Folgen
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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. -
Fehlende Folgen?
-
Lords:
* Lena
* Droqen
Topics:
* Kill gameplay
* https://droqen.itch.io/the-end-of-gameplay
* The thrill of firefighting on live service games, and how to stop
* It was D and K who showed me the way
* https://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=705
Microtopics:
* Great content.
* Multiplayer games that are focused on human connection.
* Farmers' markets.
* Kinopio. (The mind-mapping software.)
* Just barfing stuff onto the page.
* Looking at a piece of software that someone has polished for fifteen years and being astounded.
* Weird ego boosts.
* Meeting hundreds of people whose names you recognize from the Internet and they're all like "I love the thing you made."
* Pursuing the thing that other people say is good about your work and forgetting what you liked about it yourself.
* A nebulous idea whose lot in life is to be dominated by more concrete ideas.
* Making your next game with the intention of killing your most popular game.
* Unlocking creative expression into a vessel.
* Tolerating a combat system to get to the good parts of a game.
* Playing a game because you enjoy pushing the buttons.
* A museum exhibit of a hundred different platformer control schemes.
* Using your ability to hang out with people to tell them a story.
* A list of all the ideas you've ever had.
* The safety of watching the numbers go up.
* An interaction that exists to be self-perpetuating.
* Advertising as a way to tell people that a thing exists vs. all the noxious cruft that we've grown on top of that idea.
* Game addiction as a thing that is desirable.
* Games that grip you as tightly as possible vs. games that gracefully end and allow you to stop playing.
* Game developers accidentally discovering that they can Skinner Box people and then deciding "let's build our entire industry around that forever"
* The mantra you use to remind yourself to not put gameplay in your games.
* Trying to detect the humanity in a work of art.
* Trying to express your experiences in a medium and knowing you at least have an audience of one. (Yourself.)
* Disagreeing about color names.
* It's Thanksgiving and people are at-ing you on Twitter that your online service isn't working.
* Moving fast enough that you don't have time to sit with your thoughts and second-guess yourself.
* The true meaning of a Lord.
* How to sit with the discomfort of uncertainty.
* Solving a problem before you get the chance to wonder whether solving the problem aligns with your values.
* Running an online world that gets hacked and rolling back only 98% of the hack, leaving enough to remind people that this is a world with a living history.
* Ruminating about your past actions as a way to learn how to behave in the future.
* Acting without reflection because you can't reflect and act at the same time.
* It doesn't matter what you do as long as you feel really bad about it afterwards.
* How to stop.
* Don't make live service games.
* Sitting with the knowledge that you are going to make mistakes.
* Staring at blue-green walls.
* The most juicy fire-fighting that's available.
* The horrible steak that is life.
* Trying to construct your life so that you are doing something thrilling and important for one to four hours per day and then relaxing.
* The introverted fire fighter who has his own personal cardboard box to cover his head with as he's hanging out at the station.
* What's-his-letter?
* If Heaven's so good, why haven't they made a Heaven 2?
* Making a one-user forum for yourself.
* Poetry 2: it's when you do something interesting with forum posts.
* Doing something for brain reasons and then people who you inspire do the same things to so they can pretend to have the same brain reasons.
* Adding everyone who ever influenced you to the credits of your game.
* Intentionally excluding the U.
* Suck it, English orthography! -
Lords:
* CisHetKayFaber
* https://www.patreon.com/CisHetKayFaber
* Andrew
* https://luxurybunkers.bandcamp.com/album/killer-karen
Topics:
* People say the craziest stuff in front of janitors.
* Revisiting development of a creative work after 20 years
* Naming conventions in the demo scene vs. the ZZT scene
* How to Be Perfect, by Ron Padgett
* https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57243/how-to-be-perfect
* Floops, a 3D cartoon character generated in VRML in the mid-90's internet
Microtopics:
* Putting all your stress from the last three months into a single EP.
* Brains pooping right into your ears.
* Refusing to talk about Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music.
* Are you allowed to talk to janitors??
* Being assumed to be part of a group (openly racist people) that you are not actually part of.
* The risks of letting other people clean up after you.
* How do you know when it's time to eat candy when you don't have the candy gland?
* Giving yourself heat stroke because you don't realize it's too hot.
* Making a plan for how to not get heat stroke!
* Not having a thirst meter but your snacking meter is pegged 24/7.
* The inability to sleep and eat at the same time.
* How to tell if you're on SSRIs.
* Cyclothymia.
* "You have to do this now or I'm going to stare at you."
* A VR exercise app where if your heart rate drops too low all the NPCs start staring at you.
* The cost of not taking care of yourself.
* Clinging to your flow state for dear life.
* Feeling like you've done a thing vs. actually doing the thing.
* Sedarising and unsedarising your essay.
* The many eras of cancelling David Sedaris.
* Independent tabletop game developers in the Osaka area.
* Writing to explore your own thought space.
* Writing the program and then running the program.
* Taking a twenty year break between essay drafts so you can revisit your ideas fresh.
* Cyberpunk-coded online handles.
* Attaching a political ideology to the ZZT scene.
* Role-playing bring a small business owner as you make art in your bedroom and share it with the online community.
* Social capital in the cracking community.
* The era in your life when you didn't even know it was possible to pay for computer games.
* Who'd win in a fight, Slayer, or Mega Slayer ZZ9 Final?
* The revealed philosophies of different online communities.
* Shareware and early web nostalgia.
* A wild time to be on the Internet.
* Enjoying lo-fi versions of a thing.
* A movie with bad special effects that look great in the pirated cammed version.
* Straightening your room before you save the world.
* Not doing anything to make what you want impossible.
* Using attractive stamps, like the one with the tornado on it.
