• Xalavier
  • https://store.steampowered.com/app/3139570/Coop_Kaiju_Horror_Cooking/
• Cort

Topics:

• What's the coolest instrument to give a child?
• What happened to sound lasers?
• Appearing Canes
  • https://www.amazon.com/Healifty-Retractable-Collapsible-Professional-Accessories/dp/B093G7J6JG
• The Story of Mel
  • http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html
  • https://melsloop.com/docs/the-story-of-mel/pages/mel-kaye-cv

Microtopics:

• Whether your middle name is really Danger.
• Half an extra plug.
• The inexplicable aliveness of Strange Scaffold.
• Co-op Casual Horror Cooking.
• Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival.
• Making a game so that you can voice act the main character.
• How many careers you're allowed to have before the world begins to rip them away from you.
• Hiring the designer of Frog Fractions when Frog Fractions is already designed.
• A boxing game featuring the inside of your mouth.
• Knockout Kings 2003 or Fight Night Round 3.
• Your dad explaining all the ways grownups are better than children while soundly trouncing you at Fight Night Round 3.
• Tattooing a message on your infant son's head so that he reads it when he begins to bald.
• Playing music with humans.
• What's special about playing an analog monosynth.
• Getting an analog synthesizer and finally sounding like the 70s.
• Your larynx thinking "I'm singing meat!" while you push air through it, making it vibrate.
• All the ways your larynx is confused about the nature of music.
• Sitting in a circle and playing music together.
• The Topanga Banjo and Fiddle Festival.
• Playing folk songs within ten minutes of owning a mandolin.
• How Irish sessions compare to Bluegrass sessions.
• Being too far back in the crowd to have sex with Neil Young.
• A big long guitar with only four strings.
• Bass Sherpa Hunter Bond.
• Practicing bass with your bass unplugged because plugging in your bass feels like an imposition.
• Short-scale basses.
• Finding the bass that makes it feel like you're holding Mjolnir.
• The Minibrute, Microbrute, Matrixbrute and Polybrute.
• The problematic acoustic P-bass.
• Travel amps and amp alternatives.
• The non-problematic acoustic P-bass.
• Oh yeah, that's the acoustic bass player!
• The only instrument in a rock band that can go up to. x6 multiplier.
• Coming back to Rock Band after learning the actual instrument.
• The Rock Band Pro Controller.
• What about Second Topic?
• Asking a parent if it's okay to give their child an accordion and backpedaling when they start white-knuckling their chair.
• Kung fu instructionals.
• The smallest member of the mandola family.
• Instruments that require elongation.
• Chapman sticks.
• The kind of musical instrument you can stab someone with.
• Vibrating your bones.
• That time science stopped itself from inventing something awful.
• Non lethal directed acoustic energy weapons.
• Sound cannons as an anti-piracy measure.
• SASERs.
• Using headphones as a microphone and vice versa.
• Plugging a bass into a guitar amp.
• Traveling to another country and trying out the basses that they have there.
• Whacking the high tension wires to make laser noises.
• What they have on BART now instead of high tension wire noises.
• Raising Cain's.
• Trying to reload your appearing cane.
• The type of thing the TSA would miss but should watch out for.
• Terrorists taking over the plane by doing such an impressive magic show that the passengers are like "that was amazing, we'd better do what he wants"
• It poked me straight in the middle of my eye.
• A sound laser for mischief and giggles.
• Fighting those who would be your comrades in shenanigans.
• Easy to operation!
• If you love something, let it go. If you hold onto it, it will stab you in the hand.
• A frog boiling effect but for extremely long poems.
• Computers made out of drums and vacuum tubes.
• Royal McBee Computer Corp.
• Executing another complete revolution to find the next instruction.
• If the thesis of Summoning Salt was that "this is what all gamers should be doing all the time."
• When you get old enough that most of the people you don't like are now dead.
• When you decide to hate somebody, taking comfort in the fact that one day they will die, or maybe you'll die, and either way you won't have to deal with them any more.
• Taking comfort that Mel is out there writing in direct hexadecimal for all us sinners.
• Jobs you wish you'd had in the past but that you wouldn't take today.
• The honor in choosing not to be famous.
• Our first pangram rhyme scheme.
• Version control plugins that scan commits for variable names that scan to the Ninja Turtles theme.
• Winston on the Microbrute.

