Topic Lords Jim Stormdancer

Lords:



Jenni
Xalavier


Topics:



How do centaur internal organs work
What is the most unlikely horror franchise to adapt to games?
Do boomerangs work?
Serious KAAAND!


https://www.reddit.com/r/TopicLords/comments/1b3j3nu/serious_kaaand/

Most game mascots are the sexual avatars of their creators
The Ted Dabney Experience


Microtopics:



Rusty Lake.
An intriguing, terrifying morsel.
Whether it's okay to lie on this show.
Life Eater.
The horror fantasy kidnapping sim space.
Shippers shipping games.
How do we ship this game without destroying people?
All of the horse except for the head and neck.
Cosmetic centaur organs.
Introducing yourself to the inside of a centaur and it's extremely squishy in there.
A single multifunctional cube that births a centaur and that's the original Xbox startup video.
Speaking a language that doesn't exist and every time you finish a sentence you hear church bells.
Would a defective centaur wear a hat like this or like this?
Centaurs always standing at their standing desks.
A centaur wearing a horse mask.
Playing Wii Golf with someone who remains sitting the entire time.
Getting off the Power Pad to long jump.
Sitting golf.
My Dinner with Andre the Giant.
The monster mash vs. monster bash.
Adapting the Ghostbusters theme song to other media.
Playing as the car and running people over.
Jail for cars.
Jelly beans that taste bad on purpose.
80s films for children that are meant to turn them into weird bisexuals when they grow up.
Jeff Minter's Dune.
Barbarella the video game.
More things you can do with your Rock Band instruments.
Sticking even more games inside of Fortnite.
The lemur with the really big eyes.
Microorganisms that live in water and have the end of a comedy roast bone for a head.
Venomousness of hybrid mammals.
Grabbing your stress ball after learning that the duck billed platypus uses electroreception to track their prey, Xalavier Nelson, Jr.
Platypus patch notes.
Adding expansions to Classic World of Warcraft.
Gauging the temperature of the room when it comes to boomerangs.
Throwing a washing machine in a circle.
How you feel when the boomerang doesn't come back.
Objects that you see on TV.
Boomerangs that instant of being carved to return when you throw them, are carved to say "help, I'm trapped in a boomerang factory" in an Australian accent when the wind whistles through it.
A boomerang with a heart on it that you throw to find true love.
Boomerangs vs. Gen-Xerangs.
Getting lazy by the time you sharpen the 7th blade on your boomerang.
Disrupting marshmallows by making them kinda good.
Hiring a game studio to make a satisfying sequel to Katamari Damacy and then immediately suing them for fraud because making a satisfying sequel to Katamari Damacy is impossible.
Getting Australian concussions all weekend.
Naming your facial hair "are you ready for the next topics"
Hi guys call anyone knows how to buy guns and armor India?
Crossposting between r/TopicLords to r/IndianTeenagers.
Weeding out the cowards with Gregorian Chant.
Looking at Glover and immediately understanding his salient sexual verbs.
The distinction between mascot and main character.
Your Sonics, your Gexes and your Crashes Bandicoot.
Switching places with your therapist.
Non-saucy mascots.
Having to pick between being horny and being a sociopath because you can't be both.
Glover vs. Hamburger Helper vs. Thing.
Opening yourself to a deeper Freudian zeitgeist.
The mascot platformer you keep seeing roms of but have never downloaded.
Blinx 2: Masters of Time and Space.
Blinx dressing up as the lead singer of Power Man 5000.
Exactly the sort of podcast segment you want to commit to sight unseen.
Being willing to give up 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand to make a friend happy.
How much do you want that Golden Microphone?
The crucible of the soul you go through to record a podcast.
People in the future deciding what you would have made a podcast about if you were still alive and making that podcast.
The Xalavier Nelson, Jr.

