Topic Lords

Jim Stormdancer
  • 4.8 (13)
  • Comedy
  • Updated Weekly

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

  1. 2d ago

    352. The Dim Sum Moose

    Lords: Alex Shannon Topics: What's a ghost? And other questions you can't explain to a 3 year old. Trophic memory, deer, and a truly unique scientific object- Copied from thoughtforms.life https://thoughtforms.life/trophic-memory-deer-and-a-truly-unique-scientific-object/ Summer Homework Otzi Awake, by Max Lavergne https://www.tumblr.com/dat-soldier/787624576603619328/beingharsh Microtopics: Game Changer and other Drop 7 shows. What real Topic Heads know. California Extreme, the pinball and arcade machine expo. Getting in on the ground floor to become the only place where topics are discussed. Dropping soup cans into a jacuzzi to record the Frog Fractions splash noises. Dropping the Frog Fractions lore. Releasing art and watching people get it in the way you wanted them to get it. Seeing the Human from Frog Fractions in real life and wondering "where do I know this human from?" A pin-up calendar where you draw your own pin-up each month. Conveying the concept of a ghost to a three year old. Whether it's okay to tell the truth to a small child Realizing that the three-year old only knows about fantasy skeletons and explaining that actually, skeletons are inside of us. A two-minute soliloquy about where mama owls come from. Doing your best not to adopt a child's adorable mispronunciation of restaurant. Hearing Dust in the Wind in a car commercial and being like "That's my dad's guitar song! That's the song my dad plays on guitar!" Accepting that you are responsible for shaping this child into a good, healthy adult human, but also, wouldn't it be funny if... Training your child to ask for "hot guys on Instagram" when she wants to look at pictures of unicorns and waterslides. Finding and ankylosaurus in the bedsheets. The age at which children develop a sense of fear. An entire song about not being afraid of ghosts and also how to bust them. One of the major delights of being around a child. Big bones sticking out of your head for a few months until they fall off. A New Fork in the Antlers. Whether it's advantageous to have more complicated antlers. Growing antlers in the lab. Owning a bunch of deer and collecting and labeling all their antlers. Telling the bone cancer what to do. Watching a moose shake its head and the antlers just pop right off. A moose dropping antlers to distract a predator. Trying to get on a plane with your new antler growth. Eating enough calcium to do all the antler growing you need to do. Scoring deer by counting the antler points. Moose lifespan. Seasonal Antler Disorder. The Dim Sum moose with one dumpling on every point of its antlers. Your 2nd grade teacher calling you up to assign you math homework to do on your honeymoon. Homework: what is it for? Homework as anti-union training. Striving to care less about your job. An after-school program that helps kids finish their homework by having an adult just do all the homework, like the parents would if they had the time. The cat on Jim's head. Finally hearing about a behavioral problem from your kid's teacher, that he likes reading too much. Doing the social norms because you are in a group who is all doing the social norms. Otzi the Preserved Carcass. A pretty dang old guy. An ice-age man with almost as many tattoos as a modern teenager. Gen X Cuspers. The earliest known human with Lyme disease. Wanting to make a gutstring bow but there are no guts around. What being any celebrity is like. What percentage of humans are related to Otzi the Ice Man. Being chased through the alps by people who want to kill you with arrows and the next thing you know scientists are rummaging through your stomach contents. An ancient form of Grindr. How old does a corpse need to be before you can buy and sell it? How lost does a corpse need to be before you can find it? Which natural laxatives the ice man used.

