Topic Lords

Lords: * Ben * Avery Topics: * The Mishima Incident, in which one of the most famous authors in Japan created his own private militia of young men, attempted to overthrow the government and, upon failing, committed ritual suicide. * City-wide game of hide and seek * How to stick it to bad Bluetooth actors * The Carrotman's Lament, by E.L. Hubert * https://x.com/sweetstench/status/1724958011754504568 * Esper says: "Avery’s anecdote about the carrot poem being something he’d do in high school reminded me of something I did in high school, where I took the song 'The Cha Cha Slide' and removed every instance of 'slide to the right' and added a bunch of 'slide to the left' so that people eventually collapsed into the wall. I got to do it at a little party with friends, and it paid off nicely." Microtopics: * Where to play some crosswords. * Cruciverbalism. * Putting the black squares where the letters don't go. * Putting structural jokes in your crossword puzzles. * The cleverer the gimmick, the less fun the crossword puzzle. * Talking into your phone's transcription software during a five hour drive and having five hours of gibberish at the end of it. * Fifth caller wins a t-shirt! * Impossible Owls. * Squishy details. * Taking on an apprenticeship with a nobel prize winner. * The Japanese Self-Defense Force. * Dressing in bee keeper outfits and hitting each other with sticks. * Buying swords for your right wing ultra nationalist militia with the proceeds of your prize-winning literature. * Exhorting the troops to reinstate the emperor of Japan but nobody can hear you because there's a helicopter flying overhead. * A poster of a kitten next to a poster of a samurai, with diametrically opposed mantras about how you ought to handle failure. * Topics that leave you speechless. * Founder Brain. * Debunking a thing from philosophy. * The Philosophy of Reversing a Linked List. * The alternate universe where Banksy is a totalitarian dictator. * Vladimir Putin tagging up the streets of Bristol in the 90s. * Top hat, eyeball and coattails. * The Residents of Theseus. * Rednex. * David Bowie starring as Tesla in The Prestige and self-driving off the set. * The percentage of Teslas on the street * Nice Stylized T as a Screw Shirt. * Brainstorming places to hide in Copenhagen. * The problem of how to define the bounds of the hide and seek legal play field. * Playing hide and seek and knocking on a stranger's door and asking if you can hide in their house. * Knocking on the door of the company that moved into the building your company was in six years ago, asking to use the conference room because you're six years late for a meeting. * Journey to the End of the Night. * Playing music and speaking in riddles. * At what point it becomes morally correct to join the zombies. * Why is it okay to name a thing after another thing? Why is it okay to name a band after someone else's song? * Whether Skibidi Toilet has been cool, is currently cool, will become cool temporarily, or will become cool and stay forever. * A meme based on a Youtube thing. * Dadaist comedy Internet videos made in Garry's Mod. * Changing the head so it's not owned by Valve. * Generations starting the alphabet over, like hurricane names. * Turn of the millennium coffee shop war stories. * Drinking coffee at 2 AM on January 1st, 2000, looking out the window and waiting for the satellites to come crashing down. * Tech folks successfully convincing people that the Y2K bug is a problem, but not what the problem actually was. * What the Y2K bug was and how we solved it. * The Corolla Must Have Control. * The phone is too eager and the car is too greedy. * The phone and the bluetooth speaker agreeing to connect, and isn't there somebody you forgot to ask?? * We invented this new thing but we don't know what it's for. Let's try to solve every problem with it and see if anything sticks. * Everybody migrating to TempleOS to get away from LLMs. * A lightweight operating system designed to be the Third Temple from the Hebrew bible. * Writing to your colleague to retract the continuum hypothesizing. * God's Chosen Programmer. * Off-Topic Lords. * A poem on the back of a bag of carrots. * A poem having been added to a bag of carrots by a scoundrel. * How many carrots you need to eat before you can be called a carrot man. * Explaining hidden tracks by first explaining that music used to come in this form called "albums." * If you have topics to talk about, we have a show for that, you don't put it on a hidden track on a CD in the 1990s. * Living to regret your self-own.

Lords: * Xalavier * https://store.steampowered.com/app/3139570/CoopKaijuHorror_Cooking/ * Cort Topics: * What's the coolest instrument to give a child? * What happened to sound lasers? * Appearing Canes * https://www.amazon.com/Healifty-Retractable-Collapsible-Professional-Accessories/dp/B093G7J6JG * The Story of Mel * http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html * https://melsloop.com/docs/the-story-of-mel/pages/mel-kaye-cv Microtopics: * Whether your middle name is really Danger. * Half an extra plug. * The inexplicable aliveness of Strange Scaffold. * Co-op Casual Horror Cooking. * Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival. * Making a game so that you can voice act the main character. * How many careers you're allowed to have before the world begins to rip them away from you. * Hiring the designer of Frog Fractions when Frog Fractions is already designed. * A boxing game featuring the inside of your mouth. * Knockout Kings 2003 or Fight Night Round 3. * Your dad explaining all the ways grownups are better than children while soundly trouncing you at Fight Night Round 3. * Tattooing a message on your infant son's head so that he reads it when he begins to bald. * Playing music with humans. * What's special about playing an analog monosynth. * Getting an analog synthesizer and finally sounding like the 70s. * Your larynx thinking "I'm singing meat!" while you push air through it, making it vibrate. * All the ways your larynx is confused about the nature of music. * Sitting in a circle and playing music together. * The Topanga Banjo and Fiddle Festival. * Playing folk songs within ten minutes of owning a mandolin. * How Irish sessions compare to Bluegrass sessions. * Being too far back in the crowd to have sex with Neil Young. * A big long guitar with only four strings. * Bass Sherpa Hunter Bond. * Practicing bass with your bass unplugged because plugging in your bass feels like an imposition. * Short-scale basses. * Finding the bass that makes it feel like you're holding Mjolnir. * The Minibrute, Microbrute, Matrixbrute and Polybrute. * The problematic acoustic P-bass. * Travel amps and amp alternatives. * The non-problematic acoustic P-bass. * Oh yeah, that's the acoustic bass player! * The only instrument in a rock band that can go up to. x6 multiplier. * Coming back to Rock Band after learning the actual instrument. * The Rock Band Pro Controller. * What about Second Topic? * Asking a parent if it's okay to give their child an accordion and backpedaling when they start white-knuckling their chair. * Kung fu instructionals. * The smallest member of the mandola family. * Instruments that require elongation. * Chapman sticks. * The kind of musical instrument you can stab someone with. * Vibrating your bones. * That time science stopped itself from inventing something awful. * Non lethal directed acoustic energy weapons. * Sound cannons as an anti-piracy measure. * SASERs. * Using headphones as a microphone and vice versa. * Plugging a bass into a guitar amp. * Traveling to another country and trying out the basses that they have there. * Whacking the high tension wires to make laser noises. * What they have on BART now instead of high tension wire noises. * Raising Cain's. * Trying to reload your appearing cane. * The type of thing the TSA would miss but should watch out for. * Terrorists taking over the plane by doing such an impressive magic show that the passengers are like "that was amazing, we'd better do what he wants" * It poked me straight in the middle of my eye. * A sound laser for mischief and giggles. * Fighting those who would be your comrades in shenanigans. * Easy to operation! * If you love something, let it go. If you hold onto it, it will stab you in the hand. * A frog boiling effect but for extremely long poems. * Computers made out of drums and vacuum tubes. * Royal McBee Computer Corp. * Executing another complete revolution to find the next instruction. * If the thesis of Summoning Salt was that "this is what all gamers should be doing all the time." * When you get old enough that most of the people you don't like are now dead. * When you decide to hate somebody, taking comfort in the fact that one day they will die, or maybe you'll die, and either way you won't have to deal with them any more. * Taking comfort that Mel is out there writing in direct hexadecimal for all us sinners. * Jobs you wish you'd had in the past but that you wouldn't take today. * The honor in choosing not to be famous. * Our first pangram rhyme scheme. * Version control plugins that scan commits for variable names that scan to the Ninja Turtles theme. * Winston on the Microbrute.

