Podcast
Topic Lords
Hosted by Jim Stormdancer · EN
Every week, Jim invites different friends to guest on Topic Lords and be excited about whatever they've been fixated on this week.
34episodes
Episodes
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345. Is the Bass Pro Shop Pyramid Visible From Space?
3d ago01:07:18Tap to summarizeLords: Aubrey http://glowhno.com/ Avery Topics: Every day since 1981 Yuri Borisovich Norstein and his wife Francheska Yarbusova have worked on their masterpice--an animated adaptaion of Gogol's short story The Overcoat. They couple is now in their 80s and will most likely never complete their film. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Overcoat_(animated_film) Video game urban legends https://vimeo.com/91436410 https://saint-arthur.tumblr.com/post/146680746144/riding-immortal-on-the-seeking-road Bay Area Airport Naming Drama The Only Animal by Franz Wright https://april-is.tumblr.com/post/89794820/april-25-2008-the-only-animal-franz-wright Microtopics: Loving only the parts you don't hate. Finishing the whole pack of Red Vines because you refuse to let them defeat you. An album you haven't put on Spotify. You know. Those podcasts. The sort of thing we don't do around here. Holding up cue cards so the guests know what to say. Reading all 180,000 messages in the Frog Fractions 2 ARG solvers discord. The tech company you're applying to sending you all the Enron emails, saying "review these before the interview" Mysteries, Easter eggs, and rose-tinted glasses. Hedgehog in the Fog. Arduous animation processes. Working on an animated feature by yourself for over 40 years. Great Family Entertainment. A story about a guy who has everything he needs who dies while trying to buy an overcoat. A huge pack of Red Vines that you and your wife have been eating since 1981. Burning yourself out very quickly if you don't put guardrails in place. Perfectionists throwing away years of work because it's not good enough. DJs who still spin vinyl and other artists who choose to do things the hard way. Enveloping yourself in an emotion. Refusing to break character for the entire time you're making the Youtube documentary. Putting away art you're having a hard time with and coming back to it later. Everything that happened between the Sigil Master and Austin Walker. Losing track of whether art looks good. The fine line between pacing yourself and torturing yourself. The statue in the background of Frog Fractions that turns red when you're on Mars. Encouraging people to have whimsy. Space Knight Rom. Snagglepuss the 1950s playwright. Back when you could make up a video game rumor and not have it immediately debunked. GTA San Andreas urban legends. Windows Movie Maker transition screens. Gravitating towards the unknowable. Self-destructing music. Scarcity and unknowability. Buying an album from the record shop and perusing the indie record label catalog that comes with it. Searching for the 16th colossus. Forming a small community and feeling communal with them. Playing games with a group of friends like a book club. An MMO full of ARGy type stuff. Automatically grouping people into a puzzle solving community. Being paralyzed by the sheer amount of information that you don't know. What's going on with the iGlyphs? Finding evidence of the Jejune Institute on a telephone pole. Painstakingly making the 7th Frog Fractions game, 45 years from now. The history of Seeking Mr. Eaten's Name. Game secrets that can't be ruined by one jerk with a decompiler. Sleep No More. Getting pulled into a secret compartment during an interactive play. Multi-city zombie larps. The Oakland Airport renaming themselves to the San Francisco Bay International Airport and then later the lawsuit becoming the Oakland San Francisco Bay Airport. Bay Area topology. San Francisco and South San Francisco. The Unincorporated Area of San Mateo County International Airport, or UAOSMCIA. American cities named after European cities. The Bass Pro Shop Pyramid in Memphis, TN. Filling a 32-story disco pyramid with sports equipment. Fry's Electronics. Another episode of Topic Lords where we read from Wikipedia. A huge empty building with paintings of Mayan gods holding torches that used to be an electronics store. One more way in which people forget about San Diego. The only animal that brushes its own teeth A monkey wearing a spacesuit trying to smoke a cigarette through the face shield. The only animal that smokes cigarettes. (Todd, who works down at the warehouse.) Meeting your estranged dad when at the awards show when you're both up for the same Pulitzer. Whether that fuckin' awesome monkey is a Bored Ape. Whether Google Image Search is making up images yet. That time Ryan North and his dog got stuck in an empty swimming pool and turned it into an interactive text adventure. By the time you've smelt it, they have dealt it. Topics are over! Support Topic Lords
Transcribe →344. All Teeth Are Equally Smooth in the Eyes of the Lord
