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. 5D AGO

    316. Mr. T and the Rats of NIMH

    Lords: * Jenni * Felicia Topics: * The Mr. T cartoon * A hyper-specific comedy roast where it's just a couple giving each other shit for doing the dishes wrong * The poem that wasn't on Yuji Naka's wall * Sprouts, by Loryn Brantz * https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/0V0RfSkz.jpg * The phenomenon where you're convinced you could do way better at the TV competition show than the people on the TV competition show Microtopics: * The Fisher Price DJ Mixer. * Farting directly into the DJ Mixer. * Furries working in cyber security. * Furries working at Arby's. * Impossible Roast Beef. * Beef Pringles. * Potato molecules. * Miscellaneous Meat Molecules. * 3D-printing various cuts of meat. * Whether Neil Hamburger has helped or hurt Taco Bell sales. * A fictional guy, like Chuck Tingle. * Seasonal Depression Suite. * Future topics. (Not for today.) * Cool PBS parents not letting you watch the Mr. T cartoon. * The KGB, the Computer and Me. * Writing three original songs per episode of your low-budget Saturday morning cartoon. * Mr. T stomping around yelling at Nicodemus. * A bulldog with a mohawk named Dozer. * Solving crimes by wearing a denim vest and punching through a steel wall. * How gymnasts refuse to walk around like regular people, they have to handspring everywhere. * Live action Mr. T explaining the moral of the story. * Whether The Jetsons qualifies as STEM programming. * Spending fifteen minutes watching a silent music video on your audio-only podcast. * Google Meat. * I hate that everything is on Google Meat now. My face is covered in blood! * Mr. T swinging an alligator around by the tail and throwing it, shouting "so long, gay Bowser!" * Taskmaster. * What happens if you put three lentils together? * If you eat almost all the leftover takeout, everyone knows you ate almost all the leftover takeout, but if you eat all of it and throw away the box, nobody knows for sure because maybe the box got lost behind the mayonnaise. * Being an object of a hyperspecific roast. * The Alice in Wonderland Theater Public Shaming Experience. * A burlesque show with a sexy caterpillar where they ask everyone in the audience to write a confession, such as "I find this caterpillar sexy." * The Drag Red Queen pulling the audience's written confessions out of her back pocket and everyone is like "oh no" * Eating almost the entire tub of Rocky Road but leaving one rock and one road at the bottom, explaining when you are confronted that "it doesn't say Rocky Roads" * Going outside and finding a piece of toast on the ground and that's the most exciting thing that's happened in two years. * Cruise ships ceasing operation during COVID, which rules, but then resuming operations later, which sucks. * Explaining that we'll be hosting the event on Google Meat and then slapping you with the salami. * A motivational poem that says "Miyamoto is a fart in the wind." * Looking at your motivational poem and getting angry every morning. * A cross-stitch reading "Miyamoto is a fart" inside of a 1-Up mushroom cloud. * Who wouldn't want to cross-stitch a butt? People who suck, that's who. * Podcast headers vs. podcast covers. * Oh jesus it's the skin fortress. * Walking around just trying to live your life but everybody knows exactly what to say to get you to fight. * Rock Paper Scissors Fart Scorpion Miyamoto. * Classic first time Lord mistake: jogging to school with toast in your mouth but crashing into your attractive senpai and both of you end up in an alien world and one of you is a chain mail dragon. * How can you read poetry when a katamari could roll you up at any moment and send you up into space so you can scream forever into the void. * Your katamari Prince costume with the fresnel lens that makes you look really small. * Whether it's safe to let babies eat chocolate. * Which poop is the best to transplant. * Only the most pristine dumps. * Keeping your blood inside and your skin closed. * Babies using your arm hair as a fidget toy. * Arm hairs rolling around each other. * Stabbing yourself because you're the only one worth stabbing. * Solipsistic Stabbing. * Who's my little tuber? Who's all starchy? You are. Yes you are! * While you were watching Great British Bake Off, I was studying the dough. * You're letting too much lactic acid build up in your muscles, you humble gas station clerk. * Watching an Olympic sport you've never seen before and critiquing the competitor's technique. * Spin, spin, triangle to grind. * A contestant putting rose in their cake and you're like "I've watched 20 seasons of this, that's how you go home, you put rose in stuff" * Studying game theory before competing on Survivor and everyone votes you off as soon as they find out you studied game theory. * Crime Scene Kitchen. * Silently switching from content warnings to tags. * The professional pink gaming chair with bunny ears. * Moral Maggie cutting in at the end of the episode to tell you how to live your life. * The Topic Lords discord: we like to have fun. * Gratuitous use of the Finger Fortress.

