Topic Lords

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lords: * Ben * Andrew Topics: * Super Nintendo World's theming is on point * The ABC of Style - A Guide to Plain English (book) * Can you still rent game consoles? * Matsuo Bashô: Frog Haiku * https://www.bopsecrets.org/gateway/passages/basho-frog.htm * https://itch.io/jam/variety-megajam-2022/topic/2514101/2nd-poem- * Pixel art impressionism * https://twitter.com/MarioBrothBlog/status/1801616946837823790 Microtopics: * The games you should've bought when the Steam Spring Sale was still going. * Citizen Sleeper 2. * Being excited about a new project until you landlord tells you to move out. * Real-life POW blocks. * Timing your punch so that the shell pops out. * The park employees doing their best to ameliorate the bad game design of the theme park. * Rushing to hit the snooze button so the piranha plant doesn't wake up. * A plant that's not quite as big as Audrey II. * Buying the wrist band so that you can punch blocks to get coins and find all the KONG letters. * Using your shadow to interact with a video game. * Running from the park entrance to your favorite ride right when the park opens and there's already a two hour line. * A picture that you took with your camera and somehow they made reality look cel shaded. * Super Mushroom Croutons. * Clipping the AR goggles into the Mario hat. * No matter where you look, stuff is happening all the time. * Whether kids in Japan handle failure better than kids in California. * A phone booth, except it exists. * A book about pedantry. * When to use difference vs. discrepancy. * Reading text aloud but internalizing it not at all. * The model of the mind where you are a passive observer sitting in the backseat thinking about pancakes while the driver is doing all the thinking and acting. * Whether the person who struggles to read gets more out of the text than the person who reads effortlessly, because they're spending more time on it * Two full pages about "like." * Faces similar to faces you've never seen before. * Drive it like you hate it vs. drive it as if you hate it. * Utilizing a big word. * Phrasing something in an awkward way for entertainment purposes. * One of the more expensive things you can rent. * Being able to afford all the games that you want. (Not that many game consoles.) * Naughty Dog remaking The Last of Us for the third time. * Sending an assassin to the Second to Last Blockbuster. * Not knowing how a certain business works because you refuse to give them your social security number. * Digitally renting a PS5. (It has fingers.) * Putting stickers on your toilet claiming that it's an Xbox. * Building a Mario Kart course into your house. * Sharing your cool social security number. * Pronouncing Japanese like someone who is covered in tattoos of Pokemon. * Frog-jump-in Water-sound. * Pond. Frog. Plop. * Localizing a Japanese poem into sculpture. * What is art? What is anything? * Looking at a pixel art face and thinking "whoa, what's going on with that guy?" * Pixel art being able to represent detail at a certain scale, but only if it aligns with the directionality of the grid. * Trying to represent a cartoon world realistically. * Walking into a dungeon and being surrounded by statues that look like sentries. * Recognizing a blob of pixels as representing the idea of a decoration and never thinking about it again. * Fan art of Dr. Robotnik's niece. * High color, high detail, low resolution. * Weird rendering techniques that are texture mapping adjacent. * Line Cook. * A blue lid that feels sort of mayo. * Only realizing late in life that three lines makes a ladder. * The main places that you don't post.

Lords: * John * Tyriq * https://oddobject.zone/ Topics: * "Is it harder with twins than with one?" "I wouldn't know." * Would it be neat or terrible to live on a supercontinent * That X-Files episode when Scully scanned an alien artifact in a grocery store's bar code reader * When I Am Among The Trees by Mary Oliver * https://cih.ucsd.edu/sites/cih.ucsd.edu/files/cfm/When%20I%20am%20among%20the%20Trees%20by%20Mary%20Oliver.pdf * Dippin' Dots except each dot is a tiny burger Microtopics: * Pouring a glass of water and leaving it for your future self to discover later. * What Jim used his mailing list for before Mail Chimp shut in down. * Discussion things. (Not topics.) * Trying to do a bit and the person you're doing s bit to does a bit back and now you're doing two bits. * Raising a couple of outliers. * Children who have learned how to run but have not yet learned not to run into the street. * You're already making dinner for one twin, why not feed the other one too? * Raising a child with your tired adult body. * Is it bad for twins to always be together? * A/B testing your twins. * Getting Minecraft pajamas for the kid who keep talking about Minecraft. * It's like Legos but there are monsters. * Running Doom in Minecraft redstone at four hours per frame. * The continents being spread out like s badly peeled orange. * Flying around in the Aluminium Falcon. * Pangaea vs. Panthalassa. * A small bird that digs into your bag and eats your food and it's not afraid of you because it has no predators. * Wooly Rhinoceroses, Land Sharks, and * A little guy in a world that's too big for him. * Playing Counterstrike and always picking the map where you are a mouse in a gigantic kitchen and all your friends hate it * The katamari getting bigger but the prince stays the same size. * Finishing your book about mice knights before you realize you're writing a children's series. * The breadth of fiction about sapient rodents. * Inner-Continental Gigantism. * Finding a reason to offscreen your lead actress. * Why Scully uses a different text editor to write her reports in every episode. * What does Scully do with the dog she adopted? * What happened to alien abductions? * A very powerful spice and making an entire meal out of just the spice. * The Lone Gunmen. (Cancelled after half a season.) * Watching unaired Lone Gunmen pilot for Casey's Star Trek podcast * Short subject lords. * Equally the beach, the oaks and the pines. * To go easy, to be filled with light. * How much five dollar words cost now, adjusted for inflation. * Becoming a nature person over time. * Whether dollars existed in the 1580s. * Measuring the value of a word by multiplying chips by mult. * Hoping to one day look back on your experiences playing Balatro. * A thousand burgers each the size of a grain of quinoa. * Whether it's possible to make hamburger buns smaller. * They're just tiny burgers, so why don't you call them that? * Maximizing your burger's surface area because you taste the surface, not the middle. * You can't taste the middle of a burger! * A plate full of Dippin' Dots burgers. * Eating rice, but each grain takes like a burger. * A bed of the finest chopped onions. * Making a rectangle of steamed hamburger and chopping them up in a grid. * Extruding tiny finished hamburgers out of the pasta machine. * Odd Object dot Zone. * The Garages' final final album.

Lords: * Erica * Jenni Topics: * The chaos you missed * Having a baby is like being assigned a set of hobbies you don't necessarily care about but are expected to engage in full-time * Do people actually live longer in Greece and Japan or do they just have more pension fraud? * Too Many Women Become Desperate, by Infinite Sexy Marriage * https://bsky.app/profile/infinitesexy.bsky.social/post/3lcxskqdmoc26 * Is it possible to never show your kid Cocomelon and they never demand to be shown Cocomelon or are they gonna find out about it through osmosis Microtopics: * Beneficial nematodes: are they really that good? * How to pronounce "iykyk." * Singing "beneficial nematodes" to the tune of Hall of the Mountain King. * Going extreme on the melismas. * The Saying Hi Chamber. * Shazam chastising you for singing. * 100 MIDIs that some Chinese intern threw together in a couple of hours and now every baby is going to grow up with these tunes in their heads. * Inventing a new way to live that's worse in every respect. * Having dinner with a friend while grandma puts the kid to bed. * A baby getting upset because he isn't staring at geometric shapes right now. * Making sure the baby makes all the right neural connections and not the wrong ones. * A video of a guy walking down every street in Vice City. * Twenty minutes of people icing cakes. Not the really fancy cakes, just regular-ass cakes. * Clutching at your face as the cake icer puts red next to brown. * Caking Bad. * A coup amongst the Smithsonian National Zoo's naked mole rats. * Stabbing your mom with your teeth so that you can breed. * A horrible skin creature with prehensile chopsticks. * Eusocial mammals. * Growing extra vertebrae every time you give birth. * A Topic Lords field trip to the naked mole rat colony to meet the new queen. * Intervertebral red shift. * EBF, EFF and EP. * Wake windows and contact naps. * Holding them like a football and making a sandwich and putting the sandwich in the football, and now you're breastfeeding! * Whether it's ethical to leave your baby at the Burger King or if you need to go fast casual. * The poop potato who has opinions. * You gotta draw the line somewhere, and it's sweeping the floor. * All the things you're not supposed to put in the crib with the baby. * Replacing your baby with a gerbil because you're not allowed to kiss your baby on the forehead in case you have a cold sore. * How to tell if a gerbil has been replaced with a similar gerbil. * Paying $7/month for the NYT crossword but not getting access to the articles so you click on the crossword constructors' notes but you're already at your three free article limit. * Anthrocyanins. * Cynical Jim says yes, Regular Jim says maybe. * The most domesticated mammal: man. * Small Japanese women having the longest lifespans because they hide in your crawlspace and death cannot find them. * Old ladies? In my duct work? * Hoping there are no old ladies living in your duct work because you haven't cleaned in s while and there are probably mold spores in there * Poop Songs for Roy. * Thinking of the shrieking old lady as a sonic shower for you duct work. * The future-episodes channel, where we discuss episodes that may one day exist. * Remember that time when you retweeted a thing and it turned into a picture of a fish. * The ransom note on top of peach tarts aesthetic. * Welcome to lesbianism. Here is your greeting card with peaches. * Whether reverse image search is bad now or if it was always bad. * The Poem is Entertaining. * Speculative fiction about soviets invading. * The kind of poem you'd read in feminist bookstores in the early 00s. * Children's YouTube channels full about new wave songs about trucks. * Showing your child only OG Sesame Street episodes so they can't relate to adults or children their own age and are technically Xennials. * Xennial Warrior Princess. * Everything's more true when you're wearing pants. * The 25th place you can post pictures of your baby. * The legend of Shrimptaur. * Hide in the discord and never post. * Finally writing the tweet that's going to make John Hodgman unfollow you

