Lords:

• Mark
  • Mark's top albums of 2025: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1InKh07sllCLF6cu9za0yhQvmGVC3ZHvM162XI1u1S9A
• Shirley

Topics:

• If you want to be at the front of the stage at a show, just go there, literally no one is stopping you - or - THE ONLY THING YOU LACK IS WILL
• Elves and Using Religion to Protect Natural Spaces
• It's illegal to mod your EV to have custom engine noises
• Litany Against Fear
  • https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Litany_Against_Fear
• How to stop drinking coffee

Microtopics:

• The Splintered Oar, by Weft.
• An album about labor rights in Kentucky.
• Reading aloud to your friends and family.
• The siren song of sitting on the couch and watching TV.
• Time as the crow flies.
• Measuring time as the crow looks at the clock.
• Wanting to be right in front of the stage and just going there.
• Paying hundreds of dollars to stand in an extremely loud room.
• Getting after it with an open heart.
• Everyone standing at the same height as the musicians playing live music.
• An active member of a live music community in a major US city.
• Physically engaging with the music.
• Letting go of your concern for the eyes upon you.
• Standing in place for the entire four or five bands playing this show without ever leaving your spot to pee.
• Working the merch booth.
• Unloading a truckload of positive energy into the space in front of the stage.
• Mosh pit comfort.
• Bands graduating to the next level of popularity.
• Fighting your way to the front of the stage so you can not look at the band.
• Luxuriating in the freedom of a shared experience of joy.
• Giving back to the artists you love by screaming at them while they play music.
• Becoming part of a local scene.
• People who believe in elves and people who pretend to believe in elves.
• Looking forward to when your child might one day bring you boba.
• Elf kayfabe.
• Mall Santa breaking kayfabe.
• Whether the mall Santa has to keep up the act even when he's alone in the shower.
• Reindeer-powered Yaris.
• Scandinavian elf lore.
• Post 9/11 supporting of the troops.
• Arguments to which there is no possible rebuttal, such as "you can't build a mini mall because the elves live here."
• Picking a random Wikipedia article about Nordic folklore and finding out how many metal bands are named after it.
• How few murders there are in the modern black metal scene.
• A looping sample of Snoop Dogg saying "this Volt is in reverse."
• Automotive engineers deliberately making the engine noise play a power chord.
• Instead of banning whistle tips, legislators mandating that they play a 7th chord, and also that the driver must know enough music theory to explain why they chose that chord.
• Being on the sideshow mailing list so you can attend every sideshow.
• All the different motions you have to make to wash the entire surface of both hands.
• A poem about not allowing fear to conquer you while you wash your hands.
• A poem with a specific utility.
• The lifelong pursuit of being okay with your own mortality.
• Trying to learn to be happy with what you have.
• How I fucked myself up.
• How many waves coffee has.
• Genetic sense of thirst.
• Making up a magic number of ounces of water to drink.
• Getting a water bottle and putting a cool sticker on it.
• The lion's share of behavioral addiction.
• Going downstairs into your morning environment.
• The ritual pleasure of fidgeting with a cigarette.
  
• Quitting smoking and having to find other rituals to fill the space smoking used to fill.
• Your brain being like "remember cigarettes? That was cool" and you're like "that's a weird thing to bring up right now, brain."
• Having a puff on a cigarette to find out if that's enough to get you addicted again.
• What it would take to make smoking look uncool.
• How much easier it is to quit smoking now that they have fidget spinners.
• All the little adjustments you make to make your life more tolerable.
• Embers of the Dawn by Bronze Hall.
• Pumping your fist while you think about elves.