    1h 15m

  2. NOV 3

    315. I Can't Believe It's Butter

    Lords: * John * Kevin * https://www.youtube.com/@kevin_hainline Topics: * Asking for help / Dealing with the slightest criticism/suggestions/etc * Roger Rabbit and Marvel vs. Capcom were big deals. How long until multiverse & crossover shit is exciting again? * Update on media that makes me feel things vs. media that doesn't * "Bell's Theorem"", a poem that I wrote, and then, at a poetry reading someone suggested the next poem and it demonstrated how good poets are pretty amazing and I am not a good poet * https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CkNH-KlDCAMRNsI6hDZjlyvOpAgM2TsP8x-lIp5TeqQ/edit?usp=sharing * We're in a golden age of new official localizations and rereleases of old games (and why am I not playing them?!) Microtopics: * Some guy on the internet. * Transparent aluminum ukuleles. * Hurting your fingers because your ukulele action is too high. * Do you still call them cowboy chords when you play them on a ukulele? * An astronomer making a series of Youtube videos about Jurassic Park. * The history of Mr. DNA. * How much kids in the early 90s loved Jamaicans. * Solving a 30 year old Internet mystery. * Suing Michael Crichton to make him put you in the Jurassic Park acknowledgements section. * The Ancient DNA Study Group. * Ian Malcolm just saying a bunch of lines from James Gleick's "Chaos." * Going into slow motion to show all the Victorian era pickpocketing. * Asking an august astronomer to critique your work and squirming as he critiques your work. * Therapy-style processing via Topic Lords. * People who like being asked for help because it gives them an opportunity to help. * The German word for being a person. * Being so overly polite that people feel obligated to reassure you that you don't need to be so polite, which is a big pain. * After someone helps you, asking for clarification on whether they wanted to help or if they felt obligated. * How to save Jim a lot of time and effort. * Two people coming from the same gross Internet soup. (Not 4chan) * The friends you made on the Pokey the Penguin mailing list. * Swearing to kids these days that the internet was good once. * Finding the exact right gif for your animated profile picture. * Pretend socialization: it's still socialization. * Knowing a guy by his Internet handle for decades and suddenly having to call him his birth name. * When crossovers started being a thing. * The Supreme Court ruling that corporations are people, saying the stage for the world depicted in Bio Freaks for the N64. * Daffy and Donald playing rival pianos. * Detective Munch's cameo in Fortnite. * Konami Wai Wai World. * Vib Ribbon n Astro Bot. * Why am I on this show when I could be playing Vib Ribbon? * Burning episodes of Topic Lords to CD-R so you can play them in Vib Ribbon. * Extremely pixelated vector art. * The save the cat moment on Topic Lords. * Mind-blowing crossover media events where the mind-blowing part is how much they paid all the lawyers to negotiate the deal. * Why the indie game scene hadn't produced a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with public domain characters like Robin Hood, Santa Claus, Mickey Mouse and Abraham Lincoln. * Reagan-Gorbachev. * Which president was kidnapped by ninjas. * Choosing to let the ninjas keep Ronald Reagan. * Ape Out: Get Back In There! * Pushing the left stick to lean and pushing the triggers to lift either foot. * Trying to play a video game in which you dislike the protagonist. * A guy whose defining trait is that he tries to get out of every conversation as quickly as possible. * Playing with the mismatch between what the player wants and what the player character wants. * Upsetting the apple cart of how video games work. * A minimap that takes up the top fifth of the screen but is nonfunctional until you unlock it halfway through the game. * Which Jurassic Park video game is most interesting and which is most fun. * Looking down at your cleavage to see your health meter. * Saying the secret word and screaming real loud. * A poem based on a physics thing. * Forgetting your ex girlfriend's face, along with all the state capitals. * Time pointing an arrow at your back, and you walk. * The New Physicality of Long-Distance Love. * Sending a poet up on the spaceship to drain buckets from downtown. * A poem written sometime between 1936 and 1992. * Off-Topic Lords, a place for people who shout answers at podcasts in grocery stores. * A collection of Double Dragon and Kunio-kun games. * Kid Dracula. * Mother 3's copyright nightmare. * Mario Paint on the Switch 2. * Who was the Terry that Chris Houlihan replaced in Nintendo World Cup? * Satellaview games ported to the Switch. * Batman Loves Him a Parallelogram. * Joining the discord for the best PicoSteveMo experience. * KevinHainlineOnYoutube.com * Naming a distant galaxy after yourself and other astronomers mocking you mercilessly.

