Topic Lords

Lords: Chris Fabian https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/ Topics: Oops, my 3D printer became a hobby GTA's AI is not trying to screw with you with its sudden lane changes and T-boning you at intersections, it's just oblivious. (Probably.) Esper says: "I can confirm the traffic AI in Cyberpunk 2077 is still hilarious. I set my car to 'auto drive' and after maybe 30 seconds it took a hard right into the ocean. Maybe that’s lore accurate, who knows." Alberic Whale and the Enigma Layer https://thespinoff.co.nz/the-best-of/31-12-2018/summer-reissue-the-mystery-of-zach-new-zealands-all-too-miraculous-medical-ai https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/13-01-2020/rip-zach-probe-finds-serious-wrongdoing-over-miracle-medical-ai Between What I See and What I Say…, by Octavio Paz https://www.wisdomportal.com/PoetryAnthology/OctavioPaz-Anthology.html Microtopics: A coffee shop that exists here because of the port of Oakland. Popping unroasted coffee beans into your mouth like peanuts. The worst tasting and most caffeinated cup of coffee you've ever had. Your local library. Things that should not be businesses. Three possible purposes of universities. Finding a new hobby (derogatory) 3D printing a selection of action figures for your wedding. That one person you know who's really into 3D printers. Why having a broken 3D printer counts as a hobby where having a broken refrigerator is just a situation. Yanking out some gunk with pliers in hopes that that'll fix it. Your 3D printer breaking halfway through your wedding figurine project so you have to make the other other half out of milled aluminum. IBM Selectric Typewriters shipping with a repair guy who lives in your spare bedroom in case it breaks. Amazon sending an Amazon warrior to repair your 3D printer but since you only paid for the cheap extended warranty she's allowed to attack anybody including you. Whether Balatro is trying to deliberately find weaknesses in your build. Higher fidelity graphics coming with expectations of higher fidelity traffic modeling. Car AI in open world games being as dumb as the developers can get away with, except for in Cyberpunk 2077, where they're dumber than the developers can get away with. Whacking at it until it's good enough to ship. Traffic tuning in GTA Vice City. Playing games with really smart, effective AI, like Chessmaster 2000 and X-Com, and realizing that actually having really smart AI is no fun. Skating around with rollerblades on your elbows and knees. Everything's a tuna can. Three car accidents in six weeks. Conscientiously objecting to military service so they insist you get a driver's license instead. Driving through a haunted house to train the braking reflex in response to being startled. Whatever happened to ol' Alby Whale? The AI assistant named Zack turning out to just be a dude named Zack. Adorable tiny food delivery robots who turn out to just be remote controlled by a guy hiding around the corner. Waymo cars blocking major thoroughfares for hours at a time. Multitasking between all the most stressful, confusing driving situations. Self-driving cars (allegedly) turning self-driving off half a second before impact so the impact is blamed on the human operator. Several hundred tons of liquid nitrogen cooled supercomputer. Blaming your spelling errors on The Enigma Layer. Having seen more proof of your AI assistant than you have of god. It's scammers and hucksters all the way down. Whether DLSS is taking away game developer jobs. What happens when you go from a three word Markov model to a five word markov model. A giant prank with no particular end-game in sight. Acts of speech. Poetry as synesthesia. Trying to explain in words why that cat is acting weird when the cat doesn't think in words at all. My Psychosis, my Bicycle and I, by Fritz B. Simon. Trying to figure out how football works when you can't see the players, only the referee. Feeling some type of way. Trying to take musical ideas and apply them outside of the realm of music. Creating words that dance around concepts. Getting stuck forever in your cringe phase. Opportunities to write the same program over and over again. A melancholy linked list implementation. Passive-aggressive C code. Java Enterprise Abstract Singleton Proxy Factory Bean. Remember printed manuals? The international obfuscated C code contest. What made the 3D accelerated demo scene interesting again. How much code you can fit in 64k if you don't link to anything. Secret Topics.

Lords: Jason https://bumpyskies.com/ Ben https://www.zerofiftyone.net/ Topics: Prepping for a colonsocopy, the jmac way! https://fogknife.com/2023-12-31-my-colonoscopy-strategies.html How to do things you're bad at The Trustworthy Shirts Tournament https://eldritch.cafe/@cassolotl/116156921111844432 Do not go gentle into that good night, by Dylan Thomas https://poets.org/poem/do-not-go-gentle-good-night Microtopics: The Wordle Puzzmo and Dall-E shitposts channel. Plugging your turbulence forecasting web site at both ends. Kids picking a name for themselves at age 8 and then being stuck with it forever. Going to court and the judge is named "velociraptor#1993" and that's just normal. Trying to pick a baby name and suggesting the name of your great grandmother whom you never met, velociraptor1993. People still being named Baker even though nobody bakes any more. Ripped off vs. stolen. Colonoscopy Strategies. Poorly understood advice from well meaning friends. Drinking squid ink the day before your colonoscopy. A power-blasted clean empty warehouse of a colon. Why are you still listening to these colonoscopy stories? Skip to the end of the episode where I ask you to give money to the patreon. The tattoo on the inside of your colon of an arrow indicating "this polyp right here" Staying up until 3 AM drinking an entire jerry can of mineral wax. Referring to the COVID pandemic as "the pandy" The colonoscopy robot's tattoo gun. Knowing all the names of parts of the intestines because of the difficult boss fight inside an intestine at the end of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. Hideo Kojima setting out to design a game to force people to write strategy guides about traversing the human rectum. What Google searches Hideo Kojima was trying to inspire when he designed Snatcher. Writing a strategy guide for drinking a five gallon can of lemon-flavored gym socks. Slightly chewy boiled sweets. Whether Jim should already have had a colonoscopy by now. Getting your colon cancer screening kit in the mail and it swishes when you shake the box. The tattoo scissor robot: it's out there waiting for you. Getting an image of someone else's intestines tattooed on the inside of your intestines. Getting "how's my driving" or "if you can read this you're too close" or "we bought this before we realized Elon was a fascist" tattooed on the inside of your intestines. Striving to be more comfortable with being bad at skills. All the ways you can fail at throwing pottery. Learning to enjoy being bad at the piano. The doodle that Bach drew on the cover of Well Tempered Clavier. Flanderizing yourself because nobody else will. Art forms where you accumulate physical evidence of your skill progression. Recording three audio books and observing yourself getting better at recording audio books. Audible's gig economy thing. Never studying piano because you get too much done when you procrastinate studying piano. Converted telephone microphones. Trying to learn to play piano with a broken digital piano and really getting into electronics repair. Playing live music and being completely at the mercy of time passing. The Moogseum in Asheville, North Carolina. The aspect of human existence that you're most missing out on. Sitting there watching people play music and wishing you could also play music. Learning to play the Final Countdown riff or the Axel F riff and being set for life. Following a tutorial to create a convincing cover of Satisfaction by Benny Benassi. Rip it Up, by Orange Juice. Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat. The Lesser Trolley Problems. Whether viewers of The Good Place are more likely to value moral philosophy. M*A*S*H vs. Moomins. Who would go around wearing a M*A*S*H shirt in 2026? Deciding how much to trust a Moomins aficionado without knowing how old they are. Identifying Moomins on sight. Owl House vs. Owl City. People who go around wearing Owl House shirts without thinking about all the passers by assuming that they mean the Fireflies band. What the characters in Interstellar think of Dylan Thomas. The last wave by soaking in the green bay. Whether you should get mad before you die. Breathing life and fire into those who yet live. Showing people an argument for losing so that they get mad and win instead. Charitable Reads Book Club, LLC. Production values that are way too high for this bit. Soupertasters 15, with guest star Michael Caine. Corn poems vs. carrot poems.

