web01.fireside.fm Wed, 15 Apr 2026 01:54:16 -0500 Fireside (https://fireside.fm) Topic Lords - Episodes Tagged with “Jp” https://topiclords.com/tags/jp Mon, 11 Aug 2025 00:00:00 -0700 Every week, Jim invites different friends to guest on Topic Lords and be excited about whatever they've been fixated on this week. en-us episodic The only place on the internet you can hear topics discussed! Jim Stormdancer Every week, Jim invites different friends to guest on Topic Lords and be excited about whatever they've been fixated on this week. yes Jim Stormdancer jim@goombas.org 303. A System of People Doing Stuff and Being Weirdos https://topiclords.com/a-system-of-people-doing-stuff-and-being-weirdos c514abe3-ee04-4a08-9f5f-3a4fd47bde31 Mon, 11 Aug 2025 00:00:00 -0700 Jim Stormdancer full Jim Stormdancer Lords: JP and Styger. We discuss the nature of Mario vs. Super Mario, Hot Defensive Bee Ball, solving all 25 million 5x5 nonograms, Poem Seen in a Motel Fan by Alberto Blanco, werecreature logistics, and The Ball is Back. 1:06:04 yes Lords: * JP * https://jplebreton.com/ * Styger * https://www.sf.gov/readysf Topics: * Is "Non-Super" Mario an alternate state of consciousness or identity, or merely an alternate physical state? * "Hot defensive bee ball" + bees in general * Solving all 24,976,511 5x5 nonograms * https://pixelogic.app/every-5x5-nonogram * Poem Seen in a Motel Fan by Alberto Blanco * https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/-_x1pv5l.jpg * Werecreature logistics * "The Ball is Back." Discuss. Microtopics: * The World of Video Games * Your favorite granola coming back in stock. * Working to make the world a slightly better place every day. * Weird frustrating tethering. * Levels that are about hauling ass. * Being on the same train as someone for a few stops. * The small version of yourself that you become when you lose your mushroom. * Whether Small Mario has access to all of Super Mario's memories. * What was the authorial intent of Alice growing bigger and smaller. * Whether Small or Big Mario is the original default. * Mario accumulating power and becoming an enormous hulking beast. * Designing a level to support multiple player scales. * Game series that have been both 2D and 3D platformers. * Small Mario eating a mushroom and teleporting into a pocket dimension, swapping in Big Mario. * Japanese hornets in an evolutionary arms race with Japanese honey bees. * Bees forming a tight clump around a hive invader to make them uncomfortably warm. * A baseball sized mass of bees smothering a huge horrible wasp. * Touring beehives and giving seminars about the hot defensive bee ball. * A multi-disciplinary bullshit operation. * Enjoying your job. * The degree to which they waggle. * Bees having a dance-off to determine where to live. * Extending the bee dance language to teach them orbital dynamics so they can find pollen sources in space. * Candy that smells like a bee alarm pheromone. * The NPC in Curse of Monkey Island who explains that merengue is made of eggs. * What they call being "slashdotted" nowadays. * Doing 15 puzzles and taking satisfaction in being 15 puzzles closer to not being able to play this game any more. * Web sites: they shouldn't scale. * Putting every 5x5 nonogram in the Library of Congress. * Humanity dedicating all of its resources to solve every 6x6 nonogram. * The 100 people in the world whose brains are tricked by this kind of fake work. * The most interesting three-digit numbers. * What happens when we run out of nonograms?? * The kayfabe of the community doing every 5x5 nonogram over and over again * A convex mirror, a fisheye, a golden dome. * Taking comfort in the continued existence of observers. * Having all the resources to grow as a person but none of the incentives. * Your little chunk of humanity's future. * Things can get better but also they can get worse. * The City Lights Pocket Poets Anthology, 60th Anniversary Edition. * The official City Lights typeface. * A dignified serif. * A poem is when you do something interesting with typefaces. * How to distribute your poem that does something interesting with fonts. * Lycanthropy booths and other werewolf accommodations. * It's not a disability but they still accommodate you. * Seasonal Mania. * Humans brains being affected by the sun and moon in ways we don't fully understand. * Hospital intake numbers that correlate with the lunar cycle. * What's the deal with the ball being back? * A flying silver ball that sucks your brains out with a fork. * Doing what you do just because. * The ball: it has to be back. * Watching an 80s horror movie and thinking "surely someone has made a Doom level of this" * Inventing perfectly mirrored silver spheres entirely independently from ray tracers. * Reporting back when you are further along on your Phantasm journey. * Not being on the Internet because you're hanging out with the bees instead. Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The World of Video Games
  • Your favorite granola coming back in stock.
  • Working to make the world a slightly better place every day.
  • Weird frustrating tethering.
  • Levels that are about hauling ass.
  • Being on the same train as someone for a few stops.
  • The small version of yourself that you become when you lose your mushroom.
  • Whether Small Mario has access to all of Super Mario's memories.
  • What was the authorial intent of Alice growing bigger and smaller.
  • Whether Small or Big Mario is the original default.
  • Mario accumulating power and becoming an enormous hulking beast.
  • Designing a level to support multiple player scales.
  • Game series that have been both 2D and 3D platformers.
  • Small Mario eating a mushroom and teleporting into a pocket dimension, swapping in Big Mario.
  • Japanese hornets in an evolutionary arms race with Japanese honey bees.
  • Bees forming a tight clump around a hive invader to make them uncomfortably warm.
  • A baseball sized mass of bees smothering a huge horrible wasp.
  • Touring beehives and giving seminars about the hot defensive bee ball.
  • A multi-disciplinary bullshit operation.
  • Enjoying your job.
  • The degree to which they waggle.
  • Bees having a dance-off to determine where to live.
  • Extending the bee dance language to teach them orbital dynamics so they can find pollen sources in space.
  • Candy that smells like a bee alarm pheromone.
  • The NPC in Curse of Monkey Island who explains that merengue is made of eggs.
  • What they call being "slashdotted" nowadays.
  • Doing 15 puzzles and taking satisfaction in being 15 puzzles closer to not being able to play this game any more.
  • Web sites: they shouldn't scale.
  • Putting every 5x5 nonogram in the Library of Congress.
  • Humanity dedicating all of its resources to solve every 6x6 nonogram.
  • The 100 people in the world whose brains are tricked by this kind of fake work.
  • The most interesting three-digit numbers.
  • What happens when we run out of nonograms??
  • The kayfabe of the community doing every 5x5 nonogram over and over again
  • A convex mirror, a fisheye, a golden dome.
  • Taking comfort in the continued existence of observers.
  • Having all the resources to grow as a person but none of the incentives.
  • Your little chunk of humanity's future.
  • Things can get better but also they can get worse.
  • The City Lights Pocket Poets Anthology, 60th Anniversary Edition.
  • The official City Lights typeface.
  • A dignified serif.
  • A poem is when you do something interesting with typefaces.
  • How to distribute your poem that does something interesting with fonts.
  • Lycanthropy booths and other werewolf accommodations.
  • It's not a disability but they still accommodate you.
  • Seasonal Mania.
  • Humans brains being affected by the sun and moon in ways we don't fully understand.
  • Hospital intake numbers that correlate with the lunar cycle.
  • What's the deal with the ball being back?
  • A flying silver ball that sucks your brains out with a fork.
  • Doing what you do just because.
  • The ball: it has to be back.
  • Watching an 80s horror movie and thinking "surely someone has made a Doom level of this"
  • Inventing perfectly mirrored silver spheres entirely independently from ray tracers.
  • Reporting back when you are further along on your Phantasm journey.
  • Not being on the Internet because you're hanging out with the bees instead.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • The World of Video Games
  • Your favorite granola coming back in stock.
  • Working to make the world a slightly better place every day.
  • Weird frustrating tethering.
  • Levels that are about hauling ass.
  • Being on the same train as someone for a few stops.
  • The small version of yourself that you become when you lose your mushroom.
  • Whether Small Mario has access to all of Super Mario's memories.
  • What was the authorial intent of Alice growing bigger and smaller.
  • Whether Small or Big Mario is the original default.
  • Mario accumulating power and becoming an enormous hulking beast.
  • Designing a level to support multiple player scales.
  • Game series that have been both 2D and 3D platformers.
  • Small Mario eating a mushroom and teleporting into a pocket dimension, swapping in Big Mario.
  • Japanese hornets in an evolutionary arms race with Japanese honey bees.
  • Bees forming a tight clump around a hive invader to make them uncomfortably warm.
  • A baseball sized mass of bees smothering a huge horrible wasp.
  • Touring beehives and giving seminars about the hot defensive bee ball.
  • A multi-disciplinary bullshit operation.
  • Enjoying your job.
  • The degree to which they waggle.
  • Bees having a dance-off to determine where to live.
  • Extending the bee dance language to teach them orbital dynamics so they can find pollen sources in space.
  • Candy that smells like a bee alarm pheromone.
  • The NPC in Curse of Monkey Island who explains that merengue is made of eggs.
  • What they call being "slashdotted" nowadays.
  • Doing 15 puzzles and taking satisfaction in being 15 puzzles closer to not being able to play this game any more.
  • Web sites: they shouldn't scale.
  • Putting every 5x5 nonogram in the Library of Congress.
  • Humanity dedicating all of its resources to solve every 6x6 nonogram.
  • The 100 people in the world whose brains are tricked by this kind of fake work.
  • The most interesting three-digit numbers.
  • What happens when we run out of nonograms??
  • The kayfabe of the community doing every 5x5 nonogram over and over again
  • A convex mirror, a fisheye, a golden dome.
  • Taking comfort in the continued existence of observers.
  • Having all the resources to grow as a person but none of the incentives.
  • Your little chunk of humanity's future.
  • Things can get better but also they can get worse.
  • The City Lights Pocket Poets Anthology, 60th Anniversary Edition.
  • The official City Lights typeface.
  • A dignified serif.
  • A poem is when you do something interesting with typefaces.
  • How to distribute your poem that does something interesting with fonts.
  • Lycanthropy booths and other werewolf accommodations.
  • It's not a disability but they still accommodate you.
  • Seasonal Mania.
  • Humans brains being affected by the sun and moon in ways we don't fully understand.
  • Hospital intake numbers that correlate with the lunar cycle.
  • What's the deal with the ball being back?
  • A flying silver ball that sucks your brains out with a fork.
  • Doing what you do just because.
  • The ball: it has to be back.
  • Watching an 80s horror movie and thinking "surely someone has made a Doom level of this"
  • Inventing perfectly mirrored silver spheres entirely independently from ray tracers.
  • Reporting back when you are further along on your Phantasm journey.
  • Not being on the Internet because you're hanging out with the bees instead.

Support Topic Lords

]]> 242. Malware for Labyrinths https://topiclords.com/malware-for-labyrinths 1e69d7f9-e4ae-4afc-a779-cf73d4b4a854 Mon, 10 Jun 2024 00:00:00 -0700 Jim Stormdancer full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Maxx and JP. We discuss different kinds of "changing your mind" in creative work, what texture clouds are, Infinity Island, Sleep by Jorge Luis Borges, and Chippendale Mupps and the slowest nerves. 1:06:14 yes Lords: * Maxx * JP Topics: * The different kinds of "changing your mind" in creative work * What texture did you think clouds were as a kid? * Infinity Island * Sleep, by Jorge Luis Borges * https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=38645 * Chippendale Mupps and the slowest nerves Microtopics: * Knowing the names of zero outdoor cats in your neighborhood. * Canny outdoor cats who are adapted to city life and don't need your plugs. * Obi like the belt or like the Star Wars guy? * Loosey goosey versions * Changing your mind while making a creative work. * Moving a door or a window in an existing wall. * Bigger creative decisions being composed of many smaller creative decisions. * Retaining maximum flexibility at every point in the process. * A workflow that reflects the spectrum of flexibility. * Flexibility Lost is Sturdiness Gained. * Tweaking the value of pi to suit your needs. * A system where a bunch of things depend on a bunch of other things. * Axes of flexibility that you don't end up using. * More specific categories of types of changing your mind. * Going down a deep dark hole and finding the glittering prize but not being sure whether it's worth anything. * A loop that spirals, oscillating, into the middle. * Putting a branch into a meditation labyrinth and changing its theological meaning. * Rewriting your novel in second person, present tense, just to see how it feels. * The Citation Needed guy doubting that mazes can be built with snow. * The ongoing Corn vs. Maize Wikipedia war. * The marine layer rolling in. * Looking at clouds and totally seeing the ice cream. * Buying aerogel samples on eBay. * What stuffed animals are stuffed with. * Going to the sky island and it's sort of rubbery. * Walkable clouds in the Mario series. * Cloudjacking. * Yanking Lakitu out onto the pavement and going on a joyride until the LoJack system kicks in. * Super Mario Bros. redubbed with Quake and Half-Life sounds. * Super Mario Bros. Next Gen AAA * What clouds taste like. * Fizzy Lifting Drinks. * The soda with the glass ball. * Ordering something red hoping for cherry, watermelon or strawberry flavor, but it's cinnamon flavored. * Eating Red Hots for the first time and realizing you've been Halloween poisoned. * Your first bitey cinnamon food. * A little poison, as a treat. * Filling your mouth with tree bark. * Games with saved progress feeling like you're participating in a responsible activity than games where you start over every time. * Deliberate mechanical whimsy. * Making a complicated game and failing to teach the player how to play it. * For a Change, by Dan Schmidt. * An infinite variety of forms of confusion. * Playing Frog Fractions all the way through and being like "what twist??" * Why Jorge Luis Borges gets annoyed when people wake him up. * Semi-routinely yelling in your sleep. * Being asleep is the inside time. * Citing Borges as a vibe. * A mid-pod plug. * The works of Ted Chiang. * Internalizing the idea that you need sleep to function. * Stepping stones of self-reflection. * Waking up feeling the vague sensations of having dreamt. * Sleeping with your eyes open. * Integration of your environment into your dreams. * Biting your tail before you go to sleep and not feeling it until you wake up. * Putting keys in your toast. * Repurposing the Chippendale Mupp's nervous system to make a vintage delay pedal. * Esports competitors putting the left mouse button between their teeth to improve reaction time, because it's closer to the brain. * Brains evolving to process whatever whenever and assembling the timeline later. * Kuratas Heavy Industries. * Smiling to fire the heavy machine guns. * Gripens. * Subway ads exhorting Maximum Lethality! * The airport nearest to all of the oil fields in the Permean Basin. * Billboards for enterprise services. * Wasting eyeballs. * A couple of active web presences. Lords:

  • Maxx
  • JP

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Knowing the names of zero outdoor cats in your neighborhood.
  • Canny outdoor cats who are adapted to city life and don't need your plugs.
  • Obi like the belt or like the Star Wars guy?
  • Loosey goosey versions
  • Changing your mind while making a creative work.
  • Moving a door or a window in an existing wall.
  • Bigger creative decisions being composed of many smaller creative decisions.
  • Retaining maximum flexibility at every point in the process.
  • A workflow that reflects the spectrum of flexibility.
  • Flexibility Lost is Sturdiness Gained.
  • Tweaking the value of pi to suit your needs.
  • A system where a bunch of things depend on a bunch of other things.
  • Axes of flexibility that you don't end up using.
  • More specific categories of types of changing your mind.
  • Going down a deep dark hole and finding the glittering prize but not being sure whether it's worth anything.
  • A loop that spirals, oscillating, into the middle.
  • Putting a branch into a meditation labyrinth and changing its theological meaning.
  • Rewriting your novel in second person, present tense, just to see how it feels.
  • The Citation Needed guy doubting that mazes can be built with snow.
  • The ongoing Corn vs. Maize Wikipedia war.
  • The marine layer rolling in.
  • Looking at clouds and totally seeing the ice cream.
  • Buying aerogel samples on eBay.
  • What stuffed animals are stuffed with.
  • Going to the sky island and it's sort of rubbery.
  • Walkable clouds in the Mario series.
  • Cloudjacking.
  • Yanking Lakitu out onto the pavement and going on a joyride until the LoJack system kicks in.
  • Super Mario Bros. redubbed with Quake and Half-Life sounds.
  • Super Mario Bros. Next Gen AAA
  • What clouds taste like.
  • Fizzy Lifting Drinks.
  • The soda with the glass ball.
  • Ordering something red hoping for cherry, watermelon or strawberry flavor, but it's cinnamon flavored.
  • Eating Red Hots for the first time and realizing you've been Halloween poisoned.
  • Your first bitey cinnamon food.
  • A little poison, as a treat.
  • Filling your mouth with tree bark.
  • Games with saved progress feeling like you're participating in a responsible activity than games where you start over every time.
  • Deliberate mechanical whimsy.
  • Making a complicated game and failing to teach the player how to play it.
  • For a Change, by Dan Schmidt.
  • An infinite variety of forms of confusion.
  • Playing Frog Fractions all the way through and being like "what twist??"
  • Why Jorge Luis Borges gets annoyed when people wake him up.
  • Semi-routinely yelling in your sleep.
  • Being asleep is the inside time.
  • Citing Borges as a vibe.
  • A mid-pod plug.
  • The works of Ted Chiang.
  • Internalizing the idea that you need sleep to function.
  • Stepping stones of self-reflection.
  • Waking up feeling the vague sensations of having dreamt.
  • Sleeping with your eyes open.
  • Integration of your environment into your dreams.
  • Biting your tail before you go to sleep and not feeling it until you wake up.
  • Putting keys in your toast.
  • Repurposing the Chippendale Mupp's nervous system to make a vintage delay pedal.
  • Esports competitors putting the left mouse button between their teeth to improve reaction time, because it's closer to the brain.
  • Brains evolving to process whatever whenever and assembling the timeline later.
  • Kuratas Heavy Industries.
  • Smiling to fire the heavy machine guns.
  • Gripens.
  • Subway ads exhorting Maximum Lethality!
  • The airport nearest to all of the oil fields in the Permean Basin.
  • Billboards for enterprise services.
  • Wasting eyeballs.
  • A couple of active web presences.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • Maxx
  • JP

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Knowing the names of zero outdoor cats in your neighborhood.
  • Canny outdoor cats who are adapted to city life and don't need your plugs.
  • Obi like the belt or like the Star Wars guy?
  • Loosey goosey versions
  • Changing your mind while making a creative work.
  • Moving a door or a window in an existing wall.
  • Bigger creative decisions being composed of many smaller creative decisions.
  • Retaining maximum flexibility at every point in the process.
  • A workflow that reflects the spectrum of flexibility.
  • Flexibility Lost is Sturdiness Gained.
  • Tweaking the value of pi to suit your needs.
  • A system where a bunch of things depend on a bunch of other things.
  • Axes of flexibility that you don't end up using.
  • More specific categories of types of changing your mind.
  • Going down a deep dark hole and finding the glittering prize but not being sure whether it's worth anything.
  • A loop that spirals, oscillating, into the middle.
  • Putting a branch into a meditation labyrinth and changing its theological meaning.
  • Rewriting your novel in second person, present tense, just to see how it feels.
  • The Citation Needed guy doubting that mazes can be built with snow.
  • The ongoing Corn vs. Maize Wikipedia war.
  • The marine layer rolling in.
  • Looking at clouds and totally seeing the ice cream.
  • Buying aerogel samples on eBay.
  • What stuffed animals are stuffed with.
  • Going to the sky island and it's sort of rubbery.
  • Walkable clouds in the Mario series.
  • Cloudjacking.
  • Yanking Lakitu out onto the pavement and going on a joyride until the LoJack system kicks in.
  • Super Mario Bros. redubbed with Quake and Half-Life sounds.
  • Super Mario Bros. Next Gen AAA
  • What clouds taste like.
  • Fizzy Lifting Drinks.
  • The soda with the glass ball.
  • Ordering something red hoping for cherry, watermelon or strawberry flavor, but it's cinnamon flavored.
  • Eating Red Hots for the first time and realizing you've been Halloween poisoned.
  • Your first bitey cinnamon food.
  • A little poison, as a treat.
  • Filling your mouth with tree bark.
  • Games with saved progress feeling like you're participating in a responsible activity than games where you start over every time.
  • Deliberate mechanical whimsy.
  • Making a complicated game and failing to teach the player how to play it.
  • For a Change, by Dan Schmidt.
  • An infinite variety of forms of confusion.
  • Playing Frog Fractions all the way through and being like "what twist??"
  • Why Jorge Luis Borges gets annoyed when people wake him up.
  • Semi-routinely yelling in your sleep.
  • Being asleep is the inside time.
  • Citing Borges as a vibe.
  • A mid-pod plug.
  • The works of Ted Chiang.
  • Internalizing the idea that you need sleep to function.
  • Stepping stones of self-reflection.
  • Waking up feeling the vague sensations of having dreamt.
  • Sleeping with your eyes open.
  • Integration of your environment into your dreams.
  • Biting your tail before you go to sleep and not feeling it until you wake up.
  • Putting keys in your toast.
  • Repurposing the Chippendale Mupp's nervous system to make a vintage delay pedal.
  • Esports competitors putting the left mouse button between their teeth to improve reaction time, because it's closer to the brain.
  • Brains evolving to process whatever whenever and assembling the timeline later.
  • Kuratas Heavy Industries.
  • Smiling to fire the heavy machine guns.
  • Gripens.
  • Subway ads exhorting Maximum Lethality!
  • The airport nearest to all of the oil fields in the Permean Basin.
  • Billboards for enterprise services.
  • Wasting eyeballs.
  • A couple of active web presences.

Support Topic Lords

]]> 240. Who Was Emily Dickinson Owning? https://topiclords.com/who-was-emily-dickinson-owning 2b07c29c-88b1-4b58-aabe-2cdab8d0b2c2 Mon, 27 May 2024 00:00:00 -0700 Jim Stormdancer full Jim Stormdancer Lords: JP and Shepard. We discuss Microsoft adding a good feature to Office, favorite DOS game soundtracks, the Balatro Discourse, and Faith is a Fine Invention by Emily Dickinson 1:00:50 yes Lords: * JP * Shepard Topics: * Damn it, Microsoft added something worthwhile to Office. * Favorite DOS game soundtracks? * The Balatro Discourse * Faith is a Fine Invention, by Emily Dickinson * https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/faith-is-a-fine-invention/ Microtopics: * Artist Alley. * Scrolling down a web page and seeing a bunch of cool stuff. * Seeing a list and wondering "how did this list happen"? * Steam Farming Fest. * Trying to figure out what you want to do when you grow up. * Eating eggs and rice when you have tummy troubles. * The file you all edit to make the deposit slip. * Taking data from multiple columns and putting them all in a single list. * Becoming the spreadsheet wizard. * Installation wizards. * Why nobody calls a software feature a "wizard" any more * A window into the dialectic of wizards. * The LLM hype tornado. * Renting video software from Blockbuster. * Back when any media was a "tape" * Enumerating the kinds of MS-DOS audio hardware. * Emitting a blast of data. * Enjoying a video game in 4, 16 or 256 colors. * How Doom sounded on the internal PC speaker. * Playing multiplayer Doom on a four computer LAN where two of the computers don't have sound cards. * The Doom source port family tree. * Whether Linux supported the internal PC speaker. * Playing each MIDI note with the off-the-track square wave. * Holding on to a joke for several minutes. * Doing sound effects via the Roland MT-32. * FM synth guitars sounding more evil than real guitars. * Synthesizers that are fancier than other synthesizers and are therefore better. * The ambient music on the Doom soundtrack. * The Lost Vikings soundtrack. * Games with tracker soundtracks. * The tracker music era. * A roguelike deck builder kind of a thing. * A huge hit within your social horizon. * Beginners hoping to project intelligence and competence. * The kind of mixing of data and code that Lua makes easy to do. * How to deploy a Love2D game to consoles. * A cool game idea that's just a bunch of cards doing stuff. * Sean Barrett's STB libraries. * The ability to change your mind without having to throw away a bunch of work. * Ambient complexity vs. intrinsic complexity. * Hot takes escaping containment. * The Celeste character controller. * Software security practices that do not apply to a single player indie game. * Looking at code and seeing all the things that it used to be. * Looking at code solving a problem in a domain you are unfamiliar with. * An Emily Dickinson poem that reads like a response to an argument she had at dinner. * Situations where you can directly observe what's happening. * All the filters preventing you from bursting out into song. * Esprit de escalier. * Who was Emily Dickinson owning? * A contempt for faith and a sense that microscopes are good. * Knowing that nobody reads your blog, but taking satisfaction in the knowledge that someone hypothetically could. * Excavating spiritual truth from apocryphal ramblings. * The app that holds all the texts you don't send for ransom. * Digging through people's trash but with fewer steps. Lords:

  • JP
  • Shepard

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Artist Alley.
  • Scrolling down a web page and seeing a bunch of cool stuff.
  • Seeing a list and wondering "how did this list happen"?
  • Steam Farming Fest.
  • Trying to figure out what you want to do when you grow up.
  • Eating eggs and rice when you have tummy troubles.
  • The file you all edit to make the deposit slip.
  • Taking data from multiple columns and putting them all in a single list.
  • Becoming the spreadsheet wizard.
  • Installation wizards.
  • Why nobody calls a software feature a "wizard" any more
  • A window into the dialectic of wizards.
  • The LLM hype tornado.
  • Renting video software from Blockbuster.
  • Back when any media was a "tape"
  • Enumerating the kinds of MS-DOS audio hardware.
  • Emitting a blast of data.
  • Enjoying a video game in 4, 16 or 256 colors.
  • How Doom sounded on the internal PC speaker.
  • Playing multiplayer Doom on a four computer LAN where two of the computers don't have sound cards.
  • The Doom source port family tree.
  • Whether Linux supported the internal PC speaker.
  • Playing each MIDI note with the off-the-track square wave.
  • Holding on to a joke for several minutes.
  • Doing sound effects via the Roland MT-32.
  • FM synth guitars sounding more evil than real guitars.
  • Synthesizers that are fancier than other synthesizers and are therefore better.
  • The ambient music on the Doom soundtrack.
  • The Lost Vikings soundtrack.
  • Games with tracker soundtracks.
  • The tracker music era.
  • A roguelike deck builder kind of a thing.
  • A huge hit within your social horizon.
  • Beginners hoping to project intelligence and competence.
  • The kind of mixing of data and code that Lua makes easy to do.
  • How to deploy a Love2D game to consoles.
  • A cool game idea that's just a bunch of cards doing stuff.
  • Sean Barrett's STB libraries.
  • The ability to change your mind without having to throw away a bunch of work.
  • Ambient complexity vs. intrinsic complexity.
  • Hot takes escaping containment.
  • The Celeste character controller.
  • Software security practices that do not apply to a single player indie game.
  • Looking at code and seeing all the things that it used to be.
  • Looking at code solving a problem in a domain you are unfamiliar with.
  • An Emily Dickinson poem that reads like a response to an argument she had at dinner.
  • Situations where you can directly observe what's happening.
  • All the filters preventing you from bursting out into song.
  • Esprit de escalier.
  • Who was Emily Dickinson owning?
  • A contempt for faith and a sense that microscopes are good.
  • Knowing that nobody reads your blog, but taking satisfaction in the knowledge that someone hypothetically could.
  • Excavating spiritual truth from apocryphal ramblings.
  • The app that holds all the texts you don't send for ransom.
  • Digging through people's trash but with fewer steps.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • JP
  • Shepard

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Artist Alley.
  • Scrolling down a web page and seeing a bunch of cool stuff.
  • Seeing a list and wondering "how did this list happen"?
  • Steam Farming Fest.
  • Trying to figure out what you want to do when you grow up.
  • Eating eggs and rice when you have tummy troubles.
  • The file you all edit to make the deposit slip.
  • Taking data from multiple columns and putting them all in a single list.
  • Becoming the spreadsheet wizard.
  • Installation wizards.
  • Why nobody calls a software feature a "wizard" any more
  • A window into the dialectic of wizards.
  • The LLM hype tornado.
  • Renting video software from Blockbuster.
  • Back when any media was a "tape"
  • Enumerating the kinds of MS-DOS audio hardware.
  • Emitting a blast of data.
  • Enjoying a video game in 4, 16 or 256 colors.
  • How Doom sounded on the internal PC speaker.
  • Playing multiplayer Doom on a four computer LAN where two of the computers don't have sound cards.
  • The Doom source port family tree.
  • Whether Linux supported the internal PC speaker.
  • Playing each MIDI note with the off-the-track square wave.
  • Holding on to a joke for several minutes.
  • Doing sound effects via the Roland MT-32.
  • FM synth guitars sounding more evil than real guitars.
  • Synthesizers that are fancier than other synthesizers and are therefore better.
  • The ambient music on the Doom soundtrack.
  • The Lost Vikings soundtrack.
  • Games with tracker soundtracks.
  • The tracker music era.
  • A roguelike deck builder kind of a thing.
  • A huge hit within your social horizon.
  • Beginners hoping to project intelligence and competence.
  • The kind of mixing of data and code that Lua makes easy to do.
  • How to deploy a Love2D game to consoles.
  • A cool game idea that's just a bunch of cards doing stuff.
  • Sean Barrett's STB libraries.
  • The ability to change your mind without having to throw away a bunch of work.
  • Ambient complexity vs. intrinsic complexity.
  • Hot takes escaping containment.
  • The Celeste character controller.
  • Software security practices that do not apply to a single player indie game.
  • Looking at code and seeing all the things that it used to be.
  • Looking at code solving a problem in a domain you are unfamiliar with.
  • An Emily Dickinson poem that reads like a response to an argument she had at dinner.
  • Situations where you can directly observe what's happening.
  • All the filters preventing you from bursting out into song.
  • Esprit de escalier.
  • Who was Emily Dickinson owning?
  • A contempt for faith and a sense that microscopes are good.
  • Knowing that nobody reads your blog, but taking satisfaction in the knowledge that someone hypothetically could.
  • Excavating spiritual truth from apocryphal ramblings.
  • The app that holds all the texts you don't send for ransom.
  • Digging through people's trash but with fewer steps.