Support Topic Lords

• Xalavier
• Brianne

Topics:

• Why do movies about contract killers skip over the good part of negotiating in excruciating detail the contract and clauses present?
• Are fictional characters greater role models than real people?
• The new Zelda game talks too much and I'm okay with that
• Think of Others by Mahmoud Darwish
  • https://www.ayearofbeinghere.com/2014/11/mahmoud-darwish-think-of-others.html
• Should every person be forcibly drafted into a customer service job, like the military.
• The horrible things I would do in the Criterion Closet, if given an opportunity.
  • Jim's evidence for why The Pest is memorable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAB8dNMoXZ0

Microtopics:

• I Am Your Beast.
• Making 50 games in 7 years.
• A co-op Kaiju horror cooking game
• The Name of the Rose meets Godzilla meets Lethal Company.
• Power couples in games.
• Moviegoers who want to know about contract law.
• Search and replacing "murder" with "unalive" so that a contact killer can safely sue the client for breach of contact.
• Pedantic legal contact killer law every week.
• Lowering the bar so that we can all raise it later.
• Doctor Odyssey.
• Disheveled Detective.
• The Autistic Coded Detective.
• A ahow about autistic people written by neurotypical people.
• Making a weekly podcast and scoffing at the TV shows that can only manage 24 episodes a year.
• Asking google for the "podcast with the fewest episodes" and google just assuming you meant the podcast with the shortest running time.
• Sending children to the sharps dump. (Because the kid asked for it and the parent signed a waiver.)
• Desperately knocking on Google's door and beginning them to tell you where the furthest Denny's is.
• The Waluigi-owned Denny's in the Andromeda Galaxy.
• Role Models happening accidentally.
• Donald Duck becoming a sex pest after edgier writers take over.
• A form of self to aspire to.
• 300 Rorschach Guys in a discord server.
• An epic story that FromSoft will continue to plunder of its biggest plot elements for the next 30 years.
• A character that you relate to and then you realize that's bad.
• What do you do after you get what you want?
• Leading a horde of ninja at the dictates of an Eldritch god.
• Getting what you've been looking for and realizing that you're no longer the person who wanted that thing.
• Role-playing a princess who has to talk to a litany of insufferable people.
• Swinging your sword through grass to reveal rupees.
• Zelda's Got an Onus.
• Who you're thinking about as you pay your water bills.
• Those who are nursed by clouds.
• Shakespeare beeves.
• GettingTikTok Mad.
• The Death of Arthur.
• Impacting media literacy for generations because you want to make a sassy pun.
• Slipping into Belgian because you don't have enough mana to speak French.
• The red phone in every publicly traded franchise restaurant that connects the customer directly to a random shareholder.
• Working a Black Friday at a retail job and being awarded a purple heart.
• Working a Best Buy Geek Squad tour of service to earn your citizenship.
• The Criterion Closet.
• The level of stardom you need to attain in order to remove movies from the Criterion Collection.
• Supermarket Sweep.
• Asking someone who took one year of high school French what you call someone who owns a closet.
• I would not be normal and they would not be safe.
• Landed noblemen who are super into Amontillado.
• Where to lock the insufferable friend who went to film school.
• How many Miami Vice episodes ended up in the Criterion Collection.
• The movie that you remember the least.
• Forgiving the insufferable film school attendees in your life because you can't think of a good punishment for them.

Support Topic Lords

• Jenni
• Xalavier

Topics:

• How do centaur internal organs work
• What is the most unlikely horror franchise to adapt to games?
• Do boomerangs work?
• Serious KAAAND!
  • https://www.reddit.com/r/TopicLords/comments/1b3j3nu/serious_kaaand/
• Most game mascots are the sexual avatars of their creators
• The Ted Dabney Experience

Microtopics:

• Rusty Lake.
• An intriguing, terrifying morsel.
• Whether it's okay to lie on this show.
• Life Eater.
• The horror fantasy kidnapping sim space.
• Shippers shipping games.
• How do we ship this game without destroying people?
• All of the horse except for the head and neck.
• Cosmetic centaur organs.
• Introducing yourself to the inside of a centaur and it's extremely squishy in there.
• A single multifunctional cube that births a centaur and that's the original Xbox startup video.
• Speaking a language that doesn't exist and every time you finish a sentence you hear church bells.
• Would a defective centaur wear a hat like this or like this?
• Centaurs always standing at their standing desks.
• A centaur wearing a horse mask.
• Playing Wii Golf with someone who remains sitting the entire time.
• Getting off the Power Pad to long jump.
• Sitting golf.
• My Dinner with Andre the Giant.
• The monster mash vs. monster bash.
• Adapting the Ghostbusters theme song to other media.
• Playing as the car and running people over.
• Jail for cars.
• Jelly beans that taste bad on purpose.
• 80s films for children that are meant to turn them into weird bisexuals when they grow up.
• Jeff Minter's Dune.
• Barbarella the video game.
• More things you can do with your Rock Band instruments.
• Sticking even more games inside of Fortnite.
• The lemur with the really big eyes.
• Microorganisms that live in water and have the end of a comedy roast bone for a head.
• Venomousness of hybrid mammals.
• Grabbing your stress ball after learning that the duck billed platypus uses electroreception to track their prey, Xalavier Nelson, Jr.
• Platypus patch notes.
• Adding expansions to Classic World of Warcraft.
• Gauging the temperature of the room when it comes to boomerangs.
• Throwing a washing machine in a circle.
• How you feel when the boomerang doesn't come back.
• Objects that you see on TV.
• Boomerangs that instant of being carved to return when you throw them, are carved to say "help, I'm trapped in a boomerang factory" in an Australian accent when the wind whistles through it.
• A boomerang with a heart on it that you throw to find true love.
• Boomerangs vs. Gen-Xerangs.
• Getting lazy by the time you sharpen the 7th blade on your boomerang.
• Disrupting marshmallows by making them kinda good.
• Hiring a game studio to make a satisfying sequel to Katamari Damacy and then immediately suing them for fraud because making a satisfying sequel to Katamari Damacy is impossible.
• Getting Australian concussions all weekend.
• Naming your facial hair "are you ready for the next topics"
• Hi guys call anyone knows how to buy guns and armor India?
• Crossposting between r/TopicLords to r/IndianTeenagers.
• Weeding out the cowards with Gregorian Chant.
• Looking at Glover and immediately understanding his salient sexual verbs.
• The distinction between mascot and main character.
• Your Sonics, your Gexes and your Crashes Bandicoot.
• Switching places with your therapist.
• Non-saucy mascots.
• Having to pick between being horny and being a sociopath because you can't be both.
• Glover vs. Hamburger Helper vs. Thing.
• Opening yourself to a deeper Freudian zeitgeist.
• The mascot platformer you keep seeing roms of but have never downloaded.
• Blinx 2: Masters of Time and Space.
• Blinx dressing up as the lead singer of Power Man 5000.
• Exactly the sort of podcast segment you want to commit to sight unseen.
• Being willing to give up 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand to make a friend happy.
• How much do you want that Golden Microphone?
• The crucible of the soul you go through to record a podcast.
• People in the future deciding what you would have made a podcast about if you were still alive and making that podcast.
• The Xalavier Nelson, Jr. Experience.
• The dream list of developers you ask to help finish your game in your will.
• Locking Albert Einsten and Genghis Khan in a haunted house and they vote each other off the show back and forth forever.
• A deeply safe field for job hunting.
• The Ted Dabney Experience of finding out that Ted Dabney died twelve years ago.
• Mrs. Columbo.
• A movie named "This Movie Has Marky Mark In It."
• A game called Beyonce Battle Royale that doesn't have Beyonce in it and it's not a battle royale. (It's a clicker.)
• Beyonce: Oops All Mudkips.

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:

• Eitan
  • https://www.firehosegames.com/
• Xalavier
  • https://twitter.com/WritNelson

Topics:

• When I was a kid I hated gym class. Now I'm kinda sad that no one forces me to play sports on a semi-regular basis
• How long is it polite to stare at a person before it gets weird for you, specifically (assuming they haven't seen you).
• When asked why some people find her music to be spiritual, Enya explained that "It's the amount of reverb we use."
• "Eighty Million Years Ago," by Bill Watterson
  • https://sites.google.com/site/mrkoofloradale/common-lessons/language/languagemorecalvinandhobbespoetry
• Untrue facts about human anatomy
• Things that have been on your "I'm gonna do it" list for 10+ years, that you will in fact probably never get around to doing
• Why do cows have four stomachs but only one butthole?

