Topic Lords

Lords: * JohnB * Kevin * JADES data: https://jades.idies.jhu.edu/public/ Topics: * Thoughts on approximately 5/12 of Don Quixote * The Time Life "Mysteries of the Unknown" Series (1987-1991) and its impact on a generation of young nerds * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MysteriesoftheUnknown * https://www.reddit.com/r/IcebergCharts/comments/r487u4/distantastronomicalobjectsiceberg/ * https://www.slideshare.net/DirkTheDaring11/timelife-mysteries-of-the-unknown-the-ufo-phenomenon * https://archive.org/details/DreamsAndDreaming201809/page/n33/mode/2up * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lal0aWAys0k * Thomas Edison didn't think telephones needed to ring. He figured the caller could just start yelling "hello" at you even before you answered the phone * Desiderata * https://www.desiderata.com/desiderata.html * https://www.readwritethink.org/sites/default/files/resources/lessonimages/lesson372/PoloniusExcerpt.pdf * Is pinball meant to be fun? Can you lose a quarter at an arcade faster in a game cabinet or in a pinball machine? * https://arcadeblogger.com/2018/07/06/arcade-holy-grail-the-pinball-circus/ * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAtVBb8rOok * https://archive.org/details/TILTTheBattleToSavePinballDisc2Extras Microtopics: * Dog ownership. * A living creature that just wanders around the house. * Picking up warm soft weird thing. * Cracking open a cold one. * Computers flush with science data. * The deepest images humans have ever taken. * Finding distances to individual galaxies. * Listicles you can peruse. * Picking a galaxy and naming it after yourself. * Bug Mars 2. * The Glass Universe. * Hiring women and calling them computers. * A guy with a lot of free time and a gold nose. * Some public domain books being more readable than others. * Pun localization. * North American otaku tilting at windmills with their katanas. * How people pronounce quixotic and how they ought to pronounce quixotic. * Whether we respect English majors on this show. * Naming a character something weird and hoping nobody argues about the pronunciation hundreds of years from now. * Butthead as Don Quixote and Beavis as Sancho Panza. * The Great Cornholio tilting at windmills. * The era of translations that don't realize Don Quixote is a parody. * Part II of Don Quixote responding to Don Quixote fan fiction. * Don Coyote. * Sending Mario Maker back to Miguel Cervantes to see what he would make. * The kinds of books your parents would have on their shelf, back when that was the only thing available to read. * The 80s resurgence of New Age thought. * Mystic Places. * The Shin Megami Tensei section in the library. * Where to find the books that teach you magic in the public library. * The canonical map of reported UFO sightings worldwide. * Books for the kind of person who thinks Aleister Crowley is cool. * The Spaceships of Ezekiel. * The JWST iceberg. * The Distant Astronomical Objects iceberg. * A tin can and a string with a battery attached. * Hello, fellow phone owner. * A phone call asking you to log into a web site and read a message. * Funny ways to answer the phone. * E.B. Games, where you can get F-Zero for Zero. * The size of fortune cookies in the 1920s. * Nice things to do and be. * Desiderata vs. Deteriorata. * Advice giving poems. * Skin cancer is mid. * Casey Kasem quitting Transformers after they wrote an episode featuring Abdul, king of Carbombya. * Avoiding loud and aggressive persons. * Pinball getting harder and more complex over the course of a century. * Baffleball. * Pinball features to make things easier for beginners. * The quickest way to lose money on an arcade game. * Tilt-sensing plum bobs. * A weird kinetic sculpture that exists just for your entertainment. * The Black Hole for Personal Reasons. * A boring and easy pinball cabinet that you can play for an hour when you want to get sick of pinball. * Tilt: The Battle to Save Pinball. * Multidisc! * Pinball tables by George Gomez. * Pinball: not actually fun, but they did their best. * Free play skee-ball. * Pacific Pinball Museum and Musee Mecanique. * Twitter forgiveness.

Lords: * Jonah * AC Topics: * When was the last time you listened to a song backwards? * Decentralized manufacturing * Are there other terms like "foodies," to describe those who are super into universal bodily functions? * The Bathroom Line, by Jesse Thurston * Playtesting legos Microtopics: * Pet Rock Dot Site * Whether rhythm is a kind of sound. * A rhythm synthesizer that produces control voltages. * All the things you could hypothetically like about New York City. * Crowded speculative real estate. * Canada's role as a fire hazard. * The power company in charge of all the wildfires. * What happened to Smokey the Bear. * Stopping for lobsters crossing the highway. * Whether Smokey the Bear died in his sleep. * Putting the oven on self clean and it cleans your whole house. * Bringing back Satanic Panic to make backmasking cool again. * Constructing a cliff that echoes backwards. * Musique Concrete. * The kind of people who would make an album in Csound. * Admitting that your music is hilarious. * Conlon Nancarrow's works for player piano. * Black MIDI. * Knowing that you should be adding a constraint to your assertion but not knowing what it should be. * If Conlon Nancarrow had only entered cryosleep. * Loading up a song in Sound Forge. * Squid Salmple. * Bluetooth: it works every time! * Virtual modular synthesizers with cool cable physics. * The etymology of backmasking. * If Wiktionary is so good, why isn't there a Wiktionary 2? * Franchising your rhythm box. * Doing each other's administrative work. * Doing a labor swap to get fresh eyes on your project. * Ubering to the trail head. * Imagine: paying rent for an office. * Poopsocking it on this family show. * The Armory. * Going back in time and having $14 million. * Selling your forehead as advertising space. * Joseph Circuit City Smith. * This man needs your help to remove his porn logo forehead tattoos. * Aspirational snake eye contacts. * Your contacts contact. * Antique sword knife bookmark charm sword knife pendants knife charms for bookmarks. * Going to the breathing club and breathing really hard. * The Hearty-Starty. * Trying to joke about a thing that turns out to just be a real thing. * A Facebook group for people who love shitting. * Blinkos and all the nuances of the ways they love to blink. * A whole world just for smelling. * How your heart doesn't stop every time you sneeze. * Green text vs. other colors of text. * The r/bluetext subreddit that's all about links to other web sites. * Nutty Gum and Fruit Spleggings. * Finding the one while in line to poop. * Going to college for like a year and one of the best things about it was the bathroom graffiti. * A chalkboard in the physics department's bathroom stall. * Help I'm trapped in the bathroom grout. * Peeing while trying to think of a poem. * Peeing your pants in the bathroom. * Don't Backmask Me, Bro. * Finding someone in a bar who wants to playtest your experimental game for three hours. * The movie Yesterday except for inventing Legos. * Following instructions as a way to fidget. * Trying to solve a difficult programming puzzle when someone comes up and starts biting you in the ass. * All the ways someone can be onboarded onto an experience. * Free HTML5 Games Tagged Idle. * Top Three Clickers. * Roguathia. * Waiting until you have more SP to select upgrades.

