Topic Lords

Lords * Daniel * https://www.cocoongame.com/ * https://kbones.itch.io/dorks * Alexander Topics: * Octopus dreams * Perception of memories. Why does actual recency and percieved recency often seem so at odds * Hike on 58 * https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45087/sonnet-18-shall-i-compare-thee-to-a-summers-day * World of Warcraft over the years / WoW Hardcore Mode * The highest honor you can receive in mathematics is to have your name uncapitalized. * Polywater * My brain is polluted by trochaic trimeter recognition Microtopics: * Preventative care. * COVID lucky streaks. * Being able to go to the ER. * How to spell Cocoon. * Moth guys carrying orbs on their backs. * Boss battles that you wouldn't expect. * Wilford Brimley's agelessness. * Octopus nightmares. * The octopus equivalent of rapid eye movement. * Meeting sapient crows and asking them whether Y or Z should be up. * Which memories stick better. * Perception of time when you have a routine vs. when you don't. * Arranging your life to maximize perceived lifespan. * Different ways to have an adventure. * Shooby doooby doggie. * A sports rule that sounds like a 17776 plot point * Why the Bob Emergency is an emergency. * The best quarterbacks getting stuck in an endless hike and football ending forever. * The one person who hasn't played Frog Fractions but just listens to Topic Lords because they like topics so much. * Summer's lease. * Reading a poem aloud without knowing what "ow'st" means or how to pronounce it. * Words that used to rhyme but don't anymore. * Meter recognize meter. * Writing all your sonnets during COVID lockdown. * A poem about a dude that Shakespeare is not in love with. * Woe is me, etc. * Piss Jugman vs Piss Jugm'n. * Making phonetic reforms that don't take. * Smoothing off any rough edges or peculiarities. * Permadeath taking inspiration from real life. * A fun thing that you wouldn't have expected to see. * Enjoying spending time in the world. * Hold the W key and cruise through it. * The difference between wanting something vs. liking it. * Abelian. * The opposite of how you would think honor works. * Great honors: brands hate them! * Whether to capitalize "lynchian," "kafkaesque" or "quixotic" * Eternal abstract universal objects. * Teaching truck drivers where to put their piss jugs. * The highest honor Piss Jugman can receive. * The surname Piss. * What is the average Piss lifespan? * A real life Bobby Tables moment. * The Polywater Gap. * Water that scientists have sweated in. * Buying a can of Soviet Scientist Sweat in a Japanese vending machine. * Polyester intoxication. * Liquids with a lower freezing temperature than water. * The Polywater Doodle. * A metabolism described by Richard Feynman. * Brain Pollution. * The particular better of the first line of Aqualung by Jethro Tull. * Singing "parallelipiped" to the tune of Aqualung. * Hearing random phrases in your life. * Spelling "yogurt" backwards. * Trying to understand the New York Times' effect on man. * A killer rap album based on alliteration rather than rhyming. * Poetry that rhymes on the second to last syllable rather than the last. * The baffling cosmology of Butter Dorks.

