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. 2H AGO

    331. Earbuds Are a Type of Sandwich

    Lords: Kory https://kbones.fun/ Andy https://highcadence.online/ Topics: The Gametank https://gametank.zone/ https://www.crowdsupply.com/clydeware/gametank I swear to God, I'm going to talk about auctions and auctions in games, it's super interesting and I don't want to get preempted a third time. Esper says: "There’s actually a game coming out in a week where you break into museums to heist real-life African artifacts with the goal of returning them to their rightful homes! It’s called Relooted and looks pretty cool." https://store.steampowered.com/app/3255890/Relooted/ Winston figured out how to watch TV at 2AM Dragonfly Catcher, by Chiyo-ni https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@gingerbeardman/115933940306986226 I just lost a snapshot of my life in mp3 format. Microtopics: Multi-time lords. K-Bones dot fun. CachyOS. Scrubbing topics against the corrugated metal washboard of discussion. Leaning into the microphone and saying "topics." Helping Andy quit his day job tonight. What MAGfest used to stand for. Playing with SGI hardware in the Old-Ass Computer Room. Game consoles that output square video. Getting pixels into the framebuffer of the Fairchild Channel F. Seeing a fun puzzle to solve but not solving it because you already have way too many projects. Through-hole soldering. Replacing volatile memory with F-RAM. Preparing to have fun. Reaching the point in your life where you don't want to bother with the war game, you just want to paint the miniatures. What do you call it when you pair up with three people? Throupling up for the next 45 minutes. Who has time to both solder things and play video games? Why Robotron 2084 was more difficult in emulation than in the arcade. How to pronounce SNES. Shmups slowing down when there are more objects on the screen, and game designers incorporating that into the game design. The ZX Spectrum Next and the Mega 65. A game console that only 150 people own and they get super excited whenever a new game comes out for it. Game development like a caveman would do it. Whether more than one person can take the under. The rules of Monopoly as written vs. the folk rules. eBay auctions as an extremely boring game. First price vs. second price auctions. Visiting the real money auction house in Diablo and finding out just how little your time and effort is worth. The Gold Standard of the Hat Meta. An evolutionary branch of PVP that's distinct from Yomi. What to do when you want to play Avalon Hill's Dune. Fence Lara Croft's Stolen Treasures. Lara Croft's Stolen Antiquities Simulator. Winning a bunch of Saltybucks on Saltybet. Age-appropriate behavior. Speedrun watching TV at 2 AM. Live and Don't Learn. Explaining jet lag to a two year old. Watching MTV's Liquid Television block until 2:30 AM. Finally sitting your son down to have the Aeon Flux talk. Haiku that end "that's it, that's the haiku" even though that's too many syllables. Hiking in the wilderness and encountering or not encountering a dragonfly. People at risk of owning a Game Tank. Broadly appealing messages sent out to farm likes. The psychological cost of having 20,000 people following you. Choosing your Mastodon instance based on what domain name William Gibson thought was funny. The Mazzy Star song that's on the Batman Forever soundtrack. iPod shuffles always insisting you're not pregnant no matter how much you pee on them. Ephemeral preservation of a time in your life. A biological weapon that removes your ability to perceive music as music. You die young, or you live long enough to see Nine Inch Nails become dad rock. Music Inspired by the Soundtrack. Putting your MP3 collection on striped RAID arrays for the benefit of future archaeologists.

