Topic Lords
284. Spotting A Wild Misogyny
Lords: * Mitch * https://www.youtube.com/@HBMmaster * Nathan * https://store.steampowered.com/app/2976260/ChainStaff/ Topics: * I wish someone told me all classic Star Trek was based on writer Ursula LeGuin * Ryu Numbers and Tom Scott Numbers * https://www.tumblr.com/tomscottnumber * How to get out of a chair * Have you seen the new show? by Orcboxer * https://www.tumblr.com/orcboxer/745859389762764801/poob-has-it-for-you * OUR DRAWINGS - PRINCESS MOVIE | Full Animation Film | Artist * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1LhdhQEKtg * https://www.tumblr.com/fullanimationfilmartist Microtopics: * Mitch from jan Misali. * The episode where we have beef. * The milk frother attachment to the chain staff. * The milk frother is DLC you pay extra for that milk frother. * Hearing about Ursula Leguin for the first time. * The Wind's Twelve Quarters. * The Clock Before Armageddon. * Solving sexism, here on Topic Lords. * Living long enough to discover a new favorite sci-fi author. * What's interesting about Sapphire for the PC Engine, other than the price? * Dreams of gutting the collectors market. * Spending $2,000 on a rare game and trying to convince itself it's good enough to justify the price. * A game that is not very rare but it's still expensive because it's so good that people want to keep it. * Deciding at the last minute to not use motion controls for your Wii rhythm game. * Erdos numbers preceding Bacon numbers because of course it was mathematicians who came up with that shit. * What counts as a Bacon Connection. * A character who has been in a lot of crossover games. * The de facto authority on Ryu numbers. * Whether the frog at the end of TXT World is the same as the game from Frog Fractions. * Whether Hatricia from the Hat DLC is the same as the cat the wedding dress in the photo at the end of TXT World. * The British buy who wears a red shirt. * The ever-shifting discourse for what counts as a connection for Scott Numbers. * Adding rules to make a trivial game into a non-trivial game. * White men who have had a long Youtube career. * Whether Ryu has a surname. * Stephen Hawking's Sabbath number. * Movies and plays tending to tell different stories whereas recorded and live music tends to be the same music. * The hypothetical guy whose favorite movie is just one where they pointed a camera at a stage play. * Why do people love squats? * Doing a 500 pound deadlift to get out of bed. * Doing one exercise to get better at a slightly related exercise. * Fucking up your knees by getting out of a chair repeatedly. * Doing the old heave-ho thing to get out of a chair. * The Inherently Beautiful Design of Everyday Objects, by Bonald Normag. * Watching the X-Files with your wife. * Aged Like Me. * Putting your knees under the chair and standing up, and unbending your knees pushes the chair backwards and it falls over, but you're upright, and then like the punching bags with sand at the bottom the chair bounces back up and hits you in the ass so you don't even need to work to start walking. * A wheelchair with an extremely gentle ejection seat. * Why obese people have worse COVID outcomes. * How to make a bed that fat people want to lie in face-down. * A.C. Slatering. * Why isn't Jim an industrial designer? * Applying for an industrial design job and putting sharks on your resume. * Poob has it for you. * Screenshotting a Tumblr post and cropping out the username to post it on Tiktok and claiming that it's something your therapist told you. * The ghost you're talking about waving its hands in your face being like "I'm right here!" * Tumblr eras. * The event that convinced the Tumblr community that Tumblr users should not ever be in charge of anything. * The people who left Tumblr when they banned porn and then came back when Elon Musk bought Twitter. * The Tumblr Funnymen. * The Tumblr CEO personally harassing trans women off of Tumblr. * Someone who looks like they've been deactivated. * The miracle of Tumblr still being online. * The Poster's Curse. * Bucket, where are you? * A jumble of keywords that someone might hypothetically search for. * Distinctly amateurish outsider art in a way that only a human could create. * Beatboxing puppy! * A contextless segue into a musical number. * An hour long trailer for a twenty minute movie. * A movie made by people who were figuring out 3D animation as they were making it. * Legally distinct Marios rapping. * Being anti-AI art because you are extremely pro copyright law. * The beatboxing puppy scene that everybody forgot about. * It's cool when people make art. * Four consecutive narrators all explaining the same concepts in slightly different ways that slightly contradict each other. * A movie asking you to watch it over and over to pump up its numbers. * Wanting to see a sequel to "OUR DRAWINGS - PRINCESS MOVIE | Full Animation Film | Artist" because you want to know what the title will be. * Complaining that Amazing Digital Circus is more important than your own movie.
283. Dracula's Big Happy Polycule
Lords: * Dan * https://orionblasters.com/ * https://mollyjames.bandcamp.com/album/loved-by-life * Daniel Topics: * Could Dracula escape Groundhog Day? * How to know you’re in a golden era * Indiana Jones is supposed to look good?? * https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=1019&v=f1fWB5HP7s8 * Where the Heart Is by F.S. Yousaf * https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/pMNUZSdU.jpg Microtopics: * Deciding to get a teleprompter on episode 283. * The Molly James Band. * Mid-century lounge music. * Describing yourself as a cross between Pink Floyd and Doja Cat. * Shooting a music video the day after the election. * The sun and the battery life racing each other to ruin your forest concert first. * What does Dracula get up to? Does he have hobbies? * A lawyer hired to buy Dracula a new house * Scrubbing all the proper nouns out of your fan fiction. * Dracula as smoldering sex bomb vs. Dracula as a weird old man. * Figuring out how to not cancel Dracula. * A D&D campaign where you need to recruit a therapist into the party as part of your goal is to convince Dracula to become a better person. * Dracula being verbally abused by all his wives. * Batman playing Flappy Bird while he waits behind the curtain to ambush the villain. * Extremely high powered Nerf rifles. * Joining a community and ascertaining what they need. * Living through a golden age and not realizing until later. * Feeling grateful for the good things you once had. * Being reluctant to push your awesome community because you're afraid it's going to grow too large. * Figuring out how to 3D print blasters. * Mentoring under Captain Slug. * Realizing that your hobby is suddenly your primary source of income. * How to be part of a burgeoning music scene. * The cool kid at GDC. * Ways Jim could've made Glittermitten Grove more accessible without losing the interesting game design. * Getting email from a parent saying that their kid wants to become a mechanical engineer because of you Nerf blaster design. * A video game that is the third best Indiana Jones film. * Who is this technology helping, and how to we stop listening to their opinions? * Playstation Four and a Half. * A game with a lot of whirling debris. * Finding new ways to make more expensive every day. * How you'd put a loot box in a Pico-8 game. * The mental health community arguing about when it's okay to sleep with your therapist. * A/B tasting topics to see which ones get more downloads. * Staying up late enough to get hungry. * What kind of salad you'd put Doritos in. * What kind of salad you'd put a Clif bar in. * Clif bars: fall off of us! * Disappointing dolmas. * Your everyday carry web browser. * The difference between Chrome and Chromium. * Why doesn't everyone just compile their own Firefox? * Bawling at the typewriter about not having the thing you're writing a poem about. * Deciding your book of love poetry to your therapist. * Saving your fan mail to be read at your funeral. * Archaeologists tooting Interesting exchanges written in cuneiform. * Future archaeologists training AI to peruse the entire corpus of tweets to find the choicest memes. * The time to look for an out. * Serenading the audience with the address they can mail cash to. * Where all the best Lords hang out.
