Topic Lords

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

  1. -6 дн.

    349. Life Finds a Way (To Scratch Its Nose)

    Lords: Cort Martin https://steamcommunity.com/app/2111550 Topics: What does Thomas The Tank Engine do when he gets an itchy nose? The end of Destiny Glittermitten Grove's undisclosed AI content Iroha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroha I need to add bears to my threat model What thing would you like to be entangled with? Microtopics: Setting arbitrary deadlines to get things done and taking them seriously. Lord Walker. Writing 20 songs in 12 hours. Schrodinger's Cat Burglar. A video game that everyone in the world will love. Jimbo and the Jet Set. Soulful butt-licking. Do Fish Itch? What twisted idiot god would make a fish itch. The cosmology of Thomas the Tank Engine. Itchy planes flying very close to a mountain so they can scratch their faces. Whether trains can die in the Thomas the Tank Engine universe. Trains trying to live up to human standards of beauty. Pixar Cars needing eye surgery. Destiny's Final Update. Patrolling the moon in search of wizards. T-shirts with the insignias of obscure PVP factions. The logo of a football team that doesn't exist. Destiny shipping as MusicPlayerDemo.exe. Six people at the peak of their skill doing weird crap. Extremely obscure, elaborate secrets in MMOs. The CEO wanting to write a bunch of game lore so the developers have to find a place for him to put it Deliberately burning yourself out on an MMO and then deleting it forever. Vaulting Justifications. Clarity of Biome. Great ideas for a company that has infinite resources. RuneScape Modern and RuneScape Classic. Quitting WoW with your fiancee because you have a wedding to plan. The additional fee Blizzard charges for hosting your wedding inside of World of Warcraft. Fantasy heroin vs. Sci-Fi heroin. Stephepoa, Jasquosius, Dovanice and Jixandlia. Little dudes persisting between missions, if they survive. Naming all the fish after your Kickstarter backers. Doing all the same things the target your satirizing does, except you're doing them ironically. Lemmings as a squad-based tactical war game. A joyous approach to an anti-war message that makes war seem like a ton of fun. Violating the Geneva Convention by putting the Red Cross in Duke Nukem 3D. The video game that has committed the most real life war crimes. Poems you can't look at. Arriving today at the deep mountains of evanescent existence. Perfect pangrams. How they decided on the order of the Japanese phonetic alphabet. Who does Shakespeare think he is? Localizing Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffallo into foreign languages. Poorly localized advertising campaigns. Who is the Pilot? Reading Kingdom Hearts sequel titles as poetry. A Language Built for Poetry. Coyotes begrudgingly scampering away after you honk loud enough. A small family of black bears walking down your street and effortlessly demolishing all your trash cans. Dressing your dogs up like bear cubs so the mama bear takes care of them. How are you going to keep your trash safe? Trying to design a trash can lid that can be operated by a drunk human but not by a smart bear. Putting up bear crossing signs on every street in hopes that you'll discourage traffic driving through your neighborhood. What is this, an overpass for bears?! A salmon tube but for bears. Things in nature that want to kill you that you routinely interact with. Animals that are great except they have way too many legs. Entangled Burglars. Sharing thoughts and sensory inputs over long distances. Wrapping yourself in mummy wrappings so nobody can observe you directly. The Timid Butthole. Where does the cat end and the cat fur begin? Sneaking into the archives and discovering a picture of your dad's butthole in the files and wondering "How did they get this? Why do they have this?" The Three Names of an Elf. Why Cort is one of the most researched developers on Mobygames.

    1 ч. 11 мин.

  2. 22 июн.

