Topic Lords

Lords: * JohnB * CisHetKayFaber Topics: * The human body is more similar than I'd like to shitty software (humans have chitinase in our DNA, immune system works like an antivirus) * The origin of hiccups * https://derinthescarletpescatarian.tumblr.com/post/723161770948231168/okay-so-the-thing-about-hiccups-is-that-you-have * Twenty years ago there were like three real books about videogames that weren't strategy guides and now there are hundreds. * "untitled" by Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz * https://allpoetry.com/poem/13310612-Prostetnic-Vogon-Jeltz-by-Bollox * TV shows that have inspired original mathematics - yes, it has happened more than once Microtopics: * Whether it's okay to catch up. * Air conditioning on hot days. * A steel mill catching fire and the whole east bay smells like the back of a cathode ray tube. * Shaking yellow sand out of your laundry. * Importing brushfire smoke from Canada. * Using bad metaphors to explain RAM. * Stochastic immunology. * Alphabetizing all your gut bacteria. * Whitman's Anal Sampling Mechanism. * The Bonzi Buddy of the human body. * Your inkjet printer waking up at 5am to cycle some ink. * The optimal humidity to reflow your ink cartridges. * Norton Commander. * Selecting files with the arrow keys and viewing them with F3. * How Thunking ruined Jim's Norton Commander clone. * Your fish nervous system trying to be a fish again. * Reciting the anti-hiccup poem to cure your hiccups. * Fish reminding each other to not take ten small sips of water or they'll stop breathing. * Scaly swimmers. * Working in a shark lab. * Whether a fish sandwich is a fish or a sandwich. * Offering people a "tuna roll" and when they say yes guessing whether they think you mean the sushi or tuna salad on a bready roll. * Meditating on the concept of hiccups. * Congratulations, you won the game! * How to Beat the Atari Home Video Games. * Where a library would shelve those books of type-in BASIC programs. * Dave (2018) and Dave Demo (2018) * Which Boss Fight Books are good. * Starting your kid on Mario Maker. * Game Engine Black Book: Doom and Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D. * Mario Galaxy's camera-oriented level design. * Your body telling you when it's time to drink water. * Using Final Fantasy 4 as a bridge to talk about localization. * Developing a light gun game to install in all the bowling alleys now that the bowling fad has faded. * The Countdown to Irrelevance. * Books that used to be blogs. * Inventing criteria for how you beat Galaga. * Learning what micturations are twenty years after reading that Vogon poem and wondering which seeming nonsense words you'll learn in the next twenty years. * The BBC TV Hitchhiker's Guide series. * The second-worst poetry in the galaxy. * Red Dwarf airing on Dave. * A better way to think about it. (If you are a math person.) * Drive-by Mathematics. * Nesting your watch orders. * Watching every episode in every possible order to get the maximum possible amount of context for every scene. * Marylin vos Savant. * The Monty Hall Problem. * A game design that presumes the player does not want a goat. * Whether you want to switch to the other goat. * Opening 98 doors, revealing goats behind each one. * Pushing limits and talking about calculus. * Learning Japanese because you want to read the smutty manga. * X: The Everything App.

Lords: * CisHetKayFaber * Phone Topics: * Correction regarding a previous topic where I stated that Metal Gear Solid 2 was the most important game of 2023 * https://twitter.com/othatsraspberry * Children cannot be trusted to enjoy things, and maybe that's fine * This list of extremely specific danger signs * https://nextworldover.tumblr.com/post/720069329613357056 * https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/Tkr719yF.jpg * https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/9unswnr6.jpg * "Bank Account" by Louis Cole * https://genius.com/Louis-cole-bank-account-lyrics * Technical beliefs you have which may be regarded as superstition, but are true to your experience (I'm convinced my new microphone is worse) Microtopics: * The part where Jim talks. * Splitting your mutuals. * The kind of person who goes to Bluesky vs. who goes to Mastodon. * A relationship with an editor. (Like Emacs.) (Or Vim) * Wanting to see what Shaq posts. * The human zoo of bad takes. * Who sent Shaq a Bluesky invite?? * O' That's Raspberry * Metal Gear Apologies. * Sending Konami money to fund the port of Metal Gear Solid 4. * Optimizing for extremely specific hardware and getting entrenched. * Shaders languishing on PS3. * PT's final resting place. * Konami diversifying into video games in the 80s when it's lucrative and dediversifying when it stops being as lucrative in the 2010s * A lot of weird business practices involving Slurpees and banking * All the places the Vita port of Metal Gear Solid 2 went on to. * The Worlds of Power novelization of Metal Gear. * A Narpas Sword scenario. * Cutscene inflation. * What happened to cutscene lengths after voice acting became cheap. * Encoding movies on a disc for free. * Time to Crate vs. Time to When Your Input Matters. * Ramen waterslides. * Annoying things that little kids do that adults also do. * Playing video games and parenting at the same time. * Whether it's still abuse if it's happening in the Netherlands. * Expectations people place on their children for Christmas vs. for Halloween. * Distorted beer. * Getting a bunch of stuff you don't want for Christmas. * A sweater with Mario or a cool dinosaur on it. * Swapping the Barbie and GI Joe voice boxes and whether that's a plot point of the Barbie movie. * Chewbacca dancing on top of the twin towers as they collapse. * Taking wire cutters to the electrical substation and getting some free copper. * I don't feel 130 kilovolts; I'm a perfect sphere. * Creating a situation where people are safe even if they're not paying attention. * Flying around in a tornado googling "what do you do when you're flying around in a tornado" * Is it .webm or .webnn? * All the three letter acronyms that ought to be on the internet rug you can't get. * The giant System 7 floppy disk blanket. * A blanket with the Mac startup sound on it. * Missing out on some drum solos. * A poem based on a true story. * Being afraid to look at your tax returns. * Getting single taxed and double social security benefits. * Replacing your old snowball with a new snowball. * Your thing as a person trained in audio engineering. * Getting a very insensitive microphone so that it only picks up the sounds you want it to. * Jim's advice for recording your voice. * A Shure SM-57B with the Cloudlifter. * Technical knowledge for smart people. * Solid state drives failing without warning. * A high pitched whine imparting a natural warmth to your voice. * Recording your voice with a $15 boom arm. * Using shittier tools as you get more experienced. * A cover of a Weezer song that's rendered unlistenable hematite l because of the string squeak. * The inability to process and retain information about LinkedIn's purpose.

