• Ryan
• CisHetKayfaber

Topics:

• My vocal stims are getting out of control now that I don't have pets.
• Training to become a Tetris Grandmaster
  • https://www.youtube.com/@cishetkayfaber/videos
• Switching to not-bifocals
• Eagle Eye Cherry - Save Tonight
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nntd2fgMUYw

Microtopics:

• Introducing yourself or plugging something.
• Going to Cape Town for Playtopia.
• Enemies to enemies to lovers.
• A game conference with a name that sounds way too much like Fruitopia.
• What you would do for an Orbitz right now.
• An apple juice with basil seeds ensconced in it, like an Orbitz.
• I'm not mean, I'm just trying to manifest bullying.
• Semisolid Kind of Life.
• A dog following you into the kitchen and acting like a Ghostbusters trap except for all your bullshit rather than ectoplasm.
• The movie about the prep school kids who poop on the floor at their magic school.
• Making yourself laugh by doing a Gollum voice while you make a sandwich.
• Hanging up a happy face on the fridge and writing "mirror" on top of it to convince yourself that you're okay.
• An action figure that absorbs all the dark energy aimed at you.
• Giving advice to someone that you really have no basis for.
• The dog who loved your terrible celebrity impressions and the dog who gives you a look like "I expected more of you"
• Your online source for news about what water parks Jim and his family went to.
• The kind of Tetris that you become s grandmaster in.
• Tetris but the pieces don't fall, they just instantly appear at the bottom of the well.
• How the Tetris company wants you to play Tetris.
• Delayed Auto-Shift.
• Doing a hadouken move to place the zigzag piece in the correct column.
• Stack faster, stack better.
• A skill you can practice and get better at.
• Training for three or four hours a day on a hacked PlayStation Vita to become a Tetris Grandmaster.
• How the Tetris the Grandmaster community feels about leverless controls.
• Going several years between occasions to say hello to your wife.
• Going for a walk around the block so you have an excuse to say hello to your wife when you get back.
• Seeing a person and immediately infodumping at them.
• What they have now instead of bifocals.
• Training your eyes to look through the part of the lens that does the thing.
• Going to the optometrist and saying "just fuck me up"
• Why they don't make bifocals for text at the distance of a computer monitor.
• There's still time, and there's dignity.
• Watching the VOD of your own death because you missed the livestream.
• Getting used to your vision swimming in a new way when you get new glasses.
• Getting an eye exam and saying "I'd rather not say" when they ask you what letters you see.
• Freeballing your corneas.
• A fellow glasses enjoyer.
• A cursed gem that gives you astigmatism.
• Doing the Magic Eye thing in order to learn to read.
• Being born a trust fund kid, except it's your eyeballs.
• The return of the quarter speed music video.
• Even slower slow motion.
• Why can't Eagle-Eye Cherry crawl?
• Wondering why you haven't leaped yet.
• Singing to the camera while being robbed.
• Watching music videos at 1.5x speed as practice for watching them at .25x speed.
• Suddenly the dog takes its mask off and it was Eagle-Eye Cherry the whole time!
• Promising to eat your glasses frames on camera.
• Forgetting how cool your whole premise is and just stopping doing it.
• Literal music videos.
• A houseplant can't save shit. A houseplant doesn't know what time it is.
• People running around New York and looking sad at the camera.
• Buck Cherry. (Named after Chuck Berry.)

Support Topic Lords

• Kory
• Ryan

Topics:

• Incorrect stuff they teach you in school (blood, bats, soda cans, etc)
• Oops I’ve started over remaking my game again, ECS edition
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8OkkHSQjWg
  • https://bevy.org/
• Accidentally finding a cat on vacation
• Being Boring, by Wendy Cope
  • https://www.reddit.com/r/Poetry/comments/18ihpmd/poem_being_boring_by_wendy_cope/

Microtopics:

• Watching an epicurean professional licking the Switch and Switch 2 cartridges back to back.
• Switch 2 cartridges that don't contain a game but still taste disgusting.
• A digital key that tastes awful.
• 1 in 100,000 Switch 2 cartridges tasting absolutely delicious.
• Castlevania: Lords of Shadow: Relorded.
• How many people have licked the Switch game you just bought used.
• A construction worker spitting a big loog of chew and there's a Switch cartridge floating in it.
• Not everybody is Jim Stormdancer.
• And independent game design aficionado.
• The New York Mayoral primary.
• Hackmud.
• Games that get two soundtracks while some games don't even get one.
• Disasterpeace's Soupertasters theme song.
• How to prove that your blood is not blue until it hits the air.
• Why do bats e-chocolate??
• What color lobsters are until you cook them.
• In space, noone can not see your blue blood.
• Eating a 9-volt battery that tastes like chocolate.
• Strawberry flavored chocolate that you puff on.
• Hey, look who capitalism finally enslaved.
• A can of A&W Root Beer that folds in on itself like a neutron star and you don't get to drink any because it's just empty space.
• Believing the thing you were told before you turned 18.
• Bodyboarding on a plank of wood in an open field.
• An empire of the skies and caves.
• Whether the tritone was ever illegal.
• Education as a Russian doll of nested simplifications.
• Wait, this isn't plum pudding!
• Blood color facts.
• Tuning your piano down to A=420.
• Making one mistake and proceeding from the premise that everything you know is wrong.
• A t-shirt reading "My favorite guests don't have their fontanelles closed yet."
• How to structure your game world.
• A grid of lights that are flickering on and off.
• The tilty wooden labyrinth with holes in it.
• Always on the lookout for the next engine to rewrite your game in.
• One of those newfangled scripting languages that targets the NES.
• Renting a magic want and running from kiosk to kiosk doing quests.
• Finding the Pinecone of Peril.
• Capacitative touch interfaces aren't magical for you??
• Asymptotically approaching cat saturation.
• Framily.
• Hot and cold running cat slides.
• Weird reverb where things don't echo right because everything's wet.
• A Rainforest Cafe the size of several football fields.
• Rainforest Cafe Chic.
• A liquid balance tied to your QR code.
• Jailbreaking the soda fountain DRM, yelling "kill the banks" and spraying everyone with Mr. Pibb.
• Striving to be as boring as possible.
• Being boring. (In a good way.)
• Being asked how you're doing and scrambling to come up with something interesting to say.
• Trying to explain the Video Game History Foundation to your boss.
• The Video Game Thing Guy.
• Maintaining a garden and posting your harvests on your private Instagram.
• Stopping someone on the street and asking them what are the last six vegetables you grew.
• How to perform boredom after people realize that yawning means you're tired.
• Starting to make omelets a new way.
• Asking how someone is doing and bracing yourself for the answer.
  
• Getting emotional and intellectual sustenance from cleaning the bathroom.
• The me that comes up when you google my name.

Support Topic Lords

• Ryan
• Cort

Topics:

• Is it possible to make a "meat flavored" potato chip that's not disgusting.
• Meandering Pico-8 tracker jabbering
• Do you think anyone has ever used the "Add or Remove Programs" interface to add a program?
• Tommy C
  • https://genius.com/Dan-le-sac-vs-scroobius-pip-tommy-c-lyrics
• Advent calendars are just tiny bulk-rate loot crates

Microtopics:

• Ryan Ike Audio on Instagram.
• How to make music and have balance in your life.
• If there's nothing to fail at, what are you bad at?
• Stand Elsewhere, an Oregon Trail-like.
• Converting 50s pop songs to chunky four channel chip tunes.
• The Pico-8 Splore database.
• Asking a friend to make music for your PiCoSteveMo game, and having to explain what a PiCoSteveMo is, then Pico-8, trackers, music, sound, air, matter, and existence itself.
• Potatoed Chips.
• Romanian Beef Bolognese Flavored Potato Chips.
• Abuela's All-Day Braised Carnitas potato chips.
• Hate-buying a terrible flavor potato chips over and over so you can make everybody you know taste them.
• Raw Hamburger flavored potato chips that moo when you eat them.
• The Doritos Brain-hack.
• Looking at the box of Frosted Mini-Wheats with a shrimp on the box and thinking "that's a little shrimpy"
• Cool American Doritos.
• Eat the cool. They knew the risks.
• A bowl of M&Ms with a single Skittle in it.
• Fresh Meat Potato Chips.
• Walking into the Frito-Lay factory, dangling your jaw open and waiting for come what may.
• All Night Nippon Shredded Abuela's Braised Carnitas.
• The Taki's One-Chip Challenge.
• Inviting all your friends over to try the new Strawberry Mochi Dill Pickle potato chips.
• Explaining to your daughter's friends' parents that we're going to give your children tablets I got on the Internet and then we're going to eat lots of food and it's going to taste really weird. The FDA doesn't allow you to put this in food but I need you to dissolve this on your tongue.
• Par-boiling your soft palate in lemon juice because it tastes so amazing.
• Reprogramming your tongue to remix your palate.
• What to do if you love both music and spreadsheets.
• Art tools that make your tummy feel icky.
• Mr. Lee by the Bobbettes.
• What trackers are good at.
• An extremely Bojangles tracker configuration.
• Trying to do Math Rock in the Pico-8 tracker.
• Triggering patterns 0 through 7 as instruments.
• Whether the Add or Remove Programs interface can add a program.
• Windows Sandbox.
• Jacking your whole life up but your Windows desktop is pristine.
• Getting a burner desktop for write-ins.
• Inventing a guy named Dampiel and getting mad at him even years later.
• Classic Dampy.
• Renaming your game to doom.exe and suddenly Nvidia cards run it way better.
• Putting a comment in your shader saying "Dear Nvidia, please make this shader look rad."
• The Valve guy refusing to tell you how the math is wrong.
• A selection of gags, hand movements and facial expressions.
• Dying onstage while the audience applauds.
• Feigning death so often as part of your comedy act so when you really die during your routine it'll be hilarious.
• Death: just a bad deal all around.
• Not my birth mom, but my robo-mom.
• Having a death so weird that even as an extremely minor celebrity you end up on TMZ.
• Doing extensive R&D so that you can somehow be murdered by a flamingo.
• A bloodied flamingo wearing Ryan Ike's glasses.
• Walking through the zoo looking for opportunities for environmental storytelling.
• Accidentally doing an immaculate 360 Christ Air and then dying on impact.
• Thinking of one funny scenario a month.
• A treat that's busting the seams of the Advent Calendar door.
• A sack of little handmade animal ornaments.
• The Joy of Mastery.
• Empty Advent Calendars.
• Going shopping for used candy after Halloween.
• Terrible Novelty Potato Chip of the Day.
• One big Advent calendar the size of a barn door with 365 doors in it.
• The Mayan Advent Calendar.
• Automats.
• Wheel of Fortune except you're assembling a wheel and not a phrase.
• Spin the wheel, make a deal!
• The first podcast of the rest of your life.

