Lords:

• Mitch
  • https://www.youtube.com/@HBMmaster
  • https://www.google.com/search?q=w
  • https://www.seximal.net/
• Laura
  • https://twitter.com/lmichet
  • https://cohost.org/lmichet

Topics:

• What vehicle would you use to get around in the post apocalypse? Are we talking live animals, internal combustion engine vehicles, bikes, skiis, etc? Why did you choose this?
• The Super Mario Wiki is a beacon that other fan wikis should look to for inspiration
• The GTA San Andreas conversation system
• Last Straw, by George Starbuck http://reesewarner.blogspot.com/2021/04/george-starbuck-nationalpoetrymonth.html
• The gradual inflation of standard youtube video length

Microtopics:

• Lowercase jan, capital Misali.
• Collecting all 905 Pokemon after 25 years.
• R-rated Pokemon competitor, "Seximals."
• Free-range porn, or legitimate educational resource?
• First impressions of seximal.net.
• Counting up to 99 on your hands.
• College basketball's tactical use of base 6.
• The binary number represented by flipping someone the bird with both hands.
• The Airworld situation.
• A sled pulled by domesticated zombies.
• Solving the tire problem so you can bike around in the post-apocalypse.
• Horses destroying society by kicking every building down with their powerful legs.
• Horsefingers.
• Horseknuckles.
• Being just tall enough for a horse to try to eat your hair.
• Shoveling poop out of the bear bone barn.
• Standards of accuracy and editorial quality in the Super Mario Wiki.
• Niwa, the Nintendo Independent Wiki Alliance.
• What Mario Wiki has to say about the Berlin Wall.
• Abraham Lincoln's place in the Mario Canon.
• Organizing the Marvel Wiki by universe number.
• The most objective possible method of sorting a list of universes.
• Regular Peter Parker vs. Ultimate Peter Parker.
• 10 seconds of scrolling.
• A wealth of information not intended for a phone screen.
• The ontological difference between characters and allies.
• What species exist in the world of Mario?
• Action Toad.
• The wiki article about Baby Mario, a distinct character from the times various Marios have been babies.
• The love child of Bowser and Shigeru Miyamoto.
• Making invitations to your bachelor party with Mario Print World.
• Different forms of pounding your butt on the ground.
• The Ground Pound, also known as the Hip Drop, Pound the Ground attack, Bounce, Butt-Bash, Jump Smash, Smash Attack, and Butt Stomp.
• How wikis get away with not being normalized databases.
• A loose simulacrum of conversation.
• A conversation that takes the form of a hand wave and then a gulf a million miles wide.
• Pausing for several minutes to contemplate whether you've ever eaten octopus for breakfast.
• Fifty ways to say "please don't hit me in the head with that wrench."
• The Heaven's Vault conversation system.
• Ten different voice actors saying the same twenty lines.
• A normal poetry thing.
• Trying to find the poem "The Last Straw" by George Starbuck but Google only wants to show you articles about how Starbucks doesn't have straws any more.
• Poems that use two meters at once.
• Showing the frivolity of the line lengths.
• Back when Youtube videos were limited to ten minutes.
• Just sitting here making feature films by myself.
• Al Gore, the guy who invented the Algorithm.
• Promising things in the show notes that definitely aren't going to go there.
• What happens in an ecosystem where there is no pressure to make your work shorter.
• People who have time to watch a three hour Youtube video.
• Watching a movie over the course of a week, ten minutes at a time.
• Multitasking poorly.
• How to find people on Cohost.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Laura
  • https://twitter.com/lmichet/
• Nick
  • http://nicknicknicknick.net/

Topics:

• Can the biological function of expelling waste be improved in any way? Should humans expel waste differently?
• The Hobbit: Dopesmoker Edition. (it's great)
• Gato Gonzales and the Guts Pose
  • Nick at the Montreal Screwjob: https://imgur.com/a/45Opfxq
• The Fish, by Elizabeth Bishop
  • https://poets.org/poem/fish-2
• Twitter's UI has changed "Top 3" and "Top Fives" into "Top Four"
• Every Monday, when you wake up in the morning, you discover that you have grown EXACTLY one millimeter taller. This continues throughout your life, so you will grow about 5.6 centimeters per year for the rest of the time you are alive. In ten years, you will be 1.8 feet taller than you are now. If you are 30 years old right now, you will be 7.3 feet taller when you reach 70. If you are 5.5 feet tall now, you will be 7 feet tall in just over 8 years, at which point you will start to look really weird. How does this change your life? What do you do about it? There is no cure for this condition, because it is caused by magic, not science, and there is no countercurse.

