Topic Lords Podcast

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.
153. I Can't Wait For My Cockroach Lipids
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early! Lords: James Avery Topics: Stone paper "The Flashing Blade" The Number Ones https://www.stereogum.com/category/columns/the-number-ones/ https://www.americanpoems.com/poets/stanley-kunitz/king-of-the-river/ BREAKING NON MAMMALIAN MILK NEWS!! Sorry mammals, cockroaches make milk and it is considered a complete food Microtopics: The latest on whether or not you've been canceled. Spotify rejecting your album because you don't believe in yourself enough. Spagbol. The very one that is being digested by you now. thisbolognesedoesnotexist.com Paper that is 60% stone. The price you pay for participating in art. Coffee that is more powerful than a laptop. What happens if you try to shred margarine. Documents only for the document control society. The Novelty FBI raiding your house and confiscating your Novelty Top Secret Documents and hiding them in their fake Groucho Marx glasses. The guy who bought the last 100 Groucho Marx glasses from Party City. Moustache Ninja. Why more people aren't talking about Moustache Ninja. The height of Pirate Ninja Robot Mustache Mania. Ankle Biter Man. Atrocities Guide. One of many reasons why real life superheroes are a bad idea. Superheroes: police except there is no oversight whatsoever. Avery's Angels on Phoenix Jones. If Seattle police arrest you for being nude, they are legally obligated to provide you with a dinner jacket for your jail stay. Heath Ledger instructing the audience to charge their shower. The Masked Magician Revealed. TV stage magic. David Copperfield raising the Titanic. The Cheap Trick song that got to #1. The songs that hit #1 because General Hospital used them on the soundtrack. An antidote to the idea that music used to be better. Breaking Up is Hard to Do. Finding a way to enjoy art that you didn't like before. Getting old and liking boring music. What radio formats overlap with Beautiful Music. A foam snake that shoots thirty feet into the air and then drifts into a nearby tree. Tumbling over the rocks until you paint them with your belly's blood. That other flesh, heavy with milt, bruised, battering toward the dam that lips the orgiastic pool. Limber and firm in the state of his shining, forever inheriting his salt kingdom, from which he is banished forever. The most animalistic and primitive part of your consciousness. An Atari 2600 game inspired by a poem about a fish. The level in Dante's Inferno where you have to fight unbaptized babies. A game with one foot in the majesty of Greek mythology and the other foot in what it's like to bash someone's head into the concrete. A great use of thumbsticks. Whether Wisdom Tree would've published the Dante's Inferno video game. Spending your entire life obsessed with the pear you stole as a kid. An illumination of someone kneeling in front of a pear tree and weeping. Pop songs about relationship situations. An idea that is not as old as music. A piece of music going right for the emotion, like the Windows Startup Sound. Melody in lyrics, in conversation with each other. Seeing a person and drawing a stick figure. How do I get too much into my own head? Why you're turning into a fish, and what the fish represents. Sea Monkeys' Garden of Earthly Delights. Do we want to get to the Cockroach Milk? Being accosted on the street by Topic Lords fans asking for non-mammalian milk news but you're like "sorry I'm saving this for Topic Lords" How many cockroaches it takes to make one serving of cockroach milk. Sobbing in front of the slab of meat that Rocky punched. Pouring cockroach milk onto stone paper to prove its resiliency. Support Topic Lords
Sep 26, 2022
1 hr 3 min
152. National Butterscotch Pudding Day's Eve
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early! Lords: Alex Shannon Topics: Rebranding a Country The single-celled dog Joe Hart still hasn't cleared out the vampire dens https://imgur.com/a/ODW4pBI i hate it when i cant even write a poem about something because its too obvious. https://tooquirkytolose.tumblr.com/post/689145075338543104 National Butterscotch Pudding Day (Sep 19) Microtopics: Tying on the tiebreaker. Cambodian street food. Topic Time!! Two countries in the process of changing their names. Whether sovereignty was ceded. Tourism videos encouraging people to pronounce your country's name correctly. History continuing to happen after you leave high school. Changing your name to North Your Name to get an alliance with NATO. A bonanza for globe manufacturers. The United States of Mexico. Germany's reaction to the United States changing its name to The United States of Germany. Playing the wrong Korea's national anthem by mistake. Switching to Roguelike Alphabetical