  2. Jul 13

    351. The Flushable Soda Can

    Lords: Chall RT-55J https://samarantes.neocities.org/ https://metroidconstruction.com/hack.php?id=878 Topics: Remembering the Dynowarz Instagram private server, and social media thoughts every Mastodon user had already Why don't CPUs do analog arithmetic? Leaves, by Ursula LeGuin https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/148293/leaves-5bd9e153d78b2 Microtopics: DogTroid, the first Metroid ROM hack to star a dog. Self-finishing games. Sparkling water: it's like water but a lot more interesting. Caffeine Free Diet Pepsi. What sodas foam the most in response to a mento. Foam persistence. Foaminess reactions of a mento on various vintagesn of Diet Coke. Jolt Cola: all the sugar, twice the caffeine, three times the foam. A can of soda that's safe to open in a bathroom stall. Artisanal Coca Cola cans on Etsy that finally allow you to open a can of soda in a bathroom stall without anyone realizing you're drinking a Coke on the toilet. Flushable soda cans: as flushable as a flushable wipe. Why do toilets have pee traps when the pee deserves to be free? The second worst game in your NES collection. Desert Chrome title screens. Playing as a little spaceman until you enter the dinosaur mech. Shooting some alien brain or maybe a heart. 8bitnintendo.science How to pick what video games to buy in the late 1980s. How Metroid improved on the maze-with-keys genre. Nanosaur. A velociraptor with a techno-backpack. A game that is exhilarating and scary and endless when you're a child turning out to be a twenty minute trifle when you're an adult. Trespasser (1998) Simulation dinosaur emotions but you can't find a good balance so you just permanently lock them all to angry. Installing a violent action game about dinosaurs in the elementary school computer lab because dinosaurs are technically educational. Revisiting games that perplexed you as a child. Playing bad video games because no matter how bad they are they're still better than going outside and talking to people. The one where Kirby eats a car. The Roblox-like games you can find by logging into third party Minecraft servers. Starting your own Pixelfed server. Following the only person you know on Mastodon. Bluesky's recommendation algorithms recommendeding you nothing but bots. Inventing Internet forums from first principles. When your brain makes up garbage and you need a void to shove it into. Doing your part to make AI worse. CSS Crimes. How to find people to follow on Cohost. Signing up for a social media site and looking around and realizing you doing know anyone here. Mining and reposting. The ongoing maintenance requirements of running a Mastodon server. Ways you can interact with your family that only work if you have an iOS developer in the family. Off-box SQL database backup. Hypothetical IRC servers that support chat logs. Hardware random number generation. The pot of boiling water every Intel CPU draws thermal noise from for random number generation. The most commonly used analog computers in 2026. The market forces that led to semi-modular synthesizers being available for $300. Using your analog CPU to run a million instances of Lunar Lander at once. A rustic summer retreat ranch in the hills of Napa Valley, California. What makes us perceive the gradient of identities over the course of someone's life as a single identity. The most ephemeral thing possible. Musing for a few sentences and then thinking "hmm, I could put some line breaks in here and then publish it." Musing about the nature of identity, with line breaks. Topic Slingers. Topics: throw them around a lil bit. They love it. A lot of people don't know that.

