• JP
  • https://jplebreton.com/
• Styger
  • https://www.sf.gov/readysf

Topics:

• Is "Non-Super" Mario an alternate state of consciousness or identity, or merely an alternate physical state?
• "Hot defensive bee ball" + bees in general
• Solving all 24,976,511 5x5 nonograms
  • https://pixelogic.app/every-5x5-nonogram
• Poem Seen in a Motel Fan by Alberto Blanco
  • https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/-_x1pv5l.jpg
• Werecreature logistics
• "The Ball is Back." Discuss.

Microtopics:

• The World of Video Games
• Your favorite granola coming back in stock.
• Working to make the world a slightly better place every day.
• Weird frustrating tethering.
• Levels that are about hauling ass.
• Being on the same train as someone for a few stops.
• The small version of yourself that you become when you lose your mushroom.
• Whether Small Mario has access to all of Super Mario's memories.
• What was the authorial intent of Alice growing bigger and smaller.
• Whether Small or Big Mario is the original default.
• Mario accumulating power and becoming an enormous hulking beast.
• Designing a level to support multiple player scales.
• Game series that have been both 2D and 3D platformers.
• Small Mario eating a mushroom and teleporting into a pocket dimension, swapping in Big Mario.
• Japanese hornets in an evolutionary arms race with Japanese honey bees.
• Bees forming a tight clump around a hive invader to make them uncomfortably warm.
• A baseball sized mass of bees smothering a huge horrible wasp.
• Touring beehives and giving seminars about the hot defensive bee ball.
• A multi-disciplinary bullshit operation.
• Enjoying your job.
• The degree to which they waggle.
• Bees having a dance-off to determine where to live.
• Extending the bee dance language to teach them orbital dynamics so they can find pollen sources in space.
• Candy that smells like a bee alarm pheromone.
• The NPC in Curse of Monkey Island who explains that merengue is made of eggs.
• What they call being "slashdotted" nowadays.
• Doing 15 puzzles and taking satisfaction in being 15 puzzles closer to not being able to play this game any more.
• Web sites: they shouldn't scale.
• Putting every 5x5 nonogram in the Library of Congress.
• Humanity dedicating all of its resources to solve every 6x6 nonogram.
• The 100 people in the world whose brains are tricked by this kind of fake work.
• The most interesting three-digit numbers.
• What happens when we run out of nonograms??
• The kayfabe of the community doing every 5x5 nonogram over and over again
• A convex mirror, a fisheye, a golden dome.
• Taking comfort in the continued existence of observers.
• Having all the resources to grow as a person but none of the incentives.
• Your little chunk of humanity's future.
• Things can get better but also they can get worse.
• The City Lights Pocket Poets Anthology, 60th Anniversary Edition.
• The official City Lights typeface.
• A dignified serif.
• A poem is when you do something interesting with typefaces.
• How to distribute your poem that does something interesting with fonts.
• Lycanthropy booths and other werewolf accommodations.
• It's not a disability but they still accommodate you.
• Seasonal Mania.
• Humans brains being affected by the sun and moon in ways we don't fully understand.
• Hospital intake numbers that correlate with the lunar cycle.
• What's the deal with the ball being back?
• A flying silver ball that sucks your brains out with a fork.
• Doing what you do just because.
• The ball: it has to be back.
• Watching an 80s horror movie and thinking "surely someone has made a Doom level of this"
• Inventing perfectly mirrored silver spheres entirely independently from ray tracers.
• Reporting back when you are further along on your Phantasm journey.
• Not being on the Internet because you're hanging out with the bees instead.

Support Topic Lords

• JP
• Styger

Topics:

• Wouldn't mind hearing Jim's thoughts on the recent Super Mario Bros Wonder video
• Souls departing / cartoon ghosts
• You're supposed to use a "spacer" with inhalers now
• Probably not a full topic but I finally ate that apple I was hyped for in my fist Topic Lords appearance
• Questions for a more experienced musician about learning to play piano + songwriting
• How do we teach our children to pirate?