Microtopics:

• The type of band that has four songs per album.
• Creating ambient soundscapes via a series of guitar pedals.
• Johnny To.
• Interpersonal violence and the right to be perceived as human.
• A world where everyone knows Judo for some reason and they fight each other with Judo all the time.
• The quality of life edge that birds have over humans (their urine to feces ratio)
• A nozzle in your wrist like spider man so you can poop into the tiny hole in the wall that everyone's house has for wrist poop nozzles.
• Improving the human condition with a wall hole and maybe a wall tank.
• Burying a pile of trash but also putting a photograph and a floppy disk in there so if you ever get in trouble for your pile of trash you can claim it's a time capsule.
• How geniuses empty dumpsters.
• Everyone taking the first Monday of the month off of work to poop and at 6pm the city's plumbing system explodes.
• How to monetize pooping teens.
• American poor being condemned to a low quality poop zone whereas in Europe they have luxury poop villas.
• Locking your dumpster so it's not filled with old carpet overnight by marauding carpet installers.
• A Person on Twitter.
• Playing a stoner album at the same time as a stoner movie.
• An album/movie combo entirely bereft of revelatory synchronicities.
• The most wrinkly hobbit.
• Whether Gandalf was actually smoking something or if that's just something people joke about.
• Brian Moriarty's multiple GDC talks about looking for secrets where there are none.
• Writing a classic rock album intended to be played simultaneously with Boss Baby 2.
• Rodolfo "Gato" Gonzales's legacy in Japan.
• What the Guts Pose means to you.
• Assigning elaborate meaning to each fist in a fist pump.
• Henry Cavill reloading his fists.
• Playing Rock Paper Scissors with Mario whenever he collects a moon.
• A little head tilt to get you in the right mood to pick up rocks.
• Whether Guts Berserk is named after Guts.
• Elden Ring as Berserk fanfic.
• Understanding and enjoying Elden Ring in a new way.
• Attending the Montreal Screw-Job but not having any idea what's going on.
• Taking a photo to prove you were at a historical event but the flash just reflects off the bald head of the guy in front of you.
• A poem describing a fish.
• A five-haired beard of wisdom.
• A poem with fantastic mouth feel.
• Catching a fish while dad is in the bathroom and screaming at him to hurry up because you don't know what to do with a fish.
• Downloading a poem to your hard drive.
• A good idea or at least a fun idea.
• Whether you can believe the web design on this whitehouse.gov.
• Killing software like only a 90s dad can.
• Eating nachos every night.
• Wanting to do things in fours because on Twitter you can attach four images to a post.
• Top Four Favorite Sandwiches.
• Refusing to share your top anythings.
• That time Nintendo burned a hole in the palms of millions of children.
• The ways Pokemon Go encourages you to put your phone down.
• The kinds of places that society benefits from Pokemon Go not being played.
• The Pokestop Review Process.
• Two excellent reasons not to ship the Virtual Boy as a helmet.
• VR chaperones.
• Being okay with growing too tall but only if you have friends who are also growing way too tall.
• Small inconvenient things about growing taller.
• A cryptic giant living on a mountaintop.
• Being 10 feet tall and retired and figuring out how to live in a normal sized house.
• Doing CSG with caves and shirts.
• Modular clothes that you can reconfigure to cover your changing body.
• A wisp of a person with an eternal tube sweater.
• Not wanting to become a spaghetti but respecting anybody who wants to become a spaghetti.
• Growing to twice your adult height and getting cast as the monster in every horror movie.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Laura
  • https://twitter.com/lmichet/
  • https://lauramichet.itch.io/tallbagel2
• Rachel
  • https://twitter.com/rachel_sala/
  • http://wildhonesty.com/

Topics:

• You are walking down the street one day when your hand transforms into a stapler! For the next 60 minutes, your hand is a stapler from the wrist up. The next day, at the same time, your hand transforms into a stack of post-it notes. Soon, you realize that at noon every day, your hand transforms into one of the objects in your office desk drawer. You discover that anything that goes into your desk drawer has an even chance of replacing your hand for one hour at noon every day. Your desk drawer has a volume of 4 cubic feet and is 12 inches wide, 12 inches long, and 4 inches deep. What do you put into your desk drawer? (If there is nothing in your desk drawer, your hand will vanish for one hour.)
• What's the best way to hang out with friends long distance?
• My childhood impressions of Zelda 1 were apparently formed during my twenties.
• "A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts," by Wallace Stevens
  • https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/21816/a-rabbit-as-king-of-the-ghosts
• If there was one food you could delete from Earth forever, what would it be?
• What should be a flavor of soda that isn’t?

