Topic Lords

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.

Lords: * Andrew * https://kittenm4ster.neocities.org/ * Aubrianne Topics: * I will never get good at video games and that's okay * Does charging (or even allowing donations) for something change its perception as a piece of art? * Messy game design * To Be of Use, Marge Piercy * https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57673/to-be-of-use * Films Noir * Complementary Hobby Power Couples Microtopics: * Just shakin' it a little bit. * The royal it. * Putting Homestar Runner on shuffle while you do homework. * Making Pico-8 games under an Internet name. * Your child petting a dog but when you try to pet the dog as well the dog is like "no, not you!" * A beard or long braid as a fidget tool. * Spectrum Cheater Reveals. * Games where you have to plan ahead. * A very easy social slot to fit into. * How many extra organs does Master Chief have? * Watching your mom fail the same jump in Animal Well for twenty minutes. * Picking a garbage can in Fallout 3 where you keep all your stuff which works great until they patch garbage collection into the game. * A game that requires two skills and the two skills exist in two different people. * What happened to cheat codes? * Paying the pickpocket trainer to train you and then pickpocketing your money back. * Pickpocketing someone's vital organs. * Homestar Runner as the ultimate counter example. * What quilts are worth if you charged a fair wage for your time. * Spending half an hour convincing your nephew that this scarf really is worth $300. * The only two millennials who haven't professionalized their hobbies. * Constructing your game design like a mathematical proof. * The promise of the text parser. * All the weird bespoke deaths you could find in a Sierra game. * Games intended for people who have more free time than you. * How to make it completely viable to make small games. * A clever hack to market your video game (spend a bunch of money) * The promise of the 50 in one pirate kart. * Trying to get the house gifts in every game in UFO 50. * Collecting the umbrella and the pin an least a dozen times. * A Guided Tour of Barbuta. * The black sleek heads of seals bouncing like half submerged balls. * Doing what has to be done, again and again. * A form of idleness that produces an incredibly amount of textiles. * Peruvian people spinning while they wait for the bus. * Why nobody gives a shit about rope and string. * Appreciating the lasagna that's right in front of you. * Making a loaf of bread for your family that mostly eats peanut butter sandwiches. * Making a little frowny face at "amphoras." * Meeting a girl and wooing her with good semicolon usage. * Dressing up as Elaine and Guybrush for Halloween. * Whoppers Jr. and Games Boys Advance. * Classic Film Noir such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit. * That time Rita Hayworth made you realize you were gay. * Getting no movies from America for years and then getting a ton of movies from America all at once. * Pulpy low-budget melodramas. * The Hays Code. * The five minute monologue where Quint describes the graphic sex scene between Jaws and the Hoth Ice Wampa * Neo Noir. (Meaning from the 70a.) * Modern art. (Meaning from the early 20th century.) * Neo Noir films such as the Bourne Identity and Batman Begins * Bugs Bunny inventing the smoky noir saxophone. * A taxonomy of complementary hobby pairs. * Getting 20 musicians in a room and it's a total disaster. * Sheep growing so much extraneous wool that they fall on their backs and explode. * Youtube recommending a video on how to flip a sheep over. * Sheep Tips: How to Flip a Sheep. * A video of a guy getting out of a car and hopping a fence and running over to help a sheep who is stuck on its back like "what do I even do now?" * Fellow Jorts Horsians. * Deep lore of server outages.

Lords: * Xalavier * Brianne Topics: * Why do movies about contract killers skip over the good part of negotiating in excruciating detail the contract and clauses present? * Are fictional characters greater role models than real people? * The new Zelda game talks too much and I'm okay with that * Think of Others by Mahmoud Darwish * https://www.ayearofbeinghere.com/2014/11/mahmoud-darwish-think-of-others.html * Should every person be forcibly drafted into a customer service job, like the military. * The horrible things I would do in the Criterion Closet, if given an opportunity. * Jim's evidence for why The Pest is memorable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAB8dNMoXZ0 Microtopics: * I Am Your Beast. * Making 50 games in 7 years. * A co-op Kaiju horror cooking game * The Name of the Rose meets Godzilla meets Lethal Company. * Power couples in games. * Moviegoers who want to know about contract law. * Search and replacing "murder" with "unalive" so that a contact killer can safely sue the client for breach of contact. * Pedantic legal contact killer law every week. * Lowering the bar so that we can all raise it later. * Doctor Odyssey. * Disheveled Detective. * The Autistic Coded Detective. * A ahow about autistic people written by neurotypical people. * Making a weekly podcast and scoffing at the TV shows that can only manage 24 episodes a year. * Asking google for the "podcast with the fewest episodes" and google just assuming you meant the podcast with the shortest running time. * Sending children to the sharps dump. (Because the kid asked for it and the parent signed a waiver.) * Desperately knocking on Google's door and beginning them to tell you where the furthest Denny's is. * The Waluigi-owned Denny's in the Andromeda Galaxy. * Role Models happening accidentally. * Donald Duck becoming a sex pest after edgier writers take over. * A form of self to aspire to. * 300 Rorschach Guys in a discord server. * An epic story that FromSoft will continue to plunder of its biggest plot elements for the next 30 years. * A character that you relate to and then you realize that's bad. * What do you do after you get what you want? * Leading a horde of ninja at the dictates of an Eldritch god. * Getting what you've been looking for and realizing that you're no longer the person who wanted that thing. * Role-playing a princess who has to talk to a litany of insufferable people. * Swinging your sword through grass to reveal rupees. * Zelda's Got an Onus. * Who you're thinking about as you pay your water bills. * Those who are nursed by clouds. * Shakespeare beeves. * GettingTikTok Mad. * The Death of Arthur. * Impacting media literacy for generations because you want to make a sassy pun. * Slipping into Belgian because you don't have enough mana to speak French. * The red phone in every publicly traded franchise restaurant that connects the customer directly to a random shareholder. * Working a Black Friday at a retail job and being awarded a purple heart. * Working a Best Buy Geek Squad tour of service to earn your citizenship. * The Criterion Closet. * The level of stardom you need to attain in order to remove movies from the Criterion Collection. * Supermarket Sweep. * Asking someone who took one year of high school French what you call someone who owns a closet. * I would not be normal and they would not be safe. * Landed noblemen who are super into Amontillado. * Where to lock the insufferable friend who went to film school. * How many Miami Vice episodes ended up in the Criterion Collection. * The movie that you remember the least. * Forgiving the insufferable film school attendees in your life because you can't think of a good punishment for them.