Lords: * Mitch * https://www.youtube.com/@HBMmaster * Nathan * https://store.steampowered.com/app/2976260/ChainStaff/ Topics: * I wish someone told me all classic Star Trek was based on writer Ursula LeGuin * Ryu Numbers and Tom Scott Numbers * https://www.tumblr.com/tomscottnumber * How to get out of a chair * Have you seen the new show? by Orcboxer * https://www.tumblr.com/orcboxer/745859389762764801/poob-has-it-for-you * OUR DRAWINGS - PRINCESS MOVIE | Full Animation Film | Artist * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1LhdhQEKtg * https://www.tumblr.com/fullanimationfilmartist Microtopics: * Mitch from jan Misali. * The episode where we have beef. * The milk frother attachment to the chain staff. * The milk frother is DLC you pay extra for that milk frother. * Hearing about Ursula Leguin for the first time. * The Wind's Twelve Quarters. * The Clock Before Armageddon. * Solving sexism, here on Topic Lords. * Living long enough to discover a new favorite sci-fi author. * What's interesting about Sapphire for the PC Engine, other than the price? * Dreams of gutting the collectors market. * Spending $2,000 on a rare game and trying to convince itself it's good enough to justify the price. * A game that is not very rare but it's still expensive because it's so good that people want to keep it. * Deciding at the last minute to not use motion controls for your Wii rhythm game. * Erdos numbers preceding Bacon numbers because of course it was mathematicians who came up with that shit. * What counts as a Bacon Connection. * A character who has been in a lot of crossover games. * The de facto authority on Ryu numbers. * Whether the frog at the end of TXT World is the same as the game from Frog Fractions. * Whether Hatricia from the Hat DLC is the same as the cat the wedding dress in the photo at the end of TXT World. * The British buy who wears a red shirt. * The ever-shifting discourse for what counts as a connection for Scott Numbers. * Adding rules to make a trivial game into a non-trivial game. * White men who have had a long Youtube career. * Whether Ryu has a surname. * Stephen Hawking's Sabbath number. * Movies and plays tending to tell different stories whereas recorded and live music tends to be the same music. * The hypothetical guy whose favorite movie is just one where they pointed a camera at a stage play. * Why do people love squats? * Doing a 500 pound deadlift to get out of bed. * Doing one exercise to get better at a slightly related exercise. * Fucking up your knees by getting out of a chair repeatedly. * Doing the old heave-ho thing to get out of a chair. * The Inherently Beautiful Design of Everyday Objects, by Bonald Normag. * Watching the X-Files with your wife. * Aged Like Me. * Putting your knees under the chair and standing up, and unbending your knees pushes the chair backwards and it falls over, but you're upright, and then like the punching bags with sand at the bottom the chair bounces back up and hits you in the ass so you don't even need to work to start walking. * A wheelchair with an extremely gentle ejection seat. * Why obese people have worse COVID outcomes. * How to make a bed that fat people want to lie in face-down. * A.C. Slatering. * Why isn't Jim an industrial designer? * Applying for an industrial design job and putting sharks on your resume. * Poob has it for you. * Screenshotting a Tumblr post and cropping out the username to post it on Tiktok and claiming that it's something your therapist told you. * The ghost you're talking about waving its hands in your face being like "I'm right here!" * Tumblr eras. * The event that convinced the Tumblr community that Tumblr users should not ever be in charge of anything. * The people who left Tumblr when they banned porn and then came back when Elon Musk bought Twitter. * The Tumblr Funnymen. * The Tumblr CEO personally harassing trans women off of Tumblr. * Someone who looks like they've been deactivated. * The miracle of Tumblr still being online. * The Poster's Curse. * Bucket, where are you? * A jumble of keywords that someone might hypothetically search for. * Distinctly amateurish outsider art in a way that only a human could create. * Beatboxing puppy! * A contextless segue into a musical number. * An hour long trailer for a twenty minute movie. * A movie made by people who were figuring out 3D animation as they were making it. * Legally distinct Marios rapping. * Being anti-AI art because you are extremely pro copyright law. * The beatboxing puppy scene that everybody forgot about. * It's cool when people make art. * Four consecutive narrators all explaining the same concepts in slightly different ways that slightly contradict each other. * A movie asking you to watch it over and over to pump up its numbers. * Wanting to see a sequel to "OUR DRAWINGS - PRINCESS MOVIE | Full Animation Film | Artist" because you want to know what the title will be. * Complaining that Amazing Digital Circus is more important than your own movie.

Lords: * Dan * https://orionblasters.com/ * https://mollyjames.bandcamp.com/album/loved-by-life * Daniel Topics: * Could Dracula escape Groundhog Day? * How to know you're in a golden era * Indiana Jones is supposed to look good?? * https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=1019&v=f1fWB5HP7s8 * Where the Heart Is by F.S. Yousaf * https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/pMNUZSdU.jpg Microtopics: * Deciding to get a teleprompter on episode 283. * The Molly James Band. * Mid-century lounge music. * Describing yourself as a cross between Pink Floyd and Doja Cat. * Shooting a music video the day after the election. * The sun and the battery life racing each other to ruin your forest concert first. * What does Dracula get up to? Does he have hobbies? * A lawyer hired to buy Dracula a new house * Scrubbing all the proper nouns out of your fan fiction. * Dracula as smoldering sex bomb vs. Dracula as a weird old man. * Figuring out how to not cancel Dracula. * A D&D campaign where you need to recruit a therapist into the party as part of your goal is to convince Dracula to become a better person. * Dracula being verbally abused by all his wives. * Batman playing Flappy Bird while he waits behind the curtain to ambush the villain. * Extremely high powered Nerf rifles. * Joining a community and ascertaining what they need. * Living through a golden age and not realizing until later. * Feeling grateful for the good things you once had. * Being reluctant to push your awesome community because you're afraid it's going to grow too large. * Figuring out how to 3D print blasters. * Mentoring under Captain Slug. * Realizing that your hobby is suddenly your primary source of income. * How to be part of a burgeoning music scene. * The cool kid at GDC. * Ways Jim could've made Glittermitten Grove more accessible without losing the interesting game design. * Getting email from a parent saying that their kid wants to become a mechanical engineer because of you Nerf blaster design. * A video game that is the third best Indiana Jones film. * Who is this technology helping, and how to we stop listening to their opinions? * Playstation Four and a Half. * A game with a lot of whirling debris. * Finding new ways to make more expensive every day. * How you'd put a loot box in a Pico-8 game. * The mental health community arguing about when it's okay to sleep with your therapist. * A/B tasting topics to see which ones get more downloads. * Staying up late enough to get hungry. * What kind of salad you'd put Doritos in. * What kind of salad you'd put a Clif bar in. * Clif bars: fall off of us! * Disappointing dolmas. * Your everyday carry web browser. * The difference between Chrome and Chromium. * Why doesn't everyone just compile their own Firefox? * Bawling at the typewriter about not having the thing you're writing a poem about. * Deciding your book of love poetry to your therapist. * Saving your fan mail to be read at your funeral. * Archaeologists tooting Interesting exchanges written in cuneiform. * Future archaeologists training AI to peruse the entire corpus of tweets to find the choicest memes. * The time to look for an out. * Serenading the audience with the address they can mail cash to. * Where all the best Lords hang out.

