• Stevie
• Bri

Topics:

• 3D modeling and my lack of visual imagination
• Cutthroat compounds (my linguistic specialty) – current pursuit is "verb-em" last names – I'm researching the origins of the fictional law offices of Dewey Cheatum and Howe
• Pocket Warwick and other lost software
• For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper, by Joseph Fasano
  • https://www.reddit.com/r/Poetry/comments/1fvzv1f/poem_for_a_student_who_used_ai_to_write_a_paper/
• Colma's city motto "It's Great to Be Alive in Colma" is great marketing

Microtopics:

• Silly inventor and brainstormer.
• Writing code that generates audio.
• Giving talks at the Odd Salon.
• Coffeehouse revolutionary thinkers.
• Classic Hughes Behavior.
• Looking at Blender again every seven to ten years.
• Imagining a place in any level of detail. (Other than the name.)
• The memory of what a tiger looks like, and whether it rotated on a Lazy Susan.
• Whether seeing things in a dream feels similar to visualization.
• Needing a license to operate as an engineer, but anyone can call themselves an Imagineer.
• Weenies and MacGuffins.
• Drawing something in 2D and tracing it in Blender.
• Different ways to approach level design.
• Thinking of something and putting it in your game.
• Getting your game design playable as soon as possible so you can find out if it's any good.
• A verb and its direct object.
• Misers and drunks and cowards and gluttons.
• Kick 'em Jenny.
• Bop It!
• Plastic keys where the point of the key is that it immediately breaks and you have to buy a new one.
• Lawyer jokes from 19th century Australia.
• Whether Nukem is his last name or just a nickname.
• Syntactic freezes.
• Rude slang words that end up on listicles.
• How "cacafuego" became "spitfire."
• Etymonline shrugging and giving up.
• Not knowing about the alternate pronunciation of parentheses and processes until you get an office job.
• Choosing a comma as one of your hills.
• A unit of sound and meaning that you use to modify another unit of sound and meaning.
• How to pronounce Warwick Davis.
• A Jib Jab.
• A Tamagotchi Situation.
• Boatswains and forecastles.
• Adding redundancy for clarity and also removing it for efficiency.
• If you still have a Jaz disk, what do you even do with it?
• Going to MagFest to see a chip metal band called Master Boot Record and he's throwing floppy disks with Deluxe Paint on them into the crowd.
• Sharing a birthday with a Kentucky Derby winner but not being sure if he's a person or a horse.
• The Friendliest Friend!
• Stu Sutcliffe, the sixth Beatle.
• International Snooker 2012 and Seven Wonders: Ancient Alien Makeover.
• Fantasy consoles that only run Final Fantasy games.
• If it's your first time at Nice Club, you have to Nice.
• Seeing a generation grow up using automation to do a task that you had to do by hand and feeling one way or another about it.
• How to tell whether somebody can reason about a topic and express their thoughts clearly.
• Underpants Gnome Plans.
• Polishing your thought processes until you find one that you agree with.
• Defending Your Thesis, directed by Al Brooks.
• The only place on the Internet you can hear advice about going to college.
• Colma Secrets.
• Noone ever stops in Colma (on purpose)
• Everyone who came to San Francisco and died.
• Go By Train.
• Calling the Colma Historical Society to see if they have a living volunteer there that day.
• Calling a song "Going to Colma" and hoping that the phrase catches on as a euphemism for Kicking the Bucket.
• The Joy of Actual Citizens and People Involved in Government.
• Encyclopedia Briannica.