Lords: * Abby * https://www.thespaceuk.com/shows/2025/abby-denton-my-favorite-loser * Sid * https://linktr.ee/beamsplashx Topics: * Reading about type 1 diabetes * Saying vegetables instead of cussin' * https://jp.itch.io/mr-friendly * Winston punched his tooth out * If I Ran the Circus (excerpt) * With the power of portable PS2 emulation, I can find out how many types of games I don't like anymore Microtopics: * My Favorite Loser. * Mistakes we always keep in the show because it's more fun that way. * How to plagiarize video using Da Vinci Resolve. * A tool that automatically turns any Youtube video into a series of screenshots with captions. * Your mom threatening to sell your copy of Sonic the Hedgehog when it's explicitly labeled "not for resale" * Explaining to your mom that they're not video games, they're computer games, and she explains that video is from the Latin for "to see" * Mom paying proper deference to your clever sass before grounding you. * They're called RPGs, Mother! * Reading just enough about diabetes to be unhelpful. * Reading the diabetes owners manual. * Your $200/month Glucagon habit. * The Quick Start Guide to Diabetes, which explains that ideally you'd do such and such for your diabetic child but you probably don't have health insurance so, uh, good luck! * WiFi 7 upgrading you to gay. * Recreational glucose monitors. * The new glucose tablets coming in metric and confusing everybody. * That time Solid Snake went hypoglycemic while being tortured and bit down on his fake tooth to release the glucose capsule. * We put sugar gel in you, Solid Snake! It's going to make you slightly loopy! * An accountant who likes jogging. * Nobody knows why women have a higher incidence of eating disorders. If only we could ask them * They made a cure to diabetes 30 years ago, but you have to become the President of the United States to get it. * If Diabetes is so good, why haven't they made a Diabetes 2? * The Quick Start Guide to Diabetes explaining that people with diabetes can talk over you in a funny voice and you're not allowed to do anything about it. * Fiddling with a bloodletting device in an antique store and accidentally letting nearly all of your blood. * Phlegmletters. * What part of the body hurts least to prick with a needle. (The balls.) (Of your feet.) * Code switching halfway through explaining how you like to cuss. * How to swear at someone using vegetables. * What a load of parsnips! * Brussels Sprouts patch notes. * Brussels Sprouts: Belgium's Great Shame. * Winnipeg Manitoba sprouts. * Walking up to a stranger on the street and saying "Hey! It's a load of parsnips!" when they don't even know how you feel about parsnips. * Veggie Tales: Christ Died for our Parsnips. * Finding hilarious jokes in the text but your Bible studies group doesn't think they're very funny at all. * Refusing to apologize about a joke because someone somewhere is going to get the joke. * Why they still play old cartoons when they have Dragon Ball Z now. * Trying to find the 90s show about a kid trapped in a sitcom neighborhood that a talking dog told Abby about. * A video game where instead of having to shoot people, you talk to people. * Mr. Friendly. * Running errands for the demons. * Demon acceptance. * Can you believe Satan? What will they come up with next? * Lucifer Twocifer: Bringer of the Deuce. * Embarking on a multi-year project to have the coolest most clever minced oaths because you refuse to have basic minced oaths. * Whether it's racist to call a safecracker a Yegg. * The funniest joke you heard when you were eight. * The hobo with excellent glycemic index who lives in your shed. * Trying cat insulin and promising to report back if you die. * Hyperdontia. * Accidentally swallowing a tooth and growing a tooth tree in your tummy. * Explaining to your kid who just swallowed a tooth that it's going to bite him on the butt on the way out. * Inventing an increasingly elaborate series of fairies that cover everything that can happen to your child's teeth * What kind of degree you need to become a tooth fairy. * Going to the dentist to do a bunch of drugs and get punched in the face. * The tooth fairy talking about switching careers. * Paying for PDFs to print and put under your child's pillow when they lose a tooth. * Trying to pay a mortgage on a tooth fairy's salary nowadays. * What you're going to make Mr. Sneelock do. * A hoodwink who can't wink good. * If only we could talk to the LAPD. * Looking up the IPA pronunciation of Truffula Trees. * Anticipating the day you'll finally get to say "what it is" * Reading The Lorax in a bad David Lynch impression. * Over Forty Years of Trusted Quality at Nature's Bounty. * Seeing yourself on video and realizing you've been on the autism spectrum the whole time. * Knowing your friend only has one joke and telling a whole shaggy dog story to set up the one joke, as a gift. * The zoomers that they have nowadays. * Hello, this is my Asian man voice. * Going around the circle and everybody doing their best Asian man voice, finishing with the guy you want cancelled the most. * Spending $150 trying to connect your PlayStation 2 to a modern television. * Exhorting people to read the jokes in your pinned tweets. * Importing PS3 games – or not importing them, which is cheaper. * All the things you could've done instead of shooting Shinzo Abe. * Playing Tenchu: Wrath of Heaven and trying to change the control scene to be more like Sekiro, even though you hated Sekiro. * Freaking out because you didn't have everything figured out by the time you're 24. * Playing Bumpy Trot with your weeb girlfriend.

Lords: * Andrew * https://highcadence.online * Brandon * https://store.steampowered.com/app/1900250/Demonschool/ Topics: * My daughter's high school pep band playlist is full of bangers * https://embed.music.apple.com/us/playlist/lakeridge-pep-band/pl.u-LdbqENjt759ZJ * Why some actors can't carry a b-movie but others can * What do these white rings on the Microbrute mean? * https://mastodon.social/@mogwai_poet/114842907188616207 * Andrew wrote to Arturia support like a madman, and they got back to him to say that yes, the rings just mean "this knob is important" * Medley by Louis Phillips * https://www.futilitycloset.com/2025/06/29/medley/ * Things you can eat in your garden that you might not expect Microtopics: * Bringing the fact that you are now a Lord to everyone's attention. * Hitting 1700 nautical miles today. * Demonschool. (Wishlist it.) * Whether it helps to un-wishlist and re-wishlist a game on Steam. * The Hot Dog Plant. * Tiny stinky blobs that attach to each other. * What kind of marsh grasses rich people in the 80s would have in their house. * Calling an aesthetic "southwestern" even though it's to the east of you. * A pep rally band playing a Lil Nas X tune. * The band soundtracking your No Kings rally playing a medley of Blister in the Sun, When the Saints Go Marching In, and I Want You Back. * Transcribing music from Double Dragon 2 and slipping under the door of your high school band director. * Disasterpeace's score for Under the Silver Lake. * How many people it takes to compose a pop song. * What it means to be a producer. * Kyle MacLaughlan desperately trying to hold on to Elizabeth Berkeley. * Christopher Lambert being legally blind and accidentally stabbing everyone while filming Highlander. * A weird guy who goes "hheeehh" * Mean Guns. * Putting a b-movie guy in a b-movie and everyone is like "nice!" * The Recent Vampire Movie With Nicolas Cage. * The kind of movie you can follow without looking at the screen. * Someone who has at least one idea and a vision for how to achieve it. * Jean-Claude Van Damme pushing you aside so he can take over the editing suite. * Making a movie while making another movie. * The dwindling number of people getting weird chances. * What day they bury people in Ghana. * Art that's only good if a friend explains what's good about it first. * The comic relief witch doctor who is funny because he keeps screwing up. * Trying to type on a 25 key keyboard. * The three knobs that you have to be able to see best in a low light environment. * The ultrasaw: not as good as a supersaw. * Paying extra to get the one in red because of the kind of person you are. * Why buy an analog synthesizer in 2025? * The tactile wall of knobs. * The giant modular synthesizer at Mills college. * The tiniest patch cables. * Adamantium Rage's FM doom metal soundtrack. * Did you mean: I love Mickey Mouse? * Emailing Arturia Support. * The Pants That Said Maximum. * A poem with rotational symmetry around the center axis. * A poem where the whole point is the acrostic complaining about something. * Eating the leaves and stems of a squash blossom. * Allowing lettuce to bolt. * AeroLettuce. * Making pesto out of herbs other than basil. * The fragrance and the earth tones you get from a bay leaf. * Top garden plants you might not have thought of eating. * A hobby that is cool and fun to do. * Discovered two giant cucumbers you hadn't even noticed before. * Volunteer squash and wacky gourds. * Sharing the fruits of your garden with your neighbors. * When it's lemon season and everybody's trying to give everyone else lemons. * Some plants are in pots; some are in the ground. * Growing a plant that can give you something back. * mstdn.party