Lords:



JohnB
Kevin


JADES data: https://jades.idies.jhu.edu/public/



Topics:



Thoughts on approximately 5/12 of Don Quixote
The Time Life "Mysteries of the Unknown" Series (1987-1991) and its impact on a generation of young nerds


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mysteries_of_the_Unknown
https://www.reddit.com/r/IcebergCharts/comments/r487u4/distant_astronomical_objects_iceberg/
https://www.slideshare.net/DirkTheDaring11/timelife-mysteries-of-the-unknown-the-ufo-phenomenon
https://archive.org/details/DreamsAndDreaming_201809/page/n33/mode/2up
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lal0aWAys0k

Thomas Edison didn't think telephones needed to ring. He figured the caller could just start yelling "hello" at you even before you answered the phone
Desiderata


https://www.desiderata.com/desiderata.html
https://www.readwritethink.org/sites/default/files/resources/lesson_images/lesson372/PoloniusExcerpt.pdf

Is pinball meant to be fun? Can you lose a quarter at an arcade faster in a game cabinet or in a pinball machine?


https://arcadeblogger.com/2018/07/06/arcade-holy-grail-the-pinball-circus/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAtVBb8rOok
https://archive.org/details/TILTTheBattleToSavePinballDisc2Extras



Microtopics:



Dog ownership.
A living creature that just wanders around the house.
Picking up warm soft weird thing.
Cracking open a cold one.
Computers flush with science data.
The deepest images humans have ever taken.
Finding distances to individual galaxies.
Listicles you can peruse.
Picking a galaxy and naming it after yourself.
Bug Mars 2.
The Glass Universe.
Hiring women and calling them computers.
A guy with a lot of free time and a gold nose.
Some public domain books being more readable than others.
Pun localization.
North American otaku tilting at windmills with their katanas.
How people pronounce quixotic and how they ought to pronounce quixotic.
Whether we respect English majors on this show.
Naming a character something weird and hoping nobody argues about the pronunciation hundreds of years from now.
Butthead as Don Quixote and Beavis as Sancho Panza.
The Great Cornholio tilting at windmills.
The era of translations that don't realize Don Quixote is a parody.
Part II of Don Quixote responding to Don Quixote fan fiction.
Don Coyote.
Sending Mario Maker back to Miguel Cervantes to see what he would make.
The kinds of books your parents would have on their shelf, back when that was the only thing available to read.
The 80s resurgence of New Age thought.
Mystic Places.
The Shin Megami Tensei section in the library.
Where to find the books that teach you magic in the public library.
The canonical map of reported UFO sightings worldwide.
Books for the kind of person who thinks Aleister Crowley is cool.
The Spaceships of Ezekiel.
The JWST iceberg.
The Distant Astronomical Objects iceberg.
A tin can and a string with a battery attached.
Hello, fellow phone owner.
A phone call asking you to log into a web site and read a message.
Funny ways to answer the phone.
E.B. Games, where you can get F-Zero for Zero.
The size of fortune cookies in the 1920s.
Nice things to do and be.
Desiderata vs. Deteriorata.
Advice giving poems.
Skin cancer is mid.
Casey Kasem quitting Transformers after they wrote an episode featuring Abdul, king of Carbombya.
Avoiding loud and aggressive persons.
Pinball getting harder and more complex over the course of a century.
Baffleball.
Pinball features to make things easier for beginners.
The quickest way to lose money on an arcade game.
Tilt-sensing plum bobs.
A weird kinetic sculpture that exists just for your entertainment.
The Black Hole for Personal Reasons.
A boring and easy pinball cabinet that you can play for an hour when you want to get sick of pinball.
Tilt: The Battle to Save Pinball.
Multidisc!
Pinball tables by George Gomez.
Pinball: not actually fun, but they did their best.
Free play skee-ball.
Pacific Pinball Museum and Musee Mecanique.
Twitter forgiveness.
Support Topic Lords

Lords:



Jonah
AC


Topics:



When was the last time you listened to a song backwards?
Decentralized manufacturing
Are there other terms like "foodies," to describe those who are super into universal bodily functions?
The Bathroom Line, by Jesse Thurston
Playtesting legos


Microtopics:



Pet Rock Dot Site
Whether rhythm is a kind of sound.
A rhythm synthesizer that produces control voltages.
All the things you could hypothetically like about New York City.
Crowded speculative real estate.
Canada's role as a fire hazard.
The power company in charge of all the wildfires.
What happened to Smokey the Bear.
Stopping for lobsters crossing the highway.
Whether Smokey the Bear died in his sleep.
Putting the oven on self clean and it cleans your whole house.
Bringing back Satanic Panic to make backmasking cool again.
Constructing a cliff that echoes backwards.
Musique Concrete.
The kind of people who would make an album in Csound.
Admitting that your music is hilarious.
Conlon Nancarrow's works for player piano.
Black MIDI.
Knowing that you should be adding a constraint to your assertion but not knowing what it should be.
If Conlon Nancarrow had only entered cryosleep.
Loading up a song in Sound Forge.
Squid Salmple.
Bluetooth: it works every time!
Virtual modular synthesizers with cool cable physics.
The etymology of backmasking.
If Wiktionary is so good, why isn't there a Wiktionary 2?
Franchising your rhythm box.
Doing each other's administrative work.
Doing a labor swap to get fresh eyes on your project.
Ubering to the trail head.
Imagine: paying rent for an office.
Poopsocking it on this family show.
The Armory.
Going back in time and having $14 million.
Selling your forehead as advertising space.
Joseph Circuit City Smith.
This man needs your help to remove his porn logo forehead tattoos.
Aspirational snake eye contacts.
Your contacts contact.
Antique sword knife bookmark charm sword knife pendants knife charms for bookmarks.
Going to the breathing club and breathing really hard.
The Hearty-Starty.
Trying to joke about a thing that turns out to just be a real thing.
A Facebook group for people who love shitting.
Blinkos and all the nuances of the ways they love to blink.
A whole world just for smelling.
How your heart doesn't stop every time you sneeze.
Green text vs. other colors of text.
The r/bluetext subreddit that's all about links to other web sites.
Nutty Gum and Fruit Spleggings.
Finding the one while in line to poop.
Going to college for like a year and one of the best things about it was the bathroom graffiti.
A chalkboard in the physics department's bathroom stall.
Help I'm trapped in the bathroom grout.
Peeing while trying to think of a poem.
Peeing your pants in the bathroom.
Don't Backmask Me, Bro.
Finding someone in a bar who wants to playtest your experimental game for three hours.
The movie Yesterday except for inventing Legos.
Following instructions as a way to fidget.
Trying to solve a difficult programming puzzle when someone comes up and starts biting you in the ass.
All the ways someone can be onboarded onto an experience.
Free HTML5 Games Tagged Idle.
Top Three Clickers.
Roguathia.
Waiting until you have more SP to select upgrades.
Support Topic Lords

Lords:



Chris
Dev


https://devinbusha.artstation.com/



Topics:



Taking Improv classes has been life changing.
Practicing 3 keyboard layouts at the same time
I bought store brand salt. You wouldn't think this would be a big deal but it turns out to be
I Once Snorted an Eight Ball with Santa, by Richie Zaborowske


https://www.havehashad.com/hadposts/i-once-snorted-an-eight-ball-with-santa

Are all creative ideas very derivative, or is it just my ideas


Microtopics:



Pickleball.
Weird shapes the birdie flies in.
The sport that has level design.
Mindful breathing.
You are now breathing mindfully.
Looking forward to being at square one.
Getting the real data once you stop paying attention.
Thespians in High School.
Spinning a wheel to figure out what emotion to feel.
Whether the yes and rule only works for comedy.
Pancakes. Are. Starchy.
Being late to your job that's on fire because you were stuck behind the fire truck.
Celebrating your own failures.
How to play Lemmings in 2024.
Self-esteem.
Immediately vibing with a new sport.
Autotuning except it's completely manual.
A bunch of joysticks that you twiddle with your fingers to do letters.
Colemak vs. Colemak DH.
Keyboards that are laid out in columns.
Splitting up the typing test into QWERTY, Dvorak and Colemak.
Palm Pilot Graffiti.
The Lord's Prayer in Gregg.
Shorthand. (Originally called Briefhand.)
Good ciphers for room escape puzzles.
Are QR codes based on the mazes in Zelda 2?
Flaky sea salt vs. coarse sea salt.
Adding a biting experience to make your food more heterogeneous.
Edible chemistry.
The last time you pinched salt.
Audially-rewarding salt grinders.
Science Youtuber Hank Green.
Warning pregnant women to not eat too much salty licorice.
Supertaster-outing Tic Tacs that regular people love but supertasters immediately vomit.
We've got a level six kaiju supertaster on our hands!
The guy who gets paid too much to taste ice cream.
The kind of person who doesn't salt their food but instead repeatedly licks a salt lick throughout the meal.
Heads swirling around like snow globes.
A poem that doesn't do anything with line breaks but does do something interesting with sentence lengths.
A poem that you might read on a bathroom stall.
Wearing the little hat and pulling on the cord that makes the horn toot.
The ecology that grows around the dumpster.
The crane swinging porta potties around.
An extremely expensive way to have fun
Heading towards the era of having kids.
Asking for payment for software that is not being maintained.
Minesweeper but X.
An idea that is worth doing but not obviously worth doing.
How to make Missile Command fun in a new and interesting way.
A boxing essay with questionable authenticity.
Strategies for enjoying Frog Fractions.
Rangers and the new way they handle animals.
Yes-anding whatever ideas come to you.
Ancient primals that were interlocked in battle.
Someone thinking of an idea.
Constantly listening for cues.
What do inanimate objects do?
Buying a giant bag of googly eyes and putting them on everything.
Not posting on Twitter.
Support Topic Lords

Lords:



Jeff


http://dopeassvideogames.com/

Tyriq


https://fourbitfriday.itch.io/



Topics:



The shame of not remembering any good jokes for kids and having to write jokes on the spot for impatient children
What's your favorite genre to consume that you have no interest in making (or think you'd suck at?)
High Sidin'


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5INAxH1HD7s

Poetry


https://poets.org/poem/poetry

Every mammal has a fish


Microtopics:



Line of sight for the fog of war.
Plugging unplugging.
How to keep looking at TikTok when your phone is destroyed.
Telling your kid that Youtube broke.
Youtube videos that teach your child how to give a thumbs up.
Having more kids because it pays for itself.
Why did the princess have no dresses?
Explaining to a four year old about the $20 Sack Pyramid.
Weaning yourself off of saying /s by saying "wocka wocka" instead.
Teaching your kids better standards for comedy.
Snow White did this and then Belle was there and Ariel was there with her human legs.
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen but for making pie.
Looking up knock knock jokes online.
Your kid finding your secret hoard of popsicle sticks and realizing you didn't just make all those jokes up from your head.
Things you want to have made but don't want to make
Trying to surprise yourself with your own level design.
Wallowing in the stuckness.
Whether game developers know when they're making a bad game.
Playtesting the shit out of a game because you enjoy playtesting so much.
Questionable hip hop.
Thrashy hyperpop.
Full-time access to a green screen and what it does to your head.
Comedy FMV games.
Making a career out of making bad art except it's funny and having to live with yourself.
Approachable game projects.
Pivoting from making an action RPG to making a Vampire Survivors clone in the space of a weekend.
Making a bunch of efforts and they're all terrible.
Whispering into a distortion pedal.
Putting your vocals through a bunch of effects pedals because your lyrics are terrible.
Enjoying an art creation process until you get too self conscious and ruin it.
Wallowing in the stuckness.
Making art and never showing it to anybody.
A twin stick shooter that's just for me.
Game Heads.
Onlookers getting hyphy.
"Side Show" by 415.
Back when Oakland was in the 415 area code.
Turning tight ones.
Turning brodies in an intersection while commuters look at your 15-inch subwoofers.
Rogue car events.
Game: the Games and Music Experience.
A lowrider with the entirely wrong number of switches.
Whether Boots Riley and Too Short still live in Oakland.
Aspirational trailer music choices.
Car Stealth: drive around a corner and hide.
Missing Rock Band but not missing it enough to install Fortnite.
Initiating taunts in Fortnite by strumming the guitar controller.
The immovable critic twinkling his skin.
Imaginary gardens with real toads in them.
Poetry with a diss track vibe to it.
Good going, dumbass, you got into poetry.
Whether poetry should rhyme.
Discriminating against business documents.
Putting a poem on genius.com and adding a "wocka wocka" annotation after every joke.
Spending an hour searching for animal names followed by "fish"
Which fish have the thickest bones?
Buffalo Fish Wings.
A fish that is way too big and shaped like the letter D.
Is Beyonce a Nicki Minaj friends??
Grandma's big bowl of worsties.
Energy drinks that make you want to disassemble a clock radio.
Drinking C4.
The guy you know who always has at least three Red Bulls on him at all times.
Bringing home a one-of-a-kind Monet even though you know your roommate is a Monet fiend and will eat it immediately.
The Master P of devouring Kit Kats.
The Queen of Bites and Sips.
Your duty to eat snacks before they go bad.
Eating one marshmallow right now.
The shitposty garbage that made Twitter fun.
Here's some pants pooping jokes, wocka wocka.
Support Topic Lords