Lords: Andrew https://kittenm4ster.neocities.org/ Aubrianne Topics: Reading every Hugo-award-winning novel I accidentally made Frog Fractions 2.5 before knowing what a frog fractions was https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=40777 I've discovered the perfect video game genre https://mastodon.social/@mogwai_poet/116072652112241644 When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer, by Walt Whitman https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45479/when-i-heard-the-learnd-astronomer Software Toolworks Multimedia Encyclopedia CD from 1992 https://archive.org/details/the-software-toolworks-multimedia-encyclopedia-1.5-1992-12-english-cd I fixed my slow computer with time travel https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 Microtopics: Plugging moving. Apps that don't do things or have functionality. Wearing one of those blood pressure cuffs all day. The treadmill hacking into your heart rate monitor. Getting your heart rate up by being aggravated at terrible exercise apps. Video games that only work with first party controllers because they patch the controller firmware. The only team that was permitted to alter the microcode on the Nintendo 64's GPU. Reading every Hugo award winning novel. Sci-fi authors in the 50s being obsessed with advancements in psychiatry. What if there was an empire that spanned a continent. Drinking a potion every morning to address your ADHD. Dissolving your gummy vitamin in liquid nitrogen and/or Looking forward to the next time you get sick so you can take NyQuil again. The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge. Why they let women write books now. Advantages of AuDHD. The Hugo award, invented by the protagonist of Hugo's House of Horrors. Knock-off Sierra games. Feed the Ducks. The one with the Spider-Bat. Stealth plugging a classic Pico-8 game. Independently inventing Frog Fractions. Not-Vector Art. Making games that don't have a secret thing in them. Making Pizza Panda without ever telling anyone what you're working on. Picking up a mouse with hats. Just make a dumb thing that's silly and you can make fun gifs of it. Splore 'em if you got 'em. XAMWWSKH, or "Exam Whiskey" Curses, or ncurses. Walking around this maze and running into this guy and suddenly you're playing a minigame. Whether weird shit keeps happening in Pac-Man, or happens only once. Why wait at all? Just wake up each day and be surprised. Aren't we all just building mazes for ourselves? Why sports games still exist. Why do people play sports video games when they could play sports in real life? Snapping your fingers in order to better internalize the poem. What have you over-intellectualized in your life? Your particular brainotype. Learning about muscles, joints and physiology. A bicycle reflector they put on the moon so they could shoot lasers at it. Measuring diagrams during your lecture. The astronomer who lost his nose. Revealing that you've drawn a moustache on Orion's Belt. Learning to read words by looking at a spectrogram. Who knows what the Danes are up to? Things that are not widely known but can be described. Looking at really old computer stuff because that's fun. Beautiful art that nobody made on purpose. Getting actors together in a room to read a scene together before discovering that that's exactly the wrong way to do video game voice acting. Aphantasia but for audiation. Inability to audiate at different volumes or on the stereo spectrum. Focusing really hard to fall asleep. Kick-starting your hypnagogic hallucination dream state. Rolling that sleep boulder up the hill every day. Retheming your 2026 Linux computer to look like Windows 95. Downloading 20 years of email history. Playing Hunt the Wumpus on your dad's SIM-1. What game developers say now that "AI" means something else. What "drone" used to mean, and also what it meant before that. OpenRCT2 and FreeCiv. Making your customers less nauseous before they sit on a bench. Not having any restaurants at your theme park so that nobody throws up on your roller coaster. Being unable to A/B test your brain because you only have one brain. Having a variety of weirdos on Jorts dot horse.

Lords: SJ https://neutralzonehotel.com/ Benjamin Topics: TD Place Arena in Ottawa is really weird in an interesting way Learning to ice skate when you're 40 Is this keyboard layout more sensible than QWERTY? https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/VfpwY7be.jpg She Walks in Beauty, by Lord Byron https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43844/she-walks-in-beauty Microtopics: Neutral Zone Hotel. Heated Rivalry. What a loon sounds like. Going to Canada but never going outside. A real dickhead in the history of hockey. Needing a new hockey arena and a new football stadium and putting one on top of the other. Backwards ice. Canadian Tire Center. The Ottawa '67s. Realizing that your two arenas on top of one another will collapse instantly if you ever hold two events at once. Asbestos sprinkles falling from the ceiling and delighting the crowd. Ice skaters falling over because the ice is too cold. What's up with fighting in hockey? When ice hockey goaltenders got masks. Regulating sports violence with additional violence. Spontaneous vs. pre-arranged hockey fights. The Gordie Howe Hat Trick. A triple double, except instead of impacting the outcome of the game, it impacts your soul. The Punch-up In Piestany and other bench-clearing brawls. Hockey's Post-Headshot Era. Learning new skills as an adult. The Kraken Community Iceplex. Complaining about swizzles for months. Pumping your legs to propel yourself forward. Swizzles vs. backwards swizzles. The point at which ice skating classes branch out into hockey classes and figure skating classes. Beer League teams. Born knowing how to skate. Jusse Saros erasure. Hockey players getting concussed by swimming while drunk. Circle to confirm and X to back out. A keyboard with all the calculator buttons on it. Interviewing the animator who designed the weird keyboard in Bubblegum Crisis. An argument for Colemak over Dvorak. The Z, X, C and V keys staying right where they are. Switching keyboard layouts to keep your college roommates from screwing with you. Why boredom is a good thing. Desperately trying to fill today's 16 waking hours with something, anything. Making content for the Internet. Cloudless climes and starry skies. Whether Lord Byron got his title by being on the show. Trying to rhyme brow and glow. Whether they had non-rhyming poetry 200 years ago. Only remembering your anxiety dreams. The recurring dream where you explore stone stairs leading down from a decrepit old fishing house, going deeper and deeper each time you have the dream until you finally get to the bottom of the stairs and find out what your whole life has been leading to. Tiny hockey community discords.

Lords: AP https://store.steampowered.com/app/2364580/Titanium_Court/ Alexander Topics: The 5th Ramsey number Why Mr. Satan (from Dragonball) is one of my favorite characters in all of literature The Odyssey 2's ROM sprites https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/Evl0wxIY.png https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/gNkdwtoA.jpg Search Lizard Vagina And You Shall Find by Patricia Lockwood Why do drugs have two names? What's up with that? Microtopics: Recording the fakest possible sounding laughter in case someone makes a joke that doesn't work. Going on a nice short walk. The PNW, where the frogs are a-croaking. Going out to see the dog pee. Lying down and pretending to sleep Explaining to the doctor that you didn't sleep at all and he's like "that's not what your brain waves said!" Dreaming that you've been awake for 48 hours. Path of totality vs. regular shitty boring eclipse. Consume Me. Attempting to become hot in high school. Whether unwishlisting and rewishlisting a game helps. Very large prime numbers that are only two apart. Prolific math speed freaks. Whether the aliens know the fifth Ramsey Number and are just quizzing us. Aliens visiting and sharing the ultimate secret to doing laundry. Sentient arithmetic getting angry. How do kangaroos clean their pouches? Topics that don't cause listenership to drop precipitously. Thinking about Mr. Satan in the bath. Localizing Mr. Satan for the American audience. A cartoon of two muscly guys screaming at each other, getting louder and higher pitched over the course of five minutes, to the point that you start worrying about the health of the voice actors. An episode of TV that's just 22 pure minutes of building tension. Goku's hair turning blond so that the manga artist doesn't have to laboriously color his hair black al on every panel. Everyone in the story growing strong enough to blow up the planet on a whim. Everyone on Earth showing up to cheer on Mr. Satan. When wrestlers stopped maintaining kayfabe outside of the live show. King Lear asking the audience if they can see the corpse breathing. Giving annoying characters a moment of sincerity and/or heroism. Enthusiastically chanting for Satan. Witnessing the total horror of the universe and then being like "I didn't just see that" Mr. Satan convincing the evil alien not to destroy the Earth by showing him a cool puppy. How is Goku going to prevent spam bots from registering accounts? A weird lens on this strange universe. Sincerity punchlines. Behold, an anime horse! Top 37 Classiest Satans. Death losing every game against Bill and Ted. Coloring the up arrow green to represent a tree in your skiing game. The division symbol you learned in grade school and never used again. When you want to shoot a golf course, a plane or a tiny flat cake. Collecting your favorite medieval manuscript scans. The medieval scribe deciding on a whim to write the next passage in Greek. The guy plucking penises off of the penis bush and putting them in a basket. My brain, and the bad sunning lizard inside it. Here is some pornography, if it will help you. Great job, Canada. Poems that foresee themselves being uploaded to the Internet. One of the early "isn't it weird that this literary person is on Twitter writing shitposts?" My Least Favorite Antibiotic. Wrapping your antibiotic in a tortilla. I love an antibiotic with a nickname. Magic acts you can only do once. (Because they kill you.) Settling Space. (And why we shouldn't do it.) Establishing legal precedent for selling moon rocks. Can God get a thorn stuck in his paw? There's No P in Thomson. Let's try to keep it that way.