282. Check Out My Feetbook!
Lords: * Jeff * https://dopeassvideogames.com/ * Danny * https://www.youtube.com/@NoclipDocs Topics: * What's happening on Bluesky. * Using Google Earth and YouTube to rid myself of Nostalgia of Places I've lived * Dad talk: what do we do about porn? Microtopics: * The Good Morning America series finale. * Covering video games online. * Getting married and feeling safe from people who run dating sites. * Nintendo Disasters. * Reviewing every individual version of FIFA 2011. * The Sega Master System catalog. * Choosing not to do something because someone else has done it before. * A Weird Slop of People. * The CD-32 version of Alfred Chicken. * The Noclip documentary about PiCoSteveMo. * Blood and Fear and Nolf and Shogo and Condemned. * A hardware Pico-8 solution. * Explaining how to and how not to reply. * Enjoying social media because you need a place to type your garbage. * An Eternal September Situation. * Repeating Daily Show jokes from five years ago. * An oral history of Bluesky users. * Jimmy Fallon posting a picture of himself holding a Nintendo Switch. * The Ford vs. Chevy argument over and over again until we're all dead. * Laying your employees off based on their Klout scores. * What aspects of social media you can leave behind once you get a goat farm. * Having goats and not even posting pictures of them. * Goats as a gateway drug to other ungulates. * Did I get drunk and order 20 snakes again? * Boxcars: Where the Hobos Go. * Jumping in a train car full of refined materials. * Reminiscing about the time you lived in London and remembering everything that sucks about living in London. * A warped melting representation of your childhood memories. * An emotional VR moment. * Floating in space and hearing a cacophony of national anthems screaming up at you. * That time they added your uncle's farm to Google Street View. * Looking back on previous eras of your life and remembering why you don't want that kind of life any more. * The guy you know who mined bitcoins on his CPU and then spent it on black market Provigil. * Why do something that's going to make money when you can do ridiculous bullshit instead? * Three year olds who know how to use a remote control. * Areas of human interaction that you are just not prepared for. * Just putting your Zip disk in the file server and grabbing whatever's there. * What kind of porn the owner of the video rental place is personally obsessed with. * Why do you never see porn scored with tracker music? * Deep appreciation of porn that is made for somebody else * Beavis and Butthead trading cards. * Scintillating pizza delivery. * Explaining to your child that porn is fictional, not a documentary, and leaving it at that. * Your daughter asking you questions about Sonic the Hedgehog that you're not prepared to answer. * Encountering boys who play Minecraft. * Deploying new words to the wrong people. * Laying in bed and cursing at ghosts to calm yourself down. * An entire generation who goes to the gym and doesn't just watch CKY2K and break things. * Doing all the drugs so that you can explain what drugs are like to your children. * Learning how to fall as a child so you can fall safely as an adult. * Smoking Ice and waking up in San Francisco. * Pulling over, opening the hood, and punching the engine block over and over. * A poem that somebody else will read. * Whether the money has changed the Dwarf Fortress developers.
281. Mr. Nukem Was My Father
Lords: * Stevie * Bri Topics: * 3D modeling and my lack of visual imagination * Cutthroat compounds (my linguistic specialty) – current pursuit is "verb-em" last names – I'm researching the origins of the fictional law offices of Dewey Cheatum and Howe * Pocket Warwick and other lost software * For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper, by Joseph Fasano * https://www.reddit.com/r/Poetry/comments/1fvzv1f/poemforastudentwhousedaitowriteapaper/ * Colma's city motto "It's Great to Be Alive in Colma" is great marketing Microtopics: * Silly inventor and brainstormer. * Writing code that generates audio. * Giving talks at the Odd Salon. * Coffeehouse revolutionary thinkers. * Classic Hughes Behavior. * Looking at Blender again every seven to ten years. * Imagining a place in any level of detail. (Other than the name.) * The memory of what a tiger looks like, and whether it rotated on a Lazy Susan. * Whether seeing things in a dream feels similar to visualization. * Needing a license to operate as an engineer, but anyone can call themselves an Imagineer. * Weenies and MacGuffins. * Drawing something in 2D and tracing it in Blender. * Different ways to approach level design. * Thinking of something and putting it in your game. * Getting your game design playable as soon as possible so you can find out if it's any good. * A verb and its direct object. * Misers and drunks and cowards and gluttons. * Kick 'em Jenny. * Bop It! * Plastic keys where the point of the key is that it immediately breaks and you have to buy a new one. * Lawyer jokes from 19th century Australia. * Whether Nukem is his last name or just a nickname. * Syntactic freezes. * Rude slang words that end up on listicles. * How "cacafuego" became "spitfire." * Etymonline shrugging and giving up. * Not knowing about the alternate pronunciation of parentheses and processes until you get an office job. * Choosing a comma as one of your hills. * A unit of sound and meaning that you use to modify another unit of sound and meaning. * How to pronounce Warwick Davis. * A Jib Jab. * A Tamagotchi Situation. * Boatswains and forecastles. * Adding redundancy for clarity and also removing it for efficiency. * If you still have a Jaz disk, what do you even do with it? * Going to MagFest to see a chip metal band called Master Boot Record and he's throwing floppy disks with Deluxe Paint on them into the crowd. * Sharing a birthday with a Kentucky Derby winner but not being sure if he's a person or a horse. * The Friendliest Friend! * Stu Sutcliffe, the sixth Beatle. * International Snooker 2012 and Seven Wonders: Ancient Alien Makeover. * Fantasy consoles that only run Final Fantasy games. * If it's your first time at Nice Club, you have to Nice. * Seeing a generation grow up using automation to do a task that you had to do by hand and feeling one way or another about it. * How to tell whether somebody can reason about a topic and express their thoughts clearly. * Underpants Gnome Plans. * Polishing your thought processes until you find one that you agree with. * Defending Your Thesis, directed by Al Brooks. * The only place on the Internet you can hear advice about going to college. * Colma Secrets. * Noone ever stops in Colma (on purpose) * Everyone who came to San Francisco and died. * Go By Train. * Calling the Colma Historical Society to see if they have a living volunteer there that day. * Calling a song "Going to Colma" and hoping that the phrase catches on as a euphemism for Kicking the Bucket. * The Joy of Actual Citizens and People Involved in Government. * Encyclopedia Briannica.
280. How To Start An Ice Cream Shop (Probably)
Lords: * Andi * Casey Topics: * Lifehacks as communion with the divine * I decided to fire my computer * Winston is starting to forget things Microtopics: * A Star Trek watchalong podcast that doesn't exist yet. * Positing that what you said is no longer an NDA violation by the time this episode comes out. * Plugging a fake game that you worked on. * Astrobot. * Horror movie clinky noises that you can't hear over the PS4 fan noises. * Caffeine-infused mints with Tux the Penguin branding on Think Geek dot com. * The pre-eminent source for Life Hacks. * Using a hotel shower cap to bake bread. * Anime girls that are happy to see you. * That one time Film Crit Hulk broke character. * The joy of moving efficiently through the world. * More efficient ways to set the microwave timer. * Hotel rooms that you can bake bread in. * Whether bread should contain hair. * Tricking yourself into not being bored while doing something you have to do. * Reading 50 life hacks and applying none of them because. * Viral Life Hack that's killed 33 people. * A life hack that already had a body count in the double digits before someone made a TikTok about it. * Getting really fed up with computers. * Cryptographic signing processes that you can't participate in. * The HDCP certification board taking steps to ensure nobody can take a screen shot of their Crunchy Roll anime. * The analog hole. * Open source web browsers that can't see DRM content. * Microsoft-authenticated Linux installations. * Designing a circuit that solves a math problem. * Stamping a circuit onto your circuit clay. * An independent circuit re-implementation of video game hardware. * Should you use FPGA to do a thing? * Ridiculous multi-level memory caching systems. * Bootstrapping an FPGA design tool that runs on an FPGA device. * Every single circuit doing something on every single cycle. * Voltages going high and/or low. * Making a bunch of CPUs and testing them afterwards to see how many GHz they have. * Why the PS3 Cell processor had 7 SPUs * The industrial uses of the Cell processor. * A GLSL compiler that outputs FPGA circuits. * Mr. MiSTer. * Open-hardware laptops. * Inventing an open-source GPU. * Multics or Minix. * Writing a Breakout clone in Rust targeting the weird CPU your friend just invented. * Making a terrible first effort that is the right kind of good enough. * A laptop that has a FPGA where the CPU/GPU usually goes. * 1970s-era TV games. * The Epoch Cassette Vision. * A game console with interchangeable cartridges where the CPU is on the cartridge. * The Glasgow Interface Explorer. * Describing your FPGA circuit in Python. * Manufacturing homebrew Cassette Vision Homebrew cartridges for the audience of zero Cassette Vision owners. * Making art just for you, in the most overly elaborate and overly complicated way possible. * The programmer equivalent of going to swim with the dolphins. * Diagonal pixels. * Childhood amnesia. * Remembering your memories. * Using 10% of your brain. (And also the other 90%.) * Knowing things about stuff. * When one brother dies, the other brother gets their memories. * Memories that are formed before vs. after you learn to talk. * Being persecuted for being friends with a girl. * Rules of heteronormativity being enforced by three year olds. * Getting off of Wordpress.