    1h 20m

  3. OCT 27

    314. Gotta Catch Half Of 'Em!

    Lords: * Elena * Joël Topics: * The Luck Factor: * http://www.richardwiseman.com/resources/TheLuckFactor.pdf * Dual pilgrim certificate * The return of PicoSteveMo * https://itch.io/jam/picostevemo-3 * Every poem, by every human * https://www.tumblr.com/nextworldover/793694487879827456/animatedamerican-atamascolily Microtopics: * Packing cubes. * The Rolling Method. * Modular backpacks. * Camera people: a different type of people. * Nested zippered envelopes labeled one through five. * Why does your purse say "three" on it?? * Tool user opinions. * Getting ready for fiction to incorporate our new conception of what AI is. * Running experiments on people who self-identify as lucky or unlucky. * Gladstone Gander. * Paying your put-upon nephew a dime to accompany you on a trip to Zazu-Zazu. * Stan Connery's terrible taste in roles. * Natalie Portman's Tom Scott number. * Systems that are gamable but not trivially gamable. * Rick Rubin numbers vs. Sabbath Numbers. * The Kumano Kodo Trail's trail adjudicators ringing a bell and giving you a certificate to certify that you've walked their trail. * A terrible time of year to hike the Camino de Santiago. * Taking a wrong turn while hiking the Camino de Santiago and ending up on France. * All the school children running over to high five the pilgrims. * Feral Eucalyptus plantation. * Peeking into all the ancient mills. * Shrine tossing tricks. * Passing bones from chopstick to chopstick. * The three major sources of ritual pollution. * Getting sick of climbing the hill all the time so you write a poem explaining that the gods don't want the shrine to be at the top of the hill any more. * Harassment prevention for non-supervisors. * Printing and framing the certificate you got after taking the class on filling out your timecard. * The uncle so otherwise never contacts you sending you a happy birthday message on LinkedIn every year. * Endorsing your friend on LinkedIn for being a git. * Balloons in the sewer. * Sokoban mechanics that could apply Stephen King's It. * A tricycle kart racer set in the Overlook hotel. * NanoSteveMo. * The scruffy guy the hotel manager doesn't want around. * Singlehandedly supplying the fanbase for this Mo. * Hoarding Pico-8 cartridges on you desktop. * The Spore creature creator exporting your creature as a PNG. * A topic for another Topic Lords. * Concatenating a zip file to the end of a different file. * Here's this artifact. Please try it out. * Saving PNGs to Starlings. * Storing your Pico-8 game in a bird. * Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme. * Pirating software on Usenet. * Catching 50 out of 100 birds to extract the Pico-8 game from them. * Realizing that it's a plums in a refrigerator thing and moving on. * Helping a stranger grieve using your well-honed crossword skills. * Approaching classical literature as a collection of in-jokes and wanting to be in on the joke. * A book with a serrated edge. * How to read a book vs. how to read a poem.

