Topic Lords Jim Stormdancer

Lords:



Elena


https://www.gouletpens.com/blogs/fountain-pen-blog/sailor-shikiori-tokiwa-matsu-ink-review

Nathalie


https://alienmelon.itch.io/ [cw:flashing lights]



Topics:



Fish-based screensavers


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQpCcQhNfxM
https://www.montereybayaquarium.org/animals/live-cams

Fire safety


https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheThingThatGoesDoink
https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/voices.uchicago.edu/dist/8/644/files/2017/08/Chiang-Lifecycle-of-Software-Objects-q3tsuw.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4Qxqmhqj1A

The Aquarium and the Glass Harmonica


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOx7zmO5ppw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FAc3HmfoSY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSzTPGlNa5U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA3sA3ncX44&start=103

I Am Running Into A New Year by Lucille Clifton


https://nextworldover.tumblr.com/post/738271770264600576

I went to Japan


https://nerdparadise.com/mspaint/stereogram
https://twitter.com/mischiefanimals/status/1704934776421913018



Microtopics:



Shikiori Ink.
The Computer Museum in Berlin.
Back when you saw fish-based screen savers everywhere.
The Roku app fish screen saver.
A rock in the aquarium that says "Roku"
11 hours of fish content.
Fish nerds sitting in a small box at the bottom of the ocean getting hype over seeing a small worm.
An animated gif of fish nerds getting hype.
A live jellyfish web cam that is just in principle.
A web cam of the thing that goes donk and everyone cheers when it goes donk.
The fish screen saver where you need to keep buying floppy disks with fish food on it or the fish die.
Don't copy that fish food!
The startup selling digital rabbit food going out of business so all the digital rabbits go into hibernation.
The Life Cycle of Software Objects.
Being unable to open your front door because the smart lock ran out of batteries.
Everybody congratulating you on the infuriating guy you made up to get mad at.
Fire safety anecdotes.
Glass top electric stoves that look just like induction stoves, as a prank.
How fire extinguishers taste.
Looking at fire extinguisher dust and thinking "let's get the blood brain barrier involved."
Leaving the stove on.
Broiling a sandwich and the whole sandwich catches fire.
A five year old doing science experiments with a lit candle.
The UX design of grease fires.
The William Shatner song about the dangers of deep frying a turkey.
Relating to the teens coming into fashion for like a week and then the next week the teens are like "You're still trying to relate? That's cheugy AF."
Self-moistening fingertips.
Soaking your fingertips in water for eight minutes to get them pruny.
The Canon of harmonica virtuoso music.
Ethereal floating tones that fade in and out of existence.
The Flat Bells.
The Mellotron as a slightly more physical sampler.
Clara Rockmore playing "The Swan" on Theremin.
Bit-doers playing "The Swan" on Otamatone.
Letting go of what you said to yourself about yourself when you were 16, 26, even 36.
The assumption that you need to be forgiven for something.
The sun coming up on this episode of Topic Lords.
Working up the courage to climb the mountain you see every day from your back yard.
Really tall hills you can walk up.
What it's like to not hear cars constantly.
Designing a building to sound good – even if it isn't a concert hall.
Car-free cities.
Biking in a bike-centric environment.
Throwing your body into traffic and hoping drivers care about the legal liability of running someone over.
The intersection where you always see the skid marks from kids doing donuts.
Doing watercolors but with ink.
Buying a bunch of art supplies and never using them because you're afraid to waste them.
How do you get your paintbrush to do what you want?
How watercolors behave depending on how wet the painting is and how wet the paintbrush is.
Scraping your knife on the painting and it just looks like a shed.
Is it a bunch of cats or is it the word "gay"?
Images tha

Lords:



Alex
Shannon


Topics:



The less you spend on food, the better it tastes
The jizz of a bird


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jizz_(birding)

The Cosmic Call


https://blog.plover.com/2024/04/15/

Line Fishing by Daniel Kahaulelio


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

How to order coffee in Malaysia


https://kopi.guide/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6mv7VY8YLA

