Topic Lords

Lords: * John * Kevin * https://www.youtube.com/@kevin_hainline Topics: * Asking for help / Dealing with the slightest criticism/suggestions/etc * Roger Rabbit and Marvel vs. Capcom were big deals. How long until multiverse & crossover shit is exciting again? * Update on media that makes me feel things vs. media that doesn't * "Bell's Theorem"", a poem that I wrote, and then, at a poetry reading someone suggested the next poem and it demonstrated how good poets are pretty amazing and I am not a good poet * https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CkNH-KlDCAMRNsI6hDZjlyvOpAgM2TsP8x-lIp5TeqQ/edit?usp=sharing * We're in a golden age of new official localizations and rereleases of old games (and why am I not playing them?!) Microtopics: * Some guy on the internet. * Transparent aluminum ukuleles. * Hurting your fingers because your ukulele action is too high. * Do you still call them cowboy chords when you play them on a ukulele? * An astronomer making a series of Youtube videos about Jurassic Park. * The history of Mr. DNA. * How much kids in the early 90s loved Jamaicans. * Solving a 30 year old Internet mystery. * Suing Michael Crichton to make him put you in the Jurassic Park acknowledgements section. * The Ancient DNA Study Group. * Ian Malcolm just saying a bunch of lines from James Gleick's "Chaos." * Going into slow motion to show all the Victorian era pickpocketing. * Asking an august astronomer to critique your work and squirming as he critiques your work. * Therapy-style processing via Topic Lords. * People who like being asked for help because it gives them an opportunity to help. * The German word for being a person. * Being so overly polite that people feel obligated to reassure you that you don't need to be so polite, which is a big pain. * After someone helps you, asking for clarification on whether they wanted to help or if they felt obligated. * How to save Jim a lot of time and effort. * Two people coming from the same gross Internet soup. (Not 4chan) * The friends you made on the Pokey the Penguin mailing list. * Swearing to kids these days that the internet was good once. * Finding the exact right gif for your animated profile picture. * Pretend socialization: it's still socialization. * Knowing a guy by his Internet handle for decades and suddenly having to call him his birth name. * When crossovers started being a thing. * The Supreme Court ruling that corporations are people, saying the stage for the world depicted in Bio Freaks for the N64. * Daffy and Donald playing rival pianos. * Detective Munch's cameo in Fortnite. * Konami Wai Wai World. * Vib Ribbon n Astro Bot. * Why am I on this show when I could be playing Vib Ribbon? * Burning episodes of Topic Lords to CD-R so you can play them in Vib Ribbon. * Extremely pixelated vector art. * The save the cat moment on Topic Lords. * Mind-blowing crossover media events where the mind-blowing part is how much they paid all the lawyers to negotiate the deal. * Why the indie game scene hadn't produced a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with public domain characters like Robin Hood, Santa Claus, Mickey Mouse and Abraham Lincoln. * Reagan-Gorbachev. * Which president was kidnapped by ninjas. * Choosing to let the ninjas keep Ronald Reagan. * Ape Out: Get Back In There! * Pushing the left stick to lean and pushing the triggers to lift either foot. * Trying to play a video game in which you dislike the protagonist. * A guy whose defining trait is that he tries to get out of every conversation as quickly as possible. * Playing with the mismatch between what the player wants and what the player character wants. * Upsetting the apple cart of how video games work. * A minimap that takes up the top fifth of the screen but is nonfunctional until you unlock it halfway through the game. * Which Jurassic Park video game is most interesting and which is most fun. * Looking down at your cleavage to see your health meter. * Saying the secret word and screaming real loud. * A poem...

Lords: * Elena * Joël Topics: * The Luck Factor: * http://www.richardwiseman.com/resources/TheLuckFactor.pdf * Dual pilgrim certificate * The return of PicoSteveMo * https://itch.io/jam/picostevemo-3 * Every poem, by every human * https://www.tumblr.com/nextworldover/793694487879827456/animatedamerican-atamascolily Microtopics: * Packing cubes. * The Rolling Method. * Modular backpacks. * Camera people: a different type of people. * Nested zippered envelopes labeled one through five. * Why does your purse say "three" on it?? * Tool user opinions. * Getting ready for fiction to incorporate our new conception of what AI is. * Running experiments on people who self-identify as lucky or unlucky. * Gladstone Gander. * Paying your put-upon nephew a dime to accompany you on a trip to Zazu-Zazu. * Stan Connery's terrible taste in roles. * Natalie Portman's Tom Scott number. * Systems that are gamable but not trivially gamable. * Rick Rubin numbers vs. Sabbath Numbers. * The Kumano Kodo Trail's trail adjudicators ringing a bell and giving you a certificate to certify that you've walked their trail. * A terrible time of year to hike the Camino de Santiago. * Taking a wrong turn while hiking the Camino de Santiago and ending up on France. * All the school children running over to high five the pilgrims. * Feral Eucalyptus plantation. * Peeking into all the ancient mills. * Shrine tossing tricks. * Passing bones from chopstick to chopstick. * The three major sources of ritual pollution. * Getting sick of climbing the hill all the time so you write a poem explaining that the gods don't want the shrine to be at the top of the hill any more. * Harassment prevention for non-supervisors. * Printing and framing the certificate you got after taking the class on filling out your timecard. * The uncle so otherwise never contacts you sending you a happy birthday message on LinkedIn every year. * Endorsing your friend on LinkedIn for being a git. * Balloons in the sewer. * Sokoban mechanics that could apply Stephen King's It. * A tricycle kart racer set in the Overlook hotel. * NanoSteveMo. * The scruffy guy the hotel manager doesn't want around. * Singlehandedly supplying the fanbase for this Mo. * Hoarding Pico-8 cartridges on you desktop. * The Spore creature creator exporting your creature as a PNG. * A topic for another Topic Lords. * Concatenating a zip file to the end of a different file. * Here's this artifact. Please try it out. * Saving PNGs to Starlings. * Storing your Pico-8 game in a bird. * Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme. * Pirating software on Usenet. * Catching 50 out of 100 birds to extract the Pico-8 game from them. * Realizing that it's a plums in a refrigerator thing and moving on. * Helping a stranger grieve using your well-honed crossword skills. * Approaching classical literature as a collection of in-jokes and wanting to be in on the joke. * A book with a serrated edge. * How to read a book vs. how to read a poem.