279. Concrete Peanut Butter Condensate
Lords: * Kory * James Topics: * I've been reading more lately, and ditching the eReader sure has helped * Journey to the Planets * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEWiJ1Mn-aY * Send Me to Heaven * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SendMeto_Heaven * My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun, by William Shakespeare * https://poets.org/poem/my-mistress-eyes-are-nothing-sun-sonnet-130 * Re: Smooth Criminal. Are criminals like peanut butter? * My journey to make photography as labor intensive as possible and learn to enjoy it again in the process Microtopics: * A circulating cadre of hobbies. * Corpseflower blooms. * A forum to complain about the state of e-Readers. * eReaders launching as a perfect product and then slowly morphing into shitty phones. * Autosleep anxiety. * Increased difficulty of finding reference art now that stable diffusion exists. * Turning off all your screens in order to accomplish something. * Accordioning ebooks. * Breaking out into meat space with tiny Greek busts. * Freedom to do it the wrong way. * Reading the last page of a book so you don't have the temptation of reading the last page of the book. * Physical bit rot books. * Buying more than one book. * Collecting treasure in order to get home. * A flying around in space mini game. * Dying from comets. * Designing a game that you would never play. * Art that is better in some contexts than others. * King's Quest. * Tuning your adventure game difficulty based on how distracting the real world is. * Difficulty ramping in adventure games. * The text adventure prototype of Outer Wilds. * Untitled Goose Game's melding of the adventure game and the stealth sandbox. * Brock the Investigator's melding of the adventure game and the belt scroller. * An adventure game where the solution to the puzzle is to run up and kick something. * Games that would've been a useful referent for Gunhouse if it had existed. * The I'm Rich era of phone app development. * Let's Play videos of Send Me to Heaven. * App Store review bits that are not very well received. * If hairs be wires then black wires growing on her head. * Quoting a Shakespeare sonnet in your diss track. * Whether "reeks" has the same connotation in Early Modern English. * It's true but you shouldn't say it vs. I just think they're neat. * Whether the Smooth Criminal is the kind where you need to stir the oil in * Smooth criminals vs. chunky criminals. * In what ways criminals are like peanut butter? * What would a chunky rap sheet look like? * A pristine unopened criminal. * Getting merged in some sort of valve situation. * Scientists studying the stripey toothpaste to discover how it stays striped. * That movie where every character is the same person. * Regressing to the analog wherever possible. * Developing film without a dark room, using a dark bag. * Obsessing over a single photograph until the color balance is perfect. * Photography tropes that read as fancy. * The instinct to replicate the superficial qualities of an analog process in its digital equivalent. * Authentically taking a terrible picture with a terrible camera. * Getting sick of what fancy used to mean and figuring out what fancy means going forward. * Hypernice photography. * Art that has way too much detail.
278. Successfully Talking
Lords: * Avery * Linker Topics: * Twin Peaks * Myxozoa * How storytelling is failing us * Bones and Shadows, by John Philip Johnson * https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56581/bones-and-shadows * Novelizing films that originated as novels Microtopics: * A spike of interest corresponding with every episode you're on. * How many hate listeners Topic Lords has. * Chiaroscuro. * Buying Linker's games so he doesn't die. * Watching Blue Velvet while high. * Finishing season two of Twin Peaks out of a sense of duty. * A protagonist who you want to be happy. * That time David Lynch bought five Woody Woodpecker dolls and named them Chucko, Buster, Pete, Bob and Dan, then had to cut them out of his life after their personalities changed. * Focusing the energy you have on the things you love: filmmaking, painting and smoking. * The David Lynch Foundation for the Human Mind. * David Lynch changing the subject back to transcendental meditation. * The permeable boundary between dreams and reality. * David Lynch putting sawmills in every movie because he just likes sawmills. * The disappearance of all-night diners. * What it takes to get Denny's In small-town New Brunswick. * Whether it's possible to mod the bad parts of Deadly Premonition. * Putting evolutionary pressure on jellyfish to get smaller until they evolve back into a single-called organism. * Mammals returning to the sea. * The mutation that allows Henrietta Lacks to live forever. * The cancerous organism that's been hitchhiking in dogs for over a thousand years. * What kind of tumors are blowing around in the Tasmanian Devil whirlwind. * Real and metaphorical spandrels. * Where the Panda's sharp thumb came from. * The kiwi egg-to-body-mass ratio. * Big Bird, the evolutionary pinnacle of all birds. * Introverted Darwinism. * Keeping your toilet paper on the bed. * It's an indie game, you have to put a dead wife in there somewhere. * Obama's presidency as the end of history. * That time everyone was terrified of superpredators. * Human beings organizing facts info stories. * One of the many human traits that cause problems. * Interpreting observed facts differently when you are depressed. * Virtue Ethics. * Deducing ethics via pure reason. * Whether it's true or false that Sherlock Holmes smoked a pipe. * Flash games where you drone strike terrorists. * Exploring a system by interacting with it. * A poem about a guy being beaten up for money. * Successfully talking. * Becoming the bones in the last case. * Pre-nostalgia. * Answering a question by just saying shit. * A video game adaption of a poem. * An atheist take on Tarot readings. * The opinions of someone who once read a lot of philosophy. * Sensing the passage of time in a film clip of a stationary object. * Splinter of the Mind's Eye and the Star Wars radio plays. * The Weird Al song that's just the whole plot of The Phantom Menace. * The Blade Runner and V for Vendetta novelizations. * Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, the novelization. * Kenneth Branagh rolling around in slime with a naked reanimated corpse because because Mary Shelley would've wanted it that way. * A social media platform that was designed to be mindful of mental health, going out of business almost immediately.