Lords: * Mark * Shirley Topics * Lawn Angst: Why does the city get to decide what is a weed vs an acceptable plant? * Learning to code is like a cheat code for life, or at least work * Poop epidemiology * https://nextworldover.tumblr.com/post/720886587343454208 * Insomnolence by Charles Rafferty * https://poets.org/poem/insomnolence * Ville asks: "buying mysterious items that aren't labeled in a language you speak from the Asian supermarket because the picture on the front looks good, then choosing whether to roll the dice by putting them in your dinner or keep them in the back of the cupboard until you move house and throw them away" Microtopics: * Chamber Mage. * Touring on the strength of your one song. * Heartstopper, by Alice Oseman. * The city issuing a ticket because you have a weed on your lawn. * Declaring certain plants weeds when they're all good plants, Bront. * All the different signs you could put on your lawn to tell off your neighbors. * How tall a CB tower you're allowed to build without a permit. * The youngest homeowners on the block. * A natural space that isn't so manufactured. * A society that loves some plants and hates others. * How to grow flowers on the moon. * Making 660 folders based on an excel spreadsheet. * The stick-to-it-iveness required to fight a bunch of bugs. * What LLMs are good at and bad at. * A Dragonborn Paladin with aphasia. * Generating humans with too many fingers. * Where to post your Wordle results and Dall-E shitposts. * A cryptic lineage of COVID in Columbus, Ohio. * Gross but amazing. * Some seriously bad-ass science. * Expecting more diligence after you start paying your volunteers. * The Paxlovid Rebound. * Gin Gin Ginger Chews * Genetically altering your tongue to taste the most possible bitter flavor all the time. * Placing a ginger chew on your tongue and allowing it to dissolve over the course of an hour. * Paxlovid Mouth. * How to sleep with a cough. * Numbing your coughing agents. * Stashing the lozenge on your gums. * Waking with a hard candy stuck to your teeth. * Scarring your vocal folds by coughing as much as you can. * Poets: good at writing in a poetic way. * Poetry that's just prose if you think about it. * Turning a poet in to the authorities for writing prose. * At night, in the woods. * Standing here a thousand years ago and feeling the exact same thing. * Not being able to upgrade our armor any more because bokoblins are extinct. * Finding and giving up on a new ingredient every week. * RIP Bean Paste. * H-Mart. * Gooey Duck. * Buying a bunch of dumplings without any idea what's in them and having a tasting party. * A tiny freezer with only durian in it. * A smoothie that tastes like drinking a gas leak. * Jackfruit as a crab or pulled meat alternative vs. jackfruit as a tasty treat. * Getting foodstuffs stuck behind your soft palate. * Asafoetida risks. * Golden Mountain Sauce. * Brown Umami Boosters. * Fish sauce tastings. * Three Crabs vs. Flying Lion. * How to say "Serving Suggestion" in all the different Asian languages. * Loving all your listeners, even the problematic ones. * Throne of Iron. * Heavy metal music about D&D. * Finding yourself on the internet.

Lords: * Alex * Shannon Topics: * Tree law * https://www.tumblr.com/whistletown/721716818422677504 * https://www.tumblr.com/whistletown/723346723280453632 * Tax Heaven 3000 * When I was a kid I read about a magic trick where if you touch your index fingers together and cross your eyes, a disembodied third finger appears between them.This is the kind of thing we had for entertainment in the 80s. * https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/156405/outbreaks * Best food byproducts Microtopics: * Exhausting topics before the show even starts. * Should we give bee educators guns? * Lords with lord awards. * Megalords lording over huge swaths of topics. * Getting your partner a very smooth engagement ring so it hurts less when they punch you in the face. * Trimming a tree in the middle of summer. * Tree law consequences. * The Hitman games, you know, with the bald guy * Whether Hit People are hired to kill likable or dislikable people. * Games with missions designed to make you feel bad about what you're doing but also to give you no choice but to do it. * Injured while sl searching for bodies in Lake Mead? Demand compensation! * A cute anime girl who really wants to help you prepare your taxes. * MSCHF. * Calling the Key 4 All hotline for real time data on the car's location and speed. * Playing Geoguessr to determine where the car is. * Reverse engineering the smell of WD-40. * Using the car for purposes of a car. * The legal standing of Public Universal Car. * Don't rotate the donut, you gave to rotate the pie * Legal MSCHF. * Taking the SATs for money. * Writing a list of demands in a child's scrawl and sending it to your senator. * Seeing the Vienna sausage with knuckles. * Getting a book of Magic Eyes in the 90s and staring at it until you see the dolphin and having a splitting headache for the next day and a half. * A jump scare in Magic Eye form. * Why we all need glasses. * Listening to your dad listening to a podcast. * Disappearing your own nose. * The purpose of feeling boredom. * The impossibility of being bored when libraries exist. * Paleolithic man enjoying memes. * Why campfire smoke always blows into your eyes. * Building a prehistoric highway system and using one of those printers that prints on the road so paleolithic man can enjoy dank memes. * What kids get in their stockings today now that iTunes gift cards are obsolete. * Why keep any DVDs? * A common metaphor for a problem that can be overcome by relaxing. * The most racist shrimp. * It's not a firearm, it's just an explosive knife. * Begging your mom to buy you the Krazy Krabs. * Putting on a brine shrimp show for your family members. * A spring loaded rigid whip. * Kitchen Somebody. * Searching for comfort and the eels come. * The neon 24 hour fried chicken sign gleaming behind the pines. * Finding god in a cluster of eels beneath your palms. * Have you given god a pizza? * A different eel pizza meme. * All the Breaking Bad fans coming to your neighborhood and throwing pizza on top of the Pizza Eels for a photo opportunity and the eels are getting extremely fat. * Feeding the sharks by stuffing a dive suit full of chum. * A cooking process that creates a byproduct that you can use to cook something else. * Calling bean juice "aqua fava" and styling. * Browning the whey to create a delicious paste loaf. * The two-in-one, in which they put two taquitos into a burrito. * Glorpamole.

Lords: * Jenni * Tyriq Topics: * King Leonardo and His Short Subjects * https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/WesternAnimation/KingLeonardoAndHisShortSubjects * Nervous Subject * https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/Nervous_Subject * Subject Zero * https://masseffect.fandom.com/wiki/Jack * On the Subject of Poetry By W. S. Merwin * https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=26014 * Royal subjects * Subject 13 * https://www.mobygames.com/game/84773/subject-13/ Microtopics: * The only place on the internet you can hear subjects discussed. * Subject Lords. * Finding video games in places that don't exist. * Renaming the spreadsheet to the Subject Bucket. * A hand me down Rocky and Bullwinkle bedsheet set. * Rocky and Bullwinkle indoctrination. * How many seasons the Flintstones ran for. * The Classic Wikipedia Was. * Wacky Racers. * Whether Winston has ever tried Circus Peanuts. * Enjoying one Circus Peanut every three years. * How to buy just one Circus Peanut. * Sawing a nickel in half before money became pre-scored. * Whether jokes were funny in the past. * Two troublemaking nephews named Duke and Earl. * Mr. Mad's plan to trap the king. * One actor playing more than one character all in one take. * Somebody the Explainer. * A Nancy strip where the joke revolves around knowing that people used to take their shoes off in movie theaters. * Show Swap day at the movie theater. * Waiting in the closet for the grim reaper to show up and then jumping out and being really seductive. * Closet-pilled. * Multiple people dying in the same yoga class and the grim reaper just sticks around instead of leaving and coming back. * Yogaing while old. (YWO.) * First name nervous, last name subject. * Born pregnant by aliens. * Nervous Subject vs. Nervous Object. * Pressing X to wisecrack. * Getting quests from Lord British and killing some monsters. * The Vic Viper and the Road British. * A pop culture character who hits the center of the Venn diagram. * Writing Mass Effect fanfiction for Glittermitten Grove * 10,000 Boolean variables that can be triggered by your narrative choices. * Narratively justifying how getting a donut leads to your death. * Generating alive/dead states for everybody. * The tortured but boring space marine guy with a tragic soldier past that isn't very interesting. * The girl who is just a cloud of gas under her hazard suit. * The man who slouches listening to the wheel revolving in the stream, yet there is no wheel there to revolve. * The reason the wheel turns – though there is no wheel. * Sitting at the end of March. * Deckard Bane. * Hortatoriness. * How do we feel about monarchies? * Tropical fruit tree drama. * The Miami Fruit Organization. * Ordering a moonbeam in a jar from Instacart. * Where in the fruit the seed wants to be. * The banana that evolved for the seed to pop out and hit you in the face as soon as you start peeling it and that's how they invented firearms. * Figuring out how to hold an avocado like a gun. * Fruit with Velcro-style hook and loop. * Fruit you should avoid if you have a mucous membrane. * Subscribing to durians for $199 per week. * Turning the pineapple upside down. * The pineapple as a symbol of hospitality. * A video game with many of the components a video game would have. * The taking robots from the System Shock series. * A pre-rendered background Final Fantasy 7 type deal. * Cinematic platformers starring spheres. * Conflating two games made by Francophones. * Namable group chats. * Getting a Bluesky invite just so you can park your domain.