Lords: * Daniel * https://www.danielmullinsgames.com/ * Chris Topics: * Psychic Students In Pursuit Of Guidance (psipog) * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EIwP0zerbk * Zhaozhou's "Wash Your Bowl" Koan * Figwit * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figwit * Sudo-Ku * https://katlehmann.weebly.com/sudo-ku-a-multi-haiku-form.html * Game Design: The form is arbitrary and not worth much thought. What's interesting is how you play in and with the form. See The Witness, Undertale, Sokoban games, Pinball machines Microtopics: * Introducing yourself twice. * Spider mites and spider mite exterminators. * Exterminating your spider mite infestation with a washcloth. * Diatomaceous earth mines in your hometown. * The paperwork necessary when your diatomaceous earth mine accidentally breaks through into the neighboring nitroglycerin mine. * How to develop psychic powers of various kinds. * Learning to meditate in service of manifesting your psiballs. * Learning how to spin a watch around on the Psipog Archive. * A 90 year old dude who has been meditating all his life but still doesn't have psychic powers: maybe he's just bad at it? * The secret geometry that lets you talk to space beings. * Who wants to talk to space beings? * How to make progress on what mysteries we have left. * Reinventing all of physics from first principles. * How does nobody know about creating energy balls with your mind?? * Choosing not to do the thought experiments that have no good possible outcome. * Sitting at a desk made of laminated particleboard. * Pseudo-complex meals. * When civilization collapses, how am I gonna make a Big Mac?? * Taking the time to get to know every person you meet and understand every safety you interact with. * Wanting to know a secret that nobody else knows. * How not to pronounce "koan." * What do you do after you finish your gruel? * Becoming enlightened during Ikea furniture assembly. * Ancient Chinese yo momma jokes. * The enlightened experience of inhabiting a mind vs. the bowl needs to be washed again. * Questions that science cannot answer. * Probing your blood. * Measuring your blood chemistry while you wash the dishes to determine whether you're a good person. * How to measure how many people you've helped. * Short-circuiting your friend's money metaphor before it starts. * An incredibly wise computer refusing to tell you the answer because it's too nuanced. * Concrete actionable advice that you can trust every time. * Figwit pre- and post lines. * How things went viral before social media. * The Figwit obsession: it's weird. * Tracking down Figwit's Topps card to look up his RBI. * Why is it the "one" ring when all the Nazguls also have rings?? * Lord of the Rings fans and how much they love it when podcasters are confused about Lord of the Rings lore. * Effective fandom activism at its most innocent and pure. * Where were you when you found out Sonic was going to be in Smash? * A button that was effective so they pushed it a lot. * A Small Brown that Peter Jackson put inside the Real Brown. * Topic Lords Movie Secrets Special. * Sudo-Ku. * A fun gimmick that results in a worse poem. * Americans: do they do Haiku wrong?? * Syllables vs. sound units. * One pthong and more than one pthong. * Spending too much time reading about the form. * Drawing a line on a grid. * A valid approach to making interesting stuff. * The Pacific Pinball Museum. * Pinball as kinetic electromechanical art. * Electromechanical puppet shows at Musee Mechanique. * If Pixar existed in 1800, what would they do? * What if you're playing DDR but it's a joke? * High concept jam games. * Alien vs. Predator but you're roommates with the Alien. * Advantages and disadvantages of starting from an existing design. * Advantages of having a slightly different goal from everyone else in your field. * Chess with time travel.

Lords: * Danny * https://nightbrunchband.com/ * Walker * https://nightbrunchband.com/ Topics: * You Probably Think This Song is About You * The Perfect r/crappymusic Post: An audio tour of Archetypes * https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/0291r0zf.png * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EIwP0zerbk * Sample-based film scores in the 80s * https://www.tumblr.com/mogwaipoet/786937779224461312/terminator-2-1991-and-the-princess-bride-1987 * Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep, by Clare Harner actually * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoNotStandatMyGraveand_Weep * Being a Video Game Newb in Your 40s Microtopics: * Is it a Topic or is it Just Banter? * Cleaning Lords, Lunch Lords and Cat Lords. * Have you heard the good word about the Gaylady? * Night Brunch. * Wearing your own band's t-shirt. * A thing that could happen for a while and then was no longer able to happen. * Hi Cindy! * Motivating yourself to work harder via self loathing. * Feeling the need to act all angsty so that people take you seriously as an artist. * A Touch of Grandiosity. * How many tracks get uploaded to SoundCloud every day? * Continuing to discover music from the 1970s. * It's called "Topic Lords," not "Correct Lords." * Once it becomes impossible to make new music, and we go back and start listening to all the SoundCloud uploads with 0 listens. * All the kids at Rock & Roll Camp getting excited about Lofey. * Pretending a topic is about one thing when it's actually about something else. * Canadian Actor Dave Coulier. * Tuesday at 3:01pm. * Learning a new chord on your Electric Tenor Guitar. * Bringing Pokemon Puzzle League characters into your love song. * Having a whole week to dial in that wub wub patch. * What art is for and what art should be for. * Fun is our only reward. * The objective best pitch wheel range. * The Funky Worm preset. * Synthesizers that can save and load patches but only when plugged into your phone. * Coming up with a Rube Goldberg machine to upload patches from a web server to your CZ-5000. * thisdx7cartridgedoesnotexist.com * In a convex optimization problem, there is no gradient to descend. * Fiddling with the synthesizer sliders until you reach a corner of the parameter space that doesn't make any noise and giving up. * Camp Counselor Grant hastily drawing all the synthesizer waves on the board. * Ask any Geometer, the triangle has three sides. Love triangles are actually just two love segments. * The All Topic Fakeouts episode. * The gulf between how an artist thinks they're presenting themselves and how they're being received. * A Beautiful Rainbow of the Human Experience. * Elderly rappers with excellent flow but terrible drip. * Piling onto propaganda music. * Someone doing their own thing with confidence and authenticity. * Graffiti with immaculate copyediting. * With improved access to art tools, taste is one of the only things left to get wrong. * Only the best crappy music. * Promoting your music in r/crappymusic. * Tori the Clown Rap Gal. * The audacity of extreme autotune. * All Youtube thumbnails converging on the same cognitive attention hacks. * Singing the comments on your last video. * Situations where echo chamber amplification is fun and good for the world. * Obscure Music That Slaps. * Serbian Kolos. * The Ketron Event Chrom. * The Nightmare Klaxon that Represents Dread. * All the Fairlight CMI presets used in the Terminator 2 soundtrack. * Growing up playing samples at every possible speed in Impulse Tracker. * Slowly sucking dog food out of a can to simulate the sound of a mimetic polyalloy passing through steel bars. * It's been a long day and you're ready to go home but you need to slam 1000 more inverted glasses into bowls of yogurt, let's hurry it up guys. * That one sample library squeaking metal door sound that everyone uses. * Calling out comb filtering whenever you hear someone exhale deeply while sitting down at a desk. * The sound guy...

Lords: * John * Fif Topics: * Accidentally exploring a bunch of related subjects and/or media * The excellent progression system of Blues' Clues ABCs (1995) * https://archive.org/details/blues-clues-blues-abc-time-activities-pc-cd-rom * Salty Licorice is the sixth taste * https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/a-sixth-sense-of-taste-salty-licorice/ * https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salty_liquorice * The Cubivore between-level limerick * https://www.mobygames.com/game/11346/cubivore-survival-of-the-fittest/credits/gamecube/ * 55,555 names Microtopics: * Modern problems requiring modern solutions. * Leaving media behind. * Subscribing to PBS Passport via your local PBS affiliate. * Running out of media and just watching Peaceful Skeleton Realm Attacked By Helicopter over and over again. * Whether the Arctic Circle requires any age verification. * What even are Truck Nuts? * Why do trucks have such tiny nuts?? * Watching a movie every day because you're unemployed. * I'm Gonna Git You Sucka. * Independent used bookstores in the San Diego Area. * Used bookstores desperately trying to get rid of math textbooks. * The original Topic Lords. * Having a lot of knowledge that you can call on in a useful way. * Being old and having learned a lot of stuff. * Your mom describing your brain as "a bric-a-brac of useless facts." * Science Fiction Hall of Fame. * The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. * Someone who you forget as soon they go out of sight. * An SCP from the perspective of the SCP. * A really cool interactive fiction scene in France. * Rules lawyering your way out of yet another curse. * The 17th century demon cursing you to live forever and also that "whenever you send an email people won't be able to read what you wrote, they'll just say 'not more dick pill spam.'" * Word-based minigames. * The blank was in the sky. Blue had fun with her blank. * Making a game for three year olds warning them about insecure pedants on the Internet. * What year of our Lord was Bully released? * We don't talk about the 2010s. * The Milton Bradley Microvision. * The game is about cubes eating and fucking. * Trying to describe any flavor * Blue the Dog. * Scandinavian Delicacy Ammonium Chloride. * A quest to track down Circus Peanuts. * An edible earplug that tastes like fake bananas. * Red Vines and Black Red Vines. * Being the only grocery store in town that sells licorice and reeling in the only licorice eater in town. * That Rotting Shark Dish. * The white people equivalent of huitlacoche. * The Secret Cowbell. * The hip hop community realizing that you can increase the delay on the kick drum and rattle your entire car for several seconds. * Tigers can't see the sideshow, only cows can see the sideshow. * Piggy Fif. * A classic poem about cubes fucking. * Checking GameFAQs for a list of poems in Cubivore. * Piggy Playername's extremely distinctive manner of speaking. * Atlus Beast and Editing Beast. * The Cubivore trophy in Super Smash Bros. * A genetic progression that you need to do by transmogrifying into a progression of various beasts. * Entering a tunnel shaped like a heart and sitting in a flesh colored void until you attract 20 females into your harem. * Want to mate? Yes/no. * The Cubivore manual with the cutaway diagram of cube physiology. * Bully/Cubivore crossover fic. * Little Samson. * Get good at enjoying video games without being validated by a tiny purple cube, scrub. * The file you keep of all the names you'll answer to. * Pith, fip, pince, fifth, and fint. * People: they have a lot of names. * Being diagnosably bad at code switching. * Writing a random number of fs as a symbol representing your employee. * Choosing to be the banana taped to the wall. * Gaming naming. * Printing up a deck of constraints for when you're asking people to choose a name for you. * Paraeducation. * Jobs at The MADE. * The Worst Nintendo Store. * Teaching game design to young children every Saturday morning. * The forefront of the next...

