Topic Lords cover art

Topic Lords

Topic Lords

By: 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.© 2026 Jim Stormdancer Art
Episodes
  • 346. Adam Doesn’t Want To Get Touchy-Feely With That

    346. Adam Doesn’t Want To Get Touchy-Feely With That
    Jun 8 2026
    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 interestingThe 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 dwarfsWeird 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 fuck 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.
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    1 hr and 7 mins
  • 345. Is the Bass Pro Shop Pyramid Visible From Space?

    345. Is the Bass Pro Shop Pyramid Visible From Space?
    Jun 1 2026
    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/91436410https://saint-arthur.tumblr.com/post/146680746144/riding-immortal-on-the-seeking-roadBay Area Airport Naming DramaThe 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 fuckin' 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!
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    1 hr and 7 mins
  • 344. All Teeth Are Equally Smooth in the Eyes of the Lord

    344. All Teeth Are Equally Smooth in the Eyes of the Lord
    May 25 2026
    Lords: LenaCory Topics: Re: Cory's teeth topic, there's so many artists making teethIt would actually rule to be immortal, and all those stories about how it's not are just copeHow 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.
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    58 mins
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