Lords: * JP * https://jplebreton.com/ * Styger * https://www.sf.gov/readysf Topics: * Is "Non-Super" Mario an alternate state of consciousness or identity, or merely an alternate physical state? * "Hot defensive bee ball" + bees in general * Solving all 24,976,511 5x5 nonograms * https://pixelogic.app/every-5x5-nonogram * Poem Seen in a Motel Fan by Alberto Blanco * https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/-_x1pv5l.jpg * Werecreature logistics * "The Ball is Back." Discuss. Microtopics: * The World of Video Games * Your favorite granola coming back in stock. * Working to make the world a slightly better place every day. * Weird frustrating tethering. * Levels that are about hauling ass. * Being on the same train as someone for a few stops. * The small version of yourself that you become when you lose your mushroom. * Whether Small Mario has access to all of Super Mario's memories. * What was the authorial intent of Alice growing bigger and smaller. * Whether Small or Big Mario is the original default. * Mario accumulating power and becoming an enormous hulking beast. * Designing a level to support multiple player scales. * Game series that have been both 2D and 3D platformers. * Small Mario eating a mushroom and teleporting into a pocket dimension, swapping in Big Mario. * Japanese hornets in an evolutionary arms race with Japanese honey bees. * Bees forming a tight clump around a hive invader to make them uncomfortably warm. * A baseball sized mass of bees smothering a huge horrible wasp. * Touring beehives and giving seminars about the hot defensive bee ball. * A multi-disciplinary bullshit operation. * Enjoying your job. * The degree to which they waggle. * Bees having a dance-off to determine where to live. * Extending the bee dance language to teach them orbital dynamics so they can find pollen sources in space. * Candy that smells like a bee alarm pheromone. * The NPC in Curse of Monkey Island who explains that merengue is made of eggs. * What they call being "slashdotted" nowadays. * Doing 15 puzzles and taking satisfaction in being 15 puzzles closer to not being able to play this game any more. * Web sites: they shouldn't scale. * Putting every 5x5 nonogram in the Library of Congress. * Humanity dedicating all of its resources to solve every 6x6 nonogram. * The 100 people in the world whose brains are tricked by this kind of fake work. * The most interesting three-digit numbers. * What happens when we run out of nonograms?? * The kayfabe of the community doing every 5x5 nonogram over and over again * A convex mirror, a fisheye, a golden dome. * Taking comfort in the continued existence of observers. * Having all the resources to grow as a person but none of the incentives. * Your little chunk of humanity's future. * Things can get better but also they can get worse. * The City Lights Pocket Poets Anthology, 60th Anniversary Edition. * The official City Lights typeface. * A dignified serif. * A poem is when you do something interesting with typefaces. * How to distribute your poem that does something interesting with fonts. * Lycanthropy booths and other werewolf accommodations. * It's not a disability but they still accommodate you. * Seasonal Mania. * Humans brains being affected by the sun and moon in ways we don't fully understand. * Hospital intake numbers that correlate with the lunar cycle. * What's the deal with the ball being back? * A flying silver ball that sucks your brains out with a fork. * Doing what you do just because. * The ball: it has to be back. * Watching an 80s horror movie and thinking "surely someone has made a Doom level of this" * Inventing perfectly mirrored silver spheres entirely independently from ray tracers. * Reporting back when you are further along on your Phantasm journey. * Not being on the Internet because you're hanging out with the bees instead.

Lords: * Kory * Ryan Topics: * Incorrect stuff they teach you in school (blood, bats, soda cans, etc) * Oops I’ve started over remaking my game again, ECS edition * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8OkkHSQjWg * https://bevy.org/ * Accidentally finding a cat on vacation * Being Boring, by Wendy Cope * https://www.reddit.com/r/Poetry/comments/18ihpmd/poembeingboringbywendy_cope/ Microtopics: * Watching an epicurean professional licking the Switch and Switch 2 cartridges back to back. * Switch 2 cartridges that don't contain a game but still taste disgusting. * A digital key that tastes awful. * 1 in 100,000 Switch 2 cartridges tasting absolutely delicious. * Castlevania: Lords of Shadow: Relorded. * How many people have licked the Switch game you just bought used. * A construction worker spitting a big loog of chew and there's a Switch cartridge floating in it. * Not everybody is Jim Stormdancer. * And independent game design aficionado. * The New York Mayoral primary. * Hackmud. * Games that get two soundtracks while some games don't even get one. * Disasterpeace's Soupertasters theme song. * How to prove that your blood is not blue until it hits the air. * Why do bats e-chocolate?? * What color lobsters are until you cook them. * In space, noone can not see your blue blood. * Eating a 9-volt battery that tastes like chocolate. * Strawberry flavored chocolate that you puff on. * Hey, look who capitalism finally enslaved. * A can of A&W Root Beer that folds in on itself like a neutron star and you don't get to drink any because it's just empty space. * Believing the thing you were told before you turned 18. * Bodyboarding on a plank of wood in an open field. * An empire of the skies and caves. * Whether the tritone was ever illegal. * Education as a Russian doll of nested simplifications. * Wait, this isn't plum pudding! * Blood color facts. * Tuning your piano down to A=420. * Making one mistake and proceeding from the premise that everything you know is wrong. * A t-shirt reading "My favorite guests don't have their fontanelles closed yet." * How to structure your game world. * A grid of lights that are flickering on and off. * The tilty wooden labyrinth with holes in it. * Always on the lookout for the next engine to rewrite your game in. * One of those newfangled scripting languages that targets the NES. * Renting a magic want and running from kiosk to kiosk doing quests. * Finding the Pinecone of Peril. * Capacitative touch interfaces aren't magical for you?? * Asymptotically approaching cat saturation. * Framily. * Hot and cold running cat slides. * Weird reverb where things don't echo right because everything's wet. * A Rainforest Cafe the size of several football fields. * Rainforest Cafe Chic. * A liquid balance tied to your QR code. * Jailbreaking the soda fountain DRM, yelling "kill the banks" and spraying everyone with Mr. Pibb. * Striving to be as boring as possible. * Being boring. (In a good way.) * Being asked how you're doing and scrambling to come up with something interesting to say. * Trying to explain the Video Game History Foundation to your boss. * The Video Game Thing Guy. * Maintaining a garden and posting your harvests on your private Instagram. * Stopping someone on the street and asking them what are the last six vegetables you grew. * How to perform boredom after people realize that yawning means you're tired. * Starting to make omelets a new way. * Asking how someone is doing and bracing yourself for the answer. * Getting emotional and intellectual sustenance from cleaning the bathroom. * The me that comes up when you google my name.

Lords: * Wacy * Chris Topics: * Mysterious BART smell between 12th st. Oakland and West Oakland * Glucose monitor * Winston has been playing Minecraft. Have you heard about this game? Kids love it I guess. * The Earth Wants You * https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/_jj6TAcC.jpg Microtopics: * Knowing so many Chrises that you refuse to call yourself Chris. * Not knowing what just happened for the past how, but now there's an hour-long M4A file with your voice in it. * A whole range of thought experiments that might bear interesting fruit. * A scrap of papyrus containing a transcript of the first episode of Topic Lords. * Trash-adjacent smells. * Whether power substations smell like anything. * A smell worth seeking out for its own experience. * A smell for smell connoisseurs. * A tiny BART Easter egg for your nose. * A huge amount of substance that is replenishing the smell particles. * Checking your apps for indescribable smells. * Closing some Tupperware in a stinky room to preserve the smell forever. * A rat kingdom living under the BART tracks. * Where to talk about unsolved mysteries now that Unsolved Mysteries with Robert Stack went off the air. * Reintroducing mystery to the world like replenishing a lake with trout. * What is the goo under the BART 12th Street Tunnel? * Mystery caches. * An extremely achievable local mystery. * Your body surfacing issues you were previously unaware of. * The full spectrum of diabetes. * Disposable glucose monitors. * What type of food are you eating that spikes your blood sugar, and by how much? * Glucose Curious. * Sports enthusiasts needing to checking their pulse as they watch the big game. * Going for a walk right after eating. * Continuing walking until your blood sugar is back within tolerances. * Having a bad habit for a few months vs. having a bad habit for your whole life. * Learning to spot blood glucose meters in the wild. * Measuring your blood glucose for a month to learn how your body reacts to various foods. * Getting funneled into videos of a douchebag with spiked hair breaking shit with a hammer. * Figuring out how to survive the first night in Minecraft with a six year old. * A game that lets you do lots of different things but doesn't suggest any of them so you have to figure out what you can do and why you would want to do it. * Java edition mods vs. Bedrock edition mods. * Mods: they have they mod problem. * Why they added copper to Minecraft. * Purposeful exploration. * Laying down a bunch of the stone that makes The Warden spawn so you can meet your new Warden pal. * Exploring The End and getting your wings. * Dragon Quest Builders. * The Terraria tutorial. * A weird person to be. * Vampire Survivors: not the first Vampire Survivors-like. * Getting to the poem before it's too late. * Looking through your photos of graffiti * A cat mermaid playing a violin as if it's a guitar. * The Earth Wants You To Be Die. * Emitting a series of tones that insert an image in the listener's mind. * If you can't handle me at my fish, you don't deserve me at my cat. * Missing some sleep and some teeth. * Trying to refute an idea without exposing your audience to the original idea. * Videos continuing to appear on your travel vlog long after you've finished traveling.