Lords * Alexander * Kev Topics: * "Floaty movement" in games * The power to give people clutter that they can't throw away * https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/users/yorkdoom/palweb/week12/palwk12.htm * https://www.anabuzzalino.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/book-of-kells.jpg * Dunning Kruger got debunked! * https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2022/04/08/the-dunning-kruger-effect-is-autocorrelation/ * With or Without Witnesses, by Hasbro, Inc. * https://scryfall.com/card/jmp/457/alloy-myr * Esper says: "A lot of the lore and worldbuilding of Magic is conveyed through flavor text, but there’s also about a novel’s worth of writing for each set distributed as webfiction and a few dozen novels throughout the game's history. It’s good stuff, usually!" * The instinct to not swing a heavy object at someone, even when you're supposed to * Japanese curry Microtopics: * The Humble Screw. * What it might take to be good at hammering nails. * Fingerbashing. * An inclined plane that goes around in a circle. * Metric Rules Football. * Whether a state machine is the same kind of thing as a wedge. * Clockwork Maiden. * Speedrunning, cleaning and dating. * Floaty movement. * The JPEG artifact of physics simulation. * How to Unit Test a video game. * Using MIDI knobs to tune your game's physics. * Game Oriented Assembly Lisp. * Hot Reloading Workflow. * Why Naughty Dog stopped using Lisp. * Just going about your life when suddenly you have to use Perl for something. * Peak Node.JS/SAAS years. * Walk/run/sprint transition speed. * Getting an special drink for your guys. * Medieval style calligraphy. * Gifting someone with a burden for the rest of their lives. * Pouring rocks into your dad's pocket because that's where you keep your rocks. * The kitten going to sleep behind your laptop because it's warm back there. * Here's how someone in the 14th century would've written these words. * How to say "fuck around and find out" in medieval Latin. * Writing a meme in 14th century Blackletter Hand. * Sans-serif calligraphy. * The ancient Greeks trying to invent ASCII art but they couldn't close the deal. * Letters placed inside other letters. * Autocorrelation. * Figures 8 and 9. * Coming out of discussion the topic with a better understanding of the topic. * Using a bird feather to write. * Knowledge that we used to have and now have again. * Learning to Topic Lords while doing home improvement stuff. * Scrapping your fragile human body to merge with the machines. * Rainbows in Space. * Suns going around in circles regardless of whether anyone's looking. * A semi-conscious little robot dude. * Calling the Qualia Function. * A real messed-up looking machine cat. * Communicating the story solely via flavor text on mana dorks. * A squadron of little kids waving wooden swords at each other. * How do you turn sword fighting into something you can do in a video game? * East Bay Rat Motorcycle Club Flight Nights. * Situations where they ask if you want a mouth guard. * Asking the ref at the boxing match what the etiquette is for tapping out. * The crowd roaring when they realize you're a southpaw. * Punching a guy you just met three seconds ago. * Did you end up cutting that girl's head off? * Renaissance MMA. * That Awkward Sparring Feeling. * A simulacrum of kicking each other in the face. * Getting a part-time job at your favorite curry shop so you can learn the recipe. * What part of curry is the curry? * The curry you eat so you don't die. * Emperor Riding a Dragon to the Forbidden Palace. * The advantage of a burger as a fast food staple. * How to make curry convenient. * Rendang. * Dry curry. * Joining a discord and asking "what are all these users for??" * Which user is which lord on which episode?

Lords: * Megan * https://www.megancarnesmusic.com/ * Austin * https://austinmwav.com/ Topics: * Going for a super long walk is amazing * "Elevated" horror is a sham * I was there when Every 5x5 Nonogram section 303 finished * NPC Dialog Test by Nintendo Europe #NintendoEurope * https://x.com/MarioBrothBlog/status/1863976914349621280 * My breakfast dogma * Not bringing my shitpost music/mashup ideas to life because I'm afraid they'll be more popular than my actual music Microtopics: * Music for films and video games. * The Paper Labyrinths theme. * Feeding your cats and yourself. * Exercising, drinking water, you know, all of the worst things. * Explaining to the doctor that you're depressed and he asks if you've been eating well and exercising and you say "no, because I've been depressed." * Turning 35 and becoming interested in birds. * Shazam for birds. * Birdpilled and Avianmaxxing. * Taking the L in Chicago and eating Dick's in Seattle. * Cream cheese on a hot dog. * The late Chicago on a Bun. * Regional food that you get outside of the region. * St. Louis style barbecue. * Ordering Jack in the Box at 1am and regretting it immediately because you are in your 30s. * Eating a spicy chicken sandwich in the prime gremlin hours. * Feeling bad because you ate bad. * Forty years later, thinking "Maybe I shouldn't have eaten all that White Castle" * The kind of person who would call himself a genius. * Sometimes it's fun to be goofy and have fun. * Horror movies vs. anxiety movies. * Media imbibers. * The film critic opinions of your Trekkie mom. * The high audience score, low critic score, and vice versa. * Applauding a huge pile of garbage. * Whether anyone ever self-applied the "IDM" genre. * The Oscar Genre. * Very good movies nominated for Oscars. * Braindance. * Cringe (Derogatory) * The only good form of multiplayer. * One of the hominids that watched a different great ape figure out fire. * What happens when they run out of nonograms? * Morons welcome! * Twitch plays Every 5x5 Nonogram. * Twitch plays Dark Souls never getting out of that pool of water in the tutorial area. * Every star going out at the same time. * In the short run, everyone will be fine. * Getting bored of your death anxiety. * Life is meaningless and nothing matters and that rules actually. * Extremely sensible anxieties. * Setting an alarm to periodically tell your friend that you're not annoying and I don't hate you. * Whether everyone should be afraid of heights. * A database of all the kinds of movements a rollercoaster can make so you can search for the types you like. * Do you ever get thirsty? Studies say people with ADHD need to drink water. * Taking a drug test at your job and worrying that the test people will notice that you're dehydrated. * The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog in all caps. * Mr. Jock, TV quiz PhD. * There really are castles in the eyes of people see them. * Role-playing the skeleton of Ben Shapiro in a D&D campaign. * What's the difference between being an asshole and role playing an asshole? * The 'shopkeepers are not copyeditors" apostrophe. * Eating your breakfast burrito over the counter. * Things that people say are good for your mental health. * Anxiety medication that gives you terrible nightmares. * Your anxiety meds making you feel okay about the zombie apocalypse. * Revenge bedtime procrastination. * The kidnapping advice episode. (FBI don't listen to this one.) * Kids are funny. (Just trust us.) * Playing in a band with your best friend for fifteen years. * Kids: they're sticky everywhere. * Never making any shitposts because someone might like them better than your regular art. * Receiving a series of increasingly aggressive answering machine messages from the piece of public art across the street from your apartment.