Lords:

• SJ
  • https://neutralzonehotel.com/
• Benjamin

Topics:

• TD Place Arena in Ottawa is really weird in an interesting way
• Learning to ice skate when you're 40
• Is this keyboard layout more sensible than QWERTY?
  • https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/VfpwY7be.jpg
• She Walks in Beauty, by Lord Byron
  • https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43844/she-walks-in-beauty

Microtopics:

• Neutral Zone Hotel.
• Heated Rivalry.
• What a loon sounds like.
• Going to Canada but never going outside.
• A real dickhead in the history of hockey.
• Needing a new hockey arena and a new football stadium and putting one on top of the other.
• Backwards ice.
• Canadian Tire Center.
• The Ottawa '67s.
• Realizing that your two arenas on top of one another will collapse instantly if you ever hold two events at once.
• Asbestos sprinkles falling from the ceiling and delighting the crowd.
• Ice skaters falling over because the ice is too cold.
• What's up with fighting in hockey?
• When ice hockey goaltenders got masks.
• Regulating sports violence with additional violence.
• Spontaneous vs. pre-arranged hockey fights.
• The Gordie Howe Hat Trick.
• A triple double, except instead of impacting the outcome of the game, it impacts your soul.
• The Punch-up In Piestany and other bench-clearing brawls.
• Hockey's Post-Headshot Era.
• Learning new skills as an adult.
• The Kraken Community Iceplex.
• Complaining about swizzles for months.
• Pumping your legs to propel yourself forward.
• Swizzles vs. backwards swizzles.
• The point at which ice skating classes branch out into hockey classes and figure skating classes.
• Beer League teams.
• Born knowing how to skate.
• Jusse Saros erasure.
• Hockey players getting concussed by swimming while drunk.
• Circle to confirm and X to back out.
• A keyboard with all the calculator buttons on it.
• Interviewing the animator who designed the weird keyboard in Bubblegum Crisis.
• An argument for Colemak over Dvorak.
• The Z, X, C and V keys staying right where they are.
• Switching keyboard layouts to keep your college roommates from screwing with you.
• Why boredom is a good thing.
• Desperately trying to fill today's 16 waking hours with something, anything.
• Making content for the Internet.
• Cloudless climes and starry skies.
• Whether Lord Byron got his title by being on the show.
• Trying to rhyme brow and glow.
• Whether they had non-rhyming poetry 200 years ago.
• Only remembering your anxiety dreams.
• The recurring dream where you explore stone stairs leading down from a decrepit old fishing house, going deeper and deeper each time you have the dream until you finally get to the bottom of the stairs and find out what your whole life has been leading to.
• Tiny hockey community discords.

Lords:

• AP
  • https://store.steampowered.com/app/2364580/Titanium_Court/
• Alexander

Topics:

• The 5th Ramsey number
• Why Mr. Satan (from Dragonball) is one of my favorite characters in all of literature
• The Odyssey 2's ROM sprites
  • https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/Evl0wxIY.png
  • https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/gNkdwtoA.jpg
• Search Lizard Vagina And You Shall Find by Patricia Lockwood
• Why do drugs have two names? What's up with that?

Microtopics:

• Recording the fakest possible sounding laughter in case someone makes a joke that doesn't work.
• Going on a nice short walk.
• The PNW, where the frogs are a-croaking.
• Going out to see the dog pee.
• Lying down and pretending to sleep
• Explaining to the doctor that you didn't sleep at all and he's like "that's not what your brain waves said!"
• Dreaming that you've been awake for 48 hours.
• Path of totality vs. regular shitty boring eclipse.
• Consume Me.
• Attempting to become hot in high school.
• Whether unwishlisting and rewishlisting a game helps.
• Very large prime numbers that are only two apart.
• Prolific math speed freaks.
• Whether the aliens know the fifth Ramsey Number and are just quizzing us.
• Aliens visiting and sharing the ultimate secret to doing laundry.
• Sentient arithmetic getting angry.
• How do kangaroos clean their pouches?
• Topics that don't cause listenership to drop precipitously.
• Thinking about Mr. Satan in the bath.
• Localizing Mr. Satan for the American audience.
• A cartoon of two muscly guys screaming at each other, getting louder and higher pitched over the course of five minutes, to the point that you start worrying about the health of the voice actors.
• An episode of TV that's just 22 pure minutes of building tension.
• Goku's hair turning blond so that the manga artist doesn't have to laboriously color his hair black al on every panel.
• Everyone in the story growing strong enough to blow up the planet on a whim.
• Everyone on Earth showing up to cheer on Mr. Satan.
• When wrestlers stopped maintaining kayfabe outside of the live show.
• King Lear asking the audience if they can see the corpse breathing.
• Giving annoying characters a moment of sincerity and/or heroism.
• Enthusiastically chanting for Satan.
• Witnessing the total horror of the universe and then being like "I didn't just see that"
• Mr. Satan convincing the evil alien not to destroy the Earth by showing him a cool puppy.
• How is Goku going to prevent spam bots from registering accounts?
• A weird lens on this strange universe.
• Sincerity punchlines.
• Behold, an anime horse!
• Top 37 Classiest Satans.
• Death losing every game against Bill and Ted.
• Coloring the up arrow green to represent a tree in your skiing game.
• The division symbol you learned in grade school and never used again.
• When you want to shoot a golf course, a plane or a tiny flat cake.
• Collecting your favorite medieval manuscript scans.
• The medieval scribe deciding on a whim to write the next passage in Greek.
• The guy plucking penises off of the penis bush and putting them in a basket.
• My brain, and the bad sunning lizard inside it.
• Here is some pornography, if it will help you.
• Great job, Canada.
• Poems that foresee themselves being uploaded to the Internet.
• One of the early "isn't it weird that this literary person is on Twitter writing shitposts?"
• My Least Favorite Antibiotic.
• Wrapping your antibiotic in a tortilla.
  