Support Topic Lords

• Ryan
  • https://www.instagram.com/ryanikeaudio/
• Alicia

Topics:

• How do I ask people what they're into without sounding like a pervert?
• Arctic Expeditions and the stupid beauty of man's hubris
• Asterix Park
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parc_Astérix
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KK3Yr80lPOY
• I Won't Call You Pretty, by L.E. Bowman
  • https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/tghmy9KF.png
• I sent this poem to my wife and she immediately responded by writing one addressed to me that was just as good, so, that's the person I married.

Microtopics:

• How to work as a freelance creative without burning yourself out.
• The me who comes up if you google me.
• The black egg who knows all.
• A huge egg with a second smaller egg in it.
• The chickens who got no credit for inventing the Matrioshka doll.
• Pluto: still a planet, because a dwarf planet is a kind of planet.
• Team Moon.
• Ancient Occult Magicks that you can check out from the library.
• Giving up on the fairy smut everyone is recommending because it isn't smutty enough.
• The air I just breathed.
• One of my Top 5 Zeldas.
• How many goes you get at being alive.
• Luring Moongrum into the rolling boulder trap.
• Bracing to hear about some online stuff.
• Conference season in the game industry.
• Meeting someone at a conference and asking them a question that Black Philip would ask.
• How to Unfuck your Sales.
• Content you Enjoyed.
• Who are the coolest hangs in game dev?
• Working with people you know and trust.
• The Pervert's Mound.
• Imagine if I was cool.
• Wearing a sandwich board with the word "MONOGAMY" on it so the woman you're talking to knows you're not hitting on her.
• Refusing to answer random innocuous questions so that it's not a tacit admission of guilt when you refuse to discuss an accusation.
• Birthday bookshop tours.
• Climbing as an act of disrespect to the mountain.
• The HMS Terror and the HMS Erebus.
• Peak British Colonialism.
• Ignoring the locals' advice about what parts of animals to eat.
• Sledging around your silverware.
• Getting lead poisoning from the canned food you brought with you to find the Northwest Passage.
• A cool pantsless mummy.
• Paradoxical Undressing.
• Having a hard time climbing Mount Everest because the path is choked with corpses of white people who blew it.
• Oops, All Antarctic Ship Crashes.
• Getting excited about bookshelves again.
• Stepping forward into whatever the next grift is going to be.
• Asterix the Gaul.
• Localizing a book that is full of puns to dozens of different languages.
• Not getting jokes in the English version of the Simpsons because the Swedish version of the Simpsons uses a completely different set of pop culture references.
• What would an Asterix theme park look like?
• Riding in a big inner tube down the lazy river.
• Elder Millenials learning about Skibidi Toilet.
• Asterix Park is the world's 12th largest economy.
• My brain beans are really getting steamed, here.
• Building an empire on that mustache.
• Watching POV rollercoaster videos with your five year old.
• Refusing to get in the sea.
• Going up to strangers and asking what percentage of the sea is fish piss.
• Weekend at Bernie's-ing your friend's corpse to Asterix Park.
• What style of underwear Zeus is wearing today.
• Who makes Zeus's underwear?
• Eating the boar sandwich at Asterix Park.
• Tasting the terror sweat on the wild boar you just hunted down.
• The little bald kid from the comics page has a theme park??
• Pirates of the Carabiner.
• Sailing through a diorama.
• The theme park ride with the sudden drop into a pool of mercury.
• The Haunted Garfield Theme Park.
• DeFuncoland.
• Jon trying to get with the veterinarian lady he's into and Garfield ruining it.
• Let's-plays as a service.
• You won't believe what happens when these Muppets swarm Treasure Island.
• A movie recap that is 80% of the length of the movie.
• Flirting tricks.
• The violence of being struck by Cupid's arrow.
• Complimenting someone on something they have no control over.
• Good luck getting any continuity out of me!

Support Topic Lords

• Ryan
• Alexander

Topics:

• Getting so agitated that you cook dinner
• What's an acquired taste that's worth acquiring? What's one that's not worth the effort? What's the point of even "acquiring" a taste for anything when there are probably infinite options you don't have to teach yourself to enjoy?
• Texturally enhanced alternative beverage
• Bagme Bloma
  • https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Bagme_Bloma

Microtopics:

• How the science gets done.
• Measuring the height of a flagpole by measuring its shadow.
• Using calculus to find the surface area of a potato.
• Measuring and re-measuring until you get the result you want.
• Confronting your professor about their involvement in Frog Fractions 2.
• Country and Western music fused with synth heavy prog rock.
• Using the gun to parallel park.
• That time Ryan died while recording Topic Lords.
• Getting so agitated that you do some differential equations.
• New guy just dropped: guy who whenever he thinks about death he has to make a sandwich.
• The first step towards rejecting a task: assessing the task.
• Today is a good day to fill your Prius with snakes.
• The Raccoon Prius story.
• Hilarious mothers.
• The inside of a Prius: nothing but corners.
• Officer, it's not what you think. No, not that either.
• Putting the AC on so the python in the back seat gets sluggish.
• Getting a fork and spoon and twirling up snakes like spaghetti.
• A taste worth busting your ass for.
• An oral history of tricking alcohol post your tongue.
• An entire generation that has never had to work to enjoy things because there are so many things that are easy to enjoy.
• Twelve year olds from Alabama calling you a cuck.
• New ideas that you haven't been thinking of even without looking at your phone.
• Hiking: it's just hard walking.
• Getting so agitated that you developed a taste for hiking.
• The guy in the Fred Meyer buying Reese's cups while wearing a tuxedo.
• The Men's Wearhome.
• The Men's Wearhouse employee who is not allowed to tell you that they don't have anything for fat people so he brings out less and less flattering outfits until you take the hint.
• Orbitz. (The soft drink from 1996.)
• A proto-boba.
• Drinking a random test tube from a bioengineering lab.
• What if everyone had a number floating above their heads that represented the number of times they had to drink Orbitz before they developed a taste for Orbitz and now that Orbitz is out of production everyone's number stays the same forever
• Big Dick's Energy.
• Flavor-blasted slushies.
• The sense-horror of drinking an Orbitz.
• Shelf-stable tapioca pearls.
• A free-to-play game for your tongue.
• Texturally subdued beverages.
• Decaf Red Bull.
• The hypothetical beverage enthusiast who wants a decaf Red Bull.
• How to make Orbitz in your toilet.
• How many Orbitz you have to drink to reach Nirvana.
• eBay sellers insisting that you don't drink the thirty year old novelty beverage they're selling you.
• Thinking a poem is a Middle Earth thing but it's actually a regular Earth thing.
• Poetry that is alliterative rather than rhyming.
• Making art by fucking around with a new medium.
• Music in a foreign language.
• What Simlish sounds like in different languages.
• A quest to discover why they started dotting the letter Y.
• Expecting scrolls in 3 to 5 days.

Support Topic Lords

• Erica
• Ryan

Topics:

• Dog Bone Facts
• We went to Cuba
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candidatus_Desulforudis_audaxviator
• https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/avoid-the-noid/
• Cancelling Texas: Praise the Sun
• My sister has played video games her whole life and somehow doesn't know about [the thing everyone knows happens in Final Fantasy VII] and I need help shielding her from this knowledge.