Lords: * John * Avery * Jay Topics: * Being known for one thing and trying to do a different thing * https://jtholen.bandcamp.com/album/new-active-object * Finding instruments on the street * Accidentally arguing with sauna guy Microtopics: * Many-Time Topic Lord John Mystery. * Talking the plunge into the Topic Lords discord. * An unspoken constant presence like Seymour Glass in the Glass Family novels. * The Once and Future Musician. * Putting a formant filter on your organ so you can play the organ on Zoom. * Why pouring hot water sounds different from pouring cold water. * The sound of boiling hot urine. * The top rated coffee shop in San Francisco on Yelp for seven months in a row. * Remaining your coffee shop after Mark Zuckerberg in hopes that he'll show up in person. * Trying to open up a coffee shop in late 90s San Francisco and only realizing too late that it's 2016. * ADA compliant seating. * Four-person episodes of Topic Lords. * A 6'5" guy trying to barter a half-used spray paint can for a cup of coffee. * The Menacing Barterer. * Aggressive Wimpy gladly paying you tomorrow for a hamburger today or else. * Aggressive Wimpy throwing a shoe at your espresso machine. * Your car accidentally becoming an art car. * Letting people spray paint your car until it's nothing but spray paint. * Calling 911 and explaining that the guy menacing you needs marijuana. * Being detained by Mark Zuckerberg's private security force. * Living near Mark Zuckerberg's house so you can do whatever your fixation with Mark Zuckerberg is. * Aggressive Barter Guy trying to barter a Porsche for a cup of coffee. * The $6 Porsche. * Tholen or Tholen. * A prog album constructed from Klik n Play samples. * When someone who does I've things decides to do something else. * The Mountain Goats novelizations. * Leonard Cohen's terrible poetry. * Thinking a song is deeply meaningful until you read the lyrics. * New Active Object. * Lunch Music. * Doing a thing for a long time and getting good at it. * Who has time to read a novel? * Having Game Boys Advance but still reading books sometimes. * Telling your teacher that you need to go to your job at NASA and they're like "oh you must be doing something important over there" * Working in the waterslide industry. * The Joy of Being the Secrets Guy. * Reading too much into it is the next Frog Fractions game. * Admitting to your wife that you found a digital piano on the curb. * The digital piano in the background of the Frog Fractions 2 pitch video. * Walking by a theremin at a party and it chirps at you like a proximity car alarm. * The Moog Etherwave. * Staring at your broken Omnichord. * A toddler whose first word is "mandolin." * Living Out Yonder. * The Roland Space Echo. * A cassette tape except there isn't any cassette, the tape is just kind of wriggling around in there. * Buying synthesizers from thrift shops that don't know how to tell whether synthesizers are broken. * The Two Organs Behind Me. * Ukelins. * Zither-esques. * Dulcimers vs. hammered dulcimers. * Looping your song and picking the notes that kind of sound like they belong. * A Xylophone For Jandek. * Feeling like you're taking to extremely accomplished people and you're just a weird little guy. * Who Is Sauna Guy?? * Stuck debating sauna guy while the venerated author with similar interests to yours is holding court in the next room. * Physics Philosophy guy talking about physics and philosophy. * An hour into the conversation, telling Sauna Guy that you don't even like being warm and he just stares at you. * The new way to joke about forum URLs. * Back when the Internet was full of exciting possibilities. * What topics turn you into Sauna Guy. * David Byrne sitting alone at the David Byrne art exhibit in Palo Alto. * We're All Sauna Guy Now. * Voting each other off the podcast. * Lightning round sudden death topics. * When the sunscreen finally makes it onto your cornea. * Not having a home page again but meaning to someday.

This is the pre-show planning and banter for episode 308, recorded and edited basically by accident?? Enjoy?? Microtopics: * The old saw that if the teacher is 15 minutes late, you are excused. * All the hosts forgetting about the podcast so that episode just doesn't get recorded. * The seam in the fish video. * Procedurally vs. manually textured terrain. * How to texture a limestone chunk. * Whether Donkey Kong Bananza is deliberately evoking the sickly sheen of Donkey Kong Country's raytraced art. * Procedurally decorating terrain in Techtonica. * A lens flare shaped like bananas. * Mario Kart opinions. * Doing a stunt for the next 30 seconds. * The Baja 1000 but with Mario Kart. * How Mario Kart tries to make highways interesting. * A souped-up Volkswagen Beetle driving 1000 miles through the desert * Mario Kart except it's Desert Bus. * A Hunter S. Thompson stand-in sent to report on Mario Kart races and ranting about the Mushroom Kingdom. * Keeping your powder dry in case your anecdote gets promoted to Topic. * Topics that have been in the bucket for a long time and probably will remain there for a long time. * Doing a brass fall with your mouth. * Finally learning to play "Imagine" on piano. * Zoom's musician mode. * Going on a date with twins to the same restaurant but neither one knows about the other, so you have to keep going into the bathroom and parting your hair the other way. * The episode of Three's Company where there's a misunderstanding. * Don Knotts making a weird face. * Your prospective roommates explaining that you have to pretend to be gay so the landlord doesn't think you're all having sex with each other. * More behind than ahead. * Keeping cats in the Storage Atrium. * Buying an organ from a salvage yard. * Bartering with the organ maker's apprentice. * The Estey Organ Company. * Playing a bad prog rock solo on the analog synthesizer next to your couch. * An organ with all of its organs showing. * An accordion with zero subtlety. * The difference between an electric piano and a digital piano. * The Yamaha Clavinova with Advanced Wave Modeling. * Don't play these notes unless you want to hear them forever. * Topic Negotiation. * Driving every single topic into the ground.