Lords: Jin https://awesomedonut.github.io/ Brad https://rainwarrior.ca/ Topics: The shareware games business model Thoughts on how to define femininity? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqloPw5wp48 The Great Molasses Flood https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrnRNfXm_k4 Entrance by Rainer Maria Rilke https://poemsintranslation.blogspot.com/2010/10/rilke-entrance-from-german.html Combining magic and science in science fantasy. Microtopics: Lizard for the NES. Retrofuturism in ancient China. Silkpunk Origins. Ultima-inspired indie RPGs from 1994. Passing around public domain games on floppy disks. Registering shareware to get rid of the nag screen. Adventure game hint books as a second channel of income. Asking your mom to get a money order to register the shareware version of Impulse Tracker so you can get the Stereo Wav Writer. Front loading all the good levels in the shareware episode and selling the crap in the registered episodes. The Ur-Quan Masters. Printing to PDF. Uploading your music to mp3.com. Cracking shareware using a known plaintext attack. Drawing an image with so much entropy that the Save Robot dances for longer than usual and then plays a sad sound. A three hour deep dive on the very popular vampire novel Twilight. Going online and googling masculine and/or feminine traits. The Four Pillars of Femininity. Pants: they're for barbarians. Whether Stephanie Meyer was trying to write a treatise on idealized gender roles or whether she was just writing what she thought was cool and fun. Popular depictions of women who are masculine in behavior but feminine in appearance. Why can't your girlfriend both look like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and eat hamburgers like Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Why women work so well as horror protagonists. Do people cry less in Marvel movies? Someone crying so hard in a movie that you start to worry about the actor's social life. Tolkien adding a second female character to Lord of the Rings just so he can make the "I am no man" linguistic joke. Boston: it's not a year. Painting your giant molasses tank brown so it's harder to notice that it's leaking. All the children in town walking up and licking the giant leaking molasses tank whenever they feel like a snack. Waking up in a pile of dead bodies with your mouth full of molasses. Big Enough to be Horrible. Getting your architectural plans approved by a government body. Gilding the lily when the lily is already extremely memetic. Fame: look what it does to people. Building a giant tank of anything in the middle of a city. Where do you put your 50 million gallons of molasses? What happens if you poke the Demon Core with a screwdriver? Scientists getting too excited to keep being careful. A black and slender tree. A word kept in the mouth to grow. Eveningfall. Putting a tree in the sky while you're creating the world. The game you're making giving you ideas about the game you're making. Navigating the scientific method in a fantastical universe. Lit RPG. Dungeon Crawler Carl. Using a quarter of the words in your novel to explain the rules of the world like a board game manual. Jedi using their powers to boil water for tea. Enslaving Jedi to run your steam engine with their mind powers. Jedi Inflation. Two words that sound good together and now it's your name.

Lords: Kory https://kbones.fun/ Andy https://highcadence.online/ Topics: The Gametank https://gametank.zone/ https://www.crowdsupply.com/clydeware/gametank I swear to God, I'm going to talk about auctions and auctions in games, it's super interesting and I don't want to get preempted a third time. Esper says: "There’s actually a game coming out in a week where you break into museums to heist real-life African artifacts with the goal of returning them to their rightful homes! It’s called Relooted and looks pretty cool." https://store.steampowered.com/app/3255890/Relooted/ Winston figured out how to watch TV at 2AM Dragonfly Catcher, by Chiyo-ni https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@gingerbeardman/115933940306986226 I just lost a snapshot of my life in mp3 format. Microtopics: Multi-time lords. K-Bones dot fun. CachyOS. Scrubbing topics against the corrugated metal washboard of discussion. Leaning into the microphone and saying "topics." Helping Andy quit his day job tonight. What MAGfest used to stand for. Playing with SGI hardware in the Old-Ass Computer Room. Game consoles that output square video. Getting pixels into the framebuffer of the Fairchild Channel F. Seeing a fun puzzle to solve but not solving it because you already have way too many projects. Through-hole soldering. Replacing volatile memory with F-RAM. Preparing to have fun. Reaching the point in your life where you don't want to bother with the war game, you just want to paint the miniatures. What do you call it when you pair up with three people? Throupling up for the next 45 minutes. Who has time to both solder things and play video games? Why Robotron 2084 was more difficult in emulation than in the arcade. How to pronounce SNES. Shmups slowing down when there are more objects on the screen, and game designers incorporating that into the game design. The ZX Spectrum Next and the Mega 65. A game console that only 150 people own and they get super excited whenever a new game comes out for it. Game development like a caveman would do it. Whether more than one person can take the under. The rules of Monopoly as written vs. the folk rules. eBay auctions as an extremely boring game. First price vs. second price auctions. Visiting the real money auction house in Diablo and finding out just how little your time and effort is worth. The Gold Standard of the Hat Meta. An evolutionary branch of PVP that's distinct from Yomi. What to do when you want to play Avalon Hill's Dune. Fence Lara Croft's Stolen Treasures. Lara Croft's Stolen Antiquities Simulator. Winning a bunch of Saltybucks on Saltybet. Age-appropriate behavior. Speedrun watching TV at 2 AM. Live and Don't Learn. Explaining jet lag to a two year old. Watching MTV's Liquid Television block until 2:30 AM. Finally sitting your son down to have the Aeon Flux talk. Haiku that end "that's it, that's the haiku" even though that's too many syllables. Hiking in the wilderness and encountering or not encountering a dragonfly. People at risk of owning a Game Tank. Broadly appealing messages sent out to farm likes. The psychological cost of having 20,000 people following you. Choosing your Mastodon instance based on what domain name William Gibson thought was funny. The Mazzy Star song that's on the Batman Forever soundtrack. iPod shuffles always insisting you're not pregnant no matter how much you pee on them. Ephemeral preservation of a time in your life. A biological weapon that removes your ability to perceive music as music. You die young, or you live long enough to see Nine Inch Nails become dad rock. Music Inspired by the Soundtrack. Putting your MP3 collection on striped RAID arrays for the benefit of future archaeologists.