Lords: * April * Ryan Topics: * John asks "Puzzles/puzzle games and challenges you find pleasant and brain-expanding vs. the ones that you just cannot get your head around." * Which foods would be the most fun or the least fun to eat if you rotated them at a 90 degree angle first. * https://www.ebay.com/itm/184633478236 * The Shaggs * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XR9d4ESlpHY * Instructions for Traveling West, by Joy Sullivan * https://joysullivan.substack.com/p/how-to-leave-a-life * Songs that we completely ignore how weird they are because they're famous already Microtopics: * Unions * Plug guilt. * Mentoring young composers. * Saying smart stuff about things you know about. * Taking the W. * A high pitched ding whenever someone succeeds at something. * A Good Snowman is Hard to Build. * Into the Breach. * Pushing the Vek to a different square. * Making something in your environment more satisfying. * A squid with your kid. * Colors that have frequencies vs. compound colors. * Indigo: a fake color. * The banger heavy duty colors. * A range of frequencies that is culturally mediated. * Paint mixing vs. light mixing. * Exploding ancient dinosaur juice constantly. * The electricity magic vs. the valve magic. * What does it mean to explode? * How to tell the difference between things you know because it's common knowledge vs. things you know because it's what you obsessed about when you were 15. * Having a responsibility to the taxpayers to not be wasteful. * The science of what sounds good. * The most confusing music you've ever heard. * Food rotation. * Imagining you have a banana coming at you. (It's not scary.) * Biting it the way we bite it. * Burrowing through your hamburger top to bottom. * Living with the mayonnaise for 30 seconds. * What happens when you turn a taco 90 degrees. * Ike's Paradox. * Eating a rib straight up and down. * Pizza sandwiches. * Explaining to your dentist that your bottom jaw is a ruinous cavern because you eat ribs top to bottom. * Adding a thickening agent to soup so you can turn the bowl sideways and just shove your face in there. * Buying the Ultra Rare Cheeto Shaped Like Batman Crying just to flip it. * A li'l cute ghostie with ears. * Affection for bands that are bad. * A rock album recorded by three kids who have no interest in or aptitude for writing and performing music. * Art that lives at the very tips of the horseshoe ends. * High fashion and weird looks that aren't meant to be for everyday. * Music that sounds bad in a way that you don't recognize. * Music that is boring and propulsive at the same time. * Music that is not for listening to. * Threatening your wife with a conversation about Beatles chord progressions. * Making art that is boring in unexpected, interesting ways. * Inventing a new boring version of interesting that still isn't interesting but is boring in interesting ways, which should make it interesting but doesn't. * Finding a desert and falling in. * Watching a purple meadow quiver and drinking whiskey beside a 100 year old cactus. * Whether Joy is a trick. * Blowing up your life and other people's lives as well. * The other entendre. * Yet another example of this fucking show. * Cooking for the rest of your life without ever washing dishes. * Joy that can't not be real. * Poetry that's just really well-constructed prose. * A poem that doesn't have any line breaks because then it wouldn't fit on Instagram. * A true poet who accounts for swiping. * An expression of a huge evocative idea built out of tiny ideas. * How to be happy even when you are not actively chasing your dreams. * A song that is famous in some way. * That fuckin' Pina Colada song. * Marrying the same person three or four times. * Bouncing along and going on a fun road trip while the world is ending. * Mystifying number one hits. * Robot Mr. Feeny in your car and you go around solving mysteries together. * Getting your wife a Groucho Marx nose for christmas. * Robust dependable noses. * Think On...

Lords: * Maxx * Avery Topics: * Change Ringing * The differences between American and Japanese robotics teams * This rug * https://www.rugstudio.com/funrugsfuntimeshapecomfts-163multi.aspx * A few days after I ordered it they emailed me canceling the order. I'm pretty sure this rug doesn't exist. * Look what we found in the park in the dark * https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/KmODxwhW.jpg * Grandma giving you a world's best grandma mug Microtopics: * Topics. Disgust. * A video game experience that you will find relatable if you've ever moved. * Making prototype furniture out of huge Tetris blocks and then forcing your friends to carry them around every time you move onto a new house. * The kind of friend who believes the world should be a certain way and then acts like it is. * Just frogs. Toads too. Mostly turtles. * Frog-themed 8th birthday parties. * Running a frog rescue out of your van. * Frog Fractions 2: Revenge of the Fallen. * Writing Bonfire of the Vanities but never reading it. * Sport meets art: spart. * Method ringing with two cycle sine waves. * Installing a huge church organ in your home because they were giving it away for free but when you play a note the whole building catches on fire. * Free Pianos On Line! * Babysitting someone's upright piano while they go on the lam. * The mattress story but with a piano. * Where the warehouse came from. * When the landlord comes by and you have to put a microphone over your bed to convince him that this is a recording studio, not a bedroom. * Getting a pipe organ so you can play it while holding your brain in a jar and cackling. * Sliding down the whale rib. * Donating your brain to art so that they can slide it down the whale rib and try to hit a target. * Experiencing change ringing in a regal square. * Memorial ringing * Bell ringing machines. * Robots competing in team sports. * Microsumo. * Sumo printers smashing into each other. * Making a fighting toaster for the fighting toaster league. * Battle Bots vs. Robot Jox. * Department stores with an entire floor for stationery. * Buying Gundam models and never putting them together and just having a bunch of robot heads lying around. * Major innovations in robot mouse maze navigation. * A mouse with an inverted helicopter to keep it on the ground. * A 3D maze with a robot mouse that can walk on walls and ceilings. * Fun rugs fun time shapes to impress your teens with a trendy sense of style when you bring it into their room. * A rug covered with keywords from the 90s internet. * $87 for not that big of a rug. * Bonding with your child over ISP servers. * A visitor trying to bond with you about your ironic decor and you have to explain that sorry, no, it's supposed to be ironic. * The illuminated manuscript version of an the ironic internet rug. * A fantastic place to buy nuts and other bulk items. * A limit of 1 kilogram of tapioca pearls per customer. * Bringing the tapioca balls to life in the rice cooker. * Inventing a new way to dispose of tapioca pearls every single day. * Tiktok schticks that are connected to a minimum wage jobs so even if your tiktok starts making a bunch of money you still can't quit your shitty job. * Having anxiety dreams about the coffee shop you worked at years ago. * Non-mammalian milk enthusiasm. * Being someone's non-mammalian milk guy. * A bipedal walrus with jaundiced eyes in a jar the size of a walrus and it knows you're here. * Leaving a turtle in the park and it's a 50/50 tossup whether it immediately dies or has a litter of a thousand baby turtles that devour the entire ecosystem. * Companies that are named after the business that used to be in the building. * A 1950s sign with a bowling pin on it that says "Safeway." * Walking into the DNA lounge and demanding that they sequence some DNA. * Military challenge coins. * Meeting the world's best grandma and she hands you a "world's greatest grandma" mug to prove it. * Seek...