  3. Jul 6

    350. Tropic Olds

    Lords: Jenni Tyriq https://store.steampowered.com/app/3276700/Scrubbin_Trubble/ Topics: Doctor Lips Tropic Olds Cold Sri Top Scold It Pro Clod I Sport Pic Rod Lost Disc or Plot Doc Rip Slot Stolid Crop Lo, Cod Strip! Cod Trip Sol Corps Do Lit Cold Pis Tor Clipt Roods Microtopics: Trying to make a joke out of your own name: it's impossible. Listening to this episode first. The ice: it's not gross. (At first.) Reverse osmosis water. Shipping a game and selling more than one copy. Selling enough copies of your game to be in the black with Steam. Repaying debts until you end up in the black, because once you go black you never go back. Getting old and having creaky bones so you like being warmer. Standing in a parking lot in a melancholy mood and looking at the sky. The most genetically and financially successful people you know. Finishing off your successfulness in the Retirement State. Star Tropic Olds. Muppet Geriatrics. Everyone is born the baby of themselves. Geriatric MacGyver training a new younger MacGyver. MacGyver vs. O'Gyver. Going to Target and buying the sriracha t-shirt to establish your allegiance in the sriracha wars. The Hangover and the sequel, Baby Hangover. Too Young or Too Homeschooled? Bruh bruh bruh, pass the sri. Microsoft naming their word processor Word even though there are other kinds of words. Y'all It or It Al as the plural for It. Putting the Skip It around your ankle. Pushing the buttons you understand on a Simon. (Just the volume buttons.) Games you are guaranteed to lose, and soon. Different short term memories for different senses. Dual N-Back. Doing a single bicep curl and deciding that you understand exercise and you're done now. Clod vs. Klutz. The clumsiest people in the world in fierce competition. Things you wish you were allowed to laugh at. Things you're allowed to laugh at as long as you make a donation. Optimizing your laughter to minimize the amount of money you have to put in the laugh jar. Last One Laughing, taking the laughter out of comedy one pained grimace at a time. Clods of peanut butter. Earthen Peanut Butter. Shaping peanut butter with your earth manipulation spell. A device you can use like a dowsing rod to find dick pics in a room full of hard drives. The scene where The Dude shades the notepad. Proof that robots can get embarrassed. Waiting to watch a movie until after you know every plot twist. Everyone's favorite game show: Disc or Plot? Innova Leopard. Some sort of DJ equipment, for spinning records. Disc Golf vs. Disk Golf. Floppy Discs and Compact Disks. Devices Carrying Sound. A guy on Reddit with 8 upvotes. Seeing 8 inch floppy disks in the back of someone's car. Dr. Ripslot. The most stolid vegetable. (Ronald Reagan.) Doozers making their Doozer Sticks out of radishes. Secret Fraggle Lore. Mutualism between Doozers and Fraggles. The most emotive crop. Crop with a c, not with a k. Saying "Lo!" all the time. Thinking "betimes" frequently but never saying it out loud. Always forgetting to use "whilst." Whomst'd've. Pregnancy antihistamines. Different kinds of fake dartboards. Under the thumb of Big Velcro. Throwing fish sticks at the sun and missing. Corps Du Lit, WI Book clubs that only do books that are two or three words long. Librarian: Tidy up the Arcane Library. Relaxing by reshelving books. Complimenting housework any time you see it happen. Picking up trash from the ground and finding a place to throw it away and wishing someone would congratulate you. Hansel and Gretel and Chancellor Stormdancer. Tongue Root Harmony. Paying attention to where your tongue is at all times. What takes your cold piss away? Trunk Kevin Crap, Look at That Low Flying Plane.

  4. Jun 29

    349. Life Finds a Way (To Scratch Its Nose)

    Lords: Cort Martin https://steamcommunity.com/app/2111550 Topics: What does Thomas The Tank Engine do when he gets an itchy nose? The end of Destiny Glittermitten Grove's undisclosed AI content Iroha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroha I need to add bears to my threat model What thing would you like to be entangled with? Microtopics: Setting arbitrary deadlines to get things done and taking them seriously. Lord Walker. Writing 20 songs in 12 hours. Schrodinger's Cat Burglar. A video game that everyone in the world will love. Jimbo and the Jet Set. Soulful butt-licking. Do Fish Itch? What twisted idiot god would make a fish itch. The cosmology of Thomas the Tank Engine. Itchy planes flying very close to a mountain so they can scratch their faces. Whether trains can die in the Thomas the Tank Engine universe. Trains trying to live up to human standards of beauty. Pixar Cars needing eye surgery. Destiny's Final Update. Patrolling the moon in search of wizards. T-shirts with the insignias of obscure PVP factions. The logo of a football team that doesn't exist. Destiny shipping as MusicPlayerDemo.exe. Six people at the peak of their skill doing weird crap. Extremely obscure, elaborate secrets in MMOs. The CEO wanting to write a bunch of game lore so the developers have to find a place for him to put it Deliberately burning yourself out on an MMO and then deleting it forever. Vaulting Justifications. Clarity of Biome. Great ideas for a company that has infinite resources. RuneScape Modern and RuneScape Classic. Quitting WoW with your fiancee because you have a wedding to plan. The additional fee Blizzard charges for hosting your wedding inside of World of Warcraft. Fantasy heroin vs. Sci-Fi heroin. Stephepoa, Jasquosius, Dovanice and Jixandlia. Little dudes persisting between missions, if they survive. Naming all the fish after your Kickstarter backers. Doing all the same things the target your satirizing does, except you're doing them ironically. Lemmings as a squad-based tactical war game. A joyous approach to an anti-war message that makes war seem like a ton of fun. Violating the Geneva Convention by putting the Red Cross in Duke Nukem 3D. The video game that has committed the most real life war crimes. Poems you can't look at. Arriving today at the deep mountains of evanescent existence. Perfect pangrams. How they decided on the order of the Japanese phonetic alphabet. Who does Shakespeare think he is? Localizing Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffallo into foreign languages. Poorly localized advertising campaigns. Who is the Pilot? Reading Kingdom Hearts sequel titles as poetry. A Language Built for Poetry. Coyotes begrudgingly scampering away after you honk loud enough. A small family of black bears walking down your street and effortlessly demolishing all your trash cans. Dressing your dogs up like bear cubs so the mama bear takes care of them. How are you going to keep your trash safe? Trying to design a trash can lid that can be operated by a drunk human but not by a smart bear. Putting up bear crossing signs on every street in hopes that you'll discourage traffic driving through your neighborhood. What is this, an overpass for bears?! A salmon tube but for bears. Things in nature that want to kill you that you routinely interact with. Animals that are great except they have way too many legs. Entangled Burglars. Sharing thoughts and sensory inputs over long distances. Wrapping yourself in mummy wrappings so nobody can observe you directly. The Timid Butthole. Where does the cat end and the cat fur begin? Sneaking into the archives and discovering a picture of your dad's butthole in the files and wondering "How did they get this? Why do they have this?" The Three Names of an Elf. Why Cort is one of the most researched developers on Mobygames.