    348. A Normal Spud Gun for Normal Children

    Lords: Kate Andrew Topics: Movies that are supposed to be good and kind of annoyingly are actually good Making friends when you're old Paris's pneumatic mail system Forgiven, by A. A. Milne https://www.poeticous.com/a-a-milne/forgiven-i-found-a-little-beetle-so-that-beetle-was-his-name Microtopics: The skill to make the noises that are in your head. Writing quests for Hello Kitty Island Adventure. Sanrio's NDA-enforcing snipers. A crocodile that was invented in 1978. Writing quests that force the artists to figure out how a crocodile would wear sunglasses. Writing the dialog tree as the player is clicking on options, like Gromit placing tracks right as the train is about to roll over them. Spending five years shipping the first part of a live service game and then shipping additional parts every few weeks. Trying to rebuild a house while someone is living in it. Lingo 2. Dungeon Gals. The kind of game you can't draw a map of. Teetering on the razor's edge of "I'm a genius" and "I don't understand anything." What does the developer tooling look like for games that have non-euclidean spaces? Duplicated spaces with secret warp volumes. The kind of movie that an Infinite Jest reader will recommend. Terry Cavanagh's game about making tea. Egg Game? Astonishing movie running times. Five minutes of two men intensely looking at each other. An adventure movie about two best friends who hate each other. James Joyce: maybe he's good? A guy who lives in the middle of nowhere who thinks about politics a lot and never talks to anyone. Gerry, starring Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. The art is coming from inside the head. Pro Shots vs. bootlegs. Jukebox musicals. Shawshank Redimension. Shawshank Redemption 2: Shawshank Herdemption. Communicating between cell blocks by flushing the toilet. Loove a.k.a. Flushed a.k.a. Lavatory Lovastory. Mixing your DNA with someone you've never seen. Florida Writing. Gravity Slingshotting around your hobbies to reach friendship. Going to GDC and making a bunch of game dev friends. Plateauing at two digits. Getting hobbies that put you in a room with people of your desired gender. Your co-worker at the call center who's married to the CEO of Twinings. Playing puzzle games on the Internet in front of a chatful of puzzle experts. The protagonist getting stuck on a puzzle and the narrator turning to the audience and saying "chat, help us out with this one." Making friends vs. keeping friends. The friendships that you both care enough about to have maintained. I Love a Thoont. Building a pneumo to relieve congestion on the telegraph system. When the telegraph was invented vs. when pneumatics were invented. Why banks had pneumatic drive thrus rather than the teller just handing you the stuff through the window like a fast food drive thrus. Whimsical coffee preparation. The cost of building a giant tube between the coasts of North America. The Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel. Inventing a frictionless tube. Preparing burritos to be magnetically fired. Rifled sewers. Plunging into the Lithosphere. A diagram that shows how the burrito gets heated. The Taste of Breaking the Sound Barrier. Getting your poem voice on. Whether A. A. Milne knew about hash tags. Non-Fungible Beetles. Oh great, the same beetle came back! The kind of look that means "it's me, the same beetle!" The XIX and XX centuries. Writing Very Blackly. Why Does Pooh Own a Shotgun? All the talking Winnie the Pooh animals turning out to be aliens, like Starfox. A pneumatic tube, except instead of burritos you're firing cork. Writing your thesis on pop guns and continuing to do post doc research on pop guns. Spud Guns vs. Potato Cannons. A Normal Spud Gun for Normal Children. Seeing that Wikipedia considers Spud Guns low importance and thinking of ways to make Spud Guns more important. Too Many Posts.

    1 ч. 7 мин.

  3. 15 июн.