Lords: * Jeff * https://dopeassvideogames.com/ * Danny * https://www.youtube.com/@NoclipDocs Topics: * What's happening on Bluesky. * Using Google Earth and YouTube to rid myself of Nostalgia of Places I've lived * Dad talk: what do we do about porn? Microtopics: * The Good Morning America series finale. * Covering video games online. * Getting married and feeling safe from people who run dating sites. * Nintendo Disasters. * Reviewing every individual version of FIFA 2011. * The Sega Master System catalog. * Choosing not to do something because someone else has done it before. * A Weird Slop of People. * The CD-32 version of Alfred Chicken. * The Noclip documentary about PiCoSteveMo. * Blood and Fear and Nolf and Shogo and Condemned. * A hardware Pico-8 solution. * Explaining how to and how not to reply. * Enjoying social media because you need a place to type your garbage. * An Eternal September Situation. * Repeating Daily Show jokes from five years ago. * An oral history of Bluesky users. * Jimmy Fallon posting a picture of himself holding a Nintendo Switch. * The Ford vs. Chevy argument over and over again until we're all dead. * Laying your employees off based on their Klout scores. * What aspects of social media you can leave behind once you get a goat farm. * Having goats and not even posting pictures of them. * Goats as a gateway drug to other ungulates. * Did I get drunk and order 20 snakes again? * Boxcars: Where the Hobos Go. * Jumping in a train car full of refined materials. * Reminiscing about the time you lived in London and remembering everything that sucks about living in London. * A warped melting representation of your childhood memories. * An emotional VR moment. * Floating in space and hearing a cacophony of national anthems screaming up at you. * That time they added your uncle's farm to Google Street View. * Looking back on previous eras of your life and remembering why you don't want that kind of life any more. * The guy you know who mined bitcoins on his CPU and then spent it on black market Provigil. * Why do something that's going to make money when you can do ridiculous bullshit instead? * Three year olds who know how to use a remote control. * Areas of human interaction that you are just not prepared for. * Just putting your Zip disk in the file server and grabbing whatever's there. * What kind of porn the owner of the video rental place is personally obsessed with. * Why do you never see porn scored with tracker music? * Deep appreciation of porn that is made for somebody else * Beavis and Butthead trading cards. * Scintillating pizza delivery. * Explaining to your child that porn is fictional, not a documentary, and leaving it at that. * Your daughter asking you questions about Sonic the Hedgehog that you're not prepared to answer. * Encountering boys who play Minecraft. * Deploying new words to the wrong people. * Laying in bed and cursing at ghosts to calm yourself down. * An entire generation who goes to the gym and doesn't just watch CKY2K and break things. * Doing all the drugs so that you can explain what drugs are like to your children. * Learning how to fall as a child so you can fall safely as an adult. * Smoking Ice and waking up in San Francisco. * Pulling over, opening the hood, and punching the engine block over and over. * A poem that somebody else will read. * Whether the money has changed the Dwarf Fortress developers.

Lords: * Stevie * Bri Topics: * 3D modeling and my lack of visual imagination * Cutthroat compounds (my linguistic specialty) – current pursuit is "verb-em" last names – I'm researching the origins of the fictional law offices of Dewey Cheatum and Howe * Pocket Warwick and other lost software * For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper, by Joseph Fasano * https://www.reddit.com/r/Poetry/comments/1fvzv1f/poemforastudentwhousedaitowriteapaper/ * Colma's city motto "It's Great to Be Alive in Colma" is great marketing Microtopics: * Silly inventor and brainstormer. * Writing code that generates audio. * Giving talks at the Odd Salon. * Coffeehouse revolutionary thinkers. * Classic Hughes Behavior. * Looking at Blender again every seven to ten years. * Imagining a place in any level of detail. (Other than the name.) * The memory of what a tiger looks like, and whether it rotated on a Lazy Susan. * Whether seeing things in a dream feels similar to visualization. * Needing a license to operate as an engineer, but anyone can call themselves an Imagineer. * Weenies and MacGuffins. * Drawing something in 2D and tracing it in Blender. * Different ways to approach level design. * Thinking of something and putting it in your game. * Getting your game design playable as soon as possible so you can find out if it's any good. * A verb and its direct object. * Misers and drunks and cowards and gluttons. * Kick 'em Jenny. * Bop It! * Plastic keys where the point of the key is that it immediately breaks and you have to buy a new one. * Lawyer jokes from 19th century Australia. * Whether Nukem is his last name or just a nickname. * Syntactic freezes. * Rude slang words that end up on listicles. * How "cacafuego" became "spitfire." * Etymonline shrugging and giving up. * Not knowing about the alternate pronunciation of parentheses and processes until you get an office job. * Choosing a comma as one of your hills. * A unit of sound and meaning that you use to modify another unit of sound and meaning. * How to pronounce Warwick Davis. * A Jib Jab. * A Tamagotchi Situation. * Boatswains and forecastles. * Adding redundancy for clarity and also removing it for efficiency. * If you still have a Jaz disk, what do you even do with it? * Going to MagFest to see a chip metal band called Master Boot Record and he's throwing floppy disks with Deluxe Paint on them into the crowd. * Sharing a birthday with a Kentucky Derby winner but not being sure if he's a person or a horse. * The Friendliest Friend! * Stu Sutcliffe, the sixth Beatle. * International Snooker 2012 and Seven Wonders: Ancient Alien Makeover. * Fantasy consoles that only run Final Fantasy games. * If it's your first time at Nice Club, you have to Nice. * Seeing a generation grow up using automation to do a task that you had to do by hand and feeling one way or another about it. * How to tell whether somebody can reason about a topic and express their thoughts clearly. * Underpants Gnome Plans. * Polishing your thought processes until you find one that you agree with. * Defending Your Thesis, directed by Al Brooks. * The only place on the Internet you can hear advice about going to college. * Colma Secrets. * Noone ever stops in Colma (on purpose) * Everyone who came to San Francisco and died. * Go By Train. * Calling the Colma Historical Society to see if they have a living volunteer there that day. * Calling a song "Going to Colma" and hoping that the phrase catches on as a euphemism for Kicking the Bucket. * The Joy of Actual Citizens and People Involved in Government. * Encyclopedia Briannica.

Lords: * Andi * Casey Topics: * Lifehacks as communion with the divine * I decided to fire my computer * Winston is starting to forget things Microtopics: * A Star Trek watchalong podcast that doesn't exist yet. * Positing that what you said is no longer an NDA violation by the time this episode comes out. * Plugging a fake game that you worked on. * Astrobot. * Horror movie clinky noises that you can't hear over the PS4 fan noises. * Caffeine-infused mints with Tux the Penguin branding on Think Geek dot com. * The pre-eminent source for Life Hacks. * Using a hotel shower cap to bake bread. * Anime girls that are happy to see you. * That one time Film Crit Hulk broke character. * The joy of moving efficiently through the world. * More efficient ways to set the microwave timer. * Hotel rooms that you can bake bread in. * Whether bread should contain hair. * Tricking yourself into not being bored while doing something you have to do. * Reading 50 life hacks and applying none of them because. * Viral Life Hack that's killed 33 people. * A life hack that already had a body count in the double digits before someone made a TikTok about it. * Getting really fed up with computers. * Cryptographic signing processes that you can't participate in. * The HDCP certification board taking steps to ensure nobody can take a screen shot of their Crunchy Roll anime. * The analog hole. * Open source web browsers that can't see DRM content. * Microsoft-authenticated Linux installations. * Designing a circuit that solves a math problem. * Stamping a circuit onto your circuit clay. * An independent circuit re-implementation of video game hardware. * Should you use FPGA to do a thing? * Ridiculous multi-level memory caching systems. * Bootstrapping an FPGA design tool that runs on an FPGA device. * Every single circuit doing something on every single cycle. * Voltages going high and/or low. * Making a bunch of CPUs and testing them afterwards to see how many GHz they have. * Why the PS3 Cell processor had 7 SPUs * The industrial uses of the Cell processor. * A GLSL compiler that outputs FPGA circuits. * Mr. MiSTer. * Open-hardware laptops. * Inventing an open-source GPU. * Multics or Minix. * Writing a Breakout clone in Rust targeting the weird CPU your friend just invented. * Making a terrible first effort that is the right kind of good enough. * A laptop that has a FPGA where the CPU/GPU usually goes. * 1970s-era TV games. * The Epoch Cassette Vision. * A game console with interchangeable cartridges where the CPU is on the cartridge. * The Glasgow Interface Explorer. * Describing your FPGA circuit in Python. * Manufacturing homebrew Cassette Vision Homebrew cartridges for the audience of zero Cassette Vision owners. * Making art just for you, in the most overly elaborate and overly complicated way possible. * The programmer equivalent of going to swim with the dolphins. * Diagonal pixels. * Childhood amnesia. * Remembering your memories. * Using 10% of your brain. (And also the other 90%.) * Knowing things about stuff. * When one brother dies, the other brother gets their memories. * Memories that are formed before vs. after you learn to talk. * Being persecuted for being friends with a girl. * Rules of heteronormativity being enforced by three year olds. * Getting off of Wordpress.