Lords: * Jenni * Tyriq Topics: * Internal Monologue Soundboards * Ash wants to be the very best, but at what cost? When is competition a bad thing? * The different ways people play games * Friendship is a skill * Water… Earth… Fire… Air… which bending is best bending? Microtopics: * Scrubbin' Trouble. * Figuring out how to do a multiplayer roguelike. * Power leveling all your skills at once and hoping it's enough. * Looking at the comments, because there might be something good in there. * The Dawn of Our Topic Lords Century. * Why all ducks sound like that. * Hearing a sound an incorporating it into your internal monologue. * Saying "good morning" whenever you pick up the phone no matter what time of day it is. * Alone in the Dark Hedge Maze Mafioso Barks. * Talkin' Barks. * A vault full of clones of a guy named Gary and the only thing they can say is "Gary" * You're a cluster of cells wafting through the universe and latching onto phrases you hear on the internet. * Kids who think they invented being dumb on the Internet. * The Bill Nye theme song sound board. * Wanting to be the very best, like noone ever was, and defining "best" as "kindest." * Wanting to be the very best, and then being it, and then no longer being it and losing your entire sense of identity. * What if you're on a spaceship? Lots of weird things happen on a spaceship. * Striving to be the most benevolent god, like noone ever was. * The sound of angering the giant goose. * Trying to get your significant other to play Outer Wilds because you can't fly the spaceship. * Solving puzzles with the internet. * Super Metroid + Link to the Past and other multi-game randomizers. * Lies on video game forums. * The Search for the Last Great Secret. * A Clop or a Girp. * Collecting meat for a Roguelike Celebration talk. * Holding a meeting about all the ways your project could potentially fail. * Good mortem! * Going back in time and all humans clump together like a giant Katamari. * Friendship as a skill vs. friendship as a natural outcome of your life circumstances. * Friendship decay, a a problem that neurotypicals have. * Keeping up with real life friends vs. with Internet friends. * Online games as a third place. * Complaining about all the ways in which your are socially incompetent. * Inviting people over for a listening party. * Not knowing what number you're thinking of but knowing that it's either odd or even. * Filling away tidbits of information. * The Y2K problem where when pro people start being over 127 years old, everyone remembers them as being -128. * Things that are impossible to think about because you have no frame of reference. * Making yourself a little coffee treat and scrolling reddit so you can stop thinking about death. * Water is imba! * Whether magma falls under bending Earth or bending Fire. * Highly fluid particulate sand. * Which bending is most delicious, according to avatarfandom.com * The cosmology of Jefferson Starship's "We Built This City" * Whether circuit bending is still fun now that everything is software-controlled. * Circuit bending your electric together. * The Goodbye Noise. * Odd Object dot Zone. * Hamster Disco.

Lords: * Jenni * Robb Topics: * The phenomenon where multiple people respond with the same mystifying emoji * Skin Fort dream and image both provided by WiL: https://stale-meme.itch.io/ * Lately I've engaged in pretend play with my 4 year old nephew by pretending we stole a crate of "Toxic Waste" candy and lying to the cops about it. As actual parents, is this healthy for the child? * It turns out you don't want to rent a Playstation * Hints * https://x.com/jensbest/status/413105300535668736 * I would be happy to talk about what having an operation to get an Osia 2 bone anchored hearing aid is like. Microtopics: * The Stanley Parable New Edition. * Cyberganked. * Wishing for games using the Steam wishlist system and the Steam Monkey's Paw curls. * CRPG blobbers. * 25 years of Hugo. * Recognizing a Windows program from 1996. * Back when malware pretended to be a little guy. * The origins of Skinfort. * Hapsburg Jaw. * Angry Cry Laughing. * Meta-channels and meta-meta-channels. * Medicinal Dock Spiders. * This Spider Pays Taxes. * The weakest Great Lake of all. * The good Mexican restaurant in Fond du Lac. * Fish pouches. * Whether you have to refrigerate Big League Chew. * Putting tuna on dry toast. * Four year olds who want to impress people with how sour s candy they can eat. * The amount of toxic waste you are allowed to feed a child. * Having a milkshake and being in bed by 8:30. * Doing improv with your four year old nephew about invoking the fifth amendment. * The Cocomelon video about never talking to the police. * I'm not sad; I'm just on a triangle. * French mice asking to buy your armpit cheese. * A kid who just plain needs to be lied to. * Renting a child so you can make cheese in their armpits. * Did Jim finally rent the Playstation? * Going to the place to rent a Playstation and they immediately ask for your Social Security Number. * It's hot inside the Playstation, and the bugs are cold. * Just doing the poem about Data's cat Spot every episode. * The warlock dominatrix Harley Quinn voice that you make everybody listen to. * Oh I'm sorry, I thought the ceiling was your ass. * Telling your friends about the guy who said he thought the ceiling was your ass and asking them what it means and they just respond with the grapes emoji. * Games that have both Booty and The Wizard. * The scrawny wizard from Zwackery. * Whether chewing your food is a spell. * Listening to Topic Lords for all the mouth sounds. * Constantly rehydrating this child so that he can make the whole house wet. * Starving zombie apocalypse survivors taking the child seats out of a car so they can turn them upside down and shake all the gummy bears out. * A poem with a pangram rhyme scheme. * Bone-anchored hearing aids. * Bringing a topic list to a first date. * Waiting until your last day of insurance and bursting into the OR like the Kool-Aid Man. * Your surgeon quitting the industry immediately after seeing the inside of your head. * Performatively pressing your hearing aid's nonfunctional volume button. * Your wife violating HIPAA to tell you a hilarious work story. * Accidentally installing Bonzi Buddy on your hearing aid. * Marrying an audiologist to get the best possible hearing aid. * Going to zoom.ca to rev up your savings. * Performance Acura North Mississauga. * Adapting Eliza into a game where you're trying to trick Smaug into giving up his hoard. * Making a joke about a banana slug actually bring a plantain slug. * It is the 90s and there is time for Rifftrax.

Lords: * Mark * https://wyrmburden.bandcamp.com/album/strange-sorcerous * Shirley * https://shop.naturmacht.com/sorcerot-merch/sorceroet-rotten-magick-vinyl-crowdfunding-lim Topics: * Music League * Shaping the Head Like a Japanese Watermelon * Kugelmugel * https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kugelmugel * Welcome to Holland by Emily Perl Kingsley * https://www.emilyperlkingsley.com/welcome-to-holland * Using drugs in 2025 * https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UStimeline.Drugsinvolvedinoverdosedeaths.jpg Microtopics: * Wyrm Burden. * Metal bands running out of cool word combinations. * Checking Metal Archives. * Canadian atmospheric sludge metal. * Sorcerot. * Crowdfunding a vinyl pressing because your label refuses to pay for it. * Music that is not on Spotify. * How many Music Leagues you're part of right now. * A competition to see who has the best taste in music. * A song about a horse. * Adversarial Music League. * Posting on the internet with the goal of getting the same number of upvotes and downvotes. * Benign Hypotonia and the Floppy Baby. * Wearing a helmet 23 hours a day to adjust the shape of your skull. * Heads that smell like feet. * A very head-shaped head. * Babies that look like the Gary Oldman character in The Fifth Element. * A cone-shaped otter. * Zorg and Zord. * What kind of gear is this baby on? * Eat clen, tren hard. * Collecting as many physical therapists as possible. * A sweet little guy who's having a great time. * Putting on your resume your first word and the age you first walked. * Parent influencers with bad takes. * A baby that expands to the size of its container, so they'll stay baby sized forever unless you move into a bigger house. * Listen, have you ever evaluated anything? It's not easy. * Vibes-Based Medicine. * Declaring your metal sphere a micronation. * Closing the borders of your 8 meter micronation during COVID. * Building a house that looks like a ball. * Declaring your new house a micronation after the city refuses to grant you a building permit. * Antifascism Square. * Declaring your baby paddock a micronation. * A very good basically-a-poem. * Disabilities that are worse than going to Holland. * Trying to figure out how to live with the life you have. * Making peace with the fact that you didn't achieve all your dreams. * Divisive takes about sleep training. * Outcomes associated with prolonged cortisol exposure. * Category One Squawking. * Spending six years figuring out how to get your kid to fall asleep. * The term they invented to remind parents that just because things are good now, that doesn't mean they stay good forever, which is true for everything, but for children sleeping they have a specific term for it. * Getting real sad and going home. * Trying to take any drug except for fentanyl. * Fentanyl test strips from reliable suppliers. * If Coolio isn't safe, who is? * Narcan vending machines. * Walking down the street like you have Narcan in your pocket. * The terrifying gray line that dominates the entire graph. * A credible threat to a lot of recreational drug users. * Finally inventing the nightmare drug that DARE wanted you to be terrified of. * Nostalgia for street heroin. * The role that dopamine plays in human behavior. * A dogshit drug even from a drug enjoyer's perspective. * The only internet you even like any more.