Support Topic Lords

• Tyriq
• Stevie
• Avery

Topics:

• What is Dr. Mario's specialty?
• Boutique sardines
• Street Sharks (and the lies about them)
• PiCoSteveMo is over! (as of this recording)

Microtopics:

• Throwing out an idea like a plate of spaghetti, or a grenade.
• Odd Object.
• Piggy-back dual plugs.
• Now! That's What I Call Avery Burke, Vol. VII.
• Jason Shiga.
• Older kids who are into roughhousing and watching shark movies.
• Audio Issues Because of Dog.
• The only place on the Internet you can hear cardboard boxes rubbing against each other.
• Two hours of an attractive woman scraping her thumbnail on a microphone.
• Dr. Mario telling someone that they only have-a four months to live-a.
• The weird forehead mirror that old-timey doctors wear.
• The opinions of someone who's eaten cat food.
• Grandma barging in while you're eating dog food.
• Flintstones Cannibalism Vitamins.
• Barney's PTSD after the Neanderthal Wars.
• Wacky Races, the original MCU.
• Dr. Mario's pill pusherside hustle causing the opioid crisis.
• Ego Death Mario microdosing the germs in the pill bottle who transcend to the great pill bottle in the sky.
• Coming up with the conceit that your band is enemies with sea mammals and making all future audiences hate you.
• Three adorable sardines rowing a boat shaped like a dragon.
• An octopus tentacle that looks like a serial port or a 2x6 spot light.
• The animal that you're eating depicted in cartoon form as cheering you on.
• An anthropomorphic ginger root eating a ginger candy.
• Single-serving black characters.
• Eating a fish and finding an entire spine.
• The weirdest bone to find.
• Free floating animals gathering into a colony and turning into a face.
• The most popular fish sauce in ancient Rome.
• Sealing a whale hand in a trash can with duct tape for two years until it starts leaking and your roommate has to help you dispose of it wearing a hazmat suit.
• Tucking a whale bone under your trench coat and sneaking out of the museum.
• Famous whale disposal techniqus.
• Fishwife, fish life!
• Not knowing about the preexisting work that your favorite cartoon is in conversation with because you're a kid and don't know anything.
• Slammu, Ripster and Streex.
• Michelangelo, Leonardo, DiCaprio, and Don Angelo.
• Vin Diesel being very excited about the Street Sharks.
• IP Homeopathy.
• Sexy Mummy Costume.
• Using mumnies as train fuel because they are so plentiful.
• You can't get Mummy Brown any more because of Woke.
• Who has and hasn't heard of Tommy Tallarico.
• A toy that lets you shoot at the TV screen during the interactive parts of Captain Power.
• Fresh off the PiCoSteveMo boat.
• Graph going up emoji.
• Lots of different skill levels going on in there.
• Aardvarks and anteaters.
• A three hour celebration of weird things that games can be.
• Look Who's The Shining Two!
• Why the Sokoban puzzle in Ocarina of Time sucks.
• Puzzles vs. situations.
• Tony and the Tony Mechanic.
• The Thought Leader of the Thinky Games Community.

Support Topic Lords

• Stevie
• Avery

Topics:

• A tour of silly medieval musical instruments
• The House of David, the baseball cult who all looked like oldtimey barbers.
• Arguing with Winston about how needing to pee works
• Avery's Non Mammalian Milk Corner
• Ode on the Mammoth Cheese Weighing over 7,000 Pounds
  • https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/content/ode-mammoth-cheese-weighing-over-7000-pounds

Microtopics:

• Why the show works like that.
• Asking people if they understand what's going on.
• Spy software.
• Exactly the kind of game you don't want to explain.
• Someone who has a sense of humor and thinks something is funny.
• A hat you can put on your frog.
• Why frogs are so damn popular.
• The game with the magnifying glass.
• Whether the recorder is a real instrument or a crappy toy for babies.
• Just how thicc this bass recorder is
• The supercomputer that's also a couch.
• Talking to your mom on the phone for 45 minutes because she can't stop listing medieval instruments.
• Recorders that are double recorders.
• Michael Fassbender teaching his clone how to play the flute.
• Eating a pair of garden shears.
• An umbrella handle that was given growth hormones that sounds kind of like a stylophone.
• An instrument that is curved so that you can play it on horseback without bonking the horse.
• The sackbut.
• A selfie stick but for a trombone.
• Sausage bassoons.
• Unholy Rackett.
• How long how many strings look it up?
• Insufflation tubes and dudelsacks..
• Versatile, like the Pogues.
• Bears riding unicycles but not very well.
• Overblowing.
• Jim the Overblower.
• Bringing up bugles to someone who works hospice.
• How many songs you can play on a bugle.
• Not wanting to play Beatles Rock Band because you with at BevMo.
• A photo of an early 20th century cult/baseball team that looks like a modern-day metal band.
• Not being able to make it to the majors so you settle for House of Dave.
• Someone who's never played Blaseball trying to explain Blaseball.
• Amusement parks started by cults.
• A pretty good way to end a baseball league.
• Additional amusement.
• Preserving tiny railways built by a baseball cult.
• A busy man who has no time to pee.
• Peristalsis.
• Persons currently experiencing hubris.
• What happens to your knowledge when you're not actively thinking about it.
• When you can truly say you know the capital of the United States.
• Waking up needing to pee and trying to fall back to sleep so that you forget you need to pee.
• Having a dream about urinals overflowing.
• Cutting nature at its joints.
• Preparing for Topicking.
• Whether the Jejune Institute made money.
• When Sacky Meets Butty.
• Signing a contract in someone else's blood.
• Yet another non-mammalian milk.
• Jacked, yoked, ripped and swole spiders.
• Imagery that's only unsettling because you don't regularly drink spider milk.
• Vestigial web butts.
• Sympathy for the young.
• Putting on a spider silk dress and never being able to take it off.
• A communal spider butthole web.
• Blinded by the milk, wrapped up in a douche.
• The first boutique New York restaurant to serve spider milk pancakes.
• Cutting out all the parts where people say something dumb.
• Drum Pants. (It turns your pants into a drum set.)
• We have seen the a Queen of Cheese.
• The worst rhyme scheme.
• A poem that screams 5th grade.
• Why does this web site have line numbers?
• Are you a bad enough dude to save the president's cheese?
• A poetic technique that can be really cool (but not in this poem)
• Confusing this mammoth cheese with another mammoth cheese.
• The most mammalian of all mammals.
• My Mother Milked a Million Mostly Male Mammoths.
• A huge ice cream tub carried by four ponies.
• 35 tons of milk
• Extremely fake beards.
• A thing people once said to sell chicken.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Tyriq
  • https://twitter.com/FourbitFriday
  • https://frror.bandcamp.com/
• Stevie
  • codroid@gmail.com

Topics:

• Striped humans
• Alternative keyboard layouts: teaching yourself to type in new horrible ways
• Where did I get these floppy disks?
• The floppy disk poems
• How do I give a tech talk?
  • https://vimeo.com/91436410
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59hwI9Ae1qU
  • http://paperdino.com/save-the-date/

Microtopics:

• The extent of Jim's patience vis-a-vis delayed plugging.
• Wishing you didn't make things so you could talk about the things you didn't make.
• Plugging the small random things in life, like bugs.
• Sitting in a chair right now.
• Trying desperately for forty years to never use Bluetooth.
• George Michael's "Faith"
• George Michael rehearsing a Queen song.
• A Faith listening party.
• The etymology of "Lobster."
• Plugging bugs and unplugging crustaceans.
• Invisible stripes along one's epidermis.
• Mosaicism (as distinct from Chimerism.)
• Blaschko Lines.
• A secret invisible power to be striped.
• The show where nobody knows anything.
• Spiraling outward from a central point.
• A thing that is a fact if you believe Wikipedia.
• Describing an egg as ovoid because it is similar to an ovum, i.e. an egg.
• Whether a factoid is bullshit.
• Whether humans are humanoid.
• The distinction between a fact and a factoid and how it has changed over time.
• Being slightly hungry and eating a single macaronus.
• Batman training his successor in the sci-fi future.
• Joining the villain faction because they get the cool hooves and horns.
• Turning 90 and getting your internal organs tattooed.
• Check it out, here's my solar plexus. Enjoy.
• An injection that makes your bones glow in the dark.
• Cold-Turkey Colemak Switchin'.
• Holding your left pinky on the tab key to keep your place.
• Iterating until you find the episode title.
• Typing without twerking.
• Being able to get your hands to do what you want without hurting.
• Getting a split keyboard so your hands keep working.
• The ease and laziness of the Wiimote and nunchuk allowing you to put your hands anywhere you want.
• Twitchy aim dominating the PC FPS design space regardless of what the game designer wants.
• Making poem floppy disks and using them as drinking coasters.
• Cleaning out your mouse.
• Disassembling a floppy disk and folding it into the shape of the Starship Enterprise.
• Remembering where the USB floppy drive might stuff.
• Whether cursed demoscene executables still curse you if you run them in DosBox.
• Whether the Ring video still cursed you after it's digitized to DVD.
• Maybe'm or maybe'm not.
• A pretty cool knick knack.
• A human head like pancake batter.
• Bread that you put in a blender.
• The old good lord, bad lord routine.
• Picking a god and channeling its power into your tech talk.
• A community of people that you want to like and respect you.
• Various ways to prepare to give a talk, and why Tyriq always does it the wrong way.
• Going to a talk and thereby consenting to be lectured by the person giving the talk.
• Blaming the audience for picking the wrong talk if they don't like your talk.
• How to run an ARG for no money.
• Deconstructing the idea that canon and headcanon are in any way different.
• Re-telling the same story over and over again.
• Same bullshit, different number of dimensions.
• A movie that was cooler when it was just a throwaway line in another movie.
• Depicting the same overarching event but with details changed.
• Games that require you to make a choice that you can't take back.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Tyriq
  • https://twitter.com/FourbitFriday
  • https://frror.bandcamp.com/
• Stevie
  • https://www.hryx.net

Topics:

• Watching TAS videos and wondering how much of what is happening is necessary vs flourish
• If Jeff Bezos wanted to recreate Jurassic Park
• Chocolate-dipped fruit has such an enormous gulf between perceived effort and actual effort that as a gift giver or potluck attendee you are all but obligated to take advantage
• Strong Men, Riding Horses by Gwendolyn Brooks
  • https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=28113
