Topic Lords

Jim Stormdancer
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Every week, Jim invites different friends to guest on Topic Lords and be excited about whatever they've been fixated on this week.

  1. -6 J

    339. Become Uncoffinable

    Lords: Watson Wren Topics: Faction design in historical strategy games Linguistics makes it easier and harder to name things You belong in SLUSD. What is SLUSD? The Cremation of Sam McGee https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45081/the-cremation-of-sam-mcgee The magic systems of Brandon Sanderson Microtopics: The Three-Body Problem (Not That One) Jade City; Jade Legacy. Making any non-creamy soup into a creamy soup. Boiling an entire civilization down to a concept simple enough to program. Getting to the end of the tech tree first and winning science. Greece as the origin of many of our modern ideas about government. Grand strategy games where you spend most of your time trying to not to be assassinated by your family. Dwarf Fortress except it's obsessed with the royal family. Hiring Charles Babbage to invent the analytical engine because otherwise all your game jams will have to be board game jams. Playing a TTRPG and having to name something so first you have to create thousands of years of linguistic history. The World Builder's Disease. (A.k.a. having a delightful hobby) What you might have named somebody back in Zelda Times. Developing a set of phonotactics so that you can name something plausibly. What is SLUSD? The webp of 3D model formats. Trans people: they belong in Ohio. Putting up a billboard and hoping people will look away from the road to see your content. What investigative journalists might do if investigative journalism still existed. Solving the SLUSD mystery. Reconstructing the history of civilization from the Topic Lords vaults. What did people with ADHD do before Topics? Strange things done in the midnight sun. Cremating Sam in the wreck of the Alice May. The secret tales of the Arctic trails that would make your blood run cold. A poet who mostly writes about burial rituals in the arctic circle. Stompin' Tom. Bits to Try if You Think You're About To Die. Supernatural small-town Alaska death promises. Why SETI@Home looked for three spikes. At what point to Doom clones become first-person shooters, and at what point do you become a conspiracy theorist for pointing out all these games are the same. Gandhi becoming so peaceful that he integer underflows. Video games as a way to cope with the outcome of civilization. Sanderson's four laws. A fictional branch of physics. Various metals that do various things. Consuming metal filings that have magical effects based on this funky diagram. Eating a burrito wrapped in aluminum foil. Coinshots shooting people with coins. Soothing and inflaming various emotions. The element of thinking about stuff in various kinds of ways, and its atomic number. Forcing a Mistborn to burn aluminum, as a prank. Creating a magic system by working backwards from the premise that tinfoil hats are effective in this universe. A fandom wiki. Made by fans. Not on fandom.com. Gradually revealing the rules of your system as they become relevant. Lit RPG. Whether fantasy and horror fiction would be better if it was more like a video game. Characters in a story who are trying real hard to level up. Establishing the reality of the fiction while also taking that reality to a very strange place.

    1 h 5 min

  2. 13 AVR.