277. Tunic 2, For Lords Only
Lords: * Andrew * Kate Topics: * Is it okay to make a game that is boring * My friend wants me to play WoW. Should I? * How to melt chocolate * Kate's Wallace and Gromit song * https://bsky.app/profile/hownottodraw.bsky.social/post/3lfctso62a22q * VFX is like cooking, game design is like baking * Looksmaxxing Microtopics: * Adam Atomic's Pico-8 renaissance. * Vampire vs. Pope Army * Still Kate. * Grass and flowers and touching them. * The bifurcation of Bluesky into Twitter 2 and Mastodon into Not Twitter. * The different kinds of people who tell you you're doing it wrong on different social media services. * Looking at Bluesky and realizing it's just like Twitter, and having a reaction to that realization. * Comparing your mood before using an internet service to your mood afterwards. * You're the cow, baby! * A story about living in a village of fewer than twenty people where nothing happens for thirty years. * Countervailing forces preventing your game design from becoming a worry stone. * Going outside and being bored until being bored stops feeling like an assault on all your senses. * Talking to your mates in the pub about your new socks. * Your mayonnaise manufacturing district. * YAGNI. * That time your ex-husband stole your knife and without a knife you can't cut food! Or ropes! * Needing medical help and asking the guy in your village who owns half an encyclopedia. * A miserable experience that is worth doing. * The big advantage of playing World of Warcraft in Hardcore mode. * WoW Classic and WoW Classic Classic. * A game about killing 40 rats. * The game for children that do annoying dances. * Who knows about causality? * The two year period when game designers played nothing but World of Warcraft. * Getting addicted to an MMO and never contributing anything to society ever again. * Entering into an activity with a miserly determination to not have fun. * What it takes to do a dungeon. * The spaces between the exciting parts. * Melting chocolate on top of parchment paper. * Melting chocolate with a hair dryer. * A Fraught Bark Experience. * Mouthfuls of raw flour. * Cake Batter Bark. * Rescuing seized chocolate. * Counterintuitive chocolate behavior. * Baking: It's Stupid. * Adding a tart cheese to cream of mushrooms soup. * Reading the poem as if you're not singing it in your head. * Asking the vicar to share a stir-fry. * Adding swear words to the Wallace and Gromit theme. * Leggy Desert Boy, by Percy Bysshe Shelley. * The verse in Eleanor Rigby where they talk about cooking and eating dinner. * Words that rhyme with "pint." * Rhyming "pint" with "2019." * Inventing an OC named "blorange" to solve your rhyming problems. * Taking flavors and synthesizing new flavors. * Hammering on the "fun" button for forty or fifty years. * Having the one hit and not needing another hit. * Exploring a multidimensional design space and tapping on all the walls to see which ones are destructible. * Starting to make a game and finding out whether it's an easy game to make. * Langoliers. * Night Snacker. * Releasing games exclusively in the Topic Lords discord. * The art of turning your mortal vessel into a weapon. * Softmaxxing vs. Hardmaxxing. * Doing tongue exercises to sharpen your jaw. * The Wikipedia page with the most scare quotes on it. * Limb-lengthening surgery. * Dabbing: it's just extremely short-term looksmaxxing. * When two subcultures have two different words for the same idea. * Whether the Xes in "Looksmaxxing" are the kisses and the Os the hugs, or vice versa. * Whether the Xes in are the kisses and the Os are the hugs or whether the Xes are the dead eyes on the cartoon face. * Archiving the VODs.
276. The Yukon Territories Foodie Scene
Lords: * Remy * https://store.steampowered.com/app/1675830/1000xRESIST/ * Abhi * https://store.steampowered.com/app/1491670/Venba/ Topics: * Why does food taste better outside of Canada? * Xander asks: "Biased history is better" * Is it fair to make a new game console when we haven't finished the ones we already have? * Puranaanooru * https://oldtamilpoetry.com/2016/04/04/puranaanooru-256/ * What's one IP you would like to adapt or work with? Microtopics: * An image that allows you to attribute the text above it to the character in the image. * Knower. (The one who knows things.) * Losing your faith in God until you see the clip of Mario Kart showing 24 starting positions. * Visual novels with contextualized minigames. * Enjoying food more abroad. * Orbiting the United States. * Which state makes the best dosas. * The best Asian food ten minutes south of Vancouver. * Waves of immigration establishing generations of restaurants. * When there are finally enough immigrants in a city that one of them might open a restaurant to serve food to other immigrants. * Vancouver's restaurant licensing situation. * Vancouver's medallion system for food trucks. * No Good Pizza In My Back Yard! * NAID 96. * Jim's personal experience with Canadian food. * Whether it's what it sounds like. * Capturing the history of written language in your game. * The constant flux of our understanding of history. * Xander-biased history. * A very happy self-described sad boy. * Squeezing every last great game out of the Atari 2600 before creating a new game console. * Hoarding Pico-8 games on your desktop. * The golden era of video game development effort-to-return ratio. * New ways to make games look more expensive. * Outrageously high margins that you are not expected to fill. * Games that would still be fun if the graphics were worse. * Giving your PS5 to your dad so you can buy a PS5 Pro. * Brain hacking yourself. * PS5 Pro Max. * Realizing you don't need to upgrade your game console or in fact any consumer electronics ever again. * The Fairchild Channel F Pro, featuring S-Video. * The Dave the Diver revolution. * Failing enough that you decide to change. * Fortnite Money. * You can't read ancient Tamil?! * A small white lizard stuck to the wagon axle hub's spoke. * The purpose of art. (For people to examine it in 2000 years and find things out about you.) * Finding out what dead people thought. * Finding the time to be cruel. * Shocking Adventure Time moments. * Trusting what people write about themselves. * Finally understanding Xander Bias. * A love letter to Indian cinema. * Things Metroid Prime does to make you feel like you're inside a space suit. * Waiting for the Metroid IP to expire so you can make your Metroid fan game in your extreme old age. * Continuity nerds. * Reboot. * Vancouver-coded fictional cities. * Telus Storyhive. * An IP address you're dying to do. * Shouldn't Zelda and Sokoban be the same genre? * Atari 50 vs. UFO 50. * A murder mystery that you solve by playing video games. * Why the CBC is like that. * Brown Money.
275. Angora Semiconductors
Lords: * Maxx * https://comicfury.com/comicprofile.php?url=mildreth * https://comicfury.com/comicprofile.php?url=delia * https://comicfury.com/comicprofile.php?url=cosmicfault * Chall Topics: * I love the steam deck * The puzzle of the Wikipedia did you know section * The neuroplasticity theory of why we dream * https://www.instagram.com/reel/DELHsgYRamy/ * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-eye_hallucination * https://www.mirror.co.uk/science/viral-image-unrecognisable-objects-creepy-14705067 * She Needed a Hobby, by Maxx Microtopics: * Comic Fury. * The most mediocre comic. * Mildreth of the Night. * Collage vs. ransom note. * A squirrel that finds a way to contact aliens. * Using Redbubble to host your webcomic. * Direct-to-cassette podcast episodes. * A co-op game that makes you raise your voice. * Overcooked but it's a train. * The part of the train that keeps you moist and warm. * How to run Pico-8 on the Steam Deck. * Not wanting to get a Steam Deck because you might drop it on your face. * How many liters a parrot is. * One of those massage beds where your face goes in a little hole and your hands dangle to reach the controls of the Steam Deck that's lying on the ground. * Waterproofing the Vive. * Games Done Pwick. * Sonic the Hedgehog looking like he ought to be a progress bar but he definitely isn't. * Emulators: you can do that! * Extremely intricate marble runs. * Retiring so you have enough time to configure the warping on your enormous loom. * The pleasant monotony of weaving vs. the meticulous craft of warping. * Tuning 1000 pianos at once. * Using a drop spindle to turn wool into thread. * Spinning wool straight from the rabbit. * Breeding for maximum stats on every axis. * Facts that are not particularly fun. * Seeing what the Wikipedia home page looks like on January 2nd, 2525. * Why is a mountain landscape? * Make-your-own-fun fun facts. * Who is this man? Why did he steal a horse? * Clicking on the nomination wizard. * Five Clicks to Jesus and other Wikipedia routing games. * Getting really into patterns and categories. * Shoehorning your favorite pop culture thing into everywhere you can fit it. * Mock Guffin. * Breaking down a story into a list of tropes. * Screen savers for the visual cortex. * Finding stories in the noise. * Different levels of the thing where you see patterns on the back of your eyelids. * How much can you see behind your eyes? * Running experiments on your own physiology. * New places on your body you haven't pressed yet. * Strobe lights for your ears. * Covering the speaker on your phone because you're too place to turn down the volume. * How text looks in your dreams. * Latching onto the idea of a story. * Tasting a lot of math problems before you go to sleep. * A gross crinkled dog texture. * Accidentally crocheting so much that you remake the universe. * The names of such unthinkable numbers. * A crochet pattern for an infinite Mobius strip. * Cool yarns from the local crafting store. * The ability to stick with a hobby. * Crocheting a functional internal combustion engine.