Microtopics:

• Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator.
• As many digits as you can imagine.
• The trope where you change costumes at a party to make people think you are more than one person.
• Your game's extremely long title breaking Steam's web site.
• Petting dogs using a different hand each time.
• A cat person who made a game about dogs.
• A giant person insisting that you go outside and play sports.
• When seagulls are full grown but they haven't realized they're adults yet so they're still begging other seagulls for food.
• A teenager realizing that they are now bigger than their parents and could beat the shit out of either of them at any time.
• Remembering that you enjoyed basketball in grade school and deciding to play basketball as an adult and realizing that the only adults who are still playing basketball are a thousand times better than you are.
• Observing and fearing that you will be observed in turn.
• Trying to predict who will decide you are a creep.
• Deciding whether you are a creep vs. letting others decide.
• Watching an elderly person for as long as they are still alive.
• Staring at someone forever in a nursing home and nobody gives a shit because there's no staring time limit in a nursing home.
• PvP for Perverts.
• Finding white papers to determine how long it's safe to stare at strangers under various conditions.
• Knowing everything you need to know about someone after seeing them for 1/10th of a second.
• Paying doppelgangers to do good deeds so people instinctively associate your appearance with good deeds.
• The Serious Batmans.
• A guy who is the Penguin who was raised by penguins.
• Figuring out how to make everybody feel every emotion all the time.
• Your own voice being very small but the voices you hear being really big.
• Listening from inside the Gregorian chanter's mouth.
• Finding a dungeon in which to sacrifice your goats.
• The Church of Satan asking to put their goat on display.
• Picking the most terrifying name for your rationalist philosophy.
• A 10 year old putting the Transformers movie on hold at the local library.
• A 30 minute toy commercial that somehow got run on television.
• Watching Optimus Prime die.
• A surprisingly queer road trip impacting robot-kind through time and space.
• Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye.
• Chasing after a glowing cube that's going to give you power.
• Edison making documentary about electrocuting an elephant to prove that DC power is dangerous.
• Falling in love with a pigeon with laser eyes.
• The Christmas story where bloodthirsty reindeer are stalking Rudolph and he hides in a closet and they spot the light glowing under the door.
• Giving your child the talk about where Fortnite skins come from.
• The Santa FPS where your gun is all the reindeer and instead of muzzle flash Rudolph's nose glows.
• A ripped Santa Claus running over Peter Parker.
• Fore and aft serrations.
• Dawdling by the candy shop and being devoured.
• The terrible secret of Ragnasaurth's bones.
• Taking back the soul of the nation via Tyrannosaur poetry.
• TikTok? More like "tick tock it's time to write some dinosaur poetry."
• How neurotransmitters definitely don't work.
• The volunteer who proved that if you uncoil all the blood vessels in the human body they will reach the moon and back seven times.
• All your serotonin languishing under a heat lamp because whoever runs the diner in your brain is a real dick.
• How to convey facial expressions via sound effects in an audio medium.
• Gymnasts getting hiccups by rotating too much and having to rotate the other way to cure them.
• Not being old enough to have a bucket list.
• Fried butter.
• Waiting on tenterhooks for when it's ok to eat fried butter again.
• Deciding on your deathbed to take a bath in butter.
• Learning enough about tubes that you can hack the IV bag whenever you want to get more opiates.
• Two-socks McGillicuddy.
• Whether the guy's name is Fried Jesus or Fried Jesus.
• When you saw one set of footprints in the sand it was because you collapsed thirty miles back.
• Loss-leader churros.
• A really ethical company in a sea of Wal-marts.
• The pros and cons of having four stomachs in sequence vs. four stomachs in parallel.
• The cow not being impressed by the extra buttholes you installed at first, but later thanking you when it needs to propel itself around in microgravity.
• How much of your surface area needs to be butthole before you are yourself considered a butthole.
• A 76% butthole being.
• If the new butthole is shaped like a smiley face, does that mean the cow is happy?
• Professional with a capital p.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Xalavier
  • https://twitter.com/WritNelson
  • https://store.steampowered.com/app/1246250/An_Airport_for_Aliens_Currently_Run_by_Dogs/
• Tom
  • https://twitter.com/tv_neato
  • https://www.patreon.com/StrangeScaffold