    347. You Issue the Call; I'll Make the Modem Noises

    Lords: Erica Krissy Topics: The Battle of Food Dog and Valley Jump Park The Wilson Wolfe Affair, or, how I spent $350 on the mysterious wolfe in the sky This tabletop RPG with scripting support https://mastodon.tomodori.net/@vga256/116246406043573614 Why the heck are we making everything smart these days? And why is the security so terrible (A.K.A. The Lovense Story) The Naming of Cats by T.S. Eliot https://poets.org/poem/naming-cats Microtopics: The first and still only place you can discuss topics. Writing down your plugs ahead of time. The happy ending you deserve. A small child crawling into your bed in the middle of the night and asking the questions that keep him up at night, such as "can you one-shot a Silver Boss Bokoblin with a regular arrow and a Lizal strong bow?" Giving your child a classical education. (In Zelda and Mario games.) Living in Virginia near a bunch of Confederate monuments. Looking at the battle map to see where the soldiers come down from the Food Lion. The monument to not building anything. Sonically-enforced exclusion zones. Whether there's sound in the eye of the hurricane. What they call the Wal-Mart in Puerto Rico. Podcasts on which it's okay to hate the French. Quebecois LARPing as French. History: it's all around us, and it keeps happening. Wanting to spend $350 on the wolf in the sky but the wolf just won't take your money. Simulacra Games. Spinning a zoetrope. Questioning the palness of these supposed pals. Little mom and pop shops exhorting you to solve this unsolved cold case murder. Side stories extending the lore. Applying heat to make the secret message appear, then applying cold to make the message disappear so that the next person can apply heat to make the secret message appear. Being so busy making your video game that you don't have the spare energy to solve an interesting puzzle. Kitchen table ARGs. Dang you, Mr. Stormdancer! Always coming up with your schemes. What happened to the Twinbeard corporation. Paying $800 a year in something something taxes to keep your corporation going. Incorporating in the state of Delaware. Licensing the Frog Fractions brand for a dollar. Retiring and making Pico-8 games for the rest of your life. It's like PiCoSteveMo all year! Reading your program aloud to the DM who executes it in his head. Reading your program aloud to the DM who tells you there's a syntax error on line 397. Writing out a program to present to the class. You went over my helmet?! Programming in Logo and watching the turtle move around the screen. Rehabilitating the image of Lisp-like languages by changing the parentheses to square brackets which are much cooler. Are you a friend of humans? Crossing your legs into a storytelling position. Picking your job based on what's funniest. How smart do you have to be to be a fridge. Pulling out your phone and opening your banking app to see how much cash is in your smart wallet. Hacking smart butt plugs. Whether hacking an insecure smart butt plug is funnier or less funny than making the smart butt plug in the first place. Login functions that don't require a password. Can you get a virus from a smart butt plug? The consequences of your smart butt plug getting taken over by hackers. Messaging all your Facebook friends explaining that your smart butt plug was hacked and if the butt plug sends a message saying "help I'm trapped in a butt plug," it's not really from you. Working for the U.S. govt hacking pacemakers. The chat is coming from inside the butt. The three names of a cat. Munkustrap, Quaxo, Coricopat, Bombalurina, and Jellylorum. A cat in profound meditation. Looking up TS Eliot in the phone book. Child Jordan Mechner looking up the lyricist of the Wizard of Oz in the phone book and calling him up. Doing a Doctor Who joke that nobody gets. How many members of The Who are still alive. Effanineffability. Up to the Neck in Weber.

    54 мин.

  4. 8 июн.

    346. Adam Doesn’t Want To Get Touchy-Feely With That

    Lords: Ron https://grumpygamer.com/ Kevin https://rubixsqube.itch.io/ Topics: Do you do easy or hard tasks first? Magic (not the gathering, prestidigitation) as it exists in 2026 The thing that makes text adventures interesting The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, by Tracy K. Smith https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55517/the-universe-original-motion-picture-soundtrack Trash vs Treasure: ultra distant galaxies, little red dots, and brown dwarfs Weird hobbies Microtopics: Forgetting what you were going to say about prescription toothpaste. Microsoft Encarta '94. Back when computers were charming. A roguelike where the screen is always scrolling. Doing the hard tasks first so you no longer have to think about them. Trying to cover air quotes audially. Protaskination. Solving a topic for the first time ever. Advertisements for card tricks. Art forms involving lying to people. Nirvana the Band the Show the Movie. Using the language of punctuation to make people lean forward. Donnie Osmond being a jerk. Self-working card tricks. One of the greatest gifts ever given to you by the universe. Winning $6000 in a single spin of roulette and then retiring from gambling. Leaving decks of cards in bars that are 80% the same card. A mail order service that emails you a video of a begloved man preparing your order to ship. Why you own a nine of diamonds single card forcing deck. Video reviews that never discuss or show what the product being reviewed actually does. Dorky magicians in the Youtube era. The text adventure community adopting the Twine community. Zork's physics system and lighting model. A medium in which a single auteur can make a complete work in a few months. The Many Worlds interpretation of Twine adventures. Implementing gamepad controls for a text adventure. Complete inability to drop items in graphic adventures. A Dropping Place. Media in which only the author be clever vs. media in which the consumer can also be clever. The "that doesn't seem to work" response. How you interact with Starship Titanic. Robots saying inscrutable stuff to you. A firm turn-around wrong-way barrier. Keeping the magic of the text parser in your head even as you figure out exactly how it works. A text adventure with auto-complete. Pulitzer-winning poetry about the entire universe. White noise and black noise. The dark we've only ever imagined, now audible, thrumming. Learning how to hear poetry. (Like, at all.) A way of thinking about how the universe was born. Modern jazz as another way of exploring existence. Reading Shakespeare and having to look up "moiety" again. Reading a modern translation of Don Quixote and being annoyed that you can't find a modern translation of Shakespeare. Retreating away from the camera in horror. Unchecked ambition and desire for power. Shakespeare except it's a bunch of lawyers. Romeo and Juliet in the Globe Theater except everybody is shooting each other with guns. Bill and Ted's Excellent Use of Febreeze. JWST images of little weird pimples. Astronomers looking at Interlopers and saying "get this trash out of here" Leaving bugs in your game because they make the game more interesting. There's no such things as trash: it's all treasure to somebody. Throwing a disc up into the fizzlers. Playing a video game and thinking of a way to really f**k your game up and being compelled to find out if the developers thought of it. Always doing exactly what the game tells you not to do. Going to the Sega booth at E3 and playing Sonic as slowly as possible. Playing games in a way that makes the Sega representative come up and talk to you. The production glitches subreddit. Comb filtering. Arguing about whether it's a mistake that you can hear Alanis Morissette inhale. Parts of games that you need to polish and parts you can leave unpolished. Jim's secret to shipping video games. Polishing and honing and perfecting so much that you ruin the finished product. Picking hobbies that don't scale. Eating the top 1000 soups in the history of planet Earth. The kind of person who gets fulfillment out of people appreciating work you've done for them. Letting your wife know that you do have hobbies, actually. The Dead Poet's Society scene about measuring the relative merits of poetry. Jamming on the coffee table synthesizer, and thinking the whole time "I should make a finished song to upload to a web site" Years of meticulous cutting and shaping.

