Topic Lords Jim Stormdancer

Lords:



Avery
Chris


Topics:



Cross-Country Skiing
Putting art where advertising usually goes
Running Pico-8 on a Raspberry Pi
The Day I Fell Down the Toilet by Steve Turner


https://ramblinglisasbookreviews.com/2016/09/20/poem-the-day-i-fell-down-the-toilet-by-steve-turner/

I thought "snow" was one thing but it is about a million different things


Microtopics:



Looking for a job as a programmer but finding one as a bard.
A Transformers the Movie style power ballad.
Stopping having a job on purpose.
All the fun things you can do on mountains.
Carrying around a VR helmet so you can take photos of a mountain.
Snowy mountains on one side and lava fields on the other.
Towns named after regular guys.
Yelling at your barista that you live in Frisco.
The tier list of San Francisco's rarest nicknames.
The wrong kind of skiing.
A kind of hiking that is faster and also you can slide down the hill.
Cross-country snowboarding.
Repeatedly popping out of your ski boots and landing in the snow barefoot.
The most winter you've experienced in your entire life.
Taking snow home from the mountains and putting it in a cup in your freezer.
Breaking your toe while stage jumping.
Best ways to not save a hypothermic toe.
Devoting a portion of your massive intellect to making your friend's life interesting.
Back before the Internet was threatening.
The Avery ARG (or AARG).
Writing a short story about your friend in the form of a dating personals ad and posting hundreds of copies all over town.
Miranda July.
An app that crowdsources uncomfortable personal interactions.
A KFC billboard that has been defaced to unrecognizability but the life-sized statue of Colonel Sanders right next to it remains untouched.
Partnering with Safeway to distribute your zine on the back of Safeway receipts.
Mixing up your ammo with your pharmaceuticals so your mugger no longer feels iron deficient.
Whether it's morally okay to appreciate a well-made advertisement.
The advertisement where the guy is now on a horse.
Spray tan parties happening in your area.
Going to the buying place with your earth money.
Your favorite deodorant being discontinued and buying the very last crate and rationing them even though you go to the gym every day.
Handling Smellium with your bare hands.
Smelling what happened to the scientists who discovered Smellium.
Asking for a fun tool for Christmas even though you know you'll never have time to use it because maybe the idea of fun is enough.
The screen saver only paying attention to mouse and keyboard input so when you're playing games you need to jiggle the mouse every few minutes or the screen saver kicks in
Looking at headlines first thing in the morning to make yourself angry enough to get out of bed.
Seeing a headline saying "10,000 people join Mastodon" and thinking it's talking about the metal band.
A touring photographer whose job is is to photograph EDM acts staring at their laptops.
Software developers figure out a more effective way to make money than making their users happy.
Nonconsensual updates.
Writing demos, like in the 90s, back when computers were fun.
The optimism of feeling like computers were going to make people's lives better.
Finding cool programs to download onto your computer.
Getting a job writing Picotron BBSes in Lua.
Waiting until Chat GPT learns how to use Picotron.
Clippy but it's self-aware and hates itself.
Asking Clippy for stories about Bill Gates.
Desktop Pets.
Bonzi Buddy pointedly reminding you that he has your credit card number.
Writing a poem to get your dad to stop asking you if you're off the toilet.
The scene from Trainspotting where the protagonist dives into the toilet.
In twenty years when Winston is hosting Topic Lords and making Frog Fractions sequels.
downpour.games
Look at this, look what I did!
Seeing snowflakes for the second time in your life.
Snow: it's beautiful, unless it's in Avery's freezer.
A frozen lake that you can just run around on and dogs love it.
Snowboarding with a

Lords:



Mark
Shirley


Topics:



Egypt sweater!


https://www.etsy.com/listing/233409089/amazing-1940s-egyptian-fair-isle-jumper

At the end of this film, are we supposed to want Indy to save Elsa? To go off happily together? (I say no.)
Kazim is the best character in Last Crusade


https://www.youtube.com/shorts/IP54S-ZZtyE

Portrait of my Brother as Indiana Jones


https://www.tupeloquarterly.com/poetry/portrait-of-my-brother-as-indiana-jones-by-amorak-huey/