Lords: * Ben * Avery Topics: * The Mishima Incident, in which one of the most famous authors in Japan created his own private militia of young men, attempted to overthrow the government and, upon failing, committed ritual suicide. * City-wide game of hide and seek * How to stick it to bad Bluetooth actors * The Carrotman's Lament, by E.L. Hubert * https://x.com/sweetstench/status/1724958011754504568 * Esper says: "Avery’s anecdote about the carrot poem being something he’d do in high school reminded me of something I did in high school, where I took the song 'The Cha Cha Slide' and removed every instance of 'slide to the right' and added a bunch of 'slide to the left' so that people eventually collapsed into the wall. I got to do it at a little party with friends, and it paid off nicely." Microtopics: * Where to play some crosswords. * Cruciverbalism. * Putting the black squares where the letters don't go. * Putting structural jokes in your crossword puzzles. * The cleverer the gimmick, the less fun the crossword puzzle. * Talking into your phone's transcription software during a five hour drive and having five hours of gibberish at the end of it. * Fifth caller wins a t-shirt! * Impossible Owls. * Squishy details. * Taking on an apprenticeship with a nobel prize winner. * The Japanese Self-Defense Force. * Dressing in bee keeper outfits and hitting each other with sticks. * Buying swords for your right wing ultra nationalist militia with the proceeds of your prize-winning literature. * Exhorting the troops to reinstate the emperor of Japan but nobody can hear you because there's a helicopter flying overhead. * A poster of a kitten next to a poster of a samurai, with diametrically opposed mantras about how you ought to handle failure. * Topics that leave you speechless. * Founder Brain. * Debunking a thing from philosophy. * The Philosophy of Reversing a Linked List. * The alternate universe where Banksy is a totalitarian dictator. * Vladimir Putin tagging up the streets of Bristol in the 90s. * Top hat, eyeball and coattails. * The Residents of Theseus. * Rednex. * David Bowie starring as Tesla in The Prestige and self-driving off the set. * The percentage of Teslas on the street * Nice Stylized T as a Screw Shirt. * Brainstorming places to hide in Copenhagen. * The problem of how to define the bounds of the hide and seek legal play field. * Playing hide and seek and knocking on a stranger's door and asking if you can hide in their house. * Knocking on the door of the company that moved into the building your company was in six years ago, asking to use the conference room because you're six years late for a meeting. * Journey to the End of the Night. * Playing music and speaking in riddles. * At what point it becomes morally correct to join the zombies. * Why is it okay to name a thing after another thing? Why is it okay to name a band after someone else's song? * Whether Skibidi Toilet has been cool, is currently cool, will become cool temporarily, or will become cool and stay forever. * A meme based on a Youtube thing. * Dadaist comedy Internet videos made in Garry's Mod. * Changing the head so it's not owned by Valve. * Generations starting the alphabet over, like hurricane names. * Turn of the millennium coffee shop war stories. * Drinking coffee at 2 AM on January 1st, 2000, looking out the window and waiting for the satellites to come crashing down. * Tech folks successfully convincing people that the Y2K bug is a problem, but not what the problem actually was. * What the Y2K bug was and how we solved it. * The Corolla Must Have Control. * The phone is too eager and the car is too greedy. * The phone and the bluetooth speaker agreeing to connect, and isn't there somebody you forgot to ask?? * We invented this new thing but we don't know what it's for. Let's try to solve every problem with it and see if anything sticks. * Everybody migrating to TempleOS to get away from LLMs. * A lightweight operating system designed to...

Lords: * Xalavier * https://store.steampowered.com/app/3139570/CoopKaijuHorror_Cooking/ * Cort Topics: * What's the coolest instrument to give a child? * What happened to sound lasers? * Appearing Canes * https://www.amazon.com/Healifty-Retractable-Collapsible-Professional-Accessories/dp/B093G7J6JG * The Story of Mel * http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html * https://melsloop.com/docs/the-story-of-mel/pages/mel-kaye-cv Microtopics: * Whether your middle name is really Danger. * Half an extra plug. * The inexplicable aliveness of Strange Scaffold. * Co-op Casual Horror Cooking. * Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival. * Making a game so that you can voice act the main character. * How many careers you're allowed to have before the world begins to rip them away from you. * Hiring the designer of Frog Fractions when Frog Fractions is already designed. * A boxing game featuring the inside of your mouth. * Knockout Kings 2003 or Fight Night Round 3. * Your dad explaining all the ways grownups are better than children while soundly trouncing you at Fight Night Round 3. * Tattooing a message on your infant son's head so that he reads it when he begins to bald. * Playing music with humans. * What's special about playing an analog monosynth. * Getting an analog synthesizer and finally sounding like the 70s. * Your larynx thinking "I'm singing meat!" while you push air through it, making it vibrate. * All the ways your larynx is confused about the nature of music. * Sitting in a circle and playing music together. * The Topanga Banjo and Fiddle Festival. * Playing folk songs within ten minutes of owning a mandolin. * How Irish sessions compare to Bluegrass sessions. * Being too far back in the crowd to have sex with Neil Young. * A big long guitar with only four strings. * Bass Sherpa Hunter Bond. * Practicing bass with your bass unplugged because plugging in your bass feels like an imposition. * Short-scale basses. * Finding the bass that makes it feel like you're holding Mjolnir. * The Minibrute, Microbrute, Matrixbrute and Polybrute. * The problematic acoustic P-bass. * Travel amps and amp alternatives. * The non-problematic acoustic P-bass. * Oh yeah, that's the acoustic bass player! * The only instrument in a rock band that can go up to. x6 multiplier. * Coming back to Rock Band after learning the actual instrument. * The Rock Band Pro Controller. * What about Second Topic? * Asking a parent if it's okay to give their child an accordion and backpedaling when they start white-knuckling their chair. * Kung fu instructionals. * The smallest member of the mandola family. * Instruments that require elongation. * Chapman sticks. * The kind of musical instrument you can stab someone with. * Vibrating your bones. * That time science stopped itself from inventing something awful. * Non lethal directed acoustic energy weapons. * Sound cannons as an anti-piracy measure. * SASERs. * Using headphones as a microphone and vice versa. * Plugging a bass into a guitar amp. * Traveling to another country and trying out the basses that they have there. * Whacking the high tension wires to make laser noises. * What they have on BART now instead of high tension wire noises. * Raising Cain's. * Trying to reload your appearing cane. * The type of thing the TSA would miss but should watch out for. * Terrorists taking over the plane by doing such an impressive magic show that the passengers are like "that was amazing, we'd better do what he wants" * It poked me straight in the middle of my eye. * A sound laser for mischief and giggles. * Fighting those who would be your comrades in shenanigans. * Easy to operation! * If you love something, let it go. If you hold onto it, it will stab you in the hand. * A frog boiling effect but for extremely long poems. * Computers made out of drums and vacuum tubes. * Royal McBee Computer Corp. * Executing another complete revolution to find the next instruction. * If the thesis of Summoning Salt was that "this is...

Lords: * Abby * https://www.thespaceuk.com/shows/2025/abby-denton-my-favorite-loser * Sid * https://linktr.ee/beamsplashx Topics: * Reading about type 1 diabetes * Saying vegetables instead of cussin' * https://jp.itch.io/mr-friendly * Winston punched his tooth out * If I Ran the Circus (excerpt) * With the power of portable PS2 emulation, I can find out how many types of games I don't like anymore Microtopics: * My Favorite Loser. * Mistakes we always keep in the show because it's more fun that way. * How to plagiarize video using Da Vinci Resolve. * A tool that automatically turns any Youtube video into a series of screenshots with captions. * Your mom threatening to sell your copy of Sonic the Hedgehog when it's explicitly labeled "not for resale" * Explaining to your mom that they're not video games, they're computer games, and she explains that video is from the Latin for "to see" * Mom paying proper deference to your clever sass before grounding you. * They're called RPGs, Mother! * Reading just enough about diabetes to be unhelpful. * Reading the diabetes owners manual. * Your $200/month Glucagon habit. * The Quick Start Guide to Diabetes, which explains that ideally you'd do such and such for your diabetic child but you probably don't have health insurance so, uh, good luck! * WiFi 7 upgrading you to gay. * Recreational glucose monitors. * The new glucose tablets coming in metric and confusing everybody. * That time Solid Snake went hypoglycemic while being tortured and bit down on his fake tooth to release the glucose capsule. * We put sugar gel in you, Solid Snake! It's going to make you slightly loopy! * An accountant who likes jogging. * Nobody knows why women have a higher incidence of eating disorders. If only we could ask them * They made a cure to diabetes 30 years ago, but you have to become the President of the United States to get it. * If Diabetes is so good, why haven't they made a Diabetes 2? * The Quick Start Guide to Diabetes explaining that people with diabetes can talk over you in a funny voice and you're not allowed to do anything about it. * Fiddling with a bloodletting device in an antique store and accidentally letting nearly all of your blood. * Phlegmletters. * What part of the body hurts least to prick with a needle. (The balls.) (Of your feet.) * Code switching halfway through explaining how you like to cuss. * How to swear at someone using vegetables. * What a load of parsnips! * Brussels Sprouts patch notes. * Brussels Sprouts: Belgium's Great Shame. * Winnipeg Manitoba sprouts. * Walking up to a stranger on the street and saying "Hey! It's a load of parsnips!" when they don't even know how you feel about parsnips. * Veggie Tales: Christ Died for our Parsnips. * Finding hilarious jokes in the text but your Bible studies group doesn't think they're very funny at all. * Refusing to apologize about a joke because someone somewhere is going to get the joke. * Why they still play old cartoons when they have Dragon Ball Z now. * Trying to find the 90s show about a kid trapped in a sitcom neighborhood that a talking dog told Abby about. * A video game where instead of having to shoot people, you talk to people. * Mr. Friendly. * Running errands for the demons. * Demon acceptance. * Can you believe Satan? What will they come up with next? * Lucifer Twocifer: Bringer of the Deuce. * Embarking on a multi-year project to have the coolest most clever minced oaths because you refuse to have basic minced oaths. * Whether it's racist to call a safecracker a Yegg. * The funniest joke you heard when you were eight. * The hobo with excellent glycemic index who lives in your shed. * Trying cat insulin and promising to report back if you die. * Hyperdontia. * Accidentally swallowing a tooth and growing a tooth tree in your tummy. * Explaining to your kid who just swallowed a tooth that it's going to bite him on the butt on the way out. * Inventing an increasingly elaborate series of fairies that cover...