    1 ч. 7 мин.

  5. 1 июн.

    345. Is the Bass Pro Shop Pyramid Visible From Space?

    Lords: Aubrey http://glowhno.com/ Avery Topics: Every day since 1981 Yuri Borisovich Norstein and his wife Francheska Yarbusova have worked on their masterpice--an animated adaptaion of Gogol's short story The Overcoat. They couple is now in their 80s and will most likely never complete their film. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Overcoat_(animated_film) Video game urban legends https://vimeo.com/91436410 https://saint-arthur.tumblr.com/post/146680746144/riding-immortal-on-the-seeking-road Bay Area Airport Naming Drama The Only Animal by Franz Wright https://april-is.tumblr.com/post/89794820/april-25-2008-the-only-animal-franz-wright Microtopics: Loving only the parts you don't hate. Finishing the whole pack of Red Vines because you refuse to let them defeat you. An album you haven't put on Spotify. You know. Those podcasts. The sort of thing we don't do around here. Holding up cue cards so the guests know what to say. Reading all 180,000 messages in the Frog Fractions 2 ARG solvers discord. The tech company you're applying to sending you all the Enron emails, saying "review these before the interview" Mysteries, Easter eggs, and rose-tinted glasses. Hedgehog in the Fog. Arduous animation processes. Working on an animated feature by yourself for over 40 years. Great Family Entertainment. A story about a guy who has everything he needs who dies while trying to buy an overcoat. A huge pack of Red Vines that you and your wife have been eating since 1981. Burning yourself out very quickly if you don't put guardrails in place. Perfectionists throwing away years of work because it's not good enough. DJs who still spin vinyl and other artists who choose to do things the hard way. Enveloping yourself in an emotion. Refusing to break character for the entire time you're making the Youtube documentary. Putting away art you're having a hard time with and coming back to it later. Everything that happened between the Sigil Master and Austin Walker. Losing track of whether art looks good. The fine line between pacing yourself and torturing yourself. The statue in the background of Frog Fractions that turns red when you're on Mars. Encouraging people to have whimsy. Space Knight Rom. Snagglepuss the 1950s playwright. Back when you could make up a video game rumor and not have it immediately debunked. GTA San Andreas urban legends. Windows Movie Maker transition screens. Gravitating towards the unknowable. Self-destructing music. Scarcity and unknowability. Buying an album from the record shop and perusing the indie record label catalog that comes with it. Searching for the 16th colossus. Forming a small community and feeling communal with them. Playing games with a group of friends like a book club. An MMO full of ARGy type stuff. Automatically grouping people into a puzzle solving community. Being paralyzed by the sheer amount of information that you don't know. What's going on with the iGlyphs? Finding evidence of the Jejune Institute on a telephone pole. Painstakingly making the 7th Frog Fractions game, 45 years from now. The history of Seeking Mr. Eaten's Name. Game secrets that can't be ruined by one jerk with a decompiler. Sleep No More. Getting pulled into a secret compartment during an interactive play. Multi-city zombie larps. The Oakland Airport renaming themselves to the San Francisco Bay International Airport and then later the lawsuit becoming the Oakland San Francisco Bay Airport. Bay Area topology. San Francisco and South San Francisco. The Unincorporated Area of San Mateo County International Airport, or UAOSMCIA. American cities named after European cities. The Bass Pro Shop Pyramid in Memphis, TN. Filling a 32-story disco pyramid with sports equipment. Fry's Electronics. Another episode of Topic Lords where we read from Wikipedia. A huge empty building with paintings of Mayan gods holding torches that used to be an electronics store. One more way in which people forget about San Diego. The only animal that brushes its own teeth A monkey wearing a spacesuit trying to smoke a cigarette through the face shield. The only animal that smokes cigarettes. (Todd, who works down at the warehouse.) Meeting your estranged dad when at the awards show when you're both up for the same Pulitzer. Whether that f****n' awesome monkey is a Bored Ape. Whether Google Image Search is making up images yet. That time Ryan North and his dog got stuck in an empty swimming pool and turned it into an interactive text adventure. By the time you've smelt it, they have dealt it. Topics are over!