Microtopics:

• The flu shot.
• Your TV patching itself.
• Going wading in a bog until laundry is invented.
• Dying of smoke inhalation until someone invents the chimney.
• A topic for Jim.
• Soliciting Mario opinions.
• Murdering an 80s kid with Mario footage.
• Squat anime Link.
• Mario with a grappling hook.
• Mario with asynchronous co-op partners.
• The new Mario game bringing the real freak shit.
• Developer quality of life.
• The unfortunate mythology of the industry.
• Getting to the moon more sustainably.
• Mike Mika's Donkey Kong gender swap mod.
• Big globs of ragu flying out of rotoscoped pixel men.
• The evolutionary dynamic range of AAA games.
• The boringness of violence.
• Realistic present day modern warfare.
• Making garbage that makes the world worse forever.
• Wanting to see your medium grow.
• A puzzle platformer using a first person shooter interface.
• Reaching a little bit for a different thing.
• Dealing a little bit of damage to a wall.
• A door turning a corpse into a squished blood paste sprite.
• Pikmin 3 as the most honest war game.
• No Dead Pikmin Speed Run.
• Getting more stuff back to your onion.
• Revisiting game mechanics from throughout the series.
• Outgrowing your childhood diseases.
• A big plastic cylinder the size of a breath.
• Audio iconography saying "look at this dickhead"
• A bong for your inhaler.
• All the surfaces between the air and your bronchial tubes.
• A major change in inhaler technology.
• Putting a bunch of programmer time into making conference calls sound good.
• Respironix Optichamber Diamond.
• Algorithms to cancel out the Mentos Jingle.
• Finally trying the new apple varietal on your birthday.
• Haphazard produce sections.
• Heapsorting apples.
• This apple is going to make you its bitch.
• Bad mealy apples in the 80s.
• Banana lore.
• As Seen In Snopes: Verified Not Bullshit Fruit.
• Getting the gist of a song and being able to do your own thing with it.
• Making noises that sound like nice music.
• Learning to play guitar while waiting for your maps to compile.
• Edly's Music Theory for Practical People.
• Learning to which suspicious-looking websites to trust.
• The Golden Age of Scams.
• oldversion.com
• Spiffy new Windows NT computers.
• Streaming services that you refuse to give money to.
• Doers of Game Piracy.
• Public opinion turning on piracy and copyright.
• Information literacy.
• The surviving websites where you don't mind being found.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Styger
• JP
  • http://vectorpoem.com/

Topics:

• Comestibles as fan fiction
• The most unexpected CD to be launched from the face of the Cenobite from Hellraiser 3 that launches CDs out of his face.
  • https://cenobite.fandom.com/wiki/CD
• I got a mandolin slicer for Christmas from someone who was afraid to use it, and I am also afraid to use it.
• Ghostbusters, by Ray Parker Jr.
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe93CLbHjxQ
  • Bustin'. https://youtu.be/0tdyU_gW6WE
  • You Could Stop at Five or Six Stores https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7T1OHha9agg
  • Jeffrey Tambor Is NOT the Guy From "Ghost" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVLWybF_pwo
  • JoJo: Trick with cigarettes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJwD8q-OXLQ
• Oldest food you've eaten. ie oldest substance or object you've consumed.
  • https://youtu.be/Ga5JrN9DrVI
• Do pigeons love nacho cheese?
• Here's an alphabetical list of every move in every Mario game, from "1,000-Fold Arms – Paper Mario: The Origami King" to "Zero Laser – Super Smash Bros. Brawl."
  • https://www.mariowiki.com/List_of_special_moves
  • A. How would you fix this list?
  • B. Who wants to do a podcast series where we rank them all?

