230 episodes

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

Topic Lords Jim Stormdancer

    • Comedy
    • 4.8 • 12 Ratings

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

    230. What's God Even Made Of Anymore?

    230. What's God Even Made Of Anymore?

    Lords:



    Mike
    Jake


    Topics:



    Cameras are peaking -- what's next?
    Is the mysterious disappearing, or just mystery?
    Preschool security practices
    At the Feast in the Great Hall, by Ursula Leguin


    https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/1-EFinaN.png

    It's not boring to talk about dreams


    Microtopics:



    The great state of Maine.
    A project you've been working on for a long time.
    Inventing a game developer community in Michigan.
    Meaningful distinguishers on normal camera use.
    A lukewarm decisionmaking process.
    Computational photography.
    Samsung's fake moon.
    A camera that just guesses what you want to see so you don't even need to take the photo.
    A massive endless feed of the same photo with different people in it.
    Why people use cameras.
    Whether photos exist.
    Late stages of the product category.
    People who need Photoshop to do their job.
    Photo mode in real life.
    A photo you can take later.
    Adding a filter to make the guy in the background less likable.
    Meals for the Ages
    How to get from here to perfect ubiquitous service surveillance.
    Theatrically pretending to be hit by a stationary car.
    Going to the Gallagher movie and getting sprayed with watermelon.
    There's just the one Bigfoot, it's the same Bigfoot every time.
    Tomato sauces that are still delicious even if you learned the recipe from the Internet and not from a grandma.
    Mysterious things backing into the shadows so they can remain mysterious.
    Protecting mystery wherever you find it.
    The Museum of Jurassic Technology.
    Stepping inside someone else's very strange brain.
    Dawn Wall.
    An intensely detailed exploration of the surface of a cliff.
    I wonder what it's like on the fucking moon?
    Who painted the iconic cover of the Wrinkle in Time paperback.
    The shoot-em-up cabinet you saw in the canteen at the US Embassy in Monrovia, Liberia before the first Liberian civil war and have never been able to find since.
    A reaction to the lack of organic mystery in our lives.
    The Case of the Missing Hit and Searching for Sugarman.
    Wash over me, True Story.
    Which phone checked the kid out of preschool.
    Being on the list of services the insurance companies consider to have checked various boxes.
    We got pins. We can do that.
    The three bad four-digit pins.
    Streamlining the process of rapidly accounting for all the children.
    Developing a system that would deterministically move the needle in a useful way.
    Blundering in the brightness.
    Telling two events from the same perspective.
    Ugly crying at your desk in a public workspace.
    Spending way more time not alive than alive.
    Something that we can experience on either side of our lives.
    A Fire Take from Jake.
    Waiter stress dreams.
    A skill that you can hone.
    One of the more fun channels in the discord.
    Holding an increasingly large bag of stuff.
    Waking up laughing until you realize your dream was not funny.
    The consciousness wall between you and visualization.
    Training yourself to let your mental imagery be visible.
    Seeing clumps of color and interpreting them.
    Doing an editing pass on your dreams before relating it to your friends.
    Jay-Z's favorite bleu cheese Milkshakes.
    Screwball horror.
    A splash of furry content.
    Support Topic Lords

    • 1 hr 13 min
    229. This Show Now Available On Cockroach DNA

    229. This Show Now Available On Cockroach DNA

    Lords:



    Megan
    Lexi


    Topics:



    Erik Satie's performance indications


    https://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?boardid=60&threadid=4497

    Instant food from other cultures (why isn't everyone eating maggi noodles??)
    Seasonal decorations
    Delhi Metro


    https://docs.google.com/document/d/17k75ftxEn2xR-tJkLSV4H8st5BFAxPNxE3BNCXDI6Go/edit

    Becoming Immortal by being predictable
    Living in different climates (e.g. my experiences with the harsh winters of Chicago vs sweltering Austin TX summers)


    Microtopics:



    Music implementation for The Lamplighters League.
    Watching a streamer play games and asking them for a turn at the controls.
    How to pronounce "Erik Satie."
    How to pronounce "Gymnopedies."
    Finding 100 umbrellas in your dead friend's apartment.
    A list of Satie's performance indications.
    Grandly forgetting the present.
    With your bones dry and distant.
    Playing music with your forehead.
    Doing something to a piano.
    Your boss sending a memo asking you to work with a shy piety.
    Pizzicato vs. Bartok pizzicato.
    Adding the hamburger so it's not just Helper.
    What instant foods are missing from your food vocabulary.
    Adding heavy cream to ramen broth.
    Getting an apron so you can have a little costume when you cook.
    Realizing that when you wear the apron you don't get food on your shirt.
    A big bib for Big Jim.
    Normalizing scoop bibs.
    Kraft Dinner.
    Halal certified instant stir fry noodles.
    Ramen in a cup or ramen where you provide your own container.
    Insurance Mac.
    Canned cheeseburgers.
    A boring house with nothing on it.
    Movable feasts.
    Keeping those 12-foot skeletons in your yard and decorating it seasonally.
    The beetles that clean bones for you.
    Recreational Explosives Day.
    A Zachtronics programming puzzle for every holiday.
    A movable feast where you don't eat.
    Decorating your house to celebrate Toyotathon.
    Falling for strangers and their blue hair.
    A poem that is long if you read it but short if you recite it.
    Taking public transit as an act of defiance.
    A gift that is impossible to give yourself on purpose.
    Inventing a shower proof phone so nobody ever has shower thoughts again.
    Putting your phone in a Ziploc bag and watching movies underwater.
    Sitting down at your computer and getting stuck.
    Hacking your executive function by adding friction in the right places.
    Whether Wellbutrin gives everyone tinnitus or just you.
    Death hacks for staying mentally connected to your dead relatives.
    A service that puts your podcast on vinyl.
    Using CRISPR to infect the cockroach population with 229 episodes of Topic Lords.
    Moving to a land where your snot doesn't freeze.
    Not trusting your own weather opinions.
    Surprising yourself by enjoying seasons.
    Driving in icy conditions.
    Standing under the heated lamps like a lizard.
    Waiting for the bus in the dark.
    Learning to drive after you move to a city with public transit.
    Not driving with kids.
    Getting rid of all the bots.
    Sgt. Pepper Bot.
    Support Topic Lords

    • 54 min
    228. Detecting Myself As Spam

    228. Detecting Myself As Spam

    Lords:



    Fif
    Mitch


    Topics:



    The Ace Attorney series' English localization's naming conventions
    The kissing mechanic in Bully represents both what is genius and terrible about the game
    Podcast Prep Sheet Trending Guests and Topics
    The Tay Bridge Disaster


    https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/tay-bridge-disaster/

    No but seriously what the hell is up with the user interface in Bully. I assume it's just a Rockstar thing? I'm only into Bully so it is a mystery
    Comments that say "why did the algorithm recommend this to me"


    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1LhdhQEKtg



    Microtopics:



    Two handfuls of times.
    Something very fivey about hands.
    Dependability and a detail-oriented nature.
    Putting your resume in the show notes.
    Naming your kid a list of two things.
    A story taking place in a Los Angeles that is a satire of near future Japan.
    Naming games after verbs.
    Mario Push Button.
    The Haiku-detecting tumblr bot.
    Imagining an opinion and searching for someone who has it so you can yell at them.
    All the time we have for Topic Lords.
    Kissing a kissable person. (They have kissability.)
    A dress-up fashion thing.
    Wearing a reindeer patterned jumper to reduce your kissability.
    Applying triple-A polish to a boarding school setting.
    Dorms in a castle.
    Hey, nice face.
    Demographics based on what classes you have to take to kiss members of the demographic.
    Dressing in real life like you do in a Grand Theft Auto game.
    The one character in the entire GTA series that cares about the clothes you wear.
    Secrets Behind the Suite: Unveiling the Hidden World behind Luxury Hotels.
    Eco-friendly or Eco-fail?
    Law and Disorder: how TV crime shows get it wrong.
    Sending an email to yourself and it gets detected as spam.
    The friend who has a lot of opinions about Homestuck.
    Making your hearts for to quail.
    Poems including civil engineering advice.
    Good vs. bad nonsense poems.
    A fun poem to read.
    Paying money to engage with content.
    Deliberately slipping on a banana peel.
    What it says about hitting in the Banana Rules.
    School administrators publishing statistics on how many banana peels you've slipped on.
    Skyrim spoiling the presence of robots on the stats screen.
    Watching what players do and rewarding every action they take.
    A good video game is a game that has three good stats screens and no bad stats screens.
    Having a question in your head and not knowing who to ask so you ask the person in front of you.
    Youtube koans.
    Showing content to someone who will be not that jazzed about it.
    Youtube recommending a let's-play from a year ago with 10 views.
    A PMV of the character you are obsessed with.
    The only person who takes a the Youtube Creator Surveys.
    Constantly deleting the shorts.
    Posting a tweet to youtube.com.
    Posting a link to your own videos on Youtube.
    Community captions and what happened to them.
    Doing annotations dirty.
    Nekoneko.
    Comments popping up and scrolling across the screen constantly.
    Listening to a cassette tape you dug up in the desert.
    Support Topic Lords

