• JP
• Shepard

Topics:

• Damn it, Microsoft added something worthwhile to Office.
• Favorite DOS game soundtracks?
• The Balatro Discourse
• Faith is a Fine Invention, by Emily Dickinson
  • https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/faith-is-a-fine-invention/

Microtopics:

• Artist Alley.
• Scrolling down a web page and seeing a bunch of cool stuff.
• Seeing a list and wondering "how did this list happen"?
• Steam Farming Fest.
• Trying to figure out what you want to do when you grow up.
• Eating eggs and rice when you have tummy troubles.
• The file you all edit to make the deposit slip.
• Taking data from multiple columns and putting them all in a single list.
• Becoming the spreadsheet wizard.
• Installation wizards.
• Why nobody calls a software feature a "wizard" any more
• A window into the dialectic of wizards.
• The LLM hype tornado.
• Renting video software from Blockbuster.
• Back when any media was a "tape"
• Enumerating the kinds of MS-DOS audio hardware.
• Emitting a blast of data.
• Enjoying a video game in 4, 16 or 256 colors.
• How Doom sounded on the internal PC speaker.
• Playing multiplayer Doom on a four computer LAN where two of the computers don't have sound cards.
• The Doom source port family tree.
• Whether Linux supported the internal PC speaker.
• Playing each MIDI note with the off-the-track square wave.
• Holding on to a joke for several minutes.
• Doing sound effects via the Roland MT-32.
• FM synth guitars sounding more evil than real guitars.
• Synthesizers that are fancier than other synthesizers and are therefore better.
• The ambient music on the Doom soundtrack.
• The Lost Vikings soundtrack.
• Games with tracker soundtracks.
• The tracker music era.
• A roguelike deck builder kind of a thing.
• A huge hit within your social horizon.
• Beginners hoping to project intelligence and competence.
• The kind of mixing of data and code that Lua makes easy to do.
• How to deploy a Love2D game to consoles.
• A cool game idea that's just a bunch of cards doing stuff.
• Sean Barrett's STB libraries.
• The ability to change your mind without having to throw away a bunch of work.
• Ambient complexity vs. intrinsic complexity.
• Hot takes escaping containment.
• The Celeste character controller.
• Software security practices that do not apply to a single player indie game.
• Looking at code and seeing all the things that it used to be.
• Looking at code solving a problem in a domain you are unfamiliar with.
• An Emily Dickinson poem that reads like a response to an argument she had at dinner.
• Situations where you can directly observe what's happening.
• All the filters preventing you from bursting out into song.
• Esprit de escalier.
• Who was Emily Dickinson owning?
• A contempt for faith and a sense that microscopes are good.
• Knowing that nobody reads your blog, but taking satisfaction in the knowledge that someone hypothetically could.
• Excavating spiritual truth from apocryphal ramblings.
• The app that holds all the texts you don't send for ransom.
• Digging through people's trash but with fewer steps.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Jude
  • https://bikechurch.santacruzhub.org/
  • https://www.linkedin.com/in/jude-jackson-605680100/
• Shepard

Topics:

• The attention schema model of consciousness
  • https://books.google.com/books?id=Ta4eAAAAQBAJ&pg=PP1
• Studying a children's picture book in academia because it was successfully banned out of existence
• Your favorite floor cocktail
• Ode to Waluigi
  
  • https://www.stalberttoday.ca/local-news/student-poet-wins-national-award-1278635
• Did generations used to be a thing?
• Remembering what the mnemonic is but not what it is supposed to remind you.

Microtopics:

• Bike Church.
• Learning to fix a bike.
• The audio book for Watership Down.
• The book that inspired the plugging.
• Our own brain's mental model of our attention.
• If you are what you think then suddenly you're this other thing.
• The brain's proprioception of itself.
• The Turning Test as praxis.
• A second brain that tries to second-guess the first brain.
• An idea that is brilliant or not.
• Have machine learning researchers heard about having kids?
• X: A Child's Story.
• A discount dystopian nightmare.
• A book that is banned in twenty states but otherwise nobody cares about it.
• Kids who inexplicably look like Charles Bronson.
• The consolidation of media into six megacorporations.
• Kids learning how to pirate again.
• A specific right that can be sold or exchanged.
• The end of the golden age of streaming.
• What Napster was like.
• Downloading an MP3 from an FTP site and then recording it to a cassette tape because you don't have that much hard drive space.
• Ice that is still ice.
• When the bartender pours your drink on the floor and gives you a straw.
• The Forbidden Jungle Juice.
• A story from back when most of Jim's friends were alcoholics.
• Noticing a cocktail on the floor of the elevator and wondering how it got there and then you realize the elevator smells like a smoke bomb and you're like "oh ok"
• Checking the ceiling of the elevator for ninjas.
• The problem with the wine bar spit urn.
• The coffee that you give to the poor.
• Pouring your excess coffee into the donation box at church.
• Dropping a loose muffin into the mail drop box to show thanks to the mail carrier.
• A floor made of mail.
• A dastardly Nintendo villain.
• Thy time to attack Mario and Luigi.
• Why thou dost not have thine own video fame.
• Why thou art always cranky.
• Whether a power flower fell in you mouth when thou wast a baby.
• What it wouldst be like to be friends with Bowser and thou.
• Fighting Geno the Explorer dangerously.
• Why thou art not in Super Smash Bros. Brawl.
• A poem that asks many important questions and provides no answers.
• Hyper Mecha Sonic.
• A thriller about video game mascots.
• The bright line in the sand that makes Yoshi a pet rather than a friend.
• Dumping your boyfriend Waluigi any time you need an extra few feet of jump height because at any time you can load up Mario Tennis and get another Waluigi for free.
• Trying desperately to find or create a purple-moustachioed Waluigi.
• The eight named generations.
• The Reprisal Generation, of the Nomad/Reactive archetypes.
• Why the concept of generational cohorts is unique to modern Americans.
• Ming Dynasty Boomers.
• Violence that is continuous and normal.
• The Greatest Generation, who had no idea at the time how Great they had it.
• A Radical for Fingers.
• Seeing a king wearing a hat and trying to remember what that's supposed to remind you of.
• Looking at your hands and trying to remember why this is important.
• Not figuring out that your grandpa is hilarious until a week before he dies.
• Waiting in the bathroom for the test to start.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Dan
  • https://strangecurrencies.org/
  • https://twitter.com/SC_Reviews_Dan
• Shepard
  • They are known as Earthnova in the Discord and has one published work: http://thelitmag.com/2021-edition/this-story-has-a-ghost-in-it/