Order so Zimbabwe doesn't always go last. What does it mean to be a particular kind of animal? Transmissible cancer. A breed of dog that no longer exists as a dog but does exist as a strain of transmissible cancer. CTVT. HeLa cells. Whether Henrietta Lacks is still alive. How to fix 20,000 years of evolution. A dog that is unlike extant dogs. When you decide to change your evolutionary niche from macro to microorganism. Cancer that is smart enough to not kill its host. How cancer interacts with your mutant healing factor. What this is and why it's happening to you. Why a two year old wants to play in a copper mine. What kind of mines New England vampires lived in. Rearranging a corpse so that the vampire can't walk. No Arizona Mine Draculas. Joe Hart: defending our vampires. Change that you can really make, if you live in Arizona. Not getting the Google results you want because of sports mans. The pros and cons of vampire bats. Abandoned mines serving as habitats for 28 bat species that are crucial to the local ecology. Persons currently experiencing vampirism. Can't Have Shitting Gotham. Adding line breaks to someone's complaint about a glow in the dark star to make a poem. The imprint of one little glow in the dark star that had been missed and painted over in landlord white. A life situation that is so poignant that it's impossible to write a poem about, so you describe it in prose and wait for a Tumblr user to come and add some line breaks. A monologue that you could read in many different ways. Returning to Tumblr because you have more thoughts on the painted-over star. Responding to every text from your daughter as if it's a formal letter to a long-lost cousin. Putting glow in the dark eyeballs on your closet door. Putting you pudding under the Pudding Tree for Father Pudding. How you grow the Pudding Tree. Werther's Compromise. Using Werther's Originals as dentures and you have to replace them every hour. Removing the butter from scotch to get butterscotch. Soft crack vs. hard crack. Those terrifying Pillsbury tins that you bang on the counter and they explode and breadsticks come out. How to determine if your candy in progress is in the soft ball stage. What is pudding? Having an existential crisis on Butterscotch Pudding Day. Butterscotch Buttercream Frosting. All the Lords that are fit to print. Support Topic Lords
Sep 19, 2022
1 hr
151. A Fantastic Way To Escape From Your Loved Ones
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early! Lords: Mike https://twitter.com/mikeambrogi Adam https://twitter.com/adamdeGrandis/ Topics: Cooking is awesome https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1023147-tuna-crunch-sandwiches Profound kid questions ("how do you like something?") Mr. Jaws https://youtu.be/JeYCOFblZRg Distant Regard by Tony Hoagland https://condofire.com/2018/12/16/poem-of-the-week-distant-regard-by-tony-hoagland-via-alison-mcghee/ Having very tight standards that you hold in one part of your creative life that you totally ignore in other parts. As a game artist, it drives me crazy when people make creative decisions without solid design to back them up ("My game has a PSX art style because I think that's neat"), but as a musician I played in a garage rock band without any reason other than "50 year old music is neat". Microtopics: Desktop Dungeons Rewind. A rug that looks like a cat's face. Starting a game studio with your life. How the whole butch/femme thing works. After the fall of civilization when the guy with an iPod is the most important person in the village. Your FK-IK rigging skills really paying off in the post-apocalypse. How much kayfabe is happening right now? Whether the PS5 exists and whether you can play Jamestown Plus on it. A great way to nurture and nourish your loved ones while also staying away from them. Soaking Ls. Whether Jim has a sister-in-law. Top three texture-bothers-me foods. Jim's position on eating eyeballs. A snack that can look back. Sucking on the window to the soul. Ordering your tuna salad extra starchy. A deep appreciation of the sandwich arts. Making a Youtube series where part of the bit is that it's really professionally made but also that means you need to do all the dang work, and also maybe you're not good enough to do it as professionally as you think. Getting a real video editor to do the parts that are edited like a normal video but editing all the parts that are bullshit yourself. A daughter in rock climbing camp. Describing Cosmic Cat socks to your dad. How to enjoy things. A series of experiences that enter your body via your sensory organs. Laying a framework for understanding the self. Encoding your musical taste in a C program. Configuring human behavior on an iPad. Feeding the Reddit grist mill with season 4 of Westworld. Living near a pleasing combination