Topic Lords

Lords: Jenni John https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-yda9VTgYs Topics: It'd be nice if while you were dying time extended and you got to play out all the vacations from your anxiety dreams where the whole dream was being anxious in the airport then you woke up Discovering unwatched episodes of your comfort shows What does the Consulate General of the People's Republic of China in San Francisco want with me? The Purple Cow, by Gelett Burgess https://poets.org/poem/purple-cow Microtopics: Guest booking strategies for J names. People who live in LA who are always available to be on a talk show in a pinch. Guesting on Late Night with Conan O'Brien to ask if anyone's seen your lost cat. The 2025 revival of Chess the Musical. Events that you should've gone to when they were happening. Rap battles where they're just rapping chess moves at each other. The song from Chess the Musical that Whitney Houston covered. Slime Tutorials about all your favorite musicals. 2010 European chess suits. Remember when we ruined Slime Tutorials for everyone? The spontaneous generation theory explaining why there's pink slime in your ice maker. 3D-printing a pneumatic tube to go from your ice maker to your air fryer. Marrying a guy who worries about stuff. Reading about various OCD symptoms and coming away with lots of exciting things to obsess over. Being afraid that something scary might happen and you'd be scared by it. The They Might Be Giants song about Hitler standing right behind you. Going to get your Mouseketools. Goofy and Donald dying because you chose the wrong Mouseketool. Prepping for PiCoSteveMo. I put on clothes for this?? Almost buying Gerald's Game in Japanese before stopping yourself. Dr. Zevia: it doesn't taste very much like regular Dr. Pepper. I Enjoy a Fun Can. Stevia: it's not artificial, it just tastes like shit! Fuck you! (tm) Nobody gets a Dr. Pepper because they're feeling happy about things. Travel Logistics Dreams. The power to stop a topic mid-topic. Having the bad moustache because you forgot your cute moustaches at home. Putting the twins in their little container and they sleep the whole flight. Playing the opening song from My Neighbor Totoro on loop. Dying in Wisconsin and waking up in real life. Tell me about your comfort shows and I'll tell you about my comfort shows. Reading a cue card filled with amusing lies about yourself. Putting on your headphones to manage your dopamine. David Mitchell's poshest moments. Watching Star Trek Voyager in the background while you do other things. How to watch the mpreg episode of Bluey. The episodes of Community and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia that They don't want you to see. Trying to become the guy who's seen all of Seinfeld but you peter out after episode 2. Spine Transfers vs. Spine Transplant. Getting a Skateality by pushing Sub Zero's spine transfer button. Pogo Grapple Murderers, Just Murderers and Just Murderers: Havana Nights. Jim's game jam era. Calling your husband from every Consulate in San Francisco. Why now, brown cow? Which of Jim's friends would think it was funny to prank call him from the Chinese Consulate. Steve Stormfractions. Handing out business cards with your phone number on them and then realizing that there's no way you're ever going to answer the phone. A Memory and a Cadence. Finishing a poem with finger guns. Your boomer mom reading you a nonsensical poem and you're like "Wake up and smell the 90s, mom! Where's Clarissa to explain it all?" The Goops licking their knives. Whether Thomas Payne's political pamphlets were zines. Fleeing from Boston to San Francisco. San Francisco zine budgets getting out of control. Is your cryptocurrency doing everything it needs to for your cloud computing?! A billboard that makes you talk about the Metaverse on your Internet audio zine. Car gone? Call Sargon! Jesus died because porn wasn't good enough. Go to your web zone! Put in the digits! Telling Jim about the PiCoSteveMo game you're going to make so he'll invite you to the Topic Lords discord so you can be part of the PiCoSteveMo thread. The numeric value measuring how much people like you and respect what you say.

