Lords:

• Jenni
  • jenni@jennipolodna.com
• Kole
  • https://duckfeed.tv/
  • https://twitter.com/koleross

Topics:

• Whether or not you should stop animals who are thieves.
• We're gonna reach a point where Americans know about Eurovision pretty soon, so prepare for that
• "CRL couldn't afford the movie license for their video game adaptation of Blade Runner, so they just licensed the soundtrack.
  • http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/blade-runner-1985/
• I Did It by Dave Matthews Band
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRXZkdEj7YI
  • Unedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/gN_7KtRoZWU
• Showing your kid the Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon & him immediately adopting Sonic's attitudey idle animation
• Fixing every plot hole in media by writing a "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead"-like work where minor characters directly address them.
• The "I won't eat the cheese" joke
  • Adventure 500: https://bluerenga.blog/tag/adventure-500/?order=ASC

Microtopics:

• An entire crowd of Jennis all expressing their preferences at once.
• Creative choices that make editing this show take even longer.
• Feeling some topics right now.
• Helping a seagull looter escape.
• Just assuming that the seagull didn't pay for that bag of chips.
• Sending a penguin to the market to buy fish.
• The Keystone Kops of stopping this bird from having a cheese sandwich.
• How nobody can get mad if you train your dog to steal from shops.
• An adorable seagull stealing somebody's insulin.
• Activating the motion-sensing doors to help a seagull steal the Hope Diamond.
• Encountering a seagull smoking a tiny crack pipe and deciding whether to post a video on social media or send it to rehab.
• How to monetize the rat trying to go up the down escalator.
• When you post a viral video of a rat trying to go up the down escalator and monetize it by replying with an ad for mail order brides but don't give the rat a cut off the income.
• Whether Americans know about Eurovision.
• Pretending the listeners don't know what Eurovision is and really lording it over them.
• Having to adjust for the altitude when you bake a souffle on your high horse.
• If every state in the USA got to perform one song at the Super Bowl halftime show.
• Mr. Lordy.
• Soccer except it's singing.
• Looking up what girding your loins means.
• Stocking up on batteries in advance of when Americans find out about Eurovision.
• Power-washed Cheetos.
• A bag of bad corn snacks impaled on both a pike and a spike.
• Cat Is How Much.
• The specific ways in which Wikidiff is broken.
• Retiring replidroids.
• Knife Hopper with Boy Ratty and Dick Reckard.
• An extremely composed and photogenic dumpster.
• Getting ready for some very uncomfortable mugging.
• Identifying wizards by their extremely shiny outfits.
• Why is this man so big?
• Smoke tentacles that are just trying to turn the TV on.
• How badly the red wizard needs food.
• Sugar Ray Charles playing guitar with one hand and holding champagne in the other.
• A dojo with sauna vibes.
• Dripping your dumpster water onto the hookah rip enjoyer.
• Dave-- that's what his fans call him: Dave.
• Dave Matthews's flying kick fizzling out because his bribe to the VFX artist wasn't big enough.
• Scaring the fish with your pec shimmy.
• Doing community service with the purple wizard who is now the orange wizard.
• Your two most attitudey friends getting married and having a kid.
• Deciding that Sonic the Hedgehog's "I'm waiting" idle animation from Sonic 1 is so central to the character that you decide you need to invent reasons for Sonic to be bored in every episode of the Sonic cartoon.
• Looking at your old yearbook photos and realizing that your smirk is the same as Sonic the Hedgehog's.
• Kids getting sucked into Sonic the Hedgehog's engorged monopupil younger and younger every year.
• The helicopter but it gets you lift.
• Mario's idle animation in Super Mario 64 where he just starts naming Italian foods.
• Whether someone at Nintendo of America heard Charles Martinet's Mario audition tape and thought "Martinet's an Italian name, right? That means it can't be racist!"
• The alternate reality where Charles Martinet does a cartoonish French accent to voice Nintendo's platformer mascot.
• Getting offended on behalf of the French.
• Whether we should give Shamus O'Leary a hard time for having a racist name.
• Shamus O'Leary finding the video on Instagram where you did a cartoon Irish accent in his store's bathroom and being like "is that our choking poster??"
• Hearing that Andy Dufresne makes a hole in a cell wall and assuming Shawshank Redemption is a sequel to Fantastic Voyage.
• Writing a short story about a friendly rat who explains how Marty McFly's parents didn't recognize him.
• Making it a life goal to transform every goof on IMDB into an "error made by character" by writing fan sequels on AO3.
• Explaining how Marty McFly's parents didn't recognize him by pointing out that it was actually a movie the whole time.
• The stage play of Super Mario Bros 2 where the audience just watches Mario snore for two hours while listening to jaunty ragtime.
• A joke striking you loudly enough that it's still ringing in your head twenty years later.
• Paris Syndrome.
• Jerusalem Syndrome.
• Planting a palm tree under the Eiffel Tower.
• Adventure 500.
• A game jam where you recreate a game you haven't played in years from memory.
• Lou's voice just being a bad Sylvester Stallone accent.
• Jenni probably appreciating your email unless it's a bad email.

