88. The Horned Lizard's Final Defense
June 28th, 2021
1 hr 12 mins 47 secs
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Lords:
- Tyriq
- Ryan
Topics:
- What do animals know? Do they know things? How do we find out?
- Can we all just be adults and admit that invisibility sucks as a superpower?
- Where is the machine learning startup promising to fix the concert videos where the audience claps on 1 and 3
- Toxic by Britney Spears
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOZuxwVk7TU
- Unedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/x3eUVHdw54k
- What mundane tool/item/technology do you wish were irrelevant, and what would you replace it with?
Microtopics:
- Doing a perfect ollie your first time on a skateboard and then never skating again because you'll never top that.
- Cooking every single dish in the human culinary encyclopedia and then starving to death because you refuse to repeat yourself.
- Honor system rock paper scissors.
- Making video games, one of which is called Catacomb Kids.
- Naming your band one letter away from a common word so that your band is impossible to google.
- An extremely austere and dour change log, like in Great Expectations.
- Changing the "dragon breath" spell to "bear breath" because dragons aren't real but bears breathe fire.
- A grim window into the world in which we live, dragonless and dragon breath -less.
- A delicious treat for anyone who likes anise flavoring and salt.
- A giant human sized licorice in a wedding gown.
- Competing with nearby deer for the affections of the extremely salty licorice you're marrying.
- Spendinga lot of your mental energy trying to figure out animal cognition.
- Whether elephants worship the moon or in fact anything.
- Dogs doing the things dogs do even if they've never been taught by another dog.
- Where babies learn the things that their parents don't teach them.
- Babies smiling when they see a face even though they're not happy to see you.
- Baby reflexes that help parents bond with them during the time when they are hardest to love.
- How to be sure that animals think and feel and have memory when we can't even be sure for other humans.
- P-zombies.
- A dog's mental model of the world.
- The Far Side cartoon depicting a machine that translates dog barks into human speech.
- Whether animals have to know stuff.
- Meerkat accents.
- The mantis shrimp having an innate ability to see ghosts, and learning our language to tell us that we're stepping on ghosts all the time and we're covered in ectoplasm.
- A superpower that turns you invisible except for your eyes, so you're just a floating pair of eyeballs, not invisible at all, so you have to buy a pair of sunglasses to hide your eyes.
- Putting two of the lamest possible superpowers together in the same married couple.
- The lamest superpower that you would settle for.
- The superpower of getting up when the alarm rings and not having to hit snooze even once.
- The superpower of lactose tolerance.
- The superpower of having practiced a lot.
- Cutting a cantaloupe in half and the six of clubs is in there and the guy's like "yeah that's my card, but that cantaloupe was $9 at Whole Foods, thanks a lot."
- How to convince general audiences that they should care when in the measure to clap.
- Just assuming that audiences will be clapping in the wrong place so you add a single measure in 5/4 to your 4/4 composition to fix it.
- Playing a concert video where the video and audio are desynchronized by exactly half a measure.
- Inventing a snare drum that looks like a bass drum and vice versa, and filming a prank show where unsuspecting drummers play concerts with the inverted drum kit.
- Going to fiver and asking someone to build you a drum kit that defies science and logic.
- The one company that Topic Lords would accept sponsorship from.
- Stopping the concert when the audience starts clapping on 1 and 3 and asking them "come on, did you spend $126 to get it wrong?"
- Not finding out how low-poly these birds are until the quarter speed viewing.
- Which side Britney's nails look most amazing from.
- The outfit flight attendants had to wear in the 1950s, before they had the right to vote.
- A flight attendant with pauldrons.
- A loser with a sandwich that Britney wants to make out with in the bathroom.
- Seeing someone's ass and wondering what the Blippi subreddit would think of it.
- A dude who is a motorcycle.
- Biketaurs.
- Having the same facial expression as the motorcycle you're riding.
- A sparkly Jackson Pollock that you wrap around yourself.
- Stepping right in the laser.
- Warning the janitor that you're turning on the office's death ladder so he's not surprised when he shows up that weekend to find 15 corpses on the floor.
- A music video that is secretly the prequel to Jupiter Ascending.
- Whether this hot Scandinavian guy is the same guy as the last hot Scandinavian guy.
- Saving time shaving by dyeing your facial hair the same color as your skin.
- Whether a stiff iron bar jabbing into your back would improve a bed or a chair.
- Whether Britney Spears hallucinated the events of the Toxic video, and she's just an ordinary flight attendant.
- How to fix bread closures.
- Filling the moon with bread closures.
- Getting a bread box so people stop having to manufacture bread closures.
- How massive a bread is required to spin the bag at sufficient velocity to apply the bread closures.
- Solving your headphone cord problem by never listening to audio of any kind.
- Installing an ink sac in your fingernail so that you never have to look around for a pen.
- A tattoo of a squid that you can squeeze to spurt ink into the eyes of your enemies, but the tattoo gets more and more faded as the ink depletes.
- An awful thing that your ducks can do.
- What's going on in that biome?
- The horned lizard's final defense.
- Dropping a tail if you need to escape.
- A super ethical meat factory that spends all day terrifying the tails off of lizards.
- An avocado-like spread made out of frightened lizard tail.
- Nothing but adrenaline flavor in this tail.
- How to live as a freelancer without being drained of all your bodily fluids.