of straightaways and turns so you have to hear people racing motorcycles at all hours. The emotional status of the teenager who flipped his car in front of your house. What to say after a car accident to convince passers by to not call 911. An SUV that looks like a t-rex just tried to eat it driving the wrong way on the Bay Bridge. Bombing back into San Francisco in your exploded car. Seeing someone driving recklessly but it's okay because the car has a bumper sticker saying "Everything is fine. We're not drinking in here." Taking a joke that someone else made and making another joke out of it. As topical an artifact as you can imagine. Repetitive and familiar two-minute chunks of sound. The They Might Be Giants album that has the giant squid on the cover. Singing Fingertips from start to finish. The amount of work that went into the cover art of Dickie Goodman's Mr. Jaws. DJing from a dinghy. Writing a thank you note to your travel agent. The clouds blowing overhead like governments and years. Secular Americans having to reinvent gratitude since they don't pray. Parts of you that you think make you a better person. Valuing something in yourself but not being sure how you got there. Having taught yourself a bunch of hard things and learning to trust the process of learning a skill. Civilization: something we agreed to do. The difference between doing something professionally and doing it for fun. Trying to sneak into a giant hovering ball of rock. People who are hungry for topics refusing to hire you. Support Topic Lords
Sep 12, 2022
1 hr 7 min
150. Your Honking Monotoe
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early! Lords: Jenni https://twitter.com/horsewizrd Tyriq https://twitter.com/FourbitFriday Topics: Hot Topic Toe picks https://imgur.com/a/ARHZn5x Topical medication Groke asks: My friend (who is completely unaware of this podcast and did this apropos of nothing) emailed the Mars chocolate company to find out why the Topic candy bar has that name. "Dear Mr Smith, Thanks for getting in touch about our MARS product. The Topic bar has been a firm favourite since it's introduction in 1962, unfortunately over time the origin of how the Topic chocolate bar came to be called Topic has been lost and now it has become a mystery that we are still trying to discover'. If you need any more information, please let us know. Kind Regards, Nasteha Tiirow Consumer Care Mars Chocolate UK Reference No: 00366098" Test of Proficiency in Korean Topic Records https://myhomeworkdone.com/blog/poetry-topics/ Microtopics: Who has been on Topic Lords the most often. Plugging a leaky dog. Whether dogs know about consent. A store in the mall that teenagers go to. Stranger Things merch in the Hot Topic. Squeezing the timeline. The goth-emo shift of the aughts. The phrase "big tiddy goth girlfriend" which will far outlast the word "goth" in general usage. Dark Academia: emo but in school. Trying to do actual research in an Elden Ring library. Rustic Dark Academics. Buying a sweet Kirby t-shirt at GameStop and getting a compliment on it from your therapist. Minnesota: the Land of Lakes. Dogehouse Laser Tag. A variety show that shows a variety of Youtube videos. The internet and real life merging, to the detriment of both realms. Everyone's top four toes. Intrusive thoughts about feet, the worst body part. What the guy who runs the nude model sketch thing thinks of your feet vis-a-vis your age. The most awkward encounter of your life until the next day when you run into the same guy again. Sending a picture of your feet to the same friend every year. Putting 720° in a Marble Madness cabinet so that when people can't figure out how to play it and ask you how, you can ask them to show you their feet. Top ten toe beans. Mr. Frito-Lay smelling a dog foot and thinking "I want a chip that smells like this!" Nothin' but thumbs. Whether a horse hoof is just one big toenail. What people would look like if they had the proportions of animals. The indecency of seeing a bird's knee. Medication you're supposed to use topically but it also tastes good. The ester they use to indicate that even though this hand lotion smells good, it also smells like you shouldn't put it in your mouth. Very petroleum-based very fake coconut. Chris Hemsworth answering a question at a press conference when one of his assistants says "it's time for your hourly chicken" and shoves a chicken breast in his mouth. Deep-frying the inedible part of the edamame. Chewing your food as many times as possible. Elaborate traffic jam metaphors for chewing food. Hitting the big four-two. The Box of Celebrations. Describing a Twix bar without ever saying the name Twix. When the moon hits your eye like a big chocolate gravy, that's a mole. Trying to buy just one Andes Mint so you go to a hotel or a steakhouse in 1997 