• John
• Avery
• Jay

Topics:

• Being known for one thing and trying to do a different thing
  • https://jtholen.bandcamp.com/album/new-active-object
• Finding instruments on the street
• Accidentally arguing with sauna guy

Microtopics:

• Many-Time Topic Lord John Mystery.
• Talking the plunge into the Topic Lords discord.
• An unspoken constant presence like Seymour Glass in the Glass Family novels.
• The Once and Future Musician.
• Putting a formant filter on your organ so you can play the organ on Zoom.
• Why pouring hot water sounds different from pouring cold water.
• The sound of boiling hot urine.
• The top rated coffee shop in San Francisco on Yelp for seven months in a row.
• Remaining your coffee shop after Mark Zuckerberg in hopes that he'll show up in person.
• Trying to open up a coffee shop in late 90s San Francisco and only realizing too late that it's 2016.
• ADA compliant seating.
• Four-person episodes of Topic Lords.
• A 6'5" guy trying to barter a half-used spray paint can for a cup of coffee.
• The Menacing Barterer.
• Aggressive Wimpy gladly paying you tomorrow for a hamburger today or else.
• Aggressive Wimpy throwing a shoe at your espresso machine.
• Your car accidentally becoming an art car.
• Letting people spray paint your car until it's nothing but spray paint.
• Calling 911 and explaining that the guy menacing you needs marijuana.
• Being detained by Mark Zuckerberg's private security force.
• Living near Mark Zuckerberg's house so you can do whatever your fixation with Mark Zuckerberg is.
• Aggressive Barter Guy trying to barter a Porsche for a cup of coffee.
• The $6 Porsche.
• Tholen or Tholen.
• A prog album constructed from Klik n Play samples.
• When someone who does I've things decides to do something else.
• The Mountain Goats novelizations.
• Leonard Cohen's terrible poetry.
• Thinking a song is deeply meaningful until you read the lyrics.
• New Active Object.
• Lunch Music.
• Doing a thing for a long time and getting good at it.
• Who has time to read a novel?
• Having Game Boys Advance but still reading books sometimes.
• Telling your teacher that you need to go to your job at NASA and they're like "oh you must be doing something important over there"
• Working in the waterslide industry.
• The Joy of Being the Secrets Guy.
• Reading too much into it is the next Frog Fractions game.
• Admitting to your wife that you found a digital piano on the curb.
• The digital piano in the background of the Frog Fractions 2 pitch video.
• Walking by a theremin at a party and it chirps at you like a proximity car alarm.
• The Moog Etherwave.
• Staring at your broken Omnichord.
• A toddler whose first word is "mandolin."
• Living Out Yonder.
• The Roland Space Echo.
• A cassette tape except there isn't any cassette, the tape is just kind of wriggling around in there.
• Buying synthesizers from thrift shops that don't know how to tell whether synthesizers are broken.
• The Two Organs Behind Me.
• Ukelins.
• Zither-esques.
• Dulcimers vs. hammered dulcimers.
• Looping your song and picking the notes that kind of sound like they belong.
• A Xylophone For Jandek.
• Feeling like you're taking to extremely accomplished people and you're just a weird little guy.
• Who Is Sauna Guy??
• Stuck debating sauna guy while the venerated author with similar interests to yours is holding court in the next room.
• Physics Philosophy guy talking about physics and philosophy.
• An hour into the conversation, telling Sauna Guy that you don't even like being warm and he just stares at you.
• The new way to joke about forum URLs.
• Back when the Internet was full of exciting possibilities.
• What topics turn you into Sauna Guy.
• David Byrne sitting alone at the David Byrne art exhibit in Palo Alto.
• We're All Sauna Guy Now.
• Voting each other off the podcast.
• Lightning round sudden death topics.
• When the sunscreen finally makes it onto your cornea.
• Not having a home page again but meaning to someday.

Support Topic Lords

• Jay
• Jenni
  • https://youtube.com/@kiwami-japan?si=z03WRlRnur883JkN

Topics:

• The dying art of learning a skill on a message board, such as pixel art or having long hair
• The Baldur's Gate 3 butthole chart
  • https://www.reddit.com/r/BaldursGate3/comments/16dlml1/behold_the_chart_ever_made/
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGhcSupkNs8
• Is giving people ideas helpful?
  • https://itch.io/jam/picostevemo
• James asks "Why is configuring the thing more enjoyable than using the thing?"
• I read one time that the way you know if you live urbanly or rurally is if you live in the city you know a place and if you live in the country you have a guy

Microtopics:

• Three people with social anxiety.
• Your left ear not working at the post office.
• 80 people in a post office screaming at each other.
• Keeping your broken item and just buying another because you don't want to go to the post office.
• Naming your band after a way to transmit audio.
• I'm good that they're exist.
• Getting your New Year's Resolution off of the Mastodon Tooter.
• Finding a kid at Applebee's to sit next to.
• Forming a seal on your face when there's hair.
• A hip burger or hot dog joint hanging a sign saying "Take it to Squirts-Town" over their condiment counter.
• An app to track how much emotional load you've dumped on each friend recently.
• Preparing to hold space for your feelings.
• Going outside and banging on pots and pans at midnight.
• Getting really into Casey Kasem's Rockin' New Year.
• Getting twelve grapes and trying to eat a grape on every bong of the clock.
• How far apart are the bongs?
• Whack it for a huge dong!
• The second message board you signed up for. (After The Sims.)
• Entirely abandoning the idea of drawing with your hands.
• The Three Tile Rule.
• New Year, New Wife!
• Being approached in a Trader Joe's by a guy who runs a message board for men with long hair.
• How to find people to follow on Cohost.
• Searching for a technical issue on the internet and finding a post on a message board asking your question and the answer is to "google it."
• Message boards about tying knots.
• A ghost giving you a hug.
• Shadebobs and searching on Youtube for shadebobs.
• Shadebob Squarepixels.
• Turn-based speed runs.
• Oxygenarian runs.
• Starting with meat. Ending with meat.
• Whether it's okay to do a Butthole Chart for people who are still alive.
• The Shade of the Butthole.
• Special people with hairy buttholes.
• When God asks you to bring him 50 buttholes, what body parts he'll accept as the butthole.
• Butthole purism.
• Personality traits that correspond with butthole traits in popular culture.
• What to do if you don't like the shade or the smell of your butthole.
• Going on T because you want a hairier butthole.
• Whether billionaires are real people.
• The Butthole of Dorian Gray.
• Hiring a person to take care of your butthole situation.
• Making eye contact with the guy who cleans Jeff Bezos's butthole but you can't stop and help, you have to catch your train.
• PiCoSteveMo outcomes.
• Self-driving taxis paving the entire planet.
• Suggesting ideas as a way to make sure nobody will implement those ideas.
• Receiving a new CD for Christmas in the post-Napster era.
• What we can still use as stocking stuffers now that CDs and DVDs don't make sense any more.
• Your life partner going through a Brandon Sanderson phase and giving you a huge Brandon Sanderson book to read.
• What you call the plug that goes into a plug.
• Getting paid to learn to solder.
• Deliberately introducing mpeg artifacts into a video stream.
• How to troubleshoot a motherboard now that they don't beep any more.
• How many Intels they're up to now.
• A memory of fun that you can't go back to.
• Awful Fantasy.
• Putting a foul-mouthed rom hack on your SNES Classic and then forgetting that happened when you give it away to your friends' kids.
• Imagining how great a product is going to be while you're buying the product.
• Asking for a toy for Christmas even though you know you'll never make time for it.
• Going to a friend's house and seeing a bajillion guitar pedals that you can't afford.
• Giving your guitar pedals away to someone who'll actually use them rather than just reselling them.
• Hanging out with the kind of person who's playing Rock Band in 2023.
• The only generation that learned how to use computers.
• Worrying that the five year old computer geniuses are going to hack your foot so you can't walk.
• Living in New Holstein Wisconsin and needing psychic healing.
• Living in the city and having a place you go to for hot dogs vs. living in the country and having a guy you call for hot dogs and he comes to your house with a suitcase full of hot dogs and a USB-C grill.
• Moving to the country so you can hang out of the hot dog guy.
• A place that's not even really a place because you can't catch Pokemon there.
• Two Guys and a Place.
• Bringing independent gas stations their coffee.
• Yacht Man Cologne.
• Stuff You're Not Allowed To Eat dot com.
• Arguing with GPT-4 until it agrees that your Garfield dating sim idea is ethical.
• Putting on your face shoes.
• This Is Cake Bread!
• Tholen vs. Tholen.

Support Topic Lords

• Tyriq
• Jay

Topics:

• I recently moved and I think I understand Having Stuff more now.
• Teaching my 3-year-old to use a mouse and keyboard. Kids learning software being a ghost of its former self.
• Interface traps
• Yelp! Review for God by Willow James Claire
  • https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/ib998beS.jpg
• Starting a YouTube Channel for kids and the lack of useful information on the topic.