    1h 12m

  2. FEB 16

    330. Tip Extra To See the Nuns

    Lords: Alex Shannon Topics: Japan in summer is too hot, but there's lots of cool festivals Why can't I have marzipan made by nuns in California? Podcast playlist problems Considering the Snail, by Thom Gunn https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52887/considering-the-snail Microtopics: Traveling. If you need a lot of stuff, or if that stuff needs you. Real Topic Aficionados. Last Life and other lives. Watching a TV series you like and then going back and watching the same episodes again from a different character's perspective. Napping all day and seeing street festivals at night. Walking around with a tower of flaming candles on your head that keep getting tangled in power lines. Why aren't the modern World's Fairs as exciting as the ones from 150 years ago? Making a couple weeks vanish in lieu of a millennium and a half of leap days. Naming your baby Person Who Packs For Themselves. Naming your baby "Supplanter" The littlest bean that's currently born. Growing up enough to realize that everybody is named Luke now. How Bob used to be the funny fake name but now it's Jeremy. The Bob Emergency. The guy you call Baker because he's a baker. The canonical order of ore value in video games. Hacking your save file at home, just like in the good old days. Selling marzipan in a dark room with a turntable and a bell. Things you can eat in some parts of the world that you can't eat in others. San Diego's Best Seattle Burrito. The essence of fine Mexican foods. Australians telling candy companies "stop trying to make Halloween happen" That friend who has digestive issues eating salmon, but only in specific countries. The politics of buying Girl Scout cookies. The best place to sell a Girl Scout cookies on UCSD campus. Boy Scouts trying to sell popcorn, with seemingly no awareness that popcorn is not remotely as good as Girl Scout Cookies. Kobey's Swap Meet. Getting an old timey surgical mannequin at a swap meet so you can practice your surgery. Kids today trying to figure out how to operate a VCR like they're playing Myst. What happens if you put a VHS tape in backwards? Netflix's "continue watching" category, for movies you didn't like enough to finish. We don't want to hear your bra podcasts! The Stanford professor you're gardening for asking you what podcast you're listening to and now you have to explain your weird hobby to your employer. How to listen to podcasts without your boss sneaking up on you. The first time you've been to the dentist without headphones this millennium. Introvert Dentists. Tooth care advice that you forget immediately. Extremely symmetrical knots in a power cable. Climbing, sailing and caving knots. What is a snail's fury? Why is this snail so mad? A turtle that's decided it's go time. Getting really excited about the turtle races at the Renaissance Fair. Watching a carnival game where four people throw five spears each at targets attached to a wall of hay, and none of them manage to hit the wall. Axe throwing bars, where you have a beer and throw axes. Taking up axe throwing as a hobby because whenever someone gets killed with an axe, the police will be sad if they don't have any suspects. Axe throwing failure modes. Dominant javelin throwing strategies. Throwing a javelin further by spinning around like a discus thrower. Bullets: they go where they want.

    1h 1m

  3. FEB 9

    329. Who Made Tigers?

    Lords: Tyriq Watson Topics: My sleep experience over the holiday Esper says: "Cannabis can definitely help one get into a sleep state, but actually degrades the quality of sleep quite a bit. From personal experience my guess is this has to do with how it affects dreams, often precluding them from happening to begin with." Conlanging taught me how to judge good art Tate mode The Tyger, by William Blake https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43687/the-tyger Microtopics: Scrubbin' Trubble The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Leguin. Changing history by dreaming about it and having a hypnotherapist that's trying to change your dreams. Telling artists that you like them vs. telling them that you like your work. Learning how to take compliments. Three people who could have opinions. Spoilers for early January. Trying to sleep on an airplane and training yourself to be unable to sleep at all. A highly suboptimal experience. Untraining the fear of falling asleep on planes from your body. How to wear a neck pillow, maybe. Sleeping sitting up and your head nodding forward as you fall asleep. Neck pillow instructions dot PDF. How to transport a neck pillow. Hyperfixation on sleep and the consequences of not getting it. Mythbusters Mode. If you can't sleep, how helpful is it to pretend to be asleep? Being woken up by the sensation of all your senses shutting down as you fall asleep. Skipping your consciousness off of the surface of sleep. Getting super stoked when you're about to fall asleep and waking yourself up because you're so excited. Problems solved with more coffee vs. problems solved with more coffee tables. Lingthusiasm. Cursing yourself to hate a beloved movie series by watching it on a plane. Psychosomatic self-curses. Linguistics and conlangs. The guy everyone hires to con a lang for a movie. Judging things based on whether you like it vs. judging things based on whether it achieved the creator's goals. Learning a new framing and applying it to everything. Being aware of your frame and communicating your frame to the listener. Lojban. Lojban as a wholly unnatural way to speak in the same way that ballet is a wholly unnatural way to move. Decent and not unaesthetic. Trying to draw a picture without knowing how to hold a pencil. Birds with extra vocal tracts. Birdlangs. What if parrots evolved to be sentient, except in a fantasy world, because reasons. Ascertaining the borders of your caring. Brandon Sanderson doing Brandon Sanderson things. The IPA of sounds a human can perform live on a modular synthesizer. To create Hatsune Miku, you must first invent the universe. Horizontal vs. vertical scanlines. Designing a CRT that can scan either horizontally or vertically. Delta gun tubes with a triad of phosphor dots. Having a vertical monitor to display tall things. Page-shaped-pages. Games that ship as a rectangle on a web site. Black frame insertion. Do modern LCD displays have ghosting? A very intimidating challenge. A very fun nexus of art and programming. Tate Mode vs. Tate Modern. Tate your owl for science. Whether this poem predates the Great Vowel Shift. Mixing ands and ampersands. Capital Ampersand. Seeing an animal and realizing that this is it, this is the one that's meant to eat me. A glowing golden perfect human that everyone instantly hates and wants to eat. Whether you can invent a tiger in Dwarf Fortress.

