man.
• Atrocities Guide.
• One of many reasons why real life superheroes are a bad idea.
• Superheroes: police except there is no oversight whatsoever.
• Avery's Angels on Phoenix Jones.
• If Seattle police arrest you for being nude, they are legally obligated to provide you with a dinner jacket for your jail stay.
• Heath Ledger instructing the audience to charge their shower.
• The Masked Magician Revealed.
• TV stage magic.
• David Copperfield raising the Titanic.
• The Cheap Trick song that got to #1.
• The songs that hit #1 because General Hospital used them on the soundtrack.
• An antidote to the idea that music used to be better.
• Breaking Up is Hard to Do.
• Finding a way to enjoy art that you didn't like before.
• Getting old and liking boring music.
• What radio formats overlap with Beautiful Music.
• A foam snake that shoots thirty feet into the air and then drifts into a nearby tree.
• Tumbling over the rocks until you paint them with your belly's blood.
• That other flesh, heavy with milt, bruised, battering toward the dam that lips the orgiastic pool.
• Limber and firm in the state of his shining, forever inheriting his salt kingdom, from which he is banished forever.
• The most animalistic and primitive part of your consciousness.
• An Atari 2600 game inspired by a poem about a fish.
• The level in Dante's Inferno where you have to fight unbaptized babies.
• A game with one foot in the majesty of Greek mythology and the other foot in what it's like to bash someone's head into the concrete.
• A great use of thumbsticks.
• Whether Wisdom Tree would've published the Dante's Inferno video game.
• Spending your entire life obsessed with the pear you stole as a kid.
• An illumination of someone kneeling in front of a pear tree and weeping.
• Pop songs about relationship situations.
• An idea that is not as old as music.
• A piece of music going right for the emotion, like the Windows Startup Sound.
• Melody in lyrics, in conversation with each other.
• Seeing a person and drawing a stick figure.
• How do I get too much into my own head?
• Why you're turning into a fish, and what the fish represents.
• Sea Monkeys' Garden of Earthly Delights.
• Do we want to get to the Cockroach Milk?
• Being accosted on the street by Topic Lords fans asking for non-mammalian milk news but you're like "sorry I'm saving this for Topic Lords"
• How many cockroaches it takes to make one serving of cockroach milk.
• Sobbing in front of the slab of meat that Rocky punched.
• Pouring cockroach milk onto stone paper to prove its resiliency.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• James
  • https://twitter.com/triplefox
• Tyriq
  • https://twitter.com/FourbitFriday

Topics:

• Nostalgia is a curse
  • https://bluerenga.blog/tag/adventure-500/?order=ASC
• Nonogram puzzles
  • https://www.kesiev.com/stampadia/
• As the exodus continues, all that will be left of the public-facing internet will increasingly be the people too hard-headed or hard-hearted to burn out.
  
  • https://inessential.com/2021/10/04/in_case_i_dont_write_here_again
• The Village of Reason
  • https://www.lyrikline.org/en/poems/village-reason-8055
• Instead of writing in a journal, recording the journal on the phone

Microtopics:

• Extending your failure through time.
• Swatch clock, Swatch clock! Swatch clock, Swatch clock!
• Swatch Internet Time.
• Counting up from the beginning of time, January 1st, 1970.
• The perfect method of keeping time.
• A Swatch body horror beast.
• The promise of being made of meat.
• UFO 50's release date: May 5th, 5050.
• Deciding that nobody should feel your least favorite emotion.
• Making a new better future without looking to the past for your aspirations.
• The world before Later On.
• Remembering 80s pop songs way better than when you last took a shower.
• Making a mix tape with a song on it about when you last took a shower and sending it back in time to your younger self so this kid will listen to that song over and over and you can finally remember when you last took a shower.
• Nostalgia vs. taste.
• Trying to replicate your favorite thing and falling to replicate it, but the failure is way more interesting than the thing you were copying.
• Adventure 500.
• Recreating something you love from memory.
• A game jam where everyone picks an old video game they like and tries to recreate it from memory without looking at any references.
• Simplifying while depicting by choosing what details to focus on.
• An inverted form of nostalgia.
• Cloak and Dagger (1984)
• Putting product placement of the video game adaptation of your movie in your movie, but then the video game never comes out because it's 1984.
• Pepper's Adventures in Time.
• All the names of Nonogram puzzles.
• Finding out about Nonogram puzzles and deciding to try them and finding the hardest one you can, and after a few days of being unable to solve it you put it into a Nonogram solving program and it tells you this is an impossible puzzle.
• The Konami Pixel Puzzle Collection.
• When you do and when you don't want to be stultified.
• Roguelike Celebration.
• Beach Umbrella Games.
• Printing out a generated dungeon and solving it like a Sudoku.
• Utter not-knowing-where-to-start-ness.
• thewebsitethatyougotoeveryday.com
• Rolling dice and losing all your chill.
• Retiring to the offline colonies.
• The potential that you could hypothetically be friends with every cool person in the world.
• A person who tweets whimsical things.
• A video essay on TikTok that includes screenshots of Twitter.
• Trying to make friends by dumping your sugar in the street.
• The different life choices you might've made if you had to make friends in real life.
• Befriending an ant colony and watching your friend count shoot through the roof.
• Trying to wedge a crowbar of understanding into a cryptic poem.
• All the ways reading poetry can make you feel bad about yourself.
• The actual thing and the shadow it casts.
• Taking your hindbrain for a brisk jog around the block.
• Needing to play Brain Age for the Nintendo DS before you can understand this poem.
• Omitting words from your poetry reading because it's all about the words you don't say.
• Whether it is entertaining to learn how to analyze poetry in public.
• Q.R. Hand, Jr.
• Applauding: too loud. Too scary. It startles the poet.
• Terminator, Jr.
• Transitioning from writing your thoughts in a journal to recording your thoughts on your phone, to just talking to yourself, as you realize what you actually want to get out of the process.
• Trying to remember anything ever.
• Collecting art references.
• Reading the phrase "mariachi trumpets" in your diary and trying to figure out what it means.
• GPS tagging your journal entries so you can retrace your steps thirty years later.
• An open source phone that nobody will ever use because there are no apps for it.
• A bed contraption that, when the alarm rings, dumps you into your outfit for the day and makes you breakfast.
• Writing with your hand maybe two times a year and wondering how much more disused handwriting needs to get before people will be willing to stop teaching it in grade school.
• Being told in math class that you need to learn this stuff because you won't have a calculator all the time which is technically true because they won't let you keep your phone while you take the SATs.
• How to navigate the internet and discern fact from fiction.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• James
  • https://vulpine.club/@triplefox
  • https://twitter.com/triplefox
• Tyriq
  • https://twitter.com/FourbitFriday/
  • https://fourbitfriday.itch.io/catacombkids

Topics:

• Ravens of Golden Gate Park
• Do you also want to destroy the moon? Or: What kind of supervillain are you
• Novation Circuit
• Domino Dancing
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ik2YF05iX2w
  • Unedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/u9gcW8sBgQ0

Microtopics:

• What exactly qualifies a collection of songs as an album.
• A solid Mastodon follow.
• Filling an album with songs until the CD is full.
• The ravens you pass on your walk every day.
• The guy in the brown vest who never does anything.
• CORVID-19.
• A raven who is extremely surprised that you don't have any food.
• The mask everyone has agreed to wear when it's time to go cruising for trouble with the crows.
• Wielding a cream pie so if you accidentally hit someone you are guaranteed to do 0 damage.
• The Mythbusters episode where they figure out how to drown someone with a pancake.
• Whittling down your hit points until you stub your toe and die.
• Hit points as a measure of your will to go on, so when someone hits you in the face with a pie it's a serious blow as you reconsider whether you're really cut out to be an adventurer.
• Bonus spleen damage.
• The half-dozen extra organs Space Marines have surgically grafted in for fighting. (But none for love.)
• Hit points representing individual vertebrae so when a high level Final Fantasy character has 999 HP that means they're basically a giraffe now.
• Secretly replacing the moon with a hologram of the moon.
• Fantasy settings where the moon is destroyed and strewn across the sky like the rings of Saturn.
• Whether it'd be less work to steal a moon of Mars or to retrieve Ceres to give our moon a nice sky companion.
• Aspirations of both destroying or romancing the moon.
• Accidentally pushing the supervillain button to destroy all cereal crops when you meant all cold cereals.
• Why they call them Grape Nuts.
• Back when it was a big deal that they baked these crackers using electric power.
• A tool that is worse at what it does than your laptop but has the advantage that you can't go on Twitter.
• Making 80s techno because you're not ready to make a twelve-tone Schoenberg piece.
• Wanting to make fun jams but not knowing how to play any instruments.
• A smooth sequencer workflow.
• Different ways to make a song.
• Getting a guitar so you can put guitar sounds in your music and then realizing that now you have to learn to play guitar.
• Reasons you might want to leave notes out of a chord.
• Leaving the bass notes out because the bass player is taking care of that.
• Nine note scales and eleven note scales and everything in between.
• Pushing the limits of your instrument beyond what it was intended for.
• The lived experience of wanting cool synthesizers in the 90s vs. In the 20s.
• Music equipment manufacturers realizing you could make a toy analog synthesizer and sell it for $200 and everyone would buy it because it's a cheap fun music toy.
• Putting a cpu in a plastic box and there's your synthesizer and all that's left is to add some buttons.
• Synth Lords.
• Two shirtless young men sitting by a tree.
• Whether conventionally attractive people can work in pet shops.
• Back in the 80s before it was legally mandated that musicians be extremely attractive.
• Tipping your silver hard hat and saying "milady."
• Smash cut to a Pet Shop Boy standing in the doorway and the audience gasps.
• How you would identify the Pet Shop Boys if not for the baseball caps saying "boy."
• Pet Shop Boyd.
• Return of the stripy shirts.
• Pet Shop Yinz.
• Two shirtless youths fighting in the ocean.
• Trying to start a fight while outdoors by saying "Do you want to take this to the beach? We can't take it outside because we're already outside! The beach is the outside of the outside! After that it goes to space! Do you want to take this to space?"
• Walking alone on the beach while your suitors wrestle in the ocean suggestively.
• Horses getting loose on set while you're filming a music video and getting in every shot.
• Error with an f.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• James is on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Triplefox
• Jesse is on Twitter.

Topics:

• One of the last "most wanted" Nazi war criminals lives in my town.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmut_Oberlander
• What's Michael?, the other cartoon fat cat
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_Michael%3F
  • There are several What's Michael anime series, one of them has a particularly amazing music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWZLz1LQRnY&t=116s
  • The opening of the Heathcliff Cartoon uses one of the numerous Shuki Levy 80's cartoon themes. It rhymes "jubilee" with "superiority"! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LLb8EBU9nQ
  • He’s Wearing The Gravy Helmet, Again : The Greatest Single Panel in Modern American Comics: https://medium.com/@videocrime/hes-wearing-the-gravy-helmet-again-the-greatest-single-panel-in-modern-american-comics-10c269ca4102
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_cats_in_comics
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_cats_in_animation
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Tools
• In the patent for Tapper, the developers admit that it's just Space Invaders turned on its side
  • https://www.kmjn.org/notes/tapper_videogame_patent.html
  • "Upon an advancing patron such as the cowboy 54e in FIG. 2 receiving a filled mug 58b, the receiving patron will be moved or repelled back toward the door end of the bar a predetermined incremental distance. If the patron is moved to the boundary at the door image 52, the patron goes off screen for a predetermined time interval and then reenters the same bar at the door 52. However, if the repelled thirsty patron remains on screen, the patron will then be shown in a drinking pose 54f as in FIG. 3. When the patron, after a predetermined delay, finishes drinking the beverage, the empty mug 58c, is slid back toward the supply or keg end of the bar."
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_Cold_Beer
  • Ice Cold Beer has an official digitization in "Zeke's Peak" https://store.steampowered.com/app/1093800/Zekes_Peak/
  • https://store.steampowered.com/app/457890/TumbleSeed/
  • http://isoraqathedh.github.io/Orsaibts/anticharacterism.html
  • Shogun Assassin (1980) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081506/
• Brad asks "Hummingbirds have to consume twice their body weight in a day to survive. If you had to do this, what would your strategy be?"
• Realizing pop cans are 355 mL because that's 12 US fluid ounces.
  • The ounce is a unit of mass and the dry ounce of volume, but the pint and the dry pint are both units of volume.
  • https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/mc-mc.nsf/eng/h_lm00007.html
  • Soda vs Pop vs. Coke: Who Says What, And Where? https://www.huffpost.com/entry/soda-vs-pop_n_2103764
  • Plastic Recycling is an Actual Scam https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJnJ8mK3Q3g
  • How China Broke the World's Recycling https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXRtNwUju5g
• Is macaroni and cheese known outside of America? Or, if you were opening a restaurant in a foreign country, what cuisine would it be?
  • How Thai food took over America https://www.splendidtable.org/story/2019/01/10/how-thai-food-took-over-america
  • What Color Is a Tennis Ball? https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/what-color-tennis-ball-green-yellow/523521/
  • https://www.pizzapizza.ca/catalog/config/dipping-sauce-product_1919/store/1/delivery
  • Wikipedia lists these other related dishes:
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonara
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chili_mac
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filipino_spaghetti
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A4sesp%C3%A4tzle

Microtopics:

• An oddly temperate day in the park in the middle of January.
• Not necessarily recognizing the war criminal who lives in your town.
• Checking the box that says "I did not do the Holocaust" on the immigration form.
• How it takes 50 years to deport a Nazi from Canada.
• Berlin, Canada.
• Getting a steak and a beer with the 110 year old who works with you at the grocery store.
• Where you go if you're really young and you want to become a war criminal.
• A thing that is strange but also very ordinary.
• Explaining Garfield.
• Heathcliff, the other other fat orange cartoon cat.
• Explaining cow tools.
• Tools that don't really look like anything but it's the best a cow can do.
• What it means when Heathcliff wears the gravy helmet.
• When an ancient comic strip gets funny again because the original artist finally retired and got replaced by a Tumblr user.
• Stealing all the fish from the fish counter and the vendor can't do anything about it because you're wearing a helmet that says "fish."
• Scrolling a web page and discovering how many helmets Heathcliff has.
• Managing the flow of mugs in this Space Invaders clone.
• The best electromechanical bar game that triggers your trypophobia.
• A story-heavy RPG adaptation of an electromechanical bar game.
• Playing a story heavy game and wishing the story and the game parts were separable.
• How magical girl shows and JRPGs both presentationally separate story from combat.
• Taking the fight scenes from a robot combat show and writing new scenes where the robots are going to high school.
• Learning to fly in place.
• Becoming a hummingbird and learning to do what hummingbirds do.
• Consuming the densest possible foods such as lead.
• Assuming that iron is the densest element because it's at the Earth's core and must have sunk there.
• Searching for densest foods and Google gives you the most nutrient dense foods, which is definitively not what you asked for.
• Arctic explorers bringing sleds full of frozen butter to eat.
• Eating your weight in salt every day.
• Whether 1 milliliter of water weighs exactly one gram everywhere, or just in that locked vault in Paris.
• The Canadian hotline you can call to report bars that serve you an American pint of beer.
• The metric pint.
• Ounces per ounce.
• Writing to Stephen Wolfram to complain about the dry ounce.
• That double gotcha bar trivia question about whether an ounce of feathers is lighter than an ounce of gold.
• Europeans getting confused when Americans talk about calories when they mean kilocalories.
• Using more significant digits than the speaker intended when doing unit conversion.
• Whether someone saying "a thousand" to mean "a lot" is one significant digit or zero.
• Whether in the Bible "forty" is used colloquially to mean "a lot."
• Taking a dialect quiz that tries to guess where you're from but it doesn't know about Canada so it guesses you're from the American Midwest.
• Whether recycling is still a thing or in fact ever was.
• Keeping people employed at a factory sorting plastic for no particular reason.
• Pasta and cheese being popular all over the world.
• How Canadians have Kraft macaroni and cheese for dinner all the time.
• The biscuit you eat!
• How Pad Thai is a psyop.
• Putting fish in a bucket and waiting until it becomes fish sauce.
• Fear of discovering the fish flavor in fish sauce and ruining Thai food forever.
• Putting fish sauce on pizza yourself because Domino's doesn't offer it as a topping.
• Opening a Taco Bell in Mexico.
• Asking not for whom the Baja Blasts.
• A can of cream of mushroom soup inside of a Shepherd's Pie.
• Another salty MSG flavored brown liquid.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Chris
  • https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ianknot.htm
• James
  • https://triplefox.itch.io/
  • https://youtu.be/I8uStVXNf0M

