Topic Lords

Lords: Alex Shannon Topics: Tree law https://www.tumblr.com/whistletown/721716818422677504 https://www.tumblr.com/whistletown/723346723280453632 Tax Heaven 3000 When I was a kid I read about a magic trick where if you touch your index fingers together and cross your eyes, a disembodied third finger appears between them. This is the kind of thing we had for entertainment in the 80s. https://www.poe...

Lords: Jenni Tyriq Topics: King Leonardo and His Short Subjects https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/WesternAnimation/KingLeonardoAndHisShortSubjects Nervous Subject https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/Nervous_Subject Subject Zero https://masseffect.fandom.com/wiki/Jack On the Subject of Poetry By W. S. Merwin https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=26014 Royal subjects Subject...

Lords: April Ryan Topics: John asks "Puzzles/puzzle games and challenges you find pleasant and brain-expanding vs. the ones that you just cannot get your head around." Which foods would be the most fun or the least fun to eat if you rotated them at a 90 degree angle first. https://www.ebay.com/itm/184633478236 The Shaggs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XR9d4ESlpHY Instructions for Traveling West,...

Lords: Maxx Avery Topics: Change Ringing The differences between American and Japanese robotics teams This rug https://www.rugstudio.com/funrugsfuntimeshapecomfts-163multi.aspx A few days after I ordered it they emailed me canceling the order. I'm pretty sure this rug doesn't exist. Look what we found in the park in the dark https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4c...

Lords: Mikel https://www.lasertimepodcast.com/category/videogame-apocalypse/ Diana https://www.lasertimepodcast.com/category/thirty-twenty-ten/ Topics: Banishment is still legal as a punishment in Georgia (the state) From an evolutionary standpoint, why is it so hard to admit you're wrong? Minesweeper speed running http://www.minesweeper.info/wiki/Dreamboard Sometime During Eternity, by Lawrence F...

Lords: John JohnB Topics: The word "juxtapose" seemed hyperspecific and esoteric when I first learned it in school, but has proven incredibly common and useful Farewell to Cheap Bots Done Quick and the tens of thousands benevolent Twitter bots it powered: https://twitter.com/v21/status/1643932890105884673 Temple of Apshai's manual https://fogknife.com/2023-05-31-the-book-of-apshai-a-personal-exege...

Lords: Alexicographic Kev Topics: Sports are good actually? Apparently? Haunted articles of clothing Burrito R&D Casey at the Bat https://discoverpoetry.com/poems/ernest-lawrence-thayer/casey-at-the-bat/ Becoming a vtuber after losing a bet Getting a guided tour of a TV show Microtopics: Streaming daily. The Tears of the Kingdom thread in the Topic Lords discord. A rigid self-conception as som...

Lords: Danny Danny Topics: Most Song Lyrics are redundant Perfect fourths and fifths are named wrong It's almost summer and that means it's time for Mark Salud's "Forever in Summer" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ip_K5DHZlfg Who wants to do a smutty poem?? We haven't done one of those https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47339/upon-julias-clothes Oh yes Celebrity Deaths are getting out of contr...

Lords: Elena Quil Topics: Human Pudding, and why popular media can't depict bad art, only bad taste https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfHmctamVEA https://www.notinhalloffame.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gPuH1yeZ08 I got a van! Corporate art: From industrial musicals of the 50s-70s to this Staples logo unveiling https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWUhqoAGsfk https://philolexian.blogspot.com/200...

Lords CisHetKayfaber Charlie Topics: Umbrellas, siphons, and other physical things that seem like hacky bullshit but actually work Articulating the shape of your internal cause-and-effect network and applying it as a learning superpower (futurevision) I'm not sure what archipelago.gg is but if I read this paragraph aloud maybe we can figure it out together https://archipelago.gg/ A copypasta from...

Lords: Chris Wacy Topics: Crafting little guys Negotiating how to play Zelda together Cream of mushroom latte ChatGPT wrote a poem about zelda Climbing real rocks Microtopics: The Marble Hornets/Slender Man oeuvre. Copying and pasting a video. Sharing a movie you liked with a friend over IM by copying and pasting the title. The turnip in Breath of the Wild. Attempting and failing to enjoy wood car...

Lords: Tyriq Hallie Topics: The world needs more clues for secrets nearby https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUXow3d3-b0 How kids on tv used to hate leftovers Smartphone sales declined 11% in 2022 while sales of flip phones doubled https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44272/the-road-not-taken What will emoji look like in 100 years? I have invented a conspiracy regarding the shape of hand-held super...

Lords: Alexander Yaros Topics: Somewhat Dim Mirror Unique and weird self-bootstrapping computer language - Forth I've been getting emails from an Online Casino Guide offering analysis of the relative popularity of characters from the Mario Bros. movie. How did they get my email, and how did they know that this is the kind of thing I want to gamble on? The Kraken, by Alfred Tennyson https://en.m.wi...