1w ago00:57:30Tap to summarizeLords: Lena Cory Topics: Re: Cory's teeth topic, there's so many artists making teeth It would actually rule to be immortal, and all those stories about how it's not are just cope How committed to the bit is committed to the bit enough? A poem by Evan Balster, shared with us at GDC: A shapeless figure, locked away Inside a realm she godly sways; To weave in light and shadow, there, A living, breathing world from air. And nightly does she host a guest Who comes and goes at own behest, And time to time might take the throne To make the place a toy his own And on the morn to leave the mess Its keeper cleans, without protest. For lonely is the weaving-hand, The breaking-one's its only friend. Microtopics: Topic Lords-themed hangouts. Indie City Games. Two Truths and a Lie, a science fiction detective story. A disgusting old man using an army of combat drones to find out what happened to his ex-boyfriend. Two topics for the price of one. Tooth dreams. Considering what to do about your teeth as you go through various phases of having or not having teeth. What people say if your femur is yellow. People dying from mouth problems. Going to the tooth artists and customizing your new teeth, just like Build-a-Bear. Reaching into your mouth and pushing the button on your artificial tooth that plays your catchphrase. The artist who illustrates your subject in stages as you dissect it. Illustrating gross health things in a way that people can understand. The cartoon amoeba that teaches you how to not get salmonella. The kind of people who comment on Fecal Transplant Explainer videos. Teeth: you chew with them. Hitting up your dentist for extra teeth because the last ones were delicious. The thing you have in your mouth the most that you're not allowed to eat. (Your teeth.) Gradually eating your own teeth because you grind your own teeth at night. Different sets of dentures for different vibes. How to get glow in the dark teeth. Discovering the hard way that your fake teeth don't fluoresce under UV light. An entire generation of Americans going into the dentist together, like Hands Across America, to get all their teeth pulled so they can get dentures. Losing all your teeth just in time for COVID. Learning to not feel like you have to explain why you don't have any teeth. Depressing people with possible existences that your mind can create. What to do with the people who get too old to have good opinions. Trying to maintain a continuous personality day to day. Immortality vs. just living a really long time. Burning it all down for the sake of your legacy. Continuing to try to save people's lives and eventually inventing immortality. Death: it's really cool actually. Coming face to face with death and realizing it's not scary at all. A Satanist and his wife selling everything to open a shop where they refuse to sell you human skulls and serial killer memorabilia. Not needing a Memento Mori room because you already think about death all the time. Transferring a marble from the future jar to the past jar to remind yourself not to waste this day. Having a child and tossing it on the pile of existing children that everyone's already taking care of. All there is to learn in the universe. The Sword in the Stone. Working all of physics out from first principles because it's fun and you have that kind of time. Deciding to spend 100 years just hanging out with a tree and you don't even have podcasts. Icehenge. Associated Press title capitalization rules. A decision that is awesome for everything except your wallet. Artists who don't like what they make and don't enjoy the process, they just have to do it. Not doing art for long enough to realize how unhappy you are because you're not doing art. Making games because it's cool and fun to make games. Making yourself happier by pretending to be happy. What's bad about being too happy? Oh thank God, a crisis! A series of dreams in which the dream world is aware of you and hates you. Lonely is the weaving hand, the breaking one its only friend. Why you should be grateful when your son throws his trash on the floor. The most mystical thing that we get to regularly experience. Déjà rêvé. One of the worst ways to determine whether you're dreaming. Morpheus refusing to explain the Matrix in words even though he could describe it in 30 seconds. Spoilers: the events of Inception did not actually occur. Support Topic Lords
Transcribe →343. Put on Your Donut Ordering Face
2w ago01:09:59Tap to summarizeLords: Jenni Chris Topics: Having to relearn how to autism mask for parenting situations because the rules are different APPARENTLY Only after five years learning to how make an irrigation system for a thousand plants, do I finally truly understand Han Solo's struggles with the Millenium Falcon. The D&D conspiracy theory I saw a few days ago and can't find now Don't Ever Kill the Buddha, by adzolotl https://irrealisms.tumblr.com/post/677079389150887936/dont-ever-kill-the-buddha Microtopics: Kitchen Bitchin' Forgetting about plugs because there's a small child. Out of Taskmaster again. A tiny, very opinionated man. Only understanding about seven concepts but having strong opinions about all of them. Plugging PicoSteveMo again. The Longing is Real Time. Being in charge of all the Jaunt capsules for a few minutes before you fuck someone's life up. What Stephen King would say if he heard about PicoSteveMo. PicoSteveMo: it's a good time. People at the bank thinking you're normal. Ordering whatever donuts make sense. Whether autistic people can order donuts. Putting on your donut ordering face and