Lords: * CisHetKayFaber * Maxx Topics: * Food-focused Japanese TV * If "fish don't exist," then how do pescetarians? * PicoSteveMo is back! * https://wikipoem.org/ * Verisimilitude in play (My daughter plays GTA and Roblox) (The shifting nature of what is appropriate for children) Microtopics: * Emotionally connecting with a dying web site and meeting up with other users in Seattle. * What the Cohost diaspora is doing to do. * Drive-by bad opinions. * Where people live in Australia, on average. * CSS Crimes. * Using external image hosts to continue blogging on Cohost after it is in read-only mode. * URL shortening services reusing old links. * Meeting up with people you have a loose association with and having a good time together. * The Bowling League Mafia taking up every lane every day with tournaments so nobody else can bowl. * A TV drama where a traveling salesman keeps being hungry at different train stations. * Seeing a meal that looks delicious but you're full and can't eat a whole nother meal. * Whether food becomes fictional as soon as you eat it. * Watching satellite TV on your flip phone. * OneSeg. * Your email address being owned by your phone carrier. * A phone that closes and has great battery life. * The golden age of food-focused broadcast TV. * A celebrity who's interested in food goes and eats at a restaurant. * This Burger Weighs 30 Pounds! * Midnight Diner. * The Karate Kid but with ramen. * Watching a Youtube of the video gamers. * Ordinary People, Extraordinary Food. * Whether pescetarians exist. * The researchers in the shark lab you used to work at calling dolphins fish. * Fish eyes: nature's boba. * A block of gouda floating in the ocean. * Fish that stop being fish when you think about it too hard. * Disagreeing with beavers about what tree to cut down, but you're conflict avoidant so the beaver always wins. * Haven't we all argued with beavers? * Crows stealing the naan out of your naan and curry. * Jungle Crows who sound like an adult man doing an impression of crows. * Crows who are really good at Japanese T9. * The nets you put over your garbage that can't possibly keep the crows out. * Picking Steves from a continuity standpoint. * Finding any excuse to make a Stephen King Sokoban. * Deliberately awkward control schemes. * A thousand prototyping girls in space. * A poem without any line breaks in it. * The zine era of web design, when people would just type HTML and it would become a web page. * Phrases that make sense locally but not globally. * A comedian who is in lots of things. * The kind of poem you'd get if you put a poem on a wiki. * The kind of thing that would probably be read on this show. * The kind of web site that you'd run into when you're doing an ARG. * Installing Roblox on the PS5 to teach your daughter to read English better. * Playing a game with purple vomiting everywhere. * The ways a 7 year old interacts with a Grand Theft Auto. * Teaching yourself how to drive in Grand Theft Auto and obeying all the traffic laws. * Not shielding your kid from media but talking to them about it instead. * Academy Award winner Fisher Stevens.

Lords: * Alex * https://www.youtube.com/@adiener * https://discord.com/invite/ZkV2zdb * Mitch * https://hbmmaster.tumblr.com/ * https://www.youtube.com/@HBMmaster * https://www.patreon.com/hbmmaster Topics: * The Wikipedia article about football * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football * Classic Macintosh computers * The entomologist nerds get like two minutes of screen time in Silence of the Lambs, but I'm pretty sure they directly inspired the whole genre of forensic investigation TV. * With Apologies to Dr. Seuss, by Supper Mario Broth * https://fxtwitter.com/MarioBrothBlog/status/1807077109661114636 * Archipelago * https://archipelago.gg/ * That "chat is a fourth person pronoun" thing is impressively wrong Microtopics: * Off-the-cuff something. * Putting on the best talent show Cohost has ever seen. * Www.www.www * How to deal with multiple things that are called the same thing. * A list of things called Georgia. * A very opinionated move that you would not expect from a source as neutral as Wikipedia. * Sometimes your can carry the ball; sometimes you can't carry the ball. * What an IP address has to say about women in sports. * Sports: there's a place where you play it. * Watching Mexican TV and seeing an ad for "¡futbol americano!" * Repairing an old Mac that you found in an e-waste place. * Whether programming has changed since 1985. * Running an Electron app on a Mac Classic. * Switcher allowing you to run four 128k programs at a time on a 512k Mac. * How the 1991 Borland C++ debugger compares to the 2024 Visual Studio debugger. * Blah Blob, a Celeste-inspired platformer implemented as a Hypercard stack. * Sitting at the blender all day blending everything within arm's reach. * Steve Jobs' relationship with fans. * Wrapping your Xbox 360 in a towel to reflow the cracked solder. * Adding an extra lane to a highway to make the traffic worse. * Two awkwardly charming guys who help with an FBI investigation. * CSIvania. * The public domain jingle that precedes the poem. * Supper Mario Broth. * Wario's Shit Bone. * A Rare Gooper Bloober Goop Gooble Event. * Rhyming portend with event. * A textuovisual post. * Dr. Soup. * Whether the folks writing the Prima guide to Mario Sunshine get to personally ask Miyamoto what the weird goop enemies are called. * Bowser's Fury: the final Mario game. * F Boy: the F stands for fireball. * Trying to use a social media service when you don't know anyone on it. * In My Tumbl Opinion. * Weird Mario Enemies. * F Boy (Again) * Wanting a cool nickname like F Boy. * Explaining randomizers to someone who has never heard of video games. * Multi-game multiplayer randomizers. * A non-randomized randomizer. * Getting rupee donations left and right when all you need is a sword. * Unofficial archipelago support. * The hypothetical dad behind the fourth wall. * The hypothetical eighth month of the year. * Subtumbling. * How to tell the difference between a noun and a pronoun. * Old-fashioned home grown misinformation. * Getting from fourth wall to fourth person. * Fourth person perspective as an alternative term for first person plural. * Whether "dad" is a pronoun. * Chat hurt chatself in chat's confusion. * Rebageling images from 2014. * Agreeing with yourself from 10 years ago about which images are interesting.

Lords: * Jenni * Chris Topics: * Are corporate mascots in US culture age-locked to a generation? I have done no research about this * The continuation of our species depends on balls being able to taste soy sauce * BB-8 changed my tire * The Woodchuck, by Sam Pink * https://www.reddit.com/r/Poetry/comments/wg09x5/poemthewoodchuckbysam_pink/ Microtopics: * Too much dick content for one show. * What kind of fetus dong shot engagement you're looking for. * When they smear the goo on your belly. * Throwing a gender reveal party and the uncle nobody wants around is like "I don't believe you" and you get to whip out the photo of the kid's dick. * Shipping a person in Q4. * Automating the Omelas kid. * The Disney suffering animatronic child asking passers by to walk away from Omelas. * Gen Z no longer needing to read The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas because they live in modern society. * Gardening in one of the hardest places in the world to garden. * What's the grass for? * An office park spending millions of gallons of water to maintain a lawn nobody ever walks on or looks at. * What if the Omelas kid is a dick? What if they're treating him really well and he just has impossibly high standards and hates everything. * An electrical problem that's very pronounced when Jenni turns on the blender. * The Golden Age of Corporate Mascots. * Undead Corporate Mascots. * Trying to find a picture of the Toucan Sam redesign and ending up on Deviant Art. * Howard and Nester. * Whether American kids will tolerate anime. * President of the Nintendo No Fun Club. * Spending $200 on the Nintendo hint line trying to solve the last screen in Solstice. * An adventure game that's also a platformer where if your toe touches a candle flame it's an instant game over. * Inventing terrible camera angles in a 2D game. * It's 3D, but on your Speccy! * Trusting a YouTube documentary more the longer the video is. * Are Domo Kun and Hello Kitty free agents? * Cap'n Crunch guest starring in the Star Wars Holiday Special. * A Roma who was once helpful. * Eating a sandwich and getting the sandwich tattooed on your bicep because. * A baby name that Boomer moms love. * Remington Steel On At 7PM After Matlock Jones. * Getting into a thing with people on Metafilter. * POV: when your girlfriend gets you Swedish meatballs at Ikea. * Whether Frosthaven is important to the testicles tasting umami story. * Vanilloid receptors. * Why you can shock your tongue with a 9 volt battery but you can't shock your forearm even if it's wet. * The chef with the tiny spoon in your testicles making sure to get the exact right MSG level in your semen. * Peppers hacking mammal biology. * Seeds who enjoy being digested by birds. * The cardioprotective benefit of spicy food. * The Ones Who Bring it Back to Omelas. * Broccoli evolving into crabs. * This is canon: BB-8 drives a 2016 Corolla. * Pretending that you are talking to a Youtube audience while you make s sandwich. * Just a li'l guy who rolls around on a ball. * R2D2: a mean mean man. * The floor falling out of the Pinto while you're driving it. * A rubber pad with friction stripes on it. * Turning it until it feels like you broke it, but you didn't and you have to keep going. * After the cake comes out of the oven the recipe stops having steps. * How to get help from Linux users. * The entire wheel snapping off the axle as you're parking at Camerica Bank. * Different car, same maintenance strategy. * Driving a car until it can no longer be ontologically be classified as a car. * Churchill's Irregulars. * Waiting for Peter Jackson to mansplain to you the sound a car makes when the wheel snaps off. * Delving too deeply into the Cars cinematic universe. * A Mastodon setting that hides all of Jim's BB-8 toots. * How to find people to follow on Nectarine. * The dying MUD you joined in 1997. * Radioactive names such as Hitler and Sheldon. * Joining a social media service and it tells you there are no posts. * Sam Pink strikes again. * The emotional arc of putting a tiny hat on a woodchuck. * A woodchuck you would definitely do a murder to. * Ampersand at the beginning of the line. * The Furniture That Rolled Away From Omelas. * Why the computer is mad in I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream. * Looking for sentient life in the universe when you have dolphins at home.