  5. Jun 22

    348. A Normal Spud Gun for Normal Children

    Lords: Kate Andrew Topics: Movies that are supposed to be good and kind of annoyingly are actually good Making friends when you're old Paris's pneumatic mail system Forgiven, by A. A. Milne https://www.poeticous.com/a-a-milne/forgiven-i-found-a-little-beetle-so-that-beetle-was-his-name Microtopics: The skill to make the noises that are in your head. Writing quests for Hello Kitty Island Adventure. Sanrio's NDA-enforcing snipers. A crocodile that was invented in 1978. Writing quests that force the artists to figure out how a crocodile would wear sunglasses. Writing the dialog tree as the player is clicking on options, like Gromit placing tracks right as the train is about to roll over them. Spending five years shipping the first part of a live service game and then shipping additional parts every few weeks. Trying to rebuild a house while someone is living in it. Lingo 2. Dungeon Gals. The kind of game you can't draw a map of. Teetering on the razor's edge of "I'm a genius" and "I don't understand anything." What does the developer tooling look like for games that have non-euclidean spaces? Duplicated spaces with secret warp volumes. The kind of movie that an Infinite Jest reader will recommend. Terry Cavanagh's game about making tea. Egg Game? Astonishing movie running times. Five minutes of two men intensely looking at each other. An adventure movie about two best friends who hate each other. James Joyce: maybe he's good? A guy who lives in the middle of nowhere who thinks about politics a lot and never talks to anyone. Gerry, starring Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. The art is coming from inside the head. Pro Shots vs. bootlegs. Jukebox musicals. Shawshank Redimension. Shawshank Redemption 2: Shawshank Herdemption. Communicating between cell blocks by flushing the toilet. Loove a.k.a. Flushed a.k.a. Lavatory Lovastory. Mixing your DNA with someone you've never seen. Florida Writing. Gravity Slingshotting around your hobbies to reach friendship. Going to GDC and making a bunch of game dev friends. Plateauing at two digits. Getting hobbies that put you in a room with people of your desired gender. Your co-worker at the call center who's married to the CEO of Twinings. Playing puzzle games on the Internet in front of a chatful of puzzle experts. The protagonist getting stuck on a puzzle and the narrator turning to the audience and saying "chat, help us out with this one." Making friends vs. keeping friends. The friendships that you both care enough about to have maintained. I Love a Thoont. Building a pneumo to relieve congestion on the telegraph system. When the telegraph was invented vs. when pneumatics were invented. Why banks had pneumatic drive thrus rather than the teller just handing you the stuff through the window like a fast food drive thrus. Whimsical coffee preparation. The cost of building a giant tube between the coasts of North America. The Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel. Inventing a frictionless tube. Preparing burritos to be magnetically fired. Rifled sewers. Plunging into the Lithosphere. A diagram that shows how the burrito gets heated. The Taste of Breaking the Sound Barrier. Getting your poem voice on. Whether A. A. Milne knew about hash tags. Non-Fungible Beetles. Oh great, the same beetle came back! The kind of look that means "it's me, the same beetle!" The XIX and XX centuries. Writing Very Blackly. Why Does Pooh Own a Shotgun? All the talking Winnie the Pooh animals turning out to be aliens, like Starfox. A pneumatic tube, except instead of burritos you're firing cork. Writing your thesis on pop guns and continuing to do post doc research on pop guns. Spud Guns vs. Potato Cannons. A Normal Spud Gun for Normal Children. Seeing that Wikipedia considers Spud Guns low importance and thinking of ways to make Spud Guns more important. Too Many Posts.