    1h 5m

  4. OCT 20

    313. Don't You Wish You Didn't Know That?

    Lords: * Daniel * https://www.danielmullinsgames.com/ * Chris Topics: * Psychic Students In Pursuit Of Guidance (psipog) * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EIwP0zerbk * Zhaozhou's "Wash Your Bowl" Koan * Figwit * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figwit * Sudo-Ku * https://katlehmann.weebly.com/sudo-ku-a-multi-haiku-form.html * Game Design: The form is arbitrary and not worth much thought. What's interesting is how you play in and with the form. See The Witness, Undertale, Sokoban games, Pinball machines Microtopics: * Introducing yourself twice. * Spider mites and spider mite exterminators. * Exterminating your spider mite infestation with a washcloth. * Diatomaceous earth mines in your hometown. * The paperwork necessary when your diatomaceous earth mine accidentally breaks through into the neighboring nitroglycerin mine. * How to develop psychic powers of various kinds. * Learning to meditate in service of manifesting your psiballs. * Learning how to spin a watch around on the Psipog Archive. * A 90 year old dude who has been meditating all his life but still doesn't have psychic powers: maybe he's just bad at it? * The secret geometry that lets you talk to space beings. * Who wants to talk to space beings? * How to make progress on what mysteries we have left. * Reinventing all of physics from first principles. * How does nobody know about creating energy balls with your mind?? * Choosing not to do the thought experiments that have no good possible outcome. * Sitting at a desk made of laminated particleboard. * Pseudo-complex meals. * When civilization collapses, how am I gonna make a Big Mac?? * Taking the time to get to know every person you meet and understand every safety you interact with. * Wanting to know a secret that nobody else knows. * How not to pronounce "koan." * What do you do after you finish your gruel? * Becoming enlightened during Ikea furniture assembly. * Ancient Chinese yo momma jokes. * The enlightened experience of inhabiting a mind vs. the bowl needs to be washed again. * Questions that science cannot answer. * Probing your blood. * Measuring your blood chemistry while you wash the dishes to determine whether you're a good person. * How to measure how many people you've helped. * Short-circuiting your friend's money metaphor before it starts. * An incredibly wise computer refusing to tell you the answer because it's too nuanced. * Concrete actionable advice that you can trust every time. * Figwit pre- and post lines. * How things went viral before social media. * The Figwit obsession: it's weird. * Tracking down Figwit's Topps card to look up his RBI. * Why is it the "one" ring when all the Nazguls also have rings?? * Lord of the Rings fans and how much they love it when podcasters are confused about Lord of the Rings lore. * Effective fandom activism at its most innocent and pure. * Where were you when you found out Sonic was going to be in Smash? * A button that was effective so they pushed it a lot. * A Small Brown that Peter Jackson put inside the Real Brown. * Topic Lords Movie Secrets Special. * Sudo-Ku. * A fun gimmick that results in a worse poem. * Americans: do they do Haiku wrong?? * Syllables vs. sound units. * One pthong and more than one pthong. * Spending too much time reading about the form. * Drawing a line on a grid. * A valid approach to making interesting stuff. * The Pacific Pinball Museum. * Pinball as kinetic electromechanical art. * Electromechanical puppet shows at Musee Mechanique. * If Pixar existed in 1800, what would they do? * What if you're playing DDR but it's a joke? * High concept jam games. * Alien vs. Predator but you're roommates with the Alien. * Advantages and disadvantages of starting from an existing design. * Advantages of having a slightly different goal from everyone else in your field. * Chess with time travel.