Microtopics:

• Attack the Block.
• Movies where a delineated area is involved in some kind of fight.
• Lord quality: trying to keep it high.
• Cooking dinner as a fusion of the cuisines of the two countries that you are about to watch play a sport.
• White game designers in the 70s deciding that there isn't anything spicier than paprika in this astonishing fantasy world.
• Doing some home cooking and inventing a new sandwich in the style of the McDonald's fish fillet.
• The $100 cheese steak.
• A chef getting famous by serving incredibly high end Big Macs to rich people.
• Each bottle of Tabasco tasting uniform even though they're all composed of peppers grown in many different countries.
• How to explain cenobites to Thomas Jefferson.
• A transporter accident aesthetic.
• Not liking the music in the club so you turn the DJ into a cenobite with a CD drive for a mouth.
• Supertramp's Breakfast in America.
• All known AOL installer CD-ROMs originating with the cenobite who launches CDs out of his face.
• A CD that was killed by Mountain Dew.
• The cenobite with a CD drive for a face launching Xenogears disc 3 at you.
• Xenogears disc 3 for Super Smash Bros.
• Sympathy for the developers of Xenogears and in fact of any video game.
• Novelty CD shapes.
• CD-ROMs cut to the size of business cards with your portfolio on them.
• Destroying a slot loading CD drive by putting a small or oddly shaped CD in it.
• Learning to trust yourself to be around sharp knives.
• Strapping a mandolin slicer to yourself like a keytar.
• A great spooky house under the freeway.
• A house made of neon tubing like the ghost ship at the end of Monkey Island.
• Telekinesing the furniture.
• Being haunted by ghosts that are clearly just a couple dudes in t-shirts.
• Getting a bunch of B-list celebrities to shout "Ghostbusters" and act scared.
• Getting movie footage for your music video by pointing a video camera at the movie screen.
• Finding synergies between disparate elements of pop culture.
• Bleh hands.
• Slimer with a dozen cocktail weenies in his craw.
• Reaching a compromise that will allow Ray Parker Jr. to haunt your home in peace.
• The Ghostbusters hiring spectral Ray Parker Jr. to haunt folks and drum up business.
• Vincent Schiavelli's filmography.
• A Ghostbusters/Columbo crossover episode.
• The trick where Chevy Chase eats a cigarette.
• Slimer always believing that he ate the whole thing.
• Food age.
• Eating extremely old cough drops.
• Not being able to tell if cough drops have gone bad because they always taste like that.
• Asking someone with a philosophy degree whether cough drops are a food.
• Accidentally taking enough philosophy classes to qualify for a degree and someone tracks you down to hand you your philosophy degree like a subpoena.
• Bog cheese.
• Whether anyone has successfully eaten millennia-old frozen mammoth meat or if it all turned into black goo.
• Several thousand year old tomb honey.
• Unboxing and eating military rations on video.
• Eating hardtack from the American civil war in 2016.
• Being extremely upbeat about rancid meat.
• How to tell if vacuum sealed food has botulism.
• Having the vocabulary to describe all the different ways food can go bad.
• Trying to buy civil war hardtack on eBay and bidding on a pile of rocks.
• The most pigeon-dense place you've lived.
• Taking incredible risks for a single cheeto.
• Whether nacho cheese is incredibly beautiful to a tetrachromat.
• Nacho cheese as a nest building materials.
• Global incidence of human tetrachromacy.
• Space photos recolored into the visible spectrum so humans can look at them.
• Pointing a spectroscope at nacho cheese to figure out what pigeons see.
• The world's tiniest superpower.
• How to grow up in America without having played a bunch of Mario games.
• List of soups.
• Sitting at your Wizard's Desk for too long and getting Wizard's Foot.
• Fan wikis taking the shape of fan patience.
• Begging the wiki editors to turn this list into a normalized database table.
• An exhaustive list of games in which Mario can jump.
• An exhaustive list of games in which Mario can't jump.
• Mario visiting San Francisco.
• The Golden Gate Bridge existing in the Mario multiverse.
• Japan fitting perfectly in the Super Mario Bros. 3 universe, because Japan is also a magical foreign land I've never visited.
• The alternate reality where Mario Odyssey depicted world tourism in a hyper-realistic fashion.
• Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 as a fictionalized depiction of an Olympics that never happened.
• ESPN broadcasting CPU vs. CPU basketball matches in NBA 2K.
• Linking to a web site but not encouraging people to go there.