Topics:

• An adopted microwave which is too small for popcorn, begging the question: what is it for?
  • https://compassandquill.com/2012/03/12/how-to-cook-microwave-popcorn-on-the-stove/
• What happened to Galapagos? (And recreating pinball in software.)
  • https://triplefox.itch.io/galapagos
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tmg5WOvPKpU
• The trade-off between customer satisfaction and worker safety
• John asks "Skipping over links to music when your friends post them, and in turn posting links to music without a shred of self-awareness/the mental barrier to recommending or sharing music."
• Relearning how to run

Microtopics:

• A shoelace knot that you are amazed by.
• Whether somebody knows good ways of tying knots.
• Not having any ads on the show but the same shoelace knot being independently plugged by three separate guests.
• Looking outside and seeing someone furtively deposit the world's smallest microwave on the sidewalk.
• A microwave that is awesome until you try to put popcorn in it.
• A dollhouse microwave that can microwave popcorn one kernel at a time.
• The Easy Bake Microwave.
• That one kid you knew whose family was rich enough that he had a microwave in his bedroom.
• The Easy Bake TV which is just a light bulb that you stare into.
• Downsizing your lifestyle.
• Ultra-miniaturized microwaves that are just big enough for a can of Coca Cola.
• Hot Coke.
• Deciding to try Hot Coke after the show because your microwave is too small to fit anything bigger than a mug of Coca Cola.
• A hot tub with a volume of half a cubic foot.
• Whether the Whirlpool hot tub actually spins.
• Recording an entire additional episode of Topic Lords after this, that only we get to hear.
• Deciding that your fantasy console should be linear without knowing what linear means.
• Making software last a long time by targeting an emulator.
• Deciding that your entire approach to your current project is wrong and inverting its structure and then deciding to make a pinball game instead.
• Having to fake the physical pinball interactions because physics engines still aren't precise enough.
• Not having a ball bearing bouncing around inside of your phone.
• Applying an impulse when the ball hits a collision volume.
• The actual electromechanical mechanism of those triangles near the flippers that push the ball back.
• A physics solver that does mixed rigid and soft body deformation.
• Ordering pinball flippers online so you can measure them because you can't find specs describing their exact shape and size anywhere.
• How pop bumpers work.
• The ball rolling over the skirt and triggering the thrusters.
• Modeling an invisible cone that drives itself down.
• Buying a nice plastic skirt and an extremely high-current solenoid.
• Making a functional pinball table out of cardboard.
• A pinball table inside of a wine bottle.
• Pinball tables all having the common constraint that they need to fit through the door.
• "Hercules," the pinball table where the gimmick is that it's too big to fit through the door.
• How to draw the rest of the owl.
• Pinball except instead of a ball it's water.
• A PSP except instead of a portable video game system it's one of those games where you squeeze water to get rings onto posts.
• Christmas except every present is just a box of avocados.
• Pachinko except it's an oil timer.
• Physically impossible but physically accurate pinball machines.
• Pachinko except there's fire everywhere and what's falling through the pins is your dead body and all your individual bones.
• Getting licensed to make scrambled eggs with an espresso machine.
• A Big Black Egg Gauntlet.
• A big black glove that smells but doesn't look like rotten eggs.
• The pressure of an egg.
• Whether an egg could be held aloft by a shop vac.
• The video of an egg being sucked into a bottle that google shows you when it doesn't have any good results, because you can't stay mad when you get to see an egg sucked into a bottle.