Lords: * Kory * James Topics: * I've been reading more lately, and ditching the eReader sure has helped * Journey to the Planets * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEWiJ1Mn-aY * Send Me to Heaven * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SendMeto_Heaven * My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun, by William Shakespeare * https://poets.org/poem/my-mistress-eyes-are-nothing-sun-sonnet-130 * Re: Smooth Criminal. Are criminals like peanut butter? * My journey to make photography as labor intensive as possible and learn to enjoy it again in the process Microtopics: * A circulating cadre of hobbies. * Corpseflower blooms. * A forum to complain about the state of e-Readers. * eReaders launching as a perfect product and then slowly morphing into shitty phones. * Autosleep anxiety. * Increased difficulty of finding reference art now that stable diffusion exists. * Turning off all your screens in order to accomplish something. * Accordioning ebooks. * Breaking out into meat space with tiny Greek busts. * Freedom to do it the wrong way. * Reading the last page of a book so you don't have the temptation of reading the last page of the book. * Physical bit rot books. * Buying more than one book. * Collecting treasure in order to get home. * A flying around in space mini game. * Dying from comets. * Designing a game that you would never play. * Art that is better in some contexts than others. * King's Quest. * Tuning your adventure game difficulty based on how distracting the real world is. * Difficulty ramping in adventure games. * The text adventure prototype of Outer Wilds. * Untitled Goose Game's melding of the adventure game and the stealth sandbox. * Brock the Investigator's melding of the adventure game and the belt scroller. * An adventure game where the solution to the puzzle is to run up and kick something. * Games that would've been a useful referent for Gunhouse if it had existed. * The I'm Rich era of phone app development. * Let's Play videos of Send Me to Heaven. * App Store review bits that are not very well received. * If hairs be wires then black wires growing on her head. * Quoting a Shakespeare sonnet in your diss track. * Whether "reeks" has the same connotation in Early Modern English. * It's true but you shouldn't say it vs. I just think they're neat. * Whether the Smooth Criminal is the kind where you need to stir the oil in * Smooth criminals vs. chunky criminals. * In what ways criminals are like peanut butter? * What would a chunky rap sheet look like? * A pristine unopened criminal. * Getting merged in some sort of valve situation. * Scientists studying the stripey toothpaste to discover how it stays striped. * That movie where every character is the same person. * Regressing to the analog wherever possible. * Developing film without a dark room, using a dark bag. * Obsessing over a single photograph until the color balance is perfect. * Photography tropes that read as fancy. * The instinct to replicate the superficial qualities of an analog process in its digital equivalent. * Authentically taking a terrible picture with a terrible camera. * Getting sick of what fancy used to mean and figuring out what fancy means going forward. * Hypernice photography. * Art that has way too much detail.

Lords: * Avery * Linker Topics: * Twin Peaks * Myxozoa * How storytelling is failing us * Bones and Shadows, by John Philip Johnson * https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56581/bones-and-shadows * Novelizing films that originated as novels Microtopics: * A spike of interest corresponding with every episode you're on. * How many hate listeners Topic Lords has. * Chiaroscuro. * Buying Linker's games so he doesn't die. * Watching Blue Velvet while high. * Finishing season two of Twin Peaks out of a sense of duty. * A protagonist who you want to be happy. * That time David Lynch bought five Woody Woodpecker dolls and named them Chucko, Buster, Pete, Bob and Dan, then had to cut them out of his life after their personalities changed. * Focusing the energy you have on the things you love: filmmaking, painting and smoking. * The David Lynch Foundation for the Human Mind. * David Lynch changing the subject back to transcendental meditation. * The permeable boundary between dreams and reality. * David Lynch putting sawmills in every movie because he just likes sawmills. * The disappearance of all-night diners. * What it takes to get Denny's In small-town New Brunswick. * Whether it's possible to mod the bad parts of Deadly Premonition. * Putting evolutionary pressure on jellyfish to get smaller until they evolve back into a single-called organism. * Mammals returning to the sea. * The mutation that allows Henrietta Lacks to live forever. * The cancerous organism that's been hitchhiking in dogs for over a thousand years. * What kind of tumors are blowing around in the Tasmanian Devil whirlwind. * Real and metaphorical spandrels. * Where the Panda's sharp thumb came from. * The kiwi egg-to-body-mass ratio. * Big Bird, the evolutionary pinnacle of all birds. * Introverted Darwinism. * Keeping your toilet paper on the bed. * It's an indie game, you have to put a dead wife in there somewhere. * Obama's presidency as the end of history. * That time everyone was terrified of superpredators. * Human beings organizing facts info stories. * One of the many human traits that cause problems. * Interpreting observed facts differently when you are depressed. * Virtue Ethics. * Deducing ethics via pure reason. * Whether it's true or false that Sherlock Holmes smoked a pipe. * Flash games where you drone strike terrorists. * Exploring a system by interacting with it. * A poem about a guy being beaten up for money. * Successfully talking. * Becoming the bones in the last case. * Pre-nostalgia. * Answering a question by just saying shit. * A video game adaption of a poem. * An atheist take on Tarot readings. * The opinions of someone who once read a lot of philosophy. * Sensing the passage of time in a film clip of a stationary object. * Splinter of the Mind's Eye and the Star Wars radio plays. * The Weird Al song that's just the whole plot of The Phantom Menace. * The Blade Runner and V for Vendetta novelizations. * Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, the novelization. * Kenneth Branagh rolling around in slime with a naked reanimated corpse because because Mary Shelley would've wanted it that way. * A social media platform that was designed to be mindful of mental health, going out of business almost immediately.

Lords: * Andrew * Kate Topics: * Is it okay to make a game that is boring * My friend wants me to play WoW. Should I? * How to melt chocolate * Kate's Wallace and Gromit song * https://bsky.app/profile/hownottodraw.bsky.social/post/3lfctso62a22q * VFX is like cooking, game design is like baking * Looksmaxxing Microtopics: * Adam Atomic's Pico-8 renaissance. * Vampire vs. Pope Army * Still Kate. * Grass and flowers and touching them. * The bifurcation of Bluesky into Twitter 2 and Mastodon into Not Twitter. * The different kinds of people who tell you you're doing it wrong on different social media services. * Looking at Bluesky and realizing it's just like Twitter, and having a reaction to that realization. * Comparing your mood before using an internet service to your mood afterwards. * You're the cow, baby! * A story about living in a village of fewer than twenty people where nothing happens for thirty years. * Countervailing forces preventing your game design from becoming a worry stone. * Going outside and being bored until being bored stops feeling like an assault on all your senses. * Talking to your mates in the pub about your new socks. * Your mayonnaise manufacturing district. * YAGNI. * That time your ex-husband stole your knife and without a knife you can't cut food! Or ropes! * Needing medical help and asking the guy in your village who owns half an encyclopedia. * A miserable experience that is worth doing. * The big advantage of playing World of Warcraft in Hardcore mode. * WoW Classic and WoW Classic Classic. * A game about killing 40 rats. * The game for children that do annoying dances. * Who knows about causality? * The two year period when game designers played nothing but World of Warcraft. * Getting addicted to an MMO and never contributing anything to society ever again. * Entering into an activity with a miserly determination to not have fun. * What it takes to do a dungeon. * The spaces between the exciting parts. * Melting chocolate on top of parchment paper. * Melting chocolate with a hair dryer. * A Fraught Bark Experience. * Mouthfuls of raw flour. * Cake Batter Bark. * Rescuing seized chocolate. * Counterintuitive chocolate behavior. * Baking: It's Stupid. * Adding a tart cheese to cream of mushrooms soup. * Reading the poem as if you're not singing it in your head. * Asking the vicar to share a stir-fry. * Adding swear words to the Wallace and Gromit theme. * Leggy Desert Boy, by Percy Bysshe Shelley. * The verse in Eleanor Rigby where they talk about cooking and eating dinner. * Words that rhyme with "pint." * Rhyming "pint" with "2019." * Inventing an OC named "blorange" to solve your rhyming problems. * Taking flavors and synthesizing new flavors. * Hammering on the "fun" button for forty or fifty years. * Having the one hit and not needing another hit. * Exploring a multidimensional design space and tapping on all the walls to see which ones are destructible. * Starting to make a game and finding out whether it's an easy game to make. * Langoliers. * Night Snacker. * Releasing games exclusively in the Topic Lords discord. * The art of turning your mortal vessel into a weapon. * Softmaxxing vs. Hardmaxxing. * Doing tongue exercises to sharpen your jaw. * The Wikipedia page with the most scare quotes on it. * Limb-lengthening surgery. * Dabbing: it's just extremely short-term looksmaxxing. * When two subcultures have two different words for the same idea. * Whether the Xes in "Looksmaxxing" are the kisses and the Os the hugs, or vice versa. * Whether the Xes in are the kisses and the Os are the hugs or whether the Xes are the dead eyes on the cartoon face. * Archiving the VODs.