Lords: * Chris * Dev * https://devinbusha.artstation.com/ Topics: * Taking Improv classes has been life changing. * Practicing 3 keyboard layouts at the same time * I bought store brand salt. You wouldn't think this would be a big deal but it turns out to be * I Once Snorted an Eight Ball with Santa, by Richie Zaborowske * https://www.havehashad.com/hadposts/i-once-snorted-an-eight-ball-with-santa * Are all creative ideas very derivative, or is it just my ideas Microtopics: * Pickleball. * Weird shapes the birdie flies in. * The sport that has level design. * Mindful breathing. * You are now breathing mindfully. * Looking forward to being at square one. * Getting the real data once you stop paying attention. * Thespians in High School. * Spinning a wheel to figure out what emotion to feel. * Whether the yes and rule only works for comedy. * Pancakes. Are. Starchy. * Being late to your job that's on fire because you were stuck behind the fire truck. * Celebrating your own failures. * How to play Lemmings in 2024. * Self-esteem. * Immediately vibing with a new sport. * Autotuning except it's completely manual. * A bunch of joysticks that you twiddle with your fingers to do letters. * Colemak vs. Colemak DH. * Keyboards that are laid out in columns. * Splitting up the typing test into QWERTY, Dvorak and Colemak. * Palm Pilot Graffiti. * The Lord's Prayer in Gregg. * Shorthand. (Originally called Briefhand.) * Good ciphers for room escape puzzles. * Are QR codes based on the mazes in Zelda 2? * Flaky sea salt vs. coarse sea salt. * Adding a biting experience to make your food more heterogeneous. * Edible chemistry. * The last time you pinched salt. * Audially-rewarding salt grinders. * Science Youtuber Hank Green. * Warning pregnant women to not eat too much salty licorice. * Supertaster-outing Tic Tacs that regular people love but supertasters immediately vomit. * We've got a level six kaiju supertaster on our hands! * The guy who gets paid too much to taste ice cream. * The kind of person who doesn't salt their food but instead repeatedly licks a salt lick throughout the meal. * Heads swirling around like snow globes. * A poem that doesn't do anything with line breaks but does do something interesting with sentence lengths. * A poem that you might read on a bathroom stall. * Wearing the little hat and pulling on the cord that makes the horn toot. * The ecology that grows around the dumpster. * The crane swinging porta potties around. * An extremely expensive way to have fun * Heading towards the era of having kids. * Asking for payment for software that is not being maintained. * Minesweeper but X. * An idea that is worth doing but not obviously worth doing. * How to make Missile Command fun in a new and interesting way. * A boxing essay with questionable authenticity. * Strategies for enjoying Frog Fractions. * Rangers and the new way they handle animals. * Yes-anding whatever ideas come to you. * Ancient primals that were interlocked in battle. * Someone thinking of an idea. * Constantly listening for cues. * What do inanimate objects do? * Buying a giant bag of googly eyes and putting them on everything. * Not posting on Twitter.

Lords: * Jeff * http://dopeassvideogames.com/ * Tyriq * https://fourbitfriday.itch.io/ Topics: * The shame of not remembering any good jokes for kids and having to write jokes on the spot for impatient children * What's your favorite genre to consume that you have no interest in making (or think you'd suck at?) * High Sidin' * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5INAxH1HD7s * Poetry * https://poets.org/poem/poetry * Every mammal has a fish Microtopics: * Line of sight for the fog of war. * Plugging unplugging. * How to keep looking at TikTok when your phone is destroyed. * Telling your kid that Youtube broke. * Youtube videos that teach your child how to give a thumbs up. * Having more kids because it pays for itself. * Why did the princess have no dresses? * Explaining to a four year old about the $20 Sack Pyramid. * Weaning yourself off of saying /s by saying "wocka wocka" instead. * Teaching your kids better standards for comedy. * Snow White did this and then Belle was there and Ariel was there with her human legs. * The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen but for making pie. * Looking up knock knock jokes online. * Your kid finding your secret hoard of popsicle sticks and realizing you didn't just make all those jokes up from your head. * Things you want to have made but don't want to make * Trying to surprise yourself with your own level design. * Wallowing in the stuckness. * Whether game developers know when they're making a bad game. * Playtesting the shit out of a game because you enjoy playtesting so much. * Questionable hip hop. * Thrashy hyperpop. * Full-time access to a green screen and what it does to your head. * Comedy FMV games. * Making a career out of making bad art except it's funny and having to live with yourself. * Approachable game projects. * Pivoting from making an action RPG to making a Vampire Survivors clone in the space of a weekend. * Making a bunch of efforts and they're all terrible. * Whispering into a distortion pedal. * Putting your vocals through a bunch of effects pedals because your lyrics are terrible. * Enjoying an art creation process until you get too self conscious and ruin it. * Wallowing in the stuckness. * Making art and never showing it to anybody. * A twin stick shooter that's just for me. * Game Heads. * Onlookers getting hyphy. * "Side Show" by 415. * Back when Oakland was in the 415 area code. * Turning tight ones. * Turning brodies in an intersection while commuters look at your 15-inch subwoofers. * Rogue car events. * Game: the Games and Music Experience. * A lowrider with the entirely wrong number of switches. * Whether Boots Riley and Too Short still live in Oakland. * Aspirational trailer music choices. * Car Stealth: drive around a corner and hide. * Missing Rock Band but not missing it enough to install Fortnite. * Initiating taunts in Fortnite by strumming the guitar controller. * The immovable critic twinkling his skin. * Imaginary gardens with real toads in them. * Poetry with a diss track vibe to it. * Good going, dumbass, you got into poetry. * Whether poetry should rhyme. * Discriminating against business documents. * Putting a poem on genius.com and adding a "wocka wocka" annotation after every joke. * Spending an hour searching for animal names followed by "fish" * Which fish have the thickest bones? * Buffalo Fish Wings. * A fish that is way too big and shaped like the letter D. * Is Beyonce a Nicki Minaj friends?? * Grandma's big bowl of worsties. * Energy drinks that make you want to disassemble a clock radio. * Drinking C4. * The guy you know who always has at least three Red Bulls on him at all times. * Bringing home a one-of-a-kind Monet even though you know your roommate is a Monet fiend and will eat it immediately. * The Master P of devouring Kit Kats. * The Queen of Bites and Sips. * Your duty to eat snacks before they go bad. * Eating one marshmallow right now. * The shitposty garbage that made Twitter fun. * Here's some pants pooping jokes, wocka wocka.

Lords: * Mike * Jake Topics: * Cameras are peaking -- what's next? * Is the mysterious disappearing, or just mystery? * Preschool security practices * At the Feast in the Great Hall, by Ursula Leguin * https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/1-EFinaN.png * It's not boring to talk about dreams Microtopics: * The great state of Maine. * A project you've been working on for a long time. * Inventing a game developer community in Michigan. * Meaningful distinguishers on normal camera use. * A lukewarm decisionmaking process. * Computational photography. * Samsung's fake moon. * A camera that just guesses what you want to see so you don't even need to take the photo. * A massive endless feed of the same photo with different people in it. * Why people use cameras. * Whether photos exist. * Late stages of the product category. * People who need Photoshop to do their job. * Photo mode in real life. * A photo you can take later. * Adding a filter to make the guy in the background less likable. * Meals for the Ages * How to get from here to perfect ubiquitous service surveillance. * Theatrically pretending to be hit by a stationary car. * Going to the Gallagher movie and getting sprayed with watermelon. * There's just the one Bigfoot, it's the same Bigfoot every time. * Tomato sauces that are still delicious even if you learned the recipe from the Internet and not from a grandma. * Mysterious things backing into the shadows so they can remain mysterious. * Protecting mystery wherever you find it. * The Museum of Jurassic Technology. * Stepping inside someone else's very strange brain. * Dawn Wall. * An intensely detailed exploration of the surface of a cliff. * I wonder what it's like on the fucking moon? * Who painted the iconic cover of the Wrinkle in Time paperback. * The shoot-em-up cabinet you saw in the canteen at the US Embassy in Monrovia, Liberia before the first Liberian civil war and have never been able to find since. * A reaction to the lack of organic mystery in our lives. * The Case of the Missing Hit and Searching for Sugarman. * Wash over me, True Story. * Which phone checked the kid out of preschool. * Being on the list of services the insurance companies consider to have checked various boxes. * We got pins. We can do that. * The three bad four-digit pins. * Streamlining the process of rapidly accounting for all the children. * Developing a system that would deterministically move the needle in a useful way. * Blundering in the brightness. * Telling two events from the same perspective. * Ugly crying at your desk in a public workspace. * Spending way more time not alive than alive. * Something that we can experience on either side of our lives. * A Fire Take from Jake. * Waiter stress dreams. * A skill that you can hone. * One of the more fun channels in the discord. * Holding an increasingly large bag of stuff. * Waking up laughing until you realize your dream was not funny. * The consciousness wall between you and visualization. * Training yourself to let your mental imagery be visible. * Seeing clumps of color and interpreting them. * Doing an editing pass on your dreams before relating it to your friends. * Jay-Z's favorite bleu cheese Milkshakes. * Screwball horror. * A splash of furry content.