• The creators of Earthworm Jim: Where are they now?

Microtopics:

• Tunic.
• Finding collectible pages of a game's manual inside the game.
• Games in fake languages.
• Playing imported games in emulation and trying to figure out how to play even though you don't speak the language.
• Curveballs.
• A monthly in-person cozy casual game development meetup.
• Discovering what people mean by "within" when people say "inquire within."
• What happened to all of the art.
• What a whale bone smells like after you clean it.
• Whether it's grosser to drink bone marrow or eat oysters.
• The most charming of all the crabs.
• TAS runs.
• The various kinds of tools that might assist you in creating a tool-assisted speed run.
• Human-Mediated Speed Runs, or HMSRs.
• Proving the ideal speed run.
• Some kind of sequence that is based on a timer.
• When the TAS run does a little dance and you're trying to figure out whether that's important to the run or if they're just killing time.
• The game became Snake.
• Whether coffee cures or causes cancer.
• Like listening in a mirror.
• The vapors.
• Trillionaires not being as rich as they used to be.
• A big big island full of organisms that are just waiting to be coated in gold.
• Painting your entire body and dying somehow.
• Lemur-friendly paints.
• People who've eaten breakfast and then died.
• Dipping some shit in some crap.
• Watching Food Network to discover the Science of Chocolate.
• An attractive morsel.
• Pastries with fruit fillings.
• A solid cube of a mass of dessert-object.
• Taking advice from someone who hasn't even been on several hundred podcasts.
• Frantically putting the Topic Lords banner back on your wall when you see Jim approaching.
• Releasing Topic Lords episodes.
• Shuffling off of this mortal topic.
• Making a movie to promote your new chocolate bar.
• A type of chocolate that tries to be solid.
• Spaghetti-Os as a back formation of Spaghetti-O-ification, which is what happens when pasta passes through a black hole's event horizon.
• Using Hawking radiation to retrieve lost Spaghetti-Os from within black holes.
• The movie playing the sound of somebody peeing to let you know that now's when you get up to use the bathroom.
• A crowd of people doing foley work for a restaurant scene in Murder She Wrote.
• Picking somebody for Animatronic Angela Lansbury to murder and then picking somebody for her to pin it on when she solves the crime.
• The fine line between true and false.
• The fine line between foot and floor.
• Desert-eyed, rentless strong men pasted to stars already.
• A source of praise for the patriarchy.
• Addled by landlords.
• Whether being pasted to the stars is good.
• The elbow of the topics.
• Earthworm Jim.
• A muscular goofball earthworm.
• Whether you can say "groovy" and still be angry.
• A strict no-sequels policy.
• Not the thing you're here to talk about.
• George "The Fat Man" Sanger.
• Wall-E but a Roomba but also one of those 90s wireless phone cradles.
• Games you can play for free on the web.
• All the good times we had at Blockbuster Video renting movies from Blockbuster Video.
• How public libraries still exist and offer more movies than your local Blockbuster Video had and they're free and you keep them for a month rather than two days but nobody gives a shit because libraries don't have branding or advertising.
• A perfect solution to a problem that everybody wants solved urgently.
• Weirdly buff creatures that should not be buff.
• Music band with animal companion solves mystery.
• The Dog & The Stoner & The Band & The Ghost.
• Queen Slug-for-a-Butt.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Stevie
• Avery
  • https://averyburke.bandcamp.com/

