• Mike
• Jake

Topics:

• Cameras are peaking -- what's next?
• Is the mysterious disappearing, or just mystery?
• Preschool security practices
• At the Feast in the Great Hall, by Ursula Leguin
  • https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/1-EFinaN.png
• It's not boring to talk about dreams

Microtopics:

• The great state of Maine.
• A project you've been working on for a long time.
• Inventing a game developer community in Michigan.
• Meaningful distinguishers on normal camera use.
• A lukewarm decisionmaking process.
• Computational photography.
• Samsung's fake moon.
• A camera that just guesses what you want to see so you don't even need to take the photo.
• A massive endless feed of the same photo with different people in it.
• Why people use cameras.
• Whether photos exist.
• Late stages of the product category.
• People who need Photoshop to do their job.
• Photo mode in real life.
• A photo you can take later.
• Adding a filter to make the guy in the background less likable.
• Meals for the Ages
• How to get from here to perfect ubiquitous service surveillance.
• Theatrically pretending to be hit by a stationary car.
• Going to the Gallagher movie and getting sprayed with watermelon.
• There's just the one Bigfoot, it's the same Bigfoot every time.
• Tomato sauces that are still delicious even if you learned the recipe from the Internet and not from a grandma.
• Mysterious things backing into the shadows so they can remain mysterious.
• Protecting mystery wherever you find it.
• The Museum of Jurassic Technology.
• Stepping inside someone else's very strange brain.
• Dawn Wall.
• An intensely detailed exploration of the surface of a cliff.
• I wonder what it's like on the fucking moon?
• Who painted the iconic cover of the Wrinkle in Time paperback.
• The shoot-em-up cabinet you saw in the canteen at the US Embassy in Monrovia, Liberia before the first Liberian civil war and have never been able to find since.
• A reaction to the lack of organic mystery in our lives.
• The Case of the Missing Hit and Searching for Sugarman.
• Wash over me, True Story.
• Which phone checked the kid out of preschool.
• Being on the list of services the insurance companies consider to have checked various boxes.
• We got pins. We can do that.
• The three bad four-digit pins.
• Streamlining the process of rapidly accounting for all the children.
• Developing a system that would deterministically move the needle in a useful way.
• Blundering in the brightness.
• Telling two events from the same perspective.
• Ugly crying at your desk in a public workspace.
• Spending way more time not alive than alive.
• Something that we can experience on either side of our lives.
• A Fire Take from Jake.
• Waiter stress dreams.
• A skill that you can hone.
• One of the more fun channels in the discord.
• Holding an increasingly large bag of stuff.
• Waking up laughing until you realize your dream was not funny.
• The consciousness wall between you and visualization.
• Training yourself to let your mental imagery be visible.
• Seeing clumps of color and interpreting them.
• Doing an editing pass on your dreams before relating it to your friends.
• Jay-Z's favorite bleu cheese Milkshakes.
• Screwball horror.
• A splash of furry content.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Mike
  • https://twitter.com/mikeambrogi
• Adam
  • https://twitter.com/adamdeGrandis/

Topics:

• Cooking is awesome
  • https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1023147-tuna-crunch-sandwiches
• Profound kid questions ("how do you like something?")
• Mr. Jaws
  • https://youtu.be/JeYCOFblZRg
• Distant Regard by Tony Hoagland
  • https://condofire.com/2018/12/16/poem-of-the-week-distant-regard-by-tony-hoagland-via-alison-mcghee/
• Having very tight standards that you hold in one part of your creative life that you totally ignore in other parts. As a game artist, it drives me crazy when people make creative decisions without solid design to back them up ("My game has a PSX art style because I think that's neat"), but as a musician I played in a garage rock band without any reason other than "50 year old music is neat".

Microtopics:

• Desktop Dungeons Rewind.
• A rug that looks like a cat's face.
• Starting a game studio with your life.
• How the whole butch/femme thing works.
• After the fall of civilization when the guy with an iPod is the most important person in the village.
• Your FK-IK rigging skills really paying off in the post-apocalypse.
• How much kayfabe is happening right now?
• Whether the PS5 exists and whether you can play Jamestown Plus on it.
• A great way to nurture and nourish your loved ones while also staying away from them.
• Soaking Ls.
• Whether Jim has a sister-in-law.
• Top three texture-bothers-me foods.
• Jim's position on eating eyeballs.
• A snack that can look back.
• Sucking on the window to the soul.
• Ordering your tuna salad extra starchy.
• A deep appreciation of the sandwich arts.
• Making a Youtube series where part of the bit is that it's really professionally made but also that means you need to do all the dang work, and also maybe you're not good enough to do it as professionally as you think.
• Getting a real video editor to do the parts that are edited like a normal video but editing all the parts that are bullshit yourself.
• A daughter in rock climbing camp.
• Describing Cosmic Cat socks to your dad.
• How to enjoy things.
• A series of experiences that enter your body via your sensory organs.
• Laying a framework for understanding the self.
• Encoding your musical taste in a C program.
• Configuring human behavior on an iPad.
• Feeding the Reddit grist mill with season 4 of Westworld.
• Living near a pleasing combination of straightaways and turns so you have to hear people racing motorcycles at all hours.
• The emotional status of the teenager who flipped his car in front of your house.
• What to say after a car accident to convince passers by to not call 911.
• An SUV that looks like a t-rex just tried to eat it driving the wrong way on the Bay Bridge.
• Bombing back into San Francisco in your exploded car.
• Seeing someone driving recklessly but it's okay because the car has a bumper sticker saying "Everything is fine. We're not drinking in here."
• Taking a joke that someone else made and making another joke out of it.
• As topical an artifact as you can imagine.
• Repetitive and familiar two-minute chunks of sound.
• The They Might Be Giants album that has the giant squid on the cover.
• Singing Fingertips from start to finish.
• The amount of work that went into the cover art of Dickie Goodman's Mr. Jaws.
• DJing from a dinghy.
• Writing a thank you note to your travel agent.
• The clouds blowing overhead like governments and years.
• Secular Americans having to reinvent gratitude since they don't pray.
• Parts of you that you think make you a better person.
• Valuing something in yourself but not being sure how you got there.
• Having taught yourself a bunch of hard things and learning to trust the process of learning a skill.
• Civilization: something we agreed to do.
• The difference between doing something professionally and doing it for fun.
• Trying to sneak into a giant hovering ball of rock.
• People who are hungry for topics refusing to hire you.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Mike
• Kev
  • http://www.radcade.com/