Support Topic Lords

]]> 206. Waiting Around for Laundry To Be Invented https://topiclords.com/waiting-around-for-laundry-to-be-invented f7c88162-9481-41d2-b6e9-1ddd2d777d39 Mon, 02 Oct 2023 00:00:00 -0700 Jim Stormdancer full Jim Stormdancer Lords: JP and Styger. We discuss Super Mario Bros. Wonder, souls departing, using a spacer with inhalers, revisiting the Cosmic Crisp, how to learn to play piano, and teaching our children to pirate. 1:21:40 yes Lords: * JP * Styger Topics: * Wouldn't mind hearing Jim's thoughts on the recent Super Mario Bros Wonder video * Souls departing / cartoon ghosts * You're supposed to use a "spacer" with inhalers now * Probably not a full topic but I finally ate that apple I was hyped for in my fist Topic Lords appearance * Questions for a more experienced musician about learning to play piano + songwriting * How do we teach our children to pirate? Microtopics: * The flu shot. * Your TV patching itself. * Going wading in a bog until laundry is invented. * Dying of smoke inhalation until someone invents the chimney. * A topic for Jim. * Soliciting Mario opinions. * Murdering an 80s kid with Mario footage. * Squat anime Link. * Mario with a grappling hook. * Mario with asynchronous co-op partners. * The new Mario game bringing the real freak shit. * Developer quality of life. * The unfortunate mythology of the industry. * Getting to the moon more sustainably. * Mike Mika's Donkey Kong gender swap mod. * Big globs of ragu flying out of rotoscoped pixel men. * The evolutionary dynamic range of AAA games. * The boringness of violence. * Realistic present day modern warfare. * Making garbage that makes the world worse forever. * Wanting to see your medium grow. * A puzzle platformer using a first person shooter interface. * Reaching a little bit for a different thing. * Dealing a little bit of damage to a wall. * A door turning a corpse into a squished blood paste sprite. * Pikmin 3 as the most honest war game. * No Dead Pikmin Speed Run. * Getting more stuff back to your onion. * Revisiting game mechanics from throughout the series. * Outgrowing your childhood diseases. * A big plastic cylinder the size of a breath. * Audio iconography saying "look at this dickhead" * A bong for your inhaler. * All the surfaces between the air and your bronchial tubes. * A major change in inhaler technology. * Putting a bunch of programmer time into making conference calls sound good. * Respironix Optichamber Diamond. * Algorithms to cancel out the Mentos Jingle. * Finally trying the new apple varietal on your birthday. * Haphazard produce sections. * Heapsorting apples. * This apple is going to make you its bitch. * Bad mealy apples in the 80s. * Banana lore. * As Seen In Snopes: Verified Not Bullshit Fruit. * Getting the gist of a song and being able to do your own thing with it. * Making noises that sound like nice music. * Learning to play guitar while waiting for your maps to compile. * Edly's Music Theory for Practical People. * Learning to which suspicious-looking websites to trust. * The Golden Age of Scams. * oldversion.com * Spiffy new Windows NT computers. * Streaming services that you refuse to give money to. * Doers of Game Piracy. * Public opinion turning on piracy and copyright. * Information literacy. * The surviving websites where you don't mind being found. Lords:

  • JP
  • Styger

Topics:

  • Wouldn't mind hearing Jim's thoughts on the recent Super Mario Bros Wonder video
  • Souls departing / cartoon ghosts
  • You're supposed to use a "spacer" with inhalers now
  • Probably not a full topic but I finally ate that apple I was hyped for in my fist Topic Lords appearance
  • Questions for a more experienced musician about learning to play piano + songwriting
  • How do we teach our children to pirate?

Microtopics:

  • The flu shot.
  • Your TV patching itself.
  • Going wading in a bog until laundry is invented.
  • Dying of smoke inhalation until someone invents the chimney.
  • A topic for Jim.
  • Soliciting Mario opinions.
  • Murdering an 80s kid with Mario footage.
  • Squat anime Link.
  • Mario with a grappling hook.
  • Mario with asynchronous co-op partners.
  • The new Mario game bringing the real freak shit.
  • Developer quality of life.
  • The unfortunate mythology of the industry.
  • Getting to the moon more sustainably.
  • Mike Mika's Donkey Kong gender swap mod.
  • Big globs of ragu flying out of rotoscoped pixel men.
  • The evolutionary dynamic range of AAA games.
  • The boringness of violence.
  • Realistic present day modern warfare.
  • Making garbage that makes the world worse forever.
  • Wanting to see your medium grow.
  • A puzzle platformer using a first person shooter interface.
  • Reaching a little bit for a different thing.
  • Dealing a little bit of damage to a wall.
  • A door turning a corpse into a squished blood paste sprite.
  • Pikmin 3 as the most honest war game.
  • No Dead Pikmin Speed Run.
  • Getting more stuff back to your onion.
  • Revisiting game mechanics from throughout the series.
  • Outgrowing your childhood diseases.
  • A big plastic cylinder the size of a breath.
  • Audio iconography saying "look at this dickhead"
  • A bong for your inhaler.
  • All the surfaces between the air and your bronchial tubes.
  • A major change in inhaler technology.
  • Putting a bunch of programmer time into making conference calls sound good.
  • Respironix Optichamber Diamond.
  • Algorithms to cancel out the Mentos Jingle.
  • Finally trying the new apple varietal on your birthday.
  • Haphazard produce sections.
  • Heapsorting apples.
  • This apple is going to make you its bitch.
  • Bad mealy apples in the 80s.
  • Banana lore.
  • As Seen In Snopes: Verified Not Bullshit Fruit.
  • Getting the gist of a song and being able to do your own thing with it.
  • Making noises that sound like nice music.
  • Learning to play guitar while waiting for your maps to compile.
  • Edly's Music Theory for Practical People.
  • Learning to which suspicious-looking websites to trust.
  • The Golden Age of Scams.
  • oldversion.com
  • Spiffy new Windows NT computers.
  • Streaming services that you refuse to give money to.
  • Doers of Game Piracy.
  • Public opinion turning on piracy and copyright.
  • Information literacy.
  • The surviving websites where you don't mind being found.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

  • JP
  • Styger

Topics:

  • Wouldn't mind hearing Jim's thoughts on the recent Super Mario Bros Wonder video
  • Souls departing / cartoon ghosts
  • You're supposed to use a "spacer" with inhalers now
  • Probably not a full topic but I finally ate that apple I was hyped for in my fist Topic Lords appearance
  • Questions for a more experienced musician about learning to play piano + songwriting
  • How do we teach our children to pirate?

Microtopics:

  • The flu shot.
  • Your TV patching itself.
  • Going wading in a bog until laundry is invented.
  • Dying of smoke inhalation until someone invents the chimney.
  • A topic for Jim.
  • Soliciting Mario opinions.
  • Murdering an 80s kid with Mario footage.
  • Squat anime Link.
  • Mario with a grappling hook.
  • Mario with asynchronous co-op partners.
  • The new Mario game bringing the real freak shit.
  • Developer quality of life.
  • The unfortunate mythology of the industry.
  • Getting to the moon more sustainably.
  • Mike Mika's Donkey Kong gender swap mod.
  • Big globs of ragu flying out of rotoscoped pixel men.
  • The evolutionary dynamic range of AAA games.
  • The boringness of violence.
  • Realistic present day modern warfare.
  • Making garbage that makes the world worse forever.
  • Wanting to see your medium grow.
  • A puzzle platformer using a first person shooter interface.
  • Reaching a little bit for a different thing.
  • Dealing a little bit of damage to a wall.
  • A door turning a corpse into a squished blood paste sprite.
  • Pikmin 3 as the most honest war game.
  • No Dead Pikmin Speed Run.
  • Getting more stuff back to your onion.
  • Revisiting game mechanics from throughout the series.
  • Outgrowing your childhood diseases.
  • A big plastic cylinder the size of a breath.
  • Audio iconography saying "look at this dickhead"
  • A bong for your inhaler.
  • All the surfaces between the air and your bronchial tubes.
  • A major change in inhaler technology.
  • Putting a bunch of programmer time into making conference calls sound good.
  • Respironix Optichamber Diamond.
  • Algorithms to cancel out the Mentos Jingle.
  • Finally trying the new apple varietal on your birthday.
  • Haphazard produce sections.
  • Heapsorting apples.
  • This apple is going to make you its bitch.
  • Bad mealy apples in the 80s.
  • Banana lore.
  • As Seen In Snopes: Verified Not Bullshit Fruit.
  • Getting the gist of a song and being able to do your own thing with it.
  • Making noises that sound like nice music.
  • Learning to play guitar while waiting for your maps to compile.
  • Edly's Music Theory for Practical People.
  • Learning to which suspicious-looking websites to trust.
  • The Golden Age of Scams.
  • oldversion.com
  • Spiffy new Windows NT computers.
  • Streaming services that you refuse to give money to.
  • Doers of Game Piracy.
  • Public opinion turning on piracy and copyright.
  • Information literacy.
  • The surviving websites where you don't mind being found.

Support Topic Lords

]]> 156. Society Is Moving in a Direction https://topiclords.com/society-is-moving-in-a-direction 35defb5a-5f80-4a99-b4e3-f8bf088a7c00 Mon, 17 Oct 2022 00:00:00 -0700 Jim Stormdancer full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Alex and JP. We discuss your gravestone audio clip, counting the beats in eenie-meenie, SoundCcan and the SoundScan Era, the scorched-earth strategy for Lowest Positive Unique Integer, and "leaving beautiful ruins" in a video game. 1:05:26 yes Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early! (https://www.patreon.com/topiclords) Lords: * Alex * https://twitter.com/alexicographic * https://www.twitch.tv/damaplaysgames/ * JP * http://vectorpoem.com/ Topics: * Your gravestone has a button people can press to play a sound clip, 10 seconds or less. It can loop or be a one-shot, your preference. What sound clip does your gravestone play? * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9u8Fd7EHYAg * Counting the beats in eenie-meenie * SoundScan and the SoundScan Era * https://www.theringer.com/music/2021/5/25/22452539/soundscan-billboard-charts-streaming-numbers * There Will Come Soft Rains * https://poets.org/poem/there-will-come-soft-rains * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThereWillComeSoftRains(shortstory) * The scorched-earth strategy for Lowest Positive Unique Integer * "Leaving beautiful ruins" in a videogame Microtopics: * A return of many-storied adventure game developers. * A point and click adventure game that changed the trajectory of your life. * Suspenders as an architectural feature. * Onesie pajamas with a trap door. * People sneaking up behind you and trying to unbutton your poop flap. * Thoughts that are meant to remain unthought. * The famous elongated "some." * A marketing executive saying "nobody will know what a 'tetralogy' is." * Whether your game studio logo has a sound. * Console startup noises. * The button your loved ones can press on your gravestone to hear the Dreamcast startup sound. * King Solomoning the gif-vs-gif debate. * The governing body that decides whether your death is cool enough to warrant a gif of your death on your tombstone. * The kind of people who gravitate to a job that rates everyone's deaths on a five-star scale. * The IP situation surrounding your gravestone's looping wav button. * Your tombstone jukebox that plays David Bowie songs when people put a quarter in and the quarters all end up in your casket and if David Bowie wants them he can damn well come and get them. * Wagering on your ability to read emergent situations. * Electric Football. * Covering a metal plate with quarters and flipping the switch that makes the plate vibrate, creating the quarter configuration for optimal money gouging. * Becoming really good at beating a rigged game. * Becoming really good at funnel cake. * Dentists not understanding the motivations people have for drinking soda. * Largest Sip. * The liminal space between a Sip and a Gulp. * Gaming the outcome in Eenie Meenie Miney Moe. * Whether Eenie Meenie Miney Moe is a solved game. * A great opportunity to practice believing the lies that we form our wesociety on. * When Billboard switched from a call-stores-and-ask data collection system to an automated system to gather song sales data, and rap and R&B suddenly started dominating the charts. * Rockists fudging the numbers. * The pros and cons of getting a Billboard Hot 100 hit. * Jukebox charts. * The Billboard Humming chart based on them listening to the songs people are humming to themselves on the street. * Who loves the radio hits that everyone you know hates? (People you don't know.) * Knowing where to stick that quarter. * White dudes making 17 minute songs. * Axis of Discourse. * A directory of mp3s in your Jellyfin server. * Napster pivoting to NFTs but nobody notices or cares. * Nostalgia for the Spanish Flu. * A giant ball of iron with life forms clinging to it. * The earth continuing to be a lump of iron no matter how badly we treat it. * Potential human extinction and whether birds would notice it. * A fully-automated human house of the near to far future. * A band of roving pranksters in the post-apocalypse who are running around transmitting bad Roomba firmware updates. * Rolling up on prom with your entourage of four Half-Life scientists and five Barneys. * Rolling up on the rap battle with your entourage of backup singer Roombas trailing behind you. * The Mad Max series as prepper porn. * A good shelf to rest on in the collective psyche. * Friend deterrent strategies. * How strategy disclosure alters the gameplay of Rock Paper Scissors. * Disclosing ahead of the game or Rock Paper Scissors that your strategy will be to punch your opponent repeatedly, and how that affects the way the game is played. * Satisfactory: an open-world factory building game. * Building your factories and then leaving them behind. * Emergent haunted houses in abandoned player-built structures in persistent-world multiplayer games. * Having an idea for a game feature and having to build the whole game to try the feature out. * Being scared of weird old crap. * Adding Pokemon to Minecraft. * The last gasp of mainstream PC gaming before phones happened. * An 11 year old game developer getting thrown into the Capitalist snake pit. * The Human Attention Zoo. * Kids (or adults) having goofs. * The Golden Age of the Moddable Game Engine. * Getting a job based on your Roblox portfolio. Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • A return of many-storied adventure game developers.
  • A point and click adventure game that changed the trajectory of your life.
  • Suspenders as an architectural feature.
  • Onesie pajamas with a trap door.
  • People sneaking up behind you and trying to unbutton your poop flap.
  • Thoughts that are meant to remain unthought.
  • The famous elongated "some."
  • A marketing executive saying "nobody will know what a 'tetralogy' is."
  • Whether your game studio logo has a sound.
  • Console startup noises.
  • The button your loved ones can press on your gravestone to hear the Dreamcast startup sound.
  • King Solomoning the gif-vs-gif debate.
  • The governing body that decides whether your death is cool enough to warrant a gif of your death on your tombstone.
  • The kind of people who gravitate to a job that rates everyone's deaths on a five-star scale.
  • The IP situation surrounding your gravestone's looping wav button.
  • Your tombstone jukebox that plays David Bowie songs when people put a quarter in and the quarters all end up in your casket and if David Bowie wants them he can damn well come and get them.
  • Wagering on your ability to read emergent situations.
  • Electric Football.
  • Covering a metal plate with quarters and flipping the switch that makes the plate vibrate, creating the quarter configuration for optimal money gouging.
  • Becoming really good at beating a rigged game.
  • Becoming really good at funnel cake.
  • Dentists not understanding the motivations people have for drinking soda.
  • Largest Sip.
  • The liminal space between a Sip and a Gulp.
  • Gaming the outcome in Eenie Meenie Miney Moe.
  • Whether Eenie Meenie Miney Moe is a solved game.
  • A great opportunity to practice believing the lies that we form our wesociety on.
  • When Billboard switched from a call-stores-and-ask data collection system to an automated system to gather song sales data, and rap and R&B suddenly started dominating the charts.
  • Rockists fudging the numbers.
  • The pros and cons of getting a Billboard Hot 100 hit.
  • Jukebox charts.
  • The Billboard Humming chart based on them listening to the songs people are humming to themselves on the street.
  • Who loves the radio hits that everyone you know hates? (People you don't know.)
  • Knowing where to stick that quarter.
  • White dudes making 17 minute songs.
  • Axis of Discourse.
  • A directory of mp3s in your Jellyfin server.
  • Napster pivoting to NFTs but nobody notices or cares.
  • Nostalgia for the Spanish Flu.
  • A giant ball of iron with life forms clinging to it.
  • The earth continuing to be a lump of iron no matter how badly we treat it.
  • Potential human extinction and whether birds would notice it.
  • A fully-automated human house of the near to far future.
  • A band of roving pranksters in the post-apocalypse who are running around transmitting bad Roomba firmware updates.
  • Rolling up on prom with your entourage of four Half-Life scientists and five Barneys.
  • Rolling up on the rap battle with your entourage of backup singer Roombas trailing behind you.
  • The Mad Max series as prepper porn.
  • A good shelf to rest on in the collective psyche.
  • Friend deterrent strategies.
  • How strategy disclosure alters the gameplay of Rock Paper Scissors.
  • Disclosing ahead of the game or Rock Paper Scissors that your strategy will be to punch your opponent repeatedly, and how that affects the way the game is played.
  • Satisfactory: an open-world factory building game.
  • Building your factories and then leaving them behind.
  • Emergent haunted houses in abandoned player-built structures in persistent-world multiplayer games.
  • Having an idea for a game feature and having to build the whole game to try the feature out.
  • Being scared of weird old crap.
  • Adding Pokemon to Minecraft.
  • The last gasp of mainstream PC gaming before phones happened.
  • An 11 year old game developer getting thrown into the Capitalist snake pit.
  • The Human Attention Zoo.
  • Kids (or adults) having goofs.
  • The Golden Age of the Moddable Game Engine.
  • Getting a job based on your Roblox portfolio.

