• Maxx
• Michael

Topics:

• Reinventing pants
• Plortonomics (the economy in the game Slime Rancher)
• The Leaning American
• Maggie and Milly and Molly and May, by E. E. Cummings
  • https://poets.org/poem/maggie-and-milly-and-molly-and-may

Microtopics:

• Rabbits and writing.
• Buying the lede (but thankfully the rabbits dug it up)
• Lord Veterans
• Ancillary Justice, or The Imperial Radch.
• Rabbits who want nothing more than to chew louder than you talk.
• Leaving space for the elephant in the room
• Inventing a new kind of pants inspired by taiko drumming.
• After years, finally trying out your new idea for how to sew pants, and realizing that the waist of the pants only reaches the crotch.
• Pants that are only made of rectangles.
• The slow process of realizing what pants are.
• Rapidly becoming pants.
• The universe doesn't end with a bang, but with a zip. (Of the pants.)
• Inventing a new kind of pants and looking them up online and realizing that they already exist and the name is extremely offensive.
• Pants that are just a square of cloth that you fold around your leg.
• A new kind of pants where the crotch is higher than the waist.
• Disassembling the kimono to hang it up to dry.
• Looking up the etymology of "pants" and it comes from an ancient word that means "the thing you can't just fold around your legs, you have to find a pattern on ravelry and sew it"
• Back when "pants" were just two leg tubes that you tied to your shirt.
• Clothespins: they turn tubes into clothes.
• How pants are different for fat people.
• Clean room pants reverse engineering.
• Asking a tailor who's never seen pants to make you pants based on a verbal description of a Taiko drummer you saw once.
• Making plorts after eating.
• Vacuuming up the plorts.
• Extremely ineffective insider trading.
• The kind of crime you only get caught at if people hate you.
• Gathering data on when people didn't file a malpractice suit.
• Doctor Parsley diagnosing you with sleep apnea based on the width of your neck.
• Suing a little mouse for malpractice because his tiny thimbleful of chamomile tea didn't cure your hepatitis A.
• Wholesome farming games where you go back to nature and practice aggressive capitalism.
• Throwing your slimes into the sea. (Which is maybe made of slimes.)
• The fantasy of running at high speed down a hill.
• The fantasy of skateboarding without dying.
• Incentivizing the player to discover new plorts.
• The fantasy of being on friendly terms with your neighbors.
• Comparing your favorite Animal Crossing villagers with your favorite Love Island cast members.
• The two competing Britain's Favorite Gardener.
• A reality show where you check in three times on people doing a project.
• What the rest of the world does instead of leaving.
• Learning how to stand – normally a thing only babies do.
• Leaning on an inclined surface made for a butt.
• Leaning less when you're visiting Japan.
• Crab Doctor.
• Reading a poem before it's too late.
• Narcissists soaking French.
• Tag yourself, I'm the horrible thing racing sideways while blowing bubbles.
• As small as a world and as large as alone.
• Wikipedia Dad.
• Gauging how long an answer to give a child asking a philosophical question.
• The Final Plug of Maxx Yamasaki.

Support Topic Lords

• Maxx
  • https://comicfury.com/comicprofile.php?url=mildreth
  • https://comicfury.com/comicprofile.php?url=delia
  • https://comicfury.com/comicprofile.php?url=cosmicfault
• Chall

Topics:

• I love the steam deck
• The puzzle of the Wikipedia did you know section
• The neuroplasticity theory of why we dream
  • https://www.instagram.com/reel/DELHsgYRamy/
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-eye_hallucination
  • https://www.mirror.co.uk/science/viral-image-unrecognisable-objects-creepy-14705067
• She Needed a Hobby, by Maxx

Microtopics:

• Comic Fury.
• The most mediocre comic.
• Mildreth of the Night.
• Collage vs. ransom note.
• A squirrel that finds a way to contact aliens.
• Using Redbubble to host your webcomic.
• Direct-to-cassette podcast episodes.
• A co-op game that makes you raise your voice.
• Overcooked but it's a train.
• The part of the train that keeps you moist and warm.
• How to run Pico-8 on the Steam Deck.
• Not wanting to get a Steam Deck because you might drop it on your face.
• How many liters a parrot is.
• One of those massage beds where your face goes in a little hole and your hands dangle to reach the controls of the Steam Deck that's lying on the ground.
• Waterproofing the Vive.
• Games Done Pwick.
• Sonic the Hedgehog looking like he ought to be a progress bar but he definitely isn't.
• Emulators: you can do that!
• Extremely intricate marble runs.
• Retiring so you have enough time to configure the warping on your enormous loom.
• The pleasant monotony of weaving vs. the meticulous craft of warping.
• Tuning 1000 pianos at once.
• Using a drop spindle to turn wool into thread.
• Spinning wool straight from the rabbit.
• Breeding for maximum stats on every axis.
• Facts that are not particularly fun.
• Seeing what the Wikipedia home page looks like on January 2nd, 2525.
• Why is a mountain landscape?
• Make-your-own-fun fun facts.
• Who is this man? Why did he steal a horse?
• Clicking on the nomination wizard.
• Five Clicks to Jesus and other Wikipedia routing games.
• Getting really into patterns and categories.
• Shoehorning your favorite pop culture thing into everywhere you can fit it.
• Mock Guffin.
• Breaking down a story into a list of tropes.
• Screen savers for the visual cortex.
• Finding stories in the noise.
• Different levels of the thing where you see patterns on the back of your eyelids.
• How much can you see behind your eyes?
• Running experiments on your own physiology.
• New places on your body you haven't pressed yet.
• Strobe lights for your ears.
• Covering the speaker on your phone because you're too place to turn down the volume.
• How text looks in your dreams.
• Latching onto the idea of a story.
• Tasting a lot of math problems before you go to sleep.
• A gross crinkled dog texture.
• Accidentally crocheting so much that you remake the universe.
• The names of such unthinkable numbers.
• A crochet pattern for an infinite Mobius strip.
• Cool yarns from the local crafting store.
• The ability to stick with a hobby.
• Crocheting a functional internal combustion engine.

Support Topic Lords

• CisHetKayFaber
• Maxx

Topics:

• Food-focused Japanese TV
• If "fish don't exist," then how do pescetarians?
• PicoSteveMo is back!
• https://wikipoem.org/
• Verisimilitude in play (My daughter plays GTA and Roblox) (The shifting nature of what is appropriate for children)

Microtopics:

• Emotionally connecting with a dying web site and meeting up with other users in Seattle.
• What the Cohost diaspora is doing to do.
• Drive-by bad opinions.
• Where people live in Australia, on average.
• CSS Crimes.
• Using external image hosts to continue blogging on Cohost after it is in read-only mode.
• URL shortening services reusing old links.
• Meeting up with people you have a loose association with and having a good time together.
• The Bowling League Mafia taking up every lane every day with tournaments so nobody else can bowl.
• A TV drama where a traveling salesman keeps being hungry at different train stations.
• Seeing a meal that looks delicious but you're full and can't eat a whole nother meal.
• Whether food becomes fictional as soon as you eat it.
• Watching satellite TV on your flip phone.
• OneSeg.
• Your email address being owned by your phone carrier.
• A phone that closes and has great battery life.
• The golden age of food-focused broadcast TV.
• A celebrity who's interested in food goes and eats at a restaurant.
• This Burger Weighs 30 Pounds!
• Midnight Diner.
• The Karate Kid but with ramen.
• Watching a Youtube of the video gamers.
• Ordinary People, Extraordinary Food.
• Whether pescetarians exist.
• The researchers in the shark lab you used to work at calling dolphins fish.
• Fish eyes: nature's boba.
• A block of gouda floating in the ocean.
• Fish that stop being fish when you think about it too hard.
• Disagreeing with beavers about what tree to cut down, but you're conflict avoidant so the beaver always wins.
• Haven't we all argued with beavers?
• Crows stealing the naan out of your naan and curry.
• Jungle Crows who sound like an adult man doing an impression of crows.
• Crows who are really good at Japanese T9.
• The nets you put over your garbage that can't possibly keep the crows out.
• Picking Steves from a continuity standpoint.
• Finding any excuse to make a Stephen King Sokoban.
• Deliberately awkward control schemes.
• A thousand prototyping girls in space.
• A poem without any line breaks in it.
• The zine era of web design, when people would just type HTML and it would become a web page.
• Phrases that make sense locally but not globally.
• A comedian who is in lots of things.
• The kind of poem you'd get if you put a poem on a wiki.
• The kind of thing that would probably be read on this show.
• The kind of web site that you'd run into when you're doing an ARG.
• Installing Roblox on the PS5 to teach your daughter to read English better.
• Playing a game with purple vomiting everywhere.
• The ways a 7 year old interacts with a Grand Theft Auto.
• Teaching yourself how to drive in Grand Theft Auto and obeying all the traffic laws.
• Not shielding your kid from media but talking to them about it instead.
• Academy Award winner Fisher Stevens.