Lords: Alex Shannon Topics: Japan in summer is too hot, but there's lots of cool festivals Why can't I have marzipan made by nuns in California? Podcast playlist problems Considering the Snail, by Thom Gunn https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52887/considering-the-snail Microtopics: Traveling. If you need a lot of stuff, or if that stuff needs you. Real Topic Aficionados. Last Life and other lives. Watching a TV series you like and then going back and watching the same episodes again from a different character's perspective. Napping all day and seeing street festivals at night. Walking around with a tower of flaming candles on your head that keep getting tangled in power lines. Why aren't the modern World's Fairs as exciting as the ones from 150 years ago? Making a couple weeks vanish in lieu of a millennium and a half of leap days. Naming your baby Person Who Packs For Themselves. Naming your baby "Supplanter" The littlest bean that's currently born. Growing up enough to realize that everybody is named Luke now. How Bob used to be the funny fake name but now it's Jeremy. The Bob Emergency. The guy you call Baker because he's a baker. The canonical order of ore value in video games. Hacking your save file at home, just like in the good old days. Selling marzipan in a dark room with a turntable and a bell. Things you can eat in some parts of the world that you can't eat in others. San Diego's Best Seattle Burrito. The essence of fine Mexican foods. Australians telling candy companies "stop trying to make Halloween happen" That friend who has digestive issues eating salmon, but only in specific countries. The politics of buying Girl Scout cookies. The best place to sell a Girl Scout cookies on UCSD campus. Boy Scouts trying to sell popcorn, with seemingly no awareness that popcorn is not remotely as good as Girl Scout Cookies. Kobey's Swap Meet. Getting an old timey surgical mannequin at a swap meet so you can practice your surgery. Kids today trying to figure out how to operate a VCR like they're playing Myst. What happens if you put a VHS tape in backwards? Netflix's "continue watching" category, for movies you didn't like enough to finish. We don't want to hear your bra podcasts! The Stanford professor you're gardening for asking you what podcast you're listening to and now you have to explain your weird hobby to your employer. How to listen to podcasts without your boss sneaking up on you. The first time you've been to the dentist without headphones this millennium. Introvert Dentists. Tooth care advice that you forget immediately. Extremely symmetrical knots in a power cable. Climbing, sailing and caving knots. What is a snail's fury? Why is this snail so mad? A turtle that's decided it's go time. Getting really excited about the turtle races at the Renaissance Fair. Watching a carnival game where four people throw five spears each at targets attached to a wall of hay, and none of them manage to hit the wall. Axe throwing bars, where you have a beer and throw axes. Taking up axe throwing as a hobby because whenever someone gets killed with an axe, the police will be sad if they don't have any suspects. Axe throwing failure modes. Dominant javelin throwing strategies. Throwing a javelin further by spinning around like a discus thrower. Bullets: they go where they want.

Lords: Tyriq Watson Topics: My sleep experience over the holiday Esper says: "Cannabis can definitely help one get into a sleep state, but actually degrades the quality of sleep quite a bit. From personal experience my guess is this has to do with how it affects dreams, often precluding them from happening to begin with." Conlanging taught me how to judge good art Tate mode The Tyger, by William Blake https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43687/the-tyger Microtopics: Scrubbin' Trubble The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Leguin. Changing history by dreaming about it and having a hypnotherapist that's trying to change your dreams. Telling artists that you like them vs. telling them that you like your work. Learning how to take compliments. Three people who could have opinions. Spoilers for early January. Trying to sleep on an airplane and training yourself to be unable to sleep at all. A highly suboptimal experience. Untraining the fear of falling asleep on planes from your body. How to wear a neck pillow, maybe. Sleeping sitting up and your head nodding forward as you fall asleep. Neck pillow instructions dot PDF. How to transport a neck pillow. Hyperfixation on sleep and the consequences of not getting it. Mythbusters Mode. If you can't sleep, how helpful is it to pretend to be asleep? Being woken up by the sensation of all your senses shutting down as you fall asleep. Skipping your consciousness off of the surface of sleep. Getting super stoked when you're about to fall asleep and waking yourself up because you're so excited. Problems solved with more coffee vs. problems solved with more coffee tables. Lingthusiasm. Cursing yourself to hate a beloved movie series by watching it on a plane. Psychosomatic self-curses. Linguistics and conlangs. The guy everyone hires to con a lang for a movie. Judging things based on whether you like it vs. judging things based on whether it achieved the creator's goals. Learning a new framing and applying it to everything. Being aware of your frame and communicating your frame to the listener. Lojban. Lojban as a wholly unnatural way to speak in the same way that ballet is a wholly unnatural way to move. Decent and not unaesthetic. Trying to draw a picture without knowing how to hold a pencil. Birds with extra vocal tracts. Birdlangs. What if parrots evolved to be sentient, except in a fantasy world, because reasons. Ascertaining the borders of your caring. Brandon Sanderson doing Brandon Sanderson things. The IPA of sounds a human can perform live on a modular synthesizer. To create Hatsune Miku, you must first invent the universe. Horizontal vs. vertical scanlines. Designing a CRT that can scan either horizontally or vertically. Delta gun tubes with a triad of phosphor dots. Having a vertical monitor to display tall things. Page-shaped-pages. Games that ship as a rectangle on a web site. Black frame insertion. Do modern LCD displays have ghosting? A very intimidating challenge. A very fun nexus of art and programming. Tate Mode vs. Tate Modern. Tate your owl for science. Whether this poem predates the Great Vowel Shift. Mixing ands and ampersands. Capital Ampersand. Seeing an animal and realizing that this is it, this is the one that's meant to eat me. A glowing golden perfect human that everyone instantly hates and wants to eat. Whether you can invent a tiger in Dwarf Fortress.

Lords: Jesse Alex https://insertcredit.com/show/ https://discord.gg/dcofficial Topics: 90s Gen X "Internet High Weirdness" culture: SubGenius, DiLingo, Steve Jackson, the Looneys, KoL Writing a podcast about video games every week as someone who doesn’t really play many video games anymore The mystery of BunnyROM https://bunnyrom.neocities.org/ Junk by Richard Wilbur https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/Al2MMuFX.png https://github.com/jdonland/bookmarks Autopsy, by Ross Sutherland: https://pastebin.com/raw/npCuYjLj Disney saved Star Wars by buying it from Lucasfilm. This is what Saved Star Wars looks like. Cycling's hour record https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/52/Mens_hour_records_progression.svg/2560px-Mens_hour_records_progression.svg.png Microtopics: A gold star Canadian. Cousin show Insert Credit. One of the world's foremost experts on DC Comics. Filling in the gaps with bonus episodes. The lost episode of topic lords that might one day be produced. Spreadsheet Secrets. Detritus and ruins of the culture that came before yours. (Gen-X.) Whether Steve Jackson is still doing the GURPS thing. Where did Gen-X come from, and why did it disappear? Your personal relationship with They Might Be Giants. The weirdos who first colonized the Internet in search of the community they weren't finding in their lives. Nerds riding high on military funding and founding new religions with varying degrees of mockery. British comedy crossing the ocean and losing its cultural context, so a generation of American nerds grow up with a more absurdist sense of humor than the previous generations. Sitting at your computer running IRC in 1996, staring at the screen waiting for someone to say something. Classical Education as a shared cultural context so rich people can understand each other's jokes. Halfway into the 2020s, still thinking about the Roaring Twenties whenever anyone names the decade. Everybody forgetting how to group history by decade after a twenty years of not easily being able to talk about "the 00s" and "the 10s." Playing video games from the ages of 5 to 20 and then stopping forever. Asking some of the most thoughtful people you know questions about video games. The exhaustion of trying to keep video games in your life. Artists and critics with opinions that are wildly out of step with their audience. Video game companies that have great logos. People who are so good at telling interesting stories about the bad video games that they're playing that they convince you to buy the game and then you're like "where's the interesting game they talked about" Talking to the same oldbies every week. An 18 year old kid obsessed with the Atari Jaguar wandering into the middle-aged video game club and everyone is like "sickos face yes emoji" Trying to track down the manufacturer of Digital Princess Friend. Mysterious ROM images that nobody knows the origin of because nobody asked. A Tamagotchi where your little guy can be a fighter plane or Sponge Bob. Mysteriously good Tamagotchi software floating around. The reason M&Ms come in different colors. An egg that your umbrella with an eye can hatch from. Why you can't ship a container full of cheap junk to the United States any more. Middle English style poetry. Sheer shards of shattered tumblers. Modern English alliterative verse. It's cool what people do with words. Paying so much attention to the alliteration that you miss the meaning of the poem. All the Babu Frik Funko Pops that will still be around long after all the stars go out. Hephaestus' Hammer, all gunked up in microplastics. Quoting other poems in the middle of your poem. Publishing a book of all the poems we've read on Topic Lords and then being sued for copyright infringement. A poem that originated on Jim's fridge. Diminishing Mandalorian Returns. The goddamned Ewoks shit. The Droids cartoon. The future of Star Wars: jokes about Star Wars?? The Day the Clown Cried of Star Wars. The angriest you've ever been watching a movie. The third good Star Wars movie. Stealing good ideas from cool fiction. One guy who got lucky a couple times and a thousand yes men enabling him for the next 40 years. Planet Moriband. Finally finding a guy you can call Mace Windu. Waiting for Jar-Jar. Sometimes you just need drivel that you like. Buying a tangerine and noticing that it's a Star Wars-branded tangerine. Technology improving the way we interact with wind resistance. 1890 guy on his velocipede getting mad at all the new Space Bikes. Instituting new rules stating that your bicycle has to look like a bicycle. Ivory Tower Cycle Men. Vampire Tactics. The most prestigious world record in professional cycling. Keeping track of the world record best dress at a fashion show. What about Funny Cars? What's so funny about them? Trying to break the Merckx record using Merckx's original bicycle and outfit. Everyone tying the same world record forever. Riding 270 miles a day for a year. Walking to work 23 miles a day, both ways, because you love suffering and hate bicycles. Detective Comics Comics.