Support Topic Lords

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

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • A return of many-storied adventure game developers.
  • A point and click adventure game that changed the trajectory of your life.
  • Suspenders as an architectural feature.
  • Onesie pajamas with a trap door.
  • People sneaking up behind you and trying to unbutton your poop flap.
  • Thoughts that are meant to remain unthought.
  • The famous elongated "some."
  • A marketing executive saying "nobody will know what a 'tetralogy' is."
  • Whether your game studio logo has a sound.
  • Console startup noises.
  • The button your loved ones can press on your gravestone to hear the Dreamcast startup sound.
  • King Solomoning the gif-vs-gif debate.
  • The governing body that decides whether your death is cool enough to warrant a gif of your death on your tombstone.
  • The kind of people who gravitate to a job that rates everyone's deaths on a five-star scale.
  • The IP situation surrounding your gravestone's looping wav button.
  • Your tombstone jukebox that plays David Bowie songs when people put a quarter in and the quarters all end up in your casket and if David Bowie wants them he can damn well come and get them.
  • Wagering on your ability to read emergent situations.
  • Electric Football.
  • Covering a metal plate with quarters and flipping the switch that makes the plate vibrate, creating the quarter configuration for optimal money gouging.
  • Becoming really good at beating a rigged game.
  • Becoming really good at funnel cake.
  • Dentists not understanding the motivations people have for drinking soda.
  • Largest Sip.
  • The liminal space between a Sip and a Gulp.
  • Gaming the outcome in Eenie Meenie Miney Moe.
  • Whether Eenie Meenie Miney Moe is a solved game.
  • A great opportunity to practice believing the lies that we form our wesociety on.
  • When Billboard switched from a call-stores-and-ask data collection system to an automated system to gather song sales data, and rap and R&B suddenly started dominating the charts.
  • Rockists fudging the numbers.
  • The pros and cons of getting a Billboard Hot 100 hit.
  • Jukebox charts.
  • The Billboard Humming chart based on them listening to the songs people are humming to themselves on the street.
  • Who loves the radio hits that everyone you know hates? (People you don't know.)
  • Knowing where to stick that quarter.
  • White dudes making 17 minute songs.
  • Axis of Discourse.
  • A directory of mp3s in your Jellyfin server.
  • Napster pivoting to NFTs but nobody notices or cares.
  • Nostalgia for the Spanish Flu.
  • A giant ball of iron with life forms clinging to it.
  • The earth continuing to be a lump of iron no matter how badly we treat it.
  • Potential human extinction and whether birds would notice it.
  • A fully-automated human house of the near to far future.
  • A band of roving pranksters in the post-apocalypse who are running around transmitting bad Roomba firmware updates.
  • Rolling up on prom with your entourage of four Half-Life scientists and five Barneys.
  • Rolling up on the rap battle with your entourage of backup singer Roombas trailing behind you.
  • The Mad Max series as prepper porn.
  • A good shelf to rest on in the collective psyche.
  • Friend deterrent strategies.
  • How strategy disclosure alters the gameplay of Rock Paper Scissors.
  • Disclosing ahead of the game or Rock Paper Scissors that your strategy will be to punch your opponent repeatedly, and how that affects the way the game is played.
  • Satisfactory: an open-world factory building game.
  • Building your factories and then leaving them behind.
  • Emergent haunted houses in abandoned player-built structures in persistent-world multiplayer games.
  • Having an idea for a game feature and having to build the whole game to try the feature out.
  • Being scared of weird old crap.
  • Adding Pokemon to Minecraft.
  • The last gasp of mainstream PC gaming before phones happened.
  • An 11 year old game developer getting thrown into the Capitalist snake pit.
  • The Human Attention Zoo.
  • Kids (or adults) having goofs.
  • The Golden Age of the Moddable Game Engine.
  • Getting a job based on your Roblox portfolio.

Support Topic Lords

]]> 112. Getting a Lot Of Vengabus Vibes From This https://topiclords.com/getting-a-lot-of-vengabus-vibes-from-this 6482ae40-7f55-4f23-9af6-de2f7eea13d3 Mon, 13 Dec 2021 08:00:00 -0800 Jim Stormdancer full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: JP and John B. We discuss seeing Akira and believing that that's what all anime is like, doppelganger/parodies who exist in the same world as their progenitors, the Tonkachi Editor, and There was an Old Man of St. Bees, by W.S. Gilbert. 52:17 yes Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early! (https://www.patreon.com/topiclords) Lords: * JP * John B * https://twitter.com/YouOldSoAndSo * https://twitter.com/vs_everyone Topics: * Showing "Akira" to someone who has never seen any anime before and telling them, "this is what all anime is like" * https://twitter.com/kbonds420/status/1378850398665125892 * Bizarro, Dan Hibiki, Homsar, and other not-quite-doppelgangers/parodies who exist in the same world as their progenitors * https://twitter.com/TheDemoScout/status/1457602338013728769 * The Tonkachi Editor * https://glitchcat7.com/the-complete-history-of-kaizo-mario/ * "There was an Old Man of St. Bees, by W.S. Gilbert * https://edwardleartrail.wordpress.com/2016/04/16/there-was-an-old-man-of-st-bees/ Microtopics: * Capcom vs. Everyone. * Corpus maintenance. * Death from Seventh Seal vs. Death from Castlevania. * Moms teaming up based on both being tagged "mom." * The philosophy of tagging tools. * Alt-Universe Prompts Bot. * Coming up with a list of every character in pop culture. * The Ryu Number. * Gary Busey playing himself in Hitman 2. * Shattered Shield At Shattered Shield. * Saturday Night Anime on the Sci-Fi channel. * Roger Ebert's favorite early 90s anime. * Anime that is just Cyberpunk C-Span. * Mario's Macross for the SNES. * Evolutionary bottlenecks in video game design. * The Akira Bike Slide Tribute. * A completely ridiculous context in which to invoke the Akira Bike Slide. * Serious war movie guy plummeting to his death. * A generic karate guy with similar moves. * Spoilers for all of Mr. Karate's sons. * Inventing a new protagonist based on a typo. * Meeting a savvy and helpful hologram that is a projection of an AI run by the World Trade Organization, and later meeting the pop star the AI is based on and she's a total asshole. * Meeting the Evil Scooby Doo Gang in the Evil Mystery Mobile. * A story about the mirror people escaping from behind the mirror and it turns out you were one of them the whole time!! * Wholesome Comedy Doppelgangers. * Batzarro, the world's worst detective, who killed his own parents and is trying to solve the murder. * Planning out your Mario mod on graph paper and then typing it into the hex editor with the Famicom controller. * Conlon Nancarrow manually cutting strips of paper out of a piano roll. * Making tiny ROM hacks using the Game Genie. * The Awakening of Tinkerers. * A landmark case in IP law. * Trying out randomly generated Game Genie codes because it's the 90s and you have nothing better to do. * Hacking Game Genie codes to give you even more lives. * Parts of the logic which are scrutable. * Talking about garbage and finding out if it makes it into the show. * Scrupulously avoiding burning cast. * Burning Cast Xtreme Fishing. * A chair with only three legs. * Playing a glitchy video game and reality starts breaking down in front of you. * Dumping computational work directly into the framebuffer. * The episode of That 70s Show that was about circuit-bending Pong. * When things look like they should rhyme but don't. * Robot Carnival. * Rainy weather in San Francisco on this cursed episode of Topic Lords. * Overthinking the poem. * The Uncarrot Tarot. * The clashing colors of slant rhymes. * Metamagical Themas. * Jokes you can play musically. * A disaster episode of Topic Lords. * The Mote In His Eye. * Being here for history. Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Capcom vs. Everyone.
  • Corpus maintenance.
  • Death from Seventh Seal vs. Death from Castlevania.
  • Moms teaming up based on both being tagged "mom."
  • The philosophy of tagging tools.
  • Alt-Universe Prompts Bot.
  • Coming up with a list of every character in pop culture.
  • The Ryu Number.
  • Gary Busey playing himself in Hitman 2.
  • Shattered Shield At Shattered Shield.
  • Saturday Night Anime on the Sci-Fi channel.
  • Roger Ebert's favorite early 90s anime.
  • Anime that is just Cyberpunk C-Span.
  • Mario's Macross for the SNES.
  • Evolutionary bottlenecks in video game design.
  • The Akira Bike Slide Tribute.
  • A completely ridiculous context in which to invoke the Akira Bike Slide.
  • Serious war movie guy plummeting to his death.
  • A generic karate guy with similar moves.
  • Spoilers for all of Mr. Karate's sons.
  • Inventing a new protagonist based on a typo.
  • Meeting a savvy and helpful hologram that is a projection of an AI run by the World Trade Organization, and later meeting the pop star the AI is based on and she's a total asshole.
  • Meeting the Evil Scooby Doo Gang in the Evil Mystery Mobile.
  • A story about the mirror people escaping from behind the mirror and it turns out you were one of them the whole time!!
  • Wholesome Comedy Doppelgangers.
  • Batzarro, the world's worst detective, who killed his own parents and is trying to solve the murder.
  • Planning out your Mario mod on graph paper and then typing it into the hex editor with the Famicom controller.
  • Conlon Nancarrow manually cutting strips of paper out of a piano roll.
  • Making tiny ROM hacks using the Game Genie.
  • The Awakening of Tinkerers.
  • A landmark case in IP law.
  • Trying out randomly generated Game Genie codes because it's the 90s and you have nothing better to do.
  • Hacking Game Genie codes to give you even more lives.
  • Parts of the logic which are scrutable.
  • Talking about garbage and finding out if it makes it into the show.
  • Scrupulously avoiding burning cast.
  • Burning Cast Xtreme Fishing.
  • A chair with only three legs.
  • Playing a glitchy video game and reality starts breaking down in front of you.
  • Dumping computational work directly into the framebuffer.
  • The episode of That 70s Show that was about circuit-bending Pong.
  • When things look like they should rhyme but don't.
  • Robot Carnival.
  • Rainy weather in San Francisco on this cursed episode of Topic Lords.
  • Overthinking the poem.
  • The Uncarrot Tarot.
  • The clashing colors of slant rhymes.
  • Metamagical Themas.
  • Jokes you can play musically.
  • A disaster episode of Topic Lords.
  • The Mote In His Eye.
  • Being here for history.

Support Topic Lords

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

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Capcom vs. Everyone.
  • Corpus maintenance.
  • Death from Seventh Seal vs. Death from Castlevania.
  • Moms teaming up based on both being tagged "mom."
  • The philosophy of tagging tools.
  • Alt-Universe Prompts Bot.
  • Coming up with a list of every character in pop culture.
  • The Ryu Number.
  • Gary Busey playing himself in Hitman 2.
  • Shattered Shield At Shattered Shield.
  • Saturday Night Anime on the Sci-Fi channel.
  • Roger Ebert's favorite early 90s anime.
  • Anime that is just Cyberpunk C-Span.
  • Mario's Macross for the SNES.
  • Evolutionary bottlenecks in video game design.
  • The Akira Bike Slide Tribute.
  • A completely ridiculous context in which to invoke the Akira Bike Slide.
  • Serious war movie guy plummeting to his death.
  • A generic karate guy with similar moves.
  • Spoilers for all of Mr. Karate's sons.
  • Inventing a new protagonist based on a typo.
  • Meeting a savvy and helpful hologram that is a projection of an AI run by the World Trade Organization, and later meeting the pop star the AI is based on and she's a total asshole.
  • Meeting the Evil Scooby Doo Gang in the Evil Mystery Mobile.
  • A story about the mirror people escaping from behind the mirror and it turns out you were one of them the whole time!!
  • Wholesome Comedy Doppelgangers.
  • Batzarro, the world's worst detective, who killed his own parents and is trying to solve the murder.
  • Planning out your Mario mod on graph paper and then typing it into the hex editor with the Famicom controller.
  • Conlon Nancarrow manually cutting strips of paper out of a piano roll.
  • Making tiny ROM hacks using the Game Genie.
  • The Awakening of Tinkerers.
  • A landmark case in IP law.
  • Trying out randomly generated Game Genie codes because it's the 90s and you have nothing better to do.
  • Hacking Game Genie codes to give you even more lives.
  • Parts of the logic which are scrutable.
  • Talking about garbage and finding out if it makes it into the show.
  • Scrupulously avoiding burning cast.
  • Burning Cast Xtreme Fishing.
  • A chair with only three legs.
  • Playing a glitchy video game and reality starts breaking down in front of you.
  • Dumping computational work directly into the framebuffer.
  • The episode of That 70s Show that was about circuit-bending Pong.
  • When things look like they should rhyme but don't.
  • Robot Carnival.
  • Rainy weather in San Francisco on this cursed episode of Topic Lords.
  • Overthinking the poem.
  • The Uncarrot Tarot.
  • The clashing colors of slant rhymes.
  • Metamagical Themas.
  • Jokes you can play musically.
  • A disaster episode of Topic Lords.
  • The Mote In His Eye.
  • Being here for history.

