• 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

Lords:

• Nick
  • https://twitter.com/NickPancakes
• Greg
  • https://twitter.com/simgreed
  • https://store.steampowered.com/app/945490/Little_Square_Things/

Topics:

• Anthropomorphized inanimate objects
• Quaker Names
  • https://zeugmalitotes.tumblr.com/post/656465316855119872/fishpilled-these-guys-were-onto-something-i-think
• Why do car doors get Shitty Shut
• Go West - Call Me
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AV0ugZumyJU
• What's on the grill if you're "grillin up some 'good boys'"
• Overly complicated navel-gazing plots in video games, especially those that absolutely do not need plots

Microtopics:

• Completing the set of Duckfeed guests.
• Health care simulation.
• The moth having himself a journey.
• Hydrodynamics of the bloodstream.
• Little Square Things.
• Filling your life with media about anthropomorphized inanimate objects.
• Whether Data needs hair.
• Giving your shiny yellow skin for legal reasons.
• A talking garage that is hungry for cars.
• Does that anthropomorphic talking chair even eat ass?
• A talking map of the United States.
• Whether someone already mentioned the talking photo booth.
• Clocky the talking map.
• The "marry it" joke.
• Cortana receiving your one-star review of trying to rename this folder.
• Preserved Fish.
• Morris Morris, Jr.
• Experience Burt Merrick.
• Preserved Fish writing his own Wikipedia page.
• Signing in to leave a flower.
• Leaving a Blingee on your ancestor's grave.
• A door that is shut but it's not flush with the doorway and the "door ajar" alarm goes off.
• A car upgrade where if you partially close the door it closes it the rest of the way for you.
• Why don't they make two planes out of the black box material, one on top of the other.
• A car door that is in many respects shut.
• Go back to sleep and wake up properly, dipshit.
• Trying to make Shitty Shut happen with Gen Z by getting on TikTok and using a filter that makes you look young and doing meme dances.
• Teaching your three year old to call it "shitty shut" and when grownups tell him he shouldn't use the word "shitty," whispering from the bushes "yes you should!"
• Euphemism withdrawal.
• Steadfastly refusing to swear but still calling it a shitpost because that's what you call it.
• The clip art dude sailing across the screen.
• Doing one dance and your shadow doing a slightly different dance.
• Reshooting a scene but keeping the same shadows as before.
• Pop quiz: sideburn on only one side of the face, or slept on a greasy bench?
• An entertaining slow watch.
• A fire hydrant made of a pie tin and aluminum foil.
• Singing into a fan.
• Everybody realizing that there is someone on the ceiling.
• The Gentle Exorcist.
• A sheriff labeled "boy."
• A drug store full of a band.
• The additional challenge of a mechanical bull mounted upside down on the ceiling.
• Figuring out how to do a special effects shot for a story moment and then deciding to put the effect in every other shot regardless of whether it makes sense.
• Watching a 40 year old music video and then tracking down the director and asking if you win a prize for being the first to notice a specific joke.
• The falling yellow liquid spilling forth within the billiards bar.
• Go low, Ken and sons.
• Whether people say that they have some "bad" "boys" on the "grill," why don't you "pop" on "over."
• The thing where you carve a hot dog into an octopus shape.
• A hot dog that is too polite to burst if you put it in the microwave.
• Why every dog is a "good boy" but none of them are great.
• The Go West Music Video Cinematic Universe.
• Bad boys who are also bad dancers.
• The Ultimate Good Boy.
• Running out the time rewind potion.
• A puzzle game with story except for the enormous lore dump at the end.
• Bob's Game.
• Being really into the story of the development of Bob's Game except for all the pain and human suffering.
• ARGeez.
• Renaming your game to "OK" so nobody can search for it.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• John B is @YouOldSoAndSo everywhere.
  • 20th President of the United States James Garfield's proof of the Pythagorean Theorem: https://www.maa.org/press/periodicals/convergence/mathematical-treasure-james-a-garfields-proof-of-the-pythagorean-theorem
  • Khan Academy video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EINpkcphsPQ
• Nick is @NickPancakes on Twitter.

