• Alexander
• Kev

Topics:

• "Floaty movement" in games
• The power to give people clutter that they can't throw away
  • https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/users/yorkdoom/palweb/week12/palwk12.htm
  • https://www.anabuzzalino.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/book-of-kells.jpg
• Dunning Kruger got debunked!
  • https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2022/04/08/the-dunning-kruger-effect-is-autocorrelation/
• With or Without Witnesses, by Hasbro, Inc.
  • https://scryfall.com/card/jmp/457/alloy-myr
  • Esper says: "A lot of the lore and worldbuilding of Magic is conveyed through flavor text, but there’s also about a novel’s worth of writing for each set distributed as webfiction and a few dozen novels throughout the game's history. It’s good stuff, usually!"
• The instinct to not swing a heavy object at someone, even when you're supposed to
• Japanese curry

Microtopics:

• The Humble Screw.
• What it might take to be good at hammering nails.
• Fingerbashing.
• An inclined plane that goes around in a circle.
• Metric Rules Football.
• Whether a state machine is the same kind of thing as a wedge.
• Clockwork Maiden.
• Speedrunning, cleaning and dating.
• Floaty movement.
• The JPEG artifact of physics simulation.
• How to Unit Test a video game.
• Using MIDI knobs to tune your game's physics.
• Game Oriented Assembly Lisp.
• Hot Reloading Workflow.
• Why Naughty Dog stopped using Lisp.
• Just going about your life when suddenly you have to use Perl for something.
• Peak Node.JS/SAAS years.
• Walk/run/sprint transition speed.
• Getting an special drink for your guys.
• Medieval style calligraphy.
• Gifting someone with a burden for the rest of their lives.
• Pouring rocks into your dad's pocket because that's where you keep your rocks.
• The kitten going to sleep behind your laptop because it's warm back there.
• Here's how someone in the 14th century would've written these words.
• How to say "fuck around and find out" in medieval Latin.
• Writing a meme in 14th century Blackletter Hand.
• Sans-serif calligraphy.
• The ancient Greeks trying to invent ASCII art but they couldn't close the deal.
• Letters placed inside other letters.
• Autocorrelation.
• Figures 8 and 9.
• Coming out of discussion the topic with a better understanding of the topic.
• Using a bird feather to write.
• Knowledge that we used to have and now have again.
• Learning to Topic Lords while doing home improvement stuff.
• Scrapping your fragile human body to merge with the machines.
• Rainbows in Space.
• Suns going around in circles regardless of whether anyone's looking.
• A semi-conscious little robot dude.
• Calling the Qualia Function.
• A real messed-up looking machine cat.
• Communicating the story solely via flavor text on mana dorks.
• A squadron of little kids waving wooden swords at each other.
• How do you turn sword fighting into something you can do in a video game?
• East Bay Rat Motorcycle Club Flight Nights.
• Situations where they ask if you want a mouth guard.
• Asking the ref at the boxing match what the etiquette is for tapping out.
• The crowd roaring when they realize you're a southpaw.
• Punching a guy you just met three seconds ago.
• Did you end up cutting that girl's head off?
• Renaissance MMA.
• That Awkward Sparring Feeling.
• A simulacrum of kicking each other in the face.
• Getting a part-time job at your favorite curry shop so you can learn the recipe.
• What part of curry is the curry?
• The curry you eat so you don't die.
• Emperor Riding a Dragon to the Forbidden Palace.
• The advantage of a burger as a fast food staple.
• How to make curry convenient.
• Rendang.
• Dry curry.
• Joining a discord and asking "what are all these users for??"
• Which user is which lord on which episode?

Support Topic Lords

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

Topics:

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

Microtopics:

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

Support Topic Lords

• Alexicographic
• Kev

Topics:

• Sports are good actually? Apparently?
• Haunted articles of clothing
• Burrito R&D
• Casey at the Bat
  • https://discoverpoetry.com/poems/ernest-lawrence-thayer/casey-at-the-bat/
• Becoming a vtuber after losing a bet
• Getting a guided tour of a TV show

Microtopics:

• Streaming daily.
• The Tears of the Kingdom thread in the Topic Lords discord.
• A rigid self-conception as someone who does not like sports.
• Roller derby.
• Whether skateboarding is a sport.
• Going fast and shoving past people.
• An athletic endeavor.
• How much hockey fights feed back into the actual game.
• Baseball nerds.
• Chart Party.
• Storytelling using data.
• The Bob Emergency.
• Seven Bobs left, and they're all aged.
• Who was the top Bob?
• East Bay Bike Party.
• Floyd Rose Bridge Valves.
• Figuring out how to make video games without involving Bay Area salaries.
• Persian Castle Day at the climbing gym.
• Taking the leather jacket that your drug dealer OD'd in.
• Signing the bathroom guest book every time you poop at your grandma's house.
• Schwarzenegger DNA on eBay.
• The Clothes People Have Died In line at Value Village.
• This Shirt Will Kill You.
• A detailed cosmology of how hauntings work.
• Ghosts of people who are still alive, following you around and asking for their hat back.
• Taco Shop Guacamole.
• A completely different foodstuff from what you were accustomed to.
• Wet Burritos.
• Airport Head.
• A 3 oz container of guacamole that the TSA will allow on the plane.
• Burrito night at the Stormdancer household.
• Lulus and Cakes.
• Spheroids.
• Baseball Hagiography.
• A Quora reply from three years ago.
• Searching for cake and Google asking you to prove that you're not a robot.
• Bethlehem slang from 1888.
• Vtuber tooling.
• Picking a punishment for yourself that you already want to do.
• Animated fish backgrounds.
• A more compatible CUDA API.
• Mixtapes of TV episodes and video game levels.
• Someone's top ten list of Star Trek episodes.
• What the kids call Cliff's Notes.
• The skill of understanding someone else's taste.
• These are the songs that I love, perhaps you will also love them and if so we could fall in love.
• Exchanging Spotify playlists because that's what we have now instead of mixtapes.
• Trying to get into Homestuck via Problem Sleuth.
• An 11 year old with the patience to wait a year to read Harry Potter book 2.
• Phish Food.
• Recording Topic Lords before lunch and getting a well-deserved burrito afterwards.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• CisHetKayFaber
• Kev

Topics:

• Food from dreams and nightmares
  • https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/adeonibada/man-dream-kings-hand-snack
• Han Unification happened in Unicode and every time they add more emojis to the Unicode spec it literally hurts
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification
• The Super Mega Crossword
  • https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/18/crosswords/super-mega-2022-clues.html
• Down by the Bay by Raffi
  • https://www.vulture.com/2015/12/finding-raffi-c-v-r.html
• Video game franchises known for secrets
• Five-tined forks
  • [NMS] https://www.google.com/search?q=five-tined+forks&tbm=isch
• Horrible exceptions to rule34
  • After recording, CisHetKayFaber managed to find their holy grail videos depicting the "exception." Jim's example is much better, but Kev was also correct in having faith in human ingenuity.

Microtopics:

• First time long time.
• A very light hobby that is kind of shallow.
• Getting really into Rubik's Cube because you already love flash cards.
• Being reminded of something right before you were about to forget it.
• How best to memorize pizza coding and microphone specs.
• Ignoring the room and being annoyed when people talk to you.
• Work life balance being too tilted toward life
• The King's Hand.
• Orange Creamsicle Mashed Potatoes.
• M&M fingernails.
• A tweet and what happened with it.
• Biting something with the wrong texture and having to stare at a wall for ten minutes.
• UTF-8 character encoding.
• Adding support for Asian languages to Unicode without consulting any native speakers for advice.
• The international new global meme language of the internet.
• PuzzleMania.
• All the downsides of doing a crossword on paper.
• Words that just happen a lot when you're constructing a crossword puzzle.
• The Elden Ring of crossword puzzles.
• Doing the crossword puzzle on paper so that when you're done you can say "looks right to me" and there's no app to tell you you're wrong.
• Reading crossword puzzle clues to your wife as she falls asleep.
• A time traveler from the future who invented time travel to bring us excellent children's songs.
• A national treasure (Canada)
• A fly wearing a tie, a bear combing its hair, a llama eating pajamas, &c.
• A song intended to be performed improvisationally.
• Extending the finger family song by adding more fingers.
• Messing the cadence up with your fake mother voice.
• Where the watermelons roam.
• A mom saying nonsense that really makes you think.
• Avoiding your mom because she keeps saying weird shit about a goose kissing a moose.
• Unlocking a branch of a storyline by fulfilling a set of conditions.
• Subverting overused fantasy tropes.
• Finding a cool castle by going down a secret cliffside stairway into a hidden cave.
• Systems that point you everywhere on the map.
• Secrets of all sorts of scopes.
• The Doom thing where they point out that you didn't find all the secrets.
• Frog Fractions containing Rule 34 of itself.
• Reacting to five-tined fork.
• The fork optimization function that decided that four is the right number of tines.
• Unknowing a conversation.
• A Victorian flex of a fork.
• When die-casting was invented.
• A shovel with teeth.
• Seven-tined sporks.
• The Pornography Lord.
• Human pairings and human activities that you would expect there to be pornography of.
• Linda Hunt smugly declaring "ass to ass"
• AI pornographers buying sex dice on eBay.
• Weird combinations of words you can plug into a search engine.
• People don't want everything; people only want some things.
• The Frog Fractions pornography gap.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Kev
• Cort
  • Cort's new album: https://postgoodism.bandcamp.com/album/tourism
  • The Frog Fractions vinyl: https://www.turtlepalstapes.com/product/frog-fractions-green
  • Monty Python's three-sided record: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monty_Python_Matching_Tie_and_Handkerchief
  • Locked grooves: https://www.yoursoundmatters.com/locked-grooves-endless-fun-literally/
  • The Most Wanted Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jId-qaEwuvI
  • The Most Unwanted Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gPuH1yeZ08