Microtopics:

• The COVID booster as a form of recreational drug use.
• Puking, but not for the listeners at home.
• The only way you can know if you're doing well.
• WavHog.
• Trying a lot of things that aren't working out.
• A chat log that's organized poorly.
• An ever-growing cacophony.
• The million dollar web page.
• Buying ad space on a web page that's entirely ads.
• Gordy and the Monster Moon.
• Little Buddy mode vs. Little Nemesis mode.
• Making a noise whenever you wonder about something.
• The sound of the aurora borealis.
• The Northern Lights explaining to you how many bones are in a dog's body.
• Peeing on your equipment to keep the foxes away.
• Maintaining curiosity about things.
• Burying a question and seeing if it comes back to you.
• Recording a podcast even though you don't know anything.
• An information strategy that is much more enchanting than looking things up.
• Leaving through your journals.
• Tannish white hair.
• Burying a dog bone so that it grows into a dog bone tree.
• Farms with no distinct edges.
• Cholera vegetables.
• Inventing your own COVID-19 vaccine.
• Putting a whole country in a snow globe.
• Tube ham.
• Drinking a soda branded "your ass."
• Knight Anoles.
• Gerrymandering Florida to fix Cuba.
• Lord Kensingtonitis.
• A bacterium named after a Jules Verne quote.
• The only known organism to exist in an ecosystem containing only itself.
• A biome that's just a bunch of clones of you making a go of it together.
• Slurping up radiation from the good good surrounding bedrock.
• All the little guys out there being interesting.
• The credentials you need to call yourself a scientist.
• Which bacteria are most bothered by their Wikipedia pages.
• Everyone's MRCA.
• Meteorites throwing amino assets into space.
• Extremely grabby carbon.
• Moldy bathtubs all over the universe.
• Little Buddy mode but for bacteria.
• The works of Florence P. Wordsmith.
• The origin myth of the Noid.
• Whether the Noid is wearing a suit or if that's just his skin.
• Yo! Noid and Yo! Noid 2: Enter the Void.
• A layer of water that's waving up and down.
• Empathizing with how the Noid sees the world.
• Writing a poem about the Noid and, instead of hiding it in shame, putting it on the internet for all to see.
• Getting a game over before you finish the first level but at least you killed a lot of seagulls with a yoyo.
• The sun making a big X over Texas.
• Drilling for oil in the Permian Basin.
• The last total eclipse of the sun of our lifetimes.
• Checkmate, scientists!
• Solar noon.
• Grab your glasses and get lookin'!
• Meeting Topic Lords all summer.
• Going sightseeing to find out where all your gasoline comes from.
• Going to see the solar eclipse or just closing your eyes to get the same effect.
• A big pile of polygonal Doritos killing another pile of polygonal Doritos.
• Making sequels to the Final Fantasy 7 remake.
• The porn web site named after a Final Fantasy 7 plot point.
• aerisdies.com vs. aerithdies.com.
• Retransliterations.
• Husbands who are dead (asleep).
• The option that makes you look like less of a douchebag.
• Watching a Final Fantasy documentary before you watch it with your girlfriend to make sure it won't spoil a major character's death for her, and it shows the death onscreen but you missed it during the vetting process, but it's okay because she couldn't visually parse the Playstation-era graphics anyway.
• Sending your sister to media literacy classes so that she can understand when Aeris dies.
• A pile of snack chips fighting each other.
• Showing Star Wars to kids who have never seen it but know every plot point in advance.
• A priceless Ming vase that has never been perceived by human eyes and everyone thinks it's an idiot and Erica wants to save it by calling it up on the phone and smashing it.
• A big red button you can push whenever you want.
• The only time you've ever been accused of underthinking something.
• Putting your first name and last name together to make a person.

Support Topic Lords

• April
• Ryan

Topics:

• John asks "Puzzles/puzzle games and challenges you find pleasant and brain-expanding vs. the ones that you just cannot get your head around."
• Which foods would be the most fun or the least fun to eat if you rotated them at a 90 degree angle first.
  • https://www.ebay.com/itm/184633478236
• The Shaggs
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XR9d4ESlpHY
• Instructions for Traveling West, by Joy Sullivan
  • https://joysullivan.substack.com/p/how-to-leave-a-life
• Songs that we completely ignore how weird they are because they're famous already

Microtopics:

• Unions
• Plug guilt.
• Mentoring young composers.
• Saying smart stuff about things you know about.
• Taking the W.
• A high pitched ding whenever someone succeeds at something.
• A Good Snowman is Hard to Build.
• Into the Breach.
• Pushing the Vek to a different square.
• Making something in your environment more satisfying.
• A squid with your kid.
• Colors that have frequencies vs. compound colors.
• Indigo: a fake color.
• The banger heavy duty colors.
• A range of frequencies that is culturally mediated.
• Paint mixing vs. light mixing.
• Exploding ancient dinosaur juice constantly.
• The electricity magic vs. the valve magic.
• What does it mean to explode?
• How to tell the difference between things you know because it's common knowledge vs. things you know because it's what you obsessed about when you were 15.
• Having a responsibility to the taxpayers to not be wasteful.
• The science of what sounds good.
• The most confusing music you've ever heard.
• Food rotation.
• Imagining you have a banana coming at you. (It's not scary.)
• Biting it the way we bite it.
• Burrowing through your hamburger top to bottom.
• Living with the mayonnaise for 30 seconds.
• What happens when you turn a taco 90 degrees.
• Ike's Paradox.
• Eating a rib straight up and down.
• Pizza sandwiches.
• Explaining to your dentist that your bottom jaw is a ruinous cavern because you eat ribs top to bottom.
• Adding a thickening agent to soup so you can turn the bowl sideways and just shove your face in there.
• Buying the Ultra Rare Cheeto Shaped Like Batman Crying just to flip it.
• A li'l cute ghostie with ears.
• Affection for bands that are bad.
• A rock album recorded by three kids who have no interest in or aptitude for writing and performing music.
• Art that lives at the very tips of the horseshoe ends.
• High fashion and weird looks that aren't meant to be for everyday.
• Music that sounds bad in a way that you don't recognize.
• Music that is boring and propulsive at the same time.
• Music that is not for listening to.
• Threatening your wife with a conversation about Beatles chord progressions.
• Making art that is boring in unexpected, interesting ways.
• Inventing a new boring version of interesting that still isn't interesting but is boring in interesting ways, which should make it interesting but doesn't.
• Finding a desert and falling in.
• Watching a purple meadow quiver and drinking whiskey beside a 100 year old cactus.
• Whether Joy is a trick.
• Blowing up your life and other people's lives as well.
• The other entendre.
• Yet another example of this fucking show.
• Cooking for the rest of your life without ever washing dishes.
• Joy that can't not be real.
• Poetry that's just really well-constructed prose.
• A poem that doesn't have any line breaks because then it wouldn't fit on Instagram.
• A true poet who accounts for swiping.
• An expression of a huge evocative idea built out of tiny ideas.
• How to be happy even when you are not actively chasing your dreams.
• A song that is famous in some way.
• That fuckin' Pina Colada song.
• Marrying the same person three or four times.
• Bouncing along and going on a fun road trip while the world is ending.
• Mystifying number one hits.
• Robot Mr. Feeny in your car and you go around solving mysteries together.
• Getting your wife a Groucho Marx nose for christmas.
• Robust dependable noses.
• Think On Thine Sins, Gumshoes.
• Giving the Latin Grammar Police the L.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Alicia
• Ryan
  • Just type his name into google.

Topics:

• Seattle's reaction to snow vs the Bay Area's reaction to rain: who is more dramatic?
• Would you rather fart bones once a month or have Goldeneye "big head mode" on in real life for a year?
• Moral philosophy lessons from the California DMV
• Nancy
  • https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1966/08/18/nancy/
• Common everyday items that make you mentally "time travel"

Microtopics:

• Structurally reinforcing the scrotum.
• Plugging mundane chores around the house.
• Why do you live here, Seattle?
• The lamentation of a failed joke being funnier than the joke itself would've been.
• Turning the tire towards the curb when parking on a hill.
• Driving in inclement weather.
• Milking oats.
• What it means for society when you make oat milk at home.
• The rain we occasionally get except way more.
• Bettie White-out.
• When an imaginary kid uses his last words to put you on blast.
• The advantages and disadvantages of big head mode.
• How to get on the bus with big head mode on.
• Whose bones you're farting right now.
• Big Head Mode Confirmed in GoldenEye 007.
• The yoga pose that is most optimal for shitting bones.
• Getting your GoldenEye big head stuck in the automatic doors at TJ Maxx.
• Whale bones on your mattress.
• Which bones you can do without.
• Bone pellets.
• Using your broken tooth as a fidget toy.
• An absolutely staggering amount of dental work.
• A perfectly lovely root canal.
• Using your bone-lasered rib as a fidget toy.
• Extra ribs just loose in your torso somewhere.
• Ribs of betrayal stabbing you in your soft pink innards.
• McRib, more like MacBethRib.
• The DMV letting you know that your custom license plate is "in the mail, you fucking pervert."
• A grizzled PI paid to determine whether Dr. Puff is a real doctor.
• Dark, but fair.
• The moral philosophy of the DMV.
• The 4chan veteran the DMV hires to detect profanity in custom license plate applications.
• Three letters that mean a car thing.
• You just got passed by a bad driver.
• Nancyverse lore.
• The one place in the world where the cost of living is higher than San Francisco.
• Slant rhymes that slant so much they fall over.
• Writing a Nancy fan poem just so you can slip increasingly awful rhymes into it.
• Making your poem worse and worse as it goes on because what are the readers going to do, stop reading? Nobody has Netflix in 1966.
• Using hand-crank egg-beaters when it's not the Prohibition.
• Everybody at the office party with those paper guillotines, going to town on reams of paper.
• Jim's hotel waffle story again.
• Paying $8 for this novelty bust of Duke Nukem because you liked Duke Nukem 1.
• High school kids dressing just like you dressed when you were in high school 20 years ago.
• JNCO jeans with a dragon on the back pocket.
• That Nostalgia Cycle: it's gonna come around.
• Using two different keys to unlock and start your car.
• The best car for the kidnapper on the go.
• The first car to use the same key for the door, trunk and ignition.
• Locking the exhaust pipe so nobody can put a banana in there.
• Separate keys for locking your sun and moonroof.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Ryan
  • https://twitter.com/ryanikecomposer/
  • https://www.instagram.com/ryanikeaudio
• Chall
  • https://twitter.com/MrChrisLHall/

Topics:

• What position do you sleep in and based on that which of us on the podcast is going to die first?
• Are limes overpowered?
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citrus_taxonomy#/media/File:Citrus_tern_cb_simplified_1.svg
• Why do we have fingernails? Sure they protect the nail bed but the nail bed wouldn't need protection if the nail weren't there. Are they really just claws but shitty?
• This poem written on a whiteboard, author(s) unknown:
  • https://imgur.com/a/dDRjZuX
  • https://cafemom.com/entertainment/kourtney-kardashian-travis-barker-relationship-timeline/valentines-day-Kardashian-Barker

Microtopics:

• Reading someone's grocery list and trying to decide if it's ironic.
• The importance of firing Jimmy Wales.
• Trying to make a garbage fire better but it's not better yet.
• Filming yourself becoming the villain so that the documentary won't be disappointing.
• Topic Sloars.
• Not really knowing what a sloar is except that you can roast in the belly of it.
• The place for Buster-Heads.
• Sleeping the wrongest.
• Going to your dentist for sleeping advice.
• Sleeping in a position to minimize the number of times per hour you stop breathing.
• The sleep paralysis demon not being able to sit on your chest because you sleep on your side.
• Sleeping in a nanofiber web suspended from the ceiling.
• Whether sleeping cuddling a pillow is good or bad for various bones and organs.
• Famous Racist Pillow Peddler.
• Doctor Wu says you're going to eat shit.
• Sleeping like the number four.
• Lying in entirely different positions at the beach because you don't want anyone to know how you sleep.
• Trying the number four leg and letting Ryan know how it goes in the morning.
• A night of making cocktails using limes.
• Deciding that limes are too powerful and we need to put them in their place.
• Garnishing your beverage with cornflakes.
• All citrus fruit descending from the mustard plant.
• Demanding that every foodstuff be as delicious and useful as limes are.
• A pile of nasty pasta mistake.
• Chocolate pasta that you boil and put on your ice cream.
• A Wikipedia rabbit hole of citrus fruits.
• The three ur-fruits that control the fate of every citrus fruit you've ever eaten.
• An open faced lime growing in the wild.
• Optimus Lime.
• Thinking of a pop culture pun and asking the bartender for it because it's probably a beer.
• Extremely lumpy limes.
• Filling city hall with gorillas so they'll eat all the snakes.
• Hot dog fingers that are homogenous all the way to the end.
• Manatee toenails.
• Where whales keep their finger bones.
• Awesome ladies with orca fingernails.
• An extremely informative image search that you don't recommend to anyone.
• All the gross ways Takis can fail.
• Origami claws.
• The state of the spit valves on those Cool Ranch Bugles.
• Sweet and Salty and Chocolate and Peanut Butter Bugles.
• Ultra-Powerful Butter Flavor.
• Coming out of your bunker after 200 years and not knowing who Batman is but seeing the "ultra rare cheeto shaped like batman crying" and thinking "wow it's like a man, but also a bat, and he's weeping because he'll never solve his parents murder"
• Making NFTs of every character in FF2 minigame Biker Chicks and then trying to get all the Kickstarter backers who sent in photos to buy their own face, because if they don't someone else is going to own their face.
• Selling visitation rights to your collection of rare Cheetos.
• Rare Cheeto NFTs.
• Buying Cheeto earrings and becoming Cheeto Earrings Guy.
• Something in red that was where "garlic bread" is -- erased.
• Painters buying big slabs of bathroom stall at craft stores so they can paint on it.
• Keeping your finger on the pulse of garlic bread related poetry.
• The dark recesses of Jim's Travis Barker poetry headcanon.
• A traveling japesman who modifies any exposed whiteboard poetry to be about food.
• Where you do your business after dark.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Ryan
  • https://twitter.com/ryanikecomposer/
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldtX4d5qanA
• Jenni
  • https://twitter.com/horsewizrd/

Topics:

• Video games providing an illusion of competency & how jarring it is when they don't
• Carcinization
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation
• Manualism
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwxvOKuLUQ0
• Did you ever play "AR games" with your own imagination when you were a kid? What kind?

Microtopics:

• Whether Jim enjoys it when nobody can decide who should go first.
• Whoever can blurt their name out fastest.
• Dog Airport Game.
• Eating pizza around a three year old.
• Wizard With A Gun.
• A song for a trailer where the trailer ends but the song keeps going for years.
• Hiring a team of monks to take turns notes on a church organ for seven hours at a time.
• When one of the monks you hired to play the organ for seven hours at a time dies and keels over onto the keys and it's a cluster chord but we'll take it.
• Jack Pumpkin Skellington.
• What happens when Merlin gets off in space.
• How many wizard/firearm puns we can think of. (2)
• Making a movie about the legend of King Arthur with all the magic removed and Merlin is just an old man who needs a bath.
• The highly relatable legend of King Arthur buying Excalibur from the katana shop next to Spencer's Gifts.
• That time King Arthur lost his wedding ring under the bed and had to sweep it out using Excalibur.
• A collaboration where one person writes the first half of the story and the other person writes a 4chan reference.
• Making paintings with the art skills of a writer.
• The illusion of hyper-competency.
• Moving your thumb a fraction of an inch and your avatar onscreen does a cartwheel off of a robot's face.
• Driving behind Wario and he has that big purple caboose and you just want to slam it.
• Blue Shell pacifists who try throw a Blue Shell without hurting any other drivers
• Whether that skeleton who shoots lasers at you has a wife and kids at home who would also shoot lasers at you.
• Mr. Friendly.
• Having to solve each topic before you can move on.
• Someone trying to pirate your music on Youtube but instead of music you poured vinegar into the tube and when they listen to the other end of the tube they just get an earful of vinegar.
• Flies landing on your psoriasis patches because they ooze a little bit and probably smell like rotting meat or at least oozing meat.
• Going into a psychological death spiral because you just realized that you and everyone you know is just rotting meat, and then coming out of it and letting everyone know that they can just skip the death spiral, there isn't any sweet loot down there.
• Reminding the listener that everyone they care about will die someday but it's okay because Wario's juicy purple butt exists.
• Providing foley for your death just in case in case you die silently while recording the show.
• Writing a song to play at a friend's funeral but they're not allowed to hear it until then so when they die they go into the Great Unknown Mystery of whether your song is any good.
• Whether this 27k wav file that you've been instructed to play at your funeral counts as music, strictly speaking.
• Writing an intricate eight minute sonata with the intention of time-stretching it down to less than a second.
• Meeting crab scientists who talk about carcinization and then turn into crabs right in front of you.
• Transmorphing into a crab and deciding to hold a knife all the time just because you can.
• Finding out about carcinization and then staying up all night wondering when you're going to get your crab claws.
• Finding out whether anyone at Berkeley has designed a musical instrument for after you turn into a crab by googling for "Berkeley carcinization instrument"
• A vent-based apparatus.
• Wrapping your fingers in electrical tape and getting a preview of what making music will be like after we all turn into crabs.
• Chilling with a pile of rotting meat on a beach, like "what's up?"
• Hands feet and they're all around sticking out in every direction so we can just roll everywhere.
• The fate of the Butthole Foot.
• Centaur World, where everything is centaurs.
• The mighty centaur, with the bottom half of a bull and the top half of a cenobite.
• A centaur thing a wrinkle through time flew
• A man with a body of a motorcycle.
• Centaur court, the court where the bottom half is replaced with a horse.
• Gerry the manualist.
• Playing songs on your hands for 52 years.
• Playing AR games with your own imagination.
• Picking a dirty spot on the window to be your avatar and moving your head around to make it dodge obstacles in the background, which doesn't look any sillier than when you play a VR game except that since you don't have a helmet on your can see the people giving you the side eye.
• Imagining that your parent's car shoots missiles out of the hubcaps.
• Tony Hawk with feet sticking out in every direction except from his butthole.
• Doing Christ Air after Christ Air on your way to get some Arby's.
• One professor refusing to judge your thesis because the two of you go to the same school and all the other professors refusing to judge your thesis because the first professor's reason for not doing it doesn't make any sense so the school just gives up and lets you graduate.
• Wanting it until it turns out to have been a bad idea to want it.
• Being a professional for five seconds a week.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Tyriq
  • https://twitter.com/FourbitFriday/
  • https://frror.bandcamp.com/releases
• Ryan
  • https://twitter.com/RyanIkeComposer
  • https://www.instagram.com/ryanikeaudio/

Topics:

• What do animals know? Do they know things? How do we find out?
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F
• Can we all just be adults and admit that invisibility sucks as a superpower?
• Where is the machine learning startup promising to fix the concert videos where the audience claps on 1 and 3
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UinRq_29jPk
• Toxic by Britney Spears
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOZuxwVk7TU
  • Unedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/x3eUVHdw54k
• What mundane tool/item/technology do you wish were irrelevant, and what would you replace it with?

Microtopics:

• Doing a perfect ollie your first time on a skateboard and then never skating again because you'll never top that.
• Cooking every single dish in the human culinary encyclopedia and then starving to death because you refuse to repeat yourself.
• Honor system rock paper scissors.
• Making video games, one of which is called Catacomb Kids.
• Naming your band one letter away from a common word so that your band is impossible to google.
• An extremely austere and dour change log, like in Great Expectations.
• Changing the "dragon breath" spell to "bear breath" because dragons aren't real but bears breathe fire.
• A grim window into the world in which we live, dragonless and dragon breath -less.
• A delicious treat for anyone who likes anise flavoring and salt.
• A giant human sized licorice in a wedding gown.
• Competing with nearby deer for the affections of the extremely salty licorice you're marrying.
• Spendinga lot of your mental energy trying to figure out animal cognition.
• Whether elephants worship the moon or in fact anything.
• Dogs doing the things dogs do even if they've never been taught by another dog.
• Where babies learn the things that their parents don't teach them.
• Babies smiling when they see a face even though they're not happy to see you.
• Baby reflexes that help parents bond with them during the time when they are hardest to love.
• How to be sure that animals think and feel and have memory when we can't even be sure for other humans.
• P-zombies.
• A dog's mental model of the world.
• The Far Side cartoon depicting a machine that translates dog barks into human speech.
• Whether animals have to know stuff.
• Meerkat accents.
• The mantis shrimp having an innate ability to see ghosts, and learning our language to tell us that we're stepping on ghosts all the time and we're covered in ectoplasm.
• A superpower that turns you invisible except for your eyes, so you're just a floating pair of eyeballs, not invisible at all, so you have to buy a pair of sunglasses to hide your eyes.
• Putting two of the lamest possible superpowers together in the same married couple.
• The lamest superpower that you would settle for.
• The superpower of getting up when the alarm rings and not having to hit snooze even once.
• The superpower of lactose tolerance.
• The superpower of having practiced a lot.
• Cutting a cantaloupe in half and the six of clubs is in there and the guy's like "yeah that's my card, but that cantaloupe was $9 at Whole Foods, thanks a lot."
• How to convince general audiences that they should care when in the measure to clap.
• Just assuming that audiences will be clapping in the wrong place so you add a single measure in 5/4 to your 4/4 composition to fix it.
• Playing a concert video where the video and audio are desynchronized by exactly half a measure.
• Inventing a snare drum that looks like a bass drum and vice versa, and filming a prank show where unsuspecting drummers play concerts with the inverted drum kit.
• Going to fiver and asking someone to build you a drum kit that defies science and logic.
• The one company that Topic Lords would accept sponsorship from.
• Stopping the concert when the audience starts clapping on 1 and 3 and asking them "come on, did you spend $126 to get it wrong?"
• Not finding out how low-poly these birds are until the quarter speed viewing.
• Which side Britney's nails look most amazing from.
• The outfit flight attendants had to wear in the 1950s, before they had the right to vote.
• A flight attendant with pauldrons.
• A loser with a sandwich that Britney wants to make out with in the bathroom.
• Seeing someone's ass and wondering what the Blippi subreddit would think of it.
• A dude who is a motorcycle.
• Biketaurs.
• Having the same facial expression as the motorcycle you're riding.
• A sparkly Jackson Pollock that you wrap around yourself.
• Stepping right in the laser.
• Warning the janitor that you're turning on the office's death ladder so he's not surprised when he shows up that weekend to find 15 corpses on the floor.
• A music video that is secretly the prequel to Jupiter Ascending.
• Whether this hot Scandinavian guy is the same guy as the last hot Scandinavian guy.
• Saving time shaving by dyeing your facial hair the same color as your skin.
• Whether a stiff iron bar jabbing into your back would improve a bed or a chair.
• Whether Britney Spears hallucinated the events of the Toxic video, and she's just an ordinary flight attendant.
• How to fix bread closures.
• Filling the moon with bread closures.
• Getting a bread box so people stop having to manufacture bread closures.
• How massive a bread is required to spin the bag at sufficient velocity to apply the bread closures.
• Solving your headphone cord problem by never listening to audio of any kind.
• Installing an ink sac in your fingernail so that you never have to look around for a pen.
• A tattoo of a squid that you can squeeze to spurt ink into the eyes of your enemies, but the tattoo gets more and more faded as the ink depletes.
• An awful thing that your ducks can do.
• What's going on in that biome?
• The horned lizard's final defense.
• Dropping a tail if you need to escape.
• A super ethical meat factory that spends all day terrifying the tails off of lizards.
• An avocado-like spread made out of frightened lizard tail.
• Nothing but adrenaline flavor in this tail.
• How to live as a freelancer without being drained of all your bodily fluids.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Ryan
  • https://twitter.com/RyanIkeComposer
• Alicia
  • https://www.instagram.com/historianraptor/

Topics:

• How many throw pillows is too many? Does it depend on number of pillows? Size of furniture? Number of family members? Softness/firmness level?
• Why are yawns considered a sign of boredom?
• Art packs/music disks
  • https://16colo.rs/pack/wiz-0296/
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlvsDtevNJ0&feature=youtu.be
• Ville asks "Chester Bolingbroke is blogging his attempt to finish every computer RPG ever in chronological order, despite this being clearly impossible. He started at The Dungeon (1975) and is currently up to Legends of Valour: Ragged Chet (1992)."
  • http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/
• Do you consider listening to an audio book "reading?" What about having a book read to you by someone, live? Could we interpret radio plays or listening to a film with our eyes closed "reading?"

Microtopics:

• Getting good enough at English to speak in Instruction Manual.
• Back before the content ocean.
• A whole slew of trucks that have jobs.
• Your two year old wishing you good luck by leaving a cement mixer on your desk.
• A lateral career move where you decide to stop releasing games.
• Occult and magic in the Greco-Roman world.
• Talking the kids out of going to college.
• Using Greco-Roman erotic curse tablets and binding spells to examine romantic relationships of the time period.
• How nobody calls love potions "curses" any more.
• Variable demand for throw pillows over the course of the day.
• Needing to get more dogs because your have too many throw pillows for the number of dogs you have.
• A bowling pin orientation of ten to twelve pillows that you have to clear out of the way before you can sleep.
• A barricade of squish.
• A wheezing Darth Vader mask.
• Sleeping in an ominous dark orb next to your wife in bed and she complains that your orb is too hard and it pinches when it closes.
• A lacerating throw pillow.
• Opening yourself up to the soft life.
• A badminton racket in your closet that you haven't used in over a decade.
• Edible pillows.
• Yawning whenever you see the sun.
• Possible origins of the myth that yawning indicates boredom.
• A yawn factory to your left.
• Trying to change society in the next ten minutes.
• A manatee at the zoo giving you a hard time because you yawned at their enclosure.
• Oxygenating before you charge an invader.
• Hippos yawning in order to fuck you up.
• Getting kicked out of the zoo after yawning at the chimpanzees and the admission booth putting up a photo of your gaping mouth saying "don't let these teeth in."
• What you get for challenging a peacock.
• Living in a bad society and being tired all the time.
• Yawning it out.
• Sticking a finger in your elderly dog's mouth when they yawn because they don't have enough teeth left to bite you.
• What you did with a modem before the internet was a thing.
• BBS operators commissioning ANSI art to differentiate their BBS from other BBSes.
• Making elaborate works of art within the constraints of IBM PC text mode.
• An executable that displays procedural animations on the screen and describes the features of a BBS.
• What Minnesota locals think of Bruno Mars' hats.
• Minnesota not having any LAN parties but you can get a deep fried floppy disk on a stick at the state fair.
• How to fool 2008-YouTube into allocating extra bandwidth to your fluorescent waffle pattern.
• A logo that is shimmering so hard that it is impossible to read.
• Never reading a video title because you don't want to be biased going into it.
• The script you would read on the side of an obelisk on an ancient asteroid.
• Whether the sci-fi story you just wrote is just Mass Effect again.
• Making art for your friends.
• Inventing a podcast because you need an excuse to chat with friends.
• Watching your wife's phone ring and asking if she's going to do something about that.
• Being on a podcast where you have to do homework.
• The LAN party of podcasting.
• Creating a box for your podcast so you can put a quote on it.
• Legends of Valour: Ragged Chet.
• Creating content in order to make friends.
• Whether you can play every RPG faster than they are released.
• When it's okay to feed Gremlins again.
• Setting out on a quest to do something esoteric that nobody has asked for.
• Whether the guy in Zelda who said "tenth enemy has the bomb" made sense in Japanese.
• Whether Gremlins respect the daylight savings time changeover.
• Whether leaving food out on the counter that the Gremlin later eats counts as "feeding" it.
• A Bubsy 3D-style Gremlins sequel.
• Abandoning the topic to just talk about Gremlins for ten minutes.
• Yelling to the sky in impotent rage when an inanimate object rips one of your earbuds out.
• Buying a pianist an incredibly sharp kitchen knife.
• Cutting your sandwiches with a machine gun.
• Getting knife proof gloves for the kitchen and then just wearing them all the time because who knows when your fancy new chef's knife will strike.
• Engaging with the story and creating a construct in your imagination.
• Whether it's okay to "read" a book on tape.
• Calling NES cartridges "tapes" because Nintendo deliberately designed them to resemble VHS tapes.
• A sci-fi video game filled with Data Prisms which have identical storage capacity and security properties to Post-It notes but are way more futuristic.
• Leaving a note saying "Don't forget to get paper towels at Fred Meyer" for the post-apocalyptic scavenger exploring your kitchen.
• Dying together on the toilet in a heartwarming embrace.
• A framed Post-It note saying "Ryan's favorite number is 63."
• Digging Jim's corpse up and squeezing him like a bagpipe into his CPAP machine to unlock Frog Fractions 3.
• How at Taco Bell "supreme" means sour cream and tomatoes but at Pizza Hut "supreme" means sausage and green peppers but at the combination Taco Bell and Pizza Hut it means pouring Baja Blast on your Pizzone.
• Choosing your bad handle and owning it.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Max
  • https://twitter.com/MaxKriegerVG
  • https://twitter.com/nonstandardmcd
• Ryan
  • https://twitter.com/RyanIkeComposer

Topics:

• What do you think is behind the human fascination with miniature things?
• What are things people assume about you, based on your profession, look, or general vibe, that are always untrue?
• How to fix speed runs
  • https://twitter.com/RavenWorks/status/1214615137056899072
• Yuri asks "Games you love, but really wish you did not. Maybe even games you really don't like much, but keep playing anyway, like a terrible reality tv show you can't look away from."
• Does anyone actually like Frame Interpolation? Am I the only one who always turns it off?
• There seems to be a zoological consensus that hippos share a unique, communal, organized hatred of humankind for reasons that cannot be explained through typical animal behavioral reasoning.
• A restaurant where all the glasses are the same size but if you order a large it gets poured out of a 55 gallon drum and if you order a small it gets filled with an eye dropper.
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3YGtQ40Qvs

Microtopics:

• Running a novelty Twitter account about Nonstandard McDonalds.
• Grabbing every flashlight on your house to light your live TV news appearance.
• Running a novelty Twitter account about the mundane business details of running a Long John Silver's.
• White Castle except even stinkier somehow.
• Making tiny novelty hamburgers out of gelatin and cornstarch.
• Miniature things which are their normal size but are smaller than you.
• Sneaking a secret, more interesting topic in after your overt one.
• Elixirs in a JRPG having expiration dates so you don't end the game with 80 of them, never having used a single one.
• Holding a Lego minifig in your hands and thinking "I could pop your head off any time I feel like it."
• Converting inches of height to thousands of dollars per year in salary, and how that works differently for men and women.
• Taking a knife edge turn into the patriarchy.
• Knowing you could mash the person you're talking to like a paper bird, but reassuring them that of course you would never do that.
• Mixing powders into paste and then pressing the paste into a mold.
• Going down the rabbit hole on slurry-based miniature food construction.
• The sad sashimi special you get at a shitty bar after work.
• New shapes of ennui that you've never known as a human being.
• Biting the brick of instant ramen and then washing it down with a bite of the brick of Golden Curry.
• Wanting to produce high quality audio but not really caring much about the quality of audio you listen to.
• Mostly playing video games on consoles that are at least ten years old.
• Tech workers wanting the least internet-connected kitchen appliances available.
• Growing up with hair that makes you look like you do a lot of drugs.
• Getting tossed into camp dirtbag.
• Trading McDonald's jokes with your novelty McDonald's account followers.
• Thinking about long hamburgers every day.
• A tablet you would etch your name into in ancient Egypt, on a hoagie bun.
• Getting a hoagie delivered from a pizza place like some kind of maniac.
• Resetting a game until you get a favorable result.
• Oops All Marathon Strats.
• Why Speedrun?
• Speedrunning as a way to share a game you love with the audience.
• The Timic Skip.
• The changes Jim made to Frog Fractions: Game of the Decade Edition to make speedrunning it more fun.
• Designing your game to be interesting to reverse engineer.
• Tetris: The Grand Master.
• Cranking the skill ceiling on every aspect of Tetris to the absolute maximum.
• Stretching the rules of Tetris so much that the Tetris Company says "this has gone too far" and revokes your Tetris license.
• Designing a game with the assumption of fervent frame by frame analysis by the player base.
• Returning again and again to a game that doesn't respect your time.
• BeamNG.drive
• Gran Turismo Meets Garry's Mod.
• The most satisfying car crash simulator.
• Sitting in a sandbox and smashing Micro Machines together.
• A soft-body physics engine that is supposed to be for gearhead nerds but that you use to crash cars into each other and giggle.
• The cynicism setting in long before the dopamine cycle wears off.
• Deliberately avoiding gacha games because you might start paying for spins.
• Discreetly turning motion smoothing off on your parents' TV.
• Screening your roommates for whether or not they like motion smoothing.
• Looking at a 4k TV and not really noticing a difference.
• The hypothetical audience for motion smoothing.
• Whether Best Buy is your Best Bud.
• Stretching a 4:3 image to cover your 16:9 TV.
• The consumer paying for the chocolate company advertising on the chocolate bar.
• Negotiating with the car dealership by threatening to remove the license plate frame with the dealership's name on it from your car.
• The raw power of a hippopotamus.
• The hippo as a reification of mother earth's desire to cleanse the earth of humanity.
• Hippo Accelerationism.
• Importing hippos into every continent so they can kill even more people even faster.
• The fried banana stand at the San Diego Zoo.
• Why toucans don't swarm and devour humans.
• An abominably fat crow forging relationships left and right.
• Liking someone so much that you leave a big chunk of drywall on their doorstep.
• A forklift robot that can pour a beverage directly out of a 55 gallon drum.
• A chemical you can pour on any part of the pizza to form a crust there.
• A pizza fractal and it never stops, baby.
• Walking into a Sizzler and asking for the fruit lasagna.
• The buffet boom of the 80s.
• Sizzler representing choice in a country about freedom of choice.
• A four minute indoctrination video shown to new Sizzler employees.
• The thickest glasses known to man.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Ryan is @RyanIkeComposer on Twitter and @RyanIkeAudio on Instagram and is probably not working on Skyrim 2?
• Tyriq is FourbitFriday everywhere and really wants to finish Catacomb Kids.
  • https://www.ckgame.net/

Topics:

• What's a fandom you're not a part of, but kind of wish you were?
• Pointless Automatons
  • https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/opinion/future-scooters-central-park.html
  • https://www.strandbeest.com/
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HitchBOT
  • http://www.tweenbots.com
• Please help reconstruct this lost pun: "vegan jazz standards" with nutritional yeast
• Mallow asks: "how do you grapple with / think about your legacy? (things that sprang to mind included the relevant timeframe, obligations to the future, how/what people inherit from their ancestors, and how (self-)censorship is a way to cut off a legacy)"
• Consistency of idiolect
  • Disfluencies providing value to the listener: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000300.html
• How can we appeal to Gen Z so when they take over we aren't executed along with the Boomers?

Microtopics:

• Clapping just because it's fun.
• A trainwreck of three people talking over each other.
• Being in a corridor and punching a weird alien.
• Topic thirst.
• Pokemon Snap making you even more of a pariah, if that's even possible.
• Throwing apples at a Snorlax until it wakes up, like the shitty kid at the zoo.
• A reverse body snatcher situation, where you're the only alien walking around in a skin suit.
• Enjoying a game more if it doesn't involve collecting things.
• Going to a free R&B concert every Sunday.
• Going to a white small town Lutheran church which was boring and lame.
• The organ coming in for particularly high-energy moments.
• Somebody telling you that you are inches away from going to hell in the same basement that they just had an alcoholics anonymous meeting four seconds ago.
• Having to worry about all your atheist friends going to hell.
• Non-Euclidean Christianity.
• Refusing to put anything in your ears to make the music be less music and going deaf for three days.
• Big moving contraptions that resemble some sort of life form made out of shafts of PVC that wander along the beaches.
• Having no purpose other than to exist.
• Having made so many things extinct that you feel obligated to fill the ecosystem with weird new robots.
• Sentient scooters running wild in New York City.
• An adorable robot that can only roll forward and relies on passers-by to navigate.
• Automations existing wholly outside of the human sphere.
• A battlebot that got loose in the forest, a ramp rolling around the forest floor flipping over pinecones.
• Wanting to believe that battlebots are real so badly that you forget that they have RC drivers.
• A robot with a nuke or at least a flail.
• A village of Rube Goldberg machines triggering each other forever.
• Listing jazz standards except replacing one of the words in each title with "nooch."
• One of those jokes that you construct for 17 people to get, but those 17 people really appreciate it.
• Slipping in the shower and the last thought in your head before you die is the game of the jazz standard that makes the best nooch pun.
• Not being sure whether an answer to your question is possible but proceeding under the assumption that it is.
• Not allowing yourself to die until you know the answer.
• Carrying around the answer to your life's question in your wallet so whenever you're ready to die you can read it and the paramedics will find you crumpled on the floor holding a note that just says "The Girl From Ipanoocha."
• Just wanting to be a person who has a finished game.
• Being driven to finish your current project so you can start the next one.
• Realizing that just because you made a promise to finish one project, you're allowed to do other things too.
• The projects that anyone can come in and finish vs. the projects that will die with you.
• Not having the attention span to finish a big project unless you owe it to somebody.
• Having some realizations right here on the podcast.
• Convincing yourself that the thing you want to do can fit as part of your larger project.
• Making music and never playing it for anybody because you're just making music because you enjoy it.
• All the great artists of the past having had a record label or a church they were beholden to.
• Michelangelo just deciding "this ceiling looks wack, I'm gonna fix it."
• Thinking of your unpublished works as increasing your posthumous clout.
• Putting your unpublished works in the attic because that's where people find posthumous art.
• Selling one album to somebody in New Jersey in your twelve year music career.
• Starting a patreon for people who want to support your main work and putting only unrelated works behind the patreon paywall.
• Uploading yourself to the cloud and making jam games forever for an audience of nobody.
• Adopting new phrases into your lexicon and letting other ones vanish.
• Adopting the vocal mannerisms and vocabulary of people you hang out with.
• Needing a phrase that means "diggity dang" but replacing each one after six months as you get sick of it.
• Talking to someone who doesn't use "umm" or "like" and instead just pauses for the same amount of time, and never being sure if they're done talking or if they are about to headbutt you.
• So-called "disfluencies" like "umm" and "uh" providing value to the listener in that they signify that the upcoming idea is more complex.
• Why everyone talked so fast in the early 20th century.
• Op-eds from Victorian times complaining about how young women are constantly saying "prithee" and "perchance" now.
• Needing the revolution to start soon because the boomers are about to die of old age and then the guillotine falls squarely on Gen X.
• Boomers writing op-eds about how Gen Z hates Gen X and millennials too, in hopes of inventing a generational divide that they're not on the wrong side of.
• Giving the next generation instructions on how and why to destroy you.
• The age segregation in the American school system resulting in most people knowing only people their own age for much of their lives.
• Cultural generations shortening as cultural change speeds up, until twins born minutes apart are on opposite sides of a war.
• Starting an Instagram to try to connect with the kids.
• College costing either zero or infinity dollars depending on the letter your last name starts with.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• April is a beast lord and Jim's wife. @AprilSaur
• Ryan is somehow also Jim's wife? @RyanIkeComposer

Topics:

• 3:56 The "spigot question" Jim keeps avoiding.
  • https://norse-mythology.org/gods-and-creatures/others/hugin-and-munin/
  • A second person may be "cured" of HIV. https://www.vox.com/2019/3/5/18249607/hiv-cure-2019
• 13:05 New Decade reading resolution.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Witcher
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seanan_McGuire
  • http://www.scp-wiki.net/antimemetics-division-hub
  • I personally recommend starting with "Introductory Antimemetics," which is a good intro to the concepts, then everything starting at "Case Colourless Green," which is the main storyline.
  • https://shadesofmagic.fandom.com/wiki/A_Darker_Shade_of_Magic
• 22:54 What does the Nakatomi corporation do?
  • http://www.scp-wiki.net/
  • https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/33713/was-nakatomi-corp-involved-in-illegal-activity
• 31:07 Favorite zoo animal.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embryonic_diapause
• 40:07 What sandwiches are better suited to a straight or diagonal cut?
• 44:28 I stayed in a hotel in Florence in 2009 where our room had a private bidet but the whole floor shared a toilet.