    1h 8m

  4. FEB 2

    328. Darth Icky

    Lords: Jesse Alex https://insertcredit.com/show/ https://discord.gg/dcofficial Topics: 90s Gen X "Internet High Weirdness" culture: SubGenius, DiLingo, Steve Jackson, the Looneys, KoL Writing a podcast about video games every week as someone who doesn’t really play many video games anymore The mystery of BunnyROM https://bunnyrom.neocities.org/ Junk by Richard Wilbur https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/Al2MMuFX.png https://github.com/jdonland/bookmarks Autopsy, by Ross Sutherland: https://pastebin.com/raw/npCuYjLj Disney saved Star Wars by buying it from Lucasfilm. This is what Saved Star Wars looks like. Cycling's hour record https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/52/Mens_hour_records_progression.svg/2560px-Mens_hour_records_progression.svg.png Microtopics: A gold star Canadian. Cousin show Insert Credit. One of the world's foremost experts on DC Comics. Filling in the gaps with bonus episodes. The lost episode of topic lords that might one day be produced. Spreadsheet Secrets. Detritus and ruins of the culture that came before yours. (Gen-X.) Whether Steve Jackson is still doing the GURPS thing. Where did Gen-X come from, and why did it disappear? Your personal relationship with They Might Be Giants. The weirdos who first colonized the Internet in search of the community they weren't finding in their lives. Nerds riding high on military funding and founding new religions with varying degrees of mockery. British comedy crossing the ocean and losing its cultural context, so a generation of American nerds grow up with a more absurdist sense of humor than the previous generations. Sitting at your computer running IRC in 1996, staring at the screen waiting for someone to say something. Classical Education as a shared cultural context so rich people can understand each other's jokes. Halfway into the 2020s, still thinking about the Roaring Twenties whenever anyone names the decade. Everybody forgetting how to group history by decade after a twenty years of not easily being able to talk about "the 00s" and "the 10s." Playing video games from the ages of 5 to 20 and then stopping forever. Asking some of the most thoughtful people you know questions about video games. The exhaustion of trying to keep video games in your life. Artists and critics with opinions that are wildly out of step with their audience. Video game companies that have great logos. People who are so good at telling interesting stories about the bad video games that they're playing that they convince you to buy the game and then you're like "where's the interesting game they talked about" Talking to the same oldbies every week. An 18 year old kid obsessed with the Atari Jaguar wandering into the middle-aged video game club and everyone is like "sickos face yes emoji" Trying to track down the manufacturer of Digital Princess Friend. Mysterious ROM images that nobody knows the origin of because nobody asked. A Tamagotchi where your little guy can be a fighter plane or Sponge Bob. Mysteriously good Tamagotchi software floating around. The reason M&Ms come in different colors. An egg that your umbrella with an eye can hatch from. Why you can't ship a container full of cheap junk to the United States any more. Middle English style poetry. Sheer shards of shattered tumblers. Modern English alliterative verse. It's cool what people do with words. Paying so much attention to the alliteration that you miss the meaning of the poem. All the Babu Frik Funko Pops that will still be around long after all the stars go out. Hephaestus' Hammer, all gunked up in microplastics. Quoting other poems in the middle of your poem. Publishing a book of all the poems we've read on Topic Lords and then being sued for copyright infringement. A poem that originated on Jim's fridge. Diminishing Mandalorian Returns. The goddamned Ewoks shit. The Droids cartoon. The future of Star Wars: jokes about Star Wars?? The Day the Clown Cried of Star Wars. The angriest you've ever been watching a movie. The third good Star Wars movie. Stealing good ideas from cool fiction. One guy who got lucky a couple times and a thousand yes men enabling him for the next 40 years. Planet Moriband. Finally finding a guy you can call Mace Windu. Waiting for Jar-Jar. Sometimes you just need drivel that you like. Buying a tangerine and noticing that it's a Star Wars-branded tangerine. Technology improving the way we interact with wind resistance. 1890 guy on his velocipede getting mad at all the new Space Bikes. Instituting new rules stating that your bicycle has to look like a bicycle. Ivory Tower Cycle Men. Vampire Tactics. The most prestigious world record in professional cycling. Keeping track of the world record best dress at a fashion show. What about Funny Cars? What's so funny about them? Trying to break the Merckx record using Merckx's original bicycle and outfit. Everyone tying the same world record forever. Riding 270 miles a day for a year. Walking to work 23 miles a day, both ways, because you love suffering and hate bicycles. Detective Comics Comics.