Lords: Josette https://www.josetteseitz.com/ https://www.instagram.com/jo_seitz/ Daniel Topics: The overlap between musicians and rhythm game players Figure Skating and the upcoming Olympics In this short Life that only lasts an hour by Emily Dickinson https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56456/in-this-short-life-that-only-lasts-an-hour-1292 The Reality of Hope https://www.therealityofhope.co.uk Is time travel media really that bad? Microtopics: 3D art spaces and the Virtual Burning Man experience. What were we talking about at lunch? The new kind of Christmas light that's reminiscent of the old kind of Christmas light. A nice soft blue. The LED lights that hurt the most. Mounting recessed lights in the eaves and lighting them up with the worst gamer RGB patterns. Beige keyboards with three green LEDs on them that you can animate because they're memory-mapped. Paradiddle. Learning to play drums in VR. Paradiddle for Snapchat Glasses. Video game audio latency vs. digital synthesizer latency. The Bemani guitar game that inspired Guitar Hero. Guitar Freaks vs. Guitar Hero as a case study in how the same idea can be executed very differently getting very different results How singing is scored in Rock Band. Finding new music via the Rock Band games. Beat Saber Library Managers. Solid beams of light. Ice Dancing. Whether you can train rhythm. Brother-sister ice skating couples. Which animals can learn rhythm. Representing your ice rink. What to do after you've spent your life training but what you were training for didn't work out? Ice skater unions. Going to the Olympics with your mom to watch the figure skating. Alysa Liu. Meeting America's Princess and she's not a nice lady. Finding the right coach at age 7. Sports therapists. The disposition to perform your best under pressure. Exercising and practicing at the expense of nearly everything else you could be doing with your time. What to do with your life now that you're no longer spending all your time training for the Olympics. Missing your friend's 11th birthday party because you're busy training for the Olympics. Giving seven year olds a test to see if they do well under pressure and if not, telling their parents not to try to get this one into the Olympics. Grit. What boot camp is for. Training to be the best person in the world at field stripping a rifle. Still living this life, which is great. Still being responsible for other people's taxes. Looking forward to the new year because it's tax time. How your life might've been different if your parents insisted you go to college. We've got learning at home but we don't have socialization at home. Studying how to study without knowing how to study. Passing the classes you were interested in at that moment and not doing so well in the test. Two friends in the furry community. Telling your friend about your medical condition in VR Chat. A documentary about kidney transplants in the furry community. Damn, That's a Good Kidney! Filming a documentary in VR Chat. What normal people think about time travel fiction. Yes, you have to use your hands, and yes it's like a baby's toy. Reading a piece of fiction because you're hoping to have a good time. Which time-travel movies have reached the heights of popular culture. Having this 360-degree camera just sitting around and trying to figure out what movie to make with it.

Lords: Cort Ben Topics: Oh man, remember the Geek Code? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geek_Code I discovered a fun fact about my neighborhood Every 5x6 Nonogram https://puzzarium.com/every-5x6-nonogram The Calf Path by Sam Foss https://poets.org/poem/calf-path Phillip Rivers Microtopics: Secret Playstation Things. Transposing a matrix in SIMD. Reclaiming your plug. Trying and failing to use Libby. Failing to check out library books from your toilet. State-sanctioned piracy. The restaurant where you had the dinner for your wedding. The "my wife" voice. Suddenly having nieces. Hadad and Barney on Black Square Day. The Talos Principal DLC. The Geek Code Era. VMS or OS/2 as a defining feature of your personality. Dilbert, Perl, Doom, and X-Files: all equally culturally relevant to this day. The Natural Bears Classification System for Gay Men. The Human Code. Your favorite grocery store's end-of-year recap. The story of a Venezuelan woman between age 30 and 55, and her top 2000 interests. Your favorite vowel in text messages you've sent this year. What they call that AE vowel. Speedrunning your entire email history in a weekend. The Miracle Mile, where all the tar pits are. Noted monster Sean "Diddy" Combs. Two hip hop producers getting mad at each other. Putting a plaque at your hotel explaining that Jim Morrison did not die at this hotel. Being the plaque you want to see in the world. Whether the Museum of Jurassic Technology has reopened after the fire. A very earnest museum about a history that never was. Wandering around dazed after every 5x5 nonogram is solved. Doing your part to serve humanity by solving nonograms. Do you remember where you were when Every 5x5 Nonogram Section 303 was finished? Why a dippy bird can't keep you online. Gesturing at the idea of collectively solving a problem. Why we haven't heard from Peter Molyneux in a while. What three digit numbers nonogram solvers think are interesting. Sending 96 million solved nonograms into space as proof to alien life that humans are still capable of collective action. Feeling bad about having installed an ad blocker and loading up a four hour block of ads from 80s TV. Being prosecuted for use of ad blockers. Look at that smirk. That's a man who knows he's preaching but getting away with it. Getting a deck of flash cards to learn all of the pentameters. Three iambs and a reverse iamb. Your favorite good poems and your favorite shitpost poems. Tony Gang Flame War. Refusing to tackle the 40 year old quarterback after his wallet falls out on the field and the photos of his ten children unfold. The median age of football players rising into retirement age as teenagers learn about the health risks and refuse to participate. Using NBA 2K as a metaphor for the decline of civilization. LA finally getting a football team again. (They have two now.) Whether they're still playing Starcraft. Broken 19 year olds who can't play Starcraft any more because their APMs are too low. The experience of attending a live e-Sports event. Whether they sell hot dogs and beer to the crowd at the live League of Legends event or if it's all GamerGrub and Feastables. A Youtube shitpost made in Garry's Mod. Channing Tatum playing the toilet in the Skibidi Toilet movie. Al Gore: still alive? Whether Wilford Brimley got plastic surgery to look that old.