    1h 6m

  5. OCT 13

    312. Rubber Baby Knopfler Romplers

    Lords: * Danny * https://nightbrunchband.com/ * Walker * https://nightbrunchband.com/ Topics: * You Probably Think This Song is About You * The Perfect r/crappymusic Post: An audio tour of Archetypes * https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/0291r0zf.jpg * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EIwP0zerbk * Sample-based film scores in the 80s * https://www.tumblr.com/mogwaipoet/786937779224461312/terminator-2-1991-and-the-princess-bride-1987 * Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep, by Clare Harner actually * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoNotStandatMyGraveand_Weep * Being a Video Game Newb in Your 40s Microtopics: * Is it a Topic or is it Just Banter? * Cleaning Lords, Lunch Lords and Cat Lords. * Have you heard the good word about the Gaylady? * Night Brunch. * Wearing your own band's t-shirt. * A thing that could happen for a while and then was no longer able to happen. * Hi Cindy! * Motivating yourself to work harder via self loathing. * Feeling the need to act all angsty so that people take you seriously as an artist. * A Touch of Grandiosity. * How many tracks get uploaded to SoundCloud every day? * Continuing to discover music from the 1970s. * It's called "Topic Lords," not "Correct Lords." * Once it becomes impossible to make new music, and we go back and start listening to all the SoundCloud uploads with 0 listens. * All the kids at Rock & Roll Camp getting excited about Lofey. * Pretending a topic is about one thing when it's actually about something else. * Canadian Actor Dave Coulier. * Tuesday at 3:01pm. * Learning a new chord on your Electric Tenor Guitar. * Bringing Pokemon Puzzle League characters into your love song. * Having a whole week to dial in that wub wub patch. * What art is for and what art should be for. * Fun is our only reward. * The objective best pitch wheel range. * The Funky Worm preset. * Synthesizers that can save and load patches but only when plugged into your phone. * Coming up with a Rube Goldberg machine to upload patches from a web server to your CZ-5000. * thisdx7cartridgedoesnotexist.com * In a convex optimization problem, there is no gradient to descend. * Fiddling with the synthesizer sliders until you reach a corner of the parameter space that doesn't make any noise and giving up. * Camp Counselor Grant hastily drawing all the synthesizer waves on the board. * Ask any Geometer, the triangle has three sides. Love triangles are actually just two love segments. * The All Topic Fakeouts episode. * The gulf between how an artist thinks they're presenting themselves and how they're being received. * A Beautiful Rainbow of the Human Experience. * Elderly rappers with excellent flow but terrible drip. * Piling onto propaganda music. * Someone doing their own thing with confidence and authenticity. * Graffiti with immaculate copyediting. * With improved access to art tools, taste is one of the only things left to get wrong. * Only the best crappy music. * Promoting your music in r/crappymusic. * Tori the Clown Rap Gal. * The audacity of extreme autotune. * All Youtube thumbnails converging on the same cognitive attention hacks. * Singing the comments on your last video. * Situations where echo chamber amplification is fun and good for the world. * Obscure Music That Slaps. * Serbian Kolos. * The Ketron Event Chrom. * The Nightmare Klaxon that Represents Dread. * All the Fairlight CMI presets used in the Terminator 2 soundtrack. * Growing up playing samples at every possible speed in Impulse Tracker. * Slowly sucking dog food out of a can to simulate the sound of a mimetic polyalloy passing through steel bars. * It's been a long day and you're ready to go home but you need to slam 1000 more inverted glasses into bowls of yogurt, let's hurry it up guys. * That one sample library squeaking metal door sound that everyone uses. * Calling out comb filtering whenever you hear someone exhale deeply while sitting down at a desk. * The sound guy instructing all the actors when to breathe to minimize comb filtering. * Rubber Baby Knopfler Romplers. * All the things you are after you die. * The purpose of suffering. (So we can write cool poems about it.) * Making art about how trauma used to exist. * Why wireheading will not solve our problems. (Because everything uses bluetooth now.) * Who needs trauma when we have CRISPR? * Shepherding noobs. * Play Any Video Game Day. * Complicated goose controls. * Trying to play Portal as your first 3D game. * Learning video games vs. learning board games. * Trying to get into video game series that don't change. * Looking at the screen and/or ants until it coalesces into an image. * Video games filled with really gross blood squirt sounds. * Jumping on and off of buildings. * Playing Breath of the Wild and just collecting mushrooms and herbs. * Grass simulation in Breath of the Wild vs. in Horizon Zero Dawn. * Putting yourself in the head-space of the protagonist in order to do protagonist stuff. * Spelling brunch the secret way.