instructing your toddler to do whatever makes sense. Enjoying activating objects. Loving to access their functions. A wonderful world where everything is interactive, especially dog tails. What is a dog's tail for if not grabbing?? Better child-rearing outcomes associated with having heard more words. Keeping a running commentary going while you put pants on your toddler. Successfully interrupting your toddler before they disassemble anyone's grocery order. Drug dealers in the parking lot who love when your toddler tries to catch a bird. Yes! Yes, it's you! Feel shame! Learning how to make small talk so you can get a job at Spencer's Gifts. Whether you're autistic or if it's some other weird trauma instead. Dad at Swim Class. The kind of dads they have in Bakersfield. Trying to find O.G. Dad in the Dad Soup. Patriogenesis. Fixing the water pressure on one end of the line which breaks all the janky connectors on the other end of the line. The Big Chungus Alarm that you installed five years ago when you were working with the Big Chungus system. Robots tearing themselves apart in ways you don't understand vs. in ways you do. People who have worked on complicated systems. Trying something new and suddenly you're dumb again. The Millennium Falcon as a jalopy from American Graffiti. Twenty extremely cool-dressed Asian kids in their twenties with souped up cars there's a racist term for that I legitimately don't remember, I'm not just trying to avoid saying it. Somebody flipping their car in front of your house while the baby is trying to nap. Self depreciation in the South Bay pan-Asian community. Keeping nitrous oxide balloons in the back of your sports car and popping one into the Mr. Balloon when you need a speed boost. Kids making too many U-turns in the 1950s and the No U-Turn signs are still making it hard to get their you're going to this day. Things everyone knows about Walter White. Black Walnut Trees extruding Juggalos, killing everyone in the vicinity. A biome map that looks like when you take Minecraft and turn the biome setting to "really small" The D&D conspiracy theory that you saw on Tumblr but can't find any more. Being outed as someone who still thinks in terms of THACO. Running a Shadowdark campaign and making delighted noises the entire time. D&D characters leveling up too much and wanting to run a business. What purpose dice serve in a TTRPG. Rolling two natural ones in a row and cutting your own head off. Orcs running ice-cream shops. Having a hypomanic episode about not being allowed to be an elf with chainmail. Having the Red Box and also the four subsequent boxes of different colors. Picking up a gold piece and putting it back down over and over because finding a gold piece is worth 1 XP. Reading a lot of things that rhyme. Reading Dr. Seuss like Ulysses. Playing pranks on people who reincarnate. When one set of footprints disappeared it's when you married the Buddha and he carried you over the threshold. Everyone trying to understand the "kill the Buddha" koan when it's just that the guy really hated the Buddha. Support Topic Lords
Transcribe →342. Psycho Mantis Says To Drink Mercury
3w ago01:08:41Tap to summarizeLords: Nathan https://store.steampowered.com/app/2976260/ChainStaff/ Robb https://store.steampowered.com/app/880930/Cyberganked/ Topics: I got pulled into the world of Eurorack modular synthesizers and now I'm finding myself trying to make cogent arguments for bringing uranium ore into the household. Ectoparasites Stairs are the driving of walking The Beaufort Wind Scale, found by nontanne https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/c8PXM396.jpg Microtopics: Year 14 of Cyberganked development. Cryptozookeeper. Struggling to play Yankee Doodle Dandy because the piano teacher doesn't want to hear your rendition of Axel F. Being hit up for $25 by the state. A text adventure with little pictures. Composing your 3D scene using pictures you took at the Denver haunted house your friend runs. Including an in-game explanation for why you chose to use the CGA colors. Playing TXT World and wondering "why would anyone make a game that looks like that?" How do you afford to take seven years to make a game? Finagling money out of various governments during COVID. Turning off the fish so that you can see the cat. Spending thousands of dollars to go to GDC and pitch your game to publishers and finding no takers because your game isn't a roguelike or a deck builder. Financial solvency isn't everything it's cracked up to be! Existing as a person on earth and being as old as possible. Life hacks for making your publisher go out of business. A spreadsheet of 450 game publishers that existed in 2023 whereas now there's just Epic and Roblox. Chainsaws and rocket launchers and other things you have in your front yard. Chainsaws vs. Chainstaffs. Measuring the IQ of every single Topic Lords listener. Asking your artist to make it 10% grosser. I know you have a good working relationship with your artist, but wouldn't you have had a better time alone in a dark room making bullshit with stable diffusion? The Bloodlust Software art style. Showing your four year old nephew how to throw a spear as Scorpion, then spending the rest of the afternoon shouting "get over here!" at each other. Your Eurorack habit