Lords: Merlin https://linktr.ee/alexglow Tyriq https://oddobject.zone/ Topics: Holograms for the eyes & ears (making holograms & immersive binaural recordings) Merlin's holography references: Process for creating Denisyuk holograms (single-beam reflection holograms): http://www.holography.ru/les1eng.htm More in-depth info (MIT Open Courseware): https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mas-450-holographic-imaging-spring-2003/9668ed9d2cbf0b127b5c1d1a770b2275_ch16inlinereflectionh.pdf Or another explanation you may prefer: https://holographer.com/single-beam-reflection-holograms I also mentioned transmission holograms (which requires a laser beam of the same wavelength to reconstruct/view the hologram, but can achieve greater depth) Also might have mentioned the Litiholo kits – which provide a more instant, darkroom-less, "Polaroid-style" holography process. I made some of these, removed the plastic film with the recorded holo, and cut them up for use in jewelry: https://litiholo.com/ "Astropilot" Soviet arcade machine, ft. Pepper's ghost effect (NOT a hologram): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsAShNzaj6s Josh Ellingson also does some cool Pepper's Ghost art: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPt7oqunrbg I realized the term I was looking for, to define (IMO) a hologram, is PARALLAX! Where it looks different based on the viewing angle, and also creates the illusion of depth with binocular vision :) Immersive binaural stereo recording: Recordings I made with my old Hooke Audio binaural-mic earbuds... Resonant tunnel singing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HLV7SG-h4g Rain & crickets along Mystic River, MA: https://soundcloud.com/alexglow/rain-crickets-along-mystic-river-ma-spatial-audio Imogen Heap performing Hide and Seek inside a decommissioned nuclear reactor (during Music Tech Fest 2018): https://www.instagram.com/tv/BnbfFaPg6AB Reaktorhallen tour: https://www.instagram.com/tv/BnZiRqPg4fv More on the reactor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R1_(nuclear_reactor) Sennheiser AMBEO Smart Headset = the set of recording earbuds I currently use: https://hifiplus.com/articles/sennheiser-ambeo-smart-headset-binaural-recording-earphones What it's like to fall in love for the first time at 36? Attract mode God is Change by Octavia Butler https://godischange.org/the-book-of-the-living/ Microtopics: The AAA studio making Scrubbin' Trubble 2. The Amnesia Fortnight kickstarter. Inviting the entire games industry to participate in PiCoSteveMo. What common English words have "merlin" in them. Custom circuit boards for changing your brain functions. In-season fruits. The partner who gets people to pay you. How hard is the "supposed to" supposed to? Going to jail for paying taxes incorrectly. An independent study in holography. Approaching the Altar to Holography and making sure all the inner tubes are evenly inflated. Stamped-foil holograms. Bertrand Fluffle. Head Related Transfer Function. 2D vs. 3D Pepper's Ghost. Hologram, or "complete writing" Whether Princess Leia is a hologram. Interference-based situations. The mall globe thingamajigs. Yelling at random people not to give you unsolicited advice. Fediverse like transmission reliability. Deciding to fall in love for anthropological purposes. Asking the person who just confessed love for you what you're supposed to do with this information. LOL. LMAO, even. Two people who think that the same Spanish words are cool. Thinking really hard about how to make your child be a good person. Relationship red flags and green flags. Liking yourself and thinking you're pretty cool. Getting some good art about your relationship situation. Slot machine attract modes. The three little pigs slot machine expanded universe. Snood on the iPod Touch. What does and doesn't count as attract mode. The UFO 50 text entry screen. The UFO 50 attract mode process. Who made the Ding Dong Dang backend? Whether attract mode should show high aspirational level play vs. poor play. Mobile game ads that show you the player being very bad at the game vs. mobile game ads that just show you something incredibly gross. Whiskey and Blue Whiskey. Whether your hair color comes across on audio. Everyone's attract mode is someone else's repel mode. Paying 25 cents to get the jukebox to play no music for three minutes. Countering the previous guy's jukebox selection by putting in a nega quarter that mutually dissolves the regular quarter. Arcade attract modes that are so annoying that you put in a quarter just to make them stop. Earthseed vs.Earthsea. The Serenity Prayer. Wherewithal, fortitude, chutzpah, stick-to-it-iveness. A two-poem show. Fascination with texts that are parsed in a non-religious way. The Tyriq tag. The Tags are Clean.