    1h 21m

  6. OCT 6

    311. Godzilla's Daily Routine

    Lords: * John * Fif Topics: * Accidentally exploring a bunch of related subjects and/or media * The excellent progression system of Blues' Clues ABCs (1995) * https://archive.org/details/blues-clues-blues-abc-time-activities-pc-cd-rom * Salty Licorice is the sixth taste * https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/a-sixth-sense-of-taste-salty-licorice/ * https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salty_liquorice * The Cubivore between-level limerick * https://www.mobygames.com/game/11346/cubivore-survival-of-the-fittest/credits/gamecube/ * 55,555 names Microtopics: * Modern problems requiring modern solutions. * Leaving media behind. * Subscribing to PBS Passport via your local PBS affiliate. * Running out of media and just watching Peaceful Skeleton Realm Attacked By Helicopter over and over again. * Whether the Arctic Circle requires any age verification. * What even are Truck Nuts? * Why do trucks have such tiny nuts?? * Watching a movie every day because you're unemployed. * I'm Gonna Git You Sucka. * Independent used bookstores in the San Diego Area. * Used bookstores desperately trying to get rid of math textbooks. * The original Topic Lords. * Having a lot of knowledge that you can call on in a useful way. * Being old and having learned a lot of stuff. * Your mom describing your brain as "a bric-a-brac of useless facts." * Science Fiction Hall of Fame. * The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. * Someone who you forget as soon they go out of sight. * An SCP from the perspective of the SCP. * A really cool interactive fiction scene in France. * Rules lawyering your way out of yet another curse. * The 17th century demon cursing you to live forever and also that "whenever you send an email people won't be able to read what you wrote, they'll just say 'not more dick pill spam.'" * Word-based minigames. * The blank was in the sky. Blue had fun with her blank. * Making a game for three year olds warning them about insecure pedants on the Internet. * What year of our Lord was Bully released? * We don't talk about the 2010s. * The Milton Bradley Microvision. * The game is about cubes eating and f*****g. * Trying to describe any flavor * Blue the Dog. * Scandinavian Delicacy Ammonium Chloride. * A quest to track down Circus Peanuts. * An edible earplug that tastes like fake bananas. * Red Vines and Black Red Vines. * Being the only grocery store in town that sells licorice and reeling in the only licorice eater in town. * That Rotting Shark Dish. * The white people equivalent of huitlacoche. * The Secret Cowbell. * The hip hop community realizing that you can increase the delay on the kick drum and rattle your entire car for several seconds. * Tigers can't see the sideshow, only cows can see the sideshow. * Piggy Fif. * A classic poem about cubes f*****g. * Checking GameFAQs for a list of poems in Cubivore. * Piggy Playername's extremely distinctive manner of speaking. * Atlus Beast and Editing Beast. * The Cubivore trophy in Super Smash Bros. * A genetic progression that you need to do by transmogrifying into a progression of various beasts. * Entering a tunnel shaped like a heart and sitting in a flesh colored void until you attract 20 females into your harem. * Want to mate? Yes/no. * The Cubivore manual with the cutaway diagram of cube physiology. * Bully/Cubivore crossover fic. * Little Samson. * Get good at enjoying video games without being validated by a tiny purple cube, scrub. * The file you keep of all the names you'll answer to. * Pith, fip, pince, fifth, and fint. * People: they have a lot of names. * Being diagnosably bad at code switching. * Writing a random number of fs as a symbol representing your employee. * Choosing to be the banana taped to the wall. * Gaming naming. * Printing up a deck of constraints for when you're asking people to choose a name for you. * Paraeducation. * Jobs at The MADE. * The Worst Nintendo Store. * Teaching game design to young children every Saturday morning. * The forefront of the next generation of digital creators.