Lords: Maxx Erica Topics: Zines and Jam Games; stuff that's understood to be breakable https://itch.io/c/689872/indiepocalypse Birding in the pandemic Itinerant Filmmakers http://www.meltonbarker.org/ Meditation on Capitalism I found the tweet that the image came from, but still don't know the author of the poem: https://twitter.com/Sierra_OffLine/status/1100852286585221122 Microtopics: The Bugzoo...

Lords: Cort Stephan https://lonelystarsoftware.itch.io/playdapon Topics: USB-C cables that only work in one orientation http://blog.zarfhome.com/2023/04/usb-c-and-plague-of-grackles.html Playgrounds seem to have gotten really good again in the last ten years Bedtime guitar update Where the Wild Things Are https://genius.com/Maurice-sendak-where-the-wild-things-are-annotated Classic hardware has be...

Lords: Tim Ben https://linktr.ee/zerofiftyone Topics: My Thursday Night The daunting thought of: there is so much music that exists now - it's more than likely that your favorite song in the world is out there and you'll never find it in your lifetime. I've been working on a small game in my spare time and I never want to ship it. I just want to have friends playtest forever. Fine Feather https://...

Lords: Danny Kim Topics: Animorphs My keyboard is registering double inputs again help me Youtube channels that summarize movies like Cliff's Notes https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyXD1jAZBdZ4u0K-GLYC77Q/videos https://www.mezzacotta.net/garfield/?comic=2799 CatGPT M3gan; technology horror movies You don't get points for coins in Super Mario World! Microtopics A video game man. The Animorphs trai...

Lords: Alexicographic https://twitter.com/alexicographic https://www.twitch.tv/damaplaysgames Andrew https://kittenm4ster.neocities.org/ Topics: The 3-food problem: what 3 foods are pairwise good but bad all together? Talking loudly during movie trailers as an act of anticapitalist subversion Moon Mode on your phone camera is probably just pasting a good picture of the moon over your bad one. http...

Lords: John Quil Topics: Taking advantage of a rare opportunity to play a Legend of Zelda game before every aspect of it is documented on the internet RCA's implementation of color television is one of the most impressive engineering feats of the 20th century The guy next to me on BART talked to me the entire ride home from GDC. He made me play the phone game he was addicted to and compared my per...

Lords: Jenni https://intfiction.org/t/lets-play-cragne-manor/56472 Chris https://trustory.fm/cool-time-dice-hour/ Topics: All the stuff we did in the 90s that is horrifying to modern parents now, like sleepovers and latchkey kids The movie for Jurassic Park 2 is somehow worse than the book and the book is very bad. The VR episode of Nowhere Man I fucked up my car by running over a mattress on purp...

Lords: Avery Tyriq Topics: Adam, Father of all humankind, was maybe a giant Heathcliff is still going and it's weird I've heard a million novelty metal covers but still nobody's done Truly Scrumptious / Doll on a Music Box from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang "The Phone Call" by James Tate Microtopics: Withholding all your best URLs until the end of the episode. Using lowercase Ls in place of Is and seein...

Lords: Ichiro Adam Topics: I learned how to animate by watching cartoons as a child (and I'm curious what else folks absorbed as a child that impacted the kind of adult they became) I created a Totally Human Rapper that can read up on a game and cut a rap video. Frog Fractions is banned from AGDQ "Frog Fractions" by Totally Human Rapper Tiny Mass Games small games cycle. Microtopics: One of the ep...

Lords: Alex Shannon Topics: Reading music badly Minigame: guess the animal from bad old-timey descriptions How to pronounce "MacPaint" https://www.tumblr.com/destinationtoast/708530541060816896 Airport teleportation Microtopics: Games that you should not play if you get addicted to games. Roguelikes that take a reasonable amount of time to play if you are bad at them. We're Not That Bad!™ The Sunn...

Lords: CisHetKeyfaber Phone Topics: Calculus ruined incremental games for me SFF PCs are ridiculous and hilarious What's the deal with HDR? Ode to Ice Cream by Vada Sultenfuss (from the movie My Girl) Metal Gear Solid 2 is the most important game of 2023 Microtopics: Appropriating wrestling culture. Idle games vs. incremental games. Trimps. Physics and calculus educators each pretending the other...

Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early! Lords: Alicia Ryan Just type his name into google. Topics: Seattle's reaction to snow vs the Bay Area's reaction to rain: who is more dramatic? Would you rather fart bones once a month or have Goldeneye "big head mode" on in real life for a year? Moral philosophy lessons from the California DMV Nancy https://www.nybooks.com/articles/196...