    1h 19m

  5. JAN 26

    327. Damn, That's a Good Kidney!

    Lords: Josette https://www.josetteseitz.com/ https://www.instagram.com/jo_seitz/ Daniel Topics: The overlap between musicians and rhythm game players Figure Skating and the upcoming Olympics In this short Life that only lasts an hour by Emily Dickinson https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56456/in-this-short-life-that-only-lasts-an-hour-1292 The Reality of Hope https://www.therealityofhope.co.uk Is time travel media really that bad? Microtopics: 3D art spaces and the Virtual Burning Man experience. What were we talking about at lunch? The new kind of Christmas light that's reminiscent of the old kind of Christmas light. A nice soft blue. The LED lights that hurt the most. Mounting recessed lights in the eaves and lighting them up with the worst gamer RGB patterns. Beige keyboards with three green LEDs on them that you can animate because they're memory-mapped. Paradiddle. Learning to play drums in VR. Paradiddle for Snapchat Glasses. Video game audio latency vs. digital synthesizer latency. The Bemani guitar game that inspired Guitar Hero. Guitar Freaks vs. Guitar Hero as a case study in how the same idea can be executed very differently getting very different results How singing is scored in Rock Band. Finding new music via the Rock Band games. Beat Saber Library Managers. Solid beams of light. Ice Dancing. Whether you can train rhythm. Brother-sister ice skating couples. Which animals can learn rhythm. Representing your ice rink. What to do after you've spent your life training but what you were training for didn't work out? Ice skater unions. Going to the Olympics with your mom to watch the figure skating. Alysa Liu. Meeting America's Princess and she's not a nice lady. Finding the right coach at age 7. Sports therapists. The disposition to perform your best under pressure. Exercising and practicing at the expense of nearly everything else you could be doing with your time. What to do with your life now that you're no longer spending all your time training for the Olympics. Missing your friend's 11th birthday party because you're busy training for the Olympics. Giving seven year olds a test to see if they do well under pressure and if not, telling their parents not to try to get this one into the Olympics. Grit. What boot camp is for. Training to be the best person in the world at field stripping a rifle. Still living this life, which is great. Still being responsible for other people's taxes. Looking forward to the new year because it's tax time. How your life might've been different if your parents insisted you go to college. We've got learning at home but we don't have socialization at home. Studying how to study without knowing how to study. Passing the classes you were interested in at that moment and not doing so well in the test. Two friends in the furry community. Telling your friend about your medical condition in VR Chat. A documentary about kidney transplants in the furry community. Damn, That's a Good Kidney! Filming a documentary in VR Chat. What normal people think about time travel fiction. Yes, you have to use your hands, and yes it's like a baby's toy. Reading a piece of fiction because you're hoping to have a good time. Which time-travel movies have reached the heights of popular culture. Having this 360-degree camera just sitting around and trying to figure out what movie to make with it.