Lords:



Mike
Jake


Topics:



Cameras are peaking -- what's next?
Is the mysterious disappearing, or just mystery?
Preschool security practices
At the Feast in the Great Hall, by Ursula Leguin


https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/1-EFinaN.png

It's not boring to talk about dreams


Microtopics:



The great state of Maine.
A project you've been working on for a long time.
Inventing a game developer community in Michigan.
Meaningful distinguishers on normal camera use.
A lukewarm decisionmaking process.
Computational photography.
Samsung's fake moon.
A camera that just guesses what you want to see so you don't even need to take the photo.
A massive endless feed of the same photo with different people in it.
Why people use cameras.
Whether photos exist.
Late stages of the product category.
People who need Photoshop to do their job.
Photo mode in real life.
A photo you can take later.
Adding a filter to make the guy in the background less likable.
Meals for the Ages
How to get from here to perfect ubiquitous service surveillance.
Theatrically pretending to be hit by a stationary car.
Going to the Gallagher movie and getting sprayed with watermelon.
There's just the one Bigfoot, it's the same Bigfoot every time.
Tomato sauces that are still delicious even if you learned the recipe from the Internet and not from a grandma.
Mysterious things backing into the shadows so they can remain mysterious.
Protecting mystery wherever you find it.
The Museum of Jurassic Technology.
Stepping inside someone else's very strange brain.
Dawn Wall.
An intensely detailed exploration of the surface of a cliff.
I wonder what it's like on the fucking moon?
Who painted the iconic cover of the Wrinkle in Time paperback.
The shoot-em-up cabinet you saw in the canteen at the US Embassy in Monrovia, Liberia before the first Liberian civil war and have never been able to find since.
A reaction to the lack of organic mystery in our lives.
The Case of the Missing Hit and Searching for Sugarman.
Wash over me, True Story.
Which phone checked the kid out of preschool.
Being on the list of services the insurance companies consider to have checked various boxes.
We got pins. We can do that.
The three bad four-digit pins.
Streamlining the process of rapidly accounting for all the children.
Developing a system that would deterministically move the needle in a useful way.
Blundering in the brightness.
Telling two events from the same perspective.
Ugly crying at your desk in a public workspace.
Spending way more time not alive than alive.
Something that we can experience on either side of our lives.
A Fire Take from Jake.
Waiter stress dreams.
A skill that you can hone.
One of the more fun channels in the discord.
Holding an increasingly large bag of stuff.
Waking up laughing until you realize your dream was not funny.
The consciousness wall between you and visualization.
Training yourself to let your mental imagery be visible.
Seeing clumps of color and interpreting them.
Doing an editing pass on your dreams before relating it to your friends.
Jay-Z's favorite bleu cheese Milkshakes.
Screwball horror.
A splash of furry content.
Support Topic Lords