Microtopics:

• Making a good dad joke on twitter.
• The ravens that have been building a nest behind your corpyard at work.
• The squabbling raven couple next door.
• Being the neighbor who didn't call animal control.
• Trying to remember the names of Odin's ravens.
• Distributing podcast episodes in a post-internet wasteland.
• The kid in middle school who guessed you were from New York because of how you say "basketball."
• Why Jim is such a coward.
• Reaching deep into the topic bucket and pulling out a black ichorous monster.
• A garden hose spigot installed in your butt such that poop sprays forward instead of down.
• Bodily fluids canceling each other out when you miss the toilet and so you just end up with a wet wall.
• Liking ketchup so much you CRISPR a biological ketchup dispenser into your elbow.
• Accidentally triggering your ketchup hands when you're icing a cake.
• Putting a cap on your ketchup elbow so you don't drip ketchup everywhere.
• Whether your new dispenser is a squishy flesh hose or a brass steampunk spigot.
• Reframing your fleshy protuberance that shoots someone else's blood to sound scary and eldritch.
• A spigot that shoots liquid money.
• Making up for your horrifying blood pranks by giving blood.
• Whipping blood into stiff peaks.
• Carnivorous merengue.
• Using science to make human blood safe to eat.
• Letting the listeners hear the good podcast juice.
• Falling down on your New Year's resolution starting in March.
• Watching the Witcher show and then reading the Witcher short stories it was based on and knowing exactly what's going to happen.
• Alchemy and math and words.
• Whether or not reading on a screen still counts.
• Reading your driver's license every night before you go to bed.
• Getting hungry immediately after the body spigot discussion.
• Being over your meal by the time you're done cooking it.
• Assembling duck a l'orange ingredient by ingredient in your tummy and by the time you finish cooking it you're like "I've already eaten this."
• Something standing right in front of you that you can't perceive.
• Deciding not to read scary stories to your wife right before bed.
• Getting ready for prose form, motherfuckers.
• Trying to remember someone's name and only remembering that they have initials.
• Medieval fantasy Londons and their relationships to magic.
• Reading ahead in the tabletop adventure book.
• A vault with 8 different kinds of locks on it, filled with non-negotiable bearer bonds.
• A regular bearer bond except you can't negotiate for it.
• A non-negotiable bond except you can hold it.
• The database documenting the contents of the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
• Manufacturing tiny toy guns and not being able to fight back against terrorists because your guns are too small.
• Explaining why your tiny gun manufacturer has a money basement.
• Tiny toy guns using only the tiniest gunpowder.
• Writing the first season of your mystery show with the certainty that it'll be canceled after one season.
• Having to figure out what polar bears are after your show gets renewed.
• When a duck decides to start whispering its quacks.
• The most convenient jaguar.
• Biting each other in the face and having a good Bear Time.
• Bats' closest relatives being humans because all their other relatives died.
• Delaying gestation until everyone's pregnant at once.
• Bats all giving birth at the same time and overwhelming the health care system.
• A zoo except for the sea.
• Watching a jellyfish enclosure and asking "what are they doing in there?"
• Plastic bags floating around in the sea except they're alive and they'll still be alive after you're dead.
• The universe being a big stupid donut.
• Nobody giving a shit that you read Great Expectations.
• Garfield being the great literature of the coming era.
• Allegorical lasagna.
• Caramelizing all your onions at once.
• Cutting your sandwich into a pair of rhombuses.
• Sitting on a stack of the most prestigious award in the country.
• Figuring out what axis you can cut a hamburger on diagonally.
• When the burrito guy folds your burrito wrong and the first bite is entirely sour cream.
• Burrito Gaia, filled with loam, mantle and magma.
• Naming your next kid after your least-favorite burrito.
• The food dictator making you a cup of Crispix when all you wanted was grilled cheese.
• The puzzle with the farmer trying to get a hen, fox and grain across the river except it's your butt, your poop, and a jet of water.
• Taking it to squirts-town.
• Building a hotel before they invented the combination toilet/bidet.
• The french word for when you take a dump in somebody's bidet.
• Hygiene strategies if a bird poops on your butthole.
• The nose being an evolutionary strategy to protect our mouths from bird poop.
• Dunking your whole ass in the ass-height sink.
• Just making zoo noises until you've reached the required minimum podcast length.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Ryan (@ryanikecomposer) made a great grilled cheese sandwich in an air fryer two weeks ago.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_fryer
• Alexander is a math professor at DigiPen and trades his chicken flock's eggs to a neighbor for home-roasted coffee beans.
  • https://www.quora.com/profile/Alexander-Young-2

Topics:

• 8:41 Creativity from a seed vs from a box
• 18:41 Every fucking comedy trailer in the 90s used Hall of the Mountain king and it sucked and I hated it and why don't we do that any more
  • https://www.20k.org/episodes/thebooj
• 29:04 Some guy you just met asks to install an HDMI port on your foot. You decide to go for it. When you plug in a TV, what's playing on your foot?
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Hawk%27s_Skate_Jam
  • https://twitter.com/tonyhawk/status/5184156673
• 40:12 David asks: "Yak shaving in your profession or hobby"
  • https://i.imgur.com/t0XHtgJ.gif
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeboxing
• 49:01 I think about the "abstinence train" from a high school health class video once a week. How can I turn this from distraction into motivation?
• 1:02:00 Multi-lingual animals

Microtopics:

• Making a transcendent grilled cheese in the air fryer.
• Dipping food in terrifyingly hot golden juice that might burn your face off.
• Walking into your friend's house and seeing an edifice.
• Esoteric kitchen appliances that we find invaluable.
• A Kevin Bacon co-working situation.
• An espresso machine where you have to screw the lid down properly or it explodes.
• The adrenaline rush of surviving the cooking process making the food taste way better.
• Trading your chicken's fresh eggs for your neighbor's home-roasted coffee beans.
• Trading jam games for fresh jam.
• Getting super excited by discovering that something is impossible.
• Proving the theorem that something can never be equal to something else.
• Using a constraint to make something new.
• AI-driven space helmets that generate plausible sounds for the space vista you're looking at.
• A naval battle In Space!!;
• Taking the script of an existing movie and adding a bunch of jokes to it.
• Everybody knowing that Shakespeare was a hack but being afraid to say it.
• Marching on the National Mall shrieking about public domain music usage in movie trailers.
• Getting nostalgic about trends you always hated.
• Aphantasia but for envisioning loudspeakers.
• Being the kind of kid that keeps a database of classical music used in film trailers.
• Owen Wilson's goblin-like face, sitting in his hall.
• Looney Tunes characters creeping around while pizzicato strings punctuate their footsteps.
• All classical music being recontextualized as Looney Tunes music.
• John Williams changing one note of your opus and now it's the soundtrack to Star Wars.
• Learning to play a mid-90s cartoon theme on harpsichord and realizing it's basically Hall of the Mountain King with every third note removed.
• The booj.
• Listening to a fake movie trailer and growing excited for a movie that doesn't exist.
• A young child singing a Judas Priest song as if it's a nursery rhyme.
• Putting the booj in trailers for Casablanca and giving 1940s audiences a heart attack.
• Playing the booj outside ancient Rome and Romans inventing the film camera because they want to see the movie so badly.
• Somehow removing even more agency from a "would you rather" question.
• The HDMI port in your foot playing pretzel advertisements.
• Asking your friend if they see the creepy guy staring at the camera in the background of this People's Court episode, but your friend can't get past that the TV episode is playing via an HDMI port on your foot.
• Being assured that whatever comes out of your foot won't kill you.
• The HDMI port in your foot not hurting unless you try to run.
• The HDMI port on your foot playing memories of you running with the Columbia City Running Club.
• Forgetting to run your brain screen saver and getting brain burn-in and the last thing someone said to you faintly ringing in your head forever.
• An AR Tony Hawk skating game where you skate on power lines by holding your phone camera up to them.
• Tony Hawk being a Pokemon.
• The cat bus from My Neighbor Totoro.
• Toddlers discovering the front yard.
• A toddler whaling on a cat but she refuses to run away and just gets annoyed.
• Getting all your cat poking and yanking out of the way as a toddler.
• Yak shaving being a metaphor, hopefully.
• Getting anxiety from hearing yak shaving explained.
• Growing up with an antagonistic relationship with sleeping and by extension your own body.
• Thinking of sleep as step 0 for anything you want to get done tomorrow.
• Wanting a free uninterrupted hour and getting it by sleeping an hour less tonight.
• The hemispheres of your brain having two different chronotypes.
• Trying way too hard to relate to the teens.
• Teens in the 90s being way into locomotives.
• Three humans dressed up as train cars heading for Abstinence Street and the caboose trying to unhook himself because he wants to feel something right now.
• The two front cars of the train polycule trying to convince the caboose that Abstinence Street is really cool actually.
• The Abstinence Train PSA being the direct inspiration for The Human Centipede.
• Ryan being the caboose in this metaphor.
• The awards organization that gives you a trophy for eating your very last peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
• An abstinent train polycule in the railyard of ideas, validating each other's impulses.
• An abstinent train polycule changing the law to allow polygamy.
• Becoming a Zen Master but when your followers think you're meditating, you're actually repeating the Abstinence Train PSA in your head.
• Finally finding the Abstinence Train on YouTube and vaporizing into the atmosphere, your purpose fulfilled.
• A homebrew recreation of the famous Abstinence Train video.
• The results you get when you type "Abstinence Train" into YouTube.
• Wanting to get a job at Google to fix YouTube's search engine so you can search for "Abstinence Train" but having to shave a yak first.
• Mean Girls but all the time and they never grow out of it.
• Chickens having a particular call they make when a hawk appears that means everyone should hide.
• A crow that knows when chickens are warning other chickens about the incipient hawk.
• Being very frustrated that the host put the topics in the wrong order.
• The host leaving the show early but the guests continuing to talk for another fifteen minutes.
• Assuring the listener that you're not bragging when you explain just how many podcasts you've been on.
• Being called out by a podcast you were listening to but not otherwise involved in.
• Being a doctor of mathematics but weighing in on whether dinosaurs were domesticable because it's Quora after all.
• Chickens being way more shareable than your latest math problem.
• Remembering the face of the human that threatened your nest.
• Making decoy nests to fool the government agency trying to get rid of you.
• A crow really just being a black pigeon.
• The sound of a juvenile crow hassling their mom for food.
• Throwing an olive at a murder of crows to meet the one crow who is willing to approach it like it's a live grenade.
• Seattle residents exchanging crow attack stories.
• Jim not being here to ask you if you want to plug anything.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Ryan Ike is a composer at @RyanIkeComposer. Where The Water Tastes Like Wine is now available on Switch!
• Gary Butterfield is a podcaster at @GaryBuh (terfieldPodcaster). He will be torturing himself for your entertainment from Dec 20-23. http://duckfeed.tv/duckstream/