Lords: * Andrew * https://higcadence.online * Brandon * https://store.steampowered.com/app/1900250/Demonschool/ Topics: * My daughter's high school pep band playlist is full of bangers * https://embed.music.apple.com/us/playlist/lakeridge-pep-band/pl.u-LdbqENjt759ZJ * Why some actors can't carry a b-movie but others can * What do these white rings on the Microbrute mean? * https://mastodon.social/@mogwai_poet/114842907188616207 * Andrew wrote to Arturia support like a madman, and they got back to him to say that yes, the rings just mean "this knob is important" * Medley by Louis Phillips * https://www.futilitycloset.com/2025/06/29/medley/ * Things you can eat in your garden that you might not expect Microtopics: * Bringing the fact that you are now a Lord to everyone's attention. * Hitting 1700 nautical miles today. * Demonschool. (Wishlist it.) * Whether it helps to un-wishlist and re-wishlist a game on Steam. * The Hot Dog Plant. * Tiny stinky blobs that attach to each other. * What kind of marsh grasses rich people in the 80s would have in their house. * Calling an aesthetic "southwestern" even though it's to the east of you. * A pep rally band playing a Lil Nas X tune. * The band soundtracking your No Kings rally playing a medley of Blister in the Sun, When the Saints Go Marching In, and I Want You Back. * Transcribing music from Double Dragon 2 and slipping under the door of your high school band director. * Disasterpeace's score for Under the Silver Lake. * How many people it takes to compose a pop song. * What it means to be a producer. * Kyle MacLaughlan desperately trying to hold on to Elizabeth Berkeley. * Christopher Lambert being legally blind and accidentally stabbing everyone while filming Highlander. * A weird guy who goes "hheeehh" * Mean Guns. * Putting a b-movie guy in a b-movie and everyone is like "nice!" * The Recent Vampire Movie With Nicolas Cage. * The kind of movie you can follow without looking at the screen. * Someone who has at least one idea and a vision for how to achieve it. * Jean-Claude Van Damme pushing you aside so he can take over the editing suite. * Making a movie while making another movie. * The dwindling number of people getting weird chances. * What day they bury people in Ghana. * Art that's only good if a friend explains what's good about it first. * The comic relief witch doctor who is funny because he keeps screwing up. * Trying to type on a 25 key keyboard. * The three knobs that you have to be able to see best in a low light environment. * The ultrasaw: not as good as a supersaw. * Paying extra to get the one in red because of the kind of person you are. * Why buy an analog synthesizer in 2025? * The tactile wall of knobs. * The giant modular synthesizer at Mills college. * The tiniest patch cables. * Adamantium Rage's FM doom metal soundtrack. * Did you mean: I love Mickey Mouse? * Emailing Arturia Support. * The Pants That Said Maximum. * A poem with rotational symmetry around the center axis. * A poem where the whole point is the acrostic complaining about something. * Eating the leaves and stems of a squash blossom. * Allowing lettuce to bolt. * AeroLettuce. * Making pesto out of herbs other than basil. * The fragrance and the earth tones you get from a bay leaf. * Top garden plants you might not have thought of eating. * A hobby that is cool and fun to do. * Discovered two giant cucumbers you hadn't even noticed before. * Volunteer squash and wacky gourds. * Sharing the fruits of your garden with your neighbors. * When it's lemon season and everybody's trying to give everyone else lemons. * Some plants are in pots; some are in the ground. * Growing a plant that can give you something back. * mstdn.party

Lords: * 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.

Lords: * Kory * Ryan Topics: * Incorrect stuff they teach you in school (blood, bats, soda cans, etc) * Oops I’ve started over remaking my game again, ECS edition * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8OkkHSQjWg * https://bevy.org/ * Accidentally finding a cat on vacation * Being Boring, by Wendy Cope * https://www.reddit.com/r/Poetry/comments/18ihpmd/poembeingboringbywendy_cope/ Microtopics: * Watching an epicurean professional licking the Switch and Switch 2 cartridges back to back. * Switch 2 cartridges that don't contain a game but still taste disgusting. * A digital key that tastes awful. * 1 in 100,000 Switch 2 cartridges tasting absolutely delicious. * Castlevania: Lords of Shadow: Relorded. * How many people have licked the Switch game you just bought used. * A construction worker spitting a big loog of chew and there's a Switch cartridge floating in it. * Not everybody is Jim Stormdancer. * And independent game design aficionado. * The New York Mayoral primary. * Hackmud. * Games that get two soundtracks while some games don't even get one. * Disasterpeace's Soupertasters theme song. * How to prove that your blood is not blue until it hits the air. * Why do bats e-chocolate?? * What color lobsters are until you cook them. * In space, noone can not see your blue blood. * Eating a 9-volt battery that tastes like chocolate. * Strawberry flavored chocolate that you puff on. * Hey, look who capitalism finally enslaved. * A can of A&W Root Beer that folds in on itself like a neutron star and you don't get to drink any because it's just empty space. * Believing the thing you were told before you turned 18. * Bodyboarding on a plank of wood in an open field. * An empire of the skies and caves. * Whether the tritone was ever illegal. * Education as a Russian doll of nested simplifications. * Wait, this isn't plum pudding! * Blood color facts. * Tuning your piano down to A=420. * Making one mistake and proceeding from the premise that everything you know is wrong. * A t-shirt reading "My favorite guests don't have their fontanelles closed yet." * How to structure your game world. * A grid of lights that are flickering on and off. * The tilty wooden labyrinth with holes in it. * Always on the lookout for the next engine to rewrite your game in. * One of those newfangled scripting languages that targets the NES. * Renting a magic want and running from kiosk to kiosk doing quests. * Finding the Pinecone of Peril. * Capacitative touch interfaces aren't magical for you?? * Asymptotically approaching cat saturation. * Framily. * Hot and cold running cat slides. * Weird reverb where things don't echo right because everything's wet. * A Rainforest Cafe the size of several football fields. * Rainforest Cafe Chic. * A liquid balance tied to your QR code. * Jailbreaking the soda fountain DRM, yelling "kill the banks" and spraying everyone with Mr. Pibb. * Striving to be as boring as possible. * Being boring. (In a good way.) * Being asked how you're doing and scrambling to come up with something interesting to say. * Trying to explain the Video Game History Foundation to your boss. * The Video Game Thing Guy. * Maintaining a garden and posting your harvests on your private Instagram. * Stopping someone on the street and asking them what are the last six vegetables you grew. * How to perform boredom after people realize that yawning means you're tired. * Starting to make omelets a new way. * Asking how someone is doing and bracing yourself for the answer. * Getting emotional and intellectual sustenance from cleaning the bathroom. * The me that comes up when you google my name.