Support Topic Lords

]]> 80. Xenogears Disc 3 for Smash https://topiclords.com/xenogears-disc-3-for-smash bc92920f-3e26-4055-8cb9-9ede5371a472 Mon, 03 May 2021 08:00:00 -0700 Jim Stormdancer full Jim Stormdancer Lords: Styger and JP. We discuss food as fan fiction, the most unexpected CD to be launched from the face of the Cenobite from Hellraiser 3 that launches CDs out of his face, mandolin slicers, Ghostbusters by Ray Parker Jr., the oldest food you've eaten, why pigeons love nacho cheese, and a list of every move in every Mario game. 1:04:32 yes Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early! (https://www.patreon.com/topiclords) Lords: * Styger * JP * http://vectorpoem.com/ Topics: * Comestibles as fan fiction * The most unexpected CD to be launched from the face of the Cenobite from Hellraiser 3 that launches CDs out of his face. * https://cenobite.fandom.com/wiki/CD * I got a mandolin slicer for Christmas from someone who was afraid to use it, and I am also afraid to use it. * Ghostbusters, by Ray Parker Jr. * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe93CLbHjxQ * Bustin'. https://youtu.be/0tdyUgW6WE * You Could Stop at Five or Six Stores https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7T1OHha9agg * Jeffrey Tambor Is NOT the Guy From "Ghost" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVLWybFpwo * JoJo: Trick with cigarettes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJwD8q-OXLQ * Oldest food you've eaten. ie oldest substance or object you've consumed. * https://youtu.be/Ga5JrN9DrVI * Do pigeons love nacho cheese? * Here's an alphabetical list of every move in every Mario game, from "1,000-Fold Arms – Paper Mario: The Origami King" to "Zero Laser – Super Smash Bros. Brawl." * https://www.mariowiki.com/Listofspecial_moves * A. How would you fix this list? * B. Who wants to do a podcast series where we rank them all? Microtopics: * Attack the Block. * Movies where a delineated area is involved in some kind of fight. * Lord quality: trying to keep it high. * Cooking dinner as a fusion of the cuisines of the two countries that you are about to watch play a sport. * White game designers in the 70s deciding that there isn't anything spicier than paprika in this astonishing fantasy world. * Doing some home cooking and inventing a new sandwich in the style of the McDonald's fish fillet. * The $100 cheese steak. * A chef getting famous by serving incredibly high end Big Macs to rich people. * Each bottle of Tabasco tasting uniform even though they're all composed of peppers grown in many different countries. * How to explain cenobites to Thomas Jefferson. * A transporter accident aesthetic. * Not liking the music in the club so you turn the DJ into a cenobite with a CD drive for a mouth. * Supertramp's Breakfast in America. * All known AOL installer CD-ROMs originating with the cenobite who launches CDs out of his face. * A CD that was killed by Mountain Dew. * The cenobite with a CD drive for a face launching Xenogears disc 3 at you. * Xenogears disc 3 for Super Smash Bros. * Sympathy for the developers of Xenogears and in fact of any video game. * Novelty CD shapes. * CD-ROMs cut to the size of business cards with your portfolio on them. * Destroying a slot loading CD drive by putting a small or oddly shaped CD in it. * Learning to trust yourself to be around sharp knives. * Strapping a mandolin slicer to yourself like a keytar. * A great spooky house under the freeway. * A house made of neon tubing like the ghost ship at the end of Monkey Island. * Telekinesing the furniture. * Being haunted by ghosts that are clearly just a couple dudes in t-shirts. * Getting a bunch of B-list celebrities to shout "Ghostbusters" and act scared. * Getting movie footage for your music video by pointing a video camera at the movie screen. * Finding synergies between disparate elements of pop culture. * Bleh hands. * Slimer with a dozen cocktail weenies in his craw. * Reaching a compromise that will allow Ray Parker Jr. to haunt your home in peace. * The Ghostbusters hiring spectral Ray Parker Jr. to haunt folks and drum up business. * Vincent Schiavelli's filmography. * A Ghostbusters/Columbo crossover episode. * The trick where Chevy Chase eats a cigarette. * Slimer always believing that he ate the whole thing. * Food age. * Eating extremely old cough drops. * Not being able to tell if cough drops have gone bad because they always taste like that. * Asking someone with a philosophy degree whether cough drops are a food. * Accidentally taking enough philosophy classes to qualify for a degree and someone tracks you down to hand you your philosophy degree like a subpoena. * Bog cheese. * Whether anyone has successfully eaten millennia-old frozen mammoth meat or if it all turned into black goo. * Several thousand year old tomb honey. * Unboxing and eating military rations on video. * Eating hardtack from the American civil war in 2016. * Being extremely upbeat about rancid meat. * How to tell if vacuum sealed food has botulism. * Having the vocabulary to describe all the different ways food can go bad. * Trying to buy civil war hardtack on eBay and bidding on a pile of rocks. * The most pigeon-dense place you've lived. * Taking incredible risks for a single cheeto. * Whether nacho cheese is incredibly beautiful to a tetrachromat. * Nacho cheese as a nest building materials. * Global incidence of human tetrachromacy. * Space photos recolored into the visible spectrum so humans can look at them. * Pointing a spectroscope at nacho cheese to figure out what pigeons see. * The world's tiniest superpower. * How to grow up in America without having played a bunch of Mario games. * List of soups. * Sitting at your Wizard's Desk for too long and getting Wizard's Foot. * Fan wikis taking the shape of fan patience. * Begging the wiki editors to turn this list into a normalized database table. * An exhaustive list of games in which Mario can jump. * An exhaustive list of games in which Mario can't jump. * Mario visiting San Francisco. * The Golden Gate Bridge existing in the Mario multiverse. * Japan fitting perfectly in the Super Mario Bros. 3 universe, because Japan is also a magical foreign land I've never visited. * The alternate reality where Mario Odyssey depicted world tourism in a hyper-realistic fashion. * Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 as a fictionalized depiction of an Olympics that never happened. * ESPN broadcasting CPU vs. CPU basketball matches in NBA 2K. * Linking to a web site but not encouraging people to go there. Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Attack the Block.
  • Movies where a delineated area is involved in some kind of fight.
  • Lord quality: trying to keep it high.
  • Cooking dinner as a fusion of the cuisines of the two countries that you are about to watch play a sport.
  • White game designers in the 70s deciding that there isn't anything spicier than paprika in this astonishing fantasy world.
  • Doing some home cooking and inventing a new sandwich in the style of the McDonald's fish fillet.
  • The $100 cheese steak.
  • A chef getting famous by serving incredibly high end Big Macs to rich people.
  • Each bottle of Tabasco tasting uniform even though they're all composed of peppers grown in many different countries.
  • How to explain cenobites to Thomas Jefferson.
  • A transporter accident aesthetic.
  • Not liking the music in the club so you turn the DJ into a cenobite with a CD drive for a mouth.
  • Supertramp's Breakfast in America.
  • All known AOL installer CD-ROMs originating with the cenobite who launches CDs out of his face.
  • A CD that was killed by Mountain Dew.
  • The cenobite with a CD drive for a face launching Xenogears disc 3 at you.
  • Xenogears disc 3 for Super Smash Bros.
  • Sympathy for the developers of Xenogears and in fact of any video game.
  • Novelty CD shapes.
  • CD-ROMs cut to the size of business cards with your portfolio on them.
  • Destroying a slot loading CD drive by putting a small or oddly shaped CD in it.
  • Learning to trust yourself to be around sharp knives.
  • Strapping a mandolin slicer to yourself like a keytar.
  • A great spooky house under the freeway.
  • A house made of neon tubing like the ghost ship at the end of Monkey Island.
  • Telekinesing the furniture.
  • Being haunted by ghosts that are clearly just a couple dudes in t-shirts.
  • Getting a bunch of B-list celebrities to shout "Ghostbusters" and act scared.
  • Getting movie footage for your music video by pointing a video camera at the movie screen.
  • Finding synergies between disparate elements of pop culture.
  • Bleh hands.
  • Slimer with a dozen cocktail weenies in his craw.
  • Reaching a compromise that will allow Ray Parker Jr. to haunt your home in peace.
  • The Ghostbusters hiring spectral Ray Parker Jr. to haunt folks and drum up business.
  • Vincent Schiavelli's filmography.
  • A Ghostbusters/Columbo crossover episode.
  • The trick where Chevy Chase eats a cigarette.
  • Slimer always believing that he ate the whole thing.
  • Food age.
  • Eating extremely old cough drops.
  • Not being able to tell if cough drops have gone bad because they always taste like that.
  • Asking someone with a philosophy degree whether cough drops are a food.
  • Accidentally taking enough philosophy classes to qualify for a degree and someone tracks you down to hand you your philosophy degree like a subpoena.
  • Bog cheese.
  • Whether anyone has successfully eaten millennia-old frozen mammoth meat or if it all turned into black goo.
  • Several thousand year old tomb honey.
  • Unboxing and eating military rations on video.
  • Eating hardtack from the American civil war in 2016.
  • Being extremely upbeat about rancid meat.
  • How to tell if vacuum sealed food has botulism.
  • Having the vocabulary to describe all the different ways food can go bad.
  • Trying to buy civil war hardtack on eBay and bidding on a pile of rocks.
  • The most pigeon-dense place you've lived.
  • Taking incredible risks for a single cheeto.
  • Whether nacho cheese is incredibly beautiful to a tetrachromat.
  • Nacho cheese as a nest building materials.
  • Global incidence of human tetrachromacy.
  • Space photos recolored into the visible spectrum so humans can look at them.
  • Pointing a spectroscope at nacho cheese to figure out what pigeons see.
  • The world's tiniest superpower.
  • How to grow up in America without having played a bunch of Mario games.
  • List of soups.
  • Sitting at your Wizard's Desk for too long and getting Wizard's Foot.
  • Fan wikis taking the shape of fan patience.
  • Begging the wiki editors to turn this list into a normalized database table.
  • An exhaustive list of games in which Mario can jump.
  • An exhaustive list of games in which Mario can't jump.
  • Mario visiting San Francisco.
  • The Golden Gate Bridge existing in the Mario multiverse.
  • Japan fitting perfectly in the Super Mario Bros. 3 universe, because Japan is also a magical foreign land I've never visited.
  • The alternate reality where Mario Odyssey depicted world tourism in a hyper-realistic fashion.
  • Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 as a fictionalized depiction of an Olympics that never happened.
  • ESPN broadcasting CPU vs. CPU basketball matches in NBA 2K.
  • Linking to a web site but not encouraging people to go there.

Support Topic Lords

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

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Attack the Block.
  • Movies where a delineated area is involved in some kind of fight.
  • Lord quality: trying to keep it high.
  • Cooking dinner as a fusion of the cuisines of the two countries that you are about to watch play a sport.
  • White game designers in the 70s deciding that there isn't anything spicier than paprika in this astonishing fantasy world.
  • Doing some home cooking and inventing a new sandwich in the style of the McDonald's fish fillet.
  • The $100 cheese steak.
  • A chef getting famous by serving incredibly high end Big Macs to rich people.
  • Each bottle of Tabasco tasting uniform even though they're all composed of peppers grown in many different countries.
  • How to explain cenobites to Thomas Jefferson.
  • A transporter accident aesthetic.
  • Not liking the music in the club so you turn the DJ into a cenobite with a CD drive for a mouth.
  • Supertramp's Breakfast in America.
  • All known AOL installer CD-ROMs originating with the cenobite who launches CDs out of his face.
  • A CD that was killed by Mountain Dew.
  • The cenobite with a CD drive for a face launching Xenogears disc 3 at you.
  • Xenogears disc 3 for Super Smash Bros.
  • Sympathy for the developers of Xenogears and in fact of any video game.
  • Novelty CD shapes.
  • CD-ROMs cut to the size of business cards with your portfolio on them.
  • Destroying a slot loading CD drive by putting a small or oddly shaped CD in it.
  • Learning to trust yourself to be around sharp knives.
  • Strapping a mandolin slicer to yourself like a keytar.
  • A great spooky house under the freeway.
  • A house made of neon tubing like the ghost ship at the end of Monkey Island.
  • Telekinesing the furniture.
  • Being haunted by ghosts that are clearly just a couple dudes in t-shirts.
  • Getting a bunch of B-list celebrities to shout "Ghostbusters" and act scared.
  • Getting movie footage for your music video by pointing a video camera at the movie screen.
  • Finding synergies between disparate elements of pop culture.
  • Bleh hands.
  • Slimer with a dozen cocktail weenies in his craw.
  • Reaching a compromise that will allow Ray Parker Jr. to haunt your home in peace.
  • The Ghostbusters hiring spectral Ray Parker Jr. to haunt folks and drum up business.
  • Vincent Schiavelli's filmography.
  • A Ghostbusters/Columbo crossover episode.
  • The trick where Chevy Chase eats a cigarette.
  • Slimer always believing that he ate the whole thing.
  • Food age.
  • Eating extremely old cough drops.
  • Not being able to tell if cough drops have gone bad because they always taste like that.
  • Asking someone with a philosophy degree whether cough drops are a food.
  • Accidentally taking enough philosophy classes to qualify for a degree and someone tracks you down to hand you your philosophy degree like a subpoena.
  • Bog cheese.
  • Whether anyone has successfully eaten millennia-old frozen mammoth meat or if it all turned into black goo.
  • Several thousand year old tomb honey.
  • Unboxing and eating military rations on video.
  • Eating hardtack from the American civil war in 2016.
  • Being extremely upbeat about rancid meat.
  • How to tell if vacuum sealed food has botulism.
  • Having the vocabulary to describe all the different ways food can go bad.
  • Trying to buy civil war hardtack on eBay and bidding on a pile of rocks.
  • The most pigeon-dense place you've lived.
  • Taking incredible risks for a single cheeto.
  • Whether nacho cheese is incredibly beautiful to a tetrachromat.
  • Nacho cheese as a nest building materials.
  • Global incidence of human tetrachromacy.
  • Space photos recolored into the visible spectrum so humans can look at them.
  • Pointing a spectroscope at nacho cheese to figure out what pigeons see.
  • The world's tiniest superpower.
  • How to grow up in America without having played a bunch of Mario games.
  • List of soups.
  • Sitting at your Wizard's Desk for too long and getting Wizard's Foot.
  • Fan wikis taking the shape of fan patience.
  • Begging the wiki editors to turn this list into a normalized database table.
  • An exhaustive list of games in which Mario can jump.
  • An exhaustive list of games in which Mario can't jump.
  • Mario visiting San Francisco.
  • The Golden Gate Bridge existing in the Mario multiverse.
  • Japan fitting perfectly in the Super Mario Bros. 3 universe, because Japan is also a magical foreign land I've never visited.
  • The alternate reality where Mario Odyssey depicted world tourism in a hyper-realistic fashion.
  • Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 as a fictionalized depiction of an Olympics that never happened.
  • ESPN broadcasting CPU vs. CPU basketball matches in NBA 2K.
  • Linking to a web site but not encouraging people to go there.