Support Topic Lords

• Maxx
• JP

Topics:

• The different kinds of "changing your mind" in creative work
• What texture did you think clouds were as a kid?
• Infinity Island
• Sleep, by Jorge Luis Borges
  • https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=38645
• Chippendale Mupps and the slowest nerves

Microtopics:

• Knowing the names of zero outdoor cats in your neighborhood.
• Canny outdoor cats who are adapted to city life and don't need your plugs.
• Obi like the belt or like the Star Wars guy?
• Loosey goosey versions
• Changing your mind while making a creative work.
• Moving a door or a window in an existing wall.
• Bigger creative decisions being composed of many smaller creative decisions.
• Retaining maximum flexibility at every point in the process.
• A workflow that reflects the spectrum of flexibility.
• Flexibility Lost is Sturdiness Gained.
• Tweaking the value of pi to suit your needs.
• A system where a bunch of things depend on a bunch of other things.
• Axes of flexibility that you don't end up using.
• More specific categories of types of changing your mind.
• Going down a deep dark hole and finding the glittering prize but not being sure whether it's worth anything.
• A loop that spirals, oscillating, into the middle.
• Putting a branch into a meditation labyrinth and changing its theological meaning.
• Rewriting your novel in second person, present tense, just to see how it feels.
• The Citation Needed guy doubting that mazes can be built with snow.
• The ongoing Corn vs. Maize Wikipedia war.
• The marine layer rolling in.
• Looking at clouds and totally seeing the ice cream.
• Buying aerogel samples on eBay.
• What stuffed animals are stuffed with.
• Going to the sky island and it's sort of rubbery.
• Walkable clouds in the Mario series.
• Cloudjacking.
• Yanking Lakitu out onto the pavement and going on a joyride until the LoJack system kicks in.
• Super Mario Bros. redubbed with Quake and Half-Life sounds.
• Super Mario Bros. Next Gen AAA
• What clouds taste like.
• Fizzy Lifting Drinks.
• The soda with the glass ball.
• Ordering something red hoping for cherry, watermelon or strawberry flavor, but it's cinnamon flavored.
• Eating Red Hots for the first time and realizing you've been Halloween poisoned.
• Your first bitey cinnamon food.
• A little poison, as a treat.
• Filling your mouth with tree bark.
• Games with saved progress feeling like you're participating in a responsible activity than games where you start over every time.
• Deliberate mechanical whimsy.
• Making a complicated game and failing to teach the player how to play it.
• For a Change, by Dan Schmidt.
• An infinite variety of forms of confusion.
• Playing Frog Fractions all the way through and being like "what twist??"
• Why Jorge Luis Borges gets annoyed when people wake him up.
• Semi-routinely yelling in your sleep.
• Being asleep is the inside time.
• Citing Borges as a vibe.
• A mid-pod plug.
• The works of Ted Chiang.
• Internalizing the idea that you need sleep to function.
• Stepping stones of self-reflection.
• Waking up feeling the vague sensations of having dreamt.
• Sleeping with your eyes open.
• Integration of your environment into your dreams.
• Biting your tail before you go to sleep and not feeling it until you wake up.
• Putting keys in your toast.
• Repurposing the Chippendale Mupp's nervous system to make a vintage delay pedal.
• Esports competitors putting the left mouse button between their teeth to improve reaction time, because it's closer to the brain.
• Brains evolving to process whatever whenever and assembling the timeline later.
• Kuratas Heavy Industries.
• Smiling to fire the heavy machine guns.
• Gripens.
• Subway ads exhorting Maximum Lethality!
• The airport nearest to all of the oil fields in the Permean Basin.
• Billboards for enterprise services.
• Wasting eyeballs.
• A couple of active web presences.

Support Topic Lords

• Maxx
• Nick

Topics:

• Puzzmo
• I'm worried about my tableware rotation strategy
• Ennigaldi-Nanna's museum
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ennigaldi-Nanna's_museum
• It Was A Coffin That Sang, by Olena Davis
  • https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/xBLG36yN.png

Microtopics:

• Instead of giving someone a business card, stamping your information on them so they have to call you before they take a shower.
• Where's George?
• George isn't here. George was never here.
• Canadians looking forward to when they can walk around with King Charles' face in their pocket.
• Giving the barista a coupla chucks for a cup of coffee.
• Money with RadarSat on it.
• inaturalist dot org.
• Taking a photo of a weird plant with a weird seed pod.
• The fantasy of collecting information.
• The game where you try to name every street in San Francisco.
• Running all the streets in your city over the course of a decade.
• Games Genie.
• Lexicographic Ordering and Time Travel.
• A sanctioned topic. (It's on the list.)
• Wario Ware presenting you with a full sized crossword and giving you six seconds to solve it.
• A fun little histogram.
• Finally implementing the letter T.
• Doing the crossword on paper and making your daughter enter your answers into the app.
• Will Shortz coming out of his orb to carry out a hit on a competing puzzle.
• Fugue Orbs.
• Comparing the interface design of Connections and Red Herring.
• Things Relating to Wonder Woman.
• Extremely well SEO'd pestilences.
• Arranging your dinner plates in a stack vs. in a queue.
• Using all your plates evenly so they all break at the same time.
• Rotating the Stock.
• The dangers of Low-Sodium Perpetual Stew.
• Default plates from the food service factory.
• Airplane boarding algorithms and how to convince everyone in the terminal to follow yours.
• Plates that are made for using.
• A whole Jefferson, in your Republic dollars.
• The urge to queue.
• Lanesplitting your backpack.
• History: it's a lot older than we think
• Ancient cash registers.
• Pranksters organizing the topic bucket.
• How many museums deep are we?
• The human wife.
• Efficient.. Successful. Human.
• Top five lists of your life.
• How small a flavoring agent has to be to be considered a spice.
• A twelve foot tall statue of either Zeus or Poseidon.
• Myth- and Nationhood- Making.
• A museum where you can feel wood cut with various tools.
• Hearing about a cool metalworking museum but fixating on how the bathroom works.
• Cool Bathroom Ghost.
• The toilet commenting on your performance.
• Piping bookshop noises into your bathroom.
• Robert Stack's Solved Mysteries.
• Being sad and trying to have a good sadness.
• Michael Brough talking about his design process.
• Fun exercise vs. shitty boring exercise.
• What to do about the world ending.
• Driving in circles around the McDonald's drive-thru ordering more and more coffee until they catch on.
• Telling a joke on Twitter and an archaeologist getting it 1000 years from now.
• The world's oldest joke.
• A fart joke from 1900 BCE.
• Reconstructive historical linguistics.
• The linguistics of swearing and taboo.
• Eater of bees.
• Top five stanzas.