Lords: * Elena * Esper says: "I will join both guests in also recommending Dropout, especially Game Changer. They are on to something really special with the shows they're making, very little makes me laugh as hard as the stuff on there." * Tyriq * https://50games.fun/ Topics: * Being witty and social is my favorite power fantasy to realize * Popular music: sometimes popular because it's good? * Where do we go after Cohost * Ballad of the Veliger * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WalterGarstang?useskin=vector#TheBalladofthe_Veliger Microtopics: * Japanese cold medicine. * Promising the guy at the drug store you haven't taken this drug on the last week. * Lulu Attack X. * What the College Humor folks went on to do after graduating. * 50 games for a fictional console. * UFO 500. * Super Mario Bros but it scrolls wrong. * Google docs autocorrecting your Steam keys. * Some weird shit that you're going to maybe discover. * Why he's named Gordy. * Being sharp and on it all the time in a conversational manner. * The safety of a fantasy that is unrealistic to fulfill in real life. * Picking a joke and connecting it to the prompt. * Making a speech check and the DM thinks of a clever thing for you to say. * Coming across as socially competent in a conversation and feeling great for the rest of the day. * Looking at an extremely charismatic, competent character in a film and thinking "that's me! That's me in there!" * People talking to you about Chappell Roan. * Japanese translated cover of Good Luck Babe. * Hearing a lot about an artist and thinking "this artist has a lot of attention and they don't need mine" * The combination of a man, a woman, and bunch of instruments. * Where people who like pop music hear new music. * Pop music: not as popular as it used to be. * The pros and cons of people enjoying a wider variety of pop culture. * Fingerprints in the Clay. * Having to make synthesizer music in prison because they won't let you have guitars. * Not paying attention to the political context of the unintelligible screaming in your favorite album. * Ancestors of the guitar that sound a little bit different from the guitar. * People being unable to tell what amateurish synthesizer work sounds like. * Instruments producing incidental noises that come alongside the sounds you intend to make, just by their nature as a physical object. * Pink Pony Club, a song about dancing at a club. * Authenticity vs. perceived authenticity. * Trying to stay on top of fashion trends. * Making noises because you feel compelled to. * Finding one way or another to pay off the Capitalism demons. * Having the genetic disposition to practice a lot. * Seeking out things that are easy for you personally to become good at. * Drawing because you are holding a pencil all the time and need to fidget, and stopping drawing forever when you are no longer in that life situation. * Singing to yourself on the bus. * An instrument that's just the screechy tube part of the bagpipes. * A monotonic screech machine. * Joining your church choir and knowing you're better than everybody else there. * Doing a really good job and being relieved that nobody noticed. * What does 12 year old Jim know? Certainly not where he's been for the past six months. * Making a space for humans on the internet. * Tumblr wins by doing absolutely nothing. * The kind of person who is like "follow me onto this social media site I've just heard of right now" * Artist Alley. * The moral difference between "liking" and "reposting." * The "reposting something without liking it" vs. "liking it without reposting it" truth table. * A British citizen from the 19th century with a name that looks German. * How the gastropod got its twist. * Horny Foot Without. * A poem that is just literally what it says on the tin. * A little baby sea guy. * A sonnet about the anatomy of the eyeball. * What marine biology nerds got up to in 1928. * Larval Forms and Other Zoological Verses. * Red Seas Under Red Skies. * Lamarckian evolution. * Snails are great. (Except for the cone snail.) * I'm on a sea slug diet. * The class of pet that you never touch or interact with in any way. * How to interact with fish. * Whether koi care that you're petting them. * Interacting with fish by having them clean your teeth. * Enticing your pet octopus to do the dishes by covering them with fish paste.

Lords: * Cort * Mark Topics: * The best and worst thing you’ve ever found in the trash. * Traveling with children & associated challenges/solutions * Adventures with BB-8 * Survey of Forms - Burma-Shave Sign, by Andrew Plotkin * https://eblong.com/zarf/thod/58.html * The useless superpowers game * Does Mega Man ever suffer ennui? Microtopics: * Dependable sources of guava. * Staring at the raccoons as they go by at night. * Room temperature ice cream full of bullets. * Vietnamese guava vs. central american guava. * Gnawing through a leathery rock to impress your in-laws. * Cudgel Hero Faction. * A life-sized deer sticking out of your neighbor's trash can. * What to do with three quarters of a deer. * Swimming around in a treasure factory and finding spices. * Explaining to your mom where this salt and pepper came from. * Dodging a delicious treat bullet. * Bringing home a NeXT machine from the dumpsters behind Carnegie Mellon. * Throwing away 30 year old legal books and a time traveling lawyer compares you to Hitler. * Won't somebody think of the LA hipsters? * Figuring out how to be okay not having exactly what you want all the time. * Getting heatstroke in Japan. * Mr. Puddles Pineapple having the time of his life. * Getting a photo of your stuffed penguin at a Hamlet castle holding a skull. * Is it really fake if you're telling the truth in a fake way? * Housekeeping having a good time with your stuffed animals. * The perfect companion to explore the Star Wars Galaxy by your side. * Arranging yourself external motivators. * A skill separate from cooking that is still relevant to the dining experience. * Butterfly Pee Tea. * Interwoven bread dough. * These are Zelda meatballs! * Trying out the recipe for Dubious Food in the Zelda cookbook. * Sonic the Hedgehog chili that takes five hours to make. * Rouge the Bat's favorite dish. * Very round droid. Rounder than most. * The make-your-own-lightsaber course class project room experience. * Going to Disneyland and asking someone in costume for directions to the speakeasy. * A game that exists to make children sad. * Everyone working together to blow the shit out of Bowser, Jr. * Losing the boss battle with Bowser Jr. at Super Nintendo World and the attendant hands you the dongle so your kids can listen to Princess Peach crying in despair the entire drive home. * Explaining to the Super Nintendo World staff that you shouldn't need all the keys to get to the final boss because that's not how Mario games are typically structured. * The guy trying to backwards long jump the stairs to the final boss in Super Nintendo World. * A series of billboards that turn out to be a poem. * Which came first, the Pizza Hut or the building shaped like a hut that you make pizza in? * A racially insensitive fireworks store. * Dropping a CRT monitor off of a tall building vs. dropping an LCD display. * Raccoons witnessing crimes. * Shaking exactly two aspirin out of the bottle every single time. * An extremely opaque Pepper's Ghost. * Mega Man defeating Ennui Man and acquiring his powers. * Mega Man can't defeat Dr. Wily because of Asimov's Three Laws. * Dr. Light deleting Mega Man's special abilities between games because he needs the hard drive space for porn. * Mega Man choosing to forget Crash Man's memories because he's tired of remembering that awkward first date. * Dr. Wily hacking everyone's iPhone to have the latest U2 album. * Searching for lords and finding a random raccoon.