Topics:

• Before age ~4 you don't really make long-term memories, but you can develop long-term habits. How to best exploit this.
  • Spark : The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain https://www.amazon.com/Spark-Revolutionary-Science-Exercise-Brain/dp/B08RZD6D4Z
• Extreme "kids in trench coat" trope scenarios
  • Necrophilic landscape http://2dcloud.com/the-necrophilic-landscape
  • Artist Morgan Vogel https://www.tcj.com/morgan-vogel-1986-2020/
• Krista and Tatiana Hogan are conjoined at the brain. They share thoughts, senses and control of their bodies.
• "Autopsy" by Ross Sutherland
  • I can't find a text transcript online, just a few records of Ross performing the poem. Nor does Ross himself have a "home page" per se. Here's a link to his podcast, it's great: https://www.imaginaryadvice.com/
• Neighbors overplaying the same playlist
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Woman_(soundtrack)
  • https://www.worstideaofalltime.com/
• Is it unambiguously good that technology makes creative expression easier?

Microtopics:

• Mic on, pants off.
• The inherent meaningless of "limited editions" in a finite universe ultimately bound for a slow heat death.
• Vinyl record Easter eggs.
• A big ol' spiral cut into the vinyl.
• Limited characteristics of a physical process.
• Mental models of what it means to master an album.
• Novelty vinyl colors.
• Jim's burgeoning record collection.
• The most glorious twenty minute act of art terrorism.
• Losing access to your old memories because your brain changed formats.
• How to erase medical debt by just not paying it.
• Borrowing money from your toddler.
• Spark: the revolution of exercise or some other subtitle.
• Mollusks eating their own nervous systems.
• Eating your own childhood to launch yourself into adulthood.
• Upping the emotional stakes with large animals and near-death experiences.
• Putting your girlfriend in mortal danger so that she's more likely to want to marry you.
• Getting pigeonholed as a really good butt.
• Getting surgically separated so you can disguise yourself as two kids in a trench coat.
• The hemispheres of the brain as independent entities which happen to share a body.
• Lumps of biology.
• Every person's unique inability to speak to other people's interiority.
• Walkie-talkie telepathy vs. "perfect mutual understanding" telepathy.
• One mind with two faces.
• Superhuman limb/vocal cord coordination.
• Segue Week.
• Burroughs cut-ups.
• Vigorous grandparenting with a face of terror.
• A modern-day television quiz show phoenix.
• The impenetrable free-form rhymes of a heart attack in October.
• The greets.
• Tracker music instrument names as cut-up poetry generators.
• Super Obituaries!
• The potentially transformative effect of reading your own obituary.
• The perverse incentives behind soliciting reviews of unfinished games.
• The awesome power of knowing that your feedback will be considered.
• The neighbor who only listens to Rod Stewart's Greatest Hits over and over again.
• Listening to entire albums until you're so sick of them that you underflow and love them again.
• The song you have to listen to to get to Roxette's It Must Have Been Love.
• Bad podcast ideas.
• Novelty t-shirts whose joke is only funny once, but you still wear it once a week
• The shirt with the Fight Club and the cognitive science reference on it.
• Shirts/tattoos as pop culture dog whistles.
• Getting a tattoo of the Colossus' weak points so that you can meet the people who stab you there.
• Naming your game's public alpha something innocent so it doesn't arouse suspicion when your friends see you playing it.
• The hazards of wearing a shirt promoting a pop culture reference you know nothing about.
• Wearing a shirt that makes people try to talk to you about a video game you've never played.
• All the people you disappointed in high school.
• NPCs in Thief Deadly Shadows talking about how hard it is to get a job making games.
• A bright future where nobody can make a living making video games.
• A bright future where AIs curate collections of AI-generated content.
• A case for the 1991 film "Super Mario Brothers" as the pinnacle of entertainment.
• Charles Martinet doing the Mario voice as he leaps to his death from a roof in "The Game."

