• Elena
• Quil

Topics:

• Human Pudding, and why popular media can't depict bad art, only bad taste
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfHmctamVEA
  • https://www.notinhalloffame.com/
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gPuH1yeZ08
• I got a van!
• Corporate art: From industrial musicals of the 50s-70s to this Staples logo unveiling
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWUhqoAGsfk
• https://philolexian.blogspot.com/2006/11/kilmer-2005.html

Microtopics:

• A very good New York Times crossword.
• Feats of crossword construction that just make the experience of solving it worse.
• Cottage cheese and jam.
• Fruit on the bottom cottage cheese cups.
• Whether cottage cheese comes pre-curdled.
• An opportunity to make money by making the richest people in the world happier.
• A jams and jellies bandolier.
• Going to the arcade wearing a token dispenser but also your "I don't work here" shirt.
• A band that only exists so that John Stamos can be annoyed by it.
• Whether the average person would misspell a word on a grocery list.
• Flashy rock and roll in which the lyricss are goofy and the goofy lyrics heightens the perceived quality of the music and the music heightens the perceived goofiness of the lyrics.
• Various anime in which the kids are forming a band.
• The Fictitious Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
• The East coast DIY music scene.
• Eyeball Skeleton.
• Smoosh nee Smush.
• My Pal God Records.
• The Most Wanted Song and The Most Unwanted Song.
• Ramadan jingles.
• Putting all the things people hate the most in the same song.
• Single Ladies.
• The Rescue Rangers dimension where the Rescue Rangers theme song is still modulating upwards to this day.
• Releasing an album on vinyl that ends in a locked groove with a shepard tone.
• Sprinter Vans.
• Diesel vans racking up a million miles.
• Van life.
• Vans with indoor plumbing.
• How people react when someone is sleeping in a vehicle in their neighborhood.
• How to recognize a van that somebody lives in.
• Living in a Wal-Mart parking lot.
• Campy camping.
• Living the hash tag no car life.
• Bimodal distribution of van dwellers.
• The Minimum Viable Van.
• Living six people to a bedroom and not liking it.
• A landlady who cooks for everybody in the 1800s.
• Outlawing boarding houses because there are too many single men being rowdy.
• The Florida Project.
• Moving into the hotel across the street for a day so that you don't live in one place long enough to become a tenant.
• Guessing how squatting laws work.
• Staples presenting a trailer for their new logo at E3.
• The history of Industrial Musicals.
• Hiring video artists and composers to create massive lavish displays of brand awareness.
• The documentary that Kevin Smith made about Prince just for Prince to watch and never release.
• Making a funny video for mystery people to watch for mystery purposes.
• The KFC VR training app.
• Living close to Hamburger University.
• Rerecording Prince's "1999" for every year up to 2999.
• The circus ad that Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite was based on.
• O Deathy Death.
• Most Foul Vowel.
• The Alfred Joyce Kilmer Memorial Bad Poetry Contest.
• The headspace you get into as an artist when you try to make bad art.
• A good example of a bad poem.
• Birdemic's environmental message.
• A clown photobombing your movie soundtrack.

Support Topic Lords

• John
• Quil

Topics:

• Taking advantage of a rare opportunity to play a Legend of Zelda game before every aspect of it is documented on the internet
• RCA's implementation of color television is one of the most impressive engineering feats of the 20th century
• The guy next to me on BART talked to me the entire ride home from GDC. He made me play the phone game he was addicted to and compared my performance to the coworker he was also making play the game. He got a call from his wife and introduced me to her. He told me he was in prison for 30 years for murder. His step son is a pitbull breeder and he complained about how few free pitbulls he was getting. He smelled weed on the train and put on a loud voice to announce "I'm a cop, put your vape pen away." My stop was also his stop, so the monologue didn't let up when I got off the train. I finally escaped when he was distracted by girl scout cookies.
• http://blueridgejournal.com/poems/rl-fall.htm
• Are dumplings universal? It seems like every civilization has at some point invented their version of 'carbs around a protein' food

Microtopics:

• The best part of the show.
• The Great Lakes Pigeon Rescue.
• How best to keep a pigeon.
• Hiding in the discord
• Solving problems in interesting ways.
• A very interesting idea that just barely pays off.
• Playing a new game all weekend for the first time in your life.
• A game that is too spiky to be solved by one person.
• A matchmaking service that puts you on a forum with fifty people who are each starting a Dark Souls game for the first time.
• Accidentally playing geez Fez with your sister.
• A riddle about risk management.
• Not being able to throw away radioactive waste because you don't want to waste food.
• Deciding which cookie to put in your mouth
• Finding the password to someone's laptop in a video game by googling their information in real life.
• Digital vs. Analog circuitry.
• Piggybacking the color signal on top of the black and white signal.
• Quadrature amplitude modulation.
• Racing the Beam.
• Being banished from the kingdom for partly understanding how television works.
• Inventing two televisions so you can run one backwards.
• Extroverts who when meeting an introvert, think to themselves "it's my job to bridge the gap"
• Escaping when someone is distracted by Girl Scout Cookies.
• Encountering the ARG that you made for yourself and then forgot about.
• Not getting as many free pitbulls as you thought.
• Getting off the train early to get away from the person who won't stop talking to you and he's like "oh ok I'll get off here too."
• Your wife who hates when you impersonate a cop.
• The episode of Train Hot Dog which was just Jim reading a stack trace for twenty minutes.
• Trying to figure out what web site you can browse on your phone to get the person sitting next to you to stand up.
• Jim's preferred San Francisco residents.
• The orange bland ambassadorial face of the moon.
• Wild spiders crying together.
• What to do when the air raid sirens go off.
• Moving to a new place where they don't have monthly nuclear accident drills.
• John Vanderslice.
• The Human Missile Crisis.
• Showing fear for humanity before it's cool.
• Poetry that is not meant to be read aloud.
• Stripping the formatting out of e e cummings's poetry.
• A poem that skips around on the page like Chutes and Ladders.
• Topic Troves.
• Carbs around a protein food.
• A rooster named Pierogi.
• Whether dumplings have to be slimy.
• Putting the pudding in a protein.
• A particleboard meat.
• A McRib that's been injected with custard.
• Sweet and savory things placed inside a carb.
• What civilizations have never invented the dumpling.
• How to get from agriculture to the Hot Pocket.
• The singular of funfetti.
• How to get into the Topic Lords discord.
• Topic Lords the Phone Game.
• Cheap Bots Toot Sweet.

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:

• Brad
  • @bradspendlove on Twitter
  • Check out https://twitter.com/so_writing, especially episode 6
• Quil

Topics:

• What superpowers like shrinking and invisibility suggest about how we conceptualize reality
• Is there a point where you can call the silly things you make "art" and not feel like an absolute tool about it? Not a debate about what is vs is not art. But I feel weird if I make a bunch of bad music and call it "my art"
• Stinky meat and stinky feet
  • http://www.stinkymeat.net/
  • https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hamilton-if-it-was-sung-entirely-by-adam-sandler/id1382504305
• Hope is a Thing with Feathers, by Emily Dickinson
  • https://poets.org/poem/hope-thing-feathers-254
• Visual novels are neat, but I'm never sure whether they belong in my video game queue or book queue and therefore I rarely play them because I always think I could be playing a "real" video game or reading a "real" book
• Cortical homunculus
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortical_homunculus
  • https://www.etsy.com/listing/509252848/angry-little-friend-taxidermy-monster
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homunculus_loxodontus

Microtopics:

• Accidentally agreeing to be on the show.
• Doing nothing in Chicago.
• Computer creativity.
• Making an argument that a computer program is creative.
• "Honey I Shrunk The Kids" as a philosophical text.
• Using a set of mirrors to give yourself 360 degree vision.
• Imagining additional colors.
• Assuming the listener knows what cellular automata is.
• A platonic dude in the way you would conceive of a dude.
• Trying to find a game that uses cellular automata but it's occluded by search results for Conway's Life and Nier Automata.
• The top four Live 'em Ups.
• A game that left the world when Flash stopped being a thing.
• Putting tremendous creative effort into a project but not being willing to call it your art because that would be pretentious.
• Calling your bad music your "works" because they make ye listeners despair.
• How you conceptualize the things that you make.
• Attaching a label to the semiotic representation of a thing and thereby changing the nature of the thing.
• Making a song in the amount of time the song takes to elapse.
• Having done NaNoWriMo once and then being able to tell people you're working on your second novel.
• Wanting to have the identity of being a creator.
• Something that is cool to be and do.
• How to make art that feels meaningful when you are surrounded by art that is way better than yours.
• Ancient handwriting samples.
• Doing psychic damage by singing the wrong words to a song.
• Leaving a plate of meat in your neighbor's yard.
• Deciding it's time to stop your science experiment and go to a doctor.
• A storied history of people screwing up their bodies for the sake of internet points.
• The melding of art and science.
• Piss Christ and other works that are intended to annoy.
• Trying to elicit a strong emotion but not caring too much which emotion it is.
• What it takes to know Bennett Foddy.
• The idea that heavy metal bands were trying to get listeners to kill themselves.
• The euphemism treadmill and the inverted euphemism treadmill.
• How come there are still kids if kids keep growing up??
• Slurs in various stages of reclamation.
• How there are stupid people out there and they're not bad people, they're just stupid.
• Jabroni origins.
• Replacing all your pejoratives with "ridiculous."
• Mario running up the infinite euphemism treadmill saying successively more watered down swears.
• The purpose of comparing an emotion to a bird.
• What is a poem? A pile of lines about a bird.
• Conceiving of hope as a bird sitting outside your window and waking you up way too early.
• Enclosing poems in letters to your friends.
• Making art for a person and sharing it just with that person.
• Reading "Hope is the Thing with Feathers" in the Sick Sad World announcer voice.
• Reading poems in a sarcastic voice and analyzing how it makes you feel.
• Reading Emily Dickinson poetry in the voice of somebody begging for their life.
• Whether Poe's Law is the sarcasm thing.
• Whether Machiavelli was doing a bit.
• A performance of the entirety of Hamilton in the Adam Sandler voice.
• Getting famous for singing "All Star" and having to sing it for the rest of your life.
• The realm between video games and books.
• How the phone would be the perfect venue for a visual novel if it weren't for all the phone games.
• Approaches to consuming media.
• Watching half a movie and then falling asleep and eventually realizing that now there are at least five movies you've watched half of.
• A library book from 2019 that you still haven't returned.
• Mapping the size of your body parts to how much space they take up in your brain.
• A Cortical Homunculus Funko Pop.
• Shrimp Obama Magnet.
• T-shirts about adrenal cancer.
• Angry Little Friend Taxidermy Monster Sculpture Oddity.
• Too good an idea to just let be a joke.
• Symbolizing the emotions of people who wait at the dentist's office.
• Max Rebo, the popular jizz-wailer.
• Seeing the two tabs but not knowing the difference between them.

Support Topic Lords

Lords

• Kev
  • https://twitter.com/kevzettler
• Quil
  • Whisper your secret to a snail.

Topics

• Ephemeral digital music
• Being a guest on a podcast that you normally listen to is a weird experience because it feels like you're not supposed to talk
• An update on Bug Mars
• Dancing in the Street
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HasaQvHCv4w
  • Unedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/3O9JRuv3WXA
• If you were to meet an adult who has never even heard of video games, what would you give them to demonstrate what they are? You are not allowed to interact with them in any other way

Microtopics:

• An awkward silence where you can't decide who goes first.
• Having to deliver all the chapters of a book at once.
• Kanary.
• Cooling it on making internet people mad ever since you had a kid.
• Overstepping your own boundaries.
• Lending a certain patina to your Twitter thread.
• Midis and meedees.
• Listening to a game soundtrack on a different sound engine than your had as a child.
• Listening to a game soundtrack on a different sound engine than the composer used.
• Proc-gen game soundtracks.
• A kill cam except it's a kill jingle
• Your online game detecting when someone draws a penis in the game's graffiti system but not when they draw a penis in the music editor's note grid.
• Ways of converting an image to audio.
• Deciding it's not worth going into detail but going into detail anyway.
• What executables sounds like and why they sound like that.
• Spelling the word "minimum" in a spectrograph by singing swooping pitches.
• A video game that induces four friends to sing cacophonously together.
• Three strangers having a conversation that your don't get to be a part of.
• Parasocial relationships.
• How to instantly become friends with a famous person you are a fan of.
• Two asymmetrical relationships snapping together to become a single symmetrical relationship.
• What you could've had if you just picked two friends host your podcast instead of all of them.
• A small company named after a throwaway joke.
• Spinning up a cricket farm.
• The Amazon of cricket protein.
• Alternative and synthetic protein.
• Receiving a care package of bug protein that you're definitely not going to eat.
• Whether a cricket burger is still better for the environment than a beef burger if you have to ship it across the country.
• Being grateful that other people will save the world in the ways that you don't.
• A brick wall, folks.
• SCP or rolled up carpet?
• A leprechaun with a mullet.
• Wearing a trench coat over a floral print jumpsuit.
• Racing In The Street.
• Everybody, where "everybody" means two people.
• Not being able to afford lighting after renting that crane and asking every crew member to point their car headlights at the dancers.
• Whether you still trigger counterfeiting laws by putting realistic money in your movie.
• An extended shot of Mick Jagger guzzling a generic can of beer.
• Dancing In A Stairwell.
• Dancing In The Void.
• Freeze frame on a couple of butts.
• A derelict flour mill that appears in every Brit-pop music video.
• How to tell how well you're doing in a Match Three game.
• Choosing to not introduce the mind virus of casual games to an indigenous tribe.
• Whether Bejeweled is more market-tested than Pong as an introductory video game.
• The invention of the platformer.
• Super Mario Bros. 3's budget and development timeline.
• The ways that the developers had to make Super Mario Bros. worse to make it viable as an arcade game.
• Finding an adult who has never heard of Mario, jumping, video games or television and locking them in a room until they beat Super Mario Bros.
• Looking at an image on a flat surface and interpreting it as analogous to a physical scene in the real world.
• Synesthesia but for ideas.
• Whispering a secret to the snail.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Elena
• Quil