    338. Placebo Yourself into Having a Phenomenal Time

    Lords: Mark Mark's top albums of 2025: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1InKh07sllCLF6cu9za0yhQvmGVC3ZHvM162XI1u1S9A Shirley Topics: If you want to be at the front of the stage at a show, just go there, literally no one is stopping you - or - THE ONLY THING YOU LACK IS WILL Elves and Using Religion to Protect Natural Spaces It's illegal to mod your EV to have custom engine noises Litany Against Fear https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Litany_Against_Fear How to stop drinking coffee Microtopics: The Splintered Oar, by Weft. An album about labor rights in Kentucky. Reading aloud to your friends and family. The siren song of sitting on the couch and watching TV. Time as the crow flies. Measuring time as the crow looks at the clock. Wanting to be right in front of the stage and just going there. Paying hundreds of dollars to stand in an extremely loud room. Getting after it with an open heart. Everyone standing at the same height as the musicians playing live music. An active member of a live music community in a major US city. Physically engaging with the music. Letting go of your concern for the eyes upon you. Standing in place for the entire four or five bands playing this show without ever leaving your spot to pee. Working the merch booth. Unloading a truckload of positive energy into the space in front of the stage. Mosh pit comfort. Bands graduating to the next level of popularity. Fighting your way to the front of the stage so you can not look at the band. Luxuriating in the freedom of a shared experience of joy. Giving back to the artists you love by screaming at them while they play music. Becoming part of a local scene. People who believe in elves and people who pretend to believe in elves. Looking forward to when your child might one day bring you boba. Elf kayfabe. Mall Santa breaking kayfabe. Whether the mall Santa has to keep up the act even when he's alone in the shower. Reindeer-powered Yaris. Scandinavian elf lore. Post 9/11 supporting of the troops. Arguments to which there is no possible rebuttal, such as "you can't build a mini mall because the elves live here." Picking a random Wikipedia article about Nordic folklore and finding out how many metal bands are named after it. How few murders there are in the modern black metal scene. A looping sample of Snoop Dogg saying "this Volt is in reverse." Automotive engineers deliberately making the engine noise play a power chord. Instead of banning whistle tips, legislators mandating that they play a 7th chord, and also that the driver must know enough music theory to explain why they chose that chord. Being on the sideshow mailing list so you can attend every sideshow. All the different motions you have to make to wash the entire surface of both hands. A poem about not allowing fear to conquer you while you wash your hands. A poem with a specific utility. The lifelong pursuit of being okay with your own mortality. Trying to learn to be happy with what you have. How I f****d myself up. How many waves coffee has. Genetic sense of thirst. Making up a magic number of ounces of water to drink. Getting a water bottle and putting a cool sticker on it. The lion's share of behavioral addiction. Going downstairs into your morning environment. The ritual pleasure of fidgeting with a cigarette. Quitting smoking and having to find other rituals to fill the space smoking used to fill. Your brain being like "remember cigarettes? That was cool" and you're like "that's a weird thing to bring up right now, brain." Having a puff on a cigarette to find out if that's enough to get you addicted again. What it would take to make smoking look uncool. How much easier it is to quit smoking now that they have fidget spinners. All the little adjustments you make to make your life more tolerable. Embers of the Dawn by Bronze Hall. Pumping your fist while you think about elves.

    1 h 9 min

  3. 6 AVR.

    337. Mars, Technically

    Lords: Chris Fabian https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/ Topics: Oops, my 3D printer became a hobby GTA's AI is not trying to screw with you with its sudden lane changes and T-boning you at intersections, it's just oblivious. (Probably.) Esper says: "I can confirm the traffic AI in Cyberpunk 2077 is still hilarious. I set my car to 'auto drive' and after maybe 30 seconds it took a hard right into the ocean. Maybe that’s lore accurate, who knows." Alberic Whale and the Enigma Layer https://thespinoff.co.nz/the-best-of/31-12-2018/summer-reissue-the-mystery-of-zach-new-zealands-all-too-miraculous-medical-ai https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/13-01-2020/rip-zach-probe-finds-serious-wrongdoing-over-miracle-medical-ai Between What I See and What I Say…, by Octavio Paz https://www.wisdomportal.com/PoetryAnthology/OctavioPaz-Anthology.html Microtopics: A coffee shop that exists here because of the port of Oakland. Popping unroasted coffee beans into your mouth like peanuts. The worst tasting and most caffeinated cup of coffee you've ever had. Your local library. Things that should not be businesses. Three possible purposes of universities. Finding a new hobby (derogatory) 3D printing a selection of action figures for your wedding. That one person you know who's really into 3D printers. Why having a broken 3D printer counts as a hobby where having a broken refrigerator is just a situation. Yanking out some gunk with pliers in hopes that that'll fix it. Your 3D printer breaking halfway through your wedding figurine project so you have to make the other other half out of milled aluminum. IBM Selectric Typewriters shipping with a repair guy who lives in your spare bedroom in case it breaks. Amazon sending an Amazon warrior to repair your 3D printer but since you only paid for the cheap extended warranty she's allowed to attack anybody including you. Whether Balatro is trying to deliberately find weaknesses in your build. Higher fidelity graphics coming with expectations of higher fidelity traffic modeling. Car AI in open world games being as dumb as the developers can get away with, except for in Cyberpunk 2077, where they're dumber than the developers can get away with. Whacking at it until it's good enough to ship. Traffic tuning in GTA Vice City. Playing games with really smart, effective AI, like Chessmaster 2000 and X-Com, and realizing that actually having really smart AI is no fun. Skating around with rollerblades on your elbows and knees. Everything's a tuna can. Three car accidents in six weeks. Conscientiously objecting to military service so they insist you get a driver's license instead. Driving through a haunted house to train the braking reflex in response to being startled. Whatever happened to ol' Alby Whale? The AI assistant named Zack turning out to just be a dude named Zack. Adorable tiny food delivery robots who turn out to just be remote controlled by a guy hiding around the corner. Waymo cars blocking major thoroughfares for hours at a time. Multitasking between all the most stressful, confusing driving situations. Self-driving cars (allegedly) turning self-driving off half a second before impact so the impact is blamed on the human operator. Several hundred tons of liquid nitrogen cooled supercomputer. Blaming your spelling errors on The Enigma Layer. Having seen more proof of your AI assistant than you have of god. It's scammers and hucksters all the way down. Whether DLSS is taking away game developer jobs. What happens when you go from a three word Markov model to a five word markov model. A giant prank with no particular end-game in sight. Acts of speech. Poetry as synesthesia. Trying to explain in words why that cat is acting weird when the cat doesn't think in words at all. My Psychosis, my Bicycle and I, by Fritz B. Simon. Trying to figure out how football works when you can't see the players, only the referee. Feeling some type of way. Trying to take musical ideas and apply them outside of the realm of music. Creating words that dance around concepts. Getting stuck forever in your cringe phase. Opportunities to write the same program over and over again. A melancholy linked list implementation. Passive-aggressive C code. Java Enterprise Abstract Singleton Proxy Factory Bean. Remember printed manuals? The international obfuscated C code contest. What made the 3D accelerated demo scene interesting again. How much code you can fit in 64k if you don't link to anything. Secret Topics.