Lords: * Nathan * https://store.steampowered.com/app/2976260/ChainStaff/ * Tom Topics: * During the summer olympics, France introduced breakdancing as an event, which was invented in America. They stole it from us! What new event should we steal from another country when the Olympics comes to LA in 2028? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Izzy_(mascot) * Getting to an age where media is good: the writers are your contemporaries so their work doesn't feel stodgy anymore. * How are you saying goodbye to trigraphs? * Rain by Raymond Carver * https://readalittlepoetry.com/2012/12/13/rain-by-raymond-carver/ * Jumping levels of abstraction while explaining computery things, how to pronounce angle brackets and command-line flags * 3rd tetris playtest developed ("rolling"), ponder an entirely new approach to a game (or medium, or problem) that comes nearly 40 years later. * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV5DIZyqsaw Microtopics: * Whether the chain staff is also the grappling hook. * How all games ought to be made. * Using an ancient alien artifact as an immersion blender. * Getting the steamer arm upgrade before you can steam the milk. * Space Opera by Catherynne Valente. * Books where you read a couple paragraphs and you're done for the day. * A sport where if you reach just a little bit further maybe you can touch your opponent's face with your foot. * Stealing cheese rolling from France at the 2028 Olympics. * Hosting the Olympics: a huge money-loser. * Shouldering the terrible burden of hosting the 2028 Olympics. * Aging up the 1996 Olympics mascot so they'll be the right age for the 2028 Olympics. * The Chinese Olympics mascot Jim keeps confusing for Tingle. * Olympic announcers just assuming everyone knows what a "B-Boy" is. * This right here is a horse. * Arranging a competition as bracket of 1v1 matches when it could just as easily be individually scored performances. * Gymnasts all over the world chalking their hands because humans are more alike than they are different. * Running fast at the Olympics. * Hiring Topic Lords as Olympic announcers. * Synchronized swimming except you need to synchronize with all your competitors. * Getting out the shotgun mics to televise basketball players trash talking each other. * Liking television alongside people who share your generational values. * Enjoying being part of a target demographic until you get too old. * Making an effort to appreciate new art more. * The inexhaustible supply of old movies you haven't seen. * What is lost and what is gained now that we're not all watching exactly the same TV shows every night. * Realizing your social values match the media you're consuming because you didn't roll your eyes at the Very Special Episode. * All the video games where you build a bionic arm for an NPC. * Two guys in a missile silo arguing to keep trigraphs in the C standard. * Boring programming situations where memory leaks are impossible. * A guy drinking a beer looking over your shoulder while you program who says "yep" whenever you do something he approves of. * Compiling C++ to a web site. * Writing a web assembly program by typing opcodes into a Javascript string. * What website people are into. * Music that plays while you're waiting for a game to load. * Loading the loading screen. * Some things are being destroyed and other things rebuilt. * Waking up and it's raining. * Saying you have no regrets when of course you have regrets – everyone has regrets, fool! * What cities were destroyed in December 2012? * Scraping information so you can stick it in a file system. * Complete List of Destroyed Cities. * How grumpy Raymond Carver was as a six year old. * How to communicate about what you want someone to type. * What they call curly braces in other countries. * Smooth brackets. * How Mandarin speakers write C code. * Drawing weird shit with Unicode glyphs, making it your URL, printing it on the side of a bus and making people figure out how to type it. * Mathematicians giving all their variables single letter names. * Embarrassing yourself by begging the compiler to not reformat your code. * Choosing to do the easy part of your job right now. * How to play Tetris faster. * Strumming arcade buttons to press them faster. * Weird ways of holding the NES controller to move Tetris pieces faster. * A new way to interact with this piece of plastic. * Turning the back of the controller into a giant button. * What high jump competitors thought the first time they saw the Fosbury Flop. * Learning to do close-up magic and getting frustrated because you can't literally make the card vanish. * Funding a weird game and finding out later if it ever ships. * Whether the folks who made ZPF considered any better names.

Lords: * Mark * https://mythcarver.bandcamp.com/ * https://writhenhilt.bandcamp.com/album/ancient-sword-cult * Dungeon Synth: * https://fief.bandcamp.com/ * https://auramerlin.bandcamp.com/ * https://shadowknell.bandcamp.com/ * https://hillsfar.bandcamp.com/ * https://erang.bandcamp.com/ * Shirley * https://www.leuchtturm1917.us/some-lines-a-day.html Topics: * Naming a human * Boomers say that you get more conservative as you get older, but I just keep getting more liberal. * I'm scared to start recording Mario Odyssey * The Orc * https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/6TcTlXuz.png Microtopics: * Writhen Hilt. * Writing a few sentences to achieve your goal. * Being extremely entertained by your drunken journal entries from a year ago. * Remembering the 140 years your son has been around. * Learningl from the dead. * How the archaeologists of the future are going to cope with social media, let alone the reams of LLM generated nonsense. * Detecting forged paintings via the radioactive isotopes that are only found in pigments manufactured after the detonation of the atomic bomb. * Low-background steel. * Scavenging steel from shipwrecks because you just can't make steel that good any more. * Pizza Pranks. * Packaging a USB stick as though it's a cassette tape. * Packaging your Dungeon Synth album on cassette in a Sega Genesis cartridge box. * Propsr Topics. * Calling your niece Billy Zane. * Naming your child Scooter. (Monotonously.) * Being unable to decide whether you're going to name your child Scooter or Squooter. * Some Wizard of Earrhsea ahit. * Holding power over your friends (magically, not legally) * Your name for a person carrying with it your relationship with that person. * Why they shipped a game called "Epic Mickey.* * Compaeing this year's top 50 baby names to the top 50 a century ago. * Mikse meeting Mikes. * The Bob Emergency. * One day there will be no more Bobs, and a door will close. * Continuing to refer to your nephew as a "little kid" even though he's 45 now. * Thinking you're getting more liberal but eventually realizing you're getting more apocalyptic. * Garbage-ass subreddits full of dis- and misinformation. * Battle Jackets vs. Jackets for Battle. * Pregnancy subreddits. * Checking out of gamer culture entirely. * Black metal communities dealing with white supremacists. * Can't we just have a place who love swords and wizards? * How to not run a Nazi bar. * Whether people get more liberal or more conservative as they age. * Stone cold hippies. * Explaining trans rights to your parents who are doing their best to understand. * Asking the AI-generated slush pile how to update your political beliefs. * Keeping younger people around who care about you enough to help you fix your shitty opinions. * Hungry for Jim topics. * Japanese cultural touchstones referenced in video games that just seem like nonsense to Americans. * Slavic folklore in the Witcher games. * Importing video games from more and more obscure countries because Japan is played out now. * Recognizing Greek heavy metal just from the riffs. * Vacuuming a couch and twenty one-dollar bills fly out of it. * Shagrat, you shag rats! * Rheumy weeping orbs that glare with hate. * Truly a poem of unknown provenance. * Shagrat doesn't deserve this! * We had some great topics today, y'all. * Mythcarver. * A discord for people who are due in the same month as you. * The Libras who won't let the dads in. * Circle time with other pregnant couples.

