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• Post #2484502

  The department that decides what to make thought the world was ready for mushroom bacon. The department that designs the packaging decided to avoid the word "mushroom" at all costs. #food

• Post #2099624

  Topic Lords #340: Too Young for Doom, ft. Matt and Cort. We discuss Doom Modding, the Boston Marathon Stampede, secrets in games becoming grotesque, and Dammit I'm Mad by Demetri Martin. https://topiclords.com/too-young-for-doom

• Post #2054319

  A few years ago someone tried to Venmo me $20 but I didn't have Venmo. Eventually Venmo gave up trying to email me about the $20 that's waiting for me, and I assume they kept it for themselves. A few months ago I ordered a burrito at a food truck and when it came time to pay they said they don't take credit card, only Venmo. They apologized and just let me have the burrito. Everything works out in the end.

• Post #1640922

  In Tears of the Kingdom and OG The Legend of Zelda, you start with three hearts. (Probably other Zeldas too, but these are the ones I've played recently.) Losing a single hit point is a disaster and you track and protect each meticulously. TotK maxes out at 38 hearts and Zelda 1 at 16, but endgame health is more likely ~20 and ~12, which feels closer to an analog meter rather than individual, discrete tokens. I think this change in feel is a deliberate part of the perceived power progre...

• Post #1574371

  I guess these guys have been making the rounds for a while but I just heard about them a couple days ago and goddamn, this is by far the catchiest microtonal math rock I've ever heard https://youtube.com/watch?v=0Ssi-9wS1so

• Post #1574366

  Today on Twinbeard plays Mario, it's the one you've been waiting for all your life, Super Mario Bros. Special. https://youtube.com/watch?v=A-o8bwVhE60&list=PL3SbI8kec0NsZ6qnRLEEo2f5NZde1CA9A&index=1&pp=iAQB

• Post #1574362

  Topic Lords #339: Become Uncoffinable, ft. Watson and Wren. We discuss faction design in historical strategy games, linguistics making it easier and harder to name things, belonging in SLUSD, The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert W. Service, and the magic systems of Brandon Sanderson https://topiclords.com/become-uncoffinable

• Post #1574349

  Stumbled into this dadaist billboard covered with context-free baseball words. Keep the Bay Area weird!

• Post #1574348

  Personsplaining the history of riot prrsons to my person boss while eating this person dinner in the heat of the hot person summer

• Post #1375828

  When Esper started editing Topic Lords, I added a line to my pre-recorded spiel at the end of the show saying you can pay Esper to edit your show as well, by contacting them "on Twitter." Then time passed and everyone left Twitter, so she started doing this bit where if someone said "Bluesky" during the episode, she'd copy that word out and paste it over the offending "Twitter" in the outro. This quickly devolved into doing jokes. Do...

• Post #1341422

  I found out recently about Bunnyrom, the program that every knock-off Tamagotchi runs. https://bunnyrom.neocities.org/ I love the mystery of it, how despite its ubiquity, nobody seems to know its provenance. I hate that it's ruined the mystery of the unplayed knock-off. Before I knew about this, I could look at a knock-off Tamagotchi on the shelf, or in an online store, and wonder about it. Yes, of course it'll be bad, but it might be bad in a new interesting way?? Nope, it&...

• Post #883670

  If I'd started recording Topic Lords on the day I was born, and I released an episode a week until I reached the maximum human lifespan of 120 years, there would be 6240 episodes of Topic Lords. I didn't start Topic Lords when I was a baby, and I'm not quite 120, so there are only 335 episodes of Topic Lords. That's a mere 5.3% of the theoretical human maximum. When will we see the first true 6240 episode recording career? Only time will tell.

• Post #883669

  Hash tag teeth #teeth

• Post #883667

  I've been listening to the audio book "A Deepness in the Sky" by Vernor Vinge. The spacefaring humans in the story use units of time like "kilosecs" and "megasecs," which come across one way when read on the page and in an entirely different way when pronounced aloud.

• Post #883665

  Does anyone know what this is? My wife chose it as her Xbox Gamer Pic and now we're both curious. It was on the default list of Gamer Pics that came with the Xbox. If you do a reverse image search you'll find someone who used it as their band's logo on Bandcamp and also a thousand web sites that scrape user data from e.g. Xbox Live leaderboards.

• Post #883663

  Topic Lords #336: The Four Colonoscopies, ft. Ben and Jason. We discuss colonoscopy prep, how to do things you're bad at, the Trustworthy Shirts Tournament, and Do not go gentle into that good night, by Dylan Thomas https://topiclords.com/the-four-colonoscopies

• Post #883662

  Life hack: if your joke isn't funny the rest of the year, it won't be funny on April 1st either.

• Post #751537

  Our TV just went kaput (after 11 years, thank you for your service) and there's no way I'm getting an Internet-connected TV because I'm already worried enough about my blood pressure. There don't seem to be many consumer options, but is there some reason why we shouldn't just get a commercial display intended for digital signage, like this one? https://www.cdw.com/product/tcl-te65n-ten-series-65-led-backlit-lcd-display-4k-for-digital-signa/8463458

• Post #751536

  This is a fun one. These folks were able to, with the right lighting conditions, see video frames encoded on a laserdisc using a microscope https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZuR-772cks

• Post #751533

  IMO it's fucked up that you can't just sell people a list of cool sci-fi ideas, you have to come up with a story to put the ideas in. And then! And then! A better writer can take your cool ideas and put them in a better story and they get to have the bestseller. But that has to be allowed, because otherwise someone could have all the ideas and trap them all in a shitty story forever.

• Post #751530

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=8hoT8Gg7G4w

• Post #751528

  Today on Twinbeard plays Mario, it's the level where I spend a dozen lives figuring out the first jump https://youtube.com/watch?v=Cb6Lk0H5gaE&list=PL3SbI8kec0NviwCJF2AETmxYBiMZzmKqA&index=74

• Post #751525

  Topic Lords #335: Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roll: Pick Any Two, ft. Andrew and Aubrianne. We discuss reading every Hugo-award-winning novel, accidentally making Frog Fractions 2.5, the perfect video game genre, When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer by Walt Whitman, Software Toolworks Multimedia Encyclopedia CD from 1992, and fixing your slow computer with time travel https://topiclords.com/sex-drugs-rock-and-roll-pick-any-two

• Post #706977

  I've seen a number of people confused about this, so I did some research. Here are the most important answers: - The moose want to lick your car because it has salt on it - It's bad for the moose to lick your car because it will become accustomed to being around humans - To stop the moose from licking your car, drive away

• Post #415046

  I was reminded of Casey Muratori's "Handmade Hero" video project where he shows you how to write a game in C from scratch without using any libraries. It's a cool project, but, hear me out here, libraries are great! You can walk in there and they've got desks and/or computers for you to use, and you can tell the librarian about how you want to make a game from scratch, and they'll be like "that sounds rad" and you can walk out w...

• Post #319204

  This game, about listing as many animals as you can, is shockingly well-considered and polished for such an apparent shitpost of a game idea https://rose.systems/animalist/

• Post #2560

  The big boy book of There Is No Antimemetics Division is available now. https://qntm.org/antimemetics It's extremely good, because the original work is extremely good. I was hoping rewrites and the professional editing process would improve it significantly, but the changes are mostly neutral. There's an audiobook, which is nice. The work, in any of its available forms, comes with my highest recommendation. One of my favorite works of fiction of the past 10 years.