• Tim
• Chris

Topics:

• Noodles?
• Everything and More (by DFW), the "impoverishment of the question",and free will
• Choosing an integrator
  • https://gafferongames.com/post/integration_basics/
• Lucky Jim (old song)
  • https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/U7zR1RCa.png
• Collaborative music as a game design problem (see: skill gap, handicaps, engagement, peripheral participation)

Microtopics:

• Celtic Music and Corgis.
• Tim, a figure shrouded in mystery.
• Topic Monologues.
• Gluten-free noodle straws.
• Bucatini: imagine a Red Vine but made of pasta.
• Replacing food service workers with clockwork automata made of noodles that have been hardened into gears and springs.
• Giant fusilli as playground equipment.
• Noodleness and pastitude.
• Whether gnocchi is a pasta. What about cauliflower gnocchi?
• Unleavened Carrot Cake.
• Indomie: the number one selling noodle on Earth.
• Good spices: they can work in a broth.
• Soupertaster: Jim eats soup alone while talking to a volleyball with a bloody handprint on it.
• Learning math by starting with incredibly abstract unmotivated ideas.
• Some Bottomless Pits are Deeper than Others.
• Approaching a question by interpreting it as a question that if answerable.
• The significant of the perception of free will.
• How a closed system can produce multiple different outcomes.
• What happens when we decide we don't have free will.
• A completely deterministic system that has a sensation of free will.
• Taking as much time as it takes to read a book.
• Shooting the Moon (in real life)
• Taking all the bad cards and winning.
• Becoming disciplined about time
• What a modern feature phone can do.
• Dividing your day into blocks and spending them.
• The period in your life when you lived in Burlingame.
• Getting an incredibe amount of work done during your hour and a half commute.
• Topic Lords or Plug Lords?
• Something you'll be glad you did tomorrow.
• Integration Basics.
• Explicit Euler vs. Semi-Implicit Euler.
• The pros and cons of RK4.
• The physics system behind Drawn to Life.
• What it takes to be an old song.
• Hadestown and The Instigator.
• The Hadestown Tiny Desk Concert.
• How to play music with other people in a way that accounts for skill gaps.
• Going to the Starry Plough to play the penny whistle.
• Musicians sitting in a circle and talking until someone starts playing something and everyone else joins in.
• Joining in on a song you've never heard before.
• Playing Mary Had a Little Lamb at 40 BPM.
• Making a slow song more interesting by adding ornamentation.
• Star of the County Down.
• Different ideas that come out when you play music at half speed.
• Lark Camp.
• The person who hands out the cheat sheet with all the popular tunes and their chord progressions.
• Sorting tunes by frequnecy.
• The bad things about Irish sessions, from a game design perspective.
• Learning a song by reading the notation vs. learning it by playing it for 30 years.
• Star Above the Garter.

Support Topic Lords

• Tim
• Ben
  • https://linktr.ee/zerofiftyone

Topics:

• My Thursday Night
• The daunting thought of: there is so much music that exists now - it's more than likely that your favorite song in the world is out there and you'll never find it in your lifetime.
• I've been working on a small game in my spare time and I never want to ship it. I just want to have friends playtest forever.
• Fine Feather
  • https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/vyy9So4K.jpg
• The terrifying field of Hostile Nuclear Architecture
  • https://vm.tiktok.com/ZGJmB4MFj/
• Do you have 10³ tabs open in Chrome?
• In Super Mario World, some secrets reward you by skipping levels and some reward you by adding new levels. Make up your mind! If the level add guy and the level subtract guy had just talked to each other they could've just left the levels as they were and saved everybody a lot of work.

Topics:

• Having something to unplug.
• Continuing to take care of your children.
• Going to see the Mountain Goats for your birthday.
• Sleep meds that don't interact well with grapefruit.
• Caring for a newborn for a month and then suddenly having a nice meal.
• A cocktail of factors.
• Finding an amazing new artist you become obsessed with for the next few months.
• Listening to music while you work.
• A poster containing the source code for Pitfall.
• How to keep finding new music in your thirties.
• Phonograph.
• Auto-brewery syndrome but for methamphetamines.
• A good song that everybody likes.
• Fear of stories.
• Refusing to see a movie because you're afraid of what it'll make you feel.
• Going camping in the woods in order to watch a movie.
• Reliving your past experience in memory.
• The soap operas that your ex's mom would watch.
• Buying sheet music and playing it yourself in anticipation of when the orchestra comes to your town to play you the real thing.
• Sheet music as a pre-release hype document.
• Reading the manual of your new video game on the car ride home.
• Crestfallenness.
• Listening to a record with somebody.
• Rogue topics that keep threatening to come up.
• Playtesting as a way to get to know your friends better.
• Approaching the things that are valuable to you through the lens of an illusion that you know is an illusion.
• Lockdown hobbies.
• How to enjoy hobbies.
• Starting a Youtube series called "Ben sucks at baking" so you get a bunch of followers who will be disappointed if you get good at baking.
• Dehydrating beer to get yeast out of it.
• Making beer out of the yeast that's just hanging out in the air around you.
• Gordy and the Monster Moon.
• Nine year olds who are incredible at climbing because they refuse to eat fish.
• A sparrow showing you its whole ass.
• Whether sparrows are detested.
• How to dispose of nuclear waste.
• Attempts to make you hind brain think "I need to leave here immediately."
• The meme of the skeleton playing the trumpet.
• A field of Aztec death whistles activated by the wind blowing.
• Trying to save the lives of people who live far in the future.
• Speaking across time.
• Whether this place is a place of honor.
• An ADHD Shame Graveyard of Browser Tabs.
• Going over all your browser tabs to see which ones remain relevant to you.
• Details of how one bathes oneself that we never discuss in public.
• A web browser that'll tell you "no, I think you've had enough tabs"
• A brick that gives you a key.
• How Elden Ring is structured.
• A game that is a foray into a new design space that demonstrates how not to solve these design problems.
• A scavenger hunt to find the next Topic Lords guest.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• John
  • robohunkx on Twitter, robohunk on most social media platforms
• Tim
  • Jamestown+
  • The Pathless
  • https://github.com/westquote/squidtasks

Topics:

• America's self-denying culture of compartmentalization
• Deus Ex: Revision is a mod for Deus Ex that changes maps just enough that it feels like a new game without losing what made the original special.
• Napster pranks and more generally, fun with the early internet's poor security
• The Last Titan
  • https://topiclords.com/articles/the-last-titan
• Topic Lords update: A review of the Gros Michel (aka "Big Mike") banana
• If AI can tell better stories than you, is it still worth telling them (and why)?

Microtopics:

• Planning around time zone differences.
• What bots are left after the bot purge.
• Text parsers that make it sound like you have silly accents.
• C++ Coroutines for Everyone!
• Playing the Frog Fractions soundtrack on mandolin at Jim's wedding reception.
• Seeing friends catch up.
• Waiting until the weekend to celebrate your birthday because weekdays are not for fun things.
• Topicless Topic Peasants.
• Planning to do things all week so you have things to look forward to all week.
• How to schedule a movie night.
• How to hang out with your friends on weekends.
• Hanging out with your friends once a week because your internet audience demands it.
• Setting traps for yourself so that you involuntarily have fun.
• How you felt in the Fall of 2014.
• Embracing making bad things.
• Making bad art and dropping it in the company Slack.
• April cameos.
• What to do when Jim makes a mistake.
• Watching a 3D film on a 2D viewing apparatus.
• New super duper secret places to sneak around in.
• Lay D Denton.
• Let me tell you about my Napster pranks.
• A very specific example of Napster interactions.
• Authorless messages.
• Renaming your band's music to have the same name as popular songs so people will download it on Napster.
• A very benign internet security prank.
• Telling your friend that you've made an AI chatbot but actually it's you typing the replies and she falls in love with the AI and wants to talk to it all the time.
• Philly Boys.
• Taking bets on whether any given domain name leads to porn.
• Writing a cease and desist letter to the owner of a domain name that you want, claiming that you need it for your nonexistent porn company.
• Getting out of legal jeopardy by constructing a gay porn web site.
• An old god, his glory lost to memory.
• A computer named Roboticus that you can't bear to decommission.
• Looking on a diorama of dusty objects that represent your lost past.
• Banana history.
• A banana that you've never tasted.
• Buying fruit from the Miami Fruit Organization.
• The shocking flavor of electrolytes.
• Fat Mike vs. Big Mike.
• Quantifying 45 apple varietals without realizing that there is also wide variance within varietals.
• Having to eat 10,000 bananas before you can safely say you know what they taste like.
• Eating a bunch of types of bananas and realizing that they all pretty much taste the same.
• Cotton candy flavored grapes.
• Strawberries the size (and flavor) of a human heart.
• Grapples vs. grapples.
• A banana that is certainly a banana that you can eat.
• The time Deep Blue glitched out and made a random chess move and Garry Kasparov couldn't figure it out and resigned the match.
• Teaching a computer how to get flummoxed.
• The purpose of making art.
• What about Mario coins?
• K-Mart music.
• Smarty Pants, Brain Quest and Booty Blocks.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Tim
  • https://giantsquidstudios.com/
• Nathan
  • https://twitter.com/MommysBestGames
  • http://mommysbestgames.com/website_store/index.html