Lords: Erica Micah https://www.reddit.com/r/micahwrites/ Topics: Puerto Rico branded holiday jams Chive drama on Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/KitchenConfidential/comments/1o0j6hq/cutting_a_cup_of_chives_everyday_until_the_reddit/ How to cure tinnitus (maybe) The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46647/the-ballad-of-blasphemous-bill In defense of making movies sequels until they're good again Microtopics: Being finished with horrible shit. Being in the middle of things forever. The Minutes of the Intermittent Meetings of the Society of Apocryphal Gentlefolk, by Dark Art Coming down from the high of PiCoSteveMo. Explaining PiCoSteveMo to someone like it's their first time at Rocky Horror Picture Show. Two things I'm willing to sacrifice to play PiCoSteveMo games. Putting your PICO-8 game in a CRT filter. Lawnmower Man, based on the title by Stephen King. Developing a field system in Puerto Rico. Winston's face appearing to the extent that Zoom thinks it's part of my chest. A deafening hospital siren playing while you're trying to have a good time at the beach. Pirate-themed massage. Stealing the windsurfing gear and going for a ride. Walking past the site of a pirate massage and fatal accident holding a solo cup. Getting pushed off the road by seven full-sized Coca Cola trucks led by a Santa Sleigh and followed by a party truck with a giant octagonal speaker spreading holiday cheer. Charging more for a well-traveled Coca Cola. Holiday-Branded Traffic Jams. Shipping your worst wine to India and it turns out that the sea voyage turns it into your best wine. Spanish Milk. Visiting Puerto Rico during linear time. The Puerto Rican version of Sleep No More in which Bad Bunny might pull you into a dark corner for a one-on-one and it's not clear whether he works for the event or if he's just another attendee. Day 57 of chopping chives on Reddit. Drawing airplanes crashing into the chives that are too long. Working with (and living with) the Chive Lord. Comparing Day 1 chives with day 55 chives. Finding Yoshi in a pile of chopped chives. A job that exists. (But not one you get paid for.) Asking the robot to add heart shapes to your food processor chives. These are the Days of our Chives. Each Sale I Drink a Glass of Water. Self-hosting memes and Turing-complete memes. Phase canceling your tinnitus. Not wanting to look it up because then you'd know. Curing tinnitus with extremely specific grenades. A party where everyone is constantly singing their personal tinnitus tones. Why don't we get bass tinnitus? Can you cure bass tinnitus with snail caviar? The native word for white people who are doing poorly in Alaska. The ice worms wriggling their purple heads through the crust of the pale blue snow. Pine trees cracking like little guns in the silence of the wood. Prankster Bill dying with his arms and legs outstretched so that he won't fit in his coffin. Poems that demand to be performed with a banjo. Whether they have banjos in Alaska. Having fun with the way words sound. I'm not gonna make it – but I can be an X shape. The Cremation of Sam McGee. Burning your house down to get the insurance money to buy a telescope. Making bad art until it becomes good. Tremors 3: Back to Perfection. A giant worm monster drilling up out of the ground in order to slice chives. Really dwelling on how much you don't have in common with other people. Six topics (and Shrieker Island) A dollmaker on the run after making farcical plays about Hitler. The Saved by the Bell themed music video featuring the same actors as the Final Destination movie it's promoting. Would you take 90 minutes off of your life to have not seen Final Destination 4? The replacement for the 1 to 10 pain scale where you decide which Final Destination movie you'd be willing to watch to take the pain away. Low pain awareness. Chess boxing win/loss ratios.

Lords: Andrew Kate Topics: The strange and alienating experience of learning to drive at 40 The mottos of the livery companies of London https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mottos_and_halls_of_the_livery_companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mottos Independent They Stand! https://archive.org/details/computer-games-magazine-issue-115-june-2000/page/n83/mode/2up?view=theater Leda and the Swan, by William Butler Yeats https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43292/leda-and-the-swan Predecimalization currency in the UK DIY TTRPG mapping software, the ridiculous way Microtopics: Streaming making maps of video games on the Internet. The people who are willing to watch someone map out every corner of this sprawling and convoluted game. Writing about video games and writing video games. Dicey territory. (Which is only appropriate.) King Stephen, which will have been great. Fun jokes and oblique references. Forty and a half years old. Building your life around not being able to drive a car. Pockets of civilization separated by vast stretches of asphalt. The car unsteering itself unless you hold the steering wheel in place. Someone yelling at you with their little beep beep horn. Learning a skill and forgetting how you learn it. Learning a skill before you find out that learning is hard. The false sense of immortality that allows people to get into a car. During your driving test, pushing the drift button but the driving instructor is like "I don't see any blue sparks" Learning to drive when you're six years old. Getting your Lego Land driving license. Awarding the worst student in your driving class the "most spirited" driver's license. Explaining what livery companies are by reading the Wikipedia page also. The Worshipful Company of Communicators. Everything's so good, bread especially. A great motto for clockmakers. Does anyone know any cool Latin mottos? When are all these servants having time to go out and have mottos?? The Soggiest God you can Muster. The Worshipful Company of Information Technologists finding a Latin word that is also a snack food for their motto. Painting, staining, and compelling obedience. Sticking with Hope Classic. Shoemakers making jokes about supporting their customers. Getting the salt/wit pun in there for people who know Latin. Africa: always producing some novelty. The 2000 IGF. How to read a magazine together on a podcast. John Carmack's Finger Server. Doom Guy. John Romero's specific type of memory. How they invented mouse look. Turning with the arrow keys and aiming a reticle around the screen with the mouse. Dragging the mouse to the top of your cool dinosaur mouse pad. Why doesn't Microsoft Excel keep the mouse cursor in the center of the screen? The FPS phone interface where you swipe on the touchscreen until the button you want to press is in the center of the screen, then pull the trigger on the back of the phone and a shotgun sound plays. Fold-away interface panels. Thousand Hells, by the developer of King of Dragon Pass. All the video games named "Rift" or "The Rift" How can those terrified vague pink fingers push the feathered glory from her loosening thighs? Zeus disguised as a swan. Whether Marylin Monroe will would've loved Hades. Going to Wikipedia's list of mottos because you need some more mottos. How many ha'ppenies to a thruppence? The half crown, worth 2/6. Several hundred quarterfarthings. Decimal Day, 1971. Extremely forgeable coins. Dividing the day into two sets of twelve. Decimalization. (Based on 10 fingers.) Tuppence and Thruppence. IBM calling it "hexadecimal" because they refuse to say "sexadecimal" out loud. Theater of the Mind storytelling. Importing an occlusion map. Tinting what the players can see green and tinting what the DM can see red or blue. Swapping the lenses in anaglyph glasses so one person can only see red and the other can only see blue. Hanging a projector from the ceiling and projecting the D&D map on the table. A projector of uncertain parentage. Harebrained vs. cockamamie. A fun puzzle you can run off and waste a bunch of time solving. A stochastic cinema where you never know if it's going to be comedy or horror and everything seems totally real to you and is about your personal failings. Focusing on wibbly dream state. How to exhale with your nose plugged. Losing your Apple Watch on Mt. Everest and going back up to look for it and it turns out you dropped it in the shower. Topics going into the bucket that nobody ever sees. Writing a secret on a piece of paper and burying it on a hill with a single tree on it on a moonlit night.

Lords: Ryan CisHetKayfaber Topics: My vocal stims are getting out of control now that I don't have pets. Training to become a Tetris Grandmaster https://www.youtube.com/@cishetkayfaber/videos Switching to not-bifocals Eagle Eye Cherry - Save Tonight https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nntd2fgMUYw Microtopics: Introducing yourself or plugging something. Going to Cape Town for Playtopia. Enemies to enemies to lovers. A game conference with a name that sounds way too much like Fruitopia. What you would do for an Orbitz right now. An apple juice with basil seeds ensconced in it, like an Orbitz. I'm not mean, I'm just trying to manifest bullying. Semisolid Kind of Life. A dog following you into the kitchen and acting like a Ghostbusters trap except for all your bullshit rather than ectoplasm. The movie about the prep school kids who poop on the floor at their magic school. Making yourself laugh by doing a Gollum voice while you make a sandwich. Hanging up a happy face on the fridge and writing "mirror" on top of it to convince yourself that you're okay. An action figure that absorbs all the dark energy aimed at you. Giving advice to someone that you really have no basis for. The dog who loved your terrible celebrity impressions and the dog who gives you a look like "I expected more of you" Your online source for news about what water parks Jim and his family went to. The kind of Tetris that you become s grandmaster in. Tetris but the pieces don't fall, they just instantly appear at the bottom of the well. How the Tetris company wants you to play Tetris. Delayed Auto-Shift. Doing a hadouken move to place the zigzag piece in the correct column. Stack faster, stack better. A skill you can practice and get better at. Training for three or four hours a day on a hacked PlayStation Vita to become a Tetris Grandmaster. How the Tetris the Grandmaster community feels about leverless controls. Going several years between occasions to say hello to your wife. Going for a walk around the block so you have an excuse to say hello to your wife when you get back. Seeing a person and immediately infodumping at them. What they have now instead of bifocals. Training your eyes to look through the part of the lens that does the thing. Going to the optometrist and saying "just fuck me up" Why they don't make bifocals for text at the distance of a computer monitor. There's still time, and there's dignity. Watching the VOD of your own death because you missed the livestream. Getting used to your vision swimming in a new way when you get new glasses. Getting an eye exam and saying "I'd rather not say" when they ask you what letters you see. Freeballing your corneas. A fellow glasses enjoyer. A cursed gem that gives you astigmatism. Doing the Magic Eye thing in order to learn to read. Being born a trust fund kid, except it's your eyeballs. The return of the quarter speed music video. Even slower slow motion. Why can't Eagle-Eye Cherry crawl? Wondering why you haven't leaped yet. Singing to the camera while being robbed. Watching music videos at 1.5x speed as practice for watching them at .25x speed. Suddenly the dog takes its mask off and it was Eagle-Eye Cherry the whole time! Promising to eat your glasses frames on camera. Forgetting how cool your whole premise is and just stopping doing it. Literal music videos. A houseplant can't save shit. A houseplant doesn't know what time it is. People running around New York and looking sad at the camera. Buck Cherry. (Named after Chuck Berry.)

