• Mark
  • https://wyrmburden.bandcamp.com/album/strange-sorcerous
• Shirley
  • https://shop.naturmacht.com/sorcerot-merch/sorceroet-rotten-magick-vinyl-crowdfunding-lim

Topics:

• Music League
• Shaping the Head Like a Japanese Watermelon
• Kugelmugel
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kugelmugel
• Welcome to Holland by Emily Perl Kingsley
  • https://www.emilyperlkingsley.com/welcome-to-holland
• Using drugs in 2025
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_timeline._Drugs_involved_in_overdose_deaths.jpg

Microtopics:

• Wyrm Burden.
• Metal bands running out of cool word combinations.
• Checking Metal Archives.
• Canadian atmospheric sludge metal.
• Sorcerot.
• Crowdfunding a vinyl pressing because your label refuses to pay for it.
• Music that is not on Spotify.
• How many Music Leagues you're part of right now.
• A competition to see who has the best taste in music.
• A song about a horse.
• Adversarial Music League.
• Posting on the internet with the goal of getting the same number of upvotes and downvotes.
• Benign Hypotonia and the Floppy Baby.
• Wearing a helmet 23 hours a day to adjust the shape of your skull.
• Heads that smell like feet.
• A very head-shaped head.
• Babies that look like the Gary Oldman character in The Fifth Element.
• A cone-shaped otter.
• Zorg and Zord.
• What kind of gear is this baby on?
• Eat clen, tren hard.
• Collecting as many physical therapists as possible.
• A sweet little guy who's having a great time.
• Putting on your resume your first word and the age you first walked.
• Parent influencers with bad takes.
• A baby that expands to the size of its container, so they'll stay baby sized forever unless you move into a bigger house.
• Listen, have you ever evaluated anything? It's not easy.
• Vibes-Based Medicine.
• Declaring your metal sphere a micronation.
• Closing the borders of your 8 meter micronation during COVID.
• Building a house that looks like a ball.
• Declaring your new house a micronation after the city refuses to grant you a building permit.
• Antifascism Square.
• Declaring your baby paddock a micronation.
• A very good basically-a-poem.
• Disabilities that are worse than going to Holland.
• Trying to figure out how to live with the life you have.
• Making peace with the fact that you didn't achieve all your dreams.
• Divisive takes about sleep training.
• Outcomes associated with prolonged cortisol exposure.
• Category One Squawking.
• Spending six years figuring out how to get your kid to fall asleep.
• The term they invented to remind parents that just because things are good now, that doesn't mean they stay good forever, which is true for everything, but for children sleeping they have a specific term for it.
• Getting real sad and going home.
• Trying to take any drug except for fentanyl.
• Fentanyl test strips from reliable suppliers.
• If Coolio isn't safe, who is?
• Narcan vending machines.
• Walking down the street like you have Narcan in your pocket.
• The terrifying gray line that dominates the entire graph.
• A credible threat to a lot of recreational drug users.
• Finally inventing the nightmare drug that DARE wanted you to be terrified of.
• Nostalgia for street heroin.
• The role that dopamine plays in human behavior.
• A dogshit drug even from a drug enjoyer's perspective.
• The only internet you even like any more.

Support Topic Lords

• Mark
  • https://mythcarver.bandcamp.com/
  • https://writhenhilt.bandcamp.com/album/ancient-sword-cult
  • Dungeon Synth:
  • https://fief.bandcamp.com/
  • https://auramerlin.bandcamp.com/
  • https://shadowknell.bandcamp.com/
  • https://hillsfar.bandcamp.com/
  • https://erang.bandcamp.com/
• Shirley
  • https://www.leuchtturm1917.us/some-lines-a-day.html

Topics:

• Naming a human
• Boomers say that you get more conservative as you get older, but I just keep getting more liberal.
• I'm scared to start recording Mario Odyssey
• The Orc
  • https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/6TcTlXuz.png

Microtopics:

• Writhen Hilt.
• Writing a few sentences to achieve your goal.
• Being extremely entertained by your drunken journal entries from a year ago.
• Remembering the 140 years your son has been around.
• Learningl from the dead.
• How the archaeologists of the future are going to cope with social media, let alone the reams of LLM generated nonsense.
• Detecting forged paintings via the radioactive isotopes that are only found in pigments manufactured after the detonation of the atomic bomb.
• Low-background steel.
• Scavenging steel from shipwrecks because you just can't make steel that good any more.
• Pizza Pranks.
• Packaging a USB stick as though it's a cassette tape.
• Packaging your Dungeon Synth album on cassette in a Sega Genesis cartridge box.
• Propsr Topics.
• Calling your niece Billy Zane.
• Naming your child Scooter. (Monotonously.)
• Being unable to decide whether you're going to name your child Scooter or Squooter.
• Some Wizard of Earrhsea ahit.
• Holding power over your friends (magically, not legally)
• Your name for a person carrying with it your relationship with that person.
• Why they shipped a game called "Epic Mickey.*
• Compaeing this year's top 50 baby names to the top 50 a century ago.
• Mikse meeting Mikes.
• The Bob Emergency.
• One day there will be no more Bobs, and a door will close.
• Continuing to refer to your nephew as a "little kid" even though he's 45 now.
• Thinking you're getting more liberal but eventually realizing you're getting more apocalyptic.
• Garbage-ass subreddits full of dis- and misinformation.
• Battle Jackets vs. Jackets for Battle.
• Pregnancy subreddits.
• Checking out of gamer culture entirely.
• Black metal communities dealing with white supremacists.
• Can't we just have a place who love swords and wizards?
• How to not run a Nazi bar.
• Whether people get more liberal or more conservative as they age.
• Stone cold hippies.
• Explaining trans rights to your parents who are doing their best to understand.
• Asking the AI-generated slush pile how to update your political beliefs.
• Keeping younger people around who care about you enough to help you fix your shitty opinions.
• Hungry for Jim topics.
• Japanese cultural touchstones referenced in video games that just seem like nonsense to Americans.
• Slavic folklore in the Witcher games.
• Importing video games from more and more obscure countries because Japan is played out now.
• Recognizing Greek heavy metal just from the riffs.
• Vacuuming a couch and twenty one-dollar bills fly out of it.
• Shagrat, you shag rats!
• Rheumy weeping orbs that glare with hate.
• Truly a poem of unknown provenance.
• Shagrat doesn't deserve this!
• We had some great topics today, y'all.
• Mythcarver.
• A discord for people who are due in the same month as you.
• The Libras who won't let the dads in.
• Circle time with other pregnant couples.

Support Topic Lords

• Mark
• Shirley

Topics:

• Egypt sweater!
  • https://www.etsy.com/listing/233409089/amazing-1940s-egyptian-fair-isle-jumper
• At the end of this film, are we supposed to want Indy to save Elsa? To go off happily together? (I say no.)
• Kazim is the best character in Last Crusade
  • https://www.youtube.com/shorts/IP54S-ZZtyE
• Portrait of my Brother as Indiana Jones
  • https://www.tupeloquarterly.com/poetry/portrait-of-my-brother-as-indiana-jones-by-amorak-huey/
• Sallah: The hardest brownface to swallow
• Are pits of snakes effective as circus attractions?
• The visual of them closing themselves in a giant box while on the motorcycle

Microtopics:

• A nerd of the second-highest caliber.
• Working in tech on the internet.
• Quality guests on a quality show.
• Savage Oaf vs. Savage Oath.
• Getting on Metal Archives and figuring out those bands are.
• Swearing an Oaf.
• Reading "Lord of the Rings" because you are pregnant.
• Recommending pregnancy to someone who wants a child.
• Wonder Weeks.
• Your child is about the size of a mid-sized sedan.
• A delightful looking creature about the size of a Micro Machine.
• A sister who is a chimp and other wild shit from the 1970s.
• A screwball comedy about lions living with Tippi Hedren and mauling the director of Speed.
• A movie about an archaeologist who is beloved by all his students and one of them is wearing this sweater.
• 1940s Egyptian Fair Isle Jumper.
• Getting unprofessionally close to the professor you have a crush on so he can notice your cool Egypt sweater.
• Why Dial of Destiny didn't do that well.
• An entirely tolerable movie according to Mark circa whenever that movie came out.
• Deploying the tense night-time action music.
• Going to Fiverr and paying someone the fair value of their labor.
• Elsa's a Nazi and then we're mad at Elsa.
• Emotionally elevated moments between Indy and Elsa.
• Proposing to your girlfriend on the Golden Gate Bridge in a last-ditch attempt to save your relationship.
• The payoff of Henry Jones Sr.'s character arc.
• Elsa choosing the wrong grail on purpose.
• The 50 grails on the other side of the room that Elsa didn't even look at.
• Coffee cup movie magic.
• The expeditious nature of film storytelling.
• The Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword.
• Kazim falling off the dock.
• Kazim showing up to beat the shit out of a kid who is spending too much time reading about the grail on Wikipedia.
• The two-part episode of MacGyver where MacGyver looks for the Holy Grail.
• Stealing artifacts because they belong in museums, not with the people who originated them.
• Going on a series of heists to steal artifacts back from museums and returning them to their people.
• Sometimes chased, sometimes chasing.
• Amorak from Kalamazoo.
• Love on her eyelids.
• A certified Wocust.
• Compensation for my brother-in-law's car.
• The depiction of Sallah in Raiders vs. in Last Crusade.
• Fisher Stevens in Short Circuit.
• A movie you can give up.
• John Rhys-Davies playing a dwarf even though he's not even from Middle Earth.
• Middle Earth being flat for elves but round for humans.
• A huge vat filled with undifferentiated snakes that is a circus attraction somehow.
• The guy who lays down in the bed of snakes.
• A 1920s-era circus putting on a performance of the play that Snakes on a Plane was based on.
• Giving a garter snake to every kid who comes to the circus and if their parents don't like it they can just set the snake loose in the back yard because it's the midwest.
• Not thinking to ask a question until 30 years after you've seen the movie.
• Liking art that is flawed.
• Dying from a recreational drug situation.
• Safely ensconced in the box.
• Being chased by Nazis and taking a moment to pry open a wooden crate just in case there is a motorcycle in it.
• Batman scrolling reddit while hiding behind the curtain for the guy he's going to surprise coming back into the office.
• Of course that's what they do, and of course it worked, because you just saw it happen and it worked.
• The pitfalls of googling your own medical symptoms.

Support Topic Lords

• Mark
• Shirley

Topics

• Lawn Angst: Why does the city get to decide what is a weed vs an acceptable plant?
• Learning to code is like a cheat code for life, or at least work
• Poop epidemiology
  • https://nextworldover.tumblr.com/post/720886587343454208
• Insomnolence by Charles Rafferty
  • https://poets.org/poem/insomnolence
• Ville asks: "buying mysterious items that aren't labeled in a language you speak from the Asian supermarket because the picture on the front looks good, then choosing whether to roll the dice by putting them in your dinner or keep them in the back of the cupboard until you move house and throw them away"

Microtopics:

• Chamber Mage.
• Touring on the strength of your one song.
• Heartstopper, by Alice Oseman.
• The city issuing a ticket because you have a weed on your lawn.
• Declaring certain plants weeds when they're all good plants, Bront.
• All the different signs you could put on your lawn to tell off your neighbors.
• How tall a CB tower you're allowed to build without a permit.
• The youngest homeowners on the block.
• A natural space that isn't so manufactured.
• A society that loves some plants and hates others.
• How to grow flowers on the moon.
• Making 660 folders based on an excel spreadsheet.
• The stick-to-it-iveness required to fight a bunch of bugs.
• What LLMs are good at and bad at.
• A Dragonborn Paladin with aphasia.
• Generating humans with too many fingers.
• Where to post your Wordle results and Dall-E shitposts.
• A cryptic lineage of COVID in Columbus, Ohio.
• Gross but amazing.
• Some seriously bad-ass science.
• Expecting more diligence after you start paying your volunteers.
• The Paxlovid Rebound.
• Gin Gin Ginger Chews
• Genetically altering your tongue to taste the most possible bitter flavor all the time.
• Placing a ginger chew on your tongue and allowing it to dissolve over the course of an hour.
• Paxlovid Mouth.
• How to sleep with a cough.
• Numbing your coughing agents.
• Stashing the lozenge on your gums.
• Waking with a hard candy stuck to your teeth.
• Scarring your vocal folds by coughing as much as you can.
• Poets: good at writing in a poetic way.
• Poetry that's just prose if you think about it.
• Turning a poet in to the authorities for writing prose.
• At night, in the woods.
• Standing here a thousand years ago and feeling the exact same thing.
• Not being able to upgrade our armor any more because bokoblins are extinct.
• Finding and giving up on a new ingredient every week.
• RIP Bean Paste.
• H-Mart.
• Gooey Duck.
• Buying a bunch of dumplings without any idea what's in them and having a tasting party.
• A tiny freezer with only durian in it.
• A smoothie that tastes like drinking a gas leak.
• Jackfruit as a crab or pulled meat alternative vs. jackfruit as a tasty treat.
• Getting foodstuffs stuck behind your soft palate.
• Asafoetida risks.
• Golden Mountain Sauce.
• Brown Umami Boosters.
• Fish sauce tastings.
• Three Crabs vs. Flying Lion.
• How to say "Serving Suggestion" in all the different Asian languages.
• Loving all your listeners, even the problematic ones.
• Throne of Iron.
• Heavy metal music about D&D.
• Finding yourself on the internet.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Mark
• Shirley