Topics:

• 4:45 How long do you spend on media you don't like before giving up?
• 19:05 What if food screamed when you ate it??
  • Barbershop performers usually sing major 7th chords in just intonation. For all the gushing over it in the citations, to my ear the "comparison with equal temperament" at the bottom of the page just sounds grossly out of tune. 31 cents flat, yuck. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_seventh_chord#Barbershop_seventh
• 26:46 The SP-1200 and other fetishized creative tools.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mu_SP-1200
  • Making beats with the SP-1200. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npkxjOTkZBM
  • "'You feel the power in the click,' PewDiePie proclaims while taking his new gaming mouse for a test drive." https://manofmany.com/featured/pewdiepies-camera-desk-setup-gear-money
• 35:12 If you had anything close to Kojima's level of auteur power in your field, what would you do with it?
• 45:05 How would you be useful in a post-apocalypse?
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
• 53:30 Why can't we run in a non-athletic setting?

Microtopics:

• Introducing yourself like a Pokemon.
• Graduating to being level two e-friends.
• The Spider-Man channel, the Ice Man channel, and the Firestar channel.
• Consuming things between now and when you die.
• Making game as if people have nothing to do but play your game.
• Being okay with never consuming the art you purchase.
• Min-maxing your enjoyment you have before you become a pile of inanimate carbon.
• Checking in on The Ice Man Christmas Spectacular and it's already snowing.
• Failing to explain the Battle of the Bulge.
• The intended cadence of using two question marks.
• Topic Joker's Trick.
• Associating the sound of screaming with everything tasty.
• String cheese yelling "string cheese" as you eat it to raise string cheese awareness.
• Everyone remembering where they were when food started screaming.
• Deaf people all remembering when they got Subway and learned to hear.
• David Fincher's Seven 2: Ate.
• The wailing of the ghosts of Hades echoing through Hamilton Middle School.
• The screaming and eating minutes.
• The horrible price of being a Topic Lord.
• All the layers of your sandwich singing like a barbershop quartet.
• Humanity learning to photosynthesize.
• The glucose in an IV drip whispering the time you'll die as it goes into your vein.
• Mailing your representative to ask them to vote no on the Screaming Food Act.
• The totemic power of a sampler with 256k of ram.
• PewDiePie endorsing a particular brand of streaming microphone.
• Making a cooking knife made out of dinosaur bones.
• Recording a song with Kurt Cobain's guitar.
• Recording a song with a guitar made from Kurt Cobain's body.
• A rock legend being bone-morphed into a Stratocaster.
• Being totally down with your bones used for something cool.
• Being a Topic Knave.
• Being called a genius until it breaks you.
• Being confused about whether a boat is a fortunate or unfortunate boat.
• Putting together a team to make the game to match your vanity soundtrack.
• Making a soundtrack you could paint on the side of a van.
• Auteur power inevitably turning you into a monster, and choosing to lean into that.
• Living with the comfort hose pointed at your face.
• Having no knees and a lot of money.
• Eating yourself because you are among the 1% most self-actualized.
• Dancing in a cage for a warlord because nobody needs your chiptune cover of Carry On My Wayward Son after the screaming vegetables cause World War 3.
• Getting real good at the spoons because pianos are too heavy.
• Accidentally starting fires with your thick prescription glasses.
• Murdering every Applebee's employee so you're the best chef in your future village.
• Being good with children even though you hate them.
• Terrifying passers-by because you just wanted to get your shopping done faster.
• Running to catch your yogurt like it's a bus.
• Onlookers wondering why you're always breaking up with Janine every time they see you.
• Thinking you're going to get a free sample but instead getting a sales pitch.
• Talking into a celery stalk to get out of an awkward situation.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• April is a Park Ranger and a Beast Lord and Jim's wife
• Ryan Ike Composer is a topic bucket at https://twitter.com/RyanIkeComposer/

Topics:

• 4:58 Inventing secular rituals for children
• 19:25 Playing a Tabletop RPG can make you a better person
• 33:02 Which key is most fun to jam in, on the piano?
  • The Strong Songs episode about "I Wish," by Stevie Wonder. http://strongsongspodcast.com/i-wish-by-stevie-wonder
  • "I Wish," by Stevie Wonder. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYKYka-PNt0
  • Perfect Pitch. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_pitch
  • A=432 tuning. https://attunedvibrations.com/432hz-healing/
  • Patent: Vibrating toilet seat. https://patents.google.com/patent/US4920583A/en
• 40:30 The Muddler asks: "What would happen if we outlawed moss, botanically and culturally?"
  • Reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone. https://youtu.be/ysa5OBhXz-Q
• 47:27 Monster Kabinett is a robot-hell you can pay to go to in Berlin, why don't we have these here? https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/monster-kabinett
  • The cliffs of Dún Aonghasa. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%BAn_Aonghasa
  • Oneonta falls. https://www.whentobewhere.com/travel-listing/oneonta-gorge-lower-oneonta-falls
• 58:18 "Dance Monkey," by The Tones and I. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0hyYWKXF0Q

Microtopics:

• Taking the beast lord before someone else does.
• Being the bucket.
• Being rooted to the ground and going down with the ship.
• Brains autocorrecting puns out of existence.
• Vouching for a deer prancing across a beach.
• Not marrying someone born in the early 2000s.
• Getting into that bucket.
• Getting to sing in a room that's made for singing in.
• A cat wanting to get into the recording studio really bad.
• A cask of amontillado situation except the cask is the entire world outside the recording studio.
• Choosing to consciously develop rituals for your son.
• Throwing all of spirituality out with the bathwater.
• Going to Hell even though you tried your best.
• Being a steward of the land.
• Recoiling from going out in public because social media has drained all your life energy.
• Calling a dog a good dog when they're just being a dog.
• Having a quiet reflection about the Solstice in the middle of a labyrinth.
• Changing your real name because your pseudonym is better.
• The murder squad rolling out.
• Giving polygons the business and feeling bad for them.
• Figuring out how to be a good person even though you're literally a monster.
• The laws of physics demanding that you torture a goblin.
• Turning into a grouse and being like "peace out, losers."
• Creating an even worse relationship dynamic but at least this one isn't racist.
• Rolling up a CVS middle manager for your D&D one-shot.
• Working to become blind but always knowing you could work harder.
• Meeting someone who won't admit that they like fun shapes.
• Your local goth park ranger with a tattoo covered in flowers.
• A toilet seat that vibrates at the brown note.
• Knowing from experience that eventually you run out of poop.
• Clicking random grids while you think about moss being illegal.
• Outlawing Kate Moss as an unintentional side-effect of your moss legislation.
• Being the moss lord.
• Being the moss beast.
• Muddling your mimosa because you're ahead of the curve.
• Not drinking, but knowing so much about it that it'd be dangerous if you did.
• Moss turning out to be the linchpin to global biological harmony.
• Taking the time you used to spend itching and spending it reproducing.
• Everybody being everything.
• A Delightful Nightmare.
• Having to wait because Mother is not ready yet.
• Mother being ready now.
• Mother turning out to be a free-roaming robotic spider about the size of a smart car.
• Mother malfunctioning and kicking an aluminum folding chair across the room.
• Mother vibrating out of the way like a cheap hotel bed.
• A robot sticking out of the wall with crazy proboscis lips.
• A robot that knows how to use chopsticks.
• A flesh robot playing German industrial metal while you try to escape.
• Mother remembering you and wanting to drink your blood.
• Guessing sweaters until the beast lord tells you to stop.
• A tourist attraction with a bunch of signs saying "don't come here"
• Not wanting to die but on the other hand wanting a cool inscrutable death.
• Having an animated gif of your cool death on your tombstone.
• Joanna Newsom doing Aretha Franklin.
• Not wanting to admit whether you're a doctor.
• Playing a miniature game of snake in the spreadsheet that only you can perceive.
• Still not having a catchphrase.
• Being the beast bucket.

Support Topic Lords