Topics:

• Shaped CDs and other data formats too cool to live in 2021
  • https://vgmdb.net/album/819
• The Steve Jackson RPG you called on the telephone in 1988
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy_Interactive_Scenarios_by_Telephone
• Opposites Attract
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xweiQukBM_k
  • Unedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/Jnkc7diIpdo
• Let's brainstorm ideas for how to make the next Sonic game so bad that it kills the sonic franchise once and for all
• Double-sided pizza
  • http://www.thenibble.com/zine/archives/yanni-grilling-cheese.asp
• Poop dreads

Microtopics:

• Waiting for three months to buy the fancy new LIDAR eyes for your Clydesdale.
• Whether Microsoft would eat horseflesh, and whether that would be a bad thing.
• Whether the hippo is a bigger threat to humanity than the Tsetse fly.
• The only animal in the history of the planet to be equipped with a Gatling gun.
• Whether anyone has beaten the bucket.
• A white man in tech who has never been on a podcast.
• An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs.
• Having horseflesh on the mind.
• Whether the horse runs an airport or its own dimension.
• A bright line in the sand between the listeners and Poop Dreads.
• Finding a CD-ROM shaped like a polyhedron at the bottom of the cereal box.
• Filling a CD with 4k resolution dog photographs.
• Shipping a modern game on 100 novelty shaped CDs and also shipping an enormous disc changer add-on to the PS5, called the "DataLathe."
• Contract negotiations where you're not allowed to remove any text from the contract but you can add as much as you want to the end.
• Your DataLathe™ exploding, covering everyone in the room with Lathecerations™.
• Campaigning for months to get the foam disc gun from the dollar store.
• How many dogs you could fit in a mid-sized Subaru.
• Ordering a free starter pack for this play-by-phone RPG by sending a self-addressed stamped envelope to the company running it.
• Sending a self-addressed stamped envelope to get a free trial of a defunct play-by-phone RPG and receiving a Moons Over My Hammy from the Denny's currently occupying that building.
• A coked-up American businessman in 1988 making an overseas phone call and paying 38 pence a minute so he can press 3 to cast fireball.
• A kid reading about a 900 number in the back of a magazine and just calling it and later their parents receive a phone bill and there's no regulatory oversight because the industry was replaced by the internet more quickly than lawmakers could act.
• Tricking children into calling a phone number that bills their parents for a percentage of their net worth and inventing taxes.
• Approaching the Poop Dreads barrier and being shot out of the sky.
• A puff of chimney smoke that makes it look like a cat is farting.
• Giving a cat a flat top and a goatee.
• Ripping out the back seat of a Toyota Camry and throwing it in an alley to contrast with the relentless glamour of Paula Abdul.
• Disco Ball earrings.
• Whether Silent Hill 2 would've been better starring M.C. Skat Kat.
• A funny cartoon cat man in a music video.
• Learning about what people thought was okay in the 80s.
• M.C. Skat Kat blaming the alley he lives in for his lack of hygiene when cats can just lick themselves to take a bath.
• The Oral History of M.C. Skat Kat in Opposites Attract.
• Hanging like a spider from an unseen perch.
• Paula Abdul trying to Mario Kart dash but whiffing it.
• A clock on the edge of the rooftop facing inwards so that the cool teens hanging out on the roof can head home before the purge starts.
• M.C. Skat Kat's ballerina training.
• Looking at two people whose names start with "Xa" and assuming that they're the same person.
• The Sonic Cycle.
• Ending the Sonic Cycle so that Sega can just focus on making Yakuza games.
• What it would take to kill the Sonic franchise.
• The Sonic game where players go back in time to kill Yuji Naka and destroy the timeline.
• Sending an assassin back in time to kill Yuji Naka before he invents Sonic the Hedgehog and coming back to the present to find our cultural landscape dominated by M.C. Skat Kat.
• Goro Majima featuring in the next Sonic the Hedgehog game.
• Putting the toppings as far away as possible from the organ you enjoy food with.
• Inventing double sided pizza by folding your pizza the other way.
• Biting into the Hot Pocket before making sure it's cool enough to safely consume because they're not called Cool Enough To Safely Consume Pockets.
• An inverted calzone.
• A beautiful world in which you ask a street vendor for "one pepperoni please" and he hands you a balloon and the balloon is pizza filled with helium.
• Every pizza balloon coming with a q-tip inside in case you need to clean your ears after eating.
• Arranging litterboxes in a geodesic dome so your cat goes "finally an arrangement I respect enough to poop in."
• Putting chicken wire around your bed but it doesn't keep the cat out because it's not cat wire.
• The difference between polite and clean.
• A cat who is afraid of its own hair.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Kev Zettler
  • http://radcade.com/
• Xalavier Nelson, Jr.
  • https://xalaviermakeswords.itch.io/strange-scaffold-comics-vol-1