    1 h 22 min

  4. 30 MARS

    336. The Four Colonoscopies

    Lords: Jason https://bumpyskies.com/ Ben https://www.zerofiftyone.net/ Topics: Prepping for a colonsocopy, the jmac way! https://fogknife.com/2023-12-31-my-colonoscopy-strategies.html How to do things you're bad at The Trustworthy Shirts Tournament https://eldritch.cafe/@cassolotl/116156921111844432 Do not go gentle into that good night, by Dylan Thomas https://poets.org/poem/do-not-go-gentle-good-night Microtopics: The Wordle Puzzmo and Dall-E shitposts channel. Plugging your turbulence forecasting web site at both ends. Kids picking a name for themselves at age 8 and then being stuck with it forever. Going to court and the judge is named "velociraptor#1993" and that's just normal. Trying to pick a baby name and suggesting the name of your great grandmother whom you never met, velociraptor1993. People still being named Baker even though nobody bakes any more. Ripped off vs. stolen. Colonoscopy Strategies. Poorly understood advice from well meaning friends. Drinking squid ink the day before your colonoscopy. A power-blasted clean empty warehouse of a colon. Why are you still listening to these colonoscopy stories? Skip to the end of the episode where I ask you to give money to the patreon. The tattoo on the inside of your colon of an arrow indicating "this polyp right here" Staying up until 3 AM drinking an entire jerry can of mineral wax. Referring to the COVID pandemic as "the pandy" The colonoscopy robot's tattoo gun. Knowing all the names of parts of the intestines because of the difficult boss fight inside an intestine at the end of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. Hideo Kojima setting out to design a game to force people to write strategy guides about traversing the human rectum. What Google searches Hideo Kojima was trying to inspire when he designed Snatcher. Writing a strategy guide for drinking a five gallon can of lemon-flavored gym socks. Slightly chewy boiled sweets. Whether Jim should already have had a colonoscopy by now. Getting your colon cancer screening kit in the mail and it swishes when you shake the box. The tattoo scissor robot: it's out there waiting for you. Getting an image of someone else's intestines tattooed on the inside of your intestines. Getting "how's my driving" or "if you can read this you're too close" or "we bought this before we realized Elon was a fascist" tattooed on the inside of your intestines. Striving to be more comfortable with being bad at skills. All the ways you can fail at throwing pottery. Learning to enjoy being bad at the piano. The doodle that Bach drew on the cover of Well Tempered Clavier. Flanderizing yourself because nobody else will. Art forms where you accumulate physical evidence of your skill progression. Recording three audio books and observing yourself getting better at recording audio books. Audible's gig economy thing. Never studying piano because you get too much done when you procrastinate studying piano. Converted telephone microphones. Trying to learn to play piano with a broken digital piano and really getting into electronics repair. Playing live music and being completely at the mercy of time passing. The Moogseum in Asheville, North Carolina. The aspect of human existence that you're most missing out on. Sitting there watching people play music and wishing you could also play music. Learning to play the Final Countdown riff or the Axel F riff and being set for life. Following a tutorial to create a convincing cover of Satisfaction by Benny Benassi. Rip it Up, by Orange Juice. Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat. The Lesser Trolley Problems. Whether viewers of The Good Place are more likely to value moral philosophy. M*A*S*H vs. Moomins. Who would go around wearing a M*A*S*H shirt in 2026? Deciding how much to trust a Moomins aficionado without knowing how old they are. Identifying Moomins on sight. Owl House vs. Owl City. People who go around wearing Owl House shirts without thinking about all the passers by assuming that they mean the Fireflies band. What the characters in Interstellar think of Dylan Thomas. The last wave by soaking in the green bay. Whether you should get mad before you die. Breathing life and fire into those who yet live. Showing people an argument for losing so that they get mad and win instead. Charitable Reads Book Club, LLC. Production values that are way too high for this bit. Soupertasters 15, with guest star Michael Caine. Corn poems vs. carrot poems.