    1 ч. 7 мин.

  6. 25 мая

    344. All Teeth Are Equally Smooth in the Eyes of the Lord

    Lords: Lena Cory Topics: Re: Cory's teeth topic, there's so many artists making teeth It would actually rule to be immortal, and all those stories about how it's not are just cope How committed to the bit is committed to the bit enough? A poem by Evan Balster, shared with us at GDC: A shapeless figure, locked away Inside a realm she godly sways; To weave in light and shadow, there, A living, breathing world from air. And nightly does she host a guest Who comes and goes at own behest, And time to time might take the throne To make the place a toy his own And on the morn to leave the mess Its keeper cleans, without protest. For lonely is the weaving-hand, The breaking-one's its only friend. Microtopics: Topic Lords-themed hangouts. Indie City Games. Two Truths and a Lie, a science fiction detective story. A disgusting old man using an army of combat drones to find out what happened to his ex-boyfriend. Two topics for the price of one. Tooth dreams. Considering what to do about your teeth as you go through various phases of having or not having teeth. What people say if your femur is yellow. People dying from mouth problems. Going to the tooth artists and customizing your new teeth, just like Build-a-Bear. Reaching into your mouth and pushing the button on your artificial tooth that plays your catchphrase. The artist who illustrates your subject in stages as you dissect it. Illustrating gross health things in a way that people can understand. The cartoon amoeba that teaches you how to not get salmonella. The kind of people who comment on Fecal Transplant Explainer videos. Teeth: you chew with them. Hitting up your dentist for extra teeth because the last ones were delicious. The thing you have in your mouth the most that you're not allowed to eat. (Your teeth.) Gradually eating your own teeth because you grind your own teeth at night. Different sets of dentures for different vibes. How to get glow in the dark teeth. Discovering the hard way that your fake teeth don't fluoresce under UV light. An entire generation of Americans going into the dentist together, like Hands Across America, to get all their teeth pulled so they can get dentures. Losing all your teeth just in time for COVID. Learning to not feel like you have to explain why you don't have any teeth. Depressing people with possible existences that your mind can create. What to do with the people who get too old to have good opinions. Trying to maintain a continuous personality day to day. Immortality vs. just living a really long time. Burning it all down for the sake of your legacy. Continuing to try to save people's lives and eventually inventing immortality. Death: it's really cool actually. Coming face to face with death and realizing it's not scary at all. A Satanist and his wife selling everything to open a shop where they refuse to sell you human skulls and serial killer memorabilia. Not needing a Memento Mori room because you already think about death all the time. Transferring a marble from the future jar to the past jar to remind yourself not to waste this day. Having a child and tossing it on the pile of existing children that everyone's already taking care of. All there is to learn in the universe. The Sword in the Stone. Working all of physics out from first principles because it's fun and you have that kind of time. Deciding to spend 100 years just hanging out with a tree and you don't even have podcasts. Icehenge. Associated Press title capitalization rules. A decision that is awesome for everything except your wallet. Artists who don't like what they make and don't enjoy the process, they just have to do it. Not doing art for long enough to realize how unhappy you are because you're not doing art. Making games because it's cool and fun to make games. Making yourself happier by pretending to be happy. What's bad about being too happy? Oh thank God, a crisis! A series of dreams in which the dream world is aware of you and hates you. Lonely is the weaving hand, the breaking one its only friend. Why you should be grateful when your son throws his trash on the floor. The most mystical thing that we get to regularly experience. Déjà rêvé. One of the worst ways to determine whether you're dreaming. Morpheus refusing to explain the Matrix in words even though he could describe it in 30 seconds. Spoilers: the events of Inception did not actually occur.