Topics:

• The fine art of professional wrestling
• Stealing the declaration of independence to save Nicolas Cage's life
• Atari 2600 Adventure's effectiveness as a port of Crowther and Woods Adventure
• Larry asks "That one time Taco Bell promised every American a free taco if the Mir space station hit a taco target in the indian Ocean but it missed by an entire hemisphere."
• Non-violent communication
• The threshold between an object/entity being large, and SO large that your brain can no longer process it effectively and you're no longer impressed
• Sucking a glass onto your face

Microtopics:

• Still the raddest place to play web games.
• An Airport For Aliens Currently Run By Dogs.
• Interacting with dogs in a whole new way.
• Being clean and dirty at the same time.
• Dog synergies.
• The legal standing of a game downloading a random guitar tab from the internet to make a dog play guitar.
• A scope creep game that ships.
• Whether professional wrestling is trashy.
• Audience-reactive improv theater performed by professional stunt men.
• Pro wrestling jargon creeping into your
• A work for marks who are smart marks and don't know when they're being worked or if they're not.
• Stealing vocabulary from Victorian urchins.
• Whether women's wrestling is still about macho posturing.
• Meme warfare thought devices.
• Muscled theatrical performers doing their dangedest
• Whether GDC is ever going to happen again.
• Whether GDC will be the same without Simon Carless.
• Whether Lost Levels can exist without GDC bringing everyone physically together and secretly reserving the physical venue.
• Every D-level game dev celebrity entering an arena and only one D-level game dev celebrity leaving.
• A contract sealed in blood that is a matter of public record.
• Having an hour and 45 minutes to save Nicholas Cage's life by stealing the Declaration of Independence.
• Finding out that Nicholas Cage was injured in a bear fighting accident and realizing that now's your time to shine.
• Finding out that isnicholascagenexttoabear.com isn't based on geolocation technology, it just scrapes TMZ for headlines that contain both "cage" and "bear."
• Why we still have to steal the Declaration of Independence if everyone is aware of the Nicholas Cage situation.
• Conspicuously walking down the street with the Declaration of Independence rolled up under your arm like a newspaper so that an urchin can snatch it away from you and you can pretend to be incensed.
• Finding out what Habeas Corpus means.
• Atari 2600 Adventure vs. Crowther and Woods Adventure.
• Adapting a text adventure to computer system that can't render text.
• Making a game where you explore until you find an ending in a context where all anyone's ever seen is games where you play for a high score.
• Remakes changing the meaning of the original.
• Inventing a 4D game platform to port Demon's Souls to.
• Hitting a taco target in the Indian ocean.
• Whether 40'x40' is a big taco or a small target for a space station.
• All of America having a taco-in-the-streets party.
• Dipping your girlfriend and smooching her as taco cheese falls from the sky.
• Mir falling from the sky every day being a small price to pay to solve world hunger.
• Taco Bell beginning to sweat as they realize the revolution is about to start.
• Alternate history fiction where the branch point is that Taco Bell gave every American a free taco after Mir hit their taco target.
• Non-Violent Communication.
• Communicating your lived experience backed with justification and couched in empathy.
• Instead of saying "you're annoying me," saying "I am annoyed because of you."
• The HALT principle.
• Big things making your brain go "ooh!"
• Being terrified of the scale of Jupiter but the sun being like "meh"
• Being terrified by an enormous mammoth but less terrified of the Earth when the Earth is bigger and closer than the mammoth.
• Being unable to process the scale of a large city but eventually becoming desensitized to it.
• Deciding whether to be impressed by something's size based on whether it's horizontal or vertical.
• The relief and comfort of realizing that humans don't make any fricking sense.
• Making New Year's Resolution of finally making sense of yourself and of the world.
• Different goals emerging from the same root: hubris.
• Not being able to form a seal on your face because you have a beard.
• Normalizing shaving a hole in your beard sized and situated to suck a drinking glass onto your face.
• Putting a drinking glass on your face in various configurations until one feels right.
• A drinking glass size rooted in a human arrogance that you can appreciate but that you can't encourage.
• Learning to suck a glass onto your face from the kid next to you at Applebee's.