Sallah: The hardest brownface to swallow
Are pits of snakes effective as circus attractions?
The visual of them closing themselves in a giant box while on the motorcycle


Microtopics:



A nerd of the second-highest caliber.
Working in tech on the internet.
Quality guests on a quality show.
Savage Oaf vs. Savage Oath.
Getting on Metal Archives and figuring out those bands are.
Swearing an Oaf.
Reading "Lord of the Rings" because you are pregnant.
Recommending pregnancy to someone who wants a child.
Wonder Weeks.
Your child is about the size of a mid-sized sedan.
A delightful looking creature about the size of a Micro Machine.
A sister who is a chimp and other wild shit from the 1970s.
A screwball comedy about lions living with Tippi Hedren and mauling the director of Speed.
A movie about an archaeologist who is beloved by all his students and one of them is wearing this sweater.
1940s Egyptian Fair Isle Jumper.
Getting unprofessionally close to the professor you have a crush on so he can notice your cool Egypt sweater.
Why Dial of Destiny didn't do that well.
An entirely tolerable movie according to Mark circa whenever that movie came out.
Deploying the tense night-time action music.
Going to Fiverr and paying someone the fair value of their labor.
Elsa's a Nazi and then we're mad at Elsa.
Emotionally elevated moments between Indy and Elsa.
Proposing to your girlfriend on the Golden Gate Bridge in a last-ditch attempt to save your relationship.
The payoff of Henry Jones Sr.'s character arc.
Elsa choosing the wrong grail on purpose.
The 50 grails on the other side of the room that Elsa didn't even look at.
Coffee cup movie magic.
The expeditious nature of film storytelling.
The Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword.
Kazim falling off the dock.
Kazim showing up to beat the shit out of a kid who is spending too much time reading about the grail on Wikipedia.
The two-part episode of MacGyver where MacGyver looks for the Holy Grail.
Stealing artifacts because they belong in museums, not with the people who originated them.
Going on a series of heists to steal artifacts back from museums and returning them to their people.
Sometimes chased, sometimes chasing.
Amorak from Kalamazoo.
Love on her eyelids.
A certified Wocust.
Compensation for my brother-in-law's car.
The depiction of Sallah in Raiders vs. in Last Crusade.
Fisher Stevens in Short Circuit.
A movie you can give up.
John Rhys-Davies playing a dwarf even though he's not even from Middle Earth.
Middle Earth being flat for elves but round for humans.
A huge vat filled with undifferentiated snakes that is a circus attraction somehow.
The guy who lays down in the bed of snakes.
A 1920s-era circus putting on a performance of the play that Snakes on a Plane was based on.
Giving a garter snake to every kid who comes to the circus and if their parents don't like it they can just set the snake loose in the back yard because it's the midwest.
Not thinking to ask a question until 30 years after you've seen the movie.
Liking art that is flawed.
Dying from a recreational drug situation.
Safely ensconced in the box.
Being chased by Nazis and taking a moment to pry open a wooden crate just in case there is a motorcycle in it.
Batman scrolling reddit while hiding behind the curtain for the guy he's going to surprise coming back into the office.
Of course that's what they do, and of course it worked, because you just saw it happen and it worked.
The pitfalls of googling your own medical symptoms.
Support Topic Lords

Lords:



Jenni
Xalavier


Topics:



How do centaur internal organs work
What is the most unlikely horror franchise to adapt to games?
Do boomerangs work?
Serious KAAAND!


https://www.reddit.com/r/TopicLords/comments/1b3j3nu/serious_kaaand/

Most game mascots are the sexual avatars of their creators
The Ted Dabney Experience


Microtopics:



Rusty Lake.
An intriguing, terrifying morsel.
Whether it's okay to lie on this show.
Life Eater.
The horror fantasy kidnapping sim space.
Shippers shipping games.
How do we ship this game without destroying people?
All of the horse except for the head and neck.
Cosmetic centaur organs.
Introducing yourself to the inside of a centaur and it's extremely squishy in there.
A single multifunctional cube that births a centaur and that's the original Xbox startup video.
Speaking a language that doesn't exist and every time you finish a sentence you hear church bells.
Would a defective centaur wear a hat like this or like this?
Centaurs always standing at their standing desks.
A centaur wearing a horse mask.
Playing Wii Golf with someone who remains sitting the entire time.
Getting off the Power Pad to long jump.
Sitting golf.
My Dinner with Andre the Giant.
The monster mash vs. monster bash.
Adapting the Ghostbusters theme song to other media.
Playing as the car and running people over.
Jail for cars.
Jelly beans that taste bad on purpose.
80s films for children that are meant to turn them into weird bisexuals when they grow up.
Jeff Minter's Dune.
Barbarella the video game.
More things you can do with your Rock Band instruments.
Sticking even more games inside of Fortnite.
The lemur with the really big eyes.
Microorganisms that live in water and have the end of a comedy roast bone for a head.
Venomousness of hybrid mammals.
Grabbing your stress ball after learning that the duck billed platypus uses electroreception to track their prey, Xalavier Nelson, Jr.
Platypus patch notes.
Adding expansions to Classic World of Warcraft.
Gauging the temperature of the room when it comes to boomerangs.
Throwing a washing machine in a circle.
How you feel when the boomerang doesn't come back.
Objects that you see on TV.
Boomerangs that instant of being carved to return when you throw them, are carved to say "help, I'm trapped in a boomerang factory" in an Australian accent when the wind whistles through it.
A boomerang with a heart on it that you throw to find true love.
Boomerangs vs. Gen-Xerangs.
Getting lazy by the time you sharpen the 7th blade on your boomerang.
Disrupting marshmallows by making them kinda good.
Hiring a game studio to make a satisfying sequel to Katamari Damacy and then immediately suing them for fraud because making a satisfying sequel to Katamari Damacy is impossible.
Getting Australian concussions all weekend.
Naming your facial hair "are you ready for the next topics"
Hi guys call anyone knows how to buy guns and armor India?
Crossposting between r/TopicLords to r/IndianTeenagers.
Weeding out the cowards with Gregorian Chant.
Looking at Glover and immediately understanding his salient sexual verbs.
The distinction between mascot and main character.
Your Sonics, your Gexes and your Crashes Bandicoot.
Switching places with your therapist.
Non-saucy mascots.
Having to pick between being horny and being a sociopath because you can't be both.
Glover vs. Hamburger Helper vs. Thing.
Opening yourself to a deeper Freudian zeitgeist.
The mascot platformer you keep seeing roms of but have never downloaded.
Blinx 2: Masters of Time and Space.
Blinx dressing up as the lead singer of Power Man 5000.
Exactly the sort of podcast segment you want to commit to sight unseen.
Being willing to give up 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand to make a friend happy.
How much do you want that Golden Microphone?
The crucible of the soul you go through to record a podcast.
People in the future deciding what you would have made a podcast about if you were still alive and making that podcast.
The Xalavier Nelson, Jr.

Lords:



JohnB
Kevin


JADES data: https://jades.idies.jhu.edu/public/



Topics:



Thoughts on approximately 5/12 of Don Quixote
The Time Life "Mysteries of the Unknown" Series (1987-1991) and its impact on a generation of young nerds


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mysteries_of_the_Unknown
https://www.reddit.com/r/IcebergCharts/comments/r487u4/distant_astronomical_objects_iceberg/
https://www.slideshare.net/DirkTheDaring11/timelife-mysteries-of-the-unknown-the-ufo-phenomenon
https://archive.org/details/DreamsAndDreaming_201809/page/n33/mode/2up
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lal0aWAys0k

Thomas Edison didn't think telephones needed to ring. He figured the caller could just start yelling "hello" at you even before you answered the phone
Desiderata


https://www.desiderata.com/desiderata.html
https://www.readwritethink.org/sites/default/files/resources/lesson_images/lesson372/PoloniusExcerpt.pdf

Is pinball meant to be fun? Can you lose a quarter at an arcade faster in a game cabinet or in a pinball machine?


https://arcadeblogger.com/2018/07/06/arcade-holy-grail-the-pinball-circus/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAtVBb8rOok
https://archive.org/details/TILTTheBattleToSavePinballDisc2Extras



Microtopics:



Dog ownership.
A living creature that just wanders around the house.
Picking up warm soft weird thing.
Cracking open a cold one.
Computers flush with science data.
The deepest images humans have ever taken.
Finding distances to individual galaxies.
Listicles you can peruse.
Picking a galaxy and naming it after yourself.
Bug Mars 2.
The Glass Universe.
Hiring women and calling them computers.
A guy with a lot of free time and a gold nose.
Some public domain books being more readable than others.
Pun localization.
North American otaku tilting at windmills with their katanas.
How people pronounce quixotic and how they ought to pronounce quixotic.
Whether we respect English majors on this show.
Naming a character something weird and hoping nobody argues about the pronunciation hundreds of years from now.
Butthead as Don Quixote and Beavis as Sancho Panza.
The Great Cornholio tilting at windmills.
The era of translations that don't realize Don Quixote is a parody.
Part II of Don Quixote responding to Don Quixote fan fiction.
Don Coyote.
Sending Mario Maker back to Miguel Cervantes to see what he would make.
The kinds of books your parents would have on their shelf, back when that was the only thing available to read.
The 80s resurgence of New Age thought.
Mystic Places.
The Shin Megami Tensei section in the library.
Where to find the books that teach you magic in the public library.
The canonical map of reported UFO sightings worldwide.
Books for the kind of person who thinks Aleister Crowley is cool.
The Spaceships of Ezekiel.
The JWST iceberg.
The Distant Astronomical Objects iceberg.
A tin can and a string with a battery attached.
Hello, fellow phone owner.
A phone call asking you to log into a web site and read a message.
Funny ways to answer the phone.
E.B. Games, where you can get F-Zero for Zero.
The size of fortune cookies in the 1920s.
Nice things to do and be.
Desiderata vs. Deteriorata.
Advice giving poems.
Skin cancer is mid.
Casey Kasem quitting Transformers after they wrote an episode featuring Abdul, king of Carbombya.
Avoiding loud and aggressive persons.
Pinball getting harder and more complex over the course of a century.
Baffleball.
Pinball features to make things easier for beginners.
The quickest way to lose money on an arcade game.
Tilt-sensing plum bobs.
A weird kinetic sculpture that exists just for your entertainment.
The Black Hole for Personal Reasons.
A boring and easy pinball cabinet that you can play for an hour when you want to get sick of pinball.
Tilt: The Battle to Save Pinball.
Multidisc!
Pinball tables by George Gomez.
Pinball: not actually fun, but they did their best.
Free play skee-ball.
Pacific Pinball Museum and Musee Mecanique.
Twitter forgiveness.
Support Topic Lords

Lords:



Jonah
AC


Topics:



When was the last time you listened to a song backwards?
Decentralized manufacturing
Are there other terms like "foodies," to describe those who are super into universal bodily functions?
The Bathroom Line, by Jesse Thurston
Playtesting legos


Microtopics:



Pet Rock Dot Site
Whether rhythm is a kind of sound.
A rhythm synthesizer that produces control voltages.
All the things you could hypothetically like about New York City.
Crowded speculative real estate.
Canada's role as a fire hazard.
The power company in charge of all the wildfires.
What happened to Smokey the Bear.
Stopping for lobsters crossing the highway.
Whether Smokey the Bear died in his sleep.
Putting the oven on self clean and it cleans your whole house.
Bringing back Satanic Panic to make backmasking cool again.
Constructing a cliff that echoes backwards.
Musique Concrete.
The kind of people who would make an album in Csound.
Admitting that your music is hilarious.
Conlon Nancarrow's works for player piano.
Black MIDI.
Knowing that you should be adding a constraint to your assertion but not knowing what it should be.
If Conlon Nancarrow had only entered cryosleep.
Loading up a song in Sound Forge.
Squid Salmple.
Bluetooth: it works every time!
Virtual modular synthesizers with cool cable physics.
The etymology of backmasking.
If Wiktionary is so good, why isn't there a Wiktionary 2?
Franchising your rhythm box.
Doing each other's administrative work.
Doing a labor swap to get fresh eyes on your project.
Ubering to the trail head.
Imagine: paying rent for an office.
Poopsocking it on this family show.
The Armory.
Going back in time and having $14 million.
Selling your forehead as advertising space.
Joseph Circuit City Smith.
This man needs your help to remove his porn logo forehead tattoos.
Aspirational snake eye contacts.
Your contacts contact.
Antique sword knife bookmark charm sword knife pendants knife charms for bookmarks.
Going to the breathing club and breathing really hard.
The Hearty-Starty.
Trying to joke about a thing that turns out to just be a real thing.
A Facebook group for people who love shitting.
Blinkos and all the nuances of the ways they love to blink.
A whole world just for smelling.
How your heart doesn't stop every time you sneeze.
Green text vs. other colors of text.
The r/bluetext subreddit that's all about links to other web sites.
Nutty Gum and Fruit Spleggings.
Finding the one while in line to poop.
Going to college for like a year and one of the best things about it was the bathroom graffiti.
A chalkboard in the physics department's bathroom stall.
Help I'm trapped in the bathroom grout.
Peeing while trying to think of a poem.
Peeing your pants in the bathroom.
Don't Backmask Me, Bro.
Finding someone in a bar who wants to playtest your experimental game for three hours.
The movie Yesterday except for inventing Legos.
Following instructions as a way to fidget.
Trying to solve a difficult programming puzzle when someone comes up and starts biting you in the ass.
All the ways someone can be onboarded onto an experience.
Free HTML5 Games Tagged Idle.
Top Three Clickers.
Roguathia.
Waiting until you have more SP to select upgrades.
Support Topic Lords