    58 мин.

  7. 18 мая

    343. Put on Your Donut Ordering Face

    Lords: Jenni Chris Topics: Having to relearn how to autism mask for parenting situations because the rules are different APPARENTLY Only after five years learning to how make an irrigation system for a thousand plants, do I finally truly understand Han Solo's struggles with the Millenium Falcon. The D&D conspiracy theory I saw a few days ago and can't find now Don't Ever Kill the Buddha, by adzolotl https://irrealisms.tumblr.com/post/677079389150887936/dont-ever-kill-the-buddha Microtopics: Kitchen Bitchin' Forgetting about plugs because there's a small child. Out of Taskmaster again. A tiny, very opinionated man. Only understanding about seven concepts but having strong opinions about all of them. Plugging PicoSteveMo again. The Longing is Real Time. Being in charge of all the Jaunt capsules for a few minutes before you f**k someone's life up. What Stephen King would say if he heard about PicoSteveMo. PicoSteveMo: it's a good time. People at the bank thinking you're normal. Ordering whatever donuts make sense. Whether autistic people can order donuts. Putting on your donut ordering face and instructing your toddler to do whatever makes sense. Enjoying activating objects. Loving to access their functions. A wonderful world where everything is interactive, especially dog tails. What is a dog's tail for if not grabbing?? Better child-rearing outcomes associated with having heard more words. Keeping a running commentary going while you put pants on your toddler. Successfully interrupting your toddler before they disassemble anyone's grocery order. Drug dealers in the parking lot who love when your toddler tries to catch a bird. Yes! Yes, it's you! Feel shame! Learning how to make small talk so you can get a job at Spencer's Gifts. Whether you're autistic or if it's some other weird trauma instead. Dad at Swim Class. The kind of dads they have in Bakersfield. Trying to find O.G. Dad in the Dad Soup. Patriogenesis. Fixing the water pressure on one end of the line which breaks all the janky connectors on the other end of the line. The Big Chungus Alarm that you installed five years ago when you were working with the Big Chungus system. Robots tearing themselves apart in ways you don't understand vs. in ways you do. People who have worked on complicated systems. Trying something new and suddenly you're dumb again. The Millennium Falcon as a jalopy from American Graffiti. Twenty extremely cool-dressed Asian kids in their twenties with souped up cars there's a racist term for that I legitimately don't remember, I'm not just trying to avoid saying it. Somebody flipping their car in front of your house while the baby is trying to nap. Self depreciation in the South Bay pan-Asian community. Keeping nitrous oxide balloons in the back of your sports car and popping one into the Mr. Balloon when you need a speed boost. Kids making too many U-turns in the 1950s and the No U-Turn signs are still making it hard to get their you're going to this day. Things everyone knows about Walter White. Black Walnut Trees extruding Juggalos, killing everyone in the vicinity. A biome map that looks like when you take Minecraft and turn the biome setting to "really small" The D&D conspiracy theory that you saw on Tumblr but can't find any more. Being outed as someone who still thinks in terms of THACO. Running a Shadowdark campaign and making delighted noises the entire time. D&D characters leveling up too much and wanting to run a business. What purpose dice serve in a TTRPG. Rolling two natural ones in a row and cutting your own head off. Orcs running ice-cream shops. Having a hypomanic episode about not being allowed to be an elf with chainmail. Having the Red Box and also the four subsequent boxes of different colors. Picking up a gold piece and putting it back down over and over because finding a gold piece is worth 1 XP. Reading a lot of things that rhyme. Reading Dr. Seuss like Ulysses. Playing pranks on people who reincarnate. When one set of footprints disappeared it's when you married the Buddha and he carried you over the threshold. Everyone trying to understand the "kill the Buddha" koan when it's just that the guy really hated the Buddha.