  6. Jun 15

    347. You Issue the Call; I'll Make the Modem Noises

    Lords: Erica Krissy Topics: The Battle of Food Dog and Valley Jump Park The Wilson Wolfe Affair, or, how I spent $350 on the mysterious wolfe in the sky This tabletop RPG with scripting support https://mastodon.tomodori.net/@vga256/116246406043573614 Why the heck are we making everything smart these days? And why is the security so terrible (A.K.A. The Lovense Story) The Naming of Cats by T.S. Eliot https://poets.org/poem/naming-cats Microtopics: The first and still only place you can discuss topics. Writing down your plugs ahead of time. The happy ending you deserve. A small child crawling into your bed in the middle of the night and asking the questions that keep him up at night, such as "can you one-shot a Silver Boss Bokoblin with a regular arrow and a Lizal strong bow?" Giving your child a classical education. (In Zelda and Mario games.) Living in Virginia near a bunch of Confederate monuments. Looking at the battle map to see where the soldiers come down from the Food Lion. The monument to not building anything. Sonically-enforced exclusion zones. Whether there's sound in the eye of the hurricane. What they call the Wal-Mart in Puerto Rico. Podcasts on which it's okay to hate the French. Quebecois LARPing as French. History: it's all around us, and it keeps happening. Wanting to spend $350 on the wolf in the sky but the wolf just won't take your money. Simulacra Games. Spinning a zoetrope. Questioning the palness of these supposed pals. Little mom and pop shops exhorting you to solve this unsolved cold case murder. Side stories extending the lore. Applying heat to make the secret message appear, then applying cold to make the message disappear so that the next person can apply heat to make the secret message appear. Being so busy making your video game that you don't have the spare energy to solve an interesting puzzle. Kitchen table ARGs. Dang you, Mr. Stormdancer! Always coming up with your schemes. What happened to the Twinbeard corporation. Paying $800 a year in something something taxes to keep your corporation going. Incorporating in the state of Delaware. Licensing the Frog Fractions brand for a dollar. Retiring and making Pico-8 games for the rest of your life. It's like PiCoSteveMo all year! Reading your program aloud to the DM who executes it in his head. Reading your program aloud to the DM who tells you there's a syntax error on line 397. Writing out a program to present to the class. You went over my helmet?! Programming in Logo and watching the turtle move around the screen. Rehabilitating the image of Lisp-like languages by changing the parentheses to square brackets which are much cooler. Are you a friend of humans? Crossing your legs into a storytelling position. Picking your job based on what's funniest. How smart do you have to be to be a fridge. Pulling out your phone and opening your banking app to see how much cash is in your smart wallet. Hacking smart butt plugs. Whether hacking an insecure smart butt plug is funnier or less funny than making the smart butt plug in the first place. Login functions that don't require a password. Can you get a virus from a smart butt plug? The consequences of your smart butt plug getting taken over by hackers. Messaging all your Facebook friends explaining that your smart butt plug was hacked and if the butt plug sends a message saying "help I'm trapped in a butt plug," it's not really from you. Working for the U.S. govt hacking pacemakers. The chat is coming from inside the butt. The three names of a cat. Munkustrap, Quaxo, Coricopat, Bombalurina, and Jellylorum. A cat in profound meditation. Looking up TS Eliot in the phone book. Child Jordan Mechner looking up the lyricist of the Wizard of Oz in the phone book and calling him up. Doing a Doctor Who joke that nobody gets. How many members of The Who are still alive. Effanineffability. Up to the Neck in Weber.