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Mike
• Kev
  • http://www.radcade.com/

Topics

• Embracing creative chaos is very hard but paradoxically extremely common?
• Thanatosensitivity
• GDC happened this year! They really did it
• Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy By Thomas Lux
  • https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48483/tarantulas-on-the-lifebuoy
• Being left handed in a right handed world

Microtopics:

• Wanting to learn to program and moving to Maine.
• Learning to program by implementing a meticulous copy of Metroid for the NES.
• Choosing to live a life that feels like an anime training montage.
• How to learn to program while having kids.
• Radical content for radical gamers.
• Having one's mind blown by works of art, as one does.
• The "stone soup bubblegum and baling wire everything went wrong" method of making art.
• What happens when the plan makes contact with the enemy.
• Writing a film with the magic of wintertime as a core theme and not being able to get the permit to film until spring.
• Iterating on your idea with insights you've gleaned from working on your idea.
• Ascertaining the recoverability of any given error.
• The kind of disaster that happens when a culture accustomed to low-cost-error problems tries to work on high-cost-error problems.
• Improvising bridges.
• Programming vs. the disciplined engineering fields.
• The pros and cons of storing a bunch of elephants on the roof.
• The user experience of death.
• Digital ghosts on LinkedIn.
• Logging in to LinkedIn for the first time in eight years and getting a bunch of IMs from a friend who died six years ago.
• Dealing with your dead friend's estate and having to close out all the relationships they were maintaining on OkCupid.
• Thanatechnologies.
• The human events taking place on a separate flow of time than internet time.
• Slug World.
• A human brain computer interaction conference at Noisebridge.
• alt.ctrl.GDC
• Spending all of GDC on the lawn.
• A GDC talk except instead of talking to an auditorium full of 500 people, you're talking to a hotel room full of five people.
• The Unconference Phenomenon.
• Substance-to-fluff ratios.
• Your three GDC lives.
• Going to the talks where they talk about the stuff we're doing to figure out how we can do our stuff better.
• The ascended platonic GDC.
• Getting all Dunbar's Numbered-out and spending all your time talking to people you know.
• Showing your game at a conference to increase the odds that one of the seven people at Sony who can get your game into the Spring Fever promotion will walk by and notice you.
• Making a leveraged play on your charisma and luck stats.
• GDC Santa with the sack of boxed copies of Glittermitten Grove.
• A map of TXT World stitched together out of screenshots, like in the good old days.
• A greybeard coming out of the woodwork to admire your ANSI art map.
• Disrespecting the expo.
• Realizing that somebody is about to ask you how your GDC is going and getting the drop on them by asking how their GDC is going first.
• Katie hauling off and gassing you up.
• The hazards of being Jim Stormdancer.
• A reward for not loving the death of the ugly and even the dangerous.
• The tangled underworld of your socks.
• Pretending to not be afraid of spiders because you don't want your son to be afraid of spiders.
• Growing up with rhino beetles in Liberia.
• Hog snakes.
• The extremely specific feeling of a desperate beetle clinging to your pruny fingertip.
• Formative bug experiences.
• Millions of termites growing wings to do their big ol' termite sex party.
• Sweeping up all the termites who are taking a nap after mating season to fry in palm oil as a special treat.
• The morning where the entire town is covered in bugs which sucks but you get to eat them which rules.
• Reminiscing about which body parts of a termite are saltiest.
• Getting accustomed to eating termites by the time you get to the bottom of the bag.
• Left-handed zippers.
• Trying to use the wrong scissors and assuming that you have some kind of developmental problem.
• The Uniball Jetstream Rollerball, with a pressurized ink reservoir.
• The prince who was promised.
• Fretting with your dominant hand.
• Picking a specific guitar string at speed.
• Whether handedness exists.
• Drawing with gross motor movements.
• Left-handed mugs.
• Left-handed drums vs. open-handed drums.