Support Topic Lords

]]> 56. Ethical Snorlax Pasture https://topiclords.com/ethical-snorlax-pasture 8c4f9da8-fd1d-4ae3-8955-ee9abba36a20 Mon, 16 Nov 2020 08:00:00 -0800 Jim Stormdancer full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: Laura and JP. We discusss the least horny sport, the best task-tracking software, driving around with a photo of yourself on your vehicle, gaskets, Pokemon-proofing your house, and sending a film back to 1960. 1:13:11 yes Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early! (https://www.patreon.com/topiclords) Lords: * Laura is @lmichet on Twitter and just shipped A Monster's Expedition. * JP is @vectorpoem on Twitter. Topics: * What is the least horny sport? * Best task-tracking software. Definition of "best" here is not necessarily the one you think has the best features, but the one you used longest and with the best attitude. Which is that? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban is an entire scheduling methodology, not merely the board-and-card-based task system used by various Scrum etc teams. * All comments relating to our critiques of git can be directed to highlyvaluedgitfeedback@whitehouse.gov * Driving around with a photo of yourself on your vehicle * Timothy Dalton's character in Hot Fuzz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfICiLbwz8I (that 1-second clip captures the visual gag but not the comedic timing; good enough) * The Giant Eddie Murphy Head trailer thing was part of a promotional campaign for the 2008 movie "Meet Dave", and that one specific photo of it in highway traffic went viral. Neil Cicierega used it as the profile image for his last.fm page, and so it showed up as the album art for all non-album Lemon Demon tracks. https://kottke.org/08/06/eddie-murphys-giant-head https://www.reddit.com/r/tumblr/comments/c6m2nn/doesthisremindyouofsomething/ * Stephen asks: "A fictional world, the discovery of which prompted global obsession and study which gradually allowed Tlön to bleed into and eventually replace the real world. Kind of like the internet." * Safety-proofing your house to keep a Pokemon in it, if Pokemon were real--what would this entail? Would you do it, or just give up on having a Pokemon? * An animal's cuteness being weaponized to promote its own exploitation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hL4b0Pc1xIs * You can send one print of a single film of your choosing back to 1960. What film do you choose, and why? * Ferris Bueller supplements his own bodily function noises with an E-mu Emulator II. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATkUqWssSGc Microtopics: * Typing in all lowercase because anyone who uses capital letters is a cop. * The Lowercase Age. * Capital letters and punctuation reflecting a certain social context. * Whether Laura has ever spoken to someone in person. * A very chill video game with cute jokes in it. * One of the better ways to enjoy life. * The eSport played by the oldest people. * Car Lords. * The hypothetical horniness of the train similar speed running scene. * Whether you can be fired from your train job in Train Simulator or is you're just shot on the spot. * The height of golf's horniness ceiling. * The horniness differential between simulated golf and real life miniature golf. * A medieval shepherd saying "caring for sheep in the Scottish Highlands is a low demand activity so I'm going to use this stick to hit rocks and eventually a sport will coalesce." * Not wanting to guess how to say "coalesce" in a Scottish accent. * Not wanting to call your coworkers at 9pm, the devil's hour. * Hiring a sensitivity reader to figure out how to respectfully create a pinup calendar of accents around the world. * A sample of Meg Ryan faking an orgasm. * "When Harry Met Sally" faked orgasm sound board. * Admiring the UI of task tracking software. * Using a text file to do task tracking. * An ignorant caveman who is working harder rather than smarter. * The miserable state of programming tools (compilers excepted) * How if GitHub had built their web site around any VCS, it would now be the dominant VCS, but it would be weird that they called it "GitHub." * Using SVN to talk to GitHub. * Game development putting the folks who can get value out of Git alongside the folks Git just makes miserable and forcing them to collaborate somehow. * Data mining your blood sugar levels over time. * Data mining your enamel pin collection. * Complaining that your wife really likes her new baby. * Having your phone number on your car so that if someone doesn't like your driving they can give you a call. * Decals on your rear window with stick figures representing every member of your family, with their social security numbers beneath them. * The parallel reality where everyone has their faces on their car and PictoChat on their DS so you can drive up to someone you recognize on the freeway and send them a drawing of a dick. * Not being willing to put a photo of yourself on your car but covering your tiny electric motorcycle with them. * A helmet with a huge depiction of your face, like you're in big head mode. * Gigantic electric skateboards with wacky shocks. * Eddie Murphy driving Eddie Murphy's giant head car. * Coopting someone's write-in to talk about manufacturing gaskets. * A question that makes you feel inadequate so you resent it. * Learning how to make gaskets because everyone who works at the gasket manufacturer needs to know how to make gaskets. * Gasket manufacturing equipment probably cutting rubber with a laser or maybe a big knife. * A chore wheel by which everyone at the company eventually does every job. * Treating all of humanity as a single organism, and not in the gross "this disadvantaged person needs to take one for the team" kind of way. * Gasket perishability. * A gasket failing and causing a terrible disaster because it was left on the front porch too long. * Having a plant product like perishability. * A piston seal pointing its piston tusks at the ground and launching itself into the air. * The fantasy of having a little animal who is in fire. * A dog or cat already being able to mess up your house pretty bad even though they don't have pyrokinetic powers. * Not being willing to give any dog you've ever met elemental magic powers. * A Problem Charmander. * The entire Pokemon universe is a hologram running on a GameBoy. * Whether you can be held legally liable for your pet Charmander burning your neighbor's house down. * Training your grass-type Pokemon to repeatedly fire solarbeam at your solar panels. * The ones who walk away from Nomekop. * The Pokemon species that became dominant and enslaved all the others. "Human human!" * Spending enough time in nature to develop a personal opinion about nature. * Journeying through the world and having fun equitable relationships with magical creatures. * The only anime that is about adults rather than teenagers. * Sending space movies back in time to feed the conspiracy theory that the moon landings were faked. * Repeatedly sending the sports almanac back in time to construct an optimal run of 20th century sports betting. * Sending a sports almanac back in time to everyone so everyone wins every sports bet. * Sending a white dude back in time so that a white dude can invent rock and roll. Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

  • Laura is @lmichet on Twitter and just shipped A Monster's Expedition.
  • JP is @vectorpoem on Twitter.

Topics:

  • What is the least horny sport?
  • Best task-tracking software. Definition of "best" here is not necessarily the one you think has the best features, but the one you used longest and with the best attitude. Which is that?
  • Driving around with a photo of yourself on your vehicle
  • Stephen asks: "A fictional world, the discovery of which prompted global obsession and study which gradually allowed Tlön to bleed into and eventually replace the real world. Kind of like the internet."
  • Safety-proofing your house to keep a Pokemon in it, if Pokemon were real--what would this entail? Would you do it, or just give up on having a Pokemon?
  • You can send one print of a single film of your choosing back to 1960. What film do you choose, and why?

Microtopics:

  • Typing in all lowercase because anyone who uses capital letters is a cop.
  • The Lowercase Age.
  • Capital letters and punctuation reflecting a certain social context.
  • Whether Laura has ever spoken to someone in person.
  • A very chill video game with cute jokes in it.
  • One of the better ways to enjoy life.
  • The eSport played by the oldest people.
  • Car Lords.
  • The hypothetical horniness of the train similar speed running scene.
  • Whether you can be fired from your train job in Train Simulator or is you're just shot on the spot.
  • The height of golf's horniness ceiling.
  • The horniness differential between simulated golf and real life miniature golf.
  • A medieval shepherd saying "caring for sheep in the Scottish Highlands is a low demand activity so I'm going to use this stick to hit rocks and eventually a sport will coalesce."
  • Not wanting to guess how to say "coalesce" in a Scottish accent.
  • Not wanting to call your coworkers at 9pm, the devil's hour.
  • Hiring a sensitivity reader to figure out how to respectfully create a pinup calendar of accents around the world.
  • A sample of Meg Ryan faking an orgasm.
  • "When Harry Met Sally" faked orgasm sound board.
  • Admiring the UI of task tracking software.
  • Using a text file to do task tracking.
  • An ignorant caveman who is working harder rather than smarter.
  • The miserable state of programming tools (compilers excepted)
  • How if GitHub had built their web site around any VCS, it would now be the dominant VCS, but it would be weird that they called it "GitHub."
  • Using SVN to talk to GitHub.
  • Game development putting the folks who can get value out of Git alongside the folks Git just makes miserable and forcing them to collaborate somehow.
  • Data mining your blood sugar levels over time.
  • Data mining your enamel pin collection.
  • Complaining that your wife really likes her new baby.
  • Having your phone number on your car so that if someone doesn't like your driving they can give you a call.
  • Decals on your rear window with stick figures representing every member of your family, with their social security numbers beneath them.
  • The parallel reality where everyone has their faces on their car and PictoChat on their DS so you can drive up to someone you recognize on the freeway and send them a drawing of a dick.
  • Not being willing to put a photo of yourself on your car but covering your tiny electric motorcycle with them.
  • A helmet with a huge depiction of your face, like you're in big head mode.
  • Gigantic electric skateboards with wacky shocks.
  • Eddie Murphy driving Eddie Murphy's giant head car.
  • Coopting someone's write-in to talk about manufacturing gaskets.
  • A question that makes you feel inadequate so you resent it.
  • Learning how to make gaskets because everyone who works at the gasket manufacturer needs to know how to make gaskets.
  • Gasket manufacturing equipment probably cutting rubber with a laser or maybe a big knife.
  • A chore wheel by which everyone at the company eventually does every job.
  • Treating all of humanity as a single organism, and not in the gross "this disadvantaged person needs to take one for the team" kind of way.
  • Gasket perishability.
  • A gasket failing and causing a terrible disaster because it was left on the front porch too long.
  • Having a plant product like perishability.
  • A piston seal pointing its piston tusks at the ground and launching itself into the air.
  • The fantasy of having a little animal who is in fire.
  • A dog or cat already being able to mess up your house pretty bad even though they don't have pyrokinetic powers.
  • Not being willing to give any dog you've ever met elemental magic powers.
  • A Problem Charmander.
  • The entire Pokemon universe is a hologram running on a GameBoy.
  • Whether you can be held legally liable for your pet Charmander burning your neighbor's house down.
  • Training your grass-type Pokemon to repeatedly fire solarbeam at your solar panels.
  • The ones who walk away from Nomekop.
  • The Pokemon species that became dominant and enslaved all the others. "Human human!"
  • Spending enough time in nature to develop a personal opinion about nature.
  • Journeying through the world and having fun equitable relationships with magical creatures.
  • The only anime that is about adults rather than teenagers.
  • Sending space movies back in time to feed the conspiracy theory that the moon landings were faked.
  • Repeatedly sending the sports almanac back in time to construct an optimal run of 20th century sports betting.
  • Sending a sports almanac back in time to everyone so everyone wins every sports bet.
  • Sending a white dude back in time so that a white dude can invent rock and roll.

Support Topic Lords

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

Lords:

  • Laura is @lmichet on Twitter and just shipped A Monster's Expedition.
  • JP is @vectorpoem on Twitter.

Topics:

  • What is the least horny sport?
  • Best task-tracking software. Definition of "best" here is not necessarily the one you think has the best features, but the one you used longest and with the best attitude. Which is that?
  • Driving around with a photo of yourself on your vehicle
  • Stephen asks: "A fictional world, the discovery of which prompted global obsession and study which gradually allowed Tlön to bleed into and eventually replace the real world. Kind of like the internet."
  • Safety-proofing your house to keep a Pokemon in it, if Pokemon were real--what would this entail? Would you do it, or just give up on having a Pokemon?
  • You can send one print of a single film of your choosing back to 1960. What film do you choose, and why?

Microtopics:

  • Typing in all lowercase because anyone who uses capital letters is a cop.
  • The Lowercase Age.
  • Capital letters and punctuation reflecting a certain social context.
  • Whether Laura has ever spoken to someone in person.
  • A very chill video game with cute jokes in it.
  • One of the better ways to enjoy life.
  • The eSport played by the oldest people.
  • Car Lords.
  • The hypothetical horniness of the train similar speed running scene.
  • Whether you can be fired from your train job in Train Simulator or is you're just shot on the spot.
  • The height of golf's horniness ceiling.
  • The horniness differential between simulated golf and real life miniature golf.
  • A medieval shepherd saying "caring for sheep in the Scottish Highlands is a low demand activity so I'm going to use this stick to hit rocks and eventually a sport will coalesce."
  • Not wanting to guess how to say "coalesce" in a Scottish accent.
  • Not wanting to call your coworkers at 9pm, the devil's hour.
  • Hiring a sensitivity reader to figure out how to respectfully create a pinup calendar of accents around the world.
  • A sample of Meg Ryan faking an orgasm.
  • "When Harry Met Sally" faked orgasm sound board.
  • Admiring the UI of task tracking software.
  • Using a text file to do task tracking.
  • An ignorant caveman who is working harder rather than smarter.
  • The miserable state of programming tools (compilers excepted)
  • How if GitHub had built their web site around any VCS, it would now be the dominant VCS, but it would be weird that they called it "GitHub."
  • Using SVN to talk to GitHub.
  • Game development putting the folks who can get value out of Git alongside the folks Git just makes miserable and forcing them to collaborate somehow.
  • Data mining your blood sugar levels over time.
  • Data mining your enamel pin collection.
  • Complaining that your wife really likes her new baby.
  • Having your phone number on your car so that if someone doesn't like your driving they can give you a call.
  • Decals on your rear window with stick figures representing every member of your family, with their social security numbers beneath them.
  • The parallel reality where everyone has their faces on their car and PictoChat on their DS so you can drive up to someone you recognize on the freeway and send them a drawing of a dick.
  • Not being willing to put a photo of yourself on your car but covering your tiny electric motorcycle with them.
  • A helmet with a huge depiction of your face, like you're in big head mode.
  • Gigantic electric skateboards with wacky shocks.
  • Eddie Murphy driving Eddie Murphy's giant head car.
  • Coopting someone's write-in to talk about manufacturing gaskets.
  • A question that makes you feel inadequate so you resent it.
  • Learning how to make gaskets because everyone who works at the gasket manufacturer needs to know how to make gaskets.
  • Gasket manufacturing equipment probably cutting rubber with a laser or maybe a big knife.
  • A chore wheel by which everyone at the company eventually does every job.
  • Treating all of humanity as a single organism, and not in the gross "this disadvantaged person needs to take one for the team" kind of way.
  • Gasket perishability.
  • A gasket failing and causing a terrible disaster because it was left on the front porch too long.
  • Having a plant product like perishability.
  • A piston seal pointing its piston tusks at the ground and launching itself into the air.
  • The fantasy of having a little animal who is in fire.
  • A dog or cat already being able to mess up your house pretty bad even though they don't have pyrokinetic powers.
  • Not being willing to give any dog you've ever met elemental magic powers.
  • A Problem Charmander.
  • The entire Pokemon universe is a hologram running on a GameBoy.
  • Whether you can be held legally liable for your pet Charmander burning your neighbor's house down.
  • Training your grass-type Pokemon to repeatedly fire solarbeam at your solar panels.
  • The ones who walk away from Nomekop.
  • The Pokemon species that became dominant and enslaved all the others. "Human human!"
  • Spending enough time in nature to develop a personal opinion about nature.
  • Journeying through the world and having fun equitable relationships with magical creatures.
  • The only anime that is about adults rather than teenagers.
  • Sending space movies back in time to feed the conspiracy theory that the moon landings were faked.
  • Repeatedly sending the sports almanac back in time to construct an optimal run of 20th century sports betting.
  • Sending a sports almanac back in time to everyone so everyone wins every sports bet.
  • Sending a white dude back in time so that a white dude can invent rock and roll.