Lords: * Wacy * Chris Topics: * Mysterious BART smell between 12th st. Oakland and West Oakland * Glucose monitor * Winston has been playing Minecraft. Have you heard about this game? Kids love it I guess. * The Earth Wants You * https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/_jj6TAcC.jpg Microtopics: * Knowing so many Chrises that you refuse to call yourself Chris. * Not knowing what just happened for the past how, but now there's an hour-long M4A file with your voice in it. * A whole range of thought experiments that might bear interesting fruit. * A scrap of papyrus containing a transcript of the first episode of Topic Lords. * Trash-adjacent smells. * Whether power substations smell like anything. * A smell worth seeking out for its own experience. * A smell for smell connoisseurs. * A tiny BART Easter egg for your nose. * A huge amount of substance that is replenishing the smell particles. * Checking your apps for indescribable smells. * Closing some Tupperware in a stinky room to preserve the smell forever. * A rat kingdom living under the BART tracks. * Where to talk about unsolved mysteries now that Unsolved Mysteries with Robert Stack went off the air. * Reintroducing mystery to the world like replenishing a lake with trout. * What is the goo under the BART 12th Street Tunnel? * Mystery caches. * An extremely achievable local mystery. * Your body surfacing issues you were previously unaware of. * The full spectrum of diabetes. * Disposable glucose monitors. * What type of food are you eating that spikes your blood sugar, and by how much? * Glucose Curious. * Sports enthusiasts needing to checking their pulse as they watch the big game. * Going for a walk right after eating. * Continuing walking until your blood sugar is back within tolerances. * Having a bad habit for a few months vs. having a bad habit for your whole life. * Learning to spot blood glucose meters in the wild. * Measuring your blood glucose for a month to learn how your body reacts to various foods. * Getting funneled into videos of a douchebag with spiked hair breaking shit with a hammer. * Figuring out how to survive the first night in Minecraft with a six year old. * A game that lets you do lots of different things but doesn't suggest any of them so you have to figure out what you can do and why you would want to do it. * Java edition mods vs. Bedrock edition mods. * Mods: they have they mod problem. * Why they added copper to Minecraft. * Purposeful exploration. * Laying down a bunch of the stone that makes The Warden spawn so you can meet your new Warden pal. * Exploring The End and getting your wings. * Dragon Quest Builders. * The Terraria tutorial. * A weird person to be. * Vampire Survivors: not the first Vampire Survivors-like. * Getting to the poem before it's too late. * Looking through your photos of graffiti * A cat mermaid playing a violin as if it's a guitar. * The Earth Wants You To Be Die. * Emitting a series of tones that insert an image in the listener's mind. * If you can't handle me at my fish, you don't deserve me at my cat. * Missing some sleep and some teeth. * Trying to refute an idea without exposing your audience to the original idea. * Videos continuing to appear on your travel vlog long after you've finished traveling.

Lords: * Jenni * Tyriq Topics: * Internal Monologue Soundboards * Ash wants to be the very best, but at what cost? When is competition a bad thing? * The different ways people play games * Friendship is a skill * Water… Earth… Fire… Air… which bending is best bending? Microtopics: * Scrubbin' Trouble. * Figuring out how to do a multiplayer roguelike. * Power leveling all your skills at once and hoping it's enough. * Looking at the comments, because there might be something good in there. * The Dawn of Our Topic Lords Century. * Why all ducks sound like that. * Hearing a sound an incorporating it into your internal monologue. * Saying "good morning" whenever you pick up the phone no matter what time of day it is. * Alone in the Dark Hedge Maze Mafioso Barks. * Talkin' Barks. * A vault full of clones of a guy named Gary and the only thing they can say is "Gary" * You're a cluster of cells wafting through the universe and latching onto phrases you hear on the internet. * Kids who think they invented being dumb on the Internet. * The Bill Nye theme song sound board. * Wanting to be the very best, like noone ever was, and defining "best" as "kindest." * Wanting to be the very best, and then being it, and then no longer being it and losing your entire sense of identity. * What if you're on a spaceship? Lots of weird things happen on a spaceship. * Striving to be the most benevolent god, like noone ever was. * The sound of angering the giant goose. * Trying to get your significant other to play Outer Wilds because you can't fly the spaceship. * Solving puzzles with the internet. * Super Metroid + Link to the Past and other multi-game randomizers. * Lies on video game forums. * The Search for the Last Great Secret. * A Clop or a Girp. * Collecting meat for a Roguelike Celebration talk. * Holding a meeting about all the ways your project could potentially fail. * Good mortem! * Going back in time and all humans clump together like a giant Katamari. * Friendship as a skill vs. friendship as a natural outcome of your life circumstances. * Friendship decay, a a problem that neurotypicals have. * Keeping up with real life friends vs. with Internet friends. * Online games as a third place. * Complaining about all the ways in which your are socially incompetent. * Inviting people over for a listening party. * Not knowing what number you're thinking of but knowing that it's either odd or even. * Filling away tidbits of information. * The Y2K problem where when pro people start being over 127 years old, everyone remembers them as being -128. * Things that are impossible to think about because you have no frame of reference. * Making yourself a little coffee treat and scrolling reddit so you can stop thinking about death. * Water is imba! * Whether magma falls under bending Earth or bending Fire. * Highly fluid particulate sand. * Which bending is most delicious, according to avatarfandom.com * The cosmology of Jefferson Starship's "We Built This City" * Whether circuit bending is still fun now that everything is software-controlled. * Circuit bending your electric together. * The Goodbye Noise. * Odd Object dot Zone. * Hamster Disco.

Lords: * Jenni * Robb Topics: * The phenomenon where multiple people respond with the same mystifying emoji * Skin Fort dream and image both provided by WiL: https://stale-meme.itch.io/ * Lately I've engaged in pretend play with my 4 year old nephew by pretending we stole a crate of "Toxic Waste" candy and lying to the cops about it. As actual parents, is this healthy for the child? * It turns out you don't want to rent a Playstation * Hints * https://x.com/jensbest/status/413105300535668736 * I would be happy to talk about what having an operation to get an Osia 2 bone anchored hearing aid is like. Microtopics: * The Stanley Parable New Edition. * Cyberganked. * Wishing for games using the Steam wishlist system and the Steam Monkey's Paw curls. * CRPG blobbers. * 25 years of Hugo. * Recognizing a Windows program from 1996. * Back when malware pretended to be a little guy. * The origins of Skinfort. * Hapsburg Jaw. * Angry Cry Laughing. * Meta-channels and meta-meta-channels. * Medicinal Dock Spiders. * This Spider Pays Taxes. * The weakest Great Lake of all. * The good Mexican restaurant in Fond du Lac. * Fish pouches. * Whether you have to refrigerate Big League Chew. * Putting tuna on dry toast. * Four year olds who want to impress people with how sour s candy they can eat. * The amount of toxic waste you are allowed to feed a child. * Having a milkshake and being in bed by 8:30. * Doing improv with your four year old nephew about invoking the fifth amendment. * The Cocomelon video about never talking to the police. * I'm not sad; I'm just on a triangle. * French mice asking to buy your armpit cheese. * A kid who just plain needs to be lied to. * Renting a child so you can make cheese in their armpits. * Did Jim finally rent the Playstation? * Going to the place to rent a Playstation and they immediately ask for your Social Security Number. * It's hot inside the Playstation, and the bugs are cold. * Just doing the poem about Data's cat Spot every episode. * The warlock dominatrix Harley Quinn voice that you make everybody listen to. * Oh I'm sorry, I thought the ceiling was your ass. * Telling your friends about the guy who said he thought the ceiling was your ass and asking them what it means and they just respond with the grapes emoji. * Games that have both Booty and The Wizard. * The scrawny wizard from Zwackery. * Whether chewing your food is a spell. * Listening to Topic Lords for all the mouth sounds. * Constantly rehydrating this child so that he can make the whole house wet. * Starving zombie apocalypse survivors taking the child seats out of a car so they can turn them upside down and shake all the gummy bears out. * A poem with a pangram rhyme scheme. * Bone-anchored hearing aids. * Bringing a topic list to a first date. * Waiting until your last day of insurance and bursting into the OR like the Kool-Aid Man. * Your surgeon quitting the industry immediately after seeing the inside of your head. * Performatively pressing your hearing aid's nonfunctional volume button. * Your wife violating HIPAA to tell you a hilarious work story. * Accidentally installing Bonzi Buddy on your hearing aid. * Marrying an audiologist to get the best possible hearing aid. * Going to zoom.ca to rev up your savings. * Performance Acura North Mississauga. * Adapting Eliza into a game where you're trying to trick Smaug into giving up his hoard. * Making a joke about a banana slug actually bring a plantain slug. * It is the 90s and there is time for Rifftrax.