This is the pre-show banter and topic negotiation for episode 364, ft. Maxx and Avery: Microtopics: Strumming a guitar on a Zoom call. A topic that's just a story. Cassowary Joe. Something rotten in Denver. Whether Carmen Sandiego is a pun on the city of San Diego. How the Diablo game series sounds to people who are not from the Bay Area. The mythical Kingdom of Bethesda, where you might go meet Liv Tyler. Whether you're from San Diego. (It's complicated.) In defense of the Murder Cassowary. The tiger climbing up your friend and stalking you throughout the zoo. Being the coolest kid in your apartment complex until somebody gets a Super Nintendo. Cargo Cult Entertainment Green Light. Offering a poem and immediately regretting it. The RSS feeds for individual Lords. The eight hour Avery-only episode. Reminding you buddy not to say goodbye to the Alexandria that you're losing. Pretty Wacky in Every Language. Getting excited when you have something to contribute to the video game discussion. Trying to turn your video game podcast into Topic Lords. The Idle Thumbs Steering Direction. Sharing a show on a radio station with your friend who only plays Ska and when they go to the bathroom you play Elliott Smith. Timeless Topics that Will Never Grow Old. Why is my computer automated?! The shop in your local mall in San Jose where you can rent videos that people home-taped in Japan and mailed to the shop. Gradually replacing all the water in your body with British game shows.

Lords: Maxx Avery Topics: False brochures https://legacy.drivethrurpg.com/product/513415/Green-Oaks Owning the wrong game console https://desertstormcards.com/ The middle 90% principle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gPuH1yeZ08 The God Abandons Antony, by C.P. Cavafy https://www.onassis.org/initiatives/cavafy-archive/the-canon/the-god-abandons-antony Microtopics: A person, in Seattle and on the Internet. Upcoming puppet shows. Fussy Cloud Puppet Slam. Portland Puppet People. Giant puppets made from shards of cardboard hanging from the ceiling. When people treat the puppet as real because the puppeteer did such a good job. Various tasks that would be challenging got moths. Girls go to university and boys go to cassowaryversity. Social Media! Spotify looking at your cover art and telling you "this would be better if it was AI-generated." A Swedish pop duo originally consisting of two Swedish people. A brochure that's slightly about your health. A picture in which everyone is smiling even though one of them is undergoing a medical procedure. Convincing elderly role-players to retire. Volunteering to DM at your local retirement home. Talking to your best friend, an emoji on a white orb. The part of the retirement home brochure about making a scene where it's like "if you can't think of anything to yell at your nurse here's some ideas" Growing old to become the dad from Frasier. A high school student making a horror film hiring a bunch of 30 year olds to play the teenagers. A brochure explaining what time is and different models of thinking about time. Handing about brochures about yourself in lieu of business cards. Marvel and DC comic book cards. Topps Operation Enduring Freedom collectible cards. The holographic Obama Bin Laden card. Sitting in class and contemplating why George W. Bush is touching the side of someone's head. Choosing to collect the Operation Desert Storm cards rather than the Operation Enduring Freedom series because it's more nostalgic. Trading some Japanese Yu-Gi-Oh cards for a mint condition Condoleeza Rice. Britain's Tony Blair: a Staunch Ally. Why you have that tattoo of Bonk on your stomach. Aphex Twin pressing play on his laptop and then just pacing back and forth on the stage looking angry as people dance. The Asylum Pictures of the video game industry. Kids in the neighborhood no longer coming over as soon as your neighbor gets a Super Nintendo. Nintendo localizing all the onigiri out of NES games. Kanye West's unfinished concept album about the Turbo Grafx 16. Freezing your credit card in a block of ice, but for children. A ten year old in the process of becoming a vegetarian. Running out of existential concerns before you turn ten and never developing any more. Japanese kids accepting Transformers at face value, like "of course this gun would turn into a guy" whereas American kids needed a Saturday morning cartoon to explain that it's because they're made of transformium and eat energon. Slightly malproportioned villain with a Shakespeare collar and a claw hand Going out to run errands in jeans, a t-shirt and a Shakespeare collar. How many pieces of s suit it is if you're just wearing sock garters that nobody can see. Custom colors for your Turbo Grafx?! Extremely serious Bombermans. The 90% parking principle. Calculating the approximate maximum height of a human based on having no information about humans. Mathematicians and philosophers yelling at their Windows Phones about this podcast. Trying a cup of coffee and saying "it needs more beans." Suddenly realizing that you might live to be 940. A poem who only writes about ancient Rome. Waking up to hear an invisible parade leaving Alexandria. Feeling the portents of the moment. A classic of Art Terrorism. Replacement-level mid-90s R&B. A 22 minute song including everything everyone likes best in a song. Every commercially-released Beatles song playing at once. A particular teacher who always enters the classroom in the same way. Every Topic Lords guest needing the same brand of squeaky rubber chicken A nickname that a radio DJ gave you when you were 15.