  7. Jun 8

    346. Adam Doesn’t Want To Get Touchy-Feely With That

    Lords: Ron https://grumpygamer.com/ Kevin https://rubixsqube.itch.io/ Topics: Do you do easy or hard tasks first? Magic (not the gathering, prestidigitation) as it exists in 2026 The thing that makes text adventures interesting The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, by Tracy K. Smith https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55517/the-universe-original-motion-picture-soundtrack Trash vs Treasure: ultra distant galaxies, little red dots, and brown dwarfs Weird hobbies Microtopics: Forgetting what you were going to say about prescription toothpaste. Microsoft Encarta '94. Back when computers were charming. A roguelike where the screen is always scrolling. Doing the hard tasks first so you no longer have to think about them. Trying to cover air quotes audially. Protaskination. Solving a topic for the first time ever. Advertisements for card tricks. Art forms involving lying to people. Nirvana the Band the Show the Movie. Using the language of punctuation to make people lean forward. Donnie Osmond being a jerk. Self-working card tricks. One of the greatest gifts ever given to you by the universe. Winning $6000 in a single spin of roulette and then retiring from gambling. Leaving decks of cards in bars that are 80% the same card. A mail order service that emails you a video of a begloved man preparing your order to ship. Why you own a nine of diamonds single card forcing deck. Video reviews that never discuss or show what the product being reviewed actually does. Dorky magicians in the Youtube era. The text adventure community adopting the Twine community. Zork's physics system and lighting model. A medium in which a single auteur can make a complete work in a few months. The Many Worlds interpretation of Twine adventures. Implementing gamepad controls for a text adventure. Complete inability to drop items in graphic adventures. A Dropping Place. Media in which only the author be clever vs. media in which the consumer can also be clever. The "that doesn't seem to work" response. How you interact with Starship Titanic. Robots saying inscrutable stuff to you. A firm turn-around wrong-way barrier. Keeping the magic of the text parser in your head even as you figure out exactly how it works. A text adventure with auto-complete. Pulitzer-winning poetry about the entire universe. White noise and black noise. The dark we've only ever imagined, now audible, thrumming. Learning how to hear poetry. (Like, at all.) A way of thinking about how the universe was born. Modern jazz as another way of exploring existence. Reading Shakespeare and having to look up "moiety" again. Reading a modern translation of Don Quixote and being annoyed that you can't find a modern translation of Shakespeare. Retreating away from the camera in horror. Unchecked ambition and desire for power. Shakespeare except it's a bunch of lawyers. Romeo and Juliet in the Globe Theater except everybody is shooting each other with guns. Bill and Ted's Excellent Use of Febreeze. JWST images of little weird pimples. Astronomers looking at Interlopers and saying "get this trash out of here" Leaving bugs in your game because they make the game more interesting. There's no such things as trash: it's all treasure to somebody. Throwing a disc up into the fizzlers. Playing a video game and thinking of a way to really f**k your game up and being compelled to find out if the developers thought of it. Always doing exactly what the game tells you not to do. Going to the Sega booth at E3 and playing Sonic as slowly as possible. Playing games in a way that makes the Sega representative come up and talk to you. The production glitches subreddit. Comb filtering. Arguing about whether it's a mistake that you can hear Alanis Morissette inhale. Parts of games that you need to polish and parts you can leave unpolished. Jim's secret to shipping video games. Polishing and honing and perfecting so much that you ruin the finished product. Picking hobbies that don't scale. Eating the top 1000 soups in the history of planet Earth. The kind of person who gets fulfillment out of people appreciating work you've done for them. Letting your wife know that you do have hobbies, actually. The Dead Poet's Society scene about measuring the relative merits of poetry. Jamming on the coffee table synthesizer, and thinking the whole time "I should make a finished song to upload to a web site" Years of meticulous cutting and shaping.