Lords: * Remy * https://store.steampowered.com/app/1675830/1000xRESIST/ * Abhi * https://store.steampowered.com/app/1491670/Venba/ Topics: * Why does food taste better outside of Canada? * Xander asks: "Biased history is better" * Is it fair to make a new game console when we haven't finished the ones we already have? * Puranaanooru * https://oldtamilpoetry.com/2016/04/04/puranaanooru-256/ * What's one IP you would like to adapt or work with? Microtopics: * An image that allows you to attribute the text above it to the character in the image. * Knower. (The one who knows things.) * Losing your faith in God until you see the clip of Mario Kart showing 24 starting positions. * Visual novels with contextualized minigames. * Enjoying food more abroad. * Orbiting the United States. * Which state makes the best dosas. * The best Asian food ten minutes south of Vancouver. * Waves of immigration establishing generations of restaurants. * When there are finally enough immigrants in a city that one of them might open a restaurant to serve food to other immigrants. * Vancouver's restaurant licensing situation. * Vancouver's medallion system for food trucks. * No Good Pizza In My Back Yard! * NAID 96. * Jim's personal experience with Canadian food. * Whether it's what it sounds like. * Capturing the history of written language in your game. * The constant flux of our understanding of history. * Xander-biased history. * A very happy self-described sad boy. * Squeezing every last great game out of the Atari 2600 before creating a new game console. * Hoarding Pico-8 games on your desktop. * The golden era of video game development effort-to-return ratio. * New ways to make games look more expensive. * Outrageously high margins that you are not expected to fill. * Games that would still be fun if the graphics were worse. * Giving your PS5 to your dad so you can buy a PS5 Pro. * Brain hacking yourself. * PS5 Pro Max. * Realizing you don't need to upgrade your game console or in fact any consumer electronics ever again. * The Fairchild Channel F Pro, featuring S-Video. * The Dave the Diver revolution. * Failing enough that you decide to change. * Fortnite Money. * You can't read ancient Tamil?! * A small white lizard stuck to the wagon axle hub's spoke. * The purpose of art. (For people to examine it in 2000 years and find things out about you.) * Finding out what dead people thought. * Finding the time to be cruel. * Shocking Adventure Time moments. * Trusting what people write about themselves. * Finally understanding Xander Bias. * A love letter to Indian cinema. * Things Metroid Prime does to make you feel like you're inside a space suit. * Waiting for the Metroid IP to expire so you can make your Metroid fan game in your extreme old age. * Continuity nerds. * Reboot. * Vancouver-coded fictional cities. * Telus Storyhive. * An IP address you're dying to do. * Shouldn't Zelda and Sokoban be the same genre? * Atari 50 vs. UFO 50. * A murder mystery that you solve by playing video games. * Why the CBC is like that. * Brown Money.

Lords: * Maxx * https://comicfury.com/comicprofile.php?url=mildreth * https://comicfury.com/comicprofile.php?url=delia * https://comicfury.com/comicprofile.php?url=cosmicfault * Chall Topics: * I love the steam deck * The puzzle of the Wikipedia did you know section * The neuroplasticity theory of why we dream * https://www.instagram.com/reel/DELHsgYRamy/ * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-eye_hallucination * https://www.mirror.co.uk/science/viral-image-unrecognisable-objects-creepy-14705067 * She Needed a Hobby, by Maxx Microtopics: * Comic Fury. * The most mediocre comic. * Mildreth of the Night. * Collage vs. ransom note. * A squirrel that finds a way to contact aliens. * Using Redbubble to host your webcomic. * Direct-to-cassette podcast episodes. * A co-op game that makes you raise your voice. * Overcooked but it's a train. * The part of the train that keeps you moist and warm. * How to run Pico-8 on the Steam Deck. * Not wanting to get a Steam Deck because you might drop it on your face. * How many liters a parrot is. * One of those massage beds where your face goes in a little hole and your hands dangle to reach the controls of the Steam Deck that's lying on the ground. * Waterproofing the Vive. * Games Done Pwick. * Sonic the Hedgehog looking like he ought to be a progress bar but he definitely isn't. * Emulators: you can do that! * Extremely intricate marble runs. * Retiring so you have enough time to configure the warping on your enormous loom. * The pleasant monotony of weaving vs. the meticulous craft of warping. * Tuning 1000 pianos at once. * Using a drop spindle to turn wool into thread. * Spinning wool straight from the rabbit. * Breeding for maximum stats on every axis. * Facts that are not particularly fun. * Seeing what the Wikipedia home page looks like on January 2nd, 2525. * Why is a mountain landscape? * Make-your-own-fun fun facts. * Who is this man? Why did he steal a horse? * Clicking on the nomination wizard. * Five Clicks to Jesus and other Wikipedia routing games. * Getting really into patterns and categories. * Shoehorning your favorite pop culture thing into everywhere you can fit it. * Mock Guffin. * Breaking down a story into a list of tropes. * Screen savers for the visual cortex. * Finding stories in the noise. * Different levels of the thing where you see patterns on the back of your eyelids. * How much can you see behind your eyes? * Running experiments on your own physiology. * New places on your body you haven't pressed yet. * Strobe lights for your ears. * Covering the speaker on your phone because you're too place to turn down the volume. * How text looks in your dreams. * Latching onto the idea of a story. * Tasting a lot of math problems before you go to sleep. * A gross crinkled dog texture. * Accidentally crocheting so much that you remake the universe. * The names of such unthinkable numbers. * A crochet pattern for an infinite Mobius strip. * Cool yarns from the local crafting store. * The ability to stick with a hobby. * Crocheting a functional internal combustion engine.

Lords: * John * https://abbydenton.itch.io/the-blade-of-cutiepants-a-very-cutie-christmas * Elena Topics: * Potluck advent calendar * NES games in my collection that are currently ranked rather low according to Science * http://8bitnintendo.science * Subtopic: I've grown to love engaging with criticism and differing opinions of silly things I like. * How animals read * https://jamchamb.net/projects/animal-crossing-letters * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zy-kIXzX5Cc * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGlpWJ80d_Y * https://ailbey.tumblr.com/post/750880084257374208 * https://www.amazon.com/Dynamic-Wrinkles-Drapery-Solutions-Drawing/dp/0823015874 * https://www.drawright.com/ * https://www.amazon.com/Colour-Atlas-Human-Anatomy/dp/0723408823 Microtopics: * Crispy Shrimp Balls. * What makes it Dim Sum? * Whether there's always a cart that you roll around. * Tapas Lords, a new ASMR podcast. * The Blade of Cutie Pants: a Very Cutie Christmas. * Christmas Dangerous Dave. * Here's a song. I'm going to scroll past that. * Stock footage of Godzilla attacks. * An album about making games in Kilk n Play. * Granny Cream's Hot Butter Ice Cream. * Jim's songs in the Hypnospace OST. * Knowing a lot of people just by hanging out and being entertaining. * Recognizing sounds by looking at them. * Tea and Jam Advent Calendars. * Tippy Tops. * 3D-printed animals with wiggly arms. * Taking the economics of Halloween and applying it to Christmas. * Stocking Stuffers Every Day. * 365-day Advent Calendars. * Santa with a Fanta. * Showing Home Alone to a kid who already loves setting up traps. * An Advent Calendar filled with traps. * Never playing board games but opening up the boxes and playing with the pieces. * Fake Winstons. * Getting 2.5 trinkets from each person. * Half-Lego, Half-Chocolate. * Why your favorite NES games are terrible. * Shipping a game that's no good but damned if it doesn't exist. * A Failure of Science. * Rare game or Rare game? * The Treasure Master walk cycle. * The worst NES games with the best soundtracks. * British developers succeeding on the Commodore 64 but failing on the NES because people are willing to pay 6 quid for the latest Rob Hubbard track, but not $50. * Your neighbor who had Big Nose Freaks Out. * Punching the clues. * Buying the 3D version of Urban Champion on purpose. * Trying to go back to Super Monkey Ball. * Nostalgically revisiting your best Super Monkey Ball replays. * Accidentally transposing two digits and now you have a Super Monkey Ball world record. * Making local copies of videos you want to continue to exist. * Recognizing when something works for someone else but not you. * Writing letters to your animal neighbors. * The seven criteria to judge a letter. * How to safely write a letter about VVVVVV to your Animal Crossing neighbor. * Roleplaying James Joyce in Animal Crossing. * Teaching Animal Crossing a slur and then returning the cartridge to Gamestop. * Deciding that it's okay if local news stations freak out. * Taking joy in extremely mundane activities. * How you spend your moments and how you feel about them. * Watching TV so that in several decades you can go to a bar and find out who's the same age as you. * Practicing love by trying to love yourself. * The breakup song from the Wedding Singer. * Corollaries of aphantasia. * Blind people watching TV. * Learning to draw by studying human anatomy and proportions in detail and imagining the body kinesthetics. * Looney Tunes artists making faces in the mirror. * Knowing how bones go. * The Bone Book. * That's Topics!