• I love an antibiotic with a nickname.
• Magic acts you can only do once. (Because they kill you.)
• Settling Space. (And why we shouldn't do it.)
• Establishing legal precedent for selling moon rocks.
• Can God get a thorn stuck in his paw?
• There's No P in Thomson. Let's try to keep it that way.

Lords:

• Jin
  • https://awesomedonut.github.io/
• Brad
  • https://rainwarrior.ca/

Topics:

• The shareware games business model
• Thoughts on how to define femininity?
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqloPw5wp48
• The Great Molasses Flood
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrnRNfXm_k4
• Entrance by Rainer Maria Rilke
  • https://poemsintranslation.blogspot.com/2010/10/rilke-entrance-from-german.html
• Combining magic and science in science fantasy.

Microtopics:

• Lizard for the NES.
• Retrofuturism in ancient China.
• Silkpunk Origins.
• Ultima-inspired indie RPGs from 1994.
• Passing around public domain games on floppy disks.
• Registering shareware to get rid of the nag screen.
• Adventure game hint books as a second channel of income.
• Asking your mom to get a money order to register the shareware version of Impulse Tracker so you can get the Stereo Wav Writer.
• Front loading all the good levels in the shareware episode and selling the crap in the registered episodes.
• The Ur-Quan Masters.
• Printing to PDF.
• Uploading your music to mp3.com.
• Cracking shareware using a known plaintext attack.
• Drawing an image with so much entropy that the Save Robot dances for longer than usual and then plays a sad sound.
• A three hour deep dive on the very popular vampire novel Twilight.
• Going online and googling masculine and/or feminine traits.
• The Four Pillars of Femininity.
• Pants: they're for barbarians.
• Whether Stephanie Meyer was trying to write a treatise on idealized gender roles or whether she was just writing what she thought was cool and fun.
• Popular depictions of women who are masculine in behavior but feminine in appearance.
• Why can't your girlfriend both look like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and eat hamburgers like Buffy the Vampire Slayer?
• Why women work so well as horror protagonists.
• Do people cry less in Marvel movies?
• Someone crying so hard in a movie that you start to worry about the actor's social life.
• Tolkien adding a second female character to Lord of the Rings just so he can make the "I am no man" linguistic joke.
• Boston: it's not a year.
• Painting your giant molasses tank brown so it's harder to notice that it's leaking.
• All the children in town walking up and licking the giant leaking molasses tank whenever they feel like a snack.
• Waking up in a pile of dead bodies with your mouth full of molasses.
• Big Enough to be Horrible.
• Getting your architectural plans approved by a government body.
• Gilding the lily when the lily is already extremely memetic.
• Fame: look what it does to people.
• Building a giant tank of anything in the middle of a city.
• Where do you put your 50 million gallons of molasses?
• What happens if you poke the Demon Core with a screwdriver?
• Scientists getting too excited to keep being careful.
• A black and slender tree.
• A word kept in the mouth to grow.
• Eveningfall.
• Putting a tree in the sky while you're creating the world.
• The game you're making giving you ideas about the game you're making.
• Navigating the scientific method in a fantastical universe.
• Lit RPG.
• Dungeon Crawler Carl.
• Using a quarter of the words in your novel to explain the rules of the world like a board game manual.
• Jedi using their powers to boil water for tea.
• Enslaving Jedi to run your steam engine with their mind powers.
• Jedi Inflation.
• Two words that sound good together and now it's your name.