Support Topic Lords

• Maxx
• Avery

Topics:

• Change Ringing
• The differences between American and Japanese robotics teams
• This rug
  • https://www.rugstudio.com/funrugsfuntimeshapecomfts-163multi.aspx
  • A few days after I ordered it they emailed me canceling the order. I'm pretty sure this rug doesn't exist.
• Look what we found in the park in the dark
  • https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/KmODxwhW.jpg
• Grandma giving you a world's best grandma mug

Microtopics:

• Topics. Disgust.
• A video game experience that you will find relatable if you've ever moved.
• Making prototype furniture out of huge Tetris blocks and then forcing your friends to carry them around every time you move onto a new house.
• The kind of friend who believes the world should be a certain way and then acts like it is.
• Just frogs. Toads too. Mostly turtles.
• Frog-themed 8th birthday parties.
• Running a frog rescue out of your van.
• Frog Fractions 2: Revenge of the Fallen.
• Writing Bonfire of the Vanities but never reading it.
• Sport meets art: spart.
• Method ringing with two cycle sine waves.
• Installing a huge church organ in your home because they were giving it away for free but when you play a note the whole building catches on fire.
• Free Pianos On Line!
• Babysitting someone's upright piano while they go on the lam.
• The mattress story but with a piano.
• Where the warehouse came from.
• When the landlord comes by and you have to put a microphone over your bed to convince him that this is a recording studio, not a bedroom.
• Getting a pipe organ so you can play it while holding your brain in a jar and cackling.
• Sliding down the whale rib.
• Donating your brain to art so that they can slide it down the whale rib and try to hit a target.
• Experiencing change ringing in a regal square.
• Memorial ringing
• Bell ringing machines.
• Robots competing in team sports.
• Microsumo.
• Sumo printers smashing into each other.
• Making a fighting toaster for the fighting toaster league.
• Battle Bots vs. Robot Jox.
• Department stores with an entire floor for stationery.
• Buying Gundam models and never putting them together and just having a bunch of robot heads lying around.
• Major innovations in robot mouse maze navigation.
• A mouse with an inverted helicopter to keep it on the ground.
• A 3D maze with a robot mouse that can walk on walls and ceilings.
• Fun rugs fun time shapes to impress your teens with a trendy sense of style when you bring it into their room.
• A rug covered with keywords from the 90s internet.
• $87 for not that big of a rug.
• Bonding with your child over ISP servers.
• A visitor trying to bond with you about your ironic decor and you have to explain that sorry, no, it's supposed to be ironic.
• The illuminated manuscript version of an the ironic internet rug.
• A fantastic place to buy nuts and other bulk items.
• A limit of 1 kilogram of tapioca pearls per customer.
• Bringing the tapioca balls to life in the rice cooker.
• Inventing a new way to dispose of tapioca pearls every single day.
• Tiktok schticks that are connected to a minimum wage jobs so even if your tiktok starts making a bunch of money you still can't quit your shitty job.
• Having anxiety dreams about the coffee shop you worked at years ago.
• Non-mammalian milk enthusiasm.
• Being someone's non-mammalian milk guy.
• A bipedal walrus with jaundiced eyes in a jar the size of a walrus and it knows you're here.
• Leaving a turtle in the park and it's a 50/50 tossup whether it immediately dies or has a litter of a thousand baby turtles that devour the entire ecosystem.
• Companies that are named after the business that used to be in the building.
• A 1950s sign with a bowling pin on it that says "Safeway."
• Walking into the DNA lounge and demanding that they sequence some DNA.
• Military challenge coins.
• Meeting the world's best grandma and she hands you a "world's greatest grandma" mug to prove it.
• Seek god coin??

Support Topic Lords

• Maxx
• Erica

Topics:

• Zines and Jam Games; stuff that's understood to be breakable
  • https://itch.io/c/689872/indiepocalypse
• Birding in the pandemic
• Itinerant Filmmakers
  • http://www.meltonbarker.org/
• Meditation on Capitalism
  • I found the tweet that the image came from, but still don't know the author of the poem: https://twitter.com/Sierra_OffLine/status/1100852286585221122

Microtopics:

• The Bugzooka
• Booms and busts of little insect invasions.
• A little vacuum chamber that you squish closed.
• Sucking a fly through a tube.
• Cry havoc and let slip the bugs of war.
• Egads, Bugzooks!
• The Bug-A-Salt Passion Assassin 3.0.
• A middle aged dad of the type that would buy a salt gun
• A bugzooka in active use.
• A balding man who looks like Jeffery Epstein crawling on the floor in his underwear to promote the Bug-A-Salt.
• Professor Fly Presents: Fly Facts.
• Judging the anatomical correctness of Professor Fly.
• Hammacher-Schlemmer ads for bug-catching devices.
• Whether women make better snipers.
• Aiming at the fly on the wall with your laser sight.
• Mr. Pinch.
• A fly in a lab coat who lives in Seattle.
• A photocopied leaflet about your band or political cause.
• The best, most well-produced musicians in the world.
• Ways to frame game jams.
• A good brain hack for if you feel the urge to be a product.
• Indiepocalypse.
• Electric Zine Maker.
• Whether the pandemic is over.
• One of the birdiest places in the United States.
• Talk Irby to Me.
• Becoming texting buddies with a famous bird systematist from Cornell.
• A Big Year.
• Yelling bird coordinates at someone you just met.
• Winston's favorite bird and why he likes it so much.
• Knowing something about ravens. (Not what they eat.)
• The Northwestern Crow.
• A crow catching live shrimp and stashing them in the moss.
• Collecting black walnut husks to dye wool.
• Feeding crows who bring you lipstick from the 1940s.
• What to do with a 10 pound bag of unsalted peanuts.
• A movie where every kid in town foils an attempted kidnapping and then holds a talent show.
• Ark Music Factory.
• Hiring a record label guy to write and record a song with your daughter so she can star in a terrible music video and become a survivor of internet celebrity.
• Social media survivors.
• Stardom: it's not good for you.
• Whether kids today still want to be movie stars.
• Bitmojis and other things that put you in a little cartoon.
• A customized birthday greeting from a Weird Al.
• Paying Rudy Giuliani a pittance to wish your mom a happy birthday.
• One of the Breaking Bad hitman twins undercutting the other by $300 on Cameo.
• Preserving your Too Short custom rap tape on Youtube.
• A poem written in BASIC that is spoilers for Mad Men.
• The light in your Ikea bookshelf recognizing the light in you.
• Doing line number archaeology when reading a BASIC program.
• Seeing text from the other side of the page through the page.
• Do It.
• Instructional Art.
• Finding 25 identical objects and naming them all Jimmy.
• Flying Maxx to the Permian Basin to teach your students how to repair microscopes.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Maxx
• Tyriq

Topics:

• Nancy and having a continuous tone for a hundred years
• Recommendations
• Adding trinkets to other people's time capsules
• A Psalm for the Wild-Built https://nextworldover.tumblr.com/post/705362430786748416/guooey-a-psalm-for-the-wild-built-becky

Microtopics:

• Looking down a lot while you're on a walk.
• What is this Meta for?
• Discovering that there is a cliff and having a brief high-octane experience.
• Sitting on the bus and saying the lore of the land.
• A lego minifig that you found on the street.
• Fritzi Ritz.
• Making millennial shitposts in the 1930s.
• Being wholesomely surreal for a hundred years.
• Accruing canon.
• Simple archetypes that have been honed to a point.
• Writing a new punchline to the same joke every day for a hundred years.
• Comics going on two silent retreats, one for the setup (at a monastery) and the other for the punchline (at an empty lot)
• Coronation St.
• The kids we met in 1964.
• Whether South Park is still a thing.
• Finding success at a young age and staying the same person for the rest of your life.
• Retirement or Blade Runner Retirement?
• User Friendly.
• Web comics that started when the hardest part about making a web comic is uploading an image to the internet.
• Web comics going from having bad art to having good art.
• Telling someone to like art other than the art they like.
• Politely accepting advice and then ignoring it.
• Speaking into the void to ask for music recommendations.
• If you don't see it, that's what you paid for.
• Delivering Nancy comics daily for over 100 years.
• Working on the same game for 10 years even though you like different kinds of games now.
• Working within the framework of past you.
• Every page of a webcomic as a collage of all the previous pages.
• Pokey the Penguin: updated sporadically.
• Enjoying a webcomic a lot.
• Weird semi-robot creatures.
• Haribogosean.
• Recommending someone a nice leaf.
• Wanting to accept recommendations but hating them viscerally.
• Tricking music recommendations into someone's life like a fairy tale gremlin.
• Introducing hot jams to the people of the future.
• Burying a can of cheese for a hundred years.
• Extra old tardigrades.
• A sealed piggy bank where if you want to get the tardigrades out you have to smash it on the floor.
• Opening up your terrarium every so often to swap out the moss.
• This wholesome man with this forty year old bottle ecosystem.
• The most advanced level of mummification, in which you become a mannequin.
• Dumping a pile of garbage in the forest and leaving it to your children in your will.
• The Artemis Program.
• Returning to the moon to get the geocache back.
• Inserting a completely fictional topic into the historical record.
• Wax House, Baby!
• A fake fact about the world that has been purged from Wikipedia but is still everywhere that scraped the data from Wikipedia.
• Chosts from chostville.
• The age of monetizing all your hobbies.
• Trying to make a human connection via your art.
• Digging up, modifying, and reburying other people's time capsules even though nobody's paying you to do it.
• Keeping your citizens happy and healthy.
• An intentionally altered view of how automated clothing production is.
• Going on a journey together with a robot.
• Cozy books entirely lacking in high-octane moments.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Erica
• Maxx

Topics:

• Freesound.org and the delight of sharing things without fame
  • https://freesound.org/people/Bram/sounds/15543/
  • https://freesound.org/people/Mrthenoronha/sounds/369065/
  • https://freesound.org/people/smokenweewALT/
• Shutting down the FF2 ARG Twitter account
• Leisure in the 70s
• Snow by David Berman
  • https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/snow-14
• The some potatoes diet
• Plants that can see sorta?
  • https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8903786/

Microtopics:

• The Topic Lords discord.
• Meeting friends in the Kingdom of Loathing chat.
• A virtual birthday party crashing app.
• Piranesi.
• A website where people post sound.
• Wav laundering.
• Purchasing a lion sound effect from an off-Broadway sound effect shop.
• Sending over the can crushing noises that you selected.
• Someone's friend pretending to be a bird.
• Having a roommate named Phil all of whose passwords were “Phil”
• AAA games with Freesound user names in the credits.
• Recognizing Brick Drop 5 from Dope Dragon 69's Freesound portfolio.
• Officer, I was just making a video game!
• The psychology of why no Freesound user has uploaded a good pneumatic tube delivery sound.
• The bank teller watching you and registering your surprise at being delivered a tube.
• The bank tellers noticing that you are shitting into the pneumatic delivery tube and lifting the Gallagher tarp in front of their faces.
• Getting ready for bed and then suddenly recording an episode of Topic Lords.
• SmokenweewALT recording water flowing sounds in Flushing, Queens.
• The best Wikipedia pages.
• Toe Cleavage.
• Cats who have jobs.
• Finding things on Wikipedia that are not directly related to one another.
• Tweeting your disappointment that a weird thing turns out to be part of the Frog Fractions ARG.
• The alternate reality where Frog Fractions 2 launched but nobody ever found it.
• The final unsolved (and now unsolvable) FF2 ARG puzzle.
• Who was solving things?
• New ways to not be at work.
• Another word for having a good time.
• Choosing photos to represent the concept of leisure.
• Phil relaxing on the couch next to his toilet paper.
• Someone who doesn't have a bed but does have two lanterns.
• The guy who has spent fifteen years uploading pictures of his foreskin to Wikipedia just in case someone needs a picture of foreskin.
• Spending so long thinking about someone that you're unsure whether they're notorious to anyone but you.
• A foreskin in repose.
• Believing that genes are immortal survival machines that use our disposable bodies to endlessly replicate themselves.
• The concept of leisure as a human right.
• Serious vs. casual leisure.
• Project-based leisure projects.
• A poem stapled to the wall in a laundromat in Massachusetts.
• Voices hanging close in the new acoustics.
• Explaining to your little brother that the snow angels are angel corpses that a nearby farmer murdered.
• Lying to your child just a little bit, as a treat.
• The Seattle Space Noodle.
• The last Burger King in Amsterdam.
• The most normal person you know.
• Running an impromptu experiment on the internet by asking strangers to eat nothing but potatoes and report back.
• Trying the all-potatoes diet for thirty years.
• Eating 40 potatoes a day.
• Game designer and science communicator Nicky Case.
• Halftato.
• Overdosing on potassium.
• Doctors telling you to cool it with the potassium.
• Why doctors don't know how much chemotherapy to give obese people.
• The doctor from the phrenology department measuring your neck to see if you have sleep apnea.
• Parasitic plants imitating the host plant's leaves.
• Recognizing silhouettes of birds from an 8x8 monochrome image.
• Rapidly changing the hydraulics of your leaves.
• A forest of Max mimicry.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Quil
• Maxx

Topics:

• Maybe I just don't like apples
• Opposite Costco
• The Sweet Science
• The Village and the Curious Hole
  • http://thesciencesalon.blogspot.com/p/village-and-curious-hole.html
• BALLU the best robot
  • https://youtu.be/EdSoUbXirVI
  • https://www.strandbeest.com/
  • https://youtube.com/shorts/lbxJlwQ6-U8

Microtopics:

• Making robots and video games in Seattle.
• Cohost dot org.
• Tumblr without Tumblr's weird nesting.
• Finding interesting people to follow in 2005.
• Cohost's discovery apparatus.
• Making bad music on the internet that's not very enjoyable.
• The worst fruit. (Apples.)
• The enormous gulf between the audiovisual experience of watching someone eat an apple and eating that apple yourself.
• The world's most apple growing place.
• "Extra honey" apples.
• Upgrading your teeth so that you can eat stone fruit without pitting them.
• Installing a machine in your mouth that you can pour wheat into and it extrudes noodles right into your throat.
• What wheat becomes if you chew it.
• Pasta-flavored gum.
• Vaguely salty orange chewing gum.
• Installing an app to play a "biting an apple" ringtone into whenever you bite any fruit.
• Japan's canonical fruit ranking with melon at the top, as seen in Pac-Man.
• The way in which the B-tier melons are substandard.
• The most cherries per slot machine.
• Pivoting to chewing gum after San Francisco bans your gambling machines.
• Buying just one leaf of parsley from Opposite Costco.
• Naming your company after the idea of charging for things.
• Buying hundreds of jigsaw puzzle pieces in bulk.
• Tito Beverage.
• You win stun, you lose stun.
• Doug Bowser's Heel Turn.
• Inaptronyms.
• Punching somebody and all their honey comes out.
• Preferring to punch people who bruise extremely precisely.
• Hypothesizing that you are about to be punched in the face and setting up a control group.
• Using science in an interesting way in 1832.
• Little Alchemy and other combine-'em-ups.
• What to play if you like adventure game inventory puzzles but not the rest of the adventure game.
• The phone number you could call as part of the Frog Fractions ARG.
• Investigating where the wind knocked over the fox shrine.
• Finding an infinitely deep hole and dumping all your garbage in it until you realize you can use it to solve the housing crisis.
• The deepest man-made hole.
• The town that is permanently on fire.
• An extremely plausible hellmouth.
• Thanks, Hellmouth!
• Inventing Hell in the 1970s.
• A video that you can silently play in the background.
• A robot that is just a large helium balloon.
• A robot that is neutrally buoyant.
• Strandbeests.
• Making the goofiest lil guy.
• The exploded cell phone ghosts.
• A traffic cone skateboarding with ska playing in the background.
• The Topic Lords startup incubator.
• Cony Hawk.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Maxx
  • http://false-panels.com/
• Nelson
  • https://twitter.com/WritNelson/