Lords: * Erica * Judy * https://www.tiktok.com/@diluftmensch * https://www.tumblr.com/diluftmensch * https://bsky.app/profile/diluftmensch.bsky.social Topics: * The Pantone college experience * Why is everyone with superpowers a crime fighter or a criminal * Sell me on metal utensils * Grand Avenue, by Ron Koertge * https://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php%3Fdate=2014%252F10%252F19.html * Abridged version: https://allpoetry.com/poem/14373111-Grand-Avenue-by-Ronald-Koertge * Toothpaste is traditionally spicy Microtopics: * Just Judy. * Telling your friends you love them. * Taking a break from the Internet and staring at the ceiling. * Realizing you need to take a break and then trying to figure out what you need to take a break from. * Doing absolutely nothing for ten minutes. * People who enjoy meditation explaining that you just need to meditate harder. * Taking a depressing game and remaking it, reframing it as relaxing. * Tetromino Chill. * Asking "do I have the flu?" in French. * Clicking on a wav file of Sleepwalk by Santo and Johnny and thinking "computer music is cool" * Your college's particular shade of purple. * The proliferation of this exact shade of purple now that Pantone has made it possible to exactly reproduce a color. * The reason why can't we tell who's buff and sexy any more. * Going to college to get sick of a particular color. * Whether any place is as intensely branded as a college campus. * What the founding fathers would think of this college campus' branding. * James Madison inventing the signature duplicator. * James Madison insisting that his entire family sleep sitting up. * Colors that you can't use until you really mean it. * Colors that are not allowed in the bathroom. * Pantone inventing a way to pee any known color. * Boom Box Guy. * The professor with the glasses with two different color lenses who is constantly complaining about JMU Purple. * Having jaws strong enough to eat bones and eating way more bones than you used to. * Topics that have been in the bucket since the inception of the bucket. * Unlimited energy. (Not limited energy.) * Why isn't Superman using his x-ray vision to watch TV better than anyone? * Lois Lane wearing superman's shirt. * Using your x-ray vision to make sure ant colonies aren't siphoning money out of bank vaults. * Advising strangers on the street that they have an untreated medical condition and they're like "go away creep" * The spoon doing a catapult move because the handle is too heavy, and flinging chili everywhere. * Plastic utensils for adults. * Hitting the age when doctors start saying things like "let's see if we can get a couple more good years out of you" * Whether the fork ever touches your tongue. * Ceramic spoons. * Melamine, the plastic material manufactured on Alf's home planet. * Handsome Korean wooden spoons. * Just slurping down a whole bowl of guacamole. * Everyday Carry Forks. * Metal utensils: so good, you carry them around. * Trying to eat a leaf of lettuce with an extremely heavy fork. * Eating a meal with a pickaxe and a pronged shovel. * Turning the corner by Señor Fish. * Different ways to kil for somebody. * A punch-line that was not set up in the descriptive part of the poem. * A poem that is a subset of another poem. * Where is the wacky misunderstanding that I was promised? * A bumper sticker reading "you just got passed by a bad driver (AI)" * Slapping the "artificial intelligence" label on everything you write so people blame AI. * Cinnamon toothpaste and ginger toothpaste. * Conventionally spicy toothpaste. * Toothpaste that doesn't taste like anything. (You know, for cats!) * Spicy tuna toothpaste and black pepper toothpaste. * Rinsing your mouth with lemon cleanser so your mouth can feel lemon fresh. * Pure Piperin. * Tubes: they're for squeezing. * Phosphoric acid toothpaste.

The video of Charles Martinet puppeteering Mario around the screen: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyezQsI-v-s Lords: * John * Esper Topics: * Chess, the Musical: a show that is universally acclaimed but no longer performed because it consistently loses money * I believe live television to be the most exciting thing humans have invented * Blaseball had $3 million in VC funding * Pad, Pad by Stevie Smith * https://allpoetry.com/Pad,-Pad * Why not RSS for text? * Officiating weddings for your friends Microtopics: * The video of Charles Martinet puppeteering the Mario head. * Who gets to say "roll theme song!" * A community where the chances of someone acting in bad faith is negligible. * DC Action News. * All human communication is technicallt advertising. * The generous Haste demo. * A skipping stones on water kind of game. * Sonic/Klonoa/late 90s/early 00s aesthetics. * A karaoke favorite that is not very reasonably sensitive. * All the Tims who did not work on Chess the Musical. * The guy from Rent whose name you can't remember. * Breakdancing while arbitrating a chess match. * Internet radio stations. * A Windows 95 theme of Chess the Musical. * Installing Windows 95 themes on your Picotron desktop. * Sex, Death and Live Television! * Live TV mishaps that ruin entirely the wrong career. * HQ. * At five o'clock, there's gonna be a guy. * The sense of spectacle you get from a live broadcast with a big audience. * The time one of the leads forgot his entire monologue. * The thrill of being part of a live performance as it's going wrong. * Listening to Shoutcast channels on Winamp. * Winamp's Shoutcast station registry. * The childhood dream of owning a TV station and getting to make all the little station IDs. * Netflix's abandoned "just fuck me up" button. * Six episodes of Deep Space 9 on a single VHS tape. * Drop 7 vs. Dropout TV. * Getting entirely the wrong information from your survey about what people like about your product. * Trying to sign up for Blaseball and failing. * Funny names such as Dominic Marijuana. * Jumping in and forcing some actions to happen. * Needing your game to break so that you can write the way it breaks into the narrative of the story. * Blaseball-likes. * Terrorball. (Short for Territory Ball.) * A list of all locations. * The Scarborough Fairies. * Resurrecting Jaylen Hotdogfingers. * An online text mode football manager with a live chat. * Fish Center. * Determining which fish is best. * Bringing a little bit of the live frisson to a fake live broadcast. * Whether it's okay to read a poem more than once. * Softly I go now, pad pad. * Cats you had together. * The cat that Hatricia Hop-Meow is based on. * Blogs: do they exist? * Making a point of finding an open source way to do your shit. * A 24 hour cycle of live podcasts. * TiVo for podcasts. * Edging the feeling of whether you're watching live TV or not in a slip slidey timestream. * Asking chat a question and then waiting 15 to 20 seconds for the response to come back. * Bringing back RSS readers. * The New Old Reader. * Opening with the mawwige joke. * Wanting people to want things. * Going back to your old life except now your friends are married. * Protecting The Lord from unauthorized clergymen. * Paying $20 to the Universal Life Church so you can perform weddings in most states. * Keeping the card in your wallet in case anyone tries to claim that you're not really an ordained minister.