Support Topic Lords

Lords

• Kev
  • https://twitter.com/kevzettler
• Quil
  • Whisper your secret to a snail.

Topics

• Ephemeral digital music
• Being a guest on a podcast that you normally listen to is a weird experience because it feels like you're not supposed to talk
• An update on Bug Mars
• Dancing in the Street
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HasaQvHCv4w
  • Unedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/3O9JRuv3WXA
• If you were to meet an adult who has never even heard of video games, what would you give them to demonstrate what they are? You are not allowed to interact with them in any other way

Microtopics:

• An awkward silence where you can't decide who goes first.
• Having to deliver all the chapters of a book at once.
• Kanary.
• Cooling it on making internet people mad ever since you had a kid.
• Overstepping your own boundaries.
• Lending a certain patina to your Twitter thread.
• Midis and meedees.
• Listening to a game soundtrack on a different sound engine than your had as a child.
• Listening to a game soundtrack on a different sound engine than the composer used.
• Proc-gen game soundtracks.
• A kill cam except it's a kill jingle
• Your online game detecting when someone draws a penis in the game's graffiti system but not when they draw a penis in the music editor's note grid.
• Ways of converting an image to audio.
• Deciding it's not worth going into detail but going into detail anyway.
• What executables sounds like and why they sound like that.
• Spelling the word "minimum" in a spectrograph by singing swooping pitches.
• A video game that induces four friends to sing cacophonously together.
• Three strangers having a conversation that your don't get to be a part of.
• Parasocial relationships.
• How to instantly become friends with a famous person you are a fan of.
• Two asymmetrical relationships snapping together to become a single symmetrical relationship.
• What you could've had if you just picked two friends host your podcast instead of all of them.
• A small company named after a throwaway joke.
• Spinning up a cricket farm.
• The Amazon of cricket protein.
• Alternative and synthetic protein.
• Receiving a care package of bug protein that you're definitely not going to eat.
• Whether a cricket burger is still better for the environment than a beef burger if you have to ship it across the country.
• Being grateful that other people will save the world in the ways that you don't.
• A brick wall, folks.
• SCP or rolled up carpet?
• A leprechaun with a mullet.
• Wearing a trench coat over a floral print jumpsuit.
• Racing In The Street.
• Everybody, where "everybody" means two people.
• Not being able to afford lighting after renting that crane and asking every crew member to point their car headlights at the dancers.
• Whether you still trigger counterfeiting laws by putting realistic money in your movie.
• An extended shot of Mick Jagger guzzling a generic can of beer.
• Dancing In A Stairwell.
• Dancing In The Void.
• Freeze frame on a couple of butts.
• A derelict flour mill that appears in every Brit-pop music video.
• How to tell how well you're doing in a Match Three game.
• Choosing to not introduce the mind virus of casual games to an indigenous tribe.
• Whether Bejeweled is more market-tested than Pong as an introductory video game.
• The invention of the platformer.
• Super Mario Bros. 3's budget and development timeline.
• The ways that the developers had to make Super Mario Bros. worse to make it viable as an arcade game.
• Finding an adult who has never heard of Mario, jumping, video games or television and locking them in a room until they beat Super Mario Bros.
• Looking at an image on a flat surface and interpreting it as analogous to a physical scene in the real world.
• Synesthesia but for ideas.
• Whispering a secret to the snail.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Kev Zettler
  • http://radcade.com/
• Xalavier Nelson, Jr.
  • https://xalaviermakeswords.itch.io/strange-scaffold-comics-vol-1

Topics:

• The fine art of professional wrestling
• Stealing the declaration of independence to save Nicolas Cage's life
• Atari 2600 Adventure's effectiveness as a port of Crowther and Woods Adventure
• Larry asks "That one time Taco Bell promised every American a free taco if the Mir space station hit a taco target in the indian Ocean but it missed by an entire hemisphere."
• Non-violent communication
• The threshold between an object/entity being large, and SO large that your brain can no longer process it effectively and you're no longer impressed
• Sucking a glass onto your face

Microtopics:

• Still the raddest place to play web games.
• An Airport For Aliens Currently Run By Dogs.
• Interacting with dogs in a whole new way.
• Being clean and dirty at the same time.
• Dog synergies.
• The legal standing of a game downloading a random guitar tab from the internet to make a dog play guitar.
• A scope creep game that ships.
• Whether professional wrestling is trashy.
• Audience-reactive improv theater performed by professional stunt men.
• Pro wrestling jargon creeping into your
• A work for marks who are smart marks and don't know when they're being worked or if they're not.
• Stealing vocabulary from Victorian urchins.
• Whether women's wrestling is still about macho posturing.
• Meme warfare thought devices.
• Muscled theatrical performers doing their dangedest
• Whether GDC is ever going to happen again.
• Whether GDC will be the same without Simon Carless.
• Whether Lost Levels can exist without GDC bringing everyone physically together and secretly reserving the physical venue.
• Every D-level game dev celebrity entering an arena and only one D-level game dev celebrity leaving.
• A contract sealed in blood that is a matter of public record.
• Having an hour and 45 minutes to save Nicholas Cage's life by stealing the Declaration of Independence.
• Finding out that Nicholas Cage was injured in a bear fighting accident and realizing that now's your time to shine.
• Finding out that isnicholascagenexttoabear.com isn't based on geolocation technology, it just scrapes TMZ for headlines that contain both "cage" and "bear."
• Why we still have to steal the Declaration of Independence if everyone is aware of the Nicholas Cage situation.
• Conspicuously walking down the street with the Declaration of Independence rolled up under your arm like a newspaper so that an urchin can snatch it away from you and you can pretend to be incensed.
• Finding out what Habeas Corpus means.
• Atari 2600 Adventure vs. Crowther and Woods Adventure.
• Adapting a text adventure to computer system that can't render text.
• Making a game where you explore until you find an ending in a context where all anyone's ever seen is games where you play for a high score.
• Remakes changing the meaning of the original.
• Inventing a 4D game platform to port Demon's Souls to.
• Hitting a taco target in the Indian ocean.
• Whether 40'x40' is a big taco or a small target for a space station.
• All of America having a taco-in-the-streets party.
• Dipping your girlfriend and smooching her as taco cheese falls from the sky.
• Mir falling from the sky every day being a small price to pay to solve world hunger.
• Taco Bell beginning to sweat as they realize the revolution is about to start.
• Alternate history fiction where the branch point is that Taco Bell gave every American a free taco after Mir hit their taco target.
• Non-Violent Communication.
• Communicating your lived experience backed with justification and couched in empathy.
• Instead of saying "you're annoying me," saying "I am annoyed because of you."
• The HALT principle.
• Big things making your brain go "ooh!"
• Being terrified of the scale of Jupiter but the sun being like "meh"
• Being terrified by an enormous mammoth but less terrified of the Earth when the Earth is bigger and closer than the mammoth.
• Being unable to process the scale of a large city but eventually becoming desensitized to it.
• Deciding whether to be impressed by something's size based on whether it's horizontal or vertical.
• The relief and comfort of realizing that humans don't make any fricking sense.
• Making New Year's Resolution of finally making sense of yourself and of the world.
• Different goals emerging from the same root: hubris.
• Not being able to form a seal on your face because you have a beard.
• Normalizing shaving a hole in your beard sized and situated to suck a drinking glass onto your face.
• Putting a drinking glass on your face in various configurations until one feels right.
• A drinking glass size rooted in a human arrogance that you can appreciate but that you can't encourage.
• Learning to suck a glass onto your face from the kid next to you at Applebee's.

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Lords:

• Kev - https://www.radcade.com/
• Chall - https://twitter.com/MrChrisLHall

Topics:

• Rick Astley's Youtube channel in 2020
  • https://www.youtube.com/c/RickastleyCoUkOfficial/videos
  • https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1303143128740720640?s=19
  • https://twitter.com/necrosofty/status/1300908917896085505
• Unconsciously adjusting for sensory deficiencies
  • https://www.improbable.com/2010/02/15/ig-nobel-acceptance-speech-knuckle-cracking/
  • https://news.bme.com/2013/03/06/adding-and-subtracting/
• All food photography of prawns in the UK use the same six genetically engineered prawns.
  • https://twitter.com/LRBbookshop/status/1301469852599754753
  • https://youtu.be/J1NV6CUJl18
• Not A Butt Face asks: "Numbers in games are too big. We should just use smaller numbers. YuGiOh and final fantasy monsters having tens of thousands of HP and your attacks doing hundreds or thousands of damage looks cool when you have those quad 9s pop up... but games like Paper Mario or Megaman Battle Network keeping damage and health numbers in the tens to hundreds range means you can mentally calculate damage difference and feel the impact more granularly."
  • https://thespelunkyshowlike.libsyn.com/
  • I forgot to mention another important aspect of BCD, which is that it rounds more intuitively than binary floating point math. Hence its use in calculators.
• Michael Jackson and the Sonic 3 soundtrack
  • Sonic Robo Blast 2: https://www.srb2.org/