Lords: * Mikel * https://www.lasertimepodcast.com/category/videogame-apocalypse/ * Diana * https://www.lasertimepodcast.com/category/thirty-twenty-ten/ Topics: * Banishment is still legal as a punishment in Georgia (the state) * From an evolutionary standpoint, why is it so hard to admit you're wrong? * Minesweeper speed running * http://www.minesweeper.info/wiki/Dreamboard * Sometime During Eternity, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti * https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42860/sometime-during-eternity- * Marsupials: Have they got it figured out? * Venture Bros. rewatch - things gleaned from a binge rewatch 20 years after it debuted, ahead of the finale * Esper says: "Also I second the Venture Bros. recommendation, and double-triple the content warning. The first season is rough not only in terms of political correctness, but some of the episode setups are just 'let's watch the characters be racist for a while and assume that's funny.' They work their way out of it mostly after the first season, and those episodes aren't even great, but are completely necessary for laying groundwork going forward. And it's really worth it to get through them! Everything after season 1 is excellent, and everything from seasons 3 to 7 is truly some of the best television writing of all time." * The origin of dungeons * https://cohost.org/mogwai-poet/post/1771576-if-you-look-up-dung * Esper says: "The 'big B' is, according to my high school German knowledge, called an 'esset,' and can be replaced by 'ss' in just about any word using it. It's just a double S sound." Microtopics: * Vidjagame Apocalypse. * 30 20 10. * The day when new games used to come out. * Why podcasts come out at certain times. * Banishing someone from 158 counties. * Taking drugs to regulate your brain chemistry. * Figuring out some way you were right every time you're wrong. * Signaling and countersignaling. * Being so high status that you don't even need to pretend to be right. * Coming back two days later to prove that Steven Spielberg directed Star Wars. * Minesweeper board generation. * The Dreamboard. * 16 vs 32-bit PRNGs. * Speed running a game regardless of whether it's fun to speed run. * Watching speed run attempts live. * Using up one of your Life Stalks. * The shame of confusing Minesweeper and Minecraft. * The origins of Minesweeper. * Minesweeper the Game the Movie. * Harrison Ford on a boat fighting aliens. * Rihanna on a boat fighting aliens. * Manning an aircraft carrier with four guys, two of whom are over 90. * Back when they were still making movie video games. * An Advance Wars clone made as a tie-in to the movie Battleship. * Some scroll-type parchments that some henchmen left lying around the Dead Sea. * Jesus sitting in on your jazz combo. * Sitting there looking dead. * Going all in on Beatnik Jargon. * Asking centenarian beat legend Lawrence Ferlinghetti what he thinks about Minesweeper. * Flies holding their noses to eat durians. * If humans had elephant-length gestation periods and the kids came out walking and talking. * Giving birth to peanut-sized babies and expecting the babies to climb into your pouch on their own. * Having half a dozen kids because you need help emailing PDFs. * Adorable tiny possums that look like weasels all over South America. * Marsupials transplanting babies between pouches. * Some K-Type shit. * Munching on opiates your entire life. * What if Jonny Quest grew up to become a fail son? * The slowest rollout of a TV show in the history of television. * Gee willikers, I can't wait to solve this mystery! * Making a sequel that reflects the fact that you've grown since you made the original. * Adventure cartoon archetypes. * David Bowie showing up and yelling at you. * The deadly sting of the monarch butterfly. * One of the things that you put up against your throat and it vibrates. * A little straw that you put in your mouth to make it sound like you're talking through a didgeridoo. * What a regular person thinks of when they hear...

Lords: * John * JohnB Topics: * The word "juxtapose" seemed hyperspecific and esoteric when I first learned it in school, but has proven incredibly common and useful * Farewell to Cheap Bots Done Quick and the tens of thousands benevolent Twitter bots it powered: * https://twitter.com/v21/status/1643932890105884673 * Temple of Apshai's manual * https://fogknife.com/2023-05-31-the-book-of-apshai-a-personal-exegesis-.html * "Seen and Not Seen" by Talking Heads * https://genius.com/Talking-heads-seen-and-not-seen-lyrics * The new Zelda game several weeks in feels like the phase of a Civilization game where much, but not all, of the world has been revealed Microtopics: * John and John as well. * A John of Many Names. * The Frog Fractions Soundtrack of the Decade Edition Vinyl. * Being sued for copying a song's vibes. * Aldi Barcodes. * Noise-cancelling the sound of eating crackers. * Just scan it. It's food. * A word full of high-scoring Scrabble tiles. * Juxtaposing a police station. * A history of "juxtapose" waiting in the wings like a Batman origin story. * Pre-35 words. * Biff going back in time to 17th century Prague to be thrown out a window but surviving because he landed in a pile of manure. * An upbeat song about tolerating people that you hate. * The invention of defenestration. * Farewell to Cheap Bots Done Quick. * Sharing a fun tweet. * Being technical enough to look at nested braces and know what that means. * Bots in Space. * Capcom vs. Everyone. * Temple of Apshai. * A text adventure except they couldn't fit any of the text on the floppy. * Action RPGs that demand you manage your stats and inventory on paper. * Solo D&D adventure books. * Dragon's on a Chip. * Video games that come with books that you need to read to play the game. * A thick boy, full of lore. * The philosophy of city planning. * What is an Earth for? * Tunic. * What StarTropics did with the letter. * Sentinel Worlds One: Future Magic. * [See paragraph 3.] * 1980s computer game copy protection. * Bringing the Shenzhen I/O manual to work to study it on the job. * Why the main campaign in Shenzhen I/O is so much better than the bonus campaign. * Keeping an ideal facial structure fixed in your mind for years. * Musical mumbling. * Songs that are just a Shower Thoughts post. * The long-term discipline of adjusting your facial features over time. * Thinking about wider, thinner lips during the instrumental breakdown. * Trying to save SACD albums. * The Depths. * Sharing your location precisely. * There are four places: go to them. * The Ghost King Rauru. * The Calamity Ganon Calamity. * A dragon with really weird exaggerated eyelashes that you can run around on. * Giving up on horses. * Unique items of dubious usefulness. * Okay boomer, it's called a Purah Pad now. * Finding a tiny rock to jump off of to go into bullet time. * The two-fan hoverbike. * Skating around atop frozen gourmet meat.