Topics:

• Some people put on music and then just talk over it instead of singing along?? Why
• Being the only person in a movie theater/concert
• A Spirograph but for your butt
• Daniel asks "Legacy board games such as Pandemic Legacy or Gloomhaven."
• Weird sleeping apparatuses
• "House Special Live Frog in Hot Stone Pot" on the delivery menu

Microtopics:

• A girl who is raised as a boy in pre-revolutionary France and becomes Marie Antoinette's guard.
• Turn of the millennium club music.
• Finding out that Itsy Bitsy Spider has been about perseverance all this time.
• Having to restrain yourself from singing along when you're at the opera.
• Trying to eat dinner but you can't eat because you need to sing along to your sea shanty playlist.
• Trying to eat bites of dinner during the verses because you keep having to sing along to the choruses.
• Properties of sea shanties.
• Having a different song for every task.
• Everybody performing music before recorded music was a thing, because that was how you had music in your life.
• The horrible historical handwriting that historians never show you.
• Celebrating the new decade with Cats (2019) and when you walk out of the theater you're the only person in the building.
• Seeing Pitch Perfect 3 at 10pm on Christmas Eve and probably ruining a bunch of theater employees plans to have a party in that empty theater.
• When you're the only person in the theater, asking the projectionist to pause the movie while you go to the bathroom.
• Being the last person seeing an awful live band because everyone else walked out, and realizing that if you too walk out, they'll be playing to an empty room.
• A drummer and a guitarist who are both playing too loud to hear each other.
• The only live performance you've ever walked out on.
• Pooping in a spiral.
• Nature's sharpie.
• The origin of topics.
• A disc that you sit on.
• A combination nausea inducer and butt spirograph.
• Cake icing videos.
• Asking your son what his life is a commentary on.
• A shark embedded in a formaldehyde solution.
• Work that aggressively annoys the art community.
• Ironic cocaine.
• Sneaking into the museum to hang up your own work.
• Taking photos of a painting and then destroying the original and then taking photos of the photos and destroying the original artist.
• Modifying the rules as you play the game.
• Opening up more and more of your board game every time you play, like an Advent calendar.
• A board game that you learn like a video game.
• Memorizing a dozen page book before you can start playing a game.
• Copyrighting the concept of a legacy.
• Proposing to your wife by intentionally losing a board game over and over again.
• The thing you were working towards screwing you over and now you have to undo it.
• Trying to think of a board game you've played more than a few times.
• Really looking forward to a board game and finally getting it and deciding to just watch your friends play.
• Whether it's apparati or apparatodes.
• The doublet of apparat.
• Wanting to be hyper correct in everything you do.
• Buying a tent to go over your bed because your blackout curtains aren't cutting it.
• Buying a bunch of weird pillows to compensate for the position your arms automatically get into when you sleep.
• How CPAP machines all have a SIM card and phone home with your sleep behavior and there's no way to turn it off.
• Nasal pillows.
• Sleeping with a weird contraption blowing air into your face constantly.
• Discovering that it is much easier to fall asleep when you are very tired at the end of the day.
• Ranking your morningness and eveningness.
• Sleeping in a hammock.
• Making a nest of pillows around you.
• Putting on your velcro pajamas and jumping onto the velcro wall to fall asleep.
• Your velcro bed waking you up with a loud ripping sound every time you switch positions.
• Time-release velcro.
• Ice velcro.
• Making a salt igloo at the salt flats.
• A weighted blanket that is so heavy you can't get up until a crane rescues you.
• Sleeping under a chainmail sheet.
• A quilt made out of beanbags.
• The first thing you searched for when you got on the internet.
• Youtube videos about your idealized farm life.
• Ordering a pet frog from your Szechuan delivery menu.
• Getting Hot Pot delivered and the Pot arrives cold.
• Ordering Chicken 65 because there are no other numbered items on the menu.
• Not wanting to eat animals whole because there's poop in there.
• Frog Fractions 65.
• If Chicken 6 was so good, why isn't there a Chicken 6 5?
• A Kidz Bop version of Ocean's 11.

Support Topic Lords