Microtopics:

• Ben and Jerry's Cookie Dough ice cream.
• Washing the ice cream off of the cookie dough ice cream and baking cookies.
• Snacking dough.
• Living on your own and owning silverware for the first time.
• Losing a fork that they don't make any more and having mismatched forks forever.
• A hodgepodge of styles.
• Different spaces each with their own internal consistency.
• Going to your ex-roommate's Halloween party as a guest for the first time.
• Parties that you can leave.
• Finding out you were right about what you thought you'd like.
• Moving house in an hour.
• Your kid banging on the keyboard to write nonsense messages in discord but he forgets to hit enter to send so you have to do it for him.
• Teaching kids to read by giving them a Kindle tablet.
• Typing "stop" fifty times in notepad.
• Dell Rugged.
• What Mavis Beacon is up to nowadays.
• Computers as the exciting future vs. computers as the boring shitty present.
• Getting a laptop without a touch screen so your kid can learn to use the mouse.
• Different ways to not understand folders.
• Whether the problem is that Gen Z doesn't know what a folder is or whether it's that they sometimes still need to know what a folder is.
• Apps that appear to be native apps but they're secretly running in a web browser.
• Coming into possession of a child.
• An overworld where you can walk in 8 directions and bump into NPCs.
• Boots Quest.
• Auto Shooting Survival.
• Roguelike Turn-Based Auto Shooting Survival.
• Mini Yoto.
• Using the insert key on purpose.
• The Jay's Wife of Scroll Lock.
• The two Smush tracks on the Hypnospace Outlaw soundtrack.
• Why there are separate shift and caps lock keys but no separate toggle insert and hold to insert keys.
• Sticky Keys.
• Caps lock keys that physically toggle.
• Toon Boom Harmony and other way too expensive subscription software.
• Can't draw can't see pencil in toon boom reddit
• Lock the taskbar, lock the taskbar.
• The pros and cons of different start menu orientations.
• Getting kissed in the vegetable aisle, so to speak.
• Talking about dungeons and dragons and getting something slightly wrong about dungeons or dragons.
• The laws of physics preventing you from kidding boys.
• On the one hand growing up as a trans poet in Arizona. On the other, drinking a whole lot of strawberry kiwi kombucha.
• Four out of five stars for inventing an extremely dry mouth.
• A dry, scratchy, sandpaper cat tongue.
• A song about a ghost eating toast.
• Watching your kid watch things.
• Where to put video content on the internet.
• Ideas that are occluded by ideas that are better search-engine optimized.
• Whether librarians are scarier in Germany.
• Combining three people with social anxiety to make one really big person with social anxiety.
• Fixing kids software for 100 people because it's too hard to fix it for the whole world.
• X for Extreme.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Avery
  • https://averyburke.bandcamp.com/releases
• Jay
  • https://twitter.com/jaytholen

Topics:

• Kowloon Walled City
• Internet communities gaining a reputation and then changing over time as members mature.
• The moral cost of the 303 Devilfish clone
• Justified and Ancient
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XP5oHL3zBDg
  • Unedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/Peeo6xZqeVs
• Cyber Nexus internet cafe in Lakeland Florida and late 1990s internet cafes in general
  • https://twitter.com/jaytholen/status/1370002162063990786

Microtopics:

• Putting all of Spotify on shuffle.
• Spotify rejecting your album because you put lyrics on the album cover.
• Immersing yourself in a shitty visual aesthetic until you love it and the guy at the record label rejects your album cover.
• Renaming your company to Content Distribution Baby now but the logo is still a baby on a CD.
• The Godaddy man and the pets dot com sock puppet.
• A demon face in the middle of a circuit board.
• The part of the show where we look at image search results together.
• Visiting Kowloon Walled City for the cheap dentistry.
• Going to a nightmare city to get your teeth worked on: an opportunity to die.
• One of several problems with working seven days a week and never taking a break.
• Blame! or perhaps Blam!
• Trying to live in the dystopian future where the construction nanobots run wild and convert all matter on the planet into endless nonsense staircases and ventilation ducts.
• The protagonist having a really cool gun.
• When the author doesn't know what's interesting about their own setting.
• Having to write a novel because nobody's invented D&D source books yet.
• Feeling like an outsider because you don't know which Dale Earnhardt crashed into a wall.
• An online pixel art isometric place to hang out.
• Being a jerk to people in an organized manner.
• Audio production subforums.
• How internet communities get radicalized and how they mellow out.
• Ironically doing outrageous stuff on the internet.
• The strange purity of being ahead of the curve.
• Memes as a bannable offense.
• Getting a Something Awful forum account for your birthday and never looking at it because you don't like awful things.
• A synthesizer for the singer songwriter who doesn't have a bass player.
• Discovering the future of techno in the bargain bin.
• The history of the TB-303.
• The Prophet-5 vs. the Prophet-6.
• A drum pad that is the first of its kind.
• The thing with the egg breaking against a wall and how you always side with the egg.
• Creating reproductions of saught after out of print old stuff.
• Having two guitars, one tuned in fifths and one tuned like a ukulele.
• Writing music that could never be played.
• Making games because you want to get your music in front of people.
• Jim Stormdancer and the Frog Fractions Players.
• Finally receiving the obscurity you've been craving.
• Writing a book about the KLF as a lens into your particular moral philosophy.
• Drum or Brown?
• Doom Demon Invisible.
• 5 times voted CMA female vocalist Tammy Wynette.
• Trying to gesture at Discordianism or other forms of alternative mysticism.
• Making a new game in character as a character from your last game.
• The Burning Man man.
• Presented with the Most Coveted Living Legend Award Sponsored By TNN.
• Hiring randos to sing and play instruments on your album and hiring entirely different randos to be in your music video.
• King Boy D and the other guy.
• Burning a million quid and then going around asking people why you burned a million quid.
• Good names for internet cafes.
• A square of computers.
• Not recognizing Stargate decor and assuming it's just sci fi Egypt themed.
• Losing at Quake for your birthday while your parents watch a Pink Floyd DVD with the owner of the Internet cafe.
• Which one is Cyber and which one is Nexus?
• Not remembering why your band was invited to play a set at the Interface of Language and Technology.
• That's a level 12 mage, get off of that!
• Whether an internet cafe is the same thing as a cyber cafe.
• The regular at your coffee shop who scalps tickets for a living.
• Whipping out a 61 key MIDI controller to write tracks at Starbucks.
• Trying to avoid situations where you'd accidentally give a philosophy lecture.
• What is an organism and what organisms do.
• Whether Aristotle knows that whales are mammals.
• A category of things that have an effect.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• John of the Maryland Johns
• Jay of Hypnospace
  • http://www.hypnospace.net/

Topics:

• When you're more interested in following news about things than the things themselves: When will the rumored The Cure albums come out? No Man's Sky updates. What is Josh Sawyer working on?
• Realizing that your funny friend as a child was just repeating lines from HBO comedy specials that you weren't allowed to watch.
• The Terminator 2 soundtrack and the Fairlight CMI 3
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnpYowxlwsU
  • I couldn't find a source for the analog modeling synth running on a 60s mainframe, but I did find this example of early digital synthesis from 1961: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41U78QP8nBk
  • Fairlight is the name of a village in East Sussex, England. I could've sworn it was one of Santa's reindeer or something like that.
• Kevin asks "The diminishing returns technologically with each passing console generation. For instance, NES to SNES was a massive leap, whereas you can barely distinguish ps4 games from ps5 games."
• Adventures in cooking: share tales of delicious things you have made recently

Microtopics:

• A game about the old internet.
• Figuring out who DMed John.
• Doing better at a game than all the people who don't know that the game exists.
• Searching things a lot when you're on the toilet.
• Being more interested in news about the cure for COVID than about the cure itself.
• The three rumored The Cure albums that have been teased for the past four years.
• Identifying as someone who cares about video games long after you no longer have time to play video games.
• The cultural event of Blaseball.
• Whether you are less interested in things as you get older or if you just have less time.
• Not buying a Raspberry Pi because you definitely don't have time to play with it.
• Sitting two feet away from a 50 inch television and trying to get RetroArch working.
• Buying a NES and SNES Classic but never actually playing the games.
• Whether Bonk's Adventure is good in 2020.
• Kanye West naming an album Turbo Grafx 16.
• Naming your The Beatles tribute band The Beatles.
• Being exposed to Monty Python primarily by your friends who constantly quote lines out of context.
• Finally watching Monty Python and realizing your funny friend has never made an original joke in his life.
• Friends who communicate solely in movie one liners.
• Making friends with a kid who always says lines from Duke Nukem 3D and learning to say them yourself even though you've never heard of Duke Nukem.
• Whether anyone actually knew what Cornholio actually was.
• The abject cultural domination of Beavis and Butthead.
• Whether or not the listeners will want to know what a ROMpler is.
• A $60,000 industrial-strength sampler/synthesizer in your garage.
• Playing naturalistic orchestral samples at unnaturally low playback speeds.
• A terrifying grindy klaxon sound.
• An unstoppable liquid metal monster with a jaunty soundtrack.
• Supercomputers producing digital audio in not real time.
• The Mellotron.
• The brass hit sample used in Owner of a Lonely Heart.
• Whether Fairlight the warez group has any relation to Fairlight the synthesizer company.
• Emulating the crustiness of the Fairlight CMI.
• Where to find all the samples that came built-in to the Fairlight CMI.
• Audible frowns.
• Just throwing polygons at the rasterizer.
• Being clever and squeezing every last drop of performance out of the new consoles and it still doesn't look that much better.
• The visual quality of a console you grew up playing being acceptable forever.
• Noticing the hottest new game graphics for fifteen minutes and after that you're just playing a video game again.
• How we could be up to the NES 6 or the Wii U by now.
• Playing Wii Sports and not noticing or caring that the Wii can play other games.
• Completely ignoring F2P games until one of your relatives turns out to be susceptible to gambling addiction.
• How Nintendo spent the Breath of the Wild budget.
• Shielding your eyes when you see a map because you don't want to know too much about the world.
• Which Breath of the Wild HUD modes include a compass.
• Stuffed mushrooms.
• The only recipe that your family makes literally every Thanksgiving.
• Making a tray of stuffed mushrooms where the seasoning is different on every mushroom.
• A Delicious Chore.
• Eggs on toast with remoulade.
• The default thing you put on a sandwich.
• Espresso machine eggs.
• The hypothetical standalone steamer arm.
• Promising to not promote anyone's Kickstarter.
• What Jim will do with a sharp knife if he gets one for Christmas.
• Putting a salmon in the fridge until it desiccates.
• Whether scales are a kind of skin.
• Knowing you really ought to eat fish.
• Putting cabbage in the oven until it's melted cabbage.
• Two people who are the same height but one looks taller because their legs are longer.
• Dog content on this podcast.
• Allowing both pronunciations of Jay's name.
• Katie content on this podcast.
• A baby becoming a person after basically being a potato for a while.
• John's one (1) tweet.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Jay is working on an expansion to Hypnospace Outlaw.
  • https://twitter.com/jaytholen
  • Rollin' With Tholen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXZFm1FLx6E
• Chris's album "The Lost Backups" will hopefully be out by the time this episode airs.
  • https://twitter.com/CHRISdelCAMINO
  • https://twitter.com/beekChiptunes
  • https://www.instagram.com/chrisdelcamino/

Topics:

• 7:06 I'm looking for ideas for my "songwriters" "tarot deck"
  • The Most Wanted Song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McIfIx29tSg
  • The Most Unwanted Song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gPuH1yeZ08
• 19:05 Did CD-ROM multimedia programs have advantages over later formats (fancy websites, mobile apps, etc.) or is it just nostalgia?
  • Ishkur's Guide. http://music.ishkur.com/
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishkur%27s_Guide_to_Electronic_Music
• 26:47 Banana Variety Box results
  • "The Coronavirus Is Bringing Back a 1,000-Year-Old ‘Cheese’ in Japan" https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-to-make-so-cheese
• 33:58 Craig asks: "Picking the right speech sample for the breakdown in your '90s techno. Compare and contrast, 'I am not an Atomic Playboy' from Second Reality vs. 'Ow that hurts' from Ballz: The Director's Cut for 3DO"
  • Ballz. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AhNn9vB-Lw
  • Second Reality. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJF0vUtVpCM
  • Legion of Rock Stars. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqSsybm3hJ5g6P7wbhfTXUk_RtM1wbUFA
  • 2 Legit 2 Quit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Yun_uAiaVY
  • The Mollusk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5K_w9Tbhoc
• 41:23 The genres available in the ID3 tag. They look like a 14 year old just started naming genres off the top of his head and stopped when he hit 128. Where did this come from and why have we let it persist for so long?
  • Milton Fludgecow. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWl8phxrP78&list=PLvKD5LjgylqZhQaxtDa00t1sh19MYzB9R
• 46:14 Who remembers everything2.com?
  • https://everything2.com/user/chrisjh

Microtopics:

• Adding even more Internet to your fake Internet.
• Hearing someone pronounce their own name wrong in a YouTube video and shaking your fist at the screen.
• Changing your name because you're just looking to make your way.
• The multitude of four-letter B and K names in the demo scene.
• Promoting your album because hopefully you'll finish it before this episode is out.
• Dreaming your friend a horrible job history.
• A pair of tongs with a sticker on them saying "Super Atheist."
• The guy in the pharmacy whose only job is to not give people their prescription.
• Getting your doctorate for free because you're dating a doctor.
• Forgetting all about Peter Schmidt.
• Buying chord pack after chord pack and eventually giving up and buying the ultra-rare G11/F# card from a collector.
• An app that scans your Spotify play list and generates a list of constraints to write songs under.
• A team of researchers writing the perfect song by surveying listeners about what elements of music that they like the most.
• A team of researchers writing the worst possible song by surveying listeners about what elements of music that they hate the most.
• A rap opera about life on the farm with a children's choir singing holiday and corporate jingles.
• Breaking your jaw harp because your jaw is just too strong.
• People hating different kinds of music in 2020 from what they hated in the 1990s.
• The identity of the accordion player on the floppy disks Jim dropped as he was arrested by time travelers.
• Round Robin Key Clicks From A Skype Call.
• Waiting for CD-ROMs in the 90s being faster than modern web pages.
• Clicking on Miles Davis' face and reading about Hard Bop.
• A topic you are interested enough in to buy a CD-ROM about it.
• Jobs paying well until investors realize they're money-losers.
• One person's perspective on how all electronic music breaks down.
• Information that is thorough and well-presented memetically dominating over information that is arguably more accurate but less accessible.
• Finding a guide to obscure music genres and worrying that they might be magic spells.
• Eating a bunch of weird bananas and deciding that all bananas basically taste the same.
• Militant banana forums rallying the troops to take down Jim's boring banana opinions.
• Recognizing differences between apple cultivars.
• Growing up eating the Red Delicious because it's red and delicious.
• Which apple cultivar Snow White ate.
• The apple core as a social construct.
• Why the Japanese don't like cheese when your toddler proves that it's super easy to develop a taste for cheese.
• Seagulls eating rats now that humans are out of the way.
• Whether or not the Ballz Directors Cut for 3DO OST is homophobic.
• Analyzing the music theory behind the Ballz Directors Cut for 3DO OST.
• Getting a band together and playing a song you all remember poorly and that's it, that's the album.
• Having heard 20 seconds of a comedy song and not needing to listen to the remaining five minutes.
• Trying to make fun of a clown.
• Writing questions that generate techno samples in response.
• All protocol and format technology decisions being made by 14 year olds.
• Whether or not Chanson is a portmanteau of Chiptune Hanson.
• The difference between Afrobeat and Afrobeats.
• Not adding Shoegaze to Winamp until 2010.
• A pre-Wikipedia attempt to invent the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.
• Making your web that is a sequel to your previous web site, so you give it the same name but add a 2.
• Wikipedia except that instead of an editorial voice it has a poem about a pomegranate.
• The most popular chord progressions staying about the same for the past 20 years.
• Sliding an open chord up the neck and leaving the open strings where they are.
• There probably being a music theory name for the musical trick you like to do.
• Counting in binary while meditating because if you just count in decimal you'll lose track when you think of something else.
• A classic web app where you submit a form and the server generates the HTML you will see in response.
• Accidentally lording it over someone.
• Having a fake thing you fool yourself into believing is important so you can procrastinate doing it and get the real work done.
• How to abbreviate Murder Hornet Keeper into a demo scene handle.
• Learning German from Wolfenstein 3D.

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 this week:

• Jenni is let's-playing Flower Sun and Rain with Riff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDmj6Kt5p_g&list=PLQqC_GkS4_4YvUIsmDBnd5vX8W1Fme6vu
• Jay is late!

Topics:

• 2:07 Trying to get immersion in a language when you don't know any native speakers & you're not in the country.
  • Look at that horse. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sv5woNs9WRE
• 13:52 If you have scars on the inside of your cheek along where your teeth meet, that means your mouth is too small.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linea_alba_(cheek)
  • Mold-a-rama: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mold-A-Rama
• 18:45 When you're not expecting food.
• 20:38 Road trips in Germany: paying to pee, no tourist traps. (Though public transport owns for non-leisure trips.)
• 31:18 Thomas "Dolby" Robertson's early 90s online music service.
  • Manufacture of cheddar cheese: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacture_of_Cheddar_cheese
  • Who coined the term "world wide web"? https://www.quora.com/Who-coined-the-term-world-wide-web
• 39:07 Being ok with admitting it when you don't know about something.
  • Quantum suicide and immortality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortality
  • One Terabyte of the Kilobyte Age. https://blog.geocities.institute/

Microtopics:

• Ostensibly being in a hotel to stop an act of terrorism but first having to get someone's mojo back.
• A portable computer that you call Catherine.
• A time loop, here on Topic Lords.
• Quitting that owl. Telling that owl where he can shove his heroin.
• Duo Lingo being named after its founder and enforcer, Duo.
• Gamification ruining your productivity because you can't help but care about these poorly-designed leaderboards.
• This being a video games podcast now, I guess.
• Putting in the effort to suck at a game so you can get more out of it.
• Doing a couple squats and all the monsters dying and feeling like a badass because of all your gains.
• Guessing that a higher intensity means a higher ratio of reps to jogging.
• Guessing that lowering the workout intensity will increase your heart rate.
• Squatting and catching the coins.
• Being surprised that legal let them put squats in the workout game beacuse you can super fuck up your knees by doing squats wrong.
• Learning Japanese so you can watch anime while also keeping an eye on that spider.
• Asking your co-lord to stereotype an entire species.
• Asking your co-lord about the personality of a spider when you made the spider up in this scenario.
• Doing the equivalent of the look at the horse thing.
• Explaining funny Youtube videos to each other.
• A half hour of getting head massages and trying to make a face as if you're enjoying the head massage.
• The mind whisk not working when you do it to yourself but a vibrating one might.
• Not wanting to swear around clean boys.
• Salvaging a terrible kale broccoli smoothie by adding rum.
• Frying your terrible kale broccoli smoothie into falafels.
• The only memory you have of a dentist being him telling you that you have a tiny mouth.
• Not brushing your teeth or going to the dentist for four years.
• Jim's good dentist costing twice as much as every other dentist and only being a 12-hour drive away.
• The seam on a molded toy where the mold came together.
• Knowing what the other person is talking about if it's the same thing that you were just talking about.
• Going to the bank and giving them all your change and them giving you back half a black crayon and a couple of flatten pennies with dinosaurs on it and a lego.
• Withdrawing all your money from the bank in black crayons.
• Putting down the other half of your hot pepper bacon jam and peanut butter sandwich and later taking a bite, forgetting about the hot pepper bacon part.
• A prank show that swaps out your half a sandwich with a different half a sandwich.
• Getting food poisoning because someone on a podcast from the future gave you a bad recommendation and you paused it before hearing them say they were only kidding.
• Searching for Jim Stormdancer who gave you a food poisoning recommendation on a time looped podcast but no results come back because that's not their name yet.
• Realizing at the last second that a delicious gulp of Dr. Pepper is actually milk, then it turning out to actually be iced tea.
• Beverageception.
• How we all left fifty glasses of water in our room in case the aliens invade because that's a normal thing.
• Milk not coming out of your glass when you try to drink because it's yogurt now.
• Combination sleep mask and headphones.
• Turning twenty half-full cans of Dr. Pepper into ten full cans of Dr. Pepper.
• Not being able to take the last sip of anything because that sip is tainted.
• Convincing yourself that if you just take a smaller sip it won't be the last sip.
• Having five euros worth of pee vouchers because nobody actually accepts your pee vouchers.
• Not having any concept of what it's like to drive without seeing tourist traps.
• Figuring out what the German equivalent of Elvis is and instantly becoming a millionaire.
• Starting to optimize your bathroom trips because now there's a currency involved.
• The friendly potty making things weird.
• The unfriendly potty trying to put it back.
• Getting the smallest piece of chocolate imaginable at the end of your chocolate museum tour.
• Helping the prince and his dragon friend make some chocolate shoes after the dragon accidentally melts the previous pair of chocolate shoes and melts them.
• Brushing up on your chocolate trivia so you can get the sticker that says "Chocolate Genius."
• Hiring a writer and telling them "it's a kingdom, and it's chocolatey -- go!"
• Trying to convince museum attendees that you aren't exploiting laborers even though there are pictures of exploited laborers right there.
• Theatrically fiddling with your synthesizers at because Channel 9 news is here.
• Naming yourself after a music technology company because you also do music technology.
• Missing an opportunity to name yourself after cheese.
• Cheddars that have not undergone the cheddaring process.
• Mistaking Thomas Dolby for Thomas Colby and cheddaring him but not getting cheddar for some reason.
• Going grocery shopping with your mom and asking her for a candy bar and an Internet World Magazine.
• Sticking with Gopher VR because the World Wide Web will never replace Telnet.
• The term "World Wide Web" having been coined by Joseph McCarthy to describe Soviet influence in America.
• Nodding along but feeling bad about not being able to connect with these people because you're 15 and don't know anything.
• Being proud of not knowing about something.
• Choosing to not be around people who make fun of you.
• Programming being excellent practice for humility because you're demonstrably wrong all the goddamned time.
• Wishing that you wanted to go outside more.
• Synthesizer enthusiasts knocking over your trash can to look for patch cables.
• Living on a canal and seeing a bunch of cool sea creatures all the time.
• Spraying tap water into the canal to attract manatees and every one of them having propeller scars.
• Watching shuttle launches from your back yard.
• Slipping on frozen sprinkler water and somehow not hitting your head on your way down into the canal.
• Every person ending up alone in the universe after everyone else has died.
• Answering to Betty because you want to be polite and don't want to correct the person who thinks your name is Betty.
• Betty Boop shooting to the top of the list of people you don't want to be confused with.
• Being confused about whether Betty Boop is supposed to be sexy or a dog or both.
• Betty Boop's apparent sexiness being like reading Shakespeare and not knowing what moiety means.
• Judging somebody by the trucks you've seen with bootleg stickers of them on the back.
• A bumper sticker of John Calvin peeing on whatever he doesn't like.
• Inventing your own web safe palette.
• Floyd-Steinberg fans high-fiving each other.
• Good lording all around!