Lords: * Erica * Ryan Topics: * Dog Bone Facts * We went to Cuba * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CandidatusDesulforudisaudaxviator * https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/avoid-the-noid/ * Cancelling Texas: Praise the Sun * My sister has played video games her whole life and somehow doesn't know about [the thing everyone knows happens in Final Fantasy VII] and I need help shielding her from this knowledge. Microtopics: * The COVID booster as a form of recreational drug use. * Puking, but not for the listeners at home. * The only way you can know if you're doing well. * WavHog. * Trying a lot of things that aren't working out. * A chat log that's organized poorly. * An ever-growing cacophony. * The million dollar web page. * Buying ad space on a web page that's entirely ads. * Gordy and the Monster Moon. * Little Buddy mode vs. Little Nemesis mode. * Making a noise whenever you wonder about something. * The sound of the aurora borealis. * The Northern Lights explaining to you how many bones are in a dog's body. * Peeing on your equipment to keep the foxes away. * Maintaining curiosity about things. * Burying a question and seeing if it comes back to you. * Recording a podcast even though you don't know anything. * An information strategy that is much more enchanting than looking things up. * Leaving through your journals. * Tannish white hair. * Burying a dog bone so that it grows into a dog bone tree. * Farms with no distinct edges. * Cholera vegetables. * Inventing your own COVID-19 vaccine. * Putting a whole country in a snow globe. * Tube ham. * Drinking a soda branded "your ass." * Knight Anoles. * Gerrymandering Florida to fix Cuba. * Lord Kensingtonitis. * A bacterium named after a Jules Verne quote. * The only known organism to exist in an ecosystem containing only itself. * A biome that's just a bunch of clones of you making a go of it together. * Slurping up radiation from the good good surrounding bedrock. * All the little guys out there being interesting. * The credentials you need to call yourself a scientist. * Which bacteria are most bothered by their Wikipedia pages. * Everyone's MRCA. * Meteorites throwing amino assets into space. * Extremely grabby carbon. * Moldy bathtubs all over the universe. * Little Buddy mode but for bacteria. * The works of Florence P. Wordsmith. * The origin myth of the Noid. * Whether the Noid is wearing a suit or if that's just his skin. * Yo! Noid and Yo! Noid 2: Enter the Void. * A layer of water that's waving up and down. * Empathizing with how the Noid sees the world. * Writing a poem about the Noid and, instead of hiding it in shame, putting it on the internet for all to see. * Getting a game over before you finish the first level but at least you killed a lot of seagulls with a yoyo. * The sun making a big X over Texas. * Drilling for oil in the Permian Basin. * The last total eclipse of the sun of our lifetimes. * Checkmate, scientists! * Solar noon. * Grab your glasses and get lookin'! * Meeting Topic Lords all summer. * Going sightseeing to find out where all your gasoline comes from. * Going to see the solar eclipse or just closing your eyes to get the same effect. * A big pile of polygonal Doritos killing another pile of polygonal Doritos. * Making sequels to the Final Fantasy 7 remake. * The porn web site named after a Final Fantasy 7 plot point. * aerisdies.com vs. aerithdies.com. * Retransliterations. * Husbands who are dead (asleep). * The option that makes you look like less of a douchebag. * Watching a Final Fantasy documentary before you watch it with your girlfriend to make sure it won't spoil a major character's death for her, and it shows the death onscreen but you missed it during the vetting process, but it's okay because she couldn't visually parse the Playstation-era graphics anyway. * Sending your sister to media literacy classes so that she can understand when Aeris dies. * A pile of snack chips fighting each other. * Showing Star Wars to kids who have never...

Lords: * Mitch * https://janmisali.tumblr.com/ * https://www.seximal.net/ * Andrew * https://kittenm4ster.neocities.org/ Topics: * Super Mario Bros. Wonder is the first mainline 2D Mario game since... (how many Super Mario games are there? update) * Original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XejJ6PzPtEw * New survey: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScsj0Yibs4rJjHWjIRVb3wwHsgVS64qYOAoUWqRwrXEfgVeag/viewform * Owning the domain emailfordogs.com for some reason * When I took my driver's test, a kid ran out onto the road in front of me, I braked, and the proctor made a check mark on his forms. * Love in the Age of Google by Brian Bilston * https://brianbilston.com/2018/08/ * The Burrito Run (a form of physical exercise) * The WarioWare series has become increasingly story-driven in every game since WarioWare: Snapped! (DSi, 2008) Microtopics: * Your names. * Jokes that have or have not been done. * The real Jim Stormdancer. (On my birth certificate.) * A game which has no sequels. * Pizza Panda dot Pizza. * Cultivating an audience who loves clicking links. * A