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

    341. The Real Jim Stormdancer (On My Birth Certificate)

    Lords: Andrew https://kittenm4ster.neocities.org/ Noel https://noelcody.itch.io/ Topics: Moss Moss design & process Being gaslit by an open-source 3D physics engine ACME products Splinter by Carl Sandburg https://allpoetry.com/poem/14327262-Splinter-by-Carl-Sandburg Microtopics: Blippo+ Wearing merch for a TV show in the Blippo+ cosmology. The bureau where you keep your cotton. Mossing the world and finding secrets. Designing for mystery and discovery. A platformer with no skill checks. The standard puzzle game playbook. Designing your game to offer one question per screen. Pig Farm. Discovering your way through a story. What to show and what to hide Collecting leaves that grow a vine up to something at the top. Cats or rabbits or turnips or something. An underrated comment on the Pico-8 BBS. A secret at the end of the game that you try to be okay with most players not finding. Play testing with your local game dev scene. Various Pico-8 data compression strategies. Code golfing until you can't stand it. Ending every project in a nightmare slog. PARENS-8. How Pico-8 makes constraints feel real and not like some arbitrary b******t you decided to do. Forking Pico-8 and expanding the token limit to 8193. 50 years of game designs to draw examples from. Spikes. Bounding your understanding of the space. The satisfying feeling of playing a good XAMWWSKH. Lions sculpted out of hedges that want to give you a big hug. Creatures in the game world just going about your business in a way that can aid or hinder you. Just lil dudes, just hanging out. The feeling of being outside the bounds of a game world. Lunacid. Games that don't know you're playing them. The pickup truck you can just barely spot in Pokemon Red. Interpreting data as a compressed Pokemon. Trying to make an N64 game because Pyrite 64 came out Testing on your Summer Cart. Choosing the physics engine that only supports cubes. Lateral friction. Reading about video game car physics on the Internet and getting so desperate that you start asking the LLMs. Four wheels all applying different forces in different conditions. What Google indexes now rather than text on the Internet. A heavily abbreviated transcript. Nearly 20,000 microtopics. microtopics_ebooks. An ebook written by many uncredited people. Collecting 30,000 Bug Mars Work Visa signatures. Informing your users that you are collecting their personal information but only in order to improve the contents of your wallet. Zenith Electronics Is. The game developers who broke off of Activision to form Accolade looking in the dictionary to find a name that's come earlier than Activision in alphabetical listings, and then the game developers who broke off from Accolade to form Acclaim doing the same thing. Going to a movie theater in the 1930s because that's how you see the memes. Hanna-Barbera inventing a new animation technique where they give everybody a collar so they can animate their head and body separately. Disney replacing animators with photocopiers in the 1950s. A medium's technical limitations eventually becoming an art style. How often did they make the Looney Tunes? How many Looney Tunes are there? Shorts that play before the main feature. The DJ in the projection booth deciding what Looney Tune will drive the crowd wildest. How many movies are made each year. When the MPAA was established. Which Looney Tunes did they play in front of the R-rated movies? A splinter of singing. If you say hello a thousand times, is the thousandth time actually a goodbye? Eating the last grilled cheese sandwich of your life, and either being aware of it or not aware of it. Crickets going extinct every winter and re-evolving in the spring. Crickets becoming locusts in the winter and seeing how many divine plagues they can enact before springtime. Entomology Blog: you're totally full of shit. Walking towards a cricket and it stops chirping and you're like "how am I supposed to hunt you down and eat you now?" The science weighs in: we won't be able to visit the aliens, but we will be able to send them a plague of locusts.

    1h 4m

  2. APR 27

    340. Too Young for Doom

    Lords: Matt https://mtrop.net/ Cort Topics: Doom Modding and You The Boston Marathon Stampede This 1989 Shigeru Miyamoto quote. "When pornography escalates, it eventually crosses into the grotesque. I think the world of 'hidden secrets' in games has almost reached that same grotesque level. It's reached a point where it isn't measured by common sense anymore. It's just people getting bored and looking for stronger and stronger stimulation. We've hit a wall. When you're at the point where you have no choice but to go 'grotesque,' you have to start thinking of new ways to use the medium." https://shmuplations.com/itoimiyamoto/ Dammit I'm Mad by Demetri Martin https://www.reddit.com/r/Poetry/comments/zc6iic/poem_dammit_im_mad_by_demetri_martin/ Microtopics: Plugging in the middle of someone else's topic. Successfully comparing apples and oranges. Waking extremely early to meet with someone in the wrong time zone. Doing anything for 30 years. What monsters do. Making Doom mods before they figured out how to change the walls. The Hacker's Guide to Doom, by Hank Leukart. Anthropology of Doom modding. Roots: the Evolution of Doom Level Design. Demon of the Well. People heralding the end of Doom modding before you even get started. Megawads. Where's All the Data? Non-commercial Doom Source License. Jokes that take thirty years to get. The Vanilla Limitations of Doom. Recreating your high school in Doom, which was okay at the time but stopped being okay several years later. Dividing eras at a pinching point. People who are opposed to doors. Relaxed-Limit Source Ports. The Stand-Alone Project Era. DeHackEd patching the binary. Various sources of value you might get from modding Doom. Mark Z. Danielewski commenting on MyHouse.wad. Sonic Robo Blast 2. Falling Away Floors. Taking certain features and mushing them together into a new thing. Back when Doom rules the LAN parties. What you played on your Mac instead of Doom. A hardware mod that added looking up and down to Doom via a cardboard window that you can slide around the monitor. Making a Beeline for the Bungie Booth. A crowd of shifty eyed gamers waiting to sprint across the show floor full of unsuspecting exhibitors setting up booths. An okay one of those if you're into that sort of thing. Drinkable Cheeseburgers. Finishing the tutorial and quitting Marathon (2026) forever so that you can brag about your100% extraction rate. Doing non-euclidean architecture in your Marathon maps. Adding portals to the Doom engine. The three stages of development that every medium goes through. Paying the shareware fee to get your registered copy of WinBolo and/or LinBolo. The point when you have no choice but to Go Grotesque. Miyamoto quotes that modern-day Nintendo would never allow to escape containment. A completely constructed, untrue memory of how you played The Legend of Zelda. Miyamoto foretelling in 1989 that grotesque secrets in video games will lead directly to the cat hair mustache puzzle and kill adventure games. Slaughter-mappy. Hell Keep and the Fortress of Mystery. The one place in the Doom episode they can force a constrained-ammo puzzle. I rise; my bed on a sun. Rats peed on hope. Deified as a sign in ruby ash. Making a computer watch every episode of Seinfeld. Guided Markov. Writing a poem from both ends at the same time. Saying the moon is anything and squeezing a poem out of it. Doom mods where you can pull down the console. Porting ZZT to the Doom engine and vice versa.

    1h 5m

  3. APR 20

    339. Become Uncoffinable

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

    1h 5m

  4. APR 13

    338. Placebo Yourself into Having a Phenomenal Time

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

    1h 9m

  5. APR 6

    337. Mars, Technically

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

    1h 22m

  6. MAR 30

    336. The Four Colonoscopies

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

    1h 7m

  7. MAR 23

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

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

    1h 11m

  8. MAR 16

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

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

    50 min
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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
    342
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Jim Stormdancer
  • Show Website
    Topic Lords

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