Support Topic Lords

• JP recommends Esperpento. http://esperpentotapasrestaurant.com/
• Styger recommends Esperpento and Yamo. https://www.theinfatuation.com/san-francisco/reviews/yamo

Topics:

• 1:52 A brief history of JP using "Lords" as a comedy word, 2008-present, and why British people will probably never "get" this quasijoke.
• 9:00 Emergency preparedness!
  • The SFFD neighborhood emergency response team: https://sf-fire.org/neighborhood-emergency-response-team-nert
• 16:55 The apple with a launch date. https://story.californiasunday.com/cosmic-crisp-apple-launch
• 23:15 Larry asks: "Are there horses"
  • Miniature horses as service animals: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=miniature+therapy+horse&ia=images&iax=images
• 28:39 Being an amateur naturalist from another part of the country.
  • Sneakers: navigating San Francisco by sound. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuIheGaiFLM
  • "Watch Dogs 2: Touring San Francisco's Famous Landmarks"
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F9_l19j4XY
• 43:15 What makes some hotels scarier than others?
  • "It should be illegal for horror movies to advertise." https://twitter.com/okexactly/status/1185756975612727297?s=20
  • "If you make that film as a bleak drama, then we’re making it for like, an audience of three. So what might be a deterrent to an audience in one genre suddenly becomes a virtue in another, and it just felt like a no-brainer to channel that through a horror-movie filter." https://www.vulture.com/2018/06/hereditarys-ari-aster-breaks-down-his-upsetting-film.html
  • Scratch and sniff feelie in Leather Goddesses of Phobos. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leather_Goddesses_of_Phobos

Microtopics:

• Hypothesizing about how much business your internet review gets a small business.
• A restaurant in San Francisco somehow not going out of business.
• Reassuring meme carriers that they are still good people.
• Majestic yet ridiculous muscledudes.
• Dreaming a GDC talk.
• Taking the "lord" title seriously because you are probably ruled by literal lords.
• Our sister podcast across the pond, Topic Senators.
• Distinguishing lords from non-lords by their shoulder armor.
• Preppers going from being a joke to an aspiration.
• Realizing that literally none of your skills would help you in the apocalypse.
• Drinking pee through a Life Straw and it still tasting like pee.
• California-branded disasters.
• Naming your produce via an Internet poll.
• Produce having a launch date.
• Lining up at Safeway for produce's midnight launch.
• Eating berries exclusive to your region.
• Believing horses still exist because you've seen them once.
• Being almost sure horses aren't a hoax.
• Inserting horses into the historical record.
• Duckbilled platypi being obviously bullshit.
• Every platypus having been secretly manufactured by the Tyrell Corporation.
• LA and San Francisco merging because Philip K Dick didn't predict rising construction costs.
• Finding out that miniature horses can be service animals.
• Service ponies in the soup aisle.
• Someone defacing an explanatory sign to make people believe that horses can be service animals.
• Miniature ponies being grandfathered in.
• Everyone choosing the mockingbird as their state bird.
• Being annoyed that trees are the wrong trees.
• Being young enough for them to just be trees I guess.
• The sky being the wrong sky.
• Seeing freeway exit signs for Jupiter.
• The Golden Gate Bridge getting wrecked.
• A story being grounded in geography.
• Stepping out of the movie theater into the neighborhood the movie you saw was set in and feeling like you're still in the movie.
• Everyone's effective hometown being San Francisco because that's where every movie is set.
• Getting experience points for taking selfies.
• The Coit Tower secretly being a giant hologram full of horses.
• The arbitrariness of what makes a hotel scary.
• The horror of a hotel room possibly having bedbugs.
• Not being scared by a movie because you chose to watch it.
• The cute robot doing all the murders.
• The TV edit of Robocop somehow being even more traumatic.
• Sneaking an art house movie into your horror movie.
• No longer being affected by supernatural horror but being terrified of movies with car accidents.
• The implicit social contract that horror movies shouldn't address the horror of real life.
• The ethics of advertising horror movies.
• The ad that places a horrible idea in your mind and promises closure/the antidote if you pay for the full movie.
• Buying a tub of baked beans at the concession stand and feeling good for five minutes.
• Refilling the essential oil cartridge for gunfire.
• Not wanting to smell Bioshock, or most video games really.

Support Topic Lords