polling feature that is great for polling people. * Why not use one thing? Just have one place where you post everything. * How to make your audience stop clicking links. * 358 games that might or might not be Super Mario games. * A game called Super Mario Bros. Something. * All the different years there hasn't been a new Super Mario game since. * A controversy, but not one people care about. * New guy just dropped: guy who gets in arguments about whether New Super Mario Bros. 2 is a mainline Super Mario game. * Super Mario Bros. and Friends: When I Grow Up. * Super Mario and his friends discussing what career paths they might take. * Looking at all these MS-DOS colors. * Brian A. Rice, Inc.: it's just a guy! * Mario games for MS-DOS. * A Mario fan theory that has been disproven extremely recently. * Princess Peach and Princess Daisy having a conversation about something other than a man. * The description of Daisy in Smash Ultimate trying to come up with convincing reasons why Peach and Daisy are different people. * New Super Mario Bros. Mii. * Super Mariologists studying Super Mariology. * Super Mario Bros. Special. * A smeary snapshot of your mind. * A Mario game that was extremely expensive to make. * Working on a game until it's ready. * If you like Mario games, then it's one of them. If you don't then it's not. * Super Mario Bros. Tudor. * Super Mario Bros. Oneder. * Getting email for dogs at emailfordogs.com. * A hobby you used to be able to have. * Enough people making up fake emails for their dogs that some them send email to your fake dog email domain name. * Rip the old spacejam.com. * Space Jam: a New Legacy. * Reusing apacejam.com to capture all the people clicking on novelty domain names that redirect to spacejam.com. * A very small scale conspiracy, between one driver's test examiner and one child. * Being too flustered to deliberately fail your test. * A checkbox on the DMV test labeled "did not assassinate my arch rival, whom I now owe five dollars." * Back in my day kids actually Crossied the Road. * A smoke made with the fume of sighs. * A poem that scans as a poem. * A million monkeys using a million trackers. * One extremely busy monkey using a million trackers. * A new form of physical exercise. * Terraforming the hill to make your exercise routine more effective. * Copylefted exercise routines. * There are very few perfect things in life but this is the perfect exercise routine. * Dogs who are like dogs. * Dog theory. * What's more habitual than eating lunch? * Mathematical proof that all horses are the same color. (Except for the horse of a different color.) * Booger joke fart joke silly game. * A history of storytelling in the Wario Ware series. * Wario's hiring process. * A thing that happens after Wario puts a toilet on his head. * Why the latest Wario Ware game has microgames in it. * The Wario Ware employee who joined the company...

Lords: * Cort * https://a.co/d/iRrEZcy * Elena Topics: * My due date is literally tomorrow * Dogme 95 for web development * Visits from the neighborhood cats * Potato, by Jane Kenyon * https://poets.org/poem/potato-0 * Cooperative board games are hard to design * Space themed coop trick-taking card game: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/284083/crew-quest-planet-nine * Building a conlang generator from the phonology up * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonorityhierarchy * Linear algebra cursed conlang: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ze5ie_ryTk Microtopics: * The Be Real App. * Posting your mortifying skin condition for all the internet to see. * Being born. * The Dance Dance Revolution song "20,November," by Earth Wind and Fire. * PiCoSteveMo. * Tossing around hastily drawn concept art with your team. * Being born, again. * Having a kid for someone else. * Eating cigarettes off of the sidewalk. * A grab bag of thousands of possible pregnancy symptoms. * Literacy as a symptom of pregnancy. * A visceral reminder that you are part of a long chain of humans. * Which came first, humans or birth? * The comfort of the humans who are still around having individual experiences even after you die. * Tips n Tricks for dealing with fear of death. * Inviting dead people onto the show. * Asking for more pro-death art so you can feel better about death. * Pro-life, in the literal sense. * Flowers and mushrooms growing up through the bones. * Returning to the universe to nurture it. * Dumb Ways to Die. * Sum: 40 Tales from the Afterlives. * Thought experiments about something weird that could happen. * The Egg by Andy Weir. * Covering birth and death in the same topic. * Looking at photos of yourself from five years ago and thinking "oh shit!" * I am choosing to no longer have conscious experience, mom. You wouldn't understand, mom. * Swedish with a mouthful of potatoes. * Dogme 95. * Enpoopification. * A protocol for exchanging information on a computer. * Rewinding to a kinder, simpler web. * Avoiding all this gestures at the world * New rule: no web servers more powerful than a Raspberry Pi. * The cool thing that was on the web in the mid-90s. * Making