274. Samuel Beckett's Animal Crossing Letters
Lords: * John * https://abbydenton.itch.io/the-blade-of-cutiepants-a-very-cutie-christmas * Elena Topics: * Potluck advent calendar * NES games in my collection that are currently ranked rather low according to Science * http://8bitnintendo.science * Subtopic: I've grown to love engaging with criticism and differing opinions of silly things I like. * How animals read * https://jamchamb.net/projects/animal-crossing-letters * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zy-kIXzX5Cc * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGlpWJ80d_Y * https://ailbey.tumblr.com/post/750880084257374208 * https://www.amazon.com/Dynamic-Wrinkles-Drapery-Solutions-Drawing/dp/0823015874 * https://www.drawright.com/ * https://www.amazon.com/Colour-Atlas-Human-Anatomy/dp/0723408823 Microtopics: * Crispy Shrimp Balls. * What makes it Dim Sum? * Whether there's always a cart that you roll around. * Tapas Lords, a new ASMR podcast. * The Blade of Cutie Pants: a Very Cutie Christmas. * Christmas Dangerous Dave. * Here's a song. I'm going to scroll past that. * Stock footage of Godzilla attacks. * An album about making games in Kilk n Play. * Granny Cream's Hot Butter Ice Cream. * Jim's songs in the Hypnospace OST. * Knowing a lot of people just by hanging out and being entertaining. * Recognizing sounds by looking at them. * Tea and Jam Advent Calendars. * Tippy Tops. * 3D-printed animals with wiggly arms. * Taking the economics of Halloween and applying it to Christmas. * Stocking Stuffers Every Day. * 365-day Advent Calendars. * Santa with a Fanta. * Showing Home Alone to a kid who already loves setting up traps. * An Advent Calendar filled with traps. * Never playing board games but opening up the boxes and playing with the pieces. * Fake Winstons. * Getting 2.5 trinkets from each person. * Half-Lego, Half-Chocolate. * Why your favorite NES games are terrible. * Shipping a game that's no good but damned if it doesn't exist. * A Failure of Science. * Rare game or Rare game? * The Treasure Master walk cycle. * The worst NES games with the best soundtracks. * British developers succeeding on the Commodore 64 but failing on the NES because people are willing to pay 6 quid for the latest Rob Hubbard track, but not $50. * Your neighbor who had Big Nose Freaks Out. * Punching the clues. * Buying the 3D version of Urban Champion on purpose. * Trying to go back to Super Monkey Ball. * Nostalgically revisiting your best Super Monkey Ball replays. * Accidentally transposing two digits and now you have a Super Monkey Ball world record. * Making local copies of videos you want to continue to exist. * Recognizing when something works for someone else but not you. * Writing letters to your animal neighbors. * The seven criteria to judge a letter. * How to safely write a letter about VVVVVV to your Animal Crossing neighbor. * Roleplaying James Joyce in Animal Crossing. * Teaching Animal Crossing a slur and then returning the cartridge to Gamestop. * Deciding that it's okay if local news stations freak out. * Taking joy in extremely mundane activities. * How you spend your moments and how you feel about them. * Watching TV so that in several decades you can go to a bar and find out who's the same age as you. * Practicing love by trying to love yourself. * The breakup song from the Wedding Singer. * Corollaries of aphantasia. * Blind people watching TV. * Learning to draw by studying human anatomy and proportions in detail and imagining the body kinesthetics. * Looney Tunes artists making faces in the mirror. * Knowing how bones go. * The Bone Book. * That's Topics!
273. Why Isn't Dracula Good At Anything?
Lords: * Esper * https://ourbroadcastday.com/ * RT-55J * https://rt-55j.itch.io/ Topics: * Memes where the specific instance of joke customization is frontloaded, while the punchline remains the same every time. * Making ZZT games in 2024 * https://stale-meme.itch.io/the-king-in-yellow-borders * It's 2024 and still nobody has ported Mario 64 to the Commodore 64 * https://abbydenton.itch.io/the-blade-of-cutiepants-a-very-cutie-christmas * What I Would Tell Eve by Maegen McAuliffe O’Leary * https://www.reddit.com/r/Poetry/comments/1ez31sh/poemwhatiwouldtellevebymaegenmcauliffe/ * "A vampire with a cheque-book, a solicitor, and a balance at the bank is not a plausible kind of creature." - Andrew Lang (contemporary reviewer of Dracula) * Do you think there were any Fortnite die-hards who got really upset when Fortnite started introducing Marvel and Star Wars guys to the game? Microtopics: * A Muppet Christmas Carol. * Gradations of Michael Caine oldness. * The Museum of ZZT. * Wizened ZZT Wizards. * Taking a common idea and altering it in an interesting way. * Why do plays still exist? * Making up an audience to applaud you. * Rehearsing a conversation in a low-oxygen environment. * A guy walking around touching things in the world and flavor text appears. * The ZZT aspect ratio problem. * Sneaking into the office at night and playing ZZT in silent mode so you don't bother the janitor. * 8-way movement in ZZT. * Reasons to stick with a certain set of constraints. * WeaveZZT. * Making a deck builder RPG in ZZT. * The safety and romance of a good set of constraints. * The King in Yellow Borders. * Oktrollberfest. * A found object horror game built in a fake ZZT engine. * Wario doing a ground pound and breaking the Youtube interface around the video. * Reading like 200 pages of Problem Sleuth and never getting around to Homestuck. * A program you can install to make your computer look like it's still running Windows Vista, and another you can install to make it feel like Obama is still president. * Porting ZZT to the Commodore 64. * An economy of people enjoying themselves. * Porting Mario 64 to ZZT and ending up on the front page of Planet Quake. * Tux Racer. * Scoping your game just big enough for people to see screen shots and get excited, but small enough that it's still finishable. * Mario 64's British Platformer Energy. * Whether Argonaut or Rare was a bigger influence on the design of Mario 64. * 3D Construction Kit for the Commodore 64. * Trying to build a scene in PovRay. * What iPad kids were like in the mid-90s. * Whether or not Eve ate the best possible apple. * Plausible and implausible vampires. * Ahistorical vampire analysis. * Why there's chicken on the Streets of Rage * What the Antediluveans got up to. * The 14 million year war for Cybertron. * What did you eat for 14 million years? * Subsisting on pure unfiltered Sparklemotion. * Two robots punching each other in the face for millennia. * Nike sponsorships in Magic the Gathering. * A roadmap of Magic the Gathering Crossovers. * The Guitar Hero game where you could make Kurt Cobain perform Run DMC. * Rated E for Explicit. * A PubG with fort building mechanics. * Winning your first game of Fortnite and retiring forever. * The Super Smash Instinct. * Monetizing a child's insatiable gambling instincts. * Playing a video game and worrying about the developer's immortal soul.