but the host won't let you buy it, they're like "just take it and leave." Triscuit: it's one more than a biscuit. Champion Racehorse Electricity Biscuit. The Shape of Electricity, starring Pikachu. Winston drinking all of your water. Being proud that you translated a sign in a language you're learning, then looking just below that sign and seeing a translated sign in your native language just below it. Sneaking into somebody's room and replacing their diary with their diary translated into Korean. Saloon: just a salon with an extra O. The room where you keep your art collection in a pile on the floor and visitors can come in to dig through it. The podcast where we talk about Robin Tunney. Selling Soviet and left-wing political music by mail order. The Hundred Best Poetry Topics. Why it is so frustrating to be frustrated. Support Topic Lords
Sep 5, 2022
1 hr 1 min
149. Croc Nutz
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early! Lords: Erica David Topics: A partnership between you and a tool Schmalhausen and Vernadsky, my own personal ARG Stop trying to make "a wedge is a machine" happen. It's not going to happen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine The Poetry Teacher, by Mary Oliver https://voetica.com/voetica.php?collection=2&poet=27&poem=5712 Drinking vinegar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-chain_fatty_acid Microtopics: Taking an allergy pill and getting something unexpected. Nap skeptics. Non-stop napping. Wanting to eat nothing but spinach for two days so you go to Disney World and pay extra for all the park employees to tell you that in the happiest place on Earth we only eat spinach. Who gets to chew the grape next and for how long. Forgetting a story after you tell it, so you can tell the story back and forth forever. A plastic grape that dissolves in your nose. The least favorite thing that you bought during the pandemic. The collective politico-pandemical nightmare. A shitty partnership between you and a shitty tool. Ol’ Slicky. Tools that bring you distress. Whether it's legal to open carry a claymore in Texas. A decoration you can put on your truck just in case nobody knows what an asshole you are. Whether you can open-carry a dildo in Texas if the dildo is also an assault rifle. Gluing a penis to things you don't like and explaining that "this is a partnership between you and a tool." Papers that you really approve should've read fifteen years ago. The parallel world of the Modern Synthesis. Soviet biologists who were recognized in their time but have since been forgotten. Stalin's purge of scientists researching Mendelian genetics. Being evacuated to Kazakhstan and fed only wilted spinach so that you can finally write the book you've been thinking about. Bringing your adopted pet wolf back with you from Kazakhstan. Growing up after the Russian revolution in St. Petersburg. Delegating research by convincing the Game Detectives folks that there is a pop culture reward behind it. Your own personal ARG that only you care about and doesn't lead to any goal except knowing more facts. The point of games. The creativity that exists in fiction that you wish you could capture in nonfiction. The advantages of reality over fiction. Becoming disenchanted with capitalism in the 1920s. The Demon Haunted World. Escaping from Stalinist Russia into Nazi Germany. Cheers to a boring life. A slightly tilted floor. Electrifying the wedge so it's finally a machine. The xkcd comic from 15 years ago that lampooned the way Wikipedia articles used to be stereotypically bad. Being good at math and assuming that also means you'd be good at writing an encyclopedia. Whether Wildlife Ecology is a different field from Wildlife Biology. The shittiest source that Wikipedia will accept as a citation. Citing George W. Bush as a source in your peer-reviewed paper about climate change. All the dogs arriving at once. Dogs teaching students how to write thirsty happy poems. Dog Songs (2013) Deliberately putting line breaks where they seem least intentional. The Wedge of the Poetry World. Dinging the pan to proceed. The manufacture and use of short-chain fatty acids. Fixing an ulcer with vinegar. Fuck you, I'm drinking a shrub. Drinking balsamic vinegar and then rinsing with baking soda. Butter and vinegar, together at last. Support Topic Lords
Aug 29, 2022
1 hr 6 min
148. Dual-Wielding Ingresses