Microtopics:

• Tall Bagel 2: Avocado Hardtack
• Awkward family dinner simulators
• A topic that has been percolating in the bucket since its inception, getting better every year.
• Safely scratching your butt when your hand suddenly turns into a gun.
• Making a list of safe things for your hand to spontaneously turn into, like a hawk.
• Putting a hawk in the drawer so at noon your hand turns into a hawk, then putting a hood on your hand so it thinks it's night time.
• Putting a sandwich in the hand drawer so your hand turns into a sandwich at lunchtime.
• Spending a lot of time at a computer drawing cartoon animals.
• Finding out how sandwiches feel about being eaten.
• Hypothetical questions that make you want to figure out how to break the laws of thermodynamics.
• Keeping your magic drawer away from evil government researchers.
• Knowing what is like to be a cannibal and to be cannibalized, because you chew your fingernails.
• The consequences of replacing your hand with a gold coin.
• Fully mediating which of your actions are perceived by the other party.
• Fighting a large poisonous skull with your friends.
• Talking to your friends for an hour without any awkward lulls.
• Topic Lords, Jr.
• Finding out that a cherished childhood memory could not possibly have happened the way you remember it.
• Receiving photocopies of the Legend of Zelda manual months before receiving the game itself.
• Reliability of witness identification.
• Weird encounters that you tell as stories to your friends.
• Becoming Samuel Pepys.
• Acquiring most of your impressions of world history via what Victorians thought were important.
• Remembering too much about your life and wishing you could forget.
• Lying to your future self in your journal.
• Benevolently gaslighting yourself.
• That monument of cat, the cat forgotten in the moon.
• Sitting with your head like a carving in space.
• Poetry that is angry at the concept of making sense.
• Letting the syllables wash over you.
• The inversion of the power relationships you would expect in nature.
• Whether Wallace Stevens had peers.
• Correctly identifying 100 poem authors in a row.
• Caring a lot about American poetry until you discover video games.
• basketballsintrafficcones.com
• Notes towards a supreme fiction.
• What green things the cat was thinking about.
• Being perceived by a rabbit as tall as outer space.
• Writing for an assumed audience who doesn't exist any more.
• Recommending enjoying being weirded out.
• Deleting ranch dressing because it's just weird vinegary mayonnaise.
• Getting that fake garlic grease zone going on
• Screaming in people's ears all night.
• Misspeaking and having to commit to what you said.
• Throwing your back out by sitting in a relaxed position.
• Gag sodas.
• Soda flavor innovation.
• Pebble ice.
• Savory beverages like sipping vinegar or a cup of warm broth.
• The fakest orange you ever did taste.
• Being disempowered at dinner.
• A relatable game where you can steal food from other people's plates with your long tongue.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Laura
  • https://twitter.com/lmichet
• Brendon
  • https://twitter.com/BlendoGames
• April
  • https://twitter.com/aprilsaur

Topics:

• If you were locked in a Home Depot overnight with 19 other people and you wouldn’t be let out until only one person survived, and also all the lights were turned off, what would you do?
• What's up with teeth. They seem designed to be tedious to brush and floss and maintain. Is this really the best version of mandible?
• Help me workshop this joke: Eve/eave
• Chickens turn into crocodiles
  • https://youtu.be/vTic1y37ueY
  • https://youtu.be/zQOkwoUPNgQ
• If you make an IRL Westworld theme park, how do you prevent having two dozen people on the same quest to have a showdown duel with the bad guy. Do you just have 24 people draw their gun and shoot the bad guy at the same time? Or is this even a problem in the first place?
• New skills learned during the pandemic--what skills have you learned? Was it worth it?