Lords: * Alexicographic * Kev Topics: * Sports are good actually? Apparently? * Haunted articles of clothing * Burrito R&D * Casey at the Bat * https://discoverpoetry.com/poems/ernest-lawrence-thayer/casey-at-the-bat/ * Becoming a vtuber after losing a bet * Getting a guided tour of a TV show Microtopics: * Streaming daily. * The Tears of the Kingdom thread in the Topic Lords discord. * A rigid self-conception as someone who does not like sports. * Roller derby. * Whether skateboarding is a sport. * Going fast and shoving past people. * An athletic endeavor. * How much hockey fights feed back into the actual game. * Baseball nerds. * Chart Party. * Storytelling using data. * The Bob Emergency. * Seven Bobs left, and they're all aged. * Who was the top Bob? * East Bay Bike Party. * Floyd Rose Bridge Valves. * Figuring out how to make video games without involving Bay Area salaries. * Persian Castle Day at the climbing gym. * Taking the leather jacket that your drug dealer OD'd in. * Signing the bathroom guest book every time you poop at your grandma's house. * Schwarzenegger DNA on eBay. * The Clothes People Have Died In line at Value Village. * This Shirt Will Kill You. * A detailed cosmology of how hauntings work. * Ghosts of people who are still alive, following you around and asking for their hat back. * Taco Shop Guacamole. * A completely different foodstuff from what you were accustomed to. * Wet Burritos. * Airport Head. * A 3 oz container of guacamole that the TSA will allow on the plane. * Burrito night at the Stormdancer household. * Lulus and Cakes. * Spheroids. * Baseball Hagiography. * A Quora reply from three years ago. * Searching for cake and Google asking you to prove that you're not a robot. * Bethlehem slang from 1888. * Vtuber tooling. * Picking a punishment for yourself that you already want to do. * Animated fish backgrounds. * A more compatible CUDA API. * Mixtapes of TV episodes and video game levels. * Someone's top ten list of Star Trek episodes. * What the kids call Cliff's Notes. * The skill of understanding someone else's taste. * These are the songs that I love, perhaps you will also love them and if so we could fall in love. * Exchanging Spotify playlists because that's what we have now instead of mixtapes. * Trying to get into Homestuck via Problem Sleuth. * An 11 year old with the patience to wait a year to read Harry Potter book 2. * Phish Food. * Recording Topic Lords before lunch and getting a well-deserved burrito afterwards.

Lords: * Danny * Danny Topics: * Most Song Lyrics are redundant * Perfect fourths and fifths are named wrong * It's almost summer and that means it's time for Mark Salud's "Forever in Summer" * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ip_K5DHZlfg * Who wants to do a smutty poem?? We haven't done one of those * https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47339/upon-julias-clothes * Oh yes * Celebrity Deaths are getting out of control * ZZT has achievements now Microtopics: * Which Danny should go first. * The Noclip Archive. * Night Brunch. * Plugging before demonstrating your plugworthiness. * Whatever happened to MySpace. * The gnarliest weirdest thing you can get away with. * Stop making weird things! * Feeling passionately about individual words without considering their actual message. * Writing lyrics by stringing together abstract vowel sounds and then filling in the rest of the word later. * The native language of rock and roll. * Prisencolinensinainciusol. * Irish rap. * All the ways music is redundant. * A very inefficient way to communicate factual information. * The Mentos jingle. * Spoonman: a famous guy who played the spoons. * Music's ability to convey ideas that shouldn't be conveyed. * Teaching kids to love it. * What's perfect about a perfect fifth. * Music theory homework that calls it a "perfect unison." * Lydian to Locrian. * An extremely popular nostalgic songwriting device. * Trying to bring up topics out in the wild. * Even majorer then major. * What it means to be far from A. * A thing that happened on Public Access TV in San Diego. * Keyjazzing. * Weirdos making weirdo outsider art. * The tradition of using an Amiga 500 as a musical instrument. * Watching a musical performance by looking at the back of the performer's head. * Something to watch. * Economy of movement. * Playing drums so as to take up the most possible space. * The kind of singing that the Rock Band scoring system encourages. * Pre-singing the note so you're getting points as soon as the note starts. * Smutty poetry. * Whether singer songwriters have parentheses. * The Diamond Fleece. * Whether liquefaction is a Bay Area word. * Brave Vibrations. * What people thought was sexy in the 1600s. * Talking about a topic because people can hear you. * The 80s-90s thing of saying "as if" * America's Whitest City. * A phrase that Zoomers use to mean that they don't believe what they just said. * Investigating the Cool S for ten years. * Finding the Cool S in ancient Sumeria. * People in Latvia who don't know who Marilyn Manson is but they know he had a rib surgically removed. * The first celebrity. * Increasing numbers of celebrities. * Industrialized celebrity. * Adopting a future grief machine. * Practicing grief. * Several generations of digital fish. * Trugoy the Dove. * Disembodied consciousnesses living on a Dyson Sphere simulating Tina Turner's music. * Downsides of everyone living forever. * This is a mistake. (Here I go.) * Pre-dead. * Questions that will not be answered on this show because they are not topics. * Fish swimming in the background of someone's Zoom call. * What a time to not want to be alive! * Doing squats so you can get out of a chair. * Maximizing broken limbs while minimizing brain trauma. * Renaming Potomac Computer Systems to Epic Megagames. * ZZT: an Epic Game Store exclusive. * Caverns of Kroz. * An Amiga platformer sponsored by Chupa-Chups. * Retro Achievements. * Modding emulators to add achievements to old games. * Adding achievements to the Fairchild Channel F. * Achievements as a ludological device. * Assigning a point value to all the things your lizard brain needs an extra incentive for. * Citizen Game. * A game design trope that can be deployed with taste or not.

Lords: * Elena * Quil Topics: * Human Pudding, and why popular media can't depict bad art, only bad taste * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfHmctamVEA * https://www.notinhalloffame.com/ * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gPuH1yeZ08 * I got a van! * Corporate art: From industrial musicals of the 50s-70s to this Staples logo unveiling * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWUhqoAGsfk * https://philolexian.blogspot.com/2006/11/kilmer-2005.html Microtopics: * A very good New York Times crossword. * Feats of crossword construction that just make the experience of solving it worse. * Cottage cheese and jam. * Fruit on the bottom cottage cheese cups. * Whether cottage cheese comes pre-curdled. * An opportunity to make money by making the richest people in the world happier. * A jams and jellies bandolier. * Going to the arcade wearing a token dispenser but also your "I don't work here" shirt. * A band that only exists so that John Stamos can be annoyed by it. * Whether the average person would misspell a word on a grocery list. * Flashy rock and roll in which the lyricss are goofy and the goofy lyrics heightens the perceived quality of the music and the music heightens the perceived goofiness of the lyrics. * Various anime in which the kids are forming a band. * The Fictitious Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. * The East coast DIY music scene. * Eyeball Skeleton. * Smoosh nee Smush. * My Pal God Records. * The Most Wanted Song and The Most Unwanted Song. * Ramadan jingles. * Putting all the things people hate the most in the same song. * Single Ladies. * The Rescue Rangers dimension where the Rescue Rangers theme song is still modulating upwards to this day. * Releasing an album on vinyl that ends in a locked groove with a shepard tone. * Sprinter Vans. * Diesel vans racking up a million miles. * Van life. * Vans with indoor plumbing. * How people react when someone is sleeping in a vehicle in their neighborhood. * How to recognize a van that somebody lives in. * Living in a Wal-Mart parking lot. * Campy camping. * Living the hash tag no car life. * Bimodal distribution of van dwellers. * The Minimum Viable Van. * Living six people to a bedroom and not liking it. * A landlady who cooks for everybody in the 1800s. * Outlawing boarding houses because there are too many single men being rowdy. * The Florida Project. * Moving into the hotel across the street for a day so that you don't live in one place long enough to become a tenant. * Guessing how squatting laws work. * Staples presenting a trailer for their new logo at E3. * The history of Industrial Musicals. * Hiring video artists and composers to create massive lavish displays of brand awareness. * The documentary that Kevin Smith made about Prince just for Prince to watch and never release. * Making a funny video for mystery people to watch for mystery purposes. * The KFC VR training app. * Living close to Hamburger University. * Rerecording Prince's "1999" for every year up to 2999. * The circus ad that Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite was based on. * O Deathy Death. * Most Foul Vowel. * The Alfred Joyce Kilmer Memorial Bad Poetry Contest. * The headspace you get into as an artist when you try to make bad art. * A good example of a bad poem. * Birdemic's environmental message. * A clown photobombing your movie soundtrack.