    1 h 7 min

  5. 23 MARS

    335. Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roll: Pick Any Two

    Lords: Andrew https://kittenm4ster.neocities.org/ Aubrianne Topics: Reading every Hugo-award-winning novel I accidentally made Frog Fractions 2.5 before knowing what a frog fractions was https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=40777 I've discovered the perfect video game genre https://mastodon.social/@mogwai_poet/116072652112241644 When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer, by Walt Whitman https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45479/when-i-heard-the-learnd-astronomer Software Toolworks Multimedia Encyclopedia CD from 1992 https://archive.org/details/the-software-toolworks-multimedia-encyclopedia-1.5-1992-12-english-cd I fixed my slow computer with time travel https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 Microtopics: Plugging moving. Apps that don't do things or have functionality. Wearing one of those blood pressure cuffs all day. The treadmill hacking into your heart rate monitor. Getting your heart rate up by being aggravated at terrible exercise apps. Video games that only work with first party controllers because they patch the controller firmware. The only team that was permitted to alter the microcode on the Nintendo 64's GPU. Reading every Hugo award winning novel. Sci-fi authors in the 50s being obsessed with advancements in psychiatry. What if there was an empire that spanned a continent. Drinking a potion every morning to address your ADHD. Dissolving your gummy vitamin in liquid nitrogen and/or Looking forward to the next time you get sick so you can take NyQuil again. The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge. Why they let women write books now. Advantages of AuDHD. The Hugo award, invented by the protagonist of Hugo's House of Horrors. Knock-off Sierra games. Feed the Ducks. The one with the Spider-Bat. Stealth plugging a classic Pico-8 game. Independently inventing Frog Fractions. Not-Vector Art. Making games that don't have a secret thing in them. Making Pizza Panda without ever telling anyone what you're working on. Picking up a mouse with hats. Just make a dumb thing that's silly and you can make fun gifs of it. Splore 'em if you got 'em. XAMWWSKH, or "Exam Whiskey" Curses, or ncurses. Walking around this maze and running into this guy and suddenly you're playing a minigame. Whether weird shit keeps happening in Pac-Man, or happens only once. Why wait at all? Just wake up each day and be surprised. Aren't we all just building mazes for ourselves? Why sports games still exist. Why do people play sports video games when they could play sports in real life? Snapping your fingers in order to better internalize the poem. What have you over-intellectualized in your life? Your particular brainotype. Learning about muscles, joints and physiology. A bicycle reflector they put on the moon so they could shoot lasers at it. Measuring diagrams during your lecture. The astronomer who lost his nose. Revealing that you've drawn a moustache on Orion's Belt. Learning to read words by looking at a spectrogram. Who knows what the Danes are up to? Things that are not widely known but can be described. Looking at really old computer stuff because that's fun. Beautiful art that nobody made on purpose. Getting actors together in a room to read a scene together before discovering that that's exactly the wrong way to do video game voice acting. Aphantasia but for audiation. Inability to audiate at different volumes or on the stereo spectrum. Focusing really hard to fall asleep. Kick-starting your hypnagogic hallucination dream state. Rolling that sleep boulder up the hill every day. Retheming your 2026 Linux computer to look like Windows 95. Downloading 20 years of email history. Playing Hunt the Wumpus on your dad's SIM-1. What game developers say now that "AI" means something else. What "drone" used to mean, and also what it meant before that. OpenRCT2 and FreeCiv. Making your customers less nauseous before they sit on a bench. Not having any restaurants at your theme park so that nobody throws up on your roller coaster. Being unable to A/B test your brain because you only have one brain. Having a variety of weirdos on Jorts dot horse.