Topics:

• How many random numbers you can dial before you contact someone who is expecting you
• Pocket versions of your art. (Mini games, mini sculpture, mini songs?)
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Matthews_Band_Chicago_River_incident
• https://poets.org/poem/so-you-want-be-writer

Microtopics:

• Being non-binary in Washington.
• Witch Strandings.
• The crucial aspects that define a traditional Strand-Like.
• What makes the nurturing not feel bad/weird?
• Physically inhabiting a mouse cursor.
• Playing shuffleboard on a Mario Golf power meter using the Oblivion persuasion wheel.
• Several things that people like, existing at the same time.
• Why nobody but Jim is making Frog Fractions games.
• Dialing random phone numbers until you reach someone you know.
• A nightmare creature from the abyss waiting by the phone for your call.
• Everyone having exactly one mom and exactly one faceless nightmare creature waiting by the phone.
• Phone number Minesweeper.
• Birthday parties as an opportunity to force your friends to play the weird game you just designed.
• Guessing the phone number of the burner phone in front of you.
• Computers you can talk to in your local area.
• Hacking the government mainframe that has all the Nintendo games.
• Needing to have a soul before your soul can be sucked out through the phone.
• Finding out how smart dolphins are after they meet the being from beyond the abyss.
• Holding on to your childhood dreams of stealing a series of towers for your tower collection.
• Figuring out how to put custom ringtones on your flip phone even though the Verizon rep said it was impossible.
• What the Kidz Bop version says instead of "it smells like R. Kelly's sheets."
• A coat that smells like my baseball cleats, yikesssss.
• What if football wasn't good?
• What would happen if a child held all of baseball in their hands?
• Futilitris.
• Supernova SWF Enabler.
• Working in the Kidz Bop factory.
• Who Put Goku In Fortnite?
• Ending the game immediately when somebody drops the come bomb.
• Not being allowed to say dang or shit.
• The through line from miniature replica sculptures to Kidz Bop Breaking Bad.
• Kidz Bop Oldboy.
• The French opera singer who replaced her girlfriend with a dummy and then set the nunnery on fire so it looked like her girlfriend died in the fire, but her opera singing was so good that the king had to pardon her.
• If Jim was arrested for dumping 800 pounds of sewage on an open air tour boat, how many people would try to solve the ARG?
• Wiping the raw sewage off of your face and wondering aloud "is this Frog Fractions 2?"
• Going to jail for making a cursed tweet.
• What if your tweet only goes viral after the cursed tweet law is enacted?
• Having to read your tweet aloud to everyone who liked it.
• Going to jail for writing a cursed tweet and being sentenced to having to explain it to your mom.
• All-ages interactive sculptures.
• A child with a tiny screwdriver installing an emergency communication system in case someone has a bad time in their Radio Flyer.
• A pretty intense poem by a pretty intense dude.
• Why or why not to be a writer.
• Warning young people against destroying themselves.
• Being deeply desperately driven by the essence of what you are creating.
• Needing somebody to remind you that your work has value.
• The different coping strategies required to create a work that takes half an hour to finish vs. years to finish.
• False panels.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Maxx
  • maxx.infinity@gmail.com
• Michael
  • https://www.instagram.com/softseabunny/
  • https://www.tiktok.com/@creative.rabbit

Topics:

• "World's greatest author Chuck Tingle"
• Way of making moving easier, collective tips?
  • https://overmental.com/content/the-beautiful-zelda-artwork-of-katsuya-terada-7898
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DataHand
• Melatonin parenting decisions
• http://false-panels.com/fjf/

Microtopics:

• Rabbit nose speeds.
• A stranger from Australia handing you a twenty dollar bill.
• Lining a trench coat with Steam keys.
• How to make Elden Ring feel like a video game rather than a slog.
• An incredible variety of fantastical biomes filled with body horror monstrosities that are inexplicably bad at killing you.
• Playing Elden Ring with passive enemies
• Big columns with massively muscular horsemen.
• Sheep curling up into a wheel and rolling away.
• Fostering a different sense of what accomplishment means.
• Ramps interweaving the stairway.
• Going into a spooky house and the house is like "why would you come in here? Can't you see I'm haunted"
• Going into a spooky house in hopes of seeing bespoke content.
• An author of real books that people think are memes.
• A tornado that has a butthole because it must've picked it up with all the other debris.
• Lesbian candy corn.
• High-functioning chocoholics.
• Having sex with the State of California and reading the list of things that the State of California has found to cause cancer.
• Making a career out of exploring the weird connections in your own mind.
• Writing to Chuck Tingle to ask for more details about the 747's genitalia.
• Moving house and then moving house again immediately, to save yourself a packing/unpacking cycle.
• Having many shamefully confusing objects and making the movers wear blindfolds.
• Making your friends wear blindfolds and rely on LIDAR when they come into your house.
• Putting all your vacation souvenirs in storage and going to your storage unit when you want to remember your vacation.
• Three drawers of cables organized into power cables, USB cables and audio cables, all neatly constrained with velcro.
• Giving your rabbit decoy cables to chew on so that the important cables remain safe.
• Throwing away 70% of your stuff.
• Whether it's a lie if you have books on your shelf that you haven't read yet.
• Apocryphal John Waters quotes.
• Having an outfit for hacktivism.
• Mounting the spines of books you've read above your hearth.
• Data Hands.
• A keyboard that doesn't work in direct sunlight.
• Foot Mouse and the Data Hands.
• Staring into the abyss, wiggling your fingers.
• Underwear computing.
• Late-onset melatonin generation.
• How to deal when everybody in the family gets sick at once.
• An island made of bureaucracy.
• The fax machine in your underwear computer.
• How to pronounce "James" according to Jim's facebook profile.
• Armchairing a request for poetry in the rudest way possible.
• Streets that duel like coarse teeth.
• The matted thing that leaves its woman without the duck.
• Hooking your poetry generator up to a receipt printer so people can print a new poem on demand.
• Writing a poem and finding out what you meant later.
• Soup repair.
• A man who is nice on British TV but angry on American TV.
• Old Enough!
• An extremely relatable two year old.
• Being tasked with juicing some oranges and spending the next hour chasing the dog.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Maxx
  • https://mechcem.itch.io/
  • https://www.instagram.com/maxxyamasaki/
• Ananda
  • https://www.instagram.com/a__gabo/

Topics:

• Rare videos of European Hamsters.
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cf06WJQ4FnE
• Would you rather eat: the last dragon or a human being?
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hufu
• What happened in the editor culture that made medical and mathematical Wikipedia absolutely useless for lay readers, and is there anything we can do to fix it?
• All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace, by Richard Brautigan
  • https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/weekend-poem-all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving-grace/245251/
  • Esper Quinn adds: "I grew up very techno-utopian in that particular Y2K post-history stripe, where everything will be Extreme Sports and Peace Summits for the rest of existence once we can get everybody hooked up to 'broadband'. I loved the idea of the singularity, humanism, the maybe naive idea that once everybody can just understand how everyone feels by way of livejournal posts or brain implants we'll all be friends and start working together on things. I still have a lot of love for that era, and my dream video game concept I tinker with every couple months is an extremely Y2K-aesthetic snowboarding-ballsport called CYBERXROSS. I had heard this Brautigan poem before, though a bit late for that era; I want to say it was around 2012, just when Facebook (and post-bubble Silicon Valley Capitalism) began to really bare its teeth and sink into the world's throat, shattering the idea of technology as a Total Positive entirely. Oh well. I still love the poem."
• Diatomite and our weird relationship to tiny cursed skeletons.
• Making fermented foods. I want to make stinky tofu.

