Topic Lords

Jim Stormdancer
Topic Lords

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

  1. 4 DAYS AGO

    267. Unburying The Duck

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

    1h 13m
  2. NOV 25

    266. Voronoi Cookies

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

    1h 7m
  3. NOV 18

    265. We're Here To Make This Slide Floppy

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

    1h 11m
  4. NOV 11

    264. Pickpocketed So Hard You Die

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

    1h 8m
  5. NOV 4

    263. Drafted Into The Applebee's Wars

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

    1h 10m
  6. OCT 28

    262. Real Meal, Fictional Man

    Lords: CisHetKayFaber Maxx Topics: Food-focused Japanese TV If "fish don't exist," then how do pescetarians? PicoSteveMo is back! https://wikipoem.org/ Verisimilitude in play (My daughter plays GTA and Roblox) (The shifting nature of what is appropriate for children) Microtopics: Emotionally connecting with a dying web site and meeting up with other users in Seattle. What the Cohost diaspora is doing to do. Drive-by bad opinions. Where people live in Australia, on average. CSS Crimes. Using external image hosts to continue blogging on Cohost after it is in read-only mode. URL shortening services reusing old links. Meeting up with people you have a loose association with and having a good time together. The Bowling League Mafia taking up every lane every day with tournaments so nobody else can bowl. A TV drama where a traveling salesman keeps being hungry at different train stations. Seeing a meal that looks delicious but you're full and can't eat a whole nother meal. Whether food becomes fictional as soon as you eat it. Watching satellite TV on your flip phone. OneSeg. Your email address being owned by your phone carrier. A phone that closes and has great battery life. The golden age of food-focused broadcast TV. A celebrity who's interested in food goes and eats at a restaurant. This Burger Weighs 30 Pounds! Midnight Diner. The Karate Kid but with ramen. Watching a Youtube of the video gamers. Ordinary People, Extraordinary Food. Whether pescetarians exist. The researchers in the shark lab you used to work at calling dolphins fish. Fish eyes: nature's boba. A block of gouda floating in the ocean. Fish that stop being fish when you think about it too hard. Disagreeing with beavers about what tree to cut down, but you're conflict avoidant so the beaver always wins. Haven't we all argued with beavers? Crows stealing the naan out of your naan and curry. Jungle Crows who sound like an adult man doing an impression of crows. Crows who are really good at Japanese T9. The nets you put over your garbage that can't possibly keep the crows out. Picking Steves from a continuity standpoint. Finding any excuse to make a Stephen King Sokoban. Deliberately awkward control schemes. A thousand prototyping girls in space. A poem without any line breaks in it. The zine era of web design, when people would just type HTML and it would become a web page. Phrases that make sense locally but not globally. A comedian who is in lots of things. The kind of poem you'd get if you put a poem on a wiki. The kind of thing that would probably be read on this show. The kind of web site that you'd run into when you're doing an ARG. Installing Roblox on the PS5 to teach your daughter to read English better. Playing a game with purple vomiting everywhere. The ways a 7 year old interacts with a Grand Theft Auto. Teaching yourself how to drive in Grand Theft Auto and obeying all the traffic laws. Not shielding your kid from media but talking to them about it instead. Academy Award winner Fisher Stevens. Support Topic Lords

    1h 11m
  7. OCT 21

    261. Chat Hurt Chatself In Chat's Confusion

    Lords: Alex https://www.youtube.com/@adiener https://discord.com/invite/ZkV2zdb Mitch https://hbmmaster.tumblr.com/ https://www.youtube.com/@HBMmaster https://www.patreon.com/hbmmaster Topics: The Wikipedia article about football https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football Classic Macintosh computers The entomologist nerds get like two minutes of screen time in Silence of the Lambs, but I'm pretty sure they directly inspired the whole genre of forensic investigation TV. With Apologies to Dr. Seuss, by Supper Mario Broth https://fxtwitter.com/MarioBrothBlog/status/1807077109661114636 Archipelago https://archipelago.gg/ That "chat is a fourth person pronoun" thing is impressively wrong Microtopics: Off-the-cuff something. Putting on the best talent show Cohost has ever seen. Www.www.www How to deal with multiple things that are called the same thing. A list of things called Georgia. A very opinionated move that you would not expect from a source as neutral as Wikipedia. Sometimes your can carry the ball; sometimes you can't carry the ball. What an IP address has to say about women in sports. Sports: there's a place where you play it. Watching Mexican TV and seeing an ad for "¡futbol americano!" Repairing an old Mac that you found in an e-waste place. Whether programming has changed since 1985. Running an Electron app on a Mac Classic. Switcher allowing you to run four 128k programs at a time on a 512k Mac. How the 1991 Borland C++ debugger compares to the 2024 Visual Studio debugger. Blah Blob, a Celeste-inspired platformer implemented as a Hypercard stack. Sitting at the blender all day blending everything within arm's reach. Steve Jobs' relationship with fans. Wrapping your Xbox 360 in a towel to reflow the cracked solder. Adding an extra lane to a highway to make the traffic worse. Two awkwardly charming guys who help with an FBI investigation. CSIvania. The public domain jingle that precedes the poem. Supper Mario Broth. Wario's Shit Bone. A Rare Gooper Bloober Goop Gooble Event. Rhyming portend with event. A textuovisual post. Dr. Soup. Whether the folks writing the Prima guide to Mario Sunshine get to personally ask Miyamoto what the weird goop enemies are called. Bowser's Fury: the final Mario game. F Boy: the F stands for fireball. Trying to use a social media service when you don't know anyone on it. In My Tumbl Opinion. Weird Mario Enemies. F Boy (Again) Wanting a cool nickname like F Boy. Explaining randomizers to someone who has never heard of video games. Multi-game multiplayer randomizers. A non-randomized randomizer. Getting rupee donations left and right when all you need is a sword. Unofficial archipelago support. The hypothetical dad behind the fourth wall. The hypothetical eighth month of the year. Subtumbling. How to tell the difference between a noun and a pronoun. Old-fashioned home grown misinformation. Getting from fourth wall to fourth person. Fourth person perspective as an alternative term for first person plural. Whether "dad" is a pronoun. Chat hurt chatself in chat's confusion. Rebageling images from 2014. Agreeing with yourself from 10 years ago about which images are interesting. Support Topic Lords