Topics:

• What would you do if you came downstairs and all of my clothes and my glasses were on the floor in a heap in a puddle of water?
• Aphasia: What doesn't it mean?
• Dr. Icecreamwala
  • https://www.icecreamderm.com/
• Eternal Champion - I Am The Hammer
  • https://eternalchampion.bandcamp.com/track/i-am-the-hammer
• Teen Censorship (what to restrict, if anything?)
• SCA stuff: social skills in the SCA, thrown weapons, and winter camping!

Microtopics:

• EEG, EKG and ECG.
• Dogs and video games.
• Kingdom: Two Crowns.
• Whoops, I'm Dead!
• Borker and Starina.
• Waking up in the morning and telling your wife "and we're back!"
• Sleeping with the Shirley-cicle.
• When your wife turns into a puddle of water and you have to get a hot water bottle shaped like your wife to sleep with every night.
• Hedge witches.
• An Alex Mack situation.
• Turning yourself into a goo accidentally vs. on purpose.
• A dog athletic enough to pee on your glasses while you're wearing them.
• Figuring out what muscle to flex to telepathically communicate as a glass of water.
• Believing things you see written in an authoritative voice.
• The kind of movies Bruce Willis has been making lately.
• Aphasia vs. Primary Progressive Aphasia.
• The four primary modalities of human language.
• Figuring out how to hang out with someone you can't talk to.
• Decoupling the word "yes" from its literal meaning.
• Apraxia of speech.
• Thanking colonialism for this moment of delight.
• Serving your patients their prescription in a waffle cone.
• Flying to the Bay Area to get some light dermatology done.
• The battle-starved riders of Tarsul.
• The demon priests of ill Nitaar.
• Nolan Bushnell receiving feedback about the name Atari.
• The God Blade.
• Fist-pumpin', sword-swingin' heavy metal.
• A good source of lore.
• Cosmologies where god is a species.
• Drinking his blood to see what happens.
• Heavy metal bands fronted by blacksmiths.
• Wanting your teenager to feel safe listening to fascist heavy metal in front of you so that you can talk to them about it.
• Installing a web filter so that your child doesn't accidentally stumble into gross abusive porn.
• Opinions about parent-child relationships from someone who was once a child.
• Heavy metal bands who write music about white nationalism vs. heavy metal bands who are just white nationalist without writing about it.
• Deliberately not separating the art from the artist so you get the extra enjoyment out of musicians who are cool people.
• Videos of common household items being crushed under the wheels of a car.
• Videos of people building things in the woods.
• Devil's toothpaste.
• Reacting to the sugar tax by angrily boycotting soda.
• The Society for Creative Anachronism kicking you out if you dress up as a time traveler from the future or a 1950s greaser.
• The SCA re-enacting the before-times, when morning zoo radio didn't exist yet.
• Apex Nerds.
• Geniuses above petty squabbling.
• A better system of chilling out.
• Going into the woods with your friend who likes building stuff in the woods and watching him build stuff in the woods.
• Movies set in the 80s that have absolutely nothing from the 70s in them because everybody threw all that shit away on January 1st, 1980.
• Handing out arm rings to your sworn men.
• Instituting a buddy system where you buy each other awards.
• Happy baby cow.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Mark
• Shirley

Topics:

• Neuroscience!
• Fertility tracking is more complicated than I realized.
• When it turns out that a character in a movie is movie-star hot because it's a plot point, rather than because they're portrayed by a movie star, and I guess then the audience is supposed to pretend all the other characters, also played by movie stars, just look like regular schlubs.
• Immortal - Call Of The Wintermoon
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VBdAY8eA9w
  • Unedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/I4XK7YqwgFg
• Tiktok food trends that are more about elaborate assembly than flavors.
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vesYREe6_uk

Microtopics:

• A band from Sweden that just released a demo.
• Album art with a big giant snake and a shirtless barbarian dude whipping a mace at a guy.
• A punk band composed of mixed race middle school riot grrls.
• Speaking to a rude 12 year old and running off to write a bitchin' punk song about it.
• Observing someone's career arc via the podcasts they guest on.
• Talking yourself out of being a scientist.
• Helping people with early-stage dementia manage activities of daily living.
• An acquired language problem.
• Adapting to not being in an abusive workplace environment.
• How a process improvement is received when you suggest it to your BevMo manager vs. when you suggest it to the head of your neuroscience lab.
• How every retail store is as understaffed as possible by design.
• Switching from a retail job to an office job and suddenly being trusted to decide when to go to the bathroom.
• How the world might be different if the people in charge had to live in the world they created.
• Thriving in Our Hypercapitalist Dystopia.
• Trying to have a kid and learning a whole bunch about your own body in the process.
• Giving kids facts instead of ideology or even advice.
• Going to pregnancy club and wondering if there's an aspirational pregnancy club.
• Taking your temperature when you emerge from slumber.
• Peeing on sticks. (A medical process.)
• Not trying, not preventing.
• Cervical mucus.
• A bad batch of kombucha can kill you, and other ways kombucha is like a pregnancy.
• Being naturally blessed with high motility sperm.
• Asking your doctor if you should run a bunch of tests and they're like "just chill" and you're like "take my blood, please"
• The science of trying-adjacent.
• Drinking too deeply of the colloidal silver.
• A bookish nerd who is portrayed by one of the most attractive humans on the planet but they're wearing glasses.
• The incomparable Finn Carter.
• Trying to cast an actor to play an unattractive person but Steve Buscemi is busy and you can't find a single other ugly actor so you cast Scarlet Johansson and have the makeup department put her in uglyface.
• Doing an image search for "ugly actors" and every single result is of a South Asian and freaking out until you find out that there's a Bollywood movie called "Ugly."
• Putting "the frumpy one" from a movie in a room next to a bunch of normal people and realizing that you need to blow way past the conventionally-attractive bell curve to even be allowed into Los Angeles.
• A music video that was shot on VHS and uploaded to 2006-era Youtube.
• Goth clowns scowling and looking out from behind trees.
• A troupe of grumpy goth clowns in leather daddy outfits discovering and exploring ancient ruins.
• Cutting your frenulum so you can stick out your tongue as far as Gene Simmons and waking up choking on your tongue meat every night.
• Grumpy goth clowns crouching in doorways.
• Hearing a variety of different screams and growls.
• Training to scream for several hours a day, every day, without ruining your screamy bits.
• Doing the crabcore thing decades before crabcore.
• Googling "candlemass bewitched" for a good time.
• Watching TikTok on Reddit because you're old.
• Extremely simple and compelling recipes that can't possibly work and will in fact cause a fire in your chicken.
• Making bad content to make people mad.
• Trying to redefine porn as anything you enjoy.
• Making a series of recipe videos with your nonstandard measuring cups so people need to buy your weird measuring cups to follow along.
• Elsagate.
• J. Kenji Lopez-Alt.
• Hard boiling a million eggs to scientifically determine that you're super sick of eating eggs.
• Food Wishes.
• That's Just You Cookin'.
• A cool chef with a cool attitude.
• A chef with a cadence of speaking that really annoys your dad.
• Learning to improvise when faced with an unexpected situation.
• How to get joy out of cooking.
• The fugu preparation certification.
• Watching somebody spend five minutes washing some extremely starchy rice.
• Having two gimmicks.
• A knife that you can also use as a spatula.
• Using fresh stream water in your forest cooking videos.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Mark plugs Ravening Iron
• Shirley plugs a silicone reusable popcorn maker

Topics:

• The trend of positive media (Great British Baking Show, etc.)
• What is your favorite magic paradigm? Related: Space Wizards: What happened??
• Transitioning from being able to cook a dish to being able to cook a meal
• Larry asks "Yearbooks. Do you still have them? Have you ever actually used one? Is it full of signatures and stuff like that?"
• "Dude, maybe Jim can give us parenting advice" is what I just said out loud, what do you think of that, Jim?