Microtopics:

• Choosing to believe when somebody last ate oatmeal.
• Outside oatmeal vs. inside oatmeal.
• The wide world of breakfast goops.
• Writing your to-do lists in calligraphy.
• Minutes from the meeting where you are every member of the board of directors and you agree with yourself that you should remain CEO.
• Jodorowsky's Hamster.
• Videos of aggressive wild hamsters that they don't want you to see.
• Ethical hamster breeders in your area.
• Shipping a hamster in a box with a potato and when it arrives there's no potato but there's a potato's worth of feces.
• The kind of habitat that pet hamsters need.
• A German naturalist's hamster cage.
• King Solomon's Ring, by Konrad Z. Lorenz.
• Importing an entire pond into your house so you can observe it more efficiently.
• A cheese shop in a small town staffed by the same person who runs the travel agency and the general store.
• Imitation cannibalism hoax "Hufu."
• Whether Winston can say good night.
• Whether a three year old understands the ethical calculus behind eating or not eating the last dragon.
• Eating raw dragon and getting Mad Dragon Disease.
• Whether biomagnification would be worse in dragon or human meat.
• Whether Wikipedia pages for difficult ideas should have tutorials.
• A series of date nights in which you make Powerpoint presentations about armadillos for each other.
• The Seven-Banded Armadillo.
• A detailed technical description of the scoots on the Seven-Banded Armadillo's fourth moveable band.
• Volunteer opportunities to study Paraguayan fauna.
• Spending four years in Paraguay discovering and describing a new species of armadillo by going to the museum where they are stuffed and mounted.
• The relief of discovering that other people fail at things too.
• Mutually programming harmony, like pure water touching clear sky.
• A cybernetic forest filled with pines and electronics.
• The counterculture era of hippies and computers.
• Solving every problem.
• Making a machine to water your plants and going back to sleep.
• Making art that is deeply alarming but also incredibly pleasant.
• Violently bright emotions for short moments.
• How to recognize utopias from the outside.
• Fixing a poem you almost like and posting the result on Instagram.
• Crypto bros perishing in the wildfires of this cybernetic ecosystem.
• Exploring and coming to terms with the complications of the field you were uncomplicatedly excited about as a kid.
• The set of questions that don't have words attached to them.
• The Mossman Lock Collection.
• Branches of technology that we didn't take.
• Using a slab of diatomaceous earth as your bath mat.
• The multivarious uses of the skeletons left behind after the primordial seas dried up.
• Surrounding your pantry with ancient dry skeletons so when ants step on the skeletons they think "oh gross, this skeleton is so dry" and they go away.
• Pouring nitroglycerin into ancient tiny skeletons to invent dynamite.
• Scrubbing the exposed parts of your skeleton with much smaller skeletons.
• Late night snack vendors.
• Sarcophagus tofu.
• Preserved organ dishes.
• The difficulty of acquiring stinky tofu during a global pandemic.
• Fermented meat products.
• How to tell when your stinky tofu turned out wrong.
• Drinking the band-aid beer.
• Paying a nominal fee for a lab to DNA sequence your mystery meat.
• Comparing sludge notes.
• Adding kimchi to pizza sauce.
• Drawing the Instagram logo out of diatomaceous earth on the floor and going to sleep in it and waking up and now you are Instagram and whenever someone uploads a video they're uploading it into your head.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Maxx
  • maxx.infinity@gmail.com
• Elena
  • https://propinquity.me/

Topics:

• Been playing Celeste recently and I'm real into the themes of conflict with oneself vs acceptance of oneself
• The museum of Jurassic Technology and when it's okay to lie to your audience
• Human jaw shrinkage
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_jaw_shrinkage
• Feeding the Worms, by Danusha Lameris
  • http://poetrytreeonthecharles.net/2020/09/feeding-the-worms-by-danusha-lameris/
• Linguistics of Swearing and Taboo
  • The weird Mummy trailer with the missing audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1jg5YlQuT8

Microtopics:

• Getting a lot of calories for your money.
• All your amino acids right there.
• Superman grabbing the bumper and lifting the entire gestalt of the car.
• A "superfood" in the sense of being beyond the concept of food, e.g. antidepressants.
• Whether you get better at running events after running events for a decade.
• Ultimately reconciling with yourself after making a video game about reconciling with yourself.
• A platformer about depression and panic attacks.
• The checkbox in a hard game's accessibility options that allows you to give yourself permission to use the disability options.
• The 8-way joystick gate on the Nintendo 64 and the Gamecube.
• Installing little pigeon spikes on the thumb stick to remind yourself to use the d-pad when playing Celeste.
• Iterating when everything you do is slightly difficult.
• A mixed record of enjoying platformers.
• Putting in the effort to making someone's holy video game genre, such as the scrolling shooter or the masocore platformer, accessible to a non-believer.
• A culture of something.
• Being unable to process what's going on in a movie so you look up the Wikipedia plot summary mid-movie.
• Media-related experiences that you miss out on because your priorities lie elsewhere.
• Hating very difficult platformers but also being so good at platformers that you only get mildly frustrated at platformers that are generally considered very difficult.
• An art installation that pretends to be a museum.
• Visiting a museum and at the end of it being unsure what a museum is.
• A glitch in your house where rooms occasionally disappear.
• The genre of joke that takes the form of telling a lie, and the failure modes where the listener believes the lie and gets confused, or where they don't realize it's supposed to be amusing and think you're trying to deceive them.
• Listening to someone tell a story from their life with growing horror and only realizing midway through that they're describing a dream.
• Subscribe to Nitro on Discord and needing to write a SQL query to find the right emoji reaction.
• Using a normally innocuous emoji in a way that is not innocuous on this particular Discord server.
• Using emoji reactions to replace the parental paratextual back channel of information that body language gives you in a real life conversation.
• Whether "human jaw shrinkage" refers to over an individual lifetime or over millennia of evolution.
• Human jaws getting smaller not because of evolutionary pressure, but because we aren't chewing tough grains and nuts as much as our ancestors did.
• Not experiencing pain, fear or anxiety and not realizing it until you're in your sixties.
• Not experiencing pain, fear or anxiety so you only feel mild disappointment when you get a cut on your foot and your dog eats your foot while you're not paying attention.
• The tickly sensation of yanking metal wire out of the ground.
• Recreational anaphylaxis.
• Drinking hot tea to burn your tongue so your dad won't be disappointed when you react to incredibly spicy ramen.
• The sweetness of apples permeating the pores all over your stringy body.
• The feathery tops of carrots.
• At what point things become gross.
• High and low variance fruit.
• Mush that is beyond comprehension.
• If going on the bus to work was that chaotic Willy Wonka tunnel.
• Getting more reminders of life in your life.
• Google procedurally generating a vacation montage of the time you visited a Holocaust memorial, and playing a jaunty tune over it.
• Giving people unlabeled interfaces that they subconsciously learn how to use.
• Using a fishing rod to hanging a sad mannequin head in front of the lens when you're taking photos that you don't want Google to create a jaunty montage of three years from now.
• Ling 269.
• What that guy is saying in the weird Mummy trailer.
• Pan-Pan the Human Man.
• Studying the brain of the guy who can only say "pan," and there in his brain wrinkles you can read the word "pan" in the place where most people have the dictionary etched.
• An aphasic situation.
• A comprehensive timeline of euphemisms for genitals going back to the 12th century.
• A novel mince to your swear.
• Practicing minced oaths until they are internalized enough to move into swear storage in your brain.
• Finding a stranger in the Alps.
• Americans coming back from World War I with a bunch of new slurs.
• The Holy Shit Shift, where the offensive part of the phrase "holy shit" shifted from one word to the other over time.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Maxx
  • @mechcem on Twitter
  • Maxx plugs sitting at various angles
• Erica
  • @YerrikTRB on Twitter
  • Erica plugs Lovage, not the band but the spice
• Jim
  • Jim plugs Big Boy beds, or doesn’t