    1h 3m
  8. OCT 14

    260. This Sentient Life Could've Been An Email

    Lords: Jenni Chris Topics: Are corporate mascots in US culture age-locked to a generation? I have done no research about this The continuation of our species depends on balls being able to taste soy sauce BB-8 changed my tire The Woodchuck, by Sam Pink https://www.reddit.com/r/Poetry/comments/wg09x5/poem_the_woodchuck_by_sam_pink/ Microtopics: Too much dick content for one show. What kind of fetus dong shot engagement you're looking for. When they smear the goo on your belly. Throwing a gender reveal party and the uncle nobody wants around is like "I don't believe you" and you get to whip out the photo of the kid's dick. Shipping a person in Q4. Automating the Omelas kid. The Disney suffering animatronic child asking passers by to walk away from Omelas. Gen Z no longer needing to read The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas because they live in modern society. Gardening in one of the hardest places in the world to garden. What's the grass for? An office park spending millions of gallons of water to maintain a lawn nobody ever walks on or looks at. What if the Omelas kid is a dick? What if they're treating him really well and he just has impossibly high standards and hates everything. An electrical problem that's very pronounced when Jenni turns on the blender. The Golden Age of Corporate Mascots. Undead Corporate Mascots. Trying to find a picture of the Toucan Sam redesign and ending up on Deviant Art. Howard and Nester. Whether American kids will tolerate anime. President of the Nintendo No Fun Club. Spending $200 on the Nintendo hint line trying to solve the last screen in Solstice. An adventure game that's also a platformer where if your toe touches a candle flame it's an instant game over. Inventing terrible camera angles in a 2D game. It's 3D, but on your Speccy! Trusting a YouTube documentary more the longer the video is. Are Domo Kun and Hello Kitty free agents? Cap'n Crunch guest starring in the Star Wars Holiday Special. A Roma who was once helpful. Eating a sandwich and getting the sandwich tattooed on your bicep because. A baby name that Boomer moms love. Remington Steel On At 7PM After Matlock Jones. Getting into a thing with people on Metafilter. POV: when your girlfriend gets you Swedish meatballs at Ikea. Whether Frosthaven is important to the testicles tasting umami story. Vanilloid receptors. Why you can shock your tongue with a 9 volt battery but you can't shock your forearm even if it's wet. The chef with the tiny spoon in your testicles making sure to get the exact right MSG level in your semen. Peppers hacking mammal biology. Seeds who enjoy being digested by birds. The cardioprotective benefit of spicy food. The Ones Who Bring it Back to Omelas. Broccoli evolving into crabs. This is canon: BB-8 drives a 2016 Corolla. Pretending that you are talking to a Youtube audience while you make s sandwich. Just a li'l guy who rolls around on a ball. R2D2: a mean mean man. The floor falling out of the Pinto while you're driving it. A rubber pad with friction stripes on it. Turning it until it feels like you broke it, but you didn't and you have to keep going. After the cake comes out of the oven the recipe stops having steps. How to get help from Linux users. The entire wheel snapping off the axle as you're parking at Camerica Bank. Different car, same maintenance strategy. Driving a car until it can no longer be ontologically be classified as a car. Churchill's Irregulars. Waiting for Peter Jackson to mansplain to you the sound a car makes when the wheel snaps off. Delving too deeply into the Cars cinematic universe. A Mastodon setting that hides all of Jim's BB-8 toots. How to find people to follow on Nectarine. The dying MUD you joined in 1997. Radioactive names such as Hitler and Sheldon. Joining a social media service and it tells you there are no posts. Sam Pink strikes again. The emotional arc of putting a tiny hat on a woodchuck. A woodchuck you would definitely do a murder to. Ampersand at the beginning of the line. The Furniture That Rolled Away From Omelas. Why the computer is mad in I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream. Looking for sentient life in the universe when you have dolphins at home. Support Topic Lords

    1h 16m
4.8
out of 5
12 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.

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