Lords: Maxx Michael Topics: Reinventing pants Plortonomics (the economy in the game Slime Rancher) The Leaning American Maggie and Milly and Molly and May, by E. E. Cummings https://poets.org/poem/maggie-and-milly-and-molly-and-may Microtopics: Rabbits and writing. Buying the lede (but thankfully the rabbits dug it up) Lord Veterans Ancillary Justice, or The Imperial Radch. Rabbits who want nothing more than to chew louder than you talk. Leaving space for the elephant in the room Inventing a new kind of pants inspired by taiko drumming. After years, finally trying out your new idea for how to sew pants, and realizing that the waist of the pants only reaches the crotch. Pants that are only made of rectangles. The slow process of realizing what pants are. Rapidly becoming pants. The universe doesn't end with a bang, but with a zip. (Of the pants.) Inventing a new kind of pants and looking them up online and realizing that they already exist and the name is extremely offensive. Pants that are just a square of cloth that you fold around your leg. A new kind of pants where the crotch is higher than the waist. Disassembling the kimono to hang it up to dry. Looking up the etymology of "pants" and it comes from an ancient word that means "the thing you can't just fold around your legs, you have to find a pattern on ravelry and sew it" Back when "pants" were just two leg tubes that you tied to your shirt. Clothespins: they turn tubes into clothes. How pants are different for fat people. Clean room pants reverse engineering. Asking a tailor who's never seen pants to make you pants based on a verbal description of a Taiko drummer you saw once. Making plorts after eating. Vacuuming up the plorts. Extremely ineffective insider trading. The kind of crime you only get caught at if people hate you. Gathering data on when people didn't file a malpractice suit. Doctor Parsley diagnosing you with sleep apnea based on the width of your neck. Suing a little mouse for malpractice because his tiny thimbleful of chamomile tea didn't cure your hepatitis A. Wholesome farming games where you go back to nature and practice aggressive capitalism. Throwing your slimes into the sea. (Which is maybe made of slimes.) The fantasy of running at high speed down a hill. The fantasy of skateboarding without dying. Incentivizing the player to discover new plorts. The fantasy of being on friendly terms with your neighbors. Comparing your favorite Animal Crossing villagers with your favorite Love Island cast members. The two competing Britain's Favorite Gardener. A reality show where you check in three times on people doing a project. What the rest of the world does instead of leaving. Learning how to stand – normally a thing only babies do. Leaning on an inclined surface made for a butt. Leaning less when you're visiting Japan. Crab Doctor. Reading a poem before it's too late. Narcissists soaking French. Tag yourself, I'm the horrible thing racing sideways while blowing bubbles. As small as a world and as large as alone. Wikipedia Dad. Gauging how long an answer to give a child asking a philosophical question. The Final Plug of Maxx Yamasaki.

Lords: Linker Alexa Topics: Variations in vampire stories: types of powers, origins of vampires, lack of consent lol Anthropomorphism/Connection in media Get a free burger when you join my rewards Meditation at Lagunitas by Robert Hass https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47553/meditation-at-lagunitas What letter of the alphabet would win in a Royal Rumble Anti-Lesbian Vampire Propaganda of the 1970s as shown in The Vampire Lovers (1970) https://crossingsjournal.ca/index.php/crossings/article/view/283 Microtopics: Being American and then being Canadian-American. Elephantasy and Elephantasy Flipside. Crazy Aaron's Thinking Putty. 3D-printed worms. A plastic casing attached to your keychain that used to have a clicky button on it. What we did to fidget after the industrialization of textiles. How office workers goofed off before the Internet. Bella's lead skull that prevents Edward from mind-controlling her. Making up a power to be your favorite vampire power. What happens when you inhale a vampire in mist form. Using a picture of Cat's Cradle to illustrate the concept of telekinesis. Putting the vampire coffin in steerage and the familiar has to sit in coach and then pull the coffin off of the luggage conveyor belt. Would it be fun to turn into mist and be collected in a cup and then drunk? Miss Frizzle, vampire expert. Getting frustrated at a stealth video game and giving up being a pacifist as a metaphor for being an old vampire. New Money vs. Old Money vampires. Vampires going on Fetlife to find ethically sourced food. One mysterious vampire at Goth night at the nightclub quietly asking to drink your blood, vs. twenty vampires going around begging and everyone's like jeez, this again? Nobody expecting you to embezzle the blood. Talking to a computer like it's a person you have absolutely no respect for, in a way you'd never talk to a real person because you assign a baseline respect for just being a real person, and people overhearing you are like "holy shit they're really mad" but you're not mad, you're just talking to a computer. Apologizing to the table you just ran into. It Takes Two. Following the instructions of the book of love. Creation of personality in moments of friction. Interacting with video games in similar ways as you would a person, expect without the social anxiety. Why would you ruin this perfectly good complex system with social anxiety? We've got teamwork at home. Sentient burgers enslaving other sentient burgers. Being rewarded with a free burger but then turning into a burger and being given away as a reward. Chicken stars! They're like chicken nuggets but they're shaped like stars! Where were you when you were drafted into the Rewards Wars? Naming your rewards program "My Rewards" so when the mascot refers to it it sounds like the rewards belong to the mascot. Demanding to see the terms and conditions before you eat this hamburger. A word that is elegy to what it signifies. Moments when the body is as numinous as words. Taking some LSD and learning about non-symbolic states. Ignoring poetry in the same way that you ignore ads. Vampire jokes! Transylvanian Hounds. Serif H being much more combat-ready than sans serif H. The most bouba letters. Capital O rolling around crushing the other letters of the alphabet like in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Distraction the ref so you can stab. Which letter of the alphabet could do the best backflip. Whether the ampersand counts as a letter. Letters that are good at stabbing vs. letters with broad sturdy bases. The nuclear family emerging in response to the financial boom following World War II. Anti-lesbian propaganda films that are far too sexy to be effective. Heteronormative fiances. Carmella the lesbian vampire stealing your wife. The vampire lesbians receiving their comeuppance and the heteronormative couple living happily every after. Be gay do crimes. (Murder.) Buying Linker's games so he doesn't die.