Support Topic Lords

]]> 13. Kurt Cobain Vocaloid https://topiclords.com/kurt-cobain-vocaloid 7ca0ad29-773e-4a33-acb8-c424e0dd2425 Mon, 20 Jan 2020 08:00:00 -0800 Jim Stormdancer full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: Shannon Strucci and JP LeBreton. We discuss monetizing hobbies vs. just having hobbies, inventing a 5 acre island in the remote south Pacific, level design lessons from Hawaii, the Oakland Athletics adopting "Movin' Like Bernie," fictions containing themselves as a gag, the first time you've tried your favorite foods, and Time Trap and creating mysteries from the outside in. 1:10:14 yes Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early! (https://www.patreon.com/topiclords) Lords: * Shannon Strucci does video essays at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCh9DnjvObUcvvwrYbJ4-cLQ and is a film correspondent for http://www.strugglesession.us/ and is a teen superhero on https://www.criticalbitcast.com/ * JP makes stuff at http://vectorpoem.com, especially game tourism mods: http://vectorpoem.com/tourism/ Topics: * 2:43 The pressure to monetize hobbies or perform them for social media vs just having hobbies * 13:25 If you could create a 5 acre island in the middle of the remote south Pacific ocean, what would you use it for? * 17:25 Level design lessons from Hawaii * Goats for hire, preventing wildfires in California. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n56opj5gJhc * Kalij pheasants. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C63tykplkhU * 28:30 "The 2012 Oakland Athletics adapted 'Movin' Like Bernie' into their celebration routines after Coco Crisp played the song for third baseman Brandon Inge in the team's clubhouse before a game." * Oakland A's Bernie Lean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJMBmsK5hXc * BOILeR season 2017 playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLj5IcL4eAydWVS2hTWFIjB7YFJBwt4D3A * 34:07 Fictions that, as a throwaway gag, exist within their own worlds (Remembrance of the Daleks, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure) * Dick Justice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3epcX07t78M * Simlish pop songs: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeTlCMqy3jFUUeqNhjiPBO88SU2PXZqI * 46:05 First time you tried your favorite foods? Especially if you first tried them as an adult * Brussels Sprouts are less bitter than they used to be. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/10/30/773457637/from-culinary-dud-to-stud-how-dutch-plant-breeders-built-our-brussels-sprouts-bo * 52:06 Time Trap and creating mysteries from the outside in * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TimeTrap_%28film%29 * A definitive Timeline for Primer: https://unrealitymag.com/at-last-a-definitive-timeline-for-primer/ * The self-lacing Nike MAG. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NimGxU4Qnhk Microtopics: * Being confused by the existence of two separate Shannons. * Video games where nobody bothers you, and arguably that being the whole point of video games. * Doing calligraphy on Twitch. * Doing calligraphy just for yourself and that being way better. * The cost of getting more than one kind of value out of something. * Having an audience and feeling the need to entertain the audience whenever possible. * Finally deciding to get a real job because you have a kid on the way. * Imagining having a job as a programmer and not being happy about it. * Doing creative work in private because you're not good enough to do it publicly. * Producing a complete song in five minutes when it takes five years to make a game. * Always being able to see the geological phenomenon that will take your life one day. * The base of the Sutro Tower basically being a Quake level. * Being shot at as you approach the Sutro Tower. * Seeing Batman's head and knowing which way to go. * DragonCon's failure to produce parchment realm maps. * Hawaii having lava, hostile creatures and good landmarking. * Playing your anime theme song on your phone as you show up at the manga and wall scroll store with your katana. * Having an animated gif that represents your identity. * How to turn Binding of Isaac into an e-sport. * Stupefyingly long TV series lifetimes. * Text-to-speech deepfakes. * Chopping up Garret's voice to create dialog for your Thief fan mission. * Measuring Ian McKellen's voice and sending the data to people who have never heard Ian McKellen so they have plausible deniability. * Living on your own and eating Indian food for the first time. * Discovering a new continent at the Indian buffet. * Not wanting to eat a salad because probably there are bugs in there. * Stepping stones to eating sushi. * Food preferences being heavily shaped by first impressions. * Liking Primer two different ways, ten years apart, and being right both times. * The important lesson being hidden behind the interesting puzzle. * Unsolvable mysteries that haunt you for the rest of your life. * Enclosing a narrative with another narrative. * Assuming the Wii will remain ascendant because it's 1989 and Nintendo dominates your culture. * The story turning to mush when it comes time to actually answer to the question. * The thrill of reactive, improvisational storytelling. * The strength of remaining vague about whether your show is supernatural or not. * Imagining what happens next in a story as a way of enjoying the story. * The nectar that mystery storytelling is trying to extract. Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Being confused by the existence of two separate Shannons.
  • Video games where nobody bothers you, and arguably that being the whole point of video games.
  • Doing calligraphy on Twitch.
  • Doing calligraphy just for yourself and that being way better.
  • The cost of getting more than one kind of value out of something.
  • Having an audience and feeling the need to entertain the audience whenever possible.
  • Finally deciding to get a real job because you have a kid on the way.
  • Imagining having a job as a programmer and not being happy about it.
  • Doing creative work in private because you're not good enough to do it publicly.
  • Producing a complete song in five minutes when it takes five years to make a game.
  • Always being able to see the geological phenomenon that will take your life one day.
  • The base of the Sutro Tower basically being a Quake level.
  • Being shot at as you approach the Sutro Tower.
  • Seeing Batman's head and knowing which way to go.
  • DragonCon's failure to produce parchment realm maps.
  • Hawaii having lava, hostile creatures and good landmarking.
  • Playing your anime theme song on your phone as you show up at the manga and wall scroll store with your katana.
  • Having an animated gif that represents your identity.
  • How to turn Binding of Isaac into an e-sport.
  • Stupefyingly long TV series lifetimes.
  • Text-to-speech deepfakes.
  • Chopping up Garret's voice to create dialog for your Thief fan mission.
  • Measuring Ian McKellen's voice and sending the data to people who have never heard Ian McKellen so they have plausible deniability.
  • Living on your own and eating Indian food for the first time.
  • Discovering a new continent at the Indian buffet.
  • Not wanting to eat a salad because probably there are bugs in there.
  • Stepping stones to eating sushi.
  • Food preferences being heavily shaped by first impressions.
  • Liking Primer two different ways, ten years apart, and being right both times.
  • The important lesson being hidden behind the interesting puzzle.
  • Unsolvable mysteries that haunt you for the rest of your life.
  • Enclosing a narrative with another narrative.
  • Assuming the Wii will remain ascendant because it's 1989 and Nintendo dominates your culture.
  • The story turning to mush when it comes time to actually answer to the question.
  • The thrill of reactive, improvisational storytelling.
  • The strength of remaining vague about whether your show is supernatural or not.
  • Imagining what happens next in a story as a way of enjoying the story.
  • The nectar that mystery storytelling is trying to extract.

Support Topic Lords

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

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Being confused by the existence of two separate Shannons.
  • Video games where nobody bothers you, and arguably that being the whole point of video games.
  • Doing calligraphy on Twitch.
  • Doing calligraphy just for yourself and that being way better.
  • The cost of getting more than one kind of value out of something.
  • Having an audience and feeling the need to entertain the audience whenever possible.
  • Finally deciding to get a real job because you have a kid on the way.
  • Imagining having a job as a programmer and not being happy about it.
  • Doing creative work in private because you're not good enough to do it publicly.
  • Producing a complete song in five minutes when it takes five years to make a game.
  • Always being able to see the geological phenomenon that will take your life one day.
  • The base of the Sutro Tower basically being a Quake level.
  • Being shot at as you approach the Sutro Tower.
  • Seeing Batman's head and knowing which way to go.
  • DragonCon's failure to produce parchment realm maps.
  • Hawaii having lava, hostile creatures and good landmarking.
  • Playing your anime theme song on your phone as you show up at the manga and wall scroll store with your katana.
  • Having an animated gif that represents your identity.
  • How to turn Binding of Isaac into an e-sport.
  • Stupefyingly long TV series lifetimes.
  • Text-to-speech deepfakes.
  • Chopping up Garret's voice to create dialog for your Thief fan mission.
  • Measuring Ian McKellen's voice and sending the data to people who have never heard Ian McKellen so they have plausible deniability.
  • Living on your own and eating Indian food for the first time.
  • Discovering a new continent at the Indian buffet.
  • Not wanting to eat a salad because probably there are bugs in there.
  • Stepping stones to eating sushi.
  • Food preferences being heavily shaped by first impressions.
  • Liking Primer two different ways, ten years apart, and being right both times.
  • The important lesson being hidden behind the interesting puzzle.
  • Unsolvable mysteries that haunt you for the rest of your life.
  • Enclosing a narrative with another narrative.
  • Assuming the Wii will remain ascendant because it's 1989 and Nintendo dominates your culture.
  • The story turning to mush when it comes time to actually answer to the question.
  • The thrill of reactive, improvisational storytelling.
  • The strength of remaining vague about whether your show is supernatural or not.
  • Imagining what happens next in a story as a way of enjoying the story.
  • The nectar that mystery storytelling is trying to extract.

Support Topic Lords

]]> 5. Very Hype About This Apple https://topiclords.com/very-hype-about-this-apple c233bd8f-f1c7-4a04-95b8-db095a34411c Mon, 25 Nov 2019 08:00:00 -0800 Jim Stormdancer full Jim Stormdancer Lords: JP and Styger. We discuss using the word "lord" as a joke, emergency preparedness, Cosmic Crisp: the apple with a launch date, whether horses exist, being an amateur naturalist from another part of the country, and what makes hotels scary. 1:03:59 yes Lords: * JP recommends Esperpento. http://esperpentotapasrestaurant.com/ * Styger recommends Esperpento and Yamo. https://www.theinfatuation.com/san-francisco/reviews/yamo Topics: * 1:52 A brief history of JP using "Lords" as a comedy word, 2008-present, and why British people will probably never "get" this quasijoke. * 9:00 Emergency preparedness! * The SFFD neighborhood emergency response team: https://sf-fire.org/neighborhood-emergency-response-team-nert * 16:55 The apple with a launch date. https://story.californiasunday.com/cosmic-crisp-apple-launch * 23:15 Larry asks: "Are there horses" * Miniature horses as service animals: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=miniature+therapy+horse&ia=images&iax=images * 28:39 Being an amateur naturalist from another part of the country. * Sneakers: navigating San Francisco by sound. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuIheGaiFLM * "Watch Dogs 2: Touring San Francisco's Famous Landmarks" * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F9l19j4XY * 43:15 What makes some hotels scarier than others? * "It should be illegal for horror movies to advertise." https://twitter.com/okexactly/status/1185756975612727297?s=20 * "If you make that film as a bleak drama, then we’re making it for like, an audience of three. So what might be a deterrent to an audience in one genre suddenly becomes a virtue in another, and it just felt like a no-brainer to channel that through a horror-movie filter." https://www.vulture.com/2018/06/hereditarys-ari-aster-breaks-down-his-upsetting-film.html * Scratch and sniff feelie in Leather Goddesses of Phobos. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LeatherGoddessesofPhobos Microtopics: * Hypothesizing about how much business your internet review gets a small business. * A restaurant in San Francisco somehow not going out of business. * Reassuring meme carriers that they are still good people. * Majestic yet ridiculous muscledudes. * Dreaming a GDC talk. * Taking the "lord" title seriously because you are probably ruled by literal lords. * Our sister podcast across the pond, Topic Senators. * Distinguishing lords from non-lords by their shoulder armor. * Preppers going from being a joke to an aspiration. * Realizing that literally none of your skills would help you in the apocalypse. * Drinking pee through a Life Straw and it still tasting like pee. * California-branded disasters. * Naming your produce via an Internet poll. * Produce having a launch date. * Lining up at Safeway for produce's midnight launch. * Eating berries exclusive to your region. * Believing horses still exist because you've seen them once. * Being almost sure horses aren't a hoax. * Inserting horses into the historical record. * Duckbilled platypi being obviously bullshit. * Every platypus having been secretly manufactured by the Tyrell Corporation. * LA and San Francisco merging because Philip K Dick didn't predict rising construction costs. * Finding out that miniature horses can be service animals. * Service ponies in the soup aisle. * Someone defacing an explanatory sign to make people believe that horses can be service animals. * Miniature ponies being grandfathered in. * Everyone choosing the mockingbird as their state bird. * Being annoyed that trees are the wrong trees. * Being young enough for them to just be trees I guess. * The sky being the wrong sky. * Seeing freeway exit signs for Jupiter. * The Golden Gate Bridge getting wrecked. * A story being grounded in geography. * Stepping out of the movie theater into the neighborhood the movie you saw was set in and feeling like you're still in the movie. * Everyone's effective hometown being San Francisco because that's where every movie is set. * Getting experience points for taking selfies. * The Coit Tower secretly being a giant hologram full of horses. * The arbitrariness of what makes a hotel scary. * The horror of a hotel room possibly having bedbugs. * Not being scared by a movie because you chose to watch it. * The cute robot doing all the murders. * The TV edit of Robocop somehow being even more traumatic. * Sneaking an art house movie into your horror movie. * No longer being affected by supernatural horror but being terrified of movies with car accidents. * The implicit social contract that horror movies shouldn't address the horror of real life. * The ethics of advertising horror movies. * The ad that places a horrible idea in your mind and promises closure/the antidote if you pay for the full movie. * Buying a tub of baked beans at the concession stand and feeling good for five minutes. * Refilling the essential oil cartridge for gunfire. * Not wanting to smell Bioshock, or most video games really. Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Hypothesizing about how much business your internet review gets a small business.
  • A restaurant in San Francisco somehow not going out of business.
  • Reassuring meme carriers that they are still good people.
  • Majestic yet ridiculous muscledudes.
  • Dreaming a GDC talk.
  • Taking the "lord" title seriously because you are probably ruled by literal lords.
  • Our sister podcast across the pond, Topic Senators.
  • Distinguishing lords from non-lords by their shoulder armor.
  • Preppers going from being a joke to an aspiration.
  • Realizing that literally none of your skills would help you in the apocalypse.
  • Drinking pee through a Life Straw and it still tasting like pee.
  • California-branded disasters.
  • Naming your produce via an Internet poll.
  • Produce having a launch date.
  • Lining up at Safeway for produce's midnight launch.
  • Eating berries exclusive to your region.
  • Believing horses still exist because you've seen them once.
  • Being almost sure horses aren't a hoax.
  • Inserting horses into the historical record.
  • Duckbilled platypi being obviously bullshit.
  • Every platypus having been secretly manufactured by the Tyrell Corporation.
  • LA and San Francisco merging because Philip K Dick didn't predict rising construction costs.
  • Finding out that miniature horses can be service animals.
  • Service ponies in the soup aisle.
  • Someone defacing an explanatory sign to make people believe that horses can be service animals.
  • Miniature ponies being grandfathered in.
  • Everyone choosing the mockingbird as their state bird.
  • Being annoyed that trees are the wrong trees.
  • Being young enough for them to just be trees I guess.
  • The sky being the wrong sky.
  • Seeing freeway exit signs for Jupiter.
  • The Golden Gate Bridge getting wrecked.
  • A story being grounded in geography.
  • Stepping out of the movie theater into the neighborhood the movie you saw was set in and feeling like you're still in the movie.
  • Everyone's effective hometown being San Francisco because that's where every movie is set.
  • Getting experience points for taking selfies.
  • The Coit Tower secretly being a giant hologram full of horses.
  • The arbitrariness of what makes a hotel scary.
  • The horror of a hotel room possibly having bedbugs.
  • Not being scared by a movie because you chose to watch it.
  • The cute robot doing all the murders.
  • The TV edit of Robocop somehow being even more traumatic.
  • Sneaking an art house movie into your horror movie.
  • No longer being affected by supernatural horror but being terrified of movies with car accidents.
  • The implicit social contract that horror movies shouldn't address the horror of real life.
  • The ethics of advertising horror movies.
  • The ad that places a horrible idea in your mind and promises closure/the antidote if you pay for the full movie.
  • Buying a tub of baked beans at the concession stand and feeling good for five minutes.
  • Refilling the essential oil cartridge for gunfire.
  • Not wanting to smell Bioshock, or most video games really.