    1h 6m

  6. JAN 19

    326. A Dead Quarterback Can Still Score

    Lords: Cort Ben Topics: Oh man, remember the Geek Code? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geek_Code I discovered a fun fact about my neighborhood Every 5x6 Nonogram https://puzzarium.com/every-5x6-nonogram The Calf Path by Sam Foss https://poets.org/poem/calf-path Phillip Rivers Microtopics: Secret Playstation Things. Transposing a matrix in SIMD. Reclaiming your plug. Trying and failing to use Libby. Failing to check out library books from your toilet. State-sanctioned piracy. The restaurant where you had the dinner for your wedding. The "my wife" voice. Suddenly having nieces. Hadad and Barney on Black Square Day. The Talos Principal DLC. The Geek Code Era. VMS or OS/2 as a defining feature of your personality. Dilbert, Perl, Doom, and X-Files: all equally culturally relevant to this day. The Natural Bears Classification System for Gay Men. The Human Code. Your favorite grocery store's end-of-year recap. The story of a Venezuelan woman between age 30 and 55, and her top 2000 interests. Your favorite vowel in text messages you've sent this year. What they call that AE vowel. Speedrunning your entire email history in a weekend. The Miracle Mile, where all the tar pits are. Noted monster Sean "Diddy" Combs. Two hip hop producers getting mad at each other. Putting a plaque at your hotel explaining that Jim Morrison did not die at this hotel. Being the plaque you want to see in the world. Whether the Museum of Jurassic Technology has reopened after the fire. A very earnest museum about a history that never was. Wandering around dazed after every 5x5 nonogram is solved. Doing your part to serve humanity by solving nonograms. Do you remember where you were when Every 5x5 Nonogram Section 303 was finished? Why a dippy bird can't keep you online. Gesturing at the idea of collectively solving a problem. Why we haven't heard from Peter Molyneux in a while. What three digit numbers nonogram solvers think are interesting. Sending 96 million solved nonograms into space as proof to alien life that humans are still capable of collective action. Feeling bad about having installed an ad blocker and loading up a four hour block of ads from 80s TV. Being prosecuted for use of ad blockers. Look at that smirk. That's a man who knows he's preaching but getting away with it. Getting a deck of flash cards to learn all of the pentameters. Three iambs and a reverse iamb. Your favorite good poems and your favorite shitpost poems. Tony Gang Flame War. Refusing to tackle the 40 year old quarterback after his wallet falls out on the field and the photos of his ten children unfold. The median age of football players rising into retirement age as teenagers learn about the health risks and refuse to participate. Using NBA 2K as a metaphor for the decline of civilization. LA finally getting a football team again. (They have two now.) Whether they're still playing Starcraft. Broken 19 year olds who can't play Starcraft any more because their APMs are too low. The experience of attending a live e-Sports event. Whether they sell hot dogs and beer to the crowd at the live League of Legends event or if it's all GamerGrub and Feastables. A Youtube shitpost made in Garry's Mod. Channing Tatum playing the toilet in the Skibidi Toilet movie. Al Gore: still alive? Whether Wilford Brimley got plastic surgery to look that old.