art and putting it on the internet and getting a fan base. * The teenage gamer comic series making a comic about prostate exams. * Sharding the internet. * El Goonish Shive. * Anime hammers that you do when someone is being a pervert. * Coming to personal revelations regarding your neurodivergence or gender situation. * How to be a successful artist. * Not knowing if your favorite webcomic had ads because you use an adblocker. * Working at your parents animation studio as an inbetweener. * Merging your cats into one cat. * Neighborhood coyotes. * Cats beyond the reach of fear. * Window-peering Jim: he's just checking out your remodel. * Putting a GoPro on your neighbor's cat and livestreaming the inside of their house. * Cats with amazing life stories that they'll never tell you. * The consort of coffee grounds. * Making shepherd's pie for an entire hamlet. * A possibly accidental double line break. * A line break corresponding to a conceptual boundary. * The Story of Mel: a Real Programmer. * Adding left angle brackets to the start of every line until word wrap makes it a poem. * Blackout poetry. * Pumping gas as an element of Cottagecore. * A hamlet is just a city in New Jersey. * The fireworks on your forehead game. * A game where everyone stops talking. * The Yelling Game. * A dedicated period of yelling. * Space-themed trick taking games. * The Spaceteam card game. * Coming up with a set of place names that sound like they're from the same culture. * Assigning syllable groups to a morpheme. * Asking Claude. * Interpolating the obvious things. * The Sonority Hierarchy. * A gradient from less vowel-like to more vowel-like. * Cursed Conlangs. * Generating syllables and mushing them together.

Lords: * Andrew * https://store.steampowered.com/app/1658150/Moonstone_Island/ * Kate * https://tunicgame.com/ Topics: * British food is good, actually * Really enjoying programming in MonoGame (and stop motion animation) * Lightswitch abstraction limit * Un petit d'un petit * The Old Timey Computer Show * Trying to get your friends to play a game that sucks to learn * Winston has discovered that the ending of a story is usually the most exciting part, so he doesn't want to watch whole movies any more, just the last twenty minutes of each Microtopics: * Moonstone Island. * A tiny fox in a big world. * Cherry blues. * Something within your culture that is awful and bad. * Whatever can grow in the wet and dark. (Potatoes.) * Cool Whip based salads. * Yorkshire pudding. (The fluffy one.) * The non-spicy gravies. * J. Kenji Lopez-Alt's roast potato recipe. * Lamb going with mint and pork going with applesauce. * How to eat Vegemite or Marmite. * A man at the end of the table whose entire job is to carve meat for you. * A place to take your picky grandma to eat. * Bodega cats and bodega kids. * Doing stop motion animation as a goof. * The fun part of Dunning Krueger. * Doing a magic trick without knowing how the trick works and amazing yourself. * Leaning into the good times. * Accidentally getting good at an employable skill. * Flailing at the wall until the light switches are in the right position. * Off: just a different kind of on. * Doing your first pull request. * The fountain pen of the version control ecology. * Getting a bunch of little plant men to turn the lights on and off for me. * Poetry written in nonsensical French that is homophonic with English nursery rhymes. * An entire book for a very specific kind of nerd to have a sensible chuckle. * Allowing yourself one E, as a mistake. * A joke written back when people knew what am omnibus was. * Vintages footage from 1980s computer shows. * Dousing CD-Rs. * The Free Cake and Donuts Half-Hour. * Getting as many 35+ computer dorks as you can under a box before you pull the string. * Making two children fight each other on the British equivalent of Crash Bandicoot. * A policeman on a unicycle. * The imagined experience of programming the ZX Spectrum. * The other Cambridge. * Mac PCs. * The Oliver Twins. * Turning on all the shaders to make your programmer art look good. * Finding three extra Dizzy games in the attic. * Trying to tell your friends about a family tradition and while you're telling them you realize how messed up it is. * A pile of 500 cards that should really be a computer game instead. * A rule where every time you play a card you have to sigh a little bit. * A game where you torture your friends. * A food with the letter E in it. * Trying to have fun despite your friend who is making you play the game. * Have you guys heard about conclusions? * A bunch of stuff happening and then there's a riddle. * The Go Left Problem. * When games have secrets. * Pushing at the edges of a game and the game pops up a dialog saying "I noticed you pushing at my edges." * A password named "Susan." * A DVD where every interface to start the movie starts it at chapter 2 and chapter 1 is a secret. * Reading just the last word of a book. * Watching the first episode and the last episode of a sitcom and trying to guess which actors missing from the last episode died and which went to prison. * How to find your Mastodon name.