Topics:

• Micro game jams, Weekend of ZZT
  • WarioWare D.I.Y. archive: https://archive.org/details/WarioWareDIYWarehouse
  • Super Metroid and A Link to the Past Randomizer (a.k.a. SMZ3): https://samus.link/
  • SGDQ2019 co-op speedrun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uujsW7yFkZU
• The primary motivation for information acquisition being grist for making and understanding jokes
  • Ken Jennings' books about knowledge acquisition and comedy:
  • https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/79195.Brainiac
  • https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36373629-planet-funny
  • These two contain the sum of all human knowledge:
  • https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/1745/8107/products/IMG_E1971_1400x.JPG?v=1571480346
  • https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/45/BillyJoel_StormFront.jpg
• Roblox as the most popular game platform
  • Downloading Wikipedia: https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/how-to-download-wikipedia/
  • All roads lead to "philosophy" on Wikipedia: https://flowingdata.com/2011/06/08/all-roads-lead-to-philosophy-on-wikipedia/
  • Adopt Me!, one of the most popular games created in Roblox: https://roblox.fandom.com/wiki/DreamCraft/Adopt_Me!
  • I Wanna Maker: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1114940/I_Wanna_Maker/
• Quill points out: this list of things unexpectedly named after people: https://notes.rolandcrosby.com/posts/unexpectedly-eponymous/
  • "Widenius has three children – My, Max, and Maria – who inspired the names for MySQL, MaxDB and the MySQL-Max distribution, and MariaDB" https://twitter.com/davidjustodavid/status/1288903463422722049
• Becoming a film nerd
  • Turner Classic Movies, from the same company that brings you Mortal Kombat: http://www.tcm.com/
  • They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? - 1,000 Greatest Films, compiled using a Metacritic-like approach of looking at other people's lists: https://www.theyshootpictures.com/gf1000.htm
  • Also, their 1,000 Noir Films list: https://www.theyshootpictures.com/noir1000.htm
  • The Narrow Margin (1952): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044954/
  • The Tall Target (1951): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044105/
  • A good starting list for train movies, by no means exhaustive or definitive: https://allgiftsconsidered.com/the-31-best-train-movies-of-all-time/
  • List of films on Netflix from the year 2000 and before, total count at the time of search approx. 250, compared to around 3,500 for 2001-2020 : https://reelgood.com/movies/source/netflix?filter-year_end=2000
  • Kanopy, a movie streaming service you may be able to use through your local library: https://www.kanopy.com/
  • Qwikster, b. 2011 d. 2011: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/10/5-reasons-why-qwikster-is-now-deadster/246465/
  • 1939, Hollywood's "annus mirabilis": https://ew.com/movies/2019/12/22/1939-hollywoods-greatest-year/
  • 1957 in Film: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1957_in_film
  • Patton Oswalt's book about becoming a film nerd, Silver Screen Fiend: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17571109-silver-screen-fiend
• CBoyardee, Barkley: Shut Up and Jam Gaiden, and the failure of Barkley 2.
  • CBoyardee's Dilbert trilogy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6rGUlVvVJ4
  • www.nfl.com: Just check it out.
  • Barkley, Shut Up and Jam Gaiden: https://www.talesofgames.com/related_game/barkley-shut-up-jam-gaiden/
  • Hardcore Gaming 101 article about the game: http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/barkley-shut-up-and-jam-gaiden/
  • Barkley 2 Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/talesofgames/barkley-2-an-rpg-sequel-to-barkley-shut-up-and-jam
  • Barkley 2 PAX Prime 2015 interview for PC Gamer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHSyDq_IyYE
  • A longer look at Barkley 2 from that same PAX: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ni2hceqpqHA
  • Barkley 2 - Janky Demo: https://talesofgames.itch.io/barkley-2
  • The gun's of Barkley 2: https://bowelflies.tumblr.com/post/185855518364/the-magical-realms-of-t%C3%ADr-na-n%C3%B3g-escape-from
  • Dingletopia, Gortarius' game that actually came out: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1286140/Dingletopia_Nation_Under_Siege_by_Orcs/
  • Not mentioned in the show, but CBoyardee also did some writing on the 2019 video game Katana ZERO: https://www.katanazero.com/
  • Cyberdwarf Body Pillow (Warning: Tsundere): https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/767094-dakimakura-body-pillow