• The ethics of asking your wife to take a video of cafe workers making scrambled eggs.
• The violence of recommendations.
• Whether or not you can get mad about your time being wasted for twenty seconds.
• Doing everything in your power to like your favorite band's new album.
• Your first "Hero's Journey" vs. your hundredth.
• The kind of media you consume while doing other things vs. the kind you actively study.
• Mentoring teenagers and exhorting that they listen to as much music as possible before they get old like you, and handing them some Linkin Park CDs.
• Getting better at stuff.
• Each sport having a different set of recommended vitamin supplements.
• Lurching forward on your ankles.
• Looking up how runners run on Youtube and immediately realizing how you can run way faster.
• Getting running shoes that force you to spring around on your toes rather than landing on your heel.
• Getting it but not liking it.
• Studying Full Tilt.
• Taking your kick scooter on the freeway.
• Pre-Stormdancer problems.
• Googling your own name and finding erotic short fiction starring a gay lumberjack with your name.
• The sound of probably not being able to hear anything
• Whether a beverage can be both hot and carbonated.
• Sadness when you can't carbonate soup.
• The audio signature of Coke being microwaved.
• A microwave% run of Super Mario 64 where you need to turn on the microwave next to the Nintendo 64 at the exact right frame.
• Honey refusing to dissolve in tea no matter how much you stir.
• Putting your mug of flat microwaved Coke in the Sodastream to recarbonate it.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• James is working on Galapagos. https://triplefox.itch.io/galapagos
  • https://twitter.com/Triplefox
  • http://ludamix.com/
• Jay is on Twitter. https://twitter.com/jaytholen

Topics:

• 1:38 References dating things and/or making them inaccessible. Examples: older Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes and that Winter Wonderland song where they say a snowman looks like Parson Brown. Who the heck is that??
  • What color is Parson Brown? https://www.datalounge.com/thread/18081042-what-color-is-parson-brown-
  • "What are your favorite culturally untranslatable phrases?" https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/efee7/what_are_your_favorite_culturally_untranslateable/
• 9:33 How four-year-olds perceive Lego(tm)
  • The Game Engine Black Book: Doom. http://fabiensanglard.net/gebbdoom/
  • Romero's Sigil Doom episode, featuring Buckethead. https://www.romerogames.ie/si6il
• 19:25 Watching behind-the-music documentaries and realizing all the meatheads I was judging from their appearance in music videos in the 90s are as huge music theory nerds as any of my friends.
  • T-Pain without autotune: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyzlUUqxXYs
• 25:06 Groke asks: "Cheap musical instruments are cool, aren't they? Penny whistles, harmonicas, ocarinas... any personal experiences with these?"
  • The Thomas the Tank Engine theme played on Otamatone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugW_eU5jgIM
  • The Tastee Bros. play the Olympic Fanfare https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hs5ioAc_oY8
  • The Tastee Bros. 300 tips for playing a trumpet really high: http://www.gibble.org/high.htm
  • "A dodecaphonic scream trumpet homage to Christmas the Tastee Bros and Mr Santa. X" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Udvy8XYzH4U
• 32:35 Timberwolf/husky breeds and their incredible jaws.
• 38:49 Losing the ability to know when things are conventionally aesthetically pleasing.
  • One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age. https://blog.geocities.institute/
• 53:04 This CPAP machine is really putting a damper on my dreams of growing a Santa beard one day.
  • "Your Source for CPAP Mask Sealant Specially for Bearded Men" https://cpapbeardandmustacheseal.com/
  • "The 'Machine Bow' is a reality!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hs5ioAc_oY8