Lords * CisHetKayfaber * Charlie Topics: * Umbrellas, siphons, and other physical things that seem like hacky bullshit but actually work * Articulating the shape of your internal cause-and-effect network and applying it as a learning superpower (futurevision) * I'm not sure what archipelago.gg is but if I read this paragraph aloud maybe we can figure it out together * https://archipelago.gg/ * A copypasta from this page: * https://www.followchain.org/best-copypastas/#3 * Why is a skill less valued the more we love it? Shouldn't it be the opposite? Is this arguable? Microtopics: * Supporting someone's video game dream in Denmark. * Escaping from idle games. * Video games drawing the screen as often as they can. * The pauses getting longer and longer whenever the bear needs to shit a new prime number. * The prime number shitting bear getting constipated. * How to calculate prime numbers faster. * Math stuff. * A choo choo train of thought. * Meditation apps that play ads while you're in the middle of meditating. * The thing where you put your mouth on the tube and then have to spit out the gas or you get neurological damage. * Creating a low pressure system by sucking on a tube. * Whether umbrellas make sense. * Umbrella side-drip. * How bicycles stay upright. * Does a bicycle on a treadmill stay upright? * Pattern recognition. * Seeing a situation you recognize and understanding what's going to happen. * Predicting where someone's sentence is going to end up. * Putting your water glass in a zone where it's going to get knocked over. * The shape of your mind's cause and effect network. * Seeing scenes from the future, like in Law and Order. * Predicting the future so that you can be a more efficient organism. * Mashing air molecules at you. * Speaking a language that your coworkers don't. * Applying FutureVision to your creative process. * Nonlinear creative processes. * One unique large musical story where nothing repeats. * A physical task you are doing inside your head. * The pet that is closest to having a kid. * Importing a portal gun into Tears of the Kingdom. * Finding the hookshot in Metroid and your friend then bring able to use it in Link to the Past. * How to know what your friends want. * All the bad ways an idea could be implemented * Surprise boomerangs. * Archipelago's Release System. * The era of couch co-op games. * A multiplayer season where everybody picks a different game. * Doing the oration. * Who the colored lights in your keyboard are for. * Polygonal dudes with long hair head banging in the background. * Weirdly modern music. * Fifteen years of everything else. * Rhythm games vs. music games. * Living in a society. * Devaluing the skills you love. * Listening to a song and really appreciating its use of rests. * How note lengths and rests work in tracker music. * Stopping a note without starting a new one. * Running experiments to determine exactly when a note should stop. * The micro decisions of things that people don't think about or care about. * A bird named Mabel. * A bird figuring out how to enjoy music. * A tepid delicate series of notes. * Attractivision.

Lords: * Chris * Wacy Topics: * Crafting little guys * Negotiating how to play Zelda together * Cream of mushroom latte * ChatGPT wrote a poem about zelda * Climbing real rocks Microtopics: * The Marble Hornets/Slender Man oeuvre. * Copying and pasting a video. * Sharing a movie you liked with a friend over IM by copying and pasting the title. * The turnip in Breath of the Wild. * Attempting and failing to enjoy wood carving. * Stabbing the Korok until it is less fuzzy. * A Snapchat filter that makes it look like you're made of felt. * Losing your needle-felted Lorax and getting upset. * Kirby eating Halo. * Hobbies that double as fidget toys. * Carving a stick into a squirrel. * Finding polymer clay out in the woods. * Naturally-occurring fission reactors. * Nature with really good graphic design. * Sharing a Zelda save with your life partner and learning a lot about each other. * Finding every turnip. * Learning spoilers at an interesting space. * The huge thing. * Target's 30-day return policy. * What Switch games support local wireless multiplayer. * Playing halfway through a video game before you figure out the most of the systems. * Stirring until the lumps go away. * Kombucha milk. * An incredibly cheap gas. * The Sus Engineering DIY carbonation guide. * Cream of Cow Latte. * Target getting out the UV light to detect traces of cream of mushroom soup on the espresso machine you're trying to return. * Frothy oily coffees. * Inventing a culinary taxonomy in which mushrooms and cheese are both fruit. * Sweet cheese and savory fruit. * Sweet cheesus! * Making a yes or no answer incredibly long. * Rewriting each paragraph until it ends with a word on a line by itself. * Rapping about Zelda in 1980s. * Finding plot holes in this poem about the Legend of Zelda. * Using video games to ignore that you're on a plane for six hours. * Horror poems. * "A Crow Looked at Me" by Mt. Eerie. * Knowing why someone wrote an album but not why people listen to it. * Bad Two-Sentence Horror. * Whether Poe's The Raven counts as horror. * Businesses named after the thing that the building they're in used to be used for. * Berkeley Bowl's produce section. * Climbing a boulder that is not labeled with its difficulty level. * Difficulty inflation at the climbing gym. * How rocks are shaped. * A lump that you pinch with your whole hand. * Reading about a weird thing in Harry Potter and not knowing if it's weird because it's a magical kingdom or if that's how England does things. * What camping is like in England. * Taking a four year old to a parkour gym. * Being a kid and looking forward to finally growing tall enough to skate on the power lines. * A table full of rock obstacle courses. * The standards body that certifies what playground equipment is safe to install. * Old Enough. * Achieving the Milk Task. * Not teaching children cursive. * Having a name because your mom liked it.