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early! Lords: CisHetKayFaber https://twitter.com/CisHetKayFaber/ Phone Topic Lords: Why are Japanese adult video titles so long and weird? 3DS Street Pass Service at Lou's Diner is incredible https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYnEmyq-0sA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJb-czNC_ls The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, by Gil Scott Heron. https://genius.com/Gil-scott-heron-the-revolution-will-not-be-televised-lyrics People that do things Microtopics: Seeking penance from the Topic Lord. Dual-purpose infotainment. Getting a new job that is better for your mental health. The People's Republic of Wal-Mart. Maximizing human dignity. Jennifer Government. Works of stilted microfiction describing porn contents. Information density and reading speed in Japanese writing. Accidentally machine-translating the wrong field. Organizing your porn by publisher. The full title of Robinson Crusoe. When movie trailers stopped giving the whole plot away as a matter of course. Setting your most recently played game to "Health and Safety Information" before going out to collect 3DS street-passes. Trying to get 3DS street passes on in suburbia. Edging towards the playground to get 3DS street passes without getting close enough that people notice you edging towards the playground. Walking backwards into the playground, staring at your 3DS. Taking over a gym and leaving something behind. A lady with three phones and a tablet out who you are sure is making a drug deal but it turns out she's just playing Pokemon. Collecting all the territories in 3DS street pass. The critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XVIV now with the free expansion up to level 60. A problem that helps you exercise. Wandering around Willow Glen dual wielding Ingresses. Attacking a portal in an AR game and some guy in cargo shorts comes out of his house to politely ask you to stop. Min-maxing your Burger King visits to become the mayor of Burger King. Hacking the limiter on your chocolate milk tap. Lou's superhuman beverage production. The era of automats. How they stored coffee in the 1950s. Having one of each thing on your menu ready to give to potential customers immediately. The turnaround on a queue of hamburgers. Spaghetti and blankets at the Japanese McDonald's. The MegaMuffin. The Bojangles biscuit game. Losing yourself on skag and skipping out for beer during commercials. Nixon playing a bugle. A revolution to get rid of the nubs. Sliding a color TV into a stolen ambulance. Only letting people into the revolution who can't spell Natalie Wood's name. Dreaming about the end of television. The BBC covering climate change by talking about how nice and sunny it is. The guy who wanted to work at Nintendo so he got a job working at Nintendo. Improving your tools and workflow because you're procrastinating doing actual work. Playing Tetris on a gamepad vs. on a keyboard. Tetris APM. Switching joycon hands because you're accustomed to using the arrow keys with your right hand. Making friends the wrong way in Japan. Making things on purpose vs. making them accidentally. Knowing how to act in a Japanese meeting. Learning how to work towards a goal every day whether or not you feel like it. How to tell when a game is ready to ship. Going to the grocery store and explaining to the cashier about the cool art you make and they're like "great but you still have to pay for this food with money." Support Topic Lords
Aug 22, 2022
1 hr 8 min
147. Part-Time Cryptids
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early! Lords: Laura https://twitter.com/lmichet/ Nick http://nicknicknicknick.net/ Topics: Can the biological function of expelling waste be improved in any way? Should humans expel waste differently? The Hobbit: Dopesmoker Edition. (it's great) Gato Gonzales and the Guts Pose Nick at the Montreal Screwjob: https://imgur.com/a/45Opfxq The Fish, by Elizabeth Bishop https://poets.org/poem/fish-2 Twitter's UI has changed "Top 3" and "Top Fives" into "Top Four" Every Monday, when you wake up in the morning, you discover that you have grown EXACTLY one millimeter taller. This continues throughout your life, so you will grow about 5.6 centimeters per year for the rest of the time you are alive. In ten years, you will be 1.8 feet taller than you are now. If you are 30 years old right now, you will be 7.3 feet taller when you reach 70. If you are 5.5 feet tall now, you will be 7 feet tall in just over 8 years, at which point you will start to look really weird. How does this change your life? What do you do about it? There is no cure for this condition, because it is caused by magic, not science, and there is no countercurse. Microtopics: The type of band that has four songs per album. Creating ambient soundscapes via a series of guitar pedals. Johnny To. Interpersonal violence and the right to be perceived as human. A world where everyone knows Judo for some reason and they fight each other with Judo all the time. The quality of life edge that birds have over humans (their urine to feces ratio) A nozzle in your wrist like spider man so you can poop into the tiny hole in the wall that everyone's house has for wrist poop