Microtopics:

• Your co-host not saying his last name so you're not sure whether he knows how to pronounce it.
• Sometimes working in the same room and sometimes getting coffee together.
• Living in Germany and not being able to not bring it up.
• Trying to enjoy topical comedy from decades ago.
• Trying to enjoy topical comedy from centuries ago and having to rely on footnotes.
• Jokes that are so dated nobody even perceives them as a joke.
• Liking a joke better before you get it.
• Translating a text that is full of French puns into English puns.
• A police officer yelling "sweater" at a lady driving down the road.
• Trying to find an authoritative answer but only finding answers.yahoo.com.
• Parsons being so ubiquitous that everyone must know a "Parson Brown."
• Your four year old niece asking you what a Lego is and it probably being a part of a wing from a Toy Story kit or something.
• A four year old wanting answers and older people having all the answers.
• A giraffe staying forever in a park because you surrounded the park with a fence and it's a happy giraffe.
• Playing with Legos with your uncle but not really wanting to build anything and just wanting your uncle to tell you a story about something that already exists.
• Trying to evoke a feeling by doing the thing that did it thirty years ago.
• Being inspired to try exciting new creative tools but as soon as you get in there it just immediately feels like work.
• Games that you need to read a textbook to be able to enjoy.
• Seeing something happen once and assuming it's going to happen that way every time.
• A baby throwing a cup on the ground over and over again to make sure it falls downwards every time.
• Most people having a much higher drive to be cool than you do.
• A nu-metal punk sitting at a piano and talking about jazz chords.
• Being surprised when people who look fashionable are also skilled.
• Having being in your early teens when Grunge hit and that affecting your fashion sense for your entire life.
• A photo of your nu-metal phase somehow not ending up in Hypnospace Outlaw.
• Finding dorky button up shirts some Silicon Valley folks would've worn in the late 90s and making that be just your fashion sense.
• Method acting but for video games.
• Billy Idol insisting that interviewers need to have read Neuromancer but not having read it himself.
• Not having time to read so insisting that interviewers read a book for you and tell you about it while they interview you.
• The note getting louder when you squeeze the face.
• Thinking an effect is a digital filter but it turns out to just be the mouth opening and closing.
• When you put your thumb over the Game Boy speaker and slowly peel it off.
• Just sticking the head of a plunger into your trumpet.
• Getting a reed instrument for Christmas and not being able to make it make anything that sounds like a note before your mouth gets tired of vibrating.
• Learning to hit those high notes because it's cool, not because it's particularly musically useful.
• Being obsessed with claves because of Brian Eno's "St. Elmo's Fire," but not being sure how to pronounce "claves."
• Finding a melodica in your wife's parents' basement.
• Most dogs just looking at your hand but this one bringing its entire jaw over your arm sideways.
• Noisebridge being an anarchist collective where anything can happen.
• Laughing when your kid does stuff you really ought to be discouraging.
• Accidentally teaching a small child to call people fat.
• Your kid calling a Wal*Mart customer "fat" and trying to pretend he meant "hat" because she's wearing a hat and the kid emphatically clarifying that no, he meant she's super fat.
• Writing in your first-grade journal that you don't like when your parents take you to "the dark place."
• Writing in your first-grade journal that "on 911 a fire happens" with an illustration of a burning building but you just meant the TV show "911" about emergency responders.
• The borrowed tribal iconography mixed with tech themes that Internet companies to show a new era of togetherness and communication.
• Finding beauty in a Geocities web page with random animated images everywhere and a tiled background.
• Immersing yourself in an aesthetic until you like it.
• Art getting way better when the image links start breaking.
• Your sense of aesthetics being your only guide for knowing how to make something.
• Slowly learning to trust your sense of aesthetics when people like your work.
• Not trusting your own sense of aesthetics and turning to philosophy to come up with interesting aesthetic rules to follow instead.
• Trying a new pixel art aesthetic that's even more rectangular than before.
• The threshold between mere aesthetic weirdness and people immediately dismissing a work as ugly.
• Deliberately choosing your system palette in the way that 8-bit microcomputers and early consoles did not.
• Considering yourself done after the first draft of an idea if the idea is difficult and complicated to implement, but iterating if it's simple.
• Having an aesthetic plan for growing old.
• Doing a cursory Google search before giving up on your dreams.
• Not trusting cheapcpapsupplies.com because they probably just want to sell you their CPAP supplies -- but at least it's cheap.
• Instagram figuring out that you have sleep apnea.
• The potions master brewing up a snoring solution as a punishment.
• Dressing up like disguised Santa and if a kid finds out you're santa, pulling open your trench coat to reveal the S emblazoned on your chest.
• Having a distinctive laugh for when you're firing your longbow extremely rapidly.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Jay worked on Hypnospace Outlaw. http://www.hypnospace.net/
  • https://twitter.com/jaytholen
• James is working on Galapagos. https://triplefox.itch.io/galapagos
  • https://twitter.com/Triplefox
  • http://ludamix.com/

