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.

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.