leading you to import uranium. So-called "synthesizer music." Shitpost Eurorack Modules. Enriching uranium. Talking to everyone about the uranium-based Eurorack module you want to buy in order to shift the Overton Window until buying the uranium-based Eurorack module seems totally normal. Making the most incredible techno everyone's ever heard before dying of radiation poisoning, like Marie Curie. What the Moog Modular would be like if Bob Moog only designed shitpost modules. The three reasons to buy a hardware synthesizer. Making art on the same device you use to doom scroll. Sitting there with a jeweler's screwdriver trying to tune your synthesizer. Coming on Topic Lords to declare that you're not a pervert. Deckard's Dream. Spending $5000 on a new synthesizer, making one song, and selling it for 75 cents on Bandcamp. Making things go twang in the 70s. The kind of parasites Slimer would have. Fixing a toilet in space. Tongue-eating isopods. Eating a tongue and then becoming the tongue. You are what you eat! Making Elevator Action and then getting in a multi-floor shootout in an office building. Alpha Gal, the matriarch that makes you allergic to beef. Teaming up with the Kool-Aid Man to fight the tick that makes you allergic to the color red. A floor except every step you take is higher than the last and after you take a few steps you're way up in the air. The accident-per-mile-traveled for stairs. How your family reacts the second time you fall down the stairs. What a caveman would think of stairs. What simple machine a staircase is. Hiding from the Dalek on the second floor because Daleks don't understand desires. Umbrellas difficult to use. A poem that came from the sea. Might Order an Extra Mango Lassi. Whether the scoville scale is logarithmic. Arguing against preventing forest forest. Bringing a machete to the farmer's market because what are the chances there are two machetes at the farmer's market? Sea Heaps Up. Fresh Gale vs. Whole Gale. Never having been outside in the wind but trying to guess what happens in a moderate gale. Taking a seven foot Chainstaff to MAGFest. 3D printing a giant spear for your Hornet costume. Sign-twirling your seven foot bone spear and terrifying all the MAGFest attendees. Support Topic Lords
Transcribe →341. The Real Jim Stormdancer (On My Birth Certificate)
May 401:03:33Tap to summarizeLords: Andrew https://kittenm4ster.neocities.org/ Noel https://noelcody.itch.io/ Topics: Moss Moss design & process Being gaslit by an open-source 3D physics engine ACME products Splinter by Carl Sandburg https://allpoetry.com/poem/14327262-Splinter-by-Carl-Sandburg Microtopics: Blippo+ Wearing merch for a TV show in the Blippo+ cosmology. The bureau where you keep your cotton. Mossing the world and finding secrets. Designing for mystery and discovery. A platformer with no skill checks. The standard puzzle game playbook. Designing your game to offer one question per screen. Pig Farm. Discovering your way through a story. What to show and what to hide Collecting leaves that grow a vine up to something at the top. Cats or rabbits or turnips or something. An underrated comment on the Pico-8 BBS. A secret at the end of the game that you try to be okay with most players not finding. Play testing with your local game dev scene. Various Pico-8 data compression strategies. Code golfing until you can't stand it. Ending every project in a nightmare slog. PARENS-8. How Pico-8 makes constraints feel real and not like some arbitrary bullshit you decided to do. Forking Pico-8 and expanding the token limit to 8193. 50 years of game designs to draw examples from. Spikes. Bounding your understanding of the space. The satisfying feeling of playing a good XAMWWSKH. Lions sculpted out of hedges that want to give you a big hug. Creatures in the game world just going about your business in a way that can aid or hinder you. Just lil dudes, just hanging out. The feeling of being outside the bounds of a game world. Lunacid. Games that don't know you're playing them. The pickup truck you can just barely spot in Pokemon Red. Interpreting data as a compressed Pokemon. Trying to make an N64 game because Pyrite 64 came out Testing on your Summer Cart. Choosing the physics engine that only supports cubes. Lateral friction. Reading about video game car physics on the Internet and getting so desperate that you start asking the LLMs. Four wheels all applying different forces in different conditions. What Google indexes now rather than text on the Internet. A heavily abbreviated transcript. Nearly 20,000 microtopics. microtopics_ebooks. An ebook written by many uncredited people. Collecting 30,000 Bug Mars Work Visa signatures. Informing your users that you are collecting their personal information but only in order to improve the contents of your wallet. Zenith Electronics Is. The game developers who broke off of Activision to form Accolade looking in the dictionary to find a name that's come earlier than Activision in alphabetical listings, and then the game developers who broke off from Accolade to form Acclaim doing the same thing. Going to a movie theater in the 1930s because that's how you see the memes. Hanna-Barbera inventing a new animation technique where they give everybody a collar so they can animate their head and body