Lords:

• Watson
• Wren

Topics:

• Faction design in historical strategy games
• Linguistics makes it easier and harder to name things
• You belong in SLUSD. What is SLUSD?
• The Cremation of Sam McGee
  • https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45081/the-cremation-of-sam-mcgee
• The magic systems of Brandon Sanderson

Microtopics:

• The Three-Body Problem (Not That One)
• Jade City; Jade Legacy.
• Making any non-creamy soup into a creamy soup.
• Boiling an entire civilization down to a concept simple enough to program.
• Getting to the end of the tech tree first and winning science.
• Greece as the origin of many of our modern ideas about government.
• Grand strategy games where you spend most of your time trying to not to be assassinated by your family.
• Dwarf Fortress except it's obsessed with the royal family.
• Hiring Charles Babbage to invent the analytical engine because otherwise all your game jams will have to be board game jams.
• Playing a TTRPG and having to name something so first you have to create thousands of years of linguistic history.
• The World Builder's Disease. (A.k.a. having a delightful hobby)
• What you might have named somebody back in Zelda Times.
• Developing a set of phonotactics so that you can name something plausibly.
• What is SLUSD?
• The webp of 3D model formats.
• Trans people: they belong in Ohio.
• Putting up a billboard and hoping people will look away from the road to see your content.
• What investigative journalists might do if investigative journalism still existed.
• Solving the SLUSD mystery.
• Reconstructing the history of civilization from the Topic Lords vaults.
• What did people with ADHD do before Topics?
• Strange things done in the midnight sun.
• Cremating Sam in the wreck of the Alice May.
• The secret tales of the Arctic trails that would make your blood run cold.
• A poet who mostly writes about burial rituals in the arctic circle.
• Stompin' Tom.
• Bits to Try if You Think You're About To Die.
• Supernatural small-town Alaska death promises.
• Why SETI@Home looked for three spikes.
• At what point to Doom clones become first-person shooters, and at what point do you become a conspiracy theorist for pointing out all these games are the same.
• Gandhi becoming so peaceful that he integer underflows.
• Video games as a way to cope with the outcome of civilization.
• Sanderson's four laws.
• A fictional branch of physics.
• Various metals that do various things.
• Consuming metal filings that have magical effects based on this funky diagram.
• Eating a burrito wrapped in aluminum foil.
• Coinshots shooting people with coins.
• Soothing and inflaming various emotions.
• The element of thinking about stuff in various kinds of ways, and its atomic number.
• Forcing a Mistborn to burn aluminum, as a prank.
• Creating a magic system by working backwards from the premise that tinfoil hats are effective in this universe.
• A fandom wiki. Made by fans. Not on fandom.com.
• Gradually revealing the rules of your system as they become relevant.
• Lit RPG.
• Whether fantasy and horror fiction would be better if it was more like a video game.
• Characters in a story who are trying real hard to level up.
• Establishing the reality of the fiction while also taking that reality to a very strange place.