nozzles. Improving the human condition with a wall hole and maybe a wall tank. Burying a pile of trash but also putting a photograph and a floppy disk in there so if you ever get in trouble for your pile of trash you can claim it's a time capsule. How geniuses empty dumpsters. Everyone taking the first Monday of the month off of work to poop and at 6pm the city's plumbing system explodes. How to monetize pooping teens. American poor being condemned to a low quality poop zone whereas in Europe they have luxury poop villas. Locking your dumpster so it's not filled with old carpet overnight by marauding carpet installers. A Person on Twitter. Playing a stoner album at the same time as a stoner movie. An album/movie combo entirely bereft of revelatory synchronicities. The most wrinkly hobbit. Whether Gandalf was actually smoking something or if that's just something people joke about. Brian Moriarty's multiple GDC talks about looking for secrets where there are none. Writing a classic rock album intended to be played simultaneously with Boss Baby 2. Rodolfo "Gato" Gonzales's legacy in Japan. What the Guts Pose means to you. Assigning elaborate meaning to each fist in a fist pump. Henry Cavill reloading his fists. Playing Rock Paper Scissors with Mario whenever he collects a moon. A little head tilt to get you in the right mood to pick up rocks. Whether Guts Berserk is named after Guts. Elden Ring as Berserk fanfic. Understanding and enjoying Elden Ring in a new way. Attending the Montreal Screw-Job but not having any idea what's going on. Taking a photo to prove you were at a historical event but the flash just reflects off the bald head of the guy in front of you. A poem describing a fish. A five-haired beard of wisdom. A poem with fantastic mouth feel. Catching a fish while dad is in the bathroom and screaming at him to hurry up because you don't know what to do with a fish. Downloading a poem to your hard drive. A good idea or at least a fun idea. Whether you can believe the web design on this whitehouse.gov. Killing software like only a 90s dad can. Eating nachos every night. Wanting to do things in fours because on Twitter you can attach four images to a post. Top Four Favorite Sandwiches. Refusing to share your top anythings. That time Nintendo burned a hole in the palms of millions of children. The ways Pokemon Go encourages you to put your phone down. The kinds of places that society benefits from Pokemon Go not being played. The Pokestop Review Process. Two excellent reasons not to ship the Virtual Boy as a helmet. VR chaperones. Being okay with growing too tall but only if you have friends who are also growing way too tall. Small inconvenient things about growing taller. A cryptic giant living on a mountaintop. Being 10 feet tall and retired and figuring out how to live in a normal sized house. Doing CSG with caves and shirts. Modular clothes that you can reconfigure to cover your changing body. A wisp of a person with an eternal tube sweater. Not wanting to become a spaghetti but respecting anybody who wants to become a spaghetti. Growing to twice your adult height and getting cast as the monster in every horror movie. Support Topic Lords
Aug 15, 2022
1 hr
146. If You Can't Pay The Time, Don't Do The Feet Liking
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early! Lords: Maxx http://false-panels.com/ Nelson https://twitter.com/WritNelson/ Topics: How many random numbers you can dial before you contact someone who is expecting you Pocket versions of your art. (Mini games, mini sculpture, mini songs?) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Matthews_Band_Chicago_River_incident https://poets.org/poem/so-you-want-be-writer Microtopics: Being non-binary in Washington. Witch Strandings. The crucial aspects that define a traditional Strand-Like. What makes the nurturing not feel bad/weird? Physically inhabiting a mouse cursor. Playing shuffleboard on a Mario Golf power meter using the Oblivion persuasion wheel. Several things that people like, existing at the same time. Why nobody but Jim is making Frog Fractions games. Dialing random phone numbers until you reach someone you know. A nightmare creature from the abyss waiting by the phone for your call. Everyone having exactly one mom and exactly one faceless nightmare creature waiting by the phone. Phone number Minesweeper. Birthday parties as an opportunity to force your friends to play the weird game you just designed. Guessing the phone number of the burner phone in front of you. Computers you can talk to in your local area. Hacking the government mainframe that has all the Nintendo games. Needing to have a soul before your soul can be sucked out through the phone. Finding out how smart dolphins are after they meet the being from beyond the abyss. Holding on to your childhood dreams