Lords: * Andrew * Andrew Topics: * Finally making a 3D game after using only PICO-8 for 10 years * PICO-8 screen carts * Picotron Viruses * Quest by kittenmaster * https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/Kvg10u32.png Microtopics: * Professional software developers trying to figure out a terrible UI. * The Real Andrew – it says so on my computer screen. * Make 10 Deluxe. * Double Mustache's Lizard Multiplication, now available in a cardboard box in Staples. * Lizard Multiplication Tables. * Total Toads. * Pizza Panda vs. Pizza Possum. * Children's Allegra, on Nick, Jr. * Eugene, Oregon, the grass seed capital of the world. * Scientists discovering an exciting new antihistamine in the medicine aisle. * Working on whatever feature strikes your fancy for a year and ending up with an undirected project that's nowhere near shipping. * Using the lessons you've learned making small games to make a bigger game. * Making an N64 game for modern PCs. * Two people with the same name, the same headphones, and the same back story. * 3D cameras: a huge pain in the ass. * What makes San Francisco Rush different from Mario Kart. * Getting Keys in Rush 2. * How to collect keys in the middle of the air. * Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom and other car platformers. * Extending the lifetime of an arcade game by adding weird secrets. * Arcade games with a save system. * Feeding Smash Tokens into the gacha system. * Super Mario Bros.: The Movie: The Game. * Looking at Picotron and thinking "I don't have time to draw that many pixels." * The Tweet Jam Andrews. * Is this really that interesting, Andrew? * Foreshadowing the poem. * How much game can you fit on one screen? * Code golfing and limiting yourself to typeable characters. * Reading a David Ahl book and realizing you want to tell the sand how to think. * Playing music on the PC speaker and printing funny phrases on the screen. * Writing a series of text mode animations in C in 1992 and then losing them all. * STDIO jam. * Dig World and Dig World Realms. * Typing in 6 pages of ROT13 text. * Writing an adventure game with a novel-length source code listing and demanding that players type it in. * Accidentally reading ROT13 spoilers. * The people who memorize the eye exam chart. * Rotting ROT13 a different amount. * Running ROT13 multiple times for extra security. * Competing ROT13 implementations that rotate in different directions. * Games in which the game state includes what line of code is currently executing. * How beginners expect game programming to work. * Deliberately contracting the Picotron virus where the characters fall to the bottom of your screen. * A monster that runs around on your desktop and eats your icons. * Turning off networking features for individual programs. * Writing a keylogger to read people's email and it turns out people's email is incredibly boring. * Writing a keylogger by hooking the keyboard interrupt and not bothering to log the state of the shift key. * Capturing the handshake and brute forcing it. * The first S is for Secure. * Screen carts vs. tweet carts. * Colon colon home colon colon. * Question mark? Puzzlescript man. (Or weird asterisk.) * The new default Pico-8 code editor background color. * Forgetting to screen shot the pixels so you open the image in Photoshop and add the pixels back. * Alfonzo's Bowling Challengs. * Unlocking HD streaming at level 2.

Lords: * Alex * Shannon Topics: * The rapid proliferation of identical mobile games * https://store.steampowered.com/app/2348100/YEAHYOUWANTTHOSEGAMESRIGHTSOHEREYOUGONOWLETSSEEYOUCLEARTHEM/ * Randomly generated time traveler loadout * Turning your body into 3D printer filament after you die * https://www.suspenders.com/products/1-1-2-undergarment-hold-up-reg-suspender-hip-clip-style-patented-no-slip-reg-clips * Girls Only Want One Thing, Isabel Correra * https://www.instagram.com/isabellecorreawrites/p/Cz3t1xQOnx/ Microtopics: * Alien Clay. * Gravity Falls. * Tryharding at Duolingo. * Removing the popsicle sticks in the right order or the king dies in lava. * Writing a solitaire game generator and uploading 30,000 solitaires to the app store. * Ads that are not even pretending to not be falsely advertising to you. * Mobile game advertisers all pretending that their games are the same non-existent game genre. * Yeah! You Want "Those Games," Right? So Here You Go! Now, Let's See You Clear Them! * People saying "that ad for a game where you pull out popsicle sticks until a king doesn't die looks pretty good but when I click on it it's a completely different game." * Lying to consumers in the 80s vs. lying to consumers today. * Ads that are just two horrifying images to get your adrenalin spiking. * Screaming Tamagotchi. * The Paw Patrol diagetically being funded by real life Paw Patrol merch sales. * Maximizing emotional whiplash when it doesn't matter which two emotions they are. * Having a week to prepare for a one way trip to Northern Italy in 1326. * Going on a trip and bringing along your undeveloped Broca's area. * Bootlegging reproducing GMO crop seeds in Renaissance Italy. * Wizard/Prophecy Person. * 21st Century Traveling Merchants. * Bringing your jar of penicillin mold to the 14th century. * Being stranded in Renaissance Italy and becoming travelling minstrels. * Larger bearded guy that wears suspenders (under a graphic tee) * When were you born? The 14th century. Fuck you. * Bringing a snack to the spooky extraterrestrial from the planet Vulcan who lives in the woods. * Big ol' dogs. * Non-electronic megaphones. * A little top you can spin that's made of grandpa. * A magic genie that can grant any wish as it's for a small striated plastic trinket. * Getting turned into Redstone after you die. * A poorly-made fidget spinner that used to be your husband. * Shipping ashes and asking that ashes be put into things. * The sloughed off skin cells coating everything you send in the mail. * A shitty fidget spinner that just happens to have some human remains in it. * Where human composting is allowed. * Places it's no longer legal to bury a body. * The problem with imbuing symbols with value. * An alternative wedding ring that you switch to as necessary. * A plant that is a metaphor for death. * Grandpa living forever by being repeatedly melted down and 3D printed into a new toy when you get sick of the old once. * Bringing 3D printing back to 14th century Italy to revolutionize reliquaries. * Giving the world both Frog Fractions and Topics. * How many people you pass on the street each day are wearing suspenders under their shirt. * Hip Clips Style Under Ups. * A poem that's in the bucket twice. * Love is a seed and lust is a bird ravenous for seeds. * Burying the word sorry and seeing what grows. * Poetry that's just a paragraph of text. * What you're going to be if you eat the fruit of the sorry fruit. * Trying to imit inimitable things. * There's a lot of different women and they all want different things. (Except they all want to travel back in time.) * My Mother's Savage Daughter. * Girls only want one thing: to not be found on the Internet.

Lords: * Kory * Andy Topics: * Whim-based coding * How do you make and maintain a buddy on the Internet? * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJKRFd4J_1w * That oscilloscope demo * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8CzrPG9S0U& * Peripheriques Like Halos, by Robert Montgomery * https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/fmr9gsma.jpg * https://globalizationofcalifornia.com/alameda-county-i-580-political-signs-spark-free-speech-fight/ * Enhancing a party with a bespoke bar menu. * Creating a threatening windows batch file and leaving it on the desktop to frighten an application into not crashing Microtopics: * Kbones. * When was the last time you invested in yourself? * Getting FM to sound like anything except a bell. * The American Psycho meme of FM syntheses. * A griminess level somewhere between Streets of Rage 2 and Streets of Rage 3. * The Yamaha DX7 presets. * An aggressively nonlinear approach to productivity. * Doing board game AI until it becomes boring and then moving on to something else * A lifelong ADHD enjoyer. * Trying to explain "burndown rate" without knowing the term burndown rate or what burndown rate is. * Getting ideas out of your brain so it can think about something else for a while. * Games that you aren't allowed to play for fun. * The M stands for Money. * Whim-based topics. * Segue-free zones. * Essness and Snez. * Maintaining friendships via custom chat stickers. * Stickers you use in your daily life. * Discord For Andy. * Anonymous inscrutable pixel faces. * A sticker of Princess Rosaline shrugging with the text "Skill Issue?" * The rich ecology of daily Garfield recap podcasts. * Conflating RJ-45 and RJ-11. * Which One's The Astromech?? * Two superpowers at one. * How to win the Frog Fractions ARG. * Classic Raster Bars. * Reading a 40k stream of consciousness essay scrolling by the bottom of the screen in a pixelated font * Scrubbing right to Cronologia. * Doing surgery on the topic bucket right now. * That Oscilloscope Demo. * Converting your laptop into tent mode. * Zamboni Mayhem. * Running a video signal through a reverb pedal. * Stereo oscilloscopes. * Pringle of Scotland: once you pop, you can't stop. * A picture of a wall with a bunch of balloon letters spelling out a phrase. * Non-elected councils called ABAG and ICLEI. * A weird thing that's been kind of near you your whole life. * The final Neon Genesis Evangelization 3.0+1.0 movie. * A gripe session with themed cocktails. * Continuing to think of puns and refusing to pass any of them up. * Taking a Negroni and calling it LCL. * A 55 gallon drum of Tom Collins with a valve on it. * Walking by the booze aisle and everything looks delicious. (Even though it's not.) * Everyone's favorite topic. * Waving a .bat around to make your computer behave. * Sorry about your synapses! * An angry phone call from your mom circa 1995. * Telling the sand how to think and making the little guy run around. * Writing a bad song and immediately sending it to all your friends. * Pivoting to pay-per-reload. * Discovering what the requirements are as you discover the game you are making. * Crashing Pico-8 so hard that it reverts to Japanese.