Support Topic Lords

]]> Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Hypothesizing about how much business your internet review gets a small business.
  • A restaurant in San Francisco somehow not going out of business.
  • Reassuring meme carriers that they are still good people.
  • Majestic yet ridiculous muscledudes.
  • Dreaming a GDC talk.
  • Taking the "lord" title seriously because you are probably ruled by literal lords.
  • Our sister podcast across the pond, Topic Senators.
  • Distinguishing lords from non-lords by their shoulder armor.
  • Preppers going from being a joke to an aspiration.
  • Realizing that literally none of your skills would help you in the apocalypse.
  • Drinking pee through a Life Straw and it still tasting like pee.
  • California-branded disasters.
  • Naming your produce via an Internet poll.
  • Produce having a launch date.
  • Lining up at Safeway for produce's midnight launch.
  • Eating berries exclusive to your region.
  • Believing horses still exist because you've seen them once.
  • Being almost sure horses aren't a hoax.
  • Inserting horses into the historical record.
  • Duckbilled platypi being obviously bullshit.
  • Every platypus having been secretly manufactured by the Tyrell Corporation.
  • LA and San Francisco merging because Philip K Dick didn't predict rising construction costs.
  • Finding out that miniature horses can be service animals.
  • Service ponies in the soup aisle.
  • Someone defacing an explanatory sign to make people believe that horses can be service animals.
  • Miniature ponies being grandfathered in.
  • Everyone choosing the mockingbird as their state bird.
  • Being annoyed that trees are the wrong trees.
  • Being young enough for them to just be trees I guess.
  • The sky being the wrong sky.
  • Seeing freeway exit signs for Jupiter.
  • The Golden Gate Bridge getting wrecked.
  • A story being grounded in geography.
  • Stepping out of the movie theater into the neighborhood the movie you saw was set in and feeling like you're still in the movie.
  • Everyone's effective hometown being San Francisco because that's where every movie is set.
  • Getting experience points for taking selfies.
  • The Coit Tower secretly being a giant hologram full of horses.
  • The arbitrariness of what makes a hotel scary.
  • The horror of a hotel room possibly having bedbugs.
  • Not being scared by a movie because you chose to watch it.
  • The cute robot doing all the murders.
  • The TV edit of Robocop somehow being even more traumatic.
  • Sneaking an art house movie into your horror movie.
  • No longer being affected by supernatural horror but being terrified of movies with car accidents.
  • The implicit social contract that horror movies shouldn't address the horror of real life.
  • The ethics of advertising horror movies.
  • The ad that places a horrible idea in your mind and promises closure/the antidote if you pay for the full movie.
  • Buying a tub of baked beans at the concession stand and feeling good for five minutes.
  • Refilling the essential oil cartridge for gunfire.
  • Not wanting to smell Bioshock, or most video games really.

Support Topic Lords

]]> 2. Conjure a False Gobot https://topiclords.com/conjure-a-false-gobot 98cd634b-713e-44b8-b6b2-7ede1ccc0b1c Mon, 04 Nov 2019 08:00:00 -0800 Jim Stormdancer full Jim Stormdancer Lords this week: John Mystery and JP LeBreton. We discuss horses climbing stairs, getting enough sleep, shitpost movie advertising, doctoring the historical record, and ending all reality from within a dream. 1:02:30 yes Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early! (https://www.patreon.com/topiclords) Lords: * John is excited to be a Topic Lord * JP does stuff at http://vectorpoem.com/ Topics: * 1:36 Horses will climb stairs but can't get back down again. * http://www.firecritic.com/2009/08/18/fire-pole-or-sliding-chute/ * CLOP: http://www.foddy.net/CLOP.html * 12:13 Do you get enough sleep? If so, how? * 21:36 The ad for a movie sequel that was the entirety of the previous movie in the series. * The Wendy's tabletop RPG: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/10/dd-licious-wendys-now-has-a-tabletop-rpg-and-the-villain-is-frozen-beef/ * Too Many Cooks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrGrOK8oZG8 * Bandersnatch, the semi-interactive Black Mirror thing on Netflix: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackMirror%3ABandersnatch * Adaptation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptation(film) * The weird trailer for Identity that preceded Adaptation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8fjyxM7DgU * 35:34 How much work would it take to insert a fictional person into the historical record? * Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - A novel by Neal Stephenson about near-future technological advancements like uploading your consciousness to the cloud and curating your online existence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall;or,Dodgein_Hell * 49:18 John's recurring dream about seeing the wrong image and ending all levels of reality Microtopics: * Lord enthusiasm. * Thinking of Ghostbusters because you can't imagine a firefighter. * Foraging for oats on the top floor of a fire station. * Installing a pole because your infant son can't descend stairs. * Finding a horse in a tree. * Playing CLOP to learn empathy for the descending horse. * Replacing a spiral staircase with a normal staircase. * The entire city burning down because the firefighters can't get past the horse that's stuck on the landing. * Becoming a morning person because of your government job. * Your child possibly loving the daycare lady more than he loves you. * Taking melatonin because you don't have the discipline for not looking at screens before bed. * The shitty dreams of melatonin boot camp. * Gnawing on the melatonin and leaving it on the nightstand for next time. * Your body getting stuck on a particular sleep schedule long past its relevance. * Hypothesizing how much long-lasting damage you did with your teenage sleep habits. * Focusing better because everyone else is asleep. * Working until 4am because you're being so productive. * Not knowing how ads work because you have an ad-blocker installed. * Finding about how ads work from an 11 year old. * Your alternate reality self who enjoys a good advertisement now and again. * Maintaining the pace of film trailers for over an hour. * Mistaking the trailer before the movie as being part of the movie. * Nobody being fooled by your fake trailer because people don't watch movies in theaters any more. * Avoiding watching Bandersnatch because you're a completionist. * The technical difficulties of adding late choice points to an otherwise linear film. * Being nostalgic for old UIs of web services. * Finding a web page that hasn't changed in 15 years. * Finding a web page that looks 15 years old but also has a mobile style sheet. * Editing an innocuous fact on Wikipedia that nobody will bother to fact-check. * Asking to view a historical document and sneaking in a quill pen and inkwell to modify it. * Citing your doctored document on Wikipedia. * Befriending a history professor and asking them to mention your fake Kansas senator in a published paper. * Falsifying movie running times just because you can get away with it. * Citing an obscure magazine as your source on Wikipedia because nobody will bother to check. * Clinging to the scraps of the past that you've salvaged from eBay and garage sale VHS tapes. * Poor documentation of pop culture leading to compelling mysteries. * Drowning true information with false information. * The downside of having a unique Google string. * Having repercussions on all levels of nested reality. * Dreams as really lazy storytelling. * Remembering facts without remembering their origin. * Getting stuck opening a door to mask dream loading time. * Making up any old bullshit and being convinced it's a Beatles rarity. * Desperately fleeing from the "The End" title card. * Realizing your dream is actually just the plot of The Neverending Story. Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Lord enthusiasm.
  • Thinking of Ghostbusters because you can't imagine a firefighter.
  • Foraging for oats on the top floor of a fire station.
  • Installing a pole because your infant son can't descend stairs.
  • Finding a horse in a tree.
  • Playing CLOP to learn empathy for the descending horse.
  • Replacing a spiral staircase with a normal staircase.
  • The entire city burning down because the firefighters can't get past the horse that's stuck on the landing.
  • Becoming a morning person because of your government job.
  • Your child possibly loving the daycare lady more than he loves you.
  • Taking melatonin because you don't have the discipline for not looking at screens before bed.
  • The shitty dreams of melatonin boot camp.
  • Gnawing on the melatonin and leaving it on the nightstand for next time.
  • Your body getting stuck on a particular sleep schedule long past its relevance.
  • Hypothesizing how much long-lasting damage you did with your teenage sleep habits.
  • Focusing better because everyone else is asleep.
  • Working until 4am because you're being so productive.
  • Not knowing how ads work because you have an ad-blocker installed.
  • Finding about how ads work from an 11 year old.
  • Your alternate reality self who enjoys a good advertisement now and again.
  • Maintaining the pace of film trailers for over an hour.
  • Mistaking the trailer before the movie as being part of the movie.
  • Nobody being fooled by your fake trailer because people don't watch movies in theaters any more.
  • Avoiding watching Bandersnatch because you're a completionist.
  • The technical difficulties of adding late choice points to an otherwise linear film.
  • Being nostalgic for old UIs of web services.
  • Finding a web page that hasn't changed in 15 years.
  • Finding a web page that looks 15 years old but also has a mobile style sheet.
  • Editing an innocuous fact on Wikipedia that nobody will bother to fact-check.
  • Asking to view a historical document and sneaking in a quill pen and inkwell to modify it.
  • Citing your doctored document on Wikipedia.
  • Befriending a history professor and asking them to mention your fake Kansas senator in a published paper.
  • Falsifying movie running times just because you can get away with it.
  • Citing an obscure magazine as your source on Wikipedia because nobody will bother to check.
  • Clinging to the scraps of the past that you've salvaged from eBay and garage sale VHS tapes.
  • Poor documentation of pop culture leading to compelling mysteries.
  • Drowning true information with false information.
  • The downside of having a unique Google string.
  • Having repercussions on all levels of nested reality.
  • Dreams as really lazy storytelling.
  • Remembering facts without remembering their origin.
  • Getting stuck opening a door to mask dream loading time.
  • Making up any old bullshit and being convinced it's a Beatles rarity.
  • Desperately fleeing from the "The End" title card.
  • Realizing your dream is actually just the plot of The Neverending Story.

Support Topic Lords

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

Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Lord enthusiasm.
  • Thinking of Ghostbusters because you can't imagine a firefighter.
  • Foraging for oats on the top floor of a fire station.
  • Installing a pole because your infant son can't descend stairs.
  • Finding a horse in a tree.
  • Playing CLOP to learn empathy for the descending horse.
  • Replacing a spiral staircase with a normal staircase.
  • The entire city burning down because the firefighters can't get past the horse that's stuck on the landing.
  • Becoming a morning person because of your government job.
  • Your child possibly loving the daycare lady more than he loves you.
  • Taking melatonin because you don't have the discipline for not looking at screens before bed.
  • The shitty dreams of melatonin boot camp.
  • Gnawing on the melatonin and leaving it on the nightstand for next time.
  • Your body getting stuck on a particular sleep schedule long past its relevance.
  • Hypothesizing how much long-lasting damage you did with your teenage sleep habits.
  • Focusing better because everyone else is asleep.
  • Working until 4am because you're being so productive.
  • Not knowing how ads work because you have an ad-blocker installed.
  • Finding about how ads work from an 11 year old.
  • Your alternate reality self who enjoys a good advertisement now and again.
  • Maintaining the pace of film trailers for over an hour.
  • Mistaking the trailer before the movie as being part of the movie.
  • Nobody being fooled by your fake trailer because people don't watch movies in theaters any more.
  • Avoiding watching Bandersnatch because you're a completionist.
  • The technical difficulties of adding late choice points to an otherwise linear film.
  • Being nostalgic for old UIs of web services.
  • Finding a web page that hasn't changed in 15 years.
  • Finding a web page that looks 15 years old but also has a mobile style sheet.
  • Editing an innocuous fact on Wikipedia that nobody will bother to fact-check.
  • Asking to view a historical document and sneaking in a quill pen and inkwell to modify it.
  • Citing your doctored document on Wikipedia.
  • Befriending a history professor and asking them to mention your fake Kansas senator in a published paper.
  • Falsifying movie running times just because you can get away with it.
  • Citing an obscure magazine as your source on Wikipedia because nobody will bother to check.
  • Clinging to the scraps of the past that you've salvaged from eBay and garage sale VHS tapes.
  • Poor documentation of pop culture leading to compelling mysteries.
  • Drowning true information with false information.
  • The downside of having a unique Google string.
  • Having repercussions on all levels of nested reality.
  • Dreams as really lazy storytelling.
  • Remembering facts without remembering their origin.
  • Getting stuck opening a door to mask dream loading time.
  • Making up any old bullshit and being convinced it's a Beatles rarity.
  • Desperately fleeing from the "The End" title card.
  • Realizing your dream is actually just the plot of The Neverending Story.

Support Topic Lords

]]>