Lords: * Tyriq * Hallie Topics: * The world needs more clues for secrets nearby * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUXow3d3-b0 * How kids on tv used to hate leftovers * Smartphone sales declined 11% in 2022 while sales of flip phones doubled * https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44272/the-road-not-taken * What will emoji look like in 100 years? * I have invented a conspiracy regarding the shape of hand-held supermarket baskets Microtopics: * Lumps. * Lumpy Space Princess. * The best Space Princesses. * A completely different two Ls. * A good first vertically scrolling shooter. * Electric vehicle backing up noises. * Collecting Tesla license plates whenever you hear the Tesla collectible item noise. * The most sound-designed thing you interact with on a regular basis. * What kind of noises electric motorcycles make. * The laser you can point at any window to turn it into a speaker. * Bubb Rubb's reaction to whistle tips. * An urban legend about a haunted car driving down the freeway. * Advertisers beaming holograms directly into your AR goggles. * The city where instead of taxes they have ads and you're not allowed into the city without wearing the AR goggles at all times, even in the shower. * Wandering into the woods to escape the ubiquitous advertising but the birds have learned to repeat the ads. * Birds who sing the song that turns your skull into a speaker. * A scrub jay watching you with binoculars from across the street, reading your lips while you talk about the brown note, so it can teach the rest of the birds the song that makes the humans shit their pants. * Describing memes on podcasts. * The fungus that killed all the leftovers so the leftovers we eat today are a completely different varietal of leftovers. * Why leftovers-flavored jelly beans don't taste like real leftovers. * Spending more money so people don't perceive you as poor. * Food that you don't have to cook again. * Eating pizza straight out of the freezer. * Taking an ice cold slice of pizza into a hot shower. * Toaster pizza. * Cat body temperature pizza. * Rosemary garlic pop tarts. * Whether a day old poptart you forgot in the toaster counts as leftovers. * Leftunders. * Increasing crime by 100% but it's all good crime. * Flip phones Georg and whether he should be counted. * If anyone in the world decides not to eat something, that thing is canonically leftovers. * Wanting to be in a forest. * Dudes talking about themselves and the roads they've traveled. * The Most Misread Poem in America. * Pop quiz: individualism or fake individualism? * Doing a Twitter poll every time you are making a life decision and then taking the road less traveled by. * Dialects of emoji. * What Unicode looks like in the future where we communicate by swapping brain lobes with each other momentarily. * Doing the emoji hand clap for every word thing in your Great American Novel. * A screen reader reading out ascii art of a forest and after six minutes the blind user is like "nice forest!" * What the audio book for House of Leaves sounds like. * Lexicalogical collapse. * Veiny eggplant. * Which end of the eggplant emoji the droplets go on. * Genetically modifying eggplants so they look like dicks while unbeknownst to you another scientist is genetically modifying dicks so they look like eggplants and everyone remains confused. * Going to the bulk bin and scooping rice directly into your shopping basket. * If rice is like water and Bruce Lee is like water then Bruce Lee is like rice. * Trying to Tetris into a curve. * When a service works perfectly fine and they change things for no reason. * Searching Podcast Addict for a podcast and it comes back with a one episode podcast called "Please Update Podcast Addict" * Uber and Lyft becoming uncompetitive because they're trying to be profitable. * Ads that aren't even beamed directly into your skull so that good are they? * Advertising by teleporting a brain hemisphere of someone who loves your product with your target audience...

Lords: * Alexander * Yaros Topics: * Somewhat Dim Mirror * Unique and weird self-bootstrapping computer language - Forth * I've been getting emails from an Online Casino Guide offering analysis of the relative popularity of characters from the Mario Bros. movie. How did they get my email, and how did they know that this is the kind of thing I want to gamble on? * The Kraken, by Alfred Tennyson * https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheKraken(poem) * NES dev scene and new games still being released * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0Yg0GAX5vw * You have to heat a black hole to cool it down * Winston is suddenly really into Power Rangers which I'm not super thrilled about, but it does make me happy that the appeal of cheesy MIDI rock won't be lost on future generations * Esper says: "The tradition of taking Japanese action stuff and reworking it into an entirely different show is pretty wild, and pretty common. The original idea behind the western release of Sailor Moon was actually going to be a live action cast of young girls who transform into "cartoon scouts" or something, and the legendary anime Macross (known for animating lots of missles with cool smoke trails) was brought over here and entirely rewritten to be Robotech, an already existing western property. Power Rangers specifically comes from the Super Sentai tokusatsu series, of which there's actually two or three dozen seasons, each with more or less individual continuity. They're fun and goofy to watch if you get a chance to see the originals; I was mostly surprised by how self-aware they are." Microtopics: * Just playing games you already know whenever you find the time for games. * Dystopian fiction about all the little annoying things. * Dystopian fiction about all the terrible TV shows that are on now. * A guy who thought his idea would work but it didn't. * A black mirror but a little less black. * How really shiny black things work. * Logging in to watch people make themselves miserable. * Reverse polish notation. * Giving up on operating systems and deciding to live inside a Forth interpreter. * Going back to the Cambrian period and being like "what is this shell thing and what is it trying to accomplish?" * How Forth is like Eurovision. * Borrowing someone's RPN calculator and being very confused for a moment. * Your Dymaxion map of the globe. * The next emulations of Hewlett-Packard reverse polish notation calculators. * Online Casino Guides and the kinds of email they send. * A gaming and entertainment experience. * Naming your movie @ and getting incredible engagement on Twitter. * How recently Nethack has been patched. * Carpetology and the study of rugs and carpets even though they're not in the same phylum. * The Dungeons and Dragons Chick Tract. * A kid named Wario. * The Abysmal Sea. * Unnumbered and enormous polypi. * Interpreting a poem as a political statement when it's clearly about how giant squids are super cool. * Lauding this poet's skill with language even though he didn't know the difference between abyssal and abysmal. * Calling a poem a sonnet when it doesn't meet the criteria of a sonnet just because Tennyson wrote it. * Wanting to be huge and eat sponges, like the kraken. * Dendy. * Buying NES games made this year. * Sokoban with a Twist. * MOON 8. * Releasing chiptunes on vinyl shaped like a square. * Russian Roulette for the NES making good use of the Zapper. * Two people who are really bad at archery. * Pointing your Rambo exploding arrow at the exploding barrel sitting right next to you. * A turn-based thing where you can kill zombies. * Forklift simulators in VR. * NES Maker and GB Studio. * LLVM's NES back-end. * Making a NES game in C and never using local variables. * Finding the free time to do all your hobbies. * The bigger I am the colder I am, and if you heat me up I get bigger and colder. What am I? * A tear in geometry that just leaks shit. * Care and feeding of your pet black hole. * Pascal's Breakfast. * Whether it's in...

Lords: * Maxx * Erica Topics: * Zines and Jam Games; stuff that's understood to be breakable * https://itch.io/c/689872/indiepocalypse * Birding in the pandemic * Itinerant Filmmakers * http://www.meltonbarker.org/ * Meditation on Capitalism * I found the tweet that the image came from, but still don't know the author of the poem: https://twitter.com/Sierra_OffLine/status/1100852286585221122 Microtopics: * The Bugzooka * Booms and busts of little insect invasions. * A little vacuum chamber that you squish closed. * Sucking a fly through a tube. * Cry havoc and let slip the bugs of war. * Egads, Bugzooks! * The Bug-A-Salt Passion Assassin 3.0. * A middle aged dad of the type that would buy a salt gun * A bugzooka in active use. * A balding man who looks like Jeffery Epstein crawling on the floor in his underwear to promote the Bug-A-Salt. * Professor Fly Presents: Fly Facts. * Judging the anatomical correctness of Professor Fly. * Hammacher-Schlemmer ads for bug-catching devices. * Whether women make better snipers. * Aiming at the fly on the wall with your laser sight. * Mr. Pinch. * A fly in a lab coat who lives in Seattle. * A photocopied leaflet about your band or political cause. * The best, most well-produced musicians in the world. * Ways to frame game jams. * A good brain hack for if you feel the urge to be a product. * Indiepocalypse. * Electric Zine Maker. * Whether the pandemic is over. * One of the birdiest places in the United States. * Talk Irby to Me. * Becoming texting buddies with a famous bird systematist from Cornell. * A Big Year. * Yelling bird coordinates at someone you just met. * Winston's favorite bird and why he likes it so much. * Knowing something about ravens. (Not what they eat.) * The Northwestern Crow. * A crow catching live shrimp and stashing them in the moss. * Collecting black walnut husks to dye wool. * Feeding crows who bring you lipstick from the 1940s. * What to do with a 10 pound bag of unsalted peanuts. * A movie where every kid in town foils an attempted kidnapping and then holds a talent show. * Ark Music Factory. * Hiring a record label guy to write and record a song with your daughter so she can star in a terrible music video and become a survivor of internet celebrity. * Social media survivors. * Stardom: it's not good for you. * Whether kids today still want to be movie stars. * Bitmojis and other things that put you in a little cartoon. * A customized birthday greeting from a Weird Al. * Paying Rudy Giuliani a pittance to wish your mom a happy birthday. * One of the Breaking Bad hitman twins undercutting the other by $300 on Cameo. * Preserving your Too Short custom rap tape on Youtube. * A poem written in BASIC that is spoilers for Mad Men. * The light in your Ikea bookshelf recognizing the light in you. * Doing line number archaeology when reading a BASIC program. * Seeing text from the other side of the page through the page. * Do It. * Instructional Art. * Finding 25 identical objects and naming them all Jimmy. * Flying Maxx to the Permian Basin to teach your students how to repair microscopes.

