Topic Lords

Jim Stormdancer
Topic Lords

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

  1. 3일 전

    270. B-Roll Of The Big Bang

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

    1시간 8분
  2. 12월 16일

    269. Wet-Ass Planetoid

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

    1시간
  3. 12월 9일

    268. Puzzles For Puzzle Enjoyers

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

    59분
  4. 12월 2일

    267. Unburying The Duck

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

    1시간 13분
  5. 11월 25일

    266. Voronoi Cookies

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

    1시간 7분
  6. 11월 18일

    265. We're Here To Make This Slide Floppy

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

    1시간 11분
  7. 11월 11일

    264. Pickpocketed So Hard You Die

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

    1시간 8분
  8. 11월 4일

    263. Drafted Into The Applebee's Wars

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

    1시간 10분
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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.

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