Microtopics:

• Whether Ravening Iron slaps.
• The life-changing silicone popcorn maker.
• A cup that says "tea" on it that's filled with bourbon.
• Dirty Harry except he's shooting the mishandling of evidence in the face.
• Dirty Harry except instead of shooting perps in the face he takes a bath.
• Watching Joker (2019) and thinking "finally, the IPs of my youth are real art now"
• A slow motion replay of a lady forgetting to put ice cream back in the fridge.
• Choosing the biggest burliest man you can find who is moved to tears at the drop of a hat to judge your reality show.
• Being moved to tears because a jug is unexpectedly light.
• A manual of non-toxic masculinity.
• Men Feeling Feelings.
• Collecting magic paradigms.
• Staying up all night studying your book of magic and then the next day you can cast one (1) fireball.
• Studying magic for years and then having spells in your head that you never cast.
• All the spells in a wizard's head going off at once when the wizard dies, like that fireworks show in San Diego.
• Accidentally learning the spell that will unmake reality.
• Learning the magic words and swizzling a wand.
• Teaching children that magic is an inherent ability that you either have or don't have.
• Why there are so few space wizards.
• Waking up in the middle of a night with a great story idea and in the morning you realize it's Star Wars.
• Doctor Who explaining the science behind space vampires.
• What if Marty McFly's photo of his brother was an actual person and his body parts started to vanish.
• Battle mages carrying around notepads and calligraphy pens and battling by writing notes at each other.
• Magical inscriptions all over your body rendering you invulnerable to physical harm everywhere except your face because your retail job doesn't allow face tattoos.
• Recognizing Rise of the Skywalker as bad but still basically enjoying it because you just don't care that much any more.
• The plot of a long running movie franchise suddenly hinging on the protagonist needing to find a bathroom when they've never been depicted as pooping even once.
• Growing out of hating art.
• Loving this topic.
• Breakfast being easier to cook than other meals because it's okay to just make one dish and call it breakfast.
• Breakfast being easier to cook than other meals because it uses a smaller set of potential ingredients.
• Learning to look at a set of available ingredients and plan a meal out of them.
• Learning how to cook to learn about process and flexibility.
• Following a recipe but ultimately having to make the decision yourself that the food you're making is ready to be taken off the heat and served.
• Skimming a recipe to get the gist and then just being able to make the thing because you know how food works.
• The canonical flavor pairings of breakfast.
• Figuring out your flavor profile and then your main protein and working outwards to the sides.
• Learning to make scrambled eggs and realizing now you can just have scrambled eggs any time.
• A Real Egg Hobbyist
• Leaving behind audio logs for future civilizations.
• A paint pigment made out of mummies, and more generally how every pigment is made from some different weird thing.
• Every ingredient in your kitchen coming from a different weird and often horrifying animal or plant process.
• Humans possibly developing larger brains because we invented cooking.
• Raw food enthusiasts just enjoying digesting harder than the rest of us.
• Measuring the calories in a food by making the food explode.
• The millennia-long development of corn as a staple crop.
• Posing with a crazy hat because your yearbook editors didn't have enough photos of Crazy Hat Day.
• Falsifying the historical record.
• Seeing a yearbook on a friend's bookshelf and offering to sign it.
• Paying extra to get your high school yearbook pre-signed.
• Seeing your parent's yearbook and realizing for the first time that they had hobbies once.
• A nice kid who is always doing their best.
• Seeing your high school teacher in street clothes at the grocery store and realizing that he is just a few years older than you.
• How a task seems impossible until you have a strong enough incentive to do it.
• The switch that flips in your brain once you have a kid where it becomes unthinkable to not have a kid or want to have a kid.
• Childbirth lawyers.
• Having an extra plug.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Mark's meme is https://imgur.com/a/YFTXteU plus the caption "When you get on the bus and it's rush hour and the only free space is being taken up by someone's bag."
• Shirley's meme is https://imgur.com/a/9oyR7fa

Topics:

• 1:10 Living abroad/Third Culture Kid experience
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_culture_kid
  • Understanding prejudice: the Implicit Association Test. https://secure.understandingprejudice.org/iat/
• 11:19 Camgirl life
• 27:14 Why don't most animals need to learn to walk?
  • Bowerbird. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowerbird
• 35:43 Quill asks: "What bones have you broken and how?"
• 48:51 Hypnagogic hallucination/anxiety
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia

Microtopics:

• Jim's favorite episodes of this show.
• Not being plugged in and having no idea what's going on.
• The podcast ruining somebody's lack of internet presence.
• Not being sure whether you defined Third Culture Kid correctly.
• The four types of Third Culture Kids.
• Being within five minutes of a Coca Cola at any given moment no matter where you go in the world.
• Meeting a child of a Coca Cola executive at every international school.
• Bathroom metaphors for your childhood identity.
• Thoroughly describing the procedure of a scientific test.
• The only guy you know who didn't show any bias on the Implicit Bias Test showing plenty of bias after living in the United States for 15 years.
• Showing kids pictures of faces of different races and asking them which one is the liar.
• Children turning out racist despite never having been explicitly instructed to be racist.
• Taking a Third Culture Kid refresher course to refresh your lack of racial bias.
• Confusing being a minority with being oppressed.
• Nobody having enough experience with your race to know whether or not to be prejudiced against you.
• People who sound like they have no accent because they live near Hollywood, California.
• Turning on a camera and expecting the money to pour down around you.
• Nobody giving you money because you're a boring naked person.
• Sometimes logging on and making $0 and sometimes logging on and making thousands of dollars.
• The liberation of leaving your retail job.
• The ability to say no when you don't want to do something.
• Realizing your ability to consent is way more present at your sex work job than at your retail job.
• Not being able to ban the worst customers from the store you work at.
• Feeling like you can get to the life you want if you stick through the hard times.
• Quitting one job that sucks and ending up at another job that sucks.
• Working 16 hours straight at your catering job and only being able to eat when you reach in and scoop a handful of spaghetti and meatballs out of the tray you're about to serve.
• Heading back to the kitchen before your tray of hors d'oeuvres is empty in hopes that you can eat the last few yourself.
• Taking the deviled egg tax every time you make deviled eggs.
• Realizing that being a scientist is way cooler than working retail.
• When the one guy you know who's always had it figured out suddenly changes it up.
• The cool high school robotics teacher with a top knot.
• God-tier hipsters.
• All babies being born early because their head gets too big.
• The word for when someone is deliberately slow at work.
• Being jealous of your son's ability to learn skills extremely quickly.
• Being jealous of your son's enormous head circumference.
• Kangaroos basically giving birth to a fetus and the fetus climbing up into the mother's pouch when your kid is sixteen months old and still can't climb worth a damn.
• Deciding this bower sucks, chirping out and trying to find a better bower bird with a better bower.
• Bowerbirds innately knowing that they want to build big, blue bowers, but sucking at it until they apprentice under experienced bowerbirds.
• Innately preferring big bowers and you can not lie.
• Bowerbirds being super impressed by blue headphones with bluetooth support.
• Joking about introducing paint to bowerbirds and finding out they already mix their own pigments to paint the interior of their bowers blue and realizing who is the true blue master here.
• Tripping into a plexiglass window and realizing the guy from Hudsucker Proxy saved your life.
• Having a rich friend who owns a golf cart and tearing the golf cart around while South African golfers shake their fists at you.
• The golf cart not having a third seat so you just stand in the indentations where the golf bags usually go.
• Diving off of a golf cart that is about to tip over.
• Sustaining grave head injuries but the gate attendant still not letting you take the golf cart out of the parking lot.
• Peeling the hair off your friend's face to reveal why the gate attendant should let you out of the parking lot.
• After your concussion, not remembering who the president is or what year it is, but still remembering that you're going to get drinks at O'Hagen's tonight.
• Getting a security briefing at the U.S. consulate about how to deal with a carjacking and he says to just give the guy a car.
• Embedding a second PSA within your PSA.
• Breaking a toe by kicking the softest thing you can think of.
• Bringing up the Big Mike for maybe the third episode in a row.
• Needing to come back on the show to tell the people the banana truth if it turns out that the Big Mike really does taste like the fake banana flavoring.
• Giving a name to the dude you keep hallucinating standing in the corner of the room as you sleep.
• Rearranging your bedroom to minimize shadows because the creepy dude only materializes in darkness.
• Your wife waking you up to tell you someone's standing in the corner of the room and saying "ok good luck with that babe" and going back to sleep.
• Not wanting to tell anyone you hallucinate while you sleep because of mental illness stigma.
• Sleep paralysis and hypnagogic hallucinations totally explaining why people used to believe in ghosts.
• Having the fun doesn't-ruin-your-life kind of hypnagogic hallucinations.
• Existential dread only getting worse as your life goes on.
• Not being able to finish watching an episode of Gargoyles because a shot from very high up gave you mortal terror.
• Not being on the Internet except to look for memes.
• Enrolling in every Cognitive Neuroscience program in the country because you're trying to befriend this week's guests to get their memes.

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