Lords: * Megan * Lexi Topics: * Erik Satie's performance indications * https://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?boardid=60&threadid=4497 * Instant food from other cultures (why isn't everyone eating maggi noodles??) * Seasonal decorations * Delhi Metro * https://docs.google.com/document/d/17k75ftxEn2xR-tJkLSV4H8st5BFAxPNxE3BNCXDI6Go/edit * Becoming Immortal by being predictable * Living in different climates (e.g. my experiences with the harsh winters of Chicago vs sweltering Austin TX summers) Microtopics: * Music implementation for The Lamplighters League. * Watching a streamer play games and asking them for a turn at the controls. * How to pronounce "Erik Satie." * How to pronounce "Gymnopedies." * Finding 100 umbrellas in your dead friend's apartment. * A list of Satie's performance indications. * Grandly forgetting the present. * With your bones dry and distant. * Playing music with your forehead. * Doing something to a piano. * Your boss sending a memo asking you to work with a shy piety. * Pizzicato vs. Bartok pizzicato. * Adding the hamburger so it's not just Helper. * What instant foods are missing from your food vocabulary. * Adding heavy cream to ramen broth. * Getting an apron so you can have a little costume when you cook. * Realizing that when you wear the apron you don't get food on your shirt. * A big bib for Big Jim. * Normalizing scoop bibs. * Kraft Dinner. * Halal certified instant stir fry noodles. * Ramen in a cup or ramen where you provide your own container. * Insurance Mac. * Canned cheeseburgers. * A boring house with nothing on it. * Movable feasts. * Keeping those 12-foot skeletons in your yard and decorating it seasonally. * The beetles that clean bones for you. * Recreational Explosives Day. * A Zachtronics programming puzzle for every holiday. * A movable feast where you don't eat. * Decorating your house to celebrate Toyotathon. * Falling for strangers and their blue hair. * A poem that is long if you read it but short if you recite it. * Taking public transit as an act of defiance. * A gift that is impossible to give yourself on purpose. * Inventing a shower proof phone so nobody ever has shower thoughts again. * Putting your phone in a Ziploc bag and watching movies underwater. * Sitting down at your computer and getting stuck. * Hacking your executive function by adding friction in the right places. * Whether Wellbutrin gives everyone tinnitus or just you. * Death hacks for staying mentally connected to your dead relatives. * A service that puts your podcast on vinyl. * Using CRISPR to infect the cockroach population with 229 episodes of Topic Lords. * Moving to a land where your snot doesn't freeze. * Not trusting your own weather opinions. * Surprising yourself by enjoying seasons. * Driving in icy conditions. * Standing under the heated lamps like a lizard. * Waiting for the bus in the dark. * Learning to drive after you move to a city with public transit. * Not driving with kids. * Getting rid of all the bots. * Sgt. Pepper Bot.

Lords: * Fif * Mitch Topics: * The Ace Attorney series' English localization's naming conventions * The kissing mechanic in Bully represents both what is genius and terrible about the game * Podcast Prep Sheet Trending Guests and Topics * The Tay Bridge Disaster * https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/tay-bridge-disaster/ * No but seriously what the hell is up with the user interface in Bully. I assume it's just a Rockstar thing? I'm only into Bully so it is a mystery * Comments that say "why did the algorithm recommend this to me" * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1LhdhQEKtg Microtopics: * Two handfuls of times. * Something very fivey about hands. * Dependability and a detail-oriented nature. * Putting your resume in the show notes. * Naming your kid a list of two things. * A story taking place in a Los Angeles that is a satire of near future Japan. * Naming games after verbs. * Mario Push Button. * The Haiku-detecting tumblr bot. * Imagining an opinion and searching for someone who has it so you can yell at them. * All the time we have for Topic Lords. * Kissing a kissable person. (They have kissability.) * A dress-up fashion thing. * Wearing a reindeer patterned jumper to reduce your kissability. * Applying triple-A polish to a boarding school setting. * Dorms in a castle. * Hey, nice face. * Demographics based on what classes you have to take to kiss members of the demographic. * Dressing in real life like you do in a Grand Theft Auto game. * The one character in the entire GTA series that cares about the clothes you wear. * Secrets Behind the Suite: Unveiling the Hidden World behind Luxury Hotels. * Eco-friendly or Eco-fail? * Law and Disorder: how TV crime shows get it wrong. * Sending an email to yourself and it gets detected as spam. * The friend who has a lot of opinions about Homestuck. * Making your hearts for to quail. * Poems including civil engineering advice. * Good vs. bad nonsense poems. * A fun poem to read. * Paying money to engage with content. * Deliberately slipping on a banana peel. * What it says about hitting in the Banana Rules. * School administrators publishing statistics on how many banana peels you've slipped on. * Skyrim spoiling the presence of robots on the stats screen. * Watching what players do and rewarding every action they take. * A good video game is a game that has three good stats screens and no bad stats screens. * Having a question in your head and not knowing who to ask so you ask the person in front of you. * Youtube koans. * Showing content to someone who will be not that jazzed about it. * Youtube recommending a let's-play from a year ago with 10 views. * A PMV of the character you are obsessed with. * The only person who takes a the Youtube Creator Surveys. * Constantly deleting the shorts. * Posting a tweet to youtube.com. * Posting a link to your own videos on Youtube. * Community captions and what happened to them. * Doing annotations dirty. * Nekoneko. * Comments popping up and scrolling across the screen constantly. * Listening to a cassette tape you dug up in the desert.

Lords: * Erica * Kory * https://kbones.itch.io/ Topics: * Mystery Hunt 2024 * Developing my first video game * Wearing glasses prevents COVID * English Ending Song, by Ryoji Yoshitomi * https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/AxA-XP8E.png * How to make satisfying non-violent gameplay * @DJTentMode@mstdn.party Microtopics: * Letting go of concepts of yourself that you believe. * Losing a concept of yourself as a person and just becoming free-floating thoughts. * 47 year old house painters. * Growing up to be a pluripotent human being. * Finding cool and positive Internet spaces to hang out in. * Excavating old Bubsy memorabilia. * Checking the maps on your telephone. * Defining yourself as someone who doesn't eat free cheese samples. * Scientists researching how to be cool and cringe at the same time. * 2023 Game of the Year Gordy and the Monster Moon. * Protocols and processes that presume that if you are good at solving puzzles then you must also be good at designing puzzles. * The humble beginnings of the MIT Mystery Hunt. * Puzzle Inflation. * Instant stooging. * People who are obligated to prevent their children from dying. * Server migration problems. * Accidentally writing the same puzzle as someone else. * Premium content for listeners who want to subscribe. * Putting sprites on the screen and accepting controller input. * Game design by proxy. * Your local Barcade with a Pico-8 cabinet. * Buttoning up a game to make it a shippable product. * Whether the knife is detecting a dork. * Butter golems. * Bugs that make games more fun. * Building a high end gaming PC and only running Pico-8 on it * I can't believe they buttered Jorts! * Meeting the guy who runs the Indie Arcade at Magfest. * Waiting 40 years for opportunities to fall in your lap. * Think Buick. * A cat that is not on the show. * Of all the exposed mucus membranes on your face, the eyes are two of them. * Projectile transmission. * Did this COVID infection rate study control for popularity? * Hitting 40 and embracing the cringe. * Wearing chemistry goggles in public. * Myopic basketball players. * Things you can put on your face to look like a superhero in disguise. * The Wario Land 4 soundtrack. * Making ogg vorbis rips of the Wario Land 4 soundtrack to put on Napster. * A gem of a poem to be hidden in a Wario game. * Playing back vocals with single-syllable samples. * Our collective dream diary. * Your dreams melting into your pillow with all the dust mites. * Everything is impermanent, especially video games. * A shocking removal of an important human from your life. * Making your peace with the time you have forgotten. * The natural high you get from blowing things up. * Throwing apples at a Snorlax until it wakes up. * Cooking games. * Matching happy looking fruits of different sizes. * Watching carefully as two peaches slide together. * Designing video games for 5-year olds on T. * Dropping things that merge in a two dimensional space with gravity. * The boy has two dads. * What can I do that is nonviolent and crunchy and interesting and solvable? * Looking for inspiration outside of video games.