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

Lords:

• Jenni does stuff at http://www.jennipolodna.com/
• Jay worked on Hypnospace Outlaw. http://www.hypnospace.net/

Topics:

• 0:38 Jay is frustrated that he learned to play the ukulele rather than any other fretted instrument.
  • (I actually meant Super Mario Bros. 3 world 1. Here are the chords: 000x 0000 0002 0000 000x 0000 0002, then barre up to 222x, etc.)
  • Somewhere Over the Rainbow ukulele cover by Israel "IZ" Kamakawiwoʻole. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1bFr2SWP1I
• 11:16 Jenni attended a Stripper Karaoke performance. https://www.devilspointbar.com/stripparaoke
  • A dial tone is 350hz and 440hz, very close to F4 and A4.
• 19:26 Jim discovers how to make spaghetti edible.
  • The only evidence I could find that Japanese alphabet soup might exist: https://i.imgur.com/tDWu43P.png
• 22:44 There are no yeasty donuts in Germany, only cake donuts.
  • London cab drivers need to memorize the entire city: https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/10/21/450235327/londons-cabbies-say-the-knowledge-is-better-than-uber-and-a-gps
• 31:02 Jenni discovers how to make chicken wings edible
  • Pad thai was standardized by the Thailand government as the official Thai dish for westerners: https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/food-drink/article/3007657/history-pad-thai-how-stir-fried-noodle-dish-was-invented-thai
• 45:43 Jim talks about fixing a wet phone
  • TekDry possibly saved my phone: https://www.tekdry.com/
• 49:02 Jenni figures out how many peppers is too many peppers, but the jury is still out on how many is just enough.
  • The old process for measuring scoville was to dilute it until testers said "this isn't hot" and then report the dilutedness. Now they use science. https://www.thespruceeats.com/hot-chile-peppers-scoville-scale-1807552

Microtopics:

• Not remembering the name of your own show.
• Cursing oneself by learning the wrong skill.
• Looking like a huge lumberjack playing a tiny instrument.
• Enjoying music wrong.
• Never asking for advice because you know people will tell you it's a bad idea.
• The mythical non-portable ukulele.
• Confusing Prog Rock and Prague Rock.
• Punting a conversation to later because you can't brain right now.
• Off-season Cirque du Soleil performers normalizing strip club culture.
• Having just the right stripping outfit for someone's karaoke choice.
• Why singing for the Rock Band high score doesn't sound like good singing.
• Waking up your partner to join your loud video game.
• Calling your partner to ask to make a dial tone together.
• Everyone agreeing on the worst pasta shape.
• Getting into a spaghetti situation.
• Inventing short spaghetti.
• Earning your satiation with the gamer's pasta.
• Soup screaming at you if it doesn't like you.
• Figuring out how to type during a podcast.
• Donuts being slightly shiny to fool you.
• Germans presenting Americans with fake donuts to collect their tears.
• Swimming the English Channel in hopes that they have real donuts there.
• Memorizing every street in London because cab drivers aren't allowed to use Mapquest.
• Not feeling like any more of a monster than usual.
• Eating a taco above another taco to grow its powers.
• Taco Bell provocateurs rewriting history.
• Going to a sushi restaurant when you don't like fish.
• Insisting your wife only speak to you in German.
• Not learning the local language because watching Netflix is easier.
• Impressing people by setting the bar extremely low.
• Being the only adult at the kid's table.
• Dropping your phone in a freshwater vs. a saltwater toilet.
• Using magical beams to get the water out.
• Apologizing for your router.
• The clerk knowing you eat Hot Cheetos just by looking at you.
• Shaming customers into ordering the mild.
• Moving to a country where everyone else is as spice-intolerant as you are.
• Confusing being spicy and being spicy.
• Tactically voting each other off the podcast.

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