• Linker
• Alexa

Topics:

• Variations in vampire stories: types of powers, origins of vampires, lack of consent lol
• Anthropomorphism/Connection in media
• Get a free burger when you join my rewards
• Meditation at Lagunitas by Robert Hass
  • https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47553/meditation-at-lagunitas
• What letter of the alphabet would win in a Royal Rumble
• Anti-Lesbian Vampire Propaganda of the 1970s as shown in The Vampire Lovers (1970)
  • https://crossingsjournal.ca/index.php/crossings/article/view/283

Microtopics:

• Being American and then being Canadian-American.
• Elephantasy and Elephantasy Flipside.
• Crazy Aaron's Thinking Putty.
• 3D-printed worms.
• A plastic casing attached to your keychain that used to have a clicky button on it.
• What we did to fidget after the industrialization of textiles.
• How office workers goofed off before the Internet.
• Bella's lead skull that prevents Edward from mind-controlling her.
• Making up a power to be your favorite vampire power.
• What happens when you inhale a vampire in mist form.
• Using a picture of Cat's Cradle to illustrate the concept of telekinesis.
• Putting the vampire coffin in steerage and the familiar has to sit in coach and then pull the coffin off of the luggage conveyor belt.
• Would it be fun to turn into mist and be collected in a cup and then drunk?
• Miss Frizzle, vampire expert.
• Getting frustrated at a stealth video game and giving up being a pacifist as a metaphor for being an old vampire.
• New Money vs. Old Money vampires.
• Vampires going on Fetlife to find ethically sourced food.
• One mysterious vampire at Goth night at the nightclub quietly asking to drink your blood, vs. twenty vampires going around begging and everyone's like jeez, this again?
• Nobody expecting you to embezzle the blood.
• Talking to a computer like it's a person you have absolutely no respect for, in a way you'd never talk to a real person because you assign a baseline respect for just being a real person, and people overhearing you are like "holy shit they're really mad" but you're not mad, you're just talking to a computer.
• Apologizing to the table you just ran into.
• It Takes Two.
• Following the instructions of the book of love.
• Creation of personality in moments of friction.
• Interacting with video games in similar ways as you would a person, expect without the social anxiety.
• Why would you ruin this perfectly good complex system with social anxiety?
• We've got teamwork at home.
• Sentient burgers enslaving other sentient burgers.
• Being rewarded with a free burger but then turning into a burger and being given away as a reward.
• Chicken stars! They're like chicken nuggets but they're shaped like stars!
• Where were you when you were drafted into the Rewards Wars?
• Naming your rewards program "My Rewards" so when the mascot refers to it it sounds like the rewards belong to the mascot.
• Demanding to see the terms and conditions before you eat this hamburger.
• A word that is elegy to what it signifies.
• Moments when the body is as numinous as words.
• Taking some LSD and learning about non-symbolic states.
• Ignoring poetry in the same way that you ignore ads.
• Vampire jokes!
• Transylvanian Hounds.
• Serif H being much more combat-ready than sans serif H.
• The most bouba letters.
• Capital O rolling around crushing the other letters of the alphabet like in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
• Distraction the ref so you can stab.
• Which letter of the alphabet could do the best backflip.
• Whether the ampersand counts as a letter.
• Letters that are good at stabbing vs. letters with broad sturdy bases.
• The nuclear family emerging in response to the financial boom following World War II.
• Anti-lesbian propaganda films that are far too sexy to be effective.
• Heteronormative fiances.
• Carmella the lesbian vampire stealing your wife.
• The vampire lesbians receiving their comeuppance and the heteronormative couple living happily every after.
• Be gay do crimes. (Murder.)
• Buying Linker's games so he doesn't die.

Support Topic Lords

• Avery
• Linker

Topics:

• Twin Peaks
• Myxozoa
• How storytelling is failing us
• Bones and Shadows, by John Philip Johnson
  • https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56581/bones-and-shadows
• Novelizing films that originated as novels

Microtopics:

• A spike of interest corresponding with every episode you're on.
• How many hate listeners Topic Lords has.
• Chiaroscuro.
• Buying Linker's games so he doesn't die.
• Watching Blue Velvet while high.
• Finishing season two of Twin Peaks out of a sense of duty.
• A protagonist who you want to be happy.
• That time David Lynch bought five Woody Woodpecker dolls and named them Chucko, Buster, Pete, Bob and Dan, then had to cut them out of his life after their personalities changed.
• Focusing the energy you have on the things you love: filmmaking, painting and smoking.
• The David Lynch Foundation for the Human Mind.
• David Lynch changing the subject back to transcendental meditation.
• The permeable boundary between dreams and reality.
• David Lynch putting sawmills in every movie because he just likes sawmills.
• The disappearance of all-night diners.
• What it takes to get Denny's In small-town New Brunswick.
• Whether it's possible to mod the bad parts of Deadly Premonition.
• Putting evolutionary pressure on jellyfish to get smaller until they evolve back into a single-called organism.
• Mammals returning to the sea.
• The mutation that allows Henrietta Lacks to live forever.
• The cancerous organism that's been hitchhiking in dogs for over a thousand years.
• What kind of tumors are blowing around in the Tasmanian Devil whirlwind.
• Real and metaphorical spandrels.
• Where the Panda's sharp thumb came from.
• The kiwi egg-to-body-mass ratio.
• Big Bird, the evolutionary pinnacle of all birds.
• Introverted Darwinism.
• Keeping your toilet paper on the bed.
• It's an indie game, you have to put a dead wife in there somewhere.
• Obama's presidency as the end of history.
• That time everyone was terrified of superpredators.
• Human beings organizing facts info stories.
• One of the many human traits that cause problems.
• Interpreting observed facts differently when you are depressed.
• Virtue Ethics.
• Deducing ethics via pure reason.
• Whether it's true or false that Sherlock Holmes smoked a pipe.
• Flash games where you drone strike terrorists.
• Exploring a system by interacting with it.
• A poem about a guy being beaten up for money.
• Successfully talking.
• Becoming the bones in the last case.
• Pre-nostalgia.
• Answering a question by just saying shit.
• A video game adaption of a poem.
• An atheist take on Tarot readings.
• The opinions of someone who once read a lot of philosophy.
• Sensing the passage of time in a film clip of a stationary object.
• Splinter of the Mind's Eye and the Star Wars radio plays.
• The Weird Al song that's just the whole plot of The Phantom Menace.
• The Blade Runner and V for Vendetta novelizations.
• Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, the novelization.
• Kenneth Branagh rolling around in slime with a naked reanimated corpse because because Mary Shelley would've wanted it that way.
• A social media platform that was designed to be mindful of mental health, going out of business almost immediately.
  

Support Topic Lords

• Adam
  • https://store.steampowered.com/app/2769410/Ash__Adams_GOBSMACKED/
• Linker
  • https://linker.itch.io/

Topics:

• Ways you've changed in the last 20 years that have surprised you
• Examples of x animal software running on y animal hardware (ie. fox being cat software on dog hardware)
• This argument about whether erasure poetry is poetry
  • https://www.tumblr.com/whistletown/753096096947011584
• Favourite RPG (videogame or tabletop; open to interpretation)

Microtopics:

• Launching a game in the deep past.
• Indiepocalypse.
• After Journey's End vol. 2.
• The Monthly Tape Club.
• Games that are big enough or marketable enough.
• Getting excited about this month's PC Gamer demo disk.
• Zine-like game distribution.
• Making a small game to express a thought.
• Making a living making weird shit.
• The methods of marketing a small game.
• Practices that have existed for thousands of years.
• The boom and bust cycle and why you might or might not get in on the next boom.
• Making a shit-ton of money and continuing to pay your employees rather than laying them off.
• Whether Gen Z is savvy to the MBA brain worms.
• Whether Jim has a college degree.
• New England Sarcastic.
• Learning about having kids and wondering what it'd be like to have a purpose in life.
• Being legally responsible for the survival of the worst roommate imaginable.
• Other People's Dogs.
• How is your life different from when you were 6 years old?
• Becoming a permanent resident of Canada.
• A local theater company producing your play.
• Frog Fractions: it came from space.
• A thing that expresses the maelstrom going on in my head (or soul)
• The six 70s funk songs with a long enough stretch of isolated drums that they became the drums for every song ever.
• How to make art as an expression of human needs.
• Video games: they shouldn't exist.
• Expressing a thought with the skills you enjoy flexing.
• The virtues of having playtesters.
• Bug software running on mammal hardware.
• Tiny cats in the bodies of big cats.
• Service dogs for cheetahs.
• Remaining calm around humans because your dog buddy loves humans.
• Erasure Poetry.
• Oh Someone Oh God And Then Me.
• Formalized rules for determining who gets credit for what when a bunch of people make a piece of art.
• Legal precedents for copyright and reproduction rights.
• Magnetic fridge poetry.
• Inventing an art form that's even more constrained than pixel art somehow.
• Unity of effect.
• Looking at a blurry 16x16 tile and not being quite sure what it's supposed to be.
• RPGs: what even are they?
• What you can get away with within the aesthetics of a black and white Game Boy game.
• Whether Breath of the Wild counts as an immersive sim and whether immersive sims count as RPGs
• Getting into the topic weeds.
• Chained Echoes.
• Observing the sand running through the hourglass.
• Social anxiety preventing you from enjoying tabletop RPGs.
• Playing tabletop RPGs with a bunch of weird theater people.
• Meeting your friend at a bar to catch up on the latest events in his tabletop RPG sessions.
• How to use your name on social media.

Support Topic Lords