    1h 5m

  7. SEP 29

    310. Dance Like The Universe Is An Empty Wasteland

    Lords * Alexander * Kev Topics: * "Floaty movement" in games * The power to give people clutter that they can't throw away * https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/users/yorkdoom/palweb/week12/palwk12.htm * https://www.anabuzzalino.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/book-of-kells.jpg * Dunning Kruger got debunked! * https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2022/04/08/the-dunning-kruger-effect-is-autocorrelation/ * With or Without Witnesses, by Hasbro, Inc. * https://scryfall.com/card/jmp/457/alloy-myr * Esper says: "A lot of the lore and worldbuilding of Magic is conveyed through flavor text, but there’s also about a novel’s worth of writing for each set distributed as webfiction and a few dozen novels throughout the game's history. It’s good stuff, usually!" * The instinct to not swing a heavy object at someone, even when you're supposed to * Japanese curry Microtopics: * The Humble Screw. * What it might take to be good at hammering nails. * Fingerbashing. * An inclined plane that goes around in a circle. * Metric Rules Football. * Whether a state machine is the same kind of thing as a wedge. * Clockwork Maiden. * Speedrunning, cleaning and dating. * Floaty movement. * The JPEG artifact of physics simulation. * How to Unit Test a video game. * Using MIDI knobs to tune your game's physics. * Game Oriented Assembly Lisp. * Hot Reloading Workflow. * Why Naughty Dog stopped using Lisp. * Just going about your life when suddenly you have to use Perl for something. * Peak Node.JS/SAAS years. * Walk/run/sprint transition speed. * Getting an special drink for your guys. * Medieval style calligraphy. * Gifting someone with a burden for the rest of their lives. * Pouring rocks into your dad's pocket because that's where you keep your rocks. * The kitten going to sleep behind your laptop because it's warm back there. * Here's how someone in the 14th century would've written these words. * How to say "f**k around and find out" in medieval Latin. * Writing a meme in 14th century Blackletter Hand. * Sans-serif calligraphy. * The ancient Greeks trying to invent ASCII art but they couldn't close the deal. * Letters placed inside other letters. * Autocorrelation. * Figures 8 and 9. * Coming out of discussion the topic with a better understanding of the topic. * Using a bird feather to write. * Knowledge that we used to have and now have again. * Learning to Topic Lords while doing home improvement stuff. * Scrapping your fragile human body to merge with the machines. * Rainbows in Space. * Suns going around in circles regardless of whether anyone's looking. * A semi-conscious little robot dude. * Calling the Qualia Function. * A real messed-up looking machine cat. * Communicating the story solely via flavor text on mana dorks. * A squadron of little kids waving wooden swords at each other. * How do you turn sword fighting into something you can do in a video game? * East Bay Rat Motorcycle Club Flight Nights. * Situations where they ask if you want a mouth guard. * Asking the ref at the boxing match what the etiquette is for tapping out. * The crowd roaring when they realize you're a southpaw. * Punching a guy you just met three seconds ago. * Did you end up cutting that girl's head off? * Renaissance MMA. * That Awkward Sparring Feeling. * A simulacrum of kicking each other in the face. * Getting a part-time job at your favorite curry shop so you can learn the recipe. * What part of curry is the curry? * The curry you eat so you don't die. * Emperor Riding a Dragon to the Forbidden Palace. * The advantage of a burger as a fast food staple. * How to make curry convenient. * Rendang. * Dry curry. * Joining a discord and asking "what are all these users for??" * Which user is which lord on which episode?

