• Watson
• Wren

Topics:

• Faction design in historical strategy games
• Linguistics makes it easier and harder to name things
• You belong in SLUSD. What is SLUSD?
• The Cremation of Sam McGee
  • https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45081/the-cremation-of-sam-mcgee
• The magic systems of Brandon Sanderson

Microtopics:

• The Three-Body Problem (Not That One)
• Jade City; Jade Legacy.
• Making any non-creamy soup into a creamy soup.
• Boiling an entire civilization down to a concept simple enough to program.
• Getting to the end of the tech tree first and winning science.
• Greece as the origin of many of our modern ideas about government.
• Grand strategy games where you spend most of your time trying to not to be assassinated by your family.
• Dwarf Fortress except it's obsessed with the royal family.
• Hiring Charles Babbage to invent the analytical engine because otherwise all your game jams will have to be board game jams.
• Playing a TTRPG and having to name something so first you have to create thousands of years of linguistic history.
• The World Builder's Disease. (A.k.a. having a delightful hobby)
• What you might have named somebody back in Zelda Times.
• Developing a set of phonotactics so that you can name something plausibly.
• What is SLUSD?
• The webp of 3D model formats.
• Trans people: they belong in Ohio.
• Putting up a billboard and hoping people will look away from the road to see your content.
• What investigative journalists might do if investigative journalism still existed.
• Solving the SLUSD mystery.
• Reconstructing the history of civilization from the Topic Lords vaults.
• What did people with ADHD do before Topics?
• Strange things done in the midnight sun.
• Cremating Sam in the wreck of the Alice May.
• The secret tales of the Arctic trails that would make your blood run cold.
• A poet who mostly writes about burial rituals in the arctic circle.
• Stompin' Tom.
• Bits to Try if You Think You're About To Die.
• Supernatural small-town Alaska death promises.
• Why SETI@Home looked for three spikes.
• At what point to Doom clones become first-person shooters, and at what point do you become a conspiracy theorist for pointing out all these games are the same.
• Gandhi becoming so peaceful that he integer underflows.
• Video games as a way to cope with the outcome of civilization.
• Sanderson's four laws.
• A fictional branch of physics.
• Various metals that do various things.
• Consuming metal filings that have magical effects based on this funky diagram.
• Eating a burrito wrapped in aluminum foil.
• Coinshots shooting people with coins.
• Soothing and inflaming various emotions.
• The element of thinking about stuff in various kinds of ways, and its atomic number.
• Forcing a Mistborn to burn aluminum, as a prank.
• Creating a magic system by working backwards from the premise that tinfoil hats are effective in this universe.
• A fandom wiki. Made by fans. Not on fandom.com.
• Gradually revealing the rules of your system as they become relevant.
• Lit RPG.
• Whether fantasy and horror fiction would be better if it was more like a video game.
• Characters in a story who are trying real hard to level up.
• Establishing the reality of the fiction while also taking that reality to a very strange place.

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• Tyriq
• Watson

Topics:

• My sleep experience over the holiday
  • Esper says: "Cannabis can definitely help one get into a sleep state, but actually degrades the quality of sleep quite a bit. From personal experience my guess is this has to do with how it affects dreams, often precluding them from happening to begin with."
• Conlanging taught me how to judge good art
• Tate mode
• The Tyger, by William Blake
  • https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43687/the-tyger

Microtopics:

• Scrubbin' Trubble
• The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Leguin.
• Changing history by dreaming about it and having a hypnotherapist that's trying to change your dreams.
• Telling artists that you like them vs. telling them that you like your work.
• Learning how to take compliments.
• Three people who could have opinions.
• Spoilers for early January.
• Trying to sleep on an airplane and training yourself to be unable to sleep at all.
• A highly suboptimal experience.
• Untraining the fear of falling asleep on planes from your body.
• How to wear a neck pillow, maybe.
• Sleeping sitting up and your head nodding forward as you fall asleep.
• Neck pillow instructions dot PDF.
• How to transport a neck pillow.
• Hyperfixation on sleep and the consequences of not getting it.
• Mythbusters Mode.
• If you can't sleep, how helpful is it to pretend to be asleep?
• Being woken up by the sensation of all your senses shutting down as you fall asleep.
• Skipping your consciousness off of the surface of sleep.
• Getting super stoked when you're about to fall asleep and waking yourself up because you're so excited.
• Problems solved with more coffee vs. problems solved with more coffee tables.
• Lingthusiasm.
• Cursing yourself to hate a beloved movie series by watching it on a plane.
• Psychosomatic self-curses.
• Linguistics and conlangs.
• The guy everyone hires to con a lang for a movie.
• Judging things based on whether you like it vs. judging things based on whether it achieved the creator's goals.
• Learning a new framing and applying it to everything.
• Being aware of your frame and communicating your frame to the listener.
• Lojban.
• Lojban as a wholly unnatural way to speak in the same way that ballet is a wholly unnatural way to move.
• Decent and not unaesthetic.
• Trying to draw a picture without knowing how to hold a pencil.
• Birds with extra vocal tracts.
• Birdlangs.
• What if parrots evolved to be sentient, except in a fantasy world, because reasons.
• Ascertaining the borders of your caring.
• Brandon Sanderson doing Brandon Sanderson things.
• The IPA of sounds a human can perform live on a modular synthesizer.
• To create Hatsune Miku, you must first invent the universe.
• Horizontal vs. vertical scanlines.
• Designing a CRT that can scan either horizontally or vertically.
• Delta gun tubes with a triad of phosphor dots.
• Having a vertical monitor to display tall things.
• Page-shaped-pages.
• Games that ship as a rectangle on a web site.
• Black frame insertion.
• Do modern LCD displays have ghosting?
• A very intimidating challenge.
• A very fun nexus of art and programming.
• Tate Mode vs. Tate Modern.
• Tate your owl for science.
• Whether this poem predates the Great Vowel Shift.
• Mixing ands and ampersands.
• Capital Ampersand.
• Seeing an animal and realizing that this is it, this is the one that's meant to eat me.
• A glowing golden perfect human that everyone instantly hates and wants to eat.
• Whether you can invent a tiger in Dwarf Fortress.

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