Lords:

• Kory
  • https://kbones.fun/
• Andy
  • https://highcadence.online/

Topics:

• The Gametank
  • https://gametank.zone/
  • https://www.crowdsupply.com/clydeware/gametank
• I swear to God, I'm going to talk about auctions and auctions in games, it's super interesting and I don't want to get preempted a third time.
  • Esper says: "There’s actually a game coming out in a week where you break into museums to heist real-life African artifacts with the goal of returning them to their rightful homes! It’s called Relooted and looks pretty cool." https://store.steampowered.com/app/3255890/Relooted/
• Winston figured out how to watch TV at 2AM
• Dragonfly Catcher, by Chiyo-ni
  • https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@gingerbeardman/115933940306986226
• I just lost a snapshot of my life in mp3 format.

Microtopics:

• Multi-time lords.
• K-Bones dot fun.
• CachyOS.
• Scrubbing topics against the corrugated metal washboard of discussion.
• Leaning into the microphone and saying "topics."
• Helping Andy quit his day job tonight.
• What MAGfest used to stand for.
• Playing with SGI hardware in the Old-Ass Computer Room.
• Game consoles that output square video.
• Getting pixels into the framebuffer of the Fairchild Channel F.
• Seeing a fun puzzle to solve but not solving it because you already have way too many projects.
• Through-hole soldering.
• Replacing volatile memory with F-RAM.
• Preparing to have fun.
• Reaching the point in your life where you don't want to bother with the war game, you just want to paint the miniatures.
• What do you call it when you pair up with three people?
• Throupling up for the next 45 minutes.
• Who has time to both solder things and play video games?
• Why Robotron 2084 was more difficult in emulation than in the arcade.
• How to pronounce SNES.
• Shmups slowing down when there are more objects on the screen, and game designers incorporating that into the game design.
• The ZX Spectrum Next and the Mega 65.
• A game console that only 150 people own and they get super excited whenever a new game comes out for it.
• Game development like a caveman would do it.
• Whether more than one person can take the under.
• The rules of Monopoly as written vs. the folk rules.
• eBay auctions as an extremely boring game.
• First price vs. second price auctions.
• Visiting the real money auction house in Diablo and finding out just how little your time and effort is worth.
• The Gold Standard of the Hat Meta.
• An evolutionary branch of PVP that's distinct from Yomi.
• What to do when you want to play Avalon Hill's Dune.
• Fence Lara Croft's Stolen Treasures.
• Lara Croft's Stolen Antiquities Simulator.
• Winning a bunch of Saltybucks on Saltybet.
• Age-appropriate behavior.
• Speedrun watching TV at 2 AM.
• Live and Don't Learn.
• Explaining jet lag to a two year old.
• Watching MTV's Liquid Television block until 2:30 AM.
• Finally sitting your son down to have the Aeon Flux talk.
• Haiku that end "that's it, that's the haiku" even though that's too many syllables.
• Hiking in the wilderness and encountering or not encountering a dragonfly.
• People at risk of owning a Game Tank.
• Broadly appealing messages sent out to farm likes.
• The psychological cost of having 20,000 people following you.
• Choosing your Mastodon instance based on what domain name William Gibson thought was funny.
• The Mazzy Star song that's on the Batman Forever soundtrack.
• iPod shuffles always insisting you're not pregnant no matter how much you pee on them.
• Ephemeral preservation of a time in your life.
• A biological weapon that removes your ability to perceive music as music.
• You die young, or you live long enough to see Nine Inch Nails become dad rock.
• Music Inspired by the Soundtrack.
• Putting your MP3 collection on striped RAID arrays for the benefit of future archaeologists.