Lords: * Will * Chris Topics: * Canoes * Blowing soap bubbles with your hands, making cricket noises, "party tricks" * nissan.com * Nothing Is Too Small Not To Be Wondered About, by Mary Oliver * https://thevalueofsparrows.wordpress.com/2017/05/20/poetry-nothing-is-too-small-not-to-be-wondered-about-by-mary-oliver/ * Would zombies try to hide the fact that they were zombies? * Magic Microtopics: * Soda Drinker Pro for the Nintendo Entertainment System. * Finding someone to port your game to NES via LinkedIn. * The Vivian Clark Experience. * Making certain contortions slightly easier. * Rock climbing. (Not a topic.) * The Phantom Lapboard. * The Only Viable Product. (OVP.) * What if you could mouse and keyboard on the couch? * Growing up in a canoe family. * Paddling vs. rowing. * Carbon fiber paddles for canoe racing. * Waterwalker by Bill Mason. * Your favorite memories of a kayak. * Waking up in your kayak to see a snapping turtle staring at you. * Floating up and wiggling all over the place. * Kayaking to lunch from your office. * Living in a ski cabin and your office is at the bottom of the mountain. * Living at a Lagrange point and your office is at the bottom of the zipline. * Boston Unity Knights. * Doing a game jam every month for four years. * Knowing enough people in your field that you no longer need to network. * Five really worthy zero-hour games. * Making a therapeutic horror game. * Going to a terrifying party in an abandoned train tunnel and finding a burned-out police car. * Questionable poisonous air filled with unknown tunnel organisms. * Doing mouth stuff in VR. * Making the soda line up with your mouth. * The Ferris Bueller water drop noise. * The thing where you play a blade of grass like a reed instrument. * Cheek-flapping noises. * Magic tricks vs. Party Tricks. * Inhaler magic. * Twenty levels of spinning pens. * A different horrible knife game. * A game about chopping off fingers named "Chop the Finger." * Shooting arrows in the air while your friend run away. * The keyboard shortcut for finding someone to port your game to NES. * A web site where you endorse people as thought leaders. * Entering the LinkedIn cheat code on Xbox 360. * Porting your video game to a robotic arm. * Making it move when you think about it. * Uzi Nissan v. Nissan Motors. * It can happen to you or someone you know! * Picturing conceptual rabbit holes in your head. * Sylvester Stallone's Mom's web site. * Sylvester Stallone's mom doing palm readings of your ass. * All our favorite apps, such as buffalo wings and boneless spare ribs. * Thinking about a cricket's interiority. * Putting some nature in your poem. * Using cricket noises to tell what temperature it is. * Having the same number of wings you've always had. * Do any bugs make a plan. * Leaving "I gave up" pheromones * Leaving a map of a physical space in the space. * Sizable ants. * Fewer scorpions than you'd expect. * Putting a bug into your awareness. * Pseudoscorpions hanging out on old stuff. * Little guys in random places very occasionally. * Zombies going to Whole Foods. * Going quiescent until a dude walks by with a tasty-looking scalp. * Painting a brain on your helmet to fool the zombies. * A short-hair wig taped to your grandfather's basketball. * Dropping your scalp like a lizard tail and the zombie shakes your scalp back and forth in its teeth. * An analyst commissioned by a think tank to write a book explicating how to deal with the zombie apocalypse. * Sound Reading Trainer. * Having a bunch of magic props that you never show anyone how to use. * The casino OJ got arrested at. * Tommy Wonder. * Reviewing a product on YouTube without ever showing it or saying what it does. * How stage hypnosis works.