272. Beakknifed In Busch Gardens
Lords: * Ryan * Cort Topics: * Is it possible to make a "meat flavored" potato chip that's not disgusting. * Meandering Pico-8 tracker jabbering * Do you think anyone has ever used the "Add or Remove Programs" interface to add a program? * Tommy C * https://genius.com/Dan-le-sac-vs-scroobius-pip-tommy-c-lyrics * Advent calendars are just tiny bulk-rate loot crates Microtopics: * Ryan Ike Audio on Instagram. * How to make music and have balance in your life. * If there's nothing to fail at, what are you bad at? * Stand Elsewhere, an Oregon Trail-like. * Converting 50s pop songs to chunky four channel chip tunes. * The Pico-8 Splore database. * Asking a friend to make music for your PiCoSteveMo game, and having to explain what a PiCoSteveMo is, then Pico-8, trackers, music, sound, air, matter, and existence itself. * Potatoed Chips. * Romanian Beef Bolognese Flavored Potato Chips. * Abuela's All-Day Braised Carnitas potato chips. * Hate-buying a terrible flavor potato chips over and over so you can make everybody you know taste them. * Raw Hamburger flavored potato chips that moo when you eat them. * The Doritos Brain-hack. * Looking at the box of Frosted Mini-Wheats with a shrimp on the box and thinking "that's a little shrimpy" * Cool American Doritos. * Eat the cool. They knew the risks. * A bowl of M&Ms with a single Skittle in it. * Fresh Meat Potato Chips. * Walking into the Frito-Lay factory, dangling your jaw open and waiting for come what may. * All Night Nippon Shredded Abuela's Braised Carnitas. * The Taki's One-Chip Challenge. * Inviting all your friends over to try the new Strawberry Mochi Dill Pickle potato chips. * Explaining to your daughter's friends' parents that we're going to give your children tablets I got on the Internet and then we're going to eat lots of food and it's going to taste really weird. The FDA doesn't allow you to put this in food but I need you to dissolve this on your tongue. * Par-boiling your soft palate in lemon juice because it tastes so amazing. * Reprogramming your tongue to remix your palate. * What to do if you love both music and spreadsheets. * Art tools that make your tummy feel icky. * Mr. Lee by the Bobbettes. * What trackers are good at. * An extremely Bojangles tracker configuration. * Trying to do Math Rock in the Pico-8 tracker. * Triggering patterns 0 through 7 as instruments. * Whether the Add or Remove Programs interface can add a program. * Windows Sandbox. * Jacking your whole life up but your Windows desktop is pristine. * Getting a burner desktop for write-ins. * Inventing a guy named Dampiel and getting mad at him even years later. * Classic Dampy. * Renaming your game to doom.exe and suddenly Nvidia cards run it way better. * Putting a comment in your shader saying "Dear Nvidia, please make this shader look rad." * The Valve guy refusing to tell you how the math is wrong. * A selection of gags, hand movements and facial expressions. * Dying onstage while the audience applauds. * Feigning death so often as part of your comedy act so when you really die during your routine it'll be hilarious. * Death: just a bad deal all around. * Not my birth mom, but my robo-mom. * Having a death so weird that even as an extremely minor celebrity you end up on TMZ. * Doing extensive R&D so that you can somehow be murdered by a flamingo. * A bloodied flamingo wearing Ryan Ike's glasses. * Walking through the zoo looking for opportunities for environmental storytelling. * Accidentally doing an immaculate 360 Christ Air and then dying on impact. * Thinking of one funny scenario a month. * A treat that's busting the seams of the Advent Calendar door. * A sack of little handmade animal ornaments. * The Joy of Mastery. * Empty Advent Calendars. * Going shopping for used candy after Halloween. * Terrible Novelty Potato Chip of the Day. * One big Advent calendar the size of a barn door with 365 doors in it. * The Mayan Advent Calendar. * Automats. * Wheel of Fortune except you're assembling a wheel and not a phrase. * Spin the wheel, make a deal! * The first podcast of the rest of your life.
271. Ego Death Mario
Lords * Tyriq * Stevie * Avery Topics: * What is Dr. Mario's specialty? * Boutique sardines * Street Sharks (and the lies about them) * PiCoSteveMo is over! (as of this recording) Microtopics: * Throwing out an idea like a plate of spaghetti, or a grenade. * Odd Object. * Piggy-back dual plugs. * Now! That's What I Call Avery Burke, Vol. VII. * Jason Shiga. * Older kids who are into roughhousing and watching shark movies. * Audio Issues Because of Dog. * The only place on the Internet you can hear cardboard boxes rubbing against each other. * Two hours of an attractive woman scraping her thumbnail on a microphone. * Dr. Mario telling someone that they only have-a four months to live-a. * The weird forehead mirror that old-timey doctors wear. * The opinions of someone who's eaten cat food. * Grandma barging in while you're eating dog food. * Flintstones Cannibalism Vitamins. * Barney's PTSD after the Neanderthal Wars. * Wacky Races, the original MCU. * Dr. Mario's pill pusherside hustle causing the opioid crisis. * Ego Death Mario microdosing the germs in the pill bottle who transcend to the great pill bottle in the sky. * Coming up with the conceit that your band is enemies with sea mammals and making all future audiences hate you. * Three adorable sardines rowing a boat shaped like a dragon. * An octopus tentacle that looks like a serial port or a 2x6 spot light. * The animal that you're eating depicted in cartoon form as cheering you on. * An anthropomorphic ginger root eating a ginger candy. * Single-serving black characters. * Eating a fish and finding an entire spine. * The weirdest bone to find. * Free floating animals gathering into a colony and turning into a face. * The most popular fish sauce in ancient Rome. * Sealing a whale hand in a trash can with duct tape for two years until it starts leaking and your roommate has to help you dispose of it wearing a hazmat suit. * Tucking a whale bone under your trench coat and sneaking out of the museum. * Famous whale disposal techniqus. * Fishwife, fish life! * Not knowing about the preexisting work that your favorite cartoon is in conversation with because you're a kid and don't know anything. * Slammu, Ripster and Streex. * Michelangelo, Leonardo, DiCaprio, and Don Angelo. * Vin Diesel being very excited about the Street Sharks. * IP Homeopathy. * Sexy Mummy Costume. * Using mumnies as train fuel because they are so plentiful. * You can't get Mummy Brown any more because of Woke. * Who has and hasn't heard of Tommy Tallarico. * A toy that lets you shoot at the TV screen during the interactive parts of Captain Power. * Fresh off the PiCoSteveMo boat. * Graph going up emoji. * Lots of different skill levels going on in there. * Aardvarks and anteaters. * A three hour celebration of weird things that games can be. * Look Who's The Shining Two! * Why the Sokoban puzzle in Ocarina of Time sucks. * Puzzles vs. situations. * Tony and the Tony Mechanic. * The Thought Leader of the Thinky Games Community.
270. B-Roll Of The Big Bang
Lords: * Alexander * Hallie Topics: * Making AI drunk * Alexander's name generator, rehosted: http://twinbeard.com/names/ * How Star Wars being bought Disney is basically the same thing as the Roman Empire converting to Christianity * Electromagnetism * Super Bon Bon (according to Google search) * https://www.google.com/search?q=super+bon+bon+lyrics * Using flow theory and Kubler Ross grief to drive learning systems * Animals you want to pet, but cannot. Microtopics: * A Game Called Anomaly. * A tarot-based GM-less storytelling game about a sinister organization investigating a supernatural The KGB (not that one) * Deliberately lo-fi neural nets. * Real to less-real name sliders. * What Jamden Ovenson is up to these days. * Cranking the tipsy slider all way up. * anomaly. * Things humans can do with new tools. * Setting desired and undesired objectives for your learning designers. * Learning to speak as many languages as possible so that Godzilla does not rise from the briny deep. * Refusing to let the AI drive the bus. * A very big json dump. * The Mac Mini in your closet that runs your witch's familiars. * Things that are obvious to you but not to anyone else. * Cool apocryphal acts, bro. * Getting into Christ before it was cool. * Decanonizing anything that doesn't serve your power interests. * Bible/Star Wars crossover fan fiction. * Once you eat the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden, forever will it dominate your destiny. * Metals that can be turned into a magnet. * Where to even start with spin? * Whether protons are physical objects. * The language of perceiving the world. * Reading a poem about quantum physics. * Finally understanding the mathematics of love so you can ditch the love poetry and find the best lovers in the math department. * Which types of quark are super effective against other types of quark. * Why they call it electromagnetism. * But what about the Bullet Galaxies? * Weakly-interactive massive particles, or WIMPs. * Another particle that we thought up. * Microphones not picking up your tinnitus. * Extremely slow and old neutrinos. * Cosmic Microwave Background Average Frame of Reference. * The Soul Coughing cadence. * A poem, but it's performed in a certain rhythm. Some white guy should invent that and take credit for it. * Song Meanings Blog Dot Com. * Helping drive exploration of new ideas. * Making a name generator so bad that nobody uses it more than once. * Patterns and responses that characterize human behavior. * Grief as a mechanism to address overfitting in the human learning model. * The Parable of the Spandrel. * Possibilities that are more probable than Godzilla having eaten your house. * Depression as a way to just sit there. * Automatons with anxiety. * Entering random Game Genie codes into your neural net. * Wanting to pet a service dog because he's the best boy. * Service dogs having their own service dogs, recursively all the way down. * A chicken named Regular Expressions, or Reggie for short. * Digging in anything that looks diggable. * Being desperately confused by objects that you can see through but not walk through. * Ways to not get tricked by yourself or others.