    1 h 11 min

  6. 16 MARS

    334. A Pivotal Event in the Evolution of the Society of Quebec

    Lords: SJ https://neutralzonehotel.com/ Benjamin Topics: TD Place Arena in Ottawa is really weird in an interesting way Learning to ice skate when you're 40 Is this keyboard layout more sensible than QWERTY? https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/VfpwY7be.jpg She Walks in Beauty, by Lord Byron https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43844/she-walks-in-beauty Microtopics: Neutral Zone Hotel. Heated Rivalry. What a loon sounds like. Going to Canada but never going outside. A real dickhead in the history of hockey. Needing a new hockey arena and a new football stadium and putting one on top of the other. Backwards ice. Canadian Tire Center. The Ottawa '67s. Realizing that your two arenas on top of one another will collapse instantly if you ever hold two events at once. Asbestos sprinkles falling from the ceiling and delighting the crowd. Ice skaters falling over because the ice is too cold. What's up with fighting in hockey? When ice hockey goaltenders got masks. Regulating sports violence with additional violence. Spontaneous vs. pre-arranged hockey fights. The Gordie Howe Hat Trick. A triple double, except instead of impacting the outcome of the game, it impacts your soul. The Punch-up In Piestany and other bench-clearing brawls. Hockey's Post-Headshot Era. Learning new skills as an adult. The Kraken Community Iceplex. Complaining about swizzles for months. Pumping your legs to propel yourself forward. Swizzles vs. backwards swizzles. The point at which ice skating classes branch out into hockey classes and figure skating classes. Beer League teams. Born knowing how to skate. Jusse Saros erasure. Hockey players getting concussed by swimming while drunk. Circle to confirm and X to back out. A keyboard with all the calculator buttons on it. Interviewing the animator who designed the weird keyboard in Bubblegum Crisis. An argument for Colemak over Dvorak. The Z, X, C and V keys staying right where they are. Switching keyboard layouts to keep your college roommates from screwing with you. Why boredom is a good thing. Desperately trying to fill today's 16 waking hours with something, anything. Making content for the Internet. Cloudless climes and starry skies. Whether Lord Byron got his title by being on the show. Trying to rhyme brow and glow. Whether they had non-rhyming poetry 200 years ago. Only remembering your anxiety dreams. The recurring dream where you explore stone stairs leading down from a decrepit old fishing house, going deeper and deeper each time you have the dream until you finally get to the bottom of the stairs and find out what your whole life has been leading to. Tiny hockey community discords.

    50 min

  7. 9 MARS

    333. Bring Your Daughter to Monastery Day

    Lords: AP https://store.steampowered.com/app/2364580/Titanium_Court/ Alexander Topics: The 5th Ramsey number Why Mr. Satan (from Dragonball) is one of my favorite characters in all of literature The Odyssey 2's ROM sprites https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/Evl0wxIY.png https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/gNkdwtoA.jpg Search Lizard Vagina And You Shall Find by Patricia Lockwood Why do drugs have two names? What's up with that? Microtopics: Recording the fakest possible sounding laughter in case someone makes a joke that doesn't work. Going on a nice short walk. The PNW, where the frogs are a-croaking. Going out to see the dog pee. Lying down and pretending to sleep Explaining to the doctor that you didn't sleep at all and he's like "that's not what your brain waves said!" Dreaming that you've been awake for 48 hours. Path of totality vs. regular shitty boring eclipse. Consume Me. Attempting to become hot in high school. Whether unwishlisting and rewishlisting a game helps. Very large prime numbers that are only two apart. Prolific math speed freaks. Whether the aliens know the fifth Ramsey Number and are just quizzing us. Aliens visiting and sharing the ultimate secret to doing laundry. Sentient arithmetic getting angry. How do kangaroos clean their pouches? Topics that don't cause listenership to drop precipitously. Thinking about Mr. Satan in the bath. Localizing Mr. Satan for the American audience. A cartoon of two muscly guys screaming at each other, getting louder and higher pitched over the course of five minutes, to the point that you start worrying about the health of the voice actors. An episode of TV that's just 22 pure minutes of building tension. Goku's hair turning blond so that the manga artist doesn't have to laboriously color his hair black al on every panel. Everyone in the story growing strong enough to blow up the planet on a whim. Everyone on Earth showing up to cheer on Mr. Satan. When wrestlers stopped maintaining kayfabe outside of the live show. King Lear asking the audience if they can see the corpse breathing. Giving annoying characters a moment of sincerity and/or heroism. Enthusiastically chanting for Satan. Witnessing the total horror of the universe and then being like "I didn't just see that" Mr. Satan convincing the evil alien not to destroy the Earth by showing him a cool puppy. How is Goku going to prevent spam bots from registering accounts? A weird lens on this strange universe. Sincerity punchlines. Behold, an anime horse! Top 37 Classiest Satans. Death losing every game against Bill and Ted. Coloring the up arrow green to represent a tree in your skiing game. The division symbol you learned in grade school and never used again. When you want to shoot a golf course, a plane or a tiny flat cake. Collecting your favorite medieval manuscript scans. The medieval scribe deciding on a whim to write the next passage in Greek. The guy plucking penises off of the penis bush and putting them in a basket. My brain, and the bad sunning lizard inside it. Here is some pornography, if it will help you. Great job, Canada. Poems that foresee themselves being uploaded to the Internet. One of the early "isn't it weird that this literary person is on Twitter writing shitposts?" My Least Favorite Antibiotic. Wrapping your antibiotic in a tortilla. I love an antibiotic with a nickname. Magic acts you can only do once. (Because they kill you.) Settling Space. (And why we shouldn't do it.) Establishing legal precedent for selling moon rocks. Can God get a thorn stuck in his paw? There's No P in Thomson. Let's try to keep it that way.