of stealing a series of towers for your tower collection. Figuring out how to put custom ringtones on your flip phone even though the Verizon rep said it was impossible. What the Kidz Bop version says instead of "it smells like R. Kelly's sheets." A coat that smells like my baseball cleats, yikesssss. What if football wasn't good? What would happen if a child held all of baseball in their hands? Futilitris. Supernova SWF Enabler. Working in the Kidz Bop factory. Who Put Goku In Fortnite? Ending the game immediately when somebody drops the come bomb. Not being allowed to say dang or shit. The through line from miniature replica sculptures to Kidz Bop Breaking Bad. Kidz Bop Oldboy. The French opera singer who replaced her girlfriend with a dummy and then set the nunnery on fire so it looked like her girlfriend died in the fire, but her opera singing was so good that the king had to pardon her. If Jim was arrested for dumping 800 pounds of sewage on an open air tour boat, how many people would try to solve the ARG? Wiping the raw sewage off of your face and wondering aloud "is this Frog Fractions 2?" Going to jail for making a cursed tweet. What if your tweet only goes viral after the cursed tweet law is enacted? Having to read your tweet aloud to everyone who liked it. Going to jail for writing a cursed tweet and being sentenced to having to explain it to your mom. All-ages interactive sculptures. A child with a tiny screwdriver installing an emergency communication system in case someone has a bad time in their Radio Flyer. A pretty intense poem by a pretty intense dude. Why or why not to be a writer. Warning young people against destroying themselves. Being deeply desperately driven by the essence of what you are creating. Needing somebody to remind you that your work has value. The different coping strategies required to create a work that takes half an hour to finish vs. years to finish. False panels. Support Topic Lords
Aug 8, 2022
48 min
145. A Visceral Tobacco Consumption Experience
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early! Lords: Hallie https://twitter.com/Hallie_9000/ John https://twitter.com/robohunkx Topics: Finding value in shared imagined spaces and worlds outside of religious contexts Final Fantasy Challenge: Zero Story; and other vaporware games & mods of which no record exists on the internet Youtube streams movies now, and they have comments Canterbury Tales General Prologue, by Geoffrey Chaucer https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43926/the-canterbury-tales-general-prologue Microtopics: The Ten Timers Club. Podcasting for three years straight. Fantastical ideas for famous bands covering Garages songs. An increasingly hard to describe person. Reclaiming the asshole. The sort of thing that sometimes happens in Maine. Finding the right microphone settings. A podcast about what people think about that ends up being a video game podcast because that's what they're thinking about. The barnacle on the indie game scene life. Making a video game good on purpose. Talking to your friends who talk you out of grad school because you need to be talked out of grad school again Your own personal relationship with the divine. Shared imagined worlds and how we talk about them. Your friend asks how you're doing and you say "Han and Leia at the end of Empire" and your friend just nods. Fighting a great beast together. Promoting group cohesion by developing a shared frame of reference. How in the 70s everyone watched the same three TV channels but nowadays everyone has access to all of every form of media all the time, and whether that's a handicap for developing a shared cultural reference frame. Waxy potatoes vs. starchy potatoes. Where to find non-starchy potatoes. Harry Potter and the Sacred Texts. The act of interpretation and the creation of shared symbols. A Final Fantasy mod that you were very excited about in the early 00s but that now has no results on google. Abraham Lincoln Land vanishing from the internet. All the bad video games starring Tux. Your boss saying "let me show you how the Peter Principle works" and promoting you to Project Manager. Erasing the projects you are ashamed of from your personal web site. Adding a clause to your will about deleting all your novelty web sites. A web site where you write a bunch of fake reviews of fake bands and eventually start writing the songs yourself. Mutually executable languages. A betrayal of both movies and Youtube. Commenting with a timestamp of your favorite part of Napoleon Dynamite. Whether Pedro won the election on his own merits. Creating an audition tape for the musical extravaganza your employer is running, getting the part, and later finding out that you were the only one who applied. Whether John will ever release the video of him dancing like