Lords: * Adam * https://store.steampowered.com/app/2769410/Ash_AdamsGOBSMACKED/ * Linker * https://linker.itch.io/ Topics: * Ways you've changed in the last 20 years that have surprised you * Examples of x animal software running on y animal hardware (ie. fox being cat software on dog hardware) * This argument about whether erasure poetry is poetry * https://www.tumblr.com/whistletown/753096096947011584 * Favourite RPG (videogame or tabletop; open to interpretation) Microtopics: * Launching a game in the deep past. * Indiepocalypse. * After Journey's End vol. 2. * The Monthly Tape Club. * Games that are big enough or marketable enough. * Getting excited about this month's PC Gamer demo disk. * Zine-like game distribution. * Making a small game to express a thought. * Making a living making weird shit. * The methods of marketing a small game. * Practices that have existed for thousands of years. * The boom and bust cycle and why you might or might not get in on the next boom. * Making a shit-ton of money and continuing to pay your employees rather than laying them off. * Whether Gen Z is savvy to the MBA brain worms. * Whether Jim has a college degree. * New England Sarcastic. * Learning about having kids and wondering what it'd be like to have a purpose in life. * Being legally responsible for the survival of the worst roommate imaginable. * Other People's Dogs. * How is your life different from when you were 6 years old? * Becoming a permanent resident of Canada. * A local theater company producing your play. * Frog Fractions: it came from space. * A thing that expresses the maelstrom going on in my head (or soul) * The six 70s funk songs with a long enough stretch of isolated drums that they became the drums for every song ever. * How to make art as an expression of human needs. * Video games: they shouldn't exist. * Expressing a thought with the skills you enjoy flexing. * The virtues of having playtesters. * Bug software running on mammal hardware. * Tiny cats in the bodies of big cats. * Service dogs for cheetahs. * Remaining calm around humans because your dog buddy loves humans. * Erasure Poetry. * Oh Someone Oh God And Then Me. * Formalized rules for determining who gets credit for what when a bunch of people make a piece of art. * Legal precedents for copyright and reproduction rights. * Magnetic fridge poetry. * Inventing an art form that's even more constrained than pixel art somehow. * Unity of effect. * Looking at a blurry 16x16 tile and not being quite sure what it's supposed to be. * RPGs: what even are they? * What you can get away with within the aesthetics of a black and white Game Boy game. * Whether Breath of the Wild counts as an immersive sim and whether immersive sims count as RPGs * Getting into the topic weeds. * Chained Echoes. * Observing the sand running through the hourglass. * Social anxiety preventing you from enjoying tabletop RPGs. * Playing tabletop RPGs with a bunch of weird theater people. * Meeting your friend at a bar to catch up on the latest events in his tabletop RPG sessions. * How to use your name on social media.

Lords: * Ryan * https://www.instagram.com/ryanikeaudio/ * Alicia Topics: * How do I ask people what they're into without sounding like a pervert? * Arctic Expeditions and the stupid beauty of man's hubris * Asterix Park * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parc_Astérix * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KK3Yr80lPOY * I Won't Call You Pretty, by L.E. Bowman * https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/tghmy9KF.png * I sent this poem to my wife and she immediately responded by writing one addressed to me that was just as good, so, that's the person I married. Microtopics: * How to work as a freelance creative without burning yourself out. * The me who comes up if you google me. * The black egg who knows all. * A huge egg with a second smaller egg in it. * The chickens who got no credit for inventing the Matrioshka doll. * Pluto: still a planet, because a dwarf planet is a kind of planet. * Team Moon. * Ancient Occult Magicks that you can check out from the library. * Giving up on the fairy smut everyone is recommending because it isn't smutty enough. * The air I just breathed. * One of my Top 5 Zeldas. * How many goes you get at being alive. * Luring Moongrum into the rolling boulder trap. * Bracing to hear about some online stuff. * Conference season in the game industry. * Meeting someone at a conference and asking them a question that Black Philip would ask. * How to Unfuck your Sales. * Content you Enjoyed. * Who are the coolest hangs in game dev? * Working with people you know and trust. * The Pervert's Mound. * Imagine if I was cool. * Wearing a sandwich board with the word "MONOGAMY" on it so the woman you're talking to knows you're not hitting on her. * Refusing to answer random innocuous questions so that it's not a tacit admission of guilt when you refuse to discuss an accusation. * Birthday bookshop tours. * Climbing as an act of disrespect to the mountain. * The HMS Terror and the HMS Erebus. * Peak British Colonialism. * Ignoring the locals' advice about what parts of animals to eat. * Sledging around your silverware. * Getting lead poisoning from the canned food you brought with you to find the Northwest Passage. * A cool pantsless mummy. * Paradoxical Undressing. * Having a hard time climbing Mount Everest because the path is choked with corpses of white people who blew it. * Oops, All Antarctic Ship Crashes. * Getting excited about bookshelves again. * Stepping forward into whatever the next grift is going to be. * Asterix the Gaul. * Localizing a book that is full of puns to dozens of different languages. * Not getting jokes in the English version of the Simpsons because the Swedish version of the Simpsons uses a completely different set of pop culture references. * What would an Asterix theme park look like? * Riding in a big inner tube down the lazy river. * Elder Millenials learning about Skibidi Toilet. * Asterix Park is the world's 12th largest economy. * My brain beans are really getting steamed, here. * Building an empire on that mustache. * Watching POV rollercoaster videos with your five year old. * Refusing to get in the sea. * Going up to strangers and asking what percentage of the sea is fish piss. * Weekend at Bernie's-ing your friend's corpse to Asterix Park. * What style of underwear Zeus is wearing today. * Who makes Zeus's underwear? * Eating the boar sandwich at Asterix Park. * Tasting the terror sweat on the wild boar you just hunted down. * The little bald kid from the comics page has a theme park?? * Pirates of the Carabiner. * Sailing through a diorama. * The theme park ride with the sudden drop into a pool of mercury. * The Haunted Garfield Theme Park. * DeFuncoland. * Jon trying to get with the veterinarian lady he's into and Garfield ruining it. * Let's-plays as a service. * You won't believe what happens when these Muppets swarm Treasure Island. * A movie recap that is 80% of the length of the movie. * Flirting tricks. * The violence of being struck by Cupid's arrow. * Complimenting someone on something they have no control over. * Good luck getting any continuity out of me!

Lords: * Wacy * https://www.youtube.com/@WacyandChris * Chris * https://twitter.com/mrchrislhall Topics: * Difficulties with long term traveling * Norway * Why don't they have novelty whipped cream * The Dirt Man Song, by Carter Vail * https://genius.com/Carter-vail-dirt-man-lyrics Microtopics: * Specialty pour over filter coffee. * A very deep rabbit hole of discovery of flavors. * Drink the Machine: a Clean Metallic Flavor. * Wacy and Chris. * Chris or sounds like Chris. * Living near your friends and family and being able to see them any time you want. * Spot-it. * Explaining what "on air" means to someone who has never listened to the radio. * Why are flickering lights creepy? * Getting Winston ready for swim class. * The pressure to hyper-optimize. * Being in the place where you are all the time. * The world: it's really big and really full of stuff. * How to exist in a city where you don't speak the language. * Things you don't feel like maximizing. * Grocery store bagged salads. * Countries that are known for salads. * Eating nothing but pickled fish and salty licorice during your trip even though you hate both. * Being delighted by mediocre sushi. * How many times Topic Lords has been downloaded in Osaka. * Modern New-Age Scandinavian Food. * Gas station hot dogs in Norway. * Ordering a big slab of My Girlfriend is Not Hungry. * Ways Norway is familiar to Americans. * Walking around kicking the glaciers. * Bikepackers. * Giant highway ferries with six lanes of traffic. * Brown Cheese Waffles. * Daylight all night long. * Normal people going outside and walking their dogs at 1am. * The song that plays with the baby raccoon spinning in a circle. * A country that is extremely serious about tunnels. * Opening up your windows to let the cave air in. * Visiting the Arctic circle in the winter. * Good ideas, like Pesto Whipped Cream. * Orange Cream Whipped Cream. * The toothpaste tubes with the colored wedges. * Birthday Cake Coffee Creamer. * Guava-flavored beer foam. * Coffee creamer except for beer. * Chefs seeking out the worst food so they can understand exactly why it's bad. * The Friendly's Cone Head. * The Bad-Interesting Food Spectrum. * Sleep regression, or more generally how you don't always keep forward progress. * Why kids become picky eaters. * Replicating the texture of uncooked hot dog in a novelty whipped cream. * What whippets are for. * Original flavorless N2O tanks. * Using the word for amyl nitrite that signifies that you are a VCR owner and not a drug user. * How to not become dirt in the dirt lair. * The dirt man's tithe. * Lying to your kid about cosmology. * Pretending to believe the little lies as practice for believing big lies. * Reminding your mom to make a leprechaun trap. * Making fake boot prints to convince your kids that god is real. * Reindeer food. (It's just hay.) * All the years you didn't keep dirt under your pillow. * The dirt man's dirt man taking you even deeper down. * Lots of great places where the dirt man can be found.