    1 h 9 min

  8. 2 MARS

    332. Boston: It's Not a Year

    Lords: Jin https://awesomedonut.github.io/ Brad https://rainwarrior.ca/ Topics: The shareware games business model Thoughts on how to define femininity? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqloPw5wp48 The Great Molasses Flood https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrnRNfXm_k4 Entrance by Rainer Maria Rilke https://poemsintranslation.blogspot.com/2010/10/rilke-entrance-from-german.html Combining magic and science in science fantasy. Microtopics: Lizard for the NES. Retrofuturism in ancient China. Silkpunk Origins. Ultima-inspired indie RPGs from 1994. Passing around public domain games on floppy disks. Registering shareware to get rid of the nag screen. Adventure game hint books as a second channel of income. Asking your mom to get a money order to register the shareware version of Impulse Tracker so you can get the Stereo Wav Writer. Front loading all the good levels in the shareware episode and selling the crap in the registered episodes. The Ur-Quan Masters. Printing to PDF. Uploading your music to mp3.com. Cracking shareware using a known plaintext attack. Drawing an image with so much entropy that the Save Robot dances for longer than usual and then plays a sad sound. A three hour deep dive on the very popular vampire novel Twilight. Going online and googling masculine and/or feminine traits. The Four Pillars of Femininity. Pants: they're for barbarians. Whether Stephanie Meyer was trying to write a treatise on idealized gender roles or whether she was just writing what she thought was cool and fun. Popular depictions of women who are masculine in behavior but feminine in appearance. Why can't your girlfriend both look like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and eat hamburgers like Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Why women work so well as horror protagonists. Do people cry less in Marvel movies? Someone crying so hard in a movie that you start to worry about the actor's social life. Tolkien adding a second female character to Lord of the Rings just so he can make the "I am no man" linguistic joke. Boston: it's not a year. Painting your giant molasses tank brown so it's harder to notice that it's leaking. All the children in town walking up and licking the giant leaking molasses tank whenever they feel like a snack. Waking up in a pile of dead bodies with your mouth full of molasses. Big Enough to be Horrible. Getting your architectural plans approved by a government body. Gilding the lily when the lily is already extremely memetic. Fame: look what it does to people. Building a giant tank of anything in the middle of a city. Where do you put your 50 million gallons of molasses? What happens if you poke the Demon Core with a screwdriver? Scientists getting too excited to keep being careful. A black and slender tree. A word kept in the mouth to grow. Eveningfall. Putting a tree in the sky while you're creating the world. The game you're making giving you ideas about the game you're making. Navigating the scientific method in a fantastical universe. Lit RPG. Dungeon Crawler Carl. Using a quarter of the words in your novel to explain the rules of the world like a board game manual. Jedi using their powers to boil water for tea. Enslaving Jedi to run your steam engine with their mind powers. Jedi Inflation. Two words that sound good together and now it's your name.

    1 h 3 min
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À propos

Every week, Jim invites different friends to guest on Topic Lords and be excited about whatever they've been fixated on this week.

Informations

  • Création
    Jim Stormdancer
  • Années d’activité
    2019 - 2026
  • Épisodes
    340
  • Classification
    Contenu explicite
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Jim Stormdancer
  • Site web de l’émission
    Topic Lords

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