Topics:

• Are there any negatives to having an easy mode that takes the player through the entire game? Should the "best ending" be locked somehow in easy mode?
• Why are we drawn to art that updisturbs, depresses, or scares? (And yes, "catharsis" is a weak answer!)
• How Super Mario 35 (and maybe battle royales in general) solved the worst unsolvable problem of multiplayer
• John asks: "Licensing issues and content guidelines have led to a homogenized aesthetic on YouTube that leads to all produced-in-bulk videos for children having the same sound effects and music."
• What's different (better or worse) about playing games with kids? Do you play games with your kids?
• What sports would be more interesting with low/0 gravity? Or with higher gravity?
• Tim's vegan commune cooking disaster stories

Microtopics:

• Shoot 1-Up.
• Controlling all your spaceships at the same time.
• The big thing about Galaga.
• The forever scrolling timeline of new content that you're fed all the time.
• The funniest Boris Vallejo painting.
• Being bummed to find out that Boris Vallejo was looking at people and painting them rather than just imagining them.
• Name-dropping Tom of Finland.
• Staring at pink blobs all the time.
• Making sure you're not wearing your good socks because they're about to be blown off.
• Looping the game twice with no deaths and no bombs.
• Jamestown.
• Being forced to do something unpleasant to feel a sense of satisfaction when you are given what you want.
• Not supporting an easy mode as well as you should have because you assumed those people could just play co-op.
• Bringing in a playtester who has never used a mouse before.
• Not valuing your own fake accomplishments as much because other people accomplished the same fake accomplishments more easily.
• Save the Date, by Chris Cornell.
• Having to wake up to play Super Hard mode.
• The necessity of hand-tuning all the enemy AI in shoot em up difficulty levels.
• Psychoanalyzing the entire human race at once.
• People turning to media to experience strong emotions.
• Whether it's easier to elicit good or bad emotions in the viewer.
• The safety of seeing a horrible thing that will definitely never happen to you.
• Being unusually upset by the Boston Marathon bombing because you recently ran a marathon.
• Knowing that an album is going to fuck you up because it is too proximate, and choosing not to listen.
• A scary movie taking months to purge from your brain.
• The relief of when the demons show up.
• People lining up at a party to play That Dragon Cancer.
• How movies basically never hurt children.
• Wanting to know what's in the box but also knowing that what's in the box will ruin your life for months.
• How you lose half the time in multiplayer games.
• Super Mario 35.
• The various ways video games can make you feel like you're winning harder.
• Taking turns feeling good at video games.
• We Didn't Playtest This At All
• Everybody choosing a number and everybody who chose 5 being the winner.
• Trying to win at Scrabble based on style points.
• Coming up with as many secondary win conditions as possible so that everybody can win even if they lost.
• Choosing a safeword to indicate that it's time to switch topics.
• Making all your own opulently animated scenes.
• Playing games as a way to develop social relationships.
• Empowering your son to express himself even though he's making a shitty Pokemon deck.
• Finding non-combat activities to do with the Pokemon that are not very good at combat.
• Buying SNES Classic to play games with your son and then realizing that there are more worthwhile games to play than those that merely entertain.
• Games which give you value that you can take out into the world.
• Wanting to show your kid the good stuff so that they can have a better life than you did.
• Learning music theory by listening to Justin Bieber.
• Worrying that you'll pollute your kid's natural interests with your taste in video games.
• A very nice video game world for other people to explore.
• Staring at people and saying "papaya" until they're like "why do you keep saying papaya"
• Skateboarding in low gravity.
• Full contact basketball with trampolines.
• Immersion Blender Night.
• Immersion blended salad.
• Immersion blended vegan lasagna.
• Learning the hard way that flambe does not burn off that much of the alcohol.
• A gargantuan stock pot of chocolatey oatmeal that is far too salty for human consumption.
• Improvising around your cooking mistakes.
• Promising to talk about Paddington 2 next episode.
• Going to the Giant Squid web page and checking out Tim's bio.
• Barf-sealed copies of Pig Eat Ball.