    1h 4m

  7. JAN 12

    325. Men, Explain Things to Me!

    Lords: Erica Micah https://www.reddit.com/r/micahwrites/ Topics: Puerto Rico branded holiday jams Chive drama on Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/KitchenConfidential/comments/1o0j6hq/cutting_a_cup_of_chives_everyday_until_the_reddit/ How to cure tinnitus (maybe) The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46647/the-ballad-of-blasphemous-bill In defense of making movies sequels until they're good again Microtopics: Being finished with horrible shit. Being in the middle of things forever. The Minutes of the Intermittent Meetings of the Society of Apocryphal Gentlefolk, by Dark Art Coming down from the high of PiCoSteveMo. Explaining PiCoSteveMo to someone like it's their first time at Rocky Horror Picture Show. Two things I'm willing to sacrifice to play PiCoSteveMo games. Putting your PICO-8 game in a CRT filter. Lawnmower Man, based on the title by Stephen King. Developing a field system in Puerto Rico. Winston's face appearing to the extent that Zoom thinks it's part of my chest. A deafening hospital siren playing while you're trying to have a good time at the beach. Pirate-themed massage. Stealing the windsurfing gear and going for a ride. Walking past the site of a pirate massage and fatal accident holding a solo cup. Getting pushed off the road by seven full-sized Coca Cola trucks led by a Santa Sleigh and followed by a party truck with a giant octagonal speaker spreading holiday cheer. Charging more for a well-traveled Coca Cola. Holiday-Branded Traffic Jams. Shipping your worst wine to India and it turns out that the sea voyage turns it into your best wine. Spanish Milk. Visiting Puerto Rico during linear time. The Puerto Rican version of Sleep No More in which Bad Bunny might pull you into a dark corner for a one-on-one and it's not clear whether he works for the event or if he's just another attendee. Day 57 of chopping chives on Reddit. Drawing airplanes crashing into the chives that are too long. Working with (and living with) the Chive Lord. Comparing Day 1 chives with day 55 chives. Finding Yoshi in a pile of chopped chives. A job that exists. (But not one you get paid for.) Asking the robot to add heart shapes to your food processor chives. These are the Days of our Chives. Each Sale I Drink a Glass of Water. Self-hosting memes and Turing-complete memes. Phase canceling your tinnitus. Not wanting to look it up because then you'd know. Curing tinnitus with extremely specific grenades. A party where everyone is constantly singing their personal tinnitus tones. Why don't we get bass tinnitus? Can you cure bass tinnitus with snail caviar? The native word for white people who are doing poorly in Alaska. The ice worms wriggling their purple heads through the crust of the pale blue snow. Pine trees cracking like little guns in the silence of the wood. Prankster Bill dying with his arms and legs outstretched so that he won't fit in his coffin. Poems that demand to be performed with a banjo. Whether they have banjos in Alaska. Having fun with the way words sound. I'm not gonna make it – but I can be an X shape. The Cremation of Sam McGee. Burning your house down to get the insurance money to buy a telescope. Making bad art until it becomes good. Tremors 3: Back to Perfection. A giant worm monster drilling up out of the ground in order to slice chives. Really dwelling on how much you don't have in common with other people. Six topics (and Shrieker Island) A dollmaker on the run after making farcical plays about Hitler. The Saved by the Bell themed music video featuring the same actors as the Final Destination movie it's promoting. Would you take 90 minutes off of your life to have not seen Final Destination 4? The replacement for the 1 to 10 pain scale where you decide which Final Destination movie you'd be willing to watch to take the pain away. Low pain awareness. Chess boxing win/loss ratios.