Lords: * Hallie * Tyriq Topics: * People really like potatoes and I don't get it * I wear shorts now. * Why are these ants on my desk? * The go-getters of predawn gym * Non feathered dinosaurs in the public imagination * Esper says: Magic: the Gathering does have feathered dinosaurs as part of its mesoamerican-inspired setting, which look cool as hell. Not all of them are completely covered or anything, but Gishath is a good example of how to make a dinosaur look really intimidating and powerful while still having feathers. https://scryfall.com/card/xln/222/gishath-suns-avatar * McPop Microtopics: * Not counting the Zelda game you made. * Mashing up the hummus beans. * Tahini texture. * Garbanzo merengue. * Cutting-edge vegan technology. * Making video games until you learn better. * The freezer popsicle that's just a tube of flavored water. * Potato struggle sessions. * Curly fries versus seasoned curly fries. * A waste of a hearty food that should last longer. * Century potatoes. * Burying a potato in the ground and setting a peat bog on fire. * Taro chips. * The bag in the grocery store that says "veggie sticks" and there's a picture of fresh vegetables on the bag but inside it's just potato slurry fried into stick form. * Anti-shorts positions. * A tattoo in a conspicuous place. * Showing up to a game jam in a Voldo harness. * A tattoo that makes it look like you've been scratching a rash. * Getting a cool tattoo and starting going to the gym because you want to be worthy of the tattoo. * A slovenly dude in a fedora getting a sick tattoo of a slovenly dude in a fedora. * Yakuza style tattoos except it's all video game shit. * Leaving an olive under your desk. * What the ants are into lately. * House Ants. * Storehouses of finger dust. * Letting the ants have the olive. * Mice with an exoskeleton. * Sitting on a toilet made of ants and instantly becoming one with the ants. * A bottle of Ginger Ants. * Extremely tangy abyss. * What is in my mouth? What is in my bed? * Rolling a ball of goo over your keyboard. * Finding some good goo and keeping it to yourself. * The validity of shipping yourself with things. * Merging your cats. * Motivated brothers. * Waking up at 5:30 to go to the gym. * Go-gettitude. * Chronotypes. * Expressing all the aspirational aspects of yourself. * The only person flexing in the mirrors. * Why is this young teen here so early? * Pretty ripped. (For a child.) * Giving up on waking up before dawn and becoming the kind of go-getter who gets later things. * Reconstructing dinosaurs based on what people think they should look like. * Semi-mythical creatures. (That actually existed.) * Microraptors that are slightly melty. * 65, with Adam Driver. * An interesting concept, executed poorly. * The Pepsisaur. * Adam Driver running away from horny dudes crawling around in mocap suits and the test audiences hate it so they CGI in some horny humanoid dinosaurs. * Having kids and patching ET so the government agents don't have guns and then after your kids grow up, patching ET so they have extra guns. * Twelve gauge flashlights. * Lemmings but with babies. * One of each type of eye. * Eyes that are so human looking that it kind of fucks you up. * A reverse The Fly situation. * McPopHouse. * The Junta of Tralfaz. * Picking up a new key and trying it on every locked door you've ever seen. * Pressing insert to empty your sexual tension meter. * Back before Microsoft Word owned the .doc extension. * A hoary pld PD Turbo 3.0 include file circa 1985. * Sentences from shareware documentation that have been in your head for 30 years. * BBS Doors. * Legend of the Red Dragon. * Reprising your role as Olmec.