Support Topic Lords

Lords this week:

• Tim made Jamestown and just shipped Jamestown+ on PC and Switch. http://jamestownplus.com/
• Kole makes podcasts at Duckfeed. http://duckfeed.tv/

Topics:

• 2:42 Cat trees for humans.
  • Ninja Warrior. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJPP7M1hQZE
  • "Find an American Ninja Warrior Gym." http://www.ninjawarriorgyms.com/
• 7:37 Non-analytical storytelling/writing (flash writing, story time, songwriting)
  • Alice's Restaurant. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m57gzA2JCcM
• 15:08 The ephemerality of AI Dungeon.
  • AI Dungeon: https://www.aidungeon.io/
  • AI Dungeon patreon: https://www.patreon.com/AIDungeon
  • Art breeder: https://artbreeder.com/
• 25:13 Brett asks: "The assertion that programming and in particular programmers are getting worse."
• 36:20 Sonder
  • "This Is Water." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI
  • "Laziness Does Not Exist" https://humanparts.medium.com/laziness-does-not-exist-3af27e312d01
• 47:48 What determines if an inanimate object (car, home, golf club) gets a proper name.
• 56:09 Fruity Cheezma
  • "Cheese Tea: It’s Real and It’s Spectacular" https://www.dinnerpartydownload.org/cheese-tea/
  • Orbitz (drink). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbitz_(drink)
  • Jim's Fruity Cheezma outcome: https://twitter.com/mogwai_poet/status/1210328506359414785?s=20

Microtopics:

• Releasing the same game over and over again because it keeps being your best move.
• Suffering through and finding the magic but still believing you shouldn't have had to suffer.
• Asking yourself what the problem is and breaking it down.
• Being here for topics.
• Understanding that the question you're asking is ridiculous but asking it anyway.
• What you want only existing for children because their needs are greater.
• Using adult-sized playgrounds for physical therapy.
• Using adult-sized playgrounds for physical therapy keeping those blades sharp.
• The through line from bouldering to Ninja Warrior to Super Mario Bros.
• Watching the first half of Full Metal Jacket and thinking the obstacle course looks really fun.
• Putting game show contestants in a video game for the viewers at home but the contestants themselves are just looking at a big green wall.
• Professional skaters having skate parks in their back yard.
• Doing American Ninja Warrior every day and getting a lot more miles on the tires.
• Tony Hawk getting away with skateboarding in a 50-year-old body because he's good enough to not faceplant all the time.
• Giving a skateboard to an average 50-year-old and saying "go for it buddy."
• Restarting civilization around your business plan.
• Making up stories for your children in real-time.
• Being a DM except nobody else gets a turn, you just keep going.
• Five years of daily practice to wake up your storytelling brain.
• Going to an Arlo Guthrie concert because you're old and go to Arlo Guthrie concerts.
• All of Arlo Guthrie's songs being twenty minute stories like Alice's Restaurant.
• Thinking that advice sounds wise for somebody else.
• David Lynch's book on storytelling turning out to actually be about Transcendental Meditation.
• Actually possibly having deep insights about the universe while being high on drugs.
• Writing a book by just writing down something you already said and it feeling like someone else wrote the book.
• Letting the story write itself and then taking credit for it.
• Having children because you want to become a great writer.
• Incurring $10,000 of hosting costs because you misconfigured your CDN.
• A text adventure telling you what you did but not telling you what happened as a result.
• Markov chain text generation.
• AI replacing musicians and ultimately most art.
• AI musicians giving you another album from your favorite band.
• Exploring AI generated music and sharing your unique discoveries.
• Seeing creative work as the last bastion of human work that AI can't take from us, but being wrong.
• Feeling wonder at the achievement but also complete dismay that we've made ourselves irrelevant.
• Basic income allowing us to look forward to the machines taking all our jobs.
• All the advantages of AI just turning into more profit for billionaires.
• Skating through a lucid fever dream and trying to make sense of the chaos, but it's really just chaos.
• AI Dungeon being a good improv partner but a terrible game.
• AI generated text being effectively sampled at an unknown granularity and having no idea if this is a unique sentence or if it's lifted wholesale from a Sonic fanfic.
• Programmers getting worse as a discipline vs. getting worse as people.
• Forcing everyone on Earth to participate in NaNoWriMo.
• Building software on top of a teetering stack of dependencies 1,000 feet high because your company probably won't last out the year.
• Programmers getting better in the same way speed metal guitarists are getting better.
• Just making the thing and not caring how you make it because it just doesn't matter.
• Not bothering working really hard to do the easy part really well because the hard part is what matters.
• Companies being possibly good at their focus and everything else being good enough at best.
• Some of your best friends being assholes.
• The best programmers you've met being super sociable and cooperative.
• Staying and asshole and flaming out because nobody wants to work with you or maturing and sanding off the rough edges and becoming more productive and less of a drag.
• Not being sure if your co-workers are nice to everyone or just you because you have seniority.
• The coming generation of programmers seeing programming as a hobby or a career rather than an identity.
• Blocking the guy driving too fast on the freeway but then it turns out the guy driving too fast was going to the hospital.
• Doing your best to live like people invented in storybooks.
• Realizing that everyone around you has lives just as complex and nuanced as you or anyone you know.
• The violence of walking past someone on the street and dismissing their entire context and history because you have no choice if you want to get on with your life.
• Projecting an arbitrary order onto the chaos and definitely being wrong.
• Definitely being wrong anyway so why not think a positive thing rather than a negative one.
• Changing how you see somebody by imagining them differently.
• Conceiving of a universe without yourself at the center.
• Flying off the handle because you've had shit piled on you all day and not because you dislike Kole specifically.
• Running late about 5% of the time you're driving and also being annoyed by about 5% of drivers going too fast because they're just irresponsible people.
• Working hard to build positive interactions and trying to see the best possible version of somebody.
• Instagram being a source of misery because you're comparing yourself to the prettiest people's prettiest moments.
• Comparing your backstage to someone else's front stage.
• Choosing to shape your world such that you're not walking around angry all the time.
• Having a boat and the boat having a name.
• Not giving your cat a name but permitting it to have a name.
• Anthropomorphizing the objects you rely.
• Calling it "the mud room" even though there's no mud and no room.
• Naming furniture that hurts you "kneebreaker charlie" and not hating it so much because it's a little bit funny.
• Thinking of an old car that's always breaking down as being like an old friend who's kind of a pain in the ass but you've been through so much together.
• Being happier loving things.
• A generic bunny holding an Easter Egg that nobody plays with until you give it a name.
• The only time you've bought a plant in your life being that time they put googly eyes on a cactus.
• Your roommate who took all the bows off of the presents under the tree and then shit on the floor.
• Not wanting to be the skin dad.
• Having animals to project love onto so your society is more placid and malleable.
• Cats being way more lovable than most human children.
• Empathizing with the kid crying on the airplane because you feel like crying too.
• The kid who's allowed to scream in the grocery store when if you screamed you'd get thrown out of the store or arrested.
• Putting hundreds of googly eyes on a Roomba because you can't just buy two googly eyes and calling it "Kos-ba."
• Putting two eyes on the outside of the Roomba and the rest on the inside because you don't want to freak out the squares.
• What's fruity, cheezma?
• Trying to get your friends to follow the script of your joke but they keep making their own jokes instead.
• Tweeting about there being no hits for "fruity cheezma" and now there being one hit for "fruity cheezma."
• The cheese tea rocking the boba world.
• Copping to a certain amount of midwestern provincialism.
• The probability of inhaling boba being very high but it's great though.
• Blowing a tapioca ball directly into the mouth of your enemy right as they're inhaling.
• The end of your boba beverage being like The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
• A dare than someone should not have taken and that someone having possibly been you.
• Cream cheese and fruit going together.
• The kind of logic you don't want to be applying to food.
• Putting all your old food combo ideas on the menu without testing any of them because Fruity Cheezma worked out somehow.
• Wanting peanut butter to work with sliced cheese because you can roll it up like a taquito.
• Figuring out that milk and Cheerios go together because they're both kind of off-white so next you try orange juice and Cheez-Its.
• Cheez-Its staying crispy in orange juice because they're so oily.
• A Cheez-It being named Arthur and loving its mother.
• The driver in front of you making a right turn on red from the third lane over because she was in a hurry to get to the library and walking up to her to ask for reparations.
• A telling being told or not being told.

Support Topic Lords