Microtopics:

• The Skin Deep Beacon.
• The voice of maintenance.
• Reviewing the bucket.
• Confronting the darkness within yourself at Home Depot.
• Murdering your competitors on a soft pile of dog beds.
• A chainsaw's efficacy as a murder weapon.
• Tying a chainsaw to the top of your head to foil air assassinations.
• Hot dog beds.
• The bow rack at Home Depot that holds three bows with four arrows each so you can fire twelve arrows at once.
• Trying to opt out of the Battle Royale.
• Using night vision binoculars to observe the burglar from across your bedroom.
• Buying a varmint-proof AT-AT in the hunting aisle of Home Depot.
• Pushing the shelves over like dominos and killing all your Home Depot Battle Royale competitors at once.
• A very specific thing that happens in shonen.
• Being spirited away to this Home Depot with no warning.
• Not having night vision googled so you superglue these night vision binoculars to your face.
• The people horrible enough to survive the Home Depot murder game.
• A Chippendale dancer removing their tearaway pants revealing their pants gun and killing everyone in the room.
• Hitman always introducing himself using the same pseudonym, xXx_69_KillerMan.
• The necessity of inventing pulling teeth.
• Instead of having teeth, having a single non-sectional chomper that grows continuously like a goat horn.
• A human's astounding ability to only occasionally bite their own cheeks and tongue.
• Instead of having to chew, your uvula throws a hadouken, incinerating the food.
• Instead of chewing, simply increasing the pressure in your mouth until the food becomes a diamond.
• How Neanderthals all had perfectly straight teeth like a pop star.
• Humans evolving smaller heads so they could fit through the neck of a t-shirt.
• The first humans in history to regularly eat refined sugars.
• The advantages of rotating your jaw 90 degrees.
• Finding a partner whose nose is oriented opposite yours, so instead of tilting your face to kiss, you just breathe back and forth forever.
• How humans would eat soup and sandwiches if their mouth orientation changed.
• Why eaves exist.
• Lowering energy bills using your cat.
• A very sharp quadruped.
• Figuring out how to make fun of a cat.
• Misspelling your cat's name as "Eave" when the census taker comes around and your property taxes go up by millions of dollars.
• Four chickens covered in colored vinyl.
• Chickens walking into a jello mold.
• An algorithmically created video for children.
• Every permutation of every animal walking through every liquid and turning into every other animal.
• The fashion trajectory of the designer of Super Monkey Ball.
• Walking through the fountain portal and losing one of your beards.
• Coolest video I ever seen: Adult.
• Spanish Cat in the Sky.
• More of the same, but this time there's a cat saying it.
• The black hat cowboy wearing an additional bulletproof vest for every member of your assassination party.
• Making sure there's only one serial killer at a time in your theme park.
• Teaming up to hug this enormous mechanical cowboy.
• The MMO version of David Fincher's The Game where twenty people show up on the rooftop at once so they have to take turns accidentally shooting their brother, having an emotional breakdown, and jumping off the roof to find their personal banquet.
• Going to a series of weird interactive theater events after you move to LA.
• Being diverted into a room where you swing in a wicker basket hanging from the ceiling.
• Paying $30 for a bunch of weird people to wave their fingers at you and draw on you with a sharpie and lock you in a freight elevator.
• Employing both kinds of maze construction materials: bedsheets and garbage bags.
• Sleep No More.
• Wanting to get into a hobby but not being sure how to learn to love the actual process of performing the hobby.
• Access to a wider variety of flavors in your life.
• Making Ants on a Log with Thai peanut sauce.
• Getting children to eat celery by making it unhealthy.
• Getting the quick dopamine hit of the early stages of learning a hobby, then quitting.
• Taking screenshots of a web site and reading the screenshots so the web site can't pop up any more ads.
• Just who is responsible for the state of web media.
• Scrolling past twelve life stories to figure out how to make dinner.
• Writing an angry letter to a corporation and getting a response from a minimum wage employee whose entire job is doing emotional labor to assuage angry customers.
• Not knowing how to advance in an adventure game and writing to the developers to tell them their game is broken.
• Goading game developers into revealing their puzzle solutions rather than calling the hint line.