Lords: * Esper * https://ourbroadcastday.com/ * RT-55J * https://rt-55j.itch.io/ Topics: * Memes where the specific instance of joke customization is frontloaded, while the punchline remains the same every time. * Making ZZT games in 2024 * https://stale-meme.itch.io/the-king-in-yellow-borders * It's 2024 and still nobody has ported Mario 64 to the Commodore 64 * https://abbydenton.itch.io/the-blade-of-cutiepants-a-very-cutie-christmas * What I Would Tell Eve by Maegen McAuliffe O'Leary * https://www.reddit.com/r/Poetry/comments/1ez31sh/poemwhatiwouldtellevebymaegenmcauliffe/ * "A vampire with a cheque-book, a solicitor, and a balance at the bank is not a plausible kind of creature." - Andrew Lang (contemporary reviewer of Dracula) * Do you think there were any Fortnite die-hards who got really upset when Fortnite started introducing Marvel and Star Wars guys to the game? Microtopics: * A Muppet Christmas Carol. * Gradations of Michael Caine oldness. * The Museum of ZZT. * Wizened ZZT Wizards. * Taking a common idea and altering it in an interesting way. * Why do plays still exist? * Making up an audience to applaud you. * Rehearsing a conversation in a low-oxygen environment. * A guy walking around touching things in the world and flavor text appears. * The ZZT aspect ratio problem. * Sneaking into the office at night and playing ZZT in silent mode so you don't bother the janitor. * 8-way movement in ZZT. * Reasons to stick with a certain set of constraints. * WeaveZZT. * Making a deck builder RPG in ZZT. * The safety and romance of a good set of constraints. * The King in Yellow Borders. * Oktrollberfest. * A found object horror game built in a fake ZZT engine. * Wario doing a ground pound and breaking the Youtube interface around the video. * Reading like 200 pages of Problem Sleuth and never getting around to Homestuck. * A program you can install to make your computer look like it's still running Windows Vista, and another you can install to make it feel like Obama is still president. * Porting ZZT to the Commodore 64. * An economy of people enjoying themselves. * Porting Mario 64 to ZZT and ending up on the front page of Planet Quake. * Tux Racer. * Scoping your game just big enough for people to see screen shots and get excited, but small enough that it's still finishable. * Mario 64's British Platformer Energy. * Whether Argonaut or Rare was a bigger influence on the design of Mario 64. * 3D Construction Kit for the Commodore 64. * Trying to build a scene in PovRay. * What iPad kids were like in the mid-90s. * Whether or not Eve ate the best possible apple. * Plausible and implausible vampires. * Ahistorical vampire analysis. * Why there's chicken on the Streets of Rage * What the Antediluveans got up to. * The 14 million year war for Cybertron. * What did you eat for 14 million years? * Subsisting on pure unfiltered Sparklemotion. * Two robots punching each other in the face for millennia. * Nike sponsorships in Magic the Gathering. * A roadmap of Magic the Gathering Crossovers. * The Guitar Hero game where you could make Kurt Cobain perform Run DMC. * Rated E for Explicit. * A PubG with fort building mechanics. * Winning your first game of Fortnite and retiring forever. * The Super Smash Instinct. * Monetizing a child's insatiable gambling instincts. * Playing a video game and worrying about the developer's immortal soul.

Lords: * Ryan * Cort Topics: * Is it possible to make a "meat flavored" potato chip that's not disgusting. * Meandering Pico-8 tracker jabbering * Do you think anyone has ever used the "Add or Remove Programs" interface to add a program? * Tommy C * https://genius.com/Dan-le-sac-vs-scroobius-pip-tommy-c-lyrics * Advent calendars are just tiny bulk-rate loot crates Microtopics: * Ryan Ike Audio on Instagram. * How to make music and have balance in your life. * If there's nothing to fail at, what are you bad at? * Stand Elsewhere, an Oregon Trail-like. * Converting 50s pop songs to chunky four channel chip tunes. * The Pico-8 Splore database. * Asking a friend to make music for your PiCoSteveMo game, and having to explain what a PiCoSteveMo is, then Pico-8, trackers, music, sound, air, matter, and existence itself. * Potatoed Chips. * Romanian Beef Bolognese Flavored Potato Chips. * Abuela's All-Day Braised Carnitas potato chips. * Hate-buying a terrible flavor potato chips over and over so you can make everybody you know taste them. * Raw Hamburger flavored potato chips that moo when you eat them. * The Doritos Brain-hack. * Looking at the box of Frosted Mini-Wheats with a shrimp on the box and thinking "that's a little shrimpy" * Cool American Doritos. * Eat the cool. They knew the risks. * A bowl of M&Ms with a single Skittle in it. * Fresh Meat Potato Chips. * Walking into the Frito-Lay factory, dangling your jaw open and waiting for come what may. * All Night Nippon Shredded Abuela's Braised Carnitas. * The Taki's One-Chip Challenge. * Inviting all your friends over to try the new Strawberry Mochi Dill Pickle potato chips. * Explaining to your daughter's friends' parents that we're going to give your children tablets I got on the Internet and then we're going to eat lots of food and it's going to taste really weird. The FDA doesn't allow you to put this in food but I need you to dissolve this on your tongue. * Par-boiling your soft palate in lemon juice because it tastes so amazing. * Reprogramming your tongue to remix your palate. * What to do if you love both music and spreadsheets. * Art tools that make your tummy feel icky. * Mr. Lee by the Bobbettes. * What trackers are good at. * An extremely Bojangles tracker configuration. * Trying to do Math Rock in the Pico-8 tracker. * Triggering patterns 0 through 7 as instruments. * Whether the Add or Remove Programs interface can add a program. * Windows Sandbox. * Jacking your whole life up but your Windows desktop is pristine. * Getting a burner desktop for write-ins. * Inventing a guy named Dampiel and getting mad at him even years later. * Classic Dampy. * Renaming your game to doom.exe and suddenly Nvidia cards run it way better. * Putting a comment in your shader saying "Dear Nvidia, please make this shader look rad." * The Valve guy refusing to tell you how the math is wrong. * A selection of gags, hand movements and facial expressions. * Dying onstage while the audience applauds. * Feigning death so often as part of your comedy act so when you really die during your routine it'll be hilarious. * Death: just a bad deal all around. * Not my birth mom, but my robo-mom. * Having a death so weird that even as an extremely minor celebrity you end up on TMZ. * Doing extensive R&D so that you can somehow be murdered by a flamingo. * A bloodied flamingo wearing Ryan Ike's glasses. * Walking through the zoo looking for opportunities for environmental storytelling. * Accidentally doing an immaculate 360 Christ Air and then dying on impact. * Thinking of one funny scenario a month. * A treat that's busting the seams of the Advent Calendar door. * A sack of little handmade animal ornaments. * The Joy of Mastery. * Empty Advent Calendars. * Going shopping for used candy after Halloween. * Terrible Novelty Potato Chip of the Day. * One big Advent calendar the size of a barn door with 365 doors in it. * The Mayan Advent Calendar. * Automats. * Wheel of Fortune except you're assembling a wheel and not a phrase. * Spin the wheel, make a deal! * The first podcast of the rest of your life.

Lords * Tyriq * Stevie * Avery Topics: * What is Dr. Mario's specialty? * Boutique sardines * Street Sharks (and the lies about them) * PiCoSteveMo is over! (as of this recording) Microtopics: * Throwing out an idea like a plate of spaghetti, or a grenade. * Odd Object. * Piggy-back dual plugs. * Now! That's What I Call Avery Burke, Vol. VII. * Jason Shiga. * Older kids who are into roughhousing and watching shark movies. * Audio Issues Because of Dog. * The only place on the Internet you can hear cardboard boxes rubbing against each other. * Two hours of an attractive woman scraping her thumbnail on a microphone. * Dr. Mario telling someone that they only have-a four months to live-a. * The weird forehead mirror that old-timey doctors wear. * The opinions of someone who's eaten cat food. * Grandma barging in while you're eating dog food. * Flintstones Cannibalism Vitamins. * Barney's PTSD after the Neanderthal Wars. * Wacky Races, the original MCU. * Dr. Mario's pill pusherside hustle causing the opioid crisis. * Ego Death Mario microdosing the germs in the pill bottle who transcend to the great pill bottle in the sky. * Coming up with the conceit that your band is enemies with sea mammals and making all future audiences hate you. * Three adorable sardines rowing a boat shaped like a dragon. * An octopus tentacle that looks like a serial port or a 2x6 spot light. * The animal that you're eating depicted in cartoon form as cheering you on. * An anthropomorphic ginger root eating a ginger candy. * Single-serving black characters. * Eating a fish and finding an entire spine. * The weirdest bone to find. * Free floating animals gathering into a colony and turning into a face. * The most popular fish sauce in ancient Rome. * Sealing a whale hand in a trash can with duct tape for two years until it starts leaking and your roommate has to help you dispose of it wearing a hazmat suit. * Tucking a whale bone under your trench coat and sneaking out of the museum. * Famous whale disposal techniqus. * Fishwife, fish life! * Not knowing about the preexisting work that your favorite cartoon is in conversation with because you're a kid and don't know anything. * Slammu, Ripster and Streex. * Michelangelo, Leonardo, DiCaprio, and Don Angelo. * Vin Diesel being very excited about the Street Sharks. * IP Homeopathy. * Sexy Mummy Costume. * Using mumnies as train fuel because they are so plentiful. * You can't get Mummy Brown any more because of Woke. * Who has and hasn't heard of Tommy Tallarico. * A toy that lets you shoot at the TV screen during the interactive parts of Captain Power. * Fresh off the PiCoSteveMo boat. * Graph going up emoji. * Lots of different skill levels going on in there. * Aardvarks and anteaters. * A three hour celebration of weird things that games can be. * Look Who's The Shining Two! * Why the Sokoban puzzle in Ocarina of Time sucks. * Puzzles vs. situations. * Tony and the Tony Mechanic. * The Thought Leader of the Thinky Games Community.