Microtopics:

• The raddest place to play web games.
• Topic Time.
• Something the Algorithm decided you should know about.
• Having a hairstyle identical to the one you had in that music video thirty years ago.
• Having an appropriate face for your voice.
• Rickroll Georg who lives in a cave and has rickrolled people over a billion times.
• The patron saint of being disappointed.
• A bobblehead of Rick Astley on a crucifix.
• Taking the loupe out of your breast pocket to check if your date's crucifix is really Jesus or if it's Rick Astley again.
• The YouTube algorithm deciding it's important that everyone learn how to make a house out of sticks in the swamp.
• What the Dancing Baby is up to these days.
• How memes propagated before social media.
• A deep learning up-rez of the Dancing Baby at 1080p and 60FPS.
• A reverse engineered Diddy Kong 3D model with big Retouched Jesus energy.
• Memes: look 'em up.
• The ethics of adding a moment of silence in post.
• Giving Rick Astley the Topic Lords Bump.
• Memorizing the eye test they give you at the DMV because you keep forgetting your glasses.
• The guy who only cracked the knuckles of one of his hands to test the hypothesis that cracking your knuckles causes arthritis.
• Repeatedly breaking your knuckles so you can have enormous terrifying swollen knuckles and calling it a "bone trick"
• The Bone Trick Brothers trying to out knuckle each other.
• The doors that are now open to the Bone Trick Brothers.
• The Bone Trick Brothers growing up to be insurance investigators specializing in knuckleheads.
• The complete impossibility of photographing prawns.
• Having to tell a
• A derivatives market for trading futures contracts against the six genetically engineered prawns used in all food photography.
• Being totally bought into a complete lie because it was written in a convincing authorial voice.
• Being convinced by photo evidence even though you haven't looked at the photo evidence.
• Getting your one mistake out of the way and having smooth sailing for the rest of your life.
• This Headline is False.
• Squinting at a plate of colorful rice and trying to see a negative space prawn.
• Scientists just realizing that nobody has cooked a real prawn in decades.
• The last topic being a complete fabrication.
• Opening a hole in reality and pulling in alternate reality Topic Lords episodes where Jim is in a biker club and has guests named Rex.
• Getting notifications any time a podcast anywhere in the multiverse talks about you.
• Not even liking notifications from this universe.
• Lyrics that sound like words but are not words.
• A podcast as a way for people who miss you after you die to listen to you talk for hours about inane bullshit.
• The first year of Topic Lords topics in a coffee table book.
• When GPT-3 Jim is narrating the podcast of the future.
• Instead of doing the whole trial, just doing the first few minutes of the trial and sending the transcript through GPT-3 and searching for "verdict."
• Whether we're still talking about prawns.
• Chunky Integers.
• Feeling the weight of smaller numbers better than enormous ones.
• The advantages and disadvantages of binary-coded decimal.
• Feeding a virtual pet except you're just clicking on cookies.
• Comparing sizes and distances and only really caring about order of magnitude.
• A ragtag team of Internet people spending decades elaborating on your game idea.
• Dozens of people adding features that they think will be cool and hoping that after ten years of this a good game design will emerge.
• How Micheal Jackson might hypothetically have written the Sonic 3 soundtrack.
• Getting excited to go down a YouTube rabbit hole.
• An even cooler mystery than the mystery of the prawns.
• Whether you like a song being predicated on exactly how familiar it is to you.
• Loving the Sonic 3 soundtrack so much that you track down this Michael Jackson guy's other music.
• Like playing an ARG except you're just living your life.
• A Doom mod secretly being the best Sonic the Hedgehog game even though Doom doesn't support slopes so they can't do the loop-the-loop.
• Modding room-over-room into the Doom engine so that you can put loop-the-loops in Sonic Robo Blast 2.
• A great place you got here, lotta nice topics, really screams "party."
• A part time paid employee who just came out of the woodwork.
• Being a leaf node on the employment tree.

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