separately. Disney replacing animators with photocopiers in the 1950s. A medium's technical limitations eventually becoming an art style. How often did they make the Looney Tunes? How many Looney Tunes are there? Shorts that play before the main feature. The DJ in the projection booth deciding what Looney Tune will drive the crowd wildest. How many movies are made each year. When the MPAA was established. Which Looney Tunes did they play in front of the R-rated movies? A splinter of singing. If you say hello a thousand times, is the thousandth time actually a goodbye? Eating the last grilled cheese sandwich of your life, and either being aware of it or not aware of it. Crickets going extinct every winter and re-evolving in the spring. Crickets becoming locusts in the winter and seeing how many divine plagues they can enact before springtime. Entomology Blog: you're totally full of shit. Walking towards a cricket and it stops chirping and you're like "how am I supposed to hunt you down and eat you now?" The science weighs in: we won't be able to visit the aliens, but we will be able to send them a plague of locusts. Support Topic Lords
Transcribe →340. Too Young for Doom
Apr 2701:04:54Tap to summarizeLords: Matt https://mtrop.net/ Cort Topics: Doom Modding and You The Boston Marathon Stampede This 1989 Shigeru Miyamoto quote. "When pornography escalates, it eventually crosses into the grotesque. I think the world of 'hidden secrets' in games has almost reached that same grotesque level. It's reached a point where it isn't measured by common sense anymore. It's just people getting bored and looking for stronger and stronger stimulation. We've hit a wall. When you're at the point where you have no choice but to go 'grotesque,' you have to start thinking of new ways to use the medium." https://shmuplations.com/itoimiyamoto/ Dammit I'm Mad by Demetri Martin https://www.reddit.com/r/Poetry/comments/zc6iic/poem_dammit_im_mad_by_demetri_martin/ Microtopics: Plugging in the middle of someone else's topic. Successfully comparing apples and oranges. Waking extremely early to meet with someone in the wrong time zone. Doing anything for 30 years. What monsters do. Making Doom mods before they figured out how to change the walls. The Hacker's Guide to Doom, by Hank Leukart. Anthropology of Doom modding. Roots: the Evolution of Doom Level Design. Demon of the Well. People heralding the end of Doom modding before you even get started. Megawads. Where's All the Data? Non-commercial Doom Source License. Jokes that take thirty years to get. The Vanilla Limitations of Doom. Recreating your high school in Doom, which was okay at the time but stopped being okay several years later. Dividing eras at a pinching point. People who are opposed to doors. Relaxed-Limit Source Ports. The Stand-Alone Project Era. DeHackEd patching the binary. Various sources of value you might get from modding Doom. Mark Z. Danielewski commenting on MyHouse.wad. Sonic Robo Blast 2. Falling Away Floors. Taking certain features and mushing them together into a new thing. Back when Doom rules the LAN parties. What you played on your Mac instead of Doom. A hardware mod that added looking up and down to Doom via a cardboard window that you can slide around the monitor. Making a Beeline for the Bungie Booth. A crowd of shifty eyed gamers waiting to sprint across the show floor full of unsuspecting exhibitors setting up booths. An okay one of those if you're into that sort of thing. Drinkable Cheeseburgers. Finishing the tutorial and quitting Marathon (2026) forever so that you can brag about your100% extraction rate. Doing non-euclidean architecture in your Marathon maps. Adding portals to the Doom engine. The three stages of development that every medium goes through. Paying the shareware fee to get your registered copy of WinBolo and/or LinBolo. The point when you have no choice but to Go Grotesque. Miyamoto quotes that modern-day Nintendo would never allow to escape containment. A completely constructed, untrue memory of how you played The Legend of Zelda. Miyamoto foretelling in 1989 that grotesque secrets in video games will lead directly to the cat hair mustache puzzle and kill adventure games. Slaughter-mappy. Hell Keep and the Fortress of Mystery. The one place in the Doom episode they can force a constrained-ammo puzzle. I rise; my bed on a sun. Rats peed on hope. Deified as a sign in ruby ash. Making a computer watch every episode of Seinfeld. Guided Markov. Writing a poem from both ends at the same time. Saying the moon is anything and squeezing a poem out of it. Doom mods where you can pull down the console. Porting ZZT to the Doom engine and vice versa. Support Topic Lords
Transcribe →339. Become Uncoffinable