Lords: * JohnB * Kory Topics: * I have become a vinyl record enjoyer * Teaching myself C++, or "I learned C++ when I should've learned C, AMA" * Forgetting things as a way of getting other things done * I Sat Belonely by John Lennon * https://silverbirchpress.wordpress.com/2013/05/14/i-sat-belonely-poem-by-john-lennon/ * The vestigial organs of video games Microtopics: * Kbones' Wire Tripper, on display at Wonderville. * Easter eggs for fans of Gordy and the Monster Moon. * Ebirah, Horror of the Deep. * Watching Shin Godzilla immediately after Evangelion. * Dan Ryckert's nonsense over at Giant Bomb. * Listening to a Mario Party game on the radio. * Supplementing all your collecting hobbies with a creative hobby. * Grabbing the record player before the garbage collector does. * An auto-sustaining supply of sound bars entering and leaving the trash. * The Digital Jim Gift Shop. * The Frog Fractions OST Vinyl in Bug Mars Orange. * Auditioning for college radio by DJing a show to tape that won't be aired, just rated by a panel of experts. * The vinyl soundtrack to a Net Yaroze game. * Albums that have an odd number of sides. * Holographic tie fighters that spin around when you shine a light on them. * The Funkopopization of Vinyl. * Hobbies that are better if you have friends. * Using wood glue to clean an LP, then using an inverse record player to play music off the glue's negative grooves. * The glue's glue. * Station to Station, by David Bowie. * The experience of listening to an album all the way through. * Content-producing reasons. * An excuse to listen to an album with friends under the auspices of being productive. * Seeing the music by looking how wide the groove is. * Smooth jazz appreciation. * The Madden NFL of the record shop. * How to justify going to GDC when you're not a game developer. * How to ship a Love2D game. * Drag your file onto a Love Executable. * Putting together your first Arkanoid-like in Game Boy Assembly. * To create Red Dead Redemption, first add two binary digits. * Super FML. * Objectless games. * The data flow required to change screens in a Zelda-like game. * What happened to various aspects of the Adobe Flash ecosystem. * Why console games had such sluggish menus. * A bug where if you do it right you don't have to press A. * How to do a bureaucracy thing. * Keeping an important task in mind so you can accomplish all your less important tasks. * Trying to forget all but one thing you need to do because if you remember two things you'll just sit there being anxious. * Forgetting information that you do have vs. faking information that you don't have. * Foveated vision. * Yesterday's List. * How many Frog Fractions had to die because the most dangerous task was attempted first? * A little tiny little pig. * Balonely. * A Spaniard in the Works. * Reading your own book in your fictionalized biopic. * Whimsical Elisions. * Fun whimsical vs. dark whimsical. * Coming back from India and writing a hundred one minute songs that don't mean anything. * Music that you've listened to so much that it's like listening to breathing air. * Don't Pass Me By and Octopus' Garden. * Game mechanics that still exist because nobody's thought about them in a while. * Moon phases in Shin Megami Tensei. * Demon Fusion. * What Super Mario Wonder does with a combo since it doesn't have points. * A potentially dangerous vestigial organ in video games. * How to make pinball beginner friendly.

Lords: * Erica * Casey Topics: * Isn't it great to have a coelom? * Solving problems by waiting for another bigger problem to occur and override the previous problem * Mammals learning to eat cephalopods * https://crookedtimber.org/2024/03/16/occasional-paper-when-armor-met-lips/ * A Narrow Fellow in the Grass, by Emily Dickinson * https://www.poetryoutloud.org/poem/a-narrow-fellow-in-the-grass-1096/ * Personal project retrospectives Microtopics: * That thing you just heard. * Assigning your new hire an office. * Plugging over a million leaking gas and oil wells in West Texas. * The Topic Lords Promise. * A bag that your organs sit in. * Undifferentiated tissues. * How dissecting an earthworm is different from dissecting a gummy worm. * Inflating your coelom in order to take out your spleen. * Organisms with high diseectability. * The anti-coelom lobby. * Undifferentiated tubes of goo that get depression. * The gummy worm future we're all looking forward to. * Fluid things going on in the organism. * A car that has a huge dent in it and it doesn't matter because the car still gets around no problem. * Good car ideas. * A bad thing happening but it's not your fault. * Buying your house in a point and clock adventure online. * Rediscovering all the things you have stored at your parent's house. * Multi-episode Topic Lords story arcs. * Which colored stripes are on Wikipedia's Non-Notable Flag. * The Topic Lords explainer episode where everyone finds out what this show is about. * Serial Podcast Monogamy. * Podcast guilt. * Discussing all the same topics as the last episode with no self-awareness. * Non-Stop Coelom Celebration. * My own very special walking bag of guts. * Evolving cheek muscles to suck meat out of a spiral shell. * Losing your baby lips. * What it's like to eat a planarian. * Cephalopods that have evolved to eat mammals. * The giant squid that have never been seen alive. * The colossal squid vs. the giant squid. * Finding a mobius strip solution so borh your flag and your neighbor'a flag can be biggest. * Our flag that represents limpness will be your downfall. * Non-stop sensationalized documentaries about North Korea. * Opening the border to North Korea so we can finally interview the people about the colossal squid. * Emily Dickinson slipping into Yoda Speak. * Being too busy reading to understand what you're reading. * Whether the Emily Dickinson poem about the snake is actually about a snake or about a dick or both. * It's coming at your feet! It likes a boggy acre! * A polysexual attitude towards nature. * Emily Dickinson making thousands of attempts to fix the Gilligan's Island theme. * Herman Melville describing Moby Dick as "the Ebon Whale" because he didn't have Wikipedia. * Moby Dick annotated by biologists who explain why all the whale facts are wrong. * Game Developers doing a "post-mortem" of projects that are ongoing. * Befunge. * Clojure and other Lisps. * Watching your own programming livestreams to learn how to learn better. * A huge block of text off to the side that tells you how to play the game. * Fine-grained tactical mistakes. * Why people keep telling game developers to learn to ship a game. * The most significant barrier between you and putting a work of art out in the world. * Inventing metrics for success for game engines that never ship. * Rewriting your game engine to have cooler tech but be way harder to make levels for. * Modern Jim-Style Content. * Artists trash talking their own work while they're showing it to you. * A sign on your forehead reading "ask me about my severely negative feedback." * The George W. Bush childhood home. * A community built on everyone's shared desire to leave. * The ethic of owning a shotgun. * The last of the Midland Odessa complaining. * Big Bend and Carlsbad Caverns. * An airport full of ads for oil wells and oil well accessories. * The Chris Kyle American Sniper Memorial. * A plaque on a sculpture explaining whether the flag represents a penis. * Everything's a dick if you squint hard enough. * An assassin of federal judges.