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Lords

• John Mystery lives in Maryland. https://googlethatforyou.com?q=john%20mystery%20maryland
• Nelson is making An Airport For Aliens Currently Run By Dogs.
  • @WritNelson on Twitter.
  • https://www.patreon.com/StrangeScaffold
  • https://store.steampowered.com/app/1246250/An_Airport_for_Aliens_Currently_Run_by_Dogs/
  • https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/epic-pictures-launch-gaming-venture-1289270

Topics:

• 6:15 My worst fear as an adolescent: gravity reverses while I am in the family car on the 110 and I am flung into the sky at 9.8m/s²
  • VVVVVV https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf06P-_1lkU
• 15:31 Kaiju who should know each other, but don't.
  • I'm pretty sure the male description of the RBLD dating persona is actually suggesting you stop dating entirely.
  • The Wild Rose: https://web.archive.org/web/20141031024714/http://www.okcupid.com/personality?type=RBLD&g=0&o=1
  • The Manchild: https://web.archive.org/web/20141024161727/http://www.okcupid.com/personality?type=RBLD&g=1&o=1
• 21:52 This Arkanoid TAS:
  • http://tasvideos.org/6347S.html
  • The "Super Mario World vs. the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Physics" video has been taken down but here's the original blog post: https://msm.runhello.com/p/20
  • And here's a similar video that gets the idea across. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIb2F7OLQJw
• 30:39 Yuri asks: "I was wondering what you and your fellow lords do to warm up prior to getting started on some creative thing. Does it change comparing coding to making music, drawing, crocheting, etc.?"
  • Gunhouse, on sale on Switch for $1 until April 26th! https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/gunhouse-switch/
  • (Also available on a bunch of other platforms.)
• 47:21 Would a Cool Sentient Dog in a graveyard dig up the bodies? Would that make him the anti-caretaker?
  • Oiled Up Sax Guy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1dY6OkPb7E
  • Interview with Oiled Up Sax Guy, who it turns out really did arrange and perform that cover. https://dangerousminds.net/comments/the_infamous_sexy_sax_man_from_the_lost_boys_still_still_believes_a_chat_wi
  • https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2015/12/tumblr-users-are-talking-about-bone-stealing.html
• 56:38 Experiencing FOMO about activities that you do not want to do

Microtopics:

• John of the Maryland Johns.
• Ruining the show before it's really even started.
• High fiving a friend from six feet away using your selfie stick with a hand at the end of it.
• Washing the hand at the end of your selfie stick after high-fiving someone with it.
• Motion detectors not detecting black people so corporate hires white people to follow black people around and activate the motion detectors.
• A black person walking in front of the Kinect and the Kinect being like "I think I just saw a ghost!"
• Loving your punchline and so letting it go.
• Being flung away from the earth at 9.8 meters per second per second.
• The unfathomable horror of your senator voting in favor of the "subtly tweak the laws of physics" bill.
• Finding the highrise apartment building that is most likely to remain attached to the Earth if gravity reverses.
• Being deeply bothered by children who know the metric system and understand calculus.
• Having known you were going to die but now being able to put a number to exactly how fast.
• Always paying attention to whether you feel slightly lighter now, because that means gravity is starting to reverse.
• Gravity's power suddenly doubling and the only survivors being people hanging out in trampoline parks and bounce houses at the time.
• Our only hope being heroes in mech suits but unfortunately everyone who owns a mech suit is a billionaire.
• Fish living through gravity doubling because they can swim up to a lower water pressure.
• The moon crashing into the Earth.
• Kaiju who are lonely because they don't know any other kaiju.
• Whether Swamp Thing and Godzilla would be friends.
• A giant dog who is perpetually alone because there is no Mothra equivalent in his universe.
• Bigfoot technically being a kaiju because his feet are so big.
• Whether Bigger Luke is big enough to be considered a kaiju.
• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen except for kaiju.
• Whether Jack the Ripper looms large enough in our minds that he should be banned from our Kaiju-only dating app.
• The OkCupid dating personality result that was fine for women but if you're a dude they were like "please stop dating"
• A tiny green cat as dense as a neutron star.
• Having to explain what a TAS, speed runs, Arkanoid, Breakout, and video games are before you can get to the part that's cool about this Arkanoid TAS.
• Running your Arkanoid simulation on six cores for over a year to find optimal Arkanoid strategies.
• Mario dancing with the fish for 15 seconds and then the credits play.
• Martial arts masters going into the mountains and practicing one move for 30 years.
• The Many Worlds interpretation of Super Mario World.
• A speedrunner finding a COVID-19 vaccine faster than anybody else but the FDA blocks them from releasing it.
• Philosophers not allowing themselves to have any fun because they're trying to counter the image of philosophers lazing around and not doing any real work.
• Sitting down to create while being fully aware that you might not create anything worthwhile today.
• Throwing nothing away and making everything.
• A cool game that is available on a variety of platforms.
• Being a year into making a game and it isn't fun yet and you have to trust in the iteration process that you'll find the fun before you ship, but actually maybe you won't, but you still have to ship anyway so it's not a total loss.
• Making a bad game fun by association, by placing it in a fun context.
• Hiring a narrative designer a couple months away from shipping your deeply text-centered game, because there is currently no text or story in the game and everything is on fire.
• Adding a bunch of things to your game that will definitely bite you in the ass later because you cannot be stopped.
• Running a D&D game that you haven't prepped enough and your players getting to the part of the scenario where your notes are blank.
• Fragile people in a fragile people world attempting to make juice and having empathy for each other.
• Sitting at the text editor to create and creativity not happening fast enough so you go browse Reddit.
• Being stuck on a hard problem and going to play video games while your subconscious works on the problem.
• Watching Zodiac while you're working on your cross-stitch and you look down and you've spelled out the name of the real killer.
• Trying to pick a speed run to watch in the background while you work that will keep you from being bored but not be interesting enough that you watch it instead of working.
• Having made your topic list and having to sleep in them.
• Gifts to ourselves.
• Cyber-Washington with carbon fiber dentures and a minigun that fires the teeth of his slaves.
• A cool sentient dog wearing a leather jacket and sunglasses digging up bodies and putting them in cool poses.
• Cool Dog digging for bones in the easiest place possible, the human body.
• The movie with the oiled muscle-man singing and playing a saxophone.
• Buff Weird Al Yankovic.
• Promising to name this episode "Stacksophone" but lying.
• Cool Dog turning out to be a very uncool dog if you think about it.
• Lost Boys, exhibit A in the debate of whether being a jerk is cool.
• Cool sentient dogs in the 90s digging up bodies in graveyards, but cool sentient dogs in 2020 awooing on Mastodon.
• Preferring to use human bones in your occult rituals because you relate better to the energy they carry.
• Selling your leftover human bones after you're done doing all your curses.
• Whether or not the guy selling human bones on Etsy is cool, and whether they'd be cooler if they were a dog.
• Loving Bribe Dog even though by all rights he ought to be in jail.
• A small dog gumming at a stranger's ankles and not breaking the skin but they get upset anyway for some reason.
• The life-long FOMO of wondering what you're missing out on from activities you never do because you hate doing them.
• Correctly guessing that the other guest is subtweeting Animal Crossing.
• A game that is fun until it becomes your job.
• Not needing to buy a new video game because Breath of the Wild still exists.
• Not wanting to do an activity so much as be a part of the community that does the activity.
• That month where everyone in the world was playing Pokemon Go.
• Recommending a video game to two people who have already played it.
• Leveling up as a person the first time you've ever made a non-optimal decision in a game to retain your quality of life.
• Your Animal Crossing villagers expressing shock as you chop down your entire orchard in front of them.
• Opening an iPad feeling special, like someone confessing that they love you and not loving them back.
• Getting FOMO about everyone you're not in love with.
• The future where instead of social media, everybody drops an ARG about themselves that you have to solve in order to talk to them.
• A thing that sounds exciting that you don't want to do.
• An alternate reality where nothing happens and no-one cares.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

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

Topics:

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

Microtopics:

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

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