Lords: * Alexander * https://youtube.com/@L4MPLIGHT * Chall Topics: * Having an address after not having an address * Slopsquatting * Book curses * This boke ys myne, Eleanor Worcester * https://15thcfeminist.substack.com/p/the-preservation-of-womens-words * The David Lynch random number generator * Esper says: My personal favorite use of numbers stations is the brief “station ID” type messages on Secret Agent Radio, a radio station that plays funky groovy Bond soundtrack-type music. Every now and then between songs, you’ll get a brief clip of creepy French-accented actual number station recordings, which really sells the vibe: https://somafm.com/player24/station/secretagent * Do game designers ever go into public policy or vice-versa? Microtopics: * Math. * An incredible youtube channel you don't know how to search for. * Lamplight but with a four. * Making art that only a tetrachromat could appreciate and then finding a tetrachromat to appreciate it. * The secret color: yellow. * Crashlands 2. * Watching X-Files until you've already seen all the Darin Morgan episodes. * Having twenty shirts to choose from and the same place to sit every day. * How long it takes to tire off the non-stop stream of novelty. * Working for yourself vs. working for someone else. * How to stop feeling like life is rushing past you. * Running a Kickstarter to get chores done around the house. * How to get your ADHD brain to do work in purpose. * Trying to get past the gauntlet of open browser tabs to the one where you get work done. * Running 100 times. * Productivity! * Buying a productivity calendar and then glaring at the calendar and saying "you can't trick me, calendar" * Nefarious NPM packages really popping off in the past few years. * Cool pens dot com. * Kazaam vs. Shazaam. * What people knew before they could search things on the Internet. * Dog bone facts. * The apocryphal things that LLMs like to say. * Lost books that we know about because they were mentioned in less old books. * The Actual Monster Mash. * Jeff Minter's Polybius. * Nobody ever releasing a fake Frog Fractions 2 even though Jim could never disavow it. * Hash tag relatable stories about medieval scribes. * Laws about book mishandling. * Dukes collecting books like treasures. * Putting a curse in your book to make sure nobody steals it. * The Falling Disease. * Irascibly Incoherent Book Curses. * May your NPM packages be infected with the falling disease. * A curse that can only curse people who can read. * Young people getting their grubby fingers dirty in the yard and leaving fingerprints in your books. * Someone left their bookmark in my book and the bookmark rotted again. * Cursing podcast bootleggers with the affliction where they always put their headphones on backwards. * The cheat code to unlock Nukey. * May your X button get stuck. * The wildest spelling that could possibly make sense. * A book that once belonged to a library. * Borrowing a book about space from your first grade teacher and forgetting to return it and learning about the ADHD shame procrastination spiral. * Blessed be he who steals this book. * Walking into a library and instantly being completely overwhelmed. * Giving your child the talk about where Little Free Libraries come from. * David Lynch giving you the weather in his all caps voice. * Why David Lynch never draws a 7. * The Reproducibility Crisis. * The Law of the Iterated Logarithm. * All the ways we make mistakes. * Coded drug drop messages on Britney Spears' Insagram. * The 485.152nd Amendment. * A great source of puns that must've existed for thousands of years. * How to predict whether your idea will work and then how to test whether it worked. * The Double Crossover Diamond Interchange.

Lords: * Alexei * Evan Topics: * Silt clouds & underwater visibility as a game mechanic * The bass pro shop pyramid and the utility calculations of weird buildings * What happens when your Firefox root certificate expires? * The Ailing Mirror-Smith * https://medium.com/@EvanBalster/the-ailing-mirror-smith-9c4b5a76cd#9520 Microtopics: * Roguelike Celebration. * Virtual conferences. * How to be in a conversation with one person in a room and not the whole room. * Drinking a polymorph potion to put a different animal emoji next to your user name. * Roguelikes and Roguelikers. * Topic munching and topic grazing. * How to design non-violent roguelikes. * Spending your paw prints on the "become water" skill so when a human tries to pick you up, you just flow out of their hands. * Imitone. * Abruptly tooting a horn. * Reading an email and then pointing at it and yelling "sold!" * DSP for game developers. * Video essays about maritime disasters. * Penetration diving. * Huge warning signs in front of every underwater cave. * Silt Warnings. * Guideline Entanglement. * Moving in more directional axes than you normally do. * Fast things that live underwater. * Panicking and forgetting that the game is turn based. * Playing Nethack with a screen reader. * Multi stage dives to deliver oxygen further and further into a cave system. * Retrieving the bell from the Edmund Fitzgerald. * Inventing special hells to put yourself through because the existing hells aren't good enough. * Gabe Newell's lack of fear response. * Remembering the time you blacked out and thinking "the brain is really cool." * Borrowing some time from your cat attack to give to the car crash. * Scout the Floof. * Running out of adrenalin and being extremely calm. * Entering and exiting Tennessee in a state of intense unreality. * Memphis, the ancient capital of Egypt. * The acoustic properties of a gigantic metal pyramid. * Getting married inside the Bass Pro Shop Pyramid. * Hotel rooms attached up the back of the giant fish. * Why the Egyptians built pyramids rather than other cooler shapes. * A procedurally generated lady in Canada. * Importing the Burning Man from Burning Man. * Stopping at Saskatchewan for gas. * Home of the World's Biggest Dad. * Building Ram Pumps in Dwarf Fortress. * Great Pyramid Ram Pump. * Mummy Tea. * A terrible waste of tax dollars that brings joy to children all around the world. * Firefox telling you "oh shit, you need to update now, dog." * Configuring Windows Firewall to not allow Windows Updates. * Protecting your users from malware by opening the floodgates of Internet ads. * Encino Man. * Handing Firefox a Baby Ruth and it's like "this tastes like plastic." * Picking tiny hills to die on as a way to remain mentally stable. * Escalating lack of politeness from a UK security firm. * Nitric Acid Piano: sounds great but hurts like heck to play. * 3D printing new fingernails right onto your bare cuticles every morning. * Working on a long project in which you see more potency than clarity of purpose. * Valorizing craft for the sake of craft, disconnected from the use of it. * In the worst case scenario, how could your tool be used? * Avoiding doing evil by making morally neutral art. * Sitting on multiple generations of Cold War techno-optimism. * Keita Takahashi's manifesto about being a video game romantic. * Designing things that people can do and enjoy in the world we want to live in. * Striving to bring people some small amount of a positive emotion. * Making curry for your colleagues and going totally overboard on it. * I'm going to go do evil with this curry. * Learning the flavors of new herbs and spices. * Fenugreek leaf. * The worst time in history to get enthusiastic about cooking quiche. * Trying to figure out how to post.

Lords: * Lena * Droqen Topics: * Kill gameplay * https://droqen.itch.io/the-end-of-gameplay * The thrill of firefighting on live service games, and how to stop * It was D and K who showed me the way * https://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=705 Microtopics: * Great content. * Multiplayer games that are focused on human connection. * Farmers' markets. * Kinopio. (The mind-mapping software.) * Just barfing stuff onto the page. * Looking at a piece of software that someone has polished for fifteen years and being astounded. * Weird ego boosts. * Meeting hundreds of people whose names you recognize from the Internet and they're all like "I love the thing you made." * Pursuing the thing that other people say is good about your work and forgetting what you liked about it yourself. * A nebulous idea whose lot in life is to be dominated by more concrete ideas. * Making your next game with the intention of killing your most popular game. * Unlocking creative expression into a vessel. * Tolerating a combat system to get to the good parts of a game. * Playing a game because you enjoy pushing the buttons. * A museum exhibit of a hundred different platformer control schemes. * Using your ability to hang out with people to tell them a story. * A list of all the ideas you've ever had. * The safety of watching the numbers go up. * An interaction that exists to be self-perpetuating. * Advertising as a way to tell people that a thing exists vs. all the noxious cruft that we've grown on top of that idea. * Game addiction as a thing that is desirable. * Games that grip you as tightly as possible vs. games that gracefully end and allow you to stop playing. * Game developers accidentally discovering that they can Skinner Box people and then deciding "let's build our entire industry around that forever" * The mantra you use to remind yourself to not put gameplay in your games. * Trying to detect the humanity in a work of art. * Trying to express your experiences in a medium and knowing you at least have an audience of one. (Yourself.) * Disagreeing about color names. * It's Thanksgiving and people are at-ing you on Twitter that your online service isn't working. * Moving fast enough that you don't have time to sit with your thoughts and second-guess yourself. * The true meaning of a Lord. * How to sit with the discomfort of uncertainty. * Solving a problem before you get the chance to wonder whether solving the problem aligns with your values. * Running an online world that gets hacked and rolling back only 98% of the hack, leaving enough to remind people that this is a world with a living history. * Ruminating about your past actions as a way to learn how to behave in the future. * Acting without reflection because you can't reflect and act at the same time. * It doesn't matter what you do as long as you feel really bad about it afterwards. * How to stop. * Don't make live service games. * Sitting with the knowledge that you are going to make mistakes. * Staring at blue-green walls. * The most juicy fire-fighting that's available. * The horrible steak that is life. * Trying to construct your life so that you are doing something thrilling and important for one to four hours per day and then relaxing. * The introverted fire fighter who has his own personal cardboard box to cover his head with as he's hanging out at the station. * What's-his-letter? * If Heaven's so good, why haven't they made a Heaven 2? * Making a one-user forum for yourself. * Poetry 2: it's when you do something interesting with forum posts. * Doing something for brain reasons and then people who you inspire do the same things to so they can pretend to have the same brain reasons. * Adding everyone who ever influenced you to the credits of your game. * Intentionally excluding the U. * Suck it, English orthography!