Lords: * Cort * Stephan * https://lonelystarsoftware.itch.io/playdapon Topics: * USB-C cables that only work in one orientation * http://blog.zarfhome.com/2023/04/usb-c-and-plague-of-grackles.html * Playgrounds seem to have gotten really good again in the last ten years * Bedtime guitar update * Where the Wild Things Are * https://genius.com/Maurice-sendak-where-the-wild-things-are-annotated * Classic hardware has become a kind of fantasy console * https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/04/wi-fi-in-an-nes-cartridge-super-tilt-bro-takes-the-1985-console-online/ * https://www.thenew8bitheroes.com/ * https://www.gbstudio.dev/ * Constructing a computing environment as a nested series of cages for a child to escape Microtopics: * Extra plugs. * Mr. Saitou * How to sideload software onto the Playdate. * Trying to make Sifteo happen. * Where to find all the fancy MacIntosh dithering algorithms. * Ableton for the Sega Megadrive. * Who Zarf is. * EU legislation saying that phones must charge via USB-C, which is unsustainable, when the text of the law ought to have been "Apple, knock that shit off." * Getting rid of your bucket of cables. * Never throwing away wood because you might need one that shape some day * Never throwing away oddly shaped pieces of wood because you might become a carpenter some day. * Playgrounds getting bad and then good again. * Getting breakfast at the Emeryville Public Market. * Whether swings or seesaws still exist. * Giant wooden castles with bridges going between them. * How to make the spinny playground things safe. * A regionally variable playground. * What countries have and don't have playgrounds. * The San Lorenzo Community Park. * A big stone bear you can climb on. * Whether any of those playground speaking tubes have ever worked. * Wanting the world to have magic in it so you lie to your kid about science. * The Dennis the Menace playground in Monterey. * Periodically removing the poison oak. * Growing up and being on the other side of the memory. * The Dead Dad playground turning into a fenced-off deathtrap. * Procedural memory for nice melodies. * Mountain dulcimers vs. hammered dulcimers. * Walking around with a bandolier of mountain dulcimers, one for every key. * What happens when you're living in the Appalachians and you want to make a violin but you can't. * What to do with your ability to play an instrument when you have no free time. * Maintaining a consistent strumming pattern while singing. * Strumming and finding finger positions intuitively. * Here's all the notes. Play the right ones at the right times. * The Virtual Console of musical instruments. * Jim's favorite note in the mixolydian mode. * Where the Wild Things Are for Xbox 360. * A poem with hardly any punctuation. * Going on a journey of many weeks in just a few pages. * Max in a wolf suit fighting bees with a stick. * Maurice Sendak Kart Racer. * Dinosaur Time. * Clapping for names you know. * A building with dinosaur bones in it. * Rumpusing things. * Games where you whack shadow spiders with a stick. * GB Studio. * Putting a wifi adapter in an NES cartridge. * The Mario modding tool set. * An IDE for making NES games. * Pi-Boy D. * Doing homebrew development on a system that is still in active use. * Castlevania: Passacaglia of Disrepair. * GBA of Theseus. * Making a Lynx game that supports 8-player multiplayer, when there aren't 8 people who own the system. * Porting a game about matching colors to a monochrome display. * Giving your kids a computer running Linux to teach them sysadmin skills, but they just play games on their phone instead. * Branded Scratch Wrappers. * Composing new music for the extended What the Golf? cinematic universe. * How to unlock your school laptop to play the Chrome Dinosaur Game.

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 10^3 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.

Lords: * Danny * Kim Topics: * Animorphs * My keyboard is registering double inputs again help me * Youtube channels that summarize movies like Cliff's Notes * https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyXD1jAZBdZ4u0K-GLYC77Q/videos * https://www.mezzacotta.net/garfield/?comic=2799 * CatGPT * M3gan; technology horror movies * You don't get points for coins in Super Mario World! Microtopics * A video game man. * The Animorphs train. * Children committing war crimes and having to live with the consequences. * How many books are in the Animorphs series. * The Visser Chronicles. * Yeerks living in the Yeerk pool. * Finding the person whose car you stole and explaining "here's your car back, I did a bunch of war crimes in it" * Hearing someone explain Animorphs repeatedly and never forming a single opinion. * The horror of noses moving around. * Refusing to read graphic novels because you can't read and look at pictures at the same time. * Animorphs: Shattered Reality. * Why boys don't read Animorphs. * Marco turning into an Andalyte. * Eating via your hooves. * F for Furry. * The canonical source for all sexualities. * Non-Consensual Dippin' Dots. * Haunted Headphones. * How to compliment your partner's flams. * Taking a movie and turning it into a TikTok. * The dude from Dark with the face. * Twisted social experiment: whoever survives til the end gets to live. * 2000 Year Old Head Again?? * Blind Man Who Robbers Are Trying To Avoid For A Movie. * This Garfield Comic is Too Highbrow. * A Simple Rhyming Man. * I Had a Lover's Quarrel with the World. * A chat bot that only replies with cat memes. * An extremely asymmetric cat. * Hiding inside the couch. * A cat wearing a neckerchief. * AI dolls in horror movies. * A movie that is advertised relentlessly on whatever wavelength you're on. * Content warning: hilarious child death. The whole movie theater will laugh. * Haunted TikTok. * Topic Lords M3gan Edition. * Robot vs. Firmware Updates. * Robot vs. EULA. * Horror stories about firmware updates. * A toilet that screams at you if you're not licensed to shit in it. * Bathrooms that self clean whether you're still in there or not. * How many points coins are worth in all the different Mario games. * Incentivizing children to stomp on goombas. * Frog Fractions as an expression of score-related trauma. * An email where it's hard to tell who is fucking with whom. * The kind of people who like a game and leave a negative review on Steam that is clearly a joke but actually click the thumbs down button. * Curling: the most horny sport. * The game where people crouch really low and try to get a stone into a button. * Playing Frog Fractions for 420 hours. * The modern experience of being verified on Twitter. * The time Frog Fractions was crashing when you played it in France.