Topics:

• Only playing narrative/story-driven video games once
• Sometimes life is like an adventure game, a skill or item that's useless when you get it is needed years later
• Sleng Teng Riddim
  • https://www.engadget.com/2015-12-04-casio-and-the-sleng-teng-riddim.html
  • Here's an argument that the riff originated with David Bowie: https://axischemicals.wordpress.com/2016/01/11/david-bowie-digital-reggae-kingpin/
• Tyger! Tyger! by Robin Johnson
  • https://mobile.twitter.com/rdouglasjohnson/status/1517804673998237697
• The internet and college are two great tastes that taste terrible together.
• The first time I beat my father at Scrabble
• Explaining traffic jams, or at least this one traffic jam

Microtopics:

• Wanting to see all the stuff.
• Replaying a series of four RPG length games to see the alternate endings.
• Getting the most video game endings for your dollar.
• Tenable and untenable ways to have an adventure.
• Recapturing the magic of your first time (with emulators).
• Getting every video game you wanted for a system and then enjoying that for 10 minutes.
• A giant archive of every DOS game ever.
• Losing your nostalgia for old games via emulation, but keeping your nostalgia for the box art.
• Falling out of love with Windows Vista.
• Keeping your custard pie intact until the yeti needs it.
• The bread maker approach to learning a new skill.
• Why there are no cupcakes in Frog Fractions 2.
• Playing Go against someone better than you and suddenly losing.
• The Go community rallying around the identity that computers can't beat the best Go players.
• Whether computer Go has shaped the way humans play Go.
• An extra creative extra special humany thing.
• Beating a chess expert by convincing them to play something else.
• John Henry's retirement plan.
• Being promised a Yamaha DX7 but receiving a Casio MT-40 instead.
• Writing a part for a rock and roll rhythm section that is accidentally a great reggae rhythm section.
• The origins of the Amen Break.
• Setting up a situation where you can write your own notes.
• Figuring out where the genre can go with this new tonality.
• Stripy guys and chonky units.
• The best kind of tigers. (Floofers.)
• Learning about slant rhymes one morning and that afternoon writing a poem that rhymes "eye" with "symmetry."
• Blake hearing about the Great Vowel Shift from his grandpa and deciding that that would be a great way to make Tyger! Tyger! sound old timey.
• Googling why Blake tried to rhyme "eye" with "symmetry" and finding dozens of implausible theories, all expressed with complete confidence.
• Making an impression on the world of poetry by not being good at it.
• Hipster throwbacks to the great vowel shift.
• Calvin and Hobbes panoply of tiger poems.
• Holding off on reading more Calvin and Hobbes tiger poems until you’re done recording the podcast.
• Not letting online schooling get in the way of your online education.
• Whether someone will figure out how to do a college class online before we transition back to in-person classes.
• Whether ASL is especially well suited to bring taught over Zoom.
• Doing yard work and wearing protective equipment so you can't pull out your phone to check Twitter.
• Lying down in court.
• Realizing for the first time that your parents don't know everything.
• A framed photo of the one time your mom won at Risk.
• The one thing you and your dad are both interested in.
• Sports montage of getting better at Scrabble.
• Driving or better yet watching movies with cars in them.
• Everybody slowing down to take a look at the two headed chicken.
• Driving towards a shadow and being blinded by the sun to what's beyond the shadow.
• A time loop where the car in front of you slows down for no reason and then you slow down for a good reason but the car behind you thinks you're slowing down for no reason.
• A car driving on a road.
• Stacking a bunch of human reaction speeds on top of each other.
• Slot cars as a fun and disastrous solution to traffic.
• The slot car model of public transit.
• Finding everybody on the Discord.

Support Topic Lords