Lords:



Chris
Dev


https://devinbusha.artstation.com/



Topics:



Taking Improv classes has been life changing.
Practicing 3 keyboard layouts at the same time
I bought store brand salt. You wouldn't think this would be a big deal but it turns out to be
I Once Snorted an Eight Ball with Santa, by Richie Zaborowske


https://www.havehashad.com/hadposts/i-once-snorted-an-eight-ball-with-santa

Are all creative ideas very derivative, or is it just my ideas


Microtopics:



Pickleball.
Weird shapes the birdie flies in.
The sport that has level design.
Mindful breathing.
You are now breathing mindfully.
Looking forward to being at square one.
Getting the real data once you stop paying attention.
Thespians in High School.
Spinning a wheel to figure out what emotion to feel.
Whether the yes and rule only works for comedy.
Pancakes. Are. Starchy.
Being late to your job that's on fire because you were stuck behind the fire truck.
Celebrating your own failures.
How to play Lemmings in 2024.
Self-esteem.
Immediately vibing with a new sport.
Autotuning except it's completely manual.
A bunch of joysticks that you twiddle with your fingers to do letters.
Colemak vs. Colemak DH.
Keyboards that are laid out in columns.
Splitting up the typing test into QWERTY, Dvorak and Colemak.
Palm Pilot Graffiti.
The Lord's Prayer in Gregg.
Shorthand. (Originally called Briefhand.)
Good ciphers for room escape puzzles.
Are QR codes based on the mazes in Zelda 2?
Flaky sea salt vs. coarse sea salt.
Adding a biting experience to make your food more heterogeneous.
Edible chemistry.
The last time you pinched salt.
Audially-rewarding salt grinders.
Science Youtuber Hank Green.
Warning pregnant women to not eat too much salty licorice.
Supertaster-outing Tic Tacs that regular people love but supertasters immediately vomit.
We've got a level six kaiju supertaster on our hands!
The guy who gets paid too much to taste ice cream.
The kind of person who doesn't salt their food but instead repeatedly licks a salt lick throughout the meal.
Heads swirling around like snow globes.
A poem that doesn't do anything with line breaks but does do something interesting with sentence lengths.
A poem that you might read on a bathroom stall.
Wearing the little hat and pulling on the cord that makes the horn toot.
The ecology that grows around the dumpster.
The crane swinging porta potties around.
An extremely expensive way to have fun
Heading towards the era of having kids.
Asking for payment for software that is not being maintained.
Minesweeper but X.
An idea that is worth doing but not obviously worth doing.
How to make Missile Command fun in a new and interesting way.
A boxing essay with questionable authenticity.
Strategies for enjoying Frog Fractions.
Rangers and the new way they handle animals.
Yes-anding whatever ideas come to you.
Ancient primals that were interlocked in battle.
Someone thinking of an idea.
Constantly listening for cues.
What do inanimate objects do?
Buying a giant bag of googly eyes and putting them on everything.
Not posting on Twitter.
Support Topic Lords