Napoleon Dynamite. An entire stanza of completely unintelligible Middle English. Wanting to go on pilgrimages to seek the Holy Blissful Martyr because spring is coming. Pronouncing all the silent letters. A well-SparkesNotes'd text. Having a poem memorized but not in order. How wishing someone a happy birthday before their birthday is illegal in Germany. The least surfer dude. Various tobacco saliva receptacles, some of which ding and some of which don't. Chewing tobacco but not having the self-respect to get a spittoon. The nicotine delivery method where you stick a tobacco blob under your lip like a walrus tusk and make TikTok videos. Dip a.k.a. Snus. A cool friend from Tennessee. Big League Chew, again. Asking the clerk for tar patches because nicotine patches don't give you melanoma. Ending the show early because you believe so vehemently that vaping is good for you. A pithy German word for having guested on Topic Lords ten times. Support Topic Lords
Aug 1, 2022
1 hr
144. Vultures Who Know The Difference (Between Sugar And Aspartame)
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early! Lords: JohnB https://twitter.com/YouOldSoAndSo Jesse Topics: Wario64 We need to bring back Dogme 95 Seeking Mr. Eaten's Name Again https://saint-arthur.tumblr.com/ This Is Just To Say, by William Carlos Williams https://poets.org/poem/just-say Whatever happened to outdoor pop machines? https://lovepittsburghshop.com/blogs/love-pittsburgh/may-the-pop-machine-be-with-you Godzilla Microtopics: A Link's Awakening speedrun that may surprise you. Lord clouds. What's the deal with Wario 64? Asking Webster's Dictionary to define Wario 64. Your source for video game deals. How Wario64 feels about Chris Pratt voicing Mario. Geralt in the bathtub. Wario World for the GameCube. The hidden origins of Wario64. Ten rules for how to make a movie. Lars von Trier being traumatized by a dolly shot and inventing Dogme 95. Unintentional Dogme 95 movies. Unboxing a Criterion Collection DVD live on the show and there's just a DVD in there. Creative freedom, the worst constraint. A recipe for the worst movies in the fucking world. Dogme 95 drinking game. Making a flag in the bucket. The Adventure 2600 continuity. Bats that can steal things that shouldn't be able to be stolen. A video game quest that was very difficult and obscure until someone wrote a FAQ. The ludonarrative consonance of following your self-destructive obsession at the same time your character follows their self-destructive obsession. Being confused about a story beat in a video game and having to seek out a lore genius on the internet. The Random House Annotated Fallen London. Becoming St. Gawain's Candle. How the icebox plums poem became a meme. Learning about poutine on social media. Satirical poetry in the 1960s. Things that are Ira Glass's fault. Extreme meminess. Wanting a god damn plum right now. Pictures of normal people that are considered heresy. Deliberately making your podcast guest's audio sound bad. Continuing to read poetry even though you're terrible at it. Asking Siri to get you a substantial raise. Checking the change return slots on the mobile phone bank for quarters, to do your part to sustain the soda vending machine economy. The cost of a 510 ml bottle of pop these days. The fastest pop machine in the world. Joking about the day we record the show when it comes out weeks later and none of the listeners have any idea what you're talking about. Applying the sugar tax to beverages sweetened with aspartame. The Godzilla movie with Inspector Gadget in it. Redheaded Stepzilla. The three Godzilla movies that are out of print in the US. (But not on archive.org) Having to license all the Kaiju separately. Movies that are in the public domain because they were not explicitly labeled as copyrighted. Public Domain Day. The personality traits of Sherlock Holmes that are and aren't copyrighted. The Beast at 20,000 Fathoms. Messing up a slow-motion shot by undercranking the camera rather than overcranking, but it has to go into the movie like that because it was your only take. Making a movie where you can do as many takes as you want but they all have to go in the finished film. Godzilla taking some much needed time off. Invasion of Astro-Monster. Watching the entire Godzilla series and learning why people think Avengers: Endgame is good. A latchkey kid in 1960s Japan overcoming his bullies by imagining that Godzilla is his friend. A dinosaur falling in love with a lighthouse. Empathizing with the dinosaur who is completely misunderstanding the situation. Why the English speakers in Japanese or Korean films are such bad actors. An island protector of these native people brought to society for reasons of Capitalism. Support Topic Lords
Jul 25, 2022
1 hr 12 min
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