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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
  • 328. Darth Icky

    328. Darth Icky
    Feb 2 2026
    Lords: JesseAlex https://insertcredit.com/show/https://discord.gg/dcofficial Topics: 90s Gen X "Internet High Weirdness" culture: SubGenius, DiLingo, Steve Jackson, the Looneys, KoLWriting a podcast about video games every week as someone who doesn’t really play many video games anymoreThe mystery of BunnyROM https://bunnyrom.neocities.org/Junk by Richard Wilbur https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/Al2MMuFX.pnghttps://github.com/jdonland/bookmarksDisney saved Star Wars by buying it from Lucasfilm. This is what Saved Star Wars looks like.Cycling's hour record https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/52/Mens_hour_records_progression.svg/2560px-Mens_hour_records_progression.svg.png Microtopics: A gold star Canadian. Cousin show Insert Credit. One of the world's foremost experts on DC Comics.Filling in the gaps with bonus episodes. The lost episode of topic lords that might one day be produced.Spreadsheet Secrets. Detritus and ruins of the culture that came before yours. (Gen-X.)Whether Steve Jackson is still doing the GURPS thing.Where did Gen-X come from, and why did it disappear?Your personal relationship with They Might Be Giants. The weirdos who first colonized the Internet in search of the community they weren't finding in their lives. Nerds riding high on military funding and founding new religions with varying degrees of mockery.British comedy crossing the ocean and losing its cultural context, so a generation of American nerds grow up with a more absurdist sense of humor than the previous generations.Sitting at your computer running IRC in 1996, staring at the screen waiting for someone to say something. Classical Education as a shared cultural context so rich people can understand each other's jokes.Halfway into the 2020s, still thinking about the Roaring Twenties whenever anyone names the decade. Everybody forgetting how to group history by decade after a twenty years of not easily being able to talk about "the 00s" and "the 10s."Playing video games from the ages of 5 to 20 and then stopping forever. Asking some of the most thoughtful people you know questions about video games. The exhaustion of trying to keep video games in your life. Artists and critics with opinions that are wildly out of step with their audience.Video game companies that have great logos.People who are so good at telling interesting stories about the bad video games that they're playing that they convince you to buy the game and then you're like "where's the interesting game they talked about"Talking to the same oldbies every week.An 18 year old kid obsessed with the Atari Jaguar wandering into the middle-aged video game club and everyone is like "sickos face yes emoji"Trying to track down the manufacturer of Digital Princess Friend. Mysterious ROM images that nobody knows the origin of because nobody asked. A Tamagotchi where your little guy can be a fighter plane or Sponge Bob.Mysteriously good Tamagotchi software floating around. The reason M&Ms come in different colors.An egg that your umbrella with an eye can hatch from. Why you can't ship a container full of cheap junk to the United States any more. Middle English style poetry.Sheer shards of shattered tumblers.Modern English alliterative verse.It's cool what people do with words. Paying so much attention to the alliteration that you miss the meaning of the poem.All the Babu Frik Funko Pops that will still be around long after all the stars go out. Hephaestus' Hammer, all gunked up in microplastics.Quoting other poems in the middle of your poem. Publishing a book of all the poems we've read on Topic Lords and then being sued for copyright infringement. A poem that originated on Jim's fridge. Diminishing Mandalorian Returns. The goddamned Ewoks shit.The Droids cartoon.The future of Star Wars: jokes about Star Wars??The Day the Clown Cried of Star Wars.The angriest you've ever been watching a movie. The third good Star Wars movie.Stealing good ideas from cool fiction.One guy who got lucky a couple times and a thousand yes men enabling him for the next 40 years.Planet Moriband.Finally finding a guy you can call Mace Windu.Waiting for Jar-Jar.Sometimes you just need drivel that you like.Buying a tangerine and noticing that it's a Star Wars-branded tangerine. Technology improving the way we interact with wind resistance. 1890 guy on his velocipede getting mad at all the new Space Bikes.Instituting new rules stating that your bicycle has to look like a bicycle.Ivory Tower Cycle Men. Vampire Tactics.The most prestigious world record in professional cycling. Keeping track of the world record best dress at a fashion show. What about Funny Cars? What's so funny about them?Trying to break the Merckx record using Merckx's original bicycle and outfit. Everyone tying the same world record forever.Riding 270 miles a day for a year. Walking to work 23 miles a day, both ways, because you love suffering and...
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    1 hr and 19 mins
  • 327. Damn, That's A Good Kidney!

    327. Damn, That's A Good Kidney!
    Jan 26 2026

    Lords:

    • Josette
      • https://www.josetteseitz.com/
      • https://www.instagram.com/jo_seitz/
    • Daniel

    Topics:

    • The overlap between musicians and rhythm game players
    • Figure Skating and the upcoming Olympics
    • In this short Life that only lasts an hour by Emily Dickinson
      • https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56456/in-this-short-life-that-only-lasts-an-hour-1292
    • The Reality of Hope
      • https://www.therealityofhope.co.uk
    • Is time travel media really that bad?