    1h 6m

  8. JAN 5

    324. You Don't Love Staggering?

    Lords: Andrew Kate Topics: The strange and alienating experience of learning to drive at 40 The mottos of the livery companies of London https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mottos_and_halls_of_the_livery_companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mottos Independent They Stand! https://archive.org/details/computer-games-magazine-issue-115-june-2000/page/n83/mode/2up?view=theater Leda and the Swan, by William Butler Yeats https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43292/leda-and-the-swan Predecimalization currency in the UK DIY TTRPG mapping software, the ridiculous way Microtopics: Streaming making maps of video games on the Internet. The people who are willing to watch someone map out every corner of this sprawling and convoluted game. Writing about video games and writing video games. Dicey territory. (Which is only appropriate.) King Stephen, which will have been great. Fun jokes and oblique references. Forty and a half years old. Building your life around not being able to drive a car. Pockets of civilization separated by vast stretches of asphalt. The car unsteering itself unless you hold the steering wheel in place. Someone yelling at you with their little beep beep horn. Learning a skill and forgetting how you learn it. Learning a skill before you find out that learning is hard. The false sense of immortality that allows people to get into a car. During your driving test, pushing the drift button but the driving instructor is like "I don't see any blue sparks" Learning to drive when you're six years old. Getting your Lego Land driving license. Awarding the worst student in your driving class the "most spirited" driver's license. Explaining what livery companies are by reading the Wikipedia page also. The Worshipful Company of Communicators. Everything's so good, bread especially. A great motto for clockmakers. Does anyone know any cool Latin mottos? When are all these servants having time to go out and have mottos?? The Soggiest God you can Muster. The Worshipful Company of Information Technologists finding a Latin word that is also a snack food for their motto. Painting, staining, and compelling obedience. Sticking with Hope Classic. Shoemakers making jokes about supporting their customers. Getting the salt/wit pun in there for people who know Latin. Africa: always producing some novelty. The 2000 IGF. How to read a magazine together on a podcast. John Carmack's Finger Server. Doom Guy. John Romero's specific type of memory. How they invented mouse look. Turning with the arrow keys and aiming a reticle around the screen with the mouse. Dragging the mouse to the top of your cool dinosaur mouse pad. Why doesn't Microsoft Excel keep the mouse cursor in the center of the screen? The FPS phone interface where you swipe on the touchscreen until the button you want to press is in the center of the screen, then pull the trigger on the back of the phone and a shotgun sound plays. Fold-away interface panels. Thousand Hells, by the developer of King of Dragon Pass. All the video games named "Rift" or "The Rift" How can those terrified vague pink fingers push the feathered glory from her loosening thighs? Zeus disguised as a swan. Whether Marylin Monroe will would've loved Hades. Going to Wikipedia's list of mottos because you need some more mottos. How many ha'ppenies to a thruppence? The half crown, worth 2/6. Several hundred quarterfarthings. Decimal Day, 1971. Extremely forgeable coins. Dividing the day into two sets of twelve. Decimalization. (Based on 10 fingers.) Tuppence and Thruppence. IBM calling it "hexadecimal" because they refuse to say "sexadecimal" out loud. Theater of the Mind storytelling. Importing an occlusion map. Tinting what the players can see green and tinting what the DM can see red or blue. Swapping the lenses in anaglyph glasses so one person can only see red and the other can only see blue. Hanging a projector from the ceiling and projecting the D&D map on the table. A projector of uncertain parentage. Harebrained vs. cockamamie. A fun puzzle you can run off and waste a bunch of time solving. A stochastic cinema where you never know if it's going to be comedy or horror and everything seems totally real to you and is about your personal failings. Focusing on wibbly dream state. How to exhale with your nose plugged. Losing your Apple Watch on Mt. Everest and going back up to look for it and it turns out you dropped it in the shower. Topics going into the bucket that nobody ever sees. Writing a secret on a piece of paper and burying it on a hill with a single tree on it on a moonlit night.

    1h 18m
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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
    332
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Jim Stormdancer
  • Show Website
    Topic Lords

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