    1h 3m

  8. SEP 22

    309. Shaking Ass To Music For Airports

    Lords: * Megan * https://www.megancarnesmusic.com/ * Austin * https://austinmwav.com/ Topics: * Going for a super long walk is amazing * "Elevated" horror is a sham * I was there when Every 5x5 Nonogram section 303 finished * NPC Dialog Test by Nintendo Europe #NintendoEurope * https://x.com/MarioBrothBlog/status/1863976914349621280 * My breakfast dogma * Not bringing my shitpost music/mashup ideas to life because I'm afraid they'll be more popular than my actual music Microtopics: * Music for films and video games. * The Paper Labyrinths theme. * Feeding your cats and yourself. * Exercising, drinking water, you know, all of the worst things. * Explaining to the doctor that you're depressed and he asks if you've been eating well and exercising and you say "no, because I've been depressed." * Turning 35 and becoming interested in birds. * Shazam for birds. * Birdpilled and Avianmaxxing. * Taking the L in Chicago and eating Dick's in Seattle. * Cream cheese on a hot dog. * The late Chicago on a Bun. * Regional food that you get outside of the region. * St. Louis style barbecue. * Ordering Jack in the Box at 1am and regretting it immediately because you are in your 30s. * Eating a spicy chicken sandwich in the prime gremlin hours. * Feeling bad because you ate bad. * Forty years later, thinking "Maybe I shouldn't have eaten all that White Castle" * The kind of person who would call himself a genius. * Sometimes it's fun to be goofy and have fun. * Horror movies vs. anxiety movies. * Media imbibers. * The film critic opinions of your Trekkie mom. * The high audience score, low critic score, and vice versa. * Applauding a huge pile of garbage. * Whether anyone ever self-applied the "IDM" genre. * The Oscar Genre. * Very good movies nominated for Oscars. * Braindance. * Cringe (Derogatory) * The only good form of multiplayer. * One of the hominids that watched a different great ape figure out fire. * What happens when they run out of nonograms? * Morons welcome! * Twitch plays Every 5x5 Nonogram. * Twitch plays Dark Souls never getting out of that pool of water in the tutorial area. * Every star going out at the same time. * In the short run, everyone will be fine. * Getting bored of your death anxiety. * Life is meaningless and nothing matters and that rules actually. * Extremely sensible anxieties. * Setting an alarm to periodically tell your friend that you're not annoying and I don't hate you. * Whether everyone should be afraid of heights. * A database of all the kinds of movements a rollercoaster can make so you can search for the types you like. * Do you ever get thirsty? Studies say people with ADHD need to drink water. * Taking a drug test at your job and worrying that the test people will notice that you're dehydrated. * The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog in all caps. * Mr. Jock, TV quiz PhD. * There really are castles in the eyes of people see them. * Role-playing the skeleton of Ben Shapiro in a D&D campaign. * What's the difference between being an asshole and role playing an asshole? * The 'shopkeepers are not copyeditors" apostrophe. * Eating your breakfast burrito over the counter. * Things that people say are good for your mental health. * Anxiety medication that gives you terrible nightmares. * Your anxiety meds making you feel okay about the zombie apocalypse. * Revenge bedtime procrastination. * The kidnapping advice episode. (FBI don't listen to this one.) * Kids are funny. (Just trust us.) * Playing in a band with your best friend for fifteen years. * Kids: they're sticky everywhere. * Never making any shitposts because someone might like them better than your regular art. * Receiving a series of increasingly aggressive answering machine messages from the piece of public art across the street from your apartment.

    1h 12m
See All (317)

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 - 2025
  • Episodes
    317
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2025 Jim Stormdancer
  • Show Website
    Topic Lords

You Might Also Like