Lords: * Alexander * Hallie Topics: * Making AI drunk * Alexander's name generator, rehosted: http://twinbeard.com/names/ * How Star Wars being bought Disney is basically the same thing as the Roman Empire converting to Christianity * Electromagnetism * Super Bon Bon (according to Google search) * https://www.google.com/search?q=super+bon+bon+lyrics * Using flow theory and Kubler Ross grief to drive learning systems * Animals you want to pet, but cannot. Microtopics: * A Game Called Anomaly. * A tarot-based GM-less storytelling game about a sinister organization investigating a supernatural The KGB (not that one) * Deliberately lo-fi neural nets. * Real to less-real name sliders. * What Jamden Ovenson is up to these days. * Cranking the tipsy slider all way up. * anomaly. * Things humans can do with new tools. * Setting desired and undesired objectives for your learning designers. * Learning to speak as many languages as possible so that Godzilla does not rise from the briny deep. * Refusing to let the AI drive the bus. * A very big json dump. * The Mac Mini in your closet that runs your witch's familiars. * Things that are obvious to you but not to anyone else. * Cool apocryphal acts, bro. * Getting into Christ before it was cool. * Decanonizing anything that doesn't serve your power interests. * Bible/Star Wars crossover fan fiction. * Once you eat the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden, forever will it dominate your destiny. * Metals that can be turned into a magnet. * Where to even start with spin? * Whether protons are physical objects. * The language of perceiving the world. * Reading a poem about quantum physics. * Finally understanding the mathematics of love so you can ditch the love poetry and find the best lovers in the math department. * Which types of quark are super effective against other types of quark. * Why they call it electromagnetism. * But what about the Bullet Galaxies? * Weakly-interactive massive particles, or WIMPs. * Another particle that we thought up. * Microphones not picking up your tinnitus. * Extremely slow and old neutrinos. * Cosmic Microwave Background Average Frame of Reference. * The Soul Coughing cadence. * A poem, but it's performed in a certain rhythm. Some white guy should invent that and take credit for it. * Song Meanings Blog Dot Com. * Helping drive exploration of new ideas. * Making a name generator so bad that nobody uses it more than once. * Patterns and responses that characterize human behavior. * Grief as a mechanism to address overfitting in the human learning model. * The Parable of the Spandrel. * Possibilities that are more probable than Godzilla having eaten your house. * Depression as a way to just sit there. * Automatons with anxiety. * Entering random Game Genie codes into your neural net. * Wanting to pet a service dog because he's the best boy. * Service dogs having their own service dogs, recursively all the way down. * A chicken named Regular Expressions, or Reggie for short. * Digging in anything that looks diggable. * Being desperately confused by objects that you can see through but not walk through. * Ways to not get tricked by yourself or others.

Lords: * Tyriq * Alex Topics: * Trying to superficially familiarize myself with every country * The log burner fan * https://ae01.alicdn.com/kf/S68d58689db54401f9a434456881cbdfcf/4-Blade-Heat-Powered-Stove-Fan-Log-Wood-Burner-Eco-Friendly-Quiet-Fireplace-Fan-WinterWarm.jpg * Drilling this chair for ancient water * Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams, by Kenneth Koch * https://allpoetry.com/Variations-On-A-Theme-By-William-Carlos-Williams * Boichik bagels * Boxfish skeletons are wilder than seahorse skeletons Microtopics: * Saya Gray. * Least-favorite UFO 50 games. * Treating the city you live in as if you're a tourist. * Going to obscure corners of parking lots. * A way to have an adventure in real life. * The tiny squishy seal that's no longer in your back pocket. * Web sites that are nothing but quizzes. * Trying to name every country. * This Sporcle quiz's opinion about which disputed territories count as countries. * Feeling more worldly after you memorize the names of every country. * Learning katakana and then being annoyed when signs do katakana wrong. * The curse of perfect-pitch. * Corrupted Pitch. * Tuning your whole band to the same out of tune guitar. * Hearing sounds in your head but only the sounds you're also hearing with your ears. * Statw.gov hosting PDF reports of the US government's opinion of every country. * Dear diary, today I did a cool fishing trade with Norway. * The Four Guineas. * The Place Across the Woods. * A giant CPU heat sink in gunmetal black sitting on top of your wood burning stove. * Devices powered by ambient temperature differentials. * The spinning thing on the roof that looks like a macaroon. * Putting googly eyes on your turbine roof vents. * Whether Stirling Engines are useful for anything other than a demonstration of the principles of the Stirling Engine. * Fluids moving through spaces of different sizes. * Injection molded hollow chunky boys. * Extremely mundane time capsules. * A Chair for Scientists. * A giant plastic-encased garbage ravioli. * Entire ecosystems that have existed without light for thousands of years. * Your FEMA-approved disaster preparedness chair. * Sorting all the water molecules on earth from newest to oldest. * Artists' depictions of the Hadean Earth. * The biggest wettest comet in the universe. * Don Quixote, the sopping wet comet. * Free sharps, only used once! * Writing a piece for prepared guitar after your kid fills the guitar with crayons. * Unprepared Pianos. * Juicy cold March wind. * A fair-use parody. * AI analysis of poetry that completely misses the point. * Editing Wikipedia to say that Lil Jon went to Harvard. * List of Rivers in Togo. * What a Specific Guy! * Registering an account to vandalize Wikipedia every few months for years. * Supermarket bagels. * Boiling round bread in water with crustaceans from the Bronx. * Making your own water to make coffee with. * Where to get food-grade lye. * Pastrami lox. * Seahorse skeletons. * Every Platonic Solid Has a Fish. * Where babies breathe from. * Fish without ribcages. * Caltrops arranged into a fish. * Using a pufferfish skeleton as a fidget toy. * The pufferfish at the center of our solar system. * The kind of decoration you see in a lobster joint. * Tropes of the open ocean. * The guy preventing you from being able to find search results for the Atari game Toobin'. * The loudest drinks in the world. * The Toobin' zone in LEGO Dimensions. * Chucking whole unopened cans of beer from your inner tube.

Lords: * James * https://pounced-on.me/@Triplefox * Kev * https://kevzettler.com/ * https://www.youtube.com/@MikeMotion83 Topics: * Copyparty * Egg punk vs. chain punk * Going geocaching three times * https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/ugJWqQdP.jpg * Septic Tanks * https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/q0tW8KtD.jpg * Certain kinds of trash you don't see any more * Mosquito bites Microtopics: * Multiple recurring lords. * Going back to an earlier episode to listen to the plugs. * Agreeing to a copy party without knowing what it is. * Multi-part RARs. * Putting together educational material for your hypothetical younger self. * Manually extracting files over a physical USB connection. * Org-mode. * A collection of ogg vorbis music. * Your personal learning mind-map for learning how to draw. * The bottom end of expertise. * Two contrasting branches of the punk community. * Nerdy; dancey; influenced by Devo. * Musical genres refusing to converge no matter how close they get. * genres refusing to converge no matter how close they get. * How old you have to be to know about My Bloody Valentine. * Finally getting your act together and installing the right app and logging into the right web site. * Finding excuses to be more engaged with nature. * Having conversations, like you do with friends in a park. * Finding an Altoids tin where you would expect to find a bunch of spider webs. * Walking through half-nature in near-complete darkness. * Climbing down a rocky embankment in near-complete darkness with your phone in one hand. * Caches getting muggled. * Null Island. * Realizing that you're about to go on the bad kind of adventure. * A passing wizard complimenting you on your ironic orc-detecting sword. * A stuffed BB-8 that you use for photo opportunities. * Leaving one line of your toilet poem blank in case you think of a good rhyme for "too." * The kind of poem you put in your bathroom. * A pithy way to say what to put in the toilet. * Telling the restaurant's poet laureate that he really nailed that septic tank poem. * Using a black marker to redact the line about cigarette butts from your poem. * A book that reads like browsing Reddit. * Taking your mind off of your butt for five minutes. * Whether Law and Order was ever an accurate depiction of police procedure. * How they convicted or didn't convict the latest perp. * Uncle John's Bathroom Reader. * TV Guides lying on the street. * The genre of children's craft made from newspaper. * Archaeologists finding a thousand year old USB drive and finding a bunch of PDFs and videos about how to learn to draw. * FAT16 vs. FAT32. * Multi-volume ARJ files. * Putting together dual-purpose CDs for punk banks. * CD-ROMs shaped like a business card. * Inserting mini-CDs into a slot loading CD drive. * What it takes to make an indie Gamecube game. * Side-factoids about Luigi's Mansion. * Luigi's Mansion counting the volume of dust you've vacuumed through the whole playthrough. * The new Duck Tales game modeling the physics of every treasure you can collect so you can swim in them. * Mosquito activity in the midwest. * Hanging out around mosquito predators. * Mosquitos waking up for the gloaming and then going back to bed. * Finding the one high-altitude spot in the Panhandle to avoid the mosquitos. * Feeling bad about killng mosquitos after playing Hollow Knight. * Your favorite mind control force. * Golfers hitting that ball to make the number go down when they could just play less and it'd stay at 0 forever.