Lords: * CisHetKayFaber * https://www.patreon.com/CisHetKayFaber * Andrew * https://luxurybunkers.bandcamp.com/album/killer-karen Topics: * People say the craziest stuff in front of janitors. * Revisiting development of a creative work after 20 years * Naming conventions in the demo scene vs. the ZZT scene * How to Be Perfect, by Ron Padgett * https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57243/how-to-be-perfect * Floops, a 3D cartoon character generated in VRML in the mid-90's internet Microtopics: * Putting all your stress from the last three months into a single EP. * Brains pooping right into your ears. * Refusing to talk about Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music. * Are you allowed to talk to janitors?? * Being assumed to be part of a group (openly racist people) that you are not actually part of. * The risks of letting other people clean up after you. * How do you know when it's time to eat candy when you don't have the candy gland? * Giving yourself heat stroke because you don't realize it's too hot. * Making a plan for how to not get heat stroke! * Not having a thirst meter but your snacking meter is pegged 24/7. * The inability to sleep and eat at the same time. * How to tell if you're on SSRIs. * Cyclothymia. * "You have to do this now or I'm going to stare at you." * A VR exercise app where if your heart rate drops too low all the NPCs start staring at you. * The cost of not taking care of yourself. * Clinging to your flow state for dear life. * Feeling like you've done a thing vs. actually doing the thing. * Sedarising and unsedarising your essay. * The many eras of cancelling David Sedaris. * Independent tabletop game developers in the Osaka area. * Writing to explore your own thought space. * Writing the program and then running the program. * Taking a twenty year break between essay drafts so you can revisit your ideas fresh. * Cyberpunk-coded online handles. * Attaching a political ideology to the ZZT scene. * Role-playing bring a small business owner as you make art in your bedroom and share it with the online community. * Social capital in the cracking community. * The era in your life when you didn't even know it was possible to pay for computer games. * Who'd win in a fight, Slayer, or Mega Slayer ZZ9 Final? * The revealed philosophies of different online communities. * Shareware and early web nostalgia. * A wild time to be on the Internet. * Enjoying lo-fi versions of a thing. * A movie with bad special effects that look great in the pirated cammed version. * Straightening your room before you save the world. * Not doing anything to make what you want impossible. * Using attractive stamps, like the one with the tornado on it. * Carrying the only poem you like around with you on index cards. * Living in a culture where respect for the elderly is out of control. * The age at which you get to elbow your way to the front of every line. * Getting paid to tell people how to do things better. * Things you had to learn outside of school. * A guy who looks like he's eaten every lemon in the world. * Ron Padgett celebrity lookalikes. * An alarm clock that wakes you up by shouting "I'm looking forward to the Internet of things!" in your own voice. * Who's been to cocktail parties and when, and did you discuss VRML? * Hand animating 3D cartoons by typing VRML. * Vtubers in the 90s. * Making things and putting them on the Internet and everyone just assumes you just prompted an AI to make it. * Demystifying the magic pixie dust. * The burly wizard with a hammer and anvil who knows how to make the metal not brittle. * NAND to Tetris and Cryptopals. (Not the blockchain kind.) * Learning to never roll your own crypto. * Magic. (Derogatory.) * Punished for understanding the assignment.

Lords: * Jenni * Rebecca * https://toots.ravenoak.dev/@rebecca * Weft Magazine: https://www.weftmagazine.com/ Topics: * Getting emotionally ambushed by a children's toy piano * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8g8fzwmnw8M * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvhdHkugIPE * All the non-art things you have to do to get external validation about your art * Explaining where owls come from * The Witches are Coming (excerpt) by Lindy West * https://playingintheworldgame.com/2021/11/15/the-witches-are-coming-by-lindy-west/ * Ask Me About Loom(s in video games) * Festive gazelles, vampire christmas, and the rest of the christmas card project: https://ravel.me/ggggbbybby/swc * What’s a gamp? https://ravel.me/ggggbbybby/js2cawg * In case you need comfy fingering in your life: https://www.knitpicks.com/yarn/comfy-fingering/c/5420197 * The ravelry forum where we play old-lady Minecraft: https://www.ravelry.com/discuss/warped-weavers Microtopics: * Weft: for weavers! * The Weft Zone. * A two and a half foot piano with five notes on it. * Are you the width of your arm? * Pushing a button to increase your team's number. * A white paper about how to not get a divorce when you go to burning man together. * Teaching kids all the animal names, even the ones they'll never encounter, like how we used to teach kids all the state capitals even for the states they'll never visit. * A bird with polka dot wings that could fly over the sea, and John Legend sings about it. * Expecting your child to eventually go through every age. * Now that your kid is 40, he can clean the poop from his own balls. * The umbilical cord being connected to weird meat inside your body. * Kidney bean figures connected by glowing blue lines in the astral plane. * Being paid to stay at home and solve puzzles on you computer. (And go to Zoom meetings.) * All the non-art things you need to do to get your art out there. * The Loom on Loom Island. * Exhibiting at Maker Fair and explaining how a loom works 50,000 times. * Happy last year's birthday! I made you something and it took me this long to finish it. * Getting a fanbase who has a parasocial relationship with you and having to pretend not to be a crotchety asshole. * What it takes to run a personal Mastodon instance. * Getting a call from the school and they're like "your instance isn't federating with the other instances, we need you to come pick it up." * Explaining to a six year old about sexual reproduction, DNA, mutations, and speciation so you can explain where owls come from. * Explaining to your baby that talking is when an organ vibrates in your throat that makes the air vibrate, but he doesn't know what air is, he thinks there's an ether. * What music you can play with the pentatonic scale. * Poko the cockatiel sitting Totoro. * The intern at the mobile factory who spent an afternoon downloading a hundred bootleg MIDIs so that the mobile plays. * Tooting the bad cone inside the house. * The person who would be playing the trumpet in your relationship. * Seeing someone knitting incorrectly in a TV show. * Patching better jokes into the hat DLC. * Using a sequence of transpilers to get your code from point A to point B. * People who make game engines wanting your to touch the engine as much as possible. * Wanting to declare a global variable and the developers say you can't do that but they point you to the bespoke language feature that does the same thing as global variables but in a much more complicated way. * Playing the Frog Fractions text adventure with a gamepad. * Funny looking pirates who are secretly advertisements. * Kidney beans, swans, and other delicious things. * Learning a song from a dye pot that turns things green. * A piano guitar that you just press on. * Showing your husband the Wikipedia page that proves that you hobby exists and he's like "anybody can edit Wikipedia." * Making a sculpture of the Eiffel tower without looking at any references and it ends up just being a letter A with the word "Paris" written nearby. * A coked-up knitting machine. * Spring has sprung so sprang your sprang. * Heddles and treadles and gamps. * Some of your best Comfy Fingering, please. * Basic Sour. * Smelling things in your mouth. * Getting tired of sucking your baby's snot through a tube and getting an electric aspirator. * Starting up Morrowind and being immediately presented with a guy who has a bad case of Bethesda Face. * The thirteen games that have looms in them. * The looms in Assassin's Creed being kind of historically accurate because Ubisoft's whole thing is being kind of historically accurate. * Subscribing to a service that periodically sends you different swatches of cloth so you can disassemble them and figure out how they're woven. * Festive Gazelles. * Happy Vampire Christmas! * Forum drama on Ravelry that ends up with the web designer no longer being allowed to talk directly to customers. * Creative mode for Minecraft except for a bunch of old ladies. * If you lose your bird bone just wait for another bird to hit your window. * Magazines as extremely slow podcasts. * Updating your gender and getting rid of your loser middle name while you're at it.