Dice, and physically rolling them


https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.com.tann.dice



Microtopics:



Paleo animators.
Malaysia as a vacation destination.
Restaurants that are just in s guy's house.
The best whole fried catfish you've ever had.
Eating mixed whole livers.
Striving to get a B rating from the food safety inspectors because the A rating is too bougie.
Starch and grease.
The shape of the price to deliciousness correlation graph.
If you're here to buy cake, ring the doorbell.
You can talk to the cops or you can have cake. You can't have both.
Whether Americans can drink the water in Malaysia.
Being so desperate for fresh vegetables that you wash them with tap water.
Butterfly Pee Flour.
Jizz (birding)
The practice of just getting the vibe of a bird.
I don't know, it had the jizz of a bird.
Zooniverse.
Going through the still images on a nature webcam and trying to identify local animals.
Trying to tell the difference between a wood rat and a deer mouse.
Reclassifying all the animals in the world based not on their actual genetics or but based on what people think they are by looking at them.
Small, Brown and On the Ground.
Submitting a picture of a pair of brown wood owls to a bird study app and two hours later an angry ecologist is knocking on your tent to ask if you meant a spotted wood owl.
An extremely high-stress app.
Asking an albatross which of the twelve species is albatross it is.
Walking around in the woods until you spot a kiwi.
Major gaffes in interstellar communication that future aliens will be very confused about.
Massively synesthetic dog brains.
Receiving a sequence of bits and deciding to arrange them in a grid.
The other book with the spiders.
Humans interacting with a spider-based society.
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
Expecting monkeys to become the dominant intelligent species on a terraformed planet seeded with Earth animals.
Adventuring into a dungeon built by the ancients and admiring the signage.
Opening an oil drum full of concrete and tubes and being like "where's the treasure that's supposed to be in here!"
Writing a song about how being near glowing cats is very dangerous.
Public serving meme songs.
Engineering earworms for the public good.
The Museum of Hawaiian Culture in Oahu.
Fish that watch. Fish that look.
Get those fish hungry.
It's just a lookin' fish.
Sleeping the lobes of your brain in shifts.
The lobes of your brain playing pranks on each other.
How can fish get some shuteye if they don't have eyelids??
How can fish rubberneck if they don't even have necks??
The Star Trek replicator except instead of materializing your food it prints a piece of paper with the words that you need to say to the tired-looking guy who then goes to cook your meal.
Ais krim.
What languages are hardest to spell in.
Are there four silent letters at the end, and if so which ones?
Cofftea.
Rolling all them bones.
Owning more sets of dice than you have played actual D&D sessions.
A big pile of dice rattling around in your phone.
Rolling the dice off of the table every single time.
A switch that goes ka-chonk.
Actively seeking out hobbies where you touch things.
Ways that continuous deployment sucks.
Text classifiers flagging your sexuality as photographic.
Image classifiers flagging your medical photos as pornographic.
Which photos encapsulate what you're trying to remember and discuss.
How to get your life off of a corporation's hard drive.
Unsearchable Tumblrs.
Get out there and jizz a bird!
Support Topic Lords

Lords:



Jay
Alex


Topics:



Mexican food outside San Diego (Having lived in Colorado, Ohio, and now Melbourne)
Releasing my first commercial video game
The being an uncle of camping
Skyscrapers by Matt Haig


https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/QM4hPodE.jpg

Attempting to preserve 40 years' worth of data


Microtopics:



A puzzle adventure game starring a ferret.
DROD-likes.
Sending an envelope full of guacamole to a food lab so they can tell you a list of ingredients.
Reaching in the window so you can finally drive a million dollar Porsche.
Letting the Ewok sit in the driver's seat but not actually letting it drive the car.
Whether Ewoks get old enough to drive.
Throw Rock.
Making a game by first making your own level editor, image editor, audio synthesizer and music composition tools.
Finding playtesters by letting them come to you.
An eyeball that charges a laser when you step in front of it.
Deliberately optimizing your game to take up as little disk space as possible.
A project that starts moving much faster when you figure out what kind of project it should be.
Writing a 3D modeler so that you can get your 2D game on Steam.
Working with a professional artist.
Rendering fur.
Games with turns that represent less than a second of in-game time.
The mind-feel of a turn length.
A game that was so good that the developers went back decades later to make it playable.
The Mud and the Slime.
How to play DROD without any roach timers.
Which DROD is the best one to start with.
Sokoban with swordplay.
The level in King Dugan's Dungeon that's nothing but roach queens.
Optimizing your sword movements well enough that you can move forward while fighting.
Puzzles that are just hard enough to engage your mind while you do something else.
Visiting someone who is camping and then going home to sleep in your own bed.
Building a fire and making s'mores in the bathroom.
Camping expenses.
Giving gifts to adults who can already buy whatever they want.
Deliberately choosing a vacation that is especially exhausting.
Spending two days each visiting seven different family friends.
Your grandparents taking you camping and they sleep in the RV while you have to sleep in the tent.
Buying an onion bloomer for $600 and insisting that your family eat a blooming onion every night to justify the purchase.
Skyscrapers made out of words
Training yourself to visualize words in the wrong orientation.
Puzzling out what the title of the poem would've been if the typesetter hadn't messed it up
Cross-sectional art.
Poems that are intended to be viewed rather than read aloud.
Anti-poem poems.
Every project you've ever worked on (on a computer)
Good usable archives.
The unique digital footprint of your life.
Getting the bits from a SCSI hard drive in an old Mac that doesn't boot up.
Apple Desktop Bus Connection.
The miraculous ubiquity and longevity of USB-A.
Figuring out how to hook up a digital video player that requires a Firewire connection.
The MacOS resource fork.
What the .sit and .hqx extensions meant.
Gamma Zee.
Using social media to actually do things.
Support Topic Lords

Lords:



Ben
Nicholas


Topics:



Let me describe to you the Australian treats I sent my Canadian friend
The UX of live sport is terrible
Game jam idea!


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_that_Buddha_would_not_play

I Continue to Dream, by Langston Hughes


https://mypoeticside.com/show-classic-poem-13632

Being overly patriotic and repping the national identity but only when around foreigners, is this something everyone does or just aussies?


Microtopics:



Projects that you can't talk about yet
Telling a joke for international joke day.
A very busy day for Australians.
Sending 3 kilos of lollies to your co-worker in Canada.
It's the way it shatters that matters.
Cherry Ripes.
The thinking man's candy.
Chicken Crimpy.
A biscuit inspired by Golden Gaytime.
"It's hard to have a Gaytime on your own."
Renaming chocolate jelly babies to be less racist.
A real enthusiasm for desiccated coconut.
Butter chicken parmigiana.
P burger candy.
Whether kangaroos are hunted or farmed.
Whether kangaroos are the same size as the kangaroo fruit.
The waiter in Japan staring at you until you eat the single slice of kiwi.
The official ranking of fruit prestige in Japan, with melon only being bested by keys and Galaga ships.
How many footballs they have in Australia. (At least three, maybe six.)
A sport where nobody can tell when somebody has scored so the whole audience is constantly on edge.
The theme song for the guy coming up to bat.
Booing when your team scores, because they didn't score more.
Whether Eurovision is better when you're not in Europe.
Correlating sports with Eurovision.
A little song and dance that's definitely not political.
XFL camera operators running around on the field.
Improving sports broadcasts with drone cameras.
A comprehensive list of games that are causes for negligence.
Games on boards with 8 or 10 rows (or the same games played in the sky).
Avoiding the line to be avoided.
Making a mark on a wall and deciding if it looks like an elephant.
There's no throwing, Buddha! This is not a cause for negligence.
How the Buddha feels about the Mersenne Twister.
An abacus except it's a roller coaster track.
Tracing letters in the air or on a friend's back.
Even more games Buddha would not play.
The minigame from the beginning of Mario 64 where you stretch out his eyes.
What Shall it Be?
In this game you are the video game and you are the one being played.
A video game adaptation of the less half fun of Pictionary.
Kinect Charades.
Using the Kinect voice to say "it's goat!"
It turns out Molyneux was wearing the business all along.
Turning your dream into art. Like a video game! Or something more artistic.
Dubbing your podcast onto cassette tape and calling it an Audio Zine.
The Creative Labs Creative Zen.
Setting up your sound card and hearing digitized speech in Leisure Suit Larry.
Fond memories of listening to digital audio on your Creative Labs Sound Blaster.
Dr. Sbaitso and Dr. Sbaitso imitators.
What you do when your dad isn't around to help you boot up Red Alert.
An FMV adventure game set in Germany.
The Red Alert installation experience.
Tim Curry giving his all in the Red Alert FMV cutscenes.
An oral history of Tim Curry's escape into the one place uncorrupted by capitalism.
Enjoying the Aboriginal Sauce at Outback Steakhouse.
Australians explaining that America also started as a prison colony
Hamilton didn't talk about this!
The Simpsons writing room discovering the Coriolis effect and realizing that they need to tell the world so it's lucky that anything they write will be broadcast on national television and on streaming services for decades to come.
Everyone in your age bracket having the first ten seasons of the Simpsons memorized.
Finding Frinkiac, analogous to discovering a new Blender plug-in.
Lying on the couch and taking a photo of the TV.
Having a mobile game and sending the APK to anyone who asks nicely.
Support Topic Lords

Lords:



Daniel
Andrew


Topics:



Hyperthymesia
Animal Well
Bad news for my google alerts: "Twinbeard" is the name of the Helldivers 2 community manager


Twinbeard reacts! https://twitter.com/TheTwinbeard/status/1805711034281349388

Dean asks "I know there are many seniors who are looking to start a business during retirement. For those who haven't settled on an idea yet, I'd love to suggest house flipping as a good way to earn income. May I write about this topic in a free article for your website -- specifically, how seniors can get into the house flipping business and become successful at it? I'll be sure to cover all the basics, including how to find the perfect property, how to finance the expenses, how to manage payroll for employees and contractors, etc. I'll also feature a link back to your website."
Should game developers "soak themselves" in games. Referring to this clip of Orson Welles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dg-qaeIcuyI


Microtopics:



Doom Guy: Life in First Person
A well full of animals.
A game that you keep hearing is great from people that you trust.
Remembering every detail of your life even though that's a terrible idea.
A cop asking you what you were doing on the night of November 3rd, 2021.
Fnords.
Eidetic memory vs. photographic memory vs. hyperthymesic memory.
Checking your memory of a time against your written records of that time.
Remembering that you're going to have a conversation about your day tonight so you had better do something interesting.
Data mining electronic records to figure out how you met somebody.
Playing a Sam Barlow game with your bank records.
Navier-Stokes fluid dynamics.
Spending a lot of time frowning.
Dark Forest.
A game providing you with a spoiler-free mechanism of conveying where you are in the game.
Shooting people vs. swording people.
The tools and verbs of just being a little guy.
Seeing a dog doing something you didn't expect to see a dog do.
Being unable to turn a crank because there's a blue ghost.
Choosing not to be a video game.
Setting up Google alerts for your game's working title.
Famous racehorse Secret Legend.
Liking some parts but not liking other parts.
How to construct a Google alert for t the video game Tunic.
Computer vision algorithms to increase yield and profitablity of insect farms.
How seniors can get into the house flipping business.
Collaborating with a spammer to write a poem about house flipping.
Exhorting a spammer to join the discord and post their dreams in the announcements channel.
A think tank dedicated to increasing house flipping around the world, measured by total rotation.
House flipping vs. house spinning.
A skateboard with the word "quaternion" written on it in a sick font.
Trying to flip a house but it gets gimbal locked and you lose everything.
Soaking in films. Just marinating in them.
Having virgin eyes in order to make great things.
Inventing video games from first principles.
The value of outsider art.
Shigeru Miyamoto inventing jumping.
Trying to remember the last time you jumped in real life.
Whether a historian has discovered the cave that inspired the Legend of Zelda.
What Stories Untold says about the Orson Welles quote about having virgin eyes.
Trying to prove yourself to a piece of software.
Trying to tell a story about a spaceship that doesn't involve combat.
50 Years of Text Games.
Having read a book back when it was a blog.
Whether we have time for another topic.
Mixing a Red Bull with a Caffeine Free Coca Cola.
Sunlight patterns that remind you of wandering in the forest as a child
The disco ball as an extrapolation of dappled sunlight in the forest.
Out of focus motes of light.
Figuring out how to make a desert beautiful.
Living that home assistant life.
Going to a thrift store to buy a lamp to fix the terrible lighting in your hotel room.
A motor that's constantly jiggling a pot of water.
Support Topic Lords