Lords: * John * Erica Topics: * Golden owl pre-post-mortem * https://goldenowlhunt.com/ * Twin update: one year later * Notepad has support for alternative line endings now * Goodnight Moon (And/or Goodnight Dune?) * https://www.firstcry.com/intelli/articles/goodnight-moon-nursery-rhyme/ Microtopics: * The waiting list to get into the Topic Lords discord. * What goes on the lords-only channel. * The first rule of being a lord. * It's the end of the show somewhere in the world. * Frog Fractions Royalty. * Topic Lords Con East. * Choosing pairs of lords. * What lords have been on the show least recently. * Mystery with a B. * Responsibility to the lords. * ARG goings-on. * Maze of Games. * Rubber hose ARG solving * Digging up the golden owl and replacing it with a duck. * The minimum number of golden owls you are allowed to cast in France. * The History of the Owl Stuff. * Commemorating your love of the Golden Owl by purchasing this commemorative Golden Owl. * The Mystery of the Golden Owl that nobody wanted solved. * It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. * Going and burying a duck * Unburying the Duck and putting the Owl back. * Looking through the Heart of France. * Another cursed treasure hunt in the can. * Ancient alternatives to zip files. * Re-scoping your puzzle hunt on the fly. * Telling twins apart using phrenology. * Twin identification strategies. * Let me see your flecks! * Checking your placental mammals for belly buttons. * Platypodes. * Jock twin/nerd twin. * Having children as a way to practice solving problems together. * Who forgot to take a nap today? (Everyone on the show.) * Flailing limbs kicking your bedmate all night. * Rocking your kid to sleep and then depositing them in the crib like Indy swapping out the golden idol. * How to teach babies to sleep. * Wearing children until the children no longer tolerate it. * A good selection of kid-friendly music. * A guy with a soothing British voice saying interesting things for ten minutes. * How much coffee to give a six year old right before bed. * Waiting for your kid to realize that when it's 1am he doesn't have to ask you if he can watch TV. * Just show me the byte order marker! * Adding tabs to Notepad. * Everyone agreeing to go back to WordStar. * What software developers do once a program is finished and perfect. * Loading CSV files into R. * Accidentally updating Excel. * The kind of person who is passionate about the latest cutting edge version of all software, who works in tech and is in charge of all update systems. * Adobe Premiere updates that ruin your team's entire workflow. * Why JWZ is no longer rich. * Seeing all the trailing spaces at the end of the line. * Jobs that require you to be able to distinguish between a tab character and the equivalent number of spaces. * How Unity handles upgrades and versioning. * The 75th anniversary of Goodnight Moon. * Why the New York Times's list of most borrowed children's library books of all time doesn't contain Goodnight Moon. * When Goodnight Moon says "Goodnight Nobody" and you immediately assume that the old lady died. * The calming effect of going over an inventory of really nice soothing things. * The Margaret Wise Brown ouevre. * Goodnight Dune. * Good night, shai-hulud bursting out of the dune. * Good night, Bene Gesserit witch whispering "they tried and died." * Too much of every character giving their internal monologue in italics. * Virginia Facebook's extremely cheap antiques. * Floating in the No-Room.

Lords: * Ben * Andrew Topics: * Baking: precise science of measurement or do it all by feel? (People have very different philosophies of muffins) * I've gotten into making crosswords this year and recently had the idea to start putting them on postcards and leaving them in public places for people to find. Am I becoming the Riddler? Is this fine? * I just found out that there aren't exactly 52 weeks in a year * The Rules, Leila Chatti * https://poets.org/poem/rules * Building fidgeting into a Zoom lecture * Things of Science. (Subscription science toy service that I got when I was a kid) Microtopics: * Posting pictures of pottery to social media. * The Hopefully Year of Layoffs. * Teaching game development as a hobby. * The interactive comic books of Jason Shiga. * Lies and truth and sea monsters. * Waiting for half an hour to find out if you fucked it up. * Baking intuitively. * Skimming a recipe and thinking "hmm yes, I've made food before" * Voronoi cookies. * Keeping separate baking notebooks for each season. * Having units that are divisible by two. * Putting it in a Gas 4 Oven. * How to pronounce "tare." * Sneaking into Grandma's kitchen and weighing all the ingredients. * Cruciverbalism. * Where to post the crosswords you've constructed. * A Lord's Puzzle. * Giving people a little bit of joy and avoiding hearing any feedback about it. * Living in the puzzle capital of the world. * Constructing a crossword puzzle for every party you attend. * The MIT Mystery Hunt. * Making art for a really small group of people. * Crosswordese. * Designing themed vs. themeless crossword puzzles. * How many weeks are in a leap year. * Yet another ratio that doesn't work out. * Calendrical systems you could use. * Things that you know that are wrong. * What's your favorite thing you don't know that you don't know? * Finding a drawer full of narwhal tusks in a bone shop and thinking "hm, sixty unicorns died here" * NASA's antigravity room. * Why doesn't the Mars habitat work out? * Multiple digressions on horse urine. * Refining horse urine into progesterone on Mars. * Suddenly realizing that you've been dead all along. * Cicadas doing whatever they do in the trees. * Acknowledging the expectations of what a poem is. * Why you always turn out to have been dead at the end. * Who is out there still making games about guns? * Adding line breaks to make your essay look like a poem. * Innominateness. * Garden path level design. * Reading aloud etudes. * Mavis Beacon Teaches Elocution. * Replacing your Zoom background with a video of yourself. * Brain massaging video of cutting sand. * The calming effect of amphetamines. * Fidgeting incessantly during Zoom calls. * Fidgeting for people so they don't have to. * Bubbling noises and space harps. * Remote testing protocols. * Plagiarism detector snake oil. * Doing homework to get used to the idea of doing homework. * Mass-production of adults. * Paperwork as a method of crowd control. * Homework as a barrier to family time vs. homework that facilitates family time. * Mailing people little bits of science. * Aerogel vs. Superslurper. * Growing mold in your oobleck. * Sending 1940s children asbestos in the mail. * Using every sense to explore the world. * A dog sniffing your hand and walking away. * Throwing away all the business cards that just have your Twitter handle on them.

Lords: * Tim * Chris Topics: * Noodles? * Everything and More (by DFW), the "impoverishment of the question",and free will * Choosing an integrator * https://gafferongames.com/post/integration_basics/ * Lucky Jim (old song) * https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/U7zR1RCa.png * Collaborative music as a game design problem (see: skill gap, handicaps, engagement, peripheral participation) Microtopics: * Celtic Music and Corgis. * Tim, a figure shrouded in mystery. * Topic Monologues. * Gluten-free noodle straws. * Bucatini: imagine a Red Vine but made of pasta. * Replacing food service workers with clockwork automata made of noodles that have been hardened into gears and springs. * Giant fusilli as playground equipment. * Noodleness and pastitude. * Whether gnocchi is a pasta. What about cauliflower gnocchi? * Unleavened Carrot Cake. * Indomie: the number one selling noodle on Earth. * Good spices: they can work in a broth. * Soupertaster: Jim eats soup alone while talking to a volleyball with a bloody handprint on it. * Learning math by starting with incredibly abstract unmotivated ideas. * Some Bottomless Pits are Deeper than Others. * Approaching a question by interpreting it as a question that if answerable. * The significant of the perception of free will. * How a closed system can produce multiple different outcomes. * What happens when we decide we don't have free will. * A completely deterministic system that has a sensation of free will. * Taking as much time as it takes to read a book. * Shooting the Moon (in real life) * Taking all the bad cards and winning. * Becoming disciplined about time * What a modern feature phone can do. * Dividing your day into blocks and spending them. * The period in your life when you lived in Burlingame. * Getting an incredibe amount of work done during your hour and a half commute. * Topic Lords or Plug Lords? * Something you'll be glad you did tomorrow. * Integration Basics. * Explicit Euler vs. Semi-Implicit Euler. * The pros and cons of RK4. * The physics system behind Drawn to Life. * What it takes to be an old song. * Hadestown and The Instigator. * The Hadestown Tiny Desk Concert. * How to play music with other people in a way that accounts for skill gaps. * Going to the Starry Plough to play the penny whistle. * Musicians sitting in a circle and talking until someone starts playing something and everyone else joins in. * Joining in on a song you've never heard before. * Playing Mary Had a Little Lamb at 40 BPM. * Making a slow song more interesting by adding ornamentation. * Star of the County Down. * Different ideas that come out when you play music at half speed. * Lark Camp. * The person who hands out the cheat sheet with all the popular tunes and their chord progressions. * Sorting tunes by frequnecy. * The bad things about Irish sessions, from a game design perspective. * Learning a song by reading the notation vs. learning it by playing it for 30 years. * Star Above the Garter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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