Lords: * Ryan * Alexander Topics: * Getting so agitated that you cook dinner * What's an acquired taste that's worth acquiring? What's one that's not worth the effort? What's the point of even "acquiring" a taste for anything when there are probably infinite options you don't have to teach yourself to enjoy? * Texturally enhanced alternative beverage * Bagme Bloma * https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Bagme_Bloma Microtopics: * How the science gets done. * Measuring the height of a flagpole by measuring its shadow. * Using calculus to find the surface area of a potato. * Measuring and re-measuring until you get the result you want. * Confronting your professor about their involvement in Frog Fractions 2. * Country and Western music fused with synth heavy prog rock. * Using the gun to parallel park. * That time Ryan died while recording Topic Lords. * Getting so agitated that you do some differential equations. * New guy just dropped: guy who whenever he thinks about death he has to make a sandwich. * The first step towards rejecting a task: assessing the task. * Today is a good day to fill your Prius with snakes. * The Raccoon Prius story. * Hilarious mothers. * The inside of a Prius: nothing but corners. * Officer, it's not what you think. No, not that either. * Putting the AC on so the python in the back seat gets sluggish. * Getting a fork and spoon and twirling up snakes like spaghetti. * A taste worth busting your ass for. * An oral history of tricking alcohol post your tongue. * An entire generation that has never had to work to enjoy things because there are so many things that are easy to enjoy. * Twelve year olds from Alabama calling you a cuck. * New ideas that you haven't been thinking of even without looking at your phone. * Hiking: it's just hard walking. * Getting so agitated that you developed a taste for hiking. * The guy in the Fred Meyer buying Reese's cups while wearing a tuxedo. * The Men's Wearhome. * The Men's Wearhouse employee who is not allowed to tell you that they don't have anything for fat people so he brings out less and less flattering outfits until you take the hint. * Orbitz. (The soft drink from 1996.) * A proto-boba. * Drinking a random test tube from a bioengineering lab. * What if everyone had a number floating above their heads that represented the number of times they had to drink Orbitz before they developed a taste for Orbitz and now that Orbitz is out of production everyone's number stays the same forever * Big Dick's Energy. * Flavor-blasted slushies. * The sense-horror of drinking an Orbitz. * Shelf-stable tapioca pearls. * A free-to-play game for your tongue. * Texturally subdued beverages. * Decaf Red Bull. * The hypothetical beverage enthusiast who wants a decaf Red Bull. * How to make Orbitz in your toilet. * How many Orbitz you have to drink to reach Nirvana. * eBay sellers insisting that you don't drink the thirty year old novelty beverage they're selling you. * Thinking a poem is a Middle Earth thing but it's actually a regular Earth thing. * Poetry that is alliterative rather than rhyming. * Making art by fucking around with a new medium. * Music in a foreign language. * What Simlish sounds like in different languages. * A quest to discover why they started dotting the letter Y. * Expecting scrolls in 3 to 5 days.

Lords: * CisHetKayfaber * BaseCase Topics: * Raising third cultural kids as a second cultural individual * Figuring out how to do creative projects that take longer than a weekend when you aren't getting paid for them. * Someone sent me money on Venmo and now I need to sign up for Venmo if I want to have the money * Farmyard Song * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmyard_Song * https://www.elyrics.net/read/a/aaron-copland-lyrics/i-bought-me-a-cat-lyrics.html * We've been subscribed to Universal Yums for over a year now, and the sweet snacks range from "unremarkable" to "unbelievably great" to "not my cup of tea but interesting", whereas the savory snacks are mostly bad. What's going on there? Microtopics: * Not being permitted to plug anything. * A unique situation in which you are gendered a lot less. * Australian Treat Arnott's Mint Slice. * Crossover of snacks from Australia to Japan. * Gentleman's agreements among cookie manufacturers. * Patenting your cookie recipe. * Touring school administrators. * Being friends with a lot of Coca Cola people. * Really enjoying multiculturalism. * Producing a good person. * Taking credit for the time your daughter didn't play Mario for six months. * Focusing on the aspects of the situation that you find meaningful. * What does and doesn't count as a childhood development milestone. * Being good at the work people are expecting you to do. * Doing worksheets outside. * What children report back from their experience at school. * Attempting to pirate the Montessori curriculum. * A really fun month. * Projects you can accomplish in a weekend. * Why you don't have more to show for all your free time. * Refusing to call someone stupid or lazy and having to figure out why they're actually failing. * Coping strategies to get things done. * Advice that is not helpful for neurodivergent people. * Breaking a task into subtasks and putting them on a schedule. * The first time you encountered the concept of a to-do list. * Brain tech. * Hammock time. (Or shower time.) * Showers: It's Wet In There. * Exultation of showers. * Watching someone start a hobby and immediately excel at it. * Finding a good community to learn how to do a thing. * Joining a discord with experts in many things. * Learning how to program and realizing that this makes you good at everything because programming is the hardest thing humans do. * Sending money to a phone number vs. sending money to an email address. * Canadians wishing each other money. * Nice things to do when you don't want to defraud people. * Opening a whole raft of phishing opportunities. * Visa getting a cut of every transaction that happens ever. * Whether every person in the world could live in Canada. * The Cocaine Mayor. * A traditional that is credited to Aaron Copeland. * Cats saying "fiddle-eye-fee." * Not being a raging misogynist but engaging in raging misogyny anyway. * The era when the onomatopoeia for a dog barking was "bow wow." * Onomatopoeia that is literal like "bang" vs. onomatopoeia that is more of a stretch like "shimmy shack shimmy shack." * Riffing on Aaron Copeland's sexuality. * Trying to shit enough to keep up with your toilet paper subscription. * A product built for people who have kids but do not have kids. * The mechanism by which the "Launch Frog Fractions 2" button launched Frog Fractions 2. * The great Loot Box crash of 2019. * Snacks that come with an instruction manual. * Ketchup flavored potato chips. * What you reach for when you're feeling snacky. * A potato chip palate that is just far too sophisticated. * Smoked ham potato chips. * Harry Potter jelly beans ruining snacks forever. * Only liking eating things that taste good. * This is bad, but is it bad in a new, interesting way? * The worst kind of bad. * Observing a terrible sprawling work and thinking "wow, you really did a thing here." * The recontextualization of earlier elements based on later knowledge. * Discord Lords. * Listening to ads because you have gloves on. * How to join the Topic Lords discord. * A recently minted lord who edits the show. * Lords Eat Free.

Lords: * Jason * https://jmac.org/ * https://masto.nyc/@jmac * Nathan * Mommy's Best Games Everywhere Topics: * When I paint my nails I don't paint my thumbnails. This is because I see my thumbnails all day long but I don't see my other fingernails nearly as often, and so every time I do I'm like "Whoa!!!!" * Jukebox griefing * Nintendo farmed out the development of Donkey Kong to an outside dev team, because they didn't have an in-house video game team yet. Donkey Kong was that team's first game. Their second game was Zaxxon. * Hypothetical explanations for the paradox * https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/bZmUoKct.png * Thinking about RGB color programming for games, then wondering about how the color actually happens on monitors. * Bach drew a loopy doodle at the top of the cover of his original manuscript of "The Well Tempered Clavier". It looks like he was just warming up his pen-hand, but scholars have been arguing for years that it contains secret codes about how to well-temper a clavier Microtopics: * Interactive Fiction Land. * Panoptikum Budapest. * Bumpy Grumpy's emotional arc. * Frantic Frank. * Men and male-presenting persons with painted nails. * Painting just one fingernail dark green and wondering whether that's a hankie code thing. * What's going on with my thumbs? * Your non-thumb fingernails. * Painting your nails and repeatedly rediscovering them. * Looking like an android. (But in a cool way.) * Forehead loaves. * Starting to pay attention to where your fingers are. * Why not to wear a magnetic nose stud. * Being old enough to remember when you had to walk up to the jukebox to queue up Beat It by Michael Jackson ten times in a row. * Getting into a jukebox griefing war with someone you've never met. * Walking up to the jukebox and typing in the binary code of the WAV file you want to play. * Binary data played back at audio rates. * The math describing Mario's jump arc. * Making the first racing video game and thinking "well that's racing games sorted." * Satoru Iwata's understanding of Mario's last name. * Mario: a weird little dude. * Drill Dozer. * How to run a video game business when games are sold on cassette tape for six pounds which is way too heavy for a video game. * Platformers where you go off the edge of the screen and end up on another screen and each screen has a name. * Inflation hypothesis and the youngness argument. * Earth is purposefully isolated. (Planetarium hypothesis.) * They are here undetected vs. they are here unacknowledged. * Arguing about a sexy robot. * Ironically Sexy Robots * The Fudd Paradox, by Ray Bradbury. * People who just want to toss salad and don't want to know about your weird slang. * Gender-expansive anthropomorphic rabbits. * Blank verse vs. free verse. * Burning Monkey Solitaire. * What your cat sees when he's swatting at Kratos. * How blue is blue? * Watching old episodes of Bob Ross and you can't follow along any more because they don't make Mummy Brown anymore. * The Opaque See-Through TV. * Seeing a see-through TV at CES and asking the guy at the booth what use case is of a see-through TV and he's like "to look cool at CES." * Ribbed monitors. * The secret textures of the Nintendo 3DS. * All kinds of words that you don't know how to pronounce. * The Moogseum. * Bach's looping doodle. * The structure of the J.S. Bach speedrunning community. * A community obsessing over minutia and never worrying about whether it's true or important because it's just some bullshit you made up and agreed to care about. * Hungry music theorists who need human connection. * Sponsoring AGDQ with your clavier etudes. * Black MIDI. * Using up all the claviers in the world during your clavier speedrunning event. * The Fetaverse. * Making an arcade cabinet.

Lords: * Andrew * https://kittenm4ster.neocities.org/ * Aubrianne Topics: * Knitting patterns are open source clothing * This one weird trick will make your videogame feel original * Esper says: "JRPGs are just menu games. Everything that's happening is an option in a menu doing some math, there's almost never timing involved. Why do they have to be 'battles?' I've always wanted to make a JRPG set in 1990 where instead of getting in battles, you're just a band from Detroit on tour. There's probably enough going on that you could make interesting JRPG 'battles' and story and characters out of that. 'Audience response' as an HP meter that goes up instead of down, I guess." * I noticed myself using insert. It turns out I use insert. * https://genius.com/Shel-silverstein-the-garden-annotated * Esper says: "The best summation of Black Mirror I ever heard was: 'Can I have an apple?' 'No, there are only Cyber Apples.' 'Can I have a Cyber Apple?' 'No.'" * Aphantasia but for audiation. Is that a thing? * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wW3LE8scke8 Microtopics: * Wool socks. * The thing Jim heard about wool. * Making a rope out of human hair. * Whether there are multiple Columbos or just one. * Which one of you is the programmer and which one is the rubber duck? * A human 3D printer. * Keeping your hands busy. * Stim vs. fidget. * How to end a conversation that is not during a D&D session. * Discovering that your entire personality is a coping mechanism. * YarnTube. * The fine line between dressing like a grandma and dressing like a really slutty grandma. * It's a tube. Figure it out. * Doing it badly until you figure out how to do it better. * Making a game that is fun even if it doesn't have health bars. * Instead of doing the easy and obvious things, do something really hard instead. * Why video games have conflict. * Disaccord between you and everyone else in the video game. * Definitely arguably. * Kids learning from people who are not their parents. * Smashing a bunch of things together until fun emerges. * It's not a game where you jump over pits and it's not a game where you hit people with swords so what even is it?? * Dating anime ladies by clicking through text. * A caveat among recommenders. * Video game dialog that makes you feel conflicted about shooting Nazis. * Remembering people's tweets. * The Rule of Thirds of video game dialog. * Executing a bad idea very well. * No One Weird Trick for learning to play cello. * The insert key as part of your typing repertoire. * Whether pause/break still works. * A keyboard without the LinkedIn key. * Getting your grandma online. * Pushing the pizza key on the keyboard and the CD-ROM drive opens and there it is. * Rifled plumbing that allows sewage to flow in a clockwise spiral while clean water flows in a counterclockwise spiral and they never touch. * A surprise poem where none of your fruit is food. * How to make a poem fit on Pinterest. * No combat in my poems. * Doing your best to make a good thing but never thinking your own work is good even after you experience great success. * A grocery list with a Black Mirror twist ending. * Having money in Venmo but you need to sign up for Venmo to get it. * Listening to a thing if you want to know what it sounds like. * Anauralia: the silent mind. * It takes your whole brain to be you, it doesn't have time to be other people too. * Not watching Black Mirror so that you can believe everyone when they tell you lies about Black Mirror. * It was Emma Thompson all along. * The difficulty of remembering Maggie Gyllenhaal. * Getting ripped while sitting motionless at your desk. * That fat jiggling machine from the 50s. * A weighted hula hoop to massage your guts. * Jorts Horse. * A bunch of millennials shitposting. * Trying to distribute your games locally by stapling a floppy disk to a telephone pole * Microtransaction pump games. * Sneaking into an arcade with a new arcade game in your back pocket and furtively shoving your new game between two existing arcade games.

Lords: * Chris * Esper Topics: * Geocaching * The Miyoo Mini and other handheld emulation consoles * I still think I could've made it as a highly paid Super Mario Bros. 35 coach. I should've gone for it. * There's Not a Person Alive by David Donihue * https://medium.com/@daviddonihue/theres-not-a-person-alive-poem-by-david-n-donihue-a1fcd714cc99 * The strange semiparasocial relationship between a podcast editor and the people on the podcast * Struggling to relearn high school Spanish Microtopics: * The editor of a podcast. * The #1 podcast for topic fans. * Chopping at some audio until it becomes a podcast. * Editing a recording into a podcast that's nothing but ums, mouth smacking noises and uncomfortable silence. * Zoom dynamically sensing when you're saying something dumb or boring and muting you. * Saying yes with the Sonic ring noise and no with the Sonic taking damage noise. * A cozy pleasant show full of fun facts. * Prepping for a paradigm. * How to put audio on film. * Going on a web forum and receiving a quest to find a magnetic box stuck underneath a metal staircase. * Geocaching on the Moon. * Geocaching vs. Geohashing. * A French pun for your board game night that nobody can remember because it's in French. * c:geo. * Finding a geocache by climbing a tree and pulling a paperclip attached to a fake piece of bark. * What to do if you're the one who picks up a travel bug. * Fake bolts where the center unscrews and it's hollow inside. * Developing a sense for when a geocache is nearby and always being wrong. * Miyoo Mini Plus. * Custom firmware that fixes your terrible handheld game system. * The Dream of the Playdate. * The Anbernic R something something letters numbers. * C-ctrl. * Going back to the Tekken 3 well. * A video game bar in Japan that only has Americans in it. * A very reasonable number of video games to flip through. * Emulators with daily runs. * Multi Bowl. * A game that legally can not exist. * Johann Sebastian Joust and its meta. * Getting one point in Rampage. * Advice that can literally no longer be helpful for anybody. * How to be an effective Goomba. * Looking at Jim's win/loss ratio and being inspired. * As Garfield said, "nothing good can stay." * A stainless soul lying inspired. * Bad experiences shared by every human. * A very smooth-brained day * Rampant poetry plagiarism on TikTok. * A food ASMR video where someone is repeatedly stabbing chicken with a fork. * Videos of hamsters running in wheels while listening to Dragula by Rob Zombie. * Whether the fish enjoys playing Pokemon. * A sweet 16 bracket of Best Kinds of Shark. * Rerecording the Topic Lords jingle with a swarm of bees. * The qualifications required for the person who designs electric car backing up noises. * Which apps to use to help you remember Spanish. * Speedrunning High School Spanish. * Learning Japanese from anime. * A 24/7 Livestream of digital cats lying around the house. * Hallucinating new languages around the house. * 52 Pickup with Gita Jackson and Alex Jaffee, about the most important comic book series of this century.

Lords: * Chris * Alex Topics: * Living without software updates * I like Cyberpunk 2077 * I had a friend who would argue with the people collecting signatures in support of a proposed law. Not about the proposal itself, but the methodology behind it. * PIECE A SHIT, possibly by Sam Pink * https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/Kl_AeoXl.jpg Microtopics: * Lords of Topics. * Asking your mom if this Thanksgiving turkey is Frog Fractions 3. * Haiku Hero. * How to talk to the press. * An email from the guy who sent me the quirky thing from before. * The Last Biceps. * Filling your house with electronics that continuously ask you to do things. * How to interact with the Internet on an old un-updated computer. * Snap craft something or other. * Turning off Windows updates for over a year and nothing bad happens because security best practices are bullshit. * Visiting twinbeard.com to find out about the beads in Jim's ears. * Searching Google for the little balls in your ears. * Your phone popping up a window saying "you're a year and a half out of date, would you like to update?" and hitting the back button as fast as you can. * Windows updates adding AI functionality to MS Paint. * Making uneducated guesses about how someone else's code works. * Searching for a program on your computer and Windows gives you Bing results for that program's name. * A sneaky hacker man doing non lethal takedowns. * Making a complicated video game and then patching it into a completely different complicated video game after the guides have all been written. * Trying to explain to someone why the story of Half-Life is cool and realizing halfway through your explanation that it's not that cool actually. * Cool things that build immersion. * A guy saying "have a seat" and a contextual actionicon appearing over a chair. * Voluminous closets full of costumes for virtual dress-up. * Delivering exposition in cars. * All the weird things people will put on their body in the cyber future. * A fictional city halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. * Recovering a stolen painting by showing a satellite. * A city with lots of neat stuff to do. * Querulous Friend's Advocate. * The Everyone Gets a Pony Initiative of 2023. * Filibustering people collecting signatures in front of the grocery store. * How much do you believe in the political causes you're promoting? * Watching your friend play games in a little window on your second monitor. * Mr. Feeny recording car AI voices. * Getting into World of Warcraft because you are stressed about starting a new job. * Level 1 Superman killing rats to collect 10 rat pelts. * Fun ways to fight crowds of mooks. * The things you see on your limbs when you see your limbs. * Replacing all the mirrors with cyber mirrors. * The doctor pulling out your cyber eyes and putting them in a drawer and all you can see is the inside of the drawer. * Lost games dev techniques such as palette swaps. * A screenshot of a book. * A poem painting a picture of a time and place. * Maybe Sam Pink. * Writing a bunch of messages to someone and making their phone vibrate every five seconds for a full minute. * Notification throttling. * Fanciful technological panaceas. * Ultra poetry where each line has animation and timing. * Making a word wiggle in a sine wave to indicate that it's a spooky ghost noise. * Poem Lords. * Seven poems on the itinerary. (But we'll only have time for three of them.)

Lords: * Abby * https://abbydenton.podbean.com/ * Michael * https://www.tinybarbarian.com/ * https://dawnoftimecomics.com/ Topics: * That moment when the podcast ads don't play * Lobsang Rampa * I had a dream where I needed to recolor my teeth. Why don't video game character creators support this? * "I've Been Writing You A Poem," by Abby Denton * Cats you can ride, pre-He Man Microtopics: * Cyber Cafe. * Tiny Barbarian DX. * An exciting new way to give me money. * The gamut of barbarian sizes. * Learning the power of chat from Alan Partridge. * A podcast deciding that you're not worth advertising to. * Launching into the jokes and the fiending. * 99% Inaudible. * Elvira's lawful good rival. * Sugarhill Oiljack. * Roundtree's fruit pastilles. * A more colorful playful treat time. * The comic book guy sizing you up and stapling appropriate ads into the comic you're buying. * Finding out a lot of very interesting information about Texas Railroad Commissioner and forgetting it all immediately. * Page after page of ads and then a back cover. * A hardcore Bush-era ad explaining that Klonoa's gonna kill your mom. * Two Dollar Groos. * Writing a fan letter to the guy who letters Groo the Wanderer. * Groo ASMR on GrooTube. * A man in the 50s. (And the 60s.) * A plumber from London who found success writing books about Tibetan mysticism. * What English sounds like to an Italian speaker. * Prisencolinescionalciusol. * Lobsang Rampa getting an extra bump from people misspelling Danganronpa. * Painting your teeth mother of pearl. * The Xbox 360s mii knockoffs. * Breath of the Wild's NPC faces. * Mr. Potato Head Plug and Play Mouth. * Mainly a tooth-oriented game. * Dentists wearing a back sack over their head. * How dentures happen. * Insulin price caps. * Explaining to the nice lady who works at the grocery store that the company she works for is monstrous. * Trashy people in all walks of life. * Why shouldn't I be able to give Bayonetta missing teeth? * Post-hoc nightmares where they only upset you after you wake up. * The bladder comes to me, I don't go to the bladder. * Changing the scansion on the fly. * Writing a poem for a relative who won't appreciate it. * Whether children only like 3D animation now. * Whether it's cheaper to do 3D or 2D animation. * Wanting to play with the person you see even though they can't step out of the phone. * People who love being perceived. * This poem's threen. * Vamping about an ambiguous number because of diabetes. * Feeling shaky even though you are not shaking. * Fat cats in Washington and what they're sitting on. * Two people in the universe with perfectly incompatible needs. * The only member of your family who didn't go into the hard sciences. * The giant cats in Tom and Jerry going their weird shifting their muscles walk. * A mockery of a crown. * There he is; the poopy man. * Thinking of a man riding on a cat. * The Lure of the Basilisk. * The Gandalara Cycle. * Teleport vs. New Body. * A big cat-riding opportunity. * Riding around on a cat made of pure vinyl. * How did Cringer get like that, Prince Adam? * Little jokes you do with your partner. * Wingor, Trunkor and Unkor. * She-Ra taking it back from the boys.

Lords: * Jay * Jenni * https://youtube.com/@kiwami-japan?si=z03WRlRnur883JkN Topics: * The dying art of learning a skill on a message board, such as pixel art or having long hair * The Baldur's Gate 3 butthole chart * https://www.reddit.com/r/BaldursGate3/comments/16dlml1/beholdthechartevermade/ * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGhcSupkNs8 * Is giving people ideas helpful? * https://itch.io/jam/picostevemo * James asks "Why is configuring the thing more enjoyable than using the thing?" * I read one time that the way you know if you live urbanly or rurally is if you live in the city you know a place and if you live in the country you have a guy Microtopics: * Three people with social anxiety. * Your left ear not working at the post office. * 80 people in a post office screaming at each other. * Keeping your broken item and just buying another because you don't want to go to the post office. * Naming your band after a way to transmit audio. * I'm good that they're exist. * Getting your New Year's Resolution off of the Mastodon Tooter. * Finding a kid at Applebee's to sit next to. * Forming a seal on your face when there's hair. * A hip burger or hot dog joint hanging a sign saying "Take it to Squirts-Town" over their condiment counter. * An app to track how much emotional load you've dumped on each friend recently. * Preparing to hold space for your feelings. * Going outside and banging on pots and pans at midnight. * Getting really into Casey Kasem's Rockin' New Year. * Getting twelve grapes and trying to eat a grape on every bong of the clock. * How far apart are the bongs? * Whack it for a huge dong! * The second message board you signed up for. (After The Sims.) * Entirely abandoning the idea of drawing with your hands. * The Three Tile Rule. * New Year, New Wife! * Being approached in a Trader Joe's by a guy who runs a message board for men with long hair. * How to find people to follow on Cohost. * Searching for a technical issue on the internet and finding a post on a message board asking your question and the answer is to "google it." * Message boards about tying knots. * A ghost giving you a hug. * Shadebobs and searching on Youtube for shadebobs. * Shadebob Squarepixels. * Turn-based speed runs. * Oxygenarian runs. * Starting with meat. Ending with meat. * Whether it's okay to do a Butthole Chart for people who are still alive. * The Shade of the Butthole. * Special people with hairy buttholes. * When God asks you to bring him 50 buttholes, what body parts he'll accept as the butthole. * Butthole purism. * Personality traits that correspond with butthole traits in popular culture. * What to do if you don't like the shade or the smell of your butthole. * Going on T because you want a hairier butthole. * Whether billionaires are real people. * The Butthole of Dorian Gray. * Hiring a person to take care of your butthole situation. * Making eye contact with the guy who cleans Jeff Bezos's butthole but you can't stop and help, you have to catch your train. * PiCoSteveMo outcomes. * Self-driving taxis paving the entire planet. * Suggesting ideas as a way to make sure nobody will implement those ideas. * Receiving a new CD for Christmas in the post-Napster era. * What we can still use as stocking stuffers now that CDs and DVDs don't make sense any more. * Your life partner going through a Brandon Sanderson phase and giving you a huge Brandon Sanderson book to read. * What you call the plug that goes into a plug. * Getting paid to learn to solder. * Deliberately introducing mpeg artifacts into a video stream. * How to troubleshoot a motherboard now that they don't beep any more. * How many Intels they're up to now. * A memory of fun that you can't go back to. * Awful Fantasy. * Putting a foul-mouthed rom hack on your SNES Classic and then forgetting that happened when you give it away to your friends' kids. * Imagining how great a product is going to be while you're buying the product. * Asking for a toy for Christmas even though you know you'll never make time for it. * Going to a friend's house and seeing a bajillion guitar pedals that you can't afford. * Giving your guitar pedals away to someone who'll actually use them rather than just reselling them. * Hanging out with the kind of person who's playing Rock Band in 2023. * The only generation that learned how to use computers. * Worrying that the five year old computer geniuses are going to hack your foot so you can't walk. * Living in New Holstein Wisconsin and needing psychic healing. * Living in the city and having a place you go to for hot dogs vs. living in the country and having a guy you call for hot dogs and he comes to your house with a suitcase full of hot dogs and a USB-C grill. * Moving to the country so you can hang out of the hot dog guy. * A place that's not even really a place because you can't catch Pokemon there. * Two Guys and a Place. * Bringing independent gas stations their coffee. * Yacht Man Cologne. * Stuff You're Not Allowed To Eat dot com. * Arguing with GPT-4 until it agrees that your Garfield dating sim idea is ethical. * Putting on your face shoes. * This Is Cake Bread! * Tholen vs. Tholen.

Lords: * Stevie * Avery Topics: * A tour of silly medieval musical instruments * The House of David, the baseball cult who all looked like oldtimey barbers. * Arguing with Winston about how needing to pee works * Avery's Non Mammalian Milk Corner * Ode on the Mammoth Cheese Weighing over 7,000 Pounds * https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/content/ode-mammoth-cheese-weighing-over-7000-pounds Microtopics: * Why the show works like that. * Asking people if they understand what's going on. * Spy software. * Exactly the kind of game you don't want to explain. * Someone who has a sense of humor and thinks something is funny. * A hat you can put on your frog. * Why frogs are so damn popular. * The game with the magnifying glass. * Whether the recorder is a real instrument or a crappy toy for babies. * Just how thicc this bass recorder is * The supercomputer that's also a couch. * Talking to your mom on the phone for 45 minutes because she can't stop listing medieval instruments. * Recorders that are double recorders. * Michael Fassbender teaching his clone how to play the flute. * Eating a pair of garden shears. * An umbrella handle that was given growth hormones that sounds kind of like a stylophone. * An instrument that is curved so that you can play it on horseback without bonking the horse. * The sackbut. * A selfie stick but for a trombone. * Sausage bassoons. * Unholy Rackett. * How long how many strings look it up? * Insufflation tubes and dudelsacks.. * Versatile, like the Pogues. * Bears riding unicycles but not very well. * Overblowing. * Jim the Overblower. * Bringing up bugles to someone who works hospice. * How many songs you can play on a bugle. * Not wanting to play Beatles Rock Band because you with at BevMo. * A photo of an early 20th century cult/baseball team that looks like a modern-day metal band. * Not being able to make it to the majors so you settle for House of Dave. * Someone who's never played Blaseball trying to explain Blaseball. * Amusement parks started by cults. * A pretty good way to end a baseball league. * Additional amusement. * Preserving tiny railways built by a baseball cult. * A busy man who has no time to pee. * Peristalsis. * Persons currently experiencing hubris. * What happens to your knowledge when you're not actively thinking about it. * When you can truly say you know the capital of the United States. * Waking up needing to pee and trying to fall back to sleep so that you forget you need to pee. * Having a dream about urinals overflowing. * Cutting nature at its joints. * Preparing for Topicking. * Whether the Jejune Institute made money. * When Sacky Meets Butty. * Signing a contract in someone else's blood. * Yet another non-mammalian milk. * Jacked, yoked, ripped and swole spiders. * Imagery that's only unsettling because you don't regularly drink spider milk. * Vestigial web butts. * Sympathy for the young. * Putting on a spider silk dress and never being able to take it off. * A communal spider butthole web. * Blinded by the milk, wrapped up in a douche. * The first boutique New York restaurant to serve spider milk pancakes. * Cutting out all the parts where people say something dumb. * Drum Pants. (It turns your pants into a drum set.) * We have seen the a Queen of Cheese. * The worst rhyme scheme. * A poem that screams 5th grade. * Why does this web site have line numbers? * Are you a bad enough dude to save the president's cheese? * A poetic technique that can be really cool (but not in this poem) * Confusing this mammoth cheese with another mammoth cheese. * The most mammalian of all mammals. * My Mother Milked a Million Mostly Male Mammoths. * A huge ice cream tub carried by four ponies. * 35 tons of milk * Extremely fake beards. * A thing people once said to sell chicken.

Lords: * Maxx * Nick Topics: * Puzzmo * I'm worried about my tableware rotation strategy * Ennigaldi-Nanna's museum * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ennigaldi-Nanna's_museum * It Was A Coffin That Sang, by Olena Davis * https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/xBLG36yN.png Microtopics: * Instead of giving someone a business card, stamping your information on them so they have to call you before they take a shower. * Where's George? * George isn't here. George was never here. * Canadians looking forward to when they can walk around with King Charles' face in their pocket. * Giving the barista a coupla chucks for a cup of coffee. * Money with RadarSat on it. * inaturalist dot org. * Taking a photo of a weird plant with a weird seed pod. * The fantasy of collecting information. * The game where you try to name every street in San Francisco. * Running all the streets in your city over the course of a decade. * Games Genie. * Lexicographic Ordering and Time Travel. * A sanctioned topic. (It's on the list.) * Wario Ware presenting you with a full sized crossword and giving you six seconds to solve it. * A fun little histogram. * Finally implementing the letter T. * Doing the crossword on paper and making your daughter enter your answers into the app. * Will Shortz coming out of his orb to carry out a hit on a competing puzzle. * Fugue Orbs. * Comparing the interface design of Connections and Red Herring. * Things Relating to Wonder Woman. * Extremely well SEO'd pestilences. * Arranging your dinner plates in a stack vs. in a queue. * Using all your plates evenly so they all break at the same time. * Rotating the Stock. * The dangers of Low-Sodium Perpetual Stew. * Default plates from the food service factory. * Airplane boarding algorithms and how to convince everyone in the terminal to follow yours. * Plates that are made for using. * A whole Jefferson, in your Republic dollars. * The urge to queue. * Lanesplitting your backpack. * History: it's a lot older than we think * Ancient cash registers. * Pranksters organizing the topic bucket. * How many museums deep are we? * The human wife. * Efficient.. Successful. Human. * Top five lists of your life. * How small a flavoring agent has to be to be considered a spice. * A twelve foot tall statue of either Zeus or Poseidon. * Myth- and Nationhood- Making. * A museum where you can feel wood cut with various tools. * Hearing about a cool metalworking museum but fixating on how the bathroom works. * Cool Bathroom Ghost. * The toilet commenting on your performance. * Piping bookshop noises into your bathroom. * Robert Stack's Solved Mysteries. * Being sad and trying to have a good sadness. * Michael Brough talking about his design process. * Fun exercise vs. shitty boring exercise. * What to do about the world ending. * Driving in circles around the McDonald's drive-thru ordering more and more coffee until they catch on. * Telling a joke on Twitter and an archaeologist getting it 1000 years from now. * The world's oldest joke. * A fart joke from 1900 BCE. * Reconstructive historical linguistics. * The linguistics of swearing and taboo. * Eater of bees. * Top five stanzas.

Lords: * Tyriq * Jay Topics: * I recently moved and I think I understand Having Stuff more now. * Teaching my 3-year-old to use a mouse and keyboard. Kids learning software being a ghost of its former self. * Interface traps * Yelp! Review for God by Willow James Claire * https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/ib998beS.jpg * Starting a YouTube Channel for kids and the lack of useful information on the topic. Microtopics: * Ben and Jerry's Cookie Dough ice cream. * Washing the ice cream off of the cookie dough ice cream and baking cookies. * Snacking dough. * Living on your own and owning silverware for the first time. * Losing a fork that they don't make any more and having mismatched forks forever. * A hodgepodge of styles. * Different spaces each with their own internal consistency. * Going to your ex-roommate's Halloween party as a guest for the first time. * Parties that you can leave. * Finding out you were right about what you thought you'd like. * Moving house in an hour. * Your kid banging on the keyboard to write nonsense messages in discord but he forgets to hit enter to send so you have to do it for him. * Teaching kids to read by giving them a Kindle tablet. * Typing "stop" fifty times in notepad. * Dell Rugged. * What Mavis Beacon is up to nowadays. * Computers as the exciting future vs. computers as the boring shitty present. * Getting a laptop without a touch screen so your kid can learn to use the mouse. * Different ways to not understand folders. * Whether the problem is that Gen Z doesn't know what a folder is or whether it's that they sometimes still need to know what a folder is. * Apps that appear to be native apps but they're secretly running in a web browser. * Coming into possession of a child. * An overworld where you can walk in 8 directions and bump into NPCs. * Boots Quest. * Auto Shooting Survival. * Roguelike Turn-Based Auto Shooting Survival. * Mini Yoto. * Using the insert key on purpose. * The Jay's Wife of Scroll Lock. * The two Smush tracks on the Hypnospace Outlaw soundtrack. * Why there are separate shift and caps lock keys but no separate toggle insert and hold to insert keys. * Sticky Keys. * Caps lock keys that physically toggle. * Toon Boom Harmony and other way too expensive subscription software. * Can't draw can't see pencil in toon boom reddit * Lock the taskbar, lock the taskbar. * The pros and cons of different start menu orientations. * Getting kissed in the vegetable aisle, so to speak. * Talking about dungeons and dragons and getting something slightly wrong about dungeons or dragons. * The laws of physics preventing you from kidding boys. * On the one hand growing up as a trans poet in Arizona. On the other, drinking a whole lot of strawberry kiwi kombucha. * Four out of five stars for inventing an extremely dry mouth. * A dry, scratchy, sandpaper cat tongue. * A song about a ghost eating toast. * Watching your kid watch things. * Where to put video content on the internet. * Ideas that are occluded by ideas that are better search-engine optimized. * Whether librarians are scarier in Germany. * Combining three people with social anxiety to make one really big person with social anxiety. * Fixing kids software for 100 people because it's too hard to fix it for the whole world. * X for Extreme.

Lords: * Ben * JohnB Topics: * Game & Watch Gallery * Halloween's never on the weekend, so I made Novemberween * Square mattresses * Eight Line Poem * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVqNJKQiPCA * https://genius.com/3143344 * The most entertaining bit of the new Spider-Man 2 game has been sitting on a bench Microtopics: * Fellow Traveler. * Citizen Sleeper: at least one person's game of the year. * State fair taffy. * Where to find seasonal taffy bargains. * Terrifying taffy flavors. * Single game LCD handhelds. * Gunplay Yokoi. * Withered technology. * The RC car that can only turn left because right was cut for scope. * Games where things are bouncing across the screen. * Tiger Electronics Double Dragon. * The earliest, most boring Game and Watch game. * A fun clock that's fun to watch. * Putting your face as the juggler in Ball for the Game Boy Camera. * What they did before d-pads. * A Print the Legend situation. * Mario Bros II for the Commodore 64. * Porting Game and Watch games to card stock. * Releasing a floppy disk reader for the Game Boy Advance in 2023. * Mario's Bombs Away, in Panorama Vision. * Moving slower the more gold you're carrying. * Toad walking across a bunch of seagulls. * Trying to get 16 player Faceball up and running. * The Burger King vs. Hungry Jack's era. * The Lost Lost Levels. * The most polite pumpkin head person you've ever met. * Inventing a new Halloween that happens the first weekend after Halloween so you can get candy at a discount. * Implicating the viewers in your terrible horror movie marathon. * Terrifying cakes with spooky words on them like "mortgage" * Tammy and the T-Rex. * A spooky guy in a helmet who races people in his car (and kills them) * Putting pieces of Stonehenge into circuitry to make children's faces turn into bugs. * A movie about a cat that vomits up another cat. * A very spooky four dollar pumpkin man. * Neglecting upkeep on your house for thirty years to celebrate Halloween. * Novemberween every Sunday. * How to celebrate Labor Day. * Rotating a square mattress 90 degrees. * Going into the mattress store and unrolling the amount of mattress you want from the spool and getting it cut to order. * Alternate reality How It's Made videos. * The Manchester Department. * Super Passive Aggressive Xenomorph Roommate Irritation Simulator. * Rolling the dice to determine which side of the cube mattress you're sleeping on tonight. * Rotating the tires on your racecar bed. * Asking the cat for poem opinions. * Sometimes the sun is just the sun. (Not this time though – it's David Bowie.) * Plugs within plugs. * All the different games named "Spider-Man 2" * Using your Spider Radar to track down the next objective. * A video game where you go on a holiday to Greece and stab a bunch of people. * The distressing absence of Mario Odyssey 2. * Finally, a Super Mario game you can finish without hating yourself. * A grown-up with adult things to do, like cooking bacon and receiving mail. * The Trophy Seller in Nier Automata. * Kosmology Hungry Jack.