    Microtopics:

    • 3D art spaces and the Virtual Burning Man experience.
    • What were we talking about at lunch?
    • The new kind of Christmas light that's reminiscent of the old kind of Christmas light.
    • A nice soft blue.
    • The LED lights that hurt the most.
    • Mounting recessed lights in the eaves and lighting them up with the worst gamer RGB patterns.
    • Beige keyboards with three green LEDs on them that you can animate because they're memory-mapped.
    • Paradiddle.
    • Learning to play drums in VR.
    • Paradiddle for Snapchat Glasses.
    • Video game audio latency vs. digital synthesizer latency.
    • The Bemani guitar game that inspired Guitar Hero.
    • Guitar Freaks vs. Guitar Hero as a case study in how the same idea can be executed very differently getting very different results
    • How singing is scored in Rock Band.
    • Finding new music via the Rock Band games.
    • Beat Saber Library Managers.
    • Solid beams of light.
    • Ice Dancing.
    • Whether you can train rhythm.
    • Brother-sister ice skating couples.
    • Which animals can learn rhythm.
    • Representing your ice rink.
    • What to do after you've spent your life training but what you were training for didn't work out?
    • Ice skater unions.
    • Going to the Olympics with your mom to watch the figure skating.
    • Alysa Liu.
    • Meeting America's Princess and she's not a nice lady.
    • Finding the right coach at age 7.
    • Sports therapists.
    • The disposition to perform your best under pressure.
    • Exercising and practicing at the expense of nearly everything else you could be doing with your time.
    • What to do with your life now that you're no longer spending all your time training for the Olympics.
    • Missing your friend's 11th birthday party because you're busy training for the Olympics.
    • Giving seven year olds a test to see if they do well under pressure and if not, telling their parents not to try to get this one into the Olympics.
    • Grit.
    • What boot camp is for.
    • Training to be the best person in the world at field stripping a rifle.
    • Still living this life, which is great.
    • Still being responsible for other people's taxes.
    • Looking forward to the new year because it's tax time.
    • How your life might've been different if your parents insisted you go to college.
    • We've got learning at home but we don't have socialization at home.
    • Studying how to study without knowing how to study.
    • Passing the classes you were interested in at that moment and not doing so well in the test.
    • Two friends in the furry community.
    • Telling your friend about your medical condition in VR Chat.
    • A documentary about kidney transplants in the furry community.
    • Damn, That's a Good Kidney!
    • Filming a documentary in VR Chat.
    • What normal people think about time travel fiction.
    • Yes, you have to use your hands, and yes it's like a baby's toy.
    • Reading a piece of fiction because you're hoping to have a good time.
    • Which time-travel movies have reached the heights of popular culture.
    • Having this 360-degree camera just sitting around and trying to figure out what movie to make with it.
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    1 hr and 6 mins
  • 326. A Dead Quarterback Can Still Score

    326. A Dead Quarterback Can Still Score
    Jan 19 2026

    Lords:

    • Cort
    • Ben

    Topics:

    • Oh man, remember the Geek Code?
      • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geek_Code
    • I discovered a fun fact about my neighborhood
    • Every 5x6 Nonogram
      • https://puzzarium.com/every-5x6-nonogram
    • The Calf Path by Sam Foss
      • https://poets.org/poem/calf-path
    • Phillip Rivers

    Microtopics:

    • Secret Playstation Things.
    • Transposing a matrix in SIMD.
    • Reclaiming your plug.
    • Trying and failing to use Libby.
    • Failing to check out library books from your toilet.
    • State-sanctioned piracy.
    • The restaurant where you had the dinner for your wedding.
    • The "my wife" voice.
    • Suddenly having nieces.
    • Hadad and Barney on Black Square Day.
    • The Talos Principal DLC.
    • The Geek Code Era.
    • VMS or OS/2 as a defining feature of your personality.
    • Dilbert, Perl, Doom, and X-Files: all equally culturally relevant to this day.
    • The Natural Bears Classification System for Gay Men.
    • The Human Code.
    • Your favorite grocery store's end-of-year recap.
    • The story of a Venezuelan woman between age 30 and 55, and her top 2000 interests.
    • Your favorite vowel in text messages you've sent this year.
    • What they call that AE vowel.
    • Speedrunning your entire email history in a weekend.
    • The Miracle Mile, where all the tar pits are.
    • Noted monster Sean "Diddy" Combs.
    • Two hip hop producers getting mad at each other.
    • Putting a plaque at your hotel explaining that Jim Morrison did not die at this hotel.
    • Being the plaque you want to see in the world.
    • Whether the Museum of Jurassic Technology has reopened after the fire.
    • A very earnest museum about a history that never was.
    • Wandering around dazed after every 5x5 nonogram is solved.
    • Doing your part to serve humanity by solving nonograms.
    • Do you remember where you were when Every 5x5 Nonogram Section 303 was finished?
    • Why a dippy bird can't keep you online.
    • Gesturing at the idea of collectively solving a problem.
    • Why we haven't heard from Peter Molyneux in a while.
    • What three digit numbers nonogram solvers think are interesting.
    • Sending 96 million solved nonograms into space as proof to alien life that humans are still capable of collective action.
    • Feeling bad about having installed an ad blocker and loading up a four hour block of ads from 80s TV.
    • Being prosecuted for use of ad blockers.
    • Look at that smirk. That's a man who knows he's preaching but getting away with it.
    • Getting a deck of flash cards to learn all of the pentameters.
    • Three iambs and a reverse iamb.
    • Your favorite good poems and your favorite shitpost poems.
    • Tony Gang Flame War.
    • Refusing to tackle the 40 year old quarterback after his wallet falls out on the field and the photos of his ten children unfold.
    • The median age of football players rising into retirement age as teenagers learn about the health risks and refuse to participate.
    • Using NBA 2K as a metaphor for the decline of civilization.
    • LA finally getting a football team again. (They have two now.)
    • Whether they're still playing Starcraft.
    • Broken 19 year olds who can't play Starcraft any more because their APMs are too low.
    • The experience of attending a live e-Sports event.
    • Whether they sell hot dogs and beer to the crowd at the live League of Legends event or if it's all GamerGrub and Feastables.
    • A Youtube shitpost made in Garry's Mod.
    • Channing Tatum playing the toilet in the Skibidi Toilet movie.
    • Al Gore: still alive?
    • Whether Wilford Brimley got plastic surgery to look that old.
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    1 hr and 4 mins
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