269. Wet-Ass Planetoid
Lords: * Tyriq * Alex Topics: * Trying to superficially familiarize myself with every country * The log burner fan * https://ae01.alicdn.com/kf/S68d58689db54401f9a434456881cbdfcf/4-Blade-Heat-Powered-Stove-Fan-Log-Wood-Burner-Eco-Friendly-Quiet-Fireplace-Fan-WinterWarm.jpg * Drilling this chair for ancient water * Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams, by Kenneth Koch * https://allpoetry.com/Variations-On-A-Theme-By-William-Carlos-Williams * Boichik bagels * Boxfish skeletons are wilder than seahorse skeletons Microtopics: * Saya Gray. * Least-favorite UFO 50 games. * Treating the city you live in as if you're a tourist. * Going to obscure corners of parking lots. * A way to have an adventure in real life. * The tiny squishy seal that's no longer in your back pocket. * Web sites that are nothing but quizzes. * Trying to name every country. * This Sporcle quiz's opinion about which disputed territories count as countries. * Feeling more worldly after you memorize the names of every country. * Learning katakana and then being annoyed when signs do katakana wrong. * The curse of perfect-pitch. * Corrupted Pitch. * Tuning your whole band to the same out of tune guitar. * Hearing sounds in your head but only the sounds you're also hearing with your ears. * State.gov hosting PDF reports of the US government's opinion of every country. * Dear diary, today I did a cool fishing trade with Norway. * The Four Guineas. * The Place Across the Woods. * A giant CPU heat sink in gunmetal black sitting on top of your wood burning stove. * Devices powered by ambient temperature differentials. * The spinning thing on the roof that looks like a macaroon. * Putting googly eyes on your turbine roof vents. * Whether Stirling Engines are useful for anything other than a demonstration of the principles of the Stirling Engine. * Fluids moving through spaces of different sizes. * Injection molded hollow chunky boys. * Extremely mundane time capsules. * A Chair for Scientists. * A giant plastic-encased garbage ravioli. * Entire ecosystems that have existed without light for thousands of years. * Your FEMA-approved disaster preparedness chair. * Sorting all the water molecules on earth from newest to oldest. * Artists' depictions of the Hadean Earth. * The biggest wettest comet in the universe. * Don Quixote, the sopping wet comet. * Free sharps, only used once! * Writing a piece for prepared guitar after your kid fills the guitar with crayons. * Unprepared Pianos. * Juicy cold March wind. * A fair-use parody. * AI analysis of poetry that completely misses the point. * Editing Wikipedia to say that Lil Jon went to Harvard. * List of Rivers in Togo. * What a Specific Guy! * Registering an account to vandalize Wikipedia every few months for years. * Supermarket bagels. * Boiling round bread in water with crustaceans from the Bronx. * Making your own water to make coffee with. * Where to get food-grade lye. * Pastrami lox. * Seahorse skeletons. * Every Platonic Solid Has a Fish. * Where babies breathe from. * Fish without ribcages. * Caltrops arranged into a fish. * Using a pufferfish skeleton as a fidget toy. * The pufferfish at the center of our solar system. * The kind of decoration you see in a lobster joint. * Tropes of the open ocean. * The guy preventing you from being able to find search results for the Atari game Toobin'. * The loudest drinks in the world. * The Toobin' zone in LEGO Dimensions. * Chucking whole unopened cans of beer from your inner tube.
268. Puzzles For Puzzle Enjoyers
Lords: * James * https://pounced-on.me/@Triplefox * Kev * https://kevzettler.com/ * https://www.youtube.com/@MikeMotion83 Topics: * Copyparty * Egg punk vs. chain punk * Going geocaching three times * https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/ugJWqQdP.jpg * Septic Tanks * https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/q0tW8KtD.jpg * Certain kinds of trash you don't see any more * Mosquito bites Microtopics: * Multiple recurring lords. * Going back to an earlier episode to listen to the plugs. * Agreeing to a copy party without knowing what it is. * Multi-part RARs. * Putting together educational material for your hypothetical younger self. * Manually extracting files over a physical USB connection. * Org-mode. * A collection of ogg vorbis music. * Your personal learning mind-map for learning how to draw. * The bottom end of expertise. * Two contrasting branches of the punk community. * Nerdy; dancey; influenced by Devo. * Musical genres refusing to converge no matter how close they get. * genres refusing to converge no matter how close they get. * How old you have to be to know about My Bloody Valentine. * Finally getting your act together and installing the right app and logging into the right web site. * Finding excuses to be more engaged with nature. * Having conversations, like you do with friends in a park. * Finding an Altoids tin where you would expect to find a bunch of spider webs. * Walking through half-nature in near-complete darkness. * Climbing down a rocky embankment in near-complete darkness with your phone in one hand. * Caches getting muggled. * Null Island. * Realizing that you're about to go on the bad kind of adventure. * A passing wizard complimenting you on your ironic orc-detecting sword. * A stuffed BB-8 that you use for photo opportunities. * Leaving one line of your toilet poem blank in case you think of a good rhyme for "too." * The kind of poem you put in your bathroom. * A pithy way to say what to put in the toilet. * Telling the restaurant's poet laureate that he really nailed that septic tank poem. * Using a black marker to redact the line about cigarette butts from your poem. * A book that reads like browsing Reddit. * Taking your mind off of your butt for five minutes. * Whether Law and Order was ever an accurate depiction of police procedure. * How they convicted or didn't convict the latest perp. * Uncle John's Bathroom Reader. * TV Guides lying on the street. * The genre of children's craft made from newspaper. * Archaeologists finding a thousand year old USB drive and finding a bunch of PDFs and videos about how to learn to draw. * FAT16 vs. FAT32. * Multi-volume ARJ files. * Putting together dual-purpose CDs for punk banks. * CD-ROMs shaped like a business card. * Inserting mini-CDs into a slot loading CD drive. * What it takes to make an indie Gamecube game. * Side-factoids about Luigi's Mansion. * Luigi's Mansion counting the volume of dust you've vacuumed through the whole playthrough. * The new Duck Tales game modeling the physics of every treasure you can collect so you can swim in them. * Mosquito activity in the midwest. * Hanging out around mosquito predators. * Mosquitos waking up for the gloaming and then going back to bed. * Finding the one high-altitude spot in the Panhandle to avoid the mosquitos. * Feeling bad about killng mosquitos after playing Hollow Knight. * Your favorite mind control force. * Golfers hitting that ball to make the number go down when they could just play less and it'd stay at 0 forever.