Topics

• Embracing creative chaos is very hard but paradoxically extremely common?
• Thanatosensitivity
• GDC happened this year! They really did it
• Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy By Thomas Lux
  • https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48483/tarantulas-on-the-lifebuoy
• Being left handed in a right handed world

Microtopics:

• Wanting to learn to program and moving to Maine.
• Learning to program by implementing a meticulous copy of Metroid for the NES.
• Choosing to live a life that feels like an anime training montage.
• How to learn to program while having kids.
• Radical content for radical gamers.
• Having one's mind blown by works of art, as one does.
• The "stone soup bubblegum and baling wire everything went wrong" method of making art.
• What happens when the plan makes contact with the enemy.
• Writing a film with the magic of wintertime as a core theme and not being able to get the permit to film until spring.
• Iterating on your idea with insights you've gleaned from working on your idea.
• Ascertaining the recoverability of any given error.
• The kind of disaster that happens when a culture accustomed to low-cost-error problems tries to work on high-cost-error problems.
• Improvising bridges.
• Programming vs. the disciplined engineering fields.
• The pros and cons of storing a bunch of elephants on the roof.
• The user experience of death.
• Digital ghosts on LinkedIn.
• Logging in to LinkedIn for the first time in eight years and getting a bunch of IMs from a friend who died six years ago.
• Dealing with your dead friend's estate and having to close out all the relationships they were maintaining on OkCupid.
• Thanatechnologies.
• The human events taking place on a separate flow of time than internet time.
• Slug World.
• A human brain computer interaction conference at Noisebridge.
• alt.ctrl.GDC
• Spending all of GDC on the lawn.
• A GDC talk except instead of talking to an auditorium full of 500 people, you're talking to a hotel room full of five people.
• The Unconference Phenomenon.
• Substance-to-fluff ratios.
• Your three GDC lives.
• Going to the talks where they talk about the stuff we're doing to figure out how we can do our stuff better.
• The ascended platonic GDC.
• Getting all Dunbar's Numbered-out and spending all your time talking to people you know.
• Showing your game at a conference to increase the odds that one of the seven people at Sony who can get your game into the Spring Fever promotion will walk by and notice you.
• Making a leveraged play on your charisma and luck stats.
• GDC Santa with the sack of boxed copies of Glittermitten Grove.
• A map of TXT World stitched together out of screenshots, like in the good old days.
• A greybeard coming out of the woodwork to admire your ANSI art map.
• Disrespecting the expo.
• Realizing that somebody is about to ask you how your GDC is going and getting the drop on them by asking how their GDC is going first.
• Katie hauling off and gassing you up.
• The hazards of being Jim Stormdancer.
• A reward for not loving the death of the ugly and even the dangerous.
• The tangled underworld of your socks.
• Pretending to not be afraid of spiders because you don't want your son to be afraid of spiders.
• Growing up with rhino beetles in Liberia.
• Hog snakes.
• The extremely specific feeling of a desperate beetle clinging to your pruny fingertip.
• Formative bug experiences.
• Millions of termites growing wings to do their big ol' termite sex party.
• Sweeping up all the termites who are taking a nap after mating season to fry in palm oil as a special treat.
• The morning where the entire town is covered in bugs which sucks but you get to eat them which rules.
• Reminiscing about which body parts of a termite are saltiest.
• Getting accustomed to eating termites by the time you get to the bottom of the bag.
• Left-handed zippers.
• Trying to use the wrong scissors and assuming that you have some kind of developmental problem.
• The Uniball Jetstream Rollerball, with a pressurized ink reservoir.
• The prince who was promised.
• Fretting with your dominant hand.
• Picking a specific guitar string at speed.
• Whether handedness exists.
• Drawing with gross motor movements.
• Left-handed mugs.
• Left-handed drums vs. open-handed drums.

Support Topic Lords