    1 ч. 10 мин.

  8. 11 мая

    342. Psycho Mantis Says To Drink Mercury

    Lords: Nathan https://store.steampowered.com/app/2976260/ChainStaff/ Robb https://store.steampowered.com/app/880930/Cyberganked/ Topics: I got pulled into the world of Eurorack modular synthesizers and now I'm finding myself trying to make cogent arguments for bringing uranium ore into the household. Ectoparasites Stairs are the driving of walking The Beaufort Wind Scale, found by nontanne https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/c8PXM396.jpg Microtopics: Year 14 of Cyberganked development. Cryptozookeeper. Struggling to play Yankee Doodle Dandy because the piano teacher doesn't want to hear your rendition of Axel F. Being hit up for $25 by the state. A text adventure with little pictures. Composing your 3D scene using pictures you took at the Denver haunted house your friend runs. Including an in-game explanation for why you chose to use the CGA colors. Playing TXT World and wondering "why would anyone make a game that looks like that?" How do you afford to take seven years to make a game? Finagling money out of various governments during COVID. Turning off the fish so that you can see the cat. Spending thousands of dollars to go to GDC and pitch your game to publishers and finding no takers because your game isn't a roguelike or a deck builder. Financial solvency isn't everything it's cracked up to be! Existing as a person on earth and being as old as possible. Life hacks for making your publisher go out of business. A spreadsheet of 450 game publishers that existed in 2023 whereas now there's just Epic and Roblox. Chainsaws and rocket launchers and other things you have in your front yard. Chainsaws vs. Chainstaffs. Measuring the IQ of every single Topic Lords listener. Asking your artist to make it 10% grosser. I know you have a good working relationship with your artist, but wouldn't you have had a better time alone in a dark room making b******t with stable diffusion? The Bloodlust Software art style. Showing your four year old nephew how to throw a spear as Scorpion, then spending the rest of the afternoon shouting "get over here!" at each other. Your Eurorack habit leading you to import uranium. So-called "synthesizer music." Shitpost Eurorack Modules. Enriching uranium. Talking to everyone about the uranium-based Eurorack module you want to buy in order to shift the Overton Window until buying the uranium-based Eurorack module seems totally normal. Making the most incredible techno everyone's ever heard before dying of radiation poisoning, like Marie Curie. What the Moog Modular would be like if Bob Moog only designed shitpost modules. The three reasons to buy a hardware synthesizer. Making art on the same device you use to doom scroll. Sitting there with a jeweler's screwdriver trying to tune your synthesizer. Coming on Topic Lords to declare that you're not a pervert. Deckard's Dream. Spending $5000 on a new synthesizer, making one song, and selling it for 75 cents on Bandcamp. Making things go twang in the 70s. The kind of parasites Slimer would have. Fixing a toilet in space. Tongue-eating isopods. Eating a tongue and then becoming the tongue. You are what you eat! Making Elevator Action and then getting in a multi-floor shootout in an office building. Alpha Gal, the matriarch that makes you allergic to beef. Teaming up with the Kool-Aid Man to fight the tick that makes you allergic to the color red. A floor except every step you take is higher than the last and after you take a few steps you're way up in the air. The accident-per-mile-traveled for stairs. How your family reacts the second time you fall down the stairs. What a caveman would think of stairs. What simple machine a staircase is. Hiding from the Dalek on the second floor because Daleks don't understand desires. Umbrellas difficult to use. A poem that came from the sea. Might Order an Extra Mango Lassi. Whether the scoville scale is logarithmic. Arguing against preventing forest forest. Bringing a machete to the farmer's market because what are the chances there are two machetes at the farmer's market? Sea Heaps Up. Fresh Gale vs. Whole Gale. Never having been outside in the wind but trying to guess what happens in a moderate gale. Taking a seven foot Chainstaff to MAGFest. 3D printing a giant spear for your Hornet costume. Sign-twirling your seven foot bone spear and terrifying all the MAGFest attendees.

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

Информация

  • Автор
    Jim Stormdancer
  • Годы выхода
    2019 - 2026
  • Выпуски
    350
  • Ограничения
    С ненормативной лексикой
  • Авторские права
    © 2026 Jim Stormdancer
  • Сайт подкаста
    Topic Lords

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