Lords:



Andrew
Tyriq


Lords:



The Church of the SubGenius
Making FreeCell is kind of like playing FreeCell
How do we get to a place where our primary tool for productivity is not also our primary avenue of distraction?
"3 Team Schiff", by Team Schiff


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



Microtopics:



World Building Notes
An accent you cannot discern the origin of.
Fun worlds that I've thought of.
A world where hair is the source of all life.
A port of Freecell to the Playdate that might never be released.
J.R. Bob Dobbs, a salesman from the 1950s.
Whether Discord (the IRC client) is named after Discordianism.
Tyriq Reads Wikipedia.
Principia Discordia.
An extremely profitable troll.
Good and bad reasons to troll.
Making your weird fun art without worrying about people taking you way too seriously fifty years from now.
Whether submarines are named after the Church of the Subgenus.
Rewriting your entire game in C.
Playing Freecell Validly.
A latecomer to Freecell.
The one known impossible Freecell seed.
The Freecell Helleed vs. the Minesweeper Dream Board.
The looking at the cube phase and the turning the cube phase.
Typeshift speed run hacks.
Knowing a 38-letter word.
Undo trees.
The New York Times games package being sold separately from the newspaper.
The diction of the New York Times crossword puzzle.
Doing Greek letter flash cards to up your crossword game.
Words that come up a lot when you're mashing letters together.
A job where you don't use a computer? In this economy?
Sequencer-based techno.
Constraints that fit the UI extremely well.
An interface that makes a lot of sense for the Game Boy.
Printing out the entirety of Wikipedia so you can go offline for a while.
The compressed size of Wikipedia.
Here's a thing and the only thing it does is have information on it.
Hanging out in the library with people vs. with books.
The three best things in life.
Opening the tiny drawer and flipping through the tiny cards with your tiny hands and using your tiny eyes to read the tiny text.
Downloading information about a spider that links to another spider.
Using robots.txt to ward off all kinds of creatures, not just robots.
999: Extraterrestrial Worlds.
Abandoning the Dewey Decimal System after you discover that numbers go higher than 999.
Stopping to end.
This Cat Does Not Exist.
The perfect source of images that have never been used before.
An art project that invents politicians and texts people imploring them to donate to the campaign and that's how the art project gets funding.
What Socrates would have said about the Banksy that shredded itself.
Your legal name with a bunch of letters removed.
Picking an online handle that's very hard to pronounce to make sure people don't call you that in real life.
Giving everybody you meet a different name for yourself.
Having more friends than you've ever had.
Having hobbies that put you in a room with people.
Libraries as raucous hangouts.
Inviting tweens to play video games in the back rooms (but not in a shady way)
A citizen saying "hey, library, can I use a room?"
Your local library, featuring the Middle-Aged Zone.
Lego Security Theater.
An unordered list of links.
Support Topic Lords