Lords: * Jenni * Tyriq Topics: * That mayochup and kranch * Barry Topping * Magic Shell * Hot Sauce by Just James * https://www.poetrysoup.com/poem/hotsauce889972 * Video games where you put toppings on things * The temptation of bad ice cream toppings Microtopics: * The game where you go into your uncle's nipple and find a tiny heart. * Isles of Sea and Sky. * A block pushy game. * Toppings that are just recombinations of existing toppings. * Switching sriracha brands for labor relations reasons. * Combining all the soda flavors because you're an iconoclast and suffering because the flavor is worse but it's worth it. * Getting a squeeze bottle so you can drizzle sauces like on TV. * Getting pre-ruined peanut butters so you don't need to worry about ruining it any further. * Buying peanut butter because you no longer live with someone who is allergic to nuts. * Intrusive and non-intrusive seeds. * Condiment combinations sticking in your head for decades. * Ketchup and something that's kind of like a thing you might know but might not. * Almost Pickles: It's Just Cucumbers. * Harmless Coconut Water. * Cranch: ranch dressing that that comes out of the can in a wobbly cylinder like cranberry sauce. * Barry Hilary Valentine Topping. * Paradise Killer. * Walking into court sipping your Starbucks latte. * Hopping around a beach and looking at a vaporwave pyramid. * Collecting skate tapes, just like Mario does. * Bails hurt scores, Mario! * Street Uni X. * The Tony Hawk soundtrack except slightly more a Lilith Fair. * Enjoying a bad N64 camera enough for the two of us. * The thing you squirt onto your ice cream. * Making your own counterfeit Kranch at home in a bottle with Kranch written on it in crayon. * The Cheese Remains Saucy. * Getting a boba tea for $17 outside of LA. * Taking the very worst bite out of your mother in law's ice cream cone. * Working out your jaw muscles until you can eat the entire ice cream cone in one bite. * Eating 16 pints of ice cream in six minutes. * Screaming at ice cream until it teleports into your belly. * Admonishing your readers that hot sauce would not make a good wife. * Stealing the pelt of a selkie but she always wants to go back to the ocean. * Selkie for a wife vs. ice cream for a wife. * ASMRtistry. * Spices of life. * Using a food metaphor to describe the metaphorical nature to food. * Three pop songs that compare women to food. * A topic that is floating around in the the collective unconscious. * Sriracha sorbet. * A flight of tea-flavored ice creams. * Sentient hot sauce putting itself on things you don't usually put hot sauce on. * Salamander County Public Television. * A Wario Ware that's a little bit QWOP. * The Pancake/Burger/Bacon trilogy. * An interactive thing where you put food into space. * The American Portion Gun. * Put things on things. * Video games with hamburger building elements. * A fast food simulator where you solve all the horror game problems that you're in. * Whether board games count as video games since you can see them. * Vidus Gamus. * Livin' la Video Game Loca. * Learning how to recover from mistakes. * Putting an entire Snickers bar in your cup of Sriracha and the clerk just shakes his head. * Asking the froyo guy to arrange the gummy worms "artfully. Like how I would if I could reach in there nyself. In fact why do I need to order, just give me the froyo that I want!" * All the Mistake Blizzards you can eat. * Nerds Butterfinger Mistake Blizzard. * Putting barbecue sauce on vanilla ice cream because you're out or chocolate sauce. * What's your favorite cheese to put on Pop-Tarts? * The Ambies for Excellence in Audio. * How to make more of the red liquid they found in the black sarcophagus.

Lords: * Ian * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tEaI_bi-i8 * Shannon * https://www.oddityroadshow.com/ * https://www.youtube.com/c/struccimovies Topics: * Official and unofficial remakes of Yojimbo * Danny McBride shows, and how to balance character likability with dark comedy- examples of this done well vs poorly? * I can't fix bad movie dialog mixing for everyone, but I can fix it in my own house * The Chinese Checker Players by Richard Brautigan * http://kempwash.blogspot.com/2011/05/chinese-checker-players-by-richard.html Microtopics: * Songs that signify that this scene or moment is sophisticated. * How to pronounce Debussy. * Southern gothic dark comedy body horror. * A weirdo from Twitter who can't email your employer because he doesn't know who you work for. * The Glass Key's remake family tree. * A drifter samurai coming to a town. * A dude who shows up in town and decides to play all the criminal factions against each other. * The scene where the protagonist sets the bed on fire and jumps out the window. * Escaping from rum runners by convincing them that you've already escaped. * Propping your gun on a cross and using Jesus to pull the trigger. * A sorceress who spends the whole movie topless because it's one of those movies. * Omega Doom starring Rutger Hauer. * A robot who gets stabbed in a bar because the stabber needs to download his memories. * Using a mook as a human shield. * The supporting actor getting a better offer and quitting in between takes. * Where you put the interesting part in your movie. * A hobo who runs two crime syndicates. * The story of two rival vice principals. * Jim's theory for why cringe comedy shouldn't exist. * Where cringe comedy has gone since Seinfeld. * How to make an unlikable protagonist that people don't admire. * Characters who aren't good at anything. * The schlub. * A montage of dad destroying model airplanes with a sledge hammer. * Liking some things about someone while not liking other things. * A monster who is very fun to hang out with. * The character in the show who ends up in Florida. * Marathoning Breaking Bad and Better Call Sail and ending up 40 years old no matter how old you were when you started * Why you might not throw away a sound bar. * Entering the Konami code to enable compression. * What the Clear Voice feature actually does. * Getting really agitated and putting the subtitles on. * Thinking of something interesting to say and then forgetting it. * Which one's the son and which one's the dad? * Ripley vs. Ripley's Believe it or Not. * Lobbying for more mean old lesbians in theatrical productions. * Playing Chinese Checkers with a woman who outlived her husband by 70 years. * Where you were when you realized that it's possible to outlive your spouse by 70 years. * Bowling Alone. * A place to meet people that isn't the play you go to drink or the place where you go to pray. * All your friends who went sober in the last year. * Liquor stores that only sells non-alcoholic products. * Mocktail bars. * Name tags that have different foods on them. * Inappropriate attention in nerd spaces. * Figuring out where you can go with all your sober friends. * Who listens past the first five minutes of a podcast? * AI-driven smell-o-vision. * Searching automated transcripts to find things that people didn't say. * The subtitler writing "knockos" whenever people in The Wire say "narcos" in a Baltimore accent. * Streaming services cutting corners wherever possible in a desperate attempt to become profitable. * Snitching on bootlegers of racist Disney movies. * How to get banned from TikTok.

Lords: * Elena * https://www.gouletpens.com/blogs/fountain-pen-blog/sailor-shikiori-tokiwa-matsu-ink-review * Nathalie * https://alienmelon.itch.io/ [cw:flashing lights] Topics: * Fish-based screensavers * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQpCcQhNfxM * https://www.montereybayaquarium.org/animals/live-cams * Fire safety * https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheThingThatGoesDoink * https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/voices.uchicago.edu/dist/8/644/files/2017/08/Chiang-Lifecycle-of-Software-Objects-q3tsuw.pdf * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4Qxqmhqj1A * The Aquarium and the Glass Harmonica * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOx7zmO5ppw * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FAc3HmfoSY * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSzTPGlNa5U * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA3sA3ncX44&start=103 * I Am Running Into A New Year by Lucille Clifton * https://nextworldover.tumblr.com/post/738271770264600576 * I went to Japan * https://nerdparadise.com/mspaint/stereogram * https://twitter.com/mischiefanimals/status/1704934776421913018 Microtopics: * Shikiori Ink. * The Computer Museum in Berlin. * Back when you saw fish-based screen savers everywhere. * The Roku app fish screen saver. * A rock in the aquarium that says "Roku" * 11 hours of fish content. * Fish nerds sitting in a small box at the bottom of the ocean getting hype over seeing a small worm. * An animated gif of fish nerds getting hype. * A live jellyfish web cam that is just in principle. * A web cam of the thing that goes donk and everyone cheers when it goes donk. * The fish screen saver where you need to keep buying floppy disks with fish food on it or the fish die. * Don't copy that fish food! * The startup selling digital rabbit food going out of business so all the digital rabbits go into hibernation. * The Life Cycle of Software Objects. * Being unable to open your front door because the smart lock ran out of batteries. * Everybody congratulating you on the infuriating guy you made up to get mad at. * Fire safety anecdotes. * Glass top electric stoves that look just like induction stoves, as a prank. * How fire extinguishers taste. * Looking at fire extinguisher dust and thinking "let's get the blood brain barrier involved." * Leaving the stove on. * Broiling a sandwich and the whole sandwich catches fire. * A five year old doing science experiments with a lit candle. * The UX design of grease fires. * The William Shatner song about the dangers of deep frying a turkey. * Relating to the teens coming into fashion for like a week and then the next week the teens are like "You're still trying to relate? That's cheugy AF." * Self-moistening fingertips. * Soaking your fingertips in water for eight minutes to get them pruny. * The Canon of harmonica virtuoso music. * Ethereal floating tones that fade in and out of existence. * The Flat Bells. * The Mellotron as a slightly more physical sampler. * Clara Rockmore playing "The Swan" on Theremin. * Bit-doers playing "The Swan" on Otamatone. * Letting go of what you said to yourself about yourself when you were 16, 26, even 36. * The assumption that you need to be forgiven for something. * The sun coming up on this episode of Topic Lords. * Working up the courage to climb the mountain you see every day from your back yard. * Really tall hills you can walk up. * What it's like to not hear cars constantly. * Designing a building to sound good – even if it isn't a concert hall. * Car-free cities. * Biking in a bike-centric environment. * Throwing your body into traffic and hoping drivers care about the legal liability of running someone over. * The intersection where you always see the skid marks from kids doing donuts. * Doing watercolors but with ink. * Buying a bunch of art supplies and never using them because you're afraid to waste them. * How do you get your paintbrush to do what you want? * How watercolors behave depending on how wet the painting is and how wet the paintbrush is. * Scraping your knife on the painting and it just looks like a shed. * Is it a bunch of cats or is it the word "gay"? * Images that look like stereograms but aren't. * The blank canvas stereogram. * Crowds staring at the enormous stereograms hanging up in the Mall of America. * Stereogram artists accounting for pupillary distance. * Making a stereogram in MS Paint.