Lords: * Mark * https://wyrmburden.bandcamp.com/album/strange-sorcerous * Shirley * https://shop.naturmacht.com/sorcerot-merch/sorceroet-rotten-magick-vinyl-crowdfunding-lim Topics: * Music League * Shaping the Head Like a Japanese Watermelon * Kugelmugel * https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kugelmugel * Welcome to Holland by Emily Perl Kingsley * https://www.emilyperlkingsley.com/welcome-to-holland * Using drugs in 2025 * https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UStimeline.Drugsinvolvedinoverdosedeaths.jpg Microtopics: * Wyrm Burden. * Metal bands running out of cool word combinations. * Checking Metal Archives. * Canadian atmospheric sludge metal. * Sorcerot. * Crowdfunding a vinyl pressing because your label refuses to pay for it. * Music that is not on Spotify. * How many Music Leagues you're part of right now. * A competition to see who has the best taste in music. * A song about a horse. * Adversarial Music League. * Posting on the internet with the goal of getting the same number of upvotes and downvotes. * Benign Hypotonia and the Floppy Baby. * Wearing a helmet 23 hours a day to adjust the shape of your skull. * Heads that smell like feet. * A very head-shaped head. * Babies that look like the Gary Oldman character in The Fifth Element. * A cone-shaped otter. * Zorg and Zord. * What kind of gear is this baby on? * Eat clen, tren hard. * Collecting as many physical therapists as possible. * A sweet little guy who's having a great time. * Putting on your resume your first word and the age you first walked. * Parent influencers with bad takes. * A baby that expands to the size of its container, so they'll stay baby sized forever unless you move into a bigger house. * Listen, have you ever evaluated anything? It's not easy. * Vibes-Based Medicine. * Declaring your metal sphere a micronation. * Closing the borders of your 8 meter micronation during COVID. * Building a house that looks like a ball. * Declaring your new house a micronation after the city refuses to grant you a building permit. * Antifascism Square. * Declaring your baby paddock a micronation. * A very good basically-a-poem. * Disabilities that are worse than going to Holland. * Trying to figure out how to live with the life you have. * Making peace with the fact that you didn't achieve all your dreams. * Divisive takes about sleep training. * Outcomes associated with prolonged cortisol exposure. * Category One Squawking. * Spending six years figuring out how to get your kid to fall asleep. * The term they invented to remind parents that just because things are good now, that doesn't mean they stay good forever, which is true for everything, but for children sleeping they have a specific term for it. * Getting real sad and going home. * Trying to take any drug except for fentanyl. * Fentanyl test strips from reliable suppliers. * If Coolio isn't safe, who is? * Narcan vending machines. * Walking down the street like you have Narcan in your pocket. * The terrifying gray line that dominates the entire graph. * A credible threat to a lot of recreational drug users. * Finally inventing the nightmare drug that DARE wanted you to be terrified of. * Nostalgia for street heroin. * The role that dopamine plays in human behavior. * A dogshit drug even from a drug enjoyer's perspective. * The only internet you even like any more.

Lords: * Erica * Judy * https://www.tiktok.com/@diluftmensch * https://www.tumblr.com/diluftmensch * https://bsky.app/profile/diluftmensch.bsky.social Topics: * The Pantone college experience * Why is everyone with superpowers a crime fighter or a criminal * Sell me on metal utensils * Grand Avenue, by Ron Koertge * https://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php%3Fdate=2014%252F10%252F19.html * Abridged version: https://allpoetry.com/poem/14373111-Grand-Avenue-by-Ronald-Koertge * Toothpaste is traditionally spicy Microtopics: * Just Judy. * Telling your friends you love them. * Taking a break from the Internet and staring at the ceiling. * Realizing you need to take a break and then trying to figure out what you need to take a break from. * Doing absolutely nothing for ten minutes. * People who enjoy meditation explaining that you just need to meditate harder. * Taking a depressing game and remaking it, reframing it as relaxing. * Tetromino Chill. * Asking "do I have the flu?" in French. * Clicking on a wav file of Sleepwalk by Santo and Johnny and thinking "computer music is cool" * Your college's particular shade of purple. * The proliferation of this exact shade of purple now that Pantone has made it possible to exactly reproduce a color. * The reason why can't we tell who's buff and sexy any more. * Going to college to get sick of a particular color. * Whether any place is as intensely branded as a college campus. * What the founding fathers would think of this college campus' branding. * James Madison inventing the signature duplicator. * James Madison insisting that his entire family sleep sitting up. * Colors that you can't use until you really mean it. * Colors that are not allowed in the bathroom. * Pantone inventing a way to pee any known color. * Boom Box Guy. * The professor with the glasses with two different color lenses who is constantly complaining about JMU Purple. * Having jaws strong enough to eat bones and eating way more bones than you used to. * Topics that have been in the bucket since the inception of the bucket. * Unlimited energy. (Not limited energy.) * Why isn't Superman using his x-ray vision to watch TV better than anyone? * Lois Lane wearing superman's shirt. * Using your x-ray vision to make sure ant colonies aren't siphoning money out of bank vaults. * Advising strangers on the street that they have an untreated medical condition and they're like "go away creep" * The spoon doing a catapult move because the handle is too heavy, and flinging chili everywhere. * Plastic utensils for adults. * Hitting the age when doctors start saying things like "let's see if we can get a couple more good years out of you" * Whether the fork ever touches your tongue. * Ceramic spoons. * Melamine, the plastic material manufactured on Alf's home planet. * Handsome Korean wooden spoons. * Just slurping down a whole bowl of guacamole. * Everyday Carry Forks. * Metal utensils: so good, you carry them around. * Trying to eat a leaf of lettuce with an extremely heavy fork. * Eating a meal with a pickaxe and a pronged shovel. * Turning the corner by Señor Fish. * Different ways to kil for somebody. * A punch-line that was not set up in the descriptive part of the poem. * A poem that is a subset of another poem. * Where is the wacky misunderstanding that I was promised? * A bumper sticker reading "you just got passed by a bad driver (AI)" * Slapping the "artificial intelligence" label on everything you write so people blame AI. * Cinnamon toothpaste and ginger toothpaste. * Conventionally spicy toothpaste. * Toothpaste that doesn't taste like anything. (You know, for cats!) * Spicy tuna toothpaste and black pepper toothpaste. * Rinsing your mouth with lemon cleanser so your mouth can feel lemon fresh. * Pure Piperin. * Tubes: they're for squeezing. * Phosphoric acid toothpaste.