Lords: Avery https://averyburke.bandcamp.com/album/six-songs-for-lisa Chall https://www.youtube.com/@bonk-zoo/shorts Topics: Playing real games on my phone https://www.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/1900nip/mario_kart_64_taco_bell_toy_1997/ Jim, you're a video gamer nerd. Did I hallucinate that the second player in Atari's Bruce Lee game is a Minotaur? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtBF7lBZWGw Semi-perfect pitch Bay Area Rapid Tankas by Bulian Jauer https://bart.short-edition.com/story/bay-area-rapid-tankas?ctlg=4386 Microtopics: Finally getting it wrong after seven years. Becoming a dad in two weeks. Biodegradable 3D printer filament. Printing your tax documents on your 3D printer. Printing a replica of a gun and also what you look like shooting it. Turning your body into tiny little wiggly plastic skeletons after you die. Whether Epic has ruined Bandcamp yet. The impossibility of finding good video games in phone app stores. Hypnospace Outlaw's phone port. Optimizing your phone controller clip for your BART commute. Cutting your phone in half hamburger-wise or hot dog-wise. ABXY-Lutely! Running an HTTP server on your phone. Asking the robot to do the settings. A Galaga the size of a credit card. Galaga-oriented phone solutions. The thing where you get a mattress in a tiny box and you open the box and the mattress inflates over 20 minutes, except it's a Galaga arcade cabinet on your BART commute. BART Anime Festival. A Taco Bell kids meal toy that's one of those plastic marble mazes except it's Mario Kart themed and has a replica of the middle fork of the N64 controller sticking out the bottom. The Tiger Electronics Marble Madness game, with the shitty d-pad styled to look like a trackball. The VR headset that played the same games as the regular Tiger hadhelds except you had to keep one eye closed or you get a headache. Boolean Jower. The first time you saw more than one computer in one place. Your best friend in grade school whose dad kept bringing home unfinished Atari 800 games. The blue minotaur in the Bruce Lee game for the Atari 800 whose special move was to moo. The two player mode that every single-player secretly has where the first player tries to play the game while the second player keeps poking them in the ribs and making mooing noises. The purple hugging guy in Kung Fu. The guy in the purple suit who kept trying to hug Bruce Lee. Hugging-adjacent martial arts. Nolan Bushnell founding Chuck E. Cheese. Living next to a Chuck E. Cheese and eating pizza every night. The COVID Chuck E. Cheese that only offers takeout. Reframing arcade games as being for children rather than just teen hooligans. The haunted animatronics movie where Nicholas Cage doesn't have any lines. Mockbuster versions of movies that can afford a real movie star but not enough for them to talk. A floppy disk: it's a kind of cartridge. Putting a spinning magnetic disk inside of an N64 cartridge casing. Fitting a minidisk player into an N64 cartridge so Tony Hawk's Pro Skater can finally have the CD-quality soundtrack. Mechanically-produced drum loops. What to call people who have absolute pitch except it's only accurate to within three or four semitones. The course of perfect pitch. Copium theories. The one person with perfect pitch in the a capella group trying to drag everyone else into tune. The sound of an orchestra tuning. Believing yourself to be a gifted musician and having the data to back it up. Hearing the tone that only teenagers are supposed to hear. All the teenagers that Japan is trying to scare away. The only person in the coffee shop who can hear the high pitched whine of the induction hot plate. (The owner.) A poem about the noises BART makes. Reading poems on bart.gov August Content. George Lucas probably getting the tie fighter sound from riding BART. That part of my life is over. (Two hours ago.) A recipe for not be being able to hear the teen-repellent noise. Why would anyone want to keep teenagers away from the mall? Whether malls are for teenagers any more. Why is the tofu always last to know when the mall closes? Hot Topic ghosts chasing you down as you desperately try to find the Manic Panic. A screensaver with a winner and a loser. Having a Turbo Grafx 16 while everyone else has a Super Nintendo. Your life's work in mp3 format.