* Carrying the only poem you like around with you on index cards.
* Living in a culture where respect for the elderly is out of control.
* The age at which you get to elbow your way to the front of every line.
* Getting paid to tell people how to do things better.
* Things you had to learn outside of school.
* A guy who looks like he's eaten every lemon in the world.
* Ron Padgett celebrity lookalikes.
* An alarm clock that wakes you up by shouting "I'm looking forward to the Internet of things!" in your own voice.
* Who's been to cocktail parties and when, and did you discuss VRML?
* Hand animating 3D cartoons by typing VRML.
* Vtubers in the 90s.
* Making things and putting them on the Internet and everyone just assumes you just prompted an AI to make it.
* Demystifying the magic pixie dust.
* The burly wizard with a hammer and anvil who knows how to make the metal not brittle.
* NAND to Tetris and Cryptopals. (Not the blockchain kind.)
* Learning to never roll your own crypto.
* Magic. (Derogatory.)
* Punished for understanding the assignment. -
Lords:
* Jenni
* Rebecca
* https://toots.ravenoak.dev/@rebecca
* Weft Magazine: https://www.weftmagazine.com/
Topics:
* Getting emotionally ambushed by a children's toy piano
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8g8fzwmnw8M
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvhdHkugIPE
* All the non-art things you have to do to get external validation about your art
* Explaining where owls come from
* The Witches are Coming (excerpt) by Lindy West
* https://playingintheworldgame.com/2021/11/15/the-witches-are-coming-by-lindy-west/
* Ask Me About Loom(s in video games)
* Festive gazelles, vampire christmas, and the rest of the christmas card project: https://ravel.me/ggggbbybby/swc
* What’s a gamp? https://ravel.me/ggggbbybby/js2cawg
* In case you need comfy fingering in your life: https://www.knitpicks.com/yarn/comfy-fingering/c/5420197
* The ravelry forum where we play old-lady Minecraft: https://www.ravelry.com/discuss/warped-weavers
Microtopics:
* Weft: for weavers!
* The Weft Zone.
* A two and a half foot piano with five notes on it.
* Are you the width of your arm?
* Pushing a button to increase your team's number.
* A white paper about how to not get a divorce when you go to burning man together.
* Teaching kids all the animal names, even the ones they'll never encounter, like how we used to teach kids all the state capitals even for the states they'll never visit.
* A bird with polka dot wings that could fly over the sea, and John Legend sings about it.
* Expecting your child to eventually go through every age.
* Now that your kid is 40, he can clean the poop from his own balls.
* The umbilical cord being connected to weird meat inside your body.
* Kidney bean figures connected by glowing blue lines in the astral plane.
* Being paid to stay at home and solve puzzles on you computer. (And go to Zoom meetings.)
* All the non-art things you need to do to get your art out there.
* The Loom on Loom Island.
* Exhibiting at Maker Fair and explaining how a loom works 50,000 times.
* Happy last year's birthday! I made you something and it took me this long to finish it.
* Getting a fanbase who has a parasocial relationship with you and having to pretend not to be a crotchety asshole.
* What it takes to run a personal Mastodon instance.
* Getting a call from the school and they're like "your instance isn't federating with the other instances, we need you to come pick it up."
* Explaining to a six year old about sexual reproduction, DNA, mutations, and speciation so you can explain where owls come from.
* Explaining to your baby that talking is when an organ vibrates in your throat that makes the air vibrate, but he doesn't know what air is, he thinks there's an ether.
* What music you can play with the pentatonic scale.
* Poko the cockatiel sitting Totoro.
* The intern at the mobile factory who spent an afternoon downloading a hundred bootleg MIDIs so that the mobile plays.
* Tooting the bad cone inside the house.
* The person who would be playing the trumpet in your relationship.
* Seeing someone knitting incorrectly in a TV show.
* Patching better jokes into the hat DLC.
* Using a sequence of transpilers to get your code from point A to point B.
* People who make game engines wanting your to touch the engine as much as possible.
* Wanting to declare a global variable and the developers say you can't do that but they point you to the bespoke language feature that does the same thing as global variables but in a much more complicated way.
* Playing the Frog Fractions text adventure with a gamepad.
* Funny looking pirates who are secretly advertisements.
* Kidney beans, swans, and other delicious things.
* Learning a song from a dye pot that turns things green.
* A piano guitar that you just press on.
* Showing your husband the Wikipedia page that proves that you hobby exists and he's like "anybody can edit Wikipedia."
* Making a sculpture of the Eiffel tower without looking at any references and it ends up just being a letter A with the word "Paris" written nearby.
* A coked-up knitting machine.
* Spring has sprung so sprang your sprang.
* Heddles and treadles and gamps.
* Some of your best Comfy Fingering, please.
* Basic Sour.
* Smelling things in your mouth.
* Getting tired of sucking your baby's snot through a tube and getting an electric aspirator.
* Starting up Morrowind and being immediately presented with a guy who has a bad case of Bethesda Face.
* The thirteen games that have looms in them.
* The looms in Assassin's Creed being kind of historically accurate because Ubisoft's whole thing is being kind of historically accurate.
* Subscribing to a service that periodically sends you different swatches of cloth so you can disassemble them and figure out how they're woven.
* Festive Gazelles.
* Happy Vampire Christmas!
* Forum drama on Ravelry that ends up with the web designer no longer being allowed to talk directly to customers.
* Creative mode for Minecraft except for a bunch of old ladies.
* If you lose your bird bone just wait for another bird to hit your window.
* Magazines as extremely slow podcasts.
* Updating your gender and getting rid of your loser middle name while you're at it. -
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. - Mehr anzeigen