    • 1 hr 10 min
    227. Maximal Overlap With The Dork

    227. Maximal Overlap With The Dork

    Lords:



    Erica
    Kory


    https://kbones.itch.io/



    Topics:



    Mystery Hunt 2024
    Developing my first video game
    Wearing glasses prevents COVID
    English Ending Song, by Ryoji Yoshitomi


    https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/AxA-XP8E.png

    How to make satisfying non-violent gameplay


    @DJTentMode@mstdn.party



    Microtopics:



    Letting go of concepts of yourself that you believe.
    Losing a concept of yourself as a person and just becoming free-floating thoughts.
    47 year old house painters.
    Growing up to be a pluripotent human being.
    Finding cool and positive Internet spaces to hang out in.
    Excavating old Bubsy memorabilia.
    Checking the maps on your telephone.
    Defining yourself as someone who doesn't eat free cheese samples.
    Scientists researching how to be cool and cringe at the same time.
    2023 Game of the Year Gordy and the Monster Moon.
    Protocols and processes that presume that if you are good at solving puzzles then you must also be good at designing puzzles.
    The humble beginnings of the MIT Mystery Hunt.
    Puzzle Inflation.
    Instant stooging.
    People who are obligated to prevent their children from dying.
    Server migration problems.
    Accidentally writing the same puzzle as someone else.
    Premium content for listeners who want to subscribe.
    Putting sprites on the screen and accepting controller input.
    Game design by proxy.
    Your local Barcade with a Pico-8 cabinet.
    Buttoning up a game to make it a shippable product.
    Whether the knife is detecting a dork.
    Butter golems.
    Bugs that make games more fun.
    Building a high end gaming PC and only running Pico-8 on it
    I can't believe they buttered Jorts!
    Meeting the guy who runs the Indie Arcade at Magfest.
    Waiting 40 years for opportunities to fall in your lap.
    Think Buick.
    A cat that is not on the show.
    Of all the exposed mucus membranes on your face, the eyes are two of them.
    Projectile transmission.
    Did this COVID infection rate study control for popularity?
    Hitting 40 and embracing the cringe.
    Wearing chemistry goggles in public.
    Myopic basketball players.
    Things you can put on your face to look like a superhero in disguise.
    The Wario Land 4 soundtrack.
    Making ogg vorbis rips of the Wario Land 4 soundtrack to put on Napster.
    A gem of a poem to be hidden in a Wario game.
    Playing back vocals with single-syllable samples.
    Our collective dream diary.
    Your dreams melting into your pillow with all the dust mites.
    Everything is impermanent, especially video games.
    A shocking removal of an important human from your life.
    Making your peace with the time you have forgotten.
    The natural high you get from blowing things up.
    Throwing apples at a Snorlax until it wakes up.
    Cooking games.
    Matching happy looking fruits of different sizes.
    Watching carefully as two peaches slide together.
    Designing video games for 5-year olds on T.
    Dropping things that merge in a two dimensional space with gravity.
    The boy has two dads.
    What can I do that is nonviolent and crunchy and interesting and solvable?
    Looking for inspiration outside of video games.
    Support Topic Lords

    • 1 hr 13 min
    226. Ilk-Action Lawsuit

    226. Ilk-Action Lawsuit

    Lords:



    Ryan
    Alexander


    Topics:



    Getting so agitated that you cook dinner
    What's an acquired taste that's worth acquiring? What's one that's not worth the effort? What's the point of even "acquiring" a taste for anything when there are probably infinite options you don't have to teach yourself to enjoy?
    Texturally enhanced alternative beverage
    Bagme Bloma


    https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Bagme_Bloma



    Microtopics:



    How the science gets done.
    Measuring the height of a flagpole by measuring its shadow.
    Using calculus to find the surface area of a potato.
    Measuring and re-measuring until you get the result you want.
    Confronting your professor about their involvement in Frog Fractions 2.
    Country and Western music fused with synth heavy prog rock.
    Using the gun to parallel park.
    That time Ryan died while recording Topic Lords.
    Getting so agitated that you do some differential equations.
    New guy just dropped: guy who whenever he thinks about death he has to make a sandwich.
    The first step towards rejecting a task: assessing the task.
    Today is a good day to fill your Prius with snakes.
    The Raccoon Prius story.
    Hilarious mothers.
    The inside of a Prius: nothing but corners.
    Officer, it's not what you think. No, not that either.
    Putting the AC on so the python in the back seat gets sluggish.
    Getting a fork and spoon and twirling up snakes like spaghetti.
    A taste worth busting your ass for.
    An oral history of tricking alcohol post your tongue.
    An entire generation that has never had to work to enjoy things because there are so many things that are easy to enjoy.
    Twelve year olds from Alabama calling you a cuck.
    New ideas that you haven't been thinking of even without looking at your phone.
    Hiking: it's just hard walking.
    Getting so agitated that you developed a taste for hiking.
    The guy in the Fred Meyer buying Reese's cups while wearing a tuxedo.
    The Men's Wearhome.
    The Men's Wearhouse employee who is not allowed to tell you that they don't have anything for fat people so he brings out less and less flattering outfits until you take the hint.
    Orbitz. (The soft drink from 1996.)
    A proto-boba.
    Drinking a random test tube from a bioengineering lab.
    What if everyone had a number floating above their heads that represented the number of times they had to drink Orbitz before they developed a taste for Orbitz and now that Orbitz is out of production everyone's number stays the same forever
    Big Dick's Energy.
    Flavor-blasted slushies.
    The sense-horror of drinking an Orbitz.
    Shelf-stable tapioca pearls.
    A free-to-play game for your tongue.
    Texturally subdued beverages.
    Decaf Red Bull.
    The hypothetical beverage enthusiast who wants a decaf Red Bull.
    How to make Orbitz in your toilet.
    How many Orbitz you have to drink to reach Nirvana.
    eBay sellers insisting that you don't drink the thirty year old novelty beverage they're selling you.
    Thinking a poem is a Middle Earth thing but it's actually a regular Earth thing.
    Poetry that is alliterative rather than rhyming.
    Making art by f*****g around with a new medium.
    Music in a foreign language.
    What Simlish sounds like in different languages.
    A quest to discover why they started dotting the letter Y.
    Expecting scrolls in 3 to 5 days.
    Support Topic Lords

    • 1 hr 8 min
    225. Showers: It's Wet In There

    225. Showers: It's Wet In There

    Lords:



    CisHetKayfaber
    BaseCase


    Topics:



    Raising third cultural kids as a second cultural individual
    Figuring out how to do creative projects that take longer than a weekend when you aren't getting paid for them.
    Someone sent me money on Venmo and now I need to sign up for Venmo if I want to have the money
    Farmyard Song


    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmyard_Song
    https://www.elyrics.net/read/a/aaron-copland-lyrics/i-bought-me-a-cat-lyrics.html

    We've been subscribed to Universal Yums for over a year now, and the sweet snacks range from "unremarkable" to "unbelievably great" to "not my cup of tea but interesting", whereas the savory snacks are mostly bad. What's going on there?


    Microtopics:



    Not being permitted to plug anything.
    A unique situation in which you are gendered a lot less.
    Australian Treat Arnott's Mint Slice.
    Crossover of snacks from Australia to Japan.
    Gentleman's agreements among cookie manufacturers.
    Patenting your cookie recipe.
    Touring school administrators.
    Being friends with a lot of Coca Cola people.
    Really enjoying multiculturalism.
    Producing a good person.
    Taking credit for the time your daughter didn't play Mario for six months.
    Focusing on the aspects of the situation that you find meaningful.
    What does and doesn't count as a childhood development milestone.
    Being good at the work people are expecting you to do.
    Doing worksheets outside.
    What children report back from their experience at school.
    Attempting to pirate the Montessori curriculum.
    A really fun month.
    Projects you can accomplish in a weekend.
    Why you don't have more to show for all your free time.
    Refusing to call someone stupid or lazy and having to figure out why they're actually failing.
    Coping strategies to get things done.
    Advice that is not helpful for neurodivergent people.
    Breaking a task into subtasks and putting them on a schedule.
    The first time you encountered the concept of a to-do list.
    Brain tech.
    Hammock time. (Or shower time.)
    Showers: It's Wet In There.
    Exultation of showers.
    Watching someone start a hobby and immediately excel at it.
    Finding a good community to learn how to do a thing.
    Joining a discord with experts in many things.
    Learning how to program and realizing that this makes you good at everything because programming is the hardest thing humans do.
    Sending money to a phone number vs. sending money to an email address.
    Canadians wishing each other money.
    Nice things to do when you don't want to defraud people.
    Opening a whole raft of phishing opportunities.
    Visa getting a cut of every transaction that happens ever.
    Whether every person in the world could live in Canada.
    The Cocaine Mayor.
    A traditional that is credited to Aaron Copeland.
    Cats saying "fiddle-eye-fee."
    Not being a raging misogynist but engaging in raging misogyny anyway.
    The era when the onomatopoeia for a dog barking was "bow wow."
    Onomatopoeia that is literal like "bang" vs. onomatopoeia that is more of a stretch like "shimmy shack shimmy shack."
    Riffing on Aaron Copeland's sexuality.
    Trying to shit enough to keep up with your toilet paper subscription.
    A product built for people who have kids but do not have kids.
    The mechanism by which the "Launch Frog Fractions 2" button launched Frog Fractions 2.
    The great Loot Box crash of 2019.
    Snacks that come with an instruction manual.
    Ketchup flavored potato chips.
    What you reach for when you're feeling snacky.
    A potato chip palate that is just far too sophisticated.
    Smoked ham potato chips.
    Harry Potter jelly beans ruining snacks forever.
    Only liking eating things that taste good.
    This is bad, but is it bad in a new, interesting way?
    The worst kind of bad.
    Observing a terrible sprawling work and thinking "wow, you really did a thing here."
    The recontextualization of earlier elements based on later knowledge.
    Discord Lords.
    Listening to ads because you have gloves on.
    How to join the Topic Lords discord.
    A recently minted lord who edits the show.
    Lords Eat Free.
    Support Topic Lords

    • 1 hr 19 min

Customer Reviews

4.8 out of 5
12 Ratings

12 Ratings

Livevil999 ,

Good podcast

This is a show where 3 people from alternate realities (multiverse theory) debate topics from each of their own realities. Nobody knows the topics ahead of time and points are awarded with the loser being banished from their own reality and joining a new reality chosen at random. Its a lot and sometimes you feel really bad for the people who are banished, like the one guy who was banished to the universe where all veggies taste like blue cheese or the woman who was banished to a 2nd dimensional reality but she was still 3d so she couldn’t interact with anyone really. Rough stuff.

The topics are good and it’s basically a conversation among friends but you do end up learning things from their life experience and such. Would recommend it!

scumbly ,

Wonderful show, one problem

As a longtime fan of Jim (and always a newly-minted fan of each guest/lord he invites on), this show is so close to being five stars for me.

Problem is, so many episodes bring in guests that are on microphone setups that are just unlistenable for me. I may be more sensitive to this than others, but it seems like on every other episode at least one guest sounds like they’re shouting down an echoing hallway the whole time. It’s a frustrating listen when you’re trying to concentrate on what people are saying, because otherwise the material and rapport are so fun and good.

Would love to revisit this rating, and start recommending the show to friends, if they can just establish a good baseline for guest audio quality. Until then, I’m mostly enjoying it through clenched teeth.

Zelrain ,

great lords, sufficiently topical

i grew eager to listen to this podcast when i saw that someone named the second episode “Conjure a False Godot” because i thought maybe these lords might offer some engaging Beckett discussion.

only upon reaching the end of the aforementioned episode featuring, rather than Beckett, an explanation of False Gobots did i realize my mistake:

by reversing the title’s b and reading it as a d, i conjured a false Godot to wait for while enjoying “Conjure a False Gobot”

five stars - very good podcast

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