Microtopics:

• What the insulin pod had to say.
• An extremely sexy insulin pod telegraphing its own death.
• Mourning many insulin pods at a rapid clip.
• President Garfield's proof of the Pythagorean theorem.
• Making your first ZZT game.
• Doing fetch quest after fetch quest until two AIs fall in love and a nuclear reactor explodes.
• Attempts to archive the user-uploaded games before the Wario Ware DIY servers get shut down.
• The only Meat Boy game to come out for the Wii.
• A demon that can only exist on sand and is formed of the sand.
• ShareCart, the save format shared between many different games so you can save in one game and load in another.
• How much Dr. Sbaitso likes you and how much his henchmen like you.
• Spending an afternoon trying out randomly generated Game Genie codes.
• Flipping random bits to see what comes out there other end.
• Generating a hash of a large file twice in a row and getting two different results.
• Seeing an exciting glitch in Super Mario 64 and nobody being able to replicate it until someone tries flipping bits in RAM like a solar ray might.
• The randomizer hack that combines Link to the Past and Super Metroid into a single game.
• Thirty people all making different games and hoping something interesting comes from mashing them together.
• Why the heck everyone is suddenly talking about cake.
• The primary use for your understanding of the world being making and understanding comedy.
• Your filters going to sleep first, so you make weirder connections when you're half-asleep.
• How everyone would know all the world capitals if you had also been obsessed with them as a child.
• Spending 10% of your brain on how to spell antidisestablishmentarianism and the rest on the lyrics to "We Didn't Start The Fire."
• How to download Wikipedia so you can give your son Wikipedia before you give him internet access.
• How Roblox is a much more popular game platform than any you've ever touched.
• Not knowing how to make games that appeal to children, but knowing how to make games that remind 40 year olds of when they were children.
• The incredibly accurate clone of Counterstrike that some rando made inside of Roblox.
• Roblox users calling platforming levels "Obbies."
• The window in your life where you don't talk to children.
• Watching a four year old play Minecraft and they're just breaking and replacing the same block over and over to see if it happens the same way every time.
• A Roblox level that is just a series of waterslides.
• "I Wanna Maker," for making your own masocore platformers.
• How PageRank is named after Larry Page and Debian is named after Deb and Ian.
• How Price Club is named after Sol Price and Main St. in San Fransisco is named after Charles Main.
• Jim trying to figure out when humans first called a street Main St. and giving up.
• "Taco Bell" appropriating respectfully because it respects the romance language adjective-noun order.
• Reading about aptronyms in Marilyn vos Savant's column.
• Sending your octuplets to a carnival owned by Larry Kidkill.
• The late NASCAR racer Dick Trickle.
• Changing our names to Fuck and starting a band called The Fucks and that's it, that's the tweet.
• Unemployment as a prerequisite for starting any hobby as an adult.
• Film Noir figuring out how to tell adult stories after the Hayes Code was enacted.
• The constraints of being set on a train leading to compelling storytelling.
• The train movie as a slightly less constrained bottle episode.
• Whether they allow trains on the Internet Movie Car Database.
• Yelling at librarians until morale improved.
• Libraries often offering ebooks and movie streaming.
• Netflix streaming having a limited selection of movies but the disc mailing service having every DVD, but it takes two or three days to get it.
• Filmmakers being huge nerds and that's why they keep making movies about making movies.
• 1939 and 1957 in filmmaking.
• The history of Barkley Shut Up And Jam Gaiden.
• Destroying Manhattan by performing a Chaos Dunk.
• Setting your cyberpunk universe after basketball has been outlawed.
• The dangers of running a successful Kickstarter.
• The game design conceit that there should be way too much of everything.
• Bizarre unthinkable development processes that somehow in the end produce a shippable game.
• A 397-page forum thread of people asking "Where is Barkley 2?"
• The second concrete product of the Barkley 2 Kickstarter, after the CyberDwarf body pillow.

Support Topic Lords