Topics:

• Things I Chewed as a Youth.
• In which I beg Jim to use a sharp knife or at least let me teach his child to.
• Canadian floating feet: explained.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salish_Sea_human_foot_discoveries
• Brad asks "Listening to spoilery discussion of a piece of media because you think you don't care about it, but then being convinced by said discussion that you actually would have liked it."
• Do you know off hand the tallest person you've met? And other things I wish we tracked culturally.
  • At 7 feet 0 inches: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_MacCulloch
  • At 6 feet 9 inches: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Bird
• Egg the Arts Show
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EGG,_the_Arts_Show
  • Some of EGG on VIMEO https://vimeo.com/user10049545

Microtopics:

• Sitting at various angles.
• Toilets with threatening auras.
• The butthole being the mind and the poop being the body.
• Replacing all your spices with lovage.
• How to use white pepper.
• Breaking into the kitchen and finding where they keep the peppercorns.
• Big boy beds.
• Performatively lying on stuffed animals.
• Baby MacGyver disassembling his crib from the inside.
• One for the baby book.
• The side number theory of beds.
• Sleeping on a bed shaped like a mobius strip.
• Sleeping on a tightrope because your triangular bed had too many sides.
• Staying up as late as you can and then falling asleep where you stand.
• Hiding inside the circular rack of shirts in JC Penney.
• Climbing inside a circular rack of chastity belts at JC Penney and becoming trapped when an employee comes by and locks all the belts.
• Collecting pins from the collars of the men's shirts and sticking them all into the calluses of your hands and running around displaying your hands to freak out the grownups.
• Chewing all the bones so nobody in your family can play Operation.
• An endlessly chewy grape.
• The sign up sheet for chewing on the fake plastic grape.
• The hierarchy of who in your 4th grade class is allowed to chew on the plastic grape next and for how long.
• The copycat endlessly chewy grape that is not as good as the one that Erica refuses to give up.
• Dipping the chewing sponge in whiskey to refresh its flavor.
• Filling the endlessly chewy plastic grape with peanut butter.
• Chewing stim toys that are designed for babies but you can totally chew on them as an adult too.
• Eating the eyes out of the fish before anybody else gets the chance.
• The novelty of eating an identifiable body part.
• The Snack That Tastes Back.
• Being faced with an ice cream bar shaped like a human and deciding whether to bite off its legs first so it can't run away or bite off its head first so it can't scream.
• Not celebrating Easter but knowing about Easter candy because you bought it on sale afterwards.
• Whether or not to teach a four year old kitchen knife skills.
• Giving a cat a tail knife so that it is pointy on six out of six ends.
• The least optimal medium for explaining how to hold a kitchen knife.
• Seeing a two year old and needing to arm the two year old.
• Teaching a two year old how to wield power responsibly.
• Disarticulated feet washing ashore.
• Sneakers being more buoyant than sneakers thirty years ago.
• Why floating feet like landing in Canada.
• Never a single foot.
• Salish Sea Human Foot Discoveries.
• As It Happens.
• Talking to a Canadian man who was near an earthquake.
• Cons: loose feet.
• Lying about the quality of water.
• Turning the amnesia pill like a kitchen timer to specify how much time you want to lose.
• Trying to get to Twitter Zero but some people who follow you don't log on any more so you have to find them in real life and annoy them enough that they log in to Twitter to unfollow you, but not enough that they call the police.
• Cosplaying a 2013-era Twitter asshole by uploading an egg as your profile photo.
• Tweeting nothing but pop culture spoilers and phobia-triggering photos for months to shed as many followers as possible in your quest for Twitter Zero.
• A Twitter bot that changes its avatar and username to the last person who tweeted at it and tweets what they said back at them.
• Not knowing if anyone has time these days and asking the listeners to write in if they have time, but not reading any of the emails because you don't have time.
• A language where disclosing whether you've eaten eggplant today is built into the grammar.
• Meeting a basketball player and their suit is yards and yards of tweed going right up to the ceiling, with their head perched on top.
• Meeting the basketball player who retired to play pinball at California Extreme.
• Learning to spin a ball on your finger at Harlem Globetrotters basketball camp.
• All the time you spent at basketball camp and eating avocado toast that you wish you could have back now.
• Moving to Detroit and wanting to make neighborhoods more friendly.
• Planting cabbages outside of smokestacks to remove heavy metals from the soil.
• Emailing the producer of a show you liked twenty years ago to let them know that it's not online anywhere and ending up spearheading the project to archive the show permanently.
• Doxing yourself live on the air.
• A Twitter account that every Topic Lord can post from.

Support Topic Lords

Lords

• Maxx
  • maxx.infinity@gmail.com
  • http://mechcem.itch.io/
• Aaron
  • http://aaronsee.media/

Topics:

• The TV Show Russian Doll and emotionally correct magic logic
• My favorite captchas
  • http://www.captchacomics.com/index.php?i=1540
• AI-remastered Rick Astley
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ocykBzWDiM
• Kegel based video games and sex UI
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OYmIexjX8U
• Death Stranding, Tenet, and responsible creativity

Microtopics:

• The green fuzzy stuff, and how nice it is to touch.
• Moss on all sides of a tree.
• Moss directionality at various latitudes.
• Having a water-borne moss ball instead of a fidget spinner.
• Russian Doll.
• Whether there is or ought to be another season of Russian Doll.
• Restarting from the same point every time you die.
• Every episode of a TV series depicting the same four years of high school except the protagonist joins a different club.
• The three names of Edge of Tomorrow.
• All You Need is Kill: Edge of Tomorrow: Live Die Repeat.
• Naming your book like an eBay auction.
• Time travel between adjacent panels of a comic.
• Characters in a story trying to figure out how the author's mind works.
• Successfully fusing world building with a character-driven story.
• Designing a game where the game rules change based on choices players make in the story.
• Celebrities in Prison.
• Any given playthrough of a game being consistent with itself, but not with other playthroughs.
• Playing an interactive story on the Wayback Machine, where it's no longer interactive.
• Running a MUD and exposing its creative tools to your players.
• Matching spiral galaxies to demonstrate your humanity.
• Putting pedestrians at risk by giving bad information to CAPTCHAs.
• Figuring out who your CAPTCHA buddy is so that you can give the driving AI bad information together.
• A CAPTCHA asking you how many instances of the letter i are in the author's name, then after you answer revealing their middle name.
• A spammer caring enough to figure out your bespoke commenting system so that they can spam it.
• A CAPTCHA saying "if you are human, type the word 'human' into this box" and filtering out the spam bots because they type in "spam bot" instead.
• Crook things.
• A phrase both too specific and too general to be useful.
• Doing divination readings by writing kanji with swinging pendulums.
• Using images as the source of randomness in a roguelike's daily run.
• Here was a song but now it's a building.
• Questioning the validity of converting songs to buildings.
• Having a lot of things and needing to create names for them.
• An incredible bomble.
• Deleting this entire discussion and replacing it with Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up.
• Reacting to the gestalt of Rick Astley singing in front of a fence.
• Upscaling a music video to 4k and then applying a CRT filter to make it look like it's on an old TV.
• Content aware fill but for time instead of space.
• Using content aware scale to make videos of hilarious cartoon people.
• Lighting the underside of a bridge by reflecting a searchlight off of a pot of water.
• A shadow of Rick Astley clapping his hands and his right hand just vanishes.
• Finally noticing the bartender in the Rick Astley music video.
• Doing a graceful dance nice that most people would wreck themselves trying without even conveying to onlookers that they're trying to dance.
• Trying to dragon punch but missing the timing so Ryu just flails uselessly for a few seconds.
• Flappy Bird with a kegels controller.
• The portable urination games that you see people playing on the subway and wonder if they're winning.
• Repeatedly firing a semiautomatic rifle by kegeling as rapidly as possible and then doing a backflip to reload.
• Werewolf except you're interrogating everyone to figure out who has just eaten a spicy pepper.
• Creative responsibility.
• What's good and bad about walking in video games.
• Winner vs. Loser.
• Spamming the forward button to run.
• Tapping the forward button at a certain rate or the protagonist trips and falls.
• Just being a capsule and going to zero velocity when you hit a wall.
• Filling your AAA hiking simulator with questionable exposition.
• Hiking through the United States except it's actually Iceland.
• Pressing a button to react to strong winds.
• What happens when you try to make games that aren't shooting people.
• Really thinking hard about what it means to walk.
• Making a AAA walking simulator and breaking down your org chart into the left foot team, the right foot team, the left knee team, &c.
• Hiking barefoot on an intensely beautiful mountain and not seeing any of it because you're looking at your footing.
• Taking in the beauty of your environment.
• Building a hill the size of a large building but painting it to look like a 20,000 foot mountain.
• The difficulty of emulating a Windows 95 game.
• How to install Windows 95 on a modern computer when modern computers don't have CD-ROM drives.