  8. Jun 1

    345. Is the Bass Pro Shop Pyramid Visible From Space?

    Lords: Aubrey http://glowhno.com/ Avery Topics: Every day since 1981 Yuri Borisovich Norstein and his wife Francheska Yarbusova have worked on their masterpice--an animated adaptaion of Gogol's short story The Overcoat. They couple is now in their 80s and will most likely never complete their film. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Overcoat_(animated_film) Video game urban legends https://vimeo.com/91436410 https://saint-arthur.tumblr.com/post/146680746144/riding-immortal-on-the-seeking-road Bay Area Airport Naming Drama The Only Animal by Franz Wright https://april-is.tumblr.com/post/89794820/april-25-2008-the-only-animal-franz-wright Microtopics: Loving only the parts you don't hate. Finishing the whole pack of Red Vines because you refuse to let them defeat you. An album you haven't put on Spotify. You know. Those podcasts. The sort of thing we don't do around here. Holding up cue cards so the guests know what to say. Reading all 180,000 messages in the Frog Fractions 2 ARG solvers discord. The tech company you're applying to sending you all the Enron emails, saying "review these before the interview" Mysteries, Easter eggs, and rose-tinted glasses. Hedgehog in the Fog. Arduous animation processes. Working on an animated feature by yourself for over 40 years. Great Family Entertainment. A story about a guy who has everything he needs who dies while trying to buy an overcoat. A huge pack of Red Vines that you and your wife have been eating since 1981. Burning yourself out very quickly if you don't put guardrails in place. Perfectionists throwing away years of work because it's not good enough. DJs who still spin vinyl and other artists who choose to do things the hard way. Enveloping yourself in an emotion. Refusing to break character for the entire time you're making the Youtube documentary. Putting away art you're having a hard time with and coming back to it later. Everything that happened between the Sigil Master and Austin Walker. Losing track of whether art looks good. The fine line between pacing yourself and torturing yourself. The statue in the background of Frog Fractions that turns red when you're on Mars. Encouraging people to have whimsy. Space Knight Rom. Snagglepuss the 1950s playwright. Back when you could make up a video game rumor and not have it immediately debunked. GTA San Andreas urban legends. Windows Movie Maker transition screens. Gravitating towards the unknowable. Self-destructing music. Scarcity and unknowability. Buying an album from the record shop and perusing the indie record label catalog that comes with it. Searching for the 16th colossus. Forming a small community and feeling communal with them. Playing games with a group of friends like a book club. An MMO full of ARGy type stuff. Automatically grouping people into a puzzle solving community. Being paralyzed by the sheer amount of information that you don't know. What's going on with the iGlyphs? Finding evidence of the Jejune Institute on a telephone pole. Painstakingly making the 7th Frog Fractions game, 45 years from now. The history of Seeking Mr. Eaten's Name. Game secrets that can't be ruined by one jerk with a decompiler. Sleep No More. Getting pulled into a secret compartment during an interactive play. Multi-city zombie larps. The Oakland Airport renaming themselves to the San Francisco Bay International Airport and then later the lawsuit becoming the Oakland San Francisco Bay Airport. Bay Area topology. San Francisco and South San Francisco. The Unincorporated Area of San Mateo County International Airport, or UAOSMCIA. American cities named after European cities. The Bass Pro Shop Pyramid in Memphis, TN. Filling a 32-story disco pyramid with sports equipment. Fry's Electronics. Another episode of Topic Lords where we read from Wikipedia. A huge empty building with paintings of Mayan gods holding torches that used to be an electronics store. One more way in which people forget about San Diego. The only animal that brushes its own teeth A monkey wearing a spacesuit trying to smoke a cigarette through the face shield. The only animal that smokes cigarettes. (Todd, who works down at the warehouse.) Meeting your estranged dad when at the awards show when you're both up for the same Pulitzer. Whether that f****n' awesome monkey is a Bored Ape. Whether Google Image Search is making up images yet. That time Ryan North and his dog got stuck in an empty swimming pool and turned it into an interactive text adventure. By the time you've smelt it, they have dealt it. Topics are over!

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4.8
out of 5
13 Ratings

About

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

Information

  • Creator
    Jim Stormdancer
  • Years Active
    2019 - 2026
  • Episodes
    353
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Jim Stormdancer
  • Show Website
    Topic Lords

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