Topics:

• 3:25 James is taking a storytelling class at City College
• 15:49 Propizio Chittara: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9xiOqfkKBM
• 20:12 Library and Production music. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Production_music
  • Prefab FM. https://twitter.com/PrefabFM
  • 86 hour Spotify playlist of ~90s Production music: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1O7DMdjlJqBeAqGEVVihXD?
  • David Vorhaus - My Brain's Full! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GI617uJKlg0
  • White Noise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Noise_(band)
• 29:46 Gottlieb "Street Level" Pinball. https://www.retrorefurbs.com/the-history-of-street-level-pinballs/
  • Free Gold Watch custom screen printing and pinball and video arcade. http://freegoldwatch.com/newhome/home.html
  • Pacific Pinball Museum. https://www.pacificpinball.org/
  • Pinside. https://pinside.com/
• 44:10 Jim's new life sleeping like Darth Vader

Microtopics:

• Accidentally only booking guests with your same first initial.
• Values systems driving design decisions.
• Taking only the fun classes in college.
• Children as an ideal audience for storytelling.
• A job fair for monsters.
• Black people being friends with metaphors for black people.
• Only wanting to go to school after it's unavailable to you.
• Never going to museums where you live because that's what tourists do.
• Paying to do manual labor to entertain your infant son.
• Insisting on talking to babies even though they don't understand you.
• Not knowing who Arcade Fire is.
• Knowing who Arcade Fire is.
• Spraying guitar samples into the DAW just to fill space.
• Going up to strangers talking in a bar to tell them their conversation is boring.
• Tweeting with as much context resiliency as possible.
• Hearing an instrumental in the 90s and wondering about it for the rest of your life.
• The saddest accordion solo.
• A laughing baby indicating lack of cruelty.
• Library/production music that is just as avant garde as your personal work.
• Corporate contexts appropriating music that was popular 10 years ago.
• When the retro discount kicks in for production music.
• Absorbing your friend's shoegaze album into your video game.
• Reinventing General MIDI for your alternate timeline's soundtrack.
• Picking a name for your combination pinball parlor and print shop.
• The timeline of pinball speed.
• The timeline of pinball interactivity.
• Analog video games frustrating the speed running scene.
• Video game sound effects in the reality that never invented the speaker.
• Switching around the pneumatic tubes on your brother's Call of Duty sound setup.
• Sneaking into an amusement park to play the calliope.
• Calliope MIDI playback as an online service.
• Robotic percussion as an online service.
• Sleep studies are take-home tests now.
• Stopping breathing 25 times per hour.
• Acclimating to your Darth Vader mask.
• Never living to regret your bad decisions.
• Not being sure how to pronounce your own name.

Support Topic Lords