Lords: * Lesley * Nathan Topics: * Thinking of survival shows like Alone, is "wilderness survival" a sport? * Regional differences in the tone and caliber of NextDoor posts * Pastry arbitrage * The Light That Shines When Things End * https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/bOfIPmqs.png * Wild takahē (TAH-kah-hay) have been reintroduced into the mountains of New Zealand * How are we feeling about the Boston Robotics advancements? Welcome our new robot overlords or not? Microtopics: * Hyper Light Breaker. * Bumpy Grumpy. * Recording a podcast from inside a toilet. * Fishtank bubbling noises. * Assigning a point value to eating reindeer lichen. * Eating your belt because someone famous ate their belt once in the 19th century. * Starving contests. * Calling in an air drop for your favorite outdoor survivalists. * The reality show where a guy is living alone in an apartment scouring thousands of magazines for offers of free stuff. * The "it's a living" joke. * Pez Guy. * Trying to redeem Pepsi tokens for a fighter jet. * A boiler room full of people tilting soda bottles. * Weary cereal mascots. * Hippies living in a canyon until Topanga emerges. * Making a Nextdoor post about a guy peering in your window and the replies are like "it's cool it's just Window Peering Jim checking out your remodel." * Making a Nextdoor post about finding a baby goat and what do I do and a reply saying "you need to call the Goat Goddess" and another reply saying "I'm the Goat Goddess and I can help you." * Encouraging microcultures. * Surfacing positive comments to the top of Youtube videos. * Using technology to steer people away from being terrible. * Writing a story about a guy with a sword. * Writing a parody of bad fanfiction and building Minecraft worlds to support your world building. * Whether jokes are funnier now or if old jokes are just out of fashion. * Trying to relate to the kids by saying "I can has cheeseburger?" * How art used to happen before copyright law fucked everything up. * The dudes at the farmers market selling tomatoes that are obviously from the grocery store. * The farm with a sign that says "come pick pumpkins at our pumpkin patch" but the pumpkins are just sitting on the ground and by pick they just meant "select." * The Quasi-Authentic Experience. * A pumpkin velcroed to a vine. * A large hill. (Not a mountain.) * Making the light a liar, at least until your mid-thirties. * Ruining an otherwise amazing moment. * A Minority Report precog murder kind of situation. * Whether the light has a bell too. * A poem that's just a shower thought if you think about it. * Taking the eggs to an incubation center. * Muppet Bird flavor. * Cutting open a cookie monster to reveal the cookie layers inside. * Seeing the Cookie Monster's leg in the window of the butcher shop. * The roast chicken saying "It's a living!" as you slice it up. * Robots that sound like bees. * Slipping on the ice and hearing the bees. * Whether fun robots are even scarier than serious robots. * Moxie the child companion robot. * A dog named Spot and his SDK. * Too loud, too scary, too many bees. * People who can pollinate. * If it's empty, fill it with bees. * Memes that the kids don't think are old because they have fallen out of the cultural memory entirely. * Still being on Twitter because you have games to sell.

Lords: * JP * Styger Topics: * Wouldn't mind hearing Jim's thoughts on the recent Super Mario Bros Wonder video * Souls departing / cartoon ghosts * You're supposed to use a "spacer" with inhalers now * Probably not a full topic but I finally ate that apple I was hyped for in my fist Topic Lords appearance * Questions for a more experienced musician about learning to play piano + songwriting * How do we teach our children to pirate? Microtopics: * The flu shot. * Your TV patching itself. * Going wading in a bog until laundry is invented. * Dying of smoke inhalation until someone invents the chimney. * A topic for Jim. * Soliciting Mario opinions. * Murdering an 80s kid with Mario footage. * Squat anime Link. * Mario with a grappling hook. * Mario with asynchronous co-op partners. * The new Mario game bringing the real freak shit. * Developer quality of life. * The unfortunate mythology of the industry. * Getting to the moon more sustainably. * Mike Mika's Donkey Kong gender swap mod. * Big globs of ragu flying out of rotoscoped pixel men. * The evolutionary dynamic range of AAA games. * The boringness of violence. * Realistic present day modern warfare. * Making garbage that makes the world worse forever. * Wanting to see your medium grow. * A puzzle platformer using a first person shooter