Support Topic Lords

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 highly_valued_git_feedback@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/does_this_remind_you_of_something/
• 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

Lords:

• Rachel is on Twitter as @rachel_sala. Check out Glitch CIty! https://glitch.city/
• Laura is on Twitter as @lmichet and the web at http://lauramichet.com/. Check out Industries of Titan! https://braceyourselfgames.com/industries-of-titan/

Topics:

• 4:10 All clothes hangers should be made of wood rather than wire or plastic.
• 8:32 How do you feel about food mascots shaped like the food you're about to eat?
  • Will Graham discovers Hannibal's love for sweetbreads at ~3:10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbcI6h1_bHg
• 12:31 I could put any liquid in my CPAP humidifier.
• 18:21 Mallow asks: "Sliding doors. Are people in favor? Opposed? Terrified of them? Feels like in the US we've converged on a kind of door that just isn't that great."
• 23:48 If there was one silly skill you could acquire with no effort, like being good at karaoke, what would it be?
  • https://platypusegg.bandcamp.com/
• 34:08 People in different eras interpreting subtleties in media differently--for example, people not "getting" all of Shakespeare's jokes, interpreting the ending of The Wicker Man differently, etc.
  • https://nextworldover.tumblr.com/post/615235424343998464/patricia-von-arundel-friendlytroll
• 45:07 Multi-Mario races.
  • World record Mario 1862 run in 37h57m. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/588944589
  • https://iggmarathon.com/

Microtopics:

• The comfort of a Discord voice channel where everyone is muted.
• A Discord voice channel where you go to poop.
• Perceiving a pun and wanting to forget it.
• Being in total agreement as to whether we should discuss topics.
• The hidden cost of plastic coat hangers.
• Contemplating the luxury of your collection of fancy wooden coat hangers.
• Never having purchased coat hangers in your life but still ending up with a bunch of them.
• Accruing heavier and heavier clothing as you age.
• Not needing coat hangers because you just drape all your clothes over the back of a folding chair.
• A barbecue joint where the mascot is a sapient pig that is super thrilled that you're about to eat him.
• Alienation from the food production process.
• The weird zone where pigs are slaughtered in an alternate dimension outside our ken.
• Chuck E. Cheese's real name.
• The sweetest meat you'll ever eat.
• Sweetmeats vs. sweetbreads.
• A restaurant with the slogan "the sweetest bread you'll ever eat" and the mascot is a talking Thymus gland.
• Thymus glands just being in you someplace.
• Putting soup in your humidifier and saving yourself the trouble of making breakfast.
• Accidentally blasting yourself with mold all night.
• Sharing a CPAP machine with your life partner, like a tandem bike.
• Adding a splash of bleach to your soup so it won't grow mold in your humidifier overnight.
• Taking action to ensure huge amounts of water enters your body because otherwise the water will probably just sit there.
• Every sliding glass door having a big colorful sticker on it because once someone ran into it and broke their nose or crashed through or both.
• The worst-designed lateral thinking puzzle exacerbating your fear of heights.
• All the rollers in the sliding glass door being crushed so you're just dragging a huge pane of glass along the ground.
• Sliding glass doors being perfectly safe because they cannot break; they can only become windows.
• Increasing the amount of natural light in your home via strategic placement of mirrors.
• Holding a mirror and pointing the sun at your face.
• Everyone loving your ukulele cover of Smells Like Teen Spirit, but only the first time they hear it.
• Knowing how to play a bunch of instruments but they all weigh 300 pounds.
• Making a xylophone out PVC pipes you found in a dumpster and playing Ode to Joy on it.
• Solving this portable xylophone problem once and for all by googling "portable xylophone."
• A gigantic marimba that is built into the room it's in like a supercomputer of sound.
• Wanting to go on a weird xylophone tour.
• Being good enough to impress people who don't know anything about that particular skill.
• Wanting to play an instrument that leaves your mouth free to have a jolly conversation.
• Combining our powers to identify the hexagonal pirate accordion.
• Circus jazz.
• Scottish peasants swaying together like kindergarteners singing a jolly pagan song as the flames approach.
• Fifty years ago, being horrified when pagans burn the character representing cops and religious authority alive, but nowadays everybody owns a guillotine and worships Alan Moore's snake god.
• Whether the Nicholas Cage Wicker Man being hilarious at release was inspired by the 1970s Wicker Man being hilarious in a modern context.
• Jokes that modern audiences don't have the context to understand.
• Works written in 17th or 18th century English needing localization as much as works in a foreign language.
• Not linking to an edifying Tumblr thread because Tumblr's threading is the worst.
• People in the 1940s just talking like that actually.
• Movie actors finally learning to act sometime around 1950.
• Staying awake for 38 hours to get every star, moon and shine in the 3D Mario series.
• Our failings as adult humans.
• Doing game jams where you actually sleep.
• Scoping your game development project to allow sleep during development.
• Romanticizing the idea of staying up all night doing something fun because now you're an adult with adult responsibilities and shirt resilience.
• Not being able to justify doing something for fun so you tack on a charity drive.
• The shifting sense of what's important and what's moral that defines the human experience over time.
• Whether or not you could pay us to play World of Warcraft.
• Your guild leader getting in fistfights all the time and eventually going up jail and appointing you temporary guild leader because he doesn't realize you're a woman.
• Training your brain to be okay playing just one video game for a while.
• A hat that is so ugly you had to give it to a friend.
• Giving your goth dog friend pastel outfits to wear on Bunny Day.
• Lamenting that there is no other place or time to discuss topics.