Lords: Hallie Peter https://www.paschaefer.com/ Topics: Do you know where all your things are? How education doesn't melt Bebop Bytes Back Augustus Gloop by Roald Dahl https://allpoetry.com/-Augustus-Gloop...- Microtopics: The Directrix of Cybernetic Security. Unity licensing from Unity as Unity. Fantasy Book of the Month. (FBOM) Part zombie, part ghost. Accidentally GenMoing your WriMo. A house with a bunch of your things in it, and they're everywhere. Knowing someone who knows how to find things and knowing someone who knows where things are. Knowing where to put something because it's where you first thought to look for it. A person who itches when they see somebody not using a switch statement. Having been gradually removing yourself from social media since back when Twitter was Twitter. Back when you could get out of a chair without grunting. Getting the whooping cough and coughing your disc out. (And you're in your twenties.) Whether your dad named you after the murderous robot in 2001. Seeing your students cheating poorly and teaching them how to do it well. Scaffolding it pedagogically. Big boat: hard turn. How do we get education to exhibit swarm behavior? A brand new exciting way to be bummed. Education by Panopticon. LLMs exposing how much of people's jobs and education are bullshit busywork. When does the salt jump? Putting together the 50s and then putting together the tens and then putting together the fours. The simplest shallowest version of active listening that exists. Doritos hacking the learning loop. Continually finding new opiates of the masses. Typing hex opcodes into the Beboputer. An effective educational tool that has never been less appealing to the youth it's targeted at. Steve Jobs coming out of his grave and slitting your throat if you install a programming tool on your iPhone. Making the sun wink and realizing that this is the rest of your life. Deescalating your LLM partner when it has an anxiety attack. Your Socratic Oxford Don persona. The Life Cycle of Software Objects. There is a mistake, and it is being overcome. Steps you can take to avoid Godzilla coming back and nature reclaiming the earth. A poem written by a beloved children's author who absolutely loathes fat people. Whether the terrible children in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory are all based on people that Roald Dahl knew. SwitchBitch, Roald Dahl's famous Typescript library. Making sure your weirdness is a kindness. Roald Dahl: boy did he do the stuff. Penning The Twits in an effort to "do something against beards." Why Stephen King? The Dollar Babies. Whether Stephen King is still on MySpace. Walking down the road and hearing Stephen King yelling at cloud. The Dave Barry game jam. Going into the sewer and solving puzzle platformer problems. Group hug vs. forming a blob. Tube Hippo is back! The game engine sorting hat. Coming out of character to talk about Inform 7. The year that you fucked around with interactive fiction but never shipped anything. Presuming that interactive fiction has continued to be great even after you stopped playing. Choosing Twine over Inform 7 because of your absolutely enormous forelimbs. LLMs as an extremely fancy Tarot deck.

Lords: Esper Cort Topics: Building your identity around a thing that you're kind of not as excited about lately Stateless procedural music Hulu can't decide whether it has X-Files Offering, by Ursula K Le Guin https://fleurmach.com/2016/09/28/ursula-k-le-guin-offering-2012/ Microtopics: Figuring out new ways to make video games more expensive. Puzzled Pint. Oh man, this one's a real quart! Puzzled Pint getting you through to the next MIT Mystery Hunt. Blippo Plus. If you're going to watch TV, why not watch TV from another dimension? Capturing broadcast artifacts and CRT fuzz on a 1-bit display. An amateur DSPist. (Such as myself.) Whether Lucas Pope took time away from his busy life as a pirate actuary to make a video about temporally-stable dithering. Dr. Richard Garfield, who loves lasagna and hates Mondays. Final Fantasy espers vs. Magic the Gathering espers. All the different licenses Wizards of the Coast is using to fuck up Magic the Gathering. How to play Magic the Gathering without getting your ass kicked by a SpongeBob deck. Splitbeard, my nemesis. The Kickstarter backer tier that nobody pledged to get. Jim's beard braids, still floating around in a Ziploc bag somewhere. Electroswing Jackson. Trying to continue to evolve as an artist after you named yourself Chrono Trigger Remix DJ. A sci-fi weird constructed zone. The guy on the team who comes up with names like "banalia" Fake scam Oxford English Dictionaries. A Finn named Viznut. The C program on Viznut's business card. Recognizing the twelfth root of two in an obfuscated C program. Bytebeat. Generating audio in ShaderToy. A closed form function of T that produces the Terminator theme. Learning how to put GLSL into the GPU. Needing the preceding 200 samples to produce the current sample so you just start at T-200 and start crunching numbers. The oldest film on Netflix. (From 1987.) Trying to finish X-Files before it leaves your streaming service. Esper's power over the Futurama production schedule. Why would you attack and dethrone God when you could summon God to help you fight a slime? Trying to summon your god in a tough JRPG battle and she's like "not right now I'm editing a podcast." Trying to describe a vocal sample without saying what the voice is saying. The bitrate itself shaping new phonemes. Wahoo vs. wahey vs. waheh. The great darkness where sleep goes and farther death goes. The gods choking on all the dreams you forget. The dump trucks of tasteless gruel keep coming. How to prevent the data miners determining exactly how far the mystery goes. You Can't Data Mine Fallen London. The character who doesn't exist in the game, only the game data files, because he erased himself. Media where you can predict how much longer the story goes and media where you can't. The forty second episode of Topic Lords. The episode of Game Changer that had the fake "end of video" screen before the episode continues. Hitting tab to switch to the next field. Hitting tab to highlight the secret clickable button. Bittorrenting all eight hours of Bandersnatch and watching every scene in random order. How many names does a Seaman know? Escaping the internet. Binge watching the PiCoSteveMo development thread.

Lords: Mitch Kory Topics: The Nintendo 64DD Wristwatch repair videos How to switch to Linux?? Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43991/kubla-khan The ICZN's recommended method of determining the Latin grammatical gender of a word that isn't Latin Microtopics: Being a fledgling your whole life. Mitch from the Super Mario Wiki. The episode of Topic Lords where we specifically didn't discuss what's happening in Washington DC. A show with nobody on it discussing nothing. Putting money in the jukebox to have three minutes of peace and quiet. A noise cancellation podcast that guesses what noise you'll probably be surrounded by when you listen. The least notable of Nintendo's major failures. What if we added a floppy disk reader to compete with the Playstation? In retrospect, it sounds like a bad idea, but at the time, it also sounded like a bad idea. Paying $100 for a plastic replica of a Virtual Boy to play Virtual Boy games on your Switch. The rich tapestry of homebrew games for the Virtual Boy. Why isn't the Nintendo 64DD in Super Smash Bros. Brawl? Animal Crossing for the Nintendo 64DD. People writing very politely worded letters to Nintendo and getting Mother 3 released. Playing with the 3D sculpture mini game on the title screen of Donkey Kong Bananza and thinking "I bet I could do something cool with this if I was an artist" Mario Artist Polygon Studio. Wario Ware as a spinoff of the Mario Paint series. Family BASIC for the Famicom Disk System. The Tonkachi Editor. Mario 64 2 for the Game Boy Advance. Vegging out by binging wristwatch repair videos. Jewels on the movement that you ambiently know of. Using a ruby or sapphire as a bearing for a mechanical device. Synthetic corundum. Why the little work is going back and forth. Solving a very particular problem at a very micro scale. Transistor radios advertising how many transistors are in there. The World's First 128-Bit Web Site! What 1990s video game enthusiasts knew about numbers of bits. 1.21 Gigaflops! The sad state of Nintendo 64 emulation. Nintendo Classics – Nintendo Switch Online. Migrating all the executables you use to the inside of virtual machines running Windows XP. Winboat. Linux distributions with as much or as little configuration as you want How they made Linux good. The year of Linux on the Desktop. Attaching an IR transceiver to the GPIO pins. Setting the oven via PHP script. Getting an ancient Thinkpad to install Linux on. The red nub in the middle of the keyboard. Whether there's any possible way this $50 Thinkpad doesn't run Pico-8. A stately pleasure dome decreed. Women wailing for their demon lovers. Five miles meandering with a mazy motion. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: a native speaker of early modern English, or he's Just Like That? A poem that starts with a real Rubik's Cube of a sentence. How Adam Saltzman does it. Procrastinating game development by installing Linux on everything. The Zoologist with naming dibs. Finally getting to name a beetle and choosing to name it a word borrowed from Serbo-Croatian just to piss people off. The ICZN's stance on Serbo-Croatian.