Lords: * Alex * Shannon Topics: * The less you spend on food, the better it tastes * The jizz of a bird * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jizz_(birding) * The Cosmic Call * https://blog.plover.com/2024/04/15/ * Line Fishing by Daniel Kahaulelio * https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/rWuOwlpV.png * How to order coffee in Malaysia * https://kopi.guide/ * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6mv7VY8YLA * Dice, and physically rolling them * https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.com.tann.dice Microtopics: * Paleo animators. * Malaysia as a vacation destination. * Restaurants that are just in s guy's house. * The best whole fried catfish you've ever had. * Eating mixed whole livers. * Striving to get a B rating from the food safety inspectors because the A rating is too bougie. * Starch and grease. * The shape of the price to deliciousness correlation graph. * If you're here to buy cake, ring the doorbell. * You can talk to the cops or you can have cake. You can't have both. * Whether Americans can drink the water in Malaysia. * Being so desperate for fresh vegetables that you wash them with tap water. * Butterfly Pee Flour. * Jizz (birding) * The practice of just getting the vibe of a bird. * I don't know, it had the jizz of a bird. * Zooniverse. * Going through the still images on a nature webcam and trying to identify local animals. * Trying to tell the difference between a wood rat and a deer mouse. * Reclassifying all the animals in the world based not on their actual genetics or but based on what people think they are by looking at them. * Small, Brown and On the Ground. * Submitting a picture of a pair of brown wood owls to a bird study app and two hours later an angry ecologist is knocking on your tent to ask if you meant a spotted wood owl. * An extremely high-stress app. * Asking an albatross which of the twelve species is albatross it is. * Walking around in the woods until you spot a kiwi. * Major gaffes in interstellar communication that future aliens will be very confused about. * Massively synesthetic dog brains. * Receiving a sequence of bits and deciding to arrange them in a grid. * The other book with the spiders. * Humans interacting with a spider-based society. * Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. * Expecting monkeys to become the dominant intelligent species on a terraformed planet seeded with Earth animals. * Adventuring into a dungeon built by the ancients and admiring the signage. * Opening an oil drum full of concrete and tubes and being like "where's the treasure that's supposed to be in here!" * Writing a song about how being near glowing cats is very dangerous. * Public serving meme songs. * Engineering earworms for the public good. * The Museum of Hawaiian Culture in Oahu. * Fish that watch. Fish that look. * Get those fish hungry. * It's just a lookin' fish. * Sleeping the lobes of your brain in shifts. * The lobes of your brain playing pranks on each other. * How can fish get some shuteye if they don't have eyelids?? * How can fish rubberneck if they don't even have necks?? * The Star Trek replicator except instead of materializing your food it prints a piece of paper with the words that you need to say to the tired-looking guy who then goes to cook your meal. * Ais krim. * What languages are hardest to spell in. * Are there four silent letters at the end, and if so which ones? * Cofftea. * Rolling all them bones. * Owning more sets of dice than you have played actual D&D sessions. * A big pile of dice rattling around in your phone. * Rolling the dice off of the table every single time. * A switch that goes ka-chonk. * Actively seeking out hobbies where you touch things. * Ways that continuous deployment sucks. * Text classifiers flagging your sexuality as photographic. * Image classifiers flagging your medical photos as pornographic. * Which photos encapsulate what you're trying to remember and discuss. * How to get your life off of a corporation's hard drive. * Unsearchable Tumblrs. * Get out there and jizz a bird!

Lords: * Jay * Alex Topics: * Mexican food outside San Diego (Having lived in Colorado, Ohio, and now Melbourne) * Releasing my first commercial video game * The being an uncle of camping * Skyscrapers by Matt Haig * https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/QM4hPodE.jpg * Attempting to preserve 40 years' worth of data Microtopics: * A puzzle adventure game starring a ferret. * DROD-likes. * Sending an envelope full of guacamole to a food lab so they can tell you a list of ingredients. * Reaching in the window so you can finally drive a million dollar Porsche. * Letting the Ewok sit in the driver's seat but not actually letting it drive the car. * Whether Ewoks get old enough to drive. * Throw Rock. * Making a game by first making your own level editor, image editor, audio synthesizer and music composition tools. * Finding playtesters by letting them come to you. * An eyeball that charges a laser when you step in front of it. * Deliberately optimizing your game to take up as little disk space as possible. * A project that starts moving much faster when you figure out what kind of project it should be. * Writing a 3D modeler so that you can get your 2D game on Steam. * Working with a professional artist. * Rendering fur. * Games with turns that represent less than a second of in-game time. * The mind-feel of a turn length. * A game that was so good that the developers went back decades later to make it playable. * The Mud and the Slime. * How to play DROD without any roach timers. * Which DROD is the best one to start with. * Sokoban with swordplay. * The level in King Dugan's Dungeon that's nothing but roach queens. * Optimizing your sword movements well enough that you can move forward while fighting. * Puzzles that are just hard enough to engage your mind while you do something else. * Visiting someone who is camping and then going home to sleep in your own bed. * Building a fire and making s'mores in the bathroom. * Camping expenses. * Giving gifts to adults who can already buy whatever they want. * Deliberately choosing a vacation that is especially exhausting. * Spending two days each visiting seven different family friends. * Your grandparents taking you camping and they sleep in the RV while you have to sleep in the tent. * Buying an onion bloomer for $600 and insisting that your family eat a blooming onion every night to justify the purchase. * Skyscrapers made out of words * Training yourself to visualize words in the wrong orientation. * Puzzling out what the title of the poem would've been if the typesetter hadn't messed it up * Cross-sectional art. * Poems that are intended to be viewed rather than read aloud. * Anti-poem poems. * Every project you've ever worked on (on a computer) * Good usable archives. * The unique digital footprint of your life. * Getting the bits from a SCSI hard drive in an old Mac that doesn't boot up. * Apple Desktop Bus Connection. * The miraculous ubiquity and longevity of USB-A. * Figuring out how to hook up a digital video player that requires a Firewire connection. * The MacOS resource fork. * What the .sit and .hqx extensions meant. * Gamma Zee. * Using social media to actually do things.