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Lords:

• Jenni is emailable at jenni@jennipolodna.com and plugs Chris's cooking channel on Youtube.
• https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRsnCRAIi-VsRPPX4AtzVGQ/
• Maxx is on Twitter as @mechcem or emailable at maxx.infinity@gmail.com and plugs their game bookclub thing.
• https://groups.google.com/g/game-book-club/about

Topics:

• Not caring if you're duplicating thought work that was done by a ton of people forever ago because you're having a good time.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punnett_square
• Correction on Japanese crop microbiome.
• The PXL-2000 camcorder
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PXL-2000
• This is the first Wikipedia page for a movie that has the entire movie embedded in the page:
  
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_to_Bali
• Search and rescue as an excuse for robotics research.
• What if poop worked like, you ate dinosaur chicken nuggets, you got dinosaur poops.
• It's annoying that it took me so long to realize I love writing dialog trees.

Microtopics:

• Thinking that other people have had sex, when they haven't.
• Making a very good one about fried green boys.
• The dominant recessive two alleles punnett square stuff.
• All the mystery flowers that have been reproducing willy nilly.
• Finding out about Redstone and reinventing computing from scratch.
• Whether figuring out all the crafting shapes is a good part of Minecraft.
• Waking up in an abandoned cryogenics facility and enjoying the plastic bag upgrade tree.
• Waking up in an abandoned cryogenics facility but there's lots of fish sticks so you just eat fish sticks.
• Whether fish sticks are frozen fish or are born sticks.
• Making a stick into a spear by holding it in your hand.
• A shopping cart breaking into almost enough pieces to make a new shopping cart.
• The soul of the shopping cart ascending into heaven so you have to play a fishing minigame to get it back.
• A good starter project where after your finish it there are birds in it right now.
• Beginner knowledge work projects feeling useless because somebody already wrote the program you just wrote.
• 3D printer projects resulting in a physical artifact even when there's an error.
• Constantly being annoyed that you're not a scientist in the 1300s.
• How Tycho Brahe was the "greatest naked eye astronomer" because he owned a sextant and had a bunch of spare time that he spent looking up.
• An "octant" possibly being 33% more than a sextant but nobody on the podcast is sure.
• Trying to figure out what "congresstant" means.
• Japanese far right nationalists being terrified of Koreans touching their rice.
• Hearing a Japanese person say a fact about Japan and just assuming that it's true.
• Wes Anderson accidentally validating far right Japanese nationalists by putting their caricatures of a foreigner in Isle of Dogs.
• Watching Japanese television because your Japanese isn't good enough to tell who's being a far right douchebag.
• Muting a TV show and procedurally generating subtitles whenever someone speaks.
• Localizing an anime without knowing what characters were originally saying.
• Sitting there with your 2020 sensibilities going "oh my god."
• Saving video to audio cassette.
• The camera that filmed the two minute performance art scene in Richard Linklater's Slacker.
• Not having time to watch Monty Python movies but hanging eventually internalizing the whole oeuvre from when fans quote it.
• Picking a movie and having to communicate only in lines from that movie for the rest of your life.
• Looking for the movie with the most words in it but Google only wants to tell you the movie with the most f-words in it.
• Not having seen Casino but deciding to say only things that they say in Casino from now on.
• According to this one web page Jim found, Team America World Police only having 1600 words in it.
• Hearing a line from Casino and immediately forgetting it.
• Singing Come to my Window by Melissa Etheridge except with blueberries.
• A mask that covers your eyes but plays a tone in your ears based on the distance of the closest object in front of each eye.
• Watching the entire movie inside the Wikipedia page for the movie.
• Embedding Myst in Wikipedia.
• Putting on your business card that the Frog Fractions Wikipedia page is rated "GA" for "good article."
• Plugging the Wikipedia article for Frog Fractions into GPT-2 and learning facts about future sequels.
• Insect-inspired robots.
• People asking what your robot design is for and always saying "search and rescue" and everybody believing you even though search and rescue people never use robots.
• Making robots that are too small to get military funding because they can't carry a payload.
• Taking an ultrasound of a fly while it's flying.
• Inventing the idiom "cheap as a moth."
• Harvesting antennae from dead moths and attaching it to your circuit board with Bio Gel and your circuit board has a sense of smell until the antenna rots away an hour later.
• Moths not having a circulatory system but they do some stuff with liquids.
• Whether or not Jim's wife needs an army of robot bugs for her park ranger crew.
• Your life goal being to annoy your neighbors with the self-replicating robot mosquito you invented.
• Smearing bio gel on you battery connectors and then inserting any foodstuff into the battery compartment.
• Putting flies on leashes.
• A robot-fighting praying mantis with a perfect record.
• The mantis refusing to fight any given robot more than once.
• Oops, All Biogel.
• Enjoying looking at all your little dinosaur poops.
• Eating alphabet soup consecutively and sending a photo of the toilet to your message recipient.
• Discovering your superpowers at a baby food tasting party.
• Eating baby food for the first time and vienna sausages bursting from every pore.
• Identifying a strange substance by putting it in your mouth.
• Tasting the ash of a cremated person and pooping out their face, then applying the electricity and they come back to life.
• Not discovering that you love writing dialog trees until you're 41.
• Making a mixtape of Nintendo DS ROMs for your partner.
• Writing a dialog tree into a stressful email so you get all the future stressful emails out of the way too.
• Your girlfriend reading your dialog tree linearly so she thinks you want to break up, get married, have a baby, and move to Pittsburgh.
• Gmail basically being a dialog tree nowadays.
• The Gmail Labs feature that predicts the three suggested responses that your recipient will see, so you can rewrite your email until they only get three variations of "Wow, what a great email!"
• Ostensibly being a comedy writer but laughing harder at dialog written by an algorithm.
• Japanese people making an acknowledgement noise for every word you say, and feeling way too validated.
• Reading RPG-style text and imagining somebody making a grunting noise every time a letter appears.

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