Topics:

• Collectable cheetos on Ebay
  • https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=rare+cheeto
• Japanese websites are stuck in the 90s. Any theories?
  • https://search.marginalia.nu/
• Medieval European and ancient Egyptian philosophy.
• Brad asks "Denatured alcohol: alcohol that has poison added to it to prevent people drinking it. What other things do we / could we intentionally pollute to restrict their usage?"
• The unusual puzzles of StarTropics.

Microtopics:

• Defining poop by its shape.
• The lava of the human body.
• The Content Distribution Baby growing up into a Content Distribution Man.
• An angry internet mob that won't say why they're angry so you just have to fix every problem until they go away.
• Legally changing your name to add a silent and invisible Bitcoin logo.
• Searching for collectible Cheetos on eBay.
• A Cheeto shaped like a lobster claw.
• Putting a Cheeto shaped like a cockatiel on eBay for months but nobody's buying so you give up and eat it.
• Whether there is a subculture of investors collecting rare Cheetos on eBay or if it's just a subculture of people listing Cheetos on eBay as a joke.
• heritageauctionsforcheetos.com
• Bidding $40,000 on a Cheeto shaped like Harambe when you have no intention of paying, because the worst that can happen is that your eBay score goes down by one point.
• Buying a penis-shaped collectible Cheeto for $1.40 but still waiting on it because it got caught up in escrow.
• Bidding on an eBay auction and walking away when you get outbid.
• Looking at collectible Cheeto auctions and then eBay won't stop trying to sell you posters of ladies canoodling.
• Cheeto misprints and their value on the collectors market.
• Arnold Schwarzenegger if his legs were joined together like a seal.
• The web sites we visited back before the internet had the power to reach into the real world and strangle it.
• A search engine optimized to return pages that are mostly static text.
• Loading the bottom of your web page with keywords.
• Keeping a designer on payroll so that every few years your interface can alternate between having gradients and being flat.
• Asking Jeeves things and he tells you the answers, like a modern day Delphi.
• Let's play: Flaming Hot Cheetos or Freezing Cold Cheetos?
• A cheerleader pyramid made of butlers.
• Scraping Wikipedia and formating the results like a book.
• A postcard with a picture of Kim Jong Un saying "Live, Laugh, Love."
• Pharaoh culture.
• A Canticle for Liebowitz.
• Medieval monks stumbling into a bomb shelter.
• Making an illuminated manuscript of instructions on how to build a bomb so you can give it to the Pope.
• The Learned Bede.
• The four dudes in your culture who can write and create original work.
• Kingdoms in medieval Europe, centered around the manors of rich noble Romans.
• Nearly everyone dying from the plague so all the public servants are in their early teens.
• Intelligible Forms.
• Aristotelean ideas about science.
• Going real alien.
• Ultra Rare Cheeto Shaped Like The Venerable Bede.
• The first dinosaur of Egypt.
• Inventing the razor because of your unsightly back hair.
• Waking up from anesthetic to find that the surgeon shaved body parts nowhere near the incision site, "because you're a hairy beast."
• First, do no hair.
• The Egyptian book of the Dead.
• The Egyptian conception of the afterlife, where you go underground and a guy with a crocodile head weighs your heart against the Feather of Truth and if your heart balances, you get to sit in a long line with your male predecessors for eternity, and that's the best possible outcome.
• Religions competing to provide the best afterlife.
• When we as a species learned to attach afterlife outcomes to ethical behavior, as opposed to dying in battle.
• Having a dream once where all the great kings, after they die they go to the House of Dust and eat clay for eternity, and deciding that that's a fact. That's canon now.
• The nine parts of the soul.
• Being constantly surrounded, your whole life, by monuments to death big enough to see from space.
• Adding a scent to natural gas so that you can smell when it's filling your house.
• Whether antifreeze is sweet and if so can a cat taste antifreeze.
• How one might test whether cats can taste sweet.
• Tongue meat analysis: a great way to tell.
• The Inverted Qualia Problem.
• Asking a cat if it can taste sweet, and the cat asks "what does sweet mean" and you say "sweet my internal experience when I put these white crystals in my mouth" and the cat is like "I also have an internal experience when I put these white crystals in my mouth."
• A video game related topic.
• Trying to locate your missing uncle who has been abducted by aliens.
• A video game NPC asking you for a password and to find it you can to have to dip the video game's manual in water in real life.
• An 80s video game puzzle that requires you to be familiar with solfege to solve it.
• How you could get away with a lot more bullshit back in the 80s.
• The experience of suddenly realizing that it's the piece of paper.
• Going into a portable trailer made up like a cool bachelor pad and noticing that you don't have a reflection in the mirror and upon further examination realizing that the mirror is actually a window into the same room reversed, down to the clock running counterclockwise.
• Sneaking irrelevant puzzles into someone else's room escape game.
• Forcing the employees of an escape room to escape an escape room of their own. (Jail.)
• The ultimate unrequited high five.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Stevie
  • https://www.hryx.net/
• Avery might be on Spotify.

Topics:

• BREAKING NON MAMMALIAN MILK NEWS: the Arapaima, the largest freshwater fish, feeds its young with a milky white substance that has a hormone found in mammal milk.
• Boats
  • https://www.vesselfinder.com/
  • https://twitter.com/sfships
  • https://twitter.com/Nature_Grrrl/status/1375168720495075338
• Angle Grinder Man
  • https://wiki.rlsh.net/wiki/Angle_Grinder_Man
  • https://wiki.rlsh.net/wiki/Bearman
• The Safety Dance, by Men Without Hats
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjPau5QYtYs
  • Unedited (syncable) commentary segment: https://youtu.be/NxucdoBgtSc
• Music generated by food
  • https://twitter.com/simongeist/status/1366072913301037057
• Ron Gallagher, who toured small clubs doing his famous brother's act, eventually resulting in a lawsuit and the estrangement of Leo Gallaher (the famous Gallagher) from his family

Microtopics:

• The miracle of life on this very special episode of Topic Lords.
• Fish milk.
• The pigeon milk t-shirt.
• Fish lactating out of their heads so the baby fish can swim through the milk cloud to improve their complexion.
• Photos of proud fishermen holding fish bigger than they are and drinking milk off of their heads.
• The top ten pores.
• The defensive pores millipedes use to shoot itchy silk at you like silly string.
• How if arachnids couldn't eat they'd die and how that's awesome actually.
• Solid state arachnids.
• The velvet worm.
• Painting so many enormous millipedes that your boyfriend goes to the pet shop to get you an enormous millipede to draw from life and he comes back with no millipedes but he does smell like almonds for a week.
• Creating a listener survey to see how many listeners made it past the topic about fish milk.
• Not naming the RRS Sir David Attenborough but throwing a bone to the internet by naming its little buddy boat that pops out Boaty McBoatface.
• Whether they're actually called pilots.
• Losing a whole boatload of rubber duckies so to this day rubber duckies are washing ashore along with disarticulated left feet.
• A Twitter bot that just says hello and goodbye to boats entering and leaving the San Francisco Bay.
• Tweeting at a boat to say "you're killin' it out there, boat" and being immediately suspended by moderation bots.
• Thousands of boat watchers in dinghies all over the ocean watching boat movement through binoculars and sending updates to vesselfinder.com via carrier pigeon.
• Birds that are constantly changing their names.
• How slough and slough are actually two different words.
• The rest of the boat.
• How snowplows get their names in Scotland.
• The top eight snowplow names in Minnesota.
• All the plow names that didn't make the cut.
• Plugging a hair dryer into the cigarette lighter and attaching it to your front bumper to melt the ice as you drive.
• A cop writing you a fix it ticket because your hair dryer cables are too tangled.
• Superheroes who make house calls.
• The police being completely unable to apprehend Angle Grinder man when his phone number and web site are totally public.
• Construction Luigi.
• Angle Grinder man and Wheel Clamp man both having the same publicity shot of doing a split and grinding the concrete.
• A mob of masked superheroes descending on you and beating you up while you try to drink a smoothie.
• Extreme Elvis.
• A superhero named Bear Man whose superpower is that he only eats salmon.
• Pouring one out for the Petoskey Batman.
• Trying to think of how The Safety Dance goes but all you can think of is the Humpty Dance.
• Getting a taste of Youtube's time-stretching algorithm and spitting it right back out.
• Really enjoying the tall grass.
• How to tell if somebody is running, frolicking or fleeing.
• An excellent prop stone wall with a bunch of old looking rocks.
• Extreme expressions of joy bursting with love as you walk through town screaming at everyone.
• Continuously jumping and smiling and not being sure which will tire you out first.
• S for safety.
• Putting a lute in the music video when there's no lute in the song.
• A split second of trenchant-seeming serious political commentary at the very end of this lighthearted music video.
• Chumbawumba turning out to be serious political artists.
• Going to genius.com to find out what The Safety Dance is really about.
• Claiming that The Safety Dance is not a nuclear protest song per se even though you don't really know what "per se" means.
• Drum hits triggered by popcorn pooping.
• The popcorn vessel.
• How all music is food-based if you think about it.
• How humans have been singing since they had mouths.
• Using popcorn as both a source of entropy and a tasty snack.
• Tracking down the source of experimental saxophone music in the subway so you can give them money and it turns out to be a squeaky belt in the escalator.
• The vegetable orchestra.
• Powering your synth rock band using a bank of potatoes.
• How potato-covered audio cables don't sound better than regular audio cables even though they are more delicious.
• The Gallagher Prime story.
• The Greek Tragedy of the Gallagher Bros.
• Hashtag let Leo work.
• Gallagher and Alf both being popular before we discovered what entertainment was.
• All the paperwork you need to fill out to put music on Spotify.

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Lords:

• Avery might be on Spotify!
  • https://averyburke.bandcamp.com/releases
• Stevie is at @hryx on Twitter, and hryx.net

Topics:

• In my home town of San Jose, CA there is a Statue of the serpent god Quetzalcoatl. It looks like a large piece of perfectly formed dog poop. Everyone calls it "the poop snake." Let's talk about bad public art.
• Some paleontologists think that T-Rex used its tiny arms to help it get up after sleeping. I wish I had a pair of tiny arms to help me get up after sleeping.
• Doom 1.0's proto-VR mode
• John asks "Philosophical questions and concepts you independently discovered as a child regardless of how well-equipped you may or may not have been to explore them in depth."
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convolution_reverb

Microtopics:

• Putting your album on Spotify.
• Demanding your barista debate you and call him a coward.
• Reading about the philosopher who owns a coffee shop and debating them about ancient Roman tax codes for hours without buying anything.
• Going into a coffee shop just to prove a point.
• The hypothesis that the worse someone is at reading, the better they are at hearing and pronunciation.
• Inventing a time machine so you can be in the San Jose town square when the sculptor uncovers the obsidian poop snake.
• A statue of a ragdoll in a running pose with a realistic baby face superimposed on its stomach.
• A bust of Jesus made out of marshmallow Peeps.
• Trying to depict a half moon in 3D and ending up with a toenail clipping.
• The Pumpkin Fucker.
• A statue of a man being hit in the head with a bottle thrown by a babies flying biplanes.
• The statue at the border of Berkeley and Oakland they put there to remind everybody that Berkeley is us and Oakland is them.
• Being halfway through the Museum of Severed Body Parts when you decide you've had enough.
• The Dunning Kruger effect turning out to be fake.
• A strange way to find out that you have to stop being smug in this particular way.
• A T-rex curled up like a kitten.
• A T-rex sleeping hanging upside down like a bat.
• Dino Riders.
• Getting your wish for an extra pair of arms to help you get out of bed at night, but not being sure where to install them.
• The purpose of Grimace's second set of arms.
• Hiring a large unhappy looking purple guy to be your chain restaurant spokesperson.
• Hearing that the t-rex used his tiny arms to get up after sleeping and stealing t-rex arms from the local Natural History museum so you can use them to get out of bed.
• Deciding not move to the countryside and not heist any more after reading that paleontologists no longer think the t-rex uses its arms to get up from sleeping.
• The movie ending when the protagonists decide to cancel the movie's production.
• A topic you didn't write down.
• A reference to the lord because he's the lord.
• The Keck Cave.
• Some people paying thousands of dollars for a VR setup when these lab mice get it for free.
• Going to a mall in the early 90s and putting on a terrible VR headset that's guaranteed to make you throw up or your money back.
• The two independent promises of early 90s VR, one of which came to fruition decades ago.
• Connecting three monitors over an ipecac network.
• Accidentally saturating the network with packets so that nobody else can use it.
• A networked video game interpreting any incoming packets as a new game state regardless of their provenance.
• VR coming to prominence in the 90s after the Garbage Pail Kids made puking mainstream.
• The R-Zone.
• A VR setup that only shows images to one eye.
• The R-Zone chip tune rendition of the Daytona USA theme.
• Writing a program to convert MIDI music into a monophonic square wave and just accepting its output as the best possible result.
• Asking your parents for Marble Madness and they buy you the Tiger Electronics version of Marble Madness.
• A d-pad dressed up to look like a trackball, to fool your mom.
• Well-designed games that fit within the constraints of the medium.
• A Game and Watch game revealing its final boss by unlocking the hinge that lets you fold the LCD screen together like a Mad Fold-In.
• Barcode Battler.
• A slot to swipe cards.
• Trying to find the best barcode to swipe to create the swolest Barcode Battler.
• Doctoring barcodes with a sharpie by making the Beef Bar thicker.
• Learning to read barcodes by sight.
• Bleeping out a story with the R-Zone Daytona USA theme if it turns out you've already heard the story before.
• Convincing a barista to sign up for your Bitcoin wallet software so you can pay for your coffee in Bitcoin.
• Putting up QR codes of your coffee shop's menu all around the city so curious people can scan your QR code and be like "oh, luckily I was looking for a coffee shop, I wonder if this one is nearby."
• Tattooing a QR code of your coffee menu on your arm.
• Inventing the philosophical concept of the toothbrush and thinking "nah, that'd never work."
• Staring at the bathroom tiles while you invent the Pythagorean Theorem.
• Independently inventing the philosophical concept of Alf.
• Alf's real name in the Alf lore.
• Seeing Alf mourn the destruction of his home planet and realizing that one day everyone you know will die.
• A real rip-the-bandaid-off approach to introducing the concept of mortality.
• Alf Clausen, the composer of the ALF theme song.

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