interface. * Reaching a little bit for a different thing. * Dealing a little bit of damage to a wall. * A door turning a corpse into a squished blood paste sprite. * Pikmin 3 as the most honest war game. * No Dead Pikmin Speed Run. * Getting more stuff back to your onion. * Revisiting game mechanics from throughout the series. * Outgrowing your childhood diseases. * A big plastic cylinder the size of a breath. * Audio iconography saying "look at this dickhead" * A bong for your inhaler. * All the surfaces between the air and your bronchial tubes. * A major change in inhaler technology. * Putting a bunch of programmer time into making conference calls sound good. * Respironix Optichamber Diamond. * Algorithms to cancel out the Mentos Jingle. * Finally trying the new apple varietal on your birthday. * Haphazard produce sections. * Heapsorting apples. * This apple is going to make you its bitch. * Bad mealy apples in the 80s. * Banana lore. * As Seen In Snopes: Verified Not Bullshit Fruit. * Getting the gist of a song and being able to do your own thing with it. * Making noises that sound like nice music. * Learning to play guitar while waiting for your maps to compile. * Edly's Music Theory for Practical People. * Learning to which suspicious-looking websites to trust. * The Golden Age of Scams. * oldversion.com * Spiffy new Windows NT computers. * Streaming services that you refuse to give money to. * Doers of Game Piracy. * Public opinion turning on piracy and copyright. * Information literacy. * The surviving websites where you don't mind being found.

Lords: * Alex * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSjSkaBRD7k&list=PLBk6-z6v3pDKi3Q-9MeqUfupJswozircH&index=7 * John Topics: * That time I spent 4 days fasting in the woods * Twins! Coming soon! Ahhhhh! * The Zelda 1 second quest * https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/806592-now-the-world-has-gone-to-bed-darkness-won-t-engulf Microtopics: * Joyful communities. * Whether discord logs can be subpoenaed. * Encoding all your mail in ROT13 to keep them safe from the snoops at the NSA. * Finishing with your DSP design work so your employer sends you into the basement to make cardboard boxes. * Someone in the early 2000s with a high pitched voice. * Remembering your grandma's phone number from when you were six but not remembering any phone numbers since then. * Thinky Puzzle Games. * An Alan Hazelden thing. * Tom Brown's Tracker School. * Going into the woods and sitting in one spot for four days. * A good, productive, safe time. * Keeping control of your emotions. * How to know when to stop. * Doing a ritual at sunrise. * Having animal encounters. * Trees dripping water on you. * Doing the most boring thing for four days straight so you can never be bored again. * A really cool thing to do in your twenties. * Sonic showers screaming at you until you're clean. * Lacking the experience to understand what's coming for you. * Going through some shit and loving it. * What if it all works out? * The experience of knowing twins. * Taking advantage of the Groupon for college tuition. * Hanging your fears on milestones. * Taking your parental leave consecutively. * Daycare as a microcosm of communal living. * Showing people what you're working on. * Making a living putting your kids on social media until your kids get old enough to express that they don't like it. * Wearing a shirt saying "I do not consent to be photographed." * A conversation with a five year old about scrub jays. * Sharing media with an allowlist. * Setting permissions on who can see your photos. * Sharing photos with your family by handing out USB drives. * A visual novel that is extremely interested in your personal financial information. * A pen connected to a matrix of hundreds of other pens so you can sign your name hundreds of times at once. * The Zelda one-second quest. * Naming yourself Zelda as a shortcut for understanding this topic. * Naming your character Zelda without understanding the consequences. * Red bubbles that take your sword away. * An obvious door that you can walk through. * Iwata Asks. * Accidentally using only half the space available. * Zelda randomizers. * SMZ3. * How to make Super Mario World a metroidvania. * Marvin putting in work. * Capturing a particular level of snark. * Reading books in high school that you won't understand until you're 30. * The California Raisins as the sequel to the Grapes of Wrath. * The kind of person who works really hard in high school. * Xanthan gum. * Trochaic something or other. * I had a theory about music and then I made all these friends!

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.