Support Topic Lords

Lords this week:

• Tim made Jamestown and just shipped Jamestown+ on PC and Switch. http://jamestownplus.com/
• Kole makes podcasts at Duckfeed. http://duckfeed.tv/

Topics:

• 2:42 Cat trees for humans.
  • Ninja Warrior. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJPP7M1hQZE
  • "Find an American Ninja Warrior Gym." http://www.ninjawarriorgyms.com/
• 7:37 Non-analytical storytelling/writing (flash writing, story time, songwriting)
  • Alice's Restaurant. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m57gzA2JCcM
• 15:08 The ephemerality of AI Dungeon.
  • AI Dungeon: https://www.aidungeon.io/
  • AI Dungeon patreon: https://www.patreon.com/AIDungeon
  • Art breeder: https://artbreeder.com/
• 25:13 Brett asks: "The assertion that programming and in particular programmers are getting worse."
• 36:20 Sonder
  • "This Is Water." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI
  • "Laziness Does Not Exist" https://humanparts.medium.com/laziness-does-not-exist-3af27e312d01
• 47:48 What determines if an inanimate object (car, home, golf club) gets a proper name.
• 56:09 Fruity Cheezma
  • "Cheese Tea: It’s Real and It’s Spectacular" https://www.dinnerpartydownload.org/cheese-tea/
  • Orbitz (drink). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbitz_(drink)
  • Jim's Fruity Cheezma outcome: https://twitter.com/mogwai_poet/status/1210328506359414785?s=20

Microtopics:

• Releasing the same game over and over again because it keeps being your best move.
• Suffering through and finding the magic but still believing you shouldn't have had to suffer.
• Asking yourself what the problem is and breaking it down.
• Being here for topics.
• Understanding that the question you're asking is ridiculous but asking it anyway.
• What you want only existing for children because their needs are greater.
• Using adult-sized playgrounds for physical therapy.
• Using adult-sized playgrounds for physical therapy keeping those blades sharp.
• The through line from bouldering to Ninja Warrior to Super Mario Bros.
• Watching the first half of Full Metal Jacket and thinking the obstacle course looks really fun.
• Putting game show contestants in a video game for the viewers at home but the contestants themselves are just looking at a big green wall.
• Professional skaters having skate parks in their back yard.
• Doing American Ninja Warrior every day and getting a lot more miles on the tires.
• Tony Hawk getting away with skateboarding in a 50-year-old body because he's good enough to not faceplant all the time.
• Giving a skateboard to an average 50-year-old and saying "go for it buddy."
• Restarting civilization around your business plan.
• Making up stories for your children in real-time.
• Being a DM except nobody else gets a turn, you just keep going.
• Five years of daily practice to wake up your storytelling brain.
• Going to an Arlo Guthrie concert because you're old and go to Arlo Guthrie concerts.
• All of Arlo Guthrie's songs being twenty minute stories like Alice's Restaurant.
• Thinking that advice sounds wise for somebody else.
• David Lynch's book on storytelling turning out to actually be about Transcendental Meditation.
• Actually possibly having deep insights about the universe while being high on drugs.
• Writing a book by just writing down something you already said and it feeling like someone else wrote the book.
• Letting the story write itself and then taking credit for it.
• Having children because you want to become a great writer.
• Incurring $10,000 of hosting costs because you misconfigured your CDN.
• A text adventure telling you what you did but not telling you what happened as a result.
• Markov chain text generation.
• AI replacing musicians and ultimately most art.
• AI musicians giving you another album from your favorite band.
• Exploring AI generated music and sharing your unique discoveries.
• Seeing creative work as the last bastion of human work that AI can't take from us, but being wrong.
• Feeling wonder at the achievement but also complete dismay that we've made ourselves irrelevant.
• Basic income allowing us to look forward to the machines taking all our jobs.
• All the advantages of AI just turning into more profit for billionaires.
• Skating through a lucid fever dream and trying to make sense of the chaos, but it's really just chaos.
• AI Dungeon being a good improv partner but a terrible game.
• AI generated text being effectively sampled at an unknown granularity and having no idea if this is a unique sentence or if it's lifted wholesale from a Sonic fanfic.
• Programmers getting worse as a discipline vs. getting worse as people.
• Forcing everyone on Earth to participate in NaNoWriMo.
• Building software on top of a teetering stack of dependencies 1,000 feet high because your company probably won't last out the year.
• Programmers getting better in the same way speed metal guitarists are getting better.
• Just making the thing and not caring how you make it because it just doesn't matter.
• Not bothering working really hard to do the easy part really well because the hard part is what matters.
• Companies being possibly good at their focus and everything else being good enough at best.
• Some of your best friends being assholes.
• The best programmers you've met being super sociable and cooperative.
• Staying and asshole and flaming out because nobody wants to work with you or maturing and sanding off the rough edges and becoming more productive and less of a drag.
• Not being sure if your co-workers are nice to everyone or just you because you have seniority.
• The coming generation of programmers seeing programming as a hobby or a career rather than an identity.
• Blocking the guy driving too fast on the freeway but then it turns out the guy driving too fast was going to the hospital.
• Doing your best to live like people invented in storybooks.
• Realizing that everyone around you has lives just as complex and nuanced as you or anyone you know.
• The violence of walking past someone on the street and dismissing their entire context and history because you have no choice if you want to get on with your life.
• Projecting an arbitrary order onto the chaos and definitely being wrong.
• Definitely being wrong anyway so why not think a positive thing rather than a negative one.
• Changing how you see somebody by imagining them differently.
• Conceiving of a universe without yourself at the center.
• Flying off the handle because you've had shit piled on you all day and not because you dislike Kole specifically.
• Running late about 5% of the time you're driving and also being annoyed by about 5% of drivers going too fast because they're just irresponsible people.
• Working hard to build positive interactions and trying to see the best possible version of somebody.
• Instagram being a source of misery because you're comparing yourself to the prettiest people's prettiest moments.
• Comparing your backstage to someone else's front stage.
• Choosing to shape your world such that you're not walking around angry all the time.
• Having a boat and the boat having a name.
• Not giving your cat a name but permitting it to have a name.
• Anthropomorphizing the objects you rely.
• Calling it "the mud room" even though there's no mud and no room.
• Naming furniture that hurts you "kneebreaker charlie" and not hating it so much because it's a little bit funny.
• Thinking of an old car that's always breaking down as being like an old friend who's kind of a pain in the ass but you've been through so much together.
• Being happier loving things.
• A generic bunny holding an Easter Egg that nobody plays with until you give it a name.
• The only time you've bought a plant in your life being that time they put googly eyes on a cactus.
• Your roommate who took all the bows off of the presents under the tree and then shit on the floor.
• Not wanting to be the skin dad.
• Having animals to project love onto so your society is more placid and malleable.
• Cats being way more lovable than most human children.
• Empathizing with the kid crying on the airplane because you feel like crying too.
• The kid who's allowed to scream in the grocery store when if you screamed you'd get thrown out of the store or arrested.
• Putting hundreds of googly eyes on a Roomba because you can't just buy two googly eyes and calling it "Kos-ba."
• Putting two eyes on the outside of the Roomba and the rest on the inside because you don't want to freak out the squares.
• What's fruity, cheezma?
• Trying to get your friends to follow the script of your joke but they keep making their own jokes instead.
• Tweeting about there being no hits for "fruity cheezma" and now there being one hit for "fruity cheezma."
• The cheese tea rocking the boba world.
• Copping to a certain amount of midwestern provincialism.
• The probability of inhaling boba being very high but it's great though.
• Blowing a tapioca ball directly into the mouth of your enemy right as they're inhaling.
• The end of your boba beverage being like The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
• A dare than someone should not have taken and that someone having possibly been you.
• Cream cheese and fruit going together.
• The kind of logic you don't want to be applying to food.
• Putting all your old food combo ideas on the menu without testing any of them because Fruity Cheezma worked out somehow.
• Wanting peanut butter to work with sliced cheese because you can roll it up like a taquito.
• Figuring out that milk and Cheerios go together because they're both kind of off-white so next you try orange juice and Cheez-Its.
• Cheez-Its staying crispy in orange juice because they're so oily.
• A Cheez-It being named Arthur and loving its mother.
• The driver in front of you making a right turn on red from the third lane over because she was in a hurry to get to the library and walking up to her to ask for reparations.
• A telling being told or not being told.

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