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Lords:

• Laura Michet makes both indie games and huge megacorp games and just published a short story in Realms of Runeterra. https://leagueoflegends.fandom.com/wiki/Realms_of_Runeterra
• Xalavier Nelson, Jr. is a freelance narrative director, currently making An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs. https://www.patreon.com/StrangeScaffold

Topics:

• 5:10 Moth Man. Discuss. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothman
  • The Leatherman, 10-fingered vagabond. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leatherman_(vagabond)
  • The Kelly-Hopkinsville encounter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly%E2%80%93Hopkinsville_encounter
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mothman_Prophecies_(film)
  • Owls that look like aliens. https://twitter.com/MariettaDaviz/status/1195194263866429441?s=20
  • Storytelling, with Odds Bodkin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rISdBiNhzb0&list=PLR1edeZ72f3yI53_wj_3WOxSNwlS_1Y-b
• 18:19 Why aren’t there more types of chair in common use? We have so many chair types in global society and we use basically only Couch and Regular Chair chairs in public.
• 26:03 Peeing a thimbleful while pregnant, and other shop talk.
• 30:33 Are you more likely to trust any given dog or any given cat?
• 36:54 Would it actually be any fun to be an animal?
• 45:00 Advantages and disadvantages of different book bindings.

Microtopics:

• Making an igloo out of rigid body, shadow casting boarding passes.
• Cryptids appealing to adult males 18-35.
• Cryptids losing their cryptid status when they turn out to be real.
• Keeping your fingers because you are wise and have a cave.
• Wikipedia pages that really ought to put the subject's finger count front and center.
• Confusing Odds Bodkin with Odd Bodkins.
• Booking your favorite banjo-playing grandpa to play at your game development megacorp.
• Taking a bullet for a friend you wouldn't go to a concert with.
• Becoming increasingly annoyed with Richard Gere and his relationship with the moth man.
• Distinguishing thrones from non-thrones.
• Snarling like an evil prince with your leg over the arm of your throne.
• Whether there are more cats indoors or outdoors, especially in El Paso Texas.
• Legal prohibition of attempting to disperse a large enough group of cats.
• Convincing the judge that your rocking chair was not intended to disperse the cats.
• Cat sovereignty.
• Rampaging cat unions recognized by the UN.
• Reagan sending in cat scabs to replace rampaging cat unions.
• Being terrified of military veterans returning home and taking our jobs.
• A Jim Stormdancer-shaped hole that an Air Force veteran is destined to fill.
• The agent of the greater space, the arch-demon, the plane itself, the car itself, the boat itself.
• The rage of seeing a teaspoon of any liquid.
• Recording a conversation so you can decide later whether it's ethical to listen to it.
• Immediately going to murder.
• Trusting a dog to be your accountant.
• A dog being much more likely than a cat to be helpful but also being more likely to maim you.
• Being a jester for a cat's pleasure.
• Being hyper aware of the dark side of dogdom.
• Dogs representing in joy in a complicated world.
• Needing permission to pee.
• Cats not wanting to move to Hollywood.
• Cats that are cognizant of a better world they can no longer have.
• An animal with a sense of hubris, entropy and regret.
• A larger squirrel being mean to you.
• Getting the horny disease once a season.
• Getting all your horny out of the way at once, like Spock.
• Spraying eggs everywhere and not taking up anyone else's time.
• When the page curves because the other pages are in the way and the image on the page is annoyingly distorted.
• The stigma against the paperback being an act of class warfare.
• Wanting the physical trophy of the book on your shelf as much as the experience of reading it.
• Appreciating the people who have previously read the same copy of the book you have.
• Renting Final Fantasy II from Blockbuster and appreciating the previous player's save file.
• Being too mature for fart jokes and then being mature enough to enjoy fart jokes again.
• Having to make a noise every time you get out of a chair.

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