267. Unburying The Duck
Lords: * John * Erica Topics: * Golden owl pre-post-mortem * https://goldenowlhunt.com/ * Twin update: one year later * Notepad has support for alternative line endings now * Goodnight Moon (And/or Goodnight Dune?) * https://www.firstcry.com/intelli/articles/goodnight-moon-nursery-rhyme/ Microtopics: * The waiting list to get into the Topic Lords discord. * What goes on the lords-only channel. * The first rule of being a lord. * It's the end of the show somewhere in the world. * Frog Fractions Royalty. * Topic Lords Con East. * Choosing pairs of lords. * What lords have been on the show least recently. * Mystery with a B. * Responsibility to the lords. * ARG goings-on. * Maze of Games. * Rubber hose ARG solving * Digging up the golden owl and replacing it with a duck. * The minimum number of golden owls you are allowed to cast in France. * The History of the Owl Stuff. * Commemorating your love of the Golden Owl by purchasing this commemorative Golden Owl. * The Mystery of the Golden Owl that nobody wanted solved. * It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. * Going and burying a duck * Unburying the Duck and putting the Owl back. * Looking through the Heart of France. * Another cursed treasure hunt in the can. * Ancient alternatives to zip files. * Re-scoping your puzzle hunt on the fly. * Telling twins apart using phrenology. * Twin identification strategies. * Let me see your flecks! * Checking your placental mammals for belly buttons. * Platypodes. * Jock twin/nerd twin. * Having children as a way to practice solving problems together. * Who forgot to take a nap today? (Everyone on the show.) * Flailing limbs kicking your bedmate all night. * Rocking your kid to sleep and then depositing them in the crib like Indy swapping out the golden idol. * How to teach babies to sleep. * Wearing children until the children no longer tolerate it. * A good selection of kid-friendly music. * A guy with a soothing British voice saying interesting things for ten minutes. * How much coffee to give a six year old right before bed. * Waiting for your kid to realize that when it's 1am he doesn't have to ask you if he can watch TV. * Just show me the byte order marker! * Adding tabs to Notepad. * Everyone agreeing to go back to WordStar. * What software developers do once a program is finished and perfect. * Loading CSV files into R. * Accidentally updating Excel. * The kind of person who is passionate about the latest cutting edge version of all software, who works in tech and is in charge of all update systems. * Adobe Premiere updates that ruin your team's entire workflow. * Why JWZ is no longer rich. * Seeing all the trailing spaces at the end of the line. * Jobs that require you to be able to distinguish between a tab character and the equivalent number of spaces. * How Unity handles upgrades and versioning. * The 75th anniversary of Goodnight Moon. * Why the New York Times's list of most borrowed children's library books of all time doesn't contain Goodnight Moon. * When Goodnight Moon says "Goodnight Nobody" and you immediately assume that the old lady died. * The calming effect of going over an inventory of really nice soothing things. * The Margaret Wise Brown ouevre. * Goodnight Dune. * Good night, shai-hulud bursting out of the dune. * Good night, Bene Gesserit witch whispering "they tried and died." * Too much of every character giving their internal monologue in italics. * Virginia Facebook's extremely cheap antiques. * Floating in the No-Room.
266. Voronoi Cookies
Lords: * Ben * Andrew Topics: * Baking: precise science of measurement or do it all by feel? (People have very different philosophies of muffins) * I've gotten into making crosswords this year and recently had the idea to start putting them on postcards and leaving them in public places for people to find. Am I becoming the Riddler? Is this fine? * I just found out that there aren't exactly 52 weeks in a year * The Rules, Leila Chatti * https://poets.org/poem/rules * Building fidgeting into a Zoom lecture * Things of Science. (Subscription science toy service that I got when I was a kid) Microtopics: * Posting pictures of pottery to social media. * The Hopefully Year of Layoffs. * Teaching game development as a hobby. * The interactive comic books of Jason Shiga. * Lies and truth and sea monsters. * Waiting for half an hour to find out if you fucked it up. * Baking intuitively. * Skimming a recipe and thinking "hmm yes, I've made food before" * Voronoi cookies. * Keeping separate baking notebooks for each season. * Having units that are divisible by two. * Putting it in a Gas 4 Oven. * How to pronounce "tare." * Sneaking into Grandma's kitchen and weighing all the ingredients. * Cruciverbalism. * Where to post the crosswords you've constructed. * A Lord's Puzzle. * Giving people a little bit of joy and avoiding hearing any feedback about it. * Living in the puzzle capital of the world. * Constructing a crossword puzzle for every party you attend. * The MIT Mystery Hunt. * Making art for a really small group of people. * Crosswordese. * Designing themed vs. themeless crossword puzzles. * How many weeks are in a leap year. * Yet another ratio that doesn't work out. * Calendrical systems you could use. * Things that you know that are wrong. * What's your favorite thing you don't know that you don't know? * Finding a drawer full of narwhal tusks in a bone shop and thinking "hm, sixty unicorns died here" * NASA's antigravity room. * Why doesn't the Mars habitat work out? * Multiple digressions on horse urine. * Refining horse urine into progesterone on Mars. * Suddenly realizing that you've been dead all along. * Cicadas doing whatever they do in the trees. * Acknowledging the expectations of what a poem is. * Why you always turn out to have been dead at the end. * Who is out there still making games about guns? * Adding line breaks to make your essay look like a poem. * Innominateness. * Garden path level design. * Reading aloud etudes. * Mavis Beacon Teaches Elocution. * Replacing your Zoom background with a video of yourself. * Brain massaging video of cutting sand. * The calming effect of amphetamines. * Fidgeting incessantly during Zoom calls. * Fidgeting for people so they don't have to. * Bubbling noises and space harps. * Remote testing protocols. * Plagiarism detector snake oil. * Doing homework to get used to the idea of doing homework. * Mass-production of adults. * Paperwork as a method of crowd control. * Homework as a barrier to family time vs. homework that facilitates family time. * Mailing people little bits of science. * Aerogel vs. Superslurper. * Growing mold in your oobleck. * Sending 1940s children asbestos in the mail. * Using every sense to explore the world. * A dog sniffing your hand and walking away. * Throwing away all the business cards that just have your Twitter handle on them.
265. We're Here To Make This Slide Floppy
Lords: * Tim * Chris Topics: * Noodles? * Everything and More (by DFW), the "impoverishment of the question",and free will * Choosing an integrator * https://gafferongames.com/post/integration_basics/ * Lucky Jim (old song) * https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/U7zR1RCa.png * Collaborative music as a game design problem (see: skill gap, handicaps, engagement, peripheral participation) Microtopics: * Celtic Music and Corgis. * Tim, a figure shrouded in mystery. * Topic Monologues. * Gluten-free noodle straws. * Bucatini: imagine a Red Vine but made of pasta. * Replacing food service workers with clockwork automata made of noodles that have been hardened into gears and springs. * Giant fusilli as playground equipment. * Noodleness and pastitude. * Whether gnocchi is a pasta. What about cauliflower gnocchi? * Unleavened Carrot Cake. * Indomie: the number one selling noodle on Earth. * Good spices: they can work in a broth. * Soupertaster: Jim eats soup alone while talking to a volleyball with a bloody handprint on it. * Learning math by starting with incredibly abstract unmotivated ideas. * Some Bottomless Pits are Deeper than Others. * Approaching a question by interpreting it as a question that if answerable. * The significant of the perception of free will. * How a closed system can produce multiple different outcomes. * What happens when we decide we don't have free will. * A completely deterministic system that has a sensation of free will. * Taking as much time as it takes to read a book. * Shooting the Moon (in real life) * Taking all the bad cards and winning. * Becoming disciplined about time * What a modern feature phone can do. * Dividing your day into blocks and spending them. * The period in your life when you lived in Burlingame. * Getting an incredibe amount of work done during your hour and a half commute. * Topic Lords or Plug Lords? * Something you'll be glad you did tomorrow. * Integration Basics. * Explicit Euler vs. Semi-Implicit Euler. * The pros and cons of RK4. * The physics system behind Drawn to Life. * What it takes to be an old song. * Hadestown and The Instigator. * The Hadestown Tiny Desk Concert. * How to play music with other people in a way that accounts for skill gaps. * Going to the Starry Plough to play the penny whistle. * Musicians sitting in a circle and talking until someone starts playing something and everyone else joins in. * Joining in on a song you've never heard before. * Playing Mary Had a Little Lamb at 40 BPM. * Making a slow song more interesting by adding ornamentation. * Star of the County Down. * Different ideas that come out when you play music at half speed. * Lark Camp. * The person who hands out the cheat sheet with all the popular tunes and their chord progressions. * Sorting tunes by frequnecy. * The bad things about Irish sessions, from a game design perspective. * Learning a song by reading the notation vs. learning it by playing it for 30 years. * Star Above the Garter.
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