Apr 2001:04:36Tap to summarizeLords: Watson Wren Topics: Faction design in historical strategy games Linguistics makes it easier and harder to name things You belong in SLUSD. What is SLUSD? The Cremation of Sam McGee https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45081/the-cremation-of-sam-mcgee The magic systems of Brandon Sanderson Microtopics: The Three-Body Problem (Not That One) Jade City; Jade Legacy. Making any non-creamy soup into a creamy soup. Boiling an entire civilization down to a concept simple enough to program. Getting to the end of the tech tree first and winning science. Greece as the origin of many of our modern ideas about government. Grand strategy games where you spend most of your time trying to not to be assassinated by your family. Dwarf Fortress except it's obsessed with the royal family. Hiring Charles Babbage to invent the analytical engine because otherwise all your game jams will have to be board game jams. Playing a TTRPG and having to name something so first you have to create thousands of years of linguistic history. The World Builder's Disease. (A.k.a. having a delightful hobby) What you might have named somebody back in Zelda Times. Developing a set of phonotactics so that you can name something plausibly. What is SLUSD? The webp of 3D model formats. Trans people: they belong in Ohio. Putting up a billboard and hoping people will look away from the road to see your content. What investigative journalists might do if investigative journalism still existed. Solving the SLUSD mystery. Reconstructing the history of civilization from the Topic Lords vaults. What did people with ADHD do before Topics? Strange things done in the midnight sun. Cremating Sam in the wreck of the Alice May. The secret tales of the Arctic trails that would make your blood run cold. A poet who mostly writes about burial rituals in the arctic circle. Stompin' Tom. Bits to Try if You Think You're About To Die. Supernatural small-town Alaska death promises. Why SETI@Home looked for three spikes. At what point to Doom clones become first-person shooters, and at what point do you become a conspiracy theorist for pointing out all these games are the same. Gandhi becoming so peaceful that he integer underflows. Video games as a way to cope with the outcome of civilization. Sanderson's four laws. A fictional branch of physics. Various metals that do various things. Consuming metal filings that have magical effects based on this funky diagram. Eating a burrito wrapped in aluminum foil. Coinshots shooting people with coins. Soothing and inflaming various emotions. The element of thinking about stuff in various kinds of ways, and its atomic number. Forcing a Mistborn to burn aluminum, as a prank. Creating a magic system by working backwards from the premise that tinfoil hats are effective in this universe. A fandom wiki. Made by fans. Not on fandom.com. Gradually revealing the rules of your system as they become relevant. Lit RPG. Whether fantasy and horror fiction would be better if it was more like a video game. Characters in a story who are trying real hard to level up. Establishing the reality of the fiction while also taking that reality to a very strange place. Support Topic Lords
Transcribe →338. Placebo Yourself into Having a Phenomenal Time
Apr 1301:09:03Tap to summarizeLords: Mark Mark's top albums of 2025: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1InKh07sllCLF6cu9za0yhQvmGVC3ZHvM162XI1u1S9A Shirley Topics: If you want to be at the front of the stage at a show, just go there, literally no one is stopping you - or - THE ONLY THING YOU LACK IS WILL Elves and Using Religion to Protect Natural Spaces It's illegal to mod your EV to have custom engine noises Litany Against Fear https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Litany_Against_Fear How to stop drinking coffee Microtopics: The Splintered Oar, by Weft. An album about labor rights in Kentucky. Reading aloud to your friends and family. The siren song of sitting on the couch and watching TV. Time as the crow flies. Measuring time as the crow looks at the clock. Wanting to be right in front of the stage and just going there. Paying hundreds of dollars to stand in an extremely loud room. Getting after it with an open heart. Everyone standing at the same height as the musicians playing live music. An active member of a live music community in a major US city. Physically engaging with the music. Letting go of your concern for the eyes upon you. Standing in place for the entire four or five bands playing this show without ever leaving your spot to pee. Working the merch booth. Unloading a truckload of positive energy into the space in front of the stage. Mosh pit comfort. Bands graduating to the next level of popularity. Fighting your way to the front of the stage so you can not look at the band. Luxuriating in the freedom of a shared experience of joy. Giving back to the artists you love by screaming at them while they play music. Becoming part of a local scene. People who believe in elves and people who pretend to believe in elves. Looking forward to when your child might one day bring you boba. Elf kayfabe. Mall Santa breaking kayfabe. Whether the mall Santa has to keep up the act even when he's alone in the shower. Reindeer-powered Yaris. Scandinavian elf lore. Post 9/11 supporting of the troops. Arguments to which there is no possible rebuttal, such as "you can't build a mini mall because the elves live here." Picking a random Wikipedia article about Nordic folklore and finding out how many metal bands are named after it. How few murders there are in the modern black metal scene. A looping sample of Snoop Dogg saying "this Volt is in reverse." Automotive engineers deliberately making the engine noise play a power chord. Instead of banning whistle tips, legislators mandating that they play a 7th chord, and also that the driver must know enough music theory to explain why they chose that chord. Being on the sideshow mailing list so you can attend every sideshow. All the different motions you have to make to wash the entire surface of both hands. A poem about not allowing fear to conquer you while you wash your hands. A poem with a specific utility. The lifelong pursuit of being okay with your own mortality. Trying to learn to be happy with what you have. How I fucked myself up. How many waves coffee has. Genetic sense of thirst. Making up a magic number of ounces of water to drink. Getting a water bottle and putting a cool sticker on it. The lion's share of behavioral addiction. Going downstairs into your morning environment. The ritual pleasure of fidgeting with a cigarette. Quitting smoking and having to find other rituals to fill the space smoking used to fill. Your brain being like "remember cigarettes? That was cool" and you're like "that's a weird thing to bring up right now, brain." Having a puff on a cigarette to find out if that's enough to get you addicted again. What it would take to make smoking look uncool. How much easier it is to quit smoking now that they have fidget spinners. All the little adjustments you make to make your life more tolerable. Embers of the Dawn by Bronze Hall. Pumping your fist while you think about elves. Support Topic Lords
Transcribe →337. Mars, Technically
Apr 601:21:57Tap to summarizeLords: Chris Fabian https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/ Topics: Oops, my 3D printer became a hobby GTA's AI is not trying to screw with you with its sudden lane changes and T-boning you at intersections, it's just oblivious. (Probably.) Esper says: "I can confirm the traffic AI in Cyberpunk 2077 is still hilarious. I set my car to 'auto drive' and after maybe 30 seconds it took a hard right into the ocean. Maybe that’s lore accurate, who knows." Alberic Whale and the Enigma Layer https://thespinoff.co.nz/the-best-of/31-12-2018/summer-reissue-the-mystery-of-zach-new-zealands-all-too-miraculous-medical-ai https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/13-01-2020/rip-zach-probe-finds-serious-wrongdoing-over-miracle-medical-ai Between What I See and What I Say…, by Octavio Paz https://www.wisdomportal.com/PoetryAnthology/OctavioPaz-Anthology.html Microtopics: A coffee shop that exists here because of the port of Oakland. Popping unroasted coffee beans into your mouth like peanuts. The worst tasting and most caffeinated cup of coffee you've ever had. Your local library. Things that should not be businesses. Three possible purposes of universities. Finding a new hobby (derogatory) 3D printing a selection of action figures for your wedding. That one person you know who's really into 3D printers. Why having a broken 3D printer counts as a hobby where having a broken refrigerator is just a situation. Yanking out some gunk with pliers in hopes that that'll fix it. Your 3D printer breaking halfway through your wedding figurine project so you have to make the other other half out of milled aluminum. IBM Selectric Typewriters shipping with a repair guy who lives in your spare bedroom in case it breaks. Amazon sending an Amazon warrior to repair your 3D printer but since you only paid for the cheap extended warranty she's allowed to attack anybody including you. Whether Balatro is trying to deliberately find weaknesses in your build. Higher fidelity graphics coming with expectations of higher fidelity traffic modeling. Car AI in open world games being as dumb as the developers can get away with, except for in Cyberpunk 2077, where they're dumber than the developers can get away with. Whacking at it until it's good enough to ship. Traffic tuning in GTA Vice City. Playing games with really smart, effective AI, like Chessmaster 2000 and X-Com, and realizing that actually having really smart AI is no fun. Skating around with rollerblades on your elbows and knees. Everything's a tuna can. Three car accidents in six weeks. Conscientiously objecting to military service so they insist you get a driver's license instead. Driving through a haunted house to train the braking reflex in response to being startled. Whatever happened to ol' Alby Whale? The AI assistant named Zack turning out to just be a dude named Zack. Adorable tiny food delivery robots who turn out to just be remote controlled by a guy hiding around the corner. Waymo cars blocking major thoroughfares for hours at a time. Multitasking between all the most stressful, confusing driving situations. Self-driving cars (allegedly) turning self-driving off half a second before impact so the impact is blamed on the human operator. Several hundred tons of liquid nitrogen cooled supercomputer. Blaming your spelling errors on The Enigma Layer. Having seen more proof of your AI assistant than you have of god. It's scammers and hucksters all the way down. Whether DLSS is taking away game developer jobs. What happens when you go from a three word Markov model to a five word markov model. A giant prank with no particular end-game in sight. Acts of speech. Poetry as synesthesia. Trying to explain in words why that cat is acting weird when the cat doesn't think in words at all. My Psychosis, my Bicycle and I, by Fritz B. Simon. Trying to figure out how football works when you can't see the players, only the referee. Feeling some type of way. Trying to take musical ideas and apply them outside of the realm of music. Creating words that dance around concepts. Getting stuck forever in your cringe phase. Opportunities to write the same program over and over again. A melancholy linked list implementation. Passive-aggressive C code. Java Enterprise Abstract Singleton Proxy Factory Bean. Remember printed manuals? The international obfuscated C code contest. What made the 3D accelerated demo scene interesting again. How much code you can fit in 64k if you don't link to anything. Secret Topics. Support Topic Lords
Transcribe →336. The Four Colonoscopies
Mar 3001:07:29Tap to summarizeLords: Jason https://bumpyskies.com/ Ben https://www.zerofiftyone.net/ Topics: Prepping for a colonsocopy, the jmac way! https://fogknife.com/2023-12-31-my-colonoscopy-strategies.html How to do things you're bad at The Trustworthy Shirts Tournament https://eldritch.cafe/@cassolotl/116156921111844432 Do not go gentle into that good night, by Dylan Thomas https://poets.org/poem/do-not-go-gentle-good-night Microtopics: The Wordle Puzzmo and Dall-E shitposts channel. Plugging your turbulence forecasting web site at both ends. Kids picking a name for themselves at age 8 and then being stuck with it forever. Going to court and the judge is named "velociraptor#1993" and that's just normal. Trying to pick a baby name and suggesting the name of your great grandmother whom you never met, velociraptor1993. People still being named Baker even though nobody bakes any more. Ripped off vs. stolen. Colonoscopy Strategies. Poorly understood advice from well meaning friends. Drinking squid ink the day before your colonoscopy. A power-blasted clean empty warehouse of a colon. Why are you still listening to these colonoscopy stories? Skip to the end of the episode where I ask you to give money to the patreon. The tattoo on the inside of your colon of an arrow indicating "this polyp right here" Staying up until 3 AM drinking an entire jerry can of mineral wax. Referring to the COVID pandemic as "the pandy" The colonoscopy robot's tattoo gun. Knowing all the names of parts of the intestines because of the difficult boss fight inside an intestine at the end of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. Hideo Kojima setting out to design a game to force people to write strategy guides about traversing the human rectum. What Google searches Hideo Kojima was trying to inspire when he designed Snatcher. Writing a strategy guide for drinking a five gallon can of lemon-flavored gym socks. Slightly chewy boiled sweets. Whether Jim should already have had a colonoscopy by now. Getting your colon cancer screening kit in the mail and it swishes when you shake the box. The tattoo scissor robot: it's out there waiting for you. Getting an image of someone else's intestines tattooed on the inside of your intestines. Getting "how's my driving" or "if you can read this you're too close" or "we bought this before we realized Elon was a fascist" tattooed on the inside of your intestines. Striving to be more comfortable with being bad at skills. All the ways you can fail at throwing pottery. Learning to enjoy being bad at the piano. The doodle that Bach drew on the cover of Well Tempered Clavier. Flanderizing yourself because nobody else will. Art forms where you accumulate physical evidence of your skill progression. Recording three audio books and observing yourself getting better at recording audio books. Audible's gig economy thing. Never studying piano because you get too much done when you procrastinate studying piano. Converted telephone microphones. Trying to learn to play piano with a broken digital piano and really getting into electronics repair. Playing live music and being completely at the mercy of time passing. The Moogseum in Asheville, North Carolina. The aspect of human existence that you're most missing out on. Sitting there watching people play music and wishing you could also play music. Learning to play the Final Countdown riff or the Axel F riff and being set for life. Following a tutorial to create a convincing cover of Satisfaction by Benny Benassi. Rip it Up, by Orange Juice. Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat. The Lesser Trolley Problems. Whether viewers of The Good Place are more likely to value moral philosophy. M*A*S*H vs. Moomins. Who would go around wearing a M*A*S*H shirt in 2026? Deciding how much to trust a Moomins aficionado without knowing how old they are. Identifying Moomins on sight. Owl House vs. Owl City. People who go around wearing Owl House shirts without thinking about all the passers by assuming that they mean the Fireflies band. What the characters in Interstellar think of Dylan Thomas. The last wave by soaking in the green bay. Whether you should get mad before you die. Breathing life and fire into those who yet live. Showing people an argument for losing so that they get mad and win instead. Charitable Reads Book Club, LLC. Production